Necroepilogos

Two weeks out from Pheiri, in the shadow of a burnt and broken mountain range, the third of central’s monsters caught up with Thirteen Arcadia.

This was not like the first ‘physical asset’ — the golden diamond which had descended from the skies, to slay Thirteen as she had lain helpless upon the barren soil, before Elpida had rescued her, before her reconciliation with herself, before the Change had changed everything.

Nor was this third monster akin to the second asset, the one she had fought two weeks ago.

The arrival of that second infernal machine had prompted Thirteen’s departure from Elpida’s new cadre; the resulting battle had proven to Thirteen that it was high time for her to leave.

Central — The Enemy, The Unknown, The Blind Mad Idiot God — was hunting her, personally. This was what she had decided.

That second ‘physical asset’, two weeks prior, had been smaller than the golden diamond, but much quicker, considerably smarter, and infinitely more aggressive. The golden diamond, the airship, was a sledgehammer of blunt force applied against an anomaly, an attempt to blot out all evidence that a Telokopolan combat frame had fallen from orbit. The second asset was a red-hot scalpel come to cut her out and burn her to ash. Central had apparently abandoned the plan of suppressing her mere existence, falling back on the old reliable — simple extermination.

The thing had surprised Thirteen and Pheiri by approaching while cloaked. It had projected light through the surface of its body to achieve invisibility, but it had also masked its own heat signature, radar returns, nanomachine-load, and gravitic wave disturbance pattern. The machine had used its own gravitic engine to wrap itself in a veil of confusion.

The first sign of the asset’s approach was the worm-guard massing at the edge of the graveworm safe zone — first a dozen, then fifty, then over a hundred. The worm-guard had formed a phalanx of writhing, coiling, protoplasmic masses, clad in armour so dense it refused to yield to even Thirteen’s sensors. The worm-guard had kept pace with Thirteen and Pheiri’s position for over an hour, growing in number every few minutes. Elpida and the other revenants had flown into near panic; they were concerned that this was it, this was the moment they’d been fearing for the last eight days, the moment the worm-guard decided that Pheiri counted as a threat to the graveworm.

<<Iriko’s already fled,>> Elpida had told her over the comms uplink. <<She’s terrified of those machines, but I think she’s got the right idea. We need to peel off. I don’t want to provoke the worm-guard. They outnumber us a hundred to one.>>

Thirteen agreed, despite her strength.

The Change had made her powerful beyond any prior imagination; she felt exceptionally safe and confident inside her new body. The flesh she had once been was now protected by a dozen layers of nano-composite bone armour, wrapped in several thousand tons of crimson muscle, tendon, sinew, and gristle, and cradled inside a spacious sphere of milky-warm amniotic fluid. She was not that flesh anymore, of course, though she could grasp it and stretch it and look through its eyes and give it teeth with which to bite. She could extrude herself from a sphincter on her own underside to speak through lips she reformed from memory, and gesture with more hands than she’d ever had before. But she was all this flesh now, all this bone, every cell of this infinite potential for regrowth and adjustment.

She did not feel like her name should be ‘Thirteen’ anymore; that felt disrespectful and dismissive toward half her soul. She remembered her childhood, raised as a thing with two legs and two arms and a head, but now she also remembered being a combat frame, being pieced together from machine-meat, being piloted and ridden and joined with — by herself, as herself, inside herself. Her memories were paradoxical; she clearly recalled climbing inside her own body, being entered by herself, as both halves of a single being — the being she was now, after the Change. She recalled the loneliness and betrayal and rage of abandonment in orbit, in perfect clarity, burning with shame and self-recrimination. She forgave herself, but knew she still must atone. She had to treat herself with respect.

In private she experimented with new names. ‘Arcadia’s Rampart’ did not feel right, because she was not just the combat frame, she was also still Thirteen. ‘Arcadia’s Thirteen’ was worse; that implied ownership of half herself by the other half of herself. It was nonsense.

In the end she settled on ‘Thirteen Arcadia’. For now. Provisional. Until she reunited with Twelve Fifty Five.

But even a Changed combat frame could not fight infinite worm-guard. If the graveworm itself truly was a nanomachine forge the size of a mountain range, then it could drown Thirteen in ten thousand worm-guard, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Her potency and durability would count for nothing against such numbers.

So, she and Pheiri and Elpida had all agreed — they had veered away from the distant line of the graveworm, further and further out from the edge of the safe zone. They had hoped this would calm the worm’s autoimmune response. But the worm-guard had continued to gather. In the sixty seconds before the physical asset struck, Thirteen had counted five hundred and thirty seven worm-guard, with more arriving every moment. All the nearby revenants had fled. The city ruins for nearly a mile around contained nothing but herself and Pheiri. Iriko had squeezed herself into the ground somewhere nearby, hiding, invisible.

The worm-guard weren’t there for Thirteen and Pheiri, of course. They could see the monster drawing close.

The second ‘physical asset’ had burst from between the buildings of the rotten city and dropped its cloaking the moment it attacked.

A perfect sphere of mirrored metal, half a mile across.

The thing had assaulted Thirteen with earth-shattering sonic weaponry, wide-spectrum sensory static, and blinding white light — laser beams generated across every inch of the machine’s liquid skin. The suite of weapon systems was designed and selected to overwhelm Thirteen’s sensors, foul her targeting, and confuse her defences.

Once she was blinded and reeling, the main body of the asset had disgorged thousands of flying worms of living mercury, corkscrewing through the air like a cloud of falling seeds.

The flying worms were corrosive. They slipped through her shields, vibrating at the exact frequencies to pass through her seven layers of energy-weave and air-block. They fell upon her like burning rain, melting through armour and corroding her flesh.

That machine had been designed to kill her specifically, to blind and deafen Thirteen while her divine transformation was reduced to so much metallic sludge.

Good try, but not nearly close enough.

Thirteen had led the mirrored sphere on a high-speed dance through the wilds, sprinting at over sixty miles an hour to stay ahead of the corrosive rain. She had spent forty nine hours plinking at the thing with long-range weaponry, pounding at gravitic shielding until it buckled, then hammering on the perfect sphere until it was covered in divots and dents. Such a relentless pace was easy for Thirteen now; she did not need to sleep or rest anymore, not unless she chose to indulge. The new reactors deep within her flesh would keep her awake and operational through anything; she needed no external maintenance, never again, not with her own on-board nanomachine forges feeding every cell of her flesh with fresh grey sludge.

She had delivered the coup de grâce to the mirrored sphere indirectly, by leading it back toward the graveworm. She had grown curious about what might happen if central’s asset came into contact with the massed worm-guard; Elpida had also requested this course of action, during one of their regular check-in broadcasts during the fight. The Commander wanted to know if central and the worms would wage open war upon each other.

Thirteen owed everything to Elpida and Howl. She owed the Commander her eternal allegiance. Not to mention how she wanted to protect Pheiri, her brave little brother, who had been through so much.

She was going to betray them all, of course — with her inevitable departure — so she did everything she could to help. She led the mirrored sphere back toward the worm, for the sake of the experiment.

The worm-guard had dismembered and dismantled the sphere, like ants swarming over a wounded mammal. Several hundred had died in the process, but they were quickly engulfed and consumed by their kin. Thirteen had watched the whole process, then sent the footage back to Pheiri, for Elpida and the others to analyse.

She failed to secure any worm-guard flesh. Not one scrap. The survivors were meticulous in their cannibalistic recycling.

That failure stung. Elpida and the revenants were growing hungry.

Defeating the mirrored sphere had cost Thirteen almost nothing. A few burns on her flesh, a few chips off her armour, it mattered not. Her own nanomachine forges could now repair almost any level of damage. Her body — her new body, a giant of flesh and bone and blossom — could have been bisected in two, and she could have healed herself by pressing the halves together.

But Pheiri and the zombies could not do that.

The revenants could not fight for forty nine hours without a minute’s respite. Pheiri could not jump-charge his shields from a bottomless well of self-replicating nanomachine forges, nor cross the rooftops at a dead run of sixty miles an hour. He was confined to the slow healing process of a true machine, confined to the ground, to the streets, and to the extant shape of his metal and plastic.

Pheiri would not have lasted fifteen minutes against the mirrored sphere.

He would have put up a grand fight, of course! Oh yes, Thirteen had not the slightest doubt in her little brother’s courage and determination. With his particle beam emitter and his stout heart and the love he carried in his belly, he would have fought. He would have fought well, and he would have died swiftly, along with all his crew.

Central was hunting Thirteen, not Pheiri. Without the burning beacon of her presence, Pheiri could hide beneath notice once again, and the zombies could go on without being seen by The Enemy — the real enemy, the blind idiot god behind the mask of the world.

The zombies pretended otherwise. They pored over the footage. They asked Thirteen questions about the asset’s behaviour, as if they might find a way to counter the next one. They made plans and contingencies. They discussed emergency evacuation procedures.

One of them even nicknamed the thing. Mirror, the grumpy one, one of the two who had fought inside Arcadia’s Rampart to save Thirteen from the Necromancer.

<<Disco ball,>> Mirror had called it, over the comms uplink between Pheiri and Thirteen. Pheiri translated the languages for Thirteen’s benefit. <<With built-in speakers. Noise and light as primary weapons. Tacky, blinding, ultimately very stupid, beloved by fools and people with too much entactogens in their bloodstreams. Hence, disco ball.>>

<<We’re not calling it ‘disco ball’,>> another revenant had said. That was Victory, the one who had thrown her empty gun at the Necromancer for Thirteen’s sake. Thirteen Arcadia felt a special attachment and gratitude to Victory. An unadorned human who had stood up to a monster, for her, before the Change, before she had grown strong. <<Come on, Kaga, that’s absurd.>>

<<You don’t even know what a disco ball is, Victoria,>> Mirror had snorted. <<You were born almost two centuries too late for disco.>>

<<I know what a disco ball is! I didn’t live in a mud hut.>>

<<We’re calling it disco ball. Light and sound. Lasers and sonics. Disco. You have a problem with that, take it up with the Commander.>>

A sigh. That had made Thirteen giggle. <<You know Elpi’s not gonna have the faintest idea what ‘disco’ is, right?>>

<<On the contrary. I’m certain Telokopolis had some sort of orgy-disco combination activity, which she’ll be delighted to tell you all about. In detail. With demonstrations.>>

Another sigh. <<Kaga, for fuck’s sake. I’m not screwing—>>

<<We’re calling it disco ball. That’s final.>>

A long pause followed. Perhaps the conversation was over, but Thirteen had not disconnected. She liked to listen to the others speak. Eventually Victory had asked: <<Why? Kaga, this isn’t like you. You’re being … playful.>>

<<Because it disarms the terror, Victoria. Because it makes the thing less terrifying. Silly names help.>>

Thirteen had held on as long as she could.

She knew full well that without her, Pheiri and Elpida and Howl and all the others would be that much more vulnerable to the highly developed revenants which lurked beyond the graveworm line. But Pheiri had spent most of his life out there, enduring conditions much worse than the relative calm of the edge. And if Thirteen stayed, she knew more monsters would come eventually. The next one might be worse — smarter, stronger, less vulnerable to her tricks. Perhaps the next hunter would figure out that she had led the Disco Ball off into the wilds to keep it away from Pheiri and Elpida. Perhaps the next asset would use that against her. Perhaps central’s next strike would slay her little brother, and her Commander, and all the hope they were trying to rekindle.

So, it was time for Thirteen to leave.

She had calculated the shortest route to the edge of the continent, based on observations taken during her descent from orbit — south, through thousands of miles of corpse-city.

There was no reason for a tearful farewell; she would be able to maintain contact with Pheiri and the revenants for weeks or months to come, via long-range comms, tight-beam, even regular old radio. She wanted to feed them as much intel as she could, every last scrap of what she was about to witness out in the wilds. She had no idea what details might matter to Elpida in the long run, what might be useful, what might keep her saviours alive for another few days.

She set off at dawn, heading south.

For two weeks she had walked through the ruins, doubting her decision.

Her eventual departure had always been inevitable, of course; Twelve Fifty Five and the other Changed needed her more than Pheiri and the Commander did. The voice of her beloved, her long-lost missed chance, and all her ‘sisters’ — yes, sisters! The word was a glorious battle cry now — they whispered across the nanomachine ecosystem itself, like a distant echo from beneath too many layers of meat and metal. Her place was down in the ragged rotten remnants of the green, alongside the other Changed. That was the fight for which she had been made, by her mother, by Telokopolis.

On the seventh day she sighted another graveworm, miles and miles to the east, chewing through the city, bearing north. She paused to watch it pass, soaking up measurements and energy readings. That worm was much larger than the one which Pheiri and Elpida were following, easily twice the size.

Could she not have delayed one more day? One more week? Could she not have sheltered her Commander for one more night? She had regurgitated another full load of grey nanomachines for Pheiri’s stores before she’d left, even though the zombies and the robots had protested that their containers were full. But what if they were wrong? What if Pheiri got hurt, and needed her bounty once again, and she wasn’t there? What if she was wrong, and there would be no third ‘physical asset’? What if she had abandoned her new-found siblings for nothing?

The revenants out in the wastes mostly avoided her, despite their own incredible post-human changes. They were few in numbers and far between, compared with the teeming life around the graveworms. Some were still human-like, but many were beyond her comprehension, filling her sensors with information she could not begin to interpret; she catalogued them as best she could, sending the data back to Pheiri at regular intervals.

She was lucky. The most dangerous of the revenants could tell that she was not made of their kind of nanomachines. Her flesh would avail them nothing. She was not edible.

What if she got lonely, out there in the wilds, all by herself? What if she never got to hear something that made her giggle, ever again?

She had walked with Elpida a while not only because the Commander had requested it, but because she wanted to.

But Twelve Fifty Five was waiting for her, fighting a war in the dark beneath the world.

With one part of her mind Thirteen kept up her never-ending broadcast of poetry, singing out into the dark, hoping that Twelve Fifty Five could hear her coming. I’m on my way! I didn’t leave! I’m sorry!

But then the third of central’s monsters caught her in the shadow of the mountains, and Thirteen knew she’d made the right choice.

The third ‘physical asset’ was a gossamer-thin stingray of gravitic disturbance, a mile wide and three feet deep. Its form was generated by a hundred thousand tiny gravitic engines linked together in a mutual web or network, creating a ghostly body, no more than empty air crushed and constrained by a vice of pressure.

The asset came for Thirteen like a blade slicing through the ossified corpse of the city, flying at barely twenty meters off the ground, cutting through concrete and brick like butter before a heated wire. It made no attempt at stealth, not like the Disco Ball; the structures through which it sliced crashed to the ground, toppling over and smashing into other falling buildings like an onrushing wave of felled trees. The asset did not care about going unseen, or it would have approached via the air.

It wanted Thirteen to run.

And so she did, into the shelter of the mountains.

This was the first stretch of bare rock Thirteen had seen, the first large-scale geographical feature not encrusted by the blackened scabs and crumbling bone of the corpse-city. The naked slopes had been scorched by some terrible heat, centuries or millennia prior, leaving runnels and droplets of melted stone as a black crust upon the deeper strength. When she had first spotted the range from several miles away, Thirteen had assumed it was the ridged back of another graveworm, paused in post-partum recovery, after delivering its seed of fresh blue nanomachines to the waiting womb of a resurrection tomb. She had toyed with the idea of plunging in to rescue this fresh clutch of zombies — of carrying out the sort of daring raid that Elpida and the others had debated before Thirteen had left. But as she had drawn closer, the mountains had revealed themselves to be living rock, the bones of the earth, not the hide of an undead worm.

Any soil was long stripped away. No trees or plants or grasses clung to the mountainsides, only the occasional veins of black nanomachine mould, oozing at the bottom of cracks and fissures.

As Thirteen Arcadia fled toward the mountains, she wondered if the rocks themselves were nanomachines now. Where did the slime end and the stone begin? Why did the nanomachines persist in that distinction, if the whole planet was infected and infested? When she stepped onto the naked rock itself, with her four legs splaying to carry her weight, was she standing upon the Earth, or stamping on the body of The Enemy?

Now was not the time for philosophy — nor for poetry.

With great reluctance, Thirteen paused her singing, and turned all her attention toward this third monster from central.

The asset was closing fast, less than half a mile away from the base of the mountains, scything through the buildings in a crashing wave of brick and steel and glass. Masonry dust filled the air in great billows from the fallen towers and collapsed structures. The noise would have been deafening if she hadn't already closed off her external sound sensors. Any revenants nearby were probably bleeding from the ears, or crushed beneath the rubble, if they were not evolved enough to shrug off the weight of a falling skyscraper.

The leading edge of the asset was razor-sharp, a blade of focused gravitic power barely a few microns wide. Thirteen judged she could hold off that sword with her own gravitics, but it was probably designed to slip around her defences. And it would only need a moment.

Deep inside layer upon layer of bone-armour, wrapped a thousand frills of dense-packed crimson meat, suspended in a warm womb of orange liquid, the memory of Thirteen’s original body stirred with discomfort.

She might survive bisection. She would probably not survive being turned into mincemeat.

Thirteen packaged up all the data she had collected on this third asset, including every second of footage from all ten thousand of her external sensor-clusters. Then she squirted a tight-beam broadcast back to Pheiri, just in case he and Elpida might one day find it useful.

Somebody must have been in Pheiri’s cockpit at that exact moment; a familiar voice crackled over Thirteen’s long distance comm-link, filling her central womb-atrium with real audio.

<<You can do it, little sister!>> shouted Elpida, but with another tone in her throat — Howl! <<Smash that thing up! Come on, it’s a sheet of fucking foil!>>

<<How?>> Thirteen replied. <<It’ll cut me apart.>>

<<Dig, bitch! You’re standing on virgin rock! Fuck it!>>

Thirteen turned toward the mountains, urged her nano-forges into blazing glory, opened a sphincter the size of a building — and vomited forth a torrent of acid upon the rock.

She dug a hole into the mountainside, scooping out the melted stone and hurling it behind her, burrowing into the dark.

Howl’s voice — real audio, over the radio, not a cackling ghost riding along inside Thirteen’s flesh — chanted encouragement for a few moments. But then the signal was suffocated beneath a million tons of mountain.

Seconds later the third asset slammed into the rock behind her. The edge of the blade bit deep, wriggling and pushing, splitting the mountain along a crack kilometres wide. The ground shook and bucked, slamming back and forth like an earthquake. Tucked deep in the dark, digging for her life, with droplets of melted stone hissing off her shields, Thirteen thought the whole mountain was about to open.

But the bones of the earth proved too dense for the asset. It withdrew, sliding from the gap it had created, whirling off into the air beyond Thirteen’s burrow, flying like a manta ray of the skies.

Thirteen did not turn back. She did not poke her head out of the hole. She was not that kind of stupid.

She swept the surfaces with her sensors and discovered the manta ray had left pieces of itself behind; twenty three gravitic generators lay abandoned, crushed within the gap it had been forcing, or fallen upon the floor of Thirteen’s acid-etched tunnel. Each generator was no larger than the palm of a human hand.

The manta was made of a hundred thousand of the tiny generators. Losing a few had not appeared to reduce the monster. Defeating it would require destroying enough to compromise its overall integrity.

Thirteen burrowed deeper into the earth, melting the rock before her, collapsing it behind. Gravel pattered off her shields and her armour.

For five days she played hide-and-seek with the gravitic manta ray. She wormed her way through the mountain range like a gigantic mole, swallowing mouthfuls of rock and turning it to nano-sludge inside her veins, then forging the slime into increased muscle density and thickened armour and spade-like claws for better digging. She strengthened her back legs, adding telescoping joints, and wrapped great knots of muscle around the lower portions of her rearward arms; she was going to need to lift, a lot.

Every day she burst from fresh-dug trapdoors of stone, to find herself beneath the dead blanket of the night sky, or the ruddy cauldron of dawn, or the dying embers of the day — always long enough to pop off a few shots at the manta, lurking above the mountains like a bird of prey riding the thermals. Each time she attacked, the manta swooped down toward her, forming a single gleaming edge of gravitic power; each time she scurried back into the bowels of the planet itself, barely outrunning the cutting edge as it bit into the mountain, scoring yet another deep gash into the tip of this rocky outcrop.

Each day she left another few dozen of the tiny gravitic engines dead upon the mountainside, picked off by point-defence auto-cannons, exploded by HI-EX missiles, fried by bolts of superheated plasma. She fired her main railgun once every day — mostly as a show of force, to keep the manta focused. The railgun was useless against such a distributed target. It was a titan-killer, unsuitable for sweeping aside this airborne swarm-creature.

A dozen or so engines every attack, five or six attacks a day. At this rate Thirteen would defeat the manta in approximately four years.

Thirteen grinned to herself, down in the dark beneath the stone. She extruded an actual face from beneath her body, with eyes and a mouth and nice big sharp teeth, so she could grin in the lightless air of her burrow. She chewed on a chip of stone, melting it with acid saliva. It tasted disgusting.

She was close to victory.

On the morning of the sixth day, Thirteen baited the manta.

She exploded from a new trapdoor in the rock, lower than any previous ambush-hole. She located the current position of the asset — sweeping back and forth over the tips of the mountain range, waiting for her to emerge on time. She deactivated her shields. Her skin and armour steamed in the ruddy aura of Earth’s bleeding dawn.

Thirteen Arcadia stood tall, bellowed a wordless challenge from her external war-horns, and pounded the air with every weapon she had.

She filled the rotten sky with the blossoms of high explosive power and the crack of railgun slugs and the whine of her point-defence cannons. She turned the air into a sea of lead and fire, holding nothing in reserve.

The manta took the bait.

It coiled through the air, forming a razor-sharp wedge, diving for her like the blade of a guillotine.

Thirteen kept firing for as long as possible, making as much noise as she could, giving the asset every reason to believe that she had lost her temper, run out of patience, or taken leave of her senses. This was the final confrontation! She had gone mad down in the dark. Now she would be cut apart, ruined by her own lack of capacity for endurance.

She needed the manta to burrow deep this time. Deep as it could go.

At the last possible second, Thirteen halted her guns, twisted on all four legs, and hurled herself back into the hole from which she had burst.

The manta ray slammed into the rock inches from her rear legs. She scrambled up the curving tube she had dug that previous night, gravitic power nipping at her heels, cutting into the outer layers of her bone armour. She flash-started her shields with a crack of electrical power, but they guttered and flickered against the cramped walls of rock. She lost over a thousand pounds of bone amour and a few hundred pounds of flesh, torn off by the edge of the manta’s blade.

But she wriggled deep. She wormed her way upward, beyond the thing’s reach, for it could not curl within the rock.

She scrambled into the fulcrum chamber she had excavated over the last forty eight hours — nothing more than a few balanced pieces of rock, waiting for the right amount of pressure to be applied to the heart of the mountain.

She had to trust the observations she had made across the five-day fight; the calculations she had assembled, to estimate how long it took the manta to wriggle free from the stone. She counted the seconds, with her actual voice, keeping time with lips and throat in her womb-bath of amniotic fluid.

“One, two, three,” the words gurgled and bubbled from her mouth. “Four. Five. Six. Seven!”

On seven, Thirteen unfurled her own gravitics. Her gravity engines flared to life, uncoiling tentacles and tendrils of invisible power. She applied all the force she had to four separate fulcrum points she had selected within the chamber. She added her muscular strength, the pistons of her legs and arms, and the massive weight of her gigantic body.

She had spent five days turning one particular mountain peak into a honeycomb of rock.

All except the tip.

With a heave of strength only possible for a Changed combat frame, Thirteen hurled a mile-wide slice of mountain down upon her foe.

The sound and fury was beyond anything she had ever experienced. The moment she put the projectile into motion, Thirteen withdrew her gravitic feelers and wrapped them around her body. She curled up into a tight and protective ball, to ride out the sheer destruction of a dislodged mountaintop. The ground beneath her rumbled and shook. A great crashing grew and grew and grew and grew and did not stop, rolling like a wave of world-splitting thunder. Rock dust filled the air, so dense that an unprotected human would have choked to death in seconds. A storm of rock overwhelmed her shields and then plinked off her armour for minutes on end — five, then ten, then fifteen, on and on and on.

Thirteen stretched and swam inside the eternal womb of her own machine-flesh. She grew a dozen arms with which to hug her hidden core, holding herself tight against the storm beyond her skin. She grew plush, soft, pliant layers to embrace and squeeze. She grew lips and kissed herself — kissed Arcadia’s Rampart from the inside. Thirteen Arcadia ‘made out’ with herself, hidden in the dark.

What else was there to do? She was a little bored, waiting for victory.

Eventually the earthquake died away. Chips of rock ceased plinking off Thirteen’s armour. The dust began to settle — or at least did not thicken any further.

Thirteen parted the soupy air with a cautious wave of her gravitic feelers. Sunlight graced her flesh, weak and ruddy-red, bleeding from a skinless sky. She was in the open air.

She’d taken off the whole top of the mountain.

Thirteen descended slowly, wary of rockslides or collapses. She was not invincible, just very durable. The Earth could kill her as surely as it had defeated the manta.

Weak reddish light struggled through the dense clouds of rock dust, flowing down the sides of the mountain range as it settled. Thirteen pushed on through the lethal mist, scanning the way ahead with all her sensors, clambering over the spill of debris.

She found the remains of the manta ray smashed upon the rocks, at the feet of the range. The mile-wide mountain slab had overwhelmed the thin layer of gravitics and destroyed almost all the hundred thousand generators which formed the body of the third asset. The engines were crushed beneath a slurry of boulders and rubble; the rockslide had been halted only by the mass of the dead city itself. The avalanche had slammed into the buildings. A tangle of twisted steel and broken concrete extended in a semi-circle for several miles.

Thirteen spared a thought for any uninvolved revenants, caught in geologic crossfire.

Not all of the asset’s generators had been destroyed. A few handfuls remained active, tied together in miniature webs of gravity, trying to locate their fellows, and reform into larger structures.

Thirteen hunted them down. She crushed them beneath her feet where they were little, when they were no more than a few dozen nodes flickering and jerking on the rubble. Where they were larger, in the hundreds, she deployed her weapons. Half a dozen auto-cannons were more than enough to punch through the feeble gravitics and blast the generators into molten slag.

Once, she found a full thousand — one thousand and ninety two, to be exact — which had survived, located each other, and reformed into something approximating a real shape. It was a jagged mess of angles and spikes of gravitic power, hurling pieces of itself out in every direction when Thirteen approached, as if trying to ward her off.

She watched it for three hours, waiting to see if it would attempt communication, or regain coherency, or try to do anything except kill her.

By the end of those three hours, the worst of the rockslide dust had settled. The ruins of the mountain lay quiet, a truncated peak breaking up the burnt and blackened range, dyed red by high noon — or what passed for noon, beneath the smothering skies.

The remnant never did anything but quiver and jerk. Thirteen put it down with her own gravitics, pulverising the generators into compacted metal.

She lingered among the boulders and scree for a long time, breathing fresh air after five days underground.

Five days down in the dark. Nothing by comparison.

How much worse would it be, down in the rotting memory of the green?

Before she departed to continue her journey, Thirteen re-established long-range comms contact with Pheiri.

They exchanged handshakes; Pheiri was glad to hear from her. He sent her all sorts of data updates — nothing exciting, just refreshes on his current position and condition. All seemed well. Thirteen called him <<Little brother!>> in direct audio, cheering into the amniotic embrace of her inner layers, just because she could.

She gathered up all the combat data and footage and readouts from the last few days and sent them over to Pheiri. She hoped dearly that the Commander would find her experiences of some use.

Six hours later, when she was still picking her way through the ruined buildings, with the mountain range at her back, she received a reply.

<<Thirteen?>>

It was Elpida. Direct audio, from inside Pheiri’s cockpit. Down in her own belly, Thirteen opened her lips and spoke real words.

<<Commander! Hello! Did you like everything I sent? Did you see?!>>

A pause, then a gentle laugh. <<‘Like’ is maybe not the right word, Thirteen. I’m very glad you won. Well done, that was ingenious, a very clever strategy. We were all very worried when you went radio silent after digging into that mountainside. Howl never doubted you for a moment, though. She wants me to make that clear. And for the record, neither did I. Just glad you’re okay. How are you holding up, after that ordeal?>>

<<I sent you all my internal readouts too, Commander. You’ve got it all!>>

<<Yeah,>> Elpida said. <<Sure, I can read the data off the screens here, but I want to hear it from you, sister to sister. How are you holding up?>>

Thirteen smiled, even though Elpida couldn’t see. <<Doing just fine, sister. That was good practice, for what it’s going to be like down in the green. Right?>>

<<Right.>>

Thirteen heard the concern, the worry, the fear. She decided not to mention it. The war beneath the world was not Elpida’s war.

Instead, Thirteen turned the question back on Elpida. <<And how are you all holding up, Commander? How is Pheiri? And Iriko, the angry little blob?>>

Elpida laughed again. The sound made Thirteen feel good, in a way she had so rarely felt before the Change. <<Iriko? She’s … inscrutable, still. Mostly she talks to Pheiri. Sometimes to Serin, when Serin is around. Pheiri himself is doing just great, thank you. You left him with enough nanomachines to repair himself twice over. We’re still skirting the edge of the worm zone for now. No further worm-guard encounters, and nothing like another asset from central, but I’m sure Pheiri already updated you on that.>>

Thirteen noticed a conspicuous absence of reply. <<And what about you and the others, Commander?>>

Elpida paused for a long time. Thirteen could hear her breathing over the direct audio transmission.

<<Sister?>> said Thirteen Arcadia.

Elpida swallowed. <<Howl says I should tell you, so I’m going to tell you, even though this is probably none of your concern, Thirteen.>>

<<You’re my sister and my Commander,>> Thirteen replied. <<No matter how far away I must go, no matter how deep into the dark I dive. Your concerns are my concerns. Telokopolis is forever.>>

<<Telokopolis is forever,>> Elpida echoed. She sounded sad.

<<Elpida?>>

<<Last night,>> Elpida said slowly. <<Last night, we hunted. For the first time. Last night we ate raw meat, for the first time in weeks. We killed and ate other revenants. Other people like us.>>