There will be no Necroepilogos chapter on the 15th of August; Necroepilogos will return as normal on the 22nd of August!

I’m so sorry to have to do this so soon after I last took a week out of the publishing schedule, but circumstances have forced my hand! Don’t worry, I’m fine, and there’s nothing wrong with the story; I am as dedicated to writing as always.

I am making some changes to the publishing schedule. The super short version is that Necroepilogos will be moving to a three-week-on/one-week-off schedule, possibly just temporarily, to avoid any further unplanned breaks. If you want more details, I’ve written a (far too long) patreon post about it over here! But don’t feel compelled to read that, it’s seriously far too long. Necroepilogos will be back like normal next week!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Victoria was alone in Pheiri’s control cockpit, watching her friends come home.

“What do you think, hey?” she said. Her voice was blurred by the close and claustrophobic static of the storm — a rumbling murmur even inside Pheiri’s hull, far within the walls of the tomb, buried deep underground. Distant creakings and groanings sang a reply to the howling wind outside. “They’re taking the exact same route back, right? Drones up front for a vanguard, nice wide spread. What do you reckon, fifteen minutes?”

A screen lit up down by her right elbow. Glowing green text flickered in the electric gloom.

>20:00

Victoria clucked her tongue. “Oooh, I dunno about that. Twenty minutes, really? They’ve been on the move for almost thirty minutes already. Elpi’s got them hustling fast, making good progress. And that last stretch is all wide open corridors, right? Nah, come on. Fifteen minutes.”

The green text refreshed.

>20:00

“Well, you would know better than me.” Vicky was not exaggerating; Pheiri was Pheiri, with all his sensors and his processing power, while Vicky had only rough location pings, indicated by blinking green lights on a tiny steel-glass screen set into the communication console. “But I’m confident,” she said. “Fifteen minutes. Are you confident enough to bet against that number, Pheiri?”

>y

“So, what do we wager?”

>accuracy

“Ahhhhh. Bragging rights. Honour. The satisfaction of ‘I-told-you-so’.”

>y

“Didn’t know you went in for that kind of thing. Not the sort of wager I’d usually risk. Certainly not against Kaga, she’d be insufferable if she won … ”

The glowing green text held steady.

“You’re on,” she finished. “Fifteen minutes. I’ll trust you to keep count, of course.”

>20:00 … 19:59 … 19:58 …

Vicky took a deep breath, let out an equally deep sigh, and leaned back her seat with a creak of metal.

She was sat in what she had begun to think of as the ‘comms seat’ — the battered old chair perched before the bank of consoles which served as a crew interface for Pheiri’s communications array. Technically there was no need to sit directly in front of the comms console itself; Vicky could have set herself up in any seat she liked. Some of the chairs toward the rear of the cockpit boasted significantly more stuffing left in their backrests and arms; she could have forgone the rolled up t-shirt pressed into the base of her spine or the spare coat folded beneath her backside. Pheiri would happily flash any information she needed onto any of his dozens of screens, with nothing more required of her than a vocal request. If she needed to talk to the fireteam — Elpida, Kagami, Atyle, Hafina, and Ilyusha — she need only speak out loud; Pheiri’s pickup and broadcast equipment would render her voice in perfect clarity even from halfway across the room.

But Victoria refused to sit back and wait; she had enough of that in the GLR 18th Infantry — ‘hurry up and wait’ was the watchword and joke of all old soldiers, and Victoria had been an old soldier for much, much longer than she’d been undead.

She had spent most of her time over the last few weeks familiarising herself with every part of Pheiri she could reach, which meant pretty much everything above the tunnels of the engineering deck beneath her feet, where only Melyn’s tiny android body could fit. Victoria longed to see Pheiri’s nuclear heart and the baroque complexity of his engines for herself, so she might do what she could for the worn and aged components of his main drivetrain; but she had to trust in Melyn’s slender little hands for that job, and the miracle of Thirteen Arcadia’s grey nanomachine sludge.

Instead, Vicky had crawled into hidden compartments all along Pheiri’s spinal corridor, opening new rooms and spaces which had gone lightless and unused for hundreds of years. She had contorted herself and wormed her way upward into the sponson-chambers and armour-bulges of Pheiri’s many guns, to count and catalogue and check on his systems, to oil and grease and wipe clean his ageing servo-motors and ammunition feeds. She had spent entire days up there, wriggling back and forth with tins of lubricant and a heavy tool belt, doing maintenance on a machine more complex than any artillery piece she’d known in life. She had even inspected much of Pheiri’s exterior armour, accompanied by Hafina and Serin, protected by Pheiri’s heavy guns; she had searched for cracks and flaws and breaches in Pheiri’s bony white shell, though she could do little to heal those wounds. Pheiri’s skin repaired itself, given enough time and nano-sludge.

She’d learned how to operate the comms system — or at least enough of it to participate. She’d set up a recurring tight-beam ping to Hafina’s on-board radio and Elpida’s headset, to keep her and Pheiri updated on the group’s progress back toward safety and home. Not that Pheiri couldn’t have done that himself, or flashed the information up on a screen at Vicky’s request. Technically any manual operation of Pheiri’s control cockpit was pointless. Learning what the buttons and switches and displays did was a waste of time. Her input was duplicated work; Pheiri could do it all himself with nothing but a thought.

But it was wrong to expect Pheiri to do it alone. So Victoria had a little display all to herself, lit up with green text showing estimated distances and automatic ping returns. Hafina and Elpida were moving fast, well within ten feet of each other. The drones were in a ring, shown as auxiliary pings in contact with Pheiri’s on-board IFF sensors.

Kagami had refused the ping set-up, of course, because why not?

Vicky lifted her gaze to the screens above the comms console.

A dozen of Pheiri’s displays showed exterior views, from out beyond the hull — high angle panoramas from up on his turret, past the bristling guns of his armour; low tight-range sights from the rear of his ramp or down his sides, watching the floors for signs of hidden movement; infra-red, night-vision, and powerful magnification peering into every corner and crevice, sweeping back and forth across the yawning metallic darkness of the tomb.

Pheiri was currently burrowed deep into the second subterranean layer of the tomb. He was stopped toward the rear of a massive chamber of grey metal, which dwarfed even his substantial size. There were four ways in and out of the chamber — one to Pheiri’s rear, one in front, and one on either side, all covered by plenty of Pheiri’s guns. On the left hand side of the chamber, between Pheiri and the wall, corpses lay stacked in rows — the remains of Lykke’s group of revenants who had slipped past Pheiri and raced for the gravekeeper. The corpses were too numerous to process all at once, or to cram inside Pheiri in the meantime, so there they lay. Vicky tried not to look at them too often.

Getting down here had been simple enough. The grey metal passageways of the subterranean levels appeared to be built for vehicles, equipped with ramps and wide corridors, not at all like the tight spaces of the upper layers. But this was as far as Pheiri could reach, at least without blasting holes through the tomb’s innards; up ahead the corridors narrowed into twisty little tunnels, as if to restrict access to the gravekeeper’s chamber.

Pheiri didn’t need anybody to watch his cameras. Pheiri had every angle covered, everything under control. If a bunch of zombies shambled around a corner and tried to pop him in the flank with an anti-tank weapon, he would jerk out of the way or flash-start his shields or flatten them with a cannon round, all long before Victoria could shout a warning or press a button. The danger would be over and gone before she had time to clench.

But she didn’t like to leave the old boy all by himself. He deserved some company on watch.

It wasn’t just that, but Victoria tried not to think too hard about the other part.

Pheiri was alert to any sign of Necromancer activity, of course. His detection could not be fooled and his firepower could not be overcome. If this ‘Lykke’ bitch came back, she wouldn’t stand a chance. Pheiri was immune to Necromancer bullshit and his guns would reduce her to paste, no matter how many times she reconstituted herself from the walls — which was apparently a real possibility, according to Cyneswith. But the fireteam out beyond the hull had far less protection, only Kagami’s drones, Hafina’s immunity to Necromancer paralysis, and Elpida’s trump card, Howl.

Victoria dealt with anxiety the same as she had in life — watching the skies for incoming counter-battery fire.

Besides, she wanted to keep a personal eye on Shilu.

Pheiri had several screens dedicated to Shilu. He kept the ‘Necromancer’ painted with half a dozen weapon systems, highlighting her black metal body in reds and purples and night-vision greens, pinning her in the centre of targeting reticles and predicted blast radii. If Shilu so much as sneezed wrong, Pheiri could turn the entire front half of the chamber into molten slag.

But Shilu did not sneeze. Shilu did not twitch. Shilu did nothing. Shilu sat there crossed-legged, hands on her knees, eyes closed. She had done nothing but sit there since Elpida had asked her to wait.

“You keep her covered, boss,” Vicky muttered. “Keep those eyes peeled real good. Dammit, I wish she would move. Adjust a leg. Scratch her nose. Let out a fart.”

>y

Victoria tugged her armoured coat tighter around her shoulders. She wasn’t cold; the chill was all in her head, brought on by the hurricane, deepened by the incessant creaking and groaning of the tomb structure. She couldn’t see anything through Pheiri’s tiny steel-glass slit up in the top right of the control cockpit, but she glanced up anyway, then chuckled at herself. As if she could look outdoors and watch the rain.

At least they had plenty of spare clothes now, enough grey tomb-grown gear to go around a dozen times over, currently packed into Pheiri’s storage racks.

In fact, Vicky and her comrades now had more equipment than they knew what to do with — guns and body armour stacked up in the crew compartment, bullets galore in buckets and bins, weapon grease and grenades and boots and helmets, more than they could ever use, all from this one tomb’s armoury.

Vicky knew the task of sorting and stowing much of that equipment would fall on her shoulders; after all, she’d learned more about Pheiri’s compartments over the last few weeks than anybody else among her comrades, with the possible exception of Melyn. She’d end up more quartermaster than mechanic. Amina would help, she was always eager. Ooni too, she was a fast learner and all smiles these days. Maybe she could bully Pira into assisting, too. Kagami, of course, would not deign to lend her drones for the mere task of lugging firearms about.

And meanwhile? Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. Don’t dawdle, old soldier, hurry yourself up now — then wait for orders.

Vicky sighed.

Screens flickered and hummed in the electric gloom. Hurricane static hissed and buzzed against the far-away walls of the tomb. Vicky leaned back, her chair creaking again, an imitation of the black metal beneath the howling storm-winds.

She peered at the screen which showed Pheiri’s assessment of the storm — wind speeds and rainfall and the like — but none of the numbers looked any different to five minutes ago. She lifted a headset to one ear and reviewed the audio logs of sounds picked up inside the tomb — zombies scurrying about, a few snatches of unintelligible words, nothing important. She checked on Iriko again via the tight-beam, and received something like a snore in reply. That made her smile, so she checked on Hope as well, searching the skies with the comms array. But Thirteen Arcadia’s pseudo-satellite child was hiding well beyond the edge of the hurricane.

Vicky waited, watching the darkness, watching Shilu, listening to the storm. On watch with Pheiri. A good way to pass her unlife.

Elpida’s fireteam reached the chamber a little while later. Victoria saw the direct tight-beam uplink to Pheiri, chattering on the console before her — Elpida, letting Pheiri know that the figures about to round the corner were just her and Kagami and the rest, not some random zombies blundering through the tomb. Vicky watched as the little team scurried out of the corridors and hurried across the wide chamber, flanked and guarded by Kagami’s bulky new drones, all picked out in pale night-vision greens and ghostly whites. Elpida’s head was high, eyes flickering back and forth to make sure the others got aboard safely. Hafina carried Kagami. How very cosy for the Princess.

Vicky felt Pheiri’s crew access ramp descend with a thump, then watched the tiny low-light figures scurry upward and squeeze inside. A moment later the ramp closed with a matching clank of metal.

“Everyone’s back in one piece, right?” she asked out loud.

>y

“Good to know.”

Victoria did not leap out of her seat and hurry down the spinal corridor to welcome Kagami home. That would not earn Vicky a warm reception, let alone a coquettish hug and a chaste peck on the cheek. Getting a hug out of Kagami was like trying to take a wild cat for a walk. A kiss? They hadn’t kissed since that night Victoria had told Kagami the truth. If Kaga wanted to continue their earlier conversation, she would probably try later on, in her usual circuitous fashion. She’d doubtless call Victoria over to the lab in some roundabout way, or probably badger her about the storage space for the new drones, then insult her several times and stomp off again. Until then, Kaga would flare her spikes to keep Victoria off.

Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. Even when it came to Princesses from the Moon. Hurry up! And wait.

Besides, Pheiri still needed somebody to watch the cameras, and nobody had turned up to take over.

“Wait a sec, who won?” Vicky asked. “How long was that?”

>17:32

“ … ha! What does that count as then? Your win by two seconds?”

>draw

“You sure? You were right, Pheiri. They were closer to twenty minutes than fifteen. You sure you don’t want to claim the win?”

>y

“Well, have it your way. Mister gracious in victory.”

>y

Victoria leaned back again; the chair let out a satisfying creak of old metal. Perhaps she should putter about with some grease and scrap, see if she could shore up these seats a bit. Or perhaps she should turn back to the project laid out on the floor behind her. With the others safely back home, the knot in her stomach was loosening up. She could afford to spare attention for other tasks.

She ran her eyes across the exterior views one more time. Shilu, unmoving. The dark corridors of the tomb, shadowy and grey. Pheiri’s exterior hull, pitted by darkness and divots, bristling with guns and dim red warning lights. Serin, still perched up front, still watching Shilu. Vicky always had trouble talking to Serin, and enduring her weird mushroomy smell, but she still wished the woman would come inside.

Victoria sighed and turned in the seat. She could get back to the project now. This weapon wouldn’t finish maintaining itself—

A familiar figure stepped from Pheiri’s spinal corridor and into the cockpit — Kagami.

Or rather, Kagami floated into the cockpit with her socks a couple of inches off the floor, her back reclined just enough to make it clear that she was not walking. Two silver-grey drones hovered at her shoulders, doing the heavy lifting so beneath her lofty station, supporting her with an invisible gravity-field. Three more drones orbited her in a tight formation.

Vicky raised her eyebrows. “Hey you.”

Kagami looked rather rumpled inside her own armoured coat, too large for her slender body. Her long black hair was swept back as if she’d been raking her hands through it repeatedly. Her eyes were too wide with tension, still wired from the trip beyond the hull. Her usual imperious bearing was buckled beneath an invisible weight.

Kagami sighed and rolled her eyes. “‘Hey you’?” she echoed. “What kind of welcome is that? I’ve just spent the last hour — or more! — traipsing through this insane death-trap machine, wondering when our glorious leader is going to demand that somebody shoot her in the head again. Is that all you can manage? ‘Hey you’?”

Victoria sighed and smiled at the same time. “Welcome home, Moon Princess. Should I run you a bath?”

Kagami snorted and rolled her eyes again. “Mockery will get you nowhere.”

“Kaga, I’m glad you’re back safe. And stop doing that with your eyes, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

“Doing what with my eyes?” Kagami squinted. “What are you talking about?”

“Rolling them. Yeah, that. Like that. Exactly that, what you just did right there.”

Kagami clenched her jaw. Victoria braced for the next stage of the process. She had learned through bitter experience that Kagami followed embarrassment with sharp-tongued rebuke. The hotter the embarrassment, the heavier the barrage of insults, until Kagami hit a buffer overflow and regressed back to calling everyone ‘dirt-eating primitives’. Victoria had been unable to resist their little exchange over the radio earlier, but here was the butcher’s bill coming due.

But then Kagami just said: “Come with me to the lab.”

Vicky blinked. “What?”

Kagami huffed. “I said, come with me to the lab. Are you having trouble with language now? Is our translation software breaking down? Because I am not going to learn pre-NorAm English. You’ll have to learn Luna, and your accent will be terrible.”

“Uh, no, I’m just surprised.” A smile crept across Vicky’s face. Was Kagami trying to be forward? Had the fear and separation of the expedition into the tomb made her want to go somewhere private together and cuddle? Victoria forced herself not to smile too hard; if Kagami was finally reaching out for interpersonal comfort, Vicky needed to take this seriously. “I’m flattered you want me alone, Kaga, but somebody needs to stay here and watch the screens, you know?”

“Come with me to the lab,” Kagami snapped.

Vicky opened her mouth to play along again, but then realised that Kagami was not flirting. She was furious and furtive.

“ … Kaga, what’s wrong? Everyone came back in one piece, right? Did something happen?”

“Come with me. To the lab. How many times am I going to have to repeat this?”

“Kagami—”

“Come with me to the lab.”

“Ka—”

Kagami shouted. “Come with me to the lab!”

Vicky spread her hands. “Why?”

“Just do it!”

“No!”

Victoria had not intended to shout back, but she did. Kagami flinched. Two of her drones jerked forward as if to protect her, but then quickly dipped back downward.

Vicky swallowed, then took a deep breath. She did not want to lose her temper with Kagami. She had promised herself she would not do so again, not since that terrible screaming match several weeks ago; she could barely recall the substance of that argument now, it all seemed very foggy in her memory. The argument had happened when everybody had been going mad with hunger without knowing it, overcome with a need to eat that crushed all other thought and made anger quick and sharp. When Elpida had gone out to hunt and brought back fresh meat, the irritable fog had lifted as if it had never been felt. Vicky never wanted to feel that again.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Sorry, Kaga, I didn’t mean to snap, I just—”

“Why not?” Kagami said, softer but still irritated.

“Why not snap?”

“No,” Kagami sighed. “Why won’t you come with me?”

Victoria didn’t answer right away. Something was wrong with Kagami — more wrong than all the usual things which were wrong with Kagami. Was she embarrassed by the request for alone time with Vicky? Or was this an extension of the earlier jealousy, now taking some side-route that Victoria didn’t recognise? Or had something terrible happened out there in the tomb, something which nobody was telling her? Pheiri hadn’t picked up anything strange, and he would not keep silly secrets.

Vicky leaned sideways in her chair to peer around Kagami, into the jumble of systems and kinking corners which formed Pheiri’s spinal corridor. Nobody was lurking behind Kagami or blundering down through the passageway. The distant fury of the hurricane blotted out most small noises, but she would have heard the approach of another pair of feet, unless Amina was sneaking around.

“Nobody’s behind you,” Vicky said. “We’re totally alone right now. If you want to talk, we can talk right here.” She gestured at the screens which surrounded the comms console. “And I’m serious about being on duty. Unless this is an emergency, somebody needs to stay here and watch. Look, I’m happy to come with you if you call somebody to replace me. Ooni should be free. Go get her and I’ll come anywhere you want.”

Kagami sighed, began to roll her eyes, then stopped. “Victoria, I think Pheiri is perfectly capable of watching the inside of his own eyeballs.”

“Yeah, sure,” Vicky said. “But I’m on duty. Come on, you can sit down right here. You wanna talk?”

“Not particularly.”

Victoria swallowed a sigh. Kagami pursed her lips harder and harder, then—

“Fine!” she spat. “Fine. Fine. We’re going to do it like this? Fine.”

Kagami floated closer, but did not take a seat. Instead she reclined against the invisible support of her drones, one on either side of her back, until she assumed a sitting position in mid-air.

“Wow,” Vicky said.

Kaga scowled. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just you, sitting on a throne of thin air.”

Kagami huffed again and cast her eyes around the inside of the control cockpit, squinting at the views of Pheiri’s exterior on the displays. Her eyes paused on Shilu briefly, then carried on down to the comms console.

“Is this what you’ve been doing the whole time?” she asked. “Sitting here and watching the cameras?”

“Somebody’s gotta do it. It’s not that different to your drones, you know?”

Kagami sighed. She closed her eyes briefly. Victoria would have assumed she was counting to ten, but Victoria knew full well Kagami never attempted to control her anger.

“I’m not trying to be insulting,” Kagami said. “And no, actually, as I just explained, this is entirely unnecessary. Nobody has ‘gotta do it’. You’re not earning karma or good girl points or washing away your sins by sitting on watch when Pheiri is doing it anyway. This is self-flagellation, Victoria. I had hoped you were less primitive than this.”

Vicky laughed and shook her head. “Bullshit. I like helping. I like doing this. It feels good.”

“Yes, yes. Whatever.” Kagami glanced around the cockpit again, into the electric shadows and the distant rumble of the storm beyond. A particularly loud creaking sound reverberated through the black metal of the tomb. Kagami attempted to suppress a shudder, but she didn’t do a very good job of it.

After a moment, Vicky said: “How are the others?”

“Fine.”

“As in, did the return journey—”

“It was fine.”

Vicky waited a beat. “Kaga—”

“Hafina is stripping off her armour. Atyle went to stare at the wounded newbie again, which is creepy and weird and I hate it. Ilyusha is probably gnawing on a leg bone. Elpida is … busy.”

“Thank you,” Vicky said. “That’s all I was asking for. Did you look in on the newbies at all? I haven’t had a chance for a while now.”

“Mm,” Kagami grunted. She didn’t meet Vicky’s eyes, but this subject finally drew some of her poison. Her voice softened. “Eseld’s still mute, won’t respond to anything. She’s eaten a few mouthfuls of meat though. Sky’s unconscious — in the ‘good way’, as Melyn put it. Cyneswith stares at everybody like we’ve all stepped from the pages of a fantasy sim. Which I do not like. She called me ‘My Lady’.”

“Yeeeeeah,” Vicky said. “She’s gonna struggle. I’ve tried to talk to her too, but she’s pretty wilful about her world-view, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm.”

Hurricane static settled into the cockpit — sheets of distant rain, the drum of hailstones on metal, the howling of the wind and the creaking of the tomb. Vicky looked at the exterior screens again, taking note of Shilu’s position and checking the entrances to the chamber. Kagami sighed, long and low. Vicky closed her eyes for a moment. This was almost nice, just sitting here in the quiet alongside Kagami, secure together inside Pheiri while the wind and the rain howled on and on outdoors. Perhaps she really should ask Ooni to come take over on watch. Victoria would very much like to snuggle down in Kagami’s lab together, maybe take a nap.

“At least that weird roaring noise has stopped,” she muttered. “Stopped about the time you started on your way back to Pheiri. Maybe whatever was making it just wandered off. Here’s to hoping.”

“Mmhmm,” Kagami grunted.

“I saw a hurricane once before,” Vicky went on. “Back in life, I mean. The remains of one, I guess. South of New York a ways. We were pitched up in—”

“What’s that?” Kagami said, voice peaking with disdain.

Vicky opened her eyes and looked round.

Kagami was pointing at the floor behind Vicky’s chair, where the disassembled weapon was laid out on the metal. Black tubes and boxes lay separated, unrecognisable as parts of their combined form.

“Ah, that’s my little treat, to myself. I was in the middle of checking all the parts.” Vicky cracked a grin. “Wanna see?”

“See what?”

Vicky turned her seat around and bent down. She picked up the bulky receiver first, then slotted the long, ridged barrel into place, followed by the trigger mechanism, rear grip, and top-mounted carrying handle. She slapped the three parts of the drum-mag back together and clicked it home underneath. She folded out the stock and slid the forward grip into position. Then she finally lifted the optical sight and targeting computer, laid them into the armoured slot in the forward part of the receiver, and locked them in place.

She hefted the weapon, about fifteen pounds of lightweight alloys and hardened polymers, as thick as her arm and over three feet long.

She struck a pose. “Well? What do you think? Does it suit me?”

Kagami shrugged. “My knowledge of primitive weaponry is rather limited.”

“Huh!” Victoria laughed. “Primitive weaponry? Moon Princess, I could knock one of your drones out mid-flight with this baby, trust me on that.”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “No, you could not. Don’t exaggerate. What is it, ECM of some kind?”

“AGL.”

Kagami shrugged again.

“Automatic grenade launcher.”

Kagami’s eyes widened beneath the creases of a concerned frown. “That’s a joke.”

“Nope, no joke. Genuine article. I really could probably knock out one of your drones mid-flight, given enough range and a few seconds to get a reading with the sights. I could pop a round through a six-inch bunker slit in half a second, that’s also not a joke. Hey, come on, don’t look at me like that. This is my one personal claim from the armoury haul.”

Kagami hissed, “And you’ve brought it in here, inside Pheiri, into the cockpit?!”

“ … Kaga, it’s not loaded.”

Kagami threw up both hands. “Fine, fine—”

“If you don’t trust me with anything else, you can damn well trust me with ammunition and explosive safety. The rounds are stored in the armoured pocket on Pheiri’s rear, they’re not even inside his hull. I’m not stupid, thank you.”

“Fine! Fine. Alright!” Kagami paused to huff. “Luna’s soil, Victoria. When are you ever going to have a need for that?”

“Hey, it’s got a perfectly legitimate combat use. If we ever need to dig some zombies out of a trench or blast apart some cover, I’ve got us sorted.”

“We have Pheiri’s guns for that!” Kagami jabbed a finger at the AGL. “That thing is a fetish, nothing more. Admit it.”

“Maybe.” Vicky sighed. She patted the chunky barrel. “It’s the closest thing I’m ever gonna get to firing an artillery piece ever again, that’s for sure.”

Kagami opened her mouth, then closed it again. She sighed through her nose.

Victoria went on: “Honestly, hey, I’m surprised you didn’t recognise this.” She laid the AGL across her thighs, then detached the sight. She pressed one eye to the rubber socket and pointed the detached optical at Kagami’s scowl. The on-board targeting computer attempted to calculate trajectory and firing arc for the tip of Kagami’s neat little nose.

After a few moments it gave up and threw an error: DANGER CLOSE DO NOT FIRE.

Kagami squinted, face framed in miniature inside the sight. “What? What are you going on about now?”

“AGL,” Victoria said. “You used to command troops down on the surface, right? This stuff is like, standard equipment for any decently heavy infantry formation.” She lowered the sight again and looked down at the ridged barrel of the grenade launcher. “I don’t mean this exact model or anything. Hell, I don’t recognise this one either, probably comes from hundreds or thousands of years after either of us. Looks kinda like a QLZ, I guess, but much lighter. Alloys are less dense. More polymer parts. Future science, I guess. The rounds felt pretty light too, but I’m not gonna test them inside the tomb. Anyway, I mean the general principle. Crew-served weapons in a heavy infantry formation. Squad-level organic firepower, all that. It’s no artillery regiment, but … Kaga?”

Kagami was just staring, blank-faced and unimpressed. “My surface agents were generally armed with more advanced systems.”

Vicky laughed. “More advanced systems,” she echoed with a smile. “Come on, you can’t beat a good explosion. It’s not quite the same as an artillery barrage, but holding one of these and doing it yourself, it feels great. Here.” She sat up straight and raised the weapon to her shoulder, angling it upward as if about to fire, trying to keep the smirk off her face. “Where I came from, they used to say that firing one of these is a religious experience.”

Kagami frowned, incredulous. “What? Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Yeah, serious.” Vicky struggled to keep a straight face. “First you hear budda-budda-budda.” She jerked the grenade launcher as if firing. “Then, you see the light.”

Kagami rolled her eyes with a great and terrible huff. Victoria started laughing.

“That was atrocious,” Kagami said.

“Come on, Kaga! You gotta admit, that was a good one. I had you going there for a sec. The joke doesn’t quite work the same though, ‘cos the ones we had were belt-fed. Old Empire shit. They really did make a sound like that, budda-budda-budda. Scary if you’re on the receiving end.”

Kagami threw up both hands. “Your people weren’t Buddhists! It’s a shit joke!”

Victoria shrugged. “I knew a few Buddhists in the GLR. Don’t be such a closed-minded Lunarian, hey. You had Buddhists on the moon?”

“That gun is absurd and you have no need for it.”

Victoria lowered the launcher again. “I wish you’d go armed, Kaga. When you go out, beyond the hull, I mean. It’s not like we’re short on guns now. Take a pistol, a sidearm, anything. Just shove it in a pocket and forget about it unless you need it. Please?”

Kagami frowned, then gestured at one of her drones, hovering a couple of feet from her head. “I don’t need guns.”

“Take one anyway? For me?”

“Why?”

Victoria stared. Kagami stared back, then swallowed and looked away. Was that a blush Victoria detected in those cheeks? Maybe, but not quite. Kagami was beautiful when she blushed, shaded by that long black hair, like she really did belong on a throne on the Moon.

“Because,” Victoria said quietly, “I don’t want you to be alone and afraid if your drones fail. Because you and I sleep together half the time and I still don’t know what that means. Take a gun with you, Kaga. At least when I’m not with you.”

Kagami said nothing for a long moment, staring off at the flickering screens of the control cockpit. Then: “Will you come with me to the lab?”

“Like I said, if you get a replacement for me. Why? What for? You can just tell me, you know. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Kagami looked around at last. “Elpida wants to talk to both of us.”

Vicky sat up straighter. “What? Is that what all this was about? Kaga, why didn’t you say something? Is she waiting for me?”

Kagami snorted. Her eyes tightened. Her throat bobbed. “Ahhhhh, yes. There we go. When it was just me making a request, oh no, no no no. You had excuses and counter-arguments. You were too busy watching the screens to come with me. You have to get a replacement for a job which doesn’t even need doing. But when Elpida says jump, you ask how high. When Elpida says sit, you sit. Bark like a dog. Roll over. Play dead.”

“Kaga—”

“Shut up.”

Vicky shut up. Kagami shut up too, staring across the cockpit again, avoiding Vicky’s eyes. Electric gloom flickered on her burning cheeks, the reflection of Pheiri’s screens washing out her blush.

“Kaga,” Vicky started slowly, wary of another detonation. “I don’t sleep with Elpida. I don’t climb into her bunk. I don’t worry about her when she’s beyond the hull. I don’t—” Vicky had to take a breath, to sort truth from lie. “I admire her, yes. I respect her, because she’s our Commander, because she’s led us through this insane afterlife and hasn’t yet led us astray. We’re all still here, still alive, whatever that means when we’re all zombies, and that is down to her. And you said it yourself, we need to talk to her, because something is wrong with her lately. Something has been wrong with her for weeks and now she’s found this Eseld girl. That would be enough to fuck anybody up. She’s a super soldier, but I know she’s not invincible. I’ve seen her cry. So yes, I care, I worry, because she is our Commander, and my friend. But you’ve got nothing to be jealous of. Just—”

Kagami stood up — righted by her drones. She floated away, heading for Pheiri’s spinal corridor.

“Kaga, hey—”

“Maybe you’re the one who should be jealous, Victoria!” she spat back. “Fine, I’ll go get Ooni, or some other ex-fascist moron to sit in your place, so you and I and Elpida can talk all we like about how paranoid and cynical I am!”

Kagami paused by the corridor entrance, staring back, daring Vicky to answer.

Vicky said: “Kaga, where the hell is this coming from?”

Kagami stared for a moment — then three of her drones shot forward.

Victoria flinched, jerking in her seat, making the metal creak. The speed of the drones gave her no time to react. If her AGL had been loaded, she would not have been able to blast one drone out of the air, let alone three. She did not even have time to fully form the thought — that Kagami had finally lost her mind to green-eyed jealousy and the toxins of a superiority complex.

That thought only solidified a moment later, when the three drones hung in a rough triangle behind her, mirrored by three drones behind Kagami.

A gentle static crackle passed through the air; Vicky tasted a little blood. The sound of the storm grew faint, blocked by Kagami’s electromagnetic forcefield.

Vicky blinked in shock; this was not the assault she had expected, but sudden seclusion. Total privacy within this prism which held only the two of them. Even Pheiri could not listen through those invisible walls.

“Kaga, what—”

“You and I need to discuss treachery, Victoria,” Kagami snapped. “And I’m not talking about yours. You, I trust. Completely.”

The drones zipped back toward Kagami. The EM privacy field collapsed with a soft crackle. The sound of the storm rushed back, the tomb walls creaking and groaning far beyond Pheiri’s hull.

Vicky started to rise. “Hey, Kaga, woah, wait, what—”

“Keep your mouth shut,” Kagami said. She turned away and floated into the corridor. “I’ll go fetch somebody else to take over your ‘duty’. Then you come to the lab, like a good girl. Woof woof.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Kagami, if you’re trying to be sneaky and conspiratorial with your on-again off-again cross-cultural zombie lesbian situationship, calling her a dog is probably not the best way to achieve it. I dunno, unless she’s into that, but you should probably ask her first? But hey, far be it from me to criticize! Let’s see how this strategy pans out, shall we?

Meanwhile, Kagami does seem to actually be up to something. Hm. Perhaps Elpida put her cynicism and paranoia to good use after all …

Ahem! Well! Arc 12 continues apace! I think we really are going for a longer, chunkier, more brooding arc this time, dear readers. There’s so much wreckage through which to sort, so many strange threads on which to pull. Though perhaps the ‘brooding’ will only sustain itself as long as nobody starts letting off guns and getting in a fight. Which might be inevitable. We’ll see.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons. I hope!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which heps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And, as always, thank you for reading my little story! Thank you so much, dear readers; I couldn’t do any of this without all of you. Elpida and the others would have nobody to watch them! So, thank you! We continue to sink, deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the tomb, beneath the falling ceiling of the hurricane outdoors, with horrible things scuttling around in the shadows at our ankles. Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Discussion of suicidal ideation

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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?”

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.

<<special mission mission failed? mission failed? iriko did a bad. iriko tired tired sleep tired please?>>

Kagami did her best not to shudder or flinch. <<Don’t worry about it,>> she replied down the comms link. <<Go back to sleep.>>

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.

<<Kaga?>> Vicky’s voice came over the radio, clear and clean on the tight-beam. <<You okay out there? Did something happen? I’m not seeing anything on the board from Elpi or Haf, are you—>>

<<I’m fine,>> Kagami snapped. <<Nothing is happening. Sit down.>>

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, <<I am sitting down, Kaga. I’m in the comms seat.>> A hint of mockery entered her tone. <<Unless you’d rather I rise to my feet whenever you call. Should’a guessed you’d like that.>>

<<You know what I mean! Don’t sound the alarm and send the cavalry, that’s what I mean. Nothing is happening. I’m fine.>>

Vicky sighed. <<Cavalry’s already with you, anyway.>>

<<What?>>

<<Iriko. I’m talking about Iriko. She’s the closest thing we have to cavalry, right?>>

Kagami was about to argue, but she realised this was probably correct. She snorted instead. <<Since when did you become an expert in ancient combined arms?>>

<<Since right now. And hey, cavalry was still relevant when I was around. Helicopters and the like.>> A short pause, then: <<Kaga, are you okay, seriously? I know Elpi moved off-station, she sent us a location ping, she left you with—>>

<<This is not a social call, before you get any stupid ideas.>>

Another long pause. Vicky cleared her throat, then said, <<Well, if it’s not an emergency, and it’s not a social call, what it is? Can’t you go without me for twenty minutes? Should I be flattered, or what?>>

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.

<<Just checking on home base,>> Kagami said. <<I have to make sure you’re not running with scissors or playing with matches.>>

<<Ha ha,>> replied Vicky. <<You want a serious answer?>>

<<Yes. All clear?>>

<<Yeah, sure, everything’s fine. Nothing’s come near Pheiri. A couple of zombies wandered down a nearby corridor about half an hour ago, but they ran like the wind as soon as they saw Pheiri sitting here. No sign of Necromancer stuff again. No Lykke, or whatever her name was. The home front is quiet, Kaga. No worries here.>>

<<How about our new arrivals?>>

<<Ahhh, well.>> Vicky seemed less certain. <<Pira and Amina are looking after them. Melyn’s working on the one who got wounded. Sky? Yeah, Sky. She’s in a bad way. Still unconscious, or at least semi-conscious. Lots of broken bones. Internal bleeding. It’s a wonder she’s still alive. Or, well, you know, ‘alive’.>>

<<Mm. And how’s our little biter?>>

<<Eseld?>>

<<Mmmhmm.>>

Victoria sighed a very big sigh. <<Not good. She’s not comatose, but she’s barely responsive. Shell shock. PTSD? I dunno what to call it. It’s bad.>>

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.

<<Any word from our eye in the sky?>>

<<Nah,>> Vicky said. <<Hope’s put herself beyond the edge of the storm, we’re still out of contact.>>

<<And how is our uninvited guest?>>

Victoria paused, then cleared her throat. <<Creepy. Hasn’t moved the whole time.>>

<<Have Pheiri patch one of his front cameras through to my auspex visor.>>

<<You serious?>>

<<Yes, I want to get another look at her. Visual is fine, I don’t need to see her guts or anything.>>

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, <<Kaga?>>

<<Why the hell am I all the way up here, Victoria? Why was this necessary?>>

Vicky sighed, matching Kagami’s musing tone. <<Because Elpida trusts you, Kaga. Come on. She needed the drone cordon. And she wanted your opinion. She values you. She trusts you!>>

<<I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our Commander has been going steadily insane. She almost got her head blown off today. And now she’s swanning about like she’s full of uppers.>>

Vicky fell silent for a second. <<I … yeah, I know.>>

<<And you agree with her, don’t you? I should have guessed. You think she was doing the right thing by letting that idiot put a gun to her head.>>

<<She had a point … >>

<<She had an obsession! Victoria, she has spent the last few weeks memorising the faces of dead people and staring at skulls! And then she almost gets herself shot, and the only thing which stopped her was Howl. I saw it, Vicky. Up close. She was going to take that bullet! She would have let it happen! And without her we—>>

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, <<We … we need to talk about this, yeah, when everyone’s back here. Didn’t have a chance earlier, with the tomb loot and this … Shilu woman. You’re right, Kaga. Elpi’s not well. It’s weird.>>

<<I don’t trust her.>>

Vicky sounded surprised. <<Elpi?>>

<<No. The Necromancer. ‘Shilu’.>>

Vicky laughed, perhaps too glad for the change of subject — or maybe too happy that Kagami trusted Elpida. Kagami wanted to spit.

<<Yeah!>> Vicky said. <<I don’t trust her either. Elpi sure doesn’t.>>

<<And would you trust her, if Elpida did?>>

<<Uh, I … what—>>

<<You would, wouldn’t you? If our dear Commander said jump, you would leap face-first into the storm.>>

Vicky sighed again, but differently now. <<Kaga, you’re the most jealous woman I’ve ever met.>>

Kagami snorted, not convincing even to herself. <<What’s to be jealous of?>>

<<I dunno,>> Vicky said. <<You tell me. Where’s this coming from?>>

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.

<<Fuck me,>> Vicky muttered as the roar faded. <<Fucking hell. Fuck.>>

<<You heard that one too, I take it?>>

<<Yeah, loud as anything. Hey, Kaga, seriously, what do you think it is? Something alive out there?>>

Kagami snorted. <<Nothing is ‘alive’ here, Victoria, you know that.>>

<<And you know what I mean, Moon Princess.>>

<<Honest answer?>> Kagami said, with odd relief. <<Actual honest answer, I don’t know. I am praying to Luna’s silver soil that it’s not anything except the storm itself, because I have no idea what could survive in winds like that. Do you understand that, Victoria? Nine hundred miles an hour, that’s the wind speed out there. If there’s something which can live in that, it can probably squash this tomb like a house of cards. Do you understand?>>

<<Hey,>> Victoria said. <<Hey, hey, Moon Princess—>>

<<Now is not the time for—>>

<<You’re perfectly safe up there with Elpida. You’ll be back down here with me and Pheiri and all the others, real soon. Just focus on your drones—>>

<<I do not need you to lecture me on focus!>>

<<Just try not to think about it—>>

<<Oh yes, don’t think about it. That’s always your grand solution, isn’t it? Don’t think about it, don’t think too hard, don’t think at all! You absolute—>>

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: <<I’m signing off. Later.>>

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.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

What’s this? Elpida realising that she’s really bad at interpersonal intrigue and doesn’t have the skills to ferret out lies, dissembling, and treachery? And turning to Kagami for help? I guess Pira mag-dumping into Elpida’s belly really did teach her something after all.

And now it’s time for Kaga to shine! Her natural talents of being an absolute-

Ahem! Well then! This chapter actually ended up as the single longest Necroepilogos chapter so far, purely by accident. I didn’t intend it to sort of make up for skipping a week, but I guess it worked out that way. Kagami just has so much on her mind, it was impossible to stop her going and going and going like this. Oh well! At least she’s prepared for what’s up next. Right? In more metatextual news, behind the scenes this arc is shaping up to be pretty long, I think. We’re going to be jumping back and forth between POVs a bit while the rain pours, the wind screams, and the hidden monsters roar behind the wall of the storm. Onward we go!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons. I hope!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which heps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And thank you, dear readers! I know I say this every week, but thank you for reading my little story. I couldn’t write even a fraction of this without all of you, the readers! I hope you’re hunkered down inside the tomb, far from any windows and walls, because the night is dark and the storm is strong, and these zombie girls need to burrow deep. Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter!

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Iriko was on a very special mission.

Technically she was on two special missions at the same time, but the first mission was neither particularly difficult nor any different from what she would have done anyway. She did not need to be asked or encouraged or have her efforts acknowledged, but those things all felt very nice regardless of necessity. Outwardly Iriko had replied to the transmission with a sharp complaint and much residual grumbling, via several follow-up tight-beam radio squirts. But inwardly she had delighted at the message.

Iriko admitted to herself that this undermined the task’s designation as a ‘special mission’. But special missions were cool, and therefore she was on a special mission. Pheiri was rubbing off on her, silly boy that he was.

Iriko’s first special mission was very simple.

Stay alive!

The mission had come from Pheiri himself, via the private tight-beam uplink through which they passed all regular chatter. The actual wording was much more complicated than simply ‘stay alive’; even at the best of times, Pheiri was a gentleman of most ostentatious loquaciousness. He loved his data so very much, and loved to gesticulate it around to make points which could be easily condensed into much more concise forms. His tight-beam squirt had included predicted weather patterns and incoming rainfall amounts, wind speed adjustments and debris saturation calculations, and even suggested routes of exfiltration beyond the range of the incoming storm, backed up with locations of several dozen nearby potential hardened buildings or subterranean tunnel complexes, which might survive the fury of the approaching hurricane. Pheiri did not so much ‘order’ Iriko to flee — he never ‘ordered’ her to do anything. He simply and strongly suggested via a torrent of information that she needed to make herself scarce.

Iriko felt all warm and fuzzy at the request. Pheiri cared, despite his usual prickly exterior.

But Iriko wasn’t going anywhere. Oh no, not now. She would have to flee for miles and miles to outrun the storm. She wasn’t about to leave Pheiri behind inside that horrible tomb.

She’d been feeling a little lonely and abandoned after Pheiri had gone charging through the tomb’s outworks and fortifications, guns blazing in all directions, shield flashing, punching his way through any groups of zombies unwise or stupid enough to engage him. Iriko had watched from her rooftop vantage point with actual eyeballs, suitably modified with magnification and telescoping so she wouldn’t miss any of the details of Pheiri being all heroic. He had been very dashing, but then within thirty seconds he was inside the tomb’s gates and Iriko was left outdoors, all by herself, with only the rising wind and the pouring rain for company, amid thousands of zombies starting to panic and run off through the city streets.

So she sent a big raspberry-blow of refusal — 「nooooooooo! no! no! no!」

Pheiri’s personal tight-beam connection narrowed into raw audio, unspooling directly inside Iriko’s body.

「Hey there Iriko, how’s it hanging out there?」 said one of Pheiri’s zombies. It was Vicky!

Of all Pheiri’s zombies, Iriko liked Vicky the best, because Vicky talked with her more than any other. She’d even held one or two conversations with Iriko while standing up on Pheiri’s back, rather than across the tight-beam connection. Iriko had enjoyed those a lot, even though Vicky had struggled to understand Iriko’s replies. It wasn’t that the other zombies never talked to Iriko at all, but the others were often all business, or treated Iriko like she didn’t understand, or like they were speaking with an animal. But Vicky? Miss Victoria was always up for a good natter.

Iriko replied — not with a detailed breakdown of her current biochemical composition and mass-levels. Pheiri always demanded that whenever he was concerned about Iriko’s condition. Instead, Iriko replied with a poem, composed that very moment, as raindrops began to kiss the tiny scales of her refractive mail.

「victoria yes!
full stomach and lightened heart
sky fury scary?」

Vicky laughed down the radio, but Iriko could tell something was wrong. Vicky’s laugh was all stressed.

「Yeah, Iriko, uh, beautiful phrase. Sky fury scary. You see all those low clouds on the horizon to the north? That’s a bunch of very high winds and really heavy rain. Pheiri says it’s an actual hurricane, but uh, he’s already sent you that data, right. You’re probably feeling the leading edge right now, but within fifteen minutes those winds are gonna be hitting sustained speeds of eighty to a hundred miles an hour. Behind that, uh … shit. Fuck me.」 Vicky stopped and swallowed. 「Well, it’s a very powerful storm. We’re worried about you, Iriko. You can’t stay out there in this storm, not even if you stick yourself to the ground and armour up. You gotta leave the area or come indoors, you—」

「no tomb not tomb dark tomb dead things badness dark smelly bad bleh bleh. bleeeeeh!」

「We all know how you feel about the tomb. I’m sorry. But it’s the only structure sturdy enough to withstand the storm. Iriko, please, you’re going to get hurt. You need to come inside, or flee, or take some kind of shelter.」 Vicky did a big sigh; Vicky liked doing big sighs. 「Iriko, we’re on a serious time limit here. That storm is going to rip a canyon straight through the city. Come on, girl, don’t be stubborn now. You gotta understand this. Do I need to put Elpi on? Or Serin, you’ll listen to Serin, right?」

Iriko understood perfectly well. She knew all about typhoons and hurricanes and great big storms. She couldn’t remember any specific storms from before being like this — her memory was still a shattered window of broken fragments, which she knew she would never restore. But she got the gist of it. Big wind, lots of rain.

She also knew this storm was special. She didn’t need Pheiri’s big clever eyes and the panicked voices of the zombies to tell her that. The leading edge of the storm had chased the worm-guard away from the limit of the graveworm’s safe-zone a couple of hours earlier. When the ceiling of black cloud had started to dip and bulge toward the earth, the worm-guard had scuttled off through the ruins. Pheiri’s long-range sensors showed that they’d retreated into the shelter of the graveworm’s body itself, huddling beneath the vast curve of dark grey metal.

The storm had cleared a path for Pheiri and Iriko to strike inward for the tomb.

But Iriko wasn’t going to take shelter inside that tomb. She hated tombs! She couldn’t remember why, but tombs were very dangerous. Tombs were the most likely place to die, over and over again. She would get eaten if she entered a tomb. Tombs were dark and scary places full of dead things.

But the word itself was a paradox; Iriko found that fascinating, in a way she would not have been able to do so as little as two months earlier.

A ‘tomb’ was a place where you put the bodies of dead people. But the tombs here made people anew, bringing them back from the dead. The massive black metal pyramid which reared toward the sagging black belly of the sky was not a ‘tomb’ at all. It was the opposite of a tomb.

Iriko composed a poem about that paradox. The rain was falling heavier now, splashing across the top of her body, coating her refractive armour, and running down her sides, to pool in the cement surroundings of the city below.

「not dead but only
resting in eternity.
returned, for eating.」

Iriko decided she didn’t like that poem. It was another failure. She didn’t broadcast it, not to Pheiri or any of his zombies. She filed it away in the new parts of her mind where she kept notes and scraps and other such failed poems.

「Iriko? Iriko, hey, come on, say something!」 Vicky was still broadcasting down the tight-beam. 「You can’t just sit up there on a rooftop and ride this one out. At least get down to ground level and into a tunnel or something! Come on, girl!」

Iriko heard other zombies in the background — Kagami and Pira and Elpida, arguing about something, clattering about with their guns and armour plates. Somebody started shouting about risky behaviour.

Suddenly a new voice crackled down the tight-beam.

Elpida said: 「Iriko, I’m leaving Pheiri and pushing into the tomb, with a team of five. If you’re staying on-station instead of running from the storm, I need you ready for network interdiction.」

Vicky spluttered behind Elpida: 「Elpi, she can’t fucking stay out there! The winds will rip her apart—」

「Not if she gets into the tomb or gets underground. Do you read, Iriko? Do you understand?」 Elpida paused. Iriko didn’t feel like answering. 「You need to enter the tomb or get underground. I know you can do it, for me and for Pheiri. Iriko? Iriko, I want you to acknowledge me, please. Get into the tomb or get underground. Iriko, acknowledge please. Iriko. Iriko. Acknowledge—」

「pppppffffffffftttttt!!!」

Iriko blew a big raspberry down the tight-beam, then cut the connection.

Elpida was only trying to be nice, but Elpida’s ‘nice’ was so pushy! Besides, Iriko did not feel like running and hiding anymore. She had spent so much time running and hiding. Now things were different.

Iriko decided to enjoy the storm.

The wind began to shriek and wail between the taller concrete buildings, just as Pheiri and Vicky had said would happen. Tentacles of wind tugged and pulled at loose boards and hanging beams, whipping up whirls of grit and dust, sending great swirling torrents of sideways rain splattering against broken windows, running down the brickwork and the exposed steel in great flows of crashing water.

Iriko lay flat on the roof for a while and watched all this, anchored to the concrete with hard spikes of extruded metal and special bone from the underside of her body; this storm wasn’t anything like the other storm a couple of months ago, the storm caused by that great shining golden diamond in the sky. This storm could not be eaten, which Iriko found very disappointing — it was just wind and rain. On the other hand, this storm wasn’t dangerous in the same way. No beast lurked at the centre of the maelstrom, nor did the wind burn Iriko’s flesh with anything more than friction.

Iriko extended special armoured eyes into the wind, followed by thin tentacles covered in millions of microscopic hairs. She added infra-red, echolocation, and a big messy clutch of predictive algorithms.

She almost giggled. Was she really going to do this? How naughty!

This was the precise opposite of what Pheiri had suggested she do. She wondered if his zombies would start to panic when they realised her plan. She had to do it now, before she lost her nerve.

Iriko retracted all her bone-and-metal anchor spikes, launched herself off the rooftop with a single muscular heave, and went surfing through the sky.

First she flattened her body to catch the wind, riding the powerful surge of air between rows of buildings, adjusting the surface of her skin to keep it hydrophobic and glossy, cutting through the rain with the edge of her sail. She extended her senses and identified a likely group of zombies down in the ruins below, busy eating each other and pulling bionics off a kill. Iriko narrowed herself into an aerodynamic, bone-tipped dart, and dive-bombed directly into the group of advanced zombies two hundred feet below, cushioning her impact on the wind itself with outstretched flaps of flesh. Her landing scattered half her prey, though she fluttered to earth as delicately as a leaf; she ate the other half, let the runners go, then spread her body wide to catch the wind beneath her fleshy sails once again. She whirled upward between the buildings, carried off in a spiral around the vast black bulk of the tomb.

Iriko liked this very much.

Ever since she had rescued Pheiri by diving off a skyscraper, Iriko had dreamed of trying to fly, but her body was simply too heavy. She had done some secret experiments with wings and pressure-based propulsion, but those had ended in failure. She was too big, too ungainly, too messy. The failed experiments had made her want to hide away again, slink off into the dark, and stop showing the ruin of her body to Pheiri and all his zombies.

But they hadn’t cared. Pheiri never cared. So Iriko had not given up entirely.

And now, in these incredible winds, she achieved lift-off with such ease.

The hurricane was beautiful. Great swirls of coal-black cloud were piled up on the horizon like a tilted stack of gigantic plates, each one racing forward and melting into sheets of pouring rain, replaced from below by layers of gathering storm. The nearer skies churned like the innards of an iron cauldron filled with boiling pitch, whipping itself into a vortex of rotten black.

Iriko composed three poems in mid-flight. Two of them were failures, but the third was passable. She tidied it up a bit and then broadcast it in the open, so any nearby zombies with suitable communications equipment would hear her work. She used to be so terrified of doing that sort of thing, but fear itself trembled beneath the need for others to hear her speak.

「wind and rain the gods
have called down upon me
but I laugh and fly!」

Iriko picked up a few scattered responses on local radio frequencies: 「—the fuck was that?! Alice, Alice, was that you? Did you fucking hear that, somebody is shouting poems into this storm—」; 「—shut up shut up shut up! Get out of my heeeeead you bastard—」; 「—cut that open frequency, something’s using it to mess with—」; 「Mediocre, at best.」

Iriko tried to reply to that last one; she wanted to hear the critic’s thoughts in more detail. But whoever it was flooded their own connection with jamming data and squirted a series of low-grade recursive viruses back up Iriko’s tentative tight-beam. Iriko squashed the viruses. How rude!

She satisfied herself with more food instead. Iriko slammed down amid groups of easily detected zombies, falling upon them from the sky, using the wind to speed up or slow down whenever she needed. She crashed through walls and straight into ongoing cannibal feasts, declaring herself the most essential uninvited guest; she landed behind ongoing firefights with a slam of concrete and brick, then ate the largest and most easily disoriented zombies; she rode the wind through hand-span gaps between buildings and fell upon clever revenants who were themselves about to ambush others — others who were more sensibly fleeing the hurricane.

In a concession to Elpida, Iriko did her best not to eat those who were running away from the storm or just hiding and keeping to themselves. But she couldn’t be sure. Certainty was impossible. What Elpida didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

The flying — or rather, gliding, as Iriko admitted to herself — required a great deal of very complicated calculations, all done inside Iriko’s mind. She could not have done any of this two months earlier, before Pheiri and the edible storm and all the talking she always did with Pheiri’s zombies.

This would have been impossible when distracted by hunger.

Iriko was still hungry, of course. She was always hungry. She would always be hungry, no matter how many zombies she ate. Even after she had absorbed so much biomass and uncountable nanomachines from the edible storm — then spent quite a bit of that biomass saving Pheiri, of course — she had felt the hunger ebb back over the next few days, leeching the clarity of mind she had so briefly felt.

But the hunger was easier to endure these days, because Iriko was not alone.

Prior to meeting Pheiri, most of Iriko’s conversations had been with those zombies she was about to eat. Such conversations had been necessarily quite short, and often ended inconclusively. But now Iriko spoke with Pheiri every single day and every single night. Pheiri was not the best conversational partner; he rarely communicated in actual words, preferring to share sensor readout data, pieces of his own internal functions, or short sets of curt instructions.

But still, he talked.

At first Iriko had misinterpreted the regular twice-daily broadcasts Pheiri always sent, no matter how much or how little they had spoken on any given day: 「location and status update report CRITICAL PRIORITY」, always followed by 「proximity acknowledgement POSITIVE. retain supporting coherency」

After the dozenth time, Iriko realised these broadcasts always came at first light and total dusk. Pheiri was saying good night and good morning! And asking her to stay close, in case they should need each other.

This had made Iriko so happy that she’d sent Pheiri half a dozen poems. Pheiri had not supplied an opinion on those poems. He must have been embarrassed!

Over the last two months, Pheiri had warmed to her, or so Iriko surmised from the implication of his guarded attitude. Pheiri was a very silly boy, after all. He liked to send her logic puzzles and chemical equations, things for her to chew on with her newly sharpened mind. He had sent her chemical compounds to improve the scales of her refractive armour and another set to heighten the potency of her various acid extrusion methods. He had spent two weeks broadcasting increasingly difficult logic puzzles after his morning greeting each day — strange many-angled shapes which unfolded inside Iriko’s mind into much more complex arrangements. Each shape plugged into the results of the previous puzzles, building a vast trapezohedron in fourteen steps. When the trapezohedron was complete, the new shape formed a fresh puzzle which required all the tricks and principles Iriko had learned by solving each previous step; the moment she had completed the puzzle she had felt as if her mind expanded. She had paused to check her body for any signs of rogue organs or cancerous grey matter growth, but there was nothing physical to the effect. A few days later, Pheiri had sent her the chemical and molecular formula of his beautiful bone-armour; Iriko had tried to replicate the material, but she’d found that her own cells did not turn in the right direction.

Pheiri’s zombies — his ‘crew’ — spoke to Iriko as well, even if not quite as often as Pheiri himself. Iriko had gotten to know them as best she could. Elpida made sure to check in with her every day and ask if she had spotted anything important, but Elpida was all business all the time, and Howl was a little bit scary. Serin spoke now and then, but Serin liked to talk in riddles and Iriko could tell Serin did not actually enjoy Iriko’s responses. Atyle liked Iriko a lot, but Atyle was impossible and spoke nothing but nonsense. Pira was weird and difficult; she liked to monologue at Iriko, and Iriko didn’t like the subjects. Amina came by now and again too, but she seemed to find it challenging to speak for prolonged periods. Kagami had stopped in to talk quite often, but she was an angry little zombie and didn’t like Iriko’s poetry; Iriko knew that Kagami was using her as a kind of sounding board, first to rant about the difficulties of her meat-plant project, then to rant about how Victoria was a primitive fool with no sense of romance or timing. Iriko didn’t like that, because Vicky was nice to her.

But no matter how weird or troublesome the zombies could be, they just kept talking.

Iriko was not alone. Not being alone made thinking easier. Iriko discovered that she could hold onto thoughts for longer, even beneath the weight of ever-present hunger.

Words became easier, too. Poetry had come oozing back into Iriko’s mind.

She knew on some level that her poems were terrible. She was using language clumsily and shamefully, in ways that some vaguely defined prior self would have been horrified and disgusted by. She knew she had been good at poetry once. Beautiful people and clever people had liked her poetry. They would not like her now.

But to Iriko, these words were still beautiful, even if she could not do much. So she kept going, and hoped the other Iriko — the older one, before she’d been ‘Iriko’ — would understand the need to continue.

After about half an hour of zipping through the air and eating zombies, the storm stopped being fun.

The winds blew stronger and stronger and stronger still, tearing crumbly concrete from the edges of the buildings and casting it into the air; the grit and loose chunks started to foul Iriko’s trajectories, rendering her calculations less reliable. The howling wind ripped at less sturdy structures, stripping away roofs and walls, throwing boulders of brick and metal into the hurricane-whipped air. Pieces of building smashed into other buildings, exploding with brick dust and sending debris flying everywhere. The rain hammered harder and harder and harder again — hard enough to pelt unprotected flesh with bleeding bruises; walls turned into waterfalls, streets to rushing rivers, broad roads to sheets of flowing froth. The lowest areas of the surrounding city were rapidly choked up with debris-filled waters, turned into deadly swirling stews of loose metal and wood and concrete. The only remaining zombies were held up inside the few sturdy structures — a handful of scattered bunkers or high-ground constructions — so there was nothing left for Iriko to eat or hunt. The beautiful sky darkened as the embers of the shrouded sun vanished, strangled to death behind a low ceiling like a fist dragging itself through the city.

Iriko stopped flying and landed on a high hilltop; the buildings up there had all been wrecked and stripped by the wind, but the rising waters would not reach this high. She could barely control her flight anymore, the wind was too powerful and unpredictable. She anchored herself hard, sending spikes twelve feet down into the concrete and rock. Wind threatened to rip her muscular foot off her perch, so she glued herself to the ground with sticky mucus, then hardened the mucus to rival the best concrete. She made herself rounded and flat and low.

Hail came next — small at first, gathering on the concrete and plinking off Iriko’s refractive mail. The sound was quite pleasing.

But the hailstones grew steadily larger, large enough to shatter glass and dent metal; the sound of them pounding into the waterlogged ruins drowned out all else, deafening Iriko even through the toughened aural organs she kept folded deep within. She added layers of spongy ablative flesh beneath her armour to absorb the repeated impacts.

But then the hailstones kept growing. Concrete began to crack under repeated blows. The wind strengthened beyond anything Iriko had thought possible; even the tiniest tongue of air threatened to rip her from safety and throw her into the spume and scum of water and debris below; Iriko made the outer edge of her body sharp and dug it into the ground as additional anchoring, but then the wind started to tear at the earth itself, pulling up crumb-clouds of concrete and clods of grey mud. Pieces of building larger than Iriko’s body sailed through the air, concrete floating like tissue paper; a few stray fragments slammed into Iriko’s hardened shell, bruising the flesh beneath, cracking the plates of her refractive armour.

A large enough piece of building would sweep her aside like nothing. Iriko pressed herself low.

Iriko could not even see what was happening with any clarity; she dared not extend sense organs beyond her armoured shell. The debris in the wind would strip flesh from bone within seconds, and even the wind itself would tear her apart.

This was too scary. Iriko had left it too late to run.

Vicky’s voice crackled over Pheiri’s tight-beam, almost drowned out by the static of the storm: 「Iriko! Iriko, is that you on that hill? Fuck me, it is you! Why are you still outdoors?!」

Iriko tried to compose a poem in reply, but panic made words hard.

「stupid blob not smart
mistakes made bad time
help can’t come fast now」

「Then get underground! You can swim, right?! All the subterranean stuff around here is flooded, but I know you can grow gills for oxygen if you gotta! Fuck, what am I saying?! We don’t need to breathe, we’re all zombies, you too! Come on girl, just go down! Dig!」

「dark in earth dark dark don’t want to go down trapped in rock trapped trapped」

Iriko wasn’t sure why she was so afraid, but the notion of being stuck underground was worse than being trapped in the storm. She knew she was panicking and being irrational, but she did not wish to go down into the dark.

「Iriko, in about thirty seconds those winds are going to hit eight hundred miles an hour! You have to go underground! Girl, please, come on! We can’t help you right now, Pheiri’s driving deeper into the tomb. Fuck, we couldn’t even come out there if we wanted to! The tomb is gonna be the only thing left standing! Just come and join us. Come on, girl! You can do it, being underground isn’t scary at all!」 Vicky’s voice moved away from the microphone. 「Mel! Mel, we need Pheiri to talk to her or something, she’s not fucking going, she’s going to die out there! She—」

Pheiri interrupted the raw audio with a packet string of three chemical equations and a topographical structure map of a three dimensional shape.

Iriko squealed with delight. Pheiri had been holding out on her. Cheeky boy!

She synthesized the compounds Pheiri specified. She almost couldn’t make them; these were similar to the composition of Pheiri’s bone-armour, and her cells wouldn’t turn the right way. Iriko had to find workarounds, but she worked fast, and she found her way around.

The first was a fast-acting superacid; she squirted it from the underside of her body in a nice thick fat layer, directly onto the blackened rocky ground. The second chemical was a kind of foaming agent, rapidly clearing the layers of melted rock. Iriko dropped into the hole she had just burned; rain and hail sloshed after her, filling the shallow burrow with deep water and concrete debris. Iriko squirted the final compound upward — an expanding artificial concrete sealant, plugging the hole and plunging her into darkness.

Iriko dived into the filthy water, churning the mixture into a soup of mud and gritty mess. Her sides blossomed with bioluminescent lamp-organs. She extended her front downward and formed a dozen versions of the topographical design Pheiri had sent.

Drills! Big drills, with side-scoops and special angles for added efficiency!

Iriko cut through the earth, burrowing deep, away from the surface and the sky and the hurricane which ruled both.

Iriko had never been underground before. She had explored basement levels and subterranean tunnels and the like, but that wasn’t the same as digging through the rock and soil itself. The concept terrified her for some reason she could not place, some piece of herself lost deep in her broken memory. The earth would surely trap her and crush her to death! But now she melted and burned her way through her very own tunnels, coating them with slick purple sealant as she went, to stop them from collapsing behind her as she wormed through the snug embrace of rock and stone. All her earlier fears melted away, just like the earth before her scoop-drills and her squirts of acid. With Pheiri’s help she could do anything, even swim in the soil like it was the sea.

She dug through layers of solid rock and burst out into flooded underground bunkers and sub-level tunnels of the buildings above, plunging back into the earth on the opposite side after drinking her fill to fuel fresh acid synthesis. She wormed deep into the open veins of natural cave systems, popping out and dropping through the black abyss before catching herself and squirming back into the tight arms of the living rock. She ploughed through layers of tight-packed soil, bursting ancient pipes and crashing through brick walls and splitting tree-trunk-width bundles of cable and wire.

After ten minutes of wild headlong flight from the storm above, Iriko slowed down and learned to navigate. She used bursts of echolocation and sweeps of deep-penetration radar to map the rock and underground concrete and the empty spaces of open caverns.

And when she looked closely, Iriko discovered something new.

The tomb — the towering black metal edifice which ripped zombies back to life — was more than just a pyramid.

Iriko’s radar returns showed that the tomb structure was mirrored beneath the ground; black metal pyramid-steps descended in reverse, toward an apex-tip pointed down, into the bowels of the earth. The black metal was pressed flush against layers of rock and soil. The whole structure was more like a sharp-ridged octahedron, embedded exactly halfway into the ground. Iriko found this very curious, but she couldn’t tell if it was important. She broadcast this information back to Pheiri, just in case, as she swam through the earth and circled the underside of the tomb, making sure of her observations. She drew close enough for a better look, but there wasn’t much to see; the underside of the tomb did not have windows or doors or any way in and out.

Pheiri replied with a plain acknowledgement ping. Iriko prepared a teasing retort at Pheiri’s taciturn treatment — but then another voice spoke first, into Iriko’s mind.

「Hey, blob girl!」 Howl yelled. 「Nice job getting down there! Be ready to rumble!」

Iriko didn’t like Howl’s voice; Howl gave Iriko the creeps.

Howl was fine when she spoke through Elpida’s mouth, but Iriko didn’t like it when Howl spoke directly into Iriko’s mind. Iriko never understood where Howl’s voice came from — it felt like a tight-beam connection, but it wasn’t. When Pheiri spoke via tight-beam, Iriko could trace the broadcast back to his current physical location. But Howl’s voice seemed to come from nowhere, with no broadcast origin. Iriko understood why this was; Howl had taught her about the network. But the sensation still made Iriko want to curl up and go quiet, in hopes that Howl would stop being so damned spooky.

Iriko sent back: 「what what ready for what ready ready?」

「I’m about to flush a Necromancer back into the network! Remember everything we talked about? You got a meal coming your way! You’re up, Iriiiiii!」

Iriko forgot all about Howl being creepy.

This was the moment she’d prepared for! This was Iriko’s second special mission.

「need help help iriko help?!」

「Nah!」 Howl cackled. 「Pretty sure we got this bitch! But be ready. She’ll be fast, just like I told you. Give it your best shot, blob-queen. Scare the shit out of her for me, hey? I’m about to give this cunt-face a set of bruises to remember!」

Howl cut the tight-beam.

Iriko went still and silent inside her underground burrow, conserving resources, preparing her heart for the task ahead; she did not have a real heart right then, of course, that would be wildly inefficient, but she considered growing one anyway so she could count the beats.

It was very quiet underground. Quiet and dark and empty. The hurricane was a distant static hum, far away, up on the surface, powerful but muted.

Iriko felt very nervous. She’d never done this before.

Howl had taught Iriko about the network; Howl had kept it simple, avoided technical terms, and stuck to metaphors. Iriko had felt offended by that at first — she was not stupid, she understood more than she could express with words. But then Iriko had realised that Howl did not understand the network either. All the other zombies got the same metaphors from Howl, same as Iriko, same as Pheiri, same as Elpida. Iriko had felt much better after that.

Iriko did not have what Howl called ‘network access’. Apparently that was impossible.

But Howl had taught Iriko how to make special senses, to observe large enough things moving through the network; Elpida had climbed down from Pheiri’s back one day and plunged her naked arm into Iriko’s body, so Howl could show Iriko how the senses should be made.

Iriko reformed and extended those special sense organs now: delicate tendril-clusters linked to gyroscopes of bone and metal held inside her core; miniature vibration-sensitive organs which contained isolated nanomachines in tiny vacuum sacks; wide plates of reactive chemical suspended between sheets of super-cooled flesh.

When the Necromancer fled — because Howl was going to give her a set of bruises? Iriko decided that was another metaphor — Iriko would be able to see the Necromancer moving across the nanomachines themselves. Iriko could not see into the network, just as she could not see the wind of the hurricane above ground. But she could measure the direction and strength of the wind through observation of what the wind acted upon. She would know the Necromancer’s escape route by the same method.

Iriko waited in stillness and silence. Minutes ticked by.

A little of the old fear crept back. Buried underground. Crushed beneath rock. Pinned, breathless, starving, eating pieces of—

There!

At the tip of the inverted pyramid, a ripple passed through the nanomachines embedded in the rock and soil, spreading outward in a dozen different directions, so tiny that no senses would have noticed the passing, except those designed by another Necromancer.

Iriko cried out in frustration — the Necromancer was going in twelve different directions at once! How could Iriko hope to—

「Get after her, blob-girl!」 Howl shrieked into Iriko’s head. 「You don’t have to get them all! Just one is brilliant!」

Iriko surged forward through the rock and soil, melting and burning and squirming and worming.

The Necromancer’s passage was faster than Iriko could move — faster even than the winds of the hurricane above ground. Iriko selected the nearest of the twelve offshoots and arced sideways to head it off, taking her one chance at successful interception.

Iriko slammed through the roof of an open cavern and dropped straight down into darkness, falling faster than she could have dug, tumbling past walls of dead rock. For a split-second she drew level with the Necromancer’s invisible ripple, a tiny signal on the network, racing downward six inches below the rock face.

Iriko reached out with a specialised, thickened, armoured pseudopod, and formed a massive acid-dripping maw laced with a special metal cage structure — a ‘Faraday Cage’, Kagami had called it. She opened those jaws wide and lashed out toward the wall of rock, to bite deep into the stone and entrap this tiny mote of fleeing Necromancer.

The rock wall exploded outward with golden-white light.

A burning face of pale marble and melting wax thrust itself from the wall of the cavern, keeping pace with Iriko as she fell through the darkness. The face cried tears of white fire, expression warped with spurned fury, bow-shaped girlish lips twisted with spite and rejection. The light was so bright it melted Iriko’s metal cage-mouth and burned away the specialised pseudopod. Her skin began to boil and bubble and cook; parts of her refractive mail began to blacken and burn. All the bioluminescent lamp-organs on one side of her body burst and sprayed the wall with fluids, droplets sizzling into smoke as the light consumed them.

The face — the Necromancer — screamed into the cavern, drowning out the hurricane above, voice like all the storms of the world combined into one.

“Treated like so much meat! Pounded and beaten, and not even a word of care! I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her!”

Iriko ran away.

She shot out drag-lines of thick ropey tentacle and grabbed the opposite wall, fleeing from the Necromancer’s burning mask. Iriko slammed herself into the side of the cavern, then burrowed into the rock with Pheiri’s special superacid, sealing the way behind her as quickly as she could. The burning face fell into the darkness of the cave behind her, then went out like a fire snuffed beneath the waters.

Iriko did not stay to watch. She got out of there.

She dug upward, heading back toward the surface, toward the tomb. She did not want to remain underground with that thing, that tiny piece of a Necromancer, lurking down there among the horrible deep rocks. She had thought Necromancers were small and easy to eat, just like zombies except for that trick where they could freeze parts of her body. But now she knew better.

She surfaced right next to the tomb itself, on the side facing away from the hurricane and the terrible winds and the worst of the hail. The tomb was on high ground, safe from most of the flooding. Iriko burst out of the earth and slumped against the base of the tomb, cold black metal kissing her skin.

The air itself tore at Iriko’s body, high-speed winds ripping around the walls of black metal on either side. Hailstones pounded at her armour, cracking the bone and metal and pockmarking her flesh beneath with hundreds of bruises, exploiting the damage already done by the Necromancer’s white-hot fury.

Tight-beam broadcast crackled inside her mind. Vicky again: 「Iriko! Iriko, holy shit, girl, you need to get back below ground! The winds are going to hit nine hundred miles an hour, you won’t—」

「in we sadly slink
sad and wet is not enough
iriko is scared」

「 … you’re coming into the tomb?」 Vicky’s voice softened. Vicky was kind. Iriko wanted to talk more, but she was getting very hungry and that made it harder to think. She wasn’t sure how she had composed the poem. Perhaps it was shame. 「Okay, okay, come on, come on in, quickly, get inside. There’s zombies other than us in here now, but nothing which could threaten you. Get in, Iriko. Quick as you can now, come on!」

Iriko did not need telling twice. She climbed the massive metal steps of the tomb pyramid, sliding upward while clinging to the surface against the pull of the wind, thickening her armour to soak up the blows of the hailstorm as best she could. The wind howled around the sides of the tomb, making the structure creak and groan. Beyond the tomb, the city was a wall of grey rain and dense hail and the wild slashing and whirling of wind. The hurricane had swallowed everything.

A broken window stood exposed about a third of the way up the tomb pyramid. The glass was very thick — three feet, at least, but it had not survived the hail. Iriko pulled herself through the gap and out of the rain. The wind still tugged at her, so she squeezed herself down several narrow corridors and up a stairwell, until she was finally beyond the hurricane’s reach.

Iriko sat quite still for almost an hour, mending her armour, healing her bruises, tending to her burned skin. The damage was not too bad; the shock had been worse than the actual pain or lost biomass. The embarrassment was worse. She and Pheiri exchanged acknowledgement pings; he was fine, but very busy, thank you. Some of the zombies asked her if she was okay. Iriko said yes, she was alright, but she didn’t feel like composing a poem about it. She listened to the sounds of the storm and the odd sounds inside the tomb. She tried not to think about tombs.

After another half hour, Elpida spoke over the radio. 「You get the Necromancer, Iriko?」

「no nope no failed」

「That’s alright. Thank you for trying. You did your best, and I’m proud of you. Pheiri tells me you took some damage from the storm, and from Lykke. That’s the Necromancer’s name, Lykke. Did she hurt you very badly? Do you need biomass? We’ve got a lot of corpses down here, more than we can process. None of our own though. Everyone’s okay. We’ve picked up a few new faces, so be careful please, don’t eat them by mistake. Iriko? Iriko, are you there?」

「don’t want go down down is bad」

Elpida paused. 「We can bring a couple of corpses up to you, if you want. Did you enter the tomb through a broken window, or a skylight?」

「yes yes window shatter smash」

「I’ll come up and see you, then. I want to get a look at this storm with my own eyes. The way you entered might be the best spot to take a look. Don’t move far, okay? We’ll be up to see you shortly. Shout to Pheiri if anything happens or if you see any unfamiliar revenants. Stay safe.」

Elpida signed off.

Iriko extended some long meaty pseudopods back down the route she’d taken from the broken window, to peer out at the storm beyond. She stayed like that for several minutes, watching the churning vortex of clouds, listening to the screaming wind and the pounding rain, and the drumming of massive hailstones bouncing off the black metal of the tomb pyramid.

The storm did not seem to be moving; the hurricane had stopped directly overhead, as if trying to demolish the tomb.

Iriko was pretty sure storms were not meant to do that. No wonder Elpida wanted to have a good look.

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Stay safe, blob-girl. Don’t get rained on.

And we are back, dear readers! Thank you so much for waiting, thank you for your patience. Welcome to arc 12! Here we go; this chapter was originally supposed to be an interlude, then got published as chapter one of arc 12, then almost got retconned to be an interlude again, then finally got to stick it out as the true chapter one of the arc. Well done, Iriko! You made it! I couldn’t deny her this place. She’s too cute, I couldn’t say no.

Anyway! Arc 12 begins, and this one is going to be rather different to arc 11, I think. (I hope, anyway! As always, I am never fully in control.) As things stand at the moment, this is probably going to be a loooong arc, maybe 15 chapters. We’ve got quite a few different POVs to be jumping between, a hell of a lot of fallout to sift through (both human and literal, I suppose), and that there storm is pounding down on the tomb, hour after hour. I wonder, who sent it? Shall we find out? Shall we ask Shilu?

There’s no patreon link this week, as this is technically the last chapter of the month; the next chapter will fall on the 1st of August, and I never like the risk of double-charging anybody. If you were about to subscribe, feel free to wait until the 1st!

In the meantime there’s always the TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps me!

And thank you! Thank you all for reading my little story. I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the readers and audience. Thank you! As we sink down once more into the embrace of the tomb, and push ahead into the moldy flesh of this new arc, I hope you’re going to enjoy the grave delights ahead. Until next chapter!