Gilgamesh took a deep breath and closed his eyes, required for him to be able to do a deep metasence scan. The Lake Geneva area wasn’t a place for the unwary, and it wasn’t unreasonable to suspect that the Hunters had grabbed local Crows and messed with them, either with threats and blackmail, or outright conversion to the Law. Gilgamesh relaxed when the scan came back clean.
“I have a box of notes, actually,” Haiku said. He was a short man, with East Asian eyes but no accent at all. “Some stolen from a Hunter camp. I’ve taped an index card to something I think you’ll want to take a look at immediately.” Haiku couldn’t keep that smile off his face, as he carried the box forward along the trail to lay on the ground in front of Gilgamesh. The box was about three quarters full of papers, maps and the like.
“Yes?”
“Remember earlier this year, when you said that I was too young to worry about things like Mentors and Gurus?”
Gilgamesh nodded.
“I’m worrying now,” Haiku said, still smiling. “I met a big one out in Portland a while ago. Name of Jester. He bosses around some of the Gurus in the northwest.”
Gilgamesh shrugged and squatted down, leaning against the shiny trunk of an old sycamore. He radiated worry. The deep end of Crow faction politics wasn’t a safe place for a young Crow to be digging. “You want an information trade?”
“Yes.”
“About the Mentors?”
“Absolutely.”
“Very well,” Gilgamesh said. “For ease, I’ll start at the top, understanding that this is what I know, and I should warn you that what I know could easily be wrong or incomplete.” No detailed bargaining, which marked Haiku as one of Gilgamesh’s closer allies. “At the present time, there are six Crow Mentors: Arpeggio, Chevalier, Shadow, Snow, Thomas the Dreamer and, based on what you said, Jester. Arpeggio’s based in the southern great plains and the near southwest, and his top Guru is Hephaestus. Think Crow as engineer and technical wizard – if I hadn’t fallen into the orbit of the Arms, I would have ended up…”
The presentation took just under an hour.
Haiku wasn’t the one.
“Where’s the car?” Tidal Wave said. Crow Tidal Wave appeared just after the gibbous moon reached the zenith, the fourth Crow to visit Gilgamesh this evening. The Saganashkee Slough remained deserted, and the gravel parking lot stood empty. Snow slithered up and down the slopes around the Slough, snake-like and hissing. Crow Tidal Wave was a mercenary Crow, but one of Gilgamesh’s better espionage contacts. It wasn’t easy to convince Crows – local or native to Hunter territory – to pass along any information about the Hunters. In nearly all cases, Gilgamesh needed to resort to bribery to convince the Crows to pass along information on the obvious bad guys.
“A friend of mine will drive up with it after I signal.” Shem, one of Tom’s people, was the driver. He was a member of Carol’s organization, which Gilgamesh and Tom ran in tandem during Carol’s absence.
A moment later, the Crow stood and walked toward Gilgamesh, probably when he spotted the car. He didn’t come closer than 100 yards from Gilgamesh, likely out of mercenary distrust. “Guru Gilgamesh,” Tidal Wave said, coming to a rest at the edge of the parking area. “I’ll leave the packet down here. Come by and take a look at it while I check out the car.”
Tidal Wave was an animal master, with similar skills to that of Sky and Ten Dog, and rumored to be interested in becoming a Crow Master of Nobles. As with most animal masters, Tidal Wave stayed disconnected from civilization. Thus, the payment in a legal car, with a clean title, properly registered to Wisconsin and a properly forged Wisconsin driver’s license.
Gilgamesh looked through the information and didn’t find any issues.
“Perfect,” Tidal Wave said, after looking over the car and attendant documentation. “Everything okay on your end?”
Gilgamesh nodded. “I thank you for your business, Crow Tidal Wave.”
Back where Gail and her crew hid under an ancient weeping willow, Dan stuck his head down to whisper in Gail’s ear. “That’s the one, the Crow with the scent of the man.”
Shit! Just Gail’s luck that their target was climbing into a legit getaway vehicle right when they identified him as their target.
Tidal Wave started the car, put it in gear, and started to drive off.
She juice signaled Dan’s information to the crew. Gilgamesh immediately vanished from Gail’s eyesight and metasense.
Tidal Wave’s car died, Arm Naylor’s doing. He leapt out of the car and started to run down the gravel paved access road, not particularly quickly. Fifty Hunters appeared from invisibility around him, and he froze.
“There are some people who wanna talk to you, mister.” The voice was Christine’s, and as Arm Naylor had explained ahead of time, in field situations she wouldn’t physically appear or show in Gail’s metasense. Tidal Wave looked left and right at the Hunter illusions, turned around, and then drew a long-barreled .707 subgun from under his jacket. That, right there, marked him as something other than a standard Crow. Only idiot Arms carried that particular Remington as a hand held weapon; normally, it came hard-mounted on a jeep or truck.
To Gail, he still metasensed as a Crow.
“Arm Naylor, you risk your life by helping these people,” the man said. His voice was far more commanding than his assumed Tidal Wave voice. He no longer radiated feigned fear. Christine didn’t answer, likely not wanting to advertise her physical location.
“Is there even a Tidal Wave?” Gilgamesh asked. He had taken cover on the other side of the vehicle from the man.
The man laughed. “The information in the packet I gave you is real, Guru Gilgamesh. Be thankful. Today, I’m helping you.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“I think we’re going to have to get a little more threatening if we expect to get any answers,” Dan said, whispering in Gail’s ear again.
She nodded and sent the appropriate juice signal: “on three.”
Three seconds later Gail, Dan, and Gail’s top bodyguards exited from Gilgamesh’s trick tent on the near side of the parking area, set up to mask metasense and odor, at least up to Dan’s odor tracking capabilities. Gail would have liked a Noble nose to test it against, but at the moment, she didn’t have any Nobles in the Chicago area. On the opposite side of the meet-point, where the access road angled toward the main road, Focus Geraldine Caruthers exited Gilgamesh’s second trick tent, with her bodyguard crew. To Gail’s left, Focus Linda Cooley and her people exited their tent, down by the Slough, where the trees and leafless brambles held sway. On the other side of the gravel parking area and back by the access road, on Gail’s right, Sylvie, Tom and twenty of Carol’s top shooters exited the last of Gilgamesh’s trick tents.
“Ah, you’re providing me with a wonderful lesson on why I shouldn’t mess with a top Crow Guru,” the man said. He chuckled and lay down his subgun.
Gail smiled. “Or me,” she said. This had been her plan.
The man snorted. “You, on the other hand, overestimate your capabilities by about two months of training. It’s one of your defining features, Focus Rickenbach. I hope the Hunters never realize this particular weakness of yours.”
“Lay flat on the ground and put your hands behind your back,” Tom said. He strode forward, Carol’s shooters with him, Sylvie by his side. “Now!”
The man turned to Tom and shook his head. “I’m trying to save you from being annihilated by the Hunters, you idiot.”
Tom stopped. “Fine. Keep talking or I start walking. Talk to Gail.”
The man turned to Gail. “Okay, I’ll play your game. Ask me your question.”
“I have lots of questions,” Gail said. “To start with, why did you try and kill Zielinski?”
“By putting him in the no-hope bin I was doing you a favor,” the man said. A cloud scudded over the gibbous moon, and a light flurry of snow began to fall. “Whether he lived or died, the threat…”
�
�…was over,” the man said, from right behind Gail. An élan-polluted weapon, carrying the élan equivalent of a full Arm’s worth of juice, poked her side and pierced her skin. Back where the man was supposed to be, the illusion the man smiled, then vanished in a pop.
“Stop!” Arm Naylor’s said. Everyone froze from the Arm’s tuned predator effect, including Gail. In a hot situation, Gail had trained herself to listen to and obey Arm commands. Arms were so much faster than Gail in these situations, and they always seemed to do the right thing. “He’s got a failsafe weapon inside Gail.”
“Back away with me,” the man told Gail. “The rest of you stay put and don’t try anything, or you’re going to lose your Focus,” he said, to the crowd. Gail didn’t start backing away. “Now! Try anything and the kogatana, which I need to actively stabilize, will go off.”
Kogatana. The word sounded familiar, and Gail searched her memories as she followed orders and backed away from her people. Kurt, the closest to her, nearly panicked, rotating to follow her as she backed off.
Ten paces back, Gail found the reference in her memories, something from a conversation with Lori, Sky and Sadie, a week after Inferno’s arrival in Chicago. The kogatana was the dagger bone weapon of the Japanese female Chimera variant, the Satsujin. They could use it to kill or enslave, but Sadie suspected it had other uses as well. Is that what the man was? That didn’t make any sense. He didn’t show any of the abnormal physical capabilities of any of the Transforms. Any of her Transform bodyguards could take him if he wasn’t using juice and dross tricks. Nor was he at all female.
She could easily believe the man was able to mask himself enough to approach her. She, however, didn’t believe he was strong enough to mask something as potent as a kogatana. It had to be an illusion.
For now, though, she would play along.
“What do you want from me?” Gail asked. Their steps crunched on dead leaves and frozen clumps of mud as they walked.
“You’re going to get me out of here,” the man said. “The kogatana isn’t an illusion.” Poke. Gail bled a little more. “I didn’t need to hide it earlier, because, back then, it didn’t exist save as a piece of bone.”
Oh, crap. “You’re using my juice to make it real.” The man backed her through the branches of a winter-icy bush, its leaves months gone.
“Very good. It’s so nice to talk to a Focus who doesn’t think with her juice. For that, I’ll answer a better question than you’ve asked so far: my goal here, Focus Rickenbach, is to make sure the Hunters don’t destroy everything. Unfortunately, the Transform community isn’t going to take the Hunters seriously, stop their instinctive power games and unite against the enemy until the Hunters kick your asses a few times. It would be best if you survived your ass-kicking”
She shrugged. She had heard this from Van far too many times. He thought they should ignore the Hunters’ ‘phony war’ and attack them first, save that he knew the Transform community wasn’t unified enough to do this. His best idea, to make Tonya a Transform dictator, hadn’t even convinced Gail.
Enough with the game. “How much do you value your life?” she asked, and as she asked, she tagged him. “Go ahead and detonate that thing in me. Tagged, it will destroy you as well.” If her tag didn’t lie, he was a Transform like Dan, a Goldilocks.
“You do have nerve,” he said. They had backed away far enough that Gail lost metasense and juice contact with her Transforms. The man had angled them back toward the main road, though they had another three hundred yards to go. Gail stopped moving, and so did he. She was far stronger than he was.
“Who do you work for? The Progenitors? The Predecessors?” She got in his face, her charisma full-on. He ignored her subliminal charismatic order to drop the kogatana as if she had never given it.
“The idea that they’re separate is a misnomer,” he said. “Where the fuck did you park?”
“A quarter mile up the main road, to the right,” she said.
“Keep walking,” he said, his voice a pained hiss. Gail began to walk again. The bastard had rolled her, likely using her own charisma. “I work for the juice. As do the ancient ones.”
“You want the Transform apocalypse?”
“I want a part of one. Enough of one to cull the herd, but not enough of one to destroy all civilization.”
Gail almost tripped at the hidden racist truths she heard in his voice. “You monster! You want all of Asia and Africa to die!”
“You have your birth prejudices, I have mine.” He chuckled. “If Hancock manages to return, the Chimera she brings back is going to enslave you and make you part of his harem. That is, if you survive the Hunters’ attack. Oh, and his maleness is larger than that of a horse, and he uses it as he desires, often multiple times a day.” The man paused. “I’m sure you can figure out your only way out of that mess.” Ditch Carol and sign up with another Arm.
What Gail wanted to do was wring this manipulative bastard’s neck.
They walked up to the One Stop dry cleaner shop’s parking lot, where the Focuses had parked their cars and trucks. “Keys,” the man said. “Oh, right, you get chauffeured around like royalty. Hot wire it for me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Useless.” He ripped out her tag and vanished, taking his kogatana with him. Gail metasensed around and found nothing. Fifteen seconds later an empty car parked at the gas station next door started up. Gail ducked down behind a different car and sung a juice music snippet that should have stripped any Transform down to the edge of withdrawal, and dropped it on the car. Nothing.
The still empty car backed up two car lengths, turned, and drove off. The gas station attendant the car obviously belonged to chased after it, yelling and shaking his fist. Gail reached for her holdout weapon, a pistol, and didn’t find it. The man had pickpocketed it.
She sat down behind one of Gerry’s cars and put her head in her hands. The man had just handed Gail’s Chicago crew their asses. If they couldn’t handle one measly overpowered Transform, how in the world could they expect to handle the Hunter army?
---
“Let’s make the assumption that the man’s notes are correct,” Gail said. Gilgamesh nodded. “We don’t have time to go through them.” Not with Van, Daisy and Inferno gone. She would assign them to her in-house crew, but they would probably take a month. “Do your symbolic thing and make the information in these notes part of the magic corkboard.”
Gilgamesh shrugged. “I may not be as far on the ‘directed’ end of the Juice Use affinity variable as you are, but symbolic dross use isn’t easy for me.”
“Take your time, hon. You’re a fine apprentice Crow Master. I’ll do paperwork.”
Gilgamesh worked. Gail did Network paperwork. Today, she picked up a request from four Atlanta Focuses for a group discount on some termite work on their dilapidated slum housing. She found the ‘Atlanta’ section in Claunch’s Network files, found the ‘help with house maintenance’ file, and to her surprise, found a contractor, vetted by Mary Sibrian less than two months ago, who handled all sorts of Atlanta Focus issues of this nature. She mailed the Focuses the information.
“Got it,” Gilgamesh said. Gail stood and went to stand beside Gilgamesh as the magic corkboard. “Here goes.”
Symbols for over a half dozen mature Hunters and far more lesser Hunters, student Hunters, and pack members lit up southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa. Gail could practically see them moving toward Chicago.
To be continued
in “No Small Dreams”
Fiction By This Author
Transforms Universe:
The Commander Series Novels
Once We Were Human
Now We Are Monsters
All Beasts Together
A Method Truly Sublime
No Sorrow Like Separation
In This Night We Own
All That We Are
The supplementary Commander Series Stories:
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio One
>
All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Two)
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Three
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Four
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Five
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Six
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Seven)
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Eight
The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Nine
Focus
The Cause Series Novels
The Shadow of the Progenitors
Love and Darkness
The Forgefires of God
Beasts Ascendant (The First Chronicle of the Cause)
No Small Dreams (coming August/September 2016)
Indigo Universe:
Storybook Crazy
99 Gods Trilogy Novels
War
Betrayer
Odysseia
99 Gods Trilogy Supplementary Stories
Tales From The Anime Café (Part One)
Tales From The Anime Café (Part Two)
Author’s Afterword
Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Alex Farmer, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer. Without their help this novel would have never been made.
Credit for the aurora goes to Joshua Strang via Wikimedia Commons, and the Brooklyn Museum via Wikimedia Commons for the spear.
I hope you enjoy reading this compendium, which marks the beginning of the second story arc within the Cause series. More will be coming in this series.
If you enjoyed this book, you can find out further information about the Cause series, the background mythos of the Transforms universe, and about other fiction, on http://majortransform.com. Try the Author’s Facebook page for news and comments (www.facebook.com/pages/Randall-Allen-Farmer/106603522801212). Interesting and helpful comments are encouraged. Tell your friends. Post reviews.
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 50
