Echopraxia by Peter Watts Page B

but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore’s shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew thicker, somehow. Faster. Darker.
    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.
    â€œ 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.
    â€œAny 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.
    â€œIt’s okay.” Moore spoke quietly from somewhere nearby. “She’s talking to our ride.”
    â€œThis is it? Twenty people?” He gulped air, still strangely stale for all the efforts of the local life-support system.
    â€œIt’s enough.”
    Brüks could barely catch his breath. The whole compartment hissed with the sound of forced