“Someone’s in a good mood,” said Nielsen as she closed her locker. Vishal joined her and bent his head to ask her something in an undertone.

“Hey,” said Sparrow, taking a proper look at Kira. “Where’d you get the new arm?”

Kira shrugged, self-conscious. “The Soft Blade. I woke up with it.”

“Huh. Just make sure it doesn’t get away from you.”

“Yes, thank you.”

All of the cryo tubes were open save Trig’s. Kira went to pay her respects. Through the frosted viewplate, the kid looked the same as before, his expression unsettlingly serene. If not for the deathly pallor of his skin, he might have been sleeping.

“Right,” said Falconi as he started toward the door. “Let’s see what’s what.”

2.

“Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-stick,” said Sparrow. Next to her, Hwa-jung’s brow pinched, and she made a disapproving sound, though she never took her gaze off the holo. None of them did.

Falconi was scrolling through images from throughout the system. Sol was a war zone. The ruins of antimatter farms floated inside the orbit of Mercury. Ship debris cluttered the skies over Venus and Mars. On asteroids, hab-domes had been cracked open like eggs. Damaged space stations, rings, and O’Neill cylinders drifted abandoned throughout the system. Hydrotek refueling facilities were venting plumes of burning hydrogen from punctured storage tanks. On Earth—Earth of all places!—impact craters marred the northern and southern hemispheres, and a black blight covered part of Australia.

Large numbers of ships and orbital platforms clustered around the settled planets. The UMC’s Seventh Fleet was massed by Deimos, close enough to the Markov Limit that they could jump out at short notice, but not so far away that they couldn’t help the inner planets in an emergency.

In several places, fighting was ongoing. The Jellies had established a small operating base all the way out on Pluto, and they’d invaded a number of underground settlements along the arctic regions of Mars. The tunnels prevented the UMC from clearing out the aliens with aerial attacks, but ground operations were in progress to eliminate the Jellies while also trying to save the civilians in the area. More serious still was the blotch on Australia: a nightmare ship had crashed there, and within hours, their infection had taken root, spreading their corrupted tissue through the soil. Fortunately for Earth, the crash had occurred in the barest of deserts, and the immediate use of an orbital solar array to scorch and melt the area had contained the infection, although efforts were ongoing to ensure that no scrap of tissue had escaped destruction.

“My God,” said Vishal, and crossed himself.

Even Falconi seemed stunned by the extent of the damage.

Nielsen uttered a distressed sound as she pulled up a window listing the news from Venus. Kira glimpsed part of a headline saying: Falling City Is—

“I have to make a call,” said the first officer. Her face was deathly pale. “I have to check if … if…”

“Go,” said Falconi. He touched her on the shoulder. “We’ve got this.”