Echopraxia (5 page)

Brother Slippers had tapped into a half dozen of them, zoomed and cycled through each in turn. Brüks wasn't sure how useful they'd be: cheap off-the-shelf things, party favors to lure impoverished researchers into springing for a package deal. They had the usual enhancements but the range was nothing special.

They seemed to be sufficient for Slippers's purposes, though. Second window from the left, a heat source moved left to right about a hundred meters out. The camera panned automatically, tracking the target while he amped the zoom. The image resolved in slow degrees.

Another one of the monastery's eyes flared and died, its overlaid range finder fading a moment later: 3.2 kilometers.

That's almost nine meters per second. On
foot
 …

“What happens when they get here?” he asked.

Slippers seemed more interested in a distant heatprint caught on number three: a small vehicle, an ATB, same basic design as—

Wait a minute—

“That's my bike,” Brüks murmured, frowning. “That's—
me
…”

Slippers spared him a glance and a head shake. “Assub.”

“No,
listen
—” It was far from a perfect mug shot, and Telonics's steadicam tracking algorithms were the envy of no one in the field. But whoever sat astride that bike had Brüks's mustache, the square lines of his face, the same multipocketed field vest that had been years out of style even when he'd inherited the damn thing two decades before. “You're being hacked,” Brüks insisted. “That's some kind of recording, someone must've—”
Someone was
recording
me?
“I mean,
look
at it!”

Two more cameras down. Seven so far. Slippers wasn't even bothering to clear the real estate by closing the channels. Something else had caught his eye. He tapped the edge of a window that looked onto a naked-eye view of the desert sky. The stars strewn across that display glittered like sugar on velvet. Brüks wanted to fall into that sky, get lost in the stark peaceful beauty of a night without tactical overlays or polarized enhancements.

But even here, the monk had found something to ruin the view: a brief flicker, a dim red nimbus framing an oval patch of starscape for the blink of an eye. The display clicked softly, an infinitesimal sharpening of focus
—
and in the next instant the stars returned, unsullied and pristine.

Except for a great
hole
in the night hanging over the western ridge, a vast dark oval where no stars shone.

Something was crawling toward them across the sky, eating the stars as it went. It was as cold as the stratosphere—at least, it didn't show up on any of the adjacent thermal views. And it was
huge
; it covered a good twenty degrees of arc even though it was still—

No range finder. No heatprint. If not for whatever microlensing magic Slippers had just performed, not even this eclipse of ancient starlight would have given it away.

I,
Brüks realized,
have definitely picked the wrong side
.

Twenty-three hundred meters. In five minutes the zombies would be knocking at the door.

“Carousel,” Slippers murmured, and something in his voice made Brüks look twice.

The monk was
smiling
. But he wasn't looking at the cloaked behemoth marching across Orion's Belt. His eyes were on a ground's-eye view of the vortex engine. There was no audio feed; the tornado whirled silently in the StarlAmped window, a shackled green monster tearing up airspace. Brüks could hear it anyway—roaring in his memory, bending the ducts and the blades of the substructure that birthed it, vibrating through the very bedrock. He could
feel
it in the soles of his feet. And now Brother Slippers brought up a whole new window, a panel not of camera views or tactical overlays but of engineering readouts, laminar feed and humidity injection rates, measures of torque and velocity and compressible flow arrayed along five hundred meters of altitude. Offset to one side a luminous wire-frame disk labeled
VEC/PRIME
sprouted a thousand icons around its perimeter; a hundred more described spokes and spirals toward its heart. Heating elements. Countercurrent exchangers. The devil's own mixing board. Slippers nodded, as if to himself: “Watch.”

Icons and outputs began to move. There was nothing dramatic in the readouts, no sudden acceleration into red zones, no alarms. Just the slightest tweak of injection rates on one side of the circle; the gentlest nuzzle of convection and condensation on the other.

Over in its window, the green monster raised one toe.

Holy shit
.
They're going to set it
free …

A wash of readouts turned yellow; in the heart of that sudden sunny bloom, a dozen others turned orange. A couple turned red.

With ponderous, implacable majesty, the tornado lifted from the earth and stepped out across the desert.

*   *   *

It came down on two of the zombies. Brüks saw it all through a window that tracked the funnel's movements across the landscape: saw the targets break and weave far faster than merely human legs could carry a body. They zigzagged, a drunkard's sprint by undead Olympians.

They might as well have been rooted to the ground. The tornado sucked those insignificant smudges of body heat into the sky so fast they didn't even leave an afterimage. It hesitated for a few seconds, rooted through the earth like some great elephant's trunk. It devoured dirt and gravel and boulders the size of automobiles. Then it was off, carving its name into the desert.

Back in its garage, swirls of moisture condensed anew where the monster had broken free.

The vortex was past the undead perimeter now, veering northwest. It hopped once more, lifting its great earth-shattering foot into the air; pieces of pulverized desert rained down in its wake. A distant, disconnected subroutine in Brüks's mind—some ganglion of logic immune to awe or fear or intimidation—wondered at the questionable efficiency of throwing an entire weather system at two lousy foot soldiers, at the infinitesimal odds of even
hitting
a target on such a wild trajectory. But it fell silent in the next second, and didn't speak again.

The whirlwind was not staggering randomly into that good night. It was bearing down on a distant figure riding an ATB.

It was coming for
him
.

This isn't possible,
Brüks thought.
You can't
steer
a tornado, nobody can. The most you can do is let it loose and get out of the way. This isn't happening. This isn't happening.

I am not out there …

But something was, and it knew it was being hunted. Brüks's own hacked cameras told the tale: the ATB had abandoned its straight-line trajectory in favor of breakneck evasive maneuvers that would have instantly pitched any human rider over the handlebars. It slewed and skidded, kicked up plumes that sparkled sapphire in the amped starlight. The vortex weaved closer. They swept across the desert like partners in some wild and calamitous dance full of twirls and arabesques and impossible hairpin turns. They were never in step. Neither followed the other's lead. And yet some invisible, unbreakable thread seemed to join the two, pulled them implacably into each other's arms. Brüks watched, hypnotized at the sight of his own imminent ascension; the ATB was caught in orbit now around its monstrous nemesis. For a moment Brüks thought it might even break free—was it his imagination, or was the funnel
thinner
than it had been?—but in the next his doppelgänger lost its footing and skidded toward dissolution.

In that instant it
changed
.

Brüks wasn't certain how, exactly. It would have happened too fast even if whirling debris and the grain of boosted photons hadn't obscured the view. But it was as though the image of Daniel Brüks and his faithful steed
split
somehow, as if something inside was trying to shed its skin and break free, leaving a lizard-tail husk behind for the sky-beast to chew on. The maelstrom moved in, a blizzard of rock and dust obscuring any detail. The funnel was visibly weakening now but it still had enough suction to take its quarry whole.

Still had teeth enough to smash it to fragments.

The undead broke ranks.

It wasn't a retreat. It didn't even seem to be a coordinated exercise. The candles just stopped advancing and
flickered
back and forth in their windows, nine hundred meters out, directionless and Brownian. Far behind them the sated whirlwind weaved away to the north, a dissipating ropy thing, nearly exhausted.

“Dymic.” Slippers nodded knowingly. “Assub.”

Back on the pad a newborn vortex chafed at its restraints, smaller than its predecessor but
angrier,
somehow. Yellow icons blossomed across
VEC/PRIME
like rampant brush fires. Overhead, something was eating Gemini feetfirst.

Another window opened on the wall, a hodgepodge of emerald alphanumerics. Slippers blinked and frowned, as though the apparition was somehow unexpected. Greek equations, Cyrillic footnotes, even a smattering of English flowed across the new display.

Not telemetry. Not incoming. According to the status bar, this was an outgoing transmission; the Bicamerals were signaling someone. It all flickered by too fast for Brüks to have made much sense of it even if he
had
spoken Russian, but occasional fragments of English stuck in his eye.
Theseus
was one.
Icarus
another. Something about
angels
and
asteroids
flashed center stage for a moment and evaporated.

More glyphs, more numbers: three parallel columns this time, rendered in red. Someone talking back.

Out in the desert, the zombies stopped flickering.

“Huh,” Slippers said, and raised a finger to his right temple. For the first time Brüks noticed an old-fashioned earbud there, an audio antique from the days before cortical inlays and bone conduction. Slippers inclined his head, listening; up on the wall a flurry of red and green turned the ongoing exchange into a Christmas celebration.

Over on
VEC/PRIME
, orange and red icons downshifted to yellow. The chained vortex stopped thrashing on its pad and whirled smoothly at attention. Halfway to the horizon, the last vestiges of its older sibling dissipated in a luminous mist of settling dust.

The desert rested quietly beneath an invisible thing in the sky.

Just a few minutes ago, Dan Brüks had watched himself die out there. Or maybe escape in the nick of time. Something like him, anyway. Right up until that last moment when the maelstrom had chewed it up and spat it out. And right at that moment, the zombies had come—unglued …

Assub,
Slippers had said then. At least, that's what Brüks had heard.
Assub
.

Ass
—hub?

“A.S.?” he said aloud. Brother Slippers turned, raised an eyebrow.

“A.S.,” Brüks repeated. “What's it stand for?”

“Artificial Stupidity. Grabs local surveillance archives to blend in. Chameleon response.”

“But why me? Why”—in the sky, invisible airships—“why
anything
? Why not just cloak, like that thing up there?”

“Can't cloak thermal emissions without overheating,” Slippers told him. “Not for long at least, not if you're an endotherm. Best you can do is make yourself look like something else. Dynamic mimicry.”

Dymic.

Brüks snorted, shook his head. “You're not even Bicameral, are you?”

Slippers smiled faintly. “You thought I was?”

“It's a monastery. You spoke like…”

Slippers shook his head. “Just visiting.”

Acronyms. “You're military,” Brüks guessed.

“Something like that.”

“Dan Brüks,” he said, extending a hand.

The other man looked at it for a moment. Reached out his own. “Jim Moore. Welcome to the armistice.”

“What just happened?”

“They came to terms. For the moment.”

“They?”

“The monks and the vampire.”

“I thought those were zombies.”

“
Those
are.” Moore tapped the wall; a heat source appeared in the distance, a lone bright pinprick well behind the line. “
That
isn't. Zombies don't do anything without someone pulling their strings. She's coming in now.”

“Vampires,” Brüks said.

“Vam
pire
. Solitary op.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Those things aren't good in groups.”

“I didn't even know we let them out. I actually thought we were pretty scrupulous about keeping them, you know. Contained.”

“So did I.” Pale flickering light washed the color from Moore's face. “Not quite sure what her story is.”

“What's she have against the Bicamerals?”

“I don't know.”

“Why did she stop?”

“Enemy of my enemy.”

Brüks let that sink in. “You're saying there's a
bigger
enemy out there. A, a common threat.”

“Potentially.”

Out in the desert, that dimensionless point of heat had grown large enough to move on visible legs. It did not appear to be running, yet somehow crossed the desert far faster than any baseline was likely to walk.

“So I guess I can go now,” Brüks said.

The old soldier turned to face him. Regret mingled with the tactical reflections in his eyes.

“Not a chance,” he said.

 

 

 

EITHER WAR IS OBSOLETE, OR MEN ARE.

—R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

TWO GUARDS STOOD
at the door halfway down the hall, one to each side, like a couple of dark golems in matching pajamas. Brüks had not been invited to the party inside but he followed Moore at a distance, hanging back along the edge of the corridor for want of any other destination. Bicamerals brushed past in both directions, going about whatever business involved the domestication of weaponized whirlwinds. They seemed unremarkable in the morning light slanting through the windows. No arcane ululations. No vestments or hooded robes, no uniforms of any kind that Brüks could make out. A couple wore denim. One, preoccupied with a tacpad as he passed, was stark naked except for the tattoo squirming along his chest: some kind of winged animal Brüks was pretty sure didn't exist anywhere in the taxonomic database.