Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (44 page)

Truthfully, none of the 99 knew the
details of what made them strong or weak.  The Angelic Host had left that out of their war-suppression training and had refused to answer most questions on the subject, another part of their game.  Much of what the Gods learned they kept secret from each other, seeking advantages to advance their personal Missions.

They were all too new at this.

Atlanta had calculated she could hold off the Suits and force negotiation, even though she suspected it would be close.  That’s why she had risked the invasion of Suit territory.  Phoenix, her personal sounding board about the Integrity problem, thought any personal confrontations with the other Gods too risky to contemplate so early in the game.  He too had thought she would be able to force the Suits to negotiate, and had suggested she use a mortal go-between.  She had considered his suggestion far too diplomatic.

Neither of them had considered the idea that the Suits would
refuse
to negotiate the group Integrity issue.  She suspected some innate difference between the Ideological and Territorial Gods at work.

“You belong to us now,” Capitalism said, bending the Suit’s group willpower, another attack at her mind.

Self-defense time.  Atlanta broke Capitalism’s group hold, ran five steps forward and punched Capitalism in the jaw.  The Suit’s head spun around, over 180 degrees, but without the crack of a neck.  She turned and focused her willpower on Wealth, who as far as she could scrutinize had the second strongest willpower of the Suits.  She visualized a rack.  Wealth’s arms and legs flew off in the expected spray of silver divine gore.  Wealth screamed.

Three normal well-armed humans clattered into the room, drawn by the sound of fighting.  Part of Atlanta’s mind boggled at one of them, a psychopath with dozens of murders figuratively notched into his belt.  All three fired their
9 mils at her.  All their bullets bounced.  She ignored the three thugs for now.

Atlanta grabbed Indulgence as he attacked her with his puny willpower and tossed him across the meeting room, to land on a gold-leaf covered copier.  Competition and one of the unidentified Suits struck at her mind, but she shrugged it off.  Instead, she picked up the marble meeting room table and swung
it, baseball bat style, through the remaining four Suits.  For a second, horror filled their eyes.  Then the table.  The perfectly swung table cut Competition and two others in half and shattered into fast moving shrapnel, pureeing the last of the Suits and the psychopath, whose blood and gore made mockery of the room’s opulence as it splattered a wall.

The two non-psychopath normals didn’t even pick up a scratch.

Excellent.

“Shit!” the naked woman said.  Atlanta glanced at her and saw a finger-sized fragment of shattered marble table imbedded in a flowing glowing
something else
that now surrounded the naked woman.  Atlanta turned back as the last of the functional Suits charged her.  He slapped her with one of his now purple hands, which she actually felt.  The purple trick tried to destabilize her willpower, but wasn’t powerful enough to bother her.  She stepped back.

She and this Suit circled,
crunching over shattered marble mixed with writhing silver God remains and bloody red human remains, just out of hand-to-hand range.  “You can fight,” Atlanta said.  “You should lead, not Capitalism.  He’s pathetic.”

“The name’s Passion.”

“Fits,” Atlanta said.  She stepped forward and tried to throw Passion.  Passion threw her.  She picked herself up and Passion’s purple fists thudded into her face and abdomen, followed by an elbow to the chin.  Pain lanced through her.  She tried to recover and take down Passion with a leg sweep, but he skipped out of the way, grabbed her arm above the elbow, and tossed her twenty feet into a gold-gilt marble wall, about five feet away from the naked woman.  Atlanta felt her body thin and she almost blacked out.

“Your martial arts skills appear to be years out of practice,” Passion said.  “Too bad for you
, as I am the ideological master of creative destruction.”  He smiled and ran at her.

Atlanta had mental track four make another mental note, this one to get her hand-to-hand retrained.  She had learned the Semper Fu back in Basic and had kept it up until she won her place as a Marine aviator.  She
needed to bring it back up to speed.

There went more damned time from the advanced college courses she currently audited.
  Her pre-Apotheosis life hadn’t prepared her for the responsibilities of being a Territorial God, and she was dancing as fast as her feet moved to do the job right.

She really needed two hundred hour days to keep her from drowning in all of this shit.

From where she crouched in pain on the floor, Atlanta leapt straight up into the air, hovered, and as Passion, master of the markets’ animal spirits, ran at her, she focused her entire will into her one big discovery, the golden fire.  She loosed it from her fingers just before he reached her and blasted it into him and the area around him, which included the naked woman.  Passion pancaked underneath the force of the willpower blast, flattened as thin as a rug.  Atlanta hung in the air, drained, and as she took great deep breaths she sank slowly to lie flat on the floor.  She met the eyes of the two remaining normal humans and growled.  They dropped their weapons and fled.

“Wow,” the naked woman said.  “What did you do?  It passed right through me.  I thought I was a goner there.”
  She evacuated her chair, another one of those leather and gold filigree things, as if it threatened her personally, and attempted to avoid stepping her bare feet into shattered marble and gore.

“Golden fire harms Gods but doesn’t damage the furniture,” Atlanta said.  “Or even the mortals.”  If she had a real body
, she knew she would be a mass of bruises.  Aching, she picked herself up off the marble tile floor.  She needed a good long rest.

“You’ve gone after Gods before?” the woman asked.  Cheeky, forward and fearless
, and not at all bothered by any aspect of divine awe.  No feeling of hostility or murderous death on her, either.  Special, though.  Very special.

“Nope,” Atlanta said.  “Experimented on myself.”  She looked around and save for the whimpering Indulgence, still spread across the copier, all the rest of the Suits were out cold
, or whatever analog passed for ‘out cold’ with their screwy Godly no-flesh bodies.  Utterly pathetic.  “I’m Atlanta, as you overheard.  You need some clothes?”

“Dana Ravencraft.  Yes, I’d like some clothes.  These bastards disintegrated mine, and I don’t know any tricks to
allow me to get them back.”

Atlanta walked over to Dana and inspected the tall, willowy, black haired Middle Easterner.  Iranian, perhaps? 
She backed away, to fall backwards into her chair again.  “Interesting.  You’re not half-bad looking at all, despite the smallish tits,” Atlanta said, wrinkling her nose.  Dana’s skin was about as pasty white as Atlanta had ever seen.  Dana shivered at Atlanta’s statement.  “I can un-disintegrate your clothes for you.”  Dana nodded, so Atlanta did.  Dana’s clothes reappeared on her, a proper woman’s business suit.

“Thank you,” Dana said, her voice now a bit unsteady, which pleased Atlanta. 
Normal humans should feel some respect for Gods.  “May I ask a question?”

“You may,” Atlanta said.  She turned her back on Dana for a moment as she went over to Capitalism’s remains.  She put her hand on Capitalism’s head and focused her willpower on Capitalism’s mind.  If these idiot Gods could play with minds, there shouldn’t be any reason why she couldn’t.

Nothing.  Either Capitalism still maintained his mind shields or she didn’t have what it took.  She suspected the latter.

“Isn’t what you did here going to affect the Integrity of the 99 Gods as well?” Dana said.  “You killed all but one of them.”

“They attacked me first and the Suits aren’t dead, not even close,” Atlanta said.  Offing another psychopath would be a plus, she already knew.  “They’ll recover.  No harm to the Integrity.”  She hit Capitalism’s head with golden fire, pancaking it.  “Some might recover faster than others, if I’m not careful.”

“I don’t understand,” Dana said.  “When Portland and I spar, what I do to her doesn’t heal so easily
, or show this strange silver substance these Ideological Gods appear to be made from.”

“Interesting,” Atlanta said.  She found herself impressed that a softie like Portland had the sense to spar with the more dangerous varieties of willpower.  “Our creators said mortals can hurt us if we’re not careful.  It’s to keep us in our place, to remind us that although we’re Gods, we’re not God Almighty.  I hadn’t realized
this was a physical warning.”

“Creators?  You mean the Angelic Host, don’t you?” Dana
said.  She attempted again to escape from her captor chair and stood up.  Atlanta nodded.  “Uh, could we get out of here, Atlanta?  This place creeps me out, and these Gods’ opinion about what to do with people like me, mortals with unnatural tricks, involves rape, torture and death.”

“Don’t you want to finish your spying mission?” Atlanta
said.

Dana frowned.  “It wasn’t that sort of spying mission.  I followed Portland’s orders not to set foot into their lair or to approach the Suits.”  Pause.  “How’d you know about the spy mission?”

“You just told me,” Atlanta said.  Dana’s eyebrows lowered as several of the young woman’s precious assumptions evaporated.  Portland’s servant hadn’t thought her cunning.  Or smart.  “Take my hand.”

Dana did as Atlanta ordered.  Atlanta bent her will and flew,
carrying Dana along beside her.  Out the window they went.  Then up, Atlanta maintaining breathable air around them.  Not that Atlanta believed she needed to breathe, but her Imago breathed, and the Host had warned all the Territorials not to quickly change their Imagos.

Author’s
Afterword

Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Melissa May, Maurice Gehin, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer.  Without their help this novel would have never been made.

After I collected many helpful but non-monetary responses from various other publishing venues regarding this novel, I decided the best way to introduce the Commander series to a wider audience was via the ebook market.  I have two traditionally published short stories, one in Analog and the other in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine.

I hope you
enjoyed reading this novel.

If you enjoyed this novel, you can find out further information about the Commander series, the background mythos of the Commander series, and about other fiction, on http://majortransform.com.
You can also follow me on my Facebook author page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Randall-Allen-Farmer/106603522801212.  Interesting and helpful comments are encouraged.  Tell your friends.  Post reviews.

The Commander series continues
with Book Two: “Now We Are Monsters”.

Randall Allen Farmer