Necroepilogos

Shilu opened the elevator doors and strode into the cavernous room beyond, balanced on the sharp points of her spear-tip feet.

Eseld crept out of the lift in Shilu’s wake. She stumbled to a halt after three paces, eyes wide, mouth agape.

The armoury was divided in two by a pathway of slightly darker metal. The path led across a wide grey room, then terminated at an archway opposite the elevator doors. To Eseld’s right was the largest collection of functioning machinery she had ever seen. Tables overflowed with scientific equipment and hand-held devices, visored headsets and bulky goggles, portable scanners and arm-mounted readouts, trays of little mechanisms and robots and more, all manner of electronic and mechanical gadgetry. Eseld understood almost none of it, but she knew these objects were useful, because she had seen many similar examples in the hands of powerful, well-equipped, predatory revenants. A row of computers stood against the wall behind the tables; screens glowed with toxic greens and electric blues, scrolling through reams of text and numbers, or waiting to the silent beat of blinking cursors.

On Eseld’s left was power and salvation, a treasure-trove beyond her wildest dreams, a promise she had not understood when it was made.

Guns. So many guns.

When Shilu had used the word ‘armoury’, Eseld had understood perfectly well on an intellectual level. An armoury was a large store of weapons. But she had not — could not have! — imagined such limitless bounty. She had been too preoccupied with the implications of the running battle between Shilu and Lykke.

Eseld had handled a firearm only once before — a small calibre pistol. She had looted it from the remains of a powerful revenant, more deaths ago than she could count. Stronger and more ruthless scavengers than Eseld had already stripped the corpse clean of meat and cracked the bones for marrow. By the time Eseld had crept forth from her hiding place the body had been reduced to a tangle of blood-stained clothes and torn webbing, punctuated by bone fragments. Eseld had been sucking on scraps of bloody clothing when she’d discovered the handgun in a knot of sticky fabric, missed by the earlier scavengers. Snub-nosed, pocked with rust, the thing had looked like debris. The magazine had contained only three bullets. Eseld had wasted two rounds shooting at a wall, to see what would happen; recoil had surprised her so badly that she’d dropped the gun on the first shot. For the second shot she’d held the gun in both hands, closed her eyes, and turned her face away from the target. She had used the last bullet on a rival scavenger a few weeks later, but she had missed that shot and drawn attention to herself. She had died again that day, chased down by a long-legged zombie who had heard the gunfire.

The tomb’s armoury contained enough guns for a million missed shots.

Firearms of all shapes and sizes were lined up in racks and laid out on shelves — pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, heavy weapons, energy weapons, coilguns, plasma rifles, and more, many of which Eseld could not identify. Most of it was outside of Eseld’s experience, because those who carried such guns were usually so far beyond her place in the ecosystem.

Combat knives lay sheathed in rows, sorted by size. Grenades nestled in trays, arranged according to type. Body armour soaked up the light, stowed in deep rows on the shelves. Clothing sat in tubs and bins, black and grey and brand new, folded neat and tidy, without holes or bloodstains or threadbare hems.

Three sets of powered armour were locked into charging ports along the wall, their fronts open like the mandibles of giant crustaceans.

Eseld was shaking. She wiped her mouth on the back of one hand, expecting to find drool running down her chin.

Shilu walked straight down the centre of the room, following the pathway which separated the weapons and armour from the devices and computers. She scooped up a large pistol and a handful of bullets as she passed the armoury, black metal fingers clacking against the firearm. She slipped the magazine out of the pistol and loaded the loose rounds with a rapid click-click-click, then slapped the magazine back into place seconds later, all without breaking her stride.

“Arm yourselves. Be ready to leave,” Shilu called without looking back. “Don’t follow me.”

Shilu stepped through the archway, into the second chamber.

The room on the far side of the archway looked much larger than the armoury, as if the armoury was merely an antechamber. A huge pyramid of grey metal filled most of that second room, easily twenty feet tall. The tip of the pyramid was flattened out into a kind of socket; in the socket sat a perfect black sphere, lightless and empty, like a hole in reality.

A resurrection coffin stood upright at the foot of the pyramid, facing the archway and the elevator doors. The coffin was occupied.

The zombie within the coffin was bisected at the waist, her legs and hips gone. Her body was suspended on a patchwork of cables and tubes, spilling from her ruptured belly like mechanical intestines, hooked into the sides of the resurrection coffin. Wires punctured her arms and neck and penetrated the bald surface of her scalp, snaking across her withered shoulders and prominent ribcage. Her hands had been severed, replaced with yet more cables running from the ends of her wrists, plugged into the base of the coffin. She stared straight ahead, unblinking and unbreathing. She showed no reaction as Shilu entered the pyramid chamber.

Eseld had seen a great many heavily modified zombies, some of them far from human, but never anything quite like that.

Shilu’s scarecrow body of sharp angles seemed tiny before the grey pyramid and the empty black sphere, framed by the curve of the arch. Silence was smeared by the distant drumming of torrential rain. The voice of the hurricane howled against the exterior of the tomb.

Behind Eseld, Sky let out a low whistle. Eseld flinched.

“Damn,” Sky said. “That sure is a sight for sore eyes.” She stepped past Eseld and flashed a smile. “Guess our friend wasn’t lying about the armoury, huh? And real clothes, thank fuck for that.”

Eseld gestured at the pyramid and the black sphere. “What—”

Sky laughed, hard and harsh. “Bugger that, I don’t even care. Forget whatever AI mind bullshit is going on. I’m getting strapped.” She beelined toward the guns and body armour. “Keep a look out for a flamethrower, a plasma torch, or a directed microwave gun. Or thermite, that might do the trick. And toss me any EMP or ECM output equipment. We need something to take out Lykke, and make it permanent this time.”

Cyneswith advanced with more caution, pale and still. She paused and caught Eseld’s eyes. “What is all this?”

“Guns.”

Cyneswith wet her lips. “I … I don’t understand these mechanisms. What would you have me do, Miss Eseld?”

Eseld forced herself to smile. “Get some clothes on. Grab some of the backpacks. The things with straps, over there. We’ll need at least three.”

Cyneswith glanced toward Sky. The larger woman was already rummaging through the clothes. “Can you show me, Miss Eseld?”

“ … in a sec. Grab clothes. Get dressed. I … I need to … ”

Eseld hurried forward, leaving Cyneswith behind. She followed Shilu.

Eseld paused to grab a pistol from the same rack Shilu had selected. She lifted the firearm in one sweaty palm. The gun was heavy and cold in her hand. The grip was too slippery. She had neither the time nor the dexterity to fumble bullets into the magazine as she walked, so she skipped that step and hurried to the archway.

She made it just in time; in the chamber with the pyramid and the black sphere and the insensate zombie wired into a coffin, Shilu raised her gun.

She aimed at the black sphere and pulled the trigger.

The weapon’s discharge echoed off the chamber walls with a deafening bang. Eseld flinched and scrambled to a halt. Cyneswith yelped in surprise. Sky said nothing, but the sound of rummaging stopped. Eseld had assumed that Shilu would deliver a threat or an ultimatum first, perhaps to the revenant in the coffin — was that the ‘gravekeeper’? She had not expected Shilu to open the conversation with a bullet.

No ricochet sound followed the gunshot. The surface of the black sphere showed no damage.

The bullet was floating in mid-air about six feet out from the sphere’s surface. An area of heat-haze or optical illusion linked the bullet to the sphere, as if the air itself was warping under incredible pressure.

Eseld’s stomach turned over with sudden nausea. Her vision swam. Her head pounded.

“Do I have your attention?” Shilu said. She was speaking to the sphere.

The suspended bullet fell from the air and landed on the floor with a delicate metallic clink. Shilu squeezed the trigger three more times — bang! bang! bang! All three bullets froze in mid-air before they could reach the black sphere, arrested by that heat-haze warping in the air.

A wave of nausea crashed into Eseld. She spluttered and retched, but there was nothing in her belly to bring up. She was freshly resurrected, without even a mouthful of bile in her own stomach.

Shilu’s head whipped around. Wide dark eyes stared out of a pale polymer face, framed by a frown.

“I told you not to follow me,” she snapped. “Back away.”

Eseld staggered backward. The nausea lifted as suddenly as it had arrived. Her vision cleared. The pressure in her head ceased.

She stared at Shilu, panting for breath.

“Brave, zombie,” Shilu said. “But very stupid. You are not hardened against gravitics. Stay away from the gravekeeper’s chamber while I talk. Get dressed. And pick up some guns.”

Shilu turned back to the sphere and the coffin.

“Do I have your attention?” Shilu repeated.

She received no answer that Eseld could hear, but apparently Shilu was satisfied by an invisible response, because she lowered her pistol. The trio of bullets fell to the floor with a clink-a-clink of metal. Shilu walked up to the zombie inside the coffin, then stopped and spoke. Her voice was a jumble of hissing and buzzing, like a machine trying to imitate a cloud of insects.

Eseld turned away; whatever was happening in there was the domain of angels and demons. To even stand too close was to risk obliteration. She should have trusted Shilu’s warning the first time.

She was only a zombie, after all. Only meat.

The freshies were faring far better. Cyneswith had tugged on a pair of tomb-grey trousers and a stretchy grey thermal t-shirt; she was looking down at herself with a bemused expression. Sky was already fully dressed, wearing boots and combat webbing over her muscular frame. Her hair was tugged back into a dark twist, pinned by a strap of webbing across her shoulders. She was tugging some kind of rigging off the shelves and buckling pieces of it around her own body, settling metal struts across her back, like a frame for a rucksack.

She caught Eseld’s eye and shrugged. “Mind-jobs, hey?” she said. “What can you do? Leave her to it.”

Eseld answered with a shrug of her own.

Sky smiled, showing white teeth in the reddish skin of her face. Eseld did not like that smile. It contained too much glee.

Sky finished strapping the metal frame to her back; Eseld couldn’t see what the process had achieved. Sky hesitated for a moment, then trotted to the other side of the room to poke through the equipment. “There’s gotta be a wide-band ECM set somewhere here,” she said. She glanced at the open doors of the lift, then at Eseld. “Come on! We need a flamethrower or a plasma torch if we’re gonna hold that thing off. You’re still naked, soldier. Get your gear on.”

Sky turned back to the equipment without waiting for Eseld to respond. Eseld shook her head. There was nothing a lowly zombie could do to stop a demon like Lykke. It was all up to Shilu now. Sky would die quickly if she did not learn that. Sky would probably die anyway. True fresh meat did not keep long.

Eseld walked over to the bins and tubs full of clothes.

Cyneswith looked up with a bashful smile. She gestured down at herself. “They don’t have any skirts, so I’m wearing trousers! It’s such an odd feeling.”

“Um, good,” Eseld said.

Cyneswith held out one of the t-shirts, beaming with a smile. “All ready for you, Miss! They’re quite comfy. Try it!”

Eseld realised she was still gripping the handgun she’d picked up earlier, so tight that her knuckles had turned white. She put the gun down on a pile of coats and flexed her right hand to ease the aching muscles. Then she accepted the tomb-grey t-shirt and pulled it over her head.

Eseld had seen plenty of revenants wearing tomb-grown gear before — mostly the full-length padded coats, the suits of ballistic armour, and the ubiquitous boots. She knew the stuff came from the tombs, but she had always assumed the strongest revenants somehow manufactured it from the machinery inside, not that it was all just sitting here for the taking. Most of the clothing worn by ordinary zombies was dragged out of the ruins or picked off corpses. Eseld had spent every prior resurrection wearing filthy rags and rotten bits of cloth, scavenging what she could from the dead, clinging to the rare find of a jumper or a blanket amid the rubble.

The tomb-grown t-shirt was the most deliciously comfortable garment she’d ever worn. The fabric stretched, conforming to the shape of her body. The hem hugged her hips. The sleeves enclosed both arms all the way to her wrists. The material somehow warmed her skin without making her sweat. Subtle padding cupped her elbows, cushioned her ribs, and covered her upper back.

Eseld hugged herself, eyes squeezed shut. She could have cried.

Cyneswith said, “Miss Eseld? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Eseld croaked. She opened her eyes and gathered herself. “Nothing.”

Eseld got dressed. She tugged on socks, underwear, and trousers. She laced up a pair of boots. She strapped knee-pads to her legs and slipped her hands into matte black fingerless gloves with grippy surfaces on the palms. She pulled protective goggles from a box and jammed them into her trouser pockets. She found a neck gaiter and yanked it down over her head, tucking the fabric beneath her chin. In the space of a hundred seconds, Eseld felt more protected than she had since true life.

She grabbed a backpack and swung it toward Cyneswith. “We need extras. Everything we can carry. Socks, t-shirts, gloves, every—”

“Already done!” Cyneswith held up a backpack of her own. She hesitated. “Well, except for my own. I don’t know what to wear. I don’t know what most of this is. And it’s all so … utilitarian. All these greys and blacks. Aheh … ”

“Boots. Gloves. Coat. Everything you can. Especially the coat. Maybe a bullet-proof vest. Here.”

Eseld pulled an armoured coat from a bin and shoved it into Cyneswith’s arms. The freshie had no idea what she would face once out of the tomb; this was her only chance to prepare and she did not even understand what she was preparing for. Eseld grabbed a second coat for herself and held it up. The coat was a miracle — light enough to wear without effort, but packed with little armoured scales inside the fabric, ready to stiffen and harden in response to impacts and projectiles. The hood was deep enough to hide one’s face from any light. The inside of the coat was lined with pouches and straps for weapons and equipment, and the exterior pockets had plenty of room for extras.

Eseld slipped a bullet-proof vest over her shoulders first, then added the tomb-coat over the top. She tested her flexibility, rotating her arms. The armour did not restrict her natural range of movement. It was perfect, as if tailored just for her.

Then she raised her eyes to the rest of the armoury, and felt a lump grow in her throat.

Eseld walked over to a rack of submachine guns — two dozen of them, and this was just one model among several. She lifted one of the weapons, gently at first, as if she might damage or break the mechanisms inside. But the gun was sturdy, made of black metal and durable polymers, solid yet lightweight, cold to the touch. She looped the strap over her shoulders, so the gun lay against her belly. She located a magazine and loaded the bullets; her hands shook so badly that she dropped several rounds, but that didn’t matter. The armoury contained tens of thousands of bullets, in boxes and cartons and wrapped in plastic. She finished filling the magazine, then clicked it home. She shouldered the gun, aiming at nothing. She cocked the charging handle and heard the first round slide into the chamber.

She found the safety and flicked it off.

Eseld’s mouth was dry. Her breath came in hard little jerks. She was shaking all over, quivering with a feeling she had never experienced before. Her world was filled with static — was that the storm, intensifying its fury? Was the hurricane pounding the tomb with hailstones, or with concrete grit scooped out of the corpse-city and hurled against the walls?

Eseld curled her finger around the trigger of the gun.

Power. The same power which had been used on her, again and again, by a thousand predators and monsters and cannibals. Now it was hers, solid and real in her hands, embodied in a physical object. She could barely breathe.

“Eseld?”

Eseld jerked with surprise. She pulled her finger off the trigger and flicked the safety back on.

Cyneswith was staring with wide eyes and parted lips. She’d been watching the whole process.

Eseld said, “I’m fine. I’m just … we need to arm ourselves. Come on. Follow me.”

Eseld jammed additional magazines into her pockets and tossed packages of bullets into her backpack. She chased that with a short-nosed combat shotgun and handfuls of shells. She snatched a neat little PDW off the shelves and strapped it inside her coat so it lay flat against her flank, then followed that up with a pair of lightweight pistols tucked into her inside pockets. She grabbed two knives and shoved them into her trousers. The only non-combat equipment on the shelves was a stack of compact thermal blankets. She split the lot between her and Cyneswith’s backpacks. Blankets were a hard-won comfort in this Godless afterlife.

Eseld paused before some kind of energy weapon — a rifle made of black barrels and a big bulbous chamber — and wished she new how to use the thing.

“How do these machines work?” Cyneswith asked.

“The guns?” Eseld shook her head. “You don’t know guns?”

Cyneswith frowned and bit her lower lip. “Like … cannons?”

“Sort of. Weapons. They … shoot lead. Some of these do, anyway. Some of them do other things. You need to take one for yourself. Or several. They’re valuable, we need to take as much as we can carry. Grab a gun, fill your bag with bullets. And hurry. Sky’s right, we don’t know when Lykke might turn up again.”

Cyneswith blinked several times, chewing on her lips. She stared at the submachine gun strapped over Eseld’s belly.

“Can you show me how to use one? Please, Miss Eseld? I’m only … I’m only a human. I don’t know any of these things, and you and Miss Sky seem to know them all. I’m no fairy-kin, nor—”

Eseld bared her teeth. She hadn’t meant to, but Cyn flinched from her sharp-toothed maw.

“Sorry!” Eseld blurted out. “Sorry. Ask Sky. I don’t really know. I just … I just know how to point and shoot. This is my first time.”

“First time what?”

Eseld gritted her teeth and gestured at Sky. “Just … ask her.”

Sky was still on the other side of the chamber. She’d found something useful amid all the equipment — some kind of gun-shaped device festooned with tubes and screens, though it didn’t have a barrel or any kind of opening for a projectile to come out of. She was raising it and pressing the stock against her shoulder, reading numbers off a tiny screen in front of her face.

Sky noticed Eseld and Cyneswith looking at her. She flashed a grin. “EMP flash-shield,” she said. “Short range, but it might do the trick, might scramble that bitch upstairs for a few seconds. She’s probably network adaptive though, won’t last long. Might buy us a second, right?”

Cyn hissed, “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” Eseld whispered back. “Just … ask her to show you. I have no idea. Go on.”

Eseld gently pushed Cyneswith toward Sky. Cyneswith hesitated, then trotted across the room.

Eseld turned back to the armoury shelves. She couldn’t deal with the freshie right then, not with those kinds of questions. Eseld was overwhelmed by the implications of this place, of all these guns and all this armour and all the gadgets and equipment and clothes and everything. All this power, right here in the open, naked all along. She’d had no idea. Had this banquet been there for the taking, in every tomb she had escaped from so swiftly? Had this always been waiting for her?

She looked down at herself, loaded with weapons, clad in armour. She laid one shaking hand on the submachine gun.

Was she a predator now? Was this opportunity the only thing that had separated her from the revenants who had preyed on her for so many lifetimes?

Would she now hunt girls like herself, once she escaped the tomb? Would she hunt and kill girls like Andasina?

No, she wouldn’t — she wouldn’t prey on those who were weak and helpless. She swore she wouldn’t. She swore. She shook and she swore. If she had been armed like this when that revenant monster had come for her and Andasina, she could have won! She could have protected what mattered. She could have been the victor, eating the defeated. She would murder the powerful, the other monsters, her new equals. She swore she would. She swore.

But when the hunger started, would she have a choice?

Was this the only option, after God had died and left creation to fend for itself? Was the exercise of power the only thing left in a lonely cosmos after the withdrawal of all divine meaning?

Had this been the answer all along? Inflict power upon others, as it had been inflicted upon her?

Eseld took a deep breath and made a fist, digging fingernails into her palm. She could not afford this morbid introspection, not while trapped in a tomb, hunted by a demon, and pinned beneath a hurricane. She had to keep her head and keep moving, even if she was nothing but spoiled meat. She had to support Shilu.

Because Shilu was an angel, fallen or otherwise, and her fight mattered.

Eseld walked down the line of weapons, wishing she knew how to use the more esoteric and powerful firearms. Many of them were simply too large to carry by herself, or came with attached power-packs she could not hope to lift. Others lacked traditional trigger mechanisms, or were missing anything which looked like a barrel. Some she did not know which way to point, or could not figure out how they were meant to be used. She did slip a few grenades into her pockets, but she kept that covert, just in case. She kept an eye out for a flamethrower, as Sky had suggested, but Eseld did not hold out much hope.

The armour was even more of a lost opportunity. Dozens of carapace suits were lined up on the racks in glinting rows of ceramic and metal, much more sturdy and protective than Eseld’s bullet proof vest and armoured coat. She pulled down a helmet with a nice chunky visor, tested it for size, then clipped it to her belt. But the rest of the carapace suit components were too complex, covered in straps and buckles and wires and lines, fitted with interlocking mechanisms and slots for joining to some kind of underlying framework. The suits looked as if they required specialised knowledge simply to put one on.

Eseld picked up a shoulder-pad, then sighed and tossed it back on the racks. She could spend hours trying to armour herself in one of those suits. She glanced toward the open doors of the elevator, a narrow snatch of darkness between the metal leaves.

They didn’t have hours. Lykke might come down that lift shaft at any moment.

The storm pounded at the edge of Eseld’s hearing, louder than before. Maybe it really was raining hailstones, big ones, falling like rocks. Even if Shilu managed to defeat Lykke, wouldn’t they all be stuck in here until the storm passed? Maybe then Eseld could spend as long as she needed wrapping herself in an armoured shell, going at whatever pace she pleased. Maybe Shilu would help.

Ha. No, Eseld did not even smile at that notion. Shilu was on a quest of her own. Eseld could only hope to follow in her footsteps, probably not much further than the gates of the tomb.

Cyneswith and Sky had crossed back over to the armoury section of the chamber. Sky was banging about again, showing Cyneswith how to work a gun. Eseld paid them no attention. She could not deal with freshies being so naive.

She paused to examine the three suits of powered armour.

These machines were so far beyond Eseld’s experience that she felt a little intimidated just standing in front of them. She’d only rarely seen revenants wearing powered armour, and then only from far away — true monsters who could not be stopped by anything, certainly not bullets. Out in the corpse-city powered armour came in many shapes and sizes, but these three suits were all identical, eight feet tall, blocky and sharp, made of solid grey material. Eseld pressed her hand to a piece of thigh armour. It didn’t feel like metal. It was warm.

All three suits were hinged open at the chest and belly, waiting for a pilot to wriggle inside the mechanical mouth. The innards of each suit were studded with little electrodes and spikes and tiny wires, many of which seemed positioned as if to penetrate the flesh of the wearer.

Eseld peered deeper inside one suit. The holes for legs and arms were pitch black.

Sky called out: “Best not climb in there! Hey, don’t touch that. Seriously. Shit like that needs a whole ground team just to get you suited up, let alone extract you again. Don’t.”

“Yeah,” Eseld murmured, stepping back from the suits. They made her skin crawl.

Eseld glanced down the rest of the racks and shelves, casting her eyes over the cannons and heavy guns and weird blocky machines. Maybe there really was something here which they might use against Lykke. Maybe Sky wasn’t so blind to the truth after all. The guns strapped around Eseld’s body made her feel confident, strong, and powerful. She had not felt this way since the last time she had held a bow, in her true life. She could almost feel the bowstring spring free from her left hand, feel the arrow loose in flight.

Power. She had power, for the first time. Maybe if they searched for—

Blue.

A glint of blue glow, right at the end of the armoury shelves.

Eseld froze in shock, then swallowed a mouthful of sudden saliva. She hurried down the armoury, mouth open, panting with thirst. Or was it lust? She stopped in front of a large plastic box; the lid was open by just a crack. Blue glow peeked out through the gap. She opened the box with shaking hands.

Two dozen cannisters were nestled inside, each cannister full to the brim with blue liquid.

Eseld gaped. Her skin tingled. She slurped drool off her chin.

She picked up one of the cannisters and ripped the seal open, then poured the contents down her throat, swallowing rapidly, chugging the raw blue nanomachines as quickly as she could. The liquid went down so easily, like water but thick and warm, slightly below body temperature. She felt the fluid settle in her stomach like honey and lightning. She let out a soft moan of true satisfaction.

She uncapped a second cannister and poured that down her throat too.

Eseld had only ever seen raw blue twice before, both times in the hands of powerful revenants. She had barely understood what she was looking at those times, but her body had known. Her body needed the blue like it needed meat. She had put two and two together eventually, when she had realised that the soupy mess inside the coffin of a failed resurrection was almost the same colour as that maddening blue. This was the raw stuff of nanomachine unlife, the building blocks of personal modification, more valuable and precious than any gun or any number of bullets.

Eseld’s body remembered that need. She could not resist it, as a living human could not have resisted the need to draw breath.

She lowered the second cannister and reached for a third.

“What is that stuff?”

Eseld flinched, bared her teeth, and span to face—

Sky. Looming overhead. Fully armed.

Sky was wearing a suit of the carapace armour which Eseld had been unable to comprehend. Her legs, torso. shoulders, and arms were all protected by lightweight articulated plates of grey ceramic and metal, moving like a second skin. Her throat was covered by a matching gorget. Her hands were hidden by armoured gloves, fingers and palms shielded by projecting plates of metal. A visored helmet hung from her belt, sleek and smooth, not the blocky kind which Eseld had grabbed. The purpose of Sky’s torso rig was now made obvious — four mechanical arms extended from Sky’s back, lengths of finely balanced steel tipped with interfaces for firearms. The lower two mechanical arms held one of the large machine guns which Eseld had decided was too heavy for one person to carry, now suspended in an easy grip in front of Sky’s waist. The top two arms held a matched pair of energy weapons — fluted black rifles with bulky power-packs slung beneath. The arms moved as Sky moved, following her motions.

Sky also had a machete strapped to one armoured thigh, an assault rifle slung over one shoulder, and the ‘EMP’ gun strapped to her chest.

Eseld had mistaken herself for a potential predator. But here was the real thing, ready to fight off an army, single-handled.

Sky raised her eyebrows at Eseld’s sharp teeth. She cracked a nasty grin of her own. “What’s the matter, kid?” Sky said. “Never seen a real professional before?”

Eseld considered reaching for her submachine gun and jamming it under Sky’s chin. Could she move fast enough to outwit those semi-autonomous mechanical arms? Could she put Sky off the scent of the raw blue? Sweat prickled on Eseld’s back. She peeled her lips away from her teeth.

Sky’s grin faltered. She nodded at the cannisters. “I asked you what that stuff is.”

Cyneswith was looking on, a little way behind Sky. She was finally wearing boots and gloves and a neck gaiter of her own. She was also wearing some kind of armoured poncho, a variation on the tomb-grown coats stacked up at the far end of the armoury. The garment reached all the way to her ankles. A rucksack hung from her shoulders. She clutched a PDW in both hands, then tucked it under her poncho, looking awkward and ashamed of the weapon.

Eseld hesitated, licking a glaze of raw blue off her lips. She couldn’t lie about this, not openly. Sky glanced at the cannisters, then back at Eseld.

Sky opened her mouth to repeat the question a third time. “I said—”

“Food,” Eseld answered. “It’s food. Sort of. We need it.”

“Huh,” Sky grunted, unsmiling. “I’m not feeling hungry, not since boot-up, or whatever that was back there. You got peckish, kid?”

“Sort of.” Eseld leaned around Sky. “Cyn, grab another pack, please. We need to take all of this, it’s important.”

“O-okay!” Cyneswith answered. She scurried off.

“‘Cyn’?” Sky echoed, narrowing her eyes. “Pet names already, huh? Am I the only one out of the loop?”

“It’s just quicker to say her name like that.” Eseld moved fast; she had to avoid this monster’s ire. She picked up a cannister and held it out to Sky. “You want one? If you open it, you have to drink it all, or it’ll go bad.”

Sky smiled, tight and hostile. Her quartet of gun-arms adjusted as she turned sideways, looking back along the armoury racks. “Nah, thanks. You keep ‘em for now. Get them stowed in a bag and all that. But you know what I do want?”

“No?”

“I want a fucking flamethrower. One of these plasma rifles can put out a lot of heat, but it won’t keep that bitch at bay. And I want a central control unit for some of these drones.” Sky gestured at the weird bulky objects on the armoury racks, things that Eseld had never seen before. “Get me wired up and we can at least throw numbers at her. You seen a flamethrower or a central control unit, kiddo?”

“I’m not a child,” Eseld said. “I’m older than you.”

Sky snorted. “You look like a kid, you—”

“I’ve done this hundreds of times. Lived hundreds of times. You’re so young you don’t even know it. Shut up.”

Sky frowned. Her eyes went cold. “What—”

Cyneswith scurried back, holding an additional rucksack in one hand and a weird looking weapon in the other — a collection of pipes with a flat metal ‘muzzle’ at one end, but without an opening in the barrel, and a pair of large cylinders either side of the gun’s body.

She held the bag out to Eseld and showed the gun to Sky. “Is this what you were talking about?”

Sky’s face lit up. She grabbed the gun from Cyneswith and flicked several of the controls. The weapon hummed to life.

“Yeah,” Sky said. “Oh, fuck yeah. Directional microwave gun. It’s not exactly flame, but it’s heat. Big heat. Better than nothing. Ha, fuck me.” She tried to laugh, but couldn’t quite get there. “We’re gonna use a tank-buster on a human-sized target? You two are lucky I’m just that damn good.”

Eseld ignored Sky and started packing the raw blue nanomachines into the additional backpack. Cyn trotted closer and peered at the cannisters.

“What is that stuff?” she asked. “It’s so blue, goodness me. Like the sea on a sunny day.”

Eseld winced. She couldn’t remember sunlight. “It’s just food, it—”

“Kyahahahahaaaaa!”

A bubbly giggle broke across the armoury, echoing from within the pyramid chamber; the voice was amplified a hundred times into a deafening cacophony of spine-raking laughter, drowning out the fury of the hurricane beyond the distant walls.

Eseld jerked upright, frozen to the spot. Cyn grabbed Eseld’s arm, one hand stifling a scream. Sky span like a walking tank, all armour and swinging weaponry, shouldering the microwave gun.

The giggle faded away.

“Oh, Shishi,” said Lykke, from within the pyramid chamber. “You thought I was going to chase you down an elevator shaft? I’m not a roving construct, what an insult. The tomb is already mine, darling. Now, where did you stash all that zombie meat? I do need to clean up every last drop of your mess, though perhaps not before shoving your nose in it. Save me the trouble and call them over here, will you? Be a good girl now, and maybe I’ll just dump you back in the network instead of finger-painting the floor with your insides.”