The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  I was doing too many things at once: trying to hold us in the canyon, still moving at speed, intently studying my screens, the mapping of the substrata of the moon flashing by as Schaz filled in the model with her scanning information. I almost clipped the canyon wall with one of her wings, swore, and corrected. There—what I was looking for finally flashed by on the monitor.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  “Now you tell me that?” Esa moaned. Apparently she hadn’t enjoyed the loop; I wasn’t quite sure she’d ever actually recovered from hitting the gravity well at speed.

  “Our course is too complex, the walls too tight: I can’t get a clear shot at the pursuit craft,” the Preacher reported. “Neither can they, but that’s not—”

  “Mountain!” Esa shouted, as though I couldn’t see the massive peak rising up in front of us, the canyon dead-ending in a massive rising wall of green-flecked stone. “Mountain mountain mountain mountain—”

  I opened up with the forward guns again, blasting into the rock, blasting through it, even as I shifted all our shields to the top of Scheherazade. We took a few more hits aft from the pursuit craft, then we were inside the mountain, the forward guns still cutting us a path to the large cave system hidden within. I switched all power to maneuverability and the stealth systems and dove us downward, into the hidden maze of tunnels, even as the rockfall collapsed the entire mountain behind us, trapping us beneath the moon’s surface.

  “Are we inside a mountain?” the Preacher demanded to know—a fair question, since she couldn’t see forward, and only had Esa’s shrieks to go by. “Did you just fly us through a mountain?”

  “At least two of the enemy craft couldn’t pull up in time—got crushed by the rockfall,” Schaz reported. “After that my scans were blocked by . . . well, you know. Mountain.”

  “Damage report,” I asked her, slowing our forward motion, but still making my way down into the caves. The rockfall was still rumbling behind us, filling the passages in with heavy stone. The Pax couldn’t get through—any attempt to do what I just did would only bring more stone down, slowing their progress to a crawl.

  “We took a few bad hits to aft once you switched the shields; I don’t have readings on three maneuvering thrusters, so I can’t tell how bad the damage is. Shielding power total is below the red line—which will happen when the shields try to hold up an entire mountainside—but creeping back up, so you didn’t burn out the drive core. And, of course, my paint job is scratched all to hell.”

  “That’s not really ‘damage.’ ”

  “It damned well is to me.”

  I was still studying Schaz’s geological mapping on the screens in front of me—this had been what I had her looking for, scanning the orbital bodies: an extensive cave system. This particular little moon more than lived up to what we needed—the system snaked its way through the entire rocky subsurface, going on for miles. The Pax might find another entrance, but we only needed half an hour or so for the hyperdrive to finish cooling down, and we’d be ready to finally make our escape from this Pax-infested system.

  I set us down inside a deep cavern, one that likely had never been visited by any other lifeform. “Repair systems, stealth systems, and life support, Schaz, in that order,” I said, unstrapping myself from my chair. “Shut everything else down. They probably can’t track us this deep under the rock, but let’s not take any chances.”

  The Preacher was descending from the turret. “If they bring one of those dreadnaughts to bear on us, it won’t matter where we are down here,” she said, returning to the cockpit. “They’ll just keep punching holes in this moon until there’s not any moon left, and let us be crushed by the debris.”

  “Maybe, but it takes a long time to maneuver a dreadnaught into firing position, and a longer time to spin up the main gun. Unless they were already prepping for planetary bombardment, we’ll be out of here before they can fire.”

  “That’s a hell of a risk.”

  “Everything I do is a hell of a risk; I’m still here, aren’t I? Relax, you two—we’re good.” I moved through the living quarters, back to the aft exit ramp, and started pulling on a spacesuit. “I need to go make some repairs from that pounding we took near the end. Just don’t . . . touch anything while I’m gone.”

  Esa made a face at me; I grinned back before I could help myself, sealing up the suit and grabbing my toolkit as I did. It had been a hell of a day, and even for me, that had been some fancy flying there at the end.

  Then I shut the outer airlock, and was finally alone with my thoughts.

  CHAPTER 26

  My life had built me more for solitude than company, so I was fairly pleased to get a moment to myself. Of course, I really did need to repair the thrusters—Schaz’s repair bots could only do so much. She was infused with nanotech, of course, just like I was, but even the miniature machines had their limits. It was a fair trade-off—the little bots in my bloodstream and inside of Schaz’s components could repair microscopic damage I couldn’t get to, and the larger stuff that they couldn’t handle was what I could reach.

  One of the thrusters was shot, totaled; I could tell just by looking at it. She’d need a complete teardown to fix it, and we’d only get that at Sanctum. Or rather, I’d only let that happen at Sanctum—there were stations and worlds that could do it, but I didn’t trust outsiders enough to give them that much access to her systems, not even the corporation that had designed her chassis. The Justified engineering teams had made so many changes to her since then that she was nearly unrecognizable. The two other thrusters, though, I could patch; at least get them to limping.

  I worked for a while, happy to lose myself in the mundane tasks of repair. It had been a long day—long and bloody. It wasn’t over yet. But for now, for about twenty minutes, there was a problem in front of me that I could solve, a problem that didn’t shoot back, one that I didn’t have to fix with a kill. So I did that; I fixed the thrusters.

  I could feel dull thumps in the cavern floor, vibrating up through my boots; the Pax were bombarding the surface with fighters, hoping they got lucky and brought the cave system collapsing down on top of us. It was unlikely—the moon was geologically stable, just a hunk of rock, the flowing liquid that had initially carved this system of caverns long since gone, eons ago, along with the atmosphere. We were miles beneath the surface, out of the reach of anything but a dreadnaught’s main gun. Let the fuckers waste their time and ordnance.

  I was almost done with my work when Schaz buzzed my comm. “You’d better get in here,” she said. “Our surprise passenger is filling your new recruit’s head with all sorts of nonsense.”

  I sighed, and shut down my torch, stowing the repair gear and heading back for the ramp. The repair kit went just inside the airlock, and as I waited for the atmosphere to pressurize, I patched into the microphones inside the ship. “—only one possible explanation for the pulse,” the Preacher was saying. “And that would be the creators of the Barious returned. Our forerunners left this galaxy for reasons we don’t understand, possibly can’t understand; left it in the charge of lesser beings. And what did those beings do? They filled it with endless war. I don’t know what role the Barious were meant to play, what role our creators planned for us, but it’s clear we failed it. We—”

  “Stow that horseshit,” I said as I entered. “The Barious forerunners weren’t responsible for the pulse, any more than they were responsible for the evolution of the other species. I know your kind don’t like to hear it, Preacher, but you’re not special—you’re not chosen. You were just left behind, discarded tools.”

  Anger flashed across her robotic face. I mean, I deserved it, but it was true, and there’s only so much you can hear someone going on about how they’re just better than any other species before it starts to get to you. That sort of shit was what started half of the sect conflicts in the first place. “You don’t know that,” she said. “No one knows that.”

  “Whether the forerunners left,
or died off, or whatever, this galaxy meant nothing more to them.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. If they had some grand plan, you think things would have turned out the way they did? You think your people would have been left with no memory of your creation? Evolution, pure and simple—that’s where the seventeen species came from. It’s a big fucking galaxy, and we all just evolved, manifested, out of the primordial nothing.”

  “All at roughly the same time? All sharing the same basic design—bipedal, aural communication, oxygen consumption?”

  “Again—evolution, natural selection. Everything tends toward a successful outcome. Ask a biologist; there are reasons those particular traits led to species that could successfully control their own homeworlds, then spread outward, toward the stars. Also, the Cyn don’t breathe oxygen.”

  “How long has it been since anyone even saw a Cyn? Millennia before the pulse, even.”

  “Doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Maybe they were wiped out; I don’t know. But there’s your variation that proves the rule. Evolution to nonoxygen-breathing species is possible, it’s just not likely. If we were all designed by your forerunners, we’d all share the same traits, even the Cyn. Anyways—that’s not important. The forerunners didn’t cause the pulse; that much I can guarantee.”

  “Because you know who did.” Shit. I’d said too much. Never get into an argument when you’re trying to keep secrets.

  The room went absolutely silent as the other two just stared at me. I shrugged. “It wasn’t the forerunners, I promise you that.”

  “Was it the Pax?” the Preacher asked me, watching my face intently. “Is that why they remained unaffected?”

  I shook my head. “The pulse was random, Preacher. You know that.”

  “There are things about it that weren’t. There are things about it that were cruel.”

  “That’s not at all true. I get why you feel that way, but you’re making the same mistake the Pax did: they weren’t hit by the pulse, and so they figured that meant they were special. I’ll say it again—nobody’s fucking special. Not the Barious, not the Pax, not the Justified. The Pax were lucky, that’s all, and stupid enough to confuse luck with being chosen. There’s a lesson in that.”

  “Is there?” Esa asked.

  “Yeah—don’t be stupid. Don’t ascribe meaning to chance. If you want to think that some god—or some forerunner race—created every single species, molded every single piece of the galaxy according to some grand cosmic design, go right ahead. That doesn’t mean chance doesn’t exist. Some worlds got lucky, avoided the pulse. Most didn’t.”

  “So there are worlds out there, worlds that still have—”

  “Yeah. The Pax come from one of them. And they looked around, and saw their neighbors getting knocked back to the stone age, and figured that was their chance, their moment. So they kidnapped their neighbors from their pulsed worlds, and they brainwashed them into their army, and they set off to find more people to brainwash and more pulsed worlds to reap. An endless cycle: Pax get killed conquering a world, Pax replenish their ranks from the conquered, then they move on to the next.”

  “But . . . why?” Esa asked, something almost desperate in her voice. It was her home that was being overrun, after all, just another step in that endless conflict that was the Pax way.

  “Because they’re assholes,” I replied. I wished I had a better answer for her, but sometimes that was all it came down to: some people were just mean, and they found ways to spread their meanness to others. The Pax had just taken that concept more literally than most.

  Meanwhile, we still had other things to worry about; I tapped on one of Schaz’s access panels. “Scheherazade,” I asked. “How long until the hyperdrive is cooled down?”

  “We’re at seventy-five percent; ten minutes, maybe less.”

  “All right.” I made my way back toward the cockpit. “You two had better strap yourselves in,” I said over my shoulder. “We’re getting out of this godforsaken system. Get ready to say goodbye to your homeworld, Esa—one way or another, you’ll never be back here.”

  She swallowed, then nodded. It wasn’t the easiest thing, to leave a whole world behind.

  But the Preacher wasn’t ready to let go of what I’d said so easily. “You know who caused the pulse,” she said again. “Tell me. Tell me now.”

  I stared her down. “Watch yourself, Preacher,” I told her. “You’re a guest on this ship; you don’t give orders. I gave you my word to get you offworld, and I’ll keep it. But if you threaten me—or the Justified—in any way, I have other oaths that will supersede my promises to you.”

  She smiled, mocking me, just a little. “So you’d kill me just to keep me from hounding you.”

  “I’ve killed people for less. Now—strap yourself in,” I repeated. “We’re out of here.” I took the stairs up to the cockpit two at a time, and took my seat.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. My big fucking mouth. With what I’d just said, could I actually let her off the ship? If I put her down on a Barious colony, she’d spread what I’d told her around, and the Barious were obsessed with the pulse, much more so than any other species.

  Part of it was just that they were long-lived—every Barious still walking had been alive when the pulse had gone off—and part of it was that the pulse had, for all intents and purposes, rendered them obsolete, an evolutionary dead end. It had been designed to leave them unharmed, that much was true, but it hadn’t been meant to spread the way it had. The Barious themselves had been untouched, but their production facilities, the plants where they made new Barious—they were all gone, or as good as. Her people hadn’t had a new “birth” for over a hundred years. Every Barious still alive had been around since before the pulse because there were no more new Barious to add to their numbers. And as they died off, none were replacing them.

  Unintended consequences will fuck you every time.

  Scheherazade warmed her engines up, and I turned the mapping back on, finding us a route back out of the cave system. Easy enough; there was a cavern exit just a few miles up. I left just enough shielding on to protect us from any bumps along the way, and put all the rest of the power into the stealth systems. They’d find us eventually—our systems were good, but there were probably a hundred ships scanning for us out there—but by the time they did, we’d be well on our way.

  When we finally broke out of the caverns and back into atmosphere, I had Schaz remove the bulkhead seals in the living quarters, revealing the viewing window on the port side of the ship. “Is that wise?” she asked me. “If they get a lucky shot in—”

  “They’ve just now picked us up; they won’t close in time,” I promised her. “Let the girl give her home one last look.”

  Schaz was uncharacteristically quiet as she granted my request. The Pax were closing—we didn’t have a great deal of time—but I still managed to angle the ship so that the window was facing Esa’s home. I hung there for as long as I dared, letting her say her goodbyes, even if they were just in her head. I watched behind me, barely able to see her face through the cockpit access, though she’d never know I was looking: she was too busy staring out at the world she was leaving behind.

  She reached out to touch the glass, her fingers hesitating for a moment before she pressed them over her homeworld, already small to her as we moved away. Everyone she’d ever known was down there—everyone but the Preacher—all the kids she’d been raised with, all the locals in that little town she’d grown up in. The good ones and the bad, they were all under the boot heel of the Pax now, and she’d gotten away. As far as she knew, she was the only one who had. The rest were already fighting, already dead, or already taken.

  She made a small noise, almost a sigh; I watched, as patiently as I could. I’d done this more times than I could count: torn a child from their home, shown them the stars, tried to make them believe that the trade-off was worth it—everything they’d ever known, for a life of purpose, of meaning. I still believed that
. If I didn’t, I would have stopped doing this work a long time ago. That didn’t make it any easier, watching the cost settle in on their faces.

  Finally, the girl nodded—to herself, not to me—and I turned back to the console. Punched in a course out of this place, and kicked the hyperdrive online. The subsonic hum of the big engine spinning up filled the interior of the ship like something you could almost feel, and then we were gone, out into the nothing between the stars.

  ACT

  TWO

  CHAPTER 1

  I leaned back in the pilot’s chair and watched the stars sing by. We hadn’t lost the Pax yet—that would take some creative navigation, since they could calculate the vector of our escape and make a rough estimation as to which system we’d hit next—but at least we were out of combat, out of danger for the moment.

  Which meant I had to deal with my passengers.

  I unbuckled myself, and stood, and stretched. And yawned. It had been a long day. More than anything else, I just wanted to sleep, preferably for about a week. That wouldn’t happen, but still.

  I returned to the living area, where my two guests were awaiting me.

  “We’re in space,” Esa said, her voice sounding a little awed. “We’re traveling through space.” It’s easy to forget how impressive that simple concept was to someone for whom space travel was a distant memory, more a myth than a fact of everyday life.

  “We are,” I agreed.

  “And in style, too,” the Preacher said, making a slight motion with her face. If she’d been human, I would have said she wrinkled her nose. Apparently Scheherazade’s decor was not to her liking. Which—fine.

  I kept Schaz’s interior relatively spartan, I’ll admit, a feat helped by the modular design: most of the walls rotated to reveal ration storage, the kitchen, exercise gear, bunks, that sort of thing, so there was only ever one or two pieces of furniture visible at a time. At the moment, there was just the central table, its holoprojector currently unused. All the rest of the furniture was stowed inside the walls.