A surgeon’s scalpel can change a man in ways great and small. The shape of his nose. The set of his jaw. The depth of his cheeks. From an alteration as subtle as introducing double eyelids to as dramatic as a facial reconstruction, the knife was capable of many wonders.
It could not resculpt a man’s heart.
The man formerly known as Alex sat across the coffee table, transfixing Yuri with his unblinking gaze. Almost everything about him had changed since the last time they had met. Yuri had remembered a beanpole of a man with a humongous almond for a head. In the years since, he had bulked out like a bodybuilder, while the sharp edges of his skull had been rounded off and shaven down. His nose was thinner and sharper, half a spearhead jutting from his face. Ruddy red lips pressed together into a fat smear.
He had reworked his face so extensively, Yuri couldn’t recognize him. But his face, his true face, remained the same.
Flat. Blank. Empty. He wore an expression of perfect nothingness, revealing nothing but the inky blackness in the depths of his dull eyes.
He had changed his face, but he was still the same man.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Yamamoto,” the man who now called himself Peter said.
His voice hadn’t changed either. Posh and clipped, his accent was alien to the nation, to the era, a relic of some forgotten age of kings and knights. He spoke barely above a whisper, forcing Yuri to prick his ears and study his lips.
“Good to see you again,” Yuri said. “Both of you.”
Off to Yuri’s left, forming the third point of a triangle, was Zen Tan. The diminutive former operator hadn’t changed much since they had last met. There were stress lines in his once-smooth face, stray strands of hair glowed white under the dim lightbulbs, but he still carried himself with the same intelligent attentiveness that had once called him to Yuri’s attention so many years ago, back in the beginning of the Special Tasks Section.
“Same here,” Zen said. “How are the others?”
“Peachy,” Yuri replied.
“They’re not in Babylon,” Peter said.
“Not yet. It’s too hot. Just us being here is a risk.”
Babylon. City of gods and monsters, capital of the rulers of the world, the axis mundi of the post-Cataclysm world. Here in the heart of the New Gods’ power, they had a million eyes and ears around every corner, countless fingers and tentacles stretching from every shadow. Meeting up in person to conspire against them was madness.
Yet here they were, in a travel center at the city’s edge, tucked away in a tiny room in a no-frills motel.
“They are coming here?” Peter asked.
Yuri shook his head. “I don’t even know what the job is.”
Zen and Peter exchanged a look. They were hackers, gray hats, the smartest geeks Yuri had ever known. The sheer size of their brains in such close proximity threatened to collapse the local universe into a singularity. For the past few weeks they’d been working on whatever it was hackers did when they weren’t hiding from the New Gods. Whatever they’d found had driven them to call Yuri out of hiding. In that glance, they had revealed so much about themselves.
They were tight. Tight enough that they didn’t have to speak to communicate. Not anymore. They’d spent long hours poring over screens, composing code, puzzling over the secrets they had unearthed. Those secrets, and their implications, gave rise to an emotion he had seen too many times.
Fear.
“The New Gods are forming an alliance,” Peter said.
Yuri’s eyes narrowed. “They hate each other too much to do that.”
“Not anymore,” Zen replied. “They’re partnering up with each other against the government and their rivals. And us.”
“How do you know this?”
“A bit over a year and a half ago, Deadeye and I helped Peter get his hands on a Void Collective biocomputer. With it, we’ve penetrated their networks and databases. Not all, not yet, just some of the less-secure ones, but we’ve found a treasure trove of intel. They’ve been monitoring the movements of the New Gods, their Elect, and their assets. Between that and the data we’re tracking on the darknet and open sources, we’re seeing the New Gods preparing to take sides.”
“How long have you known this?”
“Only a couple of weeks. Right before you left for the Riveria job. We had to proceed with subtlety and caution when penetrating the VC networks. We couldn’t afford to let them know we had a biocomputer. Just figuring out how the damn thing worked and how to use it to penetrate their network took us the better part of a year.”
“Fourteen months, two weeks and three days,” Peter interjected.
“Once we were in, we had to comb through zettabytes of raw data. Yeah, we’re good, but there’s only two of us, plus the former STS cyber cadre we managed to rope into this project. We tracked money flows, business deals, personnel movements, research projects, surveillance footage, intel reports. We had to sort out the signal from an ocean of noise, and corroborate what we’d found. We only managed to piece everything together a few days back. The day before I messaged you, in fact.”
“What did you learn?” Yuri asked.
“The New Gods are preparing for war,” Peter said. “The last war to come.”
Yuri said nothing.
Zen said nothing.
Peter rocked slowly back and forth, eyes glowing with inner flame, but said nothing.
“Go on,” Yuri prompted.
“The Court, the Pantheon and the Liberated are locked in a three-way struggle. You’ve seen it yourself in Riveria. To resolve this deadlock, they’re seeking allies.
“The Liberated is looking to ally with the Guild of the Maker. Their ideologies are similar enough. However, allying with them would mean entering into conflict with the Singularity Network and the Seekers. For their part, the Guild wants allies against the Singularity Network, but they might not want to risk any deal with the Seekers either.
“The Pantheon and the Court are trying to sign deals with the Seekers. All three of them oppose the Liberated, but the Pantheon and the Court have too much bad blood between them to consider fighting on the same side. Not without resolving this conflict.
“The Seekers themselves wish to play kingmaker. They’ve reached out to every other faction except the Liberated to offer their services and their support.”
The Seekers didn’t worship any gods. They sought to become as gods. Using their connections in the private and public sector, they sought to carve out an advantage using cutting-edge technologies, forbidden magic, and deals with lesser gods and devils.
But among the New Gods, they were the weakest.
“What do they have that the others want?” Yuri asked.
“Remember the Leviathan?” Zen asked.
Yuri shuddered. “How can we forget?”
“The Seekers pulled the Leviathan out of its native universe using their tech. You forced them to reveal that capability to the other New Gods. Now that everyone knows what they can do, they want a piece of that action. They’re willing to do everything it takes to get their hands on that tech. They’ll sign a deal with the Seekers if the price is right, but they’re more than willing to use force if they have to. Seems to me the Seekers want to sell access to their tech in exchange for protection against all the other gods.”
“That’s not everything, is that?” Yuri said, his voice now a whisper too.
Zen frowned. Peter’s face remained blank.
“You have a theory,” Peter said.
“Unfortunately.”
“Let’s hear it.”
Yuri closed his eyes. Took a breath. Locked gazes with both men.
“The Seekers have the capability to reach into other realms and summon monsters. From there, it’s only a small step away from summoning the New Gods.”
Zen cursed darkly. Peter rocked back and forth, saying nothing.
His words had hit home, Yuri knew. For all their power, the New God’s presence was limited on Earth. They had to act through their Elect and specially-constructed avatars. Should the New Gods cross over from their native dimension and manifest in the flesh…
“It’ll be the end of the world,” Zen said.
Nobody knew what would happen if the New Gods crossed over into the material plane in all their damned glory. Nobody wanted to know. The few surviving records from the Cataclysm had painted a picture of a bleak hellscape. Mountains rolling across the land like tsunamis of rock and earth. Seas and rivers bursting from once-solid earth. Volcanoes erupting from new fault lines, burning ice raining from the heavens, land masses disappearing or emerging from the seas. Entire peoples had been displaced by the changing universe. Invisible forces had torn holes into reality, sucked them into fathomless gulfs of icy cosmic abysses, and spat them out into strange lands far from their places of origin—those who had reappeared from the eternal night.
The New Gods had claimed that they had displayed mercy, that they had used only the tiniest fragment of their power to rewrite the face of the Earth. Yuri knew they were exaggerating, but not by much. No one knew the depths of their power. No one wanted to know.
“What are the Void Collective and the Singularity Network doing about this?” Yuri asked.
“The Sinners plan to create their own god,” Zen said. “The Deus Ex Machina, born from the Will of the Net. They don’t need to summon a god from some higher realm. But they recognize that if some other faction summons their god first, it’s game over.”
“The Void Collective is indifferent,” Peter said. “They are already capable of warping space-time. The Void implants a portion of itself into the members of the Collective during their initiation ritual. It does not need the Seekers’ portal technology to cross over.”
“Why hasn’t it done so already?” Yuri asked.
“Doing so would destroy the world. That’s according to the reports its in-house scientists have prepared. The Void does not seek to obliterate all of reality. Merely assimilate all souls into itself. But it is also aware that if the other New Gods manifest, they could potentially foil their plans. Permanently.
“The Sinners and the Void are two different species of hive minds. They both recognize the threat the other gods pose, and do not presently see each other as threats. Thus, they seek to form an alliance against the rest of the New Gods.”
“A marriage made in hell,” Yuri muttered.
The New Gods were too evenly matched. It was the one thing keeping them destroying all of humanity. Everything could change if just one god forged a permanent alliance with another. It would upset the balance of power. There was only one way that would end: war. War to the knife, knife to the hilt, ending in nothing less than total annihilation.
The STS and the Federal government had war-gamed many possible conflicts involving the New Gods. This was the ultimate worst-case scenario: Babylon Black.
“We’ve got to keep this from happening,” Zen said.
“How do you plan to do this?” Yuri asked.
“We were hoping you’d have some input,” Peter said.
“This is the job you wanted my help with?” Yuri asked.
“Yes,” Peter said gravely. “Preventing the apocalypse.”
Yuri massaged the bridge of his nose. This was way above his pay grade. It was above everyone’s pay grade. In the event of Babylon Black, the only thing the STS could do was evacuate as many people as they could, batten down the hatches, and ride out the end of the world.
But Babylon Black hadn’t arrived yet.
They still had a chance.
“We need to destroy the Seekers’ portal tech,” Yuri said. “Without that, the New Gods would not be able to cross over. Then they wouldn’t have a reason to spark the apocalypse.”
“We’re still trying to pinpoint its location,” Zen said.
“Until we do, we need to keep the New Gods from signing a formal alliance. How close are they to doing that?”
“The Seekers are still sending out feelers,” Peter said. “They must know that whoever they partner with will likely win the final war between the New Gods. At the same time, they know that they cannot pick too weak a partner, or the other gods will gang up to crush them both. They may be willing to form alliances with more than just one god. They will certainly seek to exact maximum concessions from potential allies, including the right to be left alone and continue their activities in peace, as well as a power-sharing arrangement after their final victory. These negotiations will be tense and complicated.”
“The Singularity Network and the Void Collective are close to signing a formal agreement,” Zen said. “We’ve found references to a joint research project dated last year. That project may be critical the alliance. We’re still trying to dig up intel on that project, but it’s behind heavy-duty security.”
“The Liberated must be feeling the pressure,” Yuri said.
Peter nodded solemnly. “Yes. The Seekers sought to eliminate Turnbull at the Rose House. Turnbull was sitting on a goldmine of blackmail material. The Seekers probably wished to weaken the Liberated’s positions prior to opening negotiations. But after what you did, after you exposed the involvement of the Seekers, the Liberated would be more likely to seek violent resolution against the Seekers.”
“Do we have any leads?” Yuri asked.
“Just one,” Zen said. “Mr. One.”
Yuri’s heart skipped a beat.
Mr. One was the mysterious Seeker operative who had orchestrated the false flag attack against the Liberated in Babylon. He had arranged for the abduction of Primate Bartholomew, the Archbishop of Babylon and Metropolitan of Nova Babylonia, to manipulate Yuri into doing his dirty work. Yuri had turned the tables, but Mr. One had escaped.
Yuri’s breath grew ragged. Under the table, his hands closed into fists. Yuri breathed, softly and smoothly, releasing the tension threatening to grow in his chest.
“You have his location?” Yuri asked.
“Yes,” Peter replied.
“The VC and the Sinners have been tracking the movements and activities of their rivals all across the country, especially in Babylon,” Zen elaborated. “Soldiers, spies, diplomats, everyone officially declared as an Elect and many who aren’t. They paid special attention to Seeker representatives who’ve been reaching out to their counterparts in the other factions. Using Big Data, Babylon’s camera network, and pattern of life analysis, they’ve steadily narrowed down Mr. One’s identity.”
“How do they know it’s him?”
“The bodies you, Deadeye and Lycan left behind. The VC and the Sinners painstakingly reconstructed their movements. They’ve placed them in the same location as Mr. One. He met them in person, presumably to issue orders and delivery payments. They believe he is the leader of a cell of wetwork operatives and mercenaries. They prepared a dossier on him. We’ve managed to verify most of the information in it.”
“I want a copy of the dossier,” Yuri said.
“Of course,” Peter said.
“What are you thinking?” Zen asked.
“We need two things: intelligence and time. Hitting Mr. One will net us both. We grab him, download him and any intelligence he has, and we’ll develop the situation from there. With Mr. One out of the way, the Seekers’ ability to influence the other factions will be diminished.”
“The Seekers may see it as retribution from the Liberated, possibly with the aid of the Collective or the Network,” Peter said.
“Which would make them more desperate to seek out allies,” Zen continued.
“Which in turn would push the Void and the Sinners closer to an alliance,” Yuri said. “They won’t be able to hide all that activity. Leaders and facilitators will expose themselves. We’ll have opportunities to act.”
“Recon by fire, eh?” Zen said.
“Maybe. But once we pull the trigger, we can’t take back the bullet. We need all the intel we can get on the New Gods and potential targets before we act.”
“Of course.”
“I take it you will accept the job?” Peter asked.
Yuri sighed.
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
Witness the ending of the world in Babylon Black!
