The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The council chambers were located down a stretch of open corridors bathed in an azure swath of crystal-reflected light, the cool, calming blues making the whole section feel like it was underwater. I think when the Justified who found this place were laying out their new headquarters, maybe they thought reserving that sector of the city for their major forum might help cooler voices prevail. It never seemed to work that way.

  “You’ve been advocating for us to retake those guns for decades now.” The council was busy sniping at each other as I stepped into the chamber, the various council members seated on a semicircular raised platform above the doors; the speaker was named Helliot, a bad-tempered Vyriat who was probably leading the vote to take me into custody as soon as I arrived.

  If Reint and Tyll were vaguely reptilian, and Wulf were vaguely lupine, the Vyriat were closer to cephalopods than any other creature from the human sphere: amphibious, like the Reint, they were covered in waving tendrils and fine cilia that tended to stand on end when they were upset, meaning Helliot currently looked like a pincushion.

  “It’s a waste of resources, a pipe dream!” Oblivious to our entrance, she continued her tirade, her iridescent skin shimmering with barely contained fury as she shouted across the table. The target of her ire was Criat Long-run, the Wulf council member who headed up my division; he glared back, but was holding his tongue, for now. That likely wouldn’t last long. “Even if we took the planetside guns,” Helliot spat at him, “which is still a big ‘if,’ the radiation would cook them as fast as we could repair them. We have no idea—”

  “If we don’t retake the anti-orbital cannons, we’ll all die here.” I cut Helliot off before Criat could form his own response, which likely would have involved a great deal of swearing. If the council was going to throw me in jail anyway, might as well do it for as many reasons as possible, and keep some of the heat off of my boss. “It’s really that simple. We don’t have the defenses otherwise.”

  The Vyriat glared at me, the swirling colors under her skin amplifying the narrowing shift of her three eyes. “Do you really think your voice carries any weight here?” she asked, her tentacles waving disdainfully in my direction. “You brought this down upon us, and you’ve broken I don’t even know how many regulations just by doing so. Your fate—”

  “She brought us warning, Helliot,” Criat rumbled at her, speaking slowly to control his own temper. “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Old legends said that when humans had first encountered the Wulf—the first sentient species we’d met outside of our own world—we first took them for “werewolves,” old fairy tales about men who became more canid than man. That was about as apt a description of the Wulf as any. Even their name was a corruption of the lupine species from our homeworld; what the Wulf called themselves was unpronounceable to most other species, and so the name humans had given them had spread through the universal lexicon instead.

  With the level of fury contained in Criat’s glare, I wasn’t surprised those early humans had looked at Wulf and seen beasts: I sure as hell wouldn’t want that much Wulf that angry in my direction. Of course, his antagonism of Helliot was as much in general principle as in defense of me; they’d never gotten along real well.

  “Oh, I can think of plenty of other reasons to shoot her,” Helliot replied, her tone like acid.

  “Shoot me or not, that’s up to you,” I replied. “But why are the cannons even under discussion? You’ve read the report I sent in, the report Marus’s sources—”

  “A single source, from a single agent.” The objection came from one of Helliot’s cronies on the council—Bathus, a Tyll who headed up the research division, old enough that his rocky pate was nearly black and his skin was faded from bright neon hues to an almost pastel shade of green typical of older Tyll. Still, I shouldn’t sell him short—he always backed Helliot’s plays because she made sure his scientists always had what they needed, not out of any personal stake.

  Of course, whether I respected him or not didn’t matter; he was still cutting our argument out from under us. “You expect us to scramble and waste precious time,” he drawled, tapping his six fingers against the railing before him, “without even confirmation that this is a true threat?”

  “The Pax are mobilizing,” I said evenly. “I’ve seen that with my own eyes.”

  “And we’re just supposed to—”

  “Whether she’s broken regulations or not, she is still an operative of the Justified, and can be trusted as such,” Criat reminded Bathus, the bass register of his voice heavy with a reminder of the weight we all carried. “As is Marus. If we start doubting each other, we are truly doomed.”

  “A fair point.” MelWill, small even for Reint standards, had to use a microphone to be heard, and was seated on a raised chair to even reach that microphone. She was the head of the engineering division, mostly comprised of Reint and Tyll, and a bona fide hero to everyone within Sanctum. Our tech, our defenses, and the theory that the next generation could be used to turn back the next tide of the pulse: all of it, all MelWill’s work. Without her, the Justified would have fallen apart long ago: she’d given us new purpose in the dark years after we’d begun to understand what we’d unleashed. That discovery alone went a long way to explain the near-veneration she received—and deserved—from the rank and file Justified.

  “It’s not their word I don’t trust, it’s their source.” Bathus switched tactics smoothly, not willing to take on MelWill—and her legend—directly. As Bathus headed up the science division, the two of them worked closely together: he couldn’t afford to alienate either MelWill herself, or the engineering corps his scientists depended on. “One strung-out junkie on one trade station is simply not enough intelligence for us to uproot—”

  Criat’s fur was fairly standing on end. “If Sanctum is pounded into dust by a sustained barrage from multiple dreadnaughts, I imagine your precious projects will be set back significantly farther.”

  “We always knew this day might come.” Acheron427 was the new speaker, the Barious who headed up the next-generation research initiative, otherwise known as the school that Esa would be attending. Tall for a Barious, and missing an arm—without the Barious factories online, she couldn’t replace it, and she refused to wear a normal prosthetic instead, though whether she was making some kind of statement with that refusal I’d never been quite sure.

  I didn’t look away from the council, but I could feel the Preacher stiffen beside me as she realized there were Barious not just in the Justified ranks, but this high up in our command structure. “We’ve hidden Sanctum well, but nothing stays hidden forever,” Acheron continued, her gaze flicking over the Preacher, then back to the other counselors. “Criat is right—regardless of whether the cannons should have been retaken years ago, they must be retaken now.”

  “My agent’s information, sadly, did not include a timetable.” Aoka was the head of the intelligence division, Marus’s boss. Despite the fact that he was a Vyriat, like Helliot—all tentacles and slick, bulbous skin in hues that shifted depending on their moods—the two of them despised each other, always had. By nature Aoka was secretive, distrustful, and cryptic for the sake of being cryptic: all to be expected from a spymaster. “We don’t know if we even have time to reactivate the cannons. We have to consider evacuation.”

  Criat shook his head, sending fur flying. “Not possible. We simply do not have enough ships. Less than a quarter of Sanctum could be—”

  “I was not considering evacuating everyone, my friend.” Aoka smiled. The two were usually allies on the council—much like Bathus and MelWill, Aoka and Criat often worked closely together, Criat’s operatives carrying out retrievals or raids based on intelligence from Aoka’s spies—but this particular issue seemed to be drawing all new battle lines. “Merely Acheron’s students, their instructors, other key personnel. The next generation must survive. Everything else is secondary.”

  “And I suppose that ‘key personnel’ would include ourselves.”
The last member of the council, Seamus, was human: in charge of the day-to-day operations of Sanctum, including security, he had a surprising amount of pull for someone who managed duties the rest tended to think of as “menial.” Still, when they wanted something done, it was Seamus and his workers who got it done, and they all owed him for one rush job or another.

  Unremarkable in every single way, from his shoes to his haircut, I had a feeling Seamus cultivated that appearance very much on purpose: he didn’t want you to think about him until you needed something. He shook his head now, looking carefully at each council member in turn. “We are the Justified. We stand together, or not at all.” His gaze shifted to my boss. “I’m with Criat. We need to get working on the anti-orbital guns, and we need to start yesterday.”

  Their argument was an old one, a discussion that had been going on for as long as Sanctum had been settled by the Justified. When they’d first arrived here—I hadn’t been present for the initial argument, still being stuck on the world where we’d set off the pulse bomb—Sanctum itself had been the obvious choice for a safe haven. The few remaining pockets of Reint on the other worlds had already collapsed into chaos, their very presence forming a kind of natural camouflage—anyone who somehow made it past the black holes and debris fields to scan the system would just find the few habitable spots overrun with devolved Reint, and devolved Reint were not something to fuck with.

  That, however, meant that the defenses the Reint sect had built to deal with an enemy incursion—before their worlds had been attacked, before they themselves had descended into base savagery—had also been left unmaintained, and the Justified had chosen to leave them that way. A system emptied of all but devolved Reint would be overlooked; a system emptied of all but devolved Reint and curiously well-maintained defenses was worth a second glance.

  The former occupants had originally built hundreds of anti-orbital cannons, seeded throughout the system—weapons powerful enough to trade fire with a dreadnaught—but whatever mystery devastation had torn their worlds apart, less than a dozen had survived. Three of the big guns were based on the same moon as Sanctum; the rest were scattered throughout the three remaining worlds, all of which had been affected by the pulse to greater or lesser degrees.

  The council had been bickering over the issue for decades, some arguing that we should retake the cannons just in case we needed to mount a more muscular defense of Sanctum than “run and hide,” the others arguing that an operational cannon facility would make a lie of our carefully constructed smokescreen. Devolved Reint, after all—the only local population other than us, creatures long since fallen back to their basest predatory urges—couldn’t hold a wrench, much less maintain an anti-orbital gun.

  “A compromise.” Aoka held up a tendril. Of course the spymaster was the one to offer a neutral path. “Of the eight cannons that still might be operational—regardless of the pulse, we do not know if lack of maintenance and the basic laws of entropy have rendered them useless—three are located on this very moon. Let’s send engineers to those three, to try and reclaim those facilities, at least until this threat has been dealt with. Then we can argue about whether or not they should continue to be maintained.”

  An optimistic outlook. Not a bad idea; the only problem was that the cannons he was talking about were on the opposite side of the moon, facing the entrance to the system and the pathway between the black holes. They could bombard the Pax fleet while it approached, yes, but the enemy would have defilade from the guns as soon as they circled the moon and arrived above Sanctum itself.

  “A half-measure.” Criat shook his head. “We need at least six cannons—the three on the far side of this moon, yes, but also at least three more. We will need additional firepower to stop the Pax than what we already have. This is a fact. I do not say that bringing the weapons back online will ensure our survival, merely that we are doomed if we do not.”

  “Of the five remaining cannon scattered about the system, three are locked into firing positions that would render them useless in any fight,” MelWill pointed out. “Left that way in the wake of the chaos that broke these worlds apart. So your ‘six’ is unobtainable, regardless of desire. The three on the moon, yes, we can reach those with minimal difficulty: there seems to be no disagreement on this point, correct?” She looked around at the other council members, nodded when she heard no objections, and continued, raising up two talons. “That leaves two cannon remaining, those on the planet directly below: in an ideal position to fire up at anyone attempting to bombard Sanctum itself.”

  “The cold will have destroyed them years ago.” Helliot dismissed her with a wave of her tentacle. “Even if it did not, that world is choked with radiation, pushed back by the pulse to a pre-spaceflight era. Keeping them running during a fight would require a massive effort, one we simply cannot spare the engineers for.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” MelWill told her, her voice cool. MelWill did not like being told what her own people were capable of. “I didn’t realize you were the head of the engineering department.”

  That shut Helliot up, at least for a bit; MelWill continued as if she’d never been interrupted in the first place. “First we must ascertain whether the lunar guns can be repaired, the three on the surface of this moon,” she said. “If there’s no hope of fixing them, there’s absolutely no hope of fixing the guns below. So. I’ll send exploratory teams to each of the three guns on the outward face of this moon. If my teams tell us that there’s at least a chance the lunar guns can be made operational, we can consider expeditions to the two on the surface below.”

  “And the risks involved?” Seamus asked her. “You’d send your engineers onto a pulsed world?”

  She shook her head. “The pulse is not the danger; we all know what prowls the world below. It would take a sizeable military force to reclaim facilities overrun by those . . . things.”

  “You mock your own kind?” Aoka raised a tentacled eyebrow.

  “I pity them,” MelWill replied calmly. “And I know how dangerous they are. You here on the council have always spoken of the devolved Reint we share this system with as if you truly understood the threat they represent; you do not. I do. Without soldiers to protect them, it would be certain death for my engineers.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Most species on the pathway to the interstellar technologies that had allowed the golden age—fusion reactors, hyperdrives, AI—to exist at all had evolved from stone tools to spaceflight in a certain window of time, all driven to conquer the world around them mainly in order not to be killed off by the ecological dangers of their specific planets. The Reint had taken nearly six times as long, simply because, on their homeworld, they already were the apex predator, and not because of their mental capacity.

  Quick, silent, and possessed of singular hunting instincts, the key Reint steps on the technological ladder hadn’t been fire or sailing or the wheel. Instead they had been basic social structures, things the other species took for granted. The Reint forced themselves to be massively social creatures, a cultural habit deeply ingrained by hundreds of thousands of years of rigid adherence, because if they didn’t, they quickly returned to the alpha predator state of “eat everything you can find, unless it can be fucked” that had nearly wiped out every other species of fauna on their homeworld.

  After the pulse, when much of the social order had collapsed, not all Reint colonies had devolved back to their pre-sapient state, but those few that had were nightmare factories. I’d tangled with them before, and still had the scars; I wasn’t in any hurry to do so again.

  Even still, I raised my voice, because I didn’t see that there was another option. “I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll check out the other two cannons. If I can clear them of Reint, we can send in engineers. If I can’t, I’ll get eaten, and the council won’t have to worry about what to do with me after.”

  CHAPTER 9

  For a moment, the council just stared at me, as if unsure that those words had just come out of
my mouth. I couldn’t blame them; I wasn’t entirely sure they had either, and I had said them.

  Marus joined me, coming to stand at my elbow. He took in the silence in a single look, then asked under his breath, “What exactly have you done?”

  I gave him a mild shrug. It was hard to explain.

  Finally, Helliot laughed, a disbelieving bubbling sound that filled the azure chamber. “I’d been planning on calling for your execution when this was all done, anyway,” she told me. “If you want to walk into it instead, be my guest.”

  I don’t know what I’d done to piss the Vyriat leader off, or when, but whatever it was, she’d been holding a grudge against me for quite some time. “Happy to oblige,” I grated at her.

  “Great—let your anger make the decision for you. Smart.” Funny, Marus didn’t sound complimentary. “Well, you’re not going alone,” he sighed. “I’ll go with you.”

  “That’s not for you to decide, Marus,” Aoka told him pointedly, his boss trying to keep his operative alive.

  “Actually, it is,” Marus responded. “Khonnerhonn is gone, killed by the Pax. I don’t have a ship—I won’t be any good in the upcoming fight. I can at least help clear the guns.”

  “You’ll need more help than that,” Seamus said, ever the pragmatist. “The both of you. I’ll ask for volunteers—”

  “No. Absolutely not.” Helliot again. Of course. “If she wants to throw her life away on a fool’s errand, all the better, but we will not waste personnel on her execution. Neither Marus nor any of the security forces can be allowed to accompany her.”