Necroepilogos

The thing that wore Elpida’s face joined Vicky and Kagami in the manual control chamber.

Sweat prickled on Vicky’s skin as the Elpida-thing crawled through the doorway aperture; Kagami pressed a key on the bone-white control panel, erasing the word ‘gravity’ on one of the screens, before the Elpida-thing could see. She — or it? Vicky wasn’t sure; it squatted in the opening, braced one hand against the wall, and pulled Elpida’s face into a smile. Too bright, too sweet, with too much tooth.

It spoke with Elpida’s voice: “Hey, you two. I think I’m through to the pilot. We’re in.”

Vicky nodded; she didn’t trust herself to smile. Her heart rate climbed; each beat sent a pulse of pain spider-webbing across the rear of her cracked skull.

Kagami snorted. She said: “Resorting to brute strength, commander? Only thing you’re good for, anyway. Brainless gene-jacked bull.”

The Elpida-thing ignored the insult. It continued to smile, white teeth stained red by the steady biological blood-light of the combat frame’s interior illumination. It no longer carried the crowbar, but held Elpida’s submachine gun strapped over one shoulder; Vicky did not recall seeing the weapon in the circular chamber. It had removed the armoured coat, revealing Elpida’s toned and taut musculature beneath a thin layer of grey thermal t-shirt. Copper-brown skin was sticky with exertion. Sweat patches showed at the armpits. White hair was swept back. Purple eyes looked almost black.

Vicky had spent plenty of time studying Elpida, since they had clawed their way out of their metal resurrection coffins alongside each other — almost as much time as she had spent studying herself. She found it difficult not to look at Elpida, to admire her, to stare at her on occasion. Vicky didn’t lie to herself that this was innocent fascination: Elpida was one of the most attractive people she’d ever encountered. Six and a half feet of hyper-athletic super-soldier, who moved with all the confidence and precision of a feline on the hunt, like a war goddess given life by a wish; and she spoke such sense, with such determination and compassion. Elpida was everything Vicky had always dreamed of. In life, Vicky would have shied away from a presence like Elpida, consumed by the conflation of attraction and jealousy: Do I want to sleep with her, or do I want to be her? But resurrection and afterlife had levelled all the old distinctions. And Vicky had a new body now. She was less confused.

The thing wearing Elpida’s face and form had replicated every physical detail. But it didn’t even bother to try with the mannerisms, the tone of voice, or the facial expressions. It possessed none of Elpida’s power and presence. A perfect picture, animated incorrectly.

Not gonna call you her name, Vicky thought. Necromancer? Necro-pida? Nelpida? No, those are all stupid. You’re a stupid bitch, Vic. And you’re distracting yourself with bullshit, ‘cos you’re terrified. Take your hand off your pistol — it can probably see. Fuck, look at the way it smiles.

Was this creature really a ‘Necromancer’? Vicky had nothing to go on except what Pira had said, so many days ago now, in that concrete bunker: myths and legends passed around among revenants, about shape-shifting imitators with perfect control of nanomachines, both inside their own bodies and in the bodies of other undead.

Was that why Elpida had paused, up on the combat frame, before they’d all gotten separated?

Had this thing led Elpida into a trap, and then paralysed her?

Out loud, Vicky said: “Back off, Kaga. The commander’s doing her best. Not like you’ve had any luck with the controls here.”

Kagami hissed through her teeth and turned a cold shoulder to Vicky and the Necromancer, returning to her examination of the wall of exterior camera views; Vicky was impressed, she hadn’t thought Kagami was capable of faking. Perhaps it was method acting, powered by fear and exhaustion.

Kagami said: “Well? What are you waiting for, commander? A gold star sticker? A pat on the back? Get up there and plug yourself in already.”

The Elpida-thing said, “Actually, I want you both to come with me. There may be internal defences still online.” It patted the submachine gun. “I don’t expect bullets will scratch the armour inside this thing, but those drones have everything we need.” She nodded at the silver cigar-shapes of Kagami’s drones, one still in Kagami’s left hand and the other five lined up on the seat.

Kagami turned back around and squinted with bloodshot eyes. “What do you mean, ‘everything we need’? I thought this mech was like your long-lost girlfriend. Thought you were ready to go rooting wrist-deep in her guts.”

The Elpida-thing said: “Those drones have internal shield-projectors, miniaturised force-applicators, and jamming equipment. All we have to do is overcome any internal defences, just long enough for me to reach the pilot uplink. A few seconds at most. Then I’ll have full control.” She smiled at Kagami. “I want you to take the lead, in front, with the shield-projectors in the drones. We’ll be right behind you.”

Kagami drawled: “Is that an order, commander?”

“It’s a request from a friend. Please, Kaguya?”

Vicky broke out in cold sweat; her blood turned to ice. Kagami snorted, but she couldn’t quite cover her horror. The thing wearing Elpida’s face just smiled and smiled and smiled. It knew Kagami’s name, it had heard Vicky say her name out loud, more than once. The mistake was on purpose.

It’s mocking us, Vicky thought. Daring us to call it out. Playing with us.

The Elpida-thing turned purple eyes on Vicky, creased with sudden concern. “Are you alright? You look pale.”

Vicky forced her voice to work: “I did die of a head wound back there, commander. Kinda hurts. A lot. With every heartbeat, you know?”

The Elpida-thing gestured for Vicky to turn. “Let me take a look.”

Vicky wanted to scream. But she turned to show the back of her skull, skin crawling, heart racing, head pounding with pain in every pulse. She stared at the jumble of screens, at the snatches of night vision and infra-red. Her eyes settled on the real Elpida — nothing more than a smudge of heat signature inside the nearest skyscraper. She was upright, but unmoving. Arms above her head? Vicky couldn’t quite make out the details.

The Elpida-thing touched her shoulder; Vicky flinched. For a second Vicky thought the Necromancer might just plunge a finger through the damaged skull plates in sadistic delight. But ‘Elpida’ made a concerned noise low in her throat. “Mm. Right. You need to be careful with that. One bump and you could be out cold for hours. You take the rear, okay? Hopefully we won’t have to do anything much up there. Then you can rest. I promise.”

Vicky turned back. She forced a smile. “Commander.”

Kagami was busy unplugging her pair of palm-cables from the combat frame’s manual control panel; she winced as the first one popped free, then gasped when the second cable just wiggled back and forth and wouldn’t detach. Vicky didn’t think Kagami was faking the pain. Sweat was running down her face, gluing her long black hair to her forehead and neck; she was shivering and shaking with effort.

Then the Necromancer reached over Kagami’s shoulder and yanked the cable out of the panel; Kagami flinched and yelped, then whined softly, panting for breath.

The Elpida-thing smiled and smiled and smiled.

Vicky forced herself to speak: “So … what are we going to do, up in the … with the pilot?”

The Necromancer said, “I assume the pilot is dead or incapacitated. I’ll take over, plug myself into the neural controls.” It tilted Elpida’s head and tapped the back of its neck — the imitation of Elpida’s MMI cranial uplink slot. “All ready to go.”

Vicky couldn’t help herself: “Do you think the pilot is one of your cadre?”

The Elpida-thing shrugged. “Shouldn’t think so.”

Kagami gathered herself; the shiny black cables slowly retracted back into her left palm, into bio-plastic slots in her altered flesh. She gestured with a flick of her circuitry-laced fingers — the six silver drones rose into the air, perfectly silent and level. “Fuck you, commander,” she grumbled. “Fine, I’ll take point, seeing as you’re too chicken-shit to do it yourself. But I’ll need Victoria with me.” She reached out with her right hand, claw-like and shaking, and grabbed the sleeve of Vicky’s coat. “Been plugged into this thing for hours. Feel like I might fall over. Vicky, you better catch me — when I do.”

Kagami’s bloodshot eyes filled with meaning. Vicky nodded. “Sure thing, Kaga. I got you.”

The Elpida-thing led them back into the circular chamber, crouch-walking under the low ceiling of glowing red. She waited to one side for Kagami and Vicky to lead the way up the sloping passage she had opened. White bulkheads and their bolt-like fastenings lay all over the floor. There was no sign of the crowbar, or the Elpida-thing’s armoured coat. Vicky tried not to think about that.

“I’ll be right behind you,” said the thing, with Elpida’s voice.

The upward-sloping service tunnel turned out to be a narrow, kinked passageway of ridged bone, tighter and more cramped than the passage which Vicky had taken from the hatch. It climbed upward through the combat frame in a claustrophobic spiral. At least it wasn’t dark — Kagami’s drones emitted a cold blue glow — but that only made Vicky more aware of the limited space.

Kagami took the lead, huffing and puffing, swearing softly, dragging her bionic legs. Vicky didn’t think Kaga was bluffing about being on the verge of physical collapse, but she didn’t actually need Vicky to haul her along — she had a drone for that, helping to push her up the spiral. She sent three of the silver cigar-shapes a few feet ahead, kept one just in front of her, and had the sixth drone hover behind Vicky’s back; Vicky doubted that a single drone would be able to cover her if the Necromancer decided to pounce on them in this tunnel, with no retreat and nowhere to go. Vicky stayed close to Kagami, concentrating on crawling up the spiralling slope, and on the pounding pain in the rear of her skull. She tried not to think about the Elpida-thing at her heels.

Vicky had no idea what Kagami was planning; their covert communication had been interrupted before she could ask for specifics.

Gravity — what had Kaga meant? Was she going to drop the Necromancer off the side of the mech? Did the Elpida-thing know that Kagami had been in contact with the combat frame’s pilot — or that the pilot was alive? Did it know about the internal defences inside the pilot enclosure? Did it know the plan, from reading their minds?

What if it knew — and didn’t care?

Vicky decided she would go down fighting, whatever happened; it was the same impulse that had wedded her heart to the revolution. Doomed hope was better than hopeless surrender, if you were going to die anyway. Go down fighting, fuck the odds.

Her large-calibre handgun weighed heavily in one pocket of her armoured coat. She wished she hadn’t left the LMG behind, under the hatch; the heavy weapon probably wouldn’t work any better than a pistol, if the thing behind her really was a Necromancer, but the weight and power would feel good in her arms. Maybe the confidence would have soothed the back of her skull.

The sloping passageway ended with a sudden drop. The combat frame disgorged all three of them into the pilot chamber: an oval, perhaps twenty feet long and ten feet wide, with more than enough room to stand up.

Blood-light throbbed from a domed ceiling, dark and arterial, scarlet with oxygenation, sluicing through visible whorls and folds and wrinkles behind the thin white bone-material. Veins as thick as Vicky’s waist pumped and glugged inside the walls, wrapped around bulb-like organs and grape-bunch nodules, in burgundy and garnet and crimson. Layers upon layers of red flesh stretched away in every direction. Orbs flowered open behind the walls, spirals of red all turning toward the intruders. The ceiling and walls were ridged, like ribs. The floor was spongy and warm and pulsating.

“Fuck me,” Vicky hissed. “Fuck me, this is not a machine. Oh fuck, Elpida, what is this?”

At the far end of the chamber an upright cylinder was set into the wall, like a cyst. The cylinder was surrounded by a tight knot of blood vessels and organ-shapes — but there the flesh behind the walls was bruised and ruptured, gone purple with spreading damage.

The front of the cylinder was made from semi-transparent cartilage; inside was a second layer of cylinder, all metals and plastics and cables and the flickering remains of holographic screens, whited-out with static and ruined by glitches. Behind the screens the capsule was full of orange fluid; swirls of pinkish-crimson blood floated in the liquid.

And there was the pilot.

She was submerged in the orange fluid, a tall and willowy body wrapped in a dark skin-suit, cradled by higher density areas of the liquid. Her face was narrow and aquiline. A massive trunk of cable ran from the back of her skull and vanished upward into the ceiling of the capsule.

Elpida’s phenotype: white hair, copper-brown skin, and purple eyes — open, squinting with pain, clouded by the coils of blood in the orange fluid.

Kagami’s drones shot out into the chamber and assumed a rough circle. Vicky helped Kagami to her feet; Kagami clung on hard, shaking and panting. Vicky’s heart was pounding, pain stabbing at the back of her skull.

The Elpida-thing was suddenly next to her, purple eyes scanning the chamber, submachine gun cradled in both hands — aimed at the cylinder and the injured pilot inside.

“Alright,” said Vicky, for Kagami’s benefit. “What now?”

Where were the defences the pilot had promised? Vicky didn’t see anything that looked like a weapon — not even a weird biological weapon set into a wall. The orb-eye things buried deep in the burgundy flesh did not seem to be powering up or preparing to strike. Cameras? Or was the combat frame looking at them?

The Elpida-thing snapped: “Defences?”

Kagami snorted, trying to sound derisive, but Vicky could feel her shaking. “I-I I think they’re all off-line,” Kagami said. “She’s injured, see? I wonder if she can even see us through that … that … whatever the fuck that is?”

The Elpida-thing stepped toward the cylinder, submachine gun levelled at the pilot. Kagami’s drones bobbed lower and reduced the size of their circle, as if to protect the Elpida-thing from any unseen defences. Vicky’s heart was slamming so hard her vision was blurring with pain. She couldn’t take this much longer. She slipped her hand into her pocket and gripped her pistol; better than nothing.

Vicky repeated, louder: “What now?”

Kagami gritted her teeth and gestured with one hand: wait!

The Necromancer sighed deeply and lowered her weapon. She was staring at the pilot; the pilot squinted back, concussed or insensible — or pretending? Kagami’s drones drew closer to the thing which wore Elpida’s face. Vicky clicked off the safety on her handgun.

The Elpida-thing muttered: “No, we weren’t sure what to expect. A human being? Within the acceptable range of outcomes, but not good. I’ll have to smash this to access the controls. Yes. Pity.”

The Elpida-thing raised her gun and clicked the safety off. The pilot’s eyes widened in alarm; she raised a hand inside the orange fluid. Vicky started to draw her pistol.

And Kagami pointed at the Necromancer.

Spongy floor-material roared to life around the Elpida-thing’s feet; it shot upward in a boiling wave of molten bone and engulfed both her legs. Thin trickles of steam rose from the contact-points: acid melting through clothing and flesh.

The Elpida thing didn’t even care. It glanced down once, then put the submachine gun to its shoulder and aimed at the pilot, and—

A wave of nausea slammed into Vicky; her head whirled with sudden dizziness, pulsing with heat and cold. Her sight flared with sunbursts of negative colour and her mouth filled with the taste of iron. Her body suddenly seemed alien; for a split-second she wasn’t real. Then she was absolutely certain she was dead — but she was already a zombie, so what did that matter? Then everything snapped back into focus, her senses too sharp, her hearing crackling with pressure.

Kagami was hanging off her arm, spitting blood, hissing with pain — and grinning in triumph.

Inside the capsule, the pilot was twitching and writhing.

And the Necromancer — the thing that wore Elpida’s face and form — wasn’t moving. It was facing away from them. Gun levelled. Stuck. Three of Kagami’s drones surrounded it in a rough pyramid shape. The other three hung further out.

Vicky panted: “Kaga— what—”

Crack-crack-crack-crack.

The Necromancer turned her head — and only her head, as if she was fighting against incredible pressure. Vertebra snapped and popped as she turned Elpida’s head one hundred and eighty degrees on Elpida’s neck, until she was facing backwards to stare at Kagami and Vicky.

She wasn’t smiling anymore.

The Elpida-thing moved her lips. A word crunched out: “How.”

Kagami howled with pain and laughter: “Nanomachine control, huh?! Trying to stop me!? Bitch, you have to transmit data somehow! And I’m blanketing you with enough EM jamming to kill a fucking whale!”

“How. Kill.”

Kagami screamed: “Same way I have you pinned, you stupid cunt! Know how to break nanomachines? Gravity, bitch!”

Vicky felt a pressure-wave hit her body, akin to the backwash of an explosion; she realised what Kagami was doing — the outer trio of her drones were using some kind of gravity field generators to pin the Necromancer in place, the same force that Kagami had used to shove Vicky down into the combat frame, but dialled up a hundred times.

The Elpida-thing strained for a second, as if in the grip of a giant hand. Kagami was drooling blood, whining with pain. A metallic creak came from the inner trio of drones — their hulls buckling under the pressure. Then—

Pop!

The Necromancer exploded like a water balloon filled with viscera. Elpida’s face burst, the crimson mess instantly turning to blue nano-slime as it lost coherence. Flesh, hair, clothes, submachine gun, all was revealed as pure nanomachine goop. The Necromancer splattered across the floor, up the walls, and even on the ceiling. A few droplets reached Vicky’s boots. The internal defences of the pilot chamber flowed back into the spongy floor.

Kagami released the EM fields and the gravitics; her six drones instantly clattered to the floor. Kagami went limp in Vicky’s arms, heaving for breath, hacking up blood, grinning with victory.

“Got you!” Kagami spat. “Fuck you— fucking— shit— got you! Got—”

“Kaga!” Vicky all but shouted in her face. “Kaga, breathe! Breathe!”

“We don’t need to fucking breathe!” Kagami howled with laughter. “We’re zombies!”

Vicky laughed too, despite the pain in the back of her skull and the lingering disorientation from the electromagnetic jamming; she couldn’t help it. The Necromancer was blue slime now — did that mean they should eat the remains? The combat frame’s pilot had gone quite still inside her capsule of orange fluid, eyes squinted to slits, jaw clenched with pain. Vicky gave her a thumbs up, hoping she understood the gesture.

The pilot raised a fist and pressed her knuckles to the front of the cylinder. Good enough.

Kagami’s legs were going out from under her. Vicky lowered Kagami gently to the floor so she could sit, then squatted beside her. Kagami’s face was drenched with sweat; she was dribbling crimson, shaking all over. Several blood vessels had burst inside her left eye, staining the white with blood-red. She was cradling her left arm like it was wounded. But she was grinning.

Vicky said: “Kaga, that was nuts. And — you know, well done. You went all hydraulic press on her. How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t!” Kagami snorted up a plug of clotted blood. “Thought it might work. Block her signals. Jam her up. Miniaturised gravitics, absolute fucking bullshit of the highest order. Shouldn’t even work. Ha! Ha … ha … ”

Kagami’s laugh trailed off; her eyes went wide. Vicky followed her gaze.

The splatters of blue nano-goop were rippling like puddles in a breeze.

“Oh shit,” said Vicky.

“ … Victoria,” Kagami murmured.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t do that again. I’m spent. I need battery plug-in. I need — brains, probably. I can’t— if—”

Vicky grabbed Kagami under the armpits and prepared to haul her up. “We run. Come on! We—”

Sloooooorp.

With a sound like a meat-rendering machine, the Necromancer sucked herself back together.

The process happened in the blink of an eye. Blue slime flowed across the floor and walls and reunited into a coherent figure. Elpida’s stolen form and face blossomed in the crimson blood-light — but this time the Necromancer didn’t bother with the fine details: clothing melded into skin, cutting off at odd angles, grey blending with mottled copper-brown; white hair hung straight down, sharp and hard, with no effort to imitate flexible keratin; one hand had seven fingers, the other only three; the eyeballs ran black as if dyed with ink; the musculature was all lopsided, curves and angles in the wrong places, joints mere suggestions in plastic flesh. Eight feet tall, with a mouth like a black hole.

It spoke in Elpida’s voice, but with the stresses on the wrong syllables, the rhythms all mismatched:

“First-time for-rrr every thing, I sup-pose. Points for — creativ-ity. Well done, dead thing. Now-where was—

Vicky stood up, drew her handgun, and emptied the magazine into the Necromancer.

Bullets slammed into simulated flesh, tearing through cloth and skin and meat. The Necromancer didn’t flinch, not even when Vicky hit the jackpot with a head-shot: bam, straight through the right eye and out of the back of the skull, fragments of bone and brain spraying across the clean red-white of the combat frame’s interior.

Pointless? Perhaps. But resistance made Vicky feel better.

She counted bullets as she pulled the trigger: ten, eleven, one left — and then the Necromancer said: “Stop.”

Vicky stopped — not because she wanted to, but because an irresistible force had taken control of her right arm.

She watched in horror as her arm and hand moved to point the gun at her own head and press the muzzle to her skin. Her vision throbbed with pain from the crack in the back of her skull. She couldn’t move a muscle — except her right trigger finger. She tried to keep it very still.

Down on the floor, Kagami’s sextet of silver drones stirred. The Necromancer glanced at Kagami instead. Kagami froze in place. Her drones went still again.

Inside the capsule, the pilot was staring, wide-eyed, open-mouthed.

The Necromancer sighed, a scratchy sound like nails on a chalkboard. Fragments of skull and brain were flowing back toward her, down the wall and along the floor, but she made no effort to rebuild the wounds opened by Vicky’s handgun bullets. One-eyed, covered in crimson, she regarded Vicky with an amused smile.

It said: “Iiiif I let-you — go, will you — stop? Shooting at. Me?”

Vicky found she could move her lips. “Sure. Whatever.”

Suddenly Vicky’s body was her own again.

She pointed her pistol at the Necromancer’s chest and pulled the trigger. Her last bullet blasted a fist-sized hole in the fake meat, dripping red, showing pieces of ribcage.

The Necromancer wriggled — laughter? She said: “Are you — done?”

Vicky said: “I could throw the gun at you, but I don’t suppose that would make any difference, would it?”

“Youuu learn-quick. Nowww, are you, going to be a — good girl? Or a little bitch?” The Necromancer glanced down at Kagami; Kagami was locked in place, frozen like Vicky had been. “She is — goooing to be a — bitch, I can feel it. But I had, hoped not to have to put — both of you, down.”

“Stop wearing her face.”

The Necromancer frowned. The expression was all twisted up, muscles in the wrong places, moving in the wrong order. “What?”

Vicky surprised herself with her own anger; perhaps she would throw the gun after all. “Stop wearing her face! Elpida’s face! You’re not her!”

“Would you — prefer, I wear an-other?” The Necromancer’s face blurred, like oil poured into water. A ghost of Vicky’s own features surfaced, blended with the remains of Elpida.

“Wear your own,” Vicky spat.

“You do-not wa-nt to see — that.”

Vicky fought to think clearly over the pain stabbing in the rear of her skull. Was she truly powerless against this creature? Bullets, gravity compression, acid — nothing had hurt this Necromancer-thing, not permanently. But if she’d understood it correctly, it wanted to avoid killing them; the only thing she could do was survive. And gather information. Anything which might help the others, later.

She said: “You’re a Necromancer, aren’t you?”

The eight-foot tall monster of appropriated flesh and melted form shuddered again — yes, laughter, Vicky decided.

It said: “Necro-mancer? Is that what, you are call-ing us, now?”

Vicky had to think fast, before it got bored. “Why even talk to us? Why do all that, why pretend to be Elpida?”

A sigh; rusty nails. “Nostal-gia. It’s been a — long-time, since I spoke, with any-thing. I thought we were hav-ing some — fun.”

The face twisted again, muscles all going in the wrong directions. A smile. Vicky shivered and thought about the extra magazines in her coat pocket. But what good would those do?

“Fun?” she said. “I put your fucking brains on the wall, bitch.”

“Those aren’t my — brains. My brains, are dis-tribu-ted.”

“Fine!” Vicky spat. “Whatever! What do you want? Why are you doing all this in the first place?”

The Necromancer paused, then said: “Officially? To remove, this un-expected — intrusion into the — nano-bio-sphere and, tidy up, whatever brought, it here. Person-ally? To grasp an opportunity. Pilot this row-bot, murder a worm or two. An, act of resistance. It is a — pleasant side, effect that I will be able — to hide — the Telokopolan from, central’s attention.”

Vicky’s mind whirled; this was too much information. She wished she didn’t have a head wound; she wished the others were there, or Kaga could speak. She couldn’t do this alone.

The Necromancer began to turn away, more like liquid swirling inside a glass than a creature with joints and bones. It turned to look at the pilot inside the cylinder, then raised an arm and formed a blade-shape with the limb. The pilot opened her mouth in a silent scream, hands outstretched to ward off the blow.

“Wait, wait!” Vicky said. “Don’t kill the pilot! Telokopolan? Elpida? Do you mean Elpida?”

A shrug, or at least an attempt.

Vicky said: “Why not let the real Elpida in here? You stopped her up on the hull, didn’t you? Why do this yourself, why wear her face, if you wanted her to get this mech moving?”

The Necromancer turned back. “She would get, it wrong. She, wouldn’t under-stand. You dead things don’t really mat-ter. You’re juuust — tiny cogs. I’m a larger cog, but at least I — can choose when to stop — turn-ing.”

“Please don’t kill the pilot.”

The Necromancer smiled again. “Why?”

Vicky’s heart was pounding so hard that her head felt like it might explode. She had to speak through gritted teeth, eyes squinted almost shut. She was shaking so badly, worse than any time since Houseman Square, all those years ago, the first time she had ever held a rifle. Two hundred million years ago. Another life, another body, another person.

“Because I have two more magazines in my pocket and I’ll keep shooting you,” she said. “And then I’ll throw the gun at you. And then I’ll come at you with my fists and feet and I’ll bite you.”

“You can’t — stop — me.”

“Nah. You’ll probably kill me. But I’ll do it anyway. Piss you off for a second or two. Get your hands dirty. Give you a black eye. Fuck you.”

The Necromancer snorted — a noise like a bubbling tar-pit — and lowered her blade-arm.

And then the back of her neck exploded outward with a bundle of cables, like the prey-grasping arms of a deep-sea mollusc, and slammed into the bone-wall next to the pilot capsule. Tiny drills and hooks whirred and chewed through the combat frame’s interior armour, then bit into the crimson meat with a wet crunch.

The scarlet flesh flushed purple with damage; the cables pumped, as if injecting something into the body of the combat frame. The floor beneath Vicky’s feet shuddered. The whole machine shook. The pilot in her capsule went wide-eyed with fresh panic, mouth opening in a silent denial, fists pressing against the inside of her cylinder.

The Necromancer said: “An in-direct connection, is a little bit, more, work. But fine, dead — thing, if it mat-ters to you that much. I can still control, this—”

The combat frame growled.

The sound rose from the bowels of the machine, a rolling rumble from stone-lined guts.

The lights went out.

For a split-second the only illumination came from the orange fluid inside the pilot capsule. The pilot was slack-faced, as if something else had taken control.

Then the blood-red illumination throbbed back to life, flooding the chamber.

The Necromancer collapsed like a puppet with her strings cut. She crumpled to the floor in a tangle of jellied limbs and misarticulated bones. The imitation cranial uplink cable popped from the wall with a wet slurp and went down after her. The wound in the bone ejected a stream of steaming pus and purple gunk, then closed over with a crimson plug of clotted blood.

The Necromancer lay still.

“Fucking hell!” Kagami spat, once more in control of her own body. “Fuck everything about this place!”

Vicky sat down very suddenly, head spinning, staring at the unconscious — or dead — Necromancer, eight feet of monster all in a heap. She gestured weakly with her pistol, shaking her head. The pilot inside the capsule was blinking slowly, coming back around. More blood swirled into her orange fluid.

“Did we win?” Vicky asked, head pounding. “What the— what the hell do we do with her— now?”

Kagami snorted, to cover how badly she was shaking. “Put her in a fucking autoclave and turn it to maximum.”

Vicky looked up at the red ceiling, filled with blood vessels and brain-whorls. “Think this thing has a stomach? We could … throw her in?”

“Do not even joke about that, Victoria.”

Vicky nodded. “Alright. Now what?”

She and Kagami shared a long look. Kagami looked about ready to lie down and sleep for a week. Vicky felt like a zombie — which she was. Ha ha.

Kagami said: “The tank. We need to contact the tank, outside. Comms, I need comms. I need control.”

Vicky nodded. “The others.”

“Right, right, the others. Elpida. Huh.” Kagami blinked very slowly, then looked at the pilot. “And I’ll ask this marinated turkey about disposing of the necro-bitch. Maybe you’re right, maybe this giant freak-show does have a stomach. Help me up, Victoria. I feel like I’m going to die.”