The Forever Watch (36 page)

We take cover in the lee of a hill. A supply bunker, the terminus for one of the branches leading away from the snaking, intestine-like train tunnel. The walls are angled very flat, and there are no windows. We climb higher but stay crouched behind a cooling unit, hissing as it vents hot exhaust out in front of us, vibrating and humming.

I point back the way we came.

All those eggs. They're drawing huge amounts of psi energy. Except for that one with the hole in it.

So you're saying, every one of those buildings …

They are the source of the storm of emotion saturating the air.

Then the Enforcers are so close to us, it is a risk even to think in one's own head. They have subdued the creature. It is half-encased in plastech. It moves majestically along, a few meters above the ground. In stillness it seems so much smaller. It is so close, it feels as though, if I stood at the edge of the rooftop and reached out, I could touch it. Its misshapen skull turns on its neck, and one huge, milky, blue eye gazes into my soul. Together, they make for a slow procession, the Enforcers walking around and beneath the monster—probably to save power. They pass below us along the narrow path. Where the buildings close in too far, they raise the mass higher into the air.

They're taking it back to its cell.

Barrens chews on his lip for a second and nods.

Now, can we run for it?

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Probably a good idea.”

Just before we get moving, he spends a long time staring at one of the egg-shaped prison cells.

“What is it?”

“There's ID numbers on the eggs. Above the main coolant line feeding into the base. Something familiar.”

He shakes his head. It is hard to tell because of the greenish light, but he goes pale.

“What is it, Leon?”

“It's nothing. You're right. Time to get out of here. Place is making me crazy.”

26

We rush from shadow to shadow, pausing when we have cover, and try to time the passage of the glowing circles of the spotlights. Barrens goes one stop ahead and signals me when to follow. Since I'm always hunched over, sometimes crawling along the lee of a ridge that climbs up toward our exit, fatigue stings and clutches at my back and legs. Under my cold-weather gear, I'm dripping with sweat even with the zippers and the hood down, but I don't dare remove it or I'll freeze to death in the unpowered areas.

Somehow, we avoid the Enforcers' attention. Possibly the amount of psi energy in the air and the terrible presence of the creatures render our merely human presences unnoticeable. Or perhaps taking down the monster drained the Enforcers too much for them to do anything else after they've put it back and rebuilt its cage. In addition to the fight, it must be exhausting working with the ultrahard, crystalline form of plastech that composes everything in that giant prison.

I remember all those defaced murals and carvings of the builders, made of even harder matter. How much would it stress the grid to go into the gigawatt class, and how large a communion of merely human minds would it take not to burn out from channeling it?

We creep back out the doors. Barrens lays his hands on them, and I hear the bolts slide shut when he transmits the lock code.

The ground loses its hold on us and the air is again icy and stale.

Barrens leads, even lost in thought. Sometimes, he seems to forget I am there at his side. He will lope along, faster, pushing off in great bounds through zero g. The effort not to be left behind leaves me huffing, short of breath. Then he remembers himself and slows down, watching for me. When we resume, it starts off at an even pace, and then he will start to drift farther and farther ahead once more.

I focus and push on. The light of telekinesis flares at my back, keeps me flying forward. In a straight line, I am faster, but when we reach corners and turns, Barrens can just twist, bounce off his feet, and jump in the proper direction, while I have to use TK to decelerate, reorient myself, and speed up once more. The trail of discard bags and junk flies by.

After four hours of running, I give in and call out through my Implant,
Leon, I need to stop. I'm exhausted.

At first it looks as if he cannot hear me. It is just the nature of zero g though. He has nothing to hold on to and has to bounce and push off from wall to wall to bleed off his forward momentum. When he has slowed down enough, he waves to me, lets me pull us together.

Yeah. Okay. We need to eat and drink, and sleep too.

Barrens plays his flashlight over me and frowns. “I'm sorry. Should've paid more attention. You don't look so good.”

He starts rubbing my hands and arms; even through all the thick layers, it's heavenly. As is the water from my belt canteen.

We have come to a narrow, one-meter-wide shaft that climbs “up” from our previous orientation. All along one surface, the carved faces of the Builders watch us in silence. I pull up a mental image of our best map and try to match all those turns to it. This tunnel is a long curve following the spine of the Noah. We are about five days out from the Sanctuary. Less than that with just us; I won't have to help keep a line of people in orderly motion.

We each draw out a spool of line, thread it through a belt loop, and anchor the end against one surface with tape.

Looking at his face, really seeing his eyes, I squint.

The lines across his forehead are stark and deep, and he is looking far away, into his head. Maybe finally seeing confirmation of a vast, hidden truth underneath the placid existence of the crew is more than even he expected.

“Now you're the one who's so calm,” Barrens murmurs as he folds himself around me. “Your career was figuring the limits of what's on the ship and how much and how quickly it can be used, to keep the balance you kept talking about. You've just seen that there's so much more, and you seem … unruffled?”

Am I? Maybe I am too overwhelmed to show it. Maybe it is bone-deep in me, or rather, core-deep, at the primal center of the brain. Maybe it is just habit. I was indoctrinated all my life to think only about the mission and to abide all else, so this too I abide.

“I don't know why.”

I turn, push the hood back, and tuck my head under his chin. His stubble still feels odd against my close-shaven scalp. I hear the slow beating of his heart. Something huge has come together in his mind, something he is still figuring out the words to describe.

“And how about you? You are uncovering truths. Secrets that are vitally important.”

He leans back from me and we watch each other for a while, through the mist of our breaths. The numbness we feel is not because of the cold. A tremble starts inside him, just long enough to set his mouth to quivering.

“Should we stop, you think?”
We don't have to go back to the Archivists, Hana. We can just … just hide. Live out a quiet life on the fringes.

It takes many icy breaths for me to understand what I see on his face, lit faintly by the energy from the emitter plates on our skin. My hunter, my protector, he never fears for himself. But for me, he is afraid.

Leon, could you live with that? If we just quit?

It's not simple. I thought it would be. I thought we could just find out what's what, let everyone know, and everyone would make their own decisions. I never thought before of how …

“What is it?”

“Never thought before of how just the knowing can hurt someone,” Barrens whispers.

He has figured something out. And he wants what?

“You need my permission to tell me?”

Behind his eyes is a storm. The crackle and flicker of his red and my blue make unreal masks of our faces.

He kisses me then, and there is something in the taste and feel, and the pressure, of his lips. Something I don't understand. Whenever his words were not enough before, there was so much that would pass between us with just touch and gesture. In this cold, dark place, where there is no one else but us, no one else to see, or hear, the nature of my fear changes.

Oh, but I am afraid, my knight. I am.

In the dark, we spin slowly at the ends of our tethers. I want to think we are okay. He must sense that we are not, the way I hold on to him so tightly as we drift into sleep.

 

 

I open my eyes, gasping. We're tangled up. I cut us free from our lines with a small flash of psi, try to wake up all the way.

Barrens looks down at me. His lip is bleeding. His legs are wrapped around me. My wrists are clamped in his hands, but he is just holding me still, not crushing me. We are still in one of the unpowered sections, no gravity to hold us to the floor. We drift through the frigid air.

“I'm awake. Ah. Did I do that?”

“Yes. Bad dreams?”

Anyone would have nightmares, after all this. “I can't remember.”

His eyes search mine. I wonder what he sees. He lets me go and starts rummaging through his pack.

“Jerky? Biscuits?” He is avoiding something.

“What did you see just before we got away?”

“Ah, let me see. Here we go. A real luxury. A little brick of cheese.”

Don't say one thing with your words and something else with your body.

Our slight movements set us turning faster. Irksome, trying to keep our eyes on each other. There is no grid to draw on here, but it takes little power, in zero g, just to stabilize our positions and hold us in place. I choose one surface in the narrow corridor, decide that is the floor, and pull us, feetfirst, against it.

Okay. I am asking you to tell me. No matter how bad it is.

He does not look nearly so large now, after I've seen the creature in that horrible place. He starts to talk, stops. Tries again. He breaks a biscuit in half and wolfs it down, tears a big chunk of synth-meat jerky and swallows it with a long gulp of water from his canteen.

“Do you remember our Yule together?”

“Leon,” I warn him. I won't let him dodge this.

“Not trying to change the subject. It's relevant.”

I shake my head when he offers me the jerky. Even if it is not real meat, I want nothing to do with even artificial stuff. Not after that awful place. Those smells. I accept a stick of puffed rice.

You saw it too. You just have to look inside the memory. You're smarter than me. You have all the pieces.

Can that be so?

My concentration slips away, and we come loose from “the floor.”

“No.”

“Hana…”

I do not want to know after all.

You already know.

Pulling in my knees, I am a ball, featureless. Nothing. A perfect memory can be a curse. There is no forgetting. I see the ID number on the plaque on the cage. I have seen it before. It was printed in Barrens's careful, cramped scrawl, left for me after Yule.

“What does it mean?”

He winces. I guess I have lost control over my voice. I'm shrill. I hate losing control. But when have we ever had control over own lives on this cursed ship?

“I could have made a mistake when I retrieved the ident code,” Barrens says softly. He does not believe it.

“But you didn't.”

I fling myself away, hurtling down the shaft.

Or I try. He was expecting it, and aglow with superhuman enhanced reflexes, his hand catches mine. Despite my maximum unamplified energy output, the addition of his mass results in only a little more than half the speed I would have gotten, on my own.

“Let me go!” Crying. I hate how I look when I cry. I'm pounding on his arms and shoulders.

Pulled off center, we are about to crash into a wall, but he twists, somehow, and catches us, landing feetfirst and taking the shock with his powerful legs.

Can't talk anymore. I can only hang on to him.

I try to drown myself in other memories. Safe memories. A cat. Someone else's child. Delicious meals. Everything reminds me of what I cannot escape in my own head. Children. Meat. Death.

He is right. I knew it already subconsciously.

My tears drift away, perfect spheres. They will freeze, eventually. For just a little while, I let it out, let go of how I feel. Barrens's arms around me keep me from flying to pieces. His rough, deep bass rumbles through a soft, crooning nothing.

It might have been a few minutes. Or longer. Then I stop looking away. The world has not changed. It is I who changed, in the knowing. The choice to run is long behind me.

The place we just saw is a prison. This is certain. The monster escaped from one of the cells. And on one of the cells, I saw an ID code that matches what I learned in a better, simpler time, only months before, is the ident number of my missing child.

My child is one of them.

27

The way is cold and dark and grim with just the two of us and the silent weight of the thoughts in our heads. There was fear when we were outbound on our voyage of exploration, but there was excitement too, and the camaraderie of Barrens's tight-knit group. Now, it's all exhaustion, confusion.

It is cold enough that I accept Barrens's offer of his awful cigarettes. I cough and choke, but the chemical buzz of the synthetic nicotine helps me forget the hunger, and holding it in my mouth and pulling and puffing is at least some distraction from the constant, bone-freezing cold. The smoke trails behind us as I push myself along and follow as he leaps from wall to wall.

I want this long walk to be over. I am tired constantly and ache as if I have pushed my talent too far again. Yet I also want it to last forever, just the two of us, because when we arrive, decisions will have to be made and the data rattling around in our heads discussed.

I do not want to think about it anymore, but my mind keeps going.

There are only so many possibilities regarding that dark place filled with monsters. Why are they kept alive at all? Why are there so many? My Implant supplies me with perfect glimpses, and at a rough estimate there are as many of those creatures as there are of us. My child is one of them. Are they all children of humanity? How? Why?