Diabolus Read Online Free PDF Page B

ahead, and there was no way they couldn’t know what time it was at his location.
    As he dressed himself in his robe and barely functional shoes, he fretted over the summons. He wondered if he was to be excommunicated, a final punishment after five years of being a nobody in the middle of nowhere. It would be a relief, he thought. Salvatore had no idea what he might do when he was finally kicked out of the Church for good. He knew he could always go to the tabloids, or maybe even the more legitimate, respected news organizations and sell his side of the exorcism story. He also knew he would never do such a thing. Being excommunicated from the Church didn’t absolve him of his responsibilities to God.
    Less than an hour later, he stood in the middle of a large, empty field. The darkness surrounded him like fog, the sounds of the tropical jungle alive with life at night coming at him from every direction. His hand felt the pack of cigarettes in his robe pocket, then the familiar shape of the heavy lighter. Why not? he asked himself, lighting what was probably his very last cigarette.
    He wouldn’t be able to smoke again while on the shuttle, nor while in the Vatican. Depending on where he ended up after suffering his final shame as a man of the cloth, he probably wouldn’t be able to smoke there either. Salvatore was an Italian citizen, which automatically made him a citizen of NATO. All sixty-two countries that belonged to NATO had banned tobacco products forty years ago. He sighed as he blew out his final drag of the cigarette, dropping it into the dirt and crushing it with his heel, careful not to burn his foot where the sole of his shoe no longer existed.
    The shuttle dropped out of the low clouds less than three minutes later with a whine as its engines reversed thrust, allowing the shuttle to hover for a moment before landing a hundred yards from Father Antonelli. He stood there staring at it for almost a minute before a door on the side of the shuttle opened.
    “Your Excellency,” a voice from his Biblet called to him, “please board the shuttle quickly. There are humans with weapons approaching from the southeast.”
    Salvatore stared at his Biblet dumbly for a moment before realizing what the voice had said. Humans with weapons would be the drug processors who owned the village and the surrounding jungle. They would most likely assume that the shuttle belonged to government forces scouting their operations for a raid or an air strike. He ran as fast as his old legs could carry him. The instant he entered the shuttle, the door began to close.
    “Your Excellency, please strap yourself in. We must lift off in the next forty-two seconds or be within weapon range of the approaching humans,” the voice said, this time from the speaker above his head.
    The priest moved to one of the four seats and sat down, the gelpad molding around his frame while he fastened the six-point restraint. As he clicked the last fastener home, the shuttle’s engines increased pitch and the ship heaved upwards. If Salvatore had eaten anything before he’d left the church, it would have found its way all over his robe and the surrounding seats two seconds after the shuttle lifted off. Gravity pushed him deeper into the gelpad seat, holding him there for a few more minutes. Finally the pressure eased off, and Salvatore glanced out of the little window next to him. The blue curve of the earth fell away before him, the stars above shining even more brightly than they had from the ground in the jungle where light pollution meant giving away the position of the mobile processing facilities.
    “Estimated flight time is two hours, nine minutes, Your Excellency,” the voice said to him from the speaker.
    “Who are you?” Father Antonelli asked the speaker.
    “I am Aggelos, Vatican Artificial Life Form, Your Excellency.”
    “And why do you keep calling me ‘Your Excellency?’” he asked. The AI wasn’t a big shock to him. He’d