No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read online

Gilgamesh winced, even though he knew Tiamat was pulling his leg. He certainly hadn’t set out to ‘take Sky’s Focus’. He hadn’t wanted a relationship with Lori, but he had one now whether he wanted one or not. She had promised to behave, but when he visited her after his Occum visit she had done everything but strip off her clothes and do a table dance for him. No, she hadn’t said a thing and actually, she hadn’t even touched him, but she had broadcast ‘available’ with signals able to be read in the next county. He had never seen a Focus act in such a way, including the Chicago Focus who had been a prostitute. Lori now haunted his dreams as much as Tiamat did. Luckily for him Tiamat wasn’t jealous.

  Much the opposite. Arm sexuality didn’t include the word ‘exclusive’, which troubled him more than a little. He needed to get used to sharing. He wasn’t sure what he thought about Sky any more, but he certainly knew what Sky thought of him, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Chapter 10

  “When you face that reality, then you have to start taking a serious look at the issues and decide that the best public health intervention is to discourage the sinful behavior that causes Transform Sickness to spread.”

  “Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

  Carol Hancock: June 23, 1968

  Phone calls aside, I felt good about getting all my people together. I had commandeered three rooms of the Sunshine, a freeway motel up north of Houston, for my purposes. The Sunshine was within a few miles of a huge new metro airport scheduled to open about this time next year, and the authorities were putting in a new connecting freeway a quarter mile away from the Sunshine. At times I thought the whole city was one big construction zone.

  Territory. Finally. Territory sang inside of me, following my heartbeat: Arm…Arm…Arm. Territory is a powerful want and desire for us Arms, almost essential, rivaling but not as deep as our need for juice, enough so that I recently and half-accidentally picked up Oklahoma City and Austin as mine. The latter would be mine to hunt, but not to live in, the same way Milwaukee, Rockford and the Quad Cities had been mine to hunt but not my home, back in my Chicago days. Subtle, yes, but to a mature Arm, instinctive. If I possessed my own tagged Arm, I could lease out some of my hunting territories to her, but not my home territory. Before Keaton tagged me, neither of us knew the difference. This subtlety was behind Keaton’s ability to ‘give’ me Baltimore and Newark as hunting territories, as a student Arm, and the real reason why, when hunting in her home territory, Philadelphia, she poached the first kill she found for me. I suspected giving up your prey to another Arm was twice as hard, if not ten times as hard, in your own home territory.

  Mine!

  As in: Houston, now. “People, listen up. Nobody goes out alone. We have hostiles in Houston…but Houston is mine, now.” I stood in front of the television in Zielinski and Frances’ room, while my people watched me attentively from the beds and chairs.

  My newest recruit, Ricky Sanchez, nodded with his eyes from one of the two chairs. He was another thug, a bruiser and an experienced armed robber, but a step up from Fred. Perhaps two. I had found and recruited him before my Boston trip, in San Antonio, while I had been hunting for juice. He was smart for a thug with only an 8th grade education, he had a level head, and he knew his weapons. His flaw, the crack in his personality I exploited, was his lack of commitment and motivation. He was lazy. He had no ambition. The gang he ran with, before I recruited him, got so pissed with his laziness they beat him up, to teach him a lesson. Lucky for him, I showed up and decided to provide him the motivation he lacked.

  I’m good at motivation. Finding a way to get him properly educated would be harder. Hank practically wept in frustration every time he attempted to talk to Ricky. At least my motivations had Ricky freshly barbered, showered, clean-shaven, and in fresh clothes. Following my orders, the four had driven from Austin to meet Gilgamesh and me here.

  I went through the rest of my instructions to my small crew. I paired up Ricky with Fred and Hank with Frances, at least while they stayed in the Sunshine. Outside the Sunshine, I stuck Ricky with Frances and Hank with Fred. Ricky was cool and wouldn’t go after Frances the way Fred had, and Hank vastly preferred Fred, despite their history. “You’re my research crew, for now,” I said. “I want information on the housing market, the politics, obvious gang activities, and, especially, anything about Transforms. That means libraries and bars. Gilgamesh and I will be doing an up-close on Focus Peshnak tomorrow.” Gilgamesh stayed in my room, more or less. He vanished when he slept. I wasn’t sure, yet, if this was a Crow thing or one of his quirks. Or whether he vacated the place or used a juice trick to hide from me. I didn’t want to push him on the subject. Yet. He wasn’t here now, still in the process of working through whatever Crows had to work through to be able to interact with new acquaintances.

  I found a smile on my face, and I knew why. Territory. Claiming a territory definitely put a bounce in my step.

  Gilgamesh: June 24, 1968

  “Give me a few minutes more, please,” Gilgamesh said. It was one thing to help an Arm hunt down her juice, which he justified as saving lives. It was another to actually go out and help an Arm in an espionage mission.

  This required meditation. Lots of meditation.

  Tiamat paced, and later took her pacing outside after looking him over. Gilgamesh tuned her out and cleared his mind. This was the meditation form that made him more skittish, not less. If he was going into danger, he wanted to be ready to run. His biggest Tiamat problem now was his own cheating mind, which was beginning to think of Tiamat as both a comfort and as a woman. Their physical relationship was too new.

  Perhaps he should just ask Tiamat to predator at him for a few minutes. That would ramp up his panic. However, she was having a similar problem, only she thought of him as a sex object from the dominant position in the relationship. As if he was someone weak and helpless, to be protected. Her intellect knew better, but those damned juice instincts played as much havoc with her as they did with him.

  It didn’t help that they had learned, through the Focus Network, that Focus Ottilie Peshnak – Rogue Focus – was demanding $100,000 from Tiamat for the right to visit Houston and an additional $10,000 a month if she decided to live in Houston. Tiamat had been about as angry as he had ever seen her when she received the demand. She forwarded the information on to the Skinner, along with a comment that she would pay only if the Skinner ordered her to. Formally. Gilgamesh swore he heard the Skinner laughing all the way out here in Houston.

  There would be no payments.

  Finally, his mind settled into the state where enemies were everywhere around him. He stood and went to the hotel room door. Tiamat met him.

  “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  She looked him over, cautious. “It’s like there’s nobody home,” she said.

  In this state, his eyes were so vacant he knew he looked like a zombie. “My concentration’s entirely in my metasense,” he said. From what he had experienced with other Crows, he suspected his voice was as vacant as his eyes. “My mind is entirely thinking sideways. For instance I just realized that plucking dross from you while you exercise is slowly improving the symmetry of your glow.”

  “Shhh,” she said.

  She drove them, silent, through the city, while Gilgamesh stared ahead vacantly with his eyes and everywhere with his metasense. When they approached within six miles of the South Main Transform Clinic, she parked on a quiet side street and got out. She signaled him to follow, a set of elaborate arm and body position signals they had worked out with each other so they would be able to communicate if they got separated or communicate quietly if they needed.

  He followed close behind Tiamat. Full up on Arm dross as he was, his metasense not only felt better, but also worked better. He couldn’t burn juice like an Arm, but he knew that concentrating on his metasense this way used up juice faster than normal. Almost the same. He also carried as much dross around with him as possible these days, and just c
arrying around the dross load stressed him, and over time allowed him to carry more. Perhaps he would be able to push his timetable down from three years to two years to do directly what he could do indirectly with his rotten eggs.

  Fifteen minutes on foot allowed them to reach the edge of his metasense range on Rogue Focus’s household. A minute later he had the entire South Main Transform Clinic in his range.

  “Carol, the same two Focuses who I sensed in the Clinic at the end of May are still in residence, and the number of Transforms in their households haven’t changed measurably.” An anomaly.

  She nodded, sniffed, and led them to the west a few blocks before heading back south. The Houston summer night buoyed him, Miami-like in its heat and humidity. The city lights lit up the bottoms of the low clouds so much that for the two of them, as Major Transforms, it was like walking in full daylight. They kept to the darker streets as they walked, hidden from normals. To the east, Hephaestus had rounded up his young Crow charges and had crept up to the edge of Crow metasense range and stayed there. Hephaestus didn’t feel panicked at all; the now four young Crow charges in his care certainly did.

  Tiamat sniffed again. “We’re downwind from some Feds, Federal Marshals I believe.” Tiamat could sniff out Feds and differentiate them? Yikes! He put his hand on Tiamat’s shoulder to steady himself. Otherwise he would have run.

  She followed her nose. He followed her. They got closer. Tiamat stopped and hand signaled for him to go forward alone.

  He did so, only suffering a moment of hesitation. Normals were his for the initial examination; they had talked this through earlier and done some experiments. Tiamat was stealthy around normal humans, but he was better. He found a small one-story home where the Feds lived and watched them for twenty minutes before coming back.

  “There’s a tiny amount of dross in the house, about the amount you’d suspect if a Focus and her entourage visited about once a month for a few hours,” he whispered. “There are ten of them in the place, two awake and on guard, eight asleep. One of them was holding a Monster gun. I metasensed no active juice patterns.”

  Tiamat nodded. Both of them approached the Feds’ place. Tiamat crept in, examined the guards, and crept back. Using signals she led him away, north, around the Feds’ safe house and circling around the South Main Transform Clinic, skipping Rogue Focus’s place for now.

  “Two of the ten aren’t Marshals,” Carol said, as she traversed the alley behind the Foodarama on South Main. “I can’t place them by scent; they were both asleep. They’re not FBI, and if I had to guess, I’d guess CIA. In addition, that safe house has a huge arsenal of heavy weapons, with at least thirty high caliber rifles and twenty heavy machine guns.”

  Gilgamesh, 1000 feet away and walking the tree-lined sidewalk of the subdivision to the west, held up his hand, signaling to stop. One of Rogue Focus’s Transforms left her house. They stopped and waited, Gilgamesh signaling the Transform’s actions as best as possible. The Transform stopped about a mile north of Rogue Focus’s house, in a building.

  Tiamat led them around the Transform until they were downwind of his location. “Police station,” Carol said, Crow quiet. “One of her Transforms may be a local cop, starting his night shift. I want to get in closer.”

  To within her metasense range of the Transform.

  Gilgamesh covered the thousand feet between them and stuck to Tiamat like gristle to an old Focus household. They didn’t know what sort of tricks Rogue Focus used; if she had Focus Patterson’s tricks they could easily blunder into being detected. They crept close enough to metasense that the Transform was in a small precinct station. Tiamat signaled and they moved back, continuing their long circle around, toward the South Main Clinic.

  “Yup, he’s a cop,” Carol said. “I think we’re going to have to assume she’s got a fair number of local cops in her back pocket.”

  A mile from the Clinic Gilgamesh started to pick up some always difficult-to-sense juice patterns. “Juice patterns in the Clinic,” he said. “Not from the Focuses who live there.”

  Tiamat didn’t stop; they continued on through a used car dealership and an apartment complex until they were within her metasense range of the Transform Clinic. “They don’t do night patrols,” she said. “Just daylight patrols, and not many.” She was sensing their juice traces, he figured.

  “I don’t sense tags on the Focuses,” Gilgamesh said. “However, about twenty percent of the Transforms there have multiple tags.”

  “Uh huh, Rogue Focus tags,” Carol said. “These aren’t baby Focuses. One looks about 18 months out and the other about 2 years.” Hmph. He couldn’t tell Focus ages with his metasense.

  Nor were they bottom end Focuses. Each controlled their own household with a firm hand. From their household sizes he didn’t think they were top end Focuses, either. He also suspected that an average Category 2 hurricane would flatten the Clinic. Shoddy construction.

  “Yes. They’re moving around within the Clinic to avoid bad juice and they’ve got perhaps another year to go before they’ve finished fouling the entire place,” Gilgamesh said. For Transform Clinics this was practically brand new, finished in ’65. The Good Doctor had relayed to Tiamat, yesterday, the age of the place, and how pork barrel money tied to President Johnson’s presidency got this place built.

  They did a full sweep of the Clinic’s perimeter, moving extremely cautiously when they were upwind of it. “I think the older Focus has been doing some experiments with Rogue Focus’s low juice male Transform trick,” Gilgamesh said. “Four of her male Transforms show signs of being kept in peri-withdrawal for multiple weeks, although none of them are that way now. I’m also certain that she’s lost at least two male Transforms during her experimentation.” The dross signature of juice psychotics was subtle, but he had seen it before. And as with many of these places, the Clinic had an official shooting gallery set up to dispose of unwanted Transforms. The gallery was a cesspool of sludge and gristle dross, evidence of extensive use.

  After they finished circling the Clinic they cautiously headed toward Rogue Focus’s lair, this time through the parking lot of a newly constructed medical professional building. Gilgamesh still hadn’t metasensed any Transforms on patrol or any juice patterns. A quarter mile away they stopped, Tiamat agitated.

  What? he signaled. He had no desire to make an unnecessary sound so close to the Focus’s lair.

  Metasense block, Tiamat signaled back.

  He indicated that his wasn’t blocked. She nodded. Rogue Focus didn’t know how to stop the Crow metasense.

  He couldn’t follow her hand signals as she tried to explain something. He focused his metasense on Rogue Focus’s place and slowly started to metasense the juice patterns on the place, some exceedingly subtle.

  Some he stood on.

  Dammit. He barely kept from sicking up in panic.

  He signaled the fact they were standing on juice patterns to Tiamat before his panicky feet took him away, which they did. She followed him with difficulty; he had to keep adjusting his path to keep within her metasense range. She had a hard time metasensing him when he was this panicked, he knew. He had to put work into keeping himself from going all crazy and running away from Tiamat. His subconscious, it turned out, hadn’t quite bought into their closer relationship.

  “Safe for now,” he said, a mile and a half out and hiding behind a Hi Lo Auto Supply. “But five Transforms have just left Rogue Focus’s place, heading this way. They’ve got quite a few juice patterns on them.”

  Tiamat zipped over to where he hid by the garbage dumpster. At least auto supply garbage didn’t reek like restaurant garbage. “Keep an eye on the Clinic. Rogue Focus doesn’t use metasense shields, she uses a metasense static trick. I couldn’t make out anything inside her place with my metasense.”

  Her emotions didn’t show worry, but aggression and cunning. “You’ve got a nasty trick you want to pull?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure these five Transforms have nor
mals with them. I want to grab one of the normals.” For information. Not something a Crow would ever do, but her suggestion felt right. He was falling more into the Arm mindset.

  “How?”

  “I’m going to gamble that Rogue Focus has the trick where she can give her household members some sort of metasense equivalent.” They had learned from Lori that this was a common trick among the Focus witches. The trick didn’t work well; the standard trick didn’t duplicate the metasense but gave the Transform the simple ability to sense the presence of a glow. Focus witches also used juice patterns to extend their metasense range; what they stepped on earlier was likely the Focus Shaman equivalent of this standard trick. “I want you to confuse them with your rotten eggs so I can swoop in on foot and grab a normal.”

  A second group of Transforms, three in number, left the household. Gilgamesh metasensed agitation. He relayed this to Tiamat.

  “I’ll try,” Gilgamesh said. Tiamat wanted to find out how much she could depend on him. He knew she had to push him, but he didn’t have to like being pushed.

  “Do your best. If you panic and can’t get back into my range we’ll meet back at the motel.”

  He nodded and headed off toward the first group. He told himself he was a stealthy Crow. He couldn’t fool a Focus within her short metasense range, unless she was distracted, but he didn’t need to do that. He hoped. They had no idea of Rogue Focus’s age and talent level. If she was powerful, well trained and nervy she might be masking herself enough to fool him.

  He had been in worse danger, though that didn’t stop him from edging toward panic. A car sped by on South Main a third of a mile away, speeding, loud. That sent him into a short run to a safe place (an oleander hedge not yet recovered from winter) before he realized the driver wasn’t a Beast Man with a mad on.

  Sweat dripping down his face and soaking through his shirt, he approached the first group Rogue Focus had sent out. As Tiamat predicted, he found four normals with the five Transforms. Gilgamesh took off his backpack and started lobbing tennis ball rotten eggs. Woman Transform. Fear. Metasense scramble. Confusion. Sense of wonder (his latest version of Waveguide’s ‘spend money’ rotten egg). As he tossed he moved, hiding behind cars, houses, trash bins and bushes, ending up on top of a low gently sloped garage.