The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “And we have to climb all those stairs.”

  “We do have to climb all those stairs. At least ‘up’ is different from ‘forward,’ which is what we’ve been doing for the last two days.”

  “I’ve never seen a relic like this.”

  “Have you ever seen a structure from the war other than the guns in your hometown?”

  “. . . No.”

  “Well then that’s not surprising.”

  “All right, ladies,” I sighed, opening the gate at the bottom of the tower. Its hinges gave a god-awful screech as they swung, but at least they moved. “Our climb awaits.”

  CHAPTER 15

  It was a long way up. We climbed, and climbed, and climbed some more. I checked the sight lines from the platforms, checked for choke points. It was a good position. The Pax could dig us out, given enough time, but it would cost them dearly. Of course, that was assuming they wanted the girl badly enough—if there came a time when they just decided to cut their losses and bring the tower down, we were fucked.

  Finally, panting, we reached the top of the stairs, opening the single door that lead into the bunker. It had been stripped clean over the years by scavengers; there was nothing left inside the concrete walls, not even a bolted-down table. Esa flopped down inside and immediately went to sleep. I couldn’t blame her. The Preacher and I exited the bunker itself, ignoring the ladder leading to the landing platform and its roof and instead walking to the edge of the observation platform that ringed the concrete, roughly twice the square footage of the bunker itself.

  The Barious stared out at the horizon. “Anything?” I asked her as she scanned the fields, knowing her eyes were far better than mine, even with the implants and upgrades I’d had installed to my HUD.

  She shook her head. “And honestly, that worries me a little,” she said. “We’ve been surrounded by small-arms fire pretty much our whole trek here. Sometimes it’s a ways off, but it’s been there, present, at least in the distance. Now there’s nothing.”

  “So either the locals have managed to hold the Pax back—”

  “—or the Pax have been successful in quelling the local resistance, which means soon they’ll start hunting for us in earnest. They must know the girl’s not in the city by now.” She turned to look at me. “You were tracking her from orbit. You must have been—this is a fairly large world. There’s no way you were lucky enough to set down and just stumble across her.”

  “You don’t know how long I’ve been looking.”

  “A short enough time that your clothing is still giving off residual cosmic radiation. Days, not months.”

  I nodded. “I was tracking her from orbit,” I confirmed. “Anytime she uses her . . . gifts . . . it sends off a flare of benign radiation. I don’t know how good the Pax’s sensors are—not as good as Scheherazade’s, I’d wager, since hers are purpose-designed for this. But still. We tracked her to within a few square miles from orbit. If the Pax’s sensors are even half as good, that would still give them a general location, and there’s not much else out here besides this tower.”

  “But they can only track her if she uses her gift. Which is why you haven’t let her. What is it that the Justified want her for again?”

  I shook my head. “Not part of our deal.”

  She turned back to the horizon. “For now.”

  “For now.”

  Apparently, that was the end of our conversation. I wandered off a little bit to give myself the illusion of privacy as I contacted Schaz. Yes, there was still a risk that the Pax in orbit above would see her fire off the supply drop, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

  Scheherazade gave me confirmation that she had the drop prepped; it would be another day before the window in the Pax patrols opened up enough for her to fire it through. I dug some string out from my pockets and climbed the ladder to the bunker roof, marked off a section of landing platform.

  “What’s that?” Esa asked me, her catnap finished.

  “Don’t stand inside the string,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you get squished by a ton of defensive supplies dropped from orbit, it will pretty much eliminate our need for a ton of defensive supplies dropped from orbit.”

  She made a face at me. “I need to use the privy.”

  I shook my head. “There’s not a privy.”

  “So what the hell do I do?”

  “Well, you can either climb all the way back down to the ground—”

  “Nope.”

  “—or you can just go over the side.”

  “Ew.”

  “Those are your choices. I don’t care which you do, so long as you don’t get yourself killed doing either one. We’re going to be up here for a couple of days—better get used to it.”

  That earned me another long-suffering teenage sigh, and she wandered off to take care of her necessities. I dialed up the magnification on my HUD, taking another look at our surroundings. There really wasn’t anything of note out there—just the gently rolling plains of long grasses. We’d be able to see the Pax coming from literal miles away.

  Of course, maybe we’d been successful—maybe they weren’t coming at all. Maybe we’d just spend a few days holed up in the sky, Schaz would come and pick us up, and I would have wasted some of Sanctum’s not-infinite supplies setting up a defensive perimeter.

  Not likely, but one could hope. Of course, that hope didn’t last long; Scheherezade called in shortly. I was a great many things, but lucky had never been one of them. “Got troop movement, boss,” she told me. “They’re coming out of the city in force. A company, at least.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re heading our way.” I scratched my jaw. “Could be they’ve pacified the city and are moving to reinforce the platoons out in the surrounding areas.”

  “Could be. Think that’s likely?”

  “Not so much, no. They’re looking for us.”

  “Drop’s in about twenty hours. Even if they knew exactly where you were and they tried to march double time the whole way, they won’t reach your position before then.”

  “So there’s that.”

  “I’ll be out of communication for a while; their sensor grid is about to sweep my position, and I’ll have to power down.”

  “Understood. Thanks, Schaz.”

  “Anytime, boss.”

  I tapped the hard nub set between my jawbone and the base of my ear, shutting off my comm—the implant was useful on worlds like this one, where the pulse was less likely to cook technology buried in flesh, but talking on it always felt slightly strange to me, like I was hearing Schaz in my head, rather than in my ear.

  Alone with my thoughts again, I stared out at the fields of wheat and grass, a riot of pink and green in rolling waves stretching off toward the once-again setting sun. More likely than not, Pax troops would come marching over those hills, sooner rather than later. Schaz could be optimistic all she wanted—I knew they were heading for us. The only thing that I hoped for was that we’d be ready when they came, and that I could buy enough time for Schaz to get us off this damn planet.

  Pretty or not, I was getting fairly tired of rolling fields of pink and purple and green, and of the distant gunfire that seemed to go with them.

  CHAPTER 16

  The supply drop came in right on time the next day. I made all three of us retreat down the stairs a few flights, just in case the added weight was exactly what it took to collapse the bunker roof. I didn’t think it was likely—the drop did have built-in antigrav compensators and a parachute to slow its descent, though the compensators would be burned out by pulse radiation shortly after they activated—but I had no interest in taking chances, all the same.

  There was a thump as the drop set down, and the tower made an ominous creaking sound before it settled, the whole structure swaying for a moment.

  “Cool,” Esa said, looking up like she could see through the ceiling as she released her death grip on the stairwell railing. �
�Let’s go check our loot.”

  “I don’t think it’s really ‘loot’ if it already belongs to our friend, here,” the Preacher nodded at me, though she did start moving back up to the platform.

  “Whatever. Let’s check out our fancy toys. And also food. I’m sick of protein bars.”

  I could have told her that she should just be happy to have had anything at all to eat, but I didn’t. I was sick of protein bars too.

  We climbed back up the stairs, then up the half-broken ladder to the bunker roof. The supply drop was still smoking slightly, two sets of heavy crates. The concrete beneath had cracked a little where they’d hit, but it hadn’t gone all the way through the ceiling.

  I undid the manual lock—just a rotary number combination, so that pulse radiation couldn’t render it inoperable—and cracked open the cases.

  Schaz, of course, had spent the last few days scanning the tower and sorting through our supply-drop inventory to see what we might need. We had a dozen or so of these in the hold, set up for different climates, different situations. She hadn’t disappointed in her decisions.

  Two extremely high-powered gauss rifles using electromagnetic coils to accelerate rounds, designed for long-range sniper fire; one shoulder-mounted autocannon, loaded with shotgun rounds for close quarters; one SAM with six rounds; five recon drones that would link directly to my HUD; three autotargeting turret emplacements; one semiautomatic grenade launcher with several drums of different munition varieties; various tools, components, and mechanisms that would allow me to build jury-rigged, low-tech traps. And also more food.

  All of it would need assembly, of course—except the food; those were simple MREs, but still improvements over the protein bars—but we hopefully had a couple of days. Even if the Pax had managed to spot the drop, it would be a bit before they could assemble a team to check it out.

  The Preacher looked over all the implements of war, then raised a mechanical eyebrow in my direction. “And you’re, what, exactly, again?” she asked me. “The Justified’s designated babysitter?”

  “I help gifted kids,” I shrugged, digging around into the crate. “Sometimes they need a lot of help.”

  “Bullshit. This isn’t a diplomat’s crash supply, nor an aid worker’s survival cache. This is a soldier’s toolkit. Not just an infantry grunt, either. This is special-ops, black-bag gear. You could destabilize a continental government with this level of firepower.”

  “If that’s what I needed to do, then yeah. I could.”

  “I’ll say it again: you’re no babysitter. I don’t know what you are, but you aren’t that.”

  “And you’re no preacher,” I said finally, looking up at her. “You want to keep asking each other questions?”

  She shrugged, and walked away; I tossed Esa—who had been following our conversation with interest—one of the MREs to forestall her questions, then dug up another one for myself. My gambit successful, Esa hurriedly peeled the packaging free, then took a massive bite. She promptly began to cough like she’d just inhaled a lungful of water. “What the hell is this?” she gasped. “It’s spicy as . . . as . . . it’s really spicy.”

  I tossed her a bottle of water. “Sorry about that,” I told her. “You’ve only got two choices when it comes to MREs—spicy, or bland and tasteless. I pretty much only stock the ones with actual flavor.”

  “The only flavor this has is hot.”

  “Yeah, but at least it’s a flavor.”

  The Preacher, meanwhile, had knelt by the cases, studying one of the gauss rifles. Those guns were heavy as hell—I could only fire them from a prone position, using the attached tripod or resting the barrel on something—but she lifted it with ease, familiarizing herself with the weaponry. “You know how to use one of those?” I asked her around a mouthful of spicy . . . something. Something vaguely fishy, maybe.

  “I’m familiar with the style of weapon, yes,” she agreed.

  “Hell kinda preacher even are you?” Esa squinted at her, remembering my own statement.

  “One devoted to your continued safety and well-being.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  With a single smooth motion, the Preacher removed the scope from the weapon, leaving her staring down the length of the gun without so much as an iron sight. I raised an eyebrow at her, setting aside my meal for the moment. “You’ve got combat optics,” I said. It wasn’t a question. If she removed the scope, it was because it would have been unnecessary with what she already had installed.

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t serve in the wars.” That was a question, though not one I actually expected her to answer directly.

  “Not in a front lines capacity, no.”

  That was probably all I was going to get. “Think you can fire one of those and wear the autoshotgun rig at the same time?” I asked.

  “I had assumed you’d want that on Esa,” she told me.

  I laughed. “Preacher, I think maybe you need to double check some of your databanks. That rig’s sixty pounds, at least. I could barely move if I strapped that thing onto my shoulder.”

  “I bet I could carry it,” Esa frowned at me. Apparently she didn’t like being told what she couldn’t do.

  “Give it a shot.” I returned to my meal, purposefully giving off an air of nonchalance.

  Her face set in a determined scowl, she knelt beside the crates and tried to buckle on the shotgun rig. I didn’t offer to help. I’ll give her this—she actually managed to set it on her shoulder, and she almost stood up under the weight before collapsing back to the bunker roof. “Okay,” she huffed. “Maybe this should go to the Preacher.”

  The Barious fit it on with just one hand, because of course she did.

  “How long will any of this stuff hold out against the pulse radiation?” the Preacher asked me.

  I lifted my free hand and rocked it back and forth, my MRE still clutched in the other. “It won’t really start breaking down until we use the tech components,” I told her. “After that, though, it’s anyone’s guess. It depends on how much gear the Pax bring to the party. If they come loaded for bear too, the local radiation will be divided between us, and it’ll go that much slower.”

  “Rough estimate?” she asked.

  “The faster we fire, the faster they’ll break down. Two magazines out of each gauss rifle if we’re the only ones with fancy toys, five if the Pax bring their own. Five shots to a magazine.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The grenade launcher doesn’t have any exotic tech—it takes tech to fabricate it, but not to operate it. There’s nothing noteworthy in the autoshotgun, either, except the computer chips in the sensors; it’ll hold up for a good bit. Plus, hopefully, it won’t start firing until a significant length into the fight.”

  “Because that would mean they’ve come within shotgun range, which would mean they were at least climbing the tower, if not on the platform itself.”

  “Indeed. The turrets will hold out longer; they’re shielded against pulse radiation. I mean, they won’t last forever, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to fire themselves dry before the rads bring them down. The drones won’t last long after activation, but so long as we send them out one at a time, they’ll do their jobs.”

  “And that?” the Preacher nodded at the SAM, a compact design for its purpose, but still a mean-looking piece of tech.

  I shrugged. “I’ll only be able to fire it a couple of times—maybe three, if those three shots are in quick succession, but if I fire three shots in quick succession with that bad boy, we’re in pretty deep trouble.”

  “You think the Pax will have aerial units? Those won’t last long in the high rads here.”

  “They wasted an entire dreadnaught just to take the gun city. I think they might waste a few gunships, yeah, if they get desperate enough, and if they realize we’re about to get off planet.”

  Esa was watching both of us, pretending like she didn’t really care, but she’d stopped eating
her meal again. “Just how bad is this going to get?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. Before, she hadn’t really had time to worry—shit was going wrong, and her survival instinct took over. Now, though, she could think about it, and she wasn’t liking the conclusions she’d drawn from all the weaponry I’d had Schaz send down.

  I shrugged. “The Pax may not even track us here,” I reminded her. “Two more days, then we’re off this rock.”

  “But if they do?”

  “Then it gets bad.”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I set up two of the turrets on different landings on the stairs below us—one low enough that it could fire out, toward the fields where the Pax would be advancing from, the second a few flights shy of the bunker itself, positioning it so that it would fire down, at any Pax who got inside the stairwell.

  The third sentry gun I set on the edge of the observation platform itself. That meant it was high enough that the fields below were well outside of its max range, which meant I had to dig into its innards and disable the bit that wouldn’t allow it to fire at anything below a certain hit percentage, but I wasn’t counting on it doing much killing; I wanted it for suppressing fire.

  I left both the gauss rifles for the Preacher—if her optics were as good as she said, she’d likely be better than me with them, plus she could move and relocate much faster than I could under its weight. The SAM I assembled and left just inside the bunker, and the Preacher was already wearing the autoshotgun rig. The grenade launcher went near what I figured would be my first firing position, at the edge of the observation platform, behind a waist-high wall that would provide decent cover. That meant all that was left to do was wire up the stairwell and the surrounding fields with smaller traps.

  The fields I seeded with hastily buried mines. If the Pax came slowly, they’d pick them out easily, but I was betting that they’d be in something of a rush to get out from under the gunfire we’d be raining down on them from above.

  The stairwell itself was trickier—I couldn’t risk using explosives, because that might compromise the integrity of the whole structure, and it wouldn’t do us a great deal of good to kill a half-dozen Pax with a bomb if that same blast brought down the entire fucking tower, and us along with it. Instead I had to settle for a handful of smashing or bladed traps—they’d only get one soldier each, but hopefully they’d force the others to slow their ascent, checking for more.