The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  I turned to face the other direction, where the Pax would come. Nothing but snow-choked avenues and rubble down that way; nothing moving, not even Reint. My HUD lit up, scanning the remains of the city, analyzing approaches and looking for the most likely route the enemy would take based on their prior heading.

  There: a broad avenue through a central square, a few blocks away, the centerpiece a toppled statue of some forgotten hero, half-covered in snow. Here and there beyond that square, bright “pops” cut against the white: isolated pockets of gunfire where Pax troops, cut off from their main column, were defending themselves against the rush of the devolved Reint. The main force wasn’t visible yet. I still had some time.

  The supply drop was behind me, already covered in a faint dusting of frost from the winds. Schaz hadn’t just sent the single crate I’d asked for; she’d given me four of them. Made sense, I guess—if we didn’t use them now, it would be moot later.

  I pried them open, one by one. The first and second were almost entirely loaded with combat drones. They wouldn’t last too long, the tech in their guts too advanced for the level of radiation in the atmosphere, but every little bit helped. The third was the crate I had requested, full of anti-armor weapons—gauss rifles and single-fire RPGs and even more anti-infantry drones. The fourth was much of the same, with a few smart additions; apparently Scheherazade thought I’d be up here long enough that the pulse radiation in the atmosphere would be chewing through my weaponry almost faster than I could use it, and I’d need backups.

  Hopefully, she wouldn’t be wrong.

  I activated my comms. “Sahluk, you still out there?” I asked, turning back toward the cannon as I said it. It was a fruitless gesture—it wasn’t like he was going to be standing just inside the fence line, waving at me; he had better shit to do right now—but I did it anyway.

  “I am,” he replied. “We have more awfulness incoming?”

  “No,” I returned, looking down at my ambush spot, then further back, along their route. “I mean—yes, the main column of Pax troops are still on approach.” Even as I said it, I could tell it was true; the first of their soldiers were visible, picking their way through the rubble, their guns out and ready as they watched for the next Reint ambush. They were looking low, determined not to be taken by surprise again, the same way they had been by the presence of the Reint. Too bad for them.

  “That’s not why I’m calling, though,” I told Sahluk. “I decided to take a little vacation. I’m up on top of the tallest tower to the northeast of your position, with a fuck-ton of artillery.”

  Stunned silence filled the comm channel for a moment. “You really are one crazy human, you know that?” Sahluk came back finally. He almost sounded impressed.

  “I have been told that,” I agreed. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up what was happening when the Pax started firing on a random skyscraper for no apparent reason.”

  “That structure’s a century old. All they’ll have to do is pound it a couple of times with their big guns, and they won’t need to target you—the entire building will come crumbling down.”

  “I know. I’ve got a plan for that.” I hadn’t, really, not when I’d stepped off the ramp and out into the snowfall, but apparently Schaz had—hence the surprise in the fourth crate. I didn’t know whether to thank her, or MelWill’s good programming drugs.

  “Well. All right then.” Sahluk paused again; apparently he just didn’t really know what to say to all this. I couldn’t blame him. “Good luck,” he added finally.

  “Yeah. You too.” I switched off, and picked up a gauss rifle from the crate. I opened up its tripod and set it on the edge of the skyscraper, not looking through the scope quite yet.

  Instead, I swept my HUD across the square below, looking for my moment. The Pax column was already in range of the rifle, and their tanks would be just behind, but that didn’t mean it was time to fire yet—I’d need to wait for the precise instant at which I could do the most damage, and also which would keep the Pax from returning fire for the longest amount of time. That would be right before they reached the square, picking their way through the rubble that choked the mouth of the boulevard just before it opened up.

  Enough buildings remained at least partially standing around that position that their tanks wouldn’t be able to draw a direct line of fire on me until they’d entered the square proper, and if I could create a bottleneck at the end of the avenue, they’d stack up on top of each other, letting me do a great deal of damage before they managed to push through and blow the building I was currently standing on straight to hell.

  It wasn’t optimal, but it was the best I had. I set up the drones in waves, leaving them just waiting for an activating signal from my HUD, then I lay prone behind the rifle, peered through the scope, and waited.

  CHAPTER 19

  It was goddamned cold on that rooftop, especially lying prone in the snow. I mean, it wasn’t so cold that I was looking forward to when the shooting started, but still. It wasn’t warm.

  The first tank crept into view, coming around the bend in the distant boulevard. Just like everything else the Pax had ever designed, it was an ugly fucking thing: all tanks tended toward a certain brutalist utilitarianism, but I think the Pax must have made theirs even uglier on purpose, all hard edges and chunky blocks of gun emplacement. Even if you didn’t know what a goddamned tank was, you’d still hate the sight of it: from all the way up here, it looked almost exactly like some sort of steroidal roach, crawling along the avenue on wide, chewing treads, surrounded by the tinier fleas of the infantry.

  Pax troops were all over the repulsive-looking tank, seated and standing and clinging to wherever they could, firing sporadically into the buildings around them at any sign of Reint movement. They’d shifted their combat posture—they thought they’d have a clear shot to the gun once they set down, but now they were dealing with a dangerous insurrection of local fauna that they hadn’t seen coming, and they were trying to adapt.

  Time to change their calculus yet again.

  I centered the gauss rifle’s scope squarely at the engine block of the tank, then used the information streaming across my HUD to factor in elevation, bullet drop, and wind. Breathed in, the icy air arctic in my lungs; breathed out. Breathed in, and as I exhaled, I fired.

  It didn’t really matter where I hit—the kinetic shields surrounding the vehicle dissipated the force of the hyper-accelerated round. As a matter of fact, it dissipated it right through all those troops clinging to the sides of the tank, outside of the shield’s envelope. They died instantly, torn apart. I fired again, and again, even as I activated the first wave of drones, sending them swarming down toward the enemy.

  Three shots from the gauss rifle and I was through the tank’s shield; I launched the second wave of drones then, and kept right on firing. The fourth round I put right through the engine block, stalling the tank’s forward momentum. The fifth landed where I thought it would fracture the stored fusion cells, but apparently I didn’t have Pax engineering down as well as I thought I did—or basic roach anatomy—and it took a sixth shot to wrap the entire back half of the tank in a terrible expanding wreath of fire. The resulting shrapnel cut through the scattering Pax troops in a storm, and the snowy avenue was suddenly choked black with smoke and screams instead of just the moaning winter winds.

  I was reloading then, even as the first anti-infantry drones reached their targets and started firing. None of them were that powerful alone—they had relatively long-range rifles attached, firing slugs that would take a few rounds to penetrate the soldiers’ shielding, as well as a few grenades each that their rudimentary AI would fire at any cluster of troops that presented an opportunity—but there were quite a lot of them, and the Pax troops were still scattering, unsure where the attack was coming from, and of course the Reint in the surrounding buildings took the chaos as an opportunity to strike as well.

  High up in the winds, I finished reloading the big rifle and started
picking my targets, firing at any Pax soldier who seemed on the verge of getting their shit together and launching a counteroffensive. The longer I could keep them in chaos, the longer I could stall them from reaching the cannon, and the more damage both the Reint and I could do. I saw one Pax soldier hauled bodily right up the steel face of another ruined skyscraper, two Reint on either side of him, clutching his arms in their jaws. They almost had him to their nest within the shattered upper levels when a third stuck its head through a window and bit the soldier’s face in half. One less Pax to kill.

  A week ago I’d been doing my damnedest to kill the Reint in those buildings, and they’d been doing the same to me. Now I was using them to kill another enemy. The face of this city had been torn apart by whatever war had ripped through this system, and its populace had been abandoned to become the things that even now were feeding on stragglers from the Pax position. I should have felt bad about using them. Maybe later I would. Right now, every Pax they killed—and every bullet the Pax spent killing them—was one more I didn’t have to worry about myself.

  I was on my third magazine—the gauss rifle was starting to make bad hissing sounds as the pulse radiation corroded through it, but it wasn’t done yet—when the next tank appeared, pushing its way through the burning ruin of the first. It made it just a little farther than its predecessor before I brought its shields down and took out its fusion cell, with just five shots this time: I learned from my mistakes.

  We were off to the races now.

  That was it for the gauss rifle; I dropped it over the edge of the building and scrambled back to the supply crates, snatching up another. In the few spare seconds that took me, the Pax infantry had made their way into the square proper, forming up in defensive positions and trying to figure out where I was firing from. That was going to happen, one way or another—I was stuck on this goddamned rooftop, couldn’t even make it down into the building itself on account of the floors below me being nothing more than a caved-in shell—so since relocation wasn’t an option anyway, I just kept firing, waiting for the next tank to come into view.

  It did. At the same time as more Pax gunships arrived.

  I dropped the rifle—it had been smoking and nearly done anyway—and rolled through the snow toward where I’d left the RPGs, lined up neatly in a row. Picked up the first: targeted, fired, tossed it aside, then snatched up another and did the same. I let loose with the third as well.

  Two of the three missiles found their targets, the Pax pilots hadn’t been expecting resistance this heavy, not this far from the cannon. The third managed to twist out of the way, but I’d activated a third drone swarm, sending them all toward the gunship with a thought, and almost as a mass they fired their grenades, the force of the blast physically shoving the aircraft through the side of a half-collapsed building. That brought the entire structure down, choking the square below with rubble and flaming gunship parts.

  I dropped the last RPG, picked up another rifle, and swept the scope over the killing floor below. Found the tank again. Too late. Its barrel was raising up into firing position; I wouldn’t be able to crack its shields before it got at least a few rounds off, and that was all it would take to bring this building down, just like the crashing gunship had collapsed the other.

  I slung the heavy gauss rifle on my back and dashed away from the edge, just before the steel and concrete exploded from the first tank shell. The building shook and a geyser of rubble filled the air before it started raining down on my head and back, bouncing off my intention shields. Didn’t matter; I just needed to stay upright, to move.

  I was almost to the supply drop when the second shell hit, somewhere below me, the tank intent on bringing the whole building down.

  I was thrown off my feet as the whole structure shook again from the force of the blast, and then it was tilting ominously. “Up” was no longer “up,” not entirely. Still on my knees, I pulled my way to the crate, reaching in and grabbing Scheherazade’s desperate measure, then scrambled to my feet in the snow.

  Now or never—another shell would be on its way. The whole snow-slick surface was tilted at a terrible, uneven angle as the entire structure started to collapse under my boots; I ran anyway.

  The tank fired again, and the building started to come apart in pieces, entire slabs of the roof cracking and giving way. I woke the last of the drone swarms even as I threw myself over the edge, slapping the activator on the antigravity rig Schaz had provided. For a sickening second I thought it wouldn’t kick on, it was faulty or already eaten into by the rads, and I was just going to fall and hit hard on the streets below, and then with a silent push I went moving forward and upward instead, sailing out into the falling snow.

  CHAPTER 20

  The antigrav unit failed, chewed up by the pulse radiation, about ten feet from the nearest rooftop.

  I was carried on by the forward momentum I’d built up, but instead of the perfect landing I’d been planning I hit hard, on my shoulder, hard enough that if I hadn’t had my intention shields up I likely would have broken my arm in a dozen places. As it was, I slid through the drifts of snow and hit my head on a collapsed doorway instead.

  Not my most graceful moment. Given that I’d just escaped a tank trying to kill me and a building collapse, however, I’d take it. Or I would, as soon as my head stopped ringing. I wavered in and out of consciousness for a moment, clinging to the concept of light and awareness as hard as I possibly could. I didn’t quite escape that sucking black hole—I definitely lost a few moments—and when I came back to the world, everything was still vibrating slightly, and someone was shouting in my comms.

  “Kamali! Kamali! Are you still alive?”

  “Maybe,” I croaked, managing to get to my knees, if not my feet.

  “Oh. Shit.” It was Sahluk; he actually sounded taken aback.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “Asshole.”

  “We saw the building go down, thought for sure you were done for.”

  “What can I say? I’m a durable bitch.” I slapped ineffectually at the antigrav unit strapped around my chest, now about as useful as a twenty-pound sack of rocks. Finally I hit the release and it slid off of me all at once, to flump undramatically into the snow. I’d managed to hold on to both of my usual weapons and the second gauss rifle, but other than that, I was empty-handed; all the rest of Schaz’s supply drop was currently somewhere far, far below, mixed in with all the other rubble from the building that had just collapsed.

  “That you are,” Sahluk replied. “Do you know—”

  I heard the hissing just in time, and rolled.

  The Reint spat toxic steam at me; I kicked out, connecting with the side of its head, as the cloud of expectorant seared its way through the snow and concrete of the rooftop where I’d just been. My hand scrabbled for my pistol, but I stopped myself—a gunshot here would tell the Pax I was still alive, and that was the last thing that I wanted. Instead I activated both of the close-quarters implants in my wrists, and just in time, too.

  The Reint recovered from the blow to the side of its face and leapt at me, claws extended. I hit it in the chest with an uppercut, my taser knuckles activating in a wash of blue light, making its whole body spasm. It still collapsed on top of me, snapping and clawing as an autonomic reflex, even with however many volts of electricity coursing through it. I rolled with it, hitting it again and again with the amplified force behind my other hand, until I felt several things snap in its chest cavity.

  Panting, I climbed off of the dying creature, scrambling backward to put a little bit of distance between me and it. It had scored me with its talons, and more than once; I was bleeding from several gashes, including one in my face, but I didn’t think any of them were too deep, not too dangerous. Then again, that might just be the shock, and the cold. The blood was already freezing my body armor to my skin.

  The Reint hissed weakly, still trying to get to its knees. I shook my head, leaned in closer, and snapped its neck, letting its body fa
ll back to the snow.

  The building I was on wasn’t nearly as tall as the one I’d just evacuated, but it was still a solid ten stories off the ground. I hadn’t thought there would be Reint this high up. Maybe it had been sick, or wounded, hiding from its cannibalistic brethren; maybe not. Either way, I’d have to watch my back up here.

  My breath still heaving from my chest in puffs of frost, I raised Sahluk on the comms again. “Okay,” I told him. “Pretend I was in a fight to the death for the last few moments, and missed everything you just said after ‘how the hell are you still alive.’ ”

  “You’ve delayed their ground forces quite a bit,” he told me, “and they’ve delayed themselves even further by bringing that building down—it landed right in front of them, blocking their clearest path to us. We’re still getting pounded by the dreadnaughts in orbit and Pax fighters in the sky, though.”

  “Not much I can do about that,” I told him. “Where are Marus and Schaz?”

  “They’re trying to engage the Pax fighters, but Scheherazade’s only one ship, and she has to return to orbit periodically to keep from getting chewed up by the radiation. Plus they’ve been in combat for a long time; their core must be running on fumes. The Pax don’t seem to give a fuck about the rads—their ships just keep attacking until they fall out of the goddamned sky.”

  Sounded about right. How in god’s name had we managed to come under such great threat from an enemy that was that stupid? Even with all the ships they’d gained from wherever they’d dug up their extra materiel, they couldn’t afford to waste pilots like that, not when the pilots would be ejecting into enemy territory filled with very aggressive wildlife. “How are your shields holding up?” I asked Sahluk.

  “We’re at about half-strength, and returning to slightly less after every hit,” he told me. “If it wasn’t for the fighters, we could sit here and trade shots with the dreadnaughts in orbit all day; they’ve only got one left that’s firing on us, and so long as both planetary guns are firing back, they’re taking too much damage themselves to really shut us down. But they’ve concentrated the fighters on our position, I think because they haven’t managed to land ground units up in the mountains by the other gun.”