The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “Move,” Sahluk barked at his men, all business now that we were in enemy territory. “Squads one and two, circle the perimeter clockwise. You see something, don’t shout, just fire. There’s nothing but hostiles here. Squad three, you’re with me and our guests, counterclockwise. The faster we get this done, the faster we can get inside the facility and out of this fucking rain.” I don’t know if the cold actually bothered the big Mahren that much, but he knew it would be uncomfortable for his troopers.

  The two groups split apart; the second Barious went with the clockwise group, so that each of us would have a synthetic to “speak” with the turrets. Our merry little band moved on through the rain, making our way to the second gun, the empty city spreading out around us like a landscape from perdition.

  The second turret gave us little trouble, and no sign of Reint yet.

  The third was slightly harder to get to. Schaz had dropped it onto the roof of a building just outside the chain-link fence that ran around the installation. A good idea in theory, and useful placement once we got the guns online, but its elevation meant we had to climb up to the turret before we could even start to get it activated.

  Sahluk and most of his squad stayed behind on the ground, covering the facility, leaving my team to climb up the structure to the turret, easier for us without the added bulk of the exosuits. Granted, Sahluk’s team could have made their way up the structure by using the brute force of the suits to punch through the walls for handholds, but the state the building was in, that might have brought the whole thing crashing down.

  Climbing slick concrete in freezing rain: not very fun.

  Still, we made it up to the roof without incident, and the Preacher knelt by the turret while Javier, Marus, and I went splitting off to different corners to watch the silent city beyond the structure.

  It was almost like the city was sleeping, like we were in the dead of night, and as soon as the sun arose and the blanket of rain swept away the nonexistent citizens would wake, would turn on their lights, and this place would go back to the way it should be. It never would, of course—even if our best future came to be and the return of the pulse was averted by the ultimate efforts of the gifted children I and the other operatives had gathered, pulsed worlds world still be pulsed; there was no changing that. Not to mention the fact that this world was still ruined, had been ruined long before the pulse—but that was what it looked like, anyway.

  The sharp crack of a rifle shot, and a brief flash of muzzle flare in the darkness: Javier’s corner. I ignored the impulse to run over to him and provide more fire, kept my eyes peeled on my own section of the city, my HUD dancing with overlays, trying to scan for any kind of movement out in the rain. “What have you got?” I shouted into my comms.

  “Movement,” he replied. “A half-dozen of them, at least. They scattered when I winged one of them, but they’ll be back.”

  That was when Sahluk’s squad below opened fire, the sound coming from the opposite end of the roof, back in the direction of the facility. The Reint had figured out we were here.

  CHAPTER 14

  This time I did run to the far side of the roof, back toward the Preacher and the turret. That was far too much gunfire coming from Sahluk’s squad. A shot here and there, to pick off individual Reint creeping toward us, sure—much like what I’d heard from Javier—but this was sustained, and it was frantic, and it was only getting worse.

  As I approached the edge of the roof I slid through the wash of water, coming up in a firing position on one knee, my rifle already raised, seeking targets. There were plenty to choose from.

  The Reint were absolutely boiling out of the facility, their mottled scales twisting together, giving them the appearance of halos from where the rain was bouncing off their ever-so-slightly iridescent skin. They were charging Sahluk’s position; he and his men were letting loose, their big guns roaring, tearing through the darkness and the rain to chase the Reint across the open ground, but there were a great many targets to choose from, and they were fast, so much faster than their civilized counterparts. You forget the advantages we lost by hundreds of thousands of years of purposefully suppressing the predator side of our nature.

  This was wrong. This was all, all wrong. Devolved Reint didn’t act like this. They didn’t attack en masse, they didn’t move in groups, they didn’t work together at all. I thought I could even hear them communicating, a strange tonal collection of whistles and cries, just below the chaos of the gunfire. That was wrong too—that wasn’t what Reint did, not how they spoke, devolved or otherwise. This was very, very wrong.

  Time to worry about that later. For now, there were targets, and they were attacking, and while they weren’t anywhere close to overrunning Sahluk’s position, the more he and his men used their big guns, the faster they’d invite the pulse radiation to render their weapons useless hunks of metal that they’d have to leave behind.

  Every aggressor I put down with my rifle—still the same gunpowder-round weapon I always carried on rad-soaked worlds, nothing about it inviting degradation by the radiation in the atmosphere—was one fewer the soldiers below would have to fire on, one less shot to eat through the rad shielding on their guns.

  I let my HUD mark targets until my vision was swarming with red dots like aggressive fireflies, and then I started chasing them, letting them lead my rifle barrel, then overtaking them as they slowed or changed position—which they did rapidly and without warning—and firing in the split-second pause before they started moving again. I’m not saying I hit every shot, but I landed my share. This wasn’t the first time I’d fought devolved Reint, and no matter that their behavior was odd, they still moved the same. Fast.

  “How we doing on that turret, Preacher?” I shouted over the rain and the gunfire.

  “Almost there!” she shouted back.

  “Javi? Marus?” They were still in their positions on the corners of the roof behind me; I couldn’t hear them firing, but that might have simply been because of the cacophony below.

  “Movement, but they’re not coming forward!” Marus shouted back. “I don’t—”

  “Oh, fuck yes they are!” And now Javier was definitely firing, and I cursed, making a decision, right or wrong. I spun and stood and raced back to their side of the roof, reloading my rifle as I went.

  The Reint in the city were pouring out of the buildings now, the same way they were coming out of the facility, and there were a lot of them. They were behaving just as oddly as the Reint attacking Sahluk below, moving almost like birds on the wing, as if ruled by a single collective mind. Regardless, they were coming teeth bared and claws out, trying to climb the building and have us for dinner.

  We didn’t have the firepower Sahluk’s team did, and there were a great many more Reint on our side. “Preacher!” I shouted, firing down as fast as I could, trying to pick the reptilian forms off even as they climbed, their claws anchoring them as steadily as if they’d pounded in pitons.

  “Done!” she shouted back, standing away from the turret.

  Our comms buzzed to life: Sahluk. “Jump!” he shouted. “We’ll spread a—”

  We didn’t wait; we knew what he was going to say. All three of us—Marus, Javier, and I—bolted to that side of the roof and simply leapt, not even looking. We fell with the freezing rain, then hit the antigrav field below before we could smash into the concrete and break half the bones in our bodies. The field collapsed, boiled away by the rads, but we were unharmed and we were down and the turret was up.

  The Preacher, of course, hadn’t trusted Sahluk’s field; she’d just jumped, well clear of the building, trusting her metal construction to handle the landing instead. She wasn’t wrong, though the long-abandoned vehicle she crushed where she hit didn’t take it nearly as well.

  “Move!” I shouted to Sahluk. “Move to the next turret! They are still fucking coming!”

  And they were.

  CHAPTER 15

  We moved as a mobile base of fire, the h
eavy guns of Sahluk’s squad cutting us a path to the next turret. The Reint had realized by now that a direct attack wasn’t getting them anywhere—they may have been devolved, but not so far that they couldn’t recognize the corpses of their own kind, burnt down and scattered across the rain-slick pavement. Now, they watched, and hid, scrambling through the downpour, trying to find somewhere to lay in ambush.

  Or, most of them did: some of the others were busy claiming the corpses of the fallen. Enough fauna had survived on this world that life hadn’t gone extinct, there was still a food chain—on which the Reint sat comfortably on top—but that didn’t mean prey was easy to come by, and cannibalism had become a common trait in the pre-sapient Reint wasteland that had once been a thriving metropolis.

  The Preacher got the next turret up and running before the massed Reint charged again. Four down, four to go. The devolved predators hissed and screamed in the distance, both inside the complex to our left and out in the city; it sounded like the storm had come alive, thick with fury and howls.

  “We can’t keep this up for much longer,” Sahluk warned me. “We weren’t expecting this kind of opposition; our suits won’t hold up to the rads if we’re burning energy this fast.”

  “Why are they doing this?” Javier asked. “Why are they behaving this way? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s been dozens of generations since the pulse; they’ve been changed by it, just like every other world was changed. We know our objectives: get the turrets up, clear the gun. We need to keep moving.”

  Sahluk launched a grenade into an outbuilding on our path to the next turret; the round smashed through a mostly broken window and exploded inside with a dull thump. The metal of the building split and caved, and Reint came boiling out into the rain, looking for new cover. If he’d left it alone, our path would have taken us right beside the structure, and they would have been close enough to use their talons and fangs before we knew they were there.

  “This turret’s up,” the Preacher reported, standing from beside her target.

  “Good. Move,” Sahluk said, reloading his launcher.

  That was when a lone Reint came out of nowhere and hit him from the side, its claws scrabbling at his suit. The big Mahren cried out in pain and fury, dropping to one knee to try and hold it off—it couldn’t get through the metal, but he still had exposed skin where the suit gapped, and as hard as his flesh was compared to other species’, it wasn’t as hard as Reint talons.

  I drew my pistol, put it to the side of the Reint’s head, and fired, blowing its brains out into the rain. Sahluk pushed the corpse off of him and stood, bleeding. He had a nasty gash across his cheek, but at least it wasn’t high enough that the blood would get into his eyes. “I hate this place,” he growled.

  “Whatever happened to being excited to see some action?” Javier asked him.

  “There’s action and then there’s a clusterfuck,” he replied, lifting his grenade launcher again. “We’re firmly into the latter territory.”

  “They’re massing for another charge,” the Preacher warned, her ocular implants seeing farther in the frozen rain than any of us could. “Between us and the next turret.”

  “We go through them,” Sahluk said. “We—”

  “Oh, dear.” Scheherazade, on my comms. “This seems worse than I’d expected. There really are a great many of them, aren’t there?”

  “Tell me you’re on approach,” I begged her.

  “I am indeed. You might want to tell everyone else in your party to hold still.”

  I turned to the others. “Scheherazade’s coming in hot!” I shouted. “Don’t move!”

  I hoped they heard me, because before I could say anything else, Schaz had appeared out of the stormy skies, her guns blazing.

  She was using her forward cannon to blast apart the buildings closest to the fence line, scattering Reint in any given direction as they tried to escape the fire and the rubble. Those that moved further back into the city survived—those that moved closer to us found themselves in the firing solution of the lasers mounted on her wings. The blue lines of heat carved in arcane figures across the pavement, leaving a path of glowing orange behind them—and the corpses of our attackers, of course, most cut right the hell in two.

  Even over the wash of the thunderstorm, the smell was horrific, burning flesh and seared metal. By the time Schaz moved on, there wasn’t a Reint left standing anywhere out in the open. They were fast, but not faster than sustained laser fire.

  “Go!” I shouted to the others almost as soon as she’d headed off to make her circle of the entire compound. “Get to the next turret before they can recover!”

  CHAPTER 16

  Schaz had bought us time—time we desperately needed. We moved along the path of the destruction she’d wreaked, a terrible study of contrasts—the heat coming off the fires left behind in her lasers’ wake stark against the waves of freezing cold rain still lashing us from the skies above. The Preacher got the next turret up, and the next, without the Reint launching another sustained counterattack.

  By the time we’d reached the second-to-last turret, though, they’d recovered, howling like mad out in the storms. I don’t know how many Reint were out in the city, but it felt like we’d killed at least half a hundred of them, not even counting Scheherazade’s bombardment, and they just kept coming. We’d had another handful of close calls as Reint who’d hidden themselves in our path leapt out in ambush, but we’d managed to get clear of them without any casualties so far.

  We were close enough to the end of our circuit that, from our position at the second-to-last turret, we could actually see the other squads through the rain, those that had gone counterclockwise around the facility. At least one of them carried a flame unit, and the waves of fire made it easy to pick out their position. We’d both reach the last turret at roughly the same time.

  “Sergeant,” Sahluk told his second in command, the Tyll who had been one of the refugees Javier had rescued. “Take these two and make for that last turret.” He gestured at Javi and me, not even taking his hand off his gun. “Set up a base of fire so you can support the other squads on their way to join you.”

  “You sure that’s wise?” I asked him. “We’re already split up as it is.”

  “The sooner you can clear the area around the turret, the sooner we can get it up and running,” he replied. “The sooner you can do that, the sooner all we have to worry about is what’s inside the facility. I’ll breathe a lot easier with those big guns online, keeping the bastards in the city back.”

  I nodded, and dashed off into the rain: he was in command, it was his call. My rifle held close to my chest, I concentrated on moving, on clearing the open ground as fast as possible, trusting in the others to cover me as my footfalls slapped against the wet pavement.

  The last turret was on another rooftop, a former carpark, I think. Even through the rain I could hear the hissing noises of the Reint holed up inside, the sound of clicking talons on the concrete giving away their position.

  The sergeant—who was carrying a big laser repeater, an only slightly smaller version of the guns Schaz had used to cook her way through the waves of the Reint—hit the building first, just ahead of me; he busted in a window and opened fire, destroying the vehicles within that the predators had been using for cover. I stood right beside him and picked my shots, Reint backlit by the flames inside as they darted away from the chaos his big gun had unleashed. Javier covered the both of us, firing at the Reint coming from the facility itself, streaming across the open ground, drawn by the noise and fire of our attack.

  “Go on up; clear the roof,” the sergeant told us. “I’ll hold here.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I’m not leaving you alone in this mess; no way.”

  He frowned at me. “I’m second in command to—”

  “You’re not in command of us, friend,” Javier told him wryly. “And trust me: giving her orders has n
ever achieved anything. For anyone. Ever.”

  The Tyll sergeant opened his mouth to respond; that was when the Reint dropped on him from the roof above.

  Its weight carried him to the ground, his cannon caught between its body and his own. I couldn’t shoot—the round would go right through the smaller creature and hit the sergeant—so I hit it with my rifle butt instead, trying to draw its attention, but it was intent on its victim, clawing and slashing as he screamed. It hissed, a different sound from the noise the others had made before—guttural, almost gurgling—and we all knew what was coming and there wasn’t time to do a damned thing to stop it.

  The Reint had evolved a great deal of predatory tools in the millions of years between crawling out of the rough seas and becoming the dominant predator on their homeworld. An innate knowledge of ambush tactics; talons, fangs, the spike on the tip of their tail; dense muscle tissue that made them far stronger than their smallish size would seem; a kind of minor echolocation, which was what most of their hisses and howls were likely about. One of the other abilities they had, though, was one modern Reint almost never used—some had even evolved past it, the organs vestigial and useless—which was why we’d forgotten they could: the ability to spit out a cloud of caustic expectorant.

  The Reint on top of the sergeant spat it directly in his face.

  He screamed, horribly. I dropped my rifle and grabbed the Reint underneath the bunched muscles of its forearms, hauling backward and ducking at the same time as it twisted to try and bite at me. I couldn’t make it let go of the exosuit, but I at least pulled its upper body back, and that gave Javier a clear shot at its head, which he blew clean off.

  The sergeant was still screaming. I let both of them drop, then pushed my way past the dead Reint—even without a head, its muscle memory meant it still had a tight grip on his suit—and fumbled at the aid spray on my belt. Javi got there first, discharging an entire canister into the Tyll’s face, then jamming his hand through the hardening foam, right into the sergeant’s mouth. It couldn’t have been comfortable for either of them, but at least when he pulled his hand back, the man could breathe, though those breaths were coming fast and shallow, broken only by moans of pain.