All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (34 page)

“I can agree to such negotiations as well,” Focus Adkins said.  She turned to Gail.  “Don’t put this last bit into your newsletter.”  Gail nodded.

So, after all this time, they finally understood Rogue Crow’s interest in Detroit.  Stalin had been his target all along.  Enkidu’s rampage, triggered by Stalin’s Attack Focuses sticking their noses into Enkidu’s business near Chicago, was the trigger behind the expected wedding attack and many of the other unexplained events in Detroit, such as the attempt to blackmail Hard Luck into attacking Stalin.

“If I may ask, ma’am, how did Rogue Crow set up Newton to be a danger to you?”  Gilgamesh said.

“Richard skillfully hid inside the Crow more bad juice than I have in my household, all set up with advanced Crow tricks,” Focus Adkins said.  “Your friend was a bomb which would have gone off inside my household if I wasn’t already prepared for a Crow attack.  I caught him on his approach to my household and neutralized him.”  She smiled and stuck in the knife with her next words.  “After his capture he chose to cooperate with me and tell me everything he knew.”

Kali’s face turned to stone and her eyes turned to ice.

“Ma’am, may I offer a word of caution?” Gilgamesh said.  Stalin raised an eyebrow.  “Arms are not Focuses, ma’am.  I’m not sure how a Focus would react to your last statement, but to an Arm, those are fighting words.”

Focus Adkins smiled.  “Interesting.  You don’t care that I know more about you, Gilgamesh, than any other Focus does.  You do care that I now know far more about Arm Keaton than anyone but Focus Biggioni does.”  She paused.  Gilgamesh felt Kali readying for violence.  “Gilgamesh, I’m negotiating with the head Arm, not some baby Focus who doesn’t know her place.” A dig at Gail, who visibly shrank at Focus Adkins words.  “I understand full well that I can’t use this information to make the head Arm behave.”

Kali relaxed.  “It’s your armament in a mutually assured destruction stand-off.”

“Exactly.”

Gilgamesh had a bad feeling Stalin and Kali were far more alike than he wanted to think about.

“You can believe that if you want,” Kali said.  Now Gilgamesh felt Kali go in for the verbal stab.  “I believe you’ve switched sides.  You’re negotiating with Arms and Crows, allowing the negotiation to be written up in a Focus newsletter, and supporting the Council’s decision regarding recognition of male Major Transforms.”

A flicker of anger crossed Focus Adkins face.  “I’ve seen the light,” she said.  Lying.

Kali chuckled.  “Let
us
see the Crow.”

---

“Ma’am, can we talk?” Newton asked Kali, after they left the café and walked to their cars, parked a relatively safe block and a half away from Stalin’s household, and under guard by Focus Mann’s second string guards.  Responsible, no doubt, for the cars’ continued possession of all their hubcaps.  “Yes,” Kali said.  She looked at him closely.  “You’ve lost some of your skittishness.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.  “I…  Ma’am, I must confess that, before, I doubted you.  I couldn’t talk to you in person, even though you wanted me to.  I’m willing to do that now.”

Kali snorted.  “You failed me, Crow.  I have no use for you.”  She turned away.

Dammit!  Gilgamesh wanted to thrash both of them, Kali for playing her mind games and trying to make Newton into a pet, Newton for being, well, the Newt.

“Ma’am!”

“I’ll tell you what,” Kali said, without looking back.  “You want back in my good graces, serve Gilgamesh as you would serve me.  When he says you’re ready, I’ll consider your offer again.”  She climbed into her car, slammed the door, and drove off.

Newton looked crestfallen.  Yup, Arm Pet.  Focus Mann’s guards stared around them, shocked.  Keaton had just taken their car.

The whole exchange was enlightening, in a bad way.  Regaining Tiamat’s good graces, if this Detroit mess ever ended, would not be either easy or simple.  Arms were just too difficult about relationship issues.  Interpersonal friction, alas, was a
challenge
to them.

“Climb into the car with us,” Gilgamesh said, waving at Gail’s car.

“Car?” Newton said, his voice reduced to a rattish squeak.  “With a
Focus
?”

Gail put her hands on her hips and glared.  Sylvie did as well.  Gilgamesh repressed laughter.

“I wasn’t giving you options, Newton,” Gilgamesh said.  “Unless you’re ready to give up on Kali.”

“That’s so unfair,” Newton said, acquiescing with a mutter and getting into the back seat of the car with Gilgamesh.  “You’re all so unfair to me, all of the time.”

“Ah, Focus Rickenbach, could you get a message to our household…” one of Focus Mann’s guards said.

Gilgamesh ignored him.  “Just listen,” Gilgamesh said.  He turned to Gail.  “Are you okay?”

“No! I’m not okay,” Gail said, letting lose all the emotions she had kept bottled up inside.  She took a deep breath.  “That was horrible!  Focus Adkins is…is…she stood up to Arm Keaton!  I didn’t think anyone could stand up to Arm Keaton.”

“I’m more surprised Arm Keaton could stand up to
her
,” Sylvie said.  “She’s, ewwwwh, I don’t even have words for it.”

“She’s not so bad,” Newton said.  He ignored Gilgamesh’s glare.  Hadn’t he just told the Newt to keep his mouth shut?  “Or wasn’t, after she finished interrogating me about everything I knew.  That was rough.  Anyway, it’s all by house rules.  I offered to write them down for her, which she didn’t appreciate, but I found it easy once I figured out the trick: any orders without juice in them you could ignore, while any orders with juice in them were based on a house rule, even orders from
normals
.  It’s rather mesmerizing.”

“Ah, ma’am,” Focus Mann’s guard said.  Kurt, Gail’s chief guard, took him aside and they started talking.

Gail looked at Newton and dismissed him as a lightweight.  Gilgamesh preferred to think of Newton as a project.  A project taking a whole lot of effort.  “Do you think you could come by and look at the apartment’s furnace, Gilgamesh?  I think we might have some work for you,” Gail said.  Work that paid quite well, by Crow standards.  He got about half the market rate, which he didn’t mind and which made the Focus and her people quite happy.  He nodded.  “Have you gotten anywhere on your problems?” Gail said, relentlessly curious as always.  Gilgamesh shook his head.  “Surely Wini’s story about this ‘Richard’ will help you on your quest to clear Guru Shadow’s name.  It’s gotta be connected.”

“Huh?” Newton said.

Gilgamesh told Newton an abbreviated version of his kidnapping and rescue, and the appearance of ‘Shadow’.  By the time he finished, they had finally left Adkins neighborhood and were halfway back to Gail’s household.  “Unfortunately, I’m the only one who believes Shadow isn’t Rogue Crow.”  He didn’t say anything about his still useless and not fully mastered walking zazen meditations.  Far too sore a subject.  Much like Kali and her reaction to the bill she had gotten from Corkscrew – Focus Fingleman – over the Bass rescue: a million dollars.  Kali hadn’t decided yet whether to pay up, negotiate, tell Corkscrew to go to hell, or show up one day with an army of thugs.

“He couldn’t be Shadow!”  Newton said.  “I met Wandering Shade.  He’s nothing like Shadow at all.  He’s
angry
.  He’s also marked himself with the Law.”  For a moment Gilgamesh wondered why Newton hadn’t been marked with the Law.  Then he realized that Newton probably hadn’t met Wandering Shade’s standards.

“Wandering Shade is himself marked with the Law, the same Law as his Beast Men?” Gilgamesh said.

“Uh huh, that’s what I said.”

Interesting.  The ‘Shadow’ who had attacked Guru Arpeggio’s home hadn’t shown any signs of withdrawal scarring in his glow.  Rogue Crow had to be good enough at his disguises to disguise his own glow.

Which made his supposed ability to disguise himself as Shadow even more plausible.

For the first time in over a month, Gilgamesh had hope.

Chapter 8

“Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”

– The Buddha

Carol Hancock: May 1, 1969

“Ma’am,” I said, respectfully, as Keaton opened the door. It was about 9:00 in the evening, not too late.  I had just finished a fruitless conversation with Gilgamesh, now even more convinced Shadow wasn’t Rogue Crow.  Hank, more nervous than usual because of the approaching Rickenbach wedding, bowed to Keaton.  He was here to be both grilled and fucked by Keaton.  I thought she would appreciate it.  Every cat should have a songbird she can give as a gift to her master.

When Keaton let me in, I bowed my head humbly, and then got a whiff of the air.

“What’s that
smell
?”

Keaton grunted and headed back towards the kitchen. I followed, and Hank tagged behind. In the basement, the clack of weights accompanied Bass’s exercise session. She would be about five months old as an Arm, now. I noticed that Bass still kept Keaton’s house a hell of a lot cleaner than Haggerty had.

“Bass’s entertainment,” Keaton said. “Hell of a reek, isn’t it?” I pegged her at about a 125 juice count, high and tolerant. Excellent to see.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. A reek of rotting corpses, and other things even worse.

Hank blanched, an amazing sight.  As I had predicted, the introduction of Hank, Tom and Ying into my life had forced me to clean up my act.  I no longer even owned a torture chamber.  Which meant Hank was no longer used to the darker ways of us Arms.

“I won’t let her go after people the way she wants to, so she picks up stray animals off the street,” Keaton said. “I swear she can’t even think straight unless she’s torturing something. It’s about time to make her clean out this set and get a new batch, though.”

“Hmm,” I said, locking my reactions down tight. “She’s gotten into that sort of thing?”

“Yeah,” Keaton agreed, as she pulled a piece of pizza from the refrigerator. She wasn’t being any better than I was about rigorous compliance with an Arm’s optimal diet.  We drove Hank to distraction.

I leaned against the counter and let myself seem casually respectful.  Last month, Bass wasn’t being allowed out without supervision.  I had wondered why, but hadn’t been interested enough to ask.  Now, I understood.  Downstairs, I heard the whimpering of tortured animals rising above the sounds of the weights. “She really prefers people, but I put limits on that sort of nonsense. She’s going to be hell on wheels when I let her loose, though.”

Keaton studied Hank and waved the pizza under his nose.  Yanking his chain – he was close to vomiting from the stench.  “So you’ve recovered well from the operation, Hank?  Ready for me?”  Eissler’s advice on the subject of how to keep Arms happy had been correct.

“Ma’am,” he said to Keaton, respectfully.  Keaton was the sexually dominant one in their relationship.  As if you had any doubts, of course.

Keaton glanced at me and her eyes narrowed. “You’re sitting on something. Out with it.”

I shifted mental gears in a hurry, dropping all thoughts of tortured animals, Hank and sex.

“I have a favor to ask of you, ma’am,” I said.

Keaton crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow.

“I would like to request additional combat practice with you while I’m here for my monthly visits,” I said.  In each of my visits with Haggerty, as we went through figuring out our relationship, we always sparred in practice combat.  Right now, Haggerty was teaching
me
combat techniques. It would be a bad thing if a stand up fight between us ever went the other way. I figured I had damned well better work on my combat skills if I didn’t want to find my relationship with Haggerty flipped.

“Why?” Here it goes, I thought to myself. I had spent the last week getting my story straight.

“Haggerty, ma’am,” I said, bowing low and letting a hard smile show through. “I think that some extensive combat practice might be a good idea.”

Keaton paused for a second, with a little ice in her eyes and then said, “Good.” No argument, no price. Sounded to me like Keaton was a little nervous about Haggerty herself.  “Keep an eye on her.  She’s going to try and flip the dominance out of pure social clumsiness on a regular basis.”

I nodded.  “It doesn’t help that she has such crazy ideas.  Her latest is that the core of the Dreaming is left over from the last Transform emergence, and we’re somehow connected to these previous-emergence Major Transforms, who she thinks are still alive, as ancient Monsters.”

“Now you know how I felt,” Keaton said, zinging both me and Haggerty.  Now that was just damned disquieting.  I grunted in response, while Hank kept his mouth shut and his thoughts ultra-hidden.

“Read this,” Keaton said.  She passed me an envelope.  “It will quiet your fucking nerves.”

The envelope contained a short letter.

Focus Bitch

The time has come for you to pay the price you owe me.  You’ll know when – when no eyes are upon you and the target is in your sights.  You know who.  Soon.

Your Friend,

Bill Concord

Shitfuck.  Hank came over and took the letter from my hands.

“Hargrove received this?”

“Huh.”

“There have to be other traitors,” Hank said, and I nodded.  “I’ve met Hargrove and her people.  They don’t have what it takes.”

“Oh, you are so right about that,” Keaton said.

Then she smiled.  “I’ve got something else for you, Commander,” she said.  Hank went stony faced, but I could almost hear him grinning.  I followed her through her reeking basement, thankfully not encountering Bass, then through a secret door into the huge bunker she kept hidden under her back yard.

I still wasn’t used to Keaton’s new skill, or old skill she hadn’t had much call to use: picking the right people for a job.  Both Haggerty and I had remarked on how good Keaton was at picking people – not that such a thing pleased Amy, as in her world there should be someone better than Keaton at everything.  Haggerty despised Keaton with a passion.

Inside the bunker Keaton had a huge table set up, with duplicates of the church and reception hotel, and the surrounding streets and buildings, and a preliminary battle order in place.  She had moved her war room down here, and given it more space.  “It’s time to figure out what we have to work with.  What you’re going to give me to work with.  What our battle strategy is going to be.  Hank, sit back and watch.”  Hank nodded and took a chair.

Shit.  Time to think on my feet.  “Ma’am, in an ideal world, only Arms and Chimeras would be in the fight.  We don’t have that option, with only three Arms and those three titled Nobles who partner with Occum.”  Duke Jeremy Hoskins, whose combat form was an improbable land crab; Earl Robert Sellers, whose combat form was that of a speedy over-muscled dog; and Count Horace Knox, whose combat form was a vaguely humanoid super-strong demon with large red-plated armored scales on his body.  I didn’t bother mentioning the trainees of either variety.  “Necessity forces us to use Focuses, their normal and Transform household bodyguards, panic-resistant Crows and our controlled people in the fight.”

The Dearborn Hyatt and its surroundings appeared to be nearly impossible to defend.  I stared at the model, walked around it, frowning the entire time.  The gargantuan monstrosity, built for big-four auto conventions, had two dozen-story towers, thirty conference rooms, including a grand ballroom where the reception would be held, and over two dozen official and unofficial entrances.  The back of the complex was bordered by Michigan Avenue and the Rouge River; the hotel faced northwest, on a dedicated side street with a short and wide portico-shaded loop in front of the main entry – and a helipad.  Couldn’t forget the helipad.  Across the street was an old factory, currently divided into warehouses, an eyesore perhaps sixty years old.  The main restaurant angled off to the north, the grand ballroom was on the second floor of an extension that angled to the south, with a sweeping bank of windows facing west. A second dining hall, ballroom and conference room complex continued the semi-circle, attached to the far end of the grand ballroom and facing southwest.  A six level partly-underground parking garage nestled between the U of these buildings, to the northeast, separated by twenty feet of air, and connected by a maze of walkways.  The Southfield Freeway and its attendant urban clutter bordered the hotel complex on the east.  To the west was a huge parking lot, bounded by a four-lane road running north-south, and to the south, a smaller area of more parking.  The obvious attack direction on foot was from the west northwest, paralleling the Rouge River, cutting around a nearby college campus and the old divided-up factory.  The more I studied the place, the more vulnerabilities I found.

“Don’t discount those Transforms,” Keaton said, after I finished my preliminary glaring at the Hyatt.  “In my career, Transforms have been improving as fast as us Arms.  Also, don’t forget about the tamed Monster women of the Nobles and Hunters.  The improvement curve on their combat capabilities is similarly spectacular.”

I nodded.  The latter must be those ‘women’ with single names on Lori’s list that followed the Nobles.  Inferno had been training some of them, my guess.  I hauled out the master list and showed it to Keaton.  The list covered the trained Transform and normal bodyguards we could borrow, their combat proficiencies, and how pliable their Focuses were.  And the Nobles and their ‘household’.

“Good.  I’m going to be the sergeant in this fight,” Keaton said.  “You’re the general officer.”  The Commander.  This sort of arrangement would have driven a normal nuts, but Arms had the mental flexibility to cope.  Besides, wasn’t it cliché to have an experienced NCO bossing around the raw Lieutenant in those stock war movies?

“Yes, ma’am.”  Keaton was the best of us in battle tactics, but Haggerty showed promise.  She didn’t have the experience yet for anything real, though.

“Your job is to set up the battle for us and make overall strategic decisions during the battle.”  Keaton gave me one of her sly grins.  Okay, she manipulated me, we both knew it, but I didn’t mind. She had run head games like this since the beginning.

I studied the little markers set up around the church, a well-arranged defensive perimeter, and stopped.  Keaton had a similar arrangement around the Hyatt, a quarter mile out, strongpoints with good sightlines, with the reserves on the grand ballroom roof.  Not half bad if you weren’t facing Major Transforms and Monsters.  “Ma’am, you didn’t come up with this, did you?”

“No.  A normal cobbled this together.  It’s better than anything else I thought of, though.”  It reminded me of the initial instinctive advice she had given to me regarding the fight in Dallas.  Strategy at this level wasn’t one of Keaton’s strengths.

“Too diffuse,” I said.  “While we and the Hunters have relatively equal speed, their better pack women, the speedier Monsters, can match our Major Transform speed, giving them, in a defensive set up like this, the ability to overwhelm a single strongpoint and get too many of their forces to the church, or Hyatt, before the bulk of our people could react.”

“Dammit,” she said, and shook her head.

I first concentrated on the church.  I pulled in the forces to the church proper, and in a ring around the church grounds.

“What do you see?” Keaton said.

I studied the map for a minute.  “There are two basic ways our enemy can approach: on foot, and in vehicles.  We know the Hunters use semi-trucks, for instance.  If they attack in the daylight, when the wedding’s going on or immediately afterwards, I’ll bet they’ll attack from vehicles.  If they do so, we don’t want a defensive perimeter they can get inside of quickly, or disable as I mentioned earlier.  We need everyone in close.  In addition, to make this a trap, we need to have a substantial number of our people hidden away, to make us appear vulnerable.”

Keaton nodded, buying my analysis.

Days of work lay ahead of us, as we needed to create dozens of contingency plans.  Working at Arm speed, Keaton pounded battle scenarios into me until my eyes crossed in concentration, as I set up contingencies and strategies, and the best way to run the rehearsals with our people.

Sleep was optional.

Tonya Biggioni: May 8, 1969

Tonya dialed the number her spies had found for her.  It rang, she counted, thirty seven times before someone picked up.  “Yah?”

Perfect.  “This is Focus Tonya Biggioni.  We’ve met.”

No answer.

“I understand I’m not supposed to know how to get in contact with your group, but I think we can be of some use to each other.  The person I need to talk to will remain unnamed.  You know who I’m talking about.  The favor I want from you is for you to go ask this person if he would be willing to talk to me.”

She could practically follow the Chimera’s thoughts.  “I’ll be back,” he said, in his deep voice, and ran off.  He was heavy enough for Tonya to hear his footsteps as he ran, at least the first several.

Tonya did Focus mentoring paperwork as time passed.  Bored with the paperwork, she read Gail’s ‘Young Focus League’ newsletter, which included an interesting article about Wini releasing a foolish Crow from captivity in return for protection, purchased from Stacy.  The article was masterful for what it didn’t say.  Tonya was impressed.