The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The people around me were staring upward, slack-jawed or screaming. Remember, outside of the few long-lived species like the Barious, it had been generations since the pulse for most of them. Seeing a dreadnaught suddenly drop out of orbit and into their empty skies was like seeing the gods of your grandparents—the ones you had only half-believed in—suddenly manifest directly in front of you. You can pretend all you like that such a moment would be one of clarity or ecstasy, when the truth was, it would more likely be one of pants-shitting fear. That was the more prevalent reaction around me, and I couldn’t blame them. The shaking wasn’t helping matters.

  I wasn’t too pleased about it myself, but that had less to do with the appearance of the ship—I’d known it was possible, if not likely—and more to do with the massive emblem painted on the side, shaking with the tremors rippling through the dreadnaught’s bulkheads: a four-fingered fist, half-closed around a stylized star.

  The Pax. The fucking Pax.

  Slots on the bottom of the dreadnaught slid open; stun drones dropped out of their bays like they were swarms of insects, preparing to home in on anything with a heat signature and explode in a cloud of electric shock and mild neurotoxins. They wouldn’t last long in this pulsed atmosphere, but they wouldn’t need to—there were plenty of locals below, plenty of heat signatures to choose from.

  We also had a heat signature. I activated my intention shield and grabbed the Preacher around the waist, holding her close enough that the shield would cover her as well. Just in time, too: one of the drones came right for us, its sleek, hovering form skimming over the ground like the dragonflies that gave them their rough shape, drawn to us like a moth to a flame.

  A moth that then exploded. My shield blocked the shock and the toxins, but couldn’t do much with the force of the blast itself, other than dissipate it across my entire body; both the Preacher and I were lifted off of our feet and smashed backward into a shack.

  When we pulled ourselves out of the ruined wood, everything was chaos.

  That was only partly because of the stun drones. The Pax were here for the girl too—of that, there was no question, based on their tactics alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be using stun drones, they’d be using energy cannons and they’d be blasting the place apart. However, when I said they were stupid, I wasn’t just being vindictive—apparently they’d never stopped to think what would happen if they parked a dreadnaught, under assault from pulse radiation, directly on top of a populated area.

  Whole sheets of metal and debris were being ripped off the ship’s hull as the radiation worked overtime to try and devour it. I’d already said, the more advanced the technology, and the more active the technology, the faster the radiation would decay it—that also held true for the size of any given piece of tech. Scheherazade could have stayed in atmosphere for an hour or so without too much ill effect, provided she stayed relatively high, but she was on the smallish side, even for a personal starship. The dreadnaught was the size of a small goddamned city, and it was already lower than the point where Schaz had descended to drop me off at the top of the refinery tower. The thing had only been in atmosphere for a few minutes, but even if they’d pulled back right now, the ship would be unsalvageable.

  It apparently didn’t matter—not to the Pax. I mean, it should have—dreadnaughts were expensive as fuck; you could buy an entire terraformed moon for the cost of one, if you didn’t mind the rough condition the moon might be in—but the Pax’s lack of material investment in the ship was pretty goddamned evident, given that, again, they’d ridden it deep into a pulsed atmosphere.

  Their troops were already dropping down from the assault bays, either descending from rope lines or jumping with antigrav gear, just hoping that the tech would hold out long enough to get them safely to the ground. It didn’t, not for all of them—I saw a few just keep falling, plowing into the earth below—but it worked for enough that the citizens who hadn’t been taken out by the stun drones were mostly fleeing in terror.

  Meanwhile, all those pieces of the ship calving off from the whole—not to mention the falling bodies—were wreaking havoc on the town. The Pax wouldn’t be able to take the girl alive if they’d crushed her under a few tons of debris, or charbroiled her by setting a gas line on fire; this world didn’t have electricity, but it wasn’t completely technologically void, and there were already explosions and fires spreading where the collapsing dreadnaught’s detritus was causing havoc. But like I said—the Pax just weren’t that smart.

  Of all the goddamned sects for the pulse to completely avoid shutting down, it had to have been the Pax. Before the pulse, they’d just been another group out of hundreds, their mandate “complete galactic domination,” but no closer to that goal than dozens of others with the same stated intent. The galaxy was big; galactic conquest was laughably impractical, but some fuckers just kept trying anyway.

  Now, though, just from the dumb luck of not having the majority of their conquered worlds hit by the pulse, they were just about the only game in town still willing to try to conquer everything they saw by force, pulse radiation elsewhere be damned. Most of the others who’d been trying the same thing before the pulse—and thus might have checked the Pax’s own expansion—either didn’t have the tools left, or were too preoccupied by basic survival to give much of a shit what was going on elsewhere.

  How’d the Pax even find the girl? How’d they find out about her? Our intelligence had been a direct line, not a tip, and there was no way it was compromised.

  A question for another day. I hauled the Preacher to her feet. We had to get moving.

  CHAPTER 8

  The little town was in complete chaos, which was understandable. Even the concept of people living beyond the stars was just a tall tale to most of them, and now those very same half-mythical people were dropping down into their midst with body armor, stun batons, and big fucking guns, an invasion force from out of nowhere. Even the decaying state of their ship made a statement: this enemy had no way to turn back. This was not a fight the locals could win—not with the weapons they had, and not psychologically. They were used to fighting off small groups of bandits. The Pax were a lot of things, but local bullyboys they were not, and while they might have been stupid, their shock troops did follow orders; it was part of their culture.

  The soldiers knew they were looking for a human girl, so anyone who came anywhere near that description was getting the unfriendly end of a stun baton; all the rest got the significantly more unfriendly end of a gun. Their energy weapons, like their ship, were decaying rapidly, but not nearly as fast, and most of them were packing sidearms more in line with the local tech levels.

  Still, the locals were fighting back, or at least trying; it’s not like this planet was a paradise, after all, and most of them went armed most places. There was . . . a great deal of gunfire, is what I was saying. The Pax were easy to pick out from the locals, given their advanced tech and their bulky bodysuits designed specifically so you couldn’t know what species was underneath—that was part of the Pax philosophy, functionally “Pax first, anything else never.” Both sides were losing combatants rapidly, the township turning into a bloodbath, but the Pax just kept coming, even as their ship just kept collapsing. Unless they had dropships in the upper atmosphere, ready to swing down and pick the survivors back up, the Pax were here to stay, regardless of whether they found the girl or not.

  I kept the Preacher close by, within the aegis of my intention shield—her chassis, the original pieces she had left, at least, could shrug off small arms fire in a way my squishy organs could not, but a burst from one of those energy rifles would still do her in—but as handy as intention shields are, their biggest fault was right there in the name: they can only cover about a quarter of your body at once, so you have to know where the shot’s coming from before they can block it. The controls are wired directly into the user’s brainstem.

  Which was great in single-combatant firefights or even smaller group engagement
s, but in a clusterfuck like this, you were just as likely to get hit in the back of the head by a stray round you never saw coming as to get shot at by someone you knew was aiming at you. I used the intention shield because its control system meant it was down the vast majority of the time, which meant it wasn’t decaying the vast majority of the time I spent in a pulsed atmosphere, but it did have noticeable flaws.

  The Preacher didn’t seem all that thrown by the Pax assault. Or maybe she had been, and she’d just recovered in triple-time; Barious processed information very quickly. Either way, she led me down back alleys and through derelict buildings, trying to avoid the worst of the fighting. When we couldn’t do that, I used my rifle. I didn’t mind; I found killing Pax to be weirdly soothing. The fuckers.

  Finally, picking our way through the already run-down neighborhood that was quickly devolving into chaos, we reached the orphanage. What was left of the orphanage, at any rate. You could see someone—either compassionate townsfolk, or more likely the kids themselves—had tried to keep the place tidy; it was cleaner than most of the surrounding structures, and was even covered in friendly-looking murals, depicting children of various species getting along and doing chores and whatnot in perfect harmony. Or at least, it had been.

  Now, half of it was crushed underneath what had once been a laser turret, formerly attached to the Pax dreadnaught hovering above us. The upper floor was canted dangerously, the whole top of the structure—what remained of the structure—about to collapse down onto the bottom half, which was also being consumed by flames that had started . . . somewhere. One of those gas lines, maybe, or just bad luck; it seemed like there were always fires, in times like these.

  We could hear children screaming inside. Regardless of whether the girl was within or not—or whether she was still alive or not—that wasn’t a sound you could not react to. The Preacher and I made our way through the rubble, trying to find a way into what remained of the structure without getting ourselves caught on fire—even Barious could melt. We eventually wound up climbing through a first-floor window.

  All the children were huddled in the main room, what I’d guess had been a sort of mess hall. The second story was about to collapse on them. Or, I should say, it had already collapsed on them, but something was holding it back—an invisible wall of force, as if a net had been strung over the children’s heads, holding back several tons of building materials and detritus.

  Just below that net stood a young human woman, shaking and sweating with effort, her hands raised up as if she were physically holding all that debris. Her dark-skinned face was streaked with blood and grime, but there was a relentless determination burning out of her eyes, like if she had to stand here forever to keep that ton of rubble from crushing the other children, well then, that was what she would do.

  Telekinesis. One of the markers I looked for—one of the rarer ones, in fact. My HUD helpfully highlighted her form to tell me what I already knew: I’d found my girl.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Preacher and I started getting the children out.

  We ducked in and grabbed them, depositing them into the street outside. The girl barely acknowledged our efforts; she was too busy making sure the entire building didn’t collapse while we did our work. It wasn’t until we’d gotten at least half the children out that I noticed they were disappearing from the street outside. Most kids you’d expect to stay rooted to the spot after a thing like that, wailing and waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do, but these were rabbiting somewhere, not waiting for an adult to come by and help.

  I didn’t know where these kids were going, but as long as it was “not about to be crushed by falling debris,” I figured it was still better than where they had been, so I kept doing what I was doing. When we got the last child clear, the girl followed us, walking slowly, half-turned, her attention still wholly focused on the rubble she was keeping airborne with her mind.

  Finally, she stepped clear of the building, and just crumpled. I shielded her with my body—just reflex. The rubble came crashing down, bouncing off of the intention shield covering my back. When the dust cleared, I noticed the Preacher had done much the same thing—just dropped to one knee in the street, letting the debris fly around her. There were definite benefits to having a metal body.

  The girl disentangled herself from me, looking me up and down, not a great deal of trust in her expression despite the fact that I’d just rescued her from a collapsing building. “Come on,” she said finally, wiping a thin stream of blood from one nostril—an aftereffect of having pushed her gift too hard, too fast. “This way.”

  Then she ducked into a side alley across the street, out of sight.

  I cursed and followed. This was the problem with shepherding children; they’re all will and movement. An adult who had just used burgeoning telekinetic powers to hold up a collapsing building in the midst of an attack from conquerors dropping down from the sky might have asked for explanations; she just ran.

  There was a metal grate in the half-buried metal floor of the alley, raised up on its hinges—pre-pulse construction, likely a maintenance tunnel for the anti-orbital gun. I dropped down inside, the Preacher following me. It was pitch black down there, the only light coming from the grate behind us.

  I toggled the low-light vision setting on my HUD all the way up, and the black became just dim instead. Yep—maintenance tunnel. It looked like it had been used for storage during the early days of the settlement, but it had gone ignored for quite a while. The girl was halfway down the passage, moving fast, and quiet. Again, I followed.

  “We need to get out of town,” I told her, ducking under low pipes.

  “No shit,” she replied. “These tunnels will take us under the guns, all the way to the far side of the settlement. Nobody ever thinks to use them anymore.”

  “How the hell are you seeing anything down here?” I asked her. Without my HUD, I’d be blind as a bat.

  “I’m not,” she replied, coolly experienced, deigning to give the adult the wisdom of her youth. “But I know the path.”

  The other children must have come this way as well; I could hear distant footfalls, somewhere ahead of us in the warren of tunnels. They weren’t as quiet as the girl, or maybe that was just their panic.

  The earth above our heads was still occasionally thumping from debris raining down from the Pax dreadnaught, causing dust to shake down from the ceiling, dancing in the glow of my low-light vision. The sounds of gunfire were more muffled by the steel walls, until they weren’t anymore, and it was coming from up ahead of us instead.

  “Hold up,” I hissed at the girl. I don’t know if she actually listened, or if she had heard the gunshots as well—the sharp “cracks” of a ballistic weapon rather than the loud hum of an energy rifle—but either way, she drew up short.

  There was a doorway just in front of us; on the other side we could still hear the sounds of violence. At least a few of the Pax shock troops had made their way down here as well. I didn’t know if that was because they had some means to track the girl, or if this was just part of their search. Either way, we would have to go through them—the girl had clearly been headed for the door.

  Close quarters, too close for my rifle. I ran my thumb and forefinger up my right hand and arm like I was pulling on invisible gloves, then tapped a quick rhythm onto my knuckles; did the same, in a different rhythm, to my left, activating my melee implants. “Stay behind me,” I whispered to the girl. She grinned back—I doubted that was assent.

  I put my ear to the door, heard the sound of Pax voices on the other side, easily identifiable because the filters on their masks gave them all the exact same sort of electronically scrambled intonation. The gunfire had ceased: they were interrogating someone. Likely one of the children who had fled before us. Shit.

  I went through the door hard.

  Three Pax soldiers, one of them holding a child by the arm. I hit that one first, striking with the impact knuckles on my righ
t hand, three fast, sharp blows to the rib cage. The blows didn’t have to be hard—the implants took care of that, multiplying the Newtonian force of the strikes so that both the armor my target was wearing and the ribs underneath turned to jelly. She dropped the kid; I turned to face the next soldier, who was lunging for me, having holstered her sidearm for the interrogation. A quick sidestep and a hook to the jaw with my left answered her lunge, an electrical shock blazing a quick burst of light in the darkness between my knuckles and her chin, dropping her like a sack of meal.

  The third was coming at me as well, trained, fast, reflexes honed, and I might have been able to answer that attack and I might not have, but all of a sudden it didn’t matter: the Pax aggressor’s forward motion was reversed, as abruptly as it had begun. She hung motionless for a moment, struggling against the invisible force that gripped her, then flew backward and smashed halfway through the steel wall, her feet twitching, the only part of her still visible.

  I turned and looked at the girl. She gave me that kind of crooked grin again, lowering her hand. The few kids I’d known with telekinesis, even after training, would have been completely wiped after the effort she’d put forth today, but she was still going strong, that thin bleed I’d noticed from her sinuses notwithstanding. “You can fight,” she told me, like this was something I didn’t know.

  “I still appreciate the assist,” I replied.

  “And you’re not from around here.”

  “No, she is not,” the Preacher said, following us into the storeroom. I doubted she was having any trouble making her way in the dark—the Barious are born with low-light implants of a similar type to the ones that took me five two-hour surgeries to get installed. “You need to go with her, child,” she told the girl.

  The girl’s face scrunched up, automatic defiance. At fourteen, anyone who told her what to do could automatically go to hell. The Barious may have been smart, but they understood fuck-all about basic psychology.