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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.

“Carousel,” 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 disc 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 earth like some great elephant’s trunk. It devoured dirt and gravel and boulders the size of automobiles. Then it was off, carving its name into the desert.

Back in its garage, swirls of moisture condensed anew where the monster had broken free.

The vortex was past the undead perimeter now, veering northwest. It hopped once more, lifting its great earth-shattering foot into the air; pieces of pulverized desert rained down in its wake. A distant, disconnected subroutine in Brüks’ mind—some ganglion of logic immune to awe or fear or intimidation—wondered at the questionable efficiency of throwing an entire weather system at two lousy foot soldiers, at the infinitesimal odds of even hitting a target on such a wild trajectory. But it fell silent in the next second, and didn’t speak again.

The whirlwind was not staggering randomly into that good night. It was bearing down on a distant figure riding an ATB.

It was coming for him.

This isn’t possible, Brüks thought. You can’t steer a tornado, nobody can. The most you can do is let it loose and get out of the way. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.

I am not out there…

But something was, and it knew it was being hunted. Brüks’s own hacked cameras told the tale: the ATB had abandoned its straight-line trajectory in favor of breakneck evasive maneuvers that would have instantly pitched any human rider over the handlebars. It slewed and skidded, kicked up plumes that sparkled sapphire in the amped starlight. The vortex weaved closer. They swept across the desert like partners in some wild and calamitous dance full of twirls and arabesques and impossible hairpin turns. They were never in step. Neither followed the other’s lead. And yet some invisible, unbreakable thread seemed to join the two, pulled them implacably into each other’s arms. Brüks watched, hypnotized at the sight of his own imminent ascension; the ATB was caught in orbit now around its monstrous nemesis. For a moment Brüks thought it might even break free—was it his imagination, or was the funnel thinner than it had been?—but in the next his doppelgänger lost its footing and skidded toward dissolution.

In that instant it changed.

Brüks wasn’t certain how, exactly. It would have happened too fast even if whirling debris and the grain of boosted photons hadn’t obscured the view. But it was as though the image of Daniel Brüks and his faithful steed split somehow, as if something inside was trying to shed its skin and break free, leaving a lizard-tail husk behind for the sky-beast to chew on. The maelstrom moved in, a blizzard of rock and dust obscuring any detail. The funnel was visibly weakening now but it still had enough suction to take its quarry whole.

Still had teeth enough to smash it to fragments.

The undead broke ranks.

It wasn’t a retreat. It didn’t even seem to be a coordinated exercise. The candles just stopped advancing and flickered back and forth in their windows, nine hundred meters out, directionless and Brownian. Far behind them the sated whirlwind weaved away to the north, a dissipating ropy thing, nearly exhausted.

“Dymic.” Slippers nodded knowingly. “Assub.”

Back on the pad a newborn vortex chafed at its restraints, smaller than its predecessor but angrier, somehow. Yellow icons blossomed across VEC/PRIME like rampant brushfires. Overhead, something was eating Gemini feetfirst.

Another window opened on the wall, a hodgepodge of emerald alphanumerics. Slippers blinked and frowned, as though the apparition was somehow unexpected. Greek equations, Cyrillic footnotes, even a smattering of English flowed across the new display.

Not telemetry. Not incoming. According to the status bar, this was an outgoing transmission; the Bicamerals were signaling someone. It all flickered by too fast for Brüks to have made much sense of it even if he had spoken Russian, but occasional fragments of English stuck in his eye. Theseus was one. Icarus another. Something about angels and asteroids flashed center stage for a moment and evaporated.

More glyphs, more numbers: three parallel columns this time, rendered in red. Someone talking back.

Out in the desert, the zombies stopped flickering.

“Huh,” Slippers said, and raised a finger to his right temple. For the first time Brüks noticed an old-fashioned earbud there, an audio antique from the days before cortical inlays and bone conduction. Slippers inclined his head, listening; up on the wall a flurry of red and green turned the ongoing exchange into a Christmas celebration.