All That We Are (The Commander Book 7)

by Randall Farmer

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Four

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Five

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Six

  No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Seven)

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Eight

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Nine

  Focus

  The Cause Series Novels

  The Shadow of the Progenitors

  Love and Darkness

  The Forgefires of God

  Beasts Ascendant (The First Chronicle of the Cause) (coming April/May 2016)

  (more to come, later)

  99 Gods Trilogy Novels

  99 Gods: War

  99 Gods: Betrayer

  99 Gods: Odysseia

  99 Gods Trilogy Supplementary Stories

  Tales From The Anime Café (Part One)

  Tales From The Anime Café (Part Two)

  If you liked “All That We Are”, here’s a short excerpt from the beginning of the next section of Carol Hancock’s memoirs (“The Shadow of the Progenitors”) for your reading enjoyment.

  Carol Hancock (January 14, 1972 – January 27, 1972)

  I missed the non-barking dog.

  The nervous guards began shooting before they saw either Sylvia Bass, my companion Arm on this mission, or me. They missed. I motioned low and to the left with my left hand and leapt up to the right wall-ceiling corner of the tall United Toxicol hallway. When the thirteen well-spaced guards flushed themselves around the corner at a trot, their pathetic sidearms still wasting ammo, I scuttled over them, tuning my Arm predator effect to project invisibility. Bass, alert to my signal, ducked into the nearest office on the left, hugging the indestructible linoleum floor tiles.

  I knifed four of the guards before they noticed my silent attack on their rear, and by the time they noticed I had scuttled back to the ceiling, hidden again. Yes, I worried about being shot by blind fire; even with the pale aqua ceilings sixteen feet above the floor I remained close enough to these fools for them to hit me if I didn’t watch where they aimed and move accordingly. So I moved.

  After my return to the ceiling Bass came at the front of the group, low, surgically slicing femoral arteries and removing weapons from the hands of the soon-to-be-bled-out guards. Five of them fell screaming before the others reacted to the presence of a second attacker.

  As they reacted I dropped onto the nearest, legs around his neck, and twisted. Snap! Using his corpse as a weapon I plastered the guard I wanted to interrogate against the corridor wall, shattering wallboard and making the backing metal support columns groan. Down and disabled, but the guard still lived. I tossed the corpse I held into a third guard, and sliced the throat of a fourth. Bass finished off the last guard, the guard still tangled up with my tossed corpse.

  Done, and I hadn’t even managed an excuse to use my new favorite toy, a .69 cal hand-cannon, as my collaborator Dr. Hank Zielinski referred to my sleek purpose-made one of a kind firearm. I loved the weapon because if I dropped it no normal would be able to shoot the pistol without breaking his wrist. I had the absurd weapon made for me so I would be able to take down Monsters before they closed on my position. I despised Monsters.

  “Shit, these weren’t on the specs, ma’am,” Bass said, about the guards. I was the elder Arm in this duo, and younger Arms are always ever-so-polite to an elder Arm, if said Arm is helping them.

  “Shit never is.” Bass smiled at my quip, then after a beat let out a good belly laugh, sucking up and defusing the tension. I grabbed the surviving guard, dragged him out of the blood and hauled him into one of the iron-scented offices. The office was a stark place with locked file cabinets lining one wall and two desks, one clean of any personalization and the other marked by four framed pictures, each a family picture of a balding man, his gray haired wife, and three strapping teen boys who towered over their parents. “Get junior here to tell us why it takes thirteen idiots to guard the company archives.”

  The archives had indeed been our destination, before the interruption. Our first interviewee, a night watchman, had survived his encounter with us, long before the firefight, first, by not challenging us, second, by not seeing us, and third, because I used a predator effect trick to traumatize the guy’s short term memories out of him.

  This man wouldn’t be so lucky. Bass, who earned the nickname the Interrogator the same way I earned my nickname, the Commander, had the guard screaming through his gag in but a moment, after injecting him with one of her many torture drugs. This drug glowed faintly in my metasense, and inside the man’s system, Bass’s touch turned the substance into liquid agony. I stood by and let the expert work, attempting not to get sucked into the pleasures of her sadistic interrogation. Her work stirred my own too powerful darkness, and I needed neither the distraction nor the vulnerability of letting some junior Arm push my buttons.

  “We weren’t guarding the Archives, we were guarding Project 214,” he whispered, after Bass broke him and removed the gag. She had gotten so good with her interrogation specialty that I no longer even understood her top end tricks, but they worked damned well.

  “What’s 214?” Bass asked.

  “Don’t know,” the man said, gasping and moaning. “It’s in basement sublevel two, main access via the elevator we guarded.”

  An elevator we hadn’t yet reached.

  I gave Bass a throat-chop signal and she finished off the guard. We were on the clock after this slaughter. “Archives before 214.”

  I moved off at a jog, and Bass followed.

  My name is Carol Hancock, nicknamed The Commander, at least when people are being nice. I’m a Major Transform, a subset of altered humanity devilishly named Transforms. I’m an Arm, short for ‘victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome’, which means I’m a female predator. I kill human beings, specifically Transforms, for the juice that keeps me alive. I’m not what anyone would call ‘nice’; among other unpleasant vices, I picked up a nasty streak of sadism along with my transformation. I did control the sadism, but even with my best control the impulses were very much there.

  I had been an Arm for nearly five and a half years, and I was a hell of a lot more capable than I had been in my early days. I was the number two Arm in the country, at least today, and the number one Arm in the Cause after my boss got disgusted with the Focuses, the variety of Major Transform tasked to keep Transforms alive. The Cause was a group of people attempting to ensure humanity’s survival of the Apocalypse demographic bubble, when the number of transformations would explode. I was fast, smart, nasty, and damned good at what I did, which was a hell of a lot. I hunted unwanted Transforms, I rid the community of lawbreakers and hidden evil when the mundane justice system couldn’t, and I ran a string of over a dozen Cadillac and Mercedes dealerships in the greater Chicago area.

  Oh, and of course, I was trying to save the world. Ignore the irony, please.

  These are my memoirs, although this section of my memoirs is less about me and more about all of us in the Cause and our conflict with the true enemy, Transform Sickness itself. The last thing I wrote in my memoirs was the story of the birth of the Cause, back in ’69. The years in-between had been busy busy busy, but my actions weren’t all that important in the greater scheme of things. In Arm time, this was the equivalent of a decade of hard work for a normal.

  Why ‘The Cause’? I wasn’t much of a humanitarian, but I did like civilization. Transform Sickness, which turned me into an Arm, was bad and people were frightened, but the experts knew that even at its worst, the Listeria bacteria behind TS wouldn’t infect more than a minute fraction of the population. Yah know, it’s just a screwy form of food poisoning, no big problem. The induced transformations caused by the ambient juice that was now everywhere were the real problem. Although fewer than 20,000 Transforms lived in the US in 1972, by 1982, we expected people to be transforming by the millions. Unfortunately, the mortality rate for Transform Sickness was ninety percent. Civilization wouldn’t survive the Apocalyp
se demographic bubble, and, worse, Transform women were infertile. Goodbye humanity. And my car dealerships. And all the other trappings of civilization that I loved.

  The goal of the Cause was to find a way out of this no-hope scenario. The Cause consisted of Major Transforms, Transforms and normals who understood the problem and worked toward a solution. You would think everyone in their right mind would support this effort, but humanity isn’t that good. The doomsday scenario was too alarmist for most people, would cost too much money and effort to solve, and so they refused to believe.

  In the many years since 1972, people have come up with a lot of confused impressions of what I am and was. I was no saint, no angel, no shining white heroine. I was about as dark as they come. If the world didn’t need me and those like me, we would be better off dead.

  Lucky for me, the world sometimes needs the bloody knife. You see, bad as I was, there’s always worse.

  For the moment the big archive room remained quiet, though I kept an ear cocked for reinforcements. Arm Bass and I popped file cabinet locks, used cable-cutters to cut through the quarter-inch steel rods on the more secure cabinets, grabbed files and took pictures, all in Arm time.

  “Got something, ma’am,” Bass said.

  My goal in this caper was to seduce Bass into becoming my official subordinate. She, as with many of the younger Arms, lived outside of the Arm hierarchy due to an incident last May, in which my boss, the Arm Stacy Keaton, lost her temper, went into psychotic crazy mode, and slew a recently graduated Arm, Peggy Svensen. I can’t say I hadn’t had the urge to kill Svensen several times, as she was a lunatic, even for an Arm. Keaton taught all the Arms, but we didn’t find Svensen until she had survived eight weeks on her own as a feral Arm. Those eight weeks gave her issues. However, Keaton’s psychotic fit came during a tactics coordination session, after Svensen dropped a pencil she was flipping between her fingers. Killing a tagged subordinate in a psychotic rage for no particular reason isn’t good for one’s stature. All the mature (graduated) Arms save for myself and Florence Rayburn dropped their Keaton tags as soon as they were out of Keaton’s metasense range.

  Flo and I stayed loyal because we both suspected Keaton’s psychotic break was due to enemy action. Florence had metasensed something she considered suspicious, and I, with my years of experience with Keaton, considered Keaton’s actions too far out of character to be credible. We kept our tags, because you never follow your enemy’s plan. Despite a month of investigation, we never did ID the perp, though.

  Thus my work on rebuilding the Arm tag hierarchy, the top responsibility a very unhappy Keaton had dropped on my plate.

  I snapped pictures, snarly and distracted, due to stress and too much contact with another Arm. “Immediate?” Did I have to look at it now?

  “I believe so, ma’am.”

  I slid over to look over her shoulder. Sylvia Bass was a short woman with a narrow frame, all corded over with thick muscles, reminiscent of my musculature before I got myself captured and tortured by the FBI several years ago. Her hair was as mousy light brown as my own, and despite her more delicate bone structure, she at least didn’t duplicate my narrow hatchet face.

  “The mystery deepens,” I said.

  The memo touched on the multiple reasons why we came here in the first place. First, Bass’s birth family had vanished three months ago, and she cared. One month ago, I learned about a rumor going around among the sources of all rumors, the Focuses, that United Toxicol had figured out Bass was the Arm they once held in their laboratory before Keaton and I rescued her. Keaton and I had left behind a decaying Monster to fool the United Toxicol scientists into thinking Bass died in their care.

  Thus, the importance of this memo. Yes, the United Tox managers knew Bass was a former subject of theirs, yes, they knew Bass’s original name and origins, and, yes, they had sold this information to a delegation of six from a company with the DBA of Chrysanthemum. Six suspected Transforms, at that.

  “Take everything related and let’s move combat boots,” I said. Bass wore Cavender’s hand-carved cowboy boots, covered in armadillos, a brand I remembered from my Houston days. Mine were Marine Corp issue, size 7 male, about three weeks old. I went through them in job lots.

  Itchy fingers crawled in the back of my skull. Chrysanthemum involvement wasn’t good at all.

  “Monsters,” Bass said, sticking her hands akimbo on her hips and faking a pout. “Why is it always Monsters?” She said her comment in Tonya Biggioni’s voice, Tonya being the senior Focus associated with the Cause and an old Monster hunter. I snorted.

  “Supply and demand.” Sub-basement room 214 turned out to be a ten thousand square foot laboratory, now decorated with the corpses of two more guards and a night orderly. The centerpiece of the laboratory was a confinement area stocked with eleven woman Transforms cruelly attached to various pieces of medical equipment. If my eyes and my metasense weren’t lying to me, said Transforms were having their juice separated from their blood. “You’re right. They only look like prey. They’re producing Monster juice.” Technically, what they produced was termed élan, which our brother predator Major Transforms, the Chimeras, devoured with gusto. Élan made me itch and gave me psychotic breaks, so I stayed away from the crap as best I could.

  Emergency lighting cast eerie shadows in the dark room, sufficient illumination for Arm eyes. I went over to the nearest captive woman, poked, prodded, and looked under her eyelids. Nothing. I found the expected scars around her eyes. “Physically lobotomized or worse.” The inventiveness! The cruelty! Oh, and a lobotomy to keep them from suffering while they gave their lives to produce Monster juice. This smelled like Crow work to me, Crows being the chickenshit heartless Major Transform skulkers of the night. As well as most of my best friends. Recent work, too, not one of the thankfully deceased Crow Wandering Shade’s many appalling projects.

  “What’s the point of this, ma’am?” Bass said. I easily read her confusion; she hadn’t gone through the medical training Keaton subjected her favorite, Rayburn, to, or my ersatz apprenticeship under Zielinski.

  I walked Bass through this horror as I inspected the setup. Blood goes out here from each Monster, goes into this machine over there, the machine filters out the blood plasma, taking over half the juice with it, this machine replaces the plasma with plasma acquired from God knows where mixed with saline, and over there the fake blood is pumped back into the Monsters. No, they didn’t give a shit if the blood from different Monsters got mixed together. Transforms were tough and didn’t have the tissue rejection issues normals had.

  We had other issues.

  “Snowcone,” the Crow who followed Bass, “believes neither juice nor élan is stable when it’s removed from Transforms,” Bass said. I had never met Snowcone, and neither had the Crow who followed me, Gilgamesh. We both suspected Snowcone was an identity of a known Crow, a potential problem we didn’t know how to solve or mitigate against. “Unless, of course, it’s being stabilized by a senior Major Transform, ma’am.”

  Good point. “It isn’t,” I said, after a careful metasense scan of the area. After the scan I went over to the machinery at the far end of the lab. Here, they chemically separated the Monster juice from the blood plasma and stored the impure remains cryogenically after mixing them with a chemical solution smelling faintly of rubbing alcohol. I took a sample of the solution for Zielinski to identify. “They have a new trick.” Perfect for any Arm capable of subsisting off élan, which I only knew of two, Arms Armenigar (the first and ‘type’ Arm) and Haggerty (my crazy heroic underling), and neither did so full time, or without the help of Crows.

  “Interested in a little mayhem?” I asked.

  “Of course, ma’am.” Bass smiled and wiggled loose her shoulders under her thick brown leather jacket. I didn’t expect much argument from a younger Arm, but Bass was one of the four senior Arms in the United States, fourth after Keaton, myself, and Amy Haggerty. No cavalierly ordering her around.

  Polite
ness also kept us from snarling at each other. Arms without a tagged relationship often snarled at each other. A lot. Arms are territorial, and defaulted to competition and fighting absent some mitigating factor like a tag. Bass and I recognized a clear dominance relationship, with me on top, but clear dominance didn’t substitute for a tag.

  We carefully ripped the restraints off the Monsters, retreated to near the room’s exit, and shorted out the blood exchange pump. Within a minute the literally mindless Monsters were growling and clawing at themselves as they began to do what all Monsters did unless being scientifically abused in this fashion – slowly change from human shape to something else. I motioned for Bass to leave, and we did so, blazing a path up the emergency stairs, making sure we left all the doors open behind us.

  By the time we exited the lab building, we heard the insane snarling of Monsters behind us.

  On the way out we made damned sure the Monsters wouldn’t be able to escape the building.

  And so I missed Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night. The squad of guards should have had a squad of backups. Nobody in the Transform community trusted United Toxicol or its labs, especially the lab in Kansas City. The bigwig Transforms hired people (read Arms) to regularly case the labs, inside and out, and the people at United Toxicol knew about our many break-ins. For a project this appalling and obviously lucrative, they should have had backup guards. My initial supposition? Someone made a mistake somewhere along the chain of command.

  I didn’t think this lack through for quite some time, though.

  ---

  “Ma’am, I wish I understood this crap better,” Bass said. We rested in Gomorrah, my beat up and often repainted ‘mission RV’, surrounded by Tom and my people as they drove us back to Chicago. We sat among piles and boxes of papers, loot from our mission.

  “Take the time to learn,” I said, listening to the wind whistle through the many bullet holes. We exchanged growls, but Bass eventually averted her eyes and forced herself to relax. The mission needed to be over fast, as my tolerance for Bass diminished by the minute. I wanted her tagged, but I didn’t like her. With few exceptions, Arms never liked other Arms not linked by an Arm tag.