“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.