The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “The coming battle will take place in the void, Helliot,” Criat sighed, looking at me with something like disappointment in his brown eyes. I couldn’t blame him; if I’d been in charge of me, I’d want to slap me silly too. His agents were taught to keep themselves alive at all costs, and I’d just thrown that out the window. “The Pax aren’t coming to assault Sanctum from the ground; they’ll hang in orbit between the planet and the moon and pound us to dust with their long guns. A few platoons of tactical soldiers won’t make a difference, even if we do get enough frigates running before they arrive to load up boarding parties.”

  “It’s not worth a single soldier’s life to—”

  “I would spend the lives of every soldier under my command to ensure we get those guns back,” Seamus undercut her. His tone was mild, but all the same, he was pissed. “And don’t discount the abilities of the men and women under my command so easily. If I tell them to clear those guns, they’ll clear those guns. Whether or not the guns’ll be in any shape to use, after, well . . .” He threw MelWill a crooked grin. “That’s engineering’s problem.”

  “Great,” MelWill sighed. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.”

  “I would like to point something out at this juncture.” John Henry’s voice filled the auditorium; we all paused expectantly. He wasn’t a member of the council per se, but as the AI responsible for most of Sanctum’s functions, his voice carried a great deal of weight in the room. “Based on my analysis of the intelligence Marus has brought us, we have somewhere between a week and three before the Pax arrive, depending on whether or not they know we know they are on their way.

  “A week may or may not be enough time to get the frigates up and running, and it may or may not be enough time to plan a worst-case-scenario evacuation, but it is enough time to try and reclaim the guns. Whether those attempts will succeed or fail, I have no way of telling; I have no sensors on the world below, or even on the emplacements on this very moon. But we do have plenty of time to at least try.

  “This isn’t an ‘if/or’ scenario; they can reconnoiter the emplacements, and decide then exactly what sort of force will be required to retake them from the Reint, if indeed it will be possible at all. In the meantime, there is plenty of other work to be done. Repairing the frigates, calling back the operatives we have scattered about the cosmos, seeding the bottleneck with mines and other traps to slow the inevitable Pax advance.

  “If we are going to win this fight—and I won’t bore you with calculations on what our odds are; suffice it to say they are not in our favor—we need to be working, not bickering. To succeed, every department of Sanctum will have to operate at their peak abilities, not spend time trying to undercut the others. You’ve achieved what you set out to achieve today—you’re all aware of the threat, and the various steps that will need to be taken to counter it.

  “I suggest adjourning at this point and letting each department start their own work. Further discussion will only belabor our differences, not remind us of our common cause: not just our own survival, but the survival of the work we do. It is not a hyperbolic statement to make to say that the fate of the entire galaxy is at stake here: not just from what the Pax may become if they abduct the children under our protection, but from what will occur if Sanctum—and the Justified—fall.

  “The Pax intend to destroy us, in order to make themselves stronger. They do not care that in doing so, they may well doom the entire galaxy to another pulsed age, one that might make the current era seem a halcyon epoch in comparison. No one else in the galaxy is working to prevent the pulse from returning; no one else is aware of that inevitable threat, and it is not information we can share without endangering ourselves further. We are the line. Therefore, it falls to us to defend ourselves. There will be no help coming.

  “Is there any disagreement on any of the points I have made?” You could almost feel the AI watching us all in turn, to see if anyone would object. They did not; John Henry was many things, but unreasonable had never been one of them. “Good. Then let us get to work.”

  “One more issue before we begin,” Acheron said, pointing at me. “The stranger she has brought into our midst, and the traitor Javier Ortega. What will we do with them?”

  “You could ask me directly, you know,” the Preacher told her, her tone acidic at being so slighted by a member of her own race.

  “I could, but the question wasn’t for you,” Acheron replied indifferently.

  “Let them join her assault on the Reint,” Helliot said with a shivering motion in her tentacles, the Vyriat equivalent of a shrug. “If they die with her, the problem is taken off our hands. If they do not, we can consider their success a mark in their favor.”

  “You’re kind of a bitch, huh?” the Preacher asked mildly. I choked back a snort of laughter; it hadn’t been what I was expecting.

  “It’s why she’s so good at her job,” Seamus said, a hint of a smile on his own face. “Do you object to joining the assault?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “So I guess I have no objections—no useful ones, at least.” She sounded more like she was being dragged to some less-than-ideal social outing than being forced to face down prehistoric killing machines.

  “Then there we go.” Seamus turned back to me, and nodded. “I’ll send word to my men to meet you at the armory. We won’t be able to spare a craft, not with all the other work that’ll need doing, so you’ll have to give them a lift. You can resupply there if you need to.”

  “Will do,” I nodded.

  “Also, try not to get yourself killed,” Seamus added, a full-on smile on his face this time. “We really need those guns.”

  “Will also do.”

  “One more thing,” Criat rumbled. I winced; I’d worked for him long enough to know when he was pissed. “Before you take off on this daring adventure to commit suicide, kindly send Javier to me. I’d like a word with my wayward friend.” Exploration and cartography had also fallen within my boss’s purview; Javi had answered to Criat before he’d gone off the reservation. Several members of the council had blamed Criat’s loose hand for Javier’s actions. I doubted Javi was in for a fun conversation.

  I grinned at my boss. “If I tell him that, he might take off running instead.”

  “Then knock his ass out and drag him to me. I have some words to exchange with him. Words about his parentage, and the sexual proclivities of his mother. What’s the human expression I’m looking for?”

  “Probably ‘motherfucker,’ my friend,” Seamus answered him.

  “Right. Motherfucker. I’ll have to remember to call him that, specifically. It’s always nice when you can insult someone in their own species’s argot.”

  CHAPTER 10

  On my way to the armory, I had Schaz tell Bolivar to tell Javier to meet Criat; at least I didn’t have to do that in person. “What the hell have you gotten us into?” Marus asked me from my elbow as we walked.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I shrugged. All around us, Sanctum bustled with activity; the directors were already busy giving orders to their various units. We had a week, maybe more, but every single second would count. Sanctum had hidden us for a century—we’d never had an attack like this in our history in this place.

  “Did it? Did it really?”

  “You don’t have to go along, you know,” the Preacher told him.

  “I know,” he agreed with her. “I’m kind of regretting it.”

  “So why did you volunteer?”

  He grinned at me. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  I smiled back. Always nice to have friends.

  We made our way through the city, back toward the hangars built into the mountainside, where the military installations were located—specifically, the armory. I’d visited often, since it also doubled as Seamus’s quartermaster facility, where any outgoing agents picked up whatever gear they’d need. Ordinarily,
I’d be getting chewed out for leaving behind so many working tools on Esa’s homeworld, but we had bigger problems to worry about now.

  Seamus’s troops were already assembled, strapping on heavy ordnance. Their lieutenant was a Mahren named Sahluk, small for his species, which meant he only towered over me by a foot or so, his shoulders wider than Marus and me standing side by side. His rocky slate-like skin was shot through with veins of copper, making a strange contrast to the metal exosuit he was attaching around himself.

  “You got us into some trouble, huh?” he said to me as I entered. Mahren can be kind of hard to read—their facial expressions tend to be incredibly subtle, meaning it was slightly hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or serious. I’d worked with Sahluk a few times before, though, and I was banking on the former.

  “You know, just had a few strays follow me home,” I returned his mild tone. “Nothing serious.”

  He chuckled. It sounded like a minor earthquake. “Well, good to have you back in the field,” he said.

  “I knew you weren’t just a glorified babysitter,” the Preacher told me.

  “Yes, you’re very smart,” I sighed. “It helps that I told you I wasn’t, multiple times.”

  “What, you didn’t think she was a soldier?” Seamus asked the Preacher.

  “I knew she was—she just wouldn’t admit it, not outright.”

  Seamus laughed. “You’ve been spending too much time with Marus,” he told me. “Some of that spycraft, keep-your-secrets-close nonsense is rubbing off on you.”

  “I am standing right here, Sahluk,” Marus pointed out mildly.

  “I didn’t say you weren’t good at it,” Sahluk replied, feigning a slightly injured tone. “Just that it’s not, you know, for everybody.” He rapped his rocky knuckles against his exosuit, indicating the massive frame inside. “I’m not really built for covert infiltration.”

  “We all have our gifts,” Marus shrugged.

  Sahluk just laughed, turning back to me. “You want one of these?” he asked, tapping his exosuit again.

  I considered it, but shook my head. The suits were great for heavy combat—if nothing else, they let you use far larger guns than any sentient species was strong enough to carry on its own. An exo-wearing trooper was a force to be reckoned with on a battlefield, simultaneously their own base of fire and forward cover for other troopers, given the heavy armor they wore. We weren’t headed toward a conventional battlefield, though, and I had always valued speed and agility over sheer firepower.

  “I’ll let your guys handle the big guns,” I told him. “I’ll try to pick the Reint off before they can peel you out of those things like rations out of a tin can.”

  He nodded. “Suit yourself.” With negligible effort—his own massive strength helped, but it was mainly the exosuit—he lifted a spare battery pack from the floor, and attached it to one of his crew, a big Wulf. She grunted with satisfaction as her suit powered up and she was able to actually move again, the fusion battery charging the servos and pistons that made up the suit. Sahluk checked the rest of his platoon; they were all suited up and powered on as well.

  “You guys volunteered for this detail, right?” Marus asked him. We were headed into a bad situation; he wanted to make sure they all understood that.

  “We did indeed,” Sahluk replied. “You know how boring it gets around here with nothing to do but everyday policing? It’s enough to make a fella wish for a minor riot.”

  “You should have been in there with the council before,” the Preacher told him, her tone dry. “You almost got one.”

  He arched a coppery eyebrow at her. “Not impressed with Sanctum so far, outsider?”

  “I’d hoped the forces that damned the galaxy would be slightly more impressive, yes. Instead you squabble like children, no different from the sects that you shut down.”

  “We’re people, Barious. Just like other people.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “Stow it.” This from one of Sahluk’s platoon, a Barious herself. She pointed a metallic finger at the Preacher. “Everything you think you know, right now, everything you’re feeling—it’s been felt. You’ve got nothing new to add. You got dragged into this, fine, but now you’ve got an opportunity to do something. If you’re going to take it, quit whining. If not, go back to pining for our creators to return and save you from having to make any decisions on your own. It won’t help, but I’m sure it’ll make you feel better.”

  A strange moment passed between the two of them as they stared each other down; I could tell by the slightly flickering light in their eyes that they were continuing their little exchange, information flowing between them at a far faster rate than auditory communication would allow. Whether their little consultation was a philosophical debate of ideas, or simply an exchange of Barious-specific anatomical and scatological insults, I had no idea.

  Sahluk looked between the two of them. His big, exosuited hand curled into a fist. If it came to a fight, he could put either one of them through a goddamned wall, and that was without the suit’s help. Barious were strong—built internally not far from the exosuits the soldiers wore, all servos and pistons and tensile strength—but Mahren were absolute forces of nature. “All good?” Sahluk asked his soldier quietly.

  She tilted her head quizzically, still looking at the Preacher. “Depends,” she said.

  The Preacher gave a single sharp jerk of her head. Whatever they’d discussed in their little exchange of ideas, she hadn’t liked it, but she wasn’t bitching, either.

  The other Barious nodded as well. “All good,” she told Sahluk.

  He reached down and hefted his primary weapon, already cabled to his exosuit: a semiautomatic grenade launcher that I wouldn’t have been able to lift even if I had been suited up. “Then let’s go kick some ass,” he said.

  I pointed at his weapon; it was the kind of gun you strapped on when you didn’t just want to storm an enemy compound, you wanted to level it, and for whatever reason you couldn’t do so from the air. “You know we want to leave the facility intact, right?” I asked.

  He just grinned at me. It probably wasn’t as comforting as he imagined.

  CHAPTER 11

  Making my way back to Scheherazade with a heavily armored platoon of exosuited shock troopers at my back made me feel like I was leading a terrible parade. The various streams of people headed here and there on their errands to harden Sanctum parted like a river as we passed. I didn’t know if we could clear the two guns with just under twenty soldiers, but I felt a great deal better about our odds than when it had just been Javier, Marus, the Preacher, and myself.

  Schaz, however, felt differently. “No,” she said, broadcasting her dissent through the speakers near her ramp, so that all of Sahluk’s troops could hear her. “No, no, no. They won’t all fit. I’m not rated to carry—”

  “You’ll be fine, dear,” I said soothingly, managing not to roll my eyes.

  “We work hard to keep my interior clean—look at them! They’re going to leak oil and lubricant all over my nice, shiny floors! I’ve had JackDoes working hard to clean out the mess Marus made by nearly dying in my medbay—JackDoes has apologized, by the way—”

  “Am I supposed to?” Marus asked wryly; I shook my head.

  Schaz was still in full voice. “—and there’s no way twenty heavily armed soldiers aren’t going to make another mess, right after I’ve gotten the first one all cleaned up.”

  “If JackDoes has apologized, why isn’t your voice fixed?” I asked, trying to distract her.

  It didn’t work. “He says it will take a few cycles to boot back up—a week or so. Meanwhile—”

  “Come on, Schaz. It’s for the good of Sanctum.”

  “But my floors!”

  Sahluk was laughing; I suppose he couldn’t help it. Over the years, spending so much time with only Schaz for company, I’d given her significantly more . . . leeway, I suppose, to develop her own personality. Most agents had their ships
reset after a while, to clear them of exactly this sort of hiccup, but I was resistant to that sort of thing. I hadn’t really expected Schaz to develop a borderline obsessive-compulsive need for cleanliness—due, I’m sure, to my own spartan tendencies—but she had, anyway. It had become more and more pronounced over the last few years, and I would have felt boorish to ask one of the AI techs to purge her of a part of her personality just because it was occasionally an inconvenience.

  “We promise, sir.” Sahluk managed to stop chuckling long enough to get the words out.

  “Ma’am,” I corrected him, under my breath.

  “Ma’am,” he adjusted. “We’ll take the utmost care with your floors. We may be big, but we’re surprisingly graceful.”

  “You’d better,” she grumbled.

  “Oh, please tell me you fellas are here to arrest me.” Javier was approaching, taking in the platoon of heavily armed soldiers standing around Schaz’s ramp. The expression on his face told me that his conversation with Criat had been exactly as fun as I would have expected it to be. “Throw me in a cell; just don’t let Criat shout at me again. He called me . . . things.”

  “No such luck, Ortega.” Sahluk had shut down his friendly demeanor; apparently, he wasn’t exactly pleased to be partnered up with a theoretical traitor on this mission.

  Javi looked Sahluk up and down. “We going to have a problem?” he asked.

  “You planning to betray Sanctum again?”

  “No,” Javier shrugged. “But I didn’t think I was doing that the first time, either.”

  “Let it lie, boss.” This from one of Sahluk’s people, his sergeant, by the rank bars on his suit. A Tyll—not what you would expect from security, but people are allowed to stray from their species’s typical cultural roles, after all.

  Sahluk looked Javier up and down once more. “Yeah,” he said finally. He turned, and marched up Scheherazade’s lowered ramp without another word.

  “Appreciate it,” Javi told the Tyll sergeant.