She blinked, surprised, and then cocked her head at him. “Really?”
“I thought that in order to fulfill my new responsibilities, I needed to take command immediately.”
Her mouth twitched up. “They do call Carol the Commander, after all.”
“What I tried wasn’t the best approach,” Mizar said, with a slight smile of his own. “I don’t seem to recall women being so strong.” Even some of the bodyguards were women.
Gail actually laughed at his comment. “Well, I think there were always strong women, but there’s more of them than there used to be. Especially among the top Transforms. We’re cutting new ground, or we would be if there were enough of us to make a difference.”
Gail appreciated the abundance of strong women. Mizar didn’t, but he didn’t have the social capital to oppose them. A successful leader worked with the tides of history, not against them. The changes would just take some getting used to.
A lot of getting used to.
“How long have you known Carol?” Mizar said, as they made their way towards the perimeter guard, followed by four bodyguards and Jill and Pat.
Gail shrugged, and Mizar wanted to sigh. She was beautiful, but she didn’t trust him, didn’t respect his authority, and had already proved herself strong enough to defy him. Taking responsibility for this particular Focus would be a full time job.
“Well, I first met her back on my wedding day…”
Mizar listened as Gail talked, glowing with affection for the Commander. Mizar sometimes wondered if she talked about the same Carol he knew. Ornery, possessive, temperamental. Bloodthirsty and dangerous.
This entire quadrature business would be easier if Carol allowed him to care for her. Lori was easy. Sky was easy, in his own way. Even Carol hadn’t been too difficult, back when she remained thoroughly under his control. He remembered hunting, back in the Mackenzie Mountains with her by his side. There was pleasure in sharing the easy bloodlust of the predator with someone who really understood.
Now, though, she was all sharp edges. Where Lori warmed his frozen soul, Carol cut. Even her spectacular lovemaking cut at his mind, rousing his emotions to dangerous, painful intensity. Where Lori was the carrot, Carol was the stick, hurting him as she roused him to painful activity. Between them all, they had forced him out of his comfortable lair, and leashed him with new responsibility.
Her cold tag ate at his mind. It served as an added dose of steel in his spine, forcing him to stand straight when he would rather slouch. Strong, but an uncomfortable strength. He wondered if her strength would be sufficient to support his humanity, even without Sky. He suspected it would.
He had dreamed a lot of dreams, safe in his lair in the Mackenzie mountains. He dreamt many ways to make the world better, but he had always been a dreamer, not someone who could turn the vision into reality. Lori, Sky, and Carol lured him into taking responsibility for turning those dreams into reality, but, truthfully, he remained no more capable of doing so than he had ever been.
He needed Carol. She took other people’s dreams and made them real. Like with this battle planning shit. If he ever wanted to see his responsibility through, he needed Carol by his side. Such as right now, as the Commander. She would be the one he would need to execute his dreams. He might possess the knowledge of where the world needed to be changed, but only she possessed the strength to make the changes.
He felt a sudden flash of affection for the ornery Arm. How could he feel otherwise? She expended every ounce of her formidable talents to make sure he executed his responsibility properly. She may have been difficult, but she supported his responsibilities without hesitation. There wasn’t anything more basic than that.
She was so much more than just ‘The Commander’, though. He didn’t understand how to make her understand how her title limited her. His strong link to Carol disconcerted him. He would have thought, if anyone, that his strongest link would be to Lori. The women in this new world just had too many surprises.
Gail still reminisced about Carol, waxing on about some incident in training that sounded terrible but that Gail seemed to remember fondly. Mizar interrupted her by taking her chin in his huge hand and turning it up toward him.
“I will do my very best to insure peace for you and your people,” he said, knowing as he said it that the responsibility would require more than his own talents to live up to. “Despite the brewing battle, I think you should spend time talking to Van. You carry different destinies right now, and merging them again would greatly help the Cause as well as our extended family.”
Gail stopped talking and her eyes widened. Mizar leaned down and kissed her on the lips, only for a moment. As he did, he gave her a bare hint of arousal, so small it might have been natural.
Then he nodded to her and walked away, summoning Jill and Pat back to him.
He had a battle to fight, dammit.
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh put down the walkie-talkie, and shook his head. He was with the Chicago group, set up under intense metasense and vision shields in Dovehill Park, a little more than a mile and a half back of the Inferno Rest Home and Pizza Parlor. They were mostly prepared for battle, assigned to be one of what the Commander called her reaction groups. Ready to charge in at a moment’s notice.
Ready to gather in a few survivors and flee to the south, to preserve the Cause in the parts of the country too warm for the Hunters, as well. If that order needed to be given.
“What’s wrong?” Gail said. The pre-dawn fog muffled the sound of the bustle in the park.
“One of the Hunter groups is coming in the wrong way, up and over the ridge,” Gilgamesh said. Complete with an army of Hunter ghosts, the Hunter ghosts this time outnumbering the army and having an absurdly stout feel to them. He wondered what that would do to the fight.
“The ridge? The Commander’s primary retreat line?” Count Rangel said. The newly minted Count commanded the reserves, and if he continued to do as well as Gilgamesh had experienced so far, here and in Chicago, he expected the Count to soon be an Earl. He certainly possessed the gravitas and command presence of an Earl these days.
Count Rangel hopped up on top of one of their trucks, and took out a pair of binoculars from his pouch. Rangel hadn’t liked his original combat form, a lizard with alligator skin on a bear-shaped body, and with Occum’s help, after Rangel’s elevation to Count following Earl Sellers’ death, they had constructed a new one, kangaroo based, optimized for speed, quickness and mobility. “There they are. Looks like they’re inspecting the Commander’s trenches. That’s one hesitant group of Hunters,” Rangel said. Major Transforms always seemed to have excellent night vision, no matter their shape. “Metasense shielded up the wazoo as well.”
Gilgamesh nodded. “So nobody picked them up until they were visually spotted, eh? Too bad. No vision shielding, though, your grace?”
Rangel shook his head. “Not surprising, sir, what with no Crow wizards on their side. At least as far as we know.” The quality of metasense shielding, however, was a surprise, as were their tactics. Did they expect the defenders to charge at them up that damned hill? It was bad enough to think that Carol might have wanted them to retreat up the hill, but at least, in her plans, they would always be fighting downhill at those chasing them.
So much for Carol’s impromptu yet intricate plans.
“How?” a weak voice asked from the inside of a hospital tent over forty feet away.
“Yes, Arm Webberly?” Gilgamesh said, listening carefully.
“What kind of metasense shielding?” Arm Webberly remained strapped down, with her head in a bandage. When she dozed off, she had a bad habit of thrashing wildly, very dangerous to anyone who wasn’t a predator. Hank said it took Arms and Focuses three to four days to re-grow enough neurons to patch up that sort of problem. Gilgamesh had noticed the Doc wore the expression of someone with one of his hands behind his back and his fingers crossed when he said that.
“I can’t tell,” Gil
gamesh said.
“You can’t tell what sort of metasense shielding they’re using? What does that mean?”
The Arm had a point. Gilgamesh was good at battle metasense use. He examined the metasense shielding again. Nothing passed through it, not even the usual flickers. This was top quality shielding, Crow work.
Count Rangel whistled. “Ignore my last comment. I just saw a Hunter talking to someone who wasn’t there. They’ve got invisibles.”
Shit. ‘Invisibles’ meant top-end Crow wizard work, and there was only one obvious choice, the Guru Arête. They were not only facing Enkidu’s group, but his old friend Sinclair, who had yet again fallen into yet another extra-large heap of trouble. Along with exactly what they didn’t need: more enemies to face. He picked up the walkie-talkie. “Ila! Get word to the Commander. The group on the ridge is Sinclair’s renegades!”
Carol Hancock
Yerba Buena was too damned new a road, with almost no development to the south side of this section of it. I hid with my team in a field of weeds just a couple hundred yards west of the Oak Valley entrance driveway, due to lack of any other options. We depended on Crow and Chimera protections to keep us from being seen or sensed. That, and a scattering of low bushes. At least I had some faith that the Crow and Chimera defenses were top quality. Sky and Mizar had been cooking up tricks together.
The rising sun neared the horizon and I had expected the attack two hours ago. Enkidu was ready, as was Sinclair’s group, but someone was late to the battle, holding things up. I lay on the ground next to Mizar, my bare arm under his shirt and along his back so I could borrow his metasense. Sinclair’s group remained across the street and up along the ridge, but they stayed quiet. Waiting. We pretended we didn’t know they were there.
At one point in time, we had all the Hunters nicely located. Two groups, one coming in from the north and one from the east. That was before the assassination attempts, and before Focus Wilson’s protest march turned ugly, panicking all of Chevalier’s Crows and shutting down our extra eyes and metasenses. The Hunters had been ready for their final charge around 4:30 AM, and we had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting…but no charge. Now Sinclair’s renegades showed, a third Hunter group, and the first of the Hunters to expose themselves. They didn’t attack either. Of course, attacking them would be idiotic. Not with Enkidu’s other army hiding among the suburban houses.
Mizar had his arm across my shoulders, and his body nearly on top of mine. I felt his breath brushing my ear. Protective. I wondered if he did this consciously, or if this was something he didn’t even think about.
A chickadee twittered. A cricket buzzed. I heard the rustle in the grass from my restless team and smelled tension. It was funny the way you could tell the predators from the rest by the way they waited. The normals were restless. Lori shifted uneasily with the tension. As did Tom. The predators stayed motionless, with the absolute stillness of a hunter. Nora’s giant white form could have been a rock for all she had moved in the last few hours. Mary Sibrian had disappeared into the grass long ago and there hadn’t been so much as a rustle from that spot since. Mizar and I hadn’t changed positions for hours. I was stiff and sore, but all my botheration disappeared under the priorities of the hunt.
A blade of dry grass tickled my nose and I let out a tiny puff of air to blow it away. Overhead, the moon had set and the stars were beginning to dim into the morning fog. The damp ground smelled rich with earth and the beginnings of new growth. Behind me, Lena murmured something obscene about mosquitoes, and then went silent again.
I wanted to talk to Mizar, convince him to tell me his dreams one more time. We had signaled each other a bit early on, business sorts of things – where people were stationed, what Enkidu was likely to do, that sort of thing. I wasn’t interested in business now. I wanted to hear hope, dreams, all about how the future could be, all about what we were fighting for.
It had been so grim for so many years, striving and struggling for some dimly seen goal, always knowing that I was a creature of darkness, without redemption. When Mizar told me his dreams, the goal was brilliant, and the sun came up and illuminated my dark world. He was beautiful, magnificent, like some sun-lit god.
He was also cruel, brutal, and abusive. When I saw his bright beauty, I couldn’t help remembering the dark cave up in the Yukon. I remembered waiting for him with my legs spread, or cleaning his shit from the pit, or the grim day when I decided to refuse him. I felt cold all the way down, and more than anything in the world, I wanted to drive a knife into his back. Take the arm he lay over my shoulders and cut it off. Peel the skin from him with my knife to expose the muscles below and listen to him scream. Spend long hours hurting him the same way he had hurt me, until he crawled for me the way I had crawled for him. I hungered for ascendency, and the beast inside me snarled in vengeful fury.
Damn, I knew better. Lori, Sky, and I stormed winter’s asshole to get him down here because we needed him. We needed to do what was necessary to get along, including overlooking his earlier, beastly behavior. What I really wanted was real dominance over him, the way he had over me back in the Yukon, and I would never get it. Get over it, Carol, I told myself. I got out from under. That was all I really needed.
I simmered, mad at my own reactions. I had no cause for this level of anger at Mizar. I was an Arm, and dominance hierarchies were part of my life. Rising and falling in rank is just part of Arm society. It happens. Mizar had been bad for a bit, but not too bad, and not for too long. Keaton had been a hell of a lot worse, for a hell of a lot longer, and I could work with Keaton. Even Haggerty had been that bad the first time she got dominance on me, and I was on positively good terms with her now.
The answer, of course, was clear. I got along well with Keaton and Haggerty because we had settled the dominance issue. We knew who was boss, and that settled that. Mizar? Too many unresolved dominance issues.
Which left us with what? I wasn’t going to get rank on him, and it didn’t work when he had rank on me. I would say that we had proved an Arm and a Chimera couldn’t bond, except that Dowling and Webberly made it work.
I closed my eyes and let my metasense scan the countryside. I examined Sinclair’s group on the ridge. I found my various armies, all lying in wait. My Monster amulet metasensed the Hunter army to the east, two miles away, cautiously sliding forward. The Monsters felt jittery, uncertain and angry.
Somehow, Mizar and I needed to find a way past our incompatibilities. I once feared the juice would alter my emotions to make me feel affection for him, but instead the juice forced me away from him because of the unsettled dominance issue. I wondered what I would think of him if the juice didn’t screw around with my emotions.
A man, handsome, honorable, and good in bed. An arrogant, patronizing, and occasionally cruel asshole. A man who dreamed big dreams. Someone who would have a hard time running a coffee shop. A brilliant man with a lazy mind.
Once, many years ago, long before my transformation, I married a man for his big dreams. Bill Hancock, who gave me his dreams to live on and a new last name, and his dreams kept me happy for fifteen years, until Transform Sickness tore us apart.
How could I condemn a man for being arrogant, patronizing, and occasionally cruel? My own house was built from an awful lot of glass for me to be throwing those kind of stones.
So fine, the juice screwed me in a big way, something new and different. Baah. I still wanted to own him, with full dominance the way I understood it. This union of equals shit didn’t work for Arms.
Mizar looked down at me, the first motion he had made for many minutes. He could read my emotions, I knew, if not my thoughts. He hadn’t leached my anger away as I steamed beside him, giving me room to wallow in my hostility. Slowly, he leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head.
Hell.
Dolores Sokolnik
“We’ll stay here for now,” Emperor Caveworm said. “Tarn! Send down the first retrieval squads. Slowly.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, sir,” Hunter Tarn said. He headed off into the thin morning fog.
Del peered over the edge of the trench and kept watching and metasensing, in tandem with Arête. There hadn’t been any traps on the pits and trenches, but they were set up so that they didn’t stand out from the road. Sneaky, very sneaky, just what you would expect from Inferno. There would be more than just physical tricks down around the Inferno home, though. Haggerty’s group had enough Crow Gurus with them to make things very treacherous for the unwary. It made her glad to have Arête by her side.
Things ought to be heating up soon; Enkidu’s stealth group, under Colonel Loess’ command, was due to break free of cover as soon as Bass’s group rolled up. The rest of Enkidu’s forces should be right behind the stealth group a minute or two later, led by an adrenaline charge of the younger scalp-hunting Hunters specifically set up to drive the defenders out of the buildings and into Hecate’s and Caveworm’s waiting forces. Not the best plan in the world, but in Del’s mind, serviceable, given the numbers.
Focuses and Transforms covered the nursing home grounds and interior, spotters hid on the roof and watched, and Haggerty’s Corpseriders ran patrols down the nearby city streets. The defenders appeared to Del as if they hadn’t spotted the Emperor’s people. How the crap could they miss them! Where were the Major Transforms? Asleep? At five in the morning? There, that had to be a Focus. Which one, which one – ah, Gladchuck. That could explain how they hadn’t been noticed, but surely some of the rest of them…
Nah. Too improbable.
“Arête?”
“Yes?”
“That group over there is the Stone Point group. I want to see if I can pick out Scout using my juice links with him.”
“What sort of juice link do you have?”
“I have a half-tag on him, unless he’s dropped it.”
“We can try,” Arête said.
In Del’s mind, the metasense vision in front of her swam and then became a different world. She no longer picked up the physical manifestations of the juice and dross, just the patterns. Most everything vanished. There were patterns everywhere down there, given the number of Transforms, and understanding them was nearly impossible.
An Age Without A Name Page 33
