A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (16 page)

I have no idea what
my trick looked like from Teas and her bodyguards’ perspective, but the effects were spectacular: they panicked, screamed and ran.  They even left the door to the viewing area open behind them as they fled.

“Fuck,” I said, temper shot.  I tossed my own cell, making an unholy racket and ungodly mess.  Th
e bitch and my own burn had cost me two points of juice.  “Fuck fuck fuck!”  I wasn’t mad at myself; I hadn’t screwed up, although if Teas had accepted my offer to release me without a tag I would have had some hard choices ahead if I wanted to keep any sort of alliance or working relationship going with her.  Lori was off limits.  Period.  So was Gilgamesh.  Hell, so was Keaton.

Dammit.  I had
almost been seduced into a position where I would have to choose between my word and harming my friends.  Luckily, the Focus bitch didn’t trust my word.

I
now understood Keaton’s hostile paranoia toward the leading Focuses.  They were indeed poison.

T
his wasn’t one of my better days.

I predicted my coming days would be far worse.

Gilgamesh: March 17, 1968

The beach proper at Pacifica State Beach was windswept and sandy, pounded by high surf, with no cover at all.  After a little searching, Gilgamesh realized the beach property extended over to a rocky point and into an estuary marsh.  He climbed into the rocks on the slope of the rocky point, hid himself and waited, listening to the endless thunder of the surf in the night.

He wondered wh
y he was here.  He didn’t like diplomacy.  However, he had decided to get other Major Transforms involved in his problem, and letters and phone calls wouldn’t suffice.  He had at least met the Skinner in person before; their prior meeting made this meeting easier, despite the horror of their first encounter.  Only, she wasn’t Tiamat.  The Skinner was Tiamat’s sadistic teacher, a person capable of deeds as horrific as Enkidu and the other Beast Men.  She wouldn’t be ‘kind and friendly’ in the slightest, and this meeting would most likely be absurdly stressful.

Yet,
the Skinner was right, in her earlier phone comment to him.  All Major Transforms were dangerous and deadly.  Being scared out of one’s mind, at least for a Crow, was merely the price of entry into this game.  A price he would likely repeatedly pay.

He meditated,
monitoring his metasense, until he picked up the Skinner two miles away, driving down State Highway 1 and into the State Beach.  She parked, metasensed around, shrugged, grabbed a huge satchel from her car, and trotted down to the beach.  Seeing nobody she began to walk toward him.

She couldn’t have metasensed him; she didn’t
possess the range.  This showed her mind at work.  This sort of clandestine meeting fit as much into her area of expertise as his.  Anything he planned, she planned better.  She possessed years more experience.

When she reached the end of the beach, less than 100 yards outside of her metasense range from him, she scrambled up in the boulders, found cover, and began to strip off
her weapons.  Out came far too many knives, firearms, batons and of all things a long thin wire she kept in her back pocket.  As she dumped these weapons into her satchel he realized, with a metasense scan, that she carried another two hundred pounds of weaponry and ammo in the satchel, everything from a huge automatic weapon to a rather long wide-bladed sword.

Gilgamesh
was both honored and appalled.

After dropping her weapons she clambered up the rocks, heading toward him, stopping only when he relaxed the protection that damped his glow, flashing her metasense.

“We should find someplace more comfortable,” she said.

“This is fine, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said.  He found ‘ma’am’ generated a better response from both Tiamat and the Skinner than any of the other honorifics he tried.  “You can come up closer.  I won’t run.”

He metasensed her emotions at work: puzzlement, problem solving and growing wariness.  With only a minor hesitation she clambered up to within fifty feet of him.  She picked out a boulder, giving her good sighting all around her, and sat.  “So I was wrong,” the Skinner said.  “You do have physical advantages over Arms.”

Instinct had put him on the rocky slope, not thought, but she was right.  She outweighed him two and a half to one, if not more, and would have a devil of a time chasing him on this slope.  He would
be able to run on a steep rocky slope as easily as running on a similarly steep ramp.

“The better to run away.”

“The better to
fight
.”

S
he didn’t appear to be worried, though.  Hell, if he read her emotions right, she half expected a fight and, like a Beast Man, looked forward to it.  In a moment of horror, he suddenly saw things from the Skinner’s perspective.  This would be a perfect place for him to ambush her.  Or arrange for others, say police or FBI, to do the same.

He stood and raised his hands, showing himself to her.  “All I have is a knife, a memento to remind me of who I am when the juice is low.”

The Skinner didn’t respond.  She watched him closely, then made a show of relaxing.  “If you’re going to deal with us Arms, Gilgamesh, you need to start thinking like us, before you do things like set up a meeting spot in an obvious kill zone.  At least you’re smart enough to realize you made a mistake.”

He sat back down.  “Ma’am.  Shall I tell you my story?”  No small talk, not with the Skinner.  With Tiamat he craved small talk.

“Absolutely, in the fullest detail you remember,” the Skinner said.

Gilgamesh started. 
This wasn’t his best storytelling.  His hypervigilance saw to that.  He also followed Shadow’s list of things not to mention to an Arm: his ability to sense emotions, how many different things he could follow with his metasense, the range of his sick-up, or the fact non-Transforms tended to ignore Crows unless the Crows made themselves known.

His story
took almost two hours to complete, in the detail the Skinner wanted.

“…and with Enkidu it’s personal.  Once he knew it was me, he
sprinted after me and left the other Beast Men behind.  I was on the expressway by the time he caught up to me.  He ran at about forty miles an hour to start with, but sped up to sixty miles an hour during his final approach.  At his full speed he couldn’t turn quickly; he took fifty yards to complete his turn so he would be able to run down my truck.  My truck didn’t have enough acceleration to outrun him, but when he approached I did my sick-up out the truck’s side window, the largest one I’d ever done.  Enkidu ran into the sick-up and stumbled slightly, enough for me to get away.”

The Skinner nodded.  She had been concentrating on his story in a way that by itself
unnerved him.  “Let’s go back to the point where Hancock got taken down.  You said right at that point you had a hard time metasensing her.  What sort of ‘hard time’?”

Gilgamesh went back to
the memory.  “She faded in and out.  Irregularly.  This happens at times due to interference from buildings and electronics.”

“The whole area was crawling with buildings, all about the same size.  No more than six stories.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Yet you didn’t have any problem with the other buildings, earlier.”

“Correct, ma’am.”

“The building in question is a set of apartments above a storefront, a place
selling picture frames and similar sorts of things.  The only electronics I know of that causes my metasense to go haywire are large telephone exchanges and computers.”

Gilgamesh paused and thought.  She was right. 
He knew of nothing special about the building in question to cause such a problem.  “Ma’am, I agree.  I speculated earlier the Beast Master of the Beast Men might have been in the area, since his or her Beast Men were also in the area.  Another possible reason for the glow fading may be the active metasense protections on a Major Transform.  It’s possible the Beast Master was present among the FBI and State Troopers.  This would fit with my other hypothesis, that the Beast Master and Officer Canon are one and the same.”

The Skinner got all predatory and tense.  Gilgamesh, waiting for something like this, readied himself to bolt back into the rocks and farther up the slope.  “One of the things puzzling me was how Carol got taken down,” the Skinner said.  “
They had a fucking limp-dick shooting gallery set up. They set it up way too fast to be any good.  The odds of her escaping from such a shit job was pretty damn high.  She should have escaped them at least 9 out of 10 times, likely more.”  The Skinner looked around.  Metasensed around.  Pinned Gilgamesh with her gaze.  He backed off, but her eyes opened wide at his reaction and she waved at him to sit back down in a dismissive fashion.

She wasn’t angry at him.  If anything, she felt protective.  Far more comforting than a Focus sitting at a desk in her household working on household paperwork.  He sat.

Tiamat would have said “Jumpy, aren’t you.”  The Skinner said, instead: “I think Officer Canon, a known Major Transform, took the shot that took down Hancock.  While specifically hiding from you.”

Gilgamesh had another flash of Arm thinking: if Officer Canon could hide from him, then
, then Officer Canon could use him to get at the Skinner
now
.

Which meant he
possessed some important information he needed to pass along
now
, information giving him a chance of staying alive and free.  “Ma’am, I’ve run into what I believe to be the Beast Master’s metasense shielding trick, before, in a tense situation.  He or she didn’t possess the skill to tune this trick to cover from both my metasense and Carol’s metasense at the same time.”

T
he Skinner relaxed a tiny bit.  Only, with the Skinner relaxed, Gilgamesh now panicked over the Skinner’s revelation.  “This Officer Canon Beast Master is too powerful!”  Pause.  “Why hasn’t he or she taken me out?”

“That’s what minions
are for,” the Skinner said.  She spat in disgust.  “Typical Focus bitch attitude, only this Focus bitch keeps a household of Chimeras – your Beast Men – alive, along with at least one harem of part-Monster Transforms – and considers law enforcement officers her minions.  I smell yet another killer internal Focus fight.  From this noxious Focus perspective us Arms, Crows and Beast Men are big weapons, and a chance to take out one of the other side’s weapons and get vengeance would be irresistible.”

Implying there had been other, similarly deadly, internal Focus fights.  No wonder Shadow and the other Crows didn’t trust the Focuses.

“Ma’am, you’re in similar danger.”

“Huh.”  Oh.  She knew that already, didn’t she?

“So, ma’am, have you…”

“Yes.  Hancock wasn’t being her usual fuck-up self.  She was taken out by a cuntlicking Major Transform with a motherfucking plan.  She could have done better, but hell so could we all when we get attacked by other Major Transforms.”

It was obvious, so he had to say it.  He didn’t want to, but he had to.  “Ma’am, when do we leave?”  He can’t imagine how stressed working with the Skinner would make him, but he couldn’t refuse.  He would worry about the recovery later.

“We?”  The Skinner laughed.  She picked up a
fist-sized rock and smashed it, hard and loud, on the boulder she sat on.  Gilgamesh jumped and skittered, to end up behind a rock about fifteen feet upslope.  “You’ve got potential, Crow, but you’re not ready for the big leagues yet.  You’re perfect for Hancock.  Unfortunately, despite how much I need your metasense, you’d be too much of a liability and you’d slow me down and endanger me.  So…there is no ‘we’.”

Gilgamesh reddened and slunk down farther behind the rock.  His reaction to her rock made a very good point.

The Skinner stood and leapt down the slope and into the sand, leaving a crater where she landed.  She retrieved her weapons, then on the way out turned to him.  “Go ahead and stick around to do whatever you Crows do.  I’ll bring Hancock back to my place.  We have some talking to do.”  Gilgamesh winced.  Said ‘talking’ would likely involve fighting, groveling and egregious torture.  “Just stay out of my house!”

“Yes, ma’am.  Of course, ma’am.”

When the Skinner drove off Gilgamesh slumped down, allowing himself to melt into a puddle of warm Crow goo.  He hadn’t expected to end up humiliated.  Scared, yes; humiliated, no.

He
must get better, and stop being so much the young Crow.  He had some practicing and experimentation to do.

Part 2
Breaks and Failures

Said one among them – “Surely not in vain

My substance of the common Earth was ta'en

And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,

Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.”

Then said a Second – “Ne'er a peevish Boy

Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy,

And He that with his hand the Vessel made

Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.”

— from ‘The Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam