Neither did she throw up in the ditch, which she wanted to do right now more than anything. She would end up with one hell of a headache from this. She would have liked to dump it all into the quiet pools, but she needed all her wits to deal with the Commander. Either Del’s memory was cloudy or the Commander had gained even more stature on her quest, and she had been impressive to begin with.
She also sported a nice coat of fur.
Del doubted her memory was cloudy. She had a sudden urge to go into a full grovel, and the upset in her stomach became even worse as she resisted that impulse.
“What the fuck is going on with you, Del?” The Commander’s voice was icy cold, and there was a subtle darkness in her predator effect. Del recognized the darkness, the same as Ma’am Keaton projected when Ma’am Keaton was in one of her dark moods, or that she got from Bass, always. Torture, cruelty, pleasure in other people’s pain. Del’s stomach clenched up even tighter. Damn it, the Commander was supposed to have gotten rid of her beast up in the Yukon. This was as bad as ever.
“I have an offer from Emperor Caveworm,” Del said. The urge to grovel was ferocious. Del was only a young Arm. She didn’t have any business standing up to the Commander when the Commander was in a mood.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Crow captive. Name used to begin with an S, but I’ve forgotten the rest,” Del said. Soon, real soon, she would fix that problem. If she lived through the next five minutes.
“You have the Law on you,” the Commander said. Yes, that was indeed the problem.
Del knew she had better come up with something to lure the Commander’s interest right quick, or the Commander was going to decide to take down the handy enemy combatant right in front of her.
“Yes, Commander, I’m aware of that. You need to know that Arms can fight off many of the Law’s effects. Emperor Caveworm wants an agreement to cooperate against Huntress Hecate. Attacking Huntress Hecate is the real reason we’re here.”
The Commander thought for a moment, and Del barely breathed. She wondered if the Commander would kill her if she started throwing up. Probably, she decided. “I see. Bass is only loosely held under the Law, and so she’s not really fighting on Enkidu’s side, is she?”
“She’s an apostate, and should not command.” There was more, but the Law forbade the distribution of such information to outsiders. Del’s head throbbed already, and it would be easy to decide that the Commander didn’t need the information.
Dammit, she did, though. The pain in Del’s head was like an ice pick, driven right through the center of her brain. “Emperor Caveworm doesn’t want this war,” she said. She couldn’t manage more than a whisper through the pain. Her vision blacked around the edges until all she could see was a tiny point. “He only seeks to take leadership from the General and destroy Huntress Hecate. Emperor Caveworm can convert Hunters to his side if he gets a minute with them.”
There. Finished. The pain eased back to mere torture, and Del found herself shaking.
The Commander watched Del’s reactions with cold eyes. “If your group rushes Bass’s group, we’ll attack them as well,” she said. Del heard a second message in the tone of her voice. There was the subtle threat that if Del didn’t get the hell out of the ditch and far away from the Commander, the Commander was going to see if she could carve the Law out of her Arm style.
Del got Arête’s attention, and they skittered invisible up the slope. When she looked back, the Commander was back in her original position under the semi.
“The bastard caught our conversation” (3/28/73, continued)
Carol Hancock
“Mizar?” His face looked stuck part way between a frown and surprise, and had ever since I slipped back under the eighteen-wheeler from the conference with Del. I checked him for injuries, and found none. There were only five of us under this particular rig: Lena, Pat the Rat, Sky, Mizar, and me. The place sucked as a defensible position.
I ended up nose to the pavement with the filthy underside of the eighteen wheeler looming only inches above me, and old memories surfaced. At least this time, my spine remained whole and I had an army with me to oppose my enemies. The smell of asphalt stayed the same, though, as did the smell of blood.
“Things are becoming clearer to me,” Mizar said. “I have an idea on how to end this.” Oh, damn, the battle was about to become more complicated. Anne-Marie said we needed Mizar. After all these weeks, I still didn’t see how I could use him to provide the kind of impact Anne-Marie thought he could. I flat-out didn’t know enough about Chimeras. Mizar needed to find the answer himself.
“An idea?” I asked. “Regarding what?”
“The Law.” That made sense. The Law was a Hunter thing, a Chimera thing, and although it didn’t mark Mizar, he understood it. Huntress Del’s offer – I couldn’t afford to think of her as an Arm, not with the Law warping her so much – made no sense to me at all. Mizar not only understood the Huntress’s offer, he carried it forward somehow into some other insane Chimera headspace. He didn’t think Del lied to us. And she did still carry my tag.
I kept one eye on the removal of Focus Wilson’s shooters. Wilson’s people were seriously out-Focused, and I just wanted them out of here. Pure idiocy shooting into the fight with such abandon. Of course, the fact that both sides employed Monsters and Chimeras did make subtle distinctions rather difficult for a poor deluded anti-predator Pattersonite. We would deal with Focus Pitre’s discovery another day.
“You’ve got a plan,” I said. I needed to be careful. Mizar’s bright ideas didn’t always work – consider his approach to Gail, for instance. A dumb-ass move out here would get us killed.
“Yes, Carol. I’m…”
Mizar didn’t get any farther in his explanation because of a disturbance behind us. Focus Wilson’s people began to flee in panic, screaming, on foot, away from the nursing home’s driveway. Gail slapped us with an emergency juice signal I didn’t recognize. Pain lanced through my head from my tag link to Gilgamesh, and, a moment later, from my tag link to Haggerty.
Without Wilson’s people to our west, we weren’t surrounded any more. I hand signaled two squads of Gilgamesh’s reserves to come forward, and they did so slowly, taking extra care to keep under cover.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mizar. I picked up little more than juice chaos and numerous overlapping Crow metasense shields. “Something real bad’s happened.”
“Someone blew the head off of a Focus, hit another Focus and hit Gilgamesh,” Mizar whispered. “Sniper, ‘The Man’ in person. In one of the large-numbered hovering noise machines.” The news choppers? Shit!
“Sniper,” I screamed into the walkie. “News chopper! Anyone else hit?” I remained under cover, mentally cursing my roused beast and damping down the urge to go running down the helicopter on foot. With my beast roused, I had a much harder time reading the health of those I had tagged, as well as a much harder time resisting the Arm chase instincts. One of the helicopters revved its engines and zipped away, likely after collecting some ground fire.
I, luckily, didn’t give chase.
Barely.
After a moment of silence, I heard Hoskins’ voice over the walkie. “Number three down, the Courtier down.” Crap. Haggerty and Dan Freeman.
“According to Mr. Big,” Shadow “the smallmouth and an unnamed Pack Mistress with the smallmouth are both down and may not get up,” Keaton said.
Fucking shit! “I want ideas, people, now,” I said, over the walkie, bending my charisma into my voice Tonya style, backed by a fraction of a point of burned juice. “What the crap’s going on! Why these particular targets?”
“Stalingrad,” a lone voice said. It took me a moment to place the voice as Van Schuber, back with the wounded and talking over Viscount Nash’s walkie. Crap! He was right. The Man wanted Enkidu and I to destroy each other, and he aimed to kill and disable enough people on both sides to turn this battle into a pointless mutual slaughter. I heard murmured exp
letives, concurring with Van’s analysis, from Hoskins and Keaton. “One Focus is dead and Focus Rodriguez and Gilgamesh are both wounded,” Van continued, over the walkie. “Doc Pain wants permission to…”
“Yes! Get him up here and order him to get Gilgamesh back on his feet if at all possible.”
My instincts were correct when I ordered some of the reserves up. I turned to Mizar. “We’re going back.”
Mizar nodded, crisply. When the reserves reached us, I tapped Count Rangel on the shoulder. “You’re in command of this group,” I said, and tersely explained my agreement with ‘Huntress’ Del and ‘Emperor Caveworm’. He nodded, and I could see the weight settle harshly on him. He possessed the necessary talent, but he had spent too long under the deceased Earl Sellers’ authority and didn’t possess the command experience he needed. This would do him good.
Mizar and I ducked and weaved, and in a moment or three, we were back with the last of the reserve groups, now taking cover behind the vehicles Focus Wilson abandoned when she and her people fled on foot. The place was a madhouse. Transforms were down everywhere, their juice too high or low, with two coming out of withdrawal and one Monster transformation in progress (looked like this one unfortunate female Transform inherited an entire Focus household’s juice buffer). What could have turned into a complete disaster wasn’t, with everyone here stabilized by our Crow Masters, not a one I could actually see.
I couldn’t metasense even half of what was going on. I had heard horror stories about what happened to a Focus’s household when she died, and now I got to appreciate the events first hand. Lucky for me, the Focus wasn’t one of mine, or… Well, I don’t know what I would have been doing. It wouldn’t have been pretty.
“Carol!” Gail said, attracting attention. She carried Gilgamesh in her arms while crouching behind a Chevy, and Gilgamesh bled out badly. Behind her, I saw Focus Molly Janke running up the road from the park to the reserve group, carrying Hank.
“Jahnke, help Gail stabilize Gilgamesh,” I said. Focus Jahnke put Hank down and moved. I knew what Gail wanted, but I sensed a worse problem out of the corner of my eye. Mizar beat me to her.
Focus Rodriguez had taken two hits from Monster-stoppers, one through the neck and the other through the heart. She remained alive, stretched out on the pavement only slightly sheltered by one of Focus Wilson’s pickup trucks, but I recognized mortal wounds when I saw them. The political fallout would be a disaster if we allowed a Council Focus to die. “You get the heart wound, I’ll go for the neck,” I said.
“I’ll have to use élan,” Mizar said as he bent to his task, pushing aside the headless corpse beside Rodriguez. He healed using the bloody fingers routine. That is, to heal others he needed his blood coming out of his fingertips (or, in this case, paw-cum-finger tips).
“Better edging into élan Focus than dead Focus,” I said, before I stuck my tongue in Rodriguez’s neck. I healed Gail like this, once, but Gail had been hit by many .32s from a low-punch auto, while this neck wound came from a single high-velocity Monster stopper dum-dum. She didn’t just take a bullet through the spine – no, the bullet took out all her vertebrae up there as well as causing a massive brain hemorrhage. The only reason she wasn’t dead-dead was that it took a Major Transform a few minutes to die from such a hit.
I stabilized her, stopped the bleeding in her brain, and started to re-grow blood vessels in her neck. While I did so, Hank came over from Gilgamesh to help. Not with his borrowed healing, but to do a quick upper torso and head immobilization on Rodriguez so she could be moved and more fully healed at leisure.
“Keep your goddamned head down,” I told Hank.
“He’s under my personal protections now,” Mizar said. Which meant no one could see Hank unless Mizar wanted them to. As long as Hank remained close by.
“Gilgamesh thinks something screwy is going on,” Hank said, as he finished clamping Rodriguez’s head in place.
Screwy in a war? I rushed over to Gail and the wounded Gilgamesh, where they huddled under the cover of a green, wood-paneled station wagon, now shot to shit. “What can I do?”
“We’ve mostly got Focus Martin’s Transforms nailed down now,” Gail said. She and Jahnke still worked on Gilgamesh’s wound. I looked over those Transforms, and found Lori at work, reestablishing tags, moving juice and élan around as appropriate, and knocking out panicked Transforms.
Tillie Martin was the dead Focus? Her? “Why did the Man target her?” She was a promising young Focus who had attracted Gail’s attention, but worth nothing in this fight.
Gail’s face, spattered with the usual, had a mix of horror and awe on it, her mind not readable, lost in some half-awake half-Dreaming state, one of her hundreds of screwy tricks. She saw the victims and saw herself, and her emotions were as splattered as Focus Martin’s brain. “The Man hit Gilgamesh first, but he was already running, having spotted the gunfire into the Oak Valley ruins.” The Man shot Bass first? This was severely screwy. “Tillie did something with the juice and dross, something aimed at the chopper. She has, or had, some unique tricks I’ll tell you about later. About two seconds after her attack her head exploded and Lupe” Rodriguez “fell.” Gail motioned with her eyes to the headless body beside Rodriguez. Lupe, far shorter than Tillie, had been standing next to her or behind her.
“You hit?”
She lifted up her left arm, and the flesh hung like jello from her lower left arm. “One round whizzed by and did this,” she said. “No big problem.” The round that hit Gilgamesh.
I turned to Gilgamesh and pulled on his tag, to break through his healing trance. “Mizar thinks this was The Man.”
Hank came up and shooed off Focus Jahnke. He resumed his healing work on Gilgamesh, and my own ability to heal others sputtered out as he borrowed directly.
Motivated, with an Arm at hand, he was much faster at other-healing than the Focuses. He was better with the delicate work than even me using my own ability, because as a surgeon, he knew exactly what to do. From an Arm’s perspective, he could only use a tiny amount of juice, though, so despite his efficiencies this kept him away from the serious cases, like Focus Rodriguez, that needed massive tissue regeneration.
“The shooter was a Crow, not one I’m familiar with, but the metasense shielding on him slipped when he fired,” Gilgamesh said, his voice faint. “Someone was with him, likely the Man, and most likely controlling him.”
Crap. Crows were the best shooters of all, especially any Crow with a good enough metasense to see air currents. Thankfully, the number of Crows with enough nerve to fire a weapon was very small.
I signaled to Gail, she nodded, and we held hands. What should have been a sacred ceremony of juice passing became one of rough expediency. After healing Rodriquez I needed the juice. This damned battle wasn’t over yet.
“The target choice implies a plan,” Sky said. He remained invisible, and under good enough cover that I couldn’t identify where his whispers originated. “This wasn’t random, and the timing was important. I fear…”
I held up my hand and looked at Mizar.
“The bastard caught our conversation,” I said. “He interrupted us on purpose.” He couldn’t shoot us, as we had stayed under cover of the semis ever since the choppers showed up. “Your plan, sir?” If his plan was important enough to interrupt, I needed to know about it, now. I did a head nod and a tiny flourish with my hand.
Mizar smiled.
“Annie’s right, Carol. The Hunters have factionalized, and their faction politics explains why they split up as they did, and why they had to split up.”
Yes. Yes! I would have never caught this, because of my Chimera ignorance. I smiled my brightest smile and urged him to continue through the tag.
“I’m going to use Arm Sibrian as a lever and do what Arm Bass and this Emperor Caveworm want to do,” Mizar said. “Before they do.”
I didn’t understand. Whatever he proposed was obvious to him, but not to me. “And?”
“And end this,” Mizar said. “Without the disaster you and Keaton see coming.”
Keaton said that in the current situation, if either side precipitated a fight, the most likely outcome would be for the fight to spread out into San Jose, at the squad level, a literal Stalingrad. Our battle lines wouldn’t be able to hold their positions. We would level the city. We would likely lose, as well. Keaton worked on extraction plans that didn’t involve the smoking ruins of our bus fleet, but she hadn’t shared the details with me yet. She was also muttering about using her Russian rockets on Enkidu’s main group. Due to the inaccuracy of the damned things, our line would have to fall back, and if Enkidu charged then…
Disaster. Too many possible disasters.
Even after reducing their numbers by blowing up the Inferno Rest Home around them, the Hunters still had about an overall two to one advantage against us, when you factored in the relative worth of each combatant, and threw in their new walking terror adjunct, those appalling Hunter ghosts.
I smelled the sweat of our less experienced normals from here. The Hunters didn’t need to roar to terrorize them, with those damned ghosts on the job. The only way we knew of to banish these ghosts took a squad of top-end charismatic Focuses, something we couldn’t risk now. Not with The Man and his enslaved Crow flying around, likely waiting for an opportune moment to return. We would have more headless Focuses. At my request, Shadow worked on an alternate solution to the Hunter Ghost problem, but he hadn’t succeeded yet.
We were going to lose. Not too long from now, Enkidu would finish getting his people out of the rubble and attack.
“What about the charge against Bass’s Hunters?” I said. She wasn’t dead, just wounded. I could feel her seething in anger. I wanted to take her out, now, before she recovered. Then we could run like hell and let Enkidu and ‘Emperor Caveworm’ fight it out…
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 37