A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (2 page)

“I have a gift for you.”

He hated surprises, and his Master’s gifts were always surprises, but he didn’t let his feelings show.  “So…how did you do it, Master?” Enkidu said.  The talking Arm, this Hancock woman, hadn’t fallen in a fight with Transforms of any variety.  The humans had taken her down.  He had his guesses, but he needed them confirmed.

His Master chuckled.  “
It’s all as you suspected – I involved the authorities, the same way I’ve been covering your depredations.”

Wandering Shade wasn’t just the Law from a Hunter’s point of view.  He was an actual police officer,
with fake identities in a great many law enforcement organizations.  Enkidu hadn’t figured this out until after the last set of mental improvements the Wandering Shade provided, several months ago.  “You used the police
organizations
to take out the talking Arm?”  This is what he had feared…that all those normals he had sniffed around the Arm bitch had been an army of
police
.

His Master smiled.  “I’ll tell you, setting
this up wasn’t easy.  The goddamned student anti-war protests have the National Guard out everywhere and I had to work like a sonabitch to keep their nose out of the tent.”  This fit what Enkidu knew: his Master didn’t have the military infiltrated, and the National Guard was military, not law enforcement.  “Getting the Illinois State Troopers inside Chicago was a bitch and a half as well and I had to do it on the QT because the goddamned talking Arm had the local cops in her back pocket.”  The last his Master said with anger.  Enkidu understood.  His Master claimed the police as his possession.  The talking Arm’s muscling into his Master’s turf must have given him the final impetus to act.  “I didn’t have to do anything to get the FBI involved.  They were already hunting the talking Arm with far too many resources because of pressure from the Focus bitches.  As soon as their spies picked up a hint that someone had fingered the talking Arm they were there, taking over and running things, in just a few hours.”

Wandering Shade continued in
a similar vein at considerable length, silhouetted by the stars atop his wooden podium, detailing his tricks, tactics and thinking behind his victory over the talking Arm. Enkidu lost interest.  The damage was done.  His Master, by drawing the authorities into an intra-Transform dispute, had crossed the bright line of custom.  Disputes between Transforms were about to become a whole lot more difficult, and Enkidu would need to expect Transform-backed attacks from the authorities coming at the Hunters now, too.

After several minutes, he felt a powerful Hunter presence approach
through the darkness, Odin and his depleted entourage of wolfling trainee Hunters.  In Enkidu’s opinion Odin’s experiment wasn’t working.  Despite all of Odin’s efforts, the same appalling percentage of young Beast Men died before becoming real Hunters.  Fifteen minutes later Odin stood at attention in front of Wandering Shade.  Odin wore a new form, now an eight foot giant.  Odin had finally managed to shuck his beast, able now to pass as human, well, at least as well as any of the Hunters in their man-form.  Wandering Shade nodded, and Enkidu and Odin prostrated themselves before their Master.  The juice moved.  All was well.  They stood and faced the Wandering Shade, happy.

“Odin?  Bring Hoffman forth,” Wandering Shade said.  Odin whistled and a shambling bear with a human head and a tufted lion tail exited the pack of wolflings.  “Enkidu, as you have requested.  Your services and your tricks played a large part in our recent successes, and in honor of your
accomplishments, I present you with a new
responsibility
, the trainee Hunter still known by his man-name, Hoffman.

Enkidu walked forward to the picnic table, took Wandering Shade’s hand, and rubbed it on his almost manlike face.  “Thank you, Master.  I shall train him properly, by the Law.”

Hoffman looked up at Enkidu and growled.  With a terrifying bark, Enkidu leapt on the trainee before his new trainee had time to flinch.  The fool trainee tried to fight back but Enkidu had his neck in his teeth in but an instant.  “Uhhh.  ‘O Orrr.”  No more.  The trainee went limp under Enkidu’s vice grip.

Enkidu released his grip.  “Say it,” Enkidu said.

“I shall serve you as my Master, Hunter Enkidu, until I am given a name or I perish,” Hoffman said, his words barely understandable.  Despite his human-like head, he had grown a long tongue and could barely speak.  His fractured mumbles were enough.  The juice moved.  The Law was served.

Enkidu looked away from the trainee, proud of the humbling. 
Except Odin and the Master weren’t paying attention, deep in discussion over what had to be Odin’s latest proposal.

Despite all his travails, h
e had reclaimed enough honor to win a trainee, but he hadn’t climbed high enough to win his Master’s trust again.  He doubted he ever would.

Gilgamesh: March 4, 1968

Gilgamesh thrashed in the front seat of his truck, unable to sleep.  He
had pulled into a parking lot on the far north side of Madison, Wisconsin, to get a little rest.  Sleep refused to come.  The cold didn’t bother him.  Nor did his hunger.  Nor, unexpectedly, did the capture of Tiamat.

The entire
crisis kept him awake.

His Crow friends had called him a young Crow hero back in Philadelphia, partly joshing and partly because they didn’t know what to make of him and what he did.  Yet, for all his activities, he
seldom did more than react, a following along with the flow of life.  What made him special was the fact he didn’t give up as easily as the other Crows.

Stubbornness
wouldn’t work this time.  This time he would have to be proactive, take the initiative, go against the nebulous ‘this is how things are done’.  He predicted he would make big Crow enemies if he did so.

He wished he could count on the support of
any of the other Crows, but after the Philadelphia Massacre, no other Crows would live so near an Arm.  He had fallen away from the world, with no friendly contacts or help in months, besides the occasional letter and phone call.  Worse, too many of those letters came from Crows who lived in a different world, settled in one spot, anchored by their fears.

Alone, lost,
and angry, he sometimes thought of his life as a plane with a broken engine, slowly spiraling in for a crash.  Now, with Tiamat gone, he had lost the second engine, leaving him with only the wind whistling past him as he fell.

What
to
do
, though?  He didn’t know the first thing about taking the initiative.  He groused, he ruminated, he meditated, and after far too much of all three a strange new thought grew loud in his mind: what would Tiamat do?

Th
e thought put a smile on Gilgamesh’s face.

The answer was what Tiamat always did: organize.

So what if his ‘organizing things’ did buck the Crow vision of how things are done?  After his letter from Shadow last December, the one where Shadow told him to quit asking questions, he suspected he wouldn’t like the reaction he would get from the other Crows if he started to organize.  Worse, he couldn’t ask, the question itself forbidden.  The situation left him with an unnerving general terror with no target, and a very strong distrust of most of the other Crows.

He thought
through his options, and wrote a mental list in his mind of whom he trusted: Sinclair and Midgard, who both moved around all the time (though Sinclair maintained a PO Box in Maryland and Midgard in Boston).

Shadow, in New York.

Sky, in Toronto.

Occum in Boston.

Ezekiel, in Miami.

Nobody else
.

Later, while sipping from the Madison Focus, he realized what he needed to do.  He needed to contact other Major Transforms.  If the Crows were a problem, he needed help from elsewhere.  The other Crows would try
to talk him out of his plan, of course.  They might even try to stop him.  They would tell him he was too young to be doing things like this.

This time, he wouldn’t listen.  He was tired of listening.

The first Major Transform he needed to contact was the Skinner.

He sat down and wrote the first draft of a letter.

Carol Hancock: March 5, 1968

I was in a cell.  I recognized the style: early Transform Sickness Detention Center.  Just like St. Louis, only with fouler air.  I remembered my capture and snippets of the long trip from Chicago to my current location, but only snippets.  I had been doing too much healing.  I was famished but not thirsty.  Many days had passed.

They
had brought me into this oppressive fortress and proceeded to carve me up with knives.  They called their carving an operation, but they worked from ignorance.  Some fool doctor named Wilson thought his carving would help me heal.  Anesthetic doesn’t affect me, though, so they did without.  Most of my injuries would have healed better without their intervention.  They did get the rest of the bullets out, though.

Dr. Wilson said
I had a severed spine, and I would never walk again.

My name is Carol Hancock and I’m an Arm.  As usual, I was in my standard habitat: deep deep shit.  I had been an Arm, a Major Transform, about eighteen months.  As a member of biologically altered humanity – a Transform – I was not exactly human any more.  I possessed an extra sense, the metasense, and an extra substance my body relied on and was addicted to: juice, a substance produced in quantity by my prey, Transforms.  I had spent most of my career as an Arm in someone else’s hands: a captive in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center, in the hands of the sadistic Arm Stacy Keaton, for a few beautiful but harried months on my own, and now here, a captive again.  My fateful history made me wonder why I even bothered, but each time I escaped, I did so to save my sorry ass.  I had also, in that time, fought seven Chimeras, the male counterpart to the Arm, and killed four, though none of the ones I killed were quality.  That is, none of them could talk.

The kicker in my current captivity was
my captor, Special Agent Patrick McIntyre, my chief tormenter in my St. Louis incarceration.  He had captured me with several hundred of his uniformed officer friends and one unknown enemy, self-named Officer Canon, who I believed to be a disguised Focus and likely an actual police officer or FBI agent.  Focuses, Crows and Chimeras are different varieties of Major Transforms, and they all had their tricks.

As a young Arm, the
ir tricks all seemed better than
my
tricks, alas.

After Dr. Wilson finished the operation my captors left me on the heavy reinforced operating table.  They had rolled the table through the long halls of this vile place, down the elevator to the basement, and into this cell.  The steel bands and chains still held me immobile.  They didn’t give me clothes or any kind of a blanket, but the layers of bandages covered me so completely it was almost the same.

I still
wore a catheter and an IV drip.  Sugar water slowly flowed into my veins.  Monitor leads, taped to my body, led to a big black machine next to me, going
beep, beep
in time with my slow heartbeat.

The cell itself was a bleak place
, about ten feet wide and seven deep, the walls made of cinderblocks and painted an institutional green.  The floor was gray concrete.  The door into the cell was steel and the wall dividing my cell from the corridor wasn’t a wall, but simply a rank of steel bars.  Six inches outside the bars stood a clear wall made from some kind of strengthened glass.  Outside the glass, a guard stood in the corridor and watched me.  A camera pointed at my room from beside the door.  The wire cage in the center of the high ceiling held a light bulb, giving harsh light to the cell.  The cell smelled of Monster.

I lay immobile on my table, trying to tune out the grinding agony of my wounds and the lingering pains of surgery, and looked for rats.  Dungeons should have rats. 
Along with the water dripping from dank walls and the screams of the dying in the distance.  I expected Dr. Manigault, the director of the St. Louis Detention Center, to waft his evil presence outside the wall any minute now.

This place exuded stark silence with a vengeance, the only sounds low background murmurs.  I
tried to metasense some other Transform in this huge building and complex, but the only thing I encountered was the poisonous presence of the building itself, bloated with the pain the place drunk from me.  My metasense attempt sent stabbing pain through my brain and left me with a blinding headache.

Metasensing
shouldn’t hurt.  No building, however dangerous, should carry an air of poisonous malice.  I wondered what this place would do to me.  Something was definitely odd about this building.  If the St. Louis Detention Center had damaged my juice structure, this malevolent place would likely do far worse.  I would have liked to know what, but juice structure damage was a long-term problem.  My extensive wounds and my hunger loomed as much larger and more immediate problems.

I wondered which of the Detention Centers
held me this time.