The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “We’re the bad guys?” Courtney asked, puzzled. “I thought we were doing the right thing smashing up the world?”

  Quinn stood up, sending the floating candles surfing into the bubbles.

  His erection grew to a thick flesh sword hanging over Courtney’s upturned face. “We’re both; we’re bad and we’re right. Believe it.”

  Her confusion vanished, and she was smiling with simple contentment again. “I believe in you.” She cupped his balls, squeezing like he’d taught, and started to lick the length of his dick.

  “After I’ve finished fucking you, I’m going to go over and kill another one of Banneth’s people,” Quinn said. “This time, I’m going to do it right in front of her. Force her to see how impotent she is.”

  “I don’t get it.” Courtney sat back, glancing up inquiringly. “Why don’t you just march in there and start torturing her? It’s not like she can stop you, or anything.”

  “Because this is exactly what she did to me. To us. All of us. She frightens people. It’s her bang. What she can do to you up in that sanctum of hers is so fucking freaky and scary it hammers into your brain like some monster prick. All you can think of is how to stop her doing anything bad to you. Everybody in the coven knows they’re gonna be strapped down on one of her tables some day. All you can do is ask God’s Brother that when it’s your turn, she does something that boosts you. Nothing you can do about the pain. That’s fucking standard issue with Banneth.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” Courtney said, pleased with herself. “You’re stalking her.”

  “That’s a part of it, yeah. Each time I go over there and kill one of her people, it ruins a little more of what she is. The Banneth they all fear is growing smaller and smaller every day. Even dickheads that dumb are going to realize that the one person who can defeat anything is utterly helpless against the coming Night. I want her sitting there while the entire headquarters’ coven freaks out and deserts her. I’m going to make that he-bitch feel what we all did. That she’s a total nothing; all that power she’s spent fuck-knows how many decades building up isn’t worth shit any more. She used to make people piss themselves just by being sarcastic. Sarcastic, for shit’s sake! Can you believe that? But that’s how strong she was. Well now she’s going to know what I’ll do to her, and she’s going to know there’s no way out when I come for her. That puts me in control, and me on top. It switches her whole life around; screws with the way her brain’s wired. I love that almost as much as I love the pain I’m going to inflict.”

  Courtney rubbed her cheek along his dick, eyes closed in dreamy admiration. “I want to watch.”

  “You can.” He beckoned. She was taken up against the wall, hands pinned above her head. A loutish violation of hard thrusts, energistically strengthened muscles overcoming any hindrance to pummel his body against hers. In his mind he let it be Banneth, enhancing the pleasure.

  Halfway through, when Quinn’s orgasm was building, Billy-Joe knocked tentatively on the door. “Get in here, you little shit,” Quinn yelled.

  “Wait. Watch us.”

  Billy-Joe did as he was told. Standing well out of the way. Keeping still, but with inflamed eyes following every aspect of Courtney’s contortions. Quinn finished with her, and let go. She sank to the floor, propped up clumsily against the wall, shivering heavily. Her hands stroked gingerly over her body, touching the fresh bruises.

  “What do you want?” Quinn asked.

  “It’s one of the possessed come to see you,” Billy-Joe said. “He’s one of the new ones. Come from the Lacombe sect. Says he’s got to see you. It’s like real urgent, he says.”

  “Shit.” Quinn’s skin dried; his robe materialized around him. “Hey! You want any of those healed up?”

  “It’s all right, Quinn,” Courtney said thickly. “I’ve got some cream and stuff to rub on. I’m fine.”

  “This better be fucking important,” Quinn said. “I told you dickheads not to move around the arcology. The police are going to be watching for you.”

  “I was careful,” the possessed man said. His name was Duffy. He’d taken over the Lacombe coven’s magus. Unlike the magus, Quinn judged him devout enough to God’s Brother. Duffy had been left in charge of the coven, organizing several successful strikes against Edmonton’s infrastructure.

  Quinn sat down in one of the lounge’s fraying leather armchairs, and let his mind wander through the Chatsworth and its neighbouring buildings.

  They were only a couple of blocks away from Banneth’s headquarters, a location perfect in every respect.

  There were no suspicious minds anywhere near. If Duffy had been spotted and followed, then the police were keeping well back. Quinn resisted the impulse to go over to the window and pull back one of the tatty curtains to peer down onto the street. “Okay, you haven’t completely fucked up. What is it?”

  “This magus, Vientus, I been squeezing him. He ain’t a magus, not a real one. Doesn’t believe in God’s Brother.”

  “Big deal. None of those shits ever did, not really.”

  Duffy played with his hands, wretchedly nervous. Nobody liked the idea of telling Quinn what to do—like shut up and listen—but this was vital.

  “All right,” Quinn grunted. “Go on.”

  “He’s some kind of secret police informer. Has been for years. Every night he makes a report to some kind of supervisor about what the coven’s been doing and what’s going down on the street.”

  “That’s impossible,” Quinn said automatically. “If the police had that kind of information they would have raided the coven.”

  “I don’t think the supervisor’s that kind of police, Quinn. Not like you get in the local precinct house. Vientus never met them, he just datavised the information to some eddress each night. There was other stuff going on, too. Vientus sometimes got told to target people for this supervisor, local business people, buildings that needed to be firebombed. And they’d talk about what other gangs were doing, and if they needed to be chopped back. Real detailed shit like that. It was almost like the supervisor was running the coven, not Vientus.”

  “Anything else?” Quinn was listening, but not really paying attention. He was too involved thinking through the implication, and with that came a growing sense of alarm.

  “This supervisor must have had some influence with the cops. Quite a bit, I guess. There were times when Vientus got useful sect members released from custody. All he had to do was ask the supervisor for them, and the cops would let them go. Easy bail, or community work sentence, some shit like that.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said quietly. That recollection was one of the most bitter he owned. Waiting in Edmonton’s Justice Hall for days with the dwindling prospect that Banneth would get him released. Banneth could make the whole legal system do tricks for her, like every judge owed her a favour.

  Murder suspects out on parole within an hour. Stim suppliers given house arrest sentences.

  “Er.” Duffy was sweating badly now. “And, er … the supervisor had told Vientus to look out for you.”

  “Me? The supervisor used my name?”

  “Yes. There was a visual file on you and everything. The supervisor said you were using the possessed to take over sect covens, and they thought you’d try to kill Banneth.”

  “Shit!” Quinn stood up, and sprinted for the door. Halfway across the lounge he shifted into the ghost realm, running through the closed door without breaking stride.

  Half past two Edmonton local time, and the arcology was at its quietest.

  Solaris tubes suspended underneath the elevated roads between the uptown skyscrapers shone down on deserted streets. Hologram adverts swarmed up the frontage of the ground level shops, bright fantasy worlds and beautiful people shining enticingly. An army of municipal mechanoids crawled along the pavements in front of them, spraying their solvents on tacky patches and guzzling down fast food wrappers. The only pedestrians left to avoid were a few late night stimheads thrown out of club
s by the bouncers, and romantic youthful couples slowly strolling the long route home.

  Quinn adopted Erhard’s image as he hustled along the street. Not an exact replicant, but a reasonable facsimile of the pathetic ghost. Good enough to deceive any characteristics recognition program scanning pedestrian faces through the street monitor sensors for a glimpse of Quinn Dexter.

  He stopped by the taxi rank a full block from the Chatsworth, and the barrier slid down. One of the sleek silver Perseus cabs glided up out of the subway garage, opening its door for him.

  Quinn pulled the seatbelt on with one hand, keying in his destination on the central control column with the other. He transferred the displayed fee from his bank disk and the little vehicle sped off along the street.

  It all made a frightening amount of sense. He remembered the High Magus in New York; who obviously knew too much to risk being possessed. And back in Edmonton when he’d been a junior acolyte; the way everyone on a sect gig had to tell their sergeant acolyte all the crap that was going down on the street. It happened every single day. The sergeants would report to the senior acolytes, who in turn reported to Banneth. An uncompromising routine, drilled in to Quinn along with all the others right from their initiation. Information is the weapon which wins all wars. We need to know what the gangs are doing, what the police patrols are doing, what the locals are doing. Every coven was the same, in every arcology. The sect knew the moves of every downtown illegal on the whole planet.

  “Perfect!” Quinn shouted. He thumped his fist into the seat cushion.

  “Fucking perfect.” The taxi was starting to rise up a ramp to the elevated express-road. Vertical lines of blanked windows zipped past as they increased speed, then curved round to a horizontal blur. Thousands of slumbering minds slipstreamed through his consciousness. Restful and content. Just as they were supposed to be. As they had to be.

  Arcologies were the social equivalents of nukes. Half a billion people crammed into a couple of hundred square kilometres; an impossibility of human nature. The only society which could conceivably hang together in those circumstances was a total-control dictatorship. Everything licensed and regulated with no tolerance of dissent or rebellion. Anarchy and libertarian freedoms didn’t work here, because arcologies were machines.

  They had to keep working smoothly, and the same way. Everything interlocked. If one unit fucked up, then every other unit would suffer.

  That couldn’t be allowed. Which was a paradox, because you couldn’t keep the jackboot stamping down forever. However benign a dictatorship, some generation down the line will rebel. So somebody, centuries ago, had worked out how to keep the lid screwed down tight. An old enough idea, never quite managed in practice. Until now. A government department that quietly and secretly takes control of society’s lowest strata. Criminals and radical insurgents actually working for the very people whose existence they threaten.

  Quinn could feel his energistic power starting to boil up. His thoughts were so hot with fury he could barely contain the power. “Gotta keep it in,” he spat through clenched teeth. One mistake now, and they’d have him. “Got to.” He pummelled his hands against his head, the shock of the craziness helping to bring himself back under control. Deep breath, and he glanced out of the cab’s window. Uptown’s layout was second nature, though he’d rarely experienced it from an elevated road before, much less a cab. They’d be taking the down ramp soon, angling in to Macmillan Station. Minutes only.

  His breathing evened out, though he was still outraged. The sect, the awesome gospel he’d given his very life to, was being used as the front of some ultra-spook department. No wonder Banneth and Vientus could fix for an acolyte’s bail with the cops; they were the fucking cops. Anyone with the slightest potential for danger was sucked in by the sect. And if they couldn’t be cowed into dumb obedience and neutralized that way, then they were thrown to the cops and given an Involuntary Transportee sentence.

  “That was me,” he whispered in pride. “Banneth couldn’t subdue me. Not even with all that shit she can do to bodies. Not me!” So the cops had been told about the persona-sequestrator nanonics he was bringing into the arcology. He’d always wondered who’d tipped them off, who the traitor was amongst his fellow devout. There probably had never even been any in the carton.

  Banneth. Always fucking Banneth.

  The taxi drew up in front of one of the hundreds of vehicle entrance bays to Macmillan Station. Quinn knew there and then that he was in the deepest shit imaginable. He climbed out of the cab and walked slowly into the main concourse.

  The giant arena of corporate urban architecture was almost as empty as the streets outside. There were no arrivals. No streams of frantic passengers racing away from the tops of the escalators. Icons had evaporated from the informationals, which were hanging motionless in the air. Stalls had been folded up and abandoned by their sellrats. A few clumps of listless people stood under holoscreens, cases clutched tightly, staring up at the single red message that was repeated like a parallel mirror image everywhere you looked across the station: ALL VAC-TRAIN SERVICES TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. Even the scattering of ghosts Quinn could see were wandering aimlessly about their haunt, their expressions even more glum and bewildered than usual.

  A group of cops were standing together outside a closed BurrowBurger outlet, drinking from plastic cups, talking quietly among themselves. The loud echo of his footsteps as he walked towards them stirred way too many memories inside Quinn’s skull. It was the same concourse, same dark cop uniform. Then, there had been pounding feet, heart thudding hard in his chest. Screams as people dived out of his way, shouted warnings. Alarms blaring. Brilliant lightbursts. The pain of the nervejam shot.

  “Excuse me, officer; could you tell me what’s happening here? I have a connection to San Antonio in half an hour.” Quinn smiled Erhard’s twitchy smile at the cops. It must have been a good copy; most of them sneered.

  Finally, the failed acolyte had performed a useful service for God’s Brother.

  “Check the station bulletin,” one of them said. “Christ’s sake.”

  “I, a ha, I don’t have a set of neural nanonics. I qualify for the company loan scheme next year.”

  “Okay … sir; what we have here is a vacuum breach. The tunnels were pressurizing, so the transit company had to activate the emergency seals. There’s a repair crew down there now. Should be fixed in a day or so.

  Nothing to worry about.”

  “Thank you.” Quinn walked back to the taxis.

  I can’t get out, he realized. God’s Brother! The bastards have snared me here. Unless I can get to the other arcologies, His work will remain incomplete. The Night may be held off. And that cannot be allowed. They are thwarting the Light Bringer Himself!

  It was frightening, the way he’d been lulled into a false sense of security. He, of all people. Ever suspicious, ever mistrustful. And he’d fallen into their trap. Yet they must be frightened of him to go to such elaborate lengths. Whoever they were.

  He stood outside a taxi for a long time, working out where he should go.

  In the end, there wasn’t a lot of choice. He was in Edmonton for one person. And only one person would be able to tell him who his real enemy was.

  This was the part Billy-Joe didn’t like. He was holding a laser pistol in one hand, there was a heavy-calibre magnetic carbine hanging on a strap round his left shoulder, fitted with a magazine of EE-tipped projectiles, a bag full of EE demolition charges on his right shoulder, codebuster and ELINT blocks on his belt, and a slim omniview band worn like a tiara on his forehead to boost his sight. It was enough hardware to start a war.

  Kicking the shit out of Courtney’s punters was Billy-Joe’s usual gig.

  Fast, nasty, and personal. None of this commando shit, where security systems would shoot back at him if anybody in the group screwed up.

  But Quinn had wanted to stir things up in Edmonton, keep the cops busy and away from uptown. So Billy-Joe was sneaking down a
lightless alley at half past four in the morning with ten other acolytes from Duffy’s coven.

  “This is the place,” said the possessed man who was leading them, and stopped at a blank section of the alley wall.

  He gave Billy-Joe the creeps, maybe even more than Quinn. One of the five possessed which Duffy had let into the bodies of snatched civilians. They all lived at the coven headquarters, treating the acolytes like shit and lording it up: the core of what Quinn promised was to be the army of the Night. Billy-Joe wasn’t so sure about all that dark destiny stuff now, despite all he’d seen Quinn do. From where he was, it was just replacing one bunch of turds for another. The sect never changed; he always got dumped on no matter who was in charge.

  The possessed rested his hands on the wall, tensing as if he was trying to push it over. He probably could, Billy-Joe acknowledged. And that was without energistic power. He was at least thirty centimetres taller than Billy-Joe, and must have weighed half as much again.

  A door materialized in the wall, made of wooden planks with big black iron bolts and with a sturdy circular handle. It opened silently, letting a wedge of bright light spill out into the fetid alley. There was a long hall of machinery on the other side; bulky turbine casings half-submerged in the carbon-concrete floor. Billy-Joe was looking down on them from at least sixty metres; the door had opened onto a high metal gantry running round the inside.

  “In you go,” the possessed man ordered. His bass voice rumbled along the alley, agitating the rats.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to use your power,” Billy-Joe said. “The cops know how to look for it now.”

  “They can only detect those fireballs we use,” the possessed said glibly. “Listen, kid; Quinn wants you to bugger up this water station, he was real keen for you to do that. That’s why I’m here with you, so I can let you guys in quietly. Now, unless you’d like to go in by the front gate, this is the way to do it.”