Victoria was making herself useful. She liked being useful; the alternative would drive her spare with anxiety.
Every loose object inside Pheiri’s crew areas needed to be stowed away, strapped down, or otherwise secured. Every last firearm, every plate of body armour, every piece of equipment, it all needed new homes, as quickly and cleanly as possible, wherever space could be found — up in the storage racks above the crew compartment, wedged into the little chambers and ducts and enclosed spaces along Pheiri’s spinal corridor, or just bundled up in spare fabric and roped to the walls of the bunk room. Permanent storage solutions with proper inventory and easy access could wait. Anything more stiff and bulky than a coat had to be made immobile; anything breakable had to be padded and cushioned; this whole process had to be complete before Pheiri finished his slow crawl through the guts of the tomb, back to the yawning dead maw of the entrance and the dying hurricane outdoors. Beyond that point, Pheiri’s usual smooth ride might get ‘somewhat bumpy’, as Kagami had scoffed. An unsecured handgun or a loose helmet could turn into a lethal projectile.
The Commander — no, everyone inside Pheiri, all Vicky’s new comrades — needed this job done before Pheiri hit the surface. After that, things were going to get rough.
Vicky had never set foot on a ship back in her mortal life, despite spending most of her teenage years well within range of the stench rolling off the toxic bacterial contamination of Lake Michigan. She’d never even been on a river boat, let alone served on one of the few gun-buckets that made up the GLR’s early excuse for a navy. But near the end of the long campaign to the east, when the fighting was over and the BosWash corridor oligarchies were all gone, Victoria had gazed out at the Old Empire aircraft carriers rotting in their graves off the Atlantic coast. Great humped masses of steel slowly breaking down in the salt air, corpses long since picked over by Euro-trash vultures and the braver of the coastal oligarchs. She’d seen pictures of Chinese carriers before, so she knew what they were — but those gleaming behemoths were half a world away. The dead giants in the Atlantic were too big, too real, too ancient.
She’d tried to imagine what it would be like to live inside one of those aircraft carriers, before the machines had been abandoned by the Old Empire. Always at the mercy of the sea, scurrying through those tight metal corridors, everything bolted to the floor lest a swelling wave brain you with your own coffee cup.
Now she imagined it was probably a little like this.
She had spent the last hour and a half — every minute since she had rolled out of bed and dragged Kagami after her — preparing Pheiri’s innards for the rough driving ahead. Boxes of spare ammo sealed and stowed, guns wrapped and racked deep in any spare space inside Pheiri’s superstructure, body armour bundled up and strapped to the mattresses in the bunk room. Every errant knife had to be accounted for, every stray boot, every hand-held doodad.
For the first half-hour of the job, before Pheiri had left the tomb chamber where he’d been parked, Vicky had plenty of the spare weapons taken off her hands, her task lightened. Serin, Shilu, Hafina, and Pira had been given the responsibility of carrying out the plan to arm and armour the near-helpless dregs who had sheltered beneath Pheiri’s protection. They had taken dozens of guns, plenty of fresh clothes, and more than a few bullet-proof vests and helmets.
Vicky didn’t resent that, not in the slightest. Pheiri’s crew had more weapons and armour than they would ever need, even with the addition of Eseld, Cyneswith, Sky, and Sanzhima. They could give away nine tenths of what they’d taken in the tomb and still be one of the most well armed groups in the corpse city — powered armour excepted.
Besides, Elpida was right. All those zombies back there with the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis freshly daubed and scribbled on their clothes, they were the real hope for any future beyond the cycle of cannibalism.
There was a good chance Pheiri was not going to make it through this.
No, Vicky told herself as she worked, don’t think about that. Don’t think about a horde of Necromancer super-zombies sprouting up from the ground like mushrooms after the rain. Pheiri is big and fast and more robust than a concrete bunker. He’s better armed than an Old Empire battleship. We’re going to get free and clear and play chicken with the worm-guard. We’re going to win. Elpida says we’re going to win. Has the Commander been wrong yet?
Victoria tried not to dwell on that.
Kagami’s ‘laboratory’ had to be carefully packed up, sensitive equipment secured in place. Protecting the meat-plant project itself had consumed the bulk of Victoria’s efforts, with Kagami supervising and Elpida helping. The three surviving meat-plants were beyond value, an ongoing embryonic miracle of nanomolecular engineering, to be protected at all costs. Victoria had strapped their containers down with steel wire and sealed them behind metal panels with air-holes in the top. By the time she was done, she was confident the compartment itself could collapse without harming the plants.
Then again, if parts of Pheiri were collapsing, protecting the plants was probably a fruitless endeavour.
Ha, fruitless.
She didn’t share that joke with Kagami or Elpida. Everyone was too on edge, though Elpida didn’t show it easily. Victoria had just dusted off her hands, said job’s a good’un, and carried on with the rest.
Do your job, focus on your role, on what you can do. Focus on what you can affect. Leave the rest to the Commander. To Kagami. To Pheiri. To Shilu?
If it came down to Shilu fighting off Necromancers hand-to-hand, they were all fucked.
Victoria didn’t say that out loud either.
Exhaustion was steel wool scratching behind her eyes, matched by the slowly increasing roar of the hurricane. The storm was dying away, dropping toward Kagami’s golden survivable number of two-hundred-thirty miles per hour — but the volume of the screaming winds and pounding hail and whipping rain was ramping up as Pheiri crept toward the outer layers of the tomb. The growing static made Victoria’s head ache and her stomach clench. She couldn’t stand the waiting. It was like being back in the artillery. Hurry up and wait, Vic, hurry up and wait! The infantry’s eternal curse.
Why did it bother her so much more than it had in life?
The exhaustion, clearly. A few hours’ sleep was not enough to banish the stress of the last day and a half.
Vicky concentrated on the physical things she could affect with her hands, tightening straps and closing hatches, locking armour plates together, making sure the buckles for the bench seats in the crew compartment all worked. She was tired, so what? She’d done worse things while more tired than this. She’d loaded and fired while tired, humped shells by hand, risked losing her fingers to the treacherous mechanisms of her beloved big guns. She’d slept in muddy holes, in the backs of trucks, beneath constellations of small arms fire. This was nothing. Do it tired!
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty of help. All the others had chipped in where they could. Hafina had assisted with some heavy lifting, and even Pira had shown up to wait for orders. When other tasks had taken priority, Victoria had been left with Amina, Eseld, and Cyneswith to scurry about after her, laden down with armfuls of equipment and guns, taking her orders with gusto. Eseld and Cyneswith might be new, but they understood what was at stake, especially after Elpida had announced the plan to everybody. The new girls didn’t know exactly where to go inside Pheiri, but they worked without complaint, though Vicky wondered about the determined little frown on Eseld’s face, and the way she constantly watched Cyneswith as if the other girl might wander off at any moment.
Amina went above and beyond, squeezing herself into smaller gaps than Vicky could, clambering into the back of the storage racks to make sure everything was strapped down tight. Amina had taken to the job like a fish to water. If she was nervous, she didn’t show much. Perhaps she just wanted to feel useful too.
The others were all busy with their own jobs. Melyn had vanished through the hatch on the floor of the spinal corridor, down into Pheiri’s mechanical guts, for last-minute checks on the secret machinery of his nuclear heart. Kagami and Elpida were up front, plugged in and planning, respectively. Pira was back in the infirmary, double-checking Ooni and Sanzhima were both strapped down tight. Most of the others were up in the cockpit now, watching the screens as the hurricane’s wind-speed dropped, getting buckled into their seats as best they could.
Was it go time? Vicky wished she had a mission clock, something big and bold and objective, up on the wall. Or at least a wristwatch. The anxiety was like a rock in her stomach.
She was inside one of the cramped side-chambers off Pheiri’s spinal corridor, focused on strapping down a final plastic crate full of ammunition. Amina scurried into the compartment and past Victoria, wriggling into a narrow gap between the boxes of supplies, to test the straps Vicky had just secured. Amina’s face popped out of the gap a moment later, smiling and nodding.
“Good job, Amina,” Victoria said, flashing her a thumbs up. “Thank you.”
Amina hesitated, then copied the gesture, eyes asking a silent question.
“It’s a thumbs up,” Victoria said. “Means … yeah, sure, yes, good, and so on. It’s not rude. I promise.” She stood up and dusted off her hands, keeping her head low so she didn’t bump the ceiling.
Amina wriggled back out of the gap and bounced to her feet, flushed and wide-eyed, eager for more orders. They were both stripped down to shorts and t-shirts, the better to navigate through the smaller spaces inside Pheiri. Amina’s hair was swept back out of her face, tied up with a piece of rubber she’d found somewhere. It was the first time Victoria had seen Amina do anything different with her hair.
“What next?” Amina chirped. “What’s next? Vicky?”
Vicky gave her a broad smile; Amina had risen to the challenge with surprising clarity. “Good question. You tell me. What’s left in the crew compartment?”
“One suit of armour carapace, the one Pira stripped off when she came back in. Haf’s stowed hers already. Other than that it’s all blankets and clothes, soft stuff. Not dangerous, yes?” She blinked and swallowed, a flash of anxiety crossing her face. “Oh, and Illy’s shotgun. But I don’t think she would let us take that off her … p-probably … ”
Vicky chuckled. A few weapons and pieces of body armour were locked directly to the walls of the crew compartment — weapons that might be needed if the flight from the tomb ended in close combat.
“Good,” Elpida said. “Thank you, Vicky. Let me know when everybody’s secure.”
“Will do. Vicky out.”
Elpida closed the internal line with a soft beep. The headset crackled again two seconds later. Victoria reopened the line, suppressing a sigh.
“Yeah, Kaga?”
A moment of silence, full of storm-static and the soft mechanical noises from the cockpit. Then a sharp, stabbing sigh. Kagami hissed, “Oh, forget it.”
“I’ll be fine,” Vicky said. “I’m just cracking a window.”
“Don’t get your head blown off,” Kagami snapped.
“Sure thing, moon princess. You know us surface types. Heads made of iron.”
“Tch!”
Kagami killed the line, another soft beep. Victoria carried on toward the crew compartment.
“Love you too,” she muttered under her breath.
The crew compartment was clear of equipment and debris, lights turned up to full brightness, picking out every ancient scuff mark on the metal walls and floor. Half the crew was already strapped into the bench seats. Ilyusha sprawled, bionic legs and arms still ungainly after the ad-hoc reattachment process, her massive black-and-red tail coiled in the seat next to her, shotgun clutched to her chest; she looked as exhausted as Victoria felt. Eseld was helping Cyneswith get her own straps straightened out, then hopped into the next seat and pulled the safety belts over her own body. Hafina took up two seats by herself, with Melyn snuggled down deep in her lap, not strapped in but enclosed by several of Hafina’s massive muscular arms, snuggled beneath a blanket. Amina darted out of the infirmary and bobbed her head at Vicky.
“All good!”
“Well done,” Vicky told her, then gestured at Hafina and Melyn. “You two, you don’t wanna go up front? In the cockpit? Last chance if you wanna move.”
Hafina grinned, big and dopey, like an oversized dog. Victoria liked that, she grinned back automatically.
Melyn shook her head. “Pheiri knows best,” she said. “Knows best. Keeps us safe.”
“Right on he does,” Victoria agreed. “Amina, final checks, then get yourself strapped in.”
“What about you?” Amina bobbed forward again, as if trying to block Victoria’s path.
“The Commander wants me to call Serin and Shilu in, they’re up top. It’ll only take a minute. Get seated, Amina, go on.” Victoria clapped her on the shoulder, then headed for the bunk room.
She sounded so much more confident than she felt. Like she was channelling Elpida from up front. The Commander’s confidence and Kagami’s acid had briefly washed away her worries.
Of course they were going to survive this. They’d survived everything else so far, hadn’t they? And now they had Pheiri, more guns than the Old Empire, and a Necromancer on their side.
In the momentary privacy of the bunk room, Victoria dragged on her trousers, stomped into her boots, and grabbed her armoured coat off her bunk. The bunk room was even more cramped than usual, every bunk filled with spare equipment strapped to the walls or bundled up as padding. Extra tomb-grown clothes lay in unsecured piles, the lowest priority for storage.
As Victoria pulled the armoured coat over her shoulders, Elpida’s voice boomed and echoed from beyond Pheiri’s hull, amplified by the external loudspeakers, muffled by the metal of Pheiri’s skin.
“—do not attempt to follow us. I’ve told you this already, but I’m telling you again. You will not survive exposure to the storm at the current wind speeds. We’re leaving to draw danger away from you, not leaving you to your fate. Do not attempt to follow us. Wait until the storm subsides—”
Victoria checked the sidearm in her coat pocket — nothing special, just an automatic pistol. She couldn’t justify keeping her new grenade launcher loaded and slung over her back all the time. Right now it was strapped to the walls of the bunk room with everything else.
“—not attempt to follow us—”
But even if she was just cracking the hatch to shout at slowpokes, she couldn’t imagine going beyond Pheiri’s hull without a weapon, without a little armour between her skin and the world.
“—remember, Telokopolis is forever.”
If a cheer went up from the crowd of zombies who had tried to follow Pheiri, Victoria couldn’t hear it over the chaos of the storm. She shivered at the thought of that rain lashing against her, the hailstones drumming on her skull, even with the armoured hood of her coat up.
She almost laughed at herself. So reluctant to go outdoors, eh? When had she become such a homebody?
Home?
The word echoed in Victoria’s mind as she darted out of the bunk room and hurried into the narrow staircase that led to the top hatch. She cast a glance over her shoulder, to check that Amina was getting strapped in, then plunged upward into the darkness of the tiny stairwell. Her boots slammed against the metal steps as she turned the corner and groped for the hatch.
Was Pheiri her home now?
In life, Victoria had never known a home; the thought came like a hammer-blow to the centre of her chest. Her parents had done the best they could with the tent in the refugee camps south of Chicago, but even when she’d been a child, Vicky had known that was meant to be temporary. What about Chicago itself? The unconquered city, with the festering arcology at its core, the arcology that had never been cracked in Vicky’s own life? Of course not. The GLR had been home, and then the 18th Infantry, and then the artillery. The regiment was home. Her comrades were home. Always moving, always changing — is that a home?
Home had been the revolution, the road, the process. Victoria had always wanted to put down roots after the war. Change herself, after the war. Become something other than a grubby infantry brat. After the war. But she had ended before the war did.
Kagami’s knowledge of the future told her that the GLR had flowered into the best the revolution could have hoped for, but Vicky hadn’t gotten to see any of that. She’d been homeless all her life, just another pair of feet on the campaign for a better world. She’d won — they had won! But Vicky had died in Chicago’s mud.
And then this, an afterlife where everyone was homeless, where nobody could ever stop moving, where the roots were dead and the tree was rotten.
But Pheiri, this mobile bubble of safety and security. This was home now, right? In a way Vicky had never felt before, this was home.
Her hands brushed the control panel to open the top hatch. She muttered under her breath.
“Thank you, Pheiri.”
Elpida’s plan to play chicken with the worm-guard was bonkers, but it was the only way to protect home.
Victoria thumbed the hatch controls and yanked the lever. The seal popped with a hiss of pressure difference and the hatch rose an inch on smooth hydraulics. The roar of the storm rushed in — close now, a deafening static of hailstones and raindrops, echoing as if from the mouth of a cave, backed by the wind like the howling of a god. Victoria pushed and the hatch gave way, exposing a narrow slit of Pheiri’s outer deck.
Whorls of bone-armour stretched away toward his front, flanked by the craggy outcrops of gun emplacements and missile blisters and weapon domes, all lit by the soft blood-red glow of the external lights.
Victoria couldn’t see Shilu and Serin right away, they weren’t on the easily navigable part of the outer deck. Her stomach tightened; she hadn’t considered what she would do if she couldn’t contact them. She pushed the hatch wider, straightening up, the sound of the hurricane beyond the tomb roaring like some far-off monster. Fingers of wind plucked at her hair and the collar of her coat. She reached for the comms headset, to ask Elpida for further instructions.
But then she let her hand drop. Serin and Shilu were right there, next to the hatch. Serin was perched on a nodule of Pheiri’s bone armour, looking past the looming bulk of the turret at the tomb passageway to the rear. Shilu was standing upright, armoured coat whipping around her human disguise, staring straight ahead.
Victoria opened her mouth. Her eyes slid sideways, following Shilu’s gaze. The words died in her throat.
She saw the storm.
Pheiri was on the final approach to the mouth of the tomb, crawling at slow speed down the same long tunnel they had taken into the heart of the structure. The ceiling was three times Pheiri’s height, as if the tunnel had been made for worm-guard. Side passages vanished into darkness, briefly lit by the blood-wash of external lights as Pheiri crept past.
At this distance, the mouth of the tomb was no bigger than Victoria’s thumbnail — a void of roiling grey static cut into the black, split apart by the shadow of whirling debris and the visual noise of hailstones the size of fists. She stared, and did not so much see the hurricane as feel it in her guts, on her skin, behind her eyeballs. The storm demanded her attention, raw and unclothed.
Victoria felt her throat closing up. Her skin prickled with cold sweat. She felt a strange urge to draw her gun. She kept one hand firmly on the hatch, gripping so hard her knuckles hurt.
Elpida was right. A god had sent this storm — if not Telokopolis from inside the network, then something else. Vicky hoped it was Telokopolis. She didn’t want to meet the alternative.
“Quite something, isn’t it?” Shilu said.
Victoria swallowed and nodded, then forced down a deep breath; the air tasted moist and ashen. Elpida had given her a job. Whatever had sent this storm, they would beat it too.
“Elpida wants both of you down inside, ASAP!” Victoria shouted over the static. “Shilu, Serin, come on! We’re almost there!”
Shilu allowed a heartbeat to pass, then turned away from the storm. Her eyes were as calm as always, her face unchanged, despite the way the wind dragged at her hair and pulled on her coat. But she locked eyes with Victoria for a moment, then nodded. Victoria nodded back.
“Lead on,” Shilu said.
Serin hadn’t moved. She was staring the other way, back into the tomb. “Serin!” Victoria shouted. “Don’t make us leave you out here.”
“You’re leaving her out here,” Serin muttered from behind her mask, barely audible over the roar and crash from up ahead.
“What?” Victoria shouted back.
Serin unfurled from her outcrop of bone-amour, dozens of limbs shifting beneath her robes. She turned her moon-pale face toward Victoria, dull amusement in her eyes; the wind made her black robes snap against the jumbled form beneath.
She nodded sideways, back down the passageway. “Iriko. She follows us still. Follows Pheiri. She wishes to ride the storm. Ride it she will, I think, no matter what we or Pheiri say.”
“Can you send her a message, from me, right now?” Victoria shouted.
Serin’s eyebrows rose. “I can. But it will be more of the same, won’t it? Stay back, for your own safety. See you when this is over. We will—”
“Tell her we’re all going home. When this is over. Her too. Tell her she’s coming home with us.”
Serin blinked. A moment passed. The skin around her eyes crinkled with a hidden smile.
“She liked that.”
Victoria nodded down, into the hatch, and stood aside. “Now inside, both of you!”
Serin and Shilu slipped through the hatch. Victoria cast one last glance at the storm, then followed, sealing the hatch behind her. The noise of the hurricane cut off, muffled by Pheiri’s skin. She pumped the hatch handle twice, to make sure it was sealed.
She hurried down the stairwell, back into the crew compartment. Serin was bracing herself at the far end, half a dozen pale hands grabbing the walls and looping her thin and bony arms into spare straps. Shilu slid into a seat, dragging belts across her body. Amina was strapped in next to Ilyusha.
Victoria found a seat and yanked the straps over her chest. Then she keyed the comms headset.
Elpida answered a split-second later: “Vicky?”
“Everyone’s in, Commander. Serin too. We’re ready. Ready when Pheiri is. It’s go time.”