The Forever Watch (41 page)

The vehicle stalls, wheels squealing as she gets a hold on it too. Stops it.

She stamps her feet, utterly maddened. Like a child. The buildings around us sway and rumble with her undisciplined fury.

She can barely think. She is burning through her talent so quickly, she will probably drain herself unconscious even if I do nothing. A hail of stones and boulders rain down on me.

I'm more worried about my companions.

I lose sight of Barrens as he vanishes, a bolt of red lightning crackling across the road. Two other trails of fire blur about his path. Thunder, whip cracks, concrete shattering. They are three shooting stars blasting the ground with each leap, ripping through the air as they strike at each other. The comets spiral up the side of a ten-story office building, breaking what's left of the glass façade, colliding again and again.

I cannot help screaming when I see a dark shape fly out of one of those red explosions. A large man, already broken. No. It's not Barrens.

Hana! Pay attention to yourself! I can handle these amateurs fine!

My jaw drops when I turn back to this madwoman. In the moments I looked away, she has become totally unhinged. She lifts the entire three-story shophouse unit off the street, tons upon tons of stone-textured plastech. As it breaks apart, she throws half-ton chunks my way.

Now, I stress the grid. My rewiring of the civilian amplifier is not as good as I'd hoped. At sustained high-kilowatt-class draw, I can smell its circuitry starting to burn out as I deflect the paths of truly dangerous building chunks. Most of them are pulverizing the hillside behind me, overshooting badly. Her poor aim is all that saves me.

I am about to reach out and snuff her out with a narrow, focused burst of force when the woman's eyes roll back in her head. She starts trembling, shaking. Blood is pouring down her face now. She is in full psi-seizure.

The remnants of the building fall back onto its foundations, burst apart in a cloud of dust and stone.

And all is quiet again.

Barrens is striding back. His jacket is somewhat torn, and a bruise is on his cheek. I did not see how he disposed of the last attacker.

Closer, the young man I've started to think of as a little brother is still staring at the one he's killed. He shakes. His mind's voice calls out,
Why?

They probably saw us using psi and assumed we're ISec. Or maybe they're just handing out jackets and Psyn like candy.

Only when I walk closer do I see the wet stain spreading across Bullet's black T-shirt. “You're bleeding!”

“I am? Oh.”

Barrens just catches the boy. “Kid!”

Bullet's knees give way slowly. “Huh. So this is what it's like.”

“Bullet!” I catch him telekinetically. Try to smile at him. “You'll be … you'll be fine.”

“Naw, Dempsey. Boss. I don't think so.” A spasm starts, stops, leaves him coughing blood. “We were trying to do good, weren't we?”

“We were,” Barrens rumbles.

“Isn't so bad … hurts less than … how everyone dies … anyway…”

By the time we get his jacket and shirt off and spot the crossbow bolt that has gone almost completely through his torso, Bullet is gone. His face is caught in its last moment, a soft smile, remembering.

Barrens touches those eyelids, closes them over those once-bright eyes.

I entomb the corpse in a block of glittering white stone. I cannot think of any worthy epitaph. So I leave only his name, carved into the side.
JOE NOVEMBER
.

We drive in silence.

 

 

I have only driven a ground transport a handful of times, mostly back when I was a rookie on a construction crew. It is not difficult with the streets being so empty. Only occasionally do I have to slow down to get around empty vehicles and the smoldering remains of fires.

Most of the people we see skitter away into the shadows. Some throw rocks at us, yelling. A few have crossbows. Once, I have to ram through a barricade of chairs and tables and chunks of rock and drywall, while bolts ricochet off the car's armor.

“How could it have gotten like this so fast?”

Barrens presses his thumbs to his temples. Whispers, “All along, the others have been planning. Waiting. They must have been mass-producing and stockpiling Psyn for months. Ah, fuck. I was used, me and my boys. My fault.”

“It's not all your—”

Don't. Please.

The terraced lines of the three-floor shophouses along the road end, replaced by the large offices clustering around the broad, green gardens leading to the vertical farm. The first ISec checkpoint is in sight.

Blue-coated policemen, eyes blank, obviously Adjusted, stop us just long enough for me to broadcast the codes Karla gave us. They wave us on.

A great big tactical transport rumbles up toward us, slamming aside the empty cars on the road. Emitter and receiver plates are all over its surface. It is mist gray rather than the deep ocean blue of the police force. The windshield has spiderweb cracks. A spike has punched halfway in—and I recognize it. One of the Archivists' crossbow quarrels, only scaled several times up. It must have been launched from … I remember the equipment of Barrens's cell. This must have come from an even larger version of the Roman-style ballista. Aside from that, the armor is pitted and scarred with little craters.

I stop the car and the transport stops too. We get out first.

A heavy door slides open, and a ramp clangs down.

She strides down to us at the head of a full squad of five Enforcers. They are not wearing just the standard armor, they are outfitted in massive amplifier suits. I only saw Enforcers wearing such gear back in the prison city. Up close, they are walking tanks that dwarf even Barrens.

The changes in Karla's appearance since we last spoke are stark. She has lost weight. Those sharp cheekbones are too sharp now. Purple half-circles under her eyes. And her uniform is rumpled, as though she has slept in it. I am shocked to notice that she is so delicately built, and shorter than Bullet and me. She seemed so much bigger back in the detention cell.

“Well, well. At last we meet, Peace Officer Barrens. I have heard so much about you.” Her smile is sharp, her voice drips with cold poison, contempt. She walks around him, looks him up and down, like an animal. Like a piece of meat. “Did you enjoy the tour?”

She wants me to cower. After Meena, after the city of caged children, after these war-torn streets, a bitter woman's cruelty is not much to bear. “It is what it is,” I say.

Her eyes are on Barrens, only on him. “Wasn't there another—ah, I get it. Guess you should have picked better followers. Imagine them shooting at their great leader and his companions, no warning at all.” She matches the face in our memories to the file in her head. Dismissal in her face as she changes the angle of her neck, looks down upon Barrens though he towers so far above her.

“You will obey my commands without question, without hesitation.”

My man's teeth are pressed together so hard I am afraid he will crack them. But he nods. “This”—his arms swing out, pointing out the sky, the Habitat all around us—“it's not…” I can feel him wanting to say so much more.

“Despite your intentions, here we are.” Karla smiles darkly. “What a pleasure to hear you talking so softly. Meekly. Now, know your place.”

She snaps her fingers. The green flash of her talent fires and crackles around us.

I toss and turn, wriggling on the ground. It is like choking down a rock almost as wide around as my throat. There is no “pain,” but there is pressure. Blood trickles down my nose and ears. When I wipe my face, the tears on my fingers are red. I am blinded by light. But it is a light in my head and closing my eyes does nothing to stop it. Through the hard-packed dirt, I feel the vibrations of Barrens flailing on the ground close by.

The light fades, leaving a solid, dense block of impenetrable black, pressing down on my brain.

“Get them on board, strap them in. With the Induction rushed like this, they won't be moving for a while.”

29

The information starts to unfold.

All Information Security principles boil down to three basic tenets.

First, that the more dangerous a piece of information is, the smaller the proportion of humanity that can rationally deal with it.

Second, that all information is dangerous to a lesser or greater degree.

And last, that all dangers to the mission must be minimized.

Upon these axioms, all ISec regulations are built.

Besides the rules, there are operating procedures and ciphers and training memories. In between the documents, data, experiments, films, and texts, long moments of hazy darkness ebb and flow like tides. Those blackouts are when powerful hypnotic-suggestion programs layer the rules ever deeper into my subconscious.

During the Induction, I cannot control my body. Only the straps hold me in the seat when the transport decelerates and makes its turns.

I am dreaming, but I am not asleep. When we reach our destination, I am still trapped in my head. I am floated down corridors with many doors. There is a room with beds and machines.

When it ends, I feel removed, separated from my own senses, even if I am aware of the faint light of the monitoring devices next to my bed. The feel of the bed against my back and the straps holding me down come through my nerves as though I am feeling them remotely, through a datafeed. And the smell of cigarette smoke?

Karla's rich voice cuts through the silence, the steady thrum of the cooled air from the ventilation shafts. “Welcome to the Ministry of Information.”

I hear the deep thump of an explosion, but I cannot tell how far off it is.

She is there next to us, standing over us. Just looking.

I cannot see her clearly, my brain still unable to process the signals from my eyes. But I can sense the radiant warmth of her power, and she seems fearsome and tall, swallowing everything up in her cold light.

“Now, you both require sleep. Real sleep.” She snaps her fingers, and I sense Barrens in the bed next to mine going limp, sinking to deeper slumber. “That and we have to undo the hackjobs that burned out the tracking ganglia in your implants.”

Karla leans closer to me. She blows smoke in my face.

“And a good-night to you too.”

 

 

More brain surgery. When I wake up, I do not even notice the difference.

In a conference room in Karla's office thirty meters under the district farm, we have barley and spinach, dill and tofu, carrots and onions. Bread. Coffee.

I feel lousy. Am I coming down with something? But I've felt this way, on and off, since my “escape.” My head aches. I feel tired even though I've just woken and showered. The food sits in my belly, too dense. The smell of tobacco in the air gets my guts to twist up, and it takes real effort not to vomit all of breakfast. This ISec Induction is rougher on me than it is on Barrens, even if I went through something like it before, in the holding cell.

All these revelations so close together, they have made a shambles of the neat, tidy society I knew. Barrens's quest has brought him what he wanted to know about what happened to Callahan, and so much more.

“So. We got it mostly right,” he whispers, almost to himself.

“Yes. We did.”

In between the lines of the Induction, the last pieces can be found: the documents that justify ISec methods and history.

Barrens and I bounce our understanding back and forth between us, until it all falls into place.

A derelict alien ship crashed onto Earth, with technology that revolutionized everything. Psi-tech. But the Strangers' ship also brought with it a terrible disease; one that spread far and wide before anyone understood what it was or where it came from.

It is not a fungus, bacterium, virus, or prion. After centuries of study, no one has come close to finding a cure; no one even truly understands its mode of action. The best guess is that it is a nucleic-acid-based nanomachine that selectively alters gene transcription.

Officially, it is designated Nucleic Machine Disease-1; but so few people even knew that it existed, even the ISec staff now calls it Mincemeat.

It is not the name that matters but what it does. The pathogen has an alternating sequential generation phenotype.

I and all the “normal” humans are G-0. The span of our lives is random, and sooner or later, we are all condemned to share Callahan's fate, flesh rent asunder. Those of us in Generation Zero give birth only to monsters, only to the G-1 creatures.

They are animals gifted with supercharged psionic talents. Yet the G-1s have to be kept alive because their offspring are G-0 individuals. Without them, no more humans can be born.

“What pitiful things we are,” Barrens whispers.

A few records of the end of Earth are available to us at our current access levels. What we can see emphasizes the true danger of the G-1 beasts. Most have powers only a little greater than human-normal, but a dangerous few are orders of magnitude beyond us, and when they lose control in a mindless rage, they produce explosions of psi greater than the explosion of any atomic bomb. I cannot help watching one memory in my head, over and over. It is a view of Earth from orbit showing an entire city being annihilated by one brilliant white sphere of power.

An unregulated birth could result in the death of millions. And there were many unregulated births during those last years on Earth.

The alien ship is refitted in orbit by Earth's survivors. Then, they leave. One last image from the Noah is a look back at dead Earth. The blue and the white are blasted away. The crust of the world is broken, leaving a sphere of blackened rock and bright red lava.

Here, in this closed population, where monitoring is easier to enforce, the ship's crew sets up a stable society. It is easy to get the cooperation of all while they watch Earth receding from the ship's observatory, a wasteland, everyone burdened by survivor's guilt. The primary protocols are developed. G-0 humans are indoctrinated against the instinctive social behaviors around blood relationships. Their monstrous G-1 children are taken from them before they can be subjected to the trauma of seeing what is born from their bodies. These beasts are kept asleep almost through their entire lives, their only purpose to live long enough to breed and give birth to the next generation of we G-0s, given to Keepers to raise to propagate our otherwise doomed species.