No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (11 page)

She shook her head.  “None at all.  Not even the base signals you give off just by existing.”

Oh, now that sounded wonderful.  If I didn’t irritate her by my mere presence, such a change would be worth a lot.

“What else?” she said.

“We’ve got some kind of juice link.  As if I could pass you juice if I wanted to.”  I shook my head, trying to find words for these screwy Arm emotions.  “No, it’s more complicated.  Sometimes I might be able to pass you juice, if the time is right.  I’m comfortable around you.  Not so much afraid.”

She frowned at the last.  “I’m not sure I much care for this ‘not afraid’ business.”  Uh, oh.  Her tone didn’t sound good.

In an instant, she was on me, a predator effect based specter of death, knife at my throat, death and damnation on two legs.  The panic hit and my heart rate spiked.  A scream built in my throat and I almost wet myself, except I remembered her white couch and stopped that particular reaction.  Normally I had to suppress my challenge urges to get the pee reaction.  Not this time.

Keaton stopped.  I took a breath and let my adrenaline come down again.  Right now I
couldn’t
challenge her, even if I wanted to. I wondered if this was permanent.

“Good.”  She grunted and sat down next to me on the couch.

“Ma’am?  Is there some submission gesture you’d like?  I want to make you happy.”

She leaned back on the couch and ran her hand through her cropped hair.  I found it rather pleasant to have her so close.  She looked over at me and shook her head.

“Dammit, I just nearly scared the piss out of you and you’re back to being calm as a cucumber.  What the fuck’s going on?”

This was getting to be a lot of analyzing.  I had a sneaky suspicion I was a little buzzed from this whole tagging business and the bolts in my head weren’t all screwed down tight yet.  Also, with Gilgamesh gone, I had to work again to make the simplest logic flow.

“You’re the boss.  If you want to make me afraid, that’s your right.  Would you like some chocolate cheesecake?  There’s four of them in the freezer.  I’d be glad to get it for you.”

“No, I don’t want cheesecake!  We’re having a serious discussion, damn it.”

“Yes, ma’am.  Is there something else I can get for you?”

“No!”

At the snap of irritation in her voice, I fell to the floor and knelt, meekly crouching in my best grovel position.

“And get up off the floor, damn it!  I already told you that once!”

I popped back up on the couch as if someone lit a firecracker underneath me.

“Ma’am,” I said, forlorn. “I don’t want to make you mad.”

She sighed and rubbed her forehead.  “All right, look.  Groveling is a way to make me happy, and you told me yourself that the Arm tag provides shortcuts.  All by itself having you tagged makes me happy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  The submission gestures were only symbols.  Now we did it with the juice. With Transforms, everything got back to the juice.

“And you want to do something for me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She sighed. “All right, this is going to be different.”

“There are some interesting implications of these Arm tags, Hancock,” Keaton said.  I wasn’t the only one who was a little buzzed.  We were both on the floor now and sat knee to knee on a white faux-fur rug, gazing in each other’s eyes.  Oddly, considering that I had taken juice just a few hours ago, I should be horny as all hell.  Given what Keaton and I had been doing after all my juice draws, we should have been in the bedroom having make-up sex.

I wasn’t the least bit horny.  I couldn’t make a pass at Keaton if I wanted to.  Something in what we had done, with the fight and the tag, removed those urges entirely.  She knew so, too.

Stupid juice.

“Back to our previous discussion.  You’re working for me now.”

“Of course.”  That’s what the fight settled.  Hadn’t it?

Keaton nodded.  Right now I didn’t need the ‘ma’am’ and she didn’t care.

I waited.

She waited.

“Normally you can’t let sleeping dogs lie like that,” Keaton said.  “Aren’t you curious about what I’m going to have you doing?”

“Yes.”

“Your first task is to…” Keaton, studying me, stopped mid-order.  “Happy anticipation?”  She couldn’t believe. “You hate it when I give you orders, hints and suggestions.”

“Ma’am,” I said, trying to remember.  “You’re right.  I did.  I was challenging you, ma’am, by being resentful.”  The logical steps here made me work.  “My instincts say it was the correct thing to do.  Then.”

Keaton smiled.  “I get it.  For Arms it’s not fight or flight, it’s tag or fight.  Hell, this
is
important.  Like your memory said, the Arm tag is the key to Arm society.  I’d been working a different method of solving the aggression problem based on what I’ve seen with Focus organizations and the American officer corps, and although my idea has promise, it wasn’t providing me any leverage on the aggression problem.”

I picked this out of her mind.  What she talked about was the teamwork trick, the team-building thing she did with Gilgamesh and me.

Here she was, doing it again.  I thought her teamwork trick made the aggression problem worse, though.  All your team members had to be aggressive to be at their best.  “I was going to break your balls for having to rescue you, until you managed to pay me off with something spectacular,” she said.  “Well, in my mind figuring out the Arm tag pays off the rescue.  This sure the hell beats having you wear a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, formal.  She didn’t say she wasn’t going to boss me around.  That made me happy.  It was proper for her to be bossing me around.

This Arm tag was spectacularly messing with my head.

“You know you’re not fully recovered.  You also know, at some level, that you’ve been leeching off of my mind and Gilgamesh’s mind for a bunch of your smarts.”

“Ma’am, could you explain more of what you sense in me.  Please?”

“Your ability to read people is better than when you graduated.  Whether your skills have diminished at all from where they were at the end in Chicago I don’t know.  You’re using this to supplement your intelligence the same way a horse or dog uses its ability to read people and thus seem more intelligent.”

Nasty comparison, but I couldn’t complain.  Keaton was right.

“So when you send me out I’m going to have some intellect problems.”

“They could be large problems unless you get some intelligent companions.”  Pause.  I had the bad feeling she had just zinged me, but her comment flew over my head.  “In any event, your number one overall goal is to get yourself fixed up.  In the meantime, I’m going to have you doing some odd jobs for me.  For instance, I have a set of paperwork that needs to go to Focus Gladchuck.  You get to deliver it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  I paused, troubling thoughts tumbling through my head.  “What level of initiative would you like me to show, ma’am, when I’m working on your odd jobs?”

Keaton met my gaze.  “As much full Carol Hancock Arm initiative as you can come up with.  If I don’t want Arm initiative on some task, I’ll give the task to someone else.”

I smiled.  My instinct said this was a choice on her part.  “In that case, ma’am, I’d like to know what your priorities are, beyond completing the task at hand.”  If old Carol had made this comment, it would have been a subtle challenge, a question of what I would be able to ignore.  Me, now?  I wanted to please.

“Information.  My overall goal of getting us out from under the thumbs of the senior Focuses and likely the senior Crows requires information we don’t have, and we won’t know what we’ll need until after we get it.  So: information comma all comma voluminous comma don’t worry about giving me too much information.  Next priority is survival.  If you’re going to get killed, run.”  Hell.  Information was worth more than my life?  Ouch.  “Right.  Fuck, this priority crap is tough.  Okay, for something as earth-shattering as Arm tags, risk your life.  Anything else don’t bother.  Next priority?  Your ideas.  You’ve got a good track record on the idea front and I expect you to continue along those lines, and I’m going to want you to pass them along when you get them.  Next priority is recruits.  You’re going to need them.”

I nodded.  “Ma’am, I have some people I’d like to kill.  May I add this as a priority?”

“No.  No revenge killings.  For someone like you, revenge is a stupid emotional response that will only get you into more trouble.”

I didn’t respond and merely let my head hang low.  Her orders hurt.  I wanted my revenge.  Orders were orders though.

Keaton loved me for my response.  An Arm experiences love when they dominate.  They love whom they dominate.  They love what they possess.

I was the one with the tag and the juice-enforced obedience, but Keaton didn’t escape untouched.  She didn’t get to own me without caring for me.  The realization was hard for her.

“This is how it’s going to be,” Keaton said. “You want revenge?  You can have your revenge in five years. Your temper will have had time to cool and the traps those people are now guarded with will be gone.  Five years.  Before then, if even one of these people dies suspiciously…”  Keaton’s voice tailed off.

I had heard this sort of rant many times before.  Her rant was supposed to end with “…I will come after you, and I will hurt you like you have never been hurt before.  Do you understand me, Hancock?”

Instead: “That’s it?  I say it, you obey it?” Keaton asked.  “I don’t need to threaten?”

“No, ma’am.  I’m yours.”

She didn’t like my answer.  Somehow, in all the changes the juice made to her and to me, torture had dropped out of the equation.  Where was her opportunity to beat up on me?  Not that I minded, of course.

Keaton didn’t like my reaction.  The knife appeared from nowhere and she plunged it into my arm.  Twisted.  “I do this just for fun, remember?” she said.  Snarled.

I looked at her and said nothing.  Let the pain show on my face.

“Tell me why this hurts me more than it hurts you, Hancock,” she said.  Her own face was pale under the stone mask.

“Ma’am.  I have no idea.”

“Think.”

I thought.  It took a while, but eventually I understood.

“I’m yours,” I said.  “I’m an extension of you, ma’am.  When you hurt me it’s the same as hurting yourself.”  The juice doing things, not me.  The juice always won.

The knife vanished.  I lapped up the blood to keep it from dripping on her beautiful pale carpet.

“Disobey me, Hancock.  Something small.”

The obvious next test.  Intelligent, tool using, sapient predators definitely have different methods of settling things than tigers, lions and bears.  I smiled at her.  “I refuse.”

Keaton frowned for a moment at my response, and smiled back.  “For refusing my order, I punish you to walk around the room on your hands five times,” she said.

I did so.  This was proper punishment.  Even in a dress, I didn’t hesitate.

I finished and returned to my seat.

“Huh,” Keaton said.  She still puzzled through the implications of our little exercise.  So did I.  If I disobeyed Keaton’s orders, I would be inviting Keaton to torture me.

“I have another test.  I’m going to stay right here.  I want you to walk, slowly, down the road for a distance of a mile.  Pay careful attention to your emotions.  Then come back.”

“Yes, ma’am.  May I ask a question first?”

“Ask.”

“Yes, ma’am.  Ma’am, what do you see when you see me?  How do I seem different to you?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed.  “You’re cute, all right?  You’re obedient, you’re submissive, you’re mine.  And you’re cute.  Now go down the road like I told you.”

Cute.  Not bad at all.  I got.

I didn’t find much within a mile of Keaton’s house, just a narrow winding road progressing down a steep slope, with a few large houses hidden well back from the road.  The fresh air was a delight to my nose.

About a hundred yards away, the mental effects of the tag began to fade. The tag itself remained, but the active juice link faded with distance.  My free will came back to me.  No more enforced obedience.  No more enforced subservience.  I kept walking, probing at my mind.

The tag itself was easy for me to wrap my mind around.  I knew I could get rid of the tag with no more than an effort of will.  My instincts said many things might knock the tag off.  Betrayal, for instance.  Turning on Keaton.  Anything, I suspected, that made me think in my own mind I was no longer hers.

Here, beyond her direct control, any effects from the tag were minor at most.  I could disobey if I chose to, subject, I suspected, to any penalties she chose to extract when I next came back to her presence.  Before, I obeyed her orders reflexively, eagerly looked for opportunities to serve her, took whatever punishments she assigned for my misdeeds, and submitted in all circumstances.  Now, outside her range, if I didn’t like the arrangement, I could get rid of her tag and go my own way.

The non-tag effects were more evident.  Late lunch was past, so this was late afternoon.  So was the sun, over there above the not-so-distant ocean, setting or rising?  I burned a tiny bit of juice to logic out the sun was setting.  So, where would it rise?