To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  Lt. Hawes answered: “That’s our unofficial designation for the planet. Easier to remember than some random letter.”

  Kira thought it was fitting. Closing her eyes, she switched her overlays to the shuttle’s outside cameras. The curve of the planet rose up before them, one half in shadow, the other in light, and the terminator a dusky, twilight realm dividing the two from pole to pole. Bands of swirling clouds enveloped the middle of the orb—massive storms driven by the transferred heat from the sun-locked side. Nidus.

  Vertigo made Kira grab the arms of the jump seat as, for a moment, she felt as if they were hanging over an enormous precipice, about to fall.

  It wasn’t needed, but the pseudo-intelligence provided continual updates, perhaps because it was calming, perhaps because of UMC protocol:

  “Resumption of weightlessness in five … four … three … two…” The lead blanket vanished, and Kira swallowed as her stomach attempted to escape through her mouth. “Z-axis swap commencing.” She felt a shove against the right side of her body, and Nidus swung out of view, replaced by the spangled depths of space as the Ilmorra turned end for end, and then another shove as the spin stopped. She turned off the overlays and concentrated on controlling her rebellious stomach. “Retracting radiators.… T-minus one minute, fifteen seconds until atmospheric entry.” The time crawled by with agonizing slowness. Then: “Contact in ten … nine … eight—”

  As the pseudo-intelligence continued its countdown, Kira checked on the Jellies. Four of the ships had changed course in pursuit of the shuttle. The other three were heading toward the asteroid belt, presumably to refill their tanks, same as the Darmstadt and the Wallfish. So far, none of the aliens seemed to show any interest in attacking either of the two ships, but Kira knew that would change.

  “Contact.”

  A tremor ran through the Ilmorra, and Kira drifted back against her seat as the tremors increased into a shuddering roar. She took a quick look outside via the rear-facing cameras. A wall of flame greeted her. She shivered and switched off the feed.

  “Initiating braking,” said the pseudo-intelligence.

  A full-body hammer blow slammed Kira into the seat. She gritted her teeth, grateful for the support of the Soft Blade. The shaking worsened, and the Ilmorra bucked hard enough to make Kira’s head snap back and her teeth clatter together.

  Several of the Marines whooped. “Oh, Momma! Riding the dragon!” “Kick it, man!” “Just like orbital skydiving back home!” “Now that’s what a hot drop is supposed to feel like!”

  Part of Kira couldn’t help but think that Sparrow would have enjoyed the turbulence.

  The sound of the engines changed, growing deeper, more muted, and the vibrations quickened in frequency. “Switching fusion drive to closed-cycle operation,” said the pseudo-intelligence.

  That meant they were about ninety klicks above the ground. Below that height, the density of the atmosphere would cause enough thermal backscattering from an open-cycle reactor to melt the back of the shuttle. Not only that, an unshielded exhaust would irradiate everything near the landing zone.

  The problem with closed-cycle operation, however, was that the reactor devoured hydrogen at close to ten times the normal rate. And right then, Kira worried that they would need every ounce of propellent to escape the Jellies.

  Unless, that was, she could get her hands on the Staff of Blue.

  The bulkheads around them groaned and squealed, and somewhere a piece of equipment clattered onto the floor.

  Kira checked the cameras: a layer of clouds obscured the view, and then they cleared and she spotted the small fold of weathered mountains they were heading for. The Vanished complex was just barely visible as a gleam of white lines hidden deep within the shadowed valley.

  The Ilmorra bucked again, even harder than before. Pain shot through Kira’s tongue, and blood flooded her mouth as she realized she’d bitten herself. She coughed as the blood went down the wrong way. “What was that?” she shouted.

  “Drag chutes,” replied Koyich in an infuriatingly calm voice. She would have sworn he was enjoying this.

  “Helps save fuel!” Sanchez added.

  Kira nearly laughed at the absurdity of it.

  The roar of the wind outside softened, and the pressure on her chest lessened. She took a breath. Not much longer now.…

  RCS thrusters sounded: short bursts above and below them along the hull. The ship wobbled and seemed to turn slightly around Kira. Stability adjustments, repositioning the Ilmorra for landing.

  She counted seconds to herself. Almost half a minute passed, and then a sudden burn jammed her deep into the chair, making it difficult to breathe. The Ilmorra juddered and swayed, Kira’s weight normalized, and from the back of the ship came a pair of booming thuds. Then the engines cut out and a shocking stillness followed.

  Planetfall.

  CHAPTER III

  SHARDS

  1.

  “We made it,” said Kira. After so long spent traveling, arrival hardly seemed real.

  Falconi popped his buckles. “Time to say hi to the natives.”

  “Not quite yet,” said Koyich. He stood. “Eyes and ears, you ugly apes. Exos free to disengage. Grab your battle rattle and get me a sitrep yesterday. And keep those drones outta the air until I give the order. You heard me! Go!” Around them, the shuttle transformed into a bustle of activity as the Marines readied themselves to deploy.

  Before popping the airlock, they checked the atmosphere for unknown risk factors and then scanned the surrounding area for signs of movement.

  “Anything?” Koyich demanded.

  One of the Marines from the Darmstadt shook his head. “Nossir.”

  “Check thermals.”

  “Already did, sir. It’s dead out there.”

  “Alright. Move out. Exos take point.”

  Kira found herself crowded between the two Entropists as the Marines assembled before the airlock.

  Veera said, “Isn’t this—”

  “—most exciting?” Jorrus concluded.

  Kira tightened the grip on her blaster. “I’m not sure that’s the word I’d choose.” She wasn’t even sure what she was feeling. A potent combination of dread and anticipation and—and it didn’t bear thinking about. She’d save her emotions for later. Right now there was a job that needed doing.

  She glanced over at Trig. The kid’s face was pale behind his visor, but he still looked stupidly eager to see where they’d landed. “How you doing?” she asked.

  He nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the airlock. “All green.”

  The airlock broke with a loud hiss, and a crown of condensation swirled around the edges of the door as it rolled back. The dull red light of Bughunt streamed in, casting an elongated oval on the corrugated decking. The lonely howl of an abandoned wind became audible.

  Koyich signaled with his hand, and four of the armored Marines scrambled through the airlock. After a few moments, one of them said, “Clear.”

  Kira had to wait until the remaining Marines exited the shuttle before they signaled for her and the Entropists to follow.

  Outside, the world was split in half. To the east, the rust-colored sky held an evening glow and Bughunt protruded above the tortured horizon—a swollen red orb far dimmer than Epsilon Indi, the sun Kira had grown up with. To the west lay a realm of perpetual darkness, shrouded with starless night. Thick clouds hung low over the land, red and orange and purple and knotted with vortices driven by the ceaseless wind. Lightning illuminated the folded depths of the clouds, and the rumble of distant thunder echoed across the land.

  The Ilmorra had landed on what looked like a patch of cracked paving stones. Kira’s mind automatically categorized them as artificial, but she cautioned herself against making assumptions.

  Surrounding the landing zone were open fields covered with what looked like black moss. The fields ascended into foothills, and the foothills into the bounding mountains. The snow-mantled peaks were rounded with ag
e and wear, but their dark silhouettes possessed a solid bulk that still managed to be intimidating. Like on the fields and the foothills, glossy black vegetation grew upon the sides of the mountains—black so as to better absorb the red light from their parent star.

  The buildings she had identified from space weren’t visible at the moment; they lay farther up the valley, behind a flank of the neighboring mountain, perhaps two or three klicks away (she always found it hard to judge distances on new planets; the thickness of the atmosphere, the curve of the horizon, and the relative size of nearby objects were all things that took some time getting used to).

  “Dramatic,” said Falconi, coming up beside her.

  “It looks like a painting,” said Nielsen, joining them.

  “Or something out of a game,” said Trig.

  To Kira, the place felt old beyond reckoning. It seemed unlikely it had been the homeworld of the Vanished—for a sentient, technologically advanced species to evolve on a tidally locked planet would be extremely difficult—but she had little doubt the Vanished had settled there long ago, and had stayed for a long time thereafter.

  The Marines rushed about, setting up auto-turrets around the shuttle, tossing drones into the air (which zoomed skyward with a nerve-scraping buzz), and posting sensors—active and passive—in a wide perimeter.

  “Form up,” Koyich barked, and the Marines assembled in front of the now-closed airlock. Then he trotted over to where Kira stood watching with Falconi and the Entropists, and said, “We’ve got two hours before the Jellies make orbit.”

  Kira’s heart dropped. “That’s not enough time.”

  “It’s all the time we’ve got,” said Koyich. “They’re not going to risk hitting us with bombs or missiles or rods from god, so—”

  “Sorry, what?”

  Falconi answered: “Kinetic projectiles. Big heavy lumps of tungsten or something like that. They hit almost as hard as nukes.”

  Koyich jerked his chin. “That. The Jellies aren’t going to risk destroying you or the staff. They’re going to have to come down here in person. If we can get into the buildings you spotted, we can fight a delaying action, buy you some time. Hold out long enough and the Darmstadt might be able to give us some reinforcements. This ain’t going to be a fight won in space, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Guess we can forget about proper containment procedures,” said Kira.

  Koyich grunted. “You could say that.”

  The first officer barked a few commands, and within moments, their group set out marching at double speed across the broken stones, each step of the fourteen sets of power armor thudding like dire drums. Two of the Marines from the Darmstadt stayed behind with the shuttle. When Kira looked back, she saw them moving around the vessel, checking its heat shield for damage.

  The wind provided a constant pressure against Kira’s side. After so long spent on ships and stations, the movement of air seemed strange. That and the unevenness of the ground.

  She did the math in her head. It had been close to six months since she had last stood on Adrasteia. Six months of closed rooms, artificial lights, and the stink of close-pressed bodies.

  Patches of black moss crunched under the soles of her boots. The moss wasn’t the only vegetation nearby; there were clusters of fleshy vines (assuming they were plants) growing upon nearby rock formations. The vines tumbled like locks of greasy hair across the face of the stone. Kira couldn’t help but note different features: leaf-like structures with veins that formed reticulated venation, similar to Earth dicots. Staggered branching, with deep ridges on the stems. No visible flowers or fruiting bodies.

  Looking was one thing, but what she really wanted was to get a sample of the plant’s cells and start digging into its biochemistry. That was where the real magic was. An entirely new biome to explore, and she didn’t dare stop to learn anything about it.

  They rounded the flank of the mountain, and by unspoken consent, the nineteen of them stopped.

  Before them, in the low hollow of land at the head of the valley, lay the complex of alien buildings. The settlement was several klicks across, bigger even than Highstone, the capital of Weyland (not that Highstone was particularly big by League standards; there had only been eighty-four thousand people living there the year Kira had left).

  Tall, spindly towers stretched skyward, white as bone and laced with a caul of the invading moss that had insinuated itself into every crack and flaw in the structures. Through broken walls, rooms of every size were visible, now drifted with dirt and obscured by opportunistic vines. An assortment of smaller buildings huddled in the spaces between the towers—all with tapered roofs and lancet windows empty of glass or other covering. There were few straight lines; naturalistic arcs dominated the design aesthetic.

  Even in their half-ruined state, there was an attenuated elegance to the buildings that Kira had only seen in art or videos of pre-planned luxury communities on Earth. Everything about the complex felt intentional, from the curve of the walls to the layout of the paths that wound like streams throughout the settlement.

  The place was undeniably abandoned. And yet, in the light of the endless sunset, beneath the shelf of burning clouds, it felt as if the city wasn’t dead, just dormant, as if it were waiting for a signal to spring back to life and restore itself to the heights of its former glory.

  Kira breathed out. Awe left her without words.

  “Thule,” said Falconi, breaking the spell. He seemed as affected as she was.

  “Where to?” said Koyich.

  It took Kira a moment to clear her mind well enough to answer. “I don’t know. Nothing jumps out at me. I need to get closer.”

  “Forward march!” Koyich barked, and they continued down the slope toward the city.

  Next to Kira, the Entropists said, “We are indeed blessed to see this, Prisoner.”

  She felt inclined to agree.

  2.

  The towers loomed ever higher as they approached the edge of the settlement. White was the predominate color among the buildings, but irregular panels of blue provided contrast to the structures, enhancing with a shot of vivid decoration an otherwise barren cityscape.

  “They had a sense of beauty,” said Nielsen.

  “We don’t know that,” said Falconi. “Everything could be for some practical purpose.”

  “Does it really look like that to you?”

  The captain didn’t answer.

  As they entered the city via a wide avenue from the south, an intense feeling of familiarity swept over Kira. It left her feeling displaced, as if she’d shifted through time. She had never been to that twilight city before, but the Soft Blade had, and its memories were nearly as strong as her own. She remembered … life. Moving things: flying and walking, and machines that did the same. The touch of skin, the sound of voices, the sweet scent of flowers carried on the wind … And for a moment, she could nearly see the city as it had been: vital, vibrant, standing tall with hope and pride.

  Don’t lose control, she told herself. Don’t lose control. And she hardened her mental grip on the Soft Blade. Whatever happened that day, she was determined not to let the xeno slip her grasp and run rampant. Not after her previous mistakes.

  “When do you think this was built?” said Trig. He gaped through his visor with undisguised wonder.

  “Centuries ago,” said Kira, recalling the sense of age from the Soft Blade’s memories. “Before we ever left Earth. Maybe even earlier.”

  Koyich glanced over his shoulder at her. “Still no idea where to look?”

  She hesitated. “Not yet. Let’s head to the center.”

  With two of the Marines in power armor taking the lead, they continued deeper into the maze of buildings. Overhead, the wind whirling between the tapered towers sounded as if it were trying to whisper secrets, but listen though she did, Kira could make no sense of the words in the air.

  She kept scanning the buildings and streets, looking for anything that might spark a spec
ific memory. The spaces between the structures were narrower than humans preferred; the proportions were taller, thinner, which matched the images she had seen of the Vanished.

  Rubble blocked the avenue in front of them, forcing them to detour around. Veera and Jorrus stopped and bent to pick up a piece that had fallen from one of the nearby towers.

  “It does not look like stone,” said Veera.

  “Nor metal,” said Jorrus. “The material—”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” said Koyich. “Keep moving.”

  Their footsteps echoed off the sides of the buildings, loud and disconcerting in the empty spaces.

  Snikt.

  Kira spun toward the noise, as did the rest of the squad. There, by an empty doorway, a rectangular panel flickered with artificial light. It was a screen of some sort, blue-white and distorted with cracks. No text or pictures appeared, just the pale field of light.

  “How can there still be power?” said Nielsen in an overly calm voice.

  “Maybe we’re not the first ones to visit,” said Trig.

  Kira started toward the screen, and Koyich put up an arm to bar her way. “Hold up. We don’t know if it’s safe.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, and walked past him.

  Up close, the glowing panel produced a faint hum. Kira put a hand on it. The screen didn’t change. “Hello?” she said, feeling slightly foolish.

  Again, nothing happened.

  The wall next to the panel was covered with grime. She wiped some of it away, wondering if there was anything beneath.

  There was.

  A sigil lay there, set within the surface of the material, and the sight of it froze her in place. The emblem was a line of fractal shapes, coiled close, one upon another.

  Kira couldn’t decipher any meaning, but she recognized the language as belonging to the same, all-important pattern that guided the Soft Blade’s existence. Unable to take her eyes off the sigil, she backed away.

  “What is it?” Falconi asked.

  “I think the Vanished made the Great Beacon,” she said.