The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “So that makes it better.”

  “I said we thought the pulse might have helped; I didn’t say I still thought that way.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” She sat back in her chair. “So the pirates we’re going to visit are pretty much the same thing as the bandits that prowled around outside my city, just with spaceships rather than rifles. Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. And we’re not going to visit the bandits; we’re going to talk to Javier.”

  “Who, because your people kicked him out of Sanctuary—”

  “Sanctum.”

  “Because your people kicked him out of your clubhouse might well be a bandit now himself.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  I sighed. “You’re young enough that you still think adults know everything, and we’re just keeping it from you out of spite. Tell me: is it really a victory, getting someone older than you to admit they don’t know something?”

  She paused, studying me. “So you don’t know what he’s doing, then.”

  “Ask Schaz; she’s the one who’s been reading his letters. Apparently.”

  “I do not think he’s a pirate,” Schaz chimed in helpfully. “Would you like me to tell you what he has been doing?”

  Esa said “yes!” at the same time I said “no.” We stared at each other for a moment; I sipped my coffee even as I kept up the glare. “Fine,” she sighed, finally. “Tell me this, then: where are we going?”

  “A pirate den, like you said.”

  “Well, yeah, but what is it? Is it, like, carved into a moon or something? A sort of,” she waved her hand in a way that told me exactly nothing at all, “floating, spaceship-docky-thing?”

  “A space station?”

  “Yeah, one of those.”

  I shook my head, smiling slightly into my coffee cup to hide my reaction from Esa. Among the other lessons I’d learned escorting teenagers over the years, it’s that they hate it when you find them amusing. I couldn’t help it, though; “spaceship-docky-thing” was pretty goddamned funny to me. “It’s not a space station, not really. Remember how I said, when I was telling you about Javier, that the ships that were in transit when the pulse hit weren’t really affected by it?”

  “Sure,” she nodded.

  “Well, Beyond Ending is a couple of those, bolted together. Remember the dreadnaught that attacked your hometown?”

  She shuddered. “Not likely to forget something like that any time soon, no,” she said.

  “Well, that’s what they were: two dreadnaughts. That’s actually where the name comes from—one of them was called ‘The Beyond,’ and the other was called ‘The Ending.’ Both ships were pretty badly damaged in a battle that was raging when the pulse hit; they were actually on opposite sides of the conflict. After the chaos and the flight, they found themselves floating in a pretty much empty system, and in the days right after the pulse . . . it’s hard to explain exactly what that time was like. We were used to getting a great deal of information, all the time. Suddenly that flow of information was completely cut off. Both ships were limping, and both of their captains realized that all the stupid reasons they’d been at war didn’t really matter now; survival was what mattered.

  “As it turned out, the damage they’d both taken was weirdly complementary; the Beyond had systems still running that had been completely destroyed on the Ending, well past the point of repair, and vice versa. Both ships probably still could have been fixed if they’d just limped back to a shipyard, but by that point, neither captain knew if there were any more shipyards still working. Remember, this was just after the pulse—they didn’t know if it was everywhere, they didn’t know if they were the only working spacecraft left. So they tossed aside decades, maybe centuries of sectarian hate, and they bound their ships together with what little tools they had. The survival of their crews trumped everything else.”

  “That’s nice. What happened next?”

  I shrugged. “A passing pirate syndicate noticed them, saw that their weapons systems were all shot to hell, so they forced their way on board and killed everyone inside.”

  “Good god!”

  “Hey, I didn’t say the story had a happy ending. But at that point, the ships were bound together; no way to undo it. They couldn’t even get to hyperspace, not with their engines tied up like that. So the pirates dropped them into a long orbit around the local star, and started using them as a staging ground for their raids. They started up trade with some other pirate groups, and little by little, a pirate city was born.”

  “And that’s where we’re going? Piratopia?”

  “That’s where we’re going, yeah. It wouldn’t be my first choice.”

  “But I get to stay on the ship.”

  “You get to stay on the ship.”

  “I think that’s a good plan.”

  CHAPTER 12

  We came out of hyperspace on the far side of the system from Beyond Ending, which was a good thing, as far as I was concerned. Give them time to scan us, write us off as not a threat—which they would. I had some of Scheherazade’s disinformation systems cranked to high heaven—they’d read us as a lightly armed courier vessel, nothing more.

  Beyond Ending was locked into orbit around the star itself; the only other neighbor it had was a massive chlorine-colored gas giant that had swallowed up all its other planetary brothers and sisters eons ago—collided with them and kept right on spinning even as they splintered and dissolved into its depths. It was the sort of thing that reminded you why most cultures named stars and planets for creatures from their legends. Plus, there might have been some sort of metaphor there for Beyond Ending’s rampant growth once it had become a pirate mecca.

  “Give me the stick, Schaz,” I commanded my AI. “I do ‘slightly erratic’ better than you.”

  As I spoke the dreadnaughts came into view, looking like nothing so much as two city skylines glued together at the bottom, towers both rising and falling from the twinned superstructures. There were places on board where the two interlocked gravity generators got confused, and confusing.

  “Oh?” Schaz asked. “Is that what we’re going for?”

  “Think you can handle it?”

  “I can certainly handle it; whether they are amused or not is another story.”

  Our comms crackled to life. “You seem to be lost, friend,” a slightly bored voice came out the other end, putting just a touch of purring menace into the words. “That’s a nice ship. We’re going to take it from you now.”

  One of my screens lit up: contacts on the radar. Two craft, heading on an intercept course toward us. Both bulky, slow moving, likely passenger craft retrofitted with guns rather than purpose-designed fighters; if they actually started a fight, they’d be badly surprised—Schaz and I could whip them without breaking a sweat. Of course, that would alert everyone else on Beyond Ending that we weren’t what we seemed, and we could not win a fight with every single pirate on board the twinned dreadnaughts. So: time for a different plan.

  “Whoa, man,” Schaz “breathed” heavily into the comm as she spoke—she didn’t actually breathe, of course, but she could shift her vocal patterns to make it sound like she was almost swallowing a microphone as she talked. “Has anyone ever told you your ships are, like, glued together? That’s fucked up.”

  She couldn’t quite change the accent JackDoes had stuck her with, but it was amazing what she could do with just a little modulation; instead of sounding like a tony Tyll aristocrat on his way to the opera, she now sounded like a slumming Tyll elite who had fallen on hard times after the pulse, doing a menial job he considered beneath him and killing the time by spending most of it stoned out of his gourd. How she managed to convey all that information in just two sentences, I had no idea, but it was as clear as day.

  “Friend”—the voice on the other end of the line laughed—“you seem a little confused. Let me break it out for you: we’re going to kill yo
u, then steal your ship. Just so you understand.”

  “Don’t do that, man.” Schaz managed to sound vaguely amused, rather than at all afraid, which was likely more the reaction that the pirate on intercept had been looking for. “I’ve got a message: I’m delivering a message.”

  Somewhere on the other line, we heard someone else in the background say, “He’s a courier; take another look.” The first voice came on again. “You a courier, buddy? That what you’re telling me?”

  “Yeah, man. Like, does that not show up when you scan me? ’Cuz it does for everybody else. Maybe your shit’s wired wrong—that’s what happens when you start gluing things together aren’t meant to be glued. Just sayin’. No offense or anything, it’s a real nice . . . a real nice thing, that you’ve . . . it’s real nice, man. Real nice.”

  “We’re not reading courier markings at all on you, pal,” the pirate comms officer said. “Why don’t you tell me who your package is for, and we’ll take it off your hands, make sure it gets to him.”

  “Can’t do that, man. I mean the first part, sure—Javier somebody, let me . . . it’s around here somewhere . . . Javier Ortega, brother, that’s who I’m looking for; he’s got a package from a . . . from a . . . from a one Colleen Nazafi. Najafi.” That wasn’t my name—I wasn’t that stupid—but it was one Javier would recognize, an alias Scheherazade and I had used on operations we’d included him in back in the day.

  Of course, if Javier was using a nom de guerre as well then this plan was fucked, but I’d bent my rules enough to ask Schaz about the digital addresses on his letters, and he’d been using his real name on those, at least.

  Schaz continued her performance. “But as far as handing it off, no can do. We signed a contract, and the lady sending the package signed a contract, and until Mr. Ortega signs the contract, ain’t nobody putting their hands on this package but us. You try, and like, it’s wired to blow.” Schaz delivered the line with the same drugged-out nonchalance she had every other one; I think that’s what really sold it. Dangerous people—like, say, workaday pirates—are definitely dangerous, but chemically imbalanced people with access to bombs are also dangerous, and much more unpredictable.

  More murmured communication on the other line, probably the pirates asking each other who the hell Javier Ortega was. If Javi was using a pseudonym, this would be where the plan would fall apart—I was still bobbing and weaving along our course, but I was ready to break off and run if I had to.

  The guy on the other side of the comm shouted something to someone else in the room with him, covering the mic with his fist; then he got back on the line. “All right, ease off, buddy—nobody’s going to try and take your precious package. Ortega’ll meet you at the airlock—”

  “Like, not me, man.” Schaz even put in a little snicker. “I just fly the boat. My captain’s the one who’ll hand off the goods.”

  An audible sigh of relief as the pirate realized the imaginary high-as-fuck Tyll wasn’t alone with the bomb. “Whatever, guy,” the pirate agreed. “The two ships coming out to meet you will escort you in. Just . . . do what they do.” Before he signed off, we could hear him shouting again, this time not remembering to cover up the mic: “Will somebody tell fucking Ortega that if he’s going to order goddamned takeout, to make sure it’s not wired up with a goddamned high explo—” And then the comm signal was cut off.

  “Well done as always, Scheherazade,” I congratulated my AI.

  “I try my best,” she preened.

  CHAPTER 13

  We followed the route in laid out for us by the scout craft. Honestly, it was a good thing, too—the last century had seen so many changes to the configuration of the two dreadnaughts, I doubted I could have found a viable docking bay with full scans of the ships and a few hours to study them.

  I let Schaz take the stick; now that we were slaved in on the other ships’ course, the fictional Tyll would have turned over control to his AI, anyway. I started for the living quarters—needed to get changed into something a courier captain would wear.

  “That was risky.” The Preacher was frowning at me as I entered. She’d heard the exchange on Scheherazade’s ship-wide comms; my AI could never let one of her performances lack the widest possible audience.

  “It worked.” I shrugged out of my ship-wear and began pulling on the various articles of clothing that made up my “slightly sketchy” galactic outfit—a lot of belts and buckles and clasps stitching together various out-of-date military-grade surplus.

  “It was still—”

  “Captain,” Scheherazade interrupted, “you need to see this.”

  I frowned, and made my way back to the cockpit. Our scanners had gone dead—we were closing on the twinned dreadnaughts, which meant we were inside their envelope, the signature of the two massive ships blotting out any other reading. That was expected. What had drawn Schaz’s attention was purely visual, visible out the cockpit windows: they were running out the guns, the side of the craft—the crafts—suddenly bristling with weaponry that hadn’t been there before.

  “That’s not for us.” I frowned. “They wouldn’t need that much firepower to take us down. Something else is happening.”

  “I was reading activity on the edge of the system, just before we hit their dead zone,” Schaz told me. “No idea what it was, but they’re setting out the party favors. We’ve never had the best timing, but did we really get here just in time to get stuck in the middle of a pirate war?”

  God, I hoped not. I’d been in one of those, once, and only survived it because there were some maneuvers even pirates weren’t crazy enough to risk. Thankfully, I’d been in a stolen ship at the time, one I was willing to let shear itself apart, or Schaz would have been reminding me of that particular nightmare at this very moment. “Nothing we can do about it now,” I told her. “Still, once I’m on board Beyond Ending, lock yourself down, and be ready to get out of here at a moment’s notice.”

  “Once we’re docked, they’ll try to slave my propulsion systems, keep us from taking off without their say so.”

  “Then don’t let them; we’ve got programs for that.”

  “They might notice.”

  “We’re a courier craft; not letting anybody tell us where to go is part of the job.” I turned to the Preacher. “Give me a list of the drugs we need for Marus.”

  She nodded, and her eyes stuttered with a wireless signal; the list appeared in my HUD. “Thank you,” I said, heading for the hold. “You two stay on board, and don’t . . . just . . . don’t anything.”

  “We’ll try to control ourselves,” Esa drawled. I ignored her; I had other things on my mind.

  It had been nearly three years since I’d seen Javi. Had I thought about what a reunion might be like? Sure, during boring moments on stakeouts, or on long interstellar cruises. In certain . . . lonelier moments in my bunk, maybe those daydreams had taken on a certain erotic sheen—I’d admit to that. But at no point had I pictured me needing his help—the stories I invented for myself usually went the other way around. Which at the time had definitely seemed more likely.

  Anyway, none of that mattered. I was here for Marus. Javier would understand that; Marus had been his friend too.

  Of course, neither of us had lifted a finger when he’d been exiled.

  Not that he would know that—he’d been long gone by then. Still, it made me uncomfortable; always had, really. I knew why he’d done what he did. That didn’t mean I agreed with him, or thought it was the right choice. But we had been close, and when I’d had the chance to fight for him, I’d stayed silent. It wouldn’t have mattered—his “trial” in absentia had been an afterthought, his exile a foregone conclusion; all I could have done by speaking up in his defense was damage my own standing with the council.

  That didn’t mean I felt good about it.

  I stepped through the airlock just as Scheherazade gave a slight thump; we were docked on board Beyond Ending. As the ramp started to lower, I banished all the other
thoughts from my mind—put myself in the headspace of the courier captain instead. Being surrounded by my armory helped.

  I was here to make a delivery, and then to escort Ortega to wherever he had a return package for me; it was just a job, that’s all. We’d be watched the whole time I was on board, pirates not in general being a particularly trustworthy lot. Honestly, that made me feel better—it meant certain uncomfortable conversations were much less likely, neither one of us capable of speaking freely.

  Javier was waiting for me as the ramp lowered. He still looked good; I’d give him that. Same strong jaw, same hawkish nose, same slightly-too-wide eyes. I’d thought maybe, cut off from the medical expertise of the Justified, he’d have aged poorly, but if anything, he looked healthier—had put on some muscle where he’d been a little thin before. Then again, he’d always been younger than me, by a solid three decades, born after the pulse.

  He was still tall, taller than me, which was fairly rare. Not that I’d expected that to change, but sometimes you wondered if your memories were exaggerating certain characteristics of people you hadn’t seen in a while. Nope: still tall. He’d grown his hair out, too: had it tied low in a ponytail that vanished down his back. It looked amazingly stupid.

  I held on to that thought as I walked down the ramp, slipping a slightly bored expression onto my face. Not that he still looked good, even better than I remembered; not how much I suddenly realized I missed him. That his hair was stupid.

  “You Javier Ortega?” I drawled, scanning the rest of the docking bay. I’d expected at least a few other pirates, keeping tabs on the outsider who’d landed on their ship, but there was nothing—just Javi, and a few empty scout craft. Not even our escorts had docked.

  I was expecting him to answer in kind, to probe at my cover story so that he could match it if it came up—we maybe hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but I doubted he was pissed enough to sell me out to pirates, even if I had been ignoring his letters—but instead he moved quickly up the ramp and took me by the elbow, pulling me back inside Scheherazade’s airlock.