The Forever Watch Read online

  An ISec paper-pusher wants to try to be a hero and jumps at me, trying to tackle me. He’s been watching too many old movies. He should have used his amp bracelet to subdue me. I send him flying away from me, a bowling ball knocking the pins of the crowd aside for me to rush through.

  Now, some of them start to use their psi, and a hail of spoons and forks shoots after me, so many bullets. Poorly aimed bullets. They do more harm to each other than to me. I float more food trays along my way to block them.

  This part is just like my paintball matches with my friends.

  There are no Enforcers after me. They will all be held back just long enough for me to escape from the less competent, less trained interrogation staff. Or at least, I pray that Karla is doing so. Or I will be dust and ashes within moments.

  The gray men in their murky, colorless coats drop through the hole I made. More are pushing their way in from the cafeteria entrance.

  I am already past the kitchen doors. I fuse them shut. The sensation of being able to draw on the grid again is heady. I had been scraping by on a trickle in the desert, and now I have a sea of power behind me. The kitchen staff stare, stunned at this disruption of routine.

  A flare of cobalt blue and the drainage grate pops free from the corner of the room. I force it wider.

  The doors crush open. Angry men running, even as I jump down again. But I have to slow them down or the first bruiser that gets mobilized will knock me out before I can think to react.

  I run and run. The breath whistles in and out between my teeth. I might have exercised as much as I could in my cell, but running a marathon is not the kind of fitness I could shoot for.

  Foul smells in the air. Sewage sloshing around my feet.

  Methane gas.

  I part with a few grams of material from my sleeve, harden it into a pair of rough, metallic disks, leave them hovering behind me as I pound my way down the tunnel.

  When I judge that my pursuers have reached my little present, I force the disks to strike together.

  The spark gives birth to a fireball. I fling up a wall of dirty water and sludge to stop it from reaching me. The heat bakes it into a crust.

  I hope I have not killed anyone.

  Now, I have to get lost. I need to keep going deeper, to where there is too much interference for them to track and pinpoint my location through my Implant emissions.

  Exhaustion. Not enough food. And the strain of pushing my talents beyond the limits I thought I had. Knees are trembling. Feet drag through the muck. The information that Karla has forced upon me includes many maps of these service tunnels. Functions she has added to my Implant make it a trivial matter to trace my path so far and match it up to the complex, three-dimensional web of shafts and tunnels.

  So tired and it is still so far. I descend deeper into the network. Small plaques with hexadecimal markings label some of the intersections and keep me oriented. Karla did not explicitly mark out an escape route for me, but with my many requirements of staying away from where I can be detected and tracked as well as reaching one of the Nth Web data conduits spread throughout the ship, I have only a handful of options to choose from. Most of them are flagged, indicating that maintenance teams are scheduled to check on them soon.

  The sludge underfoot begins to move faster, threatens to drag me under. I am close, at last, to a side-access link to the information network lines. There is no wireless to the Nth Web in the uninhabited zones. I need that hardwired line, need to signal Monster so Barrens can find me.

  If she was telling the truth about the Monster being untraceable, then I don’t need to worry; I can just use it to call out to him without the complex tricks he was using to message whomever else he’s dragged into this.

  I just hope he’ll be able to find me, or I could be lost down here until I starve.

  There. A circular door atop a landing high enough to be just clear of the slime.

  Not locked, but too heavy for my feeble human muscles to open. Groaning now, I call upon the borrowed amplifier’s power again. First, I reform my bodysuit and stretch the already thin material to its limits while treating it with subtle vibrations to increase its toughness and change its opacity. It covers me now, head to toe. A clear bubble forms around my head, encloses me with a minute’s worth of breathable air. I need it to get past what lies ahead.

  Too much strain in too short a time. The world seems to spin around me and I hang on to consciousness. The half-ton hatch swings out into a blindingly bright space full of lights.

  The constricted, choking space of the sewage shaft opens up into a vast emptiness. The fetid air blasts out at my back. Fingers and power clutch at the walls and keep me from falling.

  This is one of several main arteries cutting through the superstructure of the ship. It is unintentionally beautiful. Streams of light so intense they look like solid matter crisscross through the air, blues, yellows, greens, reds—the psionic power grid. The largest rivers spiral around the center and stretch up and down; it is all colors and none. They feed in and branch away from it toward the curving walls. Bolts of lightning crackle, traversing up and down, bouncing from the control antennae projecting out into the space, gleaming bridges of delicate filigree, ever-shifting, formless plastech tendrils that twine about the crackling pathways of energy rooted in the obsidian surface of the walls. Immense blocks of circuitry are embedded right into the structure of this grand hall of light. Strange symbols are carved everywhere—a character set I’ve seen before, in that one lost fragment of reclaimed data.

  No time to take it in and wonder why there’s this strange, ancient artwork here where there is no one to see it. Maybe they were markings by the Builders, useful during the construction of the Noah.

  “Pay attention!” I bark at myself. It would be far, far too easy to die at this step.

  Air sighs in and out along hundreds of vents. Not breathable air though—which is why I need my airtight shelter.

  In the suit, my breaths are too loud in my ears. Must breathe slowly, must not saturate my air with CO2 before I get to the data line on the opposite side of the shaft. It just takes courage.

  I let go of the moldy, slippery doorway and take a step out into the emptiness. There is no drop. There is no simulated gravity as that would serve no purpose here. My stomach, though, insists that I am falling. My heart pounds. My inner ears tell me there is no “down” anymore.

  Emergency zero-g training seems like a thousand years ago.

  Biting my lip, I pull myself where I need to go, the faintest glimmer of my touch surrounding me. Slow. I must be careful. Touch one of those glowing currents and there will not even be ashes left of me. Banks of steam are crawling up and down the walls in rivers—vapor coolant, tremendously caustic. I must avoid those too.

  A hundred meters away. The tiny, white door I am aiming for grows in size. Now to decelerate. It would be stupid of me to get this far and crack my head open from hitting it too fast and asphyxiating in this ridiculous, skintight, translucent body stocking.

  Dizzy. Little globules of blood from my nose and ears are floating around in my helmet. Distracting. Hands are trembling. Forgot how cold it would be. Cold. The blood droplets are freezing into little red crystals. My breath is icy mist, making it hard to see.

  I spin in midair and press my feet against the wall, just clear of the data line. I spread my hands, force the triangular doors to slide apart. Air starts rushing out of it. It is not a vacuum in this main shaft, but it is lower pressure, to keep toxic gases from backing up into other systems. Not too hard to fight my way into the tunnel against the current. Gravity reasserts and pushes me to my hands and knees in the much warmer, pearl-gray triangular corridor. Numb now, when I close the doors.

  Tear open my helmet. Blessed, warmer air. Oxygen. Not much farther.

  Crawling. Cannot stand anymore. Gleaming panel, an Nth Web access terminal right in the wall. It takes a painful, long minute for my twitching fingers to open the panel and touch the
conductive access port.

  Hey. My guardian. My lion. I need you. I’m here.

  I fold the words and the hex label on the terminal into a clear packet of thought. I enclose it in a file with a smattering of keywords and data, send it off to the Monster.

  It is a matter of probabilities. The chance that my program has already spread to the closest Analytical Node to find my message. The chance that Barrens will see it before lack of water kills me.

  With the last dregs of my power, I cocoon myself into the tunnel wall, with just cracks to breathe through for air, and then I close my eyes and hope I have gone far enough and deep enough. Exhausted, still it takes what feel like hours to fall asleep. I just escaped from a secret prison because the alternative was being lobotomized. Am I a foolish girl looking for the man I love, or, as Karla spoke of, a guided missile streaking toward a target of the Council’s choosing?

  Barrens would say, “You’re badass, baby.”

  Consciousness returns in slow stages.

  Awareness. I could wake up immediately. But I do not. I let myself drift. I am in a bed, with blankets. A huge paw is closed around my hand. So warm. Better than the best memories of that stupid cat, that other person’s child.

  My head aches fiercely. A jagged boulder is bouncing back and forth in my skull.

  “You’re awake.” His voice is soft. Still a low rumble, a gentle growling.

  It hurts too much even to talk. Probably he can see it on my face. Feel it in the pressure of my clutching hands.

  “Yeah. If you got a headache, that’s from the surgery.”

  Fantastic. Yet another person’s been in my head, rummaging through it.

  Surgery? Pulling on my psi to message him Implant-to-Implant causes my eyes to feel as if they will burst.

  “Yeah. You were hemorrhaging in your head—pushed your talent too far.”

  “And we also had to remove the part of the Implant that lets them track us,” added a clear, high, childish voice. “Barrens, we should leave her be. The stimulation will keep the drugs from helping her rest.”

  “Yeah, got it. Sorry, Doc.”

  Silence then. Chill along the veins of my arms, feeling the drips going into me. Their words are slowing down, slurring. I sleep again.

  20

  There are plush couches. The floor is functional tile. The lamps are bright over the tables and desks, but outside those pools of light, it is dim, and murky. Cigarette smoke in the air diffuses silhouettes. The walls have been converted into floor-to-ceiling displays.

  Barrens sits before me. The table between us has been fabricated to look like wrought iron. The small lamp on it is just bright enough to be functional, but our faces remain in shadow.

  A tablet is in his hands. An unlit cigarette dangles between his lips.

  Coffee. Hot, scalding. Takes both my hands to hold the mug up to my mouth.

  Smell of bacon, frying. Bacon! I only had it once as a child, when Mala rewarded me for one particularly exceptional grading period. As an adult, I could afford it whenever the urge struck, but it was always a little magical to me, that rich fat like little else.

  Around us, other men and women eat and chat. They talk about Web streams and movies.

  We could have been sitting in a café somewhere.

  But too many of the conversations delve into history and philosophy and conspiracy. Everyone is talking about the latest news. They have found a way through toward one of the secret sections of the ship.

  And they have found more evidence of the Builders. Joe November still insists on being called Bullet, and for the first three days of my recovery, he has taken every possible opportunity to visit me and offer to show his collection of psychometric impressions of the Builders—mostly from touching the ancient writings on some of the tunnel walls out here in the uninhabited zones. I guess he changed his mind about the aliens not mattering so much. Or maybe it’s his newfound popularity.

  A number of the men and women in Barrens’s group are nearly addicted to the alien sense memories Bullet has shared. They fantasize about finding a hidden cache of Builder artifacts, alien wisdom that can change our society, improve our clumsy understanding of their technologies, a panacea to make everything better in every way. When they touch Bullet to reexperience the memories his talent has extracted firsthand, they sway in place, like maddened fans overwhelmed by the presence of an old-time rock star.

  I decline every offer to see them. Just the one memory that the data-miner found was plenty for me. Their minds are too different from ours. When I revisit that memory, it is always deeply disturbing; I imagine it feels like being high. They felt emotions so intensely, yet so differently from us. They had emotions we don’t have words for, and without the background cultural concepts and context, they are mind-bending. And can any memory of a Builder walking through a corridor or doing maintenance work or humming match what Barrens and I saw, of that pair of others standing above the Noah as it was being created?

  The real excitement in the air is about the expedition into what they call the Unmapped Regions. They talk about who will get to go. They talk about how, soon, everyone will know the Noah’s secrets.

  They tend to be either very young, just teenagers, swinging their hands about and gesturing with enthusiasm, or very old, gray- and white-bearded men and thin crones with reedy voices. A pair of them stand before one of the large displays, reformulating program code. Blocks of instructions that I recognize. I wrote much of them.

  Above what looks like a pool table, a three-dimensional image is projected. A densely packed series of lines and curves and tiny, glowing blips, data labels, tags. It is a schematic of the Noah focusing on one of the abandoned sections, depowered, with no life support or gravity.

  A plate is lowered before me. The boy that serves it inclines his head deferentially to Barrens.

  “Hi, Bullet.” I hug him and smile and, when he blushes, hug him again. I think it was those weeks in isolation, and having so many strangers around now. The only two people I know here from before are Barrens and Bullet, and I take every opportunity to touch them and feel that I exist.

  “Thanks. Grab some for yourself too, huh?”

  “Uh. Sure. Haha.” He turns a little pink. “Hey, you know, it’s not just Builder memories I’ve found, so if you want to see anything more, you know I like to feel useful.”

  “You’re probably the most important guy here, Joe.”

  “No way.” He shakes his head. “That’s the big guy, because he’s the hand that’s holding this mess of crazies together. And that’s you, for making the Monster. Though, the artsy kids that joined in want to call it Argus instead. I wasn’t ever into mythology.”

  A number of youths on a couch wave to him.

  “Go on, go on,” Barrens says. “You’ve had more time with Hana than I have, and your groupies are wanting more of you.”

  A little twitch around his eyes, as if Bullet wanted to roll them. “It’s not me that’s got groupies, it’s the Builders. Easy for people to fantasize that they were so perfect, seeing as they’re all gone and we can’t know if they were just as screwed up as us.” But he sighs and goes over to the alien enthusiasts anyway.

  Beside me, Barrens sips his coffee.

  My fork breaks the yellow yolk of an egg. It is glorious. It trickles onto a thick cut of toast. In my mouth, fat and salt and protein and the complex flavors, and the slight crunch of the crusty bread, and all of it overwhelming, after months in isolation with flavorless goop. Sunlight in my mouth. I eat only a few, tiny bites. It seems like a dream.

  Big fingers tug at the skin on my wrist and pinch. Just enough to let me feel it.

  “Not gonna wake up back in a cell.”

  “When did you learn how to read, hmm?”

  Not that Barrens needed to pinch me. There are too many aches and pains. And more than just from burning my talent to the point of scraping the inside of my mind. Where my spine meets my skull is a sharp, throbbing ache, where
another youth performed psychic surgery on me. He slid needles of incorporeal force into my head and destroyed the collection of nanite threads composing the transponder ganglion, the part of the Implant that constantly transmits location data. Supposedly, the procedure is without side effects. Barrens said they have all gone through it.

  I wonder though. The sharp, clear plans that got me out of Information Security have become fuzzy and directionless. If I had the time to scan through my memories one by one, would any be damaged? Are my talents affected? It will take time to test myself. There’s so much to catch up on with the jerk. I’m going to let him have it sometime, for leaving me.

  Later. Real soon.

  Right now I can’t stop looking at him when he’s around, and I sink into the deep bass of his voice when he talks.

  “I was a cop. It doesn’t take psi talent to know something about body language, facial expressions.” That rough, calloused thumb glides over my cheek. “Like to think I know a lot about you.”

  His touch gets a sigh out of me and I lean into his hand, into the heat radiating from the furnace of him. I missed this too much. I missed him. Barrens stares at me hungrily as if he cannot believe I am here, as if he wants to consume me and possess me, that beast of his too, and at the same time there is that tenderness no one else knows. This is real, to me. It has to be. His presence, the gritty roughness of his hands.

  Strange, hearing his voice again. His spoken speech is cleaner than before, more like the thoughts in his head. I guess he needed to work on that at last, to be a leader to his flock. Is he the leader? He is boss to this small gathering here, but no one has told me how many other groups there are, how many other bosses there are. How are decisions made? How independent are they?

  Then there is what happened with Miyaki. He took an oath to protect life. An oath to defend each individual of humanity left. When we are suitably alone, I will ask, and I will listen.