by Joshua Guess
Perhaps that was for the best. He had sworn the oath himself, but how often had he bent its meaning and worked to circumvent the Tenets for the greater good? He had known for months what the Cabal had planned for the Remnants, and had more than once considered allowing a purge to occur as a way of incriminating Keene and his supporters.
Not Beck. Not Eshton. They were better than that. They were what a better world needed.
Summoning up the last dregs of his strength, Bowers made a choice.
“Command protocol,” he gasped. “Transfer High Command, Agent 6311. Execute upon death.”
The suit chimed once more. “Transfer queued. Confirm.”
Bowers closed his eyes and smiled. “Confirm.”
Then he died.
31
Beck stood over the corpse and could not summon tears. The old man looked peaceful, even happy with that enigmatic smile on his face. The system display streaming from his armor told her he had only passed a handful of minutes before. She had climbed into her armor and made her way to him as soon as she could, letting her suit move at speeds dangerous for the pilot. Thirty miles an hour left her aching and sore. It wasn’t enough. Leaving as soon as she saw the transmission was not enough. He was gone.
That he made the video traceable told her she was supposed to be his backup. That he knew she would come for him. Why else would he set the meeting in the undercity, close enough for her to run to him? The failure tore at her.
“You stupid bastard,” she said. “Why?”
She had watched the video. She knew he provoked the attack. The logic changed nothing.
Lost for what to do next, Beck began to kneel. She would place his body in his armor and however ghoulish it might be, walk it back to the Spire. There she could find someone in charge, maybe get in touch with others in the Movement.
Before her knees could bend halfway, priority alerts began popping up on her HUD. She straightened and began checking them. The first and largest on the screen was a system message. The sort that went out to every member of the Watch.
She played it.
“As of now,” Bowers’s recorded voice said, “High Command is temporarily assigned to Agent 6311, Rebecca Park. In 24 hours the lockouts will disable and the congress of Wardens will be allowed to choose a new High Commander. Give Sentinel Park all aid and assistance.”
Beck tried to breathe. No. No fucking way. The old man had given control over to her?
The next message was private, from Bowers to Beck. It played automatically. Apparently he was sly enough to have tricks she didn’t know, because nothing she did could stop the video.
“If you’re watching this,” he said, lined face nearly filling the screen, “then I’m dead. It wasn’t my first plan, but if it ends up being my last then you have to take advantage. I have several implants in my body, cutting edge technology that can’t be detected by casual scans when they’re without power. I meant to use the one in my eye to incriminate the Cabal. Keene, in this case. I don’t know if it will work, but if you’re seeing this then there’s a good chance my murder was just recorded. Right now it’s being sent to every Watchman. Those who aren’t loyal to the Cabal should listen to you when you call on them to hunt him down. You have a day, Beck. Then the video goes out to the public. It will prepare them for the files you want to release. It will give them context about Keene’s betrayal. Hopefully it will be enough to stop everything from spinning out of control. Worry about that part later. Today, your only job is to cut the head of the beast. Once Keene is out of power, the rest might lose their nerve. It will be easier to turn some and find others. Good luck.”
She should have been a mess, but Bowers was savvy enough to understand the effect those words would have. Where a few moments earlier Beck was aimless and lost, so in shock by his death that her compass could only spin in place, now she had a mission. A simple one in execution even if the fallout would have ramifications she could barely contemplate.
“This is 6311 accessing Manhattan,” Beck said into her mic. The suit automatically lifted the blocks she’d put on its communications systems, bringing her fully online once more. In less than a second she had a green light from the Rez’s top-level control system. A field of options populated the screen, giving her control of…everything.
“Commence martial law lockdown of all access points out of the city,” Beck ordered. “Set all surveillance to locate Jason Keene, Protector. Charge is murder of High Commander Bowers. Deathwatch only. This is a civilian information blackout until further notice.”
Every Watchman had to learn the basics of Rez controls. It was all part of the training. True, when she had learned the commands and procedures in case every other Watchman in her chapterhouse was dead and order had to be maintained, it was never with the expectation that she would use them. Much less in the capitol itself. For a few seconds she wondered if it would even work. To her, this level of power approached magic.
Even when the confirmations began scrolling across the screen, it didn’t quite seem real.
“Contact the following and alert them they are needed in Manhattan on my authority,” Beck said, then rattled off five agent numbers. “All haste.”
Beck sent out a retrieval notification to the nearest squad of Sentinels with orders to take Bowers’s body to the spire. Then she flipped the override on her suit’s medical systems and gave herself a shot of Tough, the nickname for one of the combat drugs saved for extreme need. In seconds the aches began to leak away and strength returned to her muscles. Her heart hammered against her sternum. Heat climbed her neck and face.
As she ran, Beck recorded message after message, sending them to the people who most needed to know the score. Plans began churning through her mind. Not long-term, but the first threads of what she would need for even a chance at stability. The responses would have to wait, however.
She had a target to catch.
Using the video of Bowers’s death as a guide, Beck followed the trail as far as she could. Physically this meant working her way down the long corridor and connecting tunnels until she hit the street. Every door along them was locked tight, obviously a security measure meant to ensure no random workers could intrude on Keene’s route to meeting Bowers.
Once Beck reached street level, things got harder. She called up the surveillance network and tried to track Keene through it. The system had no record of him. Not a piece of video, not a single log of any tablet or other electronics carried by him. He should have had an RFID chip for security purposes, a subdermal tag meant to find him in case of an abduction, but that too was dark.
“Son of a bitch used my own trick against me,” she muttered. Keene had to be invisible to Manhattan’s computers. It was the only explanation.
“Package retrieved and out for delivery,” someone said over the local channel. That would be Bowers.
Beck stood at the base of a building that looked like one of the combination business/residence blocks from Brighton but on a much larger scale, and she tried to think of a next move. After a few seconds she sent out a command.
“Any non-Security Watchmen within five blocks of the government district, this is Park,” she said. “I want squads to secure every headquarters and physically check every person inside them. The sensors are all blind to Keene. We have to look for him the old-fashioned way.”
Dozens of acknowledgments flooded the channel over the next ten seconds. She doubted it would work, but Keene had access to the Deathwatch network through his band of traitors. If he thought Beck expected him to make a power play to retain control of the Protectorate and save his own ass, he would avoid the place like the plague. It forced him to choose other options. After years of being in charge, the man could have any number of hidden bolt holes and safe houses. There would be no clever solutions, just brute force searches and hoping for a little luck.
Beck pulled up the location data on Keene’s residence. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she opened a search for
all of his movement data contained in the Manhattan system. The man couldn’t be invisible all the time. That would draw attention the way a black hole did. The scrolling columns of numbers were too much information for her to process at once, much less find a pattern in. Well, if Bowers wanted to give her total command, she might as well use it.
“Open line to the Spire, Science division,” Beck said. When the channel pinged, she saw the face of someone with Guard rank insignia on their uniform.
“Yes?” the Guard asked. “This is Andrew Lin. How may I help you? This is a command priority channel. Who are you?” The words came quickly and with a slightly nervous edge. Beck read anxiety in them rather than irritation.
“This is Agent Park, Sentinel and currently in command of the whole damn show, if you can believe that,” Beck said. “I have a bunch of location data I need sorted an hour ago. Find whoever you can to put this through a program that will spit out a pattern. I need probable frequent stops. Looking for anywhere the target may have hidden or spent time that doesn’t jibe with his public data. You may need to look at blank spaces, too. He has a fail-safe built in to make him impossible to track.”
Lin blinked several times before glancing at the incoming stream of information. His eyes grew wide. “This is the Protector. And you’re using Commander Bowers’ access profile. What…”
“No time,” Beck said. “If you haven’t heard the news yet, then take ten seconds and check your messages. So long as when you’re done you haul ass and fucking do what I tell you. I want to catch this fucker.”
Beck delivered the last words with bite, and Lin started. “Yes, ma’am. We’re on it. Do you have any other directives?”
“No,” Beck said, more authoritatively than she felt. Directives? She was doing what was needed to contain Keene. Yes, the bastard needed to pay for killing the Commander, but left alone to wreak havoc he was a threat too large to truly comprehend. The man would have his hands on as many levers of power and contingency measures as he could. That was good as far as the search went. With every communication channel being monitored, he would have to manage everything face to face. Blacked out calls would be noticed, especially with the next move Beck intended to make.
She ended the call with Lin and sent out an order for all top and second-tier heads of civilian divisions to be given total security protection. She specified that Security division itself was to stand down and return to the chapterhouse to await further instructions. Their proximity to Keene and people like him made the whole lot untrustworthy in her eyes. Recalling them and ordering other divisions to take up their slack would insult and infuriate pretty much every Watchman in Security. Beck looked deep inside herself and discovered she didn’t give a fuck. It would be a headache. One she could deal with later.
She did all of this while rooted in place on the side of a somewhat dirty and run down street. It was the first time she had ever led anything larger than her small squad. When the orders were done she found herself hyperventilating badly enough that her armor’s medical system started asking if she was okay. The Tough in her system wasn’t helping, and in retrospect it might have been a bad idea.
What had she expected? To chase Keene down on foot with him having a head start? No way. Not in Manhattan. The place was too big, too easy to get lost in even with an armored escort. Which Keene would have split off from at his first chance.
The momentum of a lifetime of haring off to do everything herself was the problem. She was thinking on the same scale she always did. Bowers gave her control because he believed she was capable of seeing the bigger picture and of choosing how to improve its landscape.
She would never chase down Keene thinking on such small terms. If she wanted to throw him in a cell and put him on trial, she had to expand the canvas and use every resource imaginable. There was no other way to corner a man who had so much time to plan for the eventuality.
Resigned to the fact that she was not going to heroically arrest the Protector on a random city street, Beck made her way toward the Spire. She would not occupy Bowers’s office, but at least from its heights she might gain perspective.
32
When word came from Lin that his team had a lead, it was delivered to Beck while she stood in the middle of a crowd of surprised but happy faces.
Six figures in the black armor so feared by much of the populace shared a fairly small office space and stared at each other with bare faces. Jeremy, Jen, Wojcik, Tala, and Lucia regarded Beck with expressions running the spectrum from mildly shocked to deeply amused. The latter rested firmly on Wojcik’s square-jawed mug. He hadn’t stopped smiling since coming in the room.
The round of general greetings and back-slapping halted when the comm chimed.
“We have a probable location,” Lin said. “Do you want me to dispatch a team?”
Beck raised a hand to silence the others, but they were already dead quiet. “Not yet. Give me the short version. Why do we think he’s there?”
Lin cleared his throat. “Short version. Yes. Well, we looked for places the Protector stopped that were outside the scope of his official duties. Most were political visits. Homes of division heads, that sort of thing. A small number were to favorite haunts. He had a thing for a sushi restaurant—”
“Lin,” Beck said in a warning tone.
“Ah, sorry,” Lin said, not sounding sorry at all. “Anyway, none of that panned out. What we did find was a recurring pattern of his signal going dark within a four-block span. About once a week for the last two years. On those four blocks there is only one building that isn’t currently occupied. It was labeled unsafe and scheduled for a full overhaul, but somehow Infrastructure never got to it.”
Beck felt as though she didn’t need to bother asking. She did anyway. “Let me guess. Keene had a hand in keeping the place empty.”
“We haven’t chased down all the back and forth on that, but yes,” Lin said. “It looks that way. If he has a safe house, this is probably the most likely target.”
Beck pursed her lips and thought hard for a few seconds. “Send it to me, Lin. Have Science set up long-distance observation of the place. I want your people on overwatch for this. I’ll put together the ground teams myself. Let me know when you’re in place.”
“Of course,” Lin said before disconnecting.
The others looked at her expectantly. Jeremy acted as their voice, as usual. “You’re going to go personally, aren’t you?”
Beck fixed him with a frank look. “Of course I am. You’re all coming with me. Along with every spare body I can wrangle in the next twenty minutes. You guys put your lids on and meet me on the street in ten. I have to make some calls.”
As it turned out, the number of Watchmen at her command was high. In a technical sense all of them were, but the number of off-duty Sentinels and Guards who reported in as active was staggering. In less time than it took to make dinner, nearly three hundred of them were on the streets and moving.
Beck and her team rode in an armored transport toward their destination, a former food warehouse as far west on the island as it was possible to be without butting up against the wall. The small army worked in radio silence, every communication up to that point sent person to person to avoid the open airways.
As the transport approached, the ring of suited bodies tightened. Science division sent targeted updates every twenty seconds. No movement. No movement.
When the assault teams got within a hundred yards, Beck ordered the power cut in a ten block radius. If there was something nasty inside, she wanted to starve it.
The situational awareness overlay on her HUD gave her a field of green lights, far too many to count. The array of Watchmen surrounding the place was the largest force she had ever seen. It seemed fitting that the graphic representing them on her screen was incapable of showing the sheer power gathered around her.
“Squads six and seven will take entry at the front,” Beck said. Wojcik and the others began mumbling on their team
channel, but Beck waved them to silence. “My team will follow behind. I want one through five to take the walls and use foam on the exteriors. Don’t blow holes in the place without an order from me or one of the squad leaders from the entry teams. I’d rather not die because someone dropped a building on me.”
Acknowledgments filtered in. The transport rolled to a stop.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
The two squads in front of her showed Beck how much education was left in front of her. They used drones she had never seen, tiny things the size of a child’s fist, to scout ahead before blowing the door off its hinges.
“No movement,” the leader of squad six said. “Not getting any signs of life at all.”
They moved deeper into the building, through front offices clearly long-disused. The interior doors were unlocked. Several members of the teams in front stepped through them and checked for hidden enemies.
Nothing.
The vast storage area had clearly seen more recent use, though for what Beck couldn’t have guessed. Clean spots in the dusty floor were the only clue that huge quantities of something was recently kept here, but no sign remained beyond them and a huge number of footprints. Most of the latter were left by Deathwatch armor. Far fewer by the soles of civilian shoes and boots.
“Staging ground,” Wojcik said. “They were storing something here they wanted to keep secret.”
Jen made a sound deep in her throat like an angry cat. “Yeah. And it probably wasn’t anything good.”
Lucia moved out of formation and paused, tilting her helmet upward before letting it rotate down and around in a deep scan of the space. “The question is how did they move it all so quickly? Or did they? Maybe Keene had this place emptied ahead of time.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Beck said. “He’s a planner.” The thought curdled her stomach.
