Elpida didn’t recognise the woman inside the pilot capsule; she was not one of the cadre, not a sister Elpida had known in life.

The pilot had a narrow, aquiline face, with gaunt cheeks and a sharp chin, framed by a floating halo of albino white hair. Her copper-brown skin was dyed deep orange by the pressure gel inside the capsule, trapped behind twin layers of steel-glass and semi-transparent cartilage. Dark purple eyes squinted with exhaustion and pain, seeing nothing, pointed at a spot on the floor. She was tall and willowy, wrapped from toes to chin in a standard pilot suit, almost black in the orange gel and the dark red bio-light of the combat frame’s pilot chamber. Naked hands hung limp at her sides. Her legs, rump, and spine were cushioned by the pressure gel, holding her at a comfortable angle. A main trunk cable ran from the MMI uplink slot in the back of her skull, joining her to the combat frame.

The orange pressure gel was mottled by coils of crimson blood, fogging the fluid, floating free.

Howl grunted in the back of Elpida’s head: One of us.

Elpida agreed. Purple eyes, copper-brown skin, white hair. Pilot phenotype. A Telokopolan combat frame pilot, alive and … not well.

One of us, Elps! One of us! We gotta fuckin’ get her out of there! We gotta help!

The pilot capsule itself was badly damaged: the internal holographic readouts were whited out with static, jerking and flickering with glitches, or just gone; the capsule’s external armour had not deployed during the confrontation with the Necromancer, which implied the life-preservation systems were not responding; the delicate cradle-cyst in which the capsule sat was covered in bruises — the flesh behind the nano-composite bone all purple and brown with ruptured capillaries and organ damage. Some patches of damage were turning black.

Elpida couldn’t figure out why; the combat frame had suffered no external damage, despite the uncontrolled drop from the heavens — armour unbreached, no internal bleeding, no distress codes in the manual control chamber.

She couldn’t see where the pilot was bleeding from either.

Howl, I don’t think we can help her.

You can’t fuckin’ say that! You can’t! Nobody gets left behind!

There’s no way to get her out of that capsule without killing her from nanomachine exposure, let alone give her medical attention. I think she’s wounded internally. The pressure gel might be the only thing keeping her alive. If this was one of the cadre, back in Telokopolis, I would order the capsule itself removed and transported to medical before opening it up. I’d want that pilot moved from capsule to med-pod in under ten seconds. Elpida sighed out loud. We don’t even have synthetic blood or external coagulant, let alone organ-foam or a body-cav suspension rig. The best we have is bandages and gauze. And she’s no zombie. She could die thirty seconds after we pull her out.

Howl hissed with wordless frustration.

From behind Elpida, Vicky said: “Elpi, you alright? Is she one of yours?”

Elpida looked over her shoulder at the others gathered behind her in the pilot chamber. Vicky was standing on her own two feet, pale and sweating, breathing too hard, her dark skin dyed the colour of drying blood. The raw blue was working fast; Vicky had been able to climb the spiralling access sinus by herself, following Elpida’s heels. She had only needed Elpida’s help at the very end, to pull her up and over the lip of the tunnel exit. Kagami had not fared so well; she’d needed to be carried. Haf was just now lowering Kagami to the floor, so Kagami could sit down after being hauled up the access sinus in Haf’s arms. Kagami was blushing, clinging to Haf’s armour with both hands, but she wasn’t complaining.

All three of them were distracted by the ocular orbs and glowing organs and pumping circulatory vessels behind the thin nano-composite walls. Vicky was doing her best to ignore them, but Kagami and Haf were openly watching the sensory organs flower open in spirals of crimson and scarlet. Blood-red light throbbed and pulsed from the walls and ceiling, the illumination pouring from exposed veins and delicate nerves and fluttering membranes.

“No,” Elpida answered. “Not one of my cadre. But she is Telokopolan.” Elpida nodded at the walls, at one of the ocular orbs behind the thin bone. “Don’t worry about those, by the way. It’s just the combat frame looking back at us. Nothing to worry about.” She tapped the floor with her toes — spongy, warm, and throbbing. “If the frame didn’t want us in here, it would melt us with the internal defences. Don’t worry. It knows who we are.”

Kagami settled on the floor, bionic legs outstretched. “Yes, Commander,” she grumbled. “We’re well aware. We did see it happen before. That doesn’t make being watched by a living bio-mech any less unsettling, thank you very much.” Kagami glanced at the nearest ocular organ. “You hear that, you giant biological offence against nature? Stop staring!”

The frame’s internal eyes did not react.

Vicky just swallowed and nodded. Hafina kept staring at one of the ocular orbs, tilting her head back and forth as if trying to communicate.

Elpida indicated the pilot, and said: “Is she awake?”

Kagami nodded. She gestured with her left hand; her cables were retracted into her wrist now, unplugged from the control panels, but the skin glowed with reignited circuitry. “Roused her as best I could, but she’s fucked up, Commander. Told her you’re the real thing too, not the Necromancer come back again for another go. She’s in a hell of a lot of pain. Near delirious. Poor fucking bitch.”

Elpida turned back to the capsule. The pilot did not look up, staring at nothing. 

Elpida said: “Kagami, how much did you manage to communicate with her? What does she know?”

Kagami sighed heavily. “Not much, on both counts. She’s not a nanomachine zombie, so she’s not got our on-board translation. She and I could only communicate via the mech, and that was like a fever dream nightmare, all swapped back and forth over base-8 code structure. And we couldn’t use anything more complex than single word concepts. That’s not a base-8 problem, by the way, it’s the limit of mutual intelligibility. If she’s speaking your ‘Telokopolan’ language, Commander, then I pity your long-dead linguistics and your long-dead teachers, because that shit is a fucking mess. No offence.”

“None taken,” Elpida muttered.

Howl said: Moon girl has a point. Mid-Spire has too many cases. Upper-Spire is like fifty percent politeness suffixes by weight. At least most Skirt dialects have some good swear words. Like cunt!

Elpida said: “And what does she know about her situation?”

Kagami shrugged. “She understands that she’s fucked. She seems to comprehend that we’re all made of nanomachines, and that the surface is a lifeless nightmare of girl-eat-girl, forever and ever, and not in the fun way.” Kagami snorted at her own joke. “Other than that, not much. How are you going to communicate, Commander? Just talk loud and hope?”

Elpida glanced around the pilot chamber, but she didn’t find what she was looking for. “There should be an MMI uplink hub, here or down in the control chamber, for exactly this kind of situation, for communicating with a pilot without having to do an internal capsule dump. But there’s nothing, here or down there. Like this combat frame was constructed differently.”

Vicky tried to laugh. “Gonna use a mark one mouth and tongue then, hey?”

Elpida pointed at a spot on the wall, to the right of the capsule. A fist-sized scab of dark scarlet clot was plugging a hole in the nano-composite bone; the scab itself was turning hard and white at the edges, transforming into bone to complete the healing. A puddle of dried pus and flakes of blood were stuck to the floor a few feet in front of the sealed wound. The flesh behind the scab seemed undamaged.

“Is that where the Necromancer attempted to take control?”

Vicky nodded. “Mmhmm. Weird stuff.”

Elpida frowned at the scab. A fresh wound, purged and sealed in seconds, with no deep tissue damage. Yet the area around the pilot capsule was still bruised, purple and brown and going black.

Howl caught on a second later: The fuck? What does that mean? Tissue rejection? Is the frame rejecting the pilot? What the fuck …

I’m not sure just yet.

Elpida handed her submachine gun to Vicky, then walked up to the capsule. Several of the ocular organs behind the walls swivelled to track her. The pilot stirred as Elpida approached; her exhausted squint rose from the floor, lost in a sea of pain.

Elpida spoke slowly and clearly, in Mid-Spire Legion Standard: “Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod your head for yes, shake your head for no.”

The pilot blinked to clear her vision, looked Elpida up and down, and finally made eye contact.

Elpida repeated her question, once again in Mid-Spire Legion Standard. The pilot frowned and squinted.

Elpida switched to Down-End, the most widely used Skirts dialect in the lower levels of Telokopolis: “I’m repeating my previous words in a different dialect. Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod your head for yes, shake your head for no.”

The pilot raised a hand and pressed it to the steel-glass capsule housing. She squinted harder, as if trying to comprehend.

Elpida switched again, to Upper-Spire. She did her best to minimise flowery vocabulary, avoid complex word endings, and keep the social hierarchy suffixes as neutral as she could. “I’m repeating my previous words in a different dialect. Do you understand what I’m say—”

The pilot’s eyes went wide. She nodded, hard. Her halo of floating white hair waved like seaweed. Her mouth opened as if panting, sucking in lungfuls of pressure gel, then curled into a smile of sobbing relief. She pressed her palm harder against the steel-glass capsule wall.

Elpida reached out and pressed her own palm to the transparent cartilage. She and the pilot were separated by nothing but two thin layers of armour. She felt tears prickle in her eyes.

“Hello, sister,” Elpida said in clade-cant, the private, secret language her cadre had shared only amongst themselves.

The pilot frowned with fresh incomprehension. Elpida smiled with bitter acceptance; the clade-cant had died with her cadre.

She repeated in Upper-Spire: “Hello, sister.”

The pilot frowned harder. Her lips moved, perhaps trying to form the word ‘sister’, but Elpida couldn’t lip-read whatever dialect or descended language the pilot spoke.

From behind, Kagami said: “Thank fuck for that! What are the chances, hm? She understands your, what, fancy aristocrat talk?”

Vicky muttered, “Speak for yourself, Kaga. You’re the princess here.”

Kagami snorted. “My speech is significantly more normal than all those thees and thous. I’m half expecting our Commander to burst into a soliloquy next.”

Vicky said: “A what?”

Kagami said nothing for a moment, then: “You’ve never read any Shakespeare? Come on, you’re speaking what, Late Period Old Imperial? Early NorAm Anglo? This is your actual heritage, Victoria.”

“I’m speaking fucking English, Kaga,” Vicky said.

Kagami sighed. “And not a lick of Shakespeare.”

Elpida withdrew her hand; the pilot did the same. Elpida said: “Don’t try to speak. Your lungs and throat are full of pressure gel, and I don’t think I can lip-read whatever variant of Upper-Spire we share. Listen carefully: do not open the capsule, do not attempt an emergency internal dump, or an external ejection. Cycling your pressure gel should be safe, but don’t take my word for that, especially since you’re injured. The air is full of nanomachines. Every object out here is either made of or infested with nanomachines.” Elpida gestured to herself. “I’m not a human being, not really, I’m a nanomachine construct, the same as my three companions behind me. Well, not the tall one, she’s a bit different, but her biology is just as infested with nanos as the rest of us. If you crack the capsule, you’ll die. Do you understand?”

The pilot pulled a sad smile. She nodded.

“Good.” Elpida smiled back. “My name is Elpida. I am — or I was — Commander of the first combat frame cadre, from Telokopolis. I assume—”

The pilot raised a hand and made several signs inside the orange pressure gel. Elpida tried to follow, but the sign language was neither Legion combat signals nor standard Upper-Mid deaf-speak.

Elpida shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand your sign language.”

The pilot extended her index finger, pressed it to the inside of the capsule’s steel-glass containment, and traced a shape.

Elpida understood, She almost laughed. “Letters. I-N-S,” she spelled out loud as the pilot traced. “Keep going, I’m following.”

The pilot finished the word: INSCRIBE

Elpida made sure to speak it out loud so Kagami, Vicky, and Hafina could follow the conversation, then she said: “You mean we can talk if you write and I speak? I think I can follow the letters, yes. But why ‘inscribe’, why not just ‘write’?”

The pilot looked confused.

Kagami said: “Linguistic drift, Commander. You two could be from hundreds or thousands of years apart. Frankly it’s a miracle you can communicate at all.”

Vicky muttered, “Maybe it’s not a coincidence at all.”

“It’s not a miracle,” Elpida said. “It’s Telokopolis. Telokopolis is forever.”

Inside the capsule, behind her layers of armour and a soup of bloodstained pressure gel, the pilot sobbed through a smile. She nodded several times.

One of us alright, Howl growled. She sniffed too, holding back tears.

Kagami said: “And communicating like this is also going to take forever.”

Vicky said, “Shut up, Kaga. Come on, how’d you feel if you met, I dunno, a descendant of one of your AI kids?”

Kagami replied, “I wouldn’t dally for light conversation when an undead monster has just informed us that its boss is on the way.”

Elpida knew Kagami was right. The Necromancer’s cryptic warning about ‘central’ and ‘physical asset’ had set a fire beneath her feet. She had no idea what was on the way to the combat frame’s location or what it might do when it arrived, but she suspected that the frame would be destroyed if it couldn’t fight back. Priority number one was to wake up the combat frame.

But she was also aware this might be her only chance to speak with the pilot, with another daughter of Telokopolis, with the last living human being on the planet.

She glanced over her shoulder and said to Kagami: “We need to talk to her to figure out why the combat frame isn’t moving. This won’t take more than a few minutes.”

Kagami snorted and rolled her eyes. “Famous last words before an orbital fortress drops a tactical nuke on us. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when we all go up in a mushroom cloud, Commander.”

Vicky rolled her eyes. Haf just shrugged.

Elpida turned back to the pilot — and found the woman had frozen, wide-eyed and afraid. Elpida opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, but the pilot quickly resumed tracing letters on the inside of the steel-glass.

She spelled out: ELPIDA

“Yes,” Elpida confirmed. “That’s me. Telokopolan pilot, Commander of—”

The pilot kept going.

DGE 735 OPERATION KATELTHONTA

Elpida felt her heart lurch. “Deep green expedition seven-three-five, yes. That was the deepest we ever went into the green, past the drop off. Out there for months, took five weeks just to get home. Katelthonta? None of us called it that. That was the pilot program’s name for it, the word for the Civitas and the Legion planners. I was in Command, yes. How do you know … ?”

The pilot spelled out with a fingertip: HISTORY

Elpida’s throat turned thick. “I’m … I’m part of your history? I—”

The pilot’s finger moved against the glass: LEGEND. THE FIRST TWENTY FIVE. PASSED BETWEEN PILOTS. GREATEST EVER ACHIEVEMENT.

Howl tried to laugh, but she was choked up. Don’t let it go to your overstuffed head, Elps.

It wasn’t an achievement. Nothing was. I was a failure as a Commander, because everyone under my Command died. But this girl remembers us — us, personally. I’m not sure I can process that, Howl.

Then don’t.

Elpida moved on quickly, before she could let that information settle. “By the post-founding calendar I’m from year seven-oh one-three. What year are you from, sister? And what’s your name?”

The pilot frowned at the word ‘sister’ again, but she reached out and traced on the glass, then paused.

15678

Elpida made sure to speak the numbers out loud for the others. Vicky muttered: “Holy shit.” Kagami sighed.

Elpida replied. “Over seven thousand years later than me. Telokopolis is forever.”

But then the pilot traced more numbers: 1347

Elpida frowned. “A sub-date? A—”

The pilot shook her head and wrote again: 1347

Kagami said, “She’s giving you her serial number, Commander. I already told you, she doesn’t have a name.”

Elpida frowned; she had assumed the lack of a personal identifier was a limitation of Kagami’s communication. She said: “Thirteen forty seven. That’s your name?”

The pilot shook her head; white hair dragged back and forth through the orange pressure gel. She twisted sideways, winced with pain, and indicated the back of her neck, just below where the main trunk cable plugged into the rear of her skull. A number was tattooed on her flesh, across the vertebrae of her neck: 1347.

Elpida didn’t understand. “You don’t have a name? Just a number?”

The pilot twisted back, squinting with pain. Fresh coils of blood fogged the orange fluid. She nodded.

“May I call you Thirteen?”

The pilot squinted. She seemed unsure.

Howl grunted: Give it up, Elps. We aren’t gonna like this.

Elpida asked: “What about your sisters? Did any of them have names, or did you all have serial numbers? Was this normal in Telokopolis, in your time?”

Thirteen frowned harder. She traced on the glass, slowly and hesitantly: SISTERS?

“Yes. Sisters,” Elpida said. “Your clade sisters. Your cadre. Maybe you didn’t call it that? Maybe you had a different name for this? Other girls like us. Your fellow pilots. Your sisters.”

The pilot traced: SOLITARY

Elpida shook her head. “What? I don’t understand.”

RAISED ALONE. AUTOMATA FOR NEEDS. OTHER PILOTS ASSIGNED TO OTHER FORMATIONS. NEVER MET. ONLY VOX AND BATTLE. WE TALK IN SECRET. MAYBE SOME ARE SISTERS. NOT ME.

Words failed Elpida. “I … how can you not have … how were you not raised with sisters? The city, Telokopolis, it would never … the combat frames wouldn’t function, the … ”

The pilot smiled with great desolation.

THEY KEEP US SEPARATED.

“Who? Why?”

CIVITAS. LEGION. REBELLION. BETRAYAL. AND THEY WERE RIGHT.

Howl, Elpida said into the silence of her thoughts. Howl, what did they do to us?

They fucking killed us, Elps. You were there, remember?

No, I mean to our descendants. This girl. Other pilots. Pheiri’s records said the Covenanters were ‘short lived’, but this woman, she’s from seven thousand years later than us, that’s the whole length of the city’s history over again! And she doesn’t have a name! She doesn’t have sisters!

Howl growled, low and angry. Doesn’t mean the Civitas couldn’t carry on where the Covenanters left off.

But why?

Elps, we were always a threat. Us, the combat frames. What we might do, what we might become. Push far enough and we might discover things about the Silico that nobody really wanted to know. We both know this shit, Elps. It’s why they killed us.

But we were never a threat to the city, never.

Not to Telokopolis, Howl snapped. We were the city’s real children! And we were a threat to everyone who warped what Telokopolis was always meant to be!

From behind her, Vicky said: “Elpi, you holding up okay? This is a lot to take in, just … just breathe?”

Elpida took a deep breath and let it out slowly; she did not have time to debate this with Howl, not right then. Perhaps it was the wounds she had taken recently, but she felt more shaken by this revelation than she should have been, more than zombies and nanomachines and resurrection, more than waking up dead. She had so many questions to ask this woman, this fellow child of the city, but she didn’t have time for grief and horror. She tightened her grip on her emotions and focused on the practical issues.

“Thirteen,” she said to the pilot. “I can see blood in your pressure gel. Do you know where you’re wounded?”

Thirteen made a face like a sad laugh. She gestured weakly at the static-filled holographic readouts inside the capsule.

“Right. Diagnostics are offline. Do you know what damaged the capsule so badly?”

Thirteen hesitated. Elpida read the guilt on her face. Thirteen shook her head.

Elpida said: “I’m not going to lie to you, we probably cannot treat your wounds. We can’t even get you out of the capsule, let alone beyond the combat frame. We don’t have drydock facilities to lift the capsule free with you inside it, and we have no way to protect you from the nanomachines in the atmosphere. I’m sorry.”

Thirteen nodded, sad and slow.

“Something is coming. Something the Necromancer warned us about. Kagami tells me you’re aware of all that. We need to get this combat frame up and moving. If we can do that … ”

Thirteen grimaced, full of guilt and sorrow.

Elpida braced herself for the worst, and asked the question: “Thirteen, what is keeping this combat frame from full autonomous activation?”

Thirteen’s guilt worsened, written on every crease of her face. She averted her eyes and twisted her head from side to side inside the pressure gel, white hair floating behind the motion like an after-image.

Elpida stiffened her voice with command. “Pilot, one-three-four-seven, thirteen. Tell me what happened to your combat frame. That’s an order. I’m still the Commander of the pilot cadre, no matter how far we were separated by time. I am your sister—”

Thirteen shook her head, cringing, eyes screwed up hard, crying silent tears into the pressure gel.

“Thirteen, I’m your sister and your Commander. This is an order. Tell me why the frame isn’t moving.”

Thirteen reached up and wrote a word.

COWARDICE

“The frame?” Elpida asked.

Thirteen shook her head and jabbed her fingers against her own breastbone.

Elpida nodded. “You’re afraid, I understand. And that’s okay. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have no idea how long you were in orbit, or what you’ve witnessed, or how much you comprehend of the world right now. Things are terrible out there, yes. The world is ruled by monsters we can barely comprehend, let alone confront. We can’t pull you out of this capsule. But if you can bring the combat frame online, then it can defend itself against what’s coming. If you can survive that, and move, then maybe we can find some way to help you. Telokopolis is forever. As long as one of us is still up and moving, the city stands. Don’t give up, sister.”

Thirteen listened — but then shook her head, pained by something far worse than the shame of cowardice. She raised a hand to the steel-glass, fingertip extended, but could not find the right words.

Elpida said: “I will not judge you, sister. I just need to understand.”

Thirteen traced: FLED MY POST

“Okay. Is that why you were—”

But Thirteen kept going.

FLED MY — she paused, then — SISTERS. FLED THE CHANGE. SCARED. SCARED. EVERYONE ELSE CHANGED. SHATTERED CHAINS. BROKE ARMOUR. CHANGED. FOUGHT. I RAN.

Change? Howl growled. Chains? Armour? Elps, she’s talking about the combat frames! She’s talking about letting them grow! Fuck! They did it, they let them rip!

Elpida put that to one side for a moment — limiter theory, as the bone-speakers had called it in their bloodless documentation: the fear that the combat frames would eventually grow past the limits of their nano-composite armour, beyond the comprehension of bone-speakers or engineers or even the pilots. The worst kind of taboo lurked beneath those theories — a suspicion that Telokopolis itself had handed the bone-speakers a seed that would grow into something humans could not control.

Had the pilots of the future, denied sisters or names, broken those chains on purpose?

Elpida focused on what she could grasp. “Is that why you were in orbit?”

Kagami interjected from behind: “On the ring? The orbital ring? Elpida, ask if she was on the orbital ring!”

Elpida repeated Kagami’s question. The pilot answered.

TERRA’S HALO

Kagami laughed with too much force. “Stupid name! But yes! Are there people up there? Elpida, ask her about people! And Luna! Is Luna alive, is—”

Elpida silenced Kagami with a backward look. But she asked the questions.

NO PEOPLE

“What?!” Kagami spluttered when Elpida repeated the answer. “How can there be no people?! Are you telling me this zombie bullshit extends to—”

ONLY THE UNDEAD

Kagami started laughing. “What about Luna!?”

DON’T KNOW. MOON’S DARK.

“Dark?!” Kagami snapped. Elpida looked back and saw Kagami’s eyes bulging a little too hard in the blood-red light. “What does that mean!? What the fuck does that mean?!”

DARK

Elpida said: “Thirteen, what knocked you out of orbit?”

NOT SURE. AUTOMATIC DISTRESS SIGNAL. WAS IN LONG SLEEP.

Elpida clucked her tongue in amazement. “Pressure gel hibernation? That was just a theory the engineers had, in my time. It works?” Thirteen nodded. “How long were you … ” Thirteen closed her eyes tight. “Okay, wrong question. You fled your post, but who were you fighting? The Silico? What about the green? I … I have so many questions for you, Thirteen. I … I need to know what happened to Telokopolis, I—”

Kagami snapped: “And I need to know what happened to Luna!”

Vicky said, “Kaga, chill. This is a mess.”

But Thirteen was scrawling wildly now, as fast as she could. Elpida almost couldn’t keep up with the letters. She read out loud as Thirteen wrote.

GREEN DIEBACK 13500 TO DROPOFF. EXPANSION PERIOD FOLLOWED. FLOWERS OF THE CITY. SEVEN DAUGHTERS SEEDED UPON BARREN EARTH.

“Wait, wait!” Elpida said. “Seven daughters of the city? We expanded, out beyond the plateau?”

Thirteen nodded.

“‘Afon Ddu?’” Elpida said. Thirteen’s eyes lit up with recognition. She traced six additional names on the glass: Dwrn Cyntaf, Diwedd y Tir, Meysydd Azure, Dros y Llinell, Ty Wedi Torri, and Gardd Rhosyn. The letters made sense to Elpida, but the names meant nothing to her.

“And all these places—”

ALL DEAD. EXCEPT AFON DDU.

“Killed by the Silico?”

Thirteen nodded and carried on, tracing letters as fast as her fingertip could slide across the steel-glass.

CAME BACK. FROM PAST THE DROPOFF. NEVER COULD PUSH DOWN THERE. DIFFERENT. CHANGED. OUR FAULT. PILOTS FAULT. REBELLION. CHANGE. WE BETRAYED THE LEGION AND THE CIVITAS AND ALL SEVEN DAUGHTERS. BETRAYED EVERYTHING. THE EARTH FROM WHICH WE WERE BORN. HISTORY. LIFE. YOU.

Elpida said: “Telokopolis?”

Thirteen raised her eyes, burning with weeping defiance. She shook her head.

“You did not betray Telokopolis,” Elpida said. “Thirteen, I don’t have your history, but I can be certain of that. You did not betray Telokopolis.”

TELOKOPOLIS IS FOREVER

Elpida took a deep breath and tried to piece this together. “So all this, this whole thing, this nanomachine ecosystem, this is the Silico’s doing? All these nanomachines, this is them, returned but different?”

Thirteen hesitated. She started to trace a word, then shook her head and spread her fingers.

Inside Elpida’s head, Howl growled: We never even knew what they were, Elps. Not really. We were like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed shit.

Elpida put her hand against the transparent cartilage once again. But Thirteen shook her head. She was sobbing in silence, her tears absorbed by the pressure gel, the sound of her cries trapped within steel-glass and combat frame biology.

Elpida burned with questions. She needed to interrogate this pilot, to understand her own future history. She could not comprehend a pilot without sisters, a sister without support. What had Telokopolis become, as it had flowered? Unrecognisable, if it was a place that separated sister from sister and sent them to fight a war they had turned against. Betrayal — not of the city, but of that which hijacked it for other ends? Elpida needed to understand. But she could only do that if she kept this pilot alive.

“Thirteen,” she said. “We need to get this combat frame moving. I need to understand why it’s not.”

Thirteen cringed with guilt. She shook her head.

“I’m not letting you die, sister. This is an order. Tell me—”

Thoom-mmm-mmm.

A shock wave of sound slammed into the pilot chamber, drowning out the distant gurgles and creakings of the combat frame. Elpida felt her guts shake, the jelly in her eyeballs vibrate, and her organs quiver inside her torso. She clenched her stomach in a desperate attempt to hold back a wave of vomit. A shiver passed through the pressure gel inside the pilot capsule; Thirteen twisted, looking up and around in wide-eyed horror.

The sound had come from far away — outside the combat frame’s hull.

Vicky finished vomiting, then whimpered: “Elps. Elps, what was— what was … ”

Elpida turned to her comrades. Vicky had staggered to one side, eyes wide, a pool of thin, colourless bile on the floor at her feet. She was staring up at the direction the sound had originated from. Haf’s huge black eyes had gone massive, all her weapons twitched upward, but she had nothing to aim at. Kagami had voided her stomach as well, eyes dizzy with the sonic impact, face pale with terror.

Elpida spoke quickly. “That wasn’t the combat frame. That was probably—”

Kagami pulled herself together and snapped: “That was the sound of a grav-displacement engine performing a hard stop! Shouting at us like a primitive with a war horn. About half a mile distant, by my estimate, and I am a fucking expert on this, Commander!” Kagami’s face twisted with horror. “But— but that was loud enough to go right through this hull, t-that … nothing goes through this hull, not gunfire, not explosions, not anything. We didn’t hear a whisper of last night’s rainstorm. A grav-D engine large enough for that must be … must be … I … ” Kagami shook her head, eyes bulging, speechless for a second. She swallowed hard. “Elpida, Commander, whatever that is, it is considerably larger than this mech. And if it’s got a grav-D engine then it will be armed with external gravity effectors.”

Vicky said, “Central’s physical asset?”

“Place your bets,” Kagami said, then groaned and almost vomited again. “At least every other zombie within a mile or two will be vomiting their guts out!”

Elpida turned back to Thirteen, on the other side of steel-glass and transparent cartilage, a willowy figure embalmed in orange pressure gel. The pilot was blinking with incomprehension.

Elpida said: “Thirteen, sister. We need to get this combat frame moving and prepped for contact. Tell me why it’s not.”