The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The hallway stretched forever to the left. I still had my intention shields raised over my back, and that was why I didn’t die when a round hammered into what should have been the back of my skull. I dropped to the ground—that part was easy, given that my shields diffused the force of the bullet, but couldn’t disperse it entirely—and rolled, so I was facing behind me.

  There were two Pax, stalking down the hall, guns only half-raised; they thought I was dead. Just beyond them was their post—they’d been guarding a door. A door to the reactor. I should have chosen the right-hand path. If they hadn’t fired on me, I never would have known I was headed in the wrong direction.

  I brought my rifle up—they saw that I was still moving, were doing the same—and fired, two bursts, one at each. I killed the larger, but the second one had the sense to jerk away before her shields were entirely ripped down. I scrambled to my feet, trying to fire again, and of course my rifle clicked empty. My shields were stripped to nothing; if the Pax got her gun up, it was over.

  She started raising it. I dropped my rifle and hauled at the pistol on my belt, firing from the hip nearly as soon as I got it clear of the holster. The first round punched through her shoulder, spattering the wall behind her with fuchsia blood—she must have been a Vyriat under all that leather and armor. The second round whined past her head, ricocheting off the wall, and she was still trying to raise her rifle, despite one of her arms not working properly anymore; her system must have been absolutely flooded with narcotics for her to even move it. I was almost on top of her when I fired again, directly into the faceplate of her armor. It was meant to deflect debris and grazing shots, not a large-caliber pistol round at point-blank range.

  She slumped over, very dead. I’d survived. That fight, at least. There were still more Pax behind me. I picked up her rifle and headed to the door. It slid open—the bastards hadn’t even sealed it yet. Maybe this actually could work.

  The dreadnaught’s big gun fired again; the Nemesis could fire fast. There was a long stretch of catwalks before me, hanging out over nothing—the fusion reactor took up about three stories, just like it had at Bravo facility on the planet. The main control station was on this level, suspended around the glowing centerpiece of the room—the reactor itself. Several engineers were working furiously at those consoles, trying to take the reactor offline.

  Between me and them were three Pax in exosuits, guarding the catwalk approach. I was down to four rounds in my handgun and a stolen rifle, and my shields had yet to recover. I’d come too damned far to die here. I raised my rifle and started firing.

  CHAPTER 13

  My rounds pinged harmlessly off the shields of the exosuited Pax marines. The bullets weren’t going to get through, but at least the sudden burst of fire kept them occupied long enough for me to slip inside and shut the door behind me, then smash the keypad—that would keep my pursuers out for long enough to . . . for long enough.

  The first Pax recovered from my fusillade and raised her weapon: a flamethrower. Even if my shields hadn’t been nearly offline, there wasn’t much I could do about that. I fired off the last few rounds from my stolen rifle at the other two, then threw the empty weapon at the flamethrower itself. She triggered it just as the rifle hit, and a bloom of flame passed harmlessly through the metal of the catwalk to illuminate the piping and wiring below.

  I leapt toward the Pax, trying to close the gap—the other two were trying to get their weapons up as well; one of them had a grenade launcher, the other some sort of massive rifle—and I passed over the still-billowing flames and punched the first Pax right in the battery pack of her exosuit. It hurt like a motherfucker—even with my stun knuckles activated, punching a large metal battery with a bare fist was still punching a large metal battery with a bare fist—but it worked. The battery exploded, peppering all of us with shrapnel and a hot lash of fusion energy, and the first Pax’s exosuit went dead, trapping her inside the hulking frame.

  I used my momentum to topple her backward, off the catwalk. She fell three stories below. I didn’t know if she’d survive the fall, and I didn’t much care; she was out of the fight. One down.

  The other two were triggering their weapons.

  The grenade launcher fired first. Here’s the thing about being in combat for most of your life—whether that was on the ground, in dogfights in the void, or on board enemy ships like I was now—it’s not that your reflexes get honed to a sharp edge, though they do. It’s that you make decisions unconsciously, without even knowing that you are making them. I saw the grenade fire from the barrel of the weapon, less than three feet away from me, and I just reacted.

  My force-multiplying knuckles still active, I backhanded the explosive out of the air, directly toward the other Pax.

  I’m pretty sure it snapped my wrist when I hit it, but I could barely feel anything, I was so buzzed with adrenaline. The grenade itself hit the other Pax directly on the faceplate with an almost comically underwhelming metal “tink,” and then dropped to the catwalk at her feet.

  For a single moment, we all stared at it, spinning on the grating. Then we were trying to scramble away, the Pax somewhat slowly: exosuits make you stronger, but they do greatly limit your mobility, a definite downside when you’re right next to, say, a primed explosive.

  The grenade blew through the catwalk, and it took out the supporting suspension lines as well. The whole thing started slipping, too heavy now for the few lines that were left. I’d managed to hook an arm through one of the catwalk’s rails, so I at least didn’t plummet immediately—unlike the Pax who had fired the grenade, who went to join her friend down at the bottom of the room, likely crushed to death by the weight of her own suit—but I did slide with the catwalk, until I was hanging almost vertically from that lone railing.

  Two down.

  The other Pax had managed to scramble to safety as well, standing nearly back by the door where I’d come in. She took in the damage the grenade had done—took in me, hanging from the catwalk directly opposite her—and then, again, started to raise her fucking gun.

  Still hanging, I drew my pistol.

  We both fired at the same time.

  Her clutch of bullets tore through what little bit of my shields had managed to regenerate, but her footing wasn’t great on the shifting, dangling catwalk, and the recoil made her stumble backward; the rest of the rounds went high just as my shield sputtered and died. My own shot hit her shields square, deflected easily. She was bringing her rifle back to bear as I fired again, the recoil lifting my hand above my head. I fought to bring it back down, and fired one last time.

  Her shields had been cracked by the earlier rounds. The third made it all the way through, and my aim was dead on, took her right between the eyes. She slumped in the suit, dead, and ever so slowly, the whole mass—Pax soldier and Pax exosuit—tilted and fell from the catwalk.

  Three down.

  I holstered my pistol, still hanging almost vertically above the drop. Gritted my teeth and hauled myself back onto the portion of the catwalk that wasn’t broken or tilted, trying not to use the broken wrist on the arm still looped around the railing. For a moment, I simply sat there, trying to get my breath back, trying to believe that all of that had just happened, that I’d taken on three exosuited Pax at close quarters and won.

  That was when something hit me from behind, hard, just beneath the ribs; a feeling I knew intimately.

  I’d just been shot.

  CHAPTER 14

  I jerked forward from the force of the bullet—almost went over the edge. I barely put my hand out flat against the catwalk to stop myself falling off entirely, the impact making the broken bones in my wrist send shrieks of pain down my arm; it may have hurt more than the goddamned gunshot.

  I turned, drawing my pistol as I did. One of the engineers. One of the goddamned engineers had a pistol out, a plume of smoke rising from the barrel of her gun—no Pax was ever unarmed, even those who weren’t soldiers. I should have remembered th
at.

  I reached down with my free hand, the broken one; felt blood, felt the wound with an almost electric shock of pain—before my hand touched the raw edges of my skin and muscle and came back slick with red, it was like I hadn’t even been able to feel it.

  The engineer who had shot me was just staring, her gaze going from the gun in her hand to me, like she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. The Pax may have trained all of their people in combat, but it had likely been years since she’d fired a gun.

  I shot her in the head.

  That was the last round out of my pistol, but the other two engineers didn’t know that. My teeth gritted around the rising tide of bile and blood climbing up from my throat—as if I needed confirmation that I was bleeding internally. I staggered to my feet, holding the empty pistol on the other two engineers. One of them raised her hands; the other just stood there, still working at the control panel.

  “Hands up,” I said. The words came with a mist of blood and spit that clung to my lips. The second engineer backed away slowly. I took a few trembling steps forward, off the catwalk and onto the decking of the main control station proper, then forced myself to kneel. It felt like my side was ripping open all over again, but I managed to holster my own pistol and pick up the weapon the dead engineer had dropped. It would have been easier—and faster, and safer—to do that in the opposite order, but I still didn’t trust the shattered wrist to hold a gun.

  For a moment, we just stared at each other, the two Pax engineers and I. I wondered if they knew I was dying. I wondered if I knew I was dying, really. I don’t think that information had quite made it to my brain. My body was still just busy shouting “hurt hurt HURT” and getting shut down by my higher processes.

  The cannon fired again. The draw from the weapon made the reactor flare bright; the first engineer thought that was her moment, and she charged me, not even going for the pistol at her side. She was wrong. I shot her through the chest, then turned, and shot the second engineer as well. She had been trying to run; I shot her in the back.

  Just another crime I’d have to live with. Or not.

  I staggered toward the control panels, fell, more than anything else, until I was half-leaning against the metal. What the fuck did I know about fusion reactors? Not much, but enough to see a lever had been drawn from “full” to “low.” I cranked it all the way back up, then turned, and slid slowly down the panel itself, leaving a smear of blood behind me until I was finally sitting again, my back to the cool metal.

  Sitting was good. Sitting was better. My side didn’t hurt quite as much. It still hurt, it hurt a great deal, but it didn’t feel like the rest of me was on fire. I could feel the nanotech swarming through my bloodstream, trying to patch the damage, being overwhelmed. Vaguely, I remembered that I had an emergency sealant canister on my belt. I fumbled it off, and gritted my teeth as I sprayed it on both wounds, entry and exit, filling each with cooling foam.

  That would at least stop the external blood loss. As for the blood pooling inside my body, the sepsis from organs leaking fluid into each other, the damage to the organs themselves, and, of course, the simple shock—there was nothing I could do to stop that.

  Like I said earlier: I was dying. That information was finally catching up to me.

  I twitched my head, just a little bit; activated my comms.

  “Marus, Preacher,” I rasped. “Esa. Javi. The reactor’s . . . back online. You should . . . should be able to . . . you’re clear. Shoot the bastards out of the sky.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Roger that,” Javier’s voice came back to me, clear and clean, sounding farther away than it should have, but also sounding like he was right there beside me. For a brief moment, I imagined that he was; that I was leaning, not against a cold control panel, but back into his chest, that his arms were wrapped around me, and I was warm, and I was safe, and I was somewhere other than here. “The guns at Sanctum and planetside are pounding holy hell out of them—we’ve taken another dreadnaught out of play. Jane, I think this is actually going to work.”

  “Told you,” I said, mustering a smile from somewhere, willing him to hear it down the line of the comm. I’d told him no such thing.

  “Sahluk and Criat have cleared a path from the docking bay to the gunnery station,” the Preacher told me. “We’ve still got a few hostiles trying to hit us from your part of the ship, but I think mostly they went after you.”

  I looked up; I could see . . . something, some sort of color or motion back across the catwalk where I’d entered, but the distance made it impossible to focus. Something was going wrong with my eyes, behind my eyes. I blinked, tried to make sense of what I was seeing: sparks, falling from the sealed door. The Pax were trying to cut their way through.

  It didn’t matter much now. It took time to take the reactor offline, time the Pax could no longer afford. And even if they did—it wasn’t like getting past me was going to be difficult, not given the state I was in—we’d taken another dreadnaught out of play, and were firing on the remaining supercraft.

  The Justified had won. Sanctum was safe. The fighting might not be over yet, and wouldn’t be over for quite a while—once we’d patched up the damage they’d done, we’d still have to clear the remaining dreadnaughts from the system, those, like the one I was currently sitting on, that had been knocked out of the fight but were still crewed by hundreds of Pax. But that was just mopping up. We’d won the war.

  There was always a price. My life was just a part of that, a piece of the equation. I was surprisingly all right with the concept. I’d seen a great deal over the course of my long existence. There were worse things to die for.

  “Do you want us to come for you?” Esa asked me. I could hear her swallow, trying to ask what she didn’t want to know, what she wasn’t quite sure she could hear in my voice. “Do you want—”

  “Negative,” I told her. “Stay where you are.” The dreadnaught was shaking; the other Pax craft were still pounding holy hell out of her with their smaller guns, trying to cut off the damage we were doing. Dreadnaught shields were powerful things, but even they couldn’t stand up to sustained fire from fixed positions coming from multiple sides. “When John Henry . . . when he gives you the all-clear, get to Sahluk and Criat. Get out of here.”

  Silence on the other side of the line, for a moment. “But . . . what about you?” the girl whispered.

  “I’ll find my own way back.” I’d lied to her before, for worse reasons; I didn’t feel bad, doing it again. “There are dozens of Pax soldiers between us. I’ll find another way. If you can get clear, get clear.”

  The cutting on the reactor room door was going in earnest, now; they’d be through in minutes, maybe even less. I reloaded my own pistol—painstakingly, the barrel jammed between my knees, because I couldn’t trust my broken wrist for the fine motor skills, or even just to hold the barrel. I’d set the stolen Pax handgun on the ground beside me. I wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, but I’d be damned if I didn’t put up any at all.

  “Yeah,” Javier said. “We’re not doing that.” I could hear gunfire, behind his voice; apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d been playing down the amount of danger I was still in.

  “Javi—”

  “No, Jane.”

  “Javi, just—”

  “No, Jane. If you can’t—if you don’t think you can get to us, then we’re coming to get you. That’s non-negotiable. You can shout about it all you like, but there’s not a lot—”

  “I’m dying, Javi.” Finally, I managed to shut him up. “I took a stray round to the gut, and I was already in rough shape. I’m torn up, bad. There’s no point in coming here. I’ll be . . . gone, before you can. Get Esa, get to Scheherazade, and get the hell out.” My eyes tried to flutter closed on me, letting a poisonously comforting darkness creep around the edge of my vision. I forced them wide instead, focusing on the light coming from the cutting lasers of the Pax about to force their way in. The fact that
I couldn’t seem to focus on the sparks made them almost pretty in their abstraction. My pistol trembled in my hand. “I love you,” I whispered to Javier. “Stay away.”

  “No.” It wasn’t Javier that spoke; it was Esa. If I’d been smart—if I’d been thinking at all—I would have shut my comm channel to just his, but I hadn’t. “No. We haven’t come this far—”

  “Esa, it’s—”

  “We haven’t come this far, we haven’t come all this way through . . . through everything, through hell and . . . and . . . and all the shit we’ve come through just for you to die here. That’s not—I won’t let you. I won’t—”

  “Esa. It’s all right. I’m a soldier. Soldiers die on the battlefield. We’re supposed to. I feel . . . privileged.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Javier again. The door to the reactor room slid open suddenly, all at once—they must have cut the hydraulics—and I fired at the first Pax who stuck their head through. Actually took him square in the chest, a minor miracle given how much my vision was dimming and my hand was shaking.

  The round didn’t kill him—he had shields up—but it put him on his ass. I raised my gun for another shot, took it. Ended him. It was over in seconds. It felt like it took a minor forever.

  Meanwhile, Javier was still shouting at me. “Not even you believe that, Jane, and you believe some goddamned stupid stuff. You’re not dying.” His voice broke as he said it; I could hear the damage I was doing to him, just in his voice. I was sorry for that. “Not here, not today, not on this fucking ship, not in this fucking war. We are coming for you, Jane. Just hold on.”

  “Javier, please.” I fired again; the round whined past the other Pax scrambling for cover in the hall. “This is . . . it is what it is. I was always going to meet this sort of end. I’m glad . . . I’m glad we found each other again. I’m glad we—” The Pax decided to just bull through the door, all at once. It should have worked, but they were stymied by the broken catwalk, perfect targets. I fired my handgun dry, then dropped it, and I tried to raise the Pax pistol, but my arm just wouldn’t work anymore. The recoil from my own gun had just spent too much of my energy.