“What now?” Kira asked, overtaken by sudden dread.

Akawe placed the cup on the shelf next to him. “All the Jellies in the system are dead.”

“That’s … good?”

“It’s fan-fucking-tastic,” he said. “And it means their FTL jamming is also gone.”

Understanding dawned on Kira. Maybe she could finally get a message through to her family! “You picked up news from the rest of the League.” It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “Sure did. And it’s not exactly cheery.” He plucked a shiny blue coin from his breast pocket, studied it a moment, and then pocketed it again. “The nightmares didn’t just hit Sixty-One Cygni. They’ve been attacking all of settled space. The Premier has officially designated both them and the Jellies Hostis Humani Generis. Enemies of all humans. That means shoot on sight, no questions asked.”

“When did the nightmares first appear?”

“Not sure. We haven’t heard yet from the colonies on the other side of the League, so can’t say what’s happening out there. The earliest reports we have are from a week ago. Here, look.”

Akawe tapped a panel on the wall, and a display sprang to life.

A series of clips played: a pair of the nightmare ships crashing into a manufacturing facility in orbit around one of the moons of Saturn. A civilian transport exploding as a long, reddish missile slammed into it. Ground footage from somewhere on Mars: nightmares swarming through the cramped corridors of a hab-dome while Marines blasted at them from behind barriers. A view out one of the floating cities of Venus as fragments of destroyed ships rained down through the layers of cream-colored clouds—a burning fusillade that slammed into another of the broad, disk-shaped platforms a few kilometers away, destroying it. On Earth: a huge glowing crater amid a great sprawl of buildings somewhere along a snowy coastline.

Kira sucked in her breath at that. Earth! She had no great love for the place, but it was still shocking to see it attacked.

“It’s not just the nightmares either,” said Akawe. He tapped the panel again.

Now the clips showed Jellies. Some fighting the nightmares. Others fighting the UMC or civilians. The recordings were from throughout the League. Sol. Stewart’s World. Eidolon. Kira even saw a snippet of images from what she thought might have been Shin-Zar.

To her dismay, one of the clips appeared to have been recorded in orbit around Latham, the gas giant farthest out from Weyland: a short video of two Jelly ships strafing a hydrogen processing station low in the atmosphere.

Kira wasn’t surprised; the war was everywhere else, why not there? She just hoped the fighting hadn’t reached Weyland’s surface.

At last, Akawe stopped the parade of horrors.

Kira tightened in on herself. She felt raw and hurt, vulnerable. Everything in those videos was, in a way, her fault. “Do you know what’s happening at Weyland?”

He shook his head. “Just what you saw, plus a few reports of possible Jelly forces on one of the moons in the system. Unconfirmed.”