The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  I fought the urge to throw something at him. He was my boss, after all.

  Feeling marginally more human—but nowhere back to a hundred percent—Javi and I rejoined the others on Scheherazade, and we lifted off again.

  One gun cleared; one to go.

  CHAPTER 22

  Compared to taking Bravo, Alpha was a goddamned breeze.

  For one thing, the storm system that had plagued us before had moved on by the time we even reached the second facility, leaving the sky a crystalline blue, clear enough that once we’d set down—after Schaz had made her first circle, dropping the second round of turrets—we could actually see Sanctum hanging above us: not just the moon in the sky but Sanctum itself, lit up on the surface of the shores of the crystal sea above.

  For another, the elevation helped tremendously: the second facility was high in the mountains, in inhospitable terrain—a pain in the ass for us, but overall a great benefit, since it meant that the Reint hadn’t gathered in nearly the same numbers as they had at Bravo. Additionally, the mountains were at such great elevation that Schaz could provide almost constant cover; this high up, she could stay in the atmosphere for much longer, meaning we had air support the entire time we were setting up the fence. We simply moved around the perimeter, activating the turrets and picking off the few Reint who emerged from the facility itself.

  Then it was time to enter and clear. We got lucky for a third time there: whatever in the blue fuck had been going on with the Reint at the first gun in terms of their deeply strange behavior, it wasn’t happening here. These were acting much more like the lone predators they were, and most of those who had been inside had fucked right off when they’d seen what was going on with the fences. Even devolved Reint were smart enough to realize that a platoon of heavily armed soldiers murdering other Reint meant their chances for taking us on were slim at best.

  We cleared the mountain facility without taking a single injury, much less a fatality. I sent Marus back with Schaz to pick up another round of engineers, and then I waited, sitting outside and staring up at that long stretch of blue sky. Above me, the giant gun pointed up into the sky; I wondered idly how long it had been since the damn thing was fired. Had it been used as the rest of the system was torn apart? Had its Reint operators—the ancestors of the creatures we’d just killed or driven off—been forced to watch, all their firepower useless against the merciless forces that had been unleashed in their skies against the other worlds?

  Hopefully it would do more good for us, now that another enemy was about to come between the stars above and the gun below.

  This emplacement wouldn’t have as good an angle of attack as Bravo did, not on the Pax advance: Bravo would be able to pound away repeatedly at any dreadnaughts that made it into a position over Sanctum, whereas Alpha would only be able to deteriorate their shielding on approach. Still, no lives lost taking it, and even that small firing window could mean a big difference, given how many dreadnaughts the Pax were bringing to the party.

  Taking the Bravo, in the city, had cost us nearly a dozen soldiers, with an equal number of casualties added to the injured list, those who likely wouldn’t be able to rejoin the fight before the Pax arrived. Taking Alpha had cost us nothing, not even a bruise. Sometimes, that was just how war went.

  Still, the losses we had taken earlier stung. I should have been able to view them as an easy price, for the good the guns would do us in the coming fight, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I’d gotten used to . . . shifting my expectations as to what losses meant, in terms of tactics and combat. They had become dependent on the world I was on, the level of conflict, the level of breakdown in whatever societies had formed after the pulse. I’d fought in what the locals had called “wars”—usually as a pretext to get to whatever kid I needed to escort offworld—that had been nothing more than a few dozen men and women trying to kill each other in a field.

  Of course, I’d also fought in the sect wars, actual goddamned wars, before the pulse, when the whole goddamned galaxy had been trying to kill each other. I’d learned to pilot in void—set battles just as full of dreadnaughts and frigates and fighters as this one was promising to be. For most of the Justified, this was going to be combat on a scale undreamt of; for me, it was like coming home.

  It would be easy to say one level of violence was worse than the other, that a few dozen dead was far preferable to thousands, millions, more. After all, that was the argument we’d used when we first built the pulse. It was a lie. I knew that now, had realized it far too late. The mind can only process so much; watching someone die in front of you, whether on your side or in another uniform: it does its damage, regardless of how big the fighting raging around you is.

  All you could do was try to carry it, to let it make its place in your soul, before moving on to the next fight, damaged and wounded inside, if not physically. This galaxy had always been defined by conflict, one way or another. I’d spent my life bouncing from violent action to violent action; I knew it was taking a toll. But at the end, it was all I knew how to do.

  I lit a cigarette, and just stared out at the mountains. Eventually, Javier joined me.

  “We can win this, you know,” he told me, taking a seat at my side. It was the closest we’d been to each other since he came back. Everything else aside—all the violence, all the fear, all the desperation—the human body is the human body, and mine reacted to him being so close to me, to his physical presence, the weight of his form, to his smell. That’s just . . . biology.

  Javier and I had known each other very intimately before he’d made the decision that saw him exiled. It’s not exactly that I thought we’d have a future with each other, or that he’d always be there—our work was dangerous, and took us to far-flung corners of the galaxy; we’d gone months without seeing each other sometimes—but physically, my body didn’t care about any of that. It had been through trauma, and it wanted what it wanted.

  Specifically, it wanted me to reach over and run my hands down his skin, to pull his body into contact with mine, to make me feel something other than the shame and weariness and fear that was overloading my nervous system. It could want that all it liked; I wouldn’t do it.

  “We can.” I nodded, still smoking my cigarette, trying to shut down the stupid impulses of my sex drive. Trying to reclaim what we’d had, once, would just lead to a great deal of hurt down the line.

  “It’ll deal a great blow to the Pax,” he continued. “Maybe even ruin them. That’s not just good for Sanctum; that’s good for everyone, everywhere in the galaxy, even if they don’t know it. The Pax are a damned plague. We get to be the cure.”

  I shook my head, exhaling smoke. “Not so simple,” I replied. “Even if we did that, hit them hard enough that they never recovered—and this, the fight here, this would just be the start of that; agents like Marus would have to be sent back to their conquered worlds, to make sure they didn’t store the location of Sanctum or share it with anyone else—another sect would just rise up and take their place. A different group of would-be zealots or conquering assholes, sure that the pulse left them guns for a reason, and that reason was to use those guns to subjugate anyone else who doesn’t agree with them.”

  Javier looked at me. I didn’t look back. I knew the expression already. Like I said, I knew him well. “You’re in a mood,” he said. He was trying to be kind.

  I shook my head, stubbed out my cigarette. “You weren’t born when we decided to use the pulse,” I reminded him. “It wasn’t supposed to spread across the universe, and it wasn’t supposed to spread unchecked, but I’d be lying if I said we didn’t intend to use it again, over and over, on the assumption that taking away the worst tools from the worst aggressors would somehow make a better galaxy.”

  “So you would have taken the Pax’s favorite toys away, if you’d managed to keep control,” Javier shrugged. “So what? That wouldn’t have been a bad thing.”

  “Not the point. The me who would have said that was a good t
hing, that would help—she would have been wrong. The last century has shown me that. I can’t keep watching people die, Javi. I just can’t do it. And there is nothing that can stop us from killing each other. Absolutely goddamned nothing. That was the mistake we made, designing the pulse.”

  He put an arm around me, and kissed me on the crown of my head. Absurdly enough, it did make me feel better, just a little; I kind of hated that it did. Again, biology. We’re just not meant to be alone. “Let’s survive this, first,” he told me. “Then we can worry about fixing the rest of the universe.”

  I shook my head, and managed a smile for him. “Always the optimist,” I told him.

  “Always something,” he shrugged. “By the way—I talked to Marus; he’s back at the first gun, at Bravo. Says they found . . . a thing, buried in the subbasement, where it was flooded.”

  “Yeah? What kind of a thing?”

  “Damned if I know. Damned if anybody knows. Weird tech, weird materials, apparently been there since before this world cracked apart. One of the Barious engineers swears it’s forerunner design, but Barious say that about everything they don’t understand; could have been something the Reint here were building on their own. Anyway. That’s what was making them crazy. It was all tangled up with the fusion reactor, messing with the radiation it was putting out, doing weird shit to their . . .” He tapped the side of his head. “Screwing with their senses, with their pheromones, with their neurochemical balances.”

  “So it wasn’t the pulse,” I said.

  “Just because most crazy shit in the galaxy has to do with the pulse doesn’t mean all of it does. I think there’s a saying about that. Some kind of platitude.”

  I frowned at him. “Do not start with the platitudes, Javier.”

  “I just said there was one, not that I was going to say it.”

  I sighed, shaking my head. “So we walked into a trap—we walked into a bloodbath—because some ancient relic, some fucking thing was making the Reint crazy. Crazier. All because it got left behind when the sect that used to live here . . .” I looked up, above the mountains, to the cracked sky of the system above. I wondered if the thing we’d stumbled upon in Bravo’s basement—and had cost us lives—had anything to do with whatever weapon had ruined this system. I wondered if it had been what their enemies had been looking for.

  “Pretty much, yeah,” Javier agreed with my unfinished statement. “Somebody’s always paying for someone else’s sins. Even a hundred years after whatever those sins bought is long gone. That’s the way the galaxy works, right?”

  “I’m not the only one in a mood today,” I told him, managing a slight smile.

  “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just nerves. I never thought I’d be risking getting killed fighting the Pax, of all people.”

  “You’re not going to get killed, Javier. I won’t let you.”

  He shook his head at that, smiling despite himself. “I appreciate that. But I mean—come on. The Pax? Really? Of all the sects out there—of all the sects still flying out there—I think I’d rather get killed by almost any other one. Even the weird ones. Especially the weird ones. The Mahrielle, or the Argiscene, even the Dryatalia.”

  “Aren’t the Dryatalia the ones who worship . . . like . . . forests? The ones on those worlds with flora that didn’t come from any of the sentient species’ home planets—they worship the wood itself. Like, the actual trees. The roots and everything.”

  “Yeah, that’s them.”

  “Wasn’t aware they went around killing too many people. I thought mostly they just stayed on their weird-ass worlds, and were only dangerous if you landed and looked like you were going to build yourself a lumber mill.”

  “Still. I’d still rather die at the hands of tree-worshipping nutcases than the Pax. They’re thugs, and idiots.”

  “They’re thugs and idiots who stumbled into an untouched fleet of ships, and somehow found their way to Sanctum. It’s not the fact that the Pax are the Pax that brought them here, Javi. This could have been any sect who wanted power—and that’s most of the sects out there. Give any of those what the Pax got—a fleet of dreadnaughts and Sanctum’s location—and it’d be them knocking at our door, instead.”

  “Everybody wants someone to blame. Might as well be us.”

  I smiled at him. “Not your weight anymore, remember?”

  “It’ll always be my weight. It—” He stopped, then reached up with his hand to touch the side of his neck. He was getting a transmission on his implanted comm. He listened for a moment, then grinned, his black mood banished seemingly in an instant. “Just heard from Var,” he told me. “He and Schaz are on their way in. Apparently he got tired of sitting around Sanctum and decided to help ferry engineers. He’s playing it off like he wanted to help, but I think he was just bored: apparently all there was to do back at the docking bay was listen to a bunch of Reint engineers argue about whether or not they were allowed to service him, given that technically he was just as guilty as me for our desertion.”

  I shaded my eyes as well; I could just make out the two ships on approach. It wasn’t like they were using stealth kits—the Reint on this world didn’t exactly have the tech to pick them up on radar, or to take shots at them even if they did.

  “We’re back,” Schaz said mildly into my ear. “We brought your engineers. And also . . . a surprise.”

  I sighed. “Schaz, today is not the day for surprises,” I told her, standing anyway. “Actually, ‘never’ is the day for surprises. I hate surprises.”

  “I know,” she said, but that was all she said.

  The mountains were high enough that the ships could actually set down long enough that the engineers didn’t have to try and descend rope lines to get down to the gun. As Schaz’s ramp descended, they poured out, eager to get to work, to do their part for the upcoming fight.

  Esa came out after them.

  CHAPTER 23

  What in the hell?” I wondered out loud. I’m not sure exactly what Javier heard in my voice, but he reached out and grabbed my elbow, shaking his head as he did.

  “Hold on,” he told me. “Let’s see what she’s trying to—”

  “What she’s trying to do is get herself killed!” I hissed. “I did not drag her off of that backwater planet and halfway across the goddamned galaxy—”

  “It was, what, a hundred or so light years, at most?”

  “I did not go through all the shit I went through in order to get her here just to have her wander into the middle of a soon-to-be-battlefield,” I finished, fuming. “I repeat: what in the hell?”

  Meanwhile, Esa had seen us, and waved cheerily as she approached. “Hi, guys,” she said. “I got bored back on Sanctum, so I thought I’d come see what you were doing.”

  “You got bored,” I said slowly, trying to parse this information. It was like she was suddenly speaking a foreign tongue, one I only knew a handful of words in. “Shouldn’t you still be in orientation?”

  “Yeah, they canceled that,” she told me. “I guess they kind of figured if we’re about to all be killed by Pax, it wouldn’t really matter. If we’re still alive at the end of the invasion, I guess they plan to do it after. I—”

  I held up a hand for silence; raised Schaz again. “Schaz,” I said. “Why is she here?”

  “I am truly not sure, boss,” Schaz replied.

  “Then why is she here? If you’re not sure, why did you fly her across the system; why did you even let her on board?”

  “She boarded with all the engineers; I didn’t even notice she was there until halfway through the flight, and what was I supposed to do then, turn around and take her back to Sanctum? You needed the engineers here, now, soon.”

  “Right.” I turned back to Esa. “You’re going back to Sanctum. Now.”

  “Actually, I’m not,” she disagreed. “Like I said: they canceled orientation. I still got to meet a couple of the other kids, though, the ones like me. And they said something interesting—said t
hey’d been told what was coming, and they’d been offered a chance to help with the war effort. Those with mechanical skills, for example, were supposed to—”

  “You don’t. Have. Mechanical skills.” I ground out the words through gritted teeth.

  “You don’t know that,” she returned, sounding a little hurt.

  “Fine. But even if you did, they would have wanted the students with engineering skills working on restoring the frigates, not out here working on the guns. You do understand that as soon as this all starts, this position is going to be a primary target for the Pax, right?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like Sanctum won’t—”

  I shook my head. “Not just for the Pax dreadnaughts; I mean everything else the Pax have got. Every ship in their armada that makes it through the minefields is going to try and take out this gun, because unless they do that, this thing will be picking their dreadnaughts apart. And if they can’t do it with ships, I guarantee you, they will land ground troops. It isn’t a question of ‘if’ the Pax overwhelm this gun, it’s a question of how long into the battle it will take to fall.”

  “Oh.” Apparently she hadn’t put all that together.

  “Still seem like a good idea for you to sneak on board Schaz?” I asked her.

  She glared back, defiant. “Yeah. It did. If things are going to get as bad as all that, then you need me, even more than I thought.”

  “Esa, this won’t be like escaping the settlement back on your homeworld, or even the observation tower. This will be war—”

  “I know, war, the thing everyone keeps talking about, the thing your whole”—she sort of churned her hand uselessly in midair, giving me very little actual information—“thing was supposed to stop. It’s big and it’s scary and it will change me for good. But you know what else would change me? Dying. Dying, or being a Pax slave, being brainwashed. That’s one thing I learned growing up on my homeworld, on a pulsed world: if you have the chance to fight, you fight. Don’t wait, don’t expect a better moment to arrive, don’t think someone’s going to come along and save you—if you need to fight, you fucking fight, you start and you don’t stop until you’re done, one way or another.”