Echopraxia (9 page)

“Brüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it—
fuck
it hurts…”

Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man's shoulder. “I—”

The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking
hell
that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane:
HAPPINESS
,
ORGASM
,
APPETITE SUPPRESSANT
—

ANALGESIC
.

He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett's side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett's brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.

Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.

“That's better,” he said.

Brüks eyed Luckett's trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It's not. This is—”

“Not my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours, either, thank your lucky stars.”

“But what is it? There's got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”

Luckett shook his head. “She's on our side.”

“But she's—”

“Not her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes on an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull's-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”

We've been making moves all day.

“What did you do?
What did you do?
”

“Do?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got
noticed
. And now we're—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”

“They wouldn't just—”
Then again, why wouldn't they?
“Wasn't there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn't they give us a chance to surrender, or—”

The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.

Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore's
aerosol delivery
. But there'd been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always an incubation period, it always took
time
for a few lucky spores to hatch out in the lungs and breed an army big enough to take down a human body. Even the magic of exponential growth took hours to manifest.

The enemy—

—
People like you,
Lianna had said—

—must have set this plan in motion the moment they'd set up their perimeter. It wouldn't have mattered one good goddamn if the whole Bicameral Order had marched out across the desert with their hands in the air; the weapon was already in their blood, and it was blind to white flags.

“How could you let them do this?” Brüks hissed. “You're supposed to be
smarter
than us, you're post-fucking-
singular,
you're supposed to be ten steps ahead of any plan we poor stupid cavemen could ever put together.
How could you let them?
”

“Oh, but this is all according to plan.” Luckett patted him on the arm with one spastic, short-circuiting hand.

“What
plan
?” Brüks choked back a hysterical giggle. “We're
dead
already—”

“Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables.” Luckett coughed again. “Not to worry, though. We planned for the things we couldn't plan for…”

Faintly, through the open door—drifting down the corridor, through high narrow windows; through barred gates, through glass panes looking into deserts and gardens: a
whistling
sound, Doppler-shifted. The muffled thud of some nearby impact.

“Ah. The mopping-up begins.” Luckett nodded serenely. “No point being stealthy now, eh?”

Brüks put his head in his hands.

“Don't worry, old chap. It's not over yet, not for you anyway. Jim's lair. He's waiting for you.”

Brüks raised his head. “Jim—but—”

“I
told
you,” Luckett said. “According to plan.” Spasms rippled across his body. “
Go
.”

And now Brüks heard another sound, a deeper sound, rumbling up the scale behind the hacking of the maimed and whistling shriek of inbound paralysis. He felt the vibration of great blades spinning up far down in the earth, heard the muffled hiss of steam injected into deep silos. He heard the growing drumbeat of an elemental monster straining against its chains.

“Now
that,
” he said, “is more fucking like it.”

*   *   *

Moore was in his bunker, but he wasn't running the show. No controls blinked on the smart paint, no sliders or dials or virtual buttons to press. The readouts were all one-way. Somewhere else, the Bicamerals were bringing their engine online; Moore was only watching from the bleachers.

He turned at Brüks's approach. “They're dug in.”

“Doesn't matter, though, right? We're gonna tear them to pieces.”

The soldier turned back to the wall and shook his head.

“What's the problem? They out of range?”

“We're not fighting.”

“
Not fighting?
Have you
seen
what they're doing to us?”

“I see.”

“Everyone's dead or halfway there!”

“We're not.”

“Right.” Nerves sang ominously in Brüks's fingers. “And how long is that going to last?”

“Long enough. This bug was customized for Bicamerals. We've got more time.” Moore frowned. “You don't engineer something like that in the field, not overnight. They've been planning this awhile.”

“They didn't even fire a warning shot, for fucksake! They didn't even try to negotiate!”

“They're scared.”

“
They're
scared.”

“They'd assume that giving us any advance warning would put them at an unacceptable disadvantage. They don't know what we're capable of.”

“Then maybe it's time we showed them.”

Moore turned back to face the other man. “Perhaps you're not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It's predominantly nonviolent.”

“You and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into
predominantly nonviolent
corpses.”
Friends.
“Is Lianna—”

“She's fine.”

“None of us are
fine
.” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.

Moore's hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.

“We will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don't know if they're responsible.”

“You just said they'd been
planning
this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You
know
.”

“Doesn't matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”

“Fuck you. I'm not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old
no free will
shtick.”

“These people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they'd swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat's-paws.”

“They're not zombies, Moore.”

“Whole different species.”

“
They're killing us
.”

“You're just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”

“Leave me—?”

“We're getting out of here. Why do you think they're warming up the engine?”

*   *   *

Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.

Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No
onboard
propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—

And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.

“Get in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don't have much time.”

Of course they know. They've got satellites, they've got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we're doing and just blow it all to shit …

“
Missile…,
” he croaked.

The sky shattered where he was pointing.

The contrail just
stopped
high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn't sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky
crinkled
: wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky
imploded
and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.

A thunderclap split Brüks's skull like an ice pick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore's mouth was moving, but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore's shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew
thicker,
somehow. Faster. Darker.

Valerie's invisible airship. He'd forgotten. A hundred thousand cubic meters of hard vacuum directly in the path of the incoming missile: broken on impact, sucking cascades of desert air into the void.

Moore pushed him toward the sphere. Brüks climbed unsteadily into darkness and the web of some monstrous spider. It was already full of victims, tangled half-seen silhouettes. All hung cocooned in a mesh of broad flat fibers stretching chaotically across the structure's interior.

“
Move.
” A tiny, tinny voice growling through a chorus of tuning forks. Brüks grabbed a convenient band of webbing, gripped as tightly as the sparks in his hand would allow, pulled himself up. Something bumped the side of his head. He turned and recoiled at the face of one of Valerie's zombies, upside-down, eyes jittering, hanging in the mesh like an entangled bat. Brüks yanked back his hand; the webbing stuck as though he were a gecko. He pulled free, clambered up and away from those frantic eyes, that lifeless face.

Another face, not so dead, hung in the gloom behind its bodyguard. Brüks—irises still clenched against the morning sun—couldn't make out details. But he could feel it watching him, could feel the predator grin behind the eyes. He kept moving. Sticky bands embraced at his touch, peeled gently free as he pulled away.

“Any empty spot,” Moore said, climbing up in his wake. The ringing in Brüks's ears was fading at last, as if somehow absorbed by this obscene womb and its litter of freaks and monsters. “Try to keep away from the walls; they're padded, but it's going to be a rough ride.”

The hatch swung into place like the last piece of a jigsaw, sealed them in and cut off the meager light filtering from outside; instantly the air grew dense and close, a small stagnant bubble at the bottom of the sea. Brüks swallowed. The darkness breathed around him with unseen mouths, a quiet claustrophobic chorus muffled by air heavy as cement.

Vision and ventilation returned within a breath of each other: a stale breeze across his cheek, a dim red glow from the padded facets of the wall itself. Bicamerals blocked the light on all sides: some spread-eagled, some balled up, a couple of pretzel silhouettes that spoke either of superhuman flexibility or broken bones. Maybe a dozen all told.

A dozen monks. A prehistoric psychopath with an entourage of brain-dead killing machines. Two baseline humans. All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.