Echopraxia (38 page)

Maybe
Portia
's hiding, too. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.

“We have to tell Jim,” he said.

*   *   *

“Will you look at that,” Moore remarked.

Lianna's spacesuit flickered on the dome, a snapshot taken before Sengupta had pulled the drone back for fear of setting off alarms. Not that a live feed would have been any more dynamic.

“It's Valerie it's fucking
Valerie
—”

“Apparently.”

It can't be,
Brüks thought for the thousandth time, the voice in his head weaker with each iteration. By now it was barely whispering.

“I told you we can't
trust
—”

“She seems harmless enough for now,” the Colonel remarked.

“
Harmless
are you felching crazy don't you remember what she—”

Moore cut her off: “There's no way that suit could support an active metabolism all the way back to Earth and there's no sign of any kind of octopus rig. She's gone undead for the trip home. Probably expects to revive and jump ship when we dock in LEO. Waking up earlier wouldn't accomplish anything except using up her O
2
.”

“
Good
then I say we give the bot some teeth and go scrape her off the hull like a goddamn barnacle while we got the chance.”

“By all means, if you think she hasn't set up any defenses against just that scenario. If you're certain the hull isn't booby-trapped with a nanogram of antimatter set to blow a hole in the ship if anything disturbs her. I assumed you realized that she's
smart
. You certainly pulled your drone back fast enough.”

That gave her pause. “Whadda we do then?”

“She's waiting for us to dock. So we don't dock.” Moore shrugged. “We jump ship and let the
Crown
burn up on reentry.”

“And then what surf back through the atmosphere on top of a passing comsat? If I was supposed to pack a shuttle nobody told me.”

“One thing at a time. For now, just continue your hull crawl in case she's left anything else out there for us to find. If you'll excuse me”—he drifted around his own axis and pushed himself off the deck—“I have my own work to do.”

He disappeared into the attic. Brüks and Sengupta stayed at the mirrorball. Buried in the shadows of some obscure province on the hull, Valerie lay still as death in her stolen skin.

“What does she
want
?” Brüks wondered.

“What all of them want I guess to touch the Face of God.”

The common enemy,
he remembered. “That whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing went down the toilet the moment she slaughtered the Bicams. Whatever it was, she wanted sole access.”

“She's got
plans
for God oh yah they all did. Too bad God had plans for them too.”

Maybe she wasn't happy just touching the Face of God,
he mused.
Maybe she wants to bring God home as a pet. Maybe, while we've been going crazy looking for
Portia
in here, it's been out there all along sealed up in a ziplock bag.

Another good reason to burn this fucking ship. As if we needed one.

“Whatever those plans were,” he said, “they're all dead in the water now.”

“Oh you think so huh?”

“Jim's—”

“Oh
Jim
that's a good one. Because vampires are no match for roach plans are they? So how did she get
out
then in the first place huh? How come she isn't still strapped to a chair solving puzzles at SFU?”

Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn't even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.

Valerie, walking blithely out of her cage one night and scaring the piss out of prey in a local bar for chrissakes and
then walking back in again,
just to show that she could.

“I don't know,” Brüks admitted.

“I do.” A single, jerky nod. “It wasn't just her there were others there were three other vampires in that lab and they worked
together
.”

He shook his head. “They'd never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they
did
meet they'd be more likely to tear out each other's throats than draw up escape plans.”

“Oh they drew up their plans all right they all just did it
alone
.”

Brüks felt a contradiction rising on his tongue. Then it sunk in.

“
Shit,
” he said.

“Yah.”

“You're saying they just
knew
what the others were going to do. They just—”

“
Elevated respiration from the short redhead prey consistent with conspecific encounter within the past two hundred breaths
,” Sengupta chanted. “
East south corridors public so exclude them; conspecific must have been moved twenty meters along the north tunnel no more than one hundred twenty five breaths ago
. Like that.”

Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they'd acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they'd never met would have worked out the same scenario.

“How do you
know
?” he whispered.

“It's the
only way
I tried to make it work from every other angle but it's the only model that
fits
. You roaches never stood a chance.”

Jesus,
Brüks thought.

“Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with the fear in Sengupta's voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually
could
stand to be in the same room together?”

He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That's why we made sure they couldn't.”

“Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”

“Nobody's
that
territorial. Someone must've amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”

“How do you know that I haven't seen that anywhere.”

“Like you said, Rak: it's the only the model that
fits
. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the
Divide and Conquer
Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”

“They're better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don't care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I'm not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I'm firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”

Now
there's
a quick weekend project
. Aloud: “Anything else?”

“I don't
know
I'm working on it but how do I know she hasn't already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”

“Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can't hack sheet metal.”

Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she might look
at
him.

“When it's time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn't a rental. If it is, I'm pretty sure the damage deposit's already a write-off.”

He waited for the inevitable put-down.

“That's a
great
idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself.
Fuck
safety protocols. I'll do the Hold and the spokes you do the attic.”

*   *   *

The docking hatch wouldn't take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock's inner wall.

Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.

Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”

“We're keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”

“Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi's idea, I'm guessing.”

“Uh-huh.”

Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn't like me at all.”

“You can't really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical
snap
; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks's sinuses.

“I don't think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn't me in any case.”

“Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire.
Snap
.

“Not necessarily.”

Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.

“Jim, you told me how it works.
Herded into the service of agendas they'd never support in a thousand years,
remember?
Somebody
thought that up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore's eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks's left shoulder.

You're barely even here,
Brüks thought.
Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance …

“There's a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don't know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to
marshal our forces,
as we like to say. And do you know what's really remarkable about it, Daniel?”

“Tell me.”

“As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just
discovered
it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife's supraconscious networks.”

“Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.

“You don't buy it.”

He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just
emerged
?”

Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just
evolve
. Something must have
created
it.”

Ouch,
Brüks thought.

“I'll admit I've heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I'd hear it from a biologist.”

Evidently half of him was enough.

 

 

 

AN INSTRUMENT HAS BEEN DEVELOPED IN ADVANCE OF THE NEEDS OF ITS POSSESSOR

—ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

HE AWOKE TO
the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.

“Rak?”

The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.

“Uh…,” Brüks began.

“I told you I didn't like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can't trust him roach, I never really
liked
him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he's just—gone all the time. Don't know
what
he is anymore.”

“He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”

“It's more than that he lost his kid
years
ago.”

“But then he got him
back
. In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they're still out there somewhere, and they're
talking
and it doesn't matter if they're talking to you or not it's still
them,
it's
new,
you're not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she's
actually out there
and—”

He caught himself, and wondered if she'd noticed.

I could have her back,
he told himself.
Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real
time
at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven's door …

Which was, of course, the one thing he'd sworn to never do.

“He says Siri's alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he's coming
home
.”

“Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”

She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake:
Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.