The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (23 page)

“The half tag will keep me from wanting to behead a certain intransigent student Arm.”

“That I’ll accept.”

“I sure as hell hope you’re better behaved around the Commander.”

“Can Ma’am Hancock take Bass in a fair fight?”

“The Commander,” Webberly said, indicating that Ma’am Hancock was not the proper honorific, “can take Bass in an unfair fight, the same way I can take you in an unfair fight.”

Del nodded, and surrendered to Webberly.  Webberly was nearly as cold as she was.  The last should have been said with a smile, but Webberly hadn’t lost her stone face throughout the confrontation.

Webberly stood.  “Stand, Student.”

Del stood.

“We don’t have any real evidence that Bass is one of the two unknowns, so calm down,” Webberly said.  “Grabbing you student Arms is only a part of why we’re here.  Keaton’s information library is just as high a priority.  Given the circumstances, everyone, it’s time to get to work.”

Del nodded as Webberly turned away from her and ungroveled the rest of the Arms serving Del.  The minor annoyance at having her territory usurped – her Arms, that is – vanished into her quiet pools, already diminished by the effects of the half tag.

“Which one are you, anyway?” the overly large Arm said.  “I’m Giselle Debardelaben, from Montreal, a new member of the Commander’s crew.”

So?  “Ma’am,” Del said, wondering why this strange Arm was attempting to befriend her with a strange charisma trick.  Or why the Arm carried eight Focus tags, and a screwy tag that said if she was in Canada she would boss Webberly around and if she was in the United States, Webberly would boss her around.  “My name is Dolores Sokolnik.”

“So you’re some sorta baby super-Arm from Hell, eh?” Debardelaben said.  “You should have spent more time learning how to fight properly.  We’re in a war, kiddo.”  Pause.  “So, where’s this, um, M35A2C truck we’re supposed to load the crap into?”

“The deuce and a half?  It’s in garage C bay 4; if you want I’ll drive it up.”

“
We’ll
drive it up,” Debardelaben said.  “Safety in numbers.”  Pause.  “Then, if we all get lucky, we’ll drive that baby cross country while we get to do a little Bass fishing along the way.”

Inane.  “Ma’am.”

“You don’t know how to smile, do you?”

“Certainly not, ma’am.”  What passed for humor, at least as far as Del was concerned.  “You should put one of those half-tags on me, ma’am.  Some Arms find me most annoying.”

“I woulda never guessed,” Debardelaben said, shaking her head and pasting a half-tag on Del.  Del winced at the half-tag’s strength.

Perhaps things were looking up.  This youngish Arm somehow and unexpectedly carried the stature of a senior Arm.

Part 2
Echoes of a Fall

“All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.” – John Locke

Ignore the Crow hiding behind the boxes

Donna Fingleman – Focus #11 – September 1956.  Focus Fingleman is currently the President of the West Region of the UFA.  Intelligent and hardworking, she believes that high-level cooperation between governmental authorities and the Transforms is both necessary and fruitful for both sides.  Known among the first Focuses for being the first to recognize the need for household bodyguards for Focuses, and the need to have both normal and Transform bodyguards.  Among the younger Focuses, Focus Fingleman is known for being the Focus who discovered that Transforms are not chronic disease victims but instead can be trained to be more than they were before – and for being the first Focus who insists upon the strictest deference of the younger Focuses to their elders.

“Lives of the Focuses”

Carol Hancock: December 21, 1972

“Let me see the letter.”  Just past dawn and we lounged in Gail’s suite, and even without the coming-home sex we all wanted and needed, it was wonderful just to be near her and her entire household.  So much the opposite of Patterson and her lair, calling to the part of me that wasn’t the beast.

Freezing rain beat on the windows, and the streets below were treacherous with ice.  I tried to find a place to put down my cup of hot cider, but the coffee table was piled high with Zielinski diagrams, all threatening to spill on the floor.

Ah, nope, I noted.  Several of them were past threatening.  I wondered if Gail would miss the Zielinski diagram under the couch.

Gilgamesh handed me the challenge letter.  “I contacted Phobos this evening, over the phone, as you and Shadow suggested.  Are you sure this is a good idea?  Aren’t we being a bit hasty?”

I grinned.  I was starting to get back into this Commander thing.  It felt so good not having anyone above me.  “If
you
think this is hasty, think how the other guy feels.  He’s a Crow who’s never been counseled by an Arm.  Crowd him hard and you can almost get him to defeat himself.”

Gilgamesh shook his head, not convinced.  “Phobos used to be a friend.  He’s never been an enemy before.”

Gilgamesh, my boy, you don’t have a predator’s instincts, I thought.  Fortunately, the predators around him would help.

“He’s an enemy now,” I said.  “Don’t forget, speed is the ultimate force multiplier.”

My comment got a grin out of Gail.  She understood.  Gilgamesh, who had been with me for years, and heard the comment from me innumerable times, still didn’t understand at the gut level.

However, he did nod.  He would obey his Commander.

“What about us?  Inferno’s already packing for the Adirondacks camp,” Gail asked.

“You’re going to the Adirondacks camp, but you’re not going to the Patterson fight.  Instead, you and the other pregnant ladies are going to provide a cheering section for Gilgamesh in his duel.”

Gail blinked.  “How’d you know?  It’s only been a couple of weeks…”

Gilgamesh shifted and I turned to him. “Yes, she’s pregnant,” he said, and then shrugged as Gail glared at him.  “It’s not that hard to spot once you know what to look for.”

“Get the pregnant women to wear maternity clothes.”  I didn’t need to explain that every damned Crow in the country who followed Shadow already knew.  Even among the absurdly non-violent Crows, paternity was power.

“
Maternity clothes
?” Gail said.  “I’m hardly even pregnant.  I don’t need maternity clothes.”

I just stared.

“You have a plan,” Gail said, hungry happy.  She had never gotten to be around me much in Commander mode, and for whatever screwy reason she liked me better as the Commander than as Teacher.

For her, moving fast wasn’t grand strategy, it was tactics, a way of chasing off the angst.

“Of course.  While you’re there, mingle, be friendly, and take every opportunity to let the Crows know you’re pregnant, Gilgamesh is the father, and you think everything’s just fabulous.  Think of yourself as a walking sales brochure, just another take on Transform Rights.  Can you do that?”

Gail blinked at me and smiled.  “Sounds like a blast.”

“Carol, can I talk to you?” Gail said, once we were alone, an hour later.

I was already looking forward to my next stop, but at Gail’s request, I paused.

“What is it?” I said, gently.  Bringing my thoughts back to Gail jolted my mind, especially after I had shifted my thoughts to Wini Adkins and how she needed another dose of my beastly attention.  I pushed the awakening beast back into her lair.  Barely.

“Carol, I’ve never complained about all the things you’re doing…”

“But?” I said, my voice hard at the sudden questioning of my acts.  Old instincts, not appropriate for Gail.

“But
Cathy Elspeth
.”  She glared at me, challenging.  “She leads the Transform Rights fight and I’ve been working with her for three years.  I don’t know what else she’s done, but she’s done good things on Transform Rights.  She’s no darker than Tonya.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, not pointing out how little I trusted Tonya, or pushing back at Gail’s challenge.  Goddamned Focuses.  “One other thing.  This would be a perfect time for Patterson to pull something.  I need you in the Dreaming, guarding me.  Starting this evening.”

She nodded and ran her right hand through her hair to hide a spate of sudden nerves.  “I can’t get into the Dreaming from here.”  My turn to glare and challenge.  “If you give me a few minutes, though, I’ll get together a large bodyguard crew of normals and go to my Littleside darkroom.”

“Call me when you’re ready,” I said.  Gail left, a bit humbled in a properly Focus fashion, and I paced, anxious and anticipatory.  Time for a slow chat with Wini Adkins.

“What’s this?” I asked, looking up from the lists of personnel while I waited for Gail to get into position.  Zielinski had prostrated himself Arm-like on the floor of my Branton office.

“Ma’am,” he said.  “I wish to report an observation and ask for your forbearance.  I am yours.”

Zielinski almost never went formal on me of his own volition, and he never exhibited full submission without heavy prompts from me beforehand.  ‘I am yours’ indeed – like he needed to remind me, not after his success with the juice music project.  I wondered for a moment what sort of boneheaded mistake he had made, but Hank never made mistakes of commission, and certainly not boneheaded ones.  Failed experiments by the dozen, yes, and errors of omission all the time.  I stood and walked around my desk and over to him, to comfort him Arm style, and three paces away, almost fell into a stalk.

What the fuck?

I knelt beside him and thought, not saying a thing, mastering my sudden murderous urges.  Why didn’t he feel like he was mine?

“Explain,” I said, voice low.  This had to be why he was prone on the floor, offering his neck to me.  No, he hadn’t fucked up.  This was something else entirely.

“Ma’am, as a normal, I don’t have the wherewithal to remove your former boss’s tag from me,” he said.  The scent of his fear aroused my beast.  “She’s your enemy, now.”

Yes.  I smelled Keaton’s tag on him.  That’s what dropped me into a stalk.  Beforehand, when Keaton was my boss, her tag on him didn’t rankle.  Now it did.

How did I know he was mine, anyway?  He had always been so damned independent, and he had always served as an extra pair of Keaton’s eyes inside my organization.  Before now, I had accepted his position and used it for my own benefit.  A game.

His espionage days ended now.  I couldn’t afford any chance that Zielinski might be giving Keaton any reports.  I knew how to ensure loyalty, even in someone as independent as he was.  I stroked the bald spot on his head and reached out with my foot to shut the door.

What I was about to do was painful, humiliating and private.  Good for Hank, though.  My ministrations would go easier for him because he figured this out and volunteered.

---

Grace Billington was the youngest Arm to come out of yesterday’s fiasco with sole possession of a first Focus.  She had four and a half months on Betsy, and a sordid post-transformation history, ending up as Keaton’s primary
object de torment
after Webberly’s graduation.  She had entered Keaton’s school as a petite light brown haired pale-skinned waif with a sensitive and well-educated artistic soul and a passion for poetry and reefer, hitting the trifecta on the Boss’s dislikes.  Couldn’t cook worth shit, either.

She stood in front of me, now, taller, with light brown skin, wide lips, and short kinky black hair, at the edge of the Cook County forest preserve, in Camp Sullivan.  Her people had contacted my people, exchanged information, and my people had demanded she turn over her prize, Mary Beth Julius.  I expected more pushback, but Julius had nearly escaped from her twice, though I wasn’t sure I believed one of Billington’s reported attacks – a charismatic invisibility insinuation while Julius was unconscious, in a healing trance.  Billington agreed to give Julius to a higher authority, meaning me.  Unlike Naylor, she went all formal on me, though; instead of Naylor’s breezy ‘I’ll trade Focus Morris to you for a tag, ma’am’ I picked up implications of a challenge.

As to why the Camp Sullivan meet?  Well, nobody was camping here today, not with the howling thirty mile an hour wind out of the north, the blowing snow, and single digit temperature.  Feeling more than wary, I wanted no part of any strange Arm anywhere near the Branton or my other strongholds.  Not with the two unknowns from the Patterson attack aftermath on the loose.

I didn’t think Billington knew about any of my seventy well-hidden people ringing the meet area, either.  I had so many Crows involved that the ones in back were exchanging Johnny Carson monologs and sports gossip, barely worried enough to sweat.

The no longer waif-like and no longer pale-skinned Billington glared at me.  “Commander, I’m more than willing to turn first Focus Julius over to you.  I do have
worries
about the situation, though.”  Before Billington transformed, Keaton had gotten her jollies by tormenting the Negro Rose Webberly, enslaving her and hitting her with every vile racial slur and prejudice known to humanity.  Rose graduated and despised Keaton afterwards; Keaton just shrugged and enslaved her newest charge, Billington, treating her as if she was black, simply because she liked the game.

Billington reacted in a different manner than Rose.  Two weeks in, she decided to roll with the punches and accept her newfound blackness, as Keaton’s forced Hollywood-style Negro slave ‘yessa massa’ routine was only the third worst abuse Billington suffered through during her training.  The worst turned out to be the modern poetry deconstruction sessions; no, I still don’t know when or where the Boss learned anything about poetry, modern or otherwise, but it turned out she enjoyed Romantic poetry, especially Keats and Wordsworth.  By the end, Billington
became
black.  She ended up liking Keaton as well, what us psych-types term ‘capture bonding’.

Her ‘worries’ about this situation?  She wanted payment.  I growled at the implied challenge, a growl with only a tiny fraction of its normal effect because of the howling wind.

“Turn her over to me, now, and report to Arm Haggerty for a debriefing.”  I didn’t have time for this.  I had Amy set up in my fancy warehouse backup lair doing post-attack analysis and disaster coordination.

“Ma’am,
debriefing?
”  As in: ‘who the fuck are you to be giving me orders?’  No, Billington wasn’t the smartest Arm around, but any Arm of average intelligence and average social skills should realize she had just issued a formal challenge.  I took a moment to examine Billington more closely, fearing enemy mind control or some other nasty bad-guy trick.  I soon realized the real problem: when she saw me she saw the humbled Carol Hancock wearing a bunny suit, sucking shit in front of Keaton’s students, not the current me, the Commander and the boss Arm.  There was no way she could bring herself to submit to me as a senior Arm with the bunny suit picture in her mind.

Okay, a real challenge, not some mind-bent idiocy dropped into her brain by one of my many enemies.  I shucked my coat and weapons and stalked toward her, crunching my way through the three inches of hard frozen snow lying below my feet.  Her four people moved to intercept, but she waved them back and charged me.  Good thing for her, as her four were but a mere second or two from death from
my
people.

Five feet from me she settled into a boxer’s crouch, her favored combat form.  Given her relative youth as an Arm, I could humble her with a single blow, empowered by my stature and my charisma, but I chose not to.  Instead, I decided to work out my stress and tension.  On her.  Thus her surprise when I settled into a boxer’s crouch myself, and started punching.  We were even the same weight class; although I had almost five inches on her, she balanced the height difference with her far heavier muscles.  As with Giselle and Betsy, her pectorals almost came up to her ears, and she was another of those Arms who carried so many muscles she barely could pass as a normal man.