To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  And Kira knew this was the pattern the Soft Blade served. Served or was. And Kira realized there was a question inherent in the design, a choice related to the very nature of the xeno. Would she follow the pattern? Or would she ignore the design and carve new lines—lines of her own—into the guiding scheme?

  To answer required information she didn’t have. It was a test she hadn’t studied for, and she didn’t understand the parameters of the inquiry.

  But as she gazed upon the shifting shape, Kira remembered her pain and her anger and her fear. They burst forth, hers and the Soft Blade’s combined. Whatever the pattern meant, she was certain of the wrongness of the graspers and of her desire to live and of her need to rescue Trig.

  To that end, Kira was willing to fight, and she was willing to kill and destroy in order to stop the graspers.

  Then her vision sharpened and telescoped, and she felt as if she were falling into the fractal. It expanded before her in endless layers of detail, flowering into an entire universe of theme and variation.…

  Pain roused Kira. Shocking, searing pain. The pressure around her torso vanished, and she filled her lungs with a desperate gasp before loosing a scream.

  Her vision cleared, and she saw the tentacle still encircling her. Only now a belt of thorns—black and shiny and tangled in a familiar fractal shape—extended from her torso, piercing the twitching limb. She could feel the thorns, same as her arms or legs, new additions but familiar. And surrounding them a heated press of flesh and bone and spurting fluids. For a moment the memory of the suit impaling Alan and the others intruded, and Kira shuddered.

  Without thinking, she shouted and chopped at the tentacle with her arm. As she did, she felt the suit reshape itself, and her arm sliced through the Jelly’s translucent flesh as if it were hardly there.

  A spray of orange liquid splattered her. It smelled bitter and metallic. Disgusted, Kira shook her head, trying to shake off the blobs of ichor.

  Severing the tentacle freed her from the alien. The Jelly twitched in its death throes as it drifted toward the far side of the room, leaving its amputated limb behind. The tentacle twisted and coiled in the air like a headless snake. A core of bone showed in the center of the stump.

  Unbidden, the thorns retracted into the Soft Blade.

  Kira shivered. So the xeno had finally decided to fight alongside her. Good. Maybe she had a chance after all. At least there was no one around she had to worry about stabbing by accident. Not at the moment.

  She scanned her surroundings.

  The chamber had no identifiable up or down, same as the aliens themselves. What light there was emanated in an even field from the forward half of the space. Clumps of mysterious machines, black and glossy, protruded from the curving walls, and two-thirds of the way around the dusky expanse—half-lost in the gloom—was a large, barnacle-like shell that Kira assumed was an interior door of some kind.

  At the sight of the room, Kira felt an overpowering sense of déjà vu. Her vision swam, and the walls of another, similar ship appeared ghost-like before her. For a moment, it felt as if she were in two different places, in two different ages—

  She shook her head, and the image disappeared. “Stop it!” she growled at the Soft Blade. She couldn’t afford distractions like that.

  If not for the dire nature of the situation, Kira would have loved to examine the chamber in exhaustive detail. It was a xenobiologist’s dream: an actual alien ship filled with living aliens, macro and micro. A single square inch of the space would be enough to make an entire career. More than that, Kira just wanted to know. She always had.

  But now wasn’t the time.

  There was no sign of Trig in the room. That meant one or more Jelly was still alive.

  Kira spotted Falconi’s grenade launcher floating by the wall some distance away. She pulled herself toward it, palms sticking to the inside of the hull.

  She’d killed an alien! Her. Kira Navárez. The fact disturbed and astonished her as much as it gave her a certain grim satisfaction.

  “Gregorovich,” she said. “Any idea where they took—”

  The ship mind was already talking: *Keep going forward. I can’t give you an exact fix, but you’re heading in the right direction.*

  “Roger that,” said Kira as she snared the launcher.

  *Jorrus and Veera are helping me with Sparrow. I’m jamming all outgoing frequencies, so the Jellies might not be able to signal if they recognize you. They can still use a laser for line-of-sight comms, though. Be careful.*

  While he spoke, Kira willed the suit to propel her toward the barnacle-like shell. As in vacuum, the Soft Blade was able to provide her with a modest amount of thrust—more than enough to traverse the distance within a few seconds.

  The compulsion was headache-strong now, insistent and insidious. She scowled and tried to concentrate past the throbbing.

  The shell parted in three wedge-shaped segments that retracted into the bulkhead to reveal a long, circular shaft. More of the doors dotted the shaft at irregular intervals, and at the far end, there twinkled a panel of lights: a computer console perhaps, or maybe just a piece of art. Who could tell?

  Kira kept the grenade launcher at the ready as she maneuvered into the shaft. Trig could be in any of the rooms; she’d have to search them all. There were engines at the back of the ship, but Kira didn’t have a clue as to where anything else might be. Did the Jellies have a centralized command station? She couldn’t remember mention of one in the news reports.…

  A flicker of motion appeared along the near wall. She twisted just in time to see a crab-like alien slip out of a parted door.

  The Jelly fired a cluster of laser beams at her. They curved harmlessly around her torso. The laser blasts were too fast for normal human vision to detect. But with the mask over her face, the pulses were visible as nanosecond flashes: incandescent lines that blinked in and out of existence.

  Without thinking, Kira fired the grenade launcher. Or rather, the Soft Blade fired it for her; she wasn’t even conscious of pulling the trigger, and then the buttstock kicked her shoulder and sent her spinning backwards.

  The damn thing was big enough to be artillery.

  BOOM!

  The grenade detonated with a pulse of light so bright, Kira’s vision dimmed almost to black. She felt the force of the explosion in her organs: her liver hurt, and her kidneys too, and all through her body, tendons and ligaments and muscles that Kira had previously been unaware of made themselves known with a chorus of sharp complaints.

  She scrabbled to grab something, anything, within reach. By sheer chance, she brushed against a ridge along the wall, and the xeno adhered to the smooth, stonelike surface, stopping her tumble. She gulped for air and hung there while she regained her bearings, pulse racing with frantic speed. Across from her floated the pulped and shredded remains of the Jelly. Orange mist coated the passageway.

  What had the creature been trying to do? Sneak up on her? A sinking sensation wholly unrelated to weightlessness formed in Kira’s stomach as she thought of an explanation. The crab had been sent to slow her—knowing it would fail—while the rest of the Jellies prepared a nasty surprise for her somewhere else.

  She swallowed hard, the sour taste of vomit still strong in her mouth. The best thing she could do was keep searching, hope the aliens weren’t able to predict her every move.

  A glance at the grenade launcher. Four shots left. She’d have to make them count.

  She pushed herself back around to look at the barnacle door where the Jelly had emerged. The wedges of broken shell hung loose. Past them was a globular room half-full of greenish water. Ribbons of what resembled algae floated within the tranquil reservoir, and tiny insect-like creatures skated upon the bowed surface, tracing lines and rings. The word sfennic rose unbidden within her mind, along with a sense of crunchy, quick upon the skin.… At the bottom of the pool was a pod or workstation of some sort.

  The water ought to have been drifting around
in blobs, free to wander the interior of the room so long as the ship was in free fall. Instead, it clung to one half of the room, as still and steady as any planet-bound pool.

  Kira recognized the effect of the Jellies’ artificial gravity. It seemed to be a localized field, as she didn’t feel anything at the entrance to the room.

  The artificial gravity didn’t interest her much. What she really wanted to study were the sfennic and the algae-like growths. Even a few cells would be enough to run a full genomic analysis.

  But she had to keep moving.

  Fast as she dared, she cleared the next several rooms. None of them held Trig, and none had any recognizable function. Maybe this one was a bathroom. Maybe that one was a shrine. Maybe something else entirely. The Soft Blade wasn’t telling, and without its help, any explanation seemed likely. That was the problem when dealing with alien cultures (human or otherwise), the lack of context.

  One thing Kira knew for certain: the Jellies had changed the layout of their ships since the Soft Blade had been on them. The arrangement of rooms felt wholly unfamiliar.

  She saw plenty of evidence of battle damage: holes from shrapnel, laser burns, melted composites—evidence of the ship’s clash with the UMC at Malpert Station. The light flickered, and warping, whale-song alarms sounded elsewhere in the ship. The scents of … warning, danger, and fear stained the air.

  At the end of the shaft, the passageway forked. Kira’s gut told her to go left, so left she went, driven onward by desperation. Where is he? She was starting to worry it was already too late to save the kid.

  She passed through three more of the ubiquitous shell doors, and then a fourth one opened to another spherical chamber.

  The room felt enormous—the walls barely curved as they extended out from her—but it was hard to be sure of the true size of the space. A thick bank of smoke clogged the air, dimming the usual blue illumination to the point that it was difficult to see much past the ends of her arms.

  Fear crept up Kira’s side. The room was the perfect place for an ambush.

  She needed to see. If only … She concentrated upon her need, concentrated with all her might, and she felt a tickle atop her eyeballs. Her vision twisted, like a sheet being wrung dry, and then it snapped flat and the haze seemed to retreat (though the far end of the room remained obscured) as everything went monochrome.

  The chamber must have been over thirty meters across, if not more. Unlike the other rooms, it had structures throughout: branches of pale scaffolding pocked with a bone-like matrix. A black walkway lined the inner circumference of the back half of the space. Mounted to the walls on either side of the walkway were rows upon rows of what appeared to be … pods. Huge and solid, they hummed with electrical power, and bright rings of magnetic force chained them to hidden circuits.

  Dread mingled with curiosity as Kira looked at the nearest one.

  The front of the pod was made of a translucent material, milky and pale, like the skin of an egg. Through it, she saw an indistinct shape, hazy, convoluted, and difficult to resolve into anything recognizable.

  The object shifted, unmistakably alive.

  Kira gasped and jerked back, raising the grenade launcher. The thing inside the pod was a Jelly, its tentacles wrapped around itself and bobbing softly in a viscous liquid.

  She nearly shot the creature; only the fact that it didn’t react to her sudden movement—and her desire to avoid unwanted attention—stopped her. Were they birthing chambers? Cryo tubes? Sleeping containers? Some sort of crèche? She glanced around the room. Her lips moved under the mask as she counted: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven … Forty-nine in total. Fourteen of the pods were smaller than the rest, but even so, forty-nine more Jellies, if all the pods were full. More than enough to overwhelm her and everyone on the Wallfish.

  Trig.

  She’d worry about the pods later.

  Kira braced herself against the rim of the portal and then kicked off toward one of the spars of scaffolding. As she flew toward it, a silvery rod shot out of the haze deeper in the chamber.

  She jerked up her arm and knocked it aside. The xeno hardened around her forearm enough to keep her wrist from breaking.

  Her motion and the impact sent her spinning away. She tried to grab the spar, and for a moment her fingers swung through empty air—

  She ought to have missed. She ought to have kept spinning. But instead, Kira reached and the Soft Blade reached with her, extruding tendrils in a natural extension of her fingers until they looped around the spar and brought her to a teeth-clattering stop.

  Interesting.

  Behind her, Kira saw a clawed something leap from spar to spar as it pursued her. In the shadows, the creature looked dark, almost black. Spikes and claws and odd little limbs protruded from it at unexpected angles. A Jelly of a sort she hadn’t seen before. The creature’s size was difficult to gauge, but it was bigger than her. In one of its claws, it carried another of the silvery rods: a meter long and mirror bright.

  She fired Francesca at the alien, but it was moving too fast for her to hit, even with the suit’s help. The grenade exploded against the opposite side of the chamber, destroying one of the pods and providing a lightning-flash of illumination.

  By it, Kira glimpsed two things: near the back of the room, a bulky, human-shaped figure tethered among the spars. Trig. And also the alien’s claw lashing out as it sent the second rod hurtling toward her.

  She couldn’t dodge in time. The rod struck her in the ribs, and although the Soft Blade did its best to protect her, the impact still left her dazed and gasping in pain. Half her side went numb, and she lost her grip on the grenade launcher. It spun away.

  Trig! Somehow she had to get to the kid.

  The alien snapped its claws and sprang toward her. The creature wasn’t like the other Jellies; it didn’t have tentacles, and she saw what seemed to be a cluster of eyes and other sensory organs along one side of its rubbery, soft-skinned body: a rudimentary face that gave her a definite sense of which end was the front and which end the back.

  Desperate, Kira tried to attack with the Soft Blade. Strike! Slash! Tear! She wished the xeno would do all those things.

  It did. But not as she expected.

  Clusters of spikes erupted from her body and jabbed in random directions, wild and undisciplined. Each was like a punch to her body, pushing her in the opposite direction of the deadly shards. She tried to direct them with her mind, and while she could feel the xeno respond to her commands, the response was badly coordinated—a blind beast flailing in pursuit of its prey, overreacting to ill-mated stimuli.

  The reaction was instantaneous. The clawed alien twisted in midair, throwing off its trajectory so it just missed being impaled. At the same time, a spurt of nearscent tainted the air with shock, fear, and something Kira felt was akin to reverence.

  [[Kveti here: The Idealis! The Manyform lives! Stop it!]]

  Kira retracted the spikes and was about to jump after the grenade launcher when a soft, slithery shape crawled around the spar she was clinging to: a tentacle, thick and probing. She slashed at it, but she was too slow. The trunk-like slab of muscle slapped her and sent her flying head over heels until her back slammed into another piece of scaffolding.

  Even through the suit, the impact hurt. Despite the pain, she concentrated on holding her position, and the Soft Blade clung to the spar for her and stopped her from spiraling away.

  The clawed monstrosity clung to a forked shaft some distance away, beyond the reach of the blade. There, it raised its bony arms and shook them at her, snapping its claws like a crazed castanet dancer.

  Past it, she saw the owner of the tentacle—another of the squid-like Jellies—emerge from behind the spar she’d been knocked off of. The squid’s tentacles pulsed with luminous bands, startlingly bright in the gloom. In one tentacle, the alien held … not a laser. A long, flat-barreled weapon of some kind. A portable railgun?

  Ten, twelve meters away, Kira spotted th
e grenade launcher.

  She jumped for it.

  There was a bang like two boards clapping together, and a bolt of pain punched through her ribs.

  Her heart faltered, and for a moment her vision went black.

  Panicked, Kira lashed out with the Soft Blade, stabbing in every direction. But it didn’t help, and another bolt of pain struck her right leg. She felt herself start to spin.

  Her vision cleared as she collided with the grenade launcher. She grabbed it, and as she did, she saw the clawed, crab-like alien jumping toward her.

  Her suit continued to send forth spikes, but the alien evaded them with ease. The arms on its segmented body unfolded, reaching toward her head with jagged spurs, sharp and sawlike. Electricity sparked between the tips of them, bright as a welding arc.

  In a detached, almost analytical manner, Kira realized the alien was trying to decapitate her, so as to break her bond with the Soft Blade.

  She raised the rifle, but too slow. Far, far too slow.

  Just before the creature collided with her, a jet of ablated flesh erupted from the alien’s side. Across the room, Trig’s power armor lowered its arm.

  Then the alien crashed into Kira’s face. Its legs wrapped around her skull, and everything went black as its soft belly covered her face. Pain bloomed in her left forearm as a crushing weight seemed to pinch it from either side. The pain was so intense, she saw it as much as she felt it—saw it as a flood of lurid yellow light radiating from her arm.

  Kira screamed into her mask and punched the alien with her other arm, punched and punched and punched. Muscle gave beneath her fist, and bones or something like bones cracked.

  The pain seemed to last an eternity.

  As suddenly as it had started, the pressure on her arm vanished, and the clawed alien went limp.