*What—* Sparrow started to say.
*Alas,* said Gregorovich, and for the first time, he seemed genuinely sorry, *alas, the nightmares have decided to join the fight. And this time, they’ve brought something else with them. Something big. It’s broadcasting on all channels. Calls itself … the Maw.*
CHAPTER V. ASTRORUM IRAE
1.
Kira stared with horror.
On her overlays, she beheld a vision of terror. A true nightmare, given shape by the sins of her past. The Maw.… It appeared as a grotesque collection of black and red flesh floating in space, raw, skinless, glossy with oozing fluids. The mass was bigger than the Battered Hierophant. Bigger than any space station she had seen. Nearly the size of the two small moons orbiting the planet R1. In form, it was a branching, cancerous mess, too chaotic for anything resembling order, but with a suggestion—an attempt perhaps—at a fractal shape along its fringe.
At the sight of the Maw, Kira felt an instant, visceral disgust, followed by a sickening, almost debilitating fear.
The obscene tumor had emerged from FTL near the orbit of R1, along with the vast swarm of smaller Corruptions. Already the Maw and its forces were moving in to attack human and Jelly alike, making no distinction between the two.
Kira wrapped her arms around herself and dropped into a hunched crouch, feeling ill. There was no way the Seed could overcome something like the Maw. It was too big, too twisted, too angry. Even if she had time to grow the Seed to an equal size, she would lose herself in the body of the xeno. Who she was would cease to be, or else would become such a small part of the Seed as to be totally insignificant.
The thought was more terrifying than death itself. If she were just killed, she would still be who and what she was until the end. But if the Seed consumed her, she would be facing the destruction of her self long before her mind or body ceased existing.
Then the heavy hands of Falconi’s exo were on her, and he was lifting her back onto her feet, speaking to her in soothing tones: *Hey, it’s okay. We haven’t lost yet.*
She shook her head, feeling tears forming underneath the xeno’s mask. “No, I can’t. I can’t. I—”
He shook her hard enough to get her attention. The Soft Blade reacted with a mild ripple of spikes. *Don’t fucking say that. If you give up, we might as well already be dead.*
“You don’t understand.” She made a helpless gesture toward the misbegotten shape hovering in her overlays, even though Falconi couldn’t see it. “That, that—”
*Stop it.* His voice was stern. Stern enough that Kira listened. *Focus on one thing at a time. We need to kill Ctein. Can you do that?*
She nodded, feeling a measure of control returning to her. “Yeah.… I think so.”
*Okay. Then get it together and let’s put down this Jelly. We can worry about the nightmares afterward.*
Kira’s gut still twisted with fear, though she tried to ignore it, tried to act as if she were confident. She banished the feed from her overlays, but in the back of her mind, the image of the Maw remained, as if burned into her retinas.
At Kira’s internal command, the xeno propelled her to the front of the airlock. “Let’s do this,” she said.
2.
Outside the Wallfish, in the alien storage room, shadows spun as the Battered Hierophant spun, and yet because of the alien ship’s gravity field, Kira felt none of the rotation. The shifting light had the brutal, hard-edged starkness peculiar to space, and its movement produced a strobe-like effect that was disorienting.
“Stay close,” she said.
*We’re right behind you,* said Falconi.
Unwilling to waste even a single second, Kira started across the strobing storage room. The cycling shadows made her dizzy, so she focused on the decking between her feet and tried not to think about how they were spinning through space.
As she moved among the rows of translucent globules—each of which was at least four meters in diameter and filled with strange, frozen shapes—a fist-sized explosion took out a chunk of the one by her head.
There was no sound, but Kira felt a spray of shrapnel ping the hardened surface of the xeno.
*Cover!* Falconi shouted.
Kira made no attempt to hide. Instead, she reached out with the xeno and ripped up the pearl-white decking, tore at the nearby globules and the stem that connected them, and compacted all the material into a shield that protected not only her but also the crew behind her. Same as she’d done on Orsted. Only now she felt confident, self-assured. Compared with before, commanding the Seed was effortless, and she had little fear of losing control. As she willed, so it was.
She switched her vision to infrared and saw a white-hot beam stab out from among the racks of storage units and burn a glowing, pinkie-sized hole into the material directly over her chest. The sight alarmed her until she realized the hole was far too shallow to reach her body.
Ahead of her, two Jellies—a pair of squids—lurked among the globules. They were hurrying away from her on coiled tentacles, a pair of enormous blasters gripped in their pincers and aimed her way.
Oh no you don’t, Kira thought, and sent tendrils racing out from the Soft Blade.
With them, she caught the Jellies, squeezed them, cut them, tore them into a mess of twitching flesh and spurting ichor. Maybe this was going to be easier than they’d thought.…
Over the radio, Kira heard someone gag.
“With me!” she shouted, and headed toward the white shell that would grant them access to the pressurized interior of the Battered Hierophant.
The shell refused to open as she neared, but with three quick slices of the Soft Blade, Kira severed the mechanism that kept the three-part door closed.
A hurricane of wind buffeted her as the wedges of the shell sagged apart.
The shield she’d constructed was too large to fit inside, so with some reluctance, she discarded it before allowing the xeno to propel her into the depths of the alien ship. Itari and the crew followed close behind.
3.
The interior of the Hierophant was unlike the two other Jelly ships Kira had been on. The walls were darker, more somber—colored with an assortment of greys and blues, and decorated with strips of coral-like patterns that in any other circumstance Kira would have loved to study.
She was standing inside a long, empty corridor marked with side passages, additional doorways, and alcoved tunnels leading both up and down. Now that they were again surrounded by air, Kira could hear a piercing whistle from the ruined door behind them, as well as the buzz of Hwa-jung’s drones and a howling klaxon that reminded her of whale sounds, as if the entire ship were bleating with pain, anger, and fear.
The rushing air stank with nearscent of alarm, and with it, a command that all service co-forms were to swim shadow-wise without delay. Whatever that meant.
For the briefest of moments, Kira thought that perhaps they had slipped past the Hierophant’s sensors, and perhaps they wouldn’t have to fight every step of the way.
Then, with an audible snikt, a white membrane slid across the door she’d cut open, stopping the flow of air, and—at the opposite end of the corridor—a mass of swarming limbs appeared: scores of Jellies, angry, armed, and heading straight for her and the others.