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

  Carol had him, along with Frances, stationed on the flat gravel roof of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, nicely situated to be the information headquarters for the attack. Frances was Crow nervous, not only because she had never been involved in anything like this before, but because of how Tiamat had transported her here, sack of potatoes fashion, up the side of the museum building. They had everything they could possibly need, including firearms (Tiamat had spent time teaching Frances firearm basics, just in case), walkie-talkies, extra batteries, maps, and typed up contingency plans. Gilgamesh had arranged it all in neat rows, ready and accessible for when the fighting started.

  Kali’s rampage, which would set the older Arm up for years as far as money was concerned, had worked as a distraction. Only two Feds remained in the Fed safe house, most likely the two CIA operatives. Sky and Tiamat had studied them often enough to convince themselves the two were non-combatants. They were no threat.

  Gilgamesh wiped sweat from his forehead, the result of stress and the Houston evening heat and humidity. At least the omnipresent mosquitos rarely ventured all the way up here on the roof. The waning moon provided barely enough light to see, and he looked over the edge of the roof as two miles away to the southwest Tiamat’s sixty expendable troops, led by four of her real recruits, piled out of vehicles and surrounded Rogue Focus’s complex. Tiamat cut off phone service to the Focus’s house and the mission was on.

  Lori, Focus Ackerman and their people, which included Transforms from several other New England households, parked just outside of the South Main Transform Clinic and walked in the front door. From earlier discussions, he knew both of the non-Houston Focuses wore well-crafted disguises, as did most of their household members and borrowed Transforms. The invaders spread out after they entered the Clinic, jogging over to the dorms where the Clinic Focuses and their people lived. The Boston Focuses and their people started to jaw with the Clinic Focuses; neither Clinic Focus was able to get her people out of their dorms. As Tiamat had hoped for, Lori’s crew swiftly neutralized these two Focuses.

  As Lori and Focus Ackerman did their thing, Rogue Focus’s people exited the three buildings they lived in and took up positions around the main house. They knew what they were doing and had cover pre-arranged, including four foxholes they maintained for emergencies like this.

  Tiamat had scouted the foxholes beforehand and she rushed one of the positions, all by herself. Her plan was to clear it so her troops could push their way into the Focus’s house. Only she didn’t make it. Mid-leap, she grabbed at her head and fell just outside the fence marking the edge of Rogue Focus’s property. She scrabbled away, dodging. No gunfire yet, though.

  “Uh oh,” Gilgamesh heard from Sky over his walkie-talkie. “I’ve got one, two, no five cars and trucks filled with normals coming. I think…yes, they’re here for the fight.”

  Gilgamesh passed word via his other walkie-talkies. Tiamat had been right. She had predicted there would be at least one big surprise. He couldn’t reach Tiamat on the walkie-talkie, though, a big problem.

  Normals. They hadn’t even considered the idea that Rogue Focus might have recruited normals to help her. They had seen nothing to indicate she had any outside contact with any normals beyond her police department contacts.

  Crap. Gilgamesh hoped the whole plan hadn’t just been flushed down the toilet.

  “I’m going in,” Sky said, his emotions now roiled and fierce. “Marde!” His voice clicked and buzzed, and then cut out.

  Well, this was the reason why Sky was the Crow stationed closest to Rogue Focus’s household. They couldn’t ask him to participate directly, but Tiamat somehow had known Sky wouldn’t be able to resist if things went wrong. Gilgamesh hoped he could pull some miracle out of the now collapsing fiasco in progress.

  “Someday I’ll be able to be that brave,” Gilgamesh said, hugging his arms around his torso.

  “You’re crazy, Crow,” Frances said. “I just hope they don’t figure out where our command post is.”

  Yes, that would be nice. The whole idea of a big fight like this practically made Gilgamesh break out in hives. He was glad he was up here and the fight was down there and over that-a-way.

  Carol Hancock: July 20, 1968

  No gunfire, no cops, no worries. My people crept forward in the darkness. A quarter moon provided a bare minimum of light, plenty for me, but damned little for the normals. I hoped my people didn’t end up shooting each other out of general confusion. “Fred, Dennis, stick six more over by the mailbox on the left,” I said. Rogue Focus had gone for a defensive deployment and so far hadn’t shown herself. Perfect. “The Clinic Focuses are neutralized,” Lori said, over the walkie-talkie. I smiled.

  With that potential problem down, the next step was breaking the deployment Rogue Focus had ringed around her house. I expected getting into the bitch’s house to take time. By then her people would be shooting at us. Lori expected Rogue Focus would have placed some nasty Freudian juice patterns on the house itself, or just inside – something about sunlight and weather degradation making it impossible to maintain nasty juice patterns outside. According to Lori, juice patterns were exhaustible, meaning my expendable recruits were going to be, well, expended. What might these juice patterns do? Mess with the mind. Not kill. So my expendables had been taught to disarm, contain and remove anyone who got hit, and recognize Freudian tropes when it hit them. I wasn’t really sure of the effectiveness of the last, but, well, you worked with what you had.

  Rogue Focus’s weakest strongpoint was the north edge of her east back yard privacy fence. I signaled my people – I couldn’t call them an army, there weren’t enough of them – before I rushed the fence and leapt over. The plan was for me to disable and disarm the four defenders who guarded this section of the privacy fence. My people would go through the fence and start taking down the perimeter defenders from behind their lines. Noise suppressed handguns, handcuffs, rope, the works. We were supposed to be keeping the body count down.

  Only the leap of mine didn’t work. Lori had sworn you couldn’t make a force field or Star Trek like ‘shields’ with a juice pattern, but it felt like that’s what I ran into in my leap. Only, it was my own body fighting itself that caused me to ‘bounce’. Pain like a thousand fishhooks ripped through my skin and my head exploded with the agony of a migraine headache from hell as I fell.

  I grabbed my head as I hit the ground, moaning. Following procedure, my people disarmed me, pulled me back under cover, in this case behind a couple of parked cars on the other side of the street, and contained me outside the lines.

  The thousand fishhooks pain wasn’t the problem. That I ignored; Keaton had done worse. The headache was something else entirely, pain in nerves Keaton hadn’t ever been able to touch. My eyesight wouldn’t focus, and multiple images spun around me, making me dizzy. My metasense winked out, reduced to static.

  I tried to bark orders, but nothing came out but a moan. Dimly, I realized the attack had tossed me back into the same mental headspace I had been stuck in after I first woke up after my withdrawal episode: inability to talk, fractured logic, general insanity. I probably couldn’t read or write again, but right now I didn’t care.

  A deeper part of me realized I had stepped into the Freudian trope of phantasmagoria and become lost in chaos. Well, as long as I didn’t take any sudden death drives or start thinking of my enemies as walking penises, I would be okay. I wasn’t going to let this stop me. I had done quite well as the ‘magical thinking’ Arm, thank you very much. I burned juice to chase away the headache, or at least made the attempt. It actually took me quite a while, perhaps half a minute, to find where inside my head the damned problem was. Then I fixed it with a juice burn.

  Gunfire. People shouting. Nobody in command. There should have been someone. Me, for instance. Without me to lead, the entire attack was going to shit. I fixed my eyesight and metasense with more juice burning and tried to stand.

  Nope. Someone had handcuffed my han
ds and feet.

  I didn’t have time for this. Pop! Pop! Now I wore chromed metal bracelets.

  No words came through my mouth, dammit. I looked around over the parked Cougar and found myself behind my people. Thugs piled out of several cars stopped in the middle of the street, just a few houses down. Enemies. Normals. As many of them as there were of us. A fight!

  I fought, the obvious thing to do. They shot at me. I was faster. The enemy thugs, which weren’t a part of my plan, set up a defensive perimeter just to the west of Rogue Focus’s property. West was a bad omen. The Clinic was to the southeast. West was the direction of the Fed’s safe house. I didn’t like their direction, so I tried to keep the thugs from maintaining their defensive perimeter. I counted bullet wounds: one, two, three, and decided the next one, ‘many’ would be a bad omen for me, so I retreated. Many of my people and their people were no longer functional, lying on the ground and leaking blood. This wasn’t how the attack was supposed to go.

  Weak hands spun me around. “Carol, what in the hell are you doing?”

  Sky. Crow. In my face.

  I picked him up and moved us farther back, to behind my trusty gold Cougar. He didn’t resist. I pointed to my mouth and shook my head.

  “A juice pattern got you, eh, Commander? I can’t even sense it!” Sky said. Bad omen that.

  What was he doing here? Another bad omen. And why had he called me ‘Commander’?

  “What can I do?”

  I shrugged.

  “I know, I’ll get Lori,” he said.

  His intended action didn’t match the plan, so I tried to stop him. Instead, I caught his lips on mine, and then found inside myself a great desire to close my wounds, burning juice. I did so. When I finished Sky had vanished. By now I was too addled to see the Freudianisms at work. Thankfully.

  Rogue Focus solved the problem with my plan, that of getting into her house, by exiting her house, with her combatants, joining up with the remaining mob of normal thugs. They took off on foot, heading west.

  There was method to her madness, but I had to burn juice to figure it out: the Feds wouldn’t let Rogue Focus keep any heavy weaponry in her house, just hand guns. However, I knew the Feds had a substantial weapons locker in their safe house. Rogue Focus was going for the big penises.

  Definitely a bad omen.

  Sky: July 20, 1968

  Sky leapt like a madman toward the South Main Transform Clinic, happy for his last year of exercises and training. He had run into a fight! He knew he had been acting far more fierce and directed than normal, but he couldn’t believe he had actually run into a fight. He wasn’t sure why, but he had a bad feeling it wasn’t because he had suddenly transformed into a Beast Man or something equivalently rational. No, it was something Crowish and irrational: he had fallen for Carol in some insane subconscious fashion. Nothing spectacular like Lori falling for Gilgamesh. But he could no longer think of Carol as ‘Tiamat’.

  Accouché! What, was this a disease? Well, yes, but not in the way he thought he meant. Had he caught it from Lori? Gilgamesh? Or from Carol directly, when he had Crow-operated on her messed up glow?

  At least he was running away from the fight now.

  He tried not to think about Carol’s newest fashion statement, handcuffs worn as bracelets. Too much thought along those lines might be a bit distracting. Or her kiss. That hadn’t been an ‘I’m about to rape you’ kiss or a ‘let’s be friends’ kiss. That had been a ‘let’s go make hot sweaty love’ kiss.

  The Clinic didn’t have guards or defenses worth thinking about, and those who might have spotted him decided to take a nap, courtesy of a few cheap dross constructs. The multi-building Clinic complex reminded him of the old old days, back in the 50’s, when the Transform Clinics and Detention Centers were new and Transform Clinics and the like hadn’t become completely clogged with sludge and gristle dross. Lori and Flo had gathered the two Focus’s households together. They stood, shoulder to shoulder in the wide clinic entryway, facing the Clinic Focuses and their households. Next to them glowered a trim Oriental 30-ish woman Transform radiating power and fierceness as well as carrying a half dozen juice patterns. She gave him a sideways glance of buried hostility and slickly pulled a second pistol from a shoulder holster to match the one already in her left hand. This had to be Dahlia Woo, the supposed diplomat from first Focus Fingleman’s household, here to collect Rogue Focus. Sky suspected the ornate pins holding up the diplomat’s long black hair were also weapons and lockpicks.

  Far away, a third Focus and her large armed entourage had just entered the Clinic in a line of cars and trucks. Focus Laswell, if Sky remembered correctly. Was she late? He probably should have kept a closer watch on the plan. He hadn’t expected he would end up being a part of it.

  “Emergency,” Sky said, growling and skidding to a stop behind Lori, Flo and Dahlia Woo as the door banged behind him. The entryway was wide, but not enough to hold the dozens of people trying to cram themselves in, and it was packed.

  “What sort?” Lori said, as she turned and elbowed her way toward him. Tim and Tina stayed by the Focus’s left elbow, pushing their way through the mob to follow. Woo backed off and turned, so she could keep an eye on both the Clinic Focuses and Sky. The place reeked of tension. The two Clinic Focuses weren’t cooperating. At least they hadn’t started shooting at each other. Yet.

  He and his love were currently on the relationship upswing; worry and affection covered Lori’s face. “Carol’s been…”

  Lori took off at a dead run, leaving her bodyguards behind. The door banged again.

  He should have seen this coming. Lori, you besotted fool! Soap opera Focus indeed.

  Now the weight settled onto his shoulders. Time to act like a goddamned Major Transform leader again.

  “Sadie, Ann: go make nice with Focus Laswell,” Sky said, his voice echoing long-forgotten Arm cadences. He pointed. Sadie and Ann took off at a dead run. “Inferno bodyguards? Your Focus heads toward the fight. Follow.” Tim looked at him blankly for a moment, wondering if he was who he appeared to be. Tina shook Tim and started giving orders, following his instructions. “Focus Ackerman?” Flo turned to him, her eyes narrow with concentration. Damn. Without Lori she wouldn’t be able to hold the Focuses in place with her charisma for much longer. Focus Laswell was on her way, but slowly, not realizing how close the situation was to disaster.

  Sky didn’t have any choice. He was the senior Major Transform here, this was a confrontation but not a physical fight, and these two enemy Focuses weren’t particularly inimical or powerful. He cranked the knob on his fierceness aura up to ‘high’, focused two ‘on your knees and surrender to me’ dross constructs through his hands, and strode forward.

  “Focuses, I am Crow!” Sky said, face just inches from one Focus and then the other. “I am the Focus nightmare, the enemy of reason, the bringer of insanity. You can’t help but love me and be my friend, despite how much you hate me. Kneel!”

  They knelt, smiling, as did every last member of their households. Dahlia Woo backed off, both her pistols aimed at him. “Don’t you even think about doing that to me,” she said, a low whisper.

  “Ma’am, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sky said. He had other plans for Woo if she got even the least bit twitchier.

  He held the Clinic Focuses until Ann and Sadie brought over Focus Laswell and her well-armed and currently not very friendly bodyguard cadre, elbowing still more people into the packed entryway.

  “Ann, see?” Sky said, over the heads of Dahlia Woo and a half-dozen Inferno fighters. “This is what should have happened at the Medievalist Tournament to Lori and Inferno.”

  “Thank the heavens for functional household superorganisms, then,” Ann said, in her quiet voice.

  Sky snorted. “Most honored Focus Laswell, I now release these two fools into your custody,” Sky said, making a hand gesture only partly for show. The rest was a tug on the minds of his captives to fall into Focus Laswell’s sway. They did so. Behi
nd him, Flo breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Ah didn’t know Focus Rizzari had a senior Crow on staff,” Focus Laswell said, eying the two Focuses while at the same time trying to eyeball Sky. She didn’t know Crows personally, but she did know the theory.

  Ann, who had managed to make her way to Sky’s side, started to correct Focus Laswell, but Sky put his finger against his lover’s lip before she could get a word out. “I don’t have the official status a senior Crow does here in the States, mademoiselle Focus, as I follow my own path, but I am somewhere between the tenth and fourteenth oldest surviving Crow in North America. Pardon my pissiness, as this situation is difficult for a Crow.” To say the least.

  Ann gave him the look. She hadn’t realized his overblown stature. His omission would get him a stern talking to later, he realized.

  “It’s difficult for all of us,” Focus Laswell said. She turned to the subdued Clinic Focuses and cranked up her charisma. “Focus Gipson, Focus Roberts, y’all need to surrender for real. Focus Peshnak and her thugs are no longer in charge in Houston. I am.” The two Clinic Focuses complied. Well. Focus Laswell’s home field advantage had paid off.

  Sky backed off, leaning on Ann, woozy from his exertions. Woo finally holstered her pistols. “Any advice, dear one, would be greatly appreciated,” Sky Crow whispered.

  Ann chuckled. “Let’s organize the cleanup. Lori and Carol will be just fine.”

  Sky wasn’t nearly so sure. At least Lori wouldn’t do anything to endanger their baby.

  He froze and almost panicked. What was he thinking? Of course Lori would take those risks if she didn’t have time to think about them beforehand.

  Carol Hancock: July 20, 1968

  “There.”

  Much of the fog cleared from my mind. Lori stood beside me, wary.

  I had been herding the battle around by force of my predator, I realized, which accounted for Lori’s wariness. We were about half way between Rogue Focus’s household and the Feds’ safe house, on a street of narrow urban homes with well-manicured lawns, and Rogue Focus and her remaining thugs had taken cover down the street on the grounds of one of the urban homes, hiding behind bushes, cars and corners of the home, carefully moving from position to position, always heading west. I stood with Lori behind the garage of a different urban home, among the remainder of my own people. Between us, bodies lay groaning on the street and on various no longer perfectly manicured lawns. A couple of Rogue Focus’s thugs lay moaning on the ground less than 20 feet from me. I still thought it would be a bad omen if her thugs got to the safe house.