To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Read online

  But that wasn’t all. Amid the dim racks, Kira saw seven pots laid out in an arc. In each pot stood a tall, thin stem topped with a delicate purple flower that drooped under its own weight. A cluster of pollen-tipped stamens extended from within each blossom—like bursts of fireworks—while white speckles adorned their velvety inner throats.

  Midnight Constellations! Her favorite flower. Her father had raised them, and even with his horticultural talent, they had given him no end of trouble. They were temperamental, prone to scab and blight, and intolerant of the slightest imbalance of nutrients.

  “Alan,” she said, overcome.

  “I remembered you mentioned how much you liked them,” he said.

  “But … how did you manage to—”

  “To grow them?” He smiled at her, clearly pleased by her reaction. “Seppo helped. He had the seeds on file. We printed them out and then spent the last three weeks trying to keep the damned things from dying.”

  “They’re wonderful,” Kira said, not even trying to hide the emotion in her voice.

  He hugged her close. “Good,” he said, his voice half-muffled in her hair. “I wanted to do something special for you before…”

  Before. The word burned in her mind. “Thank you,” she said. She separated from him just long enough to examine the flowers; their spicy, overly sweet scent struck her with the full, staggering force of childhood nostalgia. “Thank you,” she repeated, coming back to Alan. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She pressed her lips against his, and for a long while, they kissed.

  “Here,” said Alan when they broke for air. He pulled an insulated blanket from under one of the racks of potato plants and spread it out within the arc of Midnight Constellations.

  They settled there, cuddling and sipping their punch.

  Outside, the baleful immensity of Zeus still hung overhead, visible through the clear pressure dome of the hydroponics bay. When they’d first arrived on Adra, the sight of the gas giant had filled Kira with apprehension. Every instinct in her screamed that Zeus was going to fall out of the sky and crush them. It seemed impossible anything so large could remain suspended overhead without support. In time, though, she’d grown accustomed to the sight, and now she admired the magnificence of the gas giant. It needed no overlays to catch the eye.

  Before … Kira shivered. Before they left. Before she and Alan had to part. They’d already used up their vacation days, and the company wouldn’t give them more than a few days of downtime back at 61 Cygni.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” said Alan, his voice soft with sympathy.

  “You know.”

  “… Yeah.”

  “This isn’t getting any easier. I thought it would, but—” She sniffed and shook her head. Adra was their fourth time shipping together, and it was by far their longest shared posting. “I don’t know when I’m going to see you next, and … I love you, Alan, and having to say goodbye every few months really sucks.”

  He stared at her, serious. His hazel eyes gleamed in the light from Zeus. “So then let’s not.”

  Her heart lurched, and for a moment, time seemed to stop. She’d been dreading that exact response for months now. When her voice started working again, she said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let’s not do this bouncing around anymore. I can’t take it either.” His expression was so open, so earnest, she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of hope. Surely he wasn’t…?

  “What would—”

  “Let’s apply for berths on the Shakti-Uma-Sati.”

  She blinked. “As colonists.”

  He nodded, eager. “As colonists. Company employees are pretty much guaranteed slots, and Adra is going to need all the xenobiologists and geologists they can get.”

  Kira laughed and then caught his expression. “You’re serious.”

  “Serious as a pressure breach.”

  “That’s just the drink talking.”

  He put a hand on her cheek. “No, Kira. It’s not. I know this would be a huge change, for both of us, but I also know you’re sick of jetting around from one rock to another, and I don’t want to wait another six months to see you. I really don’t.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “I don’t want that either.”

  He cocked his head. “So then let’s not.”

  Kira half laughed and looked up at Zeus while she tried to process her emotions. What he was suggesting was everything she’d hoped for, everything she’d dreamed of. She just hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. But she loved Alan, and if this meant they could be together, then she wanted it. She wanted him.

  The meteor-bright spark that was the Fidanza sailed past overhead, in low orbit between Adra and the gas giant.

  She wiped her eyes. “I don’t think the odds are as good as you say. Colonies only really want pair-bonded couples. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Alan.

  A sense of unreality caused Kira to grip the floor as he knelt in front of her and, from his front pocket, produced a small wooden box. He opened it. Nestled inside was a ring of grey metal set with a bluish-purple gem, startling in its brilliancy.

  The lump in Alan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Kira Navárez … you asked me once what I saw among the stars. I told you I saw questions. Now, I see you. I see us.” He took a breath. “Kira, will you do me the honor of joining your life with mine? Will you be my wife, as I will be your husband? Will—”

  “Yes,” she said, all worries lost in the flush of warmth that suffused her. She put her hands around the back of his neck and kissed him, tenderly at first and then with increasing passion. “Yes, Alan J. Barnes. Yes, I’ll marry you. Yes. A thousand times yes.”

  She watched as he took her hand and slid the ring onto her finger. The band was cold and heavy, but the heaviness was a comforting one.

  “The ring is iron,” he said softly. “I had Jenan smelt it from ore I brought him. Iron because it represents the bones of Adrasteia. The stone is tesserite. Wasn’t easy to find, but I know how much you like it.”

  Kira nodded without meaning to. Tesserite was unique to Adrasteia; it was similar to benitoite, with a greater tendency toward purple. It was by far her favorite rock on the planet. But it was exceedingly rare; Alan must have searched long and hard to locate such a large, high-quality piece.

  She brushed one of his coppery locks away from his forehead, and she stared into his beautiful soft eyes, wondering how she had gotten so lucky. How either of them had managed to find the other in the whole damn galaxy.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “I love you too,” he said.

  Then Kira laughed, feeling almost hysterical, and wiped her eyes. The ring scraped her eyebrow; it was going to take time to get used to its presence. “Shit. Are we really going to do this?”

  “Yeah,” said Alan, with his comforting self-confidence. “We sure are.”

  “Good.”

  He pulled her closer then, his body hot against hers. Kira responded with equal need, equal desire, clinging to him as if she were trying to press herself through his skin and into his flesh until the two of them became one.

  Together, they moved with frantic urgency within the arc of potted flowers, matching the rhythms of their bodies, oblivious to the orange gas giant that hung high overhead, huge and glaring.

  CHAPTER II

  RELIQUARY

  1.

  Kira tightened her grip on the arms of her seat as the suborbital shuttle pitched downward, descending toward island #302–01–0010, just off the western coast of Legba, the main continent in the southern hemisphere. The island lay on the fifty-second parallel, in a large bay guarded by several granite reefs, and was the last known location of the disabled drone.

  A sheet of fire engulfed the front of the cockpit as the shuttle burned through Adrasteia’s thin atmosphere at almost seven and a half thousand klicks per hour. The flames looked as if they were only a few inches from Kira’s face, yet she felt no heat
.

  Around them, the hull rattled and groaned. She closed her eyes, but the flames remained jumping and writhing in front of her, bright as ever.

  “Hell yeah!” shouted Neghar next to her, and Kira knew she was grinning like a fiend.

  Kira gritted her teeth. The shuttle was perfectly safe, wrapped in the mag-shield that protected it from the white-hot inferno outside. Four months on the planet, hundreds of flights, and there hadn’t been a single accident. Geiger, the pseudo-intelligence that piloted the shuttle, had a nearly flawless record; the only time it had malfunctioned was when some hotshot asteroid captain had tried to optimize a copy and ended up killing his crew as a result. Safety record notwithstanding, Kira still hated reentry. The noise and the shaking made her feel as if the shuttle were about to break up, and nothing could convince her otherwise.

  Plus, the display wasn’t doing anything to help her hangover. She’d popped a pill before leaving Alan in his cabin, but it had yet to cut the pain. It was her own fault. She should have known better. She did know better, but emotion had trumped judgment last night.

  She turned off the feed from the shuttle’s cameras and concentrated on breathing.

  We’re getting married! It still didn’t feel real. She’d spent the whole morning with a silly smile plastered on her face. No doubt she’d looked like an idiot. She touched her sternum, fingering Alan’s ring under her skinsuit. They hadn’t told the others yet, so she’d chosen to wear the ring on a chain for the time being, but they were planning to that evening. Kira was looking forward to seeing everyone’s reactions, even if the announcement didn’t come as much of a surprise.

  Once they were on the Fidanza, they would get Captain Ravenna to make it official. And then Alan would be hers. And she his. And they could begin to build their future together.

  Marriage. A change of jobs. Settling down on just one planet. Family of her own. Helping to build a new colony. As Alan had said, it would be a huge change, but Kira felt ready for the shift. More than ready. It was the life she’d always hoped for but that, as the years crept by, had seemed increasingly unlikely.

  After they finished making love, they had stayed up for hours, talking and talking. They’d discussed the best places to settle on Adrasteia, the timeline of the terraforming effort, and all the activities possible on and off the moon. Alan went into great detail about the type of dome house he wanted to build: “—and it has to have a hot tub big enough to stretch out without touching the other side, so we can have a proper bath, not like these dinky little showers we’ve been stuck with,” and Kira had listened, touched by his passion. In turn, she talked about how she wanted greenhouses like the ones on Weyland, and they both agreed that whatever they did, it was going to be better done together.

  Kira’s only regret was that she’d drunk so much; everything after Alan’s proposal had become something of a blur.

  Delving into her overlays, she pulled up her records from the previous night. She saw Alan kneeling in front of her again, and she heard him say, “I love you too,” before wrapping her in his embrace a minute later. When she’d had her implants installed as a kid, her parents hadn’t paid for a system that allowed for full sense-recording—no touch, taste, or smell—as they’d considered it an unnecessary extravagance. For the first time, Kira wished they hadn’t been so practically minded. She wanted to feel what she’d felt that night; she wanted to feel it for the rest of her life.

  Once they returned to Vyyborg Station, she decided, she would use her bonus to have the necessary upgrades installed. Memories like the ones from yesterday were too precious to lose, and she was determined not to let any more slip away.

  As for her family back on Weyland … Kira’s smile faded somewhat. They wouldn’t be happy about her living so far from home, but she knew they would understand. Her parents had done something similar themselves, after all: emigrating from Stewart’s World, around Alpha Centauri, before she was born. And her father was always talking about how it was humanity’s grand goal to spread out among the stars. They’d supported her decision to become a xenobiologist in the first place, and Kira knew they would support her current decision.

  Returning to her overlays, she opened the most recent video from Weyland. She’d already watched it twice since it had arrived a month ago, but right then, she felt a sudden urge to see her home and family again.

  Her parents appeared, as she knew they would, sitting at her dad’s workstation. It was early morning, and the light slid in sideways through the west-facing windows. In the distance, the mountains were a jagged silhouette draped along the horizon, nearly lost in a bank of clouds.

  “Kira!” said her dad. He looked the same as always. Her mom had a new haircut; she offered a small smile. “Congratulations on making it to the end of the survey. How are you enjoying your last few days on Adra? Did you find anything interesting in the lake region you told us about?”

  “It’s been cold here,” said her mom. “There was frost on the ground this morning.”

  Her dad grimaced. “Fortunately the geothermal is working.”

  “For now,” said her mom.

  “For now. Other than that, no real news. The Hensens came by for dinner the other night, and they said—”

  Then the study door slammed open and Isthah bounced into view, dressed in her usual nightshirt, a cup of tea in one hand. “Morning, sis!”

  Kira smiled as she watched them natter on about the doings in the settlement and about their day-to-day activities: the problems with the ag-bots tending the crops, the shows they’d been watching, details about the latest batch of plants being released into the planet’s ecosystem. And so forth.

  Then they wished her safe travels and the video ended. The last frame hung before her, her dad frozen mid-wave, her mom’s face at an odd angle as she finished saying, “—love you.”

  “Love you,” Kira murmured. She sighed. When had she last managed to visit them? Two years ago? Three? At least that. Too long by far. The distances and the travel times didn’t make it easy.

  She missed home. Which didn’t mean she would have been content to just stay on Weyland. She’d needed to push herself, to reach beyond the normal and the mundane. And she had. For seven years she had traveled the far reaches of space. But she was sick of being alone and sick of being cooped up on one spaceship after another. She was ready for a new challenge, one that balanced the familiar with the alien, the safe with the outlandish.

  There on Adra, with Alan, she thought perhaps she would find just such a balance.

  2.

  Halfway through reentry, the turbulence began to subside and the EM interference vanished along with the sheets of plasma. Lines of yellow text appeared in the top corner of Kira’s vision as the comm link to HQ went live again.

  She scrolled through the messages, catching up with the rest of the survey team. Fizel, their doctor, was being his usual annoying self, but other than that, nothing interesting.

  A new window popped up:

 

  Kira was unprepared for the sudden tenderness his concern evoked in her. She smiled again as she subvocalized her response:

 

 

  She smiled.

  <’K … Listen, we didn’t really get a chance to talk this morning, and I wanted to check: You still okay with everything from last night? – Alan>

  She followed up before he could reply:

 

  Her breath caught a little as she sent the text.

  His answer was swift:

  She felt herself soft
en.

 

  Kira made a delighted sound. It came out more choked than intended.

  “All good?” Neghar asked, and Kira could feel the pilot’s eyes on her.

  “More than good.”

  She and Alan continued to talk until the retrorockets kicked in, jolting her back to full awareness of her surroundings.

 

  <’K. Have fun.;-) – Alan>

 

  Then Geiger spoke in her ear: “Touchdown in ten … nine … eight … seven…”

  His voice was calm and emotionless, with a hint of a cultured Magellan accent. She thought of him as a Heinlein. He sounded as if he would be named Heinlein, if he were a person. Flesh and blood, that is. With a body.

  They landed with a short drop that caused her stomach to lurch and her heart to race. The shuttle listed a few degrees to the left as it sank into the dirt.

  “Don’t take too long, you hear?” said Neghar, unclipping her harness. Everything about her was neat and compact, from her finely carved features to the folds in her jumpsuit to the thin lines of braids that formed a wide strip across her head. On her lapel she wore an ever-present gold pin: a memorial to co-workers lost on the job. “Yugo said he’s cooking a fresh batch of cinnamon rolls as a special treat before blastoff. ’Less we hurry, they’ll all be gone by the time we get back.”

  Kira pulled off her own harness. “I won’t be a minute.”

  “Better not, honey. I’d kill for those rolls.”

  The stale smell of reprocessed air hit Kira’s nose as she slipped on her helmet. Adrasteia’s atmosphere was thick enough to breathe, but it would kill you if you tried. Not enough oxygen. Not yet, and changing that would take decades. The lack of oxygen also meant that Adra didn’t have an ozone layer. Everyone who ventured outside had to be fully shielded against UV and other forms of radiation. Otherwise, you were liable to get the worst sunburn of your life.