The Silico opened fire.

Sabot-rounds from the heavyweight cyclic coilgun tore into the black metal with a deafening roar, whipping up clouds of shrapnel, sending chips and chunks flying through the air. The zombie swept the weapon back and forth, raking any scrap of cover where revenant girls sheltered and screamed. The anti-material rifle on the opposite arm slammed out rounds to catch anybody who broke cover. Limbs exploded into gore, bodies crumpled against walls, armour buckled and broke. The cyborg killing machine showed no emotion as it worked; it couldn’t, not with a face made of sensory equipment, lenses and intake tubes and scanner-heads. It stood tall where it had stopped, right in the middle of the clearing, and drowned the world in firepower.

Elpida threw herself back down behind the wall. Pira slipped away, diving out of cover and around a corner. Elpida let her go.

Coilgun rounds thunked into the wall, chewing up the metal.

Amina was screaming into her ballistic shield. Kagami yelped as if surprised. Vicky flinched and let out a gasp, clutching her machine gun in white-knuckled hands. Atyle just stared. Ilyusha was cackling with laughter, grey eyes burning bright, lips peeled back to show her teeth.

Elpida realised with relief that the Silico’s heavyweight cyclic coilgun traded away penetration in return for portability, rate of fire, and speed of target acquisition. Her coilgun used solid slug rounds fed from the receiver; the zombie’s weapon was probably shaving slivers off an ammunition block.

“Everyone stay down!” she screamed over the noise. “Heads down! It can’t shoot through the metal!”

Other shouts rang out over the clearing, in strange accents, from buzzing voice-boxes, muffled by helmets and scarves and metal jaws.

“Fucking run! Leave it, it’s fucking gone!”

“Annie! Annie!”

“This shit ain’t nothing, who’s got high-ex?! Somebody throw me the—”

“It’s standing in the fucking way! Look at it, bastard knows what it’s doing, this is necromancer bullshit, necro—”

“Annie!”

“Throw the header corpses at it, one of them was strapped with a vest—”

“Necromancer bullshit—”

“Leave it, it’s after the freshies! Get gone, get—”

Sporadic return fire plinked and crunched off the metal around the cyborg construct. A machine gun opened up with a clatter-clatter-clatter of bullets. A heavy hissss scorched the air with the invisible beam of a microwave weapon. The crump of a fragmentation grenade went off nearby. No single source of fire lasted long, each one silenced by the zombie’s unrelenting assault

Elpida risked a split-second glance around the edge of her cover, an in-out jerk, her head wrapped in armoured hood.

The construct was undeterred: feet planted, head tracking targets with stop-motion jerks, weapons flicking back and forth. The barrels of the cyclic sliver-gun blurred as they spun. The anti-material rifle self-loaded with rapid clunk-clunks of the mechanism. It didn’t need its other four limbs, the close-combat weapons or the blades or the area-denial chemical and biological dispersal pouches. Bullets bounced off bionic limbs. A few rounds had torn papery wounds in the stretched skin, leaking white circulatory fluid; any vital internal structures would be heavily armoured, and hardened against electromagnetic attack.

Elpida whipped her head back into cover. An anti-material round punched through the air a split-second later. It sailed past and blew a crater in a distant wall, showering the ground with black metal shrapnel.

Vicky was almost hyperventilating, eyes gone huge in a face gone grey. “Elpi? Elpi, what now?”

Ilyusha whooped at the top of her lungs. Elpida realised the heavily augmented girl was enjoying this. “It’s just a fucking zombie!” she called up into the air, over their cover. “Hit it in the fucking head, yeah?”

Kagami whispered: “Should have drowned you all in nuclear fire. This is an obscenity.”

Vicky grabbed Elpida’s shoulder. “Elpi! What do we do!?”

Elpida didn’t have a plan.

She knew there was no escape. The zombie was opening fire on anybody who broke cover. The gap in the outer curtain wall was about a hundred meters away. Even if they could duck and dive from position to position while the murder-machine was occupied with other targets, traversing the exit itself would leave them exposed for perhaps twenty seconds. Elpida could sprint it in ten, alone. But she would not go alone.

The zombie was standing right in the middle of the clearing, exposed in what should have been a killing ground; that position gave it a clear shot at anybody who reached the exit. It was blocking the only escape.

Elpida suspected it was doing that on purpose.

Kagami was hissing: “There must be another way out, there must be!”

Vicky nodded. “Yeah! Right! Pira had the right idea. We fucking run. Right, Elpi? Let’s go!”

Elpida shook her head. “No. If it follows, we could get trapped.”

Kagami was right: there must be other exits from the tomb-fortifications. Some of the other girls were probably making for them now; that’s why Pira had fled. But Elpida did not know where those exits might be. The tangle of black metal walls and bunkers and trenches was just as complex as any undergrowth out in the green — and just as full of unknown dangers. She had no known route and no way to scout ahead. Running now would risk getting lost, or backed into a dead end if the zombie pursued.

Vicky shouted in Elpida’s face. “We’re sitting and waiting to die! Elpida!”

Atyle was murmuring to herself, bionic eye whirring as she stared through their cover and right at the zombie. Elpida caught words beneath the noise of gunfire and shrapnel: “God machine— littlest joint of the littlest finger— take me to the source—”

Elpida raised her voice. She could barely hear herself over the rapid-fire slam of sabot rounds. “Nobody is going to die here. We—”

Two options.

Option one: wait for the construct to pursue another group, then slip away.

Elpida’s heart rebelled at the notion of sacrificing others to aid her own escape, but it wasn’t to save her skin alone; she couldn’t rescue everybody. If they could reach the exit while the zombie’s attention was on another target, they might be able to sprint through the gap. Elpida could shed the coilgun and lift Kagami over her shoulder. Vicky could probably carry Amina. Atyle would have to pick her feet up for once.

But Elpida had a suspicion that the murder-machine would not move until it was finished. They couldn’t hide from it either; that sensory set-up could likely see through matter. The zombie would cover that entrance, mow down anybody who tried to flee, murder everyone it could reach, kill everything in range, and only then move on.

We are not prisoners in our city, Old Lady Nunnus had told her once. That thought is the refuge of fools. Their ‘solemn vow and covenant’ is nothing but projection. They think of you girls as an affront against the cage they have constructed in their own minds. Telokopolis is not a cage or a mausoleum. Reaching beyond it is not a sin. Your existence is not a sin, because you are one of us.

Nunnus would have thought her a fool for such a passive strategy.

Option two: kill the Silico.

The construct in the clearing was the lowest form of Silico life — a corpse-drone made from re-purposed parts. It possessed none of the alien elegance and haunting beauty that Elpida and the cadre had witnessed out in the deep green, nor the brutal power and awe-inspiring horror of the dead monsters on display in the public museums, and it lacked the terrible symmetry and imitative humanity of the live specimens sealed in Legion archives.

Relatively speaking, this zombie should have been easy to kill.

But Elpida was not armed for Silico, and not for this situation. The construct knew exactly what it was doing: standing in the open, overwhelming any response with weight of firepower. Even with a hardshell and a monoedge blade, Elpida had no hope of getting close enough to breach the construct’s reactor, or cut off the head, or just hack it to pieces. She needed a shaped charge, a heavy-duty laser — or a combat frame. A combat frame could have crushed this drone with one footfall.

All she had was the coilgun. The Silico drone might have magnetic countermeasures — but those kinds of countermeasures would draw a huge amount of power and require an early warning.

She needed to catch it off guard.

“We can take it out, we can do it!” she yelled over the noise. She took Vicky’s hand from her shoulder and pressed it back to Vicky’s machine gun. “Hold onto that, I might need you to cover me.” Then, quickly, before the others could doubt: “Kagami! You can see it through the wall, right? It should have a miniature fusion reactor, maybe two. I need a location.”

Vicky said, “Fucking hell, Elpi.”

Kagami squinted through her readout visor, shaking and flinching at every impact, her tiny pale face framed by lank black hair. “Two … yes! Fuck, this thing is pouring out radiation, let’s hope we’re all immune.”

“Concentrate. Power sources, where are they?”

“Base of the neck, bottom of the spine. Looks like it’s drawing from both? I can’t tell!”

“That’s great. Kagami, thank you. Keep your head down.” Elpida clapped her on the shoulder, then looked left and right, to see if she could spot any other groups without leaving cover.

She couldn’t just shout the plan out loud and hope somebody followed along; most Silico understood human speech perfectly well. She didn’t want it alerted. She needed it looking away long enough for her to take a shot.

Elpida spotted the sniper.

Far up on a walkway to the right was the sniper she had seen earlier. The woman was wrapped in loose black from head to toe, except a metal jaw-mask and a strip of mushroom-pale skin around dark red eyes. A dozen arms stuck out from her bundle of robes; half cradled a long rifle, aimed directly at the zombie, while the other half gripped the black metal around her, braced for recoil.

She was perfectly still. She was also the only thing the construct wasn’t shooting at.

Elpida raised a fist and rocked it back and forth, but the woman didn’t look. “Heeeey!” she shouted over the unrelenting firepower, but the noise was too loud. Elpida hissed: “We need a distraction. I’ve got to communicate with her, the sniper up there. If we can coordinate—”

Ilyusha barked: “Bait time!”

The heavily augmented girl hopped up into a squat and shrugged out of her backpack — the backpack which contained shotgun shells and the cannisters of blue nanomachine slime, taken from the tomb armoury. She pressed the backpack into Amina’s shaking arms. “Don’t drop it!”

Amina stammered, wet with tears. “W-why me—”

Elpida snapped: “Ilyusha, no! Stay down!”

She grabbed for Ilyusha, but the heavily augmented girl whipped her bionic tail between them, then grinned at Elpida over the black bio-plastic. Her eyes burned like molten lead.

“I’m faster than any bitch!” She made her rotary shotgun go ka-clunk — then cocked her head, grin frozen, tail wagging. The sound of the zombie’s cyclic coilgun raked the opposite side of the clearing. Elpida heard it pause on a target; the noise of the sabot-impacts rang out as clanging ricochets as the zombie pummelled sustained fire into an immovable object. A familiar voice screamed in fear and panic.

Ilyusha screeched: “There! Take the shot, beanpole! Fuckin’ love you all!”

Ilyusha exploded from a squat, kicked out with one red-clawed bionic leg, and leapt onto the wall.

Elpida had no choice; no member of the cadre ever fought alone. Except her, at the very end. She would not allow it.

She rose with Ilyusha.

Out in the middle of the clearing, the murder-machine jerked its anti-material rifle around to draw a bead on Ilyusha.

But the heavily augmented girl was already sprinting down the length of the wall, claws clicking, tail lashing, pumping out rounds from her rotary shotgun to irritate and distract the zombie. She was shrieking with laughter at the top of her lungs. Two consecutive anti-material rounds hit the lip of the wall, chasing the black-and-red cyborg berserker. Black metal shrapnel plinked off Ilyusha’s bionic limbs and pattered against Elpida’s armoured coat and hood. Elpida had to turn her head to avoid getting her face torn to ribbons.

Ilyusha howled, “Too slow, robot fuck!”

Ilyusha had picked her moment with expert timing; the six-armed zombie monster of stretched skin and chrome limbs was pointing the cyclic coilgun at the other side of the clearing, barrels spinning red-hot, sabots hammering at the one target it couldn’t break: Lianna. The spider-girl from inside the tomb was out of cover, half-exposed, her orange shield-limbs raised in a wall to shelter the diminutive form of Inaya. Sabot-rounds bounced off the shielding in their hundreds, chewing at the black metal ground and whizzing into the air. Lianna was screaming. Inaya was oblivious, staring up at the empty sky; Zeltzin was a red slash at the edge of the shield-wall, waiting for a chance to — what? Rush the zombie? Several more figures were gathering in Lianna’s wake, but nobody seemed prepared to push forward.

Elpida shouldered the coilgun — and held her fire.

Ilyusha was sprinting away to the left; the Silico’s sensor equipment tracked her, attention focused. But Elpida needed to be outside its direct sensory cone to have any chance of beating magnetic countermeasures. She would only get one shot before the construct would prioritize her as a threat.

She breathed out, emptied her lungs, made her hands go still.

A sudden burst of firepower joined in from deeper in the tangle of black metal fortifications: a heavy machine gun opened up with a rattle, buffeting the zombie with a torrent of lead. Elpida risked a glance around the edge of her hood. It was the dirty-white armoured suit from earlier. The pilot inside had raised an arm-mounted machine gun, lightweight, meant for infantry support. No hope of penetrating the Silico’s body — but it was helping the gambit.

Elpida sighted down the coilgun receiver, at the base of the zombie’s spine. One shot would blow the reactor apart.

The Silico’s head was turning, following Ilyusha. She needed one more second.

Ilyusha whooped and leapt, anti-material rounds exploding inches from her bionic claws. In the corner of Elpida’s vision she was haloed by shrapnel — and then a six-inch shard of black metal went through the meat of her back.

Ilyusha yowled, tumbling forward, momentum lost. Next to Elpida a tiny voice screamed: “Illy!”

The zombie’s anti-material rifle flicked forward, covering the heavily augmented girl as she crashed into the floor. Ilyusha lurched up onto her claws, swaying and reeling, streaming with blood, spitting and screaming.

Elpida was still within the construct’s direct visual cone.

If she pulled the trigger now, the gambit might fail and they would all die. If she didn’t pull the trigger the Silico would kill Ilyusha.

She wouldn’t have hesitated for Howl. She wouldn’t have hesitated for any of her cadre.

Her finger tightened.

Crack.

A shot rang out and snapped the Silico’s head sideways by ninety degrees. In Elpida’s peripheral vision, white arms worked the bolt on a sniper rifle, up on a lonely walkway. A second shot slammed into the zombie’s head again, then a third, then a fourth. Pin-point accuracy. Perfect shooting.

A cheer went up — then died.

The zombie jerked its head upright, twisted around to lock onto the many-armed sniper, and raised both its main weapons. The sniper scurried away like a spider as the Silico opened fire; sabot-rounds and anti-material bullets turned her vantage point into a nest of torn metal.

On the far side of the clearing Zeltzin broke from behind Lianna’s shield-wall and sprinted toward the construct; her twin swords flashed free from inside her red robes. The zombie turned toward her, weapons clicking down flicker-fast.

Elpida squeezed the trigger. Magnetic coils discharged with a stomach-pounding thump.

Zeltzin’s foolish bravery had ruined the shot; Elpida’s round missed the base of the zombie’s spine and tore through a bionic weapon-arm, pulverising the joint in a cloud of metal and polymer and milky white artificial blood. The anti-material rifle fell with a wet crunch.

The Silico didn’t respond to the damage. It didn’t even adjust its footing. It opened up with the cyclic sliver-gun and turned Zeltzin’s midsection into bloody mist.

The red-clad swordswoman fell face-down in a puddle of meat. Her twin swords clattered to the ground.

Elpida’s moment of hesitation had cost everything.

The cyclic coilgun swung for her next, barrels spinning. She hurled herself down behind cover.

Vicky shouted: “Amina, no!”

Amina had stood up and stepped out from behind the wall, tears running down her face as she stumbled forward, backpack hanging from one arm, bulletproof ballistic shield clutched in both hands. She was trying to reach Ilyusha; the heavily augmented girl had collapsed into the next stretch of cover, slumped and bloody.

The Silico opened fire.

Sabot-rounds chewed across the low wall as Elpida ducked. She saw an impact blow a chunk out of Amina’s ballistic shield. The girl screamed and went down. Elpida couldn’t see her from that angle.

Vicky was paralysed, staring out at where Amina had fallen. Kagami was panting, shaking, covered in a sheen of visible sweat; her visor fed her too much information. Atyle was entranced by the Silico, lost in a world of her own. Sabot-rounds slammed against their cover; now the zombie knew she was a genuine threat. She could hear terrible wailing from the other side of the clearing.

Elpida raised her voice: “Amina, keep low! Stay still! Stay down behind the shield, stay low! Can you hear me?”

Amina replied with mad screaming. Elpida prayed she wasn’t injured.

“Vicky!” Elpida said. “Vicky!” She had to grab the front of Vicky’s clothes and shake her. “Amina’s just knocked down, we need to get her into cover.”

Vicky stammered: “Ze—Zeltzin, I saw— I saw her— she was just—”

“Vicky, concentrate. I need you to follow my orders. Amina needs your help. You can do this.”

Vicky swallowed hard, sweat beading on her brow. “What do we do? Tell me what to do, please—”

“Dump your machine gun. Empty hands. Break cover, run for Amina, pick her up and haul yourself into cover next to Ilyusha.”

“But—”

“The Silico can’t target the coilgun as fast—”

“The— the what?”

“The zombie. It can’t target the coilgun as fast as it could with the rifle, and now I’m the priority target because I might actually be able to damage it. You break for Amina, I’ll stand up and draw its fire. It will shoot at me. I will get us out, Vicky. I will get us out. You and everyone else.”

Vicky nodded, jerky with adrenaline and fear. She left the machine gun on the ground and shuffled to the end of the wall.

Kagami was shaking like a leaf. She hissed: “You two are fucking crazy. I’m among crazy people. We’re all going to fucking die.”

“No, we’re not,” Elpida said, bracing the coilgun receiver. “Vicky, you go on one. Then I rise on zero. Ready? Three, two — one!”

Vicky shot toward Amina’s crumpled form. Elpida heard the coilgun rounds tracking across the wall. Then she rose — her own coilgun hard against her shoulder, power-tank heavy on her back, finger hot on the trigger. A clear threat, impossible to deny.

The zombie ignored her.

It swept that cyclic sliver-gun along the wall, right toward Vicky, as if Elpida was not aiming at its reactor. Fine with her; she squeezed the trigger.

And the zombie dodged.

The murder-machine jinked sideways, as if propelled by a magnetic field response. Elpida had never seen anything like it before. Her shot sailed past a bionic hip and blew apart a wall on the other side of the black metal clearing. All she’d done was foul the zombie’s aim by a few inches.

Cyclic sliver-rounds hit Vicky in the upper right arm and the side of her chest, tearing through armoured coat and underlayers and flesh and bone. The limb flew off in an explosion of blood, leaving behind a ragged stump. Vicky’s side blew open, flesh torn back in great strips across exposed ribs. She gurgled a scream and went down, not far from Amina.

Elpida had ordered her out there. Elpida had taken the shot. Elpida had failed her.

She was losing her cadre all over again.

I love every single one of you, she had once told Howl, in private, in the dark, just the two of them. I never want to lose any of us. I can’t take this. I wasn’t born for this. They tell us we were, but we weren’t.

None of us were born for this, stupid.

The spinning barrels of the cyclic sliver-gun moved back toward Elpida; the zombie’s face of sensory equipment locked onto her. She felt a fresh sabot clunk into the barrel of her own weapon. Aimed. Pulled the trigger. Magnetic coils discharged with a thump — and the sabot-round bounced off an invisible barrier, whizzing off into the sky and slamming into the side of the tomb pyramid towering over them; traditional magnetic countermeasures. The zombie knew she was a threat now. It knew to put her down.

Elpida’s trigger finger slackened. She was not fit to lead and everyone who followed her was doomed to die. She was dead; the cadre was dead; Howl was dead.

And then the clouds opened.

Red light spilled from the black heavens: a glimpse of the revenant sun in gravid glory. In the centre of that cloud-break was a speck of pure white, burning through the atmosphere.

A falling star.

Everyone looked up. Even the Silico’s sensor suite swivelled up and around.

Details grew as the speck fell: massive, angular, made of white plates, shaped for atmospheric re-entry; fins and wings, ramjets and thrusters, arms and legs, and a shielded cockpit like a silver eye. One arm resolved into a white lance, glowing, pointed downward at the dead planet.

The Silico tilted its body backward and began to deploy the chemical laser from its hollow chest cavity, to shoot down this apparition from the skies.

Elpida had no idea what she was looking at; the falling star looked more like a combat frame, built on principles foreign to Telokopolis.

But it was heavenly deliverance.

Elpida ripped the coilgun’s aim-assist rig free from her hips and let the weapon fall. She leapt the low wall and burst into the black metal clearing. The red light from the sky painted the world a rusty blood red: the Silico, distracted by this higher-priority target; the armoured form of Lianna, trying to scoop Inaya onto her back as the shrivelled woman stared in awe at the falling star; Vicky, howling in pain on the ground next to the shield-covered form of Amina; Zeltzin’s corpse, lying on her front in a puddle of blood and viscera.

And Zeltzin’s swords.

Elpida sprinted for the blades.

She’d almost made it when the zombie woke up. Cyclic coilgun snapped around, spitting slivers at her ankles. Metal shrapnel bounced off her armoured coat. Elpida dived for one of the swords. She closed her hand around the grip, rolled, bounced to her feet, and sprinted right at the zombie — right toward the spinning barrels pointed at her face.

She was too far away to reach the construct before it opened fire. All this was futile. She had failed, again and again.

A sudden roar of bullets slammed into the construct’s side from close range — small calibre, high rate of fire, not enough to penetrate, but just enough to make the monster twitch.

A flash of flame-red leapt back into cover, in Elpida’s peripheral vision.

The Silico pointed the spinning barrels at Elpida again — but she’d covered the ground. She was dead; but she wouldn’t lose another cadre.

Howl roared inside her mind. Howl approved. Howl would have done the same.

The zombie tried to fend her off with its close-combat weapons. A brass-and-chrome hand belched fire from a miniature flame-thrower, drenching the air with napalm, but Elpida was already past, the edge of her coat catching fire behind her. Scything blade-arms tried to cut her down, but she stepped inside the zombie’s guard. Structures on its flanks belched a cloud of nerve gas and flooded the air with neurotoxins, but Elpida’s body was hardened against biological and chemical warfare by all the hard-won knowledge of the greatest city ever built.

The corpse-drone took a step back.

Elpida hit the Silico just as the cyclic coilgun opened fire; she decapitated the construct in one swing. Head severed and falling, trailing artificial white blood, it still shot her through the chest. Two slivers went in through the front of her coat, breaking ribs, puncturing lungs, and punching out through her back. The third sliver tore her heart to pieces. She stayed on her feet for another second, kept there by all the genetic engineering of Telokopolis and the pain-blockers in her bloodstream and twenty three years of unbroken training — or by Howl, roaring in her memories. Elpida rammed the sword through the zombie’s abdomen; she felt it bite through metal; the tip found part of the reactor and did enough damage to break something vital.

The Silico toppled before she did, crashing over in a twitching tangle of bionic limbs and white blood.

Elpida crumpled. Flat on her back. The sky burned red. A white meteor was falling to the dead earth, far from the tomb.

The others would live. Somebody needed to cauterise Vicky’s stump and spray sealant on her ribs and check on Amina. Ilyusha’s wound needed tending, that shrapnel needed extracting. But they would both live. Her cadre would live.

Love you too, said Howl.

Elpida closed her eyes. Her flesh grew quiet. The spark went out.