The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Marus,” I told him. “He . . . by the time we got there, he was already going.”

  He looked down for a moment, composing himself. Tyll shied away from big displays of emotion; just part of their cultural makeup. “Last thing I remember was the Pax getting a missile through,” he said. “Khonn was doing his best, but there were . . . just too many of them.”

  “You sent a message,” I offered. “Set it to repeat, on a Justified frequency. That’s how we found you.”

  He nodded slowly. “I . . . I think I remember that,” he said. “But there were Pax, all around, they . . . came out of nowhere. Hit us a couple times before we could even get out-system; we kept running, and they kept chasing, getting in a few licks between each jump.”

  “Khonn kept running, after,” I told him. “Finally gave them the slip, even though . . . he knew he didn’t have long. He knew we’d come for you, though, at the end. He knew we were there, knew that you’d survive.”

  “Good.” He took a drink of water, and said no more. It wasn’t his way.

  “Holy hell, Marus; you’ve seen better days.” Javier had joined us.

  Marus broke into a broad grin when he saw him standing at the airlock. “Javier Ortega, may my pate rust over. Things must have gotten real bad for her to have dug you up. Are we about to die, or what?” He held out a hand; despite Javier’s choices, Marus had never held those against him.

  Javier wouldn’t have known that, but he shook Marus’s outstretched hand firmly anyway. “Probably,” he admitted. “So you’re not going to demand that she shoot me in the head here and now?”

  Marus shook his head. “I was one of the ones who spoke up for you, brother,” he replied.

  “Good to know someone did,” Javi replied, firmly not looking at me. I ignored him.

  Marus looked between the two of us. “Don’t give her a hard time, man,” he said. “We all knew why you did what you did; it was the sort of thing the Justified were supposed to do, were built to do, before we became . . . sidetracked.”

  “ ‘An answer to the pulse is the greatest good, our ultimate responsibility to the galaxy,’ and all that,” Javi nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Marus. I knew what I was doing when I did it.”

  “Yeah, well, she won’t say it, but it hit her hard. She doesn’t need you twisting the knife.”

  “Marus.” I shook my head softly.

  He sighed. “Fine. You two can have your spat; I’ll stay out of it. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

  “A few jumps out of Sanctum,” I told him. “Do you know why the Pax hit you? They’re behaving strangely, all over; I’ve run into them twice on this trip, both in places you wouldn’t expect them to be. And that’s not counting them hitting you.”

  “No idea, but they’re up to something—you’re right about that. There were . . . let me start at the beginning.”

  “Do that. Last time I saw you, you were on your way to a well-deserved furlough. Something about going mountain climbing somewhere, because that’s a good idea for a guy your age.”

  He laughed. “Never even got to start that trip,” he replied. “Got a message from one of my contacts, an urgent request for help. Khonn and I headed out there at full speed—she’d asked us to meet her at Marlotelle.”

  I nodded; I’d been there before as well. Marlotelle was a trading station, a little off the galactic beaten path, but still at the intersection of several well-used vectors connecting only lightly pulsed sectors of the galaxy. It should have been well outside of Pax influence, though so should Beyond Ending, for that matter.

  Marus took another drink of water, then continued. “When I arrived, there was no sign of her, but we’d met there before, and I checked one of the dead drops we’d used: found a message, a data stick. Khonn and I had just started to decrypt it when the Pax hit us. I suppose whatever it was”—he shook his head—“it’s gone now.”

  “Maybe not,” Scheherazade said. “The boss told me to pull everything from Khonnerhonn’s drives that I could, to prioritize anything with strange encryption. It’s . . . I didn’t like doing that, rooting through his files, but . . .”

  “He’d understand, Schaz,” Marus told her. “Did you find anything?”

  “I think so. An encrypted file that had recently been downloaded. I’ve been running background processes, trying to crack it, but . . .”

  “No luck? Bring it up; let me take a look.” Marus hopped gingerly off the table, made his way to the vid screen on the central table. The keyboard rotated out of its housing; coding and lines of text started flashing across the screen, far faster than I could follow. There are things I am good at, but this sort of work was not among them.

  Marus pulled up a chair and started typing away. Javier and I looked at each other, then back to Marus, letting the sound of the clacking keyboard fill the silence. Whatever we had to say to each other, it could wait. Khonnerhonn had died to get us the information behind this wall of encryption; I hoped to hell it was worth it.

  A flash of something new on the screen, then a sharp intake of breath from Marus. I might have attributed it to lingering soreness from the cort, but there was something other than pain in the noise. “Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Pax,” he replied, still staring at the monitor, and I suddenly knew what I was hearing in his voice. Fear. A great deal of fear. “That’s what my contact was trying to tell me; that’s why they hit us so hard. They couldn’t risk this getting back to us.”

  “Enough with the suspense, Marus,” Javier told him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know how, and I don’t know . . . but this is what they’ve been preparing for. I don’t . . . we may not have enough time.” He looked up at us both. “They’re putting together a massive fleet, every ship they’ve got, plus more. They’re going to hit us. They know where Sanctum is.”

  ACT

  THREE

  CHAPTER 1

  I licked my lips, my heart suddenly pounding out of my chest. I tried to convince myself that I’d heard him wrong, because it wasn’t possible; we were all so goddamned careful. We’d given up and sacrificed and worked to make sure that nobody could find Sanctum, nobody, and now Marus was telling me that had all been for nothing.

  “How?” I asked him. “How has—”

  He shook his head, still staring at the monitor. “I don’t know. They found—something, my contact didn’t know what, and he didn’t know where they found it, but she said they came into a massive armory somewhere. Maybe an old corporate world that was overlooked after—I don’t know. She says here”—he traced a line on the screen with his finger—“dozens of dreadnaughts, hundreds of ships, none of them craft she’d seen in Pax shipyards before. When she was preparing this message to me they were busy launching exploratory raids with their older craft, finishing up operations everywhere so that they could be ready when the time came to . . . to . . .” He shook his head, his six-fingered hands gripping the side of the monitor hard enough that his knuckles were a paler shade of green than the rest of his skin. “After that, they were to withdraw all their forces to the core Pax territories, preparing everything they had—all their old ships and all the new ones—for a single strike, overwhelming force.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  He spun the monitor so that I could see it: a single vector, a hyperspace route, stretching across the galaxy. Ending at Sanctum’s home system. Like an arrow, aimed at the heart of a target. Our heart. “They know,” Marus said again. “I don’t know how they know, but they know. That’s their approach route: the route they were planning to take once they were all together at the Pax core system. They may well have already left.”

  It couldn’t be. We weren’t—it didn’t make any sense.

  Except it did. Of course it did. That was why they’d been so willing to sacrifice the old dreadnaught over Esa’s homeworld, to risk thos
e that had taken on the pirates at Beyond Ending. They didn’t have the crew, not to man all of their old vessels and their newer acquisitions both, so they were shedding the weaker craft in a series of bold attacks meant to pave the way for their offensive. No more worrying about the pirates from Beyond Ending harrying their territories while they were off making their assault—they had more firepower than they knew what to do with, so they wiped the pirate refuge off the map.

  They hadn’t hit Esa’s homeworld just because they were looking to add her strength to their ranks. They’d hit Esa’s homeworld because they’d wanted to add her strength to their ranks in preparation for their upcoming offensive. They’d wanted a gifted child to lead the charge on Sanctum’s own.

  Marus was right—the map was right. If they knew where Sanctum was, and clearly they did, then attacking was a foregone conclusion. It was the Pax way.

  That meant there was a Pax armada—more than just that, multiple armadas, a force so big I didn’t even know the term for it, a force the size of which the universe hadn’t seen since before the pulse—preparing to hit Sanctum, preparing to hit the world where all my friends lived, where I’d taken all the children I’d rescued over the years and told them they would be safe. I couldn’t be made a liar like this. Not like this.

  “Schaz,” I said, my voice little more than a croak. “Set course for Sanctum. Now. Now.”

  “Yes, boss.” All the usual joking, the good-natured humor and the dry wit—it was all gone from Scheherazade’s voice. She was scared too.

  “Remember . . .” I tried to think about whatever I was forgetting, but there was too much. The enormity of this wouldn’t go away, just kept filling my mind, blocking everything else out. “Remember to send Bolivar our vector,” I reminded Schaz dully. “We’ll need to link up with him, before we start our approach.” Otherwise Sanctum control might just blast him out of the sky.

  “Got it.”

  “We could . . . the broadcast tower,” Javier suggested, flailing for ideas, doing what he always did, trying to solve things, trying to solve everything. “We could send a message, we could . . .”

  I shook my head. “We’d arrive at Sanctum well before a broadcast, anyway,” I reminded him. “Besides, I fried the tower after I sent my own message out.” That felt like it had been so long ago—half an hour, if that—that I could barely remember why I’d done it: to keep pirates from using it to locate new prey, that’s right. It seemed so unimportant now.

  “What . . . what does that mean?” Esa asked, looking among the faces of the adults in the room, all of whom probably looked as shell-shocked as I felt. I wasn’t up to looking at any of them; I was still trying to process the enormity of this.

  Marus sighed heavily, still staring at the code racing past on the screen. “Sanctum relies on deception and discretion and disinformation to stay safe,” he told her, watching the monitor as if he could will what it said to change. “That decision was made . . . many years before you were born. If no one can find the Justified, no one can attack the Justified. The location of our base was chosen very specifically because it would be hard to find, hard to get to. It’s why . . .” He made a futile, almost helpless gesture in Javier’s direction as he finally turned in his chair.

  “It’s why they drummed me out,” Javi said simply, reaching behind his head to untie his hair. He ran his hands through it, like he was trying to scratch an itch inside his skull. “It’s also why I knew they’d take in the refugees I brought with me. The more people who know the location of Sanctum, the less safe it is. If they didn’t want to kill them all, they didn’t have any choice but to absorb them. They couldn’t just let them go.”

  “Most people who live there don’t leave,” Marus said. “They help the Justified in their own way, but agents, operatives, are the only ones who go out-system; agents like us, like . . .” He looked at Javi, then looked away. “Sorry,” he said.

  Javier shrugged. “I was an agent, once. It’s a fair thing to forget. Sometimes I do too.”

  “Will they remember, when we get back there?” the Preacher asked him. “Are you walking into an execution, Ortega?”

  He shook his head. “I hope not,” he said.

  “He won’t be,” I said firmly. This was just too big to worry about one rogue operative returning to the fold. “Not after what we’re bringing with us. They might want to kill him later, but with this news, it’s going to be all hands on deck.”

  “You think you can fight this?” the Preacher asked me.

  I nodded. “We have to,” I replied. “We don’t have any other choice.”

  “You can run. Pack up everyone living there, burn everything else down behind you; don’t leave anything for the Pax to find.” She said it like she’d done it before—not from the Pax, maybe, but the running part. The leaving it all behind part. “There are millions of uninhabited worlds out there, terraformed—or nearly—and just ready for a population. Just run.”

  “Can’t.” I’d been a soldier, once—a lifetime ago. I knew how this would work.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Don’t have enough ships, for one,” Marus said, running a hand down his pate. “Even if we got the old frigates out of mothballs—and they’ve been that way for a century, it would take some serious work to get them running again—I doubt we could fit the whole population of Sanctum on board. There are millions of people living there . . . whoever the hell you are. Millions.” He looked up at the Preacher, then at me. “Who is this, by the way?” he asked.

  I waved him off. “Ships aren’t the only problem,” I told the Barious. “Sanctum’s a dead-end street, very specifically. You’ll understand when we get there. There’s only one way in and one way out; we picked it for that very reason.”

  “You hid your bolt-hole someplace with no escape route?” The Preacher couldn’t help the note of disdain that crept into her voice; it was almost closer to shock. She truly couldn’t imagine such a thing.

  “I told you”—I shook my head—“when the decision was made, we set up somewhere that we wouldn’t have to fight over. Someplace no one could find us, someplace no one would even think to look.”

  “Will someone . . . will someone tell me what the hell is going on?” Esa burst out, finally unable to contain herself. “A few days ago I was just an orphan, living on a planet I knew I was never going to get off of. Now all of a sudden there are pirates and assholes called the Pax and fights among the stars and now everybody’s real goddamned scared and I . . . don’t . . . know . . . why. Why are the Pax coming after you so hard? You keep telling me that the galaxy’s huge, and they’re just a little part of it—so why are they so hell-bent on tearing you apart? Are you even anywhere near their goddamned empire? What have you done to piss them off this bad?”

  I looked at Marus, who nodded, ever so slightly. “They know,” he said to me. “They have to. That’s why . . . it’s the only thing that explains it,” he said.

  “They know what?” Esa asked.

  “They know that we’re the reason the universe is the way it is,” I told her. “They know that we caused the pulse.”

  CHAPTER 2

  You what?” the Preacher asked. A simple question, one she’d been trying to answer for a century. There was a lurch as Schaz jumped into hyperspace; no one was paying attention. “You what?” The first time she asked, the question had been shocked, almost quiet: the second time it was full of rage.

  I don’t think she even knew she’d taken a few steps toward me, that her hands were balled into metal fists. “Easy, Preacher,” Javi said. His hand was on his gun. “Now’s not the time for—”

  “You’re telling me that you . . . you people have known what caused the pulse, that . . . that you were the ones that caused it, and you’re telling me easy?” She whipped around to glare at him, noticed that she was closer to violence than she’d thought. It was understandable. With an actual effort, she forced herself to lower her fists, but the anger in her voic
e hadn’t faded a jot. “Fuck you. Fuck both of you; fuck all of you. Start talking. Start talking now.”

  “Why?” Esa asked me. “Why would you . . .” She was staring right at me, searching my face, trying to find answers. “All the stories I grew up with, all the stories about . . . life was supposed to be so much better, before the pulse. Easier. Why would you take that away?”

  “Because your stories were lies,” I told her, my voice as even as I could manage. With a sigh, I took a seat in one of the unclaimed chairs. If the Preacher wanted to beat me to death, she was welcome to try. Maybe I even had it coming.

  I looked the Barious square in the eye. “Now you see why I didn’t want to take you to Sanctum? Now you understand why we have to hide?”

  “I understand fuck-all,” she snapped. “I want answers, Justified. Now.”

  I looked at Esa. “This was supposed to happen in a classroom,” I told her. “I wasn’t supposed to—you were supposed to learn about this with . . . charts, and videos, and stories to make you understand what happened. I wasn’t . . . I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this.”

  “But now you have,” she answered stonily. “I think the Preacher’s right. I think you had better tell us everything.”

  “Tell us why we shouldn’t just let the Pax roll right over you,” the Preacher spat. “Because right now, that would seem like justice; it would seem justified.” She snarled the last word.

  “Your stories.” It wasn’t me who started talking; it was Marus, speaking to Esa. “The ones about how much easier life was, before the pulse. In some ways, they were right. Medicine was better; it was easier to grow crops, to feed people. In a perfect galaxy. But the galaxy wasn’t perfect. More people starved to death, died from disease, every year in the old universe than do in a decade now.”