Peter Watts - Firefall

They’re taking out our cameras, Brüks realized, and wondered distantly when he had started to think of these rapture-stricken deviants as part of we .

Less than three and a half kilometers now.

A new set of windows bloomed across the wall. The pictures flickering in these frames were grainier than the others, desaturated, almost monochrome. And while they, too, panned the desert, there was something about those views, something different yet familiar—

There. Third window over: a tiny monastery hunkered on the horizon, a tiny vortex engine. This camera was looking back from way the hell across the desert.

That’s my network, Brüks realized. My cameras. I guess the zombies left some alive after all…​

Brother Slippers had tapped into a half dozen of them, zoomed and cycled through each in turn. Brüks wasn’t sure how useful they’d be: cheap off-the-shelf things, party favors to lure impoverished researchers into springing for a package deal. They had the usual enhancements but the range was nothing special.

They seemed to be sufficient for Slippers’s purposes, though. Second window from the left, a heat source moved left to right about a hundred meters out. The camera panned automatically, tracking the target while he amped the zoom. The image resolved in slow degrees.

Another one of the monastery’s eyes flared and died, its overlaid range finder fading a moment later: 3.2 kilometers.

That’s almost nine meters per second. On foot …​

“What happens when they get here?” he asked.

Slippers seemed more interested in a distant heatprint caught on number three: a small vehicle, an ATB, same basic design as—

Wait a minute—

“That’s my bike,” Brüks murmured, frowning. “That’s— me …”

Slippers spared him a glance and a head shake. “Assub.”

“No, listen —” It was far from a perfect mug shot, and Telonics’s steadicam tracking algorithms were the envy of no one in the field. But whoever sat astride that bike had Brüks’s mustache, the square lines of his face, the same multipocketed field vest that had been years out of style even when he’d inherited the damn thing two decades before. “You’re being hacked,” Brüks insisted. “That’s some kind of recording, someone must’ve—” Someone was recording me? “I mean, look at it!”

Two more cameras down. Seven so far. Slippers wasn’t even bothering to clear the real estate by closing the channels. Something else had caught his eye. He tapped the edge of a window that looked onto a naked-eye view of the desert sky. The stars strewn across that display glittered like sugar on velvet. Brüks wanted to fall into that sky, get lost in the stark peaceful beauty of a night without tactical overlays or polarized enhancements.

But even here, the monk had found something to ruin the view: a brief flicker, a dim red nimbus framing an oval patch of starscape for the blink of an eye. The display clicked softly, an infinitesimal sharpening of focus — and in the next instant the stars returned, unsullied and pristine.

Except for a great hole in the night hanging over the western ridge, a vast dark oval where no stars shone.

Something was crawling toward them across the sky, eating the stars as it went. It was as cold as the stratosphere—at least, it didn’t show up on any of the adjacent thermal views. And it was huge ; it covered a good twenty degrees of arc even though it was still—

No range finder. No heatprint. If not for whatever microlensing magic Slippers had just performed, not even this eclipse of ancient starlight would have given it away.

I, Brüks realized, have definitely picked the wrong side .

Twenty-three hundred meters. In five minutes the zombies would be knocking at the door.

“Carousel,” Slippers murmured, and something in his voice made Brüks look twice.

The monk was smiling . But he wasn’t looking at the cloaked behemoth marching across Orion’s Belt. His eyes were on a ground’s-eye view of the vortex engine. There was no audio feed; the tornado whirled silently in the StarlAmped window, a shackled green monster tearing up airspace. Brüks could hear it anyway—roaring in his memory, bending the ducts and the blades of the substructure that birthed it, vibrating through the very bedrock. He could feel it in the soles of his feet. And now Brother Slippers brought up a whole new window, a panel not of camera views or tactical overlays but of engineering readouts, laminar feed and humidity injection rates, measures of torque and velocity and compressible flow arrayed along five hundred meters of altitude. Offset to one side a luminous wire-frame disk labeled VEC/PRIME sprouted a thousand icons around its perimeter; a hundred more described spokes and spirals toward its heart. Heating elements. Countercurrent exchangers. The devil’s own mixing board. Slippers nodded, as if to himself: “Watch.”

Icons and outputs began to move. There was nothing dramatic in the readouts, no sudden acceleration into red zones, no alarms. Just the slightest tweak of injection rates on one side of the circle; the gentlest nuzzle of convection and condensation on the other.

Over in its window, the green monster raised one toe.

Holy shit . They’re going to set it free…​

A wash of readouts turned yellow; in the heart of that sudden sunny bloom, a dozen others turned orange. A couple turned red.

With ponderous, implacable majesty, the tornado lifted from the earth and stepped out across the desert.

It came down on two of the zombies. Brüks saw it all through a window that tracked the funnel’s movements across the landscape: saw the targets break and weave far faster than merely human legs could carry a body. They zigzagged, a drunkard’s sprint by undead Olympians.

They might as well have been rooted to the ground. The tornado sucked those insignificant smudges of body heat into the sky so fast they didn’t even leave an afterimage. It hesitated for a few seconds, rooted through the earth like some great elephant’s trunk. It devoured dirt and gravel and boulders the size of automobiles. Then it was off, carving its name into the desert.

Back in its garage, swirls of moisture condensed anew where the monster had broken free.

The vortex was past the undead perimeter now, veering northwest. It hopped once more, lifting its great earth-shattering foot into the air; pieces of pulverized desert rained down in its wake. A distant, disconnected subroutine in Brüks’s mind—some ganglion of logic immune to awe or fear or intimidation—wondered at the questionable efficiency of throwing an entire weather system at two lousy foot soldiers, at the infinitesimal odds of even hitting a target on such a wild trajectory. But it fell silent in the next second, and didn’t speak again.

The whirlwind was not staggering randomly into that good night. It was bearing down on a distant figure riding an ATB.

It was coming for him .

This isn’t possible, Brüks thought. You can’t steer a tornado, nobody can. The most you can do is let it loose and get out of the way. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.

I am not out there…​

But something was, and it knew it was being hunted. Brüks’s own hacked cameras told the tale: the ATB had abandoned its straight-line trajectory in favor of breakneck evasive maneuvers that would have instantly pitched any human rider over the handlebars. It slewed and skidded, kicked up plumes that sparkled sapphire in the amped starlight. The vortex weaved closer. They swept across the desert like partners in some wild and calamitous dance full of twirls and arabesques and impossible hairpin turns. They were never in step. Neither followed the other’s lead. And yet some invisible, unbreakable thread seemed to join the two, pulled them implacably into each other’s arms. Brüks watched, hypnotized at the sight of his own imminent ascension; the ATB was caught in orbit now around its monstrous nemesis. For a moment Brüks thought it might even break free—was it his imagination, or was the funnel thinner than it had been?—but in the next his doppelgänger lost its footing and skidded toward dissolution.