She started toward the next of the nightmares, but her help was unneeded. The combined firepower of the Marines and the allied Jellies had already killed the rest of the creatures.
Falconi wiped a smear of blood off his visor, his expression grim. “Now they know where we are.”
“Keep moving,” Koyich barked, and their group continued down the street.
“We’re getting low on ammo,” Hawes said.
“I see that,” said Koyich. “Switch to two-round bursts.”
They concentrated on running. “Contact!” shouted a Marine as he loosed several rounds at a nightmare that appeared around the corner of a building. The creature’s head exploded in a red mist.
Hemoglobin, Kira thought. Iron-based blood, unlike the Jellies.
The nightmares continued to harass them in ones and twos as they raced to the city’s edge. When the buildings gave way to moss-covered ground, Kira checked on the situation in orbit. The Wallfish had already passed by the planet and was heading toward the outer reaches of the system. A mess of Jelly and nightmare ships were fighting high overhead: both sides against one another, and the Jellies also against themselves. The Darmstadt was still some distance away from Nidus but inbound fast. Smoke trailed from several burn marks along the cruiser’s hull.
“Follow me,” said Tschetter, taking the lead over the blasted land. The moss there lay outside the shadow of the city. It had been exposed to the full fury of the nuclear explosion and had burned beneath the heat; the small fronds crunched with each step, leaving an ashy residue on their soles.
They headed westward, away from the buildings, deeper into the dusky dark.
As they ran, Kira maneuvered herself to Tschetter’s side and said, “After you were rescued, did you tell the Jellies I was still alive?”
The major shook her head. “Of course not. I wasn’t about to give our enemies actionable information.”
“So Lphet and the rest of them didn’t know where I was or that the suit existed?”
“Not until you sent your signal.” Tschetter shot her a glance. “In fact, they never actually asked. I think they assumed the suit had been destroyed along with the Extenuating Circumstances. Why?”
Kira took a moment to gather her breath. “Just trying to understand.” Something about Tschetter’s explanations didn’t seem right. Why wouldn’t the Jellies that hid the Soft Blade be curious about its location following the events at Adra? If they’d bothered to carry out a flash trace, they would have seen the Valkyrie leaving Sigma Draconis. Surely that would have been enough to track her to 61 Cygni. So why hadn’t they? And then there was the question of the nightmares.…
“Is Iska with you?” Kira asked Tschetter.
The major didn’t answer for a moment, her expression labored from exertion. “He stayed behind in case anything happened to me.”
“So how did you find us?”
“Lphet knew about the ships sent to track you down. We just followed them. It wasn’t hard. Corrupted must have done the same.”
A shriek sounded overhead, and a cluster of dark shapes dove toward them, flapping bat-like wings. Kira ducked while lashing out with one arm. She connected with a solid, disturbingly soft body, and then the suit hardened, forming an edge, and her arm sliced through flesh and bone with hardly any resistance.
A shower of orange ichor covered her. The rest of their group suffered a similar fate as humans and Jellies alike shot down the flock. The creatures had mandibles for mouths and tiny arms with pincers tucked close against their downy breasts.
When the shooting stopped, three of the Marines were lying motionless on the ground and half a dozen more appeared injured.
Nishu kicked one of the downed creatures. “No sense of self-preservation, these.”
“Yeah,” said Tatupoa, bending to pick up one of his wounded teammates. “Real eager-like to get themselves killed.”
[[Kira here: Are these things yours?]] She pointed at the winged corpses.
[[Lphet here: No. These are also Corrupted.]]
Kira’s puzzlement deepened as she translated for the rest. Not hemoglobin this time, and there seemed to be no consistency among the shapes of the different nightmares. At least with the Jellies, it was clear the various types were somehow related, what with their shared blood, skin markings, muscle fibers, and the like. The nightmares lacked any such cohesion, aside from the consistently diseased look of their hides.
Tschetter gestured at a ridge of rock that rose before them. “The ships are just ahead, on the other side.”
As they trotted up the ridge—the Marines trailing along as they helped their injured—Nielsen said, “Look at the sky!”
The mushroom cloud had punched a large, circular hole in the overcast sky. Through the opening in the tattered billows of mist, Kira saw great sheets of color rippling across the twinkling expanse. Reds and blues and green-yellows, shifting like ribbons of gossamer silk in a vast neon display, thousands of kilometers across.
The sight left Kira awestruck. She had only seen the aurora a few times on Weyland, and never in anything but the darkest night. It looked unreal. It looked like a bad overlay, too bright and smooth and colorful to be natural.
“What’s causing it?” she asked.
“Nukes or antimatter in the upper atmosphere,” said Tschetter. “Anything that dumps charged particles into the ionosphere.”
Kira shivered. The sight was beautiful and yet, knowing its cause, terrifying.
“It’ll die down in a few hours,” said Hawes.
At the top of the ridge, Kira paused to glance back at the city behind them. She wasn’t the only one.
A horde of bodies was streaming out of the overgrown streets: nightmares and Jellies together, their previous differences now forgotten. And walking along behind them, the Seeker—tall, skeletal, almost monastic in appearance with its seeming hood and cape. The Seeker stopped at the edge of the buildings. The same high-pitched keen rang out over the fields of blasted moss, and the Seeker spread both pairs of arms. Its cape lifted as well, unfolding to reveal a pair of wings, veined and purplish and nearly nine meters across.
“Moros,” said Koyich in a surprisingly conversational tone. “See if you can put a bullet through that bastard’s head.”
Kira nearly objected, but she held her tongue. If there was a chance they could kill the Seeker, it would be for the best, even though a part of her would mourn the loss of a creature so old, capable, and obviously intelligent.
“You got it, sir,” said one of the Marines in power armor. He stepped forward, lifted one arm, and—without a moment’s delay—fired.
The Seeker’s head snapped to one side. Then it slowly looked back at them with what Kira could only interpret as sheer malevolence.
“Did you hit it?” said Koyich.
“Nossir,” said Moros. “It dodged.”
“It … Marine, nail that thing with the strongest laser blast you’ve got.”
“Yessir!”
The whine of charging supercapacitors sounded within Moros’s armor, and then a BZZT! as loud as any gunshot sounded. Kira’s skin tingled from the residual electrical charge.
She saw the laser pulse with her thermal sight: a seemingly instantaneous bar of ravening force that joined Moros to the Seeker.
Only the blast didn’t touch the dark-shrouded alien. Rather, it curved around the creature’s hide and burned a fist-sized hole in the wall of the building behind.
Even at a distance, Kira would have sworn the Seeker was smiling. And a memory came to her: it was they that enforced the wishes of the Heptarchy, and they that guarded the dangerous depths of space.…
[[Lphet here: This is to no point.]] As it spoke, the Jelly started down the other side of the ridge, along with its comrades.
Lphet’s words needed no translation. Kira followed with everyone else. The knife-edge keening rang out again, and underlying it, she could hear the drumming of approaching feet.
The two Jelly ships were parked at the foot of the ridge. The globular vessels weren’t particularly large by the standards of spaceships—the Darmstadt would dwarf them in length—but sitting there on the ground, they seemed enormous: as large as the administrative building in Highstone, where she’d gotten her seed license.
A loading ramp lowered from the belly of each ship.
The Jellies divided into two groups, one heading for each ship. Tschetter paired off with Lphet and several other Jellies heading toward the left-hand vessel. “You take that one,” she said to Koyich, pointing at the ship on the right.
“Come with us!” said Kira.
Tschetter never missed a step as she shook her head. “It’s safer if we split up. Besides, I’m staying with the Jellies.”
“But—”
“There’s a chance for peace here, Navárez, and I’m not going to give up on it. Go!”
Kira would have argued further, but they were out of time. As she sprinted alongside Falconi toward the other Jelly ship, she couldn’t help but feel grudging admiration for Tschetter. Assuming the major was still in her right mind, what she was doing was incredibly brave, same as her decision to stay behind on Adra.
Kira doubted she would ever like the major, but she would never question the woman’s devotion to duty.
More Jellies were waiting for them at the top of the loading ramp, guarding the opening with an impressive array of weapons. They moved aside as Kira and the others ran up. Koyich shepherded his men aboard, shouting at them to hurry. They stumbled in, dripping blood from bodies and fluids from exos. Nishu and Moros brought up the rear, and then the ramp retracted and the ship’s loading port slid shut and locked in place, sealing the hull.
“I cannot believe we’re doing this,” Falconi said.