Free Echopraxia by Peter Watts Page B

Maybe the screamer was just a little farther along. Maybe the screamer was Daniel Brüks in another ten minutes.
    Maybe it was right here, behind this door.
    Brüks pushed it open.
    Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.
    The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.
    â€œBrüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it— fuck it hurts…”
    Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I—”
    The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking hell that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane: HAPPINESS , ORGASM , APPETITE SUPPRESSANT —
    ANALGESIC .
    He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett’s side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett’s brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.
    Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.
    â€œThat’s better,” he said.
    Brüks eyed Luckett’s trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It’s not. This is—”
    â€œNot my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours, either, thank your lucky stars.”
    â€œBut what is it? There’s got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”
    Luckett shook his head. “She’s on our side.”
    â€œBut she’s—”
    â€œNot her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes on an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull’s-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”
    We’ve been making moves all day.
    â€œWhat did you do? What did you do? ”
    â€œDo?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got noticed . And now we’re—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”
    â€œThey wouldn’t just—” Then again, why wouldn’t they? “Wasn’t there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn’t they give us a chance to surrender, or—”
    The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.
    Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore’s aerosol delivery . But there’d been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always