The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  At one point the cave had been occupied by another group of raiders, but they’d long since vacated the premises—based on the bullet holes in some of the stuff they’d left behind, rather hurriedly. Maybe the settlement militia had been at least trying to keep the area secure; maybe it had been the result of an economic disagreement with another group of bandits. Didn’t matter much, either way—they were long gone.

  The Preacher volunteered to keep watch—Barious didn’t sleep, exactly, just shut down their various systems in a cycle so that nothing was running continuously for too long, but their senses were never completely dead, either. It was closer to meditation than rest, and she was perfectly capable of keeping an eye on the surroundings visible from the mouth of the cave while she did it.

  I covered Esa with my coat; she took it without complaint. I guess orphans were used to wearing other people’s castoffs. I would have thought she would have drifted right to sleep—it had been a very long day. But I should never underestimate the curiosity of teenagers.

  “What’s it like?” she asked softly. “Up there?”

  “Very different,” I said, shutting my eyes as I tried to get comfortable on the rocky cave floor. I could sleep pretty much anywhere—the trick was just letting your body remind you how worn it was, and ignoring everything else.

  “Different how?”

  “Not just different from here—different from itself, too. It’s not like this is the only world that got hit by the pulse, Esa. Almost all of them did, to greater and lesser degrees. Some took the opportunity to put aside their old hatreds and try to create utopias; others—more—devolved into savage wastelands where the very strongest rule everyone else.”

  “But other places have . . . ships, like yours. People born there can still leave their world, if they want to. Make a new life for themselves.”

  “Some. Not many. And there are difficulties, even on worlds that still have higher levels of technology. It’s not like everyone can afford a ship, even if they live someplace where ships can still operate. It’s been a long day, Esa, and it’ll be a longer one tomorrow; go to sleep.”

  “You can afford a ship. Are you rich?”

  “My ship was given to me by the . . . organization I work for, the organization that sent me looking for you. I couldn’t afford to buy one on my own.”

  “Does your organization not pay you well?”

  “I’m not doing this for the money. Go to sleep.”

  “So why are you doing it?”

  “Because a very long time ago, I did some very bad things, things I can’t undo. I figure I should at least try to balance the scales a little bit. Finding kids like you—it’s important, for reasons the people I’m taking you to meet will be better suited to explain than me. I’m suited for fighting, flying, and not much else; might as well fight for something important.”

  The philosophical concept of redemption didn’t seem to interest Esa all that much. “So you’re poor, then. Like me.”

  “I get by.”

  “That’s what people say when they’re poor. They’re usually lying.”

  “Esa.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Go. To. Sleep.”

  She sighed—that very specific teenager sigh, heavy and theatrical—and rolled over onto her back. “Why are the Pax after me?”

  “We can talk about that later.”

  “But it’s because of my tele . . . telekrin . . . teelekin . . . because I can move stuff with my mind, yeah?”

  “I promise, kid, I will explain as much as I can to you once we’re safely on my ship and locked into a nice, boring hyperspace cruise. For now, go to goddamned sleep.”

  “What’s hyperspace?”

  “Esa, if you don’t stop talking, I’m going to have the Preacher inject you with a sedative.”

  “Can you do that?” she asked the Barious, sitting up a little on her makeshift bed—otherwise known as “a patch of the cave floor mostly free of rocks”—to ask.

  The Preacher nodded. “I have a basic first-aid package installed,” she said. “A sedative is part of that suite.”

  “Cool. I did not know that.”

  “Now you do.”

  “Both of you: less chat, more rack. Sleep. Now. We have a long day of probably getting shot at tomorrow.”

  “Oh. That sounds bad.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be worse if we’re trying to do it while we’re exhausted.”

  Another long sigh. “Fine.” A pause. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “You too.”

  “Don’t let—”

  “Esa. Shut the fuck up.”

  She giggled, like all teenagers vaguely amused by profanity—all she’d seen that day, and she could still giggle; I took it as a good sign—then rolled onto her side, and finally drifted off.

  Shortly thereafter, I did too.

  CHAPTER 13

  In the morning, before the girl awoke, I raised Scheherazade again on my comms. The good news: she’d found someplace she could pick us up, an old observation tower, far enough from the Pax’s search grid that she could get in and out, and high enough up that she wouldn’t cook her engines setting down on the rad-soaked earth below.

  The bad news: the tower was two days’ hike from where we were, and once we got there, we’d have to wait three more days before a big enough hole opened up in the Pax’s orbits, giving Schaz enough time to get in and out. The slightly better news was that there would be a smaller hole in their search grid that would open up before then, big enough through which she could shoot down a supply drop. It was a little risky—Scheherazade’s prediction algorithms were good, but they weren’t perfect, and there was a chance the Pax would pick up the drop on their sensors, trace its trajectory, and know where we were—but it was better than nothing.

  “Do it,” I confirmed to her. “I’ll contact you when we’re in place.”

  “A supply drop?” the Preacher asked. She’d been listening in, of course—probably could even pick up Schaz’s side of the conversation, despite the fact that to me it had sounded like it was inside my head. “Is that wise?”

  “Better than the alternative,” I shrugged. “With the high ground and some basic defenses from the drop, we’ll be able to hold the Pax off even if they do know where we are. For a while, at least. If we don’t get supplies and they find us anyway, we’ll be in much worse trouble.”

  “Plus you and the girl need food.” Barious drew energy from an internal fusion battery that converted almost everything around them—sunlight, kinetic energy, even background radiation—into sustenance. The pulse had been designed specifically to not target them; we’d wanted to stop war, not commit genocide. My point was, the Preacher didn’t need to eat, but Esa and I did.

  I nodded. I had some basic protein bars, enough to at least get the girl and me to the observation tower without leaving us half-starved, but they’d be gone before five days were out. We could survive without a supply drop, but we wouldn’t be much use to anybody in the last few days if we had to. “Plus we need food, yeah,” I agreed.

  “You haven’t told me why you’re after her, you know,” the Barious said, watching the sunrise over the fields of grass, the iridescent light show the flora put on at night slowly fading in the glow of the warm sun as the sky shifted back to its daylight orangish hue. “I understand why the Pax might be—whatever it is that allows her do the things she does, if they could apply it to their soldiers, they’d be unstoppable. But I don’t get the sense you’re building an army.”

  “Trust me—she’s better off with us than she is with them.”

  “So you’d be saying your actions are, what, ‘justified’?” She gave a small smile at the pun.

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “And why haven’t you driven me off yet? I doubt your mandate includes picking up stranded Barious preachers.”

  “You’re handy enough. Might need you to fire a gu
n before this is all through.”

  “So you won’t let me board your ship.”

  “You’re willing to leave your flock?”

  “My flock.” She gestured with one hand toward the horizon, back toward whatever remained of the city under the anti-orbital gun. “I don’t know what, if any, remains. Religion was only a way to teach them, to educate them. Everyone thinks the pulse is over, but we don’t even know where it came from. They need to be prepared if it returns.”

  I felt a twinge at that, but it was a familiar one. I did know where the pulse had come from, and her concern wasn’t at all misplaced. Still, I shoved it aside. “So you want to come with us when we leave.” I made the words a statement.

  “I also feel responsible for the girl. Before all this, I helped feed and clothe the orphans, as much as I could, and I helped keep them safe from harm. Then I pointed you in her direction. I’m certain you’re right—whatever you have planned for her will be kinder than what the Pax intend. That does not mean it will be kind.” She was watching me, closely—not like she was desperate for my answer to be one thing or another, more that she wanted to see exactly how I phrased my response, and why. “So, yes. I would like to come with you when you leave. If you’ll allow me to.”

  I sighed. “Preacher, you help us off this rock, I’ll take you as far as the nearest Barious-populated system. Whether that’s a world with most of its tech still intact, whether that’s a station with a Barious conclave, whether that’s another rock like this one, just with more Barious than anyone else—I make no promises.”

  “But you won’t take me all the way to your destination.”

  I shook my head.

  “All right,” the Preacher nodded, turning from her examination of my face. “I understand.”

  “I understand” doesn’t mean “I consent,” and we both knew that. We also both knew it was the best I was going to get under the circumstances. I hadn’t been lying—if we wound up having to hold the observation tower from Pax assault, I would need her with a gun. I doubted she’d been a soldier before all of this; you could tell, even with the machine race, who had and who hadn’t. I had. She hadn’t. But she still had Barious reflexes, and Barious senses, and Barious strength. She’d be an asset I couldn’t turn down, not if I had a chance to exploit her. Even if it meant abandoning her later, rather than leaving her here, on a world she at least knew.

  Does that sound cruel? Maybe it was. But there’s a certain calculation in the work I do. My goal was to get the girl back to Sanctum: that was it, that was all. Nothing else factored in.

  A small sound behind us: Esa was waking up. I turned to watch—saw it on her face as she swam back out from sleep, the prior day coming back to her, bit by bit. Different expressions chased themselves across her features: fear, sadness, excitement, grief. Neither the Preacher nor I said anything as she put herself together, ready to face this new day, her life markedly stranger than it had been the last time she’d roused herself from slumber.

  “All right,” she said to us. “You two are up, good for you. Are we about ready to move?”

  CHAPTER 14

  We hiked mostly in the hours around dawn and dusk. Given the relative shortness of the days on this planet, that meant we covered more ground than it maybe sounds like we did—there was only about an hour, hour and a half after the sun was at its zenith before the sky started darkening again. I’d said before that many of the terraformed worlds had orbital cycles roughly in line with a twenty-four-hour day/night cycle; this wasn’t one of them.

  I cautioned Esa again against using her talents. You never knew who was listening. Or, in this case, we did.

  The fields of variegated Tyll wheat stretched around us, a soft breeze shifting them ever so slightly as the last of the light faded. Maybe once, this world had been intended to feed other worlds, those pink grasses and green or violet fronds of wheat intended to feed dozens of other planets, but that very purpose—its agrarian nature—had made it a battlefield during the wars, or at least a target. Now its bucolic fields of wheat and grass hid threats of a different sort: every dip in the lay of the landscape threatened to hold an ambush, every copse of trees seemed menacing.

  We could hear gunfire in the distance; the Pax were still waging their war against the locals, for whatever reason—either to try and track down the girl, or just because they were assholes—but the further we got from the city and whatever logistical support they had back there, the more evenly matched the fighting became.

  After all, the people living out in the wilderness weren’t city-dwellers counting on numbers or high walls to protect them: they were either armed and prepared to deal with bandit incursions, or bandits themselves. As far as they were concerned, fighting off Pax was no different than fighting off anyone else, especially not now that the pulse would have mostly eaten away at the Pax’s technological advantage.

  Still, we managed to avoid combat through a combination of the Preacher’s keen senses and my comms with Scheherazade, who was still busily scanning the surface from whatever moon she was hiding out on. We had to change our route several times to do so, but I’d take the loss of time and the extended hiking over risking another firefight, especially one that might draw more attention down on our heads.

  During the hikes, Esa was mostly quiet, doing her best to keep up with her longer-legged companions. When we rested, though, it was nonstop questions: who were the Pax? What were the other worlds like? Okay, what were the other worlds I’d visited personally like? What kind of world had I grown up on? Where had I learned to fight? Would she be taught to fight? Where had I learned to fly? Why did I fly, when my ship could talk? Couldn’t the ship just fly herself? Had I named my ship? Why had I given my ship that particular name? Why wouldn’t I tell her my name?

  The Preacher just laughed when she asked that one. She knew I wouldn’t answer.

  Esa realized pretty quickly the more general she kept her questions, the more likely I was to reply. I didn’t want to tell her anything about Sanctum; anything I told her, purposefully or not, would be colored by my own perspective, and I wanted her to be able to make the decision she’d be facing for herself. Likewise, I didn’t talk about what she could expect there.

  I didn’t talk about myself because it’s not a subject I care for. I didn’t tell her my name for similar reasons, and because of what had been hammered into us when we’d first started this little duty: we were not to allow the children to grow too attached to us. We were shepherds, and once we’d delivered our current charge, we would have to go out for another lost sheep. Likewise, our charges would either join Sanctum or make their way in the galaxy, but the odds that they would ever see us again were slim. I was a member of the Justified, but I saw Sanctum rarely—just often enough to drop off my “cargo” and then I was off to scour the galaxy for more.

  We were not their parents; we were not their guardians; we were not their friends. As far as we were concerned, they were sentient packages that we were delivering, and as far as they were concerned, we were the will of Sanctum, of the Justified, forged into a person. We shouldn’t have too many traits of our own.

  It had never really been an issue for me—I’ve usually had more trouble failing to connect with people rather than connecting when I shouldn’t. Eventually, Esa took the hint, deciding that if I weren’t going to talk about myself anyway, she was better off pursuing more fruitful areas of inquiry.

  Finally, we came within sight of the observation tower.

  Esa shaded her eyes, staring up at the far-off structure. It rose up like a spindle from the surrounding fields, topped by a single broad platform—no outbuildings, no connecting wires, even the roads that might have once led to it long since overgrown. There were just the gently waving fronds of wheat around it and the latticed metal beams of the tower, stretching up toward the sienna sky and shifting even in the relatively gentle winds. “That . . . doesn’t look too sturdy,” Esa said, having noted that telltale tilting
in the structure. “Does it look sturdy to you?”

  I shrugged. “It survived god knows how many bombardments during the wars, and the pulse, and god knows what since. I think it’s plenty sturdy.”

  “Uh-huh.” Esa turned from me to the Preacher. “Does it look sturdy to you?”

  “Calm, child,” the Preacher smiled. “We’re only going to live there for a few days, then land an entire starship on the platform up top. Possibly whilst under fire from the Pax.”

  Esa frowned at her. “For a religious leader-person, you suck at comfort, you know that, Preacher?”

  “It has been mentioned, yes.”

  We moved down into the last valley, crossing the open stretch of land between us and the tower.

  It really was tall, taller than I’d expected. I don’t know what its purpose might have been during the war—it was taller than any use I could think of off the top of my head. At least thirty stories, straight up, just an exposed metal stairwell surrounded by catwalks and the structure’s steel, the smallish bunker with a landing platform on its roof the only thing at the top. Some sort of watchtower, maybe, though watching for what, I couldn’t say.

  On the bright side, once we got to the top, we’d be able to see for miles around—there was nothing but fields of grass and wheat in any direction, their tips swaying gently in the breeze. Not even so much as one of the miniature azure forests we’d passed on the way here broke the line of the horizon. Even if Schaz didn’t get us that supply drop, I could hold a place like this with just my rifle for . . . quite some time.

  Provided the Pax hadn’t brought along heavy munitions and just decided to blow us up, that is. But they wanted the girl alive, so that seemed less likely.

  “Really tall,” Esa said, staring up at the thing from its base.

  “It is, yes,” the Preacher affirmed.