Necroepilogos

Kagami woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

What a ridiculous phrase. A superstitious anachronism inherited from one of Luna’s surface-culture ancestors. As if rolling to one’s feet in the incorrect direction could somehow curse one with bad luck. Kagami had not slept in a bed during life, anyway; that would have meant decanting herself every night, an uncomfortable and humiliating process at the best of times, even if she shepherded it herself with remote robotic attendants.

No, Kagami slept like real royalty — in her suspension tank, with her body cocooned and cushioned by the pool of warm bio-gel, while her mind soared through whatever somnambulant simulation she so desired.

She had passed many a night in the apex of magnificent feudal-era castles, looking out across mist-shrouded mountain ranges, snuggled up inside a thick and fluffy futon. She had dozed away the hours in the secret hearts of dripping woodland glades clad in emerald and jade, with alien stars wheeling overhead, her bedside attended by lithe satyr-boys and nubile fawn-girls. She had slept alone in perfect simulated recreations of public campgrounds from the old country, with the distance populated by approximations of fellow campers, with a roaring fire at her feet, and a tent the size of a house at her back. She had passed out in exhaustion at the centre of grand orgies — every other participant simulated, of course — right in the middle of a bed large enough for fifty people, a sole slumbering real human surrounded by dozens of copulating couples. She’d slept in airships, starships, bullet-trains, and cruising cities — fanciful creations from the minds of Luna’s greatest simulation authors, along with a few choice selections from the most enlightened and scientifically advanced of the dirt-eaters down below. She’d slept with imaginary partners three times her height, and with harems of sweet young things who she could sweep up as if she was the tall, strong, dashing, dominant one. She’d slept after banquets and battles, meetings and matings, holidays and horror stories, pre-written romances and wildly unpredictable improv and pure unstructured playtime.

Sometimes she’d slept snuggled up with her AI daughters, when they were young. Kurumi had liked that especially, during the first three years of her incarnation. Kagami had even slept outside sim-space on rare occasions, in the dim light of the naked suspension tank, to the sound of her own biological pulse in her ears.

So how could one possibly wake up on the wrong side of the bed? That was the kind of assumption made by first-timers to sim-space — newbies always assumed that their fleshy body was still flailing about, that they were always about to blunder into a wall. Luddites at best, morons at worst. The simulation would always compensate.

But now Kagami was flesh alone.

She woke up face down on her narrow bunk, eyes gummed shut with sleep crust, cheek stuck to her pillow with a puddle of cold drool. She groaned several times, hoping her irritation might summon a control panel into the darkness behind her eyelids.

In her half-awake state Kagami still harboured a vain hope that the last few weeks were nothing more than an elaborately cruel prank at her expense. Any moment her father would roar with laughter, accompanied by the chorus of his court, and she would find herself standing in the brilliant glittering light of Luna’s parliament, represented in yet another perfect sim-space recreation. Oh certainly, she would be red faced with fury, spitting indignation, and probably attack somebody important. But the humiliation would be worth the salvation.

She would have to find the simulation writer who made all this, of course. She would keep the effort quiet; her father would undoubtedly have predicted her retribution, and probably squirrelled the author away somewhere. But she would dig the little worm out of whatever hole it was burrowed into, and then she would shake it until it screamed.

She wouldn’t have the author killed, though. Oh no. She wanted all these people re-created, from scratch, from their alpha-copy originals: she would give ‘Commander’ Elpida a piece of her mind; she would have Pira shot after a proper court martial; and Victoria, well, Vicky she would invite to join her in—

“Gnnnnhhhh,” Kagami groaned again. These thoughts were nonsense.

Nothing happened, anyway. Deny as she might, this was reality.

Kagami lifted her head from the pillow, eyes still glued shut, and rolled over to get out of bed. She needed to swing these offensively useless bionic legs off the side of the bunk, so she could find the floor with her clumsy feet.

She rolled the wrong way, toward the rear of the bunk, not the opening into the narrow, cramped, dirty little room.

She banged her wounded right shoulder into the metal wall.

Izumi Kagami — Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon, Princess of Tycho City, mother to fourteen AIs, a woman who once had all of Luna’s nuclear arsenal dancing at her fingertips — whined into the thin and lumpy pillow, keening through her teeth, tears running down her cheeks. She clutched at her wounded shoulder, spitting with the indignity of pain.

Yes, her father would never craft such pain. The man was a boor and a clown. He might menace her with cartoonish cannibals and stick ridiculous legs onto her hips, but he was a stranger to agony.

Eventually the sharper torment ebbed away, leaving behind the exposed rocky shore of chronic pain. Kagami finished hissing curses into her pillow, got herself oriented correctly, pulled back the thin blue privacy curtains, and swung the hateful dead weight of her legs over the correct side of the bunk.

She sat, panting in the aftershocks, wiping her eyes on the back of a sleeve.

At least nobody was watching.

The bunk room was a nest of haze and shadows. Tiny, cramped, and full of junk. The air reeked of human sweat — zombie sweat, rather. The sound of soft breathing filled the gloom.

Infinitely preferable to sleeping in the open, of course, or in the rotten guts of some ruined building riddled with holes, so any borged-up predator or bottom-feeding scavenger might creep up on her in the dark. At least she was inside armour now, tucked away behind inches of steel and dozens of guns. It was no sensory suspension tank in the core of Tycho City, protected by an army of robots and drones and seven-point-six million human beings, but Kagami had to admit that Pheiri’s insides brought her a degree of comfort and security. He was a very skilled autonomous machine. She would not mind speaking with him again, sometime.

She would rather be off-planet, no question about that. But if she had to be down here, inside a powerful biomechanoid was an acceptable compromise.

Still, she cursed the fool who’d built this room so small.

Kagami sat on the edge of her bed for several minutes, taking stock of her various sufferings.

She felt as if she had awoken from a full night’s sleep; her head was fuzzy, but that was from the chronic pain and the aftermath of so much adrenaline yesterday. Her bionic legs and her hip joints still ached as if her bones were being pressed in a vice, but she’d almost gotten used to that, like background static. Her right shoulder throbbed with every beat of her heart; she’d been caught by a piece of stray shrapnel on the mad flight from the new-born biomechanoid. A six-inch spike of red-hot metal had slipped precisely through the halves of her coat. So unfair, so bloody stupid, such a tiny chance of happening. Why her?! That sort of bullshit fed her unkind hopes that this was all a simulation aimed at her personally.

The wound had bled like a boar on the end of a spear. Melyn had stitched the flesh shut, slathered Kagami’s skin with ointment and sealants, and then applied thick, soft, clean bandages.

Clean bandages! In this place. A miracle.

Melyn was the real miracle. A medical android, a real physician, not some drooling sawbones revived from the dawn of history. The android had worked with quick, precise, confident movements, not a muscle wasted, not a finger out of place. Beautiful as anything made on Luna. Better, even! That was not something Kagami ever admitted out loud. If something like this had happened on Luna, Kagami would have had Melyn uplifted, uploaded, and designated citizen-AI under her own auspices. If Melyn had been a sim-space fiction, wrought in some sadistic simulation, then Kagami would have hunted down the author, extracted the alpha copy of Melyn’s design, and imprinted her on a brand new AI substrate enclosure.

But she couldn’t do either of those, because she was not on Luna, and this was not a simulation. She sighed and tutted. She had no way to suitably reward Melyn for her service.

Kagami frowned into the murk. She suddenly felt useless. How strange.

But she wasn’t useless now, was she?

Kagami rolled up her left sleeve to examine the changes to her left arm. She had not had a chance to stop and look, let alone think about what she’d done to herself, not with everything since they had first approached the downed biomech.

Circuitry glowed with faint greenish-blue light beneath the natural brown of Kagami’s skin — fingers, palm, wrist, all the way down to her left elbow. When she flexed her fingers or rotated her wrist, she felt metals and polymers moving inside her flesh. An imperfect implant job, certainly, but more than acceptable under the field conditions. The pair of data-uplink cables were currently retracted into her wrist, tucked away for now. She did not relish having to unearth them again; that had hurt like yanking out her own tendons.

Kagami grinned. She couldn’t help herself. Useless? Far from it, she was apex again! Her work inside Arcadia’s Rampart had proven that; she could never have burst that fucking Necromancer bitch without this. A data uplink port, near-field electronic interfaces, and a high-density connection processor, all wired into her brain-stem.

If only it hadn’t hurt so much to grow.

The arm didn’t burn anymore, not since Elpida had turned up inside Arcadia’s Rampart with that bottle of blue. That dose of raw nanomachines had allowed Kagami to stabilise the ad hoc transformation, though she wasn’t exactly sure about the mechanism. She had simply decided that she was finished, that the machines inside her arm were complete, and her body had stopped.

The skin itched like a bad rash, but the pain had ended with the changes.

Kagami’s armoured coat was crammed into a corner of her bunk. She reached out with a flicker of near-field machine-comms — she didn’t even need to move her fingers, but it felt right to wiggle them. She pinged one of the six drones in her coat pockets. The drone acknowledged with a short burst of wake-up code, which scrolled down the inside of Kagami’s left eye.

A flare of pain exploded around her eye socket. She hissed, trimmed the drone’s log-keeping transmission to emergency only, then summoned it to her side.

A silver-grey oblong about the length of her hand wiggled free of her armoured coat and hung in the air before her face.

She snorted out loud. “You’re no domestic robot, but you’ll do. Number … 3, I think I’ll call you.”

Kagami stood up; she could work her bionic legs without falling over now, but she had the drone steady her with a gentle brush of gravitics. Then she used it to drag her armoured coat off the bunk and hold the sleeves for her to insert her arms. A most useful little extension of her body. She left the other five drones in her pockets for now; she was too fuzzy and too tired to keep all six smart drones on-station. Directing the full sextet to pin and crush that Necromancer had almost knocked Kagami unconscious with the effort. Besides, some of the drones had taken a few lumps during that encounter. She needed to examine the outer casings for damage when she was fully awake and clear-headed.

Speaking of being clear-headed, where the hell was Victoria? Kagami’s pet revolutionary was not in her bunk.

Kagami pressed a hand to Vicky’s sheets. They were hours cold. She checked the other bunks, in case Vicky had resorted to a nearby bedmate, but the others were innocent. Atyle was sleeping like the primitive she was, flat on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Creepy. Amina and Ilyusha were curled up together on one of the top bunks, both of them fast asleep, flaunting their intimacy. Kagami did not like the way Ilyusha’s claws were exposed. Amina was clutching a big notebook to her chest. No sign of Vicky.

No Elpida, and no Victoria.

Kagami felt bile rising up her throat.

She was not jealous. What would she be jealous of? She had kissed the idiot to shut her up and stop her absurd worrying. A kiss meant nothing. Kagami had necked with hundreds of simulated men and women, ninety nine percent of them much more to her tastes than Vicky. She had made out with things with tongues long enough to reach her simulated stomach. She had kissed things for whom kissing was sex, and felt like it too.

But she had kissed Vicky, meat on meat. That was new.

She felt sick. Her cheeks was flushed. She fiddled with the drone’s gravitics to fan her face for a moment, then felt stupid and stopped. She pinched a lock of her long black hair between thumb and forefinger — greasy, unwashed. She felt vile. In a sim she would have cleaned it instantly, and then dyed it a more interesting shade for a few days. What would Vicky think of pink? Or maybe just a nice rich brown, like—

Kagami clenched her teeth. Had that kiss actually meant something to the idiot dirt-eating surface dweller?

Did Kagami need to — what? Take responsibility? Apologise? Explain herself?

Victoria was such an immature little primitive. Kagami had no choice.

She walked over to the bunk room door. She had to clutch the edges of the bunks to compensate for her wobbly legs. She had the drone turn the handle, crack the door, and float through the gap. She didn’t want any nasty surprises from the crew compartment. The drone returned a camera-feed to her left eye, which ignited a sparkle of headache, but Kagami winced her way through the pain. All was quiet and dark out there, bathed in low red night-cycle illumination — another element of Pheiri’s construction that Kagami approved of.

Kagami retrieved the drone, stepped through the hatch, and had the drone shut the door behind her.

The crew compartment was less muffled than the bunk room. Kagami could hear the sound of Pheiri’s tracks against the road outside, and feel the throb of his nuclear engines far beneath her feet.

The androids — Melyn and Hafina — were sleeping in a nest of blankets on the floor. Kagami wrinkled her nose; those sheets must be filthy, even for androids. Still, she was not about to complain, certainly not to either of their faces. Melyn was a real physician, and Hafina was a full-scale combat model. Kagami liked that part. Combat androids were predictable, useful, and very nice to have on one’s side.

The air smelled faintly of rotten wood and meaty fungus. Kagami wrinkled her nose harder. Where was that coming from?

The rear of the crew compartment was drenched in jagged shadows over the doorway to the rear ramp. Kagami squinted into the gloom, then almost jumped out of her skin, heart racing against her ribcage.

Serin was standing right there, in plain view.

Or maybe she was leaning against a wall — or slumped into one of the bench seats? Her ragged shape made it hard to read the position of her torso and limbs. Her hunched back loomed tall, almost brushing the ceiling of the compartment.

Kagami rolled her eyes. She knew Serin’s type all too well. Independent surface agents were awful to deal with — arrogant, jumped-up, paranoid, and fond of showmanship. Serin was clearly lurking in the darkness because she might make somebody jump. Which she had been successful at. Kagami’s face burned.

At least the cyborg troll was sleeping. Or rather, her eyes were closed and—

“Good morning,” Serin rasped from behind her metal mask. She did not bother to open her eyes. “Sleep well?”

Kagami tried not to flinch, even though Serin couldn’t see. Or could she? Serin looked like she was grinning behind that mask.

Kagami replied in a whisper: “Shhh. You’ll wake the androids.”

Serin said, “Mmm? Will I?”

“Shhhhh. Shut up.”

Before Serin could draw her into some infuriating conversational game, Kagami turned away and quickly made for the front of the crew compartment. Her legs felt stiff and awkward. Her heart was beating too fast. She used the drone’s gravitics to help steady her feet.

She peeked into the infirmary, but the cramped room was empty; she paused just long enough to toss a glass of water down her throat. Back in the crew compartment she refused to look at Serin again, because she was not giving that cyborg freak-show the satisfaction of her discomfort.

After a moment’s further consideration, Kagami plunged into the tangle of Pheiri’s central corridor.

She had not yet visited Pheiri’s control cockpit; Elpida had informed her of the general layout, in case of an emergency, but after the fight and her wound and the entire last few days, Kagami had wanted nothing more than to lie down in a dark room for a dozen hours.

But Vicky must be up front. She must be.

The spinal corridor was a jumbled mess of overlapping systems and abandoned components, loose cables hanging from the ceiling and ancient station seats with their stuffing all gone, uneven flooring and threateningly bare metal, tiny side-hatches and mechanical covers which led into the deeper reaches of the fortress-sized biomechanoid. She passed over a massive bulge of super-heavy armour — probably encasing the machine’s AI substrate enclosure — and beneath a ladder which led up into the darkness of a turret.

Kagami had never been anywhere like this before — not outside of a simulation, anyway.

She had to bend and duck and turn sideways over and over again. She had to stop three times, her legs shaking with effort, hip joints throbbing with cold agony. Every footstep sent fists of dull pain radiating upward. She still could not walk properly, not for long enough to get where she was going, not without help.

Damn Victoria and her wanderlust. Kagami needed a hand!

She used the drone to take the edge off, easing some of her weight onto a flat field of gravitic power. She considered using the thing to float herself, like her father on his throne of office back on Luna. But the gravitics on these smart drones were not delicate enough to avoid smashing her knees and elbows against the metal walls. The smart drones were combat models, not suited for the most delicate work of transporting her spongy, tender, vulnerable flesh.

Eventually Kagami emerged into the control cockpit.

The room was nice and large, not cramped like the corridor, but it was an even worse jumble, full of screens and control panels in every direction she looked, with consoles and readouts filling every available surface but the floor. Seats clustered before the cacophony of systems, serenaded by a low orchestra of clicking and buzzing, the hissing of screens and the ticking of internal machinery.

Pheiri’s control room looked like the bridge of a ramshackle space vessel, the kind of human-crewed shit that everyone on Luna found so amusing and perplexing. Sending humans into space in anything but the most guarded and armoured automated protection was a kind of barbarism that went beyond mere objection and into absurdity. Kagami had seen the insides of plenty of those, captured via drone-camera — most of them full of frozen corpses.

At least Pheiri had a window. High up on the right was a narrow strip of steel-glass, a little viewing port, creeping along as Pheiri ground forward through the city outside.

Dawn had arrived in ruddy waves of dull red behind the black clouds, like blood soaking into coal soot. Rotten fingers of corpse-city clutched at the bounty of wet and bleeding meat.

The cockpit was occupied by the Commander’s all-too-rapidly ‘reformed’ fascists, Ooni and Pira.

They were both awake. Kagami paused in the doorway. She felt a swallow coming on; she controlled her throat. She straightened up and raised her chin. She looked down her nose.

Snakes.

Ooni was sitting sideways in one of the seats, ignoring the screens at her elbow, bleary-eyed and exhausted, long black hair all messy from sleep. She did not look as if she had gotten a full night’s rest — which was good, because she did not deserve that. She had been staring at Pira, but now she blinked in confusion at Kagami. She hadn’t met Kagami before, but Kagami had seen her through the exterior sensors back on Arcadia’s Rampart.

Pira was up on her feet. She’d been stretching her back muscles, or trying to. Pira was still covered in wounds, a mass of bandages and dressings beneath the armoured coat draped over her shoulders, bright red hair swept back over her skull. She still listed to one side even when standing. Her eyes were sunken with inner ruin.

Guilt and shame, Kagami hoped. Traitor.

Ooni stared like a startled rodent. Pira met Kagami’s eyes, unreadably blank.

Neither of them were armed, a small mercy. Kagami moved her drone in front and threw up a tentative wall of gravitics anyway, just in case. She forced herself not to swallow.

“Where’s the Commander?” she said.

Ooni answered first: “Don’t know. I don’t know! Sorry … um, hello.”

Kagami snorted. She didn’t even bother to look at Ooni.

Pira shrugged, slow and lopsided. “I haven’t seen the Commander since last night. We both just woke up.”

“Both, huh?” Kagami said.

Ooni swallowed. Pira said nothing.

Rampant bitches, all of them. These two had clearly spent the night fucking — or worse, doing something deeply weird. All of them were the same. Ilyusha and Amina, curled up in bed together. Melyn and Hafina, snuggled down all comfy. And now Elpida and Victoria, missing! How could anybody go missing in these tight confines? Victoria just couldn’t resist her muscle-dyke Commander, could she? Revolutionary? Ha! Vicky took orders like a professional submissive. Next thing she’d be wearing a collar and barking on command. She was probably squeezed into a cupboard somewhere right now, dripping juices onto the floor, with Elpida wrist-deep in—

“Tch!” Kagami hissed through clenched teeth. Ooni flinched.

Pira spoke, slowly and carefully. Her voice was a raw croak. “Kagami. I know you never liked me. You never trusted me. You were right to suspect me. I’m—”

“If it was up to me,” Kagami snapped, “both of you would have been shot.”

Pira stopped. She stared in silence.

Ooni said: “Um … we don’t have to fight. I don’t want to. I don’t care about—”

“Don’t bother,” Kagami said. “Don’t even speak. If you’re rehabilitated then I’m a Martian. Shut your mouth.”

Ooni shut her mouth.

Pira croaked: “Good thing for us you’re not in charge, then.”

Kagami jabbed a finger at her floating drone. She had to steady herself against the wall with her other hand. “You know what this is?”

“Yes,” said Pira.

“I seriously doubt that,” Kagami said. “It’s a smart drone, with on-board gravitics. And it’s mine, along with five sisters. Slaved to my on-board control. Understand? See this?” She waved her left hand, showing off her new circuitry.

“Crystal clear,” Pira said.

“If I get one hint, one errant whiff of another betrayal from you, I will turn you into meat paste.” Kagami smiled; this felt good. Fuck these two and their public rutting. “The moment I think you’re not obeying the Commander, you’re red slurry. Both of you.”

“Mmhmm,” Pira grunted. She seemed unconcerned. At least Ooni was wide-eyed and sweating. Maybe Kagami could have a good shout at her if she caught Ooni alone.

Pira’s defiance made Kagami want to spit at her feet.

She resisted that urge — Pheiri was not that dissimilar to Arcadia’s Rampart, and she had no idea how he would feel about her spitting on his inner decking. She had negative respect for these two, but a healthy regard for the tank-shaped biomechanoid.

Kagami said, “You truly have no idea where the Commander is?”

Pira shook her head. Ooni shrugged, opened her mouth, then thought better of speaking, and closed it again.

Kagami stared at Pira for a moment longer, hoping Pira might turn away or back down. She willed the treacherous little mud-sucker to look at the floor.

But Pira didn’t. Dull as a milk cow, big bovine eyes, she just stared and stared.

Kagami snorted, turned away, and stalked back into the spinal corridor.

She was fuming, with plenty of justification. The least Victoria could have done was wait for her to wake up! Victoria hadn’t even done as she was told, she had not gone back to bed. So much for ‘oh my Moon Princess!’ Instead she had slithered off to beg for Elpida’s praise again. An unwelcome image floated to the surface of Kagami’s mind as she stomped and banged her way back down the corridor: Victoria sitting at Elpida’s feet, listening to a bedtime story about Telokopolis, all big eyes and receptive ears. Oh yes, Commander, tell me more about your shining city! Tell me more about how you fucked all day long! Tell me how big and strong you are, he-he-fucking-he.

Kagami got so angry that she had to stop, just below the turret ladder. She heaved through her nose, huffing and puffing. She raked at her own scalp, sending waves of greasy black hair everywhere. She considered summoning the other drones from her pockets, just so she could scream into a suffocating pillow of gravitics, or—

A voice spoke from nearby, muffled behind layers of metal.

“—not sure if she’ll stay for long, though. Serin has an agenda of her own. And I don’t think she likes to share.”

It was the Commander. Elpida.

“True that,” said another voice, just as muffled — Vicky?

Kagami looked up and down the corridor, but there was nowhere to hide, unless both Elpida and Victoria were crouched behind an old seat or wedged into an inch-wide gap between metal plates. She concentrated on her hearing, but the conversation had either stopped, or the participants had turned away. Or Elpida was filling Vicky’s mouth with her tongue.

Kagami plugged her drone’s external microphones into her brain-stem. A wave of nausea and disorientation passed over her, punctuated by a clicking pain in the side of her skull. She endured, clenching her jaw so hard that her teeth creaked.

There, to her right, ten paces ahead. Sound waves indicated two people breathing amid the soft murmurs of further conversation.

The hatch was easy to find when she knew that one must be present. A low door of thin metal was set into the wall of Pheiri’s spinal corridor, half-obscured by a set of dead screens and a fan of hanging cables. The sound of conversation was muffled by more than a single layer of metal, so Kagami used her drone to ease the hatch aside, as silently as possible. The hatch slid sideways into its housing, revealing a much sturdier layer behind, with a strong-looking steel handle. The door had once boasted a chunky exterior locking mechanism, but the lock was ruined now — part of it had been crowbarred open and ripped off, and not recently. The damage looked just as ancient as everything else inside Pheiri.

It made sense that Pheiri contained additional compartments. He was very wide, after all.

Kagami had to crouch if she wanted to pass through the hatch. Her hips screamed as she lowered herself. She swallowed a grunt.

Before she could grab the handle, the conversation inside regained clarity, though still muffled behind the metal.

“Wait, wait,” Vicky was saying. “You think Serin was lying to us?”

A sigh from Elpida. “Yes and no.”

Vicky snorted. “Is that why you wanted me here to check out this … this … whatever this is? So we could gossip behind her back?”

“Again, yes and no.” Elpida replied. She sounded amused. “I do genuinely want your opinion on this compartment. We could use it. The … Melyn called them ‘charging cradles’, I think they’re for the Artificial Humans. We could seal them up. Maybe some of us could sleep in here.”

“Pffft.” Vicky sounded unimpressed. “Nah, this place is already giving me the creeps. No thanks.”

“Fair enough,” Elpida replied. “As for Serin, I don’t think she would be offended if we called her a liar.”

“Eh? To her face?”

“Yes, seriously. I think there were things she didn’t want to tell us, and nothing could convince her to do so. I think she would respect the guts to say that to her face. But we don’t need to.”

“Like what?” Vicky asked. “What was she lying about?”

A pause. Kagami swallowed. Had they heard her sneaking about outside the door? She dared not move a muscle.

But then Elpida answered: “The stuff about her benefactor, Veerle. And about Necromancers. And the gravitic weapon. None of it adds up properly. I think she was holding things back, because she has an agenda of her own. But — and I want to make this very clear, Vicky — I don’t think she was lying to us about the basics. All the stuff she said about food, about survival, about the crescent-and-line symbol. I suspect all that was basically true.”

Another moment of silence. Kagami wanted to swallow again, but she was afraid they would hear.

Vicky said: “Do you think she lied to Amina, when they were alone?”

“No.”

“Why not? Ami’s bound to be more impressionable than us, right?”

“Amina came out of the infirmary with renewed hope. You could see it in her eyes. I don’t think Serin was lying to her.” A short pause. “And Amina is smarter than you’re giving her credit. She’s learned, fast. That counts for a lot.”

“Huh,” Vicky grunted. “Can we trust Serin or not, then? Like, she’s inside Pheiri, inside his armour. What if she turns on us?”

A clatter of feet made Kagami flinch. She jerked backward in sudden fear of discovery. One of the two had stood up, or perhaps sat down?

Elpida said, “If she wanted to hurt us, she would have done so already. I’m pretty confident she could take us all out one by one, while we sleep, if she wanted. Except maybe Hafina, and Ilyusha. And I never can tell with Atyle.”

“Huh, true that, as well,” Vicky muttered.

“But no,” Elpida continued. “I don’t think Serin is a threat to us, at least not physically. I think her aims and agenda are parallel to our own, not orthogonal. She … ” Another pause. Kagami held her breath. “I’m not sure I should say this, Vicky. But I feel I need to get the idea off my chest, share it with you, with the others. I think Serin is very pessimistic. She’s afraid we’re going to be very short lived. But part of her wants us to be successful, despite her doubts. She’s standoffish because she’s afraid of investing her hopes in us.”

“Ha,” Vicky snorted. “Yeah. We’re just a bunch of dumbass zombies to her, right.”

“Something like that,” Elpida muttered. She said something else, but it was so soft that Kagami couldn’t hear. She put her ear against the metal door.

There was a long, long, long pause. Were they necking, making out, sucking face? No, it couldn’t be. Kagami would hear the sounds, the slurping and—

“Elpi,” Vicky said eventually — and there it was! The emotional hitch in her voice, the tentative, nervous fumbling. Kagami’s lips peeled back from her teeth with rage. She grabbed the door handle and prepared to shove the hatch open with her own strength. She had kissed Victoria first, not Elpida! Victoria couldn’t do this now, she couldn’t! This wasn’t allowed! It wasn’t right!

“What’s wrong?” Elpida said.

“Can I ask you something personal?” That quiver again, that disgusting preening! Kagami could hear it clear as a siren!

Kagami wound back her other fist to punch the door. Her face was flushed, her teeth clenched, her eyes hot. Her wounded shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat.

“Of course,” Elpida said. “Go ahead. You have a perfect right to ask me anything, if I expect you to follow my orders.”

Any moment now they would—

“Are you … are you alright, Elpida?” Vicky said, slow and awkward. “I only mean, well, you were kind of fucked up back there. When we were all talking to Serin. No offence. And uh, you didn’t make any decisions I disagreed with, that’s not what I mean, nothing like that. But you were kinda … aggressive. Needlessly so. You kept trying to shut me down. First time for that, not had you do that before. So, uh, I guess I’m directing the question back at you. What’s wrong?”

Kagami went cold. Her anger drained away. She flushed with embarrassment instead, disgusted at herself. Why was she so worked up?

Elpida sighed so heavily that Kagami heard it through the hatch. “I’m sorry about that, Vicky.”

Vicky said, “Hey, I’m not looking for an apology here.”

“You deserve one regardless. I’m … I’m not used to commanding without a certain level of push back. That’s what it was like, with the cadre, with my sisters. They only followed my orders because they believed those orders made sense, that I had their best interests as my first priority, and that we were all on the same side, no matter what. Some of them — Howl especially — did constantly question my orders, force me to justify myself, that kind of thing. It’s what I’m used to.”

“Howl. She’s … ” Vicky sounded nervous. “She’s the one in your head now, right?”

A third voice spoke, one Kagami had not heard before — Elpida’s voice, but in a new tone, one the Commander never used, as if her voice was gripped by a new will. The Commander had done the same thing inside Arcadia’s Rampart.

‘Howl’ said: “Heyyyyy. I’m right here, you know?”

Vicky replied, stiff and formal. “Hello. Um. Yes. You. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“S’cool,” said Howl.

Elpida spoke, herself again: “Yes. Howl is in my head now. Long story, I’ll explain later.”

This idea was not alien to Kagami. Neurological partitioning and its medicalised forebears had been well understood on Luna, and in some of the less primitive surface cultures, whether purely biological or with cybernetic enhancement; some of Luna’s best logicians induced the condition on purpose. Kagami’s most skilled counterpart down in NorAm — a rival logician she had known in life only as ‘Dolphin’ — was notorious for intentional self-fragmentation.

But Kagami was not certain that Elpida was practising neuro-partitioning. This was some nanomachine zombie bullshit, wasn’t it? ‘Howl’ was something external, burrowed into Elpida’s head.

Kagami hoped that this entity really was Elpida’s sister, willingly invited. The alternatives were disgusting.

Vicky forced a laugh. “Not any weirder than anything else we’ve seen so far.”

Elpida said, “Vicky, the bottom line is this: you can always push back against me. Please do. Push back, question my decisions, call me a cunt if I don’t listen.”

Vicky spluttered. “Wha— Elpi, come on, you—”

“No, I’m serious. Sometimes I need a good kicking. You’re authorised to do that.”

Victoria said something, but it was too faint for Kagami to make out. Elpida laughed softly.

After a moment, Vicky spoke again: “So, if I’m allowed to say that your decisions are shit, have you made the biggest one yet?”

“Biggest one?” Elpida echoed. “What’s that?”

“Where are we gonna go?” Vicky asked. “With the worm, or out into the wilds? Ha, worm or wilds. Has a nice ring to it, right?”

“We’ll take a vote,” Elpida said. “After everyone has been fully informed of all the implications. After we see Thirteen off, wherever she’s going. After we’re ready.”

Kagami rolled her eyes. Voting! At squad level? A recipe for disaster! The Commander was somehow both the most qualified that Kagami had ever known, and also a blithering moron. Who had the vote, in this miniature democracy? Did Pheiri get one? What about that blob-monster outside, ‘Iriko’? And Serin, was she one of them, or not? What about Elpida’s pet fascists? Perish the thought. Or Elpida’s new neurological passenger?

Vicky asked another question. “What about food? We still haven’t made a choice, Elpi, and I don’t know if I can. If we vote … I don’t know if I can abide by the result. I’m sorry, but this shit is eating at me. Uh, fuck, pun not intended.”

“There may be other ways, just like you want to explore with Pheiri’s food manufacturing systems,” Elpida said. “But first, we have a visitor.”

Kagami frowned — and then flinched as the handle of the hatch was yanked downward.

She tumbled through and into the room beyond, arms wind-milling, losing control, about to fall flat on her face. She yelped in surprise, trying to catch herself with her drone’s gravitics.

Strong hands caught her under the armpits and hoisted her up.

Elpida’s face filled Kagami’s vision, purple eyes framed between a frown and a smile. Vicky shot to her feet behind Elpida, peering over Elpida’s shoulder. A long, cramped, tight space was crammed with person-sized upright cubicles, some kind of android self-repair and recharge stations, like shiny chrome sarcophagi.

Vicky spluttered: “Kaga?! You were eavesdropping?!”

“It’s fine,” Elpida said with an infuriatingly indulgent smile. She gently lowered Kagami onto her feet. Kagami was blushing, her dignity in shreds. She grunted as her weight returned to her hips, scowling and blushing, wishing she could thump Elpida in the stomach.

“I was about to join you!” she snapped. “You could at least have invited me in rather than risk breaking my fucking nose!”

“I didn’t know it was you,” Elpida said gently. She even put a hand on Kagami’s shoulder, the uninjured one. “I thought it was Serin, sneaking around. I’m sorry. And you weren’t eavesdropping. You have a right to hear all of this as well, Kagami. Every last word. You’re one of my cadre, too.”

Kagami opened and closed her mouth several times. She wanted to tell Elpida where to shove her ‘cadre’. Instead she crossed her arms and said, “Of course I have the right. Thank you. Yes. Good!”

Elpida smiled again. “In fact, I have a job for you, Kagami. Something I suspect only you can do.”

Kagami frowned. She didn’t like the sound of that. “What does that mean?”

“How much do you know about nano-engineering?”

“Some. Why?”

Elpida glanced at Vicky. “Here’s your counterpart. Victoria, you handle the macro-scale, with the machines, either up here, or down inside Pheiri.” Elpida returned her attention to Kagami. “And you — you’re going to reverse engineer our bodies.”

“I … ” Kagami blinked rapidly. “What? Commander, what?”

“You heard me,” Elpida said. “We need to find a way to make zombie meat, or at least the basic inputs for it. Nanomachines. From dirt, air, and sunlight. Kagami, I need you to grow me a plant.”