Pheiri inched through the gates of the tomb, out into the teeth of the withering storm.
Elpida watched from inside the control cockpit. The screens and displays showed dozens of views from beyond Pheiri’s hull, via his external cameras, lighting the cockpit with ashen backwash, shot through by the dirty white of falling hail. Nobody spoke as Pheiri crossed the threshold of the tomb, as the howling wind rose to a screaming chorus and concrete grit crunched beneath his treads. Kagami had been counting down, following Pheiri’s own estimate displayed in softly glowing machine-text; but the text was washed out by the leaden light, and Kagami had trailed off long before zero. Her right hand was gripping the arm of her seat, knuckles white. Elpida held her breath as she felt the others doing the same. Even Howl was silent, a clenched jaw in the back of Elpida’s mind.
Pheiri flashed up his progress on a side-screen, in glowing green text — millimetres vanished in a blink, replaced by centimetres for a moment, then by meter after meter, ticking upward as his massive armoured form rolled from the tomb’s mouth. His exit was flanked by pressure readings, external hull integrity responses, traction estimates, and a dozen other low-level alerts which Elpida could not fully interpret.
The wind’s volume surged, suddenly close, roaring directly against Pheiri’s hull, whistling and warbling through his weapon mounts and the hidden abscesses in his outer layers, a banshee chorus held at bay by nano-composite bone-amour and sheer body weight. Sheets of lashing rain and the hammer-drum of hailstones passed across Pheiri’s skin in a humming staccato.
Pheiri paused. The cockpit rocked gently as his tracks settled.
They were out.
Elpida found herself speechless. She had thought she understood the violence of the hurricane. She had piloted combat frames down into the deep green, into environments so far beyond human norms and survivability that releasing footage to the public was considered a serious hazard. She had fought Silico monsters, giant killing machines, things that she and her sisters could barely describe, down there in the dark beneath the world. She had considered that as the most inhospitable place imaginable, where unprotected human life would be melted away in seconds. Nothing could compare, certainly nothing in nature.
But to feel the hurricane up close was like a god screaming itself to death four feet from her skull. Pheiri’s readings were all well within his tolerances — hull integrity was untouched, internal gyroscopes and accelerometers reported no movement beyond a slight swaying of his chassis, no need to activate his shields for the comparatively soft assault of fist-sized hailstones. Pheiri had been built to slay giants, his body and his armour were more than enough to withstand the storm. But Elpida felt vulnerable in a way she never had before, barely protected from a force no amount of skill or guts or Telokopolan genetic engineering could withstand, let alone defeat. Pheiri’s armour didn’t seem like enough. Venturing out into this seemed like madness. Braving the storm seemed to pull at something deep in her gut, deeper than training or pilot genetic modifications or her own determination, deeper even than Telokopolis. She felt an undeniable urge to order Pheiri back inside the tomb, to scurry away with her tail between her legs, to wait for clear skies that would never come. This was not a force for human beings to fight, no matter what they came armed with.
Could Telokopolis have fought a hurricane and won? Elpida doubted.
And this — the wind speed just beneath two hundred and thirty miles an hour — was the dying gasp of the storm. Elpida tried to imagine what it would have felt like when the wind speeds had topped over eight hundred miles an hour.
And the view—
Hop to it, bitch-tits, Howl snapped inside Elpida’s head. Stop gawking. Get moving. Move! Show them how!
Elpida did not need telling twice. She blinked hard and bottled her awe.
“Okay, we’re out! We are out the front door!” she called, raising her left hand to slap the nearest clear patch of metal bulkhead. “Thank you, Pheiri!” She whipped her eyes across the endless chatter of readouts and sensor data; many of the external camera views were rapidly encrusting with overlays, showing everything from estimated pressure changes to the nanomachine density in falling raindrops. False colour terrain maps unfolded on fresh screens, rain and hail cleared away by algorithmic image processing, accompanied by preliminary targeting solutions for hundreds of hypothetical hostile actions. “Kaga, what’s external wind speed?”
Kagami occupied the front-most cockpit seat again, the seat where a driver might have sat when Pheiri still needed human crew. She was wired into Pheiri’s guts via the cables from her bionic hand, strapped into the seat over the bulk of her armoured coat, straight-backed and wide-eyed as she stared at the view from outside. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t answer. Her skin looked waxy with sweat.
Elpida reached over and grabbed Kagami’s shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze. “Kagami, focus. Give me wind speed.”
The question was unnecessary; Elpida could see the wind speed readouts perfectly well, scrolling by on an upper screen. But the repeated question dragged Kagami out of her own wondrous terror. She hissed, shrugged off Elpida’s hand, then gestured vaguely at one of the data-choked external views.
“Two hundred twenty five miles an hour,” Kagami snapped. Her eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, sometimes going glassy as she looked inward at the data-streams she shared with Pheiri, her face ashen grey in the reflected light. “Sustained average, mind you. Gusts measured at … thirty to forty mph in excess of that. And we’re sheltered right now, by all … this!”
Kagami gestured at the displays, at the external camera views, at what the storm had wrought.
Pheiri had paused just past the threshold of the tomb, with his entire hull exposed to the storm’s onslaught. Between the tomb and the corpse-city itself lay the tomb’s outworks — the layer of black metal bunkers and walls and bridges and killing fields, used to either trap freshly resurrected zombies or give them a chance to escape, whatever the original purpose.
The black iron tangle of infantry-scale fortifications was drowned and choked and buried in the storm’s debris, slopping with filthy grit-filled water, littered with drifts and dunes of concrete wreckage tossed from the city by the height of the storm. Spears of steel rebar taller than Pheiri stood swaying in the wind like stalks of grass. Chunks of concrete from tower blocks lay shattered across the black metal. Silt-flows of pulverized stone and asphalt poured back and forth under the wind’s voice. All of it was blurred by a never-ending haze of pounding rain and the white static of the hailstones.
But Kagami was right; the tomb’s outworks were relatively sheltered compared to what lay beyond. The last of Kagami’s forward scouts were out there now, a trio of bulky drones pathfinding the route ahead, sticking close to the ground, anchoring themselves with tiny gravitic engines, their black hides almost invisible beneath the torrent of rain and hail.
At least the direct route through the exterior wall was still open, not yet completely blocked by rubble and concrete slurry. Elpida had been prepared for Pheiri to have to blast his way out, but the debris-filled passageway looked just about navigable, at least for something Pheiri’s size.
Beyond the wall, the sky was a roiling cauldron of black tar. Pheiri’s internal clock said it was daytime, but Elpida couldn’t spot the usual ruddy red patch that indicated the sun’s position. Even that dying fire was choked off behind the hurricane.
“Understood,” Elpida said. “Danger to Pheiri?”
One of the screens at her elbow flickered with a fresh ream of green text.
///gyroscopic stability confirm POSITIVE
///pressure differential < expected maximum tolerance
///hull integrity standard output
>proceed
You heard him, he’s good to go, Howl purred.
Elpida almost laughed, surprised at the tension inside her head.
Kagami huffed and gestured at the screen. “I agree. Mostly. Winds are down low enough that nothing is going to pick us up and throw us around. Something might fall on us, but that’s what the shields are for.” Kagami added a mutter, “In theory.”
“Good to hear it. Anything else out there?”
Kagami hissed through her teeth, scanning the screens and data readouts. “Half a city, turned to pulverized concrete and gone airborne. What do you expect, Commander? Even Pheiri can’t see through this shit. I doubt I could see through it from orbit. Yes, there’s plenty of readings, take your pick, but good luck interpreting anything.”
“Nothing alive?”
Kagami went still and quiet for a long moment before she replied. “Nothing … nothing on nanomachine readouts. Nothing zombie-sized, not that we can see. There’s something … ” Kagami squinted, gaze turning inward. “Something big, to our left. Far away to our left. Getting further away.”
“Something out in the storm?” Elpida asked. “Necromancer?”
Another one of Pheiri’s screens flashed with green text.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
“No, like he says,” Kagami muttered. “Just … big.” She tutted and shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s leaving, heading for the edge of the graveworm safe zone. Thank Luna for that. Maybe it’s just sensor ghosts, noise from the storm, a big piece of concrete, whatever. But if it’s not, well … I’m glad we didn’t come out early enough to meet it.”
A mutter came from behind ELpida — Atyle, strapped into one of the cockpit seats further back. “A handmaiden to the gods, come to watch the hatching.”
Elpida twisted in her seat. Atyle was staring at a spot on the wall. Watching the departing giant?
A particularly strong gust of wind howled against Pheiri’s hull. The cockpit swayed, perhaps by half an inch. On the opposite side to Atyle, Sky was also strapped into a seat. She blinked hard, jaw tight, swallowing a flinch. Sky was coated in sweat.
Elpida twisted back to Kagami. “All good?”
“As far as I can tell,” Kagami grunted. “Pheiri isn’t concerned.”
“Alright, then we’re good to go. Are you pulling those final drones back in?”
“Yes, yes,” Kagami sighed. “They won’t be able to endure the wind beyond the outworks here. I’m reeling them in now.”
On Pheiri’s screens the blurry dark smudges of Kagami’s drones started back toward the tank, resolving as they ploughed through the rain and hail. Kagami pulled them in and tucked them into sheltered whorls and pockets on the exterior of Pheiri’s bone armour, sheltered from the storm but ready for quick redeployment.
While she waited for the drones to return, Elpida keyed her comms headset.
Victoria answered instantly, voice clear over the short-range connection. “Commander?”
“Everyone snug back there, Vicky?”
“For now.”
Elpida pretended not to hear the fear and tension in Victoria’s voice. They had a single screen back there in the crew compartment, a tiny window onto the storm outside.
“Everything’s going smooth,” Elpida said. “We’re about to get underway. Is everyone strapped in?”
“Right, yeah. Um, I mean, yes, everyone is strapped in. Confirmed.”
“Thank you. The line to the cockpit will be clear, in case anything happens,” Elpida said. “Keep in touch.”
“I uh … I will, yeah. I understand.”
“Good. One more thing. Tell Shilu to come up front and join us in the cockpit. I want our resident Necromancer expert within shouting distance, in case we spot anything.”
“Will do, will do. Shilu, okay. Will do, Commander.”
“Keep everyone’s spirits up back there, Vicky. I need you to do that for me.”
A swallow. Victoria’s voice firmed up. “Got it. I’ll do that. Thank you, Elpi.”
Elpida closed the line. The drones were safely tucked away. She eyed the screen that displayed the readout from Pheiri’s external necromancer-detection equipment. It was updating every two seconds, text refreshing letter by letter.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
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Shilu appeared less than a minute later, ducking through from the spinal corridor, still wearing her human disguise. She stepped past both Atyle and Sky, took a seat close to Elpida, then dragged the safety harness across her body.
Sky said, “Do you really need a seat belt, huh?”
“Do you?” Shilu replied.
“Yeah, but like, you’re made of metal beneath that, right? What does it matter if you bang your head?”
Shilu twisted to look at Sky, grabbed a pinch of her own cheek, and pulled it tight. “Is this metal?”
Sky shrugged and looked away.
Shilu sat back. “Elpida. You wanted me here.”
Elpida indicated the screen with Pheiri’s detection readouts. “I want your knowledge and expertise. The moment we spot a Necromancer, I want your assessment, whatever you can give us.”
“Mmhmm,” Shilu grunted. “If they’re going to attack, they won’t come right away. They’ll need the storm all the way down, enough to re-establish connection with the wider network.”
“Right. Kagami, if the storm keeps weakening at this rate—”
“Then we have about two hours until it’s nothing worse than a blustery day,” Kagami said. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot when she glanced at Elpida. “Are we going to sit here yapping, or run for the worm? If we’re all going to die, I’d rather get this over with.”
Patience, patience, Howl growled, deep inside Elpida’s mind.
“Patience,” Elpida echoed. “And we’re not going to die. There’s no sense in charging the worm-guard before our opponents turn up. But yes, let’s get underway. Let’s get as close as we can.” She patted Pheiri’s bulkhead again. “Take us away, Pheiri. And keep your eyes peeled, little brother.”
>y
Pheiri crossed the tomb’s outworks at a steady crawl, descending the stepped ramp into a soup of concrete dust and storm waters, five or six feet of fluid lapping at his sides. Internal pump systems inside his structure woke with a deep, solid glugging sound, flushing silt and grit out of his track-housing, sending up a spray of vaporised water on all sides. He mounted low dunes of wrecked concrete, tilting his structure so that Elpida and the others were pushed back into their seats. Loose scree and fragmented concrete was kicked out behind him as his whole body skidded and slipped amid the debris.
Reaching the gap in the exterior wall took only a few minutes at a gentle pace. The gap was less choked than the outworks; the walls reared up either side of Pheiri, black iron sentinels watching over the way out of the tomb, their depths clogged by six feet of water.
And then he was out on the far side, shouldering past a twisted tangle of steel rebar and shattered brick, out into the open, back in the corpse-city.
Nobody spoke; silence lingered for minutes. Pheiri pressed on, nosing his way onto what had been a road, picking a likely route through the deep drifts of rubble and ruin.
The city had been pulverised. The landscape was beyond recognition. A jagged plane of grey and black chaos — buildings torn asunder and knocked apart, steel bent and buckled, brick reduced to powder, glass tuned to grit, all by the sheer power of sustained winds beyond anything which should have been possible on earth. Skyscrapers and towers had been uprooted like rotten trees and tossed through the air, lying broken where they’d fallen, shattered leviathans scattered across roads and city blocks. Smaller buildings had been scoured from their foundations, walls turned to pulp, innards minced, mixed into a gritty soup of every imaginable material, spread out like brambles. Only the hardiest and mostly deeply dug-in structures had survived, and were only visible where they occupied natural high ground — a few bunkers and other squat, well-made buildings dotted here and there, scarred and gouged by flying debris. Undoubtedly most basement and subterranean levels were intact, choked by debris and downed by water. But the rest of the city was a sea of grey ruin and serrated steel, cut through by rushing rivers of storm-water, still pounded by an unceasing barrage of hailstones. The corpse-city had been rendered down into bone shards and gristle.
“I told you it would be … ” Kagami muttered. “Would be like this … ”
“Fuck off,” Sky muttered from the rear of the cockpit. “You ain’t seen shit like this before. This isn’t hurricane damage, it’s fucking nuclear exchange aftermath.”
Kagami grunted a bitter little laugh as Pheiri mounted a gritty dune of concrete and steel, his tracks grinding as they found purchase on the hillside of shifting debris. “Ha. More like a round of atomics would solve our biggest problem here. That’s what I’d do, blast a passageway through this crap, and don’t stop til I see soil gone to glass. Wouldn’t even need that much!”
Kagami’s voice was shaking. Sky swallowed, loudly.
“Everybody relax,” Elpida said. “Pheiri’s got this, he’s more than capable. Concentrate on staying in your seats and not bumping your heads. Let Kagami focus on helping Pheiri. Kaga.”
“On it, yes, yes,” Kagami muttered through clenched teeth. “Eyes peeled, eyes up, all that crap, yes, fine.”
Pheiri pushed on through the sea of debris, keeping to the higher ground wherever he could, tracks grinding across the drifts and dunes of pulverised concrete. The ground was uneven at best, the chunks of buildings prone to slide and settle, slipping out from beneath Pheiri’s tracks. Whenever the high ground ran out, Pheiri forded the temporary rivers of filth-choked rainwater, his hull buffeted by floating rafts of debris and hidden reefs of twisted steel. He roared back out of the waters again and again, passing forests of rebar, sludge-pits of liquefied brick, and jagged monoliths of wind-torn concrete. There was no opportunity for Elpida or the others to leave their seats now, tossed sideways and jolted upright and pushed against their straps and belts by unexpected sudden lurches. Elpida checked with Victoria every ten minutes via the comms headset, to make sure nobody back in the crew compartment was getting hurt.
Elpida felt something she had rarely experienced before, but she knew well enough to recognise — helplessness.
She trusted Pheiri with their survival, and trusted Kagami to assist him however she could. She trusted Shilu’s advice about Necromancers, perhaps against her better judgement. She trusted that Victoria had stowed everything safely, and that the others were strapped securely into their seats. She trusted Howl to let her focus. But she, Elpida, the Commander, she could do nothing but watch and wait, sitting tight in her own seat. This was nothing like piloting a combat frame through the deep green; no matter how hostile that environment had been, this was worse.
She caught herself using her left hand to gently cup the stump of her right arm. She wasn’t worrying at the fresh bandages, but she knew this behaviour might lead to minor acts of self-harm, picking at the stump, at the wound beneath.
Elps, Howl said, in the back of Elpida’s mind. It’s not easy. Fuck knows it’s not easy. You gotta let go.
I’m responsible for everyone’s safety. I’m responsible for keeping us alive.
And that’s what you’ve done, right? Howl laughed softly. You made the call, you made the decision, now Pheiri’s carrying it out. Trust our little brother. He’s got this shit covered.
I do trust him. I just …
Can’t do everything yourself, Howl snapped. I thought you’d finally figured that out.
I did. Elpida sighed, and hoped the others didn’t notice. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.
You’re doing great. Sit tight. Howl lapsed into silence
“How are we gonna outrun these necro-fuck things in this?” Sky muttered after about half an hour of forward progress.
Kagami snorted. “This is nothing,” she called over her shoulder. “Pheiri can go much, much faster, even in this. The ride will get considerably more bumpy when he does. And it is ‘when’, not if. Hope you picked a seat with a working headrest.”
“Fuck me,” Sky spat. “This is worse than a fucking rock-hopper ship. At least you don’t feel the void.”
Kagami barked a little laugh. “Spaceships are smooth, sure. You don’t feel the bump when something goes wrong.”
Sky groaned. Elpida wondered about the nature of space-dwellers, that two people from so far apart in history could share the same gallows humour about crossing that starry void.
Pheiri kept his sensor net extended as far as possible, peering through the sheets of rain and the barrage of hail with more than just infra-red. The contours of the shattered city were laid out in false colour on one of his screens, the rubble and ruin picked out from beneath the rain, scanned constantly for any signs of greater nanomachine density, any signs of undead life. Every two seconds the same message refreshed, glowing green letters always the same.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
Thirty minutes crept by, then forty, then forty five. Elpida counted, eyes on the screens, alert for anything shaped like a human being, anything moving that wasn’t loose concrete. Howl brooded in silence in the back of Elpida’s mind, doing much the same, for all the good it would do. If a Necromancer sprouted from the ground, Pheiri would know before anybody on board.
With the possible exception of Shilu. Elpida kept one eye on her too.
As the minutes crept by, the rain grew steadily less intense, the static easing off so slowly that it was hard to notice the decline from one moment to the next. The hail trailed off completely; Elpida heard the final audible hailstone tap against Pheiri’s armour at fifty five minutes and three seconds, though smaller pieces fell for several minutes longer. Without the white static of the hail, the outlines of the city rose from the dark grey murk, visible without false colour or Pheiri’s algorithms picking real details out of the chaos. The wind howled on without pause, but the stronger gusts dribbled away, then ceased at last.
Kagami announced as the sustained wind speed dropped. “We’re down below one thirty mph. Dipping toward a hundred. Pheiri’s reporting less buffeting on his hull. Still dropping.”
Howl took control of Elpida’s mouth. “Any idea when your friends are gonna show up, cheese grater?”
“No,” said Shilu. And she didn’t say more.
As the storm finally began to die, a layer of black mold crept up from between the cracks and gaps in the vast hummocks and ridges of broken concrete, as if the kinetic impacts of the hailstones had been keeping it from spreading. At first Elpida thought it was mere shadows, but then the mold began to thicken and climb, as if soaking up the rain, crawling higher all across the landscape of shattered debris. It started to clog the temporary streams, lying in thickened mounds over the floating masses. Pheiri’s tracks tore through it with ease; the mold did not cling to him or bar his way, but began to cover everything else. Pheiri highlighted the phenomenon on a single screen, scanning the material and showing readouts of the composition. Bio-matter, spongy with motion, thick enough to chew.
“What the fuck are we watching?” Sky hissed. “What is all this shit?”
“The miracle of life after death,” Atyle said. Sky shot her a look with bared teeth.
“She’s serious,” Elpida said. “I think we’re witnessing the city’s self-repair mechanisms. That stuff is growing fast, absorbing the buildings, processing debris. Kagami, what’s the nanomachine density inside that stuff?”
“Negligible,” Kagami grunted, reaching out to tap one of Pheiri’s screens. “Wouldn’t want to risk a mouthful of it.”
“How can it be repairing the city, then?” Sky asked with a little scoff.
“Shilu?” Elpida said.
Shilu shrugged. “I was a Necromancer. I did what I was told. I have no greater insights into the nanomachine mechanisms of the world. Though … I’ve seen this happen before, on a smaller scale. You’re probably right. Self-repair.”
“Huh,” Sky grunted. “Some fucking use you are, tin can.”
Elpida held up a hand for quiet. “The storm’s died down enough. Pheiri, can we see the graveworm?”
Pheiri answered by piping his best forward-facing external camera view to one of the largest screens, up and to Kagami’s right. The view was still choked with thick sheets of rain, but thinner than before, a mist that darkened as it marched toward the black horizon. The city lay like a ripped blanket dipped in liquid concrete, jagged with outcrops of steel, being eaten by black mold.
An uneven line towered over it all, barely visible through the rain against the tarry sky, like the shadow of a mountain range.
“There she is,” Elpida said. “How close are we?”
“Close enough,” Kagami hissed. “Another half hour at this pace and we’ll be within sight of the base. No worm-guard yet, but … ” She shrugged. “Who knows when they’ll come out to play.”
“Alright, Pheiri,” Elpida said. “Take us slow, creep us in. We want to see Necromancers before we sprint. This only works if we’re baiting them.”
Kagami let out a long, slow breath. “Commander— fuck!”
Elpida almost flinched. Sky jerked in her seat. Shilu looked up, eyes quickly scanning the screens. Atyle said nothing.
“Kaga?” Elpida demanded. “What—”
Kagami sighed. Elpida instantly knew this was not an emergency, nor the arrival of a dozen Necromancers. Kagami gestured vaguely with her left hand, the one wired into Pheiri. One of Pheiri’s screens jerked and flickered with a new camera view — a distant one, to the rear, with the black stepped pyramid of the tomb dominating the view.
An indistinct blob of familiar flesh was launching itself from the exterior walls of the tomb, then snapping wide like a glider shaped to catch the wind. The blob soared upward on the remaining scraps of the hurricane, taking wing over the shattered plain of the city.
“Ah,” Elpida said.
Sky started laughing. Atyle purred with approval.
“Iriko’s following us,” Kagami grunted. “Flying. For fuck’s sake! Fool will get herself torn apart if she’s not careful.”
“What does Pheiri say?” Elpida asked. She got an answer from one of Pheiri’s screens.
///tightbeam uplink re-established
///communication protocol standard
///warning ISSUE
///warning IGNORE
///overwatch NEGATIVE engagement distance
///advise non-contact
///tightbeam uplink maintain
“Good idea,” Elpida said, patting one of Pheiri’s consoles. “Keep her in the loop, but tell her to keep away. We don’t want her getting injured in all this.”
>y
Sky snorted, then said, “You can follow all that?”
“Just about,” Elpida said. “It’s how he talks. You’ll get used to it.”
Minutes and meters crawled past in unison. Pheiri entered a canyon formed from the fallen remains of several skyscrapers, their glass all pounded to dust, their steel frames twisted and broken, creepers of black mold climbing their remains. The rain slowly died away, until it no longer drummed on Pheiri’s hull; the wind did the same, dropping below a hundred miles an hour, then below eighty, then fifty, forty, still dropping. Pheiri emerged from the long canyon of dead buildings beneath a sky just a touch lighter than before.
Elpida looked for the tell-tale ruddy-red glow of the sun, the furnace trapped behind the ever-present black clouds — and there it was, off to Pheiri’s right, a red smudge in a distant corner of the sky.
“Suns out, guns out,” Sky muttered. Nobody laughed — except Howl, in the back of Elpida’s head.
“Maybe they’re not coming,” Kagami said, eyes glued to her screens. “Maybe Perpetua was lying. Maybe the plan changed.”
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
“Shilu?” Elpida said.
“The network may be taking time to re-establish connections. This is a wide area of damage. Assume nothing.”
“Assume nothing, right. Kaga, what about—”
Kagami slapped the arm of her chair and grinned wide. “We have Hope! She’s talking to us over tightbeam!”
“Haha!” Sky laughed. “I thought you were kidding about that? You fuckers really do have air support?”
Elpida breathed a sigh of relief — Hope, Thirteen Arcadia’s daughter-machine, a sub-orbital pseudo-satellite hovering several klicks up, had made herself scarce before the storm front had hit. They’d lost contact before entering the tomb. As another daughter of Telokopolis, Elpida was delighted to hear Hope was still up there.
“Can she send us aerial—”
“Already trying,” Kagami said, the fingers of both hands twitching as she sifted through Pheiri’s external comms. “She’s too far to the west to get us any good high-angle shots. Needs to stay out from beneath the storm. She’s got— Ah. Okay.”
One of Pheiri’s screens shifted, showing a single static shot of what looked like endless grey soup studded with rotten outcrops of broken material, sinking into a deeper substrate of black. A tiny dot in the middle was highlighted in red.
“That’s us?” Elpida asked.
“That’s us. Hope can see us.”
“Fucking hell,” Sky breathed. “This goes on for miles and miles. It’s … forever.”
“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. “This is only local. Big, but local. Kagami, if we can talk to Hope, that means other things can talk too. Ask her to get us as many wide-angle shots as she can. Look for anything shaped like a person, anything moving, anything that might be a Necro—”
One of Pheiri’s screens turned red.
///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///advise immediate priority one procedure
///seal electromagnetic ingress
///raise external firewall
///retract communications pickup net
“That’s our first Necromancer!” Elpida announced, interrupting herself. Pheiri’s screens flickered and jerked, cycling through external views; other screens locked up as firewalls rose, narrowing his sensory range, closing off comms ingress. “Kaga, get those wide-angle shots from Hope, show us where it is! Pheiri, show me what we got, show us where—”
Kagami winced, eyes going wide, face turning grey. At the exact same moment, inside Elpida’s head, Howl said, Huh. That’s weird.
“What?” Elpida said out loud. “What is it? Talk to me.”
Exactly, Howl grunted.
What?
“Something is trying to access Pheiri’s tightbeam receiver,” Kagami said, voice tight in her throat. “And it’s not an attack, not a virus.” She turned to look at Elpida. “Something out there wants to talk.”