The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (30 page)

Lady Death remained important and useful, if we needed her, but Lori’s violent side wasn’t appropriate inside a Focus household.

“Heaven help you if my darkness ever gets loose again,” I said.  With mine luring her on, she would never be able to control her own.

“Heaven help the world,” Lori said, enigmatic.

---

“No, no!”  I got in the face of the young Transform woman in front of me.  “Fast.  You want speed.  Push yourself.  You can learn speed if you work at it.”  The day was warm and gorgeous, and the scent of fresh grass, damp ground and honest sweat could have been sold in bottles.

“Like this.  Block.”  I raised the wooden knife to the first position, then down, then up again to the other side.  She blocked, but not fast enough.  I picked up the speed and pushed her harder.

This wasn’t a real knife-fighting drill.  This was purely a speed exercise, but wooden knives did make a good prop, and the students already knew the basic positions.

“Faster!”

“I can’t…”

I smacked her.  Over to the side, Gail caught her breath.

“Keep the fucking juice count steady!”  Gail jumped and concentrated on the juice again, holding it at 23.1, the Transform training optimum.  If she kept the juice count rock solid at the training optimum, and if I applied enough stress to her bodyguards, they would be getting a hell of a lot better just about now.  Gail’s people used the training optimum trick already, and had for almost two years.  They progressed slower than they should because nobody in this chaotic rathole knew the first thing about proper stress, and because Gail, when she got distracted or over-emotional, couldn’t keep her people’s juice at 23.1

“Don’t you ever say ‘I can’t’,” I said to the woman kneeling on the ground.  “You can.  Now get up off your ass and do this again.”

The Transform, Melanie, stood up again and stepped toward me with her knife raised.  She wore a bright red handprint on her cheek, and tears dribbled out of her eyes, but she came at me with an angry fire in her movements.  I drilled her again, just at the limit of her speed, until she gasped for air and dripped with sweat, but she didn’t slack off this time.  I stepped up the predator effect and increased my speed, until I smelled the stench of juice usage as she increased her own speed to keep up with me.  Then I clipped her with the wooden knife and crowded her harder.  Pain, stress.

“Faster, bitch.”  The tears came in earnest now, and her lips pulled back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl of her own.  I saw in her face the agony her own muscles gave her as she pushed them beyond their limits, but she moved her knife, fast, faster, keeping up with me as if her very life depended on it.

Five seconds.  Ten seconds.  I pushed her.  The others gathered around, murmuring in awe.  Fifteen seconds.  Twenty seconds.  If Gail got distracted now, and decided to watch us rather than maintain Melanie’s juice count, I would paste her ass into next week.

Twenty-five seconds.  Thirty.  Thirty-five seconds and I smelled the faint ozone scent in the odor of Melanie’s juice signaling incipient juice overuse.

I stopped.  “Enough,” I said.  “You’re done.”

Melanie stared at me for just a moment before her legs collapsed underneath her and she fell backwards into the beaten-down grass, gasping giant, heaving breaths.  Everyone else called out congratulations in voices mixing impressed astonishment with an undercurrent of unease.

“Great job!” Gail said, as she rushed over, goosing Melanie’s juice count as she did so.

Success.  I stepped back to look at my students.  Six men, five women, and Gail, in a fallow field south of Ann Arbor, with the remains of last year’s corn stubble showing amid the high grass.  Gail’s household’s fallback emergency home, heaven help them.  These were Gail’s top Transform bodyguards, those worthy of advanced training.  Quite a lot of them, but Gail wanted as many of her people as possible to be bodyguard capable, and I didn’t at all mind lending a hand.

I hadn’t realized before I got involved with them, but Gail and her household were no more a normal Focus household than Inferno, Lori’s household.  Not in the same way, though.  Instead of Monster hunting, Gail and her household’s edge came from their Transform rights work, because of death threats, angry crowds, police harassment, the occasional rock and bottle, and agitators threatening to riot.  Add in dirty politics and journalist-style investigations and you ended up with a great deal of streetwise wisdom.  The first time I saw her freeze a normal just by looking at him, I had to re-evaluate my first impressions of Gail entirely.  Lori had been right.  In her own way, Gail and her fractious yet impossibly stubborn household did remind me of Lori and Inferno when I first met them nearly five years ago.  Most of Gail’s bodyguards were already blooded, at least at the fisticuffs level, and well trained for their needs.  They used the training optimum tricks to master what they thought they needed: situational awareness, quick reactions, and much less self-defense than I thought necessary.

Time for Gail and her household to get booted into the big leagues, as Zielinski, Keaton and I did for Lori and Inferno all those years previous.

Fifty yards away, Tom trained the non-Transform bodyguards, including Gail’s husband, Van, who would have a hard time winning a bar fight with a junior high school athlete.  He had good eyes, though, and could shoot.  Past Tom, Lena trained the rest of the household, all the non-fighters, in basic self-defense and weapon use.  Out farther, the kids played a game of kickball, and the younger teens watched over the very young children.

Gail’s female bodyguards didn’t surprise me, but the fact she had picked up the practice years ago did.  Female bodyguards were a new innovation among the Focuses, but Gail picked up on the new and interesting like a bee picked up pollen.

Me, I was a little slower, but I did recruit Lena for my moneymaking operation about a year ago.  When I picked her up, she had been poor and abused, with a major chip on her shoulder.  She signed on with me because I offered to teach her to fight, and I did, but I also spent the next six months cleaning up her massive head problems.  She was a good one these days, but damn, clearing out the sewer in her head had been hard work.

“You, John,” I said.  “You’re next.  Get yourself ready.”

I looked them over as they sparred.  Not a bad crew, if you wanted crowd control and protection from crazies.  They all needed some improvement.  There on my right, Gail still hovered over Melanie trying to give comfort and reassurance to the exhausted guard.

Not, in my opinion, the best way to build strong bodyguards.  They needed a little less mothering and a lot more self-reliance.  Yet, in Gail’s household, the mothering felt right.  Perhaps if I could get them to tone down the mothering just a little…

“Gail,” I said.  “You first.”

Before I started in with Melanie, all the guards had been sparring, Gail as well.  Only she held back against her partner, a young man a little too respectful of his Focus.  She far overvalued her combat capabilities, in my opinion.

We started on the speed drill, and I gave her a lot more speed than I gave Melanie.  “You proud of yourself, Focus?” I said, needling her.  “All these extra advantages, and you can barely keep up with a Transform.”  I upped the speed a little more and clipped her in the arm with my wooden knife, hard enough to bruise.

Minor harassment.  I saved the major stuff for our private times.  I still drove her to tears, but she coped now with the little things.  She took the hit and the harassment without blinking, and kept attempting to block me.  I eased my speed back down to something more reasonable and circled around her.  She turned to block me from the new direction, and our forearms hit, driving me back.  She was strong for a Focus, probably as strong as I had been when I finished my Arm training with Keaton, but strength wasn’t even close to the entire Arm package.  I slipped around her forearm and forced
her
back.  Around me, the others knew better than to break off their own sparring, but I felt their eyes.  Major Transform sparring went far beyond the limits of human capabilities, and Gail was no neophyte fighter, nor a Focus housewife clone.  Turning her into a combat-oriented Focus would be luscious fun and relatively easy, but I, alas, had other priorities.

Gail stepped backwards, her foot slipped in a hole, and she went down.  I didn’t stop my attack, and she kept her knife moving, blocking one strike after another.  Excellent!  The spine-stiffening training was working; when we started she would have given up when she fell.  Instead, she continued with her defense and scrambled back to her feet.  Her knife never stopped moving.  I kept going for a few more passes before I stopped.

“Good,” I said.  She looked at me with wide eyes.  This was the first compliment I had given her.

“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly, surprised to find herself so pleased.  I looked at her thoughtfully for a moment.  She really was a beautiful Focus, hot and sweaty and stressed, with grass in her hair and fire in her eyes.  Easy to linger on, just watching her.

I turned away.  “John, get over here.  You’re up.”

We trained all afternoon, then the non-fighters took a break to prepare a huge picnic dinner, and we trained again until dusk.  By the time we finished, every one of the Transform bodyguards teetered on the edge of juice overuse, and every one of them was notably faster and more capable than they had been at the beginning of the day.  I made a mental note to tell Newt about this place, as he would love this sort of dross.  Slowly but surely, I won Newton over, as I had won over Gilgamesh.

By the end of the training session, the entire rest of the household had gathered round just to watch, impressed and a little unsettled to discover the Transforms, who they thought ordinary, were capable of such feats.

The Transform bodyguards themselves looked at me with fear and awe, and also just a little bit of respect.

I rested, predator sated, and lost myself in my metasense as the household lingered to talk and finish off the last of the food before cleaning up.  I caught Gail right after she polished off her last hamburger.

“Gail.”  She looked at me as I sat down next to her, still glowing from the tiny nugget of praise earlier in the day.

“Yes, Teacher?”

“There’s going to be an Arm ceremony next Tuesday night, and I’m inviting you to attend.”

Her eyes lit up with curiosity, but then practicality intruded.

“How dangerous is this?”

I shook my head.  “Not at all.  The Arms are all Amy’s and mine, and you’ll only be observing, not participating.”

She thought for a moment, so interested she could hardly contain herself, and then nodded.

“Good,” I said.  “Bring your entourage, and dress up.  This is a formal occasion.”

Her grin faded.  Hell, she didn’t have enough money to dress up for a formal occasion.  I thought about the problem, and then pulled my wallet out of my jeans.

“Here,” I said, and pulled $1000 out and put it in her hand.  I always kept a large supply of cash with me, just in case.  Gail gaped at the money, and hesitated only for an instant.  I practically heard the words ‘Arm pet’ echoing around in her head, followed a moment later by ‘such a stupid prejudice’.  She had been the only non-Arm supported Focus in the Midwest Region to stand up for the shunned Focuses, which won her a lot of political brownie points from all the Arms.

“Your appearance reflects on me,” I told her.  “Make sure you do yourself up right.”

Gilgamesh: July 22, 1972 – July 25, 1972

“And so, a collection of Crows cast Sinclair out, without even the permission of his Guru,” Gilgamesh said, finishing his story to Dynamo.

Dynamo looked unhappy.  “Do you know who the senior Crows were?”  They sat in Dynamo’s lab, where he was a research chemist at an actual paying job.

“Guru Chevalier identified himself,” Gilgamesh said.  “We know there were more, but we don’t know who.”

A flicker of an expression passed over Dynamo’s face, brief enough to hide, before he replaced it with sympathy and concern.  If Gilgamesh hadn’t been watching Dynamo with a Crow’s paranoia, he would have missed it.

“I’m so sorry,” Dynamo said.  “I can’t imagine what they were thinking.  What can I do to help?”

“You can help me look at these new rotten egg effects,” Gilgamesh said, deviating from his usual storytelling.  “I’ve been learning a lot of new tricks, but I’m still not able to get the variation you’re managing.  Can you have a look at these?”  He extracted several dross-doused tennis balls from his pocket.

Dynamo’s eyes lit, and he smiled, a more natural smile.  “Let me have a look.  And maybe we can make a few trades.”

They traded tricks for the next two hours.

“All right,” Hoskins said.  “We’re 5 miles away from Las Cruces.  Why are we 5 miles
north
of Las Cruces on I-25?”

Sumeria rumbled along the freeway through a no man’s land of desert and scrub.  Gilgamesh shielded his eyes from the setting sun as he turned to talk to the Duke.  “Dynamo is calling his Guru, Hephaestus, right now to report us, and we needed to convince him we were going north.”

“You sense this?  I thought he was out of your range.”