To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  Everyone glanced at her as she entered Control, and then they returned their attention to the holo projected over the central table. Filling the holo was a model of the system they’d just entered.

  Kira leaned against the edge of the table as she studied the image. Seven planets nested around the small, dim star: one gas giant and six terrestrial. The rocky planets were crammed in close to the star. The farthest one out orbited at only .043 AU. Then there was a gap and a sparse asteroid field, and the gas giant at .061 AU. Closer to the star—Bughunt—a second, thinner band of debris occupied the space between the second and third planets.

  A chill of recognition crawled down Kira’s spine. She knew this place. She’d seen it before, in her dreams, and more; her other flesh, the Soft Blade, had walked among those planets many times in the far distant past.

  With recognition, she also felt vindication. She hadn’t imagined or misinterpreted where they needed to go, and the Soft Blade hadn’t deluded her. She’d been right about the location of the Staff of Blue … assuming it was still in the system after all these years.

  The Darmstadt and the Wallfish were both marked in the holo with bright icons, but Kira also saw a third icon, near the Markov Limit, which—because of the low mass of the star and the compact orbits of the planets—was about two days’ thrust at 1 g from Bughunt (assuming one intended to slow to a stop; otherwise it would only take a day and a half).

  “What’s that?” she said, pointing at the icon.

  Falconi said, “The Darmstadt dropped a relay beacon as soon as it popped out of FTL. That way, if something happens to us, we might still be able to get a signal out.”

  Made sense, although it would take a long time to get a signal back to the League. The faster an FTL signal, the weaker it was. One strong enough to make it all the way to 61 Cygni in a coherent form would be even slower than a spaceship like the Wallfish. She’d have to check the numbers, but it could be years before the signal arrived.

  Falconi gestured at the holo. “We’re picking up evidence of structures throughout the system.”

  Even under the Soft Blade, Kira felt goosebumps erupt across her body. Finding the xeno and now this? It was what she had dreamed about when she was a kid; of making discoveries as big and important as the Great Beacon on Talos VII. The circumstances weren’t what she would have wished for, but even so—if humanity survived the war with the Jellies and the nightmares, the things they could learn!

  She cleared her throat. “Any currently … active?”

  “Hard to tell. Doesn’t seem like it.” Falconi zoomed in on the band of debris between the second and third planets. “Check this out. Gregorovich, tell them what you told me.”

  The ship mind answered directly: “The composition of the flotsam seems to indicate it’s artificial. It contains an unusually high percentage of metals, as well as other materials that, based off albedo if nothing else, cannot be natural in origin.”

  “All that?” said Kira, amazed. The amount of stuff was staggering. There was an entire lifetime’s worth of study here. Several lifetimes’.

  Hwa-jung altered the view of the holo as she studied it. “Maybe it was a Dyson ring.”

  “I didn’t think any material was strong enough to make a ring that big,” said Vishal.

  Hwa-jung shook her head. “Does not have to be a solid ring. Could be lots of satellites or stations put all around the star. See?”

  “Ah.”

  Nielsen said, “How old do you think it is?”

  “Old,” whispered Gregorovich. “Very, very old.”

  An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Then Trig said, “What do you think happened to the aliens here? A war?”

  “Nothing good, I’m sure,” said Falconi. He looked at Kira. “You’re going to have to tell us where to go. We could spend forever wandering around, looking for the staff.”

  Kira studied the projection. No answer jumped to mind. The xeno didn’t seem willing or able to tell her. It had helped them find the system; now it seemed they were on their own.

  When she had been silent for a while, Falconi said, “Kira?” He was starting to sound worried.

  “Give me a minute.”

  She thought. Most of the memories the Soft Blade had showed her of the staff had seemed to take place on or around one of the planets in the system. A brownish planet, with bands of circling clouds …

  There. The fourth planet. It had the color, it had the clouds, and it was in Bughunt’s habitable zone, if just barely. She checked: no evidence of an orbiting station. Oh well. That didn’t mean anything. It could have been destroyed.

  She highlighted the planet. “I can’t tell you the exact location, but this is where we should start.”

  “You sure?” Falconi asked. She gave him a look, and he raised his hands. “Okay, then. I’ll let Akawe know. What are we searching for? Cities? Buildings?”

  She continued the list for him: “Monuments, statues, public works. Basically anything artificial.”

  “Got it.”

  The walls seemed to twist around them as Gregorovich adjusted their course.

  “Captain,” said Nielsen, getting to her feet. If anything, she looked worse than before. “I’m going to…”

  He nodded. “I’ll let you know if there’s news.”

  The first officer crossed her arms, as if cold, and left the control room.

  For a minute, no one else talked as Falconi had a one-sided conversation with the Darmstadt. Then he grunted and said, “Alright, we have a plan. Kira, we’re going to feed you images of the planet’s surface. We need you to look at it, see if you can figure out where to land. The planet is tidally locked with Bughunt—they all are—but maybe we’ll get lucky with the side facing us. Meantime, we’re going to head for the asteroid belt. Looks like there’s plenty of ice flying around, so we can crack some hydrogen and refill our tanks.”

  Kira looked at Vishal. “I’ll need a new set of contacts. The suit disappeared mine on the way here.”

  The doctor pushed himself out of his chair. “Come with me then, Ms. Kira.”

  As she followed him to sickbay, Kira couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease and displacement at how far they were from the League. Not only that, it was alien territory, even if the aliens were long dead.

  The Vanished, she thought, remembering the term from the Jelly ship. But vanished to where? And were the makers of the Soft Blade members of the Jellies or the nightmares or some other, older species?

  She hoped they would find the answers on the planet.

  In sickbay, Vishal gave her another set of contacts, and she said, “Can you print up another few pairs? I’ll probably lose these on the way back.”

  “Yes, yes.” He bobbed his head. “Do you still need your nose to be reset, Ms. Kira? I can do it now. Just—” He held his hands parallel and made a short jerking motion. “—schk and it will be done.”

  “No, it’s okay. Later.” She didn’t want to deal with the pain at the moment. And besides, she felt a certain reluctance to do anything to fix her nose, although if asked, she couldn’t have said why.

  2.

  Back in the galley, Kira made herself some chell, and then she sat at one of the bench tables and inserted the contacts. Fortunately, all of the data from the previous pair had uploaded into the ship’s servers, so she hadn’t lost anything.

  She made a note to back up everything in at least two different places.

  Once connected, alerts marking incoming messages from both Gregorovich and the Darmstadt’s ship mind, Horzcha Ubuto, appeared in the corner of her vision. Kira opened them to find a collection of telescopic images of the fourth planet—or “planet e,” as it was labeled—from both ships. Appended to the first set was a note:

  If you need a different type of imaging, just ask.—Horzcha Ubuto

  Then Kira settled in to study the surface of planet e. There was a lot to study. It was 0.7 the diameter of Earth and nearly the same density. That mean
t water. And possibly native life.

  She felt sure the planet had a proper name, but no sense of it came from the Soft Blade.

  The pictures she had were mostly from the dark side of the planet. Only a sliver of the terminator between night and day was visible from their current position. The terminator was the most likely place for a city or installation of some kind, as it would be the most temperate area, balanced between the scorching heat of one side and the frigid cold of the other.

  The near side of the planet was brown and orange. Vast canyons scraped the surface, and blackish patches marked where Kira thought giant lakes might lie. Ice crusted the poles, more away from the star than toward.

  The ships’ telescopes weren’t the largest—neither the Wallfish nor the Darmstadt were scientific vessels—and given the distance, the resolution of the images wasn’t the highest. But Kira did her best, examining each one for anything that seemed familiar.

  Unfortunately, nothing struck a chord. There was evidence of habitation (helpfully outlined for her by Gregorovich and Horzcha Ubuto): faint lines that might be roads or canals along a section of the northern hemisphere, but nothing notable.

  She lost herself in the images, barely paying attention to her surroundings. When she went to drink the chell, it was already cold, which annoyed her. She sipped at it anyway.

  The door to the galley scraped open, and Trig entered. “Hey,” he said. “Did you see what Gregorovich found?”

  Kira blinked, slightly disoriented as she cleared her overlays. “No. What?”

  “Here.” He bounced over to her table and activated the built-in display. An image popped up of what appeared to be part of a space station, now broken and abandoned. The shape of it resembled no human-made structure. It was long and jagged, like a length of natural-grown crystal. The station obviously hadn’t spun in order to create a sense of weight for its inhabitants. That meant either they had artificial gravity or the aliens hadn’t minded spending their time in zero-g.

  “Well,” said Kira slowly. “I think we know one thing.”

  “Yeah?” said the kid.

  “It sure doesn’t look like the ships the Jellies or the nightmares are building these days. Either they’ve changed styles, or—”

  “Another species.” Trig beamed, as if this was the best piece of news ever. “The Vanished, right? The captain told me.”

  “That’s right.” She cocked her head. “You’re enjoying this, huh?”

  “Because it’s cool!” He poked at the display. “How many alien civilizations do you think are out there? In the whole galaxy, that is.”

  “I have no idea.… Where did Gregorovich find the station?”

  “Floating in the Dyson ring.”

  Kira drained the last of her chell. “How’s your wrist, by the way?” The kid didn’t have a cast anymore.

  Trig rolled his hand in a circle. “All better now. Doc says he wants to see me again in a few weeks, real time, but other than that, I’m good to go.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  The kid went to get some food, and Kira returned to studying the survey images of planet e. There was already a new batch waiting for her.

  The work wasn’t so different from the prep they’d done before arriving at Adrasteia. Out of habit, Kira found herself scanning for evidence of flora and fauna. There was oxygen in the atmosphere, which was encouraging, and nitrogen too. Thermal imaging seemed to show what might be areas of vegetation near the terminator line, but as with all tidally locked planets, it was difficult to be sure given the screwy atmospheric convections.

  While she worked, the crew came in and out of the galley. Kira exchanged a few words with them, but for the most part, she kept her focus on the pictures. Nielsen never appeared, and she wondered if the first officer was still ill from cryo.

  New pictures kept tumbling in, and as the spaceships grew closer to planet e, the resolution improved. Mid-afternoon, ship time, Kira received a message from the Darmstadt saying:

  Of interest?—Horzcha Ubuto

  Attached was an image from the southern hemisphere that showed a complex of buildings secreted in a fold of protective mountains, smack-dab in the middle of the terminator. At the sight of it, Kira felt a chill of ancient memories: fear, uncertainty, and the sadness born of regret. And she saw the Highmost ascend a pedestal, bright in the dawn everlasting—

  A small gasp escaped her, and Kira felt a sudden certainty. She swallowed hard before opening a line to Falconi. “I found it. Or … I found something.”

  “Show me.” After studying the map, he said, “Seems like I keep asking this, but—are you sure?”

  “As I said before we left: as sure as I can be.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk with Akawe.” The line clicked dead.

  Kira made herself another cup of chell and warmed her hands around it while she waited.

  Not ten minutes later, Falconi’s voice sounded over the intercom throughout the ship: “Listen up, everyone. Change of plans. We have a destination on planet e, courtesy of Kira. We’re going to do a burn straight there and drop off Kira and a team to check out the location while the Wallfish and the Darmstadt continue back out to the asteroid belt to refuel. It’ll only take four or five hours to reach the belt, so the ships won’t be too far away if we’re needed. Over and out.”

  3.

  Kira returned to Control and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, watching as new discoveries continued to pop up on their screens. There were scores of artificial structures throughout the system, both on the planets and in space: monuments to a lost civilization. None appeared to have power. By the gas giant floated the hull of what looked to be a ship. By planet e, a cluster of junked satellites parked in what would have been a geostationary orbit if the planet hadn’t been tidally locked. And of course, there was the Dyson ring (if that’s what it was), which seemed to be filled with technological relics.

  “This place—” said Veera.

  “—is a treasure house beyond compare,” finished Jorrus.

  Kira agreed. “We’ll be studying it for centuries. Do you think these were the aliens who made the Great Beacon?”

  The Entropists inclined their heads. “Perhaps. It very well could be.”

  Dinner that night was a subdued, informal affair. No one bothered cooking; everyone’s stomach but Kira’s was still in a delicate state from cryo. As a result, it was prepackaged rations across the board, which made for a monotonous, if healthy, meal.

  The Marines still didn’t join them. Nor did Nielsen. The first officer’s absence was conspicuous; without her quiet, steady presence, the conversation around the tables was sharper, more hard-edged.

  “Tomorrow,” said Vishal, “I would like to see you, Ms. Sparrow, for a checkup. It is necessary to make sure your new organs are working well.”

  Sparrow bobbed her head in an imitation of Vishal and said, “Sure thing, Doc.” Then an evil little grin spread across her face. “Just using this as an excuse to get your hands on me, aren’t you?”

  Color bloomed on Vishal’s cheeks, and he stuttered. “Ms.! I would—That is, no. No. That would not be professional.”

  Trig laughed through a mouthful of food. “Ha! Look, he’s blushing.”

  Sparrow laughed as well, and a faint smile appeared on Hwa-jung’s broad face.

  They continued to tease the doctor, and Kira could see him getting more and more frustrated and angry, but he never snapped, never lashed out. She didn’t understand it. If he just stood up for himself, the others would knock it off, or at least back off for a while. She’d seen it plenty of times before on the mining outposts. Guys who didn’t punch back always ended up getting picked on more. It was a law of nature.

  Falconi didn’t interfere, not directly, but she noticed how he unobtrusively steered the conversation in a different direction. As they took up another topic, Vishal sank back in his seat, as if hoping no one would notice him.

  While they talked, Kira went to the
Entropists, who were hunched over a bluish, oblong-shaped object on their table, turning it over as if trying to find a key or a latch to open it.

  She sat next to Veera. “What is that?” she asked, indicating the object. It was the size of both her fists combined.

  The Entropists peered at her, owlish under the hoods of their robes. “We found this—” said Jorrus.

  “—on the ship of the Jelly,” said Veera. “We think it is a—”

  “—processor or control module for a computer. But to be honest—”

  “—we are not entirely sure.”

  Kira glanced back at Falconi. “Does the captain know you have this?”

  The Entropists smiled, mirroring each other’s expression. “Not this specifically,” they said, their voices coming in stereo, “but he knows we salvaged several pieces of equipment off the ship.”

  “May I?” asked Kira, and held out her hands.

  After a moment, the Entropists relented and allowed her to take the object. It was denser than it looked. The surface was pitted slightly, and there was a smell of … salt? to it.

  Kira frowned. “If the xeno knows what this is, it’s not telling me. Where did you find it?”

  The Entropists showed her via footage from their implants.

  “The Aspect of the Void,” said Kira. The English translation tasted strange on her tongue; it was accurate, but it failed to capture the feel of the Jelly original. “That was the name of the room. I didn’t go in there, but I saw the sign.”

  Veera carefully took back the oblong object. “What, in this instance—”

  “—does the word void refer to? Likewise, what does—”

  “—the word aspect?”

  She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Maybe … communication? Sorry. Don’t think I can help you any more than that.”

  The Entropists dipped their heads. “You have given us more than we had previously. We shall continue to ponder upon this matter. May your path always lead to knowledge, Prisoner.”

  “Knowledge to freedom,” Kira replied.