To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  She was alone now. She and the Seed, and a ship of angry Jellies surrounding them, and the great and mighty Ctein ahead.

  The corner of Kira’s mouth twitched. If through some miracle they survived—if the human race survived—there were going to be some interesting xenobiology courses taught about her experiences. She just wished she’d be there to see them.

  She’d cut her way halfway through the floor of the shaft when the Hierophant tilted like an unhinged seesaw. The walls rattled, and Kira heard an alarming number of pops and hisses. The lights went out, only to be replaced by emergency backups, dim and red. A half-dozen fingers of high-pressure vapor erupted from the walls, marking the locations of ruptured pressure lines.

  Up and down the length of the shaft, Kira saw jagged holes in the paneling—holes that hadn’t been there before. Some were no bigger than a fingernail; others were the size of her head.

  The receiver in her ear crackled. * … copy. I repeat, meatbag, do you read me?*

  “Gregorovich?!” she said, hardly believing.

  *Indeed. You need to hurry, meatbag. The nightmares are closing in. One of them just took out a Jelly ship. The Hierophant got hit by the debris. It seems to have disrupted their jamming.*

  “One of our Jellies?”

  *Fortunately, no.*

  She resumed digging into the floor below her. “The others are hunkered down one deck back. Any chance you can help them return to the Wallfish?”

  *We are already in close consultation,* said Gregorovich. *Options are being discussed, plans being outlined, contingencies being considered.*

  Kira grunted as she tore loose a support beam. A slug ricocheted off her side from farther down the transport shaft; she ignored it. “’K. Let me know if they get off the ship.”

  *Affirmative. Give ’em hell, Varunastra.*

  “Roger that,” she said from between gritted teeth. “Giving ’em hell.”

  More slugs, laser blasts, and projectiles began to slam into her as a seething pool of Jellies gathered at the end of the shaft. The sides of the Soft Blade were thick enough that Kira paid them no mind. She’d cannibalized enough of her immediate surroundings to make her effectively immune to small-arms fire. The Jellies would have to bring in something a lot bigger if they wanted to hurt her.

  The thought gave her a measure of satisfaction.

  Down through the floor of the shaft, down through a room that glowed dull red and was filled with transparent tubing sloshing with water and large enough for the Jellies to swim through, and then down through the floor of the room and into the final deck. Finally. Kira bared her teeth. Ctein was close now: just a short way ahead of her.

  The level she’d arrived on was dark purple, and there were patterned lines on the walls that reminded her of the designs from Nidus. Echoes of the Vanished, repurposed by the graspers who neither knew nor cared for the significance of the artifacts they’d found.

  The disgust Kira felt was not her own; it came from the Seed, a disapproval strong enough to make her wish to deface the walls, to cleanse them of their arrogant, ignorant, garbled reproductions.

  She flew forward, clearing doors with slashes too fast to see, killing Jellies with jabs and twists, letting nothing stop or slow her. She might have gotten lost, but ahead of her a thick bank of nearscent swelled, and she recognized it as Ctein’s: a scent of hate and wrath and impatience and … satisfaction?

  Before Kira could make sense of it, she came upon a circular door that stood a full ten meters high. Unlike every other door she’d seen on the Jelly ships, it was made not of shell but of metal and composite and ceramics and other materials she didn’t recognize. It was white, and banded with concentric circles of gold, copper, and what might have been platinum.

  Seven stationary guns were mounted around the frame of the door. And hanging on the walls by the guns were at least a hundred Jellies of all different sizes and shapes.

  Kira never hesitated. She dove straight toward them while letting the Soft Blade yank up the bulkhead in front of her, sending black needles jabbing toward the guns, and throwing a thousand different threads through the air—each one seeking flesh.

  The mounted weapons exploded in a roll of deafening thunder. The room seemed to grow quiet around Kira as the xeno dulled the sound. A dozen or more projectiles slammed into her, some of them breaking or puncturing parts of the suit, with accompanying lashes of not-pain.

  It was a valiant effort on the part of the defending Jellies. But Kira had learned too much, and she had grown too confident. Their efforts were nowhere near enough to stop her. A half second later, she felt the tips of the needles tickle the mounted guns, and then she was stabbing through them, destroying the machinery.

  The muscles, bones, and carapaces of the Jellies posed no more of a challenge. For a handful of frenzied seconds, she felt their flesh—felt her blades piercing their insides, soft and giving and quivering with trauma. It was intimate and obscene, and although it sickened her, she never stopped, never slowed.

  Kira withdrew the Soft Blade then. The area before the circular door was a cloud of misted ichor and mangled bodies: a massacre all her own doing.

  A sense of uncleanliness filled her. Shame too, and a quick, sharp yearning for forgiveness. Kira had never been religious, but she felt as if she had sinned, same as when she’d inadvertently created the Maw.

  What else was she supposed to do, though? Allow the graspers to kill her?

  She didn’t have time to think about it. Propelling herself forward, she grasped the door with tendrils extended in every direction. Then, with a shout and a heave, she tore apart the massive structure and threw the parts aside so they crashed into walls and dented bulkheads.

  14.

  Pungent nearscent assaulted Kira, stronger than any she’d smelled before. She gagged and blinked, eyes watering behind the suit’s mask.

  Before her was a huge, spherical room. An island of crusted rock rose from what would have been the floor when the Battered Hierophant was under thrust. Surrounding the island—enveloping it, encasing it, subsuming it—was a vast orb of water, midnight blue and flexing like a great, mirrored soap bubble. And there, in the center of the orb, mounted atop the crusted island, was the great and mighty Ctein.

  The creature looked like a nightmare, in both senses of the word. A tangle of tentacles—each mottled grey and red—sprouted from a heavy, corpulent body studded with random growths of orange carapace. Hundreds, no … thousands of blue-rimmed eyes lay within the upper half of Ctein’s folded flesh, and they rolled toward her with a collective glare powerful enough to make Kira quail.

  Great and mighty indeed, Ctein was enormous. Bigger than a house. Bigger than a blue whale. Bigger even than the Wallfish, and more massive too, as it was solid through and through. The size of the monster was difficult for Kira to comprehend. She’d never seen a creature so huge except in movies or games. It was far larger than she remembered from her dreams, the result, no doubt, of Ctein’s ceaseless gluttony through the centuries since.

  There was more. With the expanded vision the Soft Blade granted her, Kira saw what seemed to be a miniature sun burning inside the heart of Ctein’s shapeless mass—a steady-state explosion desperate to escape its hardened shell. A gleaming pearl of destruction.

  She flipped to visible light and then back to infrared. In visible light, nothing unusual appeared; Ctein’s body was the same dark grey-red that she remembered from ages past. But in infrared, it burned, it glowed, it shimmied and shined. It glistered.

  In short, it looked as if the Jelly had a goddamn fusion reactor embedded within itself.

  Kira felt tiny, insignificant, and severely outmatched. Her courage nearly failed. Despite everything the Soft Blade had done, she had difficulty imagining it could equal the might of Ctein. The creature was no dumb animal either. It was cunning as any ship mind, and its intelligence had allowed it to dominate the Jellies for centuries.

  Knowing that filled Kira with doubt,
and the doubt caused her to hesitate.

  Rooted on the floor around Ctein’s rocky perch was a goodly portion of the Abyssal Conclave—barnacle-like shells mottled with greens and oranges and with the many-jointed arms of their occupants waving in the currents. Waving and wailing in a hellish din that, to Kira’s human ears, sounded like a chorus of tortured souls. To the grasper in her, to Nmarhl, it sounded like home, and memories of the Plaintive Verge flooded her mind.

  Then the overwhelming stench of nearscent changed from satisfaction to amusement. And from the nightmare creature emanated a single, apocalyptic statement:

  [[Ctein here: I see you.]]

  At that moment, Kira knew her hesitation had been a mistake. She called upon the Soft Blade, coiling it like a great spring as she prepared to strike and end Ctein.

  But she was too slow. Far too slow.

  A clawed arm unfolded from along the Jelly’s equator, and it plucked a dark slab of something from the top of its carapace. And it aimed the slab at her—

  Shit. The object was a massive railgun, a weapon large enough to be mounted on the prow of a cruiser, powerful enough to punch a hole through an entire UMC battleship. She was dead. No time to run, no place to hide. She just wished—

  Two things happened, one after the other, so quickly that Kira barely had time to register the sequence of events: the suit shifted around her, expanding outward, and

  BANG!

  The deck rippled underneath her, and there was a sound so loud, all went silent. Across the chamber, a bubble of sparkling green flame erupted from the side of the curving wall, and a pressure wave raced through the orb of water, crushing the Abyssal Conclave and uprooting the great and mighty Ctein from its ancient throne. The creature’s tentacles thrashed, but to no avail.

  The bulkhead to Kira’s right vanished, and she heard the scream of escaping air. Before she could react, the wall of frothing water slammed into her.

  It hit with the force of a raging tsunami. The impact tore off all of her tendrils and feelers—tore the main part of the suit away from the rest of its mass and sent her and it tumbling into the glowing whiteness of outer space.

  *Kira!* Falconi shouted.

  CHAPTER VI

  SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS

  1.

  Space was white?

  Kira ignored the obvious inconsistency. First things first. She willed the Soft Blade to stabilize their flight, and it responded with puffs of gas along her shoulders and hips. Her spin slowed, and within seconds the receding hull of the Battered Hierophant occupied a single location within her vision.

  A huge chunk had been torn from the side of the Hierophant; whatever had hit the ship had blasted through most of the decks on the aft section. Another Casaba-Howitzer?

  She could feel the orphaned pieces of the Soft Blade still within the Hierophant, separate from her and yet connected. Afraid of what might happen if she lost them for good, Kira drew on them with her mind. And they began to stir, worming their way through the structure of the ship.

  She glanced around. Yup, space was white. She dropped the infrared. Still white. And glowing. But not glowing as brightly as it should have been if she were in the open, in direct line of sight with the nearby sun.

  Then her brain clicked, and she got it. She was inside a cloud of smoke meant to defend the Hierophant against incoming lasers. Good for the ship, inconvenient for her. Even with visible light, she could only see about twenty meters in any given direction.

  *Kira!* Falconi shouted again.

  “Still alive. You okay?”

  *I’m fine. One of the nightmares just rammed the Hierophant. It—*

  “Shit!”

  *You said it. We’re making our way to the Wallfish. The Jellies seem to be ignoring us at the moment. Their fleet has the rest of the nightmares tied up, but we don’t have a whole lot of time. Tschetter says Ctein is still alive. You gotta kill that Jelly, and fast.*

  “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

  Kira swallowed hard, doing her best to tamp down her fear of Ctein. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Besides, there were worse threats approaching. The nightmares. The Maw.

  She’d never been so scared. Her hands and feet were ice cold, despite the best efforts of the Soft Blade to keep her warm, and her heart was pounding painfully fast. Didn’t matter. Keep going. Don’t stop moving.

  Kira switched back to infrared and used the xeno to hold herself in place while she scanned up, down, and around. Ctein was big as hell, so where the hell was it? The chamber they had been ejected from was visible as a shadowed cavity deep within the bowels of the Hierophant, a husk now empty of its monstrous fruit. Like her, Ctein might have been blown away from the ship, but she had a suspicion the Jelly had attitude jets hidden somewhere in its bulk. If Ctein had flown around the curve of the Hierophant’s hull … the alien would take a long time to find in the swirling cloud. Too long, in fact. The Hierophant had kilometers and kilometers of surface area.

  “Gregorovich,” she said, continuing to scan. “You see anything out here?”

  *Alas, the Wallfish is still lodged in the Hierophant. My sensors are blocked.*

  “Check with Tschetter. Maybe the Knot—”

  A bar of smoke-free space, half a meter across, flashed in front of her. It ran straight from the horizon of the Hierophant’s hull, past her chest, and continued on into deep space. A mass of swirling curlicues expanded through the smoke, pressing it outward, and the glow of transferred heat spread through the haze.

  Kira swore. At her command, the xeno reversed their course and shoved her toward the damaged ship. They were an easy target, hanging out in the open. She had to get to cover before—

  From behind the curve of the Battered Hierophant, an enormous tentacle emerged, twisting and grasping with malevolent intent. In infrared, the tentacle was a tongue of fire, its suckers incandescent craters, its skeletal interior a flexible column of white-hot ingots stacked end to end, bright within the translucent flesh. Cilia lined the last third of the limb, each snakelike structure several meters long and seemingly possessed of its own restless intelligence, for they moved and waved and knotted independent of their neighbors. A second tentacle joined the first, and then a third and a fourth as the rest of the gigantic Ctein hove into view.

  The skin of the Jelly had changed: it was smooth and colorless now, as if coated with pewter paint. Armor of some kind, she supposed. Worse yet, the creature still held the ship-sized railgun with its clawed arm.

  Kira shouted into the void as she urged the Soft Blade on even faster. She jetted back among the exposed decks of the Hierophant, but just when she began to relax slightly, Ctein’s multifarious shadow eclipsed her and the monster fired its weapon.

  The blast hit her with numbing force and sent her tumbling into a bulkhead.

  But she was still alive.

  The xeno had poofed out around her, like a giant black balloon, covering her whole body, including her head, though it didn’t block her vision any more than the mask had. She could feel structures within the balloon: complicated matrices of fibers and rods and plastic-like filling—all of which the Soft Blade had manufactured in a mere fraction of a second.

  Another explosion went off in her face, jarring her so hard, it left her dazed. This time she felt the suit counter the incoming projectile with an explosion of its own, diverting the deadly spray of metal to either side, leaving her untouched.

  With a hint of astonishment, Kira realized the xeno had constructed some form of reactive armor, similar to what the military used on their vehicles.

  She would have laughed if she’d had the chance.

  There was no telling how long the Soft Blade could keep her safe, and she had no intention of staying to find out. She couldn’t go head-to-head with Ctein. Not while it was armed. The only way she could fight was to duck and run and wait for the Jelly to run out of ammo. That or find a way to close with it so she could use the Soft Blade to tear it apart.

&
nbsp; Stabbing out a hand (it moved but stayed hidden within the balloon), she formed a cable and launched it toward a shelf of half-melted beams several meters above her head. The cable struck and stuck, and she hauled on it with all her strength, slinging herself up and out of the pit blasted into the side of the Hierophant. At the lip of the crater, she released the first line, threw out a second one, caught the hull, and pulled, converting upward momentum into forward momentum. As she soared over the anchor point for the line, she sent forth another one ahead of her, and then another and another, dragging herself across the hull until she was hidden from the Jelly.

  The monster followed. The last she saw of it, Ctein was leaping after her, its limbs rippling with hypnotic grace.

  Kira grimaced and tried to pull harder on the latest cable. But she was already at the limits of what her body and the xeno were capable of.

  As she flew around the side of the Hierophant, like a tetherball around a pole, Kira had a thought. An idea.

  She didn’t stop to consider practicality or likelihood of success; she merely acted and hoped—blindly hoped—that what she was doing would work.

  Sending out several more cables, she yanked herself to a stop beside a jagged rent a piece of shrapnel had torn through the hull. She collapsed the balloon around her and converted the material into tentacles of her own. With them, she grabbed sections of upturned hull and sliced them free.

  Each chunk was slightly over a meter thick, most of that thickness being thin layers of composite sandwiched with what looked like a metallic foam. Exactly as she’d hoped. As with human ships, the outer hull of the Hierophant had a Whipple shield to protect it against impacts from space debris. If the armor could stop micrometeoroids, then enough layers ought to be able to stop the projectile from a kinetic weapon like the railgun.