In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (34 page)

“Are you two ready for our big gamble?” I said.  Sky and Gilgamesh were both necessary.

“I’ve got my oversized slingshot and a bag full of rotten eggs,” Gilgamesh said.

“I’m good to go, too,” Sky said.

Neither brimmed with confidence.  I worked on that while the day got older, perking up myself as well.  Two Crows are definitely better than one.

Long after lunch (catered by my people) I picked up my case of telephoto cameras, got everyone together, and we left.

Odin’s pack lived on some farmland left to go wild just southwest of the small town of Frankfort, itself 30 miles from downtown Chicago.  The farm backed up on a 300 acre forest, just over a mile south of US 30.  The place was clearly a compromise, with barely enough cover to keep passersby from noticing the part-Monster pack women, but close enough to Chicago to allow Odin and his two current trainee Hunters hunting access to Chicago.  Their security problems had to be impressively nasty.

Gilgamesh had earlier scouted out a half dozen access points we might use, depending on the wind of the moment.  Today the wind blew from the south-southwest, allowing us to use the favored north access point, a low forested hill with good views of the farmhouse 1800 feet farther south and a quick retreat path down a county road and over to the main highway.

Our caravan consisted of a stolen church school bus (hastily repainted and replated) and two rental jeeps.  My people drove the jeeps and the bus, and all of the Transforms and bodyguards rode the bus.  On the three plus hour drive we talked, going over all the relevant security precautions, signals, and what we would be doing.  We also practiced our metasense sharing, Focus, Crow and Arm; as with all things strange Sky had coined a name for this trick: recognition.

Obvious to him, but not to me.

“Each Major Transform has parts of his juice structure that are fixed and other parts that are malleable by situation,” Sky said.  He sat in the back of the bus, while Geraldine twisted sideways to face him from the next seat forward.  The rest of the Transforms clustered close to listen.  They left a respectful distance around me.  “The recognition of this difference and the adjustments this allows provide for the metasense sharing trick and quite a few other tricks that Lori and I have discovered.”

“Discovered but not yet told anyone about,” I said.  I found Sky and Lori’s incessant experimentation, and their tendency not to share the results until they fully explored and understood them, to be teeth clenching annoying at times.

“Each of these tricks takes different forms of adjustment, but it’s the same trick,” Sky said.  “Don’t go experimenting with different adjustments now – some of them are highly dangerous.  Mostly, we haven’t figured out what’s going on.”

“This metasense sharing appears to be the default adjustment,” Geraldine said, after she mastered the trick.  In the process, she had migrated to the back seat and now sat hip to hip with Sky.  I smiled; although young, Geraldine was clearly a top-end Focus, and compatible with my personality. “At least for Focuses and Crows, and Focuses and Arms.  What’s the Focus-Focus default?  I can tell that’s not the same.”

Geraldine could have walled herself off, ticked at us and uncooperative, but instead she ‘got back at us’ by pumping us for all the information we were willing to spill.  Luckily for her, I viewed Geraldine not as an enemy, but as an ally we hadn’t fully won over yet.  As Lori said, the more these techniques spread, the more we undercut the old hidebound view of Transform life.  Today we did a vast amount of undercutting.  For a Focus who transformed about the same time I did, Geraldine was well-trained, difficult to read and possessed ample charisma.  I picked her from Biggioni’s stable of Focuses because I could read her anyway and because my Arm charisma dwarfed hers.  I liked her as well, a little worrisome, because this meant Biggioni and I had similar tastes in Focuses.

“Try it and see,” Sky said.  “It’s safe.”

Geraldine and Thelma gave it a whirl.  “I don’t like it,” Thelma said, before the two Focuses dropped it.

“What did it look like to you?” I asked.  Two Focuses doing a juice-link was new to me, as well.

“It gives enhanced control over juice work, but it also feels like trying to dance the Two Step in a refrigerator box,” Thelma said.

“That’s roughly what Lori and Flo said,” Sky said.  “This is one of the many tricks we’ve uncovered that we can’t use because of implementation problems.”

Geraldine bit her lip and thought for a moment.  She understood the trick, or used it in a different manner.  “The full implementation of this is forbidden by Council Edict 23,” Geraldine said.  She thought her comment safe to say, and also thought the comment should provide us all the information we needed to understand her point.

“Then I know the answer,” Thelma said, her Texas twang thickening, as it often did when she emphasized a point.  “This must require a Focus-Focus tag to work properly.”  She sighed.  “I’m not enough of a rebel to dive into that forbidden mess, though.”

“Good call,” I said.  I remained very leery of tags between Major Transforms.  Last thing I wanted was for us to turn into flaky Teas clones.

“Whoo doggies, there’s a Focus in that house, no question about it,” Thelma said, in Sky’s arms and linked to his metasense.

“New Focus, four months under her belt, showing signs of severe juice abuse and some very bad side effects from bad juice exposure,” Geraldine said, holding hands with Gilgamesh and sharing his metasense.  “I’m convinced.  Can we leave now?”

“We’re not even there yet,” I said, hiding my exasperation with the Focuses.  We packed our gear into the jeeps and all but two of us (my Fred and a normal bodyguard of Laswell’s) drove off in the darkness across a rutted muddy farm field, toward the forest line.  We slowly followed Gilgamesh’s blazed trail, now cleared of deadfalls.

We – the Arms and Crows – owned the night.  I hadn’t realized for quite a while that the Hunters tended to be primarily on the offensive during the daytime.  I asked Gilgamesh to quiz Occum and the Nobles on the subject, and they said working in the daytime was part of their stature.  They weren’t cowardly sneak thieves forced to work at night because of weakness, grunt growl strut.  They owned the day.  This wasn’t just a physical difference (if any existed at all), but a bit of macho posturing on their part, built into their transformation.  The Focuses, on the other hand, despite the fact their night vision was as good as mine, distrusted the night.  Night was a dangerous time for their no-night-vision Transforms.

Need I say more?

We walked the last hundred yards to the observation point, a clearing on the side of the hill facing the farmhouse, with a decent view through the tops of the trees on the downslope side.  No sign of action from the Hunters.  Sky’s metasense shields held so far.

“As I said before, we need better evidence than what we can get on our metasense,” I said, whispering, as I set up tripods and attached cameras.  If my trick failed, we would run, and settle for just the metasense evidence (which, alas, wouldn’t be enough to convince Fingleman).  I thought, as did Gilgamesh, that we could do better.  “Gilgamesh, your turn.”

He nodded.  He had been in hair trigger panic mode since we left the bus: uncommunicative, eyes unfocused, head on a swivel.  He headed off, Crow quiet, and immediately vanished from my metasense.  This was his trick, his specialty.

Two minutes later Enkidu and his pack began to appear out of nowhere in the back yard of the farmhouse.  Gilgamesh’s doing: these were dross illusions activated by Gilgamesh, transported in on his rotten egg tennis balls, shot by his oversized slingshot.  The lit farmhouse began to bustle with activity, various pack women peeking out through the normally closed curtains of the place.

Odin and one of his trainees, both in their half-beast shapes, rushed outside.  Captive Focus Frasier went to an upstairs window and looked outside.

“There’s the Focus,” Delia said, binoculars to her eyes, echoing my earlier whisper.  Interesting.  I hadn’t counted on being able to show Delia anything but our reactions, but her advanced perception training gave her enough
something
to be able to pick out the Focus.  My guess was the new Focus’s subtle change in hair color, far more beautiful than before her transformation.

I took pictures through the camera and its long telephoto lens, both of the Focus and the Hunters.  I had hoped Focus Frasier would come outside with the Hunters, but her captivity appeared to be physical as well as withdrawal-scarred.

Gilgamesh hurried back, speed trumping stealth for now.  Odin’s trainee Hunter quickly discovered Enkidu’s pack was only an illusion, and began to bark loud enough for us to hear, his barks filled with frustration and danger.

Five pack women and six of their near-juice-zombie berserker pack men came out of the farmhouse, the pack women armed with Monster rifles.  They ran to pre-arranged defensive positions and crouched down, readying for an attack.  Several more clustered at the door, ready to fight.  Odin ambled across the back yard in a large circle, sniffing and likely metasensing.

The clock in my mind clicked down to zero.  I sniffed loudly enough to attract people’s attention, and motioned for them to leave.

It was not to be.

Stomach clenching fear rolled over me, momentarily freezing me in place.  Three steps to my left Delia puked and fell.  Two of my guards lost their cool, running back to the jeeps, their missions forgotten.  Above us, a vomit-inducing demonic bear with scimitar claws and bloody teeth appeared in the sky, hundreds of feet long and a hundred feet above us.

“Gwrawarrr!  There you are,” the demon bear said, an audible effect loud enough to hurt, and be heard by Odin and his pack.  Gilgamesh took two steps before he dropped, felled by a quick swipe by one of the demonic bear’s arms and its claws.  He twitched helplessly on the ground for a few moments before his presence faded into nothingness.  Dammit!

“Illusion,” Sky said, about the bear.  “Dross based.”

“I am Wandering Shade, and
you are dead
,” the demon bear said.  The dross illusion stretched to the ground, blocking my view of the farmhouse, but on the other side of the illusion I heard Odin growling out orders.  He and his pack would be here soon.

I dropped the camera equipment and went over to Ricky, opening the large case I had him toting.  This was our worst-case scenario.  None of us knew Wandering Shade’s abilities or tricks, but if he delayed us long enough with his illusion, his personal capabilities wouldn’t matter.  Odin and his pack would see to our deaths.

Another swipe of the demon bear’s illusory paw sliced through me as I rolled my weapons case forward, trying to get a look at Odin and his pack.  I froze in place but didn’t fall.  I recognized this trick and knew how to oppose it; I burned juice into my mind to free me from the paralysis, which took only two seconds.  Wandering Shade had used this trick on me before, in his Officer Canon guise.  I sneered at the demon bear, weaving my full predatory nature into my sneer.

Nothing.

“He’s nowhere nearby,” I said, turning to Sky.  “Do it.”

Sky had a trick he wouldn’t even name, a trick that would fully waste him, turning him into baggage.  He had used it during my rescue, according to both him and Lori.  From Sky’s perspective he had made the gristle and sludge dross of the entire CDC Transform Detention Center
his
.  Lori doubted Sky’s explanation, but she did say that whatever he had done had protected my rescuers from the bad juice of the place on the way out and likely saved their lives.  Sky believed that unless Wandering Shade came into ‘Focus range’ of him – a hundred yards – Sky would be able to defeat any of Wandering Shade’s long distance attacks.

The cost was large: we would lose the metasense shields covering us from Odin and his trainee.  They would be able to hunt us down with ease.

Right now, I couldn’t even fight back until we got rid of this damned demon bear dross illusion.

Sky didn’t answer.  Instead, he opened up his long winter coat, flasher fashion.  Out of the coat sprang what appeared to me to be hundreds of crows – the bird, not the Major Transform – flying at the demon bear and pecking.  Only they didn’t stop coming.  The hundreds became thousands, then tens of thousands.

“No!  Impossible!  Aiiiiieeee!” went Wandering Shade.  His demon bear illusion flailed, trying to fight off Sky’s crows (or, more appropriately, Crow’s crows).  Holes appeared in the demon bear, then great gaping rents.  The illusion backed away and fled, followed by Crow’s crows.  In a moment I could see and metasense Odin and his pack, charging us through the trees, full speed.  Far too close.

I took my moment to fire four of my weapons, picking up one rocket grenade launcher after another and triggering them.  I didn’t miss. The first two hit Odin, the second two hit his trainee.  Both dropped, neither dead, but they wouldn’t be chasing us for at least a minute.

The rest of the pack continued on, a broken squad of nine well-armed part-Monster ladies and a gaggle of nine mostly-Monster ladies, the largest and fastest being an eleven foot tall giant carnivorous turkey, barely fifty yards away when I finished taking down the Hunters.  Behind them charged the rest of the pack and the berserker boys.  I didn’t even bother to count them.