In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6)

by Randall Farmer

  Our caravan consisted of a stolen church school bus (hastily repainted and replated) and two rental jeeps. My people drove the jeeps and the bus, and all of the Transforms and bodyguards rode the bus. On the three plus hour drive we talked, going over all the relevant security precautions, signals, and what we would be doing. We also practiced our metasense sharing, Focus, Crow and Arm; as with all things strange Sky had coined a name for this trick: recognition.

  Obvious to him, but not to me.

  “Each Major Transform has parts of his juice structure that are fixed and other parts that are malleable by situation,” Sky said. He sat in the back of the bus, while Geraldine twisted sideways to face him from the next seat forward. The rest of the Transforms clustered close to listen. They left a respectful distance around me. “The recognition of this difference and the adjustments this allows provide for the metasense sharing trick and quite a few other tricks that Lori and I have discovered.”

  “Discovered but not yet told anyone about,” I said. I found Sky and Lori’s incessant experimentation, and their tendency not to share the results until they fully explored and understood them, to be teeth clenching annoying at times.

  “Each of these tricks takes different forms of adjustment, but it’s the same trick,” Sky said. “Don’t go experimenting with different adjustments now – some of them are highly dangerous. Mostly, we haven’t figured out what’s going on.”

  “This metasense sharing appears to be the default adjustment,” Geraldine said, after she mastered the trick. In the process, she had migrated to the back seat and now sat hip to hip with Sky. I smiled; although young, Geraldine was clearly a top-end Focus, and compatible with my personality. “At least for Focuses and Crows, and Focuses and Arms. What’s the Focus-Focus default? I can tell that’s not the same.”

  Geraldine could have walled herself off, ticked at us and uncooperative, but instead she ‘got back at us’ by pumping us for all the information we were willing to spill. Luckily for her, I viewed Geraldine not as an enemy, but as an ally we hadn’t fully won over yet. As Lori said, the more these techniques spread, the more we undercut the old hidebound view of Transform life. Today we did a vast amount of undercutting. For a Focus who transformed about the same time I did, Geraldine was well-trained, difficult to read and possessed ample charisma. I picked her from Biggioni’s stable of Focuses because I could read her anyway and because my Arm charisma dwarfed hers. I liked her as well, a little worrisome, because this meant Biggioni and I had similar tastes in Focuses.

  “Try it and see,” Sky said. “It’s safe.”

  Geraldine and Thelma gave it a whirl. “I don’t like it,” Thelma said, before the two Focuses dropped it.

  “What did it look like to you?” I asked. Two Focuses doing a juice-link was new to me, as well.

  “It gives enhanced control over juice work, but it also feels like trying to dance the Two Step in a refrigerator box,” Thelma said.

  “That’s roughly what Lori and Flo said,” Sky said. “This is one of the many tricks we’ve uncovered that we can’t use because of implementation problems.”

  Geraldine bit her lip and thought for a moment. She understood the trick, or used it in a different manner. “The full implementation of this is forbidden by Council Edict 23,” Geraldine said. She thought her comment safe to say, and also thought the comment should provide us all the information we needed to understand her point.

  “Then I know the answer,” Thelma said, her Texas twang thickening, as it often did when she emphasized a point. “This must require a Focus-Focus tag to work properly.” She sighed. “I’m not enough of a rebel to dive into that forbidden mess, though.”

  “Good call,” I said. I remained very leery of tags between Major Transforms. Last thing I wanted was for us to turn into flaky Teas clones.

  “Whoo doggies, there’s a Focus in that house, no question about it,” Thelma said, in Sky’s arms and linked to his metasense.

  “New Focus, four months under her belt, showing signs of severe juice abuse and some very bad side effects from bad juice exposure,” Geraldine said, holding hands with Gilgamesh and sharing his metasense. “I’m convinced. Can we leave now?”

  “We’re not even there yet,” I said, hiding my exasperation with the Focuses. We packed our gear into the jeeps and all but two of us (my Fred and a normal bodyguard of Laswell’s) drove off in the darkness across a rutted muddy farm field, toward the forest line. We slowly followed Gilgamesh’s blazed trail, now cleared of deadfalls.

  We – the Arms and Crows – owned the night. I hadn’t realized for quite a while that the Hunters tended to be primarily on the offensive during the daytime. I asked Gilgamesh to quiz Occum and the Nobles on the subject, and they said working in the daytime was part of their stature. They weren’t cowardly sneak thieves forced to work at night because of weakness, grunt growl strut. They owned the day. This wasn’t just a physical difference (if any existed at all), but a bit of macho posturing on their part, built into their transformation. The Focuses, on the other hand, despite the fact their night vision was as good as mine, distrusted the night. Night was a dangerous time for their no-night-vision Transforms.

  Need I say more?

  We walked the last hundred yards to the observation point, a clearing on the side of the hill facing the farmhouse, with a decent view through the tops of the trees on the downslope side. No sign of action from the Hunters. Sky’s metasense shields held so far.

  “As I said before, we need better evidence than what we can get on our metasense,” I said, whispering, as I set up tripods and attached cameras. If my trick failed, we would run, and settle for just the metasense evidence (which, alas, wouldn’t be enough to convince Fingleman). I thought, as did Gilgamesh, that we could do better. “Gilgamesh, your turn.”

  He nodded. He had been in hair trigger panic mode since we left the bus: uncommunicative, eyes unfocused, head on a swivel. He headed off, Crow quiet, and immediately vanished from my metasense. This was his trick, his specialty.

  Two minutes later Enkidu and his pack began to appear out of nowhere in the back yard of the farmhouse. Gilgamesh’s doing: these were dross illusions activated by Gilgamesh, transported in on his rotten egg tennis balls, shot by his oversized slingshot. The lit farmhouse began to bustle with activity, various pack women peeking out through the normally closed curtains of the place.

  Odin and one of his trainees, both in their half-beast shapes, rushed outside. Captive Focus Frasier went to an upstairs window and looked outside.

  “There’s the Focus,” Delia said, binoculars to her eyes, echoing my earlier whisper. Interesting. I hadn’t counted on being able to show Delia anything but our reactions, but her advanced perception training gave her enough something to be able to pick out the Focus. My guess was the new Focus’s subtle change in hair color, far more beautiful than before her transformation.

  I took pictures through the camera and its long telephoto lens, both of the Focus and the Hunters. I had hoped Focus Frasier would come outside with the Hunters, but her captivity appeared to be physical as well as withdrawal-scarred.

  Gilgamesh hurried back, speed trumping stealth for now. Odin’s trainee Hunter quickly discovered Enkidu’s pack was only an illusion, and began to bark loud enough for us to hear, his barks filled with frustration and danger.

  Five pack women and six of their near-juice-zombie berserker pack men came out of the farmhouse, the pack women armed with Monster rifles. They ran to pre-arranged defensive positions and crouched down, readying for an attack. Several more clustered at the door, ready to fight. Odin ambled across the back yard in a large circle, sniffing and likely metasensing.

  The clock in my mind clicked down to zero. I sniffed loudly enough to attract people’s attention, and motioned for them to leave.

  It was not to be.

  Stomach clenching fear rolled over me, momentarily freezing me in place. Three steps to my left Delia puked and fell. Two of my gu
ards lost their cool, running back to the jeeps, their missions forgotten. Above us, a vomit-inducing demonic bear with scimitar claws and bloody teeth appeared in the sky, hundreds of feet long and a hundred feet above us.

  “Gwrawarrr! There you are,” the demon bear said, an audible effect loud enough to hurt, and be heard by Odin and his pack. Gilgamesh took two steps before he dropped, felled by a quick swipe by one of the demonic bear’s arms and its claws. He twitched helplessly on the ground for a few moments before his presence faded into nothingness. Dammit!

  “Illusion,” Sky said, about the bear. “Dross based.”

  “I am Wandering Shade, and you are dead,” the demon bear said. The dross illusion stretched to the ground, blocking my view of the farmhouse, but on the other side of the illusion I heard Odin growling out orders. He and his pack would be here soon.

  I dropped the camera equipment and went over to Ricky, opening the large case I had him toting. This was our worst-case scenario. None of us knew Wandering Shade’s abilities or tricks, but if he delayed us long enough with his illusion, his personal capabilities wouldn’t matter. Odin and his pack would see to our deaths.

  Another swipe of the demon bear’s illusory paw sliced through me as I rolled my weapons case forward, trying to get a look at Odin and his pack. I froze in place but didn’t fall. I recognized this trick and knew how to oppose it; I burned juice into my mind to free me from the paralysis, which took only two seconds. Wandering Shade had used this trick on me before, in his Officer Canon guise. I sneered at the demon bear, weaving my full predatory nature into my sneer.

  Nothing.

  “He’s nowhere nearby,” I said, turning to Sky. “Do it.”

  Sky had a trick he wouldn’t even name, a trick that would fully waste him, turning him into baggage. He had used it during my rescue, according to both him and Lori. From Sky’s perspective he had made the gristle and sludge dross of the entire CDC Transform Detention Center his. Lori doubted Sky’s explanation, but she did say that whatever he had done had protected my rescuers from the bad juice of the place on the way out and likely saved their lives. Sky believed that unless Wandering Shade came into ‘Focus range’ of him – a hundred yards – Sky would be able to defeat any of Wandering Shade’s long distance attacks.

  The cost was large: we would lose the metasense shields covering us from Odin and his trainee. They would be able to hunt us down with ease.

  Right now, I couldn’t even fight back until we got rid of this damned demon bear dross illusion.

  Sky didn’t answer. Instead, he opened up his long winter coat, flasher fashion. Out of the coat sprang what appeared to me to be hundreds of crows – the bird, not the Major Transform – flying at the demon bear and pecking. Only they didn’t stop coming. The hundreds became thousands, then tens of thousands.

  “No! Impossible! Aiiiiieeee!” went Wandering Shade. His demon bear illusion flailed, trying to fight off Sky’s crows (or, more appropriately, Crow’s crows). Holes appeared in the demon bear, then great gaping rents. The illusion backed away and fled, followed by Crow’s crows. In a moment I could see and metasense Odin and his pack, charging us through the trees, full speed. Far too close.

  I took my moment to fire four of my weapons, picking up one rocket grenade launcher after another and triggering them. I didn’t miss. The first two hit Odin, the second two hit his trainee. Both dropped, neither dead, but they wouldn’t be chasing us for at least a minute.

  The rest of the pack continued on, a broken squad of nine well-armed part-Monster ladies and a gaggle of nine mostly-Monster ladies, the largest and fastest being an eleven foot tall giant carnivorous turkey, barely fifty yards away when I finished taking down the Hunters. Behind them charged the rest of the pack and the berserker boys. I didn’t even bother to count them.

  “Evac! Now!” I said, my best no-nonsense charismatic order. Four more fire-and-drop rocket grenade launchers remained, and I blasted the giant turkey and two other Monster ladies before return fire from the armed part-Monsters forced me to drop my weapon cache and retreat.

  I scanned around as I retreated upslope into the trees, making sure we didn’t leave anyone behind. Geraldine carried Gilgamesh over her shoulder and Thelma carried Sky, and I hadn’t even asked them to do so. Hank and Ann were right – anyone who thought Crows and Focuses shouldn’t be working together needed to see this instinctive bit of mutual protection in action.

  Tom, stationed at the upslope edge of the clearing, noticed me start my retreat, and he opened up on the approaching pack with a belt-fed tripod-stabilized M-60 machine gun. They dropped into cover, slowing their approach. “Six,” I said, as I passed him, handing off the camera equipment to Ricky on the way by.

  Tom knew my code, and on a count of six he picked up his weapon and did a crouching retreat to beyond where I had dropped and set up my M-60. As soon as he moved, I started to fire, sending leaves, branches and blood flying. We covered each other this way all the way back to the jeeps. The first jeep had already bounced off back to the bus; the second waited for Tom and me. We climbed in back, fed new belts into our M-60s, and put down some heavy covering fire as our jeep bounced off as well.

  Two speedy chimp-Monster ladies caught up to us as we crossed the field, on the way back to the bus. The first Tom and I blew into chimp bits, but I needed to abandon my weapon and leap off the jeep to fight the second, doing so with a shouted “E-3.” The bus would leave without me.

  I could cope.

  Chimp-lady and I circled each other, feinting claws and knives, until I mastered her will, enabling me to dart in, slice open her throat with my long knife, and dart away before she even flinched. Bullets zipped by me now, as the armed part-Monster ladies exited the forest behind me. I took off, broken field running more literal than my usual, heading off at an angle behind the bus, trying to attract the pack’s attention.

  My ruse worked; without their pack leadership their battle tactics were even more primitive than mine. Unfortunately, I realized I was running out of time when I heard Odin’s battle roar well behind me, laden with enough juice to make me flinch. I pulled pins from grenades and tossed them over my shoulder as I ran, setting up a nice distraction and wasting money I didn’t have. When I reached the county road, five hundred yards behind the now fleeing bus, from where my troops fired at the remains of Odin’s pack, I turned, abandoned the rest of my non-bladed weapons, and started a burn-powered sprint for the bus.

  Tom, showing again he was everything I hoped for in a number two, saw what I did and popped the bus’s back emergency exit just before I leapt the final feet into the vehicle.

  “Odin’s given up,” Sky Crow-whispered from where he curled three seats ahead of me. I feared he would need another Zielinski session to cure him from whatever he had done to himself, but although he remained a limp pudding of a Crow, he could still talk. “He’s gathering his people and heading back to his farm.”

  I did a quick scan of the bus, looking for trouble. Plenty of blood and exhausted bodies draped across seats, but no deaders. No wounds on either Focus. Gilgamesh remained out cold from Wandering Shade’s attack, but he was alive and otherwise unharmed. “Some help here,” Delia said, attracting my attention. She wore a nasty wound on her upper right arm, bad enough I could watch the blood spurt as the bus bounced down the county road. Since she was still conscious, she must have been shot just before she got to the bus, or perhaps while on the bus. I counted enough bullet holes in the bus to support the latter theory.

  I couldn’t afford to let Delia die. Her death would wreck everything. Instead, I would have to use a trick I futilely hoped to keep quiet.

  You see, I had acquired myself a magic tongue.

  ---

  “Thank the Lord,” Hank had said, when I finally got some leverage over the Eissler-style healing trick. “I’d swear you were going to turn me into a goddamned scar factory before you figured this out.”

  Since I had wanted to keep my experiments quiet,
he had become my experimental test subject. Served him right. Karmic payback. Every day, while I recruited Tom, I would come by his office, cut him, and try various things to heal the cut. Each day he got crankier about the tests, not that I blamed him. We tried laying on hands, bleeding my blood into his, meditative concentration, and a half dozen other things. None of them worked. Hank told me Arm healing was likely a psychologically dependent trick, and he predicted my ability to heal would be linked to my favorite pleasurable pastime. I reluctantly agreed to try sex, but only after everything else failed. Luckily for the world, I had felt a twinge in my tongue when I licked his wounds, so we were able to skip any experiments involving the rubbing of my privates on him.

  Once I did a little healing, I needed to master it, because to start with, the trick wasn’t worth my effort. To help me, he started to teach me what he termed ‘meatball surgery’ as well as advanced anatomy. “This is a knowledge-based trick, and if you don’t know what you’re healing, and why, you’re as likely to kill whoever you’re trying to help as heal.” No surprise there; nearly all the powerful Arm tricks relied on extensive knowledge. I swear, though, every other word in Hank’s vocabulary while he taught me that meatball surgery crap was ‘adhesion’. I learned to slowly lick closed minor wounds without burning juice, learned that anesthetic didn’t work once my tongue got involved, and to really heal someone else quickly I needed to burn juice. As far as either of us could tell, if I had the time and the juice available, I didn’t have any limits on how much I could heal.

  ---

  I was beside Delia immediately. I started out by putting my thumbs and fingers on the appropriate pressure points to stop the blood from spurting. I examined the wound, finding an entry point but no exit point, meaning a partly-spent bullet had hit her, stopped by her humerus. I did a little poking and prodding, eliciting an ‘owwh!’ from Delia, enough to determine the bone hadn’t been fractured by the impact.