Echopraxia Read Online Free PDF

assailant was on his back, heat sig bright as a solar flare, muttering nonsense. His fingers fluttered as if stabbing an invisible keyboard; his left foot tapped an agitated tattoo against the elastic flooring. Lianna cradled his head in her lap and spoke to him in the same incomprehensible tongue.
    The chronic background roar of the vortex engine rose subtly in pitch. Stone trembled at Brüks’s back.
    A hot bright figure appeared down the corridor, swimming against the stream. Within moments it had reached them; Brüks’s guide passed her charge to the newcomer and was on her feet in an instant. “Let’s go.”
    â€œWhat was—”
    â€œNot here.”
    A side door. A flight of stairs, sheathed in the same rubbery skin that turned their footsteps into soft squeaks. It corkscrewed down through cooling bedrock that dimmed with each step in the goggles’ sights, but that compact body glowed like a beacon ahead of him. Suddenly the world was silent again but for their own footsteps and the distant, almost subsonic thrumming of the vortex engine.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” Brüks asked.
    â€œOh. Mahmood.” Lianna glanced back, her eyes bright garish blobs, her mouth a crimson slash of heat. “Can’t always control when the rapture hits, much less which node. Not the most convenient thing in the world but you don’t want to miss the insights, you know? Could be time travel, for all we know. Could be a cure for golem.”
    â€œYou understood what he was saying.”
    â€œKinda. It’s what I do, when I’m not bringing lost sheep in from the desert.”
    â€œYou’re a synthesist?” Jargonaut was the street name. Glorified translators, charged with bringing esoteric transhuman tablets down from the mountain, carved in runes simple enough for pitiful baseline Humans to half understand.
    Rhona had called them Moses mammals, back when she’d been in the world.
    But Lianna was shaking her head. “Not exactly. More of a—you’re a biologist, right? Synthesists would be rats. I’m more of a koala bear.”
    â€œSpecialist.” Brüks nodded. “Narrower niche.”
    â€œExactly.”
    A faint orange stain appeared on the thermoptics: warmth from below.
    â€œAnd you know who I am because…”
    â€œWe’re on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here. You think we don’t know how to access a public database?”
    â€œI just thought you’d have better things to look up when you were being attacked by zombies.”
    â€œWe keep an eye on the neighborhood, Dr. Brüks.”
    â€œYeah, but what—”
    She stopped. Brüks nearly ran into her, then realized they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Bright heat spilled around a corner dead ahead; Lianna turned and tapped his goggles. “You won’t be needing those.”
    He pushed them onto his forehead. The world reverted to a dim wash of blues and grays. The rough stone to his left broke the feeble ambient light into jagged fragments; to his right the wall was smooth gray metal.
    Lianna was already past him, heading back up the stairs. “I gotta go. You can watch from down here.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œDon’t touch anything!” she called back, and was gone.
    He stepped around the corner. The ceiling panels here were as dead and dark as every other he’d seen in this place. The room—really, more of a cul-de-sac—was lit solely by a band of smart paint covering the far wall from waist-height to ceiling. It glowed with a haphazard collage of tactical displays ranging from hand-size to two meters across. Some of the feeds were coarse green mosaics; others rendered images high rez and razor-sharp.
    A man in a loose tan coverall paced back and forth before the displays, at least two meters from his fuzzy slippers ( slippers? ) to the cropped salt-and-pepper thicket on his head. He spared a