The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  Then it all came crashing back in. He had run; I had refused to follow, or even defend him. And we’d just crashed into whatever new life he’d managed to set up for himself, bringing that down around his ears as well. I didn’t know for a fact that the Pax had come there looking for us, but I didn’t not know it, either.

  His smile slowly faded at the sight of whatever it was he saw on my face. “So,” he said, leaning back against his chair, “how have you been?”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “This is awkward,” I admitted.

  “It’s not awkward,” Scheherazade protested. “It doesn’t have to be awkward, at least.”

  “Do you guys need the room, or something?” Esa asked, looking between the two of us.

  I sighed, and shook my head. “No. Stay,” I said. “If we’re going to fight, it’s not like there’s anywhere on this ship you could not hear it, anyway. Schaz just isn’t that big.”

  “I have a ladylike figure,” Schaz said primly.

  Javi laughed, out of nowhere. “What the hell is wrong with your voice?” he asked her.

  “JackDoes,” she replied, her tone full of murder.

  “Ah. How’d you piss him off?”

  “He’s been trying to develop a sense of humor—I think he may be modeling it after someone currently on board, in fact. Someone who was never all that good at humor to begin with, despite their own certainty that they were.”

  “You mean me?” Javier tried to sound innocent. He was bad at it.

  “I mean you, yes.”

  “Sorry we got your pirate base blown up,” I said to Javi, standing from my chair and straightening. It wasn’t exactly a rousing apology, but it was at least a start.

  He shrugged. “It’s not like it was my favorite place in the galaxy, anyway. But pirates are surprisingly willing to trade with you when no one else is.”

  “So that’s what you’ve been doing? Making your living as a trader, a smuggler?”

  “It’s kept me flying,” he admitted, scratching his chin. “After all, I spent years mapping systems that the Justified either didn’t think were worth further investigation, or never got around to, but what’s not worth it to a sect like ours—yours—can still be plenty profitable for one man.”

  I smiled, looking down. “So you’re still an explorer at heart,” I said.

  “I am what I am,” he sighed, staring at his hands. “I think we both know at this point that’s not going to change. Anyway.” He looked up at me, then past me, at the Preacher. “Javier Ortega,” he said, extending a hand. “Nice shooting back there.”

  “And yourself,” she answered, carefully returning his handshake. “I hear you’re—”

  “Can we do this later?” I interrupted. I was tired, and it came out crankier than I meant it to, but I couldn’t help it—it had been a long day. “Javi, this is the Preacher—Preacher, this is Javi, like he already said. She’s here looking after the girl. The girl’s my charge.”

  “Your cargo, you mean.” His tone was dry, just a hint of humor running underneath it.

  “That’s pretty much what she means, yeah,” Esa agreed.

  “On your way to Sanctum, huh, kid? Good luck—it’s nice there. I kind of miss it. Anyway.” Javier spread his hands before turning back to me; always the peacemaker. “You said back on Beyond Ending you were here for my help. What can I do for you?”

  “Marus, he’s—”

  “Holy shit, Marus is on board?” he broke out into a broad grin as he turned, scanning the cockpit, like he was expecting his old Tyll friend to have been hiding in an air duct or something. “What’s he—”

  “He’s hurt, Javi. Bad. He’s slipped into cort.”

  The smile was erased from Javier’s face in an instant. “How long?” he asked.

  “A couple of days.”

  “So he’s got a while yet. I have a supply stash not far from here.” He shifted over to the navigation console, leaning across Esa to work in commands. “I set it up in case of . . . well, in case of exactly the sort of thing that just happened. Odds and ends, but I’ve got a good deal of medical gear—”

  “Hypochondriac,” I muttered, coming up behind him to peer over his shoulder. It was something I just did, old habits.

  “Pragmatist,” he replied, his tone fake-hurt. “Anyway, I’m fairly sure I’ve got some Tyll stuff that Schaz can break down and recompound into something that’ll . . . well, wake him up, at least.”

  I nodded. “Good. Schaz, when we drop out of hyperspace, can you send these new coordinates over to Bolivar?” I asked.

  “Will do, boss,” she replied.

  “You still calling her that?” Javier laughed at her.

  “What does Bolivar call you these days?” she asked in return.

  “ ‘Dummy’, usually,” he said.

  “He’s always lacked a certain respect for his captain,” Scheherazade replied primly. “The agents of the Justified are to be respected—”

  “Thank you, Schaz—” I was almost touched.

  “Even when they’re stupid and wrong and making bad decisions.”

  I sighed. “Thank you, Schaz.”

  “Schaz—never change,” Javier said, stepping away from the console.

  “I know. I’m pretty much perfect.”

  Javier looked up at me. “So,” he said. “Are we going to talk about it?”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “You have anything you’ve been waiting three years to say?” I asked.

  “A few things, yeah.”

  “You planning on saying them?”

  “Looking for the right moment.”

  “Then skip it for now. Let’s get Marus taken care of.”

  CHAPTER 17

  We jumped back into hyperspace, though not for long; Javier hadn’t been exaggerating—a rarity—and his stash really was close. In the meantime, I did my best to steer clear of him, given that however this ended, I knew it wouldn’t likely be with the two of us resuming our former relationship.

  That task was made easier by Esa sticking to him like glue, staying right on his heels as he moved into the living quarters. The Preacher didn’t know anything about me to tell her, and Schaz wouldn’t—.Javier, of course, would, mostly because he knew it would piss me off. “No, kid.” He laughed at whatever she’d just asked him. “I’m not quite as old as she is.” He rotated the kitchen module out of its housing with practiced ease, then started digging around in my cold box for something to drink. Make yourself right at home, Javier. “Didn’t see much of the sect wars, myself.”

  “So she was a soldier,” Esa said. “I knew it.”

  “I’ve told you that much,” I said from the cockpit; they both ignored me.

  “Yep.” He nodded. “Soldier, gunner, tactician, one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen; if you name it and it involves some kind of fighting, she’s done her share.”

  “And you?” she asked.

  “I’m no slouch—especially not on the piloting front—and I know how to keep myself alive, but I’m not her.” He looked sideways, caught me glaring at him, and raised his hands, one still grasping his glass. “And she’s sending me some not-so-subtle signals that I ought to shut up now, anyway.”

  “Why won’t you let anyone tell me anything?” Esa complained at me.

  “You’ll learn what you need to know at Sanctum. Javier’s take on the galaxy is . . . a bit skewed.”

  “By what?”

  “By Javier.”

  “By survival,” he said as way of correction, adding in a grin to lessen the bite. “Galaxy looks a lot different from the sorts of places I wind up than when you’re looking out from the shimmering towers of Sanctum.”

  “Oh, yeah, Javi. Because my life’s been nothing but crystal palaces and silken sheets.” I was officially failing in my “do not engage Javier” policy. I couldn’t help it. He was just goddamned frustrating—what was I supposed to do, let it lie?

  “There are palaces?” Esa asked.

&nb
sp; “There are towers,” I answered with a sigh. “The rest is Javier being Javier.”

  “How about the Pax?” she asked. “Can I ask him about them?”

  The smile fell off of Javi’s face in a hurry. “You can ask, kid,” he said. “I don’t think I can tell you anything you don’t already know. What they can take, they take. What they can’t take, they kill. What they can’t kill, they do their damnedest to cripple, so it can’t rise against them.”

  “But they’re not everywhere, right? She”—and here, she pointed at me, the action almost accusatory—“she told me they didn’t rule the galaxy or anything, but I still don’t—it seems like there are a lot of them.”

  He had to laugh at that; she looked kind of pissed off, so he stifled it in a hurry. “Look, Esa; I get that you grew up on a kind of . . . backwater, yeah? No offense,” he added.

  “None taken. It was kind of a shithole.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.” The Preacher sounded vaguely affronted on behalf of her adopted home.

  “As shitholes go, no.” Esa shrugged.

  “Point is, to someone who’s spent most of their life on one world—which is most people, honestly—it can be tough to grasp just how big the galaxy is,” Javier said. “There are tens of millions of Pax, yeah. Or at least, people living under Pax rule. Maybe even more than that—billions, possibly.”

  “That’s . . . a lot,” she said with a swallow.

  “It is, and it isn’t,” he said. “Compared to your homeworld, it probably is. Those billions of people, though, they only represent a tiny fraction of the total galactic population. Not even a full percent of the whole—not even a percent of a percent. A handful of worlds that the Pax claim; that’s it. Not even the biggest of the corporations—not those that are still running or those that didn’t survive the pulse—could claim to have influence over even half the worlds out there, let alone all of them. The galaxy’s just so damned big, nobody can control all of it. Even during the golden age there was never a central government—”

  “That we know of,” the Preacher added. “Most of the stories from that era of history are more legend than fact, anyway. It’s entirely possible there was a galactic government, or even that some of the civilizations that came before—like the forerunners, those who built my kind—might have managed it. Just because we’ve never seen it done, doesn’t mean it can’t be.”

  “No, but people being people does,” Javier disagreed. “You get enough individuals in a room and ask for a show of hands on any single issue, there will always be at least some full pockets. I don’t care if the issue is something almost universal, like ‘are babies cute’; there’s always going to be at least one contrarian.”

  “I hate babies,” Schaz put in, feeling her opinion was necessary at this point. “They smell and they’re loud and they can’t hold interesting conversations at all.”

  “Who hates babies?” the Preacher asked her, aghast.

  “Me. Like I just said.”

  “Case in point,” Javier tipped his drink in the direction of Schaz’s core. “And that’s just us, just a couple people in a room. A central government over something as big as a galaxy: it’s just untenable.”

  “The Pax don’t think so,” Esa put in.

  “The Pax are stupid,” Javier reminded her. “Fascists usually are. It takes a combination of a pretty scary failure of empathy and a total lack of imagination to think that you can run the whole galaxy, when nobody else has ever been able to. Especially after the pulse.”

  Scheherazade’s proximity alert started chiming; I ducked back into the cockpit, leaving them to their political discussion. Personally, I agreed with Javier, but that didn’t mean a single institution couldn’t affect the whole of the galaxy: just that they couldn’t possibly control it. That was the difference between the Justified and a more formal government. We were closer to an intergalactic aid agency than anything else.

  “Coming up on the system Javi marked, boss,” Schaz told me as I slipped behind the stick. I pulled us out of hyperspace, studying the scans on the viewscreen as I did.

  Not much to see—either in the mapping data or on the system coming into view as we dropped out of hyperspace. There was a lone populated world, one that hadn’t been taken so far back by the pulse as to be robbed of electricity, but still well short of spaceflight. Javier always had been clever: that one planet would draw the attention of anyone who arrived in the system, and they wouldn’t bother with any of the other celestial bodies, of which there were thousands, thanks to an asteroid belt ringing the inner worlds like an ocean of floating stone.

  He’d hidden his stash on one of the larger asteroids in the belt; not even Schaz’s scans could pick up anything interesting about it, just dense, common rock. We followed Bolivar in, both because of his more finely tuned instruments—this was what he had been built for, after all—and because he knew where the hell he was going.

  The asteroid was the size of a small moon, and Javi being Javi, he hadn’t just left his stash on the surface. No, he’d built it deep in a strange rift that ran halfway down to the core of the asteroid, because a constant low level of paranoia also helped in Javier’s former profession. In his current profession, too, come to think of it.

  Bolivar guided us deep into the crevice, until we were well below the point where scans would penetrate through the asteroid’s metallic surface—you’d have to be right above this particular location, and have some pretty fancy scanners, and know what you were looking for, to find Javier’s little emergency depot. Like I said: paranoia.

  It was just a cave, of course, a natural formation in whatever process had left the massive rift we had descended into. Javi was a great many things, but he wasn’t an engineer; he’d rigged up a simple shield generator to contain the atmosphere that he’d pumped in, and that was that. Too bad; I wouldn’t have minded taking another pass at Schaz’s damaged thrusters if he’d had a workshop. As it was, though, there was just the bare stone cavern, small enough that both ships could barely squeeze inside.

  Javi and I exited Scheherazade’s ramp, leaving the other two behind. The only light came from the floods on the ships; the only thing they illuminated was the stack of crates strewn haphazardly against the far wall. “Oh, very well organized,” I told him, not bothering to try and hide the sarcasm.

  He arched an eyebrow at me. “I’m sorry, were you expecting things to be alphabetized by scientific name?” he asked. “Or maybe in descending order of likelihood and severity of possible emergency. I’ve got better shit to do than spend a few days puttering around in all of my various stash houses, hauling crates around to suit the obsessive nature that I entirely lack.”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Ever since I got kicked out of the Justified, yeah, I do,” he replied, keeping his tone as bland as possible.

  Still, I winced. “Fair point,” I said.

  “Thank you.” He walked to a crate—seemingly at random, it’s not like it was marked “Tyll medical supplies,” or even anywhere near any other crate that might have had some sort of indicator as to why in the hell he went to this one in particular—and popped the mechanical lock. After a moment of rummaging, he emerged with a steel cylinder in his grasp. “This should do,” he said, extending it toward me.

  I took the medicine from him. “Thank you,” I told him.

  “My pleasure,” he grinned. “You got me off of Beyond Ending intact, I should think that—”

  I sighed. “No, dammit, Javi, I mean . . . I mean thank you. You didn’t have to do this.”

  He nodded. “You’re welcome. Marus is my friend too. Speaking of . . .” He gestured to the cylinder, locking his crate behind him again. “Let’s go dose the old man. I’m sure he has some interesting stories to tell.”

  We ascended back inside Scheherazade; the Preacher had lain Marus out on the medical table again. I plugged the cylinder into one of Schaz’s ports, and then ran an IV from there to Marus, finding a vein just
above the second joint in his elbow. It was currently just a slow-drip saline solution, but now, once Schaz was ready, she could feed the drugs to Marus without any other aid from us.

  “It will take me some time to synthesize the compound,” Schaz said, “and then it will take a little bit for Marus to come out of cort, too. He may also still need medical attention when he does.”

  “How long until the hyperdrive’s ready to jump again?” I asked.

  “Factoring in exit time from this . . . really deep hole we’re in, about fifteen minutes,” she said. “It will be a few hours before Marus can wake up.”

  “All right. Bring up your maps; find me a broadcast tower on a nearby world, preferably somewhere friendly. We need to let Sanctum know what’s been going on in here. I’m already overdue to be back with Esa.”

  “You don’t want to head directly back there?” she asked. “If we plot a direct course, we can be home in just over a day.”

  I shook my head, and looked up at Javi. He smiled, and raised his hands. “I get it,” he said. “You appreciate the help and all, but me helping you out of a jam won’t be enough to clear my name with the council. In fact, you’re going to leave me out of your report entirely, because not shooting me in the head would reflect badly on your ability to follow orders.”

  “Oh,” Schaz said, sounding small. “Right.”

  “Javi, that’s not—”

  “It is; it’s fine. And I, you know, I appreciate it. The whole ‘not shooting me’ thing.”

  Esa was watching the two of us. “This . . . doesn’t seem right,” she said slowly. “It doesn’t seem fair. I mean, he’s not a bad guy, right? He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He helped us. Can’t we help him?”

  He smiled at her. The look didn’t quite reach his eyes, but maybe it was enough to fool a teenager. “Don’t worry about it, kid,” he told her. “I knew when I got on board this wasn’t a grand reunion, just a brief hello. Like running into an old friend on the street, when you’ve both got places to be.”