Echopraxia Read Online Free

there when they’d died. The gut was not a long-range organ. Its grasp of culpability degraded exponentially with distance; there’d been so many arcane degrees separating the actions of Daniel Brüks from their consequences that conscience itself entered the realm of pure theory. Besides, he’d hardly acted alone; the guilt diffused across the whole team. And their intentions, at least, had been beyond reproach.
    Nobody had blamed them, not out loud, not really. Not at first. You don’t pass judgment on the unwitting hammer used to bash in someone’s skull. Brüks’s work had been perverted by others intent on bloodshed; the guilt was theirs, not his. But those perpetrators remained uncaught and unpunished, and so many had needed closure in the meantime. And the distance between How could they and How could you let them was so much smaller than Brüks had ever imagined.
    No charges had been pressed. It wasn’t even enough to revoke his tenure. As it turned out, it was only enough to wear out his welcome on campus.
    Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgments, didn’t care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence. She only cared about what worked and what didn’t. She welcomed everyone with the same egalitarian indifference. You just had to play by her rules, and expect no mercy if things didn’t go your way.
    And so Dan Brüks had put in for sabbatical and filed his agenda, and headed into the field. He’d left behind his sampling drones and artificial insects, packed no autonomous tech to rub his nose in the obsolescence of human labor. A few had watched him go, with relief; others kept their eyes on the sky. He left them, too. His colleagues would forgive him, or they wouldn’t. The aliens would return, or they wouldn’t. But Nature would never turn him away. And even in a world where every last sliver of natural habitat was under siege, there was no shortage of deserts. They’d been growing like slow cancer for a hundred years or more.
    Daniel Brüks would go into the welcoming desert, and kill whatever he found there.
    *   *   *
    He opened his eyes to the soft red glow of panicking machinery. A third of the network had just died in his sleep. Five more traps went down as he watched: a booster station, suddenly offlined. Twenty-two beeped plaintively a moment later—proximate heat trace, big, man-size even—and dropped off the map.
    Instantly awake, Brüks played the logs. The network was going down from west to east, each dead node another footfall in a growing trail of dark ragged footprints stomping across the valley.
    Heading directly for him.
    He pulled up the satcam thermals. The remains of the old 380 ran like a thin vein along the northern perimeter, yesterday’s stale sunshine seeping from cracked asphalt. Diaphanous thermals and microclimatic hot spots, dying since nightfall, flickered at the threshold of visibility. Nothing else but the yellow nimbus of his own tent at center stage.
    Twenty-one reported sudden warmth, and disappeared.
    Cameras lurked here and there along the traplines. Brüks had never found much use for them but they’d come bundled as part of the package. One sat on a booster that happened to be line of sight to number nineteen. He brought it up: StarlAmp painted the nighttime desert in blues and whites, a surrealistic moonscape full of contrast. Brüks panned the view—
    â€”and almost missed it: a slither of motion from stage right, an amplified blur. Something that moved faster than anything Human had any right to. The camera was dead before Nineteen even felt the heat.
    The booster went down. Another dozen feeds died in an instant. Brüks barely noticed. He was staring at that last frozen frame, feeling his gut clench and his bowels turn to ice.
    Faster than a man, and so much less. And just a little bit colder inside.
    The field sensors weren’t