The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  The only visible thing with any sort of personality was the long, built-in shelf with my few prized possessions—namely a dozen actual books, paper binding and all. Others in my profession liked to maintain more comfortable surroundings, to ease their charges out of their old lives, but I figured Sanctum was fairly spartan, too. Might as well let our passengers know what they were getting into.

  “I thought your kind prized utilitarianism,” I said to the Barious, pulling up a seat at the table for myself, across from the Preacher. Esa was perched on the table’s edge, still looking simultaneously awed and in shock.

  “There’s a difference between keeping a space useful, and keeping it sterile,” the Preacher replied. “Don’t you pretty much live in this ship? Anyone who spends all their time in a place that might as well double as a prison cell has—”

  “I’ll thank you not to insult my furnishings.” Scheherazade’s tone was waspish. She’d apparently taken against the Preacher, which, you know, who could blame her. “Not much for manners, are you?”

  The Preacher inclined her head. “Fine. You two did pull me off of that planet, and I’m fully aware that the Pax would have disassembled me. They don’t have a great deal of use for Barious; we’re too difficult to brainwash.” That was both true, and not—Barious programming didn’t respond to the sort of brute-force psychological conditioning the Pax used, fair enough, but with access to the right tech, they could have rewritten her personality entirely. It was a rarity, though for whatever reason: when Pax captured Barious alive, they usually tore them apart instead. A remnant of the bad old days of Barious segregation, maybe.

  The reminder of the fate of Pax captives jolted Esa from her reverie. “What will happen?” Esa asked. “To my home, I mean?”

  “Difficult to say.” I shrugged.

  “No it’s not.” The Preacher looked me in the eye as she said it.

  “A lot of rads on that world; maybe not worth their time.” I didn’t want to have this discussion in front of the girl.

  “You know how the Pax think. They spent a lot of capital trying to get Esa for themselves. Just because they failed at that doesn’t mean they’ll pack up and go home—they’ll consider it an investment.”

  “Will you two please stop arguing and just answer me?” Esa asked, looking between the two of us. Her voice was trembling, almost desperate. She knew what we weren’t saying was bad; she just didn’t know how bad.

  I sighed. “It’ll be rough, at first,” I said.

  “It’ll get worse,” the Preacher added.

  I glared at her until she looked away. “It’ll be war, Esa,” I told the girl. “That’s what the Pax do; that’s what they care about. Strength. Proving their strength.”

  “But . . . why?” she asked. “We’ve got—what’s there? Wheat fields and . . . and farmers and bandits, nothing worth—”

  “But that’s what the Pax want, kid,” I told her. Leaving aside the bit where what they really wanted was her; she already knew that, and reinforcing it now—making her blame herself for the horrors currently tearing her homeworld apart—would do no one any good. “They want the wheat fields, sure, but more than that, they want the farmers, and the bandits, too. Because once they’re done—once the world’s pacified and under Pax control—those people won’t be farmers or bandits anymore.”

  “They’ll just be more Pax,” the Preacher said softly.

  “You’re telling me—everyone I knew, all the other kids from the . . . you’re telling me all of them will be forced into being soldiers.” She shook her head, like she wouldn’t believe it, like she couldn’t, like if she just denied it enough it would stop being true. “You said they wanted to brainwash me, not that they’d . . .”

  “Not all of them.” The Preacher shrugged; I couldn’t tell if her apparent callousness was an act, trying to drive Esa to something, or if she really didn’t care about the people she’d spent however many years with, passing as one of their own. “Maybe not even most. Most of them will be kept as slaves, to harvest the wheat, to do whatever other labor needs doing, and, of course, to make more slaves. Who will then have the strongest of their number culled for the army, and on, and on, and on. That’s how the Pax work. Everything feeds the army, the army conquers more worlds, grows larger, keeps moving.”

  I frowned at the Barious. “You’re well-informed for someone who’s been stuck on a locked-out world ever since the pulse,” I told her.

  “I never said that,” she shrugged. “You may have assumed it, but I never said it. That’s your fault, not mine.”

  “Wait.” Esa looked between the two of us as if she’d just now realized something. “Forget . . . forget sects and Pax and whoever rules the galaxy for a moment. . . . You two are talking like—like you’ve both been alive since the pulse. That was over a hundred years ago. You, sure, maybe.” She nodded at the Preacher. “I know Barious are long-lived, but you”—she turned toward me—“you’re human. Like me. We don’t live that long.”

  “We used to,” I shrugged. “Still do, in some places, with access to nanotechnology and higher-tier medical treatments than your world had. Before the pulse, most species lived four, maybe five times their typical physical lifespan.”

  “Well—not quite,” the Preacher put in. “They could live that long. But most didn’t, given that the primary occupation for pretty much everyone back then was war.”

  “So how old are you?” Esa asked me.

  “Old enough,” I replied.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  The Preacher looked me up and down, using her gaze to scan me with various instruments. “Well over one fifty,” she replied. “Closer to two hundred than that.”

  I fixed her with a look. “That’s some pretty invasive shit to do without someone’s permission, you know that?”

  “I do.” You’ll note that wasn’t an apology.

  “You’re over a hundred and fifty years old?” Esa’s eyes were wide as she stared at me. “The oldest human I ever met was, like, sixty.”

  “I look good for my age, don’t I?”

  “I mean—yeah, I suppose. Shouldn’t you look a little less road-worn, though? With your fancy medical treatments and all?”

  “I think that’s just her face.” The Preacher leaned back in her chair, smiling.

  “Why don’t both of you just—”

  “I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation,” Scheherazade broke in, “but we’re approaching our first stop, boss.”

  “We are?” Esa jumped off the table. “I get to see a new solar system?”

  “Not much of one,” I replied, heading back for the cockpit; she followed, like a puppy after someone carrying a tray. “The Pax will still be chasing us; the more systems we can bounce through without giving them a direct line on our exit vector, the faster we’ll lose them. We’re headed to a lifeless collection of . . . pretty much nothing. A handful of gas giants, no rocky planets at all—just dozens of moons that nobody ever got around to terraforming, given that there’s nothing particularly interesting about either the planets they’re orbiting, or the moons themselves.”

  “So how does that help us?”

  “We’ll set down on one of the moons, let the hyperdrive cool for a bit, then take off on a new vector. Even if the Pax catch up to us at our next stop, the odds that they’ll be able to find us before we jet off again are pretty damned slim.”

  She made a face at me as we both buckled ourselves in. “So that’s it? Barren moons, the exciting act of sitting? You’re just determined to take all the fun out of interstellar travel for me, aren’t you?”

  I grinned. “You want a show?” I asked her, reaching for the hyperdrive controls and beginning to ease them back. “Here’s a show.”

  With a jolt, we came out of hyperspace.

  CHAPTER 2

  I’d said that the system we were jumping into was boring, and I stood by that—there was nothing of interest, nothing of use, just a bunch of planets
with null resources or value—but just because it was boring didn’t mean it wasn’t pretty. You get enough gas giants in close enough proximity to one another—and these were all very close, so close that in a couple hundred millennia, scant seconds in galactic terms, they’d probably start colliding and changing one anothers’ orbits—and it turns into a very pretty sight.

  It helped that, to the visual spectrum of the human eye, they were all different colors, all vibrant and glowing. Closest to us was a massive blue orb, indigo storms spinning through its atmosphere; just beyond that was a smaller orangish planet, bright enough that we could actually see several of the blue world’s moons highlighted against its surface. Past that were giants of every color in the rainbow, some multiple colors at once, all basking in the faint luminosity of the system’s core, a long-since-collapsed white dwarf.

  So at least Esa’s first view of a system beyond her home was an impressive one.

  “Holy mother,” she breathed, taking in the view.

  “I know, right?” I grinned, running course projections on my monitors, with Schaz’s help. When you’re not traveling through hyperspace, conventional faster-than-light drives make traversing interplanetary distances possible, but not quick; we’d have to head for the moons of the nearest planet, the big blue one. Thankfully, pulling out of hyperspace near a celestial body tends to randomize the exit location for each craft that does it—I don’t know why, ask a quantum physicist—which meant that the Pax would have no idea which planet we’d emerged nearest to. Even if they’d followed our vector precisely out of Esa’s home system, they might still emerge on the far side of one of the other celestial orbs.

  “So cool,” Esa whispered. She’d unbuckled herself and moved closer to the window to get a closer look, almost pressing her face up against the clear cockpit. She pointed excitedly toward a green world in the distance—it looked small, but of course, to be that visible with the naked eye so near one of its neighbors, it must have been massive. “That one has rings!” she gasped.

  “It does.” I’ll admit it—I played the hard-ass, and I pretended like I never cared about any of the kids I transported. That was . . . necessary. It had to be. But this—and they all did this, all the kids from worlds pushed back to a time before space travel was commonplace—this got me every time. I didn’t know whether I was offering them a better life, not really. It was necessary, necessary for the good of the galaxy, but that didn’t mean it was better for them.

  But at least I could offer them this: to show them wonders they’d never seen before, wonders they’d likely thought were permanently out of their reach, if they even knew such sights existed at all. So many years after I’d been introduced to spaceflight, my first, great love, seeing them react the same way I had: it helped remind me that the things I’d been before—before I’d been Justified—hadn’t all been bad. Just most of them.

  “Yes, it’s very pretty,” the Preacher said, joining us in the cabin. “How long will we be in system?”

  “Hyperdrive takes a little under an hour to cool down,” I shrugged.

  “The Pax may well arrive in that window.”

  “They may, and they may not, but they won’t find us; we’ll be gone before they can even lay out a sensor grid, much less start sweeping. Even if they manage to trace our vector out of here, we’ll have increased our lead time—they’ll have to cool down their drives, too. Escaping interstellar pursuit isn’t fast, but it’s not the hardest thing in the galaxy to do, either; not so long as you’ve got the ship for it. Which we do.” I patted Schaz’s console affectionately.

  “This craft is an impressive design,” the Preacher admitted, looking around her—the nicest thing she’d had to say about Scheherazade since she came onboard. “Multipurpose, capable of performing in various gravity wells as well as in the void, set up for long-haul travel—especially noteworthy, given its size—and for intense combat. I’ve never quite seen its like, I’ll admit.”

  She was trying to be nice; I’ll give her that. Still, Schaz’s voice was frosty as she said into the cabin, “I’ll thank you to refer to me as ‘her,’ rather than ‘it.’

  A ghost of a smile on the Preacher’s face. “My apologies.”

  “Wait.” Esa was confused. “If you’re a ‘her,’ why do you sound like a man?”

  I sighed. I appreciated that she needed to ask the question, but as I’d spent most of the trip out from Sanctum listening to Schaz complain about this very set of circumstances, I wasn’t in a hurry to listen to it again. “Because our lives are complex,” I said, cutting off Schaz before she could start.

  “And because JackDoes is an asshole.” Not that she didn’t try anyway.

  “And also because of that. Set us down on that nearby moon, will you Schaz?” I tapped one of the celestial bodies on my display. “At least that way we’ll be hidden if the Pax do show up.”

  “Right.” Esa turned back to me. “The Pax. I still wasn’t done asking about them.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, standing from the helm. “No reason to have this conversation crammed into the cockpit, though.” I made my way back toward the living quarters, not waiting to see if they would follow; Esa hesitated for a moment—taking in the sight of the moon approaching through the window—before following.

  “So,” I asked her, pulling myself up a seat. “What do you want to know?”

  CHAPTER 3

  You and the Preacher both—you know who they are,” she began. “And you both seem to know why they want me. I feel like I’m the only one in the dark, here.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded, reaching forward to activate the holoprojector in the center of the main table; it filled the room with light. “Schaz? Display a basic Pax shocktrooper.” The diagram—an overlay of armor and weaponry over various shifting racial “types”—snapped into focus, floating in midair.

  “I know what they look like,” Esa said; I think she was going for vaguely annoyed, but mostly she was too busy staring at the holoprojection with something like awe. She’d never seen its like before.

  Finally, she ripped herself away from the glowing wireframe display. “I’m asking who they are.”

  “But what they look like is who they are,” I told her. “That’s the point of all that armor. No identifying traits visible; it’s impossible to tell species or race or gender through all that mass. That’s how the Pax began. Uniformity in purpose; uniformity as common bond. The concept is . . . seductive, to a certain type of mind.”

  “And not the worst goal ever,” the Preacher said, joining us from the cockpit.

  I acknowledged her point with a nod. “To be divorced from who or where you were born, or how; to be judged only on your merits. Like I said—it has its appeal. To be Pax, all you have to do is be Pax. Regardless of how you were born, so long as you follow their creed, nothing else matters. And you are given purpose, a purpose many of their number lacked before becoming Pax.”

  “And what creed is that?” Esa asked. “What purpose do they offer?”

  “ ‘Might makes right,’ ” I said simply. “That’s it; that’s all. Everything else they believe stems from that. They believe that the only righteous universe is one where the weak depend utterly on the strong, and the strong, in turn, prey on the weak, in order to grow stronger. If you’re a soldier, then you fight, to prove that you deserve to win. If you’re not a soldier, if you can’t fight, you’re a slave, fit only to serve those that can.”

  “It’s the ‘deserving’ part that makes the Pax . . . troublesome,” the Preacher added, with typically Barious understatment.

  “The slavery part doesn’t help,” Schaz added sourly.

  “This from a shackled.” The Preacher dismissed my ship with a wave of a hand; I glared at her, but said nothing. “The Pax believe that the strong have a moral responsibility to fight,” the Preacher told Esa, “a moral responsibility to grow stronger, and the weak, likewise, have a responsibility to serve the strong, in return for their prote
ction.”

  “And that’s why they want you,” I told her. “You’re strong. Therefore trying to add your strength to their own—or to kill you, trying—is their responsibility. What you might or might not want has nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m not . . . I’m not strong, though,” she protested. “I don’t know how to fight. I . . . I watched the two of you defend us on that tower, and I just huddled in the bunker.” Something almost bitter in her voice. “I was so goddamned scared.”

  “That’s natural, kid—I’d be more worried if you hadn’t been. But the Pax can conquer fear in their soldiers, erase it, along with most everything else other than hate. Once they did that, your gift would make you an unstoppable force on any battlefield. Believe me—I’ve seen what happens, when they get their hands on someone . . . gifted. It’s not pretty. For the kid with the gifts, or for whoever’s standing in their way.”

  “So that’s the other part of your job, isn’t it?” the Preacher asked. “That’s why you’re more soldier than diplomat. You don’t just find gifted children for the Justified, and you don’t just recruit them. You deal with the ones that get caught up in . . . something else. Make sure they don’t get turned into weapons. Weapons that could be used against you.”

  “I do what I have to do.” I wouldn’t say more; not in front of Esa. Not to the Preacher, either, for that matter. It was none of her business.

  I turned back to the girl instead. “As far as the Pax are concerned,” I told her, “there’s no question: you represent strength, and if you don’t choose to use that strength for your own benefit, then they have a moral responsibility to see you either eradicated or indoctrinated.”

  “That’s why they don’t want you joining her sect.” The Preacher nodded at me. “The Justified are already guilty of several counts of moral failure, as far as the Pax are concerned—they don’t use their strength to dominate others, they prefer to act from the shadows, behind the scenes, influencing events rather than seizing control directly—”