Echopraxia (43 page)

“This is not what I'm talking about,” something said with her voice, and her lips did not move.

“Rhona, why are you—”

“You call this change, but it isn't,” the voice said. “Heaven isn't the future. It's a refuge for gutless wonders who want to
hide
from the future, a nature preserve for people who can't adapt. It's, it's wish fulfillment for passenger pigeons. You think I was
lording
this over you? This is nothing but a dumping ground for useless also-rans. You don't belong here.”

“Useless?” Brüks blinked, stunned. “Rho, don't
ever
—”

“I ran away. I threw in the towel years ago. But you—you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven't given up. You could be hiding with the rest of us but you're out there in a world with no reset button, a place you have no control over, a place where other people can take your whole life's work and twist it to such horrible ends and there's
no way to ever take back what they did
.”

“Rhona—what—”

“I
know,
Dan. Of course I know. You didn't have to hide it from me. You
couldn't
hide it from me, I'm more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you'd finally give up and come
inside
but—”

A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.

He blinked, moaned, tried to focus. The starfield dimmed; the roaring in his head faded a little; the giant shrank down to merely life-size. Its depths were so black they almost glowed.

Rakshi Sengupta, meet Backdoor Brüks.

Somewhere far away, a computer called out in the voice of his dead wife. Brüks tried to bring his hand to his head; Sengupta stomped on it and leaned over him. Fresh pain erupted off the midline and shot up his arm.

“I want you to imagine something, you fucking
roach
.” Sengupta's fingers danced and dipped overhead.

Oh God no,
Brüks thought dully.
Not you, too …
He let his head loll to the side, let his eyes stray somewhere anywhere else; Sengupta kicked him in the head and made him pay attention. Her fingers clenched and interlaced and bent backward so far he thought they'd break.

“Want you to imagine
Christ on the Cross
—”

He was barely even surprised when the spasms started.

Sengupta leaned in to admire her handiwork. Even now she could not look at his face. “Oh
yes
I have been waiting for this I have been
working
for this I have—”

A sound: sharp, short,
loud
. Sengupta fell instantly silent. Stood up.

A dark stain bloomed on her left breast.

She collapsed onto Brüks like a rag doll. They lay there a moment, cheek to cheek, like slow-dancing lovers. She coughed, tried to rise; sprawled downhill to Brüks's side. Her dimming eyes focused, unfocused, settled finally on some point near the hatch. Jim Moore stood there like a statue, his eyes so full of grief they might as well have been dead already.

Something crossed Sengupta's face in that moment. Not happiness, not quite. Not surprise. Enlightenment, maybe. After a moment, for the very first time, she looked Dan Brüks straight in the eye.

“Oh
fuck,
” she whispered as her eyes went out. “Are you ever screwed.”

*   *   *

“I know it doesn't make any sense,” Moore was saying, turning the gun over in his hands. “We were never close. That may have been my fault, I suppose. Although, you know, he wasn't what you'd call an
easy
child…”

He'd pulled up a chair, sat hunched and leaning against the slant with his knees on his elbows, the light from the corridor catching him in quarter-profile. Brüks lay on the floor while Sengupta's blood pooled against his side. It soaked through his clothing, stuck his jumpsuit to his ribs. His head throbbed. His throat was parched. He tried to swallow, was relieved and a bit surprised to find that he could.

“Now, though … he's half a light-year away, and for the first time in his life I feel that we're actually able to
talk
…”

Pale nebulae clouded Sengupta's open eyes. Brüks could see them clearly even in this dim light; could even turn his head a little to bring them into proper focus. Not Valerie's best-laid glitch, not the total paralysis the vampire had layered down with weeks of graffiti and subtle gesticulation—or at least, not the same precision in the trigger stimulus. It probably
was
the same program, the same chain of photons to mirror neurons to motor nerves, still dozing in the back of his head should anyone sound the call to arms; Sengupta must have just improvised after the fact, gone back over old footage, figured out the basic moves and acted them out as best she could.

“It's as though he knew I'd be listening all those months ago, as though he knew what I'd be
thinking
when his words arrived…”

She probably hadn't even been planning for vendetta. It had probably been just another pattern-matching puzzle to keep that hyperactive brain occupied, fortuitously available when it turned out that her wife's murderer and her adopted roach were one and the same. This rigor was half-assed and short-lived; he could feel it in his tendons. The tightness was already beginning to subside.

Still pretty impressive, though.

“I feel closer to Siri than I ever did when we were on the same planet,” Moore said. He leaned forward, assessed the living and the dead. “Does that make any sense to you?”

Brüks tried to move his tongue: it barely trembled against the palate. He focused on moving his lips. A sound emerged. A groan. It contained nothing but frustration and distress.

“I know,” Moore agreed. “And at first it felt more like just—reports, you know? Letters home, but full of
facts
. About the mission. I listened to that signal, oh, I would have listened forever, even if all he'd ever done was tell the tale. I learned so much about the boy, so much I never suspected.”

Take two…:
“Jim…”

“And then it—changed. As though he ran out of facts and had nothing left but feelings. He stopped the
reportage
and started
talking
to me…”

“Jim—Rak—Rakshi thought—”

“I can even hear him
now,
Daniel. That's the remarkable thing. The signal's so weak it shouldn't even be able to penetrate the atmosphere, especially with all the broadband chatter going on. And yet I can
hear
him, right here in the room.”

“Rakshi thought—your zombie switch—”

“I think he's trying to warn me about something…”

“—you might have been—hacked—”

“Something about
you
.”

“She said you—you might not be in—control—”

Moore stopped turning the gun in his hands. Looked down at it. Brüks fired every command he could, along every motor nerve in his body. His fingers wiggled.

Moore smiled a sad little smile. “Nobody's in
control,
Daniel. Do you really think you don't have one of these zombie switches in your own head, you don't think
everyone
does? We're
all
just along for the ride, it's the coming of the Lord is what it is. God's on Its way. It's the Angels of the Asteroids, calling the shots…”

Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God's sock puppets.

Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.

“What if it's not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it's something
else
…”

The Colonel smiled again. “You don't think I'd know my own son.”

“
It
knows your son, Jim.”
Of course it knows him, it
mutilated
him, can't you remember the goddamn slide show?
“It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it's
smart
Jim, it's so fucking smart…”

“So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”

If only
.

He wasn't smart enough to get out of this. Not smart enough to outthink some interstellar demon who could hack a man's brain across five trillion kilometers and a six-month time lag, who could trickle its own parasitic subroutines into the host's head and lead him around in real time. Assuming that Moore hadn't just gone batshit crazy on his own, of course. That was probably the most parsimonious explanation.

Not that it mattered. Brüks wasn't smart enough to get out of that, either.

Moore lowered his eyes. “I didn't want to do that, you know. She was a good person, she was just—misguided. I suppose I may have overreacted. I only did it to protect you.”

Behind him, up among the crossbeams that ribbed the ceiling, one shadow stirred among others. Brüks blinked and it was gone.

“I wonder if that was such a good idea…”

“It was,” Brüks croaked. “Really. It—”

Faster than he could finish: a shape detached itself from the ceiling, swayed silently against the light, and folded down over Moore like a praying mantis. Inhuman fingers, blurred in motion; silhouetted lips in motion.

Without any fuss at all, Moore stopped moving.

Valerie dropped soundlessly to the deck, crossed the room, stared down at Daniel Brüks as he slowly, painfully bent one knee. It was the closest thing to fight/flight left in him. She bent close and whispered—

“The tomb at Aramathea.”

His body unlocked.

He gulped air. The vampire stood, stepped back, gave him a small cryptic smile.

Brüks swallowed. “Saw you
burn,
” he managed.
Twice
.

She didn't even dignify it with an answer.

We expect a trick, and we find one, and we pat ourselves on the back. We find her pinned to the hull—think we do, anyway—and just stop looking. Of course she's out there: there she is
.
There goes her hab and all its tripwires. Why look any further?

Why look
inside
the
Crown
? Why check the hatches in the shuttle…?

He propped himself up on his elbows; the sodden jumpsuit peeled from the deck as if steeped in half-set epoxy. Valerie watched impassively as he got to his feet.

“So what now? You give me a ten-second head start to make it sporti—”

A blur and a hiss and he was off his feet, strangling and kicking a meter from the deck with her hand around his throat. In the next instant he was back on the floor, collapsed in a heap while Valerie grinned down with far too many teeth.

“All this experience,” she remarked while he gasped for breath, “and you're still an idiot.”

Catch and release. Cat and mouse. Just having fun, he supposed. In her way.

“Aircraft are all dead,” Valerie said. “I find a ride in the moon pool, though. Get us to the mainland at least.”

“Us,” Brüks said.

“Swim if you'd rather. Or stay.” She dropped her chin in the direction of the statue frozen on its chair. “If you stay you should kill him, though. Or he kills you when he unlocks.”

“He's my friend. He
protected
me, before—”

“Only part of him. OS conflict. It resolves soon enough, it's resolving
now
.” Valerie turned toward the door. “Don't wait too long. He's on a mission from God.”

She stepped into the light. Brüks looked back at his friend: Jim Moore sat staring at the floor, face unreadable. He blinked, very slowly, as Brüks watched.

He did not cry out against his abandonment.

Brüks followed the monster along slanting corridors and companionways, down endless flights of emergency-lit stairs into the bowels of the gyland, unto its very anus: an airlock that would have felt too small at five times the size, given present company. The chamber beyond echoed like a cave and looked a little like one, too: pipes and hoses and cylinders of compressed gas jutted like stalactites from the angled ceiling. The room was half-underwater; the ocean had breached the banks of the moon pool as the gyland listed, flooded down to some temporary equilibrium halfway up the far bulkhead. Diffuse gray-green light filtered up from outside and wriggled dimly across every surface.

It was only a small port in the storm. There was probably a bay big enough to dock a Kraken or a Swordfish somewhere else on this floating behemoth, but here the berths were for smaller vehicles. A dozen parking racks hung from an overhead conveyor train, most of them empty. A two-person midwater scout rested snuggly in one clenched set of grappling claws, the end of a service crane still embedded in its shattered crystal snout. Another dangled precariously from the ceiling, nose submerged, tail entangled in its broken perch.

A third, apparently intact, floated just off the flooded deck: broad shark body, whale's flat flukes, the great saucer eyes of some mesopelagic hatchetfish bridging the snout.
Aspidontus
, according to the letters etched just above the countershade line. It bumped gently against the edge of the moon pool—tail to the bulkhead, nose poking out over the hole in the floor—a waist-deep wade down the flooded incline.