Read Echopraxia for Free Online

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.
    â€œCarousel,” 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