The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “I did,” I nodded. “And it’s true.”

  “Then why . . .” She gestured helplessly to the ugly-looking needles, then stopped. Pulled up Schaz’s vidscreen, instead, where she’d been doing the rest of her research. “Epinephrine,” she read off from her list. “Dopamine. Methamphetamines. Benzodiazepine. A whole host of other narcotic cocktails that I can’t even pronounce.” She turned from the screen, back to me, her face still beseeching, more than demanding. “I looked them all up. Every single one. Different chemicals for different species, but all with the same goals; they’re used to control behavior, to control aggression, to sedate or enrage. Jane, if they’re so brainwashed that there’s no going back, why are they being drugged?”

  I took a drink of my coffee, said nothing. Let her work it out for herself. There was another question, one she hadn’t asked me, one she was still working up to. I wanted her to get there on her own.

  “If the Pax are controlling their soldiers remotely with these . . . these . . .”—she gestured at the remote syringes glowing on the hologram—“then they’re not soldiers, are they? They’re slaves.”

  “They were always slaves. And they’re still soldiers.”

  “And that’s who we’re going to fight. That’s who you’re asking me . . .” She turned, looking at the projection again. Pulled out from the set of syringes, put them back in their place in the armor, then pulled the armor itself apart, until there was just what lay in the middle: that androgynous, species-ambiguous form, the Pax within. Still a person. “That’s who I’m going to have to kill,” she said, so softly I could barely hear it.

  “Do you think you can?” I asked her, taking another sip of my coffee.

  “Do you think I should?” She was almost angry now. Finally.

  Without saying anything, I reached past her. Adjusted the wireframe again, until the electrical systems were exposed, including those linked to the autosyringes. “Take another look,” I told her.

  “I don’t understand—”

  “There’s always more you don’t see,” I said, then nodded again at the hologram.

  She turned, studied. Still didn’t see it. “They’re drugs—the soldiers that wear this armor, they’re constantly being shot up with narcotics, filled with cocktails promoting aggression, tamping down independent thinking. If we could just—if there was a way to break the transmitter, or wherever the order to inject them is coming from—”

  “And where is it coming from?” I asked her. “What’s the trigger for the injection system wired to?”

  She frowned, started looking again. At first she tried to trace it back to the comm system in the helmet, but that wasn’t where the wiring led. After a moment, she found it—traced it back down, from the neck, across the shoulder, down the arm. To the wrist. Into the hand.

  “Oh, god,” she whispered. The hand in the projection went through a series of motions; an illustration. Ring finger to base of palm was one signal; index finger to base of thumb was another. At least a dozen, each different touch triggering the syringes in the armor to begin a different type of injection.

  The narcotic deliveries weren’t controlled by some Pax commander up on the dreadnaughts, or even by some sort of slave master in charge of each platoon. They were controlled by the individual soldiers on the battlefield. They were doing it to themselves.

  “They are slaves,” I told her. “You’re right about that. They were made slaves the day they were broken. But there’s no freeing them, Esa; there’s no putting them back together. By the time they put on that armor”—I nodded to the hologram—“by the time they’re given a gun, they’re Pax, and nothing else. We can’t save them. And yes. We will have to kill them. Do you think you can?”

  “I don’t know how,” she almost whispered.

  “You do.” I hated myself for saying it, just a little bit. I said it anyway. She had the instincts for it, and she had the power. All that was required now was the will. If she looked at a Pax and saw a person, she’d hesitate, she’d freeze, and she’d get herself killed. She needed to see an enemy instead.

  “You do it to survive,” I told her. “You do it so that you, and the people you care about”—I nodded at the hologram—“will never become that.”

  “And it’s that simple.”

  “It’s always that simple,” I told her.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. She’d been trying to find a way around it; a way to save them all, somehow. Still young enough to believe there might be some solution where a lot of people didn’t have to die. We were well past that point. One way or another, blood was going to be shed.

  Better theirs than ours.

  “So what do I do?” she asked me.

  I’d delivered a lot of children to Sanctum over the years. What happened to them next wasn’t my responsibility. I wasn’t a teacher; I wasn’t a leader. I didn’t know how to make her into what she needed to be, what the galaxy needed her to be.

  But I could keep her alive. I could do that.

  “The armor’s weak here,” I told her, circling a join under the arm, “and at the top of the neck, here, just under the jaw. They’ll likely have antigrav gear and kinetic boosters, so they’ll be faster than you think, but they can’t duck very fast. Use that.”

  How to fight: how to stay alive. How to win.

  It was all I had to teach.

  CHAPTER 2

  A few days later, still working myself into a bone-weary exhaustion every day then dropping into a dreamless sleep, my conversation with Esa about the nature of the Pax continued to echo through my thoughts. It didn’t haunt me—I’d done the right thing. But it was good that the girl was prepared for what was coming, and I needed to make sure that I was just as ready. The fight was on its way.

  After our discussion after the Preacher’s revelations, and what I’d told her in Scheherazade’s living quarters, Esa and I were good, so I didn’t have to worry about that, or really Esa at all: she and the Preacher had reached a detente, wherein Esa would work with the Barious, and she could be civil, but the bond between them was damaged, maybe irreparably. Still, that wasn’t my problem—if they both survived, their conflicting feelings toward each other could be ironed out later.

  What I needed sorted was a great deal closer to home, and a great deal harder to face.

  I found Javier down in the bowels of the gun, sorting through various detritus that had been pulled from the machinery, deciding what might still be of use here, what could be sent back to Sanctum to be repurposed, and what was simply scrap.

  “Hey,” I said to him. Even to my ears, it sounded weak.

  He turned and looked at me. Raised his eyebrow. “Hey,” he said back. “You need me for something?”

  “Yeah.” I took a breath. “We need to talk.”

  He laughed. “You’ve been avoiding talking to me ever since you pulled me off of Beyond Ending,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  “We’ve got a great deal of history between us.” I shrugged. “Not all of it is good. I thought—”

  He stood, and shrugged, stretching his arms over his head. I don’t know if he did it on purpose, but he was definitely showing off the fact that life as a pirate-smuggler-whathaveyou had kept him in shape. “You thought, since there was a good chance we were about to both die anyway, why reopen old wounds?” He nodded. “Sure; I get that. But then you thought about it some more—because that’s what you do; you’re always thinking, always running scenarios in your head—and thought that, if we did die, and we didn’t talk, we’d never get a chance to have that conversation, the one you were so keen not to have. This conversation.”

  “It’s not not a possibility,” I told him, a little annoyed; I wasn’t that transparent.

  “Of course it’s a possibility.” He nodded, turning to face me. “So’s the third option: that only one of us dies, and the other has to go on wondering if things had been different, if we’d just—”

  I kissed him, j
ust to shut him up. Or, you know, partially.

  He had kept in shape, and he had also remembered everything he’d learned when we’d been together. For the first time in over a week, I spent the next hour not thinking about the Pax, or violence, or my responsibility for what had happened to the galaxy. I didn’t even feel guilty for taking a break from working on the gun. Javier was too busy not letting me feel anything but him.

  Afterward, we lay entwined on the pile of bedding we’d managed to collapse into, shoved up against the wall. No, we hadn’t even managed to make it outside of the gun before we sated our carnal desires. Both of us had a great deal of built-up need; that had become very clear, very quickly.

  “Do we still have to talk?” he asked, stroking my hair.

  I blinked against his chest, not looking at his face. “Do you hate me for not coming after you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, gently, careful not to dislodge me from my rest. “Do you hate me for betraying the Justified, for making things more difficult for you?” he asked.

  Here, in his arms, it felt right; I felt safe, and good, and warm. It would have been impossible for me to hate him here, in this moment. Had I hated him, after he’d done what he’d done? At times, yes. We’d had something, and he’d abandoned it, and I’d been hurt by that, even though I understood that he’d only been doing what he thought was right, and he, like me, knew that sometimes doing the right thing entailed sacrifice.

  I looked up at him then, my chin on his chest. “No,” I said, and it was the truth.

  He bent toward me—I could feel even that small movement, my body pressed against his, could feel the muscles move under his skin, and I’d forgotten how good it felt just to be this close to someone, to have someone hold you—and kissed me on the forehead. “Then do we pick up where we left off?” he asked. “Assuming the council doesn’t decide to execute me after we’re done. Can we do that?”

  “I think we just did,” I replied, kissing him on the chest.

  He smiled, but didn’t take his eyes off me. “There’s more to us than this, and I don’t know if that’s patched yet. On either side. Can we fix that? Do you want to?”

  I stretched out over him, so I could kiss him on the mouth. “I think we just did,” I said again.

  Then I showed him what I meant.

  CHAPTER 3

  I felt better, after that.

  Javier and I had gone from dancing around each other, half-avoiding each other, half-seeking each other’s presence, to behaving like moonstruck kids, finding excuses to be around one another. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt, to be with him, to know that he was mine, that anytime I wanted, I could grab him and steal a kiss, or more.

  Of course, the change in our behavior didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Humans.” Marus sighed, after watching me watch Javier during our lunch break. “Always ready to start mating season. It must be exhausting, being your kind.” He’d rejoined us after ferrying engineers back and forth, but I pretty much only saw him during meals, which we took in the makeshift cafeteria in the facility; he was working with the crews digging out and rewiring the targeting systems, whereas I was mostly doing physical labor on the gun itself.

  “What?” Esa looked up from stuffing her lunch into her mouth as fast as possible, first looking at Marus, then looking at me, then looking at Javi. As she realized the implications of Marus’s observation, she screwed up her face, still half-full of sandwich. “Ew. I mean, great. I mean, ew. I mean, I’m happy for you two. But still . . . ew.”

  I threw a roll at her head. It bounced, and she grabbed it before it could hit the floor—even if she didn’t have her gifts, she had the reflexes to make a damned fine Justified operative—then swallowed her sandwich in one massive gulp, and shoved the roll in after it. After all these years escorting teenagers, I was no longer surprised by just how much they ate.

  “You know the shoot-to-kill order on you has only been frozen, right?” Marus asked Javi conversationally, like they were discussing the weather. “It hasn’t been rescinded completely.” His words were directed at Javier, but they were meant for me.

  “I know,” Javi replied, answering for both of us. “But given that our odds of surviving the coming fight are pretty slim anyway . . .” He shrugged, and reached for another helping of . . . protein. I really wasn’t sure what, exactly, we were eating; I hadn’t managed to snag one of the sandwiches Esa had grabbed. Sanctum itself usually had pretty good meals, but they were too busy readying for the fight to send us prepared food, and so we were making do with the emergency stuff that came along with the engineering supplies.

  “What are you going to do if the council asks you to kill him?” Marus asked me, his tone still conversational.

  “Not do that.” I shrugged. “I’ve made up my mind about that one.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” Javi responded dryly.

  “Is this really the time to worry about this, Marus?” I asked.

  “I am . . . quite fond of both of you,” he told us. “I really don’t want to see you survive the coming battle, only to wind up torn apart again over stupid Justified politics.”

  “God, Marus.” Esa rolled her eyes. “Will you not let them, you know . . . just be for a while?”

  The Preacher sat next to us. She didn’t have to eat, but she was trying to be companionable—and trying to just be around Esa as much as possible, without forcing the issue. “Humans experience a spike in endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine when first engaging in a sexual relationship,” she put in.

  “Ew,” Esa said again, not quite directly to the Preacher, just to the world in general.

  The Preacher pointed at Javier and me with a nearby fork. “Their decision-making abilities—especially when it comes to decisions about each other—are highly impaired at the moment,” she continued. “It’s entirely possible that they—”

  An alarm started to sound.

  “Oh, thank god.” Javier sighed.

  “Is it the Reint, trying for the walls again?” Marus asked, standing.

  “No.” I shook my head. “That’s a different sound, and we’d hear the turrets, even in here. That’s the old battle-stations alarm; I helped rig it up again a few days ago.”

  Esa looked up at me with wide eyes. “Does that mean—”

  I nodded grimly. “It means we’ve heard from our scouts. The Pax are on their way.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Everyone inside the makeshift cafeteria had stopped talking, fast, as soon as the alarms began to sound. A few vidscreens had been set up; Helliot was centered in all of them, giving a speech, the rest of the council sitting somberly beside her. Her prepared text was big on honor and duty and the importance of our work. I tuned it out. Instead, I watched Criat; seated behind her; I tried to read his expression. He was giving me nothing.

  Helliot finally got to numbers. They weren’t good. We didn’t know how many spacecraft they had, because at least three of the dreadnaughts en route had their guts ripped out, been retrofitted into carriers. Just an unmodified dreadnaught—one with its big gun still intact—could carry upwards of two dozen fighters, ships roughly the size of Scheherazade. With all of that interior space converted to holds, that number would skyrocket.

  We did have an estimate on frigates, the larger vessels that would screen the dreadnaughts from attack. Sixteen. That was bad. What was worse was the count of dreadnaughts themselves: twenty-two at a minimum, maybe more. The supercraft had still been arriving from various hyperspace vectors when our scouts had retreated. Wherever the hell the Pax had picked up their armada, it had left them one of the best-armed forces in the galaxy. They’d lost one of their supercraft over Esa’s homeworld, and at least one more—maybe two—in the assault on Beyond Ending, using up the least of their dreadnaughts to clear the path to Sanctum.

  We had no dreadnaughts. Only three of the four frigates in our possession had been restored to working order. Work on the fourth would continue, of
course, and if things got desperate—which they would—it could be sent out, but not at full strength. All we had were the big guns: Chariot, Delta, Echo, the three bases on the far side of Sanctum’s moon, and Alpha and Bravo, the two I’d helped reclaim from the Reint. There was also the cannon in Sanctum itself, but that one didn’t get a codename: it was just Sanctum. If that one fell, the fight was over.

  We could set up an anti-orbital bombardment with those six guns, and Justified operatives had spent the last few weeks seeding the entrance to the system with mines and other traps; I’d take our fighters over theirs, both in terms of the ships’ design and construction, and in terms of our pilots’ abilities. We could make them pay for attacking us.

  But I didn’t like our odds of surviving.

  It felt like a last stand. It always had, true enough, but I had thought we’d have more of a fighting chance. This . . . it would take a miracle for us to survive this. Miracles had always been in short supply in this galaxy, even before the pulse.

  After Helliot had finished her speech, I retreated with my makeshift crew—the Preacher, Marus, and Esa—to Scheherazade. Javier came with us, but he wouldn’t be joining us when it came time to fight; he’d be in Bolivar instead.

  We stood around Scheherazade’s living quarters, just staring at each other. Javier was gripping the back of a chair with hands gone white around the knuckles; it seemed almost absurd that just a few hours ago those hands had been caressing me, had been tender, gentle, kind. Now they were tense and desperate.

  Marus stood, his arms wrapped tight around himself, his fingers tapping out a rhythm against his arms. He’d almost died to get us this information, to buy us the time we’d had to prepare. I had to believe that it had been worth something, worth more than just us putting up a fight before the Pax swarmed us under.

  The Preacher was looking at Esa. Usually I found Barious hard to read, and the Preacher harder than most, but at this moment her expression was crystal clear. She didn’t know if she should have brought Esa here, and she didn’t want to die with the girl still angry with her. She’d given up everything she’d known to try and protect her, and that series of decisions had led her to this, a desperate fight in a dead-end system with the Pax coming to avenge the pulse itself. Not to mention to claim all of the gifted children hiding in Sanctum.