The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  I didn’t stop glaring at her, or at least in the general direction of her core. I had a bad, bad feeling I already knew what she was going to say next. “Scheherazade?” I asked, my voice gone quiet—Esa looked at me nervously. She hadn’t known me long, and she could already tell that wasn’t a good tone. “What ‘friend’ do we have at a pirate cooperative?”

  “It’s . . . it’s possible that I’ve been getting messages from Javier.”

  “Possible. It’s possible.” My hand was reflexively gripping the arm of one of the chairs, mainly so that I didn’t pick up something else and throw it at the bulkheads between me and Scheherazade’s primary processors.

  “I haven’t been answering him or anything,” she hastened to add, reading my mood as well as Esa had. “I just . . . read them. And . . . possibly . . . bounced the messages back as ‘accepted.’ Just so he knew—”

  “Do you want us to get kicked out of the Justified, Schaz?” I seethed. “Do you want—”

  “Look, whatever this is,” the Preacher interrupted, “we need to get your friend to medical treatment, now. I can get him to the point where the damage itself won’t kill him, but cort burns a great deal of resources out of the Tyll physiology. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not a hibernative state—he’s going through calories and nutrients far faster now than he would if he was unharmed, trying to heal himself, except these injuries are beyond his body’s ability to heal.”

  “You’ve stabilized the burns; won’t he come out of it himself?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ve stabilized them enough so that they won’t kill him; that’s not the same thing as healing him. He has internal injuries that are keeping him in cort, injuries I can’t do anything about here. Again, with certain drugs, the cort can be . . . supercharged, to finish the work and bring him out of that state, but in the meantime, if we don’t get those drugs inside of him soonish, he will starve himself to death trying to fix what can’t be fixed. I can give him a fluid IV to slow that down, but he still needs help, more help than we can give here, and he needs it fast.”

  “You know a great deal about Tyll physiology, Barious.”

  “I know a great deal about many things. You have your history; I have mine.”

  I unwrapped my hand from the chair. “Fine,” I said. “Schaz, set a course, get us out of here.”

  “To Beyond Ending?”

  “To Beyond Ending. If you think you can convince Javier to let us on board—”

  “Oh, he’ll do that in a heartbeat. He really—”

  “I don’t need to know what was in his letters, Scheherazade. I don’t want to know what was in his letters. If he can help Marus, I’ll do him the courtesy of pretending I never saw him, but that’s it. That’s all he gets.”

  “Boss, he didn’t mean to—”

  “Set in the goddamned course, Schaz. And get us out of this system, before the Pax find us again.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “And Schaz?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Don’t think we’re not having a conversation about the fact that you’ve kept in contact with a turncoat operative that we have orders to shoot on sight. That discussion is coming, and it is not going to be pleasant.”

  “. . . Yes, boss.”

  CHAPTER 10

  After checking on Marus myself—not that it would help; I wasn’t a doctor, especially not one trained in Tyll physiology, but he was my friend, on my ship, and I wasn’t going to just let him suffer without at least making sure there wasn’t anything else we could do—I stomped off to the cockpit. Yes, stomped. Was it a little childish? Sure, probably. Mainly I was trying to make sure the others knew that I didn’t particularly want company at the moment, and also it felt good.

  Of course, Esa followed me in, ignoring all my not-so-subtle social cues with the blithe ignorance of a teenager. “Is your friend going to be all right?” she asked me.

  I sighed, staring out the cockpit window. “As long as we get him the drugs he needs, he should be, yeah,” I told her.

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But when he wakes up—he’s going to find out that his ship is gone.”

  “That won’t be a pleasant experience for him, no. Khonnerhonn and Marus have been together nearly as long as Scheherazade and myself.”

  “Poor fella.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So”—she leaned back in what she was clearly coming to think of as “her” chair—“who’s this other guy?”

  “Esa—”

  “I mean, theoretically you’re doing all of this for me, right? So shouldn’t I know who we’re dealing with, what kind of trouble you’re getting us into?”

  “Esa, don’t—”

  “Because it sounds like you’re taking me into a dangerous pirate den, and I’d think that if that were the case, you could at least tell me—”

  “Esa. Shut. It.”

  “She’s right,” the Preacher said, entering as well. “We deserve to know.”

  I picked up my coffee mug from this morning; it was empty. I set it back down. I don’t know why I’d done that—even if it had still had coffee in it, it would have been ice cold. I sighed again. “Fine. Javier Ortega used to be another operative of the Justified.”

  “Like you,” Esa nodded.

  “Not like me.” I shook my head. “There were—are—a great many different operatives, and they all have different jobs, different duties to perform. I find kids.”

  “And then some,” the Preacher added.

  I ignored that. “Marus, back there—he tracks down information. Javi was something closer to . . . a cartographer, I guess you could say.”

  “A what now?”

  “It means he made maps,” the Preacher told her.

  “Even before the pulse, nobody had very reliable maps of the galaxy,” I told Esa, spinning my chair around so that I could face her. “Each sect had detailed information about its own territory, but they didn’t share very well; nobody wanted to draw a roadmap directly to their vital operations and risk that it might wind up in their enemies’ hands.”

  “And after . . .” The Preacher just shook her head.

  I nodded. “And after the pulse, what few maps anybody had were worthless anyway; what might once have been a bustling colony might have been completely abandoned, and a wasteland of industrial scrap might have had a settlement built on top of it, if it had been less affected by the pulse than somewhere else.”

  “So this Javi guy—”

  “Javier Ortega.”

  “You were the one that called him ‘Javi,’ not me.” Esa shrugged. “Anyway, this guy ran around the galaxy, figuring out where things were and what had changed after the pulse, and then he came back to your . . . sanctuary place—”

  “I believe she refers to it as ‘Sanctum,’ ” the Preacher reminded her.

  “Right, her little clubhouse place, where I’m supposed to go to save the world and stuff.”

  “The galaxy. Not just the world.” The Preacher again.

  “Yeah, from the return of the pulse, right, can’t forget that insanity. Anyway, this Javier guy told all your Justified friends what the rest of the galaxy was like, outside of the bubble of this Sanctum.”

  “That’s . . . not too far off,” I admitted. “If you think of me as a kind of bodyguard, and Marus as a kind of spy, Javier would have been a sort of . . . explorer. Filling in the blank places on the maps.”

  “Okay,” Esa nodded. “So I get that much. But what happened next? Because clearly something went down to get your panties in a twist.”

  “According to my physiological readings during her exchange with Scheherazade,” the Preacher replied, “her relationship with this Javier Ortega might have had an entirely different impact on her undergarments. She reacted—”

  “Preacher. Stop. Fucking. Measuring. My vitals.”

  “I’m a Barious—that’s just how we see.”


  “See less. It’s invasive.”

  “You’ve had a sexual relationship with this person.”

  “That is absolutely none of your business.”

  “Does kind of explain why you got all washed out and scary there for a second when his name came up, though,” Esa put in. “I really thought you were going to start breaking things.”

  I took a deep breath. Just because she was right didn’t mean I wanted to comment on it. I ignored her instead. “Javier was out on a reconnaissance mission when he stumbled across what’s known as a ‘refugee fleet,’ ” I said, returning to the thread of the story in an attempt to divert my two passengers from their other line of inquiry.

  “What’s that?” Esa asked.

  “When the pulse happened, it affected planets, moons, major stations—most everything with a gravity well,” the Preacher told her. “What it didn’t have any impact on was ships already in transit between star systems. Most of those either landed on a pulsed world without knowing what had happened, and had their ships cooked by radiation, or simply settled on a planet where the pulse hadn’t had much effect.”

  “But not all of them.”

  “But not all of them.” The Preacher nodded. “Those that didn’t land, and weren’t able to find welcome on the less-affected worlds, simply kept flying, gathering more and more ships to their banner, searching for that rarest of birds: an unsettled, unclaimed, terraformed world unaffected by the pulse.”

  “So your man Javi found one of these refugee fleet things—”

  “He’s not my man—” I protested.

  “You know what I mean.” She waved me away. “He ran across these refugees, then what?”

  “He ran across them when they were about to be torn apart by a fleet of Filt ships. The Filt are—doesn’t matter. When I say ‘Filt,’ just hear ‘Pax’; they operate in mostly the same fashion. Tin-pot would-be conquerors of a newly weakened galaxy.”

  “And I’m guessing he didn’t just make a notation on his maps—‘found a refugee fleet here; probably won’t still be here the next time I swing by’—and head on his way.”

  I shook my head. “He did not. I don’t know why he didn’t—”

  “Basic sentient decency?” The Preacher raised an eyebrow.

  I glared at her. “Don’t start. He led the refugees away from the Filt and straight toward Sanctum, toward Justified space.”

  The Preacher nodded. “Given what you said to me earlier, outsiders being shown the path to your fabled sanctuary is not something that’s supposed to happen.”

  “It is not. I’d be in a great deal of trouble just for bringing you in. Javi led thousands of refugees right to the Justified doorstep. Thousands. People we didn’t know, people we couldn’t trust. His plan worked, of course—the Filt thought they were starting a fight with a lightly armed refugee flotilla, and instead ran into every armed ship Sanctum had, in an ambush. We wiped them out without losing a single pilot.”

  “So what happened to the refugees?” Esa asked.

  “We took them in. We didn’t have any other choice—it was that or kill them, and we weren’t ready to commit the mass murder of relative innocents. We also couldn’t just send them on their way, not with them knowing the route to Sanctum.”

  “And Javier?”

  “His plan had worked,” I said again. “The refugees had been saved from the Filt, and given a home; it was a better outcome than they could ever dream of. If the council had let that stand, every single Justified operative would be constantly leading people back to Sanctum, people they thought were ‘worthy,’ worth saving. Sanctum has impressive resources, but they’re not limitless. We cannot save everyone. That’s drilled into all of us very early on, a lesson Javier chose to ignore.”

  “So they drummed him out, as an object lesson to anyone else who might get the same damn fool idea in their heads.” The Preacher nodded. “Honestly, I’m surprised they let him live.”

  “I’m not sure if they would have,” I shrugged. “But Javi had known what he was doing all along; he knew there would be consequences. Before the fight was done—pretty much as soon as he saw that we were engaging the Filt, that they had no chance of winning—he ran. With his ship, and his gear—more than he would have gotten away with, even if the council had just voted for exile.”

  “He didn’t say goodbye to you?” Esa frowned. “That was cruel.”

  “He’s been trying.” Scheherazade sighed. “She won’t answer his letters. Won’t even read them.”

  “Because if I ever see him again, I’ll have to kill him.” I glared at all of them. “That was his sentence: post-factum exile, and death, if he ever crossed paths with a Justified operative again.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to,” Esa said. “You could just—”

  I shook my head. “What I’m doing is important,” I told her. “I’d think you would understand that. Collecting children like you, giving them better lives—preparing to answer the return of the pulse. It means something, and I’m good at it. If I risked it all just to keep in contact with Javier, I probably wouldn’t have been able to rescue you. Do you get that?”

  She nodded, looking slightly abashed.

  “Good. Now, if I’ve answered enough of your personal questions for a little bit, would you two mind giving me a little space? I have to think through how I’m going to play this.”

  They stood and made their way through the door. Esa did so without comment; the Preacher, however, paused in the threshold. “Tell me one more thing,” she said.

  “What?” I closed my eyes.

  “Did you not want to tell that story because you think it reflects poorly on you—that you had a relationship with a man who endangered your cause? Or did you not want to tell it simply because it makes you seem more . . . human?”

  I didn’t answer her. Apparently she took that as response enough, and left me with my thoughts.

  CHAPTER 11

  I slept, fitfully, in the pilot’s chair. You learn how to do that, to adjust your body’s rhythms, to catch sleep when you could. I’d picked up the skill all the way back in the wars, controlled my breathing, calmed my thoughts, and willed myself to rest now, because I figured I had another long stretch ahead of me, and I didn’t know when my next chance to grab some shut-eye was going to be.

  Plus, that way, I didn’t have to think about seeing Javier again.

  When I woke up, of course, Esa was staring at me.

  “What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  She handed me a cup of coffee. That was sweet of her; that, or Scheherazade was coaching her. “We’re going into a pirate den,” she said.

  “I’m going into a pirate den,” I corrected her. “You’re staying on the ship.”

  “Okay; fine. But still. There are pirates? How are there pirates? Why are there pirates?”

  I shrugged, still groggy. The coffee was a nice gesture, but couldn’t she have waited until the caffeine had actually hit my system before starting in with the questions? “Galactic commerce took a definite hit when the pulse shook everything back to various earlier stages of technological evolution—that will happen when ninety-five percent of your trading partners drop out of the market—but it didn’t go away entirely. Even if five percent of the worlds out there were only lightly affected by the pulse—hell, even if it was only two percent, no one’s really sure, it’s not like anyone’s done a census—that still leaves millions of developed worlds open for business.”

  “Okay, so you’ve explained how there’s still, you know, trade and stuff. That doesn’t explain pirates.”

  “Sure it does. Where there’s ‘trade and stuff,’ there’s people willing to steal from those who engage in trade. And stuff. Thus, pirates. And slavers—you’d be surprised how many of those worlds decided that, now that the inhabitants of other planets didn’t have access to the same tech they did, the people living there were suddenly subhuman, had no rights at all.” Esa made a face; I guess that kind of logic w
asn’t too far from the bandits who had stalked her settlement—or the locals’ view of the bandits, for that matter. “So slave-taking bastards deck out their ships in anti-rad shielding, find a world without the tech to put up much resistance, swoop in, scoop up as many people as they can before the shielding starts to break down, then jet off and sell their take—namely, people—to the highest bidder.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah, it is. There was a moment when we thought the galaxy might be a better place after the pulse. It had cut a great deal of civilization off from some very helpful tech, yeah, but it also went out of its way to target the really scary stuff, too—the planet-killing weapons and the nanotech viral research centers, things like that.”

  “I don’t know what most of those words mean.”

  “Be thankful for that.”

  “I still think that argument is horseshit, though.”

  “Do you?”

  “Just because people aren’t dying all at once quite so much doesn’t mean they’re dying any better. Sure, I was never worried about someone coming along and blowing my whole planet up, but I also didn’t know anybody who lived to a hundred and seventy-three, or however old you are.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I grew up in a fairly peaceful little city, you know; you saw it. You know how it was kept so peaceful?”

  I shook my head, though I could guess. “How?”

  “Because the local government exiled anybody who didn’t agree with them. Fed them right to the bandits that prowled the countryside. I saw it; I lost friends to it. Plenty of the kids living in the orphanage were only there because their parents had done something to piss off the ruling council. Does that sound ‘better’ to you?”

  I stared at her for a moment. She was so young; it was easy to forget that, on worlds like hers, ‘young’ didn’t mean the same thing I sometimes thought it did. And that coming from me, who had never been young.

  Again, I shook my head. “No. It sounds pretty much the same, just on a smaller scale. It’s not like democracy and galactic suffrage were all that popular during the sect wars, either.”