To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  “How?” said Sparrow. “We’re moving waaay too fast to just jump over. Maybe Kira or the Jelly could make it, but the rest of us would get turned into a bloody smear. It’s a fucking dead end.”

  Outside the shield, gunfire continued to erupt: dull thumps that came in controlled bursts as the Marines fought back the nightmares. Or so Kira assumed.

  “Yes, thank you,” Falconi said in a dry tone. He turned back to Hwa-jung. “You’re the engineer. Any ideas?” He glanced at the Entropists. “How about you?”

  Veera and Jorrus spread their hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Mechanics—”

  “—are not our specialty.”

  “Don’t give me that. There has to be a way to get us from here to there without killing us.”

  The machine boss frowned. “Of course there is, if we had enough time and materials.”

  Another boom sounded in the concourse.

  “No such luck,” said Falconi. “Come on, anything. Doesn’t matter how far-fetched. Be creative, Ms. Song. That’s what I hired you for.”

  Hwa-jung’s frown deepened, and for a moment she was silent. Then, she muttered, “Aigoo,” and scrambled into the maglev car. She ran her hands over the floor, rapping it with her knuckles in different places. Then she waved Kira over and said, “Here. Open the floor here.” And she traced a square on the floor. “Be careful. Just remove the top layer. Don’t damage anything underneath.”

  “Got it.”

  Kira retraced the square with her index finger, and the tip of her nail scored the grey composite. She repeated the motion, increasing the pressure, and a thin, diamond-like blade extended from her finger and sliced through the first centimeter or so of material. Then she gripped the square—bonding it to her palm as if with gecko pads—and pulled it free from the rest of the floor, like snapping a cracker along pre-established lines.

  Hwa-jung got down onto her hands and knees as she peered into the hole, studying the wires and banks of equipment within. Kira had no idea what any of them were for, but Hwa-jung seemed to understand what she was looking at.

  The banging outside the terminal intensified. Kira glanced back at the shield. It was beginning to dent inward. Another minute and she figured she would have to go reinforce it.

  Hwa-jung made a sound in the back of her throat and then stood. “I can move the car, but I need a power source.”

  “Can’t you—” Falconi started to say.

  “No,” said Hwa-jung. “Without power, it is a no-good stupid rock. I can’t do anything with it.”

  Kira looked over at the Jelly. [[Kira here: Can you fix this machine?]]

  [[Itari here: I have no energy source that would work.]]

  “What about a set of power armor?” asked Nielsen. “Would that do the trick?”

  Hwa-jung shook her head. “Enough power, yes, but it wouldn’t be compatible.”

  “Could you use a laser turret?” Kira asked.

  The machine boss hesitated, then nodded. “Maybe. If the capacitors can be set to—”

  Kira didn’t wait to hear the rest. She jumped out of the car and sprinted back to the makeshift barrier. As she reached it, the banging stopped, which worried her, but she wasn’t going to complain.

  Extending the suit in dozens of wriggling tentacles, she rooted through the mangled plug of scraps, searching for the turret she’d buried within the mass. It wasn’t long before she found it: a smooth, hard piece of metal, still warm from being fired. Moving as fast as she dared, she bent and pressed the parts of the shield until she created a tunnel just large enough to pull the turret through—all the while struggling to maintain the structural integrity of the shield and keep the front of it a solid, unmoving face.

  “Faster, please!” said Falconi.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” she shouted.

  The turret came free, and she caught it in her hands. Cradling it like a live bomb, she hurried back to the car and handed the weapon to Hwa-jung.

  Sparrow tapped her glass-like knife against her thigh as she glanced around. Then she grabbed Kira by the arm and dragged her a few steps away.

  “What?” said Kira.

  In a low voice, tight with tension, Sparrow said, “Those grease-heads are going to blast their way in through the ceiling or the walls. Guarantee it. You’d better work up some kinda fortification shit, or we’re goners.”

  “On it.”

  Sparrow nodded and returned to the car, where Vishal was helping Hwa-jung take apart the turret.

  “Everyone stay back!” Kira said. Then she faced the cramped terminal and, as in the concourse, sent forth dozens of lines from the Soft Blade, allowing it to do what was needed. A painfully loud din assaulted her as the xeno started to dismantle the floor, walls, and ceiling. She drew the pieces closer and, fast as she could, began to assemble them into a dome around the front of the maglev docking port.

  As the chunks crashed into place, she could feel her sense of self expanding again. It was intoxicating. She distrusted the feeling—distrusted both herself and the Soft Blade—but the lure of more was seductive, and the ease with which she and the xeno were working together bolstered her confidence.

  One of the panels she yanked free must have contained the intercom speaker, because she heard sparks, and then the stationmaster’s voice cut out.

  Meter by meter, she stripped the terminal, exposing Orsted’s underlying skeleton of cross-joined beams, anodized against corrosion and riddled with holes to save on weight.

  Soon she couldn’t see anything but the inside of the dome, and still she kept adding to it. Darkness enveloped them, and from the car, Vishal called, “You’re not making this easy, Ms. Navárez!”

  “It’s that or getting shot!” she shouted back.

  A blast shook the terminal.

  “Time to get this show on the road,” said Falconi.

  “I’m working on it,” said Hwa-jung.

  Kira extended herself even farther, stretching to the limits of her reach and finding she could reach yet farther still. Consciousness thinned, spread over a greater and greater area, and the amount of input became disorienting: pressures and scrapes here, pipes there, wires above and below, the tickle of electrical discharges, heat and cold and a thousand different impressions from a thousand different points along the Soft Blade, and all of them squirming, changing, expanding, and inundating her with ever more sensations.

  It was too much. She couldn’t oversee it all, couldn’t keep up. In places, her supervision failed, and where it failed, the Soft Blade acted of its own, moving forward with deadly intent. Kira felt her mind fragmenting as she tried to focus first on one place, then another, then another, and each time quickly bringing the suit back to heel, but while she was occupied, it continued to swarm elsewhere, growing … building … becoming.

  She was drowning, disappearing into the expanding existence of the Soft Blade. Panic sparked within her, but the spark was too feeble to rein in the suit. A sense of pleasure emanated from the Soft Blade at finally being let loose to pursue its purpose; from it Kira had flashes of … yellow fields with flowers that sang … memories that … a treelike growth with metal scales for bark … disoriented her further, made it almost … a group of long, furry creatures that yipped at her from between brindled mandibles … impossible to concentrate.

  In a brief shard of lucidity, the horror of the situation struck Kira. What had she done?

  With ears not her own, she heard a sound like doom itself: the measured tramp of armored soldiers marching into the outer part of the terminal. Discomfort, sharp and piercing, disturbed several grasping pseudopods. Startled, she/they retracted.

  Attack her/it, would they?

  Walls and beams and structural supports crumpled beneath her/their grasp as they collapsed the station in around the shield. The deck buckled, but it didn’t matter. Only finding more mass: more metals, more minerals, more, more, more. A hunger formed inside her/it, an insatiable, world-eating hunger.

>   “Kira!”

  The voice sounded as if from the far end of a tunnel. Whoever they were, she/it didn’t recognize the person. Or maybe she/it didn’t care to. There were other, more important things that needed her/its attention.

  “Kira!” At a remove, she/it felt hands and shaking and pulling. None of which, of course, could budge her/it from place: her/their cords of banded fibers were too strong. “Kira!” Pain shot through her/its face, but it was so slight and distant as to be easily ignored.

  The pain appeared again. And then a third time.

  Anger formed in some part of her/itself. She/it looked inward from every direction, with eyes above and eyes below and eyes still made of flesh, and with them beheld a man standing next to her, red-faced and shouting.

  He slapped her across the face.

  The shock of it was enough to clear Kira’s mind for a moment. She gasped, and Falconi said, “Snap out of it! You’re going to kill us all!”

  She could already feel herself slipping back into the morass of the Soft Blade. “Hit me again,” she said.

  He hesitated and then did.

  Kira’s vision flashed red, but the bright sting on her cheek gave her something outside of the Soft Blade to focus on and help center herself. It was a struggle; gathering the different parts of her mind back together felt as if she were trying to free herself from a pool of grasping hands—one for each fiber of the suit, and all of them freakishly strong.

  Fear gave Kira the motivation she needed. Her pulse soared until she teetered on the brink of passing out. But she didn’t, and moment by moment she was able to retreat into herself. At the same time, she recalled the Soft Blade from the surrounding walls and rooms of the station. It fought her at first; it was reluctant to abandon its grand project and surrender what it had already subsumed.

  But in the end, it obeyed. The Soft Blade recoiled upon itself, constricting and contracting as it returned to the shape of her body. There was more of it than she needed, and at the thought, ropes of the suit’s material shriveled and turned to dust, leaving nothing useful behind.

  Falconi started to lift his hand again.

  “Wait,” said Kira, and he did.

  Her hearing was returning to normal; she noticed the whistle of escaping air and pressure alarms sounding in the distance, overriding all other alarms.

  “What happened?” said Falconi. She shook her head, still not feeling entirely whole. “You ripped a hole in the hull, nearly spaced us.”

  Kira glanced up and quailed as she saw—directly above them—a thin, dark rift of space showing through the ruined ceiling and several layers of ruptured decks. Stars spun past the opening, a crazed kaleidoscope of constellations, dizzying in their speed.

  “Lost control. Sorry.” She coughed.

  Something clanged against the outside of the dome.

  “Hwa-jung!” he shouted. “We need to be outta here. I mean it!”

  “Aigoo! Stop bothering me!”

  Falconi turned back to Kira. “You good to move?”

  “Think so.” The Soft Blade’s intrusive presence still wormed restless within her mind, but her sense of identity held strong despite.

  From the source of the clang, Kira heard a spitting, hissing noise, like something a congested blowtorch would produce. A spot on the inside of the dome began to glow dull red, then yellow, and almost immediately, she felt the temperature in the space increasing.

  “What is that?” said Nielsen.

  “Shit!” said Sparrow. “The pricks are using a thermal lance!”

  “The heat will kill us!” said Vishal.

  Falconi gestured. “Everyone in the car!”

  “I can stop them!” said Kira, though the thought filled her with fear again. As long as she concentrated upon one area of effort and didn’t let the Soft Blade run amuck … Even as she spoke, she started ripping up the floor within the dome and slapping the pieces onto the glowing hotspot. Fumes shot out sideways from the sections of composite as they turned red and softened.

  “Forget it. We gotta go!” shouted Falconi.

  “Just close the doors. I’ll buy you some time.”

  “Stop fucking around and get in the car! That’s an order.”

  [[Itari here: Idealis, we must leave.]] The Jelly was already crammed into the front end of the car, tentacles pressed against the sides.

  “No! I can hold them off. Let me know when you’re—”

  Falconi grabbed her by the shoulders and twisted her toward him. “Now! I’m not leaving anyone behind. Comeon!” By the burning light, his blue eyes seemed bright as flaming suns.

  At that, Kira relented. She released the dome and allowed him to pull her into the car. Sparrow and Nielsen shoved the maglev door shut; it locked with a loud click.

  “You trying to get yourself killed?” Falconi growled in Kira’s ear. “You’re not invincible.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Stow it. Hwa-jung, we good to go?”

  “Almost, Captain. Almost…”

  Outside the car, a spray of white-hot metal erupted from the center of the glowing spot as the lance burned its way through the full thickness of the dome. The spray started to move downward, slowly cutting one side of a trooper-sized opening.

  “Don’t look at it!” said Sparrow. “It’s too bright. It’ll burn out your retinas.”

  “Hwa-jung—”

  “Ready!” said the machine boss. Kira and everyone else turned to face her. The turret lay in parts between her feet. The power pack had been pried open, and wires led from it into the machinery that filled the car’s undercarriage.

  “Listen to me,” said Hwa-jung. She tapped the power pack. “This is damaged. When I turn it on, it might melt and explode.”

  “We’ll risk it,” said Falconi.

  “There is more.”

  “Not really the time for a lecture right now.”

  “Listen! Aish!” Hwa-jung’s eyes gleamed with the searing light of the thermal lance. “I was able to splice into the feeds for the electromagnets. This thing will lift us, but that is all. I can’t access the directional controls; it won’t move us forward or backward.”

  “Then how—” Nielsen tried to say.

  “Kira, you do this: break off a chair for each of us, and then knock out the windows, there and there.” Hwa-jung pointed at each side of the car. “When I activate the circuit, you use your suit to pull us forward, and we will coast into the main tube. The supercapacitors only have enough charge to keep us suspended for forty-three seconds. We’re going about two hundred and fifty klicks per hour relative to the docking ring. We have to shed as much of that speed as possible before we crash. The way we do that is by sticking the chairs out the windows and pushing them against the walls of the tube. They will act as brakes. Clear?”

  Kira nodded along with the others. Outside, the fountain of molten metal vanished for a second as the thermal lance reached the floor. Then it reappeared at the top of the dripping incision and started to make a horizontal cut.

  “You will have to push very hard,” said Hwa-jung. “As hard as you can. Otherwise the crash will kill us.”

  Kira grabbed the nearest chair and wrenched it off its gimbaled mount with a hollow ping. The next three chairs produced similar sounds. With a quick exchange of scents, she explained what they were doing to Itari, and the Jelly also grabbed a pair of chairs with its coiled limbs.

  “This is some shit-crazy plan, Unni,” said Sparrow.

  Hwa-jung grunted. “It’ll work, punk. You’ll see.”

  “Watch your eyes,” Kira said. Then she lashed out with the Soft Blade and smashed the windows along both sides of the maglev.

  A furnace-blast of heat washed over them from the interior of the half-shell dome. Falconi, Nielsen, Vishal, and the Entropists dropped to the floor, and Falconi said, “Seven hells!”

  The thermal lance started its second downward cut.

  “Get ready,” said Hwa-jung. “Contact in three, two, one.�
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  The floor rose a few centimeters underneath Kira. It listed slightly and then stabilized.

  Lifting her arms, she launched several ropy strands from her fingers, through the shattered windows, and onto the walls outside. The xeno understood her intent, and they stuck, like lines of spider silk, and she pulled.

  The car was heavy, but it slid forward, seemingly without friction. With a soft brushing sound, it passed through the seal at the end of the station and then tilted downward and raced into the dark, rushing tube set within the inner face of the docking ring.

  Wind screamed past them. If not for her mask, Kira would have had difficulty seeing or hearing in the ferocious torrent of air. It was cold too, although—again because of the suit—she wasn’t sure how cold.

  She scooped up one of the loose chairs and stuck it out the nearest window. A horrible screeching split the wind, and a comet’s tail of sparks streamed back along the inside of the tube. The impact nearly tore the chair out of her hands, even with the help of the Soft Blade, but she clenched her teeth and tightened her grip and held it in place.

  Ahead of her, Itari did the same. Behind her, she was dimly aware of the others staggering to their feet. The screeching worsened as Nielsen, Falconi, Vishal, Sparrow, and the Entropists also pressed their chairs against the wall of the tube. The car rocked and chattered like a jackhammer.

  Kira tried to keep track of the seconds, but the noise was too loud, the wind too distracting. It felt as if they weren’t slowing down, though. She leaned on the chair even harder, and it squirmed in her hands like living thing.

  The tube had already ground through the chair’s legs and half of its seat; soon she wouldn’t have anything to hold on to.

  Slowly—far too slowly—she felt her herself growing lighter, and the soles of her feet started to slip. She fixed herself to the floor via the suit and then slung out lines and secured the others so they could keep pushing and wouldn’t drift away.

  The screeching lessened, and the banner of sparks grew shorter and fatter, and soon they began to curl and spiral in elaborate patterns instead of flying straight back.

  Kira had just begun to think they would make it when the electromagnets cut out.