Hawes shook his head. “Everything’s jammed.”

“Dammit. No way to tell where we’re heading.”

Kira focused on Wrnakkr. The alien had a white streak across its central carapace that made it easy to single out. [[Kira here: Can we see what’s happening outside the ship?]]

With one tentacle, the Jelly caressed the wall. [[Wrnakkr here: Look, then.]]

A curved patch of hull turned transparent. Through it, Kira could see the coin-sized disk of Nidus shrinking into the distance. Explosions flared along the terminator line: bright flashes reminiscent of the florescent discharges of lightning sprites. Even from so far away, the resulting auroras were visible, laced across the top of the turbulent atmosphere.

Kira searched for other ships, but if any were present, they weren’t close enough to spot with the naked eye. Not that that meant much in space.

“How long to reach the Wallfish?” she asked.

The Entropists were the ones to answer: “If we are thrusting at the same—”

“—acceleration generally observed among the Jellies—”

“—and given the prior distance to the Wallfish—”

“—no more than five or ten minutes.”

Nielsen sighed, and the joints of her power armor squealed as she sank into a crouch. She was still holding Trig’s rigid form. “Do we really have any chance of getting out of the system? The—”

The light within the room flashed, and nearscent of alarm suffused the room, clogging Kira’s nostrils.

[[Wrnakkr here: We have Corrupted in pursuit.]]

Kira told the others, and then they sat in silence—waiting—while the ship’s rocket strained. There was nothing else they could do. Outside the window Wrnakkr had created, the stars swung in crazy arcs, but the only centrifugal force Kira felt was a slight pull in the direction of their turns.

As they’d seen at 61 Cygni, the nightmares could out-accelerate even the Jellies. That implied a level of technology that only a highly advanced interstellar civilization could possess, which just didn’t seem to match with the creatures they’d been seeing.

Don’t judge by appearances, Kira cautioned herself. For all she knew, the ravening, animal-like nightmares with the shark teeth were as intelligent as a ship mind.

A burst of silvery chaff glittered through the window. A poof of chalk followed a moment later, obscuring the view for a few seconds.

Koyich and Hawes were murmuring together. Kira could tell they were preparing to fight.

Then the ship jolted underneath them, and her gorge rose as, for a moment, she felt yanked along all three axes at once. The artificial gravity rippled—producing a feeling of rolling compression through her body—before cutting out entirely.

The lights flickered. Finger-sized holes stitched their way across the inside of the bulkhead, and a dull boom echoed through the hull. Alarms began to shriek, loud even over the hiss of escaping air.

Kira stayed where she was, clinging to the wall, uncertain of what else to do.

The ship jolted again. A white-hot circle appeared on what had just been the ceiling, and seconds later, a disk-shaped section of the hull flew inward.