It hit with the force of a raging tsunami. The impact tore off all of her tendrils and feelers—tore the main part of the suit away from the rest of its mass and sent her and it tumbling into the glowing whiteness of outer space.

*Kira!* Falconi shouted.

CHAPTER VI

SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS

1.

Space was white?

Kira ignored the obvious inconsistency. First things first. She willed the Soft Blade to stabilize their flight, and it responded with puffs of gas along her shoulders and hips. Her spin slowed, and within seconds the receding hull of the Battered Hierophant occupied a single location within her vision.

A huge chunk had been torn from the side of the Hierophant; whatever had hit the ship had blasted through most of the decks on the aft section. Another Casaba-Howitzer?

She could feel the orphaned pieces of the Soft Blade still within the Hierophant, separate from her and yet connected. Afraid of what might happen if she lost them for good, Kira drew on them with her mind. And they began to stir, worming their way through the structure of the ship.

She glanced around. Yup, space was white. She dropped the infrared. Still white. And glowing. But not glowing as brightly as it should have been if she were in the open, in direct line of sight with the nearby sun.

Then her brain clicked, and she got it. She was inside a cloud of smoke meant to defend the Hierophant against incoming lasers. Good for the ship, inconvenient for her. Even with visible light, she could only see about twenty meters in any given direction.

*Kira!* Falconi shouted again.

“Still alive. You okay?”

*I’m fine. One of the nightmares just rammed the Hierophant. It—*

“Shit!”

*You said it. We’re making our way to the Wallfish. The Jellies seem to be ignoring us at the moment. Their fleet has the rest of the nightmares tied up, but we don’t have a whole lot of time. Tschetter says Ctein is still alive. You gotta kill that Jelly, and fast.*

“I’m trying. I’m trying.”

Kira swallowed hard, doing her best to tamp down her fear of Ctein. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Besides, there were worse threats approaching. The nightmares. The Maw.

She’d never been so scared. Her hands and feet were ice cold, despite the best efforts of the Soft Blade to keep her warm, and her heart was pounding painfully fast. Didn’t matter. Keep going. Don’t stop moving.

Kira switched back to infrared and used the xeno to hold herself in place while she scanned up, down, and around. Ctein was big as hell, so where the hell was it? The chamber they had been ejected from was visible as a shadowed cavity deep within the bowels of the Hierophant, a husk now empty of its monstrous fruit. Like her, Ctein might have been blown away from the ship, but she had a suspicion the Jelly had attitude jets hidden somewhere in its bulk. If Ctein had flown around the curve of the Hierophant’s hull … the alien would take a long time to find in the swirling cloud. Too long, in fact. The Hierophant had kilometers and kilometers of surface area.