The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  If we tried to take them alive, if we spent time tying them up or setting a guard over them, that was time we couldn’t spend on our objective, and our objective was all that mattered. There were millions of lives hanging in the balance, and those were just the inhabitants of Sanctum—if you considered the Justified’s mission, preparing for the return of the pulse, then the fate of untold trillions was at stake.

  Javier and Marus got to work sealing the airlock doors—not just locking them with the security panels, but physically welding them together. The Pax would be able to breach that eventually, but it would buy us more time. I made sure the room was clear; it was two stories, the second a catwalk above that could have held hidden threats. The Preacher started hacking into the controls themselves.

  “Esa,” I called down to her, my rifle still raised. “See if you can find the access for the docking bay doors. Let’s invite Criat and the others to this little party.”

  “What will they look like?” she asked. She’d adapted so well to this new world I’d almost forgotten she’d never seen the interior of a starship until Scheherazade had plucked her from her homeworld, scant weeks and what felt like forever ago.

  “There should be a screen that says ‘Maintenance control,’ ” I told her, praying that there was, in fact, a maintenance-access system inside the gunnery station. “Look for that. How’s it coming, Preacher?”

  “The Pax AI is fighting me,” she said. If she’d been any other species, I would have said she was grinding her teeth.

  “And?”

  “And I’m winning. But it’s going to take time.”

  There was a dull thump from behind the first set of doors Marus and Javier had welded shut; the Pax were trying to get in. They’d moved on to the doors on the opposite side of the room, but Marus cast a worried glance backward. “If they’re willing to use explosives to get in here, we won’t have as long as we thought,” he warned me.

  “They don’t know what we’re trying to do yet,” I told him.

  “They know we’ve locked ourselves in gunnery control. They’re stupid, but they’re not that stupid. They—”

  An explosion tore through the door. Not all of it, not even a person-sized hole; the doors were thick, and hard to breach. But it was enough for the Pax to start firing through. A few of their shots bounced off of my intention shield, ricocheting around the room. I fired back, just putting rounds through the breach, as even more alarms began to sound.

  That was when the automated security kicked in, and an even thicker blast door slammed shut over the entranceway.

  I grinned over at Marus. They hadn’t known how the Nemesis would react to someone trying to use explosives to force their way into its gunnery controls—it was too new, its interlocking systems still partially a mystery to the Pax. As a result, they’d just given us better armor than we could ever have hoped to weld in place. “No, I think they’re exactly that stupid,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Did they really just lock us inside their gunnery control station?” Javier was dumbfounded; he was staring literally slack-jawed, his mouth hanging halfway open as he tried to process what had just happened. “Is that . . . did that just happen?”

  “It did,” I confirmed as my shields slowly reached full capacity again. “Or rather, the ship itself did, and they hadn’t done their homework to know that’s exactly what it was going to do when they set off those charges. Seal the security doors, too; let’s buy ourselves as much time as we can, huh?”

  “On it.” He headed to the door they’d almost breached; Marus was already on the other side, welding shut the heavier blast door.

  “Preacher?” I asked.

  “Do not ask me ‘how are we doing,’ ” she said, her vocal modulation still giving the impression that she was speaking through gritted teeth, even though she had no teeth to grit. “I will tell you how we’re doing when I’m through their firewalls. Until that time, please be so kind as to—” She stopped, jerking back from their system as though it had shocked her. “We’re through their firewalls,” she told me.

  “How soon until we can fire this thing?”

  “I just need to line up a shot.”

  “Then what the hell are you talking to me for? Esa? Any luck with the—”

  “I’ve got . . . I’m at the docking bay controls, I think, and I think I know how to open them, but should I—”

  “Yes. Go ahead.” There weren’t many guns on Criat’s prototype ship, but it wasn’t like it was unarmed; if he could land inside the Pax’s own docking bay, he and his men would have their own base of fire. They’d be able to hold their position fairly easily, unless the Pax managed to get to some of the dormant tanks or heavy infantry weapons they doubtless had stored in the bay as well.

  I raised Criat on the comms. “You’re about to get an invitation to the party,” I told him.

  “About damned time,” he growled. “I’ve been sitting here fixing my makeup and worrying about which dress to wear.”

  “Was that . . . were you just—”

  “I was sticking with your metaphor, yeah. Just open the damn doors.”

  “Firing solution locked in,” the Preacher reported. “Firing the main cannon . . . now.”

  Just like when we were on Sanctum, when the big cannon fired, you knew it. The massive gauss barrel ran the entire length of the dreadnaught—all the bulkheads and all the insulation and all the metal in the world couldn’t keep that sound out. I rushed over to the monitors to see if she’d connected.

  “What . . . what did you do?” I asked. One of the Pax dreadnaughts was already down, a hole blasted clean through its hull—one of the dreadnaughts on the opposite side of their formation from us. I wasn’t even able to piece together how she’d achieved that result.

  She hadn’t had a clean shot on it, which was why she’d been able to do the damage she’d done; its shielding had been concentrated on its outward-facing starboard side, the side taking fire from Sanctum itself. She’d somehow hit it on the port hull instead, regardless of the fact that there were two other dreadnaughts in between her and her target.

  “I banked it,” she said, sounding smug. Deservedly so.

  “You what?”

  “She ricocheted the round off the shielding of one of their other dreadnaughts.” Marus sounded stunned; he had just finished welding shut the far door, and was staring at the screens as well. “She hit the shielding of the closest dreadnaught at just the right angle—not full on, that would mean all the force dissipated, but not oblique enough to send it howling off into the void—and she banked it inside their defensive circle. She just made a trick shot with a dreadnaught cannon across half a million miles. That’s a thing that just happened.”

  “Well done,” Javier told her, a grin spreading across his face.

  “Thank you. I played a great deal of—what’s the human game, with the sticks and the little balls and the felt tables with the pockets?”

  “Pool. You just fired a dreadnaught cannon like you were making a pool shot.”

  “Pool, yes, that’s the one. It had something of a resurgence back on—”

  “How soon can we fire again?” I asked her. We’d taken another dreadnaught out of their formation, but it wasn’t going to be enough to save Sanctum, and the Preacher’s clever trick wasn’t going to work again. The other dreadnaughts were already reacting, shifting their rotation, closing ranks, already preventing her from doing the same thing twice.

  “Two minutes,” she replied.

  “And the rest of the Pax . . . you know, they noticed that one of their ships just fired on another one of their ships,” Marus reported.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think that was just going to slip by them.”

  “The other dreadnaughts close by are already firing on us. Not with their big cannons—they’ve got either damaged engines or damaged main guns, so they can’t do that—but with everything else they’ve got.”

  “Take over at the s
hielding controls.”

  “I am already doing that.”

  My comm crackled to life. “Was that the main cannon firing just now?” Criat asked me. I could hear gunfire in the background of the channel; he must have set down almost immediately after the big cannon had fired. “I only ask because—”

  “One Pax dreadnaught down,” I told him, fighting the urge to crow. “It’s working.”

  “Good. We’re carving out a defensive perimeter in the hangar; we can act as a blockade for their forces forward from this position. You’ll still have to deal with those trapped aft, but we should at least be able to cut off their reinforcements.”

  “Criat—stay alive.”

  “You too. One down, Kamali. Five to go.”

  And with us pounding the Pax dreadnaughts from their exposed side, the cannon at Sanctum as well as Alpha and Bravo would be able to do more damage as well; the Pax ships couldn’t rotate out of a firing solution long enough to let their shields recharge before they’d rotated right into the next. For the first time since I’d seen the Pax circle of ships between the moon and the world below, I thought this might actually work.

  “Five to go,” I repeated into the comm, more to myself than to Criat.

  CHAPTER 11

  We’ve got a problem,” Javier reported. He was at another station; I couldn’t tell which one.

  “Of course we do,” I said; there went my brief moment of optimism. I moved to stand beside him. “What are they—”

  “The fusion reactor,” he said. “We took control of the guns from them, and we took control of the shields, but we didn’t—”

  I cursed. “How did we not think of that?”

  “We had a host of bad options—”

  “We did, and this was the one we chose. How did we not think of that?” There were more muffled explosions coming from either side of the security doors; the Pax were trying to get through again. I didn’t know how long we’d have, but it wouldn’t be long enough. And now we had this to deal with.

  “Because we didn’t,” Javier shrugged, surprisingly calm about the fact that the Pax were currently—at best—trying to shut down the flow of power to the cannon, and at worst trying to scuttle the whole damned ship. “We just didn’t. Even if we had, I don’t know what else we could have done.”

  “Preacher, can you—”

  “Already on it. Javier, will you take over at gunnery controls for me?”

  “My pleasure.”

  Javi and the Preacher switched stations, Javier prepping the dreadnaught’s cannon to fire another round, the Preacher hacking into the power relay controls, trying to stop the Pax from shutting down their entire ship. I held my breath. Soldiers were still pounding on the doors outside—they’d be breaking in any minute. If the Preacher couldn’t do something, then at least one of us would have to break out, and I knew which one it would be.

  She shook her head, moving back to the gunnery controls. “They knew we’d try it,” she said. “They’ve locked me out. They’ve locked everyone out; shut off network access to the power grid entirely, probably by cutting the hardline.”

  I’d thought the Pax had been remarkably stupid so far, even for Pax, and they had been, but it looked like not everyone on board had lost all of their cognitive processing ability during the course of the Pax brainwashing. “So someone’s got to go down there,” I said.

  “What?” Esa asked. “There have to be a hundred soldiers between us and that reactor—”

  “At least,” I nodded, checking my rifle.

  “That’s exactly what they’ll expect us to do,” she said. “That’s—they’ll be waiting for us, they’ll be—”

  “No ‘us,’ kid,” I shook my head at her. “Not this time. You’re the biggest gun we’ve got: you need to stay here and defend the Preacher and Marus. If I stop the Pax from shutting off our power, it won’t do any good if they’ve retaken this position.”

  “Well, you’re not going alone,” Javier told me. “I can—”

  “You can stay here with Esa. Two access points,” I jerked my thumb at one door, then the other, “that means at least one person covering each one. At all times.”

  “Criat,” Esa suggested desperately. “Criat and Sahluk. They can get to the reactor—”

  “Actually, they can’t. They’re forward, in between us and the majority of the Pax forces on this ship, and the reactor is aft. There’s only one way this plays out, and it’s—”

  “Firing again,” the Preacher said quietly, and the sound of the gun going off overwhelmed any more arguments Esa may have made. If I didn’t get to the reactor, that might be the last shot we managed to make.

  I pointed at the aft security door. “When they crack that open,” I said—and the bright blue line slowly carving up the quick and dirty welding job Marus had applied suggested they were about to do just that—“you’re going to hit them as hard as you possibly can.”

  “Please, Jane—please—”

  “You’re going to hit them as hard as you can,” I repeated, “and then you’re going to hold this position as I go through them. If I can take out . . . whoever’s down there in the reactor, then I’ll be able to hold it, at least for a little while. I can buy us the time we need to keep firing.” I slung my gun for a moment, and put my hands on her shoulders. “We can save Sanctum, Esa, and this is how we do it.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Take it from me, kid. I’ve lived through a lot. It’s not often the right thing to do is also the easiest choice to make. This time, it is. I need to get down to the reactor. You need to stay here and protect our friends. It’s that simple.”

  She put her hand over mine, and gripped it, tightly. “Stay alive,” she told me, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Do fucking better than that. I want you to promise. I want your word.”

  I smiled at her slowly, even as I shook my head. “Sorry, kid. I don’t make promises I don’t know I can keep. Don’t come after me.”

  “They’re coming through!” Javier shouted, and then the door was breached.

  CHAPTER 12

  There was a bright flash, and then movement, and gunfire. Esa hit them hard; I could feel the push of her power as it swept past me. It slammed into the Pax fighting their way through the breached door, smashing them up against the walls, hard enough to break bones. I pulled a couple of grenades from Javier’s belt and rolled them through the hole, then turned away from the blast.

  In the short window before the grenades exploded, Javier grabbed me by the wrist, and he kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it, and just for a moment, I melted. He was here. After all we’d been through, after all that had separated us, he’d come back to me.

  “Stay safe,” he told me, even as he pulled away.

  Then the blast thumped through the walls, and I was moving.

  I slid through the ruin of the door, firing as I went. The Pax outside weren’t expecting it—they had thought they were moving forward, not that the opposition would be coming to them. A few managed to get their guns up and start firing back, and my shield took several hard hits, but I was picking my targets fast, they were having trouble adjusting, and then Esa hit them again, standing in the breach as she sent them flying backward, down the hall.

  “Go!” she shouted at me.

  I picked myself up and started running.

  I had a map of a Nemesis pulled up on my HUD, a single bright line pulsing along the floor, laying out the swiftest route to the fusion reactor. It helped, but not as much as it should; either the Pax or whoever had owned this vessel prior to its being mothballed had modified it extensively since it rolled off the production line, and I was constantly finding walls where there shouldn’t have been walls, doors that had been sealed off, corridors that continued where my map told me they dead-ended.

  And everywhere I went, of course, I found Pax.

  Most of them had shields as well, but I’d toggled
my rifle to fire four-round bursts—just enough to overwhelm a typical intention shield and punch through, assuming I connected with each round. Some of them I put down; some of them I just forced back into cover, into side rooms or other hallways, and I kept running. That meant they were still behind me, but there were always going to be Pax behind me. I’d shifted my shielding to my back, and every time I had a long run down a straight hallway, bullets sang past from the troops on my heels, and a few punched their way into my shield. I had to fight each time just to keep my footing.

  The goddamned dreadnaught was like a maze.

  I turned a corner and ran right into a platoon on their way to reinforcing the reactor itself; they hadn’t been expecting me any more than I was expecting them. I dropped my rifle and went hand to hand, filling the corridor with the flash and sizzle of my stun knuckles and breaking bones right and left, using the close quarters against them, blocking their shots with the bodies of their allies. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the main cannon fired again, the roar and shake overwhelming us all for a moment—the fucking barrel of the gun must have been just on the other side of the bulkhead. I recovered first and finished wiping them out, then took off running again, moving as fast as I could through the strobing crimson-lit corridors before the Pax behind me could catch up.

  I hadn’t gotten away from the fight clean, though. I had at least two broken ribs, a grazing chemical burn along my scalp—my hair wouldn’t grow back right for months, if ever—and they’d reopened at least a few of the wounds the Reint had carved into me back on the world. The ribs especially were slowing me down.

  And the dreadnaught was still a goddamned maze.

  According to my HUD, the reactor should be just on the other side of the wall ahead of me. According to my HUD, there also should have been a goddamned door on the wall just ahead of me. There wasn’t. The corridor dead-ended in an intersection instead, breaking both right and left; I went left, on the basis of nothing but a coin flip in my head. Shut down the map in my HUD—it was useless. I just needed a door.