No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5)

by Randall Farmer

  Up they went, the both of them carefully metasensing just feet ahead to see if they could pick up any of Rogue Focus’s screwy juice patterns. Nothing.

  Tiamat made the decision and signaled for them to move within Focus Laswell’s metasense range. The Focus noticed them immediately – which panicked Gilgamesh out of the Focus’s range before he got control of himself.

  The heavens opened up on them a second later, turning a panicky exercise in espionage into a horribly disgusting and drenched one. Tiamat found his ear. “If Lori’s right, heavy rain degrades juice patterns. Hell, with the amount of rain this town gets, Rogue Focus probably has to renew these patterns weekly. I think it’s safe for us to make contact.”

  He nodded. Tiamat signaled to Focus Laswell, pointing and gesturing with big broad arm waves. The signaling turned into a negotiation ending up with them balanced on the shingles of the Focus’s main household roof with the Focus and two of her bodyguards.

  They huddled up and talked through the downpour. “Focus, I sure as hell hope your trust in those bodyguards is correct, because Rogue Focus will kill you over this if she finds out.”

  Focus Laswell nodded, knowing without being told who ‘Rogue Focus’ referred to. “There’s no need to worry. Ah can order them to forget this ever happened.”

  Tiamat nodded.

  Focus Laswell, now as drenched as the two of them, turned to Gilgamesh. “Ah’ve never met a Crow before. Can ah call you Crow Gilgamesh?”

  “If you wish,” Gilgamesh said. This Focus thrived on formality. He approved.

  “I hate to rush things, but I don’t want any surprises from Rogue Focus,” Carol said. “Dahlia special three.”

  This was the code word they had learned through Focus Rodriguez and Focus Webb. Much to Gilgamesh’s surprise, first Focus Fingleman had set-up code words with the local Focuses for various eventualities regarding Rogue Focus. The level of thought and preparation impressed the hell out of Gilgamesh – Focus Fingleman and her household were frighteningly capable. This code meant outside forces were going to attack Rogue Focus, and Focus Laswell’s forces needed to be involved. As Lori predicted, the Focus Council and Focus Fingleman would be publicly opposed to what they were doing while privately supporting them.

  “You’re involved in this?” Focus Laswell said.

  “I’m leading it,” Carol said.

  “Whoo.” The downpour slowed to a drizzle, leaving the air thick enough to knead. The Focus thought for a moment, tense. “Ah’ll be ready,” Focus Laswell said, committing herself. “Do you want me to contact the other local households?”

  Carol shook her head. “Too much risk. They aren’t to know the attack is happening.”

  Worry radiated through the Focus. “Ah hope you’ve got more’n just my people, because the target’s no pushover.”

  “I can’t tell you the details, but yes, your people will be less than a quarter of my command.” Much less, actually. “I don’t envision you leading the charge into Rogue Focus’s place, either.”

  Focus Laswell smiled. “Ah guess you must really want to set up shop here in Houston. I’m looking forward to doing bidness with you once you’ve established yerself.”

  Ah. A sales-Focus. She would be a useful contact; perhaps she would be able to help him when he set up his usual appliance repair business.

  “We need to be going,” Carol said. “Thank you, in advance, for your help.”

  Tiamat bounded away, roof to roof. Gilgamesh followed.

  “I picked up something interesting from Focus Laswell,” Carol said, once they were well away from Focus Laswell’s household and back on the ground. They had caught up with the rain, and it was pouring again. “It explains why Keaton has been so subdued about this operation. The local Focuses, probably through intermediaries, have tried at least once to hire Keaton to take out Rogue Focus and the negotiations fell through, probably because Keaton wanted too large a payment. I’m guessing Keaton already had all the intelligence we risked our necks to gather.”

  “This was a test, then. This is all a test.” Gilgamesh grimaced. Out west of them, the Crows were agitated. They had found something that disturbed them. “I’m beginning to wonder if Sky’s Crow name for her, Kali, isn’t more appropriate than the Skinner. Is it legal for me to call her a bitch?”

  Carol laughed. “She’s definitely Kali, she’s definitely a bitch, and I don’t think she minds us thinking of her in that way. Strength is strength.” She slid over to him and took his elbow lightly in her hand. “What’s going on to the west of us?”

  He had instinctively turned his head to follow his metasense. He had to break himself of his habit. “If I’m interpreting the signals correctly, Sinclair’s just found recent Beast Man sign.” The rain had moved ahead of them again, and he brushed his soggy hair out of his eyes.

  “Well then, lover, I think we’re going to get to spend some more quality time together tonight.”

  ---

  The sun warmed the eastern sky, perhaps a half hour before sunrise. Tiamat pulled over to the side of the county road and stuck her head out of the car. “Yup. That’s his juice trace again. No wonder I’ve never gotten a whiff of this Beast before. He doesn’t nest anywhere near Houston.” According to Gilgamesh’s map they were just west of the town of Plantersville, well to the northwest of Houston. The Beast Man still wasn’t in his metasense range.

  “We should double back to the main road and head north some more,” Gilgamesh said. “I think we’re getting close.” He didn’t see juice traces, but he did pick up faint dribbles of dross, which weren’t from the Beast. This was the third time he had picked them up. “I think this Beast has a wounded captive woman Transform with him.” He wasn’t too panicked by this jaunt; he was sure Rogue Crow’s well trained Beasts didn’t leave juice traces. This had to be a native untrained Beast Man.

  “Crap,” Carol said. “The time she’s spent with the Beast’s enough to make her too foul for me to take, save in an emergency, which this isn’t.” He had been talking to Carol about making her juice draws safer, and she had been taking his advice. So far. “We need to find this Beast so I can figure out what to do.”

  They turned around and headed to the main road, and then north. The two-lane road took them by corn, cotton and cows as Tiamat drove at a constant 20 miles per hour faster than the speed limit. As the sun peeked through the morning clouds Gilgamesh picked up the Beast Man on his metasense. “Got him,” he said. “Well. This is unexpected.”

  “Spill,” Carol said, a Tiamat edge in her voice.

  “I’d sort of expected he wouldn’t have any withdrawal scarring, which he doesn’t. But he has a harem anyway.” Gilgamesh hissed, unhappy. “His harem’s in horrible shape. I don’t think he can keep them alive past three trips into near-Monster. But how did he learn to support a harem at all?”

  Carol didn’t respond, mind elsewhere. Whatever thinking she was doing was grim and Tiamat like. She turned the car around and headed back to Navasota, the last town they had passed through. There she stopped, adjusted her disguise, and dragged Gilgamesh out of the car with her. “Keaton said I was never to pass up any glaring opportunities and to use my Arm initiative. Hell. Here we go.”

  She stopped by the phone booth at the corner Texaco station and started feeding it quarters. “Hey. Rose Marie? I need the Focus. Emergency.”

  Lori. Gilgamesh had no idea what Tiamat was up to. He paced while she talked and the town woke up around them, normal people going about normal days. They didn’t register Tiamat and Gilgamesh. He kept watch anyway.

  She hung up the phone and dialed again. Lori would be at Boston College, as usual spending the night in her office or lab, probably already awake and at work.

  “Lori?” Carol said, connection made. “Perfect. I’ve just stumbled on an amazing opportunity. I’ve got a talented but unattached Chimera in my sights, and I was wondering if you knew if Occum still wanted new ones. Wonderful. Could you do me a favor and get th
ings rolling on your end? I’m going to subdue this puppy and I need to get him off my hands as soon as I can. Thanks.”

  Gilgamesh mentally signaled to get Carol’s attention. “My turn,” he said. He called Sinclair’s local phone number; the dapper Crow was staying in a moderately decent hotel east of Houston, in the industrial suburb of Baytown. “It’s me,” Gilgamesh said. “We found the Beast and he’s free of the scarring, but he’s a natural and has a harem, albeit terribly maintained.”

  “Tiamat’s going to slice him to ribbons, then,” Sinclair said, relieved. A car pulled into the Texaco station and Gilgamesh twitched, and then took a breath and calmed himself. The attendant glanced at Gilgamesh as he headed out to fill the car, but then turned away, not interested in the pair by the phone.

  “Tiamat’s got a scheme. She wants to subdue him for Occum.”

  “Oh, smart, smart. She’s working on doing us all favors, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Can either you or Midgard handle a Beast?”

  “Holy Hannah! No way. Wait. If the Beast and his harem are already subdued, I’ve learned enough from Shadow to keep them subdued.” Occum had recently taught Shadow his tricks, and Shadow had been teaching Beast confusion and subdual techniques to those in his stable of Crows who were old enough to learn them. Which, alas, didn’t include Gilgamesh.

  “In that case, expect delivery soon,” Gilgamesh said. “Congratulations. You get to be the first of your crew to meet Tiamat.”

  Gilgamesh practically heard Sinclair sweat. On the other hand, business was business, and that’s often what it took for Shadow’s Crows to stick their beaks into new situations.

  He hung up the phone. Tiamat gave him a smile and a thumbs up. “Let’s go collect some supplies,” she said.

  ‘Some supplies’ included a 30 foot long panel truck and various lengths of chains set up for towing cars, about three hundred feet total. They came in from the northwest, parking the vehicle about a mile from the Beast Man’s nest. The area where the Beast laired was a scrub-infested river lowland, within shouting distance of several farms but still secluded enough for daytime work. Tiamat hauled chains through the brush.

  “You do the Crow thing and drag this chain over to there,” Carol said, pointing. The ‘Crow thing’ meant moving without leaving any scent traces. “Loop it like this.” She made a diagram on the ground. “Then drop one of your sick-ups large enough to look like decent Chimera-chow right in the middle.”

  “He’ll be able to metasense us.”

  “If he’s a young fool Beast, like he appears to be, your rotten egg ‘glow fuzz’ and our native abilities to damp our metapresences should be enough,” Tiamat said. Definitely Tiamat. “If not, plan B.” Plan B was for her to rush in and beat the Beast nearly dead. What she was afraid of, though she wouldn’t say so, was that she wouldn’t be able to stop at ‘nearly’.

  Tiamat did not like Beast Men.

  Gilgamesh had no problem with her dislike.

  They backed off through the brush to over a hundred yards away, leaving the chain behind. Gilgamesh attempted to ignore the chiggers gnawing on his ankles. Tiamat found a clear spot in the shadow of a dead tree and they meditated, together. Once they damped their glows Gilgamesh slowly rolled forward a sick-up Beast Man lunch and dropped it in the center of the chain circle. His nerves wouldn’t stop howling about danger – he was feeding a Beast Man with this trick, which he didn’t like one bit. If they had to resort to Plan B he was out of here as fast as his feet could carry him, depending on Tiamat to protect him. Tiamat understood and thankfully didn’t say a thing.

  The Beast Man charged at them, or so Gilgamesh’s panic said. The Beast wasn’t even in sight yet. Gilgamesh let the panic ready him for action, as Sky and Kali both recommended. The Beast Man hove into view, galloping like the blond bear he was. He pounced into the sick-up and began to feed, Beast-like, scattering the sick-up élan around in a wasteful fashion. Gilgamesh noted the Beast wasn’t fully bear-shape, retaining human hands and possessing, humorously, an oversized squirrel-like blond tail.

  As Tiamat had predicted, the Beast didn’t even notice them. Definitely an untrained Beast.

  Quick as a breath Tiamat burned juice, sprinting forward to grab the chain and yank. The chain slithered through the tow hook and got the Beast around the middle. Tiamat circled a foot-thick sycamore, fixing the chain to it, and barked predator at the Beast, getting his attention. The Beast charged; Tiamat backed off to just behind her second loop of chain. The Beast reached the end of the chain, which pulled tight, bringing him up short. Tiamat then pulled on the second chain, catching the right arm of the Beast. She ran in, looped her end of the chain around the Beast’s neck, and pulled. The Beast tried to rush her, stopped, held by the first chain and the anchor tree, and then fell with the crack of vertebrae breaking.

  The Beast’s harem proved next to useless; of the Beast’s five captives Tiamat had to kill three. The other two women needed help, one because she was wounded, recently captured, and the other because her mind was gone because of the insanity of the situation and because she was within two days of going Monster. Tiamat shot both with tranquilizer darts and had Gilgamesh tie them up. “They’re not mine. Not mine. Never will be mine,” Carol said. He read ‘hopefully’ in her glow.

  Carol backed the truck in as close as the underbrush allowed, unloaded the baby fork-lift from the back of the truck and fork-lifted the weighty Beast inside. Then after securing all three captives, they headed off toward Baytown in the large panel truck.

  Two phone calls later, they stopped the truck in a copse of woods along a bayou about a mile north of Baytown. To Gilgamesh’s surprise both Sinclair and Hephaestus waited for them; the other Crows, quieted by Sky, huddled fighting panic two miles away. Hephaestus stayed back, in whispering range, but Sinclair slowly walked forward through the trees.

  “Ma’am, I’m Sinclair,” he said, stopping about fifty feet away. Nervous. Panicky. Gilgamesh thought calm thoughts and tried to lend his support to his friend.

  “Glad to meet you. I’m Carol Hancock, commonly referred to as Tiamat by you Crows,” she said. “I understand how stressful this is for you. How can I help?”

  “If I talked to Gilgamesh for a few minutes, ma’am, while you unload your cargo, this would help a lot.”

  “No problem,” Carol said. She had quieted her Tiamat nature down to nearly nothing, but both he and Sinclair knew this wouldn’t last. There was a Beast to move.

  Sinclair knelt to the ground when Gilgamesh reached him. Gilgamesh knelt beside him, well away from the remnants of the dirt road where the truck sat. “Thanks,” Gilgamesh said, in his quietest whisper. “The Beast’s neck is broken, but that’ll heal soon. Neither of us know how long, though.”

  “No problem,” Sinclair whispered. Gilgamesh heard Tiamat cursing at the Beast, which snapped at her despite his paralysis. In a moment, he heard her dragging the Beast and the wooden pallet underneath him over toward the back of the truck. “Any idea how this happened? I thought Beast Men had to be taught how to draw élan in a way that kept their captive women alive.”

  “I have a theory,” Gilgamesh said, falling back into the cadences of Philadelphia. He told Sinclair the story Focus Teas had told Tiamat, about how Focuses had learned, untaught, how to metasense juice levels and keep their Transforms from going into Monster or going into withdrawal. “Because some of the Beast Men have been taught this, the others may know how it’s done without having to be taught.” Behind them Tiamat started up the delivery truck’s forklift and lifted the pallet and the Beast out of the back of the truck.

  “It’s terrifying what we don’t know about our own abilities; it’s even more terrifying to realize how deep the juice has all of us in its grip and how we can get information from the juice itself,” Sinclair said. His mind engaged on the mystery, and his panic receded. It was like old times in Philadelphia. “You’ve become a Crow legend, you know. You and this Arm are changing everything.”


  “Yes,” Gilgamesh said. “That’s the whole point. Has Focus Rizzari sent you her article on the Cause?”

  Sinclair nodded. “I sent it back to her, with corrections and additions.” His eyes twinkled. “I think we’re going to end up collaborating on a formal Focus slash Crow viewpoint piece about the Cause. Oh, and household Transform viewpoint as well, because much of the document came from The Anthropologist.”

  This brought forth a low Crow laugh from Gilgamesh. “If you don’t watch it, Sinclair, you’re going to become as much of a Crow legend as I’ve become.”

  “As long as it’s in the publishing industry, I won’t mind.”

  The forklift wobbled as it went over a rut, spilling the blond bear Beast to the ground, eliciting a vicious round of curses from Tiamat and a loud whimper of agony from the Beast. “Duty calls,” Sinclair stood. He strode right up to a powerful Tiamat-aura Carol and dropped a tuned sick-up on the Beast, robbing it of its juice and sending it unconscious. Gilgamesh stayed back. Hephaestus crept forward and joined him.

  “She’s doing it, isn’t she?” Hephaestus said, while Carol and Sinclair cautiously chatted, mostly talking Beast Man business.

  “Doing what?”

  “Winning us over one Crow at a time,” Hephaestus said. “For good or bad, it’s because of you this is happening. Watch your back.” His comment wasn’t a threat. It was a warning about the senior Crows.

  “I understand,” Gilgamesh said. From the Crow perspective, Tiamat already had one Crow pet. Why would she need more? From the senior Crow viewpoint, Gilgamesh had upset their favorite apple cart, the one saying the Crows couldn’t trust the other Major Transforms. “But doing nothing is far riskier.”