Echopraxia (17 page)

(
Shock absorbers,
he realized.)

—before a tsunami of white light struck him instantly, rapturously blind.

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish. Brüks blinked away tears, reflexively reached up, felt that strange, newly familiar inertia return to his arms—

—
Free fall
—

—before the sticky mesh released them to let his gloved hands swipe clumsily at his faceplate. He missed; his arms flailed, encountering nothing but the elastic bounce of the gee-web.

He wobbled gently, weightless, waiting for his vision to clear. By the time he could see again the panorama had been usurped by mere telemetry: an impoverished wraparound of numbers and contour plots and parabolic trajectories. Brüks squinted, tried to squeeze signal from noise through the cotton growing in his head: the
Crown
's drive section was already kilometers to port and kilometers ahead, its lead increasing with each second per second. Tactical had laid a vast attenuate cone of light across the space before it, spreading from the abandoned drive like a searchlight.
Ramscoop,
Brüks realized after a second. A magnetic field to gather up ionized particles, a brake against the solar wind. A proxy for mass gone suddenly missing: no telltale change in acceleration, no suspicious easing back on the throttle. One measure among many, shoehorned in between the masking of heatprints and whatever stealthed this ship to radar. Moore had told him as much as he could understand, Brüks supposed. There would be more. Solutions to problems no baseline could even foresee, let alone solve. A careful clandestine exit stage left, while unwitting pursuers followed a bright burning decoy toward the land of the comets. All spread out across the curve of his own personal diving bell, numbers and diagrams and stick-figure animations for the retarded.

He only understood half of it, and didn't know if he could trust the other half.

Maybe it's not even real,
he thought drowsily.
Maybe it's all just a comforting fantasy to keep me pacified in the backseat. Mommy and Daddy, telling nice stories to keep the children from crying.

They were still alive, at least. The exhaust hadn't vaporized them outright. Only time would tell if radiation sickness might. Time, or—

He cast his eyes around the bubble of intel. He saw nothing that spoke obviously to the subject of gamma rays.

It would take a while, of course. You wouldn't feel anything at first, certainly not in the few minutes left before everyone went down for the … night …

Fifty days to Icarus. Fifty days tumbling ass-over-entrails, powered down, ballistic, just another piece of inner system junk. Needle in a haystack, maybe, but nowhere near sharp enough to prick anyone who happens to look this way. Lots of time for those bright little shards to rot us out from the inside. We could die in our sleep and never know it.

His eyelids felt incongruously heavy in the weightless compartment. He kept them open, peered around at all those faces under glass, looked for smiles or frowns or any telltale wrinkles of worry that might be creasing more-enlightened foreheads. Angles and optics turned half the helmets into warped mirrors, hiding the faces within. Some tiny part of Daniel Brüks furrowed its brow in confusion—
Wait a minute … aren't the lights supposed to be off?—
but somehow he could see Lianna, eyes already closed, her face smoothed either in sleep or resignation. He could see the back of Moore's helmet, down past his own boots. He was almost certain that he could make out a pair of Bicameral eyes here and there, all closed, the mouths beneath moving in some silent synchronized chant.

Nothing but breathing on comm.

Maybe I'm asleep already,
he thought, twisting in the web.
Maybe I'm lucid
.

Valerie stared back at him. No trace of fatigue or anesthesia in that face.

No metabolic hacks for
her
,
Brüks thought as his eyes began to close.
No rotten stench in the back of her throat, no CO or H
2
S clogging up her blood cells, no half-assed technology to keep
her
under. She doesn't need our help. She was doing this twenty thousand years ago, she'd mastered the undead arts before we'd even started scratching stick figures on cave walls. She gorged on us and then she just
went away
while we bred back to sustainable levels, while we forgot she was real, while we turned her from predator to myth, myth to bedtime story …

A bullet hole appeared in the center of her breastplate. A line, growing vertically: a crack splitting her suit down the middle.

All those years we took to convince ourselves she didn't really exist after all, and all that time she was sleeping right under our feet. Right up until she got hungry again, and dug herself out of the dirt like some monstrous godforsaken cicada, and went hunting while we put ourselves to sleep in our own graves and called it
Heaven
 …

Valerie twisted and squirmed and emerged naked from her silvery cocoon: white as a grub, lean as a mantis. She grinned needles and clambered across the web toward him.

Like we're sleeping now,
Brüks thought, fading.
While she smiles at me.

 

 

 

I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

—WALT WHITMAN

HE DESCENDED INTO
Heaven's dungeon, but the shackles were empty and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

He lay on his back in the desert, looked down and saw that he'd been gutted, crotch to throat. Spectral snakes surged eagerly from the gash, fled the confines of his body for the endless baked mud of a fossil seabed, free at last, free at last …

He soared through an ocean of stars, dimensionless pinpoints: abstract, unchanging, unreal. One of them broke the rules as he watched, a pixel unfolding into higher dimensions like some quantum flower blooming in time-lapse. Angles emerged from outlines; shadows stretched across surfaces turning on some axis Brüks couldn't quite make out. Bones spun majestically at its midsection.

Monsters in there, waiting for him.

He tried to veer off, to brake. He pulled all those temporoparietal strings that turned dreams lucid. The
Crown of Thorns
continued to swell in his sights, serenely untroubled by his pitiful attempts to rewrite the script. A hab swept toward him like the head of a mace; he flailed and thrashed and closed his eyes but felt no impact. When he looked again he was
inside,
and Valerie was staring back.

Welcome to Heaven, Cold Cut.

Her monster eyes were fully dilated; like headlights, like balls of bright bloody glass lit from within. The mouth beneath split open like a fresh grinning wound.

Go back to sleep,
she told him.
Forget all your worries. Sleep forever.

Her voice was suddenly, strangely androgynous.

It's your call.

He cried out—

*   *   *

—and opened his eyes.

Lianna leaned over him. Brüks raised his head, glanced frantically in all directions.

Nothing. No one but Lianna. They were back in Maintenance & Repair.

Better than Storage
.

He settled back on the pallet. “I guess we made it?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?” His throat was parched.

She handed him a squeezebulb. “We're where we're supposed to be,” she said as he sucked like a starving newborn. “No obvious signs of pursuit. It'll take a while before we can be sure but it's looking good. The drive blew up a few hours after we separated, so as far as we know they know, they got us.”

“Whoever they are.”

“Whoever they were.”

“So. Next stop, Icarus?”

“Depends on you.”

Brüks raised his eyebrows.

“I mean yes, we're going to Icarus. But you don't have to be up for it if you're not, you know, up for it. We could put you back under, next thing you know you're back on Earth safe and sound. Since you're not officially part of the expedition.”

One mission-critical
.
One ballast
.

“Or you put me back under and I die in my sleep when your expedition goes pear-shaped,” he said after a moment.

She didn't deny it. “You can die in your sleep anywhere. Besides, the Bicams would know better than any of us, and they're pretty sure you'll make it back.”

“They told you that, did they?”

“Not explicitly, but—yeah. I got that sense from them.”

“If they really knew what they were going to find down there,” Brüks mused, “they wouldn't have to go in the first place.”

“There is that,” she said. And then, more cheerfully: “But if the mission
does
go pear-shaped, wouldn't you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”

“You are the Queen of the Silver Lining,” Brüks told her.

She bowed, and waited.

A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever
alien
meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?

As if they'd ever let you get close to their precious Angel of the Asteroids
, his inner companion sneered.
As if you'd be able to make any sense of it if they did. Better to sit it out, better to let them carry you back home so you can pick up your life where you dropped it. You don't belong out here anyway. You're a roach on a battlefield.

Who could easily get squashed in his sleep. What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?

Awake, at least, he might be able to scuttle clear of descending boots.

“You think I'd pass up the chance to do
this
kind of fieldwork?” he said at last.

Lianna grinned. “Okay, then. You know the drill, I'll let you get yourself together.” She took a bouncing step toward the ladder.

“Valerie,” Brüks blurted out behind her.

She didn't turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”

“When the ship was breaking—I saw—”

She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”

Too near
. “This was no Tunnel of Light.”

“Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can't trust your own perceptions.”

She paused and turned, one hand on the ladder.

“Then again, when can you?”

*   *   *

Moore dropped unsmiling onto the deck as Brüks finished pulling on his jumpsuit. He held a personal tent in one hand, a rolled-up cylinder the size of his forearm. “I hear you'll be joining us.”

“Try to control your enthusiasm.”

“You're an extra variable,” the Colonel told him. “I have a great deal of work to do. And we may not have the luxury of keeping an eye on you if things get sticky. On the other hand—” He shrugged. “I can't imagine deciding any differently, in your shoes.”

Brüks raised his left foot, balanced on his right to scratch at his freshly pinkened ankle (someone had removed the cast during his latest coma). “Believe me, getting in the way's the last thing I want to do, but this isn't exactly familiar territory for me. I don't really know the rules.”

“Just—stay out of the way, basically.” He tossed the tent to Brüks. “You can set up your rack pretty much anywhere you want. The habs are a bit messy—we had to relocate a lot of inventory when they converted the Hold—but we've also got fewer people living in them for the time being. So find a spot, set up your tent, buckle down. If you need something and the interface can't help you, ask Lianna. Or me, if I'm not too busy. The Bicamerals will be coming out of decompression in a few days; try to keep out from underfoot. Needless to say that goes double for the vampire.”

“What if the vampire
wants
me underfoot?”

Moore shook his head. “That's not likely.”

“She already went out of her way to—to provoke me…”

“How, exactly?”

“You see her arm, after the spoke broke?”

“I did not.”

“She broke it. She broke her own fucking arm. Repeatedly. Said I wasn't setting it right.”

“But she didn't attack you. Or threaten you.”

“Not physically. She really seemed to get off on scaring the shit out of me, though.”

The Colonel grunted. “In my experience, those things don't have to
try
to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her.”

“She called me a
cold cut
.”

“And Rakshi Sengupta called you a
roach
. Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult, too.”

“Wasn't it?”

“Common Tran term. Means so primitive you're unkillable.”

“I'm plenty killable,” Brüks said.

“Sure, if someone drops a piano on your head. But you're also
field-tested
. We've had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn't even exist a few
months
ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there's probably another upgrade they can't afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything,
roach
connotes a bit of envy.”