All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (40 page)

Glares all around at her, even from Van.  “Hey?  I’m sorry.  What’d I say?”

Lori grabbed her by the shoulder with a grip of steel, nearly as rough as Keaton, and dragged her off to beside the bandstand.  “You, you…”

“Ma’am?  I apologize for anything I’ve might, uh, done or said, Professor Focus Rizzari,” Gail said, her words dissolving into word salad.  “Stac… a friend says I’m like a bull in a china shop when I’m around powerful Major Transforms.  This sort of thing has happened before, unfortunately.”

“Keaton said that to you?”

“You know Stacy?”

“I’ve given her enough gray hairs,” Lori said, her voice a little less strident and a bit more respectful.

“Well, she’s returned the favor to me.”  Gulp.  “I do apologize for making…”

“I forgive you.  You have a quality that is ubiquitous among the best of the Major Transforms: you have an exceptional metasense.  Along with the most beautiful juice structure I’ve ever seen.  You may have Crows asking you to pose for their artwork. 
Charge them
.”

Gail didn’t even bother to try to understand what the diminutive Focus meant.  Certainly neither Gilgamesh nor Whisper had said any such thing to her, or shown any interest in art.

“Ma’am?” hell, I can’t make it any worse, Gail thought, save that whenever I say that to myself I always make it worse, “Best?  Ma’am, I know I’m what Focus Biggioni calls a top quartile Focus, but…”  Her voice trailed off.  Focus Rizzari took Gail’s putative talents way too serious.

The imposing Focus went into some scholarly analogy involving vectors and axes Gail didn’t understand.

“I’m sorry, Focus Rizzari, but…”

“Lori.  Focus Rizzari is my mother…”

That had to be a joke.  Right?  How can you tell if someone is telling a joke if they can hide their emotions?

“Okay.  I’ll say it a different way,” Lori said.  “You know you have potential.  But potential means nothing unless you get it trained, and the training you need can’t start until a year or two after your charisma comes in.  Someday, we’re going to have to have a long talk together about getting you the advanced training.  Don’t talk to anyone about it but me, Tonya, and… well, let’s just leave it at that for now.  In the meantime don’t go blurting out everything you figure out to everyone who can hear it.”  Gail bit her lip.  Tonya had taught her more than she wanted to know about Transform Doublethink, but she had lost control of her own stony face hours ago, because of the wedding.  “For instance, Sky is in
disguise
as a male Transform, he’s the father of my first child, we’re trying to patch things up between us, I haven’t told him I’m pregnant again, and
he’s not the father
.  Capish?”  Looking into Lori’s face was like looking into a blast furnace.

“Gilgamesh, then?” Gail said, her voice reduced to a short squeak.  Gilgamesh said he was involved intimately with a Focus in an embarrassing two Crow one Focus love triangle.  The Focus had to be Rizzari.

Glare.  Worse than any of Keaton’s.

Just when I don’t think I can make it any worse…  Gail nodded.  “Sorry, ma’am.”

Carol Hancock

I had a headache.  I didn’t think it was possible for an Arm to get a tension headache, but this reception gave me one.  So.  They were out there, circling and revising their plans.  Sinclair and Zero, masquerading as Polly’s bodyguards, caught hints.  So did Gilgamesh and Sky, but only exceptionally tiny hints.

No attack, yet.

I smelled a rainstorm moving in, a cold front, not much in the way of thunderstorms, but several hours of rain behind it.  If I could smell it, so could the enemy.  Could they be waiting for the storm?  Did they know something about metasense and heavy weather I had missed?  I hated being in the dark.  Now, literally as well as figuratively.  The onset of the rain was only a few minutes away.

Shit.

I whispered to Tom, grabbed him, and did a quick run outside, running through scenarios in my mind, trying to find one of our pre-set deployments to match what I now knew was coming.  We had a signaling area set up, for emergencies, and I signaled for Keaton and Sky.  I ordered Tom to get his ass up on the roof above the reception and get all the roof guards ready.

My putative underling and real world Arm boss dropped in with a bang.  Off the third floor of the hotel, where the pool was.

“Make it quick.  Could be any moment now,” Keaton said.

“Ma’am, they’re going to come with the rain.  I can think of only one reason for that: to cover
numbers
.”  Thunderstorms didn’t mess up my metasense, but they messed up juice traces and my Arm-enhanced sense of smell.  “I think they may be coming in with even more than I metasensed in Chicago.  We need to switch to deployment seven, and…”

Keaton vanished, burning juice as she sprinted off to the north.  Sky vanished as well, as deployment seven had him outside the reception hall, not inside.

Keaton had said she had something set up for the low probability event that Rogue Crow had more soldiers than I had found.  One of her military toys, I guessed.

I suspected I would find out soon enough what she had kept hidden in her back pocket.

Earl Robert Sellers

“They’re out there, creeping closer, under powerful metasense protections,” the Earl said.  Ready for battle, he crouched in silence along with Duke Hoskins, Count Knox, and their leading combat-ready Commoners Gwen, Pam and Suzie, and Crow Sky, who had just arrived to tell them to switch to deployment seven.  Each of the Nobles wore his combat form today.  Their small group had commandeered a tiny section of the reception hall rooftop, on the far right, next to the two-story passageway connecting the hotel to the reception hall.  Well over two hundred well-armed normals and household Transforms readied themselves for battle on the rooftop, some armed with heavy weaponry fit for a military battlefield.

Few of them knew the Noble’s strike force was present, as Crow Sky’s protections covered them.  Those who could see, saw more normal humans.  Mostly, they cursed the sudden rainstorm.

“Wandering Shade’s covering a huge area with his metasense protections, more than I ever imagined possible, dammit,” Sky said, his voice low and almost panicky.  “This is both a good and bad thing.”

“Good and bad?” Duke Hoskins said.  “Sounds all bad to me.  What’s he covering that we haven’t anticipated?  Armored personnel carriers?  Tanks?”

Sky shook his head.  “I would be able to hear either,” he said.  “No vehicles.  They’re coming in on foot.  As to what might be good about this?  That’s easy.  Wandering Shade’s depleting himself before the fight, a crazy thing for a Crow to be doing.”

“How depleted?” Duke Hoskins said.  “Will he still be able to do Crow tricks?”

Sky nodded.  “Trust me, you don’t want to imagine how crazy a fight like this could get if Wandering Shade horded his dross for a few minutes of battle.  He’s carrying beaucoup dross, but every Crow has his maxcap, even the senior Crows.  He’ll be down to just deadly, not fatal, by the time he reaches here.”

Sellers continued to reach out with his special metasense, degraded by the rain and the distant lightning.  The feeling of illness continued to grow, which he interpreted as the enemy, slowly creeping in, likely less than three miles away.  The Commander had set up a network of Crows for metasense coverage, but had told them all to stay close to the reception hall.  All of her people, including her reserves, the ones on the ground hidden behind the reception hall, were in close.  The enemy didn’t know that, and crept in slowly, alert for patrols.

He also metasensed an Arm, coming closer, leaping toward them from the banquet hall, the much smaller piece of the hotel that stuck out at a funny angle behind them, giving cover to the Commander’s reserve force.  Arm Haggerty bothered Earl Sellers, too young a Major Transform to be involved in such a fight as this.  He didn’t understand the Arms strengths and weaknesses enough to know how big a problem she would be.  Could she hold her mind together in a combat and keep from attacking her allies?  Or didn’t Arms have that problem?

The Arm stopped thirty feet from them, bowed, and walked slowly toward their group.  “Nothing,” she said.  “I’ve got nothing.”

“They’re within three miles, coming in from the west, on foot, ma’am,” Sellers said.  The Duke and Count Knox startled their attention toward Haggerty and Sellers, and he realized that neither of them had metasensed Haggerty’s approach.  Interesting.

“So, Duke Hoskins, does that thing work when you’re in your Beast form?” Haggerty asked, a smile on her face.  She was a long leggy woman, beautiful for an Arm, at least in comparison to the other two.  As she spoke, she bent over slightly and eyed the Duke’s incongruous manhood, hanging down below his crab shell, between his legs.

“Ma’am, it works just fine in all situations,” the Duke said.  “Would you like a demonstration?”

Arm Haggerty walked up to the Duke, to stand shoulder to, well, crab shell with him.  “Perhaps later, if we live through this crazy battle,” she said.  She looked him up and down, and smiled a suggestive smile.

Yes, she was nothing like the other two Arms.  Sellers hoped she did, indeed, live through the coming battle.  If what he and his peers had seen in the clouds was correct, he worried about any of them living through the battle.  Lightning flashed to their north, a few miles distant, illuminating a massive inky ground cloud, about two miles distant, to their west.  A dross illusion, it had to be, covering up the enemy army from normal eyeballs.  It looked strange to him, and he gave it some thought, and focused his metasense on the illusion.

“I believe they may be splitting up,” Sellers said, worried.  Was he metasensing reality, or was Wandering Shade messing with his metasense?

“That’s not Crow tactics,” Sky said.  “That’s utter idiocy.  Well, from a Crow’s perspective, at least.  I think our Commander is correct, and a Hunter is in charge of the battle strategy and tactics.”

Enkidu.  The one the Commander called the General.  Something had changed among the Hunters, if Wandering Shade was allowing a Hunter to lead them into battle.

Sellers didn’t think this was a good thing.  Not at all.

Tonya Biggioni

“Tell me what you see.”

“Ma’am?” Delia said, confused by Tonya’s question. The reception had settled into the Dearborn Hyatt’s main ballroom, probably one of the few places big enough to hold them all.  Tonya didn’t want to think about how much money this reception cost Gail’s father, but Gail said he could afford it. He stood over by where the band set up after their break, looking like he was about to burst the buttons of his suit with pride.  Tonya had been teaching Delia about other Focuses and households all evening.

“There,” Tonya said.  Delia followed Tonya’s eyes.

“That’s interesting,” Delia said.  “Gail has female bodyguards.”  The best man had bodyguard written all over him and watched over everything with an attitude of cold suspicion. It took a good eye to see that his wife, Gail’s maid of honor, had the bodyguard training as well.

“I hear they got their initial training from Beth’s people, but that Wini made them take a month of training with her people, too, and Wendy leaned on them to follow Stacy’s suggestion and train up their able women as bodyguards,” Tonya said.

Delia nodded thoughtfully. “So what do you think of Gail’s household, ma’am? I know you’ve been watching over her for the last nine months.”

Tonya leaned back in her chair and sighed. “They’re a lot better than they were when I first contacted Gail. I would rate it about mid-level, promising for a Focus of Gail’s age.”

“Not better than mid-level, for a Focus of her promise?” Delia said. Over at the bandstand, the band, some of Grace Johnson’s people, started to tune up. The room became even louder as everyone raised their voices over the band.

“Gail’s taking her household down an entirely new path,” Tonya said.  “Like Inferno, her household has tremendous potential, but also like Inferno, it’s going to take years to come together properly.”

“So no bigger things for Gail and her household for now,” Delia said.  “I hope they can afford the years.”

“I hope so, too.”  Tonya watched Gail thoughtfully, over by the punch bowl and so happy she bubbled. Bigger things, Tonya thought, and wondered what Delia meant. Gail had made a decent start, especially given her initial troubles, and she had a good heart to keep her honest.  Her leadership style was ‘barely controlled chaos’, which meant weak central leadership and a lot of household power invested in her Transforms and normals.  She read household authority on quite a few of Gail’s people, especially in Van, the best man, and Gail’s maid of honor.

“The big test will come when Gail’s charisma fully comes in,” Tonya said, flickering her eyes over at Linda Cooley, trying to hide the fact she snorted down some expensive noxious drug as if it was play money.  Tonya strongly suspected Linda used her potent yet motherly charisma to score herself ‘product samples’.  “Quite a few Focuses fall by the wayside due to the temptations inherent in strong charisma.  If she can handle her charisma, and her household matures, she’ll be Council quality.”  The Council could use another strong competent Focus.  Esther Weiczokowski, the Midwest region rep, wasn’t truly Council quality, in Tonya’s opinion.