They weren’t more than fifteen hundred feet up in the air when the helixes began to fly.
“Down, down!” Jan said. “We can’t fight up here, not with the students!” Dana complied, lowering her flying platform down into the forest a half mile north of the camp, still moving forward and dodging trees. The attackers were content to zap her shields ineffectively, keeping their distance, not ready for an assault.
Two more sonic booms announced the arrival of two more Dubuque Grade Zero Supported, making a total of five Grade Zeroes and seventeen other assorted Dubuque Supported. Dana fought panic as she sent out pleas for help to Montreal and Akron, and pulled on the Kid God’s willpower for emergency help.
The Kid God woke a doll-sized projection in Dana’s purse, stuck his horse head out, scanned around and yodeled. “Mom! Get out! You have to get out and leave everyone behind!”
Typical God logic. The Mission hit for finking out on her people would be manageable, and far smaller than the consequences for fighting and dying, or surrendering.
Dana didn’t see any other option other than surrendering. Dubuque’s people outgunned them, significantly, at least five to one against. Amanda, their only skeptic, couldn’t protect more than herself and her husband. Dana thought she might be able to stop one Grade Zero, if she got lucky. Nobody else in the group could even put up a fight against a Grade Zero.
“Surrender now!” one of the enemy Grade Zero’s boomed. “Or die as the infidel dogs you are.”
Dana landed them in a winter-thatched power line easement near an abandoned road, her shields holding for the moment. “We will surrender,” she said, amplifying her voice.
“Dammit, Dana,” Jan said, a whisper in her ear. “What are these?” Jan pointed at the five brightly glowing leaders of the enemy team, now converging on the grounded group. If Dana read the situation correctly, Dubuque’s people had been scattered throughout the northeastern arrowhead of Minnesota, searching for signs of them.
“These are all Grade Zero Supported. Unlike what you said, this isn’t a few private investigators attempting to hunt down your people, this is a strong enough assault force to take me out in my home base.”
A trap. Dubuque had set out bait for them and they had fallen into the trap like idiots.
“Aunt January!” the Kid God’s projection said, now out of Dana’s purse and flying around, in appearance a corny winged horse. “Tell my Mom to get the bleep out of here! Release her from the responsibility of protecting you!”
“No way in fucking hell,” Jan said, giving the Kid God’s Pegasus projection a hot stare. “Not until I try this.” Jan reached out to Sue and Val and joined hands. “Godslayer, protect us!”
A purple fog bank sprang up around them. Peace and harmony, holy and angelic, surrounded them. The enemy warning shots vanished when they hit the indigo-tinged fog bank. “Let’s negotiate,” Jan said, her voice loud and projected out to the enemy leader.
The leader of Dubuque’s strike force landed fifty feet away, up a slight slope and under the humming power lines. His compatriots remained flying. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Unnatural tricks. Forbidden and unholy unnatural tricks, at that. No matter. I’m Lt. Terry McGovern, and you’re all under arrest. Surrender, and nobody will be harmed. After a visit to Living Saint Dubuque, I promise you will all be set free. My divine master only wishes to speak with you.”
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Jan said.
In Dana’s mind, Akron said “Stall. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Fine, then,” Lt. McGovern said. “Perhaps Living Saint Dubuque can come here.” He closed his eyes for a moment, in prayer. When his eyes opened, he appeared surprised. “Bravo Tango!” he said, his voice unsteady. His troops stopped their warning shots and flew in, close, forty feet from the edge of the indigo fog bank. Lt. McGovern turned toward Jan. “The situation has changed, as have our orders. Drop the fog bank protection now, or we’ll be forced to slay you all.”
“You won’t be able to,” Jan said. “I’ll tell you what, though. Some of us are willing to surrender to you, in return for letting the rest go.”
Dana didn’t know whether Jan was bluffing or not. She suspected a bluff. “This is Akron’s territory,” Dana said. “She’s known to be very protective of those she considers hers.”
“Last chance,” Lt. McGovern said. “We aren’t negotiating.”
“You want the three of us?” Jan said, flicking her eyes at Sue and Val. “You can get us without a fight. Just let the others go!” She glowed indigo as she spoke.
Lt. McGovern’s face showed uncertainty and doubt. “Very well. Scaramouche!”
Scaramouche?
His troops didn’t move, or fire.
Instead, Elise leapt, beheading Sue with her sword and firing at Jan, Gwen and Val with her automatic machine pistol. Gwen and Val went down, but Jan rolled before Sue fell and kicked Elise’s sword out of her hand before Elise could harm anyone else. “Elise!” Jan said, a scream. “Dammit! No!”
“Fire Alpha!” Lt. McGovern said. The Grade Zero Supported squad let loose four red and gold helixes, killer attacks. So much for any attempt to capture them. The incoming helixes hit the indigo fog and dissipated.
Unfortunately, the indigo fog vanished an instant later.
Dana, in shock over Elise’s betrayal, put up her strongest protective shell around the students and blasted Lt. McGovern with purple fire. She expected her attack would bounce off his shields, but at least she might end up distracting him enough to mess up the attack.
Lt. McGovern screamed and fell, physically unharmed, but stripped of this Supported tricks.
I just took down a Grade Zero? Dana thought. Me? By myself? How did I do that?
“I know the winning side when I see one,” Elise said, after Jan kicked Elise’s machine pistol out of her hands. “You I respected, but Abe’s way is nothing more than protracted and painful suicide. And Dubuque will give me real power.”
Crap!
Dana lost track of Jan’s confrontation with Elise as she concentrated on the combat. She had always possessed this level of power, she realized. What had changed were her qualms about using her power. She didn’t care about qualms now. Right now, she was the only thing standing between the students, non-combatants all, and this ridiculous and treacherous attack.
So she fought, focusing her mind and her willpower as she never had before. Moving and thinking faster than she knew was safe.
Dana dropped a dozen lesser Supported with a wide area yellow beam attack, stunning the lot of them. She hit a second Grade Zero with purple fire, and he fell, as well. An instant later, she tried to take down a third, but her purple fire attack didn’t reach him, unable to penetrate his shields. She hit four lesser Supported with a blue helix, ripping them in and out of reality. They dropped, severely wounded, and when they hit the ground, they died.
She dodged, instinctive, allowing two more red and gold helixes to deflect off her personal shields. Her shield over the students held; so far, none of Dubuque’s Grade Zeroes targeted them.
Jan ran back up the slope to Dana, crunching through the dry weeds and holding Elise’s and Sue’s heads in her left hand, both by the hair. She carried her now bloody sword in her right. Dana hadn’t noticed Elise’s end. “We can fix this! Get us out of here!”
“I can’t fly and protect us,” Dana said. She continued to attack any enemies, moving or otherwise, with an assortment of stunning and power stripping helixes.
Jan glanced around, looking for any remaining targets. The enemy actives were down to the three remaining Grade Zero supported. All the rest of the attackers had fallen. Of the defenders, nobody else remained alive save for now wounded Velma and Val. Dana whisked them over to inside the protective shell with the students.
Jan charged the nearest Grade Zero, sword held high, screaming bloody murder, the severed heads waved in the Grade Zero’s face for shock value. Dana concentrated a purple fire attack on
the second nearest Grade Zero. He fell, but only after agonizing seconds as Dana’s attack too-slowly ate through his personal protections. She started to feel willpower depleted, and her skin had reddened and split, now charred in places. Thin smoke rose from her arms. None of the enemy attacks had hit her; the damage was all from her own willpower exertions.
The Grade Zero Jan charged froze in place. He alternated red and gold helixes and five helix aquamarine beams at Jan, but none hit. Jan somehow, impossibly, dodged them. She also, somehow, impossibly beheaded the Supported, going through his personal protections that should have stopped anyone save a Territorial God or, well, Dana.
The last Grade Zero, the one Dana hadn’t had time to concentrate her attacks on yet, swooped closer, slalom-flying around bare tree trunks and power lines. He ripped a blue helix through Jan’s back, exploding her intestines in a red spaghetti mess. She fell, a basketball sized hole through her body.
“Jan!” Dana said, leaping toward her. One step was all it took for her to realize she wouldn’t be able to keep up the protective shell on the non-combatants if she continued. The last Grade Zero, a tall clean-shaven shorthaired tattoo-laden Hispanic man, turned on her and blasted her with a blue helix. Her personal shields stopped the attack, but she felt the attack nevertheless.
“You can’t take him, you’re nearly out of willpower! Get the fuck out of here, now!” This was the Kid God and the Godslayer, shouting together, enough to attract Dana’s attention and break her out of her focused battle trance. She suspected they had been attempting to attract her attention throughout much of this short battle. They were right. She had to retreat, to save the students.
She retreated away from the last Grade Zero, picking up the nearby dead and wounded on the way. She tried for Jan, Sue and Elise’s remains, but they were too far; she did manage to get Gwen, Greg and Amanda’s corpses. Bending her will to the task, Dana lifted the combatants off the ground and flew to the northeast.
Behind her, Dana saw the battlefield from above for the first time. They had lost Sue and Jan to the enemy, and Elise to Dubuque’s insanity and then to Jan’s sword. Unless Akron got here quickly neither Lewis nor Lisa would survive. Gwen, Greg and Amanda, all inner circle Indigo types, should live, despite their mortal wounds. Jan, worried about emergencies, had talked Dana into carrying two large coolers of blood on this rescue mission, just for this purpose.
The enemy? Save for the one last Grade Zero who followed them, and who still attacked, trying to weaken Dana’s protective fields, Dana had either killed or depowered them all. For the first time, she had worked the willpower with the approximate power of a Territorial God. She had also nearly killed herself in the process.
I did this, Dana thought. I did this. I did this. What am I becoming? What have I become?
I lost Jan.
Much later, when she finally returned to her Atlanta lair, exhausted and still emotionally numb, after leaving the wounded behind in Akron’s care, she couldn’t find a single Indigo member to give the bad news to. They were all gone, as if they had never existed.
38. (Dave)
Despite the longing in her eyes, Elorie hadn’t joined him in his sleeping bag last night, making the first snappish ‘be professional’ comment to him since they left America. He fretted over her comment, and decided his worries were just nerves.
In the morning, the rest of the crew snapped at him as well, including a pointed ‘P-boy’ comment from Jack. Dave wondered what he had done wrong, if anything, and decided everyone shared Elorie’s nerves. Dave, himself, was invigorated over their progress.
Last night, they all agreed the secret room must be ‘Arrhenius’s Room of Finding’, and Dave would go in first. He didn’t mind being the group’s canary. Perhaps he would be able to solve the mystery, save everyone else the trouble of going in, and quiet everyone’s nerves. He didn’t plan to touch anything, or take any actions more intrusive than using his smartphone as a camcorder.
They returned to the secret room with few troubles, but nobody chattered this morning, which Dave found unnerving. Nothing had been disturbed overnight, at least to Dave’s eyes.
Dave hooked himself to the front of the rope. “All yours,” Elorie said, her voice as distant as her presence. She remained distant. He looked Elorie over, closely, and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Her face was blank now, ‘professional’.
Very well. He walked into the room and started recording on his smartphone.
“The itchy magic sensation I described yesterday is stronger inside the room than just outside,” Dave said. The room appeared bigger on the inside than the outside, a trick of the eye due to the lower ceiling than in the meeting room just below.
Litter covered the mostly empty room, not only fallen pieces of ceiling but also various objects left by the Ecumenists, and a few objects that Dave suspected predated the Ecumenists’ visit. As he had noted from the doorway, the carved shelf or table did extend around the entire circumference of the room. One area of the shelf, two meters to the right of the doorway, looked cleaned recently, likely by the Ecumenists. Books and papers covered the stone shelf, scattered haphazardly. One of the papers had been a map. Dave walked over, slowly and with great care, afraid a piece of the meter-thick tufa floor might collapse underneath him. Whoever set up this room arrangement hadn’t been thinking for the eons, Dave concluded. Someday, the floor here would collapse into the room below. This couldn’t be architecturally sound. The tufa had the cracks and fissures of all rocks, from the many eons of Earth-stress, earthquakes and the like.
The map puzzled him. First, the map was printed in French; second, he didn’t recognize the map’s milieu, not right off the bat. Without touching, he checked for a map scale, and couldn’t find one. The left side of the map showed a sea, while the rest of the map primarily showed mountains. Not a map of the eastern Med, or anything in Western Europe. The map’s city names were printed in a bad color to read, the map primarily a topographical map.
Dave went on after calling out his find to the rest of the crew. He counted seven backpacks on the ground, five water bottles, one portable stove, two flashlights, a trash bag holding some food garbage, and a digital camera. “If anyone’s interested, there’s a digital camera here,” he said.
“Save the camera for later,” Elorie said, impersonal and impatient. Dave continued to look.
“A piece of the flooring has been taken out, approximately in the center of the room,” Dave said. This surprised him. He edged over and recorded the find, a thin half-meter square piece of floor, pried up. Whatever the Ecumenists had uncovered they reburied under fist-sized hunks of tufa. Scuffmarks surrounded the recovered hole, as if someone had hastily kicked the fist-sized tufa rocks into the hole on the way out.
Dave continued his observations. He found scuffmarks on the highly disturbed shelf-table directly opposite the entrance door. A scattering of small tufa pebbles covered the shelf-table. Five paces beyond the scuffmarks he found a group of interesting artifacts on the shelf-table, including the ivory horse on wheels toy he had seen yesterday. A few of the objects appeared disturbed, but a heavy layer of dust still covered most of them. He couldn’t figure out what the dust-covered objects were, but among the disturbed objects he identified a bronze knife blade, a sea shell carved into the shape of a pregnant woman, a fired clay pot crazed with age, and an ivory comb.
He carefully lifted the rope over the dug up area in the center and frowned. “When my back is turned to the covered hole in the center of the room, the magic sensation grows stronger,” Dave said. “My guess is there’s something in the hole, something dangerous.” He didn’t like the idea of a carved floor-weakening hole in the floor of this place. Just to be on the safe side, he made doubly sure he had the rope properly clipped to his caving harness.
“This box over here is a tool chest,” Dave said, after walking carefully another two meters along the edge of the room. “I wonder why the Ecumenists left their tool chest here?”
The tool chest sat open on the shelf. Two screwdrivers, a cold chisel and a rock hammer lay beside the tool chest. Dave peered inside the tool chest and found a hacksaw, two battery packs, and several battery-powered hand tools purchasable at any do-it-yourself store, including a drill. They all appeared new and unused. He looked toward the center of the room and edged back that way, lighting the area and peering closely. Yes. He had guessed right. Two pry bars lay on the floor.
He returned to the entrance door and stopped recording. “That’s everything. Let’s go back out and take a…” They had planned to go back somewhere safe and look over what Dave had recorded before deciding what next to do.
“My call,” Elorie said, snappish. “I’m going in with you. I think we need the map.”
“But the interference…”
“The longer I stay here, the more used to the interference I get,” Elorie said. “I think we over-reacted yesterday. I don’t think this is as bad a problem as we thought.”
Dave shrugged. “As long as we stay away from that thing in the center of the room.”
“I agree,” Elorie said. “Lead me to the map.”
Jack unhooked himself from the second spot, and everyone backed off one place, to let Elorie take the second spot on the rope and to give the rope enough slack to allow her to cross the room to look at the map.
“What’s this a map of?” Elorie said, as they slowly walked toward the map. She winced as she walked, as if being in the room pained her, but she didn’t say a thing.
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 47