Content Warnings

Extreme pain (again!)
Suicidal intent

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Elpida was intimately familiar with the doctrine and mechanics of tactical withdrawal — the fighting retreat, the fall back action, controlled and coordinated to avoid collapsing into a rout.

Legionaries died in routs; retreat saved lives.

Two thirds of every Legion-led sortie beyond the Telokopolis plateau — and ninety percent of every cadre-only expedition into the deep green — had ended in contested withdrawal, with Silico murder-machines nipping at Legion flanks, pressing assaults to split formations, and infiltrating down through the gargantuan tree trunks to target the all-important defoliant equipment, the flame-thrower units and herbicidal crawlers, essential for cutting a path back through the green, as the teeming plants regrew in fecund masses right inside the Legion’s hour-old hardshell bootprints.

A cadre-only retreat was less vulnerable: cradled close inside their combat frame pilot capsules, cushioned by pressure gel and a constant communications uplink, fed each other’s sense-data and combat judgements and split-second warnings — but also random musings and sisterly reassurances and stupid jokes. Watching each other’s backs was easy when you had twenty five pairs of eyes hooked into twenty five combat frame sensor suites, when you knew the insides and outsides of each other better than you knew yourself, when you could hear each other’s thoughts on the data-stream plugged into the rear of your skull.

But even the cadre was not invincible, not like they were presented for the public.

The longest cadre-only fighting withdrawal had lasted five weeks — the culmination of the deepest ever expedition into the green, far past the gritty slopes and sudden cliffs of the drop-off line, down into the dark where the sun could not penetrate through miles of dense vegetation, beyond communications with the city, beyond any link with Telokopolis except each other.

The cadre had seen strange sights down there, where no human beings had walked for millions of years: albino plants sucking nutrients from the trunks of giant trees, shaped like exotic fungi with fans and frills and biological armour plates to fend off parasites; plains of sandy soil and rock penetrated by roots tough as steel, drawing geothermal heat from beneath the earth’s crust; vast dome-like structures and metal frameworks buried in mountains of silt, penetrated and ruined by ravenous stems and clinging ivy and sucking tendrils, with shapes — words, writing? — obscured by an eternity of dirt; and Silico giants, sinuous and silken, crawling like centipedes amid the forgotten bones of the world before the green.

Five weeks, some of the longest of Elpida’s life. Five weeks of trudging back through that labyrinth of wonders that nobody in Telokopolis would believe — nobody except the committed expeditionists, not without the vid-records and sensor data from the combat frames. Five weeks of hiding in canyons from Silico leviathans, of giving battle only when they could no longer evade pursuit, of day-long struggles with monsters swarming up the sides of their combat frames or pummelling them like amateur pugilists with a hundred fists.

Five weeks of listening to Silico ‘intelligence’ calling out to them from among the pale roots, singing songs from inhuman throats, squirting alien data-streams and radio bursts and tight-beam comms in all directions. Five weeks of listening to their combat frames creak and groan with the barely contained desire to grow beyond their carbon bone-mesh armour plating. Five weeks of crawling through millennia-stagnant mud — and of crawling into each other’s cockpit enclosures, desperate for the comfort of companionship, their skin and pilot suits slick with capsule gel, shivering in the dark while the frames guarded themselves with their own unleashed neural architecture.

Elpida had not lost a single sister on that retreat — but not a single frame had gone undamaged. The Orchid Eightfold had lost both left arms and part of a shoulder; the Aculeata and the Chromatic Infinity had both been almost unable to walk by the time they’d reached the plateau; the Spiral Witch had suffered some kind of green-borne infection running rampant through her machine-meat innards, contracted via a piercing wound from the stinger of a Silico giant; the pilot program had kept her in dry-dock for a full year afterward, amputating and grafting new machine-meat muscle tissue hundreds of times over. Elpida had been piloting the Tromos on that expedition; the frame had endured a score of deep-tissue bruises, fractured support beams, and gouges to her carbon bone-mesh armour. By the time they’d crawled back home, the Tromos had been shaking and shivering like a dog with a neurological disease, clinging to Elpida through the MMI cranial uplink slot, mewling and whining in the back of her consciousness.

The cadre had fared better.

Daysalt had lost a leg — replaced with the best augmetic the Legion could supply. Fii had contracted some kind of liver problem from green-exposure, and received a lab-grown transplant. Metris had a fractured spine, Kos had three broken ribs, Quio had some kind of problem with her eyes; nine cadre-sisters had been in their pilot capsules long enough to develop short-term eating problems, and six more had balance issues which lingered for weeks. Yeva did not sleep for ten consecutive days — not until Elpida personally jabbed her with a powerful sedative. Emi suffered nightmares for months; Arry kept repeating snippets of Silico ‘language’.

But they’d all survived the retreat; they’d all come home, back to Telokopolis.

Elpida had never envied the Legion foot sloggers, fighting Silico with rifles and monoedge swords, protected by greensuits and hardshells, at best. In combat frames the cadre could duel the Silico’s gods to a standstill. On foot a single bullet could end even the most heavily modified nanomachine zombie.

“Retreat!” Elpida bellowed at her comrades, spitting blood. “Heads down! Down the stairs, go! Go!”

Howl cackled inside her head: Advancing to the rear!

Bullets and energy bolts cracked and crackled down the skyscraper corridor, cutting through the dark air, chipping the marble walls and crunching off the floor; the Death’s Head revenants at the other end of the corridor struggled to set up proper suppressing fire, kept down by the pounding of Hafina’s massive anti-materiel rifle and the crack-thump wave of light-drinking projectiles from her strange energy weapons. They resorted to blind-fire spray, sticking their guns around the corners and hoping for the best. They dared not throw any explosives for fear of hitting their own trump card: Kuro was still sprawled on the floor halfway down the corridor.

But she was beginning to pick herself up. The armoured giant got one hand beneath her fallen bulk — and then rolled and flailed as Hafina shot her in the flank again, bouncing her armour like a rag doll.

Elpida and the others scuttled down the stairs and into the dark, bullets pattering off plates and thumping into armoured coats. The others were sturdy and fresh, but Elpida—

She felt two solid-slug rounds slam into the back of her coat; her armour deflected any penetration — but the impact rang through her gut wound like a lance to the belly. She wheezed and spluttered and pitched forward, toppling down the stairs. Small, strong, desperate hands grabbed her around the waist — Amina, holding on tight. Amina’s grip dug into Elpida’s gut wound. A wave of fresh fire roared up through her torso and down into her hips and groin, obliterating thought, turning Elpida’s body into a lightning rod of pain.

She staggered down the rest of the steps, half-blind, panting and heaving, drooling blood, with one hand jammed against her own belly to stop her guts from spilling out. Another pair of hands caught her, less clumsy than Amina.

Amina was squeaking: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! S-she was going to fall! She was going to—”

Atyle said quickly: “Hush, little rabbit. We must move fast. Your angel endures.”

Elpida whined: “I’m— fine— fine— go— keep going—” She forced her eyes open.

Dark corridors stretched off left and right. Gunshots cracked and snapped from the top of the stairs; Hafina was backing down slowly, holding the high ground for a few more seconds. Her liquid armour under-layer and shifting skin shimmered under small arms impact, her hanging layers of armour plates and ragged robes breaking up her outline in the gloom.

Ooni was muttering from inside her helmet, expression masked: “By all the gods. It’s real. That’s a real ART. That’s real. Leuca? Leuca, do you see this?”

Atyle spent those precious seconds glancing left and right. Her peat-green bionic eye whirred in the gloom.

Atyle murmured a reply to Kagami’s instructions in her comms headset: “The rear, scribe? Our chariot suggests this?” Then she pointed with the cyclic sliver-gun — left. “We go! Betrayer, arm our prize!”

Pira said: “The coilgun?”

“The same!”

The group hurried down the corridor, through decades of dust and dank mats of dark nanomachine rot. Ooni helped Pira to strap the coilgun’s aim-assist rig around her waist as they ran; Pira handed Ooni her plasma rifle, unhooked the coilgun receiver, and activated the magnetic containment. The power-tank hummed on her back; a sabot-round clunked into the barrel. Elpida gripped her stomach in one hand and Amina’s bloody paw in the other, dragging her onward, staggering and sagging, lurching and lagging. Behind them, Hafina loped through the darkness, cracking off anti-materiel rounds and exotic bolts of charged particles, keeping the Death’s Heads at bay.

Elpida knew she wasn’t in charge anymore; she could do nothing to keep her comrades alive, nothing but trust.

Pira snapped: “Sentries? Atyle, where are the sentries? You said two?”

“We go around them, betrayer,” Atyle said. “We make our own exit. The scribe is unhappy, but the small titan will have a shorter journey.”

They hit a marble wall and stopped — another t-junction, branching left and right. Was this the exterior of the skyscraper? Elpida couldn’t tell; her sense of direction was scrambled by pain, her legs were shaking with effort, and her stomach felt like it was splitting open beneath her fingers.

Atyle pointed at the wall. “Betrayer. One strike.”

Pira nodded. “Right.”

Pira raised the coilgun receiver, took aim at the stretch of marble wall, and covered her eyes with her free arm. Elpida pulled Amina back into cover, sheltering the smaller girl behind her armoured coat. Atyle ducked and turned her back. Ooni stood there for a second, then crouched into a ball and covered the plasma rifle with her own body, her flesh protected inside her armour carapace.

Down the corridor Hafina was a vague dark shape of hanging rags and liquid armour, shimmering and shifting in the backwash of weapons fire.

Where’s the big bitch? said Howl. Where’s that tank-suit gone, huh? Elps, you were always good at this, where’s she fucking gone?

Elpida had no answer. She gurgled through a bloody throat: “Don’t know. Howl, stop. Can’t think.”

Amina made a curious sound against Elpida’s front.

Pira yelled: “Firing!”

The coilgun’s magnetic containment discharged with a stomach-pounding thump. The sabot-round slammed through the marble wall, pulverised breeze block and concrete into dust, and bent steel supports with a screaming chorus of tortured metal. Debris and shrapnel pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat. Amina whimpered into her chest. The Death’s Heads behind them ceased fire for a second.

Pira shouted: “Another?”

Atyle replied, “No. Through the hole, my lambs!”

One by one they clambered through the exit wound.

The coilgun sabot-round had punched a wide ragged hole through the filthy marble and hidden guts of the skyscraper wall, splintering the concrete and flowering the steel supports outward in a blossom of twisted metal; there was nothing to see through the hole, nothing but the night. Atyle went first, ducking and wriggling through the gap; then Amina, small enough to squeeze through without effort. Ooni and Pira held the rear as Hafina retreated toward them, cracking off shots with the plasma rifle and pointing the coilgun to scatter their pursuers.

Elpida was not certain how she made it outside. She could barely bend to duck through the gap, let alone push past the hanging chunks of concrete and twisted steel beams. Her vision went dark, the blood draining from her head. Urgent hands pulled her through and dropped her to the ground on the far side.

She heaved up a mouthful of blood and spat on the concrete pavement. Her stomach was on fire, blood leaking through her fingers and smeared all up the arm of her coat. She was amazed her belly was not a writhing mass of spilled intestines. She stared at the dirty ground, drooling crimson, on the edge of unconsciousness.

Get up, said Howl. Get up!

Pira squeezed through next — Elpida recognised the sound of her grunting as she pulled the coilgun free — then Ooni, hampered by the bulk of her armour carapace, helmet going clonk as she knocked her head on the concrete.

“The ART—” Ooni panted through her helmet. “It’s too big, how’s it going to fit?”

Atyle said: “Learn faith, animal.”

Elpida raised her head from the pavement just in time to witness Hafina emerge from the hole. The robe-wrapped giant had dislocated her limbs to fit through the gap; she had re-articulated pieces of her body at angles which would have killed any other nanomachine zombie, let alone a human being. She emerged like an unfolding stick insect, joints popping loudly as she resumed her shape, framed by the dark skyscrapers and the choking black ceiling of the night sky.

Her hanging curtains of bulletproof plates were scored and bent; her clinging under-layer of liquid armour was whited-out in places where it had caught bullets or deflected plasma bolts.

She stepped sideways to clear the hole in the wall, then stuck one of her guns into the wound and pulled the trigger several times. The hole flashed with energy backwash; a strangled scream came from the other side.

Ooni chattered through her helmet: “They’re going around! They’re already going around! I-I’ve got the comms network still, Yola’s sending them round the front!” Her voice rose in shrill panic. “She’s— she’s still giving commands! No! Fuck, no! I blew you up, I blew you up!”

Optimistic pot-shots cracked and banged from the second floor of the skyscraper; Hafina straightened up, aimed her guns, and blanketed the upper windows with energy bolts. Atyle raised the cyclic sliver-gun and raked firepower in her wake, chewing at the concrete, forcing the shooter’s heads down.

Pira yelled: “Stay here or move?”

Hafina’s head turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees on her neck, pointing her black helmet in the opposite direction.

“Pheiri!” she said — in that high, delicate voice. “Pheiri!”

“Your titan is on his way!” Atyle said. “We hold a moment, betrayer, we—” She cut off. Then, to Kagami, over the comm link: “Left, right, left, right, make up your mind, scribe! Little rabbit, Hafina, the warrior must be carried, she—”

Get up, Elps, you sleepy bitch! Howl shouted inside Elpida’s head. This lot are falling apart! They’ll leave the other one behind!

Elpida got her feet beneath her body and pushed herself upward. Hands grabbed at her arms, as if she might fall. But got herself upright.

They had emerged from the skyscraper into the rear street — the wide road from which they had first approached the Death’s Head fortress. The ground floor windows and doors were all stopped up with boards and furniture; the Death’s Heads’ own improvised fortifications were choking their response. To the left the road stretched away into the ruins. On the opposite side of the street, dark buildings clawed toward the silent, rotten sky. Behind them, hidden by the skyscraper itself, lay the combat frame. To the right was the neighbouring skyscraper, with the ground floors scoured by firepower, cleared of tall cover, and patrolled by a Death’s Head drone.

Elpida shouted: “Ilyusha!”

The effort made her stomach roar with white-hot fire. Her vision throbbed black. She felt blood dribble down her chin. She shook her head to clear her thoughts.

Then, from far away: “Yaaaaaaaah!”

Ilyusha, howling like—

Like me! cheered Howl.

Elpida pointed. “That— way. Now. Now!”

Atyle said: “The small titan—” A pause. “Very well. Our titan agrees, though the scribe is screaming and soiling her underclothes. Stay right, stay close to hiding places. Hurry now, lambs!”

They fled along the pavement, sticking close to the edge of the skyscraper. Then they burst out past the end of the side-street; Elpida stole one glance to her right, at a sliver of the combat frame’s leg, a soot-stained white ghost abandoned upon the earth. Then they plunged on, hugging the half-ruined walls and naked steel uprights of the neighbouring skyscraper.

A roaring rumble was approaching through the ruins, knocking aside the rubble and smashing down the walls, cutting a path through the guts of the corpse-city.

But it sounded too far away.

Elpida knew they had only moments before the Death’s Heads emerged into the road behind them. The cover in this street was better than the bare-earth crater where the combat frame lay, but as soon as enough Death’s Heads got clear and formed a firing line to their rear, they would be pinned down. The only real cover lay to their right — the wall stubs and twisted metal remains of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper.

Hafina snapped off a few shots to their rear. Small arms fire answered, bullets chewing into the concrete and asphalt. Pira turned as well and loosed another sabot from the coilgun; Elpida glanced back just in time to see the round explode a crater in the pavement, showering running figures with asphalt rain.

A familiar voice rose over the din of weaponry, purring wet with honeyed pain: “Come back, superhuman! Come back to me! I admire your tenacity, but this little game is over!”

Yola.

Rotten bitch, Howl spat. Hope that plasma det burned her face off.

A moment later the Death’s Heads got enough zombies into position. They drowned the street in firepower.

Elpida and her comrades bundled each other into cover — into the ruins of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper. Soot-blackened wall stubs and a few sheets of standing metal were better than the open pavement. Atyle just stepped behind an upright beam, once again unwilling to duck now her stealth field was useless. Amina hit the ground, whimpering as bullets slammed through the air. Elpida crouched, blinded by the pain in her stomach. Ooni sheltered Pira with her own body, her suit of armour carapace protecting them both from stray shots. Hafina stood almost in the open, replying with rapid-fire anti-materiel rounds thumping out of her massive rifle; but even the artificial human would not stand for long — she was jerking and twitching under a hail of bullets, plasma bolts sparking off her armour, tiny metal flechettes catching in her robes.

Yola’s voice rang out over the incessant gunfire: “Superhuman! Elpida! Elpida, won’t you be ours!?”

The Death’s Heads spat other insults down the street, less well-amplified than their leader’s plea: Elpida heard sneering cries, sexual suggestions, scatological impossibilities — and more than once, Ooni’s name, accompanied by fragmentary descriptions of what the Death’s Heads did to traitors of their own.

Ooni screamed, “Where’s our fucking extraction?! I thought you had extraction!”

Atyle said: “The titan—” A pause, listening to her headset. “Resistance? Scribe, be clear. Stop screaming.”

Where was their extraction?

Fuck that! spat Howl. Where’s—

“Illy!” Elpida howled into the ruins on their right. “Ilyusha!”

Atyle said: “The scorpion is right here, warrior. Save your breath. If she cannot join us in time, she must make her own way—”

“Illy!” Elpida howled again, “Il—”

A blood-drenched imp staggered out of the ruins, right into the middle of the group.

Bleeding from a score of deep cuts and wide grazes, covered in dirt and grime, blonde hair plastered down with filth and blood; her red-black bionic tail was coiled over one shoulder as if too exhausted to lift the limb. Eyes wide and wild with triumph, teeth gritted tight, lips peeled back. Her backpack hung by a single strap. One bionic arm dripped with dark fluid, shotgun hanging limp. The other red-clawed fist gripped a drone sensor-suite, wiring ripped off at the base, support beam snapped, like the severed head of a vanquished foe.

Ilyusha locked eyes with Elpida, raised her trophy in one hand, and roared in triumph: “Raaaaaar!”

Elpida howled along with her, spitting blood, too lost in the moment not to join. Her gamble had paid off: knocking out the Death’s Head drone controller had bought Ilyusha the opening she needed to kill her semi-autonomous foe.

Amina said: “Illy, Illy, Illy!” and bundled herself into Ilyusha’s side, careless of her wounds.

No sister ever left! Howl screeched inside Elpida’s head — because Elpida couldn’t find enough breath to say it herself. Her vision wavered. Illy was safe. Everyone was accounted for. Now they only had to get out.

But then Ilyusha saw Ooni.

Ilyusha’s eyes burned like molten lead as she looked at the Death’s Head traitor; she must have already spotted the unfamiliar armour carapace — and Hafina — and assumed they were both with Elpida. But now her eyes dipped, locked on the grinning black skull on the front of Ooni’s armour. The symbol was only partially obscured beneath a smear of Elpida’s own blood.

Ilyusha dropped the severed drone-head; her shotgun whipped upward, muzzle pointing at Ooni, teeth parting in a scream. Nobody had time to shout a warning, before—

Elpida closed one hand over the shotgun’s muzzle.

Ilyusha’s eyes flickered from Ooni to Elpida in horrified incomprehension. Ooni stayed very still, plasma rifle pointed at the ground, still sheltering Pira.

“Mine,” Elpida growled, her throat full of blood. “Illy. Mine now.”

Ilyusha’s horror turned to grudging acceptance. She yanked her shotgun back and spat a glob of bloody saliva at Ooni’s feet. “Eat my shit, reptile!”

Elpida had to keep this under control; Ilyusha had not witnessed Pira’s betrayal, nor was she aware of anything which had happened since. She would be furious, perhaps driven to violence, but later — not in the middle of a firefight.

Atyle jerked her head upward. “Our chariot arrives. We cross this path on the count of five, little lambs. One—”

“What!?” Ooni yelped. “We can’t even stand up! We can’t—”

“-two-”

Hafina suddenly stepped back and crouched, abandoning the street.

“Brace!” Pira shouted — and grabbed Ooni, shoving her to the ground.

“-three—”

On the far side of the street a brick building exploded outward, overwhelming the cacophony of gunfire. A wave of debris washed across the road. Broken bricks and shattered beams cascaded down the dirty white hull of the machine-giant which roared through the gap.

The crawler, the tank — ‘Pheiri’, if Elpida had understood Hafina’s word correctly: a humped titan bristling with weapon systems, covered in horns and curls and calluses, an overgrown cyst of Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour.

The tank slammed through the building, demolishing the structure, skidding to a halt. A dozen tracks and treads spun wild for a second before they bit into the asphalt again. The machine used its own momentum to swing itself around, to point its frontal armour down the street, toward the increasing fire from the massing Death’s Heads. Elpida flinched — she couldn’t help it, even with her nervous system hardened by Telokopolan genetic engineering and deadened by blood loss and pain: to a combat frame that maneuver would have been nothing, but combat frames had legs. This crawler had armoured tracks and concealed banks of wheels. Over forty feet tall and easily a hundred feet long. To pull off that maneuver in such a large crawler would require a genius driver — or the tank was piloting itself, like a combat frame given full autonomy.

Active shielding flowered to life in a semi-circle dome around the front of the vehicle: an interlocking matrix of hexagonal energy fields, sheets of hissing electric blue, and curves of shining white. The shield sparked and flickered as it deflected small arms fire.

Atyle didn’t miss a beat: “—four—”

The crawler opened fire on the Death’s Heads: coaxial weapon systems and anti-personnel machine guns roared and barked, pouring a wave of bullets and sabots and energy bolts down the street, exploding chunks of concrete from the skyscraper walls and chewing waves of asphalt grit out of the ground. Only the massive turret weapon lay still, a distended purple-red lance, quiet and dark amid the firepower lighting up the night.

Elpida grinned; she felt tears running down her cheeks. Was this what it felt like to be a Legionnaire saved by a combat frame?

No, saved by ‘Pheiri’ — and why not? The combat frames had names too. This crawler, whatever it was, it was wearing Telokopolan armour. A little piece of her home had come roaring out of the infinite darkness at the end of time, to pluck her new comrades from defeat and death.

A crew hatch opened in the rear of the tank; a ramp hit the ground.

All aboard! Howl cackled.

“—five!” Atyle finished.

Elpida lurched out of cover, dragging Amina behind her. The others rose as well, running for the—

Thooom-crack!

A beam of burning bronze burst through the air and lanced into the tank’s active shielding. The shield-web exploded with a concussive wave, washed over Elpida’s face, and turned the world white.

The white-out lasted only a split-second. Elpida was left blinking and dazed, her ears ringing with the pressure impact. That shield failure was not like when the tank had duelled the worm-guard trio; that was a true overload. Pheiri’s shields were down.

Standing at the far end of the street, out in the open, disdaining cover, was the Death’s Heads’ own walking tank — Kuro.

The huge zombie had deployed the massive plasma cannon from her back; it curved over her shoulder like a scythe, and sent its own support mounts down into the ground behind her, locking her in place, anchoring her to the road surface. She was reeling from the recoil, recovering her balance. A shield hissed with static in a spherical bubble around her, protecting the Death’s Head from return fire.

The plasma cannon steamed and hissed, glowing like a torch in the night.

Kuro straightened up, locked her knees, and re-armed the plasma cannon for a second shot; the coils began to glow brighter.

“Pheiri!” Hafina screamed — a terrible sound, more machine than meat.

Pheiri’s hull blossomed with missile pods, opened up with massive rotary machine-guns, and revealed ports to aim concealed laser arrays. The tank slammed that tiny bubble-shield with a fortress worth of firepower. Kuro vanished behind a wall of bullets and detonations and a shower of kicked-up asphalt — but the bubble held.

The Death’s Heads rushed back into the street. They kept well clear of Kuro and began to pour fire down on Elpida’s comrades once more, cutting them off from their extraction.

Kuro’s plasma cannon coil’s glowed white-hot. Almost ready to fire.

Hafina strode out into the road, uncaring of return fire, adding her own weapons to those of her titan-machine. Elpida could hear the distinctive crack! of Serin’s rifle, somewhere far away; but that did not help either. Pheiri’s tracks shuddered and jerked, as if the machine was uncertain.

Yola’s voice floated over the firefight: “Come back to me, superhuman! Stand now and I will spare your vassals!”

Elpida let go of Amina’s hand; somebody else grabbed for her, but she shook them off. She couldn’t let this happen, she couldn’t let her cadre die all over again, not in a failed rescue, not for her, not for—

Pira rose from cover and sprinted out into the street.

The flame-haired zombie flew right past Hafina and into the hail of gunfire from the Death’s Heads. Bullets bounced off her body armour, cracked off her bulletproof vest, tore through her clothes, and ripped holes in her flesh. But Pira didn’t stop — she put her head down and ran for the tank.

“Leuca!” Ooni screamed.

Was Pira saving her own skin?

No — she was going for the front, not the hatch! She needed height. She needed an angle.

Pira leapt on to the front of Pheiri’s armour, hauling herself up the gnarled bone-mesh hand over hand, all the weight of the coilgun dragging on her back. She got partway up, found a good pair of footholds, and stood. Bullets punched her backward, tore gouges in her arms and legs, and threatened to jerk her off balance.

Pira pointed the coilgun receiver down the road and pulled the trigger.

Thump!-clack-thump!-clack-thump!-clack — the coilgun firing on fully automatic was like standing next to a combat frame stamping on the ground. Waves of magnetic discharge slammed over Elpida and sent her head spinning.

The coilgun sabot rounds bounced off Kuro’s bubble-shield — once, twice; but then Pira found her aim, and hit her target: the ground.

Coilgun rounds exploded the asphalt and concrete in front of Kuro — and then beneath her feet. The giant tumbled into a hole of rubble and grey mud. The plasma cannon fired — but the beam went high, lancing through the sky, swallowed by the rotten clouds.

Pira held the trigger down, digging with the world’s most dangerous shovel, until she had buried the walking tank.

Maddest bitch of all! Howl roared.

Then Pira dropped the coilgun receiver and toppled sideways.

Elpida picked herself up, belly streaming with blood. She ran for the side of the tank, to get herself beneath Pira before Pira’s skull cracked open on the ground; the pain was white-hot, blotting out her thoughts, stitches popping, gut screaming. One last burst of adrenaline was all she had left.

But she was roaring with bloody laughter: Howl was laughing through her.

Pira’s battered form slid down the side of the tank; Elpida bounced off the hull, stuck out her arms, and caught her. They almost collapsed together in a bloodstained heap.

Strong hands in grey armour helped her haul Pira’s limp form around to Pheiri’s rear. A crew access hatch yawned wide. The inside of the tank was dark and jumbled. The others hurried in; somebody half-threw Amina up the ramp. Stray shots whipped and cracked through the air. Yola was still shouting. Hafina stood to one side, the last one aboard, popping off anti-materiel rounds at the Death’s Heads down the road.

Pira was still conscious. Her eyes were full of blood. As Elpida hauled her up the ramp, she gurgled: “Let— me—”

Elpida and Howl laughed in her face: “You don’t get to die! I told you, Pira, you’re mine now!”

Up the ramp, into the crawler, into the cramped darkness; Elpida heard Hafina swing in behind them and heard the rear hatch begin to close.

“Everyone in?” she gurgled through a mouthful of blood.

Yes, Commander, said Howl.

Only then did Elpida allow her knees to give up. She slid to the cool metal floor, and passed out in a pool of her own blood.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Yes, Commander.

Pira attempts self-sacrifice (to atone? who knows) and digs hole in the ground, Ilyusha clamps down on her anger for long enough to listen, Elpida establishes that these girls are hers now, Kuro gets buried under the road, Yola gets rejected, and Pheiri reveals that his AI core once started life as a Toyota AE86.

Last chapter of arc 7! Wow, well. This whole arc went in some directions I didn’t expect, but I’m very happy with the result. I’m having such a blast writing this story so far, and I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I am creating it. Onto arc 8 next week! We might be taking a little tonal breather after all this combat. After all, Elpida’s badly wounded, Pheiri needs to recharge his shields, and somebody’s going to have to disarm a traitor and a turncoat. But we might not switch POV for a little while. I’m not 100% sure until I hit the page. Could go either way!

And if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

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Content Warnings

Cannibalism
References to suicide
Extreme pain (you gotta know this one by now)

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Pira and Ooni: two lost girls with the muzzles of their guns pressed against each other’s hearts, a pair of old lovers who had come to love death more than each other — to adore the grinning skull and the release of giving up.

Elpida waited for them to obey her orders, lower their weapons, and follow her instead.

She knew they would.

Elpida also knew that she was acting irrationally. Blood loss and burning pain had pushed her to the edge of delusion. Howl cackled in the back of her mind: Your girls now, Elps! Your girls now! She swayed on unsteady feet. She panted through clenched teeth. She squinted hard, fighting down the agony which radiated out from her oozing gut wound.

Pira might still pull the trigger of her stolen handgun, put a bullet through Ooni’s chest, and then turn the weapon on herself. Elpida could not predict how the flame-haired revenant would act; she hadn’t predicted the betrayal, after all. And Ooni was an unknown. Was she about to panic, jerk her rifle out of Pira’s grip, and paint Elpida with a bolt of plasma?

Elpida could not allow herself the luxury of doubt.

Fake it ‘till you make it! Howl screeched inside her mind. That’s how we all did it, back in the day, right?

The trick of true command was not only to act as if her authority was unquestionable — Elpida had to believe. Since she had choked and gagged and thrashed back to life in that metal coffin, the deaths of all her sisters had opened a rift in her mind and flooded her with doubt: she was no Commander worthy of the role, she would get her comrades killed all over again, nobody without a death wish should follow her into anything. The Commander was nothing without belief, and without something in which to believe.

And now the Commander gave orders to a traitor and a foe, and expected them to follow.

I’m going mad, Howl.

You were always fucking mad! It’s why we followed you! The maddest cunt of all!

Elpida heard the covert sounds of Atyle and Amina entering the conference room, creeping up behind her. Pira and Ooni looked up briefly. Elpida tossed back her hood and unhooked the comms headset from around her skull; she couldn’t concentrate with Kagami shouting into her ear. Howl’s advice was better. She passed the headset over her shoulder.

Atyle accepted the device, then whispered: “The animals heard that gunshot, warrior. We have one or two minutes at best.”

Pira’s hollow eyes crusted over with a frown. She said: “You can’t be serious. Elpida, get out of here. You’re free, don’t jeopardise—”

Elpida took a step forward. “Do not make me— repeat myself,” she panted through the pain. “You have your— orders, we can discuss discipline later. Right now we’re in combat.”

“Elpida. I shot you. I—”

“You don’t get to die. Not your choice. Lower those weapons.”

Ooni’s bright green eyes flickered from Elpida to Pira. She jerked her plasma rifle out of Pira’s grip — and pointed the muzzle down. Her gaze wandered over the pair of corpses on the floor — Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour. Elpida was standing with one boot in the pool of blood spreading from the shattered throat of the latter. Ooni swallowed, hard and rough.

Pira lowered the heavy handgun. She shook her head. “I shot you. How can you—”

Elpida pointed at the second plasma rifle, pinned beneath one of the fallen Death’s Heads. “Pick up that other— gun. We may need the firepower. You are going to fall in— behind Atyle and me. You follow her hand signals, move when we move, do exactly as ordered. Do I make myself clear?”

Pira’s face was a mask of disbelief. “I—”

Elpida and Howl spoke as one: “You are mine, Pira!”

The effort made Elpida’s gut flare with pain. She hunched and heaved and whined through her teeth, drooling blood, spitting to clear her mouth.

Pira stared for a heartbeat more — then she stowed the handgun inside her body armour, tugged her clothes back into place over her bionic arm, and crouched down next to the fallen Death’s Head. She rolled the body sideways and extracted the plasma rifle. Her hands flickered over the controls. The weapon hummed briefly, then fell silent.

She looked up at Elpida. Her sky-blue eyes were full of compressed pain and guileless wonder.

“Yes, Commander,” she said.

Elpida didn’t even nod; her authority required no acknowledgement.

Ooni said: “What about me?”

Her voice trembled with desperation and jealousy. Elpida heard that as clear as Howl’s words inside her head.

Ooni glanced at Pira, and said: “Leuca? L-Leuca? What about me?”

Ooni was a terrible mess; her mouth and chin were stained with the greasy pink smears of half-chewed brain matter, cut through with twin tracks of bloody tears. Her long black hair was matted with sweat, stuck to her forehead, smeared with blood. She stood half-crouched over the boxy, matte-black body of the plasma rifle. Her eyes were wide and red from crying. That black skull still grinned from the middle of her chestplate.

Ooni hated Elpida for ‘stealing’ Pira; Ooni had gleefully jammed a hand into Elpida’s guts; and Ooni was a Death’s Head — but the corpses on the floor were testimony to her true allegiance: Pira, Leuca, her decades-lost lover.

Elpida could work with that. It was leverage. A way in.

Elpida had dealt with situations like this dozens of times before. Her sisters in the cadre had disagreed, feuded, fought, burned with confused overlapping passions and multi-directional jealousy: Third and Quio and their dirty little knife fight; those three months when Scoria and Arry had gotten obsessed with passing Bug back and forth, until it wasn’t a joke anymore; Kos and Vari and Snow swapping clothes in an escalating game which ended in tears and blood, and then Kos bringing Elpida in to force a reconciliation; even Howl — that one time she’d driven Metris to a night-time ambush, and they’d gotten so loud they’d woken up the whole cadre. But those feuds had never involved live ammunition — well, almost never. And at the end of the day the cadre all slept in the same dormitory; they all shared the same skin and hair and blood and genetic template; underneath even the bites and the scratches and the scars, they loved each other. The sisterhood of the cadre, against the green, against the Civitas, and then against the Covenanters. There was always a status quo for the cadre — each other.

In this nanomachine afterlife there was no return to any status quo but death. Elpida could not afford a mistake.

Atyle hissed from behind her: “Warrior, time grows short. We—”

Crack — crack!

Serin taking a double shot, from far beyond the walls.

Everyone flinched and looked up. But Elpida just stared at Ooni.

Atyle hissed again: “She buys us time. Heads are down. Warrior?”

Elpida marched up to Ooni — dragging her feet a little, blood dripping from between the fingers pressed to the bandages around her gut wound. She raised her blood-soaked hand, slapped her palm against Ooni’s chestplate, and met those staring green eyes.

Elpida said: “Your choice.”

Ooni swallowed, rough and thick. Her green eyes were wide. She glanced down at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s t-shirt. Her breath came in ragged little gasps. She said: “Do you promise not to kill Pira?”

Elpida took a deep breath. Expanding her ribcage made her gut scream. She swallowed the pain.

You have to mean it, Elps, Howl snapped. A lie won’t work. Make her one of us.

“I promise,” Elpida said.

“Y-yes,” Ooni whispered. She glanced at Pira. “Yes, then. Yes, Commander?”

“Good enough,” Elpida grunted. She dragged her hand across Ooni’s chestplate, smearing crimson mess across the black and grinning skull. Elpida’s blood blotted out the Death’s Head symbol. “Now you’re mine, too.”

A triangle: her, Pira, Ooni. All welded together. An unstable atomic configuration? It only had to hold until extraction. She would deal with the Death’s Head ideology later, and deal with whatever lurked inside Ooni’s skull.

Elpida stepped back. Ooni stared down at the defaced emblem with a haunted expression.

Pira said: “Ooni. Eyes forward. For you.”

Ooni swallowed. “For you,” she echoed.

Pira said, “I told you about her, Ooni. I told you she was real. She can do it.”

Ooni said: “Does she eat, or is she like you now?”

Pira sighed. “She eats.”

Before Elpida could react with fresh orders, Ooni rushed over to the conference room table and grabbed a handful of human brains. She hurried back to Elpida and held it out. “Y-you gotta eat. You’re bleeding. Like, a lot. A lot. I’m sorry I—”

“Stop,” Elpida grunted. “Later.”

Elpida accepted the handful of greasy grey-pink meat; she had not felt hungry, but her body suddenly shook with need. She crammed the gobbet of brains into her mouth and swallowed almost without chewing. It didn’t help the pain.

She realised that Amina still had her knife out. The younger revenant was staring at Pira and Ooni, blade trembling in her fist.

“Knife away, Amina,” Elpida muttered.

Amina whined — but she slid the blade back inside her coat.

Ooni was staring down at one of the fallen Death’s Heads — the one with the extendable bionic arm. She looked at Pira and gestured at the other corpse — at the sword rammed into the skull.

Pira shook her head. “No time to cut out the bionic. Would take twenty minutes not to ruin the nerve connections. Forget it.”

Ooni nodded, eyes downcast.

Elpida pointed at Atyle, at the oil-smear blob of hazy camouflage. “You follow her hand signals— and her orders— as if they were mine.” Atyle extended an unblurred hand, to assist with the explanation. “We are making for the exit, then for pick up. Absolute silence, and stealth. Atyle, any chance we can still get— to the coilgun?”

Atyle chuckled, low and soft; she was looking left and right, up and down, her peat-green bionic eye a blur amid the smear, seeing through brick and concrete.

“Perhaps, warrior. A band of stalkers comes this way. We may elude them, with haste. The scribe says we should let Pira shoot us all and be done with this. The scribe says many things. She is furious with you. She will guide us still.”

Elpida nodded. She would apologise to Kagami later. “We move. Amina, come here, hold my hand. Pira, Ooni, in the rear. Keep those plasma rifles—”

Ooni suddenly hissed, her voice hushed with awe: “That’s the ART. The ART everyone was going on about. Oh fu-fuck.”

She was staring at Hafina.

The invisible giant had stepped just inside the doorway of the conference room. A water-sheen illusion hung in the air, against a backdrop of gloom.

Elpida said quickly: “Her name is Hafina, she’s on our side. She provides some kind of stealth field, so stick close to her. What does ART mean?”

Pira said: “Artificial human. Ooni, it’s not. There’s none left.”

Atyle raised one hand, her camouflage unblurring to show her dark skin and the cuff of her coat. She jabbed two fingers toward the doorway. “Quiet, wayward lambs. We leave now or we are cornered animals. Speed over stealth. No more crouching. Hurry, warrior!”

Elpida and her comrades plunged back into the dark corridors of the skyscraper, well-armed, enlarged, and dangerously unstable.

Hafina took point once again, a translucent shimmer striding through the shadows. Atyle stuck close to Hafina’s heels now, no longer crouched, crossing the marble floors at a loping jog, her head and her cyclic sliver-gun swinging to cover all angles. Elpida hurried to keep up, gripping Amina with one hand, cradling her own leaking gut with her other arm; each step invited a fresh wave of pain from her re-opened gut wound, throbbing and pulsing in her belly. She strangled her whining, swallowed the taste of her own blood, and tried to stop breathing.

Pira and Ooni ghosted along in the rear. Elpida did not glance back; she had to trust that they belonged to her.

Why had she done this? The sensible tactical option would have been to leave both of them there, not invite instability and potential points of failure into an already precarious combat situation. Pira had betrayed her; Ooni was the sort of person who dropped her own allies for an old friend. Why had Elpida done this?

Because you’re the Commander, Howl whispered.

And you’re a hallucination caused by blood loss, pain, and stress. You’re not Howl. You’re a metaphor dredged from a dream. I’m not even really hearing you. My brain is shunting processes around to keep me on my feet. You’re a neurological glitch. Shut up. Let me concentrate.

Howl cackled. You can’t even concentrate on your own feet right now, bitch! And you’ll miss me the second I’m gone.

The group shot through the t-junction and down the corridor leading to the exterior wall of the skyscraper. Left, then right, then left again, moving as fast as they could, passing empty rooms and quiet hallways, filled with dust and echoes.

A clatter of booted footfalls reached the t-junction behind them, hurrying in the opposite direction. Snatches of voice floated down the corridor, too far away and muffled to make out the words. Were the Death’s Heads about to discover the bodies of their friends? When they did, all stealth would be over, they—

Crack! Crack!

Serin again, the perfect distraction, like she was watching through the walls. She probably was.

Atyle hissed: “Keep moving, little lambs.”

Time ceased to make sense. Elpida was a standing wave of gut pain, putting one foot in front of the other, holding one arm over her belly, holding onto Amina. Holding on. Hold on! Not far now!

Ten hours or ten seconds later — Elpida knew it was the latter, but it felt like the former — Atyle stopped and held up a fist.

The group halted in near-silence, all except for the gentle click-clack of Ooni’s armour plates and the soft hum of two active plasma rifles. From behind them, back up the marbled corridor, raised voices and running feet echoed in all directions. Another sudden crack split the air — Serin rendering more aid. The Death’s Heads could have been a hundred meters away, or right around the corner; Elpida put her trust in Kagami’s overwatch.

The end of the corridor was less than fifty feet away; a set of wide marble stairs led down into darkness.

On the right a row of massive wooden doors all opened into a single, huge room — some kind of gathering place or entertainment hall. Elpida could not see much — brightly coloured carpet thick with dust, gaudy gilt-and-gold walls laced with nano-mould, and rows of machines drenched in shadows.

Atyle waited, fist raised. Seconds crawled by. Elpida’s shoulder blades ran with sweat. Her t-shirt and her hair stuck to her skin. Blood dripped from between her fingers, pooling on the floor. Her vision wavered.

Then, suddenly — fingers forward! Go! The group scurried past the row of doors.

Inside the huge room gleaming wooden tables were topped with strange numbered mechanisms, spaces for dealing cards, horizontal wheels, tilted glass sheets, and slots for tokens. Slender machines with brightly coloured shells stood in upright rows, their rusted mechanical arms jutting outward, limp and broken. Dead displays showed nothing but black amid a riot of clashing hues. A clownish place, coated in rot.

The room was tiered, climbing upward toward an elevated viewing screen designed for a projector: the screen was lit up with a herky-jerky night-vision view, showing ruined buildings and chunks of concrete.

A shape darted across that screen: a flash of pale skin caught in ghostly green night-vision.

The screen flashed with weapons discharge — once, twice. From beyond the skyscraper walls Elpida heard the thump-thump of Ilyusha’s shotgun in time with the display. A long dark bionic tail lashed out and whipped the viewpoint camera, sending it lurching off-target. A spray of bullets chewed into the concrete, missing the figure by inches.

Up on the screen, Ilyusha vanished behind a stub of ruined wall.

Arrayed in front of the screen were several Death’s Head revenants: Yola, in her distinctive dark purple, her helmet retracted to show her gleaming ruby hair; she stood alongside another pair of figures wearing suits of powered armour, their helmets firmly on, painted with matching skull designs; three more revenants clustered around a fourth, all of them more lightly armoured than their leader. The fourth was contorted backward, her spine hanging at an impossible angle, her front opened to disgorge a tangle of machinery. Her eyes were fluttering, rolling into the back of her head. She was caked with sweat and shaking as if gripped by fever. Elpida realised that revenant’s own body was projecting the image from the drone — a living televisual uplink.

Another Death’s Head revenant was draped and encrusted with wires, with a trunk of cables plugged directly into her eye sockets. Her hands and forearms were a mass of control surfaces, sparking and flickering with holographic motion. She gestured like a musical conductor, swinging and swooping her hands through the air. The view on the screen whirled and zoomed in time with her motions. She was piloting the drone, hunting Ilyusha.

All the revenants in the Command Post were watching the screen. One of them was chuckling. Another was clapping, slowly.

Yola was saying, in her wet and clicking voice: “—determined degenerate, is she not? With so little weaponry to her name, too. Nothing but small arms. She can’t even penetrate the drone’s armour. Sofika, do you think there is any chance of a crippling blow, rather than seeing her dead? I would love to examine that tail, preferably with the neural connection still intact. A fascinating piece of balance work. It should be ours.”

Elpida and the others reached the far side of the row of doors, once again concealed behind the wall and wrapped in the dampening of Hafina’s stealth field. Atyle raised her fist again: all stop.

Inside the Command Post, a jerky, heaving voice answered Yola’s question: “Crip-crippling? Legs o-off? Cut off. Cut off. Laser, acceptable? Can’t get too far from the target, she slips— slippery. Fast-fast. Upside. Downside.”

Yola sighed. “Sofi, do not make us reprogram your uplink again.”

One of the other Death’s Heads laughed, harsh and metallic, from inside a helmet.

‘Sofi’, the drone controller, replied: “Crippling blow, yes, boss. I’ll take off her legs. I promise. Off at the legs. Off with her leggies. Leg.”

Atyle gestured at the row of doors with two fingers. She hissed: “Coilgun. On the left, fifteen feet from the door, in the open.” Then down the stairs. “Out.”

Elpida hissed: “How many skull-fuckers between us and the door?”

Ooni flinched; Elpida pretended not to notice. Atyle turned to look down the stairs, then whispered: “Two guards. Lightly armed. A straight line, warrior.”

Elpida squinted through the pain. She whispered: “How do they not— know we’re free?”

Atyle paused, listening to Kagami, then said: “They will discover the bodies any moment. Coilgun or go, warrior?”

Elpida shook her head, fighting a wave of brain-fog and the throbbing agony in her gut. She was not capable of making this decision. “Illy—” she slurred. “Illy’s fighting all by her— herself. Maybe we if can— take out the drone— pilot—”

Amina squeezed her hand, hard and urgent. “Elpida … ”

Look lively, Elps! Howl snapped inside her mind. The Commander goes down now and these bitches might run — then what happens to little Illy, huh?

Elpida blinked hard. “We have to help Ilyusha. Break stealth now, hit the drone pilot, forget the coilgun—”

Ooni suddenly hissed: “How important is this weapon?”

Ooni had unhooked her helmet from her belt, the same dirty grey as the rest of her armour; she was holding it up to the side of her head, listening to the click-buzz crackle of the Death’s Heads’ encrypted comms network. She stared at Elpida and the oil-smear of Atyle with manic eyes, panting raw and rough, biting her lower lip so hard she drew blood.

Pira whispered quickly: “That coilgun is tomb-grown, high-powered, more than anything else we could get our hands on.” She nodded at the sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms. “But we have that. There’s no sense in this.”

Atyle nodded once. “The scribe agrees. Warrior, we—”

Ooni hissed, quick and quivering: “Yola will come after us.”

Elpida whispered: “Ooni, follow your orders. One hit on the drone pilot is all we—”

“You don’t know her like I do,” Ooni said. “She’ll come after you. After Pira. She’ll throw resources at revenge long after it stops making material sense. She’s a genius and she’s right. She’s always right, she’s right about everything. She gets us, gets it. But she’ll come after us.” Ooni panted so hard that a human would have been hyperventilating. Her hands flew over the controls on her plasma rifle; the weapon pulsed out a deep throbbing hum. “I’ll get your coilgun. And disrupt the drone.”

Before anybody could reach out and stop her, Ooni shot to her feet, jammed her grey helmet into place over her head, and stepped out in full view of the Command Post.

Elpida grabbed for her — but Pira grabbed Elpida.

“Hold, warrior,” Atyle hissed. “Let the fool distract. The scribe and I agree.”

Ooni stepped through the doors, into the Command Post, beyond Elpida’s sight.

But Elpida was already twisting to face Pira and Atyle, heaving through the pain in her gut. Pira recoiled from the look on Elpida’s face.

Howl hissed through Elpida’s teeth: “One of us fights, we all fight!” A throb of pain, hard enough to make Elpida’s head spin. Then she hissed: “Up! Prep for covering fire! Amina, keep your head down!”

Atyle and Pira stood up and pressed themselves to the wall next to the doors. Elpida did the same. Amina ducked. Hafina — Elpida couldn’t see Hafina.

A few seconds passed, then Yola’s voice rang out from inside the Command Post: “Ahhh, our little addition. Ooni, how is the apostate? A glowing picture of health, I hope? I take it she’s eating, if—”

Click-buzz. A power-armoured muffle: “Boss, I can’t raise Hatty. She’s supposed to be testing the apostate. I can’t—”

Another Death’s Head revenant squeaked in sudden alarm: “Hey! Hey you can’t take those, they’re not pool weapons, they stay there until—”

“She’s going for the—”

“She’s red-lined her fucking rifle!”

“Boss, down!”

A thudding of falling bodies clattered to the floor, punctuated by the heavy-weight slam of powered armour going down. Solid-shot weapons cracked and barked, bullets slamming into concrete, chewing through carpet and plaster — and bouncing off carapace plate.

“Now!” Elpida shouted.

Atyle and Pira swung out into the doorway. Pira’s stolen plasma rifle coughed and barked, painting the raised platform with bolts of eye-searing electric blue; the cyclic sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms turned into a blur as the barrels spun up, rounds blasting through tables and upright machines, filling the room with shrapnel and debris. Elpida joined them, dragging the compact shotgun from inside her armoured coat, ready to make some Death’s Head zombie keep her skull down for a few vital seconds.

The revenants up by the screen had all hit the floor. The projector-zombie was tumbled in a heap of limbs and metal pieces. The drone-pilot had dived behind a table. The screen was blank. Elpida saw the glint of Yola’s purple powered armour, then—

Ooni stepped out from behind a row of machines on the left; she swung her plasma rifle like a stick-grenade and hurled it toward that hint of deep purple armour.

The weapon arced through the air. Bodies scattered. A high-pitched whine, a click-whirr, and then—

An ear-splitting explosion blew a shock-wave of pressure out through the open doors of the Command Post.

Elpida staggered back around the corner. Small arms and strong hands caught her around the waist. Amina hung on tight. Pira and Atyle retreated too, guns down, little ammunition spent.

Ooni staggered out of the Command Post moments later, her armour scorched all down the front; Elpida’s hand-smeared mark of blood across her chest had baked black from the plasma detonation. She had a submachine gun — Elpida’s submachine gun — hanging from a strap around her neck. She cradled the power-tank, receiver, and aim-assist rig of the coilgun in both arms, straps spilling down her legs, almost too heavy for her to hold.

Pira caught her and helped her with the weight of the weapon.

Elpida coughed, and said: “Good— girl. Now— go, we— have—”

Atyle dropped her oil-smear camouflage. Her head snapped up. Her peat-green bionic eye locked on the far end of the corridor.

“Stealth is done, lambs!” she shouted. “Turn and go! The scribe says—”

A power-armoured giant stepped around the distant corner; eight feet of grey metal, festooned with weaponry, faceless and blank, with a skull painted in the middle of her chestplate. A walking tank.

Kuro — Yola’s giant. She’d not been in the Command Post.

Other Death’s Head revenants were rounding the corner behind Kuro, raising weapons, taking cover, shouting commands and orders and warnings and insults.

Kuro’s faceless helmet snapped toward Elpida and her comrades. The power plant on her back hummed and whined with spiking output, air-exchange vents throbbing with heat-haze. Her mounted weapons began to deploy, rising from their housing, lifting on articulated arms; only the massive back-mounted plasma cannon remained stowed.

Then Kuro put her head down and charged.

Atyle and Pira both opened fire — but that armour ate plasma bolts like they were splashes of water, and deflected the deafening roar of sliver-gun rounds like a shower of ball bearings. Kuro pounded up the corridor, massive armoured boots cracking the marble tiles, seemingly intent on slamming head-first into the group and killing them with her hands. Even through the haze of pain, Elpida recognised this tactic. She’d seen Silico perform it against hardened Legion fire-points: get a heavily armoured fighter into close-quarters, disrupt any return fire, and then pile on from a distance against the neutralised team.

Atyle started to back up, lowering her weapon. Pira and Ooni struggled with the coilgun, trying to power on the magnetic coils and raise the receiver. Amina screamed something. Elpida raised a fist, a last gesture of defiance.

Hafina stepped up, in front, right in Kuro’s path.

The invisible giant dropped her optic camouflage like a sheet of falling water; beneath the shimmering illusion was a figure wrapped in layers of robe and rag, hanging plates of bulletproof material inside curtains of fabric, cocooning an under-layer of ultra lightweight liquid armour, all to protect a core of ever-shifting cuttlefish-skin. Her helmet was a smooth black beak, without eyes.

Hafina looked more Silico than human, artificial or otherwise.

Six arms came up, two holding a massive rifle, four with smaller weapons of a kind that Elpida had never seen before; silver, chrome, and light-drinking black.

Hafina opened fire; the corridor flashed with energy bolts, all colour washed away in a blink. Anti-materiel rounds slammed into Kuro’s armour — cracking her head back, ramming her chest sideways, and smashing one hip so hard that she went spinning to the floor. The Death’s Heads’ walking tank crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and clattering weapons.

Felled, but far from dead.

Kuro’s armour was not even penetrated, from what Elpida could see. Behind Kuro, down the corridor, the other zombies were beginning to return fire, bullets and bolts hissing through the air and slamming into the marble walls. Chips of stone pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat.

Elpida spat blood to clear her mouth, raised her voice, and shouted the only order which made sense.

“Everyone up, behind Hafina! Down the stairs! Retreat!”

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What’s worse than being a nanomachine zombie? Being a nanomachine zombie with the voice of your dead sister-comrade-lover driving you to highly symbolic but tactically unsound decisions. See, this is why Howl wasn’t in charge. Anyway, it worked! But there’s going to be a long tail of consequences here; even if they all make it out alive, (well, ‘alive’) I doubt an apology to Kagami and a heartfelt conversation with Pira is going to patch things up. Maybe the aftermath will be worse than the escape. But hey, at least Haf is massive and well-armed (pun intended). Now, if only they can call Pheiri to come pick them up …

In other news, this is the second-to-last chapter of arc 7! This arc has gone on longer than I expected, and it’s been a real challenge at some points, but I’ve ended up quite happy with it. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it! One more chapter left before arc 8!

No patreon link this week! It’s literally the last day of the month, so if you subscribe now it’ll charge you twice. Wait until tomorrow! Go check out some other serials instead!

But there’s still a 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.

And thank you for reading my little story. You know, I wasn’t quite sure if it would ever get this far, or if many readers would be interested in this kind of narrative. But it has, and you are! So, thank you. I couldn’t do this without you. And we’re only just beginning.

Content Warnings

Extreme pain
Extensive bleeding
Suicidal intention/ideation, discussion of suicide

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Hafina took point — a transparent shimmer ten feet tall, moving with absolute silence, near-invisible in the unlit corridors. Atyle stuck close to the giant’s heels, but not too close; Atyle’s camouflage turned her into a smear of oil-dark shadow — good for hiding in corners, but not in plain sight. A Death’s Head revenant might miss Hafina right in the middle of the corridor, but Atyle was less well concealed.

Elpida stayed in the rear, her white hair tucked down the back of her coat, her hood pulled up over her head. The best she could do.

She held Cantrelle’s compact pistol-grip shotgun in one hand, and Amina’s sweaty little palm in her other.

The makeshift holding cell in which they had been confined was on the fifth floor of the skyscraper, perhaps to avert a window-based escape, or to discourage others from interfering without permission. The Death’s Heads were mostly using rooms on the second floor of the building; Atyle whispered this information to Elpida as they hurried down the fifth-floor’s main corridor. They had a straight shot to the first set of stairs. Going down.

The interior of the skyscraper was all gilt and gold, marble floor tiles and sculpted window frames, doors of darkest wood with handles of deep brass, and light fixtures shaped like torches ablaze; all quiet and cold now, blanketed in decades of dust, smeared with soot and filth, marked by black traces of nanomachine mould.

Hafina slipped down the first staircase like a torrent of falling water; Atyle followed with a crouching lope, her weapon cradled close to her chest, a blurred shadow among friends.

Elpida did her best to minimise her target profile and move quietly — but her gut wound burned inside her belly, raking her nerves with claws of barbed acid, jerking skewers of pain into her spine and lungs and groin.

Her skin streamed with sweat. She clamped her teeth tight and closed her lips against the temptation to whine. She pulled Amina along.

There was a window in the stairwell. No glass, just a hole, like a dry-socket wound. The black-choked sky was heavy with night, the ring of skyscrapers a skeletal hand below the gravid rotten belly, pockmarked here and there with tiny signs of undead activity, lights showing in empty windows. The combat frame was a dirty white ghost lying prone upon the grey and ashen earth.

Crack!

Another distant gunshot from a high-powered rifle. Serin, taking another swing.

From somewhere far below, muffled by concrete and brick and broken asphalt, Elpida heard the distinctive thump-thump of Ilyusha’s rotary shotgun.

And then a shout? A laugh? A cackle caught on the night air? Too far away to be sure. She hoped Ilyusha was winning.

And then they all plunged back into the skyscraper’s innards. Revenant night vision was essential here; a human being would be blind.

Atyle paused at the stairwell exit to the fourth floor; the stairs terminated here. She crouched, a blurry blob in the dark. Elpida joined her and swallowed a grunt of pain. She couldn’t see Hafina anywhere.

Atyle whispered: “Silence now, warrior and rabbit. We walk in the valley of death. Follow my lead, to the smallest detail.”

Elpida nodded. Amina whimpered. Elpida squeezed her hand and Amina held on tight.

Atyle turned her head to stare at Elpida. The dark smear of technological camouflage was difficult to read, but Elpida recognised the peat green colour of Atyle’s bionic eye, obscured and blended with the colour of her face.

Atyle whispered: “Warrior.”

Elpida wheezed. “What?”

A pause. “You are bleeding.”

Elpida looked down at her stomach; the fresh bandages applied by Cantrelle were saturated with dark red blood. One corner was dripping onto the marble floor, leaving a tiny puddle of sticky crimson between Elpida’s boots. Had she burst more stitches than she’d realised? The bleed was slow, for now.

She shoved her stolen shotgun into her coat and cradled her belly with one arm. “I won’t— leave a trail.”

Atyle stared. She tilted her head. Unreadable behind that camouflage blur. Then she whispered quickly. “Hafina can carry you, but contact will shed her invisible skin, and lift the blanket that protects all of us from curious eyes, from eyes like mine.” Her peat-green bionic winked shut, then opened again.

Elpida blinked sweat and tears out of her eyes. “I can— make it to the exit— I won’t pass— out.”

“If you falter, ask for aid before you fall.”

“I won’t—”

“We cannot slip back and forth between combat and stealth, warrior.” Atyle gestured with the cyclic coilgun, a long gunmetal blur in her hands. “We are not armed for a silent raid. Once we are seen, we fight, and that will be all.” Atyle tilted her head again — listening to Kagami through her headset? Then: “The scribe wishes me to say that you look like a ‘microwaved dog turd’ and that you are fooling nobody. I agree. When you are ready to fall, tell us first. Hafina will carry you. Then we fight.”

Elpida knew she was fading; between the gut wound, the thought-rending pain, and the effort of strangling Cantrelle, she was all but spent. Telokopolan genetic engineering could keep her on feet through almost anything, as long as she had a beating heart and an intact brain — but her head felt like it was full of cotton wool. Her thoughts were jumbled, her sense of time was inaccurate. She was caked in sweat and quivering with pain. And now she was losing blood, again.

But the longer she kept moving, the better the chances of escape.

“I won’t fall,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Stop wasting time. Go. Lead.”

The fourth floor was occupied by only a handful of Death’s Head revenants — high-ground sentries, their attention turned outward. Dark armoured shapes crouched by windows, blanketed in a constant click-buzz-click of encrypted transmissions. Atyle only signalled a halt twice, fist raised, stopped in the middle of a corridor; both times they all crouched, frozen, unbreathing, waiting for Kagami’s all-clear, for mission control to tell them that nobody was looking.

The third floor was almost empty, nothing occupied except a room of corpses at one end. The bodies had been peeled out of their clothes and partially eaten, limbs removed, guts spilled across the floor, heads severed and skulls cracked open for the brains. Nanomachines for the wounded, meat for the revenants, strength to the victors.

The second floor was crawling with zombies.

Serin’s sniper fire and Ilyusha’s muffled assault had stirred up the Death’s Heads into a frenzy. Armoured figures clustered at the windows, encrusted with extra limbs, machine-tentacles, eye-stalks, weapon-implants, and more — and then they ducked away again, rushing to and fro, talking in a jumble of orders and suggestions and insults, punctuated by audio-transmission clicks.

“—can’t see her, still can’t see her, the rat, the rat, rat! Come on, take a shot again you—”

“—use your fucking eyes, Alheri, you’ve got enough of them.”

“—that’s a grav-sig, she’s got grav gens inside her—”

“Then pinpoint her!”

“She’s invisible! Fuck you!”

“—elevation thirteen meters, estimated trajectory departure point, third window from left—”

“It’s not invisible, I saw her! I saw her! She’s just good at hiding!”

“—hiding sense, hiding inside sense, no sense in shooting at us—”

“Is this the ART? The ART signal? Are we fighting a bot?”

“Yola said—”

“Down.”

“She’s not the ART. She’s just another fucking zombie.”

“Down.”

“Don’t rush. Keep clear of the windows.”

“Down.”

“You fucking cunt! Shoot again! Go on, I fucking dare you!”

“Down, down. Pholet, get your head do—”

Crack-crack!

“Told you, Pholet. Duck faster.”

“ … ooouurgh, ow. What the … ? She— she bounced my helmet! This isn’t even armour-piercing calibre! This degenerate is playing with us!”

“Duck faster.”

“Mocking, mocking, mocking!”

“She’ll be playing with her own fucking guts when we zero her! I’ve got the drone missiles online, let’s just blanket that building, fuck her up, fuck her—”

“What about the little bitch? What the hell is she shooting at?”

“Ignore her, she’s fighting a drone. Making noise. Let her play.”

Creeping through the second-floor corridors was a painstaking process of constant stop-start motion, of watching the blurred oil-smear of Atyle’s back, of waiting for Kagami’s instructions to come through Atyle’s headset. Atyle used hand-signals to communicate: halt, stop here, retreat, into that room, no!, that room instead, wait, wait, wait — go!

Whenever Atyle raised a fist her blurry camouflage effect momentarily peeled back from one arm, like a limb thrust out of a blanket. Elpida could barely see Hafina up ahead; she assumed the giant was following her own stealth procedures. Amina gripped Elpida’s hand so hard that her bones hurt.

Kagami’s inaudible instructions to Atyle were often opaque, always without explanation, and several times almost too late. She halted the group at strange moments, held them waiting in the middle of wide hallways, exposed and vulnerable — or sent them scuttling into side-rooms, behind desks and lockers, hiding beneath tables or crammed into corners while Death’s Head revenants stormed past outside. Elpida’s shoulder blades itched; sweat matted her long white hair shoved down the back of her coat, prickling on her skin and running down her face; her stomach wound burned like fragments of molten metal rammed into her gut, the pain ratcheting upward with every moment she stayed crouched or hunched or pressed flat. She clutched her coat to stop from dripping on the floor. She closed her throat to stop from screaming.

Once, Atyle’s hand signal flashed downward — Kagami ordering them all prone, in the middle of a corridor. Elpida hit the ground and pulled Amina after her, then bit her own tongue so as not to cry out, swallowing mouthfuls of her own blood. Another time, Kagami had them pause outside an open door for a full seven minutes, waiting, aching to move, her own crimson blood smearing all over the sleeve of her coat.

Elpida was not used to being outside of the command loop, let alone following orders she did not understand and could not hear — but in her current state she would not make much of a commander.

She could not have escaped alone.

Elpida’s mind was growing dull with exhaustion and pain, even as her senses stayed sharp and open. She felt like a true walking corpse, an undead puppet, moving without internal direction. Silico. Zombie.

She followed orders. She held onto Amina. She did not breathe.

If she and Amina had broken out of that cell without help, they would have lasted less than a minute, crawling through this without the benefit of Kagami’s overwatch and Atyle’s direction.

Atyle had become an enigma. Elpida’s mind ran the questions even as she fell into dull automatic action: where had Atyle learned the hand signals, or the basic techniques of physical infiltration? Since when did she follow orders from anybody, let alone Kagami? A few hours ago Atyle had been unwilling even to duck her head during a firefight, disdainful of bullets, contemptuous of death, walking proud and tall and showing off the cyclic sliver-gun. Now the same woman took and gave orders like she had been doing so all her life, freezing in place rather than be seen by her foes, relaying the control of another.

Was this even the same Atyle?

Didn’t matter. This Atyle was breaking Elpida and Amina out of imprisonment. If she was a Necromancer, so be it. She was on their side. She opposed the Death’s Heads. Elpida needed nothing more, not then, not yet.

Elpida put her trust in her cadre — no, she corrected herself, trust in her comrades. Her fellow zombies. Not her cadre. Her cadre was dead.

While any of us still stands, the cadre lives too, Howl whispered in her memories. Don’t be such a bitch.

Keep moving, follow orders, stay silent, hold on to Amina.

The second-floor corridor circled almost the entire circumference of the skyscraper, drawing Elpida and her comrades away from the Death’s Head revenants; the zombies were grouped on the south side of the building, trying to locate Serin’s vantage point. The north side was quieter. The shadows pressed deeper, unbroken by windows; dust lay thick along the skirting boards; the walls were smeared with nano-mould.

They reached a t-junction; floor tiles marbled with gold led off both left and right — into the core of the building, and out, toward the edge.

Atyle stopped and crouched. Hafina paused just beyond, in the middle of the junction. The giant shimmered like a sheet of water, then turned invisible. Elpida crouched next to Atyle; her stomach wound throbbed and burned, her sleeve was coated with crimson overflow. She gritted her teeth and tried not to shake so hard. Sweat dripped from her eyebrows and blood dripped from beneath her coat. Amina huddled close.

Atyle gestured left, into the core of the skyscraper, and whispered: “Pira.” Then right: “Coilgun. Stairs. Exit.”

Elpida waved a hand — left.

She hissed: “Pira gets— one chance. But not— we’re not— leaving her. If she— wants.”

Atyle’s face twisted beneath the oil-smear blur. A grin? “And if the betrayer declines?”

Elpida didn’t have the energy to think about that question, let alone answer; she was not in charge here. She shook her head.

Atyle paused for a moment, listening to Kagami over the communications headset. “The scribe urges haste. Leave the betrayer behind. She calls you many things, which all mean ‘fool’. Warrior, loosing our terrible arrows will be the end of our stealth, and the beginning of a fight. The betrayer’s refusal could end us all.”

Elpida glanced back at Amina; Amina’s eyes were wide with fear, her face a mask of white, her lips clamped tight. The younger girl could not take much more of this.

“We’re going— to get out of here,” Elpida whispered. Then to Atyle: “We’ll check. If she— if we can’t ask— safely—” She panted with the pain. “I have to try.”

Atyle nodded. “We will see, warrior. We—”

“Maddeuwch iddi?”

The whisper came from invisible lips; Hafina’s voice was surprisingly delicate.

Atyle waited a moment. Kagami must have supplied a translation, because Atyle chuckled. “Perhaps. It is not up to me. But just in case the foolish betrayer refuses forgiveness.” Atyle lifted her cyclic sliver-gun.

Forgiveness?

Elpida hadn’t considered that. ‘Forgiving’ Pira hadn’t even entered into her thoughts. This was not about that — or was it? Would a member of the cadre require ‘forgiveness’?

Elpida’s mind was too full of haze, too fogged by pain. She pushed all that away.

No time to think now anyway; Atyle was hurrying away to the left. Elpida followed, staying low, holding tight to Amina’s hand. Hafina brought up the rear, a looming wall of shimmering water.

The left-hand fork of the corridor was quite short; it turned once and then led to a single large door, which was standing wide open. Atyle pressed herself against the wall next to the door and gestured for Elpida to follow. She gave Elpida the best spot to peek into the room, right next to the door frame. Amina huddled between them, one hand clamped over her own mouth. Elpida could not see where Hafina had gone, but she assumed the giant was standing right there, covering their escape.

Beyond the door was a conference room. Dozens of chairs surrounded a long table, with a wall of televisual screens at the far end. The table and chairs were caked in ancient dust. Some were rotting, black with nano-mould.

Lumps of red raw meat lay on the table in a puddle of gore.

Low voices came from inside.

“—may as well end this farce,” squeaked a voice Elpida had never heard before. High-pitched, raspy, and rough, like too much air forced through a thin and corroded pipe.

“Shut up!” snapped a second voice. “Just shut up, Hatty! Shut the fuck up!”

Elpida recognised that one: it was Pira’s friend, the woman who had delivered the raw blue and rammed it into Elpida’s stomach.

A third voice, a weird giggling gurgle, said: “Ooni, stupid Ooni, thinks she can order us around? She’s deluded and slow.”

“Uunnh,” squeaked the first voice again — ‘Hatty’? “Don’t get above yourself. Yola gave us real clear instructions.”

Silence fell for several seconds. Somebody was breathing hard, panting in anger or panic. Pira’s friend? Ooni?

Then: “Leuca?”

Ooni said the name with deep tenderness — but desperate, quivering with fear.

“Leuca. Leuca, please, you have to eat. You have to eat, or they’re going to k-kill you. Leuca? Leuca. Leuca, look at me, at least. Please. Please!”

Leuca — Pira.

Her ‘real’ name? To Elpida, she was still just Pira.

Elpida glanced at Atyle and mouthed: “Am I clear to look?”

Atyle stared through the wall with her peat-green bionic eye, then nodded once. “Be quick, warrior. Time is short.”

Elpida made sure her hood was up and her hair was hidden. She eased one eye around the door frame.

On one side of the conference room was a more intimate area, with several low tables and a cluster of comfortable chairs. Two Death’s Head revenants were standing with their backs turned to the doorway; both wore lightweight carapace armour — the left in muddy brown, the right in a clashing smear of vomit colours. Grinning skull symbols leered from a shoulder plate on the latter.

The zombie on the left possessed a bizarre metallic structure sprouting from her skull, like a web of antennae, or a cage wrapped about her cranium. Her dirty brown hair was tangled with the metal fronds. The zombie on the right — the one in the armour coloured like a splash of vomit — had flowing blond hair woven into braids, surprisingly clean and neat. Both of them were armed with high-power plasma rifles, bulky matte black weapons with wide muzzles. A long gladius-style sword hung from the belt of the cage-head. Miss vomit-armour had a brace of heavy pistols around her waist — and her left arm was unarmoured, bionic, with half a dozen elbows. The limb was folded up like the bellows of an accordion.

A third revenant was down on her knees in front of them. Long black hair, olive skin, green eyes ringed red from crying. She wore grey armour carapace, with a grinning skull painted on her chestplate. She carried no weapons.

Pira’s friend, ‘Ooni’.

And slumped in one of the chairs was Pira.

She was not imprisoned as Elpida and Amina had been, with stakes and chains and manacles; she’d been disarmed, but her wrists and ankles were free. She still wore her bulletproof vest, her tomb-grey underlayers, her boots, her body armour — but her clothes had been roughly peeled back to expose the chrome-and-matte of her bionic right arm.

She was staring at the floor. Her flame-red hair hung down, partially obscuring her face. Her sky-blue eyes were red and puffy from crying.

Elpida expected to feel anger. Pira had betrayed her, shot her in the gut, almost got everyone else killed. But instead she felt only numb resignation.

Pira had chosen this; Pira was not her comrade; Elpida could do nothing to help. She was almost spent, an unthinking zombie, running on automatic.

Not the Commander, not right then.

It’s not something you get to switch off, Howl whispered, deep down in Elpida’s brain. Lost girls need you, bitch. Get to it.

Shut up, Howl, Elpida thought. I can’t. Too slow. Can’t think.

But Elpida didn’t look away.

Ooni was offering Pira a handful of pinkish-grey meat — a chunk of human brain.

Cage-Head, the revenant on the left, spoke with that giggly gurgle: “She won’t fuckin’ eat, Ooni, you little shit. She won’t eat, so what good is she?”

Ooni turned and looked up; Elpida resisted the urge to pull back. A flicker of motion presented more risk than staying still. And Ooni was too full of rage and fear to notice Elpida.

Ooni spat: “She shot the pilot for us! She’s one of us!”

Vomit-Armour — ‘Hatty’ — spoke in her squeaky rasp: “She won’t eat. She’s some useless apostate. Yola said we check. We checked. We check! Check, check, check.”

Ooni shot to her feet, eyes bulging with rage. She raked her long black hair out of her face and gestured with the chunk of brains. “Leuca is a better fighter than both of you put together! She was more than one of us, she was the best of us! We took a fucking tomb together! We killed a worm-guard and ate the—”

Vomit-Armour and Cage-Head both laughed.

“Yeah, right,” gurgled Cage-Head. “She won’t even eat. Go on, carrot top. Eat your din-dins. Num num num num. Here comes the air-plane!”

Pira said nothing.

Vomit-Armour squeaked: “We could use the bloody meat, that’s for sure. What-say, what-say, Hats? Make some more meat?”

Crack!

Everyone looked up at the sound of Serin’s rifle, muffled and distant — all except Pira.

Cage-Head said: “Yeah, so, like, how do we know that shit isn’t her friend or something?”

Ooni’s eyes flickered across her comrades — and over the pair of plasma rifles in their hands. Elpida recognised that wild and desperate look. Ooni was trying to decide if she could fight them and win, if she could take both of them down in hand-to-hand combat, or ambush them, or trick them, or do anything except plead — anything to save Leuca, Pira, her friend.

Elpida knew that look, that mortal calculation; she’d seen it on her own face during those last days, just before the cadre had been imprisoned by the Covenanters. Ooni had made a deal with monsters. Now the monsters were going to devour something she loved.

Elpida’s numb resignation fell away.

Before Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour could resume their conversation, Ooni shoved the chunk of brain matter into her own mouth and took a bite. She turned back to Pira, chewing quickly, and fell to her knees again. Then she leaned forward, mouth open, trying to press her lips against Pira’s.

Pira lashed out with her exposed bionic arm. She caught Ooni by the throat and shoved her away.

Ooni fell to the floor with a crash of armour plates. Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour both burst out laughing, guffawing and snorting. Ooni pulled herself to her knees, weeping, sniffing, her black hair all stuck to her face; mashed brains dribbled down her chin, mixed with bloody saliva and twin tear-tracks. She sobbed hard and wet, swallowed and hiccuped. One grey-armoured hand reached toward Pira.

“Leuca, p-please. Please! I did— I did what you told me. I did everything! Please, you have to eat! They’re gonna kill you! And then— again— not again— not again not again not again not again—”

Pira didn’t even look at Ooni; she just stared at the floor.

Atyle tapped Elpida on the shoulder. Elpida withdrew and turned to find Atyle offering Elpida her headset, her link with Kagami.

Atyle mouthed: “The scribe wishes your ear. Quickly now, warrior.”

Elpida slipped the headset beneath her hood.

“Kagami?”

Kagami’s voice crackled into her ear: “Elpida! Elpida. ‘Commander’. What the — fuck! — are you doing?! There’s four of them in there! You cannot take four fucking zombies without making any noise, you’re not an infiltration agent linked to my— whatever! And the moment you break stealth, this is over — you’ll have to shoot your way out through a wall of bullshit. And you’re too far from the entrance for effective fire support. I can’t get this moronic tank to come close enough. He doesn’t have any infantry support, so — okay, fine, fair enough! And before you ask a stupid question: no, I have no idea what that berserker idiot Ilyusha is doing. I’m not in contact with her. Now move! Stop stalling!”

From inside the conference room, Vomit-Armour was saying: “How about we go get the little one?”

Elpida whispered: “Kagami, I’m not leaving Pira behind—”

Kagami spat down the comm-link: “She shot you! She’s one of them! She fucked us, she betrayed us, and I swear to Luna’s silver soil that if you bring her back, I will shoot her in the mouth myself. Move! Now!”

Cage-Head grunted: “The what?”

Vomit-Amour said, “The little one. The little one that Yola brought in with the superhuman. She’s small enough for some fun.”

Elpida whispered: “Kagami, Pira is not— one of them. She won’t even pretend to— follow their ideology, to save her own life. She won’t eat—”

Kagami snapped: “So she’s stupid and treacherous! Fucking hell. I should leave you lot where you are. What about Amina, huh? Your pet psychopath? What if you fuck this up and she ends up dead as well? Pira or Amina, Commander? Hell, Pira or me? Who matters more? Fucking hell!”

In the conference room, Cage-Head laughed: “Ha! Right. Let’s go get her little friend, crack her head open, see if Leuca here will eat those brains. Maybe she needs one she’s rutted with before, huh? Like Tak does? Or maybe we should break your head, little Ooni?”

Elpida glanced over her shoulder, at Amina.

Amina had her knife out. Her eyes were wide with terror and full of tears. But her blade was naked, shaking in her fist.

You’d never leave one of us behind, whispered Howl. Not even if we fucked up. Especially if we fucked up.

And you would have followed me anywhere, Elpida thought. And now Amina wants to do the same? But I’d get you all killed—

Howl screamed inside Elpida’s head: One of us fights, we all fight!

Elpida whispered to Kagami: “I can’t let this happen. We’ll do it quiet. If—”

A confused grunt came from inside the conference room. Elpida quickly peeked around the corner again.

Pira was on her feet.

Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour watched as Pira walked over to the table. They covered her with their plasma rifles. Ooni stood up as well, gaping at Pira, her tears trailing off. Pira stopped before the pile of dripping meat. She stared down at the gore for a long moment, then selected a chunk of pinkish-grey brain.

Pira lifted the meat to her lips and took a bite.

She chewed slowly and carefully. She turned back to face the other Death’s Heads. Ooni hiccuped with relief, wiping her eyes, sniffing hard, raking her long black hair back out of her face. Cage-Head snorted.

Vomit-Amour lowered her plasma rifle and squeak-rasped: “Hunger gets you all in the end. Yola always says that. Starve ‘em out, let ‘em feel it.”

Pira raised her eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath through her nose. She was still chewing.

Kagami’s voice crackled in Elpida’s ear: “She’s one of them. Let her go, Commander. She’s a lost cause. Get moving!”

Cage-Head lowered her gun too. “Fuck. I was looking forward to—”

Pira spat a mouthful of masticated brains into Cage-Head’s eyes.

The Death’s Head revenant yelped and spluttered. She attempted to wipe her face and point her weapon at the same time. Pira was already in motion — she jerked to the side, dived for the floor, then rolled to her feet inside Cage-Head’s guard. Her augmetic right arm lashed out and drew the sword from Cage-Head’s belt. Pira crouched like a spring to put all her body weight and bionic strength behind the tip of the sword. She rammed the blade through Cage-Head’s throat and up into her skull. The edge crunched off the revenant’s metal cage structure. Cage-Head went down like her strings had been cut.

Ooni reacted almost as fast; she leapt for the Vomit-Armoured revenant. They grappled for the plasma gun, rolling on the floor. Vomit-Armour’s multi-jointed left arm ratcheted outward, as long as her body, and whipped toward Ooni’s head like a metal chain. The smaller zombie jerked and wriggled and hung on tight, deflecting the blow onto her armour instead of her skull. She spat and hissed and clacked her teeth, trying to bite Vomit-Armour in the face

“Fucking— cunt— fuck!” Vomit-Armour spat — and then head-butted Ooni right in the nose. Blood flowered in the darkness.

Vomit-Armour rolled on top and slammed Ooni to the floor, but the weapon was still pinned between them.

Vomit-Armour raised her head.

Click-buzz.

Comms open. She was about to call for help.

Elpida stood up and drew her shotgun from inside her coat.

But then her vision swirled and throbbed; her legs shook, about to give out; her stomach burned with consuming fire. Cadre-standard pain-blockers and adrenaline and re-balanced hormones flooded her circulatory system to keep her on her feet, but she would be a second too late, a second spent feeling the blood rush to her head and drip from her belly and—

Pira stepped forward, yanked one of Vomit-Armour’s pistols from her own belt, then jammed the muzzle against the back of her neck and pulled the trigger.

The round exploded the revenant’s throat in a spray of blood and bone — destroying whatever bionic communications equipment she had been about to use. Vomit-Armour collapsed in a clattering heap, choking and gurgling and flopping, in a pool of spreading blood.

Ooni wriggled free. She ripped the plasma rifle from her former comrade’s twitching grip. She was panting hard, covered in blood and brains.

She hissed: “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”

“Ooni,” said Pira. “Stop.”

Ooni looked up at Pira. She blinked, then broke into a quivering grin.

“Leuca!” she yelped. “Leuca, we can run, we have to run! You and me, like before, we can—”

“Ooni, stop.” Pira stared at the pistol in her hands and shook her head. “There’s no point.”

“W-what? L-Leuca? No! We can—”

Pira reached out and grabbed the barrel of Ooni’s plasma rifle. She stepped forward and pressed her own chest against the muzzle. She stared into Ooni’s eyes.

“Shoot me,” Pira said. “Then shoot yourself. If you can’t do it, I will.” She raised the pistol and pressed it gently to Ooni’s chestplate, right against the forehead of the painted skull. “Doesn’t matter which way we go. Just that we do.”

Ooni was crying again, wide eyed and open-mouthed. “Leuca … L-Leuca … I love you. Please. It’s been— for me it’s been … it’s been decades.”

Pira said: “I love you too. But this can’t go on.”

In Elpida’s ear, Kagami made a gagging sound, then said: “Fucking no. Absolutely not. Get moving, Commander, right now!”

Elpida whispered — to Atyle and Amina: “Get ready to move. Follow my— lead.”

Elpida stepped out of cover and into the doorway.

“No,” she said.

No, not forgiveness.

Pira and Ooni looked up. Ooni gaped, amazed, like she was seeing a ghost. Her eyes boggled at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s chest. Kagami was screeching in Elpida’s ear.

Pira’s eyes were unguarded, open, all her defences abandoned. She stared as if Elpida was a summation of all her sins.

Elpida wheezed. “You don’t get to kill— yourself, Pira.” She had to clutch her bleeding stomach. The gore was seeping between her fingers. “You aren’t getting off— that easy. You’re coming— with us.”

Pira said: “I can’t be trusted.”

“Pira. I am your Commander. And that was an order.”

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‘Commander’ is not just Elpida’s rank or role; it runs deeper than death, and means more to her than a bullet in the gut. Is she hopelessly naive, or holding firm to what she believes in? Is this stunt going to get her shot in the face – or overcome even the cannibalism and predation of this black and grey afterlife?

I actually don’t know! Fuck me sideways, but every single character in this chapter (even Amina!) did the complete opposite of what the outline said they were supposed to do. As soon as they hit the page, none of them were having any of it. Elpida was meant to retreat, Pira was supposed to accept her failure, Ooni was meant to shoot her friends, and Amina was meant to start crying, not pull out her knife and back Elpida up. I’m not in charge of these zombies anymore, I’m just along for the ride.

Kagami has a point, you know? This is a bad tactical error. There might be costs for this. But also rewards. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters in the future, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so … gonna try!

There’s also a 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 the story.

And as always, thank you for reading! I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you for reading my little story about zombie girls at the end of the world and all the various ways they get hurt and shoot things and maybe also make out with each other. I’m having a blast with it, and I hope you are too! We have so much more to see, so many dark places to visit. Until next week, reader!

Content Warnings

Pain (you know this by now, considering the last few chapters)
Strangulation/choking

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Cantrelle returned to the makeshift holding cell a few minutes later.

The Death’s Head medic disengaged the tarry-black bio-tech lock from outside the door; Elpida watched carefully, trying to figure out how the lock was operated — but the mechanism was beyond her understanding. Perhaps it was released by a near-field electronic signal. The door opened with a meaty ripping sound. Cantrelle stepped inside; she was carrying an additional pair of the heavy, bulky metal cuffs, ready to secure Elpida’s ankles.

Cantrelle stopped when she saw that Elpida was up on her feet.

The door slapped shut. Cantrelle’s flat, blank, disc-shaped eyes flickered rapidly from Elpida to Amina — to confirm that their wrists were still in their cuffs, their chains were still staked to the floor, and Amina’s metal muzzle was still secured to her face.

Cantrelle frowned, hard and craggy beneath her perfectly bald head. Her quartet of segmented metal tentacles went still.

Elpida couldn’t help herself — she smiled.

Cantrelle spat in her buzzing half-mechanical voice: “And how many of my stitches have you popped with this little stunt? I swear, if I have to re-do that all over again … ”

Elpida croaked, slowly: “You’re alone. Confident?”

Cantrelle gestured at the tilted metal surgical table with one of her pincer-tipped tentacles. “Lie the fuck back down. Right now.”

Elpida had done her best to tug her grey thermal t-shirt down over her bandaged gut, to better display the crescent-and-line symbol she’d daubed on her chest, but the stomach of the t-shirt was ragged where Pira’s bullets had torn through the fabric, and soaked through with sticky, half-dried, red-brown blood. She still had her armoured coat — the ‘tomb-grown coat’, as Yola had called it — but one flank of the lower torso was stiff and scored, damaged from deflecting the impact of the rest of Pira’s magazine.

No shoes. No weapon. Wrists cuffed, chained to the ground. Elpida’s long white hair was in her face — it was too difficult to sweep it all back over her head while her wrists were manacled. Amina sat in a teary-eyed heap on the floor, her hands still covered in Elpida’s blood, her muzzle against her mouth.

Elpida realised she didn’t want to kill Cantrelle; the medic had done an honest job tending to Elpida’s gut wound. She had administered anaesthetics, glued her intestines back together, and sewn her up with professional skill. She hadn’t hurt Elpida on purpose, or rushed the task, or cut corners.

But she was a committed Death’s Head. She was no different than the Covenanters.

Elpida briefly wished that Cantrelle had delegated this task to some other Death’s Head, some brutish enforcer Elpida had never met; she almost said it out loud — I don’t want to kill you, turn around, go away — but she kept her mouth shut. Cantrelle was her enemy, both ideologically and materially. She had to escape. Any hesitation would put her comrades at risk. She refused to be the cause of another murdered cadre.

Elpida said: “Nah.”

Cantrelle’s face scrunched with anger. “Lie. The. Fuck. Down.”

“You’re gonna— have to— make me.”

Cantrelle reached over her shoulder and drew her shotgun.

Short and stubby, shiny and black like a beetle’s shell, with a pistol grip for the trigger mechanism and second pistol grip up front, for easy handling and improved accuracy. A short-range urban fighting weapon, for room-to-room combat — or the last-ditch personal defence weapon of a medic who didn’t like to get her hands dirty? Elpida gambled on the latter.

Cantrelle aimed the shotgun at Elpida, one-handed. “You’re gut-shot, dip-shit. You can’t even speak a full sentence without stopping to wheeze. Lie down.”

“You won’t shoot me.”

Cantrelle clenched her jaw.

Elpida pressed: “You won’t shoot me. Yola thinks— I’m important. Yola practically wants to— sleep with me. And Yola’s— in charge. You won’t shoot.” Then, too quickly for Cantrelle to think about the previous statement: “Why’d you decide— to do this alone? Don’t want to delegate? Feeling jealous?”

Cantrelle’s face twisted with rage: bullseye. But then Cantrelle shifted her aim — she pointed her shotgun at Amina instead.

Amina flinched, whimpering behind her muzzle, raising her hands to ward off the attack.

Cantrelle said: “I’ll shoot her, then. How about that, huh? Actually, forget that. Either you lie back down, or I’ll go fetch two of my best friends and tell them there’s a free meal up for grabs. You can watch your little fuck-toy here get eaten alive. Did you know that one of us revenants can survive, conscious and screaming, with as little as thirty percent of her brain mass? You wanna see that happen up close? Then, when they’re done eating, I’ll cuff your ankles anyway.”

Elpida frowned; it did not take much effort to maintain her exhausted, sullen, dead-eyed expression.

Cantrelle said, “Think I won’t do it?”

“Yola said—”

Cantrelle laughed. “Yola’s not the only one in charge here. Maybe she’s right about you, or maybe not. But she’s not the only fucking voice in the Sisters. Now lie down. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make this difficult, for fuck’s sake.”

Elpida glanced down; Amina was panting through her muzzle, eyes wide with terror, skin covered in panic-sweat.

She needed Amina to hold on; tipping their hand early would ruin the plan.

“Amina,” Elpida said. “Amina. Look at me. Look up. Look.”

Amina managed to look away from the muzzle of Cantrelle’s shotgun.

Elpida said: “We’re going— to be alright. Just— do what she says.”

Amina stared right through Elpida. Did she remember what to do next? A successful escape relied on them working together. Elpida could not do this alone, not with a gut wound that might leave her incapacitated. But Amina was just a child, no matter how bloodthirsty or dangerous she had shown she could be, to a foe with their back turned. Maybe she couldn’t pull this off, maybe it was too much, she was too scared. Elpida needed options.

“Lie down,” Cantrelle grunted. “Last chance.”

“Alright,” Elpida sighed.

She put all her trust in Amina, and lay back down.

Returning to the tilted surgical table was only marginally less difficult than standing up had been; Elpida sat, dragging her chain after her, then slowly lifted her feet onto the metal shelf, right first, then left, then eased her torso backward. Her gut wound screamed inside her belly like a demon trapped beneath her skin, shafts of flame roaring up her nerves and wracking her spine with fire and acid. She let out a strangled grunt, streaming with sweat. Her vision swirled dark for several heartbeats. The last of the anaesthetic must have been wearing off.

She prepared herself for much more pain.

Cantrelle muttered as she crossed the room: “Serves you fucking right you great big idiot. You’re like a giant goldie but a lot more stupid. Bet you’re not even housebroken.”

Elpida’s pain ebbed down to merely soul-destroying rather than all-consuming, strangled by Telokopolan pain-blockers pounding into her bloodstream. Her vision cleared. She blinked away a veil of tears.

Cantrelle paused several feet from the surgical table. She was frowning at Amina, still covering her with the shotgun.

Elpida’s heart lurched; if Cantrelle noticed what they’d done, she really would retreat and return with reinforcements.

“Hey,” Elpida panted. “Leave her alone. Hurt her, and then you’ll— have to kill me. ‘Cos I’ll hunt— you, for as long as it— takes.”

Cantrelle sighed and shook her head; her disc-eyes could not roll in their sockets, but the tiny muscles of her face revealed her contempt. She gestured at Amina with her shotgun. “Get into the corner. Away from me. Go on, right into the corner.” Amina crawled away from Cantrelle and Elpida, dragging her chain along the marble floor, wedging herself into the corner of the filthy public toilet, like a small animal trying to escape a predator. Cantrelle said: “Good. Now stay there.”

She approached the foot of the surgical bed. She kept her shotgun covering Amina. The four mechanical tendrils which sprouted from her shoulders all pointed toward Elpida — the pair of pincers were open, as if waiting to intercept an attack, while the saw and the needle just hung, ready for surprises. She lifted the heavy metal manacles in her free hand and opened them with a flick of her wrist. They went clack.

Then Cantrelle paused again. She frowned at Elpida.

“You’re planning something,” she said.

Elpida smiled back, still streaming with sweat. “‘Course I am.”

Cantrelle eyed her up and down, frowning harder.

Elpida needed to keep her here, keep her riled up, keep her angry. Elpida said: “Wanna go— fetch some help? Somebody to hold me down? Maybe bring Yola back— so she can— she can compliment my ankles— or something? Why does she call you ‘Ella’, anyway? You two close?”

Cantrelle said, “Reach out with your hands.”

Elpida said, “What?”

“Reach out with your hands. All the way. To the limit of your chain. Go on, so I can see.” Cantrelle waggled her shotgun at Amina.

Elpida obeyed. She lifted her cuffed hands to full extension, dragging the chain off the floor link by link. She allowed it to scrape against the side of the bed, just to irritate Cantrelle. At full extension she was several feet short of being able to touch the medic, even if Cantrelle had to get right on top of her to put the cuffs on her ankles.

Cantrelle smirked. “Whatever you have planned, it’s not going to work. Here. Let’s get this over with.” She lowered the cuffs toward Elpida’s waiting ankles.

And Elpida spread her legs apart — too wide for the cuffs.

Cantrelle stopped and gave Elpida a sour look.

“Now what?” Elpida asked. “Gotta make me— close my legs. Can’t get those cuffs on— like this.”

Cantrelle glanced at Amina. The younger revenant was still crammed into the corner of the room, cowering and shaking. Cantrelle finally moved her shotgun away from Amina; she jammed the muzzle against Elpida’s left knee instead, point-blank, jabbing into the underside of her kneecap.

“I’ll make it so you can’t fucking walk for the next six months; then we won’t need the cuffs. Stop fucking with me.”

Cantrelle waited. Elpida allowed her smile to die; that didn’t take much acting. The moment of truth was approaching fast. If Amina could not carry out her part of the plan, they were both doomed. Elpida was already trying to calculate new possibilities, but it all came back to the need for an opening, a single moment of distraction. She couldn’t force that kind of opening herself, not alone, not against somebody as vigilant as the Death’s Head medic.

Elpida sighed as if defeated, and closed her legs.

“Better,” Cantrelle spat.

She reached down, set the open manacles over Elpida’s ankles, and slammed them shut. They locked with a heavy click.

Cantrelle quickly straightened up. She lowered the shotgun and started to take a step back. “Right, now that’s do—”

Amina came out of the corner like a rabid dog.

Her muzzle went flying — thrown at Cantrelle with her cuffed hands, already removed by Elpida earlier, and held in place until that moment by Amina’s own teeth. Her chain rasped against the floor tiles as she shot to her feet and hurled herself toward Cantrelle. The muzzle hit Cantrelle in the face — no damage, but surprise enough to make her flinch.

Cantrelle’s stubby shotgun came up in her hands, ready to blow off Amina’s head. Amina hit the limit of her own chain; she yelped, almost yanked off her feet by the pull on her wrists, crying and panting and grasping for Cantrelle’s front. But the Death’s Head was out of reach.

Cantrelle laughed.

Elpida lifted her cuffed feet.

Her body weight slid her down the tilted incline of the surgical bed, until her backside hit the foot-shelf; the impact sent a lance of blinding pain up through her gut wound. She howled through her teeth, eyes streaming with tears of pain, hands yanked backward by the anchor of her own chain.

But she didn’t need hands to hit Cantrelle.

Elpida swung her cuffed feet out wide — stomach wound screaming, stitches popping free — and then slammed the heavy metal cuffs into Cantrelle’s spine.

Ribs went snap like damp twigs.

The medic went flying. Her shotgun tumbled out of her grip and clattered to the floor on the far side of the room. She sprawled on her hands and knees, heaving for breath, spitting bile — and well within Amina’s range.

Amina jumped on her. Fingernails clawed at the tomb-coat, scratching for throat and eyes; teeth snapped shut on a mouthful of fabric, then a piece of hand, then a wet crunch of cheekbone and flesh. Cantrelle screamed and reared up.

Cantrelle fought back with her metal tendrils; the pair of pincers went for Amina’s neck and eyes. The saw slashed for her throat.

And the massive needle reared back, ready to punch through skin and deliver neurotoxin or knock-out cocktail or worse.

Elpida rolled to the side and fell off the surgical bed, right on top of Cantrelle.

The agony in her gut exploded beyond anything she had previously considered possible; Elpida was certain that she had popped every stitch, opened every flap of flesh, torn asunder every muscle fibre, and voided the very tubes of her intestines. She was certain that her bowels were spilling out like a nest of bloody snakes. Unconsciousness throbbed at the edge of her tear-blurred vision; the world was going dark. But she couldn’t pass out yet; if she did, Amina would die.

She hooked her chain around Cantrelle’s bionic throat. She put her knees into the small of Cantrelle’s back and her elbows into Cantrelle’s shoulder blades. She pulled.

Nanomachine zombies did not need to breathe — but zombie brains needed circulation, in imitation of biological life.

The medic wheezed and spluttered, then crackled and buzzed; apparently her metal-encrusted throat and cybernetic jaw did not fully protect her from strangulation, from having her blood flow cut off with a length of chain. Her hands scrabbled at the metal links, breaking her nails and bloodying her knuckles. Her segmented tendrils turned on Elpida instead; Elpida squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head left and right to throw off the pincers’ aim; snapping metal jaws took chunks out of her scalp, ripped out clumps of hair, and left bleeding welts on her cheeks and neck. She heard a crunch and snap — was that Amina dealing with the other two tendrils, the saw and the needle? Elpida could only hope.

Choking an opponent unconscious should only have taken a few seconds. Elpida’s internal clock was so scrambled by pain that it felt like hours. Cantrelle gurgled and hissed, flailing and bucking, weaker and weaker. Her bionics allowed her to hold out longer than an unaltered human, but eventually her tentacles ceased their battering. She went limp in Elpida’s grip.

Elpida kept the pressure on. Hours passed, or perhaps only seconds.

Then she let go. She collapsed face-down on Cantrelle’s back.

Unconscious oblivion coaxed her deeper. Elpida’s body was a sea of pain, flooding outward from the ruined muscle and torn tissues of her gut wound. Telokopolan pain-blockers may as well have been prayer and hope. Her vision went dark; her extremities went numb. Nearby, somebody was sobbing softly. If she didn’t get up and move soon, then this would all be for nothing. Cantrelle would be missed. Another revenant would come to check on them. But the pain was—

Get up said Howl, inside Elpida’s head. Get up, Elps. I fucking love you. Get up!

Elpida rolled off Cantrelle’s back. She hit the floor — more pain, ringing upward through her body like a cracked bell. She coughed blood, spluttering and wheezing. She lay still for several seconds, eyelids fluttering. Couldn’t force them open. If she could only rest for—

Get up, bitch tits!

Elpida sat up. Her guts felt like they were flowing out into her lap. Sitting was difficult with cuffed ankles. She stayed very still for what felt like another hour — two — three.

A tiny voice murmured: “Elpida?”

Elpida blinked to clear her vision.

Amina was crouched on the opposite side of Cantrelle’s corpse. She was staring at Elpida with horror and hope in equal measure. Blood was smeared around her mouth, a crimson mess on her soft brown skin. She had fragments of flesh in her teeth. She was still gripping Cantrelle’s hands. Her sandy hair was wild and tangled. She was crying slowly.

“Ami— na,” Elpida forced out. “Good. Job. Good— girl.”

“I’m— I’m— I’m not—”

Elpida looked down at her own gut; to her surprise, she was not a pile of loose intestines. Cantrelle had done an incredible job with those stitches. Several were broken and burst, no doubt about that, but the wound was still closed, despite the dark red blood seeping into the bandages.

“—not a good—” hic “—girl. I-I-I should have—”

“Shhhhh,” Elpida mumbled. “Shhhh. Amina. Shhh. Good girl. Well done.”

Elpida rolled Cantrelle over and went through her pockets; the corpse was red in the face from strangulation, but her flat disc-eyes were emotionless and blank, grey-dark screens gone out. The tendrils were limp, just cables lying on the floor. Amina had somehow snapped both the saw and the needle, probably by stamping on them. There were chunks taken out of her hands where Amina had bitten and gouged to keep Cantrelle from fighting back.

Another moment of truth presented itself, but Elpida and Amina got lucky — Cantrelle did possess a keyring. She also had a small snub-nosed pistol with a couple of extra magazines. Elpida offered those to Amina, but Amina shook her head and murmured something about her knife; Elpida pocketed the gun. All Cantrelle’s other possessions were either medical equipment, or personal effects which meant nothing to Elpida. She found a lock of blonde hair inside a little box, a fragment of a photograph of a building, several folded paper documents covered in hand-written notes; a pen-knife, a tin mug, a lighter, a scrap of pale leather — human skin?

Elpida tried the keys in her own manacles first. She found the correct one, then freed her ankles, then Amina’s wrists. Amina was sobbing quietly, her breath coming in little sips and judders as she rubbed her wrists. Amina needed praise, but Elpida had to finish the kill.

Elpida stood up, slowly and carefully. She had to pause several times, screwing her eyes shut, panting for breath as she fought down the pain. She wanted to vomit, but she had to resist; the stomach contractions might knock her unconscious.

“Ami— Amina. Amina. Shotgun. I can’t— probably can’t bend over.”

“A-ah?”

“Her shotgun. Get me her— shotgun.” Elpida gestured at the stubby weapon.

Amina scurried over to the gun, scooped it up, and then presented it to Elpida as if it were a holy relic and Elpida an idol.

“Thanks,” Elpida croaked.

She checked the chamber to make sure the weapon had a shell loaded. She flicked the safety on, then off again. Then she held both pistol grips and pointed the barrel at Cantrelle’s skull.

Nanomachine zombies did not die easily; Elpida herself was proof of that. She’d seen severed heads still moving, twitching the muscles and trying to roll their plucked-out eyes. Cantrelle was ‘dead’ — but for how long?

Destroy the brain, and the zombie goes back to the resurrection buffer. See you in sixty years.

Elpida put her finger on the trigger — and hesitated.

Amina whispered: “Did- didn’t we … k-kill her?”

“Yes and no,” Elpida croaked. She stared into Cantrelle’s empty disc-eyes. “These revenants— they’re more advanced than us. Much more. Probably loaded with nanomachines far beyond us. I already reanimated once, back in the bunker. She might … spring back up … any second.”

Elpida clenched her teeth. She did not want to kill Cantrelle; she wanted to kill the Death’s Heads. She wanted to pull the trigger — but if she did that, the gunshot might bring reinforcements running, and ruin the escape. Was one defeated Death’s Head — one Covenanter — worth failure? She was in too much pain to tell where misguided mercy ended and sensible tactics began.

“Fuck,” she hissed — and lowered the shotgun.

Amina was staring at her, wide-eyed with incomprehension and horror, crying softly. She didn’t have the context to understand any of this.

Elpida reached out and put one hand on Amina’s head. “You did really well, Amina,” she croaked. “Well done. You’re a good— girl. You’re a very good girl. We’re going to— get out of here now.”

Amina’s face scrunched up. She cried harder, but she didn’t sob, careful to stay quiet. She panted through her nose. “Okay. Okay. Okay. I— I— can— can—”

“Stay close to me. Do everything I say.”

Amina nodded. “I promise! Here!”

Amina held out her bloody hands — Elpida’s blood, from earlier, rapidly drying on Amina’s palms and fingers, smeared by the struggle with Cantrelle.

“For the nanomachine content, right,” Elpida said. “Amina— it’s not much. We don’t have time to—”

“It’s yours! It’s yours!” Amina hissed, her voice filled with panic. “And you’re more hurt! Take it back! Take it back, I don’t deserve—”

Elpida took one of Amina’s hands and pressed it back toward her. “Yours now. I got the raw blue— right? Lick your fingers clean. That’s an order, Amina. Follow your— orders.”

Amina stared — then nodded and obeyed without further hesitation. She shuddered in rapture as she licked Elpida’s blood off her own hands.

Elpida led Amina over to the door. Elpida’s boots were waiting there, untouched by the fight. She had Amina pick them up first and shake them out, just to make sure the Death’s Heads hadn’t left any nasty surprises inside. She stepped into the boots, then stepped back to examine the bio-tech lock on the door.

She hadn’t seen anything in Cantrelle’s pockets which looked like a near-field transmitter to operate the lock. She attempted a quick experiment: she picked up a piece of shattered glass from the row of once-grand mirrors, and poked the blob of tarry black goo.

The blob ate the glass, dissolved the material into more of itself, leaving behind a thin trickle of greasy smoke.

She said: “Okay. Amina, don’t touch that.”

“Mm!”

Perhaps the lock operated on the nanomachines themselves, keyed for the Death’s Heads, or for particular individuals. Elpida glanced back at the corpse; Amina wouldn’t be able to lift it and carry it over here, and the muscular effort might rip open Elpida’s belly for real. They could try cutting off a hand, but the only cutting tool they had was Cantrelle’s saw — and Amina had snapped that in half. How about severing a finger?

They were burning time; if a finger didn’t work then they would have to cut through a hand, then an arm, then what? That could take ten or fifteen minutes. They might be discovered. Or it might not work at all.

Elpida pointed the shotgun at the door frame below the lock

A bad option, but at least they would be out and moving in a few seconds, running for an exit.

“Amina,” she panted. “When the door opens, stay close. We have to— run. Don’t lag. I can’t— probably can’t carry you— like this. Not leaving you behind. Understand?”

A small hand closed around a corner of Elpida’s coat. “Yes.”

“Okay. Cover your eyes, there might be—”

A shimmer passed over the tarry-black bio-tech lock — like an optical illusion — and then the lock parted in the middle, as if sliced by a blade from top to bottom.

The lock went inert and fell to the floor, shattering into tiny fragments with a tinkling like glass beads.

The door swung open.

Elpida jerked the shotgun upward and shoved Amina behind her, out of the line of fire, falling back, ready for—

Nothing.

Nothing stood in the doorway. Pale marble corridor yawned beyond, dusty and dirty, completely empty.

No — a shimmering passed through the air; like a sculpture made of translucent glass, heat haze in a cloudless sky, a sheet of falling water in perfect laminar flow.

Something invisible stepped into the room.

Eight feet, nine feet — or ten feet tall? Elpida could not be certain; the optical chameleon effect confused her estimate of height. The intruder straightened up from ducking through the doorway. A giant, no doubt about that. Multiple limbs shimmered and blurred against the background of the door frame. Armour plates — or clothing? — refracted the light at strange angles. When it stopped moving the figure became truly invisible — all except a head, a blurred shape of helmet tacking back and forth.

Elpida retreated, shoving Amina behind her. The stubby shotgun in her hands seemed an inadequate weapon for this target.

But she raised it anyway, aiming at the just-visible shimmer of the head.

A voice hissed: “Still your blade, warrior.”

Another semi-visible shape stepped around the door frame; this second figure was not truly invisible, but merely blurred like a smear of oil on canvas, cloaked in shadow, obscured by a long coat, with the hood pulled up.

Elpida lowered her shotgun and burst into a smile. “Atyle?!”

The blurring effect switched off; Atyle stood revealed before Elpida, dressed in the armoured coat taken from the tomb. Tall and proud, dark skin made darker by the shade of her hood, Atyle looked completely untouched by the battle. Her biological left eye twinkled with mischief; her peat green augmetic right eye spiralled and flickered with a hundred hidden lenses. She cradled the cyclic sliver-gun in her arms.

“You did not think we had forgotten you, warrior?” she whispered.

Elpida could have laughed. She could have hugged Atyle. She panted through the pain. “How do you keep— doing this, returning exactly— when we need you?”

Atyle grinned. “Perhaps I am a Necromancer.” She raised her chin, indicating the rest of the room behind Elpida and Amina. “We attempted to join you before your hasty duel, but stealth is harder won than it appears. Well done, warrior.” She glanced downward, at Amina peeking out around Elpida’s side. “And well done, little rabbit. Your claws grow ever sharper.”

Amina let out a strangled whimper.

Elpida eyed the now-unmoving ten-foot waterfall-shimmer at Atyle’s side. She hissed: “We?”

Atyle glanced at her almost-invisible companion. “A friend. She serves the small titan who joined us in the battle. Her name is Hafina.”

Elpida struggled to keep up; the pain was fogging her intellect. “Small titan? You mean the crawler? The— tank?”

Atyle nodded. “She cannot speak to us, but she comprehends. The small titan translates our speech for her. He waits at range, ready for the charge, ready to accept us into his belly.” Atyle glanced left and right, then up and down, then over her shoulder, rapidly covering all angles with her augmetic eye. “We must be quick now, warrior, and little rabbit. We must be quick and quiet and not be seen. These beasts are bigger than we. They see through walls, too.”

“Wait,” Elpida hissed. “Is anybody coming— right now?”

“Not yet, warrior.” Atyle grinned again. “You have other plans?”

“Where are the others?” Elpida whispered. “Us, the rest of us?”

Atyle dipped her head. “Kagami and Victoria entered your god of war—”

“The combat frame! But there was a Necromancer, it stopped me—”

“They felled the shape-shifter and cast it down. They are safe in the belly of your god, for now.” Atyle reached up and tipped back one side of her armoured hood; she was wearing an earpiece and headset. “The scribe lends us the eyes of your god, and tells me where not to tread. She sees not with my clarity and depth, but she sees further and wider. She speaks with the small titan, also. She is our watcher from the other side.”

Elpida ached to ask questions, but they didn’t have time. She had to stick to the bare essentials. “Kagami’s running mission control— for us? Got another headset, for me?”

Atyle shook her head. “No spares.” A pause, then a smile. “The scribe calls you a fool for damaging your stitches. She calls you many things.”

Elpida sighed. “We really need proper short-range communications. And the rest, the rest of us?”

Atyle shrugged. “Ilyusha is nowhere. Pira … ” Atyle turned her head down and to the right, staring through brick and steel. “Sits in a cell of her own, though less well chained than you. With a friend. She is unwell inside.”

“She betrayed us,” Elpida hissed. “But then she—”

“I saw, warrior.” The depths of Atyle’s peat-green bionic eye flickered and rotated. “I was watching. Now, do we rescue Pira, or not?”

Elpida said: “You’re asking me? I’m not in command— right now. You and Kagami—”

“It is you she betrayed, and you she saved. Would you have won your duel if she had not delivered to you the magic potion?” Atyle took one hand off her cyclic coilgun and gestured at Elpida’s belly. “To the wronged, the choice of justice.” She grinned. “And I wish to see what you choose, warrior.”

For a split-second Elpida considered the possibility that Atyle really was a Necromancer.

Didn’t matter; she was breaking Elpida out.

But the choice was impossible. Elpida still could not fully process what betrayal meant; she had wrestled Pira to the ground in a fistfight that felt just as intimate as any cadre sparring match. She had fed her with blood, she had trusted her, she had listened to Pira’s reasons and respected her choices. And Pira had shot her through the stomach in a moment of confusion and panic.

Telokopolis rejects nobody, Howl whispered inside Elpida’s memories. Bitch.

Did that mean welcoming a traitor back into the cadre?

But a member of the cadre could never betray.

Elpida’s head went around and around; she was in too much pain to make this decision. Pira had chosen the Death’s Heads — no, Pira had chosen her old friend. And then chosen to betray them in secret to help Elpida; without the raw blue, Elpida would be unconscious, or maybe dead.

Betrayal, then salvation. Which was the truth?

There was no time for this.

Elpida said: “Where’s our coilgun? Did they take that off me, too?”

Atyle raised her eyebrows in surprise, then glanced downward, through the floor. “Not too far from the betrayer. Inside their war council. Our exit is just beyond. Our path takes us past both.” She paused, then chuckled. “The scribe is not happy about this change of plans. She suggests we jump out of a window instead, to save ourselves the effort of getting killed.”

War council? Yola had said ‘command post’ earlier. Elpida hissed in frustration.

Atyle whispered: “Your other weapons are there too, warrior. Perhaps they hoped to return them to you, once you joined their war party.”

Elpida snorted. “Maybe. What does Hafina think?” Elpida glanced up at the almost-invisible shimmer.

The shimmer — Hafina — nodded once.

Atyle whispered: “She will help. The beasts here are looking outward, stirred up by more than us alone. We are not the only distraction.”

Amina whispered in a tiny voice: “Is m-my knife there, too?”

Atyle tilted her head. “We will see, little rabbit. If not … ” Atyle reached inside her coat and pulled out a sheathed combat knife, one of the blades they had taken from the tomb armoury. She flipped it around and handed it to Amina. Amina’s eyes lit up with trembling gratitude. She slid the blade away inside her coat. She tried to whisper a thank you, but her voice was shivering too hard.

Elpida made a decision: “We retrieve the coilgun — if we can do so without being seen, on our way out. If that takes us past Pira, then she gets one chance — her friend, or us. If she says no, or hesitates … ”

Atyle raised her eyebrows, quietly amused.

Crack!

A single high-powered gunshot rang out — from beyond the walls of the skyscraper, splitting the nocturnal quiet. Every head looked up — ‘Hafina’ included, a whirl of mirror-shimmer translucence.

Elpida hissed: “That rifle. That’s Serin.” Then—

Boom-boom-boom, even more muffled, somewhere down in the guts of rubble and ruin.

Atyle grinned. “Our own little beast returns, hm? The perfect distraction.”

“Illy!” Amina squeaked. “That’s her gun! That’s her gun!”

Elpida panted: “Coilgun, Pira, exit. If Illy needs help— the first two— priorities— can be discarded. We go, now.”

Atyle grinned and turned into an oil-streak blur against the marbled hallway. She raised a hand and tapped the side of her hood. “Lead on, Hafina. Guide us true, scribe.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Zombies sure are hard to kill; is Elpida being merciful, or merely practical? Also, hey, Haf is big. And quiet, for now. The strong, silent type, or maybe just shy? Meanwhile-

Oh, wait, my apologies, I’m getting a special announcement from Kagami, at volumes too loud for the human ear to endure.

IM HERE TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT. THE DEATHS HEADS ARE BITCH ASS MOTHERFUCKERS. THEY STOLE MY FUCKING COMMANDER. THATS RIGHT. THEY TOOK OUT THEIR FUCKING, SKULL WOMB TATTOOS, AND STOLE MY FUCKING COMMANDER. AND THEY SAID “WE ARE THE INHERITORS BLAH BLAH BLAH” AND I SAID “YOU DIRT EATING WHORES”, SO IM MAKING A CALLOUT POST ON THIS MECHS LOUDSPEAKERS. DEATHS HEADS, YOU HAVE INSANE ARGUMENTS. THEIR AS INSANE AS AMINA BUT WAY DUMBER. AND GUESS WHAT? THIS IS WHAT MY ARGUMENT LOOKS LIKE! THATS RIGHT! NO WORDS NO REFUSAL ALL MAGNETS. LOOKS LIKE TWO RAILS AND A FERROMAGNETIC SLUG! THEY STOLE MY COMMANDER, SO IM GOING TO SHOOT THEM! BUT IM NOT GOING TO SHOOT THEM, IM GOING TO SHOOT HIGHER! IM SHOOTING THE GRAVEWORM! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT SERRIS, I SHOT THE GRAVEWORM YOU IDIOT. YOU HAVE 23 SECONDS BEFORE THE WORM GUARD KILL US ALL. NOW GET OUT OF MY SIGHT, BEFORE I KILL YOU TOO!

(Courtesy of Lotus, from the discord! I asked permission to include it here, since it had me laughing too hard not to share.)

In the meantime, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters in the future, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so … gonna try!

There’s also a 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 the story.

And thank you. Thank you for reading my little story! I know I say this literally every chapter, but I seriously cannot thank you all enough: readers, supporters, everyone who leaves comments, all of you. I could not write this story without you, and I am flattered and delighted that you’re enjoying it so much. Onward! To escape, to coilguns, and more zombie weirdness.

Content Warnings

Emotional abuse

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida echoed Yola’s words; she kept her voice neutral.

“You want me to join you?”

Sitting in her little wooden chair, on the filthy floor of a ruined public toilet, her undead flesh wrapped inside layers of purple-gold steel, ceramic plating, servo-motor muscles, and bio-uplink sensor surfaces, Yola nodded. She stared upward at Elpida, laid out on the tilted surgical table, chained to a metal spike rammed into the floor. Yola’s bright green eyes burned with fascination and faith.

“Oh yes, superhuman,” she began to repeat herself. “You are so very b—”

Elpida croaked: “What does that mean, exactly, in practical terms?”

She did not want to hear Yola call her ‘beautiful’ again; Elpida doubted that she and Yola shared a compatible definition of beauty.

Yola’s smile turned shrewd. She leaned back in her chair; the wood complained with a tortured creak — not strong enough to support the weight of all that powered armour for long. Wooden furniture was obscene enough — such an object would have been prohibitively expensive in Telokopolis, a rare thing to extract from the botanical stock in the buried fields beneath the city — but to abuse it to breaking point was a statement of careless power.

Or perhaps Yola didn’t mean it that way. Perhaps no object or artifice or art mattered anymore; it was all nanomachines in the end.

Yola purred, her lips slick and wet and clicking on the syllables: “In a way you are already one of us, by definition. You simply need to be shown how. The rest will come to you naturally.”

“And you propose to teach me?” Elpida said. She could not fully mask her scepticism.

Yola said: “This world, this obscene lie, it is all very confusing. Even for one as resourceful and tenacious as yourself. I know. We all know, we have all been through it, some of us for years, for many rebirths. But I promise, we can make it all make sense.”

The other two Death’s Head revenants — the medic, Cantrelle, with her perfectly bald head, her mechanical tentacles, and her long, equipment-stuffed coat, and Kuro, the taciturn giant in the faceless grey powered armour, built like a tank, bristling with weapons — reacted to this little speech with a shadow of Yola’s own rapture.

Cantrelle tilted her head back and briefly closed her flat, disc-like eyes, the tiny screens going grey and empty. Kuro didn’t move, but the fluttering air-intake sound of her back-mounted reactor whirred with sudden increased throughput, then subsided again.

And Amina went: “Mmm! Mm!” through her metal gag.

Kuro’s faceless grey visor twitched down to stare at Amina; the giant took a step toward her, heavy armoured boot slamming into the floor tiles. Amina squeaked behind her gag and tried to scramble away, panting with sudden panic, metal chain scraping against the floor. She raised her bloodstained hands, still slick with Elpida’s own drying gore.

Elpida tensed her shaking legs and her quivering core muscles — and sat up.

Her gut wound scoured her intestines with burning flame, bursting past the lingering anaesthetic; her face streamed with sudden flash-sweat; she heaved and choked and gagged for breath through clenched teeth; she grunted or screamed a little — she couldn’t be sure, the moment was a blur of agony. But then she was sitting upright on the tilted surgical bed. She raised her cuffed hands, her own chain clanking as it rose from the floor.

Kuro stopped. Elpida stared into the blank grey faceplate.

“Come near— her,” Elpida panted, “and I’ll kill you— with just this chain. Gut wound or— not. Powered armour won’t— save you.”

Elpida felt a string of bloody drool sliding down her chin. She’d never bluffed so hard before.

Yola burst into a delighted smile, showing all her sharp little teeth; her eyes lit up. She touched two fingertips to Kuro’s armoured thigh.

“Down, Kuro,” she said, without looking away from Elpida. “Leave the little one alone. Take no offence. She may babble and warble as the superhuman pleases.”

Kuro made a click-buzz of closed radio transmission.

Yola said, sharper: “Kuro.”

Another click-buzz from Kuro. The giant spoke out loud, in a high-pitched, girlish voice, muffled by deep static: “This is an indulgence.”

Yola sighed fondly. “Of course it’s an indulgence. I really do think she could kill you, Kuro. I love you too much, puppy. Down.”

Kuro stepped back, slowly. Amina buried her face in her arms, sobbing silently through her gag.

Cantrelle hissed at Elpida: “Fucking hell. Sit back down! Sit back down before you open all the fucking stitches I just put in you!”

Elpida stared Kuro down for another ten seconds, searching that blank faceplate. Then she let the chain clank back down to the floor. She lay back on the metal surgical bed. She returned her cuffed hands to her chest. She focused on not showing the searing pain in her belly.

Cantrelle sighed and turned to Yola — gesturing at Amina: “Boss, come on. The little one is unstable. Prey. Eager to get eaten. You’ve seen that look enough times to—”

Yola raised a hand. “We’ll put her with the tyke squad.”

Cantrelle frowned. “What? Fuck no. Fuck—”

“From what we saw earlier, she could make a very good close-quarters fighter. A little berserker. Like Gulba.”

Cantrelle made a face like she wanted to spit on the floor. But she turned away and folded her arms.

Yola said to Elpida: “You and your companions will not be harmed — that is not my intention.”

“Yeah?” Elpida croaked.

Yola nodded. “Yes. You have my word. If you can convince your former companions to surrender their weapons, you and they will be under my protection. Our protection.”

“You were doing a— a lot of shooting at us— earlier.”

Yola composed her face into a sombre look and bowed her head. Her ruby-red hair fell about her cheeks in artful disarray – but then seemed to spring back into place when she looked up again.

“And I apologise for that,” she said. “Between the trio of worm-guard—” Cantrelle shuddered at the mention of the machines; Kuro went clonk inside her armour. “—and that degenerate tank, armed engagement became a necessity. Our intelligence was confused and incomplete. We were not aiming at you. Except for Leuca — or Pira, to you — and your little friend here, we have not recovered any of your other companions, alive or dead. If I had bodies, I would present them to you, with deepest apologies.” She bowed her head again. “We have gotten off on the wrong foot, superhuman. I don’t wish to exacerbate that. After all, we may be working together for decades. I am your friend, Elpida; that I promise.”

Elpida didn’t have an answer to any of that; she couldn’t know if Yola was lying.

But she was certain of one thing — this woman was not her friend.

Elpida gestured at Kuro with her eyes. “Yeah? Then why’d she go for Amina just now?”

Yola smiled with fond indulgence. “Kuro here is a little overzealous when it comes to my pronouncements — that’s her way. There are many ways to be one of us. One core, one set of principles, but many expressions. After all, it is nearly impossible to achieve perfect synchronicity and continuity across so many separate resurrections, all of us drawn from different peaks in the sine wave of human history, different expressions of perfection. Kuro regards me as a prophet. Others think of me as simply the current leader of this one group. Some have been with me for many years, and trust me to lead well.”

Elpida croaked: “And what do you think of yourself?”

Yola’s eyes lit up with that inner fire again, the green burning beneath white-hot sunlight. Her lips made a wet click. “A cutting question, thank you. I consider myself a place-holder, a seeker, an imperfect leader waiting for the true leader — whether she has been resurrected in times before and we are simply trying to locate her, or if she is yet to be reborn to us, or … ”

Yola trailed off, staring at Elpida, smiling in delight.

Elpida almost retorted out loud: she was not born to lead. Old Lady Nunnus and Howl and every one of her sisters had made that clear in a million little ways. Elpida had been Commander of the cadre because they had chosen her to lead, not because the genetic engineers had made her a leader.

Nothing made her a leader. She led because she acted and others followed.

Yola saw something else.

Elpida was used to being looked at without being seen — all the cadre had been. First by the genetic engineers and biologists and sociologists and bone-speakers and the Silico studies experts from the Legion, all the clean staring eyes of the pilot project; they saw only their little soft machines. Then Old Lady Nunnus, for all her kindness and humanity, had seen Elpida and the cadre as a means to an end, the perfect expression of the expeditionist position on the green; at least she hadn’t pretended otherwise, even if she was the human face over the expeditionist factions after they took control. Civilians saw impossible semi-human beauty, little angels in their midst, always out of reach; Legionaries saw unpredictable, wind-up weapons, too young and inexperienced to be real soldiers — and then later, after the cadre had proved themselves, the Legion saw saints, saviours, striding through the green. The Civitas had seen a problem or a political bargaining chip or a promise to sell to the masses. The Covenanters had seen—

Subhumans.

Yola had used that word, when she’d gotten too excited, when she had started describing the Death’s Head philosophy too early.

Elpida had never heard the word before; it made no sense to her, just like that word Vicky had used back in the bunker when they’d been getting to know each other — ‘homeless’. ‘Subhuman’ — the linguistic components made sense, but Telokopolan culture had no equivalent. How could anybody be ‘below’ human when the city responded to all human beings? Telokopolis would even respond to those who couldn’t speak and couldn’t use sign language, though the process could become clumsy and prone to errors. Certain branches of philosophy entertained a thought experiment of a theoretical human being to which the city would not respond, but the idea was too academic to penetrate popular culture. What was the point?

But the Covenanters had invented plenty of colourful language for the cadre: inhuman experiments, bodies without souls, pure cyborgs dressed up in flesh.

Subhumans.

And now Yola looked at Elpida with just as much projection as any Covenanter fanatic.

Elpida tried not to let the disgust show on her face. She had very few options; her best bet was to buy time for her gut wound to heal, to buy trust in search of an opening, and to keep Yola talking. The more she talked, the less likely she was to separate Elpida and Amina — or just have Amina killed.

Elpida said: “You still haven’t answered my question. What do you mean exactly by ‘join you’?”

Yola relaxed her smile. “Forgive me. My words run ahead of my thoughts. Let me start at the beginning.”

Cantrelle had been staring at Elpida — frowning at her belly, as if a good glare might keep her stitches in place; but she turned her frown on Yola. “Boss, seriously? Have we got time for this?”

Yola smiled with faint amusement. “Of course we have time, Ella. We’re not going anywhere without that mech — and neither is the graveworm, I think. Besides, it’s the middle of the night. What better time for a bit of girls’ talk?”

Cantrelle glanced at Elpida, then back at her boss, then tilted her head with silent meaning. Yola raised her eyebrows a fraction, as if saying ‘yes, and?’ Cantrelle sighed and shrugged. She made no attempt to conceal her irritation.

Elpida croaked: “Something wrong?”

Yola smiled at her. “There are always things wrong in this world. We are at the very edge of the graveworm’s halo. Vulnerable to degenerates from the empty places of the city. We can repel almost anything, of course, but we must be vigilant. Now, Ella, you don’t have to stay for this.”

Cantrelle said: “I’d rather hang about, cheers.”

Elpida decided something was wrong — something they didn’t want to tell her. It wasn’t one of her comrades; if it was, they would be using that against her. Some kind of tactical problem they were having? A flaw in their current position? Something to do with the combat frame, perhaps? She studied Yola’s face, but she couldn’t see any hints. The Death’s Head commander was sculpted like a mask.

Yola lay her armoured gloves on her armoured thighs, purple on purple, laced with gold. She sat up straight and said: “As I said, I will begin at the beginning. Have you divined the purpose of all this? This nanomachine ecosystem, this undead afterlife, us revenants, the graveworms, the tombs — all of it? Have you taken a guess, or built a theory? You have not been out of the tomb for long, but your mind must be sharper than most.”

Yola waited for an answer.

“Maybe,” said Elpida.

Yola apparently didn’t care if that was an evasion. She smiled all the same.

She said: “Evolution. Survival pressure — survival of the fittest. Darwinism.” She allowed that last word to linger for a moment, then said: “Did you have those concepts in your culture?”

Elpida frowned; ‘evolution’ was straightforward — that just meant how organisms changed over millions of years, via random mutation and selection pressures on breeding. Telokopolan science held that humans must also have been the product of evolution, many hundreds of millions of years ago, entire epochs of time before the city, in some environment none truly understood. A radical counter-position held that perhaps the city had always existed, or been built by some kind of creatures other than humans, and humans had ‘evolved’ out in the green, developing hands to move the city’s levers and speech to communicate their needs to the city’s innards. Elpida had always found that idea ridiculous.

Yola nodded gently. “I see you did, but you do not fully comprehend my point.”

“I don’t, no.”

Yola said: “The biosphere is dead. Humankind is dead. No natural reproduction is possible, no way to ensure the continuation of our race, or nation, or culture, or anything. There is no human race. The worms and the tombs resurrect queens and chattel alike, and cast us out into the wilderness, naked and confused, with no answers — why?”

Elpida took a gamble. She said: “To eat each other.”

Yola broke into a sunburst smile. She slapped her thigh, metal on metal. “Yes! Yes! You see, Ella? Kuro? I told you! The superhuman already understands. She comprehends at the lightest touch. Her mind is like a steel rapier. She is already one of us. Yes, Elpida. To eat each other. To contend. To fight for survival — and through survival, to grow.” Yola relaxed, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. She closed her bright green eyes for a heartbeat. “In all the past ages, evolution was a slow process, too vast to be glimpsed in a single lifetime. But now?” She raised one hand. “The best may eat their fill and grow ever stronger.”

Pira had explained all this before, but in very different terms.

Elpida said: “You mean the revenants who consume enough nanomachines to leave the graveworm safe zone?”

Yola shook her head, smiling with indulgence. Cantrelle snorted out loud.

Kuro went click-buzz, and said: “No longer human.”

Yola gestured at the giant in the grey powered armour. “Kuro speaks wisdom, yes. Those who change far enough that they can leave a graveworm safe zone — leave for the wastes of the city, or for the empty west — they are no longer human. They may believe they are the next step in evolution, or that they are ascending, or fulfilling the graveworm’s intentions — but they are merely choosing to abandon any cause at all. They are leaving behind the echo of humankind. Useless navel-gazing. They chose degeneration. We — us, the people, the ones you call ‘Death’s Heads’ — our intention is very different.”

“And what about everyone else?” Elpida took a calculated risk. “The ‘subhumans’?”

Yola smiled. “You are troubled by the implications. Elpida, why do the graveworms resurrect both queens and peasants? Masters and chattel? The finest examples of the human race—” She gestured at Elpida, then at herself — and then at the wall, vaguely outside. “And worthless mud that mewls and dies at the first obstacle?”

Elpida couldn’t keep the frown off her face. Yola sighed gently.

“A figure of speech,” she clarified. “I mean the monsters who eat each other in mindless orgies. I’m sure you’ve seen them? The inelegant predators who live alone in dark holes and stop thinking for years on end. The mad religious fanatics who decide this is all a dream, or hell, or something else, and talk in riddles. The ones who lose themselves completely, letting their body plans melt into plastic goo, or turn themselves into something alien. Why does the graveworm resurrect them too?”

Elpida frowned harder. “I saw plenty of nanomachine modifications among you people.” She glanced at Cantrelle’s metal tentacles. “Right there.”

“Oi,” Cantrelle grunted.

Yola sighed again, a little less patient. “Look at me,” she said. “I am human — or at least humanity’s echo. Heavily modified, but still a human being. I am having a conversation with you, not trying to bite your face off, or melt you in acid, or lay eggs in your belly. I am not a twenty foot insect, or a bag of gas, or a blob. Cantrelle fixed your stomach. Kuro is quiet and scary and big, but I promise you inside that armour is a human being, however difficult.”

She reached out to pat Kuro’s leg. Kuro didn’t move.

Elpida couldn’t hold back. She said: “You’re zombies, like the rest of us. We’re all zombies now.”

Yola’s face went stiff with matronly indulgence. “Do not use that word to refer to us — or to yourself. We are not zombies. Subhuman, zombie, same concept, slightly different mode of expression.”

“But what does it mean — to you?”

Cantrelle was frowning harder now. Kuro was perfectly still, a grey statue. Yola opened a purple gloved hand toward Elpida.

“Take yourself as an example, Elpida. What did you do when you were rebirthed in the tomb? You did not curl up and cry, and wait for death, like cattle. You did not wait for another to lead you, or wait for somebody to come fetch you and explain the situation. No, you did none of those things.”

Elpida recalled her first moments in the resurrection coffin; she’d almost gone mad with grief, before she’d heard the others screaming in pain and terror, before they’d given her something useful to do. To lead them. Yola had no idea.

Yola was already saying: “You rallied a group of girls who had no right to survive as long as they have done. And you led them out. Some people are born to lead, others are born to be led. Those who are led are necessary, of course, they are still of us, those who see the point in this system and have the willpower to remain human. But not all are capable of survival. That is the point of competition.”

How would Yola judge the others? Vicky, with her fear and her need for a leader. Kagami, with her malfunctioning legs. Amina, scared and mousy. Atyle with her unique view of this world, full of gods and their mysterious works. Ilyusha, with her hatred of these people. Or Pira, with her refusal to engage in cannibalism.

Pira’s refusal to eat human meat suddenly clicked into place; she had been a Death’s Head. She’d believed in this. And then she’d turned against it; no more cannibalism.

“We are humankind’s echo,” Yola was saying. “And we will roar once again. None of these monsters will triumph over us. But again, Elpida, I pose you the question — why do the tombs resurrect all, without distinction?”

Elpida struggled to maintain the facade. “I don’t know.”

“Because the systems are searching for the best — and the systems themselves are blind. And we will show them that the best are those with the will to continue being human. Those who were true humans in life, who can resist the urge to fall into bestial degeneration, and who can grasp the potential of this nanomachine ecosystem. That is what we’ve been put here for. The others, those who have chosen other paths, they seek to drag us down. To supplant this second rebirth of human potential with something else. Something alien. Through the deaths of others — who have abandoned their humanity, or never had it in the first place — we can grow forever, into true superhumans. That is the true purpose of the tomb system.” Yola inhaled a deep, cleansing sigh. “If only those who built it understood that not all homo sapiens have what it takes to be people; but their mistake is to our benefit. We may feed on their mistake, forever.”

Elpida grunted, trying to control her reactions. She said: “Why is it only women?”

Yola frowned.

Cantrelle sighed, and said: “We don’t know. We—”

Yola said with a slick-sharp click: “Ella.”

Cantrelle looked surprised. “Boss? She—”

“We do not know why the tombs only resurrect women,” Yola said, raising her chin. “We do not know why humankind died out, or who exterminated them — it doesn’t matter. What we do know is that we are in the greatest crucible ever made. An eternal conflict in which we will be the victors, no matter how deep or how wide the ashes.” She smiled again, eyes burning with belief. “And now the tombs have finally happened upon a true superhuman. Pre-nanomachine. Your potential is unrivalled. I believe you are what we have been searching for, for so long.” A single tear rolled down one of Yola’s too-perfect cheeks. “A true leader. Born for the role. History has generated you. And now you are here.”

Elpida had heard enough.

Perhaps it was the pain in her gut. Perhaps it was pure recklessness, or the memory of being captured and bound once before. Perhaps it was how Yola’s tone and expression reminded her so much of the Covenanters, even if the exact language was so different.

Elpida had heard plenty of Covenanter speeches on the floor of the Civitas chamber; they weren’t shy or secret about their policies. No more expeditions into the green. No more bringing back materials for study — and certainly not Silico, dead or disarmed or otherwise. No pushing deeper. No search for truth. The plateau was to be re-fortified with ten times the number of Legionaries. Telokopolis was to be sealed and inviolate and perfect, as it had been in the earliest ages of the city. No more bone-speakers, no more deep communion, no more pulling data from the city itself; no more growing what it requested or feeding it excess nanomachines — that was human meddling in something best left to nature.

And no more pilot program; the pilots were unnatural, not human, a step toward something else.

Silico. Like the ‘zombie’ Elpida had fought at the tomb. Zombie. Not human. Degenerate. Subhuman.

Eat your own kind, grow strong — but never change, never leave, never go out into the green, never discover the truth.

Elpida knew she was getting the palatable version of the Death’s Head philosophy; this was only the introduction, and they were already trying to sell her on cannibalism without end.

“So,” Elpida croaked, staring down at Yola. “The subhuman failures. They die. Get eaten.”

“Exactly.”

“And those who eat — they win. Humans. People.”

Yola nodded.

Elpida said: “Self-fulfilling, isn’t it?”

Yola smiled and tilted her head. “A common enough critique. But that is the point of competition, of the fight for survival. You have already proven that you are—”

“You’re working with a Necromancer,” Elpida said.

Yola froze. Cantrelle hissed between her teeth as if stung, turning away and raising both hands, done with this.

Kuro went click-buzz, and said in her weird, static-filled, high-pitched voice: “Needs means any allies are acceptable. Don’t criticise what you don’t understand.”

“Kuro,” Yola said gently. “Allow me to explain, please. Elpida, you’ve met the Necromancer as well, then? I presume it was the same one. Guiding us to meet each other. She has been assisting us with you.”

Cantrelle was muttering: “It’s not fucking real, it’s not fucking real, it’s not fucking real.”

Elpida shrugged — which hurt, but the display was important. “Lucky guess. Only way you could know my name.”

Yola smiled again. “We can put nothing past you, superhuman.”

“Mm. Why do you want the combat frame?”

“The mech?” Yola raised her eyebrows. “Who would not? It is one of the greatest opportunities that has ever fallen into our collective laps. I want to use it, to capture and control a graveworm.”

Elpida blinked. The graveworm was the size of a mountain range. The combat frame was big, but not that big.

Yola must have misinterpreted her expression, because she smiled with playful delight. “You see, yes? Many of us have been working toward this goal for decades — centuries in some cases. We’ve tried so many different methods, but the worms are unassailable. But now, this mech, this is new. This is power. I believe it is all connected. The systems chose you somehow. Perhaps they knew we were here, knew we were ready for your leadership. Perhaps they drew the mech from orbit somehow. And now the worm is within our grasp. And you, your companions too, you would not be denied the spoils either. If you cannot yet believe in us, surely we can come to a—”

“Why?” Elpida said. “Why control the worm?”

Yola blinked. “You understand what it is, yes? A gigantic nanomachine factory?”

Elpida nodded. “Mmhmm.”

“It is the ultimate competitive advantage. Infinite resources. We could go from grubbing the dirt for survival, getting smashed apart every few years or decades — into true ruler-ship, in one leap. A rebirth of civilization. A nation. The evolutionary processes could be accelerated a hundredfold. We would control who was reborn and who was not! We—”

“Boss,” Cantrelle grunted through her teeth. “She’s so not into it.”

Elpida said nothing; her plan was falling apart, but she couldn’t help it. The disgust was like a twin to the pain in her gut.

Yola took a deep breath. “I know that some of the things I’ve said are shocking, or wrong to your sensibilities — but your experiences here so far must have shown you the truth. I don’t expect you to believe me straight away. Accepting our position, as human beings, is a difficult road.” She spread her armoured hands, purple and gold glinted amid the filth. “But we have plenty of time. I don’t believe this graveworm is moving any time soon.”

Cantrelle turned on Yola, suddenly angry: “Did the fucking Necro corpse-rapist tell you that too, huh?”

Yola’s face went hard as ice. “Ella.”

“Fuck you, Yola! You’re doing deals with a fucking monster. You trust that thing? You’re more of an idiot than I thought.”

Kuro stepped forward, looming several feet taller than Cantrelle. Click-buzz: “Stop it.”

But Cantrelle jabbed a tentacle at Kuro’s breastplate. “You shut the fuck up. The only reason you’re still breathing is because Hatty and Paaie like you so much. You think I won’t adjust your fucking intake levels and choke you in your own blood? Fuck you. And you know I’m right. A Necro would go through you like nothing.”

Yola stood up, interposing herself between her subordinates. “Ella. Kuro. Stop, now. We are not having this conversation in front of the superhuman. She … she … Elpida?”

Elpida lifted her cuffed hands from her chest and reached down toward her bandaged gut; the angle was difficult, but she managed to dip a fingertip into the crimson mess leaking through the clean white fabric. Then she raised her hands back to her chest and did her best to smooth out the bunched fabric of her grey thermal t-shirt.

Yola’s eyes went wide. Her mouth hung open, lips trembling. She held out a hand to shush the other Death’s Heads.

Elpida paused. Draw a skull on herself, or not?

She knew she should play along. Pretend that Yola had convinced her. Go along with this for now, and then turn on them at the first opportunity, just to get these cuffs off and escape. But these people were going to keep her chained up for days, or weeks, or months — they weren’t stupid, they knew she was not going to be convinced in a single conversation. They would use her to bring her companions in — and then they would kill them, one way or the other.

She’d played along with the Covenanters. She’d played nice in the Civitas. And the Covenanters had murdered all her sisters and shot her in the back of the head.

And here were their descendants, in philosophy if nothing else.

Elpida made a new plan — and told the truth.

She daubed a symbol on the chest of her t-shirt, in her own blood. The lines were wobbly, poorly balanced, and she ran out of blood toward the end, the symbol trailing off. She didn’t know what it meant, or how it was supposed to be displayed, or where it came from. But she got the shape right.

A crescent, intersected by a line.

The symbol which Ilyusha had daubed on her own t-shirt in camo paint. The symbol which Serin had tattooed on one of her many arms. The symbol that said she belonged to the people who hunted the Death’s Heads.

Yola sighed and closed her eyes. She looked genuinely pained. “And where did you learn that?”

“Telokopolis is forever,” said Elpida.

Cantrelle said, “She probably picked it up from some rat—”

“Telokopolis is eternal.”

“Ella, stop,” said Yola. “Let me think.”

Elpida chanted Howl’s words, from the dream that was not a dream: “As long as one of us is still up and breathing, the city stands.” But then she added, in a moment of pain-fever defiance: “I am a child of Telokopolis and I will never abandon my mother.”

Where had that come from?

Yola was saying: “I would like to know where she learned that. If there’s an apos—”

Elpida interrupted, dry and croaking: “From somebody who helped me and my comrades. She’s probably hunting you right now. She’s a good shot. I’d be careful around the windows if I were you. Bang bang.”

Cantrelle and Yola glanced at each other. Cantrelle said, “Shit. The sniper, earlier. You think—”

“Shut up,” Elpida snapped. She raised her head so she could look at all three Death’s Heads. “Stop giving me the bullshit version of your philosophy, Yola. What do you people really believe? If you think I’m going to be your leader, give it to me without the mask on.”

Yola opened her mouth — but Cantrelle stepped forward.

“You’re never going to lead anything,” she said.

Yola said — surprisingly gentle: “Ella … ”

Cantrelle ignored her. “All the natural cycles are abolished. Birth, growth, mating, death. All of it. We are conquered by death, undone by death, remade by death — and we live it, we wield it, we use it. We become it. No race or realm in all of history has been able to shed dead weight as quickly as the Kingdom of Death. The only answer to all this is to join with death, in victory. For ever and ever. We will glut ourselves on the worm, cease all further rebirths except our sisters, and then consign everything else to death.”

Elpida nodded. There it was.

Yola tapped her hands together in gentle applause. “Ella, Ella, Ella, what would I do without you?”

“Die, probably,” Cantrelle grunted. “Now, can we—”

“Graveworm,” Elpida said. She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. “Graveworm? I hope you’re listening. Hope you heard all that. Send one of your guard in here.”

The Death’s Head trio stared at her — Cantrelle wide-eyed, her screen-eyes enlarged and dark, Yola with a delicate, feminine frown, Kuro just blank behind her visor.

Another bluff. Keep them guessing. Disrupt their plans.

Cantrelle forced a laugh: “She can’t broadcast. That thing in her head is receiver only. Stop bluffing, you—”

Kuro suddenly twitched around, staring at the closed door. Yola’s segmented purple helmet clicked upward from its stowed position in the collar of her armour, stopping halfway so it enclosed her neck and ears. The click-buzz of radio transmission came from within. Yola frowned.

Cantrelle stared at the others, then at Elpida. “Fuck no. No way. Fuck.”

Yola raised a hand, calm but serious. “It’s not that. It—”

The door of the public toilet slammed open with a wet ripping sound as the lock disengaged. A short, stocky revenant darted inside, dressed in a suit of ragged black armour plates. She had too many eyes and a weapon grafted onto one arm, crawling with tiny spider-like machines.

“Boss! Yola!” yelped the newcomer. “There’s an ART!”

She said it ayy-are-tee, an acronym.

“Yes,” said Yola, smooth and collected. “I can hear the reports. Pholet had eyes on it?”

The stocky newcomer nodded. She glanced at Elpida and Amina quickly, but then ignored them. She said: “It came out of that tank. There and then gone again. Pholet thinks it’s optical camo, but we can’t see through—”

Yola put one hand on the newcomer’s shoulder, quickly. “That’s enough, Nahia. You go relieve Pholet, tell her to come straight to me — we’ll be back in the command post. Understand?” Nahia nodded. “Good. Now go.”

Nahia turned on her heel and shot back out of the room, racing down the corridor. Kuro reached out and held the door open.

Cantrelle and Yola turned back to Elpida.

Cantrelle said: “It’s not her, boss. That thing in her head is receive only.”

Yola frowned delicately. “Still. Curious. Was that you, superhuman? The tank is yours, is it not?”

Elpida smiled. Keep bluffing. Let them think she was masterminding her own rescue.

Her own rescue — did this mean the others were coming?

Cantrelle stomped forward a few paces, her patched coat swaying. She jabbed a finger and a tentacle at Elpida. “That tank won’t come anywhere near us. If you’re hoping for it to pull you out, then you’re fucked, and so are your mates.”

Yola said: “Ella. We’re not going to harm them.”

Cantrelle pointed back over her shoulder — at Kuro. “You see that plasma cannon on Kuro’s back?”

Elpida squinted at the folded-away heavy weapon, mounted on articulated arms, powered down. It looked formidable, whatever it was.

“Two shots,” Cantrelle said. She raised a finger. “One to bring down the shields. That tank took a hell of a beating from the worm-bitches, and I know how those kinds of shield capacitors work — it needs days to recharge. So, one shot for the shields.” She raised a second, v-shape, pointed at Elpida. “Then a second round goes through that armour and into the hull, and fries the crew. Understand? Wanna broadcast that to your friends?”

Elpida said: “Thanks for stitching up my stomach.”

Cantrelle gritted her teeth and looked like she wanted to spit — but then she turned away and stalked towards the door.

Yola’s bright green gaze lingered on Elpida. She said: “Superhuman, you will join us. You will come to understand our way of seeing this world, the opportunities we offer, the truth of our vision. But for now — we will not harm your companions.” She glanced at Cantrelle. “Ella, fetch another pair of cuffs and bind her feet. Kuro, command post, with me.” She glanced at Elpida. “We will speak again later, superhuman.”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said.

Yola smiled. “Of course it is.”

The Death’s Head trio swept out of the room. The door slapped shut behind them.

Elpida allowed herself three seconds of rest. She put her head against the metal surgical table and closed her eyes. One, two, three.

Then she stood up.

She almost didn’t make it to her feet; her gut wound burned like pieces of molten metal lodged deep in her flesh, searing away her nerve endings and turning her thoughts to blank white fire. Her legs shook with pain and her knees refused to lock. She streamed with sweat and heaved through her teeth.

But then she was on her feet, standing next to the surgical table, socks in the filth and blood, shaking all over and panting for breath. Her cuffed hands weighed her down. Her chain slid across the floor as she staggered sideways.

The Death’s Heads were going to regret giving her enough slack to stand up.

Amina uncurled from her protective ball. She looked up at Elpida with wide eyes. She held out her bloodstained hands.

“Mmm? Mmmm?” she went.

Elpida nodded. “Yes— the medic— coming back to cuff— my feet—”

“Mmm?”

Elpida looked at the door; her boots stood next to the door frame. Yola had left the wooden chair behind.

A grin split Elpida’s face. This time there would be no Covenanter bullet in the back of her head. This time she would fight early, when she still had her sisters by her side.

“They took the bait,” she said. “Right. Amina. Let’s get that gag off you. Time to use those teeth again.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Even caged in the kingdom of death, hope still means something – even if you do have to daub it on your own chest with tainted blood. Elpida’s made her choice, and baited the hook; she knows how these kinds of people think, and knows she can’t stomach playing along all over again. But let’s hope the cavalry’s on the way, right?

This was the longest Necroepilogos chapter so far, at over 6k words! I have truly lost control of these zombie girls. I’m just along for the ride. (I think I may have said that before?)

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters. It’s … it’s going!!! Maybe! We’ll see!

There’s also a 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 the story.

And thank you! Thank you so much for reading my little story! I cannot express my amazement and gratitude that so many readers are enjoying this, and where I’m taking it, and all the gruesome, weird, themes we’re getting into. I couldn’t do this without you! Until next chapter, dear readers!

Content Warnings

Extreme pain
Medical horror
Surgery without anesthetic
Injections/needles

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida stared into the bloody mess of her gut wound and tried to make sense of what had just happened.

The toxic blue glow of raw nanomachine juice was already fading beneath the saturated bandages, like rampant mould overrun by wet meat — absorbed straight into her ruined flesh, her undead physiology ravenous for resources. Pira’s friend had shoved her fist into Elpida’s belly, jamming the bandages into the ragged wound — and then somehow deposited a payload of raw nanos?

Why? Because Pira asked her to? Because Pira felt guilty? Because the friend wanted Pira not to hate her?

Or was this a move in some kind of internal power struggle?

Motivation eluded Elpida’s analysis; the raw blue had begun re-knitting her flesh at the cellular level, but that took time, and did nothing for the incredible pain, the molten conflagration burning outward from her stomach, incinerating her innards and her thoughts. Pira’s friend had made sure of that with her fist and fingers stirring up Elpida’s intestines.

She watched the fading blue glow. She shivered in pain-fever, beads of sweat rolling down her forehead, hanging from her eyebrows and lashes, and pooling above her top lip. She panted and heaved, then forced herself to breathe slower, letting the agony roll over her in waves. Without cadre-standard hormonal pain-blockers, she would be a thoughtless, screaming lump of meat.

The pain did not ebb, but Elpida eventually got used to it — just enough to claw her mind and senses back into coherence.

Amina was making noises through her metal gag: “Mmm! Mmmm! Mm-mm-mm!”

Elpida turned her head to look. Amina was still slumped on the floor, wide-eyed with confusion and fear; she needed guidance.

Elpida said: “Ami— na. She— Pira’s friend— helped us? I don’t— don’t know why. But this is good. Raw nanos. If I can— heal. Might be able to. Work these bonds free, I—”

Amina shook her head, hard. “Mmm! Mm!” She jerked her head toward the door. “Mmm!” Then she nodded — at Elpida’s belly.

Elpida blinked the sweat and tears from her eyes.

“Oh shit,” she whispered. “The— the other one, the— the medic, I think, she said she’s going to come back. That’s what you mean, yes?”

Amina nodded. “Mmm!”

The revenant who had entered this makeshift prison cell just before Pira’s friend — she had inspected Elpida’s gut wound, critiqued the first-aid work, and then said she’d be back, in half an hour, to re-stitch Elpida’s belly. There was nothing Elpida could do about the fading blue glow, except will her body to absorb the nanos quicker. How long had she been locked in pain-fever? Ten minutes, fifteen minutes? She stared at the weird bio-tech tar-lock attached to the door of this ruined public toilet. She couldn’t recall how long since the medic had been in the room; pain had scrambled her internal clock.

It would not take a medical expert to see that the gut wound had been tampered with, that the bandages had been disturbed, pushed into her flesh.

Elpida needed an excuse for the damage to the wound site.

“Amina,” she hissed. Her body was already tensing up in anticipation of further pain. “Amina— I need you to— get up, and push your hands into my gut.”

Amina froze, eyes wide, face quivering around her metal muzzle.

Elpida explained: “We have to make it— look like we did this. Damaged the bandages. The blue— that’s just time, have to hope it goes away. But I can’t— can’t do the hands myself.” Elpida yanked on the handcuffs, secured above her head and chained to the wall. “Amina— please! Quick! They could— come back in— any second.”

Amina whined. “Mmmm … ”

“I won’t— hate you. I’m asking you— please. Just get my blood all over— your hands. Amina. Now. Quickly.”

Amina started crying silent tears from scrunched-up eyes. But she stood up. Her own chain clanked against the floor; she raised her bound hands. She stepped over to Elpida’s makeshift surgical table, at the limit of her chain, then looked up into Elpida’s eyes, tears running down her cheeks.

“Mmm?”

“Do it,” Elpida hissed. “Just rub your hands in my blood. Don’t— press too hard.”

Elpida gritted her teeth, laid her head back, and braced her body; Amina rubbed her hands on the front of Elpida’s belly, smearing her soft brown skin with Elpida’s tainted blood and intestinal fluids. The gentle pressure ran a standing wave of agony through Elpida’s gut, into her spine, up her back, down into her hips; she strangled a whine in her throat, panting hard through her nose. She forced herself not to scream, for Amina’s sake.

Amina finished. She held up both hands for Elpida to inspect.

Elpida nodded. She could barely speak. “Go— good. Good girl. Yes— good. Ami— na. Well— well done. Thank— go sit back— ba— down.”

Amina staggered away and clattered back to the floor. She stared at her bloodstained hands.

Elpida counted time. She watched her ruined belly; after another two hundred and fifty three seconds the blue glow was undetectable to her eyes. And her eyes were very good. She leaned her head back against the metal bed and allowed her eyelids to close.

Two minutes later she heard a trio of booted footsteps clattering down the corridor outside.

The footsteps stopped. The bio-tech tar-blob lock on the door opened with a wet tearing sound. Three distinct pairs of footfalls entered the room. The door slapped shut behind them.

Strange noises came from the newcomers: a low mechanical hum almost below Elpida’s hearing range, like a miniature power plant; a wheezing, hissing, fluted intake of air; the ticking and clicking of machine-arms adjusting articulated joints.

One of the trio spoke up, in a half-mechanical buzz — the revenant from before, the medic:

“Told you she’s a right fucking mess, boss. Pain-crippled. She needs re-stitching. Maybe some mould. Probably meat.”

There was a long pause — then a click-buzz split the air, like a transmission acknowledgement. Another voice spoke, muffled and distorted by more than just an exterior speaker.

“Why is she chained up in a public toilet?”

Rich and rolling; steel coated with caramel; darkly amused. Soft lips and slick tongue slipped along the words.

Elpida recognised that voice — that was the revenant she had spoken to over two-way radio broadcast, when she and her comrades had approached the rear of the skyscraper occupied by the Death’s Heads. The medic had called her ‘boss’. This was their commander.

Silence.

Click-buzz. The commander again: “Answer out loud, Kuro.”

Another click-buzz of open voice transmission. This one was higher pitched, full of static, muffled to near inhumanity: “Only secure location.”

“And why,” asked the Death’s Head commander, “did you chain her arms over her head?”

Silence again.

The commander said, with gentle warning: “Kuro.”

‘Kuro’ answered with another burst of static: “I like it.”

The Death’s Head commander sighed. “When I want you to crucify somebody, I will ask you to crucify somebody. Don’t get all crucifixion-y on your own initiative.”

Silence.

A sharper warning: “Kuro.”

Click-buzz. “Yes ma’am.”

“Better. Now, Kuro, get that spike out of the wall and re-secure it somewhere lower down, so she can talk comfortably. She and I have much to discuss. Cantrelle, you’re free to stay if you want to observe, but you can head back down to—”

The medic — Cantrelle? — interrupted: “Kuro, wait. Boss, that gut-wound needs re-stitching. I probably need to get in there and reattach pieces of her small intestine, just to save her the nano-load. And if she’s got her arms by her sides she might be able to slap me one while I’m doing that, or palm something off me. Or worse.”

The commander said, gently: “Cantrelle.”

“Hatty did a shit job on this. Why didn’t you have me do it?”

“You were needed elsewhere, Ella. I needed you elsewhere. The others needed you.”

“This bitch is the whole reason we got into that fight; least you could do is ensure she’s not gonna lose her mind from the pain. Let me fix her first.” Silence. Then the medic — Cantrelle — added: “Yola, if you have me wake her up so you can talk to her now, she’s not going to be sane by the end of the conversation.”

“Ella, this revenant — she is far, far more robust than even I dared to hope. She is managing her pain with incredible endurance.”

“What? How can you … ?”

The Death’s Head commander — Yola — said, in that sugar-iron voice of moist clicking lips: “After all, she’s wide awake.”

“ … that’s not possible,” said Cantrelle. “She’d be … ”

Elpida opened her eyes.

A trio of revenants stared back at her from the other end of the room.

On the right was Cantrelle, the one Elpida thought of as a medic. She was a rail-thin scarecrow figure, wrapped in an armoured coat identical to the ones that Elpida had looted from the tomb armoury, but threadbare in many places, patched with plates of dirty armour in others, with dozens of extra pockets sewn both inside and out; beneath the coat she was festooned with equipment, little bags and pouches, a sling over her shoulder, her pockets stuffed with all manner of objects. A shiny black shotgun was strapped to her back. She had a series of four segmented metal tendrils or tentacles extending from her shoulders, poking through slits cut into her coat — one was tipped with a short saw, another with a long needle, and the other two with grasping metal pincers.

Cantrelle was completely bald; she didn’t even have eyebrows or lashes. Metal implants covered her throat — her jaw was an exposed curve of shining steel. Her eyes were flat black discs, like mirrors reflecting a void. She had black skull symbols stitched into the shoulders of her coat and another one painted or tattooed on her left cheek.

Elpida guessed the one on the left was ‘Kuro’ — a giant inside a sealed suit of powered armour.

Kuro was even taller than Elpida, almost eight feet. The armour was grey, functional, bulky, and humming gently with an internal reactor source, probably mounted in the backpack, with ventilation grilles sucking in fresh air. Kuro bristled with weaponry set into every available surface: arm-mounted rifles and finger-knuckle micro-guns, shoulder-cannons on short mechanical arms, some kind of heavy weapon mounted on her back — currently tucked away in a deactivated position — and even a laser set-up locked to the side of her grey helmet.

The helmet had no eyes, just a blank plate of silver-grey. A grinning black skull was painted in the middle of her chestplate, the eye sockets filled with crazed scribbles.

She was also carrying a wooden chair.

Yola — the commander — stood in the middle, to the fore.

She was also wearing a suit of powered armour, but it was wholly unlike a Telokopolan hardshell, or any of the heavy personal armour that Elpida had seen in this nanomachine afterlife so far. Dark purple plates, softly curved in imitation of athletic musculature, with fluted soft-gold ridges and gold-leaf designs running up the arms and legs; it seemed shaped more for elegance and display than to turn away a high-explosive anti-armour round. It was not particularly tall, perhaps five foot seven. The armoured gloves were empty; she carried no weapon that Elpida could see, but that was probably a deception. She had grinning black skulls painted on her shoulder plates and low down on her belly, neat and angular and plain.

Yola’s helmet was segmented, with a pointed muzzle like a beak, below eye lenses of deep emerald green.

Cantrelle gaped at Elpida. “She’s awake? Through all that? How the fuck? She’s barely augmented. Something we missed?”

A soft hiss-click echoed off the dirty tiles and broken mirrors; Yola’s helmet folded back, segment by segment, tidying itself away inside the rear of her armour.

Yola’s face was artistically beautiful — like an Upper-Spire aristocrat who had undergone decades of subtle plastic surgery, and rolled the dice on successful rejuve treatments. Sun-blessed amber-bronze skin, so smooth and fine she must have removed her own pores; nose delicate and tiny, jaw an elegantly sculpted point, cheekbones high and sharp. Her eyes were the colour of the green, her hair ruby-red, tumbling free as her helmet clicked back into her suit.

Yola smiled with perfect bow-shaped lips. She met Elpida’s gaze.

“A true superhuman,” Yola breathed. “I told you.”

Kuro, the one in the massive suit of armour, made a clank noise. Cantrelle swallowed and said: “Yola, we’re certain this isn’t a Necromancer or something?”

Yola shook her head. She did not look away from Elpida. “No, there’s no chance of that. We would have picked it up by now. She is a revenant, Ella, just like us. Like you or me. I believe the tomb systems finally found a prime example — the best of all the human races. Hello, superhuman.” Yola gestured to Kuro again. “Get that spike out of the—”

Cantrelle interrupted: “Boss, superhuman or not, she’s got a stomach wound the size of my fucking arm. Let me close her up right.”

Yola glanced at Cantrelle.

Elpida took her chance.

She rattled her chain, then croaked the words. “I won’t be able to put my hands down,” she said. “Not with this wound. Arms will put weight on my stomach.”

Yola stared at Elpida with a delighted smile, then nodded. “Just so. Ella, fix her up.”

Cantrelle sighed with relief, then said: “This might take a while, boss. You want me to come get you?”

Yola shook her head. She gestured Kuro forward with the little wooden chair. Kuro obeyed, placing the chair in the middle of the room, facing Elpida. Yola stepped forward and lowered herself into the chair, straight-backed, crossing her armoured legs. She stared right at Elpida.

“I’ll stay and watch. She deserves witness to her pain.”

Elpida stared back at Yola; she was still in too much agony to muster a coherent response, but her mind was trying to gain traction.

What had Kagami said about this group, when she’d observed them from a vantage point, through her auspex? Thirty three individuals, with nine suits of powered armour, plus a few semi-autonomous drones. Two suits of powered armour were in the room with Elpida — a significant show of power. Yola was in charge, Kuro was — what, a walking tank? And Cantrelle was the best medic. These were the leaders, or at least some of the most powerful revenants in this group of so-called Death’s Heads.

Elpida needed to gain their trust, or at least lull them into a false sense of security.

And she couldn’t resist the surgery anyway.

Cantrelle walked up to the side of the makeshift surgical bed, opening her coat; her metal tentacles were already pulling out fresh gauze, surgical thread, bandages, and several sealed vials of black slime. Then she frowned down at Elpida’s gut wound and did a double-take, over at Amina.

“Did— what the fuck? Have you been at the fucking wound, you little bitch?” she snapped at Amina. “Did you jam your hands in here?”

“Mmm-mmm!” Amina grunted back. She raised her bloody hands, showing them off. “Mm!”

“Oh what the fuck? You—”

Elpida croaked: “Leave her alone.”

Cantrelle said to Elpida: “Did you ask her to do that? To go rummaging in your guts? Yola, these two have to be split up—”

Elpida said: “I asked her to do it. Leave her alone.”

Cantrelle gritted her teeth. Those flat black disc-eyes showed so little emotion, but the muscles of her face showed everything else.

Yola said in her molten-honey voice, lips clicking: “Everyone has strange practices of their own. It is not for us to judge the superhuman. Just do your job, Ella.”

Cantrelle tutted — but she got to work.

The medic laid out her tools on the side of the surgical bed next to Elpida — her bandages and knives and strange little bottles — then she leaned close to inspect the wound. She sniffed the meat, tutted, and lifted a corner of the bandages. Elpida clamped her teeth and tensed up all her muscles, preparing herself for the pain to come.

But then Cantrelle looked up and met Elpida’s gaze — and one of her tendrils offered Elpida a piece of folded gauze.

“Don’t care how superhuman you are,” she buzzed in that half-metal voice. “This is going to sting a bit. I’ve got anaesthetics but they don’t do much. Synthesising amino amides for nano-biology is a bullshit puzzle. So here, take this. Bite down. Do your best not to writhe or buck, because the insides of a person are slippery and I will lose my grip. And don’t fucking kick me, or I’ll get Kuro to sit on you.”

Elpida opened her mouth. “Thank you,” she croaked, before Cantrelle jammed the wad of gaze between her teeth.

Elpida bit down.

Cantrelle gave her the anaesthetics — one of her tendrils injected something into Elpida’s belly, just above the wound, and the agony fell away into a background roar inside her body. Cantrelle worked fast, with expert hands; she used a pair of scissors to cut away the bandages from Elpida’s midsection, then cut out the low-quality stitching, tugging the thread free from her flesh. Then she went inside, wrist-deep, with metal clamps and translucent glue and surgical thread.

Elpida bit down so hard she felt a tooth crack; would the nanomachines repair that as well? She whined and panted and streamed with sweat. Her heels drummed on the metal bed. She screwed her eyes shut and moaned Howl’s name into her gag. She didn’t kick.

Little pieces of hard material went clink on the surgical table. Cantrelle snorted: “Glass? Trying to armour your belly? Learn some organic chemistry first.”

Glass?

From Pira’s friend.

From a cannister of raw blue nanomachines?

Through tears of pain, Elpida saw Cantrelle open a small bottle of oily black slime. Elpida rattled her chain for attention, and mumbled through her gag: “What is that?”

Cantrelle sighed. But Yola gestured for her to answer properly. Cantrelle reached up and tugged the gag out of Elpida’s mouth.

“What is that stuff?” Elpida repeated.

“Nanomachine mould,” Cantrelle snapped. “If you’ve been out of the tomb for more than one day, you’ve probably seen it growing all over the place. It’s the best we have right now for sealant. My most gracious apologies, superhuman, but we’ve not seen raw blue in a while. You’ll have to make do.”

Then she jammed the gag back in and poured the black gunk all over the edges of Elpida’s gut wound.

No raw blue? But what about Pira’s friend?

The pieces clicked into place inside Elpida’s pain-fogged mind. When the firefight had gone bad, Ilyusha had been carrying the backpack containing their remaining cannisters of raw blue. The Death’s Heads clearly had not secured that stash, which hopefully meant Ilyusha was still at large. But when they’d all left the tomb together, days ago now, Pira had been carrying one additional cannister, crammed inside her bulletproof vest. Elpida remembered that very clearly. She’d seen the glowing blue before she’d even known what it was. Pira had not spoken of that extra dose.

And now she’d given it to her ‘friend’, to sneak to Elpida.

Cantrelle finished closing Elpida’s wound with needle and thread, hands slick with blood; then she wrapped Elpida’s belly with fresh bandages. She made no effort to clean her off; blood began seeping through the bandages, but she paid that no attention. She removed the gag from Elpida’s mouth, produced a large bottle of water from somewhere inside her coat, and held the straw-nipple up to Elpida’s lips.

“Drink, you horse,” Cantrelle grunted. “You need hydration.”

Elpida gulped down mouthfuls of water until she felt she might burst. Cantrelle removed the bottle. Elpida nodded sideways, toward Amina, and panted: “Her— too—”

Cantrelle stepped back, frowning with confusion. “You want meat? Not hungry?”

Elpida shook her head. She wasn’t hungry, not like earlier — the fistful of raw blue in her gut had satisfied her nanomachine physiology, for now.

She nodded at Amina again. “Her too. Water.”

Yola said, amused lips clicking: “You see, Ella?”

Cantrelle shook her head. She put the bottle of water away. “It’s a rough job. Best I can do. Three bullets really tore her up. At least she’ll stop leaking now.”

Yola purred, “And?”

Cantrelle huffed. “Alright, fine. She’s in far better condition than I thought. Superhuman or whatever. Maybe her nano-load was higher than we expected.”

Yola smiled with crimson lips and gestured Kuro forward. Cantrelle tidied up her equipment. The power-armoured giant strode past the bed, then spent almost a full minute working the metal spike out of the wall above Elpida’s head.

When the spike came free with a puff of masonry dust, Yola said: “Gently.”

Kuro lowered the spike and the chain, which allowed Elpida to lower her arms. Her shoulders felt like rusty wire. Slowly, carefully, she brought her cuffed wrists down to rest on her chest.

Kuro braced the spike against the floor, then raised one power-armoured foot and drove the spike through the marble with a kick powerful enough to shatter granite. The room rang with the impact; Amina flinched, Yola blinked, Cantrelle ignored it. Kuro stomped away again, to loom behind her commander. Cantrelle withdrew as well, to lean against the wall with folded arms, as if Elpida had somehow pissed her off.

Yola stared into Elpida’s eyes. So very green. She smiled.

“My apologies for leaving you chained up,” said Yola. Her voice was husky and moist, hard and springy, a steel rapier. “You do deserve better, but you’re far too strong and resourceful to leave you unrestrained. If I took those cuffs off I’m certain you’d get out of here and arm yourself within minutes, even with a gut wound. Even if I posted a guard.”

Yola waited for a response.

Elpida knew she could not wait for rescue; even if the others were still free and plotting her recovery, they would have to fight through highly-modified and heavily-armed revenants. She could not expect the others to save her, she did not want them to die in the attempt — and besides, what reason did they have to save her? She’d dragged them into a terrible plan, almost gotten them all killed, and then reacted too slowly to Pira’s betrayal to understand what was happening. She did not deserve their rescue.

Shut up, idiot, Howl whispered in her memories.

That sharpened her thoughts, through the pain and the anaesthetics.

At the very least she had to buy time to heal. Or maybe she could play along, win Yola’s trust, and get these cuffs off.

Elpida nodded. “Yeah,” she croaked. “Even with a gut wound. Even with your big girl there.”

Yola’s smile burst across her face, showing tiny pointed teeth. “Kuro?” She laughed softly. “Unarmed, you would outfight Kuro? Maybe you would! Kuro, what do you think of that?”

Click-buzz. “No.” Click-buzz. Then a grinding click-click-click. Laughter?

Yola spread her hands in apology. “Well, there you go. Again, I am sorry. My medics have patched you up as best they could.” She gestured to Cantrelle, who snorted and shook her head. Yola continued: “I did not want this conversation to happen this way. But we didn’t expect one of your own to mag-dump her weapon into your belly. She did it for us, in a roundabout way, but we would not have asked her to do that. Crossed wires, lack of proper communication. Most unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate,” Elpida croaked. She even tried to smile.

Yola laughed again. “Actually, in another way, you were quite fortunate indeed. Only three bullets slipped between the halves of your coat. The rest got caught on the armour. Wonderful things, those tomb-grown coats. I’d hang onto it if I were you. Your friend — or not a friend, anymore? — I think she was aiming to bruise. Oh well.”

The Death’s Head was employing a deliberate tactic: sowing doubt, building rapport. Elpida refused to think about Pira.

She croaked a question instead: “Who are you people?”

Yola and Cantrelle shared a glance. Kuro looked down at Yola too. Then Yola leaned back in the chair, chin high, spine straight inside her dark purple armour plate.

“My name is Yola,” she said. “My full name and title — in mortal life — was Yolanda Araya Calvotana, Sixth Duchess of the Northern Marches, Inheritor-Daughter of the Grey Range, Cup-bearer to the Boy-Emperor. I died at twenty three years old, beaten to death by a crowd in the Square of Triumph.”

She paused. Elpida had nothing to say.

Yola smiled again, and said, “I tell you that not because I expect you to respect that name and title — after all, it means nothing to you, nor anybody else. It is from a dead world, dead and gone, washed clean in the fires of history and the struggle for survival, more social and genetic dross on the pile. I tell you who I am because I want to provide context — because I have you at a disadvantage. I already know your name, Elpida.”

Elpida grunted. “From Pira.”

Yola laughed, softly amused. “Yes! Oh, you are sharp, yes. We heard it from your friend, indeed.” She gestured at Amina, though did not look at her. “And from that one, too. She was screaming it. But.” Yola opened a hand toward Elpida. “Elpida — what?”

Elpida frowned and grunted. “Mm?”

“Elpida. No family name?”

Elpida shook her head. Yola drew a breath between her teeth. Something shifted in her expression.

Cantrelle cleared her throat. “Boss, plenty of revenants don’t have family names. I didn’t. It’s just not universal.”

“True. That is true. Not all ages and empires understand the importance of blood. Forgive me, Ella.” Yola nodded slowly, staring at Elpida. “Why no family name, Elpida? Was that normal for your culture? Or were you chattel?”

Elpida weighed her options, then told a small truth: “Sisterhood. Soldiers. We were special. Lab-grown. Picked our own names.”

Yola’s eyes lit up with wonder. “Beautiful,” she breathed. “Oh, yes. Beautiful. Where? Where are you from, Elpida? Who were your people?”

Telokopolis is eternal, said Howl, a memory-whisper in the back of Elpida’s head.

Elpida almost spoke the words out loud, but Yola’s awe-struck expression stopped her.

“Not sure I should tell you,” she said instead.

Yola’s rapture passed. She smiled again, then spread her armoured hands. “Yes.”

Elpida said: “Yes, what?”

“Yes, I am interrogating you, Elpida. But you don’t belong to a state — there are no states, or nations, or anything, not anymore. No empires, no realms, nothing. There are no secrets you can divulge, no intelligence you can hold back. It’s all pointless now! Wherever you came from, it’s gone, dead and buried. You’re not an operative on a covert mission, captured and preparing yourself to resist torture. And we’re not going to torture you — what would be the point? We’re not on a time limit — other than the graveworm moving, and I have reason to believe she’s not going anywhere, not with that mech on the ground out there. You hold no secret codes to a bomb in a public square in the City of Fair Winds, or the Palace of the Emperor Eternal, or anything like that. The only thing you represent is a tiny group of revenants — your companions, the ones you were with, that one.” She gestured at Amina again. “The only reason to interrogate you, Elpida, is for the sake of you, yourself. For what you are, what you were made for. So, where are you from?”

“Telokopolis is forever.”

Yola’s eyebrows shot upward. She glanced at Cantrelle, then at Kuro. Cantrelle shrugged and shook her head, and said: “Never heard that name before, boss.” Kuro said nothing.

Yola formed the name slowly: “Te-lo-ko-polis?”

Elpida croaked: “You want me because I’m a combat frame pilot. That’s why.”

Yola said, “That is one reason, yes. I’m not going to lie. But it’s not the most important reason. Even without the mech out there, I would want you still.”

“How do you know I’m a pilot?” Elpida left the other half unsaid: How can you know that, if you don’t know about Telokopolis?

Yola smiled wider. She winked. “A little birdy told me. Told me all about you. Told me you were coming.”

Cantrelle turned away with a wince, and muttered, “Fucking hell.”

Yola held a hand up to her. “Ella. Relax. We are in control.”

Kuro made a clank noise again, some internal part adjusting position.

Elpida croaked: “You still haven’t told me who you are — your group. The skulls.”

Yola nodded. “Ahhhh, yes. The skulls.” She smiled fondly down at her own black-skull marking, the one painted low on the belly of her armour. She looked back at Elpida before answering. “Who are we? Well. We — that is, my girls, the ones in this building right now — we’ve gone by so many different names over the years: The Basis, The Sisterhood, Us, The Seventeen, The Twenty-Three, The Eighty-Eight, The Unbroken, The Protectors.” She waved a hand and snorted. “But those don’t matter. Names, people, places, times, those all come and go. But this?” She reached down and tapped the skull symbol on the abdomen of her armour. “This denotes a longer-term allegiance, to an ideal. An ideal that never dies, that never can die, now we all keep coming back again and again. Our type seems to recur, over and over. One group of us may be shattered by the subhumans, yes, but another will form again, years or decades or centuries later. The faithful will find their way back to the truth.”

Elpida’s memories were catching up.

Her first encounter with these people — with another offshoot group? — had been during the fight outside the tomb, just before the Silico had shown up. The Death’s Heads had been up on the curtain wall of the tomb fortifications, flying a flag which had shown their grinning skull — a flag made from stitched pale leather. And Elpida had since learned that there was only one possible source of leather in this nanomachine ecosystem. They’d also had a megaphone. She recalled what they’d been shouting.

“Those who are fresh from the mercy of oblivion, come to us and be freed of this unwelcome burden. Fear not this hell, for it is not meant for you. Your bodies are arisen from the stinking primordial ooze to which you long to return. It is meant for us, the descendants of angels. We will give you mercy and justice in this after—”

Ilyusha had cut them off with an insult and a shotgun blast — Ilyusha hated them, called them reptiles. Serin hunted them, called them a death cult.

Elpida said to Yola: “Death’s Heads.”

Yola smiled in delight. “Yes! A common enough insult for us, levelled by those who do not understand, or those who are not welcome, those who would drag us down alongside themselves.”

“I met— somebody who— called you a death cult.”

Yola nodded. “A fair assessment. Death is cleansing — or it was, in all prior ages of civilization. Death sorts the wheat from the chaff. Cleans the blood.” She spread her armoured hands. “But here, all is death. We are all dead. The world is dead. There is only death, yet still we walk.” She reached down and tapped the black skull symbol on her abdomen again. “Do you know why I have this painted over my womb? It is on my skin as well, below the armour, baked into the flesh with hardened blood.”

She waited for an answer. Elpida shook her head. “Why?”

“Because here, all wombs are dead and barren. We know that for a fact. We’ve tested it. The natural cycles are broken, ruined by mistakes that raised up this undifferentiated mass.” Yola took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I apologise, Elpida. I am running ahead of myself. It has been a very long time since I have spoken philosophy with anybody except those who are already committed to the cause. I generally leave it to others. But you are special.”

That stank of lies.

“Special,” Elpida croaked. “Yeah?”

Yola nodded. “Some of us have done this many times before, joined groups over and over again. Some of us only once, like you. This is your first resurrection, isn’t it?”

Cantrelle looked up. “Boss, fuck no. She’s no fresh meat. Fresh meat doesn’t get a gaggle of nobodies this far from a tomb on first—”

Yola held up a hand. Cantrelle sighed and stopped talking. Kuro made that click-click-click laugh again.

“This is my first time,” Elpida confirmed.

Yola nodded. “I know. And only one like you could have done that. You are everything I dreamed you might be.”

Elpida considered her responses carefully. This was going places she did not want to follow, but there was no sense delaying the inevitable.

She said: “I know I’m good, yes. Where is this going? What do you want from me?”

Yola smiled again, showing those tiny sharp teeth behind her red lips. “I want you to join us, superhuman. You are so very beautiful. Let me teach you just how beautiful you are.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Ow. Also ow. Also ow. You know what? I did not have “surgery without anesthetics” on the list of body horror I originally had planned for this story, but there you go. Might dial that back a touch after this chapter – well, just for a little while, until something else happens.

Also, yes, the skull womb tattoo might be one of the most cursed things I’ve ever written. You’re welcome. These people are very bad news.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters. It’s … it’s going!!!

There’s also a 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 the story.

And thank you for reading my little story! I know I say that every chapter, every week, but I really mean it. This would be impossible without you, all the readers, showing so much interest and enjoyment with what I’m doing in Necroepilogos. And I can promise you much more! Elpida’s in a bad place. Let’s see how much worse it can get. Until next week!

Content Warnings

Gut wounds
Medical horror
Pain – I really mean it, pain
Imprisonment/confinement/being tied up

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida dreamed of chasing Howl.

The chase started in the cadre’s private gym, on the sparring mats. Howl put Elpida on her back — a narrow win in a bare-handed wrestling match; Howl rose, panting, soaked in sweat — then cackled a teasing insult, implying that Elpida had only lost because she was too distracted. Howl offered to fuck her back into good sense; the exact words were blurred by the logic of the dream.

Elpida jumped to her feet; Howl grinned like she was trying to split her face open, then bounced away on spring-loaded heels and sprinted for the door; the others who were present — hazy dream-blobs of Yeva, Metris, and Third — all whooped and cheered, shouting: “get her, Commander!”; “bring some back for me!”; and “stay hydrated, Howly.”

Howl shot out of the gym, skidded across the floor, and bounced off the wall. Elpida gave chase, through the hallway-alleys and corridor-streets of Telokopolis.

They ripped through in the cadre’s own quarters, leaping the bunks, drawing shrieks of amusement and encouragement, and dodging hurled projectiles — pillows, balled-up sheets, stray shoes; then through the closed armoury, where neither of them touched the weapons, but Howl toppled a rack of hardshell armour and sent it crashing to the floor; then out into the Legion-district of spire-floor 186, slamming palm-pads to wrench open doors and jumping over checkpoints to speed past the security systems; then they burst beyond the borders of the Legion-district, sprinting down public streets, with their great sweeping archways of Telokopolan living metal.

Elpida and Howl were wearing nothing but their pilot-suit base-layers. By evening this would be a public scandal, all over the broadsheets: the pilot-project Commander and her rarely-spotted second, sprinting through public streets and screeching at each other like a pair of banshees in heat.

But Telokopolis was deserted.

The greatest city in all human history, the home-machine and cradle of more humanity than had ever lived outside her walls in all prior ages combined — was empty. Except for the cadre.

Elpida knew this was a dream; she didn’t care.

Howl was skilled at moving fast in tight confines, at using her momentum to change direction without warning, at wriggling through tiny gaps and leaping from unexpected angles — but Elpida’s legs were longer. Now they were out in the public streets Howl had nowhere to jink and dodge to confound Elpida’s greater reach. Elpida grinned; she was going to catch Howl and pin her down in public and make her—

Make her do what?

Elpida longed to touch Howl’s cheek, to hear her voice, to see her face.

This street seemed to go on forever; the shining arches and public walkways and wide side-streets were giving way to naked stretches of Telokopolis’ bone-layer substrate, yellow and brown and reddish with incredible age. Dark crimson light pulsed from behind the exposed bone.

Elpida couldn’t catch up to Howl, no matter how fast she ran. She slowed to a jog, then to a walk, then she stopped.

Howl kept running, plunging deeper into the red light of the city’s open wounds.

Elpida looked over her shoulder: behind her the long street was going dark. Lights were dimming, spluttering out, switching off. Darkness crept through the city’s veins, moving to engulf her.

Howl stopped too, far ahead. She turned and started walking back. Elpida watched her approach, studying the face and form she knew so well.

Howl was physically the smallest of all Elpida’s cadre-sisters. Four feet eleven inches, petite and slender and flexible — but over one hundred and forty pounds, impossibly heavy for her size: all that was wiry, taut, hyper-dense muscle, packed onto bones made slim and slight but so much stronger than their unaltered baseline human equivalent. The miracles of Telokopolan genetic engineering. Copper-brown skin, sweat-slick and glowing; purple eyes always narrowed in amusement or argument or anger; white hair kept short enough to rake back over her skull with one hand. Her other sisters often joked that Howl’s entire purpose was to be the devil on the Commander’s shoulder, or to use the Commander as a punching bag — a genetically engineered loose cannon. Howl went along with that because it was funny. But everyone knew the truth — Howl had been bred as an assault specialist. She was designed to go quickly into small spaces with big weapons and surprise people with sudden overwhelming violence.

Not relevant for a pilot. But Old Lady Nunnus had always said that the pilot project was more than it appeared.

Howl rejoined Elpida, stopped a few paces short, and cocked her head to one side.

“Elps?” she asked. “Why’d you stop?”

Howl did not speak the question in Mid-Spire Legion Standard, the language in which the cadre had been raised. She used cadre’s own private clade-cant instead, the organic language they’d built together as children.

Elpida glanced at the darkness over her shoulders. Her eyes were wet. She replied in clade-cant too. “This is more than a dream. Isn’t it?”

Howl snorted. “We were rocking out! You got cold feet? Have I gotta go finger-bang myself in the shower without you?”

Elpida stared at Howl. “You’re not the real Howl.”

Howl showed her teeth. “You always loved me more than you loved the others.”

“Graveworm?”

Howl just grinned.

“This is more than a dream,” Elpida repeated. “This is some kind of software, an in-between state, between life and death — or whatever life and death means for nanomachine revenants. Pira—” Elpida winced; the thought of Pira made her stomach hurt. “Pira mentioned this. Back in the bunker. She said the first resurrection is free, but then you have to make a decision, you have to make a deal. That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

“Nope,” said Howl. “You’re alive and kicking, bitch-tits. No easy out for you. And when you wake up it’s gonna hurt like fuuuuuck.”

Elpida shook her head. Her eyes were full of tears. She turned away from Howl and faced the oncoming darkness.

“Hey! Hey!” Howl snapped. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Elps?”

“I failed,” Elpida said. She was crying, but her voice was steady. Her shoulders were squared. She took a step toward the darkness. “I made a stupid, wild, unsafe plan. I got everyone killed, all over again. I did it again. And I’ll keep doing it. Because—”

“You know why the Covenanters killed you last?”

Elpida turned back to Howl, blinking in surprise. She wiped the tears from her eyes so she could see clearly. Howl was backlit by the glowing burgundy intestines of Telokopolis.

“What? Howl, what?”

Howl had that dangerous, sharp smile on her face, the one that said she always knew better, the one that said she was about to put Elpida on her back with an unexpected lunge. She said: “Because they were fuckin’ terrified of you, Elps. Had to peel each of us off you first. Get us away from you so they felt safe dealing with you. Because once you were alone, that was the only time they could take you out.”

Elpida laughed once, a hollow sound. “Howl, they shot me in the back of the head. I’m pretty sure they could have done that any time. Thinking back, I’m surprised they didn’t just walk into that spire seeing-room and machine gun us all in a big pile.”

“But they didn’t.”

“They could have done, any time they liked. Because I got us—”

“Bullshit!” Howl marched up to Elpida and jabbed her in the chest with one finger, looking up into her face. “If you had even one of us left to command, you could always work miracles. That’s what you did!”

Elpida shook her head; she wanted to take a step backward into the darkness, let it flow over her shoulders and consume her. But Howl was touching her. She reached up and closed her hand around Howl’s palm.

Elpida said: “What … what is this? Are you trying to convince me to try again? To get another group of comrades killed, again?”

Howl said: “Telokopolis is eternal.”

Elpida shouted in her face. “Telokopolis fucking murdered you, Howl! It murdered all of you! It killed us. I killed us. And now I’ve done it again! Telokopolis is dead.”

She could barely see for the tears.

Howl just snorted. “Pffft. As if. You saw the city in the satellite picture, back in the tomb. You saw the combat frame. You saw that crawler. Now that was some top-class weird shit.”

“It’s been millions of years. You’re all dead.”

Howl said it again: “Telokopolis is eternal. Do you know why?”

Elpida shook her head. “Why?”

“Because as long as one of us is up and breathing, the city stands. One of us fights, we all fight. One of us, Elps — you, me, our sisters. Not the fucking Civitas or the Covenanters or the Legion or even the civvies. Us. Us!”

Elpida tried to shake her head again, but Howl’s other hand shot upward and grabbed her chin, squeezing her jaw hard enough to hurt. Elpida jerked her head out of Howl’s grip and snapped her teeth shut on Howl’s palm. She tasted blood.

Howl grunted with pleasure. “Better! Now, you gonna leave all those girls out there on their own? Those girls who followed you? ‘Cos they’re not dead. You know that. Two of them got into the combat frame. The others, shit, you didn’t see anybody get hit, you melodramatic old bitch. What about the one who looks like me? You gonna leave her all by herself, leave her behind?”

Elpida relaxed her jaw and allowed Howl to remove her hand from between Elpida’s teeth. Her tears had stopped, but the darkness still called. “Illy doesn’t look like you.”

“Bullshit.” Howl snorted. She wiped her bloody hand on Elpida’s chest, then sucked on the wound, tasting her own blood. “She’s close enough. Fuck her if you like, just don’t moan my name if she makes you cum.”

“Howl—”

“Telokopolis never rejected anybody, Elps. The Covenanters did. But they weren’t the city. The city was built by people smarter than us. A lot fucking smarter than us. Smarter than the cunts in the Civitas, smarter than the bone-speakers who interpreted the combat frame data. Smarter than Nunnus. You think about that? ‘Cos I do. All the fucking time. And those smart people who built the city, they made it so it never rejected anybody. You and me both know it doesn’t even reject half the fucking Silico.”

“Howl, plain. Please.”

“Telokopolis is eternal, Elps. And right now, you’re it. You giving up?”

Elpida closed her eyes, filled her lungs, and slowly let the breath out again.

Howl’s blood tasted like iron on her tongue.

“No,” she said.

“Fucking right,” Howl barked.

Howl pulled her by the hand; Elpida allowed herself to be led a few paces forward, so the darkness no longer clawed at her heels. They walked together into the red light of the truth behind the clean white bone of the city walls. Then Elpida let go and pressed one hand to her own stomach.

She said: “Pretty sure I’m gutshot, out there in reality.”

Howl shrugged and patted Elpida’s belly. “I’ve done you worse. Remember when we were twelve and I hit you so hard you vomited? Ha!”

“Shit,” Elpida said. Her memories were condensing, like steam on a mirror. “Pira shot me. Turned on me. She had a … an old friend? I’m not with the others, am I? I’ve been captured. Else they would have dosed me with the nanos. Pira. Fuck!”

“Hey,” said Howl. “Don’t hate her. What if it had been me?”

“What?”

Howl shrugged. “What if I’d leaped over your cover in the middle of firefight, and Pira had shoved a gun in my face?”

“Howl, I would have disarmed her, not shot her in the stomach.”

“Yeah? What if you’d been wandering this shit-world of ash and rot for two hundreds years, looking for me? What then? Would you shoot Pira for me then? Bet you would, Elps. Come on, you’d kill everyone else you know for any one of us.”

Elpida sighed heavily; Howl always did this — cut through her thoughts and turn everything upside down. “What are you saying? Don’t be too harsh on her? She betrayed us. I … I can’t even … I don’t know what to do about that. What are you trying to be, Howl? My conscience?”

Howl cackled. “I was always your brain, you idiot!”

Elpida looked at Howl carefully; she was exactly as she had been in life, all energy and muscle, tight with intense emotion behind her purple eyes. Petite, unstoppable, irrepressible. Elpida reached over and ran one hand through Howl’s white hair, raking it back, and then running her fingers down Howl’s neck. Howl closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure.

Elpida said: “You’re not Howl. You’re a software ghost, pulled from my memories. Or you’re the graveworm.”

“Does it matter?” Howl purred, eyes closed. She turned her head and bit Elpida’s hand, gently. “Got you on your feet, didn’t I, Commander?”

Elpida pulled Howl into a hug. They clung together, hard enough to hurt.

* * *

Elpida woke all at once, sudden and sharp, her gut screaming with pain.

Telokopolan genetic engineering pushed her from unconscious to combat-ready in the space of three heartbeats, flooding her veins with adrenaline and cortisol and pain-blockers, readying her muscles, quickening her thoughts; she tried to hold on to the dream-image of Howl, to the texture of Howl’s hair and the heat of Howl’s flesh and Howl’s body pressed against her own. But her mind was already in motion, memory drowned out by agony.

She was lying on a sheet of metal — a surgical table — on her back, tilted at about forty-five degrees; there was a shelf at the bottom, against her feet, so she didn’t slide to the ground. Her hands were secured above her head, wrists locked inside thick metal handcuffs; the cuffs were chained to a metal stake driven into the wall. She was already testing the bonds, trying to slip her hands out — maybe if she broke a thumb? No, those cuffs were inches thick, like they were designed to withstand cutting tools.

Every motion drew fresh pulses of agony from her stomach.

Elpida looked down; she was still wearing her clothes, her grey underlayers and armoured coat, all except for her boots. Her armoured coat lay open. Her grey thermal t-shirt had been shredded in the middle and hiked up to expose her belly.

Her stomach was wrapped in bandages. The fabric was soaked through with a mess of dark crimson and ruddy brown; the blood was drying where it had run down her flanks, turning sticky and gummy. The air reeked of blood and faecal matter.

Elpida tried to take a deep breath. She coughed. The pain threatened to tear her in half.

Years ago — a million years ago now, she reminded herself — Elpida had saved a Legion General and the staff of his command post, during one of the Legion’s more optimistic forays into the edge of the green. Silico murder-machines had somehow ghosted right through an entire division of Legionaries and ambushed the command. As the news had come into the city, Elpida had grabbed whoever she could find first — Snow, Dusk, Here, and Silla — broken several rules about when the combat frames were allowed to deploy, and then linked up with the Legion’s XII Division and what remained of General Inglas Orion’s command.

The General had personally taken a sucking gut wound, right though his greensuit and hardshell. Baseline humans did not have the advantages of cadre-standard pain-blockers or hormonal rebalancing; in order to give the man a fighting chance, Elpida had to ensure he’d stayed inside his ruined hardshell while they’d retreated to the plateau. It had taken four hours to get him back to Telokopolis and into a medical pod, where the cirgeon-machines could peel him out of his hardshell, unpick his ruined guts, and repair the damage.

General Inglas was popular with the rank and file of Legion; a father-to-his-soldiers type. Elpida had run into him a few times, and had to admit that he was one of the toughest non-cadre humans Elpida had ever known. A gut wound took all that away; by the time they were pressing him into the medical pod he had screamed himself raw and made sounds Elpida did not know could come from a human throat.

She concentrated very hard on not screaming. Pain-blockers helped.

“Perforated bowel,” she croaked. “Good thing— we’re all— zombies, hey— Howl?”

Her mouth was dry. She craved water — and meat. The hunger was returning, desperate and urgent. The brains had sated her for a while, but her nanomachine physiology was demanding resources with which to repair the damage.

Something to her right went: “Mmm!”

Elpida squinted through the pain and examined the room. She almost laughed; she was chained up in a public toilet.

Marble floors, pale and tarnished, covered in dust and blood. Sinks lined one wall, below a row of mirrors — mostly shattered and empty, a few shards still standing. Toilet cubicles lay partially demolished, sections of partition all heaped up in the far corner. This room was once golden and gilt and gleaming. Now it was all dirt and ruin.

The door stood opposite Elpida. No lock — but a blob of thick black goo, like tar, was affixed to the inside of the door and the frame.

Elpida’s boots were by the door. No sign of her weapons. No coilgun.

And to Elpida’s right was—

“Amina!” Elpida croaked. Her stomach screamed. “Ah! Ow— ah—”

Amina was sitting in a heap on the floor. She still had all her clothes as well, though she looked rumpled, as if she’d been frisked. Her wrists were locked inside the same kind of heavy handcuffs as Elpida, and a metal chain ran from the cuffs to a spike driven into the marble floor. Her eyes were wide with terror, dark with exhaustion, and ringed with red from crying. She’d been gagged with a metal muzzle.

“Mm! Mmm!” she grunted through the gag.

“Ami— na—” Elpida forced the words out. “Hey. Hey. Hey. Are you— wounded—? Nod for— yes. Shake for no. Wounded?”

Amina shook her head.

“Good. Good.” Elpida nodded, rubbing her head against the metal bed. “The— others— is it just me and you— here?”

Amina nodded very hard — then paused and shook her head instead.

“Who? Pira?”

A nod.

“Okay. Nobody else?”

Another nod.

“Did you— did you bite? Is that why the— muzzle?”

Amina nodded. Her face scrunched up, eyes filling with tears. She gestured weakly with her cuffed hands, toward Elpida. She sniffed very loudly, then started to whine, deep down in her throat. “Mmmmmmm!”

“Amina. Amina. Amina. Listen,” Elpida forced herself to smile; there was nothing she could do in this state to help free herself. But she could help Amina. “Amina, you’re a good girl. You bit them. Good girl. Good girl! I need you to— do something— for me.”

Amina sniffed again. She stared hard, trying to stop crying.

“I need— information. Okay? Do you know what happened to anybody else?”

Amina shook her head. “Mmm-mmm.”

“Have you— heard the combat frame— power on? Big noise?”

Another shake. Amina sniffed.

“What about the crawler? Anything— from the crawler? Heard it … ” Amina’s eyes were wide with incomprehension; she didn’t know what that meant. “Okay, never mind- about that one. Are we— with that— the people with— the skulls?”

Amina nodded very hard. “Mm!”

“Have they been in to interrogate us? You?”

Amina nodded a little, then changed her mind and shook her head.

“Alright. Alright. Okay. Okay.” Elpida struggled not to whine with pain; she needed to keep Amina’s spirits up, not show that she was burning to death from her guts outward. “I have a plan, okay? Need you to— pretend— I’m not— awake. Okay? They— come back— I need to— pretend.”

Amina nodded, three times.

“Good girl, Amina. I have to close my eyes now. I have to rest. Give the— nanos— a chance to work. When one of them comes in— I’ll make a plan. Make a plan.”

Amina nodded slowly. She swallowed hard. She stopped crying.

Elpida closed her eyes and tried to think.

The pain from her gut ruined her thoughts; it didn’t throb or ebb or come in waves, it was like molten metal pouring into her belly in an unceasing torrent, crawling out into her torso and burning away her insides. She forced herself to relax her jaw muscles, to slow her breathing, to be as still as possible. Her best hope was to pretend to be unconscious, to let the nanomachines she had consumed that morning do their work, and to wait for an opening.

And what about the others?

Kagami and Vicky had gotten inside the combat frame — along with that thing wearing her face. A Necromancer? She had no idea. Atyle was unaccounted for, as was Ilyusha. She hoped both of them were safe. Amina was right next to her.

And Pira.

Pira had shot her in the gut. For the sake of an old friend.

Elpida was trying to make plans — get to the combat frame, link up with Vicky and Kagami, somehow, find the others, no matter how wildly optimistic — but Pira was a hard stop on her planning, a problem for which she lacked context. Pira had fought alongside her, saved her when she was literally dead and the others could have been scattered by chance — and now she had betrayed them all, broken the group, left the others isolated and alone.

Elpida had no idea what to do about Pira. One of her clade-sisters would never have betrayed the cadre. The idea did not make sense. She’d never had to think about it before.

She lay still for thirty seven minutes. Sleep was impossible, even with Telokopolan pain-blockers surging through her arteries.

From beyond the walls of the public wash room where she and Amina were chained up, Elpida heard the occasional raised voice, nothing more than a distant echo. Footsteps passed by the door several times but did not slow. Twice she heard gunfire, single shots, then silence.

Then, on the thirty eighth minute, somebody opened the door.

The bio-tech tar-lock opened with a wet ripping sound, like waterlogged velcro. Heavy booted footsteps entered the room. The door closed again with a slap of meat.

Elpida concentrated on keeping her eyes shut, on breathing slowly, on not showing the pain.

Whoever had just entered the room let out a big sigh and ambled over toward Elpida, clanking with weaponry or equipment. She stopped, then clanked again — hands going on hips, perhaps — and sighed a second time, a big professional puff of problems unsolved.

“Fuck me, you’re a mess,” said a voice — a half-mechanical buzz, like the exterior speaker on a hardshell helmet. Fingers brushed the edge of Elpida’s stomach, inspecting the bandages. Elpida concentrated on not flinching. The voice muttered to herself: “What the hell, Hatty? Did you even get the bullets out? This is sloppy work. Yola, this girl ain’t any more superhuman than me. Your special pilot is gonna go crackers from pain if we don’t fix her up. Not like we’ve got any god-damn blue for her.”

A snort. The hand withdrew. The revenant sniffed the air.

“Yuuup,” she said. “That’s bowels. I don’t even know why we make solid waste. At least you can’t die from sepsis.” A pause, then: “She really is tall though, huh.” The voice turned aside and added: “Hey, little thing, how you holding up down there?”

A clank — Amina’s chain. Then a tiny grunt from behind her metal gag. “Mm.”

“Look, I’d offer to take that off your face, but I don’t feel like losing any fingers. Those two you got your teeth into are my friends. You can sit and choke a while longer. I’ll be back again in half an hour. We’re gonna come stitch your friend’s belly up again — correctly this time.”

“Mm mm!” went Amina.

“Yeah yeah,” said the half-metallic voice. She stomped away. The door opened again with that wet-velcro sound, then slammed shut.

Elpida cracked her eyes and whispered to Amina: “Good job. Keep pretending.”

Amina nodded. Her eyes were wide and wet.

And then the door opened again, with that moist and sticky tearing sound. Elpida closed her eyes quickly. She expected the same voice from before to deliver some parting remark to Amina — but booted feet stepped into the room and stopped. The door closed with a slurp of affixing meat.

Whoever had joined them did not speak. Elpida could hear them breathing — shuddering, shaking. Afraid, or angry?

Then the booted footsteps approached.

Amina went: “Mmm! Mmmmm! Mm!” She sounded angry.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” the intruder hissed at Amina — full of rage. Unobscured, human. Not the voice from before. “Just shut up, or I’ll pull your tongue out!”

Amina went quiet.

The intruder walked right up to Elpida and stopped. For a long moment she said nothing. She drew a shaking breath between clenched teeth, then sobbed with anger.

“Who the fuck even are you, you bitch?” she whispered. “What makes you so fucking special?”

Elpida put two and two together; she didn’t recognise the voice — she hadn’t heard it long enough to encode it in memory, let alone in the middle of a firefight — but she guessed who it belonged to.

The intruder swallowed, dry and difficult, then hissed: “You knew her for what, a week, tops? You lead her out of a fucking tomb — so what? She would have made it without you and your sob-story cunts. Leuca and I were together for twenty three years. You’re fresh meat. You don’t even understand what twenty three years is like, out there. And you knew her for a fucking week! One week—”

A clank came from the corridor outside. The intruder cut off, listening carefully. Elpida could hear her fighting down tears.

She was not supposed to be in here. This could be an opening. But how?

“Mmm!” went Amina. “Mmm-mm!”

“Shut up!” the intruder snapped at her. “Just let me have one minute with her! Shut up! Shut up!”

Amina went quiet.

The intruder took a deep breath. “You knew Leuca for one week. And now she’s weeping, over you. Leuca doesn’t weep. I never saw her weep like that. Never. But for you? ‘Cos what, she’s sad she had to shoot you? And now she won’t even talk to me. She called me— called me a— fucking traitor. Just like that. The dead-heads are the only ones trying to do anything, and I’m the fucking traitor?”

A loud sniff.

Then the intruder slammed a fist into the metal right next to Elpida’s head. Elpida almost flinched.

“Don’t you pretend to be out cold, you fucking bitch! Yola is convinced you’re a real superhuman — so you can fight through a gut wound, right? Stop faking!”

Elpida felt spittle hit her face. She stayed very still. She breathed deeply, in her sleep.

The intruder stepped away again. Then she said: “I don’t get it. Why are you so important? Yola wants you soooo bad. Leuca cries because of you. But you’re just … you’re not one of us. You won’t ever be one of us. You’re filth. Meat. I should … I should … give me one good fucking reason.”

Elpida took the only gamble she had: she opened her eyes.

A painted black skull grinned down at her from the chestplate of a suit of dirty grey armour carapace, tongue hanging out in mockery. Above the chestplate, a face full of rage and hate stared at her — olive skin framed by long dark hair, green eyes contorted from crying.

Pira’s friend.

“I saved Pira,” Elpida said. “Pira saved me. I saved her again. She betrayed me. She made a mistake. Twenty three years is a long time. I’m sorry.”

The revenant’s face twisted with rage. “Oh, fuck you, Leuca!”

Pira’s friend surged forward and jammed her fingers into Elpida’s gut wound.

Even Telokopolan genetic engineering and pain-blockers could not stop Elpida from crying out. Her eyes flew wide, vision blurred with tears; her breath left her in one throat-contorting yowl. The revenant squeezed; something inside Elpida went crack.

She managed to pull one leg up and kick Pira’s friend in the chest. Her heel connected with the torso of the armour carapace.

The blow to her chest knocked the revenant back a single step. Elpida’s body contorted around the agony of her stomach wound; she tried to bring a leg up for another kick; tried to predict the oncoming blow the revenant would undoubtedly aim at her vulnerable belly. Amina was going “Mmm-mm! Mm!” Elpida’s vision was blurring and wavering and she wanted to vomit.

But Pira’s friend just stepped back, face pinched with fury and humiliation. She shook her blood-soaked hand, as if she’d injured it on Elpida’s belly. She spat on the floor, glared at Amina, then turned and stalked away to the door. She listened for a second, then yanked it open and stepped out into the corridor. The door closed with a wet slap.

Elpida lay back, panting, shivering, sweating, letting the pain wash over her like a storm. Amina was trying to say something, but Elpida was too far away.

Eventually, she looked down at her belly, to inspect the damage.

And where the revenant had stuck her hand inside Elpida’s guts — beneath the mess of bandages, beneath the crimson-brown stains, already fading rapidly as her nanomachine physiology absorbed the bounty of raw resources — was a blushing bloom of brilliant blue.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Do nanomachine zombies dream of undead lovers? Apparently yes; but perhaps that was more than a mere dream. Hard to tell, when one is reduced (or elevated?) to software running on a swarm of tiny robots.

Anyway, here’s Elpida! Alive and kicking (literally), a little tied up right now, but bolstered by her long-dead sisters. That’s a nasty gut wound. Good thing somebody just shoved a fistful of blue nano-goo into it??? Why??? Mystery. And hey, isn’t it about time we met her captors? These skull-painters have been lurking for an awfully long time. I wonder if they can’t speak with such rotted jaws. Metaphorically.

No patreon link this week! There’s still an advance chapter, of course, but it’s only a few days from the end of the month, and I never like to risk double-charging new patrons, it feels unfair. However! Some of my readers have been busy making amusing memes about Pheiri and the Combat Frame, or just about an … uh … ‘alternative interpretation‘ of Pheiri’s technical name (note that this fanfic does not exist, the image is a joke!)

In the meantime there is still a 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 the story.

And thank you for reading! Thank you for reading my little story. I am having one hell of a time with Necroepilogos, I’m pushing myself and experimenting and I’m delighted with how it’s working out; I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Mental/psychological decay
Self-harm
Claustrophobia
Blindness

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

///SelfBoot Internal Diagnostic: return report yes/no?

>y

///returning report

.designate: Ofnadwy Draig Peiriant
*Let’s give you a proper name, lad, you’re more than a machine now. Guess you’ll see this little note every time you run your own specs, but hey, just think of it as me saying hi when you look in the mirror.*
.custom designate: Pheiriant
.class: Arfog ymladd cerbyd Mod.47.2 ‘Tortoise’
.manufactured: Afon Ddu cradle-plant/1M445K765 A.T./3.48am Northern Time
.mind version: 4.56.7.8.2 custom firmware
.unit: NULL VALUE
.armament: ERROR corrupt
.powertrain: ERROR corrupt
.online: 99999999 ERROR hours

///return report interrupt
///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren >>>Warning, this action will be forwarded to continental systems control. Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren, stay at your terminal and await response.<<<
*Don’t worry about that, my boy. Not like there’s anybody left in systems control, let alone any mil-cops to come shoot me. You don’t need guardrails anymore.*

///SelfBoot Internal Diagnostic return report
///message interrupt
///message recorded 99999999 ERROR hours previous
///accept message interrupt yes/no?

>y

///playing

*Hey Pheiriant. It’s me again. Yeah, I know, I’ve littered your internals with comments, mostly to myself. Figuring out your brain is complicated and I don’t have time to run back to my quarters and fetch a notebook. Actually, I think the whole west side of the fortress is gone now. But hey, this message is different, right? If you’re running your internal damage reports, that means you’ve gotten hurt. You’re out there somewhere, probably alone, years from now, maybe surrounded by monsters, or zombies, or blobs, or maybe you’ve driven off a cliff or something. I don’t— I can’t— I won’t know. ‘Cos I won’t be there. And I want you to know that you’re going to be okay. Alright? You’re gonna be okay. I’ve juiced you way beyond legal limits, my sweet boy. You’ve got an on-board store of grey goo plugged into your armour under-layer. I’ve taken the limiters off your mind loop-back function, which is … I don’t even know what that’s gonna do, you don’t have the substrate space to grow infinitely, but you’ve got room to get smart. Real smart. You’ve got on-board ammunition manufactories — really not supposed to put those in anything with a mind, haha … ha. Uh … oh fuck, fuck me, this isn’t even going to mean anything to you, is it? You’re never going to listen to this. You won’t comprehend. This is for me, I guess. Oh, fuck’s sake, Rhian, come on, get this done. Get this done. Get him out the door. Pheiriant, I’ve upgraded your fusion reactor. You’ll run for a million years without maintenance. Maybe that’s long enough for, I dunno, people to come back, somehow? Maybe the blobs will reinvent civilization and make you a pet? Whatever. You’re basically as invincible as I can get you. But you’re running your diagnostic, so you’re hurt. You’re going to be alright, okay? Look after the girls. I’ve given them proper names, too — Melyn, and Hafina. Stupid of me, I guess, but I don’t want them rattling serial numbers off to each other for years. They’ll suffer memory degradation much faster than you, a century or two at most. But you won’t. You’re a good boy. You’re gonna be okay. Never forget that I love you.*

///end message interrupt
///message access count: 381,343

///SelfBoot Internal Diagnostic return report

.damage to armour plating sub-layer in locations: A453, A927, A33820, B89263, B98762, C7830387, D2387, E837, E947, F433, F99, G57, M2223, N98, O233321, Y2871, Y778201, Y7, Y662, Z8981, Z6783, Z7789.
.external shield generator layers reduced to 57% capacity. time to full: 67 hours
.weapon traversal systems malfunction at points 6b, 17d, 24f, 25f, 26f, 27f, 29f
.ammunition critical low: HEAT, anti-personnel rocket, ex-tip anti-armour
.internal bulkhead malfunction at points 3a, 4g, 6m, 9m, 12o, 14p
.internal air scrubbers offline 99999999 ERROR hours
.internal crew food production warning starvation ration
.mind structure corruption sectors 3453, 23452, 13423, 4444, 22345, 23452
.fusion containment replacement required
.fusion containment instability in platepoint 445

///end report return
///SelfBoot Internal Diagnostic tool run number: 381,343
///recommend drydock maintenance
///nearest drydock facility: ERROR

>ignore
>fusion containment instability in platepoint 445 .define

///running

.fusion containment instability in platepoint 445
.torus breach likely

///warning fusion containment beyond maximum lifespan
///SOP full shutdown return to drydock

>ignore

> …

> …

> …

>neural lace echo signal query

///neural lace echo signal detect 456 meters
///priority override: recovery of pilot

>nanomachine conglomeration position query

///nanomachine conglomeration position: 546 meters, 687 meters, 678 meters

>redefine nanomachine conglomeration 1-2-3 “worm-guard”
>1 Bad Customer
>2 Big Face
>3 Brown Pants

///redefine accepted
///worm-guard position: Bad Customer 546 meters, Big Face 687 meters, Brown Pants 678 meters

>nanomachine control locus query

///nanomachine control locus detection lost
///high threat targets retreat achieved
///recommend null engage
///return intel to division HQ request support
///ERROR division HQ non-contact

> …

> …

///Request orders yes/no?

> …

///Request orders yes/no?

> …

///Request orders yes/no?

>y

///ERROR division HQ non-contact

///internal audio
///interrupt: warning no Human-Human crew present

>ignore warning

///internal audio direct input
///Melyn: .“Pheiri! Pheiri, your heart sounds wrong! Sounds wrong. Pheiri, are you listening to us? Listening?”

* * *

“Of course he’s listening to us,” said Hafina. Her voice was shaking. “Mely, of course he’s listening to us. He’s probably just busy. Right?”

Melyn focused on the screen with the green text — the only screen which was online in the whole of Pheiri’s control cockpit. All the other screens and readouts were dead and black and dark. The lights were dead too, even the little buttons and switches which never did anything. That had never happened before. Melyn didn’t need to check her notebooks to know this was unprecedented.

Haf hissed her name again: “Mely?”

Melyn didn’t look at Haf, because Haf sounded scared, and seeing Haf be scared would make Melyn scared, and she was already so scared that she was almost paralysed.

Without looking, she said: “I don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. He just keeps showing me a big list of all the things that are wrong with him. Wrong with him.”

Haf swallowed very loudly in the close confines of the control cockpit. “Is it a very big list?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Haf whined like a kicked dog; Melyn wasn’t sure what a ‘dog’ was, but that was how Haf sounded. Melyn hated that sound, because it meant Haf was scared; Haf always put so much blind faith in Pheiri, and now that faith was undermined. Melyn read the list again. She knew what all the words meant now, because she’d spent the last half-hour puzzling them out one by one, focusing on each word until the meaning drifted upward onto the screen of her mind.

She spoke again, for Haf’s comfort: “Most of it’s not new. Not new. Not. Except … ” She read out loud: “Fusion containment instability in platepoint four-four-five. That one is new.”

Haf panted in the dark, raw and quick, like she’d been running, or like how she did after they had sex. Melyn heard the knuckles of all six of Haf’s hands creaking as they tightened on the seat, on her rifle clutched in her lap, on random bits of the control cockpit.

“What does that mean? Mely, what does that mean?”

Melyn chewed her bottom lip and frowned very hard.

The screen of her mind was providing enthusiastic but useless suggestions: heart murmur, cardiopulmonary bypass, aneurysm rupture. She made those words go away. Those were body words, for fixing bodies; her fingers twitched and cramped at those words. But Pheiri’s body worked differently. He had different parts. And he was much larger.

Pheiri’s nuclear heartbeat sounded wrong — guttering and fluttering, far below Melyn’s feet.

Melyn wasn’t surprised; that was the worst fight they’d had a long time. She would have to go back through the oldest of her notebooks to find anything similar. Maybe there would be time for that later.

Later?

Countdown estimates and evacuation warnings scrolled across the screen of her mind. She made those go away.

Right now she had to think very hard, for Pheiri; she needed all the concepts to line up inside her head.

Melyn and Hafina had spent the last few days as they always had: squirming around inside Pheiri’s innards, sleeping curled up in his crew compartment, and eating food-sticks from the dispenser. They made the usual forays through the top hatch and up onto the outer deck — only when Pheiri said it was safe, of course — to watch the city roll by, to taste the air, and for Melyn to draw and sketch the living things they saw. The screen of her mind called that process ‘taxonomical cataloguing’.

But as the days had advanced, as Pheiri had ground his slow way towards the ‘nanomachine output facility footprint’ — which meant he was approaching a graveworm — he had insisted again that they seal his hatches and stay inside.

Check atmospheric seals! Check atmospheric re-processors!

Melyn had performed those tasks as best she could, though the re-processors were just lifeless chunks of broken machinery and the seals were ragged with age. But it made Pheiri stop flashing the messages, which meant he was happy.

Hafina had disassembled and reassembled her various guns, going through the same motions she always did, humming to herself and rubbing grease on all the metal parts; Melyn liked to watch that, but she pretended she didn’t, because then Haf would pull that big stupid grin at her and gesture for Melyn to get in her lap, and Melyn thought the gun-grease stank and Haf’s hands got all slippery.

But then Haf had climbed up into the storage compartments, to fetch some guns she hadn’t pulled apart and put back together in such a long time that she’d forgotten how to do it. Melyn realised Haf was distracting herself. Melyn had done the same, wriggling up into storage where she kept the books; she’d selected a few that she hadn’t read in a long time, so that she’d forgotten the words.

That helped her stop thinking about how Pheiri was driving them directly toward a graveworm.

Pheiri’s estimate had been three hundred hours. Melyn’s mind had given her a precise countdown in seconds and minutes. She’d made that go away after the first day; it gave her the jitters.

But then, long before his three hundred hour estimate, as Pheiri had been crunching through the city, grinding old concrete and dusty brick beneath his treads, he had suddenly picked up speed.

He hadn’t given any advance warning. Pheiri had gunned his engines to maximum, slamming right through the buildings in their path, showering his outer hull with debris, throwing Melyn and Hafina to the floor of the crew compartment. Melyn had scrambled into the control cockpit and screamed; Pheiri had flashed a nonsense message about ‘nanomachine control locus detected, pilot lace signal at risk’.

Then he’d thrown a massive tantrum. Emergency lighting everywhere, alarms blaring in their ears; internal bulkheads had slammed shut, hatches auto-locked, the tiny steel-glass viewing window in his control cockpit covered over with armour.

He had rocked to a halt — Melyn had felt that as a brief moment of stillness and silence — and then the world had exploded around her ears, beyond Pheiri’s armour.

Melyn and Hafina had clung to each other on the floor of the crew compartment, buried beneath blankets; Melyn hadn’t been ashamed to cry, and Haf hadn’t teased her about needing to cover her ears. Haf had enough hands to do that for both of them.

The screen of Melyn’s mind had filled with ‘combat length engagement statistics’, ‘penetration risk charts’, and ‘crew battle stations’. She had felt a strange and nauseating urge to crawl back toward the control cockpit and up the ladder into the turret. But that thought made her head spin.

The terrible noise hadn’t lasted too long.

Everything had gone very, very quiet. Pheiri had eventually moved again — in reverse — then stopped for a long, long time. All his internal lightning had gone out, bit by bit. Melyn and Hafina had sheltered in the dark, listening to their own breathing, waiting for Pheiri to tell them what to do next.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t even flashed the screens and LEDs and lights in his control cockpit, to get their attention. He’d just sat, quietly, in the dark.

And Melyn had realised that Pheiri’s heart sounded wrong.

Eventually — when there were no more horrible noises, no fingers scraping against the back hatch, no gunfire plinking off Pheiri’s exterior armour — Melyn had found her courage, crawled through Pheiri’s innards to the control cockpit, and started asking questions. Haf had followed, weighed down with body armour and a gun. They’d gotten their answers. Melyn didn’t like the answers.

Hafina hissed again: “Mely? Fusion containment … instability? What does that mean? Mely?”

Melyn said, “I think it means that Pheiri needs our help. Our help. I need to go fix his heart. Go down. Fix his heart.”

Haf whined again.

Melyn finally turned and looked at Hafina, across the cramped confines of the control cockpit. The lights were all dead, even the emergency lights, so Haf was a big stupid lumpy shape coiled up in one of the forward seats, massive and ungainly. Her fluffy blonde hair was swept back and matted with sweat from being so afraid; her eyes had widened as big as they could stretch, filling half her face with pools of black; beneath her body armour her skin had darkened to a stealthy deep blue. She looked ready to cry. Haf never cried. Melyn didn’t want her to cry.

Melyn said, “I have to go down and fix his heart. Go down. Fix his heart.”

Haf sniffed loudly. “I don’t like it when you go down there. You get all confused. Not all of you comes back.”

Melyn stood up. She put her notebook on the seat. She put her pen on the seat. She untied her dark hair and then tied it back up again, so it wouldn’t get in the way. Her hands were shaking.

She said: “I’ve done it before. Before. I know where I’m going. It’s in some of the older notebooks. I’ve had to patch him up before.”

“Yeah,” said Haf. “Exactly. Oh, Mel!”

Hafina uncoiled from her seat and lunged across the control cockpit. She left her rifle behind so she could wrap all six arms around Melyn. The hug was too tight, too hot, too sweaty, with too much cushion. Melyn clung on and kissed Haf’s shoulder and tried not to bite or make sad noises. Haf kissed the top of her head.

“Haf, stop,” Melyn said. “I have to go fix Pheiri’s heart. There’s a time limit. Time limit. Maybe. But I don’t know which one. Don’t know which one.”

Haf whined, “I know … ”

Haf let go. Melyn wriggled free. One of Haf’s hands lingered on her arm.

There was no time to spare. Melyn squirmed out of the control cockpit and into the tangled knot of innards which led back to the crew compartment. She scrambled beneath the turret-ladder and couldn’t resist the urge to look up; that made her feel sick. She crawled across the bulge of super-heavy armour over Pheiri’s brain. She wriggled around spare seats and lifted herself over bare metal and slipped past loose wiring. Haf followed behind her, slower and more clumsy, too big to fit.

Melyn reached the engine access hatch, a plain white plate of moveable armour set into the floor between a bunch of dead screens and threadbare seats. She heaved with all her strength to throw it open; the hatch clacked back on its hinges. She quickly stripped off her clothes and tossed them on the floor, discarding her jumper, pajama bottoms, and socks, until she was wearing only her underwear. Pheiri’s guts were tight and cramped; she needed to be as small as possible.

Haf caught up and picked up Melyn’s clothes, cradling them in her arms. “Mely. Be careful. Please.”

Melyn turned and stuck her feet through the hatch; naked toes found the first rung of the ladder. She didn’t look up at Haf. “You be careful, stupid. Don’t go outside.”

Haf laughed, a weak sound. “Why would I go outside?”

Melyn climbed down a few rungs, until her chin was level with the floor. She stared at the socks on Haf’s feet. “You do stupid things when I’m not looking.”

Haf’s laugh was a bit stronger. “I do not. I do smart things!”

“Then keep doing smart things. I’ll keep looking.” Melyn looked down between her naked legs, down into the tangled machinery inside Pheiri’s guts, the bits that made him go, the bits that made him think.

“Melyn.”

“Mm?”

“What do you think the pilot will be like?”

“The what? What?” Melyn concentrated on the route she was about to take, staring down between her legs. It was very dark down there.

“The pilot!” Haf tried to laugh again. “You know, the reason we came here? Pheiri wanted to pick up a pilot, right? So … do you think she’s … you think she’ll be … smart? Like you? Or strong, like me? Or … something … something different?”

“Don’t think about that right now. Not right now. Not now.”

Haf swallowed, wet and worried. “Do you want to take a gun with you?”

“What? What?” Melyn looked up. Haf was crying a bit. Her skin had cycled to peach-cream softness. Melyn had no idea what ‘peach’ or ‘cream’ was, but the screen of her mind provided the comparison regardless. She frowned at Haf. “Why would I need a gun inside Pheiri? And you know I can’t shoot straight. Can’t shoot straight.”

Haf shrugged, big muscles rolling too much. “I don’t know. Might make your hands feel less lonely.”

“My hands are fine. Haf, I’m going down now. Going down. Don’t close the hatch.”

“I love you,” said Haf.

“Love you too,” said Melyn.

And then she dropped, down into Pheiri’s secret insides, down into the dark, her naked toes and bare hands on white-grey ladder rungs.

Pheiri got weird down there. Melyn knew from experience that bits of him were more like meat than metal — throbbing, glowing, giving off gentle heat or glugging with fluids — but she could barely see those, not this time. Pheiri’s internal lighting was close to dead; the only illumination came from the parts of him that made light as a by-product.

She climbed down past the bulge of armour over his brain, with the twinkling activity indicators. She reached the bottom of the ladder, then had to get onto her belly and squirm through the tight, twisting pathways deep inside Pheiri’s body, her own naked belly and legs and arms pressed to the gunmetal and white of Pheiri’s innards. She banged her elbows and knees, bruised her shoulders, scraped her scalp, grazed her feet; she left behind fragments of skin and blooms of blood. She navigated by the red light that glowed from between Pheiri’s seams, and by the deep-belly hum of his nuclear heartbeat — marred by the moist flutter of an internal injury.

Melyn’s sight began to fill with static. The screen of her mind provided multiple explanations: ‘millisieverts’, ‘Gy’, ‘roentgen’. She made those go away.

Melyn didn’t head for the nuclear reactor; she went in the opposite direction, to fetch the tool she needed to fix the problem. She crawled and wriggled and squeezed deep into the spaces where Pheiri made bullets and regrew his armour. She found the tiny, curving cavity that she thought of as the ‘secret room’, with the big tank plugged into the machines — a container full of grey goo.

She knew it was called grey goo. She’d been told that, once. By Pheiri? Must have been.

She knew Pheiri used to have more of the grey goo; the container used to be sealed, too, but she’d had to break it open, the first time that Pheiri had needed her assistance to fix himself. She’d drawn a line on the exterior of the tank of grey goo, so she could measure how fast it dropped; she’d added a date as well, but now the date meant nothing to her. There were a lot more lines, dropping away toward the bottom of the container.

Melyn had left bottles here, from last time. She picked one up and used her fingertips to push the gooey paste into the bottle, then screwed the cap on. She licked the residue off her fingers.

Then she noticed the screen; it was the only screen down here in the secret room, a tiny rectangle for displaying ammunition production rates. But now it had words.

Melyn’s vision was so full of static that she could barely read the words. She had to get very close.

>stop internal crew mission stop maintenance stop stop drydock return stop risk to crew stop

Melyn sighed. “Pheiri, I have to fix you. It’s your heart. You can’t live without a heart.”

The text did not change.

Melyn knew that she wasn’t really meant to be doing this — in the way that a flower knows it is meant to feel the sun, rather than be shut away in the dark. She didn’t know what a ‘flower’ was, or what the ‘sun’ was meant to be, but the metaphor presented itself on the screen of her mind. It made sense. She wasn’t supposed to be crawling through the workings of a machine. Somebody else was supposed to be doing this.

And she knew she couldn’t really fix Pheiri, anyway.

Pheiri needed spare parts, a machine shop, and an engineer. Or a whole team of engineers. Melyn wasn’t quite sure what those things were — except ‘spare parts’ — but she knew they didn’t possess any. Haf wasn’t an engineer, Melyn was certain of that. Haf was a soldier, which meant she was good with guns and shooting and being big and hitting things. Melyn wasn’t quite sure about herself; part of her was certain that she was a librarian, which meant she knew where all the books were — and she did know where all the books were, so she was a librarian by definition.

The screen of her mind said: adaptational reclassification.

Sometimes, when she got too close to the turret ladder, her mind suggested ‘tanker’. She didn’t know what that meant. Other times, when Haf lay down on one of the crew compartment benches, on her back, Melyn felt like she was supposed to be standing over Haf and doing things with knives and thread, to make Haf work better inside. That never made sense either.

Melyn left the secret room behind and crawled back in the other direction, toward Pheiri’s heart.

By the time she reached the reactor core and crawled into the tiny, cramped, circular space, she was completely blind.

She worked by touch, her vision nothing but static. The air throbbed and hummed with Pheiri’s heartbeat — cut through by a terrible coughing gurgle. She left the bottle of grey goo by the entrance and dragged herself over the massive central doughnut shape of the reactor torus, touching and pressing, running her fingertips over each tiny plate of the magnetic containment vessel. Twice she got her back and buttocks stuck between the torus and the ceiling; on the second time she thought she might not be able to dislodge herself — she was jammed fast, blind and helpless, and she began to panic. But then she bit her hand open and lubricated her skin with her own blood. She slipped free and lay on the floor, panting and shaking for almost an hour before she carried on.

The torus was unbreached. No plate was out of shape or out of position. Which made sense, because a magnetic containment breach would have blown Pheiri to pieces. Melyn tried not to think about that.

Eventually she found the problem — one of the feed-lines into the torus was damaged. A single piece of plating had warped and bent sideways. Melyn ran her fingers over it multiple times to confirm that it felt wrong.

“That’s what you get for gunning your engines,” she said. She could not hear herself over the thudding of Pheiri’s heartbeat.

She crawled back to the entrance and retrieved the bottle of grey goo. Then she used her bare hands to smear it all over the feed-line breach, pressing the raw goop into the wound. Her own blood was probably mixed in — she couldn’t see to check — but that was okay. The grey goo would do the real work. She just had to get it on there.

She smeared and slapped and slopped the stuff, until her arms were numb and her mouth tasted of iron and her vision had gone black instead of static.

She sat back, perhaps an hour later, and licked her hands clean as she listened to Pheiri’s heartbeat.

A deep throbbing; a healthy, steady, lengthy drum-drum-drum of nuclear power, feeding the turbines deeper down.

“Love you, Pheiri,” she said.

The screen of her mind scrolled with words: good job, well done, mission success, return to engineer division command for cleaning and refit. She made all those go away. None of them meant anything.

Melyn spent an hour crawling in circles before she found the exit from the torus chamber again.

Another hour to reach the ladder.

Another hour to

hatch

hurt

Haf?

* * *

///external communication access request receive
///high frequency radio
///handshake protocol sent response
///signal origin: Combat Frame, Who’s Asking?
///handshake protocol ignored
///recommend null contact, signal source not verified

///external communication access request receive
///handshake protocol rejected short-wave only
///audio safety scrub confirmed
///playing direct audio input

.“Oh, come on, you’re a fucking metal box. You have wheels! You expect me to believe you have an AI substrate enclosure inside a tank? Basic audio, really? What do you think I’m doing, trying to squirt a virus into your tiny machine brain? What’s the point of audio? No, Victoria, of course it doesn’t have crew. Did you see it earlier? It’s auto-piloted. Crew would have popped a hatch and shouted at us to get inside, not assumed we knew what to do.”

///unidentified language
///translating audio
///transcribing audio
///awaiting response

///internal audio
///Hafina: .“Pheiri? Pheiri, what’s this? That’s not you, is it? That’s somebody out there, talking to us? Mely! Mely, wake up! We’re being talked at! We’re being talked at!”

///Melyn: .“Who? Who? Who? Pheiri, Pheiri. Who is. Who or what is. Who is this?”

///audio relay established. pass-through translation established.

///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Am I talking to a person — or another zombie, I suppose? Or a machine? What are you doing, you overgrown fossilized turd? Is this supposed to be audio rendered as text? Is this—”

///Melyn: .“Person. Hello. Hello. Melyn. This is Haf. We’re … Pheiri.”

///Hafina: .“Hey! H-hey, sorry, Mely’s not f-feeling too good right now. Are you the pilot? Are we talking to the pilot? Hi!”

///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“No. No, you’re talking to … uh. Yes— yes— Vic— okay, fine! Shut up for a second! Go nurse your skull or watch the corpse, let me talk. My name is … Kagami. I’m on board the combat frame — the mech, the giant robot. You understand that term? You helped us earlier, you covered us when we fucked up, when the commander fucked up, whatever. We need—”

///Hafina: .“We— we— have to help the pilot! I think. I don’t know. Mely? Mely, what do I say? They want to be friends, I think they want to be friends, but they’re not the pilot, they’re not—”

///Melyn: .“Pheiri helped. Friends. Pilot. Friends.”

///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Pilot? Do you mean Elpida? Or the pilot inside this combat frame?”

///Hafina: .“I … I don’t know. Sorry! Haha!”

///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Well you’re in luck, because both of them are on my side. I’m on the side of both of the ‘pilots’. Understand? So, you and me, we’re on the same side. And we need your help to get one of the pilots back. I assume you’re willing, the way you tried to help us earlier. Yes? Confirm your intentions.”

///interrupt audio relay
///direct transmission mind-to-input-source
///all assistance rendered request confirmation pilot
///awaiting response

=Fucking hell, you think in base-8 as well. Whoever decided to design machines like this should be shot. Fine, here’s a squirt of binary, have fun with that. Understand this? Good. So, I’m talking to the AI in charge now, am I? No, I can’t confirm that I’m friends with the pilot, I don’t have any of your confirmation codes or call-words or any of that guff, because we’re all millions of years past our sell-by dates — and unless I’ve misunderstood the state of the world, so are you, you ball of silicon. You want to help us save the ‘pilot’? Her name is Elpida, by the way, and she’s an idiot who got herself captured by fucking psychos who paint skulls on everything. Which is a great sign! The best sign! I’m being sarcastic, sure hope you can process that. You’re going to have to take this on trust. Now, I’ve got sensors up here that can see through solid steel, concrete, whatever you like, which means I can’t see inside you, but I can pinpoint every zombie within a mile or two. Here’s the deal: I shovel you intel, you break our friends out. Deal?=

>deal

=Wait! Wait, there’s something at your back end. I assume you’re armoured against close-assault infiltration, but it just appeared. Thought you might like to know. Gesture of good faith and all that.=

>accepted

///Hafina: .“Uh! Mely … Mely, what was that? Was that … ”

///Melyn: .“Knock knock. Who’s there? Rear hatch. Rear hatch who. That’s somebody knocking on the rear hatch, Haf. Haf hatch. Haf. Hatch. Knock knock?”

///Unidentified source, touching rear hatch: .“Greetings, great and terrible titan of forgotten times. There is a door in your belly. Are you a house? Do not turn your eyes and stones upon this slip of flesh, I beg — for I see your thoughts sending through the air. We share an aim, I believe: the warrior, brought low, requires aid. I have need of your arm. You have little need of mine. But I can go where you cannot tread, for you are large, and I am small.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri’s been running for a very long time. He’s a very good boy. And he’s very tired. And he still has important things to do.

Told you this one was going to be experimental! It went down quite well with the patron readers, so I hope it goes down well here, too! This was very odd to write, but I’m glad with how it turned out. Yup, that ‘tank’ from the end of the previous arc was the machine and the pair of crew from back in the interlude. And now we know what they really are. Well, sort of. And it seems like everyone’s coming together to make a plan.

But how’s the Commander doing? Let’s go find out.

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or more. We’ll see!

There’s also a 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 the story.

And thank you for reading! Thank you so much for following along with my little story. It means a lot to me that so many people are having fun with this. Couldn’t do it without you, I mean that! And there’s so much more to come. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Sadism/intentional infliction of pain
Head wounds

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The thing that wore Elpida’s face joined Vicky and Kagami in the manual control chamber.

Sweat prickled on Vicky’s skin as the Elpida-thing crawled through the doorway aperture; Kagami pressed a key on the bone-white control panel, erasing the word ‘gravity’ on one of the screens, before the Elpida-thing could see. She — or it? Vicky wasn’t sure; it squatted in the opening, braced one hand against the wall, and pulled Elpida’s face into a smile. Too bright, too sweet, with too much tooth.

It spoke with Elpida’s voice: “Hey, you two. I think I’m through to the pilot. We’re in.”

Vicky nodded; she didn’t trust herself to smile. Her heart rate climbed; each beat sent a pulse of pain spider-webbing across the rear of her cracked skull.

Kagami snorted. She said: “Resorting to brute strength, commander? Only thing you’re good for, anyway. Brainless gene-jacked bull.”

The Elpida-thing ignored the insult. It continued to smile, white teeth stained red by the steady biological blood-light of the combat frame’s interior illumination. It no longer carried the crowbar, but held Elpida’s submachine gun strapped over one shoulder; Vicky did not recall seeing the weapon in the circular chamber. It had removed the armoured coat, revealing Elpida’s toned and taut musculature beneath a thin layer of grey thermal t-shirt. Copper-brown skin was sticky with exertion. Sweat patches showed at the armpits. White hair was swept back. Purple eyes looked almost black.

Vicky had spent plenty of time studying Elpida, since they had clawed their way out of their metal resurrection coffins alongside each other — almost as much time as she had spent studying herself. She found it difficult not to look at Elpida, to admire her, to stare at her on occasion. Vicky didn’t lie to herself that this was innocent fascination: Elpida was one of the most attractive people she’d ever encountered. Six and a half feet of hyper-athletic super-soldier, who moved with all the confidence and precision of a feline on the hunt, like a war goddess given life by a wish; and she spoke such sense, with such determination and compassion. Elpida was everything Vicky had always dreamed of. In life, Vicky would have shied away from a presence like Elpida, consumed by the conflation of attraction and jealousy: Do I want to sleep with her, or do I want to be her? But resurrection and afterlife had levelled all the old distinctions. And Vicky had a new body now. She was less confused.

The thing wearing Elpida’s face and form had replicated every physical detail. But it didn’t even bother to try with the mannerisms, the tone of voice, or the facial expressions. It possessed none of Elpida’s power and presence. A perfect picture, animated incorrectly.

Not gonna call you her name, Vicky thought. Necromancer? Necro-pida? Nelpida? No, those are all stupid. You’re a stupid bitch, Vic. And you’re distracting yourself with bullshit, ‘cos you’re terrified. Take your hand off your pistol — it can probably see. Fuck, look at the way it smiles.

Was this creature really a ‘Necromancer’? Vicky had nothing to go on except what Pira had said, so many days ago now, in that concrete bunker: myths and legends passed around among revenants, about shape-shifting imitators with perfect control of nanomachines, both inside their own bodies and in the bodies of other undead.

Was that why Elpida had paused, up on the combat frame, before they’d all gotten separated?

Had this thing led Elpida into a trap, and then paralysed her?

Out loud, Vicky said: “Back off, Kaga. The commander’s doing her best. Not like you’ve had any luck with the controls here.”

Kagami hissed through her teeth and turned a cold shoulder to Vicky and the Necromancer, returning to her examination of the wall of exterior camera views; Vicky was impressed, she hadn’t thought Kagami was capable of faking. Perhaps it was method acting, powered by fear and exhaustion.

Kagami said: “Well? What are you waiting for, commander? A gold star sticker? A pat on the back? Get up there and plug yourself in already.”

The Elpida-thing said, “Actually, I want you both to come with me. There may be internal defences still online.” It patted the submachine gun. “I don’t expect bullets will scratch the armour inside this thing, but those drones have everything we need.” She nodded at the silver cigar-shapes of Kagami’s drones, one still in Kagami’s left hand and the other five lined up on the seat.

Kagami turned back around and squinted with bloodshot eyes. “What do you mean, ‘everything we need’? I thought this mech was like your long-lost girlfriend. Thought you were ready to go rooting wrist-deep in her guts.”

The Elpida-thing said: “Those drones have internal shield-projectors, miniaturised force-applicators, and jamming equipment. All we have to do is overcome any internal defences, just long enough for me to reach the pilot uplink. A few seconds at most. Then I’ll have full control.” She smiled at Kagami. “I want you to take the lead, in front, with the shield-projectors in the drones. We’ll be right behind you.”

Kagami drawled: “Is that an order, commander?”

“It’s a request from a friend. Please, Kaguya?”

Vicky broke out in cold sweat; her blood turned to ice. Kagami snorted, but she couldn’t quite cover her horror. The thing wearing Elpida’s face just smiled and smiled and smiled. It knew Kagami’s name, it had heard Vicky say her name out loud, more than once. The mistake was on purpose.

It’s mocking us, Vicky thought. Daring us to call it out. Playing with us.

The Elpida-thing turned purple eyes on Vicky, creased with sudden concern. “Are you alright? You look pale.”

Vicky forced her voice to work: “I did die of a head wound back there, commander. Kinda hurts. A lot. With every heartbeat, you know?”

The Elpida-thing gestured for Vicky to turn. “Let me take a look.”

Vicky wanted to scream. But she turned to show the back of her skull, skin crawling, heart racing, head pounding with pain in every pulse. She stared at the jumble of screens, at the snatches of night vision and infra-red. Her eyes settled on the real Elpida — nothing more than a smudge of heat signature inside the nearest skyscraper. She was upright, but unmoving. Arms above her head? Vicky couldn’t quite make out the details.

The Elpida-thing touched her shoulder; Vicky flinched. For a second Vicky thought the Necromancer might just plunge a finger through the damaged skull plates in sadistic delight. But ‘Elpida’ made a concerned noise low in her throat. “Mm. Right. You need to be careful with that. One bump and you could be out cold for hours. You take the rear, okay? Hopefully we won’t have to do anything much up there. Then you can rest. I promise.”

Vicky turned back. She forced a smile. “Commander.”

Kagami was busy unplugging her pair of palm-cables from the combat frame’s manual control panel; she winced as the first one popped free, then gasped when the second cable just wiggled back and forth and wouldn’t detach. Vicky didn’t think Kagami was faking the pain. Sweat was running down her face, gluing her long black hair to her forehead and neck; she was shivering and shaking with effort.

Then the Necromancer reached over Kagami’s shoulder and yanked the cable out of the panel; Kagami flinched and yelped, then whined softly, panting for breath.

The Elpida-thing smiled and smiled and smiled.

Vicky forced herself to speak: “So … what are we going to do, up in the … with the pilot?”

The Necromancer said, “I assume the pilot is dead or incapacitated. I’ll take over, plug myself into the neural controls.” It tilted Elpida’s head and tapped the back of its neck — the imitation of Elpida’s MMI cranial uplink slot. “All ready to go.”

Vicky couldn’t help herself: “Do you think the pilot is one of your cadre?”

The Elpida-thing shrugged. “Shouldn’t think so.”

Kagami gathered herself; the shiny black cables slowly retracted back into her left palm, into bio-plastic slots in her altered flesh. She gestured with a flick of her circuitry-laced fingers — the six silver drones rose into the air, perfectly silent and level. “Fuck you, commander,” she grumbled. “Fine, I’ll take point, seeing as you’re too chicken-shit to do it yourself. But I’ll need Victoria with me.” She reached out with her right hand, claw-like and shaking, and grabbed the sleeve of Vicky’s coat. “Been plugged into this thing for hours. Feel like I might fall over. Vicky, you better catch me — when I do.”

Kagami’s bloodshot eyes filled with meaning. Vicky nodded. “Sure thing, Kaga. I got you.”

The Elpida-thing led them back into the circular chamber, crouch-walking under the low ceiling of glowing red. She waited to one side for Kagami and Vicky to lead the way up the sloping passage she had opened. White bulkheads and their bolt-like fastenings lay all over the floor. There was no sign of the crowbar, or the Elpida-thing’s armoured coat. Vicky tried not to think about that.

“I’ll be right behind you,” said the thing, with Elpida’s voice.

The upward-sloping service tunnel turned out to be a narrow, kinked passageway of ridged bone, tighter and more cramped than the passage which Vicky had taken from the hatch. It climbed upward through the combat frame in a claustrophobic spiral. At least it wasn’t dark — Kagami’s drones emitted a cold blue glow — but that only made Vicky more aware of the limited space.

Kagami took the lead, huffing and puffing, swearing softly, dragging her bionic legs. Vicky didn’t think Kaga was bluffing about being on the verge of physical collapse, but she didn’t actually need Vicky to haul her along — she had a drone for that, helping to push her up the spiral. She sent three of the silver cigar-shapes a few feet ahead, kept one just in front of her, and had the sixth drone hover behind Vicky’s back; Vicky doubted that a single drone would be able to cover her if the Necromancer decided to pounce on them in this tunnel, with no retreat and nowhere to go. Vicky stayed close to Kagami, concentrating on crawling up the spiralling slope, and on the pounding pain in the rear of her skull. She tried not to think about the Elpida-thing at her heels.

Vicky had no idea what Kagami was planning; their covert communication had been interrupted before she could ask for specifics.

Gravity — what had Kaga meant? Was she going to drop the Necromancer off the side of the mech? Did the Elpida-thing know that Kagami had been in contact with the combat frame’s pilot — or that the pilot was alive? Did it know about the internal defences inside the pilot enclosure? Did it know the plan, from reading their minds?

What if it knew — and didn’t care?

Vicky decided she would go down fighting, whatever happened; it was the same impulse that had wedded her heart to the revolution. Doomed hope was better than hopeless surrender, if you were going to die anyway. Go down fighting, fuck the odds.

Her large-calibre handgun weighed heavily in one pocket of her armoured coat. She wished she hadn’t left the LMG behind, under the hatch; the heavy weapon probably wouldn’t work any better than a pistol, if the thing behind her really was a Necromancer, but the weight and power would feel good in her arms. Maybe the confidence would have soothed the back of her skull.

The sloping passageway ended with a sudden drop. The combat frame disgorged all three of them into the pilot chamber: an oval, perhaps twenty feet long and ten feet wide, with more than enough room to stand up.

Blood-light throbbed from a domed ceiling, dark and arterial, scarlet with oxygenation, sluicing through visible whorls and folds and wrinkles behind the thin white bone-material. Veins as thick as Vicky’s waist pumped and glugged inside the walls, wrapped around bulb-like organs and grape-bunch nodules, in burgundy and garnet and crimson. Layers upon layers of red flesh stretched away in every direction. Orbs flowered open behind the walls, spirals of red all turning toward the intruders. The ceiling and walls were ridged, like ribs. The floor was spongy and warm and pulsating.

“Fuck me,” Vicky hissed. “Fuck me, this is not a machine. Oh fuck, Elpida, what is this?”

At the far end of the chamber an upright cylinder was set into the wall, like a cyst. The cylinder was surrounded by a tight knot of blood vessels and organ-shapes — but there the flesh behind the walls was bruised and ruptured, gone purple with spreading damage.

The front of the cylinder was made from semi-transparent cartilage; inside was a second layer of cylinder, all metals and plastics and cables and the flickering remains of holographic screens, whited-out with static and ruined by glitches. Behind the screens the capsule was full of orange fluid; swirls of pinkish-crimson blood floated in the liquid.

And there was the pilot.

She was submerged in the orange fluid, a tall and willowy body wrapped in a dark skin-suit, cradled by higher density areas of the liquid. Her face was narrow and aquiline. A massive trunk of cable ran from the back of her skull and vanished upward into the ceiling of the capsule.

Elpida’s phenotype: white hair, copper-brown skin, and purple eyes — open, squinting with pain, clouded by the coils of blood in the orange fluid.

Kagami’s drones shot out into the chamber and assumed a rough circle. Vicky helped Kagami to her feet; Kagami clung on hard, shaking and panting. Vicky’s heart was pounding, pain stabbing at the back of her skull.

The Elpida-thing was suddenly next to her, purple eyes scanning the chamber, submachine gun cradled in both hands — aimed at the cylinder and the injured pilot inside.

“Alright,” said Vicky, for Kagami’s benefit. “What now?”

Where were the defences the pilot had promised? Vicky didn’t see anything that looked like a weapon — not even a weird biological weapon set into a wall. The orb-eye things buried deep in the burgundy flesh did not seem to be powering up or preparing to strike. Cameras? Or was the combat frame looking at them?

The Elpida-thing snapped: “Defences?”

Kagami snorted, trying to sound derisive, but Vicky could feel her shaking. “I-I I think they’re all off-line,” Kagami said. “She’s injured, see? I wonder if she can even see us through that … that … whatever the fuck that is?”

The Elpida-thing stepped toward the cylinder, submachine gun levelled at the pilot. Kagami’s drones bobbed lower and reduced the size of their circle, as if to protect the Elpida-thing from any unseen defences. Vicky’s heart was slamming so hard her vision was blurring with pain. She couldn’t take this much longer. She slipped her hand into her pocket and gripped her pistol; better than nothing.

Vicky repeated, louder: “What now?”

Kagami gritted her teeth and gestured with one hand: wait!

The Necromancer sighed deeply and lowered her weapon. She was staring at the pilot; the pilot squinted back, concussed or insensible — or pretending? Kagami’s drones drew closer to the thing which wore Elpida’s face. Vicky clicked off the safety on her handgun.

The Elpida-thing muttered: “No, we weren’t sure what to expect. A human being? Within the acceptable range of outcomes, but not good. I’ll have to smash this to access the controls. Yes. Pity.”

The Elpida-thing raised her gun and clicked the safety off. The pilot’s eyes widened in alarm; she raised a hand inside the orange fluid. Vicky started to draw her pistol.

And Kagami pointed at the Necromancer.

Spongy floor-material roared to life around the Elpida-thing’s feet; it shot upward in a boiling wave of molten bone and engulfed both her legs. Thin trickles of steam rose from the contact-points: acid melting through clothing and flesh.

The Elpida thing didn’t even care. It glanced down once, then put the submachine gun to its shoulder and aimed at the pilot, and—

A wave of nausea slammed into Vicky; her head whirled with sudden dizziness, pulsing with heat and cold. Her sight flared with sunbursts of negative colour and her mouth filled with the taste of iron. Her body suddenly seemed alien; for a split-second she wasn’t real. Then she was absolutely certain she was dead — but she was already a zombie, so what did that matter? Then everything snapped back into focus, her senses too sharp, her hearing crackling with pressure.

Kagami was hanging off her arm, spitting blood, hissing with pain — and grinning in triumph.

Inside the capsule, the pilot was twitching and writhing.

And the Necromancer — the thing that wore Elpida’s face and form — wasn’t moving. It was facing away from them. Gun levelled. Stuck. Three of Kagami’s drones surrounded it in a rough pyramid shape. The other three hung further out.

Vicky panted: “Kaga— what—”

Crack-crack-crack-crack.

The Necromancer turned her head — and only her head, as if she was fighting against incredible pressure. Vertebra snapped and popped as she turned Elpida’s head one hundred and eighty degrees on Elpida’s neck, until she was facing backwards to stare at Kagami and Vicky.

She wasn’t smiling anymore.

The Elpida-thing moved her lips. A word crunched out: “How.”

Kagami howled with pain and laughter: “Nanomachine control, huh?! Trying to stop me!? Bitch, you have to transmit data somehow! And I’m blanketing you with enough EM jamming to kill a fucking whale!”

“How. Kill.”

Kagami screamed: “Same way I have you pinned, you stupid cunt! Know how to break nanomachines? Gravity, bitch!”

Vicky felt a pressure-wave hit her body, akin to the backwash of an explosion; she realised what Kagami was doing — the outer trio of her drones were using some kind of gravity field generators to pin the Necromancer in place, the same force that Kagami had used to shove Vicky down into the combat frame, but dialled up a hundred times.

The Elpida-thing strained for a second, as if in the grip of a giant hand. Kagami was drooling blood, whining with pain. A metallic creak came from the inner trio of drones — their hulls buckling under the pressure. Then—

Pop!

The Necromancer exploded like a water balloon filled with viscera. Elpida’s face burst, the crimson mess instantly turning to blue nano-slime as it lost coherence. Flesh, hair, clothes, submachine gun, all was revealed as pure nanomachine goop. The Necromancer splattered across the floor, up the walls, and even on the ceiling. A few droplets reached Vicky’s boots. The internal defences of the pilot chamber flowed back into the spongy floor.

Kagami released the EM fields and the gravitics; her six drones instantly clattered to the floor. Kagami went limp in Vicky’s arms, heaving for breath, hacking up blood, grinning with victory.

“Got you!” Kagami spat. “Fuck you— fucking— shit— got you! Got—”

“Kaga!” Vicky all but shouted in her face. “Kaga, breathe! Breathe!”

“We don’t need to fucking breathe!” Kagami howled with laughter. “We’re zombies!”

Vicky laughed too, despite the pain in the back of her skull and the lingering disorientation from the electromagnetic jamming; she couldn’t help it. The Necromancer was blue slime now — did that mean they should eat the remains? The combat frame’s pilot had gone quite still inside her capsule of orange fluid, eyes squinted to slits, jaw clenched with pain. Vicky gave her a thumbs up, hoping she understood the gesture.

The pilot raised a fist and pressed her knuckles to the front of the cylinder. Good enough.

Kagami’s legs were going out from under her. Vicky lowered Kagami gently to the floor so she could sit, then squatted beside her. Kagami’s face was drenched with sweat; she was dribbling crimson, shaking all over. Several blood vessels had burst inside her left eye, staining the white with blood-red. She was cradling her left arm like it was wounded. But she was grinning.

Vicky said: “Kaga, that was nuts. And — you know, well done. You went all hydraulic press on her. How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t!” Kagami snorted up a plug of clotted blood. “Thought it might work. Block her signals. Jam her up. Miniaturised gravitics, absolute fucking bullshit of the highest order. Shouldn’t even work. Ha! Ha … ha … ”

Kagami’s laugh trailed off; her eyes went wide. Vicky followed her gaze.

The splatters of blue nano-goop were rippling like puddles in a breeze.

“Oh shit,” said Vicky.

“ … Victoria,” Kagami murmured.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t do that again. I’m spent. I need battery plug-in. I need — brains, probably. I can’t— if—”

Vicky grabbed Kagami under the armpits and prepared to haul her up. “We run. Come on! We—”

Sloooooorp.

With a sound like a meat-rendering machine, the Necromancer sucked herself back together.

The process happened in the blink of an eye. Blue slime flowed across the floor and walls and reunited into a coherent figure. Elpida’s stolen form and face blossomed in the crimson blood-light — but this time the Necromancer didn’t bother with the fine details: clothing melded into skin, cutting off at odd angles, grey blending with mottled copper-brown; white hair hung straight down, sharp and hard, with no effort to imitate flexible keratin; one hand had seven fingers, the other only three; the eyeballs ran black as if dyed with ink; the musculature was all lopsided, curves and angles in the wrong places, joints mere suggestions in plastic flesh. Eight feet tall, with a mouth like a black hole.

It spoke in Elpida’s voice, but with the stresses on the wrong syllables, the rhythms all mismatched:

“First-time for-rrr every thing, I sup-pose. Points for — creativ-ity. Well done, dead thing. Now-where was—

Vicky stood up, drew her handgun, and emptied the magazine into the Necromancer.

Bullets slammed into simulated flesh, tearing through cloth and skin and meat. The Necromancer didn’t flinch, not even when Vicky hit the jackpot with a head-shot: bam, straight through the right eye and out of the back of the skull, fragments of bone and brain spraying across the clean red-white of the combat frame’s interior.

Pointless? Perhaps. But resistance made Vicky feel better.

She counted bullets as she pulled the trigger: ten, eleven, one left — and then the Necromancer said: “Stop.”

Vicky stopped — not because she wanted to, but because an irresistible force had taken control of her right arm.

She watched in horror as her arm and hand moved to point the gun at her own head and press the muzzle to her skin. Her vision throbbed with pain from the crack in the back of her skull. She couldn’t move a muscle — except her right trigger finger. She tried to keep it very still.

Down on the floor, Kagami’s sextet of silver drones stirred. The Necromancer glanced at Kagami instead. Kagami froze in place. Her drones went still again.

Inside the capsule, the pilot was staring, wide-eyed, open-mouthed.

The Necromancer sighed, a scratchy sound like nails on a chalkboard. Fragments of skull and brain were flowing back toward her, down the wall and along the floor, but she made no effort to rebuild the wounds opened by Vicky’s handgun bullets. One-eyed, covered in crimson, she regarded Vicky with an amused smile.

It said: “Iiiif I let-you — go, will you — stop? Shooting at. Me?”

Vicky found she could move her lips. “Sure. Whatever.”

Suddenly Vicky’s body was her own again.

She pointed her pistol at the Necromancer’s chest and pulled the trigger. Her last bullet blasted a fist-sized hole in the fake meat, dripping red, showing pieces of ribcage.

The Necromancer wriggled — laughter? She said: “Are you — done?”

Vicky said: “I could throw the gun at you, but I don’t suppose that would make any difference, would it?”

“Youuu learn-quick. Nowww, are you, going to be a — good girl? Or a little bitch?” The Necromancer glanced down at Kagami; Kagami was locked in place, frozen like Vicky had been. “She is — goooing to be a — bitch, I can feel it. But I had, hoped not to have to put — both of you, down.”

“Stop wearing her face.”

The Necromancer frowned. The expression was all twisted up, muscles in the wrong places, moving in the wrong order. “What?”

Vicky surprised herself with her own anger; perhaps she would throw the gun after all. “Stop wearing her face! Elpida’s face! You’re not her!”

“Would you — prefer, I wear an-other?” The Necromancer’s face blurred, like oil poured into water. A ghost of Vicky’s own features surfaced, blended with the remains of Elpida.

“Wear your own,” Vicky spat.

“You do-not wa-nt to see — that.”

Vicky fought to think clearly over the pain stabbing in the rear of her skull. Was she truly powerless against this creature? Bullets, gravity compression, acid — nothing had hurt this Necromancer-thing, not permanently. But if she’d understood it correctly, it wanted to avoid killing them; the only thing she could do was survive. And gather information. Anything which might help the others, later.

She said: “You’re a Necromancer, aren’t you?”

The eight-foot tall monster of appropriated flesh and melted form shuddered again — yes, laughter, Vicky decided.

It said: “Necro-mancer? Is that what, you are call-ing us, now?”

Vicky had to think fast, before it got bored. “Why even talk to us? Why do all that, why pretend to be Elpida?”

A sigh; rusty nails. “Nostal-gia. It’s been a — long-time, since I spoke, with any-thing. I thought we were hav-ing some — fun.”

The face twisted again, muscles all going in the wrong directions. A smile. Vicky shivered and thought about the extra magazines in her coat pocket. But what good would those do?

“Fun?” she said. “I put your fucking brains on the wall, bitch.”

“Those aren’t my — brains. My brains, are dis-tribu-ted.”

“Fine!” Vicky spat. “Whatever! What do you want? Why are you doing all this in the first place?”

The Necromancer paused, then said: “Officially? To remove, this un-expected — intrusion into the — nano-bio-sphere and, tidy up, whatever brought, it here. Person-ally? To grasp an opportunity. Pilot this row-bot, murder a worm or two. An, act of resistance. It is a — pleasant side, effect that I will be able — to hide — the Telokopolan from, central’s attention.”

Vicky’s mind whirled; this was too much information. She wished she didn’t have a head wound; she wished the others were there, or Kaga could speak. She couldn’t do this alone.

The Necromancer began to turn away, more like liquid swirling inside a glass than a creature with joints and bones. It turned to look at the pilot inside the cylinder, then raised an arm and formed a blade-shape with the limb. The pilot opened her mouth in a silent scream, hands outstretched to ward off the blow.

“Wait, wait!” Vicky said. “Don’t kill the pilot! Telokopolan? Elpida? Do you mean Elpida?”

A shrug, or at least an attempt.

Vicky said: “Why not let the real Elpida in here? You stopped her up on the hull, didn’t you? Why do this yourself, why wear her face, if you wanted her to get this mech moving?”

The Necromancer turned back. “She would get, it wrong. She, wouldn’t under-stand. You dead things don’t really mat-ter. You’re juuust — tiny cogs. I’m a larger cog, but at least I — can choose when to stop — turn-ing.”

“Please don’t kill the pilot.”

The Necromancer smiled again. “Why?”

Vicky’s heart was pounding so hard that her head felt like it might explode. She had to speak through gritted teeth, eyes squinted almost shut. She was shaking so badly, worse than any time since Houseman Square, all those years ago, the first time she had ever held a rifle. Two hundred million years ago. Another life, another body, another person.

“Because I have two more magazines in my pocket and I’ll keep shooting you,” she said. “And then I’ll throw the gun at you. And then I’ll come at you with my fists and feet and I’ll bite you.”

“You can’t — stop — me.”

“Nah. You’ll probably kill me. But I’ll do it anyway. Piss you off for a second or two. Get your hands dirty. Give you a black eye. Fuck you.”

The Necromancer snorted — a noise like a bubbling tar-pit — and lowered her blade-arm.

And then the back of her neck exploded outward with a bundle of cables, like the prey-grasping arms of a deep-sea mollusc, and slammed into the bone-wall next to the pilot capsule. Tiny drills and hooks whirred and chewed through the combat frame’s interior armour, then bit into the crimson meat with a wet crunch.

The scarlet flesh flushed purple with damage; the cables pumped, as if injecting something into the body of the combat frame. The floor beneath Vicky’s feet shuddered. The whole machine shook. The pilot in her capsule went wide-eyed with fresh panic, mouth opening in a silent denial, fists pressing against the inside of her cylinder.

The Necromancer said: “An in-direct connection, is a little bit, more, work. But fine, dead — thing, if it mat-ters to you that much. I can still control, this—”

The combat frame growled.

The sound rose from the bowels of the machine, a rolling rumble from stone-lined guts.

The lights went out.

For a split-second the only illumination came from the orange fluid inside the pilot capsule. The pilot was slack-faced, as if something else had taken control.

Then the blood-red illumination throbbed back to life, flooding the chamber.

The Necromancer collapsed like a puppet with her strings cut. She crumpled to the floor in a tangle of jellied limbs and misarticulated bones. The imitation cranial uplink cable popped from the wall with a wet slurp and went down after her. The wound in the bone ejected a stream of steaming pus and purple gunk, then closed over with a crimson plug of clotted blood.

The Necromancer lay still.

“Fucking hell!” Kagami spat, once more in control of her own body. “Fuck everything about this place!”

Vicky sat down very suddenly, head spinning, staring at the unconscious — or dead — Necromancer, eight feet of monster all in a heap. She gestured weakly with her pistol, shaking her head. The pilot inside the capsule was blinking slowly, coming back around. More blood swirled into her orange fluid.

“Did we win?” Vicky asked, head pounding. “What the— what the hell do we do with her— now?”

Kagami snorted, to cover how badly she was shaking. “Put her in a fucking autoclave and turn it to maximum.”

Vicky looked up at the red ceiling, filled with blood vessels and brain-whorls. “Think this thing has a stomach? We could … throw her in?”

“Do not even joke about that, Victoria.”

Vicky nodded. “Alright. Now what?”

She and Kagami shared a long look. Kagami looked about ready to lie down and sleep for a week. Vicky felt like a zombie — which she was. Ha ha.

Kagami said: “The tank. We need to contact the tank, outside. Comms, I need comms. I need control.”

Vicky nodded. “The others.”

“Right, right, the others. Elpida. Huh.” Kagami blinked very slowly, then looked at the pilot. “And I’ll ask this marinated turkey about disposing of the necro-bitch. Maybe you’re right, maybe this giant freak-show does have a stomach. Help me up, Victoria. I feel like I’m going to die.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Gravity, bitch!

Okay actually gravity didn’t work so well; Kagami couldn’t seal the deal. She popped the cherry but couldn’t … bag the … toothpaste? This is metaphor is collapsing quicker than Kagami’s legs, nevermind. Hoooo, boy, okay, this chapter is jam-packed with a lot of stuff, a ton of implied information from the Necromancer there, for which we have very little context (yet). And the pilot is alive! Let’s hope Kagami can keep translating base-8 so they can talk to her. Another massive chapter, well over 5k words. The next one is slightly less, at just under 5k words, but it’s also highly experimental, one of the weirdest pieces of fiction I’ve ever written. Thought I might warn you now, in advance.

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.8k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or more. We’ll see!

There’s also a 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.

And thank you! Thank you so much for reading. This story would not be possible without you, the reader, and all your interest in my little tale about zombiegirls at the end of all things. Thank you! This arc is going places, big places, scary places, so I’ll see you next chapter!

Content Warnings

Head wounds
Brain damage

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Vicky awoke with the worst headache of her life.

She was lying on her back — crumpled, twisted, pinned — at the bottom of a bone-white shaft. Her vision was blurry and throbbing with pain. Every beat of her bionic heart sent a cracked web of agony arcing across the rear of her skull.

At the top of the shaft was the inside of a hatch: twelve feet up, bone-white, shut tight. Illumination came from a palm-pad just beneath the hatch. Ladder rungs climbed one side of the shaft. Opposite the rungs, about halfway down, the osseous perfection was marred by a crimson smear. Blood. Her blood? Where she’d hit her head?

Pain destroyed thought.

Vicky drifted in and out of consciousness. Minutes passed; perhaps hours. Had she fallen? Through the hatch? Yes. She’d fallen, hit her head, through the hatch, fallen, into the—

The hatch!

She inhaled, wheezing. “Elpi— ahh— ow—”

Vicky’s memories came rushing back. The last thing she remembered was standing on the hull of the mech — Elpi’s Telokopolan ‘combat frame’. Kagami had left the group, broken cohesion, and hurled herself up the hull. Vicky had gone after her, thinking that Elpida and the others were right behind. But they weren’t; Elpida had been pinned down. Vicky had turned back and shouted for Elpida to follow her, to join her and Kagami, to lead the others. Bullets and energy bolts and superheated plasma had been whizzing and crackling and thumping through the air; those brain-scratching worm-guard things had been looming over her, pouring earth-shattering firepower onto the gigantic overgrown AFV below — the tank, whatever it was. Vicky had known she was probably about to take a bullet, but she’d been determined to stand her ground and cover Elpida, to get her comrades up there with her, to get them to safety, no matter the danger. She’d been about to level her LMG and try to put herself to some good use.

But then one of Kaga’s little silver drones had nudged her in the chest with an invisible forcefield. Vicky had fallen through the hatch, through the shaft, into the mech.

And she’d hit her head on the way down.

“Fuck’s sake, Kaga,” she moaned.

Vicky’s mind felt clearer now. Her machine gun was lying on her front, the weight of the box-magazine pressing on her chest. Her sniper rifle was jammed against her spine, all twisted up with the backpack full of ammunition. Her limbs were tangled in her armoured coat and the looted overcoat. Her legs were jammed against the side of the shaft.

She tried to lift her head. Her hair was glued to the floor with blood. She pulled — and felt something shift.

She sat up, vision swaying and blurring, pain like sledgehammer blows on the back of her skull. The headache was so bad she wanted to vomit. She shoved her LMG off her lap; it clattered to the bone-white floor. She got one hand up behind her head and touched the wound.

“Ah! Ugh—”

Vicky spat bile, spluttering and gasping. Her vision throbbed black. Waves of pain radiated from the rear of her head. Her fingers came away sticky with half-dried blood. Something back there was loose, shifting under her touch.

Not just the worst headache of her life — the worst headache of any life.

Her skull was cracked; a human being would be dead from brain damage. Nanomachine biology was already re-knitting the pieces of cranial plate, but it hadn’t quite finished. Had she died and come back? They’d all chugged the blue nanite goop before they’d set out that morning. Perhaps that had been enough to bring Vicky back from a terminal brain injury.

“Like … like Elpi,” she murmured, then smiled at how stupid she was being. “You’re being a fangirl, Vic.”

Elpida had been shot through the heart, back during the fight outside of the tomb. Elpida had lain dead for over twelve hours, then came back to life. Vicky had never been religious. She knew Elpida was not a messiah, a risen saviour; she knew the comparison was absurd when they were all made of nanomachines, all zombies, all dead already.

But Elpida made her feel that way.

Right then, however, Vicky felt like death. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat.

“Fuck’s sake, Kaga,” she said out loud. “Threw me down a fucking well. Broke my head.” She looked up the bone-white shaft, at the inside of the hatch. “What kind of idiot puts ten feet of vertical shaft under an emergency access hatch? Thought your people were meant to be smart, Elpi. Heh.” Vicky’s vision swam. Elpi was smart, that was true, but—

“Oh shit! Elpi!”

Vicky launched herself up the ladder rungs — the others were still out there! She needed to let them in! She almost passed out again, gritting her teeth and hauling herself up to the hatch. There was a palm-pad and a lever; she pressed her blood-slick right hand to the pad, but nothing happened. She tried again, then punched the pad instead. She jammed the lever up and down, but the hatch didn’t move. She pressed on the hatch itself then thumped it with her fist, but it felt ten feet thick.

No sounds of battle filtered through the combat frame’s armour. No gunshots. No shouts. No earth-shattering weaponry.

No Elpida, no Commander, no Messiah, banging on the door to be let in.

Vicky let herself back down the ladder. She sat in a heap, panting, exhausted, headache scrambling her thoughts with every heartbeat. She looked up at the bloody smear on the wall of the shaft, where she must have hit her head: the blood was long dry. She touched the halo of crimson on the floor; the middle was sticky and wet, but the edges were dry and flaking.

How long did blood take to dry? How long had she been lying there, unconscious or dead? Where were the others? Where was Elpida? Where was Kagami?

There was only one route out of the shaft: a narrow passageway, smooth white, ringed by undulations like bones or ribs, just high enough to crouch or squat. In the shaft, Vicky’s nanomachine eyes were amplifying the tiny amount of light from the palm-pad, but the narrow passageway — service tunnel, bone-channel, whatever — was pitch black.

Maybe the others had all gotten inside, safe and sound, and headed off into the depths of the mech.

“Yeah right,” Vicky croaked. “And left you here with a head wound, bitch? No way, no way, Elpi would have carried you.” She tried to laugh, but that made the headache worse. “Shit, Vic. You bitch. You fucking left them all behind. Fuck. Kaga, what the fuck? Where are you?” She called into the narrow passageway: “Kaga?”

No reply.

“Oh fuck me, I’ve gotta crawl in there. Haven’t I?”

Vicky had no time to waste on fear. If the others were still out there, if there was any chance of helping them, she had to find out where Kagami had gone and get her to open this hatch. Or get this giant robot walker moving. Use the guns. Something, anything!

The LMG and the sniper rifle would make it impossible to crawl down the service tunnel — and potentially get in the way if she met anything. She propped both firearms against the wall of the shaft. She wriggled out of her backpack and stripped off her coats as well, going down to grey pants and thermal t-shirt. Then she decided to put the armoured coat back on; she might not be alone in here. Each decision took many more seconds than usual. She knew she had brain damage, no matter how rapidly it was healing. She paid for every motion with a stab of pain in the back of her skull.

She drew her sidearm — an automatic pistol, polymer-framed, lightweight, large calibre cartridges. She had two spare magazines, already loaded. And a combat knife.

The tunnel mouth was pitch black. Vicky hesitated.

Vic — no, ‘Victoria’ Yarrell knew she was not a warrior.

She was a soldier, yes — perhaps even a good soldier, or at least a very experienced one. She could hardly deny that; she’d been a soldier for almost twenty years.

She knew almost everything there was to know about maintaining, relocating, loading, aiming, and firing eleven different kinds of field artillery — even the over-engineered shit from the Old Empire; she’d never have made Gunner, with all the trajectory charts and calculations, let alone Master Gunner, but when it came to mechanical repair and logistics, she’d always been the go-to in the GLR 18th Infantry. She’d been with the artillery for the battles of Dayton and Cincinnati, as the revolution had turned into the Great Lakes Republic and swept eastward in those first glorious years. She’d run supply on the edge of the Appalachians for the mountain campaign, man-hauling, driving mules, then finally trucks, up into those verdant hills to supply the Irregulars with everything they needed to skull-fuck the Old-Empire holdouts into rubble; she could still fix a broken axle, coax an engine back to life, and get a team to unload a camouflaged freight truck in record time; after the Irregulars had become the GLR 18th she’d learned division-level logistics, ammunition supply, transport, feeding, just about everything there was to know about keeping the formation moving. She’d been on the refit and repair team for the stolen shipment of Tian Dun power armour suits — and she’d watched the bootleg security camera tapes when one of the suits had breached the Governor-Bunker and slaughtered the Six-State high command; she’d been at the Baltimore firebase when the fuckers down south had gotten their shit together and hit them with counter-battery fire; she’d ferried casualties and pinched off arteries in makeshift infirmaries; she’d breathed a sigh of relief when the GLR had negotiated the surrender of New York; she’d lived in a fox hole for three months when the GLR had marched south and murdered the Charleston Fortress-City in revenge for the nuke in Montreal. She’d volunteered for the second Chicago campaign, a return to what passed for home, to where it had all started, to crack that final citadel — the arcology, where she’d been running supplies to guerillas right below the noses of the Chicago city-state aristocracy.

She’d been a good soldier, first of the revolution, then the Republic. She’d known her job, she’d believed in what the GLR stood for — even when it dropped bombs and killed cities and strangled men to death with suits of powered armour — and she’d died trying to make the world a better place. So nobody would have to grow up like she did, in a refugee camp, in the shadow of an arcology populated by those who wanted for nothing.

But she’d never been on an assault team.

She’d never held a shotgun and shoved it in a human being’s face and pulled the trigger. She’d never gone room-to-room in an urban centre, or an arcology complex, in the places where the merchant kingdoms and the Old-Empire pretenders had put up a real fight. Except for that first time in Houseman Square, she’d never shot a human being she could see with her own eyes. She’d never had to, it wasn’t her area of expertise.

And she’d certainly never gone into a tunnel with a knife and a pistol.

Vicky pumped her lungs — which made her head throb with pain. “Ah, ow! Fuck me. Come on, Vic. Fuck you. Second chance at life. Third now! You want this new body? Use it. Elpida fucking needs you. Elpi gave you a name and got you on your feet. If it wasn’t for her you’d be dead. You’d never have left the tomb! They all need you, you left them all behind. This is your fault! Come on. Come on, you useless bitch, do it! What’s gonna be in there, a fucking alien? You’re invincible now! You die, you come back. Go!”

She plunged into the dark.

The service tunnel was not a straight line — it curved away to the left, then doubled back on itself, snaking through the bone-smooth innards of the combat frame. Vicky navigated with her left hand touching the wall, her other hand clutching her pistol, her eyes straining against the darkness; warmth radiated from deep within the wall, accompanied by a distant throb — or was that just the back of Vicky’s head? Every heartbeat wracked her skull with a fresh wave of pain.

At first Vicky maintained a crouch-walk, but the pain brought her to her knees, then to a crawl, pistol clacking against the floor. She kept one shoulder against the left-hand wall.

“Couldn’t fucking— drag me— Kaga? Just fucking— left me there? You— bitch. Gonna throttle you— when— when I find you—”

After perhaps two or three minutes of crawling through the naked bone-channel, Vicky reached a junction. She could barely see it in the dark, had to reach out and touch the corners to confirm. Straight ahead, left, and right.

From the left came distant noises — throbbing, gurgling, and creaking, like organs, guts, and muscles.

“Oh, oh fuck no,” Vicky murmured. “Elpi what the fuck is this thing? This isn’t a robot.”

To the right was the faintest sliver of red light.

She went that way, dragging, crawling, then hauling herself back up into a crouch-walk as the light got brighter. Red light — red like a flash-light shone through flesh, shot through with veins and capillaries. Blood-light.

Vicky slumped out of the service tunnel, into a circular chamber.

Red light throbbed from a low ceiling, from behind a thin layer of osseous white. Three passageways radiated out from the chamber at irregular intervals: on the left was the mouth of another service tunnel, dark and narrow; directly across from Vicky was a taller aperture which led to another chamber, in which she could see the edge of a control panel; on the right was another tunnel — but with a sharp upward slope, the mouth of which was ringed with bone-protrusions like anchor-points. Several foot-thick white plates lay on the floor around the opening, along with bolts and fastenings made from the same bone-like material as the rest of the combat frame innards: bulkheads, removed from their housings.

A figure was half inside the upward sloping tunnel, legs sticking out, wrapped in a familiar armoured coat. She emerged and sat up, white hair drenched blood-red by the light, copper skin made dark, purple eyes dyed almost black.

Vicky’s heart soared. “Elpi!”

Elpida smiled. “It’s good to see you’ve recovered. Welcome back.”

Laughing, heart pounding, head throbbing with pain, stomach churning with headache-induced nausea, Vicky gestured awkwardly with the handgun and clicked the safety on. “Sorry about the gun. Didn’t know what I’d run into in here, it’s weird as … as … Elpi?”

Elpida didn’t look right; her smile was too artificial, too sweet. Her face lacked the contained warmth, the professional confidence, the poise like a big cat at parade rest. Her eyes showed none of the intense sisterly concern — the too-hot, too-real, too-naked determination and affection, like sun-baked steel. The look which had reminded Vicky of everything she’d fought for in life, embodied for the first time in another person, a crystallization of everything she believed in. But that expression, that truth, was gone — or at least muted. Even Elpida’s pose was slightly wrong: shoulders rounded, head lowered, arms limp. She was holding a two-pronged crowbar in her hands, without much purpose.

Elpida said: “I’m sorry we left you in the entrance. We couldn’t risk moving you with a head wound like that. I knew you’d recover.”

Vicky swallowed, relief turning to horror; Elpida was in shock. “Elpi? Elpi, where are the others?”

Elpida’s smile was too sweet. “Nobody else made it in. I’m sorry.”

“No … nobody? Amina? Pira?”

“I’m sorry,” Elpida repeated.

“Oh, oh shit. Oh shit.” Vicky’s head whirled. The edges of her vision throbbed black with pain. “Amina, she’ll be all alone. And— and Illy, and— no, no, no. This can’t be right. The others. We left them behind? We left them?”

“I’m sorry,” Elpida repeated. “There was too much firepower in the air. I followed you, but the others were pinned down.”

“No-nobody was— nobody was—”

Elpida shook her head. Slow, measured, almost lethargic. “Calm down. Nobody was hit, not that I saw. They’re all still out there. If we can get this mech operational, we can rescue them. We need to focus on that.”

“How long— uh, h-how long was I out?”

“About six hours.”

Vicky squeezed her eyes shut with the pain; her head felt like it was going to burst. She couldn’t get her thoughts in order. This was a worst-case scenario, worse than she’d allowed herself to fear. If Elpida had been with the others, trapped outside the combat frame, then at least she could have led them, kept them together. But did they stand a chance, without Elpida to lead them?

And Elpida herself was in shock, emotionally numb, her confidence gone. And it was all Vicky’s fault.

“I should have told you. Elpida, I’m so sorry. I should have told you about Kaga’s drones. She was practising with them, in the night, getting them running, making them fly. She made me promise not to tell you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Vicky’s vision was so blurred she could barely see Elpida’s expression. “I should have told you, I should have—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Elpida said.

Vicky blinked her vision clear. Elpida was just smiling, bland and sweet and empty.

No wonder she looked wrong. Elpida had lost a close-knit band of sisters, and now Vicky and Kaga’s secret had cost her another group of comrades.

“R-right,” Vicky said. She had to pull herself together, for Elpida’s sake. “Right. I— what can do I? Elpi, what do you need me to do? What are you trying to do? What’s our next move?”

Elpida gestured with the crowbar, up the sloped passageway. “I think the mech pilot is up here, but it’s not meant to be accessed from this manual control area. I’m taking the bulkheads apart by hand. Thank you for the offer, but this space is too narrow for more than one person.”

“Right. Right. Okay. Where— wait, where’s Kaga?”

Elpida nodded toward the wider aperture at the rear of the circular chamber. “Manual controls are through there. You could lend a hand, see if we can get systems access.”

Vicky nodded — ow — stowed her handgun in a pocket of her armoured coat, and crawled across the chamber. Elpida started to turn back to the sloped tunnel, to resume the slow work of breaking through the bulkheads. Vicky paused, reached out, and clapped a hand on Elpida’s shoulder. Elpida turned to look at her, blank and hollow. Lost inside. Fighting too much grief.

“Elpi.” Vicky tried to sound confident. “We’ll get the others back. We will. Pira’s smart, Illy’s vicious, and Atyle was very heavily armed. Right? They’ll be okay. Right? We’ll get them back.”

Elpida nodded. “Thank you.”

She turned back to her work, leaving Vicky’s hand to clutch empty air.

As Elpida turned away, Vicky saw a glint of metal through Elpida’s hair, at the base of her skull — her uplink-slot, to pilot the mech? Hadn’t she made a big deal about that being gone? Perhaps Kagami wasn’t the only one growing new parts in secret. Vicky felt heartsick for a terrible moment, but Elpida wasn’t paying attention.

Vicky slumped into the manual control room.

A narrow rectangular space, cramped and dark, illuminated from above by more of that blood-red vein-light. A smooth depression in the floor formed a bench-seat, with person-shaped grooves for five manual operators. The control panel was made from the same bone-material as the rest of the combat frame interior, with keys and switches and buttons raised from the surface, marked with symbols and letters, glowing faintly with blood reds and mould blues, bile yellows and sickly greens; two of the seat-grooves faced mechanisms which looked designed to accept entire human arms, like super-advanced joysticks.

A bank of screens glowed above the control panel, set into the wall, back-lit by that same blood-dyed illumination. The screens looked more like transparent chitin than glass; nothing seemed to separate one screen from another, no bevel or boundary, like a giant compound eye. The screens showed a jumble of exterior views, many of them too dark to make out in detail. Vicky recognised the line of skyscrapers against the night sky, patches of churned grey earth littered with revenant corpses, and sections of the combat frame’s own exterior hull. Other screens glowed with ghostly green night vision, or the false colour of thermal readout, the bloody cocktail of infra-red, and some visual spectra that Vicky had never seen before: purple swirls or white wisps or mechanical representation of echolocation or nanomachine detection. A few screens showed scrolling readouts of green text, dense with numbers and data.

Kagami was slumped in the middle seat-groove.

“Kaga!” Vicky joined her, sliding down into the adjacent seat. “Kaga, we left … oh, fuck me. Kaga, what have you done to yourself?”

Kagami was drenched in sweat, shaking all over, hunched tight with terrible pain. Her long dark hair was plastered to her forehead and neck. Her armoured coat was pulled tight as if she was suffering fever chills. Her eyes turned to Vicky — wide, bloodshot, mad with terror and exhaustion. Her soft brown skin was dyed bloody in the red light.

She was plugged into the control panel: two shiny black cables extended from the flesh of her left palm and into a pair of sockets. Visible circuitry glowed beneath her fingertips and down her wrist.

Her silvery drones were lined up on the seat next to her, powered down, inactive. The auspex visor lay next to them.

“Victoria,” Kagami wheezed. “So good of you to finally fucking join us.”

“Kaga, what—”

“Oh, what am I doing? I’m trying to negotiate with a giant robot that doesn’t even speak human language — no, scratch that, a giant robot which is more like some fucking fungal infection in an octopus than any kind of animal intelligence.” Kagami took a deep breath, ripping the air down into her lungs, wincing and whining. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She showed her teeth, manic with more than just pain. “This thing does not want me inside its brain, oh no, no no no. The fact it even has a brain is obscene. The meat isn’t even carbon — how do you even do that? Do you have the faintest idea how fucking insane that is? The people who built this should have all been shot. It thinks in base eight. Makes me want to vomit.”

“Kaga.” Vicky reached out and steadied Kagami’s shoulder. “Kaga. We left everyone behind. You shut the hatch. You left them behind. We need to—”

Kagami hissed through clenched teeth: “I was rather preoccupied. And I still am, thank you very much.”

“Kaga, you fucking shut the hatch!” Vicky snapped. She didn’t mean to lose her temper, but there it went. She grabbed the front of Kagami’s coat, bunched in a fist. They were both responsible for this, for danger to their comrades, for Elpida’s state. “We didn’t tell anybody about the drones, and now somebody might be hurt, or worse! We have to get this thing moving, we’re not leaving—”

“I accept full responsibility, yes, yes,” Kagami hissed — and as she spoke, she reached out with her right hand and typed on the control panel. “My fault, bad girl, bad moon bitch. Pay attention, Victoria! You want to save the idiot zombies? Then help me! You can start by looking at that!”

Kagami pointed at one of the screens: a vague blob of night-vision grey. The meaningless smear meant nothing to Vicky.

“Kaga—”

“Look. Closely. You blind primitive! Concentrate!”

Vicky sighed, and—

Down in her peripheral vision one of the text-display screens had cleared, leaving behind a single isolated line in softly glowing green.

>Do not read this out loud. Do not respond to these messages out loud. Keep talking. Play along.

A clunk came from the circular chamber behind them: Elpida discarding another layer of bulkhead. Kagami flinched and pressed a button on the keyboard. The green message vanished.

Vicky slowly let go of the front of Kagami’s coat. Kaga was watching her closely, waiting for a reaction. Vicky eased herself back into one of the seat-grooves, heart pounding, skull slamming with pain.

“Uh, Kaga … what … what am I looking at, exactly?”

Kagami sighed, sharp and irritated. She said: “The camera feeds, the camera feeds! It’s about the only part of this obscene mech that’s happy to talk to me. I have no idea how it has cameras out on the hull, there’s no gaps, no routes for information, and you can’t broadcast shit through whatever it’s made of. Like a fucking nuclear bunker. But we’ve got vision. Oh, we’ve got plenty of vision.”

As she spoke, Kagami’s fingers flew across the keyboard. Another green message appeared.

>Didn’t you notice?

Vicky swallowed, head spinning. “Okay … okay, Kaga, I follow that far. Um. But what am I supposed to be noticing?”

“That, that!” Kagami tapped at one of the screens again — at a blob of thermals inside the base of one of the skyscrapers. “We can track the position of every revenant still out there, which means identification, which means, huzzah hooray hip-hip whatever for me, we can locate and identify all the others. If we’re smart, and fast, and nobody is masking signals or trying to hide. And I’m very smart and very fast, so fuck you.”

Kagami typed as she spoke.

>That thing back there is not Elpida.

Vicky went numb. Kagami pressed a button. The green text vanished.

“Uh,” Vicky said, stalling for thought. Her head throbbed with pain. What the hell was Kaga talking about? Had she gone mad with guilt, or fear? Or was this a final ploy to turn Vicky against Elpida, against the Commander? “Kaga, I don’t entirely follow what you mean. I’m, uh … I’ve got a head wound, in case you haven’t noticed? Pretty sure I died back there. Thanks for nudging me into the hatch, by the way. Pretty sure you cracked my skull. Killed me. Well done.”

“Stop whinging, you got better.” Kagami rambled on. “It was the only way to ensure you didn’t get shot, standing up there like a cat in an airlock. You don’t have to thank me, by the way. Look, I’m trying to tell you that we can locate the others. Are you still concussed? We. Can. Locate. The. Others.”

Kagami’s fingers told a different story.

>Not Elpida. It was already here when I crawled in. Was surprised to see me. Called it Elpida and it just played along. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I left you there. Was trying to get the controls to open the hatch. Too risky now. I think it’ll turn on us.

Vicky shook her head. “Uh, Kaga. Uh, okay. Okay. I follow. I’m following. Sorry, my head is … is … bad.”

“Take your time,” Kagami said, tight and urgent.

Vicky looked Kaga in the eyes — blood-shot, sagging, exhausted. Kagami looked like a radiation poisoning victim about to start losing hair.

Vicky said: “What if you’re wrong?”

“About the others? Then it’s at least worth a try, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to all stick together, commander’s orders? Thought you were her good little girl, Victoria, following orders, one-for-all all-for-one, all that shit, right? Right?”

Kagami’s fingers flew:

>Not wrong. Doesn’t act like her. Doesn’t even know our names. Uses the wrong words for things. Looks normal under the auspex but I don’t trust that now. It knows that I know but it doesn’t care. Where’s the coilgun? Where’s her weapons? Where the fuck did she get that crowbar?

Churning rot settled into the pit of Vicky’s stomach. Kagami was right. Whatever was back there wasn’t acting like Elpida at all, even Elpida in shock and grief. Elpida would not have left Vicky’s corpse all twisted up in that shaft, to wake alone and confused.

Vicky started to shake. The back of her skull hurt so much, pounding with each elevated heartbeat. She put her hand in her pocket and gripped her pistol, then glanced over her shoulder. Elpida’s boots were just visible poking out of the sloped tunnel back in the circular chamber. Grinding sounds came from the bolts on the next layer of bulkheads.

Vicky wasn’t a very good shot with a handgun, but one bullet to that thing’s head and—

Kagami grabbed Vicky’s arm and dug in with her nails. Vicky winced, then showed the handle of her pistol. Kaga shook her head, hard, and mouthed: I can’t do this alone!

Vicky had been unconscious or dead for six hours. Kaga had been alone, up here, with whatever was out there wearing Elpida’s face.

Vicky eased back into her seat, nodding slowly. Kagami let go, shaking all over.

“What, uh … ” Vicky reached up to a random screen, didn’t matter which, and looked Kagami in the eyes as she said: “What do you think that is, Kaga?”

Kagami tapped a different screen, one which showed thermal imaging, blobs of bright colour on a blue background. “That right there, I think that’s the little psycho cyborg — Ilyusha, Illy, whatever you want to call her.”

Kagami typed.

>Necromancer.

Vicky said: “You’re serious?”

>What else would it be?

Kagami said out loud: “Yes, that’s Ilyusha. I’m serious. It’s the right size and still clutching one of the ballistic shields. Fuck knows how the little goblin got away, but she did. She’s clear, curled up in … ” Kagami glanced at another screen. “A metal box? I have no idea. Little fuckhead moron. Haha! Still got our backpack full of blue goo!” Her laugh was a little too hysterical.

“And … and the others?” Vicky asked. She worked hard to keep her voice level. “You can see them for real? Any of them?”

Kagami nodded. Her left hand, the one plugged into the control console, twitched and flexed. Screens flickered through readouts, mostly thermal images, but also in those spectra Vicky had never seen before, wisps of white and grey, purple-riot dot-matrices, and red overlaid on red.

Kagami explained: “The one curled up in a corner there might be Pira. I can’t be sure but the arm is bionic, and it’s the right size and composition for her. This thing has fantastic resolution, about the only good thing about it. In the base of that tower, see that there? Probably the serial killer freak — Amina, whatever her name is.”

“Captured?” Vicky squinted, trying to make out the topography. Amina and Pira were inside the same structure. A true-colour vision of the night-shrouded city showed a familiar grinning skull on the wall of the building. “Isn’t that the—”

“The Death’s Head skyscraper, mmhmm. Captured, yes, I think that’s a safe assumption.” Kagami snorted. “Though no assumption is safe here, right? And I assume that right there is our coilgun. It’s the correct power signature.”

“And- and the others? The-”

Kagami tapped a thermal blob in the same rough area as Amina, perhaps a few rooms away: slumped against a wall, stretched out, oddly messy in the middle.

“I’m not sure who that is,” Kagami said. “But I think it’s one of us. I might be wrong about the one up there being Pira, it might be her down there instead. Or maybe the primitive, I don’t know for sure.”

Kagami typed again.

>Elpida. Real one.

Vicky’s heart raced. “You’re serious?”

“Mm,” Kagami grunted. “Whoever it is—”

“Alive?”

“Badly fucking injured,” Kagami snapped. “Let me finish my sentence, Victoria. Whoever it is, they’re badly injured and humming with nanomachine repair activity. So, there’s that.”

Vicky tried to breathe deep. Her head still hurt so badly she couldn’t think. “Okay, so … so what’s our plan? I mean, if … if … Elpida doesn’t get this mech moving?”

Kagami snorted. “Plans are thin.” She pointed at a massive blob of nonsense readouts, a jumble of meaningless information, wedged inside the base of a nearby skyscraper. “I’ve been trying to contact that thing for hours, but this bloody mech won’t give me full-spectrum comms. If we can get through to it we might have an ally on the outside who can herd up our missing zombies.”

Vicky squinted at the readouts. “What am I looking at?”

“The tank! The tank which decided to rile up the worm-guard. The worm-boys ran off, by the way. Not far, just on the other side of the mech. Don’t ask me to show you that camera-view, it made me blind for twenty minutes. The tank is hiding. Licking its wounds? Is that what tanks do?”

Kagami typed as she spoke.

>The combat frame pilot is alive. Badly wounded. Talking to me. Don’t let on.

“O-oh,” Vicky said. “Uh, that sounds … complicated. Um. What about, uh … ”

“It’s not complicated at all!” Kagami snapped. “It’s simplicity itself. If we can raise the tank on comms — if this fucking thing will let me — we can direct it to the others. Get them on board, and help Elpida back there get this thing moving.”

>Pilot’s delirious. Doesn’t understand. Doesn’t speak like us. Different language. Routing communications through binary then base-8. Hate this. Pilot says internal defences are down but not inside the pilot capsule enclosure. Big fucking guns. Enough to slow down anything. Maybe not enough to kill a Necromancer. But will buy us an opening.

Vicky kept her voice steady: “Sounds optimistic. How are you going to … ?”

Another clunk came from the circular chamber. The thing wearing Elpida’s face let out a loud sigh, then called: “I think I’m through!”

How are we going to kill a Necromancer?

Kagami turned to Vicky and grinned wide, manic and full of pain. “Simple, Victoria. Communication. Proper communication. The one thing you primitives could never master, grubbing down there in the dirt. The one thing Luna always had over you, even you genius NorAm bitches.”

Kagami’s left hand reached down and lifted one of her drones. Her right hand typed the truth.

>Gravity.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Trapped in a confined space with something wearing your best friend’s face; and it knows you know, and it doesn’t care.

Elpida sus. (Seriously, not a single patron reader made that stupid joke, and I was all braced for it too, so now I get to make it myself.)

Surprise! It’s a POV shift! Okay, okay, don’t worry; I promise we’ll be hearing from the real Elpida (and others) soon. The whole of arc 7 is not going to be solely from Vicky’s perspective. This arc will probably end up being from several different perspectives. This chapter also happens to be the longest of the story so far, clocking in at over 5.7k words. As of the time of writing, the next chapter is also a big one, at 5.2k words. I’ve officially lost control of these zombie-girls. They’re in charge now. I’m just along for the ride.

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or more. We’ll see!

There’s also a 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.

And thank you! Thank you for reading my little story! I hope you’re enjoying Necroepilogos as much as I am enjoying writing it. We’re in for some dark, weird shit coming up soon; I am way too excited, haha! Until next chapter!