The Quantum War by Derek Künsken

Author:Derek Künsken [Künsken, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781786185075
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The row of excited, eager Puppets in the metal storage area looked at Rosalie Johns-10 with wet, shining eyes. Their looks darted often to the unmoving, lumpy shape in the bullet-proof glass behind her. Their mouths were open, looking for some stray scent of the war Numen, but the hermetic systems that separated episcopal troopers from His Holiness Lester rarely leaked.

“You deserve everything I have to give,” Rosalie chanted. The Puppets repeated, and then inhaled deeply.

This cargo container was their home, for as long as it took to get to the Venus system. It might be their tomb, but they weren’t in the absence. They’d brought a Numen with them, a candle in the dark, divinity to light the darkness.

“My body is your body,” she said.

Some of them mouthed the words as she recited them before they all repeated them with an urgent expectancy. Two rows of eight Puppets squiggled closer to her. Each wore a badge that showed a little yellow panel. They followed her with their eyes, drinking in the idea of the Numen she would soon connect them to. Rosalie floated on sacral stilts with magnetized feet. Her sleeves flapped in the too-big clothing of a real Numen. Over the years, the old sweaty work shirt had lost every scent of divinity, but the chest pocket had a fragment of old chewed gum and two of the stains on the shirt were definitely dried saliva. The rest was spilled food, but food that a Numen of the pre-Fall era would have been putting in his mouth.

“My organs are your organs,” Rosalie said. They chanted the line with deep feeling.

The right sleeve was rolled up and pinned so that Rosalie could hold an uncoiled whip. She didn’t need it, because they were being good, but a pre-Fall Numen without a whip didn’t make a lot of sense to the common Puppets, even though it was a holy fact that the Numen often hadn’t needed whips.

“Please take them!” one Puppet cried out, unable to contain himself. He bounced up and down on the wall rail where he’d anchored his legs. He was among the Puppets farther back with green panels on their badges. He eyed the bulletproof glass behind her, although the inner curtains obscured His Holiness. Rosalie snapped the whip.

“Interrupting is bad,” Rosalie said in the tone of a displeased Numen, quoting from from The Book of the Good Boy. The whip crack and her tone made Jimbo Tyler’s attention come back to her. “Bad boy!” someone said from the back row.

“Please take them!” Rosalie implored, raising her arms.

“Please take them!” the Puppet worshippers said.

She turned on her stilts until she faced the Numen’s War Cage. She couldn’t smell him, but she felt a frisson of side-excited, the knowledge and idea that a Numen was close, even if they couldn’t be smelled. A Numen behind glass was magically unreal and half-real, like an epiphany just beyond understanding, grace just past seeking hands. Side-excited was about the delicious impendingness of the touch imbued with the quality of frantic almost there soonness.

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