Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  “Only one Arm, as I said,” Dan said. “Amy Haggerty.”

  “Not the Commander?”

  “I’m not familiar with any ‘Commander’, but, no, just Haggerty,” Dan said. “She seemed reasonable. For an Arm.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Nancy said. “I don’t believe any of this.” She paused, and the pistol wavered near Sylvie’s head. “Come with me, Dan. I can make them buy you a plane ticket, too.”

  “No,” Dan said. He walked toward Nancy, calm and slow. “These people have been helping us. Why mess that up?” His voice was firm and commanding, but not threatening.

  “I’m… I’m…” Nancy’s resistance to Gail’s charismatic pressure collapsed and the pistol wavered, away from Sylvie’s head. Dan, lightning quick, grabbed the pistol out of Nancy’s hand, unchambered the bullet, clicked on the safety and stuck the pistol in the back of his pants.

  Ex-military, Gail decided. Nothing of the juice was involved in his quick move.

  “What’s wrong with my finger?” Nancy said, eyeing the trigger finger Gail had numbed. No, she wasn’t ex-military.

  “Outside,” Gail said, to Nancy. “Now.” As she spoke she moved juice to Sylvie as Gilgamesh moved the dross off Sylvie. Gail also gave all her Transforms their juice back – she had lost track and noticeably shorted them during the confrontation. Sylvie staggered and fell into Kurt’s arms, Kurt with murder in his eyes.

  Gail would keep her word and not harm Nancy. Or let her guards harm Nancy. However, she wasn’t letting that crazy back into her house ever again. Nor would she be unnumbing Nancy’s trigger finger. At least for now.

  ---

  “…and that was what happened to me the first time these idiot Progenitors called me up north,” Nancy said. She had been bending Dan’s ear in the courtyard while Gail repaired the damage to her household and used Gilgamesh’s walkie to – barely, due to range issues – talk to the Commander and politely ask her to send over Arm Haggerty. Arm Hancock said Haggerty would show up in a few hours. The October night wasn’t too cold, and the mist from earlier had stopped.

  Nancy hadn’t apologized.

  Dan the Goldilocks had mostly calmed down. He didn’t react when Gail accidentally shorted him.

  He also started questioning her as soon as she entered the courtyard. “Focus Rickenbach, how familiar are you with Arm Haggerty? How much should I trust my impression of her as ‘reasonable for an Arm’?” Dan paused and frowned. “Also, do you have any idea how I know all these things that keep popping into my head?”

  “What other things are ‘popping into your head’?” Gail asked. She took a seat at the wooden picnic table, back to the table and facing Dan and Nancy as they sat on old vinyl beach chairs.

  “Well, which of your people are Transforms and which aren’t,” Dan said. He drew his jacket close against the cold mist. “The woman Nancy grabbed was what the brochures term a Focus attendant. The tall guy who was with us in the car, the one with the fly-away hair, the one I don’t see unless I concentrate, is a Crow.”

  Gilgamesh, who stood invisible ten feet away, in an unlit part of the courtyard, smiled. Dan didn’t see Gilgamesh now.

  “You’re what I and a few others term ‘prodigies’. Transforms with innate talents better than the rest.” Gail made sure Nancy knew what she thought of her; Nancy was no prodigy. Petty, yes, but Gail was in a mood. “Being a prodigy is a mixed blessing at best. I’m one, and I’m still catching heat for it.”

  “So, tell me, what’s the point at being better at being a Goldilocks when there aren’t many of us to start with, and nobody understands what we can do?” he said.

  “The authorities miss most of the Goldilocks,” Gail said. “Most aren’t even aware of what they are. The only ‘standard’ talent a Goldilocks gets to start with is the juice balancing trick, and the only ‘standard’ later trick they acquire as a mature Goldilocks is natural metasense shielding.” She paused. “You aren’t standard.”

  “So Arm Hancock’s list of absurd things…”

  “…is about you, not the average Goldilocks.” Gail smiled. Nancy twitched, about to run, but for some reason her legs wouldn’t move. Gail smiled some more. “Let me tell you a story about the perils of being a prodigy, from last year…”

  ---

  “So you’re Gail Rickenbach,” the Focus said. Gail nodded. All the Focuses involved with the Transform rights effort had pulled up their households and made their way as fast as they could to St. Louis for the meeting. Well, not St. Louis, but the nearby Babler Memorial State Park and campground. Before this, Gail had only met three of the Focuses involved in the Transform rights effort in person, all who lived within a few hours’ drive of Detroit.

  “I’m Cathy Elspeth. We need to have a little talk.” Cathy motioned to the side, down a path by the creek, and Gail followed. Focus Elspeth sounded average on the telephone, but in person her voice was so much richer, melodic and forceful. She was one of the more beautiful Focuses, which was saying a lot, given the normal Focus range of beauty. Her inner beauty was dimmed, though, and her juice structure didn’t come close to matching her physical beauty, her statuesque figure, her rich blonde movie-star hair and her riveting deep blue eyes. She frowned, though, and Gail suspected she had messed something up again. What now?

  “Is there something wrong?” Gail said. Walnut trees and white oaks arched above the narrow path, and dogwoods draped themselves over the creek. A troop of cub scouts played some sort of game in the next campground over. The game seemed to involve a lot of enthusiastic shouting.

  “Yes,” Cathy said. “You need to tone down that overactive charisma of yours, and you need to do so now.” Guards followed tactfully behind their Focuses, but the two Focuses didn’t go far.

  “I don’t understand,” Gail said. Her charisma had come in strong, according to Beth and her household. Beth hadn’t complained, but she had focused her own charisma on Gail whenever Gail let her charisma loose. Gail had practiced, and gotten quite good at wielding her charisma – and quite good at reading the charismatic capabilities of other Focuses, as well. It wasn’t as if she would be twirling Focus Elspeth in circles, as Elspeth’s charisma was the strongest she had seen in any other Focus (though Gail suspected Tonya’s charisma would turn out to be just as hellish).

  “It’s attracting attention,” Cathy whispered. “The wrong sorts of attention. I heard about it from Winifred herself, and that’s not a good thing. They watch out for Focuses with top-end charisma, and see them as resources to be either dealt with or harnessed.”

  Winifred. Shit, Focus Elspeth was talking about Focus Adkins, her own private backyard Focus Bitch!

  “They?” Gail’s first instinct was to find the nearest broomstick and shove it up Adkins’ ass. She didn’t like bitch Adkins, never had, never would. It took most of her willpower to be civil around her.

  “The leading first Focuses,” Elspeth said. “Who else?”

  Gail nodded. There was no reason to take out her anger toward Adkins and the other monstrous first Focuses on Cathy Elspeth. “I understand. I just haven’t ever thought of myself as a resource to be harnessed. Especially by the original Focuses. Who…”

  Cathy turned to Gail and captured Gail’s eyes with her charisma. It was like looking into the yawning pits of hell. “I’m a first Focus, Gail. I like you, and I like what you’re doing, but don’t make it impossible for me to save your life. You don’t understand what’s going on and you don’t even want to. Understand?”

  Shit! She had walked herself into another one, this time insulting an original Focus, and one who wasn’t on her list of original Focus leaders, at that. “Yes, ma’am,” Gail said, feeling about two inches high. Again.

  ---

  Dan’s smile matched Nancy’s frown, both well dampened by the evening mist. “I’m not a Major Transform, though, ma’am,” Dan said.

  Gail shrugged. She had been metasensing him for several hours, and had picked up on several brain anom
alies. “The reason the researchers divide Transforms from Major Transforms has to do with juice count, not innate talents or learned skills,” Gail said. She leaned back and rested her elbows on the picnic table behind her. The cool mist felt good on her skin.

  “And Sports?”

  “Sports are Major Transforms, at least by juice count.” Gail smiled a wicked grin. “Nancy here is a Sport. She’s a flawed Focus, and if there’s anything she gets out of being a Sport to compensate, I haven’t noticed it yet. There might be nothing at all.”

  Nancy’s frown turned into a glower, but she didn’t say anything. Her survival and freedom now depended on Gail’s good will, and fear now joined her anger. Which pleased Gail no end.

  “And me?”

  “Your juice count is standard for a Transform. You regenerate your juice at the same speed a woman Transform does.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I lowered your juice and measured its recovery rate.”

  “Shouldn’t I have noticed that?”

  “A regular Transform would. In addition, you possess several tiny brain abnormalities the other Transforms don’t possess. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the researchers are wrong and Goldilocks represent an entirely different axis of development than Transforms and Major Transforms.”

  Dan stood and paced. Gail noticed fraying on several of the vinyl straps of his now empty chair, and two were gone completely. She sighed. The household needed to replace their outdoor furniture, and they just didn’t have the money. “They’ll turn me into a lab rat if they ever find out.”

  “Uh huh. Let’s not tell them.” When Gail turned to Nancy, the weak link in the ‘not tell the researchers’ plan, Dan echoed her movement. “So, tell me, Dan, about the morality of all of this.” Whether Nancy should live or not.

  He paused, in thought. “When I was in the Army, I shot at people because the government told me to. This is different.” He eyed her. “You feel the same.”

  “You might say that.” If Dan tried to kill Nancy, Gail would have done her utmost to stop him. She didn’t need to tell Nancy that, though. “There are other ways to dodge the researchers, though. Joining up with a politically powerful Major Transform and have her protect you is another.” Of which I am not.

  Dan caught her unspoken comment and nodded. He finished his pacing and sat back down. “You were going to tell us about Arm Haggerty.”

  “There’s a lot to tell,” she said. “Not long after the Battle in Detroit she went to Europe to help an Arm there, Erica Eissler, defeat Europe’s leading bad-guy Major Transform, the Purifier. She came back a hero because she was able to kill him, when her allies couldn’t, which was a good trick for a young Arm.

  “That’s when I first met her and got involved in her life…”

  ---

  “You’re unfit to rule the Arms,” the Arm in black called out. One other Arm stood at her side, a bald Arm who appeared to be a man.

  Gail twitched at the sound of the Arm’s voice, pregnant with power, and wanted to vanish. Just up and vanish. What were she and Detroit’s other Focuses doing here in this empty warehouse by the Detroit River docks? Hell, she was stuck in what she decided was the third most important seat of honor, immediately to the left of Arm Keaton. On Arm Keaton’s right sat the Focus Bitch Atkins herself, and standing behind the Arm was Wendy Mann, Arm Keaton’s closest confidant. On Gail’s left sat Beth Hargrove, Gail’s closest friend among the Detroit Focuses. Beth shivered, here against her better judgment.

  Then there were the other Arms. Arms everywhere. Save for Arm Keaton, they all stood, all ready to fight at the slightest twitch.

  The empty warehouse held no furnishings but the four chairs. A few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling lit the expanse, casting odd shadows in the corners. The closed warehouse doors rattled with the frigid wind, and the temperature in the warehouse lingered barely above freezing. No one here seemed to care.

  “Who stands with me?” Arm Keaton said.

  “I will,” said an Arm. “I, Florence Rayburn, stand with you.”

  “I as well,” said another Arm. “I, Christine Naylor, stand with you.” Arm Naylor spoke with a noticeable urban New Jersey accent, and looked like she would rather be anywhere else than here.

  Another Arm shook her head. “I, Sylvia Bass, decline to stand with either party.” That hungry-gazed Arm disturbed Gail more than the others.

  “I, Rose Webberly, also decline to stand with either party,” the black Arm said.

  All eyes turned to the one last undeclared Arm, a Hispanic looking woman dressed in red silk, with a katana hanging down her back, in appearance a nightmarish Samurai. “I…” she said, and then firmed her lips. “I, Mary Sibrian, stand with Amy Haggerty.” She bowed to Arm Keaton, and then went to stand at the side of the Arm in black. Amy Haggerty. Arm Sibrian was the youngest Arm of the lot; to Gail’s metasense she had transformed only four months ago. All Gail knew about her was that she was the fastest Arm ever to graduate.

  “And you, Hancock?” Arm Keaton said. “Is this what you want to be doing?”

  The bald guy smiled. Shit, that’s Carol Hancock! Now Gail wanted to just die. She owed Arm Hancock her life, and the last thing she wanted to do was alienate her, on the wrong side of some Arm contest far beyond her comprehension.

  “Of course it isn’t. You’re both familiar with my opinion on the subject, though.”

  Cryptic. Was she supporting Haggerty or Keaton? Both or neither? The other Arms were bemused by the Commander’s behavior, save for Arm Haggerty, who was angry.

  “You still challenging me?” Arm Keaton asked Arm Haggerty. “Backed as I am?”

  “You refuse to bow to the Arm who destroyed the Purifier?” Arm Haggerty said. Gail had never heard of the Purifier, but she had the feeling whoever he was, he wasn’t a local.

  The Arms’ answers were in their eyes. Keaton stood and disarmed herself, and half a dozen knives, three foreign-manufactured guns, and a belt of hand grenades fell to the ground. Gail shook her head, wondering where Keaton had been keeping the hand grenades. She hadn’t been wearing them before, as far as Gail could tell.

  Was the audience expected to fight? No, clearly not, as all the other Arms save the Commander backed away. The Commander walked forward and stood between them, a sly grin on her face. “My bosses will now commence to fight,” she said, and gave Gail an obvious wink. Now that Gail knew who the unknown Arm dressed as a bald guy was, she couldn’t keep her eyes off her, or the Arm’s juice structure. Lovely.

  Bosses? The Commander was supposed to be the number two Arm, Keaton’s trusted lieutenant. How did Arm Haggerty get to be number two?

  The damned Arms ought to publish a newsletter.

  No wonder this felt screwy, Gail decided. Screwy and arranged ahead of time, and a bunch of what was going on had to be funny Arm psychology and juice crud. Nothing made sense. What benefit did Arm Keaton gain from the Focuses who backed her? Why did she disarm herself? What benefit did Arm Haggerty gain from those two hidden Crows? Not that they were hidden from Gail, who found Crows’ hiding capabilities easy to penetrate.

  Haggerty and Keaton moved like lightning as they fought. Gail had seen Arm Keaton fight before, and she was surprised to see that Arm Haggerty was a better fighter. Was Haggerty to be the next boss of the Arms?

  “Probably not,” the Commander whispered into her ear. Gail hadn’t sensed her moving, but the Commander now stood behind Gail. Like Keaton, the Commander didn’t have any problem ‘reading’ Gail’s mind.

  “She fights better than Ma’am Keaton,” Gail said.

  “The Hero fights a lot better than damn near anyone else does,” the Commander said, using Arm Haggerty’s new nickname. “You’ll see that combat abilities are only part of the fight, though. They’re just starting.”

  Gail waited. About a minute later, Haggerty vanished from sight and continued to pummel Keaton. A few more pummels later, Keaton began to glow like an arc li
ght. The other Focuses hissed and backed off, but Gail smiled. Arm predator, the equivalent of Focus charisma, in actual visible form. Fun to see, as long as she wasn’t the target. Poor Beth Hargrove huddled behind Gail, peering over Gail’s shoulder, hanging on tightly. Focus Adkins wasn’t as demonstrative, but she stood and put Focus Mann between her and the fight, just as disquieted as Hargrove was.

  Focus Mann also smiled at Keaton’s predator.

  “Is it my imagination, or is Haggerty not fighting as well as she was before?” Gail said. The Commander chuckled.

  “Rather more perceptive than Hargrove, here, who can’t even see me,” the Commander said. “Focus Rickenbach, you’re a treasure. You’re correct. Can you figure out why?”

  What had changed? Ah. Haggerty couldn’t match Keaton’s predatory presence, probably because of Keaton’s juice links with the Detroit Focuses.

  Oh. The Commander backed both of them equally.

  “Gold star to the Focus,” the Commander said. “It’ll be over soon.”

  It was. About forty seconds later, both Keaton and Haggerty began to move much faster than before. In the process, Haggerty became visible again. Now, the blows came faster than Gail could keep track of. The famous Arm burn. Impressive.

  Suddenly, it was over. Not because Arm Haggerty was dead, wounded or drained of juice. No, something in Keaton’s predator had tipped the fight. Haggerty now groveled to Keaton, at her feet, exposing her throat to the senior Arm.

  “Say it,” Keaton said.

  “I acknowledge your victory.”

  “Accept my tag, then,” Keaton demanded.

  “I’d rather die.”

  “Knife,” Keaton said, and Arm Rayburn tossed one to her. Keaton held the knife to Haggerty’s neck.

  The Commander walked over to them. “Sorry, not a good idea.” Gail hadn’t felt the Commander leave her side.

  Keaton and the Commander locked eyes, and neither backed down. Keaton sighed, an overblown sigh that had to be all an act. She kicked Haggerty in the ribs, hard, and then knelt on her back, holding Haggerty’s right arm twisted backwards. “Make me an offer, then.”