99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  She was disgusted.

  “The information,” Atlanta said. They walked by the elevator, not working, and went down the stairs to the ground floor. Normals scattered, as Atlanta had given up masking herself, and anyone with better than shit-for-brains ran from foreign Gods. “Although Dubuque’s the reason why the Telepaths are after our blood, it turns out he was setting up the Telepaths as well.” She went on to tell Miami the whole story of Lorenzi’s spy in Dubuque’s headquarters and some of what the spy had learned. By the time she finished the story, they had gotten into Miami’s flying bus and taken off. Atlanta still wondered what had driven the God to imbue divine powers, albeit a limited set of them, into an inanimate object instead of a person. His trick did allow one of his non-enhanced flunkies to fly the damned thing, though.

  The trick with the bus also made Atlanta wonder what other objects Miami imbued with divine power. Such as weapons. Miami had probably tried weapons first. She didn’t want to be hit with the results, as an enemy, until she had some of her own.

  “One of your group told the Telepaths about Dubuque’s game, didn’t they? That’s why they fled my city,” Miami said.

  “Yes.”

  Atlanta watched as Miami worked out the implications. If it had been Miami in charge of Lorenzi’s operation, he (as Lorenzi) would have charged the enemy God a bundle to get the annoying Telepaths out of said ‘enemy God’s’ city. “There’s an implied favor in this,” Miami said. “Lorenzi’s a devious bastard.”

  “That he is.”

  “No alliance, though. I will grant him more leeway to mess around in south Florida.”

  “Mr. Lorenzi will be saddened, but not upset, by your again turning down an alliance. I correctly predicted your response and braced him ahead of time,” Atlanta said.

  Miami shrugged. “I owe yah one, too, personally,” Miami said. “Let me tell you about Dubuque’s offers and threats.” Miami went on to relay Dubuque’s communications with him, or, at least, the ones Miami was willing to share. Miami’s communications with Dubuque matched Atlanta’s experience, with one exception.

  “He offered you the International Space Station?” Atlanta said, with a shake of her head. The offer didn’t make sense.

  Miami nodded. “That and Cape Canaveral, which is your territory. I asked why, but didn’t get an answer. The best I can guess is that Dubuque wants some God, not the mortals, in charge of the place. Real screwy.”

  “There’s a lot more going on with that God than we know about,” Atlanta said. “Beyond Dubuque’s plans to bring us in line and his desire to set up this City of God mirage of his, we know he’s got a bitchload of supporting schemes. Unfortunately, we’ve only managed to figure out a few of those. Any help in figuring out Dubuque’s plans would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Well, count me out for now,” Miami said. “I did figure out a solution to the problem of the Seven Suits, though.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Let them buy you off,” he said, and smiled. “They appear to think monetary agreements are more binding than any other.”

  “Then they are fools,” Atlanta said. She wondered if she would fall so far as to allow the Seven Suits to buy her off. Not yet, anyway.

  Miami nodded. “I’m still building a power base in my own territory, and I’m a long way away from being able to project any sort of political, social or military power outside it. I can’t afford to mess with Dubuque.”

  “When he gets around to you, it’ll be too late,” Atlanta said.

  “Perhaps,” Miami said. “I’ve got a few other schemes going which might help.”

  Miami still refused to let Atlanta store a projection in his territory, which would allow her to flick into it without the travel time issue, so she dissolved her projection and instantly went back to her own body. Night had fallen, and across the room in her penthouse office overlooking downtown Atlanta, Dana sat at Atlanta’s desk and typed on her keyboard, her face illuminated by the soft glow of her LCD screen. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights.

  “How’d everything go?” Dana said, when Atlanta stood up from the couch where her body had been resting.

  “Fine,” Atlanta said. “Miami agreed to the proposal, and everything’s worked out. Anything come up while I was gone?”

  Dana shrugged and stretched. “Nothing major. I’ve managed to prove that some of the world’s larger corporations, including the top six automobile makers, are paying protection money to the Suits to keep them off their backs.” Atlanta shook her head, disgusted. With all the time they spent on the Dubuque issue, they had little left to devote to the problem of the Suits. “Oh, and as we suspected, the new chief of police in Raleigh-Durham is a Dubuque plant.”

  “I’ll put him on the list.”

  Dana pursed her lips and looked away. The list consisted of people to intimidate or otherwise neutralize. Dana didn’t like either, but at least she didn’t give Atlanta the same amount of grief she had once given her, back when Atlanta had been killing Dubuque’s plants.

  “How are Velma and Lara doing?” Atlanta said.

  “Their home group” Dana still hesitated in using the ‘Indigo’ word “is working on another location move, to yet another of their hidden strongholds, and when they’re done, they’d like you to bless it with your protections. Velma’s decided to ditch Athens and move here” to the city of Atlanta “so she can be more open about her miraculous healing. If you don’t mind, she wants to donate what proceeds she garners to various Georgia women’s shelters.”

  “No problem. Lara?”

  “She had some sort of nervous breakdown while you were gone, and she’s off being tended to.” Dana took a deep breath. “I think I may have triggered it.”

  “What did you do?”

  Dana blushed. “Lara was venting about some incomprehensible relationship she has with some guy, who’s the father of her only child, and how he got all verbally shut down and paranoid and cutting after you 99 showed. After she said that I gave her a hug.”

  Atlanta winced. “She’s a lezzie, she’s unattached, and she’s had a crush on you since she first laid eyes on you.” Yup, Dana had triggered Lara’s breakdown. You would think someone of Lara’s real age would be able to cope, but, given Atlanta’s own pre-Apotheosis relationship contretemps, she had quite a bit of sympathy.

  “Huh? But, uh, the guy, Grover…”

  “He’s her ‘one guy who doesn’t break her sexual identity’ exception,” Atlanta said. Dana shook her head, uncomprehending. “You’ve never run into that before?”

  Dana, the utterly naïve, shook her head again.

  “We’ve got to get you laid, just so you don’t mess up our allies,” Atlanta said.

  “Sorry,” Dana said, eyeballing ceiling. “I just don’t understand why we all can’t come with owners’ manuals for all these silly sexual issues.”

  Uh huh, and getting Dana laid would take mountains being moved. Atlanta gave up on her professional virgin for the moment. “I’m off to visit Lorenzi and pass on the news,” Atlanta said. She could only run one projection at a time, and she couldn’t yet run her real body while she ran a projection. Worse, she suspected that the Mission hits she kept taking would soon rob her of the ability to run any projections. That would make life far more difficult.

  She hated to be on the short end of the stick. Unfortunately, nothing she had tried to improve the situation had worked.

  She feared that she would soon have to make some very bad choices, all to the tune of Dubuque’s distant laughter.

  39. (Atlanta)

  Lorenzi’s men packed the venerable safe house. Tables cluttered what had once been an elegant living room complete with real wooden floors. A man in a brown friar’s habit left over from the Dark Ages stared engrossed at the three giant flatscreens arranged on the table in front of him and occasionally moved a mouse and typed numbers. A man in an expensive business suit sat in an easy chair in the far corner and stared fixedly at a h
and mirror while his other hand held a sharp-edged small rock. A man in sweats sat on the floor next to him doing the same. Two men in blue jeans sorted through papers, photos and reports piled high on another table. A couple more men typed on laptops at a different table. A small man with tattoos down his exposed arms sat on the end of the couch and said the rosary. Three different crucifixes hung on the walls, the Catholic sort, with Jesus on them, not the Protestant empty cross Atlanta grew up with. Two cheese plates, a fruit tray, three bowls of chips and a mostly eaten bowl of queso lay scattered around, and Atlanta smelled some sort of pastry baking in the kitchen. From upstairs, she heard the sound of multiple men snoring, and the chatter of more men still awake. All men, all white, and all loyal to Lorenzi. She wondered where he found them all.

  Lorenzi wove his bulk through the crowded living room. “Cowabunga,” he said, deadpan, and less enthusiastic than Atlanta hoped. “Next week, south Florida. Today, I have a horde of recorded spy sessions from my Worcester guy I’d like you to look at. I think something funky is going on, and I’m wondering if you’ll come up with the same conclusion as I did.”

  “I can look,” Atlanta said. It galled her to realize she had become Lorenzi’s flunky, despite the substantial benefits she gained from the association. Lorenzi now had over two hundred people working on his various schemes and operations. Without her support, though, he would have a hard time keeping himself and his number two, Reed, afloat. He had become a fixture in Atlanta’s Mission, and if and when Atlanta wanted to use it, he had given her power over him, a form of power she suspected Lorenzi didn’t understand.

  “Oh, and one other thing, we lost the Telepaths,” Lorenzi said. He eased himself down into a dining room style chair across from the table with the man with three monitors. “Someone’s covering them.”

  Atlanta crossed her arms across her chest. “What do you mean ‘lost’, John?”

  “We don’t know where they are any more.”

  “Any idea who did this?”

  “An unknown Ideological God,” Lorenzi said. “Definitely not one of the Seven Suits.”

  More interference to unfuck. Atlanta paced the small open space between three monitor man and the couch. “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I,” Lorenzi said. “I’m upping the pressure on a lot of things right now. My instincts say something’s up. I want to find out what.”

  “You think Worcester’s involved?”

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  Atlanta nodded. She wanted those damned Telepaths on her side and following her orders, one of her medium term plans. They had so much potential, yet all they did was dick around and waste time, consumed by existential angst. She sat down at the other end of the couch from the man saying the rosary and picked up one of the magic imbued spy-eye connections from the coffee table. Three boxes of them sat on the coffee table, plus a dozen or so loose, all looking like small jagged rocks. In one of the boxes, the rocks were all carefully packed in tissue paper, as if someone somewhere couldn’t imagine something so valuable flying loose during shipping. The packers of the other two boxes seemed to have had more faith in the sturdiness of rocks.

  Atlanta picked up one of the loose rocks, noted the information on the carefully taped-on label, and flashed through its contents. Lorenzi’s new magicians could rake up hundreds of hours of information with ease, but neither they nor Lorenzi had any means of quickly analyzing the information. Nor would Lorenzi’s baby magicians be useful in any sort of fight; Lorenzi-style magic didn’t appear to be well suited for combat to start with, and the uses of his magic in combat took years to master, according to her analysis.

  Atlanta had no problem quickly analyzing the information, not with the multi-track mind common to all the Gods.

  The fifth spy eye she picked up proved to be one of the ones looking in on the Telepaths, or should have, if it still worked. The information record covered the point where someone had blocked the spy eye, and contained the flavor of the power they used. The divine power blockage did reek of an Ideological God’s willpower. Atlanta compared the flavor to her mental database of divine power use, and got a hit.

  “John, I’ve identified the Ideological God who’s covering the Telepaths,” Atlanta said.

  Lorenzi rushed over, still munching on a chocolate chip cookie straight from the oven. “Who? How?”

  “Don’t worry about the how,” Atlanta said. “The God behind it is Freedom.”

  “So Freedom’s been suborned to Dubuque? Not good,” Lorenzi said. “He was one of the neutrals I thought we might be able to recruit.”

  Atlanta shook her head. “I think your earlier analysis was correct. He’s doing this to protect the Telepaths, and there’s no Dubuque taint on his protections at all.”

  “Why would he protect them?” Lorenzi said. “We don’t have any record of him contacting them.”

  “Well, they are Telepaths,” Atlanta said. John’s magical spy tricks couldn’t pick up telepathy. “Another possibility is that Freedom has his own plans and plots in motion. Remember, he was one of the public Ideological Gods who vanished after my confrontation with Dubuque.” Virtue, Faith and Charity, three Ideological Gods who had been public and active in America practically from the day the 99 appeared, had also vanished. Atlanta doubted those four were allies, as Faith and Freedom appeared to be active competitors. Still, their Ideological instincts might have led them to such an improbable alliance, if they figured out the danger of Dubuque early on.

  More likely they had determined she was the danger, though. Her mind, no, her Mission, kept trying to convince her they weren’t the bad guys. That bit of mental dissonance colored all her thoughts.

  “The second makes the most sense to me,” Lorenzi said. “In Freedom’s media interviews, he’d emphasized his support of pluralism, tolerance and democracy, though more from the Joe Six-Pack end of things than the de Tocqueville end.” Freedom’s love of anarchy and his propensity to dress like a cowboy had led Atlanta to dismiss Freedom as a potential ally. Joe Six-Pack, though? There were times when she worried about this antiquated flake’s connection to reality. As far as she knew, and not counting the Indigo people, who were only loaners, Lorenzi didn’t have any women in his organization, which annoyed her a lot. He also didn’t have a single Protestant, atheist or agnostic among them. Most of his men were Catholics, but he also had Eastern Orthodox Christians, Moslems and Jews among his crew. She didn’t know why, or care. “I think he’s protecting the Telepaths from the other Gods. Can you locate them?”

  Atlanta shook her head. “I tried. Nothing.”

  “What’s your opinion about what Worcester’s doing?”

  “I’m not done looking through the spy eye recordings yet.”

  Lorenzi nodded and went over to one of his magicians who had raised his hand, politely attracting attention. The politeness didn’t surprise her. She wished Lorenzi’s team possessed more discipline, though; they tended to work short hours backed up by never-ending bull sessions.

  Atlanta picked up another spy eye and flashed through its contents. Then another. Slowly she emptied the boxes. After she analyzed the first dozen of the Worcester spy-eye records, each holding four hours of data, she started to pick up on several patterns. She continued to analyze, to check her hypothesis. After seven more, Dana’s projection awakened, and Dana rushed from the upstairs closet where she stored her projection to Atlanta’s side. Male eyes turned from their business to watch.

  “Atlanta, we’ve got a problem,” Dana said. “Nine of Dubuque’s planted operatives woke up. They’re all doing the same thing, agreeing to local media requests for interviews.”

  “Fuck,” Atlanta said, quietly. She and Dana had suspected something like this might happen after Lorenzi had convinced her to do some good deeds in public. Public opinion about her had improved, especially after her public repairs of the I-24 bridge over the Tennessee River, previously closed due to incipient failure. The repair, and severa
l other public miracles, had significantly buoyed her Mission, and she didn’t want to lose the hard-won benefits now.

  Reed had noticed Dana’s projection awakening and followed her down the stairs. “What’s wrong?” Atlanta still hadn’t found a way to hide her emotions from Reed, his trick too subtle for her to stop. Telepaths worked that way, it appeared: the more subtle the trick the more difficult to block. Atlanta found her trust of the Telepaths as a class diminishing by the day.

  “I’ve got to go; my territory’s under attack by Dubuque,” Atlanta said, and gave details. In response, Reed whistled. The room quieted and he waved at Lorenzi, who was just reappearing from the bathroom.

  “Everybody, pay attention,” Reed said. “Atlanta, if you would, could you explain what’s going on?”

  Atlanta explained, while wondering what Reed had seen to convince him to push the panic button.

  Lorenzi shook his head. “It’s a distraction,” he said. “Dubuque wants you occupied elsewhere.”

  “This isn’t something I can ignore,” Atlanta said. She wouldn’t have a territory left if she didn’t neuter these Dubuque-sponsored infiltrators.

  “I understand, Atlanta,” Lorenzi said. “We need you back here as soon as possible, though, with what’s going on with the Telepaths.”

  “Wait,” Dana said. “What’s going on with the Telepaths now?”

  Atlanta dropped the information directly into Dana’s mind. Dana shivered for a moment and held up her hand.

  “No no no. Let’s look at this again, please, both of you. Atlanta, this isn’t a distraction to keep you away from helping John. I’m afraid it’s a distraction to keep you from helping the Telepaths,” Dana said.

  Atlanta merged her emotions into Dana’s, which allowed her to follow along with her chief of staff’s expert analysis. Dana was correct. The Telepaths would soon walk into something that would normally attract Atlanta’s attention. “This implies Dubuque’s going to make an attempt on them, in my territory,” Atlanta said. The most obvious way to attract her personal attention.