“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He slid a half step back, and gave me a half bow. I think he prided himself in being a stout enough Crow to not have to ‘yes ma’am’ any Arms. Of course, I was a lot more than a ‘mere Arm’ right now.
I turned to Mimi. I didn’t have time for anything more elaborate than a: “Can you cope?” She reddened a bit, likely attracted to the Crow at the juice level, despite the situation and obvious personality differences between them.
Mimi turned to the Crow. “Can you fight? Can you cope with gunfire?” she asked. She didn’t have the metasense acuity to pick up on Flowerpot’s weaponry.
“Yes, Focus Minton.”
Mimi turned and nodded to me. I slapped a half-tag on the Crow, and they exchanged half-tags as well. “Guard each other’s backs.” They nodded, and I jogged off to my next responsibility.
The vanguard of Enkidu’s army metasensed as being only four miles out.
Emperor Caveworm (3/27/73)
“Out, out, out!” Hunter Tarn’s shouts broke the predawn silence, and initiated a cascade of Guys, Gals, Monsters, part-Monsters, juice slaves, cowed normals, Hunters, Pack Alphas and assorted other Transforms from their truck caravan. Tarn had picked the location for disembarking, a former lumberyard bedecked by a “For Sale” sign out front, and no lumber out back. The General ordered their group to approach on foot and take all the normal precautions. That was worth a snicker, Emperor Caveworm thought, as he looked over the Transforms he had gleaned and now commanded. What an utter fucking embarrassment! Focus Hargrove’s partly trained Transform household had more spit and polish when he first arrived at Haggerty’s Larralee ranch, and the Hunters had the gall to proclaim they were an army ready to conquer the world.
His gaggle did have five senior Hunters, counting Tarn, as well as seven junior Hunters, and four trainee Hunters not yet worth giving starter packs to. Mind-controlled baggage haulers. A mere four Pack Mistresses, and one of those was Pack Mistress Elspeth, as much of a special case as Hunter Tarn. Oh, and Huntress Del, Shaman Newton and himself. The other three Pack Mistresses didn’t see much daylight – or starlight, for that matter – as they huddled in semi-trailers, hidden around back in the former lumber yard along with the other non-combatants. All twelve of the real Hunters utilized Pack Alphas, their pack leader women, including Tarn as of two weeks ago, and Caveworm had spent a great deal of time adjusting the Law on each of the Pack Alphas, as much time as he spent on the Hunters.
“For’rd, march!” Tarn was a Canuck, and talked like one. As with Elspeth, Caveworm had riddled Tarn’s Law with as many holes as he could and still have it feel like the Law to the other members of the Hunter Empire. They had a far different task today than Enkidu’s other troops, and that meant no idiotic Hunter Banzai charges for his folks.
“This is such glorious stupidity, Emperor,” Elspeth said, pitching her velvet voice low. Whispers in the darkness, in the shadow of a truck already unlit. “Male testosterone junkies with delusions of grandeur, all these Hunters. Juice addled Monsters so self-centered they’d rather be chasing their own tails. They don’t care whether they live or die, save for a few of the poorly adjusted Monster ladies who just want to die.”
No wonder the Hunters normally locked their Pack Mistresses away.
“Where are we, anyway?” Huntress Del asked. She stood illuminated by moonlight. Her Law remained unchanged, as he didn’t want to make any mistakes with the often clinically insane young Huntress. Now she was spit and polish – a living example of the benefits of Arm discipline and why the Arms nearly always survived these battles. He suspected that if he gave her command of this group, they might actually do some damage to the Stone Point and Inferno Transforms they were, um, ‘attacking’.
A good reason to keep command for himself.
“We’re just south of San Jose, on the Monterey Highway. The combat target zone is about six miles north of here, on Yerba Buena drive. According to Enkidu’s spotters, Inferno’s living in a converted nursing home. Between here and there is the ridge you see in front of you, uninhabited wasteland. We’re going to be going up and along the ridge, Huntress.”
“Along the ridge, Emperor? Wouldn’t a charge over flat terrain be faster?”
As he feared, Huntress Del got a bit too much into the spirit of the night’s illusion. “We have three objectives today, Huntress Del. The first is to grab and convert as many Hunters and Pack Alphas into my service as possible. The second is to kill Hecate, and that’s why I’m going to be on the field of battle myself, with Pack Mistress Elspeth and our friend Nabors.” A Crow, a Focus and a Sport that was a living chemical weapon ought to be able to take out an Arm, with help from a younger Arm and one vaguely intelligent Chimera. He hoped. “The third is to survive and get through the rest of this idiot battle, as most properly described by our Pack Mistress, as best we can. None of our goals involves getting to the fight first. For one thing, when we get to the fight, we might have to shoot up and knife a few of our former friends. That is, after all, what Enkidu wants us to do. We’re just not going to be very efficient about it.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?” Huntress Del said. “Besides killing Hecate, which I’ll need considerable help with.”
Kill Hecate. Oh, that sounded wonderful to Emperor Caveworm. The damned Law kept trying to tell him Hecate remained a member of the Hunter civilization and they couldn’t kill her. Despite her rebellion against General Enkidu and her ease at balking the law. He faced the same dangers, if, for instance, Enkidu got tired of Colonel Loess’s advocacy and proclaimed Emperor Caveworm’s apostasy. Risks, the world overflowed with risks. He wanted to scream with Crow panic and hide in a deep hole, but screaming had ceased to be an option a long time ago.
“Stay alive. Keep me alive. Stay out of sight of Webberly and Haggerty. Use your metasense to spot tricks.” His spy network said other enemies had assassinated Webberly, but death was always an iffy proposition with Arms.
“You don’t want me going with Hunter Tarn, sir?”
“Not to start with. His retrieval squads may need your help later.” Caveworm paused. “Try not to slaughter too many normals. The less angry we make the authorities, the better.”
“That isn’t going to work, sir. Battles aren’t that predictable.” Huntress Del was full of it this morning. Fight anticipation, likely.
“Would you prefer Enkidu’s plan? The direct charge at the flanks, into who knows how many households worth of gunfire?”
“No, sir,” the Arm said, with a salute in her voice. He could almost see the alternate plans shifting through her devious mind, any one of which would likely accomplish exactly what he didn’t want, that being a stand-up fight against Inferno, Stone Point or Haggerty’s damned army.
“Good,” Caveworm said. “Let’s follow. Enkidu’s people are already filtering through the suburb for their on-foot approach, and I’m sure Hecate’s people are getting ready for their drive and drop on the boulevard in front of the nursing home. We need to clumsily alert the defenders that something’s up.”
They started the slow slog up the ridge, then along it, two hours of walking, hopping, and slithering. Surely some of Haggerty’s biker gang would be able to spot them as they trudged along the ridgetop, even in the darkness. Why hadn’t he heard their Harleys already?
A runner came back to him a half mile from the target zone. “Emperor, sir, Hunter Tarn wants to inform you that someone’s prepared the ridgetop near the target zone for battle. Trenches and mounds, sir, all recently dug. Prepared but not occupied.”
“Excellent!” Caveworm said. Not unexpected. Someone on the other side smelled the coming battle and thought ahead. Possibly one of Webberly’s people or Webberly herself, assuming she still lived. Neither Haggerty nor Hoskins were much in the ‘thinking ahead’ department. More likely Inferno, doing some thinking ahead of their own; he needed to remember the Transforms. The Law tended to discourage that. Idiotic. “Secure them for our use, identify traps
if any and keep an eye out for trouble.”
He turned to Huntress Del and the ever-present Arête. “You two go run up ahead and take a look for traps, Huntress, then come back and report.”
“Yes, sir,” Huntress Del said, and ran off into the darkness with Arête, both of them nicely invisible. It was nice having a Crow wizard under his command, even one with a Law-addled mind. For now, Emperor Caveworm decided to keep Arête’s many skills in his metaphorical back pocket. Plenty of time for Crow wizard work when things got nasty.
Part Three
The Law Is A Lie (3/27/73)
“Though a cock may be brave in war
He strikes his claws in vain on a brazen falcon.
A cat is a lion in catching mice
But a mouse in combat with a tiger.” – Sa’di
“Welcome home, Commander.”
Mizar
Mizar despised cities. They stank, they were noisy, the hunting was terrible, and they damn near crippled his metasense. On top of that, he hated wars and was stuck in a nasty one despite his best efforts. Carol was being damned near intolerable, with her infinite stream of high-handed orders. That tag of hers felt like a straitjacket, locking his mind into an unnatural position. Worse, he was starting to get very annoyed with the common Major Transform greeting he kept running into, this hand sniffing business. The greeting kept barging into the part of his mind where two of the other varieties of Transform linkages lived. He didn’t really want to know that many people!
He growled under his breath, as the pickup truck bounced over another pothole, and Fred Dowling moaned. Mizar should have stayed in the cold, quiet and peaceful Yukon. Instead, he carried a major responsibility for this war, while the success or failure of the war remained outside of his control. He really hoped Carol turned out to be as good as she thought. Given his feelings of trepidation, his many visions in the clouds of unknown forces and enemies at work, she would need to be excellent.
He had never felt so helpless in his life.
He had looked forward to the planning meeting, figuring that watching the Arms and Nobles come up with a battle plan would satisfy his curiosity about the character of the people leading the Cause. Only – no planning meeting. They ran out of time. He expected squawking and chaos, but, no the damned Arms had well-practiced procedures for emergencies of this nature. Somehow, Carol came up with some dispositional setup or whatever they called it, where she placed people where she wanted on the battlefield ahead of the battle. Hundreds and hundreds of combatants and non-combatants, and she knew where she wanted every one of them, and what she wanted them prepared to do in the battle. He had peered into the back of her mind as she gave the orders, and, no, she didn’t just make everything up as she spoke. She kept the details in her head. Impossible, but she had found a way to create this, put it together, while she walked around and schmoozed. As one of about a dozen contingency plans. Impossible and terrifying.
It didn’t help that Carol hoped and practically prayed that he would come through with some great miracle to save the day, and he didn’t understand how to summon up any such thing. He didn’t understand battles like this, how one won or lost, or even what would be good or bad to do in a battle. Not only did he not know any battle terminology, he hadn’t even realized that ‘battle terminology’ existed. He still didn’t understand this ‘enfilade’ thing, for instance.
This was no place for his miracles.
He had told Gail The Man was here, in the area. She and her estranged husband both rightly considered The Man a dangerous enemy, to be worthy of considerable worry. Gail feared The Man had been behind the attempt on Arm Webberly, Count Dowling and Van’s life, but he said the attack carried a different scent, that of their deceased enemy, the White Witch. Gail understood his comment, which pleased him. None of the rest of the family understood, or appreciated, his more mystical side. Perhaps there was more to Gail than her immense power and her similar sized obstinacy.
There was something subtly different about the Arm tag that Fred wore, Mizar noticed. His Arm tag rested farther into Fred’s juice structure than Mizar’s own and seemed more integrated. Mizar looked at it thoughtfully for a while. He didn’t really understand tags, but this one seemed more of a cross between an Arm and a Chimera tag, and it definitely seemed better adapted to a Chimera. Now why couldn’t Carol use a tag like that? He wondered if he should modify it, but decided that would be idiotic for someone as new to tagging technology as himself. Instead, as soon as this appalling war ended, he would get Carol to figure out this tagging business.
The pickup truck pulled to a stop in a quiet parking lot, dark and humid in the pre-dawn stillness. Mizar let his protections fade. The caravan of rattletrap vehicles carried the wounded and the non-combatants from Oak Valley to a small city park a mile and a half away. Dovehill Park, according to the sign. Mizar’s responsibility? Make sure the movement didn’t cause any ripples in the Dreaming.
Gail jumped out of the flatbed in the next parking spot over, to supervise the unloading of her husband Van. She was a good-looking woman, well-muscled for a non-Arm, with long chestnut hair that hung in a braid down her back. Whatever else he could say about Carol, she did like good-looking Focuses. Gail wore a loose tunic that tied under her full breasts, and modified blue jeans. Mizar grimaced. Pants on a pregnant woman?
Fortunately, she didn’t try to help lift her husband onto the stretcher, despite her ample strength. Mizar half-expected her to, anyway. Modern women still disconcerted him, and he didn’t understand what to expect from a woman any more, except to expect different things than what the echoes of memories seemed to tell him.
Behind him, dozens of children swarmed out of trucks and cars, wide-awake with excitement despite the early morning hour. Gail’s household president, Sylvie Dejung, also pregnant, followed them with Lori’s baby Doran on her shoulder. Somewhere in the chaos of children were Lori’s other children, but he had no hope of picking them out.
He leaped over the side of the pickup and Jill and Pat followed, to take up defensive positions on either side of him. Worried about dangers from their many enemies, he looked around and found several Monsters and mid-rank Nobles defending the outpost. They should be enough, at least for now. He had a few minutes before he needed to head back, and he took advantage of the benefits of re-entering civilization. All around, there seemed to be an infinite supply of Focuses. Two in the caravan besides Gail, and another, Molly Jahnke, exiting one of the tents with several of her household.
Now there was a fine Focus. Long brown hair, athletic curves, and a way of spreading calm on everyone nearby. She possessed a beautiful juice structure, and he definitely wanted to spend some time getting to know her better. Mizar thought Carol far too picky about choosing Focuses for their household, and he would remedy that as soon as possible, by pulling in a few Focuses of his own. Possibly starting with Molly Jahnke.
He watched as her people loaded Fred and then Webberly onto stretchers, and carried them into one of the hospital tents. The park was a busy place despite the hour. Hank Zielinski climbed out of the same truck and followed. He was one of Carol’s people, a favorite, and another one Mizar loved to spend time with. He smelled far too much of someone who lived in the center of a storm, more of the role of a leading Major Transform. Mizar first noticed it a week ago, when they first met, and the scent still lingered today.
By the time Molly Jahnke’s people finished moving Webberly and Dowling into the hospital tent, Gail exited the tent, emotions locked down tight. Finished with seeing Van settled, she now moved over to the combat group. This little park, besides holding the wounded and non-combatants, held one of the reserve forces, made up of the various combatants from Chicago.
Something was wrong with the world, when pregnant women became major combatants in a serious fight. Mizar gave Jill and Pat a little shake of the head, and they moved away from him, to stand near Gail’s bodyguards. He strode close to Gail and walked with her.
“Your people seem to be doing a fine job with that Focus,” Mizar said, nodding his head toward Darla Nicosia. Mizar liked Focuses in general, but not Darla Nicosia. Some of the Abyss people watched over the Focus and her household, but Darla’s household was in charge of their Focus today. The Abyss people were fighters, and didn’t have time to supervise a crew of non-combatants. “I’m surprised that the other Focuses let them get away with what they’re doing.”
Gail watched Mizar warily. “It’s always been the prerogative of leading Focuses to take the failures in hand. Back when I lived in Detroit, the local first Focus had a failure of a Focus under her control.” Gail shrugged. “The other Focuses granted me the same prerogative.”
Mizar tucked the tidbit of information back in his mind, with all his other little acquired tidbits. Together, they began to form a picture, of the patterns of current events, and the tides pulling people one way or another. He had taken a responsibility to lead, and for that, he needed to smell the great patterns on the winds, listen for the howl of chaos and order, and sense the pulse of events through his skin. Like a minimalist painting, each little tidbit of information implied a greater picture.
“Respect for you, then, not your people?” he said.
Gail sighed. “We still have a long way to go before Transforms gain that kind of respect.”
He could still smell her wariness, even as they walked together along the dark walkway. He admitted to being a little wary himself. He had not expected that she and her Crow would be strong enough to defy him, and her ability to parse his more mystic utterances raised her up more in his sight. “I owe you an apology for the way I tried to push my authority, back in Chicago.” He tried to bed her, as was his right, and she found a way to refuse. Then he tried to woo her, as Sky suggested, but that only made things worse. All he had proven, back in Chicago, was that he didn’t understand modern relationships, even those within his established family.
An Age Without A Name Page 32
