Necroepilogos

Pira and Ooni: two lost girls with the muzzles of their guns pressed against each other’s hearts, a pair of old lovers who had come to love death more than each other — to adore the grinning skull and the release of giving up.

Elpida waited for them to obey her orders, lower their weapons, and follow her instead.

She knew they would.

Elpida also knew that she was acting irrationally. Blood loss and burning pain had pushed her to the edge of delusion. Howl cackled in the back of her mind: Your girls now, Elps! Your girls now! She swayed on unsteady feet. She panted through clenched teeth. She squinted hard, fighting down the agony which radiated out from her oozing gut wound.

Pira might still pull the trigger of her stolen handgun, put a bullet through Ooni’s chest, and then turn the weapon on herself. Elpida could not predict how the flame-haired revenant would act; she hadn’t predicted the betrayal, after all. And Ooni was an unknown. Was she about to panic, jerk her rifle out of Pira’s grip, and paint Elpida with a bolt of plasma?

Elpida could not allow herself the luxury of doubt.

Fake it ‘till you make it! Howl screeched inside her mind. That’s how we all did it, back in the day, right?

The trick of true command was not only to act as if her authority was unquestionable — Elpida had to believe. Since she had choked and gagged and thrashed back to life in that metal coffin, the deaths of all her sisters had opened a rift in her mind and flooded her with doubt: she was no Commander worthy of the role, she would get her comrades killed all over again, nobody without a death wish should follow her into anything. The Commander was nothing without belief, and without something in which to believe.

And now the Commander gave orders to a traitor and a foe, and expected them to follow.

I’m going mad, Howl.

You were always fucking mad! It’s why we followed you! The maddest cunt of all!

Elpida heard the covert sounds of Atyle and Amina entering the conference room, creeping up behind her. Pira and Ooni looked up briefly. Elpida tossed back her hood and unhooked the comms headset from around her skull; she couldn’t concentrate with Kagami shouting into her ear. Howl’s advice was better. She passed the headset over her shoulder.

Atyle accepted the device, then whispered: “The animals heard that gunshot, warrior. We have one or two minutes at best.”

Pira’s hollow eyes crusted over with a frown. She said: “You can’t be serious. Elpida, get out of here. You’re free, don’t jeopardise—”

Elpida took a step forward. “Do not make me— repeat myself,” she panted through the pain. “You have your— orders, we can discuss discipline later. Right now we’re in combat.”

“Elpida. I shot you. I—”

“You don’t get to die. Not your choice. Lower those weapons.”

Ooni’s bright green eyes flickered from Elpida to Pira. She jerked her plasma rifle out of Pira’s grip — and pointed the muzzle down. Her gaze wandered over the pair of corpses on the floor — Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour. Elpida was standing with one boot in the pool of blood spreading from the shattered throat of the latter. Ooni swallowed, hard and rough.

Pira lowered the heavy handgun. She shook her head. “I shot you. How can you—”

Elpida pointed at the second plasma rifle, pinned beneath one of the fallen Death’s Heads. “Pick up that other— gun. We may need the firepower. You are going to fall in— behind Atyle and me. You follow her hand signals, move when we move, do exactly as ordered. Do I make myself clear?”

Pira’s face was a mask of disbelief. “I—”

Elpida and Howl spoke as one: “You are mine, Pira!”

The effort made Elpida’s gut flare with pain. She hunched and heaved and whined through her teeth, drooling blood, spitting to clear her mouth.

Pira stared for a heartbeat more — then she stowed the handgun inside her body armour, tugged her clothes back into place over her bionic arm, and crouched down next to the fallen Death’s Head. She rolled the body sideways and extracted the plasma rifle. Her hands flickered over the controls. The weapon hummed briefly, then fell silent.

She looked up at Elpida. Her sky-blue eyes were full of compressed pain and guileless wonder.

“Yes, Commander,” she said.

Elpida didn’t even nod; her authority required no acknowledgement.

Ooni said: “What about me?”

Her voice trembled with desperation and jealousy. Elpida heard that as clear as Howl’s words inside her head.

Ooni glanced at Pira, and said: “Leuca? L-Leuca? What about me?”

Ooni was a terrible mess; her mouth and chin were stained with the greasy pink smears of half-chewed brain matter, cut through with twin tracks of bloody tears. Her long black hair was matted with sweat, stuck to her forehead, smeared with blood. She stood half-crouched over the boxy, matte-black body of the plasma rifle. Her eyes were wide and red from crying. That black skull still grinned from the middle of her chestplate.

Ooni hated Elpida for ‘stealing’ Pira; Ooni had gleefully jammed a hand into Elpida’s guts; and Ooni was a Death’s Head — but the corpses on the floor were testimony to her true allegiance: Pira, Leuca, her decades-lost lover.

Elpida could work with that. It was leverage. A way in.

Elpida had dealt with situations like this dozens of times before. Her sisters in the cadre had disagreed, feuded, fought, burned with confused overlapping passions and multi-directional jealousy: Third and Quio and their dirty little knife fight; those three months when Scoria and Arry had gotten obsessed with passing Bug back and forth, until it wasn’t a joke anymore; Kos and Vari and Snow swapping clothes in an escalating game which ended in tears and blood, and then Kos bringing Elpida in to force a reconciliation; even Howl — that one time she’d driven Metris to a night-time ambush, and they’d gotten so loud they’d woken up the whole cadre. But those feuds had never involved live ammunition — well, almost never. And at the end of the day the cadre all slept in the same dormitory; they all shared the same skin and hair and blood and genetic template; underneath even the bites and the scratches and the scars, they loved each other. The sisterhood of the cadre, against the green, against the Civitas, and then against the Covenanters. There was always a status quo for the cadre — each other.

In this nanomachine afterlife there was no return to any status quo but death. Elpida could not afford a mistake.

Atyle hissed from behind her: “Warrior, time grows short. We—”

Crack — crack!

Serin taking a double shot, from far beyond the walls.

Everyone flinched and looked up. But Elpida just stared at Ooni.

Atyle hissed again: “She buys us time. Heads are down. Warrior?”

Elpida marched up to Ooni — dragging her feet a little, blood dripping from between the fingers pressed to the bandages around her gut wound. She raised her blood-soaked hand, slapped her palm against Ooni’s chestplate, and met those staring green eyes.

Elpida said: “Your choice.”

Ooni swallowed, rough and thick. Her green eyes were wide. She glanced down at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s t-shirt. Her breath came in ragged little gasps. She said: “Do you promise not to kill Pira?”

Elpida took a deep breath. Expanding her ribcage made her gut scream. She swallowed the pain.

You have to mean it, Elps, Howl snapped. A lie won’t work. Make her one of us.

“I promise,” Elpida said.

“Y-yes,” Ooni whispered. She glanced at Pira. “Yes, then. Yes, Commander?”

“Good enough,” Elpida grunted. She dragged her hand across Ooni’s chestplate, smearing crimson mess across the black and grinning skull. Elpida’s blood blotted out the Death’s Head symbol. “Now you’re mine, too.”

A triangle: her, Pira, Ooni. All welded together. An unstable atomic configuration? It only had to hold until extraction. She would deal with the Death’s Head ideology later, and deal with whatever lurked inside Ooni’s skull.

Elpida stepped back. Ooni stared down at the defaced emblem with a haunted expression.

Pira said: “Ooni. Eyes forward. For you.”

Ooni swallowed. “For you,” she echoed.

Pira said, “I told you about her, Ooni. I told you she was real. She can do it.”

Ooni said: “Does she eat, or is she like you now?”

Pira sighed. “She eats.”

Before Elpida could react with fresh orders, Ooni rushed over to the conference room table and grabbed a handful of human brains. She hurried back to Elpida and held it out. “Y-you gotta eat. You’re bleeding. Like, a lot. A lot. I’m sorry I—”

“Stop,” Elpida grunted. “Later.”

Elpida accepted the handful of greasy grey-pink meat; she had not felt hungry, but her body suddenly shook with need. She crammed the gobbet of brains into her mouth and swallowed almost without chewing. It didn’t help the pain.

She realised that Amina still had her knife out. The younger revenant was staring at Pira and Ooni, blade trembling in her fist.

“Knife away, Amina,” Elpida muttered.

Amina whined — but she slid the blade back inside her coat.

Ooni was staring down at one of the fallen Death’s Heads — the one with the extendable bionic arm. She looked at Pira and gestured at the other corpse — at the sword rammed into the skull.

Pira shook her head. “No time to cut out the bionic. Would take twenty minutes not to ruin the nerve connections. Forget it.”

Ooni nodded, eyes downcast.

Elpida pointed at Atyle, at the oil-smear blob of hazy camouflage. “You follow her hand signals— and her orders— as if they were mine.” Atyle extended an unblurred hand, to assist with the explanation. “We are making for the exit, then for pick up. Absolute silence, and stealth. Atyle, any chance we can still get— to the coilgun?”

Atyle chuckled, low and soft; she was looking left and right, up and down, her peat-green bionic eye a blur amid the smear, seeing through brick and concrete.

“Perhaps, warrior. A band of stalkers comes this way. We may elude them, with haste. The scribe says we should let Pira shoot us all and be done with this. The scribe says many things. She is furious with you. She will guide us still.”

Elpida nodded. She would apologise to Kagami later. “We move. Amina, come here, hold my hand. Pira, Ooni, in the rear. Keep those plasma rifles—”

Ooni suddenly hissed, her voice hushed with awe: “That’s the ART. The ART everyone was going on about. Oh fu-fuck.”

She was staring at Hafina.

The invisible giant had stepped just inside the doorway of the conference room. A water-sheen illusion hung in the air, against a backdrop of gloom.

Elpida said quickly: “Her name is Hafina, she’s on our side. She provides some kind of stealth field, so stick close to her. What does ART mean?”

Pira said: “Artificial human. Ooni, it’s not. There’s none left.”

Atyle raised one hand, her camouflage unblurring to show her dark skin and the cuff of her coat. She jabbed two fingers toward the doorway. “Quiet, wayward lambs. We leave now or we are cornered animals. Speed over stealth. No more crouching. Hurry, warrior!”

Elpida and her comrades plunged back into the dark corridors of the skyscraper, well-armed, enlarged, and dangerously unstable.

Hafina took point once again, a translucent shimmer striding through the shadows. Atyle stuck close to Hafina’s heels now, no longer crouched, crossing the marble floors at a loping jog, her head and her cyclic sliver-gun swinging to cover all angles. Elpida hurried to keep up, gripping Amina with one hand, cradling her own leaking gut with her other arm; each step invited a fresh wave of pain from her re-opened gut wound, throbbing and pulsing in her belly. She strangled her whining, swallowed the taste of her own blood, and tried to stop breathing.

Pira and Ooni ghosted along in the rear. Elpida did not glance back; she had to trust that they belonged to her.

Why had she done this? The sensible tactical option would have been to leave both of them there, not invite instability and potential points of failure into an already precarious combat situation. Pira had betrayed her; Ooni was the sort of person who dropped her own allies for an old friend. Why had Elpida done this?

Because you’re the Commander, Howl whispered.

And you’re a hallucination caused by blood loss, pain, and stress. You’re not Howl. You’re a metaphor dredged from a dream. I’m not even really hearing you. My brain is shunting processes around to keep me on my feet. You’re a neurological glitch. Shut up. Let me concentrate.

Howl cackled. You can’t even concentrate on your own feet right now, bitch! And you’ll miss me the second I’m gone.

The group shot through the t-junction and down the corridor leading to the exterior wall of the skyscraper. Left, then right, then left again, moving as fast as they could, passing empty rooms and quiet hallways, filled with dust and echoes.

A clatter of booted footfalls reached the t-junction behind them, hurrying in the opposite direction. Snatches of voice floated down the corridor, too far away and muffled to make out the words. Were the Death’s Heads about to discover the bodies of their friends? When they did, all stealth would be over, they—

Crack! Crack!

Serin again, the perfect distraction, like she was watching through the walls. She probably was.

Atyle hissed: “Keep moving, little lambs.”

Time ceased to make sense. Elpida was a standing wave of gut pain, putting one foot in front of the other, holding one arm over her belly, holding onto Amina. Holding on. Hold on! Not far now!

Ten hours or ten seconds later — Elpida knew it was the latter, but it felt like the former — Atyle stopped and held up a fist.

The group halted in near-silence, all except for the gentle click-clack of Ooni’s armour plates and the soft hum of two active plasma rifles. From behind them, back up the marbled corridor, raised voices and running feet echoed in all directions. Another sudden crack split the air — Serin rendering more aid. The Death’s Heads could have been a hundred meters away, or right around the corner; Elpida put her trust in Kagami’s overwatch.

The end of the corridor was less than fifty feet away; a set of wide marble stairs led down into darkness.

On the right a row of massive wooden doors all opened into a single, huge room — some kind of gathering place or entertainment hall. Elpida could not see much — brightly coloured carpet thick with dust, gaudy gilt-and-gold walls laced with nano-mould, and rows of machines drenched in shadows.

Atyle waited, fist raised. Seconds crawled by. Elpida’s shoulder blades ran with sweat. Her t-shirt and her hair stuck to her skin. Blood dripped from between her fingers, pooling on the floor. Her vision wavered.

Then, suddenly — fingers forward! Go! The group scurried past the row of doors.

Inside the huge room gleaming wooden tables were topped with strange numbered mechanisms, spaces for dealing cards, horizontal wheels, tilted glass sheets, and slots for tokens. Slender machines with brightly coloured shells stood in upright rows, their rusted mechanical arms jutting outward, limp and broken. Dead displays showed nothing but black amid a riot of clashing hues. A clownish place, coated in rot.

The room was tiered, climbing upward toward an elevated viewing screen designed for a projector: the screen was lit up with a herky-jerky night-vision view, showing ruined buildings and chunks of concrete.

A shape darted across that screen: a flash of pale skin caught in ghostly green night-vision.

The screen flashed with weapons discharge — once, twice. From beyond the skyscraper walls Elpida heard the thump-thump of Ilyusha’s shotgun in time with the display. A long dark bionic tail lashed out and whipped the viewpoint camera, sending it lurching off-target. A spray of bullets chewed into the concrete, missing the figure by inches.

Up on the screen, Ilyusha vanished behind a stub of ruined wall.

Arrayed in front of the screen were several Death’s Head revenants: Yola, in her distinctive dark purple, her helmet retracted to show her gleaming ruby hair; she stood alongside another pair of figures wearing suits of powered armour, their helmets firmly on, painted with matching skull designs; three more revenants clustered around a fourth, all of them more lightly armoured than their leader. The fourth was contorted backward, her spine hanging at an impossible angle, her front opened to disgorge a tangle of machinery. Her eyes were fluttering, rolling into the back of her head. She was caked with sweat and shaking as if gripped by fever. Elpida realised that revenant’s own body was projecting the image from the drone — a living televisual uplink.

Another Death’s Head revenant was draped and encrusted with wires, with a trunk of cables plugged directly into her eye sockets. Her hands and forearms were a mass of control surfaces, sparking and flickering with holographic motion. She gestured like a musical conductor, swinging and swooping her hands through the air. The view on the screen whirled and zoomed in time with her motions. She was piloting the drone, hunting Ilyusha.

All the revenants in the Command Post were watching the screen. One of them was chuckling. Another was clapping, slowly.

Yola was saying, in her wet and clicking voice: “—determined degenerate, is she not? With so little weaponry to her name, too. Nothing but small arms. She can’t even penetrate the drone’s armour. Sofika, do you think there is any chance of a crippling blow, rather than seeing her dead? I would love to examine that tail, preferably with the neural connection still intact. A fascinating piece of balance work. It should be ours.”

Elpida and the others reached the far side of the row of doors, once again concealed behind the wall and wrapped in the dampening of Hafina’s stealth field. Atyle raised her fist again: all stop.

Inside the Command Post, a jerky, heaving voice answered Yola’s question: “Crip-crippling? Legs o-off? Cut off. Cut off. Laser, acceptable? Can’t get too far from the target, she slips— slippery. Fast-fast. Upside. Downside.”

Yola sighed. “Sofi, do not make us reprogram your uplink again.”

One of the other Death’s Heads laughed, harsh and metallic, from inside a helmet.

‘Sofi’, the drone controller, replied: “Crippling blow, yes, boss. I’ll take off her legs. I promise. Off at the legs. Off with her leggies. Leg.”

Atyle gestured at the row of doors with two fingers. She hissed: “Coilgun. On the left, fifteen feet from the door, in the open.” Then down the stairs. “Out.”

Elpida hissed: “How many skull-fuckers between us and the door?”

Ooni flinched; Elpida pretended not to notice. Atyle turned to look down the stairs, then whispered: “Two guards. Lightly armed. A straight line, warrior.”

Elpida squinted through the pain. She whispered: “How do they not— know we’re free?”

Atyle paused, listening to Kagami, then said: “They will discover the bodies any moment. Coilgun or go, warrior?”

Elpida shook her head, fighting a wave of brain-fog and the throbbing agony in her gut. She was not capable of making this decision. “Illy—” she slurred. “Illy’s fighting all by her— herself. Maybe we if can— take out the drone— pilot—”

Amina squeezed her hand, hard and urgent. “Elpida … ”

Look lively, Elps! Howl snapped inside her mind. The Commander goes down now and these bitches might run — then what happens to little Illy, huh?

Elpida blinked hard. “We have to help Ilyusha. Break stealth now, hit the drone pilot, forget the coilgun—”

Ooni suddenly hissed: “How important is this weapon?”

Ooni had unhooked her helmet from her belt, the same dirty grey as the rest of her armour; she was holding it up to the side of her head, listening to the click-buzz crackle of the Death’s Heads’ encrypted comms network. She stared at Elpida and the oil-smear of Atyle with manic eyes, panting raw and rough, biting her lower lip so hard she drew blood.

Pira whispered quickly: “That coilgun is tomb-grown, high-powered, more than anything else we could get our hands on.” She nodded at the sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms. “But we have that. There’s no sense in this.”

Atyle nodded once. “The scribe agrees. Warrior, we—”

Ooni hissed, quick and quivering: “Yola will come after us.”

Elpida whispered: “Ooni, follow your orders. One hit on the drone pilot is all we—”

“You don’t know her like I do,” Ooni said. “She’ll come after you. After Pira. She’ll throw resources at revenge long after it stops making material sense. She’s a genius and she’s right. She’s always right, she’s right about everything. She gets us, gets it. But she’ll come after us.” Ooni panted so hard that a human would have been hyperventilating. Her hands flew over the controls on her plasma rifle; the weapon pulsed out a deep throbbing hum. “I’ll get your coilgun. And disrupt the drone.”

Before anybody could reach out and stop her, Ooni shot to her feet, jammed her grey helmet into place over her head, and stepped out in full view of the Command Post.

Elpida grabbed for her — but Pira grabbed Elpida.

“Hold, warrior,” Atyle hissed. “Let the fool distract. The scribe and I agree.”

Ooni stepped through the doors, into the Command Post, beyond Elpida’s sight.

But Elpida was already twisting to face Pira and Atyle, heaving through the pain in her gut. Pira recoiled from the look on Elpida’s face.

Howl hissed through Elpida’s teeth: “One of us fights, we all fight!” A throb of pain, hard enough to make Elpida’s head spin. Then she hissed: “Up! Prep for covering fire! Amina, keep your head down!”

Atyle and Pira stood up and pressed themselves to the wall next to the doors. Elpida did the same. Amina ducked. Hafina — Elpida couldn’t see Hafina.

A few seconds passed, then Yola’s voice rang out from inside the Command Post: “Ahhh, our little addition. Ooni, how is the apostate? A glowing picture of health, I hope? I take it she’s eating, if—”

Click-buzz. A power-armoured muffle: “Boss, I can’t raise Hatty. She’s supposed to be testing the apostate. I can’t—”

Another Death’s Head revenant squeaked in sudden alarm: “Hey! Hey you can’t take those, they’re not pool weapons, they stay there until—”

“She’s going for the—”

“She’s red-lined her fucking rifle!”

“Boss, down!”

A thudding of falling bodies clattered to the floor, punctuated by the heavy-weight slam of powered armour going down. Solid-shot weapons cracked and barked, bullets slamming into concrete, chewing through carpet and plaster — and bouncing off carapace plate.

“Now!” Elpida shouted.

Atyle and Pira swung out into the doorway. Pira’s stolen plasma rifle coughed and barked, painting the raised platform with bolts of eye-searing electric blue; the cyclic sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms turned into a blur as the barrels spun up, rounds blasting through tables and upright machines, filling the room with shrapnel and debris. Elpida joined them, dragging the compact shotgun from inside her armoured coat, ready to make some Death’s Head zombie keep her skull down for a few vital seconds.

The revenants up by the screen had all hit the floor. The projector-zombie was tumbled in a heap of limbs and metal pieces. The drone-pilot had dived behind a table. The screen was blank. Elpida saw the glint of Yola’s purple powered armour, then—

Ooni stepped out from behind a row of machines on the left; she swung her plasma rifle like a stick-grenade and hurled it toward that hint of deep purple armour.

The weapon arced through the air. Bodies scattered. A high-pitched whine, a click-whirr, and then—

An ear-splitting explosion blew a shock-wave of pressure out through the open doors of the Command Post.

Elpida staggered back around the corner. Small arms and strong hands caught her around the waist. Amina hung on tight. Pira and Atyle retreated too, guns down, little ammunition spent.

Ooni staggered out of the Command Post moments later, her armour scorched all down the front; Elpida’s hand-smeared mark of blood across her chest had baked black from the plasma detonation. She had a submachine gun — Elpida’s submachine gun — hanging from a strap around her neck. She cradled the power-tank, receiver, and aim-assist rig of the coilgun in both arms, straps spilling down her legs, almost too heavy for her to hold.

Pira caught her and helped her with the weight of the weapon.

Elpida coughed, and said: “Good— girl. Now— go, we— have—”

Atyle dropped her oil-smear camouflage. Her head snapped up. Her peat-green bionic eye locked on the far end of the corridor.

“Stealth is done, lambs!” she shouted. “Turn and go! The scribe says—”

A power-armoured giant stepped around the distant corner; eight feet of grey metal, festooned with weaponry, faceless and blank, with a skull painted in the middle of her chestplate. A walking tank.

Kuro — Yola’s giant. She’d not been in the Command Post.

Other Death’s Head revenants were rounding the corner behind Kuro, raising weapons, taking cover, shouting commands and orders and warnings and insults.

Kuro’s faceless helmet snapped toward Elpida and her comrades. The power plant on her back hummed and whined with spiking output, air-exchange vents throbbing with heat-haze. Her mounted weapons began to deploy, rising from their housing, lifting on articulated arms; only the massive back-mounted plasma cannon remained stowed.

Then Kuro put her head down and charged.

Atyle and Pira both opened fire — but that armour ate plasma bolts like they were splashes of water, and deflected the deafening roar of sliver-gun rounds like a shower of ball bearings. Kuro pounded up the corridor, massive armoured boots cracking the marble tiles, seemingly intent on slamming head-first into the group and killing them with her hands. Even through the haze of pain, Elpida recognised this tactic. She’d seen Silico perform it against hardened Legion fire-points: get a heavily armoured fighter into close-quarters, disrupt any return fire, and then pile on from a distance against the neutralised team.

Atyle started to back up, lowering her weapon. Pira and Ooni struggled with the coilgun, trying to power on the magnetic coils and raise the receiver. Amina screamed something. Elpida raised a fist, a last gesture of defiance.

Hafina stepped up, in front, right in Kuro’s path.

The invisible giant dropped her optic camouflage like a sheet of falling water; beneath the shimmering illusion was a figure wrapped in layers of robe and rag, hanging plates of bulletproof material inside curtains of fabric, cocooning an under-layer of ultra lightweight liquid armour, all to protect a core of ever-shifting cuttlefish-skin. Her helmet was a smooth black beak, without eyes.

Hafina looked more Silico than human, artificial or otherwise.

Six arms came up, two holding a massive rifle, four with smaller weapons of a kind that Elpida had never seen before; silver, chrome, and light-drinking black.

Hafina opened fire; the corridor flashed with energy bolts, all colour washed away in a blink. Anti-materiel rounds slammed into Kuro’s armour — cracking her head back, ramming her chest sideways, and smashing one hip so hard that she went spinning to the floor. The Death’s Heads’ walking tank crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and clattering weapons.

Felled, but far from dead.

Kuro’s armour was not even penetrated, from what Elpida could see. Behind Kuro, down the corridor, the other zombies were beginning to return fire, bullets and bolts hissing through the air and slamming into the marble walls. Chips of stone pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat.

Elpida spat blood to clear her mouth, raised her voice, and shouted the only order which made sense.

“Everyone up, behind Hafina! Down the stairs! Retreat!”