Echopraxia (34 page)

Now that he had, she leapt.

He brought up the laser and
snarled
. Valerie sailed toward him; Brüks could have sworn she was laughing. He fired. The beam scattered off the reflective thermacele of the vampire's spacesuit, shattered into myriad emerald splinters bright as the sun. They scorched split-second tracks on random surfaces before Valerie darted out of the way.

Brüks lunged for the hatch controls, grabbed the lever, fumbled. The
Crown
clenched her front door a fraction, relaxed it again. Valerie closed for the kill, arms outspread. Somehow he could hear her: a mere whisper, impossibly audible even over Sengupta's panicked chanting on comm. A voice as clear as if she were murmuring at his shoulder, as if she were right inside his head:

I want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross …

Electricity sang, deep down in his bones. Synapses snapped like blown circuits. Brüks's flesh hummed like a tuning fork, every muscle thrown instantly into tetanus. Wet warmth bloomed at his crotch. He couldn't move, couldn't blink, could barely even breathe. Some distant part of him worried briefly about that last fact, then realized that it probably didn't matter. Valerie was bound to kill him long before he had a chance to suffocate.

In fact here she came now, reaching out—

—and careening away, struck from behind. Jim Moore loomed up in her stead, his face utterly reptilian, eyes dancing frantic little jigs in the dark cavern of his open helmet. He pushed Brüks into the bay, slammed the airlock shut behind them both; his fist came down on Brüks's chest not quite hard enough to crack the sternum through the suit. Something broke in there, though; something
unlocked,
and Brüks was sucking back great tidal washes of recycled air. By the time he stopped gasping Moore had webbed him into an empty alcove for safekeeping, an occupied suit next to empty ones.

There were plenty of those.

The
Crown
was a symphony orchestra, warming up: the creak and groan of stressed metal, the distant cough of awakening engines, the random percussion of buckles clanking against bulkheads pushed into grudging motion. Sengupta's vocals, crackling out panicked numbers. A rogue droplet of oil floated in place while the ship shifted around it, splashed against Brüks's cheek with a whiff of benzene.

From somewhere very far away, the roar of an ocean.

Moore's hands brought up an interface on the bulkhead. His fingers played those controls with inhuman precision. A window opened to one side, an exterior feed rendered in smart paint: a smear of ragged blue light lashing back and forth, the lamprey torn free and recoiling into some distant burrow. A play of stars and shadow and knife-edged geometries blocking out the heavens. Dim red constellations flashed along wire-frame gantries: cliffs of black alloy stretched far and wide to their own horizons.

Valerie's helmet, blocking the view. Fists pounding against the hull, any possible sound drowned out by the vibration of the engines.
Sunrise,
sudden and scalding: the whole universe burst into flame as the
Crown of Thorns
lumbered out of eclipse. Somewhere Sengupta was cursing; somewhere else, thrusters fired. For one brief instant Valerie was a black writhing shadow against a blinding sky: then burst into flame an instant before the pickup fried.

Moore's fingers never stopped dancing.

It took endless seconds for the backup camera to kick in. By the time it did they were back in hiding, huddled in Icarus's shadow, the starless black silhouette of the radiator spire sliding past to port. A gentle hand began to nudge Brüks down against the bottom of the alcove, mass-times-acceleration pulling him out against the webbing. The dim zodiac of the array's streetlights receded slowly to stern—but other lights ignited back there as he watched, a pentagon of hot blue novae flaring silently in the darkness. It was only then that another silence registered: Moore had stopped talking to the wall, stilled the machine-gun staccato of his fingers against metal. Brüks could barely make out a fuzzy shape at the edge of vision; it took a Herculean effort to move his eyes even a fraction of a degree, to bring the Colonel into focus. He never did succeed completely. But he squeezed enough from his peripheral vision to see the old warrior standing still as stone against the deck, one hand half-raised to his face. He thought he heard a soft intake of breath caught halfway, and decided to call it the sound of a returning soul.

Icarus shrank away. The sun burst back into view around it. Five blue sparks still flickered even in the light of that blinding corona: five bright dots in a dwindling black disk in a sea of fire.
Stabilizing thrusters,
Brüks realized distantly, and wondered why they burned so long and so bright, and wished that the answer hadn't come to him so quickly.

The newborn gravity kept putting on weight. It pulled Brüks ever harder against his restraints, leaned him out of the alcove and angled over the deck. His knees did not buckle under the strain; his body did not collapse. He was breathing statuary, and some gut sense stronger than logic knew that he would not crumple if those straps gave way: he would topple to the deck and
shatter
.

The spacesuits beside him had disappeared. Rotting corpses hung in their stead, slivers of gray flesh dangling through the mesh, maggots dripping like rice grains from empty eye sockets. Grinning mandibles clicked and clattered and uttered incomprehensible sounds.
REM paralysis,
one part of Brüks said to another, although he was not asleep.
Hallucination
. The corpses laughed like something less dead, coughing through mud.

Floaters swarmed in his eyes. Half-visible in the encroaching fog, Jim Moore stood against the deck without benefit of webs or incantations or anything but the crushing awareness of his own actions. Darkness closed in. With the last few synapses sparking in his cache, Brüks wondered what Luckett might have said in the face of such a toll.

Probably that everything was going according to plan.

 

PREDATOR

You have to understand, Deen, this is the fifth attack on Venezuela's jet-stream injection program so far this year. Stratospheric sulfates are
still
down by three percent and even if there aren't any further attacks, we'll be lucky if they recover by November. Any agro who can't afford seriously drought-hardened transgenics is going to have a disastrous summer. Clones and force-grown crops from higher lats should be able to pick up the slack—as long as we don't suffer a repeat of last year's monoculture collapse—but local shortages are pretty much inevitable.

We're well aware that the Venezuelan program is technically illegal (you think none of us have read the GBA?) but I don't have to tell you about the benefits of stratospheric cooling. And even if geoengineering
is
a short-term solution, you gotta use what you can or you don't live long enough to reach the long term. Of course, Caracas isn't doing itself any favors with their idiotic adherence to an outmoded judicial system. Personal culpability? What are these
[EPITHET AUTOREDACT]
going to come up with next, witch-dunking?

So I can speak for the whole department when I say that we sympathize completely. And if you folks over in Human Rights want to blacklist them again, go right ahead. But the bottom line is,
You can't ask us to withdraw support for Venezuela
. The world just can't afford to see even modest climate-mitigation efforts sabotaged like this.

I know how bad the optics are. I know how tough it is to sell an alliance with a regime whose neuropolitics are rooted in the Middle Ages. But we're just going to have to take this dick in our mouths and swallow whatever comes out. Stratospheric cooling is one of the few things keeping this planet from falling on its side right now, and as you know that technology takes a
lot
of power.

If it makes you feel any better, consider the fact that if this had happened twenty, twenty-five years ago we wouldn't even be having this conversation; we didn't have enough joules in hand back then to be able to afford these kinds of options. We'd probably be tipping into another Dark Ages by now.

Thank God for Icarus, eh?

—Fragment of internal UN communiqué (correspondents unknown): recovered from corrupted source released during a scramble competition between unidentified subsapient networks, 1332:45 23/08/2091

 

 

I HAVE NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT SEEN CLEARLY WITHIN MYSELF. HOW THEN WOULD YOU HAVE ME JUDGE THE DEEDS OF OTHERS?

—MAURICE MAETERLINCK

HE WOKE UP
weightless. Unseen hands guided him like a floating log through the Hub, through a southern hemisphere that didn't move any more than he could. Rakshi Sengupta called in from somewhere far away, and she did not bray or bark but spoke in tones as soft as any cockroach: “This is taking too long we're gonna start falling back if we don't restart the burn in five minutes tops.”

“Three minutes.” Moore's voice, much closer. “Start your clock.”

And that's all of us,
Brüks thought distantly.
Just Jim, and Rakshi, and me. No vampires left, no undead bodyguards. Bicamerals all gone. Lianna dead. Oh God, Lianna. You poor kid, you poor beautiful innocent corpse. You didn't deserve this; your only crime was faith …

One of the axial hatches passed around him. In the next instant he was swinging around an unaccustomed right angle: the
Crown
's spokes, rigged for thrust, still laid back along her spine. Rungs scrolled past his face as Moore pushed him headfirst to stern.

All our children, gone. Smarter, stronger, leaner. All those souped-up synapses, all those Pleistocene legacy issues stripped away. Where did it get them? Where are they now? Dead. Gone. Turned to plasma.

Where
we'll
be, probably, before long …

Maintenance & Repair. Moore folded out the medbed and strapped him in just as the
Crown
began clearing her throat. By the time he turned to leave, weight was seeping back into the world. Brüks tried to turn his head, and almost succeeded. He tried to clear his throat, and did.

“Uh … Jim…” It was barely above a whisper. The Colonel paused at the ladder, a vague silhouette in the corner of Brüks's eye. The ongoing burn seemed to sink him into the deck.

“… Th-thanks,” Brüks managed.

The silhouette stood silently in the burgeoning gravity.

“That wasn't me,” he said finally, and climbed away.

*   *   *

Moore was not the only one to visit. Lianna returned to him from the grave, a dark flickering plasma who smiled down on his frozen features and shook her head and whispered
You poor man, so lost, so arrogant
before the sun called her back home. Chinedum Ofoegbu stood for hours at his side and spoke with fingers and eyes and sounds that stuttered from the back of his throat, and somehow Brüks understood him at last: not the ululating cipher, not the intelligent hive cancer, but a kind old man whose fondest childhood memory was the family of raccoons he'd surreptitiously befriended with a few handfuls of kibble and subtle sabotage inflicted on the latch of the household organics bin.
Wait—you had a childhood?
Brüks tried to ask, but Ofoegbu's face and hands had disappeared under eruptions of buboes and great ropy tumors, and he could no longer get out the words.

Rhona even came back from Heaven, though she'd sworn she never would. She stood with her back to him, and fumed; he tried to turn her around and make her smile, but when she did the expression was bitter and furious and her eyes were full of sparks.
Oh, do you miss her?
she raged.
You miss your mindless puppet, your sweet adoring ego-slave? Or is it just the fact that you've lost the one small fake part of your whole small fake life where you had some kind of
control
? Well, the chains are off, Dan, they're off for good. You can rot out here for all I care.

But that's not what I meant,
he tried, and
I never thought of you that way,
and—when he finally ran out of denials and had nothing else to say:
Please. I need you. I can't do it on my own …

Of course you can't,
she sneered.
You can't do
anything
on your own, can you? I'll give you that much: you've actually turned incompetence into a survival strategy. Whatever would you do if you actually lost your excuses, if you augged up like everyone else? How would you ever survive without your
disability
to invoke when you can't keep up?

He wondered what Heaven could possibly be like, to make her so vindictive. He would have asked but Rhona had turned into Rakshi Sengupta right in front of his fossiled eyes, and her train of thought seemed to have jumped to a whole different track.
You gotta stay away from the bow,
she whispered urgently, glancing nervously over her shoulder.
You gotta stay out of the attic,
he's
in there now and maybe something else. I wish you'd come back this could be bad and I'm only good with numbers, you know? I'm not so hot in meatspace.

You're doing fine,
Brüks tried to say.
You're even starting to talk like one of us roaches
. But all he could manage was a croak and a cough and whatever Rakshi heard seemed to scare her more than his silence had.

Sometimes he opened his eyes to see Moore looming over him, moving shiny blinking chopsticks in front of his face. Once or twice an invisible roaring giant stood on his chest, pressing him deep into the soft earth at his back (the sparse bands of new-grown grass on the bulkhead bowed low against the wall, every blade in uniform alignment); other times he was as weightless as a dandelion seed. Sometimes he could almost move, and the creatures gathered at his side would startle and pull back. Other times he could barely roll his eyes in their sockets.