99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  Not true. However, Orlando, with his science and academic background, couldn’t conceive of sucking in the raw materials for healing from the air, soil and plants. Dana gave in and ate.

  Her food tasted like ashes.

  “So, you said you had an idea about how I can better protect the Kid God. Later’s happened and I’m over my post-fight anger and annoyance,” Dana said, lying like a dusty worn rug.

  “Yes, I have an idea,” Orlando said. “I’m not sure how you’re going to take my, um, idea, though.”

  Meaning whatever he had come up with this time would again annoy the crap out of her. She shrugged in response. Despite her undeniable attraction to him she kept her personal distance and kept their interactions nicely professional. They were so different, too different, to be anything closer than acquaintances.

  She had Googled him after they learned from Persona that the Gods had all been mortals who had died on a particular day. Before his death and apotheosis, Orlando had been a rock-star scientist, gallivanting across America, Europe and Japan, with a background in what the physicists quaintly termed ‘condensed-matter-physics’, and fertilizing a calling as a futurologist. He had made more money off his public appearances than from government grants or patents, more of a popularizer than high-output genius researcher. In the Googled pictures, he had always had women hanging on his arm, a different one or ones every time. Amazing what someone could do with a minor discovery in high-temp superconductivity if they possessed the rock-star ego.

  Orlando slid around the picnic table, and then went down on one knee beside her. “Dana, marry me,” he said. Instead of an engagement ring, two gold wedding bands appeared in his hand.

  Dana slipped into a willpower-based fast thinking mode and worked through the myriad details and suppositions accompanying Orlando’s marriage proposal. She understood exactly what Orlando intended with his two rings: he wanted to attract the Telepaths, a gambit both dangerous and crass. She saw the other obvious implications, at least from a mortal’s perspective. She didn’t fully understand how this would play from a Mission standpoint, though, but she understood enough so the idea bothered her. She couldn’t logically dismiss the proposal out of hand.

  When she retreated out of the fast thinking mode anger and annoyance washed through her, anger that despite all her hard soul-aching work she had distilled her life down to this pathetic stereotype, and annoyance about Orlando’s clumsy method, his timing and his atrocious battle-blood-stained location for this proposal.

  “Oh, that’s romantic,” Dana said.

  “Surely you know I love you,” Orlando said.

  Dana shrugged, though somehow she sensed he spoke the truth. “Let’s go somewhere quiet to talk, somewhere away from the battle stench,” she said. He had proposed to her in a charnel house! Of all the…

  Orlando nodded and flew them through the air several miles away, to a beautiful hillside forest clearing complete with a narrow brook tumbling down the rocks. Birds chirped and a breeze rustled the branches of the pines. Dana sat on a cool rock and motioned for Orlando to sit beside her.

  The gloriously beautiful setting Orlando chose assuaged her annoyance but didn’t cool her anger in the slightest. “I’m flattered by this proposal, but the answer is ‘no’,” Dana said, her voice cold and her emotions in check. She met his eyes; he looked hurt. “Orlando, I’m not interested in doing something like this just to escape my problems. We can’t have an equal partnership. You’re a God and I’m not, despite my screwy status and abilities. Nor am I interested in physical or emotional intimacy at this point in time.” She didn’t understand her heart. When the strangely resurrected Jan announced her departure with the Diana from another timeline, Dana had grabbed Jan’s hands and begged her not to go.

  “I know,” Jan had said. “The memory of you was one of the things keeping me going. But both of us have larger responsibilities, and we will most likely never be together again. I’m sorry.” Dana had cried when Jan left. That was a true loss. That had been love.

  Not this.

  This was a disaster.

  4. (Dave)

  Dave’s vision filled with twisty sparkly things. Headache banished, he suddenly became more alive than was remotely reasonable after a night of no sleep.

  Nessa, in the bathroom toweling off from a shower, pranced back into the hotel room and sat next to Dave on the hotel room bed, not doing a good job of modesty. Dave nodded.

  “Yes. I sensed, uh, whatever this was,” Dave said.

  Slam.

  Sigh. Dave wiped new tears of pain from his eyes. Nessa had left tear tracks up and down his body, so he guessed they were indeed peers. Of the wet salty variety. He still wasn’t sure about the whys and hows about what happened last night, but the ‘what’ he understood. Nessa had finally found a way to drill a hole through his mind shields and make him a fake Telepath.

 

  Dave paused for a moment to collect his quite scattered thoughts.

  Nessa raised her eyebrows.

  Nessa. More easily distractable than he was, and that said a lot.

  Nessa paused.

  Thoughts poured into Dave’s mind, verbalizations from what he guessed were hundreds, if not thousands, of people. In these numbers, he couldn’t make sense of a single one of them.

  The thoughts poured out of Dave’s mind. Nessa sent.

  Dave sent, again glad he wasn’t a Nessa-style telepathy specialist.

  Nessa gave him a big kiss, mercurially happy again. Nessa sent.

  Telepathy net. Yes, of course. He had wanted so badly to be a part of Nessa’s extended family’s telepathy net he had opened himself up to Nessa. She thanked him appropriately by painfully blasting a hole through his mental shields. The means she used, well, some things were best forgotten.

  In the months since he and Elorie had escaped the Watchers, they had settled into Nessa and Ken’s family, an odd hominess with some truly interesting people. And Dave liked Alaska, weather and all. Interesting people, interesting rocks, and Elorie. What more could a geologist ask?

  Nessa licked her lips.

  Two rings. Dana Ravencraft and Orlando. An actual vision of the two of them popped into his mind, not just words. He felt their emotions, hostility mélanged with confusion. Something was messed up, something bad. Dana was half-ready to go to war with Orlando.

  Dave sent.

  Dave froze. Shiiiit.

  He repressed the idea of Ken dropping a car on him by trying to figure out the vision.

  Nessa said. When the inevitable ‘but you already are’ thought flashed through his mind, Nessa telepathically poked until the thoug
ht popped like an over-inflated balloon.

  Dave giggled, caught up in Nessa’s mood swings fly-on-flypaper style. he said, his thought stream interrupted by pins and needles tingling up and down his arms. He knew what the pins and needles meant. A psychic hunch. His real trick, his only talent as a Psychic.

  Nessa turned to him, met his eyes and frowned.

  The last she sent at an ear-splitting mental volume. Dave’s shields slammed down, hard. Nessa didn’t twitch. She had anticipated his response and yanked herself out of his head the moment before. “Here we stay!” she said, wagging an index finger in front of his nose. “You can go take that hunch and stick the damned thing up your backside. My responsibility is to my children!”

  Dave glared at Nessa. She returned the glare for a moment or three, and then softened. “Sorry.”

  He opened his mind shields again.

  Nessa sent, referring to an earlier telepathic lesson.

  Dave certainly hadn’t picked up anything of the sort from the brief vision glimpse.

  Nessa sent.

  “Social scientists should never predict the future; it’s hard enough to predict the past.” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature

  “I have my needs, and I don’t work for free.”

  5. (Betrayer)

  “Agree to this and all you’re going to get is grief, pain, and war,” Betrayer said, in Dana’s mind. Betrayer had found a way to slip past Dana’s mind defenses when Orlando’s projection, mid-wooing, had walked through Dana’s body. “Only an idiot would be stupid enough to marry a God. Of course, you are an idiot; you’ve proven this often enough to convince me. Bwah hah hah hah!” Betrayer extracted her presence from Dana’s mind when Orlando’s idiotic projection body finished passing through Dana. The nerdy God had proposed to Dana as a projection, and had continued as a projection as he had attempted and failed miserably to negotiate his way into Dana’s frigid heart.

  “Give me the ring,” Dana said, figurative steam figuratively jetting from her willpower prosthetic ears. Orlando frowned but did as Dana asked. Dana stuck the ring on her left hand. “There. We’re married. Our Territories are now one. You’re now Bob’s stepfather. If we’re lucky the Telepaths will show up, ally with us and we’ll even survive the experience without ending up drooling in a corner, minds broken.”

  Orlando slowly put the matching ring on his left ring finger, crash and burn written all over his divine projection’s face.

  “But don’t you dare try and get frisky with me, Disney Boy,” Dana said. She even wagged her index finger at him. “I’m not at all happy with you and your depth of commitment to this strategic operation. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Betrayer howled with laughter as Dana merked Orlando with her white-bread version of trash talk. Her little bit of reverse psychology had practically nailed the wedding band to Dana’s finger. Yes, her prediction that Orlando would fail miserably in his ‘marry me’ argument had been a hundred percent accurate.

  “If only everything was so easy,” Betrayer said, sending her howling with laughter again. “I’ll let Orlando stew in sufferation for a few days before I spring his on him.” She flew her projection off from the battlefield, happy with the results.

  Perfection.

  A rosy glow in her heart, Betrayer flew her projection to her East Coast ‘home away from home’, a pleasant quiet spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia she had purchased at rock bottom prices from a bamboozled logging company. She checked her ‘stronghold’ for enemy intrusions before she approached, and finding none, walked her projection inside through the oversized ventilation ducts. The main corridors and passageways of her lair were so laden with alcoves, overhead beams and other hiding places that even despite her many traps they were tactically unsafe; she always traveled by her stronghold’s oversized ventilation shafts, the only places in her stronghold with good defensive sight lines.

  She loved her lair and its misdirections. Made using a combination of willpower hewn rocks and solid willpower illusions, her ersatz home possessed all the ambience necessary to convince anyone crazy enough to visit that this was her real headquarters, the sort of place where she should be keeping her real body, the one no-one ever saw. The willpower-constructed ‘robots’ were her latest trick, and she kept finding more cute evil villain crap to put in them. The faux Nazi uniforms she designed for them last week still brought a smile to her face.

  She entered her stronghold’s main control room through the ventilation ducts and pressed the stronghold’s ‘self-destruct’ button, which turned on the lights and the off-the shelf and mildly old-fashioned Wintel computers (all nicely set up so intruders could read the screens from the real entrance to the room, which was nicely labeled ‘control room’ outside in the corridor). She typed in the password ‘reyarteb’ to get them going. When the countdown on the ‘self-destruct’ timer reached 204, she pressed the self-destruct button again to turn on the real security system monitors. After the security system stabilized she scanned the security cameras, checking for evidence of intruders: dungeon filled with bones heisted from a graveyard, clean; supposed private luxury suite filled with false clues, clean; the transformed and enlarged stray cat who served as her ‘guardian monster’, alive and clean (as was the intentionally precarious observation walkway around the kitty’s lair); high security detention cells and their obligatory prisoners, all lackeys of what remained of the Seven Suits Satanically-destroyed organization, clean (and the idiots had finally found the hollow pipes and set up the necessary inter-group communications; she wondered if she would eventually need to help them escape, they were so inept); the robot assembly area and hideaway filled with loud but non-functional machinery, clean (but oily); the robots’ storage and equipment area, clean; server farm for her free site-hosting, email and blog service – crap!

  Betrayer sighed. The computers set up to monitor and run the server farm throbbed with blinking red lights yet again. She reached her projection hands through the security cameras, typed on the server farm’s security computer and cursed. The message on the front page of her website read, in bright red letters on a black background ‘Tut tut. Where’s the security? You’ve been hacked by the North Korean Intelligence Agency. Sorry.’

  “Third time this fucking month,” she said, disgusted; yet another porn company had cracked her protections and squatted on her disk space. She erased the files, redid her security setup and put ‘kill the damned da vinci who keeps breaking in’ on her mental to-do list. Of all of her cute ideas, this one, to monitor the City of God’s normals by luring them into free internet accounts, had been the least successful. Despite the fact she knew this trick would work, according to the Place of Time.

  Hackers, it appeared, were able to find ‘million-to-one odds against’ openings and exploit them as easily as she did. Or the off-the-shelf idiot-level AI she had running security was a plant. Or the Place of Time wasn’t as good as the Angelic Host advertised. The latter wouldn’t surprise her, as nothing the Host recommended ever turned out to be as good as advertised.

  Lastly she checked the storage room with the spare ‘uniforms’ and other faux supplies. Here she kept her real lair, well shielded so she could do her long-distance work without interference. No ventilation shafts led here. She had to transport her projection in.

  Nestled between the jackboots and the office supplies, she meditated
. All her old shit had become more difficult with everyone holding an image of her as a mad evil villain in their heads. Oh, her Mission did just fine. The system allowed for evil opposition. However, the opinions of the other Gods and their Supported did influence the way her willpower worked.

  These days, her willpower worked better when she caused trouble, villain style. At times, Mission made no sense at all. Betrayer pressed her thoughts out far, far into the distance.

 

  came Nessa’s response.

 

  Nessa sent. Betrayer had unsuccessfully advised Nessa to stop supporting her faux telepathy scheme among her extended family. Instead, Nessa got irate.

  Betrayer sent.

 

 

  White lightning blasted through Betrayer’s mind. Nessa no longer telegraphed her long-distance telepathic attacks, showing some level of change and improvement, at least. Betrayer cut off the contact. She rebuilt her projection from the incredible damage of a Nessa style telepathic attack and rested.

  Nessa’s response? Perfect. A quick peek into the Place of Time showed exactly what Betrayer wanted. With only three or four more prods, Nessa might actually start to think rationally about leaving her nest. Far too many of Betrayer’s plans depended on getting Nessa back in the game.

  Alas, several of those prods fell to Betrayer, who winced in headachy anticipation.