A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (40 page)

Sky steered the tanker truck around the bend.  As the tanker truck appeared
, the two CDC guards shouted and waved their hands.  Sky slowed the tanker truck down, and as the truck approached the guards, Sky stuck his head out the window.

“What’s up, officers?” Sky called out
, his signal to Eileen.  She grabbed the window frame on the door with her left hand, anchored her left foot on the window handle, and pushed off with her right foot.  The truck door swung open, with Eileen swinging out and away from the truck herself.  She raised her rifle as she swung away from the truck; balanced in mid-air she shot across the front of the truck at the guards.  Two shots, two hits.  Both guards fell, neither noticing Eileen until too late, their eyes glued to Sky, the person talking to them.  Neither died, as far as Sky could tell, at least not yet.  Sky pressed on the gas and lurched the truck forward.  This swung Eileen back toward the truck, still hanging on to the now closing door.  She clambered back inside without any fuss.

“That worked,” Eileen said, half in surprise
.  She closed her eyes for a moment to reorient herself.  The trick she just pulled would have been insanely difficult for a normal, if not impossible.  For a well-trained Transform like Eileen, the trick was easy.

“You did
well,” Sky said.  She hadn’t fallen apart yet, but Sky still worried.

“Thanks.”  She paused.  “Do you think they got a good look at me?”

Sky, disguised as an old bald roughneck, smiled.  “I think not.”  Besides, Lori had Eileen disguised as a man.  If they got a good look at her, it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway.

“I hate having to shoot people,” Eileen said.  “It just isn’t right.”

Sky didn’t answer.  He could see the inner fence up ahead and in a moment he saw the guard station by the inner fence.  Open.  The VW van rolled ahead, already half way from the inner fence to the CDC building.  Lori and her crew’s next job would be to get the basement parking area open for the tanker truck.

The CDC
complex’s jail shared the standard Transform Detention Center design, copied many times in the States.  The design included a parking garage underneath, set up for restricted entry.  The parking garage was tall enough for the tanker truck, built for the convict busses and mobile pens used for transporting potentially hazardous Transforms.  Transforms who could go Monster on the trip to the Detention Center.

There was even a shooting gallery in the parking garage area, which appalled Sky when
Tim first told him about such things.  He knew the conditions in the States were brutal for Transforms, especially regarding anything built in the 50s, and especially in the southern part of the United States.  However, he hadn’t known about the on-site execution-by-firing-squad areas set up in all the Detention Centers for killing Monsters.  And others.  Tim and Tina recited a whole raft of stories to him on the subject, all of which made Sky sick to his stomach.  Legally, the authorities could declare any Transform ‘a Monster’, leaving them open to summary judgment, in the form of execution, at any time.  Many Transforms, even tagged Transforms, had met such a fate after their captors judged them uncooperative, back in the days of the Quarantine.  The lack of the basic human right to life and liberty explained how reasonable people like Tim and Eileen (not Tina – she wasn’t a reasonable person to begin with) might be willing to turn outlaw with barely a flicker of distaste.  When the authorities could legally kill you just for being a Transform, at their whim, without even the threat of a slap on the wrist, Sky no longer wondered why so many Transforms were willing to shoot back on occasion.  This bothered Sky a lot.  It would not take much for the Transforms and authorities in the States to fall into a war of atrocities upon each other, leading to an armed insurrection by the Transforms, or, if the Transforms weren’t successful, an extermination of all the Transforms.

Barbaric trigger happy idiots.

Sky slowed the tanker truck to a crawl, gliding it around the CDC building toward the ramp down into the parking garage.  Several guards spotted them on the way by, but by now the severity of the firefight had grabbed everyone’s attention.  Since the tanker truck was inside the inner fence, surely they were here on official business, right?  Sky metasensed more than two dozen FBI agents and state police straggle out of the CDC building toward the inner north gate, and then off to their respective comrades.  Soon, someone would figure out the ruse, and turn on them.

Kali walked among the
guards now, disguised as an FBI agent, sliding back toward the inner north gate.  Any agent she found, she intimidated and chased off toward the firefight.  She waited near the basement gate as Lori, Tim and Tina found a way to open the security barricade protecting the basement from entry and exit.  Sky drove the tanker truck past their get-away vehicle, down the ramp, through the open security barricade and into the basement.  While he did so, he kept his metasense on Kali, as Kali watched the stragglers go out the opposite gate.  In a flash, as the last of the stragglers jogged through the gate, she stepped inside the security perimeter and took over the guardhouse by force.  In the resulting fracas at least five guards died needless deaths.  Within seconds, Kali managed to shut the other vehicular gate.  Then she turned her weapons on the switches and mechanism controlling the gate.  She now had the state police and FBI locked out, at least by way of that gate.  By the time they circled the two kilometers around the wire, to the rescue crew’s side of the complex, if all went according to plan, the rescue crew would be gone.

Sky leapt out of the tanker truck
, his steps echoing in the cavernous garage.  “Kali’s inside the fence, on the way here,” he said, running over to Lori.

Lori
had a bullet wound, a blood stained impromptu bandage around her upper right arm.  Tim’s face was bloody.  Tina was unharmed.  “Don’t, Sam,” Lori said.  “Concentrate on the mission.”

Sky stopped.  Lori was right.  No time for his Crow nurturing instincts to take over.

“Crow says there are six guards who have taken up a defensive position outside of the target’s cell,” Sky said.  The charade would hopefully be enough to fool Kali.  Since he used ‘Crow’ as his name on many occasions, his statement wasn’t even a lie.

“Between?”

“The remaining guards are guarding the front door, not the elevator from the parking garage.”

“The rest?”

Sky closed his eyes.  Behind him, Kali raced at Arm speeds down into the parking garage, burning juice to maintain her sprint.  She left a barred doorway behind her, which would take an engineering crew or another Arm to open.  “Crow isn’t sure,” Sky said.  He was Sam, now.  Just another Transform.  He needed to remember the ruse, or he would spend the rest of his short miserable life as Kali’s experimental subject and torture plaything.  “The bad juice is interfering too much.”  An understatement of epic proportions.  The dross here gibbered and shrieked at him.  It dragged at his metasense, whirling him away from where he wanted to look.  Illusions of crying, beaten and starving Transforms littered his mind.

“Fuck,” Kali said.  “Anyone who willingly stays in this godforsaken place deserves what they get.”  Kali cri
ed blood tears, reacting herself to the dross miasma.

Lori
held in her disgust until they started talking about the pervasive foulness.  She turned and vomited.  “It’s worse inside,” she said.  “Your call, Stacy.  Together or separate in the elevator?”

“Together.
”  Doesn’t anyone but me understand even the simplest battle tactics? Sky metasensed Kali mentally shriek in disgust.  “Can’t afford to split up now.”  She turned to Sky. “Where?”

“Crow says third floor,” Sky
said.  He had no idea how, but Kali had provided both blueprints of the Detention Center as well as extensive hand-written notes on the modifications the authorities had made to the place.  “Out of the elevator, to the right, past the nurse’s station, past the wide doors, second door on the left.”

They piled into the
oversized elevator, big enough to transport Monsters in cages.  They had worked out a new command structure early in the morning. Kali had demanded she be in charge of the tactics once they got on site.  Lori agreed, demanding she be in charge of the preparations.  With Kali’s advice, of course.  Although they divvied up the authority better than before, they still rubbed each other along their raw edges.  Crow – Sky – remained in charge of keeping track of things.  Spotter.

Eileen, Tim and Tina
would learn a very hard lesson, today, about the real capabilities of Major Transforms.  If they survived, Sky suspected their outlook on the Cause would never be the same.

“Drop your weapons, everyone but Sam and Lori,” Kali said, as the elevator started up.  “Hand to hand.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the three Transforms said, and put their weapons on the floor.  Tim was starting to show problems with the place’s dross.  He kept slapping at imaginary mosquitoes and Sky bet he was hearing things as well.  Getting the weapons out of Tina’s hands was equally important.  Tina hunched over with her eyes slitted and forehead furrowed, more problems caused by the corrupted dross.  Sky suspected she would shoot at anything that moved.  Eileen twitched as she walked, with tears leaking down her face.  She saw imaginary things as well.

“You two, cover us,” Kali said, at Sky/Sam and Lori.  Kali wiped blood from her eyes, turning her once-disguised face into a demon’s mask.  “These idiots are holed up in a narrow corridor, too close to the corner.  If we rush them, we’ll be on them before they have a chance to react.”

The elevator door opened.  Ahead of them, a single guard watched the elevator.  He raised his weapon at them, readying to fire.  Lori put a bullet into his head, a quiet ‘phfft’ from her silenced pistol, just as the guard was about to pull the trigger.  Kali burned juice as she sprinted down the corridor ahead, followed as fast as their legs could take them by Tina, Tim and Eileen.  No other guards were present.  Just a striking woman in a white cloak.  Lori didn’t register her and turned to run after the Transforms.  The woman’s sea-green eyes tracked Sky as he moved.

Sky gawked momentarily at the white cloaked woman.  She was an illusion, some insanity of the dross, Sky decided.  He followed Lori.

“I’m no illusion,” the woman with the sea-green eyes said.  A Focus.  Only Focuses were so otherworldly beautiful and had such melodious voices.  She stood five nine or so, with rich blonde hair with silver highlights hanging in deep waves around the hood of her cloak, over her right shoulder and down to her waist.  She had full but pale lips open in wonder, a dreamy and vulnerable look to her face, and golden teardrop earrings hanging from her ears.  She dressed all in white.  Sky watched her in shattered awe as he ran after Lori, past cold steel doors and one intersecting corridor.  The Focus glided after him.

Not an illusion, but she wasn’t
present, either.  She was in his mind.

“I ride the flow, Crow,” the white Focus said.  “Why bother with a rescue?  The Arm is ruined.  Do not risk yourself in this futility.  The Arm is too weak to save, not worth the effort.”  Her voice
echoed with the voice of angels, almost a contralto Crow whisper, water gurgling over stones.  She knew of the flow, the pheromone flow long known of and named by the American Crows, the Crow version of the Dreaming.  Her perfect alabaster skin showed thin blue veins in places, ripples over a white sand beach.  Her posture reeked of invitation, to lose himself within her perfection.  Her pale sea-green eyes were hidden deep behind the Focus’s nearly invisible eyelashes and highlighted by silver flecks matching the silver highlights of her unearthly blonde hair.  An angel of mercy, of healing, of comfort, all in the guise of a Focus of knee-melting beauty.

“Go away,” Sky said, batting at her with his hand, striking nothing but air.  Lori swiveled her head at him.  Alarmed.  Sky slowed when he reached the corner.  Up ahead
and to the left, in front of the outer door to Hancock’s cell, Kali had subdued two guards and had knocked the weapon out of the hands of a third.  Tim, Tina and Eileen fought the other three.  One of the guards fired and hit Tina’s leg before all three fell.  The fight lasted only a few seconds.  Lori turned from Sky back to the fight, running to help Tina subdue her opponent.

“An interesting fight, Crow, but very violent,” the Focus said, her voice soothing and cool, calming Sky’s incipient panic.  Even her teeth gleamed perfect whiteness.  Her chin was comely, pointed, almost aristocratic in its form.  Her mouth held a secret smile of gravest invitation.  “Your boon companions include very well trained Transforms.  Someone pushed them into post-human capabilities, someone of greater intellect than their Mistress.  You must give me the entire story, my most wondrous Crow hero.”

Sky knew himself now to be a dark evil being, rolling in mud, corrupt and in need of salvation.  Why would such an angel of perfection be willing to save him?  Amazing! “Of course.  Mademoiselle Foyer, I am…”

Sky choked his voice to a stop.  What was this Focus
doing
to him?  Tendrils of corrupted gristle dross climbed his legs, reaching into his body, toward his torso, on the way to his head.  He hadn’t even noticed their appearance.  “No!” Sky shrieked and began to fight.  He was the Crow!  Not this
thing
, this saintly Focus entrapping him with her soft-spoken words.  The dross would obey him, not her!