The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “What do you think?” Javier asked me quietly. Both our ships were streaking across the lunar surface, fleeing the Pax ships at our backs, but in that moment, they didn’t matter; what mattered was the choice laid out before us.

  “You can’t make it to the planet,” I told him. “Even if you did, you wouldn’t do any good.”

  “I can’t,” he agreed. “But I can draw these Pax bastards off of you, if you cut on your stealth drive.”

  “Without us drawing fire, it’s no guarantee you’ll even make it to Sanctum.”

  “That’s the thing about combat: there are very few guarantees, anywhere. Are you going to go?”

  Damn it. God damn it. I didn’t want to have to make this choice. I didn’t want to abandon Javier to nearly a dozen Pax fighters; I didn’t want to take an already weakened Scheherazade directly from one firefight to the next. But the planetary guns had to stay up, had to stay firing. If they didn’t, we had no chance of taking out the Pax dreadnaughts; none.

  Somehow, through the silence I was broadcasting over the comms, Javier read my answer in the static. “Good luck,” he said softly.

  “Stay alive, you son of a bitch,” I told him, and I might have been crying; I was so keyed up I honestly couldn’t even tell. “Don’t you dare die on me now, not after I just got you back.”

  I could actually hear him smiling over the comms. “I love you,” he said.

  I didn’t even have a chance to say it in return; he rolled out of our protective envelope, and the Pax pounced, putting everything they had into one last desperate attempt to bring down the more damaged ship. I didn’t know if I was crying, but I do know that I screamed as I pressed the button to activate the stealth systems, and then our guns went silent, and we could only watch as Bolivar streaked away across the moon on a different course, Pax fire chasing him over the surface, leading them away from us.

  He was making for the razor rain dashing down from the constant storm front, and he wasn’t planning to fly above: he was going to try to go through it. Even at full shielding, it would have been insane, but it was the only way he could tear the Pax off his six.

  I didn’t dare interrupt him, not when he was in the fight of his life, so I switched off the comm as I whispered into the void: “I love you, too.”

  CHAPTER 16

  We pulled out of the atmosphere of the moon, leaving the Pax fighters behind. They disappeared over the curve of the world, chasing Bolivar, chasing the Preacher, chasing Javier. I told myself that he would make it. Bolivar was fast; Javi was a great pilot. He would make it through the storm. He had to.

  “Will they get to Sanctum?” Esa asked me quietly. “Will they be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. I could lie to myself. I couldn’t lie to her; not anymore.

  We reached the void. To one side, everything was chaos and light, the remaining Pax dreadnaughts highlighted in the halo of the suns as they rained fire down on the planet below, on Sanctum. They were surrounded by the crackle and fire of their shielding as it repulsed attacks from the guns both on the world’s surface and on Sanctum itself. The frigates had also engaged, the Pax vessels forming a cordon around the dreadnaughts, our own trying to stay out of the firing solutions of the larger vessels while still doing what good they were able to do, picking at the Pax fighters on their approach. All of the space between was filled with fighters, intense dogfights that spun and twisted as the pilots went dashing and blasting their way across the stars.

  Meanwhile, from the back of the dreadnaughts came a steady stream of gunships and troop carriers, headed toward Alpha and Bravo on the planet’s surface. The trio of lunar guns were lost, or would be soon: now, the planetside pair, those we’d taken from the devolved Reint, were more important than ever.

  I pulled Scheherazade in a wide arc, staying well clear of the battle itself. I’d cut the stealth drive as soon as we came out of the atmosphere, letting Schaz concentrate power on getting our shields back up. The fusion core was draining much faster than I would like, but at least we wouldn’t be only half-shielded by the time we made it back into the fight.

  “Jane, wait.” I could hear the frown in Marus’s voice.

  “What do you see?” I asked him, knowing he was looking at his own screens, studying the Pax attack patterns.

  “The trajectory of their troop carriers; it’s odd. Those heading into the city, especially. If they continue on their current vector—and there’s no reason they shouldn’t, we don’t have enough ships in the air past the dreadnaughts to force them to take evasive action—they’ll be setting down at least a few miles out from the cannon, from Bravo gun.”

  “So? They want to stay well clear of the anti-aircraft batteries.” In rebuilding the anti-orbital guns at the two planetary positions, we’d also reinforced their defense systems; both had a full shielding suite, and were fully capable of devastating surface-to-air fire. Nowhere near the defenses of Sanctum, but still, it would take some work to pound them apart from the sky.

  “Yeah, they do,” Marus agreed with my reasoning, “and that explains their route, but it doesn’t make it wise. It means their ground forces—once they’ve unloaded—will have to march through the city itself.”

  I tried to follow his thought process; it was absurd, in retrospect, how long it took me to get there. After all, we’d bled to clear that facility, Bravo gun—fought, and lost people, to make it safe from the dangers lurking within the sepulchral metropolis surrounding it. “They don’t know about the Reint,” I breathed.

  “I don’t think they do.”

  I adjusted our approach. “New plan,” I said. “We hit them from behind, try to make them shift even farther outside of their approach. Every step further back from the gun we can make them march is one more step they have to take through murderopolis down there.”

  “They’ll still have tanks, gunships,” Marus warned. “They will absolutely still be able to reach the cannon.”

  “Yeah, but the further back we push them, the more damage their infantry will take. We can let the Reint do our murdering for us.” Speaking of which; I swapped comm channels. “Sahluk,” I called into the frequency the Justified were using on the planet below. “Sahluk, do you read me?”

  “I’m here,” he came back; I could hear gunfire on the line, the chatter of the autoturrets we’d set up. Whether they were firing at Pax troops or still holding off devolved Reint, I didn’t know. “We’re watching a line of Pax ships descend into the atmosphere. Tell me you have good news.”

  “Which cannon facility are you at?”

  “The city; Bravo.” The first gun we’d taken from the Reint. “It looks like that’s the one they’re going to hit the hardest.” That made sense; the city gun had a wider range of fire, and was pounding the dreadnaughts hanging over Sanctum itself. Plus, they thought Bravo was the easier approach: taking Alpha would have required fighting their way up the mountainside.

  “Disable the autoturrets,” I told him. “Don’t fire on the Reint; don’t fire at all if you can help it. Keep the fences up and keep yourself safe, but don’t give the Pax any sign you’re already in combat.”

  A beat, as Sahluk thought through the implications of what I was saying. “Son of a bitch. You think they don’t know about the Reint,” he said, echoing my own reasoning.

  “And every Reint you kill is one less to attack them. Most of those around the facility will have figured out we’re too hard a target to mess with by now. They’ll be frustrated, and desperate—”

  “—and primed to take all that frustration out on the Pax,” he chuckled. “That’s absolutely evil, Kamali.”

  “We spilled blood taking those guns from the Reint. I figure it wouldn’t be fair if the Pax didn’t offer up a sacrifice of their own.”

  “Got it. Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  We were in the planet’s atmosphere by now, heading directly toward the line of Pax gunships. They’d noticed us coming and were beginnin
g to adjust course, fully aware that their troop carriers couldn’t stand up to a sustained combat with a fighter; that was fine by me. I marked targets in my HUD, prioritizing the vessels carrying tanks into battle—those, the Reint wouldn’t be able to do anything about.

  We opened fire.

  CHAPTER 17

  We pushed the line of Pax troop carriers and gunships as far as we could, willing it to snap. It didn’t quite get there, but a few links did fracture, ships that took too much damage or panicked, dropping early to the city below. That was fine—they’d be alone, relatively speaking, in prime Reint hunting grounds, and they’d either have to waste time trying to regroup with their main column or they’d move directly to assault the facility, which meant Sahluk and his teams would be dealing with a piecemeal assault rather than a full attack.

  Every time they diverted their course because of our attack run, pushing further out from their initial landing zone, it felt like a thrilling victory. Behind me, Esa kept up a steady string of whispered curses, language blue enough that by the time I actually got her into the university back at Sanctum—please, whatever god, let me get her back to the university—her instructors might be taken aback by the vocabulary she’d picked up on her homeworld.

  A well-placed laser sweep from Esa ripped open the bottom of a troop carrier; Pax soldiers started falling, still burning, from the sky. The cursing stopped suddenly, and Esa made a sound halfway between a cough and a retch. I imagine our conversation before the battle was coming back to her: it was easy to forget that the targets we were shooting down were full of living people, brainwashed and abused by the Pax, victims in their own way. Firing at specks on the ground during the fighting over the moon had been one thing; watching the soldiers fall screaming to their deaths was another entirely.

  “No time for that,” I told her. “We can shake our heads at the atrocities of war later. For now, every one of these bastards that dies is one less to attack the guns; every one that can’t attack the guns is a minute longer the guns can keep firing; every minute the guns can keep firing is another minute Sanctum keeps standing. The math is that simple, kid.”

  “I know,” she said weakly, returning to her firing position. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “You don’t,” I agreed, dropping Scheherazade into a dive so that I could unleash the forward cannons on a tank carrier.

  “The Pax have noticed what we’re up to,” Schaz said crisply. “We’ve got fighters on the way.”

  “How many?”

  “More than we can comfortably handle on our own.”

  I nodded; I’d expected that. Again, it worked to our advantage, on a larger, tactical scale—every fighter we could pull away from the battle over the skies of Sanctum was one less the other Justified would have to deal with, one less that could launch attacks on the shielding over the city itself. Grand for them, but it meant we were about to have a great deal of company.

  I swept us past the line of Pax gunships for one more attack run, then changed course, diverting us back toward the cannon, and its defensive perimeter of anti-aircraft guns. We’d managed to push the Pax landing craft back a fair ways; that would buy Sahluk some time, at least.

  It would also buy me time to prepare for what came next. I was not looking forward to it. “Marus, get up to the cockpit,” I told him through the comms. “Schaz, ready supply drop Charlie three-oh-three.”

  “Why are we dropping more of my supplies to Sahluk?” Scheherazade asked, sounding vaguely nettled. “They have plenty of guns down there.”

  I swear, the things she got possessive about. “We’re not,” I told her. “We’re—”

  “What’s up?” Marus asked, appearing at the cockpit door.

  “Take the stick,” I told him, standing from my chair. We were locked into our course; we had a few minutes before the Pax fighters reached us.

  “We’re in the middle of combat, Jane,” he told me. “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?”

  “Maximizing resources,” I said. “You’re a capable pilot, nearly as good as me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You can take on these Pax assholes just as well as I can; just keep them in range of the anti-aircraft guns at Bravo and you’ll be fine. You’ll only have a little bit of time in atmosphere left, anyway; Schaz is going to need to get out of this radiation pretty soon. The elevation’s too low here for her to stay much longer.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question: while I’m doing that, where the hell will you be?”

  “There’s a skyscraper still standing in view of the cannon. I marked it when we were down there before. It’ll have a perfect line of sight on the approaching Pax column.”

  Marus paused, staring at me. “You’re fucking kidding me,” he said finally.

  I shook my head. “With the Reint crawling all over them, the same math applies—every second we can slow them down is another second they get torn apart by the poor bastards down in the city. I’ve got Schaz readying an anti-armor supply drop for me. I’ll be able to hit their tanks before they can do any real damage to the shield at Bravo. The longer that shield holds, the longer Bravo can pound away at the dreadnaughts above.”

  “And when the tanks decide to hit you?”

  I grinned at him. “I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it,” I told him.

  “You don’t have to do this, Jane,” he said.

  My grin dropped away. “Sit in the damned chair, Marus,” I said. “This is our best shot, and you know it.”

  He stared at me for another beat, then sighed, slipping into the pilot’s chair. “Don’t get yourself killed,” he told me. “If you do and Javier finds out that I didn’t stop you, he will absolutely murder me. In my sleep. He’s not the type to fight fair where that sort of vengeance is concerned.”

  “Thanks, Marus.”

  “Just keep yourself alive. I’ll do the same for your ship.”

  Esa had unbuckled herself as well, and was starting to stand up; I put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down. “What the hell?” she asked, glaring up at me. “You’ll need me down there! Crazy brain powers, remember? I bet I can crush a tank into a pretzel just by looking at it!”

  “Maybe you can. Schaz can survive without a tail gunner; the same doesn’t hold without someone at main gunnery controls. If I keep myself alive down there, I’ll need you guys to do the same, if for no other reason than I’ll need extraction. I don’t want to spend the rest of this fight stuck on a goddamned rooftop. It’s pretty cold up there.”

  “That’s . . .” I knew what she wanted to say even before the words came out; that it wasn’t fair, the last bastion of a child. The words died on her lips. It was almost sad, watching that vestige of her childhood shear off and float away.

  Finally she snorted, then nodded, turning back to her console. “Just don’t die,” she said, her voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t quite place. “There’s still a whole hell of a lot I need to learn from you.”

  “Good to know I still have my uses,” I told her.

  “Your supply drop is ready,” Scheherazade said.

  “You’re not going to try and stop me?” I asked her.

  “Would it do any good?”

  “Nope.”

  “See? That’s why they call AI ‘learning machines.’ We learn. Eventually.”

  “Also you’re still, just, super high on MelWill’s crazy programming spike.”

  “Also that.”

  “You see the building I marked?” I called to Marus, heading for the living quarters, then the airlock and the armory, and then the ramp down and a long, cold drop.

  “I’ve got it!” he called back.

  “Get us into position overhead. If I break my leg getting onto that rooftop, I won’t do much fucking good, will I?”

  “You can still shoot with a broken leg, kid,” he shouted over the rush of incoming air as I opened up the airlock. “I know Mo taught you that.”

  Now I
knew Marus was under a lot of stress. He rarely mentioned my former mentor at all, given the circumstances of his departure from our ranks, and it had been decades since he’d called me “kid.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The airlock cycled open; the ramp lowered. Schaz unspooled a rope line, and I grabbed it, leaning out over the drop. At least it wasn’t raining anymore. It was snowing instead, but only lightly. The ruined city spread beneath me, gray blanketed in white. Scheherazade was holding just above the remains of the former skyscraper—my firing position.

  I stepped out into the void, and slid down.

  Almost as soon as I’d dropped to the snow-covered concrete below, Marus was peeling off, Schaz reeling in the line as she disappeared into the white cloud banks of the storm. Maybe there were fighters incoming, or maybe Marus just didn’t want to give away my position, but either way, I was well and truly alone again, for the first time since Schaz had left me on Esa’s homeworld. I took a breath, and stared out over the edge.

  I could see the cannon from where I stood; you could probably see it from everywhere in the city. The electrified lines between the turrets still glowed, but the guns themselves were silent: Sahluk had taken my advice. I was on one of the taller buildings still standing, and the cannon still towered overhead, reaching toward the sky. It fired like clockwork, the big, booming recoil shaking off all the snow that had settled since the last time the gun went off. A tower of metal, spitting thunder up into the frozen atmosphere, aiming out at where our enemies hung between the stars: that was what I was here to protect, our last line of defense against the dreadnaughts in the void above.

  Even as I watched, return fire smashed down, making the shield visible for a moment before the enemy bombardment dissipated across the crackling electrical surface. It was like watching big, beefy pugilists trade heavy blows—they seemed to be weathering the storm, but you never knew exactly which shot would crack through the defenses, and one was all it would take.