Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“She’s no threat.” Moore was behind Valerie now, looking past her shoulder to her prey. The prey croaked softly. “There’s no reason to—”

“Thank you for your tactical advice.” A faint white smile ghosted across her lips.

Was that a faint moan sighing up through the Crown ’s throat? Still conscious then, maybe. Still hope.

“Trade,” Valerie said.

“Yes,” Moore replied, moving forward.

“Not you.”

Suddenly Brüks was off the deck and yanked into the air; suddenly Valerie’s hand was around his throat, gripping him just below the jaw with fingers cold and sinuous as tentacles while a distant irrelevant Rakshi Sengupta bounced off the southern hemisphere, hacking, doubled over.

And when Valerie looked at him with that bemused and distant stare, he looked back. He tried not to. Over the slow burning in his lungs, over the casual pain of a larynx compressed just this side of strangulation, he would have given anything to turn away. Somehow he didn’t have the will. He couldn’t even close his eyes against hers.

Her pupils were bright bloody pinpoints, red stars clenched tight against the light of day. Behind them, the bulkhead rolled past in lazy slow motion.

The Hub dwindled to the wrong end of a telescope. Sengupta was shouting somewhere, her voice raw and tinny and barely audible over the white noise of distant pounding surf: She killed one of them she killed one of her zombies one of her people he’s not on the board I can’t find him anywhere—

There was nothing in Valerie’s face but that spectral half smile, that look of dispassionate appraisal. She didn’t seem to notice Moore slipping up from behind, or Sengupta screaming headlong back into the fray with claws bared. She didn’t even seem to notice her own left hand flicking back of its own accord to casually slap the pilot into the soldier, all that momentum spun impossibly on the head of a pin and redirected a hundred eighty degrees. Fucking monster fucking monster fucking monster, Sengupta shouted from across an ocean and Brüks could only think: Cats and dogs cats and dogs…

But none of that mattered. All that mattered were he and Valerie, alone together: the way she let just enough air past her fingers to keep him awake, the way she reached out with her free hand and tapped that light arrhythmic tattoo across his temple; the things she whispered for his ears only, intimate secrets of such vital importance he forgot them even as she breathed them out along his cheek.

Behind her, Jim Moore grabbed a cargo strap and braced his feet against the wall. Valerie didn’t even bother to keep him in view.

“Is it true?” he asked quietly.

“Of course it’s fucking true she’s a vampire she’d kill all of—”

Moore, eyes locked on Valerie, raised a palm in Sengupta’s direction. Sengupta shut up as if guillotined.

“You think this matters.” There was distant amusement in Valerie’s voice, as if she’d just seen a rabbit stand up on its hind legs and demand the right to vote.

“You think so, too,” Moore began. “Or—”

“—you wouldn’t have reacted,” he and Valerie finished in sync.

He tried again: “Were they under formal con…” they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgment of futility. The vampire even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.

Sengupta fumed silently across the compartment, too smart and too damn stupid to be scared. Brüks tried to swallow, gagged as his Adam’s apple caught between the vice of Valerie’s thumb and forefinger.

“Malawi,” Valerie said quietly, and: “Not mission-critical.”

Brüks swallowed again. As if there’s anyone on this goddamn ship who’s less mission-critical than me.

Maybe Moore was thinking it, too. Maybe he decided to act on behalf of Daniel Brüks, the Parasite That Walked Like a Man. Or maybe he just took advantage of his adversary’s distraction, maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Brüks at all. But something—changed subtly, in Moore’s stance. His body seemed looser, somehow, more relaxed, incongruously taller at the same time.

Valerie was still eye to eye with Brüks, but it didn’t matter. It was obvious from the way her smile widened and cracked, from the tiny click of teeth against teeth: she could see everything that mattered about Moore’s face, reflected in his own.

She turned, almost lazily, tossed Brüks aside like a cigarette butt. Brüks flailed across the open spine; he barely missed a figure blurring past in the opposite direction. A cargo cube caught him and slapped him back off the deck. He doubled over, coughing, while Moore and Valerie danced in fast-forward. The monster’s arms moved as though spun by a centrifuge; her body rebounded off the deck and shot through empty space where Jim Moore had existed a split-second before.

“Fhat thouding do’re.”

Not a shout. Not even an exclamation. It didn’t sound like a command. But those sounds reached into the Hub from the south pole and seemed to physically slap Valerie off target, reach right into the monster’s head and grab her by the motor nerves. She twisted in midair, landed like a jumping spider on the curve of the bulkhead and froze there: eyes bright as halogen, mouth full of gleaming little shark teeth.

“Juppyu imaké.”

Moore rose from a defensive crouch, studied hands half raised against blows that hadn’t materialized. Brought them down again.

Chinedum Ofoegbu rose from the throat of the Crown .

You can’t do that, Brüks thought, astonished. You’re stuck in the Hold for another three days.

“ Prothat blemsto bethe? ” Ofoegbu’s hands fluttered like a pianist’s against an invisible keyboard. The light in his eyes slithered like the Aurora Borealis.

I don’t care how smart you are. You’re still made out of meat. You can’t just step out of a decompression chamber.

The Bicameral’s blood must be fizzing in its flesh. All those bubbles out on early parole, all those gases freed from the weight of too many atmospheres: all set loose to party it up in the joints and capillaries…

One’s all it’ll take, one tiny bubble in the brain. A pinpoint embolism in the right spot and you’re dead , just like that.

“Your vampire —” Sengupta began, before Moore preempted her with: “We have some mission-critical issues to deal with…”

But there is no you anymore, is there? You’re just a body part, just a node in a network. Expendable. When the hive cuts you loose, will you get it all back? Will Chinedum Ofoegbu wake up in time to die a roach’s death? Will he change his mind too late, will he have a chance to feel betrayed before he stops feeling anything at all?

Ofoegbu coughed a fine red mist into the room. Blood and stars bubbled in his eyes. He began to fold at the middle.

Lianna Lutterodt climbed up in his wake, bent in on herself, one arm clenched tight to her side. With the other she reached out, wincing; but her master was too far away. She pushed off the lip of the south pole, floated free, caught him. Every movement took a visible toll.

“If you people are through trying to kill each other—” She coughed, tried again—“maybe someone could help me get him back to the Hold before he fucking dies .”

“Holy shit, ” Brüks said, dropping back into Commons. The node was back with its network. Lianna was meshed and casted and had retreated to her rack while her broken parts stitched themselves back together.

Moore had already cracked open the scotch. He held out a glass.