Content Warnings
Starvation, again.
Elpida was crouch-walking down the capillary tunnel inside the combat frame, moving as fast as she could in the narrow, lightless, bone-smooth passageway. She had one hand on the wall for navigation, her submachine gun strapped inside her coat, and Hafina bringing up the rear.
She and Haf had left their cloaks and boots behind in the tiny shaft beneath the access hatch, bundled up next to the weapons they’d discovered — Vicky’s rifle and the LMG. The garments were heavy and sticky with grey mud from long hours of belly-crawling across the impact crater; the cloaks from Pheiri’s storage racks had served their dual purpose well, both as an extra layer of visual concealment and as a barrier to absorb the worst of the waterlogged muck. Elpida’s trousers and armoured coat were dry and almost clean by comparison. But even unencumbered by shoes and cloak and mud, Elpida felt slower than usual. When they’d wriggled into the capillary tunnel Elpida had to crouch and duck, which compressed the lingering pain of her gut wound, pulling on the stitches which were still holding her belly shut. Haf had wordlessly folded up her limbs and crawled inside, with no more difficulty than a spider slipping down a paper straw.
Elpida’s heart had blossomed with painful nostalgia the moment her fingers had touched the perfectly smooth nano-composite bone of the capillary tunnel. She was back inside a combat frame at last; she longed to lie down in the dark and press her face to the wall, even though she had never known this particular frame. Pheiri was her brother, a fellow child of Telokopolis no matter how distant in time, and she did not spurn the safety of his sanctuary, not even in a stray thought — but he was not this, he was not the missing component of her own body.
Howl grunted in the back of Elpida’s head: Lie down later, Elps. Keep moving.
I know. No rest for the dead.
Ha!
Elpida opened her mouth to call out down the passageway, hoping for Vicky or Kagami to lead them in; radio contact would not work within the hull, so she had already stowed the comms headset inside her armoured coat.
But then somebody screamed.
The sound came from up ahead, echoing down the smooth curve of the tunnel, lost in a labyrinth of sinusal caves. She could not tell if it was Kagami or Vicky; the scream was muffled by the chorus of intestinal gurgling and muscular creaking from deeper within the living guts of the combat frame.
Elpida called out: “Vic—”
Thump! Thump-crack! echoed down the tunnel, followed by the meaty clatter of a body hitting the floor.
“Vicky!” Elpida shouted into the pitch black in front of her eyes. “Kagami! Respond!”
A reply floated out of the womb-like darkness. Vicky, shrill with panic: “Here! Elpi, we’re in here! Right at the crossroads! Go right!”
Elpida hit a junction in the capillary tunnel — the wall ended, her hand met empty air. “Halt,” she hissed to Hafina. She reached out and touched the corners to confirm she was in a cross-junction, then followed Vicky’s directions and looked to the right. Faint red light glowed from around another curve of passageway.
Howl sighed with pleasure: Fuuuuck yes. Sight for sore eyes, yeah?
The scarlet and crimson of combat frame biology, the interior body-light of a living frame, calling her to safety and home.
Elpida hissed over her shoulder: “Haf, turn right at this junction. Follow the red light. Be ready.”
“Yup yup yuuuup,” Hafina confirmed, her voice muffled by mask and tunnel.
Elpida turned and hurried onward. She called out again: “Vicky! Vicky, are we clear to enter?”
“Y-yes! Yes, I think so! Yes!”
Kagami’s voice joined her, raw and ragged: “Fucking get in here, Commander! Right now!”
Elpida shouted: “Hostiles?”
Vicky stammered: “N-no! Uh, yes! Yes! I think!”
Elpida took the grip of her submachine gun and flicked the safety off. She hissed to Hafina: “Check your targets. That’s our friends in there.”
“Mmmmmmmhmmmmm!” Hafina purred. “No worries, boss lady.”
Elpida burst from the mouth of the capillary tunnel and into a welcoming waterfall of blood-red light.
She straightened up, raised her weapon, and stepped to one side to clear the tunnel mouth.
She found herself inside the main human-habitable chamber of the combat frame. The space was oddly bare — no crash webbing, no padded sleeping caskets, no storage modules, no weapon rack, no MMI-uplink hub, nothing which might be needed during an extended expedition out into the green, nothing but bare walls and the mess of bulkheads and bolts on the floor. But she felt the rush of nostalgic longing all the same, the familiarity and comfort of a place like those she had known inside and out, as close as any of her cadre sisters. The frame’s scarlet and crimson biology throbbed from behind the thin bone-white ceiling; Elpida longed to close her eyes and bask in that homeward glow.
She swept the room, muzzle low.
Vicky was on the floor, on her arse, panting, wide-eyed, face covered in a sheen of sweat. Her left boot was smeared with blood and fragments of flesh. Kagami was slumped sideways in the doorway to a manual control chamber, her back to the wall, her bionic legs jutting out before her, with a bank of glowing screens highlighting her face in profile; Elpida guessed that Kagami had probably lurched out of the seat and crawled into the aperture. She was squinting, her hair a bedraggled mess, gritting her teeth with effort and pain.
On Elpida’s right, lying next to the exit from the capillary tunnel, was the Necromancer.
The corpse looked like a badly drawn parody of a human being. The limbs were angled wrong, the joints either too small or too large beneath the clothes; the hair was stiff and rubbery, like exposed cartilage; the skin and clothing were melted into each other, like the aftermath of burn wounds but without any damage; the hands were not remotely plausible, fingers melded together and turned backwards and missing half the fingernails, the palms the wrong shape, lacking bones or proper structure. The face was a bloody smear; the nose and jaw and eye sockets had been broken with a swift kick. One dark eyeball had burst, spilling black jelly down a jagged cheekbone. Several of the steel teeth were bent or broken.
Dead — but still grinning.
Elpida could see the vague resemblance to herself, beneath the damage.
You’re kidding, Howl said. Doesn’t look shit like you! You think I’d fall for that, Elps? You think I’m blind?
Elpida replied: It’s not meant to fool anybody. It’s meant to unnerve and upset.
Howl snorted. Why?
I’ll let you know when I figure that out.
Six cigar-shaped silver oblongs floated in the air around the corpse, like the anchor-points of an invisible net, perfectly silent and rock-solid still — Kagami’s drones.
Elpida covered the corpse with her submachine gun, purely to bolster morale. She spoke quickly: “Kagami, I see your drones. Are you jamming?”
Vicky blurted out: “Elpi! Elpi it moved, it—”
“Commander!” Kagami slurred, her speech thick with pain. “It did more than— f-fuck! What—”
Vicky yelped as well. She scrambled backward.
The corpse hadn’t moved, not even a twitch; they weren’t reacting to further undead activity — they were both staring at Hafina, as she stepped into the chamber and unfolded herself like a telescoping artillery piece. Haf was wearing her full combat outfit, layers of robe and rag wrapped around bulletproof plates and curtains of ballistic fabric, with a core of liquid armour beneath that, and snatches of colour-shifting cuttlefish-skin visible through the gaps. The suit of armour was topped by an eyeless black beak. Haf carried several guns in her six arms: her strange weapons of chrome and black, and her gigantic anti-materiel rifle.
Elpida indicated Haf with a sideways nod. “This is Hafina, from Pheiri. You know that already. She’s on our side.”
Hafina reached up with one massive black-armoured hand and tilted her helmet back. Blonde hair spilled out, followed by a big goofy grin beneath her wide, all-black eyeballs.
“Hiiiiiii,” she purred.
Vicky heaved for breath, one hand to her heart. “Oh. Oh fuck me. Hi, yeah, okay.”
Kagami snapped: “You could have said something, Commander!”
Scaredy cats, Howl grumbled. She ain’t that big.
Elpida said, “I told you Haf was large. Kaga, the drones. Are you jamming?”
Kagami blinked hard. “No. No, if I was then you would get fried as well. This close we’d all feel like we were standing inside a particle accelerator. They’re ready, a precaution!”
Elpida said, “Right. Vicky, Kagami, are either of you injured?”
Kagami shook her head. Vicky made a weak coughing sound — Elpida realised it was meant to be a laugh — and said: “Yeah, obviously, but not like, recently.” She pointed at the corpse. “Elpi, it moved! I swear, it moved—”
Kagami snapped: “It did more than fucking move! It spoke! I fucking told you, Victoria, I told you it was going to come back to life! That’s why they call it a Necromancer!”
Vicky said, “And I kicked it in the face! Okay? What else was I supposed to do? We don’t have any bullets!”
“Maybe don’t touch it?!” Kagami shrieked back. “Maybe don’t go hand-to-hand with the protoplasmic blob monster that could fucking absorb you?! What, one moment of surprise and you regress back to street fighting techniques?”
Vicky coughed. “You try beating a Chicago curb-stomp, moon princess!” She gestured at the corpse. “And it worked, see?”
Kagami shouted: “It’s playing dead!”
Howl snorted: These two really need to fuck.
Later, Elpida replied. Maybe I’ll lock them in the bunk room together when we’re safely back in Pheiri.
Ha! They’ve been locked in here for two days and they haven’t done it yet. That isn’t gonna help!
Maybe they have done it, then.
Bullshit.
Out loud, Elpida said: “The Necro, what did it say?”
Vicky gathered herself, blinking hard. “Uh. Something like … ‘nice work, dead thing’. Then I kicked it. Elpi, we— we can’t— it moved— it—”
Elpida gestured at the dubious corpse. “Haf.”
Hafina levelled all five of her weapons at the Necromancer, including the anti-materiel rifle; if she fired that in here then everyone would probably go deaf, and the bullet might rip a chunk of nano-composite bone from the inside of the combat frame, but Elpida judged the threat was worth the risk. Haf braced her arms and legs, locking her limbs.
Hafina did not need orders repeated — Elpida had learnt that over the course of their long, gruelling, boring journey across the sucking mud and freezing water of the impact crater. Hafina operated with a clarity of action and instant comprehension that Elpida had rarely encountered outside of the cadre. She required only a short explanation of any plan and then slotted herself into it perfectly; the journey had required perfect silence — both radio and vocal — and Haf had picked up Elpida’s hand signals after only a single demonstration. Her goofy grin and loose-limbed mannerisms belied tactical acumen beyond anything Elpida had expected.
Before she and Hafina had left the safety of Pheiri’s hull, Elpida had discussed her idea in detail with both Hafina herself, and with Melyn, whose reliance upon and open love for Hafina could not be discounted. Neither of the ARTs had been certain about Elpida’s theory — that the Necromancer’s paralysing control would not extend to an artificial human. But they both agreed it was worth a shot.
Hafina’s bullets might not do much against a Necromancer, but bullets were better than nothing.
Elpida lowered her submachine gun, flicked the safety back on, and set about tending to her comrades.
Victoria and Kagami looked awful, as if they’d spent a week locked in a cell with nothing but dirty water and mouldy bread to sustain their bodies, rather than two nights confined inside the warm, comfortable, glowing safety of a combat frame. Vicky couldn’t keep her eyes straight — she kept squinting and glazing over, then blinking herself back to clarity, clear signs of a traumatic brain injury. She was shivering despite the perfect body-temperature heat inside the frame, a thin trickle of drool was running down her chin, and her dark skin was ashen and grey. Kagami was faring a little better, but she huddled beneath her armoured coat as if she couldn’t retain any body heat. Her left eye was a mess of burst blood vessels and a streak of crimson was running from her nose. She looked greasy and filthy. When she spoke her voice was raw and rough.
Elpida had expected this. The state of her comrades confirmed that being cut off from the atmospheric nanomachines presented serious danger of starvation, degeneration, and possibly worse. Pira had warned her that Vicky and Kagami would not be able to stand, let alone fight.
She swung her pack off her shoulders and placed it on the floor halfway between Vicky and Kagami. “It’s good to see you both, I’m glad you’re okay. Let’s get you back on your feet.”
Vicky stammered: “What about the— the— Necro? Y-you’re just gonna leave it there?”
Elpida crouched down and unzipped the backpack. “Haf’s got it covered. I need you two up and moving first.”
Kagami said, “Took your sweet time, Commander. Got into a fight out there? Got shot at and slowed down?”
“Only at the very end,” Elpida replied. “Uneventful journey. Haf’s stealth field worked perfectly, but we had to switch it off at the last second to make radio contact. Here.”
Elpida lifted a cannister of raw blue nanomachines from inside her backpack; she had only brought one along, the other remaining three were stashed safely aboard Pheiri, in case of mission failure. The blue glow was dark and muted beneath the combat frame’s blood-red bio-light.
Vicky let out a moan of desperate need. Kagami made a throaty noise, almost a growl.
Elpida uncapped the cannister. “Half each. Don’t drink the whole thing. You have to share.”
Vicky slurred through a mouth full of drool: “Kaga, you first—”
Kagami snapped back, “You fucking primitive, this isn’t a heroism contest, we’re not living in caves! You’re the one with the brain damage! You drink—”
“No. Kaga. Go first, go.” Vicky wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
Howl took control of Elpida’s lips: “You bitches really need to fuck this out.”
Vicky blinked several times and stared at Elpida. Kagami frowned, eyes narrowed in disbelief.
Elpida re-assumed control and held the cannister out to Vicky. “You drink first.”
“ … Elpi?” Vicky said.
Kagami snorted. “Losing your mind, Commander?”
“Gaining it, actually. I’ll explain later. Not before we deal with the Necro, not before we get you both on your feet. Vicky, drink half the nanos. That’s an order.”
Victoria nodded and accepted the cannister. She drank with urgency, throat bobbing, eyes screwed shut. Elpida put a hand on Vicky’s wrist when it seemed like she was going to drink more than her share, but Vicky lowered the cannister and let out a gasp. “Uuuhhh … y-yeah, okay, okay. I’m good, Elpi, I’m good. Uh … ” She stared at the cannister, then at the fingers of her free hand. “You … you think I should smear some of this on my … back of my skull?”
Kagami huffed. “No, you moronic dirt-eater! Don’t touch it! You’ll give yourself more brain damage and pass out again!”
Elpida said, “I’ll check your head wound in a moment, Vicky. Here.” She took the cannister and held it out to Kagami. “Your turn.”
Kagami drank with less urgency than Vicky, but she consumed every last drop. The glowing blue slid off the inside of the cannister with perfect viscosity, leaving nothing behind. As Kagami drank, Elpida examined the pair of black cables which extended from Kagami’s left wrist; they led back into the manual control chamber and plugged into the control panel. A web of circuitry lay just beneath the skin of Kagami’s left wrist and palm and fingers, grey and dull in the red light.
Kagami finished drinking. Elpida recapped the cannister and stowed it in her pack, for later use. Then she pulled out the second cannister, full of water from Pheiri’s internal cistern.
Vicky spluttered: “Oh, thank fuck.”
Vicky and Kagami passed the water back and forth without complaint. Elpida nodded at Kagami’s cables. “You’ve plugged yourself directly into the combat frame, is that correct?”
Kagami glared back. “I told you already. Jealous, Commander?”
Elpida smiled. “Visual confirmation feels different. You’ve reverse engineered Telokopolan MMI-uplink technology. Perhaps not all the way, but it’s a promising start.”
Kagami rolled her eyes. “Thank you so much for your confidence.”
Vicky nodded at the ceiling, water running down her chin. “Elpi, is this really what your great big forest-walking mechs looked like on the inside?”
Elpida said: “Most of ours were smaller. But yes. This is a Telokopolan combat frame. In here is one of the safest places in the entire world. I know it looks strange, it looked strange to most people from my time, from Telokopolis. It’s part of why they didn’t like me and my sisters. But this creature is on our side, born from the city of Telokopolis itself. In a way it’s a little bit like Pheiri, and a little bit like me. It is a child of the city. And we’re going to wake it up. Don’t be afraid.”
Vicky tried to smile, but she couldn’t hide her nerves. Kagami just snorted.
Ignorant cunts, Howl hissed.
It’s not their fault, Elpida replied.
Elpida had seen that kind of reaction so many times before — at least it wasn’t the open disgust of the Covenanters. She told herself that Vicky and Kagami did not mean it in that way; they were frightened and exhausted and this was alien to them. It was not a reflection of any deeper ideological position.
Elpida tried not to think about her own missing MMI implant. She did not yet fully understand how Kagami had grown herself a set of interface cybernetics, but she understood it had required resources, pain, and time; the first could be spent, the second Elpida could endure, but the third was in short supply. If they truly couldn’t help the injured pilot up in the capsule, then Elpida could have plugged herself in and gotten the frame moving, but that wasn’t possible without an MMI uplink socket at the base of her skull.
Elpida crushed those thoughts down. She said: “Is the pilot stable?”
Kagami nodded. “Yes. She’ll keep. Days, weeks, I don’t know.”
Elpida nodded. She briefly checked Vicky’s skull fracture — a nasty mess of bone fragments, matted hair, and dried blood — and decided not to touch the wound. The raw blue would do more than she could, at least without Melyn’s medical skills. Kagami wasn’t wounded anywhere but inside, her reserves of nanomachines spent on that imitation MMI-uplink and the processing power inside her left arm.
Elpida said: “You two sit tight and let the nanomachines do their work. You’ve done well.”
Kagami snorted and jerked her augmetic legs. The bionic limbs scraped against the floor. “Yes, Commander, without your sagely advice I would have gotten up and gone for a light jog.”
Vicky slumped forward and squeezed her eyes shut. “Kaga, stop being a bitch, please.”
“We’re all bitches here,” Kagami growled.
Ha! Howl barked. I like the moon bitch. I wanna play with her. Pretty please, Elps? Can I corner her later?
No promises.
Awwww.
Elpida stood up and turned back to the Necromancer’s corpse; Hafina was still covering it with her weapons.
The pulped crimson mess of the face was almost black in the blood-red bio-light, the copper brown skin a shade too dark, the hair the colour of blood, the same as her sisters had always looked when inside a combat frame. The implicit insult made Elpida angry and offended in a way she had not expected. This interior, this warmth and safety, it should have been one of the most inviolate places in the entire world, a mobile piece of Telokopolis itself. Yet here was an imitation of her face, bloodied and twisted, a mockery meant to unsettle her comrades.
Vicky muttered: “Kaga must be right. There’s no way kicking that thing in the head a couple of times killed it.”
Kagami said, “Of course I’m right.”
Vicky continued: “The mech — sorry, the combat frame — fried it for us, the first time, when it tried to plug in and take control or whatever. We couldn’t do shit to it, not really. Bullets were a joke. Even Kaga’s gravity trick just stunned it for a bit. It’s just pretending to be dead. Playing possum. Elpi, that thing is still alive.”
Kagami snorted. “Nothing is alive here, Victoria.”
Vicky sighed. “You know what I mean.”
Elpida looked from the corpse to the dark mouth of the capillary tunnel, then over at the control panel in the next room, then at Kagami. She said: “Did the Necro move before or after you popped the hatch?”
“After. After! What difference does it—” Kagami went wide-eyed, then spat: “Fuck!”
“Mmhmm.” Elpida nodded.
“Fucking hell!” Kagami said. “Shit, I should have— fuck! I’m an idiot. Moron! My brain is turning to mush down here!”
Elpida said, “You were starving to death, dehydrated, and cognitively impaired. Don’t beat yourself up, Kagami.”
Kagami snorted. “You could have said something, Commander! You could have warned us!”
“I only just figured it out. I apologise for my laxity. It was my responsibility to consider what might happen when we cracked the hatch.”
Vicky frowned at both Elpida and Kagami. “Am I the only one not following this?”
Kagami rolled her eyes. “You’re brain damaged. Don’t worry about it.”
Hafina purred like a big cat: “Noooope. Me neither.”
“Kagami,” Elpida said. “You can explain better than I can. Please.”
“Damn right I can!” Kagami said. “We’re networked.” She jabbed a finger at the ‘corpse’ of the Necromancer. “So is that thing! The whole planet is networked. Every piece of flesh, every cubic inch of air, all of it is stuffed with nanomachines, and all of them are networked together.” She slapped the floor. “They must be, it’s the only explanation.”
“For what?” Vicky said.
Elpida added: “Unless that’s just what the Necromancer wants us to think.”
“Don’t!” Kagami snapped. “Don’t say that! Look, this machine, this mech, it’s a sealed environment. You and I starving to death proves that part. But it’s not just atmospherically sealed. It’s sealed against comms, too. Nothing can get through that hull out there, not radio, not radiation, IR, radar, nothing! Probably not even quantum entanglement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Commander’s freakish base-eight-thinking civilization figured out how to break that, too!” Kagami held up her left hand, showing the two black cables that linked the cybernetics in her wrist to the control panel; the circuitry was beginning to glow blue and green beneath her skin, a soft flutter of candlelight inside her flesh. “The only way to get a signal in or out is via the brain — ha!” she spat. “‘Brain’. This thing’s brain would redefine the fucking word. Eight-lobed, I’m guessing. But the point stands. You want to talk, it has to go through the beast itself.” She pointed at the control panel in the next room. “Either via that, if you can convince it to let you, or via the pilot upstairs. I suspect her connection doesn’t come with this bastard machine arguing back against every interpretation of every word.” She nodded at the Necromancer. “When that thing got bricked, it had no way to reboot from external backups. No contact with home base.”
Vicky squinted. “You think it was remote controlled?”
Elpida said, “Yes. I told you two about the sleep paralysis message it sent me. That happened while this corpse was lying right here. The Necro’s true body is elsewhere.”
Kagami scoffed. “‘Remote control’, ‘true body’. You two are like a pair of paleo bone-humpers looking at the night sky and trying to comprehend the flare of a fucking ion drive. No, it’s very likely a network presence. Maybe with some master-instance in an AI substrate enclosure somewhere. But I would bet a handful of moon dust that it doesn’t have a ‘real’ body at all.”
“We don’t know that,” Elpida said.
Kagami ranted on: “When we opened the hatch, the nanomachines could talk to each other again. The Necro uploaded its memories, or reconnected with its master copy, or whatever! I don’t know exactly! And we don’t have the tools to find out. I would kill for one Tycho City nano-lab right now. I’d put that thing through a fucking autoclave and see what it’s made of, empty out its cache and trace every signal it’s sent.” She glared at the ‘corpse’. “How would you like me rooting around in your head, you spooky little shit?!”
Vicky said, “You don’t think it could like … download into one of us? Like taking over a body?”
Kagami huffed. “Why bother? Why not just coalesce a body from the air and the dirt? It’s all nanomachines! All networked! How many times do I have to repeat this?”
“Fine, fine,” Vicky grumbled.
Elpida did not look away from the corpse; she stared into the one remaining eye in the Necromancer’s imitation face. A black orb, oil-dark in the blood-light. Vicky and Kagami had been alone with this corpse for two full days — but then it had been a true corpse, not just pretending. After Kagami had popped the hatch, they’d been alone with it for less than two minutes. One of them had screamed.
Could the Necromancer have taken over Vicky and Kagami while Elpida and Hafina had been hurrying down the capillary tunnel?
If Kagami was right, and it was a network presence, then why bother?
But if it had taken her over, then it was telling Elpida exactly what she wanted to hear.
Nah, Howl snorted. Doesn’t make sense, Elps. You’re being paranoid. Why take them over? Because it wants to come with us? It can spy on us anyway, remember? Sent you that message while you were sleeping? There’s no reason. They’re clean. Simmer down.
Elpida nodded. “You’re right.”
Kagami grunted. “Mm?”
“I think you’re right, Kagami. I don’t think bodily invasion and assimilation is how these things work. At least, that’s my best guess.”
“Um,” Vicky said. “What about the blood on my boot? That’s Necromancer blood, right?”
Kagami snorted. “Just don’t lick it up, Victoria. I don’t think we have to worry about that. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not a boot licker.”
Elpida gestured to Hafina. “Haf, lower your guns, please.”
Kagami spluttered. “Commander, what!?”
Vicky said, “Uhhh, Elpi?”
Elpida explained. “There’s no point. The Necro is immune to our weapons. You made that clear before. Guns will do nothing.”
Hafina said: “Sure is sure?” Her huge all-black eyes peered at Elpida with curious concern from beneath the rim of her raised helmet. Her big mouth was turned downward with anxious discomfort.
Elpida nodded. “Do it.”
Hafina unlocked her limbs with a jerk, lowered her weapons, and straightened up to her full height.
Elpida walked up to the ‘corpse’, then crouched down so she could peer at the face.
Kagami snapped: “You don’t have to get that close to it, fucking hell!”
Elpida spoke right to the Necromancer’s imitation face: “If it wanted us dead, we would be. If it wanted to kill you two before Hafina and I had finished crawling down the capillary tunnel, it would have done so. If it wanted to kill me right now, it could grow a spike and ram it through my eye socket. As far as I can tell, it could paralyse all of us with a thought, and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it.”
Kagami croaked: “I can jam it again. Pin it in place with gravitics, I can … ”
Elpida looked back at Kagami. She knew Kagami was bluffing; the raw blue would work fast, but not that fast, and Kagami was still an exhausted, shivering wreck. Deploying her drones’ on-board gravitic fields took a great deal of concentration and cybernetic coordination.
Kagami trailed off. No words needed.
Elpida turned back to the ‘corpse’. It was still staring at the ceiling with one black eye, the other a blob of dark jelly stuck to the cheekbone. Elpida said: “It doesn’t want us dead. Specifically it doesn’t want me dead. When it visited me via the imitation sleep paralysis, it told me to keep my head down. Go off unnoticed. Don’t be seen.”
Vicky asked, “By … by what?”
Kagami suggested: “Central.”
Elpida nodded. “That was the word it used with you and Vicky, upstairs in the pilot chamber. Correct? ‘Central’s attention’?”
“Mm,” Kagami grunted.
Vicky said, “I’ve been thinking about that a little bit, sure. But what the hell does that mean? Some kind of command and control? That thing has a boss, a superior officer, what?”
Elpida stared into the dead face of the Necromancer, a parody imitation of her own. “I have no idea.”
Vicky said, “And why jump scare me like that? If it’s just gonna lie there now and pretend to be dead? What was the point?”
Kagami snorted. “It enjoys spooking us! It enjoys the cruelty!”
“No,” Elpida said slowly. “Same reason it told me to keep my head down. It wants us scared, running, hiding. But I don’t know why.” She reached out and nudged the dead shoulder; the flesh was spongy and yielding, more like foam than meat and bone. “I know you can hear me. I know you’re still in there, still active, still listening. A stomp or two to the face did not disable you, not like trying a hostile MMI-connection to a combat frame did. That must have really hurt, right? I don’t know if a thing like you feels pain, but I’m hoping you can. It doesn’t matter what physical structures you imitate, you’re not a pilot, you’re not one of my sisters, not one of our clade. And the combat frame could tell that. But a stomp? No way. You’re in there. Feel like talking?”
The corpse did not move.
Elpida kept a tight hand on her frustration. If only she could make the Necromancer talk, there would be no need to kidnap Yola and no need to deal with the Death’s Heads again. Right here, lying on the floor, was a direct line to the secret workings of this nanomachine ecosystem — a representative of the power behind the system, or at least a being with a better understanding of how that system worked. If Elpida and her comrades were pawns in a game they could not see, then here lay a queen.
Elpida said: “Your plan to commandeer this combat frame has failed. I don’t think you want to try again, not after you plugged in and found that it could scramble you. You obviously want me to do something, to stay clear of something. But I need you to explain why, I need you to explain what you think I’m going to do. And then maybe I’ll do it.”
Silence. Unblinking death.
Elpida had neither the tools nor the knowledge to contain or interrogate this being. Kagami was right, she would kill for a proper nanomachine laboratory right now. She would gladly take the Necromancer apart piece by piece. But all she had was small arms and her comrades.
Elpida tried one more time: “What is ‘central’?”
Nothing.
“Fucking hell, Elpi,” Vicky hissed. “I don’t wanna hear that thing talk again. I don’t.”
Kagami said, “We cannot leave it at large inside the combat frame. We can’t. Commander. Commander!”
“Wait,” Elpida said. “If I can just—”
“I know!” Kagami snapped. “Commander, look at me.”
Elpida looked over her shoulder.
Kagami was clear eyed. She said: “I know, Elpida. I know this is a wasted intel opportunity of the worst kind. An asset like her, I would have scooped up as a priority one target and wrapped her in cotton wool until I could get her off-surface and into orbit. But we do not have the tools, Elpida. We don’t! If I had half a dozen lab-size electromagnets and a shielded Faraday cage, then maybe — maybe I would be willing to risk interrogating that thing. But right now that undead monster is a danger. Sure, it’s playing possum at the moment, having fun winding us all up. But what if it changes its mind?” Kagami gulped, dry and raw. “We need to get rid of it. Now. Right now. You want to go up into the pilot chamber and help the pilot, get this stupid mech moving? Fine. We need to dispose of that thing first.”
Kagami stared, breathing hard. Elpida stood up, took a deep breath, and nodded.
“Kagami, you are correct,” she said. “Thank you for your counsel. Let’s get this thing out of here before it changes its mind.”
Kagami sighed with relief and visibly sagged. Elpida was glad to prove her worries wrong.
Howl was giggling inside Elpida’s mind: Oh, oh, oh, I like this bitch. She’s jittery and juicy and smart. You given her a reward yet?
Not my place to do that, Howl.
Pffft. Whatever. Bet she’s a squealer.
Out loud, Elpida said: “Right, we’re not leaving the Necromancer inside the combat frame. Hafina, are you comfortable handling the body?”
Haf pulled a grimace, but she nodded. “Suuuuure.”
“Kagami, get back to the control panel and set the pilot access hatch to open manually, from the inside. Hafina will drag the corpse back down the capillary tunnel, I’ll cover her. We’ll open the hatch, dump the corpse down the side, then button up again. Any questions?”
Vicky nodded. “Hell yeah. I mean, uh, no questions. Just yeah, cool.”
Kagami hissed between her teeth. “What are you going to do if it comes to life in the tunnel and eats you both?”
Elpida said: “It won’t.”
“How can you be so fucking sure, Commander? How are you so certain about everything?!”
Elpida replied: “I’ll say this out loud so the Necro knows that I know. I don’t think it wants to be in here. I think it wants out, and it doesn’t want to talk to us. It knows that body can get stuck in here, full of intel — we might not be able to extract that, but something else might. It’s taunting us, to get us to freak out and dump the corpse. And we’re going to give it what it wants, because we want it too. A mutual deal, made in silence. Right?”
The Necromancer did not move. Not a whisper. Not a twitch.
Dragging the dead weight down the capillary tunnel was easy enough for Hafina’s artificial muscles; she gripped the Necro’s imitation-collar, then dragged the ‘corpse’ behind her, vanishing into the mouth of the pitch-black passageway. Kagami withdrew her floating drones, stowing the silver oblongs in her coat pocket. Elpida followed Haf a moment later, her senses swallowed by the darkness.
The journey back down the capillary took only 153 seconds — Hafina moved almost as fast as she did when unencumbered. Elpida did not bother to clutch her submachine gun; she had no illusions that she could stop the Necromancer if it decided to change tactics. She couldn’t see anything in the lightless tunnel anyway. She concentrated on navigating via one hand on the wall, and on not blundering into the Necromancer’s booted feet as Hafina dragged the corpse ahead of her.
When they reached the vertical shaft beneath the pilot access hatch, Hafina straightened up, propped the corpse against one wall, and mounted the ladder, ascending quickly with her six arms. Elpida wriggled into the shaft after Hafina. Weak illumination filled the cramped space, glowing from the palm pad just beneath the hatch, twelve feet up.
“Hit the palm pad to pop the hatch,” Elpida said. “I’ll pass you the body, then you toss it out, as far as you can.”
“Could take it to the edge?” Haf suggested. “Quick like, quick run to the edge and back?”
Elpida shook her head. “Absolutely not. Puts you in too much danger. Revenants out there will be watching this hatch. Just throw.”
Haf nodded, then scurried the rest of the way up the ladder. Elpida bent down and hauled the Necromancer’s corpse up by the armpits, keeping the face turned away from her; she didn’t want it bursting into a mocking grin at the last moment, when she had no choice but to carry on with the plan.
“Ready?” she said.
“Ready!” Haf purred.
“Go!”
Haf hit the palm pad. Elpida heard the hatch unlock with a deep clunk of mechanical release. She hauled the body upward, passing it to Haf’s considerable multi-armed grip. Hafina accepted the weight with two arms, pulled it upward, then shoved the hatch open with two other arms.
Elpida caught a glimpse of the black sky, lit from a distant corner by the smothered red sun.
And a tiny dark dot, moving fast against the clouds.
Hafina braced to throw the corpse.
Elpida saw the Necromancer’s grin flash wide, full of steel teeth and dried blood.
Hafina hurled the corpse through the hatch with all her strength. Elpida realised her mistake at the last second — she had ordered Haf to throw the Necromancer as far as she could; Haf’s arms slammed forward like a set of pistons, hurling the body like a shell from a cannon. The Necromancer was gone.
Hafina did not wait to admire her handiwork. She reached up and slammed the hatch shut again as quick as she could. The locking mechanisms engaged with a loud clunk.
Elpida said: “Did you see that dot in the sky?”
Hafina dropped back down the ladder. She tilted her massive head to one side, big eyes blinking black in the gloom. “Dot?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Good work, Haf. Nice throwing arm.”
Hafina grinned, big and goofy. “If she’s still alive, she’ll feel it when she lands.”
Elpida couldn’t help laughing.
When they returned to the circular chamber, Kagami was shouting in panic.
“Commander! Elpida!” Kagami yelled from the control chamber as Elpida emerged from the tunnel. Vicky was already in there with her, slumped against the wall. “Elpida, you need to see this, get in here!”
Elpida hurried across the main chamber once again, past the discarded bulkheads and the pack she’d left on the floor. Hafina unfolded herself from the tunnel and followed at a trot. Elpida stepped into the control chamber and slipped down into one of the seats. The bank of screens was a dizzying array of exterior camera views, filtered through dozens of readout types and sensor equipment. She’d never liked these manual controls; they were crude at best and useless at worst, designed for the bone-speakers doing diagnostics and the engineers to convince themselves they understood the combat frames. The clarity of an MMI-uplink was instant and instinctive; this was just noise.
“What am I looking at?” she said.
Kagami pointed at one of the true-colour readouts — a view of the ground, the grey waterlogged mud right up against the side of the combat frame’s hull.
It was Elpida.
The Necromancer, wearing Elpida’s face and Elpida’s skin, Elpida’s clothes and Elpida’s long white hair, Elpida’s gear and mannerisms and everything, whole and unwounded once again, rather than the parody corpse they’d carried to the hatch. She was ankle-deep in grey mud, staring directly at the camera feed from the exterior sensors, one hand raised in a lazy wave.
Elpida said, “That was quick.”
Kagami snapped: “She hit the side of the mech and slid. By the time she was on the ground, she was you again! Looking like you again, I mean! Fucking hell.”
Vicky hissed, “Fuck me, that’s creepy.”
Hafina let out an uncomfortable whine from the doorway.
Random pot-shots and sniper fire cracked through the air around the Necromancer, but she ignored the bullets. A couple of rounds slammed into her imitation armoured coat; one hit her in the leg, but she didn’t react. Her lips were moving, repeating the same few shapes over and over.
Elpida said: “We have external microphones, yes?”
Kagami scoffed. “You want to listen to it?”
“It wants to talk. External mics. Kagami, do it, please.”
Kagami hissed, flexed her left hand, and jabbed a few buttons on the control panel. Audio crackled through the little membrane-speaker, punctuated by the distant bang and crack of gunfire.
“Thanks for the assist, Commander,” said the Necromancer, in a perfect copy of Elpida’s voice.
It’s not perfect! Howl spat. Doesn’t sound anything like you! Doesn’t have shit on your tone, Elps!
The Necromancer kept talking, staring into the camera feed. Bullet impacts churned the mud at her feet.
“I know you can’t reply, so I’ll keep this short and to the point,” it said. “I’ve fucked up. These local discrepancies have not gone unnoticed. My mistakes have been registered, but not accounted for. Central is on the way with physical asset, to resolve the situation.” The Necromancer reached forward and rapped her knuckles against the hull of the combat frame. “The ‘situation’ being this. I suggest you all run. I will be covering my tracks, and I can cover yours, but I cannot hide you if you remain in plain sight.” She mimed a two-fingered salute. “I hope to meet you again, Commander Elpida. Good luck, dead thing.”
The Necromancer turned away. Within seconds she was lost amid the churned mud and waterlogged holes.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Elpida said: “Kagami, broadcast to Pheiri and the others, let them know the Necromancer might approach them while wearing my face.”
“Oh, trust me, ‘Commander’, I’m already on it!” Kagami snapped. She jabbed at the control panel.
Vicky was panting, wide eyed, sweat on her face. “Central? Physical asset? What? What did that mean? Elpi? W-what does that mean? Have we pissed something off? What do we do? Elpi?”
Elpida stood up from the bench-seat. She looked out of the control chamber and across the main room, at the narrow aperture which led up to the pilot’s chamber.
“The plan remains unchanged,” she said. “We need to get this combat frame up and moving.”
Yeet that leech! Uh, I mean lich. But that doesn’t rhyme properly. Still, hell of an arm on Haf.
Does the Necromancer count as a lich? Is a networked AI core a phylactery? Do Necromancers bounce when they hit the ground? Will Vicky and Kagami ever fuck? All very good questions.
Time to talk to the last human on Earth.
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Necroepilogos 