Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (36 page)

“You want me to get the FBI involved?” he asked.

“Not officially.  You’re known to have quite a few mercenary friends, beyond your FBI contacts.”

Dr.
Zielinski sat back, rested his elbows on the chair arms, and put his fingertips together under his chin.  His fake ‘mercenary friends’ were a cover for his involvement with Stacy Keaton.  However, he knew Tommy could pull in quite a few people, both from inside and outside the FBI.  Not only that, but there was opportunity here…

“How secure is your lab?”

“We sweep for bugs regularly,” she said, surprised at the question.

“I also have a project with a problem,” he said.  He would have to trust Focus Rizzari’s security.  “You likely know by now that I’m involved with new Arms.  The newest Arm, Carol Hancock, is being held in St. Louis against her will.  The FBI, or at least one of the nastier parts of the FBI, is going to kill her or let her fall into withdrawal and die unless my allies and I find a way to spring her.  For reasons you can likely guess and I can’t speak about, I need an unclaimed Transform, near death.”

Focus Rizzari’s eyes widened with the look of someone who had stepped into a new world, one she had never imagined.  Dr. Zielinski smiled.  “Your mercenary connections, I presume,” she whispered.

She knew of his connection to Keaton.  That surprised him.  “Yes.  However, be forewarned.  You don’t want
those
mercenaries anywhere near your project.  They’re impulsive and prone to dominance fights that, for what you’re working on, would be impossible to avoid.”

“Rats,” she said. 
Dr. Zielinski heard rustling and a murmured ‘shi-it’ from behind him.  Focus Rizzari’s Transform bodyguard had figured out the unclaimed Transform he needed would to be fed to an Arm for juice.  “I’m not sure it’s worth the life of a Transform to save an Arm, even one who’s going to die.  I’m not convinced the Arms are worth saving.”

Focus Rizzari’s assistant pulled up a chair and sat down, uninvited.  She was a plain looking young woman, sturdy and intense, with unkempt black hair and poorly applied makeup. 
Dr. Zielinski leaned back, surprised at her forwardness.  “Bullshit,” the young woman said, to Focus Rizzari.

Focus Rizzari glared at her assistant.  The assistant glared back.  The faint scent of juice in use caught
Dr. Zielinski’s nose, and he realized Focus Rizzari’s assistant was a woman Transform.  Not bodyguard quality.  To his surprise, the woman didn’t back down in the face of her Focus’s irritation.  “Lori, if my hypothesis is correct, Arms are essential and we should do everything we can to get more of them functional.  Stacy Keaton is not, in my opinion, a good example of what an Arm should be.”

Her hypothesis? 
Dr. Zielinski studied the woman.  She was unexceptional, save for the way she talked.  A Midwesterner.  He couldn’t figure out why someone like her lived in an East Coast Focus’s household or why
she
had a hypothesis.

Focus Rizzari didn’t respond and continued to glare at her Transform.  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,”
Dr. Zielinski said, after shifting his position to attract their attention.

“Ann Chiron,” the woman Transform said, her eyes not leaving Rizzari.  He guessed she had been stripped, her juice lowered precipitously into a low juice state.  Painful enough to force a Transform to behave.  Rizzari’s standard Focus trick didn’t work on this woman.  “I looked over
Dr. Zielinski’s file, just like you did.  He needs to know this.”

“He’s going to laugh at you if you even hint at your idea,” Focus Rizzari said.  “Your hypothesis is too wild to present without proof.”

“It’s too wild for a hard scientist, but my background’s in anthropology,” Miss Chiron said.  “In my field, we get to wave our hands all the time.”  Aha!  Another academic, though if she was reduced to being Focus Rizzari’s aide, she had been hit by the ‘Transform Sickness Kills All Good Careers’ malady.  On the other hand, the odds against having two woman academics randomly landing together in one household were substantial.  Something fishy was going on with this Focus Rizzari, more than he had been able to find out.

“You make a fool of yourself, then,” Focus Rizzari said.  She leaned back in her lab chair and gave Ann a wicked smile.

Miss Chiron turned to him, more relaxed now, and presumably no longer stripped of juice.  “Dr. Van Reijn’s hypothesis mirrors mine.  I’m positive that Transform Sickness has appeared in the past, because it’s in our myths.  Gods, goddesses, monsters?  They’re all Transforms, or, more exactly, they’re myths based on dim recollections of Transforms.  What’s an Arm if not one of the fighting woman goddesses?  What’s a Focus if not a mother goddess?  Crows are wizards, Chimeras are gods and heroes.  Or werewolves.”

“Intriguing,”
Dr. Zielinski said, as he scrambled for something polite to say.  “Like your Focus, I can’t say your hypothesis does much for me, but you should pass it along to Dr. Van Reijn.  It does fit with his work.  On the other hand, I do agree with your assessment of Arms.  There’s something important they’re needed for, we don’t know what it is, and we can’t ignore it.  We can’t afford to ignore any of our resources in our fight to cope with Transform Sickness.”

Focus Rizzari straightened her chair, crossed her arms and glared at them.  Myths?  What a load of manure!  The household dynamic illustrated here by the interaction of Miss Chiron and Focus Rizzari was new to him, though, and had his full attention.  “Alright, then, now that we’ve got that bit of unpleasantness behind us –
Dr. Zielinski, given your background, why are you having trouble obtaining a surplus Transform, anyway?”  Flustered by Miss Chiron’s interruption, Rizzari slipped and let loose her charisma.  As he had feared, Rizzari’s charisma was almost as potent as Tonya’s.

He sighed.  He could do without the top-end charisma.  It gave him a headache every time.  “The upper echelons of Focusdom have given up on Hancock.  They don’t think she’s worth saving.  They’ve shut off my supply of surplus Transforms.”

“You disagree with their assessment?”

Dr.
Zielinski nodded.  “Yes.  Absolutely.  The other Focuses are making the mistake of confusing the young Arm with the old one they already know, forgetting that new Major Transforms are always a bit squirrelly when they’re getting their feet underneath them.  As they too once were.”  As Focus Rizzari once had been; about a year after transforming, someone had put a note in her file saying she was harsher than she needed to be with her household Transforms.  Coming from Focus Schrum, such a comment said a lot.

Focus Rizzari studied him intently as he spoke, reading him to see if he lied or shaded the truth.  It was as if she was absorbing his thoughts, though nothing in the chemical bag of tricks of a Focus allowed any such thing.  She clearly wasn’t using a standard charisma trick, as most Focuses would under these circumstances, but one of the advanced tricks the more talented Focuses rarely admitted they knew: the juice pattern. 

Dr. Zielinski was impressed, and for the first time in a long time, found himself attracted to a Focus.  Physically.  Not a normal response, as nearly a decade of dealing with Focuses had long since immunized him against their icy charm.  He doubted the attraction was intentional on the Focus’s part, either for purposes of manipulation or for amorous reasons, as Focuses didn’t have enough juice flowing through them to generate anything close to a normal libido.  Some Focuses were much worse off than ‘low libido’; he had run into Focuses who wouldn’t even allow themselves to be touched by anyone outside their household.  Dr. Zielinski ignored his response and gave thought to why he might be attracted to a Focus.  They were all either fools or backstabbers, or both.  He couldn’t come up with any quick answers.

“Remind me to talk to you about post-human morality someday,” Focus Rizzari said, deadpan, apropos of nothing. 
Dr. Zielinski carefully didn’t react.  “Some other day.  About our mutual problems?  I’ll provide you your Transform if you’re willing to throw in with our little bit of Chimera-taming nonsense.”  Focus Rizzari paused and caught his gaze again.  “I should warn you that what I come up with will probably not be what you’re expecting.” She smiled at him, not the smile of a seductress but the smile of a practical joker who was about to pull the rug out from under him.  He had a bad feeling she had noted his moment of interest in her.

“Thank you,”
Dr. Zielinski said.  What in the bloody blue blazes was post-human morality, anyway, he asked himself.  Sublimated sex?

“It’s been entirely my pleasure,” Focus Rizzari said, and on that cryptic bit of politesse, she bid him adieu.

Even afterwards, driving away in his Mercedes, he couldn’t tell whether Focus Rizzari hated his guts, loved him dearly, or something in-between.  Many of the leading Focuses hid their feelings and only showed what they wanted to show, but he had been around the block with Focuses enough he could usually pick up something.  Not from this one.  Focus Rizzari had to be one of the most closely guarded Focus he had ever run into.

He knew the usual reasons, but in Rizzari’s case it wasn’t innocence, fear, or megalomania.  By process of elimination, it had to be the other reason, one he had seen only a couple of times among the more stony of the Focuses.

It was scars.

Gilgamesh: November 8, 1966

Gilgamesh shook in his hideout under a railway trestle bridge south of St. Louis.  Not from cold, but from panic.

He had been able to talk to Rumor, Vizul Lightning and Thomas the Dreamer with only minimal problems.  He could even talk to that strange woman Transform, Sadie.  He wondered what possessed him to think he might be able to confront Echo.  He couldn’t even reveal himself to the man. 

Tiamat depended on him for her very survival.  The other Crows depended on him to handle a Crow who broke the rules.  Gilgamesh depended on himself, because he didn’t think he could live with himself if, equipped with all the tools he needed to save Tiamat, he couldn’t summon the courage to do it.  He imagined the rest of his life as a homeless vagabond, scrounging after little remnants of dross, always remembering Tiamat’s endless sea of dross and knowing he lost both that and her because of his own cowardice.

Every time he pulled up the memory of Echo in his mind, his bowels loosened in mind-numbing terror and he wanted to weep.  He had started to have nightmares.  He startled at every noise outside his little hideout, afraid Echo had found him.  The panic was nearly as bad as it had been right after his transformation.

Tiamat wasn’t dead yet.  Today she had fought for hours against a weapon-wielding opponent.  Gilgamesh didn’t know what sort of weapon her opponent had been using – perhaps a stick – but he beat her repeatedly.  In the end, she lay on the ground for nearly three hours before she got back to her feet.

Her life was misery.

So was his.

Tonya Biggioni: November 9, 1966

The evening was cold and damp, and the station manager kept Tonya waiting for half an hour after the broadcast ended before finally showing up to negotiate her contract for the next year.  If she had been given some warning the man wanted to discuss her contract, she could have sent Marty.  Then the manager made her wait.  ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ for an entire half hour.

Tonya stalked across the wet parking lot, fuming about the profligate abundance of idiots in the world.  Half way from the broadcast center to her car, Tonya caught a metasense flash at the edge of her range.  Keaton. 

Tonya stopped and scanned for trouble.  The area around the parking lot seemed normal enough.  A dented Chevy with peeling paint pulled into the parking lot, splashing through puddles on the way; the station’s janitor, coming in for his evening shift.  Two men in suits, leaving late, argued advertising rates while standing in the shelter of the center’s doorway.  A mother escorted her long-haired, short-skirted daughter down the sidewalk over towards the Woolworth’s.  All normal evening’s business, nothing abnormal at all.  Tonya motioned to her bodyguards to follow her, and went out toward the street, where she sensed Keaton.  When she reached the spot up the block where Keaton had been, Keaton edged into her metasense range another hundred yards away, this time to the left and down a dark side street.  Tonya sighed, and followed.  Three more times this happened, and Tonya began to worry about treachery.  She instructed her bodyguards to be ready to fight.

One hop later, Keaton stopped and waited for her in a real estate office, closed for the night.  Tonya knocked, an absurd bit of politeness given how she had gotten here.  Still, with Keaton, one didn’t take chances.

“Come in, but leave your fucking trigger happy fools outside.”

In Keaton’s voice Tonya heard ‘anger at the world’, not ‘anger at Tonya’.  Tonya decided Keaton didn’t plan treachery.  This was Keaton doing inexplicable Arm things Focuses didn’t have the instincts to understand.  Tonya instructed her bodyguard detail to wait outside and carefully entered the real estate office.

The office was dark, lit only by streetlights and headlights of cars through the dusty windows.  It was a cheap place trying to look elegant, with thin carpets and creaking floors.  “Say hello to Focus Biggioni, David,” Keaton’s voice echoed out of the darkness.  Tonya found the Arm sitting on the red vinyl sofa in the small waiting area, with a man kneeling at her feet.  A car passed and the headlights strobed across the room, temporarily illuminating them all.  Tonya recognized the man: David Moore, a plumbing contractor her household often provided with subs.  She had asked Keaton to help her collect money from him.  He hadn’t been paying her subs.