A surge of high-g thrust dropped them to the floor. Kira yelped as the stump of her arm banged against the inside of the airlock. Then she thought of the nightmare she’d cut in two, and fear focused her thoughts.
She looked at Falconi and said, “You have to … You have to…” She couldn’t seem to fit her tongue around the words.
“Have to what?” he said.
“You have to destroy that ship!”
Sparrow was the one to answer, her voice emanating from the intercom overhead: “Already taken care of, sweetcheeks. Hold on tight.”
Outside the airlock, there was a flash of pure white light, and then the window darkened until it was opaque. Seconds later, the Wallfish shuddered, and a series of faint pings sounded against the outer hull. Then the ship grew still again.
Kira let out her breath and allowed her head to drop back against the floor.
They were safe. For now.
CHAPTER VII. NECESSITY
1.
The inner door to the airlock rolled open. Sparrow was standing there with a rifle fitted to her shoulder, aiming it toward the Jelly at the back of the airlock. Her hair hung flat and heavy in the high-g of the Wallfish’s burn.
“What’s that thing doing here, Captain?” she said. “You want I should remove it?”
The Marines scooted back from the Jelly while keeping their own weapons trained on it. A sudden tenseness filled the air. “Falconi?” said Hawes.
“The Jelly was helping us,” said Falconi, getting to his feet. It took him noticeable effort.
[[Itari here: Strike Leader Wrnakkr ordered me to guard you, so I will guard you.]]
Kira translated, and Falconi said, “Fine. But he stays here until we get shit sorted out. Not going to have him wandering around the ship. You tell him that.”
“It,” said Kira. “Not him.”
Falconi grunted. “It. Whatever.” He slung his grenade launcher across his back and lurched out of the airlock. “I’ll be in Control.”
“Roger that,” said Nielsen, her voice muffled as she pulled off the helmet of her power armor.
The captain staggered down the corridor as fast as he could despite the ship’s thrust, and Sparrow followed close behind. “Glad you made it, knuckleheads!” she shouted over her shoulder.
Kira conveyed Falconi’s orders to the Jelly. It formed a nest with its tentacles and settled down at the end of the airlock. [[Itari here: I will wait.]]
[[Kira here: Do you need help with your injuries?]]
Nearscent of negation reached her. [[Itari here: This form will heal on its own. Help is not required.]] And Kira saw that the crack in the Jelly’s carapace was already crusted over with a hard, brown substance.
As Kira moved out of the airlock, she passed by Nielsen. “Your arm!” said the first officer.
Kira shrugged. She was still in so much shock over what she’d learned about the nightmares that the loss didn’t seem very important. And yet she avoided looking at the absence below her elbow.
The Entropists were there, but of their whole expedition, only seven of the Marines had survived.
“Koyich? Nishu?” she said to Hawes.
The lieutenant shook his head while tending to Moros, who had a piece of humerus sticking through his skinsuit. Despite her own distress, Kira felt a pang of sorrow for the lost men.
Vishal came hurrying up to the airlock, bag in hand. His face was lined and streaked with sweat. He gave Trig’s body a worried glance and then said, “Ms. Nielsen! Ms. Kira! We thought for sure we’d lost you. It’s good to see you.”
“You too, Vishal,” Nielsen said, stepping out of her armor. “When you get a chance, we’ll need some rad-pills.”
The doctor bobbed his head. “Right here, Ms. Nielsen.” He handed a blister pack to the first officer, and then held out another to Kira.
She tried to accept with her missing hand. The doctor’s eyes widened as he noticed. “Ms. Kira!”
“It’s fine,” she said, and snatched up the pills with her other hand. It most definitely wasn’t.
Vishal continued to stare after her as she left the airlock.
Once out of sight, she stopped in the corridor and downed the pills. They stuck in her throat for an unpleasant moment. After, she just stood there. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, and for a time, her brain refused to provide an answer.
Then, she said, “Gregorovich, what’s happening?”
“Rather busy at the moment,” the ship mind answered in an unusually serious voice. “Sorry, O Spiky Meatbag.”
Kira nodded and started to trudge toward Control, each weighted step jarring her heels.
2.
Falconi was hunched over the central display along with Sparrow. In the holo, a window displayed the feed from a skinsuit headcam of someone moving about on the outside of the Wallfish’s hull.
Hwa-jung’s voice sounded through the comms: “—checking the welds. I promise. Five minutes, no more, Captain.”
“No more,” he said. “Falconi out.” He touched a button, and the holo switched to a map of the system, with all the ships marked for easy viewing.
As Kira sank into the welcome relief of a padded crash chair, Sparrow glanced at her. The woman’s eyes widened as she noticed what she hadn’t before. “Shit, Kira. What happened to your—”
“Not now,” said Falconi. “Storytime later.”
Sparrow bit back her questions, but Kira could feel the weight of her gaze.
The Jellies and the nightmares were still skirmishing near and around Nidus. But it was a confused fight. The three remaining ships that belonged to the friendly Jellies—including the one carrying Tschetter—were taking potshots at both the nightmares and their own kind. Two Jelly vessels and one of the nightmares had taken off from the planet and were shooting at any and all. Kira suspected the Seeker was in control of them. Likewise, the rest of the nightmares were fighting everyone but themselves.
As one of the Jellies’ ships—fortunately, not a friendly—exploded in a nuclear flare, Sparrow winced. “What a clusterfuck,” she said.
At first Kira thought the Wallfish had been lucky enough to escape pursuit, but then she spotted the trajectories plotted from two of the nightmares: intercept courses. The long, angular ships (they looked like bundles of enormous femurs bound together with strips of exposed muscle) were on the opposite side of the planet, but they were accelerating at the same insane, cell-destroying g’s the other nightmares had employed. At the current rate, they’d be in range within fourteen minutes.
Or maybe not.
Approaching from the near asteroid belt was the Darmstadt, trailing threads of coolant from its damaged radiators. Kira checked the numbers; the cruiser would just barely cross paths with the nightmares before they shot past. If the nightmares piled on another quarter g of thrust, the UMC would be far too slow.
The comms crackled, and Akawe’s voice sounded: “Captain Falconi, do you read?”
“I read.”
“We can buy you some time here, I think. Maybe enough for you to get to the Markov Limit.”
Falconi gripped the edge of the table, the tips of his fingers turning white from the force. “What about you, Captain?”
A chuckle from Akawe surprised Kira. “We’ll follow if we can, but all that matters is that someone lets Command know about the offer from Tschetter’s Jellies, and right now the Wallfish has the best shot of escaping the system. I know you’re a civvy, Falconi—I can’t order you to do jack shit—but it doesn’t get more important than this.”