Elpida examined the bloody footprints which led away from the massacre — sharp angular wedges flanked by wide flat pads.

  They told her that this particular Silico was perhaps quite heavy, but little else.

  Silico were wrought in innumerable variety. Some could be classified into broadly applicable strains or breeds, but these designations were invented by Telokopolan academics and Legion strategists, meaningless to the Silico themselves. Two ostensibly similar individuals might display totally different purposes, combat roles, durability, armament, and more. Judging by the way this one had torn through a squad of armed Covenanters, it probably wasn’t a simple corpse-drone. This Silico construct was a true killing machine.

  With no additional clues as to where Howl had been taken, Elpida left the dismembered corpses behind, and followed the trail of footprints

  She wished she had time to double back for her hardshell suit and heavier weapons. But the Covenanters already had a head start; they could be taking Howl further away with every passing minute.

  The Silico’s footprints led deeper into the tunnel of red-glowing flesh, punctuated by ancient, yellowed, arching bone, twisting away to the left in a slowly widening arc. This passageway was much narrower than the great vault which had led to the wound-junction, with room for maybe three people shoulder-to-shoulder. The bone-ridged ceiling was only a few feet above Elpida’s head. The walls offered far fewer protruding ribs to serve as cover.

  Elpida moved slowly and silently, taking care with each footstep in her soft-soled shoes, breathing through her mouth to minimize sound. She kept the heavy pistol steady on the centre of the unfolding corridor. She had tucked away the lighter machine pistol inside her ballistic vest, detached from the webbing harness around her left shoulder and forearm; she couldn’t risk a loose weapon knocking or clicking against any surfaces.

  After about two hundred feet the footprints ran out.

  Elpida stopped and held position for ninety seconds. First she stared at the space above the final, faded footprints, until she was certain it was nothing but empty air. Then she ran her gaze down the curve of corridor, watching for any errant shimmer of warped light. She unfocused her eyes, tilted her head back and forth, stared at random points on the walls and floor — all the old-school Legion tricks, the ones Nunnus had taught her. Such techniques weren’t much use out in the green, but they would save lives if there was ever another Incursion.

  Had there ever been another Incursion into the city? Elpida realised she didn’t know; the reality of this simulated time and place was millions of years gone.

  Lykke hissed over her shoulder: “Zombie? Hellooooo? Have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

  Elpida winced. Lykke had managed to maintain silence until that moment. At least she’d whispered.

  Elpida whispered back. “The Silico was using optical camouflage. It was standing in the mouth of the corridor, in plain sight, before we found the massacre. Watching us, I don’t know why. I’m making sure it’s not standing in front of us right now.”

  Lykke let out a petite sigh. “These bogeymen of yours are so tiresome. Is this what all you people were like? Sneaking about, never having any fun?”

  “Out in the green they use this to blend in with the plants. It’s very effective. Less so up on the plateau. Standard issue Legion hardshells come with built in infra-red, night vision, and terahertz sensors. I have to use my eyes. Shut up and wait.”

  Lykke sighed again.

  Elpida was satisfied after another sixty seconds; the corridor was empty. The cold trail of Silico footprints pointed onward.

  The narrow passageway coiled leftward for about another hundred feet, then abruptly passed through an open membrane of trembling flesh, into a short stretch of naked bone and exposed metal. The flensed corridor was lined with bright warning signs, printed in Upper-Spire, Mid-Spire, Down-End, and two other varieties of Skirts dialect, as well as Braille and tactile pictograms. Every warning sign was stamped in one corner with the symbol of the bone-speakers’ guild — a pair of sinuously interlocked semi-circles, one in machine-meat red, the other in yellowed bone.

  The passageway ended in a large, armoured, blast-proof door; the lintel bore a larger version of the bone-speakers’ symbol. The blast door should have been closed and sealed, even when the room beyond was in use. Six fully armed Legionaries should have been on guard at all times, with a permanent comms uplink to an on-duty commanding officer. They should have been stationed behind a series of air-gapped pressure walls, scanner booths, and emergency lock-down remote force-restraints.

  The blast door was wide open and unguarded. The security systems were all offline. The massive hinges were bent back.

  Even in a simulation made from memories, Elpida hesitated at this threshold. She glanced back at Lykke; if this had been reality, she would have died fighting rather than lead Lykke into the room beyond. She would have given her life to keep the Necromancer out.

  Lykke just stared up at her, one eye socket still puffy with bruises, golden hair dyed dark red by the blood-light of Telokopolis, innocently curious.

  “Zombie?” she whispered, then batted her eyelashes. “Looking for some motivation in my face?”

  “Follow my lead. Go where I go. Keep low, stay down, absolute silence.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Lykke purred.

  Elpida turned back to the blast door and stepped through. She crouched as low as she could, minimizing visibility as she hurried for the nearest cover, behind a bank of computer consoles, heavy steel plates humming softly over their powered innards.

  Lykke scurried in Elpida’s wake and went down on her knees at Elpida’s side, her stained white dress bunched up around her pale thighs. A smirk played over her lips.

  Elpida eased one eye out of cover.

  She recognised this manner of chamber, if not this specific one — a massive vault about a hundred feet square, floored in living metal, crisscrossed by dozens of walkways and gantries, stuffed with computing equipment, MMI uplink chairs, cables as thick as the limbs of a combat frame, and all manner of devices, most of which Elpida had only the roughest understanding. Walls of semi-transparent machine-meat glowed with rich red light between upright ribs of sturdy bone; behind the flesh hung bundles of gigantic ganglia, wide webs of flickering nerve-tissue, thickly pulsing organs the size of armoured vehicles, and layer upon layer of fluttering meat which seemed to recede into infinite distance, deeper and deeper into the body of the city. Much of the machinery was interfaced with the machine-meat — plugged into extruded orifices, reading the beat of massive organs with traceries of delicate metal, or pointing powerful lenses and imaging devices at the walls, to read the motions of unreachable internal structures.

  Down on the floor of the room was a low metal dome, ringed with warning signs, additional computing machinery, and several safety barriers — one of the dozens of stoma into which raw nanomachines might be fed into the city’s body.

  Elpida’s gut unknotted slightly when she saw the dome was sealed and bolted. She had to remind herself this was a simulation.

  This chamber belonged to the bone-speakers’ guild. Elpida had been allowed to visit similar places a couple of times; most Telokopolans would never see anything like this outside of vid-records, and even those were rather limited. There were many like it in Telokopolis, deep within the core of the city’s body. This was one of the places where the guild attempted to interpret the needs and will and mind of the city.

  Elpida had always liked the bone-speakers, even if the experienced ones were very eccentric. They were responsible for monitoring and adjusting and managing all the processes the city itself seemed not to — though if you ever got into an extended conversation with a bone-speaker, they would always insist they were mere catalysts. It was the bone-speakers’ guild who had originally made the Civitas aware of the possibility of the pilot project; they had dredged the data for the combat frames and the pilot’s genome modifications from the incomprehensible thoughts of the city herself, though many in the Civitas and the public preferred to attribute that to human sources. Elpida had never managed to strike up much of a professional relationship with any bone-speakers — they kept to themselves, spending most of their lives ‘listening’ to the city via mundane means. The few who attempted direct communion via MMI uplink tended toward extreme detachment and dissociation, their thoughts always elsewhere, though they rarely seemed upset about it; those who dove too often sometimes lost the power of speech, or seemed concerned with matters impossible to communicate. Elpida had once met one of the bone-speakers who had personally contributed to the extraction and translation of the pilot-project data, who had done seven MMI dives in his youth; he had been a very old man by that point, well over a hundred, totally non-verbal, his eyes locked on motes of dust, one hand recording their motions in great mathematical detail on a writing pad.

  As far as Elpida knew, no bone-speaker had ever joined the Covenanters.

  She was glad there were none in this chamber, simulated or not.

  The gantries and walkways and platforms were littered with corpses — Covenanters, torn apart, bisected, crushed, left to bleed out, slumped over their weapons, crumpled inside their greensuit hoods, smeared across the floors in bloody streaks of mashed gore. Elpida counted seventeen visible casualties from her current position, and partial corpses of seven more. A small group had made a last stand on one of the highest points in the room, in front of the matching blast door on the opposite side, which was also wide open. They hadn’t fared any better.

  Elpida held her position, watching for any flicker of refracted light, listening for the sound of clawed feet clicking on metal, trying to pick out the scent of Silico flesh and metal beneath the iron-and-shit reek of so many voided bodies.

  The illumination in there was easier on the eyes but harder to read; the crimson and scarlet blood-glow was muted and mixed with the regular lighting from much of the bone-speakers’ equipment. The chamber was far from silent; the air was filled with the great subsonic throbbing of the city itself, the low clicking and humming and whirring of all the computer equipment, and the slow, steady drip — drip — drip of blood falling from one high gantry onto another.

  No sign of Silico, no hidden movement.

  Which meant it could be anywhere.

  Elpida weighed her chances.

  If something like this had happened in reality, during Elpida’s life, it would have been a near-unimaginable emergency. Elpida’s duty — which she would have accepted without question — would be to stand up and shout and draw attention to herself, to get the Silico out of this chamber by any means, to draw it away from any places the city might be truly vulnerable.

  Silico had breached Telokopolis five times in the city’s history. The First and Second Incursions had happened within a century or two of the city’s founding — at least according to the ancient, incomplete, confusing records of that time. There was a lively academic debate as to whether those incursions had actually happened, or if they were just mythical, or perhaps references to much smaller events. Telokopolan historians had little physical evidence to go on; archaeology on the plateau always turned up such a jumble of human and Silico corpses, the fruit of seven thousand years of unbroken siege.

  The Third Incursion had really happened, about three thousand years before Elpida’s life. Nobody disputed that, except perhaps the infinitesimally small number of people who thought everything in the public museums was fake. The Third Incursion had been preceded by a period of about twenty years where Silico numbers had seemed to dwindle. Probing attacks and skirmishes had trailed off, then stopped entirely. Expeditions into the green had gone almost unchallenged, except by random stragglers. The Civitas of that period had embarked on a cautious program of forcing the green itself further back, clearing land beyond the plateau.

  Historians disagreed about why the Silico had eventually returned — was it a reaction to the burning back of the green, or had the Silico been busy with some ineffable task, somewhere else on the planet’s surface? Whatever the true reason, the Silico had crashed back into the atrophied defences of the city in gigantic numbers, without even forward scouts to probe for weakness, giving the Legion barely six hours of advance warning. They had swept aside the plateau defences in two days, punched into the Skirts on the third day, and had only been driven back by fourteen months of fighting. A sudden sharp shock to Telokopolis. A reminder to never again relax her eternal vigilance.

  All that had happened so long ago, though.

  The Fourth Incursion was recorded in the same languages that Elpida had spoken in life.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  In post-founding year 6332, the city’s most sensitive long-range equipment had detected distant echoes from a series of ground tremors. The source was far beyond the plateau, far away to the extreme east, perhaps at the edge of the drop-off itself, where the green fell away to infinite benighted depths.

  Several weeks later half a dozen vast Silico leviathans had shouldered their way through the green, shredding billions of trees as they advanced, scooping up undergrowth like filter-feeders, and even devouring the smaller Silico forms they encountered. Nobody had ever seen Silico constructs of that size or kind. Legion archives were opened, bone-speakers communed with the city, and the matrosses’ guild woke engines in the Skirts that had not been fired in thousands of years. The populace had panicked; though each individual leviathan was no more than a tick when compared with Telokopolis, the notion that something could wound the body of the city was unthinkable, no matter how small the wound.

  In the end the Legion had fought the six leviathans at the edge of the plateau. The matrosses’ guild had struck the killing blows with energies that were still being studied in Elpida’s time. But as each of the vast creatures had died, they had disgorged millions of small-scale Silico constructs — along with equal numbers of what would later be called corpse-puppets, which was the first time anybody had seen their like. Plateau defences had been overwhelmed. The Skirts had been breached and constructs had swarmed halfway up the spire. The distinction between civilian and Legion had melted away; anyone who could do anything did it, because there was nowhere to run. Repulsing the attack and retaking the plateau had taken four years.

  Telokopolis had not been scarred by the Fourth Incursion — the Silico had never reached her inner places — but the people had. The Civitas of that time had instituted the official policies of isolation, the end of pushes out into the green, and the massive re-fortification of the plateau.

  The Fifth Incursion had happened about a century before Elpida’s birth. Old Lady Nunnus had been a young woman, a Legionnaire on the plateau, already showing promise in the constant churn of small-scale contact.

  The Fifth Incursion had not breached as deeply as the Fourth, nor been as surprising as the Third, and had not found Telokopolis unguarded — but it had shown intellect, adaptation, and strategic planning, which had seeded a new kind of fear. The Silico had gathered in massive numbers on a very narrow frontage, then cut through the plateau in a sharp wedge. They had ignored the Legion, retreated from open engagement, and bypassed fortifications by choking them with Silico bodies. Then they had lunged for the Skirts, like a lance rammed through the city’s armour, uncaring of the counter-blow.

  Seventeen million civilians had died; two million Legionaries. The fighting had lasted just under two years. A whole city block down in the Skirts was dedicated to a memorial. Nunnus had taken the cadre there, when they’d been quite small, just old enough to understand their intended purpose.

  The experiences of the Fifth Incursion formed the basis of all modern Legion doctrine. The political and social aftermath had seen the birth of the expeditionist faction in the Civitas — an acknowledgement that the city could not close itself off from the green and pretend the Silico would throw themselves into the teeth of the Legion’s guns forever. That, in turn, had led to the pilot program, and Elpida’s own birth.

  No Silico had ever gotten this deep inside the city. This breach was unthinkable.

  Elpida reminded herself that this wasn’t real. This was a simulation.

  But to whom did this memory belong?

  The bone-speakers’ chamber had multiple exits — three different sets of blast doors, all lying open. Elpida decided the highest was the most obvious route, the one the Covenanters had tried to defend.

  She slipped back behind cover. Lykke was smirking at her, like they were playing hide and seek.

  Elpida whispered, “We need to cross this room, to the doors on the other side, but the sightlines are terrible. We’ll be exposed the whole way, and the Silico could be hiding anywhere. We need to move fast, keep low, and stay silent. If you make a sound on purpose I will consider that a betrayal. Do you understand?”

  Lykke’s smirk dissolved into a pout. She crossed her arms over her bloodstained chest.

  “If you make a sound it could bring the Silico down on us,” Elpida whispered. “If you’re going to undermine the rescue, then I may as well shoot you now and—”

  “Yes, yes, fine,” Lykke hissed. “But don’t you think I could dance with this unwanted suitor in your place? If it wants to steal you, it has to go through me.”

  “These are no longer my memories. I don’t know what it means if either of us gets hurt or killed now.”

  Lykke grinned. “But I could still swat this fly for you.”

  “No,” Elpida hissed. “You couldn’t.”

  Lykke rolled her eyes.

  “Promise me you’ll be silent,” Elpida whispered.

  Lykke rolled her eyes harder. “Cross my iccle bitty heart and hope to die. Or not. Because I can’t die. Hee-hee-hee.”

  Elpida stared at the Necromancer, then accepted she had no choice but to trust her.

  She pulled the stolen greensuit hood out from inside her ballistic vest; she might not have time to don the disguise if they blundered into survivors on the other side of that blast door. She tugged the hood down over her head, got the internal supports snug against her skull, and tucked her hair up inside. The visor lenses gave her a good field of view, but this was a civilian model, without any electronics.

  Then she tapped Lykke on the knee, rose to her feet, and crept out from behind cover.

  Elpida picked the safest, most well-concealed route, even if it took a little longer. She went right, crouching low, past the banks of computers and stacks of machinery, then crept down a set of metal stairs, her soles silent on the textured grip of each step. She ghosted along a walkway, moving quickly and carefully; she glanced back to make sure Lykke was following. The Necromancer was doing her best to crouch and shuffle, a playful smile twitching on her lips, craning her neck to peer at everything. That would have to do.

  Down a final set of steps; Elpida hit the floor of the chamber with a whisper of fabric. Down here she was level with the sealed metal dome. Even through the greensuit hood, the air stank of blood and offal.

  She held position for thirty seconds, eyes scanning for fresh motion, for the glimmer of misshapen light, for the air to assume an incorrect angle.

  Nothing. Total stillness. No Silico, not that she could see.

  Elpida hurried onward, past the dome, heading for the stairways and gantries which led back up to the blast doors on the opposite side of the chamber. She kept her heavy pistol aimed at every blind corner and hidden nook, in case the Silico killing machine was—

  “Hsssst!”

  Elpida froze.

  “ … hssst! H-hey! Hey … here. Here!”

  The terrified whisper came from Elpida’s left — from within a sheltered alcove formed by the supports of three different overhead walkways. The light had made it seem like a blank wall.

  A small, pale, blood-smeared face was peering out from within — young, female, framed by dark hair, eyes bulging and bloodshot.

  It was a young woman, drenched from head to toe in fresh gore. She was clutching a submachine gun with both hands, knuckles so tight that her arms were shaking. She wore baggy work overalls and practical boots.

  The chest of her overalls was painted with the triple-triangle symbol of the Covenanters, white lines blurred and marred by crimson splatters.

  Elpida nearly turned away and walked on. But she had no choice.

  She altered her route and stepped into the sheltered alcove, towering above the survivor. A small pile of bodies was tangled in the mouth of the narrow space, cut into pieces, guts voided, lying in a pool of blood and viscera. This young woman must have fallen beneath the corpses, passed over by the Silico killing machine.

  The woman was shaking uncontrollably, eyes mere wide white rims in a crimson mask. Beneath the blood her skin was grey with shock. Her hair should have been bright bronze — a fashion trend Elpida vaguely remembered — but the matted blood made it look black. She had the beginnings of a tattoo down her right cheek and the side of her neck — the stylised flowing wave of a guild Elpida didn’t know.

  The tattoo was only just begun; Elpida realised this was not a young woman — this was a teenage girl, a child, no older than sixteen or seventeen.

  The girl hissed: “Shhh shhh! D-don’t say anything, don’t— don’t make a sound, it might come back, it might come back. T-there’s Silico, inside the c-city, w-we have to g-get—”

  Elpida put the muzzle of her pistol beneath the girl’s chin.

  “Put the gun on the floor,” she whispered.

  The girl froze. Her jaw hung open.

  “Put the gun on the floor,” Elpida repeated. “Or I’ll pull this trigger.”

  The girl tried to nod, but the pistol was in the way. Elpida eased back just far enough to give her room to obey. The girl bent over and placed the gun on the floor; by the way she handled it, she’d probably never touched a weapon before. She let go of the gun and spread her hands. Elpida put a foot on the submachine gun and scooted it back, beyond the girl’s reach.

  This lone survivor was too shocked to take advantage of a moment’s lapse, and Elpida had only one hand. She had to use the hand holding her pistol to take off her greensuit hood. Her long white hair fell from the hood and down her back.

  The girl’s face collapsed further — eyes bulging with fresh fear, mouth curling with a need to sob, her whole body cringing away from Elpida.

  “Oh … n-no,” the girl half-sobbed, trying desperately to stay quiet. “It’s— it’s you, the— the leader! No— no no no, don’t— don’t—”

  Elpida frowned. “You know me?”

  “W-what?” The girl boggled at her. “I— I know you from the news! You’re the head pilot, a-aren’t you?” A shudder went through the girl; she started to pant as she spoke. “Y-you let that thing in here! Didn’t you?! You let it in, to kill us! You let in!”

  “I did not let the Silico into the city. Stop. Breathe. You’re going to make too much sound and draw it down on us.”

  The girl seemed about to hiss another panicked accusation, but then her eyes flickered to Elpida’s shoulder. “W-who are you?”

  Lykke smiled, toothy and bruised, leaning around Elpida’s side. “Hiiii,” she whispered. “Oh, this one is shaking like a leaf. What fun! Can we keep—”

  “Just a civilian,” Elpida said to the girl. “Ignore her.”

  Lykke tutted. The girl didn’t seem to know where to look, then stared at the pistol. “Are you going to … kill me?”

  “If I wanted to shoot you, I would have done it already,” Elpida said. “But I will, if—”

  Lykke interrupted: “She will! You best believe her, sweet little thing. She’s a terror, this one, a real heart-breaker, a—”

  “Lykke, shut up.”

  Lykke shut up.

  The girl was staring, panting for breath, eyes wide and white. Elpida continued, “I’m going to ask you questions. You’re going to answer them. Refuse, and I’ll shoot you. Lie, and I’ll shoot you. Try to mislead me — what happens?”

  The girl swallowed. “Y-you’ll shoot me.”

  “Good.”

  Elpida was bluffing. She was not sure she could shoot an unarmed teenager, even a Covenanter — though this was a simulation. This girl had not been old enough to understand what she was committing to. She’d not even been old enough to have any responsibility in a guild. She was a child, led astray by others who should have known better.

  “Your comrades brought a captive through here,” Elpida whispered. “Yes or no?”

  The girl nodded. “Yes, yes!”

  “Who?”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “I-I don’t know! I don’t know, really, I don’t. It was just a person bundled up in a float-plate stretcher. That’s all I saw.”

  “Which exit did they take?”

  “The big one, up— up there.” The girl pointed a shaking finger at the blast doors where the Covenanters had mounted a last stand.

  “Where were they taking her?”

  “Her?” The girl blinked. “Um— I-I don’t know! I don’t. We don’t— I wasn’t part of—” Her face started to crumple. Fresh tears gathered in her eyes. “I was o-only meant to be here with— with my dad, and then—”

  “Concentrate,” Elpida said.

  It took an effort of will for Elpida to keep her face neutral. This girl — simulation or memory or not — was on the verge of a breakdown, pumped full of adrenaline, in shock. Her gaze started to drift backward, to the bodies right behind her. Was one of them her father? Was this the daughter of a committed Covenanter, just along to make her father proud? And now she was splattered with his blood, alone among the corpses, and her only hope was one of the people her father had sworn to exterminate.

  “My— my— my d-dad, he’s right there. Dad … dad—”

  Elpida reached out with the pistol and tapped the front of the girl’s chest. “Concentrate.”

  The girl swallowed and nodded. She didn’t look at her father’s corpse.

  Elpida whispered: “How many guards with the captive? How many Covenanters?”

  “S-six,” the girl murmured. “No, uh, seven. Sorry. Seven. I-I think.”

  “How were they armed?”

  The girl blinked, blank for a moment. “Uh … with … guns? I-I-I don’t know much about … guns. I’m— I’m really sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Tears started to fall down the girl’s cheeks, cutting tracks into the blood. She raised an arm to wipe her face, but her sleeve was covered with blood as well; she stared at the sticky gore, frozen for a moment.

  Elpida stared down at her, trying to sort through her memories. “I don’t recognise you,” she murmured.

  The girl looked up, wide-eyed. Lykke let out a soft sigh and muttered, “This again, zombie?”

  Elpida asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Uh … uh … Misane. Misane … Peruce.”

  A Skirts name. “Misane,” Elpida said. “What’s the last thing you remember doing?”

  Misane blinked several times. “W-what?”

  “Before this. Before you were here, in this chamber. What were you doing, before this?”

  Misane shook her head. “Talking with … m-my dad and—”

  “No, before that. Think hard, Misane. What is the last thing you remember?”

  Misane’s breathing slowed. She frowned, growing more confused than afraid. “I was … in bed? In … bed, but I was … I wasn’t … ”

  “That’s enough,” Elpida whispered.

  Elpida didn’t know what this girl was — what any of these Covenanters were. Was this really just a reconstruction from a memory, whether hers or somebody else’s? Or was this a real person? Was this another form of resurrection, dragged out of the soup of history and pressed into service inside this simulation?

  Was this just another zombie?

  Elpida took a gamble.

  “None of this is real,” she whispered to Misane. “This is a simulation, based on a memory. Do you understand?”

  Lykke let out a soft little ‘ugh’. Misane just stared, wide-eyed. Even if this girl did comprehend, Elpida was the enemy she had been taught to hate and fear, and Elpida was holding her at gunpoint.

  “Lykke,” Elpida hissed. “Pick up that submachine gun for me, please.”

  Lykke tutted. She picked up the girl’s gun with one hand, dangling it by the butt, as if it was a bag full of excrement.

  Elpida waved the pistol at Misane, gesturing her out of the alcove. She whispered, “The blast door on the opposite side of the room, it’s open, that’s where I just came from. There’s another pile of corpses down there, but nothing else. If you move quietly and slowly, the Silico won’t hear you.” She paused. “Go. Get out of here.”

  Misane looked from Elpida to the gun, then back again. “But— but if it— if it’s there, I’ll— I-I need the—”

  “I’m not putting a gun in your hands,” Elpida whispered. “Because you’ll probably use it to shoot me in the back. Go.”

  Misane cringed . “What if there’s more Silico? I-I don’t want to die, please … ”

  “None of these weapons would put a hole in a Silico killing machine. You need something heavier, like this.” She gestured with the pistol again. “Out.”

  Misane stumbled out of the alcove, back onto the main floor of the chamber. Elpida followed, moving silently. Lykke sighed and padded after them.

  Elpida pointed the pistol at Misane again. “Go.”

  Misane hesitated. “Are you going to shoot the Silico?”

  “If I can. Now—”

  “Take me with you!” Misane hissed. “Please! If this is the Sixth Incursion, they’ll be everywhere. Please, please, I’m sorry, take me with—”

  A clamour of heavy boots on metal floors rang out from far above.

  Elpida twisted just in time to see a dozen armed figures emerge from the blast door which she had intended to use as her exit. Rifles in hands, scraps of body armour on their frames, white triangles painted on greensuit hoods and jacket shoulders and cast-off Legion chest-pieces. A dozen Covenanters advanced into the chamber, with the shaken confidence of those who were not used to seeing the fresh corpses of their friends.

  Elpida tried to grab her own greensuit hood from the front of her ballistic vest, but it was too late.

  One of the Covenanters stopped and pointed down at her. “It’s one of them!” he cried out. “One of them! She’s right here!”

  Misane opened her mouth and raised a hand to her comrades. “Help—”

  Elpida tackled her to the floor, behind a bank of computer consoles which ringed the great dome at the centre of the room. Misane flailed and spat, trying to wriggle out from under Elpida, batting at her chest and back with blood-smeared hands. Elpida shoved her down, further into cover. Lykke let out a squeal of delight from somewhere behind, but Elpida couldn’t see where the Necromancer had gone.

  “Get off!” Misane screamed. “Get off! Get off me, get off—”

  The Covenanters opened fire.

  a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I'm plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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