The Forever Watch Read online

  Only the top few hundred officers of the ship are allowed to have private vehicles. The rest of the crew in their tens of thousands walk, take the bus, take the train, ride bicycles. Around us, men and women in practical steel or slate or coal business attire or uniform jumpsuits laugh on their way to get food.

  For an hour we zigzag along the Thames Streets. From the picturesque little, apple-tree-lined, pseudo-cobblestone Thames 3 Street to the four-lane Thames F Street with its midrange retail clothing stores. The mannequins in false silk and suede wave to us as we turn onto the 5, lined with small office buildings, mostly subcenters for accounting and ship-inventory management—three-floor, gray cubelets that report to City Planning. We walk the bridge over a picturesque stream called the Thames, ever so much smaller than the real one was. We pass corner pubs and little shops with replicas of precious authentic antiques preserved in nonreactive-gas vessels under nondamaging low-energy light. Soon, we reach the ring road Thames Central, set around an arc-shaped public-access park.

  Along the little brick footpaths under the sun or under the shade of trees in autumn foliage, we wonder if we need to run, while we talk as if it is still we who are the hunters.

  “If this stranger is following us based on our Web accesses, which I am pretty sure is nearly impossible, then he would be appearing at the places from which we have logged in with the dangling IDs—locations that are far apart, and which we do not use more than once. Or he could have traced it to us directly, in which case he would already know exactly who we are.”

  “Can’t be,” Barrens says. “Can’t.” He sends me a map of the city, with points lit up indicating where he’s come across the stranger’s scent. This individual, and Barrens is sure that it is an individual male, is somehow tracking us physically, from location to location.

  How? Could a bruiser scent-track us like that?

  Barrens shakes his head. No. Even when we use the talent, we’re no bloodhounds. And even specially bred dogs can only track scent trails that are several days old. This guy’s appearing at places we were at a month before or more. I can’t figure out how he’s doing it.

  “Are you sure it’s just one man?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” I’ve searched my Implant plenty, trying to cross-index scents. Only this guy appears repeatedly, and he only started showing after we started. He’s not from my precinct, he doesn’t work at City Planning, he’s never been around your friends.

  There is at least the relief that it is not Information Security. Or we would already be in their custody

  Could it happen by random chance? I could run the odds in my head, based on population concentrations and City Planning studies on crew residence and job location. Probabilities won’t give me an answer one way or another.

  I choose to have faith in Barrens’s instinct. Unfortunately, there is no crew database identification category for scent!

  He lets out a grim chuckle when I complain about this. You can certainly propose it to the database guys above me. I’m sure you could make a very convincing study.

  A thought strikes me, and I shiver. Leon. Did you detect this scent when Callahan died?

  I didn’t have an amplifier on me that day.

  Around us, ordinary men and women in business attire are finishing up their coffees and sandwiches and cigarettes. The younger kids are done with classes for the day; a handful of girls and boys play around the fountain, splashing each other with telekinetic bursts. It is a beautiful day in the fall, bright and cool, pleasant as only Hennessy’s best could program into the simulation parameters.

  Do you think it’s Mincemeat?

  I don’t know what to think.

  Too soon, we have to return to work.

  He pleads with me. He never does that. “Please. Just be careful, okay?”

  “I will.” Leon. It’s you who needs to watch yourself. He’s closer to finding you than me.

  I can take care of myself.

  I want to protest that I can take care of myself too. Shit. I don’t even always keep my civilian self-defense bracelet on me. Something I will change immediately.

  He gives me a fierce, almost angry kiss, right as we reach the base of the steps leading up to my ugly, gray office building. A sigh escapes me; it would be just that kind of day someone from my team would be looking out through the right window exactly at this moment.

  “Wait for me later. I’ll take you home.”

  “Okay.”

  We let go and walk away from each other. Both looking over our shoulders.

  The rest of my workday would be a total waste if I let it. I indulge in just fifteen minutes of this. My head buzzing with possibilities. Petrified in my chair. My eyes note the reports in front of me, but I just cannot take them in. All the while, my team is quietly doing their thing, too quietly, which means they are all chatting with each other Implant to Implant, probably about what looks like a fight between Barrens and me.

  Then I shake it off, put it aside. I need to work, so I work. Mala’s mental tricks shunt aside emotion, grant me clarity and focus and emptiness. I open five files at once; they float over the desk, visible only to me, as I pull out the paper reports and begin to cross-reference them with the live data in the Nth Web.

  Finally, the day is done. Barrens and I meet up, ignoring, once again, my coworkers’ curious gazes, and go to my place.

  “No,” I tell him.

  His face goes all tight. “Gotta find him first. Before he finds us.”

  “And I’m doing it with you.”

  “Hana…”

  “No, Leon.” I am scared for him too. He is not going to take all the risk and try to keep me safe.

  Our arms are crossed as we stare each other down. The words get stuck in his throat, and he is about to think his argument at me, but I cheat and throw all my feelings at him. Everything I’m feeling. For him.

  One last time, he tries to order me, “Just do as I say, you crazy broad!”

  I focus psi at the carpet under my feet, convert the plastech, lift myself up on a growing footstool until my eyes are even with his.

  “You. Are. Not. Going. Without. Me.”

  He throws his hands up and stalks off to the balcony. Lights a cig, puffs away.

  I sink into the couch in my living room, trying hard to push away the urge to shiver.

  After Barrens burns through half a pack, I see him let out a massive sigh, his great shoulders deflating. He comes back in.

  “This is the deal. You do what I say to stay safe. And when I think I’m getting close, I will let you know, and if it ain’t impossible, I’ll take you with.”

  When Barrens and I began our foray into the hidden, I was cavalier in response to his safety concerns.

  Now, it no longer feels so paranoid. I accept his desire to shadow me on my way to and from work to watch for others watching for me. Every evening, he reminds me to check my tablet for worms or spybots. He screens my apartment for listening devices and more subtle psionic recorders while I sleep—I know because I have seen the detection gear in his duffel bag in the morning.

  I find myself noticing every stranger in City Planning, wondering whether he or she belongs, afraid I’ll be caught looking. Among the many hundreds of individuals that I pass every day, is there one with a violent secret, a destructive urge that, for some reason, is indulged by the Noah’s Central Council?

  After two days, Barrens introduces me to Officer Miyaki Miura.

  The diner is small, open only late at night and on weekends. The décor is 1950s Americana. Prints of those old petrol-burning cars and trucks. Black and whites of the famous actresses from the movies not on the ISec proscribed list. The owners are workers at the vertical farm who run this restaurant as a hobby. Between the overhead for rent and the expenses for their supplies, their culinary skills allow them a price scale that probably just allows them to eat a slightly better class of food. Denser synthetic meat. A slightly richer blend of margarine. A milk substitute that is al
most like real milk.

  She is there before us, stands when we enter. Officer Miura is a broad-shouldered woman with a delicate face. Porcelain cheeks, and bright gems for eyes and lips. She is diminutive, petite even with the bulk of the blue Inspector’s overcoat. It is one I have seen before. I know her of course, though we have never met before today. I know her from combat briefings and after-action reports I have dipped into, and when Barrens would toss and turn at my side in the midst of nightmares, it is her name he muttered. She is the other woman closest to Barrens. A sister in battle, who has bled for him and whom he has bled for too.

  She is as intimidating as I imagined she would be.

  “Um. Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  We shake hands. I am taller, but her hand is larger than mine. It is steel under the glove, tense, all carefully controlled power. I wonder if all field peace officers have this coiled-spring tension in all their movements. Perhaps it is a by-product of their training, just as the dreamy-eyed, distracted looks that afflict me are a by-product of mine, an indicator of the multithreaded thought trances analysts maintain through most of the working day. She openly eyes me up and down. What does she see in me? I’ve wanted to meet her for a while, curious about this other woman in Barrens’s life, the only other who knows about his beast. But I am not happy to meet like this, with his saddling her with my safety.

  “Sorry about this.”

  “Don’t be sorry. The big lug just cares about you is all. He’s a worrier.”

  Barrens’s glower is particularly fierce. “When I’m not around, you gotta protect her, Miya.”

  “Okay already.” She rolls her eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen, Barrens.”

  The booths are designed for parties of four. She has one bench all to herself and slouches to take up all that space. She is languid, at ease, but her eyes are still sharp, flickering around the diner, examining every person who enters and leaves.

  Crammed together on the opposite bench, Barrens and I barely fit. It might be easier if I sat on his lap. Barrens has been with me long enough that I have grown accustomed to how much larger he is than the average; eating out is always a reminder.

  We have a short, quick meal together, us three. Tofu burgers and fried yam chips. Ice cream that is more natural than artificial. We chat about everything except for why Barrens wants her to be my part-time bodyguard.

  Then Officer Miura cocks her head to one side, as those who receive a direct message often do. She has to go. “Assignment and all. Good to meet you, Ms. Dempsey. I’ll be by in the morning at seven.”

  I am to never go anywhere alone. He practically moves into my apartment, except for nights when we are both at his. He changes the locks on our doors and has me reinforce the hinges with a special telekinetic processing that makes them more resistant to TK manipulation. I don’t know what good that will do, considering how Mincemeat got to Callahan through a thick door triple-bolted from the inside.

  Miyaki Miura is faintly amused when it’s her turn to keep an eye on me. She knows about our looking into Callahan’s death, but not the scope of it, or how many other similar deaths there have been. Mostly, she talks about the old days, about being Barrens’s partner through police academy and their first years in the force. Sometimes, she complains about her low income, and how much money she has to spend on food. She complains about the Psyn rings that have been spreading throughout the Habitat, kids riding the highs of enhanced psychic ability at the cost of burned-out brain cells and psychosis.

  Unlike Barrens, she does not much care about politics and history, which is a relief. I get more than enough of that with Leon.

  When he was shunted to Long Term Investigations, she got a promotion. And rates a police car. It’s an interesting change, the mornings and evenings when she drives me around. I rank a private-vehicle permit, but anything more substantial than a bicycle is ridiculously pricey, and I live close to a train station and multiple bus stops.

  Like Hennessy, Miyaki has no problems with getting a little too personal. “So, Miss Dempsey. What’s he like in bed, our great big beastly friend?” Her smile is wicked.

  “Uh.” Stammering, I try to turn it around. “You don’t know?”

  “It never worked out between me and him. We’re just not each other’s type. Actually, before you, I didn’t think there was anyone, man or woman, who was his type.”

  That heats up my cheeks more than her too informative tales about her multitude of boyfriends.

  Miyaki turns the wheel. The narrow wedge of the car whispers around a corner. She is careful and aware of all our surroundings. Like Barrens, she does not need reading talents to get a read on people.

  “You are the only one he’s ever fallen for,” she says, something sad and happy in her voice. “There have been others. But you know him. He’s different inside from how he seems. They never lasted.

  “I like you together. And he’s a good friend to me. Which is the only reason I’m humoring this current bout of looniness.”

  She drops me off at my apartment and stays long enough to watch me unlock the building’s outer door and enter.

  The days pass without incident. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe we are getting too deep into this. Are we at the point where we’re scaring ourselves, looking for shadows where there aren’t any?

  Barrens, of course, has no doubts. We spend every night talking about our stranger. About what we can do to catch him first.

  He is out there. He is closing in on us every day.

  10

  The best idea we come up with is to keep visiting the locations our stalker has already tracked us to. It seems too passive to me, and what’s worse is we can’t just stake out all these locations on our own. We still have our jobs. At most we can make a map of locations where Barrens has scented our man and the dates he’s done so, then try to rotate through those locations when we can go there, mostly after our workdays are over and weekends.

  It is dependent on chance for so many reasons. Barrens can’t just stand there with his amplifier continuously activated. The calorie burn would be enormous—he’d have to eat enough for a normal person’s daily intake of calories for each half hour with the amp on even the lowest power draw. So he has to use an app that automatically turns it on for a few seconds out of every minute.

  The strobing effect on his senses gives him a constant headache.

  Barrens wants to do it on his own and keep me safe and far away. Nuts to that.

  “You’re not leaving me behind for anything,” I keep having to tell him every time before we leave to follow the strange, not-quite random pattern of the stranger’s scent.

  Weeks pass like this, and my nerves tighten up with the passing days, until the occasional evening when I can’t take it anymore and force Barrens to take a break with me. To attend a jazz concert. To go dancing. To just watch an old movie.

  But we always return to this. Standing with Barrens in an alley next to the chowder place, or at this train station or that one, or in the park where I met Gorovsky, we watch people come and go. Is it this guy, or that guy? Wondering if it’s Mincemeat. And if it is, what would a monster look like?

  In the meantime, my program still spreads and searches throughout the Web. I can’t understand how there can be so many Mincemeat vanishings; I’m sure they must be false positives, just as Barrens is sure they are not.

  If we happen across him, will Barrens smell him first? Or will he detect us first, through whatever means the stranger has managed to find us?

  Friday evening and I couldn’t get out of it. The terrible three insisted and dragged me out to the paintball course. They also invited half of our graduating class from school. At least only thirty came.

  “Didn’t you miss this?” Jazz laughs while glowing globs of paint fly overhead.

  We’re crouched behind my hastily erected barrier; just a mound of earth three feet high.

  The course is a maze. The rules are that anyone can use
one of the guns, or use touch, but not both, and no amplifiers.

  She shrieks and ducks as a hail of blue spheres curves around my wall, necessitating some impressive and desperate tumbling to avoid the splatter.

  Down the range, Lyn laughs at us. “Come on, D, do your thing!”

  “Ooooh, that’s it now.” Jazz glows. Without an amp, her touch of bruiser is still substantial enough to give her performance at the edge of human ability—enough for a nine-second hundred-meter dash. She ducks and dives, a demented ballerina laughing as she touch-flings paintballs from her waist belt right back at Lyn.

  I am not in the mood to be running around playing at battle.

  But they are my friends, and I’m being mopey and it’s not fair to them. “Hey, wait for me!”

  I don’t have any bruiser’s psychometabolism at all, so compared to Jazz, I move in slow motion. But I do have the strongest touch talents of anybody in today’s game, and as I charge like a snail behind Jazz, I keep pulling up earthen barriers an inch thick to block incoming fire. They’re paintballs—it doesn’t take much of a wall to stop them.

  Then I make like the artillery and send the other group squealing in retreat as, still jogging forward, I fling up my hands and fire up half my pack of paintballs all at once. The red blobs blur and chase the enemy as they run. I scatter half a dozen of Marcus’s Water Department buddies and Lyn’s team from Nth Web R&D in about five seconds. When I lose sight of my targets, I have enough control to stop the projectiles without crushing them, then retarget and shoot them again.