Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Valerie’s invisible airship. He’d forgotten. A hundred thousand cubic meters of hard vacuum directly in the path of the incoming missile: broken on impact, sucking cascades of desert air into the void.

Moore pushed him toward the sphere. Brüks climbed unsteadily into darkness and the web of some monstrous spider. It was already full of victims, tangled half-seen silhouettes. All hung cocooned in a mesh of broad flat fibers stretching chaotically across the structure’s interior.

“ Move. ” A tiny, tinny voice growling through a chorus of tuning forks. Brüks grabbed a convenient band of webbing, gripped as tightly as the sparks in his hand would allow, pulled himself up. Something bumped the side of his head. He turned and recoiled at the face of one of Valerie’s zombies, upside-down, eyes jittering, hanging in the mesh like an entangled bat. Brüks yanked back his hand; the webbing stuck as though he were a gecko. He pulled free, clambered up and away from those frantic eyes, that lifeless face.

Another face, not so dead, hung in the gloom behind its bodyguard. Brüks—irises still clenched against the morning sun—couldn’t make out details. But he could feel it watching him, could feel the predator grin behind the eyes. He kept moving. Sticky bands embraced at his touch, peeled gently free as he pulled away.

“Any empty spot,” Moore said, climbing up in his wake. The ringing in Brüks’s ears was fading at last, as if somehow absorbed by this obscene womb and its litter of freaks and monsters. “Try to keep away from the walls; they’re padded, but it’s going to be a rough ride.”

The hatch swung into place like the last piece of a jigsaw, sealed them in and cut off the meager light filtering from outside; instantly the air grew dense and close, a small stagnant bubble at the bottom of the sea. Brüks swallowed. The darkness breathed around him with unseen mouths, a quiet claustrophobic chorus muffled by air heavy as cement.

Vision and ventilation returned within a breath of each other: a stale breeze across his cheek, a dim red glow from the padded facets of the wall itself. Bicamerals blocked the light on all sides: some spread-eagled, some balled up, a couple of pretzel silhouettes that spoke either of superhuman flexibility or broken bones. Maybe a dozen all told.

A dozen monks. A prehistoric psychopath with an entourage of brain-dead killing machines. Two baseline humans. All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.

All part of the plan.

Brüks tried to move, found that the webbing had tightened around him once he’d stopped climbing. He could wriggle like a hooked fish, bring his hand up far enough to scratch his nose. Beyond that he wasn’t going anywhere.

His eyes were adapting to the longwave, at least. A face overhead resolved into welcome familiarity: “Lianna? Lianna, are you…”

Only her body was here. Its fingers tapped the side of its head with the telltale rhythm of someone tuned to a more distant reality.

“It’s okay.” Moore spoke quietly from somewhere nearby. “She’s talking to our ride.”

“This is it? Twenty people?” He gulped air, still strangely stale for all the efforts of the local life-support system.

“It’s enough.”

Brüks could barely catch his breath. The whole compartment hissed with the sound of forced ventilation, air washed across his face and still he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs.

He fought rising panic. “I think—there’s something wrong with the air conditioner…”

“The air’s fine. Relax.”

“No, it—”

Something kicked them, hard in the side. Suddenly up was sideways; suddenly, sideways was down. Blood rushed to Brüks’s head. A giant stood on his chest. The air, already unbearably close, got closer: the stench of rotten eggs flooded Brüks’s sinuses like a tsunami.

Jesus Christ, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a worse time or place for a fart. Under other circumstances it might have been funny. Now it only made him gag, stole whatever meager oxygen had remained.

“Here we go,” Moore murmured from behind. From below. From overhead.

He sounded almost sleepy .

The web slewed. Bodies jerked in unison one way, slung like pendulums back the other, flipped around some arbitrary unknowable center of gravity. They seemed to be accelerating in ten directions at once. Niagara roared in Brüks’s head.

“Can’t—breathe…”

“You’re not supposed to. Go with it.”

“What—”

“Isoflurane. Hydrogen sulfide.”

Whirling static engulfed the world from the outside in. Twenty bodies—barely visible through the maelstrom—threw themselves as one toward some unremarkable point on the far side of the compartment. They strained toward that point like iron filings drawn to a cyclotron, their elastic shackles strained almost to the breaking point.

So, Brüks mused as his vision failed. This is it. The final conscious experience.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

HE AWOKE TOscreams and gray blurry light, a kick in the side, a bolt of pain spiking up his left leg like an electric javelin. He cried out but his voice was lost in some greater cacophony: the sound of torquing metal, vast alloy bones shearing across unaccustomed stress lines. Gravity was all wrong. He was on his back but it tugged him sideways, pulled him feetfirst through some translucent rubbery amnion that enveloped his body. Vague shapes loomed and shifted beyond. Down near the subsonic the world groaned like a humpback whale, wounded, spiraling toward a distant seabed. Alarms shrieked on higher frequencies.

I’m in a body bag, he thought, panicking. They think I’m dead…