To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  Now what?

  “Don’t move!” shouted a man. “Hands on your head!”

  Kira turned and saw two power troopers standing by a pillar over nine meters to her right. One of them held a blaster, the other a slug thrower. Behind them, a quartet of drones rose off the floor and hung whirring overhead.

  “You’ve got five seconds to comply or I’m putting a bolt through your head!” shouted the trooper with the blaster.

  Kira lifted her arms and took a single step away from her cell. Two thin tendrils still connected her to the bypass circuits the suit had formed across the doorway.

  The troopers stiffened, and the buzzing from the drones increased as the machines flew out and took up positions in a broad, rotating circle around her.

  She took another step.

  Bang!

  A gold slug flattened itself on the deck in front of her, and she felt a pinch in her left calf as a fragment struck her.

  “I’m not shitting you, lady! We will ventilate you! On the floor, right now! I’m not saying it a—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said in a sharp voice. “You’re not going to shoot me, Marine. Do you know how much trouble you’d be in with Colonel Stahl if you did? The UMC lost a lot of good people getting me here.”

  “Fuck that noise. We’ve got orders to stop you if you try to escape, even if it means killing you. Now get on the goddamn floor!”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Kira did the math. She was only about a meter and a half from the cell. Hopefully that was enough …

  She bent, as if to kneel, and then tucked and allowed herself to stumble forward into a roll. As she did, she yanked the wires out of the cell, back toward herself.

  A white-hot flash obliterated her sight, and a thunderclap slammed into her so hard, she felt it in the roots of her teeth.

  2.

  If not for her suit, the blast would have thrown Kira halfway across the concourse. As it was, the xeno kept her anchored against the deck, like a barnacle holding firm against a tsunami. A suffocating heat enveloped her—a heat too intense for even the Soft Blade to fully protect her.

  Then cooler air washed over her and her vision cleared.

  Dazed, Kira got to her feet.

  The explosion had torn apart several meters of the floor, leaving behind a crater of crushed decking, wiring, pipes, and unidentifiable pieces of machinery. In the center of the crater was the misshapen, half-melted lump of metal and composite that had been the polyhedron.

  Shrapnel had sprayed the ceiling and floor in a wide circle around the epicenter. A jagged piece of casing from one of the shaped charges had embedded itself into the deck only a few centimeters from her head.

  Kira hadn’t expected the explosion to be so powerful. The UMC must have really wanted to stop the Soft Blade from escaping. The charges had been intended not just to kill but to obliterate.

  She had to find Itari.

  Off to the side, the two Marines lay sprawled on the floor. One of them moved his arms aimlessly, as if unsure which direction was up. The other had gotten to his hands and knees and was crawling toward his blaster.

  Three of the drones lay broken on the floor. The fourth hovered tilted at an awkward angle, its blades rotating in fitful starts.

  Kira stabbed the drone with a blade the xeno formed from the hand it had made for her. The ruined machine crashed to the floor with a pitiful whine as its propellers spun to a stop.

  Then she sprinted across the concourse and tackled the Marine reaching for his blaster. She knocked him sprawling onto his belly. Before the man could react, she jammed the Soft Blade into the joints of his armor and cut the power lines, immobilizing him. The armor weighed a ton (more than that, actually), but she flipped him over, planted a palm on his faceplate, and ripped it away.

  “—answer me, dammit!” the man shouted. Then he clamped his mouth shut and glared at her with fear disguised as anger. His eyes were green, and he looked about as young as Trig, although that meant nothing on its own.

  So. Comms weren’t working. That was to her advantage. Still, Kira hesitated for a second. Escaping the cell had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, but now the reality of the situation crashed down upon her. There was no hiding on a space station. No avoiding the ever-present cameras. The UMC would be able to track her every move. And though comms were down, as soon as she asked the Marine about Itari, he would know where she wanted to go.

  The man saw her indecision. “Well?” he said, sneering. “What the fuck are you waiting for? Get it over with.”

  He thinks I’m going to kill him. The realization seemed so unjust, it left Kira feeling defensive.

  The station lurched underneath them, and a pressure alert sounded with strident urgency in the distance.

  “Listen to me,” she said, “I’m trying to help you, asshole.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Shut up and listen. We’re being attacked. Might be the nightmares. Might be the Jellies. Doesn’t matter. Either way, if they blow us up, it’s game over. That’s it. We lose. You get it?”

  “Bullshit,” said the Marine, spitting in her face. “Admiral Klein just set out with the Seventh to kick those sumbitches back to the Stone Age. He’ll see they get what’s coming to them.”

  “You don’t understand, Marine. The Jelly that came here with me on the Wallfish—the one you’ve got locked up—it came here with a peace offer. Peace. If it dies, how do you think the rest of the Jellies will take it? How do you think the Premier will take it?” Now Kira saw indecision similar to her own appear on the man’s face. “That Jelly gets blown up, it isn’t going to matter what the Seventh does. You understand? How long do you think this station is going to last?”

  As if to punctuate her question, everything twisted around them as Orsted wobbled even more than before.

  Kira swallowed a surge of bile, feeling green. “We have to get that Jelly out of here.”

  The Marine squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Then he shook his head—making a face as if he were in pain—and said, “Goddammit. Biocontainment. That’s where they took the Jelly. Biocontainment.”

  “Where i—”

  “This deck. Up-spin. By the hydroponics bay.”

  “And what about the Wallfish crew?”

  “Holding cells. Same section. Can’t miss it.”

  Kira shoved him back and stood. “Okay. You made the right decision.”

  He spat again, this time on the floor. “You betray us, I’ll come kill you myself.”

  “I’d expect nothing less,” said Kira, already moving away. It would take him at least half an hour to extricate himself from the power armor, so she figured he wasn’t a threat. The other Marine, though, was starting to move. She hurried over, grabbed the top of his helmet, pulled open the casing on his back, and ripped out his armor’s cooling system. The armor immediately shut down to avoid melting.

  There. Just let them try to follow her now!

  Kira left them and started to run up-spin, against the direction of the yellow arrows. Hide me, she told the Soft Blade. A soft, silk-like rustle passed across her skin, and when she glanced down, Kira could see through herself, as if her body had turned to glass.

  Thermals would still pick her up, but she didn’t think it likely the station’s interior cameras were full-spectrum. Either way, it would at least be harder for the UMC to spot her like this. How long until troops arrived to investigate the implosion of her cell? Not long, she thought. Not long at all, even if Orsted Station was under attack.

  Through the concourse exit was a long hallway. Empty. Everyone was either in hiding, helping emergency services, or fighting the attackers. Whatever the reasons, Kira was grateful. She really didn’t want to fight a bunch of Marines. They were on the same side after all. Or they were supposed to be.

  Down the hallway she ran, avoiding the occasional moving walkway. She was faster on foot. The whole time, she looked for lettering on the walls that might indicate t
he location of the hydroponics bay. Most people just used their overlays to navigate, but legally, every ship and station had to have clearly marked signage in the case of emergencies.

  This sure as hell qualifies as an emergency, Kira thought. Legal requirements or not, the lettering she did see was small, faint, and hard to read, which kept forcing her to slow in order to decipher it.

  At one intersection between the hall and another passageway, she jogged around a fountain where the stream of water traced two-thirds of an infinity symbol as it rose and fell. It was a small thing, but the sight fascinated Kira in an obscure way. The Coriolis effect never failed to mess with her sense of how gravity (or the appearance of gravity) should work. She supposed she wouldn’t find anything strange about it if she had grown up in a hab-ring, especially a smaller one like Orsted’s.

  She must have run almost half a klick, and she was starting to wonder whether the Marine had lied to her and she should turn back, when she spotted two lines of faint green lettering on a nearby corner.

  The upper line said: Hydroponics Bay 7G

  The bottom line said: Detention 16G

  On the other side of the hallway was another set of lettering: Biocontainment & Decontamination 21G. Down that way, Kira saw what appeared to be a security checkpoint: a closed door flanked with armored portals and a pair of viewscreens. Two Marines in full exos stood watch outside the door. Even with the station under attack, they hadn’t left their post. Kira wouldn’t be surprised if there were more of them on the other side of the door.

  She did the math. She might be able to get close enough to disable the armor of the two Marines, but anyone past that would be a challenge. And as soon as she broke Itari out, the rest of the UMC would know where she was.

  Shit. If she attacked, there was no predicting what would happen next. Events would spin out of control in a shockingly short time, and then … and then a lot of people might end up dead.

  A faint tremor passed through the deck. Whatever she was going to do, she had to do it now. Any longer and the station itself might spin out of control.

  She growled and turned away from biocontainment. Fuck it. She needed help. If she could free the crew of the Wallfish, she knew they would have her back. Maybe, together, they could figure out a solution. Maybe.

  Kira’s pulse was loud in her ears as she hurried down the side corridor that led toward the holding cells. If there was as much security around detention as biocontainment, she wasn’t sure what she would do. The temptation to let loose with the Soft Blade was strong, but Kira had more than learned her lesson. No matter what, she couldn’t make another mistake like the one that had resulted in the creation of the nightmares. The galaxy wouldn’t survive it.

  The lettering on the walls led her through several lengths of identical hallway.

  As she rounded one more corner, she spotted two people—one man, one woman—kneeling next to a pressure door halfway down the corridor, wrist deep in a hatch they’d pried open in the wall, the actinic flicker of electricity lighting their faces. The pair was shirtless, pantless, wearing only drab grey shorts. Their skin was chalk white, and everywhere but their faces was covered with gleaming blue tattoos. The lines formed circuit-like patterns that reminded Kira of the shapes she’d seen in the cradle on Adrasteia.

  Because of their lack of clothes, it took her a moment to recognize the two people as the Entropists, Veera and Jorrus.

  She was still invisible and too far away to hear, and yet somehow the Entropists detected her. Never looking her direction, Jorrus said, “Ah, Prisoner Navárez—”

  “—you were able to join us. We—”

  “—hoped as much.”

  Then the Entropists wrenched something within the wall, and the pressure door snapped open to reveal a stark holding cell.

  Falconi stepped out. “Well, about time,” he said.

  3.

  Kira allowed her invisibility to subside, and Falconi spotted her. “There you are,” he said. “I was afraid we were going to have to go hunting for you.”

  “Nope,” she said. She trotted over. The Entropists had moved on to the next door.

  “Were you locked up too?” Falconi asked.

  She jerked her chin. “You know it.”

  “Don’t suppose you got free without being noticed?”

  “Not a chance.”

  He bared his teeth. “Shit. We gotta move fast.”

  “How did you manage to escape?” she asked.

  Veera laughed, a quick, high sound, full of tension. “Always they take the robes and think—”

  “—that is enough. We are more than our many-colored garments, Prisoner.”

  Falconi grunted. “Lucky for us.” To Kira he said, “Any idea who’s hitting the station?”

  She was about to say no, but then she stopped to think for a moment. No hint existed of the compulsion she always felt when the Jelly ships were near. Which meant … “Pretty sure it’s the nightmares,” she said.

  “Great. Even more reason to move fast. There’ll be plenty of confusion to cover our departure.”

  “Are you sure?” Kira said.

  Falconi caught her meaning at once. If he and the rest of the crew broke out, their pardons would be null and void, and unlike the local government at Ruslan, the UMC wouldn’t stop pursuing them at the system border. The Wallfish crew would be fugitives throughout the entirety of known space, with the possible exception of Shin-Zar and various tiny freeholdings out on the fringes.

  “You’re damn right I am,” he said, and Kira felt an immediate glow of comradery. At least she wouldn’t be alone. “Veera. Jorrus. Have you managed to get a line open to Gregorovich yet?”

  The Entropists shook their heads. They were still fiddling with the wiring in the wall alongside the next pressure door. “Access to the station’s system is restricted and—”

  “—we do not have transmitters powerful enough to reach the Wallfish through all these walls.”

  “Shit,” said Falconi.

  “Where’s security?” said Kira. She’d expected to find a whole squad of Marines stationed by the holding cells.

  Falconi jerked his chin toward the Entropists. “Not sure. Those two hacked the cameras to buy us time. We’ve got about five minutes before the station control gets eyes on us again.”

  Veera held up a finger without taking her attention from the inside of the hatch. “We may be able to spoof the—”

  “—station’s sensors and buy us some more time,” said Jorrus.

  Falconi grunted again. “See what you can do.… Can’t you get that blasted door open?”

  “Trying, Captain,” they said.

  “Let me,” Kira said. She raised her right hand, letting the Soft Blade fuse its replica of her fingers into blades and spikes.

  “Careful,” said Falconi. “There could be pressure lines or high-voltage wires in the wall.”

  “It should not be—”

  “—a concern,” said the Entropists, and moved aside.

  Kira moved forward, glad to finally be doing something. She slammed her fist into the metal and willed the Soft Blade outward. It spread across the surface of the wall, sending seeking tendrils deep within the mechanism holding the door closed. Then she pulled, and with a screech, the bolts snapped and the door slid back on its greased track.

  Inside was a small holding cell. Sparrow stood half-crouched in front of the bunk, as if ready to fight. “Thule,” she said as she saw Kira. “Glad you’re on our side.”

  Falconi snapped his fingers. “Perimeter watch, now.”

  “Roger,” said the woman, hurrying out of the cell. She trotted down the corridor and peeked around the corner.

  “Over there!” Falconi said to Kira, pointing at another pressure door. Kira went to the second door and, like the first, ripped it open. Inside, Hwa-jung rose from where she’d been sitting. “Fighting!” the machine boss said, and smiled.

  “Fighting,” said Kira.

  “Th
is one!” said Falconi.

  Another door and another screech revealed Nielsen. She gave Kira a quick nod and went to stand with Falconi.

  Last of all, Kira broke into the cell containing Vishal. He appeared somewhat haggard, but he smiled at her and said, “How delightful.” Further relief broke across his face as he came out and saw Nielsen and the others.

  Falconi returned to the Entropists. “Have you found him yet?”

  There was a silence that made Kira want to scream with impatience.

  Jorrus said, “Uncertain, but it seems that—”

  “—they’ve left Trig in stasis on the Wallfish.”

  “Falconi,” said Kira, lowering her voice. “We have to rescue the Jelly. If we can’t get it out of here, there’s a chance none of this will matter.”

  He stared at her, his glacial eyes focused, searching, nearly devoid of emotion, though she could tell that he—like her—was concerned. So concerned that no room for panic existed.

  “You sure?” he said, deadly quiet.

  “I’m sure.”

  With that, she saw the switch flip inside him. His expression hardened, and a deadly gleam appeared in his eyes. “Sparrow,” he said.

  “Yessir.”

  “We need to jailbreak a Jelly and then somehow get off this hunk of metal. Give me options.”

  For a moment, Sparrow looked as if she were going to argue. Then, like Falconi, she seemed to put aside her objections and concentrate only on the problem at hand.

  “We could try cutting the power to biocontainment,” said Nielsen, coming over.

  Sparrow shook her head. “Won’t work. It has its own backup power sources.” While she spoke, she knelt and pulled up the right leg of her pants. Then she dug her fingers into the skin over her shin, and to Kira’s puzzlement, lifted it off to reveal a small compartment underneath, embedded within the bone. “Pays to be prepared,” said Sparrow in response to Kira’s look.

  From the compartment Sparrow produced a narrow, thin-bladed knife of some glassy, non-metallic material, a black wire mesh that she pulled over her hands like a set of gloves, and three small marbles that appeared soft, almost fleshy.