The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  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.

  We take cover in the lee of a hill. A supply bunker, the terminus for one of the branches leading away from the snaking, intestine-like train tunnel. The walls are angled very flat, and there are no windows. We climb higher but stay crouched behind a cooling unit, hissing as it vents hot exhaust out in front of us, vibrating and humming.

  I point back the way we came.

  All those eggs. They’re drawing huge amounts of psi energy. Except for that one with the hole in it.

  So you’re saying, every one of those buildings …

  They are the source of the storm of emotion saturating the air.

  Then the Enforcers are so close to us, it is a risk even to think in one’s own head. They have subdued the creature. It is half-encased in plastech. It moves majestically along, a few meters above the ground. In stillness it seems so much smaller. It is so close, it feels as though, if I stood at the edge of the rooftop and reached out, I could touch it. Its misshapen skull turns on its neck, and one huge, milky, blue eye gazes into my soul. Together, they make for a slow procession, the Enforcers walking around and beneath the monster—probably to save power. They pass below us along the narrow path. Where the buildings close in too far, they raise the mass higher into the air.

  They’re taking it back to its cell.

  Barrens chews on his lip for a second and nods.

  Now, can we run for it?

  “Yeah,” he mutters. “Probably a good idea.”

  Just before we get moving, he spends a long time staring at one of the egg-shaped prison cells.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s ID numbers on the eggs. Above the main coolant line feeding into the base. Something familiar.”

  He shakes his head. It is hard to tell because of the greenish light, but he goes pale.

  “What is it, Leon?”

  “It’s nothing. You’re right. Time to get out of here. Place is making me crazy.”

  26

  We rush from shadow to shadow, pausing when we have cover, and try to time the passage of the glowing circles of the spotlights. Barrens goes one stop ahead and signals me when to follow. Since I’m always hunched over, sometimes crawling along the lee of a ridge that climbs up toward our exit, fatigue stings and clutches at my back and legs. Under my cold-weather gear, I’m dripping with sweat even with the zippers and the hood down, but I don’t dare remove it or I’ll freeze to death in the unpowered areas.

  Somehow, we avoid the Enforcers’ attention. Possibly the amount of psi energy in the air and the terrible presence of the creatures render our merely human presences unnoticeable. Or perhaps taking down the monster drained the Enforcers too much for them to do anything else after they’ve put it back and rebuilt its cage. In addition to the fight, it must be exhausting working with the ultrahard, crystalline form of plastech that composes everything in that
giant prison.

  I remember all those defaced murals and carvings of the builders, made of even harder matter. How much would it stress the grid to go into the gigawatt class, and how large a communion of merely human minds would it take not to burn out from channeling it?

  We creep back out the doors. Barrens lays his hands on them, and I hear the bolts slide shut when he transmits the lock code.

  The ground loses its hold on us and the air is again icy and stale.

  Barrens leads, even lost in thought. Sometimes, he seems to forget I am there at his side. He will lope along, faster, pushing off in great bounds through zero g. The effort not to be left behind leaves me huffing, short of breath. Then he remembers himself and slows down, watching for me. When we resume, it starts off at an even pace, and then he will start to drift farther and farther ahead once more.

  I focus and push on. The light of telekinesis flares at my back, keeps me flying forward. In a straight line, I am faster, but when we reach corners and turns, Barrens can just twist, bounce off his feet, and jump in the proper direction, while I have to use TK to decelerate, reorient myself, and speed up once more. The trail of discard bags and junk flies by.

  After four hours of running, I give in and call out through my Implant, Leon, I need to stop. I’m exhausted.

  At first it looks as if he cannot hear me. It is just the nature of zero g though. He has nothing to hold on to and has to bounce and push off from wall to wall to bleed off his forward momentum. When he has slowed down enough, he waves to me, lets me pull us together.

  Yeah. Okay. We need to eat and drink, and sleep too.

  Barrens plays his flashlight over me and frowns. “I’m sorry. Should’ve paid more attention. You don’t look so good.”

  He starts rubbing my hands and arms; even through all the thick layers, it’s heavenly. As is the water from my belt canteen.

  We have come to a narrow, one-meter-wide shaft that climbs “up” from our previous orientation. All along one surface, the carved faces of the Builders watch us in silence. I pull up a mental image of our best map and try to match all those turns to it. This tunnel is a long curve following the spine of the Noah. We are about five days out from the Sanctuary. Less than that with just us; I won’t have to help keep a line of people in orderly motion.