Chapter Thirty-One

The sky was full of ships.

On the bridge of the carrier, Paniet—who guessed he was in charge, as much as anybody—called for more sensor sweeps, more imagery. As if that might change what he was seeing.

Seven dreadnoughts inbound. One so close he could count the number of control blisters sticking out of its sides. The other six weren’t far behind.

Flitting about them like pilot fish around a school of sharks were more than a hundred interceptors.

Very soon now one of those dreadnoughts would be close enough to attack the cruiser. It would be a showdown between its plasma ball cannons and the cruiser’s coilguns. If the cruiser lost that fight, there would be nothing to stand between the dreadnoughts and the carrier—and then it would all be over.

Paniet would give them as much of a fight as he could. The carrier had a few guns mounted on its hull. Heavy-duty particle beam cannons, which could theoretically take those interceptors to pieces. Their range was minimal, though—they were there to fight off attacking cataphracts, not alien warships. By the time the carrier’s guns could engage, the interceptors would already be close enough to use their microwave weapons. Paniet had seen what those did to the electronics on a cataphract—not to mention the pilots—and he was not looking forward to having them knock out the carrier’s systems in the middle of a pitched battle.

Their only hope, then, was the tiny speck, just a single pixel, that danced around his display. The lone cataphract out there, fighting to hold back the tide.

“Lanoe,” Paniet said, “I know you have a reputation for winning fights like this. Where the odds are against you, and all seems lost. Yes?”

“I’ve heard people say that, sure,” Lanoe told him.

“You and I are both grown-ups. We know what legends are for, don’t we, love? They’re for soothing little children when they have bad dreams.”

“In my experience,” Lanoe said, “ … yeah.”

“Any word from Valk and the ground team?” Paniet asked.

“I’ve been a little busy,” Lanoe replied. Well, Paniet could hear the PBWs blazing in the background when he spoke. “I’ll check in when I get a chance.”

Down on the ground, the guns were blazing and Ehta was trying desperately to hold things together.

The marines had drilled long and hard for a fight like this. They knew what to do. Even if panic was freezing their brains, their arms knew to lift their rifles and shoot, reach for grenades, cover each other. In theory, at least, the twenty of them should act like a well-oiled machine.

In practice it looked like unfettered chaos.

The hounds were three meters tall, when they drew themselves up to their full height—which they almost never did. Ropy constructions of legs and not much else, striped legs that shimmered and danced in the permanent twilight of the moon, legs that flicked out and grabbed at hot gun barrels, legs that twisted around marine arms and snapped them like dry twigs.

It was everything the marines could do to hold them back, to keep them from overwhelming their formation and tearing them all to shreds of meat.

The hounds keened as they ran straight into the line of fire, wailed as the bullets and particle beams tore into their boneless flesh. Sustained fire barely slowed them down, their bodies too limp and fluid to be torn apart by the rounds. It took everything the marines had to even make a dent in their numbers. When they did go down the bodies slumped and rolled across the coral, slick with yellow blood. The ones behind just scampered over the corpses—there were always more of them. More and more, hundreds of them piling onto the marines from every side.

The marines had formed a tight circle, fighting elbow to elbow while surrounding and protecting Valk. In the midst of it Ehta shouted orders she knew nobody could hear, not over the noise of her steadygun. It had reared up on its tripod legs until its barrel was higher than the heads of the marines around it, and now it was burping out a steady stream of explosive shells, tossing them out into the undulating, ululating crowd of hounds. Ehta couldn’t see if it was having an effect at all.

She realized with a shock that she’d fought this battle before.

On Aruna, a moon near Niraya, she had fought drones built by the Blue-Blue-White. Six-meter-tall robotic hunter-killers that were bundles of legs and nothing else, bundles of legs that ended in wickedly sharp claws.

Clearly, just as the bats they’d seen had been the models for the scout drones, these hounds were the prototype of those killer drones. These servant animals of the Blue-Blue-White had been copied and made more deadly by the queenship’s fiendish computer mind.

“Cut ’em off at the root,” she shouted, remembering how she’d fought those killer drones from the back of a motorized rover, a ridiculous little car. “Their brains are between their legs—go for the place the legs come together!”

Somebody must have heard her. A pistol spoke near her, loud and firing in a quick, steady rhythm. Hounds fell with smoking wounds in their nerve clusters, dying in a hurry. She glanced over and saw Valk, his one arm up and held out perfectly straight. He was holding an enormous slug-thrower, an ancient-looking pistol that shot actual lead bullets, aiming and firing with the methodical precision of the machine he was.

“I can’t reload,” he told her. “Not one-handed.” He sounded apologetic.

She grabbed a spare clip off of his belt, ejected the old one from his gun while he was still firing the last round. Slammed the new clip home.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Anytime,” she told him. “You just ask when—when—”

Off to her left, a marine screamed and screamed. She ran over and tried to grab him by the shoulders and pull him back into the circle.

It was already too late. A hound had jumped on him, wrapped its many legs around his limbs. Ehta was close enough to hear his femur snap as the hound tightened its grip. She tried to pry its squirming limbs away from his neck, from his arms, but they were so strong, holding the marine in an iron grip she couldn’t shift. Two more marines stopped shooting to try to help her, to try to pull him back into the circle, while Mestlez fired point-blank into the thing’s nerve cluster. Yellow blood fountained upward in the low gravity, and the hound shrieked out a pulsing cry of distress, but still its legs contracted around the man’s body, slithering underneath his collar ring like a boa constrictor tightening its coils. Ehta shoved her pistol right into the thing’s center of mass and fired three times, not even caring if she hit him in the process.

It might have been a mercy if she had. She saw his face turn red and then purple as the hound strangled him, crushing the bones of his chest until blood poured from his mouth. Ehta shouted in rage and shot until the hound fell limp and loosened its grasp.

The man was already dead. She pulled his body into the circle, then ordered her marines to close the gap, to make sure none of the hounds got inside their perimeter.

More of the damned things were pouring, still, from the cracked domes. There was no point counting them, but Ehta stared around her, trying to get an idea if the marines were holding back the tide.

She stopped turning when an orangish shadow passed over her, dull light tinged by having passed through gelatinous flesh. She looked up and saw twenty-five meters of translucent alien hovering over her, like a malevolent sun.

The Blue-Blue-White was moving. Coming for her.

Candless threw her stick to the side and corkscrewed away from an airfighter that banked hard to follow her, its plasma cannons spitting a steady stream of fire. Her inertial sink pulled her back into her seat as she dove under the thing, her nose pointed at the ground so she could see the network of pylons below. She caught a glimpse of flashing lights over on one side of the construction site and knew, was absolutely certain, that Ehta was meeting resistance down there.

Which meant that she hadn’t reached the site yet, that Valk hadn’t yet gotten to the queenship. “We’re running out of time!” she called.

A BR.9 flashed past her, climbing hard to fire a disruptor into the airfighter’s belly. The big drone stopped shooting and slewed over on its side, until its wing was sticking straight up, perpendicular to the ground. It started to slide toward the surface, fighting against gravity and losing. The Valk twisted around to reach clear air, then sent her a green pearl. “The airfighters are converging on the construction site,” the copy told her.

“On our location, you mean,” Candless said. She’d already figured that much out.

“No, ma’am, not exactly—they’re gathering on the far side of the site, headed toward the location of the ground team. They must understand that we’re just providing support, that the real push is down there. It’s imperative that we stop them or the marines and my original won’t stand a chance.”

“How many? How many airfighters are moving in?” Candless asked.

“Eight of them,” the copy replied.

“Hellfire,” Candless said, because if there had ever been a time to swear, this was it. “We’re barely holding our own against one of these things at a time. Do you have any suggestions as to how we can fight eight of them at once?”

“Perhaps, ma’am. But you’ll have to rescind your order against our taking suicidal actions. That will free us up to perform more risky maneuvers.”

Candless set her jaw. In other words, she had to give them the right to throw themselves away on stupid attacks. “I need you supporting me,” she said. “If you leave me alone out here—”

“Rescinding the order will allow us to buy a few minutes, during which our original might be able to finish the mission. Refusing to rescind the order effectively ensures failure.”

Candless shook her head. “You’ve run the numbers, have you? Very well,” she said. “Do it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the copy replied.

Valk lined up another shot, and another. He could see that they actually were making progress. The marines had managed to eliminate nearly seventeen percent of the oncoming hounds, and while more were still emerging from the domes, the rate of increase had dropped dramatically. He estimated—

“Valk!” Ehta shouted. “Valk, look up!”

Oh.

The Blue-Blue-White they had seen emerging from one of the largest domes was moving, squirming through the air toward them. Valk had been peripherally aware of its presence, but until that moment he’d chosen to focus on the more immediate threat. Now he saw that had been an error.

It loomed over them in its enormous bulk, its fifteen orange tentacles hanging straight down. Some of the marines had targeted it with their weapons, but to seemingly little effect—their bullets and particle beams easily cut through its thin skin, and a rain of hot liquid was falling from its mass, but the Blue-Blue-White did not appear to be significantly damaged.

“I think,” Valk said, “we might wish to switch to explosives. In fact—”

“It’s got me!” one of the marines shouted. Valk switched his attention around and saw that the marine named Mestlez was down on the ground, the limbs of a hound wrapped tightly around his leg. The animal was dragging him out of the circle, even as the marines on either side of him poured fire into its central mass. They were unable to get a decent hit in on it, however, and soon Mestlez was disappearing from view, being pulled into a knot of the creatures.

The marine did not scream. He had a combat knife in his hand and he was laying about him, trying to free himself. It wasn’t working. Valk made a decision.

He lifted his pistol, took aim, and fired.

His projectile cut through the flowglas of Mestlez’s helmet without difficulty. The combat knife spun out of the dead man’s hand and his body disappeared into the mass of hounds.

“What—what did you just do?” Ehta asked, her voice hoarse with screaming.

“The merciful thing,” Valk told her.

He was confused by the look on her face. She seemed upset, perhaps even angry with him. But then she shook her head and her expression cleared.

“I guess … I guess it was,” she said. “But, Valk—you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. Not for us!”

“Because I’m an AI, not a human?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yeah.” She shook her head again and it looked like she had more to say. He did not allow her to do so.

He dropped his pistol and pushed her away from him, hard, with his remaining hand. She went sprawling, falling slowly in the low gravity.

The Blue-Blue-White’s tentacles snapped at the air where she had been a moment before, their ends curling up like fronds. Lights shimmered inside its giant body, colors strobing in a pattern Valk understood, even if he didn’t know what they specifically meant. The alien was, in effect, shouting in thwarted rage.

“Explosives,” Valk called. “Someone, please—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his thought. An enormous wet tentacle wrapped around his waist. Another grabbed his remaining arm.

“Valk!” Ehta shouted. “Valk!”

It happened with incredible swiftness. One moment Valk was standing on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The next he was yanked up into the air, hauled skyward by the Blue-Blue-White’s tentacles. They squeezed him hard and if he’d been human they might well have broken his bones. Valk didn’t have any bones.

The Blue-Blue-White didn’t have any teeth. That fact, perhaps above all others, saved him as the alien crammed him into its enormous mouth and swallowed him whole.

The weapon ring of an interceptor flared to life and it discharged a massive microwave burst into space. But Lanoe was already climbing over the top of the giant drone, planting antivehicle rounds in its glass skin. One just grazed the machine and sprayed superhot metal across its surface. The others burst inside it and its glass panels shattered, jagged spears of glass spinning away into the void.

Three more of them were already converging on his position.

Lanoe corkscrewed up between two interceptors, moving fast so he could get through before their weapons came online.

He raked an interceptor with PBW fire, mostly just to hold its attention. So far the drones had chosen to focus on him, trying to clear the way so they would have unobstructed access to the carrier a thousand kilometers away. He could only pick them off one by one, though—a smart tactician would have pinned him down, trapped him in the middle of a formation, then split their forces and sent a squad forward to take out the carrier. That was one advantage to fighting drones, he thought. They couldn’t play dirty tricks.

The disadvantage was that their reaction times were incredibly high, better than almost any human pilot’s. Even as he twisted around behind one of them, smashing it apart with a disruptor, another swerved into his path with its weapon ring already hot. He blasted the ring with his PBWs and it sparked and burst apart, leaving the drone toothless. But more were on their way.

He punched his throttle and dove fast to escape a pair of interceptors that had caught him in a pincers trap. He craned his head around and saw them just avoid colliding with each other, having to dance around one another in a complicated move that kept them from coming after him.

Then he looked back down and saw the dreadnought. This one only had four blisters sticking out of its coral hull, and was only four kilometers across instead of five. It had twice as many weapon pits as any of the dreadnoughts he’d seen before, though. Maybe this one was a battleship variant. Designed specifically for destroying alien invader spacecraft.

Who knew? Maybe it was still growing, maybe the dreadnoughts started small and got bigger as their coral accreted. All Lanoe knew was that it was going to be a serious problem if he needed to fight the thing while dodging interceptors. Already its weapon pits were heating up, getting ready to shoot plasma balls at him.

“Valk,” he called, then realized he needed to be more specific. He tapped out the address for the Valk flying the cruiser. “Valk, fire at will, the second your coilguns are ready. We need to get this thing off the table.”

“Yes, Commander,” the Valk replied. “Firing in four. Three. Two. One—”

A seventy-five-centimeter round tore past Lanoe, so close and so fast he could feel it warping space. It plunged through the void toward the dreadnought, which tried desperately to maneuver out of the way.

It didn’t need to. The shot went wide, hurtling past the dreadnought without so much as grazing it. The projectile continued onward, carried by its own momentum until it punched through the disk, momentarily disturbing a cloud.

“Valk,” Lanoe said. “Valk, what was that bosh?”

“Sadly, what my new gun crews lack in experience, they can’t make up for with talent,” Valk replied. “We’ll try again.”

This time three of the guns spoke at once, the rounds flying in almost perfect formation. Two of them struck the dreadnought, well clear of its center. The coral cracked and an enormous pale debris cloud billowed outward. One of the blisters collapsed, its pylons fluttering away like confetti on a hurricane-strength wind.

It was something.

“Keep at it,” Lanoe told the copy of Valk. “Keep firing! We don’t need to worry about wasting ammunition anymore.”

While Lanoe had been watching the show, two interceptors had nearly crept up on him. He twisted away at the last minute, pegging one of them with an unaimed disruptor, but it was close.

The airfighters stuck to a tight formation, weaving through the air with their plasma cannons firing nonstop, jets of hot plasma streaming out in front of them. The Valks twisted and darted around them, pulling g-forces that would have killed a human pilot. It was all Candless could do to orbit the periphery of the battle, taking shots of opportunity. She cut through the wing of one of the airfighters and it fell out of the sky—leaving only seven of them.

The Valks moved in fast, making no attempt at defensive flying. One strafed an airfighter so close he shattered glass with his airfoils, sending him into a high-velocity spin no human pilot could have escaped from. Another tried to ram an airfighter, only to have it veer away at the last possible second. Candless was sure the Valk wouldn’t have blinked first.

Another airfighter went down, a disruptor still detonating inside its main fuselage even as it slipped on an air current and nosed down into the cagework below. A third drone came apart in midair, its wings twisting off on their own gliding trajectories. It took a moment for Candless to realize that a Valk’s BR.9 was part of the debris that cascaded from the sky.

Only two of the copies left—and Candless. She readied a disruptor, tried to get a lock on an onrushing airfighter. Valk called her before she could even bring up a virtual Aldis.

“They’ve made a bad mistake,” he said. “Their formation is too tight. I’d advise that you break off and head for a minimal safe distance.”

“What?” she demanded. “What are you going to do?”

She got an answer—though not a verbal one. Even as she banked away, burning hard to gain distance, the Valk dropped the containment on his fusion reactor.

A ball of perfectly white, superhot plasma blossomed in midair, a visible shock wave racing outward in every direction. Even inside her cockpit the noise and the heat buffeted Candless, made her squeeze her eyes shut as sweat poured down her brow.

When she could see again, she leaned over in her seat to look behind her, to see what was left.

A lot of debris, falling slowly through the thin air of the moon. It was impossible to tell where any one piece of it had come from—whether that jagged shard had been part of an airfighter, or whether that blob of molten metal been the fairing of a BR.9.

“Valks,” she called. “Valks, any of you that are left, any that survived—come in, please. Valks, come in.”

There was no answer.

No more Valks.

Candless checked her tactical board. There were more airfighters converging on the construction site. More drone aircraft to threaten the ground team. And now she was the only one left to hold them back.

“Cover me!” Ehta shouted, as she jumped up on a low dome, then leapt to the bigger one right next to it. The thin skin of coral cracked under her feet and she thought she might fall, thought she might fall into one of the hollow domes, no doubt to be swarmed by the keening hounds inside it. Somehow she managed to keep her footing.

Hounds came after her, swarming up the domes, but her marines had heard her, even over the repetitive thump of the steadygun. Gutierrez poured particle fire into the hounds on the domes and they fell back, their tentacular legs flapping like ribbons in the air. Ehta took three running steps and jumped, flying high in the moon’s paltry gravity, and landed on the highest dome she could find.

The Blue-Blue-White was still higher. She jumped and cursed and threw out her hands, hoping she wouldn’t just slide off the damned thing’s slick skin.

She shouted in horror as her body slammed against its yielding flesh. It was hot enough to sear her skin right through her suit, soft enough that she worried she might sink right into it, sink in and be absorbed. Her fingers, outstretched like claws, parted its thin skin and hot liquid gushed down across the front of her helmet, making it difficult to see. She clutched on for dear life, even as the Blue-Blue-White started to rise, the marines and hounds below her dwindling.

When she could breathe again, Ehta started to climb, digging her fingers and the tips of her boots into the loose flesh. The outermost layer of skin split like the rind of an overripe fruit, but the tiny wounds she was making healed over again almost as fast as they’d opened. If the Blue-Blue-White even knew she was there, it gave no sign. Lights flashed furiously inside its body, blue and pink and white, but she had no way of knowing what they meant.

She crested the top of the thing and rolled over on her back for a moment, just trying to catch her breath. Then she looked down and tried to see Valk. The Blue-Blue-White’s innards were almost transparent, but it was so big that the AI was no more than an ill-defined shadow, deep inside its twenty-five-meter bulk. She couldn’t even tell if he was still alive in there—still conscious—still … whatever an AI could be that was the opposite of dead. She just had to hope that some part of him was still functional.

There was no way she could cut him out of there, no way to just tear the alien open and spill him out in a tidal wave of guts and jelly. It was just too big, and it healed too fast. No, if she wanted to save Valk, she was going to have to get nasty.

Downright vicious, in fact.

She fumbled at her belt and came up with her sidearm. Finding what to shoot first was a problem. She could see various translucent globules floating around inside the alien’s mass, organelles with functions she didn’t even want to guess. They moved independently, by the look of things, swimming around in endless circles, changing course only to avoid the long, intricately folded strings of lights. She saw one close to the thing’s top and fired six quick shots through the skin, mostly just to open a gaping wound.

Then she holstered the pistol and grabbed a combat knife instead. She shoved her other arm straight down into the Blue-Blue-White’s body. Paniet had told her the things had protoplasm made of dilute sulfuric acid, and she worried briefly that her arm would simply melt off. It didn’t. She fished around inside, her gorge rising at the sensation. It was like digging around in a trash can full of hot gelatin. She nearly drew her arm back in revulsion—but didn’t. “Come on,” she said, “come on, you beggar, you bastard, you—”

There! Her fingers had just brushed one of the organelles. She grabbed it as hard as she could and pulled. It was attached to something, she could feel it resist her muscles, but then it came loose with a snap that nearly sent her sprawling off the top of the Blue-Blue-White. Her arm emerged steaming from the thing’s body and she was holding a semitransparent glob of goo about the size of a beachball.

It throbbed in her hand, as if it were trying to squirm out of her grasp. White ribbons of something like cartilage twisted around inside of it, trying to maintain its shape.

She stabbed it with her knife and it popped like a water balloon. She threw what was left away and tried to grab another organelle. None were within her reach. Well, she’d known it would come to this.

She held her breath—just by reflex—and dove into the wound, headfirst, slashing all around her with her knife, trying desperately not to get herself stuck in the disgusting mass of the thing. She saw an organelle swim by her and tried to impale it with her combat knife, but it got away from her. What was within her grasp was one of the long strings of lights. She grabbed it with both hands, then put a foot between them and shoved as hard as she could.

That, at least, seemed to get the Blue-Blue-White’s attention. The lights flared with color, strobing so fast they nearly gave her a seizure. The ribbon was thick and muscular, like an umbilical cord, but Ehta was desperate. Eventually, it snapped.

The Blue-Blue-White spasmed with agony.

She was sucked deep inside its body by a quivering series of peristaltic tremors. All around her the jelly convulsed, contracted, crushing her arms against her sides. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move at all, and she saw her knife go floating away from her. “No,” she whispered.

She had meant to scream it, but her rib cage was so compressed by the jelly she couldn’t exhale.

Ehta knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Knew she’d run out of time. The jelly slackened its grip on her, just a little. Just enough that she knew it was preparing to squeeze again, and this time it would crush her to a pulp.

She couldn’t lift her arms. She couldn’t kick her way out, in that tiny moment of grace. She could, however, reach her belt and remove something from a pouch there.

A concussion grenade.

She primed it without being able to see what she was doing. Thank the devil for the endless drills she’d suffered through back in basic training. Then she tossed it away from herself, down into the pulsing body of the alien.

It was six meters below her when it detonated. The explosion wasn’t particularly loud, nor did it give off very much in the way of light. The shock wave did, however, expand rapidly. Ehta felt like every bone in her body was being pulled apart from every other bone as the blast wave swept through her. It wasn’t just her, though—the wave had an impressive effect on the Blue-Blue-White, too. A spherical ripple raced through the semiliquid flesh, cavitating the alien’s innards as it spread outward. Pureeing the jelly like the blades of a blender.

The Blue-Blue-White wobbled. It bobbed up and down in a queasy motion. It shook, it trembled, it went into fits. Waves of semisolid jelly slapped Ehta around, smashed into her legs, her chest.

She was too busy to care. She pulled herself upward, half swimming, half just clawing her way up through the amorphous mass. Somehow she managed to get her helmet up into the air, out of the thing. Heaving with all her strength, she got an arm up and on top of its paper-thin skin. She slithered out of the thing’s quaking body, her entire suit steaming and running with goo.

She’d hurt the jellyfish. Hurt it bad. Hurt it enough that it lost its most basic faculty, the power of flight.

It had been fifty meters up in the air when her grenade went off. It didn’t stay that high for very long. Even in the moon’s puny gravity, it fell. It fell hard.

When it hit the coral below, it splashed.

Ejected from the alien’s flesh, Ehta bounced off the hard surface, her arm snapping where she landed on it. She grimaced in pain but didn’t have the breath to scream. She landed again and rolled over, just rolled over on her back and stared up at the sky.

Come on, she told herself. Come on. Get up. Get up.

She really didn’t want to.

You failed Ginger, she thought. You’re mentally broken and you can’t fly anymore. You let your marines die, just to promote Lanoe’s mad crusade.

But you can do this.

Slowly she got to her feet. Her arm hurt—for a second she knew nothing but blinding, intense pain—but her suit pumped her full of painkillers and she was all right. She looked around, trying to find Valk in the midst of the ruin of the jellyfish.

He was a dark lump in the middle of a lot of transparent lumps. She ran over and grabbed him by his one remaining arm, tried to pull him out of the mess. A thin translucent skin was already growing over him, subsuming him.

She looked around and saw the organelles and the light-ribbons already rolling up together, rolling into a ball. Hellfire, no. The damned thing was still alive. It was alive and healing so fast that if she didn’t hurry—

“Valk,” she shouted, grabbing handfuls of the skin and pulling it off of him. It came away wet, with long mucuslike tendrils sticking to him. She clawed and scraped at it, getting him free. “Valk, can you hear me? Come on, Valk!”

“I’m here,” he said. He clambered up to his feet. His suit was ruined. Torn up, scraped to hell. In some places it looked half-melted. His arm and his legs were crumpled, as if he was just an empty suit, as if there was no one inside there … right.

“What was that? A grenade?”

She stared at him. “Yeah,” she said.

He nodded, his black helmet bobbing up and down. The flowglas was intact, at least. “I knew explosives were the way to go.”

Ehta shook her head. She looked one way—saw her marines still fighting the hounds. Less than half of them were still alive. She needed to be over there, needed to be with them. Then she turned and looked across the domes.

“This is your chance,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Valk asked.

“We’ll cover you, you bastard. Just go, now. Get to the queenship. Run!”

“Oh,” Valk said, as if he hadn’t thought of that. He started walking past her. Then he turned back and brought his helmet toward hers, too fast, until it knocked against hers with a horrible grinding noise.

“For luck,” he said.

Hellfire—had he been trying to kiss her?

Then he turned again and bounded away, a one-armed scarecrow leaping from dome to dome, headed toward the construction yard.

When he was gone Ehta looked down and saw an organelle crawling across her foot, trying to rejoin the mass that had been, and soon would again be, the Blue-Blue-White.

She kicked the thing so hard it flew off over the domes and out of sight.