“Yes, Commander. I can arrange that.”
“Why is your group interested in this fight?” I said. I mean, all the way from Canada, and they already had a spy in my ranks.
“It’s a matter of honor,” Courtier Freeman said, drawing himself up as tall as possible. “Their grievances against the original American Focuses are extensive, as I’m sure Arm Debardelaben has already explained. On the other hand, our friendly contacts with Focuses Rizzari, Keistermann and Biggioni are similarly extensive. We wish to support their efforts in this struggle. In addition, the Borealis Barony Crow Master, Icestorm, learned from Crow Master Occum.” The last, alone, would be enough.
“Yes. What about the others in your group?” I smelled a whole lot of Transforms, and having another Crow Master and his Nobles would help immensely.
“Besides The Arm, our contingent consists of Crow Master Icestorm; Lord Kevin, Viscount of Borealis Barony; Mistress Cindy Lederer, a detection specialist Sport; Focus-Sport Nancy Rakshe; Focus Gwen Larson of London, Ontario; Sir Hal of Borealis; The Crow Nameless; nine combat trained Transforms, six combat trained commoners, two combat trained normals, and five combat trained noble Monsters. And myself.”
“And yourself.” Rakshe I knew from years ago, rescued by Occum and his first batch of Nobles from a crazy Progenitor item in the north woods of Canada. It was from them I got my now active Monster pendant. I also knew of Focus Larson as one of the few Focuses who could bring a warm smile to Keaton’s face. She was here to help rescue Keaton…and likely to try to convince me to torture Adkins, her old nemesis, to death. Slowly. “Let’s see if we can arrange this Arm to Arm meeting, why don’t we?” The extra troops would help, though I had hoped for more from a Canadian Noble contingent. Perhaps they weren’t as advanced as our Nobles – or, as with our male Major Transforms, they couldn’t spare the resources due to other problems.
“A moment, Commander,” Haggerty said. I nodded, and smiled.
“Hi, Dan!” Haggerty said, rushing over. She picked up the Courtier and gave him a huge hug. Then she nuzzled his ear and whispered some interesting things that I won’t repeat. Well, that made things clear enough, now didn’t it?
I was going to get all the Eskimo Spear heroes, plus some extras. I liked.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
Armenigar and I met outside the Adirondacks resort, in a properly neutral location, a traffic pullout with a gorgeous view of the valley where my small army gathered. The rising sun cast odd shadows over the tents and training fields. I was fighting the urge to pull out my knives and start slicing, despite the fact Armenigar could probably pound me into pudding nine times out of ten. If not more often. She was six foot eight, bald as an egg and broad as a linebacker. She squatted, smiling, just watching me. A lonely car passed, and noticed neither us nor our half dozen Transform guards.
“We need to be able to get along, and I thought the Eissler tags would work best.”
“Since when did you get into tags?” I thought she was beyond all that.
“I haven’t been sitting on my ass these past years, Hancock,” she said. “Besides, my real objection to cooperation with you down here in the States was the goddamned psychotic pipsqueak. I’ve followed your career, and you’re not half bad as an Arm, at least according to Giselle. I’m willing to support your leadership.”
“It’s nice to see you haven’t lost your arrogance,” I said. Armenigar just laughed.
In her case, she had earned her arrogance.
“You see, Hancock, at some point we’re going to need to work out who’s boss, and I thought this fight might serve as a good icebreaker. I don’t want you casting your eyes toward Canada, and I suspect you don’t want me casting my eyes toward the States. Just a guess. I figured we could use mutual Eissler tags to make our territories official and avoid needless conflict.”
I could live with that. “What are you offering? There are a lot more Arms under my command.”
“Offering?” Armenigar said, a pure growl of a word. She looked at her hands, and then sighed. “How about my word of honor to follow your commands in the upcoming fight?”
Hmm. There was a lot of juice emphasis in that statement, and more than a bit of anger. I needed to figure this out, quickly, or I would be eating dirt. Our only prior in-person contact came during the Detroit fight, where she had just barged in and did whatever she felt like doing. Our indirect contacts were more common, such as Giselle’s joining of my organization and several visits from Zielinski, which she had purchased with information. I didn’t understand her personality, save for the fact she considered it her right to do whatever she felt like doing and that she used sex as her primary recruiting method. Her word of honor meant a lot to her, though. I bet she didn’t give it lightly or often. This made her more extreme than I was, and explained her dislike of Keaton, who held to her word only as long as it suited her and it made sense – which meant most of the time, but not always. I wondered how Armenigar had avoided killing all the Canadian Focuses, though. Focuses would betray their word in a heartbeat to preserve their households.
“Our agreement needs to be deeper than that,” I said. “My people recently made a breakthrough regarding Focus technology, one aspect of which allows a Focus to give juice to an Arm.” A breakthrough I had explicitly forbidden Giselle from passing along to the Canadians. “Our enemy’s spies likely know about this. I could easily see her offering this to any of my allies who don’t have this technology as an inducement to change sides. Thus, you and your Focuses need to be assured of having this technology already, before the fight.”
“Oh, good thinking,” Armenigar said. She smiled and cracked her knuckles, a sound loud enough to worry three of the nearest guards. “Along those lines, we also might want to discuss what you’re going to do with the psychotic pipsqueak if she survives Patterson’s captivity. Similarly, we also might want to discuss our other mutual enemies, the Hunters.”
“I’m claiming command of the fight against the Hunters.” That command was not negotiable.
“I’m much better at wilderness combat than you are,” Armenigar said.
“Personal combat, or commanding others?”
“Both.”
“I’m still claiming overall command. My estimate is that we’re going to need over five hundred Transforms and normals for that fight.” I wanted to rip her head off for her non-cooperation. That was my fight! Not anyone else’s!
“Five hundred! Gah,” Armenigar said, spitting. “You can take overall command. I want you to agree to make me one of your chief lieutenants, though. Now.”
“I can do that. You’ll be joining Amy Haggerty and Duke Hoskins, a Noble, in that position. I expect others, as well.”
“Such as your cute Boston Focus, perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“I can live with that,” Armenigar said. “Does this satisfy your needs? I don’t have much experience in urban combat leadership, so for this fight, you’d probably best not put me in charge of troops, but I doubt you’re going to find a better combatant, hand to hand or with firearms.”
She had a point, there. “Patterson’s going to go after your mind.”
“Meaning do I get all gooey around Focuses? Well, I do, but Patterson’s tried for me before and failed. She’s got more screws loose than a hardware store in an earthquake. If she tries to pin me down with her witchery, she might win, but I’m tough, and trying to beat down my resistance would use up enough of her personal attention to leave her vulnerable to the rest of you.”
I wondered where and when Patterson ‘tried for her’, but I didn’t read any of Patterson’s foul tags on Armenigar. I would save my curiosity for later, though. Armenigar would make a hell of an ally in this fight, just for her fighting abilities and her resemblance to, um, Mt. Unaffectable. I decided I needed to agree to the tagging before she said something to piss me off and make me lose my cool.
“Let’s do it.”
I wanted a pr
oper and visible ceremony, one including Giselle, which took us an hour to properly set up. All those half-assed half-tag-them-as-they-run-by tags I had ordered, without ceremonies, had sapped my will to do anything without a proper ceremony. Armenigar rolled her eyes at my elaborations, but went along anyway. I did, eventually, figure out one of the reasons she was a little angry at me: she had missed out on the clearing of Chicago. I had held a big fight and didn’t invite her! That was horrible, more of an insult than an oversight.
Where things turned complex was the juice pattern technology negotiation, which, alas, needed to involve the Focuses. Focus Larson’s juice-level connections were through the Borealis Barony, not Armenigar. Armenigar’s Calgary Focuses were, well, not combat quality, with which I empathized. Still, Larson’s pull among the Canadian Focuses was large enough to allow her to negotiate for them, and along with Tonya, Lori and Polly we worked out a deal that essentially joined the Canadian Focuses to the Network and Council (or whatever our witches replaced it with) in return for access to the juice pattern technology. Assuming, of course, that we were successful at stripping every last vestige of the first Focuses’ political power from them.
I made it simple for everyone. “The juice pattern technology is mine,” I said to the group in the Lodge wine room. “So, today, is the Network. I don’t give a shit what you Focuses do with the Council. The Network is open to all Transforms – it’s not just a Focus Network any more, it’s the Transform Network. No one gets the juice music technology or anything else we come up with unless they’re part of the Transform Network. As soon as we get this worked out, we’re going to require everyone in the Transform Network to be tagged to each other, peer to peer and up and down. Not dominance tags, but some form of tag strong enough to prevent casual betrayal. I’d prefer mutual full tags, but I’m open to suggestions on that.”
“So,” Tonya said, “You’re declaring the Carol Hancock Arm dictatorship?”
“For the moment. Once we can work out the mutual tagging technology, it’ll be back to politics as usual, save without the betrayals and backstabbing. Or at least less backstabbing.”
“Keaton demanded I accept her tag,” Tonya said.
“One way dominance tags are for Arms, for punishment, and for training situations,” I said. After dealing with Elspeth and Morris, and seeing what dominance tags did to Focuses long term, there was no way I was going to allow this new organization to be corrupted by the standard use of dominance tags. Dominance tags were bad enough on the Arms, and we were built to take them. “Keaton’s idea of putting dominance tags on the Focuses to routinely control them was a mistake I’m not going to make. You have my word I’m not going to be making demands along those lines on any fellow Network leaders.” My comment satisfied the witches, though I could see the shifty little Focus political gears whirring in their heads. I could practically hear them thinking that a day without backstabbing was like a day without sunshine.
Finally, Armenigar and I tagged each other, a proper ceremony in the giant Lodge common room. I was dominant when she was in the US, and she was dominant when I was in Canada. The effects were interesting, as we passed something of ourselves to the other through the Eissler full tags, which I hadn’t realized were deep enough to handle that sort of thing. After the tag exchange, I felt twice as powerful as before, and my confidence in being able to handle absolutely anything was way up. Armenigar said she felt light on her feet and full of beans, and itching to spar with someone. So we all trooped down to the practice yard and got to watch Viscount Kevin, Amy Haggerty, Sky and Lori (of all people) gang up on Armenigar. She pasted them all and had the time of her life.
Armenigar was a hell of an addition to my army. I assigned Amy and Giselle the task of teaching Armenigar our group Arm combat signals and techniques. The only downside to Armenigar, although it wasn’t much of a downside, was that her predator effect was only about as potent as Mary’s, even after the Eissler tag. I guess you can’t be absolutely best at everything, even if you are Armenigar. The weakness in her Arm charisma explained why Armenigar hadn’t walked into Keaton’s lair and just taken over years ago. Although she could physically beat Keaton, Keaton could have humiliatingly out-faced her. Standoff.
Keaton? Well, once Armenigar and I tagged each other, Keaton was no longer an issue. We didn’t even need to talk about it.
Keaton no longer stood a chance against either of us.
---
This moment had filled my dreams since I became an Arm. I stood on the top of the bunny slope, or what would be the bunny slope once the snow began to fall in earnest this winter. The entire camp gathered around below me, the normals, Transforms, Monsters, Focuses, Crows, Nobles and Arms. All four hundred or so listening eagerly to every word I spoke, despite my current predatory nature. My army. Mine.
I welcomed them, thanked them, told them about what had been going on with Keaton and Bass, told jokes about the mud, and prepared their minds and souls for the battle. All the normal stuff any charismatic leader would say.
The day turned overcast, darkening toward the seasonally early sunset. My army had turned the bowl below into a pit of mud, aided by the last week of rain. They arranged themselves into households, the taller Nobles shunted to the sides and back to keep them from blocking the view. Even their Monsters came to listen, though despite Occum’s assurances, I still couldn’t believe they would all understand me.
Now, for the good stuff. All around me, my army listened attentively.
“What we’re fighting for is much more important than who we’re fighting against. We’re fighting for Transform lives, present and future. I and my closest allies, the Crows Sky and Gilgamesh, the Focuses Rickenbach and Rizzari, and someone you may have thought dead, Dr. Henry Zielinski, have been working for years on what we call the Household Redefinition Project.” The last got the attention of the Crow Masters and Nobles, who still venerated him as the Good Doctor. Stature-wise, Hank was worth his weight in gold, even if he was independent as all hell.
“The heart of the project is to bring all the Transforms together within households. The project isn’t finished, because we haven’t yet fully integrated in the Nobles and Arms, but even there we’re making progress. It starts with adding Crows to Focus households, using mutual tags and Affinity links to defuse worries and tensions.
“A Crow-Focus household has many advantages over the existing household. A Crow can manage the dross in a household, making it such that households don’t ‘go bad’, meaning the household doesn’t need to move because of ‘bad juice’ problems. Ever. A Crow can train a Focus to move juice more efficiently. Working together, a Crow and a Focus can tune the tags of individual Transforms, so that the Focuses produce less dross and waste less juice. They can also tune the household juice structure, again increasing juice moving efficiency, and also, while working together, tune the juice structures of individual Transforms to better fit the household and heal the juice structure damage so common in older Transforms.
“This isn’t free, though the cost involved is in training, both for the Focuses and Crows involved. Physical fitness is necessary for all Major Transforms, as it allows them to better manipulate juice. In addition, the Focus will need to learn a form of juice pattern manipulation developed by Dr. Henry Zielinski and others, termed juice music, and the cross-Major Transform tagging technology Gilgamesh and I developed. The Crow will need to learn a form of dross construct manipulation developed by the Crow Sky and Dr. Lori Rizzari, termed tuning. At the level needed for household support, these techniques are simple enough for any hard working Crow or Focus to learn.
“The benefits of the household redefinition project are immense. A redefined Transform household will be able to expand to approximately seventy-five Transforms – seventy-five! – including ten more male Transforms than the usual household allows.”
Up to that point, my audience had been wary and puzzled. Hearing the numbers, they gasped, and then roared. I let them
demonstrate for several minutes, and then grabbed their attention again.
“We aren’t done yet. We’ve already found ways for Arms to join with many households in an Arm’s territory, allowing the more talented Focuses to support Arms with juice. Arms linked to households in this fashion can protect them from free Monsters and Beasts, as well as select new Transforms, so the households are no longer dependent on the clinics to choose their members for them. And we expect more benefits to come. In addition, we’re working with the Nobles on how to integrate the Noble Baronies into the mix. Finishing this will take ongoing research, research we’re not going to be suppressing, unlike the first Focuses.
“This is what unconstrained research looks like. Life! And this is what the first Focuses have been stopping. And this is why the first Focuses oppose us. Now it’s time to finish the job. We’re going to take the reins of power from the first Focuses! We’re going to bring down their web of intrigue, blackmail, and assassinations. Today, we fight for the future of Transform humanity, and we strike at the bitch spider sitting in the center of that web, Shirley Patterson herself!”
The audience roared again, now all as a single predator.
I smiled.
---
We wouldn’t roll at my publically stated deadline. Luckily for me, and everyone within shirt grabbing and spitting distance, I had built far more slack into the schedule than anyone but Gerry and myself knew. All but three of our vehicles were idling and ready, and of the three that were not, two would be ready momentarily. The last, a school bus from Focus O’Donnell’s household, sat in a puddle of oil. Blown head gasket, someone said, but that didn’t sound right as I thought diesel engines didn’t have head gaskets.
There’s a reason I’m not suited to run logistics.
“Giselle, I’ve changed my mind,” I said, sitting down next to Arm Debardelaben, in one of the three busy logistics tents. The metal folding chair creaked under my weight and the temporary wooden floor groaned. Giselle looked up at me and put her pen down on the paper covered folding table. The other four people in the tent studiously ignored us. Gerry had Giselle doing paperwork, but Giselle was no fan of the ink smudge brigade, and the tension showed.
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 29
