All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Read online

  His foreplay didn’t satisfy Lori. She took his right hand and placed it over her crotch. Even through the blue jeans, her heat almost scalded his hands.

  Then she slowly unzipped his pants. With one hand. With the other, she pulled him close, squishing her breasts hard against his body. Lori nibbled his chin with her teeth. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop,” Lori said.

  He didn’t.

  Carol Hancock: December 26, 1968

  “Off the cross beam, then the middle column,” Keaton said, and threw. Clank. The penny landed on the concrete floor.

  My turn. I looked up and saw Hank heading this way. He looked cold in his borrowed outdoor gear and rubber snow boots. He sought out the two of us Arms, or so I guessed, but in the unlit pool cabana at night, he would never see us. I called him over.

  “What’s up?” I said. I signaled a simpler toss, off the ceiling, and threw. Tink! Into the cup. Heh. Keaton glowered at me.

  Hank looked me over, barely able to see me because of the darkness; when he noticed Keaton, he relaxed. “Good. I have a favor to ask,” he said. “As the favor pertains to my research, both of you need to approve my favor.”

  “Let’s hear about it,” Keaton said.

  “I’ve found some anomalous structures on the Chimera amygdala, after staining with…”

  Keaton held up her hand.

  “The favor, not the research,” she said. She didn’t like being interrupted with what she thought of as busy-work.

  “I want to hand my discoveries and ideas over to the Focus,” he said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea if the only Major Transform holding a professorship got fired for lack of production. Publish or perish, ma’am.”

  “What about you?” I said. Was this one of Lori’s games? I studied Hank carefully and didn’t see any of the stress signs he showed when he fought off Focus charisma. He was annoyed about something, likely the fact that no matter what Keaton decided, he couldn’t publish the findings in his real name.

  “Although this proposed paper would look wonderful on my CV, ma’am, I no longer have a CV to add to.” I was right in my worries. He paused. “And the Focus needs this. She got so caught up in her Rebellion” now ended, after we mind-scraped Biggioni “and her pregnancy that she neglected her research.”

  “Does this discovery of yours affect the day to day functioning of any Transform, or does this fall more in the theoretical realm?” Keaton said.

  “It’s physical, not theoretical, and impacts… Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, interrupting himself. He knew Arms wanted succinct answers, not long professorial digressions. However, he so liked to digress… “From an Arm’s perspective, this is theory.”

  “Give her your gift,” Keaton said. “And mention we approved it.”

  As I didn’t have any objections either, I didn’t even bridle at Keaton’s royal ‘we’. Boss Arm perks and all that.

  Hank left and the two of us returned to our plotting, planning and amusements. “Off the floor, then the middle column,” Keaton said, and threw. Tink! She gave me a match that glare and went back to discussing our uncertainty about Hunter pack sizes and how this would affect our planning.

  “…and I’d estimate we’ll need approximately fifteen hundred to twenty five hundred troops for plan C,” I said. A flurry of snow drifted into the open cabana. Keaton shook her head.

  “If our analysis is correct and we need to finish this before the Rickenbach wedding in May, you won’t have the time to recruit and train enough cannon fodder for what we need.”

  I nodded. “Ma’am.”

  She shook her head again. “Even if I master your recruiting tricks instantly I won’t be able to cover the shortfall.” Pause. “And don’t even think of being able to train Haggerty to do this. This is so far outside her skill set I don’t think she’ll ever master it, the same way you’ll never master the commodity markets.”

  Keaton had only recently informed me that she made most of her money not by theft, but by playing the commodities markets, and that Haggerty was even better at the markets than my boss. I nodded back to acknowledge the accurate hit. I had no clue what sort of Arm-based mental tricks were involved in playing the commodity markets, only that I didn’t have them.

  My boss had also said that if she ever had to attend one of these piece of crap group planning meetings again, it would be far too soon. Lori’s Christmas get-together stressed her out. Me? I was having the time of my life. With the proper breaks. This was one of my strengths. As Haggerty implied in her crazy theory, I was people oriented.

  “I don’t have any other ideas, ma’am,” I said. I had been able to come up with only three general methods of attacking the Hunters and drawing out Rogue Crow, all in Chicago, and she had blown holes in all of them.

  “Neither do I,” she said. She tried the ceiling and column toss again, and again missed. “I think I’m going to recommend your plan B in the meeting tomorrow, in hope someone can shoot down your plan and come up with something better.”

  “Ma’am,” I said. Plan B envisioned us taking out one Hunter at a time, zipping in and out over a period of two months, and forcing Rogue Crow to expose himself to protect his Hunters. I suspected Plan B would drive Rogue Crow underground after we took down our first Hunter. This plan would keep Focus Rickenbach’s wedding safe, but on the other hand, Plan B just pushed the problem into the future. It would also piss off Rogue Crow to where I expected he would put real work into exposing our Arm operations to the Feds. Repeatedly. We would have to go itinerant or go Crow and live in culverts and abandoned houses. Keaton didn’t like the idea any more than I did. We both wanted a viable alternative.

  I bounced one off the left column, a long way from the coffee cup, and it clattered into the snow.

  “Gilgamesh is off shagging Rizzari, isn’t he?” Keaton said, unexpectedly, about five minutes later.

  “Likely, although the Focus is the one making the moves.”

  “If these antics chase off Sky, it’s unacceptable,” Keaton said. I wasn’t sure what she expected me to do about it, though. “You ever make up with him?”

  Sky, that is. I nodded. “In bed?”

  I nodded again. “Was it worth the time?”

  I shrugged and decided that although my words would be overheard, I didn’t care. “He’s a lunatic romantic,” I said. Keaton made a sympathetic face. From an Arm’s mindset, romance was almost literally painful. No, scratch that. True romance could be physically painful and psychologically devastating to an Arm – but I wouldn’t learn that tidbit of apocalyptic angst for several years. “Trust me, though, he doesn’t lack romance in Inferno, and although he’s difficult to read, he still holds out hope he can win back Lori. I just hope Ann’s right about Focus-Crow relationships not being instinctively monogamous.”

  “Trusting a Transform on that is stupid.”

  I knew that. “What do your instincts say?”

  “Crows and Focuses are monogamous with each other.”

  “Yah, mine say the same.”

  I glowered at the slushy snow. My boss was right when she called Lori the Major Transform’s version of a saddle burr. I loved her dearly, but our soap opera Focus had proved to be a never-ending source of problems.

  Such as a problem named ‘the Commander’.

  “Ma’am, I’m having a problem with ‘the Commander’ nickname,” I said. “I don’t like it.” Even after Lori’s rational explanation. Keaton sighed. She had predicted this was coming. “Ma’am, how much would you charge me to buy my way out of this nickname?” Meaning how much would I need to pay to keep her from using the damned name.

  She called the ceiling and middle column shot again, and made it this time. She smiled.

  “I wouldn’t like the name, either,” she said. “Your Crow name, Tiamat, is much better. It has a tangible Arm frisson of fear – the dragon of chaos, always striking unexpectedly, terrifying and wicked.” I gave her a sideways glance. She had a point, somewhere, I could tel
l. I waited her out.

  “However, ‘the Commander’ isn’t a nickname, it’s a title,” she said, two minutes later. “No, I don’t trust the Dreaming either, but I’ve watched you closely ever since your rebirth, and based on what I’ve seen of you in the Rogue Focus and Chicago espionage episodes, ‘the Commander’ is a valid title and descriptive of where your strengths lie.”

  Shit.

  “Consider: I can do small unit combat tactics better than you, and political games as well as you, but I can’t do anything like this attack organization and command bullshit you seem to be able to do in your sleep. You were doing some of this before your rebirth. You’ve always been a schemer and organizer, but now you’ve made it work.”

  Double shit. From Keaton’s perspective, this dreamed up Commander nonsense was but an arrow in her quiver. I was stuck with the name, um, title. At her orders.

  “Even better, the crazy Focuses and Crows believe in this. They’ve seen it, when you took down Rogue Focus without attracting the wrong kind of attention. I know you understand how much this is worth to us. This isn’t something I’m going to let you give up. We need this.”

  Fucking douchebag Keaton. She would get me killed with this, I just knew it.

  “Don’t forget that I was present and trading information with Tonya when she took down the previous and very false Commander, Focus Martine DeYoung,” she said. “In specific, I took out DeYoung’s bodyguards and distracted her so-called army so Tonya could do her charisma takedown. DeYoung had everything backwards: she thought claiming to be the Commander would give her some sort of mystical shit that would protect her from what we did to her. There’s no mystical shit involved, of course, besides whatever psychological edge over our enemies you create by your repeated successes.” She gave me a pleased grin. “An edge I’m looking for.”

  God damn it all to hell! “I’m not invincible and I’m not going to win every battle,” I said. “The world doesn’t work that way.”

  “You don’t have to win every battle, you just have to win the war,” Keaton said. She gave me an Arm supportive punch in the arm. “Washington won the Revolutionary War by losing every battle except the last one, Commander.”

  Great.

  Just fucking great.

  I had a wonderful comeback, though. “Off the ceiling, off the hidden Crow, and into the cup.” I waited a beat, until Sky said the expected ‘Hey!’ and turned just so. I tossed the penny at the cabana ceiling, where it bounced off Sky’s chest and into the coffee cup.

  Keaton glared and didn’t say a thing. She hadn’t realized Sky was present.

  Score one for me.

  Tonya Biggioni: December 27, 1968

  “Well, hello there, beautiful one,” Tonya said, peering down to gaze at Cloud in Lori’s arms. A baby. A Focus-born baby. It moved her to tears, and also upset her stomach. A small piece of her even wanted to relocate to Boston to help protect Lori’s baby. Another piece of her urged her to dissolve in rage and self-pity, remembering her lost chance to see her own newborn grandchild. “She definitely has your nose.”

  Lori smiled. She knew the danger involved. How many times could she get away with pulling on Superman’s cape before the first Focuses struck back? Despite the protestations of the Arms and the Crows, Lori wasn’t an inhuman machine. She was a real live Focus, who firmly believed that if any eggs needed to be broken to make the future’s omelet, she would be the first egg. She even had, these days, an all-volunteer household. This made her, in Tonya’s eyes, the quintessential Focus.

  “Let’s talk,” Lori said. She led Tonya through the converted mansion, to Lori’s tiny personal room, Cloud on her shoulder blowing sleepy spit-bubbles on Lori’s blouse. There Tonya and Lori talked, not about events and plans, but people. Household members. Focus politics. Tonya understood Lori’s reasons for the private talk, but she couldn’t help but notice the hot stares and the angry thoughts from every Inferno household member who had passed near them on the way there.

  “What’s happened to Focus Mansfield?” Lori said. She sat on the tiny bed and rocked Cloud gently. “She’s gone from being the voice of kindness and reason to, well, what appears to me to be the worst of the first Focus mouthpieces on the Council.”

  Tonya nodded. She squeezed herself into the chair by the desk, where there wasn’t enough room with the bed pulled down, but Tonya was small. “What happened to her could happen to any of us, if we stick our necks out too far,” she said. “Too many people in her household got exposed as Transforms and lost their jobs. She was forced to skirt the law, and then her illegalities got exposed. To save her household she had to sell her soul to Fingleman.”

  Lori winced. “Giving Fingleman two votes in her pocket, then?”

  Tonya shook her head. “Based on what I’ve seen from Connie,” Fingleman’s nominal representative on the Council, Connie Webb, “Fingleman doesn’t control her at all.”

  “That’s at least something.”

  Applause and catcalls echoed in through the closed window at the end of Lori’s room, half covered by the wall unit for the Murphy bed. After asking and gaining nonverbal permission, Tonya edged her way over to the window and peeked through the frosty glass, while Lori changed Cloud’s diaper.

  The Arms sparred with two huge men, one with a strange red caste to his skin. All four used knives. Tonya had never seen a fight like this, at this speed, grace or talent level. More, Keaton and Hancock used each other, as props, backstops, and launching pads. As she watched, Keaton picked up Hancock as she came out of a roll after taking a nasty swipe from the faintly red-skinned man, swung her around, then up and over the second man, a twenty foot toss.

  “They work together,” Tonya said, in whispered awe of the Arms and their combat. Tonya visualized their combat dance as a cross between ballet and gymnastics, only five times as fast. “Who are those men? They aren’t your Transforms – they move differently.” They didn’t metasense like anything Tonya had ever metasensed before, either.

  Lori turned momentarily from Cloud. “The tall skinnier one is Earl Robert Sellers, while the shorter more muscular one is Duke Jeremy Hoskins. Once upon a time, Earl Sellers was the Pepacton Dog, the one you wanted me to kill.”

  Tonya’s skin covered in goosebumps. It was one thing to snarl at Crows, but to see two Chimeras in man shape, able to hold their minds together enough to spar with the Arms without dissolving into Beasts, brought the Cause home to her in a way she had never felt before. Real. Realer than real.

  And, knowing Lori and her control obsessions, perfectly well timed for Tonya’s viewing from a safe distance, just for this purpose.

  “The Nobles fight better in their beast forms, as they call them, than in their man forms, but they love to fight just for the thrill of fighting. They would be willing to let the Arms beat the crap out of them all day long if the Arms would let them,” Lori said.

  Tonya couldn’t figure out who was winning, but thirty seconds later the combat dance ended, Hancock on Seller’s back, pinning him, and Keaton with a knife at Hoskins’ throat. “Interesting.”

  “The Duke’s going to be at our meeting,” Lori said. “The Earl’s here as his bodyguard. Please don’t ask them, or me, how their titles are decided. It’s private.”

  Progress. They were making progress.

  ---

  Tonya mentally grabbed control of her charisma and prepared herself to do The Show. Given the number of Major Transforms at this meeting, The Show was necessary. Inferno had set up the meeting in the main room, pushing five smaller tables together to form one huge table. Lori sat at its head. Even here, a coldness waited for Tonya. They tolerated her, but did not love her or even like her.

  Duke Hoskins, the powerfully built Noble, caught her eye first. He gave her an archetypically male stare; she was sure he had just scored her looks on his mental scorecard. She did have to admit he was about as handsome a man as she had ever seen, if you discounted the reddish tinge to his skin.

 
; The Crow contingent included Gilgamesh, Sky, and Sinclair. She smiled warmly at Sinclair and complemented him on his writing, then did the same for Gilgamesh, who got horribly embarrassed at the recognition of his efforts.

  Keaton sat at Lori’s right, and next to her sat Hancock. Hancock wore her stone face, no recognition of Tonya at all, but Keaton signaled a greeting and a ‘we need to talk, later’.

  The Transform contingent was small, only Ann Chiron and Connie Yerizarian, both Inferno Transforms. Three normals attended: Secret Agent Zielinski (wearing a hair-piece, of all things, along with some bad plastic surgery), Dr. Bob Masterson of Inferno, smelling of his cheap cigars, and a sturdy black man with a military background, introduced simply as Tom. He was Hancock’s. Besides herself and Lori, the only other Focus attending was Flo Ackerman. Flo metasensed as unsure of herself, quite unlike her normal ebullient mood.

  As Tonya sat, Ann glanced over at Tonya and covered her mouth to mask a giggle. Ann didn’t approve of The Show and thought it silly.

  Oh blessed ignorance. Someday Ann would understand, if she saw the Council in action.

  Lori turned to Tonya and started things off. “Tonya, any new word on how the Council and the firsts are reacting to the changes?” The ‘changes’ being the negotiated end of the Rizzari Rebellion.

  “Focus Fingleman has been in contact with me and we are exchanging pleasantries for once,” Tonya said. “Although we can’t discuss the subject directly, I’m convinced she’s angling for a political way to support the recognition of the danger of the Hunter Chimeras. That’s the only positive political news. Polly cut off contact with me after I negotiated an end to the rebellion, and as she did, she ordered me never to speak to her again about male Major Transforms. The next regularly scheduled Council session is in early March, in Savannah, Georgia. I’ll be politicking the issue until the session.”