99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  “There’s more up here,” the other man said, shining his flashlight into the upper room with one hand and waving his gun with his other. “There’s a shelf with crap on it.”

  “Later, Evil Dude,” the braid-clenching woman said. “Let’s heal up my Cracker Jack box prize first.”

  Evil Dude?

  Dave passed out, overwhelmed by the realization he had passed into a new variety of insanity.

  41. (War)

  War flipped her projection focus back to Alt and the Telepaths. Now Javier wept, huddled under a blanket on his bed in one of Lorenzi’s cabins. Lorenzi had appeared, and he stalked from one cabin to another, trying to extract coherent communication from any of the Telepaths. He hadn’t succeeded. Alt had taken the canoe out to the middle of the muddy lake and sat there, alone, radiating an aura of ‘stay away’.

  “I guess I’m stuck nursemaiding these idiots anyway,” War said. She flew her tall warrior goddess projection over to Lorenzi.

  “So, have you figured anything out?” he said.

  “No, I was going to ask you,” War said. “You holding up to this house arrest?”

  “So so,” Lorenzi said, waving his hand back and forth as if he was waving hello. Portland had told him to stay at his lake cabins and not do anything until she let him. He griped but he had given in. He couldn’t risk losing his divine protections. “This is connected.”

  “Connected to what?”

  “My incarceration and the crew who triggered it.”

  “Fucking crap.” War still hadn’t figured out what in the hell was going on with the deaths of the Ecumenists and why looking into their deaths appeared to be pure poison on so many different levels. If Lorenzi correctly fingered the problem, then this likely also connected to the agitated Angelic Host and the destroyed airplane’s passengers who showed up in the coastal Turkish city. “How’d you figure this out?”

  She cursed herself for not making the effort to do an in-depth in the Place of Time about this particular puzzle, despite how difficult the Place was to see. However, the Host had been correct. If she examined every event or decision she made in the Place of Time, she wouldn’t have the time to do anything. She would just have to soldier on without the knowledge.

  “Magic,” John said. “How else?”

  “Let’s force the issue,” War said.

  John rolled his eyes. “I knew you were going to say that, pardner.”

  War’s head hurt after several of the Telepaths tried to shoo her away and failed. Alt hadn’t taken kindly to her dragging his canoe out of the lake, calling her every name in the book and doing his telepathic best to give her a migraine. She hadn’t relented and he gave up his resistance.

  The sky cleared in the hour she spent digging each of the Telepaths out of whatever hole they had dug for themselves. She even got Lorenzi to set up a picnic lunch for them in the shaded picnic area to the side of Lorenzi’s personal cabin. The Telepaths ate, reluctantly. Food had to improve their mood. It couldn’t make it worse.

  “We need to know, Alt,” War said as she paced around the picnic table, tall and ominous on purpose. Her Minerva projection was almost as much fun as the little girl. “You need to speak out loud, as well.” The Telepaths had been chattering non-stop with each other since War had started grabbing them, and they used some telepathy coding trick of Nicole’s to make sure War couldn’t intercept their messages. Damned annoying.

  “What’s going on is none of your business.”

  “I’m making it my business,” War said. She stopped her pacing behind Alt and partly concealed herself, enough to worry Alt a little. “Something’s happened. We need to know what.”

  “There’s a disagreement among us about what’s going on,” Angela said, from behind her hands where she rested her head. Although primarily a telekinetic, Alt and his crew had found a way to ramp up Angela’s telepathic abilities to where she could do the mental jabber routine privately with the other nearby Telepaths. “It’s not my place to say what.”

  “Alt?” Javier said, wiping his nose messily on his coat sleeve.

  Alt didn’t answer. He just glared holes through his sandwich and ignored War’s allegorical breathing down his neck.

  “It’s important,” Nicole said, looking doe-eyed at Alt. The older Telepath appeared much older than her late fifties age today, with no makeup on her face and her hair pulled back to expose its snowy roots. Her hair had been coming in snowy white ever since Nessa and Alt recruited her. “Important and scary.”

  “Fine.” Alt put his head in his hands. “Something’s happened to the Ecumenist quest crew as well as to Nessa, Ken and their group,” he said, voice low and pained.

  “Yes?” War walked around the picnic table and sat down opposite Alt. He had muted his normal hypnotic aura to near invisibility.

  “The Ecumenist quest group vanished from my mind,” Alt said. He wouldn’t look at her. “I’m sure several of them are dead; the rest have been mentally taken over by something foul.”

  “Another Telepath?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Alt said.

  “What about Nessa and Ken?”

  “That’s the disagreement. Javier thinks they’re dead. I think they’re just blocking us. Hell, I’m afraid they’re the ones who took over the Ecumenist quest group.”

  “You think Nessa and Ken switched sides and became evil in some way?” War said, glaring harder at Alt and pressing her interrogation. His idea would explain the tenor of her mental conversation with Nessa earlier that day. Her gut didn’t believe it, though.

  “Yes,” Alt said. He still didn’t register her existence.

  “When did this happen?”

  “While we were rescuing Researcher’s idiots, and later, when we were sleeping in exhaustion afterwards.”

  “The Ecumenist questers were in Turkey? Ken and Nessa were flying there?”

  “Yes.”

  War worked out the time difference. Ten hours. All too fucking plausible. “John, do you have something accessible with internet access?”

  John frowned and had one of his flunky magicians fetch an iPad. War ran her fingers over the device until she found the article Portland pointed out to her.

  “Take a look at this,” War said. Alt looked at her for the first time since she grabbed him out of his canoe, intense interest on his face. “Because of something Portland said to me, I think this is connected. Note the eleven missing passengers. That’s the number in Nessa’s crew, plus one more, who could be the Uffie person they were supposed to be collecting from Nairobi.”

  Alt paled. Javier whistled.

  “Well, that’s just dookie,” Lydia said, looking up from her own tablet prayer. “Impossible. I can’t believe it.”

  “You’re saying that Ken telekinetically rescued an entire plane full of passengers at 30,000 feet after their plane was blown up by a bomb or missile?” Javier said.

  War nodded.

  “Ken’s not that powerful,” Alt said. War did not roll her eyes. “No Telepath is.”

  “I think he is,” War said. “I could have done this and Ken and I have sparred several times. I know his telekinesis is stronger than my equivalent. I’ve always wondered why he and Nessa bothered with jets.” The idea that they did so only because of personal ethical and moral restrictions belonged to her earlier identity, not to War, so she couldn’t mention that.

  “No. It couldn’t…”

  “Alt,” Angela said. “This is possible, based on what you’ve told me about Ken.” Angela hadn’t yet had the dubious pleasure of meeting Ken and Nessa, but she was a teek specialist. “I couldn’t do the trick, but I’m not anywhere near world class, like Ken is. I could save myself from a plane blowing up around me in midair. Trivially.”

  Lorenzi cleared his throat. “This is his secret to keep, and I hate to expose him this way, but Ken is easily capable of this, and far more.”

  Lydia shook her head, causing her hair tie-ins to flap and her jeans to jangl
e. “Then – okay, folks, what does this mean?” The kid had potential, War realized. Not only did she hold her own in a group of mind-sucking Telepaths, she hinted at being able to lead them.

  Alt frowned and buried his head in his hands again. “I think they’ve gone evil.”

  “Why do you say that?” War asked. If they had gone evil, then she would have to ditch her plan. She couldn’t do the rest of her Betrayal if the only person supporting it was an evil Nessa.

  “Because whatever grabbed the Ecumenist questers was evil. If this plane rescue was Ken’s work, then Ken and Nessa survived and flew on to wherever the Ecumenist questers were. There’s no need to posit any more Telepaths. We have quite enough Telepaths involved already.”

  “Javier?” War asked.

  “Got me,” he said. “My long distance telepathy’s confined to contacting other Telepaths – oh, and Gods and Supported who do the willpower-based telepathy trick. None of the Ecumenist questers were Supported; all of Ken’s and Nessa’s bodyguard detail were Mindbound and thus couldn’t pick up the Supported equivalent of telepathy.” He paused. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t think Nessa was strong enough to block me out to where I would think she’s dead; Ken’s certainly not.”

  Lorenzi bit his lip. “Yes, but Nessa’s capable of a bit more than normal when she’s highly agitated, including being able to protect the minds of those around her. Trust my experience on this hubbub. What if she suspects us? What if she suspects someone on our side staged the attack on the jet?”

  “You’re right,” Alt said. “I’ve seen Nessa do things that are normally impossible for her when she’s lost her temper. Why would she suspect us, though?”

  “Not us, as in the people at this table,” John said. “Us, as in other members of the Divine Compact alliance.”

  “That’s not the only possibility,” Persona said. War blinked, and realized that Persona had pried herself out of Alt’s body to appear on her own. Her appearance: Nessa.

  Alt nearly flew out of his clothes.

  Persona, who often played the ditz, wasn’t apparently interested today. Her choice of appearance was no accident.

  “Tell us,” Phil Blackburn said. The putative brains of this outfit had been keeping quiet, most recently studying the internet article on the rescued passengers. As a Mindbound he didn’t catch the telepathic chatter.

  “Nessa’s pregnant, remember,” Persona said. “Think like an over-protective mother. No, think like an insanely powerful over-protective madwoman-mother. We know Nessa was worried about her unborn twins and didn’t want to go on this mission because of them. She doesn’t suspect us of causing the attack. I think she’s pissed at us for putting her in danger.”

  “Damn,” Alt said. “A pissed Nessa. Just what the world doesn’t need. We’ll all be having migraines for the next month. So then she goes and takes over the Ecumenist quest as an evil queen of darkness.”

  “Not in this mind set,” Persona said. “She’s met Elorie, remember, and she didn’t have a negative reaction. I know Nessa; no negative reaction means she liked Elorie. No way she goes evil bitch Snow Queen on someone she likes. Nor would she go killing other members of the quest, well, unless they attacked her. No, not even then. She hates killing, and she’s good enough to take people over without needing to kill.”

  “There’s one even she’s going to have problems with,” Alt said. “There’s a level ten fake Telepath among the questers – uh, that is, using Joan D’Ark terminology, a top end Psychic.” Alt had developed his own personal terminology for everything related to telepathic phenomena. His loose terminology drove War batty, and she had leaned on him not to use it. Or, at least not use his terms without translation.

  “Dave Estrada?” Persona said. Alt nodded. “I’ve met him. He and Nessa will get along just fine, even if she can’t read his mind. He’s a nice guy.”

  “I’ve met him, too, and I agree with Persona,” Lorenzi said. “I think, unlikely as this sounds, there’s another Telepath interfering in this mess. Nor should it be a surprise that something evil’s involved – we already know the Ecumenists are all dead – or at least I believe so, even if the rest of you still aren’t convinced. If I’m right, something or someone’s killed them; an evil Telepath is all too plausible a candidate to be the killer. The Ecumenists always feared evil Telepaths and the other powerful telepathy-wielding meddlers, such as One Mind and the Ha-qodeshim.”

  Which, War knew from other conversations, Lorenzi wouldn’t say word one about, not wanting to confuse the issue by dredging up other greater-than-human distractions. War had looked up the ‘Ha-qodeshim’ term, and found it was, of all things, one of several Hebraic biblical terms translated into English as ‘Angels’, and better translated as ‘the holy ones’. Which meant jack shit, as the Torah also used the term ‘B’nai Elohim’ to refer to angels, and that one translated as ‘a son of God’, which in War’s mind there was only one: Jesus.

  Alt lowered his head to the picnic table and put his hands over his head. His eyes pinched tight and every muscle in his body tensed up. “Alright, so perhaps there’s another enemy involved,” Alt said. “That means we need to be watching for something following the trail back to us. That means we need to set up watches.”

  “Good idea,” War said. “That will go well with the training I’m proposing today.”

  Walter moaned and vanished, hiding under one of his illusions and sending an illusion of himself coolly walking away from the picnic area while whistling and combing his hair. He hated War’s training with a passion. War undid Walter’s invisibility and glared him back into his seat. “It’s time, Alt.”

  “You’re talking the covert crap idea you mentioned before?”

  War nodded. “We don’t have permission from the Compact” that is, Portland “to do any covert missions against Dubuque, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be prepared ahead of time. There’s a lot you’re going to have to learn and there’s a lot I’m going to have to teach myself as well. I don’t think we’ve come close to plumbing the full covert capabilities of any of us, magician, Telepath, Supported or God.”

  “You’re including me in this?” Lorenzi said, sticking his hands on his hips and looking put out. “I’m not really a member of this particular pod of Telepaths.”

  Whatever the old fool meant. For the umpteenth time, War prayed for salvation from Lorenzi. “For now,” War said. She hadn’t seen Lorenzi with them in any of the variants of her betrayal, but given what else would be happening, Lorenzi definitely needed to upgrade his stealth tricks. “Besides, there’s likely a bunch you can teach us.”

  Lorenzi sighed and shook his head. “You want me to play target, don’t you?” War nodded. Lorenzi almost turned green.

  “Okay, okay,” Alt said. He sat up and wiped his eyes. “I agree, this sounds like a wonderful idea, no matter what we do with it.” He turned to War. “Only promise me one thing: please don’t invite Nessa and Ken to join us. If we’re going to go covert, I want it to be our tricks and our attack.”

  “They would strengthen the group,” War said. She knew there was no way Nessa and Ken would be involved. For one reason, Nessa wouldn’t agree to walk into this one because she knew too much, and Ken would likely hunch is way out of the danger as well. The other reason was that the Place of Time didn’t place Nessa and Ken anywhere near her for weeks on end. Whatever Nessa and Ken had gotten themselves involved in wasn’t likely to spit them out in time for them to interfere with War’s plans.

  “If you bring them in, I’m out,” Alt said, finally a bit of spine in his posture. “That straightforward enough for you?”

  “Yes,” War said. His insistence would help, if any questions ever came up about why she didn’t include Nessa and Ken on any of the contingency plans for the stealth attack on Dubuque. “Let’s get started.”

  And after this, on the seventh day of the tenth week, there shall be an everlasting judgment, which shall be executed upon the Watchers; and
a spacious eternal heaven shall spring forth in the midst of the angels.

  The former heaven shall depart and pass away; a new heaven shall appear; and all the celestial powers shall shine with sevenfold splendor for ever. Afterwards likewise shall there be many weeks, which shall externally exist in goodness and in righteousness.

  Neither shall sin be named there forever and forever.

  Who is there of all the children of men, capable of hearing the voice of the Holy One without emotion?

  Who is there capable of thinking his thoughts? Who capable of contemplating all the workmanship of heaven? Who of comprehending the deeds of heaven?

  He may behold its animation, but not its spirit. He may be capable of conversing respecting it, but not of ascending to it. He may see all the boundaries of these things, and meditate upon them; but he can make nothing like them.

  Who of all men is able to understand the breadth and length of the earth?

  By whom have been seen the dimensions of all these things? Is it every man who is capable of comprehending the extent of heaven; what its elevation is, and by what it is supported?

  How many are the numbers of the stars; and where all the luminaries remain at rest?

  -- The Book of Enoch 92, 16:24

  “I’ve been used. I’ve been a fool.”

  42. (Dave)

  Dave’s eyes flew open and he coughed, sending water spraying everywhere. What the hell?

  He looked around to see the temple room, the one where Georgia had identified the Persian and Harappan writings. He lay on his back; the pain had gone. The Goth princess who earlier pronounced him alive poured water on his face and wiped the damp clean with a dirty towel. She had put her handgun away. The blood accents on her black dress weren’t fashion accents, but real blood. She smelled of fire and something akin to gasoline.