She thought on that for a time. “Thank you, Gregorovich.”

*Of course, station mind. Whenever you need to talk, call, and I will listen.*

Kira took his advice seriously. Even as she labored on Unity, she redoubled her efforts to sort through the mess of memories strewn throughout her reconstituted brain, struggling to pin down and identify which ones belonged to which parts of herself. Struggling to figure out who exactly she was. She paid particular attention to the memories of the Maw, and it was while studying them that she made a discovery that filled her with cold dread.

Oh no.

For she remembered. Before coming to Cordova-1420, the Maw had taken precautions against its possible defeat (unlikely as that seemed). It had, in the darkest depths of interstellar space, formed seven avatars from its flesh and the flesh of the Seed—seven living, thinking, self-directed copies of itself. And the Maw had sent off its virulent, wrath-filled clones with no knowledge of where they might ultimately go.

Kira thought of the killing command she had broadcast before. Surely that would … But then, from the Seed, she felt an unshakable conviction that the command would not stop the Maw’s avatars, for they were the Seed—twisted and broken as the Maw had been, but still of the same underlying substance. Unlike the Corrupted, she could not unmake the Maw’s poisonous spawn with a single line, just as she could not have unmade the Maw. The Seed did not possess such power over itself. The Old Ones had not seen fit to give their creations that ability, preferring to keep it for themselves in the shape of the Staff of Blue.

But the staff was broken, and Kira knew that even if she had the pieces, she could not repair it. The knowledge was not in her, and that too was the Old Ones’ doing.

They had, she decided, been overconfident in their supremacy.

Her dread deepened as she pondered the situation. The Maw’s offspring would spread their evil wherever they went, blanketing planets with Corrupted, converting or overwriting any existing life. The seven represented an existential threat to every other being in the galaxy.… Their legacy would be one of misery—the exact opposite of everything the Seed was supposed to embody.

The thought haunted her.

With a sense of regret, Kira realized her afterlife was not to be as she’d imagined. The Maw was her responsibility, and so too were the seven deadly darts it had let loose among the stars.

CHAPTER III

DECESSION

1.

Kira acted without hesitation. Time was short, and she had no intention of wasting it.

To the ships assembled around her, she said, “Stand clear.” A scramble of activity followed as the captains pulled their ships back.