“What? Pregnant?”
“Absolutely.”
“Viable?”
“Let’s see.” Hank cut and exposed the womb, which as he expected didn’t reek of juice. Inside was a single six cm long human fetus. “Viable.”
Ann snapped pictures, making clucking noises. “We can’t publish this.”
“Hell, we shouldn’t even know this,” Hank said. “If the old biddies ever find out, they’ll kill anyone who knows.”
“I can rent you a billboard in Times Square if you want. They can’t kill everybody,” a different voice said.
Hank lurched forward in surprised terror, sticking a gloved hand in the dead Monster Transform’s abdomen to catch himself. Ann’s camera fell from her hands, accompanied by a “Fuck!”
Keaton. Hank turned from where he rested, elbow deep. Yes, Keaton, along with the Focus and two of her bodyguards. Keaton looked like hell, as if she had been fighting a Hunter in a threshing machine, and someone blew up the threshing machine mid-fight. Lori did the stone face routine, completely closed off from the world. Dressed as she normally did, in shorts and a halter top, he guessed she had picked up over a dozen bullet wounds, all healed to small red scars.
“That Gal wasn’t the only one, by the way,” Keaton said. “I’ll tell you, it’s a hell of a thing to be in combat with some damned Monster and have a fetus fall out when you gut her.” She made a slice motion with her right hand, and then put a false shock and awe expression on her face.
Ann made gurgling noises and backed away. Hank stripped off his gloves, looked around for the glove box, and put on a fresh pair. “Ma’am. I assume you’re here because you need my services?”
She nodded. “Uh huh. And to whine and strategize. The world’s done fell in.” She said the last sentence in the Commander’s voice. “I ended up being too close to my own bomb and got shrapnel imbedded in my bones.” Where it would never come out.
“Ma’am,” Hank said. “We’ll start with an X-Ray, then. May I inquire...”
“I’m jittery with too much juice because I know I need surgery,” Keaton said. The Focus, Hank noticed, stayed behind the Arm, but within touching distance. Something no Arm, in ‘business’ mode, should ever allow.
---
“Jesus,” Ann said, delivering the developed X-Rays back to Hank. Hank glanced at the X-Rays and agreed.
“Okay, I knew it was stupid at the time, but I was having too much fun taunting Enkidu and trying to entice him into charging into the minefield,” Keaton said. She pointed at the torso side-view X-Ray. “That mother right there feels like it’s stabbing me in the guts with each step I take.”
“So, how much do I need to know about whatever disaster happened to the two of you, the one neither of you are talking about, before I operate?” Hank asked.
The Focus glared at him, but Keaton shrugged. “Nothing, but I’m going to tell you everything anyway, while you operate. The story should keep my mind off the pain.”
Hank cut, fished through the Arm’s body, and retrieved pieces of shrapnel. With an Arm with the juice to heal, he didn’t particularly care how much damage he did when he removed the shrapnel, just how much pain he caused. Keaton might be mostly immune to pain, but pain could overwhelm any Arm or Focus if she suffered too much. Which she would happily pass on to him, likely with a knife.
“I had a psychotic break in a battle prep strategy session and killed Peggy Svensen,” Keaton said. “Because she dropped the pencil she was flipping between her fingers, I guess.”
Arm Svensen was one of the Arms Hank had never met. She transformed during the run-up to the Battle in Detroit, two years ago, and had been missed by the authorities and the Arms. She survived as a feral Arm until she got caught poaching Transforms from the wrong Focus, in particular, from Focus Michelle Claunch’s oversized household. Claunch captured the young Arm and sold her to Keaton, apparently without telling the authorities, the Focus Council or the other first Focuses. According to Carol, Svensen shared Carol’s metasense quirks, showed signs of having taken Monster juice on multiple occasions, and after Keaton’s training she became a ‘pacifist Arm’ in the Haggerty mode. Carol hadn’t liked her.
Hank yanked a long shrapnel needle from a rib. “Ma’am, this happened in a room full of your battle leaders?” That is, a room full of Arms and leading Focuses. Why wasn’t Stacy dead?
Keaton grunted and didn’t answer. “This was after the Council got strange on us,” the Focus said. “I wasn’t there. I was off mind-scraping Tonya, attempting to figure out why the Council pulled out of the fight. Tonya had ended up voting for the unanimous decision, and she didn’t know why.”
“Okay, this happened in a room full of Arms. How is all this possible?”
“Carol, Flo and Amy protected me as I was writhing on the floor and foaming at the mouth.”
Oh. “An enemy induced your psychotic break.” Unless Carol had been leaving out details on purpose, Stacy’s psychotic breaks didn’t end up with her on the floor, foaming at the mouth.
“Uh huh,” Stacy said. She grunted in pain, and Hank caught the edge of a non-verbal, unnerving, predatory growl. ‘Do this right or I’ll torture you for a week’, she said without words. He concentrated on reducing the pain. “I know the psychosis signs; I can’t prevent the attacks but I know the signifiers afterwards. I didn’t have them.” She paused. “Carol’s convinced an enemy did it because of her read on my psychology. Amy’s convinced that if this was a real psychotic break she would have been the target, not Svensen. Which is true. Flo says she metasensed something off or strange the moment before I broke.”
“The other Arms?”
“To a one, they dropped my tag as soon as the battle was over,” Stacy said. “Whoever was behind this was good enough to fool Bass and the rest.”
“Even Arm Sibrian?” Sibrian possessed the best metasense of any of the Arms.
“Yes, though Mary was dancing around finding me some map or other I didn’t really want. She had her back turned to the rest of us.”
Sew. Slice. Yank. Sew. Slice. Yank. “Ma’am…”
“You think this was an inside job, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m fairly well convinced it wasn’t, but only because of Amy’s arguments concerning her ‘great unknown enemy’.” She paused while he sewed. “Truthfully, I can’t rule out any of the Major Transforms in the world except Carol, Lori here and Tonya.”
“You can’t rule out Arm Haggerty?”
“Yeah, she said you ‘never do what the enemy wants’, and she said she wasn’t going to break with me over this, and she said she’s afraid she’s next and all that song and dance. It still could be her,” Keaton said. “This destroyed my stature. If Haggerty challenges me and becomes the boss Arm five months from now” when Haggerty’s year of service ended “I think she’ll climb to the top of everyone’s suspect list. I still won’t trust her if she doesn’t. This was too convenient for her.”
Hank paused mid-stitch and nodded. “So…”
“You’re wondering why I’m convinced Carol isn’t behind this? Well, for one, I’m still alive. She could have just chopped off my head and said she was protecting the rest of the Arms, and that would have been that.” Stacy sniggered. Hank froze, sewing needle in his hands. “As to why she didn’t challenge? She’s too goddamned cautious around me. When she finally gets up the nerve to challenge me, I’m either going to wet my pants and die, or say ‘yes, ma’am’.”
“She thinks she owes you too much, ma’am.”
“Well, she owes me a lot less, now. She used this to bargain her way out of her monthly visits. I also think she’s bought into Amy’s ‘great ultrapowerful enemy’ hypothesis and the ‘never do what the enemy wants’ argument.”
“Ma’am, I may be able to help,” Hank said. He turned back to the X-Rays and grimaced. Although her left leg was shrapnel free, her right leg bones resembled a pincushion. “Did you take any blood samples r
ight after the event?”
“Uh huh, Flo did, just for you.”
He turned to the Focus. “You were out of metasense range, then?”
The Focus nodded. He realized the reason she stayed within touching distance of Keaton was fear of a relapse or second attack. “I took Tonya down some dark roads in her mind, but besides exhausting the two of us, the mind scrape didn’t accomplish a thing. We never figured out why the Council acted as it did, or how the Council managed to suck her into it. She didn’t want to vote ‘yes’, but something forced her to, and that’s scary, because Tonya’s not exactly easy to roll.” The Focus sighed. “I did manage to fish out of the depths of Tonya’s mind that this was the fourth time she’s seen this happen; twice at national Council meetings and once at a northeast region meeting. I also suspect it happens more often than she remembers, on less portentous issues. At these meetings.”
“It’s likely instinctive among the Focuses, the need for unanimity, that someone’s figured out how to trigger,” Stacy said.
“I want to run something by you, ma’am, and I’m asking your permission ahead of time because something I may say may give inadvertent offense,” Hank said.
“Fire away,” she said. “Given what everyone I’ve talked to since I killed Svensen’s been thinking, I’m fairly inured to crass insults at the moment.”
“Ma’am,” he said. He paused.
“Just don’t stop the surgery.”
“Yes, ma’am, of course ma’am,” he said. “Ma’am, this happened after the Focus Council pulled back their armies?” Stacy grunted in the affirmative. “Arm Svensen was not well liked?”
“Hell, the only Arm who hadn’t wanted to kill her at one time or another was Amy, and when Carol tried to convince Amy to tag her, Amy refused, saying she felt like she needed to take a shower every time she dealt with Svensen. You have one of your zingers, Hank. Out with it.”
“This was a proof of concept attack, ma’am, and done in uttermost safety,” he said. “The enemy chose to do this when Lori and Tonya were out of metasense range, and when Arm Sibrian was distracted, the latter being something that happens on a regular basis. The target was someone who people won’t start a crusade over. The timing, doing this after the Council pulled their armies out of the fight, means the Arm community can’t blame the attack for causing them to lose the war. Now that this is proven to be a useful attack, the enemy will use this again, and when they do, it will mean utter defeat, if not death, to the target.”
“Your espionage background is showing again, Secret Agent Zielinski,” the Focus said. Hank couldn’t respond, now attempting to do a low-pain extraction of a 3 square centimeter piece of shrapnel buried deep inside Stacy’s femur. “Unfortunately, your analysis sounds disturbingly correct.”
The piece of shrapnel wouldn’t budge. “I’m going to need to saw this open,” Hank said.
“Well, fuck. Go ahead and do it.” Keaton paused. “I heard from Lori that you met our enemy Goldilocks. Our most likely ‘great unknown enemy’. I don’t think he could be behind this. Not if he’s what he appears to be.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Hank said. “I…” He blinked and went back to sawing. Hadn’t he been about to say something?
“Rizzariiii…” Stacy said, her growl filled with predator.
“Sorry, household secrets,” the Focus said. “Executive summary with the secrets extracted? Yes. Wilson, or whatever his name is, could have been using the capabilities of the Major Transforms around him to pull this off without you noticing. In theory.”
“Fine,” Stacy said. “Saw faster, dammit!” After a ten second growl, she continued with “Another possibility is that one of Carol’s old ideas is true. I’m getting fonder of it as time goes on. What if the juice really is alive and is out to destroy us?”
Hank flinched, not wanting to think about how terrible that might be. This topic was running out of steam, with far too much surgery to go. “I have some evidence to support that,” he said. When the Focus didn’t charismatically glue his lips shut, he continued with “How would you like to learn about chain reaction transformation waves, ma’am?”
“Better than suffering in silence,” she said. “Talk slower and cut faster!”
Chronicle III
The Angel, The Hero and The Diplomat
Gail Rickenbach: October 6, 1971
Dreams shouldn’t include pain. What Gail saw in her dream was the Madonna dream figure, only this time with cartoony bird wings, in the process of booting a baby bird Gail, all in pinfeathers, out of her warm cozy cartoon nest. What Gail simultaneously heard in her dream was fisticuffs, guns firing, Hunters roaring, and screams. What Gail simultaneously felt in her dream was the pain, as if someone tortured her, needles under her fingernails pain. What Gail realized as she experienced this was that her friend Wendy Mann was in danger.
She awoke screaming as she yanked herself to a sitting position, her scream dissolving into the words “Vie glorieuse vaut un âge sans nom.” She found Van’s arms around her.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“What the fuck was that!”
“A badly translated Sir Walter Scott misquote, if I’m not mistaken.”
“What?”
“What you said.”
“No, what woke me up.” Holy fuck, that dream had been superhumanly unsettling. Van’s uncanny response, too. “The nightmare.”
“A real dream, or the Dreaming?”
Her heart started to slow. Her husband knew too much. Focus Gail Rickenbach fixed the juice of her Transforms, as the nightmare had caused her to short the lot of them. “Positive feedback loops break down ongoing control attempts by causing internal mental self-examination.” A nightmare attack on a Focus wouldn’t work; as the Focus got more agitated, she would short her Transforms, which would cause her Transforms pain and make the Focus more agitated, causing… This nightmare attack probably lasted less than a second, given Gail’s ability to move juice in an instant.
Then the pain she caused woke her up.
“Hun, you aren’t making much sense here.”
Exactly. The words did make sense, but she didn’t understand where they came from, or why she thought them. “I’m still connected to something else.” Gail kept her eyes closed and her mind engaged with whatever the fuck messed with her mind. A cartoon image came to her, an enemy of the Focuses, a monstrous Focus turning on her own kind, wielding the Focus community hammer-like against Focus Wendy Mann. “Wendy’s in trouble.”
“Tell her to shoot it.” Van freed one hand to scrape a glance at the clock on the nightstand. Gail kept her eyes closed, but she never ever turned off her metasense. Van groaned at the time.
“And so it starts,” she said, aloud, without bidding herself to speak. The age without a name, no doubt, ‘glorieuse’ or not. “It ends as I end.” Her voice didn’t sound like her voice.
“Gail, that sounds fucked. Is someone speaking through you?”
“I think I’m sharing the edge of somebody else’s nightmare,” she said. Talking with her own voice. Van relaxed. “We need to go stop Wendy from doing something stupid.”
So much for relaxed. “Good luck with that.”
Van had a point. Wendy, if anything, was stubborn. “Which means there isn’t any time to waste.” She engaged her charisma. “Move. Now.”
---
Gail glanced at Van’s wristwatch as they pulled to a stop in front of Wendy’s junkyard trailer park. Not too close, given the idling trucks Wendy’s people were loading out front. The time read 4:48. Gail slammed open the left rear door of the car and jogged forward into the thin fall fog. Van, Kurt, Sylvie and Vic piled out of the car behind her and tried to keep up.
“Focus Rickenbach,” Nelson Gilleland said, stepping forward to block the open gate. He was one of Wendy’s chief lieutenants. He shifted his semi-auto rifle and came to attention as he stood in her way. “I’m afraid…”
“Sorry,” Gail said
, exerting her charisma and motioning with her eyes. Nelson moved out of the way. She felt full on now, and nothing could stop her.
She tried to make sense of the organized quiet chaos as she walked toward Wendy, who she metasensed not too far away, on the inside of the compound. Two of Wendy’s normal men walked by with a stretcher between them, Joyce Van Poon, a woman Transform of Wendy’s, unconscious and with a red blood-stained towel over her chest. Two other of Wendy’s Transform women and two of her Transform men shuffled behind, carrying boxes and suitcases, and they all showed recent bruises on their arms and faces.
“Wendy, what do you think you’re doing?” Gail said, after pushing through the rest of the chaos to where Wendy and her head of household, Walter W. Walter, directed traffic. Mr. Walter, dressed in his old Navy uniform, the one he only wore when he wanted to exert his importance, gave Gail the usual withering glare older men regularly reserved for her. Clothes. It had to be her clothes. What had she slipped on as she and Van and the rest ran out of the house? She glanced at her feet. Left: pink elephant fuzzy slipper. Right: flip flop. Damn. She didn’t want to think about the rest.
Wendy turned. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she wasn’t crying now. She stank of gun smoke and her right fist and left elbow showed raw scrapes. “Leaving town.”
“What happened?”
Wendy didn’t answer.
“You can’t leave!”
“Don’t you dare stand in my way,” Wendy said, voice lowering to a Keaton-like growl and pushing her charisma in a defensive fashion. She walked over to Gail and kept walking. Gail backpedaled, not understanding where Wendy’s hostility came from, and not feeling confident enough to challenge. Wendy forced Gail out of the streaming crowd into the moon-cast shadow of a rusted trailer. Away from Mr. Walter, Wendy softened a bit. “I shouldn’t be barking at you. You’re the only Focus who’s supported us.”
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