“Are you thinking of surrendering?” Gilgamesh said.
“Right this instant I could probably be talked into surrendering,” I said. I knew where my current lonely path led, to a cold cell with cinderblock walls and the slow inevitable descent into hell, with no friends this time to break me out. A rogue Arm was a dead Arm, and the time would come, probably soon, when I faced a choice between life or freedom. “Giving up is the only way to guarantee my people’s survival. Not too long after I would likely be receiving a formal Council-approved license to kill rebel Focuses and the orders to do so. Is that what either of you want?”
Did I play dirty? Of course. I was playing right into the Focuses’ weaknesses – protecting the lives of their people. I made Lori choose between her overzealous ideals and her rebellion.
“There’s been some developments here,” Gilgamesh said. “On November 2nd, somebody managed to sneak a box of case studies about Transform pregnancy problems into a stack of data boxes sent here from Dr. Bobenread at Georgia Tech.” Bobenread had been one of my recruiting targets, but after I realized how closely the Feds watched him, I had decided to ignore him. He was a political flake, probably one of just a few who had written in a vote for Eugene McCarthy in the just completed presidential election. “It’s sent Lori for a loop.”
I heard Lori’s wet breathing, fighting for control, but she didn’t speak. “I thought those sorts of problems occurred only in the early stages of pregnancy,” I said. Transform Sickness turned women infertile, but if they were already pregnant when they transformed and in their first trimester, and if Transform Sickness didn’t cause a miscarriage, they often had big problems.
“There were eleven case studies in the box detailing sudden late term in utero Monster transformations.”
I took the risk. “Lori, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. If you want, I’ll be there for you.”
Lori sniffed. “Thanks. I appreciate the sympathy,” she said, polite but not warm. We still had issues. She really needed to take the time to vent at me, in person, for several hours. Get it out of her system. “Sky says the scent on the pregnancy information matches Tonya’s current under-construction household. He’s also finally convinced me that Tonya used a fake Crow identity to squeeze the information about the problem incident out of him” oh, so that’s what he had been hiding from me “and pass it along to me.”
I sat down myself, shaken by the trick with the pregnancy information. Biggioni knew exactly how to slip a knife into someone’s metaphorical kidneys, and how to make it hurt. No, I wouldn’t be able to out-devious Biggioni; the bitch had long-ago lapped me in the deviousness race. I needed to change the game in a big way. Soon, as in before the first of December. She would never let me get off the hook by doing something as easy as presenting my faux PhD dissertation to Keaton. I suspected she had several more traps gestating, waiting to spring on me at the appropriate disastrous instances.
Such as the day before I presented to Keaton. Gaaah.
“Lori, she’s real close to taking me down. She almost got me today. She may have you set up to be similarly knocked out.” I didn’t keep the emotion out of my voice. Despite our problems, I wanted Lori to know she still had my heart.
“I don’t know what to do, or if I can do anything,” Lori said. “I can’t risk the baby.”
“You’re a Focus, not a mere woman Transform,” I said. “You didn’t transform while you were pregnant. None of Sky’s other pregnancies had any problems. You’re good enough to prove this, scientifically, even if you’re stuck in a bed, dammit.”
Lori didn’t answer. I had a bad feeling I underestimated the problems Lori’s now third trimester pregnancy might be causing her.
“Remember the dream we had?” Gilgamesh said. “The dream ended when you and the, um, disguised Crows got swept off the board. I think you need to think big, Carol, and sweep everything off the board.”
Good. He mirrored my thoughts on the subject. “Do you have any ideas?” I said. I liked the idea of thinking big. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any big ideas. Right now my hands still throbbed and I had worn out three of the rubber squeeze balls Hank had given me to keep my joints from locking up while I healed.
“I think Hera made a mistake with the false accusation about the kidnapped Chicago Focus,” Gilgamesh said. “We’ve never publicized my Chicago jaunt. Neither the Crow community or Focus community knows what I did; I suspect Hera thought she could get away with the accusation because to her, the kidnapping is an unsolved mystery.”
“Tonya and I talked about that a few months ago,” Lori said. “I said: I’d hoped that the Frasier kidnapping would have served as a wake-up call to the Council instead of ending up just another piece of evidence to be swept under the rug. She answered: Prove to me your Chimera boogiemen did the kidnapping, and I’ll wake up the Council. If we can prove this to her, something more than Crow proof, this will solve one of the problems you’re having with Stacy as well as putting Tonya on the spot. If she breaks her word to me, I’ll have her.”
Focus politics gave me hives. “We’ve talked about this before,” I said. “Rescuing that Focus is too dangerous.”
“You don’t need a rescue, you need a trusted witness,” Lori said. “If I told you I could give you real time information about Tonya’s Focus confidants, for instance where they physically are, could you do something with that?”
“You can do that?”
“I have a lot of useless tricks,” Lori said. Depression over the near failure of her rebellion had gotten to her. I heard it in her voice. “Tricks I can use without even leaving home.”
With said bit of confusing edification, a full-blown plan erupted into my mind. “Gilgamesh, I’ve got a job for you, and you aren’t going to like it one bit,” I said. Eight days. I could finish this off in eight days. This meant I wouldn’t be finishing the damned faux dissertation, instead betting my life on an entirely different method of mollifying my former and future boss. “Lori, I need Biggioni off my case until the end of the month. Do you have anything you can use to distract her?”
“I think so,” Lori said. “For one, if you tell me the particulars of today’s adventure, I’ll make sure the properly slanted details hit the Houston morning paper. Tomorrow. I’ve got a few other nasty tricks I can play as well. Consider her distracted for the next several weeks.” Lori sighed. “Carol, even after this conversation, you need to know there’s still a problem between us.”
“I know.”
I knew that far too well.
Tonya Biggioni: November 11, 1968
“You want me to make peace with Hancock? You?” Tonya said. She hadn’t talked to Focus Wini Adkins since the Arm Flap, when Wini had set Tonya up for a fall. Today Tonya was willing to talk. She had gone from the cusp of victory to a disastrous mess in less than a week, and she was willing to talk to anyone today. She had called Lori, but Lori wasn’t talking to her, for the first time ever. Tonya guessed Lori must have traced back to her one of the many bits of harassment she had aimed at Lori.
“Yes, I do,” Wini said. “You should be glad I’m coming around on the Arm question. Finding out that Hancock wasn’t the one behind the Transform kidnappings was a real eye opener, and after her seemingly wild theory about the Hunters proved true, I’m actually sorry for the grief I caused her. And to you, Tonya.”
Wini was apologizing to me? Tonya thought. Hell must have frozen over.
“Then who’s behind the project I’m working on?” Tonya said. The ‘forcing Hancock to deal directly with the Council’ project.
“Your bosses.”
That hurt. Focuses Suzie Schrum, Shirley Patterson and Polly Keisterman were her bosses, and they rarely ever pulled in the same direction at the same time. This meant the factions among the Firsts had realigned, again, and she had missed it. Not too surprising, as she had been out of the command loop since the Arm Flap.
Suzie’s recent order to speed up the Transform taming effort, or else, m
ade sense for the first time. The only way Tonya would be able to buy out from under Suzie’s order would be to succeed at reeling in Hancock. That’s what Suzie really wanted.
“Thank you,” Tonya said. “I’m sorry I misread the situation and have been being so rude to you.”
“Accepted,” Wini said. “I have a question for you: in your estimation, what would it cost me to get Arm protection for my people?”
“At least a million dollars,” Tonya said.
“Hmm. That’s a lot. Would this have to be in cash?”
Tonya gave the question some thought, forcing her mind to think in Arm mode. “The only things I know the Arms need, besides juice and cash, are a headquarters and ordinance. The latter is something they often have trouble obtaining, as the Feds know about their needs and they often stake out gun shops in the areas where the Arms live.”
“I might be able to do something along those lines,” Wini said. “There’s been far too much activity of the beastly sort for my tastes in Detroit, recently. Something needs to be done about that, and I figure an Arm may be the best bet for help. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Tonya said. “Do you have any feel for how I could end the fight with Hancock and still satisfy the orders I’ve been given?” Right now she wanted out from under. She had given Hancock her best shot, setting her up with Keaton and dropping the Transform gift on her doorstep, but the Arm not only found a way to defuse the situation, but found a way to turn it against Tonya. At least by the time the ‘Arm frees Transform’ story made the national press, the reporters had started to use the word ‘allegedly’ and the story had been cut down in size, buried in the back end of the newspapers’ national sections.
She had a plan in motion to expose Zielinski, after which she would offer him much better cover than Hancock’s amateur protections, but the troubles of the last week had slowed her Zielinski efforts tremendously.
“Nothing but the usual,” Wini said. “And this one sounds expensive.” Often, the only way a Focus could buy herself out of one hole was to volunteer to jump into a bigger hole. “On a different subject, do you have any idea why Katie Anderson’s suddenly rolling in money?”
Tonya smiled, glad to be back to more usual Focus politics. “I’ve always thought her problems were more from bad luck than ineptness,” she said. “Perhaps her luck turned.”
“Not so far as I can tell. This stinks, but my people haven’t been able to find anything.” Wini sighed. “My first guess had been that Anderson got herself involved in Mansfield’s current money-raising activities,” that is, organized crime, “but this doesn’t appear to be the case.” This was puzzling. Wini often knew more about the households of the established Focuses in the Midwest Region than the Focuses did.
“She might be borrowing through a front,” Tonya said. Katie wouldn’t be the first Focus to do that trick. This was good on the short term, but in the long term debts to loan sharks often crippled.
“Hmm,” Wini said. “I wouldn’t have thought Anderson was that stupid, but I’ll have to check out the possibility.”
They made small talk for another ten minutes, the real issue ignored.
When Tonya finished with Wini and the telephone, she got back to work on her other problems. There had to be a way to take down Hancock’s Houston organization without exposing Tonya’s household.
“Delia, set up a meeting with my detectives tomorrow. Allentown, using the same setup as before,” Tonya said.
Delia stuck her head in the door. “Will do, ma’am.”
Before Delia got back at her desk, Tonya heard panicked shouting and commotion from out front. She hurried out of her office, down the stairs, and to the front door.
“Focus Crushank!” Tonya said. Gwen Crushank, a Focus nearly as old as Tonya, appeared to be out of her mind. Tonya’s people tried to calm her bodyguards, and so far, they were failing. Outside, Tonya metasensed Gwen’s entire household piling out of cars, similarly panicked. “What’s the problem?”
“Monsters! Male Arms! They’re after us!”
“You’ve been attacked?” This didn’t seem likely. Gwen remained quite alive, as were all her people, many of whom should have been at work. Gwen and her household would have a hard time stopping a rogue Boy Scout. A blind rogue Boy Scout.
“Two of them. Big as houses. Scary things, giant bears with pricks as long as…” Gwen’s voice tailed off, her face turning red. Gwen was a bottom end Focus, barely in control of her own people, who she panicked into doing silly things on a regular basis. “We all saw them, roaming around the edge of my place!”
Tonya winced. Saw them, not metasensed them. No Chimeras would do anything so stupid as to show themselves without actually attacking.
This had to be another in the recent series of harassment attacks that had started with Hancock’s tossing her gift surplus male Transform at the baby Houston Focus. This one even sounded like something Hancock could arrange, unlike the metasense ‘hole’ that devoured Tonya’s kitchen last week, the three ridiculous zoning lawsuits that showed up on Monday, and Wednesday’s all-day telephone outage the phone company called a ‘bureaucratic error’.
Hancock couldn’t be so stupid as to think this harassment campaign would work. With a little bit of…
“Please, Tonya, save us!” Gwen got down on her knees, grabbed at Tonya, and said the magic words. “I’ll do anything!”
Tonya took a deep breath. This little problem would eat up her entire day. She would get back to taking down Hancock tomorrow.
Enkidu: November 12, 1968
“I don’t understand any of this,” Hoffman said. His voice was a modulated growl because he was in his beast form, the blocky black-furred bear with a crocodile’s snout. “Why here? Why now? Why us?”
“Delilah, Joshua’s Pack Mistress, can pick up on many things in her Dreams. Here, now, is where we must be,” Enkidu said. He wore his newest model beast form, a pony sized piebald wolf with oversized teeth and retractable scimitar claws. They waited in a factory yard near the East-West Toll Road’s Broadway exit in Gary, Indiana, as rain mixed with snow pelted them and kept them cool. A perfect day for a fight. In weather like this, Enkidu wouldn’t have to hold back at all. “As to the latter? Odin and his pack are on alert, but Odin’s in his half-beast form so he can use heavy weapons if he needs to. So it falls to us to attempt the intercept.” Even in his beast form, Enkidu’s voice was fully human, one of the things of which he was most proud.
“What, can this Pack Mistress thing predict the future?” Hoffman paced restlessly beside the empty racks made to hold rebar in better times.
“No. She can pick up on plans, though. Whoever or whatever this new threat is, they don’t know how to cover themselves in the Dreaming,” Enkidu said. “Perhaps they don’t even know about the Dreaming.”
The logic bothered Enkidu as well, different logic at a different level. Delilah said this was a new threat from what appeared to be a new form of Major Transform, supposedly emanating from the Focuses. However, the Dreaming was a Focus trick; the Hunters’ version of it appeared in the daytime, in the clouds, while the Crow version, according to Urine, came on the wind. The only logical explanation was some group of Focuses didn’t know the Dreaming tricks, implying that the Focuses were far more disunited and factional than Wandering Shade believed. In addition, this meant the enemy came at them based on information collected in other ways, which meant successful espionage. Which was also supposedly impossible…unless some Focus faction was helping these unknowns on the sly.
In either case, Wandering Shade’s grand strategy was flawed. They should be picking off the Focuses based on opportunity, not waiting for some perfect moment to strike and crack their organizational resolve. That wasn’t a new thought for Enkidu, not since he had learned that his Master was a crazy Crow.
Hoffman stopped his pacing and stood as tall as his bear form permitted. “New implies weak, Hunter Enkidu,” he said. “This is below you.”
“You want to claim this interception and gain a name?”
“Yes, Hunter.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid! New meant unknown, and unknown meant problems, as with his contests with the Talking Arm. However, the formality of Hoffman’s request shivered the Law. Enkidu didn’t have any choice but to say: “Then this is yours. May you gain your name.”
Wandering Shade, Odin, and the Judges had gone back and forth many times over the last year discussing how best to train young Hunters. If young Hunters gained their names and independence too easily, they commonly got stupid and died soon after they went out on their own. Enkidu, Joshua and Odin had all come close to dying in this period of their lives, saved only by the direct help of Wandering Shade. Wandering Shade found himself spread too thin these days, though, for direct help; the Hunter’s cousins, the Mountain Men, and their endless internecine warfare took up too much of his time. The Hunters needed to be able to expand without Wandering Shade’s personal help.
The solution was to make it difficult for young Hunters to gain their names. Enkidu feared gaining names had become too difficult; only one had gained a name this year, Thunder. Thunder had moved west, to the Rocky Mountains near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and although considered overly cautious by the rest of the Hunters, he appeared to be thriving. The rest…well, there were setbacks. Constant setbacks.
They waited in wet silence as the afternoon passed. Workers labored in the factory, but the factory had shrunk since its heyday, and no one used this yard any longer. The precipitation turned to snow and blew out, replaced by a cold northwest wind and a sky patchy with clouds and occasional short flurries of big-flaked snow. Enkidu’s mind wandered in the silence. He saw more dangers to Odin and his pack than these unknown enemies; familiar dangers. The Talking Arm. Gilgamesh. A monstrous senior Crow, terrifying and chaotic. That’s where he should be, facing those enemies, not here. Orders were orders, though, and he stayed put.
He noticed a distant flicker from the east, which soon resolved itself into two Major Transforms, entities that glowed Focus or Crow strong, but vastly different than either. “Hoffman. They come,” Enkidu said.
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 24
