Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(8)
Beck smiled weakly. “Talking. Feels like I’ve been doing that all day. I don’t know how people deal with this shit, but talking about it more doesn’t appeal to me at all.”
Fisher’s smile broadened into a grin. “Well, you’re lucky to be in exactly the right place. Way before the Collapse, people came to bars to get through their problems, or at least drown them.”
So for the next hour, Fisher taught Beck how to drink.
4
Though Eshton was nowhere near the chapterhouse, nor even within the Rez walls, he knew where Beck was. He had observed her through the Mesh, the name the Deathwatch used for the network. Cameras nestled regularly on buildings, unobtrusive, were only a single layer of the system. Relative location tracking using everything from embedded RFID chips in structures to the positions of other terminals created a dynamic map of everyone in the Rez.
He hadn’t paid much attention to the notifications beyond making sure she wasn’t hurt. When the barman showed up and took her away, Eshton turned his attention to other business. The occasional glance at the upper right corner of his helmet’s display showed Beck hadn’t moved. Perhaps she was going to stay the night at the bar. He hoped so; the young woman needed a more friendly face than his at present.
Eshton was forced to put concern for Beck at the back of his mind, however. Having left the exit behind to walk in the open, it would go against every bit of his training to allow himself to become distracted. The armor could give a false sense of security, especially after being worn for years, but the hard truth was that the outside was never safe for anyone.
That said, there were no Pales within sight as he trudged along, heavy footsteps taking him toward the location he’d been called to. Though he was part of Enforcement, a small Rez like Brighton inevitably meant Watch members would have to assist other divisions. There just weren’t enough of them to allow for anything else.
His display showed an overlay with the path he should walk and a distance countdown, and Eshton picked up the pace. Within a handful of minutes he reached a small cluster of wrecked buildings. They rested on the far side of the enormous hill rising up half a mile from Brighton, remnants of the old world. The buildings were nothing special; most of a town had been here in ages past. One catastrophe or another had destroyed all but this little corner, even the brick and stone wearing down to dust from decades of acidic rainfall.
Another armored figure stepped out of a doorway and waved Eshton inside. Even if the Watchman hadn’t had a proximity ping from Eshton’s approach, the clunking of his metal boots would have alerted anyone within a hundred yards of his approach.
“What do we have?” Eshton asked as he stepped inside the building.
His question was answered at a glance. The room was large, about forty feet on the long side, and empty of whatever goods had once been stocked here. It had the same forlorn emptiness most old world ruins seemed wrought from, with faded and peeling paint flaking onto cracked tiles. Yet unlike the other wrecks, this place had clearly been occupied. Recently.
Blood covered the floor in streaks and rivers, splattered in every direction. Eshton’s suit cameras cleaned up the images, made them brighter and more crisp in the near darkness. Tufts of fur jutted out from the gore in places. Fragments of bone gleamed. Whatever had died here hadn’t been alone, judging from the sheer volume of blood.
The other Watchman gestured to the mess. “We’ve had Pales nesting here, looks like.”
“I see that,” Eshton said. “I haven’t been called in for a while. What’s the situation on the wall look like these days?”
The other man, whose ID pop up listed as Sentinel 5018—Daniel Fine, somehow managed to display nervous energy through his quarter-ton suit of powered armor. “That’s, uh, why my whole unit came out here, actually. About an hour ago the sensor net on this side of the hill started going dark.”
Eshton understood the words, but it took him a few seconds to process their meaning. “Wait, you’re saying Pales started going after the sensors themselves?”
“Yeah,” Fine said. “They made a dark zone nearly a mile across, and these ruins are right in the middle of it. If they went through as much food as it looks like here, they have to be up to something.”
Eshton shook his head. “Son of a bitch. I hate how smart those things are. If they’re building up energy for an assault on the wall, why the hell are we out here? Shouldn’t we be keeping an eye on the Rez?”
“Oh, the Rez will be good,” Fine assured him. “Protocol changed since you were in Defense. Now when we get a sensor hole more than three individual sensor units across, it’s standard procedure to wake everyone in Defense up, get them on the wall, and send out a unit to investigate.”
“Ah,” Eshton said. “And you called me because it’s such a big area.”
Fine nodded. “Yeah. I also heard your mandatory year in Defense netted you a promotion as soon as you transferred to Enforcement. Figured a record like that meant you’d be a good choice to have my back out here.”
Inside his helmet, Eshton smiled. Attitudes toward the Deathwatch varied from necessary tolerance to outright veneration, but true appreciation was rare. Most of the time it fell to brothers and sisters in the Watch itself. Though he suspected Fine was buttering him up to make the night of restless searching more smooth, it still worked. “This is your show, then. Lead the way. Let’s see if we can figure out where the nest went and give them a bad night.”