Echopraxia (13 page)

He nodded. “Jim shot me up with something.”

“Good. 'Cause otherwise this would
really
hurt.” She fired. Brüks's leg jumped reflexively; he caught a glimpse of black filaments, fine as filaria, lashing frantic tails before they burrowed into his flesh and disappeared.

“Might itch for a bit once the block wears off.” Lianna was already scanning the compartment for other treasures. “Takes a while for the mesh to line itself up when you're dealing with all those little bones—ah.” An off-ivory cube, this time—no, a
transparent
one. It took its color from the viscous casting putty inside: the stuff quivered like gelatin when she cracked the lid.

There must have been enough in there to put ten people into full-body casts. Brüks glanced around while Lianna scooped up a handful; at least a half-dozen other crates were filled with the same stuff.

The putty squirmed in Lianna's hand, aroused by her body heat. “Where are we going?” Brüks wondered. “How many broken bones are you expecting when we get there?”

“Oh, they don't
expect
anything. They just like being prepared.” She slapped the goop onto his ankle. “Hold still until it sets.” It slithered around the joint like a monstrous amoeba, fused to itself, crept a few centimeters up his calf and down around his heel before slowing and hardening in the oxygen atmosphere.

“There.” Lianna was back at the cube, resealing it before the rest of its contents crusted over. “You'll have to wear that for a few days, I'm afraid. Normally we'd have it off in eight hours but you're still fighting traces of the bug. Might stage a comeback if we crank your metabolism too high.”

The bug.

Luckett, screaming in agony. A lawn littered with twisted bodies. A disease so merciless, so fast that it didn't even wait for its victims to die before throwing them into rigor mortis.

Brüks closed his eyes. “How many?”

“What—”

“Did we leave behind.”

“You know, Dan, I wouldn't write those guys off. I know how bad it looked, but if I've learned anything, it's that you don't second-guess the Bicams. They're always ten steps ahead, and they've always got plans within plans.”

He waited until the voice beyond his eyelids finished talking. Then he asked again.

It didn't answer at first. Then: “Forty-four.”

“Ten steps ahead,” he repeated in his own personal darkness. “You believe that.”

“I do,” the voice said solemnly.

“They expected forty-four deaths. They planned it. They
wanted
it.”

“They didn't
want
—”

“And when they brought that—that
monster
along for the ride, they knew exactly what they were doing. They have it all under control.”

“Yes. They do.” There wasn't the slightest hint of doubt in the voice.

Brüks took a breath, let it out again, reflected on the faint unexpected scent of growing things at the back of his throat.

“I get the sense that faith doesn't come easily to you,” the voice said gently after a few moments. “But sometimes things are just, you know. God's will.”

He opened his eyes. Lianna stared at him, kind and gentle and utterly delusional.

“Please don't say that,” Brüks said.

“Why not?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Because you can't possibly believe—because it's a fairy tale, and it's been used to excuse way too much…”

“It's not a fairy tale, Dan. I believe in a creative force beyond the physical realm. I believe it gave rise to all life. You can't blame it for all the horrible shit that's been done in its name.”

Faint tingling in his fingers. A tide of saliva rising at the back of his throat. His tongue seemed to swell in his mouth.

“Could you—I'd like to be alone, if you don't mind,” he said softly.

Lianna blinked. “Uh … sure, I guess. You can ditch the mesh anytime. I brought you a fresh jumpsuit, it's over there on the pad. ConSensus is hooked in to the paint job if you need anything, just tap three times. The interface is pretty—”

I'm going to throw up,
he thought. “Please,” he managed. “Just
go
.” And closed his eyes again, and clenched his teeth, and choked back the rising nausea until the sounds of her retreat faded away and all he could hear were the voices of machines and the roaring in his head.

He did not throw up. He drew his legs to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them, and held them tight against the sudden uncontrollable shaking of his body. He kept his eyes clenched against the new world, against this microcosmic prison into which he'd awakened: infested by freaks and hungry predators, an insignificant bubble spinning farther from home with each passing second. Earth was only a memory now, lost and receding in an infinite void; and yet Earth was right here in his head, inescapable, a desert garden strewn with twisted corpses.

Every one had Luckett's face.

 

 

 

WE LEARN GEOLOGY THE MORNING AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

EVENTUALLY THE PANIC
receded. Eventually he had to come back.

He wasn't sure how long he floated there. For the present he was content to take refuge in the darkness behind his own eyelids, in the hiss of ventilators and the soft beeping voices of medical monitors. Some kind of alarm chimed in the middle distance; it sounded five times and fell silent. A moment later the world lurched to the right and gentle pressure began to build against his shoulder blades, against his calves and heels. Up and down returned.

Brüks opened his eyes. The view hadn't changed.

He sat up, turned, let this new gravity drop his legs over the side of the pallet (his vitals vanished from the bulkhead as he rose). He fought off a threat of dizziness from his inner ears, held his hand out in front of him, watched until it stopped shaking.

The exoskeleton vibrated ecstatically as he peeled it away, each strip snapping back to some elastic minimum as he set it free. They took body hair and skin cells with them, left denuded strips along his body. He left it trembling on the deck, a tangled ball of rubbery ligaments that shivered and twitched as if alive.

He found his way to a lav that peeked around a small mountain of in-flight luggage, raided the bulkhead food fabber on the way back. Sucking a squeezebulb full of electrolytes, he peeled fresh folded clothing from the wall where Lianna had left it: a forest-green jumpsuit, preemptively custom-fabbed by some onboard printer. He wobbled precariously while pulling on the pants, but the pseudograv was weak and forgiving. Finally he was finished: clothed, upright, his batteries beginning to soak up charge from the nutrients in his gut. He folded the pallet back into its alcove. Its smart-painted underside bulged subtly from the wall, softly luminescent.

Tap three times,
she'd said.

ConSensus bloomed at his touch, an impoverished interface for the augmentally impaired: Systems, Comm, Library. A little v3-D
Crown of Thorns
hovered to one side in an imaginary void. All waited to dance at his fingertips, but he took
VOCAL INTERFACE AVAILABLE
at its word and said, “Ship layout.”

The animation expanded smoothly into center stage, bristling with annotations. Engines and reactors and shielding swallowed at least three-quarters of the display: thrust cones, fusion reactors, the rippling toroidal contours of great rad-blocking magnetic fields. Shock absorbers and antiproton traps and great protective slabs of lithium hydride. Brüks had seen the tech thumbnailed for short attention spans on any number of popsci feeds. Antimatter microfusion
,
they called it. A nuclear pulse drive turbocharged with a judicious sprinkling of antiprotons. Give it a decent launch window and the
Crown of Thorns
could make it to Mars in a couple of weeks.

“What's our heading?” he asked aloud.

NAV UNAVAILABLE
, ConSensus replied.

“What's our location?”

NAV UNAVAILABLE.

“What's our destination, then?”

NAV UNAVAILABLE.

Huh.

The
Crown
's habitable reaches lay along a spine one hundred fifty meters long, a tube of alloy and atmosphere connecting bits of superstructure like beads on a nail. The Hub Valerie had dragged him through was two-thirds of the way from drive to prow. Its spokes were back in motion, sweeping through space in majestic counterpoint to the flywheel farther up. (Only the Hub's aft hemisphere rotated, Brüks noticed. The other—
COMMAND,
according to ConSensus, as if any modern space vessel required anything as quaint as a
bridge
in physical space—seemed fixed to the spine.)

“Focus habitat.”

The
Crown
redrew herself from the inside, engines and shielding neatly excised, nothing left but the hollows of the
Crown
's forward section turning bright and front and center. Annotated constellations twinkled in those spaces like fireflies in a luminous gut. A cluster of gray icons glowed aft in the
HOLD
(enormous now, in the absence of its substrate):
CHODOROWSKA, K.; EULALI, S.; OFOEGBU, C
. Eight or nine others.
MOORE, J
.—green—glowed in the hab called
DORM
.
LUTTERODT, L.
was in the Hub, next to
SENGUPTA, R.
The hab containing
BRÜKS, D.
showed up as
MED/MAINTENANCE
, no matter what the sign on the hatch said;
GALLEY/COMMONS
occupied the hab immediately clockwise,
LAB
the one counter.
STORES/TRIM
, where he'd suffered his rude awakening, balanced out the wheel. Evidently it had already been reattached; but yellow neon highlighted distal injuries where the spoke was still under repair.

The last hab didn't come with a label. Six stars shone there, though: five gray, one green. Only the green carried an ID, and it didn't follow the usual format.

VALERIE
, was all it said.

Fifty meters farther forward—past the Hub, past some kind of attic full of plumbing and circuitry and airlocks, way up past the main sensor array at the very front of the ship—ConSensus had drawn a hemispherical nose assembly and called it
PARASOL
. It appeared to be packed away for the time being but a translucent overlay showed it unfurled, a great flattened cone wide enough for the whole ship to hide behind. Brüks had no idea what it was. Space-dust deflector, maybe. Heat radiator. Magic Bicameral Cloak of Invisibility.

“Root.” The
Crown
dwindled on the wall, slipped back into line with the other thumbnails.

A Quinternet icon! He tore it open like a Christmas present. He didn't have access to his preferences but even the Noosphere's generic headlines were like water in the desert:
ANARRES SECEDES, FFE KILLS VENTER, PAKISTAN'S ZOMBIE PREZ—

Just a cache, of course. A stale-dated abstract small enough to fit into the
Crown
's memory—unless someone was breaking silent-running protocols dating all the way back to Firefall, or tightbeaming updates directly to the
Crown
. Anything was possible.

Probably a cache, though. In which case all he had to do was sort the available content by posting date, and—

Twenty-eight days. Assuming they'd grabbed the cache on their way out the door, he'd been stashed in the basement for almost a month.

He snorted softly and shook his head, vaguely surprised at his own lack of surprise.
I'm growing immune to revelation
.

Still. Stale rations were better than none. And it wasn't as though he had anyplace else to be.

The president of Pakistan had finally, to no one's great surprise, been unmasked as an avatar: the original had succumbed to viral zombieism almost a year before, almost certainly an assassination although no one was claiming responsibility. Venter Biomorphics—the last of the old-time corporations—had finally lost the fight against entropy and been swept away. A few proximists pointed their fingers at China's agricultural collapse (that nation was still nose-diving three years after Venter's artificial pollinators had crashed), but smart money blamed the incandescent hand of Forest Fire Economics. Something called
jitterbug
—some kind of weaponized mirror-neuron thing that hijacked its victims' motor-control circuits—was doing the rounds in Latin America. And way out at L-5 (way
in,
Brüks corrected himself; way
back
), the Anarres colony had bolted a row of antique VASIM-R engines onto their belly and were preparing to take secession to new heights.

ConSensus chimed. “Roaches to the Hub,” the wall barked in its wake. A female voice, strangely familiar although Brüks couldn't put his finger on it. He returned to the cache, searched for references to a disturbance in the Oregon desert.

Nothing.

No mention of a mysterious nighttime skirmish on the Prineville Reserve: no zombie assault on religious fortifications, no counterattacking tornadoes impossibly slaved to human commands. No reports of armed forces keeping low to the ground, bivouacked around some cultist bull's-eye on the desert plain.

Odd.

Maybe their final hurried exodus from that arena never made it into the cache. Brüks had been unconscious at the time but he imagined the
Crown
might not have lingered in orbit long enough to refresh its memory with newborn updates. Still. Valerie's assault, the armistice, the quarantine—at least thirty solid hours of activity that should have pushed the needle about ten standard deevs above background. Even if there'd been no eyes on Prineville that night, someone would have noticed the sudden redeployment of personnel from previous assignments. Even if Valerie
had
blinded all those skeyes up in geosynch, the disappearance of her hijacked carousel from its garage would have registered somewhere.