The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  “Oh sweet gods,” Wire whispered.

  “My familiar got it straight from the Tory Building,” Nick told them. “It happened in one of the family apartments. He hit her. I don’t know if he meant to kill her but she fell and cracked her head. I don’t know why. My guess is that soldiers will be here to take you hostage within ten minutes. Maybe five.”

  “Oh, shit!” Wire said.

  “Why would he have killed Li Bing?”

  “Get your things, dammit Rain!”

  Everybody try to remain calm, the chalet said desperately. Extremely soothing music began to well softly through the room.

  They ran for the parking lot, Wire mismatched in her party dress and chunky boots. Hadn’t had time to tie them up, red laces flying around her ankles, snow crunching underfoot. Nick loped ahead with Lark in his arms, and Wire loved him for it. He had given his daughter to the city once. Never again. Even Raining must see that.

  Nick slipped on a patch of ice, lurched crazily and almost fell. Lark screamed with delight.

  The parking lot was almost empty. The only lights came from the hooded pathway lamps and from the Visitors Pavilion, where weary enlisted men were cleaning up the remnants of the banquet. Wire scrambled into the cab of Nick’s truck and took Lark in her lap. Raining jumped in after her.

  “Where are we going?” Lark asked.

  Nick jumped in and slammed the door. “Got your seat belt on? We’re going for a ride, sweetie. Truck: take me to the McKernan helicopter pads.” The truck powered up and rolled out of the parking lot, heading up the long hill to the top of the river valley.

  Lights started snapping on all around the Visitors Pavilion. The truck startled and strained to put on speed. “Good boy,” Nick whispered. “Come on, come on.” The truck crawled up Groat Road. “Go, go, go, go,” Nick murmured, eyes glued to the rearview mirror. “Go a little faster, dammit!”

  Lark jumped.

  Raining grinned crookedly at Nick. “I thought you were going to get a gas-powered truck instead of this little ethanol four-stroke.”

  “Never got around to it.”

  “I see that.”

  They were near the top of the hill now. The night bent around them, watching. Wire shrank down in her seat, arms tight around Lark’s waist. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Raining said, “where are we going to fly in your helicopter?”

  “I don’t know.” Nick twisted in his seat to stare back at the Mayfair plateau. Someone had used a remote override to turn the Visitors Pavilion and all the surrounding chalets transparent, with their lights on full. There would be no place to hide down there now.

  “Does this chopper have the range to get us to Vancouver?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are we going to get back to Chinatown?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Won’t they see the helicopter on their radar and bring it down?” Wire asked.

  “Can’t you shut her up?”

  “Certainly,” Raining said. “Wire, shut up. Nick, where are we going to fly in your helicopter?”

  They turned onto Saskatchewan Drive, picking up speed. Nick stared at his speedometer. Wire saw letters sparkle and dim on Nick’s eyes. He shook his head.

  Another coruscation. “No. I can’t. Not with Lark.”

  “Can’t what?” Wire said. “What is Magpie saying?” They were now going forty kilometers an hour. She wished Nick had gotten that gas-powered truck.

  Nick said, “There is one place we could go where they couldn’t find us, Magpie says. And they wouldn’t follow us.” He looked over at his wife.

  Raining’s eyes widened. “The North Side,” she whispered.

  Fifty minutes later they had swapped the tired old truck for Nick’s helicopter and were crossing the North Saskatchewan River to the one place no one from the Southside would follow.

  Nick was in the cockpit. Wire and Lark and Raining were in the back, perched on Nick’s big tool chest. A foam pad had been strapped to the lid with duct tape to make a crude bench. The wrinkled tape left little sticky silver smears on Wire’s gown. It was a beautiful dress, forest-green rayon with rust-colored trim and a fitted scoop-cut bodice that showed her breasts to advantage without looking trashy. Now she would never get that tape off it.

  “Dammit!” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “Shit. It’s Magpie. My familiar. She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Wire said. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the instant we crossed the river she was gone. No answer. I don’t seem to have a familiar anymore.”

  Lark squirmed in her mother’s lap and prepared to whine.

  Well, Wire thought, Raining’s forest didn’t much care for technology either. Although they were fading, the Powers were still Powers, and mighty on their home ground. Wire gave Lark her best conspirator’s smile. “Isn’t this an adventure?” Poor little Lark, big eyes blinking like an owlet, halfway between sleep and scared. The only charm Wire had was Raining’s locket, hanging on a chain just at the top of her breasts. She touched it, wishing she had brought something luckier. “Can you make it any warmer, Nick?”

  He shook his head. “This is all the heat we’ve got. That’s the old municipal airport down there,” Nick said. “It’s always winter on the North Side, but there have been patches of thaw the last few years. This is one of the biggest ones. I was going to risk a quick trip in two or three years, if the thaw held, to see if we could salvage some jet fuel.”

  “Why should it be thawing here more than anywhere else?” Wire asked.

  Nick shrugged.

  “Magic runs differently everywhere,” Raining said. “There was barely any of it in the Western world from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, after all. And it clots thickest where you have a lot of people jammed together. An airfield is mostly machines and empty land. Somebody’s day job.”

  The helicopter drifted down, gentle as a snowflake, feeling its way. A few cold blue strip lights still gleamed in the darkness on the runways to the west. “No, over to the buildings,” Nick said. “The runways still get some traffic.” The helicopter obliged, sidling toward the big sheet-metal hangars. “Lots of nights you can hear the phantom planes taking off,” Nick said. “Every now and then one actually comes up over the skyline.”

  “Where do they go?” Wire asked.

  “We don’t want to find out,” Raining said.

  Nick shrugged. “Ask John Walker and his legion of ghosts. Still, it’s our only hope of cover. Right now all the Infants know is that you weren’t where they expected you to be.”

  “Infants?”

  “Infantry. Regular soldiers. For all they know, you found some way to sneak back to the coast. Or you all might be”—he glanced at Wire—“out, um, drinking, say, with some new friends.”

  Raining shook her head. “The chalet will tell them you came and got us.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  The helicopter settled with a bump. A line of hangars marched off behind them, big hollow buildings with open mouths. Just to the side stood the airport terminal, with the control tower at one end. All its lights were on. In the reflected glow, stretches of tarmac gleamed with black ice.

  “I’m hungry,” Lark said sleepily.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” Raining said. “We don’t have anything to eat right now. Try to get back to sleep.”

  “But I’m hu-uh-ungry!” Lark whined.

  Large blue letters glittered on the helicopter’s windshield. If you want me to hump three adults and a kid over the mountains, I’m going to need some real fuel.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Nick said.

  Jet fuel. Gas at least.

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Now shut up,” Nick said mildly. He got out of the pilot’s chair and came back to where the others were, stooping under the helicopter’s low ceiling. “Okay, here’s the plan,” he told the chopper. “I’ll go scavenge some airplane fuel to star
t us off. But even with full tanks, that’s not going to get us all the way, right?”

  No.

  “So what we’ll do is take off from here heading northwest, as if we were just another mystery flight from the North Side going God knows where. We’ll stay under radar until we’re thirty or forty miles away. Then we swing south and head for Banff. If we can pick up the old Trans-Canada Highway we should be able to follow it all the way to the coast and tap gas out of the service station tanks along the way.”

  Okay.

  “Just like when we went over to Osoyoos. But if anything starts to go wrong, if you feel any threat at all to Lark, I want you to get the hell out of here, understood? If that means leaving me on the ground, so be it. If it means turning yourself in, you can even do that.” He glanced over at Raining. “It won’t be fun, but it will be better than some things the North Side can throw at you.—As for you,” he told the helicopter, “if I’m not around, you take directions from Raining as if she were me. Do you remember her?”

 

  Raining sighed and glanced at Wire. “I wonder if it was easier when you only had to impress your in-laws.”

  Nick decided to take Wire with him to do the fuel tap. He gave her his foil parka and dug an old dirty down-filled coat out of the back of the chopper for himself. He rummaged in his toolbox until he found a tight wool toque and pulled it down over his ears. Wire struggled into the parka. “Put your hood up,” Raining said. “You lose thirty percent of your body heat through your head. So my husband told me once.”

  Wire nodded. Nick reached over and pulled the tabs on the foil parka twice, letting it puff up for better insulation. Then he pulled the foil gloves off Wire and put them on himself. “Jam your hands in your pockets. They’ll be warmer there than they would be in gloves, as long as you don’t need to use them.”

  “I won’t need them?”

  “Tapping is a one man job. Just watch carefully. That way if something happens to me and you have to fuel up, the chopper can talk you through it. Ready to go?” She nodded. The cold rushed in as Nick opened the helicopter door. He asked Wire to pull the tap out from the tool chest in the back. She grunted and muscled it out. It looked like an ice-auger, or an oversized pogo stick. Nick took it from her and leaned it against the side of the chopper. “There should be a few rods of raw ceramic there.”

  “How many do you need?”

  “One should be enough. We’re only going three or four meters down.”

  “Shit.” Wire slid the big bar of ceramic across the floor to him. “Heavier than it looks.” She grabbed a box of bits and scrambled out of the helicopter. Nick slid the door shut behind her.

  Outside, the night was hard and clear and black. Small blue lights burned low along the runways. It was very cold. Their feet on the icy tarmac made tiny creaking sounds, quiet but clear.

  “It’s so quiet,” Wire said.

  “I thought you’d notice the cold more.”

  Wire shook her head. “No. I mean, yeah, it’s cold enough to freeze the tits off a polar bear, but that’s not…” She looked around. The dark bulk of the hangars. Cold white light from the windows of the terminal building. Small trucks parked around the tarmac. Everything still. “I thought the North Side was supposed to be spooky,” Wire said. “Where your ghosts went. And I thought it would be like, I don’t know…like being lost in the forest. Eyes watching you from behind every branch. Things you couldn’t see. But here…” She shook her head. “Look at the helicopter. Just sitting there like a dead thing. Like it didn’t have a voice at all.”

  Nick was looking at her curiously.

  “There’s a path you take to Raining’s house,” Wire said. “You can hear him talk. Here he would just be dirt. Frost. Sidewalk.”

  Nick nodded. “Raining said something like that once. I had just taken her out to the farmhouse for the first time. It was winter, and she stood there on the middle of the lone prairie. She hated it. Said she wasn’t used to being ignored.”

  Wire laughed. “That, I believe.” She shivered and stamped her feet. “Shit though, it is cold. Your piss would freeze before it hit the ground. If you were a guy.”

  Nick looked at her.

  “Not squatting. You know.”

  Nick grinned. “Ahem. It’s only minus twenty. Okay, not tropical, but you can see that it’s thawed here not too long ago.” Runnels of ice lay on the tarmac where water had crept within the last few days. “Five years ago you could fly over the whole North Side in the middle of summer and never see the ground beneath the snow.”

  “Lot of Powers fading, these days.” Wire’s breath smoked in the cold air. “Still, this place makes little ghosts run around inside my bones.”

  Nick nodded at the nearest fuel pump, which was about fifteen meters away. “We’re going over there.” He hefted the heavy tap. “You bring the rod of ceramic and the drill bits.”

  Hangars loomed on their left. Ahead of them was nothing but empty fields, runway, and half a mile away, the back of Edmonton’s abandoned downtown: windowless brick and concrete walls that were just as ugly and featureless now as they had been when they were first built in the 1940’s.

  Nick bent to study the ancient fuel pump that reared like a tombstone from the flat tarmac. Rust and frost were breaking up the red body. It still sported a gas company logo, long faded, and a hose, its rubber rotted by the gasoline, attached to a rust-clotted handle. Inside the airport some kind of announcement came over the PA system, unintelligible. Nick pretended not to notice. Wire figured she ought to do the same.

  From where they stood now, they could see into the nearest hangar. A sixteen-seat commuter plane took up the whole far wall. “Could we just take that?” Wire asked.

  “Those are dumb machines, no familiars or AIs. We’d have to actually fly it ourselves. Which we can’t.” Going back to the chopper, Nick flipped the cap off its fuel tank and clipped on one end of a length of hose. Unrolling the hose, he clipped the other end onto a short length of tubing that dangled from the top of the tap. “You can’t work these old pumps directly. Too much decay. We’re going to punch down into the tank.”

  “How do you know where to drill?”

  Nick ambled onto the tarmac, glanced around, spotted what he was looking for, and began setting up the tap. “Well, this thing has a subsonic sensor on it. So I could fit casters onto the legs and drag it back and forth across the ground until I got a crude picture of what was down there.” Nick picked up the tap and flipped out its three support legs. These rocked and settled, adjusting their lengths for maximum stability. With one booted foot he gestured at a small steel disc set flush with the tarmac. “Or I could look for the intake pipe.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  When the tap was stable, Nick fed the rod of raw ceramic into its barrel. He squinted. “Two and three quarters,” he decided. “Go.”

  The tap spun and hummed, warming up. Then with a whirring, grinding noise, it extruded a stiff tube of hardened ceramic about a handspan long and just over an inch in diameter. Wire crouched down in fascination. “It’s already grooved.”

  “Mm.” Nick looked through his bits. They looked like lampreys: gaping circular mouths ringed with vicious little teeth. He chose one and crouched down to screw it into place. “And now, since I don’t have to make myself look smart anymore, I will turn on the subsonics, so the tap knows how far down it’s supposed to go.”

  The tap began to drill, extruding an ever-lengthening tube of spinning ceramic.

  “Why did Winter hit Li Bing?” Wire said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Nick rested his full weight on the tap’s t-bar as the snarling drill tore into the asphalt. In fifteen seconds it was through into the ground below. The drill bit held the tap in place now, pulling it down. “I have no goddamn idea. Metal fatigue, maybe. Happens to people too, sometimes. They look strong, they look good, you can’t see the flaw, but the same tiny pressure builds up year after year and then one day they shear
and fly into pieces and you never saw it coming. This hasn’t been a good time for Winter. I heard a rumor that Emily has been under arrest for the last three days.”

  The tap chimed politely.

  “Congratulations,” Nick said. “We hit gas.”

  Disaster struck just after they filled the helicopter’s tanks. Wire had disconnected the rubber hose from the chopper and then climbed in to get warm. Nick was still out by the pump, fixing a cap to the new line he had run down into the fuel tank.

  Suddenly the helicopter’s rotors screamed into motion, throwing Wire out of her chair. “What are you doing!”

  Visitor. Walking toward Nick.

  They saw Nick face the approaching figure, then turn, waving frantically upward. “Go! GO!”

  The chopper bucked like a nervous horse and jumped into the air.

  “Wait!” Raining screamed. “You can’t leave him there!”

  Blades screaming, the chopper banked up and away from the airfield, gathering speed. The first sign of trouble.

  “I order you to go back and get him! You can’t decide to leave him to die! You’re just a machine!”

  The chopper ignored her and raced away, heading northwest. Lark was crying. Numbly Raining put her arms around her daughter, and looked through the helicopter’s glass body at the rushing darkness.

  In the abandoned municipal airport on the North Side, Nick stood waiting for the stranger to approach. He was wearing an ancient Southside regimental coat with general’s insignia, old winter fatigue pants, and army-issue boots. Under one arm he held a bundle of black clothing.

  Raining and Lark were safe, Nick thought. The rest didn’t matter. “Nicholas Terleski,” he said, and he held out his hand.

  The stranger took it. “John Walker,” he said.

  Chapter

  Ten

  It was cold on the North Side, and still. The lights were all out, the windows broken. Edmonton’s downtown was dressed in ancient Christmas finery. Brown wreaths hung from the streetlights lining Jasper Avenue, and pairs of candy canes, each the size of a man, still crossed above the traffic lights. Every building stood profoundly untenanted. The North Side was landscape, nothing more. The skyscrapers were outcrops of steel and glass. The roads were paths for the wind.