1.
Space was white?
Kira ignored the obvious inconsistency. First things first. She willed the Soft Blade to stabilize their flight, and it responded with puffs of gas along her shoulders and hips. Her spin slowed, and within seconds the receding hull of the Battered Hierophant occupied a single location within her vision.
A huge chunk had been torn from the side of the Hierophant; whatever had hit the ship had blasted through most of the decks on the aft section. Another Casaba-Howitzer?
She could feel the orphaned pieces of the Soft Blade still within the Hierophant, separate from her and yet connected. Afraid of what might happen if she lost them for good, Kira drew on them with her mind. And they began to stir, worming their way through the structure of the ship.
She glanced around. Yup, space was white. She dropped the infrared. Still white. And glowing. But not glowing as brightly as it should have been if she were in the open, in direct line of sight with the nearby sun.
Then her brain clicked, and she got it. She was inside a cloud of smoke meant to defend the Hierophant against incoming lasers. Good for the ship, inconvenient for her. Even with visible light, she could only see about twenty meters in any given direction.
*Kira!* Falconi shouted again.
“Still alive. You okay?”
*I’m fine. One of the nightmares just rammed the Hierophant. It—*
“Shit!”
*You said it. We’re making our way to the Wallfish. The Jellies seem to be ignoring us at the moment. Their fleet has the rest of the nightmares tied up, but we don’t have a whole lot of time. Tschetter says Ctein is still alive. You gotta kill that Jelly, and fast.*
“I’m trying. I’m trying.”
Kira swallowed hard, doing her best to tamp down her fear of Ctein. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Besides, there were worse threats approaching. The nightmares. The Maw.
She’d never been so scared. Her hands and feet were ice cold, despite the best efforts of the Soft Blade to keep her warm, and her heart was pounding painfully fast. Didn’t matter. Keep going. Don’t stop moving.
Kira switched back to infrared and used the xeno to hold herself in place while she scanned up, down, and around. Ctein was big as hell, so where the hell was it? The chamber they had been ejected from was visible as a shadowed cavity deep within the bowels of the Hierophant, a husk now empty of its monstrous fruit. Like her, Ctein might have been blown away from the ship, but she had a suspicion the Jelly had attitude jets hidden somewhere in its bulk. If Ctein had flown around the curve of the Hierophant’s hull … the alien would take a long time to find in the swirling cloud. Too long, in fact. The Hierophant had kilometers and kilometers of surface area.
“Gregorovich,” she said, continuing to scan. “You see anything out here?”
*Alas, the Wallfish is still lodged in the Hierophant. My sensors are blocked.*
“Check with Tschetter. Maybe the Knot—”
A bar of smoke-free space, half a meter across, flashed in front of her. It ran straight from the horizon of the Hierophant’s hull, past her chest, and continued on into deep space. A mass of swirling curlicues expanded through the smoke, pressing it outward, and the glow of transferred heat spread through the haze.
Kira swore. At her command, the xeno reversed their course and shoved her toward the damaged ship. They were an easy target, hanging out in the open. She had to get to cover before—
From behind the curve of the Battered Hierophant, an enormous tentacle emerged, twisting and grasping with malevolent intent. In infrared, the tentacle was a tongue of fire, its suckers incandescent craters, its skeletal interior a flexible column of white-hot ingots stacked end to end, bright within the translucent flesh. Cilia lined the last third of the limb, each snakelike structure several meters long and seemingly possessed of its own restless intelligence, for they moved and waved and knotted independent of their neighbors. A second tentacle joined the first, and then a third and a fourth as the rest of the gigantic Ctein hove into view.
The skin of the Jelly had changed: it was smooth and colorless now, as if coated with pewter paint. Armor of some kind, she supposed. Worse yet, the creature still held the ship-sized railgun with its clawed arm.
Kira shouted into the void as she urged the Soft Blade on even faster. She jetted back among the exposed decks of the Hierophant, but just when she began to relax slightly, Ctein’s multifarious shadow eclipsed her and the monster fired its weapon.
The blast hit her with numbing force and sent her tumbling into a bulkhead.
But she was still alive.
The xeno had poofed out around her, like a giant black balloon, covering her whole body, including her head, though it didn’t block her vision any more than the mask had. She could feel structures within the balloon: complicated matrices of fibers and rods and plastic-like filling—all of which the Soft Blade had manufactured in a mere fraction of a second.
Another explosion went off in her face, jarring her so hard, it left her dazed. This time she felt the suit counter the incoming projectile with an explosion of its own, diverting the deadly spray of metal to either side, leaving her untouched.
With a hint of astonishment, Kira realized the xeno had constructed some form of reactive armor, similar to what the military used on their vehicles.
She would have laughed if she’d had the chance.
There was no telling how long the Soft Blade could keep her safe, and she had no intention of staying to find out. She couldn’t go head-to-head with Ctein. Not while it was armed. The only way she could fight was to duck and run and wait for the Jelly to run out of ammo. That or find a way to close with it so she could use the Soft Blade to tear it apart.
Stabbing out a hand (it moved but stayed hidden within the balloon), she formed a cable and launched it toward a shelf of half-melted beams several meters above her head. The cable struck and stuck, and she hauled on it with all her strength, slinging herself up and out of the pit blasted into the side of the Hierophant. At the lip of the crater, she released the first line, threw out a second one, caught the hull, and pulled, converting upward momentum into forward momentum. As she soared over the anchor point for the line, she sent forth another one ahead of her, and then another and another, dragging herself across the hull until she was hidden from the Jelly.
The monster followed. The last she saw of it, Ctein was leaping after her, its limbs rippling with hypnotic grace.
Kira grimaced and tried to pull harder on the latest cable. But she was already at the limits of what her body and the xeno were capable of.
As she flew around the side of the Hierophant, like a tetherball around a pole, Kira had a thought. An idea.
She didn’t stop to consider practicality or likelihood of success; she merely acted and hoped—blindly hoped—that what she was doing would work.
Sending out several more cables, she yanked herself to a stop beside a jagged rent a piece of shrapnel had torn through the hull. She collapsed the balloon around her and converted the material into tentacles of her own. With them, she grabbed sections of upturned hull and sliced them free.
Each chunk was slightly over a meter thick, most of that thickness being thin layers of composite sandwiched with what looked like a metallic foam. Exactly as she’d hoped. As with human ships, the outer hull of the Hierophant had a Whipple shield to protect it against impacts from space debris. If the armor could stop micrometeoroids, then enough layers ought to be able to stop the projectile from a kinetic weapon like the railgun.