Sky was awake.

Sky had been awake for a while, but she was going nowhere fast.

Sky felt like shit on a shingle cooked over a tire fire — and she should know, she’d eaten worse.

Her head pounded like a jackhammer fuck, threatening her with waves of sticky, cloying nausea, though she kept her eyes closed tight and her body lying still. Every shallow breath strained at a mass of deep bruises across her chest and belly, worse than any beating since her teenage street-rip years. She counted three fractured ribs between her own stuttering breaths, and maybe a couple more in the blurred pain between. Her neck was stiff with whiplash, her back was sore with pulled muscles, and the rear of her skull had bloomed with a cluster of nasty bumps, like some gutter trash had been bouncing her off a pavement. Her nose and throat felt raw and rough, burned by her own stomach acid from too much vomiting, but also by some violation which lurked at the edge of uneasy dreams. She’d spent hours drifting among nightmares of smothering and choking and drowning; she could almost still feel the liquid death coating the inside of her lungs and bloating her stomach.

Her eyes were crusted shut. Her memory was a swamp.

Sky counted her blessings. This was far from the worst condition in which she had ever woken up. The thin mattress on which she lay was clearly a bit shit, but it was better than the alternatives.

At least she was breathing with her own lungs, with fabric and air against her skin. She could wiggle her toes and clear her own throat, though the former had gone numb and the latter hurt like she’d been throat-fucked by a suspended animation rig. Her pain level was high, but not urgent, not panic-inducing, not the kind of pain which demanded dampeners and synth-opiates. And it was infinitely preferable to the blurry pins-and-needles of nerve disconnection, while her flesh hung open and some vital part of herself regrew in a glass tube for six weeks. She couldn’t feel the tell-tale tug of IV lines or electro-hookups in her arms or legs, nor hear the beep and whirr of medical machines, nor smell the faecal reek of some field hospital in a rotting mountain hovel.

The air was filled with the static of a rainstorm and the howl of high winds, muffled beyond distant walls.

The deep throb of a powerful engine seemed to keep time with Sky’s own heartbeat.

Sky groaned involuntarily, then clenched her teeth — then groaned again. Even her jaw was bruised. Somebody had worked her over nasty style, somebody who leered down through her memories with a mouth full of bloody teeth and sunshine hair and white—

Sky hissed and tried to spit.

A beating? Ha! This was nothing. Even as a kid a beating hadn’t been enough to stop her, and she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was seasoned, she was fire-hardened, she was a rabid Black Dog spat up from the darkest corner of Sol’s entrails. Whoever had pinned her down and knocked her about was going to regret not putting a round in her skull. This wouldn’t stop her.

Sky had once spent three months in a tube of gel after the battle of Hellas City, paralysed so she wouldn’t vomit out her own digestive system before what was left of the Black Dog’s med-techs could purge the designer plague leftovers from her body. Down on Earth she’d once taken a shotgun blast to the chest, right into the armpit seam of her armour — a booby-trapped door in some abandoned Euro-trash village; the surgery to keep her alive had lasted six hours, with plenty of anaesthetic but not the mercy of unconsciousness. She’d taken head wounds and gut wounds and broken bones — and even briefly lost an eye — in half the Outer System conflicts of the last thirty years. And further back, when she’d left home, her real home, the one to which she could never return, she’d lived in the hold of one of the last lifters off-planet, no showers or hot water or changing out of her voidsuit for eight long months, stewing in her own recycled piss. And before that there were the days she didn’t like to think about too often, the cold hungry days after her world had fallen apart for the first time—

“Stop,” she hissed through bruised lips. “Stop. Stop thinking shit that doesn’t matter. Move. Now. Move or die.”

Sky opened her eyes, which took her a while. Her vision was blurry with sleep, pain, and exhaustion. She raised her right arm and rubbed her eyes, then winced — her face was puffy with bruises. She forced herself to rub and blink and squint until her vision cleared.

Deep shadows, metal walls, narrow bunks.

Sky’s memories began to consolidate. She knew where she was — still in the little bunk room where the others had dumped her, lying on one of the bottom bunks. Nobody else seemed to be around, but Sky could hear soft breathing from behind a curtained alcove.

Sky let herself vegetate for a few minutes, gathering her thoughts, flexing her legs to feel out her bruises.

This wasn’t the first time Sky had awoken since she’d been carried into this war machine, whatever it was. She had drifted in and out of consciousness for hours, perhaps the better part of a day or two. She recalled being carried through the dark corridors of the tomb, then tossed onto a slab in some kind of infirmary, cramped and crowded and awash with blood; she remembered a pixie-faced medical bot probing her to make sure she wasn’t broken inside, stitching up a few cuts and slathering gunk on a few gashes. She remembered being carried in here — she’d woken up and asked where she was, and one of the women had said, ‘Safe. Inside Pheiri. We’ve got you, zombie.’

Zombie, huh?

Sky also remembered the gravekeeper’s chamber, though that was fuzzier. She remembered vomiting — lots of vomiting — and coughed softly at the crawling sensation in her oesophagus. She remembered something liquid being forced down her throat, squirming and writhing and bloating up to fill her innards. She remembered—

Lykke!

Sky jerked upright, wincing and hissing through the pain, swinging her legs off the side of the bunk. Her heart was racing, her skin was drenched with sudden sweat, and her hands were shaking. Her chest screamed with her own heaving breaths. The effort of sitting up made her vision blur and spin.

She clutched the side of the bunk so hard that the metal dug into her palms.

“Fuck,” she hissed. “Fuck that— fucking bio-job bitch. Fuck. Fuck her. Fucking gonna— fuck. Kill her. I’ll fucking kill her.”

Sky’s memories were clear now: from the ‘resurrection chamber’, the journey through the tomb, the shock and awe of it all, beside Eseld and Cyneswith and that full-body plastimetal cyborg, Shilu, and then—

Lykke.

The cloud of flies which she’d forced down Sky’s throat. Sky had drowned in little wings and greasy bloated bodies and filth and fluids and—

Sky was shaking.

“Snap out of it, bitch,” Sky hissed at herself. “Wise up. Get it together.”

Sky slapped herself across the face, regardless of her bruises. The pain made her eyes water, but she clenched every muscle until she stopped shaking. After a moment she leaned to one side, gathered a glob of saliva in her mouth, then let it slowly drip to the floor.

Her spit was tainted with the pinkish froth of her own blood, but not with any white — no fly wings, no little crushed bodies, no remnant of Lykke’s violation.

Sky’s vision blurred with relief; she wiped the glob of spit across the metal decking with one foot. She sagged toward the thin mattress again, then shook her head and made herself sit up. She was acting like some civ-levy conscript retard.

She was alive, wasn’t she? What else mattered?

Or not alive, technically.

Sky examined herself. She was wrapped in a scratchy blue blanket and dressed in a grey t-shirt, with matching shorts — clothes from the tomb armoury. She lifted the hem of the t-shirt and found a very impressive patchwork of bruises, already turning a familiar mess of yellows and greens and browns, punctuated by the clean white of bandages and dressings, where Lykke’s claws had cut into her torso. She probed carefully until the pain brought tears to her eyes. She had a little chorus of broken ribs in there too; she needed to make sure to breathe deeply, despite the pain, or she might risk pneumonia or a collapsed lung.

Was that right? How did these new bodies work, anyway?

She had all her limbs, her senses worked right, and she wasn’t tied up or chained down or studded with fresh incisions from organ-raiding. She pulled her dark hair into a twist over one shoulder to keep it out of the way, then glanced around the room and asked herself ‘what next?’

Sky almost laughed.

She was dead, right? She vaguely recalled her own death, though it didn’t seem important now — a stupid death, an idiot’s death, blown to pieces by a bomb in a shopping mall, planted by some snot-nosed Eurasian terrorist, in a country she barely identified with, on a planet that she barely knew. Now that shit-hole planet was dead too, wiped off and repopulated by nanomachine zombies and plastic monsters. Sky was hundreds of millions of years in the future, rebuilt from fairy dust and bullshit.

Sky looked at her own hands. Her skin looked real enough — the same ruddy-red brown she’d been born with — and young again. The left side was high quality bio-polymer, almost exactly the same as real skin; she found a seam which ran roughly down the left side of her body, over her left shoulder and the side of her neck, down to her left thigh and her groin. Was that where the bomb blast had torn her apart? Resurrection had patched her up with spare parts.

And then, after resurrection, Sky had almost been raped to death by some bio-mod monster dressed like a street slut, then rescued by this unknown crew and taken inside this machine, ‘Pheiri’, whatever that meant.

The world was over, but Sky was still here.

“Again, huh?” she said — then laughed at the perversity of it all. The laugh made her ribs hurt, but she didn’t care.

Sky knew she should feel horror, or shock, or some kind of dislocation. Wasn’t that what normal people felt when the world ended? True, she’d been surprised and a little overawed by the sight from the top of the tomb — all that ruin and wreck, that choked-out sun, the mile after mile of destruction. But she’d gone numb, nice and quick, just like always.

She’d been through this so many times already. First her parents had died when she was eleven years old, killed by Jovian Security in some botched response to a terrorist attack which wasn’t even real. Ten years later, after a decade of street life, Sky had lived through Ganymede’s Murder, up close and personal. Then had come the Black Dogs, for seventeen long years; real comrades, real purpose, real pay, and nice warm squirming meat in her bunk every night — women, toyboys, bio-mod freak shows, meat-dolls, whatever she fancied. But then February Twice had taken the Dogs down the gravity well, in-system, and Mars had eaten them alive. Sky was just lucky enough to end up as gristle, spat out after being chewed up. After all that, peace had broken out and fucked up everything. The Dogs had disbanded after Hellas; there were so few of them left, February Twice was dead, along with all of Sky’s friends. The Pavonis Mons Commune had accepted her readily enough, because they were desperate for experienced soldiers by then — sadsack civvies who’d sat out the war and knew they were next on the chopping block. That period of Sky’s life had lasted a lot longer than the three-month contract she’d signed. She’d stayed on when the contract ran out, because she’d found somebody she liked to be with, a Martian called Onira. Onira had two kids and always knew the right things to say, even when Sky couldn’t talk. Sky had walked the walls and carried a gun by day and gone home to a real home at night, and not fired one shot the whole time.

She tried not to think about Onira. Made her weak.

Four years and then that had ended too; Pavonis Mons had been crushed like all the other experiments in ‘radical self-government’. Mars was a sick bucket of bad memories by then, so Sky had left for the biggest shit hole in Sol — Earth, glittering with dreams, with thick greenery, with ancient culture. Earth’s promises had turned to ash in the grinding reality of being just another merc from nowhere. She’d settled into a high-risk security job on the edge of the Eurasian Republic, spending her pay check mostly on booze and meat-body sex-dolls. Her co-workers had been pussies and whiners, nothing compared to the larger-than-life giants of the Black Dogs. Now and again some pencil-neck journalist would track her down to ask questions about Ganymede, and less often about the Mars Unification War; once she got in legal trouble for breaking a journo’s jaw with the butt of a rifle. Why ask her? Why not some other Gany-diaspora dipshit?

She’d felt dead already. A walking husk. She’d considered going back to Jovian space — not Europa or Io, those cunts could rot, but to one of the bigger station habitats, somewhere she could lose herself in the crowds, somewhere people would sound like her. But Earth’s gravity had sucked her down. And then she’d slipped up one day. Boom! Sky’s world had ended in one bright flash.

Sky’s world had ended so many times. What was different about this one?

Lykke?

Sky had never seen anything like Lykke before. She’d gone up against some pretty extreme bio-mods on Mars, and witnessed far worse things out past Titan, on old habs and empty stations and burrowed-out rocks. But Lykke broke all the rules of even the most messed up bio-mods; she was closer to some of the nanomachine nightmares Sky had seen at Ganymede’s Murder.

Sky noticed her hands started to shake when she thought about Lykke again, so she stopped.

World’s dead, and you got beaten up. So what? Keep moving.

Sky glanced around the bunk room; she needed a plan, an exit, and fast. The crew here hadn’t hurt her, but that didn’t mean much. Sky needed to arm up and learn the lay of the land. She wasn’t sure what she was even on board; the cramped bunks reminded her of a void-ship, or a bird farm, but the noises were all wrong for the former, and the deck wasn’t rolling, so it probably wasn’t the latter.

And she could still hear the distant drumming of heavy rain and high winds. Was that the storm they’d seen earlier? It sounded big.

Sky’s eyes passed over the bunk to her left, then paused and went back.

Guns?

The bottom bunk to Sky’s left was stacked with guns, armour, and equipment. She stared for several moments, caught between disbelief and confusion.

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The crew of this machine had left her unsecured in a room full of firearms?

Sky climbed to her feet. This took several abortive attempts, a lot of wincing and grunting and gritting of teeth, and much silent bitching. Her back was turbo-fucked, her stomach quivered whenever she moved, and her neck twinged if she turned her head to the right. She almost ended up on the floor, gripping the edge of the next bunk up, shamed by her weakness. She thumped herself in one thigh, swallowed a scream, and felt tears of pain run down her cheeks.

Eventually she got herself upright as best she could, bare feet on the metal floor. She stood there for minutes — way too long, if she didn’t want to be found — swaying and panting, until she felt strong enough to hobble forward.

She shuffled over to the impromptu armoury laid out on a bunk.

None of it was booby-trapped. No wires, no pressure plates, no tell-tale flicker of IR beams. Sky experimented by poking a bullet-proof vest, but nothing happened. She nudged at a boot, then reached out and wiggled the butt of a submachine gun. Still nothing.

She was sorely tempted by the massive coilgun which lay one bunk over, but she wouldn’t be able to lift the thing with her wounds. Firing it would probably knock her out. Instead she picked up an automatic handgun, something light and easy, chemical propellant with lead bullets. Primitive, but reliable. She slid the magazine out and stared, then smothered a laugh. The gun was loaded! She quietly pushed the mag back into place, made sure the safety was on, and boggled at the weapon.

The crew had left her in a room full of loaded guns, body armour, and high-tech combat gear.

They were morons.

Wait, no. Sky shook her head at her own naivety — then winced again, ow. The rescue crew, whoever they were, they’d driven Lykke off, right? So they couldn’t all be complete fools. They were well-equipped and highly skilled, must be hard as nails. Maybe they were so beyond being threatened that leaving an unknown alone with a bunch of guns didn’t matter. Yeah, that was probably it. Bitches probably had grav-plates and personal shield implants, like Sky used to back on Mars.

Or maybe this was just the way things were done here. Maybe they trusted her, despite not knowing her?

Sky stared at the gun. She didn’t know what to do. She’d been thinking of arming up and escaping, but she was too wounded and bruised to get into this gear.

What if they’d wanted her to find the guns?

When Sky had been twenty one years old, just another refugee crammed into a lifter hold among the other last-outs off Ganymede’s smouldering corpse, a woman had approached her one day — straight up, striding across the no-man’s-land in the middle of the hold. She’d thought she was in for yet another fight over food and water. But the woman had pressed a gun into Sky’s hands.

She had said: “Hey, skinny bitch. Seen you around. I like your style. You’re with me now. You’re gonna help me take the bridge of this bucket.”

The woman had seemed like just another nobody; Sky hadn’t known then that she was the owner, leader, and commander of the Black Dogs of Saturn — February Twice. Sky had no idea. Sky hadn’t understood anything, except the weight of a gun in her hands and the flash of a confident grin behind a voidsuit visor, turning away from her, expecting her to follow, utterly confident that Sky would not shoot her in the back for the meat on her bones.

And Sky had followed. Sky was good at that.

She weighed this new gun. Nobody had handed it to her. They’d left it here, for her to take.

She couldn’t have escaped even if she’d wanted to. She’d have passed out just trying to strap on a bulletproof vest, let alone arming up like the good old days.

Sky needed to find the cunt in charge of this outfit. She’d heard bits and pieces earlier, while sleeping and waking.

‘Elpida’?

Yeah, that was it. Elpida. Commander.

Sky double-checked the safety on the pistol, shoved it into the front of her waistband where it could not be missed, and decided to go find Elpida. She toyed with the idea of picking up some heavier firepower too, but anything she had to brace against her shoulder would probably cause more pain than she could handle right then. She’d have to use her words and keep her head down, until she was healed up and ready to rock.

She did take the extra time to put on a pair of socks and lace up some boots, sitting on the edge of the bunk and trying not to grunt too hard whenever she had to lean forward. Had to protect her feet, after all. Some things never changed, no matter where you were killing.

Getting out of the bunk room was not easy; Sky was so bruised she struggled to walk without pain, even with the added stability of the boots.

Only one of the other bunks was occupied. Sky got halfway to the hatch, then paused to peek around the curtain.

And who should she find sleeping there, curled up together, but Cyneswith and Eseld?

Sky’s lips curled with jealousy and disgust. Fair, the pair weren’t actually cuddling in their sleep — Eseld was pressed to the wall, while Cyneswith was a good hand-span to her rear. But they were together, weren’t they? The two she had woken up with, minus Shilu. And she’d rather not run into Shilu again. Shilu was too much for Sky to take, even healthy and healed. She half-hoped that Lykke had gotten Shilu.

Sky stared down at Cyneswith, at her delicate features and wispy light hair. Cyneswith had reminded Sky of the kind she liked — small and needy and desperate for protection. But Eseld? Huh. Eseld had saved her in the resurrection chamber, and arguably again in the gravekeeper’s chamber, but Eseld was a mouthy little shit with a face full of fangs. Sky didn’t like her.

Eseld was also cradling a human skull against her chest. Freak shit.

Well, not that Sky could talk. She’d kept trophies too.

Sky turned away, letting the curtain fall back into place. She could negotiate her position in regard to those two later — or she could give Eseld a good pistol-whip to the jaw and drag Cyneswith out with her, after shooting this ‘Elpida’ in the face, if Elpida turned out to be anything less than worth Sky’s respect.

She tried not to laugh as she made it to the bunk room door. Yeah right. The Commander was probably protected. Sky had to be sneaky.

The door to the bunk room reminded Sky of the inside of a void ship, heavy and bulky, made for atmosphere seals. She opened it quietly and stepped out into a large compartment, illuminated by low red night-cycle lighting.

The compartment was stuffed with equipment, strewn all over the floor and overflowing from built-in seat benches on either side — more guns, heavy weapons, piles of clothing, body armour, even a few drones; Sky recognised some of it from the tomb armoury. The far end of the compartment framed a single door with an atmosphere-seal indicator light. The near end had a set of stairs leading up into darkness, a ladder to some kind of storage area above, and a corridor which led forward into a mass of cables and metal corners and old screens and closed hatches. Directly across from the bunk room door was another, matching door, left slightly ajar. Sky’s sense of direction told her that was the infirmary, where she had been poked and prodded and patched up.

Sky shuffled across the big compartment. She would have preferred to be stealthy, but walking hurt too much. Her wounds ached and stung and she felt unsteady with every step, but she made it to the door and eased it open, peering into the room beyond.

Infirmary. Dried blood all over the floor, peeling paint on the walls, a work surface covered in medical equipment. A girl she didn’t recognise was lying on a medical bed, wrapped in bandages, breathing slow, shallow, and rough, out cold. She looked about how Sky felt.

Asleep on a little fold out seat next to that bed was the medical bot Sky recalled from earlier — a tiny, pixie-like android, with greyish artificial skin.

The bot was bundled up in a blanket, as if somebody had tucked her in for a nap. The area around her was blurry, as if Sky’s eyes were watering. She squinted and peered closer — then flinched, almost jumping out of her skin. She hissed at the pain in her chest and belly.

The little medical bot was not sitting on the chair directly; she was snuggled down in the lap of a second bot — a big one, with lots of arms, and chameleon-skin chromatic matching. The big android was blending in with the grey and off-white of the infirmary walls. Thankfully it was also fast asleep.

Sky cleared her throat. “Hey. Hey. Med-tech. Hey.”

The little bot opened her eyes — massive, dark, and liquid. She blinked at Sky several times, but said nothing.

“Med-tech, yeah?” Sky repeated. “You’re the one who patched me up?”

The bot blinked again, then nodded. Her eyes jumped up and down Sky’s body, as if examining her for wounds. Sky paused to let the bot do her work; always good to let the med-techs work without bullshit, even if she bristled at the intrusion. It was only a bot, after all.

“You should be in bed,” said the med-bot. “In bed. In bed. You’ve got fractures, compound and simple, and more. More. More. Didn’t expect you to wake. Wake. So soon. Soon—”

“Stop,” Sky grunted. Poor thing was on the fritz. “Tell me who’s in charge here.”

The bot blinked. “Pheiri? No. Ha ha.” She spoke the laugh out loud, but didn’t seem amused. “Elpida’s the Commander. You want to see her?”

“Please.”

“She’s up front, in the control cockpit. With all you other zombies. Watching the screens.” The bot wormed one delicate grey arm out of her blankets, then pointed, indicating the corridor back in the big compartment. “She’s the one with the white hair. White hair. Can’t miss her.”

Sky nodded. “Thanks, med-tech.”

“Melyn.”

Sky paused. “You have a name?”

“Melyn.” The bot nodded.

Who the hell gives med-bots names? Sky decided that was a good sign; she liked people who named their machines. Sky cleared her throat again and tried to ignore the second android, the big one — her eyes were open, peering at Sky over the med-bot’s head. Sky turned away without saying goodbye.

With considerable difficulty, Sky hobbled back across the compartment, then limped into the cramped, jinking, jumbled corridor, presumably heading toward the front of this war machine.

The corridor was a mess, crammed with old subsystems, abandoned crew seats, and masses of hanging wire. Sky passed open hatches which led off into tight spaces, ducked beneath flickering screens showing frozen readouts, and limped across a swell of armour as if walking over the brain of an artificial intelligence; perhaps that was the deep rhythmic thrumming she felt, like a heartbeat in the core of the machine. She passed beneath a ladder which seemed to climb up toward some kind of turret. No way, was this a tank? It was huge, bigger than any armoured vehicle had any right to be. It had to be a walker, or a water-craft, not a tank.

Sky heard a low mutter from up ahead — several voices, speaking in urgent whispers and speculative mumbles, blurred by the clicking and humming and buzzing of screens and computer readouts.

She felt a sudden rush of nostalgia, and a pang deep in her chest.

It sounded just like the war room on the Black Dog’s cruiser, Saturn’s Knuckle. Those tones, those voices, whoever they were, Sky knew they were watching and directing an operation in progress.

She started to hurry forward, clinging to whatever handholds she could find.

But then a figure stepped around one of the last turns before the control room.

White hair, long and straight all the way down to her waist. Copper-brown skin, wrapped in tomb-grey clothes, rippling with the subtle motions of tight, toned, compact muscle, held still and ready with all the practice of a career soldier. Purple eyes burned with intelligence and amusement at the sight of Sky, but no surprise.

The woman paused, left hand grabbing a piece of machinery to brace herself. Her right forearm was missing, just a stump wrapped in fresh bandages.

Sky was used to often being the tallest person in a room, but this woman had a whole head on her. She was massive. A bio-mod job, surely?

The bio-mod soldier-girl said nothing. She waited, as if for Sky to make the first move.

Sky straightened up, despite the pain. She lifted her chin. She made sure to cock her hips, showing the pistol in her waistband.

“ … Elpida, right?”

A curious smirk crossed those lips; she didn’t even glance at the gun. “Nah. Not right now, anyway. Elps is busy.”

Sky frowned. She didn’t want to be rude, not right away, but she wanted to talk to the Commander, not the Commander’s internal sub-selves. “You’re a partition?”

‘Elpida’ raised her eyebrows. “Funny word. Partition, huh?”

Sky nodded. Partitioning had been common enough on Ganymede, especially among techs and synth-workers; some of her comrades in the Dogs had practised it too, with one partition for combat, one for everything else. That always gave Sky the shivers. Combat-partitions got weird, twitchy, aggressive.

“Partition, yeah,” she repeated. “Are you not Elpida? Are you not the one in charge here?”

The smirk grew wider. “I’m Howl. I share the Commander’s head. While she’s busy, I’m what you got. Sky, right? We got your name from the others. Didn’t think you’d wake up so fast.”

“Sky, yeah. You can just call me that.”

“Sky. Nice name. Simple name. Pick it yourself?”

“Yeah, actually.” Sky bristled; she didn’t want to talk about herself, about her birth name, or anything else. She placed a hand on her hip, next to the pistol. This was a nobody, then — a combat partition, or something else. “I want to speak with the person in charge. Your commander.”

Howl started to laugh. “You’re a hot-head, aren’t you? Me too, bitch.”

Sky allowed herself to smile. “Glad we understand each other.”

Howl snorted. “Actually, we don’t. You sure do seem confident for somebody who’s never been a zombie before. You up to speed? Shilu said you were, but Shilu’s a bit cracked in her own way. Am I right, or am I right?”

“Huh,” Sky grunted. “Yeah, I’m up to speed. World’s dead. We’re all dead. Whatever. Where’s your commander?”

Howl said nothing, turning her head to one side, as if examining Sky from multiple angles. Sky didn’t like that. This ‘Howl’ was giving her the shivers, and she still didn’t spare even one glance for the handgun in Sky’s waistband. This was not a subordinate she could beat up in a secluded corridor. She doubted she would be able to draw the gun. This was real shit. This was like her early days in the Dogs.

She kept her mouth shut. Tried to stand straight. Look smart, look confident, look sane.

“You’ve adapted real fast,” Howl said. “Haven’t you?”

Sky grinned; now this, this felt familiar enough — Earth-bound dickheads and civvies looking at her like she’d stepped out of a movie.

“I’ve seen worlds die before,” Sky said, sneering. “I was on Ganymede.”

Howl didn’t react. She waited, eyebrows raised. Sky hesitated. She had no idea what else to say.

Eventually Howl said, “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

A void opened up inside Sky’s chest.

‘I was on Ganymede’.

Since Sky’s home was murdered, those words were the only thing she’d ever needed to establish her place in another person’s mind. ‘I was on Ganymede’ earned her instant respect from the others in the Black Dogs, a leg-up the ladder, a way into the established cliques. ‘I was on Ganymede’ turned heads in the Outer System, on Titan, on the Neptune habs, on any rock or metal where she set foot, even out in the Oort with the freaks on Furthest. ‘I was on Ganymede’ got her mountains of pussy on Mars, showered in attention, in drinks, in whatever she wanted. ‘I was on Ganymede’ got her into the Commune. ‘I was on Ganymede’ got her a job on Earth, free passage, room and board.

‘I was on Ganymede!’

Sky had been there on the ground at the death of a world — a little world compared with Earth or Mars, but a world all the same, the world where she had been born, the world where her parents had raised her. Those four words had never before failed to impress, to quieten, to bludgeon, or at least to lead to follow-up questions and a round of drinks.

What was it like, Sky? Hell, to her comrades in the Black Dogs, embellished with adventure and danger and dozens of kills. Hell, to Onira, when Sky had spoken about the reality. Did you fight the machines, Sky? You must have done, you lived, right! The fractal nanomachine monsters everybody’s seen in old news broadcasts? Sure did. How many did you kill, Sky? Dozens! No, that was a lie. Just one, a three-meter pale thing all made of arms and mouths, and the kill had been a screaming panicked mess of blood and horror and dead friends. Did you see the Tros dome collapse? Sky sometimes said yes, sometimes no. She’d been there, Tros was her home, and she’d been in a voidsuit when the bubble had popped. Three million had died from atmospheric exposure; millions more in the ninety percent of the city which lay underground, buried in the ice layers, they’d died differently, killed by the machines. She tried not to think about that very often in the years which followed.

‘I was on Ganymede … ’

She’d fought machines on the frozen surface for four weeks in the retreat to Eshmun — never saw what she fired at, never got the enemy up close, kept herself alive by stuffing chunks of dead people into her voidsuit nutrient intake ports, rendered down to slurry, tasting like pork. She’d been there on the surface when ships had turned up from all over Sol — Earth, Mars, Luna, Titan, even a single black hulk from the Oort. Io and Europa and Callisto had been fucking about in orbit for months by then, for all the good they could do popping nano-hive masses from over the horizon. She’d been in the wrecked bubble-fields of Eshmun when the Lunarian scum had broken cordon and sent actual ground troops to start ‘mopping up’. Sky had killed three Lunarian soldiers herself; she never told that to anybody, not outside of the Dogs. Luna had a long memory and held grudges hard. If journalists could track her down, a Lunarian wetwork sleeper sure could do the same.

She’d been on the surface when Titan started dropping the nukes. She’d seen the machines pull a starship from orbit and drown it in the subsurface oceans. Sometimes she still dreamed about that, the great bulk of a Martian warship screaming like the end of the world as it came down.

She’d been on Ganymede; she’d seen a world murdered.

And now that meant nothing.

Two hundred and fifty to three hundred millions years in the future. Until this moment, staring into these uncomprehending purple eyes, that time had been only a number. But this partitioned woman — Elpida, Howl, whatever she was — had never even heard of Ganymede, let alone its end.

Howl grinned. “Hitting you, is it?”

Sky tried to speak, but her mouth was numb.

“Yeah,” Howl purred. “There you go. Take a moment. Sit if you gotta. No shame.”

“G-Ganymede was a … a world. A moon, technically. Jovian. It … I was born there. It died. The world died.”

“Huh,” Howl said. “Another space case.”

Sky felt her chest lurch and her vision blur. The most important thing about her is that she was born off-Earth? That was it? Really?

She grabbed the gun in her waistband.

Howl just watched as Sky drew the weapon; she could barely grip it, her fingers felt so numb. Sky didn’t flick the safety off, she didn’t even point it. The pantomime of aggression seemed meaningless now, robbed of all context. She just held the gun out.

“I picked this up,” she said. “When I woke. You left me in a room full of guns. Why?”

Howl eyed Sky up and down, then sighed. She shook her head. “You gotta talk to Elps, right. You’re up to speed, but you are one hell of a mess. Tell you what, why don’t you come join us up in Pheiri’s noggin? Watch what we’re up to. Meet the crew. C’mon.”

Howl didn’t even take the gun from her. She just turned away, showing Sky her back.

Sky stumbled forward, trying to put the gun away and follow Howl, both at the same time. She’d not felt this clumsy since she was a teenager.

“What— what happened to your arm?” she asked. “That’s real fresh. I can— I can tell that much.”

Howl glanced back with a smirk on her lips.

“Elpida — the Commander,” she purred. “She got it saving another clueless little bitch like you. Welcome aboard, meat-brains. Welcome to all that’s left.”