No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5)

by Randall Farmer

  “Talk to me, Hancock,” Keaton said, “and this had better be good. I specifically told you not to show up here until you grabbed control of your new territory. Is it to be Boston or Houston?”

  “Ma’am,” I said, respectfully, from my place on the porch floor. “Houston. The matter which forced my early arrival is this new Arm here. If you don’t want her, I’ll gladly kill her.”

  “Carol,” Zielinski said, voice low. Exasperated. We were both trying his patience and the limits of his tag regarding Haggerty.

  Keaton frowned at the barely conscious Haggerty. “What do you know, she is an Arm. I thought she was some kind of fucked up Focus. I’ve never metasensed one this new.”

  “Ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have all the required information yet. This box has all her high school and college records, though.”

  Keaton waved her hand at me, stalked over to Haggerty, picked her up and tossed her through the open door into her second house. She smiled at the two of us. “Well, well. Come in, come in…”

  From the basement echoed a dreadful scream.

  “Monster,” Keaton said. “I’m trying to figure out what makes a Monster tick. Hope you can keep control of your kill lust.” Then Keaton laughed her most sadistic laugh and kicked the door closed behind us. Shit. Keaton wasn’t high on juice; this could turn out to be dangerous for us, as my juice monkey also clawed at my mind. Zielinski paled as Keaton turned on him and ran a sharp fingernail under his chin. “Don’t worry, Hank. None of this is for you. This time…”

  Hank thought Keaton had tortured him in the past. I hadn’t been sure this had been torture from Keaton’s rather expert perspective. Guess it was. That wouldn’t be happening again. Hank was mine, now.

  Keaton turned back to me, glaring and tapping her fingers on her crossed arms. We locked eyes, and she went over every spoken word of mine, every nuance, every body sign possible to notice. I waited, attempting to project subservience and competence.

  I hoped she liked what she saw because I wasn’t hiding anything. My few days with Zielinski had done wonders for my mind. I could think again, not to mention read and write. The world made logical sense. Mostly. I could reason, plan, and comprehend cause and effect. No more living by rituals and instinct. Gaah. That had been horrible. Save me from any more encounters with magic.

  “Good,” she said, her evaluation finished. “You appear to be Arm enough to talk to, again. That’s making good use of Zielinski. Tell me about what’s been going on. This better be good, or you’re going to spend some time in the basement for interrupting my work.”

  I let myself go a little pale at her threat. She sneered back at me. I had overdone my reaction and she recognized the sham. I widened my eyes a tad, and flickered my sight on Zielinski. I indicated what I had done with Zielinski was worth risking a trip to the basement. She splayed her fingers, a sign she would listen and bargain.

  I went into the living room and sat on a stool, portraying humble and abject Carol. After I got a look at her face, I decided I had better ease off. I was proud of my squeaky-clean Boston snatch and Inferno’s help with the records. Acting humble wasn’t appropriate.

  I finally pegged Keaton at a mid-range juice count. Her temper came from the fact we interrupted her work, not from low juice, thank God.

  “Talk,” Keaton said, sitting on her easy chair, a duplicate of the one she had in her main house. Haggerty didn’t move from her position in the corner. “Stand,” she said to Zielinski. “Observe and think.”

  I talked. I told her everything I knew about Haggerty. Keaton shrugged. Brains were a plus; her SDS connections and her mental image of Arms as do-gooder avengers of the night in comic book costumes a decided minus. Keaton shook her head in disgust. Haggerty would either shape up or die before she would take any of the kills I would be providing. Well, maybe I would at least get brownie points for supplying entertainment.

  “Have you and Hank had a chance to come up with any ideas about your research center proposal?” she said. Impatiently. Her games with her basement Monster aroused her.

  “Some. Houston’s got the best resources for what we need. Hank has a list of potential recruits for me to investigate. He’s willing to be the background boss in a new identity.” I turned to Hank. “Did you finish the preliminary budget scenarios?”

  He nodded. Crap like this he could do in his sleep.

  Keaton looked at Zielinski.

  “Your relationship with Hank here is the same as mine is to you, isn’t it?” I nodded. “What does it take? You make any progress understanding what’s going on?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I told her Zielinski’s comment about ‘down to the soul’ and why tagging normals would be harder because they didn’t have any juice. “It fits all my limited experiences with tagging.”

  “Well, then, I guess you haven’t earned yourself a trip to the basement,” she said. She stood and walked over to the window, staring out into the darkness for a long moment. The Monster in the basement howled again, intermixed with a few choice curses. Shit! She had a talker! Keaton was poaching on the Chimeras again. I approved.

  Keaton turned to Zielinski.

  “Eissler?”

  I had forgotten to make sure Hank was ready. Damn.

  “We met for less than four hours,” he said, without a pause. “What I learned will take approximately two hours to present, not counting any questions you may have. A chalkboard to write on might be handy. The information is hot enough that the first Focuses have a contract out on my life, presumably to keep the two of you from learning what I am about to say. Eissler played an Arm trick on me making it such that I couldn’t tell anyone else what I learned except for the two of you. I believe what I have to say is going to change your world.” I breathed a needless sigh of relief. I kept forgetting Hank taught hot shit doctors. At Harvard, for gosh sakes. He didn’t need my advice.

  Keaton turned back to me.

  “Hancock, let’s see what sort of physical progress you’ve made in your recovery,” she said. “Hank, maybe you can help me make some sense out of what happened to Hancock here.” I hadn’t been neglecting the physical aspects of my recovery. Not when recovery was Keaton’s top priority task and vital to my survival.

  Zielinski and I followed Keaton downstairs. On the way by, Keaton stopped by where the temporarily un-tortured Haggerty still lay on the floor. Haggerty’s face remained white as a sheet.

  “If you move one inch from where you are now, I will carve off small pieces of your body until your mind snaps. Do you understand me?”

  Haggerty nodded. I picked up the dank smell of fear rolling off her. She had heard the Monster in the basement, and everything Keaton, Zielinski and I said. She knew her life was in Keaton’s hands.

  We exercised our way hungry, or at least Keaton and I did. The only comment of Zielinski’s that made any sense to me was the one about chemical tells: I picked up on Keaton’s physical movements without looking, by sensing the different juice fractions let loose by her physical actions. Keaton wasn’t overjoyed until she picked up on the trick as well, after fifteen minutes of experimentation. This wasn’t a metasense function. I could do this trick even when Keaton masked herself from my metasense, an advanced trick she was working on but didn’t have perfected. Zielinski was way too enthralled by the Monster chained in the corner of the basement to be dishing out his normal volume of disquieting observations. Of all things, he made progress taming the damned thing. It looked like a goddamned courting ritual.

  I had Zielinski go fetch the coolers from the car, my cooking supplies. I knew better than to trust Keaton’s kitchen, though I hadn’t realized how much of a handicap I would be laboring under, having to cook in her house of pain. Still, in twenty minutes, we had the semblance of a home cooked meal ready to eat for a midnight snack. For poor Hank, a two in the morning snack, as his normal’s body still thought we should be in Oklahoma.

  After we ate, she looked at me, thought
about the planning necessary for the meal, looked at Zielinski, and then looked back at me.

  “Go to bed,” she told Zielinski, and tossed him a key to her mansion. “Hancock and I have some dirty security details to discuss.”

  “…but I expect that I can get most of them. The risks and rewards work out right. There are many different ways of recruiting, and you have to tailor your method to the person.” I hated having to explain my recruiting. I recruited by gut and instinct, always hard to translate into words. I knew most, if not all, of the researchers would fold up for me, but how could I explain my instincts to Keaton?

  “What level of control are you talking about? Hank, Frances the druggie, or that piece of muscle you didn’t want me to notice?”

  “Ma’am,” I said, and bowed my head, acknowledging the hit. Thank heavens for the tag; in the old days, given my relatively low juice count, I might have snarled at her. “It’s not the same, for several reasons. Hank, Frances and Fred are mine mine, personally bound to me as part of my entourage, and are all tagged. Hank is voluntarily part of our cause, I saved Frances from herself and Fred, well, I broke him to me. I’m their world to them.

  “On the other hand these researchers are old and settled with families they care for. These are leverage points we can use. Also, I won’t be making a significant disruption in their lives. They’ll still continue their research, they’ll still support their families, and even live perfectly normal lives except for the work they do for me. Lastly, I have something to offer them. These men give their whole lives to research Transform Sickness and its peculiarities. Most have never had a real live Major Transform to work with and certainly not a mature one. I’d bet several of them will be willing to sell me their souls just for that chance. I’ll get these people and keep them. But they won’t be tagged.”

  Keaton smiled sardonically. “Tell me, what happens when you have all these researchers learning all sorts of things about Arms and one of them breaks under pressure? Special delivery, straight to the FBI, everything they want to know about Arms, and about your research organization besides.”

  “Ma’am,” I said again. I didn’t have an answer for her, so I tossed the question back. “Ma’am, do you think that’s an insurmountable problem? Or do you see a way around that?”

  She didn’t answer for a long moment. I waited for her, working on my signals and trying to keep them firmly within the confines of the tag.

  “Hell,” she said. “They’re risks. There are ways to reduce the risks, but you can’t eliminate them completely. Are you willing to let Hank make the technical decisions?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then let’s work through this.”

  We didn’t sleep that night. Keaton and I hashed through an amazing number of contingency plans, first thinking them up then tearing them apart. She pointed out an appalling number of risk factors and she came up with solutions for many of them.

  I was amazed. I had never worked with Keaton on this level before, fully professional and on the top of her game. This sort of paranoid organization creation was her specialty. I learned her tricks as fast as she handed them out.

  While we talked she let me clean her house of pain, after which I cooked breakfast for her and we did another round of exercises. I was cleaning up the kitchen again when she came in from her shower.

  “Hancock,” she said. Her hair was dripping and she smelled like soap. Her voice ached with formality and juice.

  “Ma’am,” I said, respectfully. I bowed to her, dish soap covering my hands up to my elbows, and still holding a dirty spoon.

  “Here are your orders. First, I’m not willing to let you do this without oversight. I want a detailed report, every month, of exactly how you manage each of those researchers. In addition, what you did by bringing the baby Arm here without warning was unconscionably sloppy. So in addition to your monthly report on the research project, I want you to visit me, in person, every month, for a personal report on what else I’ve assigned you, and for further orders. After you call ahead. There’s to be no more showing up unannounced. Period.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” And then, “Thank you, ma’am. I know that with you watching over me, I’ll be careful.” She didn’t trust me simply because I wasn’t as professionally paranoid as she was. I did worry about these scheduled monthly visits. Not because I disliked the punishment; as punishment her task was fair and made perfect sense to me. What worried me was that a pattern like this might attract unwanted juice effects, and ‘unwanted juice effects’ was where my paranoia lived. Nevertheless, orders were orders.

  “Second, I want every bit of information you gather.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “Third, you will manage this effort. I’ll have no contact whatsoever with your organization. If I have any contact with Zielinski, it won’t be in regard to this organization. You’re the fuse before any trouble you generate gets to me. You understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Fourth, you take it slow. Fully investigate every single researcher you try for, and take all possible steps to minimize the risk. Don’t try for any but the most likely. Go for the easy ones first, because the first time you blow a recruitment and have to kill the researcher, you’re done. No more, because you will not establish a pattern. Before you start, I want to see a contingency plan for what you’re going to do when you blow a recruitment and have to kill that researcher.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. Keaton was being more careful than I would have been. With an effort this major, she was probably right.

  “Stop recruiting at any time,” she said. “If you for any reason at all think it’s time to stop, do so. Under no circumstances are you to push for complete coverage. If you do get to where you think complete coverage is a possibility, you come talk to me first, because right now I think you’re dreaming a stupid dream, and you’ll blow everything up if you try to take things that far.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Fifth, implement the dead man switches we talked about last night. You need to be able to take out each node at a moment’s notice, and also take out the entire network.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sixth, don’t ignore the Focuses,” she said. “Don’t forget about my overall goal of getting us out from under the thumbs of the senior Focuses. Anything we can pick up regarding the Focuses that isn’t public knowledge we can use as a lever on them, one way or another. Never forget that however much it bores him, Zielinski’s good at figuring out Focus tricks.”

  She stopped talking then, and I looked over to her.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do it right, Hancock. Don’t fuck this one up. Among many other things, you’ve convinced me our future depends on controlling the research on Arms.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I did some more cooking. I made sure my cooking was excellent.

  Gilgamesh: June 2, 1968

  Gilgamesh knocked on the front door to the shotgun shack. He had heard the phrase ‘Crows hiding under the Focus’s house’ before, but he had never before seen it. All three of them fled the crawlspace under the house as he approached.

  “Yes, yes, hmmm,” the woman answering the door said, blocking the way in. She was a Transform, late twenties, a tad stout but not too much, and black. Although Merlin hadn’t said anything on the subject, Gilgamesh had suspected as much from the neighborhood. “What can I do for you?”

  “Merlin sent me,” Gilgamesh said.

  The magic words. “Okay. I’ll be right back.” She gently closed the door, and all sorts of shouting erupted inside the tiny shack. From the sound, dozens of people lived in there.

  The door opened, again. This time, an older black man, short haired and thin. A Transform. Brandishing a shotgun.

  “Well, what have we here,” he said. Gilgamesh barely understood his accent.

  “I’m here to visit Focus Innkeep,” Gilgamesh said, hoping he hadn’t screwed up the
address. Transforms lived in the house, and in four houses nearby. No Focus, though.

  “She ain’t here. She’ll be back after dark.”

  “Can I wait?” Gilgamesh glanced at his watch. Half past seven in the evening, still daylight.

  “Come ‘round back,” the man said, and stepped off the porch, gun still in hand. “Paulie’s my name. What’s yours?” Paulie led him around the shotgun shack. Eyes followed him from inside, and from next door, as well. Out back he found six unmatched beat up chairs, three occupied by older adolescents. They eyed him suspiciously as Paulie motioned to one of the chairs for Gilgamesh to sit in. Paulie sat next to him. Half a dozen trees, otherwise unkempt, shaded the back yard of the place. A car on blocks in the back among the grown up weeds rusted away, and another, a mid-fifties vintage pickup truck, not on blocks but still sitting in an overgrown patch of yard, aged more gently.

  “Gilgamesh,” Gilgamesh said.

  Paulie’s eyebrows raised. “Crow? Like you?”

  “Well, Merlin did send me.”

  “Yah, yah, I know, Merlin’s a Crow. But he’s never sent another Crow to visit who’s shown up in the day. Thought you was an artist’r sumtin.”

  “Why would he send artists?” Gilgamesh said, mostly to himself.

  Paulie chuckled. “Wait ‘till you eyeball Pearl. What’chu do, sir? Before the Shakes’ got ya.”

  Gilgamesh blinked. He had been a Transform for what, nearly a year and a half, and this was the first time anyone had ever asked. “Engineer, worked for the Port of Miami.”

  “You don’t say. I done some railroad maint’nence in my time,” Paulie said.

  They swapped work stories for about an hour, until Gilgamesh picked up the approach of the Focus on his metasense.

  “Hey, Johno,” Paulie said, waving to one of the adolescents. “Go getcha ma’am, tell’r she’s got a visitor out back.”

  Pearl Innkeep stood about five four. She was a stunner, even for a Focus. Unbelievable. Focus Rizzari hadn’t been ugly, but not, well, a stunner. Lori was short, cute and perky, but put a lot of work into dressing ‘older’ and ‘dowdier’. Probably so she could teach and be respected.