The Lost Star's Sea

by C. Litka

  01

  The soft brassy blue-green sky wrapped around us, airily remote. And yet, it toyed with me - playing about me with a feathery touch. Its immensity and intimacy seemed almost smothering as I stood, magnetically attached to the hull of the Phoenix, my breakfast mug of cha in hand. Hissi was forward, breakfasting off 5,000 kilometers' worth of smashed bugs on the gig's bow. Even in this desert of air, there were bugs, though you'd never know it, standing in its immense silence.

  I sucked down the last of the warm cha and called out, 'Come along, Hissi. Time to get underway.'

  I waited while she leisurely swam up alongside of me, and then followed her down to the small, dim lit control compartment. I fired up the controls, and then the drive rockets, carefully setting our course for the brightest spot in the sky - inwards, towards the islands of the Saraime Principalities.

  As I may've remarked before, there may be bigger fools than I in the Nine Star Nebula. Anything is possible. But it takes a very rare one to follow a half meter long, pea brained, Simla dragon [an objecting hiss from behind me] into the endless Archipelago of the Tenth Star. But I'm one of 'em. All it took was Hissi, accidentally-on-purpose, brushing her tail across my face - the old Siss joke - at the very moment I was making my final decision on what course to follow. While I'm no more superstitious than the next spaceer, I took it as an omen. A telepathic Siss might well know Cin's mind well enough to believe we could be reconciled, in time. And she might've charged Hissi, still in the egg, with the task of leading me to her - somehow. Or so it seemed to me in that moment. And, so delicate was the balance, that it was enough for me to point the Phoenix inwards instead of outwards and fire its rockets.

  It certainly seems foolish enough, but, Neb help me, I had fallen in love with a girl who had fallen in love with me. In a life two centuries long, (that was looking iffy) love can come and go, but she was the first one to love me. I wasn't prepared to accept that love had come and gone in a few weeks. And, well, I'd come to suspect that my original mission was a folly that would likely end badly. Vinden was too central to the movement to be dislodged, especially since he could simply claim that it was Cin, not he, who had installed the trigger to destroy the Starry Shore - which was certainly possible. She hadn't mentioned setting any such device, but then, she might have chosen not to. In any event, neither Vynnia or Tenry were fools, so I could trust them to look after Min - better than I could.

  So, Blade Island was now two ship days astern by the gig's clock. We'd encountered only sky and more sky. Blade Island was truly a dust mote in this sea of soft sunlight. The Phoenix, with its blunt, battered bow and makeshift rudders was far from aerodynamic and even at half its former size, it was still a substantial object to be driven by three landing jets through an atmosphere. Judging from the radar data I recorded leaving Blade Island, we could reach a cruising speed of around 200 kph, so plus or minus any air currents, we may've covered something like 5,000 kilometers during my waking hours. I shut down the rockets and drifted during my short naps, so I may've given a few back to the unseen currents. At any rate, the islands of the Saraime Principalities were still unseen, but (hopefully) somewhere ahead. I'd not encountered any Temtre ships, but they had a good head start and would likely be widely scattered on their way to their usual trade islands, so I wasn't too concerned by the lack of islands. Yet.