The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “Marza. Got it. Well—stay out of the sun,” I nodded back. “I’ll send your friend on his way when I find him.”

  “Again—we are much obliged.”

  “Just doing my duty.”

  He cocked his head back, another Tyll expression. “Duty?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Figure of speech.”

  Have to watch shit like that.

  CHAPTER 5

  As I hiked through the tall grass in the general direction he’d indicated, toward the rise of the forests at the edge of the fields of wheat, I went over my options again in my head. I knew I was in the right general area to find what I’d come to this world looking for, but it was still looking for a needle in a haystack. My HUD would pick my target up if I got into visual range—it gave off a certain signature—but that was all I could count on. Otherwise it was going to require a deft touch, which is not usually one of my governing attributes.

  After an hour or so wending my way through the Tyll trees, the forests finally broke open again, giving me a view of my destination, nestled in the valley below. As was typical on worlds like this one, the settlement was built around an old military installation, ramshackle lumber huts and more impressive stone houses built up around a line of defunct anti-air batteries and one giant anti-orbital cannon, plus their adjacent storehouses.

  The farther a world had been thrown back in time, technologically speaking, the more likely you were to find their population centers built around relics of the older age. There are various reasons for that, some psychological, some defensive, but the majority of them were practical: this area was close to the coast of its continent, which meant, based on Scheherazade’s analysis of the local weather patterns, it would get deluged during the biannual monsoon season. A boon for growing crops, to be sure, but given that advanced construction techniques had been put forever out of the locals’ reach by the pulse, it made sense that they would have used what was still standing from the earlier age. Those batteries were designed to withstand multiple-megaton strikes from dreadnaught bombardment—they’d be much better shelter from torrential downpours than anything the locals could still build.

  It also made for a very striking sight, the big gun rising up out of the swaying grass, absolutely dwarfing the surrounding village. I’d estimate the population of the town at about twenty thousand or so, and based on my observation from the ridge above, I’d say it was a pretty representative species mix of the world as a whole. That meant that, in this area at least, the locals had outgrown the sectarian divisions that had defined them during the wars.

  Peace through forcible disarmament. That had actually been the goal of the pulse. It had just very rarely worked out that way.

  I made my way down the hill, sure to stow my rifle on my back and keep my hands to my side. The settlement looked plenty peaceful, sure, but if the bandits I’d encountered on the road were a regular threat, there would be sentries, and they wouldn’t be very hesitant to shoot a lone stranger approaching with a gun.

  Still, none stopped me as I entered the outskirts of the town, entering a bazaar where the locals were hawking their wares, likely where the poor Tyll farmer I’d encountered had been hoping to unload his own. I asked a vendor—a Tyll selling bowls of thick, leafy stew—where I could find Marza; she pointed me to a local watering hole built into one of the former supply sheds. They might have been thrown back to an age before electricity, but people would always find a way to distill booze.

  The dim bar served various concoctions, marked clearly on the wall in chalk, the menu separated out by species preference. A human and a Tyll could drink much the same things and achieve much the same effect, though their different taste buds might prefer different flavors, but either of those species drinking something designed for a Wulf risked becoming violently ill, and drinking something suited to some of the other species—a Reint, for example, or Vyriat—would straight up kill them. Most of the seventeen species that made up the galactic population had certain biological similarities—carbon-based biology, the oxygen levels required for a breathable atmosphere—but the deviations among them were still important to keep in mind.

  I asked the barkeep, a shaggy, canine-like Wulf, where I might find Marza; she barely looked up from the glasses she was cleaning as she nodded toward him, a human sitting at a corner table, chatting amiably with a few acquaintances. I approached and informed him of his friend’s predicament, and he thanked me, passing along a few squares of rough stamped metal—presumably the local currency—as a way of paying me off. With that done, I headed back out into the town.

  Where to find one human child in a city of hundreds of them? Especially a city with very few apparent species divides? Don’t get me wrong, I was pleased as hell that everything was so peachy and racially integrated around here, but it did make my job harder—if there had been a “human quarter,” it would have at least narrowed my search.

  That lack of racial divide meant that there were two possible avenues of inquiry to begin my search: checking to see if some sort of local religion had grown up in the last hundred years, priests being valuable sources of information as long as you couched your question right, and if that didn’t pan out, to see if there was some sort of local orphanage. This wasn’t the first child I’d recruited, and for whatever reason, the gifts they presented—the very confirmation that they were what we thought they were—almost always emerged after tragedy or trauma.

  I was pointed toward a temple by a man renting out the same strange beasts of burden I’d seen shot dead out in the grasslands, so that would be my first stop.

  Religion had always been a . . . funny thing, even before the pulse. The intermingling of seventeen different species, plus the sectarian divisions that had come after, had meant a swarm of different ideas colliding in sometimes strange and unexpected ways, new religions commingling with old and forming all sorts of offshoots and clashes of ideology. Add the pulse on top of that—an event that, as far as these people knew, was some cosmologically unprecedented, completely inexplicable act that might have come from a divine hand—and all sorts of strange cults and beliefs had sprung up in its wake. Plenty of those were apocalyptic in nature, and the local flavor turned out to be no different.

  The “church,” insofar as that’s what it was, had been built right up underneath one of the anti-aircraft guns, long silent now. They’d left the weapon as their roof, which meant they probably got rained on during services, the water dripping down all the exposed metal of the cannon to spatter on their heads as they prayed, but for all I knew that was part of their belief system, being cleansed by the wash of war or somesuch. I watched their midday services from just outside the door, trying to get a handle on how they’d translated the pulse into their beliefs.

  The priest was a Barious. I hadn’t been expecting that. For one thing, the machine race hadn’t been present in large numbers on this world before the pulse; for another, the Barious, even more so than the other races, tended to keep to themselves, a side effect of both the massive physiological differences between them and the biological species, and also the fairly horrid memories of how they’d been treated even before the pulse.

  Barious were odd in general. They were all that remained of a precursor race, one that had dominated the cosmos before any of the current species spread throughout the diaspora of stars had so much as discovered fire. Whoever that race was—generally referred to as “the forerunners”—they’d faded into nothing, the only remnant of their passage the servants they’d left behind, AI creations with no one to serve: the Barious. They’d even blanked the species’s collective memory banks, wiping out all traces of who they’d been, why their creators had made them, or why they’d existed at all.

  None of that was particularly relevant at the moment—but the pulse had been careful to leave all of the Barious’s systems intact, which meant that the priest was liable to be both older even than me by a significant amount, and to have sharper senses and sensors
than most of the locals I’d encounter. If anyone was going to cotton to the notion that I was from off-planet, it would be her.

  I only say “her,” by the way, because that’s the pronoun I’m used to; Barious are monogendered.

  Anyway, the Barious wrapped up her sermon—the usual apocalyptic, “this is the end times and soon the pulse shall return and judge what we have done in the interim” spiel that I’d heard on dozens of different worlds; what she got wrong, and how she’d clearly reached those conclusions, was almost as impressive as what she got right—and I stood to the side as her congregants filed out. My first instinct was to do the same; discourse with a Barious had a high risk factor baked in. But I didn’t have many leads, and I still felt like the church was my best shot, so I shoved that impulse aside. Time to get my dose of religion.

  CHAPTER 6

  The priest looked up at me as I approached, her metal skin reflecting the glow of the candles placed around the space of worship. Like most Barious, she was tall, angular, giving off a sense of incredible stillness as she stood at the altar—unlike organic species, Barious didn’t unconsciously shift their weight or shrug or lean or fidget when they were still. Also like most Barious, her “skin,” the metallic outer plating that covered her chassis, had been patched here and there with rougher materials, the complex alloys of her original construction welded here and there with different alloys of copper or brass. Just because the pulse had left the Barious intact and functioning didn’t mean their maintenance facilities had been so lucky, and as her components took damage, she’d been replacing them with whatever she could find.

  “Offworlder,” she said, her tone uninflected. “Interesting.”

  Well. So much for keeping that one in the bag.

  “If you’re going to ask me if I’ve come bearing the word of the gods”—I shook my head—“not my line.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.” She cocked her head at an angle, the light that shone from her eyes changing as she engaged different sensors. I have no idea what she was examining—talking to Barious can feel slightly . . . invasive, given that they take in more information than nonsynthetics could possibly process just as easily and unconsciously as we breathe—but whatever it was, she made a kind of “clicking” sound when she was done, the Barious version of a human “huh.” “Justified,” she said.

  Even for a Barious, that was a leap. It was a correct leap, but still. She wasn’t saying that she felt judged, or that I was judging her; the Justified was the colloquial term—or what had been the colloquial term, before the pulse—for my particular sect. We hadn’t been that well known, even then, and we’d liked it that way. Still did.

  We were, after all, responsible for the greatest catastrophe that had ever befallen the universe. When you’ve got something like that hidden away, you don’t go around inviting scrutiny. And yes—I’m aware of the irony of the title after that particular act.

  The full name of the sect, by the way, was “The Justified and the Repentant.” Doesn’t that sound better? I thought that sounded better.

  “You don’t sound surprised,” I told her.

  “Even during the wars, your sect was always sticking their noses—and muzzles, and snouts, and proboscises—into places they didn’t belong,” she replied. “Am I surprised that even with the pulse, you’re still managing it? No. Not at all.”

  “You’re not a native,” I said flatly. She’d already thrown me; marking me as Justified meant she’d been . . . well informed, before the pulse, at least, which meant I couldn’t assume that she’d believe—like most people on worlds like this one—that the pulse had rendered every planet in the galaxy down to the same level of technology they were on. How much she did know, what she was doing here: not questions I could easily answer, which meant I’d have to play my cards even closer to my chest than usual.

  Still, I didn’t want to be too evasive—that would risk angering her, and I had zero interest in that outcome. The Barious might play into the stereotype that they’re all logic and reason when it suits them, but believe me, you can piss them off, and when they go, they stay. They build goddamned vacation homes in their wrath, revisit their fury whenever they feel nostalgic. Barious hold grudges like nobody’s business, and given that their construction made them twice as strong as the strongest human ever born, those grudges could have messy results.

  “Do you know?” she asked me, the question almost ritual. “What caused the pulse?”

  The inquiry was intended to catch me off guard, and she almost succeeded. I had to be careful here as well—she might know if I lied, given all the sensory data she was collecting. Then again, she might not: contrary to popular opinion, there is no such thing as a universal lie detector. Even among one species, the tells and physical changes that accompany a falsehood can vary wildly.

  But Barious saw more than most, given their sensors and scanners and built-in arrays; she was taking in a great deal of physiological data as we spoke, so she’d have a better idea if I was lying to her or not than most species would.

  So I went with option B: deferral. “I’m not here because of what caused it,” I said instead. “I’m here to try and prevent it from happening again.” True, to a certain extent, in the same way that “I didn’t eat the last sweet roll on the table” was true, if you’d shoved it into your pocket instead. Plus, it rolled nicely into the fire and brimstone she’d been preaching earlier: playing to someone’s preconceived beliefs is always a useful way to get them to divulge something they might not have otherwise.

  “And that requires a visit to a place of worship?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m here because places of worship tend to be good places to get information,” I replied, again, truthfully. “I’m here to see if you know where I can find who I’m looking for.”

  She cocked her head to the side, the light behind her eyes shifting again. “Who?” she asked.

  I nodded. “A human child,” I said. “Fourteen years old.”

  “So conceived during the meteor—”

  I nodded again, cutting her off. I didn’t want to talk about that; it would take us closer to those things I didn’t want to discuss with her. It wasn’t actually related to the girl I was seeking, anyway—a correlated connection, not a causal one. “And she would have shown . . . aptitudes. Abilities.”

  The Barious narrowed her eyes at me, which was accompanied by the vague whine of the servos in her face. She thought for a moment—which meant she was giving her answer a lifetime’s worth of consideration, given how fast Barious processed information—before finally replying. “I think I may know who you mean,” she said.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Barious led me through the city, away from the big guns and the marketplace both, toward the outlying districts. She’d told me her name was Alexi54328, and that I could call her “Preacher.” Why she’d told me her name when she didn’t want me to use it, I wasn’t sure. Barious were odd.

  The citizens of whatever-the-hell-this-town-was-called greeted her fondly enough; not surprising, really. As a Barious, she’d naturally be in a position of some veneration, even without her local authority as a religious leader, given that she was old enough to actually remember a time before the pulse.

  “Where are we going?” I asked her. We were headed into a more ramshackle part of town: more natural wood, splintered and faded, without the heartier stone construction. The buildings also mostly lacked the brightly painted walls that had characterized the more well-to-do areas.

  “The orphanage,” she told me, which confirmed what I had already guessed. For whatever reason, the children I was tasked with seeking out always seemed to be orphans. Maybe that was because it took stress and trauma to activate their gifts—without a trigger, I wouldn’t even know to look for them—or maybe it was just because the universe has a bleak sense of humor. Or a storyteller’s natural flair for pathos. I’d never been much for religion—my upbringing had skewed me permanently away from th
e entire concept of faith—but I sometimes couldn’t help but feel the hand of something other than chance in the course of events, even if all that hand seemed to be doing was making an obscene gesture in my general direction.

  “Her parents?” I asked.

  “Died in a bandit raid, years ago. Shortly after she was born.” Years—that wouldn’t add up, at least not for the activating trauma. The girl had only come onto my radar, so to speak, a few months ago, when her gifts had manifested. There had to be something—

  The train of my thoughts was brought to a crashing halt when the whole town started shaking, as if an earthquake were beginning just under our feet. That couldn’t be what was happening—I’d studied the scans; the whole planet was tectonically stable, another remnant of the terraforming technology that had been so widespread before the pulse—but it was still my first thought.

  My second thought was that a ship was entering orbit, something big enough and fast enough to displace enough atmosphere to cause this level of turbulence. But I dismissed that nearly as readily as the earthquake theory; who the hell would be crazy enough to take a ship that big into an atmosphere this choked with pulse radiation?

  It turns out, I shouldn’t have abandoned that idea so readily. There’s always someone stupid enough to think they can just bull through the pulse. They’re never right, but still.

  It was a ship.

  It was a big ship.

  It roared into the upper atmosphere, shuddering and shaking like it was taking heavy fire. It wasn’t just big, it was massive, twice the size of the settlement itself: a dreadnaught, all hard lines and spires and blocky edges, so large it eclipsed the high noon sun and threw the entire settlement into shadow as the town was full of the groans and howls of the starship’s machinery tearing itself apart. A ship like that had never been meant to descend into a gravity well at all, much less into a pulsed atmosphere.