The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “You’re still smoking those things?” Javier sighed. “Such a barbaric habit.”

  “Well, I’m a barbarian,” I shrugged.

  “You going after her?”

  “I’ll give her a moment.”

  “Someone needs to go after her, is what I’m saying.”

  “And I will, but I’m going to give her a fucking moment, Javi, come on. She just had everything she knows about her life upended. She deserves a moment.” I needed sleep. I needed to be preparing for the Pax invasion. I needed to be doing anything other than this. But Esa deserved a friend right now, and maybe I was that and maybe I wasn’t, but I was what she had.

  “I’ll talk to her,” the Preacher said, starting forward.

  I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. “Yeah, I don’t think you’re who she needs to talk to right now,” I told her.

  “And you are?” she asked, her voice still hollow, like the tale she’d told had been taking up a space deep inside her that she now had nothing to fill with. “You don’t care about her—not really. She’s just a tool to you.”

  I shook my head, took a drag from my smoke. “You don’t know me,” I told her.

  “I know enough.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You’re not her mother.”

  I looked at the Preacher, let her see how closely I was studying her, an inversion of all the times she’d scanned my blood pressure and nervous system and whatever else just to answer her own curiosity. “But you could have been. And you chose not to. That was a decision you made. So you get to live with it. I’ll talk to her. You just . . . make yourself useful somewhere. Give her space.”

  The Preacher stared right back at me, her expression almost comically shocked—it likely would have hurt her less if I’d actually slapped her. Actually, with her metal skin, that probably would have hurt me more. But I was tired, and I was worn, and we had a lot of other problems to deal with; the Barious’s emotional wounds could wait. Esa was who I was worried about now.

  She deserved better than . . . all of this. Not just the Preacher’s revelations. She deserved Sanctum to actually live up to its namesake, to be a sanctuary, a haven. Instead, she’d found yet another war, just another outbreak of the plague of violence and danger that had followed the pulse wherever it went.

  “We destroyed the life she should have had,” the Barious told me. “You and me, together. Before she was even born. She deserves better than either of us.”

  “Maybe.” I nodded, exhaling smoke from my nostrils. Javier was probably right; it was a barbaric habit, but it helped calm me. “But we’re what she’s got, and you can’t help her. Not right now. So go do something useful. I’ll talk to Esa.”

  I wandered off in the general direction the girl had fled, before the Preacher could rally a response.

  The engineering teams were swarming around the facility, all sorts of rigging and scaffolding and pulleys and lifts going up. High-tension lines were stretched all over the gun, construction materials were scattered everywhere, and bright blue sparks from welding torches scattered through the day. The work was going well, which meant it was loud, which meant Esa had gone elsewhere to think.

  I found her out beyond the fence; she’d slipped out through the bars of electric light. Thankfully, she’d picked up a tag somewhere, or someone had the presence of mind to give one to her. I could barely fit through the hole myself, but I managed, cursing as I did. She was a nimble one, that girl.

  She was sitting on a rock, staring out at the distant mountains, the gun rising behind her almost like a natural formation in and of itself. If we all died here, and if the Reint ever managed to overcome their predatory instincts to form an actual functioning society, maybe a hundred thousand years from now this gun, this facility, would be wonders of their primitive world, temples to gods unknown. For now, it was just a weapon, one we’d fire at our enemies, those who had come to destroy us. So I guess it was already a repository for plenty of prayers.

  I sat beside Esa on the rock. Didn’t say anything, just finished smoking my cigarette.

  “There’s another person,” she said quietly, finally. “Someone else, the person I was supposed to be. If my parents hadn’t died, if . . .”

  “We’re defined by things outside of our control,” I said. “Where we’re born, our circumstances, how we’re raised. Who we are is something we don’t actually have a great deal of say in. Until we do.”

  She turned to look at me. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Before I joined the Justified, I was just a soldier,” I told her. “I fought for a sect, the sect I was born in. I wanted to believe the things they taught us, the world they sold—I tried, I did. I just couldn’t, not quite. Then I encountered the Justified, and I found a creed I could, one that made sense. One that I wanted to believe in. But I didn’t have to follow them. I didn’t have to leave everything I’d known behind. It would have been easier just to stay, pay lip service to the ideals I’d been raised with, and fight, and die, like I was supposed to.”

  “But you chose the unknown instead.”

  “I did. Even though it came with a cost. A great cost.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it felt braver. Because it felt right.”

  “Was it?”

  I was still just staring out at the mountains, aware that she was staring at me. “No idea,” I said. “But if I hadn’t, I’d be a different person now. Or I’d be dead; that one’s much more likely. The choices I made—and the choices of others—they all led me here. To you. To this moment. The fight that’s coming: it won’t be the first time in my life I’ve fought to try and stave off something that felt inevitable. It won’t be the first time I’ve fought to try and stop something I thought was wrong.”

  She smiled, just a little, despite the fact that she was still crying. “Hopefully it won’t be the last,” she added.

  “Hopefully.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “What would I have done when?”

  “If you had been the Preacher. If you’d . . . if you could have raised me.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not fair. She did what she thought she had to do.”

  “And I’m asking you what you would have thought you would have had to do. I don’t know if that sentence makes sense; I’m sorry.”

  “No, I get it.” I sighed. “You know about the choice I made, with Javi.”

  “You didn’t make him lead those refugees to Sanctum.”

  “No, I didn’t. But I could have followed him, when he ran. Could have tracked him. Could have forced him to come back with me, or to take me with him. At the time, the thought of living without him . . . it hurt. I won’t say it was unbearable—there’s surprisingly little in this galaxy that’s that—but it hurt. A great deal.”

  “And instead you stayed. Because that’s what you thought was right.”

  “It’s where I thought I could do the most good.”

  “Even though it hurt.”

  “Even though.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  I smiled, just a little. I wasn’t even prepared to ask myself that question, let alone have Esa ask it. “Let’s just get through the Pax assault,” I told her. “Javier and I, our little . . . whatever this is . . . I don’t know that it matters all that much, not if we’ll both be dead in a few weeks’ time.”

  “Isn’t that when it should matter most?”

  I was taken off guard by that; it hadn’t been what I was expecting. I mean, she was probably right, that just wasn’t the angle I ever would have come at it from. “Maybe so,” I told her.

  She nodded, like I had confirmed something she hadn’t asked. “But you still haven’t answered my question,” she told me.

  “I would have done what I thought was right,” I told her. “I can’t say what that would have been. It’s easy to judge the Preacher for the call she made, but the truth is, we don’t know if
that was the right call or the wrong one. We just don’t know what things would have been like if she’d taken another path. Maybe things would have wound up better for you. Maybe you wouldn’t be here at all.”

  “And you think I should be. You think this . . .” She raised her face heavenward, toward the moon that held Sanctum, its seas of crystal glittering in the reflected light of the slowly rising binary stars. “You think there is where I belong.”

  “I think you’re a fighter,” I told her, and I meant it. “I know what that looks like when I see it, because I see it in the mirror, all the time. I think maybe you didn’t know that about yourself, not until the time came to fight. You came out here, looking for us, even though you knew that meant you’d be putting yourself in danger. That says something.”

  She gave a little half-smile at that. “That I’m stupid and reckless?”

  I nodded. “Those things, yeah. And also brave. And willing to fight. That’s all we have to be, you know. Willing.”

  “That life I should have had, where my parents are still alive, where I was raised on a world not thrown so far backward in time. I’ll never know what it would have been like, will I? I’ll never know who that girl would have been.”

  I shook my head. “That’s the thing about choices, those we make and those that are made for us—once a path is chosen, the other gets closed off, for good.”

  “So all I can do is . . . what? Knowing what I know now, that this isn’t who I’m supposed to be—”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know that at all. I’m not going to tell you that things happen for a reason—I mean, yeah, they do, because of the decisions people make. But who you are, right now, the young woman sitting beside me: maybe that’s exactly who you’re supposed to be.”

  She was still looking up at the sky, but I felt her hand slide into mine. I squeezed her fingers, and held her hand right back. Let her know she wasn’t alone. “We made it to Sanctum,” she told me.

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “Does that mean you’re allowed to tell me your name now?”

  I laughed. “You’re going to be disappointed,” I told her.

  “Why? Is it a dumb name? Or scary or mean or something?”

  “It’s just a name. Doesn’t really mean anything at all.”

  “But you are allowed to tell me.”

  “I am, sure.” Actually I didn’t know about that; after I dropped the kids off, I was never supposed to see them again. Their loyalties were meant to lie with Sanctum and the Justified, not me, and I was supposed to be off fetching other children, not worrying about the ones I’d left behind.

  “Will you?” she asked.

  I looked over at her; she was watching me.

  “Jane,” I told her. “My name is Jane.”

  ACT

  FOUR

  CHAPTER 1

  I slept, finally. Then I got to work.

  I only knew a little bit about electrical engineering—enough for me to brute force my way through sealed airlocks, and that was about it—and I knew even less about fusion reactors or even weapon calibrations on a gun that size, but I was a pair of hands, and every pair of hands was put to use. We didn’t have much time.

  The Preacher spent most of her time inside the facility, getting the systems up and running; Javier and I did odd jobs in and around the complex. Esa was actually the most useful of our little party—as she’d shown back on her homeworld, she was capable of lifting several tons’ worth of equipment, and she swiftly became in high demand, differing groups of engineers clamoring for her attention.

  The days passed in a blur of hard labor, snatched sleep, and worry. When we’d needed to clear the devolved Reint to secure the guns, I could focus on that, the first step; now that it was done, the only thing looming was the Pax armada that was on its way, that could arrive any day now. I’d spent the last hundred years working to keep Sanctum safe, to build it up, recruiting children from all across the galaxy into our—my—crusade. We were still well short of our goal—turning the pulse back around before it could sweep across the galaxy again—and it felt as close to collapse now as it had in the days and weeks and months just after the pulse. We hadn’t faced a threat like this in a very long time.

  I didn’t know if we were going to be ready.

  I got reports from Criat; the lunar guns above on the far side of Sanctum had been secured, were prepared. Chariot, Delta, and Echo positions, they would have firing solutions on the Pax as they arrived, but once the enemy moved to circle the moon and come into the orbit of the world beneath our feet, they’d be useless.

  The repairs to Bravo emplacement, down in the city a thousand miles away, were coming along as well, and just like here, at Alpha, the engineers were working not just on the gun itself, but on defenses and shielding. The Pax would have to dig us out of these two positions before they could attack Sanctum proper—or at least, if they didn’t, we’d be biting them in the ass the entire time they tried.

  It was an odd thing, to know that all the work we were doing—and the blood we had shed, clearing the guns—was almost certainly going to be undone in the coming fight. Our entire strategy revolved around keeping the dreadnaughts off of Sanctum for as long as possible; I had no misconceptions that we would be able to do the same for the big cannons, either here in the mountains or in the city below. Eventually, the Pax would break through the defenses we were setting up, and pound both locations to dust.

  We were repairing weapons that had lain dormant for well over a hundred years, and at the same time, we were planting charges to bring both facilities down, in case the Pax tried to seize the guns rather than destroy them. We couldn’t let them be turned on Sanctum itself, and Bravo, at least, had a firing angle that would make that a real possibility.

  Even if some minor miracle happened and the Pax were turned back before they could destroy these facilities, we’d still have to abandon them again. This was still a pulsed world, and it was still filled with devolved Reint; we couldn’t keep the perimeters up and fight off the radiation indefinitely. Even now, the engineers were working to replace burnt-out parts and constantly reinforcing the shielding on the turrets; otherwise, the rads would have claimed them, rendered them inoperable hunks of metal.

  The Reint still tested our defenses occasionally, but they didn’t get through. Sheer animal cunning has its place, but, just like on every other world that had produced sentient species, big fuck-off guns and electrical fences were more than a match for predatory instincts.

  I was pacing the perimeter one morning, roughly a week since we’d taken the guns; my shift hadn’t started yet, and I was drinking coffee and checking how well the turrets were holding up when Schaz buzzed my comms. “You might want to step back inside,” she said, her voice quiet for some reason. She was still on world; this high up in the mountains, she could remain in the pulsed atmosphere for quite some time, and we’d been sleeping on board, then letting Schaz return to orbit after. “Esa’s . . . studying. She’s accessed my databanks, looking for some very specific information. I think there might be a conversation you two need to have.”

  I nodded, and finished my coffee, heading back toward Scheherazade. I could have asked her more—it’s not like she was broadcasting our conversation to Esa inside her living quarters—but I didn’t have to. I had a pretty good idea what the girl was looking at.

  Schaz’s ramp was lowered; she was inside the perimeter of the guns, so we weren’t worried about Reint creeping inside. She was due to take off in a bit, but Esa was using the time she had with Schaz’s databanks, putting her access to good use. Or at least what she thought of as good use.

  I moved quietly up the ramp and watched her from the airlock doorway; I don’t think she saw me. She was too busy studying the holoprojection before her, one of the very first images I’d ever shown her on its glowing wireframe surface: the image of a Pax. A basic Pax infantry unit, specifically.

  As I watched, she rotated the image;
stripped off its armor, piece by piece. Its kinetic shielding, its bulky plating, its extraneous ammunition pouches and gear kits. The scan was very detailed, based on Pax units we’d captured or autopsied over the years. We knew what was inside that armor. Now, so did she.

  She put the bulky figure back together, then took it apart again. For a moment, I wondered if she was looking for weak spots, trying to figure out where she should hit them, but: no. That’s what I would have been doing, when I was her age. Esa wasn’t me.

  With the skeleton of the armor laid bare around the faceless, amorphous outline representing the soldier within, she reached inside the hologram, pulling out a single piece of machinery and expanding it to take up the entire projection. “This is it,” she said quietly, at first I thought to herself until I realized that she’d known I was standing there, might have for a while. “This is the part I can’t get past.”

  I nodded, moving past her very deliberately to pour myself another cup of coffee. I wasn’t feigning disinterest, exactly, but if I acted concerned over her discovery, demanded she shut the projection down, that would only confirm her fears. “You know what it is, I suppose?” I asked her.

  “I do,” she nodded, still staring up at the glowing image. It was an autosyringe: specifically, a series of microsyringes, one of the few pieces of the basic Pax gear that changed based on what species was inside the armor. She was staring at the type designed for use on human soldiers, the kind that fit just at the top of the spinal column like a mechanical centipede with needles for legs. That positioning gave it access to the spine and the brain stem and the blood-brain barrier at once so that it could be remotely triggered, delivering its payloads directly into the nervous system of its subject like an insect administering a dose of venom.

  She turned, finally, not glaring at me, exactly, but not happy, either. “You told me they were brainwashed,” she said. “You told me that once the Pax were done with their . . . with their subjects, that they weren’t people anymore. That they were just Pax.”