The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (3 page)

“What’s the point of this, ma’am?” Bass said.  I easily read her confusion; she hadn’t gone through the medical training Keaton subjected her favorite, Rayburn, to, or my ersatz apprenticeship under Zielinski.

I walked Bass through this horror as I inspected the setup.  Blood goes out here from each Monster, goes into this machine over there, the machine filters out the blood plasma, taking over half the juice with it, this machine replaces the plasma with plasma acquired from God knows where mixed with saline, and over there the fake blood is pumped back into the Monsters.  No, they didn’t give a shit if the blood from different Monsters got mixed together.  Transforms were tough and didn’t have the tissue rejection issues normals had.

We had
other
issues.

“Snowcone,” the Crow who followed Bass, “believes neither juice nor élan is stable when it’s removed from Transforms,” Bass said.  I had never met Snowcone, and neither had the Crow who followed me, Gilgamesh.  We both suspected Snowcone was an identity of a known Crow, a potential problem we didn’t know how to solve or mitigate against. “Unless, of course, it’s being stabilized by a senior Major Transform, ma’am.”

Good point.  “It isn’t,” I said, after a careful metasense scan of the area.  After the scan I went over to the machinery at the far end of the lab.  Here, they chemically separated the Monster juice from the blood plasma and stored the impure remains cryogenically after mixing them with a chemical solution smelling faintly of rubbing alcohol.  I took a sample of the solution for Zielinski to identify.  “They have a new trick.”  Perfect for any Arm capable of subsisting off élan, which I only knew of two, Arms Armenigar (the first and ‘type’ Arm) and Haggerty (my crazy heroic underling), and neither did so full time, or without the help of Crows.

“Interested in a little mayhem?” I asked.

“Of course, ma’am.”  Bass smiled and wiggled loose her shoulders under her thick brown leather jacket.  I didn’t expect much argument from a younger Arm, but Bass was one of the four senior Arms in the United States, fourth after Keaton, myself, and Amy Haggerty.  No cavalierly ordering her around.

Politeness also kept us from snarling at each other.  Arms without a tagged relationship often snarled at each other.  A lot.  Arms are territorial, and defaulted to competition and fighting absent some mitigating factor like a tag.  Bass and I recognized a clear dominance relationship, with me on top, but clear dominance didn’t substitute for a tag.

We carefully ripped the restraints off the Monsters, retreated to near the room’s exit, and shorted out the blood exchange pump.  Within a minute the literally mindless Monsters were growling and clawing at themselves as they began to do what all Monsters did unless being scientifically abused in this fashion – slowly change from human shape to
something else
.  I motioned for Bass to leave, and we did so, blazing a path up the emergency stairs, making sure we left all the doors open behind us.

By the time we exited the lab building, we heard the insane snarling of Monsters behind us.

On the way out we made damned sure the Monsters wouldn’t be able to escape the building.

And so I missed Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night.  The squad of guards should have had a squad of backups.  Nobody in the Transform community trusted United Toxicol or its labs, especially the lab in Kansas City.  The bigwig Transforms hired people (read Arms) to regularly case the labs, inside and out, and the people at United Toxicol knew about our many break-ins.  For a project this appalling and obviously lucrative, they should have had backup guards.  My initial supposition?  Someone made a mistake somewhere along the chain of command.

I didn’t think this lack through for quite some time, though.

---

“Ma’am, I wish I understood this crap better,” Bass said.  We rested in Gomorrah, my beat up and often repainted ‘mission RV’, surrounded by Tom and my people as they drove us back to Chicago.  We sat among piles and boxes of papers, loot from our mission.

“Take the time to learn,” I said, listening to the wind whistle through the many bullet holes.  We exchanged growls, but Bass eventually averted her eyes and forced herself to relax.  The mission needed to be over fast, as my tolerance for Bass diminished by the minute.  I wanted her tagged, but I didn’t like her.  With few exceptions, Arms never liked other Arms not linked by an Arm tag.

“As you feared, ma’am, Chrysanthemum’s had many dealings with United Toxicol,” Bass said, many minutes later.

I nodded and didn’t bother to comment.  The worst I had found was from four months ago, when Chrysanthemum bribed United Toxicol to give a bogus report to Zielinski on one of his farmed-out biochem analysis projects.  I wouldn’t be telling Bass anything on
that
subject.  I kept information on Zielinski’s projects close.  “What do you have?”  Stacy Keaton had pounded standard debriefing and analysis procedures into our heads so deep they were automatic, and this caper had been about as standard a mission as any Arm might dream up.

“I’ve found five analysis jobs they hired United Toxicol for, including one regarding Monster amygdalas.  Aren’t those one of the brain parts that changes in a Major Transformation, ma’am?”

“Uh huh, and in the older Monsters as well.”  Zielinski believed the Major Transform’s transformed amygdala lay behind the Major Transform ability to harness juice, the same way the much better known change to the hippocampus lay behind our metasense, our long-range ability to sense juice or its derivatives.  Some Monsters, if they survived long enough, developed such things.

“Who the hell is Chrysanthemum, though?” Bass said, frustrated.  “I’d expected the Hunters were behind my family’s troubles, not some other crazy.  I’ve killed too many Hunters over the years.  I even had to relocate from Denver to the Dallas area to escape their attempts at payback.”

I weighed the odds, the costs and the benefits, and decided to toss her a bone.  More tag-wooing.  “Chrysanthemum was Wandering Shade’s front company.  We thought we closed the company down after the Battle in Detroit” back when Bass had been a baby Arm with an animal torture fetish, under Keaton’s tutelage “but we didn’t get all of it.  I’ve looked into Chrysanthemum” at Keaton and Tonya’s orders and suggestions, respectively, “and we suspect one of the hidden Major Transforms uses the company as a cash cow, selling Transform secrets to various governments.”  Tonya suspected Focus Shirley Patterson, the hidden head of the first Focuses and the woman who ran all the Focus organizations from behind the scenes.  Keaton suspected Chevalier, a hidden senior Crow who despised the Cause.  I suspected Arm Erica Eissler of West Germany, mostly because I knew she didn’t trust me or the US Major Transform establishment, and because whoever backed Chrysanthemum possessed enough talent and skills to thwart my considerable investigation abilities.

Amy Haggerty, my long-tagged partner in crime, believed (because of Chrysanthemum’s continuing existence and far too many other unexplained incidents) we faced a new unknown and ultrapowerful enemy, one nasty enough he or she would draw together all the Major Transforms in an alliance.  She regularly thought of events in too heroic a fashion, befitting her nickname, the Hero.  Keaton, boss of all us American Arms (and nicknamed The Boss, but never to her face) thought Haggerty addled.

They didn’t get along at all well.

“There’s something that crazy out there?  Ma’am, why haven’t we done more to shut down this Chrysanthemum outfit?”

I growled, irritated by the question, and didn’t answer.

In classic and tense untagged Arm silence, we shuffled papers and read like fiends until we reached Chicago.

“Ila?  Messages?” I asked my current aide-de-camp, after I showered, changed clothes, and mentally readied the meal menu where I would formally propose to tag Bass.  Little knots of stress in my head untied themselves as I settled back into my own territory.  I loved Chicago, in ways a non-Arm would never understand.

“Oh, there you are, boss,” Ila said, looking up from her desk and bumping a rose-infested vase, which she caught before it spilled.  “Got an urgent one from Focus Rizzari, cryptic as usual.  She said ‘The Hero succeeded, over ten, and we’re meeting in North Tonawanda on the 16
th
to boggle.’  Does this make any sense to you?”

I stood blinking at Ila for a stunned moment.  Haggerty had been attempting something completely and physically impossible.  Success made no logical sense.

Worse, when she had broached me on the subject, I had made a bet with her.  If Lori was right, which she usually was, I was about to suffer the wrong end of a big payout.

But Haggerty couldn’t possibly have succeeded.  It didn’t make
sense
.

“Yes.  Ila, plane tickets to Buffalo for two.  ASAP.”  So much for my fancy dinner and tag seduction.

This was going to hurt.  This was going to hurt
bad
.

---

“Not inviting either Arm Keaton or Arm Rayburn is both a challenge and an insult,” Bass said.  She radiated discomfort, which I echoed.  When we entered Room D of the Roman Conference Hall and Banquet Center, Mary Sibrian, in her red silks with her katana down her back, smiled to see me.  The Arm snagged a tray of deviled eggs from the food-laden tables along the wall and headed my way.  She wore my tag, and I felt an extra helping of tension echoing through it.  I also read relief at the appearance of a senior Arm with a shadow for her to hide under.

Sibrian was the only one in the room who showed any pleasure at our appearance.  The other Arms clustered in a tense group on the other side of the room. Webberly was the closest and most senior, and she took two steps toward me, reflexively staking out her territory and non-verbally forbidding me to come closer.  I glared at the touchy black Arm until she came to her senses, nodding to me, giving me rank and backing off.  I hadn’t had any time to mend fences with her, Arm-style, although she was next up on my list, after Bass.  The other three younger Arms – Naylor, Billington, and Whetstone – reacted as a group with a similarly aborted dominance display.  I could have made the whole lot of them grovel to me for their wretched impoliteness, but I settled for a low growl and predatory flash, echoed by Bass.  They backed off and gave us rank as Mary handed me the entire tray of eggs and settled on the other side of me from Bass.  Mary didn’t say anything, possibly a first for her, and a strong sign of how spooked she was.

Needless to say, we had the entire back of Room D to ourselves.  The building stank of cheap cigars and bad coffee. The building’s engraved granite cornerstone proudly proclaimed the place built in 1883, and from the quality of the rat-gnawed wood and the quantity of peeling paint, I doubted the owners had renovated the building since.

Yes, I had been unlivable ever since phase two of what should have been the Great Hunter War turned to mush nine months ago.  In the end, the only ones left in my command were one other Arm, one Focus and household, one Noble household, and fifty-two mercs.  The rest were either in the hospital or bailed on us.  Bailing on me in the middle of a war is a guarantee to get on my bad side.  I had been cranky ever since.

“I wouldn’t call this a challenge, I would call this boneheaded and stupid,” I said.  “However, this wouldn’t be the first time Haggerty’s boneheaded social stupidity got taken as a challenge.  I’ve certainly knocked her around enough for her nonsense.”

Bass snorted.

Ahead of us I spotted Tonya Biggioni and Geraldine Caruthers, two of the Cause’s more important Focuses.  They huddled with their heads together, chattering away, likely about nasty Focus backbiting politics.  No bodyguards or attendants, though.  In fact, I didn’t spot anyone here in Room D who wasn’t a Major Transform.  There were times when I wanted to wring Haggerty and Lori’s necks for their thoughtless prejudices.

I didn’t see Lori – Focus Lorraine Rizzari – but I did metasense her, in the hallway behind Room D, deep in a discussion with Haggerty, Focus Polly Keistermann (not a part of the Cause, but a friend) and an unknown Focus.  Like a surreal wedding, the other Arms in attendance, Webberly (dark brown), Billington (light brown), Naylor (Mediterranean olive), and Whetstone (maggoty white), sat on the left side of the hall, near the front, while the Noble and Master Crow contingent, that being Guru Shadow, Master Occum, Master Sinclair, Duke Hoskins and Count Dowling, sat on the right and farther back.  Crow Gilgamesh, my lover and confidant, sat with Flo (Focus Florence Ackerman of Boston) and Linda (Focus Linda Cooley of Chicago, my current top hometown Focus).  A large contingent of Canadian Focuses and their Crows, most of whom I didn’t recognize, took up the rest of the occupied chairs.  I didn’t see or metasense Crow Sky, Lori’s mostly live-in Crow, but I wouldn’t expect to.  He didn’t like crowds unless he was performing.

I watched the younger Arms in particular, mentally daring them to show me the least bit of challenge.  They sat stiff and tense, so afraid of the world around them they actually clung to other Arms for support.  None of them more than two years past their graduation, they were out on their own, with no support, and big red targets on their chests.  Now that Haggerty had stopped hounding the FBI, I wondered how soon the FBI would manage to pick off one of those young Arms.