I knelt in front of the girl before she could respond. “Listen,” I told her, “I’ve got a way out of here. Not just out of this city—a way off of this world, a way to someplace better, someplace where the tech still works and the pulse hasn’t shut everything else down. That place is waiting for you, if you come with me, now. If you stay”—I nodded to the shaking ceiling above us—“I don’t know that there’ll be much left to stay behind for.”
The girl looked in the direction the other kid had disappeared—not so much actually looking for the kid, I don’t think, as looking away from me. She looked hard, weighing taking that path—a path that led to who knows where, one she’d have to take alone—then nodded, slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “This place is going to hell anyway.”
So that was that.
CHAPTER 10
The Pax whose ribs I’d turned to jelly was still moaning softly on the floor. As I watched, the Preacher stepped over to the twitching form, put her foot on its neck, then, almost primly, stepped down, putting all her considerable weight on the heel pressed to the Pax’s spine.
I guess her church wasn’t really into “all life is sacred,” then.
“Harsh,” the girl said to her, sounding caught between being impressed and being aghast.
“It was suffering,” the Preacher returned, her voice level mechanical, even for a Barious. “And it was Pax.”
“It—she—was your enemy, so she deserves to have her neck snapped? Even after she couldn’t fight anymore?”
“You misunderstand. If her fellows had found her, they would have hauled her back to their barracks, and then, when they found the time, they would have beat her to death. As entertainment. Merely because she had been weak enough to become wounded to such an extent. The Pax do not believe in second chances.”
I appraised the Preacher again, my HUD turning the shimmer of her eyes into a full-on blaze of light. She was older than the pulse—I’d known that already. But even before that, there had been thousands of sects, maybe even hundreds of thousands, religions and corporations and governments all warring for dominance in the galaxy, some fighting over entire sectors, some fighting over cities or continents on lone worlds. The Pax had been no more impressive than most. What were the odds that the Preacher would be so well versed in the habits of just one of them, a sect that had been middling-to-lesser on the galactic scale when the pulse hit?
The girl, meanwhile, had not taken the Preacher’s little speech all that well. “That’s . . . pretty fucked up,” she said, sounding shaken for the first time. The dreadnaught coming out of nowhere hadn’t thrown her, a building collapsing on top of her hadn’t thrown her, our little fight in the darkness of the tunnels hadn’t thrown her, but the incivility of the Pax apparently was enough to put a tremor in her voice. Huh.
“Which way do we go to get out of here?” I asked her, redirecting the conversation to something less horribly morbid.
She stopped, reoriented herself in the darkened room—a fight will do that to you, every time—and pointed. “That way,” she said, finally letting the woman with the gun take the lead.
I ducked under some hanging wiring, ripped loose either in the chaos or years ago, making my way into the passageway she’d indicated. According to the compass on my HUD, we were heading west, which was good—the Pax dreadnaught had covered the city and then some, but the main force of their troops had seemed to be concentrated in the eastern areas.
I tried to raise Scheherazade on my comms, but got nothing. That wasn’t surprising; I wasn’t sure if wars had actually been waged on this particular planet, but it had always been standard procedure to shield anti-orbital batteries to high heaven. The walls of this whole place were probably one massive Faraday cage.
We continued on into the darkness, the earth above still shaking. How much of the dreadnaught could even be left by now? Pulse radiation is not forgiving stuff, and it grows more furious the more you deny its will. Still, a ship that size could have been carrying tens of thousands of troops—hundreds of thousands, if this had actually been the Pax’s plan and they’d packed it with nothing but infantry, knowing it was going to tear itself apart in the rad-soaked atmosphere anyway.
“So who are these guys?” the girl asked. “You said they were ‘Pax,’ right? What do they want here?”
“Pax is the name of their sect, yeah,” I told her as we moved. “What they want is to conquer the whole galaxy. They won’t be able to do it, because there are a great many people who want to conquer the whole galaxy, for whatever reason I’m sure I don’t understand. But they sure can make life miserable if they decide you’re standing between them and their entirely unachievable goal.”
“Sound like fun at parties,” she muttered. “But you didn’t answer my question. You told me what they want in general, not what they want here.”
“No, I did not,” I replied, hoping she’d take the hint.
“It’s because of me, isn’t it?” Her voice wasn’t soft as she said it, exactly, but it was a little muted. That’s the problem with teenagers: they already think they’re the center of the universe. When they find out that they actually might be incredibly important, they can react in unpredictable ways.
“They’re here for a great many reasons,” I told her. “But yes—you’re one of them.”
“So then it’s my fault,” she said. I was hoping she wouldn’t have made that particular leap. “All the people dying up there—”
“If the Pax weren’t killing people up there, they’d be killing people somewhere else,” I told her forcefully. “Killing people is what they do. You didn’t invent assholes, kid, and you didn’t make the Pax assholes, either.”
“But they’d be killing people someplace else, not my home.” She thrust her jaw out stubbornly, like she was just bound and determined to take all the blame for this on her skinny little shoulders. There were strange reflections on her cheeks in the low-light of my HUD; she was crying. Not much, just a little. “They’re up there murdering maybe everybody I’ve ever known, and you’re saying that doesn’t matter, because that’s just what they do?”
“I’m saying it’s not your fault,” I sighed. “If you blame yourself for the actions of every asshole in the universe, you wouldn’t be able to stand under the weight of all that guilt. We’re each responsible for our own actions, no more, no less. You’re responsible for you, and I’m responsible for me, and the Pax are responsible for the Pax; no one else is.”
“But they wouldn’t—”
“They are here due to circumstances beyond your control, child,” the Preacher put in, resting a comforting hand on the girl’s shoulder. “You cannot be responsible for something you had no hand in.”
She shrugged off the Preacher’s hand, but fell silent. That was fine; we could deal with the fallout of that particular revelation later, hopefully on board Scheherazade rather than down here where we were likely to get shot at. In the meantime, if she wanted to stew in her own guilt, maybe that’d make her less likely to be impulsive and run off to do something crazy. Or maybe it would make her more likely; what the hell did I know, it had been nearly two centuries since I was a teenager.
The ground beneath us had been slowly rising to an incline over the last little bit, and the sounds of combat were beginning to fade to a dull roar behind us. “Are we about clear of the city?” I asked the girl.
She looked up, broken from her reverie about how everything bad happening was her fault and everything was terrible forever. “Yeah,” she said, wiping a hand across her cheek. “There should be another grate ahead of us, just a little—”
“I see it.” The actual daylight filtering down through the metal made it stand out like a beacon in my HUD as we turned another corner. As we approached, I dialed down the low-light vision back to normal and laced my fingers in the grate, lifting it up slightly and shifting it to the side. I paused, listening, but there was nothing out of the ordinary—beyond the sound of the city collapsing somew
here behind us, I mean.
I levered myself through, then helped the kid up. The Preacher got out on her own; I couldn’t have lifted her if I tried. We were out in the grasslands again, clear of the city, up on a rise above the valley itself, the wind gently shifting the ocean of pink and purple flora between us and the war being waged below. The girl wasn’t staring at the pretty landscape, though—she’d been seeing that all her life. Instead, she was staring back at her home.
I couldn’t blame her—it was a hell of a sight.
CHAPTER 11
There wasn’t much left of the Pax dreadnaught. It hovered above the burning town, almost drawn even against the bulk of the orbital gun, as if it were a mirror image of the flaming settlement below—broken towers and shattered structures on both craft and township, fires flickering in the interiors of buildings and bulkheads both, the dreadnaught still shedding metal like a snake molting its skin.
Smoke and dust plumed up from the devastation below, caused by both the slow-motion collapse of the dreadnaught and the Pax troops rampaging through the buildings surrounding the massive, quiet guns. Once, those weapons had been built to ward off exactly an attack such as this—now they were just landmarks, standing in mute witness to the Pax assault.
The sky was shifting into indigo colors as the sun set behind the burning settlement, the flames licking through the city—and the flashes of the explosions visible through the gaps in the dreadnaught’s armor—blending their bright illumination with the last light of day. As we watched, there was one last massive explosion inside the dreadnaught, and it began listing to the side, slowly sinking, unable to keep itself in the air. It crumpled as it hit the anti-orbital gun, a slow-motion crash that only accelerated its collapse.
“The Pax had to know this would happen, right?” the Preacher asked, her tone uncertain—a rarity for a Barious. “Surely they would have at least shut down their fusion reactor before they entered the atmosphere.”
I shrugged, still staring out at the assault. “They weren’t firing any of the dreadnaught’s weapons, so that’s a good sign,” I replied. “But if you’re asking me to make assumptions about the intelligence of a Pax operation, well . . . I’m not going to.”
“But if they didn’t shut down the reactor, and if that ship is tearing itself apart—”
“Yeah. We need to move.”
“What will happen?” the girl asked, looking between the two of us. It must have seemed so strange to her, these two bizarre people—one at least someone she’d known most of her life, the other a complete mystery—discussing an event that must have seemed apocalyptic to her as though it were an everyday occurrence. “What will happen if they didn’t shut down their . . . their . . . fusion . . . thingy?”
“Their fusion reactor,” I told her. “It’s what powers that ship. And if they didn’t shut it down, it’ll go critical, sooner rather than later. And if it goes critical, there will be a new crater on this planet’s surface in a few hours. We need to move,” I said again, turning away from the sight.
The girl was still staring out at the city—her home—as it burned, barely taller than the swaying grasses around her. “I woke up this morning thinking maybe I could find some work at the saloons,” she said, a small catch in her voice. “I do that sometimes, the sweeping up. I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
“We never expect our lives to change,” the Preacher told her. “But then they do.” With a gentle—but firm—hand, she turned the girl away from the sight of the devastation. “Even if the reactor doesn’t go critical, the Pax will be looking for us. Come.”
“And don’t use your . . . talents,” I added. “They’ll draw attention.”
“They always do,” she nodded, her tone more morose than you’d expect to hear from a girl her age.
We set off through the grass that was beginning to give off a shimmering glow in the moonlight, almost iridescent, the bucolic fields suffused with a sense of melancholy as we moved away from the only life the girl had ever known, a history already in flames.
I reached out to Scheherazade by way of tapping the implanted comm node under my jaw to open the secure line. “I take it you saw our company incoming,” I said to her.
“Oh, couldn’t miss them, boss,” she replied. Incidentally, I’m going to keep using “she” to describe Scheherazade’s voice, despite the fact that the last time I visited Sanctum, JackDoes, our Reint engineer, thought that it would be hilarious to code a time-delayed change to her voice, giving her the intonations of a plummy Tyll aristocrat from a bygone era. The voice also happened to be male. Neither Scheherazade nor myself was particularly amused by his little joke; I was still planning on cornering JackDoes on a balcony somewhere and dangling him off a railing for a little bit the next time I was home.
“Is that going to complicate a pickup?” I asked her.
“Indubitably. They’ve got two more dreadnaughts in orbit, presumably waiting to deploy shuttles that can last long enough in atmosphere once their shock troops find what they’re looking for. I’m assuming that’s our girl, by the way.”
“A safe assumption,” I agreed.
“Are we one step ahead of them?”
“We are.”
“Well done, boss.”
“Appreciated. We’re just west of the dreadnaught they dropped in. How far will we have to go before you can swing down and pick us up without being spotted?”
“That depends, ma’am. It’s your calculation to make—the longer we wait, the further you can move, and the further you can move, the further I’ll be from their search grid, which means the better my stealth systems will hold up against their scans. On the other hand—”
“—on the other hand, the longer we wait, the more likely they are to send more ships to reinforce the ones already here, and the more likely we are to run into trouble on the ground.”
“That’s the rub, and it looks like they’re planning an extended stay. Three dreadnaughts, boss, and one used as a sacrificial lamb, shock and awe and all that. That’s a big show of force, ma’am, even for the Pax.”
I frowned. It made a certain amount of sense if they were looking for the girl—the Pax had been seeking gifted children, just like we had, albeit for very different reasons. They wanted soldiers, tools, to mold the children into shock troops for their armies. We wanted to train them for an entirely different purpose, one not so soaked in blood. Salvation, rather than destruction.
But coming here looking for the girl and conquering this system were not necessarily the same thing. Even for Pax, this was overkill to an extreme degree. I had no doubt they could do it, and fairly easily, but there was very little gain in it, given that the radiation signature from the pulse had pushed this particular system so far back down the technological scale it would be useless for manufacturing. About the only resource it had worth exploiting was the local population itself, to be pressed into service as more Pax soldiers, and that same resource existed on worlds they could also find other uses for.
“This is a bad scene, boss,” Scheherazade confirmed, agreeing with my thinking.
“Yeah. Scan your maps, get back to me with a few options for a pickup area.”
“Will do.”
“Were you just . . . talking to yourself?” the girl asked me.
I started to answer, then sighed instead. “What’s your name, kid?” I asked first.
She swallowed. “Esa,” she replied.
“Well, Esa,” I told her, “when we manage to get off this rock, you’re going to see and hear a great many things that don’t make a lot of sense to you. I would suggest just rolling with it.”
“But who were you talking to?” she pressed. “And how?”
“My ship, Scheherazade. She’s in orbit above us, hiding from the Pax forces hanging above the world.”
“Your ship can talk?” For some reason, this seemed more impressive to her than the ship itself, or the news that there were more Pax in orbit.
“Sh
e can.”
“Can she get us out of here?”
“That, Esa, is what we’re going to find out.”
CHAPTER 12
I’d hoped that Esa’s little trick with the maintenance tunnel—getting us out of the city before the Pax could lock it down, with minimal interaction with soldiers—would have bought us at least a bit of a head start, but no such luck. Whoever was in charge of the Pax troops, apparently they were dumb enough to think wasting a dreadnaught as troop transport—admittedly, impressive troop transport, but still—was a good idea, but smart enough that they’d given at least some of their soldiers orders to make for the countryside as soon as they touched down, rather than focusing on just pacifying the city.
That meant we were dodging Pax troops ahead of us as well as keeping an eye out for the soldiers we knew would be approaching from behind, and that meant we weren’t making quite the forward progress I would have liked.
The good news—for us, if not for the Pax or the locals—was that the bandit holdup I’d witnessed this morning had very much not been an isolated incident; the gently swaying fields of iridescent grasses were hiding multiple camps of armed bandits, and they were just as happy to waylay Pax infantry as they were farmers trying to take their goods to market. More so, if it meant they got to steal fancy offworld goods from the Pax soldiers, rather than just crops and local currency, a currency that would likely be worthless due to the invasion, not that most bandits would have been smart enough to think that far ahead.
So we were trying to avoid ambush by the Pax, the Pax were trying to avoid ambush by the bandits, and meanwhile it was starting to get pretty cold out; we’d need shelter, sooner rather than later. Even if the temperature hadn’t been dropping lower than I’d like, Esa was exhausted, and I wasn’t far off. I could have pushed myself harder if I had to, but I won’t lie: I was perfectly content to find a natural cave formation with the scanner in my HUD and announce that we’d be taking a break from skulking through the shimmering grasses and copses of blue-tinged trees.
The Stars Now Unclaimed Page 4