A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (35 page)

Sky didn’t really want to think too hard about the Detention Center. 
The place had gone over years ago, practically alive on its own.  Malevolent and hungry.

Keaton stopped and pointed ahead.  Lori knelt beside Keaton and stared.  Another set of officers block
ed the way.  Their crew had been circling for two hours and found no easy way through the cordon set up around the CDC.

Lori and Keaton wiggled eyebrows at each other.  The two of them shared some sort of non-verbal communication method Sky hadn’t been able to crack.  They could practically speak to each other
with non-verbal signals.  The signals included more than wiggling eyebrows; also involving altering body odors, muscle tension, heart rate, and of course, the juice.  Sky couldn’t imagine the discipline and mental focus needed to learn this non-verbal language.  He certainly didn’t have the discipline.  Lori and the Arm stood, and started leading the others out.  Tim and Tina manhandled the Transforms, turned them around, and off they went.

The poor volunteer Transforms
proved to be the worst of the nightmare.  Lori fed them only enough juice to be mobile, but not enough juice to be anything other than docile.  Keaton had gotten in their faces and did the Arm predator thing until the businessman and the praying man lost all their free will.  Sky tried not to think about the morality involved.  Lori couldn’t support them as part of her household, as she was full up.  She could keep the two men out of withdrawal for long enough for the Arm to use them as walking juice supplies.  Cold, callous, and cruel.  Lori showed no more signs of being bothered by this sort of activity than the Arm, but then again Lori’s emotions were locked down as tight as possible.  He could be completely wrong.

Sky wondered what he was doing on this side of the fight.  His sympathies
lay with the police and the poor Transforms serving as Arm food.  Yes, the authorities had long ago mistreated him enough for him to lose his empathy toward normal society, but this was a bit much.  He didn’t hunt normals.  Well, not for a long time, at least.  In the mess in Quebec City, a long time ago, he had acted as a spotter for the crew springing Focus from her detention.  Back then, he tended to get a little panicked just being out in the daylight.  Unlike the Arm in the Detention Center, Focus hadn’t harmed anyone, just scared them.

Focus’ jailers had been thugs, just some suborned authorities and a private businessman slash mobster slash evildoer and his minions.  Sky felt no guilt about the minor harassment the rescue team had inflicted.  These poor police on the other hand, keeping a tight cordon around the Detention Center, didn
’t deserve what would happen to them if things got violent.  Their bosses, yes.  These poor officers just followed orders to uphold the law.

Sky hadn’t expected to be having moral problems.  He
would have to do some hard thinking about his situation, later.

They trooped back a kilometer farther from the Detention Center and stopped for a rest under a huge red oak at an abandoned private campground.

“Do you have any ideas, Stacy?” Lori said.

“Huh.  I’d swear there are more of these idiots than there were two days ago.”

“Something’s changed,” Tim said.

Keaton thought for a moment.  “Damn.  Makes sense.  They broke Hancock.”  Keaton paced, her scowl growing by the second.  “I’m going to rip Biggioni’s lungs out.”

“I thought you’d decided not to blame Biggioni?” Lori said, standing, and looking like she wanted to pace, herself.

“That was when Hancock was just a captive.”  Keaton went on at length about what she
would like to do to Biggioni, including a dispassionate description of a bunch of torture tricks she had recently learned from Middle East military sources, involving power drills and grinders.  Sky rested with his back against the trunk of the oak tree and desperately tried to avoid throwing up as Keaton waxed eloquent.  Tim and Eileen, next to him, looked green as well.  Not Tina.  She looked like she took mental notes.

Sky reminded himself to stay on Tina’s good side.

“What will that get you?” Lori said, very quietly but also quite intensely.  “I think you’d want something more suited for Transforms.”

Keaton nodded.  Sky wondered if Keaton
realized Lori rolled her.  Now why couldn’t his love do that trick when Keaton wanted to torture her? ‘There are limits even to my capabilities,’ Lori would say, but Sky wondered if his love wanted someone to make her suffer.

“I think we’re going to have to risk letting them know we’re here,” Keaton said, eventually.  “I’ll lead the way.”

Lori agreed, the rest of them groaned, and they were off.

They moved in stages.  Keaton would bedazzle some poor officer, focus his attention away from the rest of them while they snuck on by.  Sky recognized the trick as a variant of the one he used to control animals.  Keaton would hide in the bushes, behind a tree, or up in a tree, and work on the officer or officers until they believed something they couldn’t see was over in Keaton’s direction.  Lori chipped in a couple of times as well, using a ‘help help I’m in trouble’ routine followed by another charismatic effect to interfere with their memories.  Each one exhausted Lori further, and after the second, Sky practically had to carry her along as she recovered.  Keaton’s trick seemed no less costly.  By the time they reached the barbed wire fence around the CDC building proper, Keaton was muttering to herself about armies of police needing to die.

They got a good look at the mob guarding the fence
, and their hearts sank.  Not only were the state police out in force, the place crawled with CDC guards and Feds from at least three agencies, the FBI, ATF and Secret Service.  Keaton slumped down and backed off.  They all followed.  They wouldn’t succeed with their charisma games against so many guards.  They had to retreat.

Their retreat
proved to be as bad as getting in.

When they reached their original gathering point at the vacant campground, dawn
illuminated the east and everyone was exhausted.

“I don’t think we’re going to get in tonight,” Lori said.  She collapsed on the ground by the giant oak tree, juice quivering in exhaustion.

“No shit,” Keaton said with an eye flicker at the lightening sky, and turned to look at Tina.  Tina backed off, shaken.

“Hey!” Lori said, peering up from the ground.  “No poaching.”

Keaton just growled.  The Arm turned away from Tina at last, streaked over to Tim, who held the black praying Transform.  “Mine,” Keaton said.  She grabbed the Transform, hauled him five meters away, and started to rip his clothes off.  Then her clothes off.  She hissed and hugged him tight.  All before anyone but Sky (and perhaps Lori) realized what was going on.

Sky
got to Lori before Keaton started to hug the Transform.  He had seen this play enough to know the ending.  He put his hand over Lori’s mouth in time to stop her from screaming at the top of her lungs.  Instead, she screamed in his hand.  Keaton kept her juice sucking routine going for nearly five minutes.  Sky had never seen anything like it.  Arm kills usually took about five seconds.  When Keaton finished, though, she didn’t fall to the ground in the normal Arm faint the way Sky had expected.  Instead, the Arm just stood and smiled.

Lori wept.  Sky hugged her.

“Get over it,” Keaton said to Lori.  “That’s what he was meant for.”

“Fu-u-u-ck yah-ah-ah-ooo.”

The Arm strode over and sneered down at Lori and Sky.  “Sentimental weakling.  Get up.  We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Nah-nah-nah-tah es-es-es-en-en-ti-ti-men-men-men-tah.” 
Lori wrenched herself out of Sky’s arms, sending him flying backwards.  From the ground, he watched Lori stand up and push her nose to within inches of Keaton’s.  Lori didn’t wipe away her tears.  Instead, she grabbed Keaton’s naked shoulders and did something with the juice.

Keaton gasped and fell back.

“Imagine five minutes of that, bitch,” Lori said.  Somehow, with a juice pattern, Lori had recreated her experience and dropped it on Keaton.  Sky had no idea Focuses could do tricks like that.

“That was uncalled for, you fucking douche bag,” Keaton said, cold.  “You’ll bleed for that.”

“That’s what it felt like to me,” Lori said, her voice high with rage.  “It didn’t stop, either.  For five minutes.  Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

“You’re weak, Focus.  Tonya just blinked a couple of times when I took one of her tagged Transforms.  She even juiced me up in the process.  Unlike you.”  Keaton’s voice was cold and contemptuous.

Fire and water.  The Arm and Lori were like fire and water – utterly incompatible personalities, and too much power and will for the wellbeing of anyone nearby.  Sky was appalled to realize his love was the fire and the out of control Arm was the water.  Why couldn’t he have fallen in love with a nice, sedate Focus who ran a dry cleaning business?  No, Sky, you idiot, you had to choose a bleeping thermonuclear weapon for a lover.

“She rolled you,” Lori said.  Sky could hear the unvoiced ‘pinhead’ appended to Lori’s statement in his head.  So could Keaton, whose eyes narrowed.  “She didn’t want you to know how much of a weapon you had against her.”

“What?  You don’t care if I have a weapon like that to use against you?”

“Do that again and I’ll turn your brain into blood pudding,” Lori said.  Keaton blinked.

“What use is having the Transforms, then?” Keaton said, her voice neutral, edging on sarcasm.

“Let me untag them first.”

“What about emergencies?”

Lori paused,
and shrugged.  “Hell.  In an emergency, I’ll eat the pain.  Emergencies are different.”

“Huh.”  Keaton turned away.  “You still owe me for this, Focus.  Later.  We need to get out of here.  Tina, you and I are going to have some fun when this is all over.”  Tina blinked and caught her breath, interested and afraid at the same time.  They all knew what an Arm needed after drawing juice; if they hadn’t known before, they did after Sky gave them many graphic descriptions of exactly how horny an Arm could get after a kill.  He
didn’t think they believed the bull moose story, though.

Lori just shook her head.  “Later today we need to see about getting some ATF uniforms,” she said.  “We need a new approach to this problem and I have the solution.”

Keaton grunted, apparently agreeing with the idea.  “Just cool your hot little head,” she told Lori, then, improbably, smiled.  High on juice.  “I’ve figured out exactly what I’m going to exact from Tonya.  She gets to hold the tagged Transforms while I feed them to Hancock.  Lots of them.”

“Why?” Lori
said.

“Because I’m betting Hancock’s going to be in withdrawal before we can get her out of this mess.”

Sky’s heart quailed when Lori shrugged, refusing to take that bet.

Gilgamesh: March 25, 1968 – March 26, 1968

Clarity grew in Gilgamesh
.  If he wanted to be an active Crow, he must gain control of himself. Specifically, control of the panic.  Sky suggested practice and meditation.  He didn’t think he was quite up for any practice today.  So, meditation.

He stocked himself up on dross and meditated.

At first the meditation did nothing for him, but after forty five minutes, he realized he had opened up his metasense to a whole new range of perceptions.  Raw, kaleidoscopic perceptions that dipped and swirled like the aurora, that hummed and bubbled like the cheese on a hot pizza.  They engaged all his senses, out of his control, all highly random and inconstant.  He noticed a definite ‘downwind’ component to the new sensations, so part of some of them clearly came through his sense of smell.  The extra sensations reacted to daylight; they had to be electromagnetic, like shortwave radio.  The two brightest sources he metasensed-at-range were the two Arms, but he had no sense for range.  When he ‘metasensed something’, was it next door?  A hundred miles away?  A thousand?

He turned his sense into himself and was shocked at
what he found.  He was a juice producer, just like a female Transform and the Housebound.  Like the Housebound, though, his innate Transform capabilities used juice, in fact, used more juice than he produced.  What innate Transform capabilities used juice at that rate?  After experimentation, he realized his metasense ate the most juice.  After a few minutes of work, he figured out how to turn off his metasense.

Well,
‘off’ lasted all of 15 seconds.  The panic attack he induced by turning off his metasense lasted nearly two hours.  From this, he decided that his metasense was always on, even if he didn’t pay attention, and if a nasty enemy came into range he wouldn’t miss him, no matter what.  Interesting information but no progress in controlling his panic.

Next, he tried practice.  He tried again to produce his controlled dross effects in an uncontrolled environment and had no more luck than before.  He kept trying.  He might master this with practice, but he feared he would die of old age first.

Next, he tried walking up to a random person’s house, a random normal person, attempting to do door to door sales.  The fiasco with Focus Gladchuck
would be his last, he vowed.  He picked up a bunch of magazine subscription offers from a drug store magazine rack and walked a city street in San Jose trying to sell magazines.