In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (43 page)

“Beat her up first?”  Carol laughed.  “I’m having a Crow suggest I beat up a Focus to the point where she’s nearly dead?  Oooh, twist my arm harder.”

A polite knock on the doorjamb swiveled both their heads over that direction.  Zielinski was there, and he looked winded and sweaty, as if he had been running outside…several months ago.  Outside, it was bright and sunny, in the sixties, and Carol had the windows open, a rarity in this town.

“Ma’am,” he said to Carol, intensely anxious.  The Good Doctor had lost his nearly always phlegmatic emotional control.  He radiated awe, terror, curiosity, wonder, and extreme disbelief.  “This is turning out to be one hell of a day.  You would not believe who I just talked to on the phone.”  He paused and blinked.  Carol waited him out.  “Are you up to a quick trip to Boston…to visit the Nobles?”

Earl Robert Sellers: December 5, 1968

“Focus Rizzari can’t attend this presentation,” Occum said.  They gathered in the half-restored candy factory, resting, eating, and getting cleaned up.  “Too much politics at too wrong a time.”  He still bounced, though, after spending three days in Inferno, meeting Focus Rizzari in person for the first time, helping her get her mental shit together using the Great Enabler, and helping Focus Sport Racshke heal herself.

Earl Sellers smiled.  The technical details weren’t his business, and his personal worry, that Occum would end up a love-sick wreck like Gilgamesh and Sky, had proved unfounded.  Sellers and his peers had presented to Inferno, a four-hour affair, with the Duke doing most of the talking, and they had wowed the audience.

Now, a presentation to the Commander, at what Occum insisted was going to turn out to be the perfect time.  Sellers suspected Occum had been talking to the Madonna of Montreal again.  This sounded like one of her crazy bits of advice.

Duke Hoskins came in from the back room, freshly dressed in his best suit, and glared.  “Nancy, what are you doing back here?” he asked Focus-Sport Racshke.  The presentation to the Commander was just under two hours away, back in their old camera shop, currently vacant and on the real estate market.

“The people in Inferno decided I needed to be here for the presentation,” Racshke said.  “Real life evidence, and, well, I’m far easier to read than you beef hunks.”  Nancy still looked like something death had chewed up and then shat out the other end, but she could walk, talk and think again.  As far as her womanliness was concerned, well, he hoped for her sake that her ugliness was from her ordeal, and not something permanent.  Right now, she made the ugliest of their Monstrous women Commoners look beautiful.  The worst, in his opinion, were the half-dozen bald spots on her head, but the fact she had lost three quarters of her teeth while trying to live off of snowshoe hares, lost all her toes and four fingers to early season frostbite, and lost the skin and muscles off the front of her left knee, to half way up her thigh, from some form of fungal rot didn’t help either.

She liked the Nobles, though, and that helped a bit.

“You do know we’re going to be presenting to an Arm?”

“Uh huh, things could go bad, sure,” Nancy said, an actual twinkle in her eye.  “But, hell, my entire life as a Transform has been things going bad.”  She was a little bit of a defeatist, but he would be, too, if he had experienced what she had gone through.  “Besides, I trust you guys.”

Nancy’s Focus-Sport trick was to be able to take juice from a woman Transform and turn it into dross.  She currently couldn’t move said created dross off the woman Transform, a very bad thing for the woman Transform, but Focus Rizzari believed she could teach Nancy how.  After that, Nancy would be a Focus for real, able to keep a household of women Transforms alive, and with a little bit of correct politics, a whole bunch of Crows insanely happy.

They drove the entire household over to the old abandoned camera shop, as part of their presentation to the Commander was the state of their Commoners, currently in their best shape ever.  Even better, since their return from the quest, they had acquired Gwen, a woman Transform who had escaped some horrible dictator Focus, gone to Inferno, and got told she could either go back, die or join the Nobles.  She had chosen them, survived her first élan draw, and again showed them the benefits of getting older women Transforms into their household instead of the newly transformed.  She had barely decayed at all during the élan draw.  Even better, Gwen and Pam had finished their first several days of Inferno Transform physical training, and they both were on their way to being as stout as the former Monster, Suzie.

Two cars of Inferno’s fleet pulled up outside the camera shop, and disgorged a motley crew of Inferno bodyguards, ringing the Good Doctor as if he was the Pope or President.  No Commander.  Sellers pasted a smile on his face and welded it there, hoping Occum knew what he was doing.  Duke Hoskins was going to go on a beastly rampage if the Commander didn’t show.

The Good Doctor shook all their hands.  “The three of you are looking quite fit, and human,” he said, radiating pleasure.  He was dressed in an expensive suit, and looked different.  Plastic surgery?  Perhaps.  Utterly professional, though.  “Simply amazing.  I’d like to introduce you to Arm Carol Hancock.”  He waved his right hand and with his left edged forward a paranoid looking Inferno woman bodyguard.  Who did not look the least bit like an Arm.  She wore a pants suit and business jacket, had long dark hair half way down her back, and heavy makeup, applied Southern style.  She even wore high-heeled cowboy boots, making her nearly six feet tall.  She carried two shoulder holsters under her jacket, backup pieces in the top of her pants, in the back, and knives in both boots, a standard over-armed Inferno woman bodyguard.

The young woman smiled, and suddenly, her entire glow changed, from Transform to Arm, and her presence transformed from paranoid bodyguard to, well, holy-shit-dangerous.

“That’s me,” she said, her accent placing her from Missouri or Tennessee, her commanding tones reminding him of Master Occum, when he got most annoyed.  “I’ve heard you boys have something to talk to me about.”  Predator radiated off her, worse than even from Arm Keaton, those few times they had met.  Now, Sellers noticed Hancock’s fierce steel grey eyes, how she moved like an expert hand-to-hand combatant, and the fact she wore a wig.

Master Occum skittered behind the four of them, radiating utter and total panic.  This wasn’t what he had arranged.  Sellers gave the situation a moment of thought, and recognized the will of another predator in action – you never did what your enemies, or your potential allies, expected.  Not if you wanted to live and fight another day.

“Yes, Arm Hancock,” Duke Hoskins said, not displeased with her.  He, too, understood the necessary ways of the predator.  “A presentation.”  He paused.  “So, is that you, Sky, in that absurd costume?”  This the Duke said to another of the Inferno women bodyguards.

The indicated woman nodded.  “I’m just here to make sure things don’t go to hell in a handbasket.”  Sky’s comment, and his saucy projected emotion of ‘only I can take down the lot of you’, earned him a glare from five hot predatory sets of eyes.  “Perhaps it might be better if I keep my mouth shut right now, though.”  Sellers almost felt bad for Sky, who often spoke before he thought, and often got himself into this sort of trouble.

“This way, Arm Hancock, if you are ready.”  The Duke, still on his best behavior, motioned to the Arm; she nodded, and walked along with him, neither ahead nor behind, anticipating his every move.  Sellers realized Hancock was damned talented at all the Arm tricks.  He had been thinking that she, as the number two Arm, would be easier to deal with than the touchy and demanding Arm Keaton, but he had a bad feeling that Arm Keaton had been holding back on them more than they had realized.  If the Duke didn’t watch himself, they would end up with an Arm as their boss, not their ally.

They had the presentation set up in the old warehouse behind the camera shop, complete with maps, trophies and some photos taken by Master Occum.  The Duke offered the Arm refreshments and a chair, and then the same to the rest of her entourage.  Once all the guests sat down, he started in with the presentation, from Boston to Montreal to Labrador City, to the Beast dream, to the dragon Monster, to the actual trap, the rescue, and home.  As he went through the story, the Duke introduced each of them at the appropriate moment, including Sir Dowling, Suzie, Pam, and Nancy.  He left out the second meeting with the Madonna of Montreal, a meeting that also involved the Canadian Transform authorities, who wanted to lock Nancy in prison for life for ‘running away’.  They had reached a deal – Nancy was officially dead, as far as their records were concerned, and she was now an official American Transform.  Dead Major Transforms cost no money, an important consideration for the cash-strapped Canadian authorities.

“In our own ways, as Noble Chimeras, we can see signs and portents,” the Duke said, starting the closing piece specially written up for Arm Hancock.  “Like many others, we call you the Commander.  We can also sense a war coming, a fight we take personally, as the mind behind it is the Master who has ruined far too many potential Noble peers of ours, turning them into Hunters, Patriarchs and Mountain Men with his mind-ruining Law tricks.  We would like to volunteer our services for this coming fight, as combatants.  As a token of our successful quest, as a simple gift, we would like to present to you
this
.”  The Duke reached down, picked up a small jewelry gift box, and gave it to the Arm.  “This ivory carving of a Monster once did something with dross and élan, but is now dead to the metasenses of all we have shown it to.  This is Predecessor made, hundreds, if not thousands of years old.  It’s a symbol of the dangers we all face, the danger of the unknown associated with the products of Transform Sickness.  A symbol of why we wish to, as a part of the Cause, make the word ‘Chimera’ mean something more than ‘enemy’.”

The Arm opened the box, took out the Monster carving, and examined it with her eyes and metasense.  “Nice,” she said, and turned to Sky, waving her arm across the room.  “How real is any of this?”

Sellers’ hackles raised, and he fought anger over being called an illusion.  Yet, her rudeness fit what he knew of her, as both Arm Keaton and Arm Hancock had the reputation for being paranoid.  For them, the world was a dangerous place, more dangerous for them, as women in a society where women were weak, and should know their place.

“Ma’am, Carol, this is real,” Sky said.  “This is evidence for and proof of…”

The Arm cut him off.  “The fact we don’t know shit about shit.  Got that part.  I mean, how real was their quest?”

“Ask Nancy.”

The Arm’s hot gaze flew by the Nobles; Sellers put his hand on the Duke’s shoulder and squeezed, as he felt the Duke ready to explode.  Hoskins took a deep breath, and then another.  They did bring the Arm here to judge them, and she did so in a manner as harsh as one Noble to another.

“You,” Hancock said.  “Come here.”

Nancy stood and walked over to Hancock, a puppet on her charismatic strings, as if the Arm was a high-end Focus Bitch.

“Sky, scoot and give Nancy your chair.”  Sky did as told, though in his case, he moved not because of the Arm’s charisma, but because of his Crow good sense.

The Arm took Nancy’s face in her hands and began to question her.  Sellers had never seen anything like it; the questioning was closer to a mind rape than a mind reading.  The poor abused Focus-Sport didn’t have a chance, or, given her condition, the will to even mildly resist.

“There’s something more out there,” Nancy said, about ten minutes in.  “I think it’s half alive, and it’s got memories in it, memories of the old ones that the Lost Tribe calls the Predecessors.”

“There’s a lot more out there than that,” Sky said.  The Arm shushed down his mutter.

“No, this is important,” Nancy said.  “It’s the center of whatever strange juice network the old ones had set up.  It’s what awakened when Arm put her blood in the Madonna’s baby walrus skull.  It’s important, because it knows how these old ones lived and survived.”

“I see,” Hancock said, boring into Nancy’s eyes.  “That’s important, something someone’s going to have to look into in the future. 
Make sure Focus Rizzari learns of this.
”  She turned from Nancy, who barely caught herself from falling out of her chair.  “The rest of this is pointless academic bullshit I’ll let Hank handle…”  Now Sellers started to lose it.  Goddamned Arms!  “but, wait, I accept your quest as proof of your prowess.  Jeez, you’re as touchy as us Arms, aren’t you?”  She smiled a happy smile.  “Look, I’m like you three.  Give me a fight and I’m happy.  The dragon Monster fight proved your worth to me.  The rest of this insanity is frosting on the cake.”  She paused and looked them over, and, like the Duke, ignored Sir Dowling as if he didn’t exist.  “Now, which of you poor suckers is going to get stuck answering Hank’s hours of questions, and which of you is going to get lucky and get to spar with me?”

They stuck Occum with the Good Doctor, without even discussing it.

Tonya Biggioni: December 6, 1968

“Tonya, I’ve heard,” the angelic voice said.

Tonya smiled to hear Focus Patterson’s voice again.  It always filled her with wonder.

“That I’m surrendering?  I must,” Tonya said.

“I agree, on one condition,” Focus Patterson said.  “Use your guile and charisma to take over Hancock and those around her.  Hit them from surprise, when they’re least expecting it.  Rizzari will be there too, so be warned.  Nevertheless, bring them to me.  I want to talk them into becoming part of my household.  It’s time to make an end of Rizzari’s rebellion and Hancock’s independence.  It’s time they started working for me.”