A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (13 page)

“You have good ears.  I assume your visit to my place was in response to my request to speed things up?”

The Skinner didn’t hang up the phone.  Instead, she ran toward her house, burning juice all the way.

Gilgamesh, who had taken the time to appreciate the Skinner’s new place – opulent, especially compared to her old warehouse – and to strip it of as much dross
as possible, got in his car and drove off.  The car was stolen; he ditched it most of the way back to his apartment, after yet another stop to wash off in the Pacific.  He hadn’t forgotten the Chimera trick of dunking themselves in the Delaware to lose their scent.  Although confident his trick would work, he still edged ever closer toward climax stress.

He could always be wrong about the dunking trick.

After a suitable amount of time to gather his courage, he called the Skinner’s home phone from a pay phone outside a seedy bank on the edge of downtown.  The handset was cracked and almost falling apart; the phone books shredded long ago.  The Skinner picked up after the second ring.  “These are my capabilities,” Gilgamesh said.

“Motherfucking Crow!” the Skinner said.  Loud.  Gilgamesh nearly dropped the phone.  “Don’t you ever do that again if you want to live!”  He winced at the predatory command.  No, she wasn’t
standing right in front of him, but his panic spiked as if she was.  He calmed himself, floating on a warm sea of freshly scooped up Arm dross.

“Ma’am, I didn’t invite you over to my apartment
, either.”

The Skinner didn’t immediately reply.  He did hear heavy breathing, which he imagined would be terrifying as all hell if the phone connection was at all good.  Then the Skinner laughed.  “Fuuuck me,” the Skinner repeated through her laughter, over and over again.

Gilgamesh had to join in.  He had to admit the situation was hilarious, as long as neither of them got hurt.

“Ma’am, I think I know what’s going on now with Carol’s incarceration,” Gilgamesh said.  The unfailing politeness actually reduced the stress.  A lot.  “If you wouldn’t mind me explaining, I shall.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re of the opinion Carol can handle the Focus who’s involved and you’re testing her to
find out if she can escape on her own,” Gilgamesh said.  “You’re stringing me along just in case the Feds chase away the Focus and do what they did in St. Louis, trying to test Carol to death.”

The Skinner laughed again.  “I can see why you and Hancock get along.  You’ve both got similarly twisty minds and a tendency to overthink things.”  The Skinner’s voice grew harsh.  “What I’m worried about is what might happen if a more competent Focus takes over.  The question isn
’t whether I’ll rescue her or not, but when and how much she’s going to owe me for fucking up.”

Well, he was talking to the Skinner.  Truth and calmness were optional for this Arm.  “So what do you want to know?”

“There’s nothing you can tell me over the phone that’s going to matter,” the Skinner said.

Oh.

Oh crap.

“You
need to meet me in person so you can use your Arm mind-reading trick on me.”

“Huh.”

“That’s going to be difficult.  For me.  Your physical capabilities dwarf mine.”

“Well, I’m not at all interested in being on the receiving end of
your Monster-juice spray again, so we’re even.”  The Skinner paused.  “We’re both Major Transforms with deadly capabilities.  That’s true of all the Major Transforms.  I’ve managed to meet amicably with many Focuses without any problems.  Ask the Focus Network if you want my bonafides.”

Gilgamesh almost dropped the phone.  “Uh, ma’am.  I don’t
deal with Focuses.  I vastly prefer Arms.”

His response
received a low chuckle as a response.  “You have good sense, Gilgamesh.”

She knew his name!  This time Gilgamesh did drop the phone.  He didn’t run, though.  Tiamat told her.  Tiamat told her.  He repeated
his mantra until his panic receded enough so that he could pick up the phone again.  “Sorry.  Crows panic when surprised.  It keeps us alive.”

“Huh.  Tell you what.  Would you be willing to meet me if I was unarmed?”

Gilgamesh thought for a moment.  “Yes.”  She counted on him being able to metasense whether she was armed or not.

“Public or private?”

“Neither.  Secluded.  An open area in a park at night would work best.”

“Pacifica State Beach?  Tonight?”

“The place would work,” Gilgamesh said.  “Tomorrow night?  I must apologize, but…”

The Skinner interrupted.  “But you’ve worn out your panic buffer for the day.  I’ll
meet you there tomorrow night.”  She hung up.  Impolite cuss, wasn’t she?  She understood Crows far too much.

Gilgamesh hung up the phone,
and called Shadow, metasensing the Skinner closely to make sure she didn’t go after him.  He wouldn’t go back to his old apartment, not unless things got settled between him and the Skinner.  Perhaps not even then.

“Shadow,” Gilgamesh said.  “You’ll never believe what just happened.”

Shadow, of course, thought Gilgamesh had gone stark raving mad.

Chapter 5

In 1967 there were an estimated 6600 newly transformed female Transforms.  Of these an estimated 630 became members of Focus households, a mortality rate of 90.4 percent (counting a secondary Monster transformations as a form of mortality).

“Understanding Transform Sickness as a Disease”

Carol Hancock: March 16, 1968

“I’ve got a counter-proposal for you, Sarah,” I said.  I was on my best behavior right this moment.  I
had been thinking.  And bored, as I had just suffered through another day of interrogation after interrogation by men in suits with no provenance.  The medical tests weren’t too bad, and I had also picked up the level of my exercises to about half.

B
y my calculations, I would need juice again somewhere between eight and ten days from now, and I would want juice sooner, such as ‘tomorrow’.  I remained in shit shape, still healing.  I had been through this before; my left shoulder wouldn’t be full strength until after my next juice draw.

Nor
did my nightmares or the goddamned whispering go away.  Both were getting worse.

“Okay, I’m listening,” Focus Teas said.  This evening she had a large picnic lunch with her.  She ate as I talked
, sitting at a small interrogation table with her bodyguards beside her.

“I have an enemy, most likely a Focus.  I call her Officer Canon; she was the person behind my capture.  She’s also the one behind the Chimeras and their depredations, the ones your bosses are trying to pin on me.”
  I paced as a talked, back and forth in front of the net, and tried to ignore the rumbling in my stomach from the odor of chicken salad with walnuts and pineapple.

“Mmm mmm,” she said, with her mouth full.  She already had figured
this out from everything else I had already said, though I never stated my case so plainly, and not to her.  She might be a flake, but she wasn’t stupid.

“What I haven’t told you about is the directed withdrawal scarring Officer Canon is using to keep these Chimeras functional.” 
She snapped to attention at my comment, hurriedly swallowing sandwich.  I stopped pacing and faced her intently.  “This Focus is your enemy as much as she’s mine.  My offer is a true alliance between equals.”  Not some ridiculous faux-enslavement arrangement.

“How do you know any of this?” Teas
said.

“I have a friend, a researcher, who autopsied one of the Chimeras I killed, Bug-Boy, and discovered the scarring.”

Teas squinched her eyes closed, shook her head and talked to the ceiling.  “Hank, you idiot!  I swear you’re trying to get yourself killed.”

I didn’t respond.  I didn
’t believe Zielinski listened in on this conversation.  Her response was simple exasperation.  I did heartily empathize with her response, though.

“Okay, I think I can verify this from the source,” she said.  “What you don’t understand is how useless such an alliance would be.”

“How so?”

“Because I’d be
dead
.”  She took a deep breath.  “The master of this particular technique is Focus Schrum, a rival VIP Focus.  I doubt she’s doing this herself; she probably has one of her wholly owned subsidiary Focuses doing the dirty work.  Biggioni, most likely.  She’s got the nerve and the nastiness, and she’s already well known as the number one Transform breaker.”

Teas
was blowing smoke.  Even she didn’t believe her own comment, save about Focus Biggioni being a Transform breaker.

“Transform breaker?
” I asked, about Biggioni.  “What’s that?”

“That’s where you use juice conditioning and psychological pressure to alter the personality of a Transform into whatever you want him to be.  She’s always moaning and griping about how long her methods take, but if I’m right she’s using the extra time to experiment with directed withdrawal scarring.”

“I would be able to protect you from Focus Schrum,” I said.  Focus Schrum was Teas’ worst enemy.  That was easy to read.

Teas shook her head.  “I’m not risking my neck to get you out of here just so you can waltz off whenever you like,” she said.  “Tag or nothing.”

I shrugged and resumed my pacing to hide my anger.  “Let’s say I agree to this.  What would you have me doing?  Can you assure me I’d be getting juice?”

Teas warmed to this subject.  “Juice?  No problem.  About a fifth of the Transform Clinics in the United States are mine and they have to waste 300 Transforms a year, more every year.  I can even keep a few on stock
, with temp tags, for emergencies.”

Teas didn’t enjoy pain and death; in fact, they disturbed her, right up there with hangnails and being caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella.  If I served under her, tagged by her, my life would depend on her whims.  Not much of a choice there.

“About what I’d have you do?  Well, I’ve come up with more than a few ideas,” Teas said.  “There’s money to be made among the normals.  Illegal drugs.  The drug dealer cartels play rough, but not Arm rough.  There’s a whole slew of business opportunities in the drug game I would get all my Focuses to participate in.  Also, there are examples that have to be made, on occasion, among the more recalcitrant Focuses.  I expect I’d still handle most of those, but imagine their consternation if I had an Arm go and snatch one of their Transforms, either to ensure good behavior or to dispose of them?”  Laugh.  “Protecting my operations from Focus Schrum’s people would be part of what you’re doing.  I might even loan your services out to other Focuses – for a price.  It wouldn’t be long before you were living in far more luxury than I am.”

I
would be the target.  She would be pulling my strings from behind and profitably milking the operation.  Again, I wasn’t one to complain about such arrangements.

“I’m still iffy about this tagging stuff,” I said.  “You said Focuses could even tag furniture.  Wh
y, if I may ask?”

“Well, in close confines
, tagging the furniture tells the other Focuses to keep their hands off my stuff!”  Laugh.  “I suspect there are other uses.  Sometimes the most obscure things can come out of stupid experiments,” Teas said.  “Watch this.”

She did hand-wavy things; I metasensed a faint juice ghost in the air in front of her
– no, this had to be a juice pattern!  So, she wasn’t making up stories about this juice pattern business.

Her juice pattern
reminded me of the Crow Rumor and his ‘dross construct’ thing he put on me to protect me from Focus Patterson’s people.  There was an awful damned lot of similarity between the Crows and the Focuses.

“What does it do?”

“Oh, this juice pattern?  This one’s a metasense magnifying glass.”  Laugh.  “Back in the day, I was sitting around amusing myself by tagging the air, and out popped something like this.  Juice patterns were my discovery.  Do the other Focuses care?  No, mostly because juice patterns aren’t my strength, not like my charisma is.”  Pause.  “I’ve seen that look of wonder many times before,” she said.

Yes, I
had slipped, and the look of wonder was mine.  Juice patterns were beautiful, similar to the dance of juice in a Focus household.  I could watch the juice move for days.

“Huh,” I said.

“You’re a young Arm, on your own, without any support, feeling around for what works and what doesn’t work,” Teas said, aligning nicely with everyone else I had talked to about this subject.  “It reminds me a lot about my early days as a Focus.  But there’s something wrong about the juice you need to know about.”

“Wrong?”  I got the feeling she
was willfully betraying her superiors again.  I stopped pacing and paid close attention.

Teas nodded.  “Talk to anyone from the Quarantine days and you’ll hear stories about how the Focuses couldn’t keep their people alive, how they would occasionally make mistakes and take away too much juice from their Transforms or give them too much juice. 
That doesn’t happen anymore, even among Focuses with even the least bit of experience.  Why?”

I shrugged.  I had no idea what Teas talk
ed about.