Lesser Gods (29 page)

Father Emanuel Girodet

I knew I was having a Jet flashback.
Once a Jethead, always a Jethead.

But where was I?
The taste of the planet’s red dust in my mouth reminded me of Mars. The trinary suns overhead argued otherwise.

I got to my feet, discovering my vestments had been replaced by an ANBER suit that encased me like armor. I studied the scarred plain around me. The land was pocked by bombs, missiles, and the burnt signatures of energy beams.
Middle of a battlefield.

The plastisteel visor of my ANBER suit allowed me to see with light in the infrared spectrum, through the black smoke which hung over the ground like a fog. The stench of charred vegetation, plastic, and flesh clung to the filtered air coming into my suit, even though the battle must have been over for several hours.

I paced forward, my suit changing to blend in with my surroundings, chameleoning from the splotched red of the ground where I’d awakened, flat on my face, to the texture of the burnt tank I passed.

I walked for perhaps ten minutes without seeing any living thing. The planet’s nearest and largest star was about to set, and a cold breeze came across the plain that made me shiver despite the constant temperature maintained by my suit.

“A messenger is coming,” my suit whispered. “To your left.”

I turned. The suit opened its weapons bubble so that I could attack in a moment’s notice; a small flashing display in the upper corner of my visor alerted me that the weapon was armed. The dark visor thickened to give added protection to my face. ANBER suits were always overly cautious.

From the corner of my eye, I saw my two guard pods wheel about in the air. Somehow, drawing on memories not my own, I realized they were part of my force.
Bodyguards
. They leveled their weapons at the approaching messenger.

I recognized the man and relaxed. I raised my hand and started to hale him, but before I could speak there was the thunder of the energy beam that struck me in the back.

How long I lay on the ground unconscious, entombed in the lifeless ANBER suit, I don’t know. The air in the suit seemed suffocating. I would have expected an enemy to incinerate me quickly; instead it seemed dying of suffocation would be my fate.

Minutes passed. My breathing became faster as I tried to gulp in the last bit of oxygen. My heart pounded. Finally I passed out.

Consciousness returned moments later as something rolled me onto my back. In the complete darkness of the suit, I felt myself lightly nudged, the way a guy might kick the carcass of a dangerous snake to be sure it was dead. There was a pause, then another nudge.

Only seconds passed before my ears rang from the hammering blows and the noise of rending metal. The terrific din continued until a crack opened in my faceplate and cool, fresh air flooded across my skin.

I took a painful, deep breath as another string of hammerings loosed my helmet which was roughly pulled from my head. The two remaining suns moving toward the horizon burned yellow and red spots against my closed eyelids. I gulped in cool air, struggling to raise my arms. But the dead armor around me kept me trapped.

A shadow blocked out the suns and I opened my eyes to see a large battle bot, one sensor melted into the side of its face, staring down at me with its one good camera.

It had enemy markings. “Too bad,” it growled. “You didn’t even put up a good fight. And I had such high hopes for you.”

The mechanical aimed its blaster appendage at me.

“Wait!” I cried. “I’m Father Emanuel Girodet. This battle… It isn’t real.”

“Real enough.” It placed the weapon against my temple.

The universe exploded in bright light.

Ralph Crocker

Avoiding being the gourmet delight for Huntington’s incarnation as Cyclops wasn’t without its upside. But it seemed like “out of the frying pan, into the fire” since I found myself plummeting downward toward what appeared to be jagged rocks covered with black worms writhing far, far below me.

My escape route seemed more like a trap.

Trying to think coherently when one is about to be smashed into oozing bits of protoplasm isn’t easy. I did my best, knowing there must be a way to survive my predicament.

Obvious: No parachute or rocket pack strapped to me. Equally obvious: No vines or other obstructions to grab for on the way down. I was game for trying anything since almost anything might work according to the whims of the game programmer. I tried concentrating and growing wings, attempted to turn into a feather or rocket, took deep breaths hoping to float like a balloon. All were exercises in futility.

Finally I simply concentrated on spreading myself as flat as possible, trying to increase my cross section to maximize air resistance and decrease my maximum rate of all. If I can slow down enough, maybe the worms will break my fall, I lied to myself.

Then another thought occurred to me. I flapped my arms, perhaps I could fly in this world. Feeling utterly foolish, I flapped. And then I didn’t feel so dumb because I discovered that I really could fly.

I fluttered about, enjoying my new-found ability to soar, then realized I was tiring quickly, flying being more work than one might imagine. I must concentrate on getting down to the earth in one piece before I run out of the oomph necessary to stay afloat.

Going into a long spiral, I glanced down at the worms to gauge my distance from the surface.

And discovered that the worms weren’t worms at all.

Rather, they were snakes. Hundreds and thousands of squirming, writhing snakes. Not your harmless garden variety of snake, either. Hooded cobras, I had no formal training nor degree from Snake Charmer University. And each serpent wore Cassius’s lean and hungry look that snakes get when they need something yummy to swallow. All the cobras watched expectantly as the foolish creature above nonchalantly soared downward. All that was missing was a “Lunch is served” announcement over the intercom.

Seeing what was really below me, I flapped my arms more violently and climbed upward, my efforts fueled by a fresh spurt of adrenaline. I knew my labor would soon come to not, but I had a plan. If I was going to die anyway, I’d do so by gaining some altitude and then go into a long dive, crushing myself on the rocks below and perhaps taking a few of the serpents with me.

Then I remembered it was only in a game. That was a cold consolation. It was too real, even if unbelievably fantastic. Unfortunately, real or not, the end would undoubtedly be a brain hemorrhage if I didn’t figure a way out.

Or would it?

If I hadn’t got too big a whiff of the jet in Huntington’s home, then there might not be much more of a drug trip ahead of me. Maybe I could remain airborne long enough to outlast the trip.

Or, if I was really still back in my apartment, then I had to be nearing the end of my jet session. Either way, all I had to do was flap my arms and continue to fly like a bird for a little bit longer.

“Nothing to it,” I muttered as my arm muscle started to cramp. I gritted my teeth and continued upward, trying to ignore the pain. I don’t know how long I maintained my flight upward. I lost all track of time and concentrated on just keeping one beat after the next, climbing…

Climbing…

One more flap, one more, one more, ad infinitum.

Up and up I went. All was going perfectly until I heard the cry of a hawk flying high above me.

I knew exactly who that hawk was: Huntington on the hunt, my constant pain in the tail feathers.

“Don’t you ever let up?” I shouted at the predator circling over me.

“And miss all the fun?” it squawked back.

Everything was starting to gray out. Either the altitude was getting to me or the jet was wearing off. “Sorry to spoil your fun,” I said, waving upward as I relaxed my arms-cum-wings. For a moment my downward fall was imperceptible, then I gained speed until I was streaking downward toward the mass of writhing snakes now far below. I folded my arms to my sides for maximum velocity. If I was going to die, it would be quick and as painless as possible.

I rapidly picked up speed, the wind whistling past, my toga flapping. The ground accelerated upward. I was nearly on top of the cobras.

Everything dissolved into nothingness.

I was sitting back in Huntington’s old, run-down house.

Now I’m going to find him, I promised myself, picking up my pistol that lay beside me. I was not in a merciful mood. As far as I was concerned he’d tried to kill me and had definitely killed the two punks who were lying on the carpet alongside me, their faces twisted into death masks of pain and horror with blood running from their ears and noses.

How he was able to throw people into the middle of his SupeR-Gs without any hardware connected to their scalps was a puzzle. But it was obvious that somehow he could do it.

How many has he killed?

One thing I knew: I would make him pay, and pay dearly.

I kicked in the nearest hallway door, my gun at the ready.

All that greeted me was dusty furniture. I took a deep breath and went through the same procedure for door number two.

And then three, all with the same results: No sign of Huntington.

Where is he?

The dish outside was connected into the roof. If I found the cable, I could trace it back to his computer. He had to be somewhere in the building, perhaps in a hidden room or the basement.

Or in the attic.

“Might be it,” I muttered, jamming the pistol back under my armor. I checked the ceilings for a sign of an attic entrance. Finally I located one in the closet of bedroom number two. I pulled a dusty old chair into the empty closet, and shoved open the plastic access plate in the ceiling, being careful since it could be booby trapped. Peeping through the dust, I knew I was on the right track. There was a bright LED bulb in the attic where no light should be.

I grabbed the two sides of the opening above me and chinned myself, studying everything around the access opening to be sure there were no traps or a Huntington in the flesh waiting with a shotgun.

Seeing nothing, I pulled myself on up into the attic where I found a narrow plastic walkway extending from the trapdoor I’d climbed through. I followed the path toward a tiny room at the far end of the attic, pausing in front of the door to again draw my gun. Then I kicked the door in, entering like gangbusters.

An anticlimactic experience. All that sat in the room was a relay machine attached to a computer. Nothing more.

I holstered the pistol, swearing at my stupidity. I should have know. Huntington wasn’t going to be that easy to find. He’d simply used a relay system to send his signals from his real hideout to this place. From here the signals might be relayed to God only knew where, most likely going through several anonymous proxy sites as well. That way, should anyone like me track him down, he could simply send a signal to the computer to self-destruct, thereby destroying any links to his whereabouts.

But perhaps Huntington wasn’t as smart as he thought. The computer didn’t look like it had self destructed just yet. Maybe there was still a chance to trace the path back to Huntington.

I approached the machine carefully, inspecting it without touching anything, and spotted the tiny, hair-thin wire attached to the keyboard. That had to be a booby trap that would initiate the self-destruct if someone fooled with the machine.

Or was it?

Huntington had been a crafty old bird thus far. Maybe that wire was the decoy and —

There!
I told myself as I got down to my hands and knees so I could view the small pressure switch under the keyboard. I followed both wires to a black box attached to the side of the ancient PC, and then carefully disconnected them.

Taking no more chances, I removed the box of plastic explosives and set it on the floor well away from the computer. Then I checked for other booby traps.

Finding none, I got down to some serious hacking on the computer system Huntington was using.

There were at least three more break-ins while I worked up in the attic. But I ignored the first two since the culprits had split when they saw the two bodies in the hallway. Most criminals can take a hint.

The third was a heavy duty dumberd. He stuck his head into the attic to announce, “You’re a dead man.”

That was the last thing he said before a three-round burst from my pistol ended his career. I found I no longer took kindly to death threats from any quarter.

This brief interlude over, I returned to my work. I completed my task a few minutes later, using an online cracker on a hacker subnet to break the cipher protecting Huntington’s satellite dish.

Knowing it was unsafe to return to my apartment, I decided to use Huntington’s system to access a dummy account I had in Washburn University’s cyber-classroom super-computer. By the time the Washburn officials tracked the unauthorized use of their super-c and sent the police here to collect the fine for the umpteen nanoseconds I’d stolen from the university, I’d be gone. That was if any police volunteered for a suicide mission in the Valley of the Shadow.

I entered the system and within minutes had followed the signal from Huntington’s relay through an anonymous ghost IP and then through a data forwarding system. That led down what should have been a dark wire cable system to what might be Huntington’s lair, but which I figured was more likely the next satellite dish relay (at least I couldn’t put that past him). Unfortunately, there was no way to hack into that system without having physical access to it.