All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (29 page)

“You fucked up.  I don’t have time for fuck up Arms.”  I got off her, backed away, and smiled.  She was low enough on juice she could barely sit up, struggling unsteadily in the puddle of her own blood.  My victory made her respectful, but I could see her eyes held that cold hard look of hidden defiance, despite the pain and submission.  My predictions about her behavior, based on what little I knew of her time with Keaton, were dead on.  Even beaten, she wasn’t broken.

“Ma’am.”

“I’ll take your life in payment for the life you took.  Or you can bribe me and I’ll let you flee the country.  Flee North America.  Or…”

“Ma’am?”

“Accept my tag.”

“I won’t be your slave.”

“Tag or one of the other choices.”  I had wanted to tag her from the beginning, from before she graduated as an Arm.  I walked over to her and let her put her neck on my foot.  It seemed she wanted to live.

“I mean you no harm, ma’am.”

I didn’t bother to respond.  Going into another Arm’s territory, killing one of her people, and messing up three tagged underlings showed blindness and stupidity.  Not understanding the seriousness of her actions was worse.  Yet, I knew she was brilliant.  She just didn’t understand Arms.  Or when life mattered.  Which meant she didn’t understand herself.  She was a hazard to me, a competitor with no respect for my power or my territory.

I had been this stupid myself coming out of Keaton’s training, just in other areas.  Keaton needed to get better at training Arms.

“Choose or die,” I said.  I knelt down, disregarding the congealing blood, and laid the edge of my longest hunting knife against the side of her neck.  Haggerty closed her eyes and thought.

“If I’m yours, am I Keaton’s as well?”

“Not automatically.  I can give you up to Keaton, but only if I choose to.”  An interesting lever.  Her weakness gladdened me.  “If you make it worth my while, I can protect you from Keaton.”

Her mood changed in an instant.  “I choose to be yours,” Haggerty said.  “I don’t know enough to survive fleeing the country.”  I took my knife from her neck and stood.

“Kneel and take my hands, then repeat what you just said.”

She wobbled to her knees and took my hands.  “I choose to be yours.”

“I accept you as mine.”

The juice did its thing, and the world changed.  Once Haggerty was no longer competition, all sorts of other dynamics bubbled to the surface.  Haggerty’s eyes opened in wonder.  “I’ve been a fool.  I thought you were Keaton’s slave!”

She wasn’t the only one who felt like a fool.  Tagging Haggerty worked differently than with my other tags.  Haggerty parked herself inside my head now; psychologically, she became my daughter.  The adjustment felt disquieting and enlightening.  I had misread Haggerty from the start.  She had liked me and wanted my attention from the day I pulled her out of that hospital detention center.  Only I hadn’t liked her,
the competition
.  When I gave her to Keaton, she saw my action as a betrayal.

Oh, she would be a problem child.  Her willful stubbornness and head-blindness would see to that.  The two of us were going places, though.  Wonderful ideas about how to make good use of an underling Arm percolated through my mind.

I had a new hunger now, right up there with juice, sex and territories.  Arms.  I wanted more subordinate Arms.

“You owe me recompense for your incompetence,” I said.  I motioned to the tagged crying man at the doorway, and had him free Castlemont from the closet.  “You.  Name?”

“Carlton Jobe.”

“Occupation?”

“Investment banker.”

Perfect.

I turned to Haggerty.  She interrupted me before I started to speak with a “Please don’t kill them, they had nothing to do with my mistake.”

Yes.  Trouble.  I half wondered if the tag was defective in some way.  “Jobe is mine now,” I said.  I had uses for a better investment expert.

“Ma’am,” she said.  Glad.  She cared for her people, the same way I did.

We talked for about an hour, and I learned everything I needed to know about Amy.  I even got her to give me her place in Los Angeles and her other preparations.  I would use it as my emergency hideout, if my situation got too hot in Houston.

She hadn’t attacked Shadow, though.  Once she located him, she had done the right thing, dealing with him amicably through Crow Midgard, and later, over the telephone.  She liked the Crow, and had been first on the scene after he got attacked.  “Ma’am, there weren’t any Major Transforms involved in the attack on Shadow,” she said.  “Or Transforms.  Just normals.”

Something funky was going on, that was for sure.

Gilgamesh: March 22, 1969

“You sound on edge,” Lori said.

“Yes, the real reason why I called,” Gilgamesh said.  After his phone search found Lori at her lab, they had chatted ‘miss you’ style for over ten minutes before Lori got down to business.

Rain poured down tonight, nasty enough to move Gilgamesh to the rack of open-air phone booths outside the Michigan Street Kroger, which at least put the wall of the Kroger between Gilgamesh and the worst of the storm.  “Keaton just told me about Haggerty’s attack on Carol’s home.”  Kali had been nearly unlivable for the last week, stuck with cleaning up the mess caused by the FBI’s takedown of her newest Detroit organization. When Kali got busy, she got rude.  Or, ruder than normal for Kali.  Worse, Tiamat had grown cold, making his occasional phone calls difficult chores.

“Uh huh.  She’s already been here and gone, taking my top people with her,” Lori said.  “I’m not sure what she’s going to do to Haggerty, but it isn’t going to be pretty.”

“Arm dominance contests never are,” he said.  “Blood and torture.  Groveling and submission.”  He wiped the rain from his forehead, an exercise in futility.  His forehead was soaked again before the next car passed.  The rain plastered his hair to his head, and dripped down his neck into his shirt.

“You don’t think Carol’s in any danger?” Lori asked.  “I keep having the twitchies about what’s going on.  Like she’s in trouble, or walking into a trap.”

“I don’t believe so. No,” Gilgamesh said.  “Not from Haggerty.  I do worry about the information given to the FBI, though.  When I looked into that, here, I picked up no traces of Transform involvement.  The information came from a courier, though, and when I traced back the courier, I found minute dross traces in the courier’s apartment.”

“Rogue Crow, or his minions?”

“These tiny bits of dross were from a Focus household,” he said.  “As if they had sloughed off a normal household member.  Not Stalin’s household, though; her tamed gristle dross leaves a very different signature.”  Keaton hadn’t appreciated his data, though she had paid him a thousand dollars for his efforts.  She didn’t like having unknown enemies after her.

Lori sighed.  “Then we don’t know what’s going on, as usual.”  She paused, and Gilgamesh swore he could hear her thinking.  The wind shifted direction and threw a sheet of water against his back.  “So, I do have news.  I’d been hoping to be able to tell you in person, but I suspect I’m not going to be making any trips to Detroit any time soon.  I’m pregnant.”

“Great!”  That’s what they had been hoping for.  He was surprised, though, that Lori didn’t trust her instincts on the subject.  She had told him she thought she was pregnant, back when she left to return to Boston.  “Congratulations.”

“Uh huh,” she said, worry creeping into her voice.  “I’m not telling Sky.  I am hoping I can convince you to visit me in Boston, though.  Soon.”

“I can’t make any promises about the timing, but I will visit,” Gilgamesh said.  He didn’t want to think about how Sky was going to react when he found out, and found out Lori had been keeping this from him.  “So, have you gotten a response from Focus Adkins?”  A good time for a subject change.

“Yes.  Until the Council meets, she can’t have any contact with you,” Lori said.  “This means we can’t even start negotiations until the end of March.”

“I can’t say I’m pleased,” Gilgamesh said.  Life in Detroit depressed him.  Everyone was cranky, everything took too much time, and everywhere he turned he found another anomaly or mystery.  “With your help, though, this might even work.”  He needed to free Newton, one of the many responsibilities he had picked up in Detroit.

“Have more faith,” Lori said, a true Crow whisper.  He heard a muffled thump over the phone, then another.  “Holy moly!”  She dropped the phone, yelling out “Attack!” as she ran.  He heard one gunshot, then another, and a confusion of voices.  Clattering.  Another muffled thump.  Some distant gunfire.

The phone went dead.

The panic took Gilgamesh, instant climax stress.  He forgot his bicycle and sprinted away, running as fast as he could through the rain toward Kali’s home.

Henry Zielinski: March 23, 1969 – March 25, 1969

Hank Zielinski put down the graph he couldn’t parse and picked up the ringing phone. “Hello?”  His desk overflowed with paperwork, the bane of creativity.  He hated paperwork, even after counting in the power it gave him over his small research lab, but at least the bureaucratic morass was neatly stacked.  Instead, he had the data on the Arm nutrition program spread out all over his desk.  Too preliminary to talk to anyone about, alas – he really needed more Arms willing to cooperate.  So far, it appeared the biggest danger to the Transform cause, at this instant, was Carol’s sweet tooth.  He did suspect he was wasting his time trying to organize this rather simple project.

Not that he could do any real work this morning, not with his lab crated up and ready for an emergency move, should it prove necessary.

“Doc, we have a situation.”  It took a moment for Zielinski to place the voice.  Tom, agitated.

“Yes?”

“Can you come over to Carol’s?” Tom said.

Zielinski completely forgot about his creeping avalanche of papers.  “Yes.  I’ll be right over.”

“Hello, Dr. Zielinski,” a ghostly voice whispered.  Hank turned and found Guru Hephaestus walking beside him. He nearly leapt out of his Mezlan Fiore shoes.  “Tom’s in Carol’s office.”

Hank tried to quiet his racing heart.  His nerves felt like he was back in the Korean War, except the war never required precautions like this.  He had checked his car for bombs, his mirror for people trailing him, the windows around him for snipers.  Visions of assassination attempts haunted his mind.

Now Hephaestus decided to surprise him.  Crows.  Crows just did things, like appear out of nowhere, far too often.  Impossible to deal with.  He knew from experience not to bother even asking Guru Hephaestus not to surprise him in the future.  Hephaestus would just give him a funny look and deny he did any such thing.

Tom sat at Carol’s desk, looking through her papers, files pulled from the credenza behind him.  Not a good sign.  Carol wouldn’t even permit Tom to sit in her chair, much less paw through her office, and Tom knew it.  Something was badly wrong.

“Doc, have a seat,” Tom said.  Hank sat.  The office was elegant and functional, with a good oak desk, matching credenza and a couple of leather office chairs.  The early-morning sun peeked through the blinds into the dim room.  “Carol never called in last night, and neither did Gilgamesh.  We can’t get in contact with either of them.”

Hank checked the time, nearly nine in the morning.  The confrontation with Haggerty should have been over by now.  He turned to Hephaestus, who had stepped back into a shadowed corner to become nearly invisible.  The Crow Guru shrugged, and Hank turned back to Tom.  “No word on the Haggerty affair?”

“Not a thing,” Tom said.

“Have you made any phone calls?”

“Only to our people, and to Gilgamesh’s various contact points,” Tom said.  Phone booths spread out over Detroit.

Hank nodded.  “Do you see any problems if I make some phone calls from here?”

“I’ve had Ricky check the inside and outside for phone taps.  Nothing,” Tom said.  “Go ahead.”  Tom waved his hand at the phone, buried under piles of papers, and then paused.  “We may have a problem with Dick.  He’s panicked.”  Dick Svetsrichen was Carol’s Houston operations manager, and he didn’t impress either Tom or Zielinski.  Tom didn’t think Dick had the balls to hold up to the rigors of his position, and Hank agreed, though he wouldn’t have used the term ‘balls’.  Carol considered Dick a success story, though, and said she wouldn’t drop him unless he screwed up.  There must be something face saving they could ease Dick into, Zielinski thought.  Bookkeeping or something.  Perhaps rearranging the office plants.

“You might need to get someone to calm Dick down,” Hank said as he extracted the phone from under the papers and pulled it toward him.  He pulled several cards from Carol’s rolodex, all numbers he kept in his own office but didn’t have memorized.

Tom frowned as Zielinski started dialing.  “If the Boss has a problem, we don’t want to alert…”

“Relax. I’m going to be calling various contacts of mine, and I’m going to be real careful.”  Tom didn’t look any happier for the reassurance.

He first called Focus Wendy Mann, in Detroit.  Keaton’s contact point.  She hadn’t had any contact with Keaton over the last day, but Keaton had missed a morning appointment.  Not the first time that had happened, though.  Still, Hank began to get worried.