The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1)

by Randall Farmer

  “I’ve found five analysis jobs they hired United Toxicol for, including one regarding Monster amygdalas. Aren’t those one of the brain parts that changes in a Major Transformation, ma’am?”

  “Uh huh, and in the older Monsters as well.” Zielinski believed the Major Transform’s transformed amygdala lay behind the Major Transform ability to harness juice, the same way the much better known change to the hippocampus lay behind our metasense, our long-range ability to sense juice or its derivatives. Some Monsters, if they survived long enough, developed such things.

  “Who the hell is Chrysanthemum, though?” Bass said, frustrated. “I’d expected the Hunters were behind my family’s troubles, not some other crazy. I’ve killed too many Hunters over the years. I even had to relocate from Denver to the Dallas area to escape their attempts at payback.”

  I weighed the odds, the costs and the benefits, and decided to toss her a bone. More tag-wooing. “Chrysanthemum was Wandering Shade’s front company. We thought we closed the company down after the Battle in Detroit” back when Bass had been a baby Arm with an animal torture fetish, under Keaton’s tutelage “but we didn’t get all of it. I’ve looked into Chrysanthemum” at Keaton and Tonya’s orders and suggestions, respectively, “and we suspect one of the hidden Major Transforms uses the company as a cash cow, selling Transform secrets to various governments.” Tonya suspected Focus Shirley Patterson, the hidden head of the first Focuses and the woman who ran all the Focus organizations from behind the scenes. Keaton suspected Chevalier, a hidden senior Crow who despised the Cause. I suspected Arm Erica Eissler of West Germany, mostly because I knew she didn’t trust me or the US Major Transform establishment, and because whoever backed Chrysanthemum possessed enough talent and skills to thwart my considerable investigation abilities.

  Amy Haggerty, my long-tagged partner in crime, believed (because of Chrysanthemum’s continuing existence and far too many other unexplained incidents) we faced a new unknown and ultrapowerful enemy, one nasty enough he or she would draw together all the Major Transforms in an alliance. She regularly thought of events in too heroic a fashion, befitting her nickname, the Hero. Keaton, boss of all us American Arms (and nicknamed The Boss, but never to her face) thought Haggerty addled.

  They didn’t get along at all well.

  “There’s something that crazy out there? Ma’am, why haven’t we done more to shut down this Chrysanthemum outfit?”

  I growled, irritated by the question, and didn’t answer.

  In classic and tense untagged Arm silence, we shuffled papers and read like fiends until we reached Chicago.

  “Ila? Messages?” I asked my current aide-de-camp, after I showered, changed clothes, and mentally readied the meal menu where I would formally propose to tag Bass. Little knots of stress in my head untied themselves as I settled back into my own territory. I loved Chicago, in ways a non-Arm would never understand.

  “Oh, there you are, boss,” Ila said, looking up from her desk and bumping a rose-infested vase, which she caught before it spilled. “Got an urgent one from Focus Rizzari, cryptic as usual. She said ‘The Hero succeeded, over ten, and we’re meeting in North Tonawanda on the 16th to boggle.’ Does this make any sense to you?”

  I stood blinking at Ila for a stunned moment. Haggerty had been attempting something completely and physically impossible. Success made no logical sense.

  Worse, when she had broached me on the subject, I had made a bet with her. If Lori was right, which she usually was, I was about to suffer the wrong end of a big payout.

  But Haggerty couldn’t possibly have succeeded. It didn’t make sense.

  “Yes. Ila, plane tickets to Buffalo for two. ASAP.” So much for my fancy dinner and tag seduction.

  This was going to hurt. This was going to hurt bad.

  ---

  “Not inviting either Arm Keaton or Arm Rayburn is both a challenge and an insult,” Bass said. She radiated discomfort, which I echoed. When we entered Room D of the Roman Conference Hall and Banquet Center, Mary Sibrian, in her red silks with her katana down her back, smiled to see me. The Arm snagged a tray of deviled eggs from the food-laden tables along the wall and headed my way. She wore my tag, and I felt an extra helping of tension echoing through it. I also read relief at the appearance of a senior Arm with a shadow for her to hide under.

  Sibrian was the only one in the room who showed any pleasure at our appearance. The other Arms clustered in a tense group on the other side of the room. Webberly was the closest and most senior, and she took two steps toward me, reflexively staking out her territory and non-verbally forbidding me to come closer. I glared at the touchy black Arm until she came to her senses, nodding to me, giving me rank and backing off. I hadn’t had any time to mend fences with her, Arm-style, although she was next up on my list, after Bass. The other three younger Arms – Naylor, Billington, and Whetstone – reacted as a group with a similarly aborted dominance display. I could have made the whole lot of them grovel to me for their wretched impoliteness, but I settled for a low growl and predatory flash, echoed by Bass. They backed off and gave us rank as Mary handed me the entire tray of eggs and settled on the other side of me from Bass. Mary didn’t say anything, possibly a first for her, and a strong sign of how spooked she was.

  Needless to say, we had the entire back of Room D to ourselves. The building stank of cheap cigars and bad coffee. The building’s engraved granite cornerstone proudly proclaimed the place built in 1883, and from the quality of the rat-gnawed wood and the quantity of peeling paint, I doubted the owners had renovated the building since.

  Yes, I had been unlivable ever since phase two of what should have been the Great Hunter War turned to mush nine months ago. In the end, the only ones left in my command were one other Arm, one Focus and household, one Noble household, and fifty-two mercs. The rest were either in the hospital or bailed on us. Bailing on me in the middle of a war is a guarantee to get on my bad side. I had been cranky ever since.

  “I wouldn’t call this a challenge, I would call this boneheaded and stupid,” I said. “However, this wouldn’t be the first time Haggerty’s boneheaded social stupidity got taken as a challenge. I’ve certainly knocked her around enough for her nonsense.”

  Bass snorted.

  Ahead of us I spotted Tonya Biggioni and Geraldine Caruthers, two of the Cause’s more important Focuses. They huddled with their heads together, chattering away, likely about nasty Focus backbiting politics. No bodyguards or attendants, though. In fact, I didn’t spot anyone here in Room D who wasn’t a Major Transform. There were times when I wanted to wring Haggerty and Lori’s necks for their thoughtless prejudices.

  I didn’t see Lori – Focus Lorraine Rizzari – but I did metasense her, in the hallway behind Room D, deep in a discussion with Haggerty, Focus Polly Keistermann (not a part of the Cause, but a friend) and an unknown Focus. Like a surreal wedding, the other Arms in attendance, Webberly (dark brown), Billington (light brown), Naylor (Mediterranean olive), and Whetstone (maggoty white), sat on the left side of the hall, near the front, while the Noble and Master Crow contingent, that being Guru Shadow, Master Occum, Master Sinclair, Duke Hoskins and Count Dowling, sat on the right and farther back. Crow Gilgamesh, my lover and confidant, sat with Flo (Focus Florence Ackerman of Boston) and Linda (Focus Linda Cooley of Chicago, my current top hometown Focus). A large contingent of Canadian Focuses and their Crows, most of whom I didn’t recognize, took up the rest of the occupied chairs. I didn’t see or metasense Crow Sky, Lori’s mostly live-in Crow, but I wouldn’t expect to. He didn’t like crowds unless he was performing.

  I watched the younger Arms in particular, mentally daring them to show me the least bit of challenge. They sat stiff and tense, so afraid of the world around them they actually clung to other Arms for support. None of them more than two years past their graduation, they were out on their own, with no support, and big red targets on their chests. Now that Haggerty had stopped hounding the FBI, I wondered how soon
the FBI would manage to pick off one of those young Arms.

  Worries ran through my mind. How successful did Haggerty’s ‘heroic’ quest need to be for Lori to label the success ‘beyond 10’ on a 1 to 10 scale? Haggerty had been off attempting to suss out the secrets of the so-called Progenitors, the long-dead previous efflorescence of Transforms, if one believed the hypothesis that Transform Sickness had showed itself before. Had she found something esoteric and hand-wavy enough for me to deny the success of her discovery with regard to our wager? I hoped so.

  My gut, though, said I was screwed. Lori’s bounce and metasensed exultation seconded my gut.

  The hallway contingent came in and they all took their seats, except for Haggerty. She looked like shit, a badly used Arm, and I metasensed that she had been living off Monster juice for far too long. Her mood, though, was triumph. The Focus I didn’t recognize was dark-haired, waif-like and beautiful, with metasense protections radiating ‘pay no attention to me, I am a generic Focus’. She sat next to Polly, who pointed out people in the crowd and named them for her.

  Haggerty stood in front and took a deep breath. “North we were called, into the unknown, by the dreams of the Madonna of Montreal and Crow Nameless.” God. I was about to be subjected to yet another of Haggerty’s ‘heroic tales’. In language straight out of some B-grade movie. Haggerty named her quest companions in a similar heroic fashion and gave their various fates; none attended, even Haggerty’s Crow companion Midgard, due to wounds, mental horrors, psychological breakdowns, or juice problems. I sat up straighter, in shock; the unknown Focus was the Madonna of Montreal, someone I occasionally thought of as nothing more than a myth. She supposedly owned my dreams and had, in the past, supposedly saved my mind from domination by Focus Shirley Patterson of Pittsburgh.

  She never left Montreal, at least as far as I knew. Yet, here she was.

  Haggerty described her heroic quest as I slipped farther into mental shock. This couldn’t be happening. The Progenitors were a myth, a tall tale, right up there with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Anything and everything about the so-called Progenitors reeked of magic and unreality. I had turned my back on the ‘myth hypothesis’ years ago after my two brushes with ‘magical thinking’. I no longer believed Transform Sickness had showed itself in the past, nor did I believe that we remembered these ancient Transforms and Major Transforms as legends of superhuman and divine events.

  Haggerty’s team, co-led by the Noble Chimera known of as Sir Kevin of the North Wind Noble household, had gone north, following Crow Nameless’s dreams. Soon they all had dreams, contradictory dreams. Guided by the aurora (which I found difficult to believe) they found location after location that tested them, minds and bodies, to prove their worth. Their judge? The surviving minds of the Progenitors themselves, according to Haggerty. A primitive intellect, a collective ghost, something rarely roused to conscious awareness.

  Pins and needles covered my arms and legs, and I sat stock still in complete disbelief. Haggerty didn’t lie, though. Centuries old ghosts? This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t be real, not in my world.

  Haggerty’s questers passed the preliminary tests and, after yet more adventures, found a stone cairn, what she called an ‘inukshuk’, near the northwest coast of Hudson Bay. Inside the cairn they found a spear, and the spear tested them, individually and collectively.

  Were they worthy to wield the spear, a great sacred object of the Progenitors? In the end, they failed the test and the spear became invisible to them by messing with their minds. They borrowed a CB radio and called in Lori and Lori’s household, Inferno. Lori and her best Inferno team came, as quickly as possible (given we’re talking about winter in the Canadian arctic, this hadn’t been easy), and Lori found a way to convince the spear she and the Cause were worthy.

  I shook and my breathing hissed. This wasn’t my world; I had no place in a world of myths and quests. I wasn’t heroic, or noble, or adventurous. I was military, a bloody-minded Arm whose best skill was preparing a small army for battle. I shrank in my seat, daunted.

  “Though this was our quest and calling, the physical fruit of this quest is not ours,” Haggerty said. “I now present the Eskimo Spear to Focus Lorraine Rizzari, to keep and guard, and to use to show us the way forward.” Those words weren’t Amy’s style of speech. Someone had written these lines for her, possibly Lori herself, or Lori’s friend and confidant Ann Chiron.

  Haggerty reached down, opened a container, and brought out a short stone-tipped spear covered by inset copper, silver and gold wires, all in an intricate pattern. Once outside of the container the spear slapped my mind, hard, and shrieked in my metasense. My heart sank to the nether depths of my soul, staggered to see and metasense true physical evidence of the Progenitors. Because of my extensive work with the Crows, I suspected I was the only Arm able to instantly metasense the chilling truth: the spear was an objectified dross construct, and as far ahead of Gilgamesh’s objectified dross constructs as a modern computer is to an abacus.

  Every Crow on the planet would be able to metasense this as well. I slunk farther down in my chair, wanting to be anywhere else but here. I wanted science, not mystical mumbo-jumbo storytelling crap told around campfires to a background of out of tune flutes and animal-hide drums.

  Lori took the spear and bowed. “Thank you, Arm Haggerty. The Cause thanks you as well, and thanks your companions, who risked mind and limb to prove the Progenitors real.”

  Prove. Proof. Real.

  My horror deepened when Lori raised the spear above her head and said “The minds of the Progenitors imprinted a picture in the spear, a picture visible to all Crows and those of us familiar with the ways of the Crows. This I will show you, now.”

  She did, breaking the last crumbs of my self-confidence and denial. The scene, built by her exquisitely trained illusion-projection capabilities, but guided by the spear, showed an Eskimo tribe. Of Transforms. Over two hundred of them. And just three Focuses and four Crows. No Arms, Chimeras or Monsters. No non-Transformed normals except for the multitude of children. An equal number of men and women.

  All these years we had hoped we would find a way to solve the Transform survival problem by allowing the Focuses to support more than a couple dozen Transforms, and support as many male Transforms as woman Transforms. Here was proof that such a way existed. We had also hoped we would find a way around the intractable Transform infertility problem. Here also was proof.

  The audience cried for joy, save for a few of us stony types.

  I felt loss as well as joy. Joy that we finally had the proof, loss and horror over the means: heroism and adventure instead of good, hard, science.

  “They killed their Arms and Chimeras,” Bass said. I had no idea how she picked up on this, but I read truth in her words. “Ma’am, let’s go. These people, who are going to follow this path, are our enemies.”

  I shook my head. “This way lies survival.”

  “Not for me. Not for us.” Bass stood and stalked away, radiating anger and disgust.

  So much for my tag seduction.

  ---

  “Congratulations,” I said, to Lori and Amy, after I corralled them in the Arm corner of Room D. I lied; I felt no such emotion. I had gone numb inside, as robotic as Webberly, the most closed off Arm. “Do you have any idea how so few Focuses were able to support so many Transforms?”

  “None at all,” Lori said. “The only thing I know for certain is that these Focuses and Crows worked differently than we do. No juice patterns, for one.” She paused. “I believe you two have something to discuss; I’ll leave you to it.”

  I still hadn’t seen or metasensed Sky. Was he as messed up about this as I was?

  Haggerty’s eyes shifted around. “Not here,” she said. She led me out into the now deserted back hallway. I knew what was coming. “I won the wager. Acknowledge me as your superior.”

  Our stupid wager. She had pledged to follow my orders and cease her heroic nonsense for five years
if her quest came up empty.

  “Bullshit,” I said, my anger growing. “All I’m willing to acknowledge is your right to continue your crazy heroic crap. You’ve proven something here, I’m not sure what.” This was the term of our wager. The wager said nothing about who would be boss.

  “No way,” Haggerty said. “Acknowledge my…”

  She didn’t get to finish her insulting demand, because my anger peaked and I attacked. She attempted to sweep my legs out from underneath me and failed. We both went invisible, and backed off from each other.

  An unseen blow sent me flying. Then another. I complained about her lack of political acumen, not inviting Keaton or Rayburn, or any Transforms or normals. She countered with her own psychological ploy: “It’s time for you to dedicate yourself to the Cause for real, instead of dicking around with Keaton’s self-serving shit.”

  I had no hope of winning this, not with my own damn traitorous subconscious agreeing with her arguments. She wanted to force the Cause on the Transforms and research our way to victory. Our political enemies would see this as a declaration of war. Haggerty didn’t care, and she was right. The simple exposure of the Eskimo Spear was in itself a declaration of war. Half of my arguments against Haggerty fell away in my mind before I stated them.

  I fought anyway.

  I had to.

  I’m an Arm.

  I’ll spare you the rest of my sorry humiliation.

  “Don’t worry,” Haggerty said. My cheek lay on her right boot-top. Ever since she went to Europe to fight in the takedown of Europe’s baddie Crow, and learned Eissler’s tricks, she had been the best fighter of all of us. Fighting wasn’t everything, though. “I learned from the rookie mistakes I made the last time I was in charge of you. We need to keep being friends, and I won’t try to micromanage you and your people.”