In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (21 page)

“No, no. I wasn’t thinking that at all,” he said, but his voice was weak, because this was exactly what he was thinking.

“Relax,” I said.  “I’ve been at this long enough to have a pretty good sense of where my strengths are, and where they’re not.  If you can make this work, I’ll let you run as far as you want.”  He had no idea how badly I wanted to be out from under the constant drain of the income effort.  He was right in his evaluation.  Robbing banks was grunt work and I was always figuring out ways to make them more fun for me.  Which made things more dangerous for everyone with me.  Tom’s demand lifted a large weight from my shoulders.

“I’m still in charge of where, how often, what sort of operation, that sort of thing,” I said.  “You clear all of that with me before you start anything.  The rest is under your control until you screw up.”

Tom looked at me for a moment, and then nodded.

“That’ll work,” he said.

I smiled, shifted position a bit and suddenly looked a lot more female.  I startled him for a moment, before he smiled back at me.

“Come by this evening when you’re done,” I said.  He smiled wider, his face creasing and crinkling.

“But you might want to deal with things down there, first.”  I nodded over at the clustered men, where Fred was attempting to buy his way in with a bottle of Jim Beam.  Several of the men had already taken swigs, and the level in the bottle was sinking fast.

“Fuck!” Tom said, and started running.  “Fall in, you assholes!  I can’t leave you ladies alone for five fucking minutes!  You’re gonna run until that liquor comes out of your fucking sweat.”

The men groaned and dragged themselves slowly into a line, and moved a little more hastily as Tom came close.  By the time he got there, their backs were straight, as was the small line, and the bottle of liquor had vanished.  Not bad, really.  He had done a lot with them in a short amount of time.

I was pleased.  Tom appeared to be as good as I had hoped.

Viscount Robert Sellers: October 13, 1968

“I think we need to start thinking about changing into our combat forms, Sir,” Sellers said.  He bumped his head against the roof of the oversized tent as he stretched the kinks out of his body and sighed.  A sigh that came out more like a whine than a sigh.

This far from civilization, they had relaxed their rank protocols, after Occum’s hint on the subject.  They were now all ‘Sir’ to each other again, peers, not three Nobles in a hierarchy.  All not including Sir Dowling, who Viscount Sellers still didn’t consider a real Noble, despite his rapid progress toward man-shape.  The poofy squirrel tail was gone, at least, and Dowling now walked like a man.

Still, when they ragged on him, he and the other Nobles called him ‘Yogi’.  Bear.  For the obvious reasons.

“You are correct, Sir Sellers,” Hoskins said.  He peeked out the canvas door, to reveal a crisp white, glittering in the faint light of the cloud-shadowed moon.  The first hints of dawn wouldn’t show themselves for another hour.  Or more.  The iron gray sky looked likely to muffle any hints of real daylight.  “In a place like this, we need our beasts.”  Last night’s icy rain had given way to snow, and a half inch of beautiful powdery white blanketed the soggy forest, giving it a nighttime postcard quality beauty.  Progress would be even slower today, because under the snow lurked a thin layer of ice, and under that, the still unfrozen soggy ground.

Dressed in his frontiersman’s hiking clothes, Sellers followed Hoskins over to Master Occum’s tent, which he shared with half of the Commoner women.  Pam was already awake and readying breakfast, her blonde hair tied back by a ribbon, a thick coat masking her thinness.  Sellers stomach rumbled; he hadn’t been getting enough food, another reason for wanting to shift to his combat form.  Hunting in this soggy excuse for a wilderness would take four feet, not two.  The land was a mixture of bare rock ground, shallow valleys that were mostly water meadows, partly frozen over small lakes, rivers of gravel Occum termed ‘eskers’ masquerading as hills, and endless scruffy pine forests.  They had counted on hunting for food, but the local larger game animals knew how to hide in the weather-beaten pine forests that dotted the countryside north of Labrador City and west of Lobstick Lake.  Sellers had smelled moose and caribou, and bear, and wolf and coyote, and seen at a distance a few of the local rabbits, but nothing had presented itself to be killed and eaten.  Their caravan, now entirely on foot, was not stealthy.

Master Occum woke grumpily, cursed out Hoskins, and stomped off among the trees to pee.  He smelled of sex again, and Suzie.  Something about being out here away from civilization had awakened their Crow’s dormant manhood, and instead of being the celibate monk Sellers had thought of his Master, he had turned into a randy goat.  With an entire tent full of women to choose from, though, he had chosen Suzie for his partner, or perhaps she had chosen him.  Sellers thought Suzie was far too pushy for good sex, an opinion the other Nobles shared.  Master Occum clearly disagreed, and Suzie’s commentary on the Noble’s annoyance with her pushiness was unprintable.  Pam shared Suzie’s opinion on the subject, but she wasn’t bedroom pushy, just pushy outside the bedroom, especially when she got a little confused about which words went with which objects.  She thought the Nobles needed a bit more civilizing, whatever that meant.

“Fine, fine,” Occum said, after he returned and Hoskins stated his case, twice.  “We do need the extra food.  Unless you have some objections, let’s start with Sir Sellers first.”

Sellers smiled, despite the pain he knew was coming.  Fast shape alteration, while moving, wasn’t in the least bit pleasant.  He preferred his combat form, his true beast shape, though.  That and the two élan draws the conversion would require.  One, as always, would come from Suzie.  The former Monster normally produced nearly twice the juice of any of their other Commoner women, and if pressed, in situations like this, she was able to produce more.  Her Monster innards made her a more advanced Transform, and when she got down on juice, she produced more, and faster.

Even better, the change took extra food, food he would get because it was necessary.

The sun rose, presumably, as the world lightened to the expected slate grey.  Master Occum did the navigating through the undersized pines, with maps, compass, and smell.  The Nobles, except for Sellers because of his shape changing, took turns pulling the great sledge.  All sane animals had fled the area, and except for the ruckus of the Noble household on the march and the drip of the slow rain through the trees, the woods were silent.

Sellers had changed his hands to paws already, and had started in on his face, shoulders and arms.  This took meditation, walking meditation, remembering the drumming and the words of his Master in the back of his mind.  “One change at a time.”  “Remember your name.”  “Visualize the place you are going as well as the place you have been.”  “Be the change.”  Changing to his beast form was instinctive, and wanted to happen all over his body – but giving in to the instinct would risk his mind.  The ‘one change at a time’ limitation made the process of changing shape into something resembling the assembly of a picture puzzle, impossibly complicated, save that Master Occum had drummed into him, literally, each necessary step.  The Great Enabler made each step alive in the back of his mind, ready for recall as needed.  As long as he avoided peri-withdrawal, the changing procedure would live within him forever.  Even better, if he and Master Occum wanted, they could alter the procedure when needed.

The hard part would come during the shift from biped to quadruped.  That most painful step took twenty-two minutes, and he would have to halt to finish the procedure.

Something rotten pulled his attention from his walking shape change.  “Master Occum!” Sellers said.  “Stop!”

They all stopped and Knox dropped the sledge ropes and straightened with a sigh, while Sellers sniffed and metasensed.  “It’s there, out there, perhaps twenty to thirty miles away.”  He pointed.  Occum clumped over through the mud and pine needles and they worked out the location on the map.

“It’s right where that crazy Arm and Focus said it would be,” Master Occum said, one gnarled index finger tapping the location on the unfolded map.  “What can you sense, if anything, from this distance?”  The map showed two ribbon lakes between them, long, narrow and this early in the fall – today, they got rain instead of snow – still unfrozen.

Nobody else picked up a thing.  Sellers shrugged.  “Disgusting old rotten garbage, or the dross equivalent of it.”  He focused on his metasense.  “It’s like some sort of crazy dross engine.  No.  It’s some sort of crazy engine that’s venting some horrible garbage dross out its exhaust.”

Occum shook his head.  “I don’t like this, not at all.  I keep thinking this Predecessor crap is too dangerous for any of us to be playing with.”

Hoskins didn’t say a word.  His eyes were slitted tight, and he felt Crow-wary and uncomfortable.  He didn’t like the situation, either.

“Moose!  Let’s go,” Sellers said, after a good long sniff.

“Finally,” Sir Knox said.  Sir Hoskins waved them on, grumbling his way back to Master Occum for another long nighttime conversation.  They had another hour of walking before they put in for the evening.  They had found one of those long gravel esker things to walk along, nicely free of entangling pines and clear enough for nighttime travel.  With the Nobles changing into their combat forms, they had decided to ditch the great sledge around noon, caching enough perishables with it for the trip back.  To keep the varmints out, Knox and Hoskins had covered their cache with several tons of boulders.  They had kept the smaller sledge with the camping gear, the tools and the weapons.  The Commoners could pull the less heavy smaller sledge, and none of them wanted to leave their tools and weapons behind, even the heavy steel pry bars and pick-axes.  One of their fancy ideas for defeating the trap, based on the description provided by the Arm and the Focus who had seen the ‘impossible barrier’, was to tunnel in, underneath it.

The rain had stopped around mid-morning and the sky had finally started to clear.  A few adventurous stars shone through the remaining clouds onto a landscape thick with fog.  Sellers led Knox away from the group, sniffing the air.  He matched Knox’s pace, slow, while they circled around where their dinner munched reeds in a soggy water meadow.  Sellers, in his Rover shape, the great black pony-sized dog, peeled off once he had Knox situated, downwind of the moose.  He circled farther, and charged in, splashing through the puddles and mud.  The moose panicked and ran, and Sellers timed the chase so that the moose reached Sir Knox at the same time Sellers reached the moose.

Easy.

Being a Noble Chimera did have its advantages.  They hauled the moose back to the caravan without having to exert themselves.  Tomorrow, after Sir Knox changed, they might even be able to hunt for more of the day.

Unfortunately, the cruelest master of all, logistics, would have them laden down with far more of the caravan’s supplies than Sellers wanted to think about.

Sellers blinked and awoke, to find himself in a place he had never imagined.  Instead of huddled up in his tent with Sir Hoskins, he was alone, on an endless snowy plain, a clear star-filled night sky above him, with auroras flickering on the southern horizon.

“Huh, huh, huh.”

He turned to the words that were not words – he had heard them in his mind, not his ears.  He saw, but didn’t metasense, the strangest creature he had ever seen in his life, a white furred bear, with a lizard’s front legs and a bird’s hind legs.  Sellers charged, instinctive, at what had to be an enemy.  Instead of meeting the expected flesh, he passed through the creature as if it were a ghost, Sellers’ teeth chomping on air instead of the Beast-Man’s neck.

For a Beast-Man it was, with a dick longer than a stallions’.

“Huh!” the creature barked out, yet more words that were not words.  The creature’s grunt was a laugh.

Sellers turned and tried to speak, but no words came out of his mouth.  Sellers panicked then, readying another charge, but the Beast-Man stared at him and growled, taking Sellers’ panic away with something of the juice.

Dominating him. 
Easily
dominating him.

This Beast-Man was his boss, now.  Terror filled Sellers, but his terror couldn’t escape his mind and become action.

The Beast-Man raised a paw and motioned for him to follow.  Sellers could do nothing other than comply.  He examined his new boss as he followed.  The Beast-Man was incredibly handsome and well-formed, for the mess of his shape.  A polar bear’s body, with the front legs of a lizard and the back legs of, well, a giant chicken, artfully feathered.  His lizard front legs ended in paws with opposable thumbs; his head was bear-like in shape, but surrounded by a lion’s mane of off-white hair, and four bone spikes, two up and two down, on either side of his head.  His teeth were that of a bear’s, except he had eight oversized serrated canines instead of a bear’s normal four.  His polar bear fur had accents, four thin forest green stripes on his neck, just behind his mane, said stripes duplicated about a third of his way down his body and on his stubby tail.  His muzzle hair was grey, and he reeked of age and ancient wisdom as well as power.

Sellers followed, though in this strange place he didn’t leave paw prints.  They moved quickly, in a mere hundred paces approaching something that had been too far off for Sellers to see when he started.