“The Fortress. The name was a statement of intent. An ideal. An aspiration. A utopian dream. The concept was simple, easy to explain, easy to share, easy to make other revenants believe in it, even the ones who had spent years eating each other in the ruins, the lost and the mad. A Fortress, for all who wished protection. Perhaps it was like that refrain you keep repeating, Commander — ‘Telokopolis is forever’. For us, in the early days, we were The Fortress, even before we had physical walls. The Fortress was self-evident. If it did not exist, it would come into being, somebody would create it. It had to exist, logically. We would take the fortress in our hearts and make it real.”
Pira spoke slowly. Her voice was a grave-whisper among the quiet machines and brooding screens of Pheiri’s control cockpit. She stared at nothing, eyes seeing into the past, brief tears dried on her freckled cheeks. The motion of speaking made the bandages and gauze on her face and jaw crinkle and flex, cracking the thin film of dried blood. Her flame-red hair had gone dull and spent. She was held together with stitches, half-naked beneath her armoured coat, listing to one side in her seat.
Black drizzle ran down the tiny steel-glass view-slit, full of grit and grime. Thin rain obscured the reddish corpse-light of the undead sunrise.
Elpida sat straight, nursing the ache in her gut, waiting for Pira to continue. Despite the protection and insulation of Pheiri’s body she felt oddly cold; she was glad she’d dragged on a fresh t-shirt and worn her coat. Her submachine gun lay within reach, atop a nearby control panel. The weapon was unnecessary but she left it in the open as a statement.
Ilyusha sat quietly in her own chair, clawed feet drawn up onto the seat, talons grasping the metal lip, tail coiled against the floor. The readouts and monitors in the control cockpit remained muted and dim. The reactor’s heartbeat throbbed far below the deck. Distant sounds inside Pheiri’s body turned soft and furtive.
Pira paused for a long time. Elpida began to worry that Pira had fallen asleep with her eyes open.
“Pira?”
“I’m awake,” Pira murmured. “This is difficult. The memories are brittle.”
Elpida said: “In your own time. That’s one thing we have plenty of, right now.”
Pira nodded slowly.
Elpida added, “But, Pira?”
Pira raised her eyes. Sky-blue, scoured clean. “Mm?”
Elpida said, “This is an interrogation. Do you understand? You can take as long as you need. You can take a break, go back to sleep. You can drink, we can even find you something to eat. But you will tell me everything.”
Pira blinked. “No more secrets,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything I can.”
Elpida smiled. “I’m gonna trust you to do that. Before you continue I want to clarify something. Ooni calls you ‘Leuca’. Do you want us to call you that as well, or are you Pira?”
A slow wince travelled across Pira’s face. “Leuca. That was my name in life. I discarded it, after … ”
She trailed off. Her eyes returned to the shadows.
“Pira, then,” Elpida said.
“Pira was my mother’s name. I think. Cleaner than my own. Not so … tainted.”
Elpida shared a curious glance with Ilyusha, raising an eyebrow in silent question. Illy just shrugged and pulled a grimace. She didn’t know what that meant either.
Pira continued. Her voice was a grinding rasp.
“The Fortress began with six of us. We were resurrected together, in the same tomb. A much larger tomb than the one we were in, Commander.”
“Larger?” Elpida interrupted gently. “I thought they were all the same.”
“The basic internal layout and external shape, yes. I mean the yield.”
Ilyusha said: “Loadsa zombies.”
“Fifty two coffins,” Pira said. “The largest I’ve ever seen, before or since. And I’ve been resurrected so many times, I … ” She trailed off briefly. “I’d been around a few times by then, maybe half a dozen, maybe a few more, I don’t recall. But I’d never seen a tomb disgorge so many revenants at once. Most of them were fresh, first-timers, helpless. A small handful were very experienced. The resurrection chamber alone was a bloodbath.”
Elpida asked: “They turned on each other as they were coming out of the resurrection coffins?”
Pira nodded. “It’s not uncommon.” She indicated Ilyusha with one hand, barely raising a knuckle. “Thought she was going to do that, when we woke together.”
“Hey!” Ilyusha snapped. “Fuck you!”
Pira blinked — was that meant to indicate a shrug? “You look the part. That’s all. No offence meant.”
“Tch!” Ilyusha hissed through her teeth and folded her arms. She tapped the metal floor with the tip of her bionic tail.
Elpida did not intervene. Ilyusha and Pira had been working out their differences without her, before she’d joined them in the control cockpit. She hoped they would still be able to do so. The group would be stronger if she did not try to act as an intermediary for every disagreement.
“Pira,” she said. “Please continue.”
Pira did: “Fifty two fresh revenants. Five died in the coffins, unfinished, stillborn. About thirty of us made it out of the resurrection chamber. Ten of us reached the exit. And six of us made it out.”
Elpida said, “Those kinds of casualty rates, is that normal?”
Pira nodded slowly, staring at the floor.
Elpida chewed on that information. Her own exit and escape from the tomb, with all her comrades alive — minus herself, at the final hurdle, ironically enough — really was not normal here. Then again, there were twelve coffins in that resurrection chamber; two of her womb-mates had died inside their own metal boxes, their bodies incomplete, their resurrections halted; three fellow revenants had left the chamber before Elpida and the others had emerged. They had discovered one of those early risers, murdered and devoured by a predator. That left two unaccounted for.
Elpida knew she would probably never meet those women, whoever they were, if they were even still alive.
“Six of us,” Pira was saying. “There was me and two other normal revenants, Dubaku and Zhaleh. Du was experienced, heavily modified. She was like a ball of living knives, almost not human anymore. Zhal was fresh, a first-timer, but she took to undeath like a fish to water. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t react when she climbed out of the coffin, like she’d been taking a nap and overslept, totally calm. When the rest of us explained to her what was happening, she tore off a hydraulic piston from a coffin lid, and used it to murder two of the other revenants, right there in the resurrection chamber.”
Ilyusha hissed: “Fuuuuuck.”
“She swore on her god that the zombies she’d murdered had been planning to kill and eat the rest of us, that they had been playing along. By that point a score was dead already, we’d had to wrestle a couple of zombies down and strangle them with our bare hands, to stop them from carrying on with the killing and feasting. Nobody was inclined to argue.” She swallowed, rough and dry, then blinked hard, screwing her eyes shut for a long moment. “I’m getting bogged down. This doesn’t matter. Du and Zhal don’t matter. Why am I telling you this part?”
Elpida said, “Because this is an interrogation. Meander as much as you need.”
Pira slowly relaxed her eyes again. “What mattered was the other three of the initial six. The seed of The Fortress. The Trio.”
“The Trio?”
Pira said, “That’s what everyone called them, once the group began to grow, once we started collecting revenants with nowhere else to go. The Trio didn’t have names, just numbers. Eleven, Sixty Three, One-Oh-Nine.”
Elpida asked: “Artificial humans?”
Pira shook her head. “No. Flesh and blood. Or nanomachines. You know what I mean. They were fresh, first-timers. But they were identical to each other in every detail, short and stocky, skin the colour of boiled cabbage, blotched with purple spirals. Not tattoos, the skin itself. Claws instead of fingernails. Hair like wire wool. They were resurrected side-by-side, in adjacent coffins. They claimed to have died together.”
“Has that ever—”
Pira shook her head before Elpida could finish. “Never. Never heard of it, before or since. Whatever they were, they were linked somehow. They all spoke parts of each other’s sentences. Seemed to always know what the others were seeing or hearing. Couldn’t tell them apart unless you asked. They were more intelligent, like three minds working together, greater than the sum of their parts.”
Elpida frowned in thought. “A collective mind, resurrected together because they constituted a single person?”
Pira shrugged, then winced; the gesture had tugged at half a dozen stitched wounds and closed-up bullet holes across her torso. “They never told. Didn’t feel the need. Elpida—”
“Commander,” Elpida corrected. “For you, Pira, for now, for the duration of this, it’s ‘Commander’.”
Pira looked up and made eye contact. “Commander. When I saw you in the tomb, the way you took charge, I thought you were something like the Trio.” She stared for a long moment, a dead, flat gaze. “I think I was correct.”
Elpida smiled. “I’m not an isolated drone from a hive mind. My sisters in the cadre were not like that. We were individuals. We were only in each other’s head when we were wired up via the MMI uplinks.”
Snerk, snorted a groggy Howl in the back of Elpida’s head. What do you call this, then, Elps?
You don’t count, Howl.
Fuck you too, Commander.
Pira shook her head. “Not what I mean. I mean the other thing.”
“The other thing?”
Pira gestured weakly with her biological hand. “The Trio organised us. Kept us together. Gave us something to believe in. They could do it because they were so intelligent, and there were three of them. It just made sense, when we started picking up others.”
Elpida nodded. “They formed the natural nucleus of a cohesive group. That’s how you see me?”
Howl snorted again, fully awake inside Elpida’s mind: She’s your girl now, Elps. Of course she does. She fuckin’ believes in what you’re putting down, whatever shit comes out of her mouth-hole.
I’m not sure she does believe. Let me listen, Howl.
Pira did not answer the question. She said: “They had the idea for The Fortress. For trying to settle, put down roots, stop all the madness and the dying. Refuse the cycle, by building something. Anything. A place, a foundation. Stability. Safety.” Pira grew quiet as she spoke, eyes drifting away to the shadows again. “And from there, from a foundation, we might strike out at … ”
“The Necromancers?” Elpida suggested.
Pira sighed. “At whoever built all this. Whatever keeps it all running. The worms? The towers deep in the city? I believed in all that. I believed in it so strongly. I fought for it, because it was right and good. Because it was the only choice.”
She went quiet for a long time, sagging in her seat. A sheen of tears shone in her eyes. Ilyusha made an uncomfortable grumble.
Telokopolis is eternal, Howl growled inside Elpida’s mind. For this idiot bitch too.
“Telokopolis is eternal,” Elpida echoed.
Pira looked up, wiping her eyes. Ilyusha snorted, but then nodded along.
“That’s what you and the Trio were trying to do,” Elpida explained. “Trying to build a fragment of Telokopolis, where none are rejected, and all are sheltered. I would have believed in it too. In a way, I do. You’re right, Pira. You were doing the right thing.”
Pira looked away and carried on. “In the early days — years, really — we tried to secure fortified structures, old bunkers, defensible buildings, that sort of thing. But with numbers comes complication. The more zombies in one place, the more the temptation for bigger predators to approach and try their luck. The more resources needed just to keep the hunger at bay for everyone. The more organisation, the more formal hierarchy, the more control you need just to keep things stable.”
Elpida said, “I can see that. Cohesion becomes more complex with more people.”
“We did it, though. The Trio made it possible. And they delegated responsibility, gave people official roles and specialisations in their own vernacular. I was ‘Mil-Com’ for a while, in charge of combat operations. Civ-Com, Scav-Com, Dis-Com, that’s the language they used. Even when the roles weren’t very useful, they made everyone a place, gave everyone something to do.”
Elpida nodded, even though this wasn’t particularly revelatory. “Pira, there is an obvious question here.”
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Pira sighed. “Yes. No matter how cohesive your group, the graveworms always move on. Revenants either move with them or die. The predators and zombies beyond the graveworm line are simply too much for us.”
“Enforced nomadism. No time or space to build.”
Pira said, “That went on for years. Sometime during that period is when I met Ooni. We pulled her out of a tomb. Long story, but nothing special.”
Nothing special? Elpida kept the frown off her face. Ooni adored Pira. Did Pira not think much of her in return? What a strange thing, to shoot your Commander in the stomach for a woman you did not hold in especially high regard.
Howl snorted. She just shows it funny. Like me!
“Pira,” Elpida said. “I got the impression that you and Ooni were romantic partners, or at least very close to it. Did you love her?”
Pira did not bother to look up. “Mm. You’re going to ask why. Because we had background in common. Because she’s more than she appears, when she’s pushed. Because she was … clean.”
Clean? Elpida kept her expression carefully neutral. What did that mean?
Pira went on: “Eventually we coalesced around a plan. A way to remain in one place when the graveworm moved on, and keep even the worst predators at bay, beyond the walls.”
“Occupy a tomb,” Elpida said.
Pira made a huffing sound through her nose; that was meant to be a laugh. “Ooni told you that part?”
“Yes. She seemed very proud of that, of The Fortress, of what you and your comrades achieved.”
Pira stared into the shadows. “We achieved nothing.”
Wrong fuckin’ thing, Elps, Howl snorted. She’s got negative pride. Pride in how much of a rotten fuck she is.
Elpida tried to redirect Pira’s self-loathing. “How exactly did you occupy a tomb, Pira? I can see how it would make a good defensible structure, but it would need a lot of work to actually maintain positions guarding the entrance, or setting it up for habitation.”
Pira blinked several times, rousing herself. She looked at Elpida. She even tried to sit up a little straighter. Aha, Elpida thought, that was the correct question.
“It did take a lot of work, that’s correct,” Pira said. “There were over a hundred and fifty of us by that point, and we’d been cohesive for over fifteen years. We weren’t just a band of scavengers anymore, we were a tribe, or an army. We had mechanical knowledge, heavy weaponry, experts in all sorts of fields. We had dedicated teams for scouting, protection, scavenging, even food distribution. That group of Death’s Heads who kept us captive back there, Commander? The Fortress would have chewed them up and spat them out.” She almost smiled. “We were the top of the food chain.”
Fuck yeah, Howl snorted. She’s a bitch, but she gets shit done.
Elpida smiled too.
“We went for a tomb right after the usual feeding frenzy, after it was open and cleared. Prepped for that for a long time. Spent years figuring out how to do it. We had more than enough people to hold the entrance, the killing ground, around the clock. We got into the gravekeeper’s chamber and went into the walls, where all the control machinery is for the tomb itself. Ignored the AI, they never give a fuck. We got into the wiring, the controls, got all the external weapon emplacements working and repaired, under our direction. We revived all sorts of facilities — medical, power generation, security feeds, computing. You name it, we got it running.” Pira’s voice started to break. “A Fortress. The Fortress. The thing we’d worked towards, for so long.”
Elpida nodded, struck by the conviction in Pira’s voice. Ilyusha was grinning.
Elpida said: “Ooni also told me you defeated a worm-guard.”
Pira smiled at last: harsh and bitter, a bare narrowing of her pale lips. “We didn’t defeat a worm-guard. It was fed to us.”
Ilyusha squinted. “Ehhh?”
Elpida held up one hand to stall Ilyusha. “Pira? What do you mean?”
“We had occupied the tomb for about three months. Then the graveworm began to move on. The moment of truth. We all braced to see if we would be able to hold out against whatever predators would come rushing in, or if we would be shattered and have to flee toward the graveworm’s tail.” Pira’s smile widened, sour and angry. “Instead we got a worm-guard.”
“The graveworm sent it after you? Because you were staying behind?”
Pira shook her head. “That’s what we thought at the time. Even the Trio thought that. Maybe we’d broken some kind of rule or condition that nobody had broken before. But I came to believe that wasn’t true.”
“What happened?”
Pira tried to straighten up, pulling against the dozens of tiny wounds and lines of stitches. She winced but did not relent. Elpida noticed fresh blood seeping into the soiled dressings on the left side of her jaw and throat.
“Pira—”
“The worm-guard came in the front of the tomb, into the killing ground,” Pira spat. “Twenty four of us were on duty. I was out there when it came over the walls. It killed fifteen revenants in the first ten seconds, shrugged off all the automatic guns, ran over us like we were nothing. I thought we were done. The Fortress was done. I was crammed beneath a shattered wall when it stepped over me.” Pira was panting now. “When I looked up I couldn’t even see it, just that mass of visual interference. It’s even worse up close, gets inside your head, scrambles your thoughts, fills your senses with this high-pitched whine like acid on your bones. Those things are weapons designed to keep us in our place. That is the only thing they’re for.” Pira reached up with her dented bionic arm and grasped the memory, fingers gripping a trigger in her mind. “I had an explosive lance. Close range armour penetrating high explosive, meant for punching through powered armour, or whatever madness grows beyond the graveworm line. Had to be close to use it, CQC range.” Pira shook her head, eyes wide and hollow, a dead sky inside her head. “Wouldn’t even scratch a worm-guard belly’s. I knew that. I waited to die.”
Pira froze, staring at nothing.
“But you didn’t,” said Elpida.
Pira shook her head. “I didn’t know why I moved. Still feel like I don’t. Like something else took hold of my arm and hand, like I was a puppet. Raised the lance, touched the tip to the worm-guard’s belly. I couldn’t even see, couldn’t think. And then, boom.”
“It died?”
“It died. Toppled sideways. So I would live to tell how I’d felled it. Should have crushed me.”
Elpida frowned. “And you think—”
“I think that was impossible. I think that worm-guard put up a token fight so we didn’t get suspicious. I think it was sent to us, like shit shovelled onto mushrooms in the dark. I think it was meant to feed us, to keep us going once the graveworm moved on.”
Elpida said, “Who sent it?”
“I don’t know,” Pira’s voice turned dark and hard. “The individual graveworm? I doubt that very much. The Necromancers? Maybe. Something else, behind the Necromancers? I have no idea. Whatever sent it to us, I think they wanted to feed us for a while, to see what we might become. And I assume we disappointed.”
“Why?”
“Because we failed.” Pira’s eyes filled with angry tears once again. “You want to know what we tried to build, Elpida?”
“Commander—”
“We tried to build a home. But that word doesn’t mean anything anymore. No rest for the wicked. No place to lay one’s head. No home. No city. No tribe. No grassy vale. No fucking grass. No stone will stand upon another. And no ‘Telokopolis’ either. Sometimes I think we are in the afterlife. Sometimes I think we’re in hell.”
Elpida said nothing. She let Pira’s anger burn itself out.
Dirty grey raindrops slid down Pheiri’s tiny window. Screens blinked and flickered in the gloom of the control cockpit. Ilyusha was chewing her tongue, grimacing at Pira’s story. Pira took a deep breath and wiped her eyes on a corner of her armoured coat. She shivered and shook, shrinking back into her seat.
“Commander,” she said.
“Thank you, Pira,” said Elpida. “I apologise for pushing you to recall all this. It is necessary.”
“You have that right.”
Ilyusha said: “What’s worm-guard taste like?”
Pira shook her head. She almost smiled again, but it was bitter and closed. “Not much. Couldn’t eat most of the thing. Many parts retained the visual and cognitive interference qualities, even when it was ‘dead’. We sifted through the ruins days later. Raw nanomachine slime, different consistencies and purposes, inside a multi-layered shell of exotic alloys and containment membranes. Plenty to eat, but tasteless and raw.”
Ilyusha grunted. “Weird.”
Elpida asked: “Why did The Fortress fail, even with all those extra resources?”
Pira’s brief burst of anger-borne energy had faded; she sat hunched and listing in her seat, lit from one side by the sickly green glow of Pheiri’s monitors.
“Logistics.”
“Ah,” Elpida said.
Pira snorted again, a single breath expelled through her nose. “We lasted six years out there. We had plenty of food at first — plenty of nanomachines. But even worm-guard guts run dry eventually. We scoured the inside of the tomb for scraps, thought we might be able to get some kind of nanomachine production running, but there isn’t any. Only the worms can actually produce it, nothing else. When the scraps were expended, we started to send hunting parties out beyond the tomb, to catch and kill whatever they could.” Pira shook her head slowly. “The ecosystem beyond the worms is almost beyond human imagination, Commander. There are things out there I cannot explain. Most of them, the largest, the strangest, we were simply below their notice. The tomb defences and our weapons drove off any curious predators. But venturing out to hunt attracted attention. That made it clear there was vulnerable meat inside the tomb. Things got bad. Things got inside now and again, hunted us, carried us off, ate us. Some tried to communicate. For some, eating was communication.” She took a shuddering breath. “We were at the bottom of the food chain, out there. And eventually there was nothing to eat but each other.”
“Shit,” Ilyusha spat. “Shit! Shit!”
Pira’s voice ground onward. “When zombies get that run down, we don’t just eat each other, we start to recycle parts, like a snake devouring its own tail. The ones of us who were left … ” Pira trailed off and swallowed. “Jalice, she lost her mind and started stealing limbs from the dead. We found her down in the gravekeeper’s chamber one day, a ball of flesh, no brain. Perisa, she cut herself apart, pulled out her own guts. Tandrice and Yeerp, they … they … joined each other’s bodies … ”
Elpida said, “I’m sorry, Pira.”
“There is a level to which one can descend which cannot be believed until one has seen it.” Pira shrank back into her coat again, small and wounded. “Our numbers dwindled. The Trio died in strange circumstances; I’m certain it was foul play, something from outside the tomb, something which knew they were there. Maybe something terminating the experiment. I got badly wounded, more than once. Eventually there were only fifteen of us, starving to death, eating pieces of our friends’ corpses, watching each other for signs of madness. And then the inevitable happened.”
“The inevitable?”
Pira took a deep breath. She slumped further, an undermined wall. “A graveworm turned up to restock the tomb, to resurrect another batch of revenants.”
“Ahhhhh,” said Ilyusha. “Shiiiiit.”
“Mmhmm,” Pira grunted. “The Trio had planned for that, or claimed they did. They’d spent five years rewiring and reprogramming the inside of the tomb, to assume control of any systems which opened communications.”
Elpida said: “They were going to take control of the worm-guard?”
Pira blinked, another stand-in for a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe the whole worm. But the plan died with them. When a graveworm approaches a tomb the first thing it does is blanket the area with hundreds of worm-guard. I suspect we in The Fortress were the first revenants to discover that fact.”
“Hundreds?” Elpida echoed.
Pira nodded. “To clear out anything which shouldn’t be there. And those worm-guard did not fall to an explosive lance, or anything else.” She took a great breath and leaned back in her seat, wincing and squinting at the pain of her many wounds. “Only three of us made it out, because we ran. Myself, Ooni, and another revenant called Riianet.”
“Pira, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Why?”
Pira opened her eyes and stared right at Elpida, blank and unapologetic, without regret or shame. “Because that’s when I joined the Death’s Heads.”
Ilyusha snorted with disgust, though less strongly than Elpida had expected.
Elpida said: “Illy? Did you two discuss this already?”
“Yeeeeeeah,” Ilyusha rasped. “Fucking idiot.”
Pira said: “I do not dispute that. I am a fool and a traitor.”
Elpida gestured for her to continue. “Please, Pira. Tell me about the Death’s Heads.”
Pira raised one shoulder in a tiny shrug. “We ran right into them, right at the tip of the graveworm safe zone. They were playing a dangerous game of their own, risking proximity to the front of the wave as the worm moved. I’d never even heard of them before, never met a Death’s Head, though I’d seen some revenants wearing their skull symbol. But not up close. They were very interested in where we’d come from, in what had happened at The Fortress.” Pira shook her head. “Even then I had a suspicion that somehow they’d known. Something had told them. They were working for something else.”
Just like Yola, Elpida thought. She didn’t say that out loud, not yet. “A Necromancer?”
“I don’t know. Never figured that out.”
“And why did you join them?”
“Because I’d just spent two decades learning that nothing can be built. We are meat, food for the gods. Playthings for Necromancers. Corpse puppets pretending to be people. Because I was wrong. Hope is a lie.”
Ilyusha rasped: “It’s not! Not!”
Elpida said, “Illy, it’s okay. Let her speak her mind. Pira?”
Pira’s blank, dead face creased with old sorrow. “Riianet was weak and wounded. They had me shoot her as a test of loyalty. They didn’t want Ooni, but Ooni was under my protection, sort of. We didn’t last long. Less than a year.”
“Ooni didn’t join them?”
Pira shook her head. “No. I didn’t let her.”
Ha! Howl barked inside Elpida’s head. Kept her girlfriend pure, huh?
“Pira,” Elpida said. “You called Ooni a traitor, for joining the Death’s Heads. Presumably that didn’t happen while you two were still together?”
Pira said: “A traitor to the memory of The Fortress.”
Elpida said, “When you said The Fortress was betrayed, is that what you meant?”
Pira stared, hollow and blank, her eyes the blue of skies burned sterile. “The Fortress was betrayed by me. I joined the Death’s Heads. I was the only one who gave up, instead of dying.
“Until Ooni.”
Pira just blinked.
Elpida said, “And then you turned against them?”
Pira shook her head. “Ooni and I both died. Separately. When I was next resurrected I went looking for the Death’s Heads again, for another splinter of their ideology, for whatever group wore the skull.”
Elpida raised her eyebrows. “You went back to them?”
Ilyusha hissed. “Fuckin’ stupid shit.”
“I’m not proud of it,” Pira said. “But I learned. They taught me things. About meat. About graveworms and towers. All of it.”
Elpida pressed; she needed an answer. “And when did you turn against them?”
Pira almost smiled, bitter with self-hate. “I don’t have a good story for you, Elpida—”
“Commander.”
“Commander,” Pira corrected. “I don’t have an incident to relate which opened my eyes. We didn’t pick apart a happy little group and eat their bone marrow, so I could have my moment of conscience. There was nothing like that. No redemptive revelation. I just came to realise they were full of shit. They were wrong. They could not build, anymore than The Fortress could. They weren’t even trying. They were just excusing their predatory hunger.”
Elpida nodded. “Yeah. I got that, too.”
“I will never again eat human flesh,” said Pira. “That is non-negotiable.”
Elpida glanced at Ilyusha. Illy dipped her head with an awkward grimace, nodding as she grumbled. “She’s not lying’. Just a fucking dumb fuck bitch.”
Pira said, “I am a fool and a traitor. That’s all I am.”
Elpida took a deep breath of her own and glanced around the control cockpit, at Pheiri’s gunmetal grey innards, speckled with scraps of cream-white paint, encrusted with a dozen layers of retrofitted control panels and monitors and readouts. She raised her eyes to the tiny steel-glass view-port, to the dirty rain and the undead sunrise, barely more than an ember’s glow in a far corner of the black sky. She listened to the thrum and thump of Pheiri’s nuclear heartbeat below her feet, and the hundreds of tiny machine sounds deep inside his body.
Pheiri’s not Telokopolis, Howl chuckled. But he’s done good on his own so far. Tell our little brother good job from sister Howl, huh?
Will do, Howl. But not right now.
“It is possible to build and survive beyond the graveworm line,” Elpida said. She gestured upward. “We are sitting inside living proof. Telokopolis is forever. A piece of it still stands, right here.”
Pira blinked slowly, casting her eyes around the cockpit. She said: “It will fall, like anything else.”
A small black screen at Pira’s side flickered to life, glowing with a sudden flash of green text. Pira turned in surprise, slowed by her various wounds. She blinked at the words on the screen. Elpida leaned forward so she could see what Pheiri had to say.
>
online: 99999999 ERROR hours
>
Pira frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t be rude to Pheiri,” Elpida said.
“What?”
“He’s survived out here much longer than any of us. Longer than your Fortress. Longer than anything, as far as I can tell. He protected his remaining crew, stayed alive, and he’s still going. And now he’s protecting us, too. He is a tiny shard of Telokopolis, come to shelter us and be sheltered in return. And now he’s my Co-Commander. Say thank you.”
Pira frowned at Elpida. But Ilyusha cackled and tapped the tip of her tail against the decking. “Thank you, Pheiri!”
Pira looked unconvinced. Clinging to her defeat.
“I’m serious,” Elpida said. “You’ve found the same principle as The Fortress, alive and well. Telokopolis is forever. You have a place here too, Pira.”
Pira shook her head. “I don’t. No, I don’t.”
Elpida straightened her back and touched the bandages over her stomach. “Pira. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by asking why you shot me in the gut. I understand why you did that. If our positions had been reversed, if one of my cadre had joined the Death’s Heads, I would have done the same to protect her, no matter the symbol she wore. But—”
Pira interrupted. “This is nonsense, Elpida.”
“Commander.”
Pira did not correct herself. Her eyes seemed to clear, burning blue in her pale face. “If I was in your position, I would have me shot.”
Elpida said, “You demonstrated that you’re on our side, when you protected Pheiri. You—”
“I did no such thing,” Pira said.
The screen at Pira’s side went blank, then filled with a block of scrolling data, of weapon readouts and timestamps. Elpida could not read the information from where she sat, but she could imagine what it meant: proof that Pira’s stunt with the coilgun had turned away a powerful anti-armour weapon. Pheiri was saying thank you.
Pira ignored the screen. She said: “I protected the tank, but that proves nothing. Perhaps I did it out of guilt. Or to help Ooni survive, or to repay my debt to you. It does not prove I believe in your cause, or that I’m safe to have inside your group, or that I am telling the truth about a single thing I’ve said. It proves nothing. I cannot be trusted.”
“Pira,” Elpida said, “I don’t trust—”
“Why am I still alive, Elpida?”