Izumi Kagami — Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon, Logician Supreme, Princess and Heroine, Mistress and Mother, the Hub of a Wheel who had once sat atop the sphere of Earth, cradled and beloved by the blessed silver soil of holy Luna beyond the sky, the will and brain and heart of the Moon, no matter the mockery and mediocrity of her father’s court, the one true heir to the throne of Luna, who alone could command the voice of the people, who alone understood the truth of Luna’s privilege and power, who alone could see further than the end of her own upturned nose, blah blah blah, so on and so on, not that her titles and honours and merits made a gnat’s fart of difference anymore — kept her eyes screwed tightly shut, so that she did not vomit down herself.
If Kagami opened her eyes, she would be quickly overwhelmed by the visual cacophony of drone-feeds and data-streams. She would lose her concentration. Vertigo and nausea would take hold. The stew of fresh meat churning in her belly would find a way out of her stomach, up through her throat, and down into her lap.
She’d already lost enough dignity for one day; besides, there was precious little to see with the naked eye.
Not that acting as the nerve centre for a dozen additional drones was any challenge to her. Far from it! Sheer numbers were child’s play — literally, she had been running drone-swarms beyond Luna’s shallow gravity well since she was six years old. In her prime she had orchestrated fleets in the thousands, and supervised hundreds of wire-slaved surface agents at once, puppeting all those cyborg brains without breaking a sweat. True, she had achieved those feats with the assistance of her AI daughters, the cushion of her sensory suspension tank, and the support of the colossal data processing power of Luna’s Defence Intelligence Network. But even reduced as she was — to a snivelling scrap of undead meat, a nanomachine animal wrapped in an armoured coat — Kagami’s skills were as sharp as ever. She was in her element, or at least as close to it as she could hope to attain, down there in the dirt, surrounded by zombies and monsters and cyborg cannibals.
Kagami almost laughed; was she not also a cyborg cannibal now? She could hardly deny that charge, not with her guts happily digesting almost two pounds of fresh meat, her share of the kill, her portion of the bloody harvest from down in the gravekeeper’s chamber.
But she didn’t laugh. She needed to concentrate, or she would vomit.
Kagami focused on the single drone-feed piped directly into her visual cortex.
She nosed the scout-drone forward a final few inches, pushing beyond the shelter of the shattered window in the side of the tomb. The glass was almost three feet thick; huge chunks of it lay scattered in the stony chamber behind the drone, peppered with the buckshot of massive hailstones, half-sunk in pools of greasy, gritty, greyish rainwater. This was undoubtedly the window Iriko had used as an ingress point; the wind and water of the storm had washed away any visual evidence of Iriko’s usual slime-trail, but the drone’s sensor suite picked up familiar biochemical traces. The trail itself resumed about twenty feet up the corridor, deeper than the rain could reach.
Iriko’s slime trail had not been easy to locate. The hurricane had plunged the tomb into premature night, rendering the visible light spectrum almost useless. Kagami navigated the drone mostly by infra-red and laser pulses, limiting any use of the on-board lights. She did not wish to attract undue attention.
Kagami edged the drone as far forward as she dared, just beyond the shattered boundary of the window. The drone’s shields flickered and flared. Bright blue flashes blossomed in the corners of the visual feed, illuminating a few inches of the tomb’s black metal surface to the left and the right. The shields held back the whipping wind, turned away the pounding hail, and formed an umbrella of murky rain.
Kagami hissed between clenched teeth. The light was no better outdoors. She couldn’t see shit out there.
This drone was not one of Kagami’s six silver-grey oblongs, her little miracles with their powerful gravitic engines; she would never have agreed to risk one of those six in the storm. This expendable scout was a bulkier model, about the size of her thigh. It was equipped with only basic gravitics for self-propulsion, armoured like a bristling hog in steel and polymer, and outfitted with a robust suite of sensory equipment — sniffers and probes and gauges and meters. The drone was physically anchored to the rear of the room via a trio of mechanical tentacles, with spikes rammed into the stonework to hold it fast against the grip of the hurricane. It was sturdy, strong, and fast enough to escape determined pursuit, as any good scout should be. Unfortunately it was also astoundingly stupid, compared with even Luna’s most basic of semi-autonomous drones. The thing was horribly verbose, eager to flood Kagami’s visual field with oh-so-helpful data at the lightest touch, as if quivering to be of use. Kagami had spent almost fifteen minutes wrestling with the audio feeds alone, so that the hellish thunder and rumble of the storm would not be rammed directly into her brain stem.
Most of the other drones from the new tomb armoury were little better. None of them were as smart or as capable as her original six, nor equipped with the high-end gravitics she had come to take for granted. But they had proven pliant and made themselves easy enough to adopt. While Elpida and Vicky and the rest of the zombies had gone all dewy-eyed over guns and body armour, Kagami had crash-slaved as many drones as she could manage. She had concentrated on the most heavily-armed combat models, charging them from Pheiri’s reactor, working as fast as she could in the three scant hours since the fight in the gravekeeper’s chamber.
Another two dozen new drones sat piled up inside Pheiri, for later investigation at Kagami’s leisure. She relished that prospect as a welcome break from the meat-plant project, but the pleasure — and the rest! — was sadly deferred, all for this absurd little errand which Elpida insisted was so important.
Kagami would rather be hunkered down inside Pheiri, waiting out the madness beyond the tomb.
She had a dozen heavy combat drones spread out in a mobile, three-dimensional, overlapping cordon, pointed down pitch-dark hallways and squeezed into tight little tunnels, watching blind corners with their sensors and sweeping slow scanner-beaks over the ends of long corridors. Guard dogs in a ring around this risky position deep in the tomb, an early warning system alert to any zombies who might decide to sneak up on Elpida’s precious rump.
Kagami had the visual feeds minimized for now; the drones would alert her if they detected anything relevant, anything moving, or anything anomalous.
Kagami checked the scout-drone’s power draw; at this position it could endure the edge of the hurricane for perhaps seventeen full minutes. More than long enough. She took some preliminary measurements of adjacent wind speed; six inches further forward, the drone’s shields would last only thirty seconds, and the physical tentacle-anchors would likely snap under the strain.
Kagami sighed; she didn’t care that the others could hear her. She had voiced her objections to this expedition strongly enough already. Elpida knew exactly what Kagami thought of this pointless risk.
“We need to invent a new word,” she muttered out loud. “Something beyond ‘hurricane’.”
“God-storm,” Atyle replied from somewhere up ahead. Kagami felt queasy. The paleo had a point.
Kagami extended the necessary sensors outward from the scout-drone, peering out into the storm-winds with radar and infra-red, taking measurements of the wind speed, trying to penetrate the darkness and the precipitation to see anything, anything at all, any hint that the world still existed beyond the tomb.
Hail and rain formed a wall of matter, whipped into a churning vortex. The drone may as well have been blind.
She took audio samples first and ran the results through the drone’s on-board processing, trying to pick out individual sounds. But the drumming of the hailstones and the static of the raindrops told her nothing useful, except that the mysterious black metal of the tomb was tanking the storm’s punishment with surprising tenacity. Kagami had already tried to analyse the metal; she had assumed it was just steel, but the stuff defied her comprehension — a fact she was unwilling to admit to the others, not yet. The metal did not block transmissions, but it was both hyper-dense and extremely flexible. Some nanomachine nonsense, Kagami was certain, but she couldn’t look at the molecular structure to confirm any hypotheses. The tomb was making the most awful din in the storm — creaking and groaning like the boards of an ancient sailing ship in a nautical-themed sim — but it was holding together all the same. Kagami did not need the drone to pick out those noises, she could hear well enough with her own ears. The sounds made her palms sweat and her buttocks tense up and—
Audio spiked — a distant roar, louder even than the impossible hurricane. High-pitched, inhuman, lost in the labyrinth of whirling wind.
The drone picked that up loud and clear. So did Kagami’s ears.
Elpida said: “Kaga?”
“Shut up.”
“You flinched. Are you alright?”
“I know I fucking flinched!” Kagami spat. She kept her eyes screwed up. Her grip tightened on her auspex visor, cradled in her lap. “Shut up, Commander! Let me concentrate or I’m going to lose the drone and vomit all over myself! Shut up!”
Elpida fell silent. Kagami took a deep breath and tried not to shiver.
She concentrated on the drone. She took the necessary readings.
Eight hundred ninety nine … nine hundred … nine hundred … eight hundred ninety eight … gust to nine-oh-five … nine hundred … eight nine nine … nine hundred …
When she had enough data to be certain, Kagami retracted the drone’s sensors out of the storm. She reeled the drone backward on the anchor-tentacles, retreating by about six inches, but then she paused. She examined the rim of wall just beyond the broken window. She peered upward with low-powered radar and magnifying cameras, to confirm her suspicions. A shutter for the broken window lay concealed in a slot above the glass. It was made of the same black metal as the rest of the tomb’s exterior. Kagami reached upward with the drone’s whip-thin mechanical arms and slipped tiny tendrils into the gap. She gripped the shutter and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge.
A deeper examination with the drone’s sensors revealed an outcrop of mechanisms buried in the wall, spider-webbing away deep into the metal bones of the structure.
Kagami sighed, sharp and fed up. More blasted machinery! More hidden circuits! Every wall and nook and floor in this place was lousy with secret innards.
She gave up on the shutter and withdrew the drone. She sent it on a return course back to safety, followed by the two combat models she’d used to guard the flanks. Within a few moments all three were folded back within the security cordon, the angles of her sphere of drones tightened, possible contact surfaces minimised.
Kagami tried to relax, let her stomach settle, then opened her eyes.
A dozen drone-feeds crowded her peripheral vision — low-light, infra-red, and heat-map views of a dozen different corridors, covering every possible angle of approach to this absurd little away-team. Kagami felt like she had become a surface agent herself, down in the dark and the muck, wormed into some forgotten warren full of borged-up monsters and unknown threats. The left side of her field of vision scrolled with data input from her six gravitic drones; she kept those within a few feet of her real body — three orbiting her head in a slow grey halo, three further out in a loose triangle. Their sensors penetrated the walls and floors and ceilings, in case something unexpected tried to creep up on her or blow through the walls or extrude itself from the raw matter of the nanomachine ecosystem.
Beyond the feeds plugged into her visual cortex there was little to see. The hallway was nothing special, just a spot Elpida had chosen as a good place to stop. All was choked with night-like darkness. The hurricane had drowned even the faintest hint of the dead sun outdoors.
Kagami did not want to be here — thirty minutes’ journey from the safety of Pheiri’s armour, high up inside the obvious trap of the tomb pyramid, tucked away in a dark and dingy corridor straight out of a bad horror sim. Not to mention that she was accompanied by a trio of maniacs. To make matters worse, she was only about twenty five feet away from Iriko, separated from the gigantic iridescent blob-monster by nothing but a wide doorway and a stretch of open floor. Talking to Iriko over the radio was one thing, but Kagami was not eager to expose her flesh to Iriko’s sheer inexhaustible hunger.
At least Kagami didn’t have to use her horrible bionic legs; she was comfortably cradled in three of Hafina’s very strong and sturdy arms. The combat android was the only sensible person in the entire group, and Kagami was glad for her protection. Androids and drones were so wonderfully uncomplicated.
Atyle — maniac number one — was standing about fifteen feet ahead of everybody else, probably so she could feel the tongues of the storm on her naked chest, or some other equally primitive nonsense. This corridor was two floors and one staircase upward from the broken window, but the faint lapping and rolling of the storm could still be felt in the currents of the air.
Maniac number two — Ilyusha — was crouched down at the heels of her Commander like a little monkey, dragging the tip of her tail across the wall, clacking her red claws against the floor. Actually, now that Kagami looked at her properly, Ilyusha seemed agitated and restless behind her ballistic shield. She kept making her shotgun go click-click-click, quick little bionic fingers moving over the parts, checking them again and again.
Kagami allowed that Ilyusha was perhaps more sensible than she seemed. Good!
Maniac number three was staring right at Kagami. Unblinking purple lamps hovered in the darkness, framed by flushed brown skin, waiting for a response.
“ … what?” Kagami spat.
Elpida said: “You requested I stop talking while you concentrate. Have you finished?”
Kagami huffed. “Of course I’ve finished. My eyes are open and I haven’t voided my guts all over myself. You don’t have to stare like you’re trying to burn holes through me, Commander.”
Elpida nodded. She glanced away, over at Iriko, then down the corridor. “I’m just concerned about you, Kaga. We’re all tired and stretched thin. You have a veto on this operation, like everyone else. If you want to pull out, you just say so.”
Kagami rolled her eyes. “I’m perfectly capable, just get on with it.”
Ilyusha snorted, down by Elpida’s heels. “Tired as shit.”
“Illy?” Elpida said. “You good too?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ilyusha grumbled. “Let’s get this done. Done!”
“We’re all tired,” Elpida said. “Just a little longer, and then we’ll be finished. Back to Pheiri within the hour.”
Elpida wasn’t exaggerating. Between the rush for the tomb, the holding action at the gates, the mad dash for the gravekeeper’s chamber, the pair of insane Necromancers they had met, the fight with ‘Lykke’, the looting of the armoury, and now this entirely unnecessary probe beyond Pheiri’s support, they’d all been going for hours and hours without a proper break. Ilyusha — for all that she was a dangerously violent borged-up thug — was quite correct. Kagami was ‘tired as shit’.
Elpida said: “Kagami, did you take the readings?”
Kagami huffed again, then adjusted her position in Hafina’s arms. The combat android was unfailingly strong and sturdy and solid, but being carried in a static pose was still uncomfortable. Kagami muttered, “Hafina, you can put me down now, please. Keep one arm on my back for support, another beneath my legs. Yes, that’s it. Thank you. Stop there. Thank you.”
Once she was partially balanced on her own feet again, Kagami lifted her auspex visor and slipped it on over her head. The dark corridor lit up as the auspex offered her a dozen augmented options for night-vision and scanner context. She selected low-light enhancement, but that made Elpida look like a banshee, eyes a-glow, hair a sheet of ghostly white. Kagami killed the night-vision and lived with the darkness. She could still see in the dark anyway. She was a zombie, after all.
Elpida waited patiently.
“Yes,” Kagami said, “my direct readings agree with Pheiri’s assessment. The storm doesn’t seem to be rising above about nine hundred miles an hour, but it’s static, holding a position above the tomb. Which, for those of you who were raised in time periods and places without proper storms, is both impossible and stupid. Hooray for us, we have discovered an entirely new form of fucking bullshit.”
From up ahead, Atyle said: “Nothing is impossible for the Gods.”
Kagami clenched her teeth and bit back an insult.
Elpida nodded slowly. Her purple eyes floated in the gloom, reflecting the faint iridescence which glowed from Iriko in the adjoining room. White hair hung down the back of her armoured coat, still matted and bloodied in one patch of scalp where Lykke had grabbed her during the fist fight. Elpida had not taken time to rest or recover, beyond shedding the bulky carapace suit and allowing Melyn to slap a bandage around the bite wound in her right forearm. The Commander had focused on nothing but getting the rescued zombies inside Pheiri and securing the contents of the armoury.
Kagami understood well enough that Elpida was a gene-jacked super-soldier, even before being resurrected into her new nanomachine body. But she could not accept how Elpida was so full of energy, so bright-eyed, so alert, especially not after the fistfight with Lykke. Everyone else was exhausted. Even Ilyusha was on edge, and Atyle was clearly more wacked-out than usual, off with the fairies and far away. But Elpida? Our dear Commander? Walking on clouds, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like she’d spent all night getting her brains fucked out. But this had nothing to do with sex, oh no. Elpida was elated because she’d finally gotten her redemption, at gunpoint.
The fury of the storm filled the brief silence, a great crashing of static haze upon the tomb, a deep drumming of fist-sized hailstones, a howling whip and whirl of wind around corners of black metal.
Another distant roar broke the hurricane’s steady beat — a high-pitched screech, lost beyond the wind.
Kagami bit her bottom lip to stop from flinching again. Ilyusha hissed between her teeth, then spat on the ground. Atyle just stared at nothing — reading the future in motes of dust, for all Kagami knew.
Elpida said: “Did you manage to take any readings of that? Did you see what’s making it?”
Kagami snorted. “I have no idea, Commander. Visibility is nil, indoors and out. Audio doesn’t match anything I can make sense of. And frankly, I don’t want to see whatever is making that sound, because I don’t want it to see me. I suggest we stay away from the windows.”
The mysterious roaring had started about three hours ago, while they’d all been busy looting the armoury and trying to pry Eseld’s jaws off Elpida’s radius. At first the calls had sounded more like buildings crashing through the impossibly strong hurricane winds, but by now it was unmistakably a voice, like the war-cry of some ancient beast striding through the storm.
Elpida said: “Any speculations?”
Kagami frowned. “What? What, Commander?”
“Speculations. Idle thoughts. Anything at all, doesn’t have to be backed up by data. I’m asking for your opinion, Kagami. What do you think is making that sound?”
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Ilyusha hissed: “Giant monster. Fucking shit.”
Kagami stared at Elpida’s purple eyes; perhaps the Commander was going even more insane than before. Perhaps her miraculous redemption at Eseld’s hands had finally sent the Commander over the edge and falling toward stark raving madness. Kagami tried to hold Elpida’s gaze. It was not easy.
Eventually Kagami shrugged. “Maybe it’s the graveworm. Or perhaps Ilyusha here is correct, maybe it’s something that would normally stay away from a graveworm, taking advantage of the storm. How am I supposed to guess, Commander? Nothing should be able to survive nine hundred mile an hour winds! Whatever it is, I do not want to know, and I do not want it to know me.”
Elpida nodded. “Alright. Thank you, Kagami. Did you pick up any visuals out there? Any buildings, anything still standing? Anything where other revenants might be able to survive the storm?”
“No! How many times do I have to say this? Commander, I don’t know how to make this clear. Visibility is nothing. Nine hundred miles an hour is not survivable by anything short of underground bunkers and low-Jovian orbitals. And I doubt the nanomachine processes were disgorging structures that well armoured.”
Ilyusha tapped the wall with the tip of her tail. “‘Cept this!”
Kagami sighed and cleared her throat. “Yes, except the tomb. The material this pyramid is made from defies explanation. The wind should have ripped it apart by now, or at least pulled off big chunks of it. But it all seems intact. Nothing is denting it, either.”
Elpida nodded. “You think the tomb can survive the hurricane?”
Kagami shrugged. “The main structure, the walls, the floors, everything made from the black metal itself? Certainly. But the innards? That window down there is shattered, letting in the wind and the rain. The wind is ripping at the insides, the rock and the regular metal, the plastics, all that. The wind is getting in and doing damage, slowly but surely.”
“Did you find the shutter?”
“Yes, yes,” Kagami huffed. “There’s a shutter, of course I was correct about that. This place is designed to be sealed up, though for what purpose I cannot imagine. Storms like this cannot be a regular occurrence.”
“And?” Elpida prompted. “Did you get it shut?”
Kagami huffed harder. “No, I can’t close it. The wind is going to continue to eat away at the stone and masonry.”
Elpida raised her eyebrows. “Do you need to use more than one drone? Better gravitics?”
“A hundred drones would not suffice, no. The shutter is wired up to some kind of internal mechanism, like everything else in this place. Commander, everywhere I look there’s more machinery behind these walls. This whole structure is lousy with buried systems, network infrastructure, access points, the works.” Kagami gestured to the wall of dark stone to her left, lips curling with disgust. “This? This dead exterior, this is a lie. This thing, we keep calling it a tomb, but it’s not. It’s a giant dormant machine. And I have no idea what it does. Except the bit that resurrects zombies, I suppose.”
Elpida nodded. “Right, Pheiri agrees with that too. Kagami, if you plugged your wrist-uplink into one of the tomb’s access points, would you be able to close that shutter?”
Kagami snorted, then saw the serious look on Elpida’s face. “Why? Are you planning to set up camp here?”
Elpida said, “If we’re going to be stuck in here for a while, we need to seal the structure. Yes or no, Kagami. Talk to me.”
Kagami resisted the urge to gulp. She raised her chin. “I can build very robust firewalls, but if I’m plugging myself into the tomb, I want an entire server bank of fail safes. Especially with the gravekeeper downstairs. That thing would turn my mind inside out, and I’m not afraid to admit it. We’d have more luck asking that to close the windows for us.”
“Understood. If—”
“And even if I was willing, I sure as fuck would not be doing it up here, away from Pheiri, exposed. If you want me to try, we need to be under the protection of his guns, not relying on me for a fucking drone cordon.”
“Kaga—”
“Commander,” she snapped, temper finally fraying beyond relief. “What are we doing up here?”
“Checking on the storm with our own eyes.” She nodded to the right. “And making sure Iriko is okay. I know you don’t like this, Kagami, but if you feel unsafe, we can pull the plug. The moment you feel your drone cordon is not enough, we move. Has that moment arrived?”
Kagami ground her teeth. “No.”
“Good. Thank you, Kagami. Now, how close can we get to that smashed window before the wind becomes dangerous? Can we get within visual range, on foot?”
Kagami squinted. “What? Commander, I’m not getting any closer to that storm.”
“Not you, Kaga. Me,” Elpida said. “I want to see the storm with my naked eyes.” She gestured behind her. “Atyle too.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“Kaga, please. How close can we get?”
“Oh, fine!” Kagami spat. “Yes, you can probably get visual without being tossed about like a fucking rag doll. Down the stairwell and ten feet to the left. That should give you a nice enough view. Enjoy the sights, Commander! Don’t let the wind pluck out your eyeballs!”
“Thank you—”
“Wait!” Kagami snapped. “Wait a second.” She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Perhaps she would get more sense out of the other one. “I want to talk to Howl, please. Can you spare a moment for that, before you go stick your arse into the wind?"
Elpida blinked; a toothy grin twisted her face in a new direction. Kagami tried not to flinch away from the instant transformation.
“I’m always here, Moon girl,” Howl purred. “What’s up?”
“Howl,” Kagami said. This was better. Howl was at least sane. “Do you agree with Elpida putting herself in danger like this? You agree with this nonsense?”
“Sure do,” Howl purred. “I wanna get a look at this sky-fucker for myself. If this thing’s tryin’ to murder us, I gotta stare it down. Don’t sweat, Moon girl. We’ll be right back. Ten minutes, that’s all.” She winked and made a kissy face. “I’ll miss you too.”
Kagami crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine. But make sure she doesn’t throw herself out of the window.”
Howl cocked her head — Elpida’s head — and narrowed her eyes. “Why would she do that?”
Kagami snorted. “Am I the only one who’s noticed the death wish lately?”
Down at Elpida’s heels, Ilyusha let out an uncomfortable grumble; her red-tipped tail lashed at the air.
“See?” Kagami grunted. “I’m not the only one.”
Howl grinned. “Whatever. Nobody’s jumping out of nothing.”
Elpida blinked again, back in control; Howl’s expression vanished.
“Five minutes,” Elpida said. “Illy, Atyle, you’re with me. Hafina, stick here and guard Kaga.” Elpida tapped her own headset. “Kagami, you spot anything moving—”
“I’ll scream and scream until my head falls off, yes. Get on with it, go on. Off you go. Don’t get brained by a hailstone.”
The trio departed, heading for the stairwell, off to stare into a storm which would flay the flesh from their skulls if they peered too far into the whirling abyss. Elpida went first, submachine gun covering the corner. Atyle strolled as if beneath the sun, unarmed once again. Ilyusha went last, guarding the rear, slinking off behind her ballistic shield. She shot an uncomfortable wink back at Kagami, then stepped out of sight, tail whipping behind.
Pointless. They were still inside Kagami’s drone cordon. She could protect them much better than their own guns.
Kagami leaned back into the support of Hafina’s arms. She tried to relax.
The storm raged on beyond the walls of the tomb, crashing and howling, roaring and hissing, drumming with hailstones like cannonballs, turning the air itself into a void of death. The black metal of the tomb creaked and groaned incessantly. Kagami hated that. Despite her readings and measurements and the data she had collected, she was struck with an irrational and irritating terror. Would the whole tomb burst asunder and expose her to the raw fury of the storm? What if the roof peeled away, layer by layer, forcing them all down underground? What if the whole structure collapsed atop her head? Even her gravitic drones could not endure that.
Kagami had never been beneath a storm before.
She had watched countless hurricanes from up in orbit, of course, tracked them across the Atlantic Ocean and observed all the details as they slammed into the southern coasts and vast seawalls of NorAm, assaulting the fortress-like concrete bulwarks which kept those coastal cities from death by drowning. She’d experienced a few via wire-slaved surface agents — nothing much to note, really, as her attention had always been on the missions and the tasks, too busy to mind the weather. She had weathered plenty of storms inside sims, too; big dark spooky storms were a favourite in many genres. She’d passed the night inside more than one simulated haunted house, while a picturesque thunderstorm had crackled and flashed beyond the creaking walls.
But never with her physical body. Never with the shaking and the quivering. Never with the crash and roar and groan about her own ears, unable to shut it all out or exit the simulation.
She wasn’t afraid of the storm, she told herself. She wasn’t afraid of the storm.
Kagami cast a wary glance at Iriko’s iridescent bulk through the connecting doorway. The giant blob was sleeping, or at least resting, exhausted by her ordeal chasing Lykke. Kagami watched for a moment, making sure that Iriko wasn’t about to start galumphing toward her. Then she cleared her throat and glanced up at Hafina’s dark helmet instead.
“Sometimes I think you and I are the only sane ones here,” she said.
Hafina looked down at Kagami — or at least angled her helmet downward, blank and eyeless — but said nothing. Kagami looked away. The noise of the storm and the creaking of the tomb rushed back to flood the silence.
Kagami cycled through the drone-feeds from her outer cordon, staring down dark corridors inside the blank metal innards of the tomb. At least two hundred revenants had stampeded into the safety of the pyramid after Pheiri had ended his blockade of the entrance; there was a lot of room in here, more than enough for several hundred zombies to keep well out of each other’s way, but Kagami wasn’t taking any chances. She had detected some furtive movement on their way up here, the occasional echo of a shout or a distant voice, the bang of a door or the stomping of feet. But no gunshots or screams. The godlike power of the hurricane had forced a brief truce among the cannibals and cyborgs.
The storm howled on and on and on. Kagami’s breath clogged up her throat. Her drones had nothing to say.
Eventually Kagami turned her attention back to Iriko. She flickered through the visual inputs on her auspex visor, then sent one of her six grav-drones into the adjoining room for a closer look. She spent a few moments cataloguing Iriko’s burn wounds and examining the spots where her armour plates had melted. The damaged patches did seem smaller than before. Elpida had slung a bag full of meat into Iriko’s mass when they had arrived at this position; perhaps the blob was making good use of the nanomachines.
A tight-beam radio connection licked out from Iriko like a questing tongue, touching the grav-drone, then tracing the control back to Kagami.
<
Kagami did her best not to shudder or flinch. <
Iriko said nothing more. Kagami let out a sigh of relief.
“Sometimes I wish you weren’t so taciturn when you’re on duty like this,” Kagami muttered, talking to Hafina. “You talk well enough when we’re inside Pheiri.”
“I’m concentrating,” Hafina said, muffled inside the black angles of her helmet.
“Right. Right, of course. Very sensible.”
Kagami swallowed a much worse flavour of sigh, choked down the venom of her pride, and pinged Pheiri’s comms from her auspex headset.
Victoria answered with shameless speed.
<
<
A long pause, filled with the static of the storm.
Kagami could perfectly picture the stupid little confused frown, followed by the blossoming realisation on Victoria’s face. The smug smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. Her inevitable attempt to suppress the grin — or not, seeing as Kagami was not currently in the room with her to scowl at her idiotic gurning. Kagami pursed her lips, burning with fresh fury at the expression she knew Victoria must have worn that very instant.
Vicky said, <> A hint of mockery entered her tone. <
<
Vicky sighed. <
<
<
Kagami was about to argue, but she realised this was probably correct. She snorted instead. <
<
<
Another long pause. Vicky cleared her throat, then said, <
Kagami swallowed a bolus of poison.
She had no idea how to manage Vicky these days, not since they’d almost fought in that haze-like period of blinding hunger, before Elpida had finally given up and decided to hunt for fresh meat. Some nights she and Vicky shared the same bunk; some nights Victoria held her from behind, though Kagami still did not know what any of that meant, or how to turn around and return the gesture. On other days she couldn’t stand the look on Victoria’s face — the easy smiles and adoring eyes she saved for Elpida. Those looks made her want to slap Victoria across the cheeks. Kagami had no time or energy to spare on figuring out the complexities of this dirt-eater nonsense. She was too busy with her work, with bioengineering the meat-plants — or was it nano-engineering, or both? Whichever, Victoria was a distraction.
But Vicky’s voice drowned out the storm.
<
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Victoria sighed a very big sigh. <
Serves her right for almost shooting Elpida in the head, Kagami thought. But she didn’t say that part out loud. Victoria wouldn’t like it — and she would like the loyalty to Elpida too much.
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Victoria paused, then cleared her throat. <
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Pheiri handed Kagami a carefully scrubbed feed of one of his front visual pick-ups, so as not to overwhelm her with data.
Shilu was right where they’d left her.
She was sitting on the metal floor of a wide corridor, crossed-legged and straight-backed, about thirty feet in front of Pheiri. She hadn’t re-donned her human disguise. She still looked like a scarecrow made of black iron, topped by a pale oval of plastic face. Pheiri had her covered with enough firepower to blow her to pieces, whatever she was made of. Serin was crouched on the front of Pheiri’s armour, locked in a one-sided staring contest with the Necromancer.
Shilu was not staring back; her eyes were closed.
Eventually, Vicky said, <
<
Vicky sighed, matching Kagami’s musing tone. <
<>
Vicky fell silent for a second. <>
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Kagami cut off. She’d said too much.
Victoria lapsed into a long silence. Kagami prepared for the teasing — without Elpida we what, Kaga? We wouldn’t survive? We wouldn’t stick together? Don’t you want her to screw you until you scream as well, Kaga? Shut up! Shut up!
But then Victoria said, <
<>
Vicky sounded surprised. <
<
Vicky laughed, perhaps too glad for the change of subject — or maybe too happy that Kagami trusted Elpida. Kagami wanted to spit.
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Vicky sighed again, but differently now. <
Kagami snorted, not convincing even to herself. <
<> Vicky said. <
Kagami’s cheeks burned; she and Victoria had not spoken like this face-to-face in weeks, not in the lab room, not in the bunks, not even in bed, pressed up against each other through their clothes. What was this? Kagami felt as if she’d left familiar hand-holds far behind. She opened and closed her mouth several times, suddenly very glad that Hafina could not listen to the private tight-beam connection.
Vicky started to laugh — but then Kagami was saved by the storm, or by what hid within it.
Another roar rode the waves of the hurricane, still distant but so much closer than before. This roar was so loud it made Kagami’s bowels quiver and drew a gasp from her throat. In the corner of her eye, Iriko’s iridescent skin shuddered in disturbed sleep. Hafina adjusted her footing.
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Kagami snorted. <
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A new voice cut into the radio — Elpida, speaking out loud on a separate channel: “Kagami, we’re coming back up. Haf, you too. Hold fire.”
“Confirmed,” Kagami grunted. Then, to Vicky: <
She didn’t wait for a reply.
Thirty seconds later the trio of madwomen reappeared around the corner ahead, looking windswept and rumpled. Elpida’s white hair had been whipped back by the power of the storm, though she could not have approached within fifty feet of the window. Atyle was wide-eyed as if she’d taken a huge hit of custom drugs. Only Ilyusha showed a borderline sensible response — cowed and quiet, hurrying ahead on her clicking claws, to crouch in the relative shelter of Hafina’s side. Ilyusha peered into the room where Iriko slept, then waved hesitantly at the massive bulk of the blob-like revenant.
Elpida and Atyle rejoined the group.
“Well?” Kagami demanded. “Did you get your naked eye look into the storm? Tell you anything useful? No? Didn’t think so.”
Atyle answered: “Godlike fury, but not divinely ordained. No clear meaning in the maelstrom.”
“And what does that mean?” Kagami snapped.
Elpida said, “Just a theory we were discussing. Kagami, how long do storms like this usually last?”
“Hurricanes?” Kagami shrugged. “A week? But real hurricanes move fast, and more importantly they move over water. That thing up there is not remotely natural. Technically it’s not even a hurricane. I wasn’t joking when I said we need to invent a new word.”
“How long do you think it could stay in one position like this?”
Kagami spread her hands in an exasperated shrug. How the hell should she know?
Elpida took a deep breath, looked up and down the corridor, then said: “Are you still confident in the security of your drone cordon?”
“Yes, of course I am. I know what I’m doing, Commander, this is simple stuff. Why?”
“I’d like to talk for a minute or two, right here. Are you comfortable with that, Kaga?”
Elpida’s purple eyes burned in the darkness, focused on Kagami. A hard lump grew in Kagami’s throat.
She was not scared of Elpida, not really, of course not. Elpida was her Commander, and despite all of Kagami’s doubts and disagreements, Elpida always seemed to stay true to that. Besides, Ilyusha and Hafina were right here; Ilyusha even straightened up as well, frowning at Elpida with a curious look on her face. Atyle seemed less surprised, but she raised an eyebrow. This was not some secret plan to drag Kagami off into the dark for a quiet murder, or else Elpida would be doing it alone.
“Commander,” Kagami said slowly. “We are in the middle of a tomb, surrounded by storm, and zombies, and … and … and whatever is out there, making that roaring sound. We need to return to Pheiri. ASAP. Or have you finally taken leave of your senses?”
“ASAP, agreed,” Elpida said. “But first, if you’re comfortable, I want your counsel.”
Kagami boggled at her. “My— my what? My counsel?”
“Yes.”
“About what? And why here? What is all this cloak and dagger about?”
“Yeah!” Ilyusha barked. “Elpi, what’s up?”
Elpida held out a gentle hand. “About what? Several things. Theories about the storm. Theories about the zombies we rescued. Theories about Shilu. Why here? Well, because here is about as far away from Shilu as we can get right now.”
Kagami stared for a moment, speechless. Ilyusha barked a laugh. “Right! Right yeah!”
“Ahhhhhhh,” purred Atyle. “Clever, clever, clever.”
Kagami snapped, “Is that the whole reason for dragging me up here? Is that why we’re standing here, exposed, in the fucking dark? Seriously?”
“No,” Elpida said with a soft shake of her head. “We needed to take readings of the storm, because we need to know what is going on. There was no subterfuge or trick to that, I promise. But I do want to ask your counsel, and this is our best option for making sure that Shilu can’t overhear.”
“She might be plugged into the tomb itself, Commander! We can’t be sure of anything!”
Kagami glanced at the camera feed in the corner of her auspex visor, still showing Shilu sitting cross-legged before Pheiri. She hadn’t moved an inch.
“It’s not perfect, yes,” Elpida said. “But it’s our best option.”
Kagami shook her head. “Why me, Commander? What is this about?”
Elpida smiled. Her eyes glowed, purple irises catching the minuscule backwash of light from Kagami’s auspex visor.
“Because, Kagami, you are the most cynical, suspicious, and paranoid member of our cadre. And right now I have need of cynicism, suspicion, and paranoia.”