Searching

Fawzia-11 fought back her building headache. At seventy years old, Watching had grown into a considerable strain. She wished she could see as far as Elpis, and be part of the investigation of the greatest mystery on any inhabited world. But at least she could still help with things that mattered.

She zoomed in, bringing her perspective close to the hideous man with the gun to the child's head. As Fawzia did so, she kept a tiny corner of her mind detached, focusing on the finger she held on the com button. With fifty-one years of experience Watching, she was the best by far at keeping track of her body while her mind was elsewhere. She could even speak while Watching when she needed to. It helped that the scene she Watched was on Earth, rather than lightyears away.

The horrible man, who'd already killed the child's parents and older siblings, dragged his hostage through the house. Furniture had been upended during the brief struggle, as the parents and three teenagers had tried desperately to fight off the attacker. The man staggered as he stepped over a heap of books. His gun barrel wavered, and Fawzia almost sent the signal, but she managed to stop herself. It would still have been a terrible risk…

Then it happened. The child tripped on the dead mother. For just a moment, the gun barrel wasn't pointed at the child's head.

Fawzia hit the button.

The murderer fell, a small red circle suddenly appearing in the left side of his head. His reflexive shot went wild, and as he hit the floor, Fawzia saw an identical hole on the right side of his head too.

The Norwegian sniper had good aim, and excellent reaction time. Not even a half second had passed between Fawzia giving the signal and the hypersonic gauss round terminating the threat.

Sighing with immeasurable relief, and finally letting herself grieve for the murdered family, Fawzia ended her Watch and closed down her equipment. She leaned back in her chair, popping more pain pills to help with her headache. She couldn't see as far as the other Watchers, but there were always opportunities for doing something vital right here on Earth.

Her comm buzzed. A thank you from the Norwegian authorities, and a report that the hostage was uninjured. They'd already secured promises from relatives that the child would have a home to go to that night.

In that moment, the loss of her dear husband rose up to torment her. Ralph-7 had perfectly complimented her, helping Fawzia cope with her slowly waning power, even as he encouraged her to pass on her wisdom to Klaus-21. He would have comforted her, helping her to come to terms with having to see that murdered family, and the stress of the entire brutal affair.

If not for Ralph's death six years before, the two of them likely would even now be passengers with a Colony Fleet. All of the married Watchers had been sent with their families to distant star systems, so that a form of instant communication would finally link those worlds. Fawzia would have been thrilled to spend her final days on an alien planet... if she'd still had Ralph. As it was though, she'd taken his place as the de facto leader of the Watchers still on Earth. And the seven of them had an oppressive workload. At relativistic speeds, the eleven interstellar Watchers wouldn't be able to enter a Trance, or even be Watched, until their ships decelerated below 80% of lightspeed.

At least Ymir-25's ship was already slowing down, so she might be able to Watch in just a month or two. It would be nearly a year before she reached the Yorkshire colony, but when she did, Earth and Yorkshire would finally circumvent the time lag. In the Proxima Centauri system, it took roughly 4 years for Yorkshire to get answers to any questions they had for Earth. If no Watchers existed, the delay would be eight years. Like most colonies, they had a Watcher Board where they posted questions for the Solar System, effectively halving the time required to receive an answer. But once Ymir arrived, and both planets had someone who could observe the other in real-time…

Fawzia's comm buzzed again. Her head pounded so hard, she wanted to ignore it. But she was the senior Watcher, and the uncontested leader of the team. She would not let herself shirk duty. With a voice command, she had her implant read the text aloud.

Five seconds later, she powered her equipment back up, sending signals for all Watchers to report in.

Cursing the interruption, Peng-24 pushed back from his meal and signaled readiness. He'd already logged seven hours of Watching today, but now he'd probably be forced to head right back to his Chamber. These people already owned his life, keeping him prisoner in Antarctica and denying ready access to his former friends and family. Of Chinese descent, he especially missed his grandparents, who couldn't afford the space flight to visit even annually. Did the Organization have to invade his free time too?

It looked like five of the other Watchers at HQ had checked in. That only left Klaus-21.

Peng hesitated. Klaus is never the last to check in. What's his hang-up?

Then, Fawzia-11 opened an audio channel with all of them. "We have an emergency, Watchers. The base just pinged Klaus-21's implants. They all came up negative. Renya and Supriya believe the only reasonable explanation is mechanical failure."

"Hold up," Peng said, talking over Duri and Anya. "Mechanical failure? Really? Watchers have, what, eleven implants?"

"Twelve," Duri corrected.

"And you think they all failed at once?"

"It couldn't happen by coincidence," Fawzia admitted. "But think it through. What could cause them all to fail at once?"

The call went quiet. Peng's heart began to speed up. Klaus was the only person Peng could confide in. Possibly the only person he trusted at all, at least on Earth. Klaus had such an approachable way about him, and always put Peng's needs—anyone's needs—above his own.

And for all of his implants to fail simultaneously…

"Extreme electrical shock," Duri whispered.

"Or radiation exposure," Charlotte added. "It would have to be very bad though."

"You see the urgency," Fawzia said. "Right now, Hasina's gathering all off duty security personnel, and hundreds from other departments are prepping too. They're going to comb the entire facility, starting on this level. Finding Klaus quickly could make all the difference in whether Supriya's team can save him from whatever disaster knocked out his implants."

"Makes me wish we didn't have such major privacy rights," Duri observed. "If this facility was allowed more internal cameras…"

"At least we have seven hundred soldiers," Charlotte said.

"So what do we do?" Anya asked. As always, the nineteen-year-old former gymnast sounded lost. If anything, it was worse than usual.

Peng pulled himself together. "Our job is obvious: We Watch. Specifically, we scour every nook and cranny of the facility that'd be difficult or dangerous to search in person." As he spoke, Peng jogged the short distance to his Chamber. Over the comm, he could hear the others doing the same. Though a tad overweight, he was naturally strong, and made good time. "I'll Watch the primary fusion core and the maintenance crawlspaces around it."

"I'll Watch the life support equipment & geothermal backup facility," Charlotte said.

"I've got the fabricators and chemical processors," Niko added, sounding scared.

Despite his deep worry for Klaus, Peng managed to smile. He might not be able to fully trust these people, but at least they all valued Klaus. The thirty-one-year-old German was the heart of their little team, despite Charlotte being the most powerful and Fawzia being their obvious leader. With Klaus in trouble, everyone was rising to the challenge.

He just hoped it would be enough.

Captain Benicio Martins moved through the facility with speed, grace, precision, and cold efficiency. He'd only been assigned to Watcher HQ a year before, direct from Brazil's Special Operations Command. Their motto: "Any mission, in any place, at any time, by every way," and he was the best in their two centuries of service. On seven occasions, his squad had led large terrorist groups within range of Brazil's main battlefield units. On twenty occasions, Benicio's unit hadn't even needed such tricks: they'd annihilated the enemy on their own. Even among the elites assigned to the Watchers, Benicio stood out for exceptional professionalism and ability. He'd fully memorized the layout of this facility in the first six months, including maintenance crawlspaces and the smallest storage closets. Not one of his fellow security personnel had genuinely done so, not with a hundred twenty levels and such a vast footprint. This facility was easily the most important stronghold in all of human civilization, with Watchers being roughly one in a billion.

While Security Chief Rakoto coordinated the search parties from her fortified Command Center, Benicio served as her single most capable searcher. Well, other than the Watchers, of course. While those unique individuals projected their awareness through the more hazardous parts of the facility, Benicio relied on his natural senses and instincts. He covered as much ground alone as any full search party could manage, and with every passing minute he grew more worried. Klaus-21 was the man who held the Watchers together, who helped them all deal with their differences and personal hangups, and focus on the role that no other humans could fill. If they lost him, Benicio didn't know how the other six would handle it, let alone the eleven Watchers who had set out toward different worlds without the rest of their team. For them to finally arrive at their destinations, only to learn that Klaus…

Stop! Focus. Worries are useless. Think, plan, act.

He felt the reassuring weight of his state-of-the-art gauss pistol at his belt. If this weren't a search and rescue mission, but something with a risk of combat, he'd be packing far more than a pistol. But for this, he depended on very different equipment. The light in his left hand would scatter against organic tissue, meaning blood or other potential clues would appear to shimmer and glow, even at a great distance. Benicio's other hand held a thermal scanner. Unless his objective had already gone completely cold, he should detect signs of his presence from up to twenty meters away.

He kept getting false hits. Despite all the efforts of the engineers and support staff, despite the inhospitable Antarctic environment surrounding the facility, they still had mice. His thermal scanner revealed the presence of the pests, and his light caused them to shimmer. But their tiny size prevented him from getting his hopes up.

Not so with a lot of the non-combat searchers. Multiple false alarms got everyone's hopes up, only for the chagrined employee to admit to seeing a mouse.

As time wore on, Benicio felt his worries deepen. Accepting this post had been the hardest decision of his life. With the facility so isolated and secure, and with such advanced external defenses, he'd feared his talents and training might be wasted here. He may well be the single most capable soldier in the Solar System, but his current post might never require him to fire a weapon. And yet, as the minutes dragged on, as the chances of finding Klaus-21 alive plummeted, he realized he'd chosen well. Perhaps his skills and experience might never be challenged here, but deep in his bones he knew how important this was. Every Watcher was a vital resource, an irreplaceable boon for humanity. There could be no more important role than protecting them.

But as minutes dragged into hours, and the search parties cleared more and more levels, Benicio's worry deepened into dread. Even if Klaus had been outright killed in an accident, his body should have been found by now. None of this made sense. The walls and floors of the corridors and public rooms were mostly white, but dappled with light grays. Intended to allow the dappled arctic camo of HQ security to function indoors, the surfaces were also specially armored. Ultra-dense inner layers made the floors and walls highly resistant to blast forces, while softer outer layers reduced the risk of ricocheting gauss rounds. If soldiers had to fire shots inside the facility, the slugs should dig into surfaces rather than deflect. Far more relevant during this search, the dull background colors should make Klaus easy to see, with his preference for brightly-colored T-shirts with nerdy retro designs.

Shift changes came and went, and ever more non-security personnel joined the search. More and more projects and tasks were put on hold to free up even more people to help.

And the whole time, the Watchers projected their minds throughout the facility. More than once, Benicio was directed to double check a shadowy corner of a room that one of the Watchers hoped might hide a clue. But so far, not a single hint presented itself. A team of scientists and doctors continued to go through Klaus-21's Chamber and sprawling apartment. Other than his uncharacteristic failure to follow sign-out procedure, they had no clues. At least the brain scan data from his last Watching session was mostly rendered into footage anyone could view. Perhaps that would shed some light on this unprecedented situation. Just about everyone not directly involved in the search was pouring over that recording.

Benicio entered a supply closet, and in an instant his adrenaline spiked. His light cast shadows in the dark room, and it scattered off a slumped figure in the back corner. But his thermal scanner didn't show anywhere near enough heat, not based on the timestamp for when Klaus-21's Watch ended.

The lights came on as he crossed the room in a burst of speed none of his coworkers could have matched. He dropped down at the figure's side, signaling to all searchers that he had found someone. Rolling them over, his heart sank when he saw residual signs of a grayish froth covering the… woman's face?

"All searchers, maintain your current patterns. Subject is not Klaus-21." He finished taking the dead woman's pulse, even as he checked her badge. "I've found the body of Samantha Gross, from the Support Division."

From her Command Center at the heart of Watcher HQ, Security Chief Hasina Rakoto coordinated eighteen hundred twenty-three personnel as they combed the vast facility. During any crisis, she exercised full Command of the entire Watcher facility, subject to the oversight of the Ministry of Colonization and the Interstellar Fleet Admiralty. Twice during her thirty years with the Watchers, she'd seen non-security personnel mobilized to search. Back when she was only twenty, an Archivist tried to smuggle eight hundred yottabytes of Watcher footage from the facility. And twelve years ago, the newly-Inducted Peng-24 had attempted to escape the facility. In both cases, the search had lasted less than twenty minutes before the fugitive had been apprehended.

This though… this could easily be the worst day of Hasina's career. After nine tense hours, the search teams were nearly finished, and they'd all suffered a morale blow partway through. The initial examination of Samantha Gross suggested a catastrophic drug overdose. With such tight controls on everything coming into the facility, the full story would likely turn into quite a scandal. And it still would mean little compared to the likely outcome of this search.

For Hasina now had two reports pulled up, side by side, and together they painted a very worrying picture.

First, the brain scans from Klaus-21's Watch had been analyzed in depth, despite not being fully rendered into audio and video. Certain details were conclusive: Klaus had been moving his perspective and actively observing right up until the instant his Watch abruptly ceased. There was no sign of him withdrawing his consciousness in the final moments, backing out to return to his own body. Even when panic attacks or flares of full-body nerve pain overcame Niko-29, there was always still the briefest moment of the Watch "fading." The image would lose clarity, the sound would distort, and multiple regions of the Watcher's brain would shift back toward the typical human norm. But nothing like that happened here. The Watch remained fully detailed right up until the instant the data stream ended.

Far more pedestrian, but equally worrying, was the door log. The door to Klaus-21's Chamber had opened 82 seconds before his final Watch had begun. The door had not opened again until Charlotte-17 had entered with an override code and found the Chamber empty.

Hasina was a master tactician and strategist, whose expertise at war games and simulations had earned her the position of Security Chief while still in her twenties. She'd grown into the role over the following twenty-six years, and had come to accept that she was the best choice for this job. But right now… she felt utterly lost. One of the most important humans in existence had simply vanished on her watch.

The reports started coming in, and her heart sank further and further. At last, Captain Martins summed it up. "All search parties have completed their sweeps. We've found no sign of the target."

Fawzia-11's voice sounded far worse than merely exhausted. The physical pain of excessive Watching competed with loss and confusion. "My Watchers… also report failure. Klaus-21… is not in this facility."

Hasina keyed the intercom for all of Headquarters. "Thank you all for your efforts. I am sorry to report… that all searches have come up empty. Non-security personnel, I'm recommending that your department heads cancel standard duties for tomorrow. Many of you may be needed for special projects and investigations related to this disappearance. Hopefully the rest of you will be allowed some time off. Chief Rakoto out."

With that, Hasina quickly chugged a barely legal concoction of caffeine and performance enhancing meds, issued to HQ security personnel for the greatest emergencies. Next, she issued several quick recommendations to various departments, and more detailed orders to her troops.

Finally, she opened a comm channel to the Solar Security Council. Within minutes, the conference came to include the Ministry of Colonization, the Global Scientific Collaboration Foundation, and the Chancellery of the German Union.