The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Six (12 page)

“I agree,” Annie said
, to Keaton’s offer.  Arm spent nearly all of her time in Calgary, her home territory.  She rarely got to see Annie doing her Madonna of Montreal bargaining, and she wasn’t happy.  Too mercenary for the purist Arm.

“There’s a Crow in Boston named Occum,” Keaton said.  “I suspect you know this already, but he’s found a way to stabilize Chimera minds and make them useful.  They call themselves Nobles, and Occum’s mind stabilization tricks have turned them into Boy Scouts.  Well, on their good days.  In a fight, they’re still Beasts.”

“You checked them out, personally?” Annie said.

“Yes,” Keaton said.  “It took work, but I g
ot along with them.”

“Son of a bitch,” Arm said.  “Son of a bitch.”

“I think, with a combination of their Boy Scout natures and their still-Beastly hungers for juice of every variety, they might be able to eat their way through this juice barrier of yours.  And they’re looking for a big enough challenge to prove themselves to the, ahem, Commander.  Their words.”

Ah, so this is how Keaton learned they had at least one Commander-style talent currently active.  Annie had wondered, when Keaton had
sent inquiries on the subject in one of her recent letters.

“I suspect you’re right, Arm Keaton,” Annie said, impressed.  “
However, I didn’t think they were ready for something real.”

“They never will be unless we – meaning you – challenge them,” Keaton said.  “Their big flaw, from a pushy Arm perspective, is lack of personal initiative.  They need the challenges.”

“Hell, I should just go beat the crap out them,” Arm said.  Annie held up her hand, but Arm ignored her signal and slid toward Keaton.

“Boston’s mine,” Keaton said, striding toward the line in the dirt.

“The hell you say, short stuff.”  Arm stomped forward, her temper shot, ready to fight.  This time, Gwen skittered back instinctively.  “I go where I want to, when I want to, and there’s nothing…”

Annie whistled, loud, and put some juice into her whistle.  The two Arms stopped, as Annie wanted, just before they crossed the line.

“Later,” Annie said.  “Please.”

The ‘later’ got to Arm, while the ‘please’ got to Keaton.  They backed off, reluctantly.  Annie wasn’t sure she
would be able to stop the two predatory idiots a second time.

“You promised me you had
something to trade worth more than I would be able to imagine,” Annie said, holding Keaton’s angry gaze.

“Yes, ma’am,” Keaton said, rapidly clenching and unclenching her fists.  Annie wasn’t sure, but based on Keaton’s internal emotional reaction, she doubted the Arm had ever ‘yes-ma’amed’ a Focus before.  Good.  It was time someone found a way to convince this mentally unstable Arm she had betters in the world.  “The discovery is how Arms can get along.  The dominant Arm tags the less dominant Arms.  Arm tags are also useful on Transforms and normals.  Both establish command dominance, and a tag on a Transform prevents any accidents.” 
‘Accidents’ meaning accidental juice draining.

“You have Hancock tagged?” Annie
said.  Keaton nodded.  “She doesn’t have you tagged?”  Another nod.  “You get along better?”

“Much better.  Our relationship has become professional
for the first time.”

Annie nodded.  Keaton was right.  Her information was worth the trade.

“Tags!” Arm said, ruining the moment.  “Tags are evil.  They mess up everyone involved, the tag holder and the tagee.  They’ll destroy you.  Drop them, and that’s an order!”  The last bit of nonsense Arm shouted at Keaton, surprising Annie.  She hadn’t realized how badly Arm disliked tags.

Keaton shook her head in response – and then her eyes lit up like beacons.

“You’ve been tagged,” Keaton said.  She let a shit-eating grin cover her face.  “That’s the big secret nobody would tell us American Major Transforms about how you managed to survive as a young Major Transform.  You were tagged.”  As if tagging was demeaning.  Annie tried to work out the puzzle, as for her, tagging was just a method of enabling juice transfers and juice control.  On the other hand, if this was part of the American Major Transform gestalt, it practically screamed that the multi-Focus household in Pittsburg, the one Focus Patterson ran, was a hellhole because of abuse of Focus-Focus tags.  What Focus Patterson did to her subsidiary Focuses was extremely demeaning.  She suspected images of misused tags haunted the dreams of all the American Major Transforms.

Arm popped her knuckles, one after the other, and shook back her shoulders.  She didn’t answer.  She didn’t need to.

“I did it, and there’s nothing to be ashamed about, as by doing so I saved your bloody life, Arm,” Gwen said.

Keaton nodded, now understanding how Gwen had stopped Arm’s first bit of aggressive behavior.  In Keaton’s mind, Gwen had dominance over Arm.  Not true – their relationship was old and far more complicated – but
Keaton’s inference had been true, once upon a time.  Arm and Gwen were able to work together, currently, at least after Annie arm-twisted the both of them to behave.

“How’d you keep from taking all her juice into your juice buffer?”

Gwen blushed.  “Practice.  Worse, I never did figure out how to give it back to her once I took it.  However, if you feed the Arm no-hope Transforms, the Focus’s juice buffer will eventually get filled up, and then any spud can keep the Arm alive, if she has a supply of no-hope Transforms.”  Gwen’s blush deepened.  Gwen held ample darkness inside her, far too much do-whatever-it-takes marde from the olden days, but she wasn’t proud of it.  “It took me three months to get enough control over my instinctive juice-grabbing to keep her tagged without accidentally stripping her.”

Three months Arm refused to speak about.  Period.

“You kept Arm caged, didn’t you?” Keaton said.  Gwen nodded, and Keaton turned to Arm, with dagger eyes.  “Was it a nice cage?  Did you…”

Arm bellowed and charged, over the line in the dirt in an instant.  Keaton went flying, crashing through the trees and taking down several hundred kilos of branches on the way by.  She landed on her feet and charged Arm, quiet, radiating hot anger.

No, they weren’t going to solve the Keaton – Arm problem with any tags.  Not any time soon.  Annie suspected she would be sweet-talking Arm for months simply to convince Arm to try tagging someone.  She waved Gwen over, keeping a wary eye on the fight.  The two crazies were already going at it with swords.

“She’s a hell of a lot nicer than Arm, isn’t she?” Gwen said.

“She’s better at putting on a show.  And you might not want to mention your observation to Arm, ever,” Annie said.  “Oh, and duck!”

She and Gwen bent down, and their normal bodyguards flicked the switches on their torches, as Keaton when flying, spinning, over their heads, Arm in pursuit, bellowing like an angry bear.

The worst thing about it was that both of the Arms were better at this sort of idiotic fighting than before.

Author’s Afterward

Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Maurice Gehin, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer.  Without their help this document would have never been made.

As stated earlier, The Good Doctor’s Tales
Folio 6 is a companion piece to my novel “No Sorrow Like Separation”.  Some of the pieces in here are here for completeness, others for fun, and they all serve to flesh out the story.

You can find out more information about the world of the Transforms and other stories published by this author on
http://majortransform.com.    You can also follow me on my Facebook author page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Randall-Allen-Farmer/106603522801212.

The Commander series continues in “
In This Night We Own” (Book Six of “The Commander”.  With this will come Folio 8 of The Good Doctor’s Tales.

Randall Allen Farmer