The Forever Watch (23 page)

Jackson! Pay attention!

Sorry, Cameron.

You better be careful. If you fall over and start choking on that shit, I am not going to dive in there to pull you out
.

Yes, Cameron
.

I mean it! Watch your step!

Cameron is twenty years older. Why isn't he getting Retired?

He slogs through the stinking muck. He is accustomed to the stench by now. It does not bother him nearly as much as the resentment that has overwhelmed him since he received the red envelope with his name on it. In truth, it's sent him reeling. He has not been able to bring himself to even talk about it. He has barely been able to eat—he's lost ten pounds already.

Put some more muscle into it!

Okay, Cameron.

The probe is heavy in his hands. It is a long stick with a sensor suite at the end, a limited-use amplifier that detects changes in plastech density. The paddle shape of the sensor head has a lot of drag. A few minutes of shifting it through the thick sludge has his shoulders and back aching.

Finally, he senses the breach.
I got it.

Without moving the end, he places a psi-tag on a hook projecting from the side of the probe's shaft. Carefully, he checks that his fingers are clear of the hook, then triggers the probe. He feels a little more power bleeding into his nervous system, enhancing his meager talent. The hook descends, and when it reaches the bottom of the probe, it activates, punching the chisel end of the tag into the crack.

Another team will be by later on to perform the actual repairs.

Cameron's voice screeches in his head, as though the man were yelling directly into his ear.
Come on then! Get moving! There's three more leaks a hundred meters aft! This segment of piping can't work until all of that is fixed and it can be pressurized again.

How far back is the fix-it crew, boss?

Never you mind. We take care of our business quick as we can. Let those wannabe engineers be slow and stupid.

He draws the probe out, rests it against his shoulder as he pushes harder, marching through the meter-thick layer of crusted sewage. His labored breath is loud inside the confines of the breathing mask. He can feel his perspiration trickling down the inside of the slick, waterproof suit, pooling at the folds at his waist, and into his boots.

Perhaps he ought to look at his impending early Retirement as a blessing? It was not as if this were a fulfilling job with good opportunities for advancement.

What would he do with himself, though, in the Retirement section? He was so young, not yet twenty. He would be surrounded by men and women two to four times his age in there!

And how long before Anita forgot him?

He would break up with her first. Maybe tonight. He had seen other couples separated by Retirement. He would not be able to take a teary good-bye prolonged over months. Then the last day would come and the Retirement people would take him off, and then to have her sobbing and weepy and restrained by one of those red-coated men with their cheery smiles? No. Not for him.

Twenty minutes more and he has marked two more leaks. But the last one is driving him crazy. Forty minutes and he just cannot find it!

I'm telling you, Cameron, there ain't no holes here. Gone over every centimeter, grid-style, and there ain't nothing.

Water Management says there's a leak there, so there's a leak there. The computers say so, and they are more reliable than we are.

Why can't the fricking computers tag the leak then?

Patiently, Cameron repeats the same thing he has probably had to say once a day to somebody on his crew for the last ten years.
The sensor resolution of the Reclamation System only goes down to the square meter.

Another twenty minutes and he can hear the repair team closing in now, just a few tags behind.

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 random 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.