Distracted, she twisted awkwardly, tumbling as the Soft Blade sent her flying toward the Hierophant. A tentacle curved toward her, and some distance away, she saw Falconi’s armor-clad torso pop over the edge of the hole in the flagship’s hull. With one arm, he lifted his grenade launcher, a flash illuminated the barrel, and—
Ctein’s rocket engine exploded in a lopsided plume of burning fuel, spraying liquid fire in every direction.
Kira flinched as it splashed against her. The fuel didn’t hurt, but old instincts were hard to ignore.
The explosion knocked the Jelly back, but amazingly, it managed to keep hold of the Hierophant with the tip of one tentacle. Much to her disappointment, it appeared unhurt.
Nearscent of a vast and terrible anger washed through the nearby space.
The creature pulled itself back against the battleship and then swung one of its tentacles at Falconi. He ducked beneath the rim of the hole, and Kira saw him vanish through a door an instant before the tentacle slammed down, crushing the exposed walls and girders.
*All yours, kiddo,* Falconi said.
“Thanks. Owe you one.” Kira stopped several meters from the Hierophant and turned to face Ctein head-on. No weapons now. Only tentacles and tendrils and their two minds pitted one against the other. She prepared herself to embrace the monstrous Jelly once more, to wrestle with it until one or both of them were dead. Despite the many advantages of the Soft Blade, Kira felt no surety that she could win. All Ctein had to do was slam her against the hull of the Hierophant, and that would be the end of her.
But she wasn’t about to give up. Not now. Not after everything they’d been through. Not with everything that was at stake.
“Alright, you big ugly,” she muttered, gathering her strength. “Let’s get this over with.”
Then Kira saw it: the smallest of tears in the armored skin of one tentacle—the same tentacle, she guessed, that had been holding the rocket. Falconi’s attack had done some damage after all. The tear appeared like a thin crack in the surface of cooling lava, open to reveal the heated flesh within.
Hope blossomed within her. Small as it was, the crack was an opportunity, and in an instant, Kira imagined how she could use it to kill Ctein. Doing so would be risky, terribly risky, but she wouldn’t get any better chance.
Her lips twitched with an approximation of a smile. The solution wasn’t to stay away—it was to embrace Ctein, regardless of the cost, and join herself to it in much the same way she was joined to the Seed. The solution was in the melding of their bodies, not in the separation.
Kira willed herself forward, and the suit responded with a hard kick from whatever thrusters it had constructed on her back. It drove her toward Ctein at over a g of acceleration, causing her to bare her teeth and laugh into the void.
The Jelly raised its tentacles, not to block her but to catch her in a cradle of grasping flesh. She corkscrewed around two of the tentacles and then latched onto the one with the tear.
At that point Ctein seemed to realize what she was doing, and it went mad.
The universe spun around Kira as the Jelly slammed its limb against the Hierophant. She managed to harden the suit an instant before they struck, but her vision still went black for a moment, and she felt slow and disoriented.
The tentacle started to rise again. If she didn’t act fast, it would beat her to a pulp; that she knew, sure as entropy. And though she hated the thought of dying, she hated the thought of letting Ctein win even more.
She could feel the tear underneath her belly, a small patch of softness on the otherwise hard surface of the tentacle. So she stabbed, she jabbed, and she twisted as she drove the suit’s fibers into the wound. The tentacle convulsed, and then it whipped from side to side in a frantic attempt to shake her loose. But there was no getting rid of her. Not now.
The flesh of Ctein was hot against her blades, and globules of ichor spurted forth and coated her skin with a thick slime. Kira extended her reach within the creature, extended and extended until she found the bones at the center of the tentacle. Then she grabbed the bones and spread the flesh, forcing the tear to split and widen, and she poured the Soft Blade into the body of the alien.
The tentacle coiled around her, dark and moist and clutching. Claustrophobia clogged her throat, and though the suit continued to provide her with air, Kira felt as if she were on the verge of suffocating.
Ahead of her, sparks flashed, and with a shock, she realized Ctein was using its other arms to cut off the limb she clung to.
Determined not to lose the advantage, she urged the Soft Blade onward and outward, willing it to do what was needed.
The xeno blossomed into a thousand delicate lines as it burrowed into Ctein. But the threads didn’t cut, as Kira expected. They didn’t slash or tear or maim. Rather, they were soft and supple, and what they touched, they … remade. Nerves and muscles, tendons and bone: all of it was food for the xeno.
Ctein thrashed and writhed. Oh how it thrashed! It beat at her through its own flesh; it gripped and wrung its own limb, seeking to crush her, and a thunder filled her ears.
But the might of the great and terrible Ctein was no match for the persistence of the Soft Blade. The fractal fibers of the organism bent and wove and devoured as it converted the flesh of Ctein. It tore apart the creature’s cells, desiccated and compressed them into something hard and unyielding. The resulting shape was angular, all flat planes and straight lines and sharp edges of atomic precision. A dull, dead object devoid of movement, unable to hurt or harm.
Twenty meters or more, and then her feelers were inside the carapace, and muscle gave way to organs and machines.
From the Soft Blade came a sense of anger over old sorrows, and without meaning to, she found herself crying out: [[Kira here: For Nmarhl!]]
The xeno increased again, doubling and redoubling until it filled the roomy shell, converting each cubic centimeter into brutal perfection.
Ctein shuddered once more—shuddered and then was still.
Kira switched to infrared for a moment and saw the glow from the fusion reactor fading.
The Soft Blade wasn’t finished; it continued to build until it consumed its way through the skin and carapace of the Jelly. Around her, stone-like veins appeared along the tentacle Kira clung to. They spread, expanding across the whole of Ctein.
Uncertain of what the xeno was doing, Kira withdrew the Soft Blade, and with a sense of relief, kicked herself free of the gigantic corpse.
As they drifted apart, she looked back on it.
Where Ctein had been now hung a bristling, dull-black asterisk: an enormous collection of basalt-like pillars, faceted and chisel-tipped. A lifeless lump of restructured carbon. In places, a familiar circuit-board pattern covered the surface.… With a shock, Kira recognized the similarity between the floating pillars and the formation she’d found on Adrasteia. That too, she realized, had once been a living thing. Once, long ago.
Kira stared at the remains of Ctein with a sense of bitter accomplishment. She had done that. She and the Seed. After centuries of rule, the great and mighty Ctein was well and truly dead. Dead and done. And they were responsible.
All that knowledge lost. All those years of memories, lost. All those hopes and dreams and plans, lost and reduced to a lump of stone drifting through space.
Kira felt a curious sadness. Then she shivered and loosed a bark of laughter. She didn’t know what she felt; so much adrenaline was rushing through her system, she might as well have been high. But she did know she’d won. She and the Seed had won.