Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

The Guildsman turned, startled, as Danal nearly ran into him, and then gaped as he noticed the long smear of Nathans’s blood on his jumpsuit and the wound on Danal’s shoulder bleeding clear synBlood. In reflex to her Master’s actions, the female Servant turned to look at Danal as well.

Her crystal-blue eyes were empty. The resurrection process had washed the sea spray from her face, and her artificial hair had been combed by someone else. Her elfin, dimpled features were waxy and lifeless.

But it was still the face on the beach, the one he had found in the hologram on Van Ryman’s mantel.

JULIA!

Suddenly his real memory burst open, all of it. Thousands upon thousands of thoughts stumbled hungrily into the light of day. His old self, his true self emerged.

And Danal knew .

He screamed as the agony struck him, making his knees buckle, turning the pain in his torn shoulder into a mere annoyance. The world vanished in the resurgent flood of his flashback as his life and his violent death on the sacrificial altar rose up to stare him in the face.

Van Ryman

Van Ryman!

I AM VINCENT VAN RYMAN!

He saw that the old Guildsman had already hurried Julia away, frightened by the rampaging Servant. Danal watched her in anguish for only a moment, fixing the scene in his mind, then ducked blindly down a crossway, then another, until he had run far enough ahead of the mob to feel relatively safe. But he could no longer hide from his returning memories.

The man I Served is an impostor, usurper!

He tried to sort out his thoughts. And everything fell back into place, just where it had always belonged.

Danal kept running by instinct. Enforcer hovercars soared overhead, skimming the tops of the buildings, converging near Resurrection, Inc. If he concentrated, Danal could still hear the sounds of the angry mob even above the background noises of the city.

Danal wondered when the Enforcers would send out special tracker teams to locate him. Or would they even bother? Would they assume he was dead? Had they even discovered that Danal had been the cause of the uprising?

The Servant stumbled into a residential area of towering condominium buildings. The streets—all of which had been named after extinct wildflowers—looped about in a conscious attempt to break the illusion of a geometrically ordered city.

Danal wished he could see through the buildings, look straight down the convoluted streets. Julia remained out there somewhere. He had seen her—a Servant like himself. But was she Julia ? Or was the true Julia gone, leaving only a walking body behind? He could remember the last time he had seen her—the real Julia. The memory had returned now, if he could find it, if he was able to dig through the pain….

She had been sitting across from him in the formal dining room of the Van Ryman mansion, resting both elbows on the tablecloth. They were laughing. It had started out as an argument, but they had consciously steered the conversation to more lighthearted things.

They talked and drank cheap pink champagne—Julia liked cheap pink champagne. Their two new Servants, a male and a female, stood attentively outside the door of the formal dining room. Danal—the real Vincent Van Ryman—had purchased the Servants to allow him more time alone with Julia, now that he had given up all his neo-Satanist activities. Danal/Van Ryman hadn’t noticed that the Servants’ eyes looked too attentive, that their thoughts seemed too alert.

Julia giggled, but then stopped laughing abruptly. Van Ryman looked up and saw that the room had gone blurry, and the champagne suddenly had an awful aftertaste of chemicals. The world went out of focus, and then faded to black….

He had awakened in the artificially dank stone Sabbat chamber underneath the mansion. Manacled to the walls—it all seemed weirdly Gothic and melodramatic. Francois Nathans was there, and Julia was not.

“Julia? What happened to Julia?”

Nathans made a wry scowl. “Oh how noble of you to think of the poor lady first, Vincent. She’s already dead—dumped on the street and deleted from The Net. But you’re a much bigger PR item. Our first ‘Traitor to the Faith.’ I couldn’t have dreamed up a better unifying force if I’d tried. We’ll have a special Sabbat in your honor, Vincent, and no one will know the difference… because you aren’t you anymore.” Nathans laughed. “Oh boy, we’re going to milk this for all it’s worth!”

Vincent Van Ryman pulled against his chains, and felt cold as he slowly reached forward to touch his face—

Then Danal slammed the door on the clamoring memories, holding them at bay for later, making them wait. Until it was safe.

The Servant found himself careening down one of the winding streets where the backs of the condominium buildings butted up against each other. He could see the worn fences of the lucky first-level dwellers who had their own yardlets fenced into little honeycombs. The denizens of the upper stories had to remain content with small terraces above, looking down at the ground.

Unseen behind one open patio window came the shouts of two men and one woman arguing in a language Danal could not identify. On another patio an older couple lay on stained chaise lounges, stretched out, motionless next to each other.

Danal felt exhausted, with the world pounding around him, too much happening all at once. His head buzzed with the reality that had just struck him, from the events that in such a short time had changed him from a normal, obedient Servant to a renegade.

He leaned against the fence, sheltered by a large garbage receptacle and the shadow of the twin condominium buildings. Resting for a moment…

Danal took a deep breath and let the nightmares come to him. He was afraid at first, but he opened the door quickly and snapped it shut again, allowing only the first memory—the last memory—to come out.

“Rah hyuun!”

“Rah hyuun!”

The ritual chanting filled the air with a drone like a locomotive, augmented by the chain of speakers around the grotto ceiling.

Vincent Van Ryman was drugged, and he stumbled. The inside of his head felt fuzzy and his vision had narrowed to the width of a pencil shaft. Around him he saw robes—white, red, black—signifying the ranks of Acolyte, Acolyte Supervisor, and Coven Manager, with various markings to indicate the sublevels of authority and mastery of neo-Satanism.

The grotto was lit by candles and red strobelights that provided a hypnotic atmosphere for the ritual, enhanced by odorless hallucinogenic drugs wafting through the enclosed air.

Danal/Van Ryman knew he was doomed, about to be sacrificed. He was not bound or restrained in any way, but he had no will to make his arms or legs move. It took all his concentration merely to remain standing or to stumble forward when someone directed him.

Nathans wasn’t there; Nathans never took part in the actual rituals. He kept his hands clean. He remained out of sight. But with Vincent Van Ryman—the former High Priest of the neo-Satanists—turned against him, Francois Nathans had yanked invisible strings, setting wheels in motion, proving to be a formidable enemy.

The ritual moved forward, but Vincent’s brain had slipped a gear, plodding ahead at a greatly reduced pace. He had conducted the chant himself a dozen times before, but now he could not remember the words, the details of the High Sabbat. Except he knew that at the culmination of the High Sabbat, someone always died.

And as he recalled this, he felt hands grasping the numb skin of his arms, roughly yet gently. Red-robed men urged him toward the poured-stone altar into which had been molded various signs and symbols. In a corner of his mind he remembered designing many of those symbols himself.