Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

“Hey, stop!” Jones shouted from the stage. Danal added his voice. Many of the neo-Satanists did hang back, frightened and uneasy, but the pressure from the others buffeted them forward.

“Drink! Join me!” Prototype thundered.

More cultists lay dead by the fountains, piling up, but others pushed ahead, some hesitant, some eager. Danal struggled with the last manacle, staring in cold horror at the cultists. Nathans had known exactly how they would react—he had selected them for their gullibility, and only the ones with the most unshakable faith would have come to the Walpurgis Night Sabbat. But how could they not see what they’d gotten into?

“It’s only an android! Prototype!” Jones cried again, softer this time, his voice with an edge of hysteria. “Look!”

He pulled out his heater-knife and stood in front of the demon. Reaching up, he sliced with the hot blade through the rubbery synthetic skin of Prototype’s chest. The Elite Guard slashed across, and down, peeling the corner to expose tendrils of optic fiber, glowing power sources, cables, pulleys, servomotors.

With some self-protective mechanism the android swatted Jones, sending him sprawling. He skidded across the stage, protected by his armor, but he struck his head on the floor and sat back, dazed. Prototype, his innards exposed by the sagging flap of synthetic skin on his chest, turned back to the worshipers. They looked at him, disregarded what they did not wish to see, and continued to press toward the scattered fountains.

In the crowd Gregor moved frantically, trying to pull the worshipers away from the fountains. “Stop them! Wakers!”

The other Servants wrestled with the neo-Satanists. Many stopped by themselves, angry and confused after Jones’s revelation, but the majority clung blindly to their faith and threw themselves at the scarlet poison. The Wakers struggled with them, but they were outnumbered dozens to one.

“I want to take all of your souls back to my realm! Join me! Drink my blood!”

Danal finally freed himself and swung down off the altar stone. He had no time to ponder, but many of the pieces fitted into place in the back of his mind. Prototype—yes, an android, a puppet for Nathans to use, but also an experiment to stretch the capabilities of Resurrection, Inc. And if Nathans had built Prototype, he would only have extended the technology already available to him—

“Prototype!” Danal shouted, “Command: Stop!”

In mid-sentence the android froze, arms upraised, fang-filled mouth open.

“Command: Be silent!” Danal stepped toward the towering monster. He looked up at the demon’s face. “Take it back. Tell them to stop.”

The Satan simulacrum lowered its gaze to look down at the Servant. Its curved horns glistened, but the bright purple glow of its eyes held no menace now.

“I cannot,” the android said. “My programming specifies the words I must speak to the audience. I cannot deviate.”

Danal wanted to scream in desperation at the demon, or break down in tears.

Then, unexpectedly, in the pentacle on the floor beside the altar stone, the body of Francois Nathans stirred and sat up.

The hands twitched, as if trying to orient themselves. The gaping hole in the man’s chest began to trickle red blood once more, splashing anew across his High Priest’s robe. Something had begun to pump in place of a heart.

Danal felt a sensation of eerie horror as Nathans fumbled with his hands, grasped the edge of the altar stone, and hauled himself to his feet. Then Danal noticed the fine-lined scars on the man’s bald scalp—scars that were better healed but otherwise similar to those that all Servants had.

From the implanting of a microprocessor.

Danal gasped as he tried to say something, but his mouth felt too thick. Had Nathans been so frightened of dying, so obsessed with returning to life, to have a standby microprocessor implanted in his head? Ready to switch on after actual brain death? It had been perhaps fifteen minutes, maybe longer—not long, but enough. Without the resurrection process, without that long interim step, perhaps he had believed that his memories, his self would come back with him. It made a cold, logical sense—as if a simple time factor was the only thing that mattered.

Death doesn’t work that way, Francois.

Dead Nathans sluggishly turned and saw Danal. His arm was rigid, still gripping the scatter-stun. He raised his arm. Danal couldn’t move. But Nathans seemed only to be following a reflex action, flexing a muscle, and stood motionless and cold. His eyes didn’t blink. His chest continued to bleed. The expression on his face was slack and cadaverous. Blank. Utterly empty.

Like Julia.

Aftermath. Holocaust. The words ran through Danal’s mind as he stood horror-struck, staring into the silent chamber.

The worshipers had been too many, too intent upon destroying themselves. Those who refused to drink the poison now stood distraught and frightened, but few of them had helped to stop their companions. The efforts of the Wakers alone did little against the tides of people.

Burly Rolf knocked down many of the cultists, sprawling them on the floor as fast as he could stride from one to another—arms swinging, shoulder tackling. Rikki was too small to do much more than distract and harry them, but still he kept a few away from the fountains. Laina became injured when she tried to wrestle with too many of the worshipers at one time; they turned on her, and only microprocessor speed saved her from being torn to pieces.

Stunned and concerned, Gregor knelt beside an old man convulsing in his last few moments. The leader of the Wakers looked deep into the old man’s face, and propped the man’s head on his knee. The victim’s lips, teeth, and mouth were a brilliant scarlet, stained by the dye. Blotches of burst blood vessels spotted his face and hands. The dying man sensed Gregor’s presence and opened his eyes; his limbs jerked spasmodically.

“Why?” Gregor asked, begging for some kind of explanation that would make sense. “You could see it was poison. You knew the demon was just an android. Why would you do this? To yourselves?”

It seemed a rhetorical question, but the dying man became lucid and gasped an answer, “Because I have Faith! ”

It all stopped when Jones had finally roused himself and, conquering his own revulsion, snatched the scatter-stun from Nathans’s dead-but-alive hand. The Elite Guard went through the neo-Satanists, stunning them all, dropping them in their tracks….

Other than sobs from some of the Wakers and the nonsuicidal worshipers, the sacrificial grotto now fell silent. The fountains continued to pour forth the bubbling red poison, but Rikki and Rolf had gone to find a way to shut them down.

Danal stood, numb and cold like a ghost. Slowly, he walked down the steps to the main floor of the chamber. He left Prototype behind him, Commanded into silence and immobility on the stage… and the zombie Francois Nathans stood bleeding away his second life.

Though many of the neo-Satanists lay unconscious, crumpled across stone benches, nearly a full hundred had managed to poison themselves. Lost out among the fallen bodies, Jones remained motionless, encased in the midnight-blue armor but without his helmet. His mouth hung open with a thread of saliva connecting his lips; his eyes were wide open and staring.

By now Danal felt almost inured to seeing the bodies. Poisoned—Nathans would have thought of that. Now they were all perfect candidates for Servants. He felt a pang of sadness as he looked back at Julia, still clad in her Acolyte robe, blank and seemingly without a conscious will of her own.