Necroepilogos

>Request orders

Elpida stared at the glowing green words on the little black screen — one of dozens of readouts and displays which punctuated the jumbled surfaces and consoles of Pheiri’s control cockpit. She felt her brain filling up with rotten static. She prayed that the words would go away — that Pheiri would retract his offer of subservience, or his plea for direction, or whatever this was. She hoped that Pheiri would understand her refusal.

The text vanished.

Raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s exterior hull.

Elpida sighed with relief. She was not coherent enough to explain why she had refused, why she could not command this—

Green text reappeared.

>Request orders

Melyn was clinging to the back of Elpida’s seat. Her white-grey face peered over Elpida’s shoulder. She hissed: “Pheiri, stop it! She doesn’t want it anyway! Doesn’t want it anyway! Stop it! Stop! It! Stop! Stop— stop— errrk!”

Melyn squeaked as something yanked her backward. Elpida turned, careful to move slowly lest she twist her damaged stomach muscles and pop her stitches.

Hafina was lifting Melyn by her armpits, dragging her back like an angry kitten. Melyn flailed and kicked briefly; one small fist connected with the side of Elpida’s head and a foot glanced off Hafina’s meaty thigh. Atyle ducked out of the way. Hafina lowered Melyn’s feet back to the floor; the smaller artificial human just scowled and pouted and crossed her arms, frowning at Elpida.

Hafina ran one hand over Melyn’s head, stroking her glossy black hair. She purred: “Melyyyy, Melyyy. You’re still all turned around inside—”

“I know! I know!” Melyn snapped. “But I know this isn’t right! Isn’t right!”

Hafina said, “Pheiri always knows best. He keeps us safe, doesn’t he? Maybe he knows what he’s asking. Maybe we should—”

Melyn said: “We were doing fine by ourselves! By ourselves! Why do we need them? Need them?”

Elpida held up a hand — a gesture of surrender. She could not rally her thoughts through the black haze inside her head. She was so tired. She had done what she had intended — she had confirmed the safety of her cadre. No, her comrades, her friends, her— the others. Everyone was safe, even if the group was currently split. Her body said it was time to rest — but Pheiri had called her a ‘Telokopolan Officer’. Questions whirled in her mind. Her gut wound throbbed. She wanted to close her eyes.

But Melyn and Hafina were both deeply distressed. So was Pheiri.

Elpida croaked: “I’m not going to steal him from you, Melyn. I promise. Hafina, thank you, but Melyn can say what she likes, it’s okay.”

Melyn snorted, glaring daggers. Hafina just nodded her big, blonde, shaggy head and tried to smile. Atyle said nothing to help. The tall, dark revenant watched the exchange with a subtle smile on her lips.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. She blinked hard, to clear her mind. The words were still there.

>Request orders

She said: “I’m sorry, Pheiri. I can’t command you. I can’t give you orders.”

A sleepy voice growled in the back of Elpida’s head: Why not, huh?

You know why, Howl.

The notion of ‘commanding’ a combat frame disgusted Elpida; pilots did not command their frames — they joined them in a physical partnership, human flesh wedded to artificial machine-meat, human thoughts blended with a piece of the city. The mind-machine interface uplink inserted the pilot into the combat frame’s own nervous system, like a missing piece to complete a circuit; the capsule enclosed the pilot as part of the frame’s own homeostatic processes, protected and cradled and fed like any other organ; decisions were made as a complete mind, not as director and actor, or master and servant, or driver and vehicle. There was no little voice whispering down the MMI uplink, no literal text printout behind a pilot’s eyes, the combat frame did not shout demands into the capsule in human language — but the subconscious feedback was undeniable. No pilot was alone inside a combat frame.

The Civitas and the public — and even the Legion — had often misunderstood what piloting a combat frame actually looked like; the pilot program had never released images to the public networks, for fear of undermining the fragile reputation of the pilots. The public might not respond positively to a real-time pict-capture of a young woman seemingly drowned in orange fluid, eyelids and extremities twitching in time with the machine-meat muscles of the frame. Not to mention the wet-rat aftermath, the vomiting, the shakes, the non-verbal episodes, the dissociative states; none of that was very photogenic.

Official Civitas communication materials had always depicted the pilots as upright and proud, sitting in shiny chrome seats, wearing helmets and uplink glasses and bead-mics, like the drivers of Legion crawlers. They’d never used the pilot cadre’s real phenotype — the purple eyes and copper-brown skin and white hair. The Civitas wanted their pilots to represent all humanity, not an engineered offshoot.

Entertainment media had run with that, at least during the good years before the Covenanters grew in number: the fictional pilots for public consumption had full names, families, marriages, parents, sometimes even children; they had varying childhoods of their own, or sympathetic backgrounds, or tearful secrets in their pasts; they had careers before piloting, sometimes Legion, sometimes civilian, sometimes plucky girls from the Skirts. Henny’s Heroines, The Steadfast Six, Dark Edge of Night — Elpida hated all the titles. She’d never paid much attention; the fictional drama seemed so much smaller than reality. Some of her sisters found the public shows hilarious — Snow, Yeva, Emi, and Shade made Henny’s Heroines into a regular group watch-along, complete with jeering, shouting, and throwing things at the screen.

At least that was better than the way the Covenanters had depicted them.

But even the pilot program and the bone-speakers had not understood the subconscious connection between pilot and frame — or perhaps they had not believed. Even Old Lady Nunnus had spoken of the combat frames like machines to be driven.

Elpida glanced around Pheiri’s control cockpit.

He did not look anything like the inside of a combat frame, not even a manual control chamber — no crimson and scarlet machine-meat light throbbing behind walls of smooth white bone. He didn’t look like the inside of a Legion crawler either; Pheiri was much more complicated than the simple layout of driver, gunner, and commander, and much bigger than even the largest. Over a dozen seats were crammed into this jumbled space; a web of control systems crawled up the walls and across the ceiling, in a network of panels and switches and headsets and levers and readouts and displays. Elpida could guess at the nature of some systems — such as the literal driver’s seat right at the front, complete with dozens of levers and a headset uplink for external cameras — but most were totally opaque to her, products of technology she had never witnessed in life.

Pheiri had also been retrofitted multiple times; some of the oldest, most well-worn consoles and chairs looked more ergonomic or expensive, and others seemed blockier or more simplistic, as if added later, in greater haste, with less resources. Loose cables were stapled to the walls in haphazard snakes; auxiliary screens were screwed directly over obsolete controls; whole banks of switches and buttons lay dark, disconnected from non-existent systems.

And then there was that MMI uplink helmet, up in the turret, back in the corridor.

That was an anachronism; the Legion had attempted to use those back before the pilot program, before the cadre had been conceived in their uterine replicators. An attempt to control the earliest of the combat frames. Those experiments had failed. The Legion ‘pilots’ had not survived the experience, though some of their bodies had lingered on life-support for decades.

An uplink helmet, a blunt instrument. Elpida had used one before, when the program had first trained her and her sisters. The connection would be crude, nothing like a main trunk into an uplink slot wired into her spinal column. Elpida let that one lie for now — she didn’t want to upset Melyn again by talking about the helmet. It wasn’t as if she would be able to climb that ladder with her gut wound, anyway.

He’s a combat frame, Elpida thought. He may not look like one, but he is. I’m not going to take advantage of him, Howl. I’m not a fucking Covenanter.

Mm, Howl grunted. She still sounded half-asleep. Sure thing, Elps. But that ain’t what you said.

What?

You said you can’t command him ‘cos you keep getting everyone killed. Stop twisting yourself in circles, bitch. You’re gonna get dizzy and throw up.

Elpida gritted her teeth and put her face in one hand. “Shut up, Howl.”

“Warrior?”

Elpida looked up at Atyle. Her dark face was framed against the gunmetal and cream-white of Pheiri’s interior. Her peat-green bionic eye flexed and twisted. Elpida blinked several times to clear her clouded vision, and said: “Sorry. Just talking to the voices in my head.”

Atyle said: “It is wise to take counsel. But, warrior, you wish to answer the titan’s needs, do you not? What he needs is within your power to grant. Why reject his fealty?”

Elpida frowned. “Because I have no right. And because I’m not a good Commander.”

Atyle shrugged. “Perhaps the titan cares not.”

Elpida looked at the little screen again.

>Request orders

Behind her, Melyn whined, low and pitiful and angry. Raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s exterior armour. His engines throbbed and pulsed beneath the deck. Green text glowed. The cockpit clicked and hummed. Elpida’s mind felt slow and thick. Her words felt clumsy. She was half-naked, with a ruined t-shirt draped over her shoulders and her gut wrapped up tight with bandages. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t.

She was the Commander.

“Pheiri,” Elpida started. “Pheiri, I don’t even really comprehend what you are, not yet. I would like to, though. I have so many questions, I—”

Stay on target, Elps, Howl grumbled.

Elpida took a deep breath. Her heart lurched with anticipation. “Let’s start with some basic information. I need you to answer a question for me. Your text, on the screen, referred to me as a ‘Telokopolan Officer’. Do you know what Telokopolis is? You’re wearing Telokopolan armour. Did you come from Telokopolis?”

The request for orders was replaced by a block of text.

>
Military Order No.76344: Recovery of Telokopolan technology, artefacts, intelligence, and stasis-preserved personnel.

The enemy is not invincible. Afon Ddu still stands, our walls unbreached, our perimeter secure, our people safe, our industry and agriculture productive, our arms strengthened and our armour toughened. A nanomachine plague has been stopped before and it will be stopped again, history is clear on this matter, all theories to the contrary are nothing more than idle speculation and defeatism. Telokopolis, the corpse-shell-seed of our great ancestor and mother, lies far to the east, far beyond the reach of our forces, but her technology and techniques do not. Recovery of Telokopolan ingenuity has already led to improvements in every area of warfare. The enemy is not invincible. Our ancestors did this once before, and so shall we.

The Afon Ddu General Command Council hereby orders all fronts and front commanders to:

1: Prioritize archaeological operations wherever possible.
2: Forbid retreat from archaeological sites.
3: Report all finds directly to the General Command Council without delay.
4: Follow up on any and all rumours of stasis-preserved Telokopolan personnel.
>

Elpida read the order several times. Rain drummed on the hull.

“We were … ” she croaked eventually. “We were archaeology, to you? We were your … ancestors? I … I don’t … we beat the green? The Covenanters beat the green? I don’t—”

The screen cleared. Fresh text appeared.

>
///Encyclopaedia entry define: ‘Covenanter’
///ERROR entry corrupt
///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

‘Covenanter’, Telokopolan, mid-era, evidence speculative: believed to a short-lived apocalypse cult during the Mid-T period.

///entry corrupt
///entry ends
>

Elpida laughed. Then she coughed. Her gut wound burned like a chunk of hot steel in her belly. Her head throbbed.

“Short lived? I-I don’t … I can’t— I can’t deal with this.” She ran a hand over her face; she could deal with this, her mind was already catching up, ignoring stressors and working on solutions. “Okay, what was Afon Ddu? Was that your—”

“Home?” said a tiny voice.

Elpida turned in her seat. Melyn was staring at the words on the screen, her huge black eyes blank with confusion. She mouthed the word again, ‘home’. Haf focused on stroking Melyn’s hair.

Elpida turned back to the screen. “So, you were searching for Telokopolis, too? Your whole society was. And you failed? Afon Ddu, I assume it’s gone now, like everything else?”

Another screen lit up down by Elpida’s elbow. The black background filled with boxes and lines in red and grey: a pyramid-shaped graph with rot around the edges.

Elpida peered closer. “Is this your order of battle?”

A box labelled ‘Civil Control’ stood at the apex of the pyramid; a single line led downward to box labelled ‘Afon Ddu General Command Council’. Both boxes were red; the line between them was severed. From the Command Council the hierarchy spread out into a wide pyramid of army groups, themata, divisions, droungos, specialist formations, armoured spears, foederati, even forts and factories directly integrated into the military command structure. Some of the terminology made sense to Elpida — Telokopolan military words in the places she expected them to be. But some it was strange to her — words from Upper-Spire or Skirts dialects pressed into new uses.

Most of the boxes were red. Some were grey, labelled with question marks. All the lines were cut.

At the very base of the pyramid, surrounded by red on all sides, was a single box glowing in gold-green.

‘Pheiriant. Arfog ymladd cerbyd Mod.47.2 ‘Tortoise’’

Pheiri’s own OOB marker had been expanded to show the contents. A list of eight names glowed in sombre red — Cerys, Talieson, Ffion, and more. To Elpida those names seemed similar to the language in which Melyn had spoken, before the nanomachine translation had caught up. Similar to Melyn, or Hafina. Not Telokopolan names.

Pheiri’s human crew? All dead?

Below the human names were two additional categories: ‘on-board synthetic assistants’, and ‘deployable autonomous infantry’. Both categories held a list of serial numbers. All the numbers were red — except for two, one each category. Those two serial numbers had been crossed out and replaced with a pair of names in gold-green: ‘Melyn’ and ‘Hafina’.

Elpida stared for a long time. Tears prickled in her eyes.

“Thank you for the answer,” she said eventually. She reached out and pressed a palm against the panel in front of her. It was cold and hard. “I know. My home’s gone too. My sisters are all dead. I’m sorry.”

Elpida wiped her eyes and looked up at the others. Atyle appeared unmoved. Melyn and Hafina were both staring at the ORBAT chart as if they didn’t quite understand what they were looking at. Melyn was frowning, her smooth, white-grey little face scrunched up with the effort of comprehension.

Pheiri’s last remaining family.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. It was empty now.

“How long have you been out here?” she asked.

>99999999 ERROR hours

“Right.” Elpida took a deep breath. “Okay. Thank you for answering, Pheiri. I get it. I really do. No command, no direction. Home’s gone. Maybe you weren’t designed to be autonomous. Maybe you’ve been running by yourself for too long, looking after Melyn and Hafina. I can be your ally, I can be your friend. But I can’t command you. I can’t give you orders. I’ve got no right. You’ve survived so much longer than I have, out here, in this. I and my friends, my comrades, I think we’d probably be dead if not for your support back there. If anything, you should be commanding me, you have more expertise than me. I can be your ally, but I can’t be your Comman—”

“Why not?!” Melyn spat.

Elpida turned in surprise. Pain shot through her stomach, stitches tugging at flesh beneath the dressing. She winced hard and lost her breath.

Melyn had pulled herself out of Haf’s grip and stepped forward again. Her many-fingered hands were bunched into fists. Her big black eyes were shiny with tears. With Elpida sitting down and Melyn standing they were almost level with each other. Melyn’s white-grey face was screwed up with offended fury.

“Melyyy, Melyyyyy!” Haf was saying — but she did not move forward to restrain her partner.

“Melyn?” Elpida wheezed. “Speak your mind.”

“Why not?” Melyn repeated. “You say you’re our Commander. Me and Haf. Me and Haf. But not Pheiri? Not Pheiri? Me and Haf but not Pheiri? You won’t give him— give him— give him—” Melyn thumped her own chest with a bloody hand — Elpida’s blood, Pira’s blood — then coughed and wheezed. Haf moved to catch her; so did Elpida, despite the pain in her stomach. But Melyn waved them away, hands flapping with anger. “If you won’t— won’t— won’t help Pheiri, then you’re right! You’re right. You’re right. You’re a bad Commander. Bad Commander. Shitty Commander!”

Melyn straightened up, tears in her eyes. Haf winced slowly, as if she expected Elpida to slap Melyn.

Elpida eased back into her chair. She took deep breaths as the pain in her gut wound subsided back to a smouldering ember. “Melyn, I thought you didn’t— like the idea— of me being— your Commander?”

“I don’t!” Melyn spat. “But it’s not fair! Pheiri is alone! Alone! We’re all alone.”

Hafina was trying to hush her: “Shhhh! Shhhhhhh!”

In the back of Elpida’s mind, Howl grumbled: She’s got a point, Elps. No sister left behind. What if this stonking great crawler-frame thing was the size of Melyn, begging for your protection, huh? Would you say no, then? Come on, bitch. Be consistent.

Elpida raised her voice: “You’re not alone. Melyn, Hafina, you’re not alone.”

They both looked at her.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. She took a deep breath. “Pheiri, your society did not end in failure. You found Telokopolis. You found me. In a way—” Elpida’s throat grew thick, but she pushed past it. “In a way you’re a child of the city too, just a fair bit younger than me. Does that make you my little brother?” She almost laughed. Her head was full of static. “I’ve had a lot of sisters, but never a brother. That makes Melyn and Hafina descendants of Telokopolis, too.” She filled her lungs and closed her eyes. “As long as one of us is still up and breathing, the city stands. Telokopolis is forever.”

She opened her eyes.

>99999999 ERROR hours

Elpida almost laughed. “That’s forever? Good enough, little brother.”

The text refreshed.

>Request orders

“Alright, Pheiri,” Elpida croaked. “I … I’ll be your Commander, too. But I can’t just give you orders. This has to be an agreement. You and I have to agree. You have the right to question me. You understand?”

>
[[[.designate non-authority advisory role]]]
>

Elpida said: “Okay. Advisory? We can start there, we can work with that. I can advise you.”

>
///Commander
>

Elpida sighed, but she couldn’t help the smile. “Sure. Call me Commander, if you want. The others mostly do.”

She looked back at Melyn and Hafina. Melyn still did not look happy, arms folded, brow furrowed; but she regarded Elpida with less hostility. Hafina grinned a big, goofy, sheepish grin. Atyle just smiled, thin and inscrutable.

Elpida closed her eyes.

Her body still demanded rest — or food. The great and terrible hunger for fresh meat was beginning to gnaw at her entrails again. The implications of Pheiri’s origins had left her stunned, even as her trained and engineered mind kept up with ease. She had so many tasks ahead of her — not least the looming conversation with Pira and Ooni.

At least she and the others were safe inside Pheiri, inside a little recovered offshoot of Telokopolis, a fellow child of the city.

Melyn muttered: “Is she sleeping?”

Atyle replied in a whisper, “Perhaps. She is very damaged, little maid.”

“Why do you call me that? Call me that?”

“Because it is what you are. The titan’s maid. It is a beautiful thing, to attend a god.”

Haf agreed: “Melyn is pretty.”

Melyn hissed through her teeth.

Safe, protected — but Elpida was in command, and two of her girls were still beyond the safety of these walls. Vicky and Kagami were still inside that fallen combat frame in the middle of the crater — disunited, cut off behind enemy lines, out in the green.

She could not afford to rest.

Elpida opened her eyes and looked at Atyle. “Our first order of business is to link back up with Kagami and Vicky. Then we need to see if there’s a way to contact Serin. She might not be one of us, but she helped us, that matters. I need to speak with Vicky and Kagami first. What are the communication systems here like?”

Atyle tilted her head. “I told you once, warrior. Rest or die.”

Melyn snapped: “Hey!”

Elpida tried to laugh; the snort made her stomach hurt. “Melyn, it’s okay. That was just Atyle, not a threat.”

Atyle said, “I am neither a wound nor weariness. I do not speak with their voices.”

Elpida sighed. “I can plan while I rest, or send others to solve the problem. I want to speak with them, to see how they’re doing, and figure out how we’re going to get them back over here.”

Atyle raised her eyebrows.

Howl snorted: Bitch is lying.

Elpida said, “You’re concealing something from me, aren’t you?”

Atyle grinned. “The warrior sees almost as much as I do. Yes, I—”

“Are Kaga and Vicky safe?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t care. How do I talk to them?”

Atyle gestured at the many control panels and internal systems of Pheiri’s cockpit. “We must use the titan himself. His shell is too thick for stray messages.”

Elpida nodded. “Pheiri, how do I—”

A speaker crackled to life on the other side of the control cockpit.

“Elpi? Hey! Hey, Elpi, is that you?”

Full of static and interference, tinny and broken, almost drowned out by the rainstorm washing the hull — but unmistakable.

Elpida croaked: “Vicky. Can you hear me?”

Vicky laughed, muffled and distant. “Yeah! Yeah, loud and clear, Elpi!” Melyn darted across the compartment and twisted several dials near the speaker grille; when Vicky spoke again, her voice was clear: “Ahhh shit. Elpi, it’s good to know you’re alright.”

Atyle murmured, “Or the titan could contact them for us.”

Elpida raised her voice as firmly as she could, in case the connection really was as bad as it sounded: “I’m doing fine, Vicky. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix. Everyone else is okay, too. We’re all in one piece, with some new friends.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard. Atyle told us. Look, I—”

“Commander!” another voice snapped through the speaker — rough and scratchy with stress and lack of sleep, dripping with sarcasm. Melyn flinched. “Elpida. ‘Commander’.”

“Kagami,” Elpida said. “It’s good to hear your voice too.”

Kagami said, “Don’t fuck with me. I have a bone to pick with you, ‘Commander’. You fucking madwoman, you—”

A rustle interrupted — was Vicky trying to hush Kagami? Vicky said: “Kaga, Kaga, hey, cool down, she doesn’t need that. Okay? We made it, we—”

“Oh, really?” Kagami spat. “She doesn’t need it, does she? Our omni-benevolent Commander doesn’t need any fucking critique to stop her from recruiting random fascists!? You’re going to sit there and tell me you’re alright with that?” Kagami’s voice suddenly cleared, as if she had leaned closer to the microphone. “She’s not okay with it, by the way, in case you were wondering. Your obedient little private here is practically contemplating mutiny, ‘Commander’”

Vicky stammered. “K-Kaga, hey, hey, stop—”

Kagami kept going. “She ranted for over an hour about how you should have put a bullet in that woman’s head. And for the record, I agree with her! Pira, too! Shoot the both of them and have done with it!”

Vicky spoke over Kagami: “And I changed my mind! Elpi, she’s shit-stirring. I’m sorry—”

Kagami shouted, “Yes, only because you have a fucking head wound!”

Elpida couldn’t keep the smile off her face. It was just like listening to her cadre. Only they weren’t in arm’s reach for her to discipline.

“Kagami,” Elpida said before one of them could snap again. “Kagami, I am thoroughly deserving of criticism, believe me, I know that very well. Recruiting Ooni may be a mistake. I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t had time to sit down and figure out who she really is. It was a poor decision, I was impaired.”

“Right! Yes!” Kagami snapped. “So you’re going to—”

“But I would do it again,” Elpida said. “And nobody is putting anything in her or Pira — bullets or otherwise. They are both under my protection, for now. Ooni took my deal, she upheld her end of that by trying to kill Yola. And Pira proved her good faith, if not her good judgement.” Elpida pulled the ruined t-shirt off her shoulders and spread it out on her lap, staring at the crescent-and-line symbol she’d daubed in her own blood; she really needed to talk to Serin about this, about what it meant. Or maybe Ilyusha. “I’m Commander to those two as well.”

Kagami clenched her teeth so hard that the microphone picked up the sound.

Elpida said: “Kagami—”

“If you’re going to tell me not to shoot both her and Pira, you can shove your—”

“Thank you.”

Silence.

Elpida carried on: “Thank you, Kagami. I’m not sure we would have made it out of the skyscraper without you acting as mission control. You did incredibly well. Good job. I’m proud of you. I’m proud you’re one of us.”

“ … s-shut up, Elpida,” Kagami hissed. “Fuck’s sake.”

“Now,” Elpida said. “How are you both holding up? Vicky, you have a head wound?”

“Ehhhhh,” Vicky grunted. “Not great, but not terrible? The head wound sucks, I have a broken skull. Makes it hard to focus? And it’s … healing slowly.”

Kagami snorted. “She’s fine, she’s just bellyaching.”

“And I’m hungry. Starving, really. We both are.” Vicky sounded less happy when she said that. Kagami just grunted, unwilling to contradict Vicky’s appetite.

Elpida said, “The inside of a combat frame is airtight. Atmospherically sealed. That thing came from orbit, so that must still be true.”

Kagami said, “So?”

“Oh,” said Vicky. “Oh, shiiiit. Yeah, we’re locked up tight.”

Kagami sighed. “We can open the hatch, you moron. I can open it from here! I’m not going to, because something might come in and eat us.”

Elpida said, “You’re both cut off from ambient nanomachines in the air.”

Kagami clucked her tongue. “Assuming that wasn’t another lie from Pira.”

“Noted,” Elpida said. “I don’t think she had any reason to mislead us about the basic mechanics of nanomachine biology. Everything we’ve seen so far does line up with what she said, Serin too. But Pira did conceal other information, so I’m open to alternative suggestions. For now, I’m going to work on the assumption that you two are slowly starving. You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Y-yeah,” Vicky said. “I agree with Elpi.”

Kagami just grunted.

Elpida sighed, closed her eyes, and let her head roll back against the control cockpit chair. Her gut wound burned beneath the clean dressing. She said: “We really need short range comms. If you two left there now and headed toward us, we’d have no way of knowing if something went wrong, let alone linking back up with you. We’re gonna have to come pick you up, one way or the other. Either in Pheiri, or on foot, or … ” Elpida frowned, trying to push through the black haze. “I suppose Hafina could go pick you up, stay in stealth, get back here?”

Melyn said: “Haf stays home. Stays home!”

Hafina let out a deep, plaintive purr.

Vicky said, “Elpi, you don’t wanna come and see for yourself?”

Elpida felt a sad smile crease her lips. “The combat frame isn’t up and walking, so I’m guessing you haven’t had much luck. In fact, I’m guessing she’s mortally wounded, and we don’t have the drydock or repair facilities to heal her. You can tell me everything, I’m listening. I do want to know what you’ve found in there. Maybe there are things I should see for myself, but … I feel like I’ve abandoned hope for that. I know you two brought down the Necromancer, Atyle told me. I want to know all about that, anything she said. She was wearing my face, right?”

Silence. Elpida opened her eyes.

“Vicky? Kagami?”

“Elpi,” Vicky said slowly. “You just want us to leave?”

Elpida sighed. “Not really. I want to wake that combat frame and see it walk. But if it’s not moving under its own power by now … ”

Kagami snapped: “What about the pilot? You want us to leave her?”

Elpida’s heart lurched. She sat bolt upright in her seat, then clutched her stomach as the motion provoked a wave of pain. “There’s a pilot? A living pilot? Is she— does she have my phenotype?”

Vicky said: “Atyle didn’t tell you?”

Atyle smiled, dark and clever. “I was attempting to coax the warrior back to bed. It seems I have failed.”

“Tell me about the pilot!” Elpida demanded. She was shaking. “Does she—

Kagami snapped out an answer: “She has the same looks as you, yes, Commander. Purple eyes, white hair, brown skin. Weird looks, I’m not going to sugar coat that. You both look weird as all fuck. And before you get your hopes up — no, her name is not one of the ones you keep muttering like a prayer. Yes, we’ve all heard you doing that. This pilot doesn’t even have a name, she has a serial number—”

Elpida’s heart lurched the other way; a pilot, with cadre phenotype, but not one of her sisters?

Still one of us, said Howl.

“—and she’s alive, yes,” Kagami finished. “Alive for now, anyway.”

“What do you mean? Explain. Is she wounded?”

“Yes,” Kagami said. “But we can’t figure out where. There’s blood in her weird orange piss-tank. And we can’t take her out of that. We don’t even dare open the thing, because she’s a real human being.”

Elpida’s blood went cold. “She’s not a zombie? The air, the atmosphere, the … everything. Even us.”

“Yup,” Kagami grunted. “Homo sapiens, original flavour, ready to decant. The nanomachines will eat her alive.”