Necroepilogos

Elpida stowed the coilgun receiver in the aim-assist rig strapped around her hips, knelt down next to Kagami behind the concrete wall, and accepted an extendible earpiece and throat-mic from the auspex visor. Kagami’s left hand shook as she pressed the earpiece into Elpida’s palm. The others looked on in confusion and alarm: Ilyusha showed her teeth and spat on the ground, while Amina huddled next to her, face blank with incomprehension; Vicky was clenching her jaw and clutching her weapon; Pira looked tight as a piano-wire, tucked into the corner between concrete wall and paving slabs. Atyle stood tall, uncaring of cover.

“Kaga,” Elpida said. “What did they say about something behind us?”

“There’s nothing there!” Kagami snapped. “I looked, there’s nothing. Now talk to them before they light us up with a fucking plasma rifle!”

Atyle agreed: “Nothing pursues us, warrior. We are alone.”

Elpida nodded. “Right. Vicky, Pira, watch our flanks, in case they’re trying to ambush us. Atyle, eyes on the skyscraper, keep me informed of movement.” She lifted the earpiece.

Pira hissed: “Don’t.”

Elpida paused. Pira’s eyes were like lightning in blue skies. “Pira?”

“Don’t talk to them.”

Kagami huffed. “It’s just radio! It’s not like they can transmit a mimetic brain-virus over radio. What are you afraid of, huh? Afraid your friends want to say hello?”

“Kaga,” Vicky snapped. “Not now.”

Pira said to Elpida: “They will lie to you. They will lie. Be careful. Trust nothing.”

Elpida nodded. “Understood. Thank you, Pira.” She raised the earpiece and hooked it around the cup of her right ear. Then she extended the attached laryngophone and pressed it to her throat.

Kagami adjusted a setting on the auspex visor’s arm-mounted control board. Then she nodded rapidly, eyes wide, face pale and sweating.

Elpida said out loud: “Commander, actual. Identify yourself.”

A flicker of radio bands; a passing ghost of static; from across the road there came an audible click of transmission equipment, loud and heavy. Atyle frowned and pointed, tracking something inside the skyscraper.

A voice spoke to Elpida.

“I said I want to speak with the mech pilot,” it purred. “Not your leader. Unless you are one and the same?”

The Death’s Head voice was amused and rich, spiced honey poured over steel, wet clicking of lips and tongue distorted by the radio signal.

“Commander, actual,” Elpida repeated. “Identify yourself.”

“You first, commander.”

“What makes you think we have a pilot for that combat frame?”

A moment of silence. Thinking fast, Elpida guessed.

Then: “Call it an educated guess. Am I speaking to the mech pilot, or not?”

Another loud click-buzz echoed out over the empty street, from the occupied skyscraper opposite. Atyle was still pointing.

Elpida made sure her armoured hood was in place, then risked a glance around the edge of the concrete wall.

Across the pitted and potholed tarmac, beneath the filth-streaked flames of the dead-sky sun, the windows of the skull-marked skyscraper were as still as empty eye sockets.

But one window was now occupied, the one Atyle was pointing at. A figure stood exposed from the waist upward, up on the second floor, uncaring of opportunistic pot-shots or sniper fire. The figure wore a full-body suit of carapace battle-armour, dirty grey plates scuffed and soot-marked, dyed dark by the ruddy sunlight. A full-face helmet was punctuated by a pair of dark eyepieces and a sealed rebreather grille. The figure cradled an exotic rifle in her arms — plasma weapon perhaps; Elpida couldn’t identify the type. The chestplate of her armour carapace was marked with a grinning skull in black paint, tongue extended in playful mockery.

Elpida ducked back into cover. Pira had taken a quick look as well; she was frowning hard.

Elpida pressed the laryngophone to her throat again. “Is that you I see on the second floor?”

“The sentry?” the Death’s Head purred with amusement. “No. She’s just interested in what she can see. Pardon her curiosity. Now, commander, are you the mech pilot, or not?”

Elpida glanced at her companions. They were all watching her, holding their collective breath. She’d brought them this far, given them hope and purpose. She couldn’t be drawn into compromise now, not with people who she had no reason to trust.

She stuck to the plan.

“Listen carefully,” Elpida said to the Death’s Head. “We are heavily armed. We have a coilgun, and a cyclic sliver-gun taken from a zombie. I killed the zombie myself. If you can see us down here, then you can probably see the power signatures too. We want passage alongside your building, through to the combat frame. If you open fire on us then we will open fire on you.”

Silence. A brush of static. A click.

“I’m sure you will,” said the Death’s Head. “Bully for you.”

A strange turn of phrase. Inaccurate translation? Elpida put it to one side for now.

“This coilgun alone will punch through several layers of wall with a single sabot. I will not hesitate to pull the trigger. You can stop me, yes — but I’m well armoured and I will kill several of you before you can bring me down. You will give us passage or I will open fire.”

The Death’s Head made a wet sound — lips parting in a smile. “Interesting cavalry you have on the way. That is yours, I assume?”

Elpida had no idea what the Death’s Head was talking about. She gestured for Atyle to look behind them again. Atyle did as ordered, then shook her head. Nothing there.

Elpida bluffed: “We have more backup than your group can repel. Let us pass, or die.”

Elpida’s heart hammered hard. Her bloodstream flushed with adrenaline. Her senses opened, combat-ready. Everything else shrank to insignificance. This was it, this was the moment, all in, all or nothing.

“Very well, mech pilot,” purred the Death’s Head. “We have higher priority targets than you. Enjoy your moment in the sun. Break a leg, darling.”

Click. Silence. Connection terminated.

Elpida pulled the earpiece off and handed it back to Kagami. “They’re letting us pass. Kagami, are they—”

“They’re not moving weapons, no!” Kagami snapped. She looked back through the concrete with her auspex visor. “They’re not moving to stop us. Fucking hell, ‘Commander’, could you bluff any harder?”

Atyle shrugged. “Small fish pass unremarked when a shark threatens. No?”

Vicky was hissing, “Elpi? Elpi, do we go? Do we go?”

“We go!” Ilyusha snapped. She banged a black and red bionic foot against the floor, scraping concrete with crimson claws, tail thwapping against the wall. “We go! We can! We can! Go! Go! Go!”

Pira was frowning hard, emotions unshuttered. “They’re scared of something — not us. They have no reason to let us pass.”

Elpida said, “Pira, do you think this is a trap?”

“No. But there’s something we’re not seeing.” A pause. Then: “But this might be our chance. I’m behind you whatever you decide. Commander.”

Elpida stood up, unhooked the coilgun receiver, and made her decision.

“We go. Plan is the same as before. Atyle, on me, up front. Everyone else in behind. Amina, Illy, keep hold of those ballistic shields. Vicky, stay close, I may need you on me. Pira, don’t drop Kagami. Whatever happens, keep moving, keep going, and do not stop.” She reached down and slapped Vicky on the shoulder as she rose, then squeezed Pira’s elbow, and briefly patted Ilyusha’s head. Illy grinned and cycled her shotgun. “I believe in all of you; we can do this, we can make it to the combat frame. All ready? Good. We move on three — one, two, three!”

Elpida swept out of cover and into the middle of the street at a rapid combat walk, hood up, armoured coat pulled tight, coilgun receiver held in both hands and tucked against her shoulder. She swept her aim across the second floor of the Death’s Head skyscraper, flicking the barrel back and forth from empty window to empty window. The revenant in dirty grey armour carapace didn’t flinch; she turned her head to watch.

Atyle strode at Elpida’s side, head high and uncovered, eyes sliding sideways to smirk at her assumed audience; she walked as if she owned the city, holding the sliver-gun so as to show off the multi-barrelled weapon.

The others scurried from cover in Elpida’s wake, trailing a few feet behind, moving quickly in a tight group, half-sheltered behind the mobile cover of the two ballistic shields. Kagami hissed and panted. Vicky was breathing too hard. Ilyusha growled and waved her weapon. But Elpida could not spare the attention to look back. She had to make the threat credible, keep her eyes on the windows, her finger on the trigger.

They plunged into the narrow alleyway between the Death’s Head skyscraper and its burnt-out neighbour to the left, heading for the soot-stained giant of the combat frame.

Curious faces began to appear in the skyscraper windows on their right: armoured or visored, mirrored or matte-black, eyes hidden behind dark circles of steel-glass or the slits of ballistic masks. Weapons lounged in gloves and gauntlets, at the ends of articulated mechanical tentacles, plumbed directly into fleshy appendages, or attached to shoulder mounts — but nobody aimed down at Elpida and her companions. She focused on those weapons, on their positions and where they were pointing; she ignored the visible evidence of extensive bionic modifications, the slips of mechanical tendrils, the additional limbs, the compound eyes, the bizarre structures running from the backs of skulls, the skittering and sliding motions as the revenants followed her progress. She did not have attention to spare on irrelevant details.

The Death’s Head revenant in the grey armour carapace kept pace with them, moving from window to window, shadowing their progress.

On their left, in the chewed-up ruins of the next-door skyscraper, one of the Death’s Head drones was also dogging their footsteps. Elpida couldn’t see it — even when she risked a quick look over her shoulder — but she could hear articulated machine-legs crunching through broken glass and shattered concrete, creeping along just out of sight.

“Keep moving,” Elpida said. “Keep moving. Call out if you fall. Ignore the revenants. Keep moving. We can do this.”

Traversing the alleyway took about one hundred and sixty seconds. The gnarled and knotted bone-mesh armour plates of the combat frame reared up beyond the alley mouth, higher and higher as they drew close. Elpida’s chest stirred with nostalgia. She refused to look.

Less than thirty meters from the mouth of the alley, Kagami hissed: “Elpida! Elpida, there is something following us! I can see it now!”

Elpida hissed back without looking: “Kagami, what is it? Speak to me.”

“I don’t know, but— oh, fuck me, it’s big, and I can’t— I can’t see through it, like it’s armoured or— oh, fuck! Fuck! It’s coming up on the rear of the alley, and fast!”

Atyle said: “The scribe speaks truth, warrior. We are pursued.”

Vicky said, “Was it cloaked before? What the hell?”

Elpida strained her concentration. Kagami was right: she could hear a rumbling far to their rear — a distant smashing aside of concrete walls, heavy weight ploughing through ruined brick, churning broken asphalt beneath metal tread.

She said: “Focus on the target. We’re almost there. We get inside the combat frame and it doesn’t matter. Alley mouth — now! Everyone down! Pira, count three seconds, then go!”

Her companions halted at the very end of the alleyway, clustered together, hunkered down momentarily behind ballistic shields — all except Atyle, who stood tall and proud, smiling upward at her audience of revenants, showing off her weapon, her height, and her peat-green bionic eye.

Elpida slammed the coilgun receiver into the aim-assist rig around her hips, then burst from the alley at a dead sprint.

She was inside the ring of skyscrapers now, their broken tips scratching at the rotten underside of the black sky. Legs pumping, head down, she sprinted for the combat frame. The ground beneath her boots was churned and burned, charred and broken, grey soil cooked to carbon and ash in the wake of the combat frame’s orbital impact. The weight of the coilgun on her back turned a four-second sprint into a seven-second slog. She raced for cover, kicking up puffs of black ash behind her. Her shoulder blades itched; a hundred pairs of revenant eyes must have been turning to look at her, scopes picking her out in infra-red or high-mag, hand-held plasma and missiles preparing a lock on the energy signature of her coilgun power-tank, undead heads shaking in laughter at her suicidal sprint.

Elpida had to trust that her companions were already following — a tight cluster of slower-moving targets, less interesting than the high-energy signature of a coilgun strapped to a mad woman sprinting across open ground. A terrible gamble, but the best one she had.

A few pot-shots rang out across the circle of skyscrapers; for a moment Elpida feared the worst, that the threat of antagonising the worm-guard was not enough to dissuade other revenants from opening fire.

But then a deep, hard, rat-a-tat-a-tat of heavy machine gun fire cut through the air — and Elpida realised that the firing had nothing to do with her. It was somewhere else, coming from higher up a nearby skyscraper. Had a skirmish broken out?

She hit the leg of the combat frame at a sprint. She didn’t stop to take cover or turn to check on the others, or to caress the rough texture of Telokopolan-made carbon bone-mesh, so familiar to her hands. Elpida mounted the sloped armour of the combat frame’s leg, hurling herself over pits and whorls, hauling her body past a dozen pieces of useful cover, scrambling up on knobbly handholds before planting her feet on the gentle incline of the fallen god-machine.

Combat frame hull stretched out before her — the rest of this left foreleg, then the main body — soot-covered white plates grown into knots and curls with age and scars, studded with recessed weapon-pods and shielded domes, awaiting the touch of a pilot to bring them roaring to life. Three more legs lay limp across the broken ground to Elpida’s left, trailing out into the grey dirt. The head of the combat frame was a single silver orb in the middle of the body, almost two hundred metres away across the hull. The main armament — the railgun — stuck straight up into the air, as if trying to penetrate the black sky above.

The manual pilot access hatch was situated beneath the silvery orb of the combat frame’s head. Recessed controls lay next to the hatch, protected by an overhang of armour: a palm pad and a lever.

The trio of worm-guard were crouched in a loose ring just beyond the hatch. Elpida’s peripheral vision jumped and flickered with interference, glitching and jerking to conceal the worm-guard machines. Up close the effect made her eyes water and ache. Their position had not been so obvious from sixty floors up: they were guarding the hatch. Elpida would have to close to within ten metres of them to get inside.

She paused for one second. She forced herself to watch the worm-guard.

They didn’t move. One second passed and Elpida was not a streak of gore smeared on the combat frame’s leg.

Her heart roared, so close to victory and vindication. Was she correct? Were the worm-guard really waiting for her to claim the combat frame? To claim the inheritance of Telokopolis in this nanomachine afterlife?

Wait for me, Howl!

Elpida spread her arms and filled her lungs; the next step of the plan was to shout as loud as she could, to shout that the worm-guard were protecting her, expecting her, waiting for her. That wild shout would distract attention from the last few moments of her companions scurrying into cover.

And then, from behind a twist of combat frame bone-mesh armour, less than five feet from one of the glitching worm-guard trio, a figure stood up.

Long white hair, copper-brown skin, purple eyes; tall and graceful, lean and muscular; dark armoured coat, hood bunched around her shoulders, submachine gun loose in one hand.

Cadre phenotype — Elpida’s phenotype; but this was not one of her cadre. Elpida knew every single member of her cadre: by sight, by smell, by touch, by the sound of their voices and the movement of their bodies. She knew mannerisms and musculature, body weight and bone shapes, habits and flaws and tics and all. She would have recognised any of them instantly — not just Howl or Silla or Metris, but any of her sisters.

The figure was not one of Elpida’s cadre.

It was her.

It was Elpida. Like looking in a mirror.

The mirror-Elpida met her eyes, expression blank and empty; that one glance stilled Elpida’s lips, stole Elpida’s breath, and froze Elpida’s diaphragm. Elpida told her legs to sprint at the mirror-copy of herself; she told her arms to grab the coilgun receiver, to aim and fire; to reach the hatch first, to banish this impossible apparition with violence or truth.

But she couldn’t move a muscle.

Her nanomachine physiology was locked in place; paralysed, no matter how hard she strained. She was a machine, switched off in mid-motion, held mid-operation.

For several crucial seconds, Elpida’s body was not her own.

Elpida watched helplessly as her mirror-self crouched next to the pilot access hatch and pressed her copper-brown hand to the palm-reader. A deep clunk of machinery sounded from inside the combat frame’s hull. The mirror-Elpida grabbed the lever and twisted. The pilot access hatch swung upward, just wide enough to admit a single person; the inside was clean white, untouched by soot or dirt.

The expressionless double looked back at Elpida. Her lips moved. Elpida heard words inside her head, transmitted through her neural lace.

“Well done, dead thing. Didn’t think you’d make it this far. Good luck.”

The mirror-Elpida stepped through the hatch. The tail of her coat whipped after her. Gone.

Elpida blinked and breathed. Her muscles were her own once again.

She lurched toward the hatch — she had to get inside, after that thing wearing her face, that thing which had locked down her body with a look.

Necromancer!? her thoughts raced. Did I just get temporarily shut down by a Necromancer? And now it’s inside the combat frame, with my face, my phenotype, my body!

But then:

“Elpida!”

Kagami, screaming from below.

Elpida turned and looked down: her companions were crammed into cover against the twisted leg-armour of the combat frame, tucked into pits and cubbyholes among the twists and turns of the aged and overgrown armour. Atyle and Kagami were both staring back toward the mouth of the alleyway. Vicky was clutching her heavy machine gun, wild-eyed with panic, staring up at Elpida, with Amina clutching the side of her coat. Pira was tucked in tight, weapon ready, prepared to repel an attack. Ilyusha was up on her claws, readying her shotgun, aiming at the front of the Death’s Head skyscraper.

A rumbling, roaring, ramming noise was racing toward them.

“It’s here!” Kagami screamed. “Elpida, what the fuck are you doing?! Get in our fucking robot!”

Elpida turned back to the hatch. Too late.

A machine burst from the mouth of the alleyway in an explosion of shattered concrete and pulverised asphalt, roaring into the impact crater like a meteoric blast wave

Wrapped in treads and tracks, studded with weapon systems like an overfilled pincushion, with a central turret mounting a swollen weapon like a lance, which was glowing purple and red like a prolapsed organ. Active shielding crackled and flashed as debris arced off sheets of electric blue and curves of burning white. Point-defence systems and coaxial weapons twisted and turned to acquire targets; boxy missile-pods split open and sprouted mushroom-tips of high-explosive. Encrusted with bone-white armour plates overgrown in a profusion of horns and curls and humps and coils; Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour, alive and mobile.

A crawler. A ‘tank’. An armoured box on flimsy treads. Like the Legion had used on the plateau around the base of Telokopolis.

Except this little crawler had become so much more, out there beyond the graveworm line.

Elpida had only a split-second to absorb this sight. As soon as the new arrival rocked to a halt on the edge of the impact crater, the trio of worm-guard turned and opened fire upon the crawler.

High-powered energy discharges shrieked through the air; purple bolts exploded off the crawler’s forward shields with flashes of blinding light; the super-frequency whine of rotary weapons with inhuman rates of fire throbbed against Elpida’s eardrums as the worm-guard switched to solid-slug ammunition; thousands of rounds of metal flared against the crawler’s shielding as it was overwhelmed — then plinked and churned as it chewed into the bone-mesh armour beneath. Telokopolan engineering held; the crawler roared forward.

Elpida’s training suggested that she find cover.

She ducked and slid, scrambling down the combat frame’s armour plate, overbalanced by the coilgun power-tank strapped to her back and hips. She slammed to the grey dirt and fell into cover — shoulder-to-shoulder with Pira, wedged into a curl of combat-frame leg-armour. Everyone had their heads down, tucked inside similar angles of protective plate, hunkered down and split up along several bits of cover formed by combat frame armour. Kagami was screaming. Amina was curled into a ball and crying somewhere nearby. Vicky was courageously trying to point her machine gun somewhere useful. Atyle was standing tall and staring at the titanic clash, enraptured, exposed, about to take a bullet.

The crawler’s shields flickered back to life; it returned fire at the worm-guard with a salvo of missiles and solid shot and anti-materiel slugs and a dozen other weapon systems barking and thumping and coughing.

In her peripheral vision, Elpida saw one of those glitch-flicker blobs lurch and stagger.

Revenants were pouring out of the skyscrapers now — Death-Heads and others — bringing heavy weaponry to bear on the worm-guard trio, or on the crawler, or on each other. An opportunistic orgy of firepower was erupting on all sides. Flashes of plasma weaponry arced across the ground; machine guns opened up with the crackle and slam of charged shot; shouts of pain and anger and the click-buzz of transmission were drowned out by the earth-shattering noise of the fight between crawler and worm-guard.

The hundred metres in either direction was rapidly turning into a true battlefield. Elpida couldn’t process anything that had just happened — but she knew what to do.

“Pira!” she shouted, grabbing Pira’s shoulder. “Pira, we have to get out! Up onto the combat frame, together! What can—”

Vicky’s voice rose from nearby, behind another turn of armour plate: “Elpi, it’s covering us! Look!”

Vicky was correct: the crawler was positioned as if it was trying to defend them from the worm-guard, as if it was their extraction, their ride out. It rocked forward another dozen meters, shields flickering in and out under the incredible firepower of the worm-guard, bone-mesh hull pounded by random shots from revenants with anti-tank guns and scorching plasma bolts. But the crawler’s strange turret-weapon lay quiet — even as one of the worm-guard lashed out with a whip of black crackling force and left a smoking scar across the crawler’s armour.

Elpida lifted the coilgun receiver and glanced around for Atyle. “Atyle!” she shouted. “Open up on the left, lay down fire! I’ll do the right! Clear a space, then follow me up! Atyle! Atyle!”

But Atyle was lost in the duel between ancient gods — then lost behind clouds of dirt and smoke and hails of gunfire.

Kagami screamed from somewhere nearby, but Elpida couldn’t see her: “What happened to your fucking mech, commander?!”

“It’s a no-go!” Elpida shouted back. She hesitated; how could she make sense of what she’d seen, the way she’d been physically paralysed? “Not pinned down like this! And there’s a hostile in—”

“Fuck you all, you fucking morons!” Kagami screamed. “I’ll do it myself!”

Kagami lurched to her feet from within a nearby abscess of combat-frame armour plate — exposed, about to get shot. She was too far away for Elpida to reach out and grab her. She was white with fear, eyes wide and bloodshot, grimacing hard against incredible pain.

Kagami made a throwing gesture with her left hand, as if scattering grains of rice into the air.

Six silver oblongs arced upward — then back down, taking station around their mistress.

Kagami’s smart-drones were online; Kagami herself was screaming, wrenching at her own left hand in agony, banging her fist against her own forehead.

Elpida shouted: “Kagami! Kagami, stay down! Down!”

Vicky wailed: “Kaga!”

Kagami lurched upward onto the combat frame’s armour plating, bionic legs kicking for footholds — but she was helped by gravity effectors inside one of the hovering drones. Stay shots bounced off an energy field deployed by another drone. A third opened fire on nearby revenants with some kind of tiny micro-weapon, energy pulses punching through armour and shredding flesh.

“Kagami!” Elpida shouted. “Stay together! Kaga!”

Kagami hurled herself up the slope of the combat frame’s hull, dragged by her drones more than her own muscle power, going for the pilot access hatch. Her sextet of drones swarmed around her.

Elpida could just see the hatch from her current position — and it was closed again? Kagami would never get inside, not without a valid pilot, or a copy.

Too late: Vicky was already scrambling up after Kagami, the only one close enough to follow, hurling herself from scrap to scrap of cover.

“Vicky! Vicky, no!”

Gunfire was pouring onto their position now, bullets chewing into bone-mesh plates, exotic weaponry scorching and burning and ricocheting in all directions; the Death’s Heads had reached the leg of the combat frame, ignored by the crawler-tank, trying to exploit the angle to pin down Elpida’s group.

Up on the hull of the combat frame, Kagami reached the hatch; Elpida was too far away to see what happened, but she heard Kagami’s blood-curdling scream of pain and anger — and then the hatch swung open.

Kagami dropped through, into the combat frame. A moment later Vicky turned back, eyes wide with horror as she realised that she had left Elpida and the others pinned down.

“Elpi!” Vicky shouted. “Elpi, you can— come on! You can make it! You can—”

One of Kagami’s tiny silver combat drones whirled in front of Vicky and nudged her in the chest with a gravity effector. She fell into the hatch.

Elpida had lost control of the combat situation.

The Death’s Head revenants were pouring suppressing fire at what remained of her comrades; she had to keep her head down, tucked into a pit of armour plate. The coilgun power-tank was humming on her back, ready to fire — but fire at what? If she broke cover and pulled the trigger, could she force enough of the revenants back to make a break for the pilot hatch?

She could no longer see the crawler tank or the worm-guard, only hear the whirr and crackle of weapons. She had no idea where Atyle had gone — walked off into the battlefield. She could hear Ilyusha somewhere further off, shouting and spitting and howling insults at the top of her lungs, shotgun going boom, boom, boom. Amina was whimpering close by, to Elpida’s right. Her left shoulder was crammed against Pira.

“Illy!” she shouted. “Illy! On me! Illy!”

Nothing.

“Pira,” she said. “I’m going to break cover and fire the coilgun, we have to link up with Ilyusha. I need you to … Pira?”

Pira had her head cocked to one side, listening for something above the din of the firefight. Her eyes were wide with shock, her mouth hanging open, her face drained of all colour.

“Pira?”

Suddenly a dirty grey form vaulted over the lip of their cover: a suit of armour carapace, filthy with use, chestplate painted with a grinning skull, tongue hanging loose.

The Death’s Head revenant crashed down hard on her backside, plasma weapon cradled in her arms.

Elpida raised the coilgun receiver and slipped her finger over the trigger.

But then Pira reached out, grabbed the coilgun barrel, and slammed it to the ground. Elpida pitched forward, thrown off balance.

“No,” Pira said, hollow and horrified, staring at the new arrival. “No.”

The Death’s Head revenant quickly removed her own helmet. Long dark hair flowed free. Olive skin was covered with a sheen of sweat. A manic smile reached up into bright green eyes with laughing delight and loving disbelief.

“Leuca,” said the Death’s Head. “I’ve been calling your name, Leuca. I couldn’t believe it was you.”

Pira looked like she’d seen her own ghost.

Elpida tried to free the coilgun receiver from Pira’s grip — but Pira wouldn’t let go. Elpida hit the release clasp on the aim-assist rig instead. The coilgun power-tank slid off her back. She shrugged out of the harness and scrambled for her submachine gun.

Pira said: “You joined them.”

The Death’s Head revenant smiled wider, with relief and release. “Only because you did first, Leuca.”

Elpida ripped her submachine gun free from inside her coat. She thumbed the safety off and pointed it at the Death’s Head revenant. She got her finger over the trigger and—

Pira turned, weeping silent tears; she put the barrel of her own gun against Elpida’s belly, and pulled the trigger.