The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The sergeant gave him a wry grin. “Not as much as I do,” he said. “My family and I were on board the refugee fleet you saved from the Filt. Sanctum may have a long memory as far as what happened that day, but we’re part of Sanctum now, and we don’t forget either.” With a whine of servos in his exosuit, he held out an armored hand to Javi. Javier shook it, and grinned.

  “My genuine pleasure, sir,” he said.

  “Right.” I sighed. “Can we get on board and start this suicide mission already? I can practically feel Schaz having a nervous breakdown about her floors.”

  CHAPTER 12

  We packed inside Scheherazade. It felt uncomfortably like being sealed inside a ration pack. Thankfully, my seat in the cockpit was relatively free of hulking security officers in heavy exosuits, so once I squeezed past I still had some elbow room. Javier and the Preacher took the main consoles while Marus folded down one of the jump seats, with Sahluk sliding in and standing next to him; the rest got as comfortable as they could in the living quarters. I think one of them wound up standing in the shower.

  “With this much weight on board, I don’t know that I’m even going to be able to break atmosphere,” Schaz grumbled, but she proceeded to do just that, taking us out of the hangar and into orbit around the world Sanctum hung above, all icy winds and frozen mountain ranges.

  “All right,” I said to Sahluk, turning in my chair. “We’ve got two guns to check and clear, both on the planet below us.” I tapped a few buttons on Schaz’s control panel, and turned the cockpit window into a viewscreen. A tactical view of the freezing planet lit up the glass, showing topography and rough estimates of the Reint populations.

  Unlike the moon housing Sanctum, the world below us hadn’t quite been locked on its axis, its rotation instead had just slowed to a crawl. Viewed as a gunnery position, that was ideal—it meant that the cannons wouldn’t rotate out of their firing solution for quite some time. From the perspective of clearing the emplacements, though, it made things more difficult.

  The various chaos that had been done to the system had led to extreme global warming on this particular world, but the longer any given side of the planet faced away from the binary stars the colder it grew, the bleak constant night broken only by a sliver of sunlight from the other binary star every few chronological days. The deep cold would hamper our efforts, but hopefully it would also make the Reint slightly sluggish, due to their cold-blooded physiology.

  “The first gun—Alpha—is up in the mountains, here.” I indicated a position on a raised piece of topography. In the living quarters behind me, the holoprojector was displaying the same map and marking where I was touching, and Schaz was transmitting my voice to the soldiers back there as well. “That’s the safest bet; it’s colder, which means it’s less likely the devolved Reint will have turned it into a hunting ground. For the upcoming fight, though, it’s not as useful to us—it doesn’t have an angle on Sanctum, which means it won’t have an angle on any dreadnaughts that get into orbit over Sanctum, just on their approach.”

  I shifted the map south, the topographical ridges fading away as I moved the view to an area lower on the planet’s surface. “The second gun—Bravo—is about a thousand kilometers away from the first, closer to the equator. It does have an angle on Sanctum, and it will also be the easier gun for the engineers to bring back online, because its fusion reactor is still running. Just a trickle, but still running.”

  “The pulse didn’t take that out?” the Preacher asked.

  I shook my head. “This world got knocked back pre-spaceflight, not prefusion. Most of our higher-tier weapons will get chewed through by the rads eventually, and the exosuits too, but fusion energy in general remains unaffected.”

  “And the reason we’re not heading to Bravo automatically?” Sahluk asked. “If it’s both the more useful gun, and the easiest to bring back online?”

  “Because it’s warmer, both by its equatorial placement and because the fusion reactor’s still running. It’s also smack in the middle of a prior population center. Heat mapping shows high concentrations of Reint still living there over the years, which means it may be crawling with hostiles, especially given the warmth of the reactor.”

  “So it’s the harder target.”

  “Significantly, yes.”

  “How do you know all this?” the Preacher asked me. “I’ve been with you since we arrived; you didn’t have time to do this much research.”

  Marus grinned at her. “Criat has been trying to convince the council to retake the guns for decades,” he said. “He’s spent that whole time forcing his agents to study the various emplacements, just on the off chance he ever actually won his argument with Helliot; she’s had this assault in the back of her mind since we first settled on Sanctum.”

  “When you settled on Sanctum, I was still getting shot at in the chaos left in the wake of the pulse bomb,” I reminded him dryly. “But, yes; I’ve known for a long time I’d be involved, one way or another, in a campaign to reclaim the cannons. Eventually.”

  “We take the hard target first,” Sahluk said decisively, reaching up to tap the hologram. “Bravo emplacement. If we succeed, it’ll take the engineers less time to get it back online, because its reactor is still active, and they can be ready to move on the other facility in short order. If we get repulsed, we can always pull back, try for Alpha instead. Once we’re successful there we can retreat back to Sanctum and beg for enough reinforcements to try again at Bravo gun, while the engineers get to work on Alpha.”

  “Got it. Scheherazade?”

  “Laying in a course,” she confirmed. “Bravo target selected.”

  “Do you have a closer view of the facility?” Sahluk asked.

  I zeroed in on the map, bringing up a composite of satellite imagery. Sahluk frowned; I couldn’t blame him. There was nothing good about the position.

  The anti-orbital cannon had been the centerpiece of a military installation built directly into the middle of a major metropolitan area—a common tactic during the sect wars. By building the facilities that would be targets for enemy raids in the midst of civilian populations, any enemy that wanted to attack was in for street-by-street fighting if they went in on foot, or would be forced to inflict massive civilian casualties if they tried bombarding the site from orbit.

  Some sects wouldn’t have cared, but others with more open-minded philosophies wouldn’t have wanted to risk the backlash that would have arisen from their own citizens in the light of indiscriminate civilian murder, not to mention hardening the will of whatever insurgency was left on the bombarded world.

  What that meant was that the gun had become one of the few sources of warmth for the Reint who had survived the devastation of their world—the only place for miles where they could rouse from the cold-blooded torpor enough to start a hunt. The rest was just crumbling city, warrens of concrete. The Reint were crammed nearly on top of each other inside the complex, or as close as their predatory instincts could stand.

  “I had my platoon load fence-linked turrets into your hold,” Sahluk said, turning away from the map. “We’ll have to set those up in a perimeter around the facility, facing outward—that will hold off the Reint attacking from outside the position. Hopefully most of those in the interior will be off hunting, and we’ll be able to construct the perimeter before they can get back.”

  “Don’t lose your tags,” his sergeant—the Tyll from the refugee fleet—added. “Those are what’ll keep the turrets from targeting you if you wind up in front of the guns. They’ll shoot at anything that moves, otherwise.” The Preacher and Javier had been given provisional tags earlier—Marus and I wore them constantly anyway, so we were good there.

  I nodded to Sahluk; it was a good plan. “You’ve fought devolved Reint before,” I said.

  “I have,” he agreed. “Have you?”

  I pulled down the collar of my jacket, showing off an ugly scar running up the side of my neck. “Yeah, you have,” he agreed. �
�So you understand. Reint don’t hunt in packs, but they will watch each other. If they see a few getting blasted to pieces by turrets or electrified by a shield fence, they’ll learn where not to attack.”

  “But while we’re setting up the fences, we’ll still have to deal with both the Reint coming at us from the city, and those from inside the installation itself,” I pointed out. “We’ll be hit from both sides.”

  “Two options, then,” he said. “We can stick together in one group, setting up the turrets one by one. Safer, but also slower, which means more time for the Reint to attack. Second option would be to split into two teams, each take a direction on the perimeter, meet back up on the far side. Faster, but each group would have half as many guns.”

  “There will be more Reint out in the city than inside the facility itself, even with the reactor warming the place,” the Preacher pointed out. “As you said: they’ll be hunting. My vote—if I get one—would be for the two teams, to shut that angle of approach off as soon as possible.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Javier pointed out, his voice a touch sour. “You’re made of metal; they’re not going to try and eat you.”

  “They will try and eat me,” I put in, “and I still vote for the second option. We’re on a timetable here. A week or so may seem like a long time now, but every extra hour we can buy means more time for the engineers to work on the gun, more time for them to tweak it, to increase range, power flow, accuracy, all those sorts of things. Faster outweighs safer here.”

  “Unless we lose people doing things the faster way,” Marus pointed out. “That just means clearing the facility itself will go slower, in the long run. And we’ll be down another gun in the fight to come.”

  “It’s your platoon,” I told Sahluk. “It’s your choice.”

  He stared at the screen a moment longer. “Faster,” he agreed. “Two teams. Not just because we want the gun up and running as soon as possible, but because the longer we’re making a commotion without the fences up, the more Reint are going to be drawn toward us from the outlying districts of the city.”

  “Also, I’ll have to bug out after I drop the turrets,” Schaz pointed out. “Too many rads. I can feed you scans from orbit, but those won’t do you much good when you’re inside the facility itself. It’s hardened against that kind of observation, because of course it is, it was a military installation. Still, once I’ve cooled off in orbit for a while, I can swing back down, try and create a firewall between you and the rest of the city. If nothing else, I’ll bring some of the buildings down—give you a clear line of sight, and hopefully make so much noise doing it that I scare some of the Reint off.”

  “Shock and awe,” Sahluk grinned. “It’s been, what, ten generations since these Reint have even seen spacecraft? In their devolved state, they won’t have any way to contextualize why a thing flying through the sky is burning them to a crisp. I like it.”

  “Speaking of rads, though, it is hot down there,” I pointed out to Sahluk. I tapped at the pauldron of his exosuit with one knuckle. “These won’t last forever; the tech will cook out.”

  “Maybe not, but they’ll last long enough for us to set up a perimeter, especially since we’re taking the faster path,” he said, before grinning at me. “Criat’s agents aren’t the only ones who have been planning this op for a while, you know.”

  Marus smiled slightly. “I thought Seamus was more eager than I expected him to be to dive into this,” he said.

  “The boss has never had as much faith as . . . certain other council members that the difficult navigational aspects of this system would be enough to protect us forever,” Sahluk replied. “He likes his contingencies.”

  I grinned at that. Seamus had been born Justified—unlike myself or Javier, who’d been inducted later in life. He knew departmental politics backward and forward, and unlike Criat, who had a typically Wulf-like lack of restraint when it came to holding his temper, Seamus was perfectly capable of playing three council sides against each other for whatever he considered the greater good. Justified were a lot of things, but we tended toward ruthless pragmatism, as a rule.

  “And after your tech does go?” Javier asked Sahluk. “Once your fancy suits are no good, we’ll still have to clear the gun installation itself, you know.”

  Sahluk raised a stony eyebrow at him. “We may spend most of our time on Sanctum, but that doesn’t mean we’re not trained for rad-soaked combat,” he replied, his tone cold. “We can strip out of the suits in less than three seconds, and we all carry ballistic backups. Don’t worry your pretty little head, Ortega—we may not have as much firepower going into the facility as we do on landing, but we’ll still keep you safe from the scary Reint. Unless, you know, we decide not to.”

  Marus sighed. “Can you two be dicks to each other later?” he asked.

  “If there is a later, sure,” Javier shrugged. “I can even be a dick in the middle of a firefight, if I have to.”

  “That much I remember,” Marus told him dryly.

  “So.” I stared at the satellite feed for a moment longer, almost willing myself to see the Reint holed up in the crumbling buildings. I couldn’t, of course—for one, some of these images were years old, if not decades, and for another, devolved Reint were very, very good at hiding. “That’s the plan.”

  “That’s the plan,” Sahluk nodded.

  “Schaz, give me a weather report on the city.”

  “There’s a storm front moving in, and it looks like once it gets there, it’ll stay awhile,” she replied promptly. “Not just rain, either—freezing sleet and hail mixed in, just short of snow.”

  “Wonderful.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Schaz threaded her way through the field of debris that encircled the nearly frozen world, found a path through, and plunged into the atmosphere below. The radiation alarms started squawking immediately; I shut them off with an irritated slap. Schaz knew what she was doing.

  We hit the storm front before we were above Bravo itself, our view of the approach limited to boiling clouds and sheets of icy rainfall. Scheherazade spent the flight muttering about her paint job.

  She took us lower, down through the clouds, and suddenly the city—the former city—loomed below us. Even after decades of landing on worlds shut down by the pulse, it was hard to ignore the strange twitch at the base of my spine that came from seeing buildings unlit, streets abandoned, structures half-collapsed under the weight of time and lack of maintenance. I knew why it was that way, but that didn’t stop it from reading as wrong, off, strange.

  The cannon was the biggest thing in the former metropolis, of course, towering over the other buildings by several magnitudes. Its scale didn’t fit with everything around it—it seemed less a part of the silent city than something out of place, a tool dropped by some world—striding colossus rather than the installation the rest of the settlement had grown up around. Still, there were lights, here and there, in the complex of buildings below, barely visible through the rain: the reactor was still active. Even after all these years. The Reint sect that had occupied this city had built their fusion tech to last, I’d give them that.

  Shame we were about to drop on top of a nest of their bloodthirsty descendants.

  As the big gun loomed above us, Schaz did a slow circle of the complex, dropping the turrets as she went, the occasional flash of lightning illuminating the cracked concrete below, her target areas. We’d have to set up the weapons ourselves, and we couldn’t bring them online until they were all connected: linked, they could resist pulse radiation for quite some time, reinforcing each other and drawing the radiation in a continuous loop around the facility. If we activated them before that connection was established, however, the rads would eat away at their guts, make them useless before we could get any work done on the gun.

  “I won’t be able to set down,” Schaz told us. “You’ll have to use the ropes.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” I agreed. “Get us into position above the sout
hernmost turret position. Do a sweep if you can, then get out of this atmosphere before the rads start to play merry hell with your internals.”

  “It always feels like I’m running a mild fever when I do this,” she sighed, more to herself than anyone else.

  Sahluk’s troops had already pressed themselves close to the airlock; it whined open, and Scheherazade dropped descent ropes down to the ground. The storm roared past her ramp, sucking all the heat from the interior of the ship. The soldiers descended three at a time, one to each rope, leaping into the teeth of the lashing rain.

  Marus, Javier, and I were the last out; I checked my rifle, then grabbed the swinging line. “Stay safe,” Schaz told me.

  “You too,” I replied, then stepped out into the storm.

  I slid downward through the freezing rain, touching down on the cracked pavement below. Sahluk’s troops had already formed a loose circle around the first turret, and the Preacher was kneeling beside the hunk of inert metal, along with the other Barious, both of them with palms pressed against its side, communicating with the computer within in ways that only their kind understood.

  “Any movement?” I asked Sahluk, having to shout to be heard over the storm.

  He shook his stony head, surveying the buildings that rose up out of the rain around us, looming up like ghosts of the civilization that had once spanned this world. In this mess, the Reint might be right on top of us before we’d even notice.

  “Maybe we’re lucky, and the storm’s keeping them inside,” Javier suggested, standing close to me with his own rifle raised.

  “In all your life, have you ever been lucky?” I asked him.

  “Well, I met you,” he shrugged, still not taking his eyes off the buildings beyond. It was an unexpectedly sweet thing to say.

  “How long at each gun?” I asked the Preacher, mainly because I didn’t know how to respond to Javi.

  “Almost . . . there,” she replied. “Almost . . . done. It’s online.” She and the other Barious stood; the gun gave a quiet whine, barely audible over the patter of the frozen rain, but otherwise was unchanged. It wouldn’t try to go active until we’d networked it with the others.