All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 2

  So they all trooped over to the corner by the window, where Lori sat near Sky, nursing little Cloud. Only a week old, a true newborn, with wide brown eyes and an astonishing shock of black hair almost two inches long standing out straight from her head. The infant lost interest in her nursing with the excitement, and stared round at them all.

  Crazy Lori. She had refused to go to a hospital to have the kid. She leaned on her local doctor to be present at the delivery, and that was all the help Focus Rizzari needed. She just said, “Okay, the baby’s ready,” induced labor on herself, and four relatively painless hours later, out popped the baby, perfectly healthy. Lori had boasted that if worst came to worst, she would have performed a C-section on herself, the thought of which made Gilgamesh gag.

  Lori stood up and adjusted her shirt, grinning proudly and holding her treasure so everyone could see. The baby gurgled and waved her arms obligingly, and everyone cooed appropriately and told Lori how wonderful the baby was. The Good Doctor took the baby to hold and surreptitiously check over, and Lori gave Carol a huge hug. The hug did something subtle to Carol’s glow, but Gilgamesh couldn’t tell what. Lori barely looked like she had just had a baby at all. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.

  “Congratulations,” Gilgamesh said, to Sky. “You’re looking chipper, given the situation.” ‘Situation’ was a code word for the Inferno household’s latest antics with Sky. In their opinion Sky’s relationship with them had fallen into a rut, limited to sex, meditation lessons and ‘adventures’, roughly in order of relative occurrence. They wanted him to be a real household member, so they had been pressing him. Gilgamesh had even had to listen to Sky complain over the phone after he had been assigned basement clean-up duty after one of his pranks.

  “As are you,” Sky said. “Travel normally puts you through the wringer. And is that Midgard hiding behind you?”

  “Yes,” Midgard whispered, still hiding. “Tiamat gave Gilgamesh a motor home for Christmas. He drives it with almost Arm-like confidence. You’d have to see it to believe it.”

  Sky’s eyes lit up. “Oh ho! What’s next, Gilgamesh, fighting with Arm-like confidence?”

  Gilgamesh noticed the members of Lori’s household watching him and Sky uneasily. He and Sky both had complicated relationships with Lori; although Cloud was Sky’s daughter, Sky and Lori had officially broken up. Did the Inferno household members think the two Crows would fight? Or push Lori about her personal life?

  They didn’t understand Crows.

  Ann Chiron, as usual, took notes. Just what he had always wanted, to end up in a scholarly paper on Crow anthropology. Gilgamesh shook his head in response to Sky. “You have a beautiful child,” Gilgamesh said, ignoring Sky’s dig.

  They exchanged short glares and Sky backed off, starting a conversation with one of the other Transforms. Lori licked her lips and shook her head. Gilgamesh feared his small confrontation with Sky had looked about as silly as two squirrels hissing at each other.

  “We’ve got a few hours before dinner,” Lori said, “and you’re just in time to hear our carolers.” After a juice signal, the music started.

  Carol Hancock: December 24, 1968

  “Ma’am,” I said, bowing formally to Keaton. Five foot two of muscle and mean, she was my boss. She and her student Arm Amy Haggerty had showed up in Inferno just after dinner, and found me in the great room talking to Ann Chiron and Tim Egins, two of the Inferno household leaders and both mine. Haggerty had her blank face on and I smelled the stress. She had been around Transforms in number before, but never the Inferno Transforms, who considered Arms in a different light. For some reason they liked us. Even Keaton. At least a little.

  It all had to do with the Inferno household cause: promoting inter-Major Transform cooperation. As a practical practitioner of the Cause, I was an Inferno favorite. The fact their Focus, Lori, got gooey about me didn’t hurt, either.

  “Hancock,” Keaton said. “I heard a rumor you have something for me.”

  I nodded and pulled my faux-dissertation on Arm control techniques out of my travel bag beside the sofa. All three hundred and twenty seven pages of it, not counting the ancillary documentation. “I’m ready to go over this any time you’re ready.”

  Keaton flipped through it and smiled. “January 1st, in Detroit.” She wanted time to read it and absorb it. She glanced at the Inferno audience – Ann, Tim, and a half dozen others – who carefully listened without staring. “I want to formally congratulate you for the work you did resolving the Biggioni situation. You not only provided us with a new and important ally, but you also explained some of Tonya’s more troubling prior behaviors.” Behaviors resulting from Focus Biggioni’s partial enslavement under first Focus Patterson’s tag. “Good job.”

  Her comment was for the audience. And me. Praise from my Arm boss was a wonderful thing. As were Arm tags: without them, Keaton and I would be circling each other, verbally and physically, searching for advantages. There are no Arm peers. One must be dominant, and that was her, not me. Which is why I valued her praise so much. She didn’t give it out often.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  “On to business,” Keaton said. “Student Arm Haggerty has a graduation presentation to make. I’ve arranged it with Lori for later this evening, once the more mundane festivities are over.” Keaton let me read her; she was proud of Haggerty, but she didn’t like the news Haggerty was about to present.

  “Very well, ma’am,” I said. I let my intentions flow through my mind, and Keaton gave me permission to carry them through. I turned to Haggerty.

  She tensed up, as she didn’t wear my tag. A tag was a subtle change to her juice to mark her as mine, and it produced all sorts of nice side effects to allow two Arms to get along with each other in a comfortable dominance arrangement. I wanted to tag her, and I thought I had the necessary bait. “Student Haggerty, congratulations on your upcoming graduation. From experience, I know you’re about to enter into the most hazardous part of your career. I’d like to offer you some help, if you’d be willing to listen to the offer.”

  “Ma’am,” Haggerty said. Because of my years of experience I was dominant even without the tag. Haggerty didn’t like the situation. “May I ask that the offer be made in a less public location?”

  She should have asked non-verbally. I realized that although she was graduating, she still wasn’t able to read me at all. I had no idea how an Arm could survive out in the cold cruel world with such a lack, but I trusted Keaton to have judged Haggerty ready based on her other talents. For one, Haggerty’s fighting capabilities appeared to be much more advanced than mine had been when I graduated. I suspected she had other compensating skills as well.

  “Certainly.” I signaled the Crows and led Haggerty outside, to the Inferno obstacle course area. A private place in this weather, as anyone but a Major Transform had enough sense to stay inside. Slow cold rain dripped from the monkey bars and turned the dirt around the tires to frigid mud.

  Haggerty, clueless, crouched into a fighting stance once we were outside. Keaton stayed back, giving me ‘this is what I have to put up with every day with this twit’ signals.

  “I had a rough start to my career as an independent Arm,” I said, ignoring Haggerty’s crouch. “What saved me was an alliance I forged with Crow Gilgamesh. I would like to introduce you to a Crow who is interested in allying with you, Student Haggerty.”

  “Ma’am,” Haggerty said, standing up straight, now thinking quickly. She made her decision and bowed to me. “I thank you for this gift, and will accept the introduction.” Clunky, from another of Keaton’s internal mental scripts, but it worked. I was hoping to convince Haggerty to let me tag her, but there weren’t any protocols for this yet, so I was just feeling my way forward.

  The Crows approached as a group: Sky, Gilgamesh, Midgard, and to my surprise, Sinclair. They had responded to my signal and had been listening from the back porch. I hadn’t known our most famous Crow author was involved, bu
t I wasn’t shocked, either. Sinclair, like Gilgamesh, had an amazing nose for ‘interesting’ and the curiosity to back it up. He normally wasn’t happy about palling around with Arms and Focuses, but he was here and not overly skittish, even with Keaton observing. At least she was on her best Crow behavior: the ‘quiet statue’.

  I introduced the four Crows, who had stopped just outside skunking range, over by the climbing wall. The Crow skunking weapon was instinctive when a Crow was startled, and unknown predators outside of a Crow’s association, such as Haggerty, were the entities most likely to trigger this instinct. “The Crow Midgard wishes to make your acquaintance,” I said, my voice a Crow whisper.

  Midgard was a tall black man with short-cropped hair; like Haggerty he dressed in black, primarily to aid in being unnoticed. His quick dark eyes flickered nervously at Haggerty, but he managed to gather the nerve to step forward. He was to Haggerty what Gilgamesh was to me, in that he had fallen in love with Haggerty’s metapresence and style. Would he be able to stand Haggerty the person? I had my doubts. I found her insufferable at best.

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Crow,” Haggerty said. She studied him for a moment and changed, almost as if she had switched from one personality to another. “I have time for a short conversation, in private,” she said. “Would you care to join me?” I had never heard Haggerty speak this way before, almost unguarded. Not a Crow whisper, but also not threatening. She had read Midgard, and instantly knew he was someone she would be able to befriend. Interesting. She wasn’t totally head-blind. As always, I was amazed at us Arms; none of the four Arms I had met, including the one who hadn’t lasted two weeks, were anything like any of the others.

  “I would love to,” Midgard said. The two headed off together toward the cabana, not exactly arm in arm but within each other’s personal space. As far as I knew, Midgard had never been alone with any other Arm before this.

  I decided to wait until later on the tag.

  “Crow Sinclair,” Keaton said. She stood quietly, by the door back into the Inferno mansion. She didn’t do whispers, but she had her ‘tolerant, dealing with Transforms’ persona on. Sinclair backed up a step, wary. “We’ve never met, but I’ve heard a great deal about you. I’ve exchanged several testy messages with a Crow in Detroit named Watchmaker, and I was wondering if you would be interested in talking to me about him.”

  She had tried to buttonhole Gilgamesh on the subject and gotten nowhere. Well, not ‘nowhere’, but she got nothing more than a growl of disgust and a comment about impossible Crows who were silly enough to think they had to point firearms at other Crows to get them to behave.

  “I would be glad to do that, ma’am,” Sinclair said. He didn’t appear happy in the slightest, but we were all allies here. I hoped he wasn’t too flustered to remember to get something out of my boss. If he did remember, I would probably be stuck having to cough up the payment. Again.

  Henry Zielinski: December 24, 1968

  To his amazement, Inferno had converted the basement television room into a formal meeting-space just for them, with abundant well-used chairs arranged in a loose semi-circle facing a small table. The Inferno basement was a huge place, and if he had been in charge, he would have held this meeting in the fallout shelter, or perhaps Lori’s morgue laboratory. Although recently cleaned, the television room still smelled like old pizza and spilled Pepsi, with ratty second-hand furniture and piles of overstuffed pillows in the corners; the place was primarily a hangout for the Inferno teens, often with the door locked for private activities. The non-Arm attendees included Lori, the Crows Sky, Gilgamesh, Midgard, Sinclair, plus Connie Yerizarian and himself.

  He was extremely happy to get this invitation from Stacy, Arm Keaton. Arms were his life, and as Haggerty was about to graduate and go off on her own, he valued the opportunity to study her. She was tall, leggy, basketball-player muscular and Focus beautiful, nothing like any of the other Arms. She was also intense and extremely intelligent, and faced the world with a social awkwardness common to many a young university student of similar intensity and intellect.

  Haggerty set up an easel to the left of the table and started her talk. “As my graduation exercise, I was tasked to solve the mystery of an unknown variety of Major Transform who Ma’am Keaton metasensed in late ’64. They are Focuses, but Focuses without households and household juice buffers. There are at least five of them. I find my discoveries to be disquieting at an instinctive level.”

  Hank’s eyes widened and he leaned forward as the stone-faced Haggerty told her story. The tale itself was amazing, involving Haggerty sneaking into the abandoned salt mine lair of these no-household Focuses, rifling their records and escaping unharmed. The salt mine Focuses excelled at hand-to-hand combat, manipulated juice in a non-standard fashion, and possessed various non-standard methods of increasing their juice production. They had excellent Focus charisma, which they bent toward recruiting normals, not influencing other Transforms. More interesting to him was the way Haggerty told her tale: as an adventure, with herself as the do-gooder hero at the story’s center. Haggerty was a different Arm than Hancock and Keaton. He caught Keaton’s resigned annoyance; she hadn’t been able to beat this non-Arm-like attitude out of Haggerty. Hank suspected she had tried.

  “According to their records, these no-household Focuses have been selectively recruited from Clinics across the country at the rate of one a year, starting in ’64. The one Ma’am Keaton sensed in ’64 was new at her trade; the reason why the others have not been sensed is, I believe, because they’ve gotten better at masking their metapresence. I found them quite difficult to metasense, even when I was looking at them. They too have a master, referred to in their records as ‘the Teacher’. Who this Teacher is, I wasn’t able to discover. In addition, and much to my surprise, two of these no-household Focuses and their troops had a near-fatal encounter with a Hunter and his pack in Gary, Indiana, on November 12th of last year. According to their records, a different member of their group had learned by unknown means about Ma’am Hancock’s espionage mission against the Hunters. They as a group decided to interfere, along with their troops, with a goal of disabling Ma’am Hancock’s vehicles before they reached their targets. The implication I took from this is that these no-household Focuses can hide themselves from Arms and Crows, and know they can, but that they cannot hide from Chimeras, and didn’t know they couldn’t.”

  Hank glanced over at Carol, who as he expected looked most annoyed.

  After Haggerty finished the talk and opened it up for questioning, there were the usual Arm-rude questions about the details and inane digressions that often ended up as subtle digs at Carol by Keaton, and vice versa. He took notes, not tremendously interested, instead watching the audience. Carol was eating this up, as was Connie Yerizarian, Inferno’s household boss, but the Crows had lost interest early on and spent the time signaling and speaking voicelessly with each other. If he read their expressions correctly, they were telling dead Focus jokes.

  “There’s one thing I didn’t follow,” Lori said, about twenty minutes into the questioning. “Why did the salt mine Focus that, um, Ma’am Keaton metasensed metasense differently enough to fool her into thinking she was a different form of Major Transform? I’ve metasensed several new Focuses and they didn’t metasense differently, nor do Focuses who temporarily lose their household juice buffer due to one accident or another.”

  “There is no definitive answer to that question,” Haggerty said. She turned toward Stacy. “Ma’am?”

  “Go ahead and speculate,” Keaton said, waving her hand in the air.

  Haggerty reached into her materials box and dragged out a presentation board from the bottom of the stack. Hank read it and sat up straight, as this built on some work he and Gilgamesh had been doing. Gilgamesh and Sinclair noticed and sat up straight, as well. Sky and Midgard continued with the dead Focus jokes, oblivious to the radical theory Haggerty had so casually set on her easel.

  �
�These no-household Focuses manipulate juice differently and they experience the world differently,” Haggerty said. “I’ve put together a theory Ma’am Keaton terms a working hypothesis. In my hypothesis, each of the Major Transform forms come in sixteen varieties, based on four affinity sets: instinctive versus overt juice/dross/élan manipulation, objectified versus personal juice/dross/élan stabilization, mystical versus rationalist thought processes, and charismatic thinking gestalt versus metasense thinking gestalt. The ‘basic’ or ‘standard’ Major Transform uses all the right-side versions of these: overt, personal, rationalist and metasense. These no-household Focuses are all instinctive, personal, rationalist and charismatic.”

  “I’ve seen some of this before,” Lori said. “For instance, Rogue Focus was also instinctive instead of overt. I’d thought this was training based, though.”

  “Cross training is possible, but what I’ve found are affinities, what comes easily for each Major Transform. I suspect someone else figured this out, figured out that instinctive-juice-manipulating charismatic-thinking Focuses didn’t work out well as standard Focuses but are trainable in hand-to-hand combat and symbolic juice manipulation, without households.”

  “Hank?” Carol said. “Spill.” She didn’t believe Haggerty’s work, but read his agreement. She wanted to know why.

  He took a deep breath. “Gilgamesh and I identified the first three affinities, though we used somewhat different terminology. However, we were only working with Crow abilities, and had no idea it might apply to other Major Transforms.” Up until now, he thought he had discovered what made Crows so different from the other Major Transforms. So much for his theory. Phaaah. “As one example, Occum uses instinctive symbolic dross manipulation.” A Shaman, as opposed to Wizard, in Gilgamesh’s terminology. “Gilgamesh does objectified dross manipulation, and Crow Nameless does mystic instead of rationalist thinking. From a Crow point of view.”