“More Jellies,” said Nielsen, a fatalistic note in her voice.

3.

“Goddammit. I don’t believe it,” said Falconi. For the first time, he seemed at a loss for what to do.

Kira opened her mouth and then closed it.

Even as they slipped into normal space, the red dots began to move, burning in all different directions.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t believe it,” said Gregorovich. He sounded oddly puzzled.

“What do you mean?” Falconi leaned forward, the usual razor-edge returning to his gaze.

The ship mind was slow to respond: “This latest batch of uninvited guests is behaving contrary to expectations. They are … calculating … calculating.… They aren’t just flying toward us, they’re also flying toward the other Jellies.”

“Reinforcements?” Nielsen asked.

“Uncertain,” Gregorovich replied. “Their engine signatures don’t match the ships we’ve seen from the Jellies so far.”

“I know there are different factions among the Jellies,” Kira offered.

“Perhaps,” said Gregorovich. Then: “Oh my.… Well, then. Isn’t that interesting?”

The main holo switched to show a view from elsewhere in the system: a live feed of three ships converging on one.

“What are we looking at?” Falconi asked.

“A transmission from Chelomey Station,” said Gregorovich. A green outline appeared around one of the ships. “This is a Jelly.” Red outlined the three other ships. “These are some of our newcomers. And this”—a set of numbers appeared next to each ship—“is their acceleration and relative velocity.”

“Thule!” Falconi exclaimed.

“That should not be possible,” said Vishal.

“Indeed,” said Gregorovich.

The newcomers were accelerating faster than any Jelly ship on record. Sixty g’s. A hundred g’s. More. Even through the display, their engines were painful to look at—bright torches powerful enough to spot from light-years away.

The three ships had jumped in close to the Jelly they were pursuing. As they converged, the Jelly released clouds of chalk and chaff, and the computer marked otherwise invisible laser bursts with lines of red. The intruders fired back, and missiles streaked between the combatants.

“Well that answers one question,” said Nielsen.

Then one of the three newcomers shot ahead of its companions and, with hardly any warning, rammed the Jelly ship.

Both vessels vanished in an atomic flash.

“Whoa!” said Trig. He walked in from the corridor and sat next to Nielsen. He’d changed out of his power armor, back into his normal, ill-fitting jumpsuit. A foam cast encased his left wrist.

“Gregorovich,” said Falconi, “can you get us a close-up of one of those ships?”

“A moment, please,” said the ship mind. For a few seconds, a piece of mindless, waiting-room music played through the Wallfish’s speakers. Then the holo changed: a blurred still of one of the new ships. The vessel was dark, almost black, and shot through with veins of bloody orange. The hull was asymmetric, with odd bulges and angles and scabrous protuberances. It looked more like a tumor than a spaceship, as if it had been grown rather than built.

Kira had never seen anything like it, and neither, she thought, had the Soft Blade. The unbalanced shape gave her an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach; she had difficulty imagining a reason for constructing such a twisted, lopsided machine. It certainly wasn’t the handiwork of the Jellies; most everything they built was smooth and white and seemed to be radially symmetrical.