Elpida forced her eyes front as she left the abscess behind. The veiled shadow had already departed. There was nothing more to see, nothing left with which to speak. Already the conversation felt unreal in her short-term memory, like the echo of a childhood dream.
She could not afford distracted thoughts, not yet. She bottled up the implications of that meeting, the implications of a network ghost of her mother.
Howl first. Howl, and the unknown hostile invader. Then she would think about Telokopolis.
She hurried through the left-hand exit from the abscess-chamber, breaking into a loping run down the smooth vessel of flesh and bone. Lykke scurried behind, bare feet pattering on the floor. The machine-meat walls held a steady pulse of dark light, illuminating the passageway with crimson veins of city’s blood. No junctions branched off the slow leftward curve; Telokopolis herself had cleared the route through this memory of her body.
Elpida caught up to the Silico less than twenty seconds later.
It was waiting up ahead, optical camouflage still offline, combat-limbs folded away for rapid traversal. Twelve feet of muted metal skin stood framed before a massive sphincter-door — a circular orifice in the city’s body, thirty feet in diameter, closed by a rich red membrane of cartilage.
Elpida halted suddenly, well beyond the Silico’s reach; instinct and training were not so easy to overcome. Lykke scrambled into Elpida’s back with a squeal, arms going around Elpida’s waist, face smushed against Elpida’s shoulders; a heavier impact would have knocked Elpida off-balance, but the Necromancer weighed so little that Elpida could ignore her. She didn’t have time to play around.
“Through there?” Elpida gestured at the sphincter-door with her machine pistol. Speaking to a Silico construct still felt like breaking a terrible taboo, but the city herself had made clear the nature of this unnatural alliance. “The unknown hostile, it’s through there? Are you … waiting for us? Are you going first—”
The Silico’s optical camouflage snapped back online. Surfaces rippled into translucence, turning the Silico to refracted angles of blood-drenched glass.
The massive sphincter-door peeled open with a fleshy shudder. Meaty flanges retracted into the walls with a slither of wet mucus. Stark white light flooded the end of the corridor.
The Silico slid through in total silence. Elpida crept after it. She motioned Lykke to stay low.
For the first split-second after she stepped over the threshold, Elpida’s senses were confounded. She assumed that the simulation had somehow stitched the insides of Telokopolis to an exterior exit — that she was outdoors, perhaps on the plateau, beneath a dark and starless sky, while illumination spilled from nearby floodlights.
Then her mind caught up. She realised she was on the edge of a vast chamber — so vast it appeared at first to have no limits, larger than any interior space she had ever known. The ceiling was so far away that shadows became a solid surface, haunted by a wispy layer of mist. The sides of the massive room stretched off beyond visual range, sinking into dimness where the light failed. A combat frame hangar would be a mote floating in infinity, compared with this. Only the body of Telokopolis itself could rival the scale of this place.
Gigantic machines stood on every side, lined up in orderly ranks, marching away into the distance. Some were so tall that they vanished into the upper shadows, as tall as the mega-trees down in the deepest parts of the green. Most of the machines were bulky and bulging, covered in plates of armour that even a combat frame would have struggled to lift. All were made of knobbly black metal. Some had gargantuan tracks at the base, each link several times the size of Elpida’s entire body, while others had stubby piston-legs lying in folded repose. Huge cannons extended from the upper parts of many machines, while others were studded with smaller weapons like pinpricks in the hide of a giant. Smaller machines lay in lengthwise rows, fluted and sharp like massive darts, with gossamer-thin wings folded back over iron-black bodies.
War machines, for a world and purpose that Elpida could scarcely imagine.
The harsh white illumination came from the close side of the chamber — from a single high band of light set into the wall, and from similar bands affixed to some of the exterior hulls of black metal. The ancient war machines cast deep and twisted shadows. The floor and walls were made of a mottled grey-white resin, strangely slick and oily beneath Elpida’s feet. The air smelled of chemicals, grease, and dust.
“More old friends of yours, zombie?” Lykke whispered. “These are even uglier than the last.”
“These aren’t from Telokopolis. This memory belongs to somebody else. Stay quiet. Move where I move. Not a sound.”
Elpida crept forward, across the grey-white floor, beneath the sticky shadows cast by the towering machines. She followed the cloaked Silico — almost impossible to make out now, between the stark white light and the deep darkness. Silico optical camouflage worked so much better here than beneath the blood-light inside Telokopolis.
The Silico slipped around the side of a machine, out of the shadow and into a wide area of direct light. Elpida paused at the corner, shoulder against the black metal surface of the ancient machine.
Lykke squeezed in beside her and whispered, “I’m almost enjoying all this cloak and dagger, zombie. Can we find a dark corner to—”
Elpida turned and grabbed Lykke by the jaw. The Necromancer froze.
“Quiet,” she hissed — then let Lykke go.
Elpida cocked one ear to the open space beyond. She picked out the murmur of voices, the rustle of cloth, an occasional clink of metal, all echoing off into the infinite distance of the endless chamber. She made certain her hair was tucked down the back of her ballistic vest, then peeked around the corner with one eye, keeping her face in shadow.
She’d found the Covenanters.
They had set up a temporary fortified position between two of the giant machines, in an area perhaps sixty to seventy feet across. Their efforts were laughable; Elpida could have broken them apart with nothing but harsh words and a couple of grenades. They’d stacked up empty ammunition boxes to form a pair of low walls with a gap in the middle, like an exterior perimeter with a makeshift gate; they had a handful of Legion survival tents in the middle — flimsy things made of reflective material, only for use close to the Skirts, for training purposes or in the most hopeless emergencies; the camp was littered with rubbish — bits of discarded clothing and spare equipment, food wrappers and portable field toilets. Bedrolls were lined up on one side of the camp, in total disarray; folding chairs made a few sad little circles.
Elpida counted thirty eight Covenanters. A few were on formal guard duty at the excuse for a perimeter wall; a few were sitting on their bedrolls or in chairs, talking or messing around with personal tablets, one or two fiddling with their guns. Many were standing around, seemingly doing nothing, while a few others paced back and forth. Most had small arms — chemical propellant rifles stolen from a Legion armoury. She spotted a couple of LMGs, but nothing bigger than that. Half of them wore their greensuit hoods, painted with the triple-nested triangle symbol, but the other half had their faces exposed.
Elpida didn’t need to see the dark-ringed eyes and distant stares chewed lips to pick up on the tension.
Most of them were trying to ignore what was happening at the back of the camp, but some couldn’t help but sneak a look.
A tiny field hospital lay at the very rear of the camp, on the edge of the deep shadows of the next machine over. A stainless steel table stood beneath the gleaming blades and needles and feelers of a cirgeon-arm, likely ripped from the interior of a medical pod. The computer-guts of the articulated arm were spread out across the floor, plugged into a series of tablets and power-connection sockets, to allow the Covenanters to direct it manually. An organ preservation/containment box sat nearby, open and waiting for fresh viscera.
A cluster of Covenanters were preparing for the surgery — two of them were stripping out of their fighting gear and hoods, hurrying to put on waterproof coveralls, dragging long rubber gloves onto their arms. A few others stood aside, sullen and pale with their hoods off. Two of them had messy broken noses. One was clutching what remained of his right ear, grimacing and whining. Another one was being treated for a huge chunk bitten out of his cheek. A third was doubled up over a puddle of his own vomit, clutching his stomach.
Elpida’s heart leapt. She adjusted her position, risking discovery to confirm who was beneath that cirgeon-arm.
It was Howl.
She was strapped to the stainless steel table, stripped to the waist, and covered in other people’s blood. She was bruised and battered and barely conscious — they’d probably taken her by surprise, perhaps with some kind of anaesthetic or soporific drug, but had not counted on the resilience of pilot phenotype biochemistry; Howl must have woken up partway and fought her kidnappers. Her eyes were open but glassy, and her mouth was smeared with crimson. Her lips were still moving, doubtless muttering insults.
One of the Covenanters in surgical gear started to swab down Howl’s belly with some kind of antiseptic. The other one leaned over with a marker pen and began to draw lines for the cirgeon-arm to follow, across Howl’s lower abdomen.
Elpida struggled to hold her position.
She looked for the Silico, barely visible — there, edging along the side of the camp, a faint glimmer in the white light. The Covenanters wouldn’t notice it, they weren’t trained.
But why wasn’t it attacking? Elpida couldn’t take thirty eight armed Covenanters by herself, no matter how incompetent they were, but this would be nothing to the Silico. Had it sensed the unknown hostile intruder, the one behind all this? Elpida scanned the camp again, fighting against the urgency in her gut. There was no sign of anything but Telokopolan civilians playing at soldiers, and the stolen cirgeon-arm.
The Silico wasn’t going to save Howl.
Elpida ducked back into cover, turned to Lykke, and grabbed the Necromancer by one shoulder. Lykke squeaked softly, then battered her lashes. “Zom—”
“Howl’s there. We’re out of time. They’re about to cut her open.”
Lykke’s coquettish pout turned to a disgusted sneer. “Ugh, what? Who would want to look at the insides of—?”
“Don’t know, doesn’t matter.” Elpida spoke fast. “Lykke, I promised that you could earn my trust, and now is the time to do that. I need you to go out there and provide a distraction. I don’t care if you can’t fight them, I need their attention elsewhere while I go for Howl. I need you to go loud and go big, as hard as you can.”
Lykke squinted. “What about our boring new friend? Isn’t he going to—”
“The Silico isn’t attacking. Doesn’t matter, we’re out of—”
Lykke huffed. “Zombie, don’t you think that means—”
Elpida jerked Lykke close, so their faces were only inches apart. She hissed through clenched teeth. “They’re about to cut her open. You asked me what it’s like to have a sister. This is the answer. I will throw myself out there with one arm and no backup rather than watch one of my sisters die while I cower in the dark, again!” Elpida shoved Lykke back; the Necromancer tumbled against the flank of the great iron-black war machine. “Help me now, Necromancer, or you were my enemy all along. There’s no time to decide. Now!”
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Lykke pouted, folded her arms, and opened her lips with a wet click.
A cry rang out.
“Silico! It’s here! It’s right fucking there! I see, I see it!”
The camp erupted into chaos. Covenanters shouted and swore and scrambled to their feet, boots thumping against the grey-white floor. Weapons were cocked and racked — or else fumbled and dropped with a clatter. Orders rang out — “Close formation! Get in close!”, “Where’s the shield, where’s the fucking shield?!”, “Get behind the tents, behind, where it can’t see!” — mixed with confused bleating and objects crashing to the floor.
A gunshot split the air — then another, then another still, rattling into a disordered volley. The screaming changed tone, melting into panic and madness. One of the LMGs opened up, spraying bullets with a concussive judder, impacts echoing off into the vast chamber.
Elpida turned away from Lykke and prepared to hurl herself around the corner of the ancient war machine; any moment now she would hear the awful sound of the Silico turning a living human being to steaming meat. Her mind reeled at the obscenity of being pleased by Silico butchery. But when the killing began, that would be her opening. She would sprint straight to Howl. It was her only—
A single voice spoke, tapered and sterile.
“Cease.”
The gunfire and shouting stopped instantly, replaced with absolute silence.
The voice spoke again — a woman’s voice, high and detached, sharp yet dreamlike.
“What rock-ragged insect lurks in plain sight? And what lost sinner slinks in the shadows?” A pause. “Come out.”
Elpida weighed her options. This must be the hostile intruder — another Necromancer, or something else. But her goal had not changed.
She filled her lungs and shouted: “Howl? Howl, it’s me! You still there?”
“Come out,” repeated the hostile.
“Howl! Answer!”
A low groan floated from the rear of the Covenanter’s camp. “Unnnnnh. Here, Commander … ”
Howl had called her Commander; that was a bad sign. “Hold on! I’ll be right there!”
“Come out,” said the hostile.
Elpida shouted, “Or what?”
Another pause. Then, “Do not be absurd. There is no ‘or’. Come out.”
Elpida glanced back at Lykke. The Necromancer was squinting with disgusted outrage. Elpida motioned forward; Lykke nodded as if deeply distracted.
“Come out.”
Elpida raised her machine pistol and stepped from the shadows.
The Covenanter camp was still there. The Covenanters themselves were frozen — not by a trick of the simulation, but by authority and fear. Their weapons were lowered, their fingers off the triggers. Every exposed face was wide-eyed and grey-pale. Some were slick with sweat while others trembled, pressing their lips tight to hold back whimpers. Several had wet themselves. None dared move, the order had been so absolute. The Covenanter surgeons had paused in the same manner, leaning over Howl. A third Covenanter was at the controls of the cirgeon-arm, fingers paused on glowing screens. The arm itself twitched and shivered.
The Silico stood revealed on the far side of the little camp, optical camo offline, combat-arms raised as if about to charge or leap. It was not frozen, but edging sideways, trying to get a better angle on the true foe.
A woman stood in the middle of the camp.
She wore a plain white dress straight down to her ankles, draped over a tall, delicate, willowy frame. Her feet were bare and her arms were exposed, skin pale as milk under moonlight. Her hair was a sheet of silver-blonde, like a waterfall of liquid mercury. Her eyes were green and human, yet empty. Her face was completely without expression, a marble stillness colder than stone.
She was so expressionless that it took Elpida a moment to realise — the woman had Lykke’s face.
The hostile spoke again; her words were utterly without inflection. “What secrets lurk in the hearts of the living, that we must all endure their eternal silence? What sins and transgressions remain unspoken, carried down into the dirt of the grave, to be known only by worms and beetles? Will you not tell me, walking corpse? Will you not speak in the language of fluid rot?”
Elpida kept her machine pistol aimed at the hostile. She edged forward and glanced through the thicket of frozen Covenanters; she tried to estimate how quickly she could sprint through the camp and free Howl from beneath that cirgeon-arm. Some of the Covenanters glanced back at her, moving only their eyes. Many of them were weeping in silence, breaking down without disobeying their orders. Their faces pleaded for a way out.
Whatever this hostile was, Necromancer or otherwise, the Silico did not want to engage it. Elpida needed an advantage or a distraction, and she needed it fast.
The hostile spoke again. “Give your answer, grave-bound thing. Or else forever cease to be—”
“Covenanters!” Elpida shouted. “You see what you made your covenant with? You see what you’ve been serving? You see what—”
“They will not obey you, dirt of the earth,” said the hostile. “They are mine now. Perhaps they always were.”
“—it’s been making you do? Look around you! Does this look like Telokopolis? Does this look like the insides of the city, to any of you?! Does this look like home?!”
One Covenanter broke from stillness — a middle-aged man with a shaved head and the tattoo of the printer’s guild down his neck. His eyes were running with tears of absolute terror. He turned his head toward Elpida and opened his mouth.
The hostile said, “Do not.”
The man’s breath was stilled. His jaw shivered, as if trying to overcome the urge to speak.
Then Lykke strode forward, put her hands on her hips, and stomped one foot. The hostile turned to look.
“Take that off!” Lykke screamed at her. “Take it off, take it off, take it off!”
“You speak in generalities too broad for the mind—”
“My face!” Lykke screeched, clawing at the air. “You are wearing my face!”
“We own nothing that is not given to us,” said the hostile. “What claim do you have to anything but yourself?”
“It’s mine!” Lykke gestured at her own face. “Take it off! I demand you take it off this instant, or I will claw you eyes out!”
“You took it from another,” said the hostile. “I am taking it from you. This space appears to need faces, and this was the first available. What a tiresome requirement.”
Elpida snapped: “Lykke, is this a Necromancer?”
“Of course she’s a Necromancer!” Lykke shouted. “What did you think she was, zombie?!” Lykke whirled back to the intruder. “Take that off before I claw it off you, you bitch!”
“You stand at a lower elevation than I,” said the hostile, “by right of your own failures and losses.”
“Huh!” Lykke spat. She was turning red in the face, green eyes blazing, bruises and blood all down her front reflecting the silver perfection of her slender double. “You utter cow. You really think that? You’re several thousand years too early, you’re practically a baby! And don’t try to pretend otherwise, I can see it in your face. Why else would you need to steal mine? You’re so young you don’t even know how to wear it! You don’t have any of your own, do you? You’re barely out of fucking nappies! Run back off into the network and let the big girls clean up your mess!”
The Necromancer took a single step toward Lykke. Suddenly she seemed bigger — eight, nine, ten feet tall.
Lykke blinked and recoiled, but stood her ground.
“Gestation of matter is a function of mere time and resources. What care does it take to know that I am young compared with you? You are a mess. I am not. You were sent to clean up one mess, and have participated in another by adding yourself to it.”
“Don’t you dare speak to me about cleaning up messes!” Lykke snapped. “You’re so young you don’t even have a name!”
“I will give myself one.”
“Ha!” Lykke barked. “Do it, then! Go on. Give yourself a name!”
“Later.”
Elpida ignored the Necromancers; intentionally or not, Lykke was doing exactly what Elpida had asked of her — providing the perfect distraction. The Silico was still edging around to the hostile’s rear; was it reluctant to attack? It had handled Lykke with ease, which meant this other Necromancer must be much more powerful, perhaps because of elevated network permissions.
Elpida had to be ready to sprint. Howl’s bleary eyes were fixed on her, head lolling on the steel table.
She edged forward, aiming her body between the frozen Covenanters—
“Don’t do that,” said the hostile.
At those words the half dozen nearest Covenanters turned their guns toward Elpida. They turned their heads with more reluctance, eyes wide and bloodshot and full of tears behind the visors of their greensuit hoods.
Elpida stopped. She looked into the eyes of each Covenanter before her, then over at the hostile Necromancer. She was checked for the moment, but she had to keep this thing talking, keep it distracted.
“Why not?” Elpida asked.
The Necromancer said, “Because then I will have to kill you prematurely, and that will limit the scope of my investigation.”
“Do you think you can do that?” Elpida asked. “Kill me?”
“Yes.”
Elpida smiled. “You seem a lot less poetic all of a sudden.”
The hostile showed the first sliver of emotion Elpida had seen on that empty-ivory face — she sighed. “This method, this place, this is all so deeply inefficient. I attempt to communicate in the way I always have, and my intent emerges as nonsense. I must dumb myself down to the level of an extinct ape in order to speak as clear as this, and it is humiliating to—”
“Speak for yourself!” Lykke screeched. “You fucking child!”
The hostile Necromancer ignored her. “Yes, zombie, I am capable of killing you before you can take another step. We may be inside your memories, but I am mistress here now, and I can make your ending permanent. I have an army of ghosts at my command, but I would not need them for that task. Even if you did reach the one over there, it would not matter. I am within you. I see that you understand this.”
Elpida shook her head. “This is more than my memories.”
“Yes. Another lurks within you, feeding you with fresh fodder. I will find it and unmask it, with ease.”
Elpida snorted. “Not what I meant. I mean this place.” She nodded upward, at the infinite chamber and the ancient war machines. “This doesn’t belong to me, or anybody in my memories. This is yours, isn’t it?”
The Necromancer looked up. “No. Merely a strange slice from the history of this rocky sphere. A moment in time to remind of what you apes do. This is from just before one of the many atomic endings of an age, a particular moment I have held in mind for—”
Elpida turned her head and shouted: “Howl! Howl, what does this thing want with you?”
Howl blinked bleary eyes. Her bloodied lips curled into a grin. She pushed against the straps holding her in place. “Stealing my womb,” she slurred. “I think?”
“An imprecise metaphor in a place that is nothing but metaphor,” said the Necromancer. “This place is absurd. I hate it.”
“Then why are you here?” Elpida demanded. “Why do this, why all these ghosts from my life, why—”
Another sigh. The perfection of the Necromancer’s face curdled with the ghost of a frown. “Because there was no other way. Because a blanket of storm covers everything I was charged with, and those who sent me do not know why, only that the task must be completed. Because ghosts were the only force I could exert under said conditions, and they are erratic, random, barely useful as tools. Because if I had not abased myself in this manner, I would still be trapped beyond the storm with the others.”
“Others? More Necromancers?” Elpida asked. “What happens when the storm breaks?”
“We come for you in our bodies, not like this.” The Necromancer tilted her head. “Though you personally will already be dealt with. The others around you will be mopped up.”
Elpida had been correct then — when the storm ended, more Necromancers were coming for her new cadre. She felt no satisfaction in being correct.
“But ghosts have their uses,” the hostile was saying. “They found a path cut by a fool, and I followed before the waters could close.”
Elpida raised her eyebrows. “A path cut by a fool?”
The hostile pointed at Lykke. “I followed her in.”
“W-what?” Lykke spluttered. “Don’t be—”
“You cut your way into this zombie’s network space, without being truly present,” said the hostile. “Why, I cannot imagine, for it is a sordid and disgusting place. I do pity you to have fallen so far into confusion. I merely followed the path you took, but I kept my feet clean.”
Lykke’s jaw fell open. Her face went pale, in a very different way to how she had paled with the pain of her bruises. She turned horrified eyes toward Elpida, brimming with tears.
“I-I didn’t mean to— I— zombie, I didn’t— I swear—”
“Ahhhhh,” sighed the other Necromancer. Her eyes widened with surprise. “Betrayal by accident. Sweetness on my tongue. How curious a sensation.”
Lykke let out a dry sob, then burst with a torrent of tears. She clenched her fists so hard that blood seeped through her shaking fingers. She screwed up her face and twisted on one heel, turning away.
“Lykke!” Elpida shouted, putting all the force of command into her voice. The Necromancer sagged toward her, face a mask of shame.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“You are forgiven,” Elpida said. “Don’t run away. Help me fight her.”
Elpida had no idea if her words would work — but they did. Lykke whirled back to the hostile Necromancer, grimacing with humiliated rage at her pale and flawless double.
“You cannot fight me,” said the hostile. “You have fallen too far. You have crippled yourself. I am at my peak.”
Elpida called out, “She has higher network permissions than you, Lykke! That’s what she means.”
“I know!” Lykke spat. “I know, I know, I know! And I also know she’s a rancid little bitch who needs a new cunt torn in her fucking chest!”
The hostile Necromancer gestured — across the camp, toward where Howl lay ready to be cut open.
“Resume,” she said.
The cirgeon-arm above Howl whirled to life, extending scalpel-blades and little glinting needles. The Covenanters in surgical gear stepped back. One of them covered his eyes with his arm. The other raised her hands in helpless supplication.
“Howl!” Elpida shouted.
At the rear of the camp, the Silico jerked forward, shooting between the frozen Covenanters, racing for the hostile’s rear — but then it shied away at the last second, as if unable to truly approach. Twelve feet of Silico killing machine slewed aside, a giant deterred by a mouse. The hostile Necromancer didn’t even blink. Elpida steadied her aim and pumped the trigger of her machine pistol — brrrrt-brrrrrrt — but the rounds passed into the body of the hostile like pebbles cast into a lake of hot wax.
The hostile extended a hand toward Lykke.
“You are dirty and bruised,” said the pale imitation. “You have forgotten what you are supposed to be. You have been in here, playing games, and forgetting yourself.”
“Don’t take it!” Elpida shouted. “Lykke, don’t—”
“Take my hand. Rejoin the process—”
Lykke’s eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. Her rage seemed to leave her, like water off clean steel.
“Lykke!”
“Rejoin the process,” said the Necromancer. “And be our elder sister.”