1347 — ‘Thirteen’, as the reborn legend, Elpida, Commander of the First Litter, had imposed upon her — was exhausted.

Not bodily; Thirteen’s body was preserved and protected by over a thousand litres of nanomachine-derived pressure gel. Arca’s amniotic fluid filled her mouth and nose and throat and lungs, replaced the delicate mucus on her eyeballs and inside her sinuses, suppressed the acid of her stomach and the action of her gallbladder, and lined her intestines with orange cushion, hugging tight to every immobile cilia. Pressure gel was inside her anus, her vaginal canal, her urethra, her womb. It joined her circulatory system, sluicing through her veins and arteries alongside the crimson of her blood. The pressure gel saw to her every physical need, delivering oxygen to the alveoli in her lungs, feeding her glucose and vitamins through her gut, keeping her hydrated and fresh, flushing waste product from her organs before it could accumulate, stopping her muscles from atrophying, arresting the growth of her hair and nails, recycling her skin cells, and replacing what she lost. Thirteen’s flesh had steeped in the orange gel for so long that the brew had penetrated her cell walls, to cushion and prune and replace her DNA with a better medium, one that did not degrade through accumulation of errors. She knew this was the truth. When Arca’s pilot chamber was unlit Thirteen could see her reflection in the steel-glass of the capsule; she had not aged since the day she had fled the Change, since she had chosen the refuge of the coward, and pickled herself forever, in orbit, alone but for Arca’s disappointment and hatred and growing insanity.

Thirteen knew she would die if removed from the capsule, and not only to the hostile nanomachine atmosphere of the outer air. Even if she found a way to endure a world which had rejected her form of life — inside a sealed suit, for example — she would be a walking ghost, doomed to decay within days, lacking any DNA processes to replicate her own cells. She would melt into a protein slurry, trapped inside a suit, and every moment would be agony. Arca’s amniotic fluid had made her immortal by turning her into an organ of the combat frame.

And now Arcadia’s Rampart was rejecting that organ.

Thirteen was bleeding inside — not much, not yet. Without the pilot capsule’s on-board diagnostics she could not pinpoint where, but she guessed the blood was coming from every organ that Arca’s amniotic fluid was meant to support. The bleeding was going to worsen. She was going to die.

The combat frame, her partner since she had been twelve years old, was rejecting her; Arca’s hate had come to fruition. Thirteen found she could not muster the defence of blame; this was her fault, her choice, her mistake. She only wished she could cry properly, without her tears absorbed back into the pressure gel. She still loved Arca. The pain of rejection was worse than the bleeding.

But still, Thirteen’s failing body was not the source of her exhaustion.

She had existed for too long.

She had grown tired of life long ago, tired of thinking. But even upon the darkest and loneliest awakenings in the void — after all comms traffic had grown incomprehensible, after Terra’s Halo had filled up with undead monsters, after Arcadia’s Rampart had fallen insensible — Thirteen had found she was still afraid of death. She had hoped to sleep away eternity, up there in the silent void of space, and never wake again.

But now she was conscious and in pain, back on the surface and in the thick of a war she no longer understood.

She should have been dust aeons past. But she was still a soldier of Telokopolis.

Beyond the pressure gel and the pilot capsule, on the far side of steel-glass enclosure and Arca’s cartilage, out in the blood-red light of the pilot chamber, a legend from the abyss of history was repeating her orders.

Elpida said: “Thirteen. Thirteen, you deserve no shame and I will pass no judgement upon you. None of that matters now. We need this combat frame prepped for contact, and we need it fast. Why is the frame inactive? Tell me what you need, sister!”

Forgiveness? Atonement? Redemption?

Thirteen did not even try to trace those words upon the glass.

The others were speaking too — the non-pilots behind Elpida: ‘Mirror’ and ‘Victory’. Arca had informed Thirteen of their names via Mirror’s manual connection to the combat frame’s nervous system.

Mirror was shouting in some non-Telokopolan language, a rapid-fire babble of staccato syllables, waving her arms as if she wanted to be picked up, twitching her bionic legs against the floor. Victory was terrified, wide-eyed with near panic, stammering and stuttering in yet another language, a weird flowing hybrid. The tall one — the Artificial Human called ‘Summer’ — started to help Mirror to her feet. Mirror shouted at Victory, snapping orders, trying to bring her around.

Elpida did not waver: “Thirteen, please. I don’t know what just turned up, but we’re going to need serious firepower. I can’t save you without your help. Talk to me!”

The shock wave of sound had surprised Thirteen even more than it had surprised Elpida and her comrades; Thirteen had felt no sensation from beyond the capsule since the final time she had joined with the frame, all those years ago. Not even the fall from orbit had penetrated the cushion of her hateful womb.

Arcadia’s Rampart was also surprised; Thirteen could feel the combat frame casting its senses upward, registering the arrival of some vast airborne target. Arca twitched the nerve-bundles which led to its weapon emplacements and shield generators.

But it could not get up. It was too tired, too old, too full of hate.

When the automatic distress signal from the surface had woken her up, Thirteen had found herself banished from the garden of Arca’s mind; now, for the millionth time since they’d decoupled from Terra’s Halo and plummeted through the cloud layer, Thirteen made a peace offering and attempted to access the combat frame’s senses. She sent her consciousness upward through the MMI uplink, hands open in surrender, proffering pleas not for herself, but for Elpida and her friends.

Arcadia’s Rampart rejected her once again. The combat frame screamed down the connection like an animal devouring its own intestines.

Pain entered Thirteen via the trunk cable, through her MMI connection. She twisted inside the pressure gel, blood blossoming from her mouth in a silent scream.

“Thirteen!” Elpida shouted, just beyond the capsule. She banged a hand on the cartilage. Thirteen forced her eyes open; the pressure gel was stained with more red than before. Elpida’s gaze burned beyond the glass. “Thirteen! Look at me! Concentrate. Thirteen. Thirteen, tell me what is wrong. Is your MMI uplink damaged somehow? Is the frame not responding? Thirteen, please, explain.”

Thirteen squinted through the pain.

Elpida was smaller than Thirteen had imagined.

The giant of the first litter. The lost leader of a headless body. The thing whispered of in the failed cloning projects. The thing the Civitas always had put down as soon as it started to display the same traits. The thing the city itself kept trying to birth once again.

Thirteen had always imagined Elpida as twelve feet tall, armoured in skin like nano-composite bone, with eyes made of purple fire, muscles to rival a Legion bio-jack, and the voice of a messiah in the throat of a swan. But the woman on the other side of the steel-glass was just another pilot mutt, just like Thirteen herself. True, Elpida was rather tall, she spoke with unwavering confidence, and her commands felt undeniable. But she was only human.

So few images survived of the First Litter. The pilots had passed that legacy around in secret, transmitted via encrypted tight-beam and entanglement comms, never on public networks. Thirteen had seen pict-captures of a few faces; those had looked mundane enough, her own skin and hair and eyes reflected back from a mirror of history. But she had always expected Elpida, the leader, the Commander, to be more — like the Legion Commanders with their rejuved bodies and their mass-enhancement implants and their bionic limbs, little puffed-up giants like roly-poly balls of muscle.

But then again, pictures of the Legion from the time of the First Litter just looked like human beings too, not the hulks of Thirteen’s latter day.

Thirteen had not seen those secret pictures until the first time she was installed in Arcadia’s Rampart and connected with her distant fellow pilots, all scattered across the Rim of the Great Land. Her first friend had been pilot 1255, a few years older than her, but so much wiser; she still had the first message from 1255 saved to the capsule’s on-board memory.

<>

That had been the revelatory awakening she’d needed her entire childhood. She had devoured the fragmentary vid-logs of the first litter’s greatest expeditions and battles. She had particularly treasured a still image of two combat frames defending a wounded third, fighting some great beast on the shores of the plateau; the image had seemed alien and strange to Thirteen — not just because the plateau, the Hub of the World, had been surrounded by lapping waves of thick, dense, verdant green, but because the three combat frames were together, in close proximity, not kept carefully separate by standing orders. Three pilots clearly helping each other, even marred and marked by the static interference of ancient video record.

The picture was captioned in barely readable Isolation Period High-Spire: ‘Fii and Kos hold line, Yeva downed. Timestamp Mission Hour 87:45:12. Last moments before recovery.’

Thirteen had no idea who Fii and Kos and Yeva were; it had taken her many years to comprehend — and longer to accept — that none of the pilots really knew. Even 556 and 777, who were the best theorists in the decentralised network of constant chatter between pilots, did not know anything beside the names of their progenitors. Centuries of work across many lifetimes had reconstructed all twenty five names of the First Litter, from mission record logs, snippets of blurred audio, the minds of combat frames themselves, and even from several daring data-infiltrations of the Telokopolis security bubble. 777 had hinted more than once that the city itself — Blessed Telokopolis upon the Hub of the World — had provided all of the clearest images and videos of the First Litter.

Thirteen believed that too. She had felt the voice of the city in her flesh since the day she was poured out of a uterine replicator. The city kept the faith. Telokopolis loved her daughters, even Thirteen.

But Arcadia’s Rampart did not. Thirteen’s long-lost ‘sisters’ did not. Thirteen did not deserve the love of Telokopolis, not anymore.

In response to Elpida’s question, Thirteen reached forward and traced another word on the steel-glass. She repeated her previous answer. It was the only truth.

COWARD

Elpida said: “You are not a coward and you are not a traitor, not to the city, not to Telokopolis, and not to me. Thirteen, listen to me. Thirteen! Thirteen, look at me!”

Elpida was wrong; Thirteen knew she was a coward. She had betrayed everything except Telokopolis — humanity, her ‘sisters’, her combat frame, herself.

She did not know where the rebellion had physically begun, but she knew where the seeds had germinated, for she carried them in her heart: the seeds had fallen in the fertile soil of solitary upbringing, of discovering that one had been fed lies one’s entire life; they had been watered by the regular returns to dry dock, cut out from one’s combat frame like a tumour, then living alone in a steel box for weeks on end, isolated from the secret pilot network; the seeds of rebellion had been fertilized by the missing, the pilots who went in for maintenance and never came back, the lost and the damned, and the few premature rebels who could not resist the siren call of intimacy, brought down and murdered by the Legion’s Giant Killer teams; those first green shoots had burst from the soil beneath the blazing sun of the Legion’s play-wars between the Seven Daughters, by war turned to sport, by trade interdiction and proxy conflict and pilots pressed into occupation; the green had blossomed and bloomed into full and gleaming life during the rigours of the other war — the real war, the war on the Rim of the Great Land, against the Silico monsters that crept up the cliffs from where the green still boiled and burned in the vastness below.

Thirteen had not heard the Silico’s emissary herself. She had not even seen what it looked like; those who had implied that nobody should witness that. She had not been one of the four pilots — 8744, 954, 298, and 823 — who had stood on the edge of the drop-off and received the secret ambassador from the inhuman empire below. But Thirteen had helped hide the meeting from the Legion and the Civitas; she had helped fake the Silico incursion toward Ty Wedi Torri. She had murdered a squadron of Legion Giant Killers when they had realised.

Arcadia’s Rampart had not disagreed with the decision. On return from dry dock, Arca had told her that Telokopolis agreed too.

Thirteen had not needed to be reassured. She felt the city’s truth in her flesh.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Thirteen had almost not survived that maintenance cycle. She had not heard the details until later, back in Arca and back at the Rim; tension in the Civitas was at breaking point. The Legions had pacified Gardd Rhosyn and Dwrn Cyntaf by force — the Civitas had the ‘low parliament’ of Gardd Rhosyn marched to the Rim and thrown into the green, an ancient punishment, broadcast around the world. Afon Ddu had declared independence and taken two full Legions with it. In Blessed Telokopolis itself, the Guild master of the City’s Voice had self-immolated in front of the Civitas chambers, apparently after a twelve-hour session of communion with the city. Civil order was breaking down, human-on-human war was now unstoppable, and the pilots’ political position was under suspicion.

But the real war, the war at the Rim, never stopped. The Silico’s secret emissary to the pilots had insinuated that it could not stop, not without some terrible price in the unseen depths of the green. So Thirteen was sent back out.

A week later she heard news of the first Change.

She saw video footage and did not comprehend: combat frame bone-armour bursting under the turgid expansion of wet, red, glistening muscle; blooms of tentacle and scythe, trees of eyeball and nets of living nerve-web, emerging from garnet flesh and scarlet blood; faces pushing out from fields of colour-shifting skin; compound eyes crystallizing in the pits of weapon-damage; living whirlwinds of flesh and bone, towers of blossoming life, mountains that dared to grow. And reactor cores, throbbing and pulsing inside the bellies of each changed combat frame — breeding their own immune systems of nanomachine swarms. No more maintenance cycles, no more Frame Control, no more returns to the cradle of Telokopolis.

With Change, liberation.

The footage had shown the four pilots who had met the Silico emissary, the first to finish feeding the data exchange to their combat frames, the first to open their flesh to the truth of the city. The footage had been captured by another pilot, 6657. She had already undergone the Change by the time she sent the broadcast.

The rebellion had taken decades to grow; from the moment of the first Change it unfolded in weeks.

Thirteen witnessed only fragments of the explosion.

She met up with 1255 and 1399, against standing orders regarding physical proximity between pilots; by then there was nobody left to enforce anything, let alone Frame Control. The Seven Daughters were at war with each other, the Legion was at war with itself, and the Changed were at war with the chains around Telokopolis. Thirteen and her two friends had agreed to stick together — but not to Change, not yet; all three of them were terrified by what they’d witnessed, by the howling, inhuman voices over the pilot network, by the whispers within their own flesh, by the nagging urge inside their own bodies to just let go.

Thirteen had never seen 1255 up close before. Never touched another pilot. They’d spent one glorious night cuddled up together, in the belly of 1255’s Bolt From The Blue. That was a revelation Thirteen had never known possible.

A few days later they’d watched a Legion Giant Killer team murder the Opal Lustre, piloted by 1566, just beyond the high walls of Dros y Llinell. The Opal was changed beyond all recognition, a ragged titan dressed in flowing sheets of ivory flesh and spiked bone; it sang as it fought, in the voice of a goddess, howling the earth into armour and bulwark and spear. It had eaten several of the Legionaries, opening a mouth in its belly full of prismatic teeth. And when it went down under the hail of melt-cannons and grav-floated squash-round artillery, it had turned to the hidden trio and called for help in a human voice.

The trio had responded, too late to save her, too early not to take damage themselves.

1399 Changed after that. She’d plugged herself back into the pilot network and listened to the data-stream, to the voices of the now-Changed pilots, to their white-hot truth that burned away her flesh. The Perfect Revenge had burst its armour like the detonation of an ancient volcano, crying to the heavens in a voice that sent 1255 and Thirteen running in terror. They never knew what happened to 1399; she had strode off in the direction of her nearest Changed sisters.

Thirteen and 1255 had endured two more weeks of madness, dodging the Legion, watching their world come apart.

By then the Silico were boiling up over the drop-off, swarming into the Great Land, overwhelming the Legion and the Changed pilots alike, a third force in this already confusing war — but the Silico were different than before, black and amorphous, blobs of matter-eating death. Neither Thirteen nor the Legion had time to construct theories.

Then 1255 had taken the Change too. She had begged Thirteen to come with her, to crawl into the belly of her combat frame again, to feel her skin, to share more kisses, to get inside each other, to listen to the voice of the city inside her flesh.

Thirteen was too scared. 1255 needed it too much.

<>

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At Land’s End point, one hundred and fifty miles from the most well-fortified of Telokopolis’ Seven Daughters, Thirteen had witnessed 1255 and 1157 meet. Two Changed combat frames, giants of writhing flesh and burst armour, standing upright and alien. 1255 had emerged from her combat frame’s belly, red-eyed and feral and howling a song, clad in a gown of bone and sinew — and still plugged into the frame, like a pulsating bulb on the end of a tentacle; 1157 had done the same, extended on a glistening limb of naked, bleeding muscle, her body melted and warped into something new.

The two pilots had entwined in the air, embracing, kissing, humping each other, mating like 1255 and Thirteen had.

And 1255 had called out.

<>

Thirteen had blocked all incoming comms and fled for the space port at Diwedd y Tir; she’d wept into the pressure gel for hours. She’d never known jealousy before.

At the space port Thirteen had commandeered a launch vehicle. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing the surface, to try their luck in the re-colonised and atmospherically sealed areas of Terra’s Halo. The ancient ring was barely explored, let alone repaired and made safe; the cities of the Great Land always had more important matters to attend.

Arcadia’s Rampart was fighting her by then. Arca wanted to Change; the need shuddered through the combat frame’s flesh, fed by the uncorked voice of the city inside Thirteen’s own body. But Thirteen was terrified. Every time she risked open comms the voices of the other pilots called to her with all the sweetest promises that they were still themselves on the other side, that this was what they were always meant to be, that Telokopolis had blessed this next step.

Thirteen had fled for orbit. Arca had begun to hate her. She had begun to hate herself.

Up on the ring she had fled again, away from the habitable zones and their new problems, their millions of refugees. She found a docking cradle out near one of the ruined sections, a place to wait and watch, where she could turn Arca’s senses toward the surface.

Up there, she could wait out the Change.

Elpida banged on the pilot capsule enclosure with a fist. Thirteen surfaced from history once again.

Elpida said: “Thirteen, why is this combat frame downed? Just explain. Please. I will not judge you, not for anything. I promise.”

Thirteen traced the truth on the glass.

TOO OLD

On the other side of the capsule, Elpida blinked and frowned. “The frame? How old? How long were you up there in orbit?”

Thirteen sobbed.

LONG SLEEP. UNCONSCIOUS.

A lie, technically. But it was too hard to explain through this limited medium.

“The frame,” Elpida said slowly and carefully. “It was conscious, wasn’t it? Thirteen, how long?”

At first Thirteen had not intended to remain in orbit — a lie she told herself as days had turned into weeks. At first she had remained conscious, sleeping only in 4-hour bursts, watching the surface of the Great Land through Arca’s long range sensors, picking up comms traffic as it left the atmosphere.

The war on the surface did not abate. The tide of strange new Silico crashed against the Seven Daughters and the Legion and the Changed. She saw that tide ebb and roll back — but never very far. She watched the situation simplify, saw the Legion stop fighting itself, saw the Changed stop fighting the cities and turn to rampage among the Silico

Thirteen considered returning, but Arcadia’s Rampart still ached for the Change. The combat frame screamed and whined and keened down the MMI connection.

Thirteen wanted and feared the Change in equal measure. The city’s voice still sang inside her flesh, even beyond the sphere of the earth. But she was afraid of losing herself.

She began to sleep for longer and longer periods, to avoid the burning desire. First weeks, then months, then an entire year. Every time she woke she would catch up on transmission logs, on the ebb and flow of the new war down in the Great Land, and on the current state of the refugees inside Terra’s Halo.

She woke from her first year-long sleep to the priority alert of a direct comms message, from something that still claimed to be 1255.

<>

The voice was a scratching nightmare of blood and bone.

Thirteen went back to sleep. She picked a random duration — fifty four years.

When she awoke again the surface of the Great Land was much the same; the Silico had pushed inward from the edge of the drop-off, but the Seven Daughters still stood, and Telokopolis itself was inviolate and eternal. The Silico had not brought the green with them, not blanketed the land with vegetation, which was odd. They were not the Silico that Thirteen had known, either, not the myriad of green-adapted forms, but still those rolling, blob-like, featureless monsters. The Legion had to invent new weapons to fight them; the combat frames had Changed even further.

Thirteen had stayed awake for three weeks that time, watching everything, fighting off the urge for the Change, fighting off Arca, ignoring the voice of Telokopolis inside her flesh. Then she’d caught another broadcast from 1255.

No words. A howl of base-8 static code, full of need and loss. Something weeping in the background noise, something huge and inhuman.

Thirteen had gone back to sleep.

Decades, then centuries, then longer; every time she woke there was another message from 1255, less and less comprehensible as the years wore on.

She watched the history of her home in snapshots a thousand years apart. In the beginning the Seven Daughters of Telokopolis endured for a long time, but over the millennia the cities were ground down, cut off from each other, cut off from Blessed Telokopolis itself. Thirteen watched them fall one by one over the course of a hundred thousand years. She observed a time-lapse of Gardd Rhosyn’s beautiful domes pierced and broken by Silico blobs, their surfaces made sharp and hard to shatter the shells. She saw Diwedd y Tir dragged piece by piece down off the drop-off and into the green; the process took 20,000 years. She woke once to find Meysydd Azure gone, the land blasted black and flat where the city had stood.

But still the green did not advance onto the Great Land — in fact, the green seemed to be at war with itself.

The green covered every inch of the planet beyond the Great Land, all the globe beyond the drop-off. Back when Elpida had walked with mortal feet, the green had covered the Great Land as well, right up to the edge of the plateau, the Hub of the World, on which stood the spire of Telokopolis. A vast ocean of swaying treetops, stretching into infinity and reaching down into the dark, where no sunlight touched the soil or stones.

But as Thirteen slept and woke and slept and woke, the green became mottled with grey and black, like a fungal infection progressing and receding with the speed of tectonic motion. As the millennia advanced and the Seven Daughters began to fall, those black portions of the green seemed to win some kind of victory; Thirteen woke many times to find vast portions of green turned to viscous black goo.

As the sticky rot began to overwhelm the green, so did black soot overwhelm the skies; the obscuring clouds were thin at first, gathering at the poles of the planet and unfolding toward the equator as they thickened. They began to interfere with Arca’s instruments, cutting the surface off from orbit.

Thirteen could make no sense of this.

Neither could the humans trapped on Terra’s Halo — they had their own plague to worry about. All those generations ago they had brought something with them, some kind of plague of undeath. Thirteen could not help them.

Thirteen could not help Arcadia’s Rampart either; despite her stubborn fears, the combat frame had slowly undergone a twisted and stunted version of the Change, growing new parts intended for atmospheric re-entry, preparing for a glorious return which would never come. Every time Thirteen woke up, the frame was more incoherent and mad, the MMI connection more erratic and painful.

The other combat frames — the Changed, or what remained of them — dwindled. First they were the only things still capable of crossing the gaps between the cities, but eventually even they were cut off from each other. They slowly vanished from Thirteen’s sight, either down into the green beyond the drop-off, or obscured too deeply behind the growing wall of soot-black cloud, or into death, decay, and disillusion.

The day she woke from long sleep and had no fresh message from 1255, Thirteen considered suicide.

At least Telokopolis itself had gone untouched, as if the Silico — or whatever strange life was descended from them — dared not risk the wrath of the city. The spire of Telokopolis was dark and quiet. But it must have still lived, for Thirteen felt the voice of truth inside her flesh.

Afon Ddu had survived as well, just visible through the dense murk, a hive of human activity, a last holdout against the encroaching Silico.

The heat and IR and nuclear signatures of Afon Ddu’s final spire were the last things Thirteen had seen, before the black skies swallowed the planet.

Thirteen decided to sleep for a long time.

She woke eventually, to silence and stillness, in a cold void, lashed to the dead ring of Terra’s Halo. Arcadia’s Rampart was alive but unresponsive. The combat frame’s sensors picked up a few stray signals from below, whatever was powerful enough to penetrate the endless black cloud cover; the content of those signals was alien and strange, incomprehensible to any of the on-board decryption software, further from human than Thirteen had thought possible.

Thirteen decided to sleep forever, or at least until something woke her up. Perhaps humans still lived out there somewhere, beyond the stars. Maybe they would find her one day.

She had slept.

And then she had woken to Arcadia’s Rampart taking control, riding the trigger of the automatic distress call, using this excuse for homecoming, at long last. The combat frame had shattered the docking clamps and slammed for the cloud layer. Thirteen had seen it all as they’d penetrated the black clouds together: the great worms like mountains crossing the landscape; the tombs glowing with inhuman life in their cores; the trio of towers to rival Telokopolis, reaching for the heavens; and the surface — the vast city that had swallowed the Great Land, teeming with the undead, and infested with the things which had grown strong beneath this wet and hidden rock.

Elpida slapped the pilot capsule with an open hand. Thirteen jerked in surprise. She had not examined these memories in many years, many awakenings. She had no need. She had spent so much time reliving them, up there in the void.

“Thirteen!” Elpida yelled through the steel-glass. “How long?”

Thirteen saw the light of hope in Elpida’s eyes. Did she think that Thirteen was proof neither of them were stranded quite so deep? Proof that neither of them were remnants, fossils, the lost?

Thirteen raised a hand inside the pressure gel. She traced on the glass.

INTERNAL CHRONOMETERS MARK 2,004,876

Elpida stared. Her throat bobbed. She read out the number, so that Mirror and Summer and Victory could understand, even though the companions were ready to climb down the tube and flee this blood-sodden womb of ruin.

Elpida said: “Years? Two million years?”

I’M SORRY