The Forever Watch (35 page)

He is not the only one.

Susan too is incapacitated. The two with the strongest
reading
talents. They thrash on the ground, limbs banging against the metallic grating.

Shit. Things never do go according to plan, do they, love?

I've got them. I'll get them out.

There is so much power here. Drawing on the grid has never been so easy. I enfold them in gentle fields of TK and get them back out into the cold, dark corridor.

It would be exhilarating if my head were not throbbing. Even my meager
reading
induces psi backlash. My eyes water, my heart pounds, my chest is compressed by the weight of the air.

The raw misery emanating from everywhere is so strong.

Barrens has no such capacity at all and is the only one completely unaffected.

“Talk to me.”

I pull one of his hands up to my face, pressing his rocky palm to my temple. “Brace yourself.” It takes but a moment to pass him a whisper of the raw emotional charge filling the air, the hate and the black terror pressing down on everyone.

He just grimaces. “Oh.”

Yes. Oh. I check on Bullet and Susan in the corridor. They're starting to recover.

Bullet moans, “Sorry. It's too much. Can't go in there.”

“You just take care of her.”

We close the doors, but do not lock them.

The rest of us grit our teeth and take in the sight we have been trying to avoid thinking about.

Our entryway is halfway down an immense, sloping, concave wall. The chamber beyond us is gigantic. Gigantic. It is the size of the entire Habitat Dome. Larger. There is no artificial sky, just an ugly expanse of slimy gray and green and rust-brown ceiling crowded with a tangle of pipes and lines and wiring and bulbous tanks and upside-down observation towers. It looks neither like the pictures and documentaries about the cave systems of lost Earth, nor like a deliberate and planned architectural construct—it is the inside of some nightmare's belly, with tumors and bulging veins and arteries and gruesome organs growing out of everything. The floor looks much the same as the ceiling, except countless rows of spheroid structures repeat in fractal patterns, a bewildering, maddening vision of not-quite-random iteration. Piercingly bright rays of light reach out from the ceiling towers, cutting through the shadows of the ambient glow of the steaming power lines against the mess of geometry.

The cargo hauler shaft beneath us exits farther down the floor, its twisting, curving tunnel resembling the snaking, pink tube of some animal's intestines.

And the smell … numbed from the harsh, dry cold of the journey here, our olfactory nerves are now processing it, I guess, or perhaps our brains rebelled for a while, refusing to accept the input signals.

It is not the smell of raw sewage. It is slightly sweet, tinged with sulfurous rot. It is less strong, yet more foul, than the odor in my disgusting trek through the sewer line.

Tommy vomits. The retching sounds and the additional smell sets off a chain reaction of nausea. Meena's death has hardened us. No one else pukes, though it is close; my own guts clench, roiling.

We are paralyzed, eyes tracking across mile after mile of wrongness. The Behavioralist Bureau's Keeper regimen has stamped religion out of our ship's culture and kept it that way for centuries, a triumph of rationalism, with all our faith directed toward the simple ideal of human survival. Still, this looks like hell, a concept that still exists for us.

Could the Builders be in there somewhere? No. No, I cannot imagine those peaceful, graceful people generating such a dense aura of utter misery.

Barrens pulls another little canister from inside the big blue greatcoat he still likes to wear.

“What are you doing? Just use your amplifier.” I don't like my voice when it's like this, hissing, ugly.

“Don't know how much time we've got here. Drawing on my amp too. Taking in every sensory input I can. All of you, order your perceptions. When we get out, we'll only have our memories. Somebody keep an eye out for those goddamn idiots. Smells so fucking bad, I can't get any scent of Gomez's group.”

I get the shakes. The bolt of raw terror slides through me. I search for that sense of empty, focused discipline I found back in the ISec holding cell. A stone, I am what I must be and stand firm. And I am not alone. It is enough.

That awful fear is still there, but it is someone else's fear, for a while.

This place is familiar to me. Déjà vu.

“It's okay. Everybody, we'll take ten, okay? But then, we're gonna move. Gonna climb down to the closest egg-thing, okay?”

Barrens looks at me, worried. “Hana,” his voice rumbles in my ear softly, softly. “You gonna be okay? Need your mind and skills for this, darlin'—you gotta look at the layout of this place, think it through.”

Every step in is harder. The air is charged with psychic screams, echoing. There is something. Something about those eggs.

I have long known that the only direction for Barrens is straight ahead.

Teeth gritted, I take another step. And another. “I'll be fine.” You're not leaving me behind.

The others get up too. They lean on each other, knees shaking. They're only moving forward because their eyes are on Barrens's broad back, taking in his quiet, constant anger, his furious courage.

This place is huge. How deep are we going?

As far as we can. Our visit won't go unnoticed. Next time, there will be heavier security than some ancient doors that open to hexadecimal codes.

We creep down the steep paths. We hop across stagnant pools of turbid fluids that collect where the incline flattens out.

“Shit. Where is Gomez?”

We close in on one of the small egg-structures. It is a kilometer away now. Steam billows out of ports scattered around its surface. Each is a hundred meters across. The one we approach is unlit—one face has cracked open. Hatched.

Crouched there, looking up at the gaping opening, there is this more intense smell—concentrated chicken broth starting to spoil. The ground around the shattered blocks is flooded by slick, clear slime. It trails away. Mann and Tommy are jumpy; they nearly fire on every moving shadow.

This is a bad idea, Leon.

Yep. Probably is.

We follow the trail down. I cannot help thinking how different this is from my only other hike with Barrens, back in the Forest biome.

He holds up a clenched fist and we crouch low in the shadow of one of the large pipes creeping along the surface. It is two meters in diameter, greenish, encrusted with gray-green fuzz, going along the right side of our path. I cannot help but grimace as I stick out a hand to keep from tumbling when I lose my balance.

Barrens's neck is craned up. He turns his head left and right. I hear him sniffing.

What is it?

I smell blood. Human blood. And more than that.

He drops down and feels around in a particularly broad, stinking pool. His face is grim. He pulls something out.

We all gasp. I scoot back on my butt, ignoring the filth soaking into my pants.

It is an arm. An arm torn free. On the hand, there is a lion tattoo.

“Gomez,” Tommy whispers.

At the crest of a hillock, we see a shadow lurch upright. Is it fifteen meters away or fifty? The light and the curving surfaces all around throw off perspective. But it is definitely too close.

Nobody move.

Spotlights sweep in, focus on it in brilliant brightness.

It is huge. It seems impossible to take in its appearance all at once. Only in pieces can I take it in. Its flesh is mottled, patchy. Parts of it are pink and soft-looking. Parts are covered over with uneven, bristly hairs. Parts are gray, like the hide of a rhino, or an elephant. Parts have no skin at all, are just raw, exposed muscle and veins and bone, covered with pus and yellowish discharge and blood. There are … extra bits. Limbs. Eyeballs. Mouths. Ears. Along its back … backs? White, bony spurs project from the lines of its spine. Teeth. Such teeth. Most of the partially formed faces scattered over the massive skull are small, slack, and unaware, but the largest of them, slightly off center from the front of its head, twitches from expression to mad expression—anger, sorrow, delight, smiling, laughing, weeping.

That one face could almost be human.

It moves with sinuous grace despite its mismatched, lumpy limbs.

Scattered about its feet, there are … pieces. The hands holding on to hunks of meat and bone look so normal. Except for extra fingers on the one, and missing fingers on the other. The monster takes bites out of something that crunches in its teeth.

When it roars, it wails. What is worst about the sound is how familiar it is. And more than the air vibrating, its voice calls straight to all our minds.
Wwaaaaaaaah.

Even Barrens feels that. He flinches back. I can almost feel his beast growling, ears pulled back. Preparing to fight. The rest of us are reduced to limp weakness, scrabbling on the ground. Barrens is on all fours, his hunter's crouch, his lips pulled back in a snarl.

No. No! Leon, you cannot fight that!

Too long. Too long before he uncoils his beast self, pulls it back. So close. But then Barrens the man blinks. Cocks his head to the side.

Under the pipe. Now!

All of us crawl under.

Then there is a sound that I have never heard in person. But I have seen Web streams about the special training that Enforcers are put through. It starts with a high whine. It deepens and thrums and pierces the skull, growing to an earsplitting shriek, and then, the air itself is torn asunder.

Above and ahead of us, bursts of Enforcer's fire light up the air, brighter than the ten-meter spotlights sweeping back and forth from the observation spires.

Enforcers, psi wings unfolded from their armored shoulder emitters, rain fire down on the creature. At any other time, I would marvel at their personal flight gear, so much smaller and sleeker than the cumbersome frames of police ornithopters.

The floor under us vibrates, ripples with the shuddering forces of the battle. The air-pressure bursts from the explosions pop my ears, deafen me.

The monster is torn up. Blood sprays in great fountains. Smell of cooking meat, and I know I will never again consider eating animal protein.

Despite its terrible wounds, it does not fall. It leaps away, crying and moaning. Leaving a trail of its own blood.

The Enforcers, fireflies of obsidian shells and living lightning, dart after it.

Leon, no! Where the hell are you going?

“Tommy,” he whispers. “Get them back to the safe house. Somebody has to see. I need to see.”

Don't you dare.

I have to go, Hana. I can't turn away. People died for this.

Not without me.

 

 

While Tommy and Mann crawl back to the exit, I follow Barrens into the shadows.

We watch from around corners, behind the squat, bulbous buildings, through the thick tangle of pipes and vents.

Plumes of black smoke rise, intertwined with the white steam hissing out of the various lines burst open by the battle between the creature and the strongest psi talents of the ship.

And it is a battle, not a hunt.

Even horribly wounded, the multilimbed horror leaps impossibly vast distances. It must be boosting its physiology with psi energy. When it turns its head up to the insects tormenting it and howls, white fire crackles up from the ground, bursts of psi. One of the black-armored figures is incinerated instantly, falls.

More Enforcers come. A dozen now. Each of them pulling megawatts of power. Some push down on it, slowing it with pure force opposing its movements. Others try to trap it with huge chains created right out of the plastech floor, sending tons of material looping around its body. The rest of them maintain a bubble of glowing cobalt light around their group, deflecting the fire to the side when it comes too quickly for them to dodge.

The creature keeps breaking the chains as it lopes along.

The explosions get louder, and bigger, as the Enforcers stress the grid. The lights across this hellish city flicker. Debris floats through the air, falls, floats again as the simulated gravity flickers on and off.

Barrens gives chase with Psyn-boosted
bruiser
speed. I keep up only by carefully catapulting myself around with
touch
. More than once, I come close to cracking my head open, or spraining an ankle when I land. We are cockroaches watching the gods shake the world. The superstructure of the ship vibrates.

Can they feel it back in the Habitat, or is the inertial damping sufficient to hide it? Well, even if it is not, the shipquake can be explained away by the flyby of a comet, or a meteorite storm's impact energies bleeding away against the armored hull.

Something about Barrens's words about the layout click in my head. As he is about to leap, I reach out and grab him with my mind. He could easily tear free, but he waits.

What is it?

Look. This whole place is armored up and hardened. Despite all the energy they're flinging around, nothing is breaking.
My thoughts race by, incomplete. I try to send him the drift of my thoughts but it is too fast and unfocused and hazy. Barrens is shaking his head, trying to keep up and absorb the information. My sense of space of this place untwists—the way the towers are configured—arranged not to watch for intruders, but to watch the lay of the land. Too high to watch for ordinary humans crawling around these deep shadows, but at just the right height for the naked eye to see one of those huge beasts.

“Slow down!” he mutters, squeezing my hand. “What are you trying to say?”

“It's a prison.”

Another explosion—the fight has changed direction and is getting closer. A searing wind flings debris everywhere, sets our clothes flapping back, gets my eyes watering.