“There are two possible directions from which to approach the combat frame. The first is directly across the impact crater, over the open ground, a straight shot from our current position.”
Elpida placed the edge of her hand against the cold glass of the penthouse window, indicating a line across the broken grey earth sixty floors below. Her fingertips brushed the sharp feet of the combat frame itself; her palm ignored the ring of soot-stained skyscrapers and the revenants lurking within. She kept her eyes off the baleful glitch-flicker of the worm-guard trio crouched atop the combat frame’s filthy white armour.
The others had fallen silent after Elpida’s declaration of intent; now she was explaining the plan. She kept her voice calm and selected her words with care.
She almost convinced herself.
Kagami laughed, hysterical and hollow. Her eyes were too wide, her black hair stuck to her scalp with sweat. “You’re joking. You’re mad.”
Vicky sighed. “Kaga, just— just let her try.”
“She’s joking! This is a joke! That would get us all killed!”
Pira agreed: “A suicide run.”
Elpida nodded. “Yes. That’s close to a thousand metres, maybe even over a kilometre, without any effective cover, crossing broken, churned-up earth, exposed to dozens of elevated sight lines from the surrounding buildings.” She waved a finger at the towers, at their thousands of windows, their broken tips scratching at the black sky. “Any group trying to cross that open ground will be under constant fire. At night, taking it very slowly, wearing heavy armour?” Elpida shrugged. “Maybe I could make that work. Maybe. But as far as I can tell we all have extremely good low-light vision. We revenants, I mean. All of us in this room can pretty much see in the dark. There’s no reason to believe other revenants can’t do so as well. Night will provide little advantage. No. Crossing the open ground is impossible.”
The others did not look reassured by her comprehensive dismissal; huddled together in the dim and dusty shadows of the rotten penthouse apartment, framed by pale wood and thick carpets and fake marble, six pairs of eyes regarded her with varying levels of concern and discomfort.
Pira just nodded. She sat nearby, to examine the vista alongside Elpida, unafraid of snipers. Ilyusha snorted, neither agreeing nor arguing, while Amina looked on with open incomprehension; they were both still sitting in the little kitchen area, on hardwood floor, half-sheltered by the counters and cupboards. Kagami ground her teeth — she had retreated away from the window, taking shelter by Vicky. Vicky herself watched as if Elpida had gone mad but she was too polite to point it out. Atyle offered nothing, sitting straight backed and cross-legged, far back on the plush carpet, still staring directly at the worm-guard.
Sitting on the floor and briefing her cadre; Elpida tried very hard to suppress that nostalgia. These were not her sisters.
But she had to make them believe.
She continued. “Option two: get as close to the combat frame as possible prior to breaking cover. That means travelling all the way around the clearing, around the impact crater, on a route that doesn’t intersect with the groups of revenants down there.” Elpida traced a line on the glass, hundreds of metres back from the skyscrapers, plunging through the depths of the city.
Vicky forced a chuckle. “Elpi, you seriously think all those big nasty zombie girls down there are gonna leave us alone?”
Ilyusha barked: “We’re big! Nasty! Zombies too!”
Elpida nodded. “Yes, Vicky, I think they will. And thank you, Illy. All those groups down there are competing for positions closest to the combat frame, for the best chance of seizing it when the worm-guard move on. If somebody breaks from that ring and enters the killing ground, I’m certain they’ll come under fire, yes. But most of the heavy weaponry down there is focused on the flanks and rear of each group. They have to protect their positions — from each other. I think there’s a good chance they won’t sortie out to engage me if I’m a couple of hundred metres back, deep in the buildings, and not bothering them.”
Vicky frowned. This conversation was taking a visible toll on her; this morning she had looked strong and healthy, bolstered by the nanomachines from the meal of brain matter. But now her dark eyes were scrunched with concern, her stolen fur-trimmed coat pulled tight around hunched shoulders, her scoped rifle clutched in her lap.
Kagami snorted. “‘Good chance’,” she echoed. “Best you can do, commander?”
Elpida said: “Kagami, am I right about weapon positions down there in those buildings?”
Kagami rolled her eyes behind her auspex visor, but she nodded. Her dusky brown skin was waxy with stress. “Yes, yes, you’re right, fine. They’re all dug in. Watching their collective arses. Well done.”
Pira added, “We’re on the edge of the graveworm safe zone. Things will be out there, hunting for strays. Worse revenants. Real zombies. We risk running into them if we go much further out.”
Amina said in a tiny voice: “Demons.”
Kagami shivered. “Fuck. Great.”
Elpida nodded to Pira. “I consider that an acceptable risk. Better than crossing the open ground. Pira, thank you for the warning.” Pira nodded once, eyes locked on Elpida. “Now, see where the combat frame is positioned?”
Elpida pointed through the penthouse windows, down at the filthy white plates of the combat frame. The great machine lay twisted and prone against a wall of skyscrapers, where it had come to rest after ploughing through thousands of tons of dirt. It looked like a person who had slid into a wall head and shoulders first, legs sticking out at the other end, limp across the churned ground. The railgun stood tall, pointed at the sky, glinting in the ruddy light.
Kagami snorted. “Oh, no, I’d missed it until you pointed it out. It’s so very small, after all.”
Vicky grunted. “Kaga, fuck’s sake.”
Elpida ignored the sarcasm. “The buildings to the rear, the ones it’s leaning against, the ones it hit — those are impassible. A tangle of rubble and melted steel. Even with proper tools and a trained team, it would take days to cut through all that. And I might fall into an opening, break both my legs, or something similar. So, do you see that gap between the intact buildings, right there? Right next to the end of the combat frame’s leg. That’s the target. Circle the crater, then take a straight line back in, down that street.”
Pira stared, expression closed. Ilyusha spat on the floor. Atyle blinked slowly, peat-green bionic eye whirring inside the socket.
Vicky said: “Right next to the death cult people.”
Elpida nodded. She wasn’t trying to conceal or downplay the danger of her plan. The intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame was the one daubed with that grinning skull symbol: the death’s head.
Behind the walls marked by that morbid icon was the single largest group of revenants gathered around the combat frame — thirty three individuals, with nine suits of powered armour, as counted through Kagami’s long-range auspex. Heavily armed, with exotic weapons guarding their rear and flanks, and a pair of loitering drones clamped high up on the front exterior wall of their temporary fortress. The specifics of their bionic enhancements and self-modifications were impossible to tell at that distance, but every single member of the group lit up Kagami’s auspex with nanomachine density warnings and high-energy readout spikes.
They had reduced the lower floors of the neighbouring skyscraper to burnt-out ruins, cover chewed to nothing but naked steel beams, littered with mines and improvised explosives, patrolled by another pair of semi-autonomous drones. The next nearest group had given them a wide berth. Their other flank was covered by part of the tangled mess of rubble from the combat frame’s impact. Dug in deep.
“Yes,” Elpida said. “Illy, Pira, you’re the only two with direct experience here. What do you think?”
Ilyusha flicked out her red-metal fingertip claws and made her bionic tail arc upward in mock threat. “Fuck ‘em up! Reptile cowards’ll run!”
Pira didn’t answer right away. She stared at Elpida for a long moment, eyes blue and distant as the lost skies. Her flame-red hair was tucked down into her body armour. Her freckles caught the light. She shrugged. “I told you already, I’ve never met this exact group before. I don’t know.”
Elpida said, “Right, thank you both. Materially they don’t seem too different to any of the other groups down there.”
Vicky’s let out another sad laugh. “This is a big fucking gamble, Elpi.”
“Yes, it is,” Elpida said. “But it’s a calculated one. Their deployment strongly suggests they care about other groups jockeying for position, not lone revenants wandering forward. I would prefer to avoid them, but the next alleyway along would add an extra two hundred metres to reach the combat frame. That alleyway, by the death’s heads, gives me barely fifty metres to sprint for the combat frame. I can make that in just over four seconds.”
Vicky laughed, shaking her head. “You super soldier miracle girl. This is crazy. You can’t outrun bullets.”
Kagami scoffed. “You’d be under fire the whole time! Fifty metres or five hundred, it makes no difference! You still have to climb the mech and get the hatch open. Under fire! I’m not stupid, I’ve directed worse — and failed, because it’s stupid.”
Ilyusha grimaced. She was no fool either.
Elpida hesitated. She could not afford to show anything but confidence. If she was going to convince her comrades, they had to believe.
She looked Kagami in the eyes and said: “Not if I’m right.”
“No,” said Pira, softly, with a touch of awe. “She thinks the worm-guard are going to cover her.”
Elpida shook her head. “No, that’s not what I think.”
But Vicky was already biting her lower lip, Kagami was laughing softly, and Ilyusha was staring in teeth-gritting worry. Only Atyle and Amina seemed swept up in the same assumptions. Both of them regarded her with two different types of silent approval, one curious, the other devoted. Pira just stared, unreadable, waiting for more.
“The worm-guard will not cover me,” Elpida repeated. “That’s not what I mean.”
Kagami spluttered. “That’s not what you said earlier! You said they were waiting for you! Like you’re the world’s own special little girl and everything here is designed just for your edification. News-flash, vat-grunt: we’re all meat now!”
Vicky put one hand on Kagami’s slender forearm. “Kaga, chill.”
Elpida said: “I believe they are waiting for a pilot, yes. The graveworm clearly doesn’t think like we do—”
Kagami laughed. “Oh, you think?! Good deduction, commander.”
Vicky reached over with her other hand and took Kagami’s chin, much to Kagami’s apparent surprise. She forced Kagami to look at her. Kagami just blinked in shock. “Kaga. Shut up. I need to hear this.”
Kagami shrugged off Vicky’s hands and hissed through her teeth. “Get off me, Victoria.”
Elpida swallowed before she continued. This was harder than she had expected. “If the graveworm wanted me personally inside that combat frame, then the worm-guard would have shepherded us here. Or one of them would be crossing the impact crater right now to escort us.” That made Vicky shiver and Ilyusha shake her head like a wet dog. “I don’t believe they’re waiting for me personally. I don’t believe I’m special, or more important than any other revenant. What I believe is that they won’t fire on me.”
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Kagami started to say something. Vicky started to interrupt her.
Pira said: “On what basis?”
“Because the graveworm is interested in me.”
Lies. Half-truths at best. Leaving so much unsaid. Elpida could never have lied to her cadre like this. Howl would have smelled it minutes ago and challenged her to a fight. But Elpida needed them to believe.
“Picture this,” she said. “I reach the combat frame, standing on the armour plates themselves, walking toward the access hatch, upright, unshielded, out of cover. The worm-guard aren’t attacking me. In fact, I’m approaching them. Would you take a shot at me, and risk drawing the attention of those machines?”
Elpida pointed out of the penthouse window, at the trio of black scribbles in her peripheral vision, the visual glitch which concealed the worm-guard from her senses.
Atyle said, “What if you are challenged, warrior? What if the resurrected release their slings and arrows regardless?”
“I’m going to shout it at the top of my lungs, when I reach the combat frame. I’m going to declare that the worm-guard are protecting me.”
Pira took a long, slow breath. Kagami laughed without humour, shaking her head. Ilyusha bared her teeth, nodding along, pumping herself up with forced enthusiasm. Atyle just smiled. Amina looked starstruck.
Vicky sounded grief-stricken: “Elpi. Elpi this is insane. Surely you can see that?”
Kagami laughed: “Your super-soldier bitch believes she’s the most special girl in the world. Face it, Victoria. She’s not yours.”
Ilyusha barked, “She’s fuckin’ right! We can do it!”
Vicky said, “I don’t think we can. Elpi, this is too many assumptions. What if you’re wrong about the worm-guard?”
“Then I’m wrong,” Elpida said.
“Elpi … ”
“I’m taking an educated gamble, yes.”
Kagami snapped, “It’s ‘educated guess’, you suicidal drone. I thought commanders and squad leaders were supposed to be grown with more self-preservation than a fucking roid-hopped grunt. Or has that obscene mech down there gotten into your head, huh? Is that thing broadcasting a signal to your brain implants? Luring you in? Wouldn’t be surprised. It looks like a fucking trap. Freak-grown illegal technology, it looks like something out of the worst AI-driven experiments, something I would have melted with a thermonuclear weapon. And that’s your saviour? Ha!”
“Linguistic drift,” Elpida said. She forced herself not to react to the insult against a fellow child of Telokopolis.
Kagami squinted. “What?”
“Educated gamble, educated guess. We’re all hearing translated versions of each other’s languages. You know what I meant.”
Vicky said: “Guesstimate.”
Kagami pulled a face. “Ugh!”
Vicky looked at her, “What?”
“That’s vile. You people always did love your disgusting neologisms.” She huffed and looked away, trembling fingertips pressed against one high cheekbone.
Vicky sighed a long, shaking sigh. “Portmanteau, not neologism.”
Atyle said, “We are all speaking in the tongue of the gods. Our roots replaced, written over. There is no history in these words. But there may be poetry.”
Ilyusha grinned at Atyle and moved her lips without making a sound; perhaps that overcame the translation software. Ilyusha snorted at her own joke while Atyle just watched.
Elpida let the others go through the motions, allowing them to distract themselves from unpleasant thoughts. This was the first step of detachment, of acceptance, of believing that she believed.
Only Pira stared at Elpida, unwavering. Did she see through the lie?
Vicky pulled herself together and said: “Elpi, you kept saying ‘I’ during all that. What happened to ‘we’?”
“Ahhhhhhh,” Atyle purred. “Yes, the twice-hidden soldier asks the question we all think. I heard the warrior’s unspoken meaning as well. She intends to go alone.”
Ilyusha perked up, tail gone stiff. “What? No! No! Elpi, no!”
Elpida raised both hands. “I’m glad you noticed. Everyone, please, let me explain.”
Elpida’s training told her to relocate the group, to move away from the floor-to-ceiling penthouse windows, to retreat deeper into the once-luxurious apartment. The whole place was covered with dust, no seat or sofa or stool was worth sitting on, there was nothing here but rot and ruin. But now she’d finished illustrating her plan, she should have moved away from the windows — away from the brain-scratching glitch of the worm-guard, away from any potential spotters or snipers.
But she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Elpida stood up, settled her heavy armoured coat on her shoulders, and shook out her long white hair.
She was framed from behind by the grey dirt of the impact crater, the skyscrapers of the dead city, and the white shell of the fallen combat frame. Dying firelight glow from the black sky blessed her with a halo. She needed the drama, needed to radiate charisma. She knew how, even if her cadre would have seen through it in an instant. Howl would have laughed and heckled. Howl would have followed her regardless.
She half-hoped a sniper would see her and take off her head. Perhaps Kagami was right. Perhaps Elpida was going mad. She’d never felt like this before, never casually put herself in danger for so little reason.
She looked at the others one by one.
She had only known these women for a few days. The blur of nanomachine afterlife made it feel like much longer. Some of them she had grown to know a little better — Vicky, Ilyusha — while others were still a mystery — Atyle — or kept themselves back — Pira. She had died for them once, fighting a Silico murder-machine, the kind of fight she had trained for all her life. Why did they follow her? Her cadre, her clone-clade sisters, her vat-grown family, had chosen to follow her because she was the best option out of twenty-five genetic experiments, the best chance to keep the cadre unbroken; they had been raised together, fought together, loved together, for years and years. But these six women — these six nanomachine revenants — they were not her cadre. They followed her because she had kept them alive.
If they followed her any further she was going to get them killed.
The lie hovered on her tongue: I know what I’m doing, the worm-guard won’t fire on me, I think this is our best bet.
She didn’t know that. She hoped — prayed to Telokopolis, eternal shelter for all — that the worm-guard would know her and welcome her. That the graveworm would know her by her touch.
But she could not be certain that she was not going mad with grief.
Tell them the truth! she screamed at herself. Tell them why you have to do this!
“This is the worst plan I’ve ever made,” she said out loud.
She could have added comparisons, but they would mean nothing to her audience: this plan was worse than the time she and Howl had decided to spend an entire week refusing to communicate with the Legion in anything other than cadre clade-cant, to make a point about organisational interdependence; worse than when she’d engaged Old Lady Nunnus in a philosophical debate on the merits of self-sacrifice; worse than the duel with Aronus, the Legion Colonel who’d blamed thirteen-year-old Elpida for the loss of a hundred men beyond the edge of the plateau, when she’d won the duel by breaking both of his legs but misunderstood the point of letting him win with a minimum of violence; worse than not murdering all the Covenanters when she’d had the chance; worse than making Howl cry.
Vicky started to speak. So did Kagami, and Ilyusha, barking over each other. But Atyle snapped her fingers for quiet — hard and sharp in the dusty silence.
Elpida held her external composure. “Yes, this is a significant gamble. In truth—” Tell them the truth, the real truth, not this bland excuse. “—I’m making dozens of assumptions — about the behaviour of the other revenants down there, about the aims of the death’s head people, about how they may react to me reaching the combat frame. I’m assuming the worm-guard won’t kill me. I’m assuming I can get into the combat frame, that it will recognise me, accept me, respond to me as a pilot. I’m assuming a lot of things. And if I’m wrong then I will die.”
“Then why do it?” Vicky asked in a distraught warble.
Kagami snorted. “Because she’s fucking mad. Death-wish bonkers. This place has gotten to her. Or that mech down there is broadcasting to her cranial implants.”
Atyle said, “She does it because she must.”
Pira just stared. Ilyusha waited, showing her teeth, desperate for anything.
The truth was a heart-wound inside Elpida’s chest.
When she had fought the Silico murder-machine outside the tomb, when it had shot her through the heart a split-second before she had killed it, when she had lay dying, bleeding out onto the cold ground, she had heard a voice. In her last moments of consciousness, she had heard Howl’s voice.
Love you too.
Brain-echoes on the verge of biological shut-down — or a broadcast from the graveworm?
The sight of the combat frame had made it real once again, impossible to ignore. That lost child of Telokopolis deserved her help in its hour of need, yes, but far greater was the desire to stride back to the graveworm, eye-to-eye with the mountain range, and demand answers, demand Howl’s voice again. She wanted the graveworm’s attention. She had no idea if the worm-guard were waiting for a pilot — or if they would turn her into meat-slurry on the concrete ground.
Say it! she admonished herself. Tell them that you think the giant worm-machine might be your dead clade-sister, your closest, your lover, your Howl. Tell them you’re mad! Then they won’t follow you. Then you won’t get them killed. Then they won’t end up like your sisters.
Elpida said, “Because I don’t see any other options.”
Vicky said, “What do you mean, no other options? There’s plenty of other options, we could … we could … ”
Elpida shook her head. “This plan is stupid and dangerous, but it’s our only option to secure the combat frame. We won’t stand a chance against all those other revenants once the graveworm starts moving and the worm-guard depart.”
“But … but we … ”
“There is another option,” Elpida said slowly. “Turn around and walk back into the safe zone. Become part of the ecosystem of nanomachines and predatory hunting, join … this.” She allowed her eyes to flick up and around, indicating the corpse-city, the nanomachine-afterlife. “This infinite cannibal machine which has resurrected us. Forever. Until you lose hope and choose not to return. That’s the other option.”
Abandon hope. Give up on her sisters, plunge into this nightmare of eternal afterlife, eating and dying, eating and dying. Accept that she and her cadre died a million years ago.
Everything she had said made perfect sense. But she could not tell where strategy ended and desire began.
Ilyusha spat again. Pira looked stone-cold. Vicky looked like she wanted to cry.
Elpida took a deep breath and said: “I’m not going to ask any of you to come with me.”
Kagami tried to laugh. “What about ordering us, ‘commander’?”
“I’m not your commanding officer. We’re not in a military. But we’re not civilians either, we’re … I don’t know what we are.”
Kagami swallowed.
Elpida said, “If I’m wrong, then anybody who comes with me is going to die. If I make a mistake, or I’m incorrect about the graveworm, or the worm-guard, then we all die. If anybody wants to stay behind, right here, then you can do that. You’ll get a share of the equipment, weapons, the raw nanomachines, and the remaining food — the brains. If I’m successful and I activate the combat frame, then I’ll come back for you. I will not abandon anybody for not wanting to take this risk. I will not abandon you. I promise.”
Amina said, in a tiny voice: “What if you don’t … ”
Elpida smiled for her. “If I don’t make it, then I hope we’ll see each other again, eventually.”
Dull amber fire filtered down through the window-skylight of the fossilised penthouse: eternal sunset in an empty black sky, brushing the skeletal fingers of the cupped skyscrapers, cradling the combat frame in the palm of a corpse’s hand. Dust motes swirled and eddied in the stale air. Elpida looked up from the others and looked over her shoulder; she fixed her eyes on a corner of white armour, dirty and soot-stained, perfect and untouched beneath the grime.
Telokopolis, fragmented and lost and alone.
She prayed to the memory of her city that the others would not come with her. Her plan sounded insane enough without confessing what she really thought.
She spoke quickly, lest any minds change: “I’ll be leaving within the hour. The graveworm may start moving at any time, and then it’ll be too—”
“We don’t have enough hours of daylight for that journey.”
Pira stood up. Elpida felt like screaming, or throwing a punch, or grabbing her weapons and running.
“If we leave now,” Pira said, “then we’ll reach the death’s head position with almost no daylight left. If there’s an engagement, they’ll have the advantage. We all have low-light vision, but it’s not perfect. They’re all highly augmented. I guarantee most of them will see more than just in the dark.”
“Infra-red? Heat signatures? Echolocation?” Training took over, gathering intel, focused on practical matters.
Pira shrugged. “Those. More. Maybe like her.” She indicated Atyle. “We should rest for the night, depart before sunrise. That will also avoid passing through the edge of the safe zone as the sun is going down. May as well give ourselves a fighting chance.”
“You’re not—”
“Yes,” Pira said. “I’m coming with you.”
Elpida’s training and experience told her not to ask the question. “Why?”
“Because I believe you’re right.”
Vicky stood up as well. “I’m coming too. Elpi, I’m coming too.” Her eyes were wet. She shrugged. “What else is there to do? What else is there? You’re right. We do this or we … trail off. Purgatory isn’t enough.”
Ilyusha bounced to her feet, claws scraping holes in the wood of the kitchen floor. She raised her shotgun in the air one-handed, tail lashing back and forth. She howled a wordless cheer of agreement; for a moment Elpida thought Ilyusha was going to fire into the ceiling, but she refrained. Amina scrambled up after her, eyes wide and staring, nodding and rocking and murmuring a prayer under her breath.
Atyle stood slowly. Her smile was slim and amused — did she know the truth? “If we die, warrior, it will be an interesting death. And the gods will answer me regardless.”
Kagami looked terrified and betrayed, at Elpida and Vicky respectively. She took several breaths, almost panting, long black hair stuck to her forehead.
Elpida spoke before the doll-like woman could panic: “Kagami, you do not have to come with me. You can stay here, well armed, and I will come back for you. Do you understand? I will come back for you. This is not your responsibility.”
Vicky said: “Oh shit. Kaga, hey, no, you don’t—”
“Shut up, both of you!” Kagami snapped. She demanded Vicky’s hand with her own. Vicky helped pull Kagami to her feet. Kagami huffed and scowled and said: “It’s not like I have any choice, is it? Being left alone isn’t any choice at all. Plus you need my eyes.” She jabbed a finger at Atyle. “She might have higher specs but she’s a nut-case primitive.” Atyle gave Kagami a look full of ice, but Kagami ignored that. “Looks like I’m coming too, ‘commander’.”
Guilt tore at Elpida’s heart. She tried to speak the truth.
Elpida said: “Kagami, I’m serious, you don’t have to follow me. I haven’t been tru—”
“Shut up, you jumped-up oversexed gene-jack job. I’ve wiped up dozens of your kind before breakfast.” Kagami snorted. “What, are you going to ‘discipline’ me for insubordination now?”
Elpida couldn’t help it. She smiled. “I already told you, I’m not your commanding officer.”
Leave first, by herself, or slip away during the night? Both options were rapidly slipping through her fingers. Pira would not lead, not without Elpida to sharpen her purpose. Vicky would not understand. Ilyusha would feel betrayed, abandoned. Elpida’s comrades believed in her too much. They needed her to lead them. They needed a Commander, even one unworthy of the rank, the role, the responsibility. Even one who was going mad with repressed grief. Even one who believed the dead were talking to her.
She was going to get her cadre killed, all over again.