Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (47 page)

“Oh.  Uh, right.”

“Well, the tags definitely interfere with each other.  We can assume we won’t get Tiamat in here to adjust hers, so we need to adjust ours around hers.  I’ve already adjusted mine, but you need to tune yours also.  Move the tag up-frequency a bit.”

“Up-frequency?  I think you’ll need to show me what that means.”

He nodded.  “Uh huh.  The adjustments will be different for each person.  Everybody’s different, plus Tiamat was getting tired by the time she finished tagging everyone, and some of her later tags aren’t as tight as the earlier ones, so we’ll need to handle those differently.  I can tighten them up for her, if she gives me permission.”

“Wow.  This is complicated.”

Gilgamesh flashed his quick smile.  “A little.  I think we can do the entire household in just a few days, and I bet doing so will buy you another three triads.”

Three triads.  “That’s a lot,” Gail said slowly.  “This can’t be what Sky and Lori did.  There’s so much more to their document I still can’t understand.”

“This is just a start.  Before we can do any tuning, though, we need to heal your people who have juice structure damage.  Any idea why Sylvie’s messed up so badly?”

Gail reddened.  “She’s been my test subject ever since I transformed.  She…I…I made a few mistakes with her, and did some nasty tests.”

“We’ll start with her, first.”  He paused.  “Also, I have a few ideas about individual tuning, and I think there’s a few things you can do to your own juice structure.  We’ll need to do a lot of work to get to a hundred, but I bet we can get you up to twenty three triads or so pretty quick.”

Gail boggled.  “You think I can support a household of sixty nine Transforms?”

“Easily.  We’ll do even more later, just as soon as we can figure out how to implement Sky’s multi-Transform tuning tricks.  Don’t forget, I’ve never done this, either.  Oh, and whoever came up with a hundred was just guessing.  My instincts tell me we can go beyond a hundred.  We also need to find some way to lean on Lori and Sky to tag each other.  The tag would buy them another four triads.  Maybe more.”  Gilgamesh smiled.  “A tag would cut down on their constant arguing, as well.”

“Gilgamesh,” Gail said.  “You know what this means?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“All the Crows and Focuses
must
do this.  Forty extra people is only a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people who are dying.  If all the Focuses and Crows did this, we’d be saving
thousands
.”

“Ah,” Gilgamesh said, “that’s harder.  Crows and Focuses?  A lot harder.”

She metasensed Carol’s emotions leap from seductive to agitated.  After less than a minute of agitation and scurrying around her house, she grabbed Van, ran down to her car, and drove off toward the Branton.  “Gilgamesh?  What’s going on with Carol and Van?”

“Something interesting,” Gilgamesh said.  “Carol’s emotional state is one I recognize: her mental preparations for a dominance fight.”

“Shit!” Gail said.  “What did I do?  Why’s she going to challenge me?”

“I don’t think she is,” Gilgamesh said.  “Take a closer look at Van.”

She did.  He wasn’t terrified, just nervous, about what one would expect for being an Arm’s baggage.  However…  “He just dropped one of his zingers on Carol.  My God!  He talked her into challenging Haggerty!  She can’t!  She’s still under the Dreaming attack, and I still haven’t been able to find her and chase away her attacker.”

“Van did a good thing,” Gilgamesh said.  “Forward momentum is good for an Arm, and Tiamat has it now for the first time since her disastrous trip to Los Angeles.  If you want to worry, worry about Haggerty.”  No question about who he supported, now was there?

They waited, entwined, as Carol sped over to the Branton, dropped Van off, and sped away again.  Van jogged to the elevator and took it to their floor.

“We’d better get presentable,” Gilgamesh said.  “He’s got a million ideas flowing through his head, and I think we’re about to get a visit.”

---

“…and he told you to
rape
me?”  Gail couldn’t believe Gilgamesh even deigned to talk to that monster.

Van had somehow deduced Gilgamesh’s conversation with Enkidu while talking to Carol.  Gilgamesh hesitated before admitting the meeting, but once he got over his embarrassment, he told them the story.

“The Hunter civilization isn’t ours,” Gilgamesh said.  “It’s rougher, stronger, anti-empathic and goal driven.  What they think of as evil isn’t what we think of as evil, and vice versa.  Oh, and they’re hopelessly misogynistic.”

“I woulda never guessed.”

Van paced around Gilgamesh’s room, dodging boxes and furniture and a big stack of old blankets, seemingly oblivious about, well, the sex.  “He’s not an oracle, then,” Van said.  “He could be wrong about everything, including his comment about Bass being under some hidden Focus’s thumb.”

“I wouldn’t trust anything he said to me,” Gilgamesh said, and paused.  “I’m not going anywhere.  His offer is a trap.  I can see what the Law’s done to him, and what it would do to any Crow who had the brass to take him up on his offer and take control of the Law.  The Law’s too powerful, connected to too many Transforms and Major Transforms.  I do
not
want to be run around by the juice.”

“That still doesn’t negate the fact that Carol’s going into her challenge with Haggerty ignorant of the real problem: that she’s got something in her head,” Van said.  He had told Carol twice about Gail’s inability to find Carol in the Dreaming and her fears of Patterson, and both times she acted as if she hadn’t heard him, matching Gail’s experience with the issue.  “What are we going to do?  What can we do?”

Gail licked her lips, amused to see Van so protective of Carol.  “I’m going to go into the Dreaming and get a posse together.  We’re going to find Carol by finding Patterson and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

Both Van and Gilgamesh blanched.  Gail gave them a turned up smile and a bit of charismatic spine stiffening.  “It’s time for the world to see what I’ve become.”

Carol Hancock: December 5, 1972

A thirty by eighty foot shop floor in a converted warehouse.  A brownstone for an office across the alley from the warehouse, connected by an added door to the brownstone next door, hiding two artists’ studios.  A second story above the shop floor, hidden from the outside, serving as the actual living area for the half dozen people associated with this operation.  A hidden basement under the brownstone, larger than normal for the Bronx, to hold the armory.  Several obscure European sports cars and ultra-luxury vehicles on the shop floor, all undergoing highly expensive repair.  Two Harleys in a similar state of extensive repair, and two more in working order.  Just another incarnation of EFCR, Inc., Haggerty’s standard front business.  Expert Foreign Car Repair.  Her profit margins were outrageous.  She kept her front business separate from her war against the FBI, and no one here in EFCR knew about Haggerty’s merc shop, and vice versa.

As usual, the place was a madhouse.  From my inexpert opinion, as someone who in her pre-Arm life found changing a light bulb to be a challenge, Hog number one would be getting a new engine.  Haggerty burned out Hog engines on a regular basis, pushing them to speeds they shouldn’t ever be pushed.  The place pulsed with concert-earsplitting modern rock, some crap my old ears rejected as audible mayhem.  I believe they called this random noise heavy metal or something equally unharmonious.  From too much time around Haggerty, I recognized the band as Deep Purple, but I didn’t recognize the song.  Probably a new release.  Just what the world needed.

The shop decorations were care of Haggerty’s cheese whiz, Mark Castlemont, her equivalent of Zielinski, only instead of a scientist, she had herself a sensitive emotional artist.  Castlemont’s art was lunatic asylum quality, derived from too many years of Arm association, but all his pieces showed off his excellent technique.  Originally, he only painted, but over the years he had hit about every art form imaginable, pushed hard by his Arm lover.  I couldn’t imagine what the EFCR customers thought of his masterpiece, the bronze exploding human heart with a Harley springing from the heart’s center.  The piece adorned the walkway between the office and the warehouse proper.  The sculpture gave me the creeps, even after knowing the Crow artistic genius, Merlin, had draped dross art on it resonating both with the broken heart and speeding Hog themes.  Merlin’s art enhancement was at Haggerty’s request, in trade for some time modeling for him.  I didn’t know how she had moved the sculpture here from Atlanta without destroying the dross art.

The rest of the shop was similarly eerie and overdone, although I appreciated an only mildly abstract painting of Enkidu holding Keaton’s leg, from the Battle in Detroit, that hung to the side of the shop door leading to the semi-attached office.  Haggerty derived a great deal of glee from any misery Keaton endured.

Haggerty appeared from nowhere on the other side of the shop, her back straight and a hard glare in her eyes.  All in black.  Her workers ignored us as if we weren’t there, our presence drowned out by the clangor of the current song on the turntable and our mature Arm predator effects.

She appeared forty feet away from me, past cars under repair and dismantled Hogs.  Some machine started up with a sound like a jackhammer, a weird counterpoint to the heavy beat of the music.  I didn’t flip on my predator beyond the usual use to hide from normal eyes, I didn’t charge, and I didn’t speak.

Haggerty knew, though.  I hadn’t achieved tactical surprise, at least not yet, but strategic surprise?  Definitely.  She radiated the bleary-eyed aura of an Arm stuck doing too much paperwork not too many seconds ago.

“Carol, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Haggerty said, cracking her knuckles and eyeing the repair shop for useful weapons.  “You should have waited until you had some real success.  Now all you’re doing is buying yourself a beat down.”

I didn’t respond.  Arms normally responded to such comments at the start of a challenge fight, or stated their case before the challenged Arm stated hers.  Psychological challenge.  I, for one, remembered my best, calling Keaton a poser for instinctively dressing like a man.  She had shaken off my comment by responding that my point wouldn’t be valid until she grew a penis.

Instead of responding, I put an extravagantly false ‘taken by the crazy’ expression on my face as I shut down my eyes and switched over to my metasense, as if I were a lunatic Crow.  The crazy jitters came natural to me now, as I carried a mere one point of juice less than the Arm maximum.

This challenge fight would be different than any other Arm challenge fight I had ever been in, or witnessed, or even heard of.  I messed up my presentation on purpose.  Haggerty had beat me in part, last time, by knowing my every move before I made it.  That bit of Arm idiocy wouldn’t ever happen again.  Not after this fight.

The beat of the music pounded around us, screaming something about shouting and mountains and pictures of home.  The machinery clattered and banged as Haggerty’s people took no notice of us.

“Shit,” Haggerty said, getting down in a crouch.  I didn’t charge.  I walked toward her, vaguely emulating the stagger of a juice zombie and radiating fear.  I felt the challenge anger and the overwhelming confidence necessary to challenge an Arm superior, but I hid them inside.  She didn’t think I set the psychology of the challenge, but I did.  I just didn’t do so verbally.

I had actually practiced, in front of a mirror, letting drool escape the right corner of my mouth and dribble down my chin as I walked.  Along with the drool came a stutter in my step, a twitch in my left hand, and a fixation of my eyes on an imaginary invisible person stalking up behind Amy.  To her right, one of her people drove an Aston Martin into the shop, got out of the vehicle, and lovingly rubbed the hood with a terry cloth.

“I know you’re in there, somewhere, and I’ll make sure you get fixed, afterwards.”  Her soft supportive words hid a Haggerty temper tantrum, a volcano of pissed Arm, best translated into the English language as ‘you let something stupid grab you and now I’m going to need to waste my precious time and beat the crap out of you to fix you, and I don’t care in the slightest if I beat you extra hard this time, you stupid cunt’.

I hissed and flared my nose, but I still didn’t charge.  I mock-stumbled over a crack in the floor and flashed into what should have been a metasense invisibility, save for the fact I didn’t succeed.  On purpose.  I fixed my non-seeing eyes on the man polishing the Aston Martin’s hood and edged toward a stalk.

By fooling Haggerty, my psychological presentation proved she wasn’t my superior.  Or would, as soon as I stopped fooling around.

“Baaaasssss,” I said.  My voice emulated Florence Rayburn.  The song lyrics referenced a ‘black footed crow’, which I couldn’t believe was completely random.  “You’re going to diiiiiie.”

Haggerty took a step to the left and tuned her predator to sight and metasense invisibility.  She took a step to the right and one back.  “Flo?”

This was rich with irony, better than I had hoped.  I hadn’t counted on Haggerty getting this confused, even though each of us three speed oriented Arms – Rayburn, Bartlett and myself – could, with extensive work, masquerade as either of the others.  I didn’t wear a Rayburn disguise or show anything of Rayburn other than with my voice.  Haggerty took my weak-ass bait anyway.  I let my right hand shake more vigorously and continued my faux stalk on the Aston Martin man.