The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “Because there were more people,” the Preacher dismissed him. “What you did was tantamount to genocide.”

  “We didn’t mean to,” he replied to her, keeping his voice even. “But it’s a false equivalency, to say that life was so much better before the pulse than after. Yes, the technologies we wiped out had the potential to improve quality of life on a great many worlds. But that wasn’t what they were actually used for, and you know it. You were alive before, just like I was.”

  “Of course.” She managed something that was almost a laugh. “Of course. The Justified and the Repentant. You always thought you were better than everyone else, smarter, more moral, trying to be a police force for the entire galaxy, ready to tell everyone else how they should think, how they should be. Of course you think you’d have the right to unleash something like that on the entire—”

  “That isn’t what happened,” I said again. “It was an accident.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You want answers, fine. And you don’t have to believe us. But you said to start talking, and we’re talking. You want to listen, or you want to keep trying to make everything fit how you think the galaxy works?”

  “I want answers,” Esa said, her voice surprisingly firm. “Tell me why. You said it was an accident. Accidents don’t just happen at random. What were you trying to do?”

  “The galaxy . . .” Marus ran a hand across the stony plates on his skull. “The sects that controlled the galaxy, before. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, each representing different ideas, different ideals, different people. They . . . disagreed.”

  The Preacher snorted. “They killed each other.”

  “Yes.” He looked up at her. “They did. Over and over and over again, all the time. Every single populated world in the galaxy, every single one, was involved in one war or another. Everything, everyone in the galaxy was defined by those conflicts.”

  “So you did it . . . the pulse, it was to stop these wars? Is that . . .” Esa shook her head. “That’s not enough.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to do . . . it wasn’t supposed to stop the wars,” I told her. “But as the conflicts escalated, so did the weaponry the sects used. You think what the Pax did to your home was bad? That was nothing back then, a minor skirmish. As would have been the fighting at Beyond Ending. Back then, whole worlds died in instants, thanks to the bigger, better, badder tools of mass destruction that the forward march of technology gave us access to.”

  “Toxic dispersal generators that could poison an entire atmosphere in hours,” Marus listed an example in a wooden, emotionless voice. “Singularity missiles that could create black holes. Solar-fusion destabilizers that could cause entire stars to go supernova. Those examples aren’t theoretical. They were used. We—the sentient, supposedly deserving races—had conquered the galaxy, and bit by bit, we were destroying it. Billions were dying every day, every single day. Billions.”

  “And how many hundreds of billions did the pulse kill?” the Preacher responded bitterly.

  “None.” He stared at her, almost daring her to contradict him. “Not a single death came from the pulse itself. It was built that way on purpose. Ships weren’t knocked out of the sky; they were left with enough power to coast to a landing. Fusion reactors didn’t go critical; they just slowly drained their energy, became inert. The very first day after the pulse, billions didn’t die that otherwise would have, if things had just gone on as normal. Because the weapons that would have killed them were useless.”

  “And the billions after that?” she asked. “The billions that suddenly didn’t have access to medicines, to surgical AIs? Those on planets that didn’t have arable land, that depended on interplanetary or interstellar trade to feed themselves? How many of those deaths are on your hands, do you think?”

  “All of them,” he replied simply. “Like she said”—he nodded in my direction—“what happened wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like that.”

  “Then what was?” the Preacher asked.

  CHAPTER 3

  The pulse—what became the pulse—it was meant to take out weapons,” I told her. “It was meant to be localized, to be aimed. To destabilize and disrupt the production facilities where the various sects were building their planet-killers. That’s all it was supposed to do.”

  “So you fucked up,” the Preacher choked back something that was almost a laugh. “Of course. Of course that’s all it was. The biggest catastrophe—the biggest change in thousands of years to how life in the galaxy was lived, and it’s because you noble-intentions-having motherfuckers just couldn’t stop yourselves from trying to make things better.”

  “Not better,” Marus shook his head. “Just not worse. You were alive back then. How often did you get news of a new planet being destroyed, being completely wiped out, or rendered completely uninhabitable? How often? Before I was born, it happened every decade. A desperate sect would do something unforgivable, and all the other sects would turn on them, repudiate them, scatter them to the interstellar winds. By the time I joined the Justified, it was once a year, and the condemnation was minor, at best. By the time I voted to use the pulse—and yes, we held a vote, and yes, I voted for it—it was every other day. We didn’t think we could stop the wars, that wasn’t ever our intent, but we thought we could at least slow the bleeding.”

  “You realize your noble intentions mean nothing to me, right?” she told him. “Your self-justifications, your desperate need to defend what you did, all the flagellation you’ve engaged in over the last century; it means nothing.”

  He nodded, looking away. “I do.”

  “So it was . . . a weapon.” Esa was still struggling to understand. “A weapon that only destroyed other weapons. That’s what it was supposed to be.”

  “It was,” I nodded. “But we used it before we were ready. When we were still designing it, still getting it prepared for its test deployment, one of our intelligence operatives brought us word that another sect—one that had long objected to our policies, our way of life—”

  “Your way of inserting yourself into conflicts that you hadn’t been involved in, of telling everyone else how to live,” the Preacher interjected.

  “Fine, yes, if that makes you feel better,” I snapped at her. “The bastards were aiming a fusion laser straight at our home, a laser that would have cut through the crust and destabilized the core of our world, but pretend like we would have deserved that, Preacher, if it’s what you need to think. Millions of people lived on that planet—our friends, our families. They all would have been killed, and not even all at once, not in a fierce flash of fire, but over days of chaos and collapse as that world shook itself to pieces. Is that how you think the Justified deserved to die, Preacher? Did anyone deserve that kind of death, any of the billions that died that way, or worse?”

  “So you used it,” Esa said; how the child was the calmest voice in the room, I’m sure I didn’t know. “The pulse, I mean, the . . . whatever it was, before. You . . . fired it, or whatever, at this other sect, this sect planning to kill you.”

  “It wasn’t fired,” I told her, calming myself with real effort. “It had to be put in place by an infiltration team, on the ground in the target area; it was far too delicate to launch in a missile. But yes, we did.”

  “He . . . Marus said that he voted for it.” She waved at him vaguely, as though she didn’t have the energy to even turn and look at him. “Did you?”

  “I did more than that,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “I was part of the platoon that set the damn thing.”

  “So what went wrong?” the Preacher asked.

  “I’m not a physicist, I’m not a . . . I don’t know. We’ve been studying it for the past hundred years, trying to answer that question, and all I can tell you is that we don’t know. It was supposed to be localized, it was supposed to irradiate the tech in a specific facility—not even the whole world, just a thousand square miles, rendered technologically inert.
Instead . . .”

  “You’re right,” Marus told her. “We didn’t know what we were doing; it was our mistake. We own that.”

  “You made my species unable to reproduce.” There; the Preacher finally said it. The reason she was so angry, the reason she had been searching, trying to hold someone, anyone accountable for the pulse. “You doomed us to a slow-motion extinction. Every Barious that dies is one fewer Barious the galaxy will ever see. I don’t think there are more than a few million of us left now. In a hundred years, that number will be down to the thousands. A hundred years past that, it may be dozens. And after that . . .” She looked down, at her hands, as though she couldn’t trust herself to look at us. “You wiped us out,” she whispered. “You killed my people, and that’s all you can say? That it was a mistake? That you own it?”

  “The pulse was designed, very specifically, to leave Barious immune,” Marus said. “But we never . . . it was never meant to be used near Barious production facilities. There wasn’t one within a dozen light-years of where we set it off. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck you,” she murmured, the words gentle, almost astonished. “Fuck your sorry.” She looked up at both of us, her face contorted into a mask of pain. “All these years, we thought it was the forerunners, our creators, those that built us. We thought they were the only ones who could have . . . we thought we’d done something wrong, something to deserve this, tarnished their legacy somehow, even though we didn’t even remember what that legacy was. But it was never our forerunners at all—it was just you, screwing around with tech you didn’t understand, trying to make the galaxy better.”

  “We did use ancient tech in the design,” Marus admitted. “Probably tech from the lost race that built the Barious. We found it, dug it up, out of a ruined . . .” He shook his head. That part didn’t matter. “If that . . . if that helps. I don’t know that it does.”

  “It doesn’t. Not at all.”

  “But what happened?” Esa asked again. “You set off this . . . this weapon, this weapon-killing weapon, and then what?”

  I spread my hands. “We don’t know. It worked—it knocked out the facility—and then it just . . . spread. In minutes, it had taken over the entire planet. In hours, the whole of that solar system. And it only got faster as it went further, which . . . that’s not how things work. The whole concept was a ‘fuck off’ to the very idea of physics.”

  “The first use was only supposed to knock the facility back to where they couldn’t build weapons of mass destruction any longer,” Marus added. “It wasn’t even supposed to send them to pre-spaceflight. We didn’t even know it could do that.”

  “So it really was random,” Esa said. “That some worlds only lost top-of-the-line tech, and others—mine—were pushed all the way back to where internal combustion engines weren’t possible.”

  I half-smiled. “How do you even know what the hell an internal combustion engine is?” I asked her.

  “There was a man in town; he kept claiming he’d . . .” She waved me away. “It’s not important,” she replied. “What’s important is what happened after that.”

  She was still looking at me when she asked the implied question, but I pointed her at Marus. “Best ask him,” I said. “I wasn’t around for the aftermath; I was stuck on the same world where we’d set off the bomb. For years, actually. The Justified were in disarray, just like everyone else—they didn’t have the resources to spare, trying to pick up a platoon that was likely dead anyway.”

  “We tried to figure it out, of course,” Marus shrugged. “Tried to discover what went wrong, looked for a way to reverse it. But instead of that, we found the other thing. Discovered them almost on accident.”

  “Me,” Esa said softly.

  “You,” he nodded. “The first of the gifted children—as far as we know—was born on our former homeworld, to a Justified mother. In studying that child, we learned that there must be others, then found them: the next generation. You.”

  “And once you learned about us—”

  “We learned about the other thing, the impossibly scarier thing. That the pulse wasn’t done, that it was still having effects, still intensifying, that it was on its way back around. Like ripples in a teacup that hit the porcelain edge and return to the center.

  “The first pulse had spread outward from its origin point, all the way to the edges of the galaxy. Instead of moving on, though, into whatever . . . nothing . . . lies out there, it just . . . stopped, instead. Stopped moving, and started churning. Building on itself. Preparing to double hack on its prior course. There’s a theory—hotly debated, even amongst our own—that it’s waiting for something, to hit critical mass somehow. Maybe even for a certain number of gifted children to be born; we know they’re linked somehow, not just the children and the radiation, but the children and the pulse itself. But waiting or not, purposeful or not, it’s still out there, out in the black beyond the ends of the galaxy, building strength. We unleashed it. We have to be responsible for when it returns. And to do that, the only way we figured out how to stop it—”

  “Me.” Esa’s jaw worked for a moment, like she had something to say, then clamped shut. She breathed in, once, then out. “You need me, and kids like me. Our gifts were created by the pulse. You think our gifts can stop it, when it returns. By . . . how? What does that even mean? You think we—your fucking ‘next generation,’ you think we can just join hands and sing songs and it’ll just turn around?”

  “Your gifts are a product of the pulse, a sort of . . . accelerated mutagenic evolution,” Marus told her, keeping his voice even. “Brought on by exposure to intense plumes of pulse radiation. They allow you to interact with matter, with energy, in ways no other beings can. Yes. We think you can stop it. If you work together. If there are enough of you. You can stop it—or you can at least hold it off.”

  “So you need us . . .” She was almost whispering. “You need us to clean up your mistake.”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “Not even to clean it up, really,” I said. “Just to stop it from happening again. We don’t think the next generation can fix the pulse, Esa. What’s done is done; the old galaxy is gone, and it’s not coming back, not any more than the Preacher’s long-lost creators are. We don’t need to clean up our mistake—we just want to avoid something worse.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Esa sighed, looked away from all of us, like she could stare through Scheherazade’s hull, like she could see right to the hole we’d unintentionally ripped in the universe. She’d thought I’d come for her because she was special. In a way, that was still true. But it was just another case of one generation passing its sins on to another.

  “What about you?” she asked Javier finally. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

  He spread his hands. “I was born after all of this happened, like you. This is all just . . . history to me.”

  “That’s it? You signed on with the Justified, even after you learned what they’d done?”

  “It was a little more complicated than that,” he shrugged. “I owed them.”

  “And that’s all that matters to you,” the Preacher asked him, almost aghast. “Your own personal debt, your own . . . what they did, it doesn’t matter, because it didn’t happen to you?”

  He fixed her with a look that would have pinned a lesser person to the spot. “I fought my wars, Preacher. I paid my dues.” His voice was low, barely a whisper.

  She just glared back. “And that’s all that matters.” Her mechanical voice didn’t quite sneer, but it came close. “Your own story, your own suffering.”

  “That’s all that matters to anyone. Even you. You want to know my story? Fine. I grew up on an absolute hellhole. Mountains and glaciers, for the most part, very little arable land. Didn’t matter before the pulse. Food got shipped in. You know what happened after?”

  “I can—”

  He shook his head. “Don’t try. You don’t. You might think you do. You’d be wrong. See,
I was born after, like I said. As far as I knew, all the old stories about the galaxy above, star freighters dropping down out of the atmosphere with thousands of tons of food? Fairy tales. Might as well have called it manna from heaven. The world I was born on was a feudal nightmare, ruled by petty tyrants who seized whatever power they could, who used the chaos to make themselves kings. Keeping people in line with the threat of those who had gone completely mad in the aftermath, become savages and cannibals.” I hadn’t known that. Javier wasn’t one to talk about his past much. “So, yeah: I wasn’t alive when the pulse went off, but don’t you dare say it didn’t happen to me. Every life in this galaxy was touched by the Justified’s mistake. Even mine.”

  “But you still joined them.”

  “I did. Like I said: I owed them.”

  “The wrongs they did, the—”

  “Doesn’t matter. They did wrong, yes. And they’re trying to fix that wrong, or at least keep it from getting worse. But maybe that doesn’t mean much to you; good intentions. Fine.” He shook his head. “You know where I’d be, if they hadn’t showed up on that dying world when they did? I do. Dead. Dead, or a monster myself. And neither one would have been pretty. I’m not responsible for what the Justified did before I was born, not any more than I’m responsible for what any other Justified does, any Justified that’s not me. I owed them, and they turned that debt around and gave me the opportunity to do good with it, and they got me off of that shithole world I’d grown up on in the bargain. You’re damned right I took them up on it.”

  “Until we kicked you out,” Marus reminded him. “For doing good, I mean.”

  Javier gave him something that was almost a grin, though there was still something mean behind his eyes, the remnants of his anger. “Whose side are you on, old man?” he asked.

  “I’m on the side of what’s right,” Marus replied. “What we did, causing the pulse; I’m still not convinced it wasn’t the right thing to try, but knowing now what we didn’t know then, of course it wasn’t the right thing to do. What we’ve done since—trying to stop the damage from compounding, gathering together the next generation, preparing them so that they can stop the pulse from returning—that’s right. Kicking you out because you tried to save more people; that wasn’t.” He turned to the Preacher. “Do you want to ask me?” he said, his voice even.