Echopraxia Read Online Free PDF Page A

powerful enough to hack surveillance satellites in geostationary orbit, but somehow unable to blind his antique Telonics network to the same heatprints. He saw a military automaton, ruthless as a shark, fast as a superconductor, betraying its own approach from kilometers away when it could have avoided his traplines entirely and killed him in his sleep.
    He saw himself from high overhead, stumbling across someone else’s game board: caught in a net that closed around but not on him.
    They didn’t even know I was here . They’re after the Bicamerals.
    He pulled to a stop. The monastery loomed fifty meters ahead, low and black against the stars. All windows abruptly shuttered, all approaches suddenly dark, it rose from the landscape as though born of it: a pile of deep rock strata breaching the surface of the world. The tornado loomed beyond like a whirling gash in space-time, barely a hundred meters on the other side. The sound of its rage filled the world.
    On all sides, candles closed in the darkness.
    0313, his goggles reminded him. Less than an hour ago he’d been asleep. It wasn’t nearly long enough to come to terms with your own imminent death.
    YOU ARE IN DANGER , the gogs told him helpfully.
    Brüks blinked. The little red letters persisted, hovering off at the corner of his eye where the chrono readout should be.
    COME ON, THEN. DOOR’S OPEN.
    He looked past the command line, panned across the darkened façades of the monastery. There, ground level: just to the left of a broad staircase that underscored the main entrance. An opening, barely big enough for a man. Something burned there at body temperature. It had arms and legs. It waved.
MOVE YOUR ASS BRÜKS YOU SELF-ABSORBED IDIOT.
SEALING ENTRANCE IN
15 S
 
14 S
 
13 S …
    Brüks moved his self-absorbed idiot ass.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    FOR THEY HAVE SOWN THE WIND, AND THEY SHALL REAP THE WHIRLWIND.
    â€”HOSEA 8:7
    INSIDE, THE DARKNESS was bright chaos.
    Human heat signatures flickered across Brüks’s goggles at point-blank range, coruscations of false color in frantic motion. The heat of their passing painted the surroundings with fainter washes of red and yellow: rough-hewn walls, a flat dead light panel for a ceiling, a floor that yielded unexpectedly beneath his feet like some ungodly hybrid of rubber and flesh. Off in an indeterminate distance, something stuttered and wailed; here in the hallway the human rainbows moved with silent urgency. The woman who’d invited him in—a petite writhing heatprint no more than 160 centimeters tall—grabbed his hand and pulled him forward: “I’m Lianna. Stay close.”
    He followed, switching the gogs to StarlAmp. The heatprints vanished; bright greenish stars moved in the void left behind, always in pairs, binary constellations jostling and blinking in the dark. A word popped into his head: luciferin . Photophores in the retinas.
    These people had eyes that doubled as flashlights. Brüks had once known a grad student with similar augments. Sex had been—disquieting, in the dark.
    His guide threaded him through the starfield. That distant wailing rose and fell, rose and fell; not words exactly, but syllables, at least. Clicks and cries and diphthongs in the dark. Bright eyes rose before him, seething with cold blue light. Amplified photons limned a gray face full of lines and angles. Brüks tried to steer his way around but that face blocked his way, eyes glowing with such furious intensity that his goggles had to dial back the amplification to almost nothing.
    â€œ Gelan, ” the face croaked. “ Thofe tessrodia .”
    Brüks tried to take a step back; bumped into traffic, rebounded.
    â€œ Eptroph! ” cried the face, as the body beneath gave way.
    Lianna pushed him sideways into the wall—“Stay right there ”—and dropped to the floor. Brüks switched back to thermal. The rainbows returned. Brüks’s