The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (55 page)

“Uh huh.  No more sprinting for me, and I can’t hear anything with my right ear.”  The worst of my half-dozen wounds had pureed my upper left thigh.  Thus the need to burn juice just to walk.

I contacted Whetstone by walkie-talkie.  “I’ve got one squad pinned down, ma’am,” she said through the static.  “But the other is coming around the east where I can’t see them.  And I think there’s a backup squad and they’re coming in too, out of my sight.”

Damn.  We weren’t winning.  I juice-signaled Gilgamesh, a slow process involving semaphore-style metasense-based communications.  We needed more muscle in the house, and we needed Focus Daumarie to get involved.  She didn’t know our signals, but Gilgamesh relayed the messages.  If two more squads appeared, Hoskins and I would be overwhelmed.  I read Daumarie’s body language as an ‘I can’t do that, I’m already in periwithdrawal’ answer.

We were screwed.

“Fort up,” I said.  We hadn’t broken the damned mercs, and still faced nearly fifty of them.  Hoskins, wobbly from low élan, slowly stacked furniture, books and bodies, to make a fort of our corner of the now empty living room and give us some protection and concealment.  I helped as best I could as I relayed orders.  The attackers hadn’t found Daumarie’s people yet as they huddled in the back room of a haberdashery, terrorizing the workers, but doing so was only a matter of time.  Perhaps a minute.

Four of Daumarie’s house guards ran into the house from the back door, laden down with more weapons.  I had them stay with us in our last-ditch position.  With our mobility gone, Hoskins and I weren’t much better than Daumarie’s house-guard Transforms.  As I positioned Daumarie’s house guards Gilgamesh’s carnage illusions expired, one dead and mutilated body at a time.  I heard the squawk of an enemy walkie-talkie, far too close.  The surviving attackers were on us.

“The Crow said to use these,” Mitch, one of the house guards, said.  He handed me a sock with five golf balls inside.  I nodded and tossed; where I tossed the walls of the Daumarie house seemingly rearranged themselves.  Nice.  “This is for the Duke.”  Mitch gave me a greasy-feeling child sized kick-ball, radiating élan.  I handed the ball to Hoskins as fast as possible, and he took it, squeezed it, and inhaled the élan.  He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up, no longer as wobbly.

Having a combat-capable Guru Crow around was most useful.  My metasense caught Gilgamesh’s dim metapresence on the roof as he started to activate and drop his golf bombs into one of the enemy groups.  When each golf bomb hit it flashed in my metasense as an élan explosion, a nasty thing to do to a normal human.  That wasn’t enough to break the enemy, though.  We were still in trouble.

I lost track of Gilgamesh when I spotted one of the enemy entering from the foyer into the living room.  I fired my trusty hand-cannon at his head, aiming with my metasense instead of my eyeballs.  The merc dropped, his head blown to bits by ammo made to stop Monsters, and the rest of his squad took cover in the foyer, returning fire.  They aimed by eye and missed.

A merc got off a lucky shot and hit one of the house guards, Vince, the kid with potential as a cook.  He fell, screaming.  Hoskins grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back so we could protect him and shut him up.  Mitch dropped his gun to tend the kid’s bleeding shoulder.  A Monster round shredded furniture and almost took off my head, and we all flattened as the attackers opened up on us, aiming for Vince’s scream.

Prone and wiggling left, I picked off three more mercs, including the lucky one responsible for Vince, one with the hand-cannon and two others with a .50 cal sniper rifle.  As the remains of the squad started to pass by us, on the way to the alley and Daumarie’s defenseless people, a stench of death and decay wafted over me, the smell of a week-old battlefield piled high in corpses, only worse.  I vomited, but none of Daumarie’s Transforms did.  Daumarie had come through, finally, though if my metasense was correct, she was now thrashing and useless, on the edge of withdrawal.

Hoskins took over the shooting duty.  He stood, and with a sub-gun in each hand he targeted the mercs on their way to the alley, killing two and wounding a half dozen others before the vomiting attackers finally broke and fled, dropping more weaponry and M-8s, filling Daumarie’s house with thick acidic smoke.  This time Hoskins only collected leg wounds, but they were bad enough to send him ass-first to the ground, snarling profanity.

Gilgamesh continued to golf-bomb the last unbroken enemy squad with élan.  They attempted to return fire at him, but he had moved to the roof across the alley, and they shot air.  The last squad, mostly disabled by his concentrated élan golf bombs and depleted by Whetstone sniping, gathered their courage and charged the house.  They didn’t make it.  Instead, they ran into Focus Daumarie’s puke attack, puked nicely, picked up their wounded and ran as well.

Victory.  I took a moment to rest my head in my hands, directing my juice into self-healing and taking the time to curse our still unknown but clearly inventive enemy.  The mercs had almost overrun us and gotten to Daumarie’s people.  I didn’t like this, not at all.

“That was fun,” Hoskins said.  We worked in the completely trashed living room, now a chaos of dust, bits of furniture, mangled books, and blood.  He helped me stack bodies; we had already sent Daumarie’s people out to clean up the bodies in the streets and alleys.  I had used a bit of spit and my healing abilities to stabilize the wounded kid.  Gilgamesh tended to a nearly climax stressed Sinclair, who, after all he had been through, shouldn’t have been anywhere near a fight today.  We showed the police false Monster corpses, sight and foul stench care of Gilgamesh’s tricks, and told them we would take care of things.  They gladly left.  “Gets me all worked up.”  Hoskins leaned over to me and stroked my shoulder, smelling of hot male musk.  “I can tell you’re worked up, too.  Perhaps…”

I glared at him and growled.  He backed off.  “Ma’am, I thought…”

“Never.”

His confusion slowly turned to horror as he studied me.  “Oh, of course, ma’am.  I apologize.  In the heat of the moment I forgot about the Enkidu incident.”  An ‘incident’ where Enkidu had raped and nearly killed me.  “That bastard’s done more harm to the reputation of all Chimeras than any ten others.”  And I still hadn’t killed him, despite my many attempts.

I tossed another body on the pile and muttered a “Sorry.” His concern mollified me, and I wished, intellectually, I could take him up on his offer.  My body needed touching.  “I appreciate the offer, but
no
.”  The idea of any Chimera making love to me disgusted me.

Hoskins nodded and picked up a bullet-riddled former couch with one hand, shook his head, and tossed the hand-me-down furniture in the now head-high garbage pile.  “This is something you need to fix, ma’am, before an enemy exploits it someday.”

“Exploits?  How in the…”  I stopped my profane comment and sniffed with my newly enhanced nose.  No.  Impossible.  “Take a sniff, your grace,” I said.  Time for a little formality here.  “It’s faint.  Tell me what you smell that shouldn’t be here.”

Hoskins tossed another dead body on the stack and sniffed for a long minute.  “I would swear I’m smelling the Interrogator’s interrogation chemicals, madam Arm.”

I nodded.  Sniffing my best, I searched and found the source, one of the merc officers and one of the few enemies carrying a walkie-talkie, the man now splayed in bloody bits in the foyer.  Yes.  A faint dross outline covered him and he did smell of several of Bass’s concoctions.  “If we can still smell Bass’s shit, it means she used her interrogation chemicals in a large enough quantity to break this man.  To recruit him.”

“Arm Bass was behind this?” Hoskins said, waving his hands at the carnage.  He crouched and metasensed, after alerting Sinclair and Gilgamesh via juice signals.  “Oh, fuck.  This wasn’t an attempt on Focus Daumarie’s life, this was a probing attack to get the two of us to reveal our fighting tricks.”  Smart man, experienced predator.

“Gilgamesh’s and Sinclair’s as well.”  Though all it revealed about Sinclair was his uselessness in a fight.  If I hadn’t heeded Lori and Hoskins’ worries and brought my own little surprises with me, we would have
lost
this fight.  We would have been dead, or captives, and…

Insights crashed through me, and I froze.  “Oh, no,” I breathed.

“Ma’am?”

“A moment while I think this through,” I said, as I sifted through memories and made one horrifying conclusion after another.

“This is bad, very bad,” Hoskins said, drawing his own cascade of conclusions.  Gilgamesh and Sinclair walked into the ground floor remains, supporting a nearly juice depleted Focus Daumarie between them, the Focus appalled and angry at the damage done to her household.

“Arm Hancock,” she said, as formal as Hoskins and me.  “Why has an army attacked my household?”

Focus Daumerie was nobody’s fool.  She also nursed an anger hot enough to melt diamonds, anger amplified by her lack of juice.  “My apologies, Focus Daumerie,” I said.  “They were after me.  I will of course cover the cost of repairs for your home, as well as gift you another $50,000 to compensate you for the inconvenience and disruption.”  From my precious, ever-shrinking money supply.

The anger faded from her eyes.  All of her people had survived, or no amount of money would have mollified her, but even so, I doubted I would be welcome in her home again.

“That will do,” she said.  She turned her head and found Vince, still on the floor and moaning.  Sinclair took charge of her, half-carrying her over to Vince, where he comforted both the Focus and the wounded Transform.

I tilted my head toward the stairs.  Gilgamesh and Hoskins followed me to the small sitting room where we had waited for Focus Daumerie to heal Sinclair.  Arm Whetstone joined us as we made our way down the hall, breathless, slightly bloody from a few lucky return shots, and grinning with battle lust.

“We have a big problem, folks.  Arm Bass hired, well, torture-hired these thugs,” I said as soon as Hoskins shut the door.

“Tiamat, don’t you have her tagged?” Gilgamesh asked me.  I nodded.

Arm Whetstone’s face fell as she contemplated the thought of a tagged Arm sending a small army to attack a superior.  “This isn’t good.”

I nodded at Betsy’s understatement.  “She’s been playing me this entire time, at least since the Toxicol mission,” I said, explaining my tsunami of insights.  “Manipulating me.  Learning me.”  Her number one goal would be to take dominance over me.  To tag me and rise in the ranks. Basic Arm behavior. “I still think I have her tagged, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out she’s found a way to fool me into just
thinking
I have her tagged.”  Had that been the trick Bass played on me when I took apart her lair?  Making me think I had her tagged, when I didn’t?

Logic.  This attack had been a probe of my capabilities and an attempt to ruin my reputation.  Given she did such things, almost certainly she had been behind the fake Monster in Detroit, another probe of my capabilities and an attempt to ruin my reputation.  She knew my dislike of Monsters, and how I predictably attacked them without doing much thinking on the subject.  The Crow likely was Echo, now revealed to have been working with her at least twice.  Perhaps three times – someone had to have tipped off the Hunters about the Sinclair Quest, and who better than the slime-dog Echo?  What had Bass learned?  Well, she at least knew that when working with Gail I wasn’t all Arm-grrrr and much more nuanced in my reactions, and that Gilgamesh was no longer an ordinary Crow.

These two and perhaps three attacks, and my personal experience with her, gave me a feel for her style: devious as hell and inclined to target other Arms. She had set up the United Toxicol mission to get me to explain to her what Toxicol was doing in their basement lab.  This explained the lack of backup guards, the dog that didn’t bark.  Bass must have neutralized them ahead of time to reduce the danger level of the caper.  The information she so conveniently had found in the archives was no new discovery for her, but something she had found, earlier, to buy me off, to get me to consider the mission a success.  She knew exactly where to look, and exactly what to give me.  All the while I had answered far too many questions for which she had no other source of information, such as the significance of Monster amygdalas and Chrysanthemum.

The Phoenix church massacre and the, alas, predictable FBI attack on my not-at-all-secret home lair had all been Carol Hancock bait, and I bit.  Bass lured me to her lair
on purpose
, gave me a tour of her place that roused my beast and awakened my lust
on purpose
, and then she set me off with the kid torture she hadn’t bothered to ideologically defend
on purpose
.  Her explanation of what she said she was doing with the children – psychological tests about child interrogation – was flat out stupid and part of what convinced me she had gone soft in the head.  In the end, she did something devious to me as I beat a tag into her.  Insane?  Not for an Arm.  We did devious capers all the time, though we normally didn’t target other Arms with them.  What was her game, and why?  What the fuck were her
goals
?

I thought, and frowned, and thought some more.

Oh, fuck!  Back into the deep deep shit, my supposedly
former
lot in life.  I thought I had outgrown the deep deep shit, thank you very much.  Shows you what I knew.