99 Gods: Betrayer
Page 72
“Have we gone too far, though?” Elorie said, twinkling eyes filled with wonder.
“Given the problems we face, I suspect we haven’t,” Dave said.
57. (War)
Betrayer – as Leo – dragged Alt into a storeroom. She had been preparing this room just for this occasion for the last week, ever since their captivity started, just as she had been secretly preparing Alt in the few days before their capture.
“Something wrong?” Alt said. “Does the Master want something from us we can’t tell the others about?”
“Cut the act,” Betrayer said. They stood in a space barely big enough to fit them, surrounded by printer paper, office supplies, and stacks of old computer equipment.
“Huh?”
“Cut the fucking act. I know as well as you do Dubuque can’t control your mind, Recruiter.”
Alt’s eyes bugged open. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t even sound like Leo!”
“I sound exactly like Leo because I am Leo; what you think you’re hearing is a message from your subconscious. Tell me who I am, Alt,” Betrayer said. “Put your hands on my head and look.”
Alt did so. He started to shake. “No. Impossible,” Alt said, his voice an octave higher. “No, I don’t want to believe it, but it is. You’re War. You’ve always been War…except when you were Atlanta. Holy shit, this is your real body! I’m dead. Shit, I’m dead. I’m not sure what I did to offend you, but if I have any credit left with you, kill me quickly. Please?”
Betrayer, who as Alt said was also War and Atlanta, shook her head. “I’m Betrayer, now, Alt. Not War. Not Atlanta. And the answer is ‘no’.”
Alt collapsed to the floor into a puddle of flesh. Betrayer didn’t do anything, and after a while, Alt stopped quivering. He had always been a bit high strung; Betrayer thought it likely came with being a Telepath. “Now what?” Alt said in a whisper, still perfectly alive and unharmed.
“Dubuque’s made a mistake, as I predicted and planned for,” Betrayer said. She did wonder if she was doing too many of these cheap theatrical speeches and pronouncements from on high, but they felt right to her these days and boosted her Mission. Her bwah-hahs certainly kept her enemies from thinking well of her and instead induced them to treat her as an annoyance rather than a threat. “He’s kept you Telepaths enslaved for a month instead of killing you. His greed betrayed his good sense; I think even he knows he can’t fully control Telepaths and considers his partial control over you to be good enough.”
“So what? By revealing yourself to me…”
Interrupting fools was another villain tactic she had learned over the past month; so was getting into their private space and blowing spit on them, which she did to Alt. “Don’t be an idiot; I wouldn’t have revealed this if you could betray me.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You betrayed us! You led us in here professing hope and lied to us all.”
“Lying to a Telepath? I know better.” Betrayer smiled, and her Leo smile was evil.
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is our mission, our mission to take Dubuque by stealth, is not over. We still have hope; we always had hope. I gave up my old names, but I didn’t give up my old tricks, not at all. Alt, Dubuque’s greed’s put him in a position where he has a hidden Territorial God sitting inside his lair – me – along with a bunch of half-controlled well-trained Telepaths I can free in an instant. He’s never been more vulnerable.”
Alt stood. “I see. Let’s go and kill the mofo for once.”
Betrayer put her big meaty Leo index finger on Alt’s chest to stop him. “We can’t kill him until the time is right, and the time isn’t right just now. There are external events we must wait for, and to do this right we must learn every last vulnerability of Dubuque.” Hell, she had only barely started on the construction of her new home. Her second great betrayal and the dénouement to follow was months off. “Because of his worshipper backing, we’re not strong enough to take him.” Long pause. “Yet.”
Alt nodded. Betrayer took a deep breath and relaxed. Alt had bought in. Now she could do her big baddy hubris-revealing pompous speech. She just loved this stuff. “We will win, Alt,” Betrayer said, a proclamation to the air. “It is inevitable.” With a little help. “I can even take Dubuque’s territory from him.” Under the right circumstances. “We’re going to utterly destroy the motherfucking City of God from the fucking inside.”
And the Lord said unto Michael: 'Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgment and of their consummation, till the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all generations. And destroy all the spirits of the reprobate and the children of the Watchers, because they have wronged mankind. Destroy all wrong from the face of the earth and let every evil work come to an end: and let the plant of righteousness and truth appear: and it shall prove a blessing; the works of righteousness and truth' shall be planted in truth and joy forevermore.
-- The Book of Enoch
The End of
Betrayer
Which started in:
War
and will be concluded in:
Odysseia
Fiction By This Author
99 Gods Trilogy Novels
War
Betrayer
Odysseia
99 Gods Trilogy Supplementary Stories
Tales From The Anime Café (Part One)
Tales From The Anime Café (Part Two)
The Commander Series Novels
Once We Were Human
Now We Are Monsters
All Beasts Together
A Method Truly Sublime
No Sorrow Like Separation
In This Night We Own
All That We Are
The supplementary Commander Series Stories:
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio One
All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Two)
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Three
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Four
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Five
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Six
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Seven)
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Eight
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Nine
Focus
Author’s Afterword
Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Alex Farmer, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer. Without their help this novel would have never been made.
Cover credit to Shutterstock for the Cappadocia underground picture and the gaudy picture representing Sorrow. “The Book of Enoch” is a real book. “The Book of Enoch” quotes here are from “The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament” by R.H. Charles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press), from “The Book of Enoch: translated from the Ethiopic, with introduction and notes” by Rev. George H. Shodde (Andover) and from the Laurence translation of the Book of Enoch. The translations do differ on their chapter numbering. Some spellings and word use have been modernized.
I am a traditionally published and epublished author, with two published short stories, one in Analog and the other in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, and the epublished seven book Commander Series (starting with “Once We Were Human”) and 10 other shorter works in the Commander universe.
If you enjoyed this novel, you may also want to read “Tales From The Anime Café Part One”, which contains a short novel, a novella and a novelette about the 99 God
s universe (including useful background information on Nessa and Ken, and the Indigo group). In addition, you can find out further information about the background mythos of the 99 Gods trilogy and the Commander Series on http://majortransform.com. Try the Author’s Facebook page for news and comments (www.facebook.com/pages/Randall-Allen-Farmer/106603522801212). Interesting and helpful comments are encouraged. Tell your friends. Post reviews.
Provisional future publishing schedule:
Storybook Crazy (the Indigo Origin Story) – November or December 2014
The first novel in The Cause, the continuation of The Commander series – April 2015.
Randall Allen Farmer