No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Page 9

  Keaton whistled. “Okay. One hundred yards. Understand what that means?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, ma’am.” The logic was beyond me.

  “A hundred yards is the metasense range of a Focus,” Keaton said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t understand her logic. I wasn’t a Focus. “I still have my old range for open air direct sensing of Transforms, ma’am.”

  “But not into office buildings.” I nodded. “I hope to hell you can make this work. This is crazy.”

  To that I had no comment.

  “Understand that you’re going to be working for me after this,” Keaton said, expansive, her gestures practically covering the width of her pale great room, with its white furniture and ivory carpets. “I have a goal, remember. To reach my goal we’re both going to have to be working our asses off, so now you’re working for me.”

  I nodded in agreement, still bouncy from my successful hunt, and filled with unsatisfied lust. Midafternoon was a wonderful time for satisfying unsatisfied lust. I anticipated some fun, soon. “Yes, ma’am. Two heads are better than one. You check on me, I check on you.”

  She blinked. “I didn’t hear that, Hancock. Did you just say you were going to check on me?”

  I nodded again. She growled. “We all make mistakes,” I said. “So you said.” Now she got hostile. “Hey! I didn’t say I’d be foolish enough to give you anything but suggestions.” Her hostility took all the fun out of my lustful anticipations.

  “Your attitude today leaves a lot to be desired, Hancock,” Keaton said, ice cold.

  So tag me, bitch. Then let’s fuck like minks.

  Her ice turned cryogenic. “You’re making me change my mind about my pledge not to torture you, scag.” In her gaze I was nothing. Less than nothing. A piece of meat to care for.

  I no longer appreciated her look.

  I dropped my weapons into my hands and settled into a fighting stance. “I am an Arm,” I said. And I was fucking tired of not being treated as one.

  I guessed my juice draw trick worked. Jazzed up right now, I was open for anything, and not particularly happy about Keaton’s damned domination of me.

  Keaton dropped her weapons and went after me in a fury, no sound, just lightning fast motions. She tried to end the fight immediately, showing me a trick I had never seen before, burning juice into specific muscle sets. The first time she burned into her lower back and calves as she punched at me whip-crack fast.

  I avoided her blows, faster. Without burning, I circled her, throwing in my more lightweight punches when I sensed an opening. When she tried a spin move I kicked up and over her, then spun myself and flattened her.

  Old Carol could have just sat on her and won the fight, but of course old Carol had never come close to flattening Keaton. I leapt on her back, jabbed nerve clusters to paralyze her, but didn’t get enough of them to put her down. For my efforts I collected a face full of boot and a short trip across the length of the mansion’s great room.

  With a running start I got on her before she was ready and hit her with a mid-air head kick that staggered her. She tried two disguised punch moves on me that failed, and then burned juice to run at me to grapple. I burned juice to match her speed and stuck an elbow in, just below her ribs, on the way by. With my current body form, any grapple with Keaton would be a loss.

  Heh. I had her. She had never fought anyone like me; although she had said I fought like Lori, her comment missed the point that I had double Lori’s weight and the ability to burn juice. I really had Keaton. I would win this fight. I hardly believed my luck, anticipating that I would be tagging Keaton, not vice versa.

  Keaton retreated to a defensible corner and sneered at me. “Dumbass cunt, your brains have turned to utter shit. If physical prowess was all that mattered, we’d automatically lose to any Chimera who challenged us.”

  She had a point. “I’m no fucking dumbass Chimera.”

  Keaton smiled at my echoing repetition. Now she thought she had won. I had no idea why.

  “I win, poser, because I’m the real predator. I rescued you. Before I got shot up in the rescue, I hadn’t even fucking been shot at since before you transformed!” She put a fucking lot of predator into her statement.

  I burned juice into my own predator to keep up. Doing so loosed my true feelings. “I went through hell and I still came out sane. Blaming all your quirks on a few minutes of withdrawal is a lame excuse. The problem is yours. It’s time you owned up to it.”

  Even I was shocked at what I said. The comment just slipped out, greased words spitting through my normal sense because I had burned juice into my own predator effect.

  Keaton went all the way to a purple face, but she didn’t charge. She studied me, subtle predator use. “Bobby died because of your weakness, bitch.”

  I froze. Bobby was still alive. He had to be. I hadn’t given him up.

  “He killed himself because he was jailed,” Keaton said. “Why was he jailed? Because Sanchek, the utter loser who squealed to the cops, had seen him. Once. Why was that? Because a particularly insecure Arm wanted to show her lover how nasty she could get.”

  I shivered. I had no comeback at all. Keaton’s purple faded as she fearlessly strode toward me.

  “The cops you supposedly owned found and questioned Bobby, but you weren’t there to manipulate them anymore. He was weak. He couldn’t betray his Arm lover. So he hung himself, taking the only way out he was strong enough to cope with. Your love is dead, Hancock, because of your failures. You think you’re so fucking complicated and brilliant, but you never ever have any useful fallback plans. You always think you’ll succeed. That’s arrogance, and your arrogance killed Bobby.”

  Keaton towered over me. I bowed my head. It took all my meager will to bury my emotions.

  Bobby’s death hurt. Oh, God, did it hurt. Oh, Bobby, your lopsided smile, and the beautiful muscular curves of your back, and the ferocious way you made love. Did anyone even care when you died? How terribly you must have hurt in prison, alone. I was gone, left you on your own, and all the demons of hell came after you. You couldn’t stand up to the stress, and I wasn’t there to protect you when I said I would. Instead, I had given you into their hands.

  “Now do you remember how badly Arms can deal with other Arms?” Keaton said, smelling pain. My pain. “You still want me to tag you?”

  “Ma’am,” I said. I groveled. She put her foot on my neck, just like in the old days. “I’m yours.”

  Keaton paused. “Dammit, yes! You’re mine.”

  The juice moved. The Arm tagging ran through me like a chain of fishhooks, intense, blinding and painful. When the fishhooks passed, the absence of pain became utter and total pleasure.

  The juice had won, again.

  The English language has a word, epiphany, that comes mildly close to describing the experience the two of us had right then. An entirely new part of myself had opened up. I was more than I had been. Something had become right with the world because of the tag.

  Keaton didn’t react to the tag in the same way. She leapt back with a snarl in her voice and a knife in her hand. “What the fuck did you do to my mind?”

  “Ma’am,” I said, still kneeling. I had nothing else to say.

  Keaton took a slow, careful breath and put her knife away. I saw her thoughts on her face as she tried to understand the change the tag made to her. Her face might have been a large-print book. I hadn’t expected this, but it made sense. Reading another was something that took time. Another shortcut.

  This had to go both ways, though. I wouldn’t be concealing my thoughts from Keaton any more.

  I poked at myself mentally, trying to figure out what the tag did to me. Yes, there it was, an echo of Keaton’s juice structure in mine. My tag idea had worked! The Arm tag even metasensed as a Focus tag.

  “All right,” Keaton said. “Spill. Exactly what are you feeling and what have you figured out about this damned tag? And get up off the fucking floor. You look ri
diculous down there.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I got up and sat on the end of the white couch. I closed my eyes and tried to analyze the difference in my mind. “I’m yours, ma’am. I’ll follow your orders.” I thought. “I no longer want to challenge you. Am I giving off challenge signals at all, like before? I don’t think I should be.”

  She shook her head. “None at all. Not even the base signals you give off just by existing.”

  Oh, now that sounded wonderful. If I didn’t irritate her by my mere presence, such a change would be worth a lot.

  “What else?” she said.

  “We’ve got some kind of juice link. As if I could pass you juice if I wanted to.” I shook my head, trying to find words for these screwy Arm emotions. “No, it’s more complicated. Sometimes I might be able to pass you juice, if the time is right. I’m comfortable around you. Not so much afraid.”

  She frowned at the last. “I’m not sure I much care for this ‘not afraid’ business.” Uh, oh. Her tone didn’t sound good.

  In an instant, she was on me, a predator effect based specter of death, knife at my throat, death and damnation on two legs. The panic hit and my heart rate spiked. A scream built in my throat and I almost wet myself, except I remembered her white couch and stopped that particular reaction. Normally I had to suppress my challenge urges to get the pee reaction. Not this time.

  Keaton stopped. I took a breath and let my adrenaline come down again. Right now I couldn’t challenge her, even if I wanted to. I wondered if this was permanent.

  “Good.” She grunted and sat down next to me on the couch.

  “Ma’am? Is there some submission gesture you’d like? I want to make you happy.”

  She leaned back on the couch and ran her hand through her cropped hair. I found it rather pleasant to have her so close. She looked over at me and shook her head.

  “Dammit, I just nearly scared the piss out of you and you’re back to being calm as a cucumber. What the fuck’s going on?”

  This was getting to be a lot of analyzing. I had a sneaky suspicion I was a little buzzed from this whole tagging business and the bolts in my head weren’t all screwed down tight yet. Also, with Gilgamesh gone, I had to work again to make the simplest logic flow.

  “You’re the boss. If you want to make me afraid, that’s your right. Would you like some chocolate cheesecake? There’s four of them in the freezer. I’d be glad to get it for you.”

  “No, I don’t want cheesecake! We’re having a serious discussion, damn it.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Is there something else I can get for you?”

  “No!”

  At the snap of irritation in her voice, I fell to the floor and knelt, meekly crouching in my best grovel position.

  “And get up off the floor, damn it! I already told you that once!”

  I popped back up on the couch as if someone lit a firecracker underneath me.

  “Ma’am,” I said, forlorn. “I don’t want to make you mad.”

  She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “All right, look. Groveling is a way to make me happy, and you told me yourself that the Arm tag provides shortcuts. All by itself having you tagged makes me happy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The submission gestures were only symbols. Now we did it with the juice. With Transforms, everything got back to the juice.

  “And you want to do something for me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She sighed. “All right, this is going to be different.”

  “There are some interesting implications of these Arm tags, Hancock,” Keaton said. I wasn’t the only one who was a little buzzed. We were both on the floor now and sat knee to knee on a white faux-fur rug, gazing in each other’s eyes. Oddly, considering that I had taken juice just a few hours ago, I should be horny as all hell. Given what Keaton and I had been doing after all my juice draws, we should have been in the bedroom having make-up sex.

  I wasn’t the least bit horny. I couldn’t make a pass at Keaton if I wanted to. Something in what we had done, with the fight and the tag, removed those urges entirely. She knew so, too.

  Stupid juice.

  “Back to our previous discussion. You’re working for me now.”

  “Of course.” That’s what the fight settled. Hadn’t it?

  Keaton nodded. Right now I didn’t need the ‘ma’am’ and she didn’t care.

  I waited.

  She waited.

  “Normally you can’t let sleeping dogs lie like that,” Keaton said. “Aren’t you curious about what I’m going to have you doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your first task is to…” Keaton, studying me, stopped mid-order. “Happy anticipation?” She couldn’t believe. “You hate it when I give you orders, hints and suggestions.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, trying to remember. “You’re right. I did. I was challenging you, ma’am, by being resentful.” The logical steps here made me work. “My instincts say it was the correct thing to do. Then.”

  Keaton smiled. “I get it. For Arms it’s not fight or flight, it’s tag or fight. Hell, this is important. Like your memory said, the Arm tag is the key to Arm society. I’d been working a different method of solving the aggression problem based on what I’ve seen with Focus organizations and the American officer corps, and although my idea has promise, it wasn’t providing me any leverage on the aggression problem.”

  I picked this out of her mind. What she talked about was the teamwork trick, the team-building thing she did with Gilgamesh and me.

  Here she was, doing it again. I thought her teamwork trick made the aggression problem worse, though. All your team members had to be aggressive to be at their best. “I was going to break your balls for having to rescue you, until you managed to pay me off with something spectacular,” she said. “Well, in my mind figuring out the Arm tag pays off the rescue. This sure the hell beats having you wear a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, formal. She didn’t say she wasn’t going to boss me around. That made me happy. It was proper for her to be bossing me around.

  This Arm tag was spectacularly messing with my head.

  “You know you’re not fully recovered. You also know, at some level, that you’ve been leeching off of my mind and Gilgamesh’s mind for a bunch of your smarts.”

  “Ma’am, could you explain more of what you sense in me. Please?”

  “Your ability to read people is better than when you graduated. Whether your skills have diminished at all from where they were at the end in Chicago I don’t know. You’re using this to supplement your intelligence the same way a horse or dog uses its ability to read people and thus seem more intelligent.”

  Nasty comparison, but I couldn’t complain. Keaton was right.

  “So when you send me out I’m going to have some intellect problems.”

  “They could be large problems unless you get some intelligent companions.” Pause. I had the bad feeling she had just zinged me, but her comment flew over my head. “In any event, your number one overall goal is to get yourself fixed up. In the meantime, I’m going to have you doing some odd jobs for me. For instance, I have a set of paperwork that needs to go to Focus Gladchuck. You get to deliver it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I paused, troubling thoughts tumbling through my head. “What level of initiative would you like me to show, ma’am, when I’m working on your odd jobs?”

  Keaton met my gaze. “As much full Carol Hancock Arm initiative as you can come up with. If I don’t want Arm initiative on some task, I’ll give the task to someone else.”

  I smiled. My instinct said this was a choice on her part. “In that case, ma’am, I’d like to know what your priorities are, beyond completing the task at hand.” If old Carol had made this comment, it would have been a subtle challenge, a question of what I would be able to ignore. Me, now? I wanted to please.

  “Information. My overall goal of getting us out from under the thumbs of the senior Focuses and li
kely the senior Crows requires information we don’t have, and we won’t know what we’ll need until after we get it. So: information comma all comma voluminous comma don’t worry about giving me too much information. Next priority is survival. If you’re going to get killed, run.” Hell. Information was worth more than my life? Ouch. “Right. Fuck, this priority crap is tough. Okay, for something as earth-shattering as Arm tags, risk your life. Anything else don’t bother. Next priority? Your ideas. You’ve got a good track record on the idea front and I expect you to continue along those lines, and I’m going to want you to pass them along when you get them. Next priority is recruits. You’re going to need them.”

  I nodded. “Ma’am, I have some people I’d like to kill. May I add this as a priority?”

  “No. No revenge killings. For someone like you, revenge is a stupid emotional response that will only get you into more trouble.”

  I didn’t respond and merely let my head hang low. Her orders hurt. I wanted my revenge. Orders were orders though.

  Keaton loved me for my response. An Arm experiences love when they dominate. They love whom they dominate. They love what they possess.

  I was the one with the tag and the juice-enforced obedience, but Keaton didn’t escape untouched. She didn’t get to own me without caring for me. The realization was hard for her.

  “This is how it’s going to be,” Keaton said. “You want revenge? You can have your revenge in five years. Your temper will have had time to cool and the traps those people are now guarded with will be gone. Five years. Before then, if even one of these people dies suspiciously…” Keaton’s voice tailed off.

  I had heard this sort of rant many times before. Her rant was supposed to end with “…I will come after you, and I will hurt you like you have never been hurt before. Do you understand me, Hancock?”

  Instead: “That’s it? I say it, you obey it?” Keaton asked. “I don’t need to threaten?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m yours.”

  She didn’t like my answer. Somehow, in all the changes the juice made to her and to me, torture had dropped out of the equation. Where was her opportunity to beat up on me? Not that I minded, of course.