To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  With each wire that she reconnected, Kira felt a brief shock as a small amount of electricity passed from one to the next. It was a sharp, satisfying feeling that left her with the faint taste of copper on her tongue. And sometimes, she thought she detected the ghost of a sensation from a neuron, like a tickle in the back of her mind.

  Despite the microscopic scale she was working on, Kira found connecting the wires relatively easy. What wasn’t easy was the scale of the task. There were thousands upon thousands of wires, and each one had to be checked. After the first few minutes, Kira realized it would take her days to do the work by hand (as it were). Days they didn’t have.

  She wasn’t willing to give up, which meant she had only one chance. Hoping against hope that she wasn’t making a mistake, she fixed her goals in mind—smooth the melted wires, attach them to the closest neurons—and did her best to impress them on the Soft Blade. Then she released her hold on the xeno, as carefully as if she were letting go of a wild animal that might react in an unpredictable manner.

  Please, she thought.

  And the Soft Blade obeyed. It slid along the wires in an atomically thin film, moving metal, pushing aside cells, and realigning wires with dendrites.

  Kira’s awareness of her body (and the growths in her cabin) faded; every bit of her consciousness was divided among the many thousands of monofilaments the xeno was manipulating. At a remove she heard Hwa-jung say, “Forty-five percent!… Forty-seven … Forty-eight…”

  Kira blocked out her voice as she continued to focus on the task at hand. Wires, smooth, attach.

  So many wires were connecting, Kira felt them like a wave of cold and hot prickles washing through her head. Tiny explosions popping off, and with each one a sense of expansion.

  The feeling accumulated, moving faster and faster. And then—

  A curtain swept back in her mind, and a vast vista opened up before her, and Kira sensed a Presence within. If not for her experience with the Soft Blade, the experience would have been overwhelming, unbearable—a behemoth weighing upon her from all sides.

  She gasped and would have recoiled, but she found she couldn’t move.

  Vishal and Hwa-jung were making noises of alarm, and the doctor said, as if from a great distance, “Ms. Kira! Stop! Whatever you’re doing, it’s upsetting his neurotr—”

  His voice faded away, and all Kira was aware of was the immensity surrounding her. *Gregorovich,* she said, but no response was forthcoming. She pressed harder, attempting to project herself: *Gregorovich! Can you hear me?*

  Distant thoughts swirled far above—thunderheads beyond reach and too large to comprehend. Then, lightning crashed and:

  A ship rattled around her, and stars spun outside. Fire streamed from her left flank: a meteoroid strike near the main generator.…

  Flashes. Screams. A howling across the sky. Below, a tortured landscape of smoke and fire rose toward her. Too fast. Couldn’t slow down. Emergency chutes failed.

  Darkness for unremembered time. Gratitude and disbelief at continued existence: the ship should have exploded. Ought to have. Perhaps would have been better. Seven of the crew still alive, seven out of twenty-eight.

  Then a slow agony of days. Hunger and starvation for her charges and then, to one and all, death. And for her, worse than death: isolation. Loneliness, utter and absolute. A queen of infinite space, bound within a nutshell, and plagued by such dreams as to make her scream and scream and scream.…

  The memory began anew, repeating as a computer frozen in a logic loop, unable to break out, unable to reboot. *You’re not alone,* Kira shouted into the storm, but she might as well have been trying to catch the attention of the earth or the sea or the universe at large. The Presence took no note of her. Again she tried. Again she failed. Instead of words, she tried emotions: comfort, companionship, sympathy, and solidarity, and—underlying it all—a sense of urgency.

  None of it made any difference, or at least none Kira could tell.

  She called out again, but still, the ship mind didn’t notice, or noticed but refused to answer, and the lowering thunderheads remained. Twice more she attempted to contact Gregorovich, with the same results.

  She felt like screaming. There was nothing else she could do. Wherever the ship mind had buried himself, it was beyond her reach or the reach of the Soft Blade.

  And time—time grew short.

  At last the Soft Blade ceased its labors, and though she was reluctant to do so, Kira extricated the suit’s tendrils from the innermost parts of Gregorovich’s brain and carefully withdrew. The curtain in her mind drew shut as contact broke, and the Presence vanished also, leaving her once again alone with her alien consort, the Soft Blade.

  …

  4.

  Kira swayed as she opened her eyes. Dizzy, she braced herself against the cold metal of the sarcophagus.

  “What happened, Ms. Kira?” said Vishal, coming over to her. Behind him, Hwa-jung watched with concern. “We tried to wake you, but nothing we did worked.”

  Kira wet her tongue, feeling displaced. “Gregorovich?” she croaked.

  The machine boss answered: “His readings are normal again.”

  Relieved, Kira nodded. Then she pushed herself off the sarcophagus. “I repaired his implants. You can probably see that. But the weirdest things happened.…”

  “What, Ms. Kira?” Vishal asked, leaning in, brow pinched.

  She tried to find the words. “The Soft Blade, it connected my brain to his.”

  Vishal’s eyes widened. “No. A direct neural link?!”

  Kira nodded again. “I wasn’t trying to. The xeno just did it. For a while, we had a … a…”

  “A hive mind?” said Hwa-jung.

  “Yeah. Like the Entropists.”

  Vishal clucked his tongue as he helped Kira to her feet. “Forming a hive mind with a ship mind is very dangerous for an unaugmented human, Ms. Kira.”

  “I know. Good thing I’m augmented,” said Kira wryly. She tapped the fibers on her arm to make her meaning clear.

  Hwa-jung said, “Were you able to talk with him at all?”

  Kira frowned, troubled by the memory. “No. I tried, but ship minds are…”

  “Different,” Hwa-jung supplied.

  “Yes. I knew that, but I never really understood just how different.” She handed back the headphones. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t reach him.”

  Vishal took the headphones from Hwa-jung. “I am sure you did your best, Ms. Kira.”

  Had she? Kira wondered.

  Then the doctor plugged the headphones back into the sarcophagus. In response to Kira and Hwa-jung’s questioning looks, he said, “I will try to talk with Gregorovich in a more normal manner, yes? Maybe now he will be able to communicate.”

  “You still have him isolated from the rest of the ship?” Kira asked, guessing the answer.

  Hwa-jung made an affirmative noise. “Until we know he isn’t a threat to the Wallfish, we keep him like this.”

  They waited while Vishal tried several times to contact Gregorovich. After repeating the same few phrases for a minute, the doctor unplugged from the sarcophagus and sighed. “There is still no response I can understand.”

  Disappointed, Kira said, “I’ll tell Falconi.”

  Vishal held up a hand. “Wait a few minutes, please, Ms. Kira. I think it would be most helpful to run some tests. Until I do, I cannot say with confidence what Gregorovich’s condition is. Now, both of you shoo. You are crowding my space.”

  “Okay,” said Kira.

  She and Hwa-jung retreated into the hallway outside the small room while they waited for the doctor to finish his tests.

  Kira’s mind was still whirling from the experience. She felt as if she’d been the one turned inside out. Unable to stand still, she paced up and down the hall while Hwa-jung squatted with her back against the wall, arms crossed and chin tucked.

  “I don’t know how he does it,” said Kira.

  “Who?”

  �
��Gregorovich. There’s so much in his head. I don’t know how he can process it all, much less interact with us.”

  A slow shrug from Hwa-jung. “Ship minds find amusement in strange places.”

  “I can believe that.” Kira stopped pacing and squatted next to Hwa-jung. The machine boss looked down at her, impassive. Kira rubbed her hands and thought about the things Gregorovich had said to her back at Sol, and specifically how he’d envied the ship mind who painted landscapes. She said, “What are you going to do when all of this is over, if we survive? Go back to Shin-Zar?”

  “If my family needs me, I will help. But I will not live on Shin-Zar again. That time has passed.”

  Then Kira thought about the Entropists’ offer of sanctuary at their headquarters by Shin-Zar. She still had their token sitting in the desk of her cabin, covered by a layer of the Soft Blade’s growths. “What’s it like on Shin-Zar?”

  “It depends,” said Hwa-jung. “Shin-Zar is a big planet.”

  “What about where you grew up?”

  “I lived in different places.” The other woman stared down at her crossed arms. After a moment, she said, “My family settled in the hills by a mountain range. Ah, it was so tall, so pretty.”

  “Were asteroids much of a problem? I saw a documentary about Tau Ceti that said the system has a lot more rocks flying around than, say, Sol.”

  Hwa-jung shook her head. “We had a shelter deep in the stone. But we only used it once, when there was a bad storm. Our defense force destroys most of the asteroids before they get close to Shin-Zar.” She looked over her arms at Kira. “That is why our military is so good. We get lots of practice shooting things, and if we miss, we die.”

  “The air is breathable there, right?”

  “Earth-norm humans need extra oxygen.” The machine boss tapped herself on the sternum. “Why do you think we have such big lungs? In two hundred years, there will be enough oxygen for even narrow people like you. But for now, we must have big chests to breathe well.”

  “And have you been to the Nova Energium?”

  “I have seen it. I have not been inside.”

  “Ah.… What do you think of the Entropists?”

  “Very smart, very educated, but they meddle where they shouldn’t.” Hwa-jung uncrossed her arms and hung them over the tops of her knees. “They always say they will leave Shin-Zar if we join the League; it is one reason we haven’t. They bring lots of money to the system, and they have lots of friends in the governments, and their discoveries give our ships advantages over the UMC.”

  “Huh.” Kira’s knees were starting to ache from the squatting. “Do you miss your home, where you grew up?”

  Hwa-jung rapped the knuckles of one fist against the deck. “Really, you ask a lot of questions. So nosy!”

  “Sorry.” Kira looked back in at Vishal, embarrassed.

  Hwa-jung muttered something in Korean. Then in a quiet voice, she said: “Yes, I miss it. The problem was my family did not approve of me, and they did not like the people I liked.”

  “But they take your money.”

  The tips of Hwa-jung’s ears turned red. “They are my family. It is my duty to help. Do you not understand that? Seriously…”

  Abashed, Kira said, “I understand.”

  The machine boss turned away. “I could not do what they wanted, but I do what I can. Perhaps one day it will be different. Until then … it is what I deserve.”

  From farther down the hallway, Sparrow said, “You deserve better.” She walked over to where they sat and put a hand on Hwa-jung’s shoulder. The machine boss softened and leaned her head against Sparrow’s hip. The small, short-haired woman smiled down at Hwa-jung and kissed the top of her head. “Come on. If you keep frowning like that, you’ll turn into an ajumma.”

  Hwa-jung made a harsh noise in the back of her throat, but her shoulders relaxed, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled. “Punk,” she said in an affectionate tone.

  Vishal came back out of the ship-mind room at that moment. He seemed surprised to see the three of them in the middle of the corridor.

  “Well? What’s the prognosis, Doc?” said Sparrow.

  He made a helpless gesture. “The prognosis is that we wait and hope, Ms. Sparrow. Gregorovich seems healthy, but it will take him time to adjust to the changes in his implants, I think.”

  “How much time?” Hwa-jung asked.

  “I could not say.”

  Kira had doubts of her own. If Gregorovich’s mental state didn’t improve, it wouldn’t matter if his implants were working or not. “Can I tell the captain?”

  “Yes, please,” said Vishal. “I will send my report to him later, with the details of the tests.”

  The others dispersed then, but Kira remained where she was while she put a call through to Falconi. It didn’t take long for her to bring him up to date.

  Afterward, Kira said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. I tried, I really tried to get through to him, but…”

  “At least you made the effort,” said Falconi.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’m glad you did. Now go get some rest. We don’t have much time.”

  “Will do. Night, Salvo.”

  “Night, Kira.”

  Discouraged, Kira slowly made her way back to her cabin. Falconi was right. They didn’t have much time. She’d be lucky to get even six hours of sleep at this point. It would be pills for sure in the morning. She couldn’t afford to be groggy when they attacked the Battered Hierophant.

  The door closed behind her with a cold clink. She felt the sound in her heart, and it struck her with the knowledge of the fast-approaching inevitable.

  Kira tried not to think about what they were about to do, but that proved to be an impossibility. She’d never wanted to be a soldier, and yet here they were, flying into the heart of a battle, about to attack the greatest Jelly of them all.…

  “If you could see me now,” she murmured, thinking of her parents. She thought they would be proud. She hoped so, at least. They wouldn’t approve of the killing, but they would approve of her and the crew trying to protect others. That, above all else, they would consider worthwhile.

  Alan would have agreed also.

  She shivered.

  At her command, the Soft Blade cleared the desk and chair in her cabin. Kira sat, turned on the console with a tap of her finger, started it recording.

  “Hey Mom, Dad. Sis. We’re about to attack the Jellies out at Cordova-Fourteen-Twenty. Long story, but in case things don’t work out, I wanted to send you this. I don’t know if my previous message reached you, so I’m including a copy with this one.”

  With short, clear sentences, Kira recounted their ill-fated visit to Sol and the reasons for now agreeing to help the Knot of Minds.

  She finished by saying: “Again, I don’t know what’s going to happen here. Even if we make it out of this, the UMC is going to want me back. Either way, I won’t be seeing Weyland again any time soon.… I’m sorry. I love you all. If I can, I’ll try to get another message to you, but it might not be for a while. Hope you’re safe. Bye.” And she touched her fingers to her lips and pressed them against the camera.

  As Kira ended the recording, she allowed herself one breath of grief, one hiccupping gulp of air that formed a fist of pain in her chest before she let it out, all of it.

  Calm was good. Calm was necessary. She needed calm.

  She had Morven forward the message to the Seventh Fleet, and then she shut down the console and went to the sink. A splash of cold water on her face, and she stood blinking, letting the droplets roll down her cheeks. Then she removed her rumpled jumpsuit, willed the Soft Blade to dim its lights, and got under the frayed blanket on the bed.

  It required a serious effort of will not to pull up her overlays and check on what was happening throughout the system. If she did, Kira knew she would never sleep.

  So she remained in the dark and worked to keep her breathing slow and her muscles soft while she imagined s
inking through the mattress and into the deck.…

  She did all those things, and yet sleep continued to elude her. Words and thoughts could not erase the nearness of danger, and because of it, her body refused to accept the lie of safety—would not relax, would not allow her mind to do anything but keep watch against the fanged creatures that instinct insisted must be lurking in the surrounding shadows.

  In a few hours she might be dead. They all might. Finito. Kaput. Done and done. No respawning. No do-overs. Dead.

  Kira’s heart began to jackhammer as a slug of adrenaline hit, more potent than any rotgut. She gasped and bolted upright, clutching at her chest. A deep, wounded groan escaped her, and she hunched over, struggling to breathe.

  Around her, dark whispering sounded as thousands of needle-sharp spines sprouted from the walls of the cabin.

  She didn’t care. None of it mattered, only the ice water pooling in her gut and the pain stabbing at her heart.

  Dead. Kira wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. Not for a long, long, long time. Preferably never. But there was no escaping it. No escaping what tomorrow would bring.…

  “Gaaah!”

  She was afraid, more afraid than she’d ever been. And what made it worse was knowing that there was nothing that could fix the situation. Everyone in the Wallfish was strapped to an express rocket heading straight toward their doom, and there was no getting off early unless they wanted to grab a blaster and put it against their temples, pull the trigger, and ride the short trip to oblivion.

  Had Gregorovich’s dark dreams infected her mind? Kira didn’t know. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered—not really—except the terrifying pit yawning before her.

  Unable to hold still any longer, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed. If only Gregorovich were there to message with. He would understand.

  She shivered and sent a thought to the Soft Blade that activated the light-producing nodules along the corners of the room. A dim green glow brightened the bristling space.

  Kira gulped for air, struggling to get enough. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about. Don’t … She let her gaze roam across the room in an attempt to distract herself.