The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (7 page)

Fantasies were deadly to an Arm.  We lived too close to the edge to allow any personal delusions to take control.

Several years ago, I had endured a couple of spells of what I called magical thinking.  One came when I was recovering from withdrawal at the hands of the CDC.  The second came at the hands of a malignant Focus when I was clearing Houston to be my home.  In both cases, logic had failed me, and I resorted to symbolism, association, connection, and all the other non-logical mental processes of myth and story.

I hated it.  I hated the fuzziness, the unpredictability, and mostly, the lack of control.

In the years since, I had dismissed the fantastic from my life, telling myself I was making the sane decision for an Arm.  Such nonsense didn’t have a place in the real world, and no sane Arm should credit it.

So much for that.  Cold reality, as Arm Haggerty proved, included the fantastic, and I had been caught out, indulging in my own personal desire for a lack of magic.

I should be grateful to Arm Haggerty, I told myself, for puncturing my dangerous delusion before it killed me.  A loss of rank was well deserved for such a mistake, and a small price to pay for an important lesson.

Baah.  I just hoped these Progenitor things didn’t turn out to be enemies.

I put the chain over my head, to let the little ivory Monster hang between my meager breasts.  Maybe if I ate enough shit, I would learn to digest it.

---

“Hank,” I said, stomping into his ratty lab.  The first thing I did when I got back to Chicago was turn the money spigot on high for the incomplete Littleside project.  Getting Hank, former Dr. Henry Zielinski, leading Transform researcher and former professor at Harvard Medical School, a state-of-the-art lab was now a priority.  “I have news.  What the hell are you doing?”

Hank was working with a Crow, one I didn’t know.  Said Crow, not sensing my approach, turned to me, bug-eyed, and half fainted and half groveled his way to the floor.

“That wasn’t nice,” Hank said to me.  He grabbed the Crow, a wild eyed, dark haired scarecrow of a man, and patted him on the shoulder.  “Dark Star, this is The Commander.”

“Ma’am,” the Crow said.  “I mean you no harm, and seek only to help your friend, the Good Doctor.”  Said Crow did grovel, but I motioned him to his feet.  No Crow so covered in dross constructs, all beyond my comprehension, should be groveling to me.  His appearance here with Hank didn’t bother me; Hank always had Crows and Nobles gadding about, trading questions and information.

“Very well,” I said.  “What are the two of you working on?”

“The Keaton project,” Hank said.  “Progress, finally.  Dark Star here is an expert on Focus mental attacks, and he thinks he’s found something in the blood samples you got Keaton to donate after the, um, unfortunate event.”  Her psychotic attack on the late Arm Svensen.

“Ma’am,” the Crow said.  I took an instant disliking to this Crow, and I normally liked Crows.  Something was off about his groveling deference.  “Focus Keistermann has a trick she’s used in the past, on household Transforms of another Focus. She uses a juice pattern that causes a noradrenaline spike.  The attack is transient, but it leaves behind markers in the blood I believe the Good Doctor can identify.”

“Great!”  I paused, turned to Hank, and said, a little quieter: “What’s noradrenaline?”

“The standard non-US term for norepinephrine.  We’ve talked about it before.”

I nodded.  Norepinephrine was one of the hormones elevated in Crows and Arms; a norepi spike drives a Crow to panic and flee, while it triggers the fight reflex in an Arm.  “That does fit, sadly enough.  I wouldn’t go pinning this on any particular Focus, though.”

We talked, and Hank did his test.  He had lost his medical license years ago as the price of helping the Arms, but still possessed all his medical competence.  He was well into his fifties these days and looked older, with a narrow face and an ever-growing bald spot.  I had tagged him years ago and considered him mine.  He considered me his.

“Inconclusive, but there is something here, in amounts just under what I would consider significant, enough to conclude Stacy did have a norepinephrine spike within an hour of the blood being drawn.”

After saying goodbye to Dark Star, who still bugged the crap out of me, I sat Hank down on a lab stool to tell him the story of my mission with Bass, the Eskimo Spear presentation, and Haggerty.

“How much trouble are we in, Carol?” he asked, worried about Amy-the-hyperkinetic dropping fifty projects on him at once. She would breathe down his neck until he finished them all, too.  Last time Amy gained dominance on me, it took him less than a week to finagle a trip to Germany to visit Eissler.

“Trouble?  Hard to say.  What we’re in for is lots of hard work.  Changes to what we’re doing, as well.  Such as putting a lot less time into our induced psychotic event hypothesis.”  Hank fidgeted, sending a pen skittering across a lab table before it clanged off a condensation column.  He wanted to work on Keaton’s project.  One of his quirks was his delight in, and at times love for, the Boss.

“I’m going to need to see the stuff you liberated from United Toxicol before I make any commitments,” Hank said.  I handed the material over, and he quickly paged through it.  Then, ignoring my presence, he moved over to his desk and slurped coffee while he slowly read and reread the report.  “Hell.  Those bastards.  Carol, this is great.  I can definitely say I’m back in business on the juice pattern codification project.”

I frowned, disliking the coincidence.  “This one piece of information is that important?”

He shook his head.  “You recall that I don’t have the people or resources to do the component analysis myself,” he said.  “I farmed out nearly all of the analysis, to nine different labs, and as a check I sent out duplicate analysis requests on about a third of the compounds.  Taken all together, the results were gibberish.  Now, with this correction, they’re no longer gibberish.”

I remained unconvinced.  “Would you be saying the same thing if one of the other labs falsified their results?”

“Yes.”

“But what about the duplications?”

“They didn’t falsify the duplicated samples I gave them, just the rest.”

Oh.  “So, there
is
a problem, but the problem’s different than I thought.  Someone, somehow, knew which samples to falsify and which ones not to falsify.”

“You’re undoubtedly correct,” Hank said.  He went back to re-reading the report.  “I’ll leave that for you to figure out.  How much liberty am I going to get to focus on this?”  I sighed at his accuracy.  I had counted eight different projects in Amy’s list that required his input, and if he got distracted by those, he wouldn’t make progress on the juice pattern codification.  None of them looked worth his time, and we probably wouldn’t even have the data for the inheritance project for another five years.

“Work on this and let me deal with Amy.”  I already knew I would be spending a great deal of my political capital with Amy sorting and filtering the portion of her project list aimed at me and my people.  Amy did inject some much needed energy into the Cause, but I suspected about half the projects on her list would do us no good, and about a tenth would be actively detrimental.  Worse, if I didn’t put some limits on how many different things my people were working on, they would never complete anything.

Hank nodded without looking up.  A moment later he had a file cabinet open and started tossing reports on his desk.  Lost to the world.

“Thanks,” I said, and walked out.  He didn’t hear me.

---

“Glen Deadman Markham.”  I got in Glen Markham’s face and snarled.  “Betty’s cleaning is none of your business.  I know it.  You know it.  So why do I hear you giving her grief about it?”

Glen, a standardly unemployed Transform in Gloria Frasier’s household, paled.  “Yes, ma’am.  Of course, ma’am.”

I stroked my hand gently down his cheek.  “I always need more juice.  If you can’t get along in Gloria’s household, you’ll do just fine.”  One of the first lessons a baby Arm learned was the danger and stupidity of juice-sucking tagged Transforms, so my spiel was pure bullshit, but I certainly scared Glen.  “Go.”

He got.  Once he turned his back, I smiled.  I actually enjoyed being Gloria’s enforcer, one of the main things she got out of our agreement.

“Got it,” Gilgamesh said, from Gloria’s room.  I followed his voice, walking down the back hallway of Gloria’s absurd late-40s era suburban ranch house, trying not to trip over the Transforms and normals sleeping day shift.  Many of her people lived in the six smallish house-trailers parked in the backyard of the house, but they never had enough room for people to sleep, and the few people in her place with jobs all worked nights, restaurant and factory work, the best work a Transform or Transform-spouse could get.

Gloria lay on her bed in what had once probably been a small child’s bedroom, eyes closed.  We were into day three of our off-and-on tag experiments.  Three days.  I had given up on the juice-moving project months ago because we knew the next step involved a true Arm-Focus tag, one that didn’t expire the first time my back was turned or I sneezed.  Focuses worked too much juice, and every time they worked juice they weakened the tag.  I currently had her tagged, and Gilgamesh did metasense analysis of my tagging attempts to figure out why these tags never stuck.

I stared down at the meditating Focus, sunk deep in her pile of blankets.  “What did you find out?”

“There’s a piece of this tag that isn’t degrading,” Gilgamesh said.  Of all the many Crows I associated with, he was
mine
, and I loved him dearly for it.  He was a lean man, with rich brown hair that never would lay flat, and silent brown eyes hiding a thoughtful mind.  “I believe it’s in her subconscious.”

I frowned.  Shouldn’t the subconscious part of the tag degrade first?  “Okay.”  So what, I didn’t say.

“I believe if you tag her in a ceremonial fashion, something to engage her subconscious, the tag will stick until Gloria consciously removes it, because the tag will reside in her subconscious.”

Oh.  Just like with a non-Transform.  “We can do a ceremony.”

---

The juice flashed in my mind and vanished.  I smiled in pleasure, but Glen, our test subject, screamed.  “You snagged his juice!” Gloria said, twitching in my arms and echoing Glen’s scream.  Glen thrashed to the edge of Gloria’s single bed and huddled against the wall in a fetal position.

The seconds ticked by as I leaned against the wall on the other side of the room, lost in the ecstasy of the juice draw.  “It wasn’t a full drain,” Gilgamesh said.  From metasense invisibility.  From the next room over.  I had never seen him move so quickly.  Crows never dealt well with surprises.  “He’s three points into withdrawal.  Give his juice back to him and he’ll recover.”

“His tag’s gone!” Gloria said.

I moaned in pleasure and attempted to clear my head.  Yes, I hadn’t taken all his juice, despite the fact that from my point of view, I drained him dry.  I didn’t feel good enough to have taken all his juice.  Nor had I been touching him.  Was this the answer?  Partial draining, done at range, using the Transform’s Focus as a conduit?

Arms normally can’t grab juice at range, but I had been holding Gloria.  I apparently used
her
range.

Glen continued to scream.  Gloria had chosen him for disciplinary reasons, reasons I concurred with.  I felt her re-tag Glen and restore his juice.  Glen stopped screaming and fell unconscious.  He didn’t feel right to my metasense.

“Status,” I said, finally able to overcome the pleasure of the juice draw.

“You mangled his juice structure,” Gilgamesh said, still in the next room.  “You got too much of his fundamental juice.”

Well, duh, that’s because us Arms can’t tell the difference between supplemental and fundamental juice.

“Is this what you wanted?” Gloria said between her tears, horribly confused.  “I thought we were working on you duplicating the way I move juice to a male Transform?”

“We were.”  With Gloria tagged and sharing her metasense, I still couldn’t sense the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice.  Or metasense a Focus’s household juice buffer as anything more than an undifferentiated blob.  “I was attempting to will my way into the juice buffer and doing my best not to drain you.”

The tag prevented the latter, giving me a mental hotfoot every time I touched her personal juice supply.  When we had tried this before we figured out the stable tag procedure, I had drained her, killing her.  Luckily, after I opened myself up to her, she had done the Focus-juice-magnet trick, even while clinically dead, and gotten her juice back.  Focuses are severely tough and difficult to kill, even the ones who moan about hangnails and stubbed toes.

Gloria hugged Glen and started bawling.  “How bad off is he?” I asked Gilgamesh.

“He’ll recover, but he’s going to have brain damage.”

Damn.

I sensed Gilgamesh approach, and I hugged him.  Right now I wanted comfort, and sex, and I had comfort to give.  I feared Haggerty was right, and I did need to work with more powerful Focuses, Focuses stout enough to keep me from sucking down one of their Transforms by accident.  We all expected mistakes like these.