Haggerty whispered something. Keaton shook her head and pulled the arm tighter. Haggerty grunted and whispered something more. Keaton shook her head again and put more pressure on Haggerty’s ribs.
Idiot predators, Gail thought. Why not just agree to a tag for a year or something equally intelligent?
The Commander caught her eye, and smiled. Keaton glanced at the Commander, who raised an eyebrow and motioned with her eyes at Gail. Keaton looked at Gail – Gail quailed in terror, a rabbit under the gaze of Keaton’s predator, and then back at the Commander. Keaton frowned and then whispered something to Haggerty. Haggerty nodded.
“I accept your offer of tagged service for a year,” Arm Keaton said. The juice moved. Gail felt a surge of stark panic. Somehow, the Commander and Keaton had each plucked her idea from her mind.
Keaton and Haggerty stood, and the Arms walked back, together, to where the Focuses had been huddled together. The glare Arm Haggerty gave Gail was one of disgust and dislike.
“Off you go, Haggerty,” Keaton said. “Start teaching my students some of those wonderful new combat techniques of yours.” Haggerty limped off, and Keaton turned to Focus Mann and Focus Adkins. “Thank you for your support.”
Then she turned to Gail and just stared at her. Gail wanted to run and hide, but couldn’t move.
“You think she’s too cheeky for you?” the Commander said.
Arm Keaton turned away from Gail, who breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. “That’s my Focus you’re making goo goo eyes at, Commander. As you well know.”
So the attraction between the two of them was that obvious. Gail had hoped it wasn’t. It was embarrassing to find an Arm so compatible.
“Another day then?” the Commander said.
“You’re not going to challenge Haggerty today?” Arm Keaton said.
“Wouldn’t be fair,” the Commander said. “Next week, perhaps. Without the Focuses.” She gave Gail a quick glare, which Gail interpreted as ‘you’re far too dangerous for your own good’, then sauntered off.
“Besides,” Keaton whispered to Gail, a moment later. “I like cheeky.”
---
“Good story, but it doesn’t exactly show this Haggerty’s personality,” Nancy said. “Crazy Arms. The lot of them.”
“Says the Focus Sport who was holding my household leader friend at gunpoint not too long ago,” Gail said. “We’re all a little crazy, all us Major Transforms.”
“Point made,” Nancy said. She wiped mist from her eyebrows. “You ever going to unfreeze my legs?”
“When it’s time for you to leave,” Gail said.
“At least you’re giving me Major Transform status,” Nancy said. “Unlike the Clinic bozos.”
Dan got up to pace again, upset. Gail checked to see if she had shorted him, and realized his discomfort came from the cold. Without a Major Transform’s metabolism, he reacted like a normal. That problem would make this quest into the arctic, at this time of year, not only unpleasant but also potentially dangerous. She wiggled Anita’s juice to get her to come over, and asked her if she could find someone to dig up a warmer coat for Dan.
“You got involved in her life after that incident?” Dan asked.
“Uh huh. She was lonely and I was willing to talk.” Gail smiled. “I like her more than she likes me, though, and most of our talks were like this, outside at night.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ever read any comic books, Dan?”
He frowned at her. Then he shook his head, thinking she was crazy. Gail didn’t care, as the explanation had come from Daisy, Van’s overly-brainy sister, now a month into her PhD program over at U of M.
“She’s horribly conflicted by her life as an Arm. She wants to do good, and spends her nights on the street looking for bad guys to kill, or tie up and leave for the cops. Only she’s an Arm, and has to kill people to survive, about one Transform every two weeks. So the good she does doesn’t balance the evil she’s forced to do. She’s also smart, and apparently Arm Keaton’s training teaches the Arms that lying to yourself, as any normal person would do in this situation, is counter-survival. Thus the conflicts.”
“How did talking to you help?”
“In two ways,” Gail said. “I am a goody-two-shoes.” Gail laughed, thinking about some of her conversations with Amy. Amy would have liked Gail more if Gail had been willing to join Amy on her nightly patrols, or if Gail developed her Focus capabilities to make herself a proper nighttime vigilante. “Think of me as the plucky reporter the vigilante confides in because of my own daytime non-violent vigilante work against, at times, the same enemies.” Dan nodded, understanding. Nancy’s disgust at Gail faded as well. Aha! Gail thought. Nancy could sift truth from lies, and interpolate further truths from Gail’s words and mind. The Focus-Sport had been unwilling to tell Gail anything about her Major Transform abilities. Getting past the tricks guarding Gail’s mind wasn’t easy. “The other is that Arm Haggerty wanted to complain about the other Arms. Amy may be a hero, but the rest of them are not.” Most were villains someone needed to stop, in Amy’s opinion.
“I’m convinced,” Dan said. Anita appeared with a proper winter coat, which he accepted, and put on in place of his flimsy jacket. “Whatever this quest is, it’s on the side of the good guys.” He, too, could read her, but whatever techniques he used wasn’t anything Gail understood, or could stop.
“I’m not, but I guess I’m willing to talk to her. I’m hoping…” Nancy’s voice faded and Gail caught her using the juice in some obscure fashion. “Fucking shit! You sold me out again! The entire Arm pack is coming here!”
Gail stood and focused her metasense, picking up nothing. “How do you know?”
Nancy didn’t answer.
“I didn’t invite them,” Gail said. “I only invited Arm Haggerty.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, Arms don’t respect boundaries at all well. We’re going to have to work hard to make sure they don’t make a hash of things.”
Dan Freeman: October 9, 1971
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Keaton said. She and her Arm pack spread themselves across the residential street in front of Gail’s apartment building.
Why did Gail drag me out here with her, anyway? To be her bodyguard?
Gail terrified me, if I thought too much about her, what she did and what she knew. The minds of all her Transforms and most of her normal household members appeared to be open to her. If she wanted, she could have ruled them with an iron fist as a totalitarian tyrant. The rumors and tabloids often referred to Focuses as enslaving their households, but only because they were the ones who controlled the juice.
They underestimated the effects of Focus charisma and the rest of the tricks someone like Gail could use. Worse, she had, once, stopped me from stalking over to Nancy and shaking some sense into the Focus-Sport by sticking out her arm and physically restraining me. She possessed the same, well, superhuman strength as an Arm, or at least in the same ballpark as an Arm. How? This wasn’t in the literature or rumor mill at all! I had dealt with bruisers in the Army, people I had been glad were nominally on my side because we wore the same uniform and saluted the same flag, and that tiny wisp of a Focus had the strength of one of those six-foot-plus bodybuilders.
“Arm Keaton, I invited Arm Haggerty, and only Arm Haggerty, ma’am, because I’m trying to talk some sense into the ‘household secret’ we touched on earlier.”
Gail inserted herself practically in the middle of the scattered group of Arms. I spotted the one called Betsy Wetsy and put myself on the other side of Gail from her, pulling the nice warm coat tight against the damned cold. I needed to change the way I thought. The world of Transforms was a different world, a world where, as far as I could tell, the women ruled and had immense power. Not my world, where the best compliment a woman could give a man was ‘he’s a good provider’, and the best a man could say was ‘she’s good in bed’. In my world, the men protected the women and provided for them, in a
n unequal partnership. Even the hippie subculture, which I had had a few tastes of, treated the women as objects. Sexual objects.
“Things change,” Arm Keaton said. “We’re here to protect Haggerty.”
“So you figured out what happened at Wendy’s place? An unknown enemy is involved, like you were afraid of?”
Oh, and I needed to ditch the instinctive ‘in any field of effort, the worst man is better than the best woman’ crap. Or judging women primarily by their appearance. Or their sexual receptivity. When my instincts said Arm Haggerty was better than the other Arms, I thought I did so because she was better looking than the others.
Mistakes like that could get me killed.
Oh, and the realization that my newfound recognition of my prejudices was the result of my so-called Goldilocks instincts scared the crap out of me. What the fuck was I, anyway?
Keaton turned to the two student Arms. They snapped their attention to her the moment she started speaking. “Listen up. This is called ‘bargaining with a Focus’. Young Arms will have one of two reactions – you will either fall in love with the Focus or think you’re brushing your teeth with a nail file. It’s because our Arm dominance instincts conflict with the Focus’s bargaining instincts. It’s all juice powered shit, so this isn’t something you can just ignore. Nor can you lose your temper over a bit of casual bargaining, even if you think that since this is ‘your Focus’ in ‘your City’, they should obey you without thinking. From a Focus perspective, you’re a fellow sister if you live in a Focus’s city. If you and the Focus don’t get along, expect a bit of backstabbery, cutting comments and the like. Oh, and even if you’ve backstabbed each other in three of your four last deals, the Focus will still expect you to bargain in good faith.”
She’s a teacher! Holy fuck, she’s actually using this situation to teach her student Arms. I had thought the only thing an Arm teacher would teach was how to juice suck victim Transforms.
Gail did her charisma thing, so that she took on a goddess-like glow. Not as goddess-like as when she snarled at Nancy, but definitely inhuman.
What was I sensing and seeing, though? I didn’t have a metasense, and the glow wasn’t physical.
“And if you piss off the Focus, you might see something like this,” Gail said, addressing Keaton’s student Arms. She turned slightly to Keaton. “Or worse.”
“Touché,” Keaton said, crossing her arms and glowering at Gail. “What we found out was that a team of assassins, with one Transform member, attacked Wendy’s compound. We don’t believe the Transform was the leader of the group, but an observer slash participant. They gave Wendy an ultimatum, likely something like ‘either pay us a ton of money, every cent you ever got from the damned Arm, or leave town’.”
“Uh huh, that sounds about right,” Gail said. “Along with ‘we don’t want scum like you in our Region’. The Transform was one of Focus Adkins or Focus Weiczokowski’s, but they weren’t the ones behind this. Any idea who was?”
Keaton shook her head. “It was one of Esther’s goons.”
“And so you’re spoiling for a fight, and hoping the fight might come visit me, here. As always.”
“You do make a hell of a good target,” Keaton said. “Besides, if your ‘household secret’ turns out to be the bad guy behind this, all we’re risking is Haggerty.”
Gail snorted. “Not counting me and my household?”
“Huh,” Keaton said. She turned to her two student Arms. They both appeared a bit flummoxed. “So, Betsy, what do you remember from my earlier lecture about Focus Rickenbach that explains why she’s standing here, and nowhere else?”
“Ma’am, the average Focus’s metasense range is 287 feet, which is also her range for juice control,” Betsy Wetsy said. “Focus Rickenbach’s range is estimated to be around 400 feet. She is currently 372 feet from the unknown metasense masked Major Transform sitting alone in the apartment courtyard.” She paused. “Ma’am, Focus Rickenbach is controlling the unknown.”
“Huh,” Keaton said. “Keep thinking like that and you may survive your first encounter with a police task force.” She turned to Gail. “She pulled a handgun on you, you partly immobilized her, and Dan showed off some of his ‘I’m more than a drafted Army grunt’ tricks, took the weapon, and now has it in the back of his pants. You trust him but you don’t trust her. Oh, and you should retag him. He shucked the tag in the fracas.”
This time I felt Gail tag me. Damn, she was fast with the juice!
---
“Arm Haggerty,” Nancy said. We had trucked back to the courtyard, where Nancy awaited, wet but not shivering. I marveled at her aplomb, and didn’t envy her position.
Arm Haggerty claimed my chair and sat next to Nancy. “I can feel your connection to the quest,” she said. “Can you?”
Nancy nodded.
“You don’t like Arms.”
“I would rather none of the Arms were involved in this mission, but what I want doesn’t appear to have much meaning at the moment.” She poked at her dead legs with a left index finger.
Arm Haggerty turned to Gail. “Focus, could you do me a favor and release this woman from your juice hold. I formally take responsibility for her.”
“Good enough for me,” Gail said. Nancy wiggled her legs and stretched them out.
“Who are you, anyway?”
“Focus-Sport Nancy Racshke.”
“The rescuee from the Noble’s quest three years ago,” Arm Haggerty said. “The Progenitors don’t appear to be done with you, then.”
Nancy didn’t answer.
“You don’t trust me.”
“Of course I don’t trust you! You’re an Arm.”
Arm Haggerty shook her head. “We’re not all alike. How much do you know about what happened to Focus Mann?”
“She…” Nancy interrupted herself with a string of profanity. “You think I had something to do with the attack on Wendy’s place?”
“I think your presence there influenced the timing,” Arm Haggerty said. “It’s possible that if you weren’t there an armed attack might have never happened.”
“But the attackers were Focus goons,” Nancy said, leaning back. “Or that’s what Wendy said. I was sleeping when it happened. By the time I woke up and got dressed, it was over.”
The Arm studied Nancy for about a minute, Nancy squirming as she did so. The Arm took out her walkie when she finished. “All clear on this end.”
“She’s part of your damned quest, as you surmised?” Arm Keaton’s crackly voice.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And the other?”
“When I mentioned the possibility, she realized the hypothesis was likely correct.”
I studied Arm Haggerty and Nancy’s interaction closely. She had noticed Nancy’s change in posture and used Nancy’s reactions to read Nancy’s mind.
Or was I mistaken?
“Show her the drawing.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Arm Haggerty took a pencil and ink drawing from the inside of her motorcycle jacket. The drawing was in a plastic protective case, a dark smudge on one side. Dried blood. The Arm wiped the dried blood off and gave the drawing to Nancy.
“Him,” Nancy said, deflated.
“When and where did you meet him?” the Arm said, more of a demand than a question. Her finger remained on the walkie’s transmit button.
“I ran into him back in August while I was hiding from Crow Nameless,” she said. “I, um, have a trick some of the older Focuses would hire me to do, on the sly. For room and board, sorta a protection scheme by them to keep track of me. The work was helping me fight off the call, and it was their way to keep me under their thumbs so I couldn’t answer the call. Anyway, I was living in Addie’s household in Illinois – that’s Focus Addie Hocutt, the Midwest Region president. Anyway, that guy approached me and made me an offer – if I used my metasense fuzzing to allow him to sneak up on Crow Nameless, he would kill the Crow for me.” She paused. “He tried to influence me to m
ake the agreement. Gail can tell you, though, those tricks don’t work well on me.”
Arm Haggerty turned to Gail. “Her mind is twisty like a Crow’s mind,” Gail said.
“Did he just give up and leave?” Arm Haggerty asked.
“Nuh uh,” Nancy said. “When I refused he tried to grab me, but I’m stronger than I look and I broke free. He pulled a gun on me, a pistol with a noise suppressor on it, so I dove into Addie’s swimming pool – above ground swimming pool – and didn’t come up. I also alerted Addie using a trick that later got me kicked out of her place. Her people came running and chased the guy off as he was shooting holes in the pool.” Nancy frowned. “Addie and I thought he was a government agent, likely FBI. Since you’re the FBI expert among the Arms, can you…”
“He’s a Transform,” Arm Haggerty said. “He metasenses, at times, as a Goldilocks. I’m not so sure he is. He’s got immense talents and tricks, and is able to balk Arms and Focuses with ease. He’s not so good with physical disguises, but he is able to disguise his personality, his voice, and the truth.”
“I could have sworn he wasn’t a Transform. He tricked me, didn’t he?”
Arm Haggerty nodded. “Let me tell you a story,” the Arm said. “You still don’t trust me, despite the fact we’re both being called. Perhaps this will help.”
“Gail’s already told me a bunch.”
“Focus Rickenbach doesn’t know this one.” Haggerty stood and told the story, riveting our attention on her using some Arm charisma trick.
---
Lever was the name Carol hung on a woman once named Roxy Raffle, because she couldn’t stand her real name. Lever’s part of my organization because her talents fit it better than Arm Hancock’s organization. You would think a tagged Transform is the last person you would see in an Arm’s organization, but then again, you probably haven’t met Lever, either.
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