To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  Aside from that, she told the truth as best she understood it, up to and including her discovery regarding the Staff of Blue. She also gave them Vishal’s test results, all of the recordings she’d made with her contacts while on the Jelly ship, and her transcriptions of the xeno’s memories.

  When she finished, there was a long, long silence, and she could see the eyes of both Akawe and Koyich darting back and forth as they messaged each other.

  “What do you have to say about all this, Falconi?” asked Akawe.

  Falconi made a wry expression. “Everything she told you about her time on the Wallfish checks out. I’d just add that Kira saved the lives of two of my crew today, for whatever that’s worth. You can check our records if you want.” He didn’t mention anything about her stabbing the Numenist, and for that, Kira was grateful.

  “Oh we will,” said Akawe. “You can bet your ass.” His eyes blanked. “One minute.”

  There was another uncomfortable pause, and then the UMC captain shook his head. “Command back at Vyyborg confirms your identity, as well as the discovery of a xenoform artifact on Adrasteia, but the details are classified need-to-know only.” He eyed Kira. “Just to confirm, you can’t tell us anything about these nightmares that just showed up?”

  She shook her head. “No. But as I said, I’m pretty sure the Jellies didn’t make the suit. Some other group or species was responsible.”

  “The nightmares?”

  “I don’t know, but … if I had to guess, I’d say no.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, Navárez, this is way above my pay grade. It looks like the Jellies and the nightmares are busy killing each other off. Once the shooting dies down, we’ll get you over to Vyyborg and let Command figure out what to do with you.”

  The captain started to stand, and Kira said, “Wait. You can’t.”

  Akawe raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “If you send me to Vyyborg, it’s just going to be a waste of time. We have to find the Staff of Blue. The Jellies seem convinced that it’ll win the war for them. I believe it too. If they get the staff, that’s it. We’re dead. All of us.”

  “Even if that’s true, what do you expect me to do about it?” asked Akawe. He crossed his arms.

  “Go after the staff,” said Kira. “Get it before the Jellies.”

  “What?” said Falconi, looking just as startled as the UMC guys.

  She kept talking. “I told you; I have a good idea of where the staff is. The Jellies don’t. I’m sure they’re already searching for it, but if we start now, we might be able to beat them to it.”

  Akawe pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he had a headache. “Ma’am … I don’t know how you think the military works, but—”

  “Look, do you think there’s any chance the UMC and League won’t want to go after the staff?”

  “That depends on what Fleet Intelligence makes of your claims.”

  Kira struggled to contain her frustration. “They can’t afford to ignore the possibility that I’m right, and you know it. And that’s the thing: if an expedition is going to go after the staff—” She took a breath. “—then I have to go with it. They’ll need me there, on the ground, to translate. No one else can do it.… Shipping me off to Vyyborg is a waste of time, Captain. Waiting for Intelligence to vet everything I’ve said is a waste of time, and they can’t. We need to go, and we need to go now.”

  Akawe stared at her for a good half minute. Then he shook his head and sucked his bottom lip against his teeth. “Goddammit, Navárez.”

  “Now you know what I’ve been dealing with,” Falconi said.

  Akawe pointed a finger at him, as if about to chew him out. Then he seemed to reconsider and folded the finger into his fist. “You may be right, Navárez, but I still have to run this up the chain of command. It’s not the sort of decision I can make on my own.”

  Exasperated, Kira let out a sound. “Don’t you see, that’s—”

  Akawe pushed back his chair, got to his feet. “I’m not going to sit here arguing with you, ma’am. We have to wait to hear what Command says, and that’s the end of it.”

  “Fine,” said Kira. She leaned forward. “But you tell them—you tell your superiors—that if they keep me here in Sixty-One Cygni, the whole system is going to be overrun. The Jellies know where I am now. You saw how they reacted when that signal went out. The only way to stop them from getting this”—she tapped her forearm—“is for me to leave the system. And if the UMC sends me to Sol, that’ll be another two weeks down the drain, and it’ll just lead a lot more Jellies to Earth.”

  There. She’d said the magic word: Earth. The semi-mythical Homeworld that everyone in the UMC had sworn to protect. It had the desired effect. Both Akawe and Koyich appeared troubled.

  “I’ll tell them, Navárez,” said the captain, “but don’t get your hopes up.” Then he gestured at the Marines. “Get her out of here. Put her in a spare cabin and make sure she doesn’t leave.”

  “Sir, yessir!”

  As the Marines flanked her, Kira looked at Falconi, feeling helpless. He seemed angry, frustrated by the shape of things, but she could see he wasn’t going to argue with Akawe. “Sorry it worked out like this,” he said.

  Kira shrugged as she got to her feet. “Yeah, me too. Thanks for everything. Give Trig my goodbyes, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  Then the Marines escorted her out of the meeting room, leaving Falconi sitting alone, facing Akawe and his tiger-eyed first officer.

  3.

  Kira seethed as the Marines escorted her through the cruiser’s interior. They deposited her in a cabin smaller than the one on the Wallfish, and when they left, the door locked behind them.

  “Gaaah!” Kira shouted. She paced the length of the room—two and a half steps in each direction—and then dropped onto the bunk and buried her head in her arms.

  This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted to happen.

  She checked her overlays. Still working, but she was locked out of the Darmstadt’s network, making it impossible to see what was going on in the rest of the system or to message any of the Wallfish crew.

  All she could do was wait, so wait she did.

  It wasn’t easy.

  She went over the conversation with Akawe six different ways, trying to figure out what else she could have said to convince him. Nothing came to mind.

  Then, in the stillness and quiet of the room, the full weight of the day’s events began to settle upon her. Morning felt like it had been a week ago, so much had happened since. The Jellies, the compulsion and her response to it, Sparrow … How was the Numenist she’d stabbed? For a moment, she lingered on the thought, then bright flashes of sensations from the fights on the Jelly ship struck her, and Kira shivered, though she wasn’t cold.

  She continued to shiver, the tremors locking her muscles into banded cords. The Soft Blade roiled in response, but there was nothing it could do to help, and she could feel its confusion.

  Teeth chattering, Kira crawled onto the bunk and wrapped the blanket around herself. She’d always done well in emergencies. It took a lot to rattle her, but the violence had been a lot and then some. She could still feel the vomit stuck in her throat, clogging her airway. Thule! I nearly died.

  But she hadn’t, and there was some comfort in the fact.

  Not long after, a scared-looking crewmate delivered a tray of food. Kira pulled herself out of bed long enough to fetch the tray, and then she sat with the pillow behind her and ate, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. With each bite, she felt more normal, and when she finished, the cabin no longer seemed quite so grey or dismal.

  She wasn’t about to give up.

  If the UMC wouldn’t listen to her, maybe the highest-ranked League official in the system would. (She wasn’t sure who that would be: the governor of Ruslan?) The UMC still answered to the civilian government, after all. There was also the company rep stationed on Malpert. He could arrange legal representation for her, w
hich would help give her some leverage. As a last resort, she could always reach out to the Entropists for help.…

  Kira reached into her pocket and pulled out the token Jorrus had given her. She tilted the faceted disk, admiring how light reflected off the fractal embedded in the center.

  No, she wasn’t about to give up.

  She put away the token, opened a document in her overlays, and started to draft a memo outlining everything she’d learned about the Soft Blade, the Jellies, and the Staff of Blue. Someone in authority had to understand the importance of her discoveries and realize they were worth taking a chance on.

  She’d only written a page and a half when a sharp rap sounded against the door. “Come in,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and sitting upright.

  The door opened, and Captain Akawe entered. He was holding a cup of what smelled like coffee, and there was a stern look on his perfectly sculpted face.

  Behind him, an orderly and a pair of Marines remained stationed just outside the cabin.

  “Seems today is a day for nasty surprises,” said the captain. He seated himself opposite her, on the cabin’s sole chair.

  “What now?” Kira asked, overtaken by sudden dread.

  Akawe placed the cup on the shelf next to him. “All the Jellies in the system are dead.”

  “That’s … good?”

  “It’s fan-fucking-tastic,” he said. “And it means their FTL jamming is also gone.”

  Understanding dawned on Kira. Maybe she could finally get a message through to her family! “You picked up news from the rest of the League.” It wasn’t a question.

  He nodded. “Sure did. And it’s not exactly cheery.” He plucked a shiny blue coin from his breast pocket, studied it a moment, and then pocketed it again. “The nightmares didn’t just hit Sixty-One Cygni. They’ve been attacking all of settled space. The Premier has officially designated both them and the Jellies Hostis Humani Generis. Enemies of all humans. That means shoot on sight, no questions asked.”

  “When did the nightmares first appear?”

  “Not sure. We haven’t heard yet from the colonies on the other side of the League, so can’t say what’s happening out there. The earliest reports we have are from a week ago. Here, look.”

  Akawe tapped a panel on the wall, and a display sprang to life.

  A series of clips played: a pair of the nightmare ships crashing into a manufacturing facility in orbit around one of the moons of Saturn. A civilian transport exploding as a long, reddish missile slammed into it. Ground footage from somewhere on Mars: nightmares swarming through the cramped corridors of a hab-dome while Marines blasted at them from behind barriers. A view out one of the floating cities of Venus as fragments of destroyed ships rained down through the layers of cream-colored clouds—a burning fusillade that slammed into another of the broad, disk-shaped platforms a few kilometers away, destroying it. On Earth: a huge glowing crater amid a great sprawl of buildings somewhere along a snowy coastline.

  Kira sucked in her breath at that. Earth! She had no great love for the place, but it was still shocking to see it attacked.

  “It’s not just the nightmares either,” said Akawe. He tapped the panel again.

  Now the clips showed Jellies. Some fighting the nightmares. Others fighting the UMC or civilians. The recordings were from throughout the League. Sol. Stewart’s World. Eidolon. Kira even saw a snippet of images from what she thought might have been Shin-Zar.

  To her dismay, one of the clips appeared to have been recorded in orbit around Latham, the gas giant farthest out from Weyland: a short video of two Jelly ships strafing a hydrogen processing station low in the atmosphere.

  Kira wasn’t surprised; the war was everywhere else, why not there? She just hoped the fighting hadn’t reached Weyland’s surface.

  At last, Akawe stopped the parade of horrors.

  Kira tightened in on herself. She felt raw and hurt, vulnerable. Everything in those videos was, in a way, her fault. “Do you know what’s happening at Weyland?”

  He shook his head. “Just what you saw, plus a few reports of possible Jelly forces on one of the moons in the system. Unconfirmed.”

  Not the reassurance Kira was looking for. She resolved to look up the specifics once she got access to the net again. “How bad is it overall?” she asked, her voice low.

  “Bad,” said Akawe. “We’re losing. They won’t break us tomorrow. And they won’t break us the day after. But at this rate, it’s inevitable. We’re bleeding ships and troops faster than we can replace them. And there’s no real protection against the sort of suicide runs the nightmares seem fond of.” Again the glowing crater appeared on the screen. “That’s not even the worst of it.”

  Kira braced herself. “Oh?”

  Akawe leaned forward, a strange, hard gleam in his eyes. “Our sister vessel, the Surfeit of Gravitas, blew up the last of the nightmares in this system exactly twenty-five minutes ago. Just before the nightmares got blasted to kingdom come, do you know what those pestilent, dick-skinned aliens did?”

  “No.”

  “Well I’ll tell you. They sent out a broadcast. And not just any broadcast.” An evil, humorless smile split his face. “Let me play it for you.”

  Across the speakers came a hiss of static, and then a voice sounded—a horrible, crackling voice full of sickness and madness—and with a shock, Kira realized it was speaking in English: “… die. You will all die! Flesh for the maw!” And the voice began to laugh before the recording abruptly ended.

  “Captain,” Kira said, choosing her words with care, “does the League have some sort of bioengineering program they haven’t told us about?”

  Akawe grunted. “Dozens of them. But nothing that could have created creatures like that. You should know; you’re a biologist yourself.”

  “At this point,” said Kira, “I’m not sure what I know anymore. Okay, so these … nightmares can use our language. Maybe that’s why the Jellies think we’re responsible for this war. Either way, these things must have been watching us, studying us.”

  “Must have, and that makes me real uncomfortable.”

  Kira eyed him for a moment, evaluating. “You didn’t come here just to tell me the news, now did you, Captain?”

  “No.” Akawe smoothed a wrinkle from his slacks.

  “What did Command say?”

  He looked down at his hands. “Command … Command is headed up by a woman named Shar Dabo. Rear Admiral Shar Dabo. She’s in charge of Ruslan operations. Good officer, but we don’t always see eye to eye.… I had a talk with her, a long talk, and…”

  “And?” Kira said, trying to be patient.

  Akawe noticed. His lips twitched, and he continued more briskly, “The admiral agreed with the seriousness of the situation, which is why she forwarded all your intel to Sol in order to get guidance from Earth Central.”

  “Earth Central!” Kira hissed and threw up her hands. “That’s going to take, what—”

  “About nine days to get a response,” said Akawe. “Assuming the stiffs back home turn out a reply without delay, which would be a miracle. An actual, honest-to-god miracle.” A frown puckered his brow. “It won’t do any good, even if they’re expeditious. Jellies have been jumping into this system every few days for the past month. As soon as the next batch shows up, they’ll jam us again, fuck up our comms from here to Alpha Centauri. Which means we’ll have to wait for a packet ship to get here from Sol before we receive our orders. And that’ll take at least eighteen, nineteen days.”

  He leaned back and picked up his cup. “Until then, Admiral Dabo wants me to bring you, your suit, and those frozen Marines from the Extenuating Circumstances back to Vyyborg.”

  Kira eyed him, trying to make sense of his motives. “And you don’t agree with her orders?”

  He took a sip of coffee. “Let’s just say Admiral Dabo and I are experiencing a difference of opinions right now.”

  “You’re thinking about going after t
he staff, aren’t you?”

  Akawe pointed at the crater still glowing in the holo. “You see that? I have friends and family back at Sol. A lot of us do.” He wrapped both hands around his cup. “Humanity can’t win a war on two fronts, Navárez. Our backs are against the wall, and there’s a gun aimed at our heads. At this point, even bad choices are starting to look pretty good. If you’re right about the Staff of Blue, it could mean we actually have a chance.”

  She didn’t bother hiding her exasperation. “That’s what I was saying.”

  “Yes, but your say-so isn’t good enough,” said Akawe. He took another sip, and she waited, sensing that he needed to talk things out for himself. “If we go, we’d be disobeying orders or, at the very least, ignoring them. Leaving the field of battle is still grounds for capital punishment, if you weren’t aware. Cowardice before the enemy, and all that. Even if that weren’t the case, you’re talking about a deep-space mission that would last a minimum of six months, round-trip.”

  “I know what it would—”

  “Six. Months,” Akawe repeated. “And who knows what would happen while we were gone.” He shook his head slightly. “The Darmstadt took a beating today, Navárez. We’re in no shape to go jetting off into the ass-end of the Milky Way. And we’re just one ship. What if we get there and there’s a whole Jelly fleet waiting for us? Boom. We’d lose what might be our only advantage: you. Hell, we don’t even know for sure if you can understand the Jellies’ language. That suit of yours could be messing with your brain.”

  He swirled the coffee in his cup. “You have to understand the situation, Navárez. There’s a lot at stake. For me, for my crew, for the League.… Even if I’d known you since the first day of boot, there’s no way I can go jetting off to who knows where just on the strength of your word.”

  Kira crossed her arms. “So then why are you here?”