A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (42 page)

“Last time th
e bitch showed up she killed one of our household Transforms, boss.  You need every gun you can get.”

Every gun she could get.  That was the problem.  Her bodyguards
thought in terms of guns, bombs and mobs.  The household had been remiss in physical training.  This wasn’t the middle ages, right?

Real Arm capabilities, though, made a mockery of
standard Focus bodyguard training.  Until she got them trained to handle targets with Hancock and Keaton’s capabilities, her bodyguards were less than useless against an Arm.  Even after advanced hand-to-hand training, she wasn’t sure they would be able to handle an Arm.

“Phil Howard was an idiot
.  Any Transform really a part of our household would have had enough sense to obey my orders.  In any case, this isn’t the same kind of situation and I need to handle it alone.”  Phil had been another one of her project Transforms, and a singularly stupid one.

Danny sighed, unhappy.
“I’m not stupid enough to disobey orders.  I don’t like leaving you in danger, though.”

Tonya didn’t discount the danger of the situation, but the last thing she wanted was to set
up a situation where she appeared to be challenging Keaton in any way.  She trusted her past dealings with Keaton enough to suspect that the Arm would at least give her a chance to talk her way out of this mess before killing her out of hand.  Unless Hancock died, in which case all bets were off.

Tonya raised an eyebrow.  Danny grimaced.  “All right.  So, what
do you want us to do, boss?”

“Establish a large perimeter, a hundred and fifty yards out.  I don’t want any outside interference tonight.”

Sky: March 27, 1968

By the time they reached Kali’s chosen vacant house, Sky had recovered to where his metasense no longer cycled on and off.  Now, he was just stupid from low juice.  Terrified.  Stressed.  They bundled Hancock into an empty bedroom, wrapped in the two blankets recently wrapped around the juice zombies.  She had been on an IV for food and liquids.  They had cut the IV line and now Kali removed the IV itself.  Hancock remained unable to take food or water.

“Shit,” Kali said, and put her head in her hands.  “She’s a fucking vegetable.  I thought there would be some
damage, but this is ridiculous.”  She sat on the floor of the empty living room, leaning against the wall, exhausted.

“Feed her the Transform,” Lori said, across the empty room and no less exhausted.  Sky curled on the floor next to her and she held him comfortably close.  Tina, Tim and Eileen rested, nearly as close to Lori as Sky.  The businessman lay on the floor on the other side of Keaton, almost as if she st
ood guard over him.

Kali
glanced up, growled, and put her head back in her hands.  “Can’t.  That’s my Transform.”

“What?”

“I’ve been around this piece of meat for too long. He’s mine,” Kali said.  Kali’s normal demeanor had vanished.  After she awoke from taking juice from the Transform in the van, she was no longer a drill sergeant or a monster from the nether depths.  She was calm, introspective, bantering, and rather tolerant.  The only disquieting Kali-like thing remaining of her was her obvious physical interest in Tina.  She even told the rest of them they had done a great job.  Compliments!

Kali, apparently, was an extremely success-motivated person.

“One of those Arm predator behaviors?” Lori said.  “How are you going to fix Hancock, then?  Do you want Inferno to try and put her back together?”

Kali kept her head in her hands.  “I’ve goddamned trained myself to be able to refuse prey.  This shouldn’t be happening.”  She paused.  “
The time inside the CDC building screwed me up.  Every second I spent in the fucking place my control slipped away more.  You’re going to need to watch yourself.”

Lori nodded.  “Then
this isn’t just me.  I had to toss all my normal juice patterns and I can barely move the juice, like I’m a baby Focus inside a household that’s gone real bad.”

The rest of them chimed in with their own maladies.  Sky said he felt like he was coming down with the Shakes again.

“You can’t take Hancock.  For one thing, any Transform near her will get juice sucked.  She’s even tried to take juice from me.”

Lori shuddered.  “
Gurgling poo!  If she starts to recover, her body will start to work before her higher mind functions do.  We would need to keep her chained in the garage to keep her from taking the Inferno Transforms and being that close to them would drive her crazy.  So, what do we do?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to get into this until later, but there’s a reason I chose this house.  Focus Biggioni
is staying in a hotel not too far from here.  I figured we would let Hancock have a little talk with her before we left.  I don’t think that’s going to happen.  Now, I’m afraid we’re going to need Biggioni’s help.  She owes me.  If you give me your word not to feed my kill to Hancock, I’ll go get her.”

“Tonya?” Lori said.  “She’s going to roll every single one of us, you know.”

“Let her try,” Kali said.  “She’s crossed the line with this escapade.  If she doesn’t behave, I’ll give her juice to Hancock.  If Hancock goes Monster she’ll at least be easier to feed.”

“Hell.  All right.  Go get her.  I promise I’ll
guard the zombie.”

Gilgamesh: March 27, 1968

Gilgamesh spent a lot of time meditating as he waited for word on Tiamat’s rescue.  Coming home from drawing dross from Keaton’s graveyard, full up and feeling a little confident from all his meditating, he thought about
his troubles with creating offensive dross effects.

What if he produce
d the dross effect ahead of time?

Here he was, with an almost infinite supply of dross, plenty of time
to waste and the need to keep distracted.  What better opportunity to experiment?

H
e closeted himself in the safest part of his apartment with a pile of supplies.  Late at night, he found something that worked: the sick-up tennis ball.  Just what every discerning Crow needs, producible when the stress was low, for use when the stress was high.  He smiled, deciding he had hit the sweet spot for personal development for a Crow of his age.

Recipe: take one old tennis ball.  Sick-up as normal on tennis ball.  Clean up the skunky dross save for
what remained within about a foot of the tennis ball.  Once clean, force the remaining sick-up into the tennis ball. Stabilize the dross in the tennis ball, as if you produced a piece of dross art.  Throw the tennis ball within a couple of days at an enemy, though, or the weapon would go bad.

Perfect
.  He would be able to prepare them ahead of time so he didn’t need to worry about his panic when he got in trouble.  He would be able to carry several of them at once.  They didn’t actually use much dross, so he would be able to prepare three or four of them every morning.  They didn’t even take long to create.

Not only that, as with any form of dross art, he could tune his dross to specific scents, or juice patterns, or emotional content.  Maybe other things he hadn’t thought of yet. 
Right now, his control was terrible, but he bet his control would get a lot better with practice.

This was a weapon, he thought with a satisfied grin, as he tossed the tennis ball rotten egg in his hand.  This particular rotten egg would douse the area in an overwhelming stench, numbing the noses of anything tracking him by scent.  A skunk effect literally as well as figuratively.

He wondered how many of those innumerable letters about dross art concealed valuable technical information about what a Crow could do with dross.  Enough to be worth a search, he suspected, and retrieved and re-examined every dross art letter in his little stash.  Yes, he did find some interesting ideas in his letters.

Nothing, though, about his little rotten eggs.  At first, he thought
they might be something no one would talk about in a letter.  When he found nothing in his letters even remotely connected to his creations, he began to suspect that he might actually be the first Crow to discover this trick.  He shivered with this realization, goose bumps running up and down his arms.  Hard to imagine, given his youth and ignorance.  Anything useful able to be discovered by a Crow of his stature had already been discovered.  Right?

His question made him
consider his own stature.  He was a year and a half old, almost as old as Sinclair when they first met.  He controlled his panic, at least a little.  He had come up with a useful trick that he now strongly suspected was either new or uncommon.

He had money, at least from a Crow
’s perspective.  He had contacts among the other Major Transforms.  He had organized the rescue of an Arm – an Arm! – from captivity…if it worked.  Not only that, but by living near the Arms for so long and subsisting on an abundance of Arm dross, he had spent months at a time at high juice, with the enhanced intelligence abundant dross produced.  The high juice was apparently enough to let him come up with some non-standard young Crow tricks.

He was
now a successful young Crow.  His surprising realization raised more goose bumps on his arms.

What was he turning into?

He had no idea.  The thought both scared him and gave him hope.

He wondered how much of his drive to produce a weapon came from hanging around Arms.  Certainly other Crows didn’t seem to think
weapons were necessary.  Yet for an Arm, weaponry would be a first priority.  Next time the Skinner wouldn’t turn him down when he volunteered to help.

Now wasn’t that a cheery thought?

Gilgamesh laughed and the laugh echoed off the walls of his apartment.  A good belly laugh, not a whisper at all.

Tonya Biggioni: March 27, 1968

Tonya waited on the small second floor hotel room balcony, weighing strategies and trying to calm herself.  She tried to do her cross-stitch, but her nerves wouldn’t let her.  She tried meditation, and the Rosary, but
they hadn’t been able to still her thoughts.  Every half hour, she checked her wristwatch.  Midnight passed, then one, then two, then three.

Around four, she heard a distant explosion.  She scanned the horizon.  To the west, somewhere off in the distance, beyond the nearest hill, something burn
ed brightly.  The CDC’s Detention Center was about seven miles in that direction, but utter destruction seemed a bit extreme, even for Keaton.  Soon, sirens echoed through the night, dopplering into the far distance.  Tonya watched the show for a long time, morose as the blaze burned.

“She went and
rescued Hancock without me,” Tonya said, quiet.  “I was sure she would …”  A juice-filled hand covered her mouth and cold steel touched her throat.

Shit!  How
did Keaton sneak up on her!

“We need to talk,” a voice whispered in her ear.  Tonya took firm control of her reactions, took a deep breath and nodded.  “Hold still,” Keaton said.  “I’m going to pick you up and carry you to somewhere safer.”

The knife left her throat and Tonya found herself in the air, carried like a sack of potatoes across Keaton’s shoulder.  They hit the ground below the balcony with a muffled ‘ooph’ of her own and Keaton sped off running into the night through the small greenbelt behind the motel, still carrying her.  Baggage, she muttered to herself, starting to find the situation and the obvious danger involved humorous.

“How
did you learn to mask yourself from my metasense?”

“Oh, that?”  Keaton’s mocking laugh was ugly.  “Focus Rizzari and I have been trading tricks.  Seems as though you Focuses can learn to do things I thought only Arms
were capable of.  You ever have a stand-up with Rizzari again, you’re going to be in a whole hell of a lot of trouble.”

Tonya grimaced, disgusted
.

“She’s a useful Focus, unlike some others I know who’ve forgotten what side they’re on,” Keaton said.  As Tonya feared, Keaton had decided to fillet her.  At least verbal
ly.  So far.  “I even got her and her anthropologist friend to teach me some advanced science, so I can understand their current research.”

“Be careful,” Tonya said, her voice muffled against the Arm’s back.  “Not only hasn’t
the Council authorized Rizzari’s research, but also much of what she’s doing is in direct opposition to Council orders.  Why are you wasting time on such highly technical esoterica, anyway?”  The last thing Tonya wanted was yet another reason for their enemies to kill Keaton.  The first Focuses had a long track record of smacking down people who learned too much, a list including Focus Rizzari, several times.

Keaton hissed, frustrated.  “Tell me, how has not knowing the technical details behind the Transforms helped you at all in, say, the past month?  How good were your recent executive decisions based on jack shit knowledge of what’s recently been discovered?”  She hopped up an incline,
and hopped again, this time catching hold of a wooden deck with her free hand.  She kept climbing.  “Tell me, if you learned that at least eleven different standard juice fractions interact with both estrogen and cortisol receptors, would you even know what I’m talking about or why this is important?  If you read that Monster juice has teratogenic fractions and pro-testosterone amplifiers, would you even know to connect this data to tales I’ve told about Chimeras and young Arm accidents with Monsters, and why it’s all important in this situation?  I could go on like this for a half hour, bitch, but the details aren’t important.  You’re not technically competent to be making any decisions about anyone except yourself right now, and possibly not even that.”