The disgust Kira felt was not her own; it came from the Seed, a disapproval strong enough to make her wish to deface the walls, to cleanse them of their arrogant, ignorant, garbled reproductions.
She flew forward, clearing doors with slashes too fast to see, killing Jellies with jabs and twists, letting nothing stop or slow her. She might have gotten lost, but ahead of her a thick bank of nearscent swelled, and she recognized it as Ctein’s: a scent of hate and wrath and impatience and … satisfaction?
Before Kira could make sense of it, she came upon a circular door that stood a full ten meters high. Unlike every other door she’d seen on the Jelly ships, it was made not of shell but of metal and composite and ceramics and other materials she didn’t recognize. It was white, and banded with concentric circles of gold, copper, and what might have been platinum.
Seven stationary guns were mounted around the frame of the door. And hanging on the walls by the guns were at least a hundred Jellies of all different sizes and shapes.
Kira never hesitated. She dove straight toward them while letting the Soft Blade yank up the bulkhead in front of her, sending black needles jabbing toward the guns, and throwing a thousand different threads through the air—each one seeking flesh.
The mounted weapons exploded in a roll of deafening thunder. The room seemed to grow quiet around Kira as the xeno dulled the sound. A dozen or more projectiles slammed into her, some of them breaking or puncturing parts of the suit, with accompanying lashes of not-pain.
It was a valiant effort on the part of the defending Jellies. But Kira had learned too much, and she had grown too confident. Their efforts were nowhere near enough to stop her. A half second later, she felt the tips of the needles tickle the mounted guns, and then she was stabbing through them, destroying the machinery.
The muscles, bones, and carapaces of the Jellies posed no more of a challenge. For a handful of frenzied seconds, she felt their flesh—felt her blades piercing their insides, soft and giving and quivering with trauma. It was intimate and obscene, and although it sickened her, she never stopped, never slowed.
Kira withdrew the Soft Blade then. The area before the circular door was a cloud of misted ichor and mangled bodies: a massacre all her own doing.
A sense of uncleanliness filled her. Shame too, and a quick, sharp yearning for forgiveness. Kira had never been religious, but she felt as if she had sinned, same as when she’d inadvertently created the Maw.
What else was she supposed to do, though? Allow the graspers to kill her?
She didn’t have time to think about it. Propelling herself forward, she grasped the door with tendrils extended in every direction. Then, with a shout and a heave, she tore apart the massive structure and threw the parts aside so they crashed into walls and dented bulkheads.
14.
Pungent nearscent assaulted Kira, stronger than any she’d smelled before. She gagged and blinked, eyes watering behind the suit’s mask.
Before her was a huge, spherical room. An island of crusted rock rose from what would have been the floor when the Battered Hierophant was under thrust. Surrounding the island—enveloping it, encasing it, subsuming it—was a vast orb of water, midnight blue and flexing like a great, mirrored soap bubble. And there, in the center of the orb, mounted atop the crusted island, was the great and mighty Ctein.
The creature looked like a nightmare, in both senses of the word. A tangle of tentacles—each mottled grey and red—sprouted from a heavy, corpulent body studded with random growths of orange carapace. Hundreds, no … thousands of blue-rimmed eyes lay within the upper half of Ctein’s folded flesh, and they rolled toward her with a collective glare powerful enough to make Kira quail.
Great and mighty indeed, Ctein was enormous. Bigger than a house. Bigger than a blue whale. Bigger even than the Wallfish, and more massive too, as it was solid through and through. The size of the monster was difficult for Kira to comprehend. She’d never seen a creature so huge except in movies or games. It was far larger than she remembered from her dreams, the result, no doubt, of Ctein’s ceaseless gluttony through the centuries since.
There was more. With the expanded vision the Soft Blade granted her, Kira saw what seemed to be a miniature sun burning inside the heart of Ctein’s shapeless mass—a steady-state explosion desperate to escape its hardened shell. A gleaming pearl of destruction.
She flipped to visible light and then back to infrared. In visible light, nothing unusual appeared; Ctein’s body was the same dark grey-red that she remembered from ages past. But in infrared, it burned, it glowed, it shimmied and shined. It glistered.
In short, it looked as if the Jelly had a goddamn fusion reactor embedded within itself.
Kira felt tiny, insignificant, and severely outmatched. Her courage nearly failed. Despite everything the Soft Blade had done, she had difficulty imagining it could equal the might of Ctein. The creature was no dumb animal either. It was cunning as any ship mind, and its intelligence had allowed it to dominate the Jellies for centuries.
Knowing that filled Kira with doubt, and the doubt caused her to hesitate.
Rooted on the floor around Ctein’s rocky perch was a goodly portion of the Abyssal Conclave—barnacle-like shells mottled with greens and oranges and with the many-jointed arms of their occupants waving in the currents. Waving and wailing in a hellish din that, to Kira’s human ears, sounded like a chorus of tortured souls. To the grasper in her, to Nmarhl, it sounded like home, and memories of the Plaintive Verge flooded her mind.
Then the overwhelming stench of nearscent changed from satisfaction to amusement. And from the nightmare creature emanated a single, apocalyptic statement:
[[Ctein here: I see you.]]
At that moment, Kira knew her hesitation had been a mistake. She called upon the Soft Blade, coiling it like a great spring as she prepared to strike and end Ctein.
But she was too slow. Far too slow.
A clawed arm unfolded from along the Jelly’s equator, and it plucked a dark slab of something from the top of its carapace. And it aimed the slab at her—
Shit. The object was a massive railgun, a weapon large enough to be mounted on the prow of a cruiser, powerful enough to punch a hole through an entire UMC battleship. She was dead. No time to run, no place to hide. She just wished—
Two things happened, one after the other, so quickly that Kira barely had time to register the sequence of events: the suit shifted around her, expanding outward, and
BANG!
The deck rippled underneath her, and there was a sound so loud, all went silent. Across the chamber, a bubble of sparkling green flame erupted from the side of the curving wall, and a pressure wave raced through the orb of water, crushing the Abyssal Conclave and uprooting the great and mighty Ctein from its ancient throne. The creature’s tentacles thrashed, but to no avail.
The bulkhead to Kira’s right vanished, and she heard the scream of escaping air. Before she could react, the wall of frothing water slammed into her.
It hit with the force of a raging tsunami. The impact tore off all of her tendrils and feelers—tore the main part of the suit away from the rest of its mass and sent her and it tumbling into the glowing whiteness of outer space.
*Kira!* Falconi shouted.
CHAPTER VI. SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS