To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

CHAPTER IV. TERROR

1.

They were surrounded. They would have to stand and fight, and they would likely die.

Kira’s mind whirled as the reality of the situation clamped shut around her, like an iron coffin. There was no escape this time, no trick or turn or hope of reprieve. They were too far from anywhere to expect help, and neither the Jellies nor the nightmares would show them mercy.

It was all her fault, and it wasn’t something she could fix.

“Is it supposed to be like that?” Falconi asked, his voice harsh. He indicated the broken staff.

“No,” said Kira.

“Can you fix it?” said Koyich, echoing her thoughts.

“No. I don’t even know if it can be fixed.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer, Navárez. We—”

BOOM!

The building shuddered. Pieces of the starry ceiling crashed to the floor, the heavens coming undone. The diamond case swayed and fell, shattered—sending the pieces of the Staff of Blue flying in different directions.

The Entropists bent to pick up one of the shards.

Through the doorway to the inner sanctum, Kira saw the front of the temple had been blown apart. The Jellies’ pillbug-like vehicle was parked outside, no longer incapacitated, main gun trained on their location. The Marines were retreating from the jagged opening even as they peppered the vehicle with bullets and lasers.

Sparks erupted from the side of the pillbug’s gun as the concentrated fire slagged it.

“Falconi! How far out is the Wallfish?” said Koyich, shouldering his gun as he moved to the side of the doorway.

“Fifteen minutes,” said Falconi, taking the other side.

“Shit. Get in here! Get in here! Move! Move! Move!” Koyich shouted at his men even while firing into the clouds of smoke and chaff, as precise as a machine.

“Pinned down!” said Hawes. “Got wounded! Can’t—”

The clumping thuds of Nielsen’s exo startled Kira as the woman charged past her, into the front area of the temple. Falconi swore and fired three grenades in quick succession to buy her some time.

As each grenade detonated, it cleared a spherical area of smoke, chalk, and dust. Then the grey-white haze rushed in, obscuring the view once more.

Feeling ashamed of herself, Kira ran after Nielsen. She saw the first officer pick up a pair of downed Marines and sprint back toward the inner part of the temple. Kira spotted another wounded Marine, only this one still in his exo. She slid to a stop next to him and hit the quick-release latches on the side of the machine.

The front casing popped open, and the man fell out, coughing blood. “Let’s go,” said Kira, slipping his arm over her shoulders.

Half carrying him, she hurried toward the doorway to the sanctum. Nielsen had already dropped off her casualties and was returning to the open.

A numbing impact hit Kira on the right side, causing her to fall to one knee. She glanced down and immediately wished she hadn’t: the black fibers along her ribs were blown out like a spray of needles. Blood, muscle, and bone were visible scattered between.

Even as she looked, the fibers knitted together as they began to close over the wound.

She gasped and pushed against the floor with legs that had lost all feeling, trying to continue moving forward. One step, two steps, and then she was walking again with the man’s weight still heavy on her shoulder.

As she cleared the doorway, Falconi took the man off her.

Kira immediately turned to head back out, but Falconi caught her by the arm. “Don’t be stupid!” he said.

She shook him off and headed deeper into the clouds, looking for the last few Marines. Outside the temple, more explosions, more gunfire. If not for the Soft Blade, Kira doubted she would have been able to think or function amid the noise. Each blast was a concussion strong enough to feel in her bones, and the objects around her blurred from the force of the blows. The noise seemed to be increasing too.

Where are they? She couldn’t see any Jellies through the mess of smoke, only twisted, incomprehensible shapes thrashing in the murk.

“SJAMs incoming,” barked Koyich. “Hit the deck!”

Kira dropped flat, covering her head.

A half second later, four separate explosions struck the streets surrounding the plaza, lighting up the area with a hellish blaze. The ground rippled and smacked Kira in the cheek, causing her teeth to clack together with painful force.

“Status,” said Koyich. “Get me eyes on hostiles.”

“Looks like we took out most of ’em,” said Hawes, “but can’t tell for sure. Waiting for a better view.”

The explosions had only added to the swirling clouds, thickening them to the point where it was nearly pitch-black in the plaza.

Kira listened; she no longer heard gunfire nor the sounds of moving Jellies. As the wind began to clear the air, she risked poking her head up and looking around.

Clang! Across the exposed antechamber of the temple, Nielsen staggered back, a large dent in the front of her power armor. She fired her arm-mounted machine gun several times into the haze, and Kira heard the splatter of bullets hitting flesh.

Down the clogged streets, she saw dozens more heat-spots approaching. More Jellies.

Trig came running out of the temple’s inner sanctum, heading for Nielsen. As he skidded to a stop beside her, Koyich said, “That’s all the help we can expect from the Ilmorra. We’ll be lucky if they don’t go after her for setting off those SJAMs. Get everyone inside. Make it fast!”

There were still four Marines on the ground. Kira started toward the nearest one.

One of the Jellies’ white drones flew into view around the edge of the temple’s broken façade, while at the same time, a large, tentacled squid climbed over the mounded rubble, a pair of blasters held by its twisting limbs.

Kira scrabbled for her weapon but couldn’t find it. Where was it? Had she dropped it? There wasn’t enough time, no time, no time—

Trig jumped in front of Nielsen, firing his blaster and his rifle at the same time. His face was contorted, and he was screaming over the radio: “Yaaaah! Come on, you fucker! Eat it!”

The white, orb-shaped drone spun as bullets slammed into it, and then it sparked and tumbled to the ground. Behind it, the squid flinched, raised a tentacle holding a long, bar-shaped railgun.

The Soft Blade pulsed outward as it struggled to attack. Out of habit, Kira resisted, unwilling to let go, unwilling to trust the xeno—Bang.

The sound from the Jelly’s weapon was short and sharp. It cut through the commotion like auditory punctuation. Startling silence followed. Trig’s guns ceased firing as his armor locked up, and then he slowly toppled backward, a statue falling.

Centered on the front of his visor was a finger-sized hole, and frozen on his face, a look of terrible surprise.

“No!” Falconi shouted.

Shock paralyzed Kira for a moment, and then horrified understanding spurred her back into action. Too slow. She relaxed her hold on the Soft Blade and reached out with it, intending to loose the xeno and tear the Jelly to shreds.

Before she could, a woman in a skinsuit ran in front of the squid, waving a piece of white cloth. “Wait! Stop! Stop! We come in peace!”

Kira froze, unable to process what she was seeing.

As the stranger clambered into the temple, the gold sheen of her visor cleared to reveal a hard, lined face.

For a moment, Kira saw only a collection of unfamiliar features. Then her perspective shifted, and the planet seemed to tilt underneath her. “You!” she said.

“Navárez,” said Major Tschetter.

2.

More Jellies gathered around the broken front of the temple, but for some reason they didn’t shoot, so Kira ignored them as she rushed to Trig’s side.

Falconi and the squad’s medic were only a step behind. The medic removed Trig’s helmet with practiced speed, and pooled blood poured out across the tessellated floor in bright crimson streaks.

The kid was still conscious, his white-rimmed eyes darting around with a panicked look. A bullet had hit him near the base of his neck, ripping apart the arteries. Blood pumped out at a frightening rate, each spurt weaker than the last. His mouth worked, but no words came forth, only a horrible bubbling sound—the desperate gasps of a drowning swimmer.

My fault, Kira berated herself. She should have acted faster. She should have trusted the xeno. If only she hadn’t been so focused on control, she would have been able to protect the kid.

From a pocket, the medic produced an oxygen mask that he fixed over Trig’s mouth. Then he took a canister of medifoam, pressed the nozzle into the center of the wound, and sprayed.

Trig’s eyes rolled back, and his breathing stuttered. His arms began to quiver.

The medic stood. “He needs cryo. Unless you can get the Ilmorra here in the next few minutes, he’s dead.” As he spoke, Nielsen got back to her feet, holding a hand against the dent in her chestplate. He pointed a finger at her. “Need help?”

“I’ll survive,” she said.

With that, the medic hurried past to the Marines waiting for his attention.

“Can’t we—” Kira started to say to Koyich.

“The Ilmorra is already on her way.”

Kira looked to the sky. After a few seconds, she heard the distinctive rumble of an approaching rocket. “Where should—”

A trio of laser beams, each beam equal to the output from a dozen handheld blasters, stabbed upward from somewhere beyond the outskirts of the city. A second later, a burning star plummeted through the shelf of clouds: the Ilmorra, trailing blue shock diamonds and a line of white exhaust. The shuttle vanished behind the flank of the nearest mountain, and a blinding flash illuminated the valley, sending shadows streaming eastward from the base of the buildings.

“Cover!” Koyich shouted, diving behind a pile of rubble.

Falconi threw himself across Trig; Kira did likewise, using a net of fibers from the Soft Blade to hold them in place.

She counted the seconds in her head: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—

The floor buckled and the direction of the wind reversed as the shockwave hit, louder and more powerful than a thousand claps of thunder. With it came a wave of suffocating heat. The towers swayed and groaned—chunks of walls flying free—and streamers of dirt blasted through the howling streets. Debris filled the air, deadly as any bullet. Dozens of the fragments shotgunned the rubble they huddled behind. Beneath her arm, Kira saw the cratered body of the pillbug blown away into the dark.

She glanced up. A gigantic mushroom cloud rose above the mountain, climbing toward the stratosphere. The pillar of nuclear fury was staggeringly huge; before it, she felt smaller than she ever had before.

If not for the protection of the mountain, they would all be dead.

She released Falconi and Trig from the net of fibers. Falconi said, “Was that—”

“The Ilmorra’s gone,” said Koyich.

The bulk of the explosion would have come from the antimatter stored within the shuttle’s Markov Drive. What now? Things had just gone from bad to apocalyptically bad.

As the howl of the wind began to subside, they got to their feet. Trig was still twitching; Kira could tell he didn’t have long to live.

The Jellies had gathered close around them during the blast. Now Tschetter stood next to one, and she seemed to be speaking to it, although Kira heard nothing.

The squid started to move toward Trig.

Falconi hissed and lifted his grenade launcher, and Kira crouched, extruding razor-sharp blades from her fingers. “Stay the fuck away or I’ll blast you to pieces,” said the captain.

“My companions say they can help,” said Tschetter.

“Is that why they shot him?”

Tschetter made a regretful expression. “It was a mistake.”

“Sure. And just who the fuck are you?” Falconi’s nostrils were flared, his eyes narrowed and savage.

The woman’s back stiffened. “Major Ilina Tschetter of the UMCI, human and loyal citizen of the League of Allied Worlds.”

“She’s the one I told you about,” Kira muttered to Falconi.

“From the Extenuating Circumstances?”

Kira nodded, keeping her gaze fixed on Tschetter and the Jellies.

Falconi seemed unimpressed. “How—”

Nielsen put a hand on his shoulder. “Trig’s not going to make it if you don’t let them help.”

“Make up your mind, Falconi,” said Koyich. “We don’t have time to be dicking around.”

After a moment, Falconi shook off Nielsen’s hand and backed away from Trig, still pointing Francesca at the aliens. “Fine. But if they kill him, I’ll shoot them, no questions asked.”

Outside, the mushroom cloud continued to climb.

Kira kept the blades on her fingers as the squid crawled over to Trig. Moving as precisely and delicately as any surgeon, the Jelly used its tentacles to disassemble Trig’s power armor until the kid lay on the crumbled floor in nothing but his skinsuit and oxygen mask. Then the Jelly wrapped a single, thick tentacle around him, and within seconds, a thick, gelatinous substance began to ooze from its suckers.

“What the hell is that?” said Falconi in a barely controlled tone.

“It’s okay,” said Tschetter. “They did it to me. It’s safe.”

The Jelly used its tentacle to smear the goo over the whole of Trig’s body. Then the coating grew opaque and hardened, forming a glistening, human-shaped pod. The whole process took less than a minute.

The alien laid the pod on the floor and retreated to Tschetter’s side.

Falconi put a hand on top of the shell. “What did they do? Can he still breathe in there? We don’t have time for—”

“It’s their form of cryo,” said Tschetter. “Trust me. He’ll be fine.” In the distance, gunfire again sounded in the streets, and several of the Jellies slipped away, heading toward the noise. Tschetter drew herself up and looked at Kira, Koyich, and what remained of the rest of their group. “They’ll buy us some breathing room. In the meantime, we need to talk. Now.”

3.

“How do we know you’re really you?” Koyich demanded. He had been present, Kira remembered, when she’d told Akawe about having to leave the major and Corporal Iska on Adrasteia.

Tschetter’s lips quirked as she seated herself on a block of rubble and looked at Kira. “I seem to recall asking you something similar on the Extenuating Circumstances.”

The major was much as Kira remembered, although she seemed thinner—as if she’d lost four or five kilos—and there was a certain manic intensity to her expression that hadn’t been present before. Maybe it was a result of current circumstances or maybe it was indicative of something else. Kira wasn’t sure.

She was having trouble wrapping her mind around Tschetter’s presence. Kira had never expected to see the major again, much less there, on a dead planet at the far end of space. The sheer incongruity left Kira feeling even more dazed than the explosion earlier.

Falconi crossed his arms. “The Jellies could have scanned your implants, learned everything they needed in order to impersonate you.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe me,” said Tschetter. “Who I am has nothing to do with why I’m here.”

Koyich eyed her skeptically. “And why are you here, Major?”

“First things first. Did you find the Staff of Blue?”

When neither Kira nor anyone else answered, Tschetter snapped her fingers. “This is important. Do you have it or not? We need to know, now.”

Koyich motioned toward the Entropists. “Show her.”

Veera and Jorrus extended their hands. In them lay one fragment of the Staff of Blue.

“It’s broken,” Tschetter said, her tone bleak.

“Yes.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Dammit,” she said quietly. “The Jellies were counting on using the staff against the Corrupted. That’s their name for the nightmares. Without it…” She drew herself upright, stiffening her back. “I’m not sure how much of a chance we stand. Them or us.”

“Is it really that bad?” Kira asked.

The major nodded, grim. “Worse. The Corrupted have been hitting the Jellies throughout their territory. Small raids at first, then bigger and bigger. Some of the Corrupted were already poking around Sigma Draconis when Iska and I got picked up. They took out two of the Jellies’ ships, and the one we were on barely got away.”

“What are the Corrupted?” Kira asked. “Do you know?”

Tschetter shook her head. “Only that the Jellies are scared shitless of them. The Jellies say they’ve fought the Corrupted before. From what I gather, it didn’t go well, and the current batch of Corrupted are supposedly even more dangerous. They have different forms, better ships, that sort of thing. Also, the Jellies seem convinced that we have something to do with the Corrupted, but I’m not clear on the details.”

Nielsen raised a hand. “How do you know what we call the Jellies and the nightmares? And how are you talking with the Jellies?”

“The Jellies,” said Tschetter, “have been monitoring all the broadcasts out of the League. They brought me up to date before we left.” She tapped the front of her helmet. “Talking is scent to sound, and vice versa. Same method the Jellies use for conversion to EM signals. Made it possible to actually learn their language, though it sure as hell wasn’t easy.”

Koyich shifted, impatient. “You still haven’t explained: Why are you here, Major? And why are the Jellies with you playing nice?”

Tschetter took a breath. The gunfire in the streets was growing closer. “The details are in a file I’m sending you. The short version is that the Jellies with me represent a faction that wants to overthrow their leadership and form an alliance with the League in order to ensure the survival of both our species. But they need our help to pull that off.”

By the looks on everyone’s faces, Kira wasn’t the only one having trouble wrapping their mind around the situation.

Koyich’s yellow eyes narrowed, and he glanced skyward. “You getting this, Captain?”

After a few seconds, Akawe answered: *Loud and clear. Major, if this is true, why didn’t you approach the League directly? Why come all the way out here to make the offer? *

“Because, as I just said, the Jellies are monitoring all transmissions in and out of human space. My companions couldn’t risk trying to contact the Premier directly. If their superiors noticed, they’d be caught and executed. Plus, there was the matter of the Staff of Blue and the need to keep Kira and her suit from falling into the wrong hands.”

*I see. Alright, I’ll look at the file. In the meantime, you need to find a way off that rock. We’re tied down at the moment, and you’ve got Jellies and nightmares incoming.*

“Roger that,” said Koyich.

“There’s more,” said Tschetter hurriedly. “The Jellies are building a massive fleet just outside the League. As soon as it’s ready, they’re going to sweep through and crush our forces before concentrating on the Corrupted. I’m told the Jellies have been planning on conquering us for a long time, but recent events have accelerated their timetable. The Jelly leadership is going to be on-site for several months to oversee the completion of the fleet. What my companions are proposing is that the UMC rendezvous with them near the fleet and that we coordinate a surgical strike to decapitate their government.”

A muffled explosion sounded farther off in the city. The fighting seemed to have turned so it was moving sideways to the plaza and the temple-like structure.

*Are your friends one hundred percent sure that their leaders will be with the fleet?* Akawe asked.

“That’s what they claim,” said Tschetter. “For whatever it’s worth, they seem to be telling the truth.”

Akawe made a sound deep in his throat. *Understood. Even if this intel ends up being a bust, getting it back to the League just became our top priority. The Jellies are jamming the whole system, so that rules out a direct signal. Would take too long in any case. At this distance, only high-power, slow-as-ass signals would make it back. That means at least one of our ships has to get out of here, and that’s going to take some doing.*

While Akawe was talking, Falconi walked a few steps away, his lips moving silently. Then he swore loudly enough to be audible through his helmet. “Goddammit! I don’t believe it.”

“What?” said Kira.

He grimaced. “The coolant line Hwa-jung repaired back at Cygni just broke again. The Wallfish can’t stop until they fix it. They’re going to fly right past us.”

“Shit.”

“My companions have two ships out by the edge of the city,” said Tschetter, gesturing at the Jellies behind her, who had been waiting patiently the entire time. “They can get you back into space.”

Kira glanced at Falconi, Koyich, and Nielsen. She could tell they were all thinking the same thing: Trust the Jellies enough to get onto their ships? What if they decided to strip her of the Soft Blade? Would she be able to stop them?

“I’m sure you’re right, Major,” said Koyich, “but I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea.”

Akawe broke in: *Too bad, Commander. You need to get off that rock, and now. As for you, Major, if this is a trap, the Darmstadt will blow up both your ships before you get out of the system, so don’t let your friends get any ideas.*

Tschetter jerked her head as if she were about to salute. “Yessir. Nossir.”

Koyich started to turn away. “Alright, we need to—”

“Wait,” Kira said, and went to stand directly in front of Tschetter. “I have a question.”

“Stow it, Navárez,” Koyich snapped. “We don’t have the time.”

Kira didn’t budge. “Why do the Jellies think we started this war? They’re the ones who attacked the Extenuating Circumstances.”

Koyich paused, his finger resting on the trigger of his blaster. “I’d like to know that as well, Major.”

Tschetter spoke quickly. “The Jellies I’ve been dealing with placed the xeno on Adra in order to hide it from the rest of their species. Apparently the xeno was a major threat in the past, and the Jellies seem to view it with a mix of fear and reverence. From what they’ve told me, their group would have done anything, anything, to keep the xeno from bonding with another host.”

“So that’s why they showed up shooting,” said Kira.

Tschetter nodded. “From their point of view, we were no different than thieves who had broken into a top-secret military installation. Imagine how the UMC would have reacted.”

“That still doesn’t explain why the rest of the Jellies have been attacking us,” said Koyich. “Did your friends tell them what happened at Adra?”

The major didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. As far as I can tell, the majority of Jellies only found out about Kira when she sent the signal from Sixty-One Cygni.” She made a wry face. “That was when my friends here hauled me out of a cell and started actually talking with me. Point is, as far as the Jelly leadership was concerned, this war started when the Corrupted started attacking them out of nowhere while broadcasting messages in English. That’s why they thought we were allied. That and because, at the time, the Corrupted weren’t attacking human territory.”

“But the Jellies still planned on invading us no matter what,” Falconi said.

“That’s right.”

Kira spoke then: “Do the Corrupted know about the staff or the Soft Blade?”

Tschetter stood. “The staff I can’t say, but the Jellies seem to think the Corrupted are drawn to the presence of the suit or something like that. I’m not entirely sure, given the language barrier.”

As if to punctuate her words, a double set of sonic booms shook the valley, and four dark, angular ships descended screaming from the sky and crashed into the city at various locations. They didn’t look like the Corrupted ships from 61 Cygni, but there was still a sense of wrongness about them that Kira couldn’t shake.

The thought that the nightmares might be specifically hunting her was deeply disturbing.

Sounds of gunfire and laser pulses bounced off the towers of the city, distorted heralds of violence. Half a klick away, maybe less. The fighting was growing closer again.

“That’s it, everyone form up!” said Koyich. “We gotta hustle.”

Tschetter said, “Let me make sure my companions understand the plan.” She turned to the Jellies and started talking, her voice now inaudible in her helmet.

While the major talked, Kira ripped off her torn skinsuit. It would just get in the way, and besides, she wanted to … yes, there it was: the nearscent of the assembled Jellies. With the skin of the Soft Blade fully exposed, she could sense the swirling cues from the Jellies as they watched and reacted to their surroundings.

She should have stripped earlier. She could have been putting her questions directly to the aliens.

The leader of the Jellies was obvious from the forms and structures of the scents used. It was a huge squid with a dark layer of flexible armor coating on its limbs. Armor that, to Kira’s eye, was not so different from the Soft Blade.

She approached the alien and said: [[Kira here: What is your name, Shoal Leader?]]

The collected Jellies stirred with surprise, their tentacles shifting and turning with a life of their own. [[Lphet here: The Idealis lets you scent us! What else has—]]

A series of choppy explosions interrupted them. The sounds were dangerously close. Approaching via an eastbound street was a large swarm of Jellies, who were exchanging fire with a pair of retreating squids that Kira assumed belonged to Lphet. And converging upon them via several of the westbound streets were masses of twisted bodies climbing over the piles of rubble and even climbing over themselves: tortured flesh that was red and black and melted like the scars on Falconi’s forearms—an army of the Corrupted. An army of nightmares.

Then a crack sounded behind them, loud as a gunshot. Kira crouched and whirled, expecting to be ambushed.

In the depths of the temple’s inner sanctum, the dark obelisk fractured, white lines racing across its surface, shedding dust. The nape of Kira’s neck prickled as the front of the pillar fell forward with a doom-laden peal.

The obelisk was hollow. Inside it stirred a tall, angular something—a figure as lean as a skeleton, with legs that jointed backwards and two pairs of arms. A cloak of black seemed to hang from its pointed shoulders, and a hard, hood-like shape hid all its face, save the crimson eyes that burned within that shadowed recess.

Kira hadn’t thought it possible to be any more afraid. She was wrong. For she recognized the creature from her dreams. It wasn’t one of the Vanished, but one of their dread servants.

It was a Seeker, and that meant death.

CHAPTER V. SIC ITUR AD ASTRA

1.

The Seeker was moving, but slowly, as if disoriented after its long sleep.

“Run,” Kira said to both humans and Jellies. “Now. Don’t stop. Don’t fight. Run.”

[[Lphet here: A Mind Ripper! Flee!]]

The Jellies threw down a smokescreen—hiding the Seeker from sight—and together, they and the Marines scrambled out the broken front of the temple. Kira’s heart was pounding with panic she couldn’t suppress. A Seeker. She remembered them from ages past: creatures made to enforce the word of the Heptarchy. A single one had wreaked havoc on the Jellies during the Sundering; she feared to think what it might do to the League if it escaped the planet.

Nielsen carried Trig’s mummified form in her arms as they clambered into the open. Falconi guarded her left; Kira her right.

“This way,” said Tschetter, leading them toward a narrow side street next to the temple—one that, for the moment, was empty of enemies.

Across the plaza, the two Jellies that had been fighting a delaying action tossed drones into the air and then abandoned their cover and sprinted on tentacles across the open space to join their companions. Orange ichor dripped from several holes in the carapace of the alien on the right.

“What was that thing?” cried Nielsen, hunching over to protect Trig.

“Bad news,” said Kira.

The mushroom cloud still towered high overhead, overwhelming in its size. The wind tore at the central column, dragging streaks of it westward, into the planet’s nightside. A burnt, dirt-like smell pervaded the air, and the electric tang of ozone also, as if from an impending storm.

But the storm had already struck, in the form of annihilating antimatter.

Kira wondered how well the Soft Blade would protect her from the fallout. If they actually made it back into space, she’d have to get some radiation pills from the medic.…

A terrifying chorus of beast-like yammering erupted several streets over, thousands of voices crying out with anger and pain. A wave of nearscent wafted through the city, stifling in its strength as the unseen nightmares clashed with the pursuing Jellies.

“Out of the frying pan—”

“—and into the fire,” said Jorrus and Veera.

Behind them, a high, keening sound cut the air, and if anything, the yammering intensified.

“Shit. Check this out,” said Hawes.

On Kira’s overlays, a window popped up with a feed from one of the Marines’ remaining drones, hovering high above the plaza by the temple. The Seeker had emerged from within the ruined building and was stalking among the banks of smoke while clumps of Jellies and nightmares fought around it.

Even as Kira watched, the Seeker seized a red, dog-like nightmare and sank its black fingers into its skull. After a half second, the Seeker released the nightmare, dropped it on the ground. The creature twisted back onto its feet and then, instead of attacking the Seeker, slunk behind it, faithful as a trained pet. Nor was it the only one: a half-dozen Jellies and nightmares already attended the Seeker, ranging about it in a swirling group that protected it from direct attack.

Neither the Jellies nor the nightmares seemed to have noticed the Seeker yet, they were so busy fighting each other.

“Gods,” said Nielsen, “what is it doing?”

“I’m not sure,” said Kira.

[[Lphet here: The Mind Ripper controls your body, makes you do what it wants.]]

The Seeker could do more than that, Kira felt sure, but she couldn’t remember specifics, which was frustrating. She trusted her fear, though; if the Soft Blade was telling her to be careful, then the threat was indeed great.

Tschetter translated, and Koyich said, “If it gets close, don’t let it touch you.”

“Yessir!” “Not a chance, sir!” said the Marines. As a group, they were looking rather battered. Tatupoa was carrying Redding, the Marine who had lost his leg. Nishu had blood smeared across his exo. Hawes and the team medic were limping, and most of the men had pits and dings on their helmets from debris. Two of the Marines from the Darmstadt seemed to be missing. Kira wasn’t sure where or when they’d fallen.

A crash sounded above them. Kira looked up to see a cluster of nightmares running along a vine-draped ledge that wrapped around a nearby tower.

The Marines opened fire, and the Jellies too: a hammering volley from automatic rifles and discharging blasters. The shots stopped several of the nightmares—blasting apart raw, scabrous-looking torsos—but the rest jumped down into their group. Two landed on Marines, driving them to the ground. The creatures were the size of a tigermaul, with rows of sharklike teeth as big as Kira’s hand. Three more nightmares, each with wildly different shapes—one sporting arms lined with spurs of bone, one with scaled wings sprouting from a crooked back, one fanged and tripod-legged—crashed into Lphet’s Jellies amid a tangle of thrashing tentacles.

Different than before, was Kira’s first thought as she saw the nightmares hurtling toward them.

She wasn’t going to hold back as she had during the attack on Trig; she’d rather die first. Willing the Soft Blade to spike outward, she ran to tackle the nightmare grappling with the nearest Marine, Sanchez.

The black thorns from her suit pierced the four-legged nightmare, and it died with a terrifyingly human scream while blood gurgled from its loose throat.

Don’t hurt him, Kira thought. To her relief, the Soft Blade obeyed the thought, and none of its spikes touched Sanchez. He gave her a quick thumbs-up.

She started toward the next of the nightmares, but her help was unneeded. The combined firepower of the Marines and the allied Jellies had already killed the rest of the creatures.

Falconi wiped a smear of blood off his visor, his expression grim. “Now they know where we are.”

“Keep moving,” Koyich barked, and their group continued down the street.

“We’re getting low on ammo,” Hawes said.

“I see that,” said Koyich. “Switch to two-round bursts.”

They concentrated on running. “Contact!” shouted a Marine as he loosed several rounds at a nightmare that appeared around the corner of a building. The creature’s head exploded in a red mist.

Hemoglobin, Kira thought. Iron-based blood, unlike the Jellies.

The nightmares continued to harass them in ones and twos as they raced to the city’s edge. When the buildings gave way to moss-covered ground, Kira checked on the situation in orbit. The Wallfish had already passed by the planet and was heading toward the outer reaches of the system. A mess of Jelly and nightmare ships were fighting high overhead: both sides against one another, and the Jellies also against themselves. The Darmstadt was still some distance away from Nidus but inbound fast. Smoke trailed from several burn marks along the cruiser’s hull.

“Follow me,” said Tschetter, taking the lead over the blasted land. The moss there lay outside the shadow of the city. It had been exposed to the full fury of the nuclear explosion and had burned beneath the heat; the small fronds crunched with each step, leaving an ashy residue on their soles.

They headed westward, away from the buildings, deeper into the dusky dark.

As they ran, Kira maneuvered herself to Tschetter’s side and said, “After you were rescued, did you tell the Jellies I was still alive?”

The major shook her head. “Of course not. I wasn’t about to give our enemies actionable information.”

“So Lphet and the rest of them didn’t know where I was or that the suit existed?”

“Not until you sent your signal.” Tschetter shot her a glance. “In fact, they never actually asked. I think they assumed the suit had been destroyed along with the Extenuating Circumstances. Why?”

Kira took a moment to gather her breath. “Just trying to understand.” Something about Tschetter’s explanations didn’t seem right. Why wouldn’t the Jellies that hid the Soft Blade be curious about its location following the events at Adra? If they’d bothered to carry out a flash trace, they would have seen the Valkyrie leaving Sigma Draconis. Surely that would have been enough to track her to 61 Cygni. So why hadn’t they? And then there was the question of the nightmares.…

“Is Iska with you?” Kira asked Tschetter.

The major didn’t answer for a moment, her expression labored from exertion. “He stayed behind in case anything happened to me.”

“So how did you find us?”

“Lphet knew about the ships sent to track you down. We just followed them. It wasn’t hard. Corrupted must have done the same.”

A shriek sounded overhead, and a cluster of dark shapes dove toward them, flapping bat-like wings. Kira ducked while lashing out with one arm. She connected with a solid, disturbingly soft body, and then the suit hardened, forming an edge, and her arm sliced through flesh and bone with hardly any resistance.

A shower of orange ichor covered her. The rest of their group suffered a similar fate as humans and Jellies alike shot down the flock. The creatures had mandibles for mouths and tiny arms with pincers tucked close against their downy breasts.

When the shooting stopped, three of the Marines were lying motionless on the ground and half a dozen more appeared injured.

Nishu kicked one of the downed creatures. “No sense of self-preservation, these.”

“Yeah,” said Tatupoa, bending to pick up one of his wounded teammates. “Real eager-like to get themselves killed.”

[[Kira here: Are these things yours?]] She pointed at the winged corpses.

[[Lphet here: No. These are also Corrupted.]]

Kira’s puzzlement deepened as she translated for the rest. Not hemoglobin this time, and there seemed to be no consistency among the shapes of the different nightmares. At least with the Jellies, it was clear the various types were somehow related, what with their shared blood, skin markings, muscle fibers, and the like. The nightmares lacked any such cohesion, aside from the consistently diseased look of their hides.

Tschetter gestured at a ridge of rock that rose before them. “The ships are just ahead, on the other side.”

As they trotted up the ridge—the Marines trailing along as they helped their injured—Nielsen said, “Look at the sky!”

The mushroom cloud had punched a large, circular hole in the overcast sky. Through the opening in the tattered billows of mist, Kira saw great sheets of color rippling across the twinkling expanse. Reds and blues and green-yellows, shifting like ribbons of gossamer silk in a vast neon display, thousands of kilometers across.

The sight left Kira awestruck. She had only seen the aurora a few times on Weyland, and never in anything but the darkest night. It looked unreal. It looked like a bad overlay, too bright and smooth and colorful to be natural.

“What’s causing it?” she asked.

“Nukes or antimatter in the upper atmosphere,” said Tschetter. “Anything that dumps charged particles into the ionosphere.”

Kira shivered. The sight was beautiful and yet, knowing its cause, terrifying.

“It’ll die down in a few hours,” said Hawes.

At the top of the ridge, Kira paused to glance back at the city behind them. She wasn’t the only one.

A horde of bodies was streaming out of the overgrown streets: nightmares and Jellies together, their previous differences now forgotten. And walking along behind them, the Seeker—tall, skeletal, almost monastic in appearance with its seeming hood and cape. The Seeker stopped at the edge of the buildings. The same high-pitched keen rang out over the fields of blasted moss, and the Seeker spread both pairs of arms. Its cape lifted as well, unfolding to reveal a pair of wings, veined and purplish and nearly nine meters across.

“Moros,” said Koyich in a surprisingly conversational tone. “See if you can put a bullet through that bastard’s head.”

Kira nearly objected, but she held her tongue. If there was a chance they could kill the Seeker, it would be for the best, even though a part of her would mourn the loss of a creature so old, capable, and obviously intelligent.

“You got it, sir,” said one of the Marines in power armor. He stepped forward, lifted one arm, and—without a moment’s delay—fired.

The Seeker’s head snapped to one side. Then it slowly looked back at them with what Kira could only interpret as sheer malevolence.

“Did you hit it?” said Koyich.

“Nossir,” said Moros. “It dodged.”

“It … Marine, nail that thing with the strongest laser blast you’ve got.”

“Yessir!”

The whine of charging supercapacitors sounded within Moros’s armor, and then a BZZT! as loud as any gunshot sounded. Kira’s skin tingled from the residual electrical charge.

She saw the laser pulse with her thermal sight: a seemingly instantaneous bar of ravening force that joined Moros to the Seeker.

Only the blast didn’t touch the dark-shrouded alien. Rather, it curved around the creature’s hide and burned a fist-sized hole in the wall of the building behind.

Even at a distance, Kira would have sworn the Seeker was smiling. And a memory came to her: it was they that enforced the wishes of the Heptarchy, and they that guarded the dangerous depths of space.…

[[Lphet here: This is to no point.]] As it spoke, the Jelly started down the other side of the ridge, along with its comrades.

Lphet’s words needed no translation. Kira followed with everyone else. The knife-edge keening rang out again, and underlying it, she could hear the drumming of approaching feet.

The two Jelly ships were parked at the foot of the ridge. The globular vessels weren’t particularly large by the standards of spaceships—the Darmstadt would dwarf them in length—but sitting there on the ground, they seemed enormous: as large as the administrative building in Highstone, where she’d gotten her seed license.

A loading ramp lowered from the belly of each ship.

The Jellies divided into two groups, one heading for each ship. Tschetter paired off with Lphet and several other Jellies heading toward the left-hand vessel. “You take that one,” she said to Koyich, pointing at the ship on the right.

“Come with us!” said Kira.

Tschetter never missed a step as she shook her head. “It’s safer if we split up. Besides, I’m staying with the Jellies.”

“But—”

“There’s a chance for peace here, Navárez, and I’m not going to give up on it. Go!”

Kira would have argued further, but they were out of time. As she sprinted alongside Falconi toward the other Jelly ship, she couldn’t help but feel grudging admiration for Tschetter. Assuming the major was still in her right mind, what she was doing was incredibly brave, same as her decision to stay behind on Adra.

Kira doubted she would ever like the major, but she would never question the woman’s devotion to duty.

More Jellies were waiting for them at the top of the loading ramp, guarding the opening with an impressive array of weapons. They moved aside as Kira and the others ran up. Koyich shepherded his men aboard, shouting at them to hurry. They stumbled in, dripping blood from bodies and fluids from exos. Nishu and Moros brought up the rear, and then the ramp retracted and the ship’s loading port slid shut and locked in place, sealing the hull.

“I cannot believe we’re doing this,” Falconi said.

2.

[[Wrnakkr here: Secure for ascension.]]

Ridges along the wall made for convenient handholds. Kira snared one, as did the other humans, while the Jellies used their tentacles to do likewise or—in the case of the legged Jellies—scurried off into darkened corridors.

Like the other Jelly ship Kira had been on, this one smelled of brine, and the lighting was a dim, watery blue. The room was an ovoid, with tubes and masses of unidentifiable equipment along one half, and egg-like capsules along the other. Stored on rows of double-layered racks were scores of what she recognized as weapons: blasters, guns, and even blades.

In close quarters, the nearscent of the Jellies accumulated until it nearly obliterated any other odor. The aliens stank of anger and stress and fear, and from them Kira felt a constant shifting of forms, functions, and honorifics.

It seemed to Kira that she and her companions were surrounded by monsters. She kept the Soft Blade on the verge of action, ready to send it spiking out if any of the Jellies made a hostile move. Koyich and his Marines seemed to feel likewise, for they gathered in a defensive half circle near the loading door, and while they kept their weapons aimed at the floor, they did not lower them entirely.

“Can you get us to our ship, the Wallfish?” said Falconi. Then he looked at Kira. “Can they get us to the Wallfish?”

“The Darmstadt is where we need to be, not your rusty old tub,” said Koyich.

“The Wallfish is closer,” said Falconi. “Besides—”

Kira repeated Falconi’s question, and in answer, the Jelly that had spoken earlier said: [[Wrnakkr here: We will try to reach the closer ship, but the Corrupted are near.]]

A distant rumble passed through the curved deck, and Kira felt the strangest dropping, twisting sensation, as if she’d fallen and risen at the same time. It was a similar feeling to jumping in a descending elevator. Then her sense of weight increased to somewhat over 1 g: noticeable but not unpleasant. But she knew they were thrusting at far, far more than 1 g.

This must be the gravity of the Jellies’ homeworld, she realized.

“Jesus Christ,” said Hawes. “Look at our altitude.”

Kira checked her overlays. Her local coordinates were going crazy, as if the computer couldn’t decide where exactly she was nor how fast she was moving.

“Artificial gravity has to be messing with our sensors,” said Nishu.

“Can you get a signal out?” said Falconi, his face pinched with worry.

Hawes shook his head. “Everything’s jammed.”

“Dammit. No way to tell where we’re heading.”

Kira focused on Wrnakkr. The alien had a white streak across its central carapace that made it easy to single out. [[Kira here: Can we see what’s happening outside the ship?]]

With one tentacle, the Jelly caressed the wall. [[Wrnakkr here: Look, then.]]

A curved patch of hull turned transparent. Through it, Kira could see the coin-sized disk of Nidus shrinking into the distance. Explosions flared along the terminator line: bright flashes reminiscent of the florescent discharges of lightning sprites. Even from so far away, the resulting auroras were visible, laced across the top of the turbulent atmosphere.

Kira searched for other ships, but if any were present, they weren’t close enough to spot with the naked eye. Not that that meant much in space.

“How long to reach the Wallfish?” she asked.

The Entropists were the ones to answer: “If we are thrusting at the same—”

“—acceleration generally observed among the Jellies—”

“—and given the prior distance to the Wallfish—”

“—no more than five or ten minutes.”

Nielsen sighed, and the joints of her power armor squealed as she sank into a crouch. She was still holding Trig’s rigid form. “Do we really have any chance of getting out of the system? The—”

The light within the room flashed, and nearscent of alarm suffused the room, clogging Kira’s nostrils.

[[Wrnakkr here: We have Corrupted in pursuit.]]

Kira told the others, and then they sat in silence—waiting—while the ship’s rocket strained. There was nothing else they could do. Outside the window Wrnakkr had created, the stars swung in crazy arcs, but the only centrifugal force Kira felt was a slight pull in the direction of their turns.

As they’d seen at 61 Cygni, the nightmares could out-accelerate even the Jellies. That implied a level of technology that only a highly advanced interstellar civilization could possess, which just didn’t seem to match with the creatures they’d been seeing.

Don’t judge by appearances, Kira cautioned herself. For all she knew, the ravening, animal-like nightmares with the shark teeth were as intelligent as a ship mind.

A burst of silvery chaff glittered through the window. A poof of chalk followed a moment later, obscuring the view for a few seconds.

Koyich and Hawes were murmuring together. Kira could tell they were preparing to fight.

Then the ship jolted underneath them, and her gorge rose as, for a moment, she felt yanked along all three axes at once. The artificial gravity rippled—producing a feeling of rolling compression through her body—before cutting out entirely.

The lights flickered. Finger-sized holes stitched their way across the inside of the bulkhead, and a dull boom echoed through the hull. Alarms began to shriek, loud even over the hiss of escaping air.

Kira stayed where she was, clinging to the wall, uncertain of what else to do.

The ship jolted again. A white-hot circle appeared on what had just been the ceiling, and seconds later, a disk-shaped section of the hull flew inward.

“Form up!” Koyich shouted as a dense swarm of nightmares poured into the Jelly ship.

CHAPTER VI. INTO THE DARK

1.

In an instant, a dense wall of smoke, chaff, and chalk clogged the air. The Marines opened fire, as did Wrnakkr and the rest of the Jellies—the deafening thunder of their guns obliterating all other sound.

The nightmares hardly slowed in the face of the barrage, and the sheer mass of the creatures allowed them to quickly cover the distance between them and the first line of Jellies.

The Jellies swung into action, their tentacles gripping and ripping every nightmare within reach. The beast-like attackers were foul to look at. Whether equipped with four limbs or two, arms or tentacles, teeth or beaks, scales or fur—or misbegotten combinations thereof—the creatures to the last appeared malformed, tumor-ridden, and sickly. Yet they possessed a crazed energy, as if hopped up on enough stims to kill a full-grown man.

Kira knew she might be able to survive the attack, but she didn’t think Nielsen or Falconi could. Nor could she protect them or Trig; there were just too many nightmares.

Falconi seemed to have reached the same conclusion. He was already retreating toward an opened shell door at the back of the room while pulling Trig’s cocooned form after himself. Nielsen followed close behind, firing occasional bursts into the horde of incoming bodies.

Kira didn’t hesitate. She dove after the two of them. Several bullets ricocheted off her as she flew through the air: hard thumps that made her catch her breath.

She arrived at the door just after Nielsen. Together, they hurried down the dark corridor on the other side.

“I got a signal through to the Wallfish!” said Falconi. “They’re on their way.”

“ETA?” Nielsen said, crisp and professional.

“Seven minutes out.”

“Then we’ll—”

A thrashing something at the corner of Kira’s vision caused her to twist around, expecting to be jumped. Nielsen did the same.

A Jelly came crawling along the side of the round corridor. Ichor leaked from a crack in its carapace, and one of its tentacles had been shot off three-quarters of the way toward the tip.

[[Itari here: Strike Leader Wrnakkr orders me to guard you.]]

“What does it want?” Falconi said, wary.

“It’s here to help.”

Several of the Marines scrambled into the corridor and took up positions on either side of the open door. “Keep going!” shouted one of them. “Find cover!”

“Come on,” said Falconi, kicking himself farther down the corridor.

[[Itari here: This way.]] And the Jelly crawled into the lead. Its wounded tentacle left splatters of ichor across the walls.

They hurried deeper into the ship, through dimly lit rooms and narrow passageways. The sounds of combat continued to reverberate through the hull: hollow booms and cracks and high-pitched shrieks of the enraged nightmares.

Then the ship lurched again, harder than before. Sparks filled Kira’s vision as the wall slammed into her, and her breath whooshed out. In front of her, Falconi lost his grip on Trig.…

With a horrendous scraping sound, a huge red and black spike plowed through the decking in front of her, separating her and Trig from the others. Another few meters of spike slid past, and then it slowed to a stop and stayed there, buried in the heart of the Jelly ship—a seeming impossibility.

Kira struggled to understand what she was seeing. Then she realized: the nightmares had rammed them. She was seeing the prow of one of their ships.

The radio crackled in her ear as she grabbed Trig’s comatose form. *Kira, you okay?* said Nielsen.

“Yeah, and I’ve got Trig. Don’t wait for me. I’ll find a way around.”

*Roger that. There’s an airlock near the front of the ship. The Wallfish is going to attempt to pick us up there.*

*If they can get close enough,* said Falconi.

Pulling Trig behind her, Kira turned around and kicked back down the corridor toward the nearest shell-like doorway. Ahead of her, the noises of fighting increased in volume.

“Dammit,” she muttered.

The door split open, and she hurried past. She raced through room after room, shying away from any hint of the nightmares.

In a low, round passageway, she surprised one of the Jelly lobsters. It clicked its claws at her, alarmed, and then said: [[Sffarn here: Go that way, Idealis.]] And it pointed toward a door next to the one she’d entered through.

[[Kira here: My thanks.]]

The shell parted to reveal a blob of floating water, now untethered by gravity from the side of the room where it normally rested. Kira didn’t stop to think; she dove into the liquid mass, aiming for the far side.

Tiny mantis-like creatures flitted past her face as she swam. In the back of her mind, she remembered liking their taste. They were … crunchy and good with yrannoc, whatever that was.

She breached the surface of the water. It clung to her face with a wobbling film that distorted her vision. Blinking, she slung a tendril from her hand to the nearest wall and reeled herself over. Once secured, and with Trig’s feet tucked under her arm, she wiped the water off her face.

Tiny droplets flew free as she shook her hand.

For an instant, the situation got the better of her and she found herself incapacitated by fear. Then her gut relaxed and she took another breath.

Stay focused. Surviving long enough to rejoin Falconi and the others was the only thing that mattered at the moment. So far she’d been lucky; she hadn’t run into a single one of the nightmares.

She crawled along the curve of the wall until she found the next doorway and then pulled Trig and herself through it into another dark corridor. “You would have loved this,” she muttered, thinking how interested the kid was in the Jellies, and aliens in general.

Her earpiece crackled. *Kira, we’re at the airlock. Where are you?*

“Getting close, I think,” she said, keeping her voice low.

*Hurry it up. The Wallfish is almost here.*

“Roger. I—”

*Oh shi—* said Falconi, and static filled the line. A second later, the ship tilted around her, and the bulkheads creaked and snapped with alarming violence.

Kira stopped. “What? What is it?… Falconi? Nielsen?” She tried several more times, but neither of them answered.

Dread welled up inside Kira. Cursing under her breath, she tightened her grip on Trig and continued along the corridor, moving even faster than before.

A flicker of motion at the far end of the passage caused her to grab a ridge on the wall and freeze. A mess of jumbled shadows had appeared in the facing intersection, and whatever cast them was moving closer.…

Desperate, Kira looked for a place to hide. The only option was a shallow alcove with a coral-like structure directly across from her in the hall.

She pushed herself over to the alcove and tucked Trig and herself behind the coral. Trig’s stiff, shell-encased body bumped against the bulkhead, and she stiffened, hoping the sound wasn’t loud enough to attract attention.

Insectile chittering drifted toward her, growing louder now. Louder.

… Louder.

Kira pressed against the back of the alcove. Don’t see me. Don’t see me. Don’t—

Four nightmares moved into view. Three of them were much like she’d seen before: raw-skinned mutations that crept along the deck upon four and six legs respectively, their fang-laden snouts swinging back and forth as they searched for prey. The fourth nightmare was different. It was humanoid, with only one pair of legs, and arms that began as segmented lengths of carapace and then transitioned into tentacles without suckers. Its elongated head had deep-set eyes as blue as Falconi’s and a mouth with tiny, moving mandibles that looked sharp enough to bite through steel. An armored lump between its legs hinted at some sort of genitalia.

The creature was frighteningly alert; it kept glancing around, checking corners, making sure no one was creeping up on them. There was an intelligence to it that Kira hadn’t sensed among the other nightmares. And something more: the skin on its plated torso shimmered in a way that seemed uncomfortably familiar, although she couldn’t quite figure out why.…

A fast chitter came from the humanoid, and the three other nightmares responded by forming a tight knot around it.

Despite her overriding concern with protecting Trig and herself, Kira was intrigued. They hadn’t seen any evidence of hierarchy among the nightmares so far. If the humanoid was one of their leaders, then … maybe killing it would disrupt the others.

No. Attracting attention would just cause more problems. Don’t see me. Don’t see me.…

It took all her self-control to hold still as the nightmares approached. Every instinct toward self-preservation urged her to leap out and attack before they spotted her, but the more rational part of her counseled patience, and for whatever reason, she listened.

And the nightmares didn’t see her.

As they hurried past, she smelled them: a burnt, cinnamon-like scent laced with a sickening mix of shit and putrefaction. Whatever they were, the creatures weren’t healthy. Two of the beast-like nightmares glanced in her direction as they passed by. Their eyes were tiny and red-rimmed and wept drops of yellowish fluid.

Confusion gripped Kira. Why hadn’t they noticed her? The alcove wasn’t that deep. She looked down at herself and, for a moment, felt dizzy; all she saw was the shadowed shape of the wall. She lifted her hand in front of herself. Nothing. Perhaps a small amount of glass-like distortion around the edges of her fingers, but that was it.

Trig’s encased body was still visible, but nothing about it seemed to attract the attention of the nightmares.

Kira grinned. She couldn’t help it. The Soft Blade was bending the light around her, same as with the invisibility cloak she and her sister had played with as kids. Only this was better. Less distortion.

The nightmares continued down the corridor another few meters. Then the one with six legs paused and swung its skull-like head back in her direction. Its nostrils flared as it tested the air, and its cracked lips retracted from its teeth in an evil snarl.

Shit. Just because the aliens couldn’t see her didn’t mean they couldn’t smell her.…

The six-legged nightmare hissed and started to turn back toward her, digging its claws into the deck for traction.

Kira didn’t wait. She loosed a yell and jumped after the creature. With one hand, she stabbed out toward it, and the Soft Blade complied by impaling the sore-covered nightmare with a triangular blade that then sprouted a pincushion of black needles.

The creature squealed, thrashed, and went limp.

With her other hand, Kira stabbed the next nightmare in line and killed it in the same fashion.

Two down, two to go.

The humanoid nightmare aimed a small device at her. A loud thump hit Kira in both her ears and her hip, knocking her off course. Her hip went numb, and pain radiated up her spine, sending electric shocks shooting through the nerves in her arms.

She gasped and, for a moment, found herself unable to move.

The other beast-like nightmare jumped her then. The impact knocked them both tumbling down the corridor. Kira covered her face with her arms as the creature attempted to savage her with its snapping jaws. Teeth skated across the hardened surface of the Soft Blade while claws scrabbled harmlessly against her belly.

Despite her instinctual fright, the nightmare couldn’t seem to hurt her.

Then it drew back its head and, from its gaping mouth, sprayed a stream of greenish liquid across her head and chest.

An acrid smell hit her nostrils, and wisps of smoke rose from the patches of skin hit by the liquid. But she felt no pain.

The creature had sprayed her with acid. The realization outraged Kira. How dare you?! If not for the Soft Blade, the acid would have burned her beyond recognition.

She jammed her fists into the creature’s mouth. With a heave of her arms, she tore its head apart, spraying blood and flesh across the walls.

Panting, she looked for the humanoid nightmare, intending to kill it as well.

The humanoid was right next to her, mandibles spread to reveal round, pearl-like teeth. Then it spoke, in a hissing, growling voice: “You! Forgotten flesssh! You ssshall join the maw!”

Shock delayed Kira’s reaction. The nightmare took the opportunity to wrap a tentacle around her right arm, and a current of fire seemed to course through her skin and into her brain.

A horrible sense of recognition seized her, and she howled as her vision flared white.

2.

She saw herself from two different angles, standing in the storage room aboard the Extenuating Circumstances. The perspective was confusing: competing viewpoints that overlapped and intermingled to produce a warped re-creation of the moment. As with the images, she felt a jumbled mix of emotions, none of which seemed to relate: surprise, fear, triumph, anger, contempt, regret.

One of her perspectives was trying to hide, pulling itself behind a rack of equipment with speed born of terror. The other seemed confident, unafraid. It remained where it was and attacked, hot beams of light slicing through the air.

She saw herself flee toward the exit, but too slow, far too slow. Black spikes bristled from her skin in random, undisciplined outbursts.

Then she turned, face contorted with fear and anger as she lifted the pistol she’d taken from the dead crew member. The muzzle flashed, and bullets smacked into a wall.

The perspective that was afraid was shouting and waving, desperate for her to stop.

The perspective that wasn’t, evaded, darting across the walls. It felt no concern.

Sparks flashed as lasers vaporized bullets.

Then one of the bullets hit the red-labeled pipe at the back of the room, and her perspectives flew apart amid a thunderclap. A moment of blankness, and when perception returned, it was further fractured. Now there were three sets of memories, and none of them familiar. The newest addition was smaller, less distinct than the others; it did not see with eyes, yet was still aware of its surroundings in a vague and cloudy way. And it was possessed of the same fear and anger she had experienced, only now amplified by confusion and lack of direction.

The explosion had torn open the hull of the Extenuating Circumstances. Wind clawed at the separate parts of her, and then she was spinning through space. Three different minds beheld the same kaleidoscope of stars, and pain racked her trinity of torn flesh. Of the three, the original two seemed weaker: their vision dimmed as consciousness faded. But not the third. Damaged it was, afraid and angry it was, incomplete it was, but not yet deprived of motive force.

Where to go? It had lost contact with the parent form, and it no longer possessed the ability to locate it. Too many fibers were broken; too many loops interrupted. Redundancy failed and self-repair cycled and stalled, lacking both knowledge and required elements.

Driven by rage and terror that refused to abate, it stretched itself thin, cast spider-threads far into the void as it searched for the nearest sources of warmth, frantically seeking its parent form, as the pattern commanded. If it failed, dormancy would be its fated lot.

Just as the last gleam of light vanished from the view of the two others—just as the stifling press of oblivion enveloped them—threads caught and held their flesh. Confusion reigned. Then the imperative to heal overrode the other directives of the searching threads, and a new pain manifested: a needlelike prick that quickly expanded into a crawling agony that encompassed every centimeter of their battered bodies.

Flesh joined with flesh in a frantic mating as the three viewpoints became one. No longer were they grasper or two-form or Soft Blade. Now they were something else entirely.

It was a malformed partnership, born of haste and ignorance. The parts did not fit, though they were stitched together at the smallest level, and they revolted against themselves and against reality itself. Then within the cross-joined mind of the new flesh, madness took hold. Reasoned thought no longer dwelt therein, only the anger that had been hers, and the fear too. Panic was the result, and further dysregulation.

For they were incomplete. The fibers that had joined them had been flawed, imperfect, poisoned by her emotions. As was the seed, so was the fruit.

They struggled to move, and their contradictory urges caused them to flail without purpose.

Then the light of a double sun bathed them with heat as the Extenuating Circumstances detonated, destroying the Tserro—the grasper ship—at the same time.

The blast blew them away from the shining disk of the nearby moon, a piece of flotsam driven before a storm. For a time, they drifted in the cold of space, at the mercy of momentum. Soon though, their new skin gave them the means to move, and they stabilized their spin and looked anew upon the naked universe.

Unceasing hunger gnawed at them. They desired to eat and grow and spread beyond this barren place, as their flesh commanded. As the broken pattern dictated. And coupled with that ravenous appetite, a constant roar of fury and fear: an instinctual rejection of the extinction of self, inherited from her confrontation with Carr/Qwon.

They needed food. And power. But first food to feed the flesh. They spread themselves wide to catch the light of the system’s star and flew the short distance to the rocky rings around the great gas giant in whose gravity well they resided.

The rocks contained the raw materials they sought. They gorged themselves upon stone, metal, and ice—used it to grow and grow and grow. Power was plentiful and easy to acquire in space; the star provided all they needed. They extended themselves across the vastness and converted every ray of light they captured into useful forms of energy.

The system could have been a home for them; there were moons and planets fit for life. But their ambition was greater. They knew of other places, other planets, where life teemed in the billions and trillions. A banquet of flesh, and power also, waiting to be claimed and converted and put to use in service to their overriding cause: expansion. With such resources at their disposal, their growth would be exponential. They would spread like fire among the stars—spread and spread and spread until they filled this galaxy and others beyond.

It would take time, but time they had. For they were undying now. Their flesh could not stop growing, and so long as a single speck of it remained, still then their seeds would spread and flourish.…

But there was an obstacle to their plan. A problem of engineering that they could not overcome, not with all their flesh nor all their gathered power.

They did not know how to build the device that would allow them to slip between the fabric of space and travel faster than the speed of light. They knew of the device, but no part of their mind knew the specifics of construction.

Which meant they were trapped in the system unless they were willing to venture forth at slower-than-light speeds, and they were not. Their impatience compelled them to stay, for they knew others would come. Others bearing the needed device.

So they bided their time, and waited and watched and continued to prepare.

…

They did not have long to wait. Three flashes along the boundary of the system alerted them to the arrival of grasper ships. Two were so foolish as to come close to investigate. The flesh was ready. They struck! They seized the ships, and in a rage, emptied them of their contents, absorbed the bodies of the graspers, and made the vessels their own.

The third ship escaped their maw, but that did not matter. They had what they needed: the machines that would allow them to bridge the chasms between the stars.

So they left to feed their hunger. First to the nearest grasper system: a newly settled colony, weak and undefended. There they found a station orbiting in the darkness: a ripe fruit ready for plucking. They crashed into it and made themselves part of the structure. The information contained within the computers became their own, and they grew confident in their ambition.

Their confidence was premature. The graspers sent more ships after them: ships that burned and blasted and cut away their flesh. No matter. They had what they needed, though not what they wanted.

They fled back into interstellar space. This time, they chose a system free of graspers or two-forms. But not barren of all life. One of the planets was a festering boil of living creatures busy eating other living creatures. So the Maw descended and devoured them all, converted them to new forms of flesh.

There then, they held. There they ate and increased and built in a heated frenzy. Soon the surface of the planet was covered and the sky dotted with the ships they were building.

No, not building … growing.

With the ships, they also grew servants, in substance based upon half-remembered templates from their binding flesh, in shape based upon a grafting of forms suggested by the different parts of their mind. The results were crude and unlovely, but they obeyed as required and that was sufficient. A horde of creatures made to carry out the dictates of the pattern. Life self-sufficient and capable of propagating itself. But some of the servants were more—pieces of the Maw, given a seed of their own flesh, that their essence might travel among the stars.

When the strength of their forces was sufficient, they sent them forth to recapture the graspers’ system, and to attack others besides. The hunger was yet unsated, and the fear-driven anger of their two minds still no less.

A season of feasting followed. The graspers fought back, but they were unprepared, and they were too slow to replace their fallen. The Maw had no such difficulty. Each system it struck, it quickly established a permanent foothold and began the process of spreading across every available planet.

Progress brought their servants closer to the space of the two-forms. The flesh of the Maw spanned seven systems now, and it felt confident in its strength. So it sent its minions against the two-forms, to drive them back and begin the process of conversion.

And then, when least expected, they had heard a cry in the dark: Stop it! And they recognized the signal and the voice as well. The first belonged to the makers of the flesh, now long vanished, and the second to her, Kira Navárez.

Again she saw her face contort with fear and anger as she fired the pistol.…

The Maw roared, and they told their servants: Find the forgotten flesh! Break it! Smash it! EAT IT!

3.

*Kira … Where are you?… Kira?*

Kira screamed as she returned to herself.

The humanoid nightmare still had the tentacle wrapped around her arm, but there was more to it than that. Black threads joined the surface of the Soft Blade to the flesh of the nightmare, and she could feel the creature’s consciousness pressing against her, seeking to blot her out. The nightmare’s skin was eating into her own as it assimilated the Soft Blade. It wasn’t a process she could stop by force of will; the xeno didn’t recognize the nightmare as an enemy. Rather, it seemed to want to assimilate with the creature’s broken flesh, to become one again with its lost parts.

If she delayed, Kira knew she would die. Or least be converted into something she abhorred.

She tried to yank her arm away from the humanoid, and they spun end over end until they smacked into the deck. The flesh of the nightmare was still melting into her.

“Give up,” said the monster, mandibles clicking. “You cannot win. All will be flesssh for the mouth of many. Join usssss and be eaten.”

“No!” said Kira. She willed the Soft Blade outward, and it responded with a thousand jutting spikes, piercing the nightmare through and through. The creature shrieked and writhed, but it did not die. Then Kira felt the spikes impaling its body dissolve and flow into the nightmare, leaving the Soft Blade thinner, smaller than before.

The tentacle had sunk deep into her arm; only the top of it was visible above the churning surface of the Soft Blade.

No! She refused to die like this. Flesh was expendable. Consciousness wasn’t.

Kira formed the suit on her left arm into a blade, and—with a yell of desperation—she cut twice.

Once through her right arm, severing it at the elbow.

Once through the nightmare, slicing it in two at the waist.

Blood fountained from the stump of her arm, but only for an instant. Then the Soft Blade closed over the raw end of the wound.

It should have hurt, but whether from adrenaline or the xeno, it didn’t.

The two halves of the nightmare flew to opposite ends of the corridor. And still the creature didn’t die; the torso half continued to move its arms and head and chitter with its mandibles, while the lower half kicked as if trying to run. Even as she watched, black tendrils emerged from the exposed surfaces of its insides, reaching and searching in an attempt to pull themselves back together.

Kira knew she was outmatched.

She looked for the alcove: there. She kicked herself over to it, grabbed Trig’s cocoon with her one hand, and then willed the Soft Blade to propel them back along the corridor, in the direction they’d been headed originally.

As they neared the end of the passage, she glanced over her shoulder at the nightmare. The two parts of the creature’s body were nearly rejoined. Then she saw the torso half lift its remaining tentacle and point the same small device at her as before.

She tried to duck her head behind her arm. Too slow.

…

…

…

A bell-like ringing filled her ears as she regained awareness. At first, she couldn’t remember who she was or where she was. She gaped at the blue-lit walls as they drifted past, trying to understand, for she was convinced something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

Her breath rushed in, and with it memory. Knowledge. Fear.

The nightmare had shot her in the head. Kira could feel a dull throb in her skull, and her neck spasmed with jolts of pain. The creature was still at the other end of the corridor, still working to rejoin its severed halves.

Boom! It fired at her again, but this time the bullet glanced off her shoulder, deflected by the hardened surface of the Soft Blade.

Kira didn’t wait to see more. Still dazed, she grabbed the wall, pulled herself and Trig around the corner at the end of the corridor, breaking the line of sight with the nightmare.

As she moved through the ship, Kira felt disconnected from reality, as if everything were happening to someone else. Sounds made little sense, and she saw rainbow-colored halos around lights.

Must have a concussion, she thought.

The things she had seen from the nightmare … They couldn’t be, and yet she knew they were. Dr. Carr and the Jelly, joined together into an abomination by the fragments of the Soft Blade blasted off her. If only she hadn’t been so consumed by her emotions during their confrontation. If only she had listened to Carr’s pleading. If only she had avoided shooting the oxygen line.… She was the mother of the Corrupted. Her actions had led to their creation, and their sins were hers. All those dead: Jellies, humans, and so many innocent life-forms on distant planets—her heart ached to think of it.

She was barely conscious of where she was going. The Soft Blade seemed to decide for her: left here, right there.…

A voice drew her from her haze: “Kira! Kira, over here! Where—”

She looked up to see Falconi hanging before her, a fierce expression on his face. The Jelly, Itari, was with him, weapons aimed at the doorway. Behind them was a large, jagged hole in the hull, big enough for a car to pass through. The dark of space showed through it, and hanging in the dark, like a gleaming gem, the Wallfish, over a hundred meters away.

With a start, Kira realized they were in vacuum. Somehow that had happened without her noticing.

“… your arm! Where—”

She shook her head, unable to find the words.

Falconi seemed to understand. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her and Trig toward the opening in the hull. “You have to jump. They can’t get any closer. Can you—”

On the side of the Wallfish, Kira saw the airlock was open. In it, several figures moved: Nielsen and some of the Marines.

Kira nodded, and Falconi released her. She gathered her strength and then leaped into the void.

For the length of a breath, she floated in silence.

The Soft Blade adjusted her course by a few centimeters, and she flew straight into the Wallfish airlock. A Marine caught her, stopped her momentum.

Falconi followed a moment later, bringing Trig with him. The Jelly came also, somewhat to Kira’s surprise, and crowded its tentacled bulk into the airlock.

The instant the outer door closed, Falconi said, “Hit it!”

Gregorovich’s whispering voice answered, “Aye-aye, Captain. Currently hitting it.”

A surge of high-g thrust dropped them to the floor. Kira yelped as the stump of her arm banged against the inside of the airlock. Then she thought of the nightmare she’d cut in two, and fear focused her thoughts.

She looked at Falconi and said, “You have to … You have to…” She couldn’t seem to fit her tongue around the words.

“Have to what?” he said.

“You have to destroy that ship!”

Sparrow was the one to answer, her voice emanating from the intercom overhead: “Already taken care of, sweetcheeks. Hold on tight.”

Outside the airlock, there was a flash of pure white light, and then the window darkened until it was opaque. Seconds later, the Wallfish shuddered, and a series of faint pings sounded against the outer hull. Then the ship grew still again.

Kira let out her breath and allowed her head to drop back against the floor.

They were safe. For now.

CHAPTER VII. NECESSITY

1.

The inner door to the airlock rolled open. Sparrow was standing there with a rifle fitted to her shoulder, aiming it toward the Jelly at the back of the airlock. Her hair hung flat and heavy in the high-g of the Wallfish’s burn.

“What’s that thing doing here, Captain?” she said. “You want I should remove it?”

The Marines scooted back from the Jelly while keeping their own weapons trained on it. A sudden tenseness filled the air. “Falconi?” said Hawes.

“The Jelly was helping us,” said Falconi, getting to his feet. It took him noticeable effort.

[[Itari here: Strike Leader Wrnakkr ordered me to guard you, so I will guard you.]]

Kira translated, and Falconi said, “Fine. But he stays here until we get shit sorted out. Not going to have him wandering around the ship. You tell him that.”

“It,” said Kira. “Not him.”

Falconi grunted. “It. Whatever.” He slung his grenade launcher across his back and lurched out of the airlock. “I’ll be in Control.”

“Roger that,” said Nielsen, her voice muffled as she pulled off the helmet of her power armor.

The captain staggered down the corridor as fast as he could despite the ship’s thrust, and Sparrow followed close behind. “Glad you made it, knuckleheads!” she shouted over her shoulder.

Kira conveyed Falconi’s orders to the Jelly. It formed a nest with its tentacles and settled down at the end of the airlock. [[Itari here: I will wait.]]

[[Kira here: Do you need help with your injuries?]]

Nearscent of negation reached her. [[Itari here: This form will heal on its own. Help is not required.]] And Kira saw that the crack in the Jelly’s carapace was already crusted over with a hard, brown substance.

As Kira moved out of the airlock, she passed by Nielsen. “Your arm!” said the first officer.

Kira shrugged. She was still in so much shock over what she’d learned about the nightmares that the loss didn’t seem very important. And yet she avoided looking at the absence below her elbow.

The Entropists were there, but of their whole expedition, only seven of the Marines had survived.

“Koyich? Nishu?” she said to Hawes.

The lieutenant shook his head while tending to Moros, who had a piece of humerus sticking through his skinsuit. Despite her own distress, Kira felt a pang of sorrow for the lost men.

Vishal came hurrying up to the airlock, bag in hand. His face was lined and streaked with sweat. He gave Trig’s body a worried glance and then said, “Ms. Nielsen! Ms. Kira! We thought for sure we’d lost you. It’s good to see you.”

“You too, Vishal,” Nielsen said, stepping out of her armor. “When you get a chance, we’ll need some rad-pills.”

The doctor bobbed his head. “Right here, Ms. Nielsen.” He handed a blister pack to the first officer, and then held out another to Kira.

She tried to accept with her missing hand. The doctor’s eyes widened as he noticed. “Ms. Kira!”

“It’s fine,” she said, and snatched up the pills with her other hand. It most definitely wasn’t.

Vishal continued to stare after her as she left the airlock.

Once out of sight, she stopped in the corridor and downed the pills. They stuck in her throat for an unpleasant moment. After, she just stood there. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, and for a time, her brain refused to provide an answer.

Then, she said, “Gregorovich, what’s happening?”

“Rather busy at the moment,” the ship mind answered in an unusually serious voice. “Sorry, O Spiky Meatbag.”

Kira nodded and started to trudge toward Control, each weighted step jarring her heels.

2.

Falconi was hunched over the central display along with Sparrow. In the holo, a window displayed the feed from a skinsuit headcam of someone moving about on the outside of the Wallfish’s hull.

Hwa-jung’s voice sounded through the comms: “—checking the welds. I promise. Five minutes, no more, Captain.”

“No more,” he said. “Falconi out.” He touched a button, and the holo switched to a map of the system, with all the ships marked for easy viewing.

As Kira sank into the welcome relief of a padded crash chair, Sparrow glanced at her. The woman’s eyes widened as she noticed what she hadn’t before. “Shit, Kira. What happened to your—”

“Not now,” said Falconi. “Storytime later.”

Sparrow bit back her questions, but Kira could feel the weight of her gaze.

The Jellies and the nightmares were still skirmishing near and around Nidus. But it was a confused fight. The three remaining ships that belonged to the friendly Jellies—including the one carrying Tschetter—were taking potshots at both the nightmares and their own kind. Two Jelly vessels and one of the nightmares had taken off from the planet and were shooting at any and all. Kira suspected the Seeker was in control of them. Likewise, the rest of the nightmares were fighting everyone but themselves.

As one of the Jellies’ ships—fortunately, not a friendly—exploded in a nuclear flare, Sparrow winced. “What a clusterfuck,” she said.

At first Kira thought the Wallfish had been lucky enough to escape pursuit, but then she spotted the trajectories plotted from two of the nightmares: intercept courses. The long, angular ships (they looked like bundles of enormous femurs bound together with strips of exposed muscle) were on the opposite side of the planet, but they were accelerating at the same insane, cell-destroying g’s the other nightmares had employed. At the current rate, they’d be in range within fourteen minutes.

Or maybe not.

Approaching from the near asteroid belt was the Darmstadt, trailing threads of coolant from its damaged radiators. Kira checked the numbers; the cruiser would just barely cross paths with the nightmares before they shot past. If the nightmares piled on another quarter g of thrust, the UMC would be far too slow.

The comms crackled, and Akawe’s voice sounded: “Captain Falconi, do you read?”

“I read.”

“We can buy you some time here, I think. Maybe enough for you to get to the Markov Limit.”

Falconi gripped the edge of the table, the tips of his fingers turning white from the force. “What about you, Captain?”

A chuckle from Akawe surprised Kira. “We’ll follow if we can, but all that matters is that someone lets Command know about the offer from Tschetter’s Jellies, and right now the Wallfish has the best shot of escaping the system. I know you’re a civvy, Falconi—I can’t order you to do jack shit—but it doesn’t get more important than this.”

“We’ll get the message back to the League,” said Falconi. Then, after a moment’s pause, “You have my word, Captain.”

A crackle of static and then: “I’ll hold you to that, Captain.… Stand by for a light show. Over.”

“What are they planning?” said Kira. “They can’t outmaneuver the nightmares.”

Sparrow wet her lips, her gaze fixed on the holo. “No. But maybe Akawe can hit them hard and fast enough to take them off our tail. Depends on how many missiles the Darmstadt has left.”

Kira and the others were still sitting, waiting and watching, when Hwa-jung lumbered in through the doorway. Falconi gave her a nod. “Problem fixed?”

Hwa-jung surprised Kira by bowing past parallel. “It was my fault. The repair I made in Sixty-One Cygni, I made in anger. The work was bad. I am sorry. You should find a better machine boss to work for you.”

Falconi walked over, put his hands on Hwa-jung’s shoulders, and raised her back into a standing position. “Nonsense,” he said, voice unexpectedly gentle. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

After a moment, Hwa-jung ducked her head. Tears filled her eyes. “I will not. I promise.”

“That’s all I ask,” said Falconi. “And if—”

“Shit,” said Sparrow in a subdued tone, pointing at the holo.

The nightmares had increased their thrust. The Darmstadt was going to fall short by a good margin. Certainly more than the effective range of the cruiser’s main lasers.

“Now what?” Kira asked. She felt numb from the rolling series of catastrophes. What else could go wrong at this point? Didn’t matter. Just deal with it. If the nightmares docked with the Wallfish, she might be able to fight off some of the invaders, but if there were more creatures like the one that had grabbed her on the Jelly ship, then she would be lost. They would all be lost.

“We set up a killing zone in the main shaft,” said Falconi. “Funnel the nightmares into there and hit ’em from every side.”

“Assuming they don’t just blow us up,” said Sparrow.

“No,” said Hwa-jung, motioning toward Kira. “They want her.”

“They do,” Falconi agreed. “We can use that to our advantage.”

“Bait,” said Kira.

“Exactly.”

“Then—”

A bloom of dazzling white in the center of the holo interrupted her and caused them all to stop and stare.

Both nightmare ships had exploded, leaving nothing but an expanding cloud of vapor.

“Gregorovich,” said Falconi. “What just happened?”

The ship mind said, “Casaba-Howitzers. Three of them.”

The image in the holo ran in reverse, and they saw the explosions collapse back into the nightmares’ ships and—just before—three needles of light flickering in a scattered line some tens of thousands of klicks away.

“How?” said Kira, confused. “The Darmstadt isn’t in range.”

Sparrow seemed about to answer when the comm line crackled again and Akawe came on. “There’s the light show, folks,” he said, sounding grimly amused. “We dropped a few RD Fifty-Twos on approach to Nidus. Something new we’ve been playing with. Hydrogen-cooled Casaba-Howitzers. Makes ’em nearly impossible to spot. In a pinch, they work pretty well as mines. We just had to force the nightmares into range. Stupid fucks didn’t even realize they were flying into a trap. We’re changing course now. Going to do our best to keep the rest of these hostiles off your backs. Just keep up your burn and don’t stop for anything. Over.”

“Roger that,” said Falconi. “… And thank you, Captain. We owe you one. Over.”

“There’ll be drinks to go around when this is done, Captain. Over,” said Akawe.

As the line went dead, Sparrow said, “I’d heard about the RD Fifty-Twos. Never got to play with them, though.”

Falconi leaned back from the holo. He ran his hands through his bristly hair, scrubbing at his scalp with the tips of his fingers, and then said, “Okay. We’ve got some breathing room. Not much, but a little.”

“How long until we can jump out?” Kira asked.

“At our current two g’s of thrust,” whispered Gregorovich, “we shall gain the freedom to depart this hallowed graveyard in exactly twenty-five hours.”

That’s too long. Kira didn’t have to say it; she could see the others were thinking it as well. The nightmares and the Jellies had only taken a few hours to reach Nidus after dropping out of FTL. If more of them decided to pursue the Wallfish, they’d have no trouble overtaking it.

“Gregorovich,” said Falconi, “any chance of a solar flare?”

Smart. Like all red dwarfs, Bughunt would be prone to high variability, which meant enormous and unpredictable solar flares. A large enough outburst would disrupt the magnetic fields used in the exhaust nozzles of their fusion drives and keep the Jellies or the nightmares from overtaking the Wallfish. Assuming they hadn’t found an effective way to shield themselves.

“None at the moment,” said Gregorovich.

“Dammit,” Falconi muttered.

“We’ll just have to hope Akawe and Tschetter’s Jellies can keep everyone off our tail,” said Sparrow.

Falconi looked like he’d just bitten down on a rock. “I don’t like it. I really don’t like it. If even one of those assholes comes after us, we’re going to be in a world of trouble.”

Sparrow shrugged. “Not sure what we can do about it, Captain. The Wallfish ain’t like a horse. She won’t go any faster if you hit her.”

A thought occurred to Kira: the malformed corruption that was the nightmares had been able to make use of the Jelly tech, so … why couldn’t they?

The idea was so outlandish, she nearly dismissed it. Only because of the desperate nature of their circumstances did she say, “What about the Jelly, Itari?”

“What about it?” said Falconi.

“Maybe it could help us.”

Hwa-jung’s eyes narrowed, and she sounded outright hostile as she said, “How do you mean?”

“I’m not sure,” said Kira. “But maybe it can tweak our Markov Drive so we can jump to FTL sooner.”

Hwa-jung cursed. “You want to let that thing tinker with the Wallfish? Gah!”

“It’s worth a try,” said Sparrow, looking at Falconi.

He grimaced. “Can’t say I like it, but if the Jelly can help us, we have to give it a shot.”

Hwa-jung looked profoundly unhappy. “No, no, no,” she muttered. Then, louder: “You do not know what it could do. It could break every system in the ship. It could blow us up. No! The Jelly doesn’t know our computers or our—”

“So you’ll help it,” Falconi said in a gentle tone. “We’re dead if we can’t get out of this system, Hwa-jung. Anything that can help us is worth trying at this point.”

The machine boss scowled and rubbed her hands together again and again. Then she grunted and got back to her feet. “Okay. But if the Jelly does anything to hurt the Wallfish, I will tear it apart.”

Falconi smiled slightly. “I’d expect nothing less. Gregorovich, you keep an eye on things also.”

“Always,” whispered the ship mind.

Then Falconi shifted his gaze. “Kira, you’re the only one who can talk with the Jelly. Go see if it thinks it can help, and if it can, then coordinate between it and Hwa-jung.”

Kira nodded and pushed herself out of the crash chair, feeling every one of the added kilos from their burn.

The captain was still talking: “Sparrow, you too. Make sure things don’t get out of hand.”

“Yessir.”

“When you’re done, take the Jelly back to the airlock.”

“You’re going to leave it there?” Sparrow asked.

“Seems like the only semi-secure place for it. Unless you have a better idea?”

Sparrow shook her head.

“Right. Then get to it. And Kira? When you’re finished, go see the doc and have him look at that arm of yours.”

“Will do,” said Kira.

3.

As Kira left Control along with the other two women, Hwa-jung gestured at her arm and said, “Does it hurt?”

“No,” said Kira. “Not really. Just feels weird.”

“What happened?” said Sparrow

“One of the nightmares grabbed me. The only way I could escape was by cutting myself free.”

Sparrow winced. “Shit. At least you made it out.”

“Yeah.” But privately, Kira wondered if she really had.

Two of the Marines—Tatupoa and another man whose name Kira didn’t know—stood stationed in the airlock antechamber, keeping watch over the Jelly inside. The rest of the Marines had cleared out, leaving behind bandages and bloody streaks on the deck.

The two men were wolfing down rations as Kira and her companions approached. They both looked pale and exhausted, stressed. She recognized the look; it was the same way she felt. After the adrenaline wore off, then came the crash. And she’d crashed hard.

Tatupoa paused with his spork in the air. “You here what to talk with the squid?”

“Yeah,” said Kira.

“Gotcha. You need any help, just holler. We’ll be right behind you.”

Although Kira doubted the Marines could protect her better than the Soft Blade, it made her glad to know they were there, guns at the ready.

Sparrow and Hwa-jung hung back as she went to the airlock and peered through the diamond pressure window. The Jelly, Itari, was still sitting on the floor, resting amid its knotted tentacles. For a moment, apprehension stalled her. Then Kira hit the release button and the airlock’s inner door rolled back.

The scent of the Jelly struck her: a smell that reminded her of brine and spice. It had an almost coppery tang.

The alien spoke first: [[Itari here: How can I help, Idealis?]]

[[Kira here: We are trying to leave the system, but our ship is not fast enough to outswim the Wranaui or the Corrupted.]]

[[Itari here: I cannot build you a flow modifier.]]

[[Kira here: Do you mean a—]] She struggled to find the right word: [[—a weight changer?]]

[[Itari here: Yes. It lets a ship swim more easily.]]

[[Kira here: I understand. What about the machine that lets us swim faster than light?]]

[[Itari here: The Orb of Conversion.]]

[[Kira here: Yes, that. Can you do anything to make it work better, so we can leave sooner?]]

The Jelly stirred and seemed to motion at itself with two of its tentacles. [[Itari here: This form is meant for fighting, not building. I do not have the assemblers or the materials needed for this sort of work.]]

[[Kira here: But do you know how to improve our Orb of Conversion?]]

The Jelly’s tentacles wrapped over themselves, rubbing and twisting with restless energy. [[Itari here: Yes, but it may not be possible without the proper time, tools, or form.]]

[[Kira here: Will you try?]]

… [[Itari here: Since you ask, Idealis, yes.]]

[[Kira here: Follow me.]]

“Well?” said Sparrow as Kira left the airlock.

“Maybe,” Kira replied. “It’s going to take a stab at helping. Hwa-jung?”

The machine boss scowled and said, “This way.”

“Whoa, there,” said Tatupoa, holding up a tattooed hand. “No one told us but nothing about this. You want to take the Jelly out?”

Sparrow had to call Falconi then, and Falconi call Hawes, before the Marines would relent and allow them to escort Itari to engineering. Kira kept close to the Jelly, the Soft Blade covered in short, dull spikes in preparation for potentially having to fight and kill.

But Kira didn’t think it would be necessary. Not yet.

Although she was alert and functional, she felt weak, wrung out by the trauma of the day. She needed food. And not just for herself; the Soft Blade needed nourishment as well. The suit felt … thin, as if the energy required for combat and the loss of the material covering her forearm had depleted its reserves.

“Do you have a ration bar on you?” Kira said to Sparrow.

The woman shook her head. “Sorry.”

Where’s Trig when you need him? Kira winced at the thought. No matter; she would wait. She wasn’t about to pass out from hunger, and food—or rather the lack thereof—was far from the top of her priority list.

Engineering was a cramped room packed full of displays. The walls, floors, and ceiling were painted with the same flat grey Kira remembered from the Extenuating Circumstances. In contrast, every pipe, wire, valve, and handle was a different color: bright reds and greens and blues and even a tangerine orange, each of them distinct and impossible to confuse. Heavy studs of oversized braille marked the objects so they could be identified in the dark and while wearing a skinsuit.

The floor looked cleaner than the galley counter. Yet the air was thick with heat and moisture, and laden with the unpleasant tang of lubricants, cleaners, and ozone. It left the taste of copper on Kira’s tongue, and she could feel her eyebrows standing on end with static electricity.

“Here,” said Hwa-jung, leading the way to the back of the room, where one half of a large, black sphere, over a meter across, protruded: the Wallfish’s Markov Drive.

The quarter hour that followed was a frustration of failed translations for Kira. The Jelly kept using technical terms that she didn’t understand and couldn’t render into comprehensible English, and likewise, Hwa-jung kept using technical terms that Kira couldn’t adequately convert into the Jellies’ language. The machine boss toggled a holo-display built into the console next to the Markov Drive and brought up schematics and other visual representations of the machine’s inner workings, which helped some, but—in the end—still failed to fully bridge the language gap.

The math behind a Markov Drive was anything but simple. However, the execution—as Kira understood it—was fairly straightforward. Annihilation of antimatter was used to generate electricity, which in turn was used to power the conditioned EM field that allowed for transition into superluminal space. The lower the energy density of the field, the faster a ship could fly, as less energy equaled higher speeds when going FTL (exactly the opposite of normal space). Efficiencies of scale meant bigger ships had higher top speeds, but in the end, the ultimate limiting factor was one of engineering. Maintaining the low-energy fields was tricky. They were prone to disruption from numerous sources both within and without a ship, which was why a strong gravity well would force a ship back into normal space. Even during interstellar flight, the field had to be adjusted multiple times every nanosecond in order to maintain some semblance of stability.

None of which gave Kira much confidence that Itari could somehow redesign their Markov Drive on the fly, without the proper equipment and without understanding English or the coding of human math. Nevertheless, she hoped, despite what reason told her.

At last, Falconi’s voice came over the comms: “Making any progress? Things aren’t looking too good out there.”

“Not yet,” said Hwa-jung. She sounded as annoyed as Kira felt.

“Keep at it,” said the captain and signed off.

“Maybe—” said Kira, and was interrupted by the Jelly turning away from the holo and crawling over the bulging surface of the Markov Drive.

“No!” Hwa-jung exclaimed as the alien started to pull at the paneling with one of its tentacles. The machine boss moved across the room with surprising nimbleness and tried to pull the Jelly off the drive, but the creature effortlessly pushed her back with another of its tentacles. “Kira, tell it to stop. If it breaks containment, it’ll kill us all.”

Sparrow was already lifting her blaster, finger on the trigger, when Kira said, “Stop! Everyone be calm. I’ll ask, but don’t shoot. It knows what it’s doing.”

The sound of bending metal made her wince as Itari wrenched free the protective shell from around the guts of the Markov Drive.

“It better,” Sparrow muttered. She lowered her blaster some, but not entirely.

[[Kira here: What are you doing? My shoalmates are worried.]]

[[Itari here: I need to see the way your Orb of Conversion is built. Do not worry, two-form. I will not destroy us.]]

Kira translated, but Itari’s assurances did little to alleviate Hwa-jung’s concern. The machine boss stood next to the Jelly, peering over its humped tentacles, scowling, and knotting her hands. “Shi-bal,” she growled. “Not the … no … ah, you stupid thing, what are you doing?”

After several minutes of tense standoff, the Jelly withdrew its armlike pincers from the insides of the drive and turned to face Kira.

[[Itari here: I cannot make your Orb work better.]] The burn of acid hit Kira’s stomach as the Jelly continued talking: [[I could make it stronger, but—]]

[[Kira here: Stronger?]]

[[Itari here: By increasing the flow of energy, the strength of the bubble can be improved, and the conversion to faster than light will happen closer to the star. But to do that, I would need equipment from one of our ships. There is no time to make the wanted parts from raw materials.]]

“What is it saying?” Hwa-jung asked. Kira explained, and the machine boss said, “How much closer?”

[[Itari here: With your Orb of Conversion … at least half again.]]

“You don’t look impressed,” Kira said, after she finished translating.

Hwa-jung snorted. “I’m not. We already boost the field strength before going FTL. It’s an old trick. The drive can’t handle any more power, though. The reaction chamber will fail or the circuits will burn out. It’s not workable.”

“Doesn’t matter in any case,” said Sparrow. “You already said it: the Jelly can’t do anything without the right equipment. We’re just shitting out an airlock.” She shrugged.

While they talked, Kira had been thinking. At first she wondered if the Soft Blade could provide Itari with the tools and materials it needed. She felt sure it ought to be possible, but she had no idea where or how to start, and the xeno gave her no hint. Then, she ran through everything she knew of on the Wallfish, searching for something—anything—that might help.

The answer sprang to her mind almost at once.

“Hold on,” she said. Hwa-jung and Sparrow paused, looked at her. Kira tabbed her comms and put a call through to the Entropists: “Veera, Jorrus, we need you down in engineering, posthaste. Bring that object you found on the Jelly ship.”

“On our way, Prisoner,” the two replied.

Hwa-jung’s eyes narrowed. “You cannot expect a random piece of machinery scavenged off an alien ship to be of any real use, Navárez.”

“No,” said Kira. “But it’s worth a try.” She explained to Itari, and the Jelly settled onto the deck to wait, tentacles wrapped around itself.

“How can this squid do anything anyway?” Sparrow demanded. She jerked the barrel of her blaster toward Itari. “It’s just a soldier. Are all their soldiers trained engineers?”

“I would like to know that too,” said Hwa-jung, her eyebrows beetling.

Kira relayed the question to the Jelly, and it said: [[Itari here: No, this form is not for making machines, but each form is given a seed of information to serve when needed.]]

“What do you mean by form?” said Sparrow.

Several of the alien’s tentacles twisted in on themselves. [[Itari here: This form. Different forms serve different uses. You should know; you have two forms yourselves.]]

“Do they mean men and women?” said Hwa-jung.

Sparrow also frowned. “Can Jellies change form? Is that what it—”

The arrival of the Entropists interrupted her. The two Questants cautiously approached Kira and—keeping both sets of eyes fixed on Itari—handed her the bluish, oblong-shaped object they had retrieved from the Jelly ship at 61 Cygni.

Nearscent of excitement struck Kira’s nostrils as she handed the piece to Itari. The Jelly turned the fist-sized object over with its crab-like arms, and its tentacles flushed with autumnal reds and oranges.

[[Itari here: This is a nodule from an Aspect of the Void.]]

[[Kira here: Yes. That was the room where my shoalmates found it. Is the nodule of any use?]]

[[Itari here: Perhaps.]]

Then Kira watched with interest and some astonishment as a pair of even smaller arms unfolded from a hidden slot within the rim of the Jelly’s carapace. Like their larger brethren, the limbs were cased in a shiny, chitinous material, but unlike them, they were fine-jointed and tipped with a set of delicate cilia no more than a centimeter or two in length.

With them, Itari rapidly disassembled the nodule. Inside were a number of solid components, none of which resembled any part of a computer or mechanical device Kira was familiar with. If anything, the pieces most closely resembled shaped sections of a gem or crystal.

Components in-cilia, Itari returned to the Markov Drive and reached with its small, tertiary limbs into the depths of the spherical device.

As banging, scrabbling, and sharp metal screeches sounded inside the drive, Hwa-jung said, in a warning tone, “Kira.”

“Give it a chance,” said Kira, though she was equally tense. Along with the Entropists and machine boss, she peered over Itari’s tentacles, into the drive. There, Kira saw the Jelly fitting the crystalline components to different parts of the machine’s innards. Whatever the components touched, they bonded to after a few moments, tiny glittering threads joining them to the nearby material. But only—Kira noticed—where appropriate. Either Itari’s direction or some inbuilt programming guided the threads.

“How are they doing that?” Hwa-jung asked, a strange intensity to her voice.

Upon Kira’s translation: [[Itari here: By the will of the Vanished.]]

The Jelly’s answer did nothing to lessen Kira’s concerns, nor—it seemed—Hwa-jung’s. But they stood by and let the alien work unhindered. Then it said:

[[Itari here: You will need to turn off the rock mind governing the Orb of Conversion for this to work.]]

“Rock mind?” said Hwa-jung. “Does it mean the computer?”

“I think so,” said Kira.

“Mmh.” The machine boss seemed less than pleased, but after several moments of silence as her eyes darted back and forth across her invisible overlays, she said, “Done. Gregorovich is overseeing the drive now.”

After Kira informed the Jelly, it said, [[Itari here: The Orb of Conversion is ready. You may activate it twice as soon as before.]]

Hwa-jung scowled as she bent over the drive, studying the mysterious additions to the machine’s internals. “And afterward?”

[[Itari here: Afterward, the energy flow will be returned to normal, so your ship may swim as fast as always.]]

The machine boss seemed unconvinced, but she grunted and said, “Guess that’s the best we’re going to get.”

“Twice as soon as before,” said Sparrow. “We’re thrusting at two g’s, so that means we can jump out … when?”

“Seven hours,” said Hwa-jung.

That was better than Kira had feared but far worse than she’d hoped. Seven hours was still more than enough time for one or more of the enemy ships to catch up with them.

When Hwa-jung called up to Control and informed Falconi of the situation, he said, “Well. Good. We’re not out of the woods, but we might be able to see the light between the trees. Neither the Jellies nor the nightmares are going to expect us to jump out so soon. If we’re lucky, they’ll think they have plenty of time to come after us and just concentrate on blowing each other out of the sky.… Good work, everyone. Kira, thank the Jelly for us and check if it needs any food, water, blankets, that sort of thing. Sparrow, make sure it gets back to the airlock.”

“Yessir,” said Sparrow. Then, when the comm line went dead, she said, “If we’re lucky. Sure. When have we had any luck recently?”

“We are still alive,” said Jorrus. “That—”

“—counts for something,” said Veera.

“Uh-huh,” said Sparrow. Then she motioned at Itari. “Comeon, big-and-ugly. Time to go.”

Mention of the nightmares again turned Kira’s mind to unpleasant thoughts. As they ushered the Jelly into the narrow corridor outside engineering, she conveyed Falconi’s thanks and asked after the Jelly’s needs, to which it replied:

[[Itari here: Water would be welcome. That is all. This form is hardy and requires little to sustain it.]]

Then she said, [[Kira here: Did you know that the Corrupted came from the Idealis?]]

The alien seemed surprised she would ask. [[Itari here: Of course, two-form. Did you not?]]

[[Kira here: No.]]

Garish colors roiled the surface of its tentacles, and nearscent of confusion tinged the air. [[Itari here: How is that possible? Surely you were present for the spawning of these Corrupted.… We have been most curious about the circumstances of this, Idealis.]]

Kira put a hand on Sparrow’s shoulder. “Hold on. I need a minute.”

The woman glanced between her and the alien. “What’s up?”

“Just trying to clarify something.”

“Really? Now? You can chat all you want back at the airlock.”

“It’s important.”

Sparrow sighed. “Fine, but make it snappy.”

Despite her immense reluctance, Kira explained to Itari the sequence of events that had resulted in the birth of the Maw. But she skimmed over the specifics of how exactly the explosion on the Extenuating Circumstances had happened, for she felt ashamed of what she had done and the consequences it had led to.

When she finished, a bouquet of unpleasant scents wafted from the Jelly’s hide. [[Itari here: So the Corrupted we see now are a mixture of Wranaui, two-forms, and the blessed Idealis?]]

[[Kira here: Yes.]]

The Jelly shivered. Not a reaction Kira had seen from any of their species before. [[Itari here: That is … unfortunate. Our enemy is even more dangerous than we first thought.]]

You’re telling me.

Itari continued: [[Until you responded to the tsuro, the searching signal of the Vanished, we thought you were the Corrupted. How could we not, when we found Corrupted lying in wait for us around the star where we hid the Idealis?]]

[[Kira here: Is that why you did not search for me after I left that system?]]

Nearscent of affirmation. [[Itari here: We did search, Idealis, but again, we thought you were the Corrupted, so it was the Corrupted we followed. Not your little shell.]]

She frowned, still struggling to understand. [[Kira here: So, the reason you and the rest of the Wranaui thought the Corrupted were allied with us is because … you knew that I’d created them?]]

[[Itari here: Yes. Such a thing happened once before, during the Sundering, and it nearly proved our undoing. Even though the others of our kind did not know the exact source of these Corrupted, they knew it had to be from an Idealis. And since, as your co-form said, the Corrupted used your language and, for a time, did not attack your pools, it seemed clear that they were your shoalmates. It was only once we heard your signal and saw the response of the Corrupted that we realized you were not growing them to wage war against us.]]

[[Kira here: The rest of the Wranaui must have realized this as well, yes?]]

[[Itari here: Yes.]]

[[Kira here: And yet they continue to attack us.]]

[[Itari here: Because they still think you and your co-forms are responsible for the Corrupted. And you are, Idealis. From that point of view, the how and the why do not matter. It has long been our plan to dam your pools and limit your spread. The appearance of the Corrupted did nothing to change that. But the ones this form serves believe otherwise. They believe the Corrupted are too great a threat for the Wranaui to overcome alone. And they believe that now is the best chance since the Sundering to replace the leadership of the Arms. For that, we need your help, Idealis, and the help of your co-forms.]]

[[Kira here: What exactly do you expect me to do?]]

The Jelly flushed pink and blue. [[Itari here: Why, to oppose the Corrupted. Is not that obvious? Without the Staff of Blue, you are our greatest hope.]]

4.

With Itari safely returned to the airlock, Kira headed to the galley. There, she grabbed three ration bars and downed a glass of water. Gnawing on one of the bars, she made her way back through the center of the ship to the Wallfish’s machine shop. As once before, she opened the drawers of printing stock and stuck the stump of her arm into the different powders. Eat, she told the Soft Blade.

And it did.

Metals and organics and plastics: the xeno absorbed them all, and in great quantities. It seemed to be fortifying itself against what might come.

While the suit gorged, Kira ate the other two ration bars, although it was difficult to tear open their foil wrappers with just one hand—and her off one at that. Why couldn’t it have been my left? she thought.

In any case, the inconvenience kept her from dwelling upon darker, more dire things.

When she and the suit were both fed, enough time had passed that Kira felt sure Vishal had finished tending to the wounded. At least, enough to spare her a few minutes. So, she closed the drawers of stock and headed to sickbay.

The room was a shambles. Bandages, gauze, empty canisters of medifoam, and scraps of bloody clothes littered the deck. Four of the Marines were there: one on the lone exam table, three more lying on the deck in various stages of undress while the UMC medic attended to them along with Vishal. All of the injured men appeared sedated.

But Kira didn’t see the one person she was most worried about. As Vishal bustled over, she said, “Hey, where’s Trig? Is he okay?”

Vishal’s expression darkened. “No, Ms. Kira. I cut him free from the webbing the Jelly placed on him. It most definitely saved his life, but…” The doc tsked and shook his head as he stripped off his blood-smeared gloves.

“Will he make it?”

Vishal removed another pair of gloves from a box on the counter and donned them before answering. “If we can get Trig to a proper medical facility, then yes, he will survive. Otherwise, not so much.”

“You can’t fix him here?”

Vishal shook his head. “The projectile shattered vertebrae here”—he touched the upper part of her neck—“and sent fragments into his skull. He needs surgery of a sort the medibot here isn’t rated for. He may even be needing to have his brain transferred into a construct while a new body is grown for him.”

The thought made Kira feel even worse. A kid as young as Trig losing his body.… It didn’t seem right. “Is he in cryo now?”

“Yes, yes, in the storm shelter.” Then Vishal reached for the end of her severed arm. “Now then, Ms. Kira, let me see. Ah, what have you been doing?”

“Nothing fun,” she said.

Vishal bobbed his head as he produced a scanner and started to examine the stump of her arm. “No, I would think not.” His gaze flicked up toward her. “The men showed me some of what you did on Nidus. How you fought the Jellies and the nightmares.”

Kira half shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. “I was just trying to keep us from getting killed.”

“Of course, Ms. Kira. Of course.” The doc tapped on the end of the stump. “Does that hurt?”

She shook her head.

As he felt the muscles around the shortened end of her arm, Vishal said, “The video I saw … What you are able to do with this xeno…” He clucked his tongue and went rummaging around in one of the cupboards overhead.

“What of it?” Kira said. The morbid part of her wondered how the sight of the Soft Blade killing had affected him. Did he see her as a monster now?

Vishal came back with a tube of green gel that he rubbed across her stump. It was cool and viscous. He pressed an ultrasound projector against her arm and focused on his overlays while he said, “I have a name for your xeno, Ms. Kira.”

“Oh?” Kira said, curious. She realized she’d never told him that the suit called itself the Soft Blade.

Vishal shifted his gaze to her for a moment, serious. “The Varunastra.”

“And what is that?”

“A very famous weapon from Hindu mythology. The Varunastra is made of water and can assume the shape of any weapon. Yes, and many warriors such as Arjuna used it. Those who carry weapons of the gods are known as Astradhari.” He eyed her from under his eyebrows. “You are Astradhari, Ms. Kira.”

“Somehow I doubt that, but … I do like the name. The Varunastra.”

The doc smiled slightly and handed her a towel. “It is named after the god Varuna. He who made it.”

“And what is the price for using the Varunastra?” said Kira as she wiped the gel off her arm. “There’s always a price for using the weapons of the gods.”

Vishal put away the ultrasound. “There is no price per se, Ms. Kira, but it must be used with great care.”

“Why?”

The doc seemed reluctant to answer, but at last he said, “If you lose control of the Varunastra, it can destroy you.”

“Is that so?” said Kira. A slight chill crawled down her spine. “Well, the name fits. Varunastra.” Then she motioned toward the stump of her arm. “Can you do anything for me?”

Vishal wobbled his hand from side to side. “You do not seem to be in pain, but—”

“No.”

“—but we do not have time to print a replacement arm for you before we leave the system. Hwa-jung may be able to make a prosthetic for you, but again, time is very short.”

“If it weren’t,” said Kira, “do you think you would be able to attach the replacement? I can make the suit retract from the area, but … I’m not sure how long I could hold it back, and if you have to cut open the skin again—” She shook her head. Anesthetic wouldn’t be an option for her either. Maybe a prosthetic would end up being the best choice after all.

Vishal bent to check the dressings on the leg of a Marine and then said, “True, true. But the xeno knows how to heal, yes?”

“Yes,” said Kira, thinking of how it had joined Carr and the Jelly. Sometimes too well.

“Then perhaps it could join a new arm to you. I do not know, but it seems capable of great things, Ms. Kira.”

“The Varunastra.”

“Indeed so.” And he smiled at her, showing his bright white teeth. “Aside from the injury itself, I can find nothing wrong with your arm. You tell me if you feel any pain, and I will look at it again, but in meantime, I do not think it is necessary to take any special precautions.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Of course, Ms. Kira. My pleasure to help.”

Back outside the sickbay, Kira paused in the hallway, hand on hip, and took a few seconds to collect herself. What she really needed was time to sit and think and process everything that had happened.

But, as Vishal had said, time was short, and there were things that needed doing. And not all of them were so obvious—or straightforward—as combat.

From sickbay, she headed toward the center of the ship and the lead-lined storm shelter set directly under Control. She found Nielsen standing by one of the seven cryo tubes mounted along the walls. Trig lay inside the tube, his face barely visible through the frosted viewplate. Smears of dark blood still discolored his neck, and there was a slackness to his face—an absence—that Kira found unsettling. The body before her didn’t feel like the person she knew but rather an object. A thing. A thing devoid of any animating spark.

Nielsen moved aside as Kira walked over and put a hand on the side of the tube. It was cold beneath her palm. She wasn’t going to see the kid again anytime soon. What was the last thing she’d said to him? She couldn’t remember, and it bothered her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. If she’d been faster, if she hadn’t been so careful to keep the Soft Blade under control, she could have saved him. And yet, maybe not.… Given what she now knew about the creation of the nightmares, letting go was the last thing she should have done. Using the Soft Blade was like playing with a motion-activated bomb; at any moment it could go off and kill someone.

What was the answer, then? There had to be a middle way—a way that would allow her to operate not from fear but a sense of confidence. Where it was, though, she didn’t know. Too much control and the Soft Blade might as well be nothing more than a glorified skinsuit. Not enough and, well, she’d seen the result. Catastrophe. She was trying to balance upon a knife’s edge, and so far, she’d failed and it had cut her.

“Eat the path,” Kira murmured, remembering Inarë’s words.

“It’s my fault,” said Nielsen, surprising her. The first officer joined her by the front of the cryo tube.

“No, it’s not,” said Kira.

Nielsen shook her head. “I should have known he would do something foolish if he thought I was in danger. He’s always acted like a puppy around me. Should have sent him back to the ship.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” said Kira. “If anything … I’m the one responsible.” She explained.

“You don’t know what would have happened if you let the suit act on its own.”

“Maybe. And there’s no way you could have known that Jelly was going to pop up. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

After a moment, Nielsen relented. “I suppose. The thing is, we should have never put Trig in that situation in the first place.”

“Did we really have a choice? It wasn’t much safer on the Wallfish.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s right. He’s younger than both my sons.”

“He’s not a child, though.”

Nielsen touched the top of the tube. “No, he isn’t. Not anymore.”

Kira hugged her, and after her initial surprise, Nielsen hugged back. “Hey, the doc says he’ll live,” said Kira, pulling away. “And you did make it. Everyone on the Wallfish did. I bet Trig would consider that a win.”

The first officer managed a wan smile. “Let’s try to avoid any more wins like that from now on.”

“Agreed.”

5.

Twenty-eight minutes later, the Darmstadt exploded. One of the nightmares controlled by the Seeker managed to hit the UMC cruiser with a missile, rupturing its Markov Drive and vaporizing half the ship.

Kira was in Control when it happened, but even there, she heard a loud “Fuck!” echoing up from the injured Marines in sickbay.

She stared with dismay at the holo of the system—at the blinking red dot that marked the last location of the Darmstadt. All those people, dead because of her. The sense of guilt was overwhelming.

Falconi must have seen something of it on her face, because he said, “There’s nothing we could have done.”

Perhaps not, but that didn’t make Kira feel any better.

Tschetter contacted them almost immediately. “Captain Falconi, the Jellies with me will continue to provide you with as much cover as possible. We can’t guarantee your safety, though, so I’d advise maintaining your current burn.”

“Roger that,” said Falconi. “What sort of shape are your ships in?”

“Don’t worry about us, Captain. Just get back to the League in one piece. We’ll take care of the rest. Over.”

In the holo, Kira saw the three friendly Jelly ships darting in and around the larger conflict. Only four of the hostile Jelly ships remained, and most of the nightmares’ had been disabled or destroyed, but those last few were still fighting, still dangerous.

“Gregorovich,” said Falconi. “Crank us up another quarter g.”

“Captain,” said Hwa-jung in a warning tone. “The repairs may not hold.”

He looked at her with a steady gaze. “I trust you, Song. The repairs will hold.”

Gregorovich cleared his simulated throat, then, and said, “Increasing thrust, O Captain, my Captain.”

And Kira felt the weight of her limbs increase yet again. She sank into the nearest chair and sighed as the cushioning took some of the pressure off her bones. Even with the help of the Soft Blade, the extra thrust was far from pleasurable. Just breathing took noticeable effort.

“How much time does that save us?” Falconi asked.

“Twenty minutes,” said Gregorovich.

Falconi grimaced. “It’ll have to do.” His shoulders were hunched under the force of the heavy burn, and the skin on his face sagged, making him look older than he was.

Then Nielsen, who was on the other side of the holo, said, “What are we going to do about the Marines?”

“Is there a problem?” Kira asked.

Falconi lay back in his own chair, allowing it to support him. “We don’t have enough cryo tubes for everyone. We’re four short. And we sure as hell don’t have the supplies to keep anyone awake and kicking all the way back to the League.”

Apprehension formed in Kira as she remembered her time without food on the Valkyrie. “So what then?”

An evil gleam appeared in Falconi’s eye. “We ask for volunteers, that’s what. If the Jelly could put Trig into stasis, then it can wrap up the Marines. Doesn’t seem to have hurt Tschetter.”

Kira exhaled forcefully. “Hawes and his men aren’t going to like that, not one bit.”

Falconi chuckled, but beneath it, he was still deadly serious. “Tough. Beats having to take a walk out an airlock. I’ll let you inform them, Audrey. Less of a chance they’ll punch a woman.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Nielsen with a wry expression. But she didn’t complain any further as she carefully pushed herself out of her seat and headed down to the hold.

“Now what?” Kira asked once the first officer was gone.

“Now, we wait,” said Falconi.

CHAPTER VIII. SINS OF THE PRESENT

1.

The day had started early. One by one the crew, the Entropists, and the Marines still able to walk gathered in the galley. With so many people present, the room was cramped, but no one seemed to mind.

Hwa-jung and Vishal took it upon themselves to heat and serve food to everyone. Despite the ration bars she’d consumed earlier, Kira didn’t refuse the bowl of rehydrated stew when it was pushed into her one remaining hand.

She sat on the floor in a corner, with her back propped against the wall. At 2.25 g’s, it was by far the most comfortable option, despite how much effort it took to get up or down. There, she ate while watching and listening to the others.

On each table, a holo displayed a live view of the ships behind them. The projections were the main focus of attention; everyone wanted to see what was happening.

The Jellies and the nightmares were still skirmishing. Some had fled to planet c or b and were currently chasing each other through the fringes of the atmosphere, while another group—three ships in total—were diving around the star, Bughunt.

“Looks like they still think they have plenty of time to catch us before we go FTL,” said Lt. Hawes. He was red-eyed and grim; all the Marines were. The losses they’d suffered during the escape from the planet, as well as the destruction of the Darmstadt, had left them looking hollow and withdrawn, shattered.

Kira thought it was an accurate representation of how everyone on the ship felt.

“Fingers crossed they don’t change their minds,” said Falconi.

Hawes grunted. Then he looked at Kira. “Once you’re up for it, we need to talk with the Jelly. This is the first chance we’ve had to communicate with one of them. The brass back home is going to want every bit of intel we can squeeze out of that thing. We’ve been fighting in the dark until now. It’d be nice to have some answers.”

“Can we do it tomorrow?” said Kira. “I’m wiped, and it won’t make any difference if we can’t escape first.”

The lieutenant rubbed his face and sighed. He seemed even more exhausted than her. “Yeah, sure. But let’s not put it off any longer.”

While they waited, Kira withdrew deeper and deeper into herself, as if she were retreating into a shell. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d learned about the nightmares. She was responsible for creating them. It had been her own misguided choices, her own fear and anger that had led to the birth of the monstrosities currently running rampant among the stars.

Even though Kira knew that, logically, she couldn’t be blamed for the actions of what the humanoid nightmare had called the Maw—the twisted, mutated fusion of Dr. Carr, the Jelly, and the damaged parts of the Soft Blade—it didn’t change how she felt. Emotion trumped logic; the thought of everyone who had been killed in the conflict between humans, Jellies, and the nightmares made her heart ache with a dull, soul-crushing pain that the Soft Blade could do nothing to alleviate.

She felt as if she’d been poisoned.

The Marines ate quickly and soon returned to the hold to oversee preparations for the transition to FTL. The Entropists and the crew of the Wallfish lingered about the holos, quiet save for the occasional murmured comment.

At one point, Hwa-jung said in her blunt way, “I miss Trig.” To that, they could only nod and express their agreement.

Partway through the meal, Vishal looked over at Falconi and said, “Is there enough salt for you, Captain?”

Falconi gave a thumbs-up. “Perfect, Doc. Thanks.”

“Yeah, but what’s with all the carrots?” said Sparrow. She lifted a spoon piled high with orange disks. “Always seems like you put in an extra bag or something.”

“They’re good for you,” said Vishal. “Besides, I like them.”

Sparrow smirked. “Oh, I know you do. Bet you keep carrots hidden in sickbay to snack on when you’re hungry. Just like a rabbit.” And she made a nibbling motion with her teeth. “Drawers and drawers full of carrots. Red ones, yellow ones, purple ones, you—”

A flush darkened Vishal’s cheeks, and he put his spoon down with a loud clack. Kira and everyone else looked. “Ms. Sparrow,” he said, and there was an uncharacteristic note of anger in his voice. “Always you have been, as you put it, ‘riding my ass.’ And because Trig admired you so much, he did the same.”

With an arch expression, Sparrow said, “Don’t take it so seriously, Doc. I’m just ribbing you. If—”

Vishal faced her. “Well please don’t, Ms. Sparrow. There is none of this ribbing with anyone else, so I would thank you to treat me with the same respect as I treat you. Yes. Thank you.” And with that, he went back to eating.

Sparrow seemed embarrassed and taken aback. Then Falconi gave her a warning look, and she cleared her throat and said, “Sheesh. If you feel so strongly about it, Doc, then—”

“I do,” said Vishal with definitive firmness.

“Uh, then sorry. Won’t happen again.”

Vishal nodded and continued eating.

Good for him, Kira thought dully. She noticed a small smile on Nielsen’s face, and after a few minutes, the first officer got up and went to sit next to Vishal and started talking with him in a low tone.

Soon after, Sparrow left to check on the Jelly.

Everyone had finished eating, and Nielsen and Vishal were washing up, when Falconi trudged over to Kira and carefully lowered himself onto the floor next to her.

She watched without much curiosity.

He didn’t meet her gaze but stared somewhere at the ceiling across the room and scratched the day-old stubble on his neck. “You going to tell me what’s bothering you, or do I have to pry it out of you?”

Kira didn’t feel like talking. The truth about the nightmares was still too raw and immediate, and—if she was honest with herself—it made her feel ashamed. Also, she was tired, tired right down her to bones. Having a difficult, emotional discussion felt like more than she could deal with at the moment.

So, she deflected. Motioning at the holos, she said, “That’s what’s bothering me. What do you think? Everything’s gone wrong.”

“Bullshit,” Falconi said in a friendly tone. He gave her a look from under his dark brows, the blue of his eyes deep and clear. “You’ve been off ever since we got back from that Jelly ship. What is it? Your arm?”

“Sure, my arm. That’s it.”

A crooked smile appeared on his face, but there wasn’t much humor to his expression. “Right. Okay. If that’s the way you’re going to be.” He undid a pocket on his jacket and slapped a deck of cards down onto the floor between them. “Ever play Scratch Seven?”

Kira eyed him, wary. “No.”

“I’ll teach you then. It’s pretty simple. Play a round with me. If I win, you answer my question. If you win, I’ll answer any question you want.”

“Sorry. I’m not in the mood.” She started to stand, and Falconi’s hand closed about her left wrist, stopping her.

Without thinking, Kira formed a cuff of spikes around her wrist, spikes sharp enough to cause discomfort though not sharp enough to draw blood.

Falconi winced but kept hold of her. “Neither am I,” he said, his voice low, his expression serious. “Come on, Kira. What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.” She sounded unconvincing even to herself.

He raised his eyebrows. “Then stay. Play a round with me.… Please.”

Kira hesitated. As much as she didn’t want to talk, she also didn’t want to be alone. Not right then. Not with the leaden ache in her chest and the fighting going on in the system around them.

That by itself wasn’t enough to change her mind, but then she thought of the scars on Falconi’s arms. Perhaps she could get him to tell her the story of how he acquired them. The idea appealed to her. Besides, there was a part of her—buried deep inside—that really did want to tell someone about what she’d learned. Confession might not make things any better, but perhaps it would help lessen the pain in her heart.

If only Alan were there. More than anything, Kira wished she could talk with him. He would understand. He would comfort and commiserate and perhaps even help her find a way of solving the galactic-level problem she’d caused.

But Alan was dead and gone. All she had was Falconi. He would have to do.

“What if you ask something I really don’t want to answer?” Kira said, a bit of strength entering her voice.

“Then you fold.” But Falconi said it as if he were daring her otherwise.

A sense of rebelliousness stirred within Kira. “Fine.” She settled back down, and he let go of her wrist. “So teach me.”

Falconi examined the hand she’d poked and then rubbed it against his thigh. “It’s a points game. Nothing special.” He shuffled the cards and started to deal: three cards for her, three for him, and four in the middle of the table. All of them facedown. The remainder of the deck he set aside. “The goal is to get as many sevens or times sevens as possible.”

“How? By multiplying the cards?”

“Adding. One plus six. Ten plus four. You get the idea. Jacks are eleven, queens twelve, kings thirteen. Aces low. No jokers, no wild cards. Since each player has seven cards, counting the shared ones,” Falconi indicated the four cards on the deck, “the highest natural hand is a straight sweep: four kings, two queens, and an ace. That gives you—”

“Seventy-seven.”

“For a score of eleven. Right. Cards always keep their face value, unless—” He held up a finger. “—unless you get all the sevens. Then sevens are worth double. In that case, the highest hand is a full sweep: four sevens, two kings, and a nine. Which gives you…” He waited for her to do the math.

“Ninety-one.”

“For a score of thirteen. Betting is normally done after each shared card is turned over, but we’ll make it easy and just bet once, after the first card. There’s a catch, though.”

“Oh?”

“You can’t use your overlays for the adding. Makes it too easy.” And a message popped up in the corner of Kira’s vision. She opened it to see a prompt from a privacy app that would lock their overlays for as long as they both chose to use it.

Annoyed, she hit Accept. Falconi did the same, and everything on Kira’s overlays froze. “Okay,” she said.

Falconi nodded and picked up his cards.

Kira looked at her own cards. A two, an eight, and a jack: twenty-one. How many sevens did that make? Despite the math she’d done during FTL, multiplying and dividing numbers in her head still wasn’t easy. Addition it was. Seven plus seven is fourteen. Plus another seven is twenty-one. She smiled, pleased that she already had a score of three.

Then Falconi reached out and turned over the first of the four communal cards: an ace. “I’ll start the betting,” he said. Behind him, the Entropists deposited their empty meal wrappers in the trash and headed out of the galley.

“You dealt. Shouldn’t I?”

“Captain’s prerogative.” When she didn’t argue, he said, “Same question as before: What’s bothering you?”

Kira already had her own question ready: “How did you get those scars on your arms?” A hard expression settled on Falconi’s face. He hadn’t expected that from her, she could tell. Well, good. It served him right. “Call. Unless you think that’s a raise?” She asked in the same tone of challenge he had used before.

Falconi’s lips flattened into a thin line. “No. I think that counts as a call.” He turned over the next card. A five.

They were both silent as they checked their math. Kira still came up with the same figure: twenty-one. Was that a good hand? She wasn’t sure. If not, her only chance of winning would be to ask another question, one that might make Falconi fold.

Nielsen and Vishal were drying their hands after finishing the dishes. The first officer walked over—her steps painfully slow in the high-g—and touched Falconi on the shoulder. “I’m going back to Control. I’ll keep an eye on things from there.”

He nodded. “Okay. I’ll relieve you in, say, an hour.”

She patted him and moved on. As she left the galley, she turned and said, “Don’t bet anything too valuable, Kira.”

“He’ll steal the tongue right out of your mouth,” Vishal added, following after.

And then it was just the two of them in the galley.

“Well?” said Kira.

Falconi turned over the third card. Nine.

Kira tried to keep her lips from moving as she did the sums. Keeping track of all the numbers wasn’t easy, and a few times she lost her place and had to start over again.

Thirty-five. That was the best she could come up with. Five sevens. A good sight better than what she’d had before. She started to feel as if there was a chance she might win the hand. Time to take some risks.

“I’m going to raise,” she said.

“Oh?” said Falconi.

“Yeah. How did you manage to buy the Wallfish?” The skin under his eyes tightened. She’d struck another nerve. Good. If she was going to tell him about the nightmares, Kira didn’t want to be the only one sharing secrets. When Falconi still hadn’t responded after a few seconds, she said, “What’s it going to be? Fold, call, or raise?”

Falconi rubbed his chin. The stubble rasped against the pad of his thumb. “Call. What happened to your arm? How did you really lose it? And don’t give me that nonsense you told Sparrow about a nightmare grabbing you. It would take a half-dozen exos to give you any trouble.”

“That’s two questions.”

“It’s a restatement. If you want to say it’s two, just say I … upped the stakes.”

Kira bit back a sarcastic reply. He wasn’t making it easy to open up, that was for sure. “Leave it. Keep going.”

“Last card,” Falconi said, seemingly unperturbed, and flipped it over.

A king. Thirteen.

Her mind raced as she tried different combinations. The next multiple of seven was seven times six, or … forty-two. Eleven plus thirteen plus one plus eight plus nine—that did it! Forty-two!

Satisfied, Kira started to relax. Then she saw it: add in the two and the five, and she had another seven. Forty-nine. Seven times seven. Her lips curled. How appropriate.

“Now there’s a dangerous expression,” said Falconi. Then he laid his cards on the deck. Two threes and a seven. “Pity it won’t do you any good. Five sevens.”

She revealed her own cards. “Seven sevens.”

His gaze darted from card to card as he checked her math. A hard line formed between his eyebrows. “Beginner’s luck.”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that. Pay up.” She crossed her mismatched arms, pleased with herself.

Falconi tapped his fingers against the deck. Then he went still and said, “The scars are from a fire. And I managed to buy the Wallfish because I spent almost a decade saving every bit I could. Got a good deal and…” He shrugged.

His job must have been very well-paying for him to afford a ship. “Those aren’t much in the way of answers,” Kira said.

Falconi swept up their cards and shuffled them back into the deck. “So then play another round. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“Maybe I will,” said Kira. “Deal.”

He dealt. Three for her, three for him, and four on the table.

She scanned her cards. No sevens, nor anything that added up to seven or a multiple of seven. Then Falconi turned over the first card on the table: the two of spades. That gave her … one seven.

“Why did you keep the scars?” she asked.

He surprised her with his counter: “Why do you care?”

“Is that … your bet?”

“It is.”

Falconi turned over the next card. Kira still had only one seven. She decided to go for another bet. “What exactly did you do before you got the Wallfish?” she asked.

“Call: What’s bothering you?”

Neither of them wagered again through the rest of the round. With the last of the communal cards, Kira had three sevens. Not too shabby. However, when Falconi showed his hand, he said, “Four sevens.”

Dammit. Kira paused, checking his math, and then she made a sound of disgust. “Three.”

Falconi leaned back and crossed his arms, expectant.

For a few moments, the only sound was the rumble of the ship and the whirring fans of life support. Kira used the time to marshal her thoughts and then said, “I care because I’m curious. We’re way out past the rim, and yet I don’t really know anything about you.”

“Why does it matter?”

“That’s another question.”

“Mmm.… You know I care for the Wallfish. And my crew.”

“Yes,” said Kira, and she felt an unexpected sense of closeness with him. Falconi was protective of his ship and crew; she’d seen it. And his bonsai also. That didn’t mean he was necessarily a good person, but she couldn’t deny his sense of loyalty to the people and things he considered his own. “As for what’s bothering me, the nightmares.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Kira and, one-handed, swept up the cards on the floor. “Maybe you can get more out of me if you beat me again.”

“Maybe I will,” said Falconi with a dangerous flash in his eyes.

It was difficult, but Kira managed to shuffle the cards. She plopped them next to her knee, stirred them in a muddled mess, and then dealt by picking up individual cards between thumb and index finger. She felt horribly clumsy throughout the whole process, and it annoyed her nearly enough to use the Soft Blade to facilitate. But she didn’t because, right then, she didn’t want anything to do with the xeno. Not then and not ever.

Since she hadn’t gotten her questions answered the last time, she repeated them. In turn, Falconi asked her: “What about the nightmares is bothering you so much?” And “How did you really lose your arm?”

To Kira’s extreme annoyance, she lost again, one to three. Still, she also felt a measure of relief at no longer having to avoid the truth.

She said, “… I haven’t been drinking enough for this.”

“There’s a bottle of vodka over in the locker,” said Falconi.

“No.” She tilted her head back and rested it against the wall. “It wouldn’t fix anything. Not really.”

“Might make you feel better.”

“I doubt it.” Tears suddenly filled her eyes, and she blinked, hard. “Nothing will.”

“Kira,” said Falconi, his voice unexpectedly gentle. “What is it? What’s really going on?”

She let out a shuddering breath. “The nightmares … they’re my fault.”

“How do you mean?” His eyes never left her.

So Kira told him. She told him the whole sorry tale, starting with the creation of the Carr-Jelly–Soft Blade monstrosity and all that had transpired with it since. It was as if a barrier broke inside her, and a tidal wave of words and feelings came rushing out in a tumult of guilt, sorrow, and regret.

When she stopped, Falconi’s expression was unreadable; she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, only that his gaze had grown hooded and the lines about his mouth deepened. He started to speak, but she preempted him: “The thing is, I don’t think I can fight the nightmares. At least, not the ones like the Soft Blade. When we touched, I could feel it absorbing me. If I’d stayed…” She shook her head. “I can’t beat them. We’re too similar, and there are so many more of them. I’d drown in their flesh. If I met this Carr-Jelly-thing, it would eat me. I know it would. Flesh for the Maw.”

“There has to be a way to stop these things,” said Falconi. His voice was low, gravelly, as if he were suppressing an unpleasant emotion.

Kira lifted her head and let it bang back against the wall. In the two-and-a-quarter g’s, the impact was a hard, painful blow that made stars flash before her eyes. “The Soft Blade is capable of so much. More than I really understand. If it’s unbound and unbalanced, I don’t see how it can be stopped.… This situation with the nightmares is the worst sort of grey goo, nanobot catastrophe.” She snorted. “A real nightmare scenario. It’s just going to keep eating and growing and building.… Even if we kill whatever it is that Carr and the Jelly, Qwon, have turned into, there are still the other nightmares with the flesh of the Soft Blade. Any one of them could start the whole thing over. Hell, if a single speck of the Maw survives, it could infect someone else, just like at Sigma Draconis. There’s just no, no way to—”

“Kira.”

“—to contain it. And I can’t fight it, can’t stop it, can’t—”

“Kira.” The note of command in Falconi’s voice cut through the swarm of buzzing thoughts in her head. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on her, steady and—in a way—comforting.

She allowed some of the tension to bleed out of her body. “Yeah. Okay… I think the Jellies might have dealt with something like this before. Or at least, I think they knew it was possible. Itari didn’t seem surprised.”

Falconi cocked his head. “That’s encouraging. Any idea how they contained the nightmares?”

She shrugged. “With a whole lot of death is my guess. I’m not real clear on the details, but I’m pretty sure their whole species was endangered at one point. Not necessarily because of nightmares, but just because of the scale of the conflict. They were even fighting a Seeker at one point, same as us.”

“In that case, it sounds like Hawes is right; you need to talk with the Jelly. Maybe it can give you some answers. There might be ways we don’t know about to stop the nightmares.”

Encouragement wasn’t what Kira was expecting from Falconi, but it was a welcome gift. “I will.” She looked down at the deck and picked at a piece of dried food stuck in the grating. “Still … it’s my fault. All of this is my fault.”

“You couldn’t have known,” said Falconi.

“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m the one who caused this war. Me. No one else.”

Falconi tapped the edge of his cards against the floor in an absentminded fashion, although he was too sharp, too aware, for the motion to be careless. “You can’t think like that. It’ll destroy you.”

“There’s more,” she said, soft and miserable.

He froze. Then he gathered up the rest of the cards and started to shuffle them. “Oh?”

Now that she’d started confessing, Kira couldn’t stop. “I lied to you. The Jellies weren’t the ones who killed my team.…”

“What do you mean?”

“Like with the Numenist. When I’m scared, angry, upset, the Soft Blade acts out. Or it tries to.…” The tears were rolling down her cheeks now, and Kira made no attempt to stop them. “Pretty much everyone on the team was pissed off when I came out of cryo. Not at me, not exactly, but I was still responsible, you know? The colony was getting canceled, we were going to lose our bonuses. It was bad. I ended up getting in an argument with Fizel, our doctor, and when Alan and I went to bed—” She shook her head, the words stuck in her throat. “I was still all messed up, and then … then that night, Neghar was coughing. She must have gotten a bit of the xeno in her, from rescuing me, see? She was coughing and coughing, and there was … there was so much blood. I was scared. C-couldn’t help it. Scared. A-and the Soft Blade came out stabbing. It-it stabbed Alan. Yugo. Seppo. J-Jenan. But it was because of me. I’m responsible. I killed them.”

Kira bent her neck, unable to bear Falconi’s gaze, and allowed the tears to fall freely. On her chest and legs, the suit roiled in response. Revulsion filled her, and she clamped down on the xeno’s reactions, forcing it to subside.

She flinched as Falconi’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. He held her like that, and after a few seconds, Kira allowed her head to rest against his chest while she cried. Not since the Extenuating Circumstances had she mourned so openly. The revelation of the nightmares had stirred up old pains and added to them.

When her tears had begun to dry and her breathing slow, Falconi released her. Embarrassed, Kira dabbed at her eyes. “Sorry,” she said.

He waved a hand and got to his feet. Moving as if he had bone-rot, he shambled across the galley. She watched as he turned on the kettle, made two mugs of chell, and then carried them back to where she sat.

“Careful,” he said, handing her one.

“Thanks.” She wrapped her hands around the warm mug and breathed in the steam, savoring the smell.

Falconi sat and ran his thumb around the rim of his cup, chasing a drop of water. “Before I bought the Wallfish, I worked for Hanzo Tensegrity. It’s a big insurance company out of Sol.”

“You sold insurance?” Somehow Kira found that hard to believe.

“I got hired to vet claims by miners, stakeholders, freelancers, that sort of thing. Only problem was, the company didn’t really want us to vet anything. Our actual job was to, ah, discourage claimants.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t take it after a while, so I quit. Not the point. One claim I had, there was a boy who—”

“A boy?”

“It’s a story. Listen. There was a boy who lived on a hab-ring out by Farrugia’s Landing. His father worked maintenance, and every day, the boy would go with his father, and the boy would clean and check the skinsuits the maintenance crew used.” Falconi flicked the drop of water off the mug. “It wasn’t a real job, of course. Just something to keep him busy while his father was working.”

“Didn’t he have a mother?” Kira asked.

Falconi shook his head. “No other parent. Not mother, not a second paterfamilias, not grandparents, not even a sibling. All the boy had was his father. And every day, the boy cleaned and checked the suits, laid them in a line, ran diagnostics before the maintenance crew went out to tend the hull of the hab.”

“And then?”

Falconi’s eyes seemed to burn into her. “One of the guys—they were almost all guys—one of the guys, he didn’t like anyone touching his suit. Made him antsy, he said. Told the boy to knock it off. Thing is, regs were clear; at least two people had to inspect all safety equipment, skinsuits included. So the boy’s father told him to ignore the jerk and keep doing what he was doing.”

“But the boy didn’t.”

“But he didn’t. He was young, just a kid. The jerk convinced him that it was okay. He—the jerk, that is—would run the diagnostics himself.”

“But he didn’t,” Kira murmured.

“But he didn’t. And one day … poof. The suit ripped, a line tore, and Mr. Jerk died a horrible, agonizing death.” Falconi moved closer. “Now who was to blame?”

“The jerk, of course.”

“Maybe. But the regs were clear, and the boy ignored them. If he hadn’t, the man would still be alive.”

“He was only a child, though,” Kira protested.

“That’s true.”

“So then the father was to blame.”

Falconi shrugged. “Could be.” He blew on his chell and then took a sip. “Actually, it turned out to be bad manufacturing. Defect in the suits; the rest of them would have failed, given time. The whole batch had to be replaced.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Sometimes,” Falconi said, “everything just turns to crap, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He looked at her. “No one’s to blame. Or maybe everyone’s to blame.”

Kira chewed over the story in her mind, searching for the kernel of truth at the center. She felt Falconi had offered it up in the spirit of understanding, if not absolution, and for that, she was grateful. But it wasn’t enough to soothe her heart.

She said, “Maybe. I bet the boy still felt responsible.”

Falconi inclined his head. “Of course. I think he did. But you can’t let the guilt from something like that consume your life.”

“Sure you can.”

“Kira.”

She pressed her eyes shut again, unable to block out the image of Alan slumped against her. “What happened can’t be changed. I killed the man I loved, Falconi. You’d think that was the worst thing ever, but no, I had to go and start a war—a goddamn interstellar war, and it is my fault. There’s no fixing something like that.”

A long silence came from Falconi. Then he sighed and put his cup down on the deck. “When I was nineteen—”

“Nothing you can say is going to make this any better.”

“Just listen; it’s another story.” He fiddled with the handle of the mug, and as she didn’t interrupt again, continued: “When I was nineteen, my parents left me to watch my sister while they went out for dinner. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck babysitting, especially on a weekend. I got pretty angry, but it didn’t matter. My parents left, and that was that.”

Falconi rapped the mug against the deck. “Only it wasn’t. My sister was six years younger than me, but I figured she was old enough to take care of herself, so I snuck out and went to hang with some of my friends, same as I would any other Saturday. Next thing I knew—” Falconi’s voice caught, and his hands opened and closed as if crushing something invisible. “There was an explosion. By the time I got back to our rooms, they’d half caved in.”

He shook his head. “I went in after her, but it was already too late. Smoke inhalation.… That’s how I got burned. We found out later my sister had been cooking, and somehow a fire started. If I’d been with her, where I was supposed to be, she would have been fine.”

“You can’t know that,” said Kira.

Falconi cocked his head. “Oh can’t I?…” He picked up the deck of cards, worked the free ones into the middle, and shuffled them twice. “You didn’t kill Alan or anyone else on your team.”

“I did. I—”

“Stop,” Falconi said, stabbing a middle finger at her. “Maybe you are responsible, but it wasn’t a conscious decision on your part. You wouldn’t have killed them any more than I would have killed my sister. As for this goddamn war, you’re not all-powerful, Kira. The Jellies made their own choices. So did the League and this Maw. In the end, they’re the only ones who can answer for themselves. So stop blaming yourself.”

“I can’t seem to help it.”

“Bullshit. The truth is you don’t want to. It makes you feel good to blame yourself. You know why?” Kira shook her head, mute. “Because it gives you a sense of control. The hardest lesson in life is learning to accept that there are some things we can’t change.” Falconi paused, his eyes hard and glittering. “Blaming yourself is perfectly normal, but it doesn’t do you any good. Until you stop, unless you can stop, you’ll never be able to fully recover.”

Then he unbuttoned the cuffs on his shirt, and rolled back his sleeves to expose the melted surface of his forearms. He held them up for Kira to see. “Why do you think I keep these scars?”

“Because … you feel guilty over—”

“No,” Falconi said harshly. Then, in a gentler tone: “No. I keep them to remind me of what I can survive. Of what I have survived. If I’m having a rough time, I look at my arms, and I know I’ll get through whatever problem I’m dealing with. Life’s not going to break me. It can’t break me. It might kill me, but nothing it throws at me is going to make me give up.”

“What if I’m not that strong?”

He smiled without humor. “Then you’ll crawl through life with this monkey sitting on your back, and it’ll tear at you until it kills you. Trust me on that.”

“… How did you manage to get rid of it?”

“I drank a lot. Got in a bunch of fights. Nearly ended up dead a few times. After a while, I realized that I was just punishing myself for no good reason. Plus, I knew my sister wouldn’t have wanted me to end up like that, so I forgave myself. Even though it wasn’t my direct fault—just like it’s not your fault—I forgave myself. And that’s when I was finally able to move on and make something of my life.”

Kira made her decision then. She couldn’t see a path clear from the mire she was stuck in, but she could at least try to fight free. That much she could do: try.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” Falconi repeated softly, and at that moment, Kira felt a bone-deep sense of connection with him: a bond born of shared sorrows.

“What was your sister’s name?”

“Beatrice, but we always called her Bea.”

Kira stared at the oily surface of the chell, studying her dark reflection. “What do you want, Falconi?”

“Salvo.… Call me Salvo.”

“What do you really want, Salvo? Out of all the universe?”

“I want,” he said, drawing the words out, “to be free. Free from debt. Free from governments and corporations telling me how to live my life. If that means I spend the rest of my years as captain of the Wallfish, well then—” He lifted his mug in mock salute. “—I accept my fate willingly.”

She mirrored his gesture. “A worthy goal. To freedom.”

“To freedom.”

The chell made the back of her throat tingle as she took another sip, and right then, the terrors of the day no longer seemed quite so immediate.

“Are you from Farrugia’s Landing?” she asked.

A small nod from Falconi. “Born on a ship thereabouts, but I grew up at the outpost itself.”

A half-forgotten memory stirred in the back of Kira’s brain. “Wasn’t there an uprising there?” she said. “Some sort of corporate rebellion? I remember seeing an article about it. Most of the workers went on strike, and a lot of people ended up hurt or in prison.”

Falconi took a drink of chell. “You remember correctly. It got real bloody, real fast.”

“Did you fight?”

He snorted. “What do you think?” Then he glanced at her from the corners of his eyes, and for a moment it seemed as if he were trying to decide something. “What does it feel like?”

“What?”

“The Soft Blade.”

“It feels like … like this.” She reached out and touched Falconi on the wrist. He watched with caution, surprised. “It feels like nothing at all. It feels like my skin.”

Then Kira willed a row of razor-sharp edges to rise from the back of her hand. The xeno had become such a part of herself, willing the blades into existence took hardly any effort.

After a moment, she allowed them to subside.

Falconi placed his hand over hers. She shivered and nearly flinched as he traced the tips of his fingers across her palm, sending cold sparks shooting up her arm. “Like this?”

“Exactly.”

He lingered a moment more, the pads of his fingers just touching hers. Then he pulled his hand back and picked up the cards. “Another round?”

The last of the chell didn’t taste quite so good as Kira downed it. What the hell was she doing? Alan … “I think I’ve had enough.”

Falconi nodded, understanding.

“Are you going to tell Hawes about Carr and the Maw?” she asked.

“No reason to yet. You can file a report when we get back to the League.”

Kira made a face at the thought. Then, heartfelt, she said, “Thank you for talking and listening.”

Falconi slipped the cards back in his pocket. “Of course. Just don’t give up. None of us are going to get through this if we stop fighting.”

“I won’t. Promise.”

2.

Kira left Falconi brooding in the galley. She debated going straight to Itari and trying to talk with the Jelly. (Would it even be awake? Did Jellies sleep?) But as much as she wanted answers, right then, she needed rest. The day had left her exhausted in a way no amount of AcuWake could fix. Sleep was the only remedy.

So she returned to her cabin. No messages from Gregorovich were waiting for her, nor would she have answered them if there were. Leaving the lights off, she lay on the bed and sighed with relief as the weight came off her throbbing feet.

Falconi’s words—she couldn’t bring herself to think of him by his first name—were still running through her head as Kira closed her eyes and, almost at once, fell into a dreamless state.

3.

A bell-like tone echoed throughout the Wallfish.

Kira tried to bolt upright and struggled as she remained pinned to the mattress, held in place by tendrils of the Soft Blade. The 2.25 g’s of thrust had let off, leaving her in weightlessness. If not for the xeno, she would have floated off in her sleep.

Heart pounding, she forced the Soft Blade to relax its hold and pulled herself over to the desk. Had the sound been in her imagination? Had she really slept that long?

She checked the console. Yes, she had.

They’d just jumped to FTL.

EXEUNT III

1.

They had escaped, but they weren’t safe.

Kira checked the ship’s records, unable to believe that none of the Jellies or the nightmares had overtaken them.

One of the Jellies had headed after the Wallfish a bit over an hour ago, closely followed by the two remaining nightmares. The three ships had been only minutes away from opening fire on the Wallfish by the time it transitioned to FTL.

In order to leave Bughunt as quickly as possible, the Wallfish had executed a hot jump, transitioning to FTL without taking the time to properly cool the ship. To do so would have required shutting off the fusion drive for the better part of a day. Hardly practical with hostile ships so close behind.

Even with the drive extinguished, the heat radiating from it—as well as the thermal energy contained within the rest of the Wallfish’s hull—would quickly build up to intolerable levels inside the Markov Bubble. Heatstroke would become a very real risk, and soon afterward, equipment failure.

Kira could already hear the life-support fans running harder than normal.

It wouldn’t be long before the Wallfish would have to drop back into normal space. But it almost didn’t matter. Whether in subluminal or superluminal space, the ships chasing them were faster than any human-built vessel.

They’d escaped, but it still looked like the Jellies and the nightmares would catch them. And when they did, Kira had no illusions of what would happen next.

She couldn’t see how they were going to get out of the situation. Maybe Falconi or Gregorovich had an idea, but for herself, Kira thought the only option would be to fight. And she had no confidence in her ability to protect the crew, much less herself, if more of the xeno-like nightmares attacked.

Her throat tightened, and she forced herself to take a breath, calm herself. The Wallfish wasn’t taking fire. It wasn’t being boarded. Better to save her adrenaline for when that was actually the case.…

She had just started for the door when the bell-like tone sounded again. So soon? Was something wrong with the Wallfish? Out of instinct born of far too many trips on spaceships, she reached for the handhold next to the desk.

The stump of her arm swung past the hold, missing it.

“Fuck.” Momentum nearly spun her around, but Kira managed to catch the hold with her left hand and stabilize her position.

A faint tingle passed across her skin, as if the electrical charge of the air had increased. She realized they’d just dropped back into normal space.

Then a thrust warning rang out, and she felt the wall press against her as the Wallfish turned and then began to burn in a new direction. “Ten minutes until next jump,” said Gregorovich in his warbling whisper.

Kira hurried straight to Control. Falconi, Nielsen, and Hawes glanced at her as she entered.

The lieutenant was pale and hard-faced. If anything he looked worse than the previous day.

“What’s going on? Why did we stop?” said Kira.

“We’re changing course,” said Falconi.

“Yes, why? We just left the system.”

He gestured at the ever-present holo in the center of the room. It showed a map of Bughunt. “That’s the point. The Jellies are jamming the whole area, and we’re still inside the jamming. That means no one saw us drop out of FTL, and since the light from the Wallfish will take over a day to get back to Bughunt—”

“No one knows we’re here,” said Kira.

Falconi nodded. “For the time being, no. FTL sensors can’t pick up sublight objects, so the assholes chasing us aren’t going to see us when they fly past, not unless—”

“Not unless,” said Nielsen, “we’re really unlucky and they decide to drop back into normal space to take a look.”

Hawes scrunched his forehead. “They shouldn’t, though. They don’t have any reason to.”

Falconi gave Kira a look from under his brows. “That’s the idea at least. We wait for the Jellies and the nightmares to go by, and then we blast off in a different direction.”

She frowned, mirroring Hawes’s expression. “But … won’t they pick us up on their instruments as soon as we leave the jamming?”

“Shouldn’t,” said Falconi. “I’m guessing the Jellies don’t want the rest of the nightmares to know about you, the Staff of Blue, or anything else at Bughunt. If I’m right, the Jellies following us are going to keep up their jamming, which means they’ll be limited to short-range observations in FTL.”

Kira was doubtful. “That’s an awfully big guess.”

He nodded. “Sure is, but even if the Jellies drop their jamming … You know anything about FTL sensors?”

“Not really,” she admitted.

“They’re pretty crap. Passive ones have to be big, real big to be effective. Not something most ships can haul around. Active are even worse, and it’s active we have to worry about. Range is only a few light-days at best, which isn’t much at the speeds we’re traveling, and they aren’t particularly sensitive, which is a problem if you’re trying to detect Markov Bubbles, since the bubbles have such a low energy state. Plus … Hawes, why don’t you tell her?”

The lieutenant never took his eyes off the display as he spoke, his words slow and deliberate. “The UMC found that the Jelly sensors are about twenty percent less effective directly behind their ships. Probably because their shadow shield and fusion drive get in the way.”

Falconi nodded again. “Odds are the nightmares have the same issue, even if they don’t use a shield.” He brought up an image in the holo of the three ships chasing them. “Once they’re past us, they’re going to have trouble detecting us—assuming no jamming—and every minute is going to make it that much harder.”

“How long until they realize the Wallfish isn’t in front of them?” Kira asked.

He shrugged. “No idea. Best-case scenario, a couple of hours. Worst case, sometime in the next thirty minutes. Either way, it should still be enough time to get out of their FTL sensor range.”

“And then what?”

A flicker of sly cunning crossed Falconi’s face. “We take a random walk, that’s what.” He jerked his thumb toward the aft of the ship. “The UMC gave us more than enough antimatter to fly to Bughunt and back. We’re using the spare to make a few extra hops, changing course each time, to throw off anyone trying to follow us.”

“But,” said Kira, trying to visualize the whole arrangement in her head, “they can still flash trace us, right?”

Gregorovich cackled and said, “They can, O my Inquisitive Mammal, but ’twill take time—time that will allow us to make our most hasty retreat.”

Falconi tipped a finger toward the speakers in the ceiling. “With each jump, it’ll be harder and harder for the Jellies and the nightmares to track us. This isn’t like the trip out here. We’re not going to be dropping out of FTL at regular intervals in what was pretty much a straight-shot flight.”

“We took precautions,” said Hawes, “but nothing as extreme as this.”

Nielsen said, “Once we’re out of sensor range, the Jellies won’t be able to predict when we go sublight. And if they miscalculate even one trajectory or miss even one jump—”

“They’ll end up waaay off,” said Falconi with a satisfied grin. “The Wallfish can cover almost three-quarters of a light-year in a day. Think how long you’d have to wait on a flash trace if you were off by even a few hours on one of our jumps. It could take days, weeks, or even months for the light to reach you.”

“So we’re actually going to make it,” said Kira.

A grim smile appeared on Falconi’s face. “Seems like it. Once we’re out far enough, the chances of any of ’em finding the Wallfish, even by accident, are going to be pretty much nil. Hell, unless they track us to our last jump, they won’t even know which system in the League we’re aiming for.”

The pressure pushing Kira against the wall ceased, and she had to hook the stump of her arm through a handhold to keep from drifting across the room. Then the jump alert echoed forth again, and again she felt the strange tingle pass across her skin.

“And which system would that be?” she asked.

“Sol,” said Nielsen.

2.

The second jump was longer than the first: forty-three minutes to be precise.

While they waited, Kira went with Hawes to talk with Itari. “You okay?” she asked as they left Control.

He didn’t meet her gaze. “Fine, thanks.”

“Akawe seemed like a good captain.”

“Yeah. He was. And he was crazy sharp. Him and Koyich.… There were a lot of good people on the Darmstadt.”

“I know. I’m sorry about what happened.”

He nodded, accepting the condolences.

“Is there anything you don’t want me to say?” Kira asked as they neared the airlock with the Jelly.

The lieutenant considered. “It probably doesn’t matter at this point, but whatever you know about Sol, the League, or the UMC, keep it to yourself.”

She nodded, lightly pushing against the wall to keep herself centered in the corridor. “I’ll try. If I’m not sure about something, I’ll check with you first.”

Hawes nodded. “That should work. We’re mostly interested in the Jellies’ military—placement of troops, tactics, future plans, et cetera—as well as their technology. Also details on why exactly this group of Jellies wants to join forces with us. So, politics, I guess. Anything else you can dig up would be a bonus.”

“Got it.”

At the airlock, Kira saw Itari floating near the back wall, its tentacles wrapped around itself in a protective embrace. The alien stirred and looked out with a single glossy eye from between a pair of tentacles. Curiosity. To be expected in any sentient organism, but Kira still found it intimidating. The intelligence lurking within the Jelly’s eye was a constant reminder that they were dealing with a creature just as capable as any human. Probably more so given its armored carapace and many limbs.

Hawes spoke with the Marines stationed on either side of the airlock—Sanchez and another man Kira didn’t recognize—and they opened the door, allowed Kira and the lieutenant inside. Kira moved to the front; Hawes stayed behind her and to the right.

[[Kira here: We would like to ask you questions. Will you answer them?]]

The Jelly rearranged its tentacles as it settled on the deck in front of them, holding itself in place with its suckers. [[Itari here: Speak, two-form, and I will answer as best I can.]]

First things first: definitions of terms. [[Kira here: Why do you call us two-forms? Do you mean…]] And she stalled out, unable to think of the Jelly word for male or female or even for sex. [[… do you mean like us?]] She motioned from herself to Hawes.

Nearscent of respectful disagreement. [[Itari here: No. I mean the form you have and the form that lives in your spaceships.]]

Of course. [[Kira here: Our ship minds?]]

[[Itari here: If that is what you call them, then yes. They give us much difficulty when we board your shells. Our first goal is always to disconnect or destroy them.]]

When Kira translated for Hawes, he snorted, darkly amused. “Good. At least they’ve learned to be scared of the minds.”

“As they should be,” Gregorovich whispered from the ceiling.

Hawes gave the speakers an annoyed glance. “This is classified, Gregorovich. Butt out.”

“And this is my ship,” Gregorovich answered, deadly quiet.

Hawes grunted and didn’t argue the point.

The Jelly shifted, a wash of reddish-pink moving across its tentacles. [[Itari here: We wonder, what relation do your ship minds have to your current forms? The one you call]]—and it produced a jumble of scents that, with some difficulty, Kira realized was the Jelly’s attempt to reproduce Tschetter’s name—[[Tschetter refused to discuss the subject. Are the minds subordinate to your form or are they senior?]]

Kira checked with Hawes, and he gave her the go-ahead. “Might as well tell it a bit,” said the lieutenant. “Reciprocity has to be worth something, right? Their civilization wouldn’t work otherwise.”

“Maybe,” Kira said. She didn’t feel confident of anything when it came to an alien society.

[[Kira here: Ship minds begin as one of us. We have to decide to become a ship mind. It does not happen on its own. A ship mind often knows and understands more than we do, but we do not always take orders from them. That depends on what position or authority the ship mind has. And not all ship minds are in ships. Many exist elsewhere.]]

The Jelly seemed to chew on that for a while. [[Itari here: I do not understand. Why would a form that is larger and more intelligent not be your shoal leader?]]

“Why indeed?” asked Gregorovich when Kira repeated the Jelly’s words. And he chuckled.

She struggled to answer. [[Kira here: Because … every one of us is different. Among our kind, you have to earn your position. It is not given to you just because you were born or built with certain traits.]] More definitions of terms, then: [[By forms you mean bodies, yes?]]

[[Itari here: Yes.]] For once the Jelly had said something expected.

Kira wanted to continue that line of questioning, but Hawes had other ideas. “Ask it about the Soft Blade,” he said. “Where does it come from?”

The nearscent of the Jelly thickened, grew sharper, and conflicted colors rolled across its skin. [[Itari here: You ask for secrets we do not share.]]

[[Kira here: I am a secret.]] She gestured at herself, at the Soft Blade. [[And the Corrupted are chasing us. Tell me.]]

The Jelly rolled and twisted its tentacles, one around another. [[Itari here: Many cycles ago, we discovered the works of the Vanished. It was their makings that allowed us to swim through space, both slower and faster than light. Their makings that gave us weapons to fight.]]

[[Kira here: You found these … makings on your homeworld?]]

Nearscent of confirmation. [[Itari here: Deep on the Abyssal Plain. Later, we found more remnants of the Vanished floating around a star counterspin to our homeworld. Among those findings were the Idealis, including the one you now are bonded with. It was that which began the war that led to the Sundering.]]

How much of their technology did the Jellies actually invent? she wondered. [[Kira here: Who are the Vanished? Are they Wranaui?]]

[[Itari here: No. They swam long before us, and we do not know where they went or what happened to them. If not for them, we would not be what we are, so we give praise to the Vanished and their makings.]]

[[Kira here: But their makings led to war.]]

[[Itari here: We cannot blame the Vanished for our own failings.]]

Hawes made notes while Kira translated. He said, “So it’s confirmed: there were or are at least two other advanced civilizations in this area of the galaxy. Great.”

“Sentient life isn’t as rare as we thought,” said Kira.

“That’s not exactly a good thing if we’re at the bottom of the pecking order. Ask if any of the Vanished are still around.”

The response was quick and definitive: [[Itari here: None that we know of, but always we hope.… Tell me, Idealis, how many makings of the Vanished have you found?]] The bite of avid desire flavored the alien’s words. [[There must have been a great number in your system for you to spread so quickly.]]

Kira frowned and again checked with Hawes. “They seem to think—”

“Yeah.”

“Should I mention the Great Beacon?”

The lieutenant thought for a second. “Okay. But don’t give away its location.”

With some trepidation, she said, [[Kira here: We have found one of the Vanished’s makings. I think. We found … a large hole that emits lowsound farscent at regular intervals.]]

A burst of reddish satisfaction spread across the Jelly’s skin. [[Itari here: You speak of a Whirlpool! One as yet unknown to us, for we keep close watch on all makings of the Vanished.]]

[[Kira here: Are there more Whirlpools?]]

[[Itari here: Six that we know of.]]

[[Kira here: What purpose do they serve?]]

[[Itari here: Only the Vanished could say.… But, I do not understand. Our scouts have not scented a Whirlpool in any of your systems.]]

She cocked her head. [[Kira here: That is because it is not in one of our main systems, and because we only found it a few cycles ago. The Vanished’s makings have not helped us learn how to fight or swim through space.]]

Itari went a dull grey, and its tentacles knotted in on themselves, as if it were rubbing its hands together—hands with fingers that were far too long and flexible. The alien seemed unreasonably perturbed. Even its scent changed, growing bitter and almondy. (Was that arsenic she was smelling?)

“Navárez?” said Hawes. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

As Kira opened her mouth, the Jelly said, [[Itari here: You lie, Idealis.]]

[[Kira here: I do not.]] And she impressed the nearscent of sincerity upon her words.

The Jelly’s agitation increased. [[Itari here: The Vanished are the source of all wisdom, Idealis.]]

[[Kira here: Wisdom can come from within as well as without. Everything my kind has done, we have done on our own, without help from Vanished, Wranaui, Idealis, or any other form or kind.]]

With a wet, sticky stound, Itari let go of the deck with its suckers and started to push itself around the airlock, as if it were swimming in circles. It was, Kira thought, the Jellies’ version of pacing. Out of the corner of her mouth, she said, “The idea that we invented all our technology ourselves seems to be a bit disturbing to our friend here.”

Hawes smirked. “Score one for humanity, eh?”

The Jelly stopped and turned its tentacles toward Kira, pointing them at her as if they had eyes on the tips. [[Itari here: Now I understand.]]

[[Kira here: Understand what?]]

[[Itari here: Why it has been the plan—since first we scented your kind after the end of the Sundering—to destroy your conclaves once we reached a ripple of appropriate strength.]]

A splinter of unease burrowed into Kira. She resisted the urge to fidget in response. [[Kira here: Have you changed your mind? Do you agree with that plan?]]

The scent equivalent of a shrug. [[Itari here: Were it not for the Corrupted, yes. But circumstances are not what they were or will be.]]

“Did it really say that?” asked Hawes. “Really?”

Bemused, but not in a pleasant way, Kira said, “It doesn’t seem worried about how we might react.”

The lieutenant scrubbed his fingers through his short-cropped hair. “So … what? The Jellies think xenocide is normal? Is that it?” He was very young, Kira suddenly thought. No STEM shots for him. He couldn’t have been older than his midtwenties. Still just a kid despite all the responsibility the military had given him.

“Could be,” she said.

He gave her a worried look. “How is peace ever going to work then? Long term, that is.”

“I don’t know.… Let me ask a few more questions.”

He gestured toward Itari. “Go for it.”

Returning her attention to the Jelly, she said: [[Kira here: Tell us of the Sundering. What was it exactly?]]

[[Itari here: The greatest struggle of our kind. Arm fought against Arm in an attempt to control the makings of the Vanished. In the end, the makings nearly destroyed us. Entire planets were left uninhabitable, and it took us many cycles to rebuild and regain our strength.]]

“Say,” Hawes remarked, “do you think the Sundering explains why we haven’t seen any signals from the Jellies over the past hundred years? If they got knocked back and had to rebuild their tech, the light might not have had time to reach us.”

“Could be,” Kira said.

“Mmm. The brass back home are going to love this.”

Now they were coming to the crux of the matter. [[Kira here: Much of the destruction during the Sundering was caused by Corrupted, yes?]]

Again, nearscent of confirmation. [[Itari here: It was they that brought about the greatest calamities of the war. They that marked the darkest days of the conflict. And they that woke one of the beings you call the Seeker from its sleep.]]

[[Kira here: And how were the Corrupted stopped?]]

[[Itari here: Few records survived from the Sundering, so we do not know exactly how. But we know this much: the colony where the Corrupted first emerged was blasted out of existence by an impact from above. The seabed is cracked, and all forms of life on the planet are now gone. Some of the Corrupted swam into space, and those spread much as they are now spreading, and it was only with many resources and great effort that we killed them.]]

Queasiness formed in her stomach, and it wasn’t just from the weightlessness. [[Kira here: Do you think we can stop the Corrupted now?]]

The Jelly’s tentacles flushed with a deep purple. [[Itari here: You and the rest of your co-forms? No. Nor do we believe the Wranaui can. Not alone. These Corrupted are stronger and more virulent than those of the Sundering. We must fight them together if we are to have any hope of success. Know this, Idealis: to stop the Corrupted, every cell in their bodies must be obliterated or else they will grow anew. That is why we sought the Staff of Blue. It had the power to command the Idealis and more besides. With it, we could have broken the Corrupted. Without it, we are weak and vulnerable.]]

“What’s wrong?” Hawes murmured. “You’ve gone all green about the gills.”

“The nightmares…” Kira started to say, and then paused, tasting acid. Right then, she didn’t want to reveal her part in creating the Maw to the lieutenant or to the UMC at large. It would come out eventually, but she couldn’t see how the truth would make any difference to the League’s response. They needed to kill the nightmares. What else mattered? “The nightmares come from the Vanished,” she said, and translated the rest of Itari’s words.

The lieutenant scratched at his neck. “Well that’s not good.”

“Nope.”

“Don’t count out the UMC,” he said with false confidence. “We’re damn good at killing things, and we’ve got some real geniuses back home figuring out new ways of dealing out death. We’re not out of the fight by a long shot.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Kira.

He fiddled with a UMC logo patch on his sleeve. “What I don’t understand is, why are we seeing nightmares now? They’ve been around for a while, yeah? So what triggered them? You finding the xeno?”

She shrugged, uncomfortable. “The Jelly didn’t say.” Technically it was true.

“Has to be,” the lieutenant muttered. “Doesn’t make sense otherwise. Signal goes out, then…” His expression shifted. “Say, how did Tschetter’s Jellies know to show up at Adra when they did? Were they keeping an eye on the system, in case anyone found the xeno?”

[[No,]] Itari said in response. [[That would have attracted attention we did not want. When the reliquary was breached, lowsound farscent was released, and after it reached us, we sent our ship, the Tserro, to investigate.]]

Kira said, “Should I get some details on who exactly this we is?”

Hawes nodded. “Good idea. Let’s find out who we might be forming an alliance with.”

[[Kira here: The ones you serve, the ones who want to form a … shoal … with our leaders, do they have a name?]]

Nearscent of confirmation. [[Itari here: The Knot of Minds.]]

From the Soft Blade came an image of tentacles gripping and intertwining, and with that a sense of close trust. And Kira understood that a knot was a form of group bonding among the Jellies, one that signified a joint—and unbreakable—cause.

Itari was still talking: [[The Knot was formed to protect the secret of Shoal Leader Nmarhl.]]

A thrill of recognition passed through her at the name. She remembered Nmarhl from one of the memories the Soft Blade had shown her when she was investigating the computer system on the Jelly ship, back at 61 Cygni. And she again recalled the unusual fondness the xeno seemed to have for the shoal leader. [[Kira here: And what was that secret?]]

[[Itari here: The location of the Idealis, which Nmarhl hid at the end of the Sundering.]]

Kira had so many questions, she didn’t know what to ask first. [[Kira here: Why did Nmarhl hide the Idealis?]]

[[Itari here: Because the shoal leader failed in its attempt to seize control of the Arms. And because hiding the Idealis was the only way to protect it and to protect us from further Corruption. If this Idealis had been in use, the Sundering could easily have been the end of the Wranaui.]]

Kira took a moment to process that and to translate for Hawes.

“You remember this shoal leader?” the lieutenant asked.

She nodded, keeping her eyes on Itari. “A bit. It was definitely joined with the Soft Blade at some point.”

Hawes motioned for her to look at him. “Let me get this straight. The Knot of Minds tried to stage a coup back during the Sundering—whenever that was—and now they’re trying to do the same again?”

When he put it that way, it didn’t sound so good. “That’s what it looks like,” Kira said.

“So what was their justification back then, and what’s their justification now?”

The Jelly’s response was swift: [[Itari here: Our reason was and is the same: we believe there is a better current to follow. The one we are caught in now can only lead to the death of Wranaui everywhere, in this ripple and others.]]

[[Kira here: Then, if you succeed in replacing your leadership, is there one among the Knot of Minds who will scent for the Wranaui?]]

The Jelly was slow to answer. [[Itari here: That will depend on those whose patterns survive. Mdethn may, perhaps, be fitted to the task. Lphet, also, but the other Arms would dislike answering to one who followed the heresy of the Tfeir. Either way, it would be difficult for any of the Wranaui to replace the great and mighty Ctein.]]

At that name, and at that phrase, a line of ice poured down Kira’s spine. Flashes of images from her dreams filled her head: a vast bulk rooted amid the Abyssal Conclave; a huge, scheming presence that saturated the water with its pungency. [[Kira here: Is Ctein a name or a title?]]

[[Itari here: I do not understand.]]

[[Kira here: Are all your leaders called Ctein, or is it the name of just one?]]

[[Itari here: There is but one Ctein.]]

“It can’t be,” she murmured, fear prickling the back of her neck. [[Kira here: How old is Ctein?]] She had to stop herself from adding the phrase “the great and mighty.”

[[Itari here: The wise and ancient Ctein has guided the Arms since the last cycles of the Sundering.]]

[[Kira here: How many cycles around your sun has that been?]]

[[Itari here: The number would mean nothing to you, but Nmarhl placed the Idealis within its keeping place when your kind were first venturing off your homeworld, if that gives you an idea.]]

She did the math in her head. Over two and a half centuries. [[Kira here: And Ctein has ruled the waters for all that time?]]

[[Itari here: And longer.]]

[[Kira here: All in the same form?]]

[[Itari here: Yes.]]

[[Kira here: How long do Wranaui live?]]

[[Itari here: That depends on when we are killed.]]

[[Kira here: What if … you aren’t killed? How long would it take you to die from old age?]]

Nearscent of understanding. [[Itari here: Age does not kill us, two-form. Always we can revert to our hatchling form and grow anew.]]

[[Kira here: Your hatchling form…?]] Several more questions only left her more confused about the Jelly life cycle. There were eggs, hatchlings, pods, rooted forms, mobile forms, forms that didn’t seem to be sentient, and—as Itari seemed to indicate—a host of forms adapted to specific tasks or environments. The unique nature of the Jellies’ biology sparked Kira’s professional curiosity, and she found herself shifting back into her role of xenobiologist. It just didn’t make sense. Complex life cycles were nothing new. Plenty of examples existed on Earth and Eidolon. But Kira couldn’t figure out how all the parts and pieces Itari was mentioning were supposed to fit together. Every time she thought she had a handle on it, the Jelly would mention something new. As a puzzle, it was frustrating and exhilarating.

Hawes had other ideas in mind. “Enough with all the questions about eggs,” he said. “You can figure out the squishy stuff later. Right now we’ve got bigger problems.”

From then on, the conversation revolved around things Kira considered less interesting but—as she would acknowledge—were no less important. Things such as fleet placement and numbers, shipyard capabilities, travel distances between the Jelly outposts, battle plans, technological capabilities, and so forth. Itari answered most of the questions in a straightforward manner, but some subjects it evaded or outright refused to answer. Mostly questions having to do with the locations of the Jelly worlds. Understandable, Kira thought, if sometimes frustrating.

Yet, no matter what the topic, she couldn’t stop thinking about the great and mighty Ctein. The formidable Ctein. And at last, she interrupted the stream of Hawes’s questions to ask one of her own: [[Kira here: Why does Ctein refuse to join with us to fight the Corrupted?]]

[[Itari here: Because the cruel and hungry Ctein has grown bloated with age, and in its arrogance, it believes the Wranaui can defeat the Corrupted without help. The Knot of Minds believes otherwise.]]

[[Kira here: Has Ctein been a good leader?]]

[[Itari here: Ctein has been a strong leader. Because of Ctein we have rebuilt our shoals and expanded again across the stars. But many of the Wranaui are dissatisfied with the decisions Ctein has made these recent cycles, so we fight to have a new leader. It is not a big problem. Next ripple will be better.]]

Hawes made a noise of impatience, and Kira returned to asking questions for the lieutenant, and no more was said on the subject of Ctein.

They were still talking with Itari when the jump alert sounded and the Wallfish transitioned back to STL space.

“Two more to go,” said Hawes, dragging a sleeve across his forehead.

During their time in the Markov Bubble, the air in the ship had grown thick and stifling and hot enough that even Kira had begun to feel uncomfortable. She could only imagine how bad it was for the others.

They gripped the handholds in the walls while Gregorovich reoriented the Wallfish, and then off they went again, flying away many times faster than the speed of light.

The interrogation of Itari continued.

The third jump was shorter than the last—only a quarter of an hour—and the fourth one was shorter still. “Just to throw them for a real loop-de-loop,” Gregorovich said.

Then the Wallfish disengaged its Markov Drive, and they sat, seemingly motionless, in the dark depths of interstellar space, with radiators spread wide and the interior of the ship pulsing with heat.

“Gregorovich, any sign of the Jellies or the nightmares?” Kira asked.

“Not a whisper. Not a whisker,” said the ship mind.

She felt herself relax slightly. Maybe, just maybe, they had really managed to escape. “Thanks for getting us out of there in one piece,” she said.

A soft peal of laughter echoed from the speakers. “It was my neck on the line as well, O Meatbag, but yes, you are most welcome.”

“Alright,” said Hawes, “we’ll call it quits with the Jelly for now. We’ve got plenty of material. It’s going to take the spooks back home years to parse all this intel. Good job translating.”

Kira released the Soft Blade’s grip on the wall. “Of course.”

“Don’t go yet. I’m going to need you to translate for a little longer. Still have to get my men settled.”

So she stayed while Hawes summoned the Marines who didn’t have cryo tubes and, one by one, Itari cocooned them. The men were not happy with the prospect, but since there was no reasonable alternative, they had no choice but to agree.

Once the cocooned Marines were safely placed in the cargo hold, next to where Hawes and the rest of his squad would soon be lying frozen in their tubes, Kira left them and went to help the crew prepare the Wallfish for the three-month-long trip back to the League.

“Gregorovich gave me an update,” said Falconi as he descended toward her on the central ladder.

Good. That saved her from having to repeat everything Itari had said. “I feel like I have more questions than answers,” she said.

Falconi made a noncommittal noise and stopped in front of her. “You didn’t tell Hawes, did you?”

She knew what he meant. “No.”

His blue eyes fixed her in place. “You can’t avoid it forever.”

“I know, but … not yet. When we get back. I’ll tell the League then. It wouldn’t do any good now anyway.” She allowed a faint note of pleading into her voice as she spoke.

Falconi was slow to answer. “Okay. But don’t put it off any longer. One way or another, you’re going to have to face this thing.”

“I know.”

He nodded and continued down the ladder, passing so close she could smell the musk of his sweat. “Come on then. Could use your help.”

3.

As the Wallfish cooled, Kira worked alongside Falconi to secure equipment, flush lines, shut down nonessential systems, and otherwise prepare the ship for their upcoming trip. It wasn’t easy for her with only one hand, but Kira made do, using the Soft Blade to hold objects she couldn’t directly grasp.

The whole time, she kept thinking about her conversation with Itari. A number of things the Jelly had said were bothering her: words and phrases that didn’t entirely make sense. Seemingly innocuous expressions that were easy to chalk up to quirks of the Jellies’ language, but that—the more Kira focused on them—seemed to hint at greater unknowns.

And she wasn’t comfortable with unknowns of that sort. Not after learning the truth about the Maw.

When most of the big, obvious tasks were complete, Falconi sent her and Sparrow to carry water and several bags of sugar to Itari. The Jelly claimed its form could digest the simple molecules of sugar without any difficulty, although it wasn’t an ideal food long term.

Fortunately, long term wasn’t an issue. Itari would be cocooning itself once the Wallfish returned to FTL. Or so the Jelly claimed. It made Kira nervous to think of the Jelly perhaps being awake while the rest of them were in a coma-like state, oblivious to their surroundings.

They left the Jelly pouring the bags of sugar into the beak-like maw on the underside of its carapace and went then to the storm shelter near the center of the ship.

There, Kira watched with an increasing sense of loneliness as, one by one, the crew again got into their cryo tubes. (The Entropists had already retired to their cabin and the tubes contained within.)

Before closing the lid over himself, Vishal said, “Ah, Ms. Navárez, I forgot to tell you earlier: there is another pair of contacts waiting for you in sickbay. So sorry. Check the cupboard above the sink.”

“Thanks,” she said.

As in 61 Cygni, Falconi waited until the last. Holding onto a grip with one hand, he pulled off his boots with the other. “Kira.”

“Salvo.”

“Are you going to practice with the xeno on the way back, like you did before?”

She nodded. “I’m going to try. I have control, but … it’s not enough. If I’d had a better feel for the xeno, I might have been able to save Trig.”

Falconi studied her with an understanding expression. “Just be careful.”

“You know I will.”

“Since you’re going to be the only one up and around, can you do something for me?”

“Of course. What?”

He stashed the boots in the locker next to him and started peeling off his vest and shirt. “Keep an eye on the Jelly while we’re in cryo. We’re trusting it to not break out and kill us, and I’ll be honest, I don’t trust it that much.”

Kira nodded slowly. “I had the same thought. I can hang some webbing outside the airlock and hunker down there.”

“Perfect. We’ve got alarms set in case the Jelly does break out, so you should have plenty of warning.” He gave her a wry smile. “I know it won’t be that comfortable there in the entryway, but we don’t have any better options.”

“It’s fine,” said Kira. “Don’t worry about it.”

Falconi nodded and pulled off his shirt. Then he stripped off his pants and socks, put them in the locker, and pushed himself over to the one empty cryo tube. On the way, he trailed a hand across the side of Trig’s tube, leaving a three-fingered mark in the layer of frost coating the machine.

Kira joined Falconi as he popped open the lid to his tube. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but admire the play of muscles across his back.

“You going to be okay?” he said, fixing her with a look of unexpected sympathy.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

“Gregorovich will be up for a little while longer, and remember—if you need to talk, at any time, you wake me up. Seriously.”

“I will. Promise.”

Falconi hesitated, and then he put a hand on her shoulder. She covered it with her own, feeling the heat from his skin radiating into hers. He gave her a soft squeeze before letting go and pulling himself into the cryo tube.

“We’ll meet again at Sol,” he said.

She smiled, recognizing the lyrics. “In the shadow of the moon.”

“By the shine of that green Earth.… Goodnight, Kira.”

“Goodnight, Salvo. Sleep well.”

Then the lid of the cryo tube slid shut over his face, and the machine began to hum as it pumped in the chemicals that would induce hibernation.

4.

Kira carefully guided a bundle of bedding through the ship’s corridors. She’d wrapped it with several tendrils from the Soft Blade, so as to keep her hand free and keep the blankets from floating away.

When she reached the airlock, she saw Itari floating near the outer door, looking out the clear sapphire porthole at the spray of stars outside.

The Wallfish still hadn’t jumped back to FTL. Gregorovich was waiting until the ship was fully chilled. Already the temperature had dropped by a noticeable amount as the radiators did their job.

Kira secured the blankets to the deck with clips and webbing from the port cargo hold. Then she went and fetched the few supplies she would need for the long journey ahead: water, ration bars, wipes, bags to store trash, the replacement contacts Vishal had printed out, and her concertina.

When she was satisfied with her little nest, she went and opened the airlock. Anchoring herself to the frame of the open doorway, she was about to speak when the Jelly preempted her: [[Itari here: Your scent lingers, Idealis.]]

[[Kira here: What do you mean?]]

[[Itari here: The things you said earlier … Your kind and mine differ in more ways than just our flesh. I have been trying to understand, but I fear it is beyond this form.]]

She cocked her head. [[Kira here: I feel the same.]]

The Jelly blinked, pale nictitating membranes flashing across the black orbs of its eyes. [[Itari here: What is it that two-forms consider sacred, Idealis? If not the Vanished, then what?]]

The question daunted her. Now she was supposed to discuss religion and philosophy with an alien? Her classes on xenobiology had never covered that particular possibility.

She took a fortifying breath.

[[Kira here: Many things. There is no one right answer. Every two-form has to decide for themselves. It is a…]]—she struggled to find a translation for individual—[[… a choice each two-form has to make on their own. Some find the choice easier than others.]]

One of the Jelly’s tentacles rolled across its carapace. [[Itari here: What do you consider sacred, Idealis?]]

That stopped Kira. What did she consider sacred? Nothing so abstract as the concept of god or beauty or anything like that. Not numbers, as the Numenists did. Nor scientific knowledge, as the Entropists did. She briefly considered saying humanity, but that wasn’t right either. Too limited.

In the end she said, [[Kira here: Life. That is what I think is sacred. Without it, nothing else matters.]] When the Jelly didn’t immediately reply: [[What about the Wranaui? What about you? Is there anything other than the Vanished you consider sacred?]]

[[Itari here: We, the Wranaui. The Arms and our expanse into the swirl of stars. It is our birthright and our destiny and an ideal that all Wranaui are devoted to, even if we sometimes disagree on the means to accomplish our goal.]]

The answer disturbed Kira. There was too much of the zealot, the xenophobic, and the imperialistic about it for her liking. Hawes had been right; it wouldn’t be easy to live in peace with the Jellies.

Difficult doesn’t mean impossible, she reminded herself.

She changed the subject: [[Kira here: Why do you sometimes say this form when you refer to yourself? Is it because the Wranaui have so many different shapes?]]

[[Itari here: One’s form determines one’s function. If another function were needed, the form can be changed.]]

[[Kira here: How? Can you change the arrangement of your flesh just by thinking?]]

[[Itari here: Of course. If there were no thinking, why would one go to the Nest of Transference?]]

It was a term she didn’t recognize from the Soft Blade. [[Kira here: Is the Nest of Transference also a making of the Vanished?]]

[[Itari here: Yes.]]

[[Kira here: So if you want to change into your hatchling form or your rooted form, you would go to the Nest of Transference and—]]

[[Itari here: No. You misunderstand, Idealis. Those are forms of the original flesh. The Nest of Transference is used for forms that are manufactured.]]

Surprise gave her pause. [[Kira here: You mean your current form was made? In a machine?]]

[[Itari here: Yes. And if needed, I might choose another form at the Nest of Transference. Also too if this flesh were destroyed, I might select another.]]

[[Kira here: But, if your form were destroyed, you would be killed.]]

[[Itari here: How can I be killed when there is a record of my pattern at the Nest of Transference?]]

Kira frowned as she struggled to understand. Several more questions did little to clarify the matter. She couldn’t seem to get the Jelly to make a distinction between its body and its pattern, whatever that was.

[[Kira here: If your form were destroyed right now, would your pattern contain all your memories?]]

[[Itari here: No. All memories from when we left the system of the Vanished would be lost. This is why our shells always swim in sets of two or more unless the need for secrecy is great, as when we sent the Tserro to the reliquary.]]

[[Kira here: Then … the pattern is not you, is it? The pattern would be an out-of-date copy. A you from the past.]]

The Jelly’s colors grew more muted, neutral. [[Itari here: Of course the pattern would still be me. Why would it not? The passing of a few moments does not change my nature.]]

[[Kira here: What if your pattern were given a new form while your old form was still here? Would that be possible?]]

Nearscent of disgust spiked the air. [[Itari here: That would be the heresy of the Tfeir. No Wranaui from the other Arms would do such a thing.]]

[[Kira here: You disapproved of Lphet, then?]]

[[Itari here: Our goals are greater than our differences.]]

Kira thought on that for a while. So the Jellies were uploading their consciousness, or at least their memories, into different bodies. But they didn’t seem bothered by their actual deaths.… She couldn’t understand Itari’s seeming indifference to its individual fate.

[[Kira here: Don’t you want to live? Don’t you want to keep this form?]]

[[Itari here: So long as my pattern endures, I endure.]] One of its tentacles reached out, and Kira struggled not to recoil as the rubbery appendage poked her in the chest. The Soft Blade stiffened as if it were about to attack. [[The form is unimportant. Even if my pattern is erased—as Ctein did to Nmarhl’s, long ago—it will continue to propagate in the ripples that follow.]]

[[Kira here: How can you say that? What do you mean by ripple? What do you mean those that follow?]]

The Jelly flashed red and green, and its tentacles wrapped tighter about its carapace, but it refused to answer. Kira asked her questions twice more, to no response. And that was all she could extract from the Jelly on the subject of ripples.

She asked a different question then: [[Kira here: I am curious. What is the tsuro, the summons that I felt when the Knot of Minds arrived at the resting place of the Idealis? I’ve felt it from all your shells, except here in this system.]]

[[Itari here: The tsuro is another of the sacred artifacts of the Vanished. It speaks to the Idealis and coaxes it forth. Were it not bonded with you, the Idealis would answer of its own accord and move to present itself at the source of the summons. By use of the tsuro, Wranaui shells everywhere search for the Ideali.]]

[[Kira here: And have you found any more since the end of the Sundering?]]

[[Itari here: Since then? No. Yours is the last surviving. But we live in hope that the Vanished have left more of their makings for us to find and that, this time, we will treat them with greater wisdom than before.]]

She stared at the weave of fibers on the back of her hands: black, gleaming, complex. [[Kira here: Does your form know—does the Knot of Minds know—how to remove the Idealis from the one it is joined with?]]

The Jelly’s skin roiled with the colors of affront, and its nearscent acquired a mix of shock and outrage. [[Itari here: In what ripple would that be desired? To be joined with the Idealis is an honor!]]

[[Kira here: I understand. It is a matter of … curiosity.]]

The alien seemed to struggle with that, but in the end it said, [[Itari here: The only way this form knows to separate from the Idealis is death. Lphet and the other ruling forms of the Knot may be aware of other methods, but if so, they have not scented them.]]

Kira accepted the news with resignation. She wasn’t surprised. Just … disappointed.

Then the ghost of Gregorovich’s voice sounded from the speakers, and he said, “Retracting radiators. Transitioning to FTL in four minutes. Prepare thyselves.”

Only then did Kira notice how cold it had gotten in the antechamber. Frustrated that she didn’t have any more time for questions, she informed Itari of the impending jump and then retreated from the doorway and closed and locked the airlock door.

The lights switched to the dull red of ship-night, a whine sounded near the back of the Wallfish, and the exposed skin on Kira’s cheeks tingled as the Markov Drive activated and they set out on the last and longest leg of their journey: the trip to Sol.

5.

Through the airlock window, Kira watched with interest as Itari wound a cocoon around itself with goo secreted from the undersides of its tentacles. The viscous substance hardened quickly, and within only a few minutes, the Jelly lay hidden within an opaque, somewhat greenish pod stuck to the floor of the airlock.

Kira wondered how the alien would know when to wake up.

Not her problem.

She retreated to her own little nest, secured herself to the webbing, and wrapped herself with blankets. The antechamber was dark and intimidating in the nighttime lighting; hardly a friendly place to spend the next three months.

She shivered, finally feeling the cold.

“Just you and me, headcase,” she said to the erstwhile ceiling.

“Worry not,” whispered Gregorovich, “I shall keep you company, O Varunastra, until your eyes grow heavy and the soft sands of sleep dull your mind.”

“How comforting,” Kira said, but she only half meant the sarcasm. It was nice to have someone to talk to.

“Forgive me for my irrepressible curiosity,” said Gregorovich, and he chuckled, “but what strange scents did you exchange with our be-tentacled guest? You stood there for quite some minutes, and you seemed most affected by the stench afflicting your delicate nostrils.”

Kira snorted. “You could say that.… I’ll write a proper account later. You can see the details there.”

“Nothing immediately helpful, I take it,” said Gregorovich.

“No. But—” She explained about the Nest of Transference and ended with, “Itari said, The form is unimportant.”

“Bodies do tend to be rather fungible these days,” the ship mind said dryly. “As both you and I have discovered.”

Kira pulled the blankets tighter. “Was it difficult becoming a ship mind?”

“Easy certainly isn’t the word I would use to describe it,” said Gregorovich. “Every sense of mine was stripped away, replaced, and what I was, the very foundation of my consciousness, was expanded beyond any natural limit. ’Twas confusion piled upon confusion.”

The experience sounded deeply unpleasant, and it reminded Kira—somewhat to her distaste—of the times when she had extended the Soft Blade, and in doing so, extended her sense of self.

She shivered. The soft sway of her body in zero-g caused her to swallow hard and focus on a fixed spot on the wall while she tried to calm her inner ear. The darkness of the antechamber and the abandoned, empty feeling of the Wallfish affected her more than she liked. Had it really been less than half a day since they’d been fighting through the streets on Nidus?

It seemed as if it had been more than a week ago.

Trying to fend off her sudden loneliness, she said, “My first day here, Trig told me how—in your last ship—you crashed and got stranded. What was it like … being by yourself for so long?”

“What was it like?” said Gregorovich. He laughed with a demented tone, and at once, Kira knew she’d gone too far. “What was it like?… It was like death, like the obliteration of the self. The walls around my mind fell away and left me to gibber senselessly before the naked face of the universe. I had the combined knowledge of the entire human race at my disposal. I had every scientific discovery, every theory and theorem, every equation, every proof, and a million, million, million books and songs and movies and games—more than any one person, even a ship mind, could ever hope to consume. And yet…” He trailed off into a sigh. “And yet I was alone. I watched my crew starve and die, and when they were gone, there was nothing I could do but sit alone in the dark and wait. I worked on equations, mathematical concepts you could never comprehend with your puny little brain, and I read and watched and counted toward infinity, as the Numenists do. And all it did was stave off the darkness for one more second. One more moment. I screamed, though I have no mouth to scream. I wept, though I have no eyes for tears. I crawled through space and time, a worm inching through a labyrinth built by the dreams of a mad god. This I learned, meatbag, this and nothing more: when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.”

“Is that so great a revelation?” Kira asked quietly.

The ship mind tittered, and she could hear him swaying on the edge of madness. “Not at all. No indeed. Ha. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Banal even. Any reasonable person would agree, wouldn’t they? Ha. But to live it is not the same as hearing or reading it. Not at all. The revelation of truth is rarely easy. And that is what it was like, O Spiked One. It was revelation. And I would rather die than endure such an experience again.”

That much Kira could understand and appreciate. Her own revelations had nearly destroyed her. “Yeah. Same for me.… What was the name of the ship you were in?”

But Gregorovich refused to answer, which upon reflection, Kira decided was probably for the best. Talking about the crash only seemed to make him more unstable.

She pulled up her overlays and stared at them without seeing. How did you provide therapy for a ship mind? It wasn’t the first time she had wondered. Falconi had said that most of the psychiatrists who worked with them were ship minds themselves, but even then … She hoped Gregorovich would find the peace he was looking for—as much for their own sake as his—but solving his problems was beyond her.

6.

The long night crept past.

Kira wrote up her conversation with Itari, played her concertina, watched several movies from the Wallfish’s database—none of them particularly memorable—and practiced with the Soft Blade.

Before she started working with the xeno, Kira took time to think about what she was trying to accomplish. As she’d said to Falconi, control alone wasn’t enough. Rather, she needed … synthesis. A more natural joining between her and the Soft Blade. Trust. Otherwise she would always be second-guessing her actions, as well as those of the xeno. How could she not, given past mistakes? (Her mind wandered toward the subject of the Maw; with an effort of will, she resolutely pulled it back.) As she’d learned through painful experience, second-guessing could be every bit as deadly as overreacting.

She sighed. Why did everything have to be so hard?

With her goal in mind, Kira began much as she had before. Isometric exercises, unpleasant memories, physical and emotional strain … everything she could think of to test the Soft Blade. Once she was confident her grip on the xeno was as strong as ever, then and only then did she start to experiment by relaxing her dictatorial control. Just a little bit at first: a tiny amount of leeway so she could see how the Soft Blade would choose to act.

The results were mixed. Around half of the time the xeno did exactly what Kira wanted in the way she wanted, whether that was forming a shape on her skin, helping to hold a stress position, or fulfilling whatever other task she’d put to the organism. Perhaps a quarter of the time the Soft Blade did what she wanted but not as she expected. And the rest of the time, it reacted in a completely disproportionate or unreasonable manner, sending spikes or tendrils every which way. Those, of course, were the occurrences Kira was most concerned with.

When she’d had enough and stopped, Kira didn’t feel as if she had made any noticeable progress. The thought dampened her mood until she reminded herself that it would be over three months before they arrived at Sol. She still had lots of time to work with the Soft Blade. Lots and lots of time …

Gregorovich started talking with her again soon afterward. He seemed to have returned to his usual self, which she was pleased to hear. They played several games of Transcendence, and though he beat her every time, Kira didn’t mind, as she enjoyed having the company, any company.

She tried not to think too much about the nightmares or the Maw or even the great and mighty Ctein brooding in the depths of the Plaintive Verge … but her mind returned to them time and time again, making it difficult to relax into the state of dormancy needed to survive the journey.

It might have been a few hours, it might have been more than a day, but eventually Kira felt the familiar slowing of her body as the Soft Blade responded to the lack of food and activity and began to prepare her for the sleep that was more than sleep. Each time she entered hibernation, it seemed to become easier; the xeno was getting better at recognizing her intent and taking the appropriate action.

She set her weekly alarm, and as her eyes drifted shut, she said, “Gregorovich … think I’m going to sleep.”

“Rest well, meatbag,” the ship mind whispered. “I think I shall sleep as well.”

“… perchance to dream.”

“Indeed.”

His voice faded away, and the soft strains of a Bach concerto took its place. Kira smiled, snuggled deeper into the blankets, and at long last, allowed herself to relax into oblivion.

7.

A shapeless while passed, full of half-formed thoughts and urges: fears, hopes, dreams, and the ache of regrets. Once a week, the alarm roused Kira, and she—groggy and bleary-eyed—would train with the Soft Blade. It often felt like fruitless labor, but she persisted. And so did the xeno. From it she sensed a desire to please her, and with repetition of action came clarity of intent, if not mastery of form, and she began to feel a hint of yearning from the Soft Blade. As if it aspired to some type of artistry in its endeavors, some form of creativity. For the most part, she shied from those instincts, but they stirred her curiosity, and often Kira had long, deeply strange dreams of the greenhouses of her childhood and of plants sprouting and twining and leafing and spreading life, good and healthy.

Once every two weeks, the Wallfish emerged from FTL, and Kira went down to Sparrow’s makeshift gym and pushed her mind and body to their limits while the ship cooled. Each time, she sorely missed her right hand. The lack of it caused no end of difficulty, even though she used the Soft Blade as a substitute to hold and lift things. She consoled herself with the knowledge that using the xeno like that was good practice. And it was.

As she trained in the hold, the Marines stood watch among the nearby racks of equipment: Hawes and three others frozen in their blue-lit cryo tubes; Sanchez, Tatupoa, Moros, and one other wrapped in the same cocoons that had saved Trig’s life. Seeing them there left Kira feeling as if she’d stumbled upon a row of ancient statues set to defend the souls of the dead. She gave them a wide berth and did her best to avoid looking at them, an odd bit of superstition for her.

Sometimes she ate a ration bar after exercising, to keep up her strength, but mostly she preferred water and a return to hibernation.

Partway through the first month, in the empty hours of the night, as she floated outside Itari’s airlock—all but insensate to the universe around her—a vision coalesced behind her shuttered eyelids, a memory from another time and another mind:

Summoned once more to the high-vaulted presence chamber, she and her flesh stood as witness before the gathered Heptarchy, three to each ascension, and the Highmost stationed between.

The central seal broke, and through the patterned floor rose a gleaming prism. Within the faceted cage, a seed of fractal blackness thrashed with ravening anger, the perversion pulsing, stabbing, tearing, ceaselessly battering its transparent prison. Flesh of her flesh, but now tainted and twisted with evil intent.

“What now must be done?” the Highmost asked.

The Heptarchy replied with many voices, but one spoke most clearly: “We must cut the branch; we must burn the root. The blight cannot be allowed to spread.”

But dissent made itself known with another voice: “True it is we must protect our gardens, but pause a moment and consider. There is potential here for life beyond our plans. What arrogance have we to put that aside unexamined? We are not all-knowing nor all-seeing. Within the chaos might also dwell beauty and, perhaps, fertile soil for the seeds of our hope.”

Long discussion followed, much of it angry, and all the while the captive blackness struggled to escape.

Then the Highmost stood and struck the floor with the Staff of Blue and said, “The fault is ours, but the blight cannot be allowed to persist. The risk is too great, the rewards too uncertain, too slight. Although light may emerge from dark, it would be wrong to allow the dark to smother the light. Some acts exist beyond forgiveness. Illuminate the shadows. End the blight.”

“End the blight!” cried the Heptarchy.

Then the rainbowed prism flashed blindingly bright, and the malevolence within shrieked and burst into a cloud of falling embers.