Necroepilogos Interlude: Pheiriant

lyn woke to the familiar sound of firearms discharge.

Low and deep and crunchy: crouf crouf. The gunshots were muffled by the thick walls of her cocoon — safely beyond of layers of exotic tal, hardened polyr, and self-regrowing composite ceramic armour — but also by the blankets in which she had wrapped herself for sleep, and by the fluttering sound of Hafina snoring next to her.

Pheiri was shooting at sothing.

This was normal, expected behaviour. Her notes recorded three thousand seven hundred and sixty two instances of Pheiri shooting at things with small arms. She’d given up adding more instances so ti ago. She couldn’t recall when.

lyn lay awake in the dark for a long ti, snuggled down against Hafina’s side. She did not want to peel herself out of the blankets to see what was going on. There was no point. The engines remained on standby, a deep-belly hum down below lyn’s range of hearing, a comforting full-body heartbeat transmitted up through the floor of the crew compartnt, where she and Haf made their bed; the hull wasn’t ringing with impacts or dinging and pinging as small-calibre rounds bounced off the dirty white exterior; nothing was scratching against the rear access ramp or the top hatch; whatever Pheiri was doing did not involve the main turret, the rail-lance, or turning on all the lights and flashing alarms and generally having a tantrum. lyn decided the noise would probably stop soon. She wanted to go back to sleep. Haf’s flank was nice and warm. Her body said no ergency. The screen of her mind was quiet and still.

But the crack-thump of weaponry went on and on. Tirs started inside lyn’s head, counting seconds, then minutes, then a quarter of an hour, until she was not only awake, but very irritated.

She left the halo of Haf’s body heat and rolled onto her back.

The crew compartnt was the single largest space inside Pheiri — the only space large enough to bed down for the night, even if the benches were often covered in junk and clothes and pieces of Haf’s rifle and side-arms; Haf liked to take the guns apart and cover them in grease and put them back together again. lyn didn’t understand why. Sotis lyn slept in one of the seats in the control cockpit, or wriggled into the cramped storage racks above the crew compartnt. She had vague mories of once sleeping inside Pheiri’s turret, though those mories hurt if she touched them for too long; perhaps she had been unwell. But the crew compartnt was the only place she and Hafina could lay down blankets and stretch out together. Sleeping together was always better than sleeping alone. lyn didn’t enjoy sleeping alone, not unless she could wedge herself into the smallest space possible.

White and guntal, Pheiri’s guts flickered and danced with the backwash from the control cockpit up front, from a constellation of LEDs and readout screens and blinking lights, like fireworks in a moonless night sky.

lyn had never seen ‘fireworks’ or ‘the moon’. She wasn’t sure what concepts those words referred to, but they scrolled across the screen of her mind regardless. She dismissed them with growing irritation.

Pheiri was still shooting: crump-crump-crack. Then ca a long pause. Then another trio of shots. A long series of whirs and clicks and deep-tissue clunks followed: fresh rounds cycling into chambers from Pheiri’s growth-organs. Three more shots. Another two. One. Silence reigned just long enough for lyn’s eyelids to droop. Then a barrage of slam-bang-crack jerked her into awareness again. Her mind was counting minutes and seconds and shots and ti between shots and predicted distances and trajectories and targets. Sleep was hopeless. She extracted her arms from the covers and frowned toward the control cockpit.

Hafina snored on, oblivious.

lyn told herself she was not jealous of Haf’s ability to sleep through anything, but she was. She was jealous of Haf’s larger body, Haf’s extra-fluffy blonde hair, Haf’s strength and stamina, Haf’s blind faith in Pheiri, and Haf’s unerring accuracy with the rifle. She was more ambivalent about Haf’s big goofy smile and Haf’s unreserved hugs and Haf’s big stupid eyes and big stupid arms.

But Haf wouldn’t understand the lights in the cockpit. The flickering patterns called to lyn, made her head hurt, suggested she might decipher them into ammunition levels, heat readouts, IR feedback. But Haf would just shrug. To Haf they were just patterns in the dark. Waking Haf was pointless.

lyn poked Haf in the side, hard.

“Wake up,” she hissed. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

Haf grumbled. She wedged her large fra further into the corner between crew compartnt floor and crew compartnt bench. The pose looked deeply uncomfortable, but Haf liked it; Haf liked to have her back against solid surfaces. That was why lyn always got the middle of the floor.

“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Haf, wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Haf. Haf. Wake up.”

“Mmmmmnnnn,” Haf grumbled again. Big eyes stayed firmly shut. Her blonde hair was all mashed into her face. She snuggled her head down further onto the bag she was using as a pillow. “How about no?”

lyn sat up, dragging half the covers off Haf’s front. “Can’t you hear that? Haf, listen. Listen. Listen.”

Firearms discharge cracked and thumped, on and on, into the night.

Haf frowned without opening her eyes. “It’s raining.”

lyn tutted. “That’s not rain. That’s guns.”

“Yeah, but there’s rain too. I can hear it on Pheiri. Plink-plonk-plink. You listen.”

lyn was about to poke Haf in the side again, harder — but then she cocked her head and realised that Haf was correct: it was raining. Big fat drops raised a wall of static against Pheiri’s exterior. The screen of her mind supplied estimated raindrop density and liquid precipitation asurents, then demanded she drink so rainwater to test the chemical composition. She made that demand go away.

“Okay,” lyn huffed. “It’s raining, fine—”

Haf said: “I was right. Go on, tell I was right.” Her grin split the darkness of the crew compartnt, big and toothy.

“No.”

“But I was right!” Haf sounded a little offended.

“That’s not important right now. Haf—”

“It’s always important when I’m right. Co on, tell I’m clever, ly. Pleeeeease, tell I’m clever. Tell I’m clever or I’ll go back to sleep.”

lyn sighed. “You’re not more clever than . Stop playing. Stop. Listen. Pheiri’s doing sothing.”

Hafina listened for a mont. Then she said: “Pheiri’s always doing sothing.”

“Yes, but we aren’t moving. And it’s not stopping.”

Haf shrugged beneath her ruined blanket cocoon. One huge naked shoulder went up and down. Her mouth twisted with grumpy sleep-desire. “So?”

“So, we’re not moving through anything. What’s he shooting at? Why’s it going on so long? Why now? It’s the middle of the night. That doesn’t make sense. And it’s not stopping. Not stopping. Not stopping. We have to check. I have to check.”

The slow crump-crack of gunshots continued, muffled beyond Pheiri’s hull. lyn let the sound speak for itself. Eventually Haf sat up, too big inside the crew compartnt, beautiful in her ungainly motions; the flickering cockpit lights glazed her naked shoulders and collarbone and chest. The screen of lyn’s mind asured Haf’s visible muscles against every previous asurent of Haf’s visible muscles, then inford her that Haf had lost an estimated sixty pounds of muscle mass over the last twenty five thousand hours. lyn’s mind suggested several sources of high-calorie intake, but she didn’t know any of the words, so she made the suggestions go away.

Haf opened her eyes and watched the ceiling. She said: “Pheiri knows what he’s doing.”

lyn hissed, “Yes, but we don’t know what he’s doing!”

Haf shot her one of those big stupid smiles, the kind which made her soft and funny and red in the face. “Then go look? Want to stop you? Is this just a roundabout way of waking up for a fuck?”

lyn punched Haf in the shoulder. Haf laughed and tried to elbow her in the side, but lyn was already squirming out of bed.

She kept her head low as she left their blanket nest, so she didn’t bang it on the crew compartnt ceiling; lyn was much smaller than Haf, with slender limbs and fewer sticky-out bits to bruise on Pheiri’s innards, but she still had to be careful. She curled her toes against the cold tal floor as she rummaged in the equipnt bags on the bench, pushing aside her helt and old body armour and too many pairs of gloves.

Haf sat up straight all of a sudden. Her eyes went three tis larger. Her skin cycled from reflective-pale to night-combat black. “l? You’re not going outside, are you?”

lyn found her big grey jumper and dragged it over her head. She pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail. “Nope.”

“But what are you doing?”

“Don’t feel like being naked right now.” lyn scooped up her notebook and a pen from the bench. She refused to look at Haf.

“Awwww, hey,” Hafina whined. “I didn’t an to make you mad. ly, what’d I do?”

“You’re fine.”

lyn went to the front of the crew compartnt and jabbed at the dispenser controls until Pheiri disgorged a food-stick. She stuck one end in her mouth, tucked her notebook under an armpit, and ignored Haf whining her na.

“lyyyy, lyyyy, lyyyyyyyy.”

lyn squird through Pheiri’s innards, over branching tubes and past bunches of wiring, lifting her naked legs to scramble over the bare tal of the reserve communication officer’s seat, the secondary gunner’s position, the access hatch for the engine, and the bulge of super-heavy armour over Pheiri’s brain. She had no idea what a communication officer or secondary gunner was, or what they needed all those extra buttons and switches and dials for. Nothing back there had lit up in a long ti. But the words scrolled across the screen of her mind anyway, along with the ti since last activation of the respective systems: five hundred twenty six thousand three hundred and two hours.

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She wriggled past the rungs of the turret-ladder and could not resist the urge to glance upward, at the control-helt which hung in the dark, inside the turret. She suppressed a shudder, but she didn’t know why.

lyn popped free into the control cockpit. The screens and buttons and dials were all trying to tell her things, too many things, all at once. lyn ignored them. She crouched on the shapeless ancient stuffing of the auxiliary manual input seat, then took a mont to chew the food-stick and lick greasy crumbs off her fingertips. She flipped open her notebook and started to cross-reference the symbols on the screens against her previous records. The screen of her mind kept making useless suggestions with words she didn’t know.

Her eyes flicked up and down. Her fingertips traced her notes. Her lips moved in silence.

Haf called out, still worming her way through Pheiri’s guts: “Is he okay? l? l? Is he alright?”

lyn tutted under her breath. “Of course he’s alright. Don’t be stupid.”

“l!”

Hafina erged into the control cockpit a second later and banged her head on the roof. She had pulled body armour over her naked top half, arms sticking out, hands clutching her rifle. Her eyes were huge in the darkness. Her skin glistened white-grey as it tried to match the tal behind her.

lyn raised an eyebrow. “Haf, what are you doing?”

Haf said: “Is there sothing wrong with him!?”

“ … no. Haf, why are you carrying the gun?”

Haf looked down at the polyr-and-tal firearm in her hands. “Seed like the right thing to do?”

lyn sighed. She pointed at a seat on the other side of the control cockpit. “Sit. Wait. Let read.”

Haf sat and waited. She was very still.

lyn found Pheiri’s information harder to comprehend than usual; there was a lot of data that she’d never seen before, not recorded anywhere in her notes, indicated on readouts which she’d never seen lit, or at least not lit in those specific ways. The screen of her mind kept supplying things about atmospheric nanomachine density, orbital re-entry disturbance, relative ti displacent, and flashing her with priority interrupts. She made all those go away because they weren’t helping.

One screen she did know: a landscape of green ghosts washed with ash and acid rain. That was a front view from Pheiri’s caras. Lights blinked on a console just above her head: green for ready, red for reloading. There were a lot of reds, taking a lot of ti to cycle back to green. At least she assud that’s what the lights ant, because she’d never seen those particular ones lit before. Lots of the usual ones were green and not changing to red.

“Different … weapons?” she muttered. Hafina sat up straighter. “I’m not talking to you, Haf. Settle down. Pheiri is fine.”

lyn pressed so of the buttons by the side of the display screens, the ones she knew from experience, the ones that would change the colours of the display or tell Pheiri that she wanted to look in different directions. But all the readouts showed her the sa information, nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, just the city, haunted by image-ghosts as zombies slipped away into the ruins. The readouts shook very slightly every ti Pheiri fired another hull-weapon. lyn couldn’t see what he was shooting at.

Haf leaned forward to get a better view, then stood up. She left her rifle behind. Her eyes were normal size again. She got behind lyn and slowly hugged her from behind, chin on lyn’s shoulder, crouching and bracing herself against the cramped tal confines of the forward compartnt.

lyn said: “You’re warm.”

“And you’re cold. Brain’s doing too much.” Hafina squinted hard at the third screen above lyn’s head. “Act— act … ive? Active! Active crew … pro— prot—”

lyn sighed. She read the glowing green text in a single glance. “Active crew protection ballistics online.”

“Ooooh, right.” Haf lit up. “What does that an?”

lyn frowned. “It’s right there, that’s what it ans. Active crew protection ballistics online.” She tapped the screen with the end of her pen. “Right there.”

Haf pouted and blew a raspberry against the side of lyn’s head, which turned into a brief struggle for dominance. lyn won - she already had the chair, her hands were quicker, and Hafina’s strength was limited against non-lethal targets. After a quick cuff round the head, Haf settled back into place with her chin on lyn’s opposite shoulder.

Haf said: “Teach .”

“Active,” lyn began. “So, opposite of passive. That ans Pheiri is doing sothing.”

Haf snorted. “We know that already.”

“Yes, but this ans Pheiri wants to tell us. And, ‘crew’, that’s … ”

Haf squinted. “Like the crew compartnt?”

“Yes. So … let’s skip that for now.” lyn tapped the next word. “Protection. Pheiri always protects us, so that must be right, I don’t think he’s doing anything bad.” lyn stopped and stared for a long ti at the next word. The firearms crumping and cracking from outside kept interrupting her thoughts with useless data.

The mont stretched too long for Hafina’s patience. She whined. “Ballistics?”

“I don’t know,” lyn admitted.

“You don’t know? What do you an you don’t know?”

“I don’t know every single word, okay? I don’t know what it ans. Stop that. Stop nibbling on .” She elbowed Haf in the ribs, which did nothing to stop Haf chewing on lyn’s ear.

“Mmmmmmm. But you read the books. Don’t they have all the words?”

lyn sighed. “They have lots but not all. You can’t have all the words in a single book, it doesn’t work like that. You put certain words in certain orders to say certain things, you don’t just jam them all together.”

The screen of lyn’s mind said: Dictionary. She dismissed that.

Hafina made a dissatisfied noise.

lyn went on: “Anyway. Ballistics. Now I’ve had a mont to think, I think it ans guns. Firearms.”

“See!” Haf laughed. “You did know! Fuck it, l, you’re so fucking smart. I love you.”

“And you’re dumb as a brick, but I love you too.” She tapped the last word in the sentence. “Online. That ans it’s on, or it’s working, or it’s connected. So Pheiri is doing sothing active, which is on, to protect us.” She finished, nodded, and smiled to herself. That felt good. All the things in her mind lined up for once. “He’s shooting at stuff.”

Hafina laughed. “We knew that from the start.”

lyn nodded. “Yes. But this way is better.” She flicked back through her notes, reading by the light from the screens and LEDs. “He’s done this before. My notes say we’ve read this line before. Three hundred and eighty tis in this notebook alone. This one alone.”

“That’s a lot.” Hafina sounded impressed. “Go Pheiri. Bang bang.”

“Mm.”

Hafina smacked her lips. “Doesn’t sound right though.”

“Yes,” lyn said. She reached up and tapped the screen again. “This next line is new. More interesting. Not seen before.” She read out loud for Haf’s benefit: “Anti-personnel munitions insufficient for penetration. Escalation to HE-tip rounds authorised.”

Hafina whistled. lyn frowned: did Haf understand what the words ant? But Haf was already asking: “He done this before?”

lyn flicked back through her notebook again. “Mm, yes. Here. And here. And once again, here. I think we forgot. We forgot. Forgot. We forgot.”

Haf squeezed lyn’s shoulders, nice and tight and hard. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Yes,” lyn said. She stared at her notes.

Hafina nuzzled her neck and said: “As long as you don’t forget .”

“How could I?” lyn straightened up. “You’re too large to forget. You always get in the way.” Haf made a sad face, peering around lyn’s shoulder. “What? What? What?”

Haf said, “Doesn’t that imply I might forget you?”

“Why? Why?”

“‘Cos you’re kinda small.”

lyn rolled her eyes. “Don’t be stupid.”

Haf smiled, pretend sadness turning back into a grin.

lyn went on: “If you forgot , I’d beat you up.”

Haf laughed. “You wouldn’t be able to beat up!”

lyn turned slightly in her seat. “If you forgot , you couldn’t use your muscles at their maximum. Therefore, I would beat you.”

Haf pulled a thinking face, then shrugged her big naked shoulders beneath her loose body armour. Her skin cycled back to its usual resting reddish tint. “Can’t argue with that, I guess.” She looked up at the screens again. “So, like, what’s Pheiri shooting at?”

lyn didn’t answer right away. She looked up and to the left, at the portion of the forward compartnt that projected upward, where the observation seat hung unoccupied. Set in the tal in front of the seat was a sliding wedge which covered a thick pane of reinforced steel-glass.

They both stared.

lyn felt her heartbeat quicken. She word a hand under her grey jumper and pressed her palm to her ribs. Haf just chewed her bottom lip, then bit off a chunk of flesh and swallowed it. lyn swatted her on the legs. Haf shouldn’t eat bits of herself. Recycling was inefficient.

“Pheiri,” lyn said. “What are you shooting at?”

Green text scroll-printed onto a nearby screen, replacing a aningless stack of data.

“Nanomachine congloration #813576,” lyn read out loud. “Estimated sapience high-value target. Damage to outer shell negligible. Damage to core negligible. Percentage of body mass lost zero-point-zero-zero-zero-three. Estimate disengagent at eighty seconds ongoing. Recomnd no pursuit of target.”

Hafina snorted. “Pheiri, we’re not gonna chase it?”

The green text re-printed itself: Recomnd no pursuit of target.

“Why not?” Haf asked. “I an, sure, you do you, but why—”

Recomnd no pursuit of target.

“Why not?” Haf repeated.

lyn said: “It’s probably bait.”

“I’m going to look,” Hafina announced. She clambered over lyn and up into the observation seat.

“No!” lyn whispered. “Don’t! You don’t know what Pheiri’s shooting at! Stop it!” lyn grabbed Haf’s ankle, but Haf shook her off.

lyn didn’t understand why she was whispering; it wasn’t as if anything outside could hear them through the inches and inches of Pheiri’s hull armour. She also didn’t understand why she was afraid. The screen of her mind was covered with terminology she didn’t understand: ‘cognitive hazard’, ‘visual spectrum infection vector’, ‘LOS resolution blocker’, and a dozen other pieces of useless nonsense that she shut down or shooed away.

Haf ignored her panic and craned forward in the observation seat. She slid the wedge open with a clack. The little steel-glass window was too high for either of them; lyn always had to stand on the seat to see anything, but Hafina only had to strain upward and press her face to the transparent surface.

lyn pulled her jumper over her head and huddled down in her seat. Haf stared into the dark beyond Pheiri’s hull. Raindrops blurred the world.

Monts passed. Tirs counted down inside lyn’s head. Haf didn’t make a sound. lyn peeked out from inside the collar of her jumper, then lowered it to uncover her mouth. Haf was unmoving. Her eyes were very large.

lyn said: “What do you see?”

“Eh,” Haf grunted. “Too dark. Too much rain. Can’t see anything.”

lyn huffed and rolled her eyes and got out of her seat. She settled her jumper so it fell past her knees, then set about crawling around the inside of the control cockpit so she could write down all the different things Pheiri was trying to tell them. She noted the position and colour of LEDs, which ones were lit and which ones were dark; she sketched the contents of all of the screens, numbering and labelling them as she went; she wrote down all the numbers she could find, especially the ones she hadn’t seen before.

“Neural lace echo signal detected,” she read off a display, because she’d never seen the words before. “New course entered. Priority override: recovery of pilot.”

Haf peered down at her from the observation seat. “What’s that an?”

lyn shrugged, writing the words in her notebook. “No idea.” She frowned through the following sentences, but there was nothing interesting, just lists of numbers and directions and speeds. But then: “High risk advisory: projected course intersects nanomachine output facility footprint; crew advised to stay within atmospheric sealed compartnts for approx three hundred hours. Check atmospheric seals. Check atmospheric re-processors.”

Haf went all stiff. Her eyes blinked in the dark, big and shiny-black. “Pheiri wants to go near a worm?”

“We’re nowhere near one,” lyn said. “Nowhere near. Nowhere.”

“Yeah we’re pretty deep, right?”

“Nowhere near. Nowhere near.”

“What’s he thinking?” Hafina clacked the cover back over the observation window. “Hey, Pheiri, what you thinking? We don’t wanna go near a worm.”

“Priority override,” said lyn.

“Eh?” Haf slithered down from the seat, huge and tight in front of lyn. Her skin was turning grey-white again, trying to blend in with the cockpit.

“It ans we don’t get a choice. It ans Pheiri has to do it, and we have … to … ” lyn looked up. “Oh. It stopped.”

“Eh?”

“Shhhhh. Listen. Listen.”

The shooting was over. No more guns going off. The lights, the ones which had been red and green, were now all dark. The ssage about active crew protection had wiped itself off the relevant screen. The ash-and-acid ghosts on the night vision monitor had vanished.

Haf broke into a grin. “Thank you, Pheiri!”

“Thank you, Pheiri,” lyn echoed in a soft purr, matching the faint hum of Pheiri’s engine. She reached out and stroked the nearest piece of bare tal.

She and Haf looked at each other for a mont, then broke into a shared giggle. Haf sat down in one of the forward seats. lyn climbed into her lap. They wriggled to get comfortable, heads together, all six of Haf’s arms around lyn’s much smaller body. Haf fell asleep first, snoring softly. lyn waited longer, listening to the rain, watching until all the little lights inside Pheiri had gone out.

“Priority override,” she whispered to the dark control room. “You sure? Sure?”

A single screen blinked on. Green text print-scrolled: No. Uncertain.

“Why?”

Signal corruption. Orbital re-entry interference. Elevated levels of nanomachine construct activity. Risk to crew. Damage to armour plating sub-layer in locations: A453, A927, A33820, B89263, B98762, C7830387, D2387, M2223, O233321, Y2871, Y778201. Risk to crew. No pilot. Risk to crew. Fusion containnt replacent required. Risk to crew. Maintenance overdue by 99999999 ERROR hours. Risk to crew.

“Are we going to do it anyway?” lyn whispered. “Do it anyway? Anyway?”

Risk to crew.

“Okay. Okay. Do it anyway?”

Risk to crew.

The screen blinked off.

Pheiri had nothing more to say. lyn closed her eyes, held her breath, and listened to the nuclear heartbeat below her feet.