Necroepilogos

Elpida was intimately familiar with the doctrine and mechanics of tactical withdrawal — the fighting retreat, the fall back action, controlled and coordinated to avoid collapsing into a rout.

Legionaries died in routs; retreat saved lives.

Two thirds of every Legion-led sortie beyond the Telokopolis plateau — and ninety percent of every cadre-only expedition into the deep green — had ended in contested withdrawal, with Silico murder-machines nipping at Legion flanks, pressing assaults to split formations, and infiltrating down through the gargantuan tree trunks to target the all-important defoliant equipment, the flame-thrower units and herbicidal crawlers, essential for cutting a path back through the green, as the teeming plants regrew in fecund masses right inside the Legion’s hour-old hardshell bootprints.

A cadre-only retreat was less vulnerable: cradled close inside their combat frame pilot capsules, cushioned by pressure gel and a constant communications uplink, fed each other’s sense-data and combat judgements and split-second warnings — but also random musings and sisterly reassurances and stupid jokes. Watching each other’s backs was easy when you had twenty five pairs of eyes hooked into twenty five combat frame sensor suites, when you knew the insides and outsides of each other better than you knew yourself, when you could hear each other’s thoughts on the data-stream plugged into the rear of your skull.

But even the cadre was not invincible, not like they were presented for the public.

The longest cadre-only fighting withdrawal had lasted five weeks — the culmination of the deepest ever expedition into the green, far past the gritty slopes and sudden cliffs of the drop-off line, down into the dark where the sun could not penetrate through miles of dense vegetation, beyond communications with the city, beyond any link with Telokopolis except each other.

The cadre had seen strange sights down there, where no human beings had walked for millions of years: albino plants sucking nutrients from the trunks of giant trees, shaped like exotic fungi with fans and frills and biological armour plates to fend off parasites; plains of sandy soil and rock penetrated by roots tough as steel, drawing geothermal heat from beneath the earth’s crust; vast dome-like structures and metal frameworks buried in mountains of silt, penetrated and ruined by ravenous stems and clinging ivy and sucking tendrils, with shapes — words, writing? — obscured by an eternity of dirt; and Silico giants, sinuous and silken, crawling like centipedes amid the forgotten bones of the world before the green.

Five weeks, some of the longest of Elpida’s life. Five weeks of trudging back through that labyrinth of wonders that nobody in Telokopolis would believe — nobody except the committed expeditionists, not without the vid-records and sensor data from the combat frames. Five weeks of hiding in canyons from Silico leviathans, of giving battle only when they could no longer evade pursuit, of day-long struggles with monsters swarming up the sides of their combat frames or pummelling them like amateur pugilists with a hundred fists.

Five weeks of listening to Silico ‘intelligence’ calling out to them from among the pale roots, singing songs from inhuman throats, squirting alien data-streams and radio bursts and tight-beam comms in all directions. Five weeks of listening to their combat frames creak and groan with the barely contained desire to grow beyond their carbon bone-mesh armour plating. Five weeks of crawling through millennia-stagnant mud — and of crawling into each other’s cockpit enclosures, desperate for the comfort of companionship, their skin and pilot suits slick with capsule gel, shivering in the dark while the frames guarded themselves with their own unleashed neural architecture.

Elpida had not lost a single sister on that retreat — but not a single frame had gone undamaged. The Orchid Eightfold had lost both left arms and part of a shoulder; the Aculeata and the Chromatic Infinity had both been almost unable to walk by the time they’d reached the plateau; the Spiral Witch had suffered some kind of green-borne infection running rampant through her machine-meat innards, contracted via a piercing wound from the stinger of a Silico giant; the pilot program had kept her in dry-dock for a full year afterward, amputating and grafting new machine-meat muscle tissue hundreds of times over. Elpida had been piloting the Tromos on that expedition; the frame had endured a score of deep-tissue bruises, fractured support beams, and gouges to her carbon bone-mesh armour. By the time they’d crawled back home, the Tromos had been shaking and shivering like a dog with a neurological disease, clinging to Elpida through the MMI cranial uplink slot, mewling and whining in the back of her consciousness.

The cadre had fared better.

Daysalt had lost a leg — replaced with the best augmetic the Legion could supply. Fii had contracted some kind of liver problem from green-exposure, and received a lab-grown transplant. Metris had a fractured spine, Kos had three broken ribs, Quio had some kind of problem with her eyes; nine cadre-sisters had been in their pilot capsules long enough to develop short-term eating problems, and six more had balance issues which lingered for weeks. Yeva did not sleep for ten consecutive days — not until Elpida personally jabbed her with a powerful sedative. Emi suffered nightmares for months; Arry kept repeating snippets of Silico ‘language’.

But they’d all survived the retreat; they’d all come home, back to Telokopolis.

Elpida had never envied the Legion foot sloggers, fighting Silico with rifles and monoedge swords, protected by greensuits and hardshells, at best. In combat frames the cadre could duel the Silico’s gods to a standstill. On foot a single bullet could end even the most heavily modified nanomachine zombie.

“Retreat!” Elpida bellowed at her comrades, spitting blood. “Heads down! Down the stairs, go! Go!”

Howl cackled inside her head: Advancing to the rear!

Bullets and energy bolts cracked and crackled down the skyscraper corridor, cutting through the dark air, chipping the marble walls and crunching off the floor; the Death’s Head revenants at the other end of the corridor struggled to set up proper suppressing fire, kept down by the pounding of Hafina’s massive anti-materiel rifle and the crack-thump wave of light-drinking projectiles from her strange energy weapons. They resorted to blind-fire spray, sticking their guns around the corners and hoping for the best. They dared not throw any explosives for fear of hitting their own trump card: Kuro was still sprawled on the floor halfway down the corridor.

But she was beginning to pick herself up. The armoured giant got one hand beneath her fallen bulk — and then rolled and flailed as Hafina shot her in the flank again, bouncing her armour like a rag doll.

Elpida and the others scuttled down the stairs and into the dark, bullets pattering off plates and thumping into armoured coats. The others were sturdy and fresh, but Elpida—

She felt two solid-slug rounds slam into the back of her coat; her armour deflected any penetration — but the impact rang through her gut wound like a lance to the belly. She wheezed and spluttered and pitched forward, toppling down the stairs. Small, strong, desperate hands grabbed her around the waist — Amina, holding on tight. Amina’s grip dug into Elpida’s gut wound. A wave of fresh fire roared up through her torso and down into her hips and groin, obliterating thought, turning Elpida’s body into a lightning rod of pain.

She staggered down the rest of the steps, half-blind, panting and heaving, drooling blood, with one hand jammed against her own belly to stop her guts from spilling out. Another pair of hands caught her, less clumsy than Amina.

Amina was squeaking: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! S-she was going to fall! She was going to—”

Atyle said quickly: “Hush, little rabbit. We must move fast. Your angel endures.”

Elpida whined: “I’m— fine— fine— go— keep going—” She forced her eyes open.

Dark corridors stretched off left and right. Gunshots cracked and snapped from the top of the stairs; Hafina was backing down slowly, holding the high ground for a few more seconds. Her liquid armour under-layer and shifting skin shimmered under small arms impact, her hanging layers of armour plates and ragged robes breaking up her outline in the gloom.

Ooni was muttering from inside her helmet, expression masked: “By all the gods. It’s real. That’s a real ART. That’s real. Leuca? Leuca, do you see this?”

Atyle spent those precious seconds glancing left and right. Her peat-green bionic eye whirred in the gloom.

Atyle murmured a reply to Kagami’s instructions in her comms headset: “The rear, scribe? Our chariot suggests this?” Then she pointed with the cyclic sliver-gun — left. “We go! Betrayer, arm our prize!”

Pira said: “The coilgun?”

“The same!”

The group hurried down the corridor, through decades of dust and dank mats of dark nanomachine rot. Ooni helped Pira to strap the coilgun’s aim-assist rig around her waist as they ran; Pira handed Ooni her plasma rifle, unhooked the coilgun receiver, and activated the magnetic containment. The power-tank hummed on her back; a sabot-round clunked into the barrel. Elpida gripped her stomach in one hand and Amina’s bloody paw in the other, dragging her onward, staggering and sagging, lurching and lagging. Behind them, Hafina loped through the darkness, cracking off anti-materiel rounds and exotic bolts of charged particles, keeping the Death’s Heads at bay.

Elpida knew she wasn’t in charge anymore; she could do nothing to keep her comrades alive, nothing but trust.

Pira snapped: “Sentries? Atyle, where are the sentries? You said two?”

“We go around them, betrayer,” Atyle said. “We make our own exit. The scribe is unhappy, but the small titan will have a shorter journey.”

They hit a marble wall and stopped — another t-junction, branching left and right. Was this the exterior of the skyscraper? Elpida couldn’t tell; her sense of direction was scrambled by pain, her legs were shaking with effort, and her stomach felt like it was splitting open beneath her fingers.

Atyle pointed at the wall. “Betrayer. One strike.”

Pira nodded. “Right.”

Pira raised the coilgun receiver, took aim at the stretch of marble wall, and covered her eyes with her free arm. Elpida pulled Amina back into cover, sheltering the smaller girl behind her armoured coat. Atyle ducked and turned her back. Ooni stood there for a second, then crouched into a ball and covered the plasma rifle with her own body, her flesh protected inside her armour carapace.

Down the corridor Hafina was a vague dark shape of hanging rags and liquid armour, shimmering and shifting in the backwash of weapons fire.

Where’s the big bitch? said Howl. Where’s that tank-suit gone, huh? Elps, you were always good at this, where’s she fucking gone?

Elpida had no answer. She gurgled through a bloody throat: “Don’t know. Howl, stop. Can’t think.”

Amina made a curious sound against Elpida’s front.

Pira yelled: “Firing!”

The coilgun’s magnetic containment discharged with a stomach-pounding thump. The sabot-round slammed through the marble wall, pulverised breeze block and concrete into dust, and bent steel supports with a screaming chorus of tortured metal. Debris and shrapnel pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat. Amina whimpered into her chest. The Death’s Heads behind them ceased fire for a second.

Pira shouted: “Another?”

Atyle replied, “No. Through the hole, my lambs!”

One by one they clambered through the exit wound.

The coilgun sabot-round had punched a wide ragged hole through the filthy marble and hidden guts of the skyscraper wall, splintering the concrete and flowering the steel supports outward in a blossom of twisted metal; there was nothing to see through the hole, nothing but the night. Atyle went first, ducking and wriggling through the gap; then Amina, small enough to squeeze through without effort. Ooni and Pira held the rear as Hafina retreated toward them, cracking off shots with the plasma rifle and pointing the coilgun to scatter their pursuers.

Elpida was not certain how she made it outside. She could barely bend to duck through the gap, let alone push past the hanging chunks of concrete and twisted steel beams. Her vision went dark, the blood draining from her head. Urgent hands pulled her through and dropped her to the ground on the far side.

She heaved up a mouthful of blood and spat on the concrete pavement. Her stomach was on fire, blood leaking through her fingers and smeared all up the arm of her coat. She was amazed her belly was not a writhing mass of spilled intestines. She stared at the dirty ground, drooling crimson, on the edge of unconsciousness.

Get up, said Howl. Get up!

Pira squeezed through next — Elpida recognised the sound of her grunting as she pulled the coilgun free — then Ooni, hampered by the bulk of her armour carapace, helmet going clonk as she knocked her head on the concrete.

“The ART—” Ooni panted through her helmet. “It’s too big, how’s it going to fit?”

Atyle said: “Learn faith, animal.”

Elpida raised her head from the pavement just in time to witness Hafina emerge from the hole. The robe-wrapped giant had dislocated her limbs to fit through the gap; she had re-articulated pieces of her body at angles which would have killed any other nanomachine zombie, let alone a human being. She emerged like an unfolding stick insect, joints popping loudly as she resumed her shape, framed by the dark skyscrapers and the choking black ceiling of the night sky.

Her hanging curtains of bulletproof plates were scored and bent; her clinging under-layer of liquid armour was whited-out in places where it had caught bullets or deflected plasma bolts.

She stepped sideways to clear the hole in the wall, then stuck one of her guns into the wound and pulled the trigger several times. The hole flashed with energy backwash; a strangled scream came from the other side.

Ooni chattered through her helmet: “They’re going around! They’re already going around! I-I’ve got the comms network still, Yola’s sending them round the front!” Her voice rose in shrill panic. “She’s— she’s still giving commands! No! Fuck, no! I blew you up, I blew you up!”

Optimistic pot-shots cracked and banged from the second floor of the skyscraper; Hafina straightened up, aimed her guns, and blanketed the upper windows with energy bolts. Atyle raised the cyclic sliver-gun and raked firepower in her wake, chewing at the concrete, forcing the shooter’s heads down.

Pira yelled: “Stay here or move?”

Hafina’s head turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees on her neck, pointing her black helmet in the opposite direction.

“Pheiri!” she said — in that high, delicate voice. “Pheiri!”

“Your titan is on his way!” Atyle said. “We hold a moment, betrayer, we—” She cut off. Then, to Kagami, over the comm link: “Left, right, left, right, make up your mind, scribe! Little rabbit, Hafina, the warrior must be carried, she—”

Get up, Elps, you sleepy bitch! Howl shouted inside Elpida’s head. This lot are falling apart! They’ll leave the other one behind!

Elpida got her feet beneath her body and pushed herself upward. Hands grabbed at her arms, as if she might fall. But got herself upright.

They had emerged from the skyscraper into the rear street — the wide road from which they had first approached the Death’s Head fortress. The ground floor windows and doors were all stopped up with boards and furniture; the Death’s Heads’ own improvised fortifications were choking their response. To the left the road stretched away into the ruins. On the opposite side of the street, dark buildings clawed toward the silent, rotten sky. Behind them, hidden by the skyscraper itself, lay the combat frame. To the right was the neighbouring skyscraper, with the ground floors scoured by firepower, cleared of tall cover, and patrolled by a Death’s Head drone.

Elpida shouted: “Ilyusha!”

The effort made her stomach roar with white-hot fire. Her vision throbbed black. She felt blood dribble down her chin. She shook her head to clear her thoughts.

Then, from far away: “Yaaaaaaaah!”

Ilyusha, howling like—

Like me! cheered Howl.

Elpida pointed. “That— way. Now. Now!”

Atyle said: “The small titan—” A pause. “Very well. Our titan agrees, though the scribe is screaming and soiling her underclothes. Stay right, stay close to hiding places. Hurry now, lambs!”

They fled along the pavement, sticking close to the edge of the skyscraper. Then they burst out past the end of the side-street; Elpida stole one glance to her right, at a sliver of the combat frame’s leg, a soot-stained white ghost abandoned upon the earth. Then they plunged on, hugging the half-ruined walls and naked steel uprights of the neighbouring skyscraper.

A roaring rumble was approaching through the ruins, knocking aside the rubble and smashing down the walls, cutting a path through the guts of the corpse-city.

But it sounded too far away.

Elpida knew they had only moments before the Death’s Heads emerged into the road behind them. The cover in this street was better than the bare-earth crater where the combat frame lay, but as soon as enough Death’s Heads got clear and formed a firing line to their rear, they would be pinned down. The only real cover lay to their right — the wall stubs and twisted metal remains of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper.

Hafina snapped off a few shots to their rear. Small arms fire answered, bullets chewing into the concrete and asphalt. Pira turned as well and loosed another sabot from the coilgun; Elpida glanced back just in time to see the round explode a crater in the pavement, showering running figures with asphalt rain.

A familiar voice rose over the din of weaponry, purring wet with honeyed pain: “Come back, superhuman! Come back to me! I admire your tenacity, but this little game is over!”

Yola.

Rotten bitch, Howl spat. Hope that plasma det burned her face off.

A moment later the Death’s Heads got enough zombies into position. They drowned the street in firepower.

Elpida and her comrades bundled each other into cover — into the ruins of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper. Soot-blackened wall stubs and a few sheets of standing metal were better than the open pavement. Atyle just stepped behind an upright beam, once again unwilling to duck now her stealth field was useless. Amina hit the ground, whimpering as bullets slammed through the air. Elpida crouched, blinded by the pain in her stomach. Ooni sheltered Pira with her own body, her suit of armour carapace protecting them both from stray shots. Hafina stood almost in the open, replying with rapid-fire anti-materiel rounds thumping out of her massive rifle; but even the artificial human would not stand for long — she was jerking and twitching under a hail of bullets, plasma bolts sparking off her armour, tiny metal flechettes catching in her robes.

Yola’s voice rang out over the incessant gunfire: “Superhuman! Elpida! Elpida, won’t you be ours!?”

The Death’s Heads spat other insults down the street, less well-amplified than their leader’s plea: Elpida heard sneering cries, sexual suggestions, scatological impossibilities — and more than once, Ooni’s name, accompanied by fragmentary descriptions of what the Death’s Heads did to traitors of their own.

Ooni screamed, “Where’s our fucking extraction?! I thought you had extraction!”

Atyle said: “The titan—” A pause, listening to her headset. “Resistance? Scribe, be clear. Stop screaming.”

Where was their extraction?

Fuck that! spat Howl. Where’s—

“Illy!” Elpida howled into the ruins on their right. “Ilyusha!”

Atyle said: “The scorpion is right here, warrior. Save your breath. If she cannot join us in time, she must make her own way—”

“Illy!” Elpida howled again, “Il—”

A blood-drenched imp staggered out of the ruins, right into the middle of the group.

Bleeding from a score of deep cuts and wide grazes, covered in dirt and grime, blonde hair plastered down with filth and blood; her red-black bionic tail was coiled over one shoulder as if too exhausted to lift the limb. Eyes wide and wild with triumph, teeth gritted tight, lips peeled back. Her backpack hung by a single strap. One bionic arm dripped with dark fluid, shotgun hanging limp. The other red-clawed fist gripped a drone sensor-suite, wiring ripped off at the base, support beam snapped, like the severed head of a vanquished foe.

Ilyusha locked eyes with Elpida, raised her trophy in one hand, and roared in triumph: “Raaaaaar!”

Elpida howled along with her, spitting blood, too lost in the moment not to join. Her gamble had paid off: knocking out the Death’s Head drone controller had bought Ilyusha the opening she needed to kill her semi-autonomous foe.

Amina said: “Illy, Illy, Illy!” and bundled herself into Ilyusha’s side, careless of her wounds.

No sister ever left! Howl screeched inside Elpida’s head — because Elpida couldn’t find enough breath to say it herself. Her vision wavered. Illy was safe. Everyone was accounted for. Now they only had to get out.

But then Ilyusha saw Ooni.

Ilyusha’s eyes burned like molten lead as she looked at the Death’s Head traitor; she must have already spotted the unfamiliar armour carapace — and Hafina — and assumed they were both with Elpida. But now her eyes dipped, locked on the grinning black skull on the front of Ooni’s armour. The symbol was only partially obscured beneath a smear of Elpida’s own blood.

Ilyusha dropped the severed drone-head; her shotgun whipped upward, muzzle pointing at Ooni, teeth parting in a scream. Nobody had time to shout a warning, before—

Elpida closed one hand over the shotgun’s muzzle.

Ilyusha’s eyes flickered from Ooni to Elpida in horrified incomprehension. Ooni stayed very still, plasma rifle pointed at the ground, still sheltering Pira.

“Mine,” Elpida growled, her throat full of blood. “Illy. Mine now.”

Ilyusha’s horror turned to grudging acceptance. She yanked her shotgun back and spat a glob of bloody saliva at Ooni’s feet. “Eat my shit, reptile!”

Elpida had to keep this under control; Ilyusha had not witnessed Pira’s betrayal, nor was she aware of anything which had happened since. She would be furious, perhaps driven to violence, but later — not in the middle of a firefight.

Atyle jerked her head upward. “Our chariot arrives. We cross this path on the count of five, little lambs. One—”

“What!?” Ooni yelped. “We can’t even stand up! We can’t—”

“-two-”

Hafina suddenly stepped back and crouched, abandoning the street.

“Brace!” Pira shouted — and grabbed Ooni, shoving her to the ground.

“-three—”

On the far side of the street a brick building exploded outward, overwhelming the cacophony of gunfire. A wave of debris washed across the road. Broken bricks and shattered beams cascaded down the dirty white hull of the machine-giant which roared through the gap.

The crawler, the tank — ‘Pheiri’, if Elpida had understood Hafina’s word correctly: a humped titan bristling with weapon systems, covered in horns and curls and calluses, an overgrown cyst of Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour.

The tank slammed through the building, demolishing the structure, skidding to a halt. A dozen tracks and treads spun wild for a second before they bit into the asphalt again. The machine used its own momentum to swing itself around, to point its frontal armour down the street, toward the increasing fire from the massing Death’s Heads. Elpida flinched — she couldn’t help it, even with her nervous system hardened by Telokopolan genetic engineering and deadened by blood loss and pain: to a combat frame that maneuver would have been nothing, but combat frames had legs. This crawler had armoured tracks and concealed banks of wheels. Over forty feet tall and easily a hundred feet long. To pull off that maneuver in such a large crawler would require a genius driver — or the tank was piloting itself, like a combat frame given full autonomy.

Active shielding flowered to life in a semi-circle dome around the front of the vehicle: an interlocking matrix of hexagonal energy fields, sheets of hissing electric blue, and curves of shining white. The shield sparked and flickered as it deflected small arms fire.

Atyle didn’t miss a beat: “—four—”

The crawler opened fire on the Death’s Heads: coaxial weapon systems and anti-personnel machine guns roared and barked, pouring a wave of bullets and sabots and energy bolts down the street, exploding chunks of concrete from the skyscraper walls and chewing waves of asphalt grit out of the ground. Only the massive turret weapon lay still, a distended purple-red lance, quiet and dark amid the firepower lighting up the night.

Elpida grinned; she felt tears running down her cheeks. Was this what it felt like to be a Legionnaire saved by a combat frame?

No, saved by ‘Pheiri’ — and why not? The combat frames had names too. This crawler, whatever it was, it was wearing Telokopolan armour. A little piece of her home had come roaring out of the infinite darkness at the end of time, to pluck her new comrades from defeat and death.

A crew hatch opened in the rear of the tank; a ramp hit the ground.

All aboard! Howl cackled.

“—five!” Atyle finished.

Elpida lurched out of cover, dragging Amina behind her. The others rose as well, running for the—

Thooom-crack!

A beam of burning bronze burst through the air and lanced into the tank’s active shielding. The shield-web exploded with a concussive wave, washed over Elpida’s face, and turned the world white.

The white-out lasted only a split-second. Elpida was left blinking and dazed, her ears ringing with the pressure impact. That shield failure was not like when the tank had duelled the worm-guard trio; that was a true overload. Pheiri’s shields were down.

Standing at the far end of the street, out in the open, disdaining cover, was the Death’s Heads’ own walking tank — Kuro.

The huge zombie had deployed the massive plasma cannon from her back; it curved over her shoulder like a scythe, and sent its own support mounts down into the ground behind her, locking her in place, anchoring her to the road surface. She was reeling from the recoil, recovering her balance. A shield hissed with static in a spherical bubble around her, protecting the Death’s Head from return fire.

The plasma cannon steamed and hissed, glowing like a torch in the night.

Kuro straightened up, locked her knees, and re-armed the plasma cannon for a second shot; the coils began to glow brighter.

“Pheiri!” Hafina screamed — a terrible sound, more machine than meat.

Pheiri’s hull blossomed with missile pods, opened up with massive rotary machine-guns, and revealed ports to aim concealed laser arrays. The tank slammed that tiny bubble-shield with a fortress worth of firepower. Kuro vanished behind a wall of bullets and detonations and a shower of kicked-up asphalt — but the bubble held.

The Death’s Heads rushed back into the street. They kept well clear of Kuro and began to pour fire down on Elpida’s comrades once more, cutting them off from their extraction.

Kuro’s plasma cannon coil’s glowed white-hot. Almost ready to fire.

Hafina strode out into the road, uncaring of return fire, adding her own weapons to those of her titan-machine. Elpida could hear the distinctive crack! of Serin’s rifle, somewhere far away; but that did not help either. Pheiri’s tracks shuddered and jerked, as if the machine was uncertain.

Yola’s voice floated over the firefight: “Come back to me, superhuman! Stand now and I will spare your vassals!”

Elpida let go of Amina’s hand; somebody else grabbed for her, but she shook them off. She couldn’t let this happen, she couldn’t let her cadre die all over again, not in a failed rescue, not for her, not for—

Pira rose from cover and sprinted out into the street.

The flame-haired zombie flew right past Hafina and into the hail of gunfire from the Death’s Heads. Bullets bounced off her body armour, cracked off her bulletproof vest, tore through her clothes, and ripped holes in her flesh. But Pira didn’t stop — she put her head down and ran for the tank.

“Leuca!” Ooni screamed.

Was Pira saving her own skin?

No — she was going for the front, not the hatch! She needed height. She needed an angle.

Pira leapt on to the front of Pheiri’s armour, hauling herself up the gnarled bone-mesh hand over hand, all the weight of the coilgun dragging on her back. She got partway up, found a good pair of footholds, and stood. Bullets punched her backward, tore gouges in her arms and legs, and threatened to jerk her off balance.

Pira pointed the coilgun receiver down the road and pulled the trigger.

Thump!-clack-thump!-clack-thump!-clack — the coilgun firing on fully automatic was like standing next to a combat frame stamping on the ground. Waves of magnetic discharge slammed over Elpida and sent her head spinning.

The coilgun sabot rounds bounced off Kuro’s bubble-shield — once, twice; but then Pira found her aim, and hit her target: the ground.

Coilgun rounds exploded the asphalt and concrete in front of Kuro — and then beneath her feet. The giant tumbled into a hole of rubble and grey mud. The plasma cannon fired — but the beam went high, lancing through the sky, swallowed by the rotten clouds.

Pira held the trigger down, digging with the world’s most dangerous shovel, until she had buried the walking tank.

Maddest bitch of all! Howl roared.

Then Pira dropped the coilgun receiver and toppled sideways.

Elpida picked herself up, belly streaming with blood. She ran for the side of the tank, to get herself beneath Pira before Pira’s skull cracked open on the ground; the pain was white-hot, blotting out her thoughts, stitches popping, gut screaming. One last burst of adrenaline was all she had left.

But she was roaring with bloody laughter: Howl was laughing through her.

Pira’s battered form slid down the side of the tank; Elpida bounced off the hull, stuck out her arms, and caught her. They almost collapsed together in a bloodstained heap.

Strong hands in grey armour helped her haul Pira’s limp form around to Pheiri’s rear. A crew access hatch yawned wide. The inside of the tank was dark and jumbled. The others hurried in; somebody half-threw Amina up the ramp. Stray shots whipped and cracked through the air. Yola was still shouting. Hafina stood to one side, the last one aboard, popping off anti-materiel rounds at the Death’s Heads down the road.

Pira was still conscious. Her eyes were full of blood. As Elpida hauled her up the ramp, she gurgled: “Let— me—”

Elpida and Howl laughed in her face: “You don’t get to die! I told you, Pira, you’re mine now!”

Up the ramp, into the crawler, into the cramped darkness; Elpida heard Hafina swing in behind them and heard the rear hatch begin to close.

“Everyone in?” she gurgled through a mouthful of blood.

Yes, Commander, said Howl.

Only then did Elpida allow her knees to give up. She slid to the cool metal floor, and passed out in a pool of her own blood.