All That We Are (The Commander Book 7)

by Randall Farmer

  “No.”

  “How did you get caught up in our problems, then?”

  “That itself is a mystery I’m trying to solve,” Gilgamesh said, ending the conversation. He slipped away into the darkness. Or tried to. Gail had no problem seeing or metasensing him as he left.

  If he read her right, this sort of craziness appeared to be what she lived for.

  Carol Hancock: January 2, 1969 – January 4, 1969

  I came up to the guard in the wide corridor outside of Bass’s room, whispered to him to surrender and put his head in his hands. He curled on the floor in a fetal position, just as all the others had. Gotta love the predator effect. We entered.

  I wrinkled my nose at the reek of chemicals, blood and juice permeating the room. It was a stark place, like a hospital room except without any signs of warmth, just a single bed and a host of cold machines. Bass remained hooked up to at least four of them, but even I could tell she wasn’t as bad off as we feared. That is, her heart beat and she breathed on her own, around the various tubes and crap associated with the heart-lung machine. I guessed that the sadistic monsters who ran this place worked 9 to 5 jobs, and this being 4 AM had given Bass time to recover.

  “I wish we had you along when we rescued you,” Sky said, as I set my garbage can on the floor with a clank. He had been radiating a mixture of disgust and awe the whole way in.

  “Sorry, I’m afraid I was detained at the time,” I said. Keaton, who had been all stone-faced since we started, barely repressed a laugh. “Now, shush. Hank?” I pushed the lid on the can down more firmly. Something inside was trying to crawl out.

  Hank, deep within himself, took my comment as an all clear. He dropped his itinerant doctor bag on a rolling metal table and fished out his instruments. I still wasn’t clear why Keaton and Sky needed to be here, save that Keaton ordered it. Hank, on the other hand, was necessary. I couldn’t have kept Bass alive on the way out, even after all Hank had taught me. For one thing, I wouldn’t have known which tubes and equipment I needed to detach from Bass, or which to cut and clamp. Hank did, and he worked quickly and professionally until he whispered “Done.”

  Keaton slung Bass over her back like a sack of flour, which drew a very strange déjà vu reaction from Sky. I suspected more echoes from my rescue, even though the place wasn’t old enough to have the level of bad juice contamination of the CDC’s Detention Center. I had been in Focus households with worse bad juice.

  I took the garbage can of the still slithering, utterly foul and decomposing part-Monster we had filched from the Patriarch underlings’ pack and sloshed the remains on Bass’s former bed. The harem Monster had been trivial to steal and kill. We retraced our steps on the way out, Bass over Keaton’s shoulder and garbage can over mine. The damned thing leaked ichor down my chest as we jogged. The guards stayed nicely surrendered and oblivious, courtesy of me. The route out the side entrance of the laboratory building and back to the closest of our two vans was nicely shrouded in darkness, courtesy of Sky’s leaping and wire-cutting. Keaton wouldn’t say why we brought two vans; she was being ultra-paranoid and very careful today in all things. Inside the van, we had a case of ice ready for Bass, a suggestion from Hank. I had already written a mental note to myself to quiz Hank on this trick, why it worked, and where he had learned it.

  When we were seven paces outside the lab building, and almost to the parking lot where the nearest van waited, Sky leapt into deeper shadows. “Marde!”

  Incoming. Easiest Crow signal in the world to recognize. Once he was safer, he hand-signaled the problem. Not that I needed the hand signals by then.

  Four Chimeras waited for us at the close van, which now sat far closer to the ground courtesy of four slit tires. They had several normals with them – I wasn’t sure how many yet. I got the four Chimeras first by eyesight in the faint starlight, and only then on my metasense. They all wore man-forms.

  Patriarchs.

  Tactics unfolded in my mind: they were talented enough Chimeras to mask their metapresence from Sky, at least until he eyeballed them, and good enough to mask the normals as well. They also had been able to find us, either through Sky’s scent-masking tricks or our own metapresence masking tricks.

  Keaton signaled ‘fight’, dropped Bass on the snowy ground, and lit off with a juice-burn powered charge, knives in hand. I charged as well, a stride behind her to start with, even with her by the time we were half way there.

  “What the fuck are you doing with my responsibility?” the head Patriarch said. This close I recognized him as Loess. “We don’t have to…”

  Easy to read, I saw he wanted us to hand over Bass, not fight. Meaning he knew what was going on here in the United Toxicol lab, also a hint that in some screwy fashion Focus Fingleman and Rogue Crow were working together. Keaton faked a heart shot and went for Loess’s femoral with one knife and his guts with her second, while I faked an eyeball poke, bounced off Keaton’s back and went for his neck with both of my knives. A classic high-low. Down Loess went, and we barreled on through his seven soldiers and into the three lesser Patriarchs. I heard a grunt from Keaton and recognized an order, so I stopped between the lesser Patriarchs and danced. The shooters fired at me and hit each other. Keaton went after the stoutest looking lesser Patriarch (six seven, three hundred pounds, close-cropped white hair) and started to take him apart. As I danced, I saw Hank show his experience by taking cover behind a pickup truck before he pulled out his pistol. I felt vomitus juice wafting by, which had to be something of Sky’s, as it caused the shooters to scream and shoot wildly.

  Dammit. Sky didn’t have what it took to read us Arms and our combat tricks at Arm burn speed. He shouldn’t have done that. Now the shooters weren’t shooting at each other, and Keaton and I would be at more risk because their targets weren’t predictable. I changed tactics and cut two throats before a sickly juice-laden and unexpected bark of “Hold!” from Loess interrupted me.

  I held. Motionless, icy annoyance flittered through me, followed by helpless fear.

  Fuck.

  I had scraped bone when I cut Loess’s throat, dammit, and Keaton had spilled his guts in a quite literal fashion. Despite the damage, he still stood and fought. He had healed his throat closed and cut off his spilled guts with his weapon. In a better mood I might admire his healing ability, but right then I wanted to shove his patriarchal dick down his patriarchal throat until he patriarchally choked.

  I metasensed Loess clean off Sky’s trick from his shooters, who peppered Keaton and I with their machine pistols before Loess’s “Disarm and manacle them” order. I bled, unmoving and unfalling.

  “Women. The enemy sent mere women? Bah,” Loess said. I tried to wiggle free from his charismatic hold, but I could move nothing. People counted on me, and…nothing. Fuck fuck fuck! I sensed juice behind the hold, some Chimera trick the Hunters didn’t have, something that had reached inside of me and turned me off, at least the juice parts of me. My wounds pumped blood, unhealing. “So much for the complaints of those pussy Hunters,” Loess said. “These women are mine!” I got manacled and disarmed. I still couldn’t move.

  “No, they’re mine!” Hank said, a bold male shout, showing just enough of himself to attract Loess’s crew’s attention. His claim shivered my juice and I recognized what he did: he pulled on Keaton and my tags.

  Keaton popped her manacles and leapt at Loess. Caught off guard by Keaton’s leap and her breaking of his hold, he was unready to fight. He still held his gut-chopper short sword in his right hand, and his left hand still pinched together his ripped open abdomen. She took Loess’s short sword from him, swung at his neck and missed, as he rolled backwards out of the way. Mid leap she glanced at me and growled predator, yanking on my tag.

  That did the trick. Back to burning juice, I tried to pop the manacles and couldn’t, then leapt and flipped. When I came down on my feet my manacles were no longer behind my back, but in front of me. The two remaining functional Patriarchs charged, and I did a flip
-kick off one, sending him flying, and leapt over the other, who barreled into one of the shooters, sending the shooter on a one-way to hell with a broken neck. Shots stitched up my left side, which I didn’t need. A moment later, I metasensed another wave of foul juice waft by, and heard the clatter of tossed weaponry. Sky, this time, had gone for a disarm.

  Keaton grunted in agony behind me, and I turned and rolled to see what was going on. She lay on the ground, bleeding, having caught more bullets than I had. Loess, though, was down, and in two pieces. I couldn’t say much for his fighting skills. Keaton had decapitated him with his own weapon.

  The two lesser Patriarchs howled in agony and charged each other. More of Sky’s tricks. No, these weren’t stout Chimeras, if Sky could fool them so easily. I charged them, or tried to, as instead of charging I went skidding to the ground. For a moment I had a horrible flashback to the fight in Chicago, where Rogue Crow had put a bullet through my spine, but I realized that I had just blown out my left leg with my attempted charge. Too much stress on shot up muscles, tendons, bones and, well, intestines.

  “Glacier, Alluvium, evac,” one of the normal shooters said, as he rushed forward toward Loess. I foresaw more gunplay, not to my advantage, and I crawled like a fiend out of the battle area, picking up a dropped HK on the way. I concealed myself behind a pile of snow at the edge of the parking lot, rolled, and shot the HK dry, taking down two of the shooters before they could pick up their own weapons and finish me off. As I shot, I got to see two of the normals dragging away Loess’s remains and the remains of the other fallen Patriarch.

  Glacier and Alluvium had to be the two remaining Patriarchs. They followed the normal who gave the orders, still fighting each other. One of the shooters, the only one who didn’t have his hands full of Patriarch, picked up an HK and alternately shot at me, Keaton and the pickup truck Hank hid behind. Keaton scrambled away, limping badly, and like Hank she took cover. At the far end of the parking lot the normals tossed the Patriarch remains in their van and sped off, followed by Glacier and Alluvium on foot, still desultorily fighting each other.

  Sky landed from whatever tree he had been hiding in and muttered something nasty in French. “Chase them down! Take them!” Keaton said. Sky answered her in predictable Crow fashion by falling to his knees, puking, and curling up in a fetal position.

  I guessed we had won, though I wasn’t able to shake my instinctive worry, that you should be able to put a Chimera back together after a decapitation. I healed enough to get to my feet and slowly staggered over to Keaton, my wrists still shackled. “Back right pocket,” she said, grumbling. I extracted her pick kit and undid the manacles. “Fucking asshole Chimeras. Goddamn piss-drinking dick-wagging motherfucking Chimeras!”

  “Ma’am, ma’am, Hank – may I be permitted to ask what in the hell just happened?” Sky said. We were on the road, back to Detroit in our second van, Bass in the icewater bath we had filched from the first van. Keaton drove for now, while Hank worked on bullet extraction and sewing me up.

  “What did it look like, short stuff?” Keaton said, a foul growl. “We got our asses handed to us. How the hell are we going to protect fucking Rickenbach’s fucking wedding if every time we fight the fucking Chimeras we get our asses handed to us?”

  Keaton held high standards. Me, I thought that after more of them jumped fewer of us, the fact we were able to kill a bunch of them and drive the rest of them off, without any deaders, was a win. I saw a problem now, though, and signaled to Keaton for permission to share some necessary information. She glared at me, but grimaced profanity-tinged permission. Sky needed to know.

  “This is ma’am Keaton’s nightmare,” I said to Sky. “Men who don’t know their place,” I said, putting as polite a face on it as I could and leaving it ambiguous whether I meant Sky or the Patriarchs. There was a real reason behind Keaton’s preferred choice of torture targets, all men who had done violent things to their women. That reason was her pre-transformation husband, who had beat her. To my boss, being an Arm meant men no longer won.

  Until today. Having a Chimera pull juice-powered male superiority crap on her had set her off. If I had fucked up even the slightest in the fight, I knew I would be paying for it later in her basement. I hadn’t, though. I couldn’t tell Sky flat out ‘be on your best behavior or you’re going to be tortured into imbecility’, as that wouldn’t be polite to either my boss or Sky, but I made damn sure I implied it.

  Sky backed off on his initial line of inquiry, a whine best translated as ‘aren’t you Arms supposed to be protecting us Crows from Beast Men and idiots with guns?’, and went down a different line. “Ma’am and ma’am, I haven’t seen that sort of Beast Man style juice attack since I was still named Crow, and I thought it a special of the Beast Man who used it. Can the Hunters you’ve faced do that as well?”

  “Not that I’ve seen,” I said.

  “Blessed Buddha, thank you,” Sky said, a quiet Crow whisper, an actual prayer.

  “Some pain coming,” Hank said, cutting leg and clamping it open. I had a set of tendons that needed some stitching. I clenched my teeth and ignored the pain, focusing on Keaton and Sky.

  “Let’s see,” Keaton said, a growling stare at Sky. “They could sense us, we couldn’t sense them until we saw them, they used vastly different charisma and juice tricks than the Hunters or Nobles, and couldn’t fight any better than Tina. You think perhaps they might be a different enough variety of Chimera to count, dipshit?”

  “Yes, ma’am, yes,” Sky said. “Ma’am, please.” Keaton didn’t back off. I swore she was half way into a stalk. If Sky had just shut the fuck up when I gave him warning, he wouldn’t get himself into trouble, but no, Sky would never just shut the fuck up. “As a young Crow I didn’t know shit, but I do, now. I’m pretty sure that in Crow terms, Loess is a Shaman Beast Man, in Ma’am Haggerty’s…”

  Bad move mentioning the bitch who had dropped Keaton’s tag. Real bad move. Keaton grabbed Sky’s neck and growled. Yes, she still drove. That didn’t stop her. “Urk!” Sky said, then to me: “Carol, ma’am, the wheel?”

  To Keaton: “Yes. Take me.”

  I ended up driving a moment later, while Hank continued to work on patching up my still clamped open leg and my other physical problems, and while farther back in the van Keaton raped Sky until he cried. Lori would spit steam over this, I just knew it.

  As he worked, I made damn sure Hank knew how much I appreciated the tag-pulling trick he used to joggle Keaton out from under Loess’s hold. He kept quiet about saving our bacon, as emotionless and professional as he could be, but he was no fool. He knew exactly how close we came to disaster in the fight. Me? Loess felt about as old a Transform as Keaton, and he and his tricks were yet another reminder that my relative youth was my biggest weakness.

  Sky’s ‘rape me’ trick worked as he planned. By the time we reached Illinois Keaton was reasonable again, even willing to tell us why she insisted on coming on the Bass rescue: she had received a warning in her dreams about unexpected danger, a dream she suspected had come from the Madonna of Montreal. I didn’t want to know the details. I had suffered through enough spooky shit in the past month and I didn’t need more.

  Slowly, but surely, though, the Madonna of Montreal was winning over my boss.

  “Wake,” Keaton said. Bass heard and opened her eyes, lying on the concrete floor and dripping blood and ice water. “I’m Stacy Keaton. You’re my new student. Tell me you’re mine.”

  Bass blinked and looked around, about all she was capable of right now. She was a wreck, missing muscles, her left hand and several abdominal organs, and she had taken two bullets in the fight. “Fuck you,” she said, barely able to talk. “I’m an Arm! I don’t take shit from nobody!”

  Young Arms all had attitude problems. Even after someone chopped them into hamburger.

  “I’m an old Arm and you’re mine!” Keaton said, going full predator and getting into Bass’s face. Sky, standing beside me in Keaton’s basement and
shivering under a blanket, groaned, his mind filled with multi-armed Kali images and his own private nickname for Keaton, the Walking Nightmare. Which didn’t bother my boss at all. Her predator swelled by fifty percent, I swear, when Sky thought those thoughts.

  I wondered if we had another Mary Fouke, but Bass proved me wrong by caving immediately. “Ma’am, yes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Bass said.

  “Say it.”

  “I’m yours! I’m yours!”

  The juice moved and Keaton tagged Bass. We were getting better at this.

  Sky relaxed. His face was gray with exhaustion and stress.

  “Ma’am and ma’am,” he said. “Gilgamesh has returned. May I have your permission to let him in, ma’am Keaton?”

  “Yes,” Keaton said. She started in on Bass, giving her the house rules, which these days included how a baby Arm was supposed to act around Keaton’s guests. Things had changed a lot since my days in Bass’s position. Bass would obey or be dead.

  Gilgamesh slid in behind Sky, and over to behind my right shoulder. “Problems?”

  “Later,” I said. I relaxed into Gilgamesh’s presence, glad he was back with me, in one piece. He radiated his own troubles.

  Keaton caught it as well and looked up from where she squatted over Bass. “Out with it,” she said to Gilgamesh, not at all her tolerant self.

  I metasensed Gilgamesh gather his courage. “Ma’am, Focus Adkins is the one behind the salt mine Focuses,” he said. “Unfortunately, I only have Crow proof.” He went on to give the details of his discoveries, primarily based on a disparity between the story of Watchmaker, the Crow who lived closest to Adkins, and the other Detroit Crows’ stories about her. “He knew what I was asking about, but following the normal Crow ‘don’t get involved with other Transforms’ mantra, he lied to me. The others didn’t know, so they didn’t lie.”