Echopraxia (35 page)

Sometimes he woke up.

*   *   *

Something sat at his side, a vaguely humanoid blur at the edge of eyesight. Brüks tried to turn his head, unfix his gaze from the ceiling. All he could see was pipes and paint.

“It's only me.” Moore's voice.

Is it. Is it really.

“I guess you weren't expecting it,” said the blur. “I'm actually surprised that Sengupta didn't tell you. It's the kind of thing she'd enjoy spreading around.”

He tried again. Failed again. His cervical vertebrae seemed—fused, somehow. Corroded together.

“Maybe she doesn't know.”

Brüks swallowed. That much he could do, although his throat remained dry.

The blur shifted and rustled. “It's a mandatory procedure where I come from. Too many scenarios when conscious involvement—compromises performance. Whatever the military is these days, you don't get into it unless you…”

A cough. A reset.

“The truth is, I volunteered. Back when everything was still in beta, before it was policy.”

Do you get to decide,
Brüks wondered,
when it comes and goes? Is it a choice, or is it a reflex?

“You may have heard we just go to sleep. Lose all awareness, let the body run on autopilot. So we won't feel bad about pulling the trigger, afterward.” Brüks heard a note of bitterness in the old man's voice. “It's true enough, these days. But we first-gen types, we—stayed awake. They said it was the best they could do at the time. They could cut us out of the motor loop but they couldn't shut down the hypothalamic circuitry without compromising autonomic performance. There were rumors floating around that they could do that just fine, that they
wanted
us awake—for debriefing afterward, experienced observer in the field and all—but we were such hot shit we didn't really care. The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.” Moore snorted softly. “Anyway. After a few missions that didn't quite go according to plan, they rolled out the Nirvana Iteration. Even offered me an upgrade, but it—I don't know. Somehow it just seemed important to keep the lights on.”

Why are you telling me this? What does it matter, now that you've thrown the world's lifeline into the sun?

“What I'm saying is, I was there. The whole time. Only as a passenger—I wasn't running anything—but I didn't
go away
. I'm not like Valerie's mercenaries, I was—watching, at least. If that makes you feel any better. Just wanted you to know that.”

It wasn't you. That's what you're saying. It's not your fault.

“Get some rest.” The blur stretched at his side; the Colonel's face resolved briefly in Brüks's field of focus, faded again to the sound of receding footsteps.

Which paused.

“Don't worry,” Moore said. “You won't be seeing it again.”

*   *   *

The next time he woke up Sengupta was leaning over him.

“How long?” Brüks tried, and was relieved to hear the words come out.

She said: “Can you move yet try to move.”

He sent commands down his legs, felt his toes respond. Tried wiggling his fingers: his knuckles were rusted solid.

“Not eashily,” he said.

“It'll come back it's just temporary.”

“Wha' she
do
to me?”

“I'm working on that listen—”

“It's like some kind of ass-fac—ass-
backwards
Crucifix Glitch.” His tongue fought its way around the words. “How the hell did she—baysh—
baselines
don't glitch, we don't have the shircuits—”

“I said I'm
working
on it. Look we got other things to worry about right now.”

You've
got other things, maybe—
“Whersh Jim?”

“That's what I'm trying to
tell
you he's up there in the attic he's up there with
Portia
I think
—
”

“Whah!”

“Well how do we know
how
far that shit spread huh it coulda coated the whole inside of the array and we never woulda known. Coulda grown all the way up to our front door and got
inside
.”

His sympathetic motor nerves were still working at least: Brüks could feel the hairs rising along his forearms.

“Anybody take sh—take
samples
?”

“That's not what I
do
I'm a math maid not a bucket boy I don't even know the protocols.”

“You couldn't look them up?”

“It's not what I do.”

Brüks sighed. “What about Jim?”

Sengupta stared past him. “No help he just keeps reading those letters from home over and over. I told him but I don't think he even cares.” She shook her head (she did it so
effortlessly
), added: “He comes down here sometimes checks up on you. He's been shooting you up with all sorts of GABA and spasmolytics he says you should be good to go by now.”

He flexed his fingers; not too bad, this time. “It's coming back, I guess. Body's just out of practice.”

“Yah it's been a while. Anyway I gotta get back.” She stepped across the hab, turned back at the base of the ladder. “You gotta get back in the game Dan things are getting weird.”

They were, too.

She'd never called him by name before.

*   *   *

He'd stopped slurring his words by the time Sengupta had departed; five minutes later he could roll from side to side without too much discomfort. He bent knees and arms in small hard-won increments, ratcheting each joint against the brittle resistance of his own flesh. At some critical angle his right elbow
cracked
and pain splintered down his arm like an electrical shock: but the limb worked afterward, bent and straightened at his command with nothing but a dull arthritic aching in the joint. Encouraged, he forced his other limbs past their breaking points and reclaimed them for his own.

Reclaimed from
what
?
he wondered.

The medical archives reenacted the corruption of his flesh in fast-forward: a body flooded with acetylcholine, Renshaw cells compromised, ATP drawn down to the fumes by fibrils that just wouldn't stop clenching. No ATP to cut in and ask myosin for this dance; nothing to break the actin-myosin bond. Gridlock. Tetany. A charley horse that froze the whole damn body.

The mechanism was simple enough: once the action potentials started hammering
that
fast it could only end one way. But this didn't seem to be drug induced. Valerie hadn't spiked his coffee or slipped anything into his food. His medical telemetry hadn't picked up the trail until long minutes after Brüks had been hit, but as far as he could tell those signals had come from his own brain: CNS to alpha-motor to synaptic cleft, boom boom boom.

Whatever this was, he'd inflicted it on himself.

He took his time in checking out. Time to extract the catheters and stretch his limbs; time to boot his defossilized corpus back into some semblance of an active state. Time to refuel: his convalescence had left him ravenous. Almost an hour had passed by the time he climbed out of M&R in search of whatever the galley might serve up.

He was halfway across the Hub before he noticed the light bleeding from the spoke.

*   *   *

A snapshot of the past: a corpse, laid out on the lawn. Brüks didn't know which element was the more incongruous.

The lawn, he supposed. At least that was unexpected: not so much a lawn as a patchy threadbare rug of blue-green grass—rusty in the dim longwave vampires preferred—ripped from the walls of the hab and strewn haphazardly across the deck. Vampires had OCD, Brüks remembered vaguely. The mythical ones at least, not the ancient flesh-and-blood predators that had inspired them. Seventeenth-century folk legends had it that you could drive a vampire to distraction by the simple act of throwing salt in its path; some supernatural brain circuit would compel it to drop everything and count the grains. Brüks thought he'd read that somewhere. Probably not peer reviewed.

For all he knew, that ridiculous superstition might have at least a rootlet in neurological reality. It certainly wasn't any more absurd than the Crucifix Glitch; maybe some pattern-matching hiccup in those omnisavant brains, some feedback loop gone over the top. Maybe Valerie had fallen victim to the same subroutine, seen all those thousands of epiphytic blades and torn them from their bulkhead beds with her bare fingernails, counting each leaf as it fluttered to the deck in a halfhearted chlorophyllous blizzard.

Of course, the catch was that vampires didn't have to
count
: they would simply
see
the precise number of salt grains or grass leaves in an instant, know that grand seven-digit total without ever going through the conscious process of adding it up. Any village peasant who sacrificed two seconds scattering salt in his path would buy himself a tenth-of-a-second's grace, tops. Not a great rate of exchange.

Maybe the zombie hadn't known that, though. Maybe the homunculus behind the eyes had rebooted just in time to see what was coming, maybe it somehow wrested control back from all those shortcuts and back alleys and tried one last-ditch Hail Mary with nothing left to lose. Maybe Valerie had let it, watching, amused; maybe even played along, pretended to count each falling blade while her dinner turned the deck into a haphazard shag rug.

Maybe the zombie hadn't even cared. Maybe it had just lain down on command and waited to be eaten. Maybe Valerie had just wanted a tablecloth.

The zombie's throat had been slashed. It lay spread-eagled on its stomach, naked, face turned to the side. The right buttock had been carved away; the quads; one long strip of calf muscle. There was flesh above and flesh below: in between, a flensed femur connected the lower leg to the torso, socketed into the broad scraped spatula of the pelvic girdle.

There was very little blood. Everything had been cauterized.

“You never checked it out,” Brüks said.

Sengupta zoomed the view: the gory table setting expanded across the window. Blades of grass grew to the size of bamboo shoots; tooth marks resolved like jagged furrows on bared bloody bone.

Some kind of wire snaked through the grass—barely visible even at this magnification—and disappeared beneath the half-eaten corpse.

“Found eight wires don't know what for exactly but that thing wasn't exactly Secret Santa you know? Carnage said probably booby traps and Carnage is probably right for once. She wanted us to see this.”

“How do you know?”

“This is the only feed she didn't break.” Sengupta waved the recording off the bulkhead.

“So you jettisoned the habs.”

She nodded. “Too risky to go in too risky to leave 'em there.”

Another feed abutted the first, a view down the truncated spoke that had once led to Valerie's lair. It ended after only twenty meters now, in a pulsing orange disk flashing
UNPRESSURIZED
back up the tunnel at two-second intervals. Just like the Commons spoke opposite, cut loose in turn to keep the vectors balanced.

He remembered downhill conversations, the sound of glasses clinking together. “Shit,” he said.

“It's not like they're not all the same you know they all got the same plumbing and life support.”

“I know.”

“And it's not like we're gonna run out of food or air what with everybody being dead and—”

“I fucking
know,
” Brüks snapped, and was surprised when Sengupta fell immediately silent.

He sighed. “It's just, the only half-decent moments I've had on this whole bloody trip were in Commons, you know?”

She didn't speak for a moment; and when she did, Brüks couldn't make out the words.

“What did you say?”

“You talked to him down there,” she mumbled. “I
know
that but it doesn't matter even if it was still here
he's
not. He just sits up in the attic and runs those signals over and over like he never even left Icarus…”

“He lost his son,” Brüks said. “It changed him. Of course it changed him.”

“Oh yah.” She barely spoke above a whisper. Something in that voice made Brüks long for the trademark hyena laugh. “It changed him all right.”

*   *   *

No excuses left. Nothing else to do.

He ascended into the Hub, breached its sky into the guts beyond: hissing bronchioles, cross-hatched vertebrae, straight-edged intestines. He moved like an old man, free fall and residual paralysis and the spacesuit he'd scavenged from the cargo-bay airlock all conspiring to take him to new depths of clumsiness. Up ahead, the paint around the docking hatch splashed the surrounding topography with the usual diffuse glow.

This is where the shadows come,
Brüks realized.
Every other corner of the
Crown
is bright as a swimming pool now that the Hold's off-limits, now that Valerie's cave has been cut loose. Shadows don't have a chance back there.

They've got nowhere else to go …

“Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Jim Moore turned slowly in the rafters, just past the airlock. The lines of his face, the edges of limbs moved in and out of eclipse.

“This is living?” Brüks tried.

“This is the waiting list.”

He thought he might have seen a smile. Brüks pushed himself across the attic and pulled a welding torch from the tool rack: checked the charge, hefted the mass. Jim Moore watched from a distance, his face full of shadow.

“Uh, Jim. About—”

“Enemy territory,” Moore said. “Couldn't be helped.”