An Age Without A Name

by Randall Farmer

  Slowly the patterns that weren’t Del’s vanished. Nothing.

  “Hmm,” Del said. “Not only Scout, but everyone else I was linked to must have dropped my tag. They must have learned what happened to us.”

  “Wait,” Arête said. “Metasense over there.”

  The vision-point of their shared metasense swam back, away from the nursing home. It was impossible to tell distances with this version of the metasense. A glow – her pattern – appeared out of nowhere, suddenly visible, on a vast number of Transforms. Scout. Bruja Modesty. Promise. The rest of the household. All prepared for battle.

  “They’re under Guru-quality metasense shields,” Arête said. “Merlin’s, to be exact. If we go to general mode, we’ll lose them.”

  “Can we back off a bit, just enough to pick up all the patterns, not just mine?” Del asked.

  A great many patterns appeared. Far too many duplicates of what was down below them in the nursing home. Now Del understood.

  “Get a physical location on that,” Del said.

  “Close your right eye and then open it.”

  Del did so. Her right eye now showed her the normal shared Arm-Crow metasense vision. At the location where the pattern traces showed were just the normal traces of dross that most every location in an urban area had these days. Just enough to give a faint physical outline. In a You-Store-It mini-warehouse, in this case, the one on Silver Creek Road, a quarter mile back from the nursing home, nearly invisible from this distance in the morning fog, if she used her unaided eyeballs.

  “Emperor, we’ve just penetrated some Guru-level metasense defenses. We’ve got a new location on the Stone Point and Inferno Transforms. They’re a quarter mile back, in the You-Store-It. The crap in front of us is someone’s illusion. A Focus illusion, if we’re metasensing correctly.” What sort of Focus had the power to cover over a square mile of city with an illusion? Del didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to meet a Focus that powerful. Was this something one of the Familia Focuses dreamt up?

  It didn’t matter. The illusion was good enough to fool everyone else in the Hunter army, including Enkidu himself. It had taken Del and Arête working together to penetrate it, and their combined metasense was better than any other pair she knew of.

  Bass and Enkidu were about to walk into a trap. That put a smile on Del’s face.

  Caveworm slithered down the trench to Del and Arête and touched them for a moment, long enough to share their metasenses. Caveworm was a horror these days, with a mangled juice structure that leaked insanity, and Del had to fight herself not to leap back in terror.

  “Well, well, well,” the Emperor said. “Welcome home, Commander. Hope you have a nice day, because I think Enkidu is about to get a real surprise.”

  Commander? Yes, if you put it all together, it did look a bit like one of the Commander’s convoluted battle plans. Caveworm might be a damned Crow, but he was quite intelligent and quite experienced. More telling, his experience had been in the Battle for Detroit, where the Commander suckered Wandering Shade into attacking what he thought was an inferior force…and what had turned out to be a superior force. She wasn’t sure how the Commander could arrange something similar this time, but it did mean….

  “There’s got to be some serious reinforcements around here, somewhere,” Del said. More than just the Familia group, which Del hadn’t spotted, yet. That one ought to be a big surprise, especially since Caveworm had forgotten about them, and thus Enkidu hadn’t learned of them from the Crow.

  As she spoke, Enkidu’s stealth group started their charge at the nursing home and its illusory defenders, a charge that started at the line of homes that backed up onto the east side of the nursing home, a hundred yards out. Their Terror calls echoed up the hill, calling her to battle.

  Damn the Law!

  Hecate’s army – which had just driven past the mini-warehouses – turned from Silver Creek Road onto Yerba Buena toward the nursing home, and then into the nursing home’s driveway. They stopped thirty yards away from the nursing home, the route in blocked by vehicles at the far end of the nursing home parking lot. Hecate’s army leapt from their semis and attacked. Hidden machine gun nests opened up with 50 caliber Monster-chopper rounds, held by the only real people inside the crazy Focus illusion. In the distance, Del metasensed Enkidu’s main and reserve group start their charges from six hundred yards away, howling Terror, their minds fixed only on a need for combat and glory. They showed no signs of realizing that they were charging into a trap.

  “That’s our signal,” Emperor Caveworm said, pointing out Hecate. Their orders were to charge once they saw Hecate’s group unload. “Charge!”

  Down the hill they went, with the remainder of Caveworm’s troops.

  “A fine day for a stroll in the park, isn’t it?” (3/28/73)

  Carol Hancock

  “Move,” I said, as six semis rolled over Oak Valley’s closed front gate, lumbered part way up the Oak Valley driveway and stopped in the visitors’ parking lot. Hunters swiftly piled out of their vehicles, by squad, and charged, by squad, at Oak Valley. Way too disciplined for Hunters, meaning I faced Bass’s thugs. The largish metasense hole near the front right of the charging Hunters I presumed to be Arm Bass and Crow Echo.

  Two hundred yards away from Bass’s Hunters, my people rose from the weeds and ran, quiet, efficient, and fast. We remained invisible, both to sight and metasense; Mizar stayed to my left and Nora, my Monster Arm follower, to my right. For the moment Mizar, Nora and I shadowed the slower members of our group.

  My beast still rode high, and I felt on. Sharp, testy, and cruel. The predator at her peak. Exactly the right mood for a battle. Mizar did the right thing by letting my beast out.

  The Hunter group in front of us was somewhat small, with a surfeit of Monster Gals and very few Guys and Gals able to shoot. By plan, we came at them timed such that as soon as they broke through the illusory defenders and into the building, we would be between them and their rides. Of course, we figured that since the front of the home was so open, it would attract the majority of the Hunters, the only place anywhere nearby large enough to unload Enkidu’s main force of twenty semis of Hunters.

  So where were they? Was Enkidu’s main force the one coming in on foot from the east, currently less than two hundred yards away from the edge of the Oak Valley complex?

  I snarled as an unexpected hidden group of Hunters exited their invisibility, already deep into the Oak Valley grounds. They went after the three machine gun emplacements on the east side of the Oak Valley buildings. Only a few of them got chopped into hamburger before they took out the machine gunners.

  So much for my plan.

  Time to fight, as prearranged. My people opened up on the back of Bass’s Hunters. The attack broke our concealment, but what the Hunters would see and metasense of us would be another of Lori’s illusions. This illusion consisted of a dozen Focus households and Baronies, good enough illusions to fool me if I didn’t know better. I fired into a young dragon and saw her fall, felt the tingle of pleasure in my nerves that came from dealing death. I roared a mock Terror roar, and then when the enemy saw me, I grabbed them with my real predator. Several backed off, and then they all did. Mizar and Nora joined in, and the back line of Bass’s Hunter group gave in to panic and rushed away from us, into their own people.

  As we charged, I metasensed the now-revealed stealth group charging around the Oak Valley buildings on the north side of the complex, not going into them. They wouldn’t make it very far, because in that direction lay the well-entrenched and supposedly illusion-hidden Inferno fighters, Stone Point fighters, and the non-Duende part of Haggerty’s army. That is, the meat of our defending forces. People ordered to stay hidden until quite a bit later.

  I had a bad feeling everything would be seat-of-the-pants from now on.

  My metasense got a decent read on the Hunter group charging through the suburb to the east, well behind the former stealthed group. Th
is had to be Enkidu’s main force, by my count all but five semi’s worth of his Hunters and packs. He did split up his forces for us, but he brought them together, here, before we could defeat them in detail. Much to my annoyance, his Generalship had improved.

  “No one would be stupid enough to charge down that hill,” I said, cocky, yesterday afternoon, regarding the steep hill to the south of the Oak Valley compound. “We’d see them coming twenty minutes off. Unless you have wings, that’s one hill you need to climb down.”

  Sinclair’s renegades messed that up, alas, and they remained entrenched and on our right. Worse, Del and Sinclair had paid attention to my lessons and came up with something right out of my playbook, doing the unanticipated to mess up the enemy’s prepared plans. So instead of being able to pin the attackers inside the nursing home grounds, with a prepared retreat line at our backs, we were stuck with a threat on our retreat line and an inability to close the loop, unless we wanted to get between two groups of Hunters.

  The believability of our defenses suffered, as well. Why didn’t our defenders flee when they spotted the enemy on the ridge? Why didn’t they flee when they saw Hunter ghosts creeping around at the edges of our defensive lines? Why was our only reaction to the attack on the east side of Oak Valley from Focus Caruthers’ volunteers in the Inferno-prepared machine gun nests. To someone – to Del at least – this had to stink. Del and Sinclair must know we used illusions.

  Enkidu’s non-hidden group charged onto the Oak Valley grounds as soon as the hidden group cleared the machine gun nests, and they charged directly across the short side of the Oak Valley complex and into the buildings. I metasensed that his main force contained at least four different sub-groups, with different training, makeup and tactics. He had put ample work into his own preparations, and this showed a bit of his own brilliance, as he hadn’t shown two of these groups in either Chicago or Calgary. Still in training, my guess. Nothing of ours matched his stealth group, and if we had been actually defending the Inferno Rest Home they would have cut our outer defenders to pieces with their successful surprise attack. They would be a big problem later, I predicted. The other new sub-group led the charge at the Inferno Rest Home, a group of over-adrenaline-ized full Hunters and ancillaries working as a unified pack. I didn’t worry too much about this innovation, as they weren’t as disciplined as Bass’s Hunters, and…

  The nursing home exploded with a thunderous boom and a blast of dust in all directions. Fuck. Way too early to catch as many inside as I wanted, not even all the over-adrenaline-ized Hunter pack. This stank of advanced Crow tricks, the only Major Transforms able to penetrate an illusion as potent as Lori’s. Which meant a Judge. We were lucky the illusions held long enough for some of the attackers to get inside.

  My group hit the main body of the Hunter group in front of us three seconds after they stopped in place, spooked by the explosion. I emptied my AK’s magazine, full auto, into the metasense invisibility that I suspected held Bass and Echo, but the only thing that became visible was a hippo sized Monster with a tiger’s head and a squat armored dinosaurian body. Fuck. I so wanted to goad Bass into combat. I still couldn’t locate her, and now, as I rushed into close quarters combat with the enemy, my opportunity vanished.

  My world turned red-tinged, my mind tuned to only two things – the opponents around me and Tom’s voice. In a fight like this, I wasn’t the Commander, I was the weapon, a six foot tall superhumanly fast blender. I maintained a low-end burn as I sliced throats, cut hamstrings, knifed eyeballs, shivved spinal cords and kidneys, and moved. My leathers soon became an élan and blood drenched mess, and the only thing I could smell was élan, juice, spilled shit and the copper odor of fresh blood.

  “Back! Fourteen seven!” Tom shouted, his shout rippling through my group’s tag network and into everyone’s ears, a trick powered by a dross object brass strip attached to Tom’s leather jacket, on the inside of his left arm. A Gilgamesh special. I obeyed without thinking, sprinting and hopping my way out of the Hunter army to a prearranged point ten or so yards back the way I had charged.

  The carnage around me made me smile, and the lack of any of our dead around me as I hopped back made me smile even wider. This part of our plan worked. Behind me, the smoke and dust from the explosion that took down Inferno’s Oak Valley home thinned enough to allow me to see the remains, as well as a tight group of enemy Gals and younger Hunters charging to where I had been several seconds ago. Mizar, Nora and I had fought our way too far into the enemy army.

  I stopped next to Tom, Nora at my side. Mizar, as blood drenched as myself, trotted up as well. He smiled; he might hate war, but he did love to fight. “Status?” I asked.

  “We’ve got around eleven or twelve Hunters in the rubble, as well as fewer than fifty pack members,” Keaton said, over the walkie-talkie. “Go to plan four, people, do not, repeat, do not execute plan one.”

  We had evacuated the Inferno Rest Home grounds hours ago, under cover of Lori and Mizar’s defenses. This left the place covered with illusory defenders and enough high explosives to turn the walls bounding the inner courtyard and the hallways into high quality shrapnel. We had hoped to ensnare twenty-five Hunters and three hundred pack members in the rubble. The next part of plan one was to separate them from the rest of the Hunters as I revealed Mizar and all us Arms to Enkidu and his leaders, hoping to spook them into retreating. I wanted the rubblized Hunters and their packs, and what I wanted from them was to strip the Law off them and turn them Noble. We had also set up enough distractions to ensnare the incoming army, including a herd of stolen cattle Guru Hephaestus illusioned to be top-end combat Monsters.

  Dammit.

  Plan four was ‘siege’. I collected my thoughts and forced myself out of my beastly battle frenzy, my left hand on Tom’s shoulder as I took deep breaths and quieted the urge to shred everyone around me. The hole in plan four was Sinclair’s group, currently sitting on our retreat line. “Straw boss,” I said, to Keaton, “I need the interlopers on the big bump cut off.”

  “West bend two, west bend two,” Keaton said. “Circle up on Z eight.” West bend two was Billington’s group, consisting of five young Arms, several dozen mercs, a few of the surviving Nobles and Focus Mann’s household. Grace Billington was the number five US Arm, right after Rose Webberly, and according to Keaton had proved herself a respectable field officer in the Chicago battles.

  “Got a problem, Brains,” Keaton said, to me. The call sign was by my choice, not wanting to alert the enemy by using the term ‘Commander’. “There’s a bunch of invisible reserves coming up on my ass.” Crap. Double crap. All our plans had Keaton’s part of the army circling behind any Hunters coming in from the east as soon as Oak Valley blew, to cut off their escape. She did so, but now a decent number of the missing Hunters came up behind her, to the east of Keaton’s forces. Moving slowly, likely to preserve their stealth. Keaton and many of our heavies, including Biggioni’s household and Mercury Catering – the late Focus Keistermann’s old household – had gotten themselves sandwiched between two Hunter groups.

  “Dig,” I said, over the walkies. Keaton’s people’s only hope was entrenching and going on the defensive. I heard heavy weapons fire to our left – the former stealthed group contacting Haggerty’s people, which would bring up Haggerty’s reserves. We continued to fire our weapons into Bass’s Hunters, who took cover instead of charging back at us. Lori’s illusions around us still held, and to Bass’s Hunters and their packs, we remained in appearance far too large a group to attack.

  I heard the first sirens in the distance, the beginning of the expected response to the explosion, which still mushroom-clouded above us, just starting to rain down dust and debris. “First family, visitors in your rear,” Keaton called out. I looked around, and ducked to Mizar’s side to see behind him. A line of cars pulled in behind us and stopped, about four hundred feet back of my current position and well inside the Oak Valley compound. They blocked our way to the road and our sec
ondary retreat line. Focus Wilson’s people, and their protestors. Rather well armed for protest… – hey!

  “Take cover, now!” I said, bellowing out NCO charisma. People obeyed, instantly. Even Mizar.

  The ‘protest group’ unlimbered their Monster weapons, and shot at the Hunters and everything in-between, which included me. Lori’s illusions vanished, showing us to be a weak-ass combat force.

  No cover here.

  “Forward!” I pointed to the Hunter’s semis off to our right, and we ran, broken field, over to the semis. Hunters now surrounded us on three sides and some twit Pattersonite covered the fourth. The only way out of this would be to take cover, and the only cover here was the Hunters’ own semis.

  Surrounded. Pinned down. Fuck.

  Thoughts of ‘decisive loss’ entered my mind for the first time. I now suspected I would end up kissing Enkidu’s hairy paws by the end of the day.

  Emperor Caveworm

  “That’s the Commander, sir,” Del said, and pointed.

  Caveworm metasensed, much easier now after the debris cloud started to clear, blown to the east. Shit. That was her under the pathetic metasense shielding, right between them and Hecate’s group? He could practically throw a rock that far. Not good. The shock from the explosion that leveled the former Inferno nursing home nearly caused his heart to stop in terror, and being pelted by debris from the explosion didn’t help, either.

  He remained a Crow inside his insane body, alas.

  “Halt. Down!” The Emperor flattened on the hillside before finishing his shout, behind the nearest set of rocks, what passed for cover on this appalling piece of real estate. The Commander was far too close for comfort.

  He didn’t like being on the other side of a fight against the Commander.