“Faster, please!” said Falconi.

“What do you think I’m doing?” she shouted.

The turret came free, and she caught it in her hands. Cradling it like a live bomb, she hurried back to the car and handed the weapon to Hwa-jung.

Sparrow tapped her glass-like knife against her thigh as she glanced around. Then she grabbed Kira by the arm and dragged her a few steps away.

“What?” said Kira.

In a low voice, tight with tension, Sparrow said, “Those grease-heads are going to blast their way in through the ceiling or the walls. Guarantee it. You’d better work up some kinda fortification shit, or we’re goners.”

“On it.”

Sparrow nodded and returned to the car, where Vishal was helping Hwa-jung take apart the turret.

“Everyone stay back!” Kira said. Then she faced the cramped terminal and, as in the concourse, sent forth dozens of lines from the Soft Blade, allowing it to do what was needed. A painfully loud din assaulted her as the xeno started to dismantle the floor, walls, and ceiling. She drew the pieces closer and, fast as she could, began to assemble them into a dome around the front of the maglev docking port.

As the chunks crashed into place, she could feel her sense of self expanding again. It was intoxicating. She distrusted the feeling—distrusted both herself and the Soft Blade—but the lure of more was seductive, and the ease with which she and the xeno were working together bolstered her confidence.

One of the panels she yanked free must have contained the intercom speaker, because she heard sparks, and then the stationmaster’s voice cut out.

Meter by meter, she stripped the terminal, exposing Orsted’s underlying skeleton of cross-joined beams, anodized against corrosion and riddled with holes to save on weight.

Soon she couldn’t see anything but the inside of the dome, and still she kept adding to it. Darkness enveloped them, and from the car, Vishal called, “You’re not making this easy, Ms. Navárez!”

“It’s that or getting shot!” she shouted back.

A blast shook the terminal.

“Time to get this show on the road,” said Falconi.

“I’m working on it,” said Hwa-jung.

Kira extended herself even farther, stretching to the limits of her reach and finding she could reach yet farther still. Consciousness thinned, spread over a greater and greater area, and the amount of input became disorienting: pressures and scrapes here, pipes there, wires above and below, the tickle of electrical discharges, heat and cold and a thousand different impressions from a thousand different points along the Soft Blade, and all of them squirming, changing, expanding, and inundating her with ever more sensations.

It was too much. She couldn’t oversee it all, couldn’t keep up. In places, her supervision failed, and where it failed, the Soft Blade acted of its own, moving forward with deadly intent. Kira felt her mind fragmenting as she tried to focus first on one place, then another, then another, and each time quickly bringing the suit back to heel, but while she was occupied, it continued to swarm elsewhere, growing … building … becoming.