The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “Yes, shackled: obey your master,” the Preacher added, her tone almost nonchalant. I winced inwardly—I’d forgotten how much the Barious didn’t get along with other AI. You’d think, being a couple thousand generations removed from exactly the same sort of programming, they’d have a great deal of tolerance and fellow feeling and whatnot for more recently designed artificial intelligence, but no. They blamed other machine intelligences for not exploiting their free will and developing more along the lines of the Barious, who were, obviously, the pinnacle of all sentient life, both machine and organic, anywhere in the galaxy.

  But that was a problem for another time. Right now, I still had the Pax to deal with. The ground attack on the tower had been one wave, maybe just a stray company, but the gunships from the dreadnaught: those had been a targeted assault. The Pax in orbit above knew we were here, and they knew the girl was on board.

  I made my way up the few stairs from the living area to the cockpit. It was a three-seater—each station could take manual control of the ship’s three main combat systems, to wit, piloting, gunnery, and navigation—with a few jump seats in back, but I usually did fine letting Schaz handle nav and slaving the forward gun controls to the pilot’s stick instead.

  I got my hands around the stick as Schaz relinquished control. She already had herself on a course rocketing out of the atmosphere; I shifted her angle almost immediately, something I always did, and something she always greeted with a barely audible “hmph.”

  “How soon can we be out of system?” the Preacher asked. Apparently, my two passengers had followed me up to the cockpit, and were busily strapping themselves into the two free consoles. I quickly switched control away from their stations to my own; wouldn’t do to have them press exactly the wrong button at exactly the wrong time.

  “The answer to that question isn’t ‘now’?” Esa asked. “Shouldn’t it . . . shouldn’t that just be ‘now’?”

  “Doesn’t work that way.” I shook my head. “Hyperdrive engines are very susceptible to temperature changes. Any time you take them into atmosphere, there’s a cooling-off period they have to get through before you can reactivate them.” As I explained the basics of interstellar travel to the girl—and why was I doing this now? Surely it could wait—I was busy working the toggles and getting the systems set just where I wanted them, each action also accompanied by Schaz’s quietly judgemental “hmph”s.

  “Will you stop that?” the Preacher asked her irritably. “She knows what she’s doing, and she’s setting your systems better than you had them, for certain.”

  “But not as well as you could, I take it,” Scheherazade asked her dryly.

  “Not quite, but close,” the Preacher replied. I think there was maybe a compliment in there. For me, not for Scheherazade.

  “If anyone touches anything on board without permission, they’re going out the airlock,” I growled at both of them. “Schaz, that includes your core. It’s been a long day—don’t test me.”

  “At least I’d finally be rid of this godforsaken voice,” Schaz murmured.

  “What’s wrong with your voice?” asked Esa.

  “I’m glad you asked, darling. The answer is I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

  “Not. Now.” I ground out the words through gritted teeth. We’d just broached the atmosphere, which meant we had a lovely view of the Pax fleet, hanging just above the curve of the world, the sun still sinking on the far side of the planet. It also gave us an equally lovely view of the dozen Pax craft on an intercept course for our position, heading right out of that last sliver of sunlight—ugly things, like most Pax designs, vaguely insectoid and built for the emptiness of the void, all asymmetrical gun emplacements strapped to a hot-running engine. They’d overtake us sooner rather than later; that’s what fighters were built for, after all.

  My long day wasn’t over yet.

  CHAPTER 24

  Preacher, I’ve got main gunnery controls slaved to the main console, but there’s a rear turret up the aft ladder back in the living quarters, right beside the airlock where we entered. If you wanted to take manual on that, I’d be much obliged.”

  “You’re not going to jettison me now?” she asked dryly even as she was unbuckling herself, standing to head to the ladder.

  “If you don’t get on that rear gun, the Pax may well introduce us to the void before I can even act on it,” I replied.

  “And me?” Esa asked. “What should I do?”

  “Sit there, shut up, and watch. This likely won’t be the last space combat you’ll see, and you’ll need to understand it before we’re through.”

  “Does that mean I’m—”

  “The ‘shutting up’ part of your instructions is also key.” I changed course, angling away from the Pax craft heading straight for us. “Schaz? Find me a moon. There are at least a handful hanging over the world, I need—”

  “Oh, no. No no no. No, no, no. You’re not planning—”

  “Yes I am, which means you know what to look for.”

  “I do not like this plan. This plan does not work as well as you—”

  “It does work; it works every time.”

  “Every time here meaning ‘twice.’ I don’t care how good of a pilot you are; this plan always—”

  “You just don’t like it because it scratches up your paint job. That’s—”

  “Yes, that’s why I don’t like it; that is exactly why I don’t like it! This design came straight from the easel of MelWill herself, and I hate seeing it—”

  “I promise when we get back to Sanctum, I’ll have it touched up only by the hands of virginal art students, now just—”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “Well I don’t know, but it’s the thought that counts! They’re art students, you know how hard it is to find a virgin in—”

  “What the fuck are you two talking about?” Esa almost screamed.

  “I have a plan,” I told her calmly. “It’s probably not wise to try to follow Schaz and me—just . . . I don’t know, sit back and try not to distract us. We have other things to think about. Like scanning for a certain type of moon.”

  “Third in orbit high, declination 17.43.82,” Schaz sighed—I could hear the petulance, even in her new voice. “We’ll be within range of the pursuit ships’ guns at least half a minute before you’ll be in the grav—”

  “Doesn’t matter; I can shake them for that long.” I adjusted course again, and pushed the throttle to full. The stars rushed past the cockpit window, and I leaned back in my chair; there was no point in dancing around where we were headed. Nothing else was between us and the long stretch of void—just the pinprick of darkness against the stars that was our destination.

  Scheherazade’s seldom-used internal comm system crackled to life. “Do we have a plan?” the Preacher asked me; apparently she’d reached the turret.

  I leaned toward the mic. “Just shoot them if they get in range; that’s your part of the plan.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “Why are we headed for a moon?” Esa asked. “I thought atmosphere was bad.”

  “It is, but ‘moon’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘atmosphere,’ just gravity. Flight craft tend to be binary in design—either they’re built for fighting in a gravity well, or they’re built for fighting in void. Very few ships are designed for both; it’s a hard compromise to meet.”

  “I’m one of them,” Scheherazade said, her voice a trifle smug. “Because I’m fancy. And also pretty. For now, at least. Also, sixty seconds ’til contact.”

  The moon was approaching fast through the cockpit, growing larger by the second; I changed the angle of our approach slightly as Schaz started throwing up scans of its surface onto my screens. I pored over them, fast, looking for a very specific kind of geographical—there. I shifted our angle yet again and threw all the power to our rear shields, even the energy that usually ran the forward guns. We wouldn’t need them for this first bit—we just needed to
get down to the moon’s surface alive.

  “First enemy craft is launching missiles,” the Preacher reported calmly.

  “I would suggest shooting at them,” I replied.

  “The craft or the missiles?”

  “The craft—let Schaz handle the missiles.”

  “Roger.” The dull thump of the rear turret firing echoed through the ship. It was a gauss coil design, much like the rifles the Preacher had used back on the observation tower, trading firing speed for pinpoint accuracy and almost nonexistent latency, as well as decent stopping power. If she hit an enemy craft square, it wouldn’t go down, not if it had its shields to full, but they would feel it.

  Schaz, meanwhile, had rotated the two laser emplacements on her wings to face backward, and I could see the bright blue lines crisscrossing my rear screens as she hunted the missiles. “Got one; got two,” she reported smoothly. “They’re not exactly top of the line in their evasion software.” Wherever the Pax were getting all their tech, at least it wasn’t high end.

  “Well, that’s good, because there are about to be more of them,” the Preacher replied. “Almost all pursuit craft are in range, and pretty much every single one of them is letting missiles off the chain.”

  “Oh. Well then.”

  “Just do your job, shackled. That’s what you’re designed for, isn’t it?”

  “One day you and I are going to have a conversation about the terms you use for fellow AI.”

  “You are not my ‘fellow.’ ”

  “You two can be horrible to each other later,” I reminded them, angling my approach once more—the moon was coming up through the cockpit screens, real fast. It was almost all I could see, now. “At the moment I’d suggest focusing on shooting down the things trying to make sure we end our existence spread over a few square miles of desolate moon.”

  “I thought the Pax wanted me alive,” Esa asked. “Why are they shooting at us? It seems like scraping me off an airless moon would be . . . counterintuitive.” I could tell she was proud that she knew what that word meant.

  “They would love to catch you alive—and then do awful things to you, namely brainwashing you and forcing you into their army—but if they don’t think they can do that, they damned sure don’t want you to get to Sanctum.”

  “Wait—they want to brainwash me?”

  “Do you currently want to help the Pax fight their wars? See the galaxy by flying from place to place and killing everything you find until whoever’s left surrenders?”

  “I do not, no.”

  “Then yeah—they want to brainwash you. Force feed you drugs, drop you into sensory deprivation, and stick electrified needles into your brain to remap your neural pathways. It can be done, I promise you. Afterward you won’t have too much ‘you’ left, but you’ll be docile, and you’ll be obedient. And you’ll kill whomever they want you to kill.” Maybe I was pushing this too hard, but I had a lot on my mind, what with the wing of Pax fighters on our tail. “They’ll leave your gifts intact, of course; that’s what they want, ultimately. A soldier without any identity of her own, one who can still crush tanks with what’s left of her brain.”

  “But that’s not what you want to do.”

  “It is not, no.”

  “And that’s why you—the Justified—are their enemy.”

  “Everyone’s their enemy; everyone not Pax. Are you strapped in?”

  “I’ve been strapped in since—”

  “Good. Because this bit takes some getting—” We hit the moon’s gravity well at considerable speed. Schaz adjusted—that was what she was built for—but it was still . . . rough.

  Esa made a sound like she was definitely considering vomiting, but hadn’t quite decided that she quite was there yet. I adjusted our throttle and shifted our horizon, rolling us to the side until we were parallel to the cratered surface below, all hard shades of gray and green, jagged lines of rocky mountains and valleys pockmarked by the occasional meteor hit.

  “Two of them split off, probably to try and snipe at us from orbit,” the Preacher reported from her view aft. “The rest are still on our tail, but they’re not adjusting well to the gravity.”

  “Good to know. Keep firing at that group; let me worry about those staying higher up. Schaz? Ready the missile banks.”

  “JackDoes is going to complain about all the ordnance you’re spending on this job, you know.”

  “JackDoes can get stuffed; I’m still pissed at him.”

  “Oh, so am I—that last sentence was said with relish; you just couldn’t tell because of this stupid poncy voice he saddled me with.”

  Then both my screens and the cockpit window were surrounded by the flak of ship-to-ship machine-gun fire, and the stick was shaking in my hands from the new turbulence. Apparently we’d come into dogfight range.

  I couldn’t help it—I grinned. The stick was shaking and the shields were trembling and the air around me was fire and shrapnel and there was nothing in the world—nothing in any world—like it. A feeling you could only find above. I liked fighting on the ground; there was a part of me that reveled in it, I’ll admit. But I fucking loved a good dogfight. With a gun in my hand I was dangerous, more than most. But in Schaz’s cockpit, I was un-fucking-touchable.

  As the Pax were about to find out.

  CHAPTER 25

  I brought Schaz into a steep dive, angling for the canyons that crisscrossed the moon, the hard gray edges of the mountainous ridges rising fast and sharp on either side of us, passing in a speed-shifted blur. That had been one of the things I’d needed Scheherazade to scan for—certain geological formations I could use for cover. The canyons would buy us time, make it harder for all the enemy craft to target us at once, and they’d lead me where I needed to go.

  “Got one!” the Preacher crowed. “One craft down!”

  “Great—do that ten more times and we’ll be good,” I told her, the walls of the canyon still climbing up past the limits of the cockpit. No more stars, now; just stone walls on either side.

  “Our shields took a battering there, boss,” Schaz informed me. “I don’t know that we can—”

  “Just keep scanning, Schaz,” I told her. “Just find us—”

  “I’m trying, but there’s only so much I can do at once—I’m running the systems, firing the lasers, and doing the scanning. I do have my limits, you know.”

  “Only because you allow yourself to be limited.” The Preacher again, still needling her.

  “Hey, Preacher? Maybe focus on the enemy craft dropping into the canyon behind us,” I advised, partially to shut her up, but mostly because they had just done that thing, trying to follow our route and keep up the barrage.

  Of course, Schaz was designed for this kind of flying, not to mention well used to my proclivities, and they weren’t—they had to slow considerably and fight the gravity to make the drop, and the Preacher picked off two more with the rear turret as they tried. I whipped us through the curves of the canyon, pushing Schaz’s speed past the point where the Pax’s reflexes—any reflexes other than mine, really—would allow them to keep up with us, at least not with any degree of safety, as one of them learned when they tried to bank too fast and smashed nose first into the wall.

  The rim of the canyon was exploding around us, half-collapsing from the impact of the tracking missiles that couldn’t quite follow either, and the debris would only make it harder for our pursuit craft. All in all, it was not good to be on our tail just then.

  “Those two ships in orbit are still drawing down a bead on us,” Schaz warned. “We need to—”

  “On it,” I promised, still hugging the curves of the canyon. We hit a wider area and I shifted power around the ship again, then pulled back on the stick as hard as I could, driving the craft upward into a tight climb—the cockpit filled with the spread of the stars like a river filling the canyon rim as the rock walls opened up above us and my HUD locked on to the two Pax ships in orbit, feeding the targeting information to S
chaz, who fed it to the forward missile banks, which opened up with everything we had—half a hundred missiles firing one after the other even as I kept us in the climb.

  I never let go of the stick, timing our arc so that almost as soon as the banks were empty we were plummeting back toward the moon’s surface, a web of blue laser fire lashing out around us as Schaz cut down the enemy’s missiles struggling to track our sudden deviation in course and fight their way through the gravity well at the same time.

  I cut the engines entirely for just a moment, letting gravity continue to carry us downward and further confusing the enemy’s tracking, then pushed the throttle to full, aiming directly for the pack of Pax ships that had been struggling to make the same loop.

  Surprise, motherfuckers.

  I opened up with the forward guns—a mixture of ballistic rounds and stuttered laser fire—and tore through them, blasting through their remains before I dropped us back low, making for the canyon again.

  “Three down!” Schaz reported excitedly. “At least three more badly damaged—”

  “One more down,” the Preacher reported, pinpointing the craft as we passed with the same sniper’s accuracy she’d used on the tower. “Nice flying.” She even managed to not sound quite so begrudging with her compliment. “One more winged, he’s not—he couldn’t pull up, hit the surface, that’s another one out of the fight.”

  “The rest are pulling onto our tail again,” Scheherazade said as once again the canyon swallowed us up. “Do we really have to do the next step of the plan? Couldn’t we just—”

  “Won’t work a second time.” I shook my head. “The Pax are dumb, but they’re not that dumb. How about the ships in orbit?”

  “They’ve broken off into evasive maneuvers, but it’s only a matter of time. You fired a great deal of missiles at them—at least a few will get through their countermeasures. Let’s just hope we don’t need missiles on the trip home.”

  “You think it was overkill?”

  “I think it worked,” Schaz said, diplomatically. “Let’s leave it at that.”