The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “You’ve got places to be?” I asked softly, before I could think better of it.

  He shrugged. “I’ve got people that want to kill me,” he said. “Probably more, now that at least a few of the pirates that got off of Beyond Ending may have put together my getting a surprise visitor, and then everything going straight to hell.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t mean to make life more difficult for you.”

  “I know. Funny how it always seems to happen that way anyway, right?” He turned, and looked at the Preacher. “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me, what?” she said in return.

  “You know she’s never going to let you see Sanctum, yeah? She’s witnessed her fair share of how the council reacts when you show up at their doorstep alongside somebody they don’t think is supposed to be there.”

  “I can be . . . very persuasive.”

  “I’m sure you can, but persuasion has its limits,” he replied. “Even if you persuaded her, it won’t stop the council from doing something drastic when she gets back, and that’s not saying anything about what they would do to you. The Justified are a great many things, and a great many of them are good, but make no mistake: they’re zealots, just like all the other zealots who spent hundreds of years waging war on each other for no good goddamned reason before the pulse. After, too, for some of them.”

  I saw where this was going, and tried to stop it. “That’s not—”

  Javier ignored me, still talking directly to the Preacher. “They will think you’re a danger to their grand cause, and they will deactivate you to keep you from telling anyone you know. Trust me: the only way you get to see a month from now is if you board Bolivar with me when I go.” He turned to me. “Assuming she’ll let you.”

  The Preacher looked at me. “Is that the way things are?” she asked, her tone blunt.

  I didn’t have a good answer, not off the top of my head.

  “Come on,” Esa said, her tone disbelieving, looking among all three of us. “We’ve been through some real shit to get here—is this really . . . just because of some stupid rule, we have to leave you guys behind?” She shook her head. “No.”

  “Esa, it’s not—”

  “No!” she insisted. “Seriously, what are you gonna say—that it’s not that simple? It really is. I’m what you’re here for, remember? I’m your stupid . . . package, your job, your cargo. You said I’d have a choice; well, I’m making one now. The Pax are still hunting us, which means they’ll be hunting them, too, to get to us. How long will they last, huh? How long?” She shook her head yet again. “I’m saying no. I’m saying you either take them with us, or you leave me with them.”

  “Kid, she will knock you the fuck out and drag you unconscious to Sanctum,” Javi said, his kind tone not matching the finality of his words.

  I glared at him. “Why the hell would you say that?” I asked him. “Is that—do you really think that’s who I am?”

  “You planning to prove me wrong?” he asked.

  I threw up my hands. “Schaz, get us out of here; get us to a broadcast tower,” I said. “We can argue over this nonsense later. We’ll contact Sanctum—I’ll let them know what’s been going on, and I’ll make every possible argument that you two should be able to come with us. Then it will be in their hands.”

  “Yeah,” Javier said softly. “Because god knows it wouldn’t be fair for you to actually have to make a choice.”

  I won’t lie: that hurt. “You have your own ship,” I told him. “You might want to get back on board; I’m sure Bolivar is getting lonely.”

  He sighed. “That’s not what I—”

  “I’ll go with him,” the Preacher interrupted, standing. “If I’m going to be exiled with the man, I might as well see how well he treats his shackled slave.”

  “Don’t call him that, please,” Scheherazade said.

  The two of them moved to the airlock and could barely wait for the ramp to lower before they got off of Scheherazade. The doors sealed behind them, and then Esa and I were alone inside our ship—the way it should have been, from the beginning.

  “It wasn’t true, right?” Esa asked into the silence. I couldn’t tell if she was asking me, or Schaz. “The Justified wouldn’t just kill them both.”

  “It’s a complicated galaxy, Esa,” I told her honestly. “Sometimes we have to do things that we don’t like. Schaz, get us out of here. Suddenly I can feel the goddamned walls pressing in on me.”

  “Will do, boss,” she murmured. Even she managed to sound slightly disappointed in me.

  CHAPTER 18

  I kept Esa occupied during the trip by having Schaz run training simulations for her at the gunnery station. If she was going to be on board, at least she could do something useful if we ran into trouble again. Plus, it kept her from asking more questions—Javier had come dangerously close to exposing information she shouldn’t have yet, and I honestly don’t know what I would have done if he had tipped my hand. At one point, I’d loved the man; I could be honest enough to admit that. Time and regret had a tendency to make you forget how infuriating people could be sometimes.

  Scheherazade kept working on the compounds we’d need to wake Marus up, but we’d get to the broadcast tower before they were quite ready. That was fine with me—don’t get me wrong, I was ready for my friend to be healed up, and to have someone else on board who would be more likely to defend the Justified from Javier’s not-quite-baseless attacks, but now that I knew that was going to happen, it removed the pressure to make sure that it did. I wanted Marus healed more than I wanted him awake.

  We emerged into the system where the tower was located; a busy little trade hub before the pulse, now home to two populated worlds—both thrown to well-short-of-spaceflight technological levels—that spun in their orbits around the twinned binary stars, locked into their own stories.

  They were almost a microcosm of the galaxy as a whole; one had laid down their arms shortly after the pulse, the three separate sects that had been waging war on the surface coming together to form a new society, seeking answers for what had happened to them. They wouldn’t get any; the pulse had guaranteed that. But it was a better world than it had been before—everything from average lifespan to infant-mortality rates to general quality of life had risen significantly, until it was no longer recognizable as the war-torn hellhole it had been. That was how the pulse had been supposed to work.

  The other world had kept moving in the same direction it had been headed before the pulse hit: the same three sides as the other world, the same three former sects, but instead of laying down their arms, they’d remained locked in brutal combat, each sure it was the actions of one of the other sides that had caused the pulse. With most of their extreme weapons knocked out by the radiation, they’d settled into a long war of attrition, mining out the few pockets of fissile material the planet contained to launch nuclear strikes, the most advanced option to kill each other left to them. Now the world was locked in a nuclear winter, and the war still raged on.

  What had been the difference between the two worlds? Why had one managed to achieve peace in the face of the chaos and strangeness of the pulse, and the other had only dug deeper into its war? The same three sects, the same basic species makeup, even roughly the same climates and landscape on the two planets, having both been terraformed to similar specifications. Different leaders, perhaps? Different reactions? It was like a coin toss that one side had won, the other had lost, and neither knew had ever happened.

  Regardless, what we were looking for was on neither world. Instead, it was on one of the moons above, circling the war-ravaged planet. Once upon a time, one of the sects below had built a powerful broadcast antenna on the moon’s surface, likely for contacting the stronghold of their sect, wherever that had been. In the century since the pulse, the sect below had lost their ability to reach out through the radiation, and the antenna had gone unused.

  Well, mostly unused. The two planets hadn’t been
able to activate the tower, but that hadn’t stopped enterprising travelers from making use of the facilities. The pulse had left both worlds with pre-spaceflight tech, but the moon itself, due to the random nature of the pulse, had been almost untouched. Passing travelers had used it to broadcast signals for decades now; currently, there were two ships set down just outside of the facility, easily visible to scans from orbit.

  The lack of markings on their hulls and the laser-scoring visible to Scheherazade’s cameras told the story of who they were quite clearly—more pirates, probably using the antenna to scan nearby systems for unwary travelers. Great.

  The comms crackled to life. “What do you think?” Javier asked me, his tone all business—not trying to remind me of the fight we’d started, but also keeping his usual sly good nature out of his voice. “Two ships, anywhere from four or five hostiles inside, up to two dozen, depending on how much they don’t like personal space. We don’t have to use this tower—we can just move on, wake Marus up, send your broadcast from somewhere else.”

  I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “Odds are another tower will just have a similar reception waiting for us,” I said. “Better the devil you know, and all that. It doesn’t look like they know we’re here—we’ve got the drop on them.”

  “Plus, making the galaxy safer from pirate scum; I never feel too bad about that, despite my recent furlough at Beyond Ending. If anything, it’s reinforced the notion. I kind of hated it there.”

  Once upon a time, both of us had believed that sort of thing was our calling—clearing away threats to the innocent of the galaxy. Those days were long past us now. “Let’s just get this done,” I told him. “You ready for a fight?” Javier had never been the fighter I was—his former position with the Justified hadn’t led him into combat nearly as much as mine did—but he wasn’t exactly a babe in the woods, either.

  “Always,” he replied. “An unfortunate side effect of my recent circumstances. How do you want to handle it?”

  “Simple,” I replied. “We’ll knock on the door.”

  CHAPTER 19

  We had Bolivar and Scheherazade set us down a ways from the broadcast tower, on the dusty surface of the moon—“us” here being Javier, the Preacher, and myself, leaving Esa behind on Schaz despite her strenuous objections. The ships retreated to orbit with all their stealth systems activated, and the three of us began the hike to the antenna.

  This particular moon had only ever had basic terraforming—atmosphere and normalized gravity, enough for a few facilities like the broadcast antenna, but not for any real manufacturing or agricultural work. Either it had been deemed unsuited for such during the golden age, with the planets nearby better candidates, or the wars had broken out before anyone could get that far. Either way, the surface was nothing but purplish dust and indigo rock; pretty in an abstract kind of way, but it got real monotonous, real quick, when you actually had to hike across it.

  The tower rose up like a gleaming spike from the moon’s surface, an antenna to the heavens meant to keep the world below in contact with the rest of the galaxy, now simply a net the pirates could spread to locate their next prey. I won’t lie—yes, this was what we needed to do, it was part of my mission, it was a viable strategy to continue moving forward, but it also felt good, to be taking on those who were making life harder for the few space-faring peoples that remained in the galaxy. Violence was a tool in my toolkit: not the only one I used, but one of the more common ones. It felt good to use it for the same reasons I’d initially picked it up.

  Our plan was simple enough; when we got close, Javier left the Preacher and me on a high ridge—both of us armed with gauss rifles, since, for a change, the lack of radiation in the atmosphere wouldn’t eat through them and force us to rush our shots—and he snuck down to the low plain below, where the pirates had left their ships. The Preacher and I watched his progress through our scopes as he crept to the belly of each craft and affixed charges to their engines.

  If there had been a point where my plan would have failed, it would have been there—just an unlucky break: if one of the pirates strolled out of the facility to retrieve something from their holds, or if there was one already on board and she decided now was a good time to head back into the low handful of buildings clustered beneath the rise of the tower, we would have been in for a protracted fight. Luckily, Javi set the charges and returned to our position above with the pirates none the wiser; however they were killing time inside, it apparently didn’t require frequent trips out to their vessels.

  He grinned at me when he got back—regardless of our fight earlier, he did still love this kind of thing, same as I did—and then he triggered the detonator.

  The explosives he’d planted weren’t enough to completely destroy the pirates’ ships, but they did ruin them beyond repair, and more importantly to the plan, they made one hell of a racket. I’m sure it came as quite a shock to the outbuildings’ current inhabitants when twin fireballs suddenly erupted from their only way off of the desolate surface of the moon—they’d had the antenna trained so hard on nearby systems that they hadn’t picked up the danger much closer to them, having long since written off the two planets as no threat. Of course, both Scheherazade and Bolivar had advanced stealth systems; those had also helped.

  The pirates came boiling out of the facility like we’d kicked over a nest of ants. Some tried desperately to put out the fires consuming their ships—regardless of the viability of the craft, they still didn’t want the flames to spread to the tower compound itself—while others cast desperately around, trying to figure out if they were under attack or if it was just some sort of terrible engineering malfunction. Still others simply cursed and swore and shook their fists, blind rage overcoming any other instincts they had. It was funny, the way different people will react to bad situations.

  Of course, regardless of their reactions, they all met the same end. The Preacher and I didn’t have to fire a shot—the rifles had been more to cover Javier. We had more powerful tools than that at our disposal.

  It was over almost as soon as it began; once Schaz and Bolivar dropped out of the sky and started scything lasers through their ranks, there was nowhere for their targets to run. At least a dozen of the pirates had emerged from the facility; none of that number made it back inside.

  We entered the facility, leaving our rifles at the door. Gauss rifles were great for long-range engagement, but less useful in close quarters, just too unwieldy. There were a few bandits left inside—mostly those too drunk to react to the explosions—and they were still scrambling to get outfitted, which meant that most of them lacked kinetic shielding units.

  In a tight-exchange gunfight like that, if one side has shielding and the other doesn’t, the fight has already been decided; it just has to play out, and in close quarters, it’ll play out quickly. It did; we were left standing, and they were not.

  Was it a fair fight? No. Was it an ambush? Yes. Exactly the same type of ambush I was sure they’d laid for dozens of ships trying to make their way through the galaxy, the same ambush they would have laid for us if we’d been unlucky enough for them to see us coming. I didn’t feel bad about it in the least. There had been close to two dozen of them; that was two dozen pirates that wouldn’t be preying on the few travelers left still trying to knit the galaxy back together. It was a small victory, but I’d take it.

  They’d clearly been living here for a while; they’d converted the interior of the facility into a kind of pirate playground, with a great deal of stolen weaponry, intoxicants, and other loot. I left Javi pawing through all of that, looking for anything useful, and went to send my message back to Sanctum. The Preacher returned outside to fetch our rifles, then went to meet Scheherazade and Bolivar, who had descended from orbit to land slightly away from the still-burning pirate craft.

  I’d already figured out roughly the message I wanted to send, had agonized over it, in fact, through much of the trip here. I didn’t know that it would
do any real good, but it was the best I could manage. In clear, calm terms, I laid out everything that had happened since my last communication, which was when I had been about to descend to Esa’s homeworld in search of her; I made sure to commend both the Preacher and Javier for their help. Sanctum couldn’t get too pissed at me for bringing them this far, not with as sideways as everything else had gone on this particular run.

  Then I shut down the antenna—for good measure running an electrical charge through its systems and frying them straight through; if another group of pirates wanted to use the tower to search for prey, they’d be facing weeks of repairs at minimum before that was a viable plan—and headed back through the pirate den. We were done here.

  That was when Schaz contacted me to tell me Marus was awake.

  CHAPTER 20

  I took the ramp at not quite a run, waiting impatiently for the airlock. When it finally cycled, I made my way to the living quarters, and there was Marus, right as rain—or, at least, not unconscious.

  He still looked inordinately tired, but his color was back to a healthy neon green; by Tyll standards, Marus was dashingly handsome, which meant wide, nearly black eyes and a thick, muscular jaw. He ran his hand over the stony plates that covered the top of his head—darkened to a stormy blue-gray, a sign of his advancing age—and smiled at me as I entered.

  “Good to see you,” he offered. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “Yeah, well, if I’d known I was going to be picking you up, I would have stopped by an intergalactic deli, gotten some sandwiches or something,” I told him. It was a little lame, I know; I was still grinning like an idiot. It was good to see my friend up and around.

  He winced as he stretched his muscles, finding new aches where the cort had kept him in one position for too long. “Khonnerhonn?” he asked, though I could tell by his tone he already knew the answer.