The Forever Watch Read online

  Balls! I’ve tried spiral search, grid, three times already! And my back is killing me. And, agh, getting hard to breathe. You sure this breather’s been put through maintenance? It’s not supposed to stink this bad inside the suit!

  Maybe you’re just farting too much, kid. Okay, look. This does happen sometimes, Jackson.

  Yeah? So what do I do?

  He cannot see his boss’s face, but he can feel the sensation of the bespectacled man shrugging behind his terminal. Okay, I’m going to send you an image of the map with the leak. Then you double-tag it as close as you can to the where the map signal says there’s a leak. Repair crew will do a square-meter patch job on it.

  He snorts. Seriously? You shitting me, boss? I know that ain’t in the manual.

  Not everything’s in the manual. You know, some tricks we pass around among us word of mouth. Err, thought. Whatever. It works. It’s not efficient though, wastes power and plastech. So don’t you do it too much or the real bosses will come down on my ass and you can bet I’ll squeeze yours till you crap blood, got it?

  What a great mental picture that is. He shakes his head and focuses on the map image in his mind. He closes his eyes, does the best he can to match up Cameron’s image and his own location. Then he punches two tags into the pipe surface, almost on top of each other.

  Okay, can I get out of here now?

  Yeah. Hey, something’s going on with—

  Cameron’s message is cut off in midtransmission. That never happens. The lights in the tunnel die out. In the distance, he can hear the repair crew cursing nervously. He curses too. This is one of the oldest parts of the ship, far outside the inhabited zone. It might take an hour to restore power to where they are. And without access to the Nth Web, it is far too easy to get lost. They would all just have to sit tight in the awful muck and wait.

  He does not have nearly enough talent to generate a significant amount of light on his own. He directs psi toward the lamp on top of his helmet. With the power grid cut off, he barely has enough energy to get a feeble, orange glimmer out of the sealed LED. It isn’t even as bright as a candle.

  Not that he can light a candle, down here. If he does, the accumulated gases will explode. Come to think of it, the improvised arc light that strong touch psychics could do would set it off too.

  The cursing in the distance changes in character, turns to screams. There is a crash, the sound of thunder, stone-dense plastech shattering. Splashing, struggling. What’s going on back there?

  “Hey!” he calls out, voice muffled by the breather. “You guys okay?”

  He retraces his route through the twisting pipelines. Down here, everyone has to watch out for each other. Every once in a while, entire tunnels collapse, the result of centuries of stresses and fatigue, and the occasional micrometeorite punching through at relativistic velocity, too small for the damage to register until it has spread and become a dangerous structural defect.

  There is only silence now, except for the sound of his boots pushing through the slime, his loud breaths inside the mask, huffing and puffing. This is good, and bad. It means there has not been a catastrophic hull breach, as there is no sound of roaring gases escaping into hard vacuum, no disgusting slurp of goop out of the pipe. His thoughts are sluggish. Of course there isn’t—he would have been sucked out into space by now, if the accident were like that. The silence is also bad. The men are not in a state where they can answer anymore.

  “I’m coming, you guys! Hey! Where are you?”

  His feet hit something, send him tumbling head over heels into manure. He hangs on to his mask, keeps it in place desperately as he pushes back upright. Using the probe, he feels around the bottom. With an effort that wrenches his back, he drags one of the repairmen out of the slime. He cannot understand what he sees, at first, with the dim light. Then his brain catches up with his eyes, and he screams. He cannot stop screaming, even if he knows he is taxing the breather’s capacity. Eventually, the buildup of carbon dioxide has him dizzy, leaning against the curved wall. Long minutes pass as he gasps, and the softly whirring breather reconditions the suit air sufficiently for him to think again.

  The man’s head is gone. It is gone. There is just a red ruin left of the neck.

  Barely, he keeps himself from running. He plays the light back and forth, up and down. There is a hole in the tunnel’s ceiling, one that was not there when he first passed through. Where is the second member of the repair crew? They always work in pairs.

  The lights come back on, white, searing brightness. He blinks. Up through the hole in the ceiling, there is a dark, vertical shaft … at the end of it, he sees something. Something dark, and huge. Long, twisted arms. He hears its snarls as it struggles with the broken shape of a man in the ugly orange jumpsuit of a Water Management man. And then it is gone.

  Jackson! You getting me? What happened? Repair crew chief is going nuts. What happened down there? A collapse?

  He cannot think. He just cannot think anymore. He curls up, does not care that the sewage reaches his neck in that position. His tears and snot are misting up the mask.

  Okay, Jackson, I got your visuals on my map. You just sit tight there, okay? We’ll get a rescue team down there. Don’t panic.

  He only puts his arms around himself and shakes.

  Perhaps being personally involved in a dangerous incident has started to harden me against traumatic memories. I shake off the horror in moments. Or maybe I am just numb.

  All right. If all this is connected, then what?

  Jackson’s memory, the many rumors tied into the urban legend of creatures in the sewers, and the document about experiments. What does it mean, put together?

  Barrens would say that there is a population of such things. Is this the new direction he’s found? The possibility that the Mincemeat killings are being performed by these monsters in the tunnels? But how would they avoid notice in the densely populated Habitat area? What else is there?

  My brain cycles through the steps. Too much is still unknown. If this is now the line of Barrens’s suspicions, it only generates more questions.

  Say there are monsters in the old tunnels and maintenance shafts. Where did they come from? The result of experimentation? Animals from the vertical farms mutated by radiation exposure, perhaps toxic leaks from the reactors or inadequate shielding from a burst of cosmic radiation? Military beasts?

  I bring up one image from the blurry, terrified recollection of the man named Jackson. It certainly seems dangerous. It looks nothing like the gracile creatures from the lost memory of the Builders that Barrens and I shared months before. Are these things related somehow to why there are no Builders on the ship? Or are they still on the ship somewhere, hidden away? I cannot imagine those wise, sad strangers experimenting on us, producing monsters in the dark on a whim.

  If there is a population of the monsters in the tunnels and not just one or two unfortunate mutants, they could account for the numbers of all those missing people I had thought were false positives in my earlier data-dives. The need for secrecy is easy to rationalize—it is only one more thing for the average crewman to fear but can do nothing about. Fear is destabilizing. It can be deadly in the confines of a closed system. These could be the creatures described by the G-1 documents.

  Something feels wrong about that. Not about the creature in the tunnel being a G-1, that feels right. But that they are the Mincemeat killers?

  Recalling Barrens’s own memory of Callahan’s mutilated remains, it does not match. As violently torn apart as Callahan’s body was, there was too much of it left there, in his apartment. It does not look as if he were partly eaten by some hungry predator, as the man in the attack that Jackson experienced was. And how would a creature from the deep shafts have gotten up there in his apartment? Why not take prey on the street level, snatch people walking along the sidewalks close to the sewer access hatches?

  Experiments, experimentation. Human experimentation would explain the victimology, the r
andom cross section of the ship’s population, from young to old.

  But too much is still missing. Never mind what the goals and methods of such cruel science might be; why run an experiment in such an uncontrolled way, where so many outside factors can interfere?

  It is a mad underworld I have fallen into. Suspicion clashes against common sense and my desire to believe in the system, in humanity’s universal mission to survive. What could Keepers and Breeding Duty possibly have to do with secrets about monsters under the city? And I remember one of Barrens’s threads in an underground discussion forum. That other guy, who suggested that early Retirements are all Mincemeat deaths.

  My mind refuses to make that fit. That is as far as I can get with what I have right now. My eyes ache, my temples are buzzing, and, agh, it’s two in the morning.

  I shove it all into a filing crate. A snap of my fingers floats it into one of my closets.

  Sleep is no escape. My dreams have me running around in tunnels. Or worse, doing maintenance in them, hour after hour.

  Soon, even the distraction and comfort of my routine at work is disrupted. A major initiative is being started from the top. Hennessy messages me rumors about something that will involve not just multiple departments across the whole Habitat, but entire Ministries.

  I can’t confirm them. He probably knows more than I do. So, I give him something else to do.

  At my desk, I putter away at all the tasks that need doing. Correcting typos in the reports to be forwarded upward. Signing off on request forms. Passing messages along. Earth died centuries before and people are still plagued by paperwork. My eyes are getting blurry as I stare at a badly labeled graph about wastewater pollutants.

  Hennessy knocks at my door. My special assignment for him took less time than I thought. Or, no. It’s halfway through the morning already. Ugh.

  “Come in.”

  “Hana?”

  “Yes, James?”

  “These are the records you asked about. I don’t understand why you asked me. Your school pal Marcus works at Water Management. You could put in the request directly yourself and get the data back faster than I could.”

  I cannot explain that I am trying to protect Marcus from any future problems if I should get caught.

  “Just some ideas I’m working on.”

  “Riiiight. Any reason why I’m showing them on my tablet instead of just messaging you with copies of the files?”

  So that there are no records of my receiving them in my office, my dear assistant, no system logs of the transmission. For someone normally so perceptive in social situations, Hennessy is talking too much about matters he should realize I want some discretion on. Perhaps he does read it on my face now. Maybe what he wants is for me to confide in him. Hennessy, if I do that and something happens to me, well. You will not be able to take my position if you have been tainted by any future suspicions related to me.

  Copying the files over to another psi-tablet takes only a moment. He blinks at that, realizes that I’m using a tablet with no detectable wireless function. Hennessy pauses at my door, closes it instead of leaving.

  “I’m not stupid, Hana.”

  “Have I given you a reason to think that I have such a low opinion of you?”

  “You can trust me. I don’t know what this is about, but—”

  Direct neural messaging. Don’t. Take care of our team, James. That’s what I’m depending on you for.

  That seems to be enough to turn him away.

  A quick query through the files suggests that the memory is real. At one time a man named Jackson and crew supervisor Cameron were in the same waterworks maintenance team. A repair team was reportedly killed right around when Jackson was Retired. Of course, the given cause was a structural collapse. That was ninety years ago.

  What is next? What’s next is I’m not supposed to be thinking through all this on my own. That overprotective ass!

  I need to get that function to filter away background processor use, so I can get on finding the jerk.

  I think about putting up an ad for a memory I do not intend to sell, and leaving a message in a secret location, like a kid playing a game. Instinct holds me back. Why? Isn’t Miura exactly the kind of company I want? She is already involved. She is a clear-minded cop. This is the sort of thing the police ought to be good at.

  She has posted the ad but not asked me what I have found. As formidable as she is, she too is afraid.

  I’ll try to meet her next week. No, not even then. I will run as far as I can on my own, until I cannot anymore. There are still many threads to follow, on the Web, and Miura will not be any better at that than I.

  Ah, that bitter ache. The sweet pain of a wound I keep picking at. I am still hoping that Barrens will be the one to send a message asking me to go to him. I would. I would forget all this, and go.

  16

  City Planning takes a turn that puts a stop to everything in my life other than being one of the six City Planning Administrators.

  The rumors come true. Directives are issued from the Central Council. All management teams in every department, agency, and bureau scramble to meet the demands of a Habitat Reconfiguration plan that was handed down with almost no warning.

  My team, like everyone else’s, is swamped. We postpone Hennessy’s meticulously planned team-building exercise in the Taiga biome. We schedule shift work. We consume prodigious quantities of coffee.

  I try to make contact with Miura if only to inform her that I simply do not have time for further investigations, at least for now. Putting up the ad on the Nth Web takes a thought, even weaving in the hidden memory. When I check for a posting from her in reply, there is nothing.

  I guess she is giving it up. That would bother me more if I weren’t so busy.

  The work makes a mess of me. Everyone in the department is exhausted and moody; Hennessy helps keep the team going. Hah. It is almost as if I planned on giving him more opportunities to lead.

  Normally in the Ministry of the Interior, City Planning plans, and Primary City works executes. Not this time.

  Each week, we have to assist in the demolition and construction of a new city block to lighten the load on Primary Cityworks.

  And it is not just the Ministry of the Interior. So much demolition and construction is going on, the Ministry of Energy has to carefully allocate reactor power, with scheduled rotating power outages in different sections of the Habitat. Significant numbers of officers from the Ministry of Peace help redirect the traffic around all those construction sites. Ministry of Information marketing specialists feed the general public feel-good sound bites about major changes for the better. Nobody is telling us what the Ministry of Health is so busy with, but everyone hears of their struggles too; there are just rumors of some major health-care component to the Habitat Reconfiguration.

  Since becoming an Administrator, I have rarely had to involve myself with construction.

  Over mere weeks, I destroy and build multiple entire skyscrapers. It is exhausting, draining work. The rest of my crew are worse off—even teamed up in mental gestalt, their combined touch rating just matches my own individual ability, because of inherent inefficiencies of different minds linking up their talents. They need to expend 30 percent more effort than I do to accomplish the same task. Among the thousands of crewmen in the combined City Planning and Primary Cityworks effort, mine is the only team that is meeting our assigned quotas and performance metrics.

  There are precious few opportunities to check on the Monster.

  Night after night, day after day, we sneak in naps either on desks telekinetically converted to cots in our office, or in the backs of the supply trucks when we are on-site at a construction zone. We go back to the gray tomb of City Planning to turn in our reports and shower. Lesser workers, secretaries and janitors, assist us with laundry and food.

  Time blurs in that state.

  All right.

  After this, I promise myself. After the workload eases up.
By then, Hennessy will be ready, and the new staff members will be trained up.

  Then I’ll vanish too. I will find him, never mind if I barely have any idea where to start looking.

  Then my team of ten loses three women to Breeding Duty and one man to early Retirement.

  Antonia, Julia, and Erica have a week to psyche themselves up for the long sleep.

  I schedule time to talk to each of them and … warn them. But I don’t think they quite understand how hard it will be. It isn’t in me to share how a place inside me still feels empty, or the dreams I still have.

  Then they are gone. A long, paid vacation. Will they be the same when they come back, or will they feel what I feel?

  Stephen receives his Retirement notice. He has two months more with us. With the current workload, we can’t even throw him a party.

  That young man who had the encounter with the tunnel beasts was right. Why are some individuals Retired so young? How can the numbers ever justify it? Stephen Wong is practically a fresh graduate. Hennessy and I have only just gotten him to where he’s familiar with all our department forms and protocols.

  Again that one poster’s most mad idea floats to the top in my thoughts.

  No. Madness lies that way. That’s not a matter of hundreds of killings, but thousands across the centuries. What could possibly do that? And why?

  No time to ponder whether the superiors who are supposed to lead and guide and protect their lessers are instead doing something horrible to us.

  There is always too much to do. More roads to reconfigure, more old buildings to demolish and new ones to raise. The months pass. Stephen says his good-byes.

  The hundredth day of this work surge arrives. During the moments between, people come and go along the streets with dark crescents under their eyes, cheeks hollow.

  Hennessy, have you ever seen anything like this?

  It’s a stupid question, a sign of fatigue that I even asked it.

  Of course not.