The Shadow of the Progenitors

Book One of The Cause

Randall Allen Farmer

Copyright © 2015, 2016, 2020 by Randall Allen Farmer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

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The Arms

The living Arms in the United States as of January 1972,

with the year they transformed in parentheses.

Stacy Keaton (1963)

Carol Hancock (1966)

Amy Haggerty (1968)

Sylvia Bass (1968)

Florence Rayburn (1969)

Rose Webberly (1969)

Christine Naylor (1970)

Mary Sibrian (1970)

Grace Billington (1970)

Betsy Whetstone (1971)

Meredith Bartlett (1971) (student)

What Has Come Before

These are primarily the memoirs of Carol Hancock, a thirty-five year old wife and mother, and victim of Transform Sickness.

In 1966{in Once We Were Human} Carol Hancock, after her transformation into a Major Transform, finds herself confined to the St. Louis Transform Detention Center. There, as she adapts to her then not-well-understood Arm transformation, Dr. Henry Zielinski, a physical trainer named Larry Borton, and numerous other experts come to manage her development, and to advance their understanding of Transform Sickness. She learns she consumes juice, the chemical all Transforms possess in their bodies, and needs to kill other Transforms to acquire her juice. Outside of the Detention Center, a new male Major Transform of the fear-dominated Crow variety, who names himself Gilgamesh, marvels at Carol’s changes and became mesmerized by her.

FBI agent Tommy Bates offers Carol an unofficial job hunting Monsters – victims of transformations gone bad – and Carol turns him down. Immediately afterwards, a group from the FBI who do not like Transforms, led by Special Agent Patrick McIntyre, take over Carol’s care. In the changeover period Larry Borton reveals that he is a she, the Arm Stacy Keaton, in disguise. Keaton offers to break Carol out of the Detention Center, but she refuses, because of Keaton’s violent reputation. Keaton predicts Carol will be tortured and killed. Soon, the FBI team fires Dr. Zielinski and begins its torturous tests. Carol learns that her transformed body is capable of surviving abuse that would kill a normal human.

While the FBI tests and tortures Carol, a more senior Crow named Echo chases Gilgamesh away from the Detention Center, claiming to be there to witness Carol’s death. Gilgamesh journeys to the east, where he meets several other Crows working on a new project, the taming of the more violent variety of male Major Transform, the Beast Man. He receives help from them and returns to St. Louis to see if he can gather his courage and help Carol.

Carol decides she made a mistake by not accepting Stacy Keaton’s offer. She uses her wits to get a letter, asking for help, to a leading Focus (the less violent female Major Transform variety, the ones responsible for keeping regular Transforms alive by caring for them in what they termed households). The Focus, Tonya Biggioni, passes on the letter to Keaton, who offers a deal – if Carol can escape the Detention Center building then Keaton will train her to live as an Arm.

Carol makes her plans and manages to escape by tricking the guards, although in the end she needs to fight her way past McIntyre. While she escapes Crow Echo moves to inform the FBI of her tricks. Gilgamesh interposes himself and manages to chase off Echo. Warned of Carol’s impending escape, and knowing he is likely to get blamed, Dr. Henry Zielinski arranges an alibi by helping the Crows (and some Transform-friendly FBI agents) corral and tame the Beast Man named Rover.

{in "Now We Are Monsters} Now under Keaton’s care, Carol learns to be an Arm, and reestablishes contact with Dr. Henry Zielinski. Keaton, however, proves to be violent and abusive, reducing Carol to menial slavery and torturing her for fun. She does, though, teach Carol how to survive as an Arm, starting with an important restriction: you never take your juice from a Focus’s Transforms. Gilgamesh finds Carol after several adventures, and falls in with a group of Crows subsisting off the dross (the waste product all Transforms produce) of the two Arms. Unfortunately, Beast Men, including one by the name of Enkidu, a Beast Man Gilgamesh had accidentally helped during his transformation while thinking he was a Crow, soon attack the group of Crows. During this time period unknowns attempt to assassinate Dr. Zielinski, but Focus Lori Rizzari, the Crow Occum, and Occum’s charge, the partly tamed Beast Man named Rover save him.

Carol graduates from her training by completing a near impossible mission – she has to capture a Transform she would normally kill for his juice and give it to her teacher, Keaton. She succeeds, but her doing so triggers Enkidu and his partner’s attack on Keaton. Keaton kills Enkidu’s partner and nearly kills Enkidu, and barely survives the experience. Carol, as she leaves town, nearly falls to the unknown Major Transform boss of the two Beast Men, Wandering Shade, who is using the alias of Officer Canon.

{in "All Beasts Together} On her own for the first time, Carol chooses the city of Chicago as her territory. After a violent encounter with Enkidu, a wounded Carol stumbles into Pittsburgh, where her juice hunger overwhelms her and she takes juice from a Focus-supported Transform. Hunted by Focus Shirley Patterson’s Transforms, she barely escapes with the help of a Crow named Rumor. Realizing she did wrong, Carol gives herself up to Focus Rizzari, who impresses Carol, and who assigns her as penance a mission to figure out how to solve the problem of ‘out of control Arms’. Focus Rizzari also ends up giving shelter to Zielinski, who becomes her household’s top researcher and who makes an important discovery about Transform training.

Carol slowly learns how to hold a territory. Her activities, however, attract attention from Wandering Shade and his growing coterie of Beast Men, who now call themselves Hunters. Her activities also attract the attention of Gilgamesh, and he and Carol meet during one of Wandering Shade’s coterie’s attacks on her. Carol wants friends and allies, and so she befriends Gilgamesh.

All of Hunter attacks fail (one failure thwarted with Focus Rizzari’s help), and Wandering Shade decides to handle the problem in a different way, by arranging for the police and FBI to take Carol. They succeed, severely wounding and capturing Carol.

{in A Method Truly Sublime} The FBI incarcerates Carol in the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center. At first she feigns cooperation with the authorities and the Focus aiding the authorities, Focus Sarah Teas. Gilgamesh, for his part, attempts to arrange a rescue, and finds few people interested in any such thing, even his own Crow Guru, a Crow by the name of Shadow. He eventually turns to the Arm, Stacy Keaton, first contacting her through letter drops, and later, by meeting her in person, a terrifying ordeal. She agrees.

Not long after, the authorities realize Carol is playing them, and turn to a more forceful Focus for aid, Focus Tonya Biggioni. She isn’t happy to be involved with this, but her Focus bosses back this, and she tells the authorities how to break Carol. As they begin to follow Tonya’s plan, Zielinski shows up, presumably to help, but mostly serving as Keaton’s eyes and ears. Keaton needs muscle to pull off the rescue, and she follows Gilgamesh’s suggestion and turns to the only possible source of willing help, Focus Rizzari and her household. Gilgamesh contacts a Crow by the name of Sky, who works with Focus Rizzari, and Focus Rizzari herself, to talk them into aiding Keaton in the rescue. He ends up in their debt, a debt that will haunt him later.

Focus Biggioni successfully breaks Carol and forces her to answer the authorities’ questions in a truthful manner. The authorities learn from Carol that Zielinski had been aiding the Arms in secret, and they arrest him. After tough negotiations with Keaton, Focus Rizzari and her household agree to help in Carol’s rescue. As the rescuers gather, an enemy Focus interferes with the ability of the authorities to provide juice for Carol, and Carol goes into juice withdrawal, ending her usefulness before she can answer all the authorities’ questions. Focus Biggioni learns of this and realizes the leading Focuses set her up to fail, and to destroy Carol, and she switches sides. After several failures, Keaton and the rescue team break into the Detention Center, rescue Carol and destroy the place. Carol at this point is in a vegetative state. With Focus Biggioni’s help Keaton and the rescue team get Carol enough juice for her to begin to heal, though none of them know what, if anything, of Carol will survive this ordeal.

{in No Sorrow Like Separation} Carol, under Keaton’s care again, slowly recovers. To help Carol recover, Keaton traps Gilgamesh into helping her, and as they work on bringing Carol’s mind back, Keaton decides to train Gilgamesh. After much work, Carol does recover, but with severe mental problems leaving her trapped in a ‘magical thinking’ state. In this open and receptive state, Carol remembers a discovery she made while a captive, based on Focus Teas’ suggestions, that of the Arm tag, a juice-based trick mirroring the ability of Focuses to tag their Transforms. The Arm who tags another Arm makes herself officially the master of the other Arm, lessening the tension between them and allowing more cooperation.

This idyll ends when the Crows call in Gilgamesh’s many debts, giving him a mission to figure out who is behind a spate of recent Crow killings. Carol goes out to reestablish herself as a free Arm, but under Keaton’s orders, working for her now. The first thing Carol does is break Zielinski out of prison and, after tagging him, gets his help in finishing the job of putting her broken mind back together. Gilgamesh works on his mission, visiting Crows and Focuses, and discovering the Focuses have been suffering from their own losses as well. In a visit to Crow Occum, who has now stabilized several Beast Men of his own, he puts his evidence together and figures out that the Hunters, under Wandering Shade’s direction, are behind the Crow killings and Focus losses.

Carol visits Focus Rizzari and pays off her debt by showing her the Arm tagging system and how an Arm tag hierarchy solves the ‘out of control Arm’ problem. Carol learns the place she wants to claim as her new Arm territory, Houston, has its own problem, a rogue Focus not cooperating with the other Focuses and enslaving several of them. She gets permission from the Focus authorities to deal with the problem, and does so in a way that shows an unexpected talent for military organization. When she presents her victory to Keaton she shows the benefit of cooperation with Crows and Focuses, and sells Keaton on the idea of allying with the Crows. She also presents Keaton with a present, a just transformed Arm by the name of Amy Haggerty, and Keaton decides to take on the job of training new Arms.

{in In This Night We Own} Carol attempts to get political payback for Focus Biggioni’s part in Carol’s incarceration. The Focus authorities respond by ordering Focus Biggioni to rein in Carol (still blaming Carol for the depredations of the Hunters), additionally punishing Focus Biggioni for the failures associated with Carol’s rescue. As part of her punishment, Focus Biggioni acquires the job of coordinating the mentoring of new Focuses, and she finds an extremely promising new Focus, Gail Rickenbach, in need of help, which she gives. Focus Rizzari, disgusted at the events associated with Carol’s incarceration, decides to challenge Focus Biggioni in the coming partly-rigged election for Focus Biggioni’s seat on the Focus Council, the source of Biggioni’s political power.

Gilgamesh reveals the identity of the Crow killer to the Crow authorities and they tell him they need better proof. While he plots and plans, Focus Biggioni makes Carol’s life miserable, turning Focus Rizzari and Keaton against her. Focus Biggioni eventually tries to sucker Carol into a mistake by providing her a ‘free’ Transform for his juice. Carol ducks the bait, but figures out Focus Biggioni is the one behind all of her problems. After talking with Gilgamesh, Focus Rizzari and Crow Sky, they come up with a plan to solve all of their problems – they plan to show one of the Hunter’s captive Focuses to a close Focus compatriot of Focus Biggioni, thus proving that the Hunters are responsible for attacks on Focuses. Carol kidnaps Focus Biggioni’s top local Focus friend and Biggioni’s top Transform and takes the two of them along on this rescue, as witnesses (under the nominal lead of Focus Thelma Laswell, Carol’s top Focus ally in Houston). Not only do they prove to the Focuses that the Hunters exist and hold Focuses captive, they also force Wandering Shade to reveal himself as a Crow. In the escape afterwards Carol learns that her Crow nickname, the Commander, is also part of the Focus’s mythology, a military savior they are waiting for.

The revelation of the Hunter’s possession of a captive Focus forces Focus Biggioni to negotiate with Carol, and Carol accepts the chance to interrogate Focus Biggioni as payment for the wrongs done to her. During this interrogation, Focus Rizzari discovers that the powerful Pittsburgh Focus, Patterson, has Biggioni tagged and partially controlled. When they discover this, Focus Patterson takes over Focus Biggioni long distance and attempts to kill them. With Carol’s help, Focus Biggioni removes the tag, and changes sides, becoming Focus Rizzari and Carol’s ally in what Focus Rizzari is now calling the Cause.

{in All That We Are} At a gathering in Focus Rizzari’s home, the members of the Cause decide to set a trap for Wandering Shade and the Hunters by publicizing the upcoming wedding of the young Focus, Rickenbach. As Carol and Keaton recruit troops for the proposed wedding fight, they uncover a plot to subvert at least one of the Focuses attending the wedding, and learn about a new Arm transformation. Gilgamesh, feeling something is wrong, starts to investigate some anomalies he’s found in Detroit, and while doing so makes contact with Focus Rickenbach, and they strike up a friendship. Carol and Keaton rescue the new Arm, Sylvia Bass, from the experiments of a company named United Toxicol in Kansas City, and end up in a confrontation with a different group of Wandering Shade’s Beast Men charges, a group named the Patriarchs. Carol soon uncovers evidence that she has a spy in her ranks in Houston, and while she attempts to find the spy (who turns out to be Crow Echo), the spy kidnaps Gilgamesh. Unable to sell Gilgamesh to Wandering Shade, Echo instead sells Gilgamesh to Crow Guru Arpeggio. Carol tracks Gilgamesh to Arpeggio’s place and walks into a confrontation between Arpeggio and Wandering Shade. Arpeggio forces Wandering Shade to flee, also revealing Wandering Shade’s hidden identity as Crow Guru Shadow.

Gilgamesh does not believe Shadow is Wandering Shade, and he leaves Carol (angering her) to go off and prove this. After Gilgamesh leaves, the newly graduated Arm Haggerty visits Carol’s place in Houston when she isn’t home and makes a mess, killing one of Carol’s people. Carol hunts Haggerty down in New York City, invades her home, beats her and tags her, making Haggerty Carol’s subordinate. A few days later, unknown normal attackers attempt to kill Focus Rizzari, killing one of her people and severely wounding her. Carol, Gilgamesh and Zielinski come to care for her, and they realize this is a trap for Carol set by Focus Patterson and her people, an attempt to entice Carol into an emotionally motivated attack on Patterson. They decide to hide instead of attack.

Gilgamesh uncovers his first evidence that Shadow isn’t Wandering Shade, but it isn’t enough to convince Carol. As a way to pay off the Crows for the help they’ve given her, and to get them to help in the coming wedding fight, Carol and her people rescue Focus Frasier, the Focus held by the Hunters. In the aftermath, Carol has to reveal she has a trick allowing her to heal wounded comrades. From this and from their other espionage, they learn about the unexpectedly large size of Wandering Shade’s Hunter army. Gilgamesh finally hunts down what had been bothering him about Detroit, and he finds the problem wasn’t related to the greater issues of the day, but something personal – his pre-transformation family was in Detroit. He attempts to apologize to Carol about abandoning her, but she brushes him off.

On the day of Focus Rickenbach’s wedding (May 17, 1969), the Hunter army does not attack until the wedding reception in the evening. Carol had many contingencies set up, mostly around keeping the Hunters and their army away from the reception, but during the early part of the fight one of the wedding guest Focuses and her household prove to be traitors and fire at the unsuspecting defenders, killing and severely wounding many, including the bride. Carol saves Focus Rickenbach using her special Arm healing trick, while Focus Rickenbach does the impossible and feeds Carol juice from her household’s juice buffer to help Carol’s healing. Afterwards, Carol is down on juice, but one of Focus Rickenbach’s people volunteers to give Carol juice (which costs him his life). Carol leads the fight out of the reception hall, where she and her people, outnumbered, get cut to pieces. Enkidu and several of the other Hunters enter the reception hall, Carol just behind them. Wandering Shade and his surviving Hunters confront Crow Guru Shadow, revealing himself as Shadow’s Crow boss (and proving his appearance as Shadow in Kansas City was a trick). After the last of the Hunters falls, Carol finds Wandering Shade and shoots him dead. After the fight, Carol and Gilgamesh resolve their differences and agree to work together again.

Carol writes: "The next few years turned out to be hard work, necessary for Gilgamesh and my advancement – but nevertheless boring. Which means a lull in these memoirs. They will pick up a few years down the road, when events got damned interesting again."

The Shadow of the Progenitors

Book One of The Cause

Things got damned interesting again. – Carol Hancock, the Commander

Stasis Undone

I have found six confirmed reports of a Focus gaining extra personal juice in non-stressful situations, for no explainable reason. Why? – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List

Carol Hancock (January 14, 1972 – January 27, 1972)

I missed the non-barking dog.

The nervous guards began shooting before they saw either Sylvia Bass, my companion Arm on this mission, or me. They missed. I motioned low and to the left with my left hand and leapt up to the right wall-ceiling corner of the tall United Toxicol hallway. When the thirteen well-spaced guards flushed themselves around the corner at a trot, their pathetic sidearms still wasting ammo, I scuttled over them, tuning my Arm predator effect to project invisibility. Bass, alert to my signal, ducked into the nearest office on the left, hugging the indestructible linoleum floor tiles.

I knifed four of the guards before they noticed my silent attack on their rear, and by the time they noticed I had scuttled back to the ceiling, hidden again. Yes, I worried about being shot by blind fire; even with the pale aqua ceilings sixteen feet above the floor I remained close enough to these fools for them to hit me if I didn’t watch where they aimed and move accordingly. So I moved.

After my return to the ceiling Bass came at the front of the group, low, surgically slicing femoral arteries and removing weapons from the hands of the soon-to-be-bled-out guards. Five of them fell screaming before the others reacted to the presence of a second attacker.

As they reacted I dropped onto the nearest, legs around his neck, and twisted. Snap! Using his corpse as a weapon I plastered the guard I wanted to interrogate against the corridor wall, shattering wallboard and making the backing metal support columns groan. Down and disabled, but the guard still lived. I tossed the corpse I held into a third guard, and sliced the throat of a fourth. Bass finished off the last guard, the guard still tangled up with my tossed corpse.

Done, and I hadn’t even managed an excuse to use my new favorite toy, a .69 cal hand-cannon, as my collaborator Dr. Hank Zielinski referred to my sleek purpose-made one of a kind firearm. I loved the weapon because if I dropped it no normal would be able to shoot the pistol without breaking his wrist. I had the absurd weapon made for me so I would be able to take down Monsters before they closed on my position. I despised Monsters.

Shit, these weren’t on the specs, ma’am, Bass said, about the guards. I was the elder Arm in this duo, and younger Arms are always ever-so-polite to an elder Arm, if said Arm is helping them.

Shit never is. Bass smiled at my quip, then after a beat let out a good belly laugh, sucking up and defusing the tension. I grabbed the surviving guard, dragged him out of the blood and hauled him into one of the iron-scented offices. The office was a stark place with locked file cabinets lining one wall and two desks, one clean of any personalization and the other marked by four framed pictures, each a family picture of a balding man, his gray haired wife, and three strapping teen boys who towered over their parents. Get junior here to tell us why it takes thirteen idiots to guard the company archives.

The archives had indeed been our destination, before the interruption. Our first interviewee, a night watchman, had survived his encounter with us, long before the firefight, first, by not challenging us, second, by not seeing us, and third, because I used a predator effect trick to traumatize the guy’s short term memories out of him.

This man wouldn’t be so lucky. Bass, who earned the nickname the Interrogator the same way I earned my nickname, the Commander, had the guard screaming through his gag in but a moment, after injecting him with one of her many torture drugs. This drug glowed faintly in my metasense, and inside the man’s system, Bass’s touch turned the substance into liquid agony. I stood by and let the expert work, attempting not to get sucked into the pleasures of her sadistic interrogation. Her work stirred my own too powerful darkness, and I needed neither the distraction nor the vulnerability of letting some junior Arm push my buttons.

We weren’t guarding the Archives, we were guarding Project 214, he whispered, after Bass broke him and removed the gag. She had gotten so good with her interrogation specialty that I no longer even understood her top end tricks, but they worked damned well.

What’s 214? Bass asked.

Don’t know, the man said, gasping and moaning. It’s in basement sublevel two, main access via the elevator we guarded.

An elevator we hadn’t yet reached.

I gave Bass a throat-chop signal and she finished off the guard. We were on the clock after this slaughter. Archives before 214.

I moved off at a jog, and Bass followed.

My name is Carol Hancock, nicknamed The Commander, at least when people are being nice. I’m a Major Transform, a subset of altered humanity devilishly named Transforms. I’m an Arm, short for ‘victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome’, which means I’m a female predator. I kill human beings, specifically Transforms, for the juice that keeps me alive. I’m not what anyone would call ‘nice’; among other unpleasant vices, I picked up a nasty streak of sadism along with my transformation. I did control the sadism, but even with my best control the impulses were very much there.

I had been an Arm for nearly five and a half years, and I was a hell of a lot more capable than I had been in my early days. I was the number two Arm in the country, at least today, and the number one Arm in the Cause after my boss got disgusted with the Focuses, the variety of Major Transform tasked to keep Transforms alive. The Cause was a group of people attempting to ensure humanity’s survival of the Apocalypse demographic bubble, when the number of transformations would explode. I was fast, smart, nasty, and damned good at what I did, which was a hell of a lot. I hunted unwanted Transforms, I rid the community of lawbreakers and hidden evil when the mundane justice system couldn’t, and I ran a string of over a dozen Cadillac and Mercedes dealerships in the greater Chicago area.

Oh, and of course, I was trying to save the world. Ignore the irony, please.

These are my memoirs, although this section of my memoirs is less about me and more about all of us in the Cause and our conflict with the true enemy, Transform Sickness itself. The last thing I wrote in my memoirs was the story of the birth of the Cause, back in ’69. The years in-between had been busy busy busy, but my actions weren’t all that important in the greater scheme of things. In Arm time, this was the equivalent of a decade of hard work for a normal.

Why ‘The Cause’? I wasn’t much of a humanitarian, but I did like civilization. Transform Sickness, which turned me into an Arm, was bad and people were frightened, but the experts knew that even at its worst, the Listeria bacteria behind TS wouldn’t infect more than a minute fraction of the population. Yah know, it’s just a screwy form of food poisoning, no big problem. The induced transformations caused by the ambient juice that was now everywhere were the real problem. Although fewer than 20,000 Transforms lived in the US in 1972, by 1982, we expected people to be transforming by the millions. Unfortunately, the mortality rate for Transform Sickness was ninety percent. Civilization wouldn’t survive the Apocalypse demographic bubble, and, worse, Transform women were infertile. Goodbye humanity. And my car dealerships. And all the other trappings of civilization that I loved.

The goal of the Cause was to find a way out of this no-hope scenario. The Cause consisted of Major Transforms, Transforms and normals who understood the problem and worked toward a solution. You would think everyone in their right mind would support this effort, but humanity isn’t that good. The doomsday scenario was too alarmist for most people, would cost too much money and effort to solve, and so they refused to believe.

In the many years since 1972, people have come up with a lot of confused impressions of what I am and was. I was no saint, no angel, no shining white heroine. I was about as dark as they come. If the world didn’t need me and those like me, we would be better off dead.

Lucky for me, the world sometimes needs the bloody knife. You see, bad as I was, there’s always worse.

For the moment the big archive room remained quiet, though I kept an ear cocked for reinforcements. Arm Bass and I popped file cabinet locks, used cable-cutters to cut through the quarter-inch steel rods on the more secure cabinets, grabbed files and took pictures, all in Arm time.

Got something, ma’am, Bass said.

My goal in this caper was to seduce Bass into becoming my official subordinate. She, as with many of the younger Arms, lived outside of the Arm hierarchy due to an incident last May, in which my boss, the Arm Stacy Keaton, lost her temper, went into psychotic crazy mode, and slew a recently graduated Arm, Peggy Svensen. I can’t say I hadn’t had the urge to kill Svensen several times, as she was a lunatic, even for an Arm. Keaton taught all the Arms, but we didn’t find Svensen until she had survived eight weeks on her own as a feral Arm. Those eight weeks gave her issues. However, Keaton’s psychotic fit came during a tactics coordination session, after Svensen dropped a pencil she was flipping between her fingers. Killing a tagged subordinate in a psychotic rage for no particular reason isn’t good for one’s stature. All the mature (graduated) Arms save for myself and Florence Rayburn dropped their Keaton tags as soon as they were out of Keaton’s metasense range.

Flo and I stayed loyal because we both suspected Keaton’s psychotic break was due to enemy action. Florence had metasensed something she considered suspicious, and I, with my years of experience with Keaton, considered Keaton’s actions too far out of character to be credible. We kept our tags, because you never follow your enemy’s plan. Despite a month of investigation, we never did ID the perp, though.

Thus my work on rebuilding the Arm tag hierarchy, the top responsibility a very unhappy Keaton had dropped on my plate.

I snapped pictures, snarly and distracted, due to stress and too much contact with another Arm. Immediate? Did I have to look at it now?

I believe so, ma’am.

I slid over to look over her shoulder. Sylvia Bass was a short woman with a narrow frame, all corded over with thick muscles, reminiscent of my musculature before I got myself captured and tortured by the FBI several years ago. Her hair was as mousy light brown as my own, and despite her more delicate bone structure, she at least didn’t duplicate my narrow hatchet face.

The mystery deepens, I said.

The memo touched on the multiple reasons why we came here in the first place. First, Bass’s birth family had vanished three months ago, and she cared. One month ago, I learned about a rumor going around among the sources of all rumors, the Focuses, that United Toxicol had figured out Bass was the Arm they once held in their laboratory before Keaton and I rescued her. Keaton and I had left behind a decaying Monster to fool the United Toxicol scientists into thinking Bass died in their care.

Thus, the importance of this memo. Yes, the United Tox managers knew Bass was a former subject of theirs, yes, they knew Bass’s original name and origins, and, yes, they had sold this information to a delegation of six from a company with the DBA of Chrysanthemum. Six suspected Transforms, at that.

Take everything related and let’s move combat boots, I said. Bass wore Cavender’s hand-carved cowboy boots, covered in armadillos, a brand I remembered from my Houston days. Mine were Marine Corp issue, size 7 male, about three weeks old. I went through them in job lots.

Itchy fingers crawled in the back of my skull. Chrysanthemum involvement wasn’t good at all.

Monsters, Bass said, sticking her hands akimbo on her hips and faking a pout. Why is it always Monsters? She said her comment in Tonya Biggioni’s voice, Tonya being the senior Focus associated with the Cause and an old Monster hunter. I snorted.

Supply and demand. Sub-basement room 214 turned out to be a ten thousand square foot laboratory, now decorated with the corpses of two more guards and a night orderly. The centerpiece of the laboratory was a confinement area stocked with eleven woman Transforms cruelly attached to various pieces of medical equipment. If my eyes and my metasense weren’t lying to me, said Transforms were having their juice separated from their blood. You’re right. They only look like prey. They’re producing Monster juice. Technically, what they produced was termed élan, which our brother predator Major Transforms, the Chimeras, devoured with gusto. Élan made me itch and gave me psychotic breaks, so I stayed away from the crap as best I could.

Emergency lighting cast eerie shadows in the dark room, sufficient illumination for Arm eyes. I went over to the nearest captive woman, poked, prodded, and looked under her eyelids. Nothing. I found the expected scars around her eyes. Physically lobotomized or worse. The inventiveness! The cruelty! Oh, and a lobotomy to keep them from suffering while they gave their lives to produce Monster juice. This smelled like Crow work to me, Crows being the chickenshit heartless Major Transform skulkers of the night. As well as most of my best friends. Recent work, too, not one of the thankfully deceased Crow Wandering Shade’s many appalling projects.

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