To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

CHAPTER I. DISSONANCE

1.

Kira’s eyes snapped open.

Why had she woken? Some change in the environment had roused the Soft Blade, and it her. An almost imperceptible shift in the air currents circulating throughout the Wallfish. A distant whir of machinery coming to life. A slight decrease in the otherwise stifling temperature. Something.

A jolt of alarm caused her to glance at the nearby airlock. The Jelly, Itari, was still inside where it ought to be, encased in its secreted pod, barely visible in the dull red light of the long ship-night.

Kira let out her breath, relieved. She really didn’t want to have to fight the Jelly.

“G-Gregorovich?” she said. Her voice was rusty as an old wrench. She coughed and tried again, but the ship mind still didn’t answer. She tried a different tack: “Morven, are you there?”

“Yes, Ms. Navárez,” the Wallfish’s pseudo-intelligence answered.

“Where are we?” Kira’s throat was so parched, the words came out in a faint rasp. She tried to swallow, despite the lack of moisture in her mouth.

“We have just arrived at our destination,” said Morven.

“Sol,” Kira croaked.

“That is correct, Ms. Navárez. Sol system. The Wallfish emerged from FTL four minutes and twenty-one seconds ago. Standard arrival procedures are in effect. Captain Falconi and the rest of the crew will be awake soon.”

They’d made it. They’d actually made it. Kira dreaded to think about all the things that might have happened since they’d left 61 Cygni six months ago.

It hardly seemed real that they’d been traveling for half a year. The wonders of hibernation, artificial or otherwise.

“Has anyone hailed us?” she asked.

“Yes, Ms. Navárez,” Morven replied, prompt as could be. “Fourteen messages from UMC monitoring stations. I have explained that the crew is currently indisposed. However, local authorities are most insistent that we identify our system of origin and our current mission as soon as possible. They are rather agitated, Ms. Navárez.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kira muttered. Falconi could deal with the UMC once he was out of cryo. He was good at that sort of thing. Besides, she knew he would want to speak for the Wallfish.

Feeling uncomfortably stiff, she began to extract herself from the nest of blankets and webbing she’d constructed close to the airlock.

Her hand.

Her forearm and hand that she had cut off in the Jelly ship had … reappeared. Astonished, disbelieving, Kira held up the arm, turned it so she could see every part, worked her fingers open and closed.

She wasn’t imagining things. The arm was real. Hardly believing, she touched it with her other hand, feeling fingers sliding across fingers. Only five days had passed since she’d last woken, and in that time, the Soft Blade had constructed a perfect replica of the flesh she had lost.

Or had it?

A sudden shade of fear colored Kira’s thoughts. Drawing a breath, she focused on the back of her hand and, with an effort of will, forced the Soft Blade to retreat.

It did, and she uttered a soft cry as the shape of her hand caved inward, melting away like ice cream on a hot summer’s day. She recoiled, both mentally and physically, losing her focus in the process. The Soft Blade snapped back into shape, again assuming the form of her missing limb.

Tears filmed her eyes, and Kira blinked, feeling a sense of bitter loss. “Dammit,” she muttered, angry with herself. Why was she letting the missing hand affect her so much? Getting an arm or a leg replaced wasn’t that big of a deal.

But it was. She was her body, and her body was her. There was no separation between mind and matter. Her hand had been a part of her self-image for her entire life up until Bughunt, and without it, Kira felt incomplete. For a moment she’d had hope that she was whole again, but no, it wasn’t to be.

Still, she had a hand, and that was better than the alternative. And the fact that the Soft Blade had managed to replicate her missing limb was cause for optimism. Why had it done so now and not before? Because it knew they were nearing the end of their trip? As a demonstration of the sort of cooperation she’d been attempting to train all the way from Bughunt? Kira wondered. Regardless of the answer, she felt vindicated in the results. The Soft Blade had acted of its own volition (although perhaps guided by her own, unvoiced desires) and in a constructive manner at that.

Again, Kira examined her hand, and she marveled at the detail. It was, so far as she could tell, a near-perfect copy of the original. The only real difference she noticed was a slight disparity in density; the new arm felt perhaps a hair heavier. But it was a small change, hardly perceptible.

Still testing the mobility of her new fingers, Kira climbed out of the nest. She attempted to pull up the date on her overlays and only then realized that—as on the trip to Bughunt—the Soft Blade had absorbed her contacts.

Belatedly she remembered the small case containing the replacements Vishal had printed for her. She dug it out from the blankets and carefully placed each transparent lens onto the corresponding eye.

She blinked and felt a sense of comfort as the familiar HUD of her overlays popped up. There now. She was a fully functioning person again.

Resisting the urge to check the news, Kira left the airlock, pulled herself along the walls until she reached the center of the Wallfish, and then started up the main shaft.

The ship was still so quiet, empty, and dark, it felt abandoned. If not for the sound of the life-support fans, it might have been a derelict drifting alone through space for gods knew how long. Kira felt like a scavenger moving through halls that had once been inhabited by others … or like an explorer opening a centuries-old mausoleum.

Her thoughts returned to the city on Nidus and their dire findings there. She growled and shook her head, annoyed. Her imagination was getting the better of her.

As she reached the level below the Control deck, the thrust alert sounded. Taking heed, Kira planted her feet on the floor, and a proper sense of weight pressed her down—there was again a down!—as the Wallfish’s fusion drive roared back to life.

She sighed with relief, welcoming the burn.

The surrounding lightstrips flickered and changed from red to the bluish-white glow of ship-day. The light was almost painfully bright after so long spent in the somber dark. Kira shielded her face until her eyes adjusted.

Falconi and the rest of the crew were just emerging from cryo when Kira arrived at the ship’s storm shelter. Dropping to all fours on the deck, Sparrow dry-heaved like a cat with a hairball.

“God, I hate long runs,” the woman said, and wiped her mouth.

“Good, you’re up,” said Kira.

Falconi grunted. “If you can call it that.” He looked as green as Sparrow, and like all the crew, he had bruised circles under his eyes. Kira didn’t envy them the side effects of such an extended cryo sleep.

Sparrow hacked again and then staggered to her feet and joined Falconi, Nielsen, and Hwa-jung as they retrieved clothes from their lockers. Vishal took longer to get going. Once he did, he went around handing out the little blue pills Kira knew so well. They helped with the nausea, as well as replenishing some of the body’s lost nutrients.

Vishal offered one of the pills to her as well, but she declined.

“What’s the shape of things?” Falconi asked, pulling on his boots.

“Not sure yet,” said Kira.

Then Gregorovich’s voice broke in on them with a laughing, teasing tone. “Greetings, my lovelies. Welcome back to the land of the living. Yes, oh yes. We’ve survived the great journey across the void. Once again we have defied the dark and lived to tell the tale.” And he laughed until the ship rang with the sound of his voice.

“Someone’s in a good mood,” said Nielsen as she closed her locker. Vishal joined her and bent his head to ask her something in an undertone.

“Hey,” said Sparrow, taking a proper look at Kira. “Where’d you get the new arm?”

Kira shrugged, self-conscious. “The Soft Blade. I woke up with it.”

“Huh. Just make sure it doesn’t get away from you.”

“Yes, thank you.”

All of the cryo tubes were open save Trig’s. Kira went to pay her respects. Through the frosted viewplate, the kid looked the same as before, his expression unsettlingly serene. If not for the deathly pallor of his skin, he might have been sleeping.

“Right,” said Falconi as he started toward the door. “Let’s see what’s what.”

2.

“Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-stick,” said Sparrow. Next to her, Hwa-jung’s brow pinched, and she made a disapproving sound, though she never took her gaze off the holo. None of them did.

Falconi was scrolling through images from throughout the system. Sol was a war zone. The ruins of antimatter farms floated inside the orbit of Mercury. Ship debris cluttered the skies over Venus and Mars. On asteroids, hab-domes had been cracked open like eggs. Damaged space stations, rings, and O’Neill cylinders drifted abandoned throughout the system. Hydrotek refueling facilities were venting plumes of burning hydrogen from punctured storage tanks. On Earth—Earth of all places!—impact craters marred the northern and southern hemispheres, and a black blight covered part of Australia.

Large numbers of ships and orbital platforms clustered around the settled planets. The UMC’s Seventh Fleet was massed by Deimos, close enough to the Markov Limit that they could jump out at short notice, but not so far away that they couldn’t help the inner planets in an emergency.

In several places, fighting was ongoing. The Jellies had established a small operating base all the way out on Pluto, and they’d invaded a number of underground settlements along the arctic regions of Mars. The tunnels prevented the UMC from clearing out the aliens with aerial attacks, but ground operations were in progress to eliminate the Jellies while also trying to save the civilians in the area. More serious still was the blotch on Australia: a nightmare ship had crashed there, and within hours, their infection had taken root, spreading their corrupted tissue through the soil. Fortunately for Earth, the crash had occurred in the barest of deserts, and the immediate use of an orbital solar array to scorch and melt the area had contained the infection, although efforts were ongoing to ensure that no scrap of tissue had escaped destruction.

“My God,” said Vishal, and crossed himself.

Even Falconi seemed stunned by the extent of the damage.

Nielsen uttered a distressed sound as she pulled up a window listing the news from Venus. Kira glimpsed part of a headline saying: Falling City Is—

“I have to make a call,” said the first officer. Her face was deathly pale. “I have to check if … if…”

“Go,” said Falconi. He touched her on the shoulder. “We’ve got this.”

Nielsen gave him a grateful look and then hurried out of Control.

Kira exchanged worried glances with the rest of the crew. If Sol was this bad, what was the rest of the League like? Weyland! She fought a sudden surge of despair.

Just as she started to search for news from home, Gregorovich said, “Ahem, if I might make a suggestion, it would be best to answer the UMC before they do something foolish. They’re threatening us with all sorts of violence if we don’t provide immediate flight information, as well as clarification of intent.”

Falconi sighed. “Might as well get this over with. Do they know who we are?”

The ship mind chuckled without much humor. “Judging by the frantic nature of their calls, I would say that is a most definite yes.”

“Alright. Put them on the line.”

Kira sat near the back of Control and listened while Falconi talked with whomever Gregorovich had connected him with. “Yes,” he said. “… No.… That’s right. The UMCS Darmstadt.… Gregorovich, you’ll—… Uh-huh. She’s right here.… Okay. Roger that. Over and out.”

“Well?” Kira asked.

Falconi rubbed his face and looked between her, Sparrow, and Hwa-jung. If anything, the circles under his eyes had gotten darker. “They’re taking us seriously, so that’s a start. UMC wants us to dock at Orsted Station, right quick-like.”

“How far away is that?” said Kira.

Before she could pull up her overlays, Falconi said, “Seven hours.”

“Orsted is a hab-ring out by Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons,” said Sparrow. “The UMC use it as a major staging point.”

That made sense. The Markov Limit for Sol was right near Jupiter’s orbit. Kira didn’t know a whole lot about Sol, but that much she remembered from her stellar geography class.

“You didn’t tell them we have a Jelly on board?” Kira said.

Falconi took a long drink from a water bottle. “Nope. Don’t want to alarm ’em too much. Figured we can work up to it.”

“They’re going to be pissed when they find out,” said Kira.

“That they are.”

Then Hawes’s voice, rough from cryo, came over the intercom: “Captain, we’re out of the cryo tubes, but we need the Jelly to come get these damn cocoons off the rest of my men. We’d cut them off, but I’m not sure what it would do to them.”

“Roger that, Lieutenant,” Falconi said. “Send someone over to the airlock, and I’ll have Kira meet them there.”

“Appreciate it, Captain.”

Falconi glanced at the ceiling. “Gregorovich, is the Jelly awake yet?”

“Just barely,” said the ship mind.

“Wonder how it knew?” Falconi muttered.

Kira was already moving toward the door as he looked at her. “I’m on it,” she said.

3.

Escorting Itari to the cargo hold, waiting while it extracted the three Marines and—with another secreted gel—revived them, took nearly forty minutes. When not translating, Kira stood by one of the racks of equipment, skimming news reports from Weyland.

They weren’t encouraging.

At least one article claimed that Weyland had suffered orbital bombardment near Highstone. Her family didn’t live especially close to the city, but they were close enough that the news made Kira even more worried.

The Jellies had also landed near Toska, a settlement in Weyland’s southern hemisphere, but according to the most recent news (which was nearly a month old), they hadn’t stayed. Several nightmares had passed through the outer part of the system, and they and the Jellies had engaged in a furious fight, the outcome of which was unknown, as all ships involved had jumped to FTL, one after another. The League had sent reinforcements to the system, but it had only been a small task force; the bulk of their ships were kept concentrated in and around Sol, to protect Earth.

Kira stopped reading when Itari finished with the Marines, and she walked the Jelly back to the airlock. When Kira told it about Orsted, Itari expressed polite acknowledgement and nothing more. The alien seemed surprisingly uncurious about where the Wallfish was heading or what would happen when they arrived. When she asked about that, it replied, [[Itari here: The ripple will spread as it will.]]

With the Jelly back in the airlock, Kira swung by the galley to grab some food and then climbed back up to Control. Nielsen arrived just as she did. The first officer was flushed and had tears in her eyes.

“Everything okay?” Falconi asked from across the holo table.

Nielsen nodded as she sank into her crash chair. “My family is alive, but my daughter, Yann, lost her home.”

“On Venus?” Kira asked.

Nielsen sniffed and smoothed the front of her tan shirt. “The whole city was shot down. She barely escaped.”

“Damn,” said Falconi. “At least she made it.”

A minute of silence followed. Then Nielsen stiffened and looked around. “Where’s Vishal?”

Falconi waved toward the back of the ship in a distracted way. “Went to check on sickbay. Said something about running a few tests on the Marines.”

“Didn’t he live in a hab-cylinder here at Sol?”

Concern spread across Falconi’s face. “Did he? He never mentioned that to me.”

Nielsen let out an exasperated sound. “Men. If you ever actually bothered asking some questions, you might learn—” She shoved herself up from her chair and stalked out of Control.

Falconi watched her go with a faint look of puzzlement. He looked over at Kira, as if hoping for an explanation. She shrugged and looked back at her overlays.

Interstellar wars were slow-moving affairs—even with technology as advanced as the Jellies’—but what had occurred was of a depressing sameness. Weyland’s experience was mirrored by those of the other colonies (although the battles at Stewart’s World were more similar in size to those at Sol).

And then there were the nightmares. As the months swept past, they had become increasingly prevalent, to the point where the UMC was fighting them as often as the Jellies. Every time they appeared, the monsters seemed to take a different set of forms, as if the result of constant mutation. Or, as Kira felt more likely, as if the driving intelligence behind them—the mashing Maw born of the unholy fusion of human, Wranaui, and Soft Blade—was feverishly, frantically, insanely, and randomly experimenting to find the best possible flesh for fighting.

The scale of suffering that the nightmares must be enduring, as well as inflicting, sickened Kira to think of.

She was unsurprised to see that the war had resulted in an unprecedented drawing together of humanity. Even the Zarians had put aside their differences with the League in order to join forces against their shared enemies. What was the point of arguing amongst yourselves if the monsters in the dark were attacking?

And yet for all that, the combined might of every living human wasn’t enough to fight off their attackers. Fragmented though the news was, it was more than clear that they were losing. Humanity was losing, despite every effort to the contrary.

The news was overwhelming, exhausting, and depressing. At last, unable to bear any more, Kira tabbed out of her overlays and sat staring at the banks of lights and switches overhead, trying not to think about how everything seemed to be falling apart.

An alert appeared in the bottom corner of her vision. A message waiting for her. Kira opened it, expecting to see something from Gregorovich.

It wasn’t.

Sitting in her inbox was a reply to the video she’d sent to her family from 61 Cygni. A reply from her mother’s account.

Kira stared, shocked. With a start, she remembered to breathe. She hadn’t expected an answer. Her family couldn’t have known where or when she would return, so how could there be a message waiting for her here, at Sol? Unless …

Trembling slightly, she opened the file.

A video appeared in front of her, a dark window into what appeared to be an underground bunker. Kira recognized it as the sort used for radiation shielding by the first wave of colonists on Weyland.… Her parents were sitting facing her, gathered around a desk cluttered with tools and medkits. Isthah stood behind them, peering between their mom and dad with an anxious face.

Kira swallowed.

Her dad had a bandage around his right thigh. He looked painfully thin, and the lines around his eyes and nose were far deeper than she remembered. There was white in his sideburns that shouldn’t have been there, not if he’d gotten his scheduled STEM shots. As for her mom, she’d grown even harder, like an eagle carved from granite, and her hair was cut short, in the style favored by colonists who spent most of their time living in skinsuits.

Only Isthah appeared much the same, and Kira took some comfort in that.

Her mom cleared her throat. “Kira, we just received your message yesterday. It was a month late, but it got here.”

Then her dad: “We’re really happy to know you’re alive, honey. Really happy. You had us worried for a while.” Behind him, Isthah ducked her head. Kira was surprised she didn’t butt in; the restraint was uncharacteristic. But then, they were living in uncharacteristic times.

Her mom glanced at the other two before focusing on the camera again. “I’m sorry, we’re sorry, to hear about your teammates, Kira. And … Alan. He seemed like a good person.”

“This can’t be easy for you,” her father added. “Just know we’re thinking about you and wishing you the best. I’m sure the scientists here in the League can find a way to get this alien—” He hesitated. “—this alien parasite off you.” Her mom put a comforting hand on his arm.

She said, “I’m not sure why the League let your message go through. Maybe they missed it, but whatever. I’m glad it got here. You can see we’re not at home. The Jellies came by a few weeks ago, and there’s been fighting around Highstone. We had to evacuate, but we’re okay. We’re doing fine. We have a place to stay here with some folks called the Niemerases—”

“Over on the other side of the mountains,” said her father.

A tip of the head from her mom. “They’re letting us live in their shelter for the time being. It’s decent protection, and we have plenty of room.” It didn’t look like plenty of room to Kira.

“The Jellies burned the greenhouses,” Isthah said in a low voice. “They burned them, sis. Burned all of them.…”

No.

Their parents shifted, uncomfortable. Her dad looked down at his large hands where they rested on his knees. “Yeah,” he said. Kira had never seen him appear so sad or defeated. A hollow chuckle escaped him. “Got this scratch trying to get out in time.” He tapped the bandage on his leg and forced a smile.

Then her mom stiffened her back and said, “Listen to me, Kira. You don’t worry about us, okay? Go do this expedition you have to do, and we’ll be here when you get back.… We’re going to send this recording to every system in the League, so no matter where you arrive, it’ll be waiting for you.”

“We love you, honey,” said her father. “And we’re very proud of you and the work you’re doing. Try to stay safe, and we’ll see you soon.”

There was a bit more, a few more words of farewell from her mom and Isthah, and then the video ended.

Kira’s overlays swam before her, blurred and watery. She took a hitched breath and realized she was crying. Closing the display, she hunched forward and buried her face in her hands.

“Hey now,” said Falconi, sounding alarmed and concerned at the same time. He came over, and she felt his hand light between her shoulder blades. “What’s wrong?”

“I got a message from my family,” she said.

“Are they—”

“No, no, they’re fine, but—” Kira shook her head. “They had to leave our home, where I grew up. And, just seeing them … my mom, my dad, my sister; they’re not having an easy time of it.”

“No one is these days,” Falconi said gently.

“I know, but this was from—” She checked the date on the file. “Almost two months ago. Two months. The Jellies hit Highstone with orbital bombardment about a month ago, and—and I don’t even know if they’re…” She trailed off. The surface of her arms prickled with tiny points as the Soft Blade mirrored her emotions. A tear fell onto her left forearm and was quickly absorbed by the fibers.

Falconi knelt next to her. “Is there anything I can do?”

Surprised, she considered for a moment. “No, but … thank you. Only thing you or I or anyone can do to help is find a way to end this damn war.”

“That would certainly be nice.”

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What about your family? Have you—”

A flicker of pain darkened his eyes. “No, and they’re too far away to just call. I don’t know if they’d want to hear from me anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” said Kira. “Not for sure. Look at what’s happening out there. We’re facing what could be the end of everything. You should touch base with your parents. If not now, when?”

Falconi was silent for a while, and then he patted her on the shoulder and stood. “I’ll think about it.”

It wasn’t much, but Kira didn’t think she could expect anything more from him. She got to her feet as well and said, “I’m going to my cabin. I want to answer them before we arrive at Orsted.”

Falconi grunted, already lost in examination of the holo. “I wouldn’t count on the League letting you get a message out. Them or the Jellies. Bet you a bucket of bits Weyland is jammed up as bad as the toilet we had in the hold.”

A moment of uncertainty shook Kira’s confidence. Then, accepting the situation as it was, she steadied herself and said, “Doesn’t matter. I have to try, you know?”

“Family is that important to you, huh?”

“Of course. Isn’t it to you?”

He didn’t answer, but she saw the muscles in his shoulders bunch and tense.

4.

Seven hours.

They passed faster than Kira expected. She recorded her response to her family—she told them what had happened at Bughunt, although as with Hawes, she avoided mentioning her role in creating the Maw—and she even showed them a little of what the Soft Blade was capable of by holding up her hand and forming the blossom of a Midnight Constellation from her palm. She hoped that would make her father smile. Most of what she said were general well-wishes and exhortations for them to stay safe, and she ended with, “Hopefully you get this in the next week or so. I don’t know what the League is going to have me doing, but I’m guessing they won’t let me communicate with you for a while.… Whatever’s happening there on Weyland, just hold on. We have a chance for peace with the Jellies, and I’m going to be working to make it happen as fast as possible. So don’t give up, you hear me? Don’t give up.… Love you all. Bye.”

Afterward, Kira took a few minutes for herself in the dark of her cabin, eyes closed, lights off, while she allowed her breathing to slow and body to cool.

Then she gathered herself and returned to Control. Vishal was there, talking in low tones with Falconi and Sparrow. The doctor stood bending at the neck to be closer to their heights.

“—that’s too bad, Doc,” said Falconi. “Seriously. If you need to bail on us, I’d understand. We could pick up another—”

Vishal was already shaking his head. “No, that will not be necessary, Captain, although I thank you. My uncle said he will let me know as soon as they find out.”

Sparrow startled him with a slap on the shoulder. “You know we’ve got your back, Doc. Anything I can do to help, you just say the word, and”—she made a whistling sound—“wsipp, I’m there.”

At first Vishal appeared offended by her familiarity, but then his posture softened and he said, “I appreciate that, Ms. Sparrow. Most truly I do.”

As Kira took her seat, she gave Falconi an inquiring glance.

As Vishal moved over to his crash chair near her own, Kira said, “Falconi just told me. I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”

Vishal lowered himself into the chair. A dark frown furrowed his brow, but his voice remained gentle as he said, “Thank you for your kindness, Ms. Kira. I’m sure everything will be fine, God willing.”

Kira hoped he was right.

She switched to her overlays and pulled up the feed from the Wallfish’s rear-facing cameras so she could watch their approach to the banded mass of Jupiter and the tiny, speckled disk that was Ganymede.

The sight of Jupiter in all its orange-colored glory reminded her with painful strength of Zeus hanging in the sky of Adrasteia. No wonder: the similarities had been the reason the original survey team had given Zeus its name.

Ganymede, by comparison, seemed so small as to be inconsequential, even though—as Kira’s overlays informed her—it was the largest moon in the system, larger even than the planet Mercury.

As for their destination, Orsted Station, it was a fleck of dust floating high above the battered surface of Ganymede. Several sparkling motes, smaller still, accompanied it on its orbit, each mote marking the position of one of the many transports, cargo haulers, and drones clustered around the station.

Kira shivered. She couldn’t help it. No matter how often she thought she understood the immensity of space, something would happen to drive home the fact that no, she really didn’t. The human brain was physically incapable of grasping the distances and scales involved. At least unaltered humans were. Maybe ship minds were different. All that empty vastness, and nothing humans had built (or would ever build) could compare.

She shook herself and returned her gaze to the station. Even the most experienced spacers could go mad if they stared into the void long enough.

It had always been a goal of Kira’s to visit Sol and, most particularly, Earth, that great treasure trove of biology. But she had never imagined that her visit would occur as it was: harried and hurried and in the shadow of war.

Still, the sight of Jupiter filled her with a sense of wonder, and she wished Alan was there to share the experience with her. They’d talked about it a few times: making enough money so they could afford to vacation in Sol. Or else getting a research grant that would allow them to travel to the system on the company dime. It had been nothing more than wishful thinking, though. Idle speculations on a possible future.

Kira forced her thoughts elsewhere.

“Everything shipshape?” Falconi asked when Nielsen came floating through the doorway a few minutes later.

“Shipshape as can be,” said Nielsen. “We shouldn’t have any problems with inspectors.”

“Aside from Itari,” said Kira.

The first officer smiled with a dry expression. “Yes, well, at least they can’t blame us for breaking quarantine. There hasn’t been proper biocontainment with the Jellies since day one.” Then she went and sat in the crash chair on the other side of Vishal.

Sparrow made a disgusted noise and looked over at Nielsen. “You see what the Stellarists are up to?”

“Mmm. No worse than the Expansion or Conservation Parties. They’d do the same if they were in charge.”

Sparrow shook her head. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. The Premier is using this whole state of emergency thing to really clamp down on the colonies.”

“Ugh,” said Kira. Why was she not surprised? The Stellarists were always putting Sol first. Understandable to a point, but it didn’t mean she had to like it.

Nielsen assumed a pleasantly blank face. “That’s a rather extreme point of view, Sparrow.”

“Just you watch,” the short-haired woman said. “After this whole mess is over, if there even is an after, you won’t be able to so much as spit without getting permission from Earth Central. Guarantee it.”

“You’re overst—”

“What am I saying? You’re from Venus. Of course you’re going to back Earth, just like everyone else who grew up with their heads in the clouds.”

A frown settled on Nielsen’s face, and she started to answer when Falconi said, “Enough with the politics. Save it for when we’ve got enough drink to make it tolerable.”

“Yessir,” said Sparrow in a surly voice.

Kira returned her attention to her overlays. She never could keep track of the finer points of interstellar politics. Too many moving parts. But she did know she didn’t like the Stellarists (and most politicians, for that matter).

As she watched, Orsted swelled in size until it dominated the aft view. The station looked heavy and brutal, like a gothic gyroscope, dark of hue and sharp of edge. The stationary shield ring appeared undamaged, but the rotating hab-ring mated to it had several large rents along one quadrant, as if a monster had raked Orsted with its claws. Explosive decompression had peeled the hull back along the edges of the holes, turning the plating into lines of jagged petals. Between the petals, rooms were visible, white and glittery with a layer of frost.

The top face of Orsted’s central hub (where top meant pointing away from Ganymede) was a bristle of antennas, dishes, telescopes, and weapons, standing motionless on their frictionless bearings. Most of the equipment appeared broken or slagged. Fortunately, the attacks didn’t seem to have penetrated to the fusion reactor buried within the core of the hub.

The spindly, cross-braced truss that extended for several hundred meters from the bottom face of Orsted’s hub appeared intact, but many of the transparent radiators that fringed it had holes punched through them or had been shattered, reducing them to knifelike shards that dribbled molten metal from their severed veins. Dozens of service bots were flitting about the damaged radiators, working to stanch the loss of coolant.

The auxiliary communications and defense array mounted at the far end of the truss appeared scorched and mangled. Through some incredible stroke of luck, the containment chamber in the Markov generator (which powered the station’s FTL sensors) hadn’t been breached. The generator only held a minuscule amount of antimatter at any given time, but if it had lost containment, the whole array (and a good part of the truss) would have been annihilated.

Four UMC cruisers hung off the port side of the station, a visible demonstration of the League’s military power.

“Thule,” said Sparrow, taking a seat. “They really got the shit beaten out of them.”

“Ever been to Orsted before?” Kira asked.

Sparrow licked her lips. “Once. On leave. Wouldn’t care to repeat the experience.”

“Better strap in,” said Falconi from across Control.

“Yessir.”

They secured themselves, and then the burn ended. Kira made a face at the return to zero-g. The Wallfish performed one last skewflip (so it was flying nose-first toward the station), and Gregorovich said, “ETA, fourteen minutes.”

Kira tried to empty her mind.

Hwa-jung joined them soon after, pulling herself into Control with the grace of a ballet dancer. An expression of disgust marred her face, and she seemed more surly than usual.

“How are Runcible and Mr. Fuzzypants?” Falconi asked.

The machine boss grimaced. “That cat had another accident. Yuck. There was poop everywhere. If I ever buy a ship myself, I won’t have a cat. Pigs are okay. Not cats.”

“Thanks for cleaning up.”

“Mmh. I deserve hazard pay.”

For a time they were silent. Then Sparrow said, “You know, speaking of biocontainment, they really shouldn’t have been so angry with us on Ruslan.”

“Why’s that?” Nielsen asked.

“All those escaped animals were a great source of newtrition.”

Kira groaned along with everyone else, but it was a token protest. Most of them, she thought, were just sorry Trig wasn’t there to make his usual jokes.

“Thule be saving us from puns,” said Vishal.

“Could be worse,” said Falconi.

“Yeah? How?”

“She could be a mime.”

Sparrow threw a glove at him, and the captain laughed.

5.

Kira’s stomach tightened as the Wallfish slowed and, with a faint shudder, coupled with their assigned docking port in Orsted’s shield ring.

After a few seconds, the all-clear sounded.

“Alright, listen up,” said Falconi, pulling off his harness. “Captain Akawe arranged pardons for us—” He gave Kira a look from under his brow. “All us miscreants, that is. The League should have them on file, but that doesn’t mean you should go making fools of yourself. No one say nothing until we have representation and we’re clear on the situation. That goes double for you, Gregorovich.”

“As you say, Captain O my Captain,” the ship mind responded.

Falconi grunted. “And don’t go blabbing about the Jelly neither. Kira and I will take care of that.”

“Won’t Hawes and his men have already told the UMC?” Kira asked.

A grim little smile from Falconi. “I’m sure they would have if I’d given them comms access. But I haven’t.”

“Hawes is fighting mad about it too,” Nielsen said.

Falconi kicked his way over to the pressure door. “Doesn’t matter. We’re going to talk with the UMC straightaway, and it’s going to take them some time to debrief our friendly neighborhood Marines.”

“Do we all have to go?” said Hwa-jung. “The Wallfish still needs maintenance after that jump.”

Falconi gestured toward the door. “You’ll have plenty of time to deal with the ship later, Hwa-jung. I promise. And yes, we all have to go.” Sparrow groaned, and Vishal rolled his eyes. “The liaison officer on Orsted specifically asked for everyone on the ship. I think they’re not sure what to make of us yet. They mentioned having to check for orders with Earth Central. Besides, we’re not letting Kira walk in there alone.”

“… Thanks,” she said, and she meant it.

“Of course. Wouldn’t let any of my crew go off by themselves.” Falconi grinned, and though it was a hard, dangerous grin, Kira found it reassuring. “If they don’t treat you right, we’ll kick up a ruckus until they do. Rest of you, you know the drill. Eyes peeled and mouths shut. Remember, this isn’t shore leave.”

“Roger that.”

“Yessir.”

“Of course, Captain.”

Hwa-jung nodded.

Falconi slapped the bulkhead. “Gregorovich, keep the ship on standby, case we have to leave in a hurry. And full monitoring of our overlays until we’re back.”

“Of course,” said Gregorovich in a warbling tone. “I shall keep an ever-so-close watch upon the feeds from your peepers. Such delightful snooping. Such scrumptious snooping.”

Kira snorted. Their long sleep certainly hadn’t changed him.

“Are you expecting trouble?” asked Nielsen as they left Control.

“No,” said Falconi. “But better safe than sorry.”

“Second that,” said Sparrow.

With Falconi at the lead, they went to the central shaft of the Wallfish and pulled themselves along the ladder until they reached the airlock mounted in the nose of the ship. The Entropists joined them there, the Questants’ robes billowing in free fall, like wind-blown sails. They dipped their heads and murmured, “Captain” as they slowed to a stop.

“Welcome to the party,” said Falconi.

The airlock was crowded with all nine of them crammed in—especially with Hwa-jung taking up nearly as much space as three of them combined—but with some pushing and shoving, they managed to fit.

The airlock cycled with the usual assortment of clicks and hisses and other unidentifiable sounds. And when the outer door rolled open, Kira saw a loading dock identical to the one she’d arrived at on Vyyborg over a year ago. It gave her a strange feeling, not quite déjà vu, not quite nostalgia. What had once been familiar, even friendly, now seemed cold, stark, and—though she knew it was just nerves—out of joint.

A small spherical drone was waiting for them, floating just to the left of the airlock. The yellow light next to its camera was on, and from a speaker came a man’s voice: “This way, please.”

With puffs of compressed air, the drone turned and jetted away toward the pressure door at the other end of the long, metal-clad room.

“Guess we follow,” said Falconi.

“Guess so,” said Nielsen.

“Don’t they realize we’re in a hurry?” said Kira.

Sparrow clucked her tongue. “You should know better, Navárez. You can’t rush a bureaucracy. There’s time, and then there’s military time. Hurry up and wait is standard operating procedure.”

Then Falconi launched himself off the lip of the airlock toward the pressure door. He spiraled slowly through the air, one arm above his head to catch himself when he landed.

“Show-off,” said Nielsen as she crawled out of the airlock and grabbed the handholds in the nearby wall.

One by one, they left the Wallfish and crossed the loading dock, with its gimbaled waldos and grooved strips for holding cargo containers in place. As they did, Kira knew that lasers and magnets and other pieces of equipment were checking their ID, scanning them for explosives and other weapons, looking for traces of contraband, and so on. It made her skin crawl, but there was nothing she could do about it.

For a second she considered allowing the mask to cover her face … but then she dismissed the urge.

She wasn’t going into battle, after all.

Past the pressure door, the drone zipped into the wide hallway beyond. It was at least seven meters across, and after so long spent on the Wallfish, the amount of space seemed enormous.

All the doors along the hallway were closed and locked, and aside from themselves, not one person was to be seen. Not there and not around the corners of the first dogleg. Nor the second.

“Some welcoming committee,” Falconi said dryly.

“Must be they are scared of us,” said Vishal.

“No,” said Sparrow. “They’re just scared of her.”

“Maybe they should be,” Kira muttered.

Sparrow surprised her by laughing so loudly, the sound echoed up and down the hall. “That’s it. You show them.” Even Hwa-jung looked amused.

The hallway led them through all five floors of the shield ring and then, as Kira knew it would, to a maglev car waiting at the end. The car’s side door was already open, the seats inside empty.

From the blackness on the other side of the car, she could hear the whisper of the rotating hab-ring, turning, turning, constantly turning.

“Please watch your hands and feet as you enter,” said the drone, stopping next to the car.

“Yeah, yeah,” Falconi muttered.

Kira took a seat with the rest of them and strapped herself in. Then a musical tone sounded, and from hidden speakers, a woman’s voice said, “The car is about to leave. Please tighten your seat belts and secure all loose items.” The door slid shut with a squeal. “Next stop: hab-section C.”

The car accelerated forward, smoothly and with hardly any noise. It passed through the pressure seal at the end of the terminal and entered the main transit tube that lay embedded between the docking ring and the hab-ring. As it did, Kira felt the cab rotate inward—felt herself rotate—and a sensation of weight began to press her down into the seat. Her arms and legs settled, and within seconds, she felt as if she’d regained her usual number of kilos.

The rotation combined with the acceleration was a weird feeling. For a moment it left her dizzy, and then her perspective shifted as she adjusted to her new down.

Down was between her feet (where it ought to be). Down pointed outward, through the shield ring and away from the station’s hub.

The car slid to a stop, and the door opposite the one they’d entered through popped its seal and retracted.

“Ah. I feel as if I’ve been twisted around a spindle,” said Vishal.

“You and me both, Doc,” said Falconi.

A chorus of clicks as they released their belts, and then they stumbled out into the terminal, still finding their balance on unsteady legs.

Falconi stopped before he’d gone more than a step or two. Kira stopped next to him.

“Shi-bal.”

Waiting for them was a phalanx of troopers in black power armor. All carrying weapons. All aimed at her and the crew. A pair of heavy assault units stood looming behind the others, like blocky giants, bug-faced and impersonal. At intervals between the troopers, turrets had been bolted to the floor. And filling the air with a hum like a million angry wasps was a swarm of battle drones.

The door to the maglev snapped shut.

A voice boomed: “Hands on your heads! Drop to your knees! You will be shot if you fail to comply. MOVE!”

CHAPTER II. ORSTED STATION

1.

Kira wasn’t sure why she had expected anything different. But she had, and the UMC’s behavior left her angry and disappointed.

“You fucking bastards!” said Falconi.

The voice boomed across the terminal again: “On the floor. NOW!”

There was no point in fighting. Kira would just get herself killed. Or the crew. Or the troopers, and they weren’t her enemies. At least, that was what she kept telling herself. They were human, after all.

Kira put her hands on her head and dropped to her knees, never taking her eyes off the soldiers. Around her, the crew did the same, the Entropists too.

A half-dozen troopers rushed forward, boots clanging in a metallic cacophony. The weight of their suits made the deck shake; Kira felt the vibrations through her shins.

The troopers moved behind them and began securing the crew’s wrists with restraints. The Entropists’ also. Hwa-jung snarled when one of the troopers grabbed her arms. For a second she resisted, and Kira could hear the soldier’s armor whine as it struggled against her strength. Then Hwa-jung relaxed and muttered an expletive in Korean.

The troopers dragged Falconi and the others to their feet and marched them off to the side, toward a pressure door that slid open at their approach.

“Don’t let them hurt you!” Falconi shouted back at her. “They touch you, rip off their hands. You hear me?!” One of the troopers shoved him in the back. “Gah! We have a pardon! Let us go or I’ll get a lawyer who’ll tear this whole place down for breach of contract. You’ve got nothing on us. We’re—”

His voice faded away as they passed through the doorway and out of sight. Within seconds, the rest of the crew and the Entropists were gone.

A chill crept into Kira’s fingers, despite the best efforts of the Soft Blade. Once again, she was alone.

“This is a waste of time,” she said. “I need to speak with whoever is in command. We have time-sensitive intel about the Jellies. Trust me, the Premier is going to want to hear what we have to say.”

The troopers moved aside, clearing a path forward, and for a moment, Kira thought her words had had the desired effect. Then the thunderous voice again sounded: “Take out your contacts and drop them on the floor.”

Dammit. They must have detected the contacts when she boarded Orsted.

“Weren’t you listening?” she half shouted. The skin of the Soft Blade tightened in response. “While you’re jerking me around, the Jellies are out there killing humans. Who’s in charge? I won’t do a damn thing until—”

The volume of the voice was enough to make her ears hurt: “You WILL comply, or you WILL be shot! You have ten seconds to obey. Nine. Eight. Seven—”

For just a moment, Kira imagined pulling the Soft Blade over herself and letting the troopers shoot her. She was pretty sure the xeno could protect her against all but the largest of their weaponry. But if the fighting on Nidus was anything to go by, the largest would be more than enough to hurt her, and then there would be the consequences for Falconi and the rest of his crew.…

“Fine! Fine!” she said, tamping down her anger. She wasn’t going to lose control. Not now, not ever again. At her urging, the Soft Blade returned to its normal relaxed state.

She reached for her eyes, hating that she was once again going to lose access to a computer.

Once the contacts were on the floor, the voice returned: “Hands back on your head. Good. Now, when I tell you, you’re going to stand up and walk to the other side of the terminal. You will see an open door. Go through that door. If you turn to the side, you will be shot. If you try to go back, you will be shot. If you lower your hands, you will be shot. If you do anything unexpected, you will be shot. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Walk now.”

It was awkward, but Kira got to her feet without using her arms for balance. Then she started forward.

“Faster!” said the voice.

She quickened her pace, but not by much. She’d be damned if she was going to run for them like a server bot programmed to obey their every word.

The battle drones followed her as she walked, their incessant buzzing as maddening as a headache. As she passed the troopers, they closed in behind her, forming a wall of iron, blank and impassive.

At the far end of the terminal was the open door the voice had promised. Another group of troopers waited for her on the other side—a double row of them standing with their weapons trained on her.

Keeping to the same measured pace, Kira left the terminal behind and walked out into the concourse beyond. It was a large chamber (decadent almost with its extravagant use of space), lit by bright panels embedded in the ceiling, which made the whole chamber appear to be bathed in Earth-norm sunlight. The light was needed too, for the walls and floor were dark, and that darkness gave the room an oppressive feel, despite the brightness of the illumination.

As elsewhere, all the doors and passageways leading out of the room had been sealed off, some with freshly welded plates. Benches, terminals, and a few potted trees were distributed in a grid throughout the area, but what really caught her attention was the structure in the very center of the concourse.

It was a polyhedron of some sort, perhaps three meters tall and painted army green. Surrounding it and separated from it by the width of a hand was a wire framework that exactly matched the polyhedron’s shape. A host of thick metal disks (each about the diameter of a dinner plate) were attached to the framework, arranged so the empty space between them was minimized. Every disk had a panel on the back with buttons and a tiny glowing display.

Within the facing side of the polyhedron was a door, and the door stood open. The polyhedron was hollow. Inside was a single chamber so dim and shadowy she couldn’t make out the details.

Kira stopped.

Behind and above her, she heard the troopers and the drones stop as well.

“Inside. Now!” said the voice.

Kira knew she was testing their patience, but she paused a little longer, savoring her last moment of freedom. Then she steeled herself and walked forward and entered the polyhedron.

A second later, the door slammed shut behind her, and the dark confines rang with what felt and sounded like her death knell.

2.

Several minutes passed, during which Kira listened to the troopers thudding about as they shifted equipment into place next to her prison.

Then a new voice sounded outside the door: a man with a rough, burred accent so thick she wished she still had her overlays to provide subtitles.

“Ms. Navárez, can you hear me?”

His words were muffled by the walls, but she could hear well enough. “Yes.”

“My name is Colonel Stahl. I’ll be debriefing you.”

Colonel. That wasn’t a navy rank. “What are you? Army?”

A brief hesitation on his part. “No, ma’am. UMCI. Intelligence.”

Of course. Same as Tschetter. Kira nearly laughed. She should have guessed. “Am I under arrest, Colonel Stahl?”

“No, ma’am, not as such. You are being held in accordance with article thirty-four of the Stellar Security Act, which states—”

“Yes, I’m familiar with it,” she said.

Another pause, this time as if Stahl was surprised. “I see. I realize your accommodations aren’t what you were expecting, Ms. Navárez, but you have to appreciate our position. We’ve seen all sorts of crazy stuff from the nightmares over the past few months. We can’t afford to trust the xeno you’re carrying.”

She bit back a sarcastic response. “Yes, alright. I get it. Now, can we please—”

“Not quite yet, ma’am. Let me be explicitly clear, lest there be any, ah, unwarranted accidents down the road. The disks you saw on the outside of your cell, do you know what they are?”

“No.”

“Shaped charges. Self-forging penetrators. The walls of your cell are electrified. If you break the current, the charges will detonate and crush you and everything around you into a molten-hot ball less than half a meter across. Not even your xeno can survive that. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any questions?”

She had lots of questions. A bedevilment of questions. So many questions, she doubted she would ever find enough answers. But she had to try. “What’s going to happen to the crew of the Wallfish?”

“They’ll be detained and interrogated until the full extent of their involvement with you, the suit, and the Jellies is determined.”

Kira swallowed her frustration. The UMC couldn’t really be expected to do otherwise. Didn’t mean she had to like it. Still, there was no point in antagonizing Stahl. Not yet. “Okay, so are you going to debrief me or what?”

“Whenever you’re ready, Ms. Navárez. We have the recording of your initial conversation with Captain Akawe on Malpert Station, so why don’t you begin there and bring us up to date?”

So Kira told him what he wanted to know. She spoke quickly, concisely—striving to present the information in the most organized fashion possible. First, she explained their reasons for leaving 61 Cygni for Bughunt. Second, she described what they had discovered on Nidus. Third, she recounted the events of the nightmare attack. And fourth, she outlined in painstaking detail the offer of friendship Tschetter had conveyed from the rebellious Jellies.

The one thing Kira didn’t tell Stahl was her role in the creation of the nightmares. She’d planned on it. She’d promised Falconi she would. But the way the League was treating her did nothing to engender a sense of charity. If the information could have helped them win the war, then she would have shared it, regardless of any discomfort. But as she saw no way it could, she didn’t.

Afterward, Stahl was silent for so long that she began to wonder if he was still there. Then he said, “Your ship mind can provide corroboration?”

Kira nodded, even though he couldn’t see. “Yes, just ask him. He also has all the relevant records from the Darmstadt.”

“I see.” The terseness of the colonel’s reply couldn’t hide the underlying anxiety. Her account had shaken him, and more than a little. “In that case I’d best look at them immediately. If there’s nothing else, Ms. Navárez, then I’ll—”

“Actually…” said Kira.

“What?” said Stahl, wary.

She took a breath, preparing herself for what was to come. “You should know, we have a Jelly on the Wallfish.”

“What?!”

And Kira heard the rapid drumbeat of troopers running toward her cell. “Everything okay, sir?” someone called out.

“Yes, yes,” said Stahl, irritable. “I’m fine. Get out of here.”

“Yessir.” The weighted footsteps retreated.

Stahl swore quietly. “Now, Navárez, what the hell do you mean you’ve got a goddamn Jelly on the Wallfish? Explain.”

Kira explained.

When she finished, Stahl swore again.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. If the UMC tried to force their way onto the Wallfish, there wasn’t a whole lot Gregorovich could do to stop them, not without taking drastic and most likely suicidal measures.

“… Give Earth Central a call. This is way above my pay grade, Navárez.”

Then Kira heard Stahl walk away, and the clamor of the troopers’ footsteps followed, rising and swelling until the sound broke like a passing wave, leaving her alone in silence.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she said, feeling a certain perverse satisfaction.

3.

Kira looked around.

The inside of the polyhedron was empty. No bed. No toilet. No sink. No drain. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of the same green plating. Above her, a small round light provided the only source of illumination. Slits with fine mesh covers edged the ceiling: vents for airflow, she assumed.

And there was her. The only occupant of the strange, faceted prison.

She couldn’t see them, but she assumed there were cameras recording her, and that Stahl or someone else was watching everything she did.

Let them watch.

Kira willed the Soft Blade to cover her face, and her vision expanded to encompass both the infrared and the electromagnetic.

Stahl hadn’t lied. The walls glowed with bluish loops of force, and between the end points of each loop ran a snake of twisting electricity, bright and shining. The leads weren’t built into the walls; it looked to Kira as if the current was coming from the framework that held the shaped charges, flowing through wire contacts dotted across the entire polyhedron. Even the floor glowed with the soft haze of an induced magnetic field.

Over the door and in the corners of the ceiling, Kira spotted several small disturbances in the fields: knot-like eddies that connected to tiny threads of electricity. She’d been right. Cameras.

She allowed the mask to withdraw and sat on the floor.

There was nothing else to do.

For a moment, anger and frustration threatened to overwhelm her, but then she beat them back. No. She wasn’t going to allow herself to get worked up over things she couldn’t change. Not this time. Whatever was going to happen, she’d strive to face it with a sense of self-control. Things were difficult enough without making them harder on herself.

Besides, coming to Sol had been their only real option. The offer from the Knot of Minds was too crucial to risk delay by trying to pass it along from another system in the League. With all the jamming and fighting going on, there was no guarantee the intel would have gotten through. And then there was Itari; the Jelly was an important link to the Knot of Minds, and Kira needed to be there to translate for it. She supposed they could have just jumped in, transmitted the information to the League, and then jumped out. But that would have been a dereliction of duty. If nothing else, they owed it to Captain Akawe to deliver the Jellies’ message in person.

Kira just wished that she hadn’t gotten Falconi and the rest of the crew tangled up in her mess. That she felt guilty about. Hopefully the UMC wouldn’t detain them for too long. A small consolation, but the only one she could think of at the moment.

A deep breath, and then another as Kira tried to empty her mind. When that didn’t work, she recalled a favorite song, “Tangagria,” and let the melody displace her thoughts. And when she tired of the song, she switched to another, and then another.

Time passed.

After what felt like hours, she heard the heavy tread of an approaching suit of power armor. The armor stopped next to the cell, and then a narrow slot in the door was pulled open and a metal-clad hand shoved a tray of food toward her.

She took it, and the hand withdrew. The cover to the slot clicked back into place, and the trooper said, “When you’re done, bang on the door.”

Then the footsteps withdrew, but not very far.

Kira wondered how many troopers were standing guard. Just the one? Or was there a whole squad of them?

She placed the tray on the floor and sat cross-legged before it. With a single look, she cataloged the contents: a paper cup full of water. A paper plate with two ration bars, three yellow tomatoes, half a cucumber, and a slice of orange melon. No fork. No knife. No seasoning.

She sighed. She’d had enough ration bars to last the rest of her life, but at least the UMC was feeding her. And the fresh produce was a welcome treat.

As she ate, she eyed the slot in the door. Things could obviously pass through it without triggering the explosives. If she could sneak a fiber or two through the seams, maybe she could find a way to turn off the current on the outside of the cell.…

No. She wasn’t trying to escape. Not this time. If she—or more accurately the Soft Blade—could help the League, then she had a responsibility to stay. Even if they were a bunch of assholes.

When she finished eating, she shouted at the door a few times, and as promised, the trooper came and took the tray away.

After that, she tried pacing, but the walls were only two and a half steps apart, so she soon gave up and instead did push-ups, squats, and handstands until she burned off her nervous energy.

She’d just finished when the light overhead began to dim and grow red. In less than a minute, it plunged her into almost total darkness.

Despite her resolution not to worry or obsess, and despite her tiredness, Kira had difficulty falling asleep. Too much stuff had happened during the day for her to just relax and drift off into unconsciousness. Her thoughts kept going round and round—returning each time to the nightmares—and none of it was useful. It didn’t help that the floor was hard, and even with the suit, she found it uncomfortable.

She concentrated on slowing her breathing. Everything else might be outside of her control, but that much she could do. Gradually her pulse slowed and the tension drained from her neck, and she could feel a welcome coolness creeping through her limbs.

While she waited, she counted the cell’s faces: twelve in total, which made it a … dodecahedron? She thought so. In the faint red light, the walls appeared brown, and the color and the concave shape reminded her of the inside of a walnut shell.

She laughed softly. “—and count myself a king of infinite space…” She wished Gregorovich could see. He of all people would appreciate the joke.

She hoped he was okay. If he behaved himself with the UMC, he might get off with a fine and a few citations. Ship minds were too valuable to ground over even relatively major infractions. However, if he yammered at them the way he had during some of his conversations with her, and the UMC decided he was unstable, the League wouldn’t hesitate to yank him out of the Wallfish and ban him from flying. Either way, he was going to have to endure a gauntlet of psych tests, and Kira didn’t know if Gregorovich was willing or able to hide the crazy. If he didn’t—

She stopped, annoyed with herself. Those were the sorts of thoughts she needed to avoid. What would be would be. All that mattered was the present. What was, not word-castles and hypotheticals. And right then, what she needed to do was sleep.

It must have been almost three in the morning before her brain finally allowed her to sink into welcome unconsciousness. She’d hoped that the Soft Blade might choose to share another vision with her, but though she dreamed, her dreams were her own.

4.

The light in the cell brightened.

Kira’s eyes snapped open, and she sat upright, heart pounding, ready to go. When she saw the walls of her cell and remembered where she was, she growled and bounced her fist against her thigh.

What was taking the League so long? Accepting the offer of support from Tschetter’s Jellies was a no-brainer. So why the delay?

She stood, and a faint layer of dust fell from her body. Alarmed, she checked the floor underneath herself.

It appeared the same as before.

Kira let out her breath, relieved. If the Soft Blade had chewed through the plating during the night, she would have been in for an explosive surprise. The xeno had to know better, though. It wanted to live as much as she did.

“Behave yourself,” she murmured.

A fist pounded on the outside of the door, startling her. “Navárez, we have to talk,” said Stahl.

Finally. “I’m listening.”

“I have some additional questions for you.”

“Ask away.”

And Stahl did. Questions about Tschetter—had the major seemed to be in her right state of mind, had she been as Kira remembered from the Extenuating Circumstances, and so forth and so on—questions about the Jellies, questions about the Seeker and the Staff of Blue, and also many, many questions about the nightmares.

Finally Stahl said, “We’re done here.”

“Wait,” said Kira. “What happened to the Jelly? What did you do about it?”

“The Jelly?” said Stahl. “We moved it to biocontainment.”

A sudden fear struck Kira. “Is it … is it still alive?”

The colonel seemed to take a certain offense at that. “Of course, Navárez. What do you take us for, complete incompetents? It took some doing, but we managed to incentivize your, ah, tentacle-covered friend to move from the Wallfish to the station.”

Kira wondered what that incentivizing had involved, but she decided it was wiser not to probe. “I see. So what is the League going to do about this? Tschetter, the Knot of Minds, and all the rest of it?”

“That’s need-to-know, ma’am.”

She gritted her teeth. “Colonel Stahl, after everything that’s happened, don’t you think I ought to be part of this conversation?”

“Maybe so, ma’am, but that’s not up to me.”

Kira took a calming breath. “Can you at least tell me how long I’m going to be held here?” If the League was going to transfer her to a UMC ship, that would be fairly clear evidence that they were going to take her to meet with the Knot of Minds so she could help negotiate the terms of alliance.

“You’ll be moved to a packet ship at zero nine hundred hours tomorrow and taken to the LaCern research station for further examination.”

“Excuse me?” said Kira, nearly sputtering. “Why would you … I mean, isn’t the League going to at least talk with the Knot of Minds? Who else do you have to translate for you? Iska? Tschetter? We don’t even know if she’s still alive! And I’m the only one who can actually speak the Jellies’ language.”

Stahl sighed, and when he answered, he sounded far more tired than he had a moment ago. “We’re not going to talk with them, Navárez.” And Kira realized he was breaking protocol by telling her.

A horrible sense of dread came over her. “What do you mean?” she asked, not believing.

“I mean that the Premier and his advisors have decided that the Jellies are too dangerous to trust. Hostis Humani Generis, after all. Surely you heard. It was announced before you left Sixty-One Cygni.”

“So what are they going to do?” she said, nearly whispering.

“It’s already done, Navárez. The Seventh Fleet departed today under the command of Admiral Klein to attack the Jelly fleet stationed at the star Tschetter gave us info on. It’s a K-type star about a month and a half away. Objective is to smash the Jellies when they’re least expecting it, make sure they can’t ever threaten us again.”

“But…” Kira could think of any number of things wrong with that plan. The UMC might be cast-iron bastards, but they weren’t stupid. “They’ll see the Seventh coming. And they can jump out before you get close enough to shoot. Our only chance is to take out the leadership before—”

“We’ve got it covered, ma’am,” said Stahl, terse as ever. “We haven’t been sitting on our hands the past six months. The Jellies might outclass and outgun us, but if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s codging together makeshift solutions. We’ve got ways of keeping them from seeing us and ways to keep them from jumping out. Won’t last long, but it’ll last long enough.”

“Then what about Tschetter’s Jellies?” Kira asked. “The Knot of Minds?”

Stahl grunted. When he spoke again, his voice had acquired a brittle tone, as if he were guarding himself. “A batch of hunter-seekers was dispatched toward the meeting location.”

“To…?”

“Eliminate with extreme prejudice.”

Kira felt as if she’d been struck. She wasn’t the biggest fan of the League, but she’d never thought of it as being actively evil. “What the hell, Colonel? Why would—”

“It’s a political decision, Navárez. Out of our hands. It’s been determined that leaving any of their leadership alive, even if they’re rebels, is too great a risk for humanity. This isn’t a war, Navárez. This is extermination. Eradication. First we break the Jellies, and then we can focus on taking out these nightmares.”

“It’s been determined,” she said, spitting out the words with all the scorn she could muster. “Determined by who?”

“By the Premier himself.” A brief pause, then: “Sorry, Navárez. That’s the way it is.”

The colonel started to walk away, and Kira shouted after, “Yeah, well fuck the Premier and fuck you too!”

She stood there, breathing heavily, fists clenched by her sides. Only then did she notice that the Soft Blade—that she—was covered with spikes poking through her jumpsuit. Again her temper had gotten the better of her. “Bad, bad, bad,” she whispered, and she wasn’t sure if she meant herself or the League.

Calm but still filled with a cold, clinical anger, Kira sat cross-legged on the floor while she tried to think through the situation. In retrospect, it seemed apparent that Stahl didn’t approve of the Premier’s decision either. That Stahl would tell her the League’s plans meant something, although she wasn’t sure what. Maybe he wanted her forewarned for some reason.

That hardly mattered now. The League’s impending betrayal of the Knot of Minds was far more important than her own troubles. Finally they had a chance of peace (with the Jellies at least) and the Premier had to throw it away because he wasn’t willing to try. Was trying so great a risk, after all?

Frustration joined anger within Kira. She hadn’t even voted for the Premier—none of them had!—and he was going to set them at perpetual odds with the Jellies. Fear was driving them, she thought, not hope. And as events had taught her, fear was a poor guide indeed.

What was the Premier’s name? She couldn’t even recall. The League tended to shuffle through them like cards.

If only there was a way to warn the Knot of Minds. Maybe then some sort of alliance could be saved. Kira wondered if the Soft Blade could somehow contact the Jellies. But no, whatever signals the xeno could produce, they seemed to be indiscriminate, blasted forth to the whole of the galaxy. And luring even more Jellies and nightmares to Sol would hardly be helpful.

If she could somehow manage to break out, then—then what? Kira hadn’t seen the file of information Tschetter had given Akawe (and that the Darmstadt had copied over to the Wallfish), but she felt sure there had to be contact information in it: times, frequencies, and locations, that sort of thing. But she doubted that the UMC technicians would have left even a single copy of the file on the Wallfish’s computers, and Kira had no idea whether Gregorovich had bothered to memorize any of the information.

If not—and Kira thought it would be irresponsible to assume otherwise—then Itari would be their only hope of warning the Knot of Minds. She’d not only have to rescue herself, she’d also have to rescue Itari, get the Jelly to a ship, and then fly the ship out of the system, where they’d be clear of any jamming, and the whole time the UMC would be doing their damnedest to stop them.

It was the sheerest fantasy, and Kira knew it.

She groaned and looked up at the faceted ceiling. She felt so helpless it hurt. Of all the torments a person could endure, that—she felt sure—was the worst of all.

Breakfast was a long time coming. When it arrived, she could hardly eat, her stomach was so cramped and unsettled. After disposing of the tray, she sat in the center of the cell, meditated, and tried to think of what she could do.

If only I had my concertina. Playing would help her concentrate, of that she felt sure.

5.

No one else came to see her for the rest of the day. Kira’s anger and frustration remained, but boredom smothered them like a blanket. Without her overlays, she was again left with nothing but the contents of her mind for amusement. And her thoughts were far from amusing at the moment.

In the end, she did what she always did when trying to while away the time during each of the long FTL trips she’d endured since leaving Sigma Draconis. Which was to say, she dozed, drifting into the hazy half-sleep that allowed the Soft Blade to preserve her strength while still keeping ready for whatever might happen next.

And so she spent the day, her only interruption being the bland lunch and even blander dinner the troopers delivered.

Then the lights dimmed to red, and her half-sleep became a full-sleep.

6.

A tremor ran through the floor.

Kira’s eyes snapped open, memories of the Extenuating Circumstances coursing through her. It might have been midnight. It might have been three in the morning. There was no way to tell, but she’d been lying on her side for so long her hip was sore and her arm was numb.

Another tremor, larger than the first one, and with it, an odd twisting sensation, similar to what she’d felt in the maglev. A moment of vertigo caused her to grab the floor for support, and then her balance steadied.

A shot of adrenaline cleared the last of her sleep haze. There was only one explanation: the hab-ring had wobbled. Shit. Not good. The very definition of not good. Jellies or nightmares—someone was attacking Orsted Station.

She looked at one of the cameras. “Hey! What’s going on?” But no one answered.

A third tremor shook the cell, and the light overhead flickered. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a thud that might have been an explosion.

Kira went cold as she dropped into survival mode. The station was under attack. Was she safe? That depended on the cell’s power source, assuming she wasn’t hit by a missile or a laser. If the cell was hooked up to the main reactor, and the reactor went offline, the explosives surrounding her could detonate. Same if there was a large enough power surge. On the other hand, if the cell was hooked up to batteries, then she might be okay. It was a gamble, though. A big one.

Boom!

She staggered as the cell shook around her. The light flickered again, more than before, and her heart clutched. For an instant, she was certain she was dead, but … the universe continued to exist. She continued to exist.

Kira straightened and looked at the door.

Screw the UMC and screw the League. She was getting out.

CHAPTER III. ESCAPE!

1.

Determined, Kira went to the door.

She had only two options. Find a way to disarm the explosives or find a way to reroute the current so she could break down the door without ending up as a white-hot lump of slag.

The floor rumbled.

Whatever she did, she’d have to do it fast.

Disarming would be safer, but she couldn’t figure out how to disarm it. Even if she could sneak a few tendrils past the slot in the door, she wouldn’t be able to see what she was doing on the other side. Groping around blindly, she’d be just as likely to blow herself up as not.

Okay. That left rerouting the current. She knew the xeno could protect her from being shocked. Which meant it could channel electricity into conductive paths around her body. So theoretically, it ought to be able to form wires or some such that could keep the current from being disrupted if she opened the door. Right? If not, she was dead.

The light dimmed for a second.

She might be dead anyway.

She covered her face with the suit and studied the lines of electricity embedded within the polyhedron’s outer surface. A half-dozen of them crossed the door. Those were the ones she’d have to bypass.

Kira took a moment to visualize, with as much detail and clarity as she could manage, what she wanted. More importantly, she tried to impress her intentions on the Soft Blade, as well as the consequences of failure. As Alan would say, “All go boom.”

“No boom,” Kira murmured. “Not this time.”

Then she released the Soft Blade and willed it to act on its own.

A cluster of thin black wires sprouted from her chest and extended outward until they touched the spots, on either side of the door, where the lines of electricity originated. Then additional wires leaped across the door and joined each contact point to its intended partner.

She could feel the xeno drilling into the walls then, burrowing with atomically sharp tips through the paneling, toward the leads.

The cell shuddered hard enough to rock her, and her breath caught.

Just a few more microns of drilling and … Contact! The glowing, blue-white lines of electricity jumped from their established paths into the wires the Soft Blade had laid down. Around them, the translucent loops of magnetic force shifted as well, roiling and realigning as they sought a new state of equilibrium.

Kira stood frozen, waiting for the inevitable explosion. When it didn’t happen, she relaxed slightly.

Hold, she told the Soft Blade, and reached between the wires. She placed her fingers over the door’s locking mechanism and drove the suit into the door. Metal screeched, and there was a sticky, tearing sound as the seal around the door parted.

The warbling whine of a siren seeped in through the gap.

Feeling as if she were trying to pet a sleeping tigermaul without waking it, Kira slowly pushed the door outward.

It swung open with a protesting squeal, but it did open.

She almost laughed. No boom.

Then Kira stepped forward. The wires warped around her as she passed through the doorway, and though the lines of electricity bent, they never broke.

Freedom!

The concourse had become a garish nightmare. Emergency lights painted the walls red, while rows of yellow arrows glowed in the floor and the ceiling. The arrows pointed spinward, and she knew if she followed them, they would lead her to the nearest storm shelter.

Now what?

“Don’t move!” shouted a man. “Hands on your head!”

Kira turned and saw two power troopers standing by a pillar over nine meters to her right. One of them held a blaster, the other a slug thrower. Behind them, a quartet of drones rose off the floor and hung whirring overhead.

“You’ve got five seconds to comply or I’m putting a bolt through your head!” shouted the trooper with the blaster.

Kira lifted her arms and took a single step away from her cell. Two thin tendrils still connected her to the bypass circuits the suit had formed across the doorway.

The troopers stiffened, and the buzzing from the drones increased as the machines flew out and took up positions in a broad, rotating circle around her.

She took another step.

Bang!

A gold slug flattened itself on the deck in front of her, and she felt a pinch in her left calf as a fragment struck her.

“I’m not shitting you, lady! We will ventilate you! On the floor, right now! I’m not saying it a—”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said in a sharp voice. “You’re not going to shoot me, Marine. Do you know how much trouble you’d be in with Colonel Stahl if you did? The UMC lost a lot of good people getting me here.”

“Fuck that noise. We’ve got orders to stop you if you try to escape, even if it means killing you. Now get on the goddamn floor!”

“Okay. Okay.”

Kira did the math. She was only about a meter and a half from the cell. Hopefully that was enough …

She bent, as if to kneel, and then tucked and allowed herself to stumble forward into a roll. As she did, she yanked the wires out of the cell, back toward herself.

A white-hot flash obliterated her sight, and a thunderclap slammed into her so hard, she felt it in the roots of her teeth.

2.

If not for her suit, the blast would have thrown Kira halfway across the concourse. As it was, the xeno kept her anchored against the deck, like a barnacle holding firm against a tsunami. A suffocating heat enveloped her—a heat too intense for even the Soft Blade to fully protect her.

Then cooler air washed over her and her vision cleared.

Dazed, Kira got to her feet.

The explosion had torn apart several meters of the floor, leaving behind a crater of crushed decking, wiring, pipes, and unidentifiable pieces of machinery. In the center of the crater was the misshapen, half-melted lump of metal and composite that had been the polyhedron.

Shrapnel had sprayed the ceiling and floor in a wide circle around the epicenter. A jagged piece of casing from one of the shaped charges had embedded itself into the deck only a few centimeters from her head.

Kira hadn’t expected the explosion to be so powerful. The UMC must have really wanted to stop the Soft Blade from escaping. The charges had been intended not just to kill but to obliterate.

She had to find Itari.

Off to the side, the two Marines lay sprawled on the floor. One of them moved his arms aimlessly, as if unsure which direction was up. The other had gotten to his hands and knees and was crawling toward his blaster.

Three of the drones lay broken on the floor. The fourth hovered tilted at an awkward angle, its blades rotating in fitful starts.

Kira stabbed the drone with a blade the xeno formed from the hand it had made for her. The ruined machine crashed to the floor with a pitiful whine as its propellers spun to a stop.

Then she sprinted across the concourse and tackled the Marine reaching for his blaster. She knocked him sprawling onto his belly. Before the man could react, she jammed the Soft Blade into the joints of his armor and cut the power lines, immobilizing him. The armor weighed a ton (more than that, actually), but she flipped him over, planted a palm on his faceplate, and ripped it away.

“—answer me, dammit!” the man shouted. Then he clamped his mouth shut and glared at her with fear disguised as anger. His eyes were green, and he looked about as young as Trig, although that meant nothing on its own.

So. Comms weren’t working. That was to her advantage. Still, Kira hesitated for a second. Escaping the cell had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, but now the reality of the situation crashed down upon her. There was no hiding on a space station. No avoiding the ever-present cameras. The UMC would be able to track her every move. And though comms were down, as soon as she asked the Marine about Itari, he would know where she wanted to go.

The man saw her indecision. “Well?” he said, sneering. “What the fuck are you waiting for? Get it over with.”

He thinks I’m going to kill him. The realization seemed so unjust, it left Kira feeling defensive.

The station lurched underneath them, and a pressure alert sounded with strident urgency in the distance.

“Listen to me,” she said, “I’m trying to help you, asshole.”

“Sure you are.”

“Shut up and listen. We’re being attacked. Might be the nightmares. Might be the Jellies. Doesn’t matter. Either way, if they blow us up, it’s game over. That’s it. We lose. You get it?”

“Bullshit,” said the Marine, spitting in her face. “Admiral Klein just set out with the Seventh to kick those sumbitches back to the Stone Age. He’ll see they get what’s coming to them.”

“You don’t understand, Marine. The Jelly that came here with me on the Wallfish—the one you’ve got locked up—it came here with a peace offer. Peace. If it dies, how do you think the rest of the Jellies will take it? How do you think the Premier will take it?” Now Kira saw indecision similar to her own appear on the man’s face. “That Jelly gets blown up, it isn’t going to matter what the Seventh does. You understand? How long do you think this station is going to last?”

As if to punctuate her question, everything twisted around them as Orsted wobbled even more than before.

Kira swallowed a surge of bile, feeling green. “We have to get that Jelly out of here.”

The Marine squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Then he shook his head—making a face as if he were in pain—and said, “Goddammit. Biocontainment. That’s where they took the Jelly. Biocontainment.”

“Where i—”

“This deck. Up-spin. By the hydroponics bay.”

“And what about the Wallfish crew?”

“Holding cells. Same section. Can’t miss it.”

Kira shoved him back and stood. “Okay. You made the right decision.”

He spat again, this time on the floor. “You betray us, I’ll come kill you myself.”

“I’d expect nothing less,” said Kira, already moving away. It would take him at least half an hour to extricate himself from the power armor, so she figured he wasn’t a threat. The other Marine, though, was starting to move. She hurried over, grabbed the top of his helmet, pulled open the casing on his back, and ripped out his armor’s cooling system. The armor immediately shut down to avoid melting.

There. Just let them try to follow her now!

Kira left them and started to run up-spin, against the direction of the yellow arrows. Hide me, she told the Soft Blade. A soft, silk-like rustle passed across her skin, and when she glanced down, Kira could see through herself, as if her body had turned to glass.

Thermals would still pick her up, but she didn’t think it likely the station’s interior cameras were full-spectrum. Either way, it would at least be harder for the UMC to spot her like this. How long until troops arrived to investigate the implosion of her cell? Not long, she thought. Not long at all, even if Orsted Station was under attack.

Through the concourse exit was a long hallway. Empty. Everyone was either in hiding, helping emergency services, or fighting the attackers. Whatever the reasons, Kira was grateful. She really didn’t want to fight a bunch of Marines. They were on the same side after all. Or they were supposed to be.

Down the hallway she ran, avoiding the occasional moving walkway. She was faster on foot. The whole time, she looked for lettering on the walls that might indicate the location of the hydroponics bay. Most people just used their overlays to navigate, but legally, every ship and station had to have clearly marked signage in the case of emergencies.

This sure as hell qualifies as an emergency, Kira thought. Legal requirements or not, the lettering she did see was small, faint, and hard to read, which kept forcing her to slow in order to decipher it.

At one intersection between the hall and another passageway, she jogged around a fountain where the stream of water traced two-thirds of an infinity symbol as it rose and fell. It was a small thing, but the sight fascinated Kira in an obscure way. The Coriolis effect never failed to mess with her sense of how gravity (or the appearance of gravity) should work. She supposed she wouldn’t find anything strange about it if she had grown up in a hab-ring, especially a smaller one like Orsted’s.

She must have run almost half a klick, and she was starting to wonder whether the Marine had lied to her and she should turn back, when she spotted two lines of faint green lettering on a nearby corner.

The upper line said: Hydroponics Bay 7G

The bottom line said: Detention 16G

On the other side of the hallway was another set of lettering: Biocontainment & Decontamination 21G. Down that way, Kira saw what appeared to be a security checkpoint: a closed door flanked with armored portals and a pair of viewscreens. Two Marines in full exos stood watch outside the door. Even with the station under attack, they hadn’t left their post. Kira wouldn’t be surprised if there were more of them on the other side of the door.

She did the math. She might be able to get close enough to disable the armor of the two Marines, but anyone past that would be a challenge. And as soon as she broke Itari out, the rest of the UMC would know where she was.

Shit. If she attacked, there was no predicting what would happen next. Events would spin out of control in a shockingly short time, and then … and then a lot of people might end up dead.

A faint tremor passed through the deck. Whatever she was going to do, she had to do it now. Any longer and the station itself might spin out of control.

She growled and turned away from biocontainment. Fuck it. She needed help. If she could free the crew of the Wallfish, she knew they would have her back. Maybe, together, they could figure out a solution. Maybe.

Kira’s pulse was loud in her ears as she hurried down the side corridor that led toward the holding cells. If there was as much security around detention as biocontainment, she wasn’t sure what she would do. The temptation to let loose with the Soft Blade was strong, but Kira had more than learned her lesson. No matter what, she couldn’t make another mistake like the one that had resulted in the creation of the nightmares. The galaxy wouldn’t survive it.

The lettering on the walls led her through several lengths of identical hallway.

As she rounded one more corner, she spotted two people—one man, one woman—kneeling next to a pressure door halfway down the corridor, wrist deep in a hatch they’d pried open in the wall, the actinic flicker of electricity lighting their faces. The pair was shirtless, pantless, wearing only drab grey shorts. Their skin was chalk white, and everywhere but their faces was covered with gleaming blue tattoos. The lines formed circuit-like patterns that reminded Kira of the shapes she’d seen in the cradle on Adrasteia.

Because of their lack of clothes, it took her a moment to recognize the two people as the Entropists, Veera and Jorrus.

She was still invisible and too far away to hear, and yet somehow the Entropists detected her. Never looking her direction, Jorrus said, “Ah, Prisoner Navárez—”

“—you were able to join us. We—”

“—hoped as much.”

Then the Entropists wrenched something within the wall, and the pressure door snapped open to reveal a stark holding cell.

Falconi stepped out. “Well, about time,” he said.

3.

Kira allowed her invisibility to subside, and Falconi spotted her. “There you are,” he said. “I was afraid we were going to have to go hunting for you.”

“Nope,” she said. She trotted over. The Entropists had moved on to the next door.

“Were you locked up too?” Falconi asked.

She jerked her chin. “You know it.”

“Don’t suppose you got free without being noticed?”

“Not a chance.”

He bared his teeth. “Shit. We gotta move fast.”

“How did you manage to escape?” she asked.

Veera laughed, a quick, high sound, full of tension. “Always they take the robes and think—”

“—that is enough. We are more than our many-colored garments, Prisoner.”

Falconi grunted. “Lucky for us.” To Kira he said, “Any idea who’s hitting the station?”

She was about to say no, but then she stopped to think for a moment. No hint existed of the compulsion she always felt when the Jelly ships were near. Which meant … “Pretty sure it’s the nightmares,” she said.

“Great. Even more reason to move fast. There’ll be plenty of confusion to cover our departure.”

“Are you sure?” Kira said.

Falconi caught her meaning at once. If he and the rest of the crew broke out, their pardons would be null and void, and unlike the local government at Ruslan, the UMC wouldn’t stop pursuing them at the system border. The Wallfish crew would be fugitives throughout the entirety of known space, with the possible exception of Shin-Zar and various tiny freeholdings out on the fringes.

“You’re damn right I am,” he said, and Kira felt an immediate glow of comradery. At least she wouldn’t be alone. “Veera. Jorrus. Have you managed to get a line open to Gregorovich yet?”

The Entropists shook their heads. They were still fiddling with the wiring in the wall alongside the next pressure door. “Access to the station’s system is restricted and—”

“—we do not have transmitters powerful enough to reach the Wallfish through all these walls.”

“Shit,” said Falconi.

“Where’s security?” said Kira. She’d expected to find a whole squad of Marines stationed by the holding cells.

Falconi jerked his chin toward the Entropists. “Not sure. Those two hacked the cameras to buy us time. We’ve got about five minutes before the station control gets eyes on us again.”

Veera held up a finger without taking her attention from the inside of the hatch. “We may be able to spoof the—”

“—station’s sensors and buy us some more time,” said Jorrus.

Falconi grunted again. “See what you can do.… Can’t you get that blasted door open?”

“Trying, Captain,” they said.

“Let me,” Kira said. She raised her right hand, letting the Soft Blade fuse its replica of her fingers into blades and spikes.

“Careful,” said Falconi. “There could be pressure lines or high-voltage wires in the wall.”

“It should not be—”

“—a concern,” said the Entropists, and moved aside.

Kira moved forward, glad to finally be doing something. She slammed her fist into the metal and willed the Soft Blade outward. It spread across the surface of the wall, sending seeking tendrils deep within the mechanism holding the door closed. Then she pulled, and with a screech, the bolts snapped and the door slid back on its greased track.

Inside was a small holding cell. Sparrow stood half-crouched in front of the bunk, as if ready to fight. “Thule,” she said as she saw Kira. “Glad you’re on our side.”

Falconi snapped his fingers. “Perimeter watch, now.”

“Roger,” said the woman, hurrying out of the cell. She trotted down the corridor and peeked around the corner.

“Over there!” Falconi said to Kira, pointing at another pressure door. Kira went to the second door and, like the first, ripped it open. Inside, Hwa-jung rose from where she’d been sitting. “Fighting!” the machine boss said, and smiled.

“Fighting,” said Kira.

“This one!” said Falconi.

Another door and another screech revealed Nielsen. She gave Kira a quick nod and went to stand with Falconi.

Last of all, Kira broke into the cell containing Vishal. He appeared somewhat haggard, but he smiled at her and said, “How delightful.” Further relief broke across his face as he came out and saw Nielsen and the others.

Falconi returned to the Entropists. “Have you found him yet?”

There was a silence that made Kira want to scream with impatience.

Jorrus said, “Uncertain, but it seems that—”

“—they’ve left Trig in stasis on the Wallfish.”

“Falconi,” said Kira, lowering her voice. “We have to rescue the Jelly. If we can’t get it out of here, there’s a chance none of this will matter.”

He stared at her, his glacial eyes focused, searching, nearly devoid of emotion, though she could tell that he—like her—was concerned. So concerned that no room for panic existed.

“You sure?” he said, deadly quiet.

“I’m sure.”

With that, she saw the switch flip inside him. His expression hardened, and a deadly gleam appeared in his eyes. “Sparrow,” he said.

“Yessir.”

“We need to jailbreak a Jelly and then somehow get off this hunk of metal. Give me options.”

For a moment, Sparrow looked as if she were going to argue. Then, like Falconi, she seemed to put aside her objections and concentrate only on the problem at hand.

“We could try cutting the power to biocontainment,” said Nielsen, coming over.

Sparrow shook her head. “Won’t work. It has its own backup power sources.” While she spoke, she knelt and pulled up the right leg of her pants. Then she dug her fingers into the skin over her shin, and to Kira’s puzzlement, lifted it off to reveal a small compartment underneath, embedded within the bone. “Pays to be prepared,” said Sparrow in response to Kira’s look.

From the compartment Sparrow produced a narrow, thin-bladed knife of some glassy, non-metallic material, a black wire mesh that she pulled over her hands like a set of gloves, and three small marbles that appeared soft, almost fleshy.

“Someday you’re going to have to explain that,” said Falconi, gesturing toward Sparrow’s shin.

“Someday,” the short-haired woman agreed, covering up the compartment and standing. “But not today.” To Kira she said, “What did you see over at biocontainment?” Kira described the security checkpoint and the two Marines stationed outside. A faint smile crossed Sparrow’s face. “Right, here’s what we do.” She snapped her fingers and beckoned for Veera to come over. “You, Entropist, when I give the signal, I want you to walk over to where the Marines can see you.”

“Is that—”

“Just do it. Kira—”

“I can hide myself,” Kira quickly said. She explained.

Sparrow jerked her sharp chin. “That makes it easier. I’ll take care of the two standing guard. You be ready to jump anyone who comes out. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Let’s hustle.”

4.

Kira willed herself back to invisibility while she hid with Sparrow in the hall that opened on the central corridor.

“Nice trick, that,” Sparrow said under her breath.

Ahead of them, Veera walked out across the intersection, heading toward biocontainment. The Entropist was more voluptuous than she had appeared when garbed in her gradient robes, and the tattoos across her pale skin only enhanced the impression. The sight was rather distracting, which—Kira had to admit—was the point.

“Go,” said Sparrow. She darted out and to the side, avoiding the Marines’ line of sight.

Kira broke in the opposite direction, and the two of them flanked Veera and took up positions on opposite sides of the passageway that led to biocontainment.

Just as Veera reached the doorway, the Marines spotted her. Kira heard the heavy treads as their armor turned, and a man said with a tone of obvious confusion, “Hey, you! What the—”

He never finished. Sparrow reached around the corner and tossed the fleshy marbles toward the Marines. Three quick bzzts! sounded as the Marines’ exos shot the marbles out of the air.

That was a mistake.

A triple strobe of light flashed the hall, smoke clogged the air, and with her enhanced vision from the Soft Blade, Kira saw flickers of violet EM energy. What the hell?

Sparrow didn’t wait. She sprinted around the corner and disappeared into the smoke. Metallic screeches sounded, and then a moment later, two enormous thuds as the exos crashed to the deck, immobilized.

Kira followed a half step behind. Switching her vision to infrared, she saw the door to biocontainment roll open. Another Marine in power armor stepped out, blaster raised to fire. Behind him or her, she saw three more Marines scrambling to take cover behind desks.

Even with all the sensors of a military-grade exo, the Marine in the doorway never saw her coming. She slammed into his power armor while driving a hundred different fibers from the Soft Blade into the machine. It took her only a fraction of a second to find the weak spots and disable the exo.

The Marine’s armor locked up and began to fall. Kira pulled it to the side, landed inside biocontainment, and rolled across her shoulders and back to her feet. None of the Marines inside were able to triangulate her exact location, but that didn’t stop them from firing blindly toward the spot she’d been.

Too slow. A laser blast seared a hole through the back of a chair next to her, but Kira was already moving, throwing tendrils across the room and snaring each of the Marines.

Don’t kill, she told the Soft Blade, hoping against hope it would heed.

A clutch of heartbeats later, and the other Marines dropped to the floor. The weight of their armor crushed tables, smashed shelves, and dented the deck.

“Get ’em all?” Sparrow asked, poking her head in.

Kira allowed her invisibility to fade and nodded. Deeper into the room was another door leading to what she recognized as an impressively large decon chamber. Past that was a third pressure door, which she assumed opened to the isolation chamber where Itari was being held.

“Watch my back,” she said.

“Roger.”

It might have been possible to get the access codes off the Marines, but Kira saw no point in wasting time. Hurrying forward, she extended her arms and allowed the Soft Blade to flow out and rip open the decon door.

At the other end of the chamber, she saw Itari through the pressure door window. The Jelly was sitting with its tentacles curled underneath it, like the legs of a dead spider.

A flash of relief passed through Kira. At least they were in the right place.

She set herself against the pressure door and again allowed the Soft Blade to worm its way into the mechanism and then to tear.

Clank. The lock broke. Pulling and pushing with the xeno, Kira rolled the door back.

A questioning scent reached her from the Jelly as it unfurled its tentacles. [[Itari here: Idealis?]]

[[Kira here: If you truly want peace, we must leave this place.]]

[[Itari here: Are these two-forms our enemies?]]

[[Kira here: No, but they do not know better. Do not kill them, I ask you. But do not let yourself be killed either.]]

[[Itari here: As you will, Idealis.]]

Kira left to rejoin the others outside biocontainment, and she heard Itari follow with a dry-leaf shuffle of tentacles.

“We good?” Falconi asked as she, Sparrow, and Itari emerged from the smoke. Veera had found a jacket somewhere in the biocontainment offices and was pulling it on, covering herself.

“Yup,” said Sparrow. “Boobs, works every time. Everyone falls for them.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Kira.

Orsted rumbled around them, and Vishal said, “Heavens preserve us, yes.”

“Veera! Jorrus!” said Falconi.

“Yessir?”

“Still nothing from Gregorovich?”

“Nothing.”

“Jamming?”

“No. They have him in lockdown.”

“He’ll be fighting mad,” said Hwa-jung.

“Good. We can use that,” said Falconi. He rounded on the rest of them. “Right. We’ll go up the main passage. Anyone shows up, break right, take cover. Don’t let ’em use you as hostages. Kira, you’ll have to deal with any opposition. None of us have weapons.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Sparrow. She held up her right hand. The glass-like dagger glinted between her fingers.

Kira gestured at the fallen Marines. “What about—”

“No good,” said Falconi. “They’re locked. Civvies can’t use UMC weapons. Not without authorization. Enough yapping. Let’s—”

With a dull thunk, pressure doors slammed shut around the intersection, closing off the corridor everywhere but the direction Kira had originally come from. There, she heard the thunder of approaching power armor, and then twenty or more Marines trotted into view, carrying blasters, railguns, and heavy turrets. A small cloud of wasp-like drones accompanied them.

“Freeze! Don’t move!” shouted an amplified voice.

5.

Kira and the others, including the Jelly, retreated into the hall leading to biocontainment and hid behind the corners of the doorway.

The voice rang out again: “We know you’re trying to rescue the Jelly, Navárez. Private Larrett told us everything.”

Kira guessed Larrett was the Marine she’d talked to outside her imploded cell. “Bastard,” she muttered.

“Unless anyone has any ideas, we’re shit out of luck,” said Falconi, his face grim.

Then Stahl spoke from the speakers embedded within the glowing ceiling, loud enough to cut through the alarms. “Kira, you don’t want to do this. Fighting isn’t going to help anyone, least of all you. Stand down, tell the Jelly to return to its cell, and no one has to—”

The deck rumbled and twisted underneath them again.

Kira didn’t hesitate. She had to do something.

She jumped into the corridor and sent a score of shafts out from her chest and legs. They angled forward and downward, and pierced the deck in different spots.

Don’t lose control. Don’t—

Her ears rang as a bullet skipped off her head, and she felt what were like several punches to her ribs, directly above her heart. Then she pulled the shafts inward, tearing up large chunks of the deck.

At her command, the Soft Blade slammed the pieces of decking together, layering them like scales to form a tall, wedge-shaped shield in front of her.

Finger-sized holes—white-hot around the edges and dripping molten metal—peppered the shield as the angry bzzt! of laser fire sounded throughout the concourse.

Kira took a step forward, and the Soft Blade moved the shield with her. As she did, she reached out farther with the suit and grabbed more pieces of the deck, adding them to the barrier, thickening it, widening it.

“With me!” she shouted, and the crew and the Jelly scurried after her.

“Right behind you!” said Falconi.

Bullets whined overhead, and then an explosion shook the shield, and Kira felt the impact through her body.

“Grenade!” shouted Sparrow.

[[Itari here: Can I help, Idealis?]]

[[Kira here: Do not kill anyone if you can avoid it, and do not get in front of me.]]

A pair of drones appeared around the edge of the shield. Kira lanced them with two quick stabs and continued plodding forward. The floor was a tattered mess of twisted girders and exposed pipes; it was difficult to keep her footing.

“Just get us to the terminal!” Falconi said.

Kira nodded, barely paying attention. Even though she couldn’t see what was in front of her, she kept using the suit to grab decking, panels off the wall, benches—any and everything she could use to protect them. She didn’t know how much weight the suit could move or support, but she was determined to find out.

Another grenade hit the shield. That one she barely felt.

Several of the suit’s tentacles encountered something long and smooth and warm (very warm, burning hot even; if she’d touched it with bare flesh, she suspected it would have seared a hole right through her skin): one of the laser turrets. That too she added to the pile, tearing the weapon free from the floor and jamming it into the gap between two benches.

“More drones!” said Vishal.

Before he’d finished speaking, Kira created a web of struts and rods (some metal, some made from the suit itself) between the shield, the ceiling, and the distant walls. In several places, she felt and heard the drones collide with the barrier; the tone of their blades increased from the strain.

She flinched as grenades blew open a hole in the web.

“Jesus!” shouted Falconi.

The drones swung toward the hole. One of them darted through, and Itari smacked it out of the air with a well-timed swing of a tentacle. Before the rest could make it past, and before they could find an angle that would allow them to shoot any of the crew, Kira snared the machines out of the air—like a frog snapping up flies—and crushed them.

All of them.

She could feel the suit growing in size, reinforcing itself with metal and carbon and whatever else it needed from the structure of the station. Her arms seemed thicker, her legs too, and a sense of power coursed through her; she felt as if she could claw her way through solid rock.

The gunfire subsided as the Marines in front of her stopped shooting and started to run back along the concourse, their heavy steps pounding a rapid beat.

Kira bared her teeth. So they’d realized it was pointless to fight. Good. Now if she could just get everyone safely to the Wallfish, then—

She heard, not saw, the pressure door in front of them slam shut. Then the one beyond it, and so forth and so on down the concourse.

“Shit!” said Nielsen. “They’ve locked us in.”

“Stay with me!” said Kira.

She continued forward until she felt her shield bump into the pressure door. The door itself was too large and heavy to cut through in a reasonable amount of time, but the frame around it wasn’t. It took her and the Soft Blade only a few moments of work before the door toppled outward and crashed with deafening results against the deck.

Ten meters down the corridor, the next blast door blocked their way.

Kira repeated the procedure, and the second door soon followed the example of the first. Then a third.… And a fourth.

All of the doors ahead of them seemed to be closed. It wasn’t stopping them, but it did slow Kira down. “The UMC is trying to buy themselves time,” Falconi said to her.

She grunted. “Bet they’re preparing a nice welcome party for us at the terminal.” A loud hissing sounded near the walls. The back of her neck prickled with alarm. Was the air being pumped out or was something being pumped in?

“Gas!” Falconi shouted, and pulled the collar of his shirt over his mouth and nose. The others did the same. The cloth molded to their faces, forming skin-tight filters. The Entropists made arcane gestures with their hands, and the lines of their tattoos slid across their faces, forming a paper-thin membrane that covered their mouths and noses.

Kira was impressed. Nanotech of the highest order.

She knew the instant she broke through to the last section of concourse—the one adjacent to the terminal—as a heavy barrage of bullets, laser blasts, railgun projectiles, and explosives pounded into the barrier she’d built. The impacts rocked her back, but she set her shoulder and pressed forward with deliberate steps.

A third of the way through the concourse section, Falconi tapped her shoulder and said, “Right! Go right!” He pointed toward the terminal entrance.

As Kira started to edge in that direction, the pipes under her feet shook, and she heard a sound like an oncoming avalanche as the Marines charged.

With less than a second to prepare, she wrenched several of the floor girders upward, so they supported the inside of the shield and prevented it from sliding backwards.

“Brace!” she shouted.

Thick as it was, the shield bent and gave as the troopers slammed into it with their power armor. There was a terrible screeching as the soldiers began to tear away pieces of the shield.

“Gotcha,” said Kira, baring her teeth.

She willed hundreds of hairlike fibers through the bulk of the shield, through all the little nooks and crannies and hidden crevices until, sightless creeping, they found the smooth shells of the troopers’ armor. Then she did as she had done before. She sent the fibers boring into the joints and seams of the armor, and she cut every wire and coolant line she could find, stopping only when she encountered the touch of overheated flesh.

It was an effort to stop, but the Soft Blade obeyed her will and respected the boundaries of flesh. Her confidence swelled.

On the other side of the shield, the screeching stopped, and the troopers collapsed with a sound fitting the fall of titans.

“Did you kill them?” asked Nielsen, her voice sounding too loud in the sudden silence.

Kira licked her lips. “No.” Talking felt weird. The shield seemed to occupy a larger part of herself than her own body. She could sense every square centimeter of the barrier. The amount of information was overwhelming. Was the experience similar to what ship minds had to deal with? She wondered.

She was about to detach herself from the shield when more boots sounded ahead of them, at the other end of the concourse.

Before Kira could react, the lights flickered and went out, save for small emergency floods along the floor, and the deck rippled like a wave, causing everyone but Kira and Itari to stagger and fall.

An industrial crash of crumpling metal echoed through the concourse, and a dark dart of veined hull punched through the decking farther up the main hallway, past the newly arrived Marines. Pressure alarms shrieked, and from a weeping cleft in the side of the intruding spaceship poured dozens of scrambling nightmares.

The heavy chatter of cycling machine guns filled the air, along with the electric snap of discharging lasers as the Marines engaged the grotesque invaders.

“Shi-bal!” cried Hwa-jung.

Kira shouted and drove the shield forward, plowing past the limp weight of the troops she’d incapacitated. If the nightmares realized who and what she was, they’d all converge on her. She half trotted, half walked the shield across the floor, and for the moment, she stopped adding material to it, her only concern to escape.

She turned, pivoting the shield around Falconi and the others so her back was to the concourse exit and the terminal beyond. Then she retreated, step by step, until the edges of the shield banged into the wall on either side of the doorway.

Moving quickly, she pulled the shield in toward herself, collapsing it into a dense cap over the doorway. She secured it to the floor, ceiling, and walls with twisted pieces of metal, making it so the only practical way to remove it would be by cutting.

Falconi pounded her on the shoulder. “Leave it!” he shouted.

A boom echoed through the terminal as a grenade detonated on the other side of the barrier. A moment later, Marines began to bang on it, producing a muffled din.

The shield would hold, but not for very long.

Kira extricated the suit from the material, and as she did, she felt diminished, reduced to her normal sense of size.

Whirling around, she saw the others had already crossed the small terminal and were forcing open the doors to a maglev car.

From the ceiling came a man’s voice: “This is Udo Grammaticus, stationmaster of this installation. Cease resisting, and I guarantee you won’t be harmed. This is your final warning. There are twenty power troopers outside your—”

He kept talking, but Kira tuned him out. She jogged over to the maglev car as Falconi said, “Can we use it?”

“Aside from the lights, all power’s been cut,” said Hwa-jung.

“So we can’t leave?” said Nielsen.

Hwa-jung grunted. “Not like this. Maglev won’t work.”

“There must be another way into the docking ring,” said Vishal.

“How?” said Sparrow. “We’re moving waaay too fast to just jump over. Maybe Kira or the Jelly could make it, but the rest of us would get turned into a bloody smear. It’s a fucking dead end.”

Outside the shield, gunfire continued to erupt: dull thumps that came in controlled bursts as the Marines fought back the nightmares. Or so Kira assumed.

“Yes, thank you,” Falconi said in a dry tone. He turned back to Hwa-jung. “You’re the engineer. Any ideas?” He glanced at the Entropists. “How about you?”

Veera and Jorrus spread their hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Mechanics—”

“—are not our specialty.”

“Don’t give me that. There has to be a way to get us from here to there without killing us.”

The machine boss frowned. “Of course there is, if we had enough time and materials.”

Another boom sounded in the concourse.

“No such luck,” said Falconi. “Come on, anything. Doesn’t matter how far-fetched. Be creative, Ms. Song. That’s what I hired you for.”

Hwa-jung’s frown deepened, and for a moment she was silent. Then, she muttered, “Aigoo,” and scrambled into the maglev car. She ran her hands over the floor, rapping it with her knuckles in different places. Then she waved Kira over and said, “Here. Open the floor here.” And she traced a square on the floor. “Be careful. Just remove the top layer. Don’t damage anything underneath.”

“Got it.”

Kira retraced the square with her index finger, and the tip of her nail scored the grey composite. She repeated the motion, increasing the pressure, and a thin, diamond-like blade extended from her finger and sliced through the first centimeter or so of material. Then she gripped the square—bonding it to her palm as if with gecko pads—and pulled it free from the rest of the floor, like snapping a cracker along pre-established lines.

Hwa-jung got down onto her hands and knees as she peered into the hole, studying the wires and banks of equipment within. Kira had no idea what any of them were for, but Hwa-jung seemed to understand what she was looking at.

The banging outside the terminal intensified. Kira glanced back at the shield. It was beginning to dent inward. Another minute and she figured she would have to go reinforce it.

Hwa-jung made a sound in the back of her throat and then stood. “I can move the car, but I need a power source.”

“Can’t you—” Falconi started to say.

“No,” said Hwa-jung. “Without power, it is a no-good stupid rock. I can’t do anything with it.”

Kira looked over at the Jelly. [[Kira here: Can you fix this machine?]]

[[Itari here: I have no energy source that would work.]]

“What about a set of power armor?” asked Nielsen. “Would that do the trick?”

Hwa-jung shook her head. “Enough power, yes, but it wouldn’t be compatible.”

“Could you use a laser turret?” Kira asked.

The machine boss hesitated, then nodded. “Maybe. If the capacitors can be set to—”

Kira didn’t wait to hear the rest. She jumped out of the car and sprinted back to the makeshift barrier. As she reached it, the banging stopped, which worried her, but she wasn’t going to complain.

Extending the suit in dozens of wriggling tentacles, she rooted through the mangled plug of scraps, searching for the turret she’d buried within the mass. It wasn’t long before she found it: a smooth, hard piece of metal, still warm from being fired. Moving as fast as she dared, she bent and pressed the parts of the shield until she created a tunnel just large enough to pull the turret through—all the while struggling to maintain the structural integrity of the shield and keep the front of it a solid, unmoving face.

“Faster, please!” said Falconi.

“What do you think I’m doing?” she shouted.

The turret came free, and she caught it in her hands. Cradling it like a live bomb, she hurried back to the car and handed the weapon to Hwa-jung.

Sparrow tapped her glass-like knife against her thigh as she glanced around. Then she grabbed Kira by the arm and dragged her a few steps away.

“What?” said Kira.

In a low voice, tight with tension, Sparrow said, “Those grease-heads are going to blast their way in through the ceiling or the walls. Guarantee it. You’d better work up some kinda fortification shit, or we’re goners.”

“On it.”

Sparrow nodded and returned to the car, where Vishal was helping Hwa-jung take apart the turret.

“Everyone stay back!” Kira said. Then she faced the cramped terminal and, as in the concourse, sent forth dozens of lines from the Soft Blade, allowing it to do what was needed. A painfully loud din assaulted her as the xeno started to dismantle the floor, walls, and ceiling. She drew the pieces closer and, fast as she could, began to assemble them into a dome around the front of the maglev docking port.

As the chunks crashed into place, she could feel her sense of self expanding again. It was intoxicating. She distrusted the feeling—distrusted both herself and the Soft Blade—but the lure of more was seductive, and the ease with which she and the xeno were working together bolstered her confidence.

One of the panels she yanked free must have contained the intercom speaker, because she heard sparks, and then the stationmaster’s voice cut out.

Meter by meter, she stripped the terminal, exposing Orsted’s underlying skeleton of cross-joined beams, anodized against corrosion and riddled with holes to save on weight.

Soon she couldn’t see anything but the inside of the dome, and still she kept adding to it. Darkness enveloped them, and from the car, Vishal called, “You’re not making this easy, Ms. Navárez!”

“It’s that or getting shot!” she shouted back.

A blast shook the terminal.

“Time to get this show on the road,” said Falconi.

“I’m working on it,” said Hwa-jung.

Kira extended herself even farther, stretching to the limits of her reach and finding she could reach yet farther still. Consciousness thinned, spread over a greater and greater area, and the amount of input became disorienting: pressures and scrapes here, pipes there, wires above and below, the tickle of electrical discharges, heat and cold and a thousand different impressions from a thousand different points along the Soft Blade, and all of them squirming, changing, expanding, and inundating her with ever more sensations.

It was too much. She couldn’t oversee it all, couldn’t keep up. In places, her supervision failed, and where it failed, the Soft Blade acted of its own, moving forward with deadly intent. Kira felt her mind fragmenting as she tried to focus first on one place, then another, then another, and each time quickly bringing the suit back to heel, but while she was occupied, it continued to swarm elsewhere, growing … building … becoming.

She was drowning, disappearing into the expanding existence of the Soft Blade. Panic sparked within her, but the spark was too feeble to rein in the suit. A sense of pleasure emanated from the Soft Blade at finally being let loose to pursue its purpose; from it Kira had flashes of … yellow fields with flowers that sang … memories that … a treelike growth with metal scales for bark … disoriented her further, made it almost … a group of long, furry creatures that yipped at her from between brindled mandibles … impossible to concentrate.

In a brief shard of lucidity, the horror of the situation struck Kira. What had she done?

With ears not her own, she heard a sound like doom itself: the measured tramp of armored soldiers marching into the outer part of the terminal. Discomfort, sharp and piercing, disturbed several grasping pseudopods. Startled, she/they retracted.

Attack her/it, would they?

Walls and beams and structural supports crumpled beneath her/their grasp as they collapsed the station in around the shield. The deck buckled, but it didn’t matter. Only finding more mass: more metals, more minerals, more, more, more. A hunger formed inside her/it, an insatiable, world-eating hunger.

“Kira!”

The voice sounded as if from the far end of a tunnel. Whoever they were, she/it didn’t recognize the person. Or maybe she/it didn’t care to. There were other, more important things that needed her/its attention.

“Kira!” At a remove, she/it felt hands and shaking and pulling. None of which, of course, could budge her/it from place: her/their cords of banded fibers were too strong. “Kira!” Pain shot through her/its face, but it was so slight and distant as to be easily ignored.

The pain appeared again. And then a third time.

Anger formed in some part of her/itself. She/it looked inward from every direction, with eyes above and eyes below and eyes still made of flesh, and with them beheld a man standing next to her, red-faced and shouting.

He slapped her across the face.

The shock of it was enough to clear Kira’s mind for a moment. She gasped, and Falconi said, “Snap out of it! You’re going to kill us all!”

She could already feel herself slipping back into the morass of the Soft Blade. “Hit me again,” she said.

He hesitated and then did.

Kira’s vision flashed red, but the bright sting on her cheek gave her something outside of the Soft Blade to focus on and help center herself. It was a struggle; gathering the different parts of her mind back together felt as if she were trying to free herself from a pool of grasping hands—one for each fiber of the suit, and all of them freakishly strong.

Fear gave Kira the motivation she needed. Her pulse soared until she teetered on the brink of passing out. But she didn’t, and moment by moment she was able to retreat into herself. At the same time, she recalled the Soft Blade from the surrounding walls and rooms of the station. It fought her at first; it was reluctant to abandon its grand project and surrender what it had already subsumed.

But in the end, it obeyed. The Soft Blade recoiled upon itself, constricting and contracting as it returned to the shape of her body. There was more of it than she needed, and at the thought, ropes of the suit’s material shriveled and turned to dust, leaving nothing useful behind.

Falconi started to lift his hand again.

“Wait,” said Kira, and he did.

Her hearing was returning to normal; she noticed the whistle of escaping air and pressure alarms sounding in the distance, overriding all other alarms.

“What happened?” said Falconi. She shook her head, still not feeling entirely whole. “You ripped a hole in the hull, nearly spaced us.”

Kira glanced up and quailed as she saw—directly above them—a thin, dark rift of space showing through the ruined ceiling and several layers of ruptured decks. Stars spun past the opening, a crazed kaleidoscope of constellations, dizzying in their speed.

“Lost control. Sorry.” She coughed.

Something clanged against the outside of the dome.

“Hwa-jung!” he shouted. “We need to be outta here. I mean it!”

“Aigoo! Stop bothering me!”

Falconi turned back to Kira. “You good to move?”

“Think so.” The Soft Blade’s intrusive presence still wormed restless within her mind, but her sense of identity held strong despite.

From the source of the clang, Kira heard a spitting, hissing noise, like something a congested blowtorch would produce. A spot on the inside of the dome began to glow dull red, then yellow, and almost immediately, she felt the temperature in the space increasing.

“What is that?” said Nielsen.

“Shit!” said Sparrow. “The pricks are using a thermal lance!”

“The heat will kill us!” said Vishal.

Falconi gestured. “Everyone in the car!”

“I can stop them!” said Kira, though the thought filled her with fear again. As long as she concentrated upon one area of effort and didn’t let the Soft Blade run amuck … Even as she spoke, she started ripping up the floor within the dome and slapping the pieces onto the glowing hotspot. Fumes shot out sideways from the sections of composite as they turned red and softened.

“Forget it. We gotta go!” shouted Falconi.

“Just close the doors. I’ll buy you some time.”

“Stop fucking around and get in the car! That’s an order.”

[[Itari here: Idealis, we must leave.]] The Jelly was already crammed into the front end of the car, tentacles pressed against the sides.

“No! I can hold them off. Let me know when you’re—”

Falconi grabbed her by the shoulders and twisted her toward him. “Now! I’m not leaving anyone behind. Comeon!” By the burning light, his blue eyes seemed bright as flaming suns.

At that, Kira relented. She released the dome and allowed him to pull her into the car. Sparrow and Nielsen shoved the maglev door shut; it locked with a loud click.

“You trying to get yourself killed?” Falconi growled in Kira’s ear. “You’re not invincible.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Stow it. Hwa-jung, we good to go?”

“Almost, Captain. Almost…”

Outside the car, a spray of white-hot metal erupted from the center of the glowing spot as the lance burned its way through the full thickness of the dome. The spray started to move downward, slowly cutting one side of a trooper-sized opening.

“Don’t look at it!” said Sparrow. “It’s too bright. It’ll burn out your retinas.”

“Hwa-jung—”

“Ready!” said the machine boss. Kira and everyone else turned to face her. The turret lay in parts between her feet. The power pack had been pried open, and wires led from it into the machinery that filled the car’s undercarriage.

“Listen to me,” said Hwa-jung. She tapped the power pack. “This is damaged. When I turn it on, it might melt and explode.”

“We’ll risk it,” said Falconi.

“There is more.”

“Not really the time for a lecture right now.”

“Listen! Aish!” Hwa-jung’s eyes gleamed with the searing light of the thermal lance. “I was able to splice into the feeds for the electromagnets. This thing will lift us, but that is all. I can’t access the directional controls; it won’t move us forward or backward.”

“Then how—” Nielsen tried to say.

“Kira, you do this: break off a chair for each of us, and then knock out the windows, there and there.” Hwa-jung pointed at each side of the car. “When I activate the circuit, you use your suit to pull us forward, and we will coast into the main tube. The supercapacitors only have enough charge to keep us suspended for forty-three seconds. We’re going about two hundred and fifty klicks per hour relative to the docking ring. We have to shed as much of that speed as possible before we crash. The way we do that is by sticking the chairs out the windows and pushing them against the walls of the tube. They will act as brakes. Clear?”

Kira nodded along with the others. Outside, the fountain of molten metal vanished for a second as the thermal lance reached the floor. Then it reappeared at the top of the dripping incision and started to make a horizontal cut.

“You will have to push very hard,” said Hwa-jung. “As hard as you can. Otherwise the crash will kill us.”

Kira grabbed the nearest chair and wrenched it off its gimbaled mount with a hollow ping. The next three chairs produced similar sounds. With a quick exchange of scents, she explained what they were doing to Itari, and the Jelly also grabbed a pair of chairs with its coiled limbs.

“This is some shit-crazy plan, Unni,” said Sparrow.

Hwa-jung grunted. “It’ll work, punk. You’ll see.”

“Watch your eyes,” Kira said. Then she lashed out with the Soft Blade and smashed the windows along both sides of the maglev.

A furnace-blast of heat washed over them from the interior of the half-shell dome. Falconi, Nielsen, Vishal, and the Entropists dropped to the floor, and Falconi said, “Seven hells!”

The thermal lance started its second downward cut.

“Get ready,” said Hwa-jung. “Contact in three, two, one.”

The floor rose a few centimeters underneath Kira. It listed slightly and then stabilized.

Lifting her arms, she launched several ropy strands from her fingers, through the shattered windows, and onto the walls outside. The xeno understood her intent, and they stuck, like lines of spider silk, and she pulled.

The car was heavy, but it slid forward, seemingly without friction. With a soft brushing sound, it passed through the seal at the end of the station and then tilted downward and raced into the dark, rushing tube set within the inner face of the docking ring.

Wind screamed past them. If not for her mask, Kira would have had difficulty seeing or hearing in the ferocious torrent of air. It was cold too, although—again because of the suit—she wasn’t sure how cold.

She scooped up one of the loose chairs and stuck it out the nearest window. A horrible screeching split the wind, and a comet’s tail of sparks streamed back along the inside of the tube. The impact nearly tore the chair out of her hands, even with the help of the Soft Blade, but she clenched her teeth and tightened her grip and held it in place.

Ahead of her, Itari did the same. Behind her, she was dimly aware of the others staggering to their feet. The screeching worsened as Nielsen, Falconi, Vishal, Sparrow, and the Entropists also pressed their chairs against the wall of the tube. The car rocked and chattered like a jackhammer.

Kira tried to keep track of the seconds, but the noise was too loud, the wind too distracting. It felt as if they weren’t slowing down, though. She leaned on the chair even harder, and it squirmed in her hands like living thing.

The tube had already ground through the chair’s legs and half of its seat; soon she wouldn’t have anything to hold on to.

Slowly—far too slowly—she felt her herself growing lighter, and the soles of her feet started to slip. She fixed herself to the floor via the suit and then slung out lines and secured the others so they could keep pushing and wouldn’t drift away.

The screeching lessened, and the banner of sparks grew shorter and fatter, and soon they began to curl and spiral in elaborate patterns instead of flying straight back.

Kira had just begun to think they would make it when the electromagnets cut out.

The car slammed into the outer rail with a yammering shriek that dwarfed the noise of the chairs. The capsule bucked, and the ceiling twisted and tore like taffy being pulled. Itari flew through the front windshield, tentacles flopping, and from the back, there was an electric flash, bright as lightning, and then smoke billowed through the maglev.

With a dwindling whine, they slid to a stop.

6.

Kira’s stomach lurched as the sensation of weight vanished, but for once, her gorge didn’t rise. That was fine with her. Nausea was the last thing she wanted to deal with right then. Explosions, thermal lances, and maglev crashes… She’d had enough for one day. Suit or not, her whole body felt bruised.

Itari! Was the Jelly still alive? Without it, everything they were doing would be pointless.

Moving jerkily, even in zero-g, she released her hold on the car and the crew. Falconi was bleeding from a cut on his temple. He put the heel of his hand to the wound and said, “Everyone okay?”

Vishal groaned and said, “I believe that removed a few years from my life, but yes.”

“Yeah,” said Sparrow. “Same.”

Nielsen brushed bits of glass out of her hair, sending them drifting forward through the destroyed windshield, like a small cloud of crystal motes. “A bit shaken up, Captain.”

“Second that,” said Veera and Jorrus. The male Entropist had a row of bloody scrapes across his bare ribs, which looked painful but not serious.

Kira pulled herself to the front of the ruined maglev and peered out. She could see Itari several meters ahead of them, clinging to a rail in the hull. Orange ichor oozed from a nasty-looking wound near the base of one of the Jelly’s larger tentacles.

[[Kira here: Are you okay? Can you move?]]

[[Itari here: Worry not about me, Idealis. This form can take much damage.]]

Even as it spoke, one of the Jelly’s bony arms reached out from its carapace and, to Kira’s shock, began to snip away with its pincer at the wounded tentacle.

“What the hell!” said Sparrow, joining Kira.

With startling speed, the alien cut off the tentacle and left it drifting in the air, abandoned amid a cloud of orange blobs. Despite the size of the raw stump left on Itari’s carapace, the Jelly’s bleeding had already stopped.

Hwa-jung coughed and swam her way out of the bolus of smoke, like a ship rising from the depths of oily water. She caught a handhold and pointed out the front. “The next maglev station is just ahead.”

Kira went first, using her suit to knock out the jagged remains of the windshield. Then she pushed herself away from the car, and one by one, the others extricated themselves from the wreckage. Hwa-jung was last; she barely fit through the frame, but with some effort, she made it.

Using maintenance grips on the walls, they crawled along the interior of the black and echoing tube until lights flicked on a few meters ahead of them.

With a sense of relief, Kira aimed herself for them.

As they floated over to the station, a pair of automatic doors in the wall opened and allowed them to dive into the vestibule on the other side.

They paused then to regroup and check their directions.

“Where are we?” Kira asked. She noticed that Vishal had a nasty cut on his right forearm and both of Hwa-jung’s hands were burned and blistering. It must have been excruciating, but the machine boss hid her pain well.

“Two stops past where we should be,” said Nielsen. She pointed downspin (not that they were spinning anymore).

With her in the lead, they started through the abandoned hallways of Orsted’s docking ring.

Occasionally they encountered bots: some recharging from sockets in the walls, some scurrying about on tracks, some jetting about on bursts of compressed air, busy with one of the myriad tasks necessary to the functioning of the station. None of the machines seemed to pay them any mind, but Kira knew each and every one was recording their location and actions.

The outer decks were filled with heavy industry. Refineries that, even during an attack from the nightmares, still rumbled and groaned with the imperatives of their operation. Fuel processing stations, where water was cracked into its component elements. Storage units packed to the brim with useful materials. And of course, the vast stacks of zero-g factories, where everything from medicines to machine guns was produced in quantities not only sufficient to satisfy the needs of Orsted’s resident population but also much of the larger UMCN fleet.

Empty as they were, the nether regions of the station gave Kira the creeps. Even there, the alarm sirens still wailed, and glowing arrows (smaller and dimmer than in the main part of the station) pointed the way to the nearest storm shelters. But no shelter could help her now. That much she’d admitted and accepted. The only safety she could count on was the isolation of deep space, and there too, the nightmares or the Jellies might find her.

They moved quickly, and after only a few minutes, Falconi said, “Here,” and pointed at a hallway that led rimward.

Kira recognized it as the same hallway they’d passed through during their arrival at Orsted.

With a sense of growing eagerness, she kicked her way along its crooked length. After everything that had happened on the station, returning to the Wallfish felt like returning home.

The pressure door to the loading dock slid open, and through the airlock at the far side, she saw …

Blackness.

Emptiness.

And perhaps a kilometer in the distance, the Wallfish rapidly shrinking in size, driven by a white plume of RCS thrusters.

7.

Falconi shouted. Not a word or a phrase, just a raw cry of anger and loss. As she heard it, Kira felt herself collapsing inward, surrendering to despair. She allowed the mask to slide off her face.

They’d lost. After all that, they’d—

Falconi jumped toward the airlock. He landed awkwardly and his breath ran out of him with an audible whoof, but he kept hold of the rungs next to the lock. Then he dragged himself across to the window and pressed his face against the sapphire wedge and stared after the Wallfish.

Kira looked away. She couldn’t bear to watch. Seeing him like that embarrassed her, as if she were intruding on something private. His grief was too open, too desperate.

“Ha!” said Falconi. “Gotcha! Oh yeah! Just caught her in time.” He turned and grinned at them with a wicked expression.

“Captain?” said Nielsen, floating over to join him.

He pointed out the window, and to her astonishment, Kira saw the Wallfish slow and reverse its course as it headed back toward the airlock.

“How did you manage that?” rumbled Hwa-jung.

Falconi tapped his blood-smeared temple. “Direct visual signal sent through my overlays. As long as the ship’s passive sensors are working, and as long as they’re in range and there’s a clear line of sight, they can’t be jammed. Not like radios or FTL broadcasts.”

“That is quite a few qualifiers, Captain,” said Vishal.

Falconi chucked. “Yeah, but it worked. I set up an override system just in case anyone tried to steal the Wallfish. Ain’t no one hijacking my ship.”

“And you never told us about this?” said Nielsen. She actually seemed offended. Kira, on the other hand, was impressed.

Falconi’s levity vanished. “You know me, Audrey. Always know where the exits are. Always have an ace up the sleeve.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked unconvinced.

“Here, let me see your hands, please,” said Vishal, moving over to Hwa-jung. She dutifully let him examine her. “Mmm, not too bad,” he said. “Mostly second-degree burns. I will give you a spray to prevent any scarring.”

“And some painkillers, please,” she said.

He laughed softly. “Of course, and painkillers.”

The Wallfish didn’t take long to reach them. As it loomed large in the window, Veera grabbed the handle in the center of the airlock in an attempt to get a better view.

“Ahhh!” Her yell ended in a strangled gurgle. She arched her back nearly in half, and her whole body went rigid, save for small twitches in hands and feet. Her face contorted into a hideous rictus, teeth clenched.

Jorrus matched her yell, although he was nowhere near the airlock, and he likewise contorted.

“Don’t touch her!” Hwa-jung shouted.

Kira didn’t listen; she knew the suit would protect her.

She looped several tentacles around Veera’s waist while, at the same time, attaching herself to the nearest wall. Then she pulled the convulsing Entropist free of the door. It wasn’t easy; Veera’s hand was clamped around the handle with unnatural strength. As the woman’s grip gave way, Kira hoped she hadn’t torn any of the muscles in her hand.

The instant Veera’s fingers lost contact with the door, her body went limp, and Jorrus’s howl ceased, though he retained the expression of a man who had just seen unspeakable horror.

“Someone grab her!” said Nielsen.

Vishal lunged out from the wall and snared Veera by a sleeve of her jacket. He wrapped an arm around the Entropist and, with his free hand, peeled back her eyelids. Then he opened Veera’s mouth and peered down her throat. “She’ll live, but I need to get her to sickbay.”

Jorrus groaned. He had his arms wrapped around his head, and his skin was alarmingly pale.

“How bad is it?” Falconi asked.

The doctor gave him a worried look. “Uncertain, Captain. I will have to keep an eye on her heart. The shock might have burned out her implants. I can’t tell yet. They need a hard reboot.”

Jorrus was muttering to himself now: nothing that Kira could make sense of.

“That was a nasty trick,” said Nielsen.

“They’re panicked,” said Sparrow. “They’re trying anything to stop us.” She raised a middle finger toward the center of the station. “I hope you get your own asses electrified! You hear me?!”

“It’s my fault,” said Kira. She motioned at her face. “I should have kept the mask on. I would have seen the electricity.”

“Not your fault,” said Falconi. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.” He maneuvered over to Jorrus. “Hey. Veera’s going to live, yeah? Relax, it’s alright.”

“You don’t understand,” said Jorrus between hitching breaths.

“Explain.”

“She—Me—Us—” He wrung his hands, which caused him to start floating away. Falconi caught him, stabilized him. “There is no us! No we. No I. All gone. Gone, gone, gone, ahhh!” And his voice dropped into meaningless rambles again.

Falconi shook him. “Pull yourself together! The ship’s almost here.” It made no difference.

“Their hive mind is broken,” said Hwa-jung.

“So? He’s still himself, isn’t he?

“That’s—”

Veera woke with a gasp and a wild start that sent her spinning. An instant later she clutched her temples and began to scream. At the sound, Jorrus curled into a fetal ball and whimpered.

“Great,” said Falconi. “Now we’ve got a pair of crazies to deal with. Just great.”

Soft as a falling feather, the Wallfish slowed to a stop outside the airlock. A series of clanks sounded as the docking clamps activated, securing the nose of the ship.

Falconi gestured. “Kira. If you wouldn’t mind?”

As the doctor struggled to calm the Entropists, Kira allowed the mask to cover her face again. The current in the airlock door appeared to her as a thick bar of bluish light, as if part of a lightning bolt had been trapped in the handle of the door. The bar was so bright and wide, she was surprised it hadn’t killed Veera outright.

Extending a pair of tendrils, she sank them into the door and—as she had in her cell—rerouted the flow of electricity through the cabled surface of the Soft Blade.

“It’s safe,” she said.

“Outstanding,” said Falconi, but he still looked wary as he reached for the airlock controls. When no shock hit him, his shoulders relaxed and he quickly activated the release.

There was a beep, and a green light appeared above the control panel. With a hiss of escaping air, the door rolled open.

Kira released her hold then, retracting the Soft Blade and allowing the electricity to resume its normal path. “No one touch the handle,” she said. “It’s still hot.” She repeated herself for Itari.

Falconi went first. He floated over to the nose of the Wallfish, punched a combination of buttons, and the ship’s own airlock popped open. Kira and the others trailed after, Vishal with one arm around Veera while Hwa-jung helped with Jorrus, as he was barely able to move on his own. Last of all was Itari, the Jelly graceful as an eel as it pulled itself through the airlock.

A thought occurred to Kira. A horrible, cynical thought. What if the UMC chose that moment to blow the docking clamps and space her and everyone else? Given everything the League and the military had done, it wasn’t something she’d put past them at that point.

However, the seal between the airlocks held, and once the last centimeter of Itari’s tentacles were inside the Wallfish, Nielsen closed the ship’s door.

“Sayonara, Orsted,” said Falconi, heading down the Wallfish’s central shaft.

The ship seemed dead. Abandoned. Most of the lights were off, and the temperature was freezing. It smelled familiar, though, and that familiarity comforted Kira.

“Morven,” said Falconi. “Initiate ignition sequence and prepare for launch. And get the damn heat back on.”

The pseudo-intelligence answered, “Sir, safety procedures specifically state that no—”

“Disable safety procedures,” he said, and rattled off a long authorization code.

“Safety procedures disabled. Beginning launch preparations.”

To Hwa-jung, Falconi said, “See if you can get Gregorovich hooked back up before we blast out of here.”

“Yessir.” The machine boss handed Jorrus off to Sparrow and then flew down the corridor, continuing deeper into the ship.

“Come now, please,” said Vishal, pulling Veera in the same direction. “Off to sickbay for you. And you too, Jorrus.”

Leaving the incapacitated Entropists with Sparrow and the doctor, Kira, Nielsen, and Falconi proceeded to Control. Itari trailed behind, and no one, not even the captain, objected.

Falconi uttered a sound of disgust as he entered the room. Dozens of small items cluttered the air: pens, two cups, a plate, several q-drives, and other pieces of random flotsam. It looked as if the UMC had ransacked every drawer, cupboard, and bin, and they hadn’t been too careful about it either.

“Get this cleared up,” said Falconi, moving to the main console.

Kira made a net with the Soft Blade and began to sweep the flotsam out of the air. Itari stayed by the pressure door, tentacles coiled close to itself.

Falconi tapped several buttons underneath the console, and around them, lights brightened and machines powered up. In the center of the room, the holo-display sprang to life.

“Okay,” said Falconi. “We’ve got full access again.” He tapped buttons along the edge of the holo, and the display switched to a map of the area surrounding Orsted Station with the locations and vectors of all nearby vessels labeled. Four red-blinking dots marked hostiles: nightmares currently skirmishing with the UMC forces around the curve of Ganymede. A fifth dot marked the nightmare ship embedded in Orsted’s inner ring.

Kira hoped Lt. Hawes and the other Marines would be safe on the station. They might have answered to the UMC and the League, but they’d been good people.

“Looks like they hit the station and flew on past,” said Nielsen.

“They’ll be back,” Falconi said with grim certainty. His eyes darted back and forth as he studied whatever his overlays were showing. He uttered a sharp bark of laughter. “Well, I’ll be…”

“Who’d have thought?” said Nielsen.

Kira hated to ask: “What?”

“The UMC actually refueled us,” said Falconi. “Can you believe it?”

“Probably planned on commandeering the Fish and using it for shuttling around supplies,” said Nielsen.

Falconi grunted. “They left us the howitzers as well. Thoughtful of them.”

Then the intercom clicked on, and Gregorovich’s distinctive voice rang out, “My, you’ve been busy, my pretty little moppets. Mmm. Kicked up the hornets’ nest, did you. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that. Yes we will. Tee-hee.… By the way, my charming infestations, I have reignited the fusion drive. You’re welcome.” A low hum sounded from the back of the ship.

“Gregorovich, yank the restrictor,” said Falconi.

An infinitesimal pause on the part of the ship mind. “Are you absolutely sure, Captain O my Captain?”

“Yes, I am. Yank it.”

“I live but to serve,” said Gregorovich, and he tittered a bit more than Kira would have liked.

She couldn’t help but worry about the ship mind as she pulled herself into the nearest seat and buckled the harness. The UMC had put Gregorovich in lockdown, which meant he’d been kept in near total sensory deprivation since they’d arrived at the station. That wouldn’t be good for anyone, but especially for an intelligence like a ship mind, and doubly so for Gregorovich, given his past experiences.

“What’s the restrictor?” she asked Falconi.

“Long story. We have a choke in the fusion drive that changes our thrust signature, makes it a hair less efficient. Take it out, bam! we look like a different ship.”

“And you didn’t pull it out back at Bughunt?” Kira asked, scandalized.

“Wouldn’t have helped. Not enough, at least. We’re talking a difference of a few hundredths of a percentage point.”

“That’s not going to hide us from—”

Falconi made an impatient gesture. “Gregorovich plants a virus in every computer we send registry info to. It creates a second entry with a different ship name, different flight path, and engine specs that match what our drive is like sans restrictor. Far as the computers go, it won’t be the Wallfish blasting off. Probably won’t fool anyone for more than a few minutes, but right now, I’ll take any advantage we can get.”

“Clever trick.”

“Unfortunately,” said Nielsen, “it’s a single-use device. At least until we can get into dock and have a new one installed.”

“So what’s the name we’re flying under now?” Kira asked.

“The Finger Pig,” said Falconi.

“You really like pigs, don’t you?”

“They’re smart animals. Speaking of which … Gregorovich, where are the pets?”

“They are again blocks of furry ice, O Captain. The UMC decided to return them to cryo rather than deal with the hassle of feeding and cleaning up.”

“How considerate of them.”

The Wallfish jolted as it disconnected from the docking ring, and then the maneuver alert sounded seconds before the RCS thrusters kicked in and shoved them away from the station.

“We’re going to give Orsted an extra dose of radiation today,” said Falconi, “but I think they earned it.”

“With interest,” said Sparrow as she sailed past Itari by the doorway. She snared a seat of her own. The Jelly braced itself against the floor, preparing for the upcoming burn.

Vishal’s face appeared in the holo-display. “We’re good to go in sickbay, Captain. Hwa-jung is here as well.”

“Roger that. Gregorovich, get us the hell out of here!”

“Yes, Captain. Proceeding to ‘get us the hell out of here.’”

With a rising roar, the Wallfish’s main rocket slammed Kira back into her seat as they hurtled away from Orsted Station. The thrust forced a laugh from her, though the laugh was lost in the sea of sound. They’d actually made it. The realization seemed almost absurd. Now maybe they could keep the Seventh Fleet from destroying any chance of peace.

A bell-like tone sounded, and her elation curdled.

With an effort, she craned her neck to see the display, wishing that she still had her contacts. The holo switched to a view of Saturn as a large cloud of red dots appeared close to the gas giant.

Fourteen more nightmares had just dropped out of FTL.

CHAPTER IV. NECESSITY II

1.

Itari moved closer to the display, tentacles braced against the deck. “Kira,” said Falconi in a warning tone.

“It’s okay,” she said, hoping she was right.

Nielsen zoomed out in the holo, and for the first time, Kira could see what was happening throughout Sol. In addition to the nightmares by Orsted, and the fourteen by Saturn, dozens of other nightmares had entered the system. Some were on a hard burn toward Mars. Others were out by Neptune, harassing the planet’s defense network. Still more were heading toward Earth and Venus.

A bright line flashed across the holo, from a satellite near Jupiter over to one of the nightmares’ vessels. The ship vanished in a flare of light. The bright line stabbed outward again and again, and each time, another of the intruders exploded.

“What’s that?” Kira asked.

“I’m … not sure,” said Sparrow, frowning as she studied her own overlays.

Gregorovich chuckled. “I can explain. Yes, I can. The League has built a solar laser. Energy farms by Mercury collect sunlight and then beam it to receivers throughout the system. Most of the time the energy is just used for power production. But in the event of an exogenic intrusion, well, you can see for yourself. Pump the energy through a giant-ass laser, and you have yourself a proper death ray. Yes you do.”

“Clever,” said Falconi.

Sparrow grinned. “Yeah. Having the local receivers cuts down on the light lag. Not bad.”

“Is anyone following us?” Kira asked.

“Not yet, my pretties,” said Gregorovich. “Our ersatz credentials continue to hold firm.”

“So what the hell is a Finger Pig?” said Kira.

“Thank you!” said Nielsen, with an exasperated tone. She gestured at Falconi. “See?”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “It’s a finger that’s a pig.”

“Or a pig that’s a finger,” said Sparrow.

In the holo, Vishal raised his eyebrows. “My understanding is that it’s slang for a pork hot dog.” Then his face vanished as he signed off.

“You’re saying we’re in a flying hot dog then?” said Kira.

Falconi chuckled with false humor. “Maybe.”

A snort came from Sparrow. “That’s not how we used the phrase in the Marines.”

“What did you use it for?” Kira asked.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Enough chitchat,” said Falconi. He twisted in his chair to look at Kira. “There’s more going on than we know, isn’t there? That’s why you were so insistent we rescue the Jelly.”

Kira tensed. Escaping had been easy compared with what she had to do now. “Did the UMC tell you what they decided to do?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing.”

“Not a damn clue.”

“… Okay.” Kira took a moment to prepare, but before she could open her mouth, an incongruously cheery chirp sounded from the display.

Gregorovich said, “Orsted Station is broadcasting a message on all channels. It’s Colonel Stahl. I think it’s meant for you, O Spiky One.”

“Play it for us,” said Falconi. “Can’t hurt to hear what he has to say.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as that,” Sparrow mumbled.

An image of Stahl replaced the holo of the system. The colonel appeared harried, out of breath, and there was a bloody scrape on his left cheekbone.

“Ms. Navárez,” he said. “If you can hear this, I’m imploring you to turn back. The xeno is too important to the League. You are too important. I don’t know what you think you’re going to do, but I promise it won’t help. If anything, you’re going to make the situation worse. If you get yourself killed, if our enemies get ahold of the xeno, it could be the death of all of us. You don’t want that on your conscience, Navárez. You really don’t. I know the situation isn’t what you wanted, but please—for the survival of our species—turn back. I promise you and the crew of the Wallfish won’t face any additional charges. You have my word.”

Then the transmission ended, and the holo returned to a view of the system.

Kira could feel the weight of everyone’s gazes upon her, even Itari with its many small, button-like eyes strung round its carapace.

“Well?” said Falconi. “It’s your call. We’re not going back, but if you want, I’ll cut the engine long enough for you to jump out the airlock without getting fried. I’m sure the UMC would be happy to pick you up.”

“No,” said Kira. “We keep going.” Then she told them, including Itari, about the Premier’s decision to betray the Knot of Minds and attack the gathering Jelly fleet.

Sparrow made a sound of disgust. “That’s what I hated the most about the service. Damn politics.”

The Jelly’s skin roiled with greens and purples. Its tentacles twisted with seeming distress. [[Itari here: If a Knot cannot be formed between your kind and ours, the Corrupted will overswim us all.]]

After Kira translated, Falconi said, “What do you have in mind?”

She looked at Itari. “I was hoping Itari might be able to send a warning to the Knot of Minds before the UMC’s hunter-seekers get there.”

She repeated the thought for the Jelly and then said, [[Kira here: Can you use our transmitter to warn the Knot of Minds?]]

[[Itari here: No. Your farscent is not fast enough. It would not reach the meeting point in time to save the Knot of Minds.… The Seventh Shoal your conclave has sent cannot kill the great Ctein of their own. They need our help, and they need us to take the leadership and to guide the Arms in the proper direction. Without the Knot of Minds, your shoal will be doomed, as will we all.]]

A sense of despair threatened to unbalance Kira as she felt her plans unraveling. Surely there had to be a way! [[Kira here: If we swam after the Seventh Shoal, could we get close enough to the meeting place that we could warn the Knot of Minds in time?]]

A flush of crimson ran the length of the Jelly’s limbs, and nearscent of confirmation suffused the air. [[Itari here: Yes.]]

That wouldn’t solve the larger problems between the Jellies and the League. But those problems were far too large for anyone on the Wallfish to fix.

Kira did her best to keep emotion out of her voice as she translated for Falconi and the others.

In a far more subdued tone than normal, Sparrow said, “You’re talking about flying right into enemy territory. Aish. If the other Jellies caught us, or the nightmares…”

“I know.”

“Stahl wasn’t wrong,” said Nielsen. “We can’t afford to let the xeno fall into the wrong hands. I’m sorry, Kira, but it’s true.”

“We also can’t afford to stand around and do nothing.”

Sparrow rubbed her face. “We’re already criminals in the eyes of the League, but this is treason. Aiding and abetting the enemy will still earn you the death penalty in damn near every territory.”

Falconi leaned forward and tabbed the intercom. “Hwa-jung, Vishal, come up to Control as soon as you can.”

“Yessir.”

“Be there directly, Captain, yes, yes.”

Anguish twisted in Kira’s gut. The Soft Blade was the problem. It had always been the problem, even going back into the distant past. Because of the Soft Blade, millions—if not billions—had died, humans and Jellies both. Because of the Soft Blade, the nightmares threatened to spread their sickness throughout the galaxy, overrunning every other form of life.

Although that wasn’t entirely true. The xeno wasn’t the only one to blame for the nightmares. She had played a role in the creation of the devouring Maw. It had been her fear, her ill-judged violence that had loosed so much pain upon the stars.

Kira groaned and covered her face with her hands and dug her fingers into her scalp until it hurt nearly as badly as her insides. The xeno seemed confused; she could feel it hardening and thickening around her, as if preparing for an attack.

If only she could rid herself of the Soft Blade, things would be easier. They would have many more options then. The Knot of Minds had safeguarded the xeno for centuries; it could safeguard it again.

Another groan clawed its way out of Kira’s throat. Absent the Soft Blade, Alan would still be alive, and so many others besides. All she wanted—all she had wanted since the Soft Blade had first infested her—was to be free. Free!

She slapped the release on her harness, shoved herself out of the chair, and stood. In 2.5 g’s, she stood. The suit helped hold her upright, but her arms felt like leaden weights, and her knees and the balls of her feet began to throb.

She didn’t care.

“Kira—” Nielsen started to say.

Kira screamed. She screamed as she had when she’d first realized Alan was dead. She screamed, and she spread her arms and used everything she had learned while training with the Soft Blade—every ounce of hard-fought mastery gained during the long, dark months spent in FTL—to shove the xeno away from herself. And she poured all of her anger and sorrow and frustration into that single, primal desire.

The xeno sprang outward. Spikes and ridged membranes extended in every direction, vibrating in response to her mental assault. But only to a degree. She constrained it with her mind, leashed it so the xeno couldn’t threaten the others.

Even so, it was a risk.

In the hollows between the protrusions, she could feel the suit thin and retract, and then air struck her exposed skin—air cold and dry and shocking in its intimacy. Her flesh prickled as the bare patches spread, islands of pale nakedness amid the jagged darkness.

By the doorway, Itari recoiled, holding up its tentacles, as if to shield its carapace.

Kira pushed and pushed, forcing the xeno to withdraw until only a few tendon-like strips connected her to it. A handful of fibers and nothing more. She concentrated on them, and she tried to will them to part. She raged at them to part. She urged them to part. She commanded them to part.

The tendons squirmed before her eyes, but they refused to give. And in her mind, she could feel the Soft Blade resisting. It had retreated and retreated, but no more. Any farther, and they would be separated, and that, apparently, it would not accept.

Enraged, Kira bore down even harder. Her vision flickered and went dark around the edges from the effort, and for a moment, she thought she would pass out. She remained standing, though, and still the Soft Blade defied her. From it, she had strange thoughts, obscure and barely understandable, worming their way from the depths of her mind into the upper regions of her consciousness. Thoughts such as: The uncleft making was not to be wrongwise cast. And: The time was off-balance. The manystuff graspers still hungered, and no cradle was close. For now, the making had to hold.

The words may have been odd, but the gist of them was clear enough.

Kira howled and threw herself against the Soft Blade with every bit of remaining strength, holding nothing back. One last attempt to drive it away. One last chance to free herself and regain something of what she had lost.

But the Soft Blade held firm, and if it empathized with her, if it felt any sympathy for her plight or regret for its opposition, she could not tell. From it came only a sense of resolute purpose, and a sense of satisfaction that the making would stand true.

And for the first time since she’d realized Alan was dead, Kira gave up. The universe was full of things she couldn’t control, and this, it seemed, was one of them.

With a choked cry, she stopped fighting and collapsed to her hands and knees. Soft as falling sand, the xeno flowed back over her, and the coldness of the air disappeared everywhere but on her face. She could still feel the floor, still feel the currents of the ship’s atmosphere tickling the small of her back, but only filtered through the artificial skin of the Soft Blade. And it blanked any discomfort, removed the bite of the cold and the sharpness of the ridges beneath her knees, so that all was warm and comfortable.

Kira squeezed her eyes shut, feeling tears leak out the corners, and her breath hitched.

“Father above,” said Vishal from by the doorway. He staggered over and put an arm around her. “Ms. Kira, are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” she said, forcing the words out past the lump in her throat. She’d lost. She’d tried her utmost, and it hadn’t been enough. And now all she had left was bare necessity. That was the phrase Inarë had used, and it fit. Oh how it fit, like shackles of black wire wound round and round.…

“You sure?” said Falconi.

She nodded without looking, and tears fell on the backs of her hands. Not cold. Not warm. Merely wet. “Yeah.” She took a shuddery breath. “I’m sure.”

2.

As Kira got back to her feet and returned to her chair, Hwa-jung came stomping through the doorway. The high thrust didn’t seem to impede her in the slightest. Indeed, the machine boss moved with a natural ease, even though Kira knew their burn was stronger than the gravity back on Shin-Zar.

“I take it we’re stuck with the xeno,” said Falconi.

Kira took a moment to answer; she was busy reassuring Itari that she was okay. Then: “You would be right.”

“Excuse me, Captain,” said Vishal. “But what is the matter of concern? We must decide where to go, yes?”

“Yes,” said Falconi in a decidedly grim tone. For the benefit of the doctor and Hwa-jung, he outlined the situation with a few terse sentences and then said, “What I want to know is whether the Wallfish is up for another long haul.”

“Captain—” Nielsen started to say.

He cut her off with a sharp gesture. “I’m just trying to get a sense of our options.” He nodded at Hwa-jung. “Well?”

The machine boss sucked on her lower lip for a moment. “Ah, the lines need to be flushed, the fusion drive and the Markov Drive both need to be checked.… Water, air, and food are still mostly full, but I would restock if we were going out for a long time. Hmm.” She bit at her lip again.

“Could we do it?” Falconi asked. “Three months’ travel in FTL, round trip. Assume three weeks out of cryo, just to be on the safe side.”

Hwa-jung dipped her head. “We could do it, but I would not recommend it.”

A bark of laugh escaped Falconi. “Most of what we’ve done over the past year falls under the category of ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’” He looked back at Kira. “The question is, should we?”

“There’s no profit in it,” said Sparrow, leaning forward, elbows on her knees.

“No,” Falconi admitted. “There isn’t.”

Nielsen said, “There’s a good chance we’d get killed. And if not killed—”

“—executed for treason,” said Falconi. He picked at a patch on his trousers. “Yeah, that’s my read on it too.”

“What would you do instead?” Kira asked, quiet. She could feel the delicacy of the moment. If she pushed too hard, she would lose them.

At first, no one answered. Then Nielsen said, “We could take Trig to a proper medical facility, somewhere outside the League.”

“But your family is still here in Sol, isn’t it?” said Kira. The first officer’s silence was answer enough. “And yours too, right, Vishal?”

“Yes,” said the doctor.

Kira let her gaze roam across the others’ faces. “We all have people we care about. And none of them are safe. We can’t just go and hide.… We can’t.”

Hwa-jung murmured in agreement, and Falconi looked down at his clasped hands.

“Beware the temptation of false hope,” whispered Gregorovich. “Resist and seek your validation elsewhere.”

“Hush,” said Nielsen.

Falconi lifted his chin toward the ceiling and scratched the underside of his jaw. The sound of nails rasping against stubble was surprisingly loud. “Ask Itari this for me: If we warn the Knot of Minds, would there still be a chance of peace between Jellies and humans?”

Kira repeated the question, and the Jelly said, [[Itari here: Yes. But if the Knot is cut, then the cruel and mighty Ctein will reign over us until the end of this ripple, to the detriment of all.]]

Falconi gave another of his grunts. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.” He turned toward Kira as far as his seat and harness would allow. “You would go?”

Despite the fear she felt at the prospect of again venturing into the unknown, Kira nodded. “I would.”

Falconi looked around the room, at each and every one of the crew. “Well? What’s the verdict?”

Sparrow made a face. “I don’t much like the thought of helping the UMC after the shit they pulled on us, but … sure. What the hell. Let’s do it.”

A sigh from Vishal, and he raised a hand. “I don’t much like the thought of this war continuing. If there is anything we can do to stop it, I feel we must.”

“Where she goes, I go,” said Hwa-jung, and put a hand on Sparrow’s shoulder.

Nielsen blinked several times, and it took Kira a moment to realize the first officer had tears in her eyes. Then the woman sniffed and nodded. “I vote yes as well.”

“What about the Entropists?” Kira asked.

“They’re in no state to be making decisions,” said Falconi. “But I’ll ask.” His gaze went blank as he switched to his overlays. His lips twitched as he subvocalized his texts, and the control room was silent.

Kira assumed he was communicating with the Entropists via a screen in the sickbay, since their implants were burned out. She took the opportunity to update Itari on the conversation. The constant back-and-forth of translation was beginning to wear on her. She also checked on the holo in the central display—to her relief, she didn’t see any pursuing ships, but the nightmares had managed to destroy the near receiver/emitter for the solar laser.

“Okay,” said Falconi. “Veera can’t talk, but Jorrus votes yes. It’s a go.” He scanned their faces once more. “Everyone on the same page?… Alright, then. We’re agreed. Gregorovich, set a course for the rendezvous point Tschetter gave us.”

The ship mind snorted, a surprisingly normal sound coming from him. Then he said, “Forgotten me, have you? Does my vote not count?”

“Of course it does,” said Falconi, exasperated. “Tell us your vote, then.”

“My vote?” said Gregorovich, an unbalanced edge to his voice. “Well now, so kind of you to ask. I vote NO.”

Falconi rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but we’ve already decided, Gregorovich. You’re outnumbered seven to one. Lay in the course and get us out of here.”

“That I think not.”

“Excuse me?”

“No. I won’t. Is that clear enough, O Captain, my stern captain, my supernumerary captain?” And Gregorovich giggled and giggled and giggled until he broke into a demented laugh that echoed through the corridors of the Wallfish.

Cold fear wormed its way into Kira. The ship mind had always seemed a bit unstable, but now he’d gone totally insane, and they were all at his mercy.

3.

“Gregorovich—” Nielsen started to say.

“I object,” whispered the ship mind, breaking his laugh. “I object most strenuously. I won’t take you there—I won’t—and nothing you can say or do will convince me otherwise. Pretty my hair and pat my head, doll me up with satin ribbons and pamper me with plumpest persimmons; I shall not reverse, regress, retract, or otherwise rescind my decision.”

[[Itari here: What is the wrongness?]] Kira explained, and the Jelly turned a queasy-looking green. [[Itari here: Your ship forms are as dangerous as hidden currents.]]

Falconi swore. “The hell is wrong with you, Gregorovich? We don’t have time for this nonsense. I’m giving you a direct order. Change our goddamn course.”

“Never I will. Never I might.”

The captain slapped the console in front of him. “Seriously? You didn’t object when we went off to Bughunt, but you’re going to mutiny now?”

“The expectation of peril thereat was not a certainty. Calculated risks remained within reasonable tolerances given available information. You were not setting forth to plunge yourself into the midst of martial turmoil, and I won’t allow it now. No, I won’t.” The ship mind sounded insufferably self-righteous.

“Why?” asked Nielsen. “What is it you’re so afraid of?”

The ship mind’s unhinged giggle returned. “The universe is spinning apart: a pinwheel driven to the point of failure. Darkness and emptiness, and what matters still? The warmth of friends, the light of human kindness. Trig lies on the brink of death, frozen in a tomb of ice, and I will not allow this crew to be further torn apart. No, not I. If we venture forth amid nightmares and Jellies battling, with the Seventh Fleet skulking about for trouble to cause, likely it is circumstance shall deliver us our doom in the shape of some ship—bearing down upon us as the wrath of cruel fate unburdened by grace or pity or the slightest shade of human consideration.”

“Your concern is noted,” said Falconi. “Now I’m ordering you to turn this ship around.”

“Can’t do, Captain.”

“You mean you won’t.”

Gregorovich laughed again, long and low. “Is the inability a result of nature or nurture? You say potatoh, I say potayto.”

Falconi glanced at Nielsen, and Kira saw the alarm in his expression. “You heard Kira. If we don’t warn the Knot of Minds, we’ll lose our only chance of peace with the Jellies and, possibly, our only chance of defeating the nightmares. Is that what you want?”

Gregorovich laughed again, long and low. “When an immovable force meets an irresistible object, causality becomes confused. Probabilities expand beyond computational resources. Statistical variables become unconstrained.”

“You mean an irresistible force and immovable object,” said Nielsen.

“I always mean to say what I mean.”

“But you don’t?”

Sparrow made a sound in her throat. “Just seems like a pretentious way of admitting you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Ah!” said Gregorovich. “But that’s the point. None of us know, and it is uncertainty itself I am protecting you against, my little chickadees. Oh yes I am.”

“Alright, I’ve had enough of your insubordination,” said Falconi. “I don’t want to do this, but you’re not leaving me any choice. Access code four-six-six-nine-upyours. Authorization: Falconi-alpha-bravo-bravo-whisky-tango.”

“Sorry, Captain,” said Gregorovich. “Did you expect that to work? You can’t force me out of the system. The Wallfish is mine, more than she was ever yours. Flesh of my flesh, and all that nonsense. Accept your defeat with good humor. To Alpha Centauri we go, and should it prove too dangerous, we’ll find safe haven upon the rim of settled space, where aliens and their seeking tentacles have no reason to intrude. Yes we shall.”

While he talked, Falconi pointed at Hwa-jung and snapped his fingers without noise. The machine boss nodded and unbuckled her harness and moved with swift steps toward the door to Control.

It slammed shut in front of her and locked with an audible clank.

“Ms. Song,” crooned the ship mind. “Ms. Song, what are you doing? I know your tricks and stratagems. Don’t think to thwart me; a thousand years of plotting and you still couldn’t outwit me, Ms. Song, Ms. Song—your melody is self-evident. Abandon your dishonorable intentions; your motif contains no surprises, no surprises at all.…”

“Quick,” said Falconi. “The console. Maybe you can—”

Hwa-jung pivoted and hurried to one of the access panels underneath the bank of controls next to the holo table.

“What about me?” Kira said. She didn’t know what the machine boss was about, but distracting Gregorovich seemed like a good idea. “You can’t keep me in here. Stop this, or I’ll go crack open your case and rip out all your power cords.”

A shower of sparks erupted from the access panel as Hwa-jung touched it. She yelped and yanked back her arm and clutched her wrist, looking hurt.

“You bastard!” Sparrow yelled.

“Just try,” the ship mind whispered, and the Wallfish trembled around them. “Oh just try. It won’t matter, though; not at all. I’ve set the autopilot, and nothing you can do will free it up, not even were you to wipe the mainframe and rebuild it from—”

A dark expression settled on Hwa-jung’s face, and she let out a sharp hiss from between her bared teeth. She pulled a rag from a pouch on her belt and wrapped it around her bandaged hand, covering her fingers. Then she reached for the access panel again.

“Let me—” Kira started to say, but by then the machine boss already had the panel open and was scrabbling around inside.

“Song,” Gregorovich crooned. “What do you think you are doing, beautiful Song? My roots run deep. You cannot dig me out, not here, not there, not with a thousand lasers on a thousand bots. Within the Wallfish, I am omniscient and omnipresent. The one and the word, the will and the way. Leave off this pointless, pathetic pandering and lay you down to—”

Hwa-jung yanked on something under the console, and the lightstrips flickered, and a burst of static sounded from the speakers—cutting off Gregorovich—and half the indicators along the walls fell dark.

“Wrong,” said the machine boss.

4.

A moment of stunned silence followed.

“Shit. Are you okay?” Sparrow asked.

Hwa-jung grunted. “I am fine.”

“What did you do?” Falconi demanded. In the question, Kira could hear his anger at Gregorovich, but also his anger that the machine boss might have hurt the ship mind and/or the Wallfish.

“I removed Gregorovich from the computer,” said Hwa-jung, standing. She rubbed her injured hand and grimaced.

“How?” said Falconi. Kira wondered that herself. Gregorovich hadn’t lied. Ship minds were so thoroughly integrated into the workings of a machine like the Wallfish, extricating them was no easier than extricating a still-beating heart from a living body (and without killing the patient, no less).

Hwa-jung lowered her arms. “Gregorovich is very clever, but some things even he doesn’t understand about the Wallfish. He knows the circuits. I know the pipes the circuits run in. Aish. That one.” She shook her head. “There are mechanical breakers on all his connecting power lines, in case of a bad electrical surge. They can be activated here or in the storm shelter.” She shrugged. “It is simple.”

Nielsen said, “So is he completely cut off, then? All alone, in the dark?”

“Not completely,” said Hwa-jung. “He has a computer built into his case. Whatever is stored on there, he can see.”

“Thank god for that,” said Vishal.

“But he can’t contact anyone?” Nielsen said.

Hwa-jung shook her head. “No wireless. No hardline.” Then: “We can talk with him, if we want, if we plug into the outside of his case, but we have to be careful. Any access to an external system and he could take control of the Wallfish again.”

“He sure ain’t going to be happy about that,” said Sparrow.

Kira agreed. Gregorovich had to be furious. Being once again trapped in his nutrient bath with no way to contact the outside world would be a nightmare. She shuddered at the thought.

“Who cares if he’s happy?” Falconi growled. He ran a hand through his hair. “Right now we have to get out of Sol before we get blown up. Can you set up a new course?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it, then. Program another random walk. Three jumps should do it.”

Hwa-jung returned to her seat and concentrated on her overlays. A minute later, the free-fall alert sounded and the sense of crushing weight vanished as the engines cut out.

The Soft Blade kept Kira welded to the back of her chair as the Wallfish reoriented itself. Of course the xeno did. It was so accommodating. So concerned with her safety and welfare. Except when it came to what she really wanted. Her old hatred for it welled up again, sour poison lanced from a boil. But it was a useless hatred. A weak and ineffectual hatred, because there was nothing she could do about it—not one damn thing—just as there was nothing Gregorovich could do to rescue himself from the prison of his mind.

“How long until we can jump to FTL?” she asked.

“Thirty minutes,” said Hwa-jung. “The modifications from the Jelly are still holding. We can jump out sooner than normal.”

[[Itari here: Idealis?]] In response to the query, Kira updated the Jelly on what was happening, and the sick green color faded from its tentacles, replaced by its normal, healthy orange.

“Real light show over there,” said Sparrow, gesturing at the alien. “Never realized they were so colorful.”

Kira was impressed by how well the crew had accepted the presence of the Jelly. So had she, for that matter.

The Wallfish finished turning, and then the deck pressed against Kira as they resumed thrust—heading toward a different point along the system’s Markov Limit.

5.

The crew spent the thirty minutes preparing the Wallfish for FTL, and themselves for another round of cryo sleep. Ideally they would have had longer to recover from hibernation, as each cycle took a toll on their bodies. Still, they were well under the yearly limit. Two a month for three months had been the commercial limit for the Lapsang Corporation, but Kira knew private citizens and military personnel often far exceeded those limits. Though not without consequence.

They had one piece of good news before departure: Vishal burst into Control with a great big smile and said, “Listen! I had word from my uncle. My mother and sisters are on Luna, thank God.” And he crossed himself. “My uncle, he promised he would keep them safe. He has a shelter, buried very deep on Luna. They can stay with him as long as they need. Thank God!”

“That’s wonderful news, Vishal,” said Falconi, clasping him on the shoulder. “Truly.” And they all gave the doctor their congratulations.

When she could, Kira stole a quick break in her cabin. She pulled up a live view of the system and zoomed in on the small green-and-blue dot that was Earth.

Earth. The ancestral home of humanity. A planet swarming with life, and so much of it complex, multicellular organisms far more advanced than those found in most xenospheres. Only Eidolon could come close to the evolutionary accomplishments of Earth, and Eidolon didn’t possess a single self-aware species.

Kira had studied the vast diversity of Earth’s biome. All xenobiologists did. And she’d always hoped to travel there for real one day. But Orsted Station was the closest she’d come, and it seemed unlikely she would ever set foot on the planet.

The sight of Earth felt slightly unreal. To think that all of humanity until just three hundred years ago had lived and died on that single ball of mud. All those people, trapped, unable to venture forth among the stars as she and so many others had been able to.

Even the word earth came from the planet she was looking at. And moon from the pale sphere hanging in close proximity (both haloed with orbital rings, bright as silver wire).

The earth.

The moon.

The originals, and no others.

Kira took a shaky breath, finding herself unaccustomedly overcome with emotion. “Goodbye,” she whispered, and she wasn’t sure to whom or what she was talking.

Then she closed the display and went to rejoin the crew. And soon enough, the jump alert sounded, and the Wallfish transitioned to FTL, leaving behind Sol, Earth, Jupiter, Ganymede, the invading nightmares, and the vast majority of humanity’s teeming masses.

EXEUNT IV

1.

By the third jump out from Sol, everyone was in cryo save Falconi, Hwa-jung, and of course, Kira. Even Itari had entered its dormant state, cocooning itself within the port cargo hold (Falconi had decided there was no longer any reason to keep the Jelly in an airlock).

While they waited in interstellar space for the Wallfish to cool, before setting out on the last leg of their journey, Kira went to the galley and made short work of three reheated meal packs, four glasses of water, and an entire pouch of candied beryl nuts. Eating in zero-g was far from her favorite thing to do, but the xeno’s exertions on Orsted had left her ravenous.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Gregorovich during her meal. The ship mind was still locked out of the Wallfish’s computer system, sitting alone in his tomb-like casing. The fact disturbed her for several reasons, but mainly because she empathized. Kira knew what it was like to be alone in the dark—her time aboard the Valkyrie had more than acquainted her with that sensation—and she worried what it would do to Gregorovich. Being abandoned, isolated, was a fate she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. Not even the nightmares. Death was a far preferable end.

Also … although she was slow to admit it, Gregorovich had become her friend. Or as much of a friend as she and a ship mind were ever likely to be. Their conversations during FTL had been a comfort to Kira, and she didn’t like to see Gregorovich in his current predicament.

Back in Control, she tapped Falconi’s arm to get his attention and said, “Hey. What are you planning on doing about Gregorovich?”

Falconi sighed, and the reflected light of overlays vanished from his eyes. “What can I do? I tried talking with him, but he’s not making a whole lot of sense.” He rubbed his temples. “Right now my only real option is to throw him into cryo.”

“And then what? Keep him on ice from here on out?”

“Maybe,” said Falconi. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to trust him after this.”

“Could you—”

He stopped her with a look. “Do you know what they do to ship minds who refuse an order, barring extenuating circumstances?”

“Retire them?”

“Exactly.” Falconi jerked his chin. “The minds get yanked from their ships, and their flight credentials get revoked. Just like that. Even in civilian ships. And you know why?”

Kira pursed her lips, already anticipating the answer. “Because they’re too dangerous.”

With a finger twirled around his head, Falconi indicated their surroundings. “Any spaceship, even one as small as the Wallfish, is effectively a flying bomb. Ever think about what happens if someone—let’s say, oh, I don’t know, a deranged ship mind—flies a cargo tug or a cruiser into a planet?”

Kira winced as she remembered the accident on Orlog, one of the moons in her home system. The crater could still be seen with the naked eye. “Nothing good.”

“Nothing good.”

“And with all that, you were still comfortable keeping Gregorovich on board?” She eyed, him curious. “Seems like a hell of a risk.”

“It was. It is. But Gregorovich needed a home, and I thought we could help each other. Until now he’s never made me think he was a danger to us or the Wallfish.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Shit. I don’t know.”

“Could you limit Gregorovich’s access to just comms and sublight navigation?”

“Wouldn’t work. Once a ship mind is in one part of your system, it’s pretty much impossible to keep them out of the rest. They’re too smart, and they’re too integrated with the computers. It’s like trying to grab an eel with your bare hands; sooner or later they wriggle free.”

Kira rubbed her arms, thinking. Not good. Aside from her concern for Gregorovich as a person, she didn’t like the prospect of flying into hostile territory without him at the helm. “Do you mind if I talk with him?” She motioned toward the ceiling.

“Actually, it’s more like—” Falconi pointed at an angle toward the deck. “But why? I mean, you’re more than welcome to, but I don’t see what good it’s going to do.”

“Maybe not, but I’m worried about him. I might be able to help him calm down. We spent a fair bit of time talking in FTL.”

Falconi shrugged. “You can try, but again, I’m not sure what good it’s going to do. Gregorovich really sounded off.”

“How so?” Kira asked, her concern deepening.

He scratched his chin. “Just … weird. I mean, he’s always been different, but this is more than that. Like there’s something really wrong with him.” Falconi shook his head. “Honestly? It doesn’t matter how calm Gregorovich is or isn’t. I’m not giving control of the Wallfish back to him unless he can convince me this was a one-off event. And I don’t see how he can. Some things can’t be undone.”

She studied him. “We all make mistakes, Salvo.”

“And they have consequences.”

“… Yes, and we might need Gregorovich when we get to the Jellies. Morven is all well and good, but she’s only a pseudo-intelligence. If we run into trouble, she won’t be much help.”

“No, she won’t.”

Kira put a hand on his shoulder. “Besides, you said it: Gregorovich is one of you, same as Trig. Are you really going to give up on him that easily?”

Falconi stared at her for a good while, the muscles in his jaw flexing. At last, he relented. “Fine. Talk to him. See if you can knock some sense into that lump of concrete he calls a brain. Go find Hwa-jung. She’ll show you where to go and what to do.”

“Thanks.”

“Mmh. Just don’t let Gregorovich get access to the mainframe.”

Kira left him then and went looking for Hwa-jung. She found the machine boss in engineering. When told what Kira wanted, Hwa-jung didn’t seem surprised. “This way,” said Hwa-jung, and led her back up toward Control.

The halls of the Wallfish were dark and cold and eerily quiet. Condensation beaded the bulkheads where the chilled air blew, and Kira and Hwa-jung’s shadows stretched before them like tortured souls as they floated through the ship.

One deck below Control, close to the core of the ship, was a locked door Kira had walked by before but never made much note of. It looked like a closet or a server room.

In a way, it was.

Hwa-jung opened the door to reveal a second door a meter within. “Acts like a mini-airlock, in case the rest of the ship gets vented,” she said.

“Gotcha.”

The second door rolled open. Past it was a small, hot room busy with whirring fans and walled with banks of Christmas-light indicators: each bright point marking a switch or toggle or dial. In the center of the room lay the neural sarcophagus, huge and heavy. A metal edifice twice the width and breadth of Kira’s bed and standing as high as her mid-chest, it had an imposing presence, as if designed to warn off any who came near—as if to say, “Meddle not, lest you regret it.” The fittings were dark, nearly black, and there was a holo-screen along one side, as well as rows of green bars marking the levels of different gasses and liquids.

Although Kira had seen the sarcophagi in games and videos, she’d never been close to one in person. The device, she knew, was hooked into the Wallfish’s plumbing and power, but were it to be separated, it was perfectly capable of keeping Gregorovich alive for months or even years, depending on how efficient the internal power source was. It was both artificial skull and artificial body, and built so securely it could survive reentry at speeds and pressures that would shred most ships. The durability of the cases was legendary. Plenty of times a sarcophagus (and the mind inside) was the only intact part left after the destruction of its parent ship.

It was strange to know that there was a brain hidden within the slab of metal and sapphire. And not an ordinary brain, either. It would be larger—much larger—and more spread out: wrinkled butterfly wings of grey matter surrounding the walnut-shaped core that was the original seat of Gregorovich’s consciousness, now grown to immense proportions. Picturing it made Kira uneasy, and in an irrational bit of imagining, she couldn’t help but feel as if the armored case was alive as well. Alive and watching her, though she knew Hwa-jung had disabled all of Gregorovich’s sensors.

The machine boss fished a pair of wired headphones out of her pocket and gave them to her. “Plug in here. Keep the headphones over your ears while you talk. If he can broadcast sound, he could hack into the system.”

“Really?” said Kira, doubtful.

“Really. Any sort of input would be enough.”

Kira found the jack on the side of the sarcophagus, plugged in, and, not knowing what to expect, said, “Hello?”

The machine boss grunted. “Here.” She flipped a switch next to the jack.

A raging howl filled Kira’s ears. She flinched and scrabbled to lower the volume. The howl trailed off into a torrent of uneven muttering—words without end and hardly a break between them, stream-of-consciousness blathering giving voice to every thought racing through Gregorovich’s mind. There were layers to the muttering: a cloned crowd yammering to itself, for no one tongue could keep pace with the relentless, lightning-fast processes of his consciousness.

I’ll wait outside, mouthed Hwa-jung, and she departed.

“… Hello?” said Kira, wondering what she had gotten herself into.

The muttering never stopped, but it receded, and a single voice—the voice she knew—spoke forth: “Hello?! Hello, my pretty, my darling, my ragtime gal. Have you come to gloat, Ms. Navárez? To point and prod and laugh at my misfortune? To—”

“What? No, of course not.”

A laugh echoed in her ears, a shrieking, broken-glass laugh that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. There was an odd tone to Gregorovich’s synthesized voice, a distorted waver that made it hard to understand his vowels, and the volume kept swinging soft to loud and there were irregular breaks to the sound, like a radio broadcast cutting in and out. “Then what? To assuage your conscience? This is your doing, O Angst-Ridden Meatsack; your choice; your responsibility. A prison here of your making, and all around a—”

“You were the one who tried to hijack the Wallfish, not me,” said Kira. If she didn’t interrupt, she had a feeling the ship mind would never stop. “I didn’t come here to argue, though.”

“Ahahaha! Then what? But I repeat myself. You are so slow, too slow; your mind like mud, your tongue like tarnished lead, your—”

“My mind is fine,” she snapped. “I just think before I speak, unlike you.”

“Oh, ho! The true colors show; pirates starboard; skull and crossbones and ready to stab a friend in need, ohahaha, when upon rocky reefs a shuttered lighthouse stands and the keeper drowns alone, ‘Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,’ he cries, and the millipede screams in lonely sympathy.”

Kira’s alarm rocketed. Falconi was right. Something was wrong with the ship mind, and it went far beyond his disagreement over their decision to help the Knot of Minds. Gently now. “No,” she said. “I came to see how you were doing before we leave.”

Gregorovich cackled. “Your guilt is as clear as transparent aluminum, yes it is. Yes, yes. How am I doing?…” There was a welcome pause in his verbal vomit, and even the background muttering fell off, and then his tone grew more measured—an unexpected return of something resembling normalcy. “The impermanence of nature long ago drove me as mad as a March hare, or haven’t you noticed?”

“I was trying to be polite and not mention it.”

“Truly, your tact and consideration are without peer.”

That was more like it. Kira half smiled. His semblance of sanity was a fragile thing, though, and she wondered how far she dared push. “Are you going to be okay?”

A snortling giggle escaped Gregorovich, but he quickly suppressed it. “Me? Oh I’ll be fiiiine, sure I will. Right as rain, twice as comfy. I’ll sit here, all by my lonesome, and devote myself to good thoughts and the hope of future deeds, yes I will, I will, I will.”

So that’s a no then. Kira licked her lips. “Why did you do it? You knew Falconi wouldn’t just let you take over. So why do it?”

The background chorus swelled louder. “How to explain? Should I explain? What point now, when actions are spent, and consequences at hand? Hee-hee. But this: I sat through darkness once before, lost my crew and lost my ship. I would not, could not endure it again, no indeed. Give me sweet oblivion first—death that ancient end. A far preferable fate to exile along the cold cliffs where souls wander and wither in isolation, each one a Boltzmann paradox, each one a torment of bad dreams. What is mind, no matter, what is matter, no mind and isolation the cruelest reduction of April and—”

A staticky burst interrupted him, and his voice faded from hearing, but Kira had already tuned him out. He was babbling again. She thought she understood what he’d been saying, but that wasn’t what concerned her. A few hours of isolation shouldn’t have unbalanced Gregorovich this much. There had to be another cause. What could affect a ship mind so strongly? Kira realized she didn’t have much of an idea.

Perhaps, if she steered the conversation toward calmer waters, she could get him into a better mindset and find out what the underlying problem was. Perhaps.

“Gregorovich … Gregorovich, can you hear me? If you’re there, answer me. What’s going on?”

After a moment, the ship mind answered with a tiny, far-off voice: “Kira … I don’t feel so good. I don’t … Everything is wrong ways round.”

She pressed the headphones tighter against her ears, trying to hear better. “Can you tell me what’s causing it?”

A faint laugh, growing louder. “Oh, are we in sharing and confessing mode now? Hmm? Is that it?” Another of his unsettling cackles. “Did I ever tell you why I decided to become a ship mind, O Inquisitive One?”

Kira hated to change the topic, but she didn’t want to upset him. As long as Gregorovich was willing to talk, she was willing to listen. “No, you didn’t,” she said.

The ship mind snorted. “Why, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, thatswhyisasisssss. Ah, the untempered idiocy of youth.… My body was slightly the worse for wear, you see (you don’t, but you do, oh yes). Several limbs were missing, and certain important organs too, and what I’m told was a spec-tacular amount of blood and fecal matter was smeared across the road. Black ribbon against black stone, red, red, red, and the sky a faded patch of pain. The only viable options were to be installed in a construct while a new body was grown for me or to transition into a ship mind. And I, in my arrogance and my ignorance, I decided to dare the unknown.”

“Even though you knew it was irreversible? Didn’t that bother you?” Kira regretted the questions as soon as she asked them; she didn’t want to unbalance him further. To her relief, Gregorovich took them well.

“I wasn’t so smart then as I am now. Oh, no, no, no. The only things I thought I would miss were hot splashes, sweet soft and savory and seductive spoonfuls and the pleasures of carnal company close held, deep felt, yes, and in both cases I reasoned, yes I reasoned, that VR would provide more-than-adequate substitute. Bits and bytes, bobs of binary, shadows of ideals melting starving on electrons, starving, starving … Were I wrong was I wrong? wrong wrong wrong, I could always avail myself of a construct to indulge in sensual delights as appealed to my fancy.”

Kira’s curiosity was sparked. “But why?” she said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Why become a mind at all?”

Gregorovich laughed, and there was arrogance in his voice. “For the sheer thrill of it, of course. To become more than I was before and to bestride the stars as a colossus unbound by the confines of petty flesh.”

“It couldn’t have been an easy change, though,” said Kira. “One moment your life is going one way, and then just like that, an accident sends you in a completely different direction.” She was thinking more of herself than him.

“Who said it was an accident?”

She blinked. “I assumed—”

“The truth of it doesn’t matter, no it doesn’t. I had already considered volunteering to become a ship mind. Precipitous disassembly merely hastened a perilous decision. Change comes more naturally to some people than others. Monotony is boring, and besides, as the ancients loved to point out, expectations of what could be or what should be are the most common sources of our discontent. Expectations lead to disappointment, and disappointment leads to anger and resentment. And yes, I’m aware of the irony, delicious irony, but self-knowledge is no protection against folly, my Simpering Symbiotic. ’Tis flawed armor at best.” The more Gregorovich spoke, the calmer and saner he seemed.

Keep him talking. “If you could do it over again, would you still make the same choice?”

“With regard to becoming a ship mind, yes. Other choices, not so much. Fingers and toes and Mongolian bows.”

Kira frowned. A slip from him there. “Is there anything you miss from before? I was going to say ‘from when you had a body,’ but I suppose the Wallfish is your body.”

A hollow sigh echoed in her ears. “Freedom. That is what I miss. Freedom.”

“What do you mean?”

“All of known space is—or was—at my disposal. I can outrace light itself. I can dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant and bask in the aurora of Eidolon, and I have. But as you said, O Perceptive Little Vexation, the Wallfish is my body, and it shall remain my body until such a time (if such a time ever arrives) as I am removed. When we dock, you are free to walk away from the Wallfish and go where you will. But not I. Through cameras and sensors I can participate from a distance, but still I remain bound to the Wallfish, and the same would be true even if I had a construct I could remotely pilot. That much I miss, the freedom to move without restriction, to relocate myself of my own accord, sans fuss or hassle.… I have heard there is a ship mind on Stewart’s World who built himself a mech body ten meters high and who now spends his time wandering the uninhabited parts of the planet, painting landscapes of the mountains with a brush as tall as a person. I would like to have a body such as that someday. I would like it very much, although the probability of it seems low at the present.”

Gregorovich continued: “Could I advise myself in the past, prior to my transition, I would tell myself to make the most of what I had while I had it. Too often we don’t appreciate the value of something until it has slipped our grasp.”

“Sometimes that’s the only way we learn,” said Kira. She paused, struck by her own words.

“So it seems. The benighted tragedy of our species.”

“And yet, ignoring the future and/or wallowing in regret can be equally harmful.”

“Indeed. The important thing is to try and, by trying, to improve ourselves. Otherwise we might as well have never come down from the trees. But no point in maudlin navel-gazing when the navel is adrift, spinning and wildling and time all out of joint. I have a memoir to write, databases to purge, subroutines to rearrange, chyrons to design, enoptromancy to master, squares upon squares a wave or indivisible scintilla tell me tell me tell me—”

He seemed stuck in a mental rut, the phrase tell me, tell me repeating in her ears at different volumes. Kira frowned, frustrated. They’d been doing so well, but he couldn’t seem to maintain mental focus. “Gregorovich…” Then, more sharply than she intended, “Gregorovich!”

A welcome pause in his logorrhea, and then almost too faint to hear, “Kira, something isn’t right. Not right at allllll.”

“Can you—”

The chorus of howling voices roared back to full strength, making her wince and dial back the volume on her headphones.

Amid the torrent of noise, she heard Gregorovich say, sounding almost too calm, too cultured: “Fair winds on your upcoming sleep, my Conciliatory Confessor. May it relieve some of your fermenting spleen. When next we cross paths, I will be sure to thank you most properly. Yes. Quite. And remember to avoid those pesky expectations.”

“Thanks. I’ll try,” she said, trying to humor him. “The queen of infinite space, eh? But you haven’t—”

A cackle from the cacophony. “We are all kings and queens of our own dementia. The only question is how we rule. Now go; leave me to my method, atoms to count, TEQs to loop, causality to question, all in a matrix of indecision, round and round and reality bending like photons past deformation of spacetime mass what superluminal transgressions torment tangential tablelands taken topsy-turvy by ahahaha.”

2.

Kira pulled off the headphones and stared at the deck. A frown furrowed her brow.

Moving carefully in the zero-g, she went back out to find Hwa-jung waiting for her. “How is that one?” the machine boss asked.

Kira handed over the headphones. “Not good. He’s…” She struggled to find a way to describe Gregorovich’s behavior. “He’s really off. Something’s wrong, Hwa-jung. Really, really wrong. He can’t stop talking, and a lot of the time, he can’t seem to string together a coherent sentence.”

Now the machine boss was frowning as well. “Aish,” she muttered. “I wish Vishal were still awake. Machines are what I work with, not squishy brains.”

“Could it be something mechanical?” Kira asked. “Could something have happened to Gregorovich when we were on Orsted? Or when you disconnected him from the mainframe?”

Hwa-jung glowered at her. “That was a circuit breaker. It would not have caused any problems.” But she continued to scowl as she tucked the headphones into a pocket. “Stay here,” she said abruptly. “There is something I will check.”

The machine boss turned and kicked herself down the hall and around the corridor.

Kira waited as patiently as she could. She couldn’t stop thinking about her conversation with Gregorovich. She shivered and hugged herself, although she wasn’t cold. If Gregorovich was as bad as he seemed … keeping him in cryo really might be their only choice. An unbalanced ship mind was a thing of nightmares.

There were, she thought, many different types of nightmares in the galaxy. Some small, some large, but the worst of all were the ones you lived with.

Kira wanted to tell Falconi about Gregorovich, but she forced herself to wait on Hwa-jung.

Nearly half an hour passed before the machine boss reappeared. She had grease on her hands, new scorch marks on her rumpled sleeves, and a troubled expression that did nothing to ease Kira’s worries.

“Did you find something?” Kira asked.

Hwa-jung held up a small black object: a rectangular box the size of two fingers side by side. “This,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Bah! It was clamped to the circuits leading into Gregorovich’s sarcophagus.” She shook her head. “Stupid. I knew something was off when the lights glitched like that in Control when I pulled the breaker.”

“What is it?” Kira asked, moving closer.

“Impedance block,” said Hwa-jung. “It stops signals from traveling through a line. The UMC must have installed it to help keep Gregorovich from escaping. None of my checks showed it when we came back on the Wallfish.” She shook her head again. “When I pulled the breaker, it caused a surge in the box, and the surge ran into Gregorovich.”

Kira swallowed. “What does that mean?”

Hwa-jung sighed and looked away for a moment. “The surge, it burned the little wires going into Gregorovich. The leads are not connecting properly to his neurons, and the ones that are, aish! They are firing wrong.”

“Is he in pain?”

A shrug from the machine boss. “I don’t know. But the computer says many of the broken leads are in his visual cortex and the area of language processing, so Gregorovich, he may be seeing and hearing things that are not there. Ahhh.” She shook the small box. “Vishal will have to help with this. I can’t fix Gregorovich.”

A sense of helplessness unmoored Kira. “So we have to wait.” It wasn’t a question.

Hwa-jung nodded. “The best thing we can do is put Gregorovich into cryo. Vishal will look at him when we arrive, but I do not think he can fix him either.”

“Do you want me to tell Falconi? I’m going to see him.”

“Yes, tell him. I want to get Gregorovich frozen. Sooner is better. I will go into cryo after.”

“Okay, will do.” Then Kira put a hand on Hwa-jung’s shoulder. “And thank you. At least now we know.”

The machine boss grunted. “What help is knowing, though? Ah, what a mess. What a mess.”

They parted, the machine boss pulling herself into the ship mind’s holding room while Kira returned to Control. Falconi wasn’t there, nor was he in the ship’s now-defunct hydroponics bay.

Slightly puzzled, Kira sought out the captain’s cabin. It didn’t seem like him to be in his room at a time like this, but …

“Come in,” he said when she knocked on the door.

The pressure door creaked as Kira pushed her way in. Falconi was sitting at the desk, strapped into his chair to keep from floating away. In one hand, he held a drinking pouch that he was sipping from.

Then she noticed the bonsaied olive tree pushed to the back of the desk. The leaves were tattered, most of the branches broken, the trunk tilted against the side of the pot, and the dirt around the roots looked as if it had been overturned: small clumps floated loose under the lid of clear plastic that covered the top of the pot and surrounded the trunk.

The state of the tree caught her by surprise. She knew how much he cared for the plant.

“So? How’d it go?” Falconi asked.

Kira braced herself against the wall before delving into her report.

As she talked, Falconi’s expression grew darker and darker. “Goddammit,” he said. “Fucking UMC. They had to go and make things worse. Every fucking time…” He drew a hand across his face and stared at an imaginary point somewhere beyond the hull of the ship. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him so angry or tired. “Should have trusted my gut earlier. He really is broken.”

“He’s not broken,”said Kira. “There’s nothing wrong with Gregorovich per se. It’s the equipment he’s hooked up to.”

Falconi snorted. “Semantics. He’s not working. That makes him broken. And I can’t do anything about it either. That’s the worst part. The one time Greg actually needs help and…” He shook his head.

“He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

A crinkle of foil as Falconi took a sip from his drinking pouch. He avoided her gaze. “If you asked the rest of the crew, I think you’d find that Gregorovich spent a lot of time talking with each of us. He didn’t always say much in groups, but whenever we needed him, he was there. And he’s gotten us out of some real tight spots.”

Kira planted her feet on the deck and allowed the Soft Blade to anchor her there. “Hwa-jung said Vishal might not be able to heal him.”

“Yeah,” said Falconi, letting out his breath. “Working on ship-mind implants is tricky stuff. And our medibot isn’t rated for it either.… Thule. Greg wasn’t even this bad when we found him.”

“What will you do if we get into a fight with the Jellies?”

“Run like hell if it’s at all an option,” said Falconi. “The Wallfish isn’t a warship.” He pointed a finger at her. “And none of this changes what Gregorovich did. It wasn’t some impedance block that caused him to mutiny.”

“… No. I suppose not.”

Falconi shook his head. “Damn fool of a ship mind. He was so scared of losing us, he went and jumped off a cliff, and now look where he’s at … where we’re at.”

“I guess it goes to show that you can still make mistakes, even with a brain as big as his.”

“Mmh. That’s assuming Gregorovich is wrong. He could be right, you know.”

Kira cocked her head. “If you really believe that, why are we going to warn the Knot of Minds?”

“Because I think it’s worth the risk.”

She thought it best to change the subject then. Motioning toward the olive tree, she said, “What happened?”

Falconi’s lip curled with a snarl. “Again, the UMC, that’s what. They ripped it out of its stasis box looking for—for whatever. Took me this long to clean the place up.”

“Will the tree recover?” It wasn’t a variety of plant Kira had experience with.

“Doubt it.” Falconi stroked a branch, but only for a moment, as if afraid to cause further damage. “The poor thing was out of the dirt for most of a day, temperature was down, no water, stripped leaves…” He held out the pouch. “Want a drink?”

She took the pouch and put her lips to the straw. The harsh burn of some sort of rotgut hit her mouth, and she nearly coughed.

“Good stuff, eh?” Falconi said, seeing her reaction.

“Yeah,” said Kira, and coughed. She took another slug and then handed the pouch back.

He tapped the silvered plastic. “Probably not the best idea before cryo, but what the hell, eh?”

“What the hell indeed.”

Falconi took a sip of his own and then let out a long sigh and let his head drift back so he was looking at what would be the ceiling when under thrust. “Crazy times, Kira. Crazy times. Shit, of all the ships we had to pick up, we had to pick up yours.”

“Sorry. It’s not what I wanted either.”

He pushed the pouch across to her. She watched it drift through the air and then snared it. Another mouthful of rotgut and another burning streak pouring down her throat. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Actually, I kinda think it is,” she said, quiet.

“No.” He caught the pouch as she lobbed it over. “We still would have ended up having to deal with this war, even if we didn’t rescue you.”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. You think the Jellies were going to leave us alone forever? You finding the suit on Adrasteia was just an excuse for them to invade.”

Kira considered that for a moment. “Maybe. What about the nightmares, though?”

“Yeah, well…” Falconi shook his head. He already seemed to be feeling the drink. “That’s just the sort of bullshit that always happens. You can prepare and prepare, but it’s the stuff you don’t anticipate that always throws you for a loop. And it always happens. You’re going about your day, and bam! An asteroid comes out of the blue, ruins your life. How are you supposed to live in a universe like that?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Kira answered anyway: “By taking reasonable precautions and not letting the possibility drive you crazy.”

“Like Gregorovich.”

“Like Gregorovich,” she agreed. “We all have to play the odds, Salvo. It’s the nature of life. The only alternative is to cash out early, and that’s just giving up.”

“Mmm.” He peered at her from under his brows, as he so often did, his ice-blue eyes hooded and ghostly pale in the dim light of ship-night. “It looked like the Soft Blade was getting away from you back on Orsted.”

Kira shifted, uncomfortable. “Maybe a bit.”

“Anything I should be worried about?”

For an uncomfortably long time, she didn’t answer. Then: “Maybe.” Contracting her hamstrings, she pulled herself down to the deck and secured herself in a sitting position. “The more I let go of the xeno, the more it wants to eat and eat and eat.”

Falconi’s gaze sharpened. “To what end?”

“I don’t know. None of its memories have shown it reproducing, but—”

“But maybe it’s keeping that hidden from you.”

She tipped a finger in his direction. He offered her the pouch again, and she accepted. “Letting me drink this is kind of a waste of good alcohol. No way for me to get drunk, not with the Soft Blade interfering.”

“Don’t worry about it.… You think the xeno is some sort of doomsday nanoweapon?”

“It has the capability, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what it was made for either.” Kira struggled to find the right words. “The suit doesn’t feel malevolent. Does that make sense? It doesn’t feel angry or sadistic.”

Falconi raised an eyebrow. “A machine wouldn’t.”

“No, but it does feel some things. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think it’s entirely a machine either.” She tried to think of another way to explain. “When I was holding the shield around the maglev, there were all these tiny little tendrils going out into the walls. I could feel them, and it didn’t seem like the Soft Blade wanted to destroy. It felt like it wanted to build.”

“But build what?” Falconi said in a soft voice.

“… Anything or everything. Your guess is as good as mine.” A somber silence stilled the conversation. “Ah, I forgot to tell you, Hwa-jung said she was going into cryo as soon as she put Gregorovich under.”

“Just you and me, then,” Falconi said, and raised the pouch as if in a toast.

Kira smiled slightly. “Yes. And Morven.”

“Pshaw. She doesn’t count.”

As if to punctuate his words, the FTL alert interrupted, and then—with a distant whine—the Wallfish activated its Markov Drive and departed from normal space.

“And there we go,” said Falconi. He shook his head as if he were having trouble accepting it.

Kira found herself looking at the ruined bonsai again. “How old is the tree?” she asked.

“Would you believe, almost three hundred years?”

“No!”

“For real. It’s from Earth, back before the turn of the millennium. Got it off a guy as part of payment for a transport job. He didn’t realize how valuable it was.”

“Three hundred years…” The number was hard to comprehend. The tree was older than the entire history of humans living in space. It predated the Mars and Venus colonies, predated every hab-ring and manned research station outside low-Earth orbit.

“Yeah.” A brooding expression settled on Falconi’s face. “Those jackbooted thugs had to tear it up. Couldn’t just scan the place.”

“Mmm.” Kira was still thinking about how the Soft Blade had felt on Orsted—that and whatever purpose it had been built or born for. She couldn’t forget the sensation of the countless threadlike tendrils insinuating themselves through the fascia of the station, touching, tearing, building, understanding.

The Soft Blade was more than just a weapon. Of that she was sure. And from that certainty came an idea that gave Kira pause. She didn’t know if it would work, but she wanted it to so she could feel less bad about herself and the xeno. So she would have a solid reason for viewing the Soft Blade as something other than an instrument of destruction.

“Do you mind if I try something?” she asked, extending a hand toward the ruined tree.

“What?” Falconi asked, wary.

“I’m not sure, but … let me try. Please.”

He fiddled with the edge of the packet as he considered. “Alright. Fine. But nothing too crazy. The Wallfish has enough holes in her hull already.”

“Give me some credit at least.”

Kira released herself from the floor and crawled across the wall to the desk. There, she pulled the pot close and laid her hands on the trunk. The bark was rough against her palms, and it smelled fresh and green, sea air wafting over cut grass.

Falconi said, “Are you just going to hang there, or—”

“Shh.”

Concentrating, Kira sent the Soft Blade burrowing into the tree, with but one thought, one directive guiding it: heal. Bark creaked and split, and tiny black threads swarmed across the surface of the tree. Kira felt the plant’s internal structures, the layers of bark (inner and outer), the rings, the hard core of heartwood, every narrow branch, and the sprouting base of every fragile, silver-backed leaf.

“Hey,” said Falconi, getting to his feet.

“Wait,” said Kira, hoping the suit could do what she was asking of it.

Across the olive tree, broken branches returned to their rightful place, lifting and straightening until standing to proud effect. The cut-grass smell intensified as sap wept from along the trunk. Crumpled leaves flattened and the holes in them closed up and, where missing, new blades budded and burst forth—silver daggers bright with new life.

At last the changes slowed and stopped, and Kira felt satisfied the damage to the tree was repaired. The Soft Blade could have continued—it wanted to continue—but then the directive would have shifted from heal to grow, and that seemed to her greedy, foolish. An unwise tempting of fate.

So she recalled the suit.

“There,” she said, and lifted her hands. The tree stood whole and healthy, as before. An aura of energy seemed to emanate from it: life newly born and burnished to a high sheen.

Kira felt overcome with a sense of wonder at what the xeno was capable of. At what she was capable of. She’d managed to heal a living thing—to reshape flesh (of a sort) and to give comfort instead of pain, to create instead of destroy. Unbidden, a laugh escaped her. A weight seemed to lift from her shoulders, as if the thrust had dropped to half a g or less.

This was a gift: a precious ability pregnant with potential. With it she could have done so much on Weyland, in the gardens of the colony. With it she could have helped her father with his Midnight Constellations, or on Adrasteia, she could have helped the spread of green across the moon’s rocky crust.

Life, and all that meant. Triumph and gratitude filled her eyes with tears, and she smiled through them, happy.

A similar wonder gentled Falconi’s expression. “How did you learn to do that?” He touched a leaf with the tip of a finger, as if unable to believe.

“I stopped being so afraid.”

“Thank you,” he said, and never had Kira heard him sound so earnest.

“You’re … you’re welcome.”

Then Falconi leaned forward, put his hands on either side of her face, and—before Kira quite knew what was happening—kissed her.

He tasted different than Alan. Saltier, and she could feel the sharp tips of his stubble scraping against the skin around her lips.

Shocked, Kira froze, uncertain of how to react. The Soft Blade formed rows of dull spikes across her arms and chest, but like her, they remained held in position, neither advancing nor retracting.

Falconi broke the kiss, and Kira struggled to regain herself. Her heart was racing, and the temperature in the cabin seemed to have shot up. “What was that?” she said. Her voice rasped more than she liked.

“Sorry,” said Falconi, seeming somewhat abashed. It was an attitude she wasn’t used to seeing from him. “Guess I got carried away.”

“Uh-huh.” She licked her lips without meaning to and then berated herself for it. Dammit.

A sly grin crossed his face. “I don’t normally make a habit of hitting on crew or passengers. Unprofessional. Bad for business.”

Kira’s heart was pounding even harder. “That so.”

“Yes it is.…” He drained the last of the rotgut from the pouch. “Still friends?”

“Are we friends?” Kira said in a challenging tone. She cocked her head.

Falconi regarded her for a moment, as if debating. “Anyone I’d trust to watch my back in a firefight is a friend of mine. As far as I’m concerned, yeah, we’re friends. Unless you feel differently.”

“No,” said Kira, pausing just as long as he had. “We’re friends.”

A sharp gleam reappeared in his eyes. “Well, I’m glad to have that cleared up. Again, my apologies. The drink got the better of me. You have my word it won’t happen again.”

“That’s … Fine. Good.”

“I’d better put this into stasis,” he said, reaching for the bonsai. “And then I should get myself into cryo before we heat up the Wallfish too much. And you, what are you going to do?”

“The usual,” she said. “I think I’m just going to hole up in my cabin this time, if that’s okay.”

He nodded. “See you starside, Kira.”

“You too, Salvo.”

3.

Back in her cabin, Kira washed her face with a damp towel and then hung floating in front of the sink while she looked at herself in the mirror. Even though she hadn’t initiated the kiss, she still felt guilty about it. She’d never even looked at another man—not in that way—while she and Alan were together. Falconi’s sudden forwardness had more than caught her by surprise; it had forced her to consider what she was going to do in the future, if she had a future.

The worst thing was, the kiss had felt good.

Alan … Alan had been dead for over nine months. Not for her, not with all the time she’d spent in hibernation, but for the rest of the universe, that was the reality. It was a hard truth to swallow.

Did she even like Falconi? Kira had to think about that one for a while. In the end she decided she did. He was attractive in a rather solid, dark, hairy way. But that didn’t mean anything in and of itself. She was in no shape to be getting in a relationship with anyone, much less the captain of the ship. That way always led to trouble.

It was selfish, but Kira was glad Gregorovich hadn’t been around to see the awkwardness. He would have made endless fun of her and Falconi in his own weird way.

Perhaps it would be best to talk with Falconi again, make it very clear that nothing else was going to happen between them. Hell, he was just lucky that the Soft Blade hadn’t overreacted out of a misplaced urge to protect her.… He’d been either very brave or very foolish.

“You did well,” she whispered, looking down at the Soft Blade. And Kira thought, just for an instant, that she felt a sense of pride from the xeno. But it was a fleeting thing that might as well have been a figment of her imagination.

“Morven,” she said. “Is Falconi still out of cryo?”

“No, Ms. Navárez,” said the pseudo-intelligence. “He just received his first round of injections. He is no longer able to communicate.”

Kira made a dissatisfied sound. Fine. It probably wasn’t necessary to talk to him again, but if it were, she could always do so when they reached their destination.

The idea wasn’t to fly all the way to the rendezvous point Tschetter’s Jellies had proposed. Rather, the Wallfish would drop out of FTL some distance away but still close enough to send a warning in time to keep the Knot of Minds from being ambushed and, in doing so, perhaps forestall an even greater catastrophe than the current war between humans and Jellies. Then, the requirements of honor and duty satisfied, they could head back to settled space.

However, Kira had a suspicion that Itari would want to rejoin its compatriots, which would necessitate a meeting of some kind.

“That’s what we are,” she muttered as she pulled herself over to the bed, “a glorified shuttle service.” It reminded her of something her grandfather—on her father’s side—had been prone to saying, which was that “… the meaning of life, Kira, is moving things from point a to point b. That’s it. That’s all we really do.”

“But what about when we talk?” she had said, not entirely understanding.

“That’s just moving an idea from in here,” and he tapped her on the forehead, “out into the real world.”

Kira had never forgotten. She’d also never forgotten that he’d described everything outside her head as the real world. Ever since, she continued to wonder if that was true or not. How much reality did the contents of one’s mind actually possess?… When she dreamed, were the dreams mere shadows or was there a truth to them?

She thought Gregorovich might have something to say on the matter.

As Kira made a web of struts from the Soft Blade to hold herself upon the mattress, she kept thinking about the bonsai tree. The memory made her smile. Life. She’d spent so long on spaceships and space stations and cold, rocky asteroids, she’d almost forgotten the joy that came from growing things.

She recalled each and every one of the sensations she’d felt from the Soft Blade during the healing process. And she compared them to the similar sensations from Orsted. There was something in them worth investigating, she thought. As they traveled through FTL, she would continue to work on her control of the xeno—always that—and on improving the ease of communication between her and the organism so that it could better carry out her wishes without her having to worry about micromanaging it so much. But more than any of that, Kira wanted to explore the urge she’d felt from the Soft Blade—only in fleeting snatches before, now more strongly—the urge to build and create.

It stirred her interest, and for the first time, it was something Kira wanted to do with the xeno.

So she set her weekly alarm, as she had done during each trip since 61 Cygni, and then she once again began to work with the Soft Blade.

It was a curious experience. Kira was determined to keep the xeno from damaging the Wallfish, as it had Orsted, but at the same time, she wanted to experiment. In certain controlled ways, she wanted to remove all restrictions and let the Soft Blade do what it so obviously wanted.

She started with the handhold by the side of her bed. It was a nonessential part of the ship; if the xeno destroyed it, Hwa-jung could easily print a replacement, although Falconi might not be too pleased about it.…

Go, she whispered in her mind.

From her palm, soft fibrils extended, black and seeking. They fused with the composite grip, and again, Kira felt the delicious, addictive sensation of making something. What, she didn’t know, but there was a satisfaction to the feeling that reminded her of the joy she so often found in solving a difficult problem.

She let out a sigh, her breath a pale wraith twining in the chilled air.

When the fibers from the Soft Blade had completely covered the grip, and when she felt from it a sense of completion and—more—a desire to move past the hold and extend deeper into the hull, she stopped it and withdrew the xeno, curious to see what it had wrought.

She saw, but she didn’t understand.

There, where the curved, cylindrical handhold had been, she saw … something. A length of patterned material that reminded Kira of a cellular structure or an intricate sculpture, one covered with a repeating pattern of subdivided triangles. The surface was slightly metallic and had a greenish iridescence to it, and there were small round nodules of palest chartreuse nestled within the triangles.

She touched the transformed grip. It was warm.

Kira traced the pattern on the surface, overcome by a sense of wonder. Whatever the Soft Blade had made, she thought it was beautiful, and she had a sense from it that the material was somehow alive. Or had the potential for life.

Kira wanted to do more. But she knew, this—this—she had be careful with, even more than the deadly stabbing spikes that the xeno was so fond of. Life was the most dangerous thing there was.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if she could guide or control the Soft Blade’s creative output. The Maw could, so why not her? Careful now. There was a reason biowarfare was banned by every member of the League (and Shin-Zar also). But she wasn’t trying to create a weapon. Nor servants to fight for her as the Maw had done.

Like this, she thought, grasping the rail alongside her bed and picturing the coiled shapes of an oros fern: her favorite plant from Eidolon.

At first the xeno failed to respond. Then, just as she’d started to give up, it flowed from her hand and across the railing. As if by magic, the delicate stems of oros ferns sprouted from the railing. They were imperfect replicas, both in shape and substance, but recognizable, and as Kira withdrew the Soft Blade, she caught a whiff of fragrance from the fronds.

The plants weren’t just sculptures. They were actual living things: organic and precious because of it.

Kira let out a small gasp, shocked despite herself. She touched each of the ferns, and tears blurred her vision. She blinked them back and half laughed, half cried. If only her parents could have seen this.… If only Alan could have.…

Kira knew it would be reckless to try anything more ambitious at the moment. She was content with what she’d achieved. What they’d achieved.

And for all the uncertainty the future held, she felt a spark of hope that had long been absent. The Soft Blade wasn’t just a force for destruction. She didn’t know how, but a certainty grew within her that the xeno might be able to stop the Maw, if only she could figure out how to harness its abilities.

A sense of lightness filled Kira’s body (and it wasn’t the zero-g). She smiled, and the smile stayed as she prepared for the long sleep ahead. Perchance to dream, she thought, and she laughed longer and louder than she would around other people. At least while sober.

Still pondering, she closed her eyes and willed the Soft Blade to relax, to rest, to protect her against the cold and the dark. And soon it was—far sooner than ever before—awareness faded and the soft wings of slumber wrapped around her.

4.

Once each week, Kira woke and trained with the Soft Blade. This time, she stayed in her cabin for the duration of the trip; she didn’t need to lift weights or otherwise stress her body in order to work with the xeno. Not anymore.

Once each week, and on each occasion she allowed the Soft Blade to spread farther across the interior of her cabin and to build and grow more. Sometimes she contributed, but for the most part, Kira gave the xeno the space to do what it wanted, and she watched with increasing wonder. Some limits she set—the display on her desk was not to be touched—but everything else in the cabin was there for the xeno to use.

Once each week and no more. And when not training, she floated still and quiet, hibernating in the sleep that was akin to death, where all was cold and grey, and sounds filtered in as if from a great distance.

In that dusty neverwhere, a dream came to her:

She saw herself—her actual self, shorn of the suit and naked as the day she was born—standing in blackest darkness. At first the void was empty save for her, and a stillness surrounded her, as if she existed in a time before time itself.

Then in front of her flowered a profusion of blue lines: fractal tracery that coiled and scrolled like vines as it spread. The lines formed a dome of intersecting shapes with her at the center, a shell of endlessly repeating curves and spikes—a universe of detail in each point of space.

And she knew, somehow she knew, that she was seeing the Soft Blade as it truly was. She reached out and touched one of the lines. An electric chill poured through her, and in that instant, she beheld a thousand stars born and died, each with their own planets, species, and civilizations.

If she could have gasped, she would have.

She took her hand away from the line and stepped back. Wonder overcame her, and she felt small and humbled. The fractal lines continued to shift and turn with a sound like sliding silk, but they grew no closer, no brighter. She sat and watched, and from the glowing matrix above, a sense of watchful protectiveness emanated.

Yet she felt no comfort. For outside the tracery, she could sense—as if with ancient instinct—a looming menace. Hunger without end spreading cancer-like in the surrounding blackness, and with it, a twisting of nature that resulted in the straightness of right angles. Without the Soft Blade, she would have been exposed, vulnerable, helpless before the menace.

Fear overtook her, and she huddled down, feeling as if the fractal dome were a candle flickering in the void, threatened on all sides by a hostile wind. She was, she knew, the focus of the menace—she and the Soft Blade alike—and the weight of its malignant craving was so great, so all-encompassing, so cruel and alien, that she felt helpless before it. Insignificant. Barren of hope.

Thus she stayed, alone and scared, with a sense of imminent doom so strong that any change—even death itself—would have been a welcome relief.