There was more. With the expanded vision the Soft Blade granted her, Kira saw what seemed to be a miniature sun burning inside the heart of Ctein’s shapeless mass—a steady-state explosion desperate to escape its hardened shell. A gleaming pearl of destruction.

She flipped to visible light and then back to infrared. In visible light, nothing unusual appeared; Ctein’s body was the same dark grey-red that she remembered from ages past. But in infrared, it burned, it glowed, it shimmied and shined. It glistered.

In short, it looked as if the Jelly had a goddamn fusion reactor embedded within itself.

Kira felt tiny, insignificant, and severely outmatched. Her courage nearly failed. Despite everything the Soft Blade had done, she had difficulty imagining it could equal the might of Ctein. The creature was no dumb animal either. It was cunning as any ship mind, and its intelligence had allowed it to dominate the Jellies for centuries.

Knowing that filled Kira with doubt, and the doubt caused her to hesitate.

Rooted on the floor around Ctein’s rocky perch was a goodly portion of the Abyssal Conclave—barnacle-like shells mottled with greens and oranges and with the many-jointed arms of their occupants waving in the currents. Waving and wailing in a hellish din that, to Kira’s human ears, sounded like a chorus of tortured souls. To the grasper in her, to Nmarhl, it sounded like home, and memories of the Plaintive Verge flooded her mind.

Then the overwhelming stench of nearscent changed from satisfaction to amusement. And from the nightmare creature emanated a single, apocalyptic statement:

[[Ctein here: I see you.]]

At that moment, Kira knew her hesitation had been a mistake. She called upon the Soft Blade, coiling it like a great spring as she prepared to strike and end Ctein.

But she was too slow. Far too slow.

A clawed arm unfolded from along the Jelly’s equator, and it plucked a dark slab of something from the top of its carapace. And it aimed the slab at her—

Shit. The object was a massive railgun, a weapon large enough to be mounted on the prow of a cruiser, powerful enough to punch a hole through an entire UMC battleship. She was dead. No time to run, no place to hide. She just wished—

Two things happened, one after the other, so quickly that Kira barely had time to register the sequence of events: the suit shifted around her, expanding outward, and

BANG!

The deck rippled underneath her, and there was a sound so loud, all went silent. Across the chamber, a bubble of sparkling green flame erupted from the side of the curving wall, and a pressure wave raced through the orb of water, crushing the Abyssal Conclave and uprooting the great and mighty Ctein from its ancient throne. The creature’s tentacles thrashed, but to no avail.

The bulkhead to Kira’s right vanished, and she heard the scream of escaping air. Before she could react, the wall of frothing water slammed into her.