Another pulse of pain made her gasp.

Fear and frustration spilled over to anger, and she shouted, “Stop it!”

The Soft Blade rippled, and she felt it respond to the summons, answering it with an echo of her angry denial, an inaudible, invisible echo of radiated energy that raced outward, spreading, spreading … spreading across the system.

In that instant, Kira knew she’d made a terrible mistake. She lunged forward and plunged her fist through the glassy pane, willing the xeno to break, crush, and shatter in a desperate attempt to destroy the transmitter before it could pick up and rebroadcast her response.

The suit flowed down her arm and over her fingers. It spread across the wall like a web of tree roots, probing and seeking, burrowing ever deeper. The displays flickered, and those close to her hand guttered and went out, leaving a halo of darkness around her palm.

Kira felt the tendrils close around the source of the summons. She braced her feet against the wall, yanked on her arm, and tore the transmitter out of the center of the displays. What came free was a cylinder of purple crystal embedded with a dense honeycomb of silver veins that wavered as if distorted with heat ripples.

She squeezed the cylinder with the tendrils of the suit, squeezed with all her might, and the hunk of engineered crystal split and shattered. Stalks of silver sprouted between the tendrils as the xeno squished the metal like hot wax. And the compulsion diminished from an urgent necessity to a distant inclination.

Before she could recover, a scent intruded, a scent so strong, it was like a voice screaming in her ear:

[[Qwar here: Defiler! Blasphemer! Corrupter!]]

And Kira knew she was no longer alone. One of the Jellies was behind her, close enough she could feel an eddy of disturbed air tickle the back of her neck.

She stiffened. Her feet were still stuck to the wall. She couldn’t spin around fast enough—

BAM!

She flinched and half turned, half crouched while stabbing outward with the Soft Blade.

Behind her, an alien flopped in the air. It was brown and shiny and had a segmented body the size of man’s torso. A cluster of yellow-rimmed eyes surmounted its flat, neckless head. Pincers and feelers dangled from what could have been its chitinous mouth, and two rows of double-joined legs (each the size and length of her forearms) kicked and thrashed along its armored abdomen. From its lobster-tail rear trailed a pair of antenna-like appendages at least a meter long.

Orange ichor leaked from the base of the creature’s head.

BAM! BAM!

A pair of holes appeared in the alien’s plated side. Gore and viscera sprayed the floor. The alien kicked once more as it spun away and then was still.

At the far end of the room, Falconi lowered his pistol, a thread of smoke drifting from the barrel. “What in seven hells are you doing?”

4.

Kira straightened from her crouch and retracted the spikes that projected from every square centimeter of her skin. Her heart was racing so hard, it took a few seconds before she was able to convince her vocal cords to work.