The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “You know agents,” Schaz said with the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “They think everything they’re doing is vital, especially the cloak-and-dagger types.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded her point, “but Marus is steady, steadier than most.” We’d worked together since I first joined the Justified, and I trusted him, a courtesy I extended to few, even among our own ranks.

  I sat back in my chair and watched the starfield sing past. Travel by hyperdrive is many things—and it certainly can be stultifyingly boring, especially on longer cruises—but the view never really gets old. I’ll give it that much.

  Eventually, I was joined by Esa, and the Preacher followed after. Given that everybody was awake again and there was no real reason to all be crammed into the cockpit, we decamped back to the living quarters.

  Long space flights can actually be pretty boring; Esa spent most of the time peppering me with questions about life at Sanctum—I tried to keep my answers somewhere between the two poles of “what I actually knew,” given that I didn’t spend very much time at Sanctum, and also “what the council would want her to know”—and questions about the universe at large.

  The Preacher wasn’t shy about interjecting into my answers on the second subject, which only confirmed what I’d been guessing—she was well informed, even for a Barious, especially about the pulse. The question of how or why she’d ended up on Esa’s homeworld was still one I hadn’t pressed her on, but I doubted she’d give me much if I did; even for a Barious, she was a cagey one.

  I doubted it was anything simple, like a crash; if that was the case, she’d just tell me. Honestly, I was a little surprised she hadn’t just gone with that as a lie, even if just to throw me off the scent.

  The good news was that, finally, we traveled through a system where the Pax didn’t show up just as soon as we were ready to leave. I didn’t know if we’d lost them for good, but at least we’d been putting steadily more distance between us. The bad news was that it was the last system between us and Marus’s coordinates—whatever had happened to him, we’d need to work fast to solve it, in case the Pax were still tracking us. I would have preferred a system or two—or half-dozen—between us and them once we reached the origin of Marus’s signal.

  “You’re worried about your friend,” Esa said, watching my face as I confirmed our coordinates.

  “I’m worried about complications,” I told her. “I don’t like complications. My job’s to get you to Sanctum; that’s all I need to do. Anything else, however necessary it might seem, is really just standing in the way of that.”

  “You take your job very seriously, don’t you?”

  “I do. It’s why you’re still alive.”

  “Point taken.”

  We slipped into hyperspace again, one step closer to whatever chaos Marus had gotten himself into.

  CHAPTER 7

  Got him,” Schaz confirmed as we slipped into the system where Marus’s distress signal had originated. “He’s . . . what is he doing there?”

  “Any sign of anybody else in system?” I asked her, already sitting behind the stick. I let Schaz keep control for now, but at the first sign of trouble, I was ready to take over.

  “No, it’s just Marus and Khonnerhonn,” she replied, naming Marus’s ship as well. “They’re in the rings of the big gas giant, closest world to us.”

  “No sign of any Pax, of any—”

  “I told you, no,” Schaz said again, a slight asperity to her voice. “That’s not something I would keep from you just for entertainment’s sake, you know. Khonn’s not answering my hails; that’s . . . worrisome.”

  “Take us in. And keep trying.”

  I watched the gas giant approach onscreen, a big swirling orb of greens and purples surrounded by three sets of rings, each at about a sixty-degree angle from the others. “That’s pretty,” Esa said, watching the planet approach.

  “It is,” I agreed. We both watched the planet approach in silence, Esa still marveling at the wonders of the galaxy as I wondered what the hell had happened, what had brought Marus to this deserted place.

  The only world of any note was a long-abandoned planet much closer to the system’s star—it had been completely stripped of mineral wealth ages ago and left derelict, long before the pulse. There were millions of worlds like it out there, millions of systems, used up and discarded in the initial outward rush of the golden age. So, in essence, the only place of even minor note in-system was only noteworthy because there wasn’t anything to note about it anymore.

  “Scheherazade?” A male voice suddenly filled the comms. It sounded . . . almost sleepy. Tired. “Is that . . . you? What are you doing here?”

  “Khonnerhonn—it’s me, yeah, we’re coming to—”

  “You have to help him.” If it had been a human speaking, I would have said their voice choked with a sob. The desperation in the sound was like a tactile thing. “I did . . . I’m doing what I can, but he’s not . . . it was one of my systems, Schaz, it burnt out and discharged and he’s hurt. We just didn’t expect them . . . they came out of nowhere.”

  “Is Marus on board, Khonn?” Schaz asked. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s hurt,” the AI said again. “He stabilized himself, but he’s in shock, went into cort to try and stay alive. He needs . . . medical treatment, he needs . . . please. Please.”

  I leaned back in my chair. This wasn’t good. Cort was an autonomic anomaly of the Tyll; unlike most other species, they had evolved on a world where they were the only form of fauna. As a result, they’d developed a handful of rather strange physiological responses. Cort was one of them—a kind of hibernative state the Tyll dropped into if they were hurt, badly. Their heart rate slowed to almost nothing, as did their breathing; their body stopped any activity other than healing. On a world full of predators, of course, that would have been a death sentence, but the Tyll never had anything to worry about except other Tyll.

  “We’ll help him, Khonn,” Schaz promised. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “He picked up some information from a dead drop, one of his informants,” Khonn said, his voice still sounding weary beyond measure. “We didn’t even get to finish decrypting it before the Pax hit us, hard. We ran, but there were too many of them. They just kept coming, kept chasing us, doing a little more damage every time. He was at the gunnery controls when they got through . . . and then my system shorted, Schaz, it was my fault. But I kept . . . I kept running. Lost them, eventually, I don’t know . . . I don’t know. Tried to get out of system, but there wasn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  “He sent us a message, Khonn,” Schaz reminded him gently.

  “Last thing he did before he slipped into cort,” Khonn said. “I’ve tried to . . . I’m trying, Schaz, I am, but . . .” The ship’s voice trailed off into nothing.

  This was very bad. The strange echo in Khonn’s voice—the sound that I would have called weariness in an organic being—it meant he was running on fumes, had very little power left. Which meant his core had been damaged. Otherwise, Pax or no Pax, he would have gotten Marus to a medical facility somewhere. Or died trying.

  “Can you get a reading?” I asked Schaz quietly. Force of habit—she wouldn’t broadcast a question like that to Khonnerhonn—but it was the equivalent of asking a doctor whether or not their patient was going to make it. Their patient, and their friend. Marus and I had known each other for a long time. Which meant so had Schaz and Khonn.

  “His core’s not critical yet, but it’s getting there,” Scheherazade confirmed quietly. “There’s nothing we can do. He’s dying, boss.”

  Starship AI was a funny thing—it was baked into the individual components of its processing hardware, the same way an organic brain was made up of the composition of electrical impulses and neuron damage done over a lifetime. There would be no downloading Khonn to a different ship, not any more than you could transfer a dying human’s mind to a different human. Most Justified operatives raised their ships’
AI from a basic program; in a way, they learned how to be themselves by watching us, their personalities disseminating into the ship itself as we taught them how to fly.

  Now Khonnerhonn’s flying days were done.

  I reached forward, to take the comm. “You did good, Khonnerhonn,” I said softly. “You did real good. You kept him safe—kept running, kept fighting, when you were so damaged that a lot of other ships would have given up. You should be proud.”

  “Just . . . just get him out of here,” Khonn whispered. “Keep him safe. And let him . . . let him know that . . .” His voice faded, his core running out of the energy required even for a low-power broadcast. If comms were down, that would mean Khonnerhonn had lost almost all of his basic systems. For all intents and purposes, the ship was dead.

  He’d died keeping Marus safe, had died doing everything he could to protect the man he was built to serve. Had kept him alive long enough for us to reach him.

  He’d died doing his duty.

  CHAPTER 8

  I heard a snuffling sound behind me, and turned; Esa was still sitting in the chair, wiping tears from her face. “That poor ship,” she snuffled. “That poor . . . poor . . .”

  “It’s all right, dear,” Scheherazade said comfortingly. “Up to his last moments, he did his duty; he protected Marus. There is no higher calling for a ship AI, no nobler end. Most of us know that, when we die, it likely means our captain dies with us, in a ball of flame under enemy fire. That Khonn managed to survive long enough to know that we were coming to save Marus, that he wouldn’t be taking his captain down with him . . . it was a good end.”

  “That doesn’t make it not sad.”

  “I know, dearheart. I know.”

  The Preacher was standing in the doorway. “That was . . . not what I expected,” she said quietly. “I did not think a—”

  “Barious,” Schaz said evenly, in a tone that even with her voice all fucked up I knew well enough to know that she meant what she said next, “if you even think the word ‘shackled’ I will spit you out my airlock.”

  The Preacher nodded, once. “It was brave,” she said finally. “I only meant that it was . . . very brave.”

  Schaz considered this for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she agreed.

  Khonnerhonn—or rather, the ship that had been Khonnerhonn—was slowly approaching in the cockpit view, a rounder, more subtle vessel than Schaz, a design more suited for infiltration than combat, lacking most of Scheherazade’s weaponry as well as her aerodynamic wings. He’d tucked himself away in the debris of the ring, hoping that enemy scans would bounce off him as just more flotsam. We’d only picked him up because Justified ships could always recognize the transponders we all had installed.

  “Pull us in close enough to board, Schaz,” I said. “And get a reading on . . . on what remains of the core.”

  “Will do, boss. Go get him.”

  I nodded, and headed toward the airlock at the back of the ship. I waited for Scheherazade to equalize the atmosphere—it wasn’t entirely gone from Khonnerhonn, but he’d been unable to regulate it for some time, and we had plenty to spare—then reached toward the seal. “The core?” I asked Schaz again.

  “Not long,” came her reply. “Be quick.”

  I opened the door.

  The Preacher came with me. Together, we entered Khonnerhonn. It felt like a ghoulish thing to do, to enter a ship we’d just heard utter his last words. But he had wanted us to save Marus, and Marus was inside somewhere.

  The Tyll intelligence operative hadn’t quite leaned into the spartan nature of the Justified the way I had—he’d spent his years finding just the right decoration for this or that spot inside his home—but it was still not a cluttered ship by any means, and we found him quickly, curled up in a fetal ball on his bunk, unresponsive to any stimuli, just a hunched figure with his usually lime-green skin gone unhealthily pale.

  “He’s still breathing,” the Preacher reported, checking his vitals. “Just very, very slowly. Electrical burns indicate—”

  “Save it for later,” I interrupted. “We’re on a clock. As long as he’s still alive, that’s good enough for now.”

  “He’s still alive, but he needs medical attention as soon as possible. Even cort won’t keep him alive indefinitely; at this point it’s just staving off—”

  “Just get him on board Scheherazade,” I said again. “There’s one more thing I have to do here.”

  She looked at me. “Are you planning to scuttle the ship?” she asked.

  “A cracked core will do that without us having to lift a finger,” I replied. “Get him on board.” Without waiting to see if she followed my instructions, I tapped the comm in my ear. “Schaz?”

  “Here, boss. Do you have him?”

  “We got him; Preacher’s bringing him in now. But I need you to do something else for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “If it will help fuck up the Pax for what they did to Marus and Khonn, I’ll like it very much.” There was real savagery in her voice as she said it. “What do you need?”

  I took a breath; she wouldn’t like it. “I’m going to hardwire you into Khonnerhonn’s databanks. I need you to download as much as you can.”

  “That’s . . . ghastly, boss.” The human equivalent probably would have been going through the pockets of a corpse, looking for loose change.

  “I know, Schaz. But Marus’s contact found something, something the Pax tracked Marus and Khonn through dozens of systems to keep out of our hands. I need you to make sure they didn’t succeed.” As I spoke I ran a thin wire from a spool just inside of Scheherazade’s airlock to a similar port just inside Khonnerhonn’s. “Khonn died to keep Marus safe, but the Pax killed him because of what they found. I won’t lose that.”

  “I understand.”

  I nodded. “Look for anything encrypted, using non-Justified encryption. Marus wouldn’t have trusted the general encryption for this kind of work; it wouldn’t have been good enough.” Something of a perfectionist, Marus was. Not that I could blame him; his work made mine look low risk, and his survival often hinged on how good his tools were, or how well he had prepared.

  “Got it.”

  “And Schaz? Work fast. I can smell the core. We don’t have long.” Fusion energy was by far the safest, cleanest, most efficient form of energy in the galaxy, or at least it was right up until something went catastrophically wrong. Ships didn’t have their own fusion reactors on board—at least, not ships the size of Khonn or Schaz—but instead charged up a core with energy from a reactor whenever they docked at a station, usually enough to keep them powered for months on end in deep space.

  Typically, you didn’t even think about your ship’s core unless there was a problem; it was completely locked off from the rest of the craft, except for the power leads siphoning energy to your other systems. The fact that I could smell the air starting to ionize from the crackling energy deep in the heart of Khonn meant something was very, very wrong with the core.

  “Get back on board,” Schaz urged me. “Seal up the airlock; we can cut the hardline on our end once I’ve got what we need. If the core’s that close to going critical, I don’t want to waste a millisecond getting us out of here when we’re ready to go.”

  “Yeah.” I took one last look around Khonnerhonn’s interior; I’d spent more than a few good days and nights on this ship, drinking and talking with Marus. He was a friend. I bent over to pick up a few notebooks Marus had scattered on the floor in his last conscious moments. I’d seen him writing in them before—I didn’t know what the hell they were, but I could save him at least something from his home.

  Then I slipped back through the airlock, and left Khonn behind forever.

  CHAPTER 9

  How’s Marus?” I asked Schaz as I sealed us off. I felt Scheherazade shift slightly underneath me as she broke the connection from Khonnerhonn and started moving us away from the dead ship, just
in case the core did go critical.

  “The Preacher has him in the medbay,” Schaz responded. “It’s . . . not good.”

  I made my way to the living area; the Barious had indeed figured out which section of the wall unfolded into Schaz’s little medical area and surgery suite. It was fine for patching up injuries from battlefield combat, but I already knew this was probably beyond what we could fix on board. “What does he need?” I asked.

  “We can stabilize him, even treat the burns,” the Preacher said, busily doing just that—as good with medical equipment as she was with a rifle, apparently. “But bringing him out of cort is another matter.”

  “We need drugs,” I said.

  “We need drugs,” she agreed. “Tyll-specific compounds, things that involve molecular structures and base amino acids that your sha . . . your ship can’t synthesize.”

  “Schaz—what’s the nearest friendly medical center that can treat Tyll?” I asked. “Even a pulsed world will do, so long as they have—”

  “There’s a primarily Tyll world about five jumps distant; they got thrown back far, nearly as far as Esa’s homeworld, but they should know how to bring him out of cort.”

  “Assuming we can find anyone willing to help us.”

  “Assuming that, yes. And it’s in the wrong direction, taking us away from Sanctum.”

  “I’m guessing you have another option.”

  “I do, but you’re . . . not going to like it much.”

  I sighed. “Just tell me.”

  “We’re only about two jumps away from Beyond Ending,” she said. “Two short jumps. I could have us there in a matter of hours.”

  I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t glare at Schaz while I was inside her, but I did my best anyway. “We don’t have any friends at Beyond Ending, Schaz,” I reminded her. “It’s nothing but pirates and smugglers. We’d need someone to vouch for us before they’d even let us dock.”

  “That’s not . . . entirely true. The ‘no friends’ part, I mean, not the ‘they wouldn’t let us dock’ part—they would totally shoot us out of the sky if we didn’t have someone on board clearing us for landing.”