She is taken into military quarantine, where a doctor, Carr, experiments on the Soft Blade, burning it and Kira with laser blasts despite her pleas for him to stop.

Kira escapes and inadvertently causes an explosion that joins a damaged piece of the Soft Blade to both Carr and one of the Wranaui, creating a malevolent, corrupted being calling itself the Maw, which floats through space seeking to grow and spread despite its madness and pain.

They succeed in boarding a disabled attacking ship, but she is only able to broadcast the location of the Soft Blade, drawing large numbers of both Wranaui and Corrupted to the system.

The Soft Blade shows her memories of a Vanished relic, the Staff of Blue, which would allow her to eradicate the Corrupted and protect humanity from the Wranaui.

The Wallfish and a military cruiser journey to the Vanished planet containing the Staff of Blue, but they find it irreparably broken.

Kira and the Wallfish crew escape during a Corrupted attack and leave to warn the Knot and preserve the chance of an alliance.

She kills the numerous Wranaui defenders but finds that Ctein is clad in Vanished armor that resists the Soft Blade.

Paolini based superluminal travel on Gregory Meholic's Tri-Space theory,[8] which in turn is inspired by Edward A. Puscher's 1980 report on possible characteristics of tachyons.

When traveling faster than light, an object's energy decreases as its velocity increases, mirroring the effects described by real-world equations for mass-energy equivalence.