To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  The Casaba-Howitzer had exploded. That much she felt sure of. And somehow—somehow—the Seed had salvaged something of her consciousness, and that of Carr and Qwon, from amid the nuclear inferno.

  She was … Kira Navárez. But she was also so much more. She was part Carr, part Qwon, and also part the Seed.

  For a lock seemed to have opened in her mind, and she realized there was a storehouse of knowledge she now had access to—knowledge from the Seed. Knowledge from the time of the Vanished. Only, that wasn’t what they had called themselves. Rather, they thought of themselves as … the Old Ones. Those who had come before.

  In the process of saving her, she and the xeno had finally become fully integrated. But there was more to it, and this too she now understood: there were layers to the Seed’s abilities, and most of them remained walled off, inaccessible until the xeno reached a certain size (which she had now far exceeded).

  So she who had once been just Kira and was now far more, far greater, hung there in the blackness of space, and she thought, and studied, and contemplated the branching possibilities that lay before her. The path had grown tangled as a thicket, but she knew that the Seed’s guiding principle would help guide her, for it was her own principle as well: life was sacred. Every part of their moral code rested upon that fundamental principle. Life was sacred, and it was her duty to protect it and, where reasonable, disseminate it.

  While she pondered, she noticed how the ships in the system arrayed themselves: human on one axis, Wranaui on another, and as much as they kept their weapons aimed at her, they kept an equal amount aimed at each other: two fleets facing off, with her in the middle. The cease-fire was an uneasy one. Even with the death of the great and mighty Ctein, it would take little to reignite the flames of war. The two species had had nothing but the Maw to bind them together and both were, at heart, ruthless, bloodthirsty, and expansionist. That much she knew from her life as Kira, and also from her life as Shoal Leader Nmarhl.

  Then too, she felt responsible for the war. Her that was Carr and Qwon. Her that had been the Maw and its offspring. Her that now floated in orbit around the Cordovan star.

  And she knew that more of her unfortunate offspring moved among the stars, spreading terror, pain, and death among the humans and Wranaui. And her that was Kira felt fear for her family. Nor was that all: she remembered the planet the Maw had infested, an entire sphere of living things, transformed into service of the misguided flesh. Machines there were too, and ships also, and all sorts of dangerous devices.

  The thought distressed her.

  She wanted … peace, in all its forms. She wanted to give the gift of life, that both humans and Wranaui might stand together and breathe air that smelled of green and good and not metal and misery.

  She knew then what she needed to do.

  “Watch, and do not interfere,” she said to the waiting fleets.

  First the most painful part. She drew upon what had been the hidden knowledge of the Seed and transmitted a powerful signal from the system. Not a cry, not a plea, but a command. A killing command, directed at the makings of the Maw. Upon reception, it would unknit the cells of the Corrupted, disassemble their bodies, and reduce them to the organic compounds that comprised them. What the Seed had made, it could unmake.

  A cleansing was necessary, and she could think of no faster way to stop the violence and suffering. The task had fallen to her, and she would not shy from the work, however sorrowful.

  With that done, she formed agents of her flesh and sent them forth to the damaged ships that floated abandoned around the planet the Wranaui had been mining. Other parts of herself she dispatched to the bands of asteroids, with the goal of extracting the materials she needed.

  While the drones pursued their function, she set to work upon the main body of her flesh, restructuring it to fit her intention. Around her core, she formed an armored sphere that served to protect what remained of her original body. From that, she extruded polished black panels designed to absorb every ray of sunlight that struck them. Power. She needed power if she were to accomplish her goal. The Seed had plenty of its own, but not enough for what she had in mind.

  What mind? No mind … She laughed to herself, a quiet song in space.

  Drawing upon the Seed’s banks of encoded knowledge, she began to build the needed machines, constructing them from the atomic level up. With energy gathered from the panels, she sparked a burning sun inside herself: a fusion reactor large enough to drive the biggest UMC battleship. With energy from the artificial star, she started to manufacture antimatter—far more than the inefficient techniques of the humans or the Wranaui allowed for. The Old Ones had mastered the means of antimatter production before either species had even come into being. And with antimatter as fuel, she built a modified torque engine that allowed her to twist the fabric of the universe and siphon energy directly from FTL space. Which was, as she had come to understand, how the Seed powered itself.

  As her agents took possession of the damaged ships, they sometimes found wounded humans or Wranaui forgotten upon the vessels. The wounded often attacked, but she ignored their attacks and tended to their injuries, despite any protestations, before sending the abandoned crew off to their kind in escape pods taken from the ships or that she made herself.

  When the drones returned with ships and stones in tow, Kira devoured the materials they contained—much as the Maw would have—and added them to the structures taking shape around her.

  The watching fleets grew nervous at this, and several of the vessels flashed her with powerful signals in an attempt to talk with her.

  “Wait,” she said. And they did, although both humans and Wranaui retreated even farther, leaving a wide berth of space around her.

  With energy and mass to spare, Kira put all her efforts into construction. The endeavor was not purely mechanical; along with beams and braces and metal girders, she allowed the Seed to create special chambers that it filled with an organic soup—heated bioreactors that began to produce the living materials needed for the finished product: woods stronger than any steel; seeds and buds and eggs and more besides; vines that crawled and clung and could transmit electricity as efficiently as copper cable; fungal superconductors; and a whole ecosystem of flora and fauna drawn from the Seed’s vast experience, and which it and Kira believed would work in a harmonious whole.

  She moved quickly, but her efforts took time. Days passed, and still the fleets sat waiting and watching, and still she built.

  From her central core grew four enormous struts that extended forward, backward, left, and right, so that they made a cross with arms of equal length. She extended the cross, meter after meter, until each strut was three and a half kilometers long and thick enough to fly a cruiser through. Then she set the Seed to joining the tips of the cross with a great equatorial ring, and from the end of each strut, a rib began to grow both up and down and curving inward, as if hugging the surface of an invisible orb.

  The Seed was so large by then that Kira could hardly imagine being confined to a body the size of a human or a Wranaui. Her consciousness encompassed the whole of the structure, and she was aware of every part of it at every moment. It was, she imagined, much how a ship mind must feel. The substance of her self expanded to match the demands of the sensory input, and with that expansion came a breadth of thought she had never before experienced.

  Construction was yet ongoing, but she was no longer willing to wait. Time had grown short indeed. Besides, all who watched could see what she had set out to make: a space station greater in size than any that human or Wranaui had built. Parts of it were metallic grey, but most of it was green and red, reflecting the organic material that made up the bulk of the station. It was a living thing, as much as any person, and Kira knew it would continue to grow and evolve for decades, if not centuries to come.

  But, like all gardens, it needed tending.

  She put her attention into several chambers close to her core, sealed them from the
vacuum, filled them with air hospitable to both humans and Wranaui, gave them gravity suitable for either species, and finished them in a style that seemed fitting. To that end, she combined elements of design from the Wranaui, the Old Ones, and the part of her that was Kira, from each choosing what was most to her liking.

  At her command, a pair of agents brought her the hardened core of what had once been Ctein. The great and mighty Ctein. The Wranaui would not care what happened to it—they were indifferent to bodies—but she did. She took the blackened remnants and again remade the substance of its flesh by converting the leaden pillars into seven shards of gleaming crystal, blue-white and dazzling to behold. Each crystal she set within a different chamber, there to serve as a warning, a remembrance, and a symbol of renewal.

  Then finally she broke her silence. “Admiral Klein, Shoal Leader Lphet, I wish to speak to you. Come. Meet me here. Falconi, you also, and … bring Trig with you.”

  CHAPTER II

  UNITY

  1.

  Kira watched as the three spaceships drew near: the UMCS Unrelenting Force, the SLV Wallfish, and a battle-scarred Wranaui vessel whose name, when translated, was Swift Currents Beneath Silent Waves.

  Each of the ships was massively different in appearance. The Unrelenting Force was long and thick, with numerous hard points along its hull for lasers, missile launchers, and railguns. It was painted a dark, matte grey, which stood in stark contrast to the glittering, silver-laced diamond of its radiators. The Wallfish was far shorter and smaller, stubby even, its hull a familiar brown, scuffed and pitted by years of impacts from micrometeoroids, and with a large hole where the Wranaui had cut into one cargo hold. Like the UMC battleship, the Wallfish had the fins of its radiators deployed, many of which had been broken. Last of all, there was the Wranaui ship, a polished, shell-white orb marred only by a blaster burn smeared across its prow.

  The three ships used RCS thrusters to slow themselves as they approached the docking ports Kira had grown for them. In the velvet background, swarms of her drones flew past, busy as bees. Her attention was as much with them as with her visitors, but Kira couldn’t help but feel a strange tilting sensation in her core.

  Was that unease? It surprised her. Even with everything she had become, she still wondered what Falconi would think of her.

  And not just Falconi. When the airlock to the Wallfish opened, the entire crew came trooping out, including Nielsen—still wearing a bandage around her ribs—and the Entropist, Veera. They brought with them Trig’s cryo tube, mounted on a rolling pallet, which pleased Kira to see.

  The Unrelenting Force disgorged Admiral Klein … and with him an entire troop of UMCN Marines in full power armor. Likewise, a group of armed Wranaui accompanied Lphet as the shoal leader left its ship. Nearscent of concern and curiosity emanated from the graspers. Among them was Itari, and also a single human: Major Tschetter, her expression unreadable as ever.

  “This way,” Kira said, and lit a line of emerald lights down the corridor facing them.

  Both the humans and the Wranaui followed her lead. She watched from the walls and the floors and the ceiling, for she was all of those and more. Falconi looked uncertain of himself, but she was glad to see that he seemed whole and healthy and that his shoulder injury no longer pained him. Klein showed no emotion, but his eyes darted from side to side, watching for anything unexpected.

  Aside from the Marines, all the humans were wearing skinsuits with helmets firmly attached. The Wranaui, as usual, made no concessions to the environment, trusting their current forms to protect them.

  As the visitors entered the presence chamber she had created to receive them, Kira shifted her view back to the flesh she had formed for herself, that Klein, Lphet, and Falconi would have an image of her to look at. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  The chamber was high and narrow, with an arched ceiling and a double row of columns grown of nnar, the coral-like excrescence she knew of from Qwon (and was fond of because). Walls were framed with spars of polished metal, dark grey and adorned with lines of blue that formed patterns of meaning known only to the Old Ones … and now her. Filling the frames were great curving sections of wood and vines and dark-leafed greenery.

  And those were from her that was Kira. Also the flowers that rested in crannies dark and shadowed: drooping flowers, with purple petals and speckled throats. Midnight Constellations, in memory of her home and of Alan—of all that she had once been.

  She had repeated the shape of the flowers on the floor, in fractal spirals that coiled without end. And the sight pleased her, gave her a sense of satisfaction.

  Among the spirals stood one of the crystals she had made of Ctein: a frozen flame of faceted beauty. Life arrested, yet still reaching and yearning.

  A few glowlights hung from the branches of nnar above, ripened fruit pulsing with a soft, golden ambience. In the broken beams of light that reached the floor, pollen swirled like smoke, heavy and fragrant. A trickle of running water sounded amid the pitted columns, but otherwise the chamber was still and silent, sacred.

  Kira made no demands, issued no ultimatums, but Klein spoke a single word to his troops, and the Marines held their position by the arched entryway as the admiral continued forward. Lphet did the same with its guard (including Itari), and human and Wranaui advanced with Major Tschetter and the crew of the Wallfish in tow.

  As they neared the far end of the presence chamber, Kira allowed the glowlights to brighten, banishing the shadows before a rising dawn so they might behold her.

  The visitors stopped.

  She looked down upon them from where her new body lay embedded within the rootlike structure of the wall, green upon green and threaded throughout with the glossy black fibers of the Seed, the wonderous, life-giving Seed.

  “Welcome,” said Kira, and it felt strange to speak with a mouth and tongue. Stranger still to hear the voice that came forth: a voice that was deeper than she remembered and that contained hints and echoes of both Carr and Qwon.

  “Oh, Kira,” said Nielsen. “What have you done?” Through her visor, her expression was one of worry.

  “You okay?” Falconi asked, brows drawn together in his habitual scowl.

  Admiral Klein cleared his throat. “Ms. Navárez—”

  “Welcome,” said Kira, and smiled. Or at least she tried; she wasn’t sure if she remembered how. “I have asked you here, Admiral Klein, and you, Shoal Leader Lphet, to act as representatives for both humans and Jellies.”

  [[Lphet here: I am no longer shoal leader, Idealis.]] And Tschetter translated the Wranaui’s words for the humans listening.

  “How then shall I address you, Lphet?” Kira spoke in both English and nearscent, that all might understand.

  [[Lphet here: As the great and mighty Lphet.]]

  A faint prickle passed along the spines of the station, as a breath of cold wind along Kira’s back. “You have taken the place of Ctein, now that Ctein is dead.” It was not a question.

  The tentacles of the Wranaui flushed red and white and rubbed together in a prideful gesture. [[Lphet here: That is correct, Idealis. Every Arm of the Wranaui is now mine to command.]]

  Admiral Klein shifted his weight. He seemed to be growing impatient. “What is all this about, Navárez? Why have you brought us here? What are you building and why?”

  She laughed slightly, a musical sound similar to the trickle of a mossy creek. “Why? For this that I shall tell you. Humans and Jellies will fight as long as they have no common ground. The nightmares, the Corrupted, provided a shared enemy, but that enemy is now gone.”

  [[Lphet here: Are you sure of that, Idealis?]]

  She understood what Lphet was really asking: Was the Maw truly gone? Was she/it still a threat? “Yes, I can promise you that. The suit I am bonded with, which you know as the Idealis, and you Admiral Klein know as the Soft Blade, shall not cause such problems again. Also, I have sent a command to the Corrupted outside this system. When it reaches them, they will c
ease to be a threat to any living creature.”

  The admiral looked doubtful. “How so? Do you mean—”

  “I mean,” said Kira, her voice echoing above them, “that I have unmade the Corrupted. You no longer need worry about them.”

  “You killed them,” said Nielsen in a subdued tone. The others seemed pleased and troubled in equal measure.

  Kira bent her neck. “There was no other choice. But the issue remains: humans and Jellies will never stay allies without reason. Well, I have provided the reason. I have made this common ground.”

  “This?” said Klein, looking around at the chamber. “This place?”

  She smiled again. The expression was easier the second time. “It is a space station, Admiral. Not a ship. Not a weapon. A home. I made it much as the Old Ones—the Vanished—would have. In their tongue, it would be called Mar Íneth. In ours, it is Unity.”

  “Unity,” said Klein, appearing to chew on the word.

  Kira nodded as best she could. “This is a place for coming together, Admiral. It is a living, breathing thing that will continue to grow and blossom with time. There are rooms fit for humans, and rooms for Jellies. Other creatures will live here also, caretakers that will tend to Unity’s many parts.”

  Tschetter spoke then, on her own. “You want us to use this station as an embassy, is that it?”

  “More than that,” said Kira, “as a hub for our two races. There will be enough space for millions to live here. Maybe more. All who come be welcome as long as they keep the peace. If the idea still gives you unease, then think of this: I have built Unity with means and methods that not even the Jellies understand. I will allow those who stay here to study the station … and to study me. That alone ought to be incentive enough.”

  Admiral Klein seemed troubled. He crossed his arms and sucked on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “And what guarantee do we have that this xeno won’t go rogue again and kill everyone on board?”

  A ripple of purple ran the length of Lphet’s tentacles: an offended response. [[Lphet here: The Idealis has already given their promise, two-form. Your concern is unwarranted.]]