“El-pi-daaaaa! Hiiiii! Hi-hi-hi-hiiiii!”
The voice screeched from Pheiri’s cockpit speakers, external broadcast processed into raw audio.
“It’s you, it’s you, it’s youuuu! I can’t believe I found you again so quick and easy, but you just shine so briiiight. Ahhhh, I can’t help myself anymore! Look, look look look, I’m being a good girl for you, okay? I’m being a super duper extra good girl, all for you, okay? All those catty bitches and filthy sluts who’ve been sent to mess with you? I’m keeping them bottled up! That’s right, all by little old me! You can thank me later, any which way you want. And I think you know the way I want. Mwah mwah mwah mwah! Byeeeee!”
Lykke’s voice ricocheted off every surface in the cockpit, crackly with interference, bouncing and breathless. She signed off with a barrage of sticky wet kisses.
Elpida reacted to the facts, not the tone. “Kaga, can we pinpoint that signal? Can we establish encrypted comms? Where is she?”
Kagami was speechless. Sky was spluttering. Shilu said nothing. Atyle purred with wordless approval. Elpida resisted a brief urge to slap the arm of her seat; this was not the time for shock over her sexual mores.
Ha! Howl spat laughter in the back of Elpida’s head. They don’t get it, Elps. They never will. They weren’t like us.
Pheiri, thankfully, was unruffled by the enthusiasm of Lykke’s message. Trust another child of Telokopolis to understand. His screens and displays rapidly cycled through external views of the storm-torn city, overlaying the horizon with visual processing algorithms, sorting through the morass of broken concrete and black mold, searching for the source of the signal, for a human figure amid the chaos, for a bright spot of high-density nanomachines. Elpida’s eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, though Pheiri didn’t need any help. Lykke’s white dress would stand out like a shaft of sunlight in this riven landscape of grey-black sludge and disintegrating concrete, against the mountainous background of the graveworm.
One of Pheiri’s lower screens was still pulsing with the red-washed warning.
///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
“Kagami!” Elpida snapped. “Focus. Can we reply? Yes or no?”
Kagami huffed, hard and sharp. “Return broadcast? No, no we can’t! Not unless you want everything else out there to hear us too. Pheiri can’t find her, there’s no sign of her, or any other Necromancers. The nanomachine control locus signal is … everywhere and nowhere, and fuck knows what means for your doxy out there, Commander—”
“She’s in the network,” Shilu said. “Just beneath the surface.”
Kagami twisted in her seat, pulling at the straps, to glare at Shilu. “And what the fuck does that mean?! It’s not the fucking sea! She can’t poke a periscope up out of the waves!”
“That is exactly what she can do,” said Shilu.
Atyle purred. “A swimmer in the sea of souls, where all else sink.”
“Ugh!” Kagami threw both hands in the air, forgetting that she was wired into Pheiri with her left. She hissed with pain and thumped back into her seat. “What did that even—” She stopped with a hiss; a little red light on the comms console was blinking. “She’s calling again. Elpida? Do you want everybody to hear this one too, or should I keep this dribbling love letter for your ears only, hm?”
“Put her on speakers.”
Lykke’s voice filled the cockpit again.
“It’s a lot more difficult than I thought, Elpi! There’s seven of them, you hear that? I’ll repeat it, to make sure it gets through your big chunk of metal there. Seven seven seven seven! Count it, write it down, remember it in that perfectly formed skull of yours, whatever. I’m keeping them penned in, but there’s only one of me and I’m so delicate and easily bent these days, you made certain of that.” Lykke panted, rough and raw, like her throat was clotted with blood and mucus. Was that just a simulation of her emotional state, or a reflection of her condition within the network, fighting a one-on-seven battle? Elpida wanted to sigh; the intel was invaluable, but she had not asked for Lykke’s self-sacrifice. “I don’t know how long I can go like this, but I’ll go as long as I can, you know? Edge all these bitches until they’re ready for you to finish them off! Just don’t do them as good as you did me. I’ll get so jealous it’ll make me sick—”
Lykke’s voice cut off with a squeal of machine-sound, like a manual data connection ripped out at the socket.
One of Pheiri’s screens flashed red. The text refreshed with a rapid stamp of letters.
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 2
///determine physical
One of the larger screens in the cockpit jerked to show a fresh viewpoint, about five hundred meters out, at Pheiri’s eleven o’clock, where several large chunks of concrete clung to a shattered skeleton of structural steel, perhaps a length of tower block that had fallen all as one when the hurricane winds had hurled it down. The mass of concrete and steel formed the highest point for quite a way around. Layers of black mold lapped at the base of the formation, creeping higher in lazy fronds and feelers of sticky sable.
A figure stood at the summit, outlined against the sky. Pheiri zoomed in on another screen, for manual identification, overlaying the image with nanomachine density and signal readouts.
A Necromancer, no doubt about it.
Too tall for a baseliner, delicate and willowy but expanded beyond human proportions, eleven or twelve feet of frame clad in a white dress, flawless and clean. Silver-blonde hair hung in a smooth and glossy wave, like a waterfall of shimmering mercury, untouched by the wind. Bare feet, taloned hands, slender forearms. The face had once been an expressionless mask, but bright green eyes gave away the truth, raw and red from hours of frustrated weeping.
“That’s her!” Sky spat. “That’s the cunt we fought, that’s her, that’s Lykke!”
“No,” Elpida said. “That’s Perpetua. That’s the Necromancer I met.”
The bitch came back for seconds! Howl laughed.
Kagami growled through clenched teeth. “So much for Lykke keeping them all penned in the network. Fuck! Pheiri, why aren’t we—”
Perpetua lifted one bare foot, stepping off the summit and into thin air, off her high ground, to plummet to the city’s new plain of churned concrete. Elpida opened her mouth, about to issue an order for Pheiri to move. This was it, this was the pursuit they’d all been preparing for; time to play chicken with seven Necromancers and see who could get closer to the graveworm without risking annihilation.
A white blur crossed the image and smashed into Perpetua’s side, like a meteor of sun-dappled sand.
Pheiri’s external cameras snapped outward to catch the redirected fall. Two figures were locked in a grapple, tearing at each other as they plunged toward the ground.
Lykke, bright blonde hair streaming out behind her, legs locked around Perpetua’s waist, grinning wide and gnashing her teeth, riding Perpetua to the grey concrete and flood-waters and black mold below. Perpetua’s face warped into a mask of howling frustration, hands hooked into talons, ripping at Lykke’s sun-kissed dress, trying to tear out her eyes. But Lykke was laughing and whooping and pushing Perpetua’s head down as if pinning her to the floor.
Lykke’s voice broke in again, screeching from the comms, blurred by the roar of rushing wind.
“Remember it’s all for you, Elpida! Don’t forget that I’m doing this! Don’t you leave me behind, you saucy little minx you, don’t you leave me behind, or I’ll come—”
Lykke and Perpetua hit the ground like a pair of pebbles cast into a pool of oil. No impact, no crash, no displaced matter. The pair of Necromancers just vanished, as if the concrete and water and black mold had swallowed them up.
///signal lost
///confirm zero zero zero
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
Pheiri’s alert flickered off. Red screens softened back to glowing green.
Silence filled the cockpit, broken by Kagami’s shaky breathing and the steady beat of Pheiri’s nuclear heart.
Elpida reached out with her left hand and patted an open space on Pheiri’s internal bulkheads, between one cockpit console and the next. “Hold. Everybody hold position. Well done, Pheiri.”
“Fuck did they go?” Sky muttered. “The fuck did they go?”
“Back into the network,” said Shilu.
“Yeah, but. Their … bodies?” Sky sounded offended.
“Nanomachine dispersal,” Shilu answered. “Their local matrices were formed from local materials, likely ad-hoc. Easy to disperse upon re-contact, with the right network permissions. Lykke just dunked her, pretty much.”
Sky sighed. “Great. Just add water, instant abominations.”
“Don’t need water,” Shilu said.
Sky sighed again, worse.
Kagami turned to look at Elpida, her face a thin mask of broken patience, eyes almost bulging. “Commander. Lykke, the Necromancer, and you. In the network. What exactly … what did you do?”
“I told you,” Elpida said. “She and I came to an understanding. She’s not quite on our side, not openly declared for Telokopolis, but she’s developed a personal attachment to me. I didn’t expect her to fight for us, not like that.”
In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl snorted, None of them are gonna settle for that, Elps. You gotta rip the bandage off.
We’re in the middle of a very delicate situation. If Perpetua got through, other Necromancers could do the same. We need to stay alert. Besides, it’s not important.
They’re blowing off steam, Elps. Goggling at their big pilot slut of a Commander. Let ‘em have some fun. Fuck, they’ll probably respect you more for it.
Right now?
No better time to bond than in battle, eh?
“Developed a personal attachment to you?” Kagami scoffed. “Is that what you called it, back in Telokopolis? ‘Developing personal attachments’ up in each other’s cunts? Am I the only one who heard that fucking broadcast?” She wrenched herself around in her chair, pointing at Sky, Atyle, and Shilu. “You aren’t all pretending to be deaf, are you? Are you? Don’t make me get Victoria up here.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned back to Elpida again. “Well? Are you going to call that what it is?”
Elpida opened her mouth to repeat the truth — she and Lykke had come to an understanding. But Howl grabbed her lips and tongue, and twisted her mouth into a grin.
“Elps fucked her brains out,” Howl said. “Nasty style.”
Sky burst out laughing. “You made her your bitch! That shape-shifting nightmare thing, and you made her your bitch! Holy shit, Commander. I knew there must be a reason everybody here follows you. Holy shit. Hahaha!”
Elpida sighed. Howl cackled along inside her head. Atyle murmured an approving noise.
Kagami stared, eyes bugging out. “You had … intercourse, real physical intercourse, with a Necromancer.”
“In the network,” Elpida said. “So, actually, no, it wasn’t physical. And it worked, didn’t it? She’s holding off seven other Necros for us, right now.”
Kagami threw up one hand and turned back to the bank of screens. “All right, fine! The Commander ‘did it’ with a Necromancer. Great. What do we do now?”
Elpida took half a second to clear her head.
She had not expected Lykke to do this. She had left enough slack to account for the possibility of Lykke’s intervention, but nothing specific. The turncoat Necromancer was a wildcard; Elpida had no way to communicate with her, let alone enough faith to rely on her, but Lykke’s personal fascination with Elpida was undeniably real. Elpida had not accounted for the possibility that Lykke might derail the entire plan without asking.
Irritating little thing, ain’t she? Howl growled. I think I like her more now.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelBin for the authentic version.
“Shilu,” Elpida said. “Do you think Lykke can really hold off all those Necromancers inside the network?”
“Not indefinitely,” said Shilu.
“Then for how long? If you don’t know, your best estimate is fine. A rough guess, anything you can give me.”
Shilu drew in a deep breath, staring at Pheiri’s screens, her soft brown face tinted green beneath the scrolling data-reams. “One against seven is an impossible match-up between Necromancers, at least at the data level of the network. But Lykke was never normal, and whatever you’ve done to her—”
“Laid some pipe in her!” Sky cheered.
“—has disrupted her limitations and permissions, though I don’t get how.”
“Jailbroken that puss-aayyyyy,” Sky said. “Fuck me. Or maybe don’t. Don’t wanna end up like that, thanks. No offence, Commander, you just ain’t my type.”
Kagami jerked in her chair. “Will you shut the fuck up! Let her talk! Shut up!”
Sky raised her hands and rolled her eyes, still smirking.
Elpida decided not to intervene. After hours of creeping progress through the shattered ruins of the corpse-city, on the tail of all that time spent trapped in the tomb, everybody was on edge, desperate for the release and clarity of combat. Paradoxically enough, Lykke’s help had stretched that tension even further. There would be no pressure valve for the crew, not yet.
Maybe not at all, if Lykke was good enough.
Elpida waited a few seconds to let the silence settle. “Shilu, you were saying?”
“Lykke’s permissions and nature have been self-adjusted,” Shilu continued. “She may be able to hold off seven Necromancers within the network for some time, but they may adapt in the same way, by learning from her. We might have minutes. We may have hours. My personal estimation of Lykke is … not reliable anymore.”
Elpida nodded a thank you. “Right, thank you. Lykke has bought us time, but the plan remains the same. We hold position, wait for the Necromancers, hope Lykke weakens them. Kaga? Pheiri?”
Kagami snorted. “As if we have any other options. Fuck. Fuck this.”
“Everyone stay sharp, stay ready. As Shilu said, we may have only minutes.” Elpida keyed her comms headset; Victoria answered a moment later. Elpida quickly repeated her orders; Victoria passed the message on to the others, who had not gotten the full picture from Pheiri’s more limited information capacity back in the crew compartment. “And stay frosty, Vicky. We may have to move at a moment’s notice.”
“Right. Sure thing, Commander. Hurry up and wait, I can do that. We can do that all day.”
“Good. Call me if you need anything. I’ll check in every ten minutes.”
“Right, of course. But, uh … Elpi, can I … can I ask … ”
“Go ahead, Vicky. I know the question.”
“Did you really fuck a Necromancer? I don’t mean any offence or anything, I just didn’t think … I dunno, actually, I dunno what I was thinking.”
“For a given definition of fuck, sure, we fucked. There was a lot of violence involved.”
“Violence?” Vicky paused. Her mouth made a dry click. “You mean … simulated violence, right? In the network?”
“Yes.”
A sigh. Vicky sounded exhausted, but then she chuckled. “Well, uh. Well done, I guess. Get everybody into Telokopolis by any means necessary, right?”
“Vicky, focus.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Focus. You got it, Commander. Vicky out.”
Elpida terminated the connection.
“Alright,” she said. “Nobody get too comfy. This reprieve might lift at any second.”
Seconds ticked by, growing into minutes.
Elpida focused on the screens, watching Pheiri’s eyes from the inside as he scanned and re-scanned the landscape. He showed only a fraction of what he saw, purely for the benefit of the zombies tucked safely away inside his crew compartment, giving them a representative slice of his senses. He showed rotating views of the ruined city, the mile after mile after mile of pulverised concrete and slopping flood-waters, slowly being filled and covered and engulfed by creeping layers of black mold. Processing overlays ran constantly, tinting the video feeds with a dozen different colours, recording and measuring and packaging everything into raw data, scrolling by on Pheiri’s other screens.
The light inside the cockpit gave everybody a ghostly green pallor. Elpida glanced around at the others, as naturally as she could, trying not to draw their attention.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
Kagami kept shifting in her seat, then started to wiggle one of her bionic legs, bouncing it up and down. She muttered under her breath, eyes following patterns on the screens that Elpida couldn’t see, or else patterns inside her own visual cortex, Pheiri’s data wired into her brain via the makeshift uplink. Shilu said nothing, face an unreadable mask, motionless as a statue. Sky started to chew her fingernails; a curious habit for somebody who had travelled in far more hazardous conditions than this, in spacecraft beyond earth’s atmosphere.
Atyle closed her eyes and went to sleep, or at least pretended to. Elpida let that pass without comment. There was no practical reason to keep everybody alert, only morale.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
Minutes crept up into the double digits. Elpida focused on her breathing, kept herself sharp and ready — but for what? If Lykke’s gambit failed, Pheiri would be the first to know, and the first to react. In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl grumbled and growled to herself. Howl had never enjoyed waiting, not for anything.
Elpida caught herself cupping the stump of her right arm. The wound still ached beneath the fresh bandages. If she focused on regrowing it right then, would her nanomachine biology begin assigning resources to the process? If they were stuck here for hours, perhaps that would be a good use of time.
No, she needed to stay sharp. Pheiri might need her. She could not yet know how.
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
As minutes wore on, the black mold grew.
Whatever the stuff was, it was drawing on a vast amount of nanomachine resources, spread over a very wide area. The wet, shiny, sticky-looking mold kept growing until it covered almost the entire landscape of the shattered city; it never quite absorbed every scrap and sliver of concrete, leaving the view as a mottled grey-black hide of strips and stripes. The stuff flowed back and forth as it expanded, revealing patches of wet concrete here, stretches of twisted metal there, some of it half-digested, as if the mold was going to work on the material beneath. Thin rain, the final dregs of the storm, coated the mold in a layer of moisture, giving it a sheen like oil on water, snatches of purple-hued rainbow shimmering from the ruined corpse of the city.
When the mold reached any given high point — the tips of a ruined stretch of fallen skyscraper, or even just the highest humps of heaped rubble — it kept going, hardening and darkening as if flush with water and pulp beneath the surface, extending into horns and curls of blackened matter, twisting toward the sky in geometric spirals.
After thirty minutes of waiting, the tallest of the growths was at least eight feet high, and still going. A forest of high-ground mold-trees was sprouting on every side, like bamboo groves down in the buried fields beneath Telokopolis.
“I hate weird nanomachine shit,” Kagami hissed, “almost as much as I hate waiting.”
“Is it dangerous?” Elpida asked, keeping her voice low.
Kagami shrugged and gestured at one of Pheiri’s data-readout screens. “It’s literally just mold, Commander.”
Sky snorted. “Yeah, and we’re literally just flesh and blood. Not.”
Kagami clenched her teeth. Elpida made a mental note — Sky and Kagami were unlikely to get on well.
“Can we maintain this position?” Elpida asked. “If it keeps growing, will it interfere with Pheiri?”
“It’s not touching Pheiri,” Kagami grunted. “Not interested in him at all.”
One of Pheiri’s screens flickered with fresh readout data — moisture levels, cell measurements, chemical composition, nanomachine density. Elpida couldn’t understand all the details, but she got the general idea.
“Just mold, right,” Elpida said. “Thank you, Pheiri.”
“It’s staying well clear of his tracks,” Kagami said. She gestured with her right hand, seemingly at nothing. “And they don’t seem to be having any trouble with it either. Whatever else it’s doing, it’s not eating zombies.”
“Them? Kagami, explain.”
“You can’t— tch!” Kagami tutted and sighed, then twitched her left hand, the one plugged into Pheiri.
Two of Pheiri’s screens jumped to fresh views, seen from above and far away — real-time video from Hope, floating beyond the twitching corpse of the storm. The tomb dominated both views, far to Pheiri’s rear, back along the route they’d taken through the city. Tiny dots were swarming out of the tomb’s main entrance, spreading into the broken landscape beyond. A particularly thick and cohesive spear of collective motion was heading right toward Pheiri, perhaps an hour or two behind his current position.
Revenants. The zombies who had taken shelter inside the tomb, and the ones who had been armed and fed and protected by Elpida, by Pheiri, by Telokopolis.
Elpida frowned. “What are they doing? Are they trying to follow us?”
“Hope can’t get good enough resolution to tell,” Kagami said. “The last of the storm and the rain is still blocking her cameras, stopping her from getting close. But yes, Commander, it looks like we have an honour guard on the way.” Kagami’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well done.”
“Shit,” Elpida hissed. “We don’t want anybody else getting caught up in this. Why? Why would they try to follow us?”
Shilu answered. “You gave them food, protection, and purpose.”
Elpida shook her head. This wasn’t part of the plan. Lykke’s intervention had thrown off all her assumptions.
“How’s Iriko?” Elpida asked. “At least tell me she’s still keeping clear.”
Kagami snorted. “Keeping clear and eating well.”
Another display filled with a new view of the city, another high-angle eye-in-the-sky shot from Hope, refreshing every half-second. This one was much better resolution; Iriko was much closer to Pheiri’s current position.
Iriko — visible as a massive blob covered in sheets of armoured scale, like a slug plated in mirrored steel — was gorging herself on the black mold, slurping up great masses of the stuff with every motion of her body, melting through the spiral stalagmites and swimming across slopping pools of inky muck. She flowed over the broken concrete, throwing massive chunks aside, burrowing through drifts of storm-water and twisted steel, chasing the choicest morsels of the strange growth.
“Good for her!” Sky cheered. “You go get filled up, blob-face. She’s on our side, right?”
“Right,” Kagami growled.
“That is good, yes,” Elpida said. She pointed at one of the forward views, the grey-black chaos of the city marching off toward the horizon, and the horizon rising like a mountain-range of matte steel, the graveworm like a wall at the edge of the world. “Kaga, are we close enough to the graveworm to get a clear image of it? Can we see worm-guard emerging yet?”
Kagami glanced at Elpida, eyes a touch wide. “No, Pheiri’s too far out. His cameras don’t have enough resolution. And the landscape is in the way, not to mention all this mold crap.”
“Not Pheiri. Hope. Ask her.”
Kagami swallowed. Shilu moved in her chair, made it creak; Elpida realised that was the first time Shilu had moved since Pheiri had stopped. Atyle opened her eyes and sat up.
“What?” Sky said. “What? What is it? You’re all acting like … ”
“We’ve not seen the graveworm up close,” Elpida said. “Only from a distance, like this. Kaga?”
Kagami settled back into her seat. She chewed on her lower lip. “Hope is repositioning. Give her a few moments.”
Shilu said, “I’ve never seen a graveworm up close. The worm-guard make it impossible.”
“Me, neither,” rasped a familiar metallic voice from the rear of the cockpit.
Elpida turned in her seat just in time to see Serin clamber from Pheiri’s spinal corridor, straightening up in the open space of the cockpit. Half a dozen pale, spidery hands anchored her to the walls and floor. Red eyes glowed above her metal mask.
“Serin, you’re meant to be strapped in,” Elpida said. “We might have to move at any moment.”
“Few bones to bruise,” Serin purred. She ambled forward, keeping herself anchored at multiple points with her hands, until she could lean over Kagami’s shoulder and peer at the screens. Sky leaned aside, away from Serin’s spindly bulk, wrinkling her nose at the fungal scent from beneath Serin’s tattered black robes.
Kagami spat, “I don’t care if you’re immune to fucking bullets, you walking mushroom. Sit down and strap in!”
“I prefer—”
“If you go flying and smash into my head, or one of Pheiri’s screens, I will personally sauté you. Sit down!”
Serin chuckled low in her throat, like meat clogged with metal. She eased back into a seat and looped four arms through the various straps and buckles. She cast a glance at Elpida, but Elpida just shrugged. Kagami was right.
“Hope is transmitting now,” Kagami muttered, eyes gone inward. “Here’s the … I don’t know what to call it. Foothills?”
The single largest display in the cockpit flickered to a new image.
A mountainside of metal filled the screen — dark grey like igneous rock, pitted and corroded and blemished in vast patches, as if rust had bloomed and faded in a quasi-biological process. The metal was ridged and spiralled and whorled in a dizzyingly regular pattern, with scoops and rises hundreds of meters deep, some of them filled with rainwater or pulverised concrete slurry, or even whole chunks of buildings, all the material which was swept up as the graveworm had moved through the city.
Scale was difficult to make out. A few shattered buildings lay in the foreground, dusted with the still-growing mold-stalks. This was the very base of the graveworm’s leviathan body, the point at which it met the ground. It towered over the ruins, up and up and up, taller even than the spire of Telokopolis.
Elpida felt the tiniest touch of dislocation. She clamped down on that feeling. “Kagami, how … how large of an area are we looking at here?”
“It’s just a tiny segment of the worm,” Kagami said. Her voice seemed very small. “Hope is having trouble getting a wide-angle shot of the whole thing, it’s … too big.”
“Fucking big ass motherfucker,” Sky muttered.
“Too big for anybody to control,” Shilu said. “With nanomachine forges on the inside. It has all it needs to rebirth the world.”
“Even your Central, Necromancer?” Serin purred.
“Exactly.”
“The seed of a new god,” Atyle said.
“Don’t,” Kagami snapped. “Just fucking don’t. It’s a machine. It’s a bloody big machine, that’s all. Here, this … ”
A fresh image snapped onto the screen, but it was almost meaningless with distance, taken from too high up, zoomed out too far. A vast mountain range of grey metal lay amid a plain of grey and black. At such distances size and scale meant nothing. The graveworm was a dark grey lozenge against a background of ruin.
Elpida’s mind snapped into sharp focus. Howl did the same, sitting bolt upright in the back of Elpida’s head.
Elps, shit, where—
“I don’t see any worm-guard,” Elpida said. “Where are they?”
Kagami shrugged. “Sheltering under the curvature of the body, I suspect. Hope can’t get the right angle to see them, but they’re probably—”
“The storm is over,” Elpida said. “Any danger to them passed over an hour ago. Where are they?”
“Ahhhhhh,” Serin purred. “A fly in the soup.”
“Oh shit,” said Sky. “Shit shit shit. That means your whole plan is fucked, right?”
Elpida held up a hand for silence. “Why would the worm-guard not emerge? Shilu, you’re the most experienced here. Why not?”
For a long moment, Shilu said nothing. Then, “Three options. One, the graveworm is deploying them against a greater threat. I don’t think that’s happening though, those high-angle shots don’t show any fresh worm-guard streaming away from the worm. Two, the worm is holding them in reserve in anticipation of a greater threat. Three, the worm is dead.”
“Is it dead?” Elpida glanced at Kagami.
Kagami spread one hand in a confounded gesture. “As if I can tell?!”
“Alright,” Elpida said. “We don’t know what’s going on. We need intel. Playing chicken might still work, but we can’t be sure, we need—”
One of Pheiri’s screens pulsed with warning red.
///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6
///signal return positive count
///ALERT
///ALERT
///ALERT
Pheiri’s screens tracked all six Necromancers as they surfaced.
They spun out of the ground like animated dirt, human forms pushing upward through a membrane of concrete and water, grey grit and black mold tightening and bursting as bodies stepped forth. One plunged upward from within a pool of storm-water and concrete slurry, as if diving through the water’s surface, filthy liquid streaming from a body sharp as a knife. Another straightened up on a high outcropping of twisted steel, as if disgorged by the fronds and stalks of black mold, heavy shoulders pushing into the open. A third stepped straight from a piece of upright concrete, the surface clinging to the edges of her body as she strode free, dress a concrete ghost, colours flowing into place.
Six Necromancers broke through Lykke’s efforts, out into the world. Every one was unique; each one glowed like a bonfire of high-density nanomachine activity on Pheiri’s sensors.
///nanomachine control locus count point: 7
Perpetua rose from the ground less than fifty feet from Pheiri’s nose. For a split-second she was made of concrete and mold, but then she was whole, herself, unmistakable. Her white dress was untouched, not a hair out of place. Her face was twisted with a lifetime of frustration and disgust, her eyes ringed red from crying, or worse.
Perpetua opened her mouth, to speak or broadcast or pass sentence.
Howl grabbed Elpida’s lips and tongue, reached out to slap the nearest of Pheiri’s consoles, and whooped at the top of her lungs.
“Engines to full, little brother! Straight ahead and straight down the middle! Let’s run this bitch right back into the ground!”