Necroepilogos

That night, when it was her turn on watch, Elpida sat before the wall of penthouse windows and contemplated the combat frame.

Black sky and city-corpse blurred together; skeletal skyscrapers sank their tips into the sagging underbelly of the burned-out heavens. Windows both broken and empty flickered with occasional light sixty floors below — electric light, weapons discharge, chemical glow. Combat frame bone-mesh armour plate faded from white to grey, with no dying sunlight to wash away the soot and filth. The trio of worm-guard machines melted into blobs of searing static, a migraine aura in Elpida’s peripheral vision — not that she had ever suffered a migraine. Telokopolan genetic engineering had improved the cranial nerve and blood-flow issues which supposedly caused such symptoms. But she’d seen artistic representations.

On the far side of the impact crater, past the combat frame’s rear left leg, the dark had almost hidden the grinning black skulls daubed on concrete and stone.

Elpida gave free reign to her training.

She ran through the details of her plan over and over. She estimated distances and times, double-checked them with re-observation, then triple-checked them again with the assumption that she was incorrect. She looked past the ring of skyscrapers and attempted to map the route through the depths of the city — though Kagami had done that earlier, with the advantage of proper comprehension of the auspex visor output. Elpida memorised the stretch of open ground between the alleyway and the combat frame, committing every bump and pothole to memory. She counted and catalogued every hand-hold and open stretch of armour plate on the combat frame’s hull between the predicted point of contact and the pilot access hatch. She re-examined that hatch with the detached scope of Vicky’s sniper rifle, then with Kagami’s auspex visor, then with her naked eyes.

She checked all the weapons, then stripped and cleaned the chemical propellant firearms — Vicky’s heavy machine gun and the sniper rifle, the submachine guns and all the pistols, including the ones they’d taken from the defeated ambush. The only guns she did not clean were Pira’s personal armaments — Pira slept with her gun in her lap — and Ilyusha’s rotary shotgun, which never seemed to leave Ilyusha’s possession. She did what little she could for the coilgun and the cyclic sliver-gun, powering them on and making sure their auxiliary systems worked. But she had neither the tools to service the former or the knowledge to service the latter. She secured the coilgun’s aim-assist rig around her hips, tightened all the straps, and spent twenty minutes testing her range of motion.

She examined the structural integrity of the two ballistic shields. She counted the remaining cannisters of raw blue nanites — thirteen bottles, no fewer than previously, no secret midnight snacks. She left seven cannisters on the counter-top in the penthouse kitchen, for the morning.

She broke the silence only once, to whisper the twenty four names of her dead cadre.

Elpida’s companions had spread out into the compact warren of the dusty penthouse; nobody was further away than a raised voice, but it was the least coherent the group had been since the resurrection chamber. Pira had stayed close — she was within visual range, fast asleep, sitting straight-backed against a stretch of wall over by an ancient entertainment centre and a long-dead televisual screen; her flame-red hair was the colour of dead embers in the dark. Atyle was stretched out on the floor closer to the door, beyond earshot, wrapped in shadows, sleeping flat on her back like a corpse. Ilyusha and Amina had slipped away to one of the bedrooms, curled up together beneath scavenged blankets; one of them was snoring softly. Elpida found the noise comforting. Vicky and Kagami had done the same, wandering off to find somewhere more comfortable to sleep — though driven primarily by Kagami’s vocal complaints and physical exhaustion.

Elpida was not surprised when she heard the near-silent rustle of sock-clad feet approaching her from behind. She looked up from the combat frame and around from the window.

It was Vicky, making no attempt at stealth, framed by the thick shadows of the penthouse and the pale wood of the walls.

“Elpi,” she whispered. “Hey. Mind if I … ?”

Vicky nodded down at the carpet next to Elpida.

She looked unwell. Her dark skin was pinched and tense around her bright eyes. Her shoulders were hunched beneath the comfort of her large fur-trimmed coat, the one they’d looted from the fight outside the tomb; she wore one of the armoured coats as well, draped over the top like a cloak. Arms folded, neck bent forward, lips creased from chewing. Elpida did not need her training and experience to know that Vicky wanted company.

Elpida whispered: “Of course I don’t mind. Sit with me, please.”

Vicky shuffled forward and sat down next to Elpida, so close that their knees touched. She winced as she forgot to avert her gaze from the trio of worm-guard, then frowned down at the combat frame. She hunched tighter inside her double layer of coats.

“Can’t sleep?” Elpida prompted.

Vicky nodded. “Can’t sleep. Right. I feel … cold, sort of. First time feeling cold since … well, since we all came back to life inside the tomb, I guess. Since resurrection. Thought we couldn’t get cold, us zombies, not really. It’s not making me shiver, though. Feels weird. Reminds me I’m a dead thing. Not really alive. We’re all just ghosts, echoes, copies. Right?”

“Pre-op nerves.”

Vicky blinked rapidly and gave Elpida an amused look. “Sorry, what?”

“Pre-op nerves. Pre-mission jitters. We have an operation planned and scheduled. Of course you’re nervous. That’s normal. We all deal with it in our own ways. Insomnia happens.”

“Oh, right.” Vicky laughed softly and shook her head. “You still get nervous, super-soldier girl?”

Elpida nodded. “Genetic engineering can’t edit the human out of the soldier. The result would be too close to Silico.”

Vicky said: “I meant like, experience. You’ve gone into combat a lot, right? Even if you were piloting a big machine or whatever. How do you deal with the anxiety?”

Elpida ran her fingers through her long mane of white hair to give herself a moment to think. She considered telling the truth.

“If you hadn’t shown up,” she said. “I would probably have started counting all our bullets. Then counting them again. Then again.”

“Ah.”

“Mmhmm.”

They lapsed into silence. Sixty floors below, a muzzle-flash briefly lit a window in one of the skyscrapers opposite. Something dark and whirling passed by an open doorway. A drone twitched high-up on a wall.

Elpida said: “That was a lie.”

“Ah?”

“A lie by omission,” Elpida continued without looking around at Vicky. “I didn’t answer your question. I apologise. I dealt with pre-mission nerves by spending time with my cadre, my clade-sisters. Argue and fight with Howl, perhaps. Get into tactical details with Silla and Metris. Make sure Fii and Yeva aren’t getting up to anything they shouldn’t be. Check everyone’s pilot suits. Force my way into any currently unresolved problems. Probably have a lot of sex. Talk a lot. Think together. That’s what we did. That’s how we did it.”

Vicky murmured: “I’m sorry, Elpi.”

“It’s fine. You asked. And I owe you the truth.”

The whole truth, yes. Tell her why you’re going to get her killed.

Vicky sat up straighter. She peered out of the penthouse window again. “Much action down there?” she asked. “Zombies going at it?”

“Not really,” Elpida said. She gestured at Kagami’s auspex visor, which lay just to her other side. “I can’t easily interpret the output from that, not like Kagami can. As far as I can tell it’s pretty quiet down there. A few pickets and sentries do shoot at each other now and again, but it’s opportunistic pot-shots only, no pushes or major shifts in power. Some of them are sleeping, some aren’t.”

Elpida refrained from relating the interpersonal violence she had witnessed through the auspex visor; she couldn’t be sure of the output, but some of those groups in the skyscrapers were using the downtime to fight or fuck — or worse, things that Elpida couldn’t identify.

Vicky nodded along.

Elpida asked: “Is Kagami asleep?”

Vicky winced. She tried to conceal the expression, but Elpida caught the involuntary twitch. “Yeah. I think so. She’s given herself a … headache.” Vicky enunciated the word with great care, concealing a greater truth. Had they fallen out? Was that why she couldn’t sleep? Was ‘headache’ part of Vicky’s cultural vernacular for something else? “She wrapped herself up in spare sheets in one of the bedrooms back there. Dunno how she can breathe in all that dust.” Vicky forced a little laugh.

“Thank you for looking after her,” Elpida said. “She needs it. You’re doing the right thing.”

That time Vicky made no effort to conceal the guilty wince. “Elpi, are you, uh, really alright with us being all spread out like this?” She nodded back into the depths of the penthouse. “You’re not worried about another ambush or anything?”

Elpida shook her head and gestured at the auspex visor again. “There’s very little out here besides us and the coherent groups around the combat frame. We could probably have dispensed with a proper watch tonight.”

Vicky nodded slowly. “Right, ‘cos I just thought—”

“But no, I’m not really alright with it.”

“ … Elpi?”

Elpida’s heart ached briefly. “I’m used to everyone sleeping together in the same room. I’m used to listening to the breathing of twenty four other sets of lungs. When times are bad, I’m used to sleeping practically on top of each other. That’s how I would ideally deal with pre-operation nerves.”

“Oh, Elpi. I’m sorry.”

Elpida smiled for her. “Don’t be. You’ve got nothing to apologise to me for. I’m glad that you and Kagami haven gotten close. Go sleep with her.”

Vicky sighed. “Easier said than done. Like I said, I—”

“Have you and she fucked?”

Vicky spluttered, then stared at Elpida. “What?! No. Elpida, what?”

“I thought maybe you had done. If you haven’t, then … ”

Maybe you should, Elpida thought, because it might be your last chance.

Vicky gave Elpida a grimacing grin of amused scepticism. “No, Elpi. Damn, girl. Not everyone comes from a super-soldier sisterhood polycule, okay? Kaga just needs somebody to hold her up and slap some sense into her, not … that. I don’t think so, anyway. Damn.”

Elpida shrugged. Guilt was twisting her thoughts in unhealthy directions, clouding her judgement, making her project onto her companions. She tightened her grip on her emotions.

Vicky frowned harder, then glanced over her shoulder at Pira, unmoving and silent on the far side of the room. She turned back to Elpida and hissed: “What about you and Pira? Did you have sex?”

“No.” Elpida paused. “Well.”

Vicky’s eyebrows climbed. “ … well? Well what?”

“Almost. Sort of. Hard to explain.” Elpida sighed. “You’d have to be one of us — one of my cadre — to understand.”

“When you and her beat each other up?”

“When she and I beat each other up.”

Vicky lapsed into a long silence, chewing her bottom lip, eyebrows expressing a mixture of amazement and curiosity. Elpida stared down at the combat frame. Eventually Vicky followed her gaze and hunched her shoulders tighter again.

“It’s like whale fall,” Vicky murmured. “Gathered round to pick the bones.”

Elpida said: “Whale fall?”

“Uh, you didn’t even have oceans, did you? A whale — big sea mammal, really big, biggest things on the planet — dies and sinks to the ocean floor. Lots of blubber, lots of meat, resources, falling down into a place where there’s not much, usually. A miniature ecosystem forms around the corpse, all sorts of different things come to feed. Supposed to last for years and years, until the body is all used up.” She nodded at the combat frame. “Whale fall.”

Elpida considered the metaphor. Her chest tightened. “I dislike that comparison.”

Vicky gave her a wary look. “Oh-kay. Okay, Elpi. Lose the scowl, okay? I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Elpida relaxed her face. “Sorry. It’s Telokopolan, the combat frame. That’s all. I don’t like the idea. Sorry, Vicky. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Vicky blew out a big sigh, staring down at the fallen machine where it lay scrunched against the skyscrapers into which it had slid. At length, halting and uncertain, she said: “So, Elpi, that’s the kind of thing you piloted, yeah?”

“Yes, though that combat frame is much larger than anything which was manufactured during my life. It may be from later.” Elpida tried not to think about the implications of that — had the pilot program survived? She focused on the technical details. “That combat frame down there is at least three times the size of a regular Incisor type frame. It’s got four legs, like the Burning Sword, but without the close-combat capability. And it’s much more well armed than the Arclight Eternal — that was the heaviest and largest combat frame we had access to during the life of the pilot program. Heavier, faster, better frames were in development when the … well, when I died.”

Vicky was frowning at her. “Say that name again?”

“Which one?”

“The most heavily armed frame.”

“The Arclight Eternal?”

Vicky’s frown deepened. “Translation software is struggling with that one, I think.” She shook her head, then gestured down at the combat frame again. “Elpi … that thing down there is weird as fuck. Like, do you not see it? Sorry if I’m offending you again, I don’t mean to insult your home, but I have to say it.”

Elpida nodded. She understood. She’d had a similar reaction to combat frames herself — to seeing them for the first time, to witnessing the machine-meat innards and the soft wet membranes for pilot-capsule interlock. They seemed bizarre to an uninformed observer: the way the carbon bone-mesh armour plates grew outward into gnarls and knots as each frame aged; the way the machines twitched and quivered when awake, straining against the rigidity of their shells; the subtle rumbles and growls and grinding from their muscles and tendons. All that was visible to any non-pilot. But she knew what it felt like to link up with the mind of the machine.

“Combat frames were a strange invention in Telokopolis,” she said. “Controversial, to say the least. The technology was dug out of the city’s own central archives, not from human writings but directly from Telokopolis’ own superstructure. It taught us how to make them.”

“No, I mean … ” Vicky sighed sharply. “I’ve seen military walkers. China’s got—” She tutted and corrected herself: “China had these great big land-crawler things for crossing the Himalayas. I’ve seen pictures. And I know the old empire had walkers — the Chicago Arcology still had one. They used to show it off in parades, try to scare everyone.” Vicky’s mouth flickered with the ghost of a smile. “Didn’t last long in combat, fucker got cut off at the ankles with a shaped charge. Turned out they didn’t have the ammo for any of the rockets or nothing. But, look, Elpi, they were machines. That down there? That doesn’t look like a human machine to me. That looks like a space alien. It looks … alive.” Vicky forced a little laugh, as if to soften an insult.

“It is,” Elpida said. “And it’s on our side.”

The combat frames had always been on the cadre’s side — but when the Covenanters had made their move, the frames had been dry-docked and nerve-locked, temporarily lobotomised, placed beyond contact. Pilotless and helpless.

Vicky didn’t look reassured. She tried, and Elpida appreciated the effort. “So who sent it?” Vicky asked. “Or dispatched it? It fell from orbit, right? There’s a ring up there, an orbital ring — Pira said so. You’re thinking it fell because of you? Sent because you came back from the dead? Maybe your people built the ring?”

Elpida shrugged. “We’ll have to ask the combat frame.”

Vicky shivered at that. She drifted off for a couple of minutes, looking out into the dark. Slowly, she let her knee brush against Elpida’s leg.

“So, Elpi,” she said eventually. “What’s your plan for getting past the skull weirdos?”

Elpida didn’t answer for a long moment, not until Vicky looked at her. Then Elpida frowned and said what was truly on her mind: “Vicky, I might get you killed tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. I said it all earlier. My plan is terrible, our chances are—”

“Elpi, I know. I know.” Vicky’s eyes bored into her, too bright, too believing. “But you’re right, hey? What are the other options?” Vicky chuckled softly, but she wasn’t amused. “Elpi, this place is a fucking nightmare. I spent most of my life — all my adult life — fighting for the principle of a better world, that better things are possible. Didn’t get there while I was alive, sure, but I still believed it. Still want to believe it now. I was never good with theory, but that belief kept me going. And this? This place? This future?” Vicky chuckled again, darker than before. “This is a nightmare. Worse than the worst case I could have imagined. Screaming fever dream. Sometimes I think it’s not real.” She pointed down at the combat frame. “So if that — that weird thing down there, if that represents the smallest chance that better things are possible, I’m taking it.”

Elpida held her gaze. “What if I have my own selfish motivations?”

“That doesn’t make you wrong, you fucking dumbass.”

Elpida blinked.

Vicky continued. “Sure you’ve got selfish motivations. You wanna meet the graveworm, right? I’m not asking why. Or maybe you really are a ‘Necromancer’ or whatever, slumming it down here with us zombies. Who gives a shit? You’re still right! Everything you said about this place, you’re still right. Don’t try to convince me otherwise.”

Elpida nodded slowly. Then she reached over and took Vicky’s hand, which was sweaty and hot and burning with fear. She squeezed. Vicky stared at the contact, swallowed hard, and then leaned softly against Elpida’s shoulder.

“So?” Vicky repeated. “What’s your plan if the skull people don’t want to let us pass? What if they shoot at us?”

Elpida smiled. She leaned in close to Vicky’s ear, driven by nostalgia and assumption.

“We shoot back,” she whispered.

Two hours later dawn threatened the horizon with embers smothered beneath a lake of tar. Elpida made sure that Vicky returned to Kagami before she started waking the others; she didn’t want Kagami roused to silent jealousy by discovering Vicky dozing in Elpida’s lap, Elpida’s fingers stroking Vicky’s dark hair back over Vicky’s scalp. Never a good idea to mount an operation with sour emotion lingering in any hearts.

The others woke quickly. Ilyusha gave Elpida a surprisingly urgent hug, bumping her head on Elpida’s ribs, strong bionic arms going around Elpida’s middle; Amina seemed like she wanted to mimic the gesture, but she settled for a bobbing bow and a whispered mantra. Atyle and Pira both had little to say, though Pira gave Elpida a long look and a single nod. Vicky was still nervous, but strengthened by Elpida’s affections in the night. Kagami looked pale and grumpy; she uttered creative curses as she dragged the auspex visor back over her squinting eyes.

They shared a meal — a breakfast of brains, to fortify their bodies with nanomachines and reduce the weight of their gear. They ate all they had left.

Then, armed and armoured and ready to depart, without prompting or explanation, they gathered around the seven cannisters of raw blue nanites which Elpida had lined up on the kitchen counter. Unnatural hunger drew them to the blue glow in the still-dark apartment.

“One each,” Elpida explained. “Drink it now, and it’ll keep us all in rapid-regen for about twenty four hours. More than enough time to reach our target. It’ll give us an edge if anybody takes any wounds.”

Kagami said, hollow voiced: “Using up the last of our fuel, eh, commander? Time to burn the boats?”

“No. We have six more cannisters.”

“Bottoms up,” Vicky said. She uncapped her cannister and drank it like she was pouring alcohol down her throat. Everyone was surprised, even Pira.

Ilyusha drank with a glugging motion, then encouraged Amina to drink as well. Atyle needed no prompting. Pira treated it like medicine, down in one smooth motion without fuss. Kagami took little sips, wincing and blinking through the leftovers of her headache. Elpida drank her own and felt a strange satisfaction fill her belly and abdomen, similar to eating the brains, but stronger. She wanted more. They all wanted more.

Sixty floors down through the dark skyscraper, then out — into the corpse-city still shrouded in night.

Elpida kept the group formation tighter than before. They had less need for Pira as a trailing rear-guard, or for Ilyusha to cover the flanks with her rapid circling. There was almost nothing this close to the edge of the graveworm safe zone except for themselves and the highly advanced groups of revenants clustered within the ring of skyscrapers. Elpida’s primary concern was to keep well clear of those dug-in weapons, to give the revenant scavengers no excuse to break ranks and come after her companions.

They plunged into the canyons between the towers, scurrying from concrete bolt-holes to abandoned shop-fronts, from drainage ditches to the lee of ancient and rusted ground-cars, from brick walls infested with black mould to overhangs of concrete colonised by giant immobile leathery pods. The corpse-city threw deep shadows as the choking dawn throbbed into unlife in the sky above, great fingers of cold darkness cast by the rows of skyscrapers across their own rotten roots.

They worked their way counter-clockwise around the fallen giant of the combat frame. For most of the journey their target and reference point was hidden behind the kinked layers and skeletal remains of crumbling buildings. But now and again a flash of soot-stained white reared up at the end of a valley, the frame signalling to Elpida: I’m still here, still waiting, come help me.

The only constant, no matter how deep they delved, was the distant jagged grey line of the graveworm — far behind, and getting further.

There was sadly no chance of attempting to link up with Lianna and Inaya — the giant spider-woman and the star-prophet who rode upon her back. They were too far in the opposite direction, clockwise around the impact crater. Taking that route would add an additional dozen hours to the journey.

“Real pity,” Vicky whispered when reminded. “We really could have used those big armour plates when we reach the skulls.”

Kagami tutted. “We need proper comms. Hi-band. Sat links. Anyway. Fuck me, I’ll settle for radio. Like a real primitive.”

“Quiet,” Elpida murmured. “Eyes up. Concentrate.”

Elpida worked hard to maintain her attention, to avoid the false sense of security implied by the relative quiet of the ruins.

Her caution was vindicated — first, less than an hour into the journey, then twice more as they swung wide around the opposite side of the impact crater, creeping into the liminal and blurry boundary of the graveworm safe zone.

Three times they crossed paths with entities which Elpida dared not engage.

The first was a Silico murder-machine — similar to the true zombie which had assaulted the groups gathered outside the tomb. A corpse-core festooned with implanted weaponry, skin stretched paper-thin over batteries of chemical and biological deployment systems, torso mounted on multi-jointed legs of chrome, the head nothing but a block of sensor equipment. They spotted it far off — Kagami first — at the end of a canyon of buildings. Then they spent over an hour worming their way through the tangled guts of a skyscraper to avoid the machine’s predicted route.

The second and third encounters were less comprehensible.

As they rounded the outer edge of the impact crater — the furthest point from the graveworm they had yet travelled — they were forced to cross a wide trail of glistening purple slime. The slime smelled like vomit and made everyone’s boot soles smoke for a few seconds. Elpida assumed this was simply more of the city-wide background nanomachine activity of decay and regrowth. But the slime trail led off between the ruined buildings, in their direction of travel.

Kagami spotted the source about half an hour later, on her auspex visor.

“It’s the size of a tank,” she whispered. “Big and weird and … and if I’d seen something like that on the surface I would have dropped a nuclear bomb on it.”

Vicky sighed. “That’s your solution to everything.”

“Fuck you. Take a look for yourself! You’d do the same!”

Atyle spoke without amusement: “I concur with the scribe. Fire and salt.”

Elpida said, “We go around. Stay quiet. Kagami, alert me if it starts moving toward us.”

“I will scream my head off, commander, believe me.”

The detour added another hour to their travel time. Nobody complained.

The third run-in with an entity from beyond the graveworm line came when they had almost reached their target, as the group was turning back toward the impact crater itself, as they were preparing themselves for the potential confrontation with the Death’s Heads.

As they were passing down a narrow alleyway between two large steel-and-glass buildings, a figure stepped out behind them, from a doorway they had passed moments earlier. A doorway which had been empty, showing nothing deeper than a blank cubby of damp concrete. The figure was wreathed in black robes thick as the shadows themselves, from head to toe, nothing but a cut-out of darkness which filled the alleyway.

All it did was watch. It did not react when Pira and Ilyusha both put rounds through its middle. The bullets passed through and chewed into the concrete behind. It didn’t care when Elpida brandished the coilgun. It just stood and watched while she covered the others, while they scurried out of the alleyway and away from the apparition.

“What the fuck was that?!” Kagami spat when they were certain they were clear. “Was that one of your fucking Necromancers?!”

Pira shook her head. “No. I have no idea what that was.”

“You must have some—”

“I don’t.”

After six hours travel, four pauses for rest and reorientation, and three encounters with things better left alone, they reached Elpida’s target.

The skyscraper occupied by the Death’s Heads was bracketed by a single alleyway which ran straight from one main street and out into the impact crater, almost right next to the combat frame itself. The soot-stained white armour plates caught the dim and ruddy sunlight in the gap between the buildings. The bottom floors of the building to the left of the occupied skyscraper had been reduced to rubble and naked steel frame — there was an autonomous drone crawling about somewhere in there; on the right was tangled steel and heaped mountains of concrete, the result of the combat frame’s impact.

Elpida moved the group as close as she could get without breaking cover, behind a series of large concrete walls on the far side of the street, too heavy and thick to penetrate even with exotic weaponry and high-energy rounds. They huddled on cold paving slabs. Kagami squinted through her auspex visor and hissed soft curses. Ilyusha kept her head down for once, though she gritted her teeth. Amina stayed close to her side, holding onto a corner of Ilyusha’s t-shirt. Atyle stared through the concrete, frowning with curiosity, cradling the cyclic sliver-gun, refusing to properly crouch. Vicky held her heavy machine gun as if preparing to lay down covering fire. Pira just waited, back to the wall, watching Elpida.

Elpida peered around a corner, armoured hood up, exposing as little of herself as possible.

The occupied skyscraper was buttoned up tight: ground floor windows were covered with metal and the two doors on this side were blocked with heavy furniture; the second floor windows were open, most of them missing their glass; she couldn’t see any visible sentries.

Grinning skull symbols were daubed on the concrete at irregular intervals, as large as Elpida was tall.

Most were in black paint. One was in dried blood. One was in something unidentifiable. Excrement, perhaps.

Elpida whispered: “Kagami?”

Kagami broke into a rushed answer: “Yes! Yes, commander, they know we’re here, some of them are looking right at us, they— fucking hell some of them aren’t even human beings anymore.”

Elpida ducked back. Kagami was staring through the concrete, white-faced and wide-eyed. “Kagami, focus. Weapons? Are they moving?”

“No, no, they don’t give a shit. They’re not rushing to the defences or anything. Lots of chatter, though! Oh, yes, lots of chatter. Lots of encrypted chatter. They’re so very interested in us.” She swallowed, rough and hard. “Oh fuck, I hate this.”

Vicky reached out and took Kagami’s arm. Kagami did not shake her off.

Pira said: “Elpida.”

Elpida nodded. She felt her bloodstream flushing with adrenaline, her stomach muscles tight with anticipation. There was nothing else to do but put the plan into action. She said: “Atyle, are you ready?”

Atyle didn’t look at Elpida, but she smiled, thin and dark. “Ahhhh, warrior. These ones are worthy of attention.”

“Remember, don’t duck, don’t crouch,” Elpida said. “We need to project absolute confidence.”

Atyle gave her a look as if this was self-evident. “I do not cower.”

“Everyone else, be ready to follow. Amina, you hold onto that ballistic shield. Kagami, do not reject Pira’s help, we can’t afford any interruptions. Vicky, ditch the machine gun if you need to keep up. We need to do this together, in one go, without hesitation. Ready?”

Nods all around. Ilyusha bared her teeth and clicked her claws against her shotgun. Pira closed her eyes. Vicky swallowed. Amina was praying under her breath.

Elpida unlatched the coilgun receiver from the aim-assist rig and held it in both hands. The power-tank hummed to life on her back; she hoped the Death’s Heads could see the power signature. That was part of the threat, part of the plan. Atyle tilted her chin up and lifted the cyclic sliver-gun too, as if to show it off the moment she stepped from cover.

The plan was simple: mutually assured destruction.

The Death’s Head revenants were highly developed, heavily armed, and dug in deep. But a direct hit from a coilgun sabot-round would still blow one of them to pieces. The cyclic sliver-gun would cut a suit of powered armour in half. If Elpida pointed the receiver at the skyscraper and held down the trigger, she could punch holes in the walls and shred anybody who got caught in the blast. Yes, she would die too, moments later, when one of them fired back — but she had a good chance of taking half a dozen of them with her.

The revenants were high-end, the result of years of nanomachine consumption and development. Elpida was barely fresh from the tomb. They had her beaten with exotic and high-powered weaponry, yes — and they would die too.

But she didn’t yet know if they would care.

Time to find out.

“Atyle,” she said. “We step out on three. Then I’ll shout. Okay? One, two—”

“Wait!” Kagami hissed. She held up a hand. “Wait wait wait! Fuck, what?”

She looked over her shoulder quickly, the way they’d come, back between the tangle of buildings, eyes wide and staring through the surface of her auspex visor. Then forward again, at the skyscraper. She squinted hard, concentrating on something only she could see.

“Kagami?” Elpida demanded.

Atyle said: “I see nothing, warrior.”

Kagami hissed for quiet, chopping the air with one hand. “They- they’re talking on unencrypted radio, they … they say there’s something—” She looked back again, behind, as if something was creeping up on Elpida and the others from the rear. Then she whirled back again, panting, wide-eyed and pale. “No, that’s not … they’re talking to us? They’re talking to us. They’re talking to us!”

“Kaga?” Vicky said. “Kaga? Hey?”

“Kagami,” Elpida snapped. “What are they saying?”

Ilyusha hissed. “Bullshit!”

Kagami looked up slowly, from the concrete wall to Elpida’s face.

“They want to talk to you, commander,” Kagami said. “They want to talk to the ‘mech pilot’.”