“Heaven help the world,” Lori said, enigmatic.
---
“No, no!” I got in the face of the young Transform woman in front of me. “Fast. You want speed. Push yourself. You can learn speed if you work at it.” The day was warm and gorgeous, and the scent of fresh grass, damp ground and honest sweat could have been sold in bottles.
“Like this. Block.” I raised the wooden knife to the first position, then down, then up again to the other side. She blocked, but not fast enough. I picked up the speed and pushed her harder.
This wasn’t a real knife-fighting drill. This was purely a speed exercise, but wooden knives did make a good prop, and the students already knew the basic positions.
“Faster!”
“I can’t…”
I smacked her. Over to the side, Gail caught her breath.
“Keep the fucking juice count steady!” Gail jumped and concentrated on the juice again, holding it at 23.1, the Transform training optimum. If she kept the juice count rock solid at the training optimum, and if I applied enough stress to her bodyguards, they would be getting a hell of a lot better just about now. Gail’s people used the training optimum trick already, and had for almost two years. They progressed slower than they should because nobody in this chaotic rathole knew the first thing about proper stress, and because Gail, when she got distracted or over-emotional, couldn’t keep her people’s juice at 23.1
“Don’t you ever say ‘I can’t’,” I said to the woman kneeling on the ground. “You can. Now get up off your ass and do this again.”
The Transform, Melanie, stood up again and stepped toward me with her knife raised. She wore a bright red handprint on her cheek, and tears dribbled out of her eyes, but she came at me with an angry fire in her movements. I drilled her again, just at the limit of her speed, until she gasped for air and dripped with sweat, but she didn’t slack off this time. I stepped up the predator effect and increased my speed, until I smelled the stench of juice usage as she increased her own speed to keep up with me. Then I clipped her with the wooden knife and crowded her harder. Pain, stress.
“Faster, bitch.” The tears came in earnest now, and her lips pulled back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl of her own. I saw in her face the agony her own muscles gave her as she pushed them beyond their limits, but she moved her knife, fast, faster, keeping up with me as if her very life depended on it.
Five seconds. Ten seconds. I pushed her. The others gathered around, murmuring in awe. Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. If Gail got distracted now, and decided to watch us rather than maintain Melanie’s juice count, I would paste her ass into next week.
Twenty-five seconds. Thirty. Thirty-five seconds and I smelled the faint ozone scent in the odor of Melanie’s juice signaling incipient juice overuse.
I stopped. “Enough,” I said. “You’re done.”
Melanie stared at me for just a moment before her legs collapsed underneath her and she fell backwards into the beaten-down grass, gasping giant, heaving breaths. Everyone else called out congratulations in voices mixing impressed astonishment with an undercurrent of unease.
“Great job!” Gail said, as she rushed over, goosing Melanie’s juice count as she did so.
Success. I stepped back to look at my students. Six men, five women, and Gail, in a fallow field south of Ann Arbor, with the remains of last year’s corn stubble showing amid the high grass. Gail’s household’s fallback emergency home, heaven help them. These were Gail’s top Transform bodyguards, those worthy of advanced training. Quite a lot of them, but Gail wanted as many of her people as possible to be bodyguard capable, and I didn’t at all mind lending a hand.
I hadn’t realized before I got involved with them, but Gail and her household were no more a normal Focus household than Inferno, Lori’s household. Not in the same way, though. Instead of Monster hunting, Gail and her household’s edge came from their Transform rights work, because of death threats, angry crowds, police harassment, the occasional rock and bottle, and agitators threatening to riot. Add in dirty politics and journalist-style investigations and you ended up with a great deal of streetwise wisdom. The first time I saw her freeze a normal just by looking at him, I had to re-evaluate my first impressions of Gail entirely. Lori had been right. In her own way, Gail and her fractious yet impossibly stubborn household did remind me of Lori and Inferno when I first met them nearly five years ago. Most of Gail’s bodyguards were already blooded, at least at the fisticuffs level, and well trained for their needs. They used the training optimum tricks to master what they thought they needed: situational awareness, quick reactions, and much less self-defense than I thought necessary.
Time for Gail and her household to get booted into the big leagues, as Zielinski, Keaton and I did for Lori and Inferno all those years previous.
Fifty yards away, Tom trained the non-Transform bodyguards, including Gail’s husband, Van, who would have a hard time winning a bar fight with a junior high school athlete. He had good eyes, though, and could shoot. Past Tom, Lena trained the rest of the household, all the non-fighters, in basic self-defense and weapon use. Out farther, the kids played a game of kickball, and the younger teens watched over the very young children.
Gail’s female bodyguards didn’t surprise me, but the fact she had picked up the practice years ago did. Female bodyguards were a new innovation among the Focuses, but Gail picked up on the new and interesting like a bee picked up pollen.
Me, I was a little slower, but I did recruit Lena for my moneymaking operation about a year ago. When I picked her up, she had been poor and abused, with a major chip on her shoulder. She signed on with me because I offered to teach her to fight, and I did, but I also spent the next six months cleaning up her massive head problems. She was a good one these days, but damn, clearing out the sewer in her head had been hard work.
“You, John,” I said. “You’re next. Get yourself ready.”
I looked them over as they sparred. Not a bad crew, if you wanted crowd control and protection from crazies. They all needed some improvement. There on my right, Gail still hovered over Melanie trying to give comfort and reassurance to the exhausted guard.
Not, in my opinion, the best way to build strong bodyguards. They needed a little less mothering and a lot more self-reliance. Yet, in Gail’s household, the mothering felt right. Perhaps if I could get them to tone down the mothering just a little…
“Gail,” I said. “You first.”
Before I started in with Melanie, all the guards had been sparring, Gail as well. Only she held back against her partner, a young man a little too respectful of his Focus. She far overvalued her combat capabilities, in my opinion.
We started on the speed drill, and I gave her a lot more speed than I gave Melanie. “You proud of yourself, Focus?” I said, needling her. “All these extra advantages, and you can barely keep up with a Transform.” I upped the speed a little more and clipped her in the arm with my wooden knife, hard enough to bruise.
Minor harassment. I saved the major stuff for our private times. I still drove her to tears, but she coped now with the little things. She took the hit and the harassment without blinking, and kept attempting to block me. I eased my speed back down to something more reasonable and circled around her. She turned to block me from the new direction, and our forearms hit, driving me back. She was strong for a Focus, probably as strong as I had been when I finished my Arm training with Keaton, but strength wasn’t even close to the entire Arm package. I slipped around her forearm and forced her back. Around me, the others knew better than to break off their own sparring, but I felt their eyes. Major Transform sparring went far beyond the limits of human capabilities, and Gail was no neophyte fighter, nor a Focus housewife clone. Turning her into a combat-oriented Focus would be luscious fun and relatively easy, but I, alas, had other priorities.
Gail stepped backwards, her foot slipped in a hole, and she went down. I didn’t stop my attack, and she kept her knife moving, blo
cking one strike after another. Excellent! The spine-stiffening training was working; when we started she would have given up when she fell. Instead, she continued with her defense and scrambled back to her feet. Her knife never stopped moving. I kept going for a few more passes before I stopped.
“Good,” I said. She looked at me with wide eyes. This was the first compliment I had given her.
“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly, surprised to find herself so pleased. I looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. She really was a beautiful Focus, hot and sweaty and stressed, with grass in her hair and fire in her eyes. Easy to linger on, just watching her.
I turned away. “John, get over here. You’re up.”
We trained all afternoon, then the non-fighters took a break to prepare a huge picnic dinner, and we trained again until dusk. By the time we finished, every one of the Transform bodyguards teetered on the edge of juice overuse, and every one of them was notably faster and more capable than they had been at the beginning of the day. I made a mental note to tell Newt about this place, as he would love this sort of dross. Slowly but surely, I won Newton over, as I had won over Gilgamesh.
By the end of the training session, the entire rest of the household had gathered round just to watch, impressed and a little unsettled to discover the Transforms, who they thought ordinary, were capable of such feats.
The Transform bodyguards themselves looked at me with fear and awe, and also just a little bit of respect.
I rested, predator sated, and lost myself in my metasense as the household lingered to talk and finish off the last of the food before cleaning up. I caught Gail right after she polished off her last hamburger.
“Gail.” She looked at me as I sat down next to her, still glowing from the tiny nugget of praise earlier in the day.
“Yes, Teacher?”
“There’s going to be an Arm ceremony next Tuesday night, and I’m inviting you to attend.”
Her eyes lit up with curiosity, but then practicality intruded.
“How dangerous is this?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. The Arms are all Amy’s and mine, and you’ll only be observing, not participating.”
She thought for a moment, so interested she could hardly contain herself, and then nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Bring your entourage, and dress up. This is a formal occasion.”
Her grin faded. Hell, she didn’t have enough money to dress up for a formal occasion. I thought about the problem, and then pulled my wallet out of my jeans.
“Here,” I said, and pulled $1000 out and put it in her hand. I always kept a large supply of cash with me, just in case. Gail gaped at the money, and hesitated only for an instant. I practically heard the words ‘Arm pet’ echoing around in her head, followed a moment later by ‘such a stupid prejudice’. She had been the only non-Arm supported Focus in the Midwest Region to stand up for the shunned Focuses, which won her a lot of political brownie points from all the Arms.
“Your appearance reflects on me,” I told her. “Make sure you do yourself up right.”
Gilgamesh: July 22, 1972 – July 25, 1972
“And so, a collection of Crows cast Sinclair out, without even the permission of his Guru,” Gilgamesh said, finishing his story to Dynamo.
Dynamo looked unhappy. “Do you know who the senior Crows were?” They sat in Dynamo’s lab, where he was a research chemist at an actual paying job.
“Guru Chevalier identified himself,” Gilgamesh said. “We know there were more, but we don’t know who.”
A flicker of an expression passed over Dynamo’s face, brief enough to hide, before he replaced it with sympathy and concern. If Gilgamesh hadn’t been watching Dynamo with a Crow’s paranoia, he would have missed it.
“I’m so sorry,” Dynamo said. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking. What can I do to help?”
“You can help me look at these new rotten egg effects,” Gilgamesh said, deviating from his usual storytelling. “I’ve been learning a lot of new tricks, but I’m still not able to get the variation you’re managing. Can you have a look at these?” He extracted several dross-doused tennis balls from his pocket.
Dynamo’s eyes lit, and he smiled, a more natural smile. “Let me have a look. And maybe we can make a few trades.”
They traded tricks for the next two hours.
“All right,” Hoskins said. “We’re 5 miles away from Las Cruces. Why are we 5 miles north of Las Cruces on I-25?”
Sumeria rumbled along the freeway through a no man’s land of desert and scrub. Gilgamesh shielded his eyes from the setting sun as he turned to talk to the Duke. “Dynamo is calling his Guru, Hephaestus, right now to report us, and we needed to convince him we were going north.”
“You sense this? I thought he was out of your range.”
Gilgamesh shook his head. “He is. He waited until we couldn’t sense him, and then he called.”
The Duke’s voice grew artificially patient. “If he’s out of your range, how do you know what he’s doing, Master Gilgamesh?”
“His expression flickered when I told him who attacked Sinclair,” Gilgamesh said. “I don’t know if or who Hephaestus will talk to, but he easily might be reporting us to Sinclair’s attacker right now. Or to Chevalier, for that matter. We need to go a few more miles north, and then take the back roads to go around Las Cruces back to I-10.”
“In the first place,” Hoskins said, “you can’t base a major change of plans on nothing more than some flicker of an expression that might not even be meaningful. And in the second place, I don’t know the back roads around here. We’ll just get lost, and then we’ll be more vulnerable, not less.”
“Your grace, no. Dynamo is going to cause trouble. We’ve got to get out of here, and lay a false trail.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Master Gilgamesh.”
“Your grace, you said in a fight, trust a fighter, and you made your point. But when you’re running, trust a Crow.”
Hoskins ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “All right, all right. I’ll try to take us around Las Cruces back to I-10. But I still don’t know the roads around here, and the atlas doesn’t show the level of detail we need. We’re going to get so lost we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Actually, your grace, I have a map.”
“You have a map.”
Gilgamesh winced. “Actually, I always get maps, wherever we go. They make me feel safer.”
“All right,” Hoskins growled. “Give me the damned map. I’ll get us around Las Cruces.” He muttered inaudibly after that, but Gilgamesh picked up the occasional ‘Crow’, and the rest didn’t sound complimentary.
Ten minutes later, they exited the highway and started the long trek through the desert back roads.
The map said Deming, New Mexico, and Gilgamesh sat out by the side of the trailer, building dross constructs, and ignoring the insane dry heat while Hoskins did whatever Hoskins did out beyond Gilgamesh’s range. Gilgamesh just hoped he didn’t bring his prey home with him. Only a couple more days to Los Angeles, if they kept up with their current pace. Slow, because they kept stopping to talk to various Crows along the way. Ah, both nostalgia and panic. The last time he did this stunt, he had been bait for Rogue Crow. If someone had told him he had been playing patty cake with a Crow Mentor back then, he would have died of panic on the spot. Now, here he was, being bait again. He hoped they had really fooled Dynamo.
He missed Carol. Nearly his entire Transform life, he had lived in Carol’s shadow, and every one of those few occasions where he had made his own way had been hell. So what did he do? Of course, he went out on his own again. And what was he facing? Hell, of course. He wondered what kind of idiocy possessed him.
He wouldn’t be the almost-Guru he was now except that he had chosen to associate with the Arms, and Carol in particular. They supplied him with nearly infinite dross, so he never suffered the low juice issues of most young Crows. Both Keaton and Carol had trained him. He
had gained confidence and courage far beyond the normal for a Crow just by learning to deal with them.
He missed Carol’s laugh, and her wicked wit. He missed her ferocity when anything threatened him. He missed the fabulous love they made together when the world gave them the chance.
The stars shone like beacons in the dark moonless night. They had parked in an otherwise empty dust-choked campground just off I-10, three miles from the town.
Gilgamesh worked on a construct to block Crow metasense. He thought he possessed the math to put together the complex but low-powered construct, and he really wanted to protect Sumeria so they couldn’t be sensed as they passed near enemy territory.
Even better, he made the shields one-directional, so he could still use his metasense to sense out. This was similar to Wandering Shade’s area masking trick, only object-linked.
Carefully, he aligned the threads and echoes and derivatives, and maybe his work did look like an engineering blueprint, but he still thought the construct beautiful.
Very slowly, he stood up and turned toward Sumeria, bringing the construct with him. Carefully, he tied the construct into the side of the motor home. Very carefully, as he had blown the object-tie twice already at this exact point. He worked for a half hour, slowly tying one strand after the other, but the construct didn’t fall apart.
When he finished, he sat back done on the ground, exhausted and shaking. Success! He couldn’t metasense Sinclair inside Sumeria from here, but he could if he went around to the front. He opened the door and went inside, and metasensed outside as if through a translucent curtain. Not perfect, but this would work.
The dross construct didn’t even collapse when he opened the door!
Gilgamesh took a deep breath and decided to give himself a half-hour of recovery. He would need three more constructs to cover all of Sumeria, and he would be able to manage one more tonight, and finish tomorrow. They would travel all day tomorrow only partially hidden, but he had covered the right side, the side facing their enemies, especially the disquieting enemy Dynamo said lurked in Flagstaff, Arizona. Gilgamesh wondered if such an enemy really existed, or if Dynamo had only been spreading lies to cause them problems.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 24
