The room felt enormous—the walls barely curved as they extended out from her—but it was hard to be sure of the true size of the space. A thick bank of smoke clogged the air, dimming the usual blue illumination to the point that it was difficult to see much past the ends of her arms.

Fear crept up Kira’s side. The room was the perfect place for an ambush.

She needed to see. If only … She concentrated upon her need, concentrated with all her might, and she felt a tickle atop her eyeballs. Her vision twisted, like a sheet being wrung dry, and then it snapped flat and the haze seemed to retreat (though the far end of the room remained obscured) as everything went monochrome.

The chamber must have been over thirty meters across, if not more. Unlike the other rooms, it had structures throughout: branches of pale scaffolding pocked with a bone-like matrix. A black walkway lined the inner circumference of the back half of the space. Mounted to the walls on either side of the walkway were rows upon rows of what appeared to be … pods. Huge and solid, they hummed with electrical power, and bright rings of magnetic force chained them to hidden circuits.

Dread mingled with curiosity as Kira looked at the nearest one.

The front of the pod was made of a translucent material, milky and pale, like the skin of an egg. Through it, she saw an indistinct shape, hazy, convoluted, and difficult to resolve into anything recognizable.

The object shifted, unmistakably alive.

Kira gasped and jerked back, raising the grenade launcher. The thing inside the pod was a Jelly, its tentacles wrapped around itself and bobbing softly in a viscous liquid.

She nearly shot the creature; only the fact that it didn’t react to her sudden movement—and her desire to avoid unwanted attention—stopped her. Were they birthing chambers? Cryo tubes? Sleeping containers? Some sort of crèche? She glanced around the room. Her lips moved under the mask as she counted: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven … Forty-nine in total. Fourteen of the pods were smaller than the rest, but even so, forty-nine more Jellies, if all the pods were full. More than enough to overwhelm her and everyone on the Wallfish.

Trig.

She’d worry about the pods later.

Kira braced herself against the rim of the portal and then kicked off toward one of the spars of scaffolding. As she flew toward it, a silvery rod shot out of the haze deeper in the chamber.

She jerked up her arm and knocked it aside. The xeno hardened around her forearm enough to keep her wrist from breaking.

Her motion and the impact sent her spinning away. She tried to grab the spar, and for a moment her fingers swung through empty air—

She ought to have missed. She ought to have kept spinning. But instead, Kira reached and the Soft Blade reached with her, extruding tendrils in a natural extension of her fingers until they looped around the spar and brought her to a teeth-clattering stop.