Echopraxia (24 page)

He tried to think of an answer.

“We've always thought
c
and friends ruled supreme, right out to the quasars and beyond,” Lianna mused. “What if they're just—you know, some kind of local ordinance? What if they're a
bug
? Anyway”—she fed her plate into the recycler—“I gotta go. We're test-firing the chamber today.”

“Look, science—” He marshaled his thoughts, unwilling to let it go. “It's not just that it works. We know
how
it works. There's no secret to it. It makes
sense
.”

She wasn't looking at him. Brüks followed her eyes to the bulkhead feed. They all seemed more or less mended by now—Chinedum, Amratu, a handful of other demigods who'd never be more than names and ciphers to him—although the pressure still kept them captive for the moment. Still insufficiently omnipotent to speed the physics of decompression. It was a small comfort.

“Those guys do
not
make sense,” he continued. “They roll around on the floor and ululate and you write up the patent applications. We don't know how it works, we don't know if it's going to
keep
working, it could
stop
working at any moment. Science is more than magic and rituals—”

He stopped.

Ululations. Incantations. Hive harmonics.

Rituals.

These feeds have motion cap,
he remembered.

*   *   *

Colonel Jim Moore crouched sideways against the Commons wall like a monstrous grasshopper: legs folded tight at the knees, spring-loaded and ready to pop; thorax folded over them like a protective carapace; one hand dancing with some unseen ConSensus interface while the other, wrapped around a convenient cargo strap, held body to bulkhead. His eyes jiggled and danced beneath closed lids: blind to this impoverished little shell of a world, immersed in some other denied Daniel Brüks.

The grasshopper opened its eyes: glazed at first, clearing by degrees.

“Daniel,” it said dully.

“You look awful.”

“I asked for an onboard cosmetics spa before we launched. They went for a lab instead.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Moore frowned.

“That does it. I'm buying, you're eating.” Brüks stepped over to the galley.

“But—”

“Unless you think that anorexia's the best way to prep for an extended field op.”

Moore hesitated.

“Come on.” Brüks punched in an order for salmon steak (he was still tickled by the fabber's proficiency with extinct meats). “Lianna's back in the Hold, and Rakshi's—being Rakshi. You want me eating with
Valerie
?”

“So this is a rescue mission.” Moore unfolded himself onto the deck, relenting at last.

“That's the spirit. What do you want?”

“Just coffee.”

Brüks glared at him.

“Okay, fine. Anything.” The Colonel waved a hand in surrender. “Kruggets. With tandoori sauce.”

Brüks winced and relayed the order, tossed a 'bulb of coffee across the compartment (Coriolis turned it into a curveball but Moore caught it anyway with barely a glance), grabbed one for himself and twisted the heat tab en route. He set the wobbly warming sphere onto the table and wound his way back to collect their meals.

“Still going over the
Theseus
data?” He pushed Moore's fluorescent krill across the table and sat down opposite.

“I thought the whole point of this was to get my mind
off
that.”

“The point was to get you off your damn hunger strike,” Brüks said. “And to get me something to talk to besides the walls.”

Moore chewed, swallowed. “Don't say I didn't warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“I distinctly remember raising the possibility—the likelihood, even—that you might be bored out of your skull.”

“Believe me, I'm not complaining.”

“Yes you are.”

“Maybe a little.” (Why did everything from the galley taste like
oil
?) “But it's not so bad. I got ConSensus, I got Lee to try and deprogram. Weigh a little cabin fever against getting stashed with the luggage for the next six months—”

“Believe me.” Moore smiled faintly. “There are worse things than extended unconsciousness.”

“For example?”

Moore didn't answer.

The
Crown
did, though. In an instant she turned half the bulkhead bloody with Intercom alarms.

SENGUPTA
, they screamed.

*   *   *

Moore commed the Hub while Brüks was still peeling himself off the ceiling. “Rakshi. What—”

Her words cascaded back, high-pitched and panicky: “She's coming oh shit she's coming up she
knows
—”

A pit opened in Brüks's stomach.

“I'm onto her I think she knows of course she knows she's a fucking
vampire
she knows
everything
—”

“Rakshi, where—”

“Listen to me you stupid roach she kil—oh
fu—
”

The channel died before she could finish, but it didn't really matter. You could have heard the screaming halfway to Mars.

Moore was through the ceiling in an instant. Brüks followed in his wake, a jump up the ladder, a grab for a passing handhold, the endless loop of the conveyor pulling him smoothly along the weight-loss gradient from hab to Hub. Moore had no time for that shit; he shot up the ladder two rungs at a time, then three, then four. He ricocheted free-falling out the top of the spoke before the belt had drawn Brüks even halfway. That was okay. Maybe he'd have everything fixed by the time Brüks made it to the top, maybe Sengupta's screams of rage would end and calm soothing voices would murmur in their stead, intent on reconciliation …

Sengupta's screams ended.

He tried to ignore the other voices, the ones in his head saying
Go back, you idiot. Let Jim handle it, he's a
soldier
for chrissakes, what are you gonna do against a goddamn
vampire
? You're collateral
.
You're lunch.

That's right, Backdoor. Just turn around and run away. Again.

The conveyor, insensitive, drew him forward into battle.

He emerged into the southern hemisphere, knees shaking. There were no calm voices. There were no voices at all.

There was no reconciliation.

The vampire clung one-handed to the grille. Her other hand held Sengupta by the throat, right at eye level, as if the pilot were a paper doll. Valerie looked impassively into her victim's eyes; Sengupta squirmed and choked and didn't look back.

The south pole was a bright gaping pit to stern. Its reflection smeared across the mirrorball like a round toothless mouth. An image flashed across Brüks's forebrain, courtesy of his hind: Valerie tossing Sengupta into that maw. The
Crown of Thorns
closing its mouth and
chewing
.

Moore edged along the Tropic of Capricorn, feet just above the deck, hands open at his sides.

“Okay, we can take it from here.”

Not Moore. Lianna's voice, ringing calm and clear from the back of the
Crown
's throat. A moment later she sailed forth from its maw, fearless, light as air, heading directly for Valerie & Victim.

What's
wrong
with her?
“Lianna,
don't
—”

“S'okay.” She spared a glance. “I've got it under—”

And was cut down with the sudden crack of bones snapping under the impact of Valerie's foot, an obscene and elegant en pointe fired like a piston into Lutterodt's rib cage. She spun back toward the south pole, a rag doll with no fixed center of gravity; the
Crown
caught her spine in passing, bent it the wrong way, tossed her back down its throat from whence she'd come.

Fuck fuck fuck—

“Let her go,” Moore was saying, his eyes still on Sengupta, calm as death. As though Lianna Lutterodt had never even made an appearance, as though she hadn't just been swatted like a mosquito. As though she couldn't possibly be bleeding out against the bulkhead a hundred meters to stern.

I have to help her
.

Valerie kept eyes on Sengupta, head cocked like a predatory bird sizing up something shiny. “She attacks
me
.” Her voice was distant, almost distracted: voicemail from a monster with other things on its mind.

Brüks crept forward, belly against bulkhead: a strut here, a cargo strap there, hand over hand toward the south pole.

“She's no threat.” Moore was behind Valerie now, looking past her shoulder to her prey. The prey croaked softly. “There's no reason to—”

“Thank you for your tactical advice.” A faint white smile ghosted across her lips.

Was that a faint moan sighing up through the
Crown
's throat? Still conscious, then, maybe. Still hope.

“Trade,” Valerie said.

“Yes,” Moore replied, moving forward.

“Not you.”

Suddenly Brüks was off the deck and yanked into the air; suddenly Valerie's hand was around his throat, gripping him just below the jaw with fingers cold and sinuous as tentacles while a distant irrelevant Rakshi Sengupta bounced off the southern hemisphere, hacking, doubled over.

And when Valerie looked at
him
with that bemused and distant stare, he looked back. He tried not to. Over the slow burning in his lungs, over the casual pain of a larynx compressed just this side of strangulation, he would have given anything to turn away. Somehow he didn't have the will. He couldn't even close his eyes against hers.

Her pupils were bright bloody pinpoints, red stars clenched tight against the light of day. Behind them, the bulkhead rolled past in lazy slow motion.

The Hub dwindled to the wrong end of a telescope. Sengupta was shouting somewhere, her voice raw and tinny and barely audible over the white noise of distant pounding surf:
She killed one of them she killed one of her zombies one of her
people
he's not on the board I can't find him anywhere—

There was nothing in Valerie's face but that spectral half smile, that look of dispassionate appraisal. She didn't seem to notice Moore slipping up from behind, or Sengupta screaming headlong back into the fray with claws bared. She didn't even seem to notice her own left hand flicking back of its own accord to casually slap the pilot into the soldier, all that momentum spun impossibly on the head of a pin and redirected a hundred eighty degrees.
Fucking monster fucking monster fucking monster,
Sengupta shouted from across an ocean and Brüks could only think:
Cats and dogs cats and dogs …

But none of that mattered. All that mattered were he and Valerie, alone together: the way she let just enough air past her fingers to keep him awake, the way she reached out with her free hand and tapped that light arrhythmic tattoo across his temple; the things she whispered for his ears only, intimate secrets of such vital importance he forgot them even as she breathed them out along his cheek.

Behind her, Jim Moore grabbed a cargo strap and braced his feet against the wall. Valerie didn't even bother to keep him in view.

“Is it true?” he asked quietly.

“Of course it's fucking true she's a
vampire
she'd kill
all
of—”

Moore, eyes locked on Valerie, raised a palm in Sengupta's direction. Sengupta shut up as if guillotined.

“You think this matters.” There was distant amusement in Valerie's voice, as if she'd just seen a rabbit stand up on its hind legs and demand the right to vote.

“You think so, too,” Moore began. “Or—”

“—you wouldn't have reacted,” he and Valerie finished in sync.

He tried again: “Were they under formal con…,” they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgment of futility. The vampire even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.

Sengupta fumed silently across the compartment, too smart and too damn stupid to be scared. Brüks tried to swallow, gagged as his Adam's apple caught between the vice of Valerie's thumb and forefinger.

“Malawi,” Valerie said quietly, and: “Not mission-critical.”

Brüks swallowed again.
As if there's anyone on this goddamn ship who's less
mission-critical
than me.

Maybe Moore was thinking it, too. Maybe he decided to act on behalf of Daniel Brüks, the Parasite That Walked Like a Man. Or maybe he just took advantage of his adversary's distraction, maybe it didn't have anything to do with Brüks at all. But something—changed subtly, in Moore's stance. His body seemed
looser,
somehow, more relaxed, incongruously taller at the same time.

Valerie was still eye to eye with Brüks, but it didn't matter. It was obvious from the way her smile widened and cracked, from the tiny
click
of teeth against teeth: she could see everything that mattered about Moore's face, reflected in his own.

She turned, almost lazily, tossed Brüks aside like a cigarette butt. Brüks flailed across the open spine; he barely missed a figure blurring past in the opposite direction. A cargo cube caught him and slapped him back off the deck. He doubled over, coughing, while Moore and Valerie danced in fast-forward. The monster's arms moved as though spun by a centrifuge; her body rebounded off the deck and shot through empty space where Jim Moore had existed a split second before.

“Fhat thouding do're.”

Not a shout. Not even an exclamation. It didn't
sound
like a command. But those sounds reached into the Hub from the south pole and seemed to physically slap Valerie off target, reach right into the monster's head and grab her by the motor nerves. She twisted in midair, landed like a jumping spider on the curve of the bulkhead and froze there: eyes bright as halogen, mouth full of gleaming little shark teeth.