No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (26 page)

He gave Haggerty a very serious doctor smile.

“You’re likely stiff from your immobility,” Zielinski said, walking right up to Haggerty, avoiding the vomit on the floor.  “Here, here and here,” he said, using Keaton’s knife as a pointer.  “These stiff points are caused by immobility; they’re stiff because your body isn’t building muscles there, but is instead taking raw materials away.  However,” he said, pointing out several places, such as the backs of her calves and her abdomen, “you can already feel extra muscles growing here.  Once these muscles get too far out of proportion relative to your other muscles, you’re doomed.  No amount of exercise will be able to save you.  You’ll die when your chest and abdominal muscles grow so large they go into spasms and contract, shattering your ribs and ripping apart your heart and lungs.  Of course, long before that, you will have gone mad from pain – as an Arm, you’re immune to all pain killers, and you won’t go into shock or unconsciousness unless you’re in a safe environment.”

He leaned right up to Haggerty’s sweat-streaked face.  “So if you aren’t going to cooperate, you’re as good as dead.  No one is going to bother to teach an uncooperative new Arm how to survive things like these muscle problems.  Since you’re going to die anyway, you might make a nice experimental subject.  That’s my specialty; I’ve seen more Arms die under my care than your two captors here have killed.  Perhaps I can convince your two captors to help me with a little vivisection project, as they’re as interested as I am in seeing how a living Arm ticks.  From the inside.”  He paused for a beat.  “On the other hand, you could just decide to cooperate.”  Throughout Zielinski’s entire speech to Haggerty, he held his tone of voice blandly neutral, until the last line, which he made sound pleasant.

He backed away from Haggerty and offered the knife hilt first back to Keaton.  She took the knife without a word.  Hancock backed away a few feet, her face stone.  She hadn’t liked it when he had been a hard-case doctor when she was a young Arm, either.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Haggerty said, to Keaton, her gaze avoiding Zielinski furiously.  “My point about Eissler is that if you add her capabilities together, they look like she developed her tricks because she’s being pursued by a powerful enemy, most likely a Transform enemy.  Someone more powerful than Eissler herself.  She has speed and stealth for avoidance.  She didn’t go for power and strength.  The enemy’s got to be an older Arm.”

That explanation would work, Zielinski decided, though he doubted that Eissler’s enemy was an Arm.  He predicted her enemy was one of the male Major Transforms, with their metasense range advantages.  Haggerty’s was quite an insight, especially from a young Arm only a few days past her transformation.  He studied the two older Arms.  Keaton gave Haggerty a subtle fish-eye, implying that Haggerty would live, too valuable for her mind to kill outright.  Hancock gave him a similar look, hopefully for the same reason.  Neither wanted to talk about the implications of Eissler having an enemy powerful enough to endanger her, given that she had been an Arm for longer than Hancock and Keaton combined.

After the question and answer session ended, Zielinski followed the two mature Arms upstairs from the basement, soaked in sweat, and took a long breath of fresh, sweet air.  Handling Keaton and Hancock together reminded him of the day the full Focus Council had grilled him.  He suspected Major Transforms synergized when they worked together, an as yet unproven hypothesis.  Their force of personality wasn’t just a linear sum, but involved a significant multiplicative term.  He had worked out a curve for the Focuses, based on his best guess that seven Focuses had about the same force of personality when working together as about ten to twelve individual Focuses, measured in what he termed individual Focus units (IFU).  Putting today’s stress value into the equation didn’t work; the non-linear term increased too quickly, noticeable with just two and a fraction Arms.  He ran through several possible alterations, discarding them one after another.  He eventually found one that fit the data and did the math in his head.  His hypothesis would work if the synergistic effect turned out to be about three times…

“Hank?” Hancock said.  He blinked and realized he had been standing in the middle of the kitchen with a sandwich in his hand.  Hancock stood right in front of him and Keaton stood over by the kitchen table watching with her cold, evaluating eyes.

“Sorry, ma’am, and ma’am.  I was doing math in my head.”

“A situation has come up in which I would like your input,” she said.  Flat stone face, utterly unreadable.  Overly formal in her speech pattern.  Her tone got his attention.  “Ma’am Keaton wishes to borrow you for a day for some expert consultation.  Without my presence,” Hancock said.  “We’ve worked out a deal, but the recompense is going to be based on how useful your consultations are.”

Interesting.  Sounded like a compromise to him.  Keaton would want his services, free, because Hancock was her subordinate.  Hancock would want payment, agreed to in advance, because he was her subordinate.  From an Arm’s perspective, it made sense that what Hancock possessed wasn’t automatically at her superior’s disposal; their dominance was more of a pack carnivore dominance structure than a normal human hierarchy.  Focuses worked similarly, though Focuses acted more like a pack of ravenous wolves than a pride of well-fed lionesses.

“I have no problems with this, ma’am.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, then,” Hancock said.

On the way out Keaton buttonholed Hancock.  “I want you back here on July 1, understand?”  Hancock nodded.  “Anything else comes up, use my PO Box or my answering service, just like everyone else.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hancock said.  She nodded at him and departed, leaving him alone with Keaton.

He turned to Keaton, whose stone face revealed nothing.  She didn’t say a word to him.  Instead, she went back down to the basement, after indicating with her eyes that he was supposed to stay where he stood.  He heard some banging, the scraping of metal on metal, and the sound of a heavy chain slithering across the floor.  Some sound of defiance in Haggerty’s voice, followed by the sound of a few slaps.  Keaton came up the stairs, seething.  She snarled at him under her breath, then sighed, exasperated.  Again, she wasn’t annoyed at him, but at Haggerty.  She motioned for him to follow and he did, quietly.  She led him out the back door, and then down a steeply sloping trail to what he thought was the next-door lot.  Not to a house, but to what appeared to be an abandoned stable.  A third place she owned, all in a row.

Inside the stable was more exercise equipment, and a few items too big to fit into Keaton’s basement.  Also, he found a small medical lab, catered to Keaton’s level of expertise, which didn’t extend much beyond drawing blood, reading juice numbers and taking blood pressure.  He found two TI juice level analyzers, one of which was bagged for storage.  He recognized the bagged beast as the one he taught Keaton to use back when they first met.  The converted stable was a quiet place, and Zielinski breathed a sigh of relief to be out of hearing of Keaton’s miserable Monster.  The medical equipment and lab setup made the place seem comfortable, far more pleasant than the house up the hill.

Keaton sat in an old wooden chair, and motioned for him to sit on the lab bench.

“How much have you figured out?”

Zielinski sat.  Thought for a moment.  “You’re having juice problems.”

Keaton grunted.  “How much has Carol figured out?”

“Nothing.”  He was sure of that.  Hancock seemed to believe Keaton could walk on water if she wanted.  The idea that Keaton might be having problems of her own never entered into her mind.  “How much do you want to talk about it?”  Always a safe question to Arms.  He needed to pay attention, here.  No woolgathering.  Not paying attention to an unsafe Arm would bring about the threat cycle.  Luckily, he wasn’t suffering through one of his periodic bouts of depression.  From experience, he knew Keaton had no patience for those.

“Some.  More than is wise.”  Keaton put her head in her hands.  “I got a huge dose of bad juice, as bad or worse than Monster juice.”

“From the CDC’s Detention Center?”

She glowered at him and nodded.  “I thought I could throw it off by just washing the shit out of my system, but the old trick didn’t work.”

“What sort of symptoms are you exhibiting?”

“Here,” she said, pulling up her sleeve to expose her right elbow.  Zielinski took it, carefully, and examined it.  A patch of skin on her elbow, extending about three inches up her arm, had become heavily calloused.  Almost leathery.  Stubbly, as well, save that elbows normally didn’t have a five o’clock shadow.  He held up his hand for a moment, searched her desk until he found something that would magnify – a jeweler’s loupe.  He examined her leathery patch again.  Thick, bristly hair, wider than normal human hair, and recently shaved.

“Hmm.”

“Speak.”

“How long does it grow?”

“About six inches.  It’s almost quill like, but not quite.”

“Anything else?”  The evidence was bad.  The implications were worse.

“Unfortunately, yes.  I’m having worse muscle problems than normal, including nodule growth.  It’s messed with my senses, as well.  About half the time now I miss tags on Transforms until I’m within short range.  Yesterday, I flat out missed the fact that Haggerty was an Arm.”

“Short range being a hundred yards?” he asked.  All of this troubled Keaton greatly, and he understood why.  Problems of this nature might be fatal to an Arm.

Keaton nodded.  He waited.  She didn’t say anything.

“When I got injected with Monster juice during the assassination attempt it took the combined efforts of a Focus, a Crow and a Chimera to reduce the problem from life threatening to a chronic annoyance,” he said.  “However, I’m not a Transform.  What worked for me might work better on you.”

She slapped her hand on the lab bench.  “You expect me to go up to a Chimera and say ‘fix me’?”

“Um, right.”  He remembered Rover, now named Sir Robert Sellers.  “The one who cured me can keep his instincts in check under normal circumstances, but still regresses when working with the juice.”  Sellers’ subconscious wouldn’t let him retain a fully human shape, at least the last time he had seen the older Noble in person.  Taking bad juice from an Arm, and not taking the rest, would likely be impossible.

“How about the Crow?  Do you think one of them might be able to help?  The fucking Chimeras killed the Crow who followed me.  Back in Philadelphia.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“Gilgamesh.  Who is too fucking young to be able to manipulate bad juice the way the older Crows do.”

Zielinski nodded.  He really wanted to meet Gilgamesh in the flesh after hearing so much about him from Carol.

“Meaning that to deal with an Arm, the Arm would probably have to be tied up and knocked out,” Keaton said.  “So unless we can get one of the older Crows working for us, which isn’t damned likely, your solution is right out.  Any other ideas?”

Zielinski closed his eyes and thought, reviewing what little Keaton told him.  “Do you have any data on your juice use?  Graphs of your juice count by time, from before and after?”  He opened his eyes, but Keaton had vanished.  In the distance, he heard something large and metal opening, then closing.  Some sort of safe.  In a moment, Keaton came back with one graph, which she put on her lab bench beside him.  She rustled through some papers on the bench and from the bottom of one stack, came up with another graph.

“Before and after,” she said.  He studied them and whistled.

“This says you have three points more of fundamental juice than before.”

“What?  Explain.  Fully.”  She was in his face, where she didn’t need to be.  He already knew the importance of this.  On the other hand, threat displays were second nature to her.  Zielinski wasn’t about to give Keaton his line about not having to follow her instincts.  She was the first Arm he told that to, while she hung him by one foot fifty feet over an asphalt parking lot.  Repeating the advice would be insulting.  He was sure she remembered.

Instead, after attempting to quiet his panic, he slowly went through the mathematics of what he had instinctively figured out.  She nodded and followed the derivation, although she hadn’t been able to figure it out for herself.

“What does this mean?” she asked, when he finished.

“Burn it out.”

Keaton backed off, thinking through the details.

“More.”

He knew she could work out the logic.  Instead, she wanted confirmation.  “You have bad juice masquerading as fundamental juice.  It isn’t.  If you take your juice count down to the normal point where you go into withdrawal, you’ll be burning out the bad juice on the way.”

“Medical explanation.”

He gave it.  “In conclusion, these bad juice fractions,” what the Crows termed élan, “that are masquerading as fundamental juice should get burned off first because they shouldn’t be there to start with.  However, even if they aren’t, burning a few percent of them off by taking yourself down into a near withdrawal state, then repeating as necessary, would still work, though such a process would take longer.”

“Less risky than leaving the crap there,” Keaton said.  “Any other ideas?”

“Give me a research lab, some researchers, and a few years, and we might be able to come up with some other ideas.”