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.