“Asshole,” Wener grunted. Along with the other acolytes, he was perturbed by the death. Trying not to show it.
Quinn knelt down at the side of the bath, searching the corpse with eyes and eldritch senses for the mechanism of its demise. There were the usual weapons implants, he could perceive those all right, hard splinters among the softer grain of organic matter, even the neural nanonics were discernible. But Quinn’s energistic power had nullified them. What then? What instrument could effect an instantaneous and painless suicide? And more curiously, why was the High Magus equipped with it?
He straightened slowly, retracting his head and arms back within his cloak’s veil of night. “It doesn’t matter,” he told his agitated followers. “God’s Brother knows how to deal with traitors, the beyond is not a refuge for those who fail Him.”
A dozen heads nodded in eager acceptance before him. “Now go and bring them to me,” he said.
The acolytes scattered to do his bidding. They rounded up everyone in the headquarters, and herded them into the temple. It was a vaulting chamber nestled at the core of the Leicester, a baroque fabrication of gilded pillars and crude cut stone blocks. Six giant pentagons were etched on the curving ceiling, emitting a dull crimson glow. The grumble of the storm was just audible, a bass reverberation sneaking through the Leicester to give the floor a faint vibration.
Quinn stood beside the altar as the captives were ushered up to him one at a time. Every time, he repeated the simple choice of futures: follow me, or be possessed. Merely claiming you would submit was no use. Quinn interrogated their innermost beliefs and fears before passing his final decree. He wasn’t surprised by how many failed. Inevitably, this far up the sect hierarchy, they had grown soft. Still evil, still exploiting the soldiers below them, but not for the right reasons. Maintaining their own status and comforts had evolved into their dominant urge, not a willingness to further the cause of the Light Bringer. Traitors.
He made them suffer for their crime. Over thirty were chained to the altar and vanquished. By now he had become proficient in opening a fissure back into the beyond; but more importantly he’d learned how to impose his own presence around the opening, valiantly guarding the gateway from the unworthy. Even in their utter desperation for escape, many souls turned aside from such a custodian. Those who did emerge conformed to Quinn’s ideal. Nearly all of them had been sect members while they were alive.
He gathered them together after the ceremony, explaining what God’s Brother had decided for them. “We need more than one arcology to bring Night to this world,” he told them. “So I’m leaving you this one for yourselves. Don’t piss this opportunity away. I want you to take it over, but carefully, not like the way the possessed do on other planets, even Capone. Those dickheads just rush up and head butt every town they come across. And each time, the cops swoop down and pick them off. This time it’s gonna be different. You’ve got the acolytes worshipping the ground you shit on. Use them. Moving around is what lets those fucking AIs sniff you out. You mess with processors and power cables just by being near them. So don’t go near them. Stay in the sect centres and get the acolytes to bring people to you.”
“Which people?” Dobbie asked. “I understand how we don’t gotta move about. But, shit, Quinn, there’s over three hundred million people in New York. The acolytes can’t bring them all to us.”
“They can bring the ones that count, the police captains and technical guys, the ones gonna cause you grief. Or at least knock them out, stop them from reporting that you’ve arrived in town. That’s all I want from you right now. Get yourselves established. There’s a sect centre in every dome, take them over and hole up there for a while. Live like a fucking king, I’m not saying don’t enjoy yourself. But I want you ready, I want you to build up a coven of possessed in each dome. Loyal ones, you all know how fucking important discipline is. We’re going strategic. Learn where the major fusion generators are, hunt down the fresh water stations, and the sewage plants, see which intersections the transport system depends on, track down critical nodes in the communication net. The acolytes will know all this crap, or they can find out. Then when I give the word, you smash each of those sites into lava. You paralyse the whole fucking arcology with terrorism, bring it to its knees. That way the cops won’t be able to organize any resistance when we emerge to claim glory for Him. You come out into the open and start possessing others, and you turn them loose. Nobody can run, there’s nowhere to go, no outside. Possessed always win on asteroids, this is no different, just bigger, is all.”
“The new possessed, they won’t worship God’s Brother,” someone said. “We can choose a few who will to start with, but if we turn them loose, there’s no way millions of them is going to do like we say.”
“Of course not,” Quinn said. “Not at first, anyway. They have to be forced into this, like I did to Nyvan. Haven’t you worked it out yet? What’s going to happen to an arcology with three hundred million possessed living in it?”
“Nothing,” Dobbie said in puzzlement. “It won’t work.”
“Right,” Quinn purred. “Nothing’s going to work. I’m going to visit as many arcologies as I can, and I’m going to seed all of them with possessed. And they’re all going to collapse, because energistic power breaks the machinery. The domes won’t be able to hold off the weather any more, there isn’t going to be any food, or water. Nothing. Not even forty billion possessed wishing at once are going to be able to change that. They’ll shift Earth into another realm, but it still won’t make any difference. Just being somewhere else isn’t going to put food on the table, won’t restart the machines. That’s when it will happen. The revelation that they have nowhere else to turn. Our Lord will have won their minds.” He lifted his hands, and allowed a pallid smile to show from his hood. “Forty billion possessors, and the forty billion they possess. Eighty billion souls screaming into the Night for help. Don’t you see? It’s a cry so strong, so full of anguish and fear, that it will bring Him. Finally, He will emerge from the Night, bringing light to those who have come to love Him.” Quinn laughed at the astonishment on their faces, and dark delight in their minds.
“How long?” Dobbie asked avidly. “How long we gotta wait?”
“A month, maybe. It’ll take me a while to visit all the arcologies. But I’ll penetrate them all in the end. Wait for my word.” The silhouette of his robe began to fade. Outlines of the furniture behind him started to show through. Then he was gone. A cold breeze drifted across the chamber, perturbing the shallow gasps of consternation that echoed from the dismayed disciples.
The Mindori approached Monterey at a steady half gee acceleration. Two hundred kilometres ahead, the asteroid’s features were resolving, crumpled dust-grey rock speared by metallic spires and panels. It was surrounded by a swarm of pearl-white specks that flashed and glinted in the tenacious sunlight. The Organization fleet: over six hundred Adamist warships floating in attendance while small service craft flitted among them. Each one a unique knot in Rocio Condra’s distortion field.
Gliding among them were the more subtle interference patterns of other distortion fields. Valisk’s hellhawks were here. Rocio called out in welcome. Those who bothered to acknowledge his arrival were subdued. The emotional content simmering within most of his fellows was one of grudging acceptance. Rocio accepted it reluctantly. It was what he’d been expecting.
Glad to see you found your way back to us,hudson proctor said. What have you got?
The affinity link provided Rocio an opening to the man’s eyes. He was in one of the docking ledge lounges, overlooking the pedestals where several hellhawks were perched. The room had been altered into an executive-style office. Kiera Salter was sitting at a broad desk, her head coming up to give him a hard, enquiring stare.