Amy opened her eyes and stared at me. “Very well. With your permission?”
I knew where she would be going, so I nodded in the affirmative. Amy turned to Webberly. “I want you to figure this out. With Carol’s permission, I assigned Mary the task of fixing the Arm tag variation problem I’ve been having with normals. I’m going to add you to the research project, Arm Webberly, and add ‘Arm tag problems with other Arms and other Transforms’ to the project.” Webberly nearly panicked, faced with the impossible problem Haggerty just dumped on her. With my permission. Instead, she froze, neither affirming or denying the assignment. The price of joining my organization; she could get loaded up with Haggerty’s projects just like the rest of us.
Haggerty turned to Mary, oblivious. “Mary, tell these fine Arms what you’ve discovered so far.”
“Ma’ams,” Mary said. If she was discommoded by being second juniormost to the other Arms at the table, her worry didn’t show. Inter-Arm relations came easy to her, in contrast to Amy’s social limitations. “My progress has been slow, but after several long conversations with senior Crows, I’ve managed to analogize Arm tagging of normals to Crow dross manipulation. I believe the Focus tag likely analogizes better, but due to edicts lay down from on high by the first Focuses, none of the senior Focuses are willing to collaborate with me on this. In return for allowing him to run me through various tests and sit through some excruciating juice-structure analysis sessions, Crow Guru Thomas the Dreamer and I worked out a mental procedure allowing me to vary Arm tags on normals in at least two variables, neither of which yet have good names. I’m currently in the process of experimenting with different tag varieties and noting the differences on tagged normals.” Webberly stared at Sibrian in shock as she talked, learning for the first time how much contact my people really had with the rest of the Transform community. Hearing about the Cause was much different from living it.
“Excellent progress,” Amy said. She likely already knew the details; her praise was a show of magnanimity for the rest of us. She turned to me with the next obvious question, and I nodded. “Mary, you and Webberly are going to be working together on this. My suggestion is you also work with the Inferno household and Lady Death. This tag alteration should, if our half-assed hypotheses are correct, work on Transforms as well, and would fit into Inferno’s household redefinition project.” Exactly. I had a mental image of Connie Yerizarian, Lori’s head of household, holding the tags of some of the more independent Inferno department heads. She needed them.
“Yes, ma’am,” Webberly said, giving rank to Haggerty and accepting the idea of working with Lori and Inferno. Dominance issue solved, the two had sorted out the basics of working together, and nobody had held a dominance fight in my goddamned dining room. Webberly had mixed thoughts about the Amy – Carol tag team crap the two of us just pulled on her. She technically admired the trick and was glad to be on a team with tricks like this, but on the other hand disliked the fact we had pulled the trick on her.
Amy de-bossed her aura and turned the session back over to me. I was the one who held the tags of Webberly and Whetstone, not her. I studied Webberly speculatively, so competent and eager to please, and thought about another contribution.
“I have another question for you, Rose. Where did you get the weaponry, and can you get more?”
She didn’t smile, but I sensed her pleasure at the notice. “I found a community of people who trade weaponry across international borders. I’ve made contact with some of those people, and have established a trading relationship.” Shit! She had managed to link herself into the international arms trade. I was impressed. “I procure certain US weaponry, and can exchange the weaponry for cash, or for weaponry from other nations.”
“Yes, I can definitely see some uses for this…”
I kept the table conversation going for over an hour, each of us telling Arm war stories, and in the process binding us all together with my charisma.
---
When you have The Commander as an underling, if you’re a smart boss, you’ll let The Commander do her thing. Later in the evening I gathered eight of us into my war room: Haggerty, Tommy Bates, Webberly, Sibrian, Whetstone, Tom, Hank and Ila. Gail found a way to tag along and insert herself into the meeting. I didn’t throw her out, partly because I didn’t want to cause a scene, and partly because I wanted to see how much rank she would claim. She had earned a seat at the table by having enough gall to claim one. Gail appeared to be par for the course for a medium-aged powerful Focus as far as nerve and presence went; I remembered my first meeting with Lori, where she had totally dominated this particular young Arm. No, training Gail wouldn’t be trivial. The resistance she gave wouldn’t be going away.
We kept Duval in a corner, meditating. Webberly didn’t do the groveling student Arm routine – instead, when Keaton normally made a student Arm grovel to keep her out of the way, Webberly had Duval meditating. I would have sent the student Arm to the weight room, but Webberly treated all aspects of Duval’s physical training as extremely important, never to be done unsupervised.
“With your permission, ma’am?” I said. Amy nodded. “All right, people. Business.” I sat at the head of the table, and all the faces turned my way. The smell of the normals’ coffee filled the air. “First on the agenda, Mary, give us a report on your last six baby Arm retrieval attempts.”
Sibrian started in. Mary’s report took her nearly a half-hour, uninterrupted except for a few questions. Her tale was of a long running feud with the authorities, attempting to identify and extract baby Arms before the authorities got to them and killed them. The fight was vicious as sin, with traps and intimidation and multiple dead on both sides. We got barely half of those baby Arms out.
I watched Haggerty warily as Mary spoke. She knew this job from experience, and given she also held Mary’s tag, Haggerty could easily claim her away from me for her own organization. Last time around, she did just that, and I had spent a great deal of time cleaning up the resulting mess. Haggerty tended to spill out dozens of projects with no clear priorities, and Mary got disorganized under stress. The resulting fiasco supplied me enough entertaining stories to keep me stocked for the next decade.
When Mary finished, I looked around at the table. Most of the team remained alert and attentive. Gail’s eyes were wide and her ears practically twitched with interest. She was getting a sudden introduction to the other side of the world, the side of the attackers instead of the defenders.
“Comments? Anyone spot anything odd?” Something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on the problem.
“They were too easy to extract,” Haggerty said, and I mentally sighed with relief. She wouldn’t poach Mary for herself. Of the six baby Arms, we had gotten lucky this year and gotten four out. One of the four had flunked out in training and died, and the other three remained in Keaton’s Arm school.
“There weren’t enough of them,” said Hank.
“How do you mean, not enough?” I asked.
“There’ve been six Arm transformations in the last year. Assuming the proportion of Arm transformations to other forms of transformations remains constant, there should have been nine. The difference might be statistical variance, but a fifty percent difference is difficult to credit.”
“So we’re missing some baby Arms?” Haggerty demanded.
“I believe so, ma’am,” Hank said.
I paused and held up my hand, insights racing through my mind. “Keaton’s been bitching about all three current student Arms, nicknaming them ‘too stupid’, ‘too young’ and ‘too crazy’. I can vouch for all but the last. There’s a distinct possibility we’ve been left with the dregs.” I didn’t like our first clue, not at all.
“All right, if they disappeared, where did they go, ma’am?” Hank asked.
The ideas came.
“Chimeras,” from Haggerty.
“The government.”
“The Focuses.”
“The military.�
� Gail and Tom. Interesting.
“The Crows.”
“The Progenitors.” My comment earned me a boss glare.
“Business interests.” The last was from Haggerty.
“Why would some corporation want baby Arms, ma’am?” Gail said. “They don’t want baby Focuses, and unless I’m missing something, baby Arms are much more difficult to handle.”
“Let me tell you a story about a company by the name of United Toxicol,” I said, and told the story. Gail paled in fear and disgust. Webberly didn’t react; I think she had learned of my adventure with Bass through the grapevine. Whetstone did react, although instead of paling, she turned beet red with anger.
“Now, why would any of these groups want to make baby Arms disappear?”
This time people were more thoughtful.
“A lot of people might like their own collection of tame Arms. The Chimeras, the government, and the first Focuses all would,” Hank said. “The first Focuses have been working on variants of this for years. Oh, and the military tried to recruit a Focus and her Transforms for the Vietnam war effort back in ’66, but the Council threatened to make a big stink if they didn’t back off, and they did. At least publicly. I have my doubts.”
“Can’t we eliminate the government from consideration?” Sibrian asked. “They’re already fighting us and we know what they’re doing.”
Bates shook his head. He looked unnatural without a cigarette hanging from his lips, but I wasn’t going to have him stinking up my war room. “The government is too big, with too many independent groups. This could be the work of a group we’ve never heard of.”
“According to Mary’s report, the baby Arms we are picking up aren’t as well defended as my experience would lead me to expect,” Haggerty said. “Someone’s giving a perfunctory effort to avoid suspicion, and focusing on this other effort, whatever it is.”
“That’s another lead,” I said.
We chewed on the problem until we understood the issue as best as we could manage. The first Focuses remained at the top of the suspicion list, with some previously uninterested branch of the government, most likely the US Army, not far behind. A joint effort by a mixed group of Crows and Chimeras was the next possibility. The last made everyone sick to think about. After the Battle in Detroit, no one wanted to imagine what a Crow/Chimera cabal could do with baby Arms to work with. No one but Gail, riding the emotions of the newly converted, thought a corporation might be behind this.
Somebody would need to track this down. Who, though? Ideally, me, as this was my style of operation. Unfortunately, I was already overbooked. Haggerty decided to do the job herself, after getting my permission to use some of my normals. She was overbooked as well, and I expected her to pass part of this along to Webberly as soon as things cooled down between them.
Next up, I wanted a captive Chimera of the Beast Man or Hunter variety. We had tried many times, and never managed to snag one. Haggerty had owned the job before January, when she explicitly tossed it when she flipped the dominance. After a short discussion about the right person for the job Mary inherited the task. I had once intended to give this one to Bass, until my wooing her fell through. I made sure Mary dumped a couple of her easier tasks onto Whetstone.
Third, Haggerty pointed out the fact we urgently needed training in resisting Focus charisma. We had a Focus on tap, a powerfully charismatic Focus at that, and Haggerty wanted us as competent as possible. I concurred; I got embarrassed every time an Arm rolled on her back and showed tummy to a Focus, and especially so when they were my Arms. Also, I had some ideas for multi-Arm effects, and I wanted to work on them as well. Arranging time for the training would be the big stickler.
Fourth, Hank thought we had Focus Network problems again. He told the story of the United Toxicol research fabrications and how he had run the project through the Focus Network to keep the project’s source anonymous. Haggerty, alert to anything that might hinder our current research projects, decided we needed a full scan on the Network, looking for problems and traitors. The project’s scope daunted everyone, but Rose suggested we each take a piece, including Gail. Haggerty agreed.
Last on my list, Whetstone and Webberly needed some remedial physical training to cure accumulated muscle problems, and Whetstone needed to learn to fight like a mature Arm. Amy volunteered for the Whetstone training, and Zielinski volunteered to take on the muscle problem issue, in part to get a look at Webberly’s problem with the shackle galls, left over from Keaton’s training, and unhealing.
Once we walked through my list, Haggerty walked through her list and got updates from everyone. She had come up with a few new ideas, of course. I shifted workloads around, taking advantage of Webberly and Whetstone and overloading them, too. I managed to stop Haggerty from loading up Gail, but only by dint of some vigorous persuasion. Of both of them. I needed Gail free for training.
All and all, we were going to be busy.
It was past two and the lights were dim, and I sat in my chair and listened to Mary play the guitar. She was good as only an Arm could be, and her complex magical music came alive in the dim room. Sometimes she sang, with a voice so pure she sounded like an angel come down from heaven, or sometimes warm and fuzzy and low, or sometimes deep, but always beautiful. She sat at my feet, with her back against my chair, safe from all threats.
Around the room, people sat and listened, mostly, except for the few exhausted ones who slept in the corners. Tom and Zielinski had double-teamed Whetstone and had convinced her to haul the furniture downstairs from the bedroom, so people sat on couches and chairs and the floor. Gail watched intently, still wide-awake, with the sparkling eyes of someone who has spent all day seeing wonders.
Mary finished one song and immediately started another, a song about leaving home, and the sadness of walking away from all the places you knew. A beautiful song to normal ears, yes, but the song possessed an added theme for an Arm, who would hear the aching sorrow of leaving her territory. I thought of all the territories I had lost, Chicago, and Houston, and Los Angeles and now Chicago again. Someday I would walk away from Detroit and go back to Chicago. I wondered what madness possessed us that we moved so often. What a cruel world, to force us from place to place, when what we wanted more than anything was to find one place to call home and to stay there.
I shook away my sadness. We didn’t have a solution now, not when the government hounded us from place to place and we needed to live in secret. Maybe things would change in the future, when more people transformed. Not now, though. So in the meantime, Mary sang.
In addition to being a con artist and petty thief before her transformation, Mary had also been a minor musician, a vagabond guitarist, what she called being a busker. Since her transformation, she had gotten much better. She performed occasionally, making surprise appearances at bars and clubs and confiscating the stage. She had also self-published a couple of records, currently a hot item among a certain subset of the young. She didn’t make any money from her work, at least not yet. This was just something she did because she wanted to.
When she signed on with me, she offered me the usual things, but the gift she offered that mattered were her songs. I also pushed her to train other artistic forms, and she learned them, slowly.
Mary finished her song and switched to a livelier tune, bouncing with energy and reveling in life and aggressive sexuality. This song also touched the normals, but this was a song about Arms, about our boundless lust and life immediately post-kill. People woke up and leaned forward all around the room, and I realized that she did something with her predator effect to add to the mood of her songs. I bet she gave a hell of a performance when she made her surprise appearances in those hot sweaty clubs.
Melanie, Gail’s bodyguard, leaned forward more intently than most and frowned, trying to drag something out of her memory.
“Tristeza!” Melanie said, and people looked at her from all over the room. Mary nodded at her with half a smile, acknowledging th
e recognition. Tristeza was her stage name. It meant ‘sadness’ in Spanish. Gail and several of her people recognized the name, and so did one of Webberly’s, and they looked at her with surprise and a new respect.
So did I; I hadn’t realized her popularity. We needed some way to make use of Mary’s minor celebrityhood. I tucked this little bit of knowledge into the back of my mind to germinate into an idea, and then sighed when I realized what I did. It had been a long time since I had discovered anything new I didn’t analyze for its value as a tool.
My ignorance of Sibrian’s popularity irritated me. Just a couple of years ago I had been very well connected with the youth culture, but my grown-up Arm responsibilities left me with little time for such pursuits. In the youth culture, a few months was an eternity and today’s youth weren’t the hippie kids I had bumped elbows with as a baby Arm, and I’ll admit my interest in the youth culture waned after the Beatles broke up. I decided to delegate fixing this to Sibrian.
Mary finished the lively song and switched to a slower one again. I didn’t place the song until I saw the recognition on Gail’s face. Mary called the song ‘The Greatest Day’, a song about the death of Rev. Matthew Narbanor in the Battle in Detroit as well as an allegory of Jesus. Matt Narbanor sacrificed himself to save the lives of the other people there. Of all the heroes of the battle, he was possibly the greatest.
He had been Gail’s. In the middle of the battle, when the defenders fell and the attackers closed in, I had been one of the few defenders left standing, weak and depleted from healing Gail. He gave me his life, to give me the juice I needed to fight. I fought, and we won, and I even killed the damned Rogue Crow who had been behind the fight, but Matt Narbanor remained dead.
Mary didn’t sing the words. She only played the music, and she had altered the tune, adding complexity and beauty to what had once been a simple song, but the main melody came through clearly. Gail watched, frozen, as Mary played. The room fell silent, and slowly, Mary wove sorrow from her predator effect into the beautiful and achingly sad music. I could have shaken off the effect, but chose not to. Heroes like Rev. Narbanor deserved the respect.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 28
