99 Gods: Odysseia

by Randall Farmer

  One of her inactive detection suites turned on; she examined the detection and tuned in. The idiots used standard willpower-style pseudo-telepathy, enchantment enabled.

  Better: they used un-encoded pseudo-telepathy. Hah!

  <…can’t run. We need to keep this God, whoever she is, mentally off balance, before she figures out something to do to us.>

 

  One of the pseudo-telepathy channels turned out to be a data-stream, a knock-off of something she had put into Portland’s security system back in the Supported days when she had been War. Standard procedures would have the data stream encoded, but these idiots hadn’t turned on the encoding. Logically, they didn’t know about the encoding, the implicit price of stealing their goods instead of acquiring them legitimately. Betrayer tapped into their data stream and started to analyze.

  If she hadn’t still been captured, she would have smiled. Her captors were indeed Shamans, but they didn’t have the same moral restrictions Epharis and Knot did. Back as Atlanta, she had ignored the Shaman skill set as yet another bit of Indigo screwiness. She hadn’t thought much about this since, save when she noted the ‘Shaman’ she met in battle outside Santa Fe’s lair had a different feel. Exactly the sort of nomenclature confusion one expected from secretive cult groups. She still didn’t know if they were related at all.

  This group of ‘Shamans’ based themselves out of Cartagena, Columbia. They and their thugs controlled a significant part of the Columbian and Caribbean drug trade and they had clashed with Miami from the start. Orlando, being a loftier and more libertarian sort, hadn’t gotten around to them yet. Part of their theft games prepared them for the day.

  “Perhaps we can negotiate,” Betrayer said.

  This group of Shamans knew how to interact with stable pieces of willpower and manipulate them. They couldn’t create willpower themselves or Natural Supported-style magic, but they could manipulate magic if they had a power source available, such as a captive Supported (Heh! Not any more, bozos!) or enchantments. They couldn’t do much with captured magic, either. More poking and analysis revealed their starkly limited skills; though not in the data stream logically they had to be able to manipulate Watcher and Lorenzi style magic as well, if they had a source.

  Which meant instead of being a crazy conquer the world scheme, they viewed their gleaning as a business project, part of this group’s long-term organizational plans. Their current big annoyance? The City of God’s enforcers, who had shut them down in the United States. Betrayer realized, amused, that she as Atlanta had caused them grief as well, though she had never caught on to their use of willpower at the time. Subtle bastards.

  “You have thirty seconds to tell us why we shouldn’t kill you,” a different captor said.

  Save for these six Shamans, the place emptied as their people shut it down and packed it up.

  “Kill me? You can’t kill…”

  One of her captors shot something. The enchantment frayed Betrayer’s projection and caused pain, and also knocked out her ability to speak.

 

  Dammit!

  They left.

  “Jurgen would love these idiots.”

  Betrayer blinked her consciousness back on full; she had been deep in her own analysis, and still in pain. She didn’t have much time before her captors finished the job. She didn’t know what their projection-killer would do, and she wasn’t particularly interested in finding out.

  The voice was January Cox’s. What timing. She didn’t think Knot was a good enough Oracle to arrange this.

  Outside interference, yet again. Who, dammit, was helping her?

  “Because of the masks? Or because they are defining themselves at the story level as bad guys?” Knot said.

  “The former,” Jan said, and snickered.

  Betrayer couldn’t sense either of them.

  “So, Betrayer, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Jan said. “It’s time we had another chat.”

  Betrayer didn’t answer, because she couldn’t.

  “This is a waste of time.”

  “Wait, Jan,” Knot said. “Let me adjust this right here.”

  Betrayer’s ability to speak returned. “I assume my captors aren’t hearing this, Cox?”

  Jan snorted, not surprised. “You assume correctly.”

  “What’s your price,” Betrayer said. Jan wouldn’t be talking to her otherwise.

  “We want in.”

  “Excuse me?” She hadn’t predicted this gift.

  “You brought us here, so we’re part of your story, at least until this is all over with, ma’am,” Knot said. “We figured we needed to join you voluntarily before you came up with some appalling betraying blackmailing scheme to force us into your service. We’d rather be willing allies.” Well, yes, that was indeed what she planned to do.

  These two took ‘being proactive’ well beyond the term’s normal bounds, though.

  “Pheah! Why should I want anything to do with people so pathetic they give into to my demands before I state them?”

  “We’ve decided your self-serving Mission, if it succeeds, is better than the alternatives,” Jan said. “We’re letting you win. Besides, what you’re up to is one of my weaknesses.”

  “Being what?”

  “People have always chided me that I wouldn’t mind anarchy, as long as I got to be the anarch,” Jan said. “It’s time I gave it a try.”

  “Besides,” Knot said. “You’re cute. How can we resist?”

  The two Indigo women were lying, and using their tricks to cover their real intensions. Were they running a ‘betray the Betrayer’ game? Possibly. Would this fit their story, the Indigo’s screwy way of looking at Mission? Only if betraying her gave them a way to get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gods.

  She could live with the problem.

  “You’ll obey my orders?”

  “Of course,” Jan said. Another lie.

  Well now, this did have the potential to be interesting.

  “Very well, minions.” Which is how they would fit into Betrayer’s Mission. “Here’s the plan.” This would give her a chance to show off an aspect of her villainous self she hadn’t had a chance to play with before.

  Betrayer howled in mock agony, completely for the benefit of her captors. January and Knot waited in the next room, staying hidden, but ready to strike if needed. She had gotten Knot to re-enable the Shamans’ eavesdropping device and jigger the capture fields to allow Betrayer to escape whenever she needed. “Owwh! Okay, okay, I surrender. What do you want? I’m sure we can negotiate. Paaaa-leeeez. Owwwh!”

  Enough screaming and her captors did file back into the room

  “You surrender?”

  “Yes! Please! Turn off the pain device!”

  “Perhaps,” one of them said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m called Persona, and…” They turned up the wattage on their pain weapon. “Owwh! Okay, I’m Betrayer, please! Don’t hurt me anymore!”

 

 

 

  Exactly as she predicted to Jan and Knot.

  “If you cooperate and stop your lying ways, we won’t hurt you anymore,” the spokes-captor said. “You’ve foolishly allowed yourself to be taken by us; if you want us to free you, you’re going to have to agree to do our bidding.”

 

 

  One of the six captors rushed off.

  “I agree, I agree,” Betrayer said, invading their data strea
m and diving into their secrets. “Oh, the unfairness of it all. Please! My skills are yours. I’ll do whatever you desire if you free me. What do you want?”

  “We want dead Gods,” one of her captors, a man, said. He hadn’t spoken before, and from his air of confidence, she decided he was the one who the other had called ‘sir’. “We want the City of God broken up, and you’re going to help by killing some Gods for us.”

  “Kill Gods? Trying to kill Gods is suicidal.”

  These Shamans had other power sources as well, referenced in the new data Betrayer gathered. Were they nervy enough to use Hell magics? Yes. When they could acquire them.

  “Nevertheless,” Sir said. “Start with Worcester and Akron, then work your way up the City of God from there.”

  Strategic idiots. “Please, please, listen to me,” she said. “That’s not going to work. I might be able to kill one of them, though I can’t begin to calculate what it would cost me to succeed. The Angelic Host is so nasty!” She cringed. She cowered. “Please!”

  “In that case, pathetic God, your target, if you want to live and be anything more than an experimental test subject, is Dubuque.”

  “Dubuque? The strongest of all the Gods!” Betrayer shivered, quivered and began to sob. “No, please, no…”

  By ‘experimental test subject’ they meant ‘ready power source for willpower’. She wasn’t the first ‘experimental test subject’ this group had obtained. Did they have some totally screwed practical or ideological Gods they had detained? Not according to her new data. Besides, the Host would have been all over that like milk on a Cheerio.

  Ah. These fools had a bank of stolen standard projections locked down and used for their willpower, hidden in their main Jamaican stronghold. Perhaps even one of hers, as she had a few that had gone missing, disappearances she had blamed on the machinations of the other Gods.

  “Yes, Dubuque. Or you die.”

  “Okay, okay, I give,” Betrayer said, moaning. “I’m dead. I’ll never survive anything like this.”

  “And you’ll agree via the Divine Compact.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Betrayer produced some abject sniveling. “I won’t be able to do this alone,” she said. “I’m going to need help. We should work together.”

 

 

  How in the hell did these motherfucking idiots know about the Watchers! She searched the data feed and couldn’t find anything. She began to feel more than a little queasy.

  They produced the Divine Compact contract. Betrayer almost laughed when she saw the contract.

  “True, Dubuque won’t be an easy kill, but you have it wrong, God,” Sir said. “We’re not working together. You work for us. If you behave yourself and do as we say, we might reward you. If not, you’ll never see us again. If you fail to slay Dubuque, this Divine Compact contract will destroy you.”

  Betrayer had a hilarious mental image of some poor Federal judge trying to cope with a breach of contract lawsuit revolving around a murder for hire scheme to kill Dubuque. Pah. These fools looked at their Divine Compact contract as a magic talisman you waved at a situation to solve impossible problems, not unexpected given their mindset and the way they interacted with unnatural power. Unfortunately for them, the only ‘force’ their Divine Compact contract employed was a requirement to appear before a judge and not perjure oneself. The Gods knew to put in better speed bumps than that in their Divine Compact contracts, but these mooks didn’t. They had used a standard Portland recruit-level boilerplate contract.

  “I’ll sign, I’ll sign,” Betrayer said.

  She signed while groveling quite nicely. Joy and elation ran through their pseudo-telepathic chatter. The Shamans thought they had acquired themselves a servant God.

  “We’ll contact you; you won’t be able to contact us. We want reports on what you’re doing and what obstacles you’ve encountered. We’ll also be giving you things to do you might not understand that are related to our cause.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Betrayer said. “Anything.”

  “We’ve set this place up to release you in an hour. If you attempt to follow us or seek us out, you will be utterly destroyed,” Sir said.

  Pure bluff.

  Not that Betrayer cared one bit.

  With Jan and Knot’s help, she had just acquired herself an organization.

  “Alt!”

  Betrayer’s Leo body sat up. The instant she did so, Alt abandoned his position in front of the television to kneel beside her, along with Nicole.

  “Here. What happened to you? Our pod figured out that you’ve been attacked, but we…”

  “I’ll fill you in later,” Betrayer said. “I need information, and fast.” She put her hand on Alt’s head and he relaxed his mental shields.

  What she knew already was worse than bad. Orlando and the motherfucking Telepaths had somehow gotten the Watchers to reveal themselves via a dolphin telepathy broadcast. Every sensitive on the planet, and a few more, had learned about the Watchers existence.

  The Angelic Host had to be spitting kittens right about now.

  As was Betrayer. Nessa had interfered with Persona’s attempt to stop the broadcast.

  “You’re looking at the wrong stuff, boss,” Alt said, wincing. “Dubuque’s been sitting on a way to make the Paladins work, an adaptation of his resurrection trick.”

  Yet more interference, this time helping her enemies. The Paladins shouldn’t have been active for six to ten weeks. “Show me.”

  She saw this in Alt’s memory of some recent spy sessions. The most informative was a meeting where Dubuque sprung the information on Verona, Lodz and Santa Fe. Betrayer immersed herself fully into Alt’s memories so she could draw out as many of the Godly nuances as possible.

  “We can resurrect our City of God fallen into Paladin enchantments,” Dubuque said, crowing, his Mission stratospheric. Lodz and Santa Fe projections and the real Verona gathered around Dubuque’s projection in Verona’s personal chapel. Gregorian chant echoed sonorously in the background. “The process is draining and we can’t support more than a couple dozen each. However, once we bond their souls to the Paladin enchantments, we can resurrect them back into new Paladin enchantments without much work. We need this, Verona. This is the only way we can regain our lost momentum.”

  “Yes,” Lodz said, happy to see his months of work pay off. “This way their automatic improvements stick.”

  “Santa Fe,” Dubuque said. “You need to figure out how to use your multi-Supported trick on these Paladins.”

  “Yes, yes,” Santa Fe said, nodding. “The trick will take some time, but…”

  “This is evil!” Verona said.

  Dubuque shook his head and fixed Verona in his gaze. “It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves, friend. We need all of this. Thus, we must. This is my choice.” Dubuque amped up the force of his Mission.

  “Then I must bow to you on this,” Verona said, actually bowing. His Mission felt totally beaten down.

  Betrayer exited Alt’s mind and took a quick peek into the Place of Time.

  “We’re screwed, Alt,” she said. “The resurrection during the debate, the Watcher revelation, and the activation of the Paladins…all lie outside of my plan.”

  “Is the plan over, then?” Nicole said. “My ghosts don’t think so. Scattered Bones” supposedly her most insightful ghost “thinks Dubuque’s become overconfident again. From what we’ve seen before, he always makes his worst decisions when he gets overconfident.”

  “Hmm,” Betrayer said, thinking. “This is a hell of a thing to have to count on. In any event, we’re all going to have to do a lot of work to get the plan’s chance of success back into positive territory. Some of what we’re going to do won’t be pretty, and all of it will be dangerous. Expect to be very busy.”

  The television blared some story about starvation in Appalachia, but no one in
the converted meeting room paid attention anymore. The whole crowd of captives had gathered around Betrayer and Alt. Betrayer dropped a load of information into their heads, including the addition of Jan and Knot to the cause. New preparations. Risky work. “You work on this while I get my shit together.” She studied the skein of the future she kept in her mind and shook her head. She had some ideas to work with, but not enough.

  Her Mission and her name called to her. Inexorably.

  “You again?” Boise said.

  Betrayer, Jan and Knot, all as projections, walked around the line of Boise penitents stretching a good fifty feed down the path from his cave. Betrayer glowered at the penitents until they scattered in terror, and entered the cave to stand in front of his mystic mountain guruness himself. Her head nearly scraped the roof of the cave. “Who the fuck else? I’ve got some information for you. Do you have anything in trade?”

  Boise looked up at Jan and Knot, who took bodyguard positions around the two Gods, and sighed. “How do I know what you know? How do you know what I don’t know, for that matter?”

  “I have my sources, and I’m hoping you’re doing more than sitting here playing mystic.”

  “I am. Have you ever contemplated anger management classes?” Boise said.

  Betrayer sighed and spent a moment divinely calming herself. “I apologize for my bad mood,” she said, after. “I’m not angry at you.” She paused. “I shouldn’t be taking my anger out on you, either.”

  “You’re not happy about the broadcast about the Watchers and the Angelic Host’s reaction?”

  Betrayer shrugged. “I’m more worried about the City of God’s new neo-Supported.”

  Boise’s gaze became suddenly intent. “Oh, really? I’ll certainly trade information about those. Come sit down over here and let’s discuss things.” Boise let himself drift down to his nest of dirty rags. Betrayer sat next to him, ignoring the condition of the rags, and gave Boise everything she knew about the Paladins, from Lodz’s early developments to the present day. In her original plan, she had expected to sell this information to Orlando in return for ongoing updates to his and the Kid God’s computer-willpower interface.