All That We Are (The Commander Book 7)

by Randall Farmer

  There was a lot of assumption bashing going around. When Lori showed up she smelled of Gilgamesh sex, and if I wasn’t confused, smelled pregnant again. I did ‘stone face Arm’ and didn’t push. It took work. Gilgamesh’s antics irked me a lot. I had the feeling I no longer knew him.

  “So,” Lori said. “What’s the emergency? Haggerty?” We sat in the library now, around a rectangular wooden table, after Connie had chased out a half-dozen kids doing homework and a couple of nosy adults.

  “I need a dozen shooters to serve as analysts, thug deterrents and potentially as thug killers. Two squads of six.” I explained what Haggerty had done to me, and the reasons for my paranoia. “I wouldn’t mind if you tagged along, either, Lori.”

  Lori shook her head, as expected. She hated these little adventures, and a minor Arm fracas, such as this, didn’t meet her criteria for ‘real emergency’.

  “What are you offering?” Connie said, her businesswoman face on.

  I sighed. Hank had called that one right. I thought they would be willing to do it gratis to help the Cause, but Hank was of the opinion that even Inferno couldn’t afford such things. Someday soon I would have to find a way to slip Inferno a half mil in some devious untraceable fashion. “I’m offering my mercenary business in Dallas. I can’t use them anymore, but from a Focus perspective they should be fine.”

  Connie frowned. “We’re not set up to use them either.” Ann juice signaled to Connie that they could trade them to Tonya, which finally engaged Connie’s full attention. “I’d like to see the details, ma’am,” Connie said.

  I handed over to Connie the specs on my mercs, and the level of FBI trouble they were in, which cut their value immensely. They would have to be relocated, provided with new identities and suitable day jobs. She looked at them, shrugged, and handed them to Ann. The two juice-signaled back and forth for a few moments. “We’ll take it,” Connie said, “on the condition that Lori chooses the team.”

  “No problem,” I said. Lori’s face lit up as if it was Christmas. Interesting. Both Connie and Ann expected me to argue the subject, but Lori hadn’t. She had won some sort of bet.

  I hoped Lori knew what she was doing. If Lori chose idiots, they would likely be dead idiots if we had trouble, so I trusted Lori to choose the best. “I’d like to request my tagged people, though, if you don’t have any objections.” Ann Chiron and Tim Egins.

  Lori nodded. She would have picked them, anyway, because of their tags. “How soon?” Connie said.

  “Tonight, if possible,” I said. “The more time we give Haggerty, the more time she has to prepare.” Speed. Speed. Speed.

  If all those damned military history, science and eyewitness stories were correct, there was no better force multiplier than speed. Speed and I had become the best of friends.

  ---

  “Ma’am, I think we’ve got her,” Ann said. We had commandeered the section of the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, at least the area where they kept current newspapers, and went digging for exact locations of recent Monster conversions. Sky, who Lori had chosen to be Inferno’s on-site Major Transform, kept the rabble away with his tricks, and kept a close watch on me, not the least bit chatty. I think he was hitting his yearly limit on cranky Arm encounters.

  We plotted out the Monster conversions on a map of New York amid the musty smell of old newspapers and microfiche, the assumption being no Arm would let any conversions occur within metasense range of her home. “The red circles are the Monster conversions, the blue stars are Focus households, and the green squares are gyms,” Ann said. The gyms were my idea. I hadn’t thought of Focus households, but the message was clear. Only one area had a dearth of Monster conversions, nearby gyms and no Focus households; yes, we had ourselves an Arm on the upper west side of Manhattan. Relatively close to my library HQ, across the long diagonal of Central Park.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and worked out arrangements in my head. I wanted everyone in our entire troop within my metasense range. Sky wasn’t being any use in the analysis, doing the full Crow paranoia metasense scan routine. Something about the situation triggered his distrust of coincidences, with which I concurred.

  I just loved having Major Transform allies.

  “What’s the plan?” Tim said.

  “I’m going to use the same method she used to find me: gyms, then normals who’ve dealt with her, then directly, by scent. The rest of you are making sure there are no surprises. No armies of police trying to ambush me. No Monsters lying in wait in the trash dumpsters.”

  “Will do, ma’am.” I left the details to Tim, and focused on my nose and my metasense.

  New York in March was cold and damp, with gray slush in the streets and no sign of any incipient spring. Haggerty’s main gym was in Morningside Heights, a long stone’s throw from Central Park. I got obscure reactions from normals just north of there. For instance, after I described Haggerty to one normal woman, she said “She’s your sister, isn’t she? That’s funny. She doesn’t look at all like you.” Very strange. Something in our Arm makeup or basic predator effect had messed with that poor woman’s logic.

  After two hours of detective work I found Haggerty’s scent saturating an old brownstone about a mile north of the logic-lacking woman. No juice traces; even a young Arm didn’t lay down a juice trace. I stopped and shook my head long enough to pull myself out of my stalk and talk to my people. Gave orders. I had Tim and Tina’s squad thoroughly case the block around Haggerty’s place and all the adjoining apartments. All they found were two anomalous normals guarding the stairway to the top floor. I took a sniff. They both smelled of Haggerty, but they weren’t tagged. I had the Inferno squads take them down without killing them and then sent everyone away to do perimeter work and stay out of Arm metasense range of Haggerty’s place. I had them stay within Sky’s metasense range, though, and we refreshed our Rogue Focus style hand signal language for the situation. Then, and only then, I went in.

  Haggerty proved to be less than ready for me. The fact she didn’t have any extraordinary protections meant she hadn’t given much thought to my striking back. Fool of a young Arm. She would learn.

  Looked like I would be the one to teach her. With everything set that could possibly be set, I let my suppressed rage and predatory anger out. It felt good. Oh, it felt good.

  The normal who answered the door to Haggerty’s place was young and male. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. He wore a smock and several scattered paint smears.

  “Hello?” he said. I brushed past him and entered the apartment.

  The man attempted to protest. I turned to him and gave him a cold, dangerous look. The man turned white as a bleached shirt as he figured out what I must be.

  My first thought was to kill him to even the balance, but I ignored my rage and instincts and decided against it. I had a much sweeter revenge planned.

  The central area of the apartment was large and airy. The ceiling vaulted high above. It wasn’t quite a studio, because of the bedroom off to the side, which doubled as an office, but the place had only the two rooms. Given Haggerty’s proclivities, a place without a kitchen had to be a plus. Paintings hung from the walls and more leaned up against them. There were paintings on easels, and one unfinished painting over by the window.

  Detailed maps of the New York metro area hung on every wall, with every Focus and Crow home marked with a pin and a hand-written tag, even Shadow’s old place northeast of Central Park. I growled at her absurd completeness, and upped the odds that she had attacked Shadow and triggered his current psychotic break.

  “The art’s yours?” I asked the man, after I returned to the central area.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You are?”

  “Mark Castlemont. Look, I think you want to talk to…”

  I didn’t let this no-name artist finish. Instead, I backed him into a corner and grilled him until he spilled everything he knew. When I was done with the now nearly dead-f
rom-panic artist, I tied him up, gagged him, and stuffed him in the coat closet.

  Two hours later, Haggerty came home, a man in tow. I could tell she knew I was here by the speed she came up the stairs. I braced myself and settled into a fighting crouch. I wanted to taste her blood.

  Haggerty came through the door at a tear, throwing knives at me and leaping. I dodged out of the way of the first knife, caught the second and sent it flying back at her, to land mid-way up her thigh. Then she was on me with a berserker fury terrible to behold.

  It did her no good. She was technically a better fighter, but I was the one who knew how to fight. I had two years more experience and I was a hell of a lot faster. I was a predator. She pretended. I had an organization and stature. She didn’t. I had been through hell as a free Arm. She hadn’t. Keaton held my tag. She didn’t have anyone behind her. I called her a fool, an idiot, and a pathetic Arm. She couldn’t even give me one word comebacks.

  The fight wasn’t a contest, but that didn’t keep her from trying. She burned juice. She out-fought me on style points. She out-thought me on combat tactics. It didn’t matter. She lost. She lost badly.

  The man she had dragged back, another normal, made it to the front doorway, but one look from me sent him sprawling in tears. He wasn’t a fighting type. Haggerty had him tagged, which made him a prize.

  It didn’t take long before I had Amy down on the floor, bleeding from a dozen wounds, and my knife pressed into her neck.

  “Crawl,” I whispered into her ear.

  We both knew this routine, beaten into the both of us by Keaton. Submit or die. Haggerty submitted, though it took a half hour worth of pain before she satisfied me her submission was real. By the time we were done, accent splatters of blood decorated her living room and juice traces filled the rest. All hers. I hadn’t had to burn juice to defeat her.

  Eventually, I let her speak. “Ma’am, what do you want of me?” she said, her voice raw.

  “You fucked up. I don’t have time for fuck up Arms.” I got off her, backed away, and smiled. She was low enough on juice she could barely sit up, struggling unsteadily in the puddle of her own blood. My victory made her respectful, but I could see her eyes held that cold hard look of hidden defiance, despite the pain and submission. My predictions about her behavior, based on what little I knew of her time with Keaton, were dead on. Even beaten, she wasn’t broken.

  “Ma’am.”

  “I’ll take your life in payment for the life you took. Or you can bribe me and I’ll let you flee the country. Flee North America. Or…”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Accept my tag.”

  “I won’t be your slave.”

  “Tag or one of the other choices.” I had wanted to tag her from the beginning, from before she graduated as an Arm. I walked over to her and let her put her neck on my foot. It seemed she wanted to live.

  “I mean you no harm, ma’am.”

  I didn’t bother to respond. Going into another Arm’s territory, killing one of her people, and messing up three tagged underlings showed blindness and stupidity. Not understanding the seriousness of her actions was worse. Yet, I knew she was brilliant. She just didn’t understand Arms. Or when life mattered. Which meant she didn’t understand herself. She was a hazard to me, a competitor with no respect for my power or my territory.

  I had been this stupid myself coming out of Keaton’s training, just in other areas. Keaton needed to get better at training Arms.

  “Choose or die,” I said. I knelt down, disregarding the congealing blood, and laid the edge of my longest hunting knife against the side of her neck. Haggerty closed her eyes and thought.

  “If I’m yours, am I Keaton’s as well?”

  “Not automatically. I can give you up to Keaton, but only if I choose to.” An interesting lever. Her weakness gladdened me. “If you make it worth my while, I can protect you from Keaton.”

  Her mood changed in an instant. “I choose to be yours,” Haggerty said. “I don’t know enough to survive fleeing the country.” I took my knife from her neck and stood.

  “Kneel and take my hands, then repeat what you just said.”

  She wobbled to her knees and took my hands. “I choose to be yours.”

  “I accept you as mine.”

  The juice did its thing, and the world changed. Once Haggerty was no longer competition, all sorts of other dynamics bubbled to the surface. Haggerty’s eyes opened in wonder. “I’ve been a fool. I thought you were Keaton’s slave!”

  She wasn’t the only one who felt like a fool. Tagging Haggerty worked differently than with my other tags. Haggerty parked herself inside my head now; psychologically, she became my daughter. The adjustment felt disquieting and enlightening. I had misread Haggerty from the start. She had liked me and wanted my attention from the day I pulled her out of that hospital detention center. Only I hadn’t liked her, the competition. When I gave her to Keaton, she saw my action as a betrayal.

  Oh, she would be a problem child. Her willful stubbornness and head-blindness would see to that. The two of us were going places, though. Wonderful ideas about how to make good use of an underling Arm percolated through my mind.

  I had a new hunger now, right up there with juice, sex and territories. Arms. I wanted more subordinate Arms.

  “You owe me recompense for your incompetence,” I said. I motioned to the tagged crying man at the doorway, and had him free Castlemont from the closet. “You. Name?”

  “Carlton Jobe.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Investment banker.”

  Perfect.

  I turned to Haggerty. She interrupted me before I started to speak with a “Please don’t kill them, they had nothing to do with my mistake.”

  Yes. Trouble. I half wondered if the tag was defective in some way. “Jobe is mine now,” I said. I had uses for a better investment expert.

  “Ma’am,” she said. Glad. She cared for her people, the same way I did.

  We talked for about an hour, and I learned everything I needed to know about Amy. I even got her to give me her place in Los Angeles and her other preparations. I would use it as my emergency hideout, if my situation got too hot in Houston.

  She hadn’t attacked Shadow, though. Once she located him, she had done the right thing, dealing with him amicably through Crow Midgard, and later, over the telephone. She liked the Crow, and had been first on the scene after he got attacked. “Ma’am, there weren’t any Major Transforms involved in the attack on Shadow,” she said. “Or Transforms. Just normals.”

  Something funky was going on, that was for sure.

  Gilgamesh: March 22, 1969

  “You sound on edge,” Lori said.

  “Yes, the real reason why I called,” Gilgamesh said. After his phone search found Lori at her lab, they had chatted ‘miss you’ style for over ten minutes before Lori got down to business.

  Rain poured down tonight, nasty enough to move Gilgamesh to the rack of open-air phone booths outside the Michigan Street Kroger, which at least put the wall of the Kroger between Gilgamesh and the worst of the storm. “Keaton just told me about Haggerty’s attack on Carol’s home.” Kali had been nearly unlivable for the last week, stuck with cleaning up the mess caused by the FBI’s takedown of her newest Detroit organization. When Kali got busy, she got rude. Or, ruder than normal for Kali. Worse, Tiamat had grown cold, making his occasional phone calls difficult chores.

  “Uh huh. She’s already been here and gone, taking my top people with her,” Lori said. “I’m not sure what she’s going to do to Haggerty, but it isn’t going to be pretty.”

  “Arm dominance contests never are,” he said. “Blood and torture. Groveling and submission.” He wiped the rain from his forehead, an exercise in futility. His forehead was soaked again before the next car passed. The rain plastered his hair to his head, and dripped down his neck into his shirt.

  “You don’t think Carol’s in any danger?” Lori asked. “I keep having the twitc
hies about what’s going on. Like she’s in trouble, or walking into a trap.”

  “I don’t believe so. No,” Gilgamesh said. “Not from Haggerty. I do worry about the information given to the FBI, though. When I looked into that, here, I picked up no traces of Transform involvement. The information came from a courier, though, and when I traced back the courier, I found minute dross traces in the courier’s apartment.”

  “Rogue Crow, or his minions?”

  “These tiny bits of dross were from a Focus household,” he said. “As if they had sloughed off a normal household member. Not Stalin’s household, though; her tamed gristle dross leaves a very different signature.” Keaton hadn’t appreciated his data, though she had paid him a thousand dollars for his efforts. She didn’t like having unknown enemies after her.

  Lori sighed. “Then we don’t know what’s going on, as usual.” She paused, and Gilgamesh swore he could hear her thinking. The wind shifted direction and threw a sheet of water against his back. “So, I do have news. I’d been hoping to be able to tell you in person, but I suspect I’m not going to be making any trips to Detroit any time soon. I’m pregnant.”

  “Great!” That’s what they had been hoping for. He was surprised, though, that Lori didn’t trust her instincts on the subject. She had told him she thought she was pregnant, back when she left to return to Boston. “Congratulations.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, worry creeping into her voice. “I’m not telling Sky. I am hoping I can convince you to visit me in Boston, though. Soon.”

  “I can’t make any promises about the timing, but I will visit,” Gilgamesh said. He didn’t want to think about how Sky was going to react when he found out, and found out Lori had been keeping this from him. “So, have you gotten a response from Focus Adkins?” A good time for a subject change.