By so publicly killing her, Blind Tom had done more damage to Dubuque and Verona’s cause than everyone else combined since the proclamation of the City of God.
The aftereffects still coursed through Dana, flaying her mind. Again and again she waltzed through the agony of Blind Tom’s attack on her. She had protected killers, even if they…
“Cut this out, you’re doing it to yourself.”
The voice shocked Dana out of her fetal position. The pain vanished. Betrayer sat next to her, cross-legged, smiling. Normal sized. Her size. Beside her sat Kara the Godslayer, a wide smile on her face. Betrayer’s crazy black semi-uniform made an odd contrast with the Godslayer’s University of Washington t-shirt and sweatpants.
Dana sat up.
“How can you say that?” Dana said to Betrayer. “You’re not God.”
“I asked one of the Host for an explanation, if you want a real answer.” Betrayer sighed. “Dammit, Dana. This one was the hardest betrayal of all. I like you. I even love you a little. Doing you like this hurts.”
“No betrayal, Atlanta,” Dana said. She smiled. “If you had had the courage of your convictions and your vision, you could have just asked me. I would have volunteered.”
Betrayer – Atlanta – sighed. “So you figured me out.”
Dana nodded.
“Toldja,” the Godslayer said.
“You knew?” Dana asked.
“I knew of her heritage from the first, and after I figured out how she messed with the future, and why, I decided to ally,” the Godslayer said.
“I believe you started your alliance by threatening me with Hell if I didn’t stop messing with your future prediction,” Betrayer said, glaring at the Godslayer. Dana smiled at the predictable friction between the two ‘allies’.
“I did, but when I realized you’d never stop, I okayed Jan and Knot joining up with you.” The Godslayer laughed, an incongruous sound after what Dana had been through. Then again, the Godslayer was a Warrior Angel. “You were too naïve to notice.”
“As you’ve said before,” Atlanta said. She eyed the Godslayer with a mixture of disgust, annoyance and exasperated acceptance. She turned back to Dana. “Would you have volunteered, Dana, even if this meant you wouldn’t be around to save your friends and husband later?”
“You would have had to explain the rest of your plan. If my guess is correct about what your plan entails, the answer would have been ‘yes’.”
Atlanta chuckled and took Dana into her arms. “Use your Angelic magic and create a couple of windows to reality. Watch and see if you’re right. Put one on Dubuque’s real body. Put the other over my Lair, looking down. If we don’t meet again…” Atlanta gave Dana’s limbo body a hug and kiss. And left.
The Godslayer didn’t. “Dana,” she said. “The coming battle will leave the Indigo depleted, if not destroyed. I’m begging you to help me gather their souls as they fall.”
“Why?” The Indigo were self-resurrecting, if their wounds weren’t too great. She hadn’t known before, but this made them difficult, if not impossible, for others to resurrect.
“Tricks,” the Godslayer said. “Victory karma does have its uses, with the proper material components.”
“Oh.” Dana would help the Godslayer resurrect some of the Indigo fallen, the ones who had died too badly, using Angelic trickery. “I’m in, aren’t I?”
“Sure, I think.”
The Godslayer vanished.
Dana turned to her magic windows and watched the battle.
The siege wasn’t over.
“My name is Patricia Solis, Living Saint of the Portland territory!” Portland said. She stood thirty feet tall outside of Dubuque’s rear headquarters, and her voice was loud enough to penetrate even the basement of Betrayer’s lair. Finally, finally, Portland had stopped her endless negotiations. All because of Dana’s death. Amazing. “I accept Dubuque’s sentence of banishment. I refuse to belong to the Angel-slaying so-called City of God, revealed now to be nothing more than yet another attempt to impose authoritarian rule while cloaked in false piety!” She and her people pulled out of the fight. With her went Montreal, Akron, Bogotá, Cordoba, Marseille, Budapest and Athens. Only the directly worshipped Gods’ projections remained, and their Paladins appeared weak. The Mission of the City of God lay on its back, eyes dark, limp feet in the air.
Dana smiled down from limbo upon the souls of the defenders, an angelic choir of one.
59. (Betrayer)
The siege of her lair riveted Betrayer’s attention, but not her willpower. That she couldn’t afford. The precipice gathered around her, opportunity and oblivion in equal measure. With the battle joined, the odds of success became incalculable. Everything slumped into tactical morass, invisible to foresight.
“Left, there. Push that piece of wall! Okay, hidden panel. The off button turns it on,” Persona, who thought of herself as Maria now, said. The information flew from Betrayer’s mind directly into Maria’s head. Now, finally, Maria trusted Betrayer.
Maria had no choice. Even after Dana’s sacrifice, the diminishment of the Paladins’ worshipper support, Blind Tom’s death, the withdrawal of the non-worshipped Gods and their followers, the two failed attacks on Betrayer’s lair that had taught the attackers some nasty lessons, and Lodz’s unexpected fall, the City of God forces’ attack still overwhelmed Richard of Orlando and Bob of Columbia’s crew.
“The code that brings up the internal weapons array is 30303.” The floor of the lair rumbled under Maria’s feet. The Paladins’ third attack wave had succeeded and they had fought their way inside Betrayer’s lair. However, she had designed her lair for sectionalized defense, for just this moment, each section a trap.
For instance, after the Paladins charged through the blasted-open front door a formerly open secondary door had slammed shut behind them, trapping the front Paladin group in a corridor between the entry room and the first preliminary guard station. Maria had then sucked the air out of that small section, leaving a vacuum.
The Paladins might not be living, but they weren’t set up to work in a hard vacuum. Most were vacuum-welded into statues within twenty seconds.
“Joystick controls aim. The display cycles between a local camera, which won’t last, and a schematic floor plan overlaid with results from the security center detection array. Blue fires Golden Fire, won’t harm living flesh but harms Gods and enchantments. Red fires Blue Helixes that are weaker but damage anything. Go!”
<Dammit, Maria! Get that bitch to let us out of this trap.> Ken. He and Nessa had recovered their sanity almost immediately after she had kissed their cheeks. Hopefully, they would soon recover their strength.
“Sorry, no can do, Betrayer says,” Maria said to the echoing air of the lair basement, too flustered and too into the battle to use the willpower telepathy analog. “We’ve got to keep Dubuque’s and Verona’s attention pinned down.” In her head, Maria asked: <Betrayer, why? What’s so important about keeping their attention?>
No more secrecy. The morale of the defenders meant more now. <I’m inside Dubuque’s lair.>
<Shit! What are you doing?>
That Betrayer wasn’t ready to answer. <Use your imagination on that one. Stall, Maria. Stall. Fight back. Do whatever it takes to draw the fight out. Give me a fucking chance.>
<Everyone, teleport time. Prepare yourselves,> Betrayer sent to Alt’s crew. They had gamed this sequence through until it had become second nature.
Alt, at her side, nodded. <Three, two, one!>
side of Dubuque’s command center, where he and Verona had enchanted monitors set up to watch all the active conflicts.
Nearly three quarters of the City of God worshippers had quit on their Gods after Blind Tom killed Saint Dana. The power of the remaining worshippers had also slumped, as only a twentieth of the original number retained their rabid fanaticism.
Lodz’s killing had been an unanticipated gift; Satan, bless her heart, likely didn’t know why she had decided to pull the trigger and actually kill Lodz, but to Betrayer this smelled of a telepathic hunch. Brilliant. The siege defenders had thirty fewer Paladin opponents, and the besiegers had one less God projection able to resurrect the damned Paladins. Lodz’ death would help a lot. Lodz’ death would save lives.
His fall wouldn’t be enough unless Betrayer’s plan worked.
Dubuque’s Oklahoma City command center was battle hardened, teleport proof, telepathy proof and nearly nuclear bomb proof. Alt’s crew had the place bugged electronically. Dubuque didn’t trust his own people, and he had backdoors to his office rigged throughout his security system for his own personal use. Which Alt’s crew themselves used repeatedly.
One Paladin door guard and five Preachers faced them in the wide marble hall outside Dubuque’s command center. The Preachers went down immediately before they could use their neo-Supported charisma, undone by Nicole and her ghosts. Betrayer and the other bodyguards in Alt’s group, laden down with gleaned enchantments stolen from the local armory, blasted the Paladin. Javier maintained a working telepathy net on them, despite the chaos. Walter, the projective illusionist, kept them covered and confused the aim of the Paladin long enough to give Betrayer and the other bodyguards enough time to kill him. Walter thought they fought in the FBI’s DC HQ against the black helicopter crowd.
For the moment, Betrayer still wore her bodyguard masquerade. The revelation would come later.
They tricked open the door with a security bypass; once the door was open Betrayer could ‘port them again, across the huge room and right on top of the two Gods. She did.
“Trigger the flood circuit,” Maria said, continuing to scream. The Paladin horde had blasted through the vacuum room, scattering their vacuum-welded front guard, and forced themselves into the second interior section. Betrayer’s robot army attacked them and lasted the predictable second. Fifty-seven Paladins in the lair, another thirty odd right behind them after winning a struggle against the secondary front door. Another group of Paladins, nearly a hundred, moved toward the lair, coming in from the resurrection station. Inside Betrayer’s lair, the defenders dropped nearly a Paladin a second. The Paladins were weaker by half, because of the weakening of the City of God Mission and the revulsion of their worshippers over the Angel-killing, but they still overpowered nearly anyone if they attacked en masse.
Ken, at Maria’s side, triggered the boiling water flood; when the water hit the Paladins’ overheated enchanted bodies the water flashed into steam. The resulting explosion blew back, out the lair, opening a temporary hole in the Paladin array and a large but now pointless breach in the front walls of the lair. “Now, the red button and the minus sign.” Maria and Ken operated a secondary control kiosk in the basement, one level down from the attackers and two hundred feet back. The panel needed five people or a Territorial God to handle the controls. Maria and Ken together could do the job. Barely.
“What’s that?”
Maria riveted Betrayer’s attention to a monitor, which showed renewed fighting outside. Had Richard or Bob started a sortie? A sortie now would be fatal.
No. Boise had showed up in person, with what had started as 60 battle projections, now down to 43 and falling quickly. Still, he cut a wider swath through the Paladins than Betrayer thought possible. Milliseconds crept by while she watched through Maria’s eyes as Boise smoked Paladins and they returned fire. Boise had mastered quite a few anti-Paladin tricks.
<Time for my part! Go back to heaven where you belong, you pathetic slaves!> Boise sent.
Boise’s sortie cut off the Paladins inside her Lair from outside support.
Betrayer worked the odds, taking another millisecond, and winced. Boise’s help was futile, and in the end all he did was endanger himself.
And what the fuck were Dave, Elorie and the Indigo crew doing, anyway? Dammit, she had ordered Jan and Knot to sit tight until later. Well, the Godslayer had given her fair warning – the Indigo was free willed and creative. Orders to them were at best ‘taken under advisement’.
Nessa’s thoughts flashed into Betrayer’s mind and faded, the touchy loonie Telepath rode her internal roller coaster of emotions, elation over the death of Blind Tom falling to disgust over killing, then back up again. She huddled in an iron-walled interior laboratory with the few non-combatants in Richard of Orlando’s group, both twins in her hands, readying last-ditch measures. The many more Indigo non-combatants huddled with them.
<You going to reveal?> she sent to the piece of Betrayer’s mind that inhabited Maria’s subconscious.
<Seconds away,> Betrayer sent back. Multi-tasking in battle had been one of her specialties as War, and today, she used every supposedly impossible trick she had ever developed.
<Can I announce for you?>
Betrayer checked locations and information streams. Richard of Orlando, Bob of Columbia and Kay, master of Progress, were on point, along with the remains of their Nerd fighting force. <Not quite yet. See?>
She sent a vision of her battle with Dubuque and Verona into Nessa’s head; Nessa could cope, being naturally multi-thought stream. <You Go Girl!>
Nessa’s support, all by itself, buoyed Betrayer’s Mission. Impossible? An analysis track said all the awake Ha-qodeshim supported the Mission boost. Without Nessa, they couldn’t keep track of events, so they used Nessa’s eyes the same way she used Maria’s. Nessa was their Daughter of Light, illuminating the unseen and impossible human world to them.
One, two, three Paladins fell in Dubuque’s control room. Verona, wearing his newly-minted Pope’s cassock today, sidetracked for a resurrection of one. This foolishness opened up Verona for an enchantment attack good enough to silver a spot. Neither Verona nor Dubuque were battle-hardened or battle ready. On the other hand, even with their diminished worshipper support, they were as sturdy as a dozen unworshipped Territorial Gods.
A piece of Betrayer’s mind winced as Nicole, the ancient and tricky Telepath, got ripped to shreds by a Paladin as it ‘died’. One down, unfortunately. Betrayer had limited resources here, and of her Telepaths only Alt himself and Walter were still alive and functional. A millisecond later the Mindbound Mary Drier got hit dead on by a blue helix from Dubuque that overwhelmed her enchanted protections. Instant death.
Following the plan, Betrayer and Alt mind-linked and dove into the millisecond-chatter thought stream going between the two enemy Gods.
<…must have got to them, despite our protections,> Verona sent.
<Binglehauser, that bitch, has no known limits,> Dubuque sent back.
Betrayer wondered how Dubuque made that mistake.
<Flee?>
<We’re a minute from winning the siege; we can’t interrupt our own victory. We’d waste too much of our already expended resources and all our planning time. We aren’t going to get another easy chance at Orlando.>
< Damn, I think that black guard’s found a way to interfere with the res,> Verona sent, correctly. Betrayer slash Leo had zapped the enchanted body next due to house a just-raised Paladin with a soul trap off an enchantment she had snuck into Dubuque’s lair as battle loot from an earlier set-to between Richard of Orlando and the Paladins.
<This is just telepathic idiocy. They’re taking down our guards but they can’t harm us. They’re too weak.>
Betrayer faced the moment of the trickiest part of the plan, where everything might go down the toilet if the two Gods decided to flee. Betrayer, however, had a trick ready to stop this. Six months trapped in Dubuque’s territory had given her the necessary time, an
d Dubuque’s landgrabbing gave her partial access to her old Atlanta territory. She could still do Territorial in an emergency.
As planned, she built a territory-backed willpower trick, a transport lockdown able to last seventeen seconds. She had gamed this out in the Place of Time and found if she had dropped the lockdown on the Gods first, before forcing the door to their headquarters, she wouldn’t get into striking range of the Gods until too late in the lockdown’s duration.
The transport lock worked only if she activated the lockdown in mid-melee, and only after the Paladin guards died.
<Santa Fe’s up!> Nessa screamed. Betrayer’s lair battle track nearly jumped out of Maria’s mind. Santa Fe couldn’t be up and functional. He had gone down for the count.
Yet there he was.
External interference again. Betrayer couldn’t afford to worry now.
Outside the lair, the Paladins concentrated on Boise, pinning him down close to the lair. He sheltered near the rocky bones of one of the many hills, but the Paladins ignored the interfering obstructions. They had destroyed his battle constructs. He had taken over two hundred Paladins down, none permanently, but many of the two hundred fallen wouldn’t be able to be successfully resurrected during this fight.
Santa Fe ‘ported to a device outside the attacker’s headquarters, a short ‘port and not particularly accurate. Betrayer knew about the device, having seen it many times in the Place of Time. The device, a God-killer, had only four shots, the device fated to slay Richard of Orlando. Richard had seen this in the Place of Time as well and had prepared a way to destroy the device if anyone used it against his people. Destroying the device would cost him his life.