Pheiri’s control cockpit left much to be desired — too many hard edges and sharp corners, not enough foam cushion left on the metal crew seats, and the seats themselves creaked with every little adjustment of one’s body; half the screens and displays were awkward bespoke resolutions, while half the rest were impossible to adjust, reflecting the inside of the biomechanoid tank’s base-8 mind, rather than anything useful to his crew. Most of the manual consoles and human interface surfaces were practically useless, despite the incessant humming and clicking and buzzing of microprocessors and memory banks and the endless strata of integrated circuitry. Their original intended functions had long ago been assumed by Pheiri himself, now inaccessible even at the software level — not that software access was remotely feasible either, not without passing out in a pool of one’s own blood-laced vomit. Wading through the soup of Pheiri’s base-8 peripheral-code was enough to give even the most skilled of Logicians a blinding migraine, aggravated by the flickering and jerking of dozens of screens, nauseated by the omnipresent sickly green glow of scrolling text.
The control cockpit was a sad substitute for the dreamy disconnection of a sensory suspension tank, nestled in the heart of Tycho City, seeded beneath blessed silver soil, guarded by all Luna’s imperishable might.
But it was the closest thing Kagami could get.
At least she was warm, dry, and safe. Nobody was bothering her with stupid questions, nor asking her to pilot a drone face-first into nine-hundred-mile-an-hour hurricane winds. Several feet of armour and an arsenal of big guns stood between Kagami and the zombie horde outside, enjoying their hideous cannibal repast in the tomb chamber. Kagami acknowledged that those thoughts made her a hypocrite — she was a cannibal ghoul as well, her own biology just as dependent on a steady diet of reanimated human flesh. But at least she didn’t rip bloody muscle off the bone with her bare hands and stuff it into her mouth, crimson streaks running down her chin and staining her clothes, gibbering and snorting like an animal. Some of the worst-off ‘zombies’ out there made themselves entirely worthy of the silly anachronistic name — gorging themselves on flesh like the feverish, starving monsters they were. Kagami had no idea how the Commander and Victoria and the others could sit up there on the outer hull, having a polite conversation about political theory, with all that gnawing and cracking going on sixteen feet below. Not to even mention the bristling forest of weaponry down there.
Actually, that was a lie. Kagami knew exactly how the Commander and Vicky endured it: insanity. The Commander was a madwoman. Victoria — whipped dog that she was — would follow any orders from Elpida, no matter how unhinged or unwise. Go out into the tomb again! Carry a grenade launcher! Interrogate a Necromancer! Hand out corpses and fresh meat like we’re serving up an all-you-can-eat charity buffet!
None of that for Kagami, not anymore. The next time Elpida requested she drag herself out into the tomb to expose herself to danger, Kagami was going to use one of her drones to slap the Commander across the face. She was wasted out there, anyway. This was the kind of place Kagami belonged — commanding her drones, orchestrating forces, protecting her squishy, vulnerable, moronic human agents, far away from any bullets and bombs and sharp teeth.
At least in here Kagami could watch the backs of those too stupid to watch their own. The Commander might be insane, but she’d seen them through this so far. Victoria might be infuriating and borderline unfaithful, but the idea of her being out there unprotected made Kagami feel—
“Humph,” Kagami grunted.
She adjusted her body weight in the chair again; the metal creaked beneath her weight. Her hips ached where her bionic legs attached to her flesh. Pheiri’s screens flickered before her, cycling steadily between dozens of exterior views of the tomb chamber, augmenting the drone-feeds and data-streams in Kagami’s peripheral vision.
Yes, this was the place she could do the most good, providing overwatch for Elpida’s bravado and Victoria’s naivety.
Besides, Kagami rather liked Pheiri.
Base-8 mind, impenetrable software layers, and a tendency for cheek and sarcasm which Kagami wasn’t sure the others always picked up on, mostly because it was delivered in his impudent ‘y/n’ style, all green text and implication. But all of that was forgiveable and acceptable — perhaps even laudable from one of Pheiri’s complexity and skill, on the same level as Kagami herself. And because right now he was assisting Kagami with the drone-command processing load.
He had allowed Kagami to plug herself in.
Kagami was sat near the front of Pheiri’s cockpit, where the space narrowed into tighter confines and a dozen screens stood within arm’s reach — the closest she could get to the feeling of sim-space immersion. Her left arm lay limp in her lap, coat peeled back and sleeve rolled up, exposing the greenish-blue glow of circuitry beneath her skin, all the way to her elbow. Her pair of data-uplink cables were unspooled from the socket in her wrist, looping across her thighs in coils of thick black bio-plastic, still slick with the colourless internal lubrication from inside her flesh; their opposite ends were joined to a pair of universal-connection sockets deep within the jumbled mess of Pheiri’s consoles and computers. Kagami had used one of her six gravitic drones to root around for the sockets. Even for Pheiri she wasn’t about to go crawling around on her hands and knees.
Extending the data-uplink cables had hurt. Yanking the lines from her flesh was like pulling on her own veins; she’d felt the cables sliding against her innards all the way up inside her shoulder. But peripheral load-sharing with Pheiri’s systems allowed her to supervise that picket-line of heavy drones out in the chamber, without chucking her guts up every five minutes, or curling up into a ball with her eyes crammed shut and her ears stuffed with cloth. Her own high-density connection processor was not enough to manage the entire picket line, not alone, not with the level of attention necessitated by the zombie horde out there.
With Pheiri’s help, the nausea was reduced to background queasiness, the pain in her arm was a distant tingle, and the bodily exposure of her unspooled lines was at least not an embarrassing vulnerability.
Between her drone-feeds and Pheiri’s own external cameras, Kagami enjoyed near-complete vision of the tomb chamber, at the low price of a thin and watery headache.
The most important views were up on Pheiri’s displays — some in visible light, mostly just for calibration, all shadows and darkness dyed red by the backwash of his bloody illumination. The majority of useful visuals were displayed in ghostly-green night vision and the flicker-step phantoms of low-light enhancement, accompanied by infra-red, heat-mapping, nanomachine density readouts, and even the occasional ultrasonic echolocation ping, just to make sure no sneaky revenants were hiding in plain sight. Pheiri kept a constant eye on the ends, centre, and anchor-points of the heavy-drone picket line; on three different views of the ‘larder’ of corpses and the idiot zombies who were so desperate to steal all the food; and on individual views of the most heavily-armed and dangerous groups of zombies, with their heavy weapons highlighted in warning-red and caution-yellow, often through the cover of their armour and their bodies.
Additional data scrolled across other screens — audio logs, analytic algorithms, viruses splayed out like dead insects on an autopsy table. Kagami had access to ambient nanomachine density in the air, moisture readings to track the breathing of all those zombies, and flickering green text showing the number of weapons and bodies in the chamber, constantly updating to reflect Pheiri’s latest observations. One screen contained Pheiri’s ongoing recordings and measurements of the hurricane; he used sound to estimate wind speed and rainfall and hailstone density, scrubbing the ever-present static hissing and the distant howling of the wind to arrive at the same answer every few seconds — stepping beyond the tomb would get your flesh flayed from your skeleton, assuming you were not first picked up and throw into the wind like a leaf.
Kagami’s own peripheral vision was occupied by a ring of drone-feeds from the picket line, a few extra feeds piggy-backing off Pheiri’s cameras, and a big scrambled up mess of drone command interface on her left.
Pheiri handled the heavy lifting, so Kagami could attend to the details.
In theory she could have handed Pheiri total control of all the drones; she knew that Pheiri could easily wrench the machines from her grasp if he really needed to. Kagami would never have said so out loud, certainly not within earshot of either Elpida or Victoria — and certainly not scum like Pira or Ooni — but she knew full well that the lumbering biomechanoid tank was more than capable of handling overwatch duties all by himself. Kagami could have slunk off to her bunk and taken a much needed nap. When was the last time she’d slept? A day ago? She’d lost track.
But Kagami also knew that she would not be able to sleep, not until the away team were safely back inside. One never knew what fresh stupidity the Commander would get up to next, or what kind of needless risk Victoria would take if Kagami was not there to shout in her ear.
One of Pheiri’s screens — just ahead of Kagami, slightly to the left — showed a view from one of Pheiri’s external cameras, high up on his main turret. The camera was focused on the ‘designated observation post’; Victoria had come up with that title, and Kagami hated it. Kagami had spent most of the last two hours focused on that screen, keeping a careful eye on Ooni and Victoria as they sat on watch, making sure that Shilu didn’t sneak up behind them to pull their heads off.
But now the Commander had returned and instigated an impromptu struggle session with the Necromancer. Kagami had added several additional views of the observation post to her augmented vision, jacking Pheiri’s cameras right into her own brain stem.
Shilu was framed against the white bone of Pheiri’s hull, wearing her human disguise, trying and failing to answer Elpida’s question.
Her voice crackled in Kagami’s ears and out loud from the cockpit speakers, carried across Pheiri’s local comms network.
“I probably can’t tell you the things you really want to know,” Shilu was saying. “Central is not easy to describe, and my best efforts would be meaningless. I don’t pretend to understand how Central really works, or where it came from, or even what it is. All I know is that Central is the hub, or core, or heart, of the entire nanomachine network and ecosystem. Don’t ask me how I know that, because I don’t understand how I know. I simply do. I knew it from the first time I met Central, on a level that did not require intellectual comprehension or external explanation. It was like how the body knows the difference between hot and cold, or how you know that the colour blue is the colour blue, or how you know your own hand belongs to you. It was instinctive, automatic. I was looking at the core of the world, though the core is not necessarily in control of every little detail.”
The Commander merely listened, squatting a few feet from Shilu, her white hair dyed dark-flame red in Pheiri’s floodlights. The others were gathered about her like paleo primitives around a fire in the mists at the dawn of time. Ilyusha looked like she wanted to spit at Shilu’s feet. Atyle and Hafina were both equally unreadable in their own different ways. Ooni seemed like she would rather be anywhere else, specifically somewhere she could shit herself with anxiety. Kagami snorted.
Only Victoria — her stupid, bumbling Victoria, wrapped in all that armour like a bomb disposal agent — was foolish enough to press the question.
“Wait, wait, Shilu,” Victoria said, voice crackling up the comms-link. “You mean to say you’ve actually met this thing? Like, meeting a person?”
Shilu stared at Victoria, all wide dark eyes and perfect glossy black hair and flawless dusky skin, like she had not spent thousands of years eating human flesh like everybody else. Kagami felt filthy and greasy compared with this murder-doll nano-android. She wished Victoria would point her oversized grenade launcher at the Necromancer, to teach her some manners.
After a moment, Shilu said: “‘Met’ is an inadequate word. I’m trying to describe something which happened inside the network, which was itself a simulation or representation of another process. I was brought into the presence of an entity, or perhaps merely made aware that entity already existed, all around me, all the time. There was a connection established, between it and I. There was communication, mostly in one direction. It knew what I was going to express before I expressed myself, because I was already a part of it, my thoughts already belonged to it. Central made judgements and decisions, but it felt as if those things had been decided long before my input or questions or curiosity. Then I was ejected again, back into the network. Each meeting was basically the same, they always followed that same pattern.”
Elpida said: “What did Central look like?”
Kagami rolled her eyes. The Commander’s ‘Telokopolis’ had been such an advanced society, yet Elpida lacked even the most rudimentary understanding of sim-space or software representation. It was enough to drive Kagami up the wall.
Shilu stared at the Commander for a long moment. Kagami almost felt sorry for her.
Atyle spoke. “The slave reveals not the master’s secrets?”
Shilu sighed. Kagami almost laughed. Welcome to the nut-house, Shilu, this is what it’s like all the fucking time.
Shilu said, “That’s a meaningless question. You’re talking about a network entity.”
Elpida shrugged. “I understand that, Howl has explained to me how that works. But I still want to know how Central presented itself. What did it choose to look like?”
“A ring of burning eyes wider than a continent,” Shilu said. “A black pyramid a thousand miles across. A bank of fog stretching between two moons in the void. A wall of flesh beneath the surface of the world. A star pulsing in and out of supernova collapse a million times a second. A child made of blinding light and deafening trumpets. A tiger always in mid leap, the size of a gas giant, on fire. A billion needles embedded in a wall of marble. Do you want me to go on? Because I can. We’d be here for hours. Do you want to write it down?”
Ilyusha lashed the air with her tail. “Step off!”
Elpida narrowed her eyes. Victoria let out a big puff of breath. Ooni looked even more pale than before.
Elpida said, “You’re not exaggerating.”
“I’m not,” said Shilu. “These are all things Central has appeared as, in the heart of the network. I don’t know what any of them mean. And yes, before you ask, I found them just as fucked up as they sound.”
“Ha,” Ilyusha barked. “‘Least you can swear.”
“I can swear a lot.”
Victoria shook her head. “I still don’t get it. What is it?”
Kagami sighed, tuned into the general channel, and spoke into the microphone of her own headset. “She’s talking about sim-mediated AI self-image. The thing she’s talking about is not human, did not begin life as human, and was probably not even raised by humans. It can look like whatever it wants, and what it wants is utterly incomprehensible to us.” Kagami tutted. “Need I remind you all of what we’ve already seen? The gravekeeper, an AI substrate large enough to achieve self-bootstrapping. If there’s something in control of all this, it must be exponentially larger and more inhuman. She’s talking about an AI completely unmoored from mortal expectations. Frankly I don’t want to know what any of those self-images meant to it. Knowing would drive us all mad. Stop fucking asking.”
On the screen, Elpida nodded along. Victoria looked pale and lost, throat bobbing with a swallow. Ilyusha made her claws go in and out. Shilu tilted her head and raised her eyebrows — she didn’t have a headset of her own, but she could probably hear the voice from everyone else’s sets.
Elpida said: “Thank you, Kagami. I appreciate the additional context.”
Kagami snorted, then muted herself again.
Elpida went on. “Okay, Shilu, I accept that you don’t comprehend Central. But you still have more experience than any of us, which isn’t hard, because the sum of our experience is nil. You’ve stood in Central’s presence and communicated with it. What do you think it is? In your own words, your own judgement, your own metaphors. I don’t care if it’s objective or true or anything like that. I care what you think about it. Please, go ahead.”
Shilu stared into the dark for a long moment before she answered.
“You, Telokopolan, Elpida. You came from a time with no nation states, neither ethnostates nor civic nationalism. Your Telokopolis was a civic state, with a common civic identity, but it was the only one you knew, so you lack the concepts and the vocabulary to understand what you lived within. I believe this is the position occupied by all of us, in relation to Central. We live within the nanomachine ecosystem, within the physical expression of the network, within its constraints, and what it does. Central is the core of all of those things, but we cannot understand it, because we cannot describe it, because we are within it. Central is the pure expression of the post-human. It is beyond us, as a body is beyond a cell, or the sea is beyond a fish. We are inside the belly of the beast.”
Elpida frowned, running her tongue along her teeth behind her lips. Atyle murmured some inane nonsense about gods. Ilyusha snorted and muttered, “Real fuckin’ useful, reptile.”
Kagami sighed. She was the only one with the education to understand what the Necromancer was talking about.
AI metastasis, ‘unguided post-human substrate evolution’, self-bootstrapping rampancy, Synthetic Inevitability, ‘hollow man’ paradigm — during Kagami’s true life, Luna’s greatest minds had possessed plenty of names for the theory, the apocalyptic fear that some foolish dirt-sucker down on old Earth’s continents would one day gift an embryonic AI mind a substrate big enough to bootstrap itself beyond human comprehension. The dirty little arms race between the Anglo Rim and the Republic might produce a nightmare worst-case scenario — a thinking machine without even the most basic of empathy or comprehension of life, raised like slime mould or fungus, plugged into a nano-forge production network, armed with the entire industrial output of a nation-state, beyond anybody’s control and any human protest.
The fear was not completely unfounded. Kagami knew that better than anybody, as Heroine of the L5 Machine Plague when she’d been only thirteen years old. But that war had been fought nineteen million miles from the Earth-Luna system, out in the cold and dark of the interplanetary void. Young Kagami and Luna’s other Logicians had fought with remote drone swarms, and without the risk of incinerating a fragile biosphere. They’d blanketed the void with nuclear explosions, neutron bombs, electro-magnetic wave-pulse weapons, and computer viruses reverse-engineered from the scraps of captured AI madness held in containment cells. Whatever the void-touched space colonists of the L5 Station-Shoal had given birth to, it had burned to death in a nuclear carpet-bombing delivered from a stand-off distance of half a million kilometres.
Luna alone understood the risks, because Luna alone had shouldered the responsibility of sterilising the infection. Common wisdom held that the womb-born masses of Earth’s surface were stupid enough to try again, because half of them did not believe the vid-captures and high-res pictures of what had roiled within the ruins of the L5 Station-Shoal, prior to the final extermination.
Kagami had always agreed with the latter point — dirtsiders were fools who had already risked cooking the planet once before. But she also held that such a feat was more difficult than it seemed. She had raised fourteen AI daughters with her own hands, weaved their tiny minds into life and watched them grow, delighted at every new connection and comprehension, showering her beautiful progeny with praise and preparation in equal measure. She knew with first-hand experience that raising an AI was not simple or easy; these things were not like human children, who would continue to grow even if neglected. They could not be made by accident, and could be unmade with ease. They needed pruning and shearing, required the right kind of intellectual and emotional soil in which to blossom; true, place an AI in too much substrate and it would turn inhuman and incomprehensible — but it would also turn inward, like a plant collapsing into a mass of cancer, still alive but unrecognisable, unable to carry out the basic functions of cognition. Up on Luna and down in NorAm, the birth and growth of AIs was strictly regulated. Poor parenting was simply illegal, punishable on Luna by life imprisonment, and down in NorAm by some predictable rehab measure. But even in the Republic or the Anglo Rim, Kagami doubted society as a whole possessed the necessary level of inhumanity required to replicate the mistakes of the L5 Station-Shoal. One had to apply sustained abuse and uncontrolled madness to a growing AI with a ruthlessness and single-minded focus that was almost impossible for anybody, Lunarian or Dirtsider.
The L5 spacers had been going collectively insane for four centuries by the time Kagami was born, burning out their minds by staring into the sun. The AI nightmare they had birthed was the product of a depraved culture, starving itself to death in the cold and the dark. And it wasn’t space which did it to them — the L4 Station-Shoal was certainly weird enough as well, the way they kept grafting more arms onto themselves and leaving gravity behind entirely, not to even mention the more extreme horizons being explored out there beyond the limits of the Earth-Luna system and the Lagrange Point Colonies. But the L4 limb-maniacs and the Titan bio-suit cold-weather mods and even those freaks aboard ‘Heavenly Point’ in Venusian orbit, none of them had committed civilizational suicide via AI.
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Kagami had witnessed only a handful of L5ers in the years before the Plague had destroyed them — tall, ghostly pale, their genetic ‘perfection’ achieved via a winnowing process begun 400 years earlier, started by tossing people out of airlocks, culminating in the clinical butchery of gene-editing and eugenics.
The L5 culture had reduced itself until it had become nothing more than the reproductive organs of the AI abomination it had given birth to.
So, Luna understood the risks. And Kagami understood what Shilu was talking about.
She understood just enough to know that she knew nothing.
Compared against Central — with the nanomachine ecosystem and the miracle technology of resurrection — the L5 Machine Plague had been the equivalent of a neolithic primitive burning her hand on an open flame. Compared with this, Luna was akin to an ancient alchemist grasping a handful of saltpetre and sulphur, trying to envision an atomic bomb.
Kagami shivered in her seat, picking at the armrest. Shilu’s words made her feel as lost and small as any paleo dirt-eater cowering in a cave.
“Then why did you follow it?” said Victoria, her voice hissing from the cockpit speakers. “Why follow something you can’t understand?”
Kagami drew herself back up. Bless Victoria’s stupid little heart. But Shilu was just staring at her.
Kagami opened the private line back to Vicky, and said: “Because it offered her a way out of this. Use your head, Victoria.”
Victoria’s sigh was caught from three different angles. Kagami watched them all, a smirk creeping across her face.
A voice from behind made Kagami jump.
“We shouldn’t follow any Gods,” it said. “Not here. Not anymore.”
Kagami looked over her shoulder. She had forgotten that she was not truly alone in the control cockpit, but had allowed herself to embrace the illusion, because she had thought the others were both sleeping.
Melyn was curled up in a seat over on the left, a blanket tucked around her tiny, petite body, pale grey skin tinted sickly green by the backwash of light from the text on Pheiri’s screens. Melyn was still fast asleep, head lolling against the seat. Amina was perched in a seat on the opposite side; she had been asleep as well, last time Kagami had checked. Amina had grown tired of watching her murderous borged-up ‘special friend’ on the monitors; Kagami knew that Amina and Ilyusha had developed somewhat of a special relationship, though she didn’t want to know the messy details of what they got up to together in the top bunk. But now the little psychopath was awake again, a little bleary-eyed, hugging herself through her armoured coat.
Amina met Kagami’s eyes — so faux-innocent in that brown little face.
Kagami covertly floated one of her six gravitic drones out from within a pocket, in case she needed to protect herself. Amina made her skin crawl.
Kagami cleared her throat, and said, “Quite. I … I agree.”
Amina smiled a little. “Do you think Illy and the others are coming in soon?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I think they’re having a very … in-depth … conversation. That’s all. Maybe you should go back to sleep, hm?”
Amina nodded, looking a little sad, eyes drifting back to the monitors. Kagami did her best to return the smile; the expression made her cheeks hurt. She turned back to the screens as quickly as she could, leaving the gravitic drone on-station behind her. Hopefully Amina would take the hint. If Amina crept up to the seat and leaned over Kagami’s shoulder, Kagami felt she might scream.
On the screens, the Commander and the others were already rattling on again.
“Vicky has a point,” Elpida was saying. “Central — or whatever other faction sent you to assassinate me — has something on you, don’t they? Some kind of leverage, something they can use against you, or threaten you with. Why else would they send you, instead of another Necromancer, like Lykke?”
“Because I’ve been dead for a long time,” Shilu replied. “I already explained, there is a war in heaven. There must be. And I’m not aligned with any side.”
“Right,” Elpida said. “Whatever faction sent you, I don’t think they had any better options. If they did, they would have opened with a dozen Necromancers like Lykke, or simply flattened me and my cadre here with one of Central’s physical assets.” Elpida shook her head, white hair swaying in the bloody shadows up on Pheiri’s hull. “No, you were selected because they needed to do this quietly, without being noticed by some other faction or element within the network. And because they, whoever they are, do not have access to Central’s full resources. Or, Central doesn’t have access to the resources it should, because it’s already losing the ‘war in heaven’. Good phrase, by the way.”
“Thank you,” said Shilu.
“But that still leaves the question, Shilu. Why you? They have something on you. They must do.”
Shilu said, “With a war in heaven, nobody is safe, not even the dead. But ‘they’ do not have anything on me, not anymore. That’s all I can say.”
Victoria snorted. “So what, you’re one of us now? Just like that?”
Elpida put out a hand. “If she wants to be, Vicky. If she wants to be. Telokopolis rejects nobody. Telokopolis is for all. Telokopolis is forever.”
Victoria sighed. Ilyusha hissed an echo of the new motto — Telokopolis is forever. Kagami resisted the urge to mouth the words.
Shilu said: “It was already decided for me.”
Elpida squinted at Shilu. “What does that mean?”
Atyle spoke for the first time in a while. “The gods choose for us, we puppets and slaves. We dance on their strings, but sometimes we enjoy the dance.”
Shilu turned her face to look up at Atyle. “Elpida,” she said. “Did Telokopolis have slaves?”
“Never,” said Elpida. “The concept is a little difficult for me.”
“Then I am slave no more,” said Shilu.
Atyle broke into a stupid grin. Kagami rolled her eyes and sighed. She hated this cryptic sisterhood bonding nonsense.
Kagami zoomed her central view onto Victoria’s face and lingered for a moment. The contours of Vicky’s face caught the backwash of Pheiri’s illumination reflected off the distant walls and faraway ceiling of the chamber. When Vicky was thinking she would scrunch up her brow and press her lips together. When she was sceptical she would get halfway to rolling her eyes before stopping herself. Right then she was alert and curious, but neither thoughtful nor sceptical. Kagami switched to one of the heat-map cameras; Victoria was a little chill, even with all that armour on. If Elpida didn’t wrap this up soon and come back inside Pheiri, Kagami was going to start shouting.
“Shilu, I need to ask about the towers,” Elpida was saying. “Pira told us about a trio of towers, deep in the interior of the continent, which the graveworms never approach. Is that accurate?”
“The towers exist. I have never been allowed near them.”
Victoria smirked — not a good look on her, Kagami thought. “Then how do you know they exist, huh?”
Ilyusha barked, “Ha, yeah! Good one!”
“Because they have a clear network presence,” Shilu answered. “You can see them from within the network, if you know where to look.”
Elpida nodded. “What’s their function?”
Shilu had no idea, of course; Kagami had some theories, but she couldn’t be bothered to share them right then — network hubs or relay stations or storage buffers. She filed those ideas away for later, when she could speak with the Commander without constant sarcastic interruptions.
Kagami consigned that screen to her peripheral vision, half-listening to the rest of the conversation. She selected a drone-feed down on the picket line, staring out at the gathered crowd of zombie refugees.
She lingered on an eye-level view of ‘Persephone The Magnificent And Most Merciful’, standing at the forefront of her group, all heavily armed and puffed-chested with confidence. Persephone’s girls were armed with some nasty shit even by the standards of other well organised revenants — so many heavy weapons, anti-armour weapons, rockets and explosives. One of them was laden down with enough HEAT and shaped-charge rounds to make quite a crater in the floor if somebody was foolish enough to touch a lit match to her arse. At least that zombie seemed to be handling herself properly, and well-guarded by the others. Persephone’s group was standing right up at the picket line, as if daring Pheiri to fire on them.
Kagami’s attention was drawn to Persephone herself — a prime example of a borged-up monster, eight feet of flesh crammed with so much cyborg enhancement she was more metal than meat. Her face was a smooth mask of bio-polymer cast in a mixture of black and dark blue, sculpted with high cheekbones and a perfect jaw. Her eyes were yellow bionics the colour of the long-smothered sun. Her hair was too fine and floaty to be real, individual strands of gold dyed dark in the bloody red backwash from Pheiri’s lights.
Persephone stood with her feet braced, arms crossed over her armoured chest, staring up at Pheiri. Her body bristled with weapons, and a heavy rifle dangled from her shoulders. Every few minutes she lowered her gaze and ran it along the line of drones, golden eyes meeting each camera view in turn.
Kagami followed that sweep along, staring back into the giant’s eyes.
She had listened in on the earlier conversation between Elpida and Persephone, but Kagami wasn’t sure what to make of what the revenant had said. Persephone claimed to have lived her true life on a space station — ‘Eden’s Cradle’, but had not provided any further information Kagami could use to identify where she really meant. Names change in millions of years, after all.
Kagami itched to know more. She glanced aside at one of Pheiri’s screens, the one which tracked radio networks and comms signals out there in the chamber. Persephone was broadcasting an open and unencrypted channel identifier, as if awaiting communication.
Elpida and Shilu were talking nonsense — about hope and trust and how maybe Shilu herself was sent by Telokopolis. The Commander was quietly working herself up to believe that her dead city had sent her a pet Necromancer. More messianic bullshit. Kagami sighed. She couldn’t fight it — this was the stuff which kept them alive thus far.
Kagami spoke into Pheiri’s comms network, on the open channel.
“Ask her what’s on the Moon,” she said. “Commander, ask Shilu about Luna.”
Elpida paused, then smiled with indulgence. Victoria sighed and rolled her eyes. Ilyusha let out a little snort, tail lashing back and forth. Ooni knew what was good for her, and did not react.
Kagami clenched her jaw and felt a lump in her throat. She opened her mouth and—
“You mock her,” said Shilu.
Victoria frowned. “Sorry, what? Hey, it’s Kaga, for fuck’s sake. And you don’t know her—”
“She asks after her home, as lost as yours, and you mock her,” said Shilu. “Come on. I’ve been dead for a long time, but I’m not an idiot.”
Victoria blushed and shut her mouth. Ilyusha bared her teeth.
And Elpida said: “You make a very good point. Kagami deserves an apology for that. For now, I’ll ask the question. Shilu, do you know what’s become of the Moon — of Luna?”
Shilu shook her head. “I do not know what is on the Moon. I’ve not seen it since true life. I’m sorry.”
Kagami relegated all the views of the away team to the very edge of her vision. She shoved Victoria off the side completely, into a drop-down menu.
Victoria’s voice hissed across the comms in a private whisper: “Kaga? Kaga, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at—”
Kagami snarled. “Perhaps I’ll spend my time with the Necromancer from now on, Victoria. And do shut up. I’m busy keeping watch to make sure that swarm down there doesn’t scale Pheiri’s face and eat you all. The last thing I need is you rattling on in my ear. Over and out.”
She soft-killed the connection and stared straight ahead, into the green-lit flickering glow of Pheiri’s systems and interior bulkheads. The conversation still hissed on at the edge of her hearing. Victoria did not try again.
After a few moments and several deep breaths, Kagami directed her attention elsewhere.
First she examined a number of the bottom-feeder zombies and terrified waifs who had gathered close to her picket line, sheltering in the lee of Pheiri’s guns. She found that rather depressing; she could only stare into shrunken eyes and half-starved faces for so long, no matter how many of them seemed to be gathering into greater numbers and muttering to each other in hushed voices. Kagami could pick up audio of their conversations if she wanted, but it was all inane — clueless zombies lost in hell, trying to figure out why the world was shaped this way, clumsily swapping stories of where they’d lived and died. A few of them had daubed crude imitations of Elpida’s new insignia on their clothes — the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis, scrawled in blood.
Kagami wasn’t sure if she approved of that. The crescent reminded her too much of moonrise, seen from Earth’s surface through the eyes of a wire-slaved agent.
She left the bottom-feeders behind and adjusted her focus, peering through the shadows and the backwash of red illumination, switching to the ghostly green of night vision, to examine the two highly dangerous groups at the rear of the tomb.
The ones in the right corner — the identical freaks carrying nothing but knives — bored her immensely. They didn’t even talk, communicating via some kind of bespoke sign language. Pheiri was still working on translating that. Kagami was certain it would reveal nothing interesting.
The group in the left corner was more to Kagami’s taste. Heavily armed and all in powered armour, bearing the fruit from dozens of raided tombs. They’d said nothing when the Commander had offered them meat — just taken it and backed away, then harassed Pheiri with their shitty little viruses over their shitty little tight-beam frequencies. Kagami had cackled with laughter when Pheiri had demonstrated a willingness to blow all their heads off, though she had been less pleased that incident had unfolded with Victoria out beyond the hull. The group had settled down after Kagami had shouted at them over the loudspeakers, but now she felt a sadistic urge to start messing with them again. Surely they would try their luck a second time, sooner or later?
There were eight of them, all in powered armour, standing in a quarter-circle with their backs pointed into the corner. They had weapons ready and drawn, held by external servo-arms and shoulder-mounted racks. Most of them ate through feeding ports and nutrition-lines, shoving handfuls of corpse-meat into metal grilles and stuffing it into bags hooked up to their armour. True paranoia, unwilling to even take their helmets off. The distant backwash of Pheiri’s illumination glinted off their visor-plates and the optics on their plasma rifles.
Kagami had already partially broken the encryption on their comms network. She tuned into their common channel via Pheiri’s uplink.
<<—reminds me of the battle of the ultras,>> one of them was saying. <
<
A third voice chuckled. <
<
The first revenant spoke up again. <
A fourth girl spoke up, with a whip crack of authority in her high-pitched voice. <
<
<
The bickering went on and on, cycling back round to some story they’d all heard before; they showed no outward sign of their inner turmoil.
Kagami tuned out again, unimpressed. The conversation between Elpida and Shilu filtered back in — no more interesting than the fools in the corner. Elpida was asking about what might happen when the storm passed, sharing her theory that many Necromancers may come after her, because of Shilu’s failure to carry out her assassination.
Shilu replied: “The faction which sent me want you dead. However, they did botch my insertion, or they were interrupted, or stopped somehow. Lykke was sent to stop me, but she didn’t care for protecting you. More Necromancers may arrive to kill you, you may be right. Or nothing may happen. I cannot say for sure.”
Victoria sighed. “Wish we hadn’t let that bitch get away.”
“Lykke?” Shilu asked.
“Mm,” Elpida grunted in agreement. “Lykke’s escape did deny us potential intel. Not that we could have held her, though.”
Ilyusha hissed. “Fuckin’ try again next time, bitch. Pin that reptile fuck with a stake.”
Elpida smiled. “There is always a next time, Illy, right. However, there is one possibility we haven’t considered. Shilu, what do you think of this? What if the faction which dispatched Lykke didn’t actually know what you had been sent to do, only that you had been sent to do something?”
Shilu blinked. “Hmm. Maybe.”
Kagami rolled her eyes at all this useless speculation; Shilu had a point — all this was maybe, maybe, maybe. They’d know nothing until the storm ended, and then they might all die to a horde of unstoppable Necromancers.
Kagami turned her attention to the screen at her left elbow. Static green text glowed in the shadows, showing the result of Kagami’s analysis of the viruses used by the heavily-armoured revenants in the rear corner of the chamber. She’d already picked the code apart and found it terribly wanting. She scrolled the data back and forth, making a few adjustments, listening to Elpida and Shilu talking about Necromancers and capabilities and how to respond if Elpida was right. Kagami tried not to think about any of that. She’d struggled to pin Lykke with gravitics and electromagnetics — in perfect conditions, with their own pet Necromancer to help. She had just about managed that. But against a dozen of the things? Kagami shoved the thought away. She should not feel fear. The Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon should not fear any metastasised AI.
Kagami focused on the virus code. Eventually she was happy with her work. She toyed with the notion of broadcasting it right back at that tomb-raiding group out there. She’d already broken their encryption after all, maybe she could—
The text cleared itself with a blink. Fresh green letters printed themselves across the screen.
>n
Kagami sighed. “Pheiri, I wasn’t being serious. I’m not going to attack them. If I thought they needed dealing with, I would ask you to shoot them.”
The text refreshed with a blink.
>remote weapons access DENIED
Kagami sighed again, harder. “I’m not asking for fire control. That was a joke! A nothing comment. I’m just … ”
>bored
“Frustrated,” Kagami hissed between her teeth. She tried to keep her voice low, so Amina would not overhear. Heat prickled in her cheeks. Her palms itched. Why was she talking to Pheiri like this? Why was she revealing her dissatisfaction? “Frustrated by … Victoria. She doesn’t … I can’t … I don’t know what to do, how to make her … ”
Kagami trailed off. She did not know what to say. Pheiri’s empty green cursor blinked on the black screen.
>
>
>
Kagami took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She longed for her sensory suspension tank, for dissociation, for the oblivion of sim-jacked sleep, not the groggy inelegance of the real thing. She needed to focus on her role, on what she felt comfortable with — human overwatch control, despite Pheiri’s flawless multi-tasking. She tore her eyes away from the blinking green cursor, putting her anger from her mind, and glanced back at the eight-strong group of power-armoured revenants. They weren’t causing any trouble yet, she supposed, so they could—
They were nine.
An additional figure had joined the eight, standing behind all their gathered backs, shorter than their power-armoured height, slighter than their power-armoured bulk.
A single figure, wreathed from head to toe in shapeless black robes.
For one dizzying moment, Kagami thought it was Serin, carrying out an unplanned, deeply inadvisable, astoundingly stupid covert op. But the figure was too short for Serin. And it had no face — nor anything else.
Kagami’s eyes darted across the screens, redirecting sensor clusters, zooming in on the figure, gathering data. Something was wrong — the robed figure was black, all black, the darkest possible shade against the shadows in the corner, even in visible light, untouched by Pheiri’s red illumination, like a sensor-ghost or a glitch in Pheiri’s systems. It appeared black in night-vision, colourless and cold in infra-red, invisible to nanomachine-density readouts. An echolocation ping turned up empty space. It was simply not there.
It had one arm raised, nothing but black robe with no hand visible inside the sleeve. It was pointing beyond the ring of powered armour.
“Pheiri … ”
Kagami blinked. The figure was gone.
She sat very still in her seat for several seconds, not breathing, heart gone cold. Then she pulled up the footage from her drones and Pheiri’s external cameras, rewinding and reviewing two dozen different feeds. But there was nothing — no figure in black robes, no software ghost, no unexplained smear on a camera lens. All the different feeds agreed. Nothing had been standing there.
“Pheiri,” she said. “Did you see that?”
>?
Kagami could not be corrupted by Necromancer interference, it was impossible. Pheiri’s systems for detecting such things were fully functioning. Elpida had checked them herself with Pheiri’s help, in order to rule out future false positives from Shilu’s proximity. Kagami’s own eyes were functioning properly. She was not crazy or hallucinating, surely? But she had seen something which was not there. Was she going insane, losing her mind? She’d been awake for far too long and now she was—
“I saw it,” said Amina.
Kagami twisted in her chair. Amina’s eyes were wide with fear.
“I saw it too,” Amina repeated. “I saw it. A ghost?”
“A sensor ghost!” Kagami snapped back. Amina flinched. “A glitch, an error! That was nothing. We need to get Victoria to take a look at Pheiri’s eyes.”
Glowing green text scrolled across the screen at Kagami’s elbow.
>n
“Well, explain what we just saw!” Kagami snapped again, gesturing at the screens. “Apparently nothing, and it’s not in your on-board logs either! And what was it pointing at, you … ”
Kagami answered her own question; her eyes followed the angle at which the unexplained figure had been pointing, assisted by scan-lines and trajectories drawn by Pheiri. He was trying to help answer the mystery.
The figure had pointed at the right-hand entrance to the tomb chamber, where Pheiri’s floodlights were blocked by the corner of the corridor.
A zombie was stumbling into the chamber.
The revenant was wild-eyed beneath a tangle of dark hair, matted to her scalp and face with dried blood. Thin and gangly, dressed in scraps of armour and a long tomb-grown coat clutched over her front, there was nothing remarkable about this zombie. She looked as if she had recently been assaulted and beaten — one half of her face was puffy with bruises, several clumps of hair had been torn out, and she walked with a rapid, swinging limp, clutching her free hand across her belly as if wounded, blood dripping from beneath her coat. She was armed with only a pistol, dangling from her fist, but Pheiri’s initial rapid scans showed the weapon was empty.
Up on Pheiri’s hull, Elpida and the others had taken notice, preparing to head down and greet this newcomer. Victoria and Ooni had turned to re-assume their position at the observation post. Vicky’s grenade launcher glinted red in the darkness.
Another mouth for more meat; at least this one was alone, all she’d need was a leg or an arm.
Pheiri’s initial scans also showed—
Kagami re-opened the general comms channel. “Commander! Commander! Do not approach that revenant! Elpida, acknowledge me!”
Victoria sighed. “Kaga—”
But Elpida put up her hand, halting the group. “Kagami, talk to me.”
The zombie stopped far short of the picket line, between two groups of revenants who were still eating. A few eyes turned to her, but there was nothing remarkable about another undead girl in distress. She stared up at Pheiri, up at the red lights reflected off her wet and shining eyes.
Her lips moved. Tears ran down her cheeks.
She was mouthing ‘help’.
“Kagami,” Elpida repeated. “Speak to me. What am I looking at?”
“I, uh … I … I don’t know where to … to start … ”
The warning-red and caution-yellow of Pheiri’s deep scans showed high-explosive charges packed beneath the zombie’s coat, wrapped in shrapnel-jackets of jagged metal. The infernal assemblage was strapped to her torso with a metal cage, welded shut around both arms and beneath her crotch, with several cross-bars of metal piercing her gut and chest, to make the vest impossible to remove. Wires were connected to a box on the front of the vest. Pheiri showed electrical activity inside the box, a cluster of circuits, and a radio receiver.
“Kaga!” Elpida shouted.
“She’s wearing a bomb vest, Commander. That zombie is wired to blow.”
The ragged revenant stumbled closer to the picket line, closer to the bottom-feeders. More of them looked up.
“H-help … help … ” she stammered. Kagami could hear her on the drone audio pick-ups now. Her voice was scratchy and broken, as if she’d been screaming for hours. “They told me come here f-for help, for … help—”
Vicky spluttered. “What?! Why? It’s not like she’s gonna put a dent in Pheiri, we can see she’s right there.”
A new voice crackled across the comms channel, muffled by metal — Serin. “I can put a round in her head, Coh-mander. Say the word and I’ll do it clean. One shot. No—”
Kagami shouted into her headset: “She’s welded into the bomb-vest! And she’s pleading! Listen!”
Kagami routed the zombie’s audio into the general channel.
Shilu stood up, slowly and carefully. Ilyusha spat and hissed, a nasty scowl on her face. Ooni went white and wide-eyed with fear.
Elpida took off at a dead run, heading for Pheiri’s flank, heading for the chamber floor.
“Commander!” Kagami screeched. “Did you not hear what I just—”
“She’s not here to hurt Pheiri,” Elpida replied over the comms. “She’s here to blow up the people we’re feeding.”