99 Gods: Betrayer
Page 46
Nessa shrugged. “Danger. Right. Back to the danger. Alt says we’re still in danger even though the trap on you was thwarted.”
“Alt – he’s the Recruiter? Contacted through the long-distance Telepath Javier?”
Nessa nodded.
“Alt’s a future predictor? Future prediction isn’t a trick on your side of the fence. Is he…”
“Nope. He’s one of us, not one of yours. Nor is he a future predictor, like your specialists. He’s mostly a real-time clairvoyant. If he thinks we’re in danger it’s because he’s found something, likely in his subconscious, a plan underway against us or something similar.”
“How did he pick up on the fact I was a trap, then?”
“Damn if I know,” Nessa said. “I think he’s got a bit of a temporal component to his hunches. Which aren’t the same as his real-time clairvoyance capabilities, but they overlap. His hunches? Well, you know all Telepaths get hunches, and none of us understands what they represent. His hunches are real good.”
Uffie licked her lips. “This one’s real time. Someone watched your meeting with Nairobi from a distance and anticipated success.”
Nessa raised her eyebrows. “Neat.” She had to remember Uffie wasn’t a general run-of-the-mill normal human being. Not a future predictor, either.
“I wouldn’t call the eavesdropping ‘neat’.”
“I wasn’t speaking of the eavesdropping, but your comment. You haven’t been hot-dogging through the games of the 99 Gods the way I have,” Nessa said. “You’ve just been enslaved by one. I’ve gotten to where I’m looking at everyone and everything I run into as a potential tool in the, well, fight.” Nessa waited for the expected Uffie explosion, which didn’t happen.
“To tell you the truth, I feel the same way. With this creeping darkness after me, I suspect I’m a hell of a lot safer being with you and Ken, knowing you can blow enemy brains out their ears and the like. Heretical for someone of my anything-tangible-is-evil-magic background, but, well, being under Nairobi’s thumb wasn’t any bed of petunias. He had far too many enemies, even if most of them carried guns, tossed bombs, or used poisons. I haven’t been safe ever since I got grabbed out of the bush.”
“I can empathize.”
Nessa took out a bar of chocolate and offered half to Uffie. Uffie smiled. “I am more coherent right this moment than earlier,” Nessa said, putting the sock away, “and I don’t want anything hanging over our friendship like this thing with Soft Hand Lady. If you want to rake me over the coals about her, now’s the time.”
“I’d rather not talk about this in front of Ken.”
Nessa looked at Ken, on the other side of her. He had his head cocked back and he softly snored. She vaguely recalled insinuating a ‘go to sleep’ suggestion into his mind to help his sanity and keep his subconscious teek from ripping apart the plane. “We can wake him and have him trade places with Soft Hand Lady.”
“That might do.”
“Ma’am.”
“You might as well call me Uffie,” Uffie said. Nessa sat by the window, Uffie sat next to her, and Soft Hand Lady sat across the isle, where Ken used to be. Ken now slept in a seat two rows back. Nessa sent the first class stewardess to fool with snacks, so they wouldn’t come between Uffie and Soft Hand Lady.
“Uffie.” Soft Hand Lady took a deep breath. “Are you as Nessa said?” Uffie nodded. “I’m not sure what to say. I thought I was alone in life.”
Uffie nodded. “Many of us do.” She frowned. “Nessa, did you do something to…” Nessa blanked out the name “something bad?”
“Yes,” Nessa said. “I’m sorry. I was recruiting while mostly dysfunctional and fixed what I thought were leakage problems in her mind shields, thinking she was a Mindbound. I have no idea what I did to her.”
“Which is why we fear Telepaths,” Uffie said, sotto voice. She turned to Soft Hand Lady. “…, you’re not a Mindbound, but …..” Whatever. “Unfortunately, you didn’t meet the criteria for recruitment by my organization. That’s why you don’t know of us. We can’t risk recruiting those who are, pardon my bluntness, not top notch.”
“I hear a ‘but’,” Soft Hand Lady said.
“Yes. We also recruit those abused by Telepaths and other types, for humanitarian reasons. I’m recruiting you now, if you want.”
“What did Nessa do to me?”
“She ‘fixed’ your mind shields as if you were a Mindbound, because that’s what you thought you were,” Uffie said. “Someone of our persuasion should be able to raise and lower their mental shields under their own control, and to us, they don’t even appear to be mind shields. Many of our tricks work better with these down, you see. I can show you how to undo what Nessa did.”
“Ma’am, Uffie, I have no tricks.”
“You do. Your talents at bodily self-control, for instance.”
“But that makes no sense,” Soft Hand Lady said.
“Your nerve connections aren’t good enough to give you the control you have over yourself. The analogy we often use is your mind has control over your motor nerves in an almost telepathic fashion. Mind you, this is just an analogy.”
“Interesting.” Soft Hand Lady flicked her gray-flecked hair in consternation. She appeared to be anything but interested in this knowledge.
“There’s more, I suspect, but that will take further analysis,” Uffie said.
Now she felt worse, ready to throw up as well as pass out. She told her body to ignore the problem, but her body refused. Nessa wiped her mouth and didn’t throw up. Barely. “Which she would rather do without me around,” Nessa said to Soft Hand Lady, referring to Uffie’s last comment about analysis.
“We still have our secrets; we don’t trust Telepaths. Telepaths cheat,” Uffie said. “They also have a tendency to regard the best of us as challenge for their Telepathy.”
Nessa snorted. The others cheated just as much, with their mind shields that flowed like oil, their encoded memories and whatnot.
“Does this organization have a name?” Soft Hand Lady said.
Uffie smiled and didn’t say anything.
“No, she’s successfully kept the name from me, although I do know they’re a subsidiary group to the strange Indigo organization I told you about,” Nessa said. Uffie’s smile turned into a frown. “I won’t even try and peek. Penance. I pledged to never mess up the mind of someone of your kind, then I went and did it by accident.” Pause. “You really think you can keep the 99 Gods from exposing your people, Uffie? Some of them have made contact with the Gods.”
“From what I’ve seen, the 99 Gods are easier to fool than the Telepaths,” Uffie said, to Nessa. “As long as you behave yourself.”
“Ken knows,” Soft Hand Lady said. “It’s obvious now.”
“But only because of his connection with Nessa,” Uffie said. “He could out us, but there’s nothing to do about it but be nice.” Uffie paused and thought for a moment. “However, …, you are no longer their bodyguard, or no longer just their bodyguard. You are now my student as well. Does that help the sensation of drowning in Telepaths?”
“Yes, Uffie, it does,” Soft Hand Lady said.
“Have I asked yet what you want to do with yourself, now that you’re free, Uffie?” Nessa said. Soft Hand Lady still sat across the aisle, instructed by Uffie to ‘learn’.
“Several times,” Uffie said.
“You can’t want to stay with Ken and me. Can you? We’re too dangerous, on far too many l
evels. For one thing, staying with us is almost an engraved invitation for your secrets to be exposed.”
“I can help you think. Once you get used to me, your mental stability will go back up as well.”
“Oh, right,” Nessa said. “I’m a research project to you. Huh. I still don’t mind being a research project. You do surrogate mother well.” Nessa’s danger sense increased almost to panic level. She focused her mind on that, to help her understand. She also reached for her airsick bag.
“I’m also dying to get a chance to interact with the Minds of the Sea,” Uffie said. “The idea they’re dolphin group minds is simply amazing. We can learn a lot more about their society now that we can communicate… Nessa? You’ve turned green.”
The captain or pilot or whatever of the airplane flashed to panic. So did Ken’s mind, and he awoke, unexpectedly working top-end telekinesis.
She integrated thoughts and grabbed what minds she could to forestall more panic. She barely started to get a grip on the airplane pilot’s panic when the missile hit the jet engine under the right wing of the plane.
Her first thought was the timing of this couldn’t be a coincidence. Their attacker knew they were out of contact with Javier and Alt.
Her second thought got aborted when she vomited explosively into the airsickness bag. As she did so, the airplane decompressed.
The twins!
I will not allow this to happen, Nessa thought, diving deeper into all the nearby minds. I will not allow these idiots to kill my two unborn children.
She wasn’t sure what she needed to do to save her children, but taking over everyone’s minds was a good start.
The fuel tank in the right wing of the airplane blew up.
37. (Dana)
“We’ve uncovered a problem, and we’d like your help,” Jan said.
Dana looked up from her paperwork, bleary eyed, to find Jan leaning on the doorjamb, falsely serene. When Dana had left Jan, after breakfast this morning, Jan had been chipper and happy. Dana hadn’t trashed a bedroom in five days. She still had Hell-nightmares, but she coped better now. Jan still mothered her, sleeping with her, but Dana suspected this would soon end. On the other hand, Grover and Jurgen had been spending time needling Jan about making it formal and proposing to Dana, and Jan’s reaction was strangely thoughtful.
Dana had her own issues. Dubuque’s minions were active in her territory again, for the first time since she took over as Regent, and she couldn’t figure out what they were doing, beyond their plastering ‘Dubuque is The Way’ stickers everywhere.
They were gathering information, that much was clear.
“What sort of problem?” Dana drained her ‘there is no spoon’ coffee mug, a ‘we need to be friends’ gift from Grover. She suspected some sort of anime reference, but she wasn’t sure; she did know Grover had designed and fabbed the mug, and its bent spoon design and logo. The mug was exceptionally good at keeping coffee warm, hardly weighed anything, and you had to put work into tipping it over.
Indigo gifts littered her office, everything personalized hand-crafted or hand-drawn art. The Indigo members liked giving gifts; gift giving was part of their intricate social dance. Dana had started to reciprocate; digging back into her old almost forgotten teen talents she had 3-D rendered an old space telescope nebula scene and added some corny and cute pixies peeking around from behind several of the nebulas.
Jan pulled the office chair back and sat down, leaned back, and rubbed her hands together. She hid her nervousness well, but Dana knew all of Jan’s tells now. “We – the real Indigo – run a camp in Minnesota where we teach prospectives inseeing. The place isn’t large, or defended, and the students tend to be teens and young adults, none of whom are innates.” Innate meant a human born with abnormal abilities, such as Psychics, Occultists, Shamans such as Epharis, and several other screwy types Dana had only heard nameless references to, but not including skeptics, which the Indigo didn’t consider abnormal. Dana thought of the classification scheme as a bit of Telepath terminology, and wasn’t sure what to make of the Indigo picking it up. “As everyone attending the school is, from a 99 God perspective, a perfectly normal human, and none of them have any Hell-contaminations, we assumed the students were safer there than anywhere else we might send them. However, Dubuque sent a squad of Supported private investigators into the area this morning, and Epharis thinks they’re looking for our school. Abe’s asked me to get them out of there.”
“You kept them in Dubuque’s territory?” Some of the Indigo’s decisions made no sense to Dana.
“The camp is far enough north in Minnesota to be in the diffuse borderland between Dubuque, Montreal and Akron’s territory,” Jan said. “We’d like some political help, here, perhaps some support pulling them out.” Jan bit her upper lip, finally showing some of her inner worry. The last Dana had heard, the Indigo prognosticators thought April was going to be a bloody month, and the rest of March would be clean. She also knew the Indigo prognosticators suspected the 99 Gods were already messing up their tricks, and their error rate was quickly rising. This problem was early and unexpected.
Dana brought up a willpower communicator and paged Akron and Montreal. The willpower communicators were Dana’s invention, a much more frugal use of willpower than projections, and given she was only a Supported with the needs and responsibilities of a full Territorial, she needed the efficiency. “Let me check with Akron and Montreal first.” When Akron and Montreal answered – or, as they were truly Gods instead of simply Regents, a single track of their multi-track minds answered – Dana laid out the problem for them. Simultaneously, she put together a willpower app to allow Jan to hear the Gods responses, and to be able to talk to them, something she hadn’t thought of before. In its native form, Dana’s willpower communicator was pseudo-telepathic, and although Jan wasn’t a skeptic, she still mind-shielded better than any of the civilians. The entire Indigo inner circle did.
“Is the area farmland?” Montreal asked.
“Nope. Forest,” Jan said.
“Then it’s in territory Akron and I jointly share,” Montreal said.
“Unless it’s in mining country, which by previous precedent I protect,” Akron said.
The real Territorials had been working the borderland issues ever since the Atlanta – Miami fight. Some of their decisions were obscure, difficult for Dana to understand. The discussions worked better between friendly Gods; as far as they knew, Dubuque was one of the more non-cooperative in this process. The territorial discussions had left her Regency alone for now, postponing such discussions until the Kid God reached his ‘adulthood’.
“The nearest mine’s about six miles away,” Jan said. “Can you protect them, Akron?”
“Yes and no,” Akron said, after a short pause, likely so a multi-thought track consensus could form. “Dubuque’s pushing us hard right now to formally join the City of God. At this moment, he has ‘detained’ one hundred and fifty eight of my Supported ‘for their own protection’. The number keeps changing because his people are detaining them for only a day or so, then letting them go. I’ve been checking out the detainees afterwards, but I’m finding no changes. I don’t have the resources to help your people where they are. Can you move them closer to me? I can get them under my headquarters protections, then.”
Jan looked over at Dana. “I could live with that,” Jan said. She didn’t like putting her people under Akron’s protections, but Akron did hold the Indigo in high regard, because of her encounter with the Hell-beast. “Dana, can you fly us there and bring them to Akron?”
“I don’t have the willpower necessary to pick up your people and fly them to Akron,” Dana said, after a moment of calculation. “Can either of you help with a projection or two?”
“Projections are fair game, and we’re still technically at war with Dubuque,” Akron said. “If we try to extract them using projections, you risking them falling to their deaths if our projections get attacked and destroyed. However, i
f you’re going in personally, Dana, I can boost the amount of willpower I’m loaning you for the duration.”
“I can do the same,” Montreal said.
“Let’s do this,” Dana said. She had to. Supporting the Indigo was part of her Mission, and she didn’t want a bunch of kids falling into Dubuque’s hands, where they could be used against them for blackmail purposes.
“That’s the place,” Jan said. Dana had them flying, invisible, at about 3000 feet, her invisibility backed up by an Akron willpower-detection thwarter. In addition to Jan, she brought Lewis, a Montreal Grade One Supported with some combat experience, and Lisa, a Montreal Grade Two who was stout enough to be able to cope with the Kid God’s temper. She also had Amanda and Greg Clover, Dr. Velma Horton (who had requested to come along, as the school’s instructor was Velma’s best friend), Dana’s usual Indigo-supplied bodyguards Elise and Gwen, and Sue Cox, Jan’s daughter and the best Communicant – witch – they could dredge up today. Any more and Dana would have had trouble flying the people out of the camp.
As Jan had said, the camp wasn’t a defended compound like Harry Mountain, but a perfectly normal looking fifty-acre hilly forest parcel with four cabins and a dirt and gravel circle road with spaces for another dozen tents and RVs. A few blackened piles of late snow marked the parking area, and winter bleak still ruled the vegetation, the trees bare and the underbrush unsprouted.
On the way, Sue had been telling stories about time spent in the camp in many of her summers; back in the late ‘80s to mid ‘90s the Indigo got together only during a late August vacation at the camp. “The only time I got to spend time with my ‘funny cousins’ Diana, John, Steve, Melissa and Samantha, and compare notes on our crazy parents and our crazy tricks was here, in those vacations,” Sue had said, wistful. “Those were good times.”
They landed and the camp’s people came out to greet them. They all looked worried, especially Val, the camp’s instructor. Val was a medium height light skinned woman with a deep southern accent, and the first thing she did when they landed was give Velma a big hug. “Line up in ranks as we practiced earlier,” Val said, to her students. As expected, the students ranged in age from tweens to young adults, and all of them radiated terror. “Unfortunately, as I feared, we’re going to be leaving our baggage behind.” The students did as told, and quickly. In less than two minutes, they were off, flying northeast, the fastest way out of any territory Dubuque could possibly claim.