The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The Pax could try and say they had come because of what we’d done to the galaxy, and maybe their rank and file troops even believed that, thanks to the brainwashing and the drugs and the idiot philosophizing of the Pax creed, but it was a lie. This was about resources, plain and simple, just like everything else the Pax did. The children were just another tool to add to their arsenal, to help speed their spread through the galaxy like a metastasizing cancer.

  Of course, they hadn’t been powerful enough to do that before the pulse, or, at least, they’d had enemies who could have stood up to them. So in a way, the Pax were our fault as well. That’s the thing about changing the galaxy: everything that happens after the change is on you. For good or for ill.

  Esa herself was watching me watch the others. “It’s worse than you thought it would be,” she said finally, the first thing any of us had said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “It is.”

  “Bad enough that we won’t be able to win?”

  “There’s always a chance to win,” Marus told her. “It may be slim, but it’s there. We just have to hold strong, to defend the guns, and we can fight them off.” He was more confident than I was, or, at least, he was doing a better job of pretending he was.

  “Just so someone says it,” Javier pointed out, looking up from his hands and straight at me. “We could run.”

  I shook my head. “We couldn’t.”

  “We could, actually. Yes, there will be an entire battle between us and the exit from the system, but it will be chaos out there once the fighting starts. Once the dying starts. All we have to do is look for our moment.”

  I made him look me full in the eye. “You want to run?” I asked softly. He’d known me better than that, once. I thought I’d known him better.

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he said. “But if we have to, if things start going south and there’s no way for the Justified to win, two ships aren’t going to make a difference. They’re just not.” Harsh, but probably true; mostly true, maybe true. But not completely. Marus was right: there was always a chance to turn the tide.

  “She won’t run,” Esa told him, still looking at me. “And you won’t run while she’s still here. So that’s that.”

  “We fight here,” the Preacher said. “They’ve come to kill us; we kill them back. It’s that simple.”

  “Just like in the sect wars,” I murmured. One way or another, this was the world I’d always lived in.

  “Are we ready to do this?” Schaz asked through her comms.

  I nodded. The time for introspection was over. There was nothing in front of us beyond the fight. If we lived through it, we could ask ourselves what we should have done differently, if there had been another possible outcome, other choices we could have made. If we died, all of that wouldn’t matter. “Start up the engines, Schaz,” I told her. “Get ready for war.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I kissed Javier goodbye. I could see him try to think of something to say, then discard those thoughts; there was nothing good enough to be our last words to each other in person. I was doing the same thing. So we kissed, and he headed out, and no words were spoken. We’d watch for each other, in the fight above.

  The Preacher went with him. I was surprised by that, but it was helpful. With Esa running the guns on board Scheherazade—and I’d had her running drills for days; she was an asset now, rather than just ballast—Marus could take the tail gun, which meant the Preacher wouldn’t have had much to do here anyway. On board Bolivar, Javier would take the stick, which meant the Preacher could run the guns.

  Criat had left a private message for me. I watched it as Schaz ran through her pre-flight check; I wondered if he’d left them for all of his operatives. If he’d recorded them as soon as we knew the Pax were on their way, or even earlier than that—if he’d had these in a drawer somewhere for years, knowing that this kind of fight would come to our doorstep someday. I wondered if he’d left one for Javier.

  He told me to fight. He told me to survive. He told me he was proud of me. He referenced missions I’d survived that I probably shouldn’t have; desperate situations that I’d escaped by the skin of my teeth. He even made a few jokes, which was rare for the boss. Mostly, though, he told me to fight. I’d oblige.

  Schaz was ready to go. I strapped myself into the pilot’s chair, made sure Esa was strapped in behind me. Then we lifted off, out of the atmosphere of the icy world, leaving the mountains behind for the vast canvas of stars above.

  Sanctum, the Pax’s eventual target, passed by above us. We could see the shimmer of the shielding, already in place as the big gun was extended. The city was locked down. Inside the mountain, millions of Justified noncombatants—scientists, children, cooks and janitors and artists—were huddled together in the bomb shelters.

  It would take some pounding for the Pax dreadnaughts to get through the big shield that spread over the entire city, and while they were pounding on that, we’d be hitting them with the cannons on the world below, and with the cannon inside Sanctum itself. The fight would come down to exactly that kind of attrition—how much damage each dreadnaught could do to the shield over Sanctum before we blew them out of the sky. Powered by a half-dozen fusion reactors, the massive web of energy could have held off a single dreadnaught indefinitely, maybe even two or three, but the Pax were going to make sure it was constantly under fire from far more than that.

  The Pax’s plan of attack would be simple: arrive in-system, make their way to the firing position on Sanctum, start their artillery barrage, possibly diverting some of their forces to blast apart our own gun emplacements on the way. We’d be hitting them the whole time, first from the guns on the moons, then from the two planetary weapons. They wouldn’t turn their dreadnaughts to those targets—dreadnaughts were slow, cumbersome things, took a long time to move, a longer time to aim, and longer than that to fire. Instead, they’d try to knock out the guns with their fighters or their frigates, or even by landing ground troops.

  That’s where we’d come in—the Justified fighters would have to take as many of their ships down as possible, before they could even launch their attack runs against the guns. Every fighter we took out was one less fighter to blast away at the shielding over the cannon; every second longer the cannons were shielded was more time for them to attack the dreadnaughts; every second the dreadnaughts took fire was one second longer for us to try and blast them apart, before they could do the same to Sanctum.

  It was complicated—massive battles like this always were—but at the end of the day, it came down to a simple concept: fight. Fight until you can’t fight any more, and then fight anyway. During the sect wars, in all the fighting I’d done on the ground, it had often seemed like a single soldier in all that chaos wasn’t making a difference, couldn’t achieve anything, but that wasn’t true. Every shot you fired—whether it hit an enemy or not—was another round pinning down an enemy position, or another round clearing the path for your side’s assault. This was the same thing, just in a ballet of death in the void rather than in mud and blood on the ground.

  The Justified vessels were all getting into position, scattering ourselves around the system, ready to hit the Pax from all sides. We wouldn’t attack first; we’d let them come in, let them hit the mines, let them get close enough to take fire from the cannons on the moon. A trap’s no good if you spring it early.

  We didn’t know if they knew that we knew they were coming or not. They might be expecting resistance; they might be expecting to take us by surprise. Either way, they’d brought along enough firepower to finish the job five times over. Or so they thought.

  We were going to make them pay for trying.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Pax didn’t make us wait for long.

  The first ship came through, drawn down out of the stars. You never quite get used to seeing ships come out of hyperspace; they sort of . . . fade in, a little bit at a time, as if they were being painted on the light-speckled canvas
of the cosmos. It was just a scout ship, a recon vessel. If it wanted to reconnoiter the system then return to the larger flotilla, we wouldn’t let it, but we had time before it tried to run—it would have to wait for its hyperdrive to cool down.

  It didn’t make any moves to return to hyperspace, though. It didn’t make any moves at all, just hung there, in the void, at the far edge of the system, between the spinning calderas of the black holes. Like it was waiting for something.

  Every single Justified vessel was watching it. I guess that’s what it was waiting for.

  Scheherazade’s comms crackled to life. “Justified.” A single word. Not a question, not a query—a statement. The voice was masked behind the usual filters; all Pax sounded alike, very much on purpose. You couldn’t tell species or gender or even tone, really; even inflection and pitch were taken out. It was the voice of the Pax, the voice of many forged into the will of one.

  “We wanted to thank you,” the Pax scout craft said. “You made this new galaxy what it is. Purposefully or not, you paved the way for our rise. Before the pulse, the Pax struggled. Too many were deaf to our call, too many already following blind paths of faith or weakness. You changed that. So many stars are now unclaimed, waiting just to hear the word of the Pax, that before were deaf to our call. Now, they will be made stronger. Now, they will make us grow stronger. For that, we thank you. For that, we give you a choice.

  “Join. Give your ships, your guns, your arms over to the Pax, so that they might be used to claim this galaxy for our will. Give us your soldiers, your engineers, your intellectuals, so that they might further the Pax cause. Give us your children, so that they might revel in the glory of the Pax. Join us now, and together we will make this galaxy into what it was always meant to be—a bastion of peace, of prosperity, all people united under one will, toward one goal, with one aim.

  “The Pax are peace through force. The Pax are prosperity through simplification. The Pax are the only path to the future. For centuries, even before the pulse, you have struggled to make your mark on this galaxy, to do things that you thought would make life better for others, whether they could see that was your aim or not. The Pax are the same, but the Pax are greater. We are greater. You prepared this galaxy for our rise. Now you can join us in that ascent.

  “Become Pax. Become the peace this galaxy deserves.

  “Or die.”

  The usual tin-pot dictator shit. I’d heard it before, on a hundred different worlds. Sometimes it was from a scout ship declaring the arrival of an armada; sometimes it was from a dozen hungry men standing at the gates of a township armed with spears where those inside only had stones. They promised peace, but only with capitulation. What they understood about the Justified made them think we were the same; they thought we both believed force was the only way to turn people to a cause, that merely possessing strength gave you the inalienable right to use that strength in whatever way you saw fit, made every action you took righteous so long as you were strong enough to take it. Accordingly, they still thought we’d triggered the pulse on purpose. Because that’s what they would have done.

  The Pax scout ship drifted forward, its engines firing slightly. Waiting on an answer.

  One of us gave it. I wasn’t sure who it was—not Scheherazade, and not Bolivar, that was all I knew. But one of the Justified gave the Pax the reply they were waiting for, in the form of a railgun blast that tore into the unprotected side of their craft. They didn’t even have their shields raised—a sacrificial calf, exsanguinated on a battlefield for the frenzied joy of whatever god. The scout ship was torn in half.

  The remnants of the Pax vessel drifted in the void. The avenue between the two black holes was narrow, and the attack had pushed the remains of the scout ship off course. We all watched as it was pulled into the cosmic riptide of the gravitational maw, dragged into the dense oblivion of the devouring star. I’m not sure what the rest of the Justified were thinking at that moment; we were a diverse bunch of people, as defined by our backgrounds and our history as by our shared creed. I’m also sure, however, that I wasn’t alone in my thought:

  One down.

  The rest of the Pax fleet started to fade into existence, already in motion.

  Hundreds to go.

  CHAPTER 7

  The battle was joined.

  The black void, filled with starlight, absolutely glowed with the heat of the passage of rounds fired from the anti-orbital cannons on the approach side of Sanctum’s moon. The lunar guns roared and roared again into the silence of the void; the first of the Pax dreadnaughts on approach was battered, twisted, already punctured on multiple decks before it could even move far enough into the system to allow more Pax vessels clearance to arrive.

  Still, the Pax must have known something like that was coming, because that first ship was just another sacrificial lamb of a kind—it was one of the converted carriers, and from out of its splitting hull burst forth dozens of fighter craft, like a wasp nest cracked open and divulging its frenzied cargo. Despite the supercraft collapsing around them, the fighter pilots were still Pax, and Pax ingrained discipline; they taught that no matter what was happening, if you were Pax, you behaved as Pax. The wasp-like fighters formed into an attack wedge and headed straight for the moon, aiming for Delta cannon.

  That was our cue.

  I threw Scheherazade’s throttle to full and we raced out of our hiding place, joined by the other Justified ships in-system. Schaz kept note of the Pax dreadnaught positions and highlighted the likely paths of the cannon-fire trajectories in my HUD; I weaved among them, dancing my nimble ship through the lines of high-velocity death. We hit the Pax ships from all sides, tearing their formation apart.

  I had control of the forward guns and the missiles; Esa had the short-range omnidirectional lasers at her fingertips; Marus was in the rear turret. Together we cut down Pax craft everywhere we found them, and they were every-where, trying to fight their way through the Justified counterattack, still suicidally focused on the lunar cannons below. They wouldn’t make it, of course—this was just a ploy by the Pax generals, meant to draw us out of hiding, so the next round of forces would know where we were and could respond accordingly—but they were fighting like the outcome of the entire battle rested on their success.

  The dogfight took us through the debris field of the pulverized celestial bodies, the ships drifting and jockeying for position among the shards of dead planets. The void was full of tracer fire and explosions as we danced and twisted through the sepulchral remnants of the brutalized worlds. There were more of the Pax ships, but we had the advantage; this was our terrain, and our traps had been laid well.

  Most of them were down before they even reached the atmosphere of the moon. A few made it all the way down to the surface, close enough to train their guns on the shield over the cannon, only to be cut down by the anti-aircraft batteries we’d installed below. The first wave of the Pax attack was over, and listening in to the chatter on the comms, I don’t think it had cost us a single Justified ship, but the Pax had forced us out of position—now our fighter craft were between the Pax fleet and the cannon, and it would take us longer to engage the next wave of assault ships. We wouldn’t be able to hit them from all sides like we had this time. This would be a war of attrition, and the Pax had the numbers for it. We didn’t.

  The enemy was still arriving, pulling out of hyperspace one at a time, their path constrained by the spinning black holes. There were four dreadnaughts in-system now, bulling their way through the cannon fire to try and orbit the planet below. The first was almost entirely out of commission, explosions rocking its structure; our gunnery crews had stopped targeting it entirely, marking it down as no longer a threat.

  But the time it had taken for the cannons to put that first dreadnaught out of the fight meant that the others were clearing the black holes without taking nearly as much damage, and soon the second of the massive supercraft would be clear of the lunar firing solutions entirely.


  More fighters were arriving as well, first clustering in the protection of the dreadnaughts’ guns, then, when they’d reached some agreed-upon number, starting their attacks on the moon, on us. A frigate had joined them. A second had tried, but had pushed the envelope of its trajectory too far, and was even now being pulled helplessly into the gravity well of the merciless black hole. Even that loss would teach the Pax—now they knew exactly the edges of their avenue of approach, the red lines of their vectors in-system, a few scout ships winking away to warn the others in their staging area.

  I shifted Scheherazade’s shields to full forward, and I may have shouted an obscenity as I pushed the throttles to full; I honestly wasn’t sure. We were in it now, there was no turning back, these motherfuckers were here to destroy my home, my friends, everything I’d ever stood for, and all I had was Schaz and the guns fused to her belly and the missiles in her banks; all I had was her engines and her shields and her responsive flight stick, and I was going to make them pay for that.

  This was what I did.

  We hit the second wave of the Pax attack head-on, just at the shimmering edge of the lunar atmosphere, the fight taking place in high orbit with boiling seas of crystal below and the mass of their protective frigate angled shark-like above, just starting to enter the ring of debris surrounding the inner system. The battle was well and truly begun now, and there would be no turning back. Fight or die.

  The Pax had thought we would join them, that any of us would join them. They thought they knew the Justified—thought what we had done made us who we were.