“The danger’s over, friends, stay calm!” it called, lowering its weapon and relaxing in the cover of the portico’s statue-studded gutter rail. “Sorry to startle everyone. I am— Hey!” Sniper jumped at the gray-purple flash of a phasing stun-rifle, fired by one of Caesar’s guards, a modern marvel capable of passing clean through stone, but useless if it cannot find its mark. “I said stay calm!” the assassin snapped, its nose wrinkling like a child teaching a smaller child how the game is played. Too fast for us to see the means, it activated one of Cato’s masterpieces, six devices hidden around the Rostra, each no larger than a grapefruit, whose activation filled the air with electric sting, and fried all the electronics around the Rostra: the cameras, microphones, trackers, and all the elegant, nonlethal weapons carried by the guards.
Sniper waited for its own cameras to take over the severed video circuits and route its voice and image to the watching world. The portico was a perfect stage, packed below with crowds and columns, but flat and open on roof level, enough like a sports track to make our athlete feel at home. “Much better. Hello, friends and foes. I am Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S.” Its perfect doll’s face smiled softly to the cameras and the world. “I’m sorry. I know this is going to break a lot of hearts, but I swore an oath to protect the seven Hives, and my Hive most of all. That duty comes before all others, even my fans. I am the current leader of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ assassins, a position called by the title of O.S. Many of you don’t agree with what we’ve done in the past, killing unknowing individuals to protect unknowing masses, but that’s over. Today is different. You may not like it, but Tully Mardi’s right, even the best parts of history have had a little violence. All free peoples in every age and every continent have agreed that assassins are necessary for one purpose above all others: to kill tyrants. That’s what I’ve done today. You’ve all been deceived. There was a conspiracy in this Seven-Ten list mess, a much darker one than my bash’ and Hive committing homicides to protect the world. The real goal of the conspiracy was to expose us and the CFB in order to rip four of the seven Hives apart, and make J.E.D.D. Mason king of what remains!”
It is only thanks to the recordings that I can include these words, reader, for I heard none of them. Sniper had chosen its bullet well, explosive, scattering Jehovah’s skull and its precious contents across the stone like storm’s detritus abandoned on a beach. ?ναξ Jehovah’s warm blood drenched me, pouring like rain from the wreckage of His head as His heart kept up its duty, pointless now. My own body failed, wracked by pain and panic more physical than mental as I felt the vital core within me stop. As a long run makes even simple breathing a challenge, now an unimaginable pressure made everything impossibly hard: seeing, hearing, sorting touch from pain, supporting Jehovah’s lifeless weight, supporting my own. I collapsed on the stone, my vision fading into neither bright nor dark, just fading. All I could think was that my fears were true. The Will Which Rules This Universe had sentenced me to death thirteen years ago, but Jehovah pitied me and made me His, and from that moment it was He, not This Universe’s God, Who gave me life. Now He was dead, and all He made would die with Him, including me. His universe must be dying too, somewhere unreachable, those marvels He had half explained to me in shards of failing language: gradients of complexity, sentiences reveling in themselves without the impediments of Distance or of Time, a better universe, infinity of Good and Kindnness such as we will never know, lost. He had been so careful all His life, no sports, no unhealthy food, no rough play, riding only Utopian cars, not out of knowledge of the assassins, but fear that an accident, however improbable, in claiming Him might claim all His Creation. I wanted to pray that it not be so, that the true Jehovah might continue in His own world, He and His creations, separate and safe despite the death of flesh, but only This Universe’s God remained to hear, and what could He do for us?
“Mycroft!” Martin did his best to catch me as I fell, and I remember wondering why the motion of his face was pale and slow.
“Their pacemaker!” The Censor was the first to realize. “The blast shorted Mycroft’s pacemaker!” Strong hands caught me from all sides, good Vivien’s strongest, like sun-warmed wood among reeds. “Lay them side by side.” I saw him lean over me, angry, and I remember thinking he must want numbers from me, that I was late for my shift, or dozing in the Censor’s office, drifting off halfway through an article. “Stay with me, Mycroft!” he cried. “I won’t lose both of you, not in one day!”
“Then get out of the way!” Bryar Kosala shoved her husband aside, the arts of first aid ready in her hands. Flocking Utopians supplied all she needed, drawing medicine’s clean tools from their coats, their many nowheres reduced to static, short-circuited by Cato’s genius devices which Sniper had used to cripple MASON’s guards, the Rostra’s guards, and me.
“Utopian!” Dominic seized the nearest of them, Aldrin, by her coat of living static and pointed to Sniper’s rooftop. “Give me a gun!”
Aldrin froze, the others too, feeling the world’s eye on them. Gunpowder, of course, was unaffected by Cato’s invention, as perhaps were new technologies: electron guns, magnetic pistols, inventions which a peaceful Hive should not have had concealed beneath their Griffincloth.
“Don’t,” MASON ordered, cold. His guards had dragged him to shelter behind the Rostra but could not shift him further, the sight of Jehovah’s body filling his iron frame with a frenzy his six guards could barely match. “Not here.”
Dominic turned a fraction of his red-hot hate on Caesar. “You choose them over Him?” He did not wait for a reply, but leapt from the Rostra, clawing his wild way across the backs and shoulders of those too fascinated by the blood to run. Does it surprise you that the bloodhound leaves Jehovah’s side? That he does not stay, like Martin, clutching his Master’s lifeless hand, or sobbing on his knees? You think perhaps that he has given up on his Master, turned to revenge now that fact has stripped hope. Not so. Dominic saw no damage or danger in Jehovah’s assassination, only blasphemy. His mind had never recognized, even imagined, any Power other than Jehovah, so it could not register the concept that his God might die. His fingers, which did not care if they were scraped or broken, made a quick climb of the double porch of the basilica, using bystanders as footholds as he scrambled toward the infidel.
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s real name is Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason.” Sniper still faced the floating cameras and, as rumor spread across the Earth like an electric plague, he reached the largest audience a single person had commanded since Emperor Mycroft MASON during the Set-Set Filibuster two hundred years before. “The mother who gave their child a name like that,” it continued, “is the leader of the conspiracy. They call themself Madame D’Arouet these days, but their birth name is Joyce Faust, one of Felix Faust’s ba’sibs. Joyce Faust left Brill’s Institute at nineteen and studied to be a sensayer, but instead of getting licensed they became a Blacklaw, moved to Paris, and founded the brothel where you saw all your leaders meeting in secret yesterday.” At Sniper’s cue the cameras split screened, showing again Ganymede and savage Perry-Kraye toppling through the shattered window at Madame’s. “I’m glad now that I brought my cameras there, since now we can show you the truth. Madame has a network of clients—spies—in every Hive, in Romanova too, thousands of them, many in high positions in the government. Madame controls them using a horde of ba’kids, if you can call them that, children they engineered and trained at their brothel like set-sets, teaching them sensayer techniques and antiquated gendered sex tricks to make them experts at manipulating people using seduction and religion. Dana? Mitsubishi is one of them. Dana? helped make Hotaka Andō Chief Director. President Ganymede was also one of them, but broke away, and has been working secretly as much as they could to free the Humanists from Joyce Faust’s conspirators without them noticing, but they did notice. That’s why Joyce Faust decided to expose O.S. They’d rather destroy the Humanists than lose control of us. And here’s another of their creations!”