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

“My cell has been dark for four days, my estimate.  They’re trying to break me by using the juice weapon.  With patience, they will succeed.  I’ve come to the conclusion there’s a good chance they’ll either kill me outright or drive me into withdrawal to break me to their service.  One of the top-end Focuses is orchestrating this; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I end up as a totally new me serving said Focus.  So, if I’m your enemy, please just subdue me and if you can, find a way to bring me back to myself.

“Anyway, while incarcerated here I had several clandestine meetings with Focus Sarah Teas.  She attempted to recruit me to her service, but stuck in a kicker: I had to accept her tag.  Voluntarily.  She said Focuses could tag anything and proved her assertion with several interesting tricks.  I didn’t accept her offer, not trusting her or her boss, who I feared was Shirley Patterson, the behind-the-scenes boss of the first Focuses.  Her demonstration did get me thinking, though, about tags.  So much of what a Focus can do is funhouse mirrored in our Arm capabilities, so I had to investigate.  Examining Teas’s furniture tag – don’t ask – I realized I’d already used the Arm version of the tag on my Chicago lover, Bobby.  The tag was triggered by a ritual of Bobby saying ‘I’m yours’ and me responding ‘you’re mine’.  Yes, a normal triggers this version of the Arm tag; however, physical contact with the Arm is necessary.  I never mentioned this to my boss or my researcher because the amount of juice used was small and the effect was mildly embarrassing – making me more tolerant of Bobby.  This version of the Arm tag isn’t infallible; once when Bobby screwed up and I was low on juice the tag had no effect on me.

“I experimented on myself and on objects to figure out the limits of Arm tags.  I’m convinced one Arm can tag another; I believe the tag must be voluntary for both Arms, and the tag’s effect will be to amplify and formalize the status of the dominant Arm over the lesser Arm.  A lesser Arm in a tagged situation should not grate on the nerves of the dominant Arm unless she willfully wishes to challenge her boss.  I also tagged myself and discovered that by doing so I gained greater control over myself, similar if not identical to what I would gain from one to two hours of meditation and self-visualization in preparation for combat or hard exercise.

“Which leads me to my conclusion: the purpose of the Arm tag is to be a shortcut.  If there’s anything an Arm tag can do that can’t be done in a much more time consuming way, I haven’t found it yet.  Furthermore, the Arm tag should allow the Arm to set up a formal dominance hierarchy, providing a concise solution to the mission Focus Rizzari gave me regarding how the Focuses should deal with the Arms: all the Focuses have to do is negotiate in good faith with the dominant Arm; whatever agreements are made would then apply to the lesser Arms as well.

“This is all I know.  I do have one message for Stacy Keaton: if you don’t already know this, the Major Transform I refer to as Officer Canon orchestrated my takedown.  Thank you very much for your time.”

The old Tiamat finished and became Carol again, who immediately dropped to her knees, skittered over to the Skinner, and lay her head on the Skinner’s feet.

“You don’t have to do that, Carol.  The current you hasn’t given me any offence.”

“Ma’am.  Was this real?” Carol said.  “Oh, this is so confusing.”

“I suspect you burned juice to fix the memory in your mind,” the Skinner said.  She moved her foot from under Carol’s head and sat down beside her.  “A trick I haven’t yet mastered, exactly the sort of silly trick I’d expect the old you to think up.”  She motioned to Gilgamesh, who sighed, put away his rotten egg and came out from behind the rowing machine to join the Arms on the floor.

Carol sat up and took his hand.  He was ready to leap out of his own skin, edgy and closing in on the horrible climax stress state.  Too many strange things!  Too much stress in general.

“Do you remember how to do any of this?” Keaton said.

Carol nodded.  “I do now.  If you want I can tag an object.  It’s utterly pointless.”

“Try one of your knives.”

Carol pulled a knife from its sheath along her right thigh and moved juice.  She put the knife on the floor between the three of them, where its barely visible juice seeped away into a minute amount of dross over several minutes.

“Huh.”

“Ma’am,” Carol said.  “May I request that you tag me?”

“Do the trick again with the knife,” Keaton said.  Carol did so.  “Gilgamesh, pick up the knife.”

The juice seepage stopped when Gilgamesh picked up the knife.  He studied what Carol had done, but his metasense found so little juice in the knife he couldn’t make out any details.  Keaton thought.  “It marks him as yours but doesn’t change him,” the Skinner said, definitive.  “Useless in our current situation.”  She sighed.  “But another piece of evidence in favor of the Myth Hypothesis; with a lot of Arms and Focuses in a tribal setting this would be quite useful.”

She looked back at Carol.  “I thank the former you for her insights and her experimentation.  However, I want to think about this Arm tag concept for a while before I make my decision about whether to tag you or not,” the Skinner said.  “Besides, you’re not getting on my nerves yet.”

“Ma’am,” Gilgamesh said.  He foresaw several bad possibilities.

Keaton looked at him and nodded.  “I agree; you’re right to fear what this might do to you, kiddo.  No tag experimenting.”

Gilgamesh relaxed.  The last thing he wanted was any Arm juice experimentation on him with unknown juice technology.

“Now scat, both of you,” Keaton said.  “I’ve got far too much to think about.”

Carol Hancock: April 13, 1968 – April 14, 1968

“Ma’am?” I asked, after the afternoon exercise session was over and I had exercised myself into exhaustion.  I had lost track of Gilgamesh again.  Also, I had been filled with worries ever since Focus Rodriguez made me whole.  “Do I have permission to ask a question?”  Keaton nodded.  “Are you going to keep me here?  Forever?”  The thought of leaving her terrified me.  The thought of staying here terrified me.  As with most things now, the question confused me.

Keaton leaned on the leg press machine next to me.  “As soon as you’re recovered enough to hunt on your own, you’re gone.  The three of us have a lot to talk about before then.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right now I want to show you something.”

I nodded.  Keaton motioned to me and I followed.  Keaton had brought in a box from her workshop.  She opened it and brought out a machine.  She set it up, drew a blood sample, mixed it with chemicals from three vials, and dropped it in the machine.  A little while later, a thermal printer spat out nearly illegible numbers on the greasy paper you get in library copiers and medical devices.  “See this number?”

“Yes.  I still can’t read, ma’am.”

“Okay.  Take my word for it, you’d be surprised if you were able to read it.  It reads 99.  This hunk of crap is accurate to only a point and a half, but you get the picture.  Your juice count is about 99.”

“Ma’am?  I’m acting different.”  A juice count of 99 used to have me crawling the walls in the need for juice.

“Yes.  You need to know this.  Since your rescue, you seem to be rather oblivious to low juice until you get down to about 94, and then low juice hits you real hard.  You go nuts.  You’re going to need to re-learn how to sense your own juice numbers.”

“Go nuts?”

“That is, do anything for juice.  Including trying to juice suck your superior, namely, myself.  Or Gilgamesh.  Tagged Transforms wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Gilgamesh?  I would end up with nasty Monster juice.  Ewwh.  Oh, and I might injure him, too.  That probably wouldn’t be good.

“Ma’am, I went after one of Focus Rodriguez’s tagged Transforms when I wasn’t low on juice.”

“Then you have a bigger problem than I realized,” Keaton said.  “We can work on that tonight.  Now, dinner?”

Time for me to cook.  I smiled, got up, bounced into the kitchen and started preparing.  I loved to cook.  I would cook all day and night if allowed.  I had already cooked so much for Keaton she had to buy three more freezers.

I served the lobster and beef with scalloped potatoes Florentine, fresh asparagus and beets, homemade bread, with an almond torte and a chocolate cheesecake for dessert.  I swore that my dinner nearly brought tears to Keaton’s eyes.  Gilgamesh, who had appeared from wherever he disappeared to, looked panicked at my preparations.

I expected Keaton to take me out and beat some tagged Transform control into me immediately after dinner, but Keaton had other plans.  We did a quick workout, and then she rolled a television out into the living room.  Keaton sat in her throne-like easy chair while Gilgamesh and I nestled against each other with our backs to the pale couch.  “They’re going to be talking about us, tonight.”

I couldn’t believe it, but it was true.  NBC was doing a special on the Arm Flap, as they called it.  “The Arm Flap: The United States government captured and tortured an Arm to death; the only other surviving Arm has declared war on the government because of the ill treatment of her comrade.”  The opening shot was of an aerial view of a smoldering ruin of a building surrounded by rolling hills.

Wow.  The amount of crap the media had figured out was amazing.  They knew who I was, who Keaton was, who Focus Goddamned Biggioni was, who Fucking Agent McIntyre was and who fucking Assistant Director Patrelle was.  I scratched off one of the names on my mental target list, Security Director Leeson.  He had died in the explosion that destroyed the Detention Center.  So very sad.  They even mentioned Henry Zielinski without calling him a pervert or an evil mad doctor.  P.S. only the latter was true and I loved him for it.

They knew about feeding volunteer Transforms to Arms, who arranged this, when and why.  They showed a snippet of a male Transform going into withdrawal.  I held on to Gilgamesh tightly when they showed that.  The scene brought up some bad memories.  They also showed the aftermath of the California Spree Killer and I got embarrassed when Keaton dug her toe into my ribs and said “that was you, dipshit” before I remembered I had done the dirty deeds.  I found this interesting; the media identified me as the California Spree Killer, even though the Feds had not.

The media presented both sides for once.  I was amazed.  Some intrepid soul had gotten into whatever prison Zielinski resided in and he had cooperated, willing to tell the world what life looked like from an Arm’s perspective.  Juice cravings.  Kill or die.  Trying to figure out who to kill and who not to kill.  The horrific burden of being forced to choose between inventing your own morality or dying.  The effects of the FBI’s abuse of me in St. Louis.  “They chained her to a post and shot her up, just to see how quickly she was able to move and how many bullet wounds she would be able to live through.”

Gilgamesh felt locked in his head, thinking hard thoughts.  I spent some time comforting him, rubbing his shoulders.  I remained conflicted about how I felt about him.  I loved him in some screwy Arm fashion, but he wasn’t my lover.  He was a possession, but he was also unownable.  Few of my emotions toward him made any sense to me.

“Zielinski’s good,” Keaton said.  “He knows enough to have damned both of us for eternity in the eyes of the public, but he didn’t.”

He was ours.  He would never have done such a thing.  Or did I extrapolate too much?  I wished more things made sense to me.

“The media has never done this before.  Present our side,” I said.  “Have they?”

Keaton shook her head.  “We’ve always been fully demonized.  However, there’s blood in the water and this is just another way for the sharks to take a bite out of the President and the current administration.  Two months from now I’m sure we’ll be demons again.”

“He’s one of your gang, isn’t he?” Gilgamesh said.  He meant Zielinski.

“That’s ‘one of us’, kiddo,” Keaton said.

“He’s famous, important, even known to the Crows,” Gilgamesh said.  “I’ve read all his research papers.”

“Someday soon you need to make his acquaintance,” Keaton said.  “Despite your panic around doctors and researchers.”

“It’s a common Crow problem around most doctors.  We don’t trust them.”

“Neither do I, but him you trust.  Your life may depend on it.”  Pause.  “Mine did.”

Scary words from Keaton.  This was from the part of her I didn’t know.

The special news report went on and on and on.  Most was dull and repetitive; they presented both sides and I found the other side, the demonizers, less than interesting.  I already knew I was evil.  They didn’t have to prove my evilness to me.

“Look at this!” Keaton said, true amazement in her voice.  The special had about fifteen minutes left to go and they were dragging out something on the Chimeras.  The media called them Male Monsters, but named them correctly as one of the four types of Major Transforms.  Four types.  This was new for the media.  They had a grainy movie of one, sort of like home movies of the Loch Ness Monster, on his way to attack a Clinic in Minneapolis.  I had seen that grainy home movie before, on a local Chicago station.  They reported many other sightings, as well.

“When did they discover Crows, ma’am?”  The media knew about Focuses and Arms, of course.  Chimeras made three, and that left Crows as the fourth.  One – two – three – four!  Logic!