While the drones pursued their function, she set to work upon the main body of her flesh, restructuring it to fit her intention. Around her core, she formed an armored sphere that served to protect what remained of her original body. From that, she extruded polished black panels designed to absorb every ray of sunlight that struck them. Power. She needed power if she were to accomplish her goal. The Seed had plenty of its own, but not enough for what she had in mind.

What mind? No mind … She laughed to herself, a quiet song in space.

Drawing upon the Seed’s banks of encoded knowledge, she began to build the needed machines, constructing them from the atomic level up. With energy gathered from the panels, she sparked a burning sun inside herself: a fusion reactor large enough to drive the biggest UMC battleship. With energy from the artificial star, she started to manufacture antimatter—far more than the inefficient techniques of the humans or the Wranaui allowed for. The Old Ones had mastered the means of antimatter production before either species had even come into being. And with antimatter as fuel, she built a modified torque engine that allowed her to twist the fabric of the universe and siphon energy directly from FTL space. Which was, as she had come to understand, how the Seed powered itself.

As her agents took possession of the damaged ships, they sometimes found wounded humans or Wranaui forgotten upon the vessels. The wounded often attacked, but she ignored their attacks and tended to their injuries, despite any protestations, before sending the abandoned crew off to their kind in escape pods taken from the ships or that she made herself.

When the drones returned with ships and stones in tow, Kira devoured the materials they contained—much as the Maw would have—and added them to the structures taking shape around her.

The watching fleets grew nervous at this, and several of the vessels flashed her with powerful signals in an attempt to talk with her.

“Wait,” she said. And they did, although both humans and Wranaui retreated even farther, leaving a wide berth of space around her.

With energy and mass to spare, Kira put all her efforts into construction. The endeavor was not purely mechanical; along with beams and braces and metal girders, she allowed the Seed to create special chambers that it filled with an organic soup—heated bioreactors that began to produce the living materials needed for the finished product: woods stronger than any steel; seeds and buds and eggs and more besides; vines that crawled and clung and could transmit electricity as efficiently as copper cable; fungal superconductors; and a whole ecosystem of flora and fauna drawn from the Seed’s vast experience, and which it and Kira believed would work in a harmonious whole.

She moved quickly, but her efforts took time. Days passed, and still the fleets sat waiting and watching, and still she built.

From her central core grew four enormous struts that extended forward, backward, left, and right, so that they made a cross with arms of equal length. She extended the cross, meter after meter, until each strut was three and a half kilometers long and thick enough to fly a cruiser through. Then she set the Seed to joining the tips of the cross with a great equatorial ring, and from the end of each strut, a rib began to grow both up and down and curving inward, as if hugging the surface of an invisible orb.