The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “As always, your timing is amazingly terrible.” He shook his head, keeping his voice pitched low. “We need to get the fuck off of Beyond Ending, and we need to do it right goddamned now.”

  CHAPTER 14

  It took me half a second to work through what he was saying. “Can’t do that,” I hissed back. “I’m here for your help, you moron; we can’t leave without—”

  “If we don’t leave”—he glared at me, leaning close so that just in case anyone else was listening they wouldn’t be able to make his words out—“we’re going to be turned into just another bit of organic debris, along with everyone else on board. These pirates are about to start a fight they can’t win. Get Schaz up and running—whatever you need help with, you’ll have to get it elsewhere.”

  I stared up at him for just a moment—maybe a beat too long, but even for me, this was all happening very fast, and for once I was the one struggling to keep up. Javier was a lot of things, but making up a lie like that, just to get on board my ship—that wasn’t something he was capable of.

  Unless his years of exile had changed him.

  Still, I wouldn’t have come here if a part of me hadn’t still trusted him. I nodded, then slapped open the airlock and we slipped inside, Javier already making his way toward the cockpit—he knew Scheherazade’s layout almost as well as I did.

  Better days.

  “Javi!” Schaz squealed—or at least, as close to a squeal as the approximation of a Tyll aristocrat that was her voice could reach. “How have you—”

  “Can it,” I growled at her, pushing past Javier as I did. “We’ve apparently landed in even deeper shit than the deep well of shit we just left behind. Get us out of here, Schaz. How long ’til the hyperdrive is—”

  “Eight minutes,” she said, suddenly all professionalism again now that she realized we were about to be shot at. Javi followed me into the cockpit; I ducked into the pilot’s seat, and he stopped, looking down at Esa, who was in her usual chair at the gunnery console.

  “Hi, nice to meet you,” he said. “Move.”

  “Do as he says, Esa,” I told her, already prepping our systems for takeoff.

  “What’s happening?” she asked, moving over to the navigation seat instead. Javier slipped behind the gunnery console, already prepping Schaz’s weapons.

  “I don’t know—ask Javi,” I replied.

  “I was halfway through the concourse—coming to meet you—when everybody started losing their goddamned minds,” he said. “Apparently an entire Pax fleet just appeared on the far side of the system, headed this way and not in a chatty mood. Dozens of frigates, hundreds of fighters and scout craft. And five dreadnaughts.”

  I swallowed. Whatever this was, I doubted it was related to us—that was a far larger force than what we’d seen over Esa’s homeworld. But it was also a far larger force than what the Pax would have needed to wipe Beyond Ending out of the stars; slaving the two supercraft together had extremely limited their mobility, and no matter how many guns the pirates had stacked onto them since then, she still couldn’t adjust her firing angles enough to be a match for even one dreadnaught, let alone five of them.

  “That sounds like overkill,” I said, lifting us off from the dock. The pirates didn’t try to stop us; they had other things on their minds at the moment.

  “Yeah, it does.” I could hear the glare in Javier’s voice. “So why do I not think it’s coincidence they dropped out of hyperspace just after your arrival?”

  “They don’t need five dreadnaughts to wipe out Beyond Ending; they definitely don’t need five dreadnaughts to take down Scheherazade,” I snapped back.

  “Ordinarily I’d take offense at that, but—yeah, you’re definitely right,” Schaz agreed. “I’d be fucked.”

  “Can you scan anything out there?” I asked Schaz.

  “Not until we’re outside of their envelope,” she replied.

  “I take it you want me back in the tailgun?” the Preacher asked, still standing in the doorway, taking all of this in as it happened.

  “Please,” I nodded. “This . . . may get rough.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Schaz muttered.

  “Maybe not—the pirates were scattering to their own ships,” Javier pointed out, “and while they can’t match the Pax fleet dreadnaught for dreadnaught, they’ve got them significantly outnumbered when it comes to smaller craft. Damned near every pirate on board Beyond Ending either has a ship in their own right, or is at least part of a ship’s crew. That’s several hundred pirate craft, all trying to get out of system at once. If the Pax are trying to find a single needle—say, us—”

  “There is no ‘us,’ ” I reminded him.

  “Fine, Schaz, then—does that really matter right now?”

  “We still don’t know they’re after us at all,” Esa reminded him, her tone nervous. She turned to me. “Are they after us?” she asked.

  “Better to assume they are and get the fuck out of here than stick around to be proven wrong,” I told her. “Even if they don’t want us specifically, they’re Pax—they’ll still make us dead just for not flying Pax colors. We’re not Pax, therefore we’re a challenge.”

  We broke out of the scan-deadening envelope surrounding Beyond Ending; my screens flooded with life and color. Javier wasn’t wrong—it was a goddamned shitstorm out there, a carnival of death and chaos as the pirates and the fascists vied for control of the local escape vectors.

  Beyond Ending was already trading fire with the Pax dreadnaughts. At the extreme ranges they were at, neither of the massive, city-sized supercraft was doing much damage—the question wasn’t the stopping power of their weapons, but more the accuracy with which they could fire over such long distances, not to mention that this early in the conflict both ships had their shields fully charged—but as they closed, the attrition would start to tell. More and more shots would break through the shielding, and more and more systems on board would start to crash.

  Meanwhile, smaller Pax craft were fanning out, trying to cut down as many of the pirate vessels as possible. Beyond Ending’s orbit had brought it close enough to the gravity well of the supergiant planet in the system that the craft trying to flee had to first get clear of that before they had a shot at the vectors out, which meant the Pax had a few minutes to take potshots at them before they could activate their hyperdrives. In return, some of the pirates were spending those few minutes engaging the Pax head on—the dreadnaughts were mostly ignoring the smaller craft, which meant that the pirates had the Pax outnumbered by a clear margin. Ships were already going down in flames, and there were just as many Pax dropping off of my radar as there were pirates, maybe more.

  Unfortunately, we were in the same boat. We had to get out of the gravity well too, and worse than that, our hyperdrive hadn’t been sitting in a dock on Beyond Ending for days, being kept artificially cool. It would only take us a couple of minutes to get clear of the gravity, but after that, we’d still have to stay alive for another smallish forever before we could make the jump to hyperspace.

  So I did the only thing I could, the last thing anyone would expect: I dove right into the bedlam before me, heading right for the heart of the fighting. If the Pax really were looking for us, they’d have to cut through a whole hell of a lot of chaos to do so.

  CHAPTER 15

  My world was nothing but fire and motion. I’d done this for over a century, and I was fucking good at it; it was all reflex now, all reaction and momentum, acting before I even knew I was acting, finding the pinpoint course that would get us clear of whatever chaos was closest, and opening up targets for the ship’s guns. It was like a dance, reading your partner’s steps and intentions and momentums, except in this case, I had a thousand partners, and they all wanted to kill me.

  Thankfully, they also wanted to kill each other. “Who should I prioritize targeting?” the Preacher asked me. “Pirates or Pax?”

  “Shoot whoever’s shooting at us; that’s your priority t
arget,” I replied, never taking my eyes off the twisting shocks of light and flame and metal filling the cockpit in front of us.

  “They’re all shooting at us!”

  “Then shoot back,” Javier said calmly, following words with action. He’d taken control of the omnidirectional laser batteries, slicing blue fire through the chaos of the void. That still left me with the forward guns, and I fired whenever someone drifted into my targeting solution, but I wasn’t seeking targets—I was keeping us clear of the targeting solutions of all the other ships, letting Javi and the Preacher worry about cutting down anyone who got too close.

  “Javi?” Scheherazade asked, even as she worked through a thousand different processes, making minute adjustments to power flow and engine settings and energy output. “Where’s Bolivar?”

  “He’s around. I told him to launch as soon as I knew I’d be getting out with—”

  “Here I am!” The incongruously cheery voice belonged to Javier’s ship; unlike Scheherazade’s fairly mellow character, Bolivar had always been a tremendously upbeat, high-energy personality. Maybe it said something about Javi and me, the way our ships had both settled into personalities over the years that complemented—or antagonized—their owners; I wasn’t sure. Now was not the time to worry about it.

  “Stick high to our six, Var, but stay out of the targeting solution for the rear turret,” I told him. Bolivar was a smaller ship than Scheherazade, a dagger to her sword, not really built for combat, though he could certainly hold his own—but without a pilot on board, his effectiveness was cut in half, at least.

  “I got it,” he replied. “So good to see you again, by the way. Or hear from you, I guess, since—”

  “Var? Not now.”

  “Got it. Also, you’ve got a drone swarm heading in your direction.”

  I swore and swerved, ducking and weaving a little too close to one of the larger pirate ships—maybe the drones would target it before they came after us. Drones were little more than a nuisance on their own in combat—really just overgrown void-capable versions of the stun variants that had attacked Esa’s home settlement. They were more dangerous than lone missiles, but no match for a ship with a pilot.

  Even as a nuisance, though, they were dangerous enough: they’d be rigged to maximize their effectiveness, with lasers modulated to swat at shields rather than penetrate hulls. The idea was that they would wear down any ships they came in contact with so that by the time the vessel they’d been biting at engaged an actual enemy, they’d be at significantly less than full strength.

  The pirate craft—almost a frigate, but not quite large enough—ignored us in order to focus its fire on the drone swarm, trying to cut them down before the wave of Pax ships that would inevitably follow. We returned the favor, blowing right past it and into the heart of another scrum, this time at least a dozen different vessels all in close combat, dodging and weaving.

  Javi took slices at all of them as we passed, not doing enough damage to bring any one ship down, but making sure they were all pushed back into defensive maneuvers, too busy worrying about their own survival to take after us. “How long ’til the hyperdrive’s up and running, Schaz?” I asked.

  “Another three minutes,” she replied. “Also, the port shield is taking a battering—one of the Pax dreadnaughts is taking an interest in us.”

  I swore again, read my screens, and dove, then pulled up in a tight spin. The dreadnaught wasn’t doing much more than occasionally sniping at us with a spare turret or two—most of its firepower was concentrated on Beyond Ending, and anyway, the guns on a dreadnaught were designed to take on other dreadnaughts or for sustained planetary bombardment, not to pick little nuisance craft out of the sky—but the weakest gun on a ship that size was still bigger than anything we had on board.

  I pulled us out of the upward spin, curving back around toward Beyond Ending. Sheets of metal were flaking off of the twinned ships as the combined might of the Pax dreadnaughts pounded against its hull; the last gasp of its shielding was a broken shimmering crackle of electricity dissipating into the void. It wouldn’t last much longer.

  Still, the pirates were giving back as well as they could, filling the cosmos with laser fire, the lances of light tinged crimson so that the gunners could actually see what they were shooting. At least one of the Pax dreadnaughts was listing badly, out of the fight, explosions pockmarking its hull.

  The outcome was only a matter of time—the pirate base simply couldn’t hold up to the pounding it was taking long enough to remove all four of the remaining Pax supercraft from the fight—but I’d give them that; there were at least a few pirates on board willing to go down fighting rather than roll over for the Pax. I guess those were the ones that knew what Pax did to their captives.

  I dove closer to the buckling curves of Beyond Ending, sending Schaz through flames erupting from its punctured hull, trying to lose the attention we’d picked up among the debris left behind in the wake of the slow-motion collapse of the twinned dreadnaughts. That also gave the Preacher a clearer shot at the smaller ships that had been pursuing us, and they either broke off or she picked them off as we came nearer and nearer to Beyond Ending’s disintegrating hull.

  “Bolivar, stick with us on the other side of the structure,” I said over the comms, cutting my thrust to minimum, just above drifting, matching the pull of orbital gravity with the dreadnaughts and using their twinned bulk as a shield. The radar screens in front of me were slowly depopulating—the pirates were either being picked off by the Pax, or making it out of the gravity well and jumping to hyperspace. Which meant, shortly, we’d be alone with the Pax and the dying dreadnaughts. Not good.

  “How long ’til the hyperdrive’s ready?” I asked Schaz again.

  “You want me to just send the countdown to your screens?” she replied, somewhat waspishly.

  “No, I want you to just tell me,” I replied.

  “Two minutes.” It had only been a minute since I asked. It felt like forever.

  “Var—stay in this orbital path, and put full thrust in. We’ll slingshot around the goddamned planet. That ought to buy us enough time for Schaz’s hyperdrive to cool down.”

  “Sounds like a plan!” Bolivar agreed, still incongruously cheery.

  “Schaz, send Var the coordinates for a nearby system—”

  “Where—”

  “I don’t care where, just so long as it’s not here!”

  Something erupted from the surface of the dreadnaught below; we broke away and I kicked the throttle to full, roaring clear from the rest of the fighting, at least temporarily. Pax craft were immediately in pursuit—no question, they’d been looking for us—but we had the advantage; they first had to find us among all of the debris flaking off of Beyond Ending, then adjust course, then try and match speed, and we were accelerating all the while.

  That didn’t mean we were out of firing range, though, and I kept ducking and twisting, still trying to keep us in the grip of the orbital gravity. “I’ve got a lot of targets back here!” the Preacher warned, and over the comms I could hear the deafening loud thump of the rear turret as she fired again and again.

  “Then you shouldn’t have any problems picking some off,” I replied, still focusing on the stick.

  “That would be easier if you would hold fucking still!”

  “I do that and we’re all going to be a lot warmer for a little bit, and then real fucking cold, Preacher. Less than a minute; just—”

  “Now, ready now,” Schaz interjected. I pulled us out of the orbital path, still picking up speed as I clawed our way out of the gravity well; Bolivar was right behind. The void in my cockpit screens—and I’m sure all behind us as well—was a mass of flak and explosions, the Pax throwing everything they had at us. They knew we were on an exit trajectory.

  “Missiles closing,” Javi warned. “I’m cutting them down as fast as I can, but I’m not going to be able to get all of them; they’re primed to explode as soon as—”

/>   “Faster, faster, faster, faster,” Bolivar was chanting; if he was a person, I’d say he was doing it under his breath, his voice rising with every iteration.

  “Beyond Ending is splitting apart,” Scheherazade reported. “That’s it, this is done, we need to—”

  We hit the edge of the gravity well and I punched us into hyperdrive just as everything around us became nothing but fire.

  CHAPTER 16

  There was a moment of quiet inside the cockpit, everyone trying to catch their breath. The stars streamed by outside, the very speed at which we were moving imparting an odd antipodean sense of stillness, especially after the combat.

  The fight had lasted less than ten minutes, but it felt like it had gone on forever; from a purely subjective viewpoint, I would say we’d been in that combat longer than we held the observation tower back on Esa’s homeworld. I would have been wrong, but that’s what it felt like. Space combat always did, for whatever reason. That was one of the reasons I’d always been so drawn to it, ever since I’d first gripped a flight stick and guided a ship through enemy fire: the intensity of the thing, the sheer awesome scope of it.

  Finally, Esa broke the stillness. “Can we . . . please . . . stop getting shot at?” she begged.

  Without looking, Javier pointed at the girl. “I’m with her,” he announced. “Why do you always get shot at?” he asked me. “Always. Like—always.”

  “You do get shot at a great deal,” Scheherazade affirmed.

  “None of this is my fault.” I tried to glare them all into submission, but it didn’t seem to be gaining me much ground.

  “Fault? No.” Javier shook his head. “Destiny? Maybe.” And then he grinned at me, and suddenly the last three years just fell away. There was nothing standing between us; he hadn’t deserted the Justified, I hadn’t deserted him. It was the exact same grin he’d always given me after I pulled him out of some trouble he’d stirred up, the exact same grin he’d given me when we managed to meet up on some isolated world somewhere, light years from Sanctum or responsibility or any other living being. I grinned back before I could help myself.