Her next thought was of the Fidanza and what remained of the survey team. Had they made it back?

System records showed that exactly twenty-six days after departing Sigma Draconis, the SLV Fidanza had arrived at 61 Cygni. No reported damage. The Fidanza docked at Vyyborg Station some days later, and then a week after that, departed for Sol. She searched for a passenger list, but nothing public came up. Hardly a surprise.

For a moment Kira was tempted to send a message to Marie-Élise and the others, on the off chance they were still in the system. But she resisted. As soon as she logged into her accounts, the League would know where she was. Maybe they weren’t looking, but she didn’t feel ready to take that chance. Besides, what could she say to her former teammates, aside from “sorry”? Sorry wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the pain and devastation she’d caused.

She shifted her attention back to the news, determined to gain a sense of the overall situation.

It wasn’t good.

What had begun as a series of small-scale skirmishes had quickly escalated into a full-scale invasion. The reports were few and far between, but enough information had reached 61 Cygni to get a sense of what was happening throughout human space: stations burning in orbit around Stewart’s World, ships gutted near the Markov Limit at Eidolon, alien forces landing on survey and mining outposts … the litany of events was too long to keep track of.

Kira’s heart sank. If it wasn’t a coincidence that the Jellies had showed up at Adra so soon after she found the xeno, then in a way … this was her doing. Just like with Alan. Just like with—She ground the heels of her hands against her temples and shook her head. Don’t think about it. Even if she’d played a role in first contact, blaming herself for the war wouldn’t help. That way lay madness.

She read on, scrolling through page after page until her eyes were blurry as she attempted to cram three months’ worth of information into her head.

To their credit, the League seemed to have reacted to the invasion with appropriate speed and discipline. What was the point of arguing among yourselves when the monsters in the dark were attacking? Reserves had been mobilized, civilian ships had been commandeered, and on Earth and Venus, mandatory drafts had been enacted.

The cynic in Kira saw the measures as just another effort on the part of the League to expand their power. Never let a good emergency go to waste, and all that. The realist in her saw the necessity of what they were doing.

All the experts seemed to agree: the Jellies were at least a hundred years more technologically advanced than humans. Their Markov Drives let them jump in and out of FTL far closer to stars and planets than even the most cutting-edge UMC warships. Their power plants—separate from the fusion drives used for propulsion—generated the staggering amounts of energy needed for the Jellies’ inertial trickery via some as-yet-unidentified mechanism. And yet they didn’t use radiators to dissipate the heat. No one understood that.