The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3)

by Randall Farmer

  “More?” I said to Webberly. I wasn’t doing a good job of maintaining a stone face, radiating pleasure I suspected even a baby Arm could read.

  “Well, I found another one at one step less intense than the half tag, what I’m calling a ‘quarter tag’. It’s so faint it’s hardly there, and I couldn’t figure out what it was good for, but a quarter tag must be good for something. My best guess is that it must be some kind of identification mark.”

  “That deserves more investigation.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So what about a step more intense? Double tags? Does it go both ways?”

  Webberly nodded. “Yes, ma’am, but I couldn’t find anyone willing to practice that one with me.”

  No, I imagined not, unfortunately. A tag even stronger than a full tag? The idea definitely appealed. Probably dangerous as hell to screw with, though.

  “So what’s that other thing you’re both wearing?”

  “That’s one of the codified variants on the second axis. It’s a full tag, except the tag’s only active when you’re in the owner’s territory.”

  “An Eissler tag,” I said. Haggerty already wore one of those. Eissler had figured this stuff out four years ago. At least. An entire country full of Arms doing research and we still lagged behind Eissler. Every time I thought about her, I got a headache. I wondered if she already could get juice from a Focus, or if we finally had something she couldn’t do.

  “Yes,” Webberly nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So how does the tag figure out where your territory is?”

  “It’s psychological, woven into our sense of self.” She paused. “Pardon me if I sound a bit like Gail when I say this, but I think she’s right – an Arm’s territory is who we are.”

  I nodded, and thought of my dream of tagging my own territory. Eissler had managed that one, too, ahead of us again, and sometime real soon I was going to figure that out myself. I bet the territory tag Eissler discovered a while ago had all sorts of beneficial effects when you included in a properly tagged Arm hunting territory.

  “So I assume the more intense tag takes precedence?”

  Webberly nodded. “If I’m in New York, I’m wearing Amy’s tag. If she’s in San Francisco, she wears my tag. The rest of the time, the half tag is in effect.”

  I bet it was going to be a cold day in hell before Haggerty visited the Bay Area, but it sounded like they had worked out the dominance. This was a hell of an improvement over the snarling they exhibited in our last group meeting.

  “So Betsy’s wearing one of these, too?”

  “Ah, well, no,” Webberly said. “After we finished experimenting, I put a full tag on her.”

  Of course. Dominant Arms would always want as strong a tag as a subordinate would take.

  “And Mary?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing yet. Amy is going to talk to her when she shows up here, and then we’ll see what we can work out.”

  “Tell her I want her to work out something,” I said to Haggerty. “I need my people to be able to work together.” I couldn’t force a tag on anyone else, but strong encouragement was a different thing. My gut said that forcing a half-tag wasn’t the same, and I could require them, but I decided to wait. “We’ll also need to see if we can get this to work on Focuses, as well.” Haggerty didn’t have a problem with Lori, but Webberly did, and Sibrian really did. Her report to me after she helped Gail, Lori and Hank with the juice music project made that clear.

  “Anything else?”

  Rose nodded. “Betsy is friends with Merry Bartlett, and they work together occasionally.” I hadn’t understood the ‘Arms as friends’ thing before I met Giselle, but I understood now. “With the things set up the way they are now, Merry is practically in a different organization. That was making it hard for them to work together anymore, so Betsy and I created a variant on the Eissler tag that respects the organization and job you’re doing. We got together with Bartlett, and Betsy and Bartlett exchanged these. Now, when they’re working together on one of Keaton’s projects, Merry’s dominant, and if they’re working on one of your projects, Betsy’s dominant.”

  Right. Ignoring the nonsense about Keaton and me heading separate organizations, this was good. Real good. Webberly had cracked a big one here, and I wanted to grin like an idiot at the thought of what this was going to do to my organization. This was a huge step, moving us up out of the stone age. From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, as Eissler would put it. Or maybe farther.

  “Excellent work,” I said, to Webberly. “I want you to keep working on this, and produce a research paper for me. Work with Zielinski on this.” I leaned back and smiled at her. “What are you calling this second variant tag, though?”

  Amy snickered, and Rose turned away for a moment. “Webberly tags, of course,” Amy said.

  “All right, let me summarize.” My new Chicago house didn’t have a war room yet, so we were seated around the dining room table. The dining room was a big room, and I filled it with furniture of black, chrome, and glass. The furniture contrasted oddly with the frilly flowered wallpaper.

  Haggerty, Lori, Webberly, Sibrian, Debardelaben and Whetstone, plus Ila, Tom, Tommy Bates and Sharon Hyder who was one of Webberly’s. I suspected Haggerty was going to want McIntyre at these sessions before too long, but she fortunately had enough sense not to push the issue yet.

  Webberly put Chrissie Duval out on patrol. I had spent some time with Webberly looking over Chrissie’s progress, and damn if Webberly hadn’t made us an Arm to be proud of. Duval could fight, hunt and scheme with the best of us, though she was somewhat more violent than I preferred. Like Giselle, she was a trophy hunter. Webberly wanted to graduate her, and I agreed, but Duval wasn’t ready to go along on our little nighttime first Focus hunt.

  I still would have loved to spend some extensive time with McIntyre in the basement.

  To keep Lori and Mary from growling at each other, I decided we would start out with a little tagging experiment. Lori was perfectly happy to experiment, and perfectly happy to remove the results of the experiment if she was displeased with them. Witches. Absolutely no respect for the permanence of juice effects.

  I needed to order Sibrian. I got to hear a half tag ceremony for the first time, and it made me wince. “You are my pack” didn’t cut it for me, and I leaned on Rose to come up with something better. I suspected the other obvious alternatives – gang, tribe, deme (for the technically inclined), clique, in crowd, etc. – would annoy me as much. Lori suggested sorority, but everyone but Amy realized she was joking. In any event, Mary and Lori’s relationship took off after that, the same way that Amy and my relationship did after I tagged her the first time.

  We still didn’t understand why certain Major Transforms rubbed each other the wrong way and some fell in love at first sight. Hank’s odor cue hypothesis sounded good, but both Amy and I wanted something a little more specific.

  “We’ve got two problems and two apparent cakewalks,” I said from my place at the head of the table. “Schrum and Adkins are our high value targets, and also our high risk targets. Worse, since she got hit by Bass, Schrum’s household is the best defended household this side of Patterson, and Adkins’ personal Focus capabilities are the best of any of the first Focuses except Patterson. Given the circumstances, I’m going to modify our orders.”

  Everyone studied me intently, and those who were still eating put their food down. Despite all the various objections to Keaton’s coup, there was still an odor of blood lust in the room. We all had grievances against our primary targets.

  I leaned my elbows on the table and caught them all with my eyes. Of all of them, I think only Sibrian realized what I was doing with my predator effect. “We’re going to do this in stages. First stage, three AM on the twentieth, we take Adkins and Schrum and we focus our resources to do it. Amy, you take Lori, Betsy and Inferno and go after Schrum. Do it fast and do it hard.”

  “Can I kill her, or do you wa
nt her alive?” Amy said. She wore a fierce grin, eager for the coming hunt.

  “Kill her. Don’t touch her people at all, but kill Schrum. The deal with Biggioni still stands until Keaton says otherwise, so no killing of any Transforms belonging to a first Focus.” I smiled. “The deal doesn’t say a thing about killing the first Focus.”

  “But her people die if we kill Schrum.”

  I nodded.

  “No big loss,” Lori said. “She’s so completely juice-mangled those people that their minds are unsalvageable, and they’re going to need to be put down anyway once she’s gone, but that’s our job.” ‘Our’ meaning Focuses, here.

  Haggerty nodded, but Debardelaben, Webberly and Sibrian backed away a bit from Lori. Focuses weren’t supposed to exhibit Arm bloodlust. “And then?”

  “And then you get in your plane, fly down to Jackson, and take Sarah Teas.” Haggerty was a respectable pilot, and owned at least one plane. “You’ll need to distribute your people to support you in both locations, and you won’t need Inferno to take down Teas. We’ll go over the details in a minute.”

  I got nods from the five Arms and Tommy Bates.

  “Mary, Rose, Giselle and I will take Adkins,” I said. “I’m hoping four Arms is overkill, but she’s the only one of our targets who’s repeatedly shown multiple top-end juice tricks.” Attack Focuses and tagged bad juice. “I’m not taking any chances with her. We’ll go in at the same time you’re taking Schrum, and we do a kidnapping, not an execution.” Wini Adkins I wanted alive. I had plans for her. Painful plans involving torture and information extraction. “We leave her people alive, too, and we need to make plans to save them, because they’re fully salvageable. Adkins goes to Chicago, at which point it should be past dawn and we fly to Salt Lake City and take Elspeth.” I carefully left my options open for whether we would end up with a live or dead Elspeth in the end.

  One of Webberly’s people was a pilot, but he was a normal, which is why we wanted to wait until morning. Duval would guard the plane when we were out hunting. I could see Webberly thinking that she might want to get pilot’s training herself, and I was thinking the same thing, except that I didn’t know where I would find the time.

  “Ila, you’ll be here and act as central communications; if things go even the tiniest bit wonky, bring in the big brains for help.” Hank, Van, and Daisy, which would suck in Gail and Gilgamesh as well. “I want regular reports coming in from everyone. Everyone got the basics?”

  There were nods all around the table. My predator effect did what I intended, and roused the predator in everyone here, even the normals. The grins were fierce and excited. We were not going to fail. Period.

  “All right then, time for the specifics. Clear the table and lay out the maps and timelines…”

  Tonya Biggioni: December 18, 1972

  “You want what?” Tonya said. Of all the requests she expected to generate from the Crow brochures, this was the least likely. She shifted restlessly in her chair, unable to keep her wandering mind obediently on business.

  “Art,” Ima said. She was an older Focus out in Minneapolis. Decent and respectable. She had even done a stint as treasurer for the Council a few years ago. “That brochure you sent out said the Crows did some special kind of Transform art. Do you know how much they charge?”

  Tonya didn’t know how much they charged. She had never considered the possibility that any Focuses might be interested. “I can find out. I imagine it depends on the artist and the quality of the work. I didn’t know you were interested in art.” She shifted again, and wished she could be outside, maybe running in the sun, maybe playing a game of softball with the rest of her household. The day was far too beautiful and she had far too much energy to sit cooped up in her office all day.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve always been interested. Just a minor interest, but when I heard the Crows were doing Transform specific art, well, I couldn’t resist. Now, I can’t pay all that much, but we did manage to squeeze a few pennies together. What do you think of their art? Is it as good as rumored?”

  Art. Ima wanted to chat about art. Tonya wanted to gnash her teeth. Why couldn’t the woman just hang up and let Tonya be out and about, doing, being, letting loose some of this spark catching fire inside of her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had so much energy.

  No, she told herself, calm down. This was ridiculous. She had work to do, and she couldn’t afford to let her over-stimulated body distract her. Shadow trusted her to represent the Crows, and she had a responsibility not to fall through on that trust. This conversation, inane as it seemed, was important.

  Still though, she gazed longingly out the window and wanted to be somewhere else. She felt unnatural. Her nerves tingled, her body hummed with energy, and she practically bounced in her seat, but still, Polly insisted that 92.5 was the optimal juice count for a Focus. She had resisted the idea of taking her count up to the optimum until two days ago, fearing the consequences. Two days ago, she gave in, and ever since, she felt as if lightning struck her and the electricity remained inside.

  She couldn’t imagine ever going back.

  Off six rooms away and down a floor, Tonya metasensed Anna Bell and Russell finding a little private time together. She obligingly increased Anna Bell’s juice count, to let the two of them better enjoy things. Things got intense quickly.

  Tonya’s metasense stayed focused on them, and her own breathing became a little heavy. She shouldn’t watch. Really, she didn’t usually pay particular attention to that sort of thing. Today, though, it seemed impossible to ignore.

  “Tonya?” Ima said.

  Tonya jumped, and tried to remember what Ima just said. This was positively embarrassing. She was supposed to be a senior Focus, not a yearling Focus voyeur. Right, art. “I haven’t seen any actual Crow art myself. I think I could probably arrange for you to see some.”

  “Oh, Tonya, you need to see some yourself. If you’re going to sell the stuff, you need to be able to tell the rest of us how good it is.”

  “I know. I keep telling myself that, but other duties always seem to interfere.”

  “Well you should,” Ima said. Anna Bell and Russell had progressed to serious business, and Tonya almost missed Ima’s words. She tried to drag her attention back to the conversation, but her body responded far too urgently to Anna Bell and Russell.

  92.5. How the crap did any of the Focuses with juice buffer access ever get anything done, if a so-called optimal juice count hit her like this? Tonya doubted she had been above eighty-five since her transformation. For all the misery of low juice, at least her low juice let her remain aloof from her household’s intimate relations.

  Tonya took another fifteen minutes to chat socially with Ima and finally satisfy her with a promise to arrange contact with a respected Crow artist. By that time, Anna Bell and Russell had finished the first and started up on a second. Tonya gave up trying to ignore them, and just sat in her chair and shared their pleasure.

  Far, far too engrossing. For fourteen years, she had never cared, but now, getting a little action seemed like the most important thing in the world. Some pleasant man able to tolerate a Focus. Someone who might even care for her.

  Someone who might nail her to a mattress now and then. Some good old fashioned honest sex.

  She never used to want things like that, not since her transformation.

  Fourteen years.

  When Anna Bell and Russell finally satisfied themselves for a second, and probably final, time, Tonya sat up straight, flushed as she tugged her suit back into position and cursed at herself for giving in to temptation. Now all she had was a frustrated need and no way to satisfy herself.

  Well, no way to satisfy herself she was willing to take. She thought of taking care of the problem, but then she thought of some Crow out there, miles away and watching everything she did. She wasn’t, under any circumstance whatsoever, going to let the damned Crows metasense her masturbate in her office.

  She careful
ly arranged her clothes and hair back into position and tried to ignore the ache between her legs. The least she could do was get some exercise and try to work off the frustration.

  Dolores Sokolnik: December 18, 1972

  Del stood over Arm Kent, who was now stuck under the fallen weight bench. At her left was Maynard, and at her right the young Arm Fairly. Del held both of their tags; Fairly’s tag was recent, in response to several discussions with the new Arm about the Arm’s pre-transformation history. Del had convinced Fairly to drop her married name, Roche, as a worthless symbol of her old life. She also taught her how to quiet her mind, to better absorb the rough teaching all Arms must endure. Both Fairly and Maynard now worked hard with Del to help her regain the humanity she had been forced to discard with the quiet pools trick. Even better, Fairly progressed nearly 50% faster than an Arm of her quality should be progressing because of Del’s tag on her.

  “So, Dorothy, do you agree?” Del said. She put a big smile on her face. “I’m sure I can help you with the task Ma’am Keaton’s assigned you.”

  Del had challenged Arm Kent, Arm style. Kent would win a purely physical fight, save that Del wouldn’t permit a purely physical challenge fight. Instead, Del held a discussion of topics of utmost interest to Arm Kent. Her interests in life, her new career as an Arm, and her prospects for the future. A catalog of Bass’s actions, especially Bass’s goal to become boss Arm.

  Del had distracted Arm Kent enough so that Arm Kent missed the physical trap Del had created out of the overloaded weight bench.

  Now, three Arm predators faced Arm Kent.

  “You’ve changed, Student Sokolnik,” Dorothy said, her faced pressed against the leg of the bench.

  “My passion? I told you what Bass threatened to do to me. I refuse to become her lab rat.”

  “I’m more interested in Maynard and Fairly.”

  “Why? Because they love me? You don’t think I’m a robot any more, do you?”