“—and for the greater good of all involved, rather than just the benefit of the Justified,” I added, before she could get too carried away.
“At least as you see it, yes,” the Preacher admitted. “So allowing you to join the Justified’s ranks, Esa, rather than killing you before you can do so: that would be a failing on the part of the Pax. Allowing their enemy to grow stronger, when they could have stopped it.”
“But . . . they were still trying to capture me,” Esa said, feeling her way through the concepts. “If all they care about is proving that they’re stronger than I am—”
“They’d still prefer to add your strength to their own, if possible,” I told her. “The strong should use every opportunity to grow stronger—that’s also part of the Pax creed. If they have to kill you to keep you from joining the Justified they’ll do so, but their perfect outcome would be to induct you into their ranks, instead. To . . . show you the galaxy. As they see it.”
Her eyes grew a little wider at that; I think she knew what I meant, or at least the outlines of the thing. She still had to ask, though. “And if they couldn’t . . . ‘show’ me?”
“They could. Everybody has a breaking point, kid. Everybody.”
“But if they couldn’t—”
“If they couldn’t, they’d do the same thing they’d do if they killed you: dissect you, cut you open and try to study your gifts, with an eye towards figuring out how to replicate them. It’s impossible, but they don’t know that.”
“And you do?” the Preacher asked; she had been watching Esa, gauging her reactions, but her attention was fully on me now. She found that piece of information interesting, to say the least—though whether that was because of the information itself, or just that I was aware of it, I wasn’t sure.
“I do,” I said, keeping my tone clipped as I met her gaze. “The Justified know more about the gifted children than almost anyone else out there, Preacher. We’ve been studying them for a very long time. But that’s the thing, kid.” I turned back to the girl. “Even though we know the Pax can’t replicate your gifts—they don’t. Just because they’ve killed a handful of gifted kids trying doesn’t mean they’re ready to give up just yet. It’s too promising a goal. The concept of you alone, at the head of a Pax battalion, is enough strength to make them salivate; the concept of that same battalion, comprised entirely of Pax who’ve been given your abilities—no army raised could stop them. The ultimate strength.”
“So the Pax just want to use me. However they can.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“And so do the Justified. To build their wall.”
“Yes.” She wasn’t wrong. The Preacher arched a metallic eyebrow at my answer; I stared at her in response until she looked away. She’d expected me to lie. “And to train you,” I added, still looking at the Preacher. “So that you can use your gifts for the good of the galaxy—for the good of all, not just yourself.”
“Were you born Justified?” The question took me by surprise; I turned back to look at the girl. She was a sharp one, I’d give her that.
“No.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t.”
“So you were recruited, like me. And they trained you. To fight the way you do; to fly the way you do.”
“No, they didn’t.” That came from the Preacher, and then it was my turn to give her a questioning look. She shrugged in response. “I’ve seen Justified fight, and I’ve seen Justified fly,” she said. “They’re good, but their techniques tend toward the . . . conservative.” I had the feeling she thought she was being diplomatic. “Whatever you are—and wherever you learned to do the things you do—conservative is not the word I would choose.”
“You’re not wrong,” I admitted.
“Which means you were something else. Before the pulse.”
“We were all something else before the pulse,” I reminded her.
“I will never get used to that,” Esa muttered. “A hundred years ago, and you’re both like ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that; good times.’ ”
“Not really,” I said.
“I mean—you know. Outside of all the war. Is that where you learned to fight? To fly?”
“Pretty much. The Pax believe that the strong should kill, or they aren’t worthy of their strength. I was raised with a much simpler code.”
“And what code was that?” The Preacher was the one who asked the question, not Esa.
“You kill or you die,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “That was the way the worlds worked, back then. You remember that much.” The Pax thought of themselves as better, and they weren’t—but they also weren’t worse. Not than some of what had come before.
Some of what had made me.
CHAPTER 4
Thankfully, I was saved any more questions about my time with the Justified—or my time in the sect wars—when Schaz summoned me to the cockpit; I left the Preacher and Esa to their discussion and ducked out of the living quarters to attend to Schaz instead.
“What’s up?” I asked, taking my seat at the helm.
“Sorry to bother you, boss,” she replied, “but I’m picking up a strange transmission that you should probably hear—just came in over encrypted channels.”
I had no illusions about the Preacher’s ability to overhear every word that was said on board the entire ship; still, I reached out to shut the airlock door between the cockpit and the living quarters before I nodded for Schaz to start the playback. If the Preacher wanted, she would hear what was on the transmission, but at least this way Esa wouldn’t.
Scheherazade’s speakers crackled to life. The message was warped, barely audible, repeating on a loop. What I was able to pick out sounded like: “. . . is is Marus Lonus . . . been att . . . ax enforcers, they c . . . out of nowhere. My . . . ssel is bre . . . ut that doesn . . . tter now. I hav . . . tion vital to Sanct . . . ut I can’t . . . isk transmitting ove . . . ypted comm channels. My coordin . . . bedded in this messag . . . ase hurry, runni . . . t of time.”
I leaned back in my chair and swore softly.
The message was from Marus Lonustan, a Tyll I knew well—he was an agent of Sanctum, like myself. His job was a little different; I trafficked in gifted children, he trafficked in information. It had been an agent like him who had pointed me toward Esa, for instance.
The gist of the message seemed clear to me: he had been attacked by the Pax, had escaped, but his ship was damaged and he needed help. He said he had information vital to Sanctum—which may well be true, he was an agent, all he did was collect information vital to Sanctum—that he couldn’t risk broadcasting, even over Sanctum encrypted channels. Which also made sense; agents tended to be a paranoid lot.
The coincidence, though, made me twitchy: what I’d said to Esa was true, the Pax weren’t everywhere in the galaxy. They weren’t even a major threat, not really. Even this close to their home systems—and we weren’t far—the chances that we’d run into Pax, and that Marus also would, on a completely separate op, were slim at best. My mentor in the Justified had once told me that there were no such thing as coincidences, only the will of man, or of God. I didn’t believe in his God, but the will of man, the will of the Pax: that I believed in. They were up to something.
“The message is fragmented,” I said to Schaz, listening again as the message repeated. “Any way to tell how many iterations it’s been through?”
“Ironically, the fragmentation has wiped out at least part of the signal decay that could tell us that. I’d say several thousand, at least.”
“It plays at . . . not quite a minute long.” I timed it out on my HUD as I listened again. “If it’s been playing several thousand times, that means this happened a day or so ago, maybe more, not counting the travel time for the message itself.” Broadcasting signals at FTL speeds is . . . complicated. You can do it, but unlike ships, which can continue to accelerate every moment they’re in hyperspace, the signals can’t. Which in turn means that, if you want a message somewhere in a hurry
, you’re better off trusting it to a courier with a fast ship than broadcasting a signal. Marus had only done so because he had no other choice.
I felt something bad creeping down my spine—whatever this was, it sounded like trouble. It felt like trouble, maybe more than we could handle. We were in deep enough ourselves.
All the same, Marus was a friend.
“Dig the coordinates out,” I told Schaz. “We’re going after him. He’s Justified; he’s ours. How soon until the hyperdrive’s ready?”
“It’s ready now.”
“Plot a course. I want to be out of here before our Pax pursuit shows up—the last thing we want to do is to mount a rescue mission, only to lead an entirely different group of Pax warships down on his head.”
CHAPTER 5
After a moment, Schaz finished her calculations as I began warming up her engines. “A couple of different vectors pulled up on your screens, boss.”
“Good job.” I was already taking off, pulling us up out of the crater where Schaz had set us down, just below the surface of a pale blue moon. As I powered us free of the lunar gravity well I turned my attention to the route options Schaz had displayed for me, and the various systems we’d have to pass through to reach Marus’s position.
“There’s our vector,” I murmured to myself, setting one in. It avoided populated worlds, but was otherwise a straight shot to Marus. The route would still take some time—about ten hours—but we’d get to him. Hopefully he could keep himself alive until then. I wasn’t that worried; Marus was a clever one.
Just before I engaged the hyperdrive, Scheherazade’s scanners started screaming; Pax contact. It was at the far edge of the system—they wouldn’t be close enough to get a reading on our escape vector. They’d know we were here, and they’d know we had left—I’m sure their sensors were screaming just like ours were—but which direction, which heading; that, they’d have to guess at. It didn’t mean they couldn’t follow us, but it was a big galaxy, and the farther we got, the more likely we were to shake them.
Then the hyperdrive kicked on, and the beautiful, empty system bled away.
I unsealed the airlock and returned to the living quarters; the shower was running, Esa esconsced within, but the Preacher was waiting for me—not speaking, just watching. I could feel her studying my expression, framing another set of questions in her head.
I sighed mentally, and went ahead and gave her the opening she was looking for. “Yes?” I asked.
“You got a transmission.”
“You were eavesdropping.”
“No. Your airlock seals are quite good.” She seemed fairly annoyed by this fact. “But I know you received some sort of message.”
“We’re going to have to make a stop. Another Justified operative is in trouble.”
“And if I was to ask who gave him this trouble?”
“You wouldn’t have to—you already know.”
“The Pax.”
“The Pax.” I nodded.
She studied me for a moment longer, then switched topics so abruptly it took me some time to catch up—which, I suppose, was likely her purpose in doing so. “When we first met,” she reminded me, “you asked me about Esa; you said she would have been conceived around the same time as the meteor shower fourteen years ago.” She cocked her head to the side, as if awaiting a reply.
“You’re asking about relevance,” I said.
“I am, yes.”
“That meteor shower didn’t seem odd to you?”
“I wasn’t an astrophysicist, even before the pulse.” But she had been something similar; I’d bet my relatively few pieces of furniture on that. She knew how to fight, but not like I did—she’d been fighting adjacent. The way she talked about science was much more active. “The event seemed noteworthy to the populace at the time,” she continued, “because their world doesn’t get meteor showers all that often. But contrary to popular opinion, we Barious don’t actually know everything.” This said with just a ghost of a smile.
“It was noteworthy because it wasn’t a meteor shower. It’s a phenomenon I’ve seen on other worlds; the pulse radiation always sinks to the surface when it first arrives, then slowly works its way up again. That was the radiation finally cooking the last of the satellites still in orbit, bringing them down. Most people had forgotten they were even up there; read the event as a meteor shower instead.”
“None of that goes to relevance.”
“It corresponds to a jump in radiation on the surface; once it hits upper atmosphere, it drops back again. Not something you’d notice in the world—it’s not different radiation, just the same stuff that’s been blocking all the other tech that hasn’t worked for a century, there’s just more of it. But I’ve seen it on other worlds; the jump tends to correspond to the conception of the gifted children who—”
“Can we not talk about my conception?” Esa asked, joining us as she toweled off her hair. “That’s just . . . weird.” She was still wearing her torn, dirty clothes from her homeworld—significantly more torn and dirty after our little adventures, I’ll admit, but they hadn’t started off clean, either. I’d have to get her some new ones.
“You never knew your parents,” the Preacher reminded her.
“You . . . already know this. Remember—the orphanage? It’s not like they were on holiday or something.”
“I do, but why does discussing your conception bother you if the physical act doesn’t involve anyone you know? It’s just an act, Esa, it’s not—”
She put her hand up. “Okay, yeah. We’re really done talking about this. Can we go back to talking about the Pax? Even brainwashing is more fun than this.”
The Preacher shook her head. “You organics, so . . . obsessed with the physical act of reproduction. It affects almost all of your mental processes; did you know that? And humans are the worst—at least with Tyll or Wulf, they’re only in season for a few months. Humans obsess about reproduction constantly—”
“Says the being whose understanding of sex amounts to my understanding of complex AI algorithms,” I pointed out dryly.
“I hate to say it, but she’s not wrong,” Schaz pointed out, her tone grudging. “I’ve noticed it in my own observations; when you go more than a few months without engaging in coitus, your behavioral patterns do start to shift dramatically—”
“Yeah, no, Esa’s right.” I held up my hand. “We’re done talking about this subject.”
“Dry spells happen to everyone, darling.” Schaz thought she was being soothing, I’m sure. Her new upper-crust Tyll accent didn’t really help, though.
“Right, we’re done,” I told . . . everyone. “We’ve got about ten hours to get to Marus—the course Schaz and I plotted will take us through three separate systems to do that, all lightly populated at best. That means, unless something goes deeply wrong, we shouldn’t run into trouble between here and there, and that means I’m going to get a shower of my own, and then I’m going to get some sleep. You two can stay up late and gossip like a couple of adolescents—”
“I am an adolescent,” Esa reminded me, a touch of asperity in her voice.
“Well, stop.” I made my way into the shower, and sealed the door before either of them could come up with a reply. Sharing information is all well and good—to a point—but my sex life was nobody’s concern but my own.
CHAPTER 6
I got my seven hours’ sleep; at least that happened. I have no idea how Schaz, the Preacher, and Esa amused themselves during that window, and I don’t really care—I needed the rest. Esa did too—when I woke, she was sacked out on the bunk above me. The Preacher was sitting at the table in her “meditation” state; I let her be, poured myself a cup of coffee in the tiny kitchen—Schaz was good about always keeping coffee handy when I was on board—and went through to the cockpit, shutting the door so I didn’t wake Esa or disturb the Barious.
“Any news?” I asked Scheherazade, setting my coffee cup on the instrument panel to cool some. I
love coffee, but I can’t drink it straight from the pot, or I won’t if I can help it. A leftover habit from subsisting on lukewarm leftovers in war zones. I do that often enough—setting the cup down in that particular spot on the panel, I mean—that Schaz was starting to complain about the rings I was leaving on the metal. She’s really very fussy.
“We’ve been through two systems so far,” she told me, “with nothing measurably interesting in either. We’re coming up on one with a world pushed almost as far back as Esa’s was—maybe we’ll get lucky, trick the Pax into thinking we landed there for some reason.”
“So we haven’t lost them yet.”
“Sorry, I should have led with that. Haven’t lost them yet.” I rolled my eyes, and took an experimental sip of my coffee: still too hot. “They keep popping into system just as we leave. I don’t know if they’re just getting lucky, or if they sent the entire complement of craft they had after us, and they’re just breaking off in each system, dividing their ships along every possible vector we could have taken. Either way—”
“If they tail us all the way back to Marus, it could be trouble. He said he had already run into Pax—whatever’s got him spooked, it involves them some-how.” There was that coincidence again, the thing I didn’t believe in. “I doubt he’d thank us much for the rescue if we led an entire Pax fleet down onto his head while we were doing it.”
“That would seem to be a debatable form of ‘rescue,’ yes.”
“Play his message for me again.”
She did that; she’d managed to clean it up a little, probably at least partially because we were getting closer to the source of the signal. “Information vital to Sanctum.” I mused over the particutar phrase Marus had employed. “Not ‘vital to the Justified,’ not ‘vital to the galaxy at large,’ but vital to Sanctum itself.”
The Stars Now Unclaimed Page 13