The Forever Watch (50 page)

Stop that,
Karla thinks to me.
Let them take care of themselves. You need to focus on the big picture.

It is analysis that she wants out of me. Analysis, intelligence. Doesn't the woman sleep?

I pull back, back into my body, next to Barrens. In the confines of this wasting flesh, this dull pain, the weakness, the nausea, I almost jerk back out into the system. But I don't, though I do leave those digital aspects of me there, in the fight. It hurts, seeing them dying, knowing each one is a line that ends forever, a diminishing of far-fallen mankind. I have to try what I can, and nobody else can do this.

In the map room, Karla paces back and forth, watching the displays showing the same battle I am watching. She thinks I am done, she doesn't notice the parallel Hana emulations still trying to save people, one crewman at a time.

Karla stops and looks up to the ceiling, messages me,
That little stunt of yours. How much longer before you can close away entire sections of the ship? We could just cut off life support to them, wait them out.

I do not know. I can do it already in some places, but these large chambers and halls, they're made of the Strangers' ultrahard, crystallized plastech, the bones of the ship itself. I'm afraid of messing with them; I might damage the Noah and not be able to fix it.

Karla winces as another precious Enforcer falls.

She doesn't feel another me cocoon away a boy that put up his hands, an Archivist crying out his surrender. Every little life counts.

She goes on thinking to me,
Well. We never thought we'd have that option in the first place, in the old plans. I'll commission a feasibility study. When this is over.

She leans in closer to the display, taps a red dot indicating one of her squad leaders. She squints, sends him orders. I could listen in on it, but do not.

She places her hands on the projection and brings it closer, zooming out. She examines the three-dimensional mess of the ship's structures, and the clouds of dots indicating the presence of Archivists. She rotates it this way and that and shakes her head. This is something else the previous Ship's Captain could never have imagined.

Dempsey, whenever Thorn tries a major attack like this, it's always to cover for something else. Use our favorite new toy and find out what it is.

In my bed, Barrens rolls away in his sleep. I use telekinetic force to lift my man closer, back to me, and I hold him tight, even if it hurts to do so.

I have grown beyond where Karla can read my thoughts. Either too much of my brain is now electronic, or perhaps the way I can migrate some of my thinking and personality onto the ship's computers makes my thoughts too different. Or Archie is shielding me even further, now that she is starting to understand something about the concept of privacy.

I can safely ponder the likelihood that Archie and I have become something more than Karla expected. She is starting to fear us, but she still needs us, and it will be a relief to her when I die. She's finally started listening to my Doctors, who are insisting that I am dangerous, that my nanites are infected with something else beyond Mincemeat. It would make their fears even worse to know that it's not some random mutation, but the influence of the AI on my body. But she still needs me too much to lock me away in quarantine.

Archie puts Karla's request together faster than it takes me to explain the request to Archie.

Far away, parts of me are crying because someone in front of us has been torn apart. We can taste the blood soaking into the cracks of the deck. But they, I, we, keep trying.

I report,
From the pattern of assaults, Thorn's group is feinting to try to draw us into attacking here, and here.
The message is packaged with a data stream showing a simulation generated by Archie and me—blue dots being pursued by the red into the fore-section, along the biggest shafts.
Power is fluctuating at these points
—I place green crosshairs on the image—
suggesting that when he has drawn enough of us in, they can trigger perhaps a bomb of some sort to kill off that raiding force.

Karla sees it, nods to herself.
Then we shall strike exactly where he hopes we cannot do so. See? You saved hundreds of lives with a bit of intelligence. Now, get some sleep.

But I don't. The battle finally ends and I pull myself fully back into one place, and the headache is terrible. Memories overlapping from more than one point of view. Magnified emotions. I don't think that's a trick I'll be trying again soon.

I need to do more. I must. Or there is no reason for my coming to this, no purpose to the sacrifices of those who have been lost.

I teach Archie some of what I was trying to do in that fight. Unlike me, her consciousness was designed around being able to split off trains of thought, threads of processing effort. She can be in every place, in every battle, making a difference. Though not too big of one, or the power drain on the grid will be too much.… And at the same time, we can't let Karla find out just how much Archie can do completely independently, including manifesting psionic power through the ship's structure without any human input at all.

Aside from all the other burdens assigned to me, I take on the nearly undecipherable mass of information in the aliens' archives. Not that I can understand more than the barest fraction of it even with Archie's help.

 

 

My appetite diminishes. A month into the symptomatic phase, I cannot eat anymore, and my meals consist of a continuous drip of white nutrient sludge going directly into the remnants of my veins.

Still, when he is here, Barrens smiles for me. When my nausea is not too bad, he might lift a spoonful of broth to my lips or a chip of flavored ice.

A false dawn rises. Many of the halls and rooms of the Bridge now have sky-simulation apps running, even if it is only through a fake window. It helps. Back in the Habitat, order is almost restored.

He sits next to the half platform, half chair in which I am wheeled around. Around us, the machines protest at the feedback they cannot interpret from my changing body.

“You look happier.” I can project my “voice” out of any object I desire. Converting things into speakers is easy.

“Happier? No. I have stopped regretting, that's all.”

Cameras shift and zoom in on his face. “Oh?”

He shrugs. A jumble of his thoughts rides the current into my head, about personal responsibility and atonement. No talent for telepathy still, but weighed down with fatigue and strain, Barrens's thoughts jumble and leak as he uses his Implant to message me, flashes of emotion and sense impressions riding on the words.
I'm at peace because we'll finish it, you and I.

Another battle occurs close to the Archivists' last strongholds.

The lines return as Barrens grimaces and frowns. Karla is in his head again. He glowers and protests at every mission. He does not want to leave me. We know, the three of us, that my time is almost up.

“Do I gotta—

“But—”

We both know how it will end. He could let himself get wound up. Get so upset that his hands tear through the doorknob on his way out, his footsteps denting the floor. But still, he will do it.

He cannot walk away.

“All right, all right! I'm going,” he exclaims up to the air. “This is the last one!”

Barrens kisses me again. Each one carries shadow and light, the bitter taste of not knowing if I'll still be here when he returns.

“Be seeing ya,” he whispers.

Hey.

Ya?

What I feel for you—

Yes. Me too.

And he is gone once more.

My condition starts to accelerate within an hour of his departure.

My heart reaches 50 percent artificial components. My body is half-fused into what has become the throne of my dreams, the seat at the center of the world. All glittering metallic surfaces, smooth except for the cables and tubes for nutrients and waste and data and power that have spread head to toe, I see the looks the others cannot help when they see that body: indifference, as though I am just another system terminal. It becomes harder every day to tell if I am a living being, with a soul, in a dying body, or if I am already dead, just a ghost composed of information, just signals on the computers.

I cannot walk or stand anymore. I have not the strength to even raise my head off my pillow. Attendants roll my body onto its side to clean me and attend to the sores on my flesh. Each time they do is a fearsome ordeal, as skin, muscle, and bone want to tear away with each movement.

When my friends think of me and cry where they think I cannot see, how can I explain that I am not unhappy? Even though I am going to pieces, even though the pain is an unstoppable flood building and building behind the cracked walls that the medics put up with drugs and neural blocks, a part of me spreads its wings. With Archie as my guide, wrench, sword, shield, chariot, and wings, my consciousness soars through the Noah. This broken shell is not a prison.

In many ways, I am free. I spend afternoons watching the deep-sea fish in the aquatic areas of the biomes. I listen to birdsong and dance with the lights playing on the floors of the dance halls, which have reopened in Paris Section, rehabilitated and productive and ordinary again. The parts of me that I believe now run on the nodes are aware of so much.

Archie shows me more of the Builders' psionic techniques—tricks that no human has ever been capable of before. Like a child, she is always hungry for praise when she shows me something new. Usually, they are just tricks of programming, or elegant, incomprehensible mathematical manipulations of equations and symbols. But every now and then, she shows me something that I know must never become common knowledge among the crew.

Even without Karla watching over my shoulder, I make decisions about knowledge that must be kept secret.

Another week passes, and the resistance is almost beaten. They are cut off from recruiting any more followers, isolated from the rest of the crew in the Habitat, many of whom are back to the normal ebb and flow of life on the ship.

With Archie and me, the figure of ten thousand rebels has been cut down at an astonishing rate. There is nowhere they can hide. There is nothing they can do to deceive us. Nothing is hidden from us. No new weapon is secret. No plan is a surprise.

Karla is pleased. Enough that it controls the fear she keeps hidden inside, that I am growing too strong, too different. She is anxious now for me to die soon, before it gets to the point that she needs to consider having me destroyed outright.

Sometimes, Barrens sends data packets at Archie. Dry reports, updates for Karla. Sometimes, they are letters to me.

Karla does not know about those. There is a lot she will never know.

34

The last midnight, my body transitions to yet another stage, when it does not inhale or exhale anymore, but is oxygenated by a continuous stream of air kept flowing into these corrupted lungs by mind's
touch
alone. I know it is the last midnight because my body is going haywire. The blue light of raw psi energy that I once found so comforting sparks across my body, slicing and tearing and ripping. At last, it is faster than the rate at which the silver nanite filaments can knit me together. I am removed from the horror of it by seeing it through cameras, as if that were someone else. I feel it all the same. Blood starts to stain the sheets. It trickles from this strange, half-metal woman, from the nose and mouth and ears, from around the ports where tubes give nourishment and oxygen and remove wastes, from the very junctions that were held together by the metallic microbots. Just a few drops here, and a few drops there. The disintegration quickens, second by second.

I wish Barrens could have made it back. No, it is better this way.

Lyn and Hennessy are asleep. Two nurses, a young trainee who still doesn't need to shave and an experienced lady with gray in her hair, are supposed to be watching me, ready to alert the rest of the medics.

Archie flexes her muscles and puts them to sleep too, by sliding into their neural Implants and switching their minds off. She defuses the alarms, feeds the monitoring machines false data.

We have been preparing for this. She has been hovering over me constantly, visible only in my head. Her expressive control has matured. She weeps for me now. Holds tight.

No,
I tell her. I need this. I need to say good-bye.
Stay focused, Archie. Soon, you'll have me all to yourself.
Am I lying? I have no idea if that's true.

Slowly, she nods to me. Still holds on to my hand, ghost sensations in the brain.

 

 

Thorn, last of the Archivists' original circle of leaders, leads his best ninety men and women through the tunnel system, trying to circle round by means of a narrow access shaft that cuts from the forward decks out to an external air lock. They plan to walk on the belly of the Noah, across the miles to another air lock that leads to one of the supply corridors for the G-1 prison dome.

They need no more crossbows. By now, all the ones that are left have adapted to Psyn; they take it in such quantities that it will almost kill them to stop.

Their plan is to release the G-1 creatures. All of them. Can they possibly want this, even knowing how cataclysmic the powers of humanity's twisted children are? My mind is removed from the dissolving shell of my being, but phantom sensations penetrate my consciousness, as though my heart were pounding, as though there were a roaring in my ears.

I feel the passing seconds keenly.

They do not know that I am the one that opened this way. They discovered this route in a fragment of data that Archie left for them, to lead them right into an ambush, a dead end where Barrens awaits, with two dozen Enforcers and the best conscripted fighters from the crew hiding in side shafts ready to cut off retreat.