“Oh, you’re still a bloody minded robot, Sokolnik. You’re just more personable about it these days. I want to know why the hell you tagged them. You can’t possibly think you can protect them from Ma’am Keaton.”
“Ma’am,” Maynard said. “We don’t need the protection. Or want it. Del’s shown us that what Ma’am Keaton and our other teachers do to us is right.”
“You don’t resent the fact that Ma’am Keaton tortures you? Treats you like scum. You can’t even damned breathe without her permission.”
“No, ma’am.”
Dorothy turned to Del. “Okay. You beat me, Student Sokolnik. I accept that. You can help me manage communications. Now, get me out from under this mess.”
Arm Kent hadn’t accepted defeat.
Del knelt in front of Arm Kent, and pulled out a knife. “How much is your life worth, Arm Kent?”
“You wouldn’t dare. Ma’am Keaton would skin you alive. Hell, she’ll give you to Bass and make a public example.”
“You see my point.”
Dorothy blinked at the knife point, in front of her eyes. “You’re nuts. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I could make you beg, but that isn’t my way,” Del said, still calm and reasonable. Maynard grinned. “Let me tell you a story, instead.” Del, crouching, her knife in front of Dorothy’s eye, told Arm Kent about all her dealings with Bass. Dorothy remained impassive, but Del sensed her will crumbling. Del had nothing to lose, and before Del finished Dorothy realized it.
“What do you want?” Dorothy said, defeated.
“I’m going to tag you. I need you as mine, working with me, on a first name basis with me, if I’m going to survive.”
“The four of us won’t be able to stop Bass, Student Sokolnik.”
“Correct,” Del said. “I’m not done yet, Dorothy. Not. Even. Close.”
Sinclair: December 18, 1972
“The Arms betrayed the Cause,” Duke Hoskins said. Yah, and Nixon beat McGovern, too. Sinclair sighed. Here we go, again.
“We know where Keaton’s lair is. I say we take her out and teach the Arms a lesson about perfidy.”
Sinclair paced. “Your grace, I must point out that if we did that, we would be seen as taking the side of the first Focuses. Among the other Transforms, that would sully our reputation, perhaps fatally.”
“Damn.”
“Perhaps we can go after her after the first Focuses fall,” Squire Alexander said. He stretched out on the floor, trying to work out some kinks in his legs. His legs were now nearly human. Of his lion form, only a barely noticeable snout and a general tawny hairiness remained.
“That might work, Squire,” Sinclair said. “Count Dowling doesn’t want to see the younger Focuses under the Arms’ thumb, either.” He found the rough affection that had grown up between the Nobles and the younger Focuses most amusing. The Nobles didn’t share the natural distrust of Focuses with the Crows, similar to the way some Crows acted toward Arms…
“What about the Commander?” Sir Randolph said. He glanced up from the book he was reading – on big game hunting – and frowned. “I, for one, would not want to face the Commander in a battle.”
“Surely she’ll be swayed to side with her friends among the Focuses, my lord,” Sinclair said. Tiamat struck him as far too intelligent to make a mistake of that magnitude, and side with a monster like Kali against her friends.
“Don’t count on it, Master Sinclair,” Duke Hoskins said. “The Commander understands the difference between duty and friendship. Her duty, her responsibility, is to Arm Keaton. She’ll follow her duty to hell and back if she needs to.”
“If you’re right, your grace, that’ll be a disaster. There are Crows who will follow Tiamat, no matter what she does.”
“I know, Master Sinclair, and that’s why I want to hit Keaton now, while Keaton is still treating the Commander and the Commander’s organization like shit. It’s our only chance to avoid a war pitting the divided Crows, the younger Focuses and the Nobles against the unified Arms.” He paused. “If such a war starts, the Hunters will be gnawing on our backs within a day, if not sooner. Consider what I found in Chillicothe, Master Sinclair.” The Hunters had recruited one Focus Saglimbeni to their ranks, recruited, not captured. Their true enemy was getting far too bold for anyone’s liking.
Sinclair put his head in his hands. Round and round and round…
Something Bad’s Happened
Susan Schrum – Focus #8 – June 1956. Focus Schrum is the current President of the Northeast Region of the United Focuses of America (UFA). She is active in day-to-day political matters among the Focuses, as well as the lobbying efforts of the UFA at the federal level and at the state level in the northeast United States. “It would be folly if we turned our backs on the non-Transforms, because they need our help as much as we need their help.” Focus Schrum is extremely forceful of will and daunting to approach.
“Lives of the Focuses”
Gail Rickenbach: December 19, 1972
“Where did you get this information from, anyway?” Carol said, after speed-reading Van and Daisy’s report. Gail flickered her eyes away from Carol for a moment, attempting not to appear too pleased or too forceful. She had already been ‘too forceful’ once, today, and she wasn’t sure she could take any more consequences.
Unfortunately, the eyes of the others in her and Van’s living room, including Gilgamesh, turned to Gail. “Trades,” Gail said.
Carol lowered the stubbly remains of her eyebrows. Hair wasn’t important and didn’t regenerate as quickly as vital organs. Tell me Carol didn’t need to say.
“The information on Julius came from Arm Billington, contacted through Betsy and Arm Bartlett. We traded her our information on Focus Fingleman.”
“You’re exposing yourself to Arm-style retaliation if the information you provided turns out to be incorrect.”
Gail shrugged. Next to her on the couch, Daisy practically vibrated with excitement and pride. “We only passed along verified information.” She paused and studied the Commander out of the corner of her eyes. Carol was going without sleep again, sporting the jittery tight expression she got after skipping sleep for multiple nights. She sat on the edge of what was usually Gail’s chair, and didn’t lean back. “Work I’m willing to stake my reputation on.”
“Okay, then, tell me your conclusions, in your words,” Carol said. “Not Van’s words or Daisy’s words.” Daisy almost protested the slight, but Van, standing behind the couch, managed to shush her before she got any angry words out. Gail needed to think of Carol as The Commander, the stiff-backed mercurial Arm who made ‘my way or the highway’ her central organizing principle…and who could talk nearly anybody into anything.
“We’ve finally cracked open another layer of the Chrysanthemum mystery, perhaps the final layer,” Gail said. “Arm Billington’s information was the last bit that allowed us to sew everything together.” Gail had never met Arm Billington, and from Carol’s description she expected a dumb jock style thug who wrote messily, in all caps, using a thick pencil. Not, as it turned out, someone who wrote lyrically, almost musically, with elegant cursive penmanship, and a pension for rhyming puns. “Focus Mary Beth Julius is the other principal owner of Chrysanthemum. As you recall from our previous report, we managed to rule out any of the other ruling Firsts as Cassandra.” Two unknowns ran the Chrysanthemum group, a small shadow corporation with far too much money to play with, mostly from selling the secrets of Transforms to other corporations and to foreign governments. Gail’s team had broken the identity of one of the owners, Ajax, a while ago – as Focus Donna Fingleman, one of the ruling Firsts. Given Focus Fingleman’s lack of allies among the other ruling Firsts, as well as other tangible evidence involving signature loans, they were able to rule out the other ruling Firsts as her partner, Cassandra. “It was either one of the non-ruling first Focuses living near the mid-Atlantic states, or one of the powerful older foreign Major Transforms. We did some curso
ry checking and were able to find the expected financial discrepancies in only one household, Julius’s.”
“You investigated Patterson?” The Commander’s non-existent eyebrows went up, then down in an angry frown.
Gail nodded. “Indirectly. We used the copy of Shadow’s Crow research notes as the basis for…” Carol held up her hands in surrender and finally leaned back in the chair.
“Continue.” Carol shook her head. “Julius is supposed to be a non-entity, a lunatic Focus under the care of the other first Focuses.”
“I think she’s still a non-entity, and still a lunatic,” Gail said. “One of the Chrysanthemum projects she’s sponsoring, a six thousand a year grant to a university that should know better, is investigating an old misconception about Focus charisma, the idea that it’s some form of supernatural luck manipulation. We have ample evidence that Julius and reality are not exactly on speaking terms.”
“You have more. Tell me.” Carol waved the report for emphasis and then dropped it in her lap.
“We all believe someone else may be involved, someone working through Julius. Either that, or Julius has quite a few more moments of coherent thought than people realize,” Gail said. She leaned forward, with her elbows on her knees. “Several of Julius’s projects are not at all insane. If you recall, we pinned the research into older Monster brain changes on Cassandra, something Arm Billington verified. Arm Billington also found evidence of a newer project we had missed, one farmed out to New Jersey Standard Chemicals: an attempt to find a way to stabilize a compound able to cause induced transformations in some people when injected.”
The Commander nodded, worried. Gail could sense her thinking through all the bad scenarios associated with this new information.
“What’s this about Bass?” Carol asked, spearing page three of the report with an impossibly muscled left index finger. “More Crow information?”
“Yes,” Gail said. “According to the Crows, Bass spent less time in her home city, Dallas, or at her Texas ranchland lair, than any other Arm spent in their city or lair – by a wide margin. We believe she is at least partly under a Focus’s control or closely allied with a Focus. When matched with the fact that her primary money-making activity, real estate speculation, is the same as Focus Fingleman’s, we suspect the Focus in question is Focus Fingleman.”
“That matches Keaton’s information on Fingleman, and her suspicion that the first Focuses had suborned one of the Arms,” Carol said.
“You need to get this to Arm Keaton as fast as you can,” Gail said. This was her biggest worry, that they had solved the last piece of the puzzle too late to influence the attack on the first Focuses. “If Arm Bass is involved in the attacks on Focuses Julius or Fingleman, any other Arms working with her are in grave danger.”
Carol snorted. “This isn’t anything Keaton will listen to me about. The best I can do is send it to her via our fast courier service and hope she draws the correct conclusion.”
“Which is?” Van asked.
“Confine Bass and keep her out of any of the attacks.”
Gail moved to stand, but before she got an inch out of her seat, Carol grabbed her right hand, still showing scrapes despite several hours of healing. “Who did you punch out, Gail?”
She slunk down into the sofa and studied her knees, which showed through the ratty blue jeans she wore today. “Buddy Attendale,” she said, and blushed.
“Oh?” Carol said. “You’re slipping if you can’t keep control of your temper around normals.”
“I didn’t lose my temper,” Gail said. “I just decided to punish him in a different way than normal after he said Anita was spending too much time with her knees spread.” She paused and her blush deepened. “You’re not the only one who thinks I went a bit overboard, but I wanted him humiliated.” She determinedly ignored Van.
“You kill him?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t go overboard at all. So, are you going to finally roil up your household and trade him and his wife, the gripe factory?”
Gail nodded. “I called Focus Frasier and accepted Gloria’s problem teen, Aster.”
“Good for you. I doubt Aster will be a problem for you,” Carol said, eyeing Gail’s torn jeans. “What you think is rebellious and what Gloria thinks is rebellious are quite different things.”
Dolores Sokolnik: December 19, 1972
Del let her fingers do the thinking as she put the now clean M-16 back together, the one with the ‘DZ’ inexpertly carved into the stock. The number two storeroom was filled with such gear, mostly clean and functional now, after days of effort by Del and the other student Arms. Racks of Ma’am Keaton’s weaponry lined the walls, and crates of newly acquired weaponry, now ready to be used, were stacked in corners. The room smelled of the predatory odor of gunmetal, ammunition, and cleaning oil. Still out of the loop, all she knew was, with all the military preparation she was doing, the strike against the first Focuses would be happening soon.
An attack in which she had no involvement save for information collation and preparatory grunt work.
An attack that would leave her open to capture and enslavement by Bass. Her best chance at survival involved attracting another Arm protector, but the next juniormost Arm, Meredith Bartlett, had a full year on Del. The only way she would be able to grab someone that senior was to use group tactics – leveraging Mona, Theresa, Dottie to join her in a coordinated gang attack.
“Not very ‘Arm’, you know, Student.” Keaton. She dropped a heavy crate of grenade launchers beside the box of M-16s. This crate reeked of Carolina mud.
“Ma’am,” Del said. “I apologize for my stray thoughts.” She could never hide her thoughts from Ma’am Keaton.
“Thoughts anyone in your position would be thinking.”
“Ma’am.” Why was Ma’am Keaton paying even the slightest attention to her? Then again, how much of the way Ma’am Keaton acted toward her had ever been real? The boss Arm, her teacher, always played devious games within games. “If I’m displeasing you in any way, I…”
“Your worries and your desperation degrade both your work and your studies.” Del froze at her teacher’s too-accurate snarl. “Fix this.”
“Ma’am. Of course, ma’am.” She turned to open the crate of M79s, but as she did a thick report appeared on the crate with a slap. Del blinked in amazement at the title: ‘Chrysanthemum Decoded’, credited to Van Rickenbach-Schuber, Focus Gail Rickenbach-Schuber, and Daisy Schuber as the authors and Arm Carol Hancock as editor.
“Read. Now. Give me your analysis.”
Shit! Why did Ma’am Keaton involve her again? She hadn’t been involved in Ma’am Keaton’s strategizing, ever since one bit of Del’s analyses went against Ma’am Keaton’s expectations. She read, hunched over on her stool with her elbows on her knees, then lost all notice of the outside world as she took in the short-ish ten page report and the two hundred pages of supporting documentation, some of which she recognized as Xeroxes of Crow notes. The report reeked of conspiracy theory fever dreams, save for the documentation proving the reality of Chrysanthemum’s long existence and the careful backtracking of its hidden owners to Focuses Fingleman and Julius. The authors had carefully attributed the Julius fingering to Arm Billington’s recent research.
Del took a deep breath and dropped the terror of Keaton’s attention deep into her quiet pools. “This reeks of being too pat, ma’am; the timing behind these revelations could simply be to cause social chaos among the Arms closest to you.”
Ma’am Keaton put down a partly cleaned and disassembled M79 and smiled at her. “Of course. This is Hancock agitprop at its finest. Two things, though. The obvious recommendation they’re implying with this is that Arm Bass shouldn’t be anywhere near the Fingleman or Julius operations, which matches my gut feeling, and one of the reasons I moved Arm Bass to the Patterson hit team last week. Second, I know Rickenbach and her husband, and they have too much integrity to fabricate something of this n
ature. Parts of it? Always a worry. But overall, you can tell from the tense sentence structure they believe this is all real.”
“Ma’am.”
“Your analysis, student?”
Del composed her thoughts, squared the report neatly and put it on the lid of the crate, now lying on the floor. She stood, unwilling to give a report seated while Ma’am Keaton stood, but kept her eyes down. “They present this as complete, the ‘Chrysanthemum mystery finally solved’, but I see two areas where it isn’t. First is in the area of contradictory motivations. Although some of the Chrysanthemum projects support Arm Bass’s overall ‘Transform apocalypse is good for us’ philosophy, such as the induced transformation project and the one feeding bad research results to Dr. Henry Zielinski, many of the others do not, especially the one sponsoring young medical specialists in the treatment of Transforms. If Arm Bass is compromised, as they heavily imply, it is not at the level of Chrysanthemum, but at a lower level of this alleged conspiracy. Second, I concur with Arm Billington’s analysis that Focus Julius’s organized and detailed involvement in Chrysanthemum is at odds with her other activities, such as her involvement with Dr. Robert Willis’ Transformology so-called movement, which is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. The writers of this document state that there is a slim possibility that Focus Julius is serving only as a front for Chrysanthemum; I would state that this possibility is in actuality the most likely one.” Del turned her eyes to Ma’am Keaton, who nodded.
“A good first-look analysis. I don’t have time to give this document the full effort it requires. You do that. I expect a full report after we take down the first Focuses.”
“Ma’am.” Ma’am Keaton’s tone implied that the takedown of the first Focuses would be happening in the next several days.
“I’m giving you the information coordination job, Del. I no longer trust Dottie.” Because Del had tagged her, among other reasons. “Later today, I want you to set up a command center to coordinate the information coming in on the first Focus attacks. Here’s what I want.” Ma’am Keaton gave Del a short hand-written note detailing what Ma’am Keaton wanted and the information resources Del would be using, including the information the Arms had collected on the first Focus targets. The note also included contact numbers for the Commander’s people; she hadn’t realized the Commander and her organization would be handling as many first Focuses as Ma’am Keaton’s Arms. “We’re starting tonight.”
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 13