Necroepilogos

Vicky awoke with the worst headache of her life.

She was lying on her back — crumpled, twisted, pinned — at the bottom of a bone-white shaft. Her vision was blurry and throbbing with pain. Every beat of her bionic heart sent a cracked web of agony arcing across the rear of her skull.

At the top of the shaft was the inside of a hatch: twelve feet up, bone-white, shut tight. Illumination came from a palm-pad just beneath the hatch. Ladder rungs climbed one side of the shaft. Opposite the rungs, about halfway down, the osseous perfection was marred by a crimson smear. Blood. Her blood? Where she’d hit her head?

Pain destroyed thought.

Vicky drifted in and out of consciousness. Minutes passed; perhaps hours. Had she fallen? Through the hatch? Yes. She’d fallen, hit her head, through the hatch, fallen, into the—

The hatch!

She inhaled, wheezing. “Elpi— ahh— ow—”

Vicky’s memories came rushing back. The last thing she remembered was standing on the hull of the mech — Elpi’s Telokopolan ‘combat frame’. Kagami had left the group, broken cohesion, and hurled herself up the hull. Vicky had gone after her, thinking that Elpida and the others were right behind. But they weren’t; Elpida had been pinned down. Vicky had turned back and shouted for Elpida to follow her, to join her and Kagami, to lead the others. Bullets and energy bolts and superheated plasma had been whizzing and crackling and thumping through the air; those brain-scratching worm-guard things had been looming over her, pouring earth-shattering firepower onto the gigantic overgrown AFV below — the tank, whatever it was. Vicky had known she was probably about to take a bullet, but she’d been determined to stand her ground and cover Elpida, to get her comrades up there with her, to get them to safety, no matter the danger. She’d been about to level her LMG and try to put herself to some good use.

But then one of Kaga’s little silver drones had nudged her in the chest with an invisible forcefield. Vicky had fallen through the hatch, through the shaft, into the mech.

And she’d hit her head on the way down.

“Fuck’s sake, Kaga,” she moaned.

Vicky’s mind felt clearer now. Her machine gun was lying on her front, the weight of the box-magazine pressing on her chest. Her sniper rifle was jammed against her spine, all twisted up with the backpack full of ammunition. Her limbs were tangled in her armoured coat and the looted overcoat. Her legs were jammed against the side of the shaft.

She tried to lift her head. Her hair was glued to the floor with blood. She pulled — and felt something shift.

She sat up, vision swaying and blurring, pain like sledgehammer blows on the back of her skull. The headache was so bad she wanted to vomit. She shoved her LMG off her lap; it clattered to the bone-white floor. She got one hand up behind her head and touched the wound.

“Ah! Ugh—”

Vicky spat bile, spluttering and gasping. Her vision throbbed black. Waves of pain radiated from the rear of her head. Her fingers came away sticky with half-dried blood. Something back there was loose, shifting under her touch.

Not just the worst headache of her life — the worst headache of any life.

Her skull was cracked; a human being would be dead from brain damage. Nanomachine biology was already re-knitting the pieces of cranial plate, but it hadn’t quite finished. Had she died and come back? They’d all chugged the blue nanite goop before they’d set out that morning. Perhaps that had been enough to bring Vicky back from a terminal brain injury.

“Like … like Elpi,” she murmured, then smiled at how stupid she was being. “You’re being a fangirl, Vic.”

Elpida had been shot through the heart, back during the fight outside of the tomb. Elpida had lain dead for over twelve hours, then came back to life. Vicky had never been religious. She knew Elpida was not a messiah, a risen saviour; she knew the comparison was absurd when they were all made of nanomachines, all zombies, all dead already.

But Elpida made her feel that way.

Right then, however, Vicky felt like death. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat.

“Fuck’s sake, Kaga,” she said out loud. “Threw me down a fucking well. Broke my head.” She looked up the bone-white shaft, at the inside of the hatch. “What kind of idiot puts ten feet of vertical shaft under an emergency access hatch? Thought your people were meant to be smart, Elpi. Heh.” Vicky’s vision swam. Elpi was smart, that was true, but—

“Oh shit! Elpi!”

Vicky launched herself up the ladder rungs — the others were still out there! She needed to let them in! She almost passed out again, gritting her teeth and hauling herself up to the hatch. There was a palm-pad and a lever; she pressed her blood-slick right hand to the pad, but nothing happened. She tried again, then punched the pad instead. She jammed the lever up and down, but the hatch didn’t move. She pressed on the hatch itself then thumped it with her fist, but it felt ten feet thick.

No sounds of battle filtered through the combat frame’s armour. No gunshots. No shouts. No earth-shattering weaponry.

No Elpida, no Commander, no Messiah, banging on the door to be let in.

Vicky let herself back down the ladder. She sat in a heap, panting, exhausted, headache scrambling her thoughts with every heartbeat. She looked up at the bloody smear on the wall of the shaft, where she must have hit her head: the blood was long dry. She touched the halo of crimson on the floor; the middle was sticky and wet, but the edges were dry and flaking.

How long did blood take to dry? How long had she been lying there, unconscious or dead? Where were the others? Where was Elpida? Where was Kagami?

There was only one route out of the shaft: a narrow passageway, smooth white, ringed by undulations like bones or ribs, just high enough to crouch or squat. In the shaft, Vicky’s nanomachine eyes were amplifying the tiny amount of light from the palm-pad, but the narrow passageway — service tunnel, bone-channel, whatever — was pitch black.

Maybe the others had all gotten inside, safe and sound, and headed off into the depths of the mech.

“Yeah right,” Vicky croaked. “And left you here with a head wound, bitch? No way, no way, Elpi would have carried you.” She tried to laugh, but that made the headache worse. “Shit, Vic. You bitch. You fucking left them all behind. Fuck. Kaga, what the fuck? Where are you?” She called into the narrow passageway: “Kaga?”

No reply.

“Oh fuck me, I’ve gotta crawl in there. Haven’t I?”

Vicky had no time to waste on fear. If the others were still out there, if there was any chance of helping them, she had to find out where Kagami had gone and get her to open this hatch. Or get this giant robot walker moving. Use the guns. Something, anything!

The LMG and the sniper rifle would make it impossible to crawl down the service tunnel — and potentially get in the way if she met anything. She propped both firearms against the wall of the shaft. She wriggled out of her backpack and stripped off her coats as well, going down to grey pants and thermal t-shirt. Then she decided to put the armoured coat back on; she might not be alone in here. Each decision took many more seconds than usual. She knew she had brain damage, no matter how rapidly it was healing. She paid for every motion with a stab of pain in the back of her skull.

She drew her sidearm — an automatic pistol, polymer-framed, lightweight, large calibre cartridges. She had two spare magazines, already loaded. And a combat knife.

The tunnel mouth was pitch black. Vicky hesitated.

Vic — no, ‘Victoria’ Yarrell knew she was not a warrior.

She was a soldier, yes — perhaps even a good soldier, or at least a very experienced one. She could hardly deny that; she’d been a soldier for almost twenty years.

She knew almost everything there was to know about maintaining, relocating, loading, aiming, and firing eleven different kinds of field artillery — even the over-engineered shit from the Old Empire; she’d never have made Gunner, with all the trajectory charts and calculations, let alone Master Gunner, but when it came to mechanical repair and logistics, she’d always been the go-to in the GLR 18th Infantry. She’d been with the artillery for the battles of Dayton and Cincinnati, as the revolution had turned into the Great Lakes Republic and swept eastward in those first glorious years. She’d run supply on the edge of the Appalachians for the mountain campaign, man-hauling, driving mules, then finally trucks, up into those verdant hills to supply the Irregulars with everything they needed to skull-fuck the Old-Empire holdouts into rubble; she could still fix a broken axle, coax an engine back to life, and get a team to unload a camouflaged freight truck in record time; after the Irregulars had become the GLR 18th she’d learned division-level logistics, ammunition supply, transport, feeding, just about everything there was to know about keeping the formation moving. She’d been on the refit and repair team for the stolen shipment of Tian Dun power armour suits — and she’d watched the bootleg security camera tapes when one of the suits had breached the Governor-Bunker and slaughtered the Six-State high command; she’d been at the Baltimore firebase when the fuckers down south had gotten their shit together and hit them with counter-battery fire; she’d ferried casualties and pinched off arteries in makeshift infirmaries; she’d breathed a sigh of relief when the GLR had negotiated the surrender of New York; she’d lived in a fox hole for three months when the GLR had marched south and murdered the Charleston Fortress-City in revenge for the nuke in Montreal. She’d volunteered for the second Chicago campaign, a return to what passed for home, to where it had all started, to crack that final citadel — the arcology, where she’d been running supplies to guerillas right below the noses of the Chicago city-state aristocracy.

She’d been a good soldier, first of the revolution, then the Republic. She’d known her job, she’d believed in what the GLR stood for — even when it dropped bombs and killed cities and strangled men to death with suits of powered armour — and she’d died trying to make the world a better place. So nobody would have to grow up like she did, in a refugee camp, in the shadow of an arcology populated by those who wanted for nothing.

But she’d never been on an assault team.

She’d never held a shotgun and shoved it in a human being’s face and pulled the trigger. She’d never gone room-to-room in an urban centre, or an arcology complex, in the places where the merchant kingdoms and the Old-Empire pretenders had put up a real fight. Except for that first time in Houseman Square, she’d never shot a human being she could see with her own eyes. She’d never had to, it wasn’t her area of expertise.

And she’d certainly never gone into a tunnel with a knife and a pistol.

Vicky pumped her lungs — which made her head throb with pain. “Ah, ow! Fuck me. Come on, Vic. Fuck you. Second chance at life. Third now! You want this new body? Use it. Elpida fucking needs you. Elpi gave you a name and got you on your feet. If it wasn’t for her you’d be dead. You’d never have left the tomb! They all need you, you left them all behind. This is your fault! Come on. Come on, you useless bitch, do it! What’s gonna be in there, a fucking alien? You’re invincible now! You die, you come back. Go!”

She plunged into the dark.

The service tunnel was not a straight line — it curved away to the left, then doubled back on itself, snaking through the bone-smooth innards of the combat frame. Vicky navigated with her left hand touching the wall, her other hand clutching her pistol, her eyes straining against the darkness; warmth radiated from deep within the wall, accompanied by a distant throb — or was that just the back of Vicky’s head? Every heartbeat wracked her skull with a fresh wave of pain.

At first Vicky maintained a crouch-walk, but the pain brought her to her knees, then to a crawl, pistol clacking against the floor. She kept one shoulder against the left-hand wall.

“Couldn’t fucking— drag me— Kaga? Just fucking— left me there? You— bitch. Gonna throttle you— when— when I find you—”

After perhaps two or three minutes of crawling through the naked bone-channel, Vicky reached a junction. She could barely see it in the dark, had to reach out and touch the corners to confirm. Straight ahead, left, and right.

From the left came distant noises — throbbing, gurgling, and creaking, like organs, guts, and muscles.

“Oh, oh fuck no,” Vicky murmured. “Elpi what the fuck is this thing? This isn’t a robot.”

To the right was the faintest sliver of red light.

She went that way, dragging, crawling, then hauling herself back up into a crouch-walk as the light got brighter. Red light — red like a flash-light shone through flesh, shot through with veins and capillaries. Blood-light.

Vicky slumped out of the service tunnel, into a circular chamber.

Red light throbbed from a low ceiling, from behind a thin layer of osseous white. Three passageways radiated out from the chamber at irregular intervals: on the left was the mouth of another service tunnel, dark and narrow; directly across from Vicky was a taller aperture which led to another chamber, in which she could see the edge of a control panel; on the right was another tunnel — but with a sharp upward slope, the mouth of which was ringed with bone-protrusions like anchor-points. Several foot-thick white plates lay on the floor around the opening, along with bolts and fastenings made from the same bone-like material as the rest of the combat frame innards: bulkheads, removed from their housings.

A figure was half inside the upward sloping tunnel, legs sticking out, wrapped in a familiar armoured coat. She emerged and sat up, white hair drenched blood-red by the light, copper skin made dark, purple eyes dyed almost black.

Vicky’s heart soared. “Elpi!”

Elpida smiled. “It’s good to see you’ve recovered. Welcome back.”

Laughing, heart pounding, head throbbing with pain, stomach churning with headache-induced nausea, Vicky gestured awkwardly with the handgun and clicked the safety on. “Sorry about the gun. Didn’t know what I’d run into in here, it’s weird as … as … Elpi?”

Elpida didn’t look right; her smile was too artificial, too sweet. Her face lacked the contained warmth, the professional confidence, the poise like a big cat at parade rest. Her eyes showed none of the intense sisterly concern — the too-hot, too-real, too-naked determination and affection, like sun-baked steel. The look which had reminded Vicky of everything she’d fought for in life, embodied for the first time in another person, a crystallization of everything she believed in. But that expression, that truth, was gone — or at least muted. Even Elpida’s pose was slightly wrong: shoulders rounded, head lowered, arms limp. She was holding a two-pronged crowbar in her hands, without much purpose.

Elpida said: “I’m sorry we left you in the entrance. We couldn’t risk moving you with a head wound like that. I knew you’d recover.”

Vicky swallowed, relief turning to horror; Elpida was in shock. “Elpi? Elpi, where are the others?”

Elpida’s smile was too sweet. “Nobody else made it in. I’m sorry.”

“No … nobody? Amina? Pira?”

“I’m sorry,” Elpida repeated.

“Oh, oh shit. Oh shit.” Vicky’s head whirled. The edges of her vision throbbed black with pain. “Amina, she’ll be all alone. And— and Illy, and— no, no, no. This can’t be right. The others. We left them behind? We left them?”

“I’m sorry,” Elpida repeated. “There was too much firepower in the air. I followed you, but the others were pinned down.”

“No-nobody was— nobody was—”

Elpida shook her head. Slow, measured, almost lethargic. “Calm down. Nobody was hit, not that I saw. They’re all still out there. If we can get this mech operational, we can rescue them. We need to focus on that.”

“How long— uh, h-how long was I out?”

“About six hours.”

Vicky squeezed her eyes shut with the pain; her head felt like it was going to burst. She couldn’t get her thoughts in order. This was a worst-case scenario, worse than she’d allowed herself to fear. If Elpida had been with the others, trapped outside the combat frame, then at least she could have led them, kept them together. But did they stand a chance, without Elpida to lead them?

And Elpida herself was in shock, emotionally numb, her confidence gone. And it was all Vicky’s fault.

“I should have told you. Elpida, I’m so sorry. I should have told you about Kaga’s drones. She was practising with them, in the night, getting them running, making them fly. She made me promise not to tell you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Vicky’s vision was so blurred she could barely see Elpida’s expression. “I should have told you, I should have—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Elpida said.

Vicky blinked her vision clear. Elpida was just smiling, bland and sweet and empty.

No wonder she looked wrong. Elpida had lost a close-knit band of sisters, and now Vicky and Kaga’s secret had cost her another group of comrades.

“R-right,” Vicky said. She had to pull herself together, for Elpida’s sake. “Right. I— what can do I? Elpi, what do you need me to do? What are you trying to do? What’s our next move?”

Elpida gestured with the crowbar, up the sloped passageway. “I think the mech pilot is up here, but it’s not meant to be accessed from this manual control area. I’m taking the bulkheads apart by hand. Thank you for the offer, but this space is too narrow for more than one person.”

“Right. Right. Okay. Where— wait, where’s Kaga?”

Elpida nodded toward the wider aperture at the rear of the circular chamber. “Manual controls are through there. You could lend a hand, see if we can get systems access.”

Vicky nodded — ow — stowed her handgun in a pocket of her armoured coat, and crawled across the chamber. Elpida started to turn back to the sloped tunnel, to resume the slow work of breaking through the bulkheads. Vicky paused, reached out, and clapped a hand on Elpida’s shoulder. Elpida turned to look at her, blank and hollow. Lost inside. Fighting too much grief.

“Elpi.” Vicky tried to sound confident. “We’ll get the others back. We will. Pira’s smart, Illy’s vicious, and Atyle was very heavily armed. Right? They’ll be okay. Right? We’ll get them back.”

Elpida nodded. “Thank you.”

She turned back to her work, leaving Vicky’s hand to clutch empty air.

As Elpida turned away, Vicky saw a glint of metal through Elpida’s hair, at the base of her skull — her uplink-slot, to pilot the mech? Hadn’t she made a big deal about that being gone? Perhaps Kagami wasn’t the only one growing new parts in secret. Vicky felt heartsick for a terrible moment, but Elpida wasn’t paying attention.

Vicky slumped into the manual control room.

A narrow rectangular space, cramped and dark, illuminated from above by more of that blood-red vein-light. A smooth depression in the floor formed a bench-seat, with person-shaped grooves for five manual operators. The control panel was made from the same bone-material as the rest of the combat frame interior, with keys and switches and buttons raised from the surface, marked with symbols and letters, glowing faintly with blood reds and mould blues, bile yellows and sickly greens; two of the seat-grooves faced mechanisms which looked designed to accept entire human arms, like super-advanced joysticks.

A bank of screens glowed above the control panel, set into the wall, back-lit by that same blood-dyed illumination. The screens looked more like transparent chitin than glass; nothing seemed to separate one screen from another, no bevel or boundary, like a giant compound eye. The screens showed a jumble of exterior views, many of them too dark to make out in detail. Vicky recognised the line of skyscrapers against the night sky, patches of churned grey earth littered with revenant corpses, and sections of the combat frame’s own exterior hull. Other screens glowed with ghostly green night vision, or the false colour of thermal readout, the bloody cocktail of infra-red, and some visual spectra that Vicky had never seen before: purple swirls or white wisps or mechanical representation of echolocation or nanomachine detection. A few screens showed scrolling readouts of green text, dense with numbers and data.

Kagami was slumped in the middle seat-groove.

“Kaga!” Vicky joined her, sliding down into the adjacent seat. “Kaga, we left … oh, fuck me. Kaga, what have you done to yourself?”

Kagami was drenched in sweat, shaking all over, hunched tight with terrible pain. Her long dark hair was plastered to her forehead and neck. Her armoured coat was pulled tight as if she was suffering fever chills. Her eyes turned to Vicky — wide, bloodshot, mad with terror and exhaustion. Her soft brown skin was dyed bloody in the red light.

She was plugged into the control panel: two shiny black cables extended from the flesh of her left palm and into a pair of sockets. Visible circuitry glowed beneath her fingertips and down her wrist.

Her silvery drones were lined up on the seat next to her, powered down, inactive. The auspex visor lay next to them.

“Victoria,” Kagami wheezed. “So good of you to finally fucking join us.”

“Kaga, what—”

“Oh, what am I doing? I’m trying to negotiate with a giant robot that doesn’t even speak human language — no, scratch that, a giant robot which is more like some fucking fungal infection in an octopus than any kind of animal intelligence.” Kagami took a deep breath, ripping the air down into her lungs, wincing and whining. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She showed her teeth, manic with more than just pain. “This thing does not want me inside its brain, oh no, no no no. The fact it even has a brain is obscene. The meat isn’t even carbon — how do you even do that? Do you have the faintest idea how fucking insane that is? The people who built this should have all been shot. It thinks in base eight. Makes me want to vomit.”

“Kaga.” Vicky reached out and steadied Kagami’s shoulder. “Kaga. We left everyone behind. You shut the hatch. You left them behind. We need to—”

Kagami hissed through clenched teeth: “I was rather preoccupied. And I still am, thank you very much.”

“Kaga, you fucking shut the hatch!” Vicky snapped. She didn’t mean to lose her temper, but there it went. She grabbed the front of Kagami’s coat, bunched in a fist. They were both responsible for this, for danger to their comrades, for Elpida’s state. “We didn’t tell anybody about the drones, and now somebody might be hurt, or worse! We have to get this thing moving, we’re not leaving—”

“I accept full responsibility, yes, yes,” Kagami hissed — and as she spoke, she reached out with her right hand and typed on the control panel. “My fault, bad girl, bad moon bitch. Pay attention, Victoria! You want to save the idiot zombies? Then help me! You can start by looking at that!”

Kagami pointed at one of the screens: a vague blob of night-vision grey. The meaningless smear meant nothing to Vicky.

“Kaga—”

“Look. Closely. You blind primitive! Concentrate!”

Vicky sighed, and—

Down in her peripheral vision one of the text-display screens had cleared, leaving behind a single isolated line in softly glowing green.

>Do not read this out loud. Do not respond to these messages out loud. Keep talking. Play along.

A clunk came from the circular chamber behind them: Elpida discarding another layer of bulkhead. Kagami flinched and pressed a button on the keyboard. The green message vanished.

Vicky slowly let go of the front of Kagami’s coat. Kaga was watching her closely, waiting for a reaction. Vicky eased herself back into one of the seat-grooves, heart pounding, skull slamming with pain.

“Uh, Kaga … what … what am I looking at, exactly?”

Kagami sighed, sharp and irritated. She said: “The camera feeds, the camera feeds! It’s about the only part of this obscene mech that’s happy to talk to me. I have no idea how it has cameras out on the hull, there’s no gaps, no routes for information, and you can’t broadcast shit through whatever it’s made of. Like a fucking nuclear bunker. But we’ve got vision. Oh, we’ve got plenty of vision.”

As she spoke, Kagami’s fingers flew across the keyboard. Another green message appeared.

>Didn’t you notice?

Vicky swallowed, head spinning. “Okay … okay, Kaga, I follow that far. Um. But what am I supposed to be noticing?”

“That, that!” Kagami tapped at one of the screens again — at a blob of thermals inside the base of one of the skyscrapers. “We can track the position of every revenant still out there, which means identification, which means, huzzah hooray hip-hip whatever for me, we can locate and identify all the others. If we’re smart, and fast, and nobody is masking signals or trying to hide. And I’m very smart and very fast, so fuck you.”

Kagami typed as she spoke.

>That thing back there is not Elpida.

Vicky went numb. Kagami pressed a button. The green text vanished.

“Uh,” Vicky said, stalling for thought. Her head throbbed with pain. What the hell was Kaga talking about? Had she gone mad with guilt, or fear? Or was this a final ploy to turn Vicky against Elpida, against the Commander? “Kaga, I don’t entirely follow what you mean. I’m, uh … I’ve got a head wound, in case you haven’t noticed? Pretty sure I died back there. Thanks for nudging me into the hatch, by the way. Pretty sure you cracked my skull. Killed me. Well done.”

“Stop whinging, you got better.” Kagami rambled on. “It was the only way to ensure you didn’t get shot, standing up there like a cat in an airlock. You don’t have to thank me, by the way. Look, I’m trying to tell you that we can locate the others. Are you still concussed? We. Can. Locate. The. Others.”

Kagami’s fingers told a different story.

>Not Elpida. It was already here when I crawled in. Was surprised to see me. Called it Elpida and it just played along. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I left you there. Was trying to get the controls to open the hatch. Too risky now. I think it’ll turn on us.

Vicky shook her head. “Uh, Kaga. Uh, okay. Okay. I follow. I’m following. Sorry, my head is … is … bad.”

“Take your time,” Kagami said, tight and urgent.

Vicky looked Kaga in the eyes — blood-shot, sagging, exhausted. Kagami looked like a radiation poisoning victim about to start losing hair.

Vicky said: “What if you’re wrong?”

“About the others? Then it’s at least worth a try, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to all stick together, commander’s orders? Thought you were her good little girl, Victoria, following orders, one-for-all all-for-one, all that shit, right? Right?”

Kagami’s fingers flew:

>Not wrong. Doesn’t act like her. Doesn’t even know our names. Uses the wrong words for things. Looks normal under the auspex but I don’t trust that now. It knows that I know but it doesn’t care. Where’s the coilgun? Where’s her weapons? Where the fuck did she get that crowbar?

Churning rot settled into the pit of Vicky’s stomach. Kagami was right. Whatever was back there wasn’t acting like Elpida at all, even Elpida in shock and grief. Elpida would not have left Vicky’s corpse all twisted up in that shaft, to wake alone and confused.

Vicky started to shake. The back of her skull hurt so much, pounding with each elevated heartbeat. She put her hand in her pocket and gripped her pistol, then glanced over her shoulder. Elpida’s boots were just visible poking out of the sloped tunnel back in the circular chamber. Grinding sounds came from the bolts on the next layer of bulkheads.

Vicky wasn’t a very good shot with a handgun, but one bullet to that thing’s head and—

Kagami grabbed Vicky’s arm and dug in with her nails. Vicky winced, then showed the handle of her pistol. Kaga shook her head, hard, and mouthed: I can’t do this alone!

Vicky had been unconscious or dead for six hours. Kaga had been alone, up here, with whatever was out there wearing Elpida’s face.

Vicky eased back into her seat, nodding slowly. Kagami let go, shaking all over.

“What, uh … ” Vicky reached up to a random screen, didn’t matter which, and looked Kagami in the eyes as she said: “What do you think that is, Kaga?”

Kagami tapped a different screen, one which showed thermal imaging, blobs of bright colour on a blue background. “That right there, I think that’s the little psycho cyborg — Ilyusha, Illy, whatever you want to call her.”

Kagami typed.

>Necromancer.

Vicky said: “You’re serious?”

>What else would it be?

Kagami said out loud: “Yes, that’s Ilyusha. I’m serious. It’s the right size and still clutching one of the ballistic shields. Fuck knows how the little goblin got away, but she did. She’s clear, curled up in … ” Kagami glanced at another screen. “A metal box? I have no idea. Little fuckhead moron. Haha! Still got our backpack full of blue goo!” Her laugh was a little too hysterical.

“And … and the others?” Vicky asked. She worked hard to keep her voice level. “You can see them for real? Any of them?”

Kagami nodded. Her left hand, the one plugged into the control console, twitched and flexed. Screens flickered through readouts, mostly thermal images, but also in those spectra Vicky had never seen before, wisps of white and grey, purple-riot dot-matrices, and red overlaid on red.

Kagami explained: “The one curled up in a corner there might be Pira. I can’t be sure but the arm is bionic, and it’s the right size and composition for her. This thing has fantastic resolution, about the only good thing about it. In the base of that tower, see that there? Probably the serial killer freak — Amina, whatever her name is.”

“Captured?” Vicky squinted, trying to make out the topography. Amina and Pira were inside the same structure. A true-colour vision of the night-shrouded city showed a familiar grinning skull on the wall of the building. “Isn’t that the—”

“The Death’s Head skyscraper, mmhmm. Captured, yes, I think that’s a safe assumption.” Kagami snorted. “Though no assumption is safe here, right? And I assume that right there is our coilgun. It’s the correct power signature.”

“And- and the others? The-”

Kagami tapped a thermal blob in the same rough area as Amina, perhaps a few rooms away: slumped against a wall, stretched out, oddly messy in the middle.

“I’m not sure who that is,” Kagami said. “But I think it’s one of us. I might be wrong about the one up there being Pira, it might be her down there instead. Or maybe the primitive, I don’t know for sure.”

Kagami typed again.

>Elpida. Real one.

Vicky’s heart raced. “You’re serious?”

“Mm,” Kagami grunted. “Whoever it is—”

“Alive?”

“Badly fucking injured,” Kagami snapped. “Let me finish my sentence, Victoria. Whoever it is, they’re badly injured and humming with nanomachine repair activity. So, there’s that.”

Vicky tried to breathe deep. Her head still hurt so badly she couldn’t think. “Okay, so … so what’s our plan? I mean, if … if … Elpida doesn’t get this mech moving?”

Kagami snorted. “Plans are thin.” She pointed at a massive blob of nonsense readouts, a jumble of meaningless information, wedged inside the base of a nearby skyscraper. “I’ve been trying to contact that thing for hours, but this bloody mech won’t give me full-spectrum comms. If we can get through to it we might have an ally on the outside who can herd up our missing zombies.”

Vicky squinted at the readouts. “What am I looking at?”

“The tank! The tank which decided to rile up the worm-guard. The worm-boys ran off, by the way. Not far, just on the other side of the mech. Don’t ask me to show you that camera-view, it made me blind for twenty minutes. The tank is hiding. Licking its wounds? Is that what tanks do?”

Kagami typed as she spoke.

>The combat frame pilot is alive. Badly wounded. Talking to me. Don’t let on.

“O-oh,” Vicky said. “Uh, that sounds … complicated. Um. What about, uh … ”

“It’s not complicated at all!” Kagami snapped. “It’s simplicity itself. If we can raise the tank on comms — if this fucking thing will let me — we can direct it to the others. Get them on board, and help Elpida back there get this thing moving.”

>Pilot’s delirious. Doesn’t understand. Doesn’t speak like us. Different language. Routing communications through binary then base-8. Hate this. Pilot says internal defences are down but not inside the pilot capsule enclosure. Big fucking guns. Enough to slow down anything. Maybe not enough to kill a Necromancer. But will buy us an opening.

Vicky kept her voice steady: “Sounds optimistic. How are you going to … ?”

Another clunk came from the circular chamber. The thing wearing Elpida’s face let out a loud sigh, then called: “I think I’m through!”

How are we going to kill a Necromancer?

Kagami turned to Vicky and grinned wide, manic and full of pain. “Simple, Victoria. Communication. Proper communication. The one thing you primitives could never master, grubbing down there in the dirt. The one thing Luna always had over you, even you genius NorAm bitches.”

Kagami’s left hand reached down and lifted one of her drones. Her right hand typed the truth.

>Gravity.