The Forever Watch (40 page)

I write a message to Information Security. The thought-packet contains only
Karla. We are coming in.

28

Tommy and Susan cannot deal. The way they see their lives and the ship is suddenly different. All they want now is to live. In their eyes, I see the terror of knowing; or maybe I am only imagining in them what I feel myself.

“I can't,” Gregory murmurs. “I'm sorry.”

“Me too,” Susan says. “I don't want to go there just to get Adjusted and sent to fight our friends.”

Tommy mumbles, “I have to take care of these two. They'd never make it without me.”

Barrens shrugs and looks at his feet. “It was me that let you down. That got you into this.”

That is that.

They will hide and wait in the tunnels, scavenging food from the undocumented supply warehouses, watching. Until they come to grips with what is happening. Or perhaps they will spend the rest of their lives out there, numb and indifferent to the uncaring world they have left behind. Or perhaps one of the tunnel gangs will find them. That small criminal underground never has enough healers, and even if Gregory never completed his training, he is skilled.

We stand at the doorway to the blackness of the unpowered regions, with the warm air from the Sanctuary blowing past us into the icy dark.

Bullet stops to embrace Susan shyly, and to shake the hands of the young Doctor and the burly mechanic. They talk for a few minutes, just a moment of sentiment, remembering their shared childhood.

“Bye, Bullet.” Susan presses her pale lips to his cheek. She presses a cut lock of blond hair into his pocket.

Barrens passes around the small, handheld crossbows and belts holding a number of chisel-pointed quarrels. I refuse mine, and he does not insist. We heft our packs to our shoulders and take a last few breaths of heated air before we wrap our scarves around our faces.

We split apart at the first intersection. Susan, Tommy, and Gregory are headed deeper, to where the secret storage areas are. And we orient ourselves back toward the Habitat.

Bullet keeps looking back over his shoulder as his friends' lights vanish around a distant corner.

Barrens murmurs, “You didn't have to come with us, Bullet. You still have time to go with your friends. You still haven't told her how you feel, even.”

“But I do. Maybe what happened wouldn't have happened without you two; well, it also would not have happened if not for me. If I hadn't gone looking myself.”

So begins another hike into the dark. I never realized how much I could miss my own home, my office job, the chowder place close to the park, the entire life I have been exiled from. Even when we make it back to the Habitat, even if we are not Adjusted so deeply that we are not just empty shells, how could anything be the same again?

 

 

Every time we come across a data-line hard port, I send Karla another message, letting her know where we are, and where we are going. Soon, we cross the great power shaft, and then we reach the same sewer line I escaped through months before.

The air is hot and fetid, but there is power.

Drawing on a touch of the grid through my modified amplifier, I change our jackets and cold-weather gear into waders rising up to our chests and masks to filter out the fumes.

Walking through the thick, foul slime, I wonder about the monstrous children that sometimes escape from the black city. Could we escape if one attacked now?

From there, it takes a few hours to get to where I punched down from the bottom level of the ISec holding facility. I shake for a moment, physically weak. These moments are coming more frequently. Annoying.

Barrens takes my hand, and my knees steady themselves. He nods at me once.

“Let's go, Miss Dempsey,” Bullet says.

I raise the hand with the amplifier. The muck below us is pushed apart and away from us, and the ceiling above opens up into a short shaft. Aglow with my
touch,
I float Barrens and Bullet up through the hole first. Barrens reaches an arm down and pulls me up.

And we are here, alone, in the basement of the only ISec installation I have been in. The kitchens I ran through are empty.

The floor above is covered in dust and rubble, and the floors above that are just gone. The building has been torn apart. We sit on the steps beyond the double doors. We are on a tall hill, overlooking this section of the Hab.

It is burning. Pillars of smoke rise in the distance. In the sky, one of Hennessy's psychedelic sunsets flickers on and off, sometimes revealing the cracked Dome above. Pipes are leaking, spraying down, here and there. The glittering spire of the Eiffel Tower–inspired vertical farm in the center of the district has been shorn in half. The streets are twisted and torn, filled with dust and debris and ash. The buildings have been warped into windowless, armored bunkers, except for where they have been blasted apart—the lonely bones of their corpses eerie by the light of the distant fires, which glow and shimmer through the dull haze of particulates in the air. Breathing in, the air tastes stale and old and smoky. The lungs of this section of the Habitat, the algal purifiers and the biomes and the crop zones in the vertical farm, must have been badly damaged, or they are simply overwhelmed by the load of the fires burning throughout the city. Below us, a few crewmen are in sight, staggering along, covered in soot, shuffling between the shadows.

It is quiet. Silent except for the absurdity of some holographic billboards hovering over the cityscape, still advertising different varieties of tofu, vegemeat, wine, dresses, watches—the trappings of a consumer culture that was only the shallowest mask, a costume of individual choices over closed lives.

It is a war zone kin to the distant memories of burned-out cities from Earth conflicts.

Bullet's face has gone completely pale. His mouth hangs open as he wrings his hands. An inarticulate, low wheeze escapes his lips.

I consider the implications of a mob with psychic talents driven to extremes of fear. Anyone that has
touch
is a living factory, capable of turning plastech to weaponry, the designs of which can easily be spread by engineers just by telepathic contact. Any
bruiser
is a deadly soldier, even without training. Psychic surgeons can use their healing to kill. Those who can
read
and
write
are more effective communicators than radios or messenger runners or smoke signals.

I lean, boneless, against Barrens. He is folded up inside himself. Haunted. Behind us, I think I hear Bullet crying.

Again, I tap into the local data-lines.

Karla. We are here.

About fucking time. Welcome back to gay Paris. So, Miss Dempsey, do you like what your friends have done with the place?

Please.
I send her an image of us, with our approximate location.
Barrens never wanted anything like this. He tried to talk them out of it, he …

The hostility in her thought stream pounds in my head, sets the blood throbbing through my temples:
He started something bigger than himself and lost control and fucked us all.

We are here to help.

There is no response for several minutes. If Karla has cut contact, I suppose it is no more than we deserve. Perhaps a strike team is already on its way to erase us. The gasps of my companions draw my attention, and from the way their eyes are rolled back in their heads, I know Karla is scanning them through her tenuous connection with me. Could she Adjust us even from here? What could I do if she chooses to? If I interrupt, I may only cause more damage.

Eventually, I see the tension leave their faces, and I relax when Barrens murmurs softly, “Guess I … Yeah. Fuck it. I accept.”

Bullet also murmurs his assent.

I almost feel Karla's strained, bitter chuckle vibrate through my skull.
As it happens, Dempsey, there are still things only you can do. And our resources are so strained, I'll even take on that twerp and your fuckwad lover.

She sends me the image of her location, and a series of pass codes. ISec is holding the vertical farm and the immediate area around it. Section v-farms are vital for food and water and, more important, the cycling of breathable air. At the false horizon, the flicker of the sky simulators end where the great vault doors have been sealed, isolating each section. We are to meet an Information Security team halfway to the farm, close to the commerce plaza.

Get moving. The codes will unlock the amplifier restrictions. There's also recognition codes to get through the checkpoints. Watch out for nutjobs.

She cuts our mental line. There's not much point in saying I've already bypassed the power-draw restrictions on our amplifiers.

Barrens shakes his head one more time. He produces a shiny bit of metal out of his pocket; a badge is on his breast again.

Would things be any different if I had tried to track him through it the very morning he had left? Or would all this be even worse—Karla would not have gotten to me, and with me joining the Archivists sooner, how much more could the Archivists have done with Archie? Perhaps things would be even worse. Or, with me at his side, perhaps Barrens would have never recruited others at all.

… But it was not just him anymore by then. Bullet was with him, and he brought in his own friends, and they brought in more.

There is regret, but no time for self-pity. We see that in each other's eyes.

There is not much of a discussion. I look at Barrens and he looks at me, and we both know and nod.

Bullet's eyes sweep back and forth across the cityscape, his fingers trembling around the flask of water as he fumbles at unscrewing the cap. Maybe it is just too much. In a matter of weeks, the things we've seen, and with how he absorbs these experiences …

“Bullet, we're going.”

“Y-yes.”

We head for the least damaged car in sight. Hooded men appear out of the alleyways to surround us just briefly—it only takes a flare of Barrens's badge and his glowering stare to back them off.

With the crackle of my own heavily modified defense amp, I feel safe for a moment, then realize that I have not programmed in anything that can handle crossbow bolts. Ah. Then a brief, dizzying flash has me stumble. It is already there, in my head, from when Karla uploaded so much data into my mind. An algorithm for exactly that purpose, one that creates a
touch
field that is permeable to air and slow-moving objects, but which will catch and immobilize any high-speed projectile. I draw on the power of the grid, and the world around us becomes tinted a faint blue. We cannot see the boundary, but those around us might see the slight blue shimmer of a dome that keeps pace with us.

Barrens recognizes it, bites his lip, and says nothing.

The vehicle we stop in front of is a six-wheeled transport used by construction and maintenance crews. The elongated beetle-shape has been thrown onto its back. Crossbow quarrels have punched into the door. Two of the wheels have been blasted off. It smells of smoke. A trail of blood starts at the shattered window and goes off into the alleyways.

“I'll have this running in a few minutes. Please keep an eye out.”

“Sure, Ms. Dempsey,” Bullet says.

“Got it.”

My hands conduct the music. This is a lot easier than growing a building or even fixing a broken tablet. One sweep of my left gets it right-side up; with my right, I slice off the cargo bed, the rearmost axle, and rearrange the remaining wheels. With a snap of my fingers the bloodstains and soot peel away. The last exertion draws the most power, into the high-kilowatt class, as I compress the material I removed and recrystallize the plastech into the hardened, toughened configuration that is used for the structural skeleton of skyscrapers, then cut and fit the pieces to fit over the body, as well as using them to replace the clear windows with opaque armor leaving only narrow viewing slits for us to peer through.

When I am done, the innocuous hauler is much smaller, a sedan from the end of the twentieth C, ominous black, all ugly, hard-angled surfaces.

We are not alone when I come out of the trance. Two hundred meters down the street, Barrens faces off against a pair of young men. Much closer, beside the smoking shell of another burned-out transport, a third would-be attacker is dead, with Bullet's quarrel projecting from between the boy's eyes.

The three attackers have symbols on their coat sleeves: a large eye, the pupil of which consists of many smaller eyes. Is that the new symbol of the Archivists?

“Dempsey! Watch out!”

I finally take in the dark streaks flying for me and stopping in flashes of light. Glittering sparks as kinetic energy is instantaneously converted to light and heat in midair and they fall, a rain of marbles. Atop the ruins of a brasserie on the corner, a cackling woman is pointing at me, lit up in blue. Her hair streams behind her, long, black waves, and her eyes are wide, and behind the flashing blue glow of
touch,
I see the telltale web of broken blood vessels around her pupils and the edges of her emitter plates—Psyn overdose.

She laughs and shrieks. She tries to overturn the car onto me, and I settle it with a thought. Wind whips around her, dust flies, and cracks propagate across the wall she is perched atop. With so much Psyn in her blood, she is powerful, even without access to the grid, but it is too much for her; she cannot control it. Raw psi flares around her, leaking out of her will's grasp.

Foiled, she grows angry. She thrusts her fists down at me. Force presses down on me—I barely manage to shield myself and the car. The road under my feet explodes, sinks into a crater, pushes even deeper until a great hole opens beneath me revealing sewage tunnels twenty meters below. I float myself over to the car, and standing atop the hood, I roll it backward.

Perhaps if I get out of sight, she will lose interest. Then I can support Barrens and Bullet. Right now, this woman is taking all I've got.