The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (35 page)

“Yes, ma’am.  Thank you, ma’am.  I really appreciate this.”

After listening to Whetstone’s request and rolling her eyes at the idea of an Arm with financial difficulties, Haggerty left for the dining room to load up on more food.  She ran into Webberly there, and I winced when I heard the tone of their voices and eased over to the left a couple of feet, so I could watch through the opening.

“Don’t think the fact you’re Ma’am Hancock’s boss means you can give me orders,” Webberly said, her voice ripe with
challenge
.

“Nothing’s changed.”  Haggerty laughed her nasty laugh.  Around them, the normals eased out of the dining room, away from the conflict.  “I could always tell you what to do, baby Arm.”

“Fuck yourself, asshole.”

“‘Oh, please,
please
don’t take New York from me,’” Haggerty said, mimicking Webberly perfectly.  “‘Please, it’s my territory, I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t do this to me.’”

Crap.  I went through this nonsense the last time Haggerty was my boss and she decided she absolutely positively immediately had to challenge Keaton for overall Arm leadership.  Back then I advised her in private, barely within the limits of the tag and definitely over the challenge edge, about her stupidity and lack of a chance of success.  In public I stayed neutral.  Haggerty, as always headblind to the nuances of upper-end Arm politics, ended up learning the hard way about her own stupidity.

On the other hand, this time Webberly did the stupid.  Her Arm instincts weren’t in the least bit deficient; instead, anger and history overrode her instincts. Three years ago, Haggerty had claimed New York as her first territory, right when she got out of training with Keaton.  She didn’t hold New York for long, because she always had the Feds on her ass, and they chased her out of New York as quickly as they chased her out of every city she took, the price she paid for her day job, hounding the FBI.

Unfortunately, two years ago, when Webberly graduated from her training, she also settled in New York as her first territory.  Six months later, Haggerty rotated back in, reclaimed New York, and threw Webberly out.  Right now, Haggerty lived in a grimy Atlanta suburb and Webberly claimed New York, but Webberly’s move wouldn’t last past the next time the FBI found Haggerty, which I expected any day now.

Webberly hated Haggerty for her actions, and Haggerty sure didn’t make things any easier.  For the moment I was caught between them in the tag hierarchy, and I needed for them to be able to work together.  Fortunately, the corollary to Keaton’s sneer about being less of an Arm because of my work with the other Major Transforms was the fact I possessed quite a few non-Arm tricks to pull on, if I needed them.

I did two things: I yanked on Webberly’s tag, hard, and I wiggled Mary Sibrian’s tag to lead her over.  She came, tried to back off when she saw the nearly started dominance contest, but I yanked on her tag hard to make my opinion known.  She stayed.  Webberly immediately gave the lesser-ranked Sibrian the glare-down.  Haggerty frowned at me, with no idea what I was doing.  I signaled a request to let me work my magic, and her posture changed from
dominant Arm
to
amused audience
.  We had played this game many times over the past three plus years.

I yanked on Webberly’s tag again, hard, when Sibrian still didn’t leave.  She jumped, startled because she had so little experience with tags.  She immediately came my way.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t wish to displease you.  What have I done? Please, punish me if I deserve it,” she said, brown face pale and bloodless.  Yanking on her brand new tag had caused more of an impact than I had intended.

“I think we have a little problem, Rose.”

“Ma’am, not with me, I hope.  I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

“Relax, I’m not mad at you.”  I led the Arms out of the dining room and into the kitchen, where people scattered and I would be able to do this without an audience.  I sat at the dinette table and the other three Arms echoed my actions.

I turned to Amy.  “Ma’am, when we talked about our various problems with tags five months ago, you asked for a concrete example of the issues with Arm tags.”  I bent my Arm predator into Focus-like charisma, searching for buy-in.  “This situation is one of them.”

“Explain,” Haggerty said, unhappy, a Keatonic demand.

“Up until tonight, we only had three Arms in our organization.  As Mary also wears your tag, ma’am, we didn’t have any difficulties.”  Amy nodded for me to continue.  Webberly for one caught the implications of my ‘our organization’ comment and the fact Haggerty hadn’t taken offense at what a more touchy Arm would have considered an explicit challenge.  “Now, our organization contains five Arms, six if we count Duval.  The issue is how those Arms without standard tag links work together when they possess tag links connected through other Arms.  This also illuminates the issue of the innate differences between how the tags work on each Arm.  Do you agree further investigation is necessary?”

Amy leaned back and her eyes glazed over as she went into one of her analysis trances.  Webberly got all anxious, finally starting to understand how little she understood Haggerty and Haggerty’s strengths, or Amy and my relationship.  While Amy thought, Betsy came in and, following my signals, pulled up a chair and sat at the now overcrowded dinette table.  The lure of four Arms in the same room had been impossible for her to resist.

“As we all grow experienced, our skill
levels
converge as our skills
diverge
,” Haggerty said, eyes closed.  “The fact we’re in an organization will make the skill levels converge faster, as we’ll be learning from each other, and the actual skills diverge faster, as we each seek advantage over the other.  The day will come, and quickly, when the current tag and challenge system leads us into a scenario where we’re spending all of our time dealing with dominance issues.”

“Exactly.”

“Ma’am, ma’am,” Webberly said.  “This is my fault, then.”  I metasensed her recovering from her shock over the tag-yanking and Haggerty’s ongoing analytical demonstration.  Despite her words, she remained unhappy.  “What kind of accommodation did you have in mind, to allow me to fix this problem?”

I shook my head, knowing her thoughts.  “Relax.  It’s not my place to order any Arm I have tagged to give rank to any other Arm I have tagged or who has me tagged.”  Oh, I could take the easy way out and play the harsh dictator, but my instincts, what Haggerty termed my ‘charismatic thinking gestalt’, told me otherwise.  I attracted Arms to me because I
didn’t
play the harsh dictator.

Amy opened her eyes and stared at me.  “Very well.  With your permission?”

I knew where she would be going, so I nodded in the affirmative.  Amy turned to Webberly.  “I want you to figure this out.  With Carol’s permission, I assigned Mary the task of fixing the Arm tag variation problem I’ve been having with normals.  I’m going to add you to the research project, Arm Webberly, and add ‘Arm tag problems with other Arms and other Transforms’ to the project.”  Webberly nearly panicked, faced with the impossible problem Haggerty just dumped on her.  With my permission.  Instead, she froze, neither affirming or denying the assignment.  The price of joining my organization; she could get loaded up with Haggerty’s projects just like the rest of us.

Haggerty turned to Mary, oblivious.  “Mary, tell these fine Arms what you’ve discovered so far.”

“Ma’ams,” Mary said.  If she was discommoded by being second juniormost to the other Arms at the table, her worry didn’t show.  Inter-Arm relations came easy to her, in contrast to Amy’s social limitations.  “My progress has been slow, but after several long conversations with senior Crows, I’ve managed to analogize Arm tagging of normals to Crow dross manipulation.  I believe the Focus tag likely analogizes better, but due to edicts lay down from on high by the first Focuses, none of the senior Focuses are willing to collaborate with me on this.  In return for allowing him to run me through various tests and sit through some excruciating juice-structure analysis sessions, Crow Guru Thomas the Dreamer and I worked out a mental procedure allowing me to vary Arm tags on normals in at least two variables, neither of which yet have good names.  I’m currently in the process of experimenting with different tag varieties and noting the differences on tagged normals.”  Webberly stared at Sibrian in shock as she talked, learning for the first time how much contact my people really had with the rest of the Transform community.  Hearing about the Cause was much different from living it.

“Excellent progress,” Amy said.  She likely already knew the details; her praise was a show of magnanimity for the rest of us.  She turned to me with the next obvious question, and I nodded.  “Mary, you and Webberly are going to be working together on this.  My suggestion is you also work with the Inferno household and Lady Death.  This tag alteration should, if our half-assed hypotheses are correct, work on Transforms as well, and would fit into Inferno’s household redefinition project.”  Exactly.  I had a mental image of Connie Yerizarian, Lori’s head of household, holding the tags of some of the more independent Inferno department heads.  She needed them.

“Yes, ma’am,” Webberly said, giving rank to Haggerty and accepting the idea of working with Lori and Inferno.  Dominance issue solved, the two had sorted out the basics of working together, and nobody had held a dominance fight in my goddamned dining room.  Webberly had mixed thoughts about the Amy – Carol tag team crap the two of us just pulled on her.  She technically admired the trick and was glad to be on a team with tricks like this, but on the other hand disliked the fact we had pulled the trick on
her
.

Amy de-bossed her aura and turned the session back over to me.  I
was
the one who held the tags of Webberly and Whetstone, not her.  I studied Webberly speculatively, so competent and eager to please, and thought about another contribution.

“I have another question for you, Rose.  Where did you get the weaponry, and can you get more?”

She didn’t smile, but I sensed her pleasure at the notice.  “I found a community of people who trade weaponry across international borders.  I’ve made contact with some of those people, and have established a trading relationship.”  Shit! She had managed to link herself into the international arms trade.  I was impressed.  “I procure certain US weaponry, and can exchange the weaponry for cash, or for weaponry from other nations.”

“Yes, I can definitely see some uses for this…”

I kept the table conversation going for over an hour, each of us telling Arm war stories, and in the process binding us all together with my charisma.

---

When you have The Commander as an underling, if you’re a smart boss, you’ll let The Commander do her thing.  Later in the evening I gathered eight of us into my war room: Haggerty, Tommy Bates, Webberly, Sibrian, Whetstone, Tom, Hank and Ila.  Gail found a way to tag along and insert herself into the meeting.  I didn’t throw her out, partly because I didn’t want to cause a scene, and partly because I wanted to see how much rank she would claim.  She had earned a seat at the table by having enough gall to claim one.  Gail appeared to be par for the course for a medium-aged powerful Focus as far as nerve and presence went; I remembered my first meeting with Lori, where she had totally dominated this particular young Arm.  No, training Gail wouldn’t be trivial.  The resistance she gave wouldn’t be going away.

We kept Duval in a corner, meditating.  Webberly didn’t do the groveling student Arm routine – instead, when Keaton normally made a student Arm grovel to keep her out of the way, Webberly had Duval meditating.  I would have sent the student Arm to the weight room, but Webberly treated all aspects of Duval’s physical training as extremely important, never to be done unsupervised.

“With your permission, ma’am?” I said.  Amy nodded.  “All right, people.  Business.”  I sat at the head of the table, and all the faces turned my way.  The smell of the normals’ coffee filled the air.  “First on the agenda, Mary, give us a report on your last six baby Arm retrieval attempts.”

Sibrian started in.  Mary’s report took her nearly a half-hour, uninterrupted except for a few questions.  Her tale was of a long running feud with the authorities, attempting to identify and extract baby Arms before the authorities got to them and killed them.  The fight was vicious as sin, with traps and intimidation and multiple dead on both sides.  We got barely half of those baby Arms out.

I watched Haggerty warily as Mary spoke.  She knew this job from experience, and given she also held Mary’s tag, Haggerty could easily claim her away from me for her own organization.  Last time around, she did just that, and I had spent a great deal of time cleaning up the resulting mess.  Haggerty tended to spill out dozens of projects with no clear priorities, and Mary got disorganized under stress.  The resulting fiasco supplied me enough entertaining stories to keep me stocked for the next decade.

When Mary finished, I looked around at the table.  Most of the team remained alert and attentive.  Gail’s eyes were wide and her ears practically twitched with interest.  She was getting a sudden introduction to the other side of the world, the side of the attackers instead of the defenders.

“Comments? Anyone spot anything odd?” Something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on the problem.