Sons (Book 2) (138 page)

“No, sir, we do eat good every day, but not prime rib good,” Dowd said, grinning at me as he placed a bright red slice of juicy, slow-roasted beef onto my plate.  “The creation of the
Huri
and the expeditions outside to meet the rest of our family are reasons for celebration!  But more importantly, there’re growing kids who’ve tripled in size.  Gotta have protein to build muscle.  Adults, too.  Chef…?”  He’d filled Ellorn’s plate as well with equally gorgeous cut of meat.  We turned to find a shocked lead line cook with a plate of sauces in ramekins.

“Lord Daybreak, it is an honor to have you in our line, sir,” Sgt. Mead said.  “And
Chene
Ellorn, you are welcome as well, of course.  I’m sorry, it’s just shocking to see Dowd the Shroud actually string more than five words together.”  The burst of laughter from the collected group of men behind him was startling in volume.

“Stop!  All of you, now!” yelled Ellorn, curtly.  He jerked us all through the floor by making us heavier, then letting off to normal gravity.  Cool effect.  It was similar to Gordon’s seismic gravity wave magic but on a tighter scale.  “That was rude,” Ellorn continue his barrage of Mead.  “Why did you choose to be rude to Dowd, Sgt. Mead?  Why did you demean him in front of Lord Daybreak?”

“No, sir!  I meant it but not to be rude!” Mead was adamant but struggled for words.  “It is shocking to see him talk this much at one time!  It’s great.  Maybe we can keep him talking to us more often.  And there’s a growing number of men who are taking quite an interest in forestry and the Rangers as a branch of service in the Guard.  Getting him to say things like this repeatedly to or near his commanding officer is his only chance of getting nominated in the first place.”

“And I can’t get more commanding, can I, Lord Daybreak?” asked Dowd, still grinning, but mischievously now.

Snickering, I said, “Ellorn, I think you’re being pranked.”  He turned to me confused.  “Oh, I don’t think it started out to be on you, but you’re the target now, young man.  Come on, chef.  Sauce us and I’ll try to explain human interaction to Ellorn.  And yes, Cpl. Dowd, there probably will be something like a Ranger Corps on Gilán within the Guard.  I’ll keep you in mind.  Thanks for dinner.” 

Ellorn managed cheerful enough farewells as I led him back the way we came, but he was not a happy camper.  “I take it this isn’t the first time you feel the Guard has over-stepped themselves?” I asked, shifting some silverware from my kitchen for us.

He sighed, accepting the knife and fork, “Honestly, Lord, I’m not certain if it’s them or me,” he admitted.  “I’m feeling unnaturally aggressive.  I want to bark at everyone.  Everything said to me contradicts something I’ve already done.  They are driving me crazy!”

I chuckled, opening the
Saun
link and expressing calmness in the now, patience for him when he needed it, and my confidence in him that he was up to the task.  “That’s the testosterone talking,” I said, starting in on the rib.  “Eat your steak before it gets cold.”  He timidly sliced a small sliver of meat away and sniffed at it.  “Come on, you’ve eaten beef before.  This isn’t new.”

“Actually, everything is new,” he said before chomping down pretty hard on that tiny bite.  It seemed nearly sexually savory to him as he sort of… quivered as he chewed it.  “Our tastes for everything are different.  Even familiar things are strangely piquant.  There’s an amazing difference in flavors.”

“It funny that we’re obsessing over taste at the moment,” I said, sampling some of the sauces.  Our variant of horseradish was fire-hot, making an excellent sauce, and the dill sauce was very good, too.  “You know, just yesterday you were a two foot brownie in charge of the Palace and doing very well at it.  Today, you’re
Saun Huri
, first of your kind and leader of your people.  How do you think you’re doing?”

He chewed slowly, contemplating the question.  “Not quite as well, I’m afraid, in some ways, but much better in others.  Like back there, I have no idea where I failed.  I thought I was protecting Cpl. Dowd.  And why did you call him ‘Stump’?”

“I’d searched his memories and came up on a very pleasant afternoon cookout when Dowd’s father complimented his grilling,” I told Ellorn.  “That’s the nickname he used, then.  It brought back good feelings he thought he’d buried without bringing up any bad.

“And you didn’t exactly
fail
, Ellorn,” I said.  “Your intentions were in the right place and everyone saw that.  Trust me, they’ll be more careful around you and yours in the future so maybe there ought to be a code of conduct or something discussed, for the common areas?  Anyway, what you didn’t see was that Stump got excited and talked a lot.  Two different people used it as a gag.  They like Dowd.  They wouldn’t have picked on him that way if they didn’t.”

“But it was humiliating for Dowd the way they treated him, especially in front of you!” Ellorn protested.

“Ah, well, I’m afraid that’s my fault,” I admitted.  “I’ve encouraged a casual attitude during casual events, as you’ve seen, and I’ll continue to do that with the Giláni.  We’re in the middle of a celebration, after all.  Admittedly, it hasn’t felt like a celebration to you or me because we’ve been working.”

“I don’t foresee a time when I won’t be working in some capacity,” Ellorn said.  “Especially now.”

“You have to make time,” I said, sighing.  “It’s the way it is for some of us.  Sometimes we’ll appear to be doing nothing while everyone else is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but mostly, we don’t stop.  So we delegate, take lots of short breaks, eat and drink often, make sure we have people to take care of us.  It’s also why we have private places where no one is allowed except that caretaker, just to preserve our own mental health.”

Ellorn thought for a few moments.  “I’ll have to assign a new staff to you.  Your entire staff is
huri
now.”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” I said.  “But I do love having brownies underfoot, too.  I am going to miss having you around that way.  But my point was that you need a support staff, too, and probably one bigger than you’re planning.  How many people do you have working in your office now?”

“Eighteen,” Ellorn said.

“Triple it, at least for the time being,” I told him.  “You can always reassign later.  Quit trying to make everything perfect from the onset.  We have plenty of time to massage out any kinks in the works in the coming months.”

“I hadn’t thought in those terms, sir,” Ellorn said.

“And take the rest of the night more slowly, more casually,” I said.  “Enjoy yourself a little more tonight.  You deserve it.  Now let’s check in on that BBQ.”

Ellorn and I wandered up the Promenade for another hour, talking about everything we saw. And we ate a delicious variety of food.  I delayed any problem he brought up until tomorrow unless it was life threatening—none were.  We decided that my valet staff would include Zed’s unchanged fourth cousins, Gibson and Guitar, and Ellorn would get Piano and Steinway.  It made me wonder if they didn’t pick their English names for their comedic effect, but it was more like they found a thesaurus with lists of words and used that.  By the end of the hour, we were both in much better moods and more relaxed.

Interestingly, when we parted ways, Ellorn hugged me and said, “Thank you, Lord.  You’ve been most helpful and understanding.”  It was an odd thing for him to do, but I just attributed it to new hormones and shifted to the Garrison.

“Evenin’, Ric, just checkin’ in,” I said quietly as I stepped up beside Velasquez at the Sit-room’s dispatch display table.  He leaned against the table but studied the huge map on the wall that currently showed six different positions on Gilán where Guard troops were dispersed.

“Good evening, Lord Daybreak,” Velasquez responded, snapping to attention but relaxing almost instantly.  “It was a glorious day today!”  He smiled nearly ear to ear.

Grinning back at him, I asked, “I guess you went outside this morning?”

“Yes, sir!” Velasquez said enthusiastically, still smiling.  “First led us to meet Arwene and Orlet on the river on the way to the southern lake.  He’s quite a wrestler, both on land and in the river, and a prankster!”

“Just wait till he grows up,” I said.  “He’s barely past puberty.  He’s just a gangly teenager now.”  This was what I was hoping for anyway.  That he’d grow up strong enough to control the lake south of him with Orlet.  And she was no lightweight by herself.  Where Arwene was graceful power, Orlet was ferocious speed and elegant movement.  They worked well together.  I’m not certain why I “hoped” because they were almost certainly engineered for that purpose somehow.

“But he’s
huge
now,” whispered my Guard Commander, visibly shocked at the thought.  “Like over eight feet tall, huge.”

“Damn, I hope he doesn’t get too big,” I muttered to myself, basically.  “That’ll severely limit his playmates.  Don’t want a grumpy nymph in charge of the lake.”

“I second that,” Velasquez said under his breath, wide-eyed.  “Lord, First setup this display for us but we can’t manipulate it.  Now it doesn’t make much sense anymore.”  He waved an arm at the screen on the wall with his shirtsleeve riding up to show a marked tan.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked, taking control of the Worldgem links.  I knew
what
I was looking at, now I needed to know why that should make sense.

“It was originally six groups of four that has merged into four groups of six,” Velasquez explained.  “They’re all currently heading for the Road, but I have no idea where that is relative to where they are.”

Okay, I had to find twenty-three
Ransé
and Jimmy somewhere between here and the southern lake.  It was mostly familiar territory and Jimmy’s aura was a blue bonfire in the distance as I pulled one frame back far enough to identify several people.  His group, though, seemed to consist of eleven others.  Jimmy walked a very natural path through the nighttime forest, but the others hadn’t quite gotten the knack for it yet.  Twigs and branches snapped, boots scuffed on tree roots, and buttons and bows caught in shrubs. 

Dropping the links and clearing the screen, I showed an overview of Gilán using the lake and the Palace as borders.  Finding the other two groups wasn’t hard since they were as noisy as Jimmy’s group.  Looking at the people, it made sense—city boys and girls and big ones at that.  Centering one screen on the northern group, Ted seemed to be doing pretty good moving through the forest, but others, not so much.  The problem was they scared off the nocturnal creatures in droves.

I set a screen for the final group with instructions to close the links to the Worldgem when everyone got in and released the map.  “There ya go, Commander.  I think that’ll do for tonight,” I said casually and glanced down at the table.  Hundreds of tiny satellite pictures of the three camps from the Russian’s records littered the glowing desktop. 
First, are you planning on bringing that herd of elephant home this evening?

That’s what’s wrong!  I knew something was irritating me
, Jimmy responded, his image halting on-screen. 
City boys, I should have realized.  That explains why the forest is so empty.  Time to scrub this, then
.  “Guys, Lord Daybreak has explained to me why we aren’t meeting anyone, so I’m scrubbing for tonight.  We’ll do at another time when we can do it right.”

Trusting Jimmy to handle that situation, I turned my attention to the satellite images on the tabletop.  Many of these were new to me, especially the Midwest encampments.  The areas of interest were no longer limited to Arizona apparently, but spread out into Utah and Nebraska.  Serious overkill, unless they showed something suspicious.

“Care to give me a quick rundown on this, Ric?” I asked, feeling Jimmy move his group to the Road.  They waited, so I figured he was going to gather everyone.  Velasquez explained the two smaller South of the Border installations first since we had little information from that satellite sweep.  The Arizonza compound was indeed a complex array of smaller training camps spread out through the Midwest in what seemed to be a random pattern.  According to my Guards’ second-in-command, these training camps where disguised and operated as businesses, private gunclubs and gyms or dojos, for instance.  Some operated in metal warehouses with parking lots refilling in cycles while some of the gunclubs had some serious bunkers on their firing ranges out in the middle of the desert.

“Current estimates of personnel just within the Arizona border sits at two thousand three hundred eighty,” concluded Velasquez.

Picking out the base camp, I asked, “How many there?”

“Six hundred, twenty,” he answered, adding, “With the possibility of another two hundred each from three nearby camps within twenty to forty minutes.”

Jimmy and Byrnes burst energetically through the door to the Sit-room, both grinning stupidly.  “It was the noise, wasn’t it?” Byrnes asked excitedly.

“Yes, Ted,” Jimmy said, exasperated.  “We were a herd of buffalo stampeding in the night and we trampled a trail a mile wide doing it.  Now, pay attention.  Boss is here.”

Byrnes turned to me and grinned.  “Evenin’, Boss.  Hayseed, here, actually knows his way around the woods.”  I chuckled while Jimmy glared at him.

“Ain’t they funny when they’re being all culturally bigoted,” Jimmy muttered.