The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “In other words, you’re holding out right now, but if the army on the ground gets to you, you’ll be getting hit by three different forces, and that will change the game real fast.”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah.”

  “Well, fuck, Sahluk, I don’t know what you expect me—” There was a low roaring overhead, the unmistakable sound of atmospheric engines.

  A Pax gunship was hunting me.

  CHAPTER 21

  It hadn’t found me yet, but given that it had diverted from attacking the cannon to make sure I was still dead, I doubted it would give up that easily. It actually gave me a perverse sense of pride—I must have done a fair bit of damage to their ground forces for them to retask gunships to come after me, rather than keeping up the pressure on the cannon that was pounding their dreadnaughts in orbit.

  Staying low on the rooftop, I crept to cover—that wouldn’t do me a great deal of good, I’m sure they had all sorts of scanners in the gunship, but there wasn’t a lot else I could do. Likewise, I unslung the gauss rifle, checking to make sure it was loaded. Again, it would take a great deal to bring down a gunship with just the rifle—if it had taken five shots to crack the shielding around a tank, the gunships would require nine or ten, and I doubted they’d hold still long enough for me to land those clean—but it was what I had.

  I’d just faced down an entire column of Pax armor and infantry, not to mention all the other shit I’d been through over the last few weeks, and all the shit I’d been through the rest of my life. I was not about to go down to one prowling Pax gunship with a grudge.

  Then again, very few of us are lucky enough to choose the day we die.

  The gunship hovered into view; I raised my rifle up to my eye. I fired before they found me, then worked the bolt, fired again. And again. They jerked backward and soared up, out of range, as they tried to identify the location of the threat. Keep trying, you bastards. Just give me time to bring you down.

  I tracked their movement in the scope, and fired again as they approached, and once more. That was that for the magazine in the gun; I replaced it without looking down, hours and days of training on board Schaz during long hyperspace jumps making the action automatic, thoughtless, and I had the rifle back to my eye in less time than it had taken me to fill my lungs. I fired again.

  Their shield was starting to crack—it was glowing red now with every hit, as opposed to the usual pale blue—but I wasn’t through yet, and they’d found my position, their big guns starting to spin up. They’d strafe the whole goddamned rooftop until I had more holes in me than flesh to connect them. Nothing for it—I fired one last time.

  The gunship exploded in a ball of flame and metal.

  That wasn’t me. That couldn’t have been me. Even if I had punched through their shielding, the entire goddamned gunship wouldn’t have gone up, not even if I’d hit the fusion core directly. Besides, I’d only hit them seven times, barely enough to start cracking their shield, let alone penetrate it with a round.

  “Getting lonely yet?” Javier asked on my comms.

  Bolivar swept past me, close enough that I could feel the wash of his passage. He was headed for the Pax ground column, the speed of his flight making the snow falling around me swirl and dance in eddies. I shouted something—I am honestly not sure what, just kind of a wordless affirmation—as I raised my gun over my head in the wake of his passage.

  Two Pax fighters were close on his tail, but then Schaz hit them from out of nowhere, dropping out of stealth and blindsiding them completely. Marus may not have been quite the pilot I was, but he was a strategic genius, and decades spent as an information specialist had given him a great breadth of tactical knowledge involving the stealth suite on board Scheherazade.

  They were both here. They’d both come to watch over me.

  There were more Pax fighters trying to intercept them, but they wouldn’t get there in time: both vessels had already reached the heart of the city, where the Pax troops were presumably still trying to pick their way through the rubble they themselves had caused.

  I could tell Schaz and Bolivar had found the infantry positions when lasers started stabbing from their bellies and wings in stuttering fire, Esa and the Preacher marking targets for the ships’ guns to incinerate.

  “You’ve got company headed your way,” I warned Javier, marking the approaching fighters in my HUD and broadcasting the information to him and Marus both.

  “No worries,” Javier said blithely. “We brought a friend.”

  The shimmer of a dropping stealth drive filled the snowy sky above me—only now that I knew it was there did I see how the snowstorm had been warping around it, creating a dry area underneath its bulk—and suddenly there was an entire goddamned frigate there, blasting the Pax ships out of the storm, flames and wreckage burning bright amid the snow.

  The nameplate glowed in the light of the lasers dancing from its undercarriage: “Poseidon,” proclaimed the twenty-foot-tall letters of brass. The name was more than just a callsign—it was recognizable to every Justified operative who knew anything about our history, the ship an antique, older even than I was by centuries. It had been one of the first ships ever flown under Justified colors, permanently retired well before I’d ever joined the sect, and the originator of the conceit that all Justified craft were named for mythological or historical figures from distant legends.

  It was the fourth frigate. MelWill’s engineering team had gotten the mothballed fourth frigate up and running, and they’d somehow fitted it with stealth tech. That was how Javier had escorted it right under the nose of the firewall the Pax had created between Sanctum and the planetary guns. The long-forgotten relic of the Justified’s glory days had been revived to fight for our very survival.

  Son of a bitch.

  Schaz and Bolivar were still chewing up the ground forces; the Poseidon was hauling its bulk over toward the cannon itself, engaging the fighters there, who had been thrown into a blind panic by the sudden appearance of a much, much larger vessel in the atmosphere. I could tell by the way the frigate was moving that the repairs to it hadn’t been complete—it probably wouldn’t be able to stand up to one of the Pax vessels of similar size, not even for a little bit—but right now, it didn’t matter; the fighters were completely outclassed.

  “How the hell . . .” I wondered into my comms.

  “There’s a whole . . . I’ll tell you later,” Javier said. “Right now all that matters is that it can cover the cannon. It can’t stay in atmosphere for very long; it’ll have to pull out in just a few minutes—but it can hover in orbit outside of the range of the other ships in the main body of the fighting, picking off fighters that try to descend to the guns. Unless the Pax want to task one of their frigates to chase after it, we’ve got control of the sky over the cannon.”

  “They’ll do that,” I warned.

  “They might not.” Even over the comm, I could hear the shrug in his voice. “Most of their frigates are tied up keeping our ships from their dreadnaughts. Either way, the ball’s in Pax command’s court now.”

  “This wouldn’t have worked if you hadn’t been down here to delay the Pax ground offensive, you know,” Marus told me. He’d brought Schaz around, to hover above my head; as I looked up, the ramp extended, and there was Esa, unspooling a line for me and waving.

  “Sahluk could have held them off.” I shrugged, grabbing onto the rope and letting Schaz winch me back up toward her.

  “Maybe so, maybe no, but either way, it blinded Pax intelligence. They were so busy trying to get extra troops on the ground—and sending extra fighters to protect them—that they weren’t paying enough attention. Even stealthed, a ship the size of the Poseidon shouldn’t be impossible to pick up; not if you’re looking. They weren’t looking, and that is most definitely because of you.”

  I grinned, even as I reached out and took Esa’s hand. “I like to do my part,” I said.

  “You like to blow shit up,” Marus retorted. “Now g
et up here and take the stick from me; Schaz complains so much more about my flying than Khonnerhohn used to.”

  “That’s because your flying’s terrible, and you’re terrible, because you’re not Jane,” Scheherazade retorted, her tone somehow wistful and dreamy, despite the words.

  “Still high, Schaz?” I sighed.

  “Yup.”

  Marus ignored both of us. “We need to get back to Sanctum and resupply—we’re running on nothing here. And after that, well . . . I’ll let you look at the scans. We’re not done with this fight yet.”

  ACT

  FIVE

  CHAPTER 1

  You’re injured,” Schaz said as I peeled off my various weapons, dropping them on the armory floor with a clatter. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have done that—if nothing else, Scheherazade would object to the clutter—but I was damned tired.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “They’re just—”

  “You’re hurt?” Esa had stayed on the ramp to watch me as I ascended, and stayed right beside me in the airlock; now I winced as she grabbed my jaw and rotated my face so she could look at the gashes the Reint had carved into me. “You’re hurt.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just—”

  “Marus!” Esa shouted back at the cockpit. “Where’s the—that spray stuff?”

  “Check the medbay!” he shouted back. “How badly is she hurt?”

  “I’ll be fine!” I shouted at him. “Just—”

  “Shut up and sit down,” Esa told me, pushing me toward a chair. She wasn’t strong enough to actually move me, but I let her anyway; if she decided to use her telekinesis, I would move, and I wasn’t sure how good her fine control was.

  I dropped into the seat as Esa found the binding spray and proceeded to cover my face and arms with coagulating foam. She must have used about half the vial. “Do not do that again,” she lectured me.

  “Esa, it was—”

  “Jane,” she replied sternly, relishing in her ability to use my name, “I don’t have many friends around here. I don’t need one of them to get herself killed just because . . . just because of . . . just because. Do not do that again.”

  I smiled, even though it hurt, more than a little. “Roger,” I said.

  “Who the hell is Roger?”

  “It means I got it. Are you going to let me stand up now?”

  “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

  Grudgingly, I lifted my arm so that she could coat the slash on my ribs with spray as well. When she was done, she finally let me stand, and I made my way back to the cockpit.

  Marus laughed when he saw me. I scowled back, and then turned on my heel and stalked back into the living quarters until I could find a towel to wipe off the excess foam. “You look like a Vyriat with . . . with . . . what’s the fungal rash they get?” he called after me. “The one where they grow mushrooms on their faces?”

  “Shut it,” I growled, brushing off flakes of the hardened gel.

  “No, seriously, what’s it called? I didn’t know a human could get that. Have you been dallying with Helliot? Javier will be pissed.”

  “Shut. It.” I tapped him on the shoulder; he relinquished the stick, still chuckling to himself.

  “Oh, I needed that,” he said, still laughing. “That may have felt better than watching Bolivar ride in like the cavalry earlier.”

  “Are you two done? Are we finished with the . . . with all the funny bits, now? Any more jokes? Any more, you know, whatever? Or can we get back to the—”

  “We watched the building collapse,” Esa told me as she took her seat at the gunnery station. I wasn’t looking at her—I was too busy adjusting various settings on Schaz’s boards, changing the shifts Marus had made—but I could hear the lingering fear in her voice. “We watched it come down around your head. We couldn’t tell if you got clear or not. Schaz told us she’d left you an antigravity unit, but . . . we didn’t know. It was awful.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “It had to be done.”

  “Well, yeah, obviously, otherwise the building would have fallen on your head, but—”

  “No, I mean . . . all of it. I had to buy Sahluk the time.”

  “Do you really not care if you live or die?”

  “I care,” I told her quietly. I didn’t tell her I just wasn’t always sure which direction it went in.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Esa said.

  “That’s not—”

  “The pulse. It wasn’t your fault. I was mad earlier, before . . . I was mad, and the Preacher was mad, and we probably . . . I may have said some things that I . . . it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do this. You didn’t make the Pax.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just made it so that the Pax didn’t have any enemies that could put them in check.”

  “You didn’t want all this to happen.”

  “That doesn’t mean . . . this isn’t the time for this, Esa. We’ve still got a fight to win.” I’d pulled Scheherazade into a climb. Her radiation alarms were squawking; we’d spent too much time in the atmosphere already. I checked the scans: Bolivar was right behind us. Reaching down, I keyed on the comms.

  “How’s it looking down there?” I asked Sahluk.

  “Survivable,” he grunted back, though I could hear gunfire in the background—not just the rhythmic repetition of the autoturrets, either, but closer, louder. He may well have been firing himself. “With the frigate in a firing position above us, we can catch any incoming fighters in between its solution and the anti-aircraft guns. Ortega and Marus did a nice job denting the ground troops, too, so they’re not hitting us as hard as they might. You don’t necessarily have to tell Ortega I said that.”

  “I’ll keep my teeth together,” I promised him, even though I’d opened up the signal to Bolivar as well; Javier was likely listening in already. “What about the dreadnaught? How much longer can you stand up to its pounding?”

  “Depends on how much damage the ground forces can do. With just the dreadnaught’s fire wearing down the shield, we can recover almost as much energy between its shots as we lose from the attacks—we’re only dropping about half a percent each hit. The engineering team did a good job with the fusion reactor. But that means we don’t have either the time or the energy to—”

  “I got it. You want me to swing back down once we shake some of this radiation, do another strafing run on the ground forces?”

  “I think you may be needed more above. What we’re reading from down here . . . it’s not good.”

  I frowned, looking back to my scans. We were too far out from Sanctum to get a good read on their shields, but as soon as we broke atmosphere and got out of the sea of rads, I’d be able to get a clear view of the remaining Pax forces. Still, I didn’t like what I heard in his tone, or his words. “I copy,” I told him. “Keep yourself alive down there.”

  “You do the same. And Kamali?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well done earlier. You find a way to hit them up top as hard as you did down here, maybe we’ll survive this. Maybe.”

  “I’ll do my best. Kamali out.”

  CHAPTER 2

  We came soaring out of the snowy atmosphere, into the black of the void above. In between us and the spread of the stars lay the meat of the main fight. It was awesome, and terrifying, the sight of the seven remaining Pax dreadnaughts locked into an almost circular pattern, four pounding down on Sanctum, three firing at the anti-orbital gun we’d just left behind. They’d set themselves to rotating slowly, so that none of the cannons—either Bravo and Alpha on the planet’s surface or the gun within the mountaintop at Sanctum—could concentrate fire on just one ship.

  Around them, almost like moons in orbit, circled the frigates from both sides. They were trying to keep out of the firing solutions of both the dreadnaughts and each other, trying to pick off fighters instead. We had two operational to their four remaining, which meant our fighters were still at a serious disadvantage, but we at least were just using fighters as a defen
sive measure, keeping their own from dive-bombing Sanctum. If their own fighters wanted to engage the planetary guns, they had to break through the firing line of Poseidon, hanging over the planet just outside the solution of the dreadnaught group and merrily picking off the few craft suicidal enough to try.

  The cosmos beyond was scattered with the wreckage from the rest of the fight. The Pax had entered the system with nearly thirty dreadnaughts all told. At least a dozen of them had been cracked open, destroyed completely, spreading ruin across the void in a path leading all the way back to the choke point leading into the system. There were more that had withdrawn from the planetary guns’ firing solutions, limping back to defensive positions, including three that were blocking the system’s exit. Their main guns were down, but they were still a force to be reckoned with.

  They wanted to make sure we couldn’t run, if it looked like we were losing.

  I raised John Henry on the comms. “John,” I asked him, watching the dreadnaughts trade fire with Sanctum. “I need the math. Can we survive the current rate of attrition on the shield?”

  “No,” he said simply. That one word sent absolute chills down my spine. “If it’s any comfort, their dreadnaughts will not either; we’ll bring down at least four of them before the inevitable ending, one of them any moment now. But ‘the math,’ as you say, is crystal clear at this point. My initial estimate was that once six dreadnaughts were firing on Sanctum at once, we would have slightly over an hour before the shield collapsed. We’ve done enough damage to their cannons’ capabilities that I’d stretch that estimate out to two. If I was feeling optimistic.”