The Forever Watch (20 page)

Through one of the great air locks, and around us, the clean, white homes and glittering towers of Edo Section give way to architecture inspired by an imagined golden age of Paris. Block after block of beautiful buildings of even height, subtle shades of pale colors, harmonious despite the differences, long lanes, lovely streetlamps, plazas with fountains and old statues. The window frames are decorated with figurines and scrollwork. Tomatoes grow out of planters on the balconies. Rosebushes line the sidewalks.

The street divides and Officer Miura hangs a right, descending down into the gray underways below the city level. Lights stream by overhead. We come to the primary warehouse district, an underground section that services the entire Habitat. The cavern, the color of concrete, is several hundred meters high and many thousands of meters across. Trains and trucks flow in and out continuously around the broad, squat columns supporting the upper deck. The columns double as grain silos, food-processing plants. Silver-threaded needles crisscross the air, the distribution lines for the psionic energy grid underneath the Habitat.

Among the giant cargo haulers, the police car is a little bird crowded by elephants. Each of those titanic wheels has a diameter greater than the length of our vehicle.

I tap the map systems of the car and see our location and route. We keep heading for the stern. There is nothing there. Or there shouldn't be. “Where are we going? To one of the abandoned Habitat sections?”

“His storage unit is right at the edge. Warehouse management sometimes loses track of the building modules out here—they get moved around a lot. No safer place to hide something. Well, other than the unmapped zones.”

Nobody comes out here. The traffic grows sparse. Disappears. Soon we are just one wedge of light slicing through the darkness with the headlights. The tunnel widens. We see the great wall at the end—the edge where the Habitat is sealed off from old compartments that are no longer used.

There are fires there, along the dam that goes left to right and up and up as far as the eyes can see. Dark shapes scurry away from our light.

“What are the—”

“Tunnel gangs. There are access shafts going up to every part of the Habitat from down here. They won't mess with us. Civilian amplifiers don't work down here. Police badges and”—she nods at me—“City Planning's construction gauntlets do.”

I do not want to disappoint her by saying that I did not bring my gauntlet. Instead, a small self-defense pendant with management override codes hacked into it let will let me draw upon power and use routines almost as well as a real gauntlet. Funny. That's not legal either; I wonder why I bothered. It's not something I would have done before all this. Before Mincemeat. Before Barrens and Holmheim.

Do I want to impress her? Maybe I do. When Barrens talked about her, he always did so with respect, almost reverence.

That is why, when we step out into the dark, echoing emptiness, I try to hide how frightened I am. I am too used to the bright lights and clean containment of the Habitat.

Her badge glows, and her eyes flare deep bloodred—the optical enhancements of a
bruiser
.

“Aren't you lighting up too?”

Not sure what I was thinking. Was I expecting her to hold my hand or something?

A packet of thought from organic brain to Implant to the amplifier under my shirt. It draws power from the grid, and with thought and focus, I direct the energy to my hand, to my fingers. A psionic arc light flares to life in the hand I hold out before me, white fire, ionizing gas held inside a sphere of force. Telekinesis makes a bubble of high-pressure air on one side, a lens that focuses the brightness.

“I'll try to keep it out of your eyes.”

At the base of the periphery curtain wall, cargo containers are stacked high on top of each other. Dim orange and red outline their doors, lights that flicker on and off at random. A flimsy-looking framework around the storage units consists of stairs and walkways going up and down and across each teetering stack.

“I hope you're not scared of heights.” She has her back to me, but I can hear her smile. She glances down at the tablet in her hands. “It's that one.” She points.

It would have to be the highest one in the middle. More than a hundred meters up.

“I do hate heights,” I admit. “But at least it'll be too dark to see how far up we are.”

All those steps. I need to get more exercise. Barrens made me promise I would.

While we clomp up the steps, which vibrate with our weight, Miya starts talking. She tells me about Callahan. In her voice, I hear something more than friendship and affection, and I wonder if she ever got to tell him any of it.

“When Leonard showed me the memory, I was in, at first. But then, he got obsessed. It was getting to be too much for me. He was seeing Mincemeat in everything, suspicious junk in ordinary paperwork misfiling.

“Then, he went to you. I didn't think he would ever trust anyone else to see the beast in his head. Can't tell you how hard it was helping him hide that whenever we had to turn in after-action memories. He thought you were real special. Only girl he'd talk about.”

That was something I'd never thought about. “How did you hide it?”

“We did repeated transfers back and forth from my viewing of it to a tablet and back to my head. It degrades the emotional content of the memory. That's what we would submit for him.”

I would bet that was Barrens's idea.

The metallic frame creaks and sways with our movements. Nerve-racking, in the dark.

“Be careful. Some of the steps are cracked. If you fall, I'm not sure I could catch you without bringing this stupid scaffolding down on top of us.”

Breathing. Control. Emptiness.

I put my left foot on the next step and keep going. As he often told me,
All we can do is what we can do.

13

“Now we cross this bridge here and—” Miya crouches, holds an arm out to stop me.

“What?”

“There's someone up there. I see someth—gaaah!” she cries out, clapping a hand to her shoulder. A small, dark shape flits by my head, whistles through the air.

Two shooters,
she thinks to me. Not direct telepathy, but through Implant-to-Implant messaging. If one of us had greater talents in
reading
and
writing,
there would be less of a delay in transmission; we could have acted as one.

I am freezing and thinking instead of acting. Gawking, sweeping my light back and forth through the darkness pointlessly. Somewhere out there, I hear the whirring of—what? Gears?

“Peace officer! Halt your fire and surrender immediately, or I will use deadly force!” Miura's voice is amplified, roars through the emptiness. When her voice is like that, I can only think of her as Officer Miura. Miya is too cute, something I might call a close friend. Not a name that goes with this warrior woman, hard-edged, dangerous. The voice a lioness's roar.

Her left hand darts out faster than I can see, grabs something right out of the air as she snarls, “You were warned!”

Shield us, stupid! My
touch
is just barely enough to operate a car! And drop your light!

I do so, barely in time. Throwing out my hands, I feel my talent get a hold of something five meters away. It comes to a stop just centimeters in front of my face, wreathed in the light of my power—a short shaft coming to a narrow, chisel-shaped point. It wobbles and falls as I see more flashes heading for us, more projectiles, catching the faint light from the dim orange glow off of the many container doors. I drop to my knees and press my hands to the plastech under us. It warps in front of Miura, a panel breaking off and twisting up at an angle. The points of the weapons punch partway through, but stop.

The third one's got something from Barrens's storage unit! Can't let him run!
Her mind-messages are crisp and clear. Little bleed-through of irrelevant thoughts and emotions, despite the thing protruding from her right shoulder. Blood trickles down her arm.

Miura leaps seemingly to her death, changes direction by grasping the rail. She flips up and starts flying along the scaffolding, which shivers and sways and rings with her feet and hands thudding against the struts, accelerating her straight up as though she were just sprinting along a flat track. She glows bright with psi energy, a fire-spider clambering up a metallic web.

Sparks in the darkness, impacts of more of those—what are they? Barrens's voice in my head, talking to me while we watch an old 2-D movie. Crossbow bolts. Like William Tell shooting apples off my head I think, giggling stupidly.

Another skitters off the support next to me and parts my hair just behind my neck.

Those aren't paintballs.

As Barrens would say, fuck this shit. I am hyperventilating and not sure if I am going to pass out. I act first.

I clap my hands together and pull in kilowatt-class energy. My whole body glows as if I were standing in a cobalt spotlight, and the pendant under my shirt shines so fiercely it is a small blue sun. The catwalk stops vibrating, and all around me, walkway panels hop off their frames and float into a rough hemispherical formation.

Lit up like a firefly, I am a bright target for sure, but at least I am a fortified one.

Miura pings me,
I'm your eyes. I'll see for you. You take care of those shooters.

She feeds me a stream of images from her point of view, lit up in the red-shaded, monochrome vision of her psionically enhanced sight. There is some degradation from the conversion through her neural Implant and then mine, static around the edges. She keeps them highlighted for me with bright blue targeting reticules. The data comes with a wash of hunger, a predator's anger. But tight and controlled, nothing like Barrens's maddened beast-self.

She keeps up the chase on the third man, who flees with the grace and speed of a free-runner. He flips through the bars and support struts and leaps from level to level; it seems impossible that he can move like this without the benefit of psi amplification. He is completely unhindered by having to carry a solid-looking briefcase in one hand. So either he has a hacked amplifier as I do, or he is an officer of some rank, or he is on Psyn.

He is not my worry.

I close my eyes. With the barriers obstructing my view, I have to do this blind, all in my head. I must not miss, or I'll bring the container units down on top of us, dominoes smashing each other down. My mental map of the area empties my head of all extraneous thoughts, until there is only data, with our positions, and their positions, rotated and adjusted for Miura's point of view as she screams up and across the beams and struts and buttresses after her prey.

More bolts spark as they ricochet off my barriers. Distracting. But not that distracting. My right hand slides down and to the side. In my mind, a straight line along my arm intersects one frame of Miura's stream of visual data, along the officer's line of sight. I do the same with my left arm, toward the second crossbowman.

Hey! Stop them already!

I hesitate only until another quarrel flies in through a gap in my turtle's shell and embeds itself into the catwalk by my foot.

Part of me remembers my youth, those first heady years post-Implant as my talent grew and I could do more and more, brief flashes. Toothbrushes and pencils, working up to tennis balls in the first year. At fourteen, without an amplifier, my raw strength topped out at about twenty-five kilos, enough to lift a small sack of rice. I could throw a softball with my hand and keep accelerating it with psi until it zoomed faster than 150 kmh. At eighteen, when my
touch
peaked in capacity, I could just barely lift fifty kilos, though it took all my concentration and left me swaying and dizzy and weak afterward. After that, all my improvements were with skill, and with my mental ability to efficiently draw more power off the ship's power grid using an amplifier.

And it scaled all over again with an amp. At nineteen, my limit was half a ton. By the time I graduated from the Class V Training and applied for a job with Professor Salvador's recommendation, well. In olden times, the things I can do would be the stuff of gods. With a proper amplifier, the force I can draw on now is not measured in tons, but in thousands of tons.

In the present, my mind is a hammer, it is a hand, it is a wrench, it is any tool I need it to be. It is kinetic energy applied without a material medium. It can hold gems up under a vain woman's earlobes. It can be a bomb. A tingling rush is shooting down from my skull, through my spine, along my limbs.

“Sorry,” I whisper, clenching my fists.

Where the strangers stand, two platforms fifty meters away, close to another staircase, unravel. The plastech structure explodes away from them for a moment, then the fragments change direction, imploding around and into their bodies.

They only have a moment to scream. I can feel it, the feedback through my mind as tons of force smash them in.

Nice shooting!

I let the power feed go. My shields drop to the ground far below, as do the two uneven spheres of mangled human and plastech. Two hundred foot drop; they burst when they hit the ground, spreading body parts and shrapnel on the gray floor below. Too far to smell, but I imagine that I can, that the blood is climbing up my nose into my brain.

I'm on my knees, shaking, not sure for how long. Or rather, I do know the number of seconds, as it is recorded on the machine part of my brain, but I do not feel that time, as though I am not in myself, not in my own head.

Fuck. Wound slowed me too much—that guy's got to be on Psyn. Lost him.

It only takes her a moment to return. I feel her eyes on me. Is she disappointed? Disgusted?

“Come on,” she says, pulling me up. “I checked the locker. They had to rush. I got something they left behind.”