Eating Stars

Prologue

When the gray ships had first appeared at the outer rim, Aalana system stations attempted contact and assumed that the lack of response was due to a need to acquire language first. They had established contact with several other spacefaring people by that time, and had experienced hesitance before, waiting to speak with the Aalana until they could do so and be understood.

The ships' continued silence worried Een as he tracked them from his listening post with growing concern.

Laiin? he sang over to where she worked at her data station. Have you calculated their trajectories?

I do so now. Her notes conveyed shared concern, but her hands never faltered over her numbers. Message home, Een. Query status. Aal, inform the director.

Ships from first contact people usually approached by degrees, but these ships, sleek and fast, hurtled through the system, arrowing toward the Aalana homeworld with dreadful purpose. Een and his mates, Laiin and Aal, had been working as deep-space listeners on one of the far-orbiting stations closest to the system's edge for several revolutions and had never seen anything like this.

The director gathered all of the station employees into the listening station's pod where they waited together, lim waving, nearly everyone humming in concern. The hours between query and answer were agonizing and Een nestled between his mates, shivering. They huddled closer when the horrifying message finally reached them, broken and desperate.

All… communication failed. Beams… widespread destruction… all cities… silent…. millions dead. They slaughter… careless abandon… medical… crèches… all gone. We are the last. All are gone. Our pleas… no mindfulness… only death.

The director hesitated only a moment, her faiina all standing up in sharp, shocked points. Then she began to sing in a strong, martial tone and point to her people. "Go, Check the jumpship. Take all we can in supplies. Send beacons out with this message to every deep-space Aalana ship we have on file, every other in-system station. Send the message from home and add to it, Flee. Scatter. Take your mates and your offspring and run. We must survive."

Almost the last to leave, Een and his station colleagues barely escaped in their single jump ship as the gray war vessels began to sweep the system for remaining Aalana. From the viewports they watched, clinging together as the hostile ships fired upon the poor little station that had been their home. They could only watch in helpless horror as the station exploded in a bright, single flare.

They ran silent, unwilling to give the gray ships transmissions to trace, songs their scattered people might feel compelled to answer and thus betray their own locations as well. No why emerged in their time of flight, no reason an alien race would wish to annihilate a peaceful people. While some of the youngest Aalana speculated and agonized over motives and how the disaster might have been averted, most of them knew there could be no adequate reason, no justification for genocide.

Rumors and whispers led them to Sanctuary, an ingenious, multispecies station populated mainly by others who had fled the invaders, each from their own doomed home planets. Hollowed out asteroids connected in strings and clusters by force fields served as habitats and common spaces, brimming with races both familiar and new to the Aalana refugees.

The gray ships would come. No one doubted that eventuality. The enemy would track their prey. The various races combined their knowledge and technologies in a two-pronged effort: first, find a planet in a far-flung arm of the galaxy on which to make a stand and second, invent a way to allow the entire station to make the jump. Many of the jump ships had arrived damaged and Sanctuary no longer had a fleet large enough to accommodate all the refugees.

Too soon, outlier scouts sent the alarm. The gray ships were coming. The new field emitter configuration wasn't ready, but they had no time. With the enemy closing on them, they were forced to make the jump, damaging the field generator and the emitter array. In the catastrophic field generator failure, the explosion had destroyed all the central habitats and sent the surviving asteroids hurtling away from each other. Those who remained set course in a last, harried attempt to reach the target planet. From all the grief-stricken, frightened messages back and forth, Een's pod had been the only Aalana vessel remaining after the generator explosion.

In their desperate flight here, how many species had been lost? How many songs had died?

The scattered pods limped toward the third planet from this system's star on widely spaced trajectories. It would take days upon days for all of the pods to reach their goal and Een's would be among the last to arrive. By then, perhaps, they would know if the people of this planet had reacted with more curiosity than hostility to their landing. They had no viable choices remaining. These alien beings were their last and only hope.

Serge dismissed the first newscast he saw as another War of the Worlds hoax. Interesting story, but just a story. He'd also had a few beers, so he didn't think about verifying with another news source, just changed the channel to a documentary about an abandoned fortress and fell asleep on the couch.

He'd been doing that a lot lately—wandering aimlessly from room to room all day and ending up with beer for dinner in front of the TV. Not healthy by a long shot. He knew it and was trying to cut back on just being…aimless. He did have to get into town soon. Man couldn't live by beer alone. With other things weighing down his mind, he'd forgotten about the pod landing.

Until the next night, when three more landed. Finally, he thought to check and the story repeated on every news station. Pods. From space. Now that this strange development had penetrated the thick fog of his life, Serge watched with something like curiosity, then growing concern.

It didn't take long for the world to figure out the pods weren't an invasion. They were refugees from some disaster and each pod so far had contained a different kind of alien. The knee-high, round furred ones who seemed to be communicating successfully with the Norwegians. The millipede sort of ones who weren't doing as well with the Canadians. The manta ones in their water hover-things who had landed in the US…

The news only showed the same thirty-second footage of them, nothing after initial contact, and Serge watched closely, suspicions growing, as more pods came down across the states over the next few days. Government officials would come on to acknowledge each landing and to say that the aliens were receiving all the help they needed, but none of the alien people appeared in front of the cameras again.

The part of him that could still care enough to worry conjured up secret federal facilities with cold, unfeeling scientists and terrible experiments. The country's track record with refugee treatment wasn't the best, after all, and the way the aliens vanished was nothing short of sinister. But really, what could he do? It wasn't any of his business and he wasn't some action hero to go swooping in and rescuing anyone from unethical labs.

Nope. Better to see what was still in the cupboard and try to figure out if he needed to stock up on anything before the next snow moved in.

Chapter One

Smoke rose from the damaged pod. Difficult to say how much, since it was obscured by the windswept snow. This was supposed to be a mild season in this hemisphere. The instruments had only given them general data, not enough to take elevation and local weather patterns into account.

Field release, Een whispered.

A last sliver of hope insisted that the AI functions might have survived the crash. No response. He fumbled with the manual release, fingers clumsy and swollen, difficult to maneuver with all his faiina still upright in hard spikes from fear and pain.

Perhaps his containment field failed as well, since it shut down suddenly, leaving him free to crawl from his command bowl out of the ruined pod. Grief jostled with frustration in his jumbled thoughts. Almost. They had been so close. On the outer rim of the escaping fleet, their small asteroid pod had escaped the worst of the damage from the failure of the fleet's field generators. Even so, they suffered localized instrument failures and the loss of outbound communications. They could only listen in horror as other pod crews cried out for assistance, desperate emergency calls in a dozen languages cut off mid-word, lives suddenly extinguished that the AI registered only as blank space in the data.

Dragging his burned and uncooperative body one-armed, he reached Aal. Once shining silver eyes stared sightless, flat and dark, at an alien sky. Forcibly ejected when the pod crashed, Aal's neck had snapped. Perhaps it was