“Someday you’re going to have to explain that,” said Falconi, gesturing toward Sparrow’s shin.
“Someday,” the short-haired woman agreed, covering up the compartment and standing. “But not today.” To Kira she said, “What did you see over at biocontainment?” Kira described the security checkpoint and the two Marines stationed outside. A faint smile crossed Sparrow’s face. “Right, here’s what we do.” She snapped her fingers and beckoned for Veera to come over. “You, Entropist, when I give the signal, I want you to walk over to where the Marines can see you.”
“Is that—”
“Just do it. Kira—”
“I can hide myself,” Kira quickly said. She explained.
Sparrow jerked her sharp chin. “That makes it easier. I’ll take care of the two standing guard. You be ready to jump anyone who comes out. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Let’s hustle.”
4.
Kira willed herself back to invisibility while she hid with Sparrow in the hall that opened on the central corridor.
“Nice trick, that,” Sparrow said under her breath.
Ahead of them, Veera walked out across the intersection, heading toward biocontainment. The Entropist was more voluptuous than she had appeared when garbed in her gradient robes, and the tattoos across her pale skin only enhanced the impression. The sight was rather distracting, which—Kira had to admit—was the point.
“Go,” said Sparrow. She darted out and to the side, avoiding the Marines’ line of sight.
Kira broke in the opposite direction, and the two of them flanked Veera and took up positions on opposite sides of the passageway that led to biocontainment.
Just as Veera reached the doorway, the Marines spotted her. Kira heard the heavy treads as their armor turned, and a man said with a tone of obvious confusion, “Hey, you! What the—”
He never finished. Sparrow reached around the corner and tossed the fleshy marbles toward the Marines. Three quick bzzts! sounded as the Marines’ exos shot the marbles out of the air.
That was a mistake.
A triple strobe of light flashed the hall, smoke clogged the air, and with her enhanced vision from the Soft Blade, Kira saw flickers of violet EM energy. What the hell?
Sparrow didn’t wait. She sprinted around the corner and disappeared into the smoke. Metallic screeches sounded, and then a moment later, two enormous thuds as the exos crashed to the deck, immobilized.
Kira followed a half step behind. Switching her vision to infrared, she saw the door to biocontainment roll open. Another Marine in power armor stepped out, blaster raised to fire. Behind him or her, she saw three more Marines scrambling to take cover behind desks.
Even with all the sensors of a military-grade exo, the Marine in the doorway never saw her coming. She slammed into his power armor while driving a hundred different fibers from the Soft Blade into the machine. It took her only a fraction of a second to find the weak spots and disable the exo.
The Marine’s armor locked up and began to fall. Kira pulled it to the side, landed inside biocontainment, and rolled across her shoulders and back to her feet. None of the Marines inside were able to triangulate her exact location, but that didn’t stop them from firing blindly toward the spot she’d been.
Too slow. A laser blast seared a hole through the back of a chair next to her, but Kira was already moving, throwing tendrils across the room and snaring each of the Marines.
Don’t kill, she told the Soft Blade, hoping against hope it would heed.
A clutch of heartbeats later, and the other Marines dropped to the floor. The weight of their armor crushed tables, smashed shelves, and dented the deck.
“Get ’em all?” Sparrow asked, poking her head in.
Kira allowed her invisibility to fade and nodded. Deeper into the room was another door leading to what she recognized as an impressively large decon chamber. Past that was a third pressure door, which she assumed opened to the isolation chamber where Itari was being held.
“Watch my back,” she said.
“Roger.”
It might have been possible to get the access codes off the Marines, but Kira saw no point in wasting time. Hurrying forward, she extended her arms and allowed the Soft Blade to flow out and rip open the decon door.
At the other end of the chamber, she saw Itari through the pressure door window. The Jelly was sitting with its tentacles curled underneath it, like the legs of a dead spider.
A flash of relief passed through Kira. At least they were in the right place.
She set herself against the pressure door and again allowed the Soft Blade to worm its way into the mechanism and then to tear.
Clank. The lock broke. Pulling and pushing with the xeno, Kira rolled the door back.
A questioning scent reached her from the Jelly as it unfurled its tentacles. [[Itari here: Idealis?]]
[[Kira here: If you truly want peace, we must leave this place.]]
[[Itari here: Are these two-forms our enemies?]]
[[Kira here: No, but they do not know better. Do not kill them, I ask you. But do not let yourself be killed either.]]
[[Itari here: As you will, Idealis.]]
Kira left to rejoin the others outside biocontainment, and she heard Itari follow with a dry-leaf shuffle of tentacles.
“We good?” Falconi asked as she, Sparrow, and Itari emerged from the smoke. Veera had found a jacket somewhere in the biocontainment offices and was pulling it on, covering herself.
“Yup,” said Sparrow. “Boobs, works every time. Everyone falls for them.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Kira.
Orsted rumbled around them, and Vishal said, “Heavens preserve us, yes.”
“Veera! Jorrus!” said Falconi.
“Yessir?”
“Still nothing from Gregorovich?”
“Nothing.”
“Jamming?”
“No. They have him in lockdown.”
“He’ll be fighting mad,” said Hwa-jung.
“Good. We can use that,” said Falconi. He rounded on the rest of them. “Right. We’ll go up the main passage. Anyone shows up, break right, take cover. Don’t let ’em use you as hostages. Kira, you’ll have to deal with any opposition. None of us have weapons.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Sparrow. She held up her right hand. The glass-like dagger glinted between her fingers.
Kira gestured at the fallen Marines. “What about—”
“No good,” said Falconi. “They’re locked. Civvies can’t use UMC weapons. Not without authorization. Enough yapping. Let’s—”
With a dull thunk, pressure doors slammed shut around the intersection, closing off the corridor everywhere but the direction Kira had originally come from. There, she heard the thunder of approaching power armor, and then twenty or more Marines trotted into view, carrying blasters, railguns, and heavy turrets. A small cloud of wasp-like drones accompanied them.
“Freeze! Don’t move!” shouted an amplified voice.
5.
Kira and the others, including the Jelly, retreated into the hall leading to biocontainment and hid behind the corners of the doorway.
The voice rang out again: “We know you’re trying to rescue the Jelly, Navárez. Private Larrett told us everything.”
Kira guessed Larrett was the Marine she’d talked to outside her imploded cell. “Bastard,” she muttered.
“Unless anyone has any ideas, we’re shit out of luck,” said Falconi, his face grim.
Then Stahl spoke from the speakers embedded within the glowing ceiling, loud enough to cut through the alarms. “Kira, you don’t want to do this. Fighting isn’t going to help anyone, least of all you. Stand down, tell the Jelly to return to its cell, and no one has to—”
The deck rumbled and twisted underneath them again.
Kira didn’t hesitate. She had to do something.
She jumped into the corridor and sent a score of shafts ou
t from her chest and legs. They angled forward and downward, and pierced the deck in different spots.
Don’t lose control. Don’t—
Her ears rang as a bullet skipped off her head, and she felt what were like several punches to her ribs, directly above her heart. Then she pulled the shafts inward, tearing up large chunks of the deck.
At her command, the Soft Blade slammed the pieces of decking together, layering them like scales to form a tall, wedge-shaped shield in front of her.
Finger-sized holes—white-hot around the edges and dripping molten metal—peppered the shield as the angry bzzt! of laser fire sounded throughout the concourse.
Kira took a step forward, and the Soft Blade moved the shield with her. As she did, she reached out farther with the suit and grabbed more pieces of the deck, adding them to the barrier, thickening it, widening it.
“With me!” she shouted, and the crew and the Jelly scurried after her.
“Right behind you!” said Falconi.
Bullets whined overhead, and then an explosion shook the shield, and Kira felt the impact through her body.
“Grenade!” shouted Sparrow.
[[Itari here: Can I help, Idealis?]]
[[Kira here: Do not kill anyone if you can avoid it, and do not get in front of me.]]
A pair of drones appeared around the edge of the shield. Kira lanced them with two quick stabs and continued plodding forward. The floor was a tattered mess of twisted girders and exposed pipes; it was difficult to keep her footing.
“Just get us to the terminal!” Falconi said.
Kira nodded, barely paying attention. Even though she couldn’t see what was in front of her, she kept using the suit to grab decking, panels off the wall, benches—any and everything she could use to protect them. She didn’t know how much weight the suit could move or support, but she was determined to find out.
Another grenade hit the shield. That one she barely felt.
Several of the suit’s tentacles encountered something long and smooth and warm (very warm, burning hot even; if she’d touched it with bare flesh, she suspected it would have seared a hole right through her skin): one of the laser turrets. That too she added to the pile, tearing the weapon free from the floor and jamming it into the gap between two benches.
“More drones!” said Vishal.
Before he’d finished speaking, Kira created a web of struts and rods (some metal, some made from the suit itself) between the shield, the ceiling, and the distant walls. In several places, she felt and heard the drones collide with the barrier; the tone of their blades increased from the strain.
She flinched as grenades blew open a hole in the web.
“Jesus!” shouted Falconi.
The drones swung toward the hole. One of them darted through, and Itari smacked it out of the air with a well-timed swing of a tentacle. Before the rest could make it past, and before they could find an angle that would allow them to shoot any of the crew, Kira snared the machines out of the air—like a frog snapping up flies—and crushed them.
All of them.
She could feel the suit growing in size, reinforcing itself with metal and carbon and whatever else it needed from the structure of the station. Her arms seemed thicker, her legs too, and a sense of power coursed through her; she felt as if she could claw her way through solid rock.
The gunfire subsided as the Marines in front of her stopped shooting and started to run back along the concourse, their heavy steps pounding a rapid beat.
Kira bared her teeth. So they’d realized it was pointless to fight. Good. Now if she could just get everyone safely to the Wallfish, then—
She heard, not saw, the pressure door in front of them slam shut. Then the one beyond it, and so forth and so on down the concourse.
“Shit!” said Nielsen. “They’ve locked us in.”
“Stay with me!” said Kira.
She continued forward until she felt her shield bump into the pressure door. The door itself was too large and heavy to cut through in a reasonable amount of time, but the frame around it wasn’t. It took her and the Soft Blade only a few moments of work before the door toppled outward and crashed with deafening results against the deck.
Ten meters down the corridor, the next blast door blocked their way.
Kira repeated the procedure, and the second door soon followed the example of the first. Then a third.… And a fourth.
All of the doors ahead of them seemed to be closed. It wasn’t stopping them, but it did slow Kira down. “The UMC is trying to buy themselves time,” Falconi said to her.
She grunted. “Bet they’re preparing a nice welcome party for us at the terminal.” A loud hissing sounded near the walls. The back of her neck prickled with alarm. Was the air being pumped out or was something being pumped in?
“Gas!” Falconi shouted, and pulled the collar of his shirt over his mouth and nose. The others did the same. The cloth molded to their faces, forming skin-tight filters. The Entropists made arcane gestures with their hands, and the lines of their tattoos slid across their faces, forming a paper-thin membrane that covered their mouths and noses.
Kira was impressed. Nanotech of the highest order.
She knew the instant she broke through to the last section of concourse—the one adjacent to the terminal—as a heavy barrage of bullets, laser blasts, railgun projectiles, and explosives pounded into the barrier she’d built. The impacts rocked her back, but she set her shoulder and pressed forward with deliberate steps.
A third of the way through the concourse section, Falconi tapped her shoulder and said, “Right! Go right!” He pointed toward the terminal entrance.
As Kira started to edge in that direction, the pipes under her feet shook, and she heard a sound like an oncoming avalanche as the Marines charged.
With less than a second to prepare, she wrenched several of the floor girders upward, so they supported the inside of the shield and prevented it from sliding backwards.
“Brace!” she shouted.
Thick as it was, the shield bent and gave as the troopers slammed into it with their power armor. There was a terrible screeching as the soldiers began to tear away pieces of the shield.
“Gotcha,” said Kira, baring her teeth.
She willed hundreds of hairlike fibers through the bulk of the shield, through all the little nooks and crannies and hidden crevices until, sightless creeping, they found the smooth shells of the troopers’ armor. Then she did as she had done before. She sent the fibers boring into the joints and seams of the armor, and she cut every wire and coolant line she could find, stopping only when she encountered the touch of overheated flesh.
It was an effort to stop, but the Soft Blade obeyed her will and respected the boundaries of flesh. Her confidence swelled.
On the other side of the shield, the screeching stopped, and the troopers collapsed with a sound fitting the fall of titans.
“Did you kill them?” asked Nielsen, her voice sounding too loud in the sudden silence.
Kira licked her lips. “No.” Talking felt weird. The shield seemed to occupy a larger part of herself than her own body. She could sense every square centimeter of the barrier. The amount of information was overwhelming. Was the experience similar to what ship minds had to deal with? She wondered.
She was about to detach herself from the shield when more boots sounded ahead of them, at the other end of the concourse.
Before Kira could react, the lights flickered and went out, save for small emergency floods along the floor, and the deck rippled like a wave, causing everyone but Kira and Itari to stagger and fall.
An industrial crash of crumpling metal echoed through the concourse, and a dark dart of veined hull punched through the decking farther up the main hallway, past the newly arrived Marines. Pressure alarms shrieked, and from a weeping cleft in the side of the intruding spaceship poured dozens of scrambling nightmares.
The heavy chatter of cycling machine guns filled the air, along with the
electric snap of discharging lasers as the Marines engaged the grotesque invaders.
“Shi-bal!” cried Hwa-jung.
Kira shouted and drove the shield forward, plowing past the limp weight of the troops she’d incapacitated. If the nightmares realized who and what she was, they’d all converge on her. She half trotted, half walked the shield across the floor, and for the moment, she stopped adding material to it, her only concern to escape.
She turned, pivoting the shield around Falconi and the others so her back was to the concourse exit and the terminal beyond. Then she retreated, step by step, until the edges of the shield banged into the wall on either side of the doorway.
Moving quickly, she pulled the shield in toward herself, collapsing it into a dense cap over the doorway. She secured it to the floor, ceiling, and walls with twisted pieces of metal, making it so the only practical way to remove it would be by cutting.
Falconi pounded her on the shoulder. “Leave it!” he shouted.
A boom echoed through the terminal as a grenade detonated on the other side of the barrier. A moment later, Marines began to bang on it, producing a muffled din.
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.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 65