Necroepilogos

Dawn broke, a streak of dirty rust on the edge of the black iron sky; the undead woke beneath body armour repurposed as bedding; muscle stirred and stretched in the grey haze, mirrored by artificial fibre bundles and bio-plastic skin; nanomachine metabolism demanded mouthfuls of brain matter to quench unslaked hungers.

Elpida watched her companions closely as she ate her own share of the remaining meat.

Ilyusha seemed back to normal. Her wounds had healed and her sulky mood had lifted. She greeted Elpida by bumping her head against Elpida’s shoulder and covertly raking a pair of exposed claws across Elpida’s back, too gentle even to snag on her clothing. Her red-and-black bionic tail wagged when Elpida patted her blonde head. Amina followed in Ilyusha’s wake, blinking and bleary, tiny and plump, brown skin flushed from unbroken sleep. She accepted her portion of breakfast from Illy’s claws, and said in a tiny, whispering voice: “Good morning, Elpida. Good morning to you. Good morning, good morning, good morning.”

She bowed her head in rhythm with her words, rocking her upper body.

“Good morning to you too, Amina. I hope you slept well.”

The reply drew a smile onto Amina’s face. Her knife was tucked into her waistband, out in the open.

Atyle appeared uncaring, serene, distant. She was already awake when Elpida had risen, finishing the end of her shift on watch. During the night she had stripped down to underwear and thermal t-shirt, leaving her willowy dark limbs on display, her graceful movements unhindered as she unfolded herself. She cut her share of brain matter from what was left, licking fatty grease off her fingertips, then sat a few feet from Elpida as she ate, openly staring at Elpida in naked contemplation. Elpida stared back.

After eating, Atyle sat in a meditation pose, straight backed and very still. She held her peat-green bionic eye wide open, flicking over the walls, seeing beyond.

Elpida asked her, “Do you see anything of note out there?”

“Of note?” An amused purr. “Yes, warrior. The engines of creation writhe and multiply inside every marriage between metal and stone and wood. If I could read their script I would possess the secrets of the gods who made us.”

Elpida resisted the urge to sigh. She had thought Atyle was cold and haughty at first — and perhaps she was, but this creative non-answer reminded Elpida too much of certain cadre-sisters: of Third, and Here. Both Third and Here had revelled in similar linguistic games, Third for sheer cheeky playfulness, and Here for the paradoxical pleasure of strict literalism over a core of absurdist humour.

Third and Here had always made Elpida laugh, even when she wasn’t supposed to.

Third and Here had died a million years ago — a week ago.

Elpida didn’t feel like laughing.

She clarified: “Anything of note other than ambient nanomachine activity?”

Atyle blinked. “We are alone out here, warrior. The jungle has fallen quiet.”

“No sign of Serin?”

“Our benefactor hides better than she argues.”

Kagami and Vicky had grown closer in the night — both emotionally and physically. The latter was plain for all to see: Vicky had moved her sleeping spot right next to Kagami, and slept with one arm wrapped around the waist of the doll-like woman, while Kagami was curled up tight, on her side, with her slender back pressed against Vicky’s front. Vicky woke first and made no attempt to pretend she hadn’t been snuggled up with a comrade, though she blushed and looked away from Elpida, awkward guilt shadowing her eyes.

Elpida said, “Vicky, well done for looking after Kagami. Don’t be ashamed.”

Vicky muttered something, but she didn’t argue.

Kagami didn’t even bother to look. She sat up and stared at her hands.

Elpida wasn’t sure if they’d actually had sex. She guessed not, the noise would have woken somebody. But part of her hoped they had.

The emotional change was more subtle, but Elpida recognised the signs: once they were both up Vicky kept shooting attentive glances at Kagami, with an undercurrent of concern at Kagami’s exhausted eyes and sluggish movements; Kagami didn’t complain when Vicky all but fed her breakfast, and once or twice Elpida caught Kagami reaching out to touch Vicky’s arm or shoulder. They exchanged hushed whispers, then Vicky looked at Kagami as if trying to extract a promise from her, or get her to commit to something. But Kagami looked away.

Whenever this kind of development had happened in the cadre — and it had, often, repeatedly, in endless recombination — Elpida had always given her sisters a day or two to adjust, to figure out the emotional shapes they were attempting to fit together, before she would risk intervention to ensure there was no rift. But now, here, she could not risk additional friction within the group.

On the other hand, Vicky and Kagami were not hers to command. They were not her sisters. Her sisters were all dead.

Elpida asked: “Vicky, how’s your reattached arm feeling?”

“Oh, uh. Much better. Pain’s almost gone.” She held it up, skin unbroken. “Um … better, yes. It’s a lot to admit, but cannibalism seems to have done the trick.”

Elpida switched over: “And Kagami — how are you?”

Kagami snorted. “Among the living. Not.”

Kagami’s strange fever and weakness appeared to have passed. Her bite wounds had closed, leaving behind nasty scars which would presumably fade. She stood and stretched with the rest, tutting at her bionic legs, raking out her long black hair so it lay straight down her back. Elpida estimated that Kagami was concealing some kind of headache. It was plain in the microsecond mistiming of her eyelids when she blinked, in the way she squinted, and moved her neck, and pretended she was not in pain.

Amina came over and hugged Vicky, which drew a horrified sidelong look from Kagami.

They exchanged more hushed whispers; Vicky even sneaked in another guilty look toward Elpida. Elpida had to resist the urge to laugh. Perhaps this kind of social complexity wasn’t unique to her cadre at all. She’d have to watch Vicky — she didn’t want guilt to cloud her conscience. Intimate comfort between comrades was no cause for guilt.

Pira had healed in the night, though less so compared with the others. Her pale skin was clear, freckles standing out in the dead sunlight. She was still bruised from the fistfight, doing her best to conceal the stiffness when she rose. But the worst of her wounds — the lingering bullet-hole in her flank — seemed to no longer bother her.

“Pira,” Elpida said. “If you need more of my blood, I want you to tell me.”

Pira just stared, expression closed. “I’m capable as I am.” Then, after a pause: “Thank you, Elpida.”

Elpida judged the group was ready to move. One more day’s travel, one more push, and then the combat frame. She said this to the others, and asked them one by one if anybody felt incapable of continuing.

“Everyone has a veto,” she said. “If you don’t feel ready, tell me now, and we’ll rest for another day. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets shamed for needing to rest.”

Ilyusha grabbed her shotgun and grinned. Pira just armed up, loose and ready. Atyle took up the cyclic sliver-gun once more and gestured for Elpida to strap on the coilgun’s heavy power-tank. Amina said out loud, in a wavering voice: “I am ready for you.” Vicky blew out a long breath, then nodded.

“Kagami?” Elpida asked. “How are your legs?”

“Stupid. Obscene. Unwanted.” She smiled, pinched and sarcastic. She was playing with one of those inert silvery drones in her left hand. “But I’ll walk if you order me to, Commander.”

“No orders. If you’re not ready, we rest.”

Vicky sighed. “Kaga, please.”

Kagami tutted. “Yes, fine. I’m ready.”

Elpida led the others down and out, through the dim and shadowy corridors of their temporary refuge, back into the petrified guts and gnawed bones of the eternal corpse-city.

They crept beneath towering skyscrapers, scurried along boulevards of broken concrete, and skirted the mouldering sores in the city’s hide — the suppurating masses of nano-rot, the mats of sticky grey mould, the half-alive flesh-beast tics and fleas embedded in the sides of buildings. Above their heads the suffocated black sky glowed in one corner with sputtering fire. They kept the same formation as previously: Elpida and Atyle in front with the heavy weapons, Vicky and Kagami just behind — Vicky so attentive and careful with Kagami now. Next came Amina, pressed in close to keep her protected. Pira took the rear, alert and experienced, while Ilyusha made herself a mobile asset, skipping back and forth, circling the group on clicking claws to scout their flanks.

Elpida pointed them toward the now not-so-distant plume of smoke where the combat frame had come down; that smoke had dried to a trickle — or rather several distinct skeletal fingers, reaching for the coffin-lid of the sky, evidence of separate fires started by the orbital impact.

The graveworm loomed on the horizon far to the left, a jagged grey mountain range cutting through the black.

Despite two days travel the graveworm did not look any smaller, but Elpida knew they had not actually moved very far since the tomb and the bunker; travel through this corpse-city was a jarring stop-start motion, interrupted by confrontations and detours, stand-offs with other revenants too dangerous or curious to engage directly, long ways around things they did not want to meet, and long silences in hiding from things whose attention they did not wish to attract. Elpida’s mind automatically settled in for a long day on the bleeding edge of tension, watching out for her comrades, watching every corner and window and road junction, and watching herself for signs of fatigue.

An hour later the discrepancy was too obvious not to mention.

“The streets are dead,” Elpida whispered to the others when they paused in an empty, unroofed shell of tumbledown brick.

Atyle replied: “And the sky is black, warrior.”

Vicky huffed, “You know what she means, don’t be stupid. It’s too quiet, there’s nothing around. City’s empty all of a sudden. Giving me the creeps.”

Kagami spoke through gritted teeth: “I would hardly call it empty, Victoria.” She gestured with her head, with the auspex visor over her eyes. “Try seeing what I see for five minutes. Every tenth building has some bottom-feeder scurrying away from us, or some lout lounging around in powered armour, staring back at me with some plasma weapon set-up that could turn us all into a bloody smear on the pavement. It’s a miracle we haven’t been assaulted yet! We’re making enough fucking noise.”

Elpida said, “Exactly. This is so much less than we were dealing with before. We’re not even being followed.”

Kagami huffed. “Oh trust me, ‘Commander’, we are — just not by much. That thing following us for twenty minutes back there, that wasn’t remotely human.”

Pira said: “We’re nearing the edge.”

Everyone looked at her.

Ilyusha grinned, nodding. “Yeeeeeah.”

Elpida asked, “The edge of the graveworm safe zone?”

Pira nodded. “It’s not a clear demarcation, more of a fuzzy boundary. Entities from beyond the safe zone will find it easier to prey on revenants who stray too close to the edge. The only revenants out here are the most desperate scavengers, or the ones very confident in their protection and bionic modifications. The mech fell right at the edge.”

Uncomfortable glances criss-crossed the group — doubt and fear. Elpida didn’t blame them, but she stepped in quickly. She said: “We’re heavily armed and we have very good intel gathering; we have Kagami’s auspex and Atyle’s bionic eye. We can fend off revenants wearing powered armour and Silico monsters alike, and I will not lead us into danger without looking first. We can do this.”

Ilyusha clicked her claws against the metal of her shotgun, bobbing her head and tail. “Yeah! Tell ‘em!”

Kagami snorted a fake laugh. “At least the bloody mech itself won’t be swarming with zombies.”

Vicky grimaced. “Kaga, don’t jinx us.”

Pira said, “I would not count on that.”

“Pira?” said Elpida. “Do you have a prediction?”

Pira went still for a moment, then shook her head. She pulled her flame-red hair back and tucked it into her armour. “Not one I’m confident about. If it’s just beyond the safe zone, that’s one thing, that means venturing out. But if it’s still inside, I think we’ll be out of luck.”

Kagami squinted from behind her auspex visor. “Oh yes? How do you figure that, no-brains?”

“Kagami,” Elpida warned — which made Kagami flinch.

Pira answered. “If it’s inside the safe zone, it’ll be accessible. Fallen technology, from orbit?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to meet the sorts of revenants who might be interested.”

Ilyusha laughed again. “Like us!”

Elpida nodded. “We find the combat frame, assess the situation, and make a plan from there. Everyone rested? Yes? Amina, are you okay? Good. Let’s move.”

Reaching the site of the orbital impact took another four hours of worming their way through the ossified intestines of the city, taking detours around impassible collapses in once-sweeping monorails and ground-car roads, pausing to wait while strange scavengers dragged themselves into shadowy burrows, and skirting the still-active infra-red eyes of machine-sentinels mounted on fortress walls.

Elpida knew they were close when the tiny tails of smoke were almost overhead, visible through the gaps in the towers.

This area of the city climbed toward the choking black overhead, encrusted with the rotten grave-fingers of many skyscrapers. Elpida and her companions passed down the canyon floors lined with fallen masonry and clusters of abandoned vehicles. Their view of the impact site was blocked by the vast towers; in a way, the city was not so different to the green, after all.

Atyle and Kagami reacted at about the same time; Elpida estimated they were only a few hundred meters from the edge of the impact site.

Atyle just stopped, staring up and ahead, through the layers of buildings which still separated the group from their goal. Her lips parted in soft awe. She exhaled in rapture. Elpida held up a fist for the others. All stop.

Kagami went pale and broke out in cold sweat, head panning left and right. “Oh fuck. Fuck me. Fuck all of us. Pira was right — it’s teeming. There’s … what’s that?” She looked up, following Atyle’s gaze, then winced and clutched her face. “Ow, ah.”

Vicky said, “You jinxed us, Kaga.”

“This is not my fault. Fuck you, it’s not!”

“Up!” Elpida snapped. “Up, now! We need high ground.”

Climbing a skyscraper for a vantage point took them an additional ninety minutes. Sixty floors up, with Kagami and Atyle checking through the walls and ceilings for lurking revenants, going slow and methodical up the dark staircases of metal and plastic. Atyle kept staring out through the exterior wall. Kagami clutched one of Vicky’s sleeves. Elpida kept them moving.

Nobody complained.

They reached the top floor, the best possible vantage point. Elpida led them out of the dark stairwell and into the mummified corpse of an opulent apartment, furnished with pale wood and plush cream carpets, covered in stains and rot and decades of dust. One wall was curved upward toward the ceiling, all made of glass, both window and skylight in one. This rambling ‘penthouse’ — a word Vicky quickly taught to Elpida — enjoyed a bird’s eye view of what had probably once been a park ringed by tall buildings, but was now an impact crater smeared across the city’s necrotic flesh.

The combat frame must have struck the earth at a shallow angle, carving first a narrow incision, then crashing through buildings, knocking towers to rubble, throwing up mountains of dust and dirt before slamming into a wall of skyscrapers. Fires had burned themselves out in the blackened and cracked ring of structures around the impact — the source of the smoke trails in the sky.

That ring of ruin was now occupied.

Fighting positions had been dragged together from chunks of concrete; concealed drones hovered against blackened walls; the muzzles of heavy weaponry poked from high windows. A few corpses lay exposed on the open ground churned up by the impact. Tiny figures crouched on rooftops, giants in powered armour or with telescoping limbs, nightmares of blade and tooth coiled tight and ready to pounce. Symbols were daubed on walls with paint or blood or worse — circles and animal-heads, bird wings and geometric shapes; the lower floors of the intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame itself were dotted with a familiar design — a grinning skull.

Occasional gunshots echoed upward from the clearing, but the conflict was frozen, awaiting a thaw.

The combat frame itself was everything Elpida had imagined — but also more.

A titan of sharp white plates, armoured like a god of the ancient world, scorched by atmospheric re-entry and filthy from impact, but still unbreached and whole. Elpida could see no burgundy gleam of machine-meat wounds. Four arms and four legs, half of them folded beneath the weight of the fallen machine as it lay on its side, crushed into the grey dirt, squeezed against the skyscrapers which had halted its slide. The body was covered in retracted weapon-pods and shielded armament domes, no doubt full of beam emitters and rocket systems and auto-cannons awaiting activation. The head was all eye, a single silver orb in the middle of the body. One arm stuck straight up — almost clean: the main armament, a railgun.

Had the pilot protected the weapon on purpose?

Was the pilot alive?

The sight threatened to overwhelm Elpida’s training, to paralyse her with awe and the pain of familiarity. But she could not afford that yet, partly due to the danger — but mostly because of the three eye-searing static blurs which crouched on top of the combat frame.

Somehow, without being told, she knew exactly what they were.

Elpida forced herself not to react to the sight — not to the revenants, or the combat frame, or what perched upon it. She compacted her emotions. She crouched next to the rotting carcass of a sofa and put a commanding whip crack into her voice.

“Nobody get too close to the windows, stay below the sight lines of the other buildings. Illy — Illy, get Amina behind that kitchen counter. Vicky. Vicky!”

Vicky was just standing, rifle limp in her hands, staring at the trio of static blurs on top of the combat frame. “Elpi, what are— what is— ah, ow, oh that hurts my eyes, why can’t I—”

Pira said: “Don’t look directly at the worm-guard. Stop looking.”

Vicky managed to look down, at her weapon. She was almost hyperventilating.

Atyle sighed with god-touched pleasure. “Ahhhhhh. The machines of the gods. They are perfect, are they not?” Her bionic eye was wide open and whirring. Her organic eye was scrunched tight with pain, crying freely. “And this … this is the warrior’s steed?”

Kagami was laughing softly, looking through the interface of her auspex visor. “Worm-guard? You’re worried about your mythical dragons? There’s dozens of revenants down there. A hundred! I count twenty-five suits of powered armour in those buildings. More, even! I don’t even know what half those weapons are. What is that? What is that smear on the concrete all the way over … oh, oh fuck, that’s still alive. That’s still active, it’s—”

Elpida snapped: “Kagami!”

Kagami flinched hard, almost flailing.

Elpida tapped the floor. “Here, now. Next to me. Pira, get Atyle down. Bundle her to the floor if you have to. Vicky—”

Kagami spluttered. “Next to you? You’re joking, Commander.” A nasty little grin spread across her lips. “I’m not going anywhere near—”

“I need your auspex. I need to know what we’re looking at. And I need you to interpret the readout. Here, now.” But Kagami just stood and shivered. “Vicky, help Kagami. Vicky!”

“Right. O-on it, Elpi. I’m on it. Kaga, come on. If Elpi says it’s safe—”

“Go fuck yourself, Victoria,” Kagami sneered.

But Kagami consented to be led by Vicky; they both joined Elpida in her pitifully concealed position by the sofa. Kagami was covered in cold sweat, shivering softly, and holding one of Vicky’s arms in a vice-like grip. Pira did not bundle Atyle to the floor, because Atyle gave her a withering look, then sat down cross-legged so she could continue staring at the objects of her fascination, no matter how much it hurt her organic left eye. Ilyusha cringed and ducked away from the things crouched on top of the combat frame, but she did as Elpida asked, helping Amina behind the cover of the kitchen counter.

Pira joined Elpida as well. “Don’t look directly at the worm-guard.”

Elpida nodded. “I won’t. Kaga, I need your eyes. We’re going to assess what’s happening here. Step by step. Let’s start with the buildings.”

Kagami laughed, humourless and hollow. “How about starting with the giant fucking mech?”

Vicky swallowed loudly. “Can the worm-guard see us? Pira? Can they see us?”

“Of course,” Pira replied. “They can see everything.”

“B-but if we look at them, they’ll see us looking and … right?”

Pira said: “They know we’re here and they know we’re looking. If they cared, we’d be dead.”

Vicky stared at Pira. “Then why shouldn’t we look?”

“Because it hurts.”

Elpida spent almost an hour cataloguing everything they could see from their vantage point. She had Kagami count the number of revenants in the buildings around the impact crater, spying them through the walls: one hundred and three, with an additional nineteen dead, and seven partially consumed or dying. Fifteen autonomous or semi-autonomous drones of varying sizes and armament. Twenty nine suits of powered armour in various states of repair, many of different designs, some outputting signatures of back-mounted fusion power plants, others drawing directly from nanomachine uplinks to their wearers, or blocks of ultra high-density fuel embedded in their plating. Weapon systems were more difficult to catalogue, far more advanced and lethal than a coilgun, or even a cyclic sliver-gun looted from a dead Silico monster.

“Lots of plasma,” Kagami said. “Lots of energy weapons. I don’t even know what that one is — a microwave gun? For melting tanks? Heavy machine guns galore. Half this lot are ready for Twen-Cen trenches but with energy-charged rounds. The other half are— fuck me, that’s a gravity effector. Hand-held? Ugh. I feel like being sick.”

“Focus,” Elpida told her.

The revenants who were gathered to pick at the corpse of the combat frame were almost all of very high level biomechanical and nanomechanical complexity — extra limbs, implanted weapons, rambling biological additions. Most of it was impossible to make out at such a distance, even with the auspex, not in any further detail than a glow of nanomachine readouts.

“Lots of comms,” Kagami said. “This lot are talking, constantly. Almost all of it heavily encrypted. Radio, actual radio. Hah. Other mediums too. I can tap into some of them.”

Elpida shook her head. “If we can tap into unencrypted communications, others can as well. They’re not stupid. Anything we can overhear may be misdirection.”

“Smart,” said Pira.

At the very far end of the impact crater was a long bloody smear, so wide and so crimson that it was visible with the naked eye, even sixty floors up. Vicky and Elpida both peered through the rifle scope at the twitching chunks of machine-gore. Kagami confirmed it was still alive.

Pira explained: “From beyond the graveworm line. Something which got too interested. Revenant once, maybe. The worm-guard neutralised it. Probably why they’re here.”

Kagami said, voice floating away: “I don’t want to be within a hundred feet of anything down there.” She clutched one of the silvery drones in her left hand, turning it over and over; Vicky kept glancing down at the unpowered machine. “Wait. That’s—” Kagami paused, squinted down at the buildings, and burst into laughter. “It’s the spider-cannibal! So big I’d recognise the giant bitch anywhere.”

“Serin?”

“No, no, the one from the tomb. The armoured spider. With the plates, and the idiot on her back.”

Vicky supplied the name: “Lianna?”

It was Lianna. Elpida had Kagami confirm that, describing the outputs until they could form a picture: the orange-plated spider girl crouching half-asleep in some burned-out building. Inaya was dozing on her back, her face still encrusted with machinery. A bundle of bloody sheets was snuggled up against one side of the star-prophet.

Zeltzin? The swordswoman who had been cut in two by the Silico, back at the tomb?

“Keeping her around as rations, maybe,” Kagami suggested in a hiccuping laugh.

Elpida and Vicky spent some time confirming the symbols on the intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame; Elpida had Kagami take some close-up zooms with the auspex readout too, just to be certain. There was no mistake: it was the same symbol as on the human-skin banner outside the tomb, and stamped on one of Serin’s arms, crossed out as a kill tally.

A grinning skull.

“Serin called them the ‘Death Cult,” Elpida mused out loud. “Inaya and Lianna, back at the tomb, called them ‘Death’s Heads’.”

Ilyusha spat on the floor. “Reptiles”

Kagami swallowed loudly. “Reptiles or grim reapers or whatever, they’re just as heavily armed as everyone else down there.”

Elpida voiced what she’d already summarised: “None of those groups are moving. There’s very little gunfire, very little contact.”

Vicky suggested: “Improvised truce? ‘Cos of the … worm-guard?”

Pira said, “They’re waiting for the graveworm to move.”

The others all looked at her. Elpida nodded for Pira to continue.

Pira gestured at the trio of static blurs atop the combat frame. “The worm-guard have responded to the mech, probably because it’s very advanced technology. They recognise it as a threat to the worm. They’re keeping anything from claiming it. But when the graveworm moves on, so will they. When they depart, the revenants will fight over the mech. But they’ll have a very short window, because the safe zone will be leaving them behind.” She shook her head. “Whoever’s closest probably has the best chance of claiming it. Assuming anybody can even use the thing.”

Vicky said, “And only the most heavily armed would try, right? Huh.”

Elpida chewed on this thought; the idea of vultures fighting over a combat frame — a child of Telokopolis, in its own way — made her feel indignant and insulted. None of them could pilot it anyway, not without an MMI uplink. The frame’s own autonomous biological systems would refuse manual control, not unless it felt the touch of a trained pilot — a pilot, from the cadre.

The design of the machine stirred recognition in Elpida’s soul — but also alienation and doubt and more questions than she had time for. She did not recognise the type, let alone the exact model; this frame was so much larger than anything Telokopolis had manufactured during her life, never mind the addition of orbital manoeuvre equipment. But the lines of the body, the shape of the legs, the way the weapon-domes sat — she knew it all.

“I can pilot it,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Pira asked.

Elpida nodded. “The machine is of Telokopolan design. Perhaps … perhaps after my time. Or … before?”

Vicky swallowed loudly. “Elpi, this is like the thing you piloted? This … it’s a … it’s giant.”

Kagami hissed: “Yes, Victoria, your super-solider girl was a mech pilot. I’m sure she had fun crushing non-combatants with those feet.”

“Kaga, shut up.”

Pira said, “You have to be sure.”

Elpida said, “If I can reach the hatch, beneath the head. See? Right there, there’s handholds and an access panel. I don’t have an MMI uplink implant anymore, so I can’t link to a pilot capsule.” Her hand wandered the back of her neck, smooth and empty. “But if I’m right and the combat frame is of Telokopolan manufacture, I should be able to interface with the manual controls. Clumsy and slow, it’ll be like piloting while blindfolded and gagged. But it will recognise me as a pilot.”

Or it might not.

What if it was built by the Covenanters, centuries after her death — but no, that made no sense, what use would Covenanters have for machines to walk the green? Or what if it was from pre-history, the birth of her city, and would not know her as a pilot?

But Elpida had no other choice. She had to try. And she could not voice her doubt, not in front of companions who needed to believe she had something to offer other than illusory hope.

Pira just stared. Vicky gulped. Kagami said nothing, eyes staring at the machine.

Ilyusha scooted out from behind the apartment’s kitchen counter, and said, “Got one already? Came down by itself?”

“Good question,” said Pira.

A living pilot. Elpida couldn’t think about the implications of that. She shook her head. “If the pilot was alive and conscious, the combat frame would be up and moving. Kagami, are there any signals from inside?”

“No. It’s dead. And the damn thing is armoured like a nuclear bunker. I can’t see through it.”

“Right. Yes. Composite nano-grown carbon bone-mesh.”

Vicky let out a nervous laugh. “So, what? You’re just gonna walk up and take the key from under the welcome mat? With a hundred revenants watching? And those three- ow, dammit, I looked again.” Vicky winced and clutched at her eyes.

Atop the combat frame, with a commanding view of every approach, crouched three worm-guard. The same type of machine that had visited and investigated Elpida and the others just after she had risen from the dead a second time. Back then, protected by the concrete bunker, they had not seen the worm-guard with their eyes, only felt it as a sensory overload.

But now the worm-guard were static blurs of black scribble and visual interference — painful to look at, impossible to examine.

Pira explained: “Target acquisition countermeasures. Don’t try to overcome it. If you do, they’ll probably upgrade you to a threat worth engaging.”

Vicky said, “They’ll shoot anything that gets close. Right?”

Ilyusha grumbled, hissing between her teeth. “Rrrrrrr. Right.”

Atyle said, “The machines of the gods wait for us to try their patience.”

Elpida said: “Atyle has a point.”

Kagami barked with laughter. “Shoot? Ha! More like obliterate. You can’t be serious, ‘Commander’. We’re fucked. Turbo-fucked. Reamed six ways to Sunday. Is that how you surface bitches say it? That trio of fucking nightmares over there is holding off over ten times our number in zombies, by sheer threat alone. You want to wait until they leave? We’ll get minced, and eaten. Literally! The things down there aren’t even human anymore — neither are we!”

Vicky swallowed. “Yeah, Elpi. Come on. This is … this is beyond us. We don’t have the firepower. Or anything.”

Pira watched, still and unmoving.

Elpida said: “No. It’s not beyond us.”

The others raised their voices. Ilyusha snorted, looking sick. Atyle called out something about talking to the gods. Vicky stammered and Kagami spat and Amina watched with huge, silent eyes full of faith. And Pira said nothing.

Elpida raised her voice: “Nobody else can pilot the combat frame. It’s useless to everyone down there. Why would the worm-guard be keeping them off it? That worm-guard which visited us before, it didn’t harm us. It checked up on us. It came to see if I was alive. You all know I’ve communicated with the graveworm itself, it spoke to me. All this has a logical conclusion.”

Vicky frowned. “Oh no, Elpi. That’s a hell of a gamble.”

Ilyusha perked up, grinned, and tapped the wooden floor with her tail. “Ours!”

Pira took a deep breath.

“Oh, right!” Kagami sneered. “So we just walk out in front of the brain-scrambling machines, is that it?”

Elpida held Kagami’s eyes until Kagami blinked. Then she cast her gaze around the others.

“Yes,” Elpida said. “Because I think the worm-guard are waiting — for us. For me. For a pilot.”