The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  In all the systems I’ve traveled to—and I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands—I’d never seen anything of its like. When I’d first reached this system, after I’d finally managed to evacuate the world where we’d set off the pulse bomb—this hadn’t been where the Justified’s original home base had been; it had been soaked with pulse rads and unusable, so we’d retreated to this bolt-hole instead, realizing that we’d have to stay hidden if anyone in the greater galaxy ever learned the extent of the great sin we’d committed—I’d been both awed by the terrifying grandeur of the sight, and reminded that this was why we’d done what we’d done, regardless of how the consequences had played out.

  Javi’s quote was right—it was easily one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen or ever would see, and it had come at the cost of billions of lives.

  “What . . . what is it all?” Esa whispered.

  “The remnants of a sect lost to history.” It wasn’t any of us that spoke; instead, it was a deep, resonant bass voice, modeled after a human male, broadcast from Schaz’s comm systems. Esa jumped when she heard it; the voice laughed. “Forgive me, young one. Scheherazade patched me in to you, and I always like to greet new arrivals to Sanctum.”

  “. . . Thanks?” she said, her voice unsure.

  “We’ve got news, John,” I told him. “Bad news.” John—John Henry, in full—was Sanctum’s resident AI. He acted as a kind of mentor and father figure to everyone on Sanctum, especially to the smaller, younger ship intelligences, but he had a soft spot for the kids I brought in, as well.

  “I know; Scheherazade has already sent me the data you recovered,” he replied. For whatever reason, John Henry hated using nicknames. Scheherazade was always “Scheherazade,” never “Schaz.” He barely tolerated us calling him just “John.” “I’m convening the council as we speak; they’ll want to debrief you in person when you arrive. They’re . . . not likely to be happy with the friends you’ve brought along, you know.”

  “The council’s never happy with me; I’ll survive.”

  “We can hope,” he replied. That wasn’t ominous at all. “I’ll talk to you again once you’ve addressed them.”

  “I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle the anticipation,” I told him dryly.

  “In that case,” he said, “have Marus tell the story about the time you were almost eaten by eels. That should help pass the time.”

  Goddammit. Never try to match wits against a supercomputer with a brain the size of a city block.

  CHAPTER 6

  So this is the Justified’s great hiding place.” The Preacher had joined us in the cockpit, was staring out at the broken system we called home. “Where you retreated to lick your wounds after your great crime. No wonder no one can find you.”

  “It’s kept us safe for a century,” I agreed, not rising to her bait.

  “I can see why.” As horrible as the acts that had ripped these worlds apart were, the Preacher was right—they had left the system an eminently defensible location. Interstellar scans wouldn’t even read any habitable worlds—there was too much interference from the chaos the various attacks had left behind.

  Once someone arrived from hyperspace, the twin black holes and the debris from the shattered planets left only one route toward Sanctum itself. There was no other approach toward the habitable zone; if incoming ships tried a different route, regardless of how fast or agile they were, they’d either be sucked into the black holes or ripped to shreds by the rain of razor-sharp detritus spinning through most of the system. Even a dreadnaught couldn’t stand up to that level of bombardment.

  Anyone coming to attack us—like, say, a Pax flotilla currently outfitting for that very same push—would be forced through that single avenue between the black holes, limited in the amount of ships they could move into the system at any one time.

  “It won’t be enough,” the Preacher said.

  “I know.” She wasn’t wrong there, either. Most of Sanctum’s defenses were built around hiding its location from the larger galaxy; the Pax already knew where we were. They’d force through as quickly as possible, even with the bottleneck of the approach, and once they cleared the black holes and the debris field, we’d be at their mercy. Their dreadnaughts would slip into orbit above Sanctum, and pound us to dust. The city was shielded, of course, and had an anti-orbital gun of its own, but no shield could stand up to that level of sustained attack, and the single major gun in Sanctum—despite being one of the most powerful in existence—still wouldn’t be able to drop all the dreadnaughts the Pax were bringing, if Marus’s intelligence was right.

  I took us through the dangerous approach, weaving an old path through the interplanetary wreckage. “Take a good look,” I reminded Esa. “This is what the sect wars left behind.”

  “Why would someone do all of this?” she asked.

  “Because there were worlds they wanted, and couldn’t have, so they decided no one would have them. Because their enemies lived here, and they couldn’t root them out with conventional warfare, so they got desperate, and used more terrible tools instead.”

  “Who were they, though? The people that did this, the people that lived here? Before the Justified, I mean?”

  “Doesn’t really matter. Not anymore. Both were sects that have been long lost to history, that were fading in their power since well before the pulse. Those who lived here, of course, thanks to all that.” I nodded out the cockpit window. “And the winners, as well. This likely wasn’t a victory for them—it was their last, desperate attempt to . . .” I didn’t know the words, how to put it. To leave their mark. To prove that they mattered. Instead, among all the spread of the massive void that was the galaxy, this was the only way they would be remembered. For the destruction they’d left in their wake.

  We hadn’t meant for the pulse to do what it did. But it had prevented something like this from happening ever again. No matter what Esa or the Preacher thought, the act of setting off the pulse—the question of whether it had been wrong or right—wasn’t so cut-and-dried.

  “It was mostly Reint in-system,” I told Esa, trying to answer her question, not just pass on my own sudden melancholy. “There are still pockets of them, here and there, on the few habitable slivers of land left. Devolved into primal chaos.”

  “And you’ve just . . . left them, like that?”

  “We didn’t have much of a choice.” I didn’t get into why; if I was right about some of the decisions the council would make, I’d be delving into that soon enough.

  “That’s awful.”

  “They had their reasons.” The support came from a surprising quarter: the Preacher. “Which world has your bolt-hole?” She used the question to smoothly deflect Esa’s attention from the other remaining planets below.

  I pointed through the cockpit. “There. The tidally locked moon over the second planet.”

  It wasn’t easy to pick out through the chaos; our approach had angled us toward that second planet, a large frozen world that still orbited the binary stars at the center of the system. It hadn’t always been an icy hell—while it had escaped direct attack, the various other changes to the system’s geography had pulled it out of its normal orbit, ceasing its rotation almost completely and locking it in an elliptical path around the stars. The side we couldn’t see was constantly scorched by the heat of the binaries, and the other half was a frozen waste, leaving only a sliver at anything even close to survivable temperatures.

  The same thing had happened to the rotation of the moon above, where Sanctum was hidden. A single crescent no more than a hundred miles wide was the only habitable area on the whole planetary body, where the planet below blocked the boiling heat from the twin stars, yet reflected enough heat for organic beings to survive. The rest of the moon was either boiling oceans of liquid crystal, or frozen, jagged wastes—beautiful, and deadly.

  That was another reason we’d chosen to locate Sanctum on that particular moon—the locked rotation. Dreadnaughts couldn’t
bombard the city until they’d put themselves in orbit around the planet below, meaning that they needed to position themselves between the icy wasteland and the crystal fields of the moon before they had an angle of attack. They couldn’t fire during their approach—they’d have to circle the moon before Sanctum came into their firing solutions.

  “All right, we’re through the difficult stuff,” I told Schaz, releasing the stick. “You can take control again.”

  “Thank you ever so much,” she said dryly. Schaz didn’t think I was actually a better pilot than she was, at least when we weren’t in combat, which was one of the reasons I was. AI are programmed to react in a certain manner in a certain way under the assumption that everything around them is going to follow the same rules, which meant that yes, Schaz was better at minute shifts in our heading and meticulously fine-tuned course corrections than I was, but once things started getting complicated, she wouldn’t be able to keep up. I’d met very few AIs I’d want on the stick over any given human pilot in chaotic conditions—in combat, or just when threading a needle through spinning fields of death, like we’d just done.

  “So what happens now?” Esa asked.

  I took a deep breath. “When we land, you’ll be taken to orientation,” I told her. “You’ll be put in a group of other kids who have relatively recently arrived, in the last few months or so. Try to be nice—some of the things I’ve told you they won’t know yet. After that—”

  She waved me away. “I don’t—I’m not asking what superpower school is like,” she said witheringly. “I’m not worried about the first day of class. From everything I’ve heard, we’re not likely to survive to graduation anyway. I mean what happens with the attack?”

  “That,” I told her, “depends on the council.”

  “Which is why you’re going to go shout at them as soon as we land.”

  “You heard John Henry. I’ve already been summoned.”

  “Yeah. Which means you’re going to go shout at them.”

  “I’m not going to shout.”

  “You’re probably going to shout,” Schaz weighed in.

  “Not if they’re not idiots,” I told her.

  “. . . You’re probably going to shout.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The moon passing beneath Schaz’s body was a barren landscape of strange, twisting crystalline formations, all violet reflection and turquoise shards of climbing minerals. Sanctum’s homeworld was a great deal of things, but it was also very pretty. Even the boiling seas, where the light from the suns raised the temperatures to past the crystals’ melting point—leading to constant storms of razor-like shards on the edge of the temperature differential—had a certain glorious awe to them.

  The city itself—and that’s what it was, not just a colony, or a military base, but a city, populated by people from all over the galaxy, people trying to make that galaxy better, even if they could only do so from hiding—was built across a mountainside, overlooking a crater filled with a pellucid sea of indigo-to-red crystal, the formations frozen in sweeping waves when the destruction that had swept through the system had locked the moon’s orbit in place. The mountain itself rose up from out of that sweep of crystal, its rocky outcroppings at first studded with the growths as well, then less and less as it climbed higher. The lights of Sanctum shone from the peak, a beacon even in the constant daylight—a beacon the Pax were coming to snuff out.

  Scheherazade set down on one of the landing platforms jutting out from the mountainside. Sanctum clung to the side of the rock in platforms and bridges, the peak drilled almost hollow so that the city was held just as much within the stone as it was anchored to the outside. The landing platform was already buzzing with activity, people running around, trying to prepare for what was coming. I doubted they could, but it was good to know the council weren’t completely sticking their heads in the sand.

  When we disembarked, I grabbed the nearest technician I could find, a Reint called SamMay. She was taller than most of her species, which meant she came almost all the way up to my chin; she grinned as she saw me. The technicians always liked me, for some reason—despite the fact that Schaz could be . . . particular about how, exactly, they worked on her, though she was usually effusive with her praise when they finally got something the way she liked it.

  The Reint as a species had evolved down a tributary of the evolutionary river closer to reptilian than mammalian; SamMay’s scales were a latticed pattern of neon orange and pink, and her fingers still ended in the retractable talons that meant Reint were handy mechanics, given that those talons were hard enough—and sharp enough—to double for most of the tools in a toolkit.

  “Get a crew together, whoever you can find,” I told her. I wasn’t trying to be rude; you just sometimes have to be . . . abrupt with Reint, or else they’ll simply wander off and do something else entirely. “I need Schaz patched, rearmed, and in prime condition as soon as possible. Take a look at her maneuvering thrusters in particular—at least three took some bad hits.”

  “Can do.” SamMay shrugged, blinking her nictitating membrane at me.

  “Also don’t let JackDoes anywhere near her.”

  She laughed, or the Reint equivalent, which was a kind of hissing through her front row of sharp teeth. “As soon as he heard you were back, he ran away to hide,” she told me, her long, fanged jaws giving her speech a sibilance lacking from most other species.

  “Well, it’s his lucky day; I’ve got other shit to deal with. When I do find time, though, he’s going to regret messing with my AI. I did not appreciate the joke.”

  “He said you were going to try and throw him off the mountain.”

  “You ever known me to try something and fail?”

  “I have not, no,” she admitted.

  “Then tell JackDoes that after all this shit is over, he’d better present himself to Schaz and apologize, profusely. If he doesn’t, it’ll be a long drop and a sudden stop for him. Meanwhile—get Schaz looked over.”

  “I got it, I got it.”

  “Thanks, SamMay.”

  “No problem. Council’s probably waiting on you.”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  SamMay darted off, already hollering to get the attention of some of the other technicians; I turned back to the ramp, where the others were waiting. “Marus, can you take Esa to orientation?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “I’ll join you after,” he said.

  “You really ought to get to the infirmary.”

  He grinned. Amazing he could still manage it. “I’ll join you after,” he repeated. “Come along, Esa.”

  The girl stared at me for a moment, like she was trying to think of something to say. I just nodded at her, and she nodded back—that was enough, it covered what neither of us wanted to try and find a way to speak out loud. She whispered something to the Preacher, then followed Marus into the bustle of the hangar.

  She was almost at the door when she turned around; apparently she’d thought better about the “not saying anything” bit. “Good luck!” she shouted across the space at me, waving.

  “Thanks, kid,” I said back. I’m not sure if she heard.

  “And me?” Javier asked, coming to stand at my shoulder and watch Esa walk away.

  “Up to you,” I shrugged. “You can do whatever you like—just remember that most of the people here still think of you as a traitor and a deserter. I’ll do my best to convince the council not to shoot you in the head right away, but until then . . .”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll just stay on board Bolivar. He’s probably getting lonely anyway.”

  “Seems like a good plan.”

  “I’ll come with you,” the Preacher told me.

  I looked over at her. That hadn’t been what I was expecting. “They may not even let you into the council chambers,” I reminded her. “I wasn’t exactly supposed to bring home strays with me.”

  “I know. But I want to see the people who rule this place myself. Look them in the eye
and make sure they truly understand what they’ve done, and what they’re facing.”

  I sighed. “ ‘Rule’ might be too strong a term,” I told her. “Most of the time they can’t even agree what to have for lunch.”

  “That’s democracy for you. I suppose if you were in charge, you’d just decide what was for lunch, and that’s what everyone would have.”

  “If I was in charge, we’d just eat whatever we had the most of, until that wasn’t the thing we had the most of anymore. It’s the same thing I do on board Scheherazade. Much simpler.”

  “You’re a tyrant at heart, you know that?”

  “I’ve spent most of the last century escorting teenagers, usually through pretty hairy situations. Of course I’ve developed a dictatorial streak; there’s no other way to get them to listen.” We started making our way into the hangar, heading toward the council chambers. I didn’t know if it was actually wise, taking the Preacher with me, flaunting the rules I was breaking just when I needed the council to hear what I had to say, but it made me feel surprisingly good that the Preacher had chosen to come with me.

  I knew she was still angry, both with the Justified as a whole and with me personally, so it was a nice gesture on her part to offer me some solidarity, from an outside perspective, at least. I appreciated it.

  We stepped into the stone-and-rose corridors of the military base that occupied this side of the mountain—the interior crystals spreading through the rock like veins of ore—and made our way toward the city itself.

  Time to see what the council had to say.

  CHAPTER 8

  That vein of rose-colored crystal that grew out of the interior of the mountain—a glittering sweep of shards reflecting the light—slowly gave way to amber veins, instead, and then pink, the colors refracting in dazzling patterns on the floors. The people who had built this place—people here long before the Justified—had placed careful spotlights in cunningly concealed positions all throughout the caverns, letting the illumination bounce and spread and sweep, bathing the whole place in kaleidoscopic colors that sometimes made it look less like a city and more like an art installation. They’d built something as beautiful as this, and someone had still come to murder them all. That was the way the galaxy had worked, before the pulse.