All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (48 page)

I walked Bass through this horror as I inspected the setup.  Blood goes out here from each Monster, goes into this machine over there, the machine filters out the blood plasma, taking over half the juice with it, this machine replaces the plasma with plasma acquired from God knows where mixed with saline, and over there the fake blood is pumped back into the Monsters.  No, they didn’t give a shit if the blood from different Monsters got mixed together.  Transforms were tough and didn’t have the tissue rejection issues normals had.

We had
other
issues.

“Snowcone,” the Crow who followed Bass, “believes neither juice nor élan is stable when it’s removed from Transforms,” Bass said.  I had never met Snowcone, and neither had the Crow who followed me, Gilgamesh.  We both suspected Snowcone was an identity of a known Crow, a potential problem we didn’t know how to solve or mitigate against.  “Unless, of course, it’s being stabilized by a senior Major Transform, ma’am.”

Good point.  “It isn’t,” I said, after a careful metasense scan of the area.  After the scan I went over to the machinery at the far end of the lab.  Here, they chemically separated the Monster juice from the blood plasma and stored the impure remains cryogenically after mixing them with a chemical solution smelling faintly of rubbing alcohol.  I took a sample of the solution for Zielinski to identify.  “They have a new trick.”  Perfect for any Arm capable of subsisting off élan, which I only knew of two, Arms Armenigar (the first and ‘type’ Arm) and Haggerty (my crazy heroic underling), and neither did so full time, or without the help of Crows.

“Interested in a little mayhem?” I asked.

“Of course, ma’am.”  Bass smiled and wiggled loose her shoulders under her thick brown leather jacket.  I didn’t expect much argument from a younger Arm, but Bass was one of the four senior Arms in the United States, fourth after Keaton, myself, and Amy Haggerty.  No cavalierly ordering her around.

Politeness also kept us from snarling at each other.  Arms without a tagged relationship often snarled at each other.  A lot.  Arms are territorial, and defaulted to competition and fighting absent some mitigating factor like a tag.  Bass and I recognized a clear dominance relationship, with me on top, but clear dominance didn’t substitute for a tag.

We carefully ripped the restraints off the Monsters, retreated to near the room’s exit, and shorted out the blood exchange pump.  Within a minute the literally mindless Monsters were growling and clawing at themselves as they began to do what all Monsters did unless being scientifically abused in this fashion – slowly change from human shape to
something else
.  I motioned for Bass to leave, and we did so, blazing a path up the emergency stairs, making sure we left all the doors open behind us.

By the time we exited the lab building, we heard the insane snarling of Monsters behind us.

On the way out we made damned sure the Monsters wouldn’t be able to escape the building.

And so I missed Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night.  The squad of guards should have had a squad of backups.  Nobody in the Transform community trusted United Toxicol or its labs, especially the lab in Kansas City.  The bigwig Transforms hired people (read Arms) to regularly case the labs, inside and out, and the people at United Toxicol knew about our many break-ins.  For a project this appalling and obviously lucrative, they should have had backup guards.  My initial supposition?  Someone made a mistake somewhere along the chain of command.

I didn’t think this lack through for quite some time, though.

---

“Ma’am, I wish I understood this crap better,” Bass said.  We rested in Gomorrah, my beat up and often repainted ‘mission RV’, surrounded by Tom and my people as they drove us back to Chicago.  We sat among piles and boxes of papers, loot from our mission.

“Take the time to learn,” I said, listening to the wind whistle through the many bullet holes.  We exchanged growls, but Bass eventually averted her eyes and forced herself to relax.  The mission needed to be over fast, as my tolerance for Bass diminished by the minute.  I wanted her tagged, but I didn’t like her.  With few exceptions, Arms never liked other Arms not linked by an Arm tag.

“As you feared, ma’am, Chrysanthemum’s had many dealings with United Toxicol,” Bass said, many minutes later.

I nodded and didn’t bother to comment.  The worst I had found was from four months ago, when Chrysanthemum bribed United Toxicol to give a bogus report to Zielinski on one of his farmed-out biochem analysis projects.  I wouldn’t be telling Bass anything on
that
subject.  I kept information on Zielinski’s projects close.  “What do you have?”  Stacy Keaton had pounded standard debriefing and analysis procedures into our heads so deep they were automatic, and this caper had been about as standard a mission as any Arm might dream up.

“I’ve found five analysis jobs they hired United Toxicol for, including one regarding Monster amygdalas.  Aren’t those one of the brain parts that changes in a Major Transformation, ma’am?”

“Uh huh, and in the older Monsters as well.”  Zielinski believed the Major Transform’s transformed amygdala lay behind the Major Transform ability to harness juice, the same way the much better known change to the hippocampus lay behind our metasense, our long-range ability to sense juice or its derivatives.  Some Monsters, if they survived long enough, developed such things.

“Who the hell is Chrysanthemum, though?” Bass said, frustrated.  “I’d expected the Hunters were behind my family’s troubles, not some other crazy.  I’ve killed too many Hunters over the years.  I even had to relocate from Denver to the Dallas area to escape their attempts at payback.”

I weighed the odds, the costs and the benefits, and decided to toss her a bone.  More tag-wooing.  “Chrysanthemum was Wandering Shade’s front company.  We thought we closed the company down after the Battle in Detroit” back when Bass had been a baby Arm with an animal torture fetish, under Keaton’s tutelage “but we didn’t get all of it.  I’ve looked into Chrysanthemum” at Keaton and Tonya’s orders and suggestions, respectively, “and we suspect one of the hidden Major Transforms uses the company as a cash cow, selling Transform secrets to various governments.”  Tonya suspected Focus Shirley Patterson, the hidden head of the first Focuses and the woman who ran all the Focus organizations from behind the scenes.  Keaton suspected Chevalier, a hidden senior Crow who despised the Cause.  I suspected Arm Erica Eissler of West Germany, mostly because I knew she didn’t trust me or the US Major Transform establishment, and because whoever backed Chrysanthemum possessed enough talent and skills to thwart my considerable investigation abilities.

Amy Haggerty, my long-tagged partner in crime, believed (because of Chrysanthemum’s continuing existence and far too many other unexplained incidents) we faced a new unknown and ultrapowerful enemy, one nasty enough he or she would draw together all the Major Transforms in an alliance.  She regularly thought of events in too heroic a fashion, befitting her nickname, the Hero.  Keaton, boss of all us American Arms (and nicknamed The Boss, but never to her face) thought Haggerty addled.

They didn’t get along at all well.

“There’s something that crazy out there?  Ma’am, why haven’t we done more to shut down this Chrysanthemum outfit?”

I growled, irritated by the question, and didn’t answer.

In classic and tense untagged Arm silence, we shuffled papers and read like fiends until we reached Chicago.

Author’s Afterword

Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Maurice Gehin, Alex Farmer, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer.  Without their help this novel would have never been made.

Cover credit goes to Jebulon for the parquet floor, Jo Naylor for the faux blood pictures and pixelman at Shutterstock for the wedding veil.

After I collected many helpful but non-monetary responses from various other publishing venues regarding my novels, I decided the best way to introduce the Commander series to a wider audience was via the ebook market.  I have two traditionally published short stories, one in Analog and the other in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine.

I hope you enjoyed reading this series.

If you enjoyed this novel, you can find out further information about the Commander series, the background mythos of the Commander series, and about other fiction, on http://majortransform.com.  Interesting and helpful comments are encouraged.  Tell your friends.  Post reviews.

The memoirs of Carol Hancock continue in “The Shadow of the Progenitors”, the first novel of
The Cause
.

Randall Allen Farmer