The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (6 page)

“Can you tell me who the father is?”

She blushed again, and mumbled “Gilgamesh.”

Ah, now things made sense.  “That may be our explanation then.  There have been rumors for many years that Crows can occasionally impregnate Transforms.  The rumors are unconfirmed, and though fertility between a Transform and a Crow seems to be rare, that might explain your current condition.”  Crows seemed to be able to impregnate Focuses at the drop of a hat – or a trouser – but Transforms were different.

Melanie nodded.  “Does it work out all right?”

“I can’t say for certain, but I didn’t hear any rumors of tragedy along with the rumors of pregnancy, so it’s likely fine.”  Zielinski was considerably less sanguine than he portrayed.  Transform Sickness killed an awful lot of people for an awful lot of stupid reasons.  He considered Melanie’s pregnancy to be a huge risk, but there was no point scaring her with his worries.  He carefully made notes in what had once been a small chart for Melanie, and was about to grow much larger.

“So if it’s a fluke, then Gretchen and Trisha are probably fine and it’s just me,” Melanie said.

Zielinski stopped cold, goosebumps on his limbs.  “Gretchen and Trisha?”

“Oh, well, Gretchen says she’s feeling about the same way I am.  She’s actually had three kids already, and she said that if she didn’t know better, she’d swear she was pregnant.  Trisha’s been bitching for weeks, and she’s actually thrown up a couple of times.”

“So,” Zielinski said, carefully.  “Did Gretchen and Trisha also sleep with Gilgamesh?”

Melanie nodded.

“Are they the only women who’ve been sleeping with Gilgamesh, or are there more?

“Ah, well, Gilgamesh is pretty popular among the unattached women in the household.”

“I see.  Do you suppose we could get all of Gilgamesh’s bed partners in here for me to test?”

Zielinski sat on his little stool in the lab and rubbed his forehead.  Six pregnancy tests so far, and four of them positive.

How in the hell had Gilgamesh done it?

Crows weren’t more than marginally fertile with anyone except Focuses.  Zielinski got ahold of Sky about an hour ago and confirmed the rumors.  In all the years Sky lived on and off in Inferno, he only managed one other baby besides Lori’s.  Given the amount of opportunity for the ever-charming Sky, that was miniscule.  Yet Gilgamesh spent seven weeks in Gail’s household and impregnated two-thirds of the women he slept with, perhaps more.  Zielinski suspected his negatives might be negative only because the pregnancy was too recent.

Two-thirds of the women pregnant.  This was greater fertility than even normal women showed.

Almost twenty years of Transform Sickness, and the one constant was the infertility issue.  Transform infertility was the death of all their dreams and plans, because whatever they did, there would be no babies.  Even if they saved every Transform there was, humanity would still decline into oblivion because there weren’t enough babies.  Even if all the Focuses had babies, all the Transform men found normal women to impregnate, and all the Goldilocks had babies, and all the Crows slept with as many women as they could find, there still wouldn’t be enough babies to replace all the adults as they aged and died.  Humanity would fade from the earth because Transforms simply weren’t fertile enough to continue the species.  The fertility problem had been the major stumbling block to Van Reijn’s hypothesis about Transform Sickness, the one issue keeping it from becoming the accepted theory.

Except for Gilgamesh.  Here, quietly in Gail’s household, Gilgamesh somehow broke through the wall surrounding Transform fertility.

The media would bury them in unwanted attention once they found out.  The fanatics would be enraged beyond reason.  The Van Reijn hypothesis was intimately coupled with the mythology hypothesis these days and the idea that Transform Sickness was a recurring phenomenon.  If this went public, if the public came to believe the myth hypothesis was something other than tabloid trash, the world would fall on them in righteous anger.

Oh, and then there was the hint of polygamy involved in this.  No, this was worse than polygamy, something worth a half dozen tabloid covers.  The dreaded peasants with pitchforks would march on them and…

Oh, and Carol would explode because of the additional complication added to her already immense and complicated household redefinition project.  Fertility.  Dammit, they had solved the fertility problem by accident!  The snowball effect, as Lori had labeled it, emanating from the needs and results of the juice pattern project.  If only Keaton and Bass had waited just another three months…

The machine binged and Zielinski pulled at the paper as the machine extruded it.  The test was a Quantitative hCG, and the value was 4 mIU/ml.  Borderline.  Probably negative in most cases.  Probably indicative of a pregnancy too recent to register in this case.

Five out of seven.  How in the hell had Gilgamesh done it?

Well, either Gilgamesh was an unusual sport of some kind, or this was an unexpected side effect of the tagging ceremony.  Whatever lay behind this, he was producing babies by the cartload.

Zielinski also blamed the tagging ceremony for Carol’s sudden willingness to give her kills to Gail’s household.  Was household tagging the big breakthrough in Transform Sickness the research community had been longing for, showing up on his doorstep unexpectedly?

Shouting from the hall interrupted Zielinski, followed by the sound of someone running.  The door to the lab opened with a bang.  Outside, a woman screamed obscenities in a voice that peeled paint off the walls.

“Doctor!”  The nurse at the door screamed in a panic, but Zielinski was already moving.  He didn’t recognize the voice, but only an Arm could manage that volume and that level of obscenity.  He headed toward the sound at a run, hoping this wasn’t the strange new Arm Carol dragged in this morning.  Instincts from his ER and Korean War experiences took over as he gave orders for prepping an operating room.  He turned the corner in the hallway and found the source of the commotion.

Haggerty stood just inside the back entrance, screaming at the people attempting to help her.  Something was badly wrong with her right leg.  Her right thigh was shorter than it should be by about six inches, and swollen up like a beach ball, perfectly round.  She screamed obscenities at anyone who bumped it, and each bump sent shivers of muscle spasms pulsing under the skin.

Terminal stage muscle hypertrophy, Zielinski realized with horror.  Her thigh was round because the bone was gone, shattered into pieces by the muscles of her leg.  How the hell did this happen to a mature Arm?  He might need to amputate the entire leg and let her grow another.

He spotted Jeannie, his nurse, among the crowd.  “Call the Commander and get her over here, immediately!” he said.  Jeannie ran for the phone.  Whatever he was going to do for Haggerty, he needed Carol here to keep Haggerty under control.  His Haggerty tag wouldn’t be enough when the inevitable surgery started.

“Out of the way,” he said, shouting at the confused and terrified crowd around the Arm, mostly doctors and nurses, plus a couple of men Haggerty brought with her.  The crowd withdrew at his voice of authority, except for a couple of the doctors and the two men of Haggerty’s.  One of the men had been trying to keep the crowd away from Haggerty’s leg and had had his back to Zielinski, but he turned around as the crowd cleared.

Zielinski stopped cold when he recognized the haggard and worn man, for one of the few times in his life shocked speechless.

“Zielinski,” the man said, not surprised to see him at all.

Carol Hancock: December 10, 1972

“Nothing new on Cathy Elspeth,” Ila said, spreading her notes on my kitchen table.  “Our people penetrated her Transform rights organization and four of her household’s businesses.  She’s on excellent terms with the Salt Lake City political and religious establishment, especially the local police force, likely her primary defense if anyone was silly enough to bother her with a Transform army.  Her household’s advertising business brings in enough money to give her the fourth largest household income among all the Focuses, allowing her to buy friends instead of needing to blackmail them.  Despite the rising tension in the Transform community, she still hasn’t upped her household defenses, sticking with her one night watchman.”  Despite the fact her suburban spread practically backed up on the Hunter and Monster dominated Wasach National Forest.  “I think she may really be what she seems, an ordinary Focus with the bad luck of being caught in the Quarantine, and because of her ample charisma now flagged to act as the proxy for the first Focuses on the Council.”

I nodded.  Ila’s information confirmed what I had learned from Webberly, and it appeared as though Cathy Elspeth would be a minor challenge at best.  I had met Cathy Elspeth several times at Council meetings, when I exercised my right to attend after Keaton gave up on the Focuses.  She possessed a once gorgeous scarred metapresence, stunning beauty, plus a good combination of decency and strength of character.  If not for the bad luck of falling into the power of the ruling First Focuses, she might have even been a decent human being.  The thought of owning her appealed to me.

“Sarah Teas.”  Sarah was my closest ally among the first Focuses – stretching the ‘ally’ word a bit – since before the Fight in Detroit.  She thought she was Mata Hari reborn and had a habit of not being quite sure who she needed to betray today, or why.  Teas always plotted
something
, but in her plots and her convolutions, the fantasy outweighed the reality by at least ten to one.

Ila grinned with a smile that had become feral over the last few years.  “I got her.”

I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table, and beside me, Tom did the same.  “What did you get?”

“I finally cracked her organization.  She’s sloppy, and she hops from project to project, and she doesn’t always tie off her loose ends neatly.  I found a senior normal lieutenant, not part of her household, who ended up pissed over his treatment by Teas and interested in some money on the side.  He gave me the opening I needed and now we’ve got people all over her organization.”  She dropped a thick folder on the table.  “Preliminary report.  People, projects, finances, the whole deal.  She’s wide open, and there’s more info coming.”

Yes!  “Good work.  Excellent.  And Suzie Schrum?”

“She’s harder.  Schrum’s a nutcase, but she’s a damned sharp nutcase.  Her organization is small, smaller still because most of the Network and anybody else with a remnant of sanity won’t have anything to do with her and because a certain someone you’re associated with” Lori “has been putting the screws to her contacts for years.  The people she’s got, she’s got tight.  They practically piss themselves when her name even comes up, and none of them would ever dream of crossing her.  I’m getting a bunch of around-the-edges info from standard research, but no ins to her organization.”

Not good news, but not unexpected, either.  “Keep trying.  Adkins?”  I put work into saying the name without a snarl.

Ila looked away.  I frowned.

“What’s wrong with Wini Adkins?”  So much for no snarl.

Ila straightened her back and stared right at me, jaw set and face pale.  “Ma’am, I regret to report failure there again.  Even my attempts at standard research have been unusually fruitless.  In addition, I found two different attempts to subvert our people which I suspect she’s responsible for, and while I can say for certain that we’re making no progress against her, I cannot swear that she’s not making progress against us.”

Ila relaxed her spine, and faded back into her seat.  “I’m sorry ma’am, but she’s better than I am.  I’m outclassed, and I’m afraid that my attempts on her only leave us more vulnerable to her.”

Shit.  I leaned back and thought while Ila studied me uneasily.  She had been mine for years, and she knew what I was like when my beast prowled.

Tom frowned.  “So we do brute force.”

I nodded.  Adkins’ organization wasn’t necessary, however much I wanted it.

I did want it.  I wanted to rip loose and destroy every single thing she owned, and then start on her.  Priorities, though, I told myself.  If I got Wini Adkins herself, everything else was gravy.

“Pull back.  Quit any attempts on her and focus those resources on Schrum, but let me vet them all before we transfer them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  She looked at me suspiciously, still waiting to hear the punishment she expected.

“No,” I said.  “I’m not going to applaud you for failure, but I won’t punish you either.  If you give me your best effort, and then admit it afterwards, you’re clean.  It would have been different if you tried to cover it up.”  She knew this already, but she still needed the confirmation.  In a few years, she would be hell on wheels, but not yet.

“Yes, ma’am.  Thank you ma’am.”

I turned to Tom.  “Military next.  Tom, beef up our defenses.  The Focus Bitch” Adkins “is going to hit us here, perhaps Littleside, perhaps Gail and Inferno.”  Tom nodded.  “How are we doing on…”

The telephone rang, interrupting me.  Mary Beth was out for the evening and so Tom reached behind him and snagged the receiver off the wall.

“Hello?”

Panic blasted from the other end of the phone.  Shouts, screams, and someone who sounded an awful lot like Haggerty letting loose a string of blistering invective.  I moved before Jeannie, Zielinski’s nurse, even started speaking.