Chapter 7 - Star Eater
Back on the ship, where Jack had air and thus could talk again, he somehow convinced Sera to lie down. The trip outside to see the city and village had drained her, the high energy she had displayed when they first meet fading away into a shell of a person.
"Go to bed!" She was worse than Jamie, despite being older than him. Much older. Did she say eight million earlier? Man she looked good for her age. Not a day older than 30. Well, maybe 25 with a good night's sleep. If it was night.
Time in space was so wonky.
With Sera tucked into bed, well, tucked wasn't the right word cuz apparently fire aliens didn't need blankets, she was just sorta lying on this springy thing, Jack decided to see if he could find out more about a) just what type of alien she was b) what type of alien she thought he was c) who was dying and d) what she needed protection from.
Of course, such information was very hard to get when the one person who knew the answers was conked out. With a sigh, Jack collapsed into the chair he had sat it earlier that evening. Day. Morning. Really, he hadn't seen the sun for hours and was so messed up right now.
"I don't even know how long I've been gone."
"Thirty six hours, five minutes, and sixteen seconds." The ceiling said.
"What the hell?" Jack jumped up, staff pointed at the ceiling. "Who's there?"
"I am the ship's AI. Now that Miss is asleep, you have command of the ship."
"I have no idea how to command a ship."
"I am here to answer any questions."
"I don't have to touch you? It can be all verbal?" Cuz in his experience, ice and silicon chips did not go together. At all. No siree.
"Yes."
Jack rubbed his hands together. Finally, some answers! First things first. "Where are we?"
"We are on Wrice, one of two moons orbiting the planet Opar."
"And the city outside?"
"It is called Aurelias."
"Do you have, I don't know, pictures of what it looked like?"
A screen flipped out from the wall and Jack was treated to not only pictures, but videos. It looked like it had been a thriving city, fully of fire aliens like Sera. After asking question after question he learned that the city, no the entire empire in it's Golden Age, had been attacked by something called fearlings. After a brief period of imprisonment, they came back stronger than ever and wiped out every empire citizen. Well, almost. There was Sera. And surprisingly, the royal family out there somewhere. But they were all that was left of a glittering empire, the last of a species.
And they weren't just fire aliens, they were stars. Like butterflies, they went from eggs to larvae to winged instincts. Sera was a larvae, what was commonly called a juvenile star, and eventually, in a few more million years, she would take a personal spaceship into space, find a good spot, and explode outward to become a main sequence star.
All the stars in the sky on Wrice were her family. Or at least acquaintances. Main sequence stars had not drawn the attention of the fearlings, they went for the juveniles, creatures who had emotions while full grown stars didn't for the most part. Star herders, slender people who could survive in thin atmosphere and who were mainly nourished by starlight, who were pale and had white hair and blue eyes and were always seen with spears that kinda sort a looked like Jack's staff, fought along side them. They were guards for the youngest stars, brandishing weapons of starlight powered crystals. They fell so easily.
But nothing the computer told him helped Jack to understand what was the current threat. The fearlings were gone, left to devour other kingdoms, but they also didn't attack full grown stars. There was no fear there. Nothing but light and fusion. They knew as soon as they developed how long they had to live. The only thing that could destroy them was their internal fuel running out. Fearlings had no power over them.
He was staring at the night sky, a star chart of the area Sera had been looking at hours ago.
"See? They're dying. Something is eating my family."
"You'll protect them from it, won't you? Protect me?"
Her words echoed in his head. She obviously thought something was wrong with the sky, with the stars that lived in it. Something is eating my family. But he couldn't see any evidence of that. The sky was so full of stars, much more than the amount seen from Earth, and even on a live feed of the view Jack couldn't make out anything capable of eating a star.
What exactly was Sera scared of? What did she want protection from?
"Do you see it?"
Sera was up from her nap, or was it a good night's rest?, and looking over his shoulder.
"No." He admitted.
"Computer, show the same sky, from five million years ago."
The screen changed.
There were more stars in the sky.
"See?" she asked, flipping between the images. "The stars are disappearing."
"How do you know it's not just a black hole or something?"
She gave him a look that implied she thought he was stupid. "For a star herder, you don't know a lot about stars."
"About that...I'm not. A star herder I mean. I'm just a boy who died and then got turned into a spirit by the Man in the Moon. This isn't natural." He pulled at his hair. "Well, okay, it is now, but it's not original. I used to have brown hair, like you."
"You're just saying that. Dead people don't come back to life. You're a star herder." She pushed off from his shoulders.
"No Sera, I'm not." He stood on his knees on the chair, turning to look at her over the back. "I can't speak your language, or that of your parents or who ever is up there." He gestured to the sky outside the parked ship. "I'm from Earth."
"No! You're a star herder!"
Frustrated, Jack froze her feet to the floor. "Can star herders do that? Or this?" He frosted a section of the wall, drew an outline of a dolphin, and then had it swim about the room to explode into snow above her head. "Are star herders this cold?" He swept into her personal space, and she seemed to mind it a lot less than he did, to put both hands on either side of her face. "Are they?"
The look in her eyes was heartbreaking. It reminded him of the look on Jamie's face ten years ago, talking to that stuffed bunny. Wanting to believe in something so much, but knowing there was all this evidence against it.
"If you're not a star herder, who will protect me?" she whispered. "Something is eating my family. It'll come for me."
"Well, I may not be a star herder, but I'm pretty good at protecting children." Never mind that by all standards, human and spirit years, he was much, much, much, much younger. But he supposed, if you compared how long they had lived compared to the average life span, they could be the same age. Maybe. He was bad at math.
"I said I'd protect you. I mean it."
She hiccuped and then broke down sobbing into his chest. Jack didn't mind the pulling and wetness, or the tight squeeze forcing air from his lungs. Because underneath all her craziness, Sera wasn't much different from a scared child. She had always had protectors, family, star herders, a Golden Army. But they were gone, had been for such a long time and she had clung to the first thing she found that was associated with safety – Jack's likeness to star herders.
He could relate to clinging to the one thing of home. It was why he still hung in Burgess, despite knowing more hospitable places. It was why he still hung out with Jamie and his friends, even though they were all now eighteen and nineteen – he had been too scared to let them go and forced them to continue to believe with never living Burgess for long.
"Don't worry. We'll figure things out." He had been a big brother, once upon a time. He had saved children, once not so long ago. Jack Frost could take on a star eater.
...Maybe.
