The receiver in her ear crackled. * … copy. I repeat, meatbag, do you read me?*

“Gregorovich?!” she said, hardly believing.

*Indeed. You need to hurry, meatbag. The nightmares are closing in. One of them just took out a Jelly ship. The Hierophant got hit by the debris. It seems to have disrupted their jamming.*

“One of our Jellies?”

*Fortunately, no.*

She resumed digging into the floor below her. “The others are hunkered down one deck back. Any chance you can help them return to the Wallfish?”

*We are already in close consultation,* said Gregorovich. *Options are being discussed, plans being outlined, contingencies being considered.*

Kira grunted as she tore loose a support beam. A slug ricocheted off her side from farther down the transport shaft; she ignored it. “’K. Let me know if they get off the ship.”

*Affirmative. Give ’em hell, Varunastra.*

“Roger that,” she said from between gritted teeth. “Giving ’em hell.”

More slugs, laser blasts, and projectiles began to slam into her as a seething pool of Jellies gathered at the end of the shaft. The sides of the Soft Blade were thick enough that Kira paid them no mind. She’d cannibalized enough of her immediate surroundings to make her effectively immune to small-arms fire. The Jellies would have to bring in something a lot bigger if they wanted to hurt her.

The thought gave her a measure of satisfaction.

Down through the floor of the shaft, down through a room that glowed dull red and was filled with transparent tubing sloshing with water and large enough for the Jellies to swim through, and then down through the floor of the room and into the final deck. Finally. Kira bared her teeth. Ctein was close now: just a short way ahead of her.

The level she’d arrived on was dark purple, and there were patterned lines on the walls that reminded her of the designs from Nidus. Echoes of the Vanished, repurposed by the graspers who neither knew nor cared for the significance of the artifacts they’d found.

The disgust Kira felt was not her own; it came from the Seed, a disapproval strong enough to make her wish to deface the walls, to cleanse them of their arrogant, ignorant, garbled reproductions.

She flew forward, clearing doors with slashes too fast to see, killing Jellies with jabs and twists, letting nothing stop or slow her. She might have gotten lost, but ahead of her a thick bank of nearscent swelled, and she recognized it as Ctein’s: a scent of hate and wrath and impatience and … satisfaction?

Before Kira could make sense of it, she came upon a circular door that stood a full ten meters high. Unlike every other door she’d seen on the Jelly ships, it was made not of shell but of metal and composite and ceramics and other materials she didn’t recognize. It was white, and banded with concentric circles of gold, copper, and what might have been platinum.

Seven stationary guns were mounted around the frame of the door. And hanging on the walls by the guns were at least a hundred Jellies of all different sizes and shapes.