“We’re not lost,” said Leuca. “We know exactly where we are. We can retrace our steps back to Pheiri any time we like, with no need to deviate or change our path. Comms are uninterrupted. Our maps are detailed. I repeat, we are not lost.”
Ooni knew that Leuca was correct. Leuca was always correct. She’d always been wise where Ooni was foolish.
But being lost or not was beside the point; Ooni couldn’t stop shaking.
Leuca’s voice hissed and crackled across the comms network, dousing the sparks of a nervous argument which had just begun to flare with Kagami and Victoria, safe and sound back in Pheiri’s control cockpit, observing the feeds from the drones. Before Kagami could rally a reply, Leuca reached up with one dirty grey gauntlet and removed her helmet, releasing the seal and slipping the armour off her head. A waterfall of flame-red hair fell across the gorget about her neck and over the narrow plates on her shoulders; her hair was dimmed by the heavy shadows of the tomb, dyed a sickly turquoise by the glow from the monitor screens, and pinned by the comms headset strapped to her skull.
Eyes the forgotten blue of a cloudless sky flashed about the chamber, ringed by dark bags of stress, framed by pale skin dusted with freckles. Leuca filled her lungs with a breath of stagnant air.
When Leuca spoke again, her voice melded with the distant hailstones and hellish wind of the hurricane beyond the walls.
“But I’m pretty sure we’re being followed.”
Ooni wanted to tell Leuca to put her helmet back on. She hesitated for three reasons: one, the bland confidence on Leuca’s face did more to calm Ooni’s nerves than any words possibly could; two, Ooni was not in charge of this fireteam and had no right to give orders; and three, she had to actively remind herself to call Leuca ‘Pira’ in front of the others. Leuca had made that clear as they had stood in Pheiri’s rear airlock together, just after Ooni had made the mistake of trying to kiss her, before they’d donned their helmets. Leuca had rejected that kiss with a turn of her head, pushed Ooni against the wall of the airlock, and given her three very clear instructions.
Concentrate on the mission. Come back in one piece — I do love you, Ooni, I do, but you have to concentrate. And stop confusing the others by using the name of a woman who died three hundred million years ago.
Professionalism and discipline, until they returned.
Not that Leuca had accepted any of Ooni’s prior attempts to kiss her, either. Ooni told herself that was okay. Twenty three years of companionship had been drowned by decades of resurrection and the shame of both their betrayals. Leuca was not the same person she had been in the era of The Fortress, and neither was Ooni. They both still loved each other, but that love was different now, bruised and tender and shivering. It might take a long time to come round. But at least it was sheltered now, within the walls of Telokopolis.
Ooni did her best to swallow her complaint about the helmet. There were no clear lines of sight into the circular chamber where the fireteam had paused. All four routes into the room were covered by Kagami’s drones, out there in the corridors beyond, blocking any undetected intruders. No secret sniper or sudden ambush could draw a bead on Leuca’s unprotected skull. The innards of the tomb were not like the streets and buildings of the corpse-city, rife with an infinite proliferation of firing angles and tangled cover. Here the exits were limited and verticality was rare.
But Ooni’s armoured gloves tightened on her firearm all the same; she could not bear the thought of losing Leuca again.
Which was why she was here, deep in the lightless bowels of the tomb, not yet lost.
Kagami’s voice crackled over the comms network, speaking to the whole fireteam. “I never said you were lost. I literally never used that word. There is no need to waste your limited attention stating the obvious, I can see the map right in front of me, just as well as you can, thank you.”
A second voice muttered, a little further from the audio pickup inside Pheiri’s cockpit — Victoria. “Kaga, Kaga, don’t rant at them—”
Kagami carried on. “What I did say is that this structure makes no fucking sense! The layout of this place is a nightmare, designed by an insane intelligence, and we just keep going deeper and deeper. What are we going to find, hm? Because I’m starting to think we’re not following the fucking Death’s Heads at all! And now that … that thing! That is a mockery aimed directly at us. It’s a provocation! Don’t assume I can’t see that, I’m not stupid. We can hardly leave it unanswered.”
Victoria again: “Kaga, stop, please—”
“It has to be destroyed!” Kagami snapped, voice wavering as she whirled away from the microphone, presumably raving at Victoria. “Order it destroyed, or I’ll take responsibility myself.”
Ooni couldn’t swallow, let alone speak, the lump in her throat was so tight. She’d been trying not to think about this, to stay focused on Leuca.
But she agreed with Kagami, totally and completely.
Over by the ‘provocation’ in the centre of the room, Ilyusha growled, then spat on the floor. “Fuckin’ right. Fuckin’ burn it. Rip it up! Fuck!”
Shilu, hands in the pockets of her armoured coat, said the first words she’d spoken since leaving Pheiri. “I concur. This is bait.”
Ooni tried to keep her eyes off the effigy in the middle of the room. If she thought about the implications, she might start shaking again.
She had to stay alert, lest some undetected ambush force its way through one of the entrances.
She knew her vigilance was pointless. If the drones couldn’t detect an ambush and their firepower couldn’t deter it, Ooni had no hope. But the ritual of discipline and the weight of the gun in her hands helped her fight the terror.
Ooni was under no illusions as to her own utility. The three-strong fireteam — herself, Leuca, and Ilyusha — were surplus to the actual mission of hunting down the remnants of the Deaths Heads, the Sisterhood of the Skull, Ooni’s former ‘comrades’. If the fireteam made contact then the drones would do all the real fighting, and any confrontation would likely be over in moments. Ooni and the others were there for show, a visible human component at the core of the remote combat machine, controlled by Kagami and Pheiri, directed from the enclosed safety of the cockpit. Ooni and the others had only mattered at the start of the operation, when they’d stomped down Pheiri’s rear ramp and set out before an awestruck audience, watched by all the zombies who had remained in the tomb chamber before Pheiri.
The decision to send them along with a dozen of Kagami’s drones had been debated for over two hours, with everybody crammed into Pheiri’s main crew compartment.
Kagami had been firm that she could carry out the operation with nothing but the drones. Howl had insisted that they needed to send soldiers, with faces, holding guns. The gesture was just as important as the hunt. They had to show that Telokopolis — the promise of Telokopolis which Elpida had made — would not let the attempted suicide bombing go unanswered. They couldn’t do this with drones alone, like a mechanical arm reaching into the dark. They had to show they cared.
Listening to Howl speaking through Elpida had been an unsettling experience, even though Ooni knew she had spoken to Howl before. Howl kept smirking in a way that made Ooni shiver. But she spoke the same basic truths as Elpida, and Ooni agreed with all her points, even though she had not spoken up. Ooni’s sole contribution to the discussion was to repeat the only thing she was confident of — “Telokopolis is forever.”
Whenever Ooni saw Sanzhima lying in the infirmary — the girl the Death’s Heads had captured and sent against Pheiri with a bomb strapped to her — Ooni saw herself.
Howl had easily won the debate and the ensuing vote. Victoria had asked for volunteers. Leuca had raised her hand.
Ooni had volunteered as well. She didn’t want to let Leuca go alone, even surrounded by drones. The others had exchanged silent glances, followed by not-so-silent suspicions. Victoria was polite about it. Atyle was dismissive and cryptic. Amina stared in that disconcerting way. But Kagami and Ilyusha both said it out loud, with varying degrees of vehemence; Pira was a turncoat twice over, and Ooni had been a member of the very group they were hunting, up until her so-called conversion at Elpida’s hands. A ‘reptile fuck’, as Ilyusha had said.
An argument had started, loud and awkward. Ooni had wanted to withdraw herself from consideration and apologise for her arrogance. To be sent on such a mission was an honour she did not deserve. But Leuca had not withdrawn, and so Ooni was nailed to her mast.
In the end, Howl had overruled the others.
“Pira and Ooni are Elps’ bitches too, right? Just like the rest of us? They any different to any of you? Ooni alerted us to the bomb and told us how it would be trapped. Pira’s made her beliefs clear. Trust ‘em now, or shoot ‘em dead. Like, right now! Shoot them both! No? Chickenshits. Trust them, then.”
Ilyusha had volunteered after that. Everybody knew she was itching for a real fight, and she was the perfect candidate to keep an eye on the distrusted. Ooni had been concerned that Ilyusha would be too distracted by that to focus on the mission, but the moment they’d all gotten beyond Pheiri’s hull Ilyusha had slipped into an easy, alert, natural professionalism.
Shilu joined as insurance. If everything went wrong, the Necromancer would handle it.
Both Ooni and Leuca were armoured in the best carapace suits that the cadre had looted from the tomb armoury — chunky plates of grey-white armour, strapped to their limbs and torsos, locked together with articulated joints, with external hard-points for supporting heavy weapons. The helmets offered basic atmospheric protection and low-light vision, both pointless for the undead.
Leuca was armed with a pump-action shotgun locked to her back and an automatic rifle slung up front. Ooni carried a ballistic shield strapped to the rear of her armour, and a heavy submachine gun in her hands, straps looped over one shoulder. Both of them had side-arms and a couple of grenades, just in case.
Ooni was surprised by the trust the cadre had placed in her, even after Howl’s words. It was only yesterday that Elpida herself had pressed a gun into Ooni’s hands; now, after the bombing and a restless night and half a day of debate and planning and preparation, she was wearing carapace armour again, carrying a gun into battle, wearing the symbol of Telokopolis.
Ilyusha had rejected most of the heavier armour, but she wore a comms headset, a stripped-down helmet which was mostly just visor, and a grey bulletproof vest over her torso, leaving her red-and-black bionic limbs free. Another ballistic shield was strapped to her back.
Shilu wore no protection except the armoured coat over her clothes; she had accepted a comms headset, but Ooni was convinced it was purely for appearances. She had gone unarmed, in her human disguise.
Prep was awkward. Howl had joined them at the airlock, acting funny. When they’d all been ready to leave, she’d paused and said, “Good hunting. Hurry home, sisters. Sisters, ha! Guess you are … ”
They had set out from Pheiri — three heavily armed zombies and one disguised Necromancer, surrounded by a bristling phalanx of a dozen heavy combat drones, supported by constant comms chatter and regular updates from the control cockpit. For four hours they had descended into the lightless corridors of the tomb, with drones leading the way, drones bringing up the rear, drones guarding the flanks, and drones piercing the gloom ahead with blood-red lights, sending stray zombies scuttling for the shadows. Shilu had strode near the front of the group, following Kagami’s directions with wordless obedience. Ilyusha had struck out, often circling around the drones themselves, leapfrogging their progress, pausing to pat their matte-black armour as if they were war hounds; she checked each corner manually, automatic shotgun rising and falling, claws clicking on the tomb’s black metal. She cast only the occasional glance at Ooni and Leuca.
Ooni had felt confident, strong, protected, and right. She wore the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis daubed on her armour’s chestplate, same as Leuca and Ilyusha. Shilu was the odd one out, but that didn’t matter.
The prospect of going up against her former ‘sisters’ filled Ooni with an excitement she could not share, not even with Leuca. In brief fantasies she imagined herself presenting Yolanda’s head to Elpida and Howl. Cantrelle in chains, dragged along the floor. Kuro peeled out of her armour and peeled out of her skin and—
Ooni had swallowed those fantasies. She knew they were not worthy of the Commander. Elpida did not approve of needless torture.
But were they worthy of Telokopolis? Surely the enemies of the promise had to be humiliated, paraded in their defeat, killed for this offensive transgression. Ooni hoped an opportunity would fall into her lap. If it happened, and it wasn’t her fault …
For the first two hours of the journey the fireteam found themselves with an escort; about thirty stray zombies from the tomb chamber picked themselves up and formed an improvised rearguard, hooting and cheering, jeering for the Death’s Heads to be destroyed, begging for more meat, thumping their chests to pledge eternal allegiance. Most of them were the bottom-feeders and half-starved wretches, daubed with the symbol of Telokopolis in imitation of Elpida. Most of them didn’t even have weapons, but a few carried knives or battered firearms. The others had not approved of this behaviour, but Ooni’s chest tightened with joy; these ragged undead were hardly a suitable auxilia, but if they were armed and given meat, maybe, just maybe …
Most of them had turned back when Kagami’s voice had boomed from one of the drones — “If you foul our shots, we won’t hesitate, you band of morons! Get clear, or it’s your own skin at risk! Nobody will pause to help you if you get filled with holes!”
The bravest few had held on until about the two-hour mark. As the innards of the tomb had grown more tortuous and serpentine, even those few faithful had fallen behind.
The fireteam had plunged onward, accompanied by the winking lights of the drones, the hiss of the comms network, and the fury of the hurricane beyond.
Ooni could tell that something was wrong with the tomb.
Her time in The Fortress, when Leuca had been proud of her name, was many subjective decades in the past now, but Ooni had not yet lost the clear memories of the tomb they had managed to clear and occupy for so long. Any two given tombs only shared certain parts in common — the top levels around the resurrection chamber, the route to the armoury, and the route to the front gates. Beyond that each tomb was unique. The inside of the Fortress had been confusing and strange, full of airy, echoing, mysterious vaults, built on a scale larger than human, shot through with vertical shafts, riddled with hidden spaces behind the walls, like the structure contained a secondary lymphatic system. The revenants of The Fortress had mostly stuck to the areas they had understood fully — the few dozen rooms close to the gates and the armoury, and the outer shell of the building, where windows and corridors were sensibly human-sized. But even when they had ventured into the twisting innards of The Fortress, seeking controls and machinery and resources, it had never been like this.
The corridors in this storm-bound tomb seemed to double back on themselves over and over, forming intestinal layers in a tight warren of lightless curves and dizzying twists, sometimes spiralling up and down as if ejecting effluvia from rotten organs. Cavernous rooms came upon the fireteam suddenly, with no warning, emerging from the mass of narrow corridors like gas-bloated abscesses bulging in rotten flesh. Slick machinery, dripping oil, naked circuitry, bundles of cable warm to the touch — all of these bulged from slits and rents in the walls, like herniae in a ripening corpse.
A few side-passages bristled with automatic gun emplacements, blocking the routes to areas where the inner configuration of the tomb changed form yet again. This was not unexpected; Ooni and Leuca had warned the others, any tomb was full of dead guns, guarding empty graves.
But these guns were active, twitching back and forth, like cilia waving in the air; they threatened with target-locks and IR-beams if approached, but did not open fire at a distance. Luckily none of them blocked the route the fireteam needed to take. Shilu and the new arrivals had claimed the passage to the armoury was like this. Ooni had not really believed them.
Who had turned on the guns? And why? There was nothing to defend down here, was there?
The fireteam had made their way through this endless, lightless, echoing tangle in near-silence, communicating by whispers over the comms network. They had paused often, waiting for the drones to scout ahead down some particularly twisty corridor, or check each branching side-passage for potential ambushes. They had paused again for Kagami and Victoria and Howl to debate the best way forward. They had paused yet again when one of the new arrivals on board Pheiri had joined the others in the cockpit — Sky, apparently, finally awake. Sky had contributed nothing but some curious grunts, then fallen silent.
Ooni’s helmet contained a basic heads-up display, nothing fancy, just a simple IFF tracker for the other members of the team, some built-in comms in case she lost the separate headset, and a data uplink back to Pheiri; Kagami could use the latter to display anything the team might find useful, or plug drone feeds into their vision. She was currently using it to display a map for the whole fireteam, tracking their progress through the tomb, laying a trail of electronic breadcrumbs along the route home.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Ooni did not like to glance at that tiny map in the corner of her visor. It showed a fragile thread of known territory twisting and turning through great yawning darkness, surrounded by blind corners and empty voids, pressed tight by the fossilised tangle. She felt like a morsel of food, trapped and squeezed by peristalsis.
The earlier rooms and spaces, those closer to Pheiri, had not been like this. Why had the Death’s Head fled into such a place?
Ooni’s confidence had begun to flag; this didn’t seem like a course of action Yolanda would willingly endorse. As leader of the Sisterhood of the Skull, Yola was not above ambushes and underhanded tactics, not when presented and bracketed with the right rhetoric. But to withdraw so deep into a maze, without showing resistance, without leaving traps, without even a rude message scrawled on a wall? Ooni’s gut had clenched and her mouth had gone dry. She smelled a rat.
She whispered this concern over the comms network, to Leuca, to Kagami, to the others. They agreed without argument — this was all very odd. But the drones were functioning normally, and they had not yet reached their destination. Ambush was impossible. Keep moving.
Five hours into the journey, Ooni had started to hear the sounds.
At first she had doubted her own ears, or perhaps the pick-ups on the outside of her carapace helmet. A scuff of distant feet there, a shuffle of armour here, a soft hum echoing down the twisted corridors from far away, back on the route the fireteam had already crossed. This mangled mass of passageways played funny tricks with sound, perhaps she was only hearing the fireteam’s own echoes, or illusions created by the storm outdoors. Kagami’s drones would surely pick up anybody trying to follow the fireteam. Leuca and Ilyusha were perfectly competent, and they didn’t say anything. And Shilu was a Necromancer.
All in Ooni’s head.
Except, when she concentrated, those sounds seemed so familiar. They made Ooni’s heart rate climb. Cold sweat broke out on her skin. She felt small and hunted.
She ignored the reason for that anxiety.
At six hours, twelve minutes, and fifteen seconds since leaving Pheiri — according to the small clock in Ooni’s HUD — the fireteam reached their destination.
They knew the Death’s Heads would not be there anymore. Ooni had offered that advice during the debate about what to do. She knew that Yolanda and Cantrelle were not stupid, they would not have accepted the radio contact from Elpida only to then wait for death. They would leave booby-traps in their wake, or set up an ambush from which they could melt away. They would not be here. They would be gone.
As the fireteam approached the contact point, Ooni found herself hoping she was wrong.
As the drones moved forward and the fireteam crouched silently in a pitch-black corridor, Ooni’s lips peeled back from her teeth, hidden inside her helmet. All those years at the bottom of the pile, all that abuse and hate shovelled on her head. Let Yola be there, she prayed to the old gods who she had once believed in, trying to dredge their names from the sunlit world she could not even remember. Let Yola be there. Let her try to fight. Let her struggle!
Ooni felt a war cry clawing at the base of her throat. She hadn’t felt that since true life — never with the Death’s Heads. Where was this feeling coming from? Had some speck of life’s bright memory returned to her? For a second she felt like she was poised to charge uphill, a smear of woad on her sun-kissed face, an axe raised high in one hand, descending toward the gormless scream of some Roman teenager cowering behind his steel shield.
She panted inside her helmet, comms off. When the moment came, she would cry at the top of her lungs — “Telokopolis is forever!”
Kagami’s drones advanced those last hundred meters with great care, scanning every surface, fanning out further than before, checking and rechecking for bombs or traps or hidden surprises.
Nothing.
The big room up ahead was unoccupied. The fire-team had entered on foot, weapons raised, following the drones, into what Kagami had laughingly called a ‘planetarium’.
The room was a large circular space about one hundred feet across, with rings of wide tiered steps dropping down into a shallow pit in the middle. The outer wall was encrusted with a thick layer of computer terminals made of dull metal and grey plastic; surprisingly for the tomb, many of the terminals were aglow with toxic light, though the data on the screens was a meaningless jumble of corrupted symbols and system glitches. Masses of cable ran from the computers and snaked up the walls, gathering across the high ceiling of the chamber into a heavy bundle which hung over the pit, from which dangled a vast array of shattered projectors. According to Kagami’s distracted explanation this room was meant to display a three-dimensional picture of the spheres beyond Earth.
The Death’s Heads had ripped down vast quantities of cable, so it hung from the ceiling in ragged masses, trailing across the floor in loops and coils of rubber-sheathed metal, like vines in a deep forest. In the centre of the room they had woven the torn cables together into a rough sphere about fifteen feet wide, with an open base. It was a lattice punctuated by two large holes high up and a curved slash lower down.
A black skull, grinning wide.
Ooni’s battle fever had been extinguished by a wave of cold in her blood. She had started to shake. She couldn’t breathe.
Beneath the black skull of the Death’s Heads, a partial corpse lay on the floor in the middle of the shallow pit — a skeleton, just a chest and a right arm, picked almost clean, with only the most inedible scraps of gristle left clinging to the bloody bones.
This was the provocation, a message from Ooni’s former ‘sisters’.
None of the others understood. Not even Leuca.
Shilu was standing a few feet from the massive black skull, hands in her pockets, impassive eyes staring back into the empty sockets. Ilyusha stood a little further back, cradling her automatic shotgun in folded arms, cutting the air with the swishing tip of her bionic tail. Leuca had not yet approached the Death’s Head effigy; Ooni stayed close to her side. It was a good excuse to avoid the gaze of those dead eyes.
All but two of the drones were covering the four exits to the room. The remaining pair of drones had drifted close to the wire skull, running their invisible scanners up and down the construct. They were big, black, bulky combat drones, bristling with sensors and weapons, floating on their tiny gravity-engines, all under Kagami’s remote control.
Kagami and Victoria were arguing on the comms.
“—don’t make me repeat myself, Victoria! Order it destroyed, or I will—”
“Kaga! Fucking— give me time to—”
“You’re in command! Make the decision!”
“I’m trying to—”
Ilyusha took a step toward the skull and raised one red-clawed bionic hand as if to rip through the wires.
Shilu put out an arm to block her. “No.”
Ilyusha whirled on the Necromancer, gesturing with her shotgun. “Fuck you, reptile! You’re not in charge, you—”
“It’s a trap,” Shilu said. “I suggest you don’t touch it.”
Ilyusha shut her mouth with a click of her teeth, grimacing at Shilu, then up at the wire skull. On the comms, the argument died away.
Ooni felt her throat closing up. Of course it was a trap. But it was so much more.
Leuca spoke into her headset microphone: “Kagami, please confirm that.”
Kagami sighed loudly. The two drones she had been using to scan the skull backed away from the effigy. Silence reigned for a few moments.
Victoria said: “There, see?”
Kagami sighed again. When she spoke, she sounded very grumpy. “Yes, yes, the Necromancer is probably correct. There’s a current running through those wires, projecting a sort of electromagnetic cone inward, over the body. I don’t have a clue what it would do, and I don’t think we want to find out. Don’t step inside, don’t touch it at all.”
Ooni wanted to sob.
Another voice spoke over the comms network, slightly behind Kagami.
“Free finger-bangs all week to anybody who can figure out how to destroy it anyway,” said Howl.
Ooni’s heart soared. Tears prickled in her eyes. Howl was not Elpida, but Howl understood almost as well. This symbol had to be destroyed. It had to be burned, wiped out, ruined and wrecked and—
Shilu was speaking, staring up at the skull. “Those coils of wire, where it’s been wrapped into spirals. See those? Those are jury-rigged electromagnets. And the spacing is expert. Whoever made this created a perfect cone of electromagnetic interference. I’m not sure what it would do to a revenant. I’m not willing to speculate. But this is challenging work, performed by an expert. I am confident in that.”
Ooni bit her lower lip so hard she tasted blood. She knew, she knew, she knew who had made this, she knew what this meant, she knew it was—
Ilyusha snorted. “Saying we can’t tear it down, necro-bitch?”
Shilu didn’t move. “I didn’t say that. I could disarm this. But it might take an hour or two.”
Howl chuckled down the comms. “Ever the pessimist, cheese-grater. Worst comes to worst, we can have the drones shoot it up.”
Ooni swallowed her plea of agreement. Leuca was staring at her, blue eyes boring into her helmet. Could Leuca see her distress? She wouldn’t be surprised.
Ilyusha growled behind her teeth, gesturing at the skull with her shotgun. “Why fuckin’ do this, then?! Shitfuck reptiles can’t ambush us, can’t get us to blunder into a trap neither.” She jerked her chin toward one of the drones. “Not with the doggies here. Why do it? Just to piss us off? Fuckers! Shit eating fuck, bitch, fuck!”
“A statement of power,” Shilu said, still staring up into the eye sockets.
Leuca said, “Are we certain this is the origin point of the signal?”
Shilu nodded. “I am.”
Kagami concurred over the radio, “Yes, Pira, this is where they made contact with Pheiri, via their own comms network. He’s totally confident about that.” She sighed through gritted teeth. “If that corpse was even slightly less devoured, we could probably identify it. I would bet a handful of lunar soil it’s one we gave out yesterday.”
Ilyusha frowned. “What? The fuck?”
Leuca grunted. “Mm. Likely enough.”
Kagami tutted. “The Death’s Heads probably scouted us by disguising one of their number as a starving zombie, then accepted the meat. The remains beneath that trap look like half a torso with one arm attached. There’s only three possible matches who we gave that exact portion, but all three of them are zombies who then left Pheiri’s tomb chamber. Not that tracing them would help us. We’re not looking for them in the middle of a city, among a crowd. That would be easy compared to this … crawling nonsense.”
She huffed and made her chair creak, back in Pheiri’s control cockpit.
Silence fell, both on the comms and in the flesh. Ilyusha snorted as she stared at the skull made of twisted wires, tilting her head from side to side as if she could see the invisible cone of electromagnetic power. Leuca ran her naked eyes across the consoles and computers around the edge of the room, but she didn’t move. Kagami’s drones hovered in the four doorways, still and steady, eyes and weapons turned outward.
Beyond the walls, muffled by distance and the black metal of the tomb, the hurricane raged on.
The comms network crackled. Victoria spoke.
“Hey, Ooni, I’ve got a question for you, since you’re our expert,” she said. “Do you think the Death’s Heads would have done that? Sent somebody in disguise, to beg for meat?”
Ooni didn’t speak for a long moment. She wished she could give the useful answer, but that would be a lie.
“I … I don’t think so,” Ooni said, speaking slowly inside her helmet. “Yola would never allow it, it would be too humiliating. But … but maybe they’ve grown desperate. I … I’m sorry. I know I used to be one of them, but … but I don’t know. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Mm,” Victoria grunted.
“Bodes well for us,” Kagami muttered.
Shilu turned away from the skull and looked directly into the visor of Ooni’s helmet. Ooni flinched; it was like the Necromancer could see through the steel-glass.
“Ooni,” she said. “Why do you think this skull is here?”
Ooni felt her whole body go stiff. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t make herself think. She knew exactly why the skull was here, but the thought made her want to run.
She did the only thing she could. She reached up, unsealed her neck-ring, and pulled the helmet off her head. Her hair slid down her neck. The air was cold and stagnant and reeked of wet metal. She glanced at Leuca; this way she was that little bit closer to her, breathing the same air, their bare skin both exposed to the same flickering toxic shadows from the computer monitors.
Leuca held her look, but said nothing.
Hissing voices whispered on the comms network. Ilyusha barked something, perhaps a rebuke. Ooni couldn’t process any of it. She raised her eyes from Leuca’s blue gaze and forced herself to acknowledge the skull.
“It’s—”
—it’s aimed at me, it’s aimed at me, it’s aimed at me—
“—a message,” Ooni managed to say. “A statement, that we can’t … dislodge them, remove them, get rid of them. That’s why it’s such an obvious trap. We can’t remove their symbol without hurting ourselves.”
Ilyusha spat on the floor again. Shilu nodded and said, “Thank you.” On the comms network Kagami tutted, and Howl snorted with derision.
“And—”
—she’s going to catch me, she’s going to pin me to the floor and rip chunks off my back with her bare teeth and pull my skin off and—
“—and—”
—it was her it was her it was her—
“—uh—”
“Ooni,” said Leuca. “Concentrate.”
Ooni took a deep breath and tried again. “I think I know who made it. The skull, I mean.”
Shilu raised her eyebrows. On the comms, Kagami said: “Go ahead. Explain. Quickly.”
“ … Kuro,” Ooni said, forcing the name past her lips. “The big one, in powered armour. The bomb-vest was her design, too.”
Howl made a contemplative noise on the comms. “Hrrrrrm. The big bitch. She’s the one who strung up Elps. Locked into her armour or something, right?”
Kagami was muttering — “Great. Wish she had a different name.”
Ooni struggled to keep speaking. “Kuro has always been Yola’s … dog. She’s very technically minded, good with jury-rigging machines, making things from scrap, that sort of thing. I think she was some kind of engineer, when she was alive. She pretends to be stupid, but I know she’s not. And she … she likes to be cruel. She knows how to get inside your head. Yola would just have painted a skull and written some words, then been done with it. But Kuro, she likes this sort of thing. This is how she thinks. It’s meant to … bother us.”
Ooni couldn’t express what she really meant. She didn’t have the words.
Victoria spoke over the comms: “But it was Cantrelle on the radio. That implies she’s in charge now. Would she do this?”
Ooni shook her head, then remembered the crew in the cockpit couldn’t see the gesture. “This is Kuro’s work. I’m certain of it. And— and—” The fear was too much; Ooni started shaking again. “And I’m … I’m certain we’re being followed. I agree with Leuca— Pira. Pira! I agree with Pira. We’re being followed.”
High winds howled far beyond the tomb’s outer walls.
Ilyusha snorted. “Scared?”
Ooni finally looked away from the skull. She met Ilyusha’s iron-grey eyes, then averted her gaze. She found it so hard to maintain eye contact with Ilyusha.
“Of Kuro? Yes.” Ooni swallowed. Her body remembered Kuro’s hands. “She’s like a … a cat. She likes to play with her food.”
Kagami sighed. “You’re not being followed. The drone sensor suites haven’t picked up anybody in hours, let alone a revenant wearing powered armour, glowing like a fucking lantern. I would know. Pheiri would know. Nobody is going to sneak up on me.”
Shilu said, “I haven’t seen or heard anything either.”
Leuca shook her head. “I have.”
Ooni was shaking now, hands creaking on the grip of her submachine gun, teeth threatening to chatter. “I’m certain— certain we’re being followed, yes. It’s the— the little sounds! I know them because they’re her sounds, the ones you always had to listen for in the Sisterhood. She blends in with the echoes and footsteps, she’s so good at it. Don’t you see? That’s how she does it, it’s how she always does it! Even in powered armour she moves like a cat. I should know, she—” Ooni felt her throat closing up. Kuro always used to like tormenting Ooni, but the words wouldn’t come. “She’s so good at sneaking up behind you, at the times you’re not thinking about it, the exact times you think she’s elsewhere. And you can never tell she’s coming. And then she’ll be in the corner of a room, or blocking a door, and you can’t escape, and she’ll just— just stand there until you move, making you think about what she’s going to do to you, and she wants you to make the first move, she wants you to feel it and—”
“Ooni,” said Leuca.
“She’s doing that to us right now! She is! That’s what this skull is about! It’s a statement, there’s no escape, there’s no—”
“Ooni!” Leuca snapped. “Stop.”
A moment of silence. Ooni took a deep breath, trying not to sob. She couldn’t look at anybody. She had shamed herself.
She touched the symbol of Telokopolis on her breastplate.
Kagami muttered, “I’ll adjust the pick-ups on the drones. Get Pheiri to run the audio through a different algorithm, whatever. Fine?”
Ooni wanted to say no, but she said nothing.
Shilu turned back to the huge wire skull. “They’re attempting to goad us. I agree with that.”
“Agreed,” Kagami grunted.
Victoria said, “They can’t hope to mount an ambush against all the drones. What are they drawing us deeper for?”
Leuca asked: “Are we pulling out?”
Kagami snorted, “That would be my advice. The tangle only gets more dense from here. This was a mistake. This operation should have been drones only.”
A long moment of silence passed over the comms. Distant hailstones drummed on the tomb.
Eventually, Victoria said, “I don’t know.”
“With drones alone, perhaps—” Kagami started.
Victoria cut over her. “Kaga, let me think.”
Howl said, “Can’t come crawling back with no trophies, hey. That’s a fail. A big one.”
Shilu said, “I could go ahead alone. Follow the signal ghosts, whatever spoor they left, sounds, breathing, heat signatures.”
“Nobody goes off alone,” Victoria ground out between clenched teeth. “We still haven’t made contact with Iriko and Serin. Anything could have happened, anything. Nobody wanders off. Understood?”
“Kuro?” Ilyusha snapped, jerking her head; Ooni looked up in surprise, because Ilyusha was talking to her. “She’s behind us? Then let’s hunt some big cat, huh?!”
Ooni shook her head. “You can’t. You can’t. You can’t—”
“Can!” Ilyusha barked, then grinned — actually grinned, right at Ooni.
For the first time since they’d met, Ooni felt an inkling of affection for the little berserker cyborg. If anybody had the courage to hunt down Kuro, maybe it was her? Or maybe she would just go missing in the tunnels, never seen again. Ooni shook her head. Ilyusha snorted.
A tiny voice spoke up — “I think they should come back. I think they should.” That was Amina. Ilyusha grimaced and looked away.
Victoria rattled on. “I agree with Amina. It’s not worth the risk. We should pull back. Pull back out. They’ve fled too far. Maybe Iriko and Serin will get them, or maybe not. But … we can’t … we can’t risk … ”
Leuca said, clean and crisp: “You need to make a decision, Victoria. If we stay here too long, that could also be a problem. Your orders, commander?”
Ooni heard Victoria’s tense breathing down the comms uplink. She didn’t envy her.
“A … vote,” Victoria said.
Kagami hissed between her teeth. “You can’t hold a fucking vote, Victoria, this isn’t one of your NorAm commune meetings, you dirt-brained—” Kagami cut off with a huff, then: “Command, or I will! Take charge, for fuck’s sake!”
“I am taking charge!” Victoria snapped. “And I’m ordering a vote. We’re not in combat. We can vote. All for pulling out?”
The ayes — Leuca, Victoria, Kagami, and Amina too, in a small voice.
“All for pushing on?”
Howl, Atyle — who had not spoken until then, tucked somewhere inside Pheiri’s cockpit — plus Shilu, and Ilyusha.
Pheiri himself abstained from voting. Sky, if she was still in the cockpit, didn’t make a sound. Nobody else seemed to be present.
Leuca, Ilyusha, and Shilu all looked at Ooni. She felt the silence waiting on the other side of the comms uplink.
Victoria said, “Ooni? I didn’t catch you on either side of that.”
Ooni felt tears gathering in her eyes. She raised her face and stared at the wire skull, at the grinning provocation of the Death’s Heads.
Kagami was hissing something about how they couldn’t put that decision on her, about how Victoria was being irresponsible, about how they had agreed not to manage the operation like this. Victoria tried to shush her, saying it was all a formality, Ooni did not have to decide, of course not, of course. Leuca sighed and said Ooni’s name. Howl started laughing. Shilu stepped away from the skull, preparing for the inevitable, preparing to leave before Ooni even spoke. Ilyusha spat on the floor and looked disgusted.
Ooni knew that this decision was not actually down to her — if she pushed the matter at all, Victoria could easily be forced to take responsibility, to take command properly. It was already happening, without any effort on Ooni’s part; Victoria was drawing breath to give the order. The drones were pulling back. Everyone was resigned to retreat, before Ooni even spoke.
Ooni wanted to feel that courage again, that moment of sunlit triumph when she had dreamed of laying Yolanda’s head at Elpida’s feet.
But when she glanced over her shoulder into the flickering shadows of the tomb, she could only imagine Kuro’s hulking form looming out of the passageway. She felt the sticky heat of Kuro’s grasping hands on the back of her neck, peeling away her armour, pinning her down, slapping her when she squealed. She felt Kuro’s reeking breath on her shoulders, teeth getting ready to teach her her place. Her nerves remembered it all too well, and her nerves were shot to pieces.
Ooni put her helmet back on, so Leuca would not see her tears.
“Alright, Kaga, alright! Fuck! Fine!” Victoria said over the comms. “We’re retreating. That’s your order. Same route as before. Nothing’s in the way. Come home, all of you. We’ll figure something else out.”
Howl purred: “And the skull?”
Victoria sighed. “We’ll shoot it from the doorway. First, everybody out.”
In the end, Ooni didn’t even cast her vote.
As the drones drifted back across the chamber and the fireteam formed up to plunge back into the twisted innards of the tomb, Ooni cut her comms and whispered to herself in the privacy of her own helmet.
“Telokopolis is forever, Telokopolis is forever, Telokopolis is forever—”
The words were blurred by the static of the storm, and marred by the chattering of Ooni’s own teeth.