The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  A clicking sound behind me was my only warning; still kneeling beside the downed Tyll, I drew my pistol and turned, firing even as the Reint leapt from the window we’d just been standing in. That was the thing about devolved Reint—give them even a fraction of an opportunity, and they’d take it.

  I managed to get two shots off, both of which hit the creature center mass, but they weren’t enough to stop the predator’s momentum, and he hit me full-on, still snapping and slashing even as death took hold. I wasn’t wearing a fancy exosuit, and I took a couple of nasty gashes before I could throw the dying Reint off me and put another round through its skull.

  “Fuck,” I swore, just on general principle, kneeling in the rain and reloading my revolver, empty shell casings spilling from my fingers as I pulled them clear. Javier was firing in every direction, trying to cover both me and the sergeant; ignoring my wounds for now, I holstered the reloaded revolver then picked up my rifle again, doing the same. Both squads were closing on our position—we had been meant to lay down fire for their approach, but now it was the other way around as they fired into the Reint striking for us.

  The Preacher reached us first, firing with the strange arm-cannon I’d last seen her use on the observation tower; she took in the scene at a glance, realized we were capable of covering ourselves, and leapt for a drainpipe on the side of the building, shimmying up the length of it in a manner not entirely unlike the Reint themselves.

  “Go after her,” I told Javi, taking up position beside the wounded sergeant and firing toward the Reint charging at us from the facility. “I got this here, and she’ll need cover.”

  He nodded, and went, moving quickly up the same pipe, if not quite as quickly as the Preacher.

  Sahluk reached me next, the rest of his men shortly behind. I made sure to pick out Marus; no, I didn’t want any of Sahluk’s people to have been hurt either, we were all Justified, but Marus was my friend.

  Sahluk knelt beside his sergeant, checking for a pulse. “He’s still alive,” I told him, “and stable. But he’s out of this fight.” And probably scarred for life. Medical nanotech is good for a great many things, but there are some kinds of damage even the tiny machines couldn’t undo. I didn’t know it for a fact, but I’d imagine getting a faceful of highly caustic gas was one of them.

  Sahluk’s rocky eyelids fluttered for a moment, making his face look like a mountainside under the waterfall of the wash of rain. It was the only sign that he was regretting his call. That was part of being a leader—not just making the decisions, but bottling up your guilt when a decision you’d made went bad. We might have lost someone else if we’d stayed together, but then again, we might not, and he’d have to live with that.

  A high-pitched hum cut through the chaos of the storm, and then there was a flash of light; the Preacher had the last turret up and running, and all of the units were online now. Beams of solid green arched out from the turret beside her to the next on either side, and from there to the next, and from there to the next, and then the automated guns were roaring, chewing through the city, picking out telltale signs of Reint movement and pouring lead into those positions. At least one made a dash for the grid of laser, diving for a gap in the bright green lines: it was promptly flash-fried as the lasers detected his approach and sliced downward, the corpse dropping to either side of the pavement, both halves still smoking even in the icy rain.

  The perimeter was established; we were safe from attack from the city. Now we just had the facility to clear.

  CHAPTER 17

  In addition to the Tyll sergeant, two members of the other teams had been injured. None as badly as our man, but they were both out of the fight, on the casualty lists. Another had been killed outright, the Wulf Sahluk had been fitting with an exosuit when I’d first joined the platoon. I hadn’t even learned her name. I could try and deny it, but the truth was, I’d avoided that on purpose—I’d known we weren’t all going home.

  Would we have avoided those losses if we’d stayed in one group? Maybe. Or maybe we would have taken more; maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get the turret perimeter up at all, and would have been forced to retreat. A call had been made; now we had to live with it.

  We winched the wounded, and the body of the fallen, back up to Schaz. Marus went with them, to keep them stable on the trip back to Sanctum. He’d return with the first batch of engineers, those who would be working on the anti-orbital cannon, and those who would be keeping the turret perimeter running. In the rad-soaked atmosphere of this world, it would take constant maintenance to keep the fence and the gun active.

  The Reint had stopped charging the barrier. The guns had laid out enough corpses in the rain that the others, those who had been watching, had realized this was a target they couldn’t penetrate. As we worked to load the wounded onto Scheherazade, we saw others, scavengers, slither through the mist and the downpour to steal away with the corpses of their own dead, making meals out of those who had tried and failed to breach the perimeter. The weak feeding on the strong until they became strong themselves. There was something uncomfortably similar to Pax philosophy in that.

  Schaz headed back out, and we were alone again in the rain.

  “What does a downpour like this make you think of?” Javier asked the question as we watched Schaz vanish into the rolling mass of clouds.

  I thought about it for a moment, my rifle still cradled in my arms. “The front, on the world where I was raised,” I said finally, still staring up into the storm. “When it rained like this, the enemy snipers couldn’t get a clear shot. Ours, either. Meant you were more likely to turn a corner and find an enemy patrol, just as lost as you were.”

  He was staring at me; I could tell, even though I was still watching the skies, thinking back. Everything had always come back around to war. Seemed like it always did. Didn’t know if that was about me, or if that was just the way the galaxy worked.

  “That’s not what I think of,” he told me.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, “I think of that cloudburst we got caught in, our first mission together. We were trying to break through the Antioch perimeter, to get to the spaceport and get clear, and then all of a sudden it was just pouring, and we were freezing, hunted, and lost. You remember that?”

  “I remember that,” I replied, the words almost lost in the storm. He’d kissed me. No; I’d kissed him. It had been a harder fight than it should have, to get clear, after, because we—

  No point in dwelling on that. No point in thinking about it. It was done; it was past; we couldn’t get it back. I didn’t know why he was even mentioning it now.

  “All that we went through, after.” He shook his head again. “All I’d gone through, before.” He was still staring at me. “I’m still glad I kissed you.”

  “I kissed you,” I told him with a frown, turning to face him.

  “Yeah,” he grinned back, shifting his rifle in his arms. “Maybe.”

  I shook my head, went back to watching the sky. Schaz was long gone. No point in dwelling on the past, what might have been, what had been. We’d made our choices, choices that cut deeper than a single moment that felt lifetimes gone. Now, we lived with them.

  Not that we’d necessarily be doing so much longer. The Pax were still on their way.

  “Ready to start?” Sahluk asked me.

  I turned back to him. Most of his platoon had stripped out of their exosuits, though a handful of them still had a little juice left. They were tired, and worn, but there was a look in their eyes—I’d seen it before, on other battlefields. We’d lost some already, and the mission wasn’t done. If we couldn’t see it through, it would all be for nothing. They weren’t going to let that happen.

  “Ready to start,” I nodded.

  We stared at the facility for a moment, trying to decide how to do this. Three floors, built around the gun itself, and an equal number of basements, all filled with nooks and crannies
likely teeming with Reint, those who hadn’t joined the attacks earlier. The reactor would be below, which meant we’d have to clear the floors above first. Time to get to work.

  “Who are we?” Sahluk roared at his soldiers.

  Spines stiffened; guns were raised. “We are the Justified and the Repentant!” came the response.

  “Do any of you feel particularly repentant today?” Sahluk shouted into the freezing rain.

  “No, sir!”

  “Good to know,” he growled, then turned and began stalking toward the facility. He didn’t have to motion for them to follow. Tired, worn, bruised—their commander was moving, and they went after.

  “Some things don’t change,” Javier said to me as we moved to follow. I couldn’t help but answer with a grin. That particular call-and-response had been around since even before I joined the Justified.

  We started at the entrance closest to us, put guns at the windows, then breached the door. The plan was to make our way up to the top of the facility, where it connected to the gun itself. Every member of the team, even Javier, had added an upgraded combat package to their HUD at some point in the past, and we all had our motion tracking dialed up, resulting in our vision being filled with soft waves. When the waves were even and unbroken, a steady line, the trackers weren’t picking up anything—when they started to bounce and twitch, something was moving in the direction of the disturbance.

  The interior of the facility felt like a ghost town. Nothing was moving beyond the drip of water here and there, a trickle compared to the roar outside. It might have just been days since the gun was abandoned, not decades. We could still hear the downpour on the other side of the exterior walls; at least we were out of the rain. It would have felt like more of an improvement if we hadn’t been expecting Reint to leap out of every shadow or to drop down from the ceilings onto our heads.

  We only found two Reint hiding on the ground floor. That wasn’t surprising—those who had claimed the lower floors would have been the strongest, the fastest, and so had likely been the same who had charged us in the initial attack. One of the two tried to run; the other tried to attack. We executed them both.

  Generations ago, their ancestors had been sapient species, thinking, sentient beings like the Reint we worked with every day back at Sanctum. Now, they were just animals—incredibly dangerous animals. Even if we tranquilized them and brought them back to Sanctum, they would never return to the state their forebears had been in.

  Not that it would have mattered, even if they might have. We still would have killed them. The stakes were just too high for hand-wringing now.

  No repentance. Not today.

  The second floor was more populated, with more aggressive members of the devolved race, those smart enough to know that charging the fence was just going to get them killed. They tried to mount an ambush, hiding in the air ducts, waiting to drop down on us from above. Thankfully, Javier spotted one slipping through a grate, and one of Sahluk’s troops still had a flame unit running off his exosuit. He filled the ductwork with fire.

  The smell was atrocious. We picked lots on who got to stick their head inside to make sure they were all dead; the Preacher lost, and she did so with a sigh, shutting her olfactory receptors off.

  Outside, we could still hear the turrets chatter every once in a while as the Reint out in the city tried to determine the limits of the autoguns’ range. Between that and the howling storm, the powered-down facility was feeling more ominous by the moment. I was perfectly happy when the Preacher climbed back down from the vents and gave us the okay to move on.

  Up to the top floor. Again, the Reint there had organized, something I thought devolved Reint would never do. They were clever. They attacked en masse from the front, forcing us to fall back into a kind of storeroom under a field of fire—only the storeroom wasn’t safe either, because that was where the ambush was pushing us: they’d laid a trap.

  More Reint were lying in wait on the highest shelves, near the ceiling; we didn’t know they were there, because they weren’t moving, weren’t setting off the motion detectors. As soon as we shut the door to the main hallway, before we could turn our attention to clearing the room, they attacked.

  The storeroom was too tight for me to get my rifle to bear, and they were on us too quick for me to pull my pistol. For the first time since landing on this planet I had to use my fists, activating my melee implants and wading into the fight.

  The Reint were quick, and they were mean, and they had a dozen awful little tricks like the gas-spitting at their disposal, but they didn’t have tech that turned a jab into a sledgehammer blow or a body hook into an electrical discharge. We fought them off.

  The extent of the injuries was that one of Sahluk’s soldiers, a human, lost an ear. He cursed a great deal as we sprayed him down with medical foam, but it wouldn’t keep him out of combat. Once we got him back to a proper medical facility, the doctors on Sanctum might even be able to grow it back for him. Maybe. You could never quite tell, especially not when it had been gnawed off and ripped free rather than removed by a clean cut.

  After that, we used the last of the flame units to burn out the Reint who had herded us into the storeroom. Top floor cleared. I was truly beginning to hate this place.

  We swept again on our way back down—three more Reint, lying in wait, met bad ends—and then the aboveground levels of the facility were cleared.

  That meant it was time to descend to the basement, where the fusion reactor was putting out the barest trickle of heat. Where most of the Reint inside would be concentrated.

  We weren’t done yet.

  CHAPTER 18

  The two stairwells we tried were blocked by rubble—possibly a purposeful act by the Reint who nested below, making it difficult for competitors to track them to their lair. That meant we had to pry open one of the elevator shafts, and what we found wasn’t good.

  “Oh, shit,” Javier said, with typical understatement.

  Oh, shit was right. The elevator went down all the way to the bottom, the third subbasement, but we couldn’t see that far down. Not because of the lack of lighting—we all had low-light-level illumination on our HUDs—but because the bottom of the shaft was filled with brackish water, perhaps ten feet deep if I remembered the facility diagrams right. There was a leak somewhere in the facility, and over the years, the bottom floor had become completely flooded.

  “How the hell is the reactor even running?” Sahluk wondered. He casually ripped a piece of rebar from the wall—that wasn’t because of his exosuit, he’d abandoned that earlier; he was just that goddamned strong—and dropped it into the murk below. Two Reint boiled out, bursting from the black pool; we cut them down.

  The Preacher lowered her rifle, answering his question as the echoes of the gunshots faded. “The bottom floor would just be piping and circulation,” she told him. “It’ll all be watertight, much more so than the building itself.”

  “We still have to clear that mess,” Javier reminded her. “And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t breathe under water, and I certainly have no desire to skindive into . . . that.” He wasn’t just worried about infection or jagged metal; Reint were amphibious, as the two we’d just killed had proven. There was a good chance the nesting grounds were hidden somewhere in the flooded basement, and Reint were twice as dangerous underwater as they were on dry land, simply by virtue of the fact that most of us were not.

  “We won’t have to.” The Preacher had a smile on her metal mouth that could only be described as cruel. “All we’ll have to do is get the fusion reactor back to full power. Without resetting the heat circulators.”

  Sahluk made a noise; it wasn’t a happy one. Yes, we were here to kill the Reint, and we’d do it by any means necessary. From a coolly logical perspective, the Preacher’s plan was infallible—it would mean clearing the flooded basement in one fell swoop, or at least driving the Reint in the water below up to the surface, real fast. That was because power
ing up the reactor without pushing the excess heat it created back into its core would bring the water below to a full boil in moments. Most of the Reint would be cooked alive.

  “We still have to clear the other two floors first,” Sahluk reminded everyone. He’d go along with the Preacher’s plan—it meant fewer Reint for his soldiers to fight one on one—but he didn’t like it, and neither did I. It was cruel. “If they’re nesting below, this will get ugly.” He turned to me. “You better send a message to your ship. It won’t catch up to her until she’s back at Sanctum, but the first team of engineers will need to know that they’ll have to bring equipment to pump all this shit out before they can get started.”

  I nodded, and did so, sending Schaz a video feed of the whole clearing operation so far. That way the engineers could study the structure on their flight over, figuring out where to start first with the repairs. Some of them would be Reint—the reptilian people had an affinity for that sort of work—and I didn’t envy them watching us kill dozens of their species on the feed, but we all did what we had to do.

  “First level,” Sahluk said when I was done. “I want the two Barious on point.”

  “That’s because Reint don’t like the taste of metal,” Sahluk’s Barious trooper told the Preacher.

  “I’d gathered that,” she replied flatly, apparently still a little annoyed with her fellow synthetic over their information exchange back on Sanctum.

  They swung down on the elevator cables, prying open the doors to the first basement. We watched from above, covering them, waiting for something—anything—to hit. We didn’t have to wait long.