The Forever Watch (27 page)

“Barrens killed her too. Personally, that one—I extracted the memory from her corpse myself. He must have wanted us to see the good officer's death—the rest of the victims got pithed.”

Pithed?

“Cored. They take a spike and shove it up the foramen magnum at the base of the skull and deep into the brain, then run a bit of electricity through it—destroys the Implant nexus, prevents memory retrieval.”

No. I cannot believe it of him. I will not.

She tilts her head and those eyes catch the light, the red flashing to pale pink. They pierce me without any need for psionic manipulation of my emotions. Her face is stone-still but for her mouth; her brows do not twitch, her body language is unyielding and focused in the extreme. But her eyes are alive, sincere, fierce.

“Take the tablet. The last few seconds of her memories.”

Escape seems beyond reach. Curling up on the tiny excuse for a bed might just tempt her to
write
commands directly into my nervous system, playing me like a puppet.

A deep breath and there is nothing to smell, just aseptic recycled air.

“I don't have a choice, do I?”

“Choices always exist, even when it may not seem like it. Even in this cell, with nothing to own but your own skin, haven't you exercised what freedoms you have? To fight to stay strong, to keep your body fit, to train your mental techniques. Why did you do them, knowing they would have no effect on the outcome?”

She holds the tablet up between us. On it are vid-streams of other men and women that were or are in cells like mine. Most of them are bleary-eyed, dirty. One has become nearly skeletal, just lying on the floor, staring up blankly—difficult to tell if that one was male or female. “Others have been in this room. After a few weeks of this, most of them give up. They let themselves go. They exist only in the escape of their memories. Strong crewmen with talents to match my own and genetically gifted with extreme potential for intelligence and physical fitness have been broken just with the emptiness of this room, and the constant, bare environment.”

Is that a compliment?

“So, yes, Miss Dempsey. You do have a choice—though you cannot choose the consequences, you can still decide.”

Another deep breath for me. Knowing would be terrible. Not knowing allows for doubt, would allow me to keep my faith in Barrens, for as long as I have until this woman rips myself out of my head and puts whatever she and her superiors decide is useful into what remains.

My hands close around the cool, glossy tablet. Contact is not necessary as this tablet has its wireless functionality, but the gesture firms my resolve. Maybe.

 

 

Glowing with red fire, drawing all the power the amplifier can. She knows it can only end this way. She unlocks everything she is.

Drawing this much psi, her
bruiser
's body works differently. She is at another level from most of the Inspectors at the precinct. It's why she made captain so young. Rather than the pounding heart and roaring blood and adrenaline and searing breaths and jagged, flaring pulses of sense organs into the brain that she knows is the experience for most of her coworkers, her body becomes slow and still, her mind empty and quiet. Each breath is an eternity. And the moment between each heartbeat is peace.

She pulls herself from the crater in the wall, folding the thin, ragged edges back. She missed. How could she have missed? He was not even lit up yet.

Time is so slow, the sounds she hears are distorted, the input from her eyes is dim. It has taken long years of practice to understand the world around her when she is this deep in her battle trance.

The low, rumbling vibrations through the air are words. His words. “Miyaki Miura was my friend. I don't know who you are. I do know why you're here.”

He is too dangerous to waste precious seconds talking to.

There is no talking anymore. He lights up too. They are two suns circling each other in a decaying orbit. The ground shudders, cracks with their footsteps.

She is still faster than he is, but not by much. She slips her head to the side, and that great big block of iron that is his fist just brushes her cheek. That slight contact cuts her skin, bruises the flesh beneath, even with the stone-hardened effect of being charged up on so much energy.

Baton in one hand, knife in the other, she spins by and strikes. She swings the club, it clips his elbow—and shatters. That club is made of one of the toughest grades of plastech, the result of a newer processing method. He swings with that arm again, and now she knows that the Psyn works on him and it is bad. He is much stronger than normal.

He is snarling, and hissing. She has long known of his beast. He never brought it out before in their sparring matches against each other. She always beat him, before this.

Now there is no time even for thought.

Another step in and she is inside his range. She must stay close because of his reach. She steps past him and kicks the back of his left knee. It gives, but only slightly. She thrusts the knife into his kidney, and the tempered, chisel point easily punches through the thickened plates of plastech of his coat to reach the flesh underneath, only for the blade to stop mere millimeters into him, catching on the dense energies of his flesh without reaching his abdominal cavity.

She ducks under another swing of his arm, dances backward.

Then she dives in again, into the whirling wind of his hands clawing at her.

With her mental state, all emotion is suppressed, distant. There is no fear. He has always been ridiculously tough. Psyn has made him into steel.

The tip of her boot finds the pit of his stomach. She feels her toes breaking. Those huge hands descend toward her leg.

She lets her rear leg collapse and slides forward on the floor, under his charge.

Spinning as she pushes off the floor, she flies to the ceiling in a leap, over his maddened rush. She rakes her knife down his back. Blood sprays. Again she is unable to reach the organs beneath.

She should run, wait until the Psyn runs out, but if she turns her back on him, he can escape, vanish again, nearly impossible to find.

He sinks deeper into his beast. He lopes along the ground now, not quite on all fours, but crouched low, and at times he plants his hands to help him turn that bulk of his as he chases after her lighter, fleeter shape.

She pivots around her right foot and avoids his widespread arms. Darts in as he is still turning, and she fires knees into his side, into his ribs, alternating with spinning flourishes with the blade to distract his eyes and cut at his flickering arms, whipping back and forth. She can feel the shock of the impacts traveling up her bones, up her spine, rattling her teeth. More of his blood flies through the air. She is so deep in psi that each crimson droplet is perfect in her vision, she could count them in between the spaces that she is trying to cut him.

She thumbs the chemical spray in her gloves. A cloud of caustic, toxic gas billows toward him. She has him now. She—

His shoulder crashes into her abdomen and forces the breath out of her. His tackle powers them both through the air. He slams her down into the ground, and her spine cracks.

Explosion in her head. Flash of white. She feels her body embedded into the floor.

He is moving now, so fast, his image is indistinct. The outline of his flame-wreathed body is red mist.

His fist.

Another flash.

Darkness, awareness an instant later. He has knocked her out of her trance. Pain now, all throughout her body. Agony. His fists, his elbows, hurtle down at her again, and again.

He is this immense darkness, looming. His eyes are red orbs. His teeth gnash.

She is growing numb. Her body will not listen to her. Her talent is fading from her grasp.

The last sensation before the dark claims her fully is the sound of meat being beaten, and the click of cracking bone, as the silver emitter plates on her face break away from the threads anchoring them in her brain.

 

 

Gasping. Choking. Coming out of that memory is like being pulled out of deep, cold water. The utter annihilation as all the nerves still firing lose coherence, and the data being collected by Miura's Implant becomes indistinct noise, background clutter.

Shaking, shivering.

“And now,” the Behavioralist says, in her prim, proper tones, “you know.”

19

“So, Miss Dempsey, what will you choose? Will you do your duty, for the Noah, for the mission, for humanity?”

I come back to myself, fill up my head with the dancing randomness of pieces of my childhood. Mala scolding me. Mala holding me. The favorite stew she used to make for me with tomatoes and mashed garbanzos and the bones from the butcher shop down the street. The last commercials broadcast into my head on my last walk to work. Minnow's fur. The tiny warmth of a baby lying atop me. The feel of Barrens inside me, moving so slow, stretching me.

She frowns. “Is that shock and disbelief scattering your thoughts, Miss Dempsey? Or are you trying to hide from me?”

Now, I show anger. It is genuine. Easy to summon. I imagine what she sees of me. The deep flush tints my dark skin. My nostrils flare. My hands clench. My neck is taut. “Of course not! It's just—how can I tell what's real anymore?” They can do things. Such skilled Behavioralists.

“Oh, it is real. Real enough that I don't have to
write
the belief into you.”

The memory is meant to rattle me.

I need to give her what she expects. Is that my idea, or is that hers, slipped into my head when I wasn't paying attention?

“So what now?” More bitterness, unfeigned.

“We are unused to being stymied, Miss Dempsey. The establishment has grown too accustomed to our toys, to the ability to track locations through the Implants, to read the thoughts out of people's heads at leisure.”

The woman, who has still not given her name, spreads her arms just so, lays her hands on the table, palms up. “Galling, for my colleagues and superiors. The protocols aren't working.”

This is why I have not been Adjusted yet. “You need to do something outside of protocol.”

Her smile returns, the touch of winter. “Between your friend's ardent requests for leniency on your behalf, and, since she is not completely without
other
friends higher up in the chain, and given the abject failure of our methods so far, I am willing to give you a chance, Miss Dempsey. Understand that I am alone in this. Most of the old men refuse to admit that Barrens is a serious threat to the stability of the ship, to the very success of our voyage. They want to peel your consciousness open and thresh out every detail they can find of the man, in the hope that a key will be found there. Something to destroy him before it's too late.”

How can Barrens's investigation into some arcane mysteries involving the crew be so dangerous? Leon, you were right. The higher-ups have become entrenched in self-importance. Secrets destabilizing the ship? I can understand information's being leaked having some negative effect on productivity and efficiency, but a threat to the mission?

If there were such secrets, his theory of Ministry-sponsored elimination would no longer be ruled out just because of the victim selection. I let none of that through, lose that thought in a forest of simultaneous, chaotic thinking, about conspiracies, about propaganda, about all the lies everyone on the ship lives with every day.

Even the days City Planning simulates for the crew is a lie.

“I do not exaggerate, Miss Dempsey.” If her smile is a razor of ice, her frown is carved doom on her marble face. “I am not lying about the grave nature of this danger. We. The Noah. We need your help.”

But why, what's driven you to killing? Just as they've put too much importance on their secrets, you have too. No information can be worth individual lives. Isn't that what you always complained about? The way the priorities of the mission made us all unimportant, faceless? There has to be more to that memory of Miura's. But I can't let the ISec agent read that so I think of the hurt when he left me and howl in my head about his obsession, his ego taking him too far. It is what she wants to see.

Deep down, hidden in the cracks, I believe in him still. I will believe in him until I find him, and ask him, face-to-face.

The hum of the luminescent walls crackles faintly—interference from the fluctuations of her grasp on her power. Her patience runs thin.

“How do you think I can find him when you lot have failed?”

“A great deal of what has made him and his followers dangerous, Miss Dempsey, came from you.”

“Oh, that's silly. I'm not that good a programmer, I—”

She shakes her head and allows her mask to slip. She is older than she appears. More tired. “I don't know how Testing could have let you slip through their fingers. You were misplaced with the number crunchers of City Planning. We could have used you much better.

“Barrens and his men continue to use your bots, your little net of programs—they have turned them to purposes I doubt you realize were possible.”

Ridiculous. My feet take me back and forth, pacing. “Don't mock me,” I whisper. I scored well in that part of the Class V evaluations, but I was not in the top tenth of a percent. Lyn did better. Marcus and Jazz. Even Hennessy has better pure coding skills. “Flattery annoys me.” The only reason I couldn't find Barrens using the Monster is that it would draw ISec attention. Without needing to worry about consuming too many computer cycles, they have a number of brute-force techniques by which to track him through the swarm.

“Your algorithms, Miss Dempsey. Ones you use habitually, and which you have taught to Barrens, and which he has taught to all his little pet terrorists—they have a flaw. They use more power than they should, they run slower. But they self-modify in the most sophisticated way. It makes your little toy on the Web impossible to crack. There is an element of randomness to them. Quirkiness, the eggheads tell me. Emergent behavior.