Echopraxia Read Online Free Page B

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    That .
    A hot tiny spark leapt against a distant slope, right about where his camp would be.
    Closer, though. And closing fast. That thing could run .
    Brüks swung the bike around and kicked it back into gear. He almost didn’t notice the second spark sweeping across his field of vision, it was so faint.
    He saw the third clearly enough, though. And the fourth. Too distant to make out shapes on thermal, but all hot as humans. All closing.
    Five, six, seven …
    Shit .
    They were fanned out along the valley as far as he could see.
    What did I do , what did I do , don’t they know it was an accident ? It wasn’t even me , for chrissakes, I didn’t kill anyone , I just—left the door open …
    Ten kilometers. Then they’d be on him like ravenous wolves.
    The ATB leapt forward. Brüks pinged 911: nothing. ConSensus was live enough but deaf to his pleas; somehow he could surf but not send. And his pursuers still weren’t showing up on satellite thermal; as far as the skeyes could see he was alone down here with the microweather and the monastery.
    The monastery .
    They’d be online. They’d be able to help. At the very least the Bicamerals lived behind walls . Anything was better than fleeing naked through the desert.
    He aimed for the tornado. It writhed in his enhanced sight, a distant green monster nailed to the earth. Its roar carried across the desert as it always did, faint but omnipresent. For a moment, Brüks heard something strange in that sound. The monastery resolved in the gogs, huddling in the shadow of the great engine. A myriad of pinpoint stars burned there against a low jumble of stepped terraces, almost painfully bright.
    Three in the morning, and every window was ablaze.
    Not so faint anymore: the vortex roared like an ocean now, its volume rising imperceptibly with each turn of the wheels. It was no longer stuck to the horizon. StarlAmp turned it into a pillar of fire, big enough to hold up the sky or to tear it down. Brüks craned his neck: over a kilometer away and still the funnel seemed to lean over him. Any second now it would break free. Any second it would leap from the ground and slam back down, there or there or right fucking here like the finger of some angry god, and it would rip the world apart wherever it touched.
    He stayed on course even though the monster ahead couldn’t possibly be made of air and moisture, couldn’t possibly be anything so—so soft . It was something else entirely, some insane Old Testament event horizon that chewed up the very laws of physics. It caught the glow from the monastery, trapped that light and shredded it and spun it together with everything else that fell within reach. A small gibbering thing inside Daniel Brüks begged him to turn back, knew that the creatures stalking him couldn’t be worse than this, because whatever they were, they were only the size of men but this, this was the very wrath of God.
    But that hesitant little voice spoke again, and this time the question lingered: Why is this thing running so hard?
    It shouldn’t have been. Vortex engines never really stopped, but at night they weakened in the cooling air, diffused and idled until the rising sun brought them back to full strength. To keep a funnel this size running so hot, so late at night—that would almost draw more energy than it yielded. The vapor from the cooling cells would have to be verging on live steam—and now Brüks was close enough to hear something else against the jet-engine roar, a faint creaking counterpoint of great metal blades, twisting past their normative specs  …
    The monastery lights went out.
    It took a moment for his goggles to amp back up; but in that moment of pure, illuminating darkness Daniel Brüks finally saw himself for the fool he was. For the first time he saw the pinpoint heatprints ahead of him, closing from the east as well as from behind. He saw forces