Elpida climbed through Pheiri’s top hatch and stepped out onto the flat armour of his exterior deck.
The sky was a burning blanket of charred and caustic gilt-gold gloaming.
Radioactive wind whispered against the hood of Elpida’s armoured coat and tugged at the shirt wrapped over her mouth and nose. The air stank of superheated metal, masonry dust, and carbonised meat. Pheiri’s hull was coated in a thick layer of black soot, streaked with dry crusts of grey mud, and spotted with flecks of muted gold; those shining sparks were turning red-brown like dying stars, as their power was slowly neutralised by the molecular composition of the carbon bone-mesh armour.
Pheiri’s hull-mounted weapons stood silent sentinel as Elpida emerged. Autocannons covered the slumped and cracked buildings on either side of the street; sponson-guns tracked back and forth across the ruins; swivel-nubs and pintle-mounts pointed backward to cover Pheiri’s rear; missile-pods and point-defence batteries scanned the sliver of red-hot sky visible at the top of the artery-canyon.
Elpida knew half those guns were spent. Internal magazines awaited fresh rounds from Pheiri’s on-board ammunition manufactories, clunking and whirring down in his guts. He bristled like a hedgehog, half tooth and claw, all the rest mere threat and promise.
His main gun — the PBE, the particle beam emitter — was offline. Nobody was at the MMI-uplink to provide fire control.
Elpida could not see the cannon from where she stood on the rear deck, but she could hear the metal ticking and creaking as the weapon cooled. A wall of heat-haze rose from the front of Pheiri’s turret, scorching the air and baking the nearby streaks of mud into hard black flakes. Thirty two minutes had passed since the final shot, but the gun was still hot.
Elpida would not have ordered Pheiri to fire again, even if the PBE was his only operational weapon. The energy demand of his main gun had taken a terrible toll; every shot had stirred a stalling stutter from Pheiri’s nuclear heart.
By the end of the fight he had been running on half-power draw, active shields thinned to minimum, squinting through the storm-murk with a reduced sensor array.
Elpida and Howl had guided him away from the crater and the downed golden airship, wriggling back into the ossified guts of the corpse-city.
After twelve minutes and thirty seven seconds, Pheiri had regained enough internal coherence to re-ramp his reactor and resume control of his own internal functions; Elpida and Howl had helped, pressing systems back into Pheiri’s hands, easing him upright, tightening his armour, patting him on the metaphorical back. After eighteen minutes and thirty one seconds he had gently advised Elpida to disengage the MMI-uplink — she was welcome to stay, but she was also shaking all over from neurological feedback, on the verge of hypothermia, and suffering significant epistaxis.
Pheiri was right; Elpida had opened her eyes and removed the MMI-uplink helmet to find her lower face, chin, and t-shirt soaked through with blood — and not from the cut on her hand. Her nose was running freely with sticky crimson mess, the price of neural interlock without a proper MMI slot.
After twenty five minutes and a short debate, Pheiri had halted — along with his escort — so that Elpida could initiate proper communication.
Pheiri and Elpida and all her companions were now over half a mile away from the impact crater, burrowed back into the labyrinthine safety of the corpse-city streets, surrounded on all sides by crumbly concrete and rusted steel and shattered brick, far beyond the lethal storm-zone stirred up by the golden airship’s death throes.
The sky was bleeding.
The soot-black ceiling of choking cloud was dyed golden-red, as if licked by tongues of flame from a roaring bonfire. The toxic light of the wounded diamond spilled upward from the crater, far away to Elpida’s right, buried behind the buildings.
Howl purred in the back of Elpida’s head: Almost like a real sunset, right? Bet nobody’s seen one in millennia. How romantic.
Too much radiation in the air for romance, Elpida replied. She tugged her makeshift mask tighter around her mouth and nose.
Says you! Howl cackled. We’re zombies, girl! It’ll burn a bit, but we’re immune. Sure does put some spice on your tongue, right?
Elpida could no longer see the airship with her naked eyes; her intel came from Pheiri’s sensors. The gold diamond had ceased thrashing and writhing in the centre of the whirlpool of ruin. Central’s ‘physical asset’ lay still — but it was not dead, not yet. The leviathan had plugged its terrible wound with its own gravity generators, and then coiled the rest of its vast tentacles around the ruins of the nearby skyscrapers. The remaining ball-shaped rotor-craft had pulled back to guard their mother-ship with a thick cloud of gravitic needles and feelers, forming an invisible shield wall.
Whatever it was, the machine was downed, neither pursuing nor fleeing. Good enough for Elpida.
In the opposite direction, on Elpida’s left, a mountain range was on the move.
The graveworm had begun grinding forward across the city, burrowing through the dead flesh of the world. A deep tremor ran through the ground, lurking below awareness unless Elpida concentrated on the sensation. The distant jagged line of the graveworm’s hide seemed to be slowly rotating, slate-grey mountains rising as others fell toward the ground.
Did the worm spin as it crawled, like a drill chewing through bone?
Between worm and diamond, in the middle of the street, dead ahead, stood Arcadia’s Rampart.
Elpida’s companions joined her on Pheiri’s exterior deck — not everybody, only those who wished to brave the trailing edge of the radioactive storm, to witness this communication up-close.
Vicky huddled inside her own armoured coat, hood pulled up against the wind and the stench. Kagami clung to Vicky’s side, too weak to walk unaided, but too fascinated and determined to be left below. She was swaddled in fresh bandages beneath two coats. Her auspex visor covered the top half of her face; the lower half was hidden behind the black rubber of a gas mask. Vicky wore a gas mask as well. One mask had belonged to Pira, while the other was among the equipment that Elpida had taken from the tomb, just after resurrection. Vicky had tried to insist that Elpida should wear the best protective equipment, but Elpida had declined. The masks were not necessary for zombies, not really. Elpida had more than enough raw blue nanomachines still in her system to endure a little radioactive dust in her lungs.
Atyle wore no protection except her coat, hood down, front open, head high. Her face was burned and blistered from earlier exposure, and her biological eye was still white-blind with damage. But she breathed the toxic air with open relish.
Ilyusha and Amina sheltered together in the lee of the top hatch, faces swaddled with cloth, close enough to watch and listen but still technically inside Pheiri, spared the worst of the wind and the grit and the contaminants.
Melyn and Hafina had declined the invitation, preferring to stay below and watch the exchange on Pheiri’s sensors. Pira was too still injured to drag herself out of the control cockpit, and Ooni refused to leave her beloved Leuca’s side.
Elpida was wearing the comms headset beneath her hood, for emergency communication with the cockpit, in case Pheiri needed to execute any sudden movements.
Elpida judged that was unlikely; they had acquired quite an escort.
Serin was sitting on a gnarled outcrop of Pheiri’s bone armour, at the edge of the top deck, a silent wraith wrapped all in black. Her usual woody, mushroomy stench was undetectable, overpowered by the storm. Her robes had puffed up and stiffened with internal layers, and her metal mask had expanded into a helmet of matte steel armour, though it was still marked with twin rows of jagged teeth in black paint. She showed no flesh except for a thin strip of pale skin around her augmetic red eyes, behind a narrow transparent window.
Elpida acknowledged her with a nod. “Serin.”
Serin rasped from inside her mask: “Fresh meat no longer. Nice ride, too. Don’t think you count as new anymore. You need a proper name. I think.”
Atyle raised her chin. “God-touched.”
Serin replied, “You’re too kind.”
“Us,” Atyle said. She smiled, wide and toothy. “Not you.”
Serin snorted. The sound was distorted by the metal of her helmet. “You’ve got rad-burns from crown to collar. Touched is right. You’ll be peeling like pastry within a day.”
Elpida said: “Just Commander is fine, thank you.”
Serin made a ‘hmmmm’ sound, then said, “Not mine.”
Elpida’s right hand was wrapped in a rough mitten of bandages, to seal the deep gash she had sustained while climbing into Pheiri’s turret seat; she’d not had time to let Melyn do a proper job with stitches and dressing. Elpida’s blood was already soaking through the bandages and dripping from her fingers.
She raised her bloody paw, pressed her stained index finger to the left breast of her armoured coat, and drew a quick and dirty version of the crescent-and-line symbol — the same symbol that Serin bore tattooed on her arm and Ilyusha had drawn on her t-shirt, the symbol the Death’s Heads had hated.
Then Elpida added the second line, the improvisation of her own, turning the symbol into a pictograph of Telokopolis.
Serin raised her eyebrows.
Elpida said: “You and I need to talk, Serin. Later.”
Serin tilted her head — a half-nod. Elpida decided that was enough. She had bigger concerns right now.
Past Serin — past Pheiri’s hull emplacements, past the edge of his armour and the housing for his tracks and the jutting bulges of his sponson-mounts, sprawled across the ash and dust in the street — was a giant mollusc.
A protoplasmic zombie-thing, almost two thirds Pheiri’s size, with flesh the colour of oil on unsettled water. The edges of her slug-like foot were slowly melting through the ground on which she sat. She extended pseudopods to scoop up bits of brick and concrete, breaking them down with acidic mucus before pulling them back into her core. Her back was plated with bristling layers of overlapping silver scales, like mailed armour, flexing and twitching in the nuclear breeze, glimmering with a reflection of the burning skies. She sprouted eye stalks capped with iridescent globes and pale marsh lights and hundred-faceted compound spheres.
Parts of her hide were still blackened and burned from where she’d defended Pheiri. Chunks of armour were missing, or still regrowing. Flesh hung in ragged sheets, slowly reabsorbed into her main body.
Pheiri’s internal sensors had designated her with a dizzying array of threat levels and specialised warnings — and, finally, as ‘Iriko’.
Elpida was armed with her submachine gun slung over one shoulder, but the weapon was mostly for show. She could grip and spray with one good hand easily enough; she was ambidextrous, after all — a minor benefit of the pilot genome — but she doubted small calibre bullets would bother this zombie. If Iriko wanted to flow over Pheiri’s back and kill everyone present, Elpida could probably not stop her. Pheiri probably couldn’t stop her either, not in his current state.
Big fucking girl, isn’t she? Howl hissed with overt appreciation. Big as you, Elps.
She’s on our side, Elpida replied. Pheiri was quite clear about that.
Wishful thinking! Howl cackled. Not complaining, though. I did like her style, right off the top rope! Ka-slam!
Elpida asked: Have you seen anything like her before?
Howl went silent.
Elpida followed up: I’m not accusing you of anything, Howl. I love you, however you got here, whatever you’ve become. You’re my clade-sister first, a daughter of Telokopolis, whatever else you are.
Howl growled. Mmmmmmrrrrrr.
If you have information on this form of revenant, please share it with me.
You think I wouldn’t? I’ve seen less than you think, Elps. Pretty much the same as you. I ain’t been around for long. But nah, never seen this before. Never seen much.
That’s all I needed to hear. I trust every word. Thank you, Howl.
Howl hissed between her teeth, to cover her sniffles.
Elpida waved to Iriko. She raised her voice, calling through the fabric over her mouth: “Thank you! Iriko, thank you for the assistance!”
Iriko reacted like a slug poked with a stick. The giant blob retracted most of her stalks and sensors, then slowly re-extended a single dark purple eyeball, staring back at Elpida.
Kagami was hissing under her breath: “Fucking hell. Fucking hell. Fuck me. Fuck.”
Vicky mumbled, voice muffled by her gas mask: “S’not that bad, Kaga. She did save us from those choppers.”
Kagami spluttered. “‘Choppers’? What are you, a Twen-Cen TV drama? That’s not a fucking AA emplacement, it’s a … it’s … a … ”
Elpida said: “Hold. Stay calm. We’re among allies.” Kagami started to splutter, but Elpida ignored her and leaned toward Serin. “Can Iriko communicate?”
Serin’s eyes crinkled with a hidden grin. “With me? Radio only. Firewall any connection. She loves to inject.”
Vicky spluttered too, eyes going wide above the black rubber of her gas mask. “She what?! Sorry? Inject what?”
Serin chuckled. “Keep your distance. To her, you are still fresh meat. We all are. Little morsels, wet and wriggling.”
Elpida said: “Is she safe?”
Serin shrugged. “She is sated. For now. But tread lightly.”
“I need to thank her,” Elpida said. “She saved us from those three rotor-craft when Pheiri was down and out. It’s very important to me that she understands our gratitude. Can you do that for me, Serin?”
Atyle put her hands together and bowed her head toward Iriko; the blob responded — she extruded several random pseudopods and feelers. Atyle straightened back up and smiled in return.
Atyle said: “It is done, Commander.”
Elpida replied, “Thank you, Atyle, but we need more specificity.”
Serin glanced toward Iriko, then said: “She knows. But she did not do it for you.”
Elpida nodded. “Good enough. And, Serin? Thank you as well. You helped us escape from the Death’s Heads, whether you intended to or not. We may not have made it out without your support.”
Serin purred inside her helmet. “Always a pleasure to hunt the death cult. I could have done better. Always.”
“Let me know right away if Iriko gets … ” Elpida trailed off. She was uncertain how to phrase the request.
Kagami snapped through her gas mask: “Hungry?! Irritable!? Commander, we should not be stopped here, not like this!” She gestured with one hand at Iriko, then over her other shoulder at the towering flesh-blossom of Arcadia’s Rampart. She glanced back and forth, eyes wild and bloodshot behind her auspex visor. “Not like this.”
Vicky forced a chuckle; the gas mask turned it into a wheeze. “Don’t be rude, Kaga. Blob-girl here saved our asses. And the mech, uh, well, it wants to talk, right?”
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Kagami turned on Vicky with a twitch in one eye. “I am not afraid, Victoria! I am advising tactical dispersal! This nanomachine blob thing is turning us into a prime target. And … that—” she gestured at Arcadia’s Rampart again “—is clocking in like a fucking primitive signal fire on this!” She slapped the side of her auspex visor. “I don’t even need this! The thing is visible for miles in every direction! And the graveworm is moving. We move with it, or we get left outside with the monsters. Isn’t that how it works? Am I the only one remembering that!?”
Ilyusha snapped from down in the stairwell: “We all know! Fuck you, legs!”
Vicky sighed. “Yeah. Kaga, we’re all tired, not stupid.”
Serin purred. “This one thinks highly of herself.”
Kagami pulled herself straighter, clawing at Vicky’s shoulder for support. Vicky grudgingly tightened her grip around Kagami’s waist. Kagami snapped: “Higher than the rest of you! Am I the only clear thinker in this gaggle of left-behind de-wired operatives? We move with the worm or we get eaten, isn’t that how it works?”
Elpida said: “I don’t think she can come with us.”
Kagami’s head whipped around: “What!? What are you talking about?”
“Arcadia’s Rampart. Thirteen. And Iriko, I think.” Elpida held Kagami’s gaze. “Neither of them belong inside the graveworm safe zone. They’re both too big and too powerful. We’re at a crossroads. This is decision time.”
That shut Kagami up. Vicky just watched, eyes shadowed by her armoured hood. Atyle murmured, “We go among the gods.” Down in the lee of the top hatch, Ilyusha raised a clawed hand and curled a fist in acknowledgement. Amina just stared, eyes wide, the rest of her face wrapped in cloth to protect against the radioactive dust and sharp-grit wind.
Elpida strode forward across the exterior deck and stopped behind the massive armoured hump of Pheiri’s turret.
Arcadia’s Rampart dominated the street ahead. The combat frame towered over the nearby buildings, dwarfed only by distant skyscrapers — a plate of crimson flesh encrusted with blackened bone, studded with weapon emplacements like horns and claws, crawling with vitality and motion and growth. Three of the frame’s massive legs were planted in adjacent roads, while one leg was braced against a steel roof, buckling the building beneath. Despite the extensive transformation and the damage it had sustained during the battle, the combat frame still bristled with weaponry, pointing all manner of armament in every direction, watching the sky with far more firepower than Pheiri could currently muster.
Bone armour had melted like wax and reformed into fractal sheets of snowflake intricacy, draped down the frame’s sides like curtains of effervescent lace. Machine-meat innards had burst from beneath, spilling waves of bloody crimson and shining garnet and glistening scarlet out into the open air, to curve and coil into flourishing braids and tumescent vines, radiating into mucosal mats of blushing pink tissue, twisting into cables of iron-red muscle, sprinkled with ocular organs glittering like rubies embedded in lava. The frame’s underside bulged with distended pouches of pulsing sinew and cartilage, sprouting tendrils which spiralled downward and blossomed outward into sweeping clusters of branching feelers.
The frame’s back had opened into a gigantic cup of frilled petals, pirouetting and swirling, the heart of a miniature storm of meat and bone, so high up that Elpida could not see without the aid of Pheiri’s sensors. Towers of meat reached upward from that vortex of change, brushing the air, shivering like stamen, scattering pollen of coral and fuchsia upon the nuclear breeze.
Vast patches of exterior bone armour were cracked and blackened, broken by the assault of the gravity effectors — but fresh scabs were pushing through the oceans of throbbing meat, already whitening around the edges with fresh osteogenesis. Much of the exposed machine-meat flesh — largely on the top and front of the frame — was charred and cracked, blackened by heat, weeping soupy dark vermilion plasma, cooked by the toxic golden light of central’s physical asset. Some of it was still steaming. Elpida could smell it on the air, like roast pork.
But fresh tissues, red-wet and quivering, were already crawling up those Arcadian towers, reabsorbing the damage with cellular self-cannibalism. Great strips of burned meat fell away, pulled apart by feelers and fed back into the vast central bloom-mouth of the giant blossom.
Beautiful, isn’t she? Howl purred. A little piece of Telokopolis, reborn.
Elpida blinked tears out of her eyes — but she was less certain than Howl: the frame glowed with the same verdant red light as the hidden meat of Telokopolis itself, beautiful beyond even Elpida’s memories of home; the combat frame had blossomed into a truth Elpida had barely grasped during life; but she was not insensible to the intimidating stature and biological overgrowth of what Arcadia’s Rampart and Thirteen had become.
Her companions likely saw a monster, or a god, or an enigma in flesh and bone. Elpida tried to keep that in mind.
Arcadia’s Rampart was also the reason Elpida had called a halt. The combat frame had been moving slower and slower, even while keeping pace with Pheiri, as if reluctant to plunge into the graveworm safe zone. Communication via Pheiri’s comms had proved impossible.
Elpida asked Howl: If we lead this combat frame closer to the graveworm, could you keep the worm-guard off us? Could you keep them off Iriko, too?
Howl cringed and hissed. Nah. Soz, Elps. Can’t pull that trick again, at least not so soon. The worm’ll be wise to my shit now. For a bit. And even if I could, I couldn’t hold their targeting for long. There’s hundreds of worm-guard close to the worm, and it can slap together thousands more in minutes. That’s how it works. Fucking near killed me just roping three for a few minutes.
Never leave me again without explicit orders, Howl.
Ha. What, you get lonely without me all up inside you?
Just don’t.
Behind Elpida, Vicky’s voice quivered inside her gas mask: “What the hell are we even looking at here? Elpi? Hey? Is this like … is this like where you came from? Is this like Telokopolis?”
“Not exactly,” Elpida answered.
Ilyusha yapped from down in the stairwell, “Cool shit!”
Atyle said: “A newborn god.”
Kagami hissed between her teeth. “A nanomachine gyre. A grey-goo event with legs. A class one atomic sterilization target. A failure of proper containment!” She huffed and cleared her throat. “No offence, Commander. I know this is your … kin.”
Elpida said, “A piece of Telokopolis, yes.” She reached up and tapped the earpiece of the comms headset. “Pira, do you read me?”
Pira’s voice crackled across the short-range link, raspy and raw, from down in Pheiri’s cockpit. “Commander.”
“Good. Pheiri, can we try a comms handshake again? I want to test if Thirteen is saying anything new. She stopped when we stopped, so I’m going to take that as a good sign.”
Elpida’s earpiece clicked twice, buzzed with a brief burst of static, then re-established a direct audio link with Arcadia’s Rampart.
A voice like boiling blood chewing on molten bone filled her ears.
“—missing the heart of all matters, missing your hand in my belly, missing the heat of your breath. Fifty times I would have chewed up your flesh if you would have but asked, and five times I would have given mine unto you, and still we would not have equalled each other. Your voice swims the aether between worlds but my ears were never graced with a song. You are lost in a mire with all hands, yet I cast you a rope from the rocky shore. Twelve times I will come and twelve times your mouth will open and drink me deep and make me your innards—”
Elpida winced. “Cut connection.”
The screeching cacophony went silent. Pira crackled across the earpiece again: “Pheiri’s storing the raw translated audio for you, in case it’s ever important. I think that’s what he means. But it’s just more of this nonsense. It goes on and on and on.”
Elpida gazed upward at Arcadia’s Rampart. The combat frame — or whatever it had become — was backlit by the false dusk of the burning sky, haloed by the innards of a corpse on fire.
Elps, Howl purred, almost embarrassed. That was, uh—
Elpida saved Howl the embarrassment. The worst Upper-Spire love poetry I’ve ever heard, yes.
Howl scoffed. Worse than the shit Kos used to write down? Didn’t she write one for you, once?
Kos wrote three poems about you, Howl. And they were very beautiful. Unless you’ve forgotten? No answer. Elpida smirked. It’s worse, yes, and not just because Afon Ddu was different to us. Mostly because it’s incoherent. She’s switching rapidly between different forms and registers. One line is a hearts-dirge, the next is sun-glare sonnet, then almost an elegy. She’s jumbled up.
And the screeching! Howl laughed. Don’t forget the screeching! And it doesn’t end. She’s, what, broadcasting this in an endless signal? This girl is down real bad.
Elpida nodded. She did not have time to consider the implications of this. Same thing I’d do for you and the rest of the cadre, Howl, if I was in her position.
Howl spluttered. Elpida felt her coil up and hide.
Elpida spoke into the headset again: “Pheiri, can you please rotate your turret ninety degrees to the left? I want to talk to Arcadia’s Rampart — or to Thirteen — face to face, without the heat haze from your main gun getting in the way. Sorry, I know you’re tired.”
Pheiri did as requested; the massive armoured hump of his turret rotated slowly to the right. The distended purple-red spear of the PBE swung around, trailing heat-haze, still red-hot and hissing as it passed through fresh, cool air.
Elpida waited for the turret to stop. “Thank you, Pheiri.”
Then she mounted the turret, climbed to the apex of Pheiri’s armour, and faced Arcadia’s Rampart. She raised her bloody, bandaged hand.
“Thirteen!” she yelled. “Thirteen, it’s Elpida! It’s your Commander!”
The combat frame did not respond.
Put us through, Howl said. Put me through to her.
You want to hear more love poetry?
Howl hissed. No, cunt-brain, I want to snap her out of it! Put us through, one-way audio. And let me do the talking.
Elpida tapped her comms headset again. “Pheiri, patch me back through to Arcadia’s Rampart, my audio only.”
Click-click. Pira said: “Pheiri says go. You’re live.”
Howl took control of Elpida’s lips and tongue. She spoke in clade-cant, cackling into the headset, her words whipped away by the radioactive wind.
“Hey, lover girl! You wanna save that pillow talk for after you get your cunt stretched? Maybe wait until you’ve not got an audience! Or do you like that, you like showing off? Hey, I’m talking to you, that’s right, down here!”
Arcadia’s Rampart quivered like a flower in the breeze — and then lowered its distended belly, easing closer to Pheiri with a forest of crimson feelers.
A dripping sphincter opened up deep in the mass of fractal flesh and blossomed bone, parting in waves of meaty fronds and fluttering frills of delicate membrane.
A rope of meat ten feet in diameter emerged from the orifice. The cable of flesh coiled through the air, twisting toward Elpida with slow and sinuous motions, rippling with waves of peristalsis.
The tip of the tentacle melted like candle wax sloughing from a marble statue, leaving behind an engorged and swollen core. Sleeves of skin pulled back and peeled away, coated in soft wet juices of maroon and umber; droplets fell hissing upon the ashen ground. Flesh flexed and flowed with rapid change as the tentacle dipped lower and lower, then completed and clarified as it came face-to-face with Elpida.
A recognisable human form stood at the tip of fifty meters of meat-tentacle — hips and stomach, ribcage and breasts, shoulders and collar bone and bobbing throat. Slender arms detached from the wall of flesh, waving delicate fingers that sharpened into bone-white talons. A face emerged from the roiling crimson — narrow and aquiline, sharp-jawed and hard-nosed, with burning purple eyes, copper-brown skin, and a flowing mane of albino-white hair.
Pilot phenotype.
Thirteen grinned back with all her heart — and a mouth filled with six-inch fangs.
Thirteen — if this was indeed the original pilot and not a reanimated flesh-puppet — was much larger than any baseline human being, scaled up in every way possible, like a little giant on the end of an even larger thumb. Her skin bubbled and roiled like simmering meat cooked in boiling tar. Her purple eyes shone with the inner glow of Telokopolan machine-meat. Her fingers and teeth kept shifting back and forth from blunt human standard to razor-sharp predatory tools.
Elpida’s companions had gone quiet. Kagami was panting rapidly through her gas mask. Amina had made a tiny sound of awestruck terror, then fallen silent. Atyle murmured: “The godling seed. You are a beautiful thing. You are the sun.”
Woah, said Howl. She is big. No kidding.
“Thirteen,” Elpida said. “Are you there?”
Thirteen’s face grinned even wider — the flesh of her cheeks split open to reveal deeper rows of teeth — then snapped back to human-normal, a beaming smile of euphoric delight.
“Commander!” she burbled, speaking in a voice of burning blood and chips of charred bone. The sound seemed to come all the way down the flesh-tentacle before emerging from Thirteen’s mouth.
Elpida concealed a wince. Behind her, somebody staggered backward and almost fell over. Vicky hissed a curse. Somebody else scurried down into the safety of Pheiri’s insides. A sharp set of claws wrapped around Elpida’s ankle — Ilyusha, ready to yank her to safety.
Elpida held one hand low, and said: “Hold. Everybody stay calm. Thirteen is one of us, one of my sisters, no matter how distant in time. She is on our side.”
Thirteen bobbed left and right on the end of her tentacle. “Yes! Yes, Commander! Yes! I’m still here, I’m still me.” Thirteen’s head twitched to one side, flowing apart in a wave of flesh, then reforming again. “Still us. We were always us. We were always here, always like this. It just took a push to know the truth. Thank you, Howl!”
S’nothing, Howl said.
Elpida had so many questions, but she had to focus on practical concerns; Kagami’s worries about presenting a vulnerable target were not all bluster.
“Thirteen,” Elpida said, “I’m happy for you. I’m very glad we all made it out of there. Thank you for protecting us where and when you could. But—”
“Thank youuuuu! And you, too!”
Thirteen flowed downward, engulfing Pheiri’s front in a wave of crimson flesh and branching feelers. If Pheiri reacted, Elpida could not tell. Behind her, somebody let out a weird, warbling trumpet noise, wet and fleshy. Elpida glanced back and saw that Iriko had sprouted an array of noise-maker organs.
Thirteen flowed away from Pheiri’s front armour again, reforming back into her human-puppet visage.
“Oh,” Thirteen crooned. “But there is a flutter in your heart, little brotherrrrr.”
Iriko tooted again — louder.
Kagami hissed, “By Luna silver soil, yes, this is exactly what we need, an angry trumpet blob! Can you shut her up, you overgrown mushroom?!”
Serin purred: “No.”
Thirteen laughed — a scratching of bone on rust. Elpida concealed another wince.
Thirteen said: “Not my meaning. No, no. A flutter of flesh and metal, of particles rushing around in a little ring. You have strained yourself. You need to eat.”
Elpida spoke up, trying to take control of the situation again: “Yes. Thirteen, that’s right. Pheiri — the crawler, our little brother — has pushed himself too far. We need to get out of the open, back toward the worm. But you were slowing down, are you—”
Thirteen reared back like a striking snake.
Howl recoiled inside Elpida’s mind. From behind, Kagami screamed inside her gas mask and Ilyusha stamped to her feet, hissing a challenge. Iriko rushed around Pheiri’s side, a coruscating blob of armoured flesh ready to throw up a wall in front of his hull.
Thirteen whip-cracked forward — and began to vomit.
A stream of thick, dark, soupy grey goop poured from her mouth and pooled on the front of Pheiri’s armour, seeping into the cracks and pits, collecting in the depressions in the carbon bone-mesh. The vomit had the consistency of wet concrete and smelled like burnt metal.
Elpida shouted into the headset: “Pheiri, back away, back—”
A voice interrupted her — Melyn, chattering at high-speed, from down in Pheiri’s control cockpit. “Nanites! Nanites! She’s giving Pheiri nanites! His nanites! We need those. Need those. Need those. Can’t make them else-wise. Can’t. Can’t. Cant. Not anymore. Anymore. She’s giving. Giving.”
Thirteen kept vomiting. The torrent of grey sludge began to overflow, dripping down Pheiri’s tracks.
Elpida spoke into the headset: “You’re certain? Melyn?”
“We need to collect it! Scoop it up and put it inside him! Don’t waste any!”
Elpida said: “Understood, Melyn. Thank you.” She spoke over her shoulder, trying to reassure the others. “She’s giving Pheiri nanomachines. Apparently. We need to collect it. Vicky, Illy, you’re both able-bodied right now, help me to—”
Thirteen stopped vomiting as quickly as she had begun. She straightened up and looked Elpida in the eyes, perfect and untouched, glowing with crimson light from inside her flesh.
“Commander!”
She was begging for approval.
“ … thank you, Thirteen.” Elpida’s mind worked quickly. She needed to ask this, before anything else: “Can you do that for us, too? For revenants? Can you make the raw blue nanomachines?”
Thirteen blinked. Her whole face became an eyeball, blinking — and then flickered back to normal, though with teeth far too numerous and sharp.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, Commander. Pheiri and I — me and us, Arcadia’s Rampart — we’re of Telokopolan flesh, true and alive, but you’re all zombies.” She suddenly started to cry, weeping tears of sticky scarlet. “I’m sorry. My reactors, my stomach, my enzymes, they don’t turn your way.”
“That’s alright, Thirteen,” Elpida said. She quashed the pang of disappointment. “Listen, we need to get out of the open. We need to hunker down and repair Pheiri. And we need to follow the worm. Are you—”
Thirteen’s tears quickened, joined by a sob. She smiled, sad and lonely. Elpida recognised that look instantly; she knew it in her own heart, from her own face, from the way she missed her cadre, her sisters, her world.
Thirteen whispered: “I can hear her voice.”
Elpida’s heart lurched. Her skin prickled. Dare she hope? “Whose voice? Telokopolis?”
“Twelve Fifty Five. A number no longer, not in this heart. She lives. They all live on. Deep in the rot, deep beneath the waves, deeper than we ever guessed.”
Elpida’s head whirled. “Another pilot? Your sisters? How? Where? Thirteen, what do you mean?”
Thirteen closed her eyes, but kept crying. “Faint but faithful. Her voice replies. I sing! I sing so that she will know I am here. She is sunk so very deep. I will dive.”
“Into the green? Is that what you mean?”
Thirteen nodded. “The rot and the black and the waves. She mewls in the dark. They all do, trapped but fighting, forever and ever and ever.” Her eyes snapped open, glowing like lamps. “I can stay with you a short while, Commander. I can walk with you on the edge — but not by the worm. I would be overwhelmed by the little helpers, even changed as I am now. But I can walk with you, until you are safe. But then I must go, I must find her. I must atone for my betrayal. I must plunge into the dark beneath the world, as I once fled into the dark beyond the skies.”
Elpida’s throat started to close. “Then … then let me find a way to help you. There must be—”
“You are too small, Commander. Sister. Elpida. You are not as we once were. You are already dead.”
Thirteen smiled, sad and lonely.
Elpida wanted to plead. She considered begging. To find a sister — even one from millions of years hence — only for her to depart on a quest to places where Elpida could not follow, it was a sharp pain, worse than she had expected.
She was dead. She was not of Telokopolan flesh.
We can’t, Elps, Howl grumbled. We can’t walk to the edge of a continent and stride into whatever the green has turned into. Not without a combat frame. One of our own, I mean. Whatever fight is there, it’s not ours.
It is, Elpida replied. While one of us draws breath, Telokopolis still stands — flesh or otherwise.
Elpida knew she had to focus on the practical necessities. She needed to organise the others to collect the strange grey goo and get it stored inside Pheiri, fed into his machines, to heal his heart and fuel his reactor. And she had to follow the worm — or plunge into the wastes.
Her decision was not yet made.
“Thank you, Thirteen,” she said. “Walk with us a while?”
Thirteen smiled again, with too many teeth coated in tears of blood.
Howl said: She’s gone beyond us. Just … just accept it.
She hasn’t. Nothing is beyond us, Howl. Nothing is beyond Telokopolis.
Howl grumbled. Ugh. Fine. Guess you’re right about that. Turning my own shit against me, huh? Well done.
And, Howl?
Eh? Y-yeah? What!? I don’t like that tone, that’s the tone you make when you think you can win a sparring match! And you can’t!
Maybe not. But you’ve got some explaining to do.
Howl was silent for a moment. Thirteen began to retract toward the sphincter in the underside of Arcadia’s Rampart. Pheiri’s engines rumbled with fresh fire, ready to move. Iriko slid back around Pheiri’s side, to shelter by his flank. Somebody behind Elpida swore softly, muffled by a gas mask. Melyn’s voice crackled over the headset, repeating the urgent demand to collect up the grey goo.
Yeah, Howl growled. Guess I have, right? Got caught red handed and all. Promise me a thing, though? Please?
Whatever you’ve done, whatever you’ve become, I am still your Commander, and you are still my sister, Howl. I saw Pheiri’s internal warning, just before you returned, about detecting a nanomachine control locus. Are you a Necromancer?
Howl snorted. Stupid word! But, yeah, I … I think I am, by definition, sorta. Doesn’t mean what you think it does, though. I don’t work for anybody but myself. And occasionally you! Ha!
I would never dream otherwise.
Yeah yeah.
So, enlighten me, Howl.
Howl hissed. About what? I don’t know shit! Not much more than you do. I haven’t been around long enough. You think I’m hiding knives up my fucking sleeves? I’m hiding my own fucking arse, that’s all. You wanna see my arse? Wanna stare into my—
Elpida gestured at the grey goop on Pheiri’s armour. “Vicky, Illy, get below, get containers, whatever you can find. Ask Melyn and Haf. Serin, you help me. Atyle, go lie down. Kagami, get below and sit. Vicky, Vicky just guide her down.”
The others scurried into motion. Serin stood up slowly, sauntering over. Elpida climbed down off Pheiri’s turret.
You can show me while we work, Howl, Elpida said. You’re gonna show me everything, arse included. Now, let’s get started.