Echopraxia Read Online Free PDF Page B

glance as Brüks approached, muttered “Glas- not, ” and turned back to the welter of intel.
    Great .
    Lianna the koala had told him he could watch, though. He stepped forward and tried to make sense of the chaos.
    Upper left: a satellite view so crisp it nearly hurt his eyes. The monastery sat dead center, a bull’s-eye on the board, aglow with telltale thermal emissions. But it was the only hot spot in the whole window; whatever orbital eye he was looking through had been precisely blinded to all those other heatprints closing in the darkness. Brüks reached for the display, his fingers set to zoom the mag; a grunt and a glare from the slippered monk and he desisted.
    So much for orbital surveillance. The monastery had its own cameras, though, judging by the mix of StarlAmp and thermal windows looking out across the desert. They painted the nightscape in palettes from every band of the visible spectrum, cool blues and rubies intense as lasers, color schemes so chaotic Brüks wondered whether they were really functional or just a reflection of some deviant Bicameral aesthetic. Candles glowed in each of those windows, and they all looked the same.
    Four klicks out, and closing fast.
    Something sparkled on one of the displays, a tiny bright sundog in the dead of night. The image flared a moment; bright electronic snow fuzzed the display. A brief, bright nova. Then a dark dead hole in the wall, NO SIGNAL flashing from its center.
    The monk’s fingers flew across the paint, calling up keyboards, zooming displays. Windows sprouted, panned brief landscapes, evaporated in turn. Three of those views sparked and died before the Bicameral had the chance to retire them gracefully.
    They’re taking out our cameras, Brüks realized, and wondered distantly when he had started to think of these rapture-stricken deviants as part of we .
    Less than three and a half kilometers now.
    A new set of windows bloomed across the wall. The pictures flickering in these frames were grainier than the others, desaturated, almost monochrome. And while they, too, panned the desert, there was something about those views, something different yet familiar—
    There. Third window over: a tiny monastery hunkered on the horizon, a tiny vortex engine. This camera was looking back from way the hell across the desert.
    That’s my network, Brüks realized. My cameras. I guess the zombies left some alive after all …
    Brother Slippers had tapped into a half dozen of them, zoomed and cycled through each in turn. Brüks wasn’t sure how useful they’d be: cheap off-the-shelf things, party favors to lure impoverished researchers into springing for a package deal. They had the usual enhancements but the range was nothing special.
    They seemed to be sufficient for Slippers’s purposes, though. Second window from the left, a heat source moved left to right about a hundred meters out. The camera panned automatically, tracking the target while he amped the zoom. The image resolved in slow degrees.
    Another one of the monastery’s eyes flared and died, its overlaid range finder fading a moment later: 3.2 kilometers.
    That’s almost nine meters per second. On foot  …
    â€œWhat happens when they get here?” he asked.
    Slippers seemed more interested in a distant heatprint caught on number three: a small vehicle, an ATB, same basic design as—
    Wait a minute—
    â€œThat’s my bike,” Brüks murmured, frowning. “That’s— me …”
    Slippers spared him a glance and a head shake. “Assub.”
    â€œNo, listen —” It was far from a perfect mug shot, and Telonics’s steadicam tracking algorithms were the envy of no one in the field. But whoever sat astride that bike had Brüks’s mustache, the square lines of his face, the same multipocketed field vest that had been years out of style even when he’d inherited the damn thing two decades