99 Gods: Odysseia

by Randall Farmer

  “I have knowledge of their type. Among other things, they are unnatural enough to have Missions, which they think of as stories, the same way our Indigo friends do. Their story fixation makes them appear to be lucky. Properly motivated, in the correct story setting, they should be able to do the impossible.”

  “Fine. Perhaps I can send them to kill Verona.”

  “Hah hah,” Boise said. “You should practice your anger management some more; taking a human name, preferably your own, would help. However, that’s beside the point. If you’re willing to listen, I do have something devious to offer. Historically, for instance, the solution to too much chaos is often the introduction of yet more chaos…”

  Betrayer spent a long time nodding in agreement and listening to a truly insanely devious idea.

  “Great Poobah, all is darkness and woe,” Betrayer typed. Of all things, she had gotten stuck using an internet café in the Northeast Branch of the Memphis Public Library as her headquarters-of-the-day. With Orlando’s group in her real lair, she couldn’t risk returning. “I found a way to penetrate the lair of the dread and fearsome Dubuque and attack him, but for my plan to work I need a distraction.” If she could snivel and leave tear marks while texting she would do so, but she hadn’t found a method yet. Emoticons didn’t cut it. Still, she tried.

  “U R trying to wiggle out of YR responsibilities, B.” Ostensibly ‘B’ stood for Betrayer, but in the Grand Poobah’s mind, it clearly stood for Bitch. “Yet, I will listen to any pleas for help.”

  “To get in, I need an anti-City of God protest in Oklahoma City.”

  “Surely U jest.”

  “Oh wondrous and fearsome Great Poobah, I quake in fear of your wrath, but I have figured out, from when I was captured, that your people are immune to willpower.” They weren’t, but because they wielded stolen willpower they liked to think they were. “Because of this, your people can safely and easily penetrate the Oklahoma City willpower shields and bring in protesters when no one else can. Think of this not only from the benefits of getting me inside the Evil One’s lair, but from the propaganda benefits. If I fail, which I might, you will still knock the City of God down a peg. I fear you can’t afford to take this risk and not do the protest.”

  Amid the mundane appeal to his manhood, Betrayer stuck in Boise’s trick, which the master of electromagnetism had assured her would travel to the Grand Poobah. Boise’s trick made it as if she had the mortal right in front of her; she didn’t control him, per se, but the trick did allow subtle willpower influences.

  “U R correct, we can do this. We will do this.”

  “Thnks!” Betrayer texted. Good enough.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Alt said.

  “Oklahoma City’s being attacked,” Betrayer said. “We need to go talk.” Meaning their special shielded room.

  “Well, Dubuque certainly doesn’t need me now. He’s using his neo-Supported Preachers for all our former duties.”

  “He is? How rude.” Betrayer didn’t care in the slightest about Dubuque’s Preachers. Their combat abilities were negligible. They existed to channel Dubuque’s impressive worshipper-backed charisma and run North America.

  “Fuck you.” Alt was grumpy for many reasons, most of which had to do with Betrayer.

  “Sit,” she said to Alt once they entered the revamped meeting room. “Today is make or break day.”

  “Already? Because of a bunch of protesters?” Alt frowned and did not sit. “I thought we were waiting on Dubuque to get his Paladin army together and attack your lair.”

  “There’s more,” Betrayer said. “We need to do a bit of sabotage that can’t be traced back to us.”

  “What sort?”

  “Letting in some computer viruses.”

  “Huh?”

  “Computer viruses toting in some willpower spells.”

  Alt frowned. “What’s this going to accomplish?”

  “What we’re trying to do is keep Dubuque from shutting down the protesters. They need to dig in deep enough so they can’t be dug out without this turning into a public relations disaster. There’s teams of somewhat immune reporters in town, and…”

  “Somewhat immune reporters! Willpower computer viruses. Damn!” He shook his head. “You’re working with Boise now! These are his sort of tricks. This changes everything!”

  Betrayer nodded. “My odds of success are up to 2% again.”

  “Two percent! That’s all this is worth?”

  “Don’t forget I can make those odds grow with my ability to play with the Place of Time.”

  “I don’t trust this any more than Nessa does, Atlanta.”

  They had chewed over that question many times. “Whatever. The Place of Time works.” Most of the time.

  “So you say. In any event, is this the attack day?”

  “Almost, Alt. If your people do the head-messing necessary to get those computer viruses in, the willpower spells they bring in are going to massage the data and make the protests look much worse than they are and totally unstoppable. If the protesters can’t be tossed from Oklahoma City Dubuque will panic. We’re going to watch; with a little nudge here and a little nudge there we can get what I’ve been working for.”

  “Verona, here.” Alt sighed. “At last.”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew that was part of your plan and why you were stalling,” Alt said. “Only an idiot would have figured that you would be satisfied with Dubuque’s head on a platter. To stop the City of God, you need to ace both of the CoG leaders.”

  Alt had to know that a fight against Dubuque and Verona practically insured all their deaths. She didn’t say anything about the subject.

  “What I don’t see is how we stand of chance of killing either of them,” Alt said. He paced in front of the television, mercifully off for a change. “Where’s the reduction of the worshipper strength going to come from?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Betrayer said.

  “Dammit fucking dammit! Nessa!”

  Betrayer nodded. Any to all the women could be involved: Nessa, Dana, Jan, Knot, Elorie, Persona, Progress or Lydia. She had scenarios set up for all of them, and which exact one or ones she would use up she couldn’t predict. She couldn’t discern the inevitable deaths and tactical details because of Orlando’s use of the Place of Time, although she gave the best odds of it being Dana. She emphasized Nessa’s involvement to cheese Alt off and help him keep his focus.

  “Well, if you get a chance to tell her in Heaven, tell her that if she fails I’m going to fucking haunt her for the rest of eternity,” Alt said. She shrugged, and he shrugged back. “Time to go phishing.” He snickered. “We’ll piggyback this on your crazy Indigo Camgirls site a few of Dubuque’s guys frequent.”

  She smiled. Her work was all coming together.

  “Who are these people?” Phil said. “Those are enchantments, aren’t they?”

  The entire Telepath crew gathered around the new duplicate security control room the Telepaths now operated in their own part of Dubuque’s HQ. Alt’s crew had vanished into the woodwork, empeoned in Dubuque’s mind as worthless, an old conquest. They had become a trophy, gathering dust.

  Which meant as long as they didn’t try to escape, they stayed safe, able to do virtually anything. Betrayer called this the Hogan’s Heroes scenario, a reference only Javier and Nicole were old enough to understand. So they had put together their own commissary, security room, armory and practice room. One of Betrayer’s worries when she had been captive by the Shamans was that Alt’s crew might screw up and reveal their secrets to Dubuque’s people, but they hadn’t blabbed a thing.

  “Call them Shamans,” Betrayer said. “They possess innate gifts, but different ones than you Telepaths. I used to say they were saner but I’ve revised my opinion. They’re just as insane, but on a different axis.”

  “They’re paranoid and delusional,” Phil said. “From what I can tell.”

  “Yes?” She wo
uld miss this crew after they died – if she herself remained alive to miss people, terribly unlikely these days.

  “They aren’t leading the protest from in front, they’re organizing from behind,” Phil said. “Under so many layers of disguise that the disguises themselves point them out. Add in the fact they’re carrying around junk 99 Gods enchantments… As I said.”

  “They’re able to do willpower magic using those enchantments as power sources,” Betrayer said. “Only their power levels suck.” As she watched, a Paladin grabbed a Shaman; the Shaman tried to fight and, well, the world had an Abu Graib moment. On live television.

  “Puke!” Mary said. She rarely paid any attention to anything Betrayer did, but fighting always attracted Mary’s attention. “Does this actually help the cause, or is this just yet more mindless mayhem and sacrifice?”

  “This helps the cause. What this street fight is doing is peeling off City of God worshippers by the bushel. Not enough for a tipping point, but the momentum is building. The big thing is to keep up the pressure and panic Dubuque. We also need to follow Orlando’s lead and make sure there’s friendly media here to record and broadcast every bit of the fight.”

  “Let’s hit them now,” Walter said. He garbed himself as Dubuque, then changed the illusion to be one of Dubuque’s chief bureaucratic flunkies (young, blonde, male, 30 inch waist – they were all interchangeable). Alt and crew had been working overtime to get Walter back to the land of the sane. They hadn’t succeeded, but he was at least back to the land of the functional. “I’ve been improving my ability to sense things, as you demanded Oh nearly omnipotent one. We can take Dubuque.”

  “Barely, with no chance of any of us surviving, even me,” Betrayer said. A fight today would end in her and Dubuque’s mutual annihilation and ensure the continuing survival of the City of God with barely a stutter. “Patience.”

  Ten minutes later, Dubuque projected himself above the protest and bellowed a sermon at them. They jeered and tossed rotten fruit at Dubuque’s projection. Futile. Several less wise Shamans tried to hide themselves with willpower, which just gave them away to the Paladins. The cameras again caught their hideous deaths.

  Dubuque’s words only increased the number of protesters. The protest had reached critical mass. Worse for Dubuque, spontaneous counter-protests appeared. His supporters arrived buoyed on pure anger and hate; nobody messed with their God, nobody! Their violent behavior showed humanity at its worst.

  Feeling fey, Betrayer activated her Oklahoma City projection, shot it into the area, and arranged a conversation with some taxi drivers. Within minutes, she had the city’s taxi drivers on strike. She had her projection speed off before she got shot to shit by the Paladins. There was no way to hide what she had done.

  More chaos, just as Boise wanted.

  “This is going to work,” Alt said. “I feel it. This will work.”

  Betrayer nodded. The odds of her plan’s success had risen to four percent.

  “I’m under siege,” Dubuque said.

  Alt’s crew watched as the entire projected City of God leadership cadre – Dubuque, Santa Fe, Verona and Lodz – gathered in Dubuque’s fanciest meeting room. For matters of honor, Dubuque appeared at his own polished mahogany table as a projection. Dubuque had eleven security monitors set up against one wall, showing the Oklahoma City protests, now in their second day. His estimates of the number of protesters were five times too high.

  “The protests have hit the world media,” Lodz said. “There are Gods behind this. I can smell the pusillanimous cowards crouching in every stinking shadow. They must die!”

  Dubuque nodded. “Boise, Orlando and Columbia have agents involved. Betrayer’s behind the taxi driver strike, just the sort of pathetic thing she does to get her rocks off. They’re conspiring against us, trying to illegitimately ruin what they cannot gain through truth and righteousness.”

  Everybody in the viewing room laughed, except Betrayer, too busy studying the non-verbals. This was the crux point. If things fell the wrong way here, the game ended. Nightmare scenarios, and there were many, ran through her head.

  “Destroy Boise,” Verona said, doodling nervously on a Dubuque Is The Way notepad Dubuque had provided just for this purpose. “His defection’s the real problem. I’m positive he’s the brains behind what’s going on here.”

  “I’ll destroy him,” Dubuque said. “But to destroy him I need to discredit him first, else I risk the defection of the rest of our North and South American allied Gods. And discrediting him’s going to be hard, as he’s not working with projections or with direct uses of willpower, but games involving the internet and television.”

  “What’s the timetable?” Lodz said.

  “Likely three weeks,” Santa Fe said. “On one hand, if he’s the lone rebel, he doesn’t imperil our pre-emptive strike against Tradition in the same way that Orlando’s crew does. On the other hand, if Our Paladins leave North America, Orlando’s crew can strike here. Boise doesn’t have a crew to strike with; he’s a loner, utterly pathetic. He can be ignored.”

  Verona tapped the table. “So.”

  “So. I’m in trouble,” Dubuque said. “I’m leaking venerators left and right. Orlando and Columbia and their agents are the real threat. We must destroy them. In public.”

  Betrayer had neatly co-opted Orlando and Columbia’s agents, who had previously been keeping their heads down as ordered, and dragged them into this mess. She hadn’t planned this betrayal of Orlando and Columbia, but it fit. This betrayal also helped her cause; Dubuque and Santa Fe considered the Shamans to be Telepaths (a mistake based on their willingness to think all humans with innate unnatural abilities were the same) and believed all the Telepath groups allied with Orlando. His people hadn’t even captured any of the Shamans, because if they did, they would have found out about her involvement and destroyed her already shaky reputation.

  “Where are they?” Verona said, speaking of Orlando and crew.

  “I don’t know,” Dubuque said. “They vanished off the face of the planet after my last attack on them. My spies are out hunting them, but so far, nothing.”

  Shit shit shit! There went everything plummeting back to zero. Unless…

  Betrayer looked across Phil to where Alt sat on a repurposed waiting room chair. “Alt, this is going to hurt you, but it’s necessary.” Now this was rude, a second hand betrayal. She explained her idea to him as she cogitated on the problem.

  This turn of events was utterly unbelievable. The odds Dubuque’s spies would lose track of Orlando’s group was around a half a percent. St. Dana’s coverage was the only explanation. Only she had the power over their destiny to screw the odds this bad.

  Either that or this was yet more outside interference.

  She finished her suggestion. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Alt said in response, looking like he had just eaten a live baby chick.

  “Either you do this or we fail.”

  They watched as Alt bowed his way into the formal meeting room, dressed in black slacks and shirt, his blackest trench coat and his shiniest wrap-around sunglasses. The divine projections watched Alt approach as well, his presence about as welcome as a herd of cockroaches.

  “Recruiter, I hear you have a hunch I desperately need,” Dubuque said, arch and nasal. “This had better be good.” Betrayer hoped the same. Her plan depended on Dubuque’s reaction to Alt’s ‘hunch’.

  “I still say they’re too dangerous to live,” Santa Fe said. He held a grudge against all the Telepaths, blaming his fall on them, and he had already bargained for the right to kill any and all Telepaths taken prisoner after Orlando’s fall. Several of Betrayer’s worshipper-weakening tricks depended on Santa Fe’s unreasonable hatred.

  “Properly held and trained, they’re excellent tools,” Verona said. “The only problem is they need to keep their free will. As with this Recruiter person.”

  “Yes, Dubuque,” Alt said, answering Dubuque’s question.

  “C
heeky, no real deference,” Lodz said. “This one I’d kill, despite his utility.” The europunk God made a throat-cutting motion with his tattooed right hand and frowned, bringing his thick eyebrows together into a unibrow.

  “So, how useful have your pets been to you, anyway, Lodz?” Verona said. Lodz turned away, sheepish. “That’s a ‘no’, I see.”

  “Don’t mind them, my friend,” Dubuque said to Alt. “Tell me of your hunch.”

  “I hadn’t realized you didn’t know the location of Orlando and Columbia,” Alt said. “I can tell you where they are.”

  Dubuque smiled. “Perfect! You see, the benefits of a properly maintained corp of Telepaths is voluntary cooperation.” Betrayer, watching the security monitor, could almost hear the gears cranking in Dubuque’s mind as he hesitated, worried. Why now? What’s the significance of ‘now’?

  Well, for one thing, if Dubuque bothered to take Alt apart and look in his mind that would be the end of everything.

  So:

  Betrayer activated her local projection again and returned to Oklahoma City. The power Betrayer used for this was her own, the Atlanta Territorial power, stolen from Persona. The willpower use could easily be mistaken for Columbia’s Territorial power, and doing this would give Columbia a migraine and raise far too many suspicions in his mind. She couldn’t do anything about the issue, though. Her projection took on Maria’s appearance and consciousness, and Betrayer dropped into the projection dozens of left over War tricks she no longer needed.

  “It’s time for you to die!” her Maria the Persona-appearing projection screamed. She let loose full battle-projection style willpower battle magic on the closest Paladins she could find, as well as any other openly working City of God bureaucrats. The attack blasted Paladin minds out of their enchanted bodies; flattened City of God bureaucrats against nearby walls, and stuck ‘traitors to humanity’ banners across their chests.