Badalamenti stood up. "The Maniax are finished, sir! We creamed 'em. We broke their central structure. We blew up their munitions dump. We rounded up the chapter heads."
"There's still the Bullmoose!"
"There's no such animal! All the ringleaders, they were all the Bullmoose, sir. It was a floating office. They've admitted as much."
"Sit down and listen, Badalamenti, or I shall be forced to discipline you immediately. I will not tolerate these outbursts. I will not, not, NOT!"
Rintoon thumped the table. Ralystyrene recaff cups jumped. Finney mopped the mess spilling towards her lap up with her sleeve. Badalamenti looked around for support, found none, and slumped back in his chair.
"The Maniax are clever," continued Rintoon. "Yes, they are. They've sustained a killing blow. We can credit ourselves with that. But this is their last mission. They're going kamikaze. They've infiltrated spies into the fort, and subversives and assassins and agents provocateurs. It's the only feasable explanation."
No one said anything. There was a dribble of saliva dangling from Rintoon's mouth, tracking through his stubble.
"The supposed Swiss woman, Juillerat, was one of them. She was there at the original UE, when she influenced the instruments. It was monitor error, as I always insisted…"
All Rintoon needed to complete the picture was a pair of ball-bearings to clack together in his hand.
"And Rexroth was in it too. He was unable to live with the guilt, and shot himself. And Stross, who was killed by his confederates because he was about to talk. I have determined the existence of a conspiracy of treachery on a scale unheard-of since the 1950s."
Colosanto bit down loudly on a pill. Badalamenti shoved his paper animals about on his blotter.
"And I shall not rest until I have rooted out this conspiracy and exterminated it down to its very last member."
Lauderdale was easing his rifle off the table. Was he planning to scrag Rintoon? At this point, he would have won a vote of confidence if he did.
"I believe there are Maniax among us, even in this room."
Everybody sat up and looked at each other. Then, they looked to Rintoon.
"By his words and his actions this morning, he has given himself away. They think they're clever, uiese hophead damfool gangcultists, but the zeroids never reckoned they'd be coming up against Vladek W. Rintoon. No siree. Ole Vladek W. Rintoon has them outfoxed eight ways from sundown." Badalamenti was statue-still now. "Yup, there's a Maniak at this very table." Badalamenti very slowly spread his bands out before him. Rintoon looked at everyone in turn. Finney tried to look away from his shining, moist eyes, but couldn't. He seemed to see clearly right through her, to sense every petty dereliction of duty, every resistance to command, every infraction of the rules, every sinful course carried through or merely considered. Then, his terrible gaze was gone, and it was Colosanto's turn to sweat.
Finally, Rintoon grinned his feral sardonicus grin and almost whispered, "Williford."
The officer sat bolt upright, rifle raised in the present-arms position in front of him.
"Williford," Rintoon cajoled, "Simon says 'take your rifle…"'
He had the gun to his shoulder now, and was standing up. "'…and execute Captain Badalamenti.'"
VI
Chantal spent a few minutes kneeling by the priest's corpse. She seemed to be looking into his dead, open eyes, as if trying to get him to reveal something to her through telepathy. It made Stack feel uncomfortable. Flies were buzzing around the body. In this heat, they would have to get him in the ground quickly. Finally, the woman got up, and gently shut the corpse's eyes. She muttered somethng and crossed herself. She walked around the cruiser, and the wreck of the altar.
"Careful," he said. "It was quiet yesterday, too, but I got a nasty shock."
"Yes, you would have. Don't worry. It's gone now."
She was at the altar now. She had it working.
"It got into the system here, from your cruiser. But how did it get into the cruiser?"
"It?"
She waved him away. "I'm sorry. I was thinking aloud."
Some of the altar's functions were down. The screen flashed green at her. She experimented with several buttons, and finally it turned off. Stack nerved up the courage to approach the cruiser. He touched it. He felt the bullet-scars in the hood. Someone had used pretty major firepower against it.
Chantal was asking a question. "Before the…uh, change…before that, what exactiy was happening to the automobile?"
That seemed like a long time ago. He remembered Leona walking around the car. Ken Kling—the poor obnoxious dead bastard—had called her "cowgirl" and asked her to get him somethng, a co-cola. She had hoped to have some of Slim's B-B-Q.
"Gas. Slim was filling the gastank."
"Hmmn," Chantal was pensive. "No. It couldn't be in the gas. Wrong medium. Was there any other kind of contact?"
"Just the usual systems check. Slim was on the yaks' payroll. His place was well set-up. We always had him look at the cruiser's whole works."
Chantal snapped her fingers. "That would be the point of possession, then."
"Possession?"
Chantal was bent down by the crushed front of the cruiser now, tapping at the spike linking it to the altar.
"Yes, possessed. Your car was under the influence of a demon."
This was crazy.
"Like, Linda Blair or something?"
"Something like. A demon is a lot of things. You might like to think of it as a computer program that infects a given system and changes its function."
"Like a virus, or a sleeper?"
"Yes, very good. Exactly like a virus. An engineered virus, of course. This was a deliberate act of aggression. Not a chance mutation."
Stack was having difficulty keeping up. Chantal had raised the hood, and was poking around near the engine.
"Ingenious adaption. It leeched surplus metals from the body of the cruiser and melted them down to form the channeling spike. It must be a fast-breeder. It'll be replicating like a plague out there."
Stack's head hurt. It usually did when he had to do any serious thinking. "Let me get this straight? There was something in the works at Slim's?"
"Undoubtedly."
"That makes sense. He said his hardware had gone crazy. And this…demon…downloaded into the cruiser, and made it run amok."
Chantal raised a finger like a teacher correcting a point. "Not amok. It was very purposeful. It came straight here, to this church, and insinuated itself into the altar system. It did exactly what it was invoked to do. It's deep in the datanet now, and it has to be stopped."
"This demon? It's just a computer virus, right? No spook stuff?"
Chantal looked at him. Her expression was serious.
"There is spook stuff."
She nodded. "I'm afraid so. You're not going to find any of this easy to cope with. Do you have any religious faith?"
"Daddy was a Baptist. I guess I'm not anything."
"Well, in that case, a demon is a computer virus."
"Come on, Chantal."
Patiently, she sat on the ruined hood of the cruiser and explained it to him. "And it's also a supernatural entity, an immortal creature, a servant of the Devil. It was summoned from Hell by a powerful diabolist, and it has been deployed in a deliberate attack on the Catholic Church and upon the information exchanges of the United States of America. It will remain in the channels until it has been exorcised."
"Sister, who the freak are you?"
Chantal looked at him as his question echoed. Somewhere, water was gushing. Holy water, he remembered. Chantal sighed, and shook her head. She was having trouble putting the words together.
"Nathan," she said, "I'm a nun."
Part Six: Holy Orders
I