The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  We would make them pay for that mistake.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jane, you’ve got one trying to zero in for a distance shot; pull to port and let me angle in for an attack run.” Javier’s voice jolted me out of the almost reverie-like state I’d been pulled into by the focus of combat; I realized I’d barely been listening to the comms, so intent had I been on the Pax ships filling the sky.

  “Roger,” I confirmed, rolling Schaz away from my current target and firing off a single missile to continue ruining his day. Javi’s warning came not a moment too soon; mere seconds later a rail-cannon blast sang past us, lighting up my screens. I marked Bolivar’s position and swung even wider, coming around the edges of the fight.

  “Got him,” Javier said, pulling Bolivar free of the trailing smoke from the Pax craft’s engines. “You’re clear.” The enemy ship he’d targeted was locked in a spiral down to the sea of molten crystal on the lunar surface below; even if the pilot survived the crash, I didn’t envy him what came next.

  “We’re more than that.” Our little evasive maneuver had pulled us out of the heat of the combat, and as a result, we’d somehow wound up closer to the Pax frigate than I’d expected, just outside of its firing envelope. For the most part, at least. I was still diving and juking around turret fire, but that particular ship was built for frontal assault, and we’d wound up in the debris field almost behind it. “Line up on me, Javi,” I told him.

  “. . . Why?” He asked the question, but I was tracking Bolivar’s movements; he was getting into position. “I only ask because you seem to be lining up for an attack run on that goddamned frigate.”

  “You always have been a sharp one, haven’t you?” I replied. The frigate—shaped almost like a crescent, the forward guns lining the interior arc, and us facing the glow of the engines at its rear—was still trying to pull free of the debris field, which meant at the moment a great many of its defensive turrets were firing on the asteroids, trying to clear a path to get it closer to the fight.

  That wouldn’t last long; once it was clear of the field, the turrets would be free to attack all comers making for the turret itself. We’d only have one chance to pull this off, and it was now.

  Ordinarily, a ship Scheherazade’s size—or Bolivar’s—could only be a nuisance to a frigate like that; if she was a mosquito up against a whale when compared to a dreadnaught, the frigate was at least a hefty terrestrial mammal, like a bear or an elk or something. This particular frigate, however, had already taken a battering from the mines and traps we’d left in the debris and the approach. We didn’t have anything else coming to bear on her; left alone, her shields would recharge, and we’d lose the moment when both her defenses were battered and her turrets were otherwise occupied. Now or never.

  “Is that smart?” Esa asked nervously, eyeballing the massive ship rising ever closer through the cockpit, the glare of a single one of its engines larger around than Schaz’s entire chassis. “Is . . . should we be doing this?”

  “No,” Javier told her in no uncertain terms; I’d forgotten that Esa was patched into the comms as well. “But it appears we’re doing it anyway, so get ready.”

  “We’re doing what?” Marus asked from the tail turret. “What are we doing? Why am I facing the debris field? Will you people please remember that I’m back here—I can’t see what’s in front of us at all.”

  “Just get ready to shoot,” I told him, pushing the throttle to full and shifting all of Schaz’s shields forward.

  “At what?”

  We were well and truly inside the frigate’s firing envelope before he could respond, and the turrets were already starting to target us fully, aware that we were more of a danger than the debris free to crash into its shielding. Still, I had us lined up on an approach at its engines, where the fewest turrets could fire on us, and Schaz’s shielding was only mostly stripped away before I got us into range of the forward guns and opened up.

  Bolivar was right there with us, and while he didn’t have as much firepower to add, every little bit helped. We poured fire into the shields, cutting thrust and dancing and juking through the field of lasers trying to cut us out of the sky, matching the slow swing of the frigate as it tried to turn and bear down on us. They were pulling their shielding from the rest of the craft now in an attempt to repel our assault, but that only meant that the whirling debris was crashing into the structure of the ship itself, the very system the Pax’s enemy.

  A web of crimson heat began to spread through the gossamer shimmer of the frigate’s shields, and then they cracked, and then we were through, pounding the engines mercilessly; my guns were approaching the red line, but we were close, goddammit, almost there, and finally the engines erupted into flame, first one, then the damage chaining to the others. I pulled us back, racing out of the firing envelope of the frigate, Schaz’s own shields in tatters as Marus picked off the missiles on our tail; I’d pushed it close, maybe too close. But the frigate was badly damaged, incapable of keeping up with the roving firefight above the moon’s surface, the ruin of its engines spreading chaos throughout the vessel.

  We raced away, trying to give our ships’ cores a moment to recharge our shields.

  “A hell of an attack run, you two,” John Henry came out of our comms, his voice admiring. “We’d been shifting our frigates into position to take that one on, but now we can continue to hold them until the Pax push closer into the system. Well done.”

  “How far have the dreadnaughts penetrated?” I asked him, scanning my screens even as I asked.

  “They’re pushing past the moon now, around the curve that will put them above the planet below, but we’re making them pay for it. We’ve taken four entirely out of commission, and they’ve just now entered the firing solution of the planetary guns.”

  That was good, but hardly enough; it meant that as we were, at full strength, we still wouldn’t be able to stop all of the dreadnaughts before they reached position over Sanctum. If things continued as they were we could take them out before they could do any lasting damage to the shield over the city, but that was only because we were at full strength, and I had no illusions that we’d be able to stay that way for long.

  Even as that thought crossed my mind, I saw it; new contacts on my screen, closer than they should have been. The frigate knew it was mostly out of the fight, and it had launched everything it had as far as craft went. That included dropships.

  The frigate hadn’t been here to back up the fighters; it had been here as troop transport, no different than the dreadnaught the Pax had sacrificed over Esa’s homeworld. They hadn’t been able to take the lunar guns out with an airstrike, so now they were committed to getting boots on the ground.

  The nature of the fight had just changed.

  CHAPTER 9

  Schaz, mark those dropships,” I snarled. “Send it out to the entire Justified fleet; I want everyone to know those are priority targets.” As we’d spent the weeks before the assault building defenses around Alpha and Bravo, the anti-orbital guns on the planet’s surface, similar crews would have been working to ring the lunar guns with turrets and defenses as well. They wouldn’t stand up to a sustained ground assault—we just didn’t have enough soldiers to spread them out across all five cannons, and most of the defenses would have been anti-air in nature. Plus, if the Pax were able to claim the lunar guns for themselves, turning Chariot and Delta and Echo against Justified ships, it would mean our frigates, at least, would be denied a large swath of the sky. It might take a while for the cannon to destroy a dreadnaught, but a frigate would go down in just one shot. The only reason we hadn’t done the same was that we couldn’t afford to divert the guns from their larger, more dangerous targets.

  My transmission was sent and bounced back, the dropships highlighted in every Justified pilot’s HUD, but the Pax knew what they were doing—assaulting defensive positions was what they did, after all; conquerors by nature focused more on assault than defense—and they’d timed t
he next wave of their offensive perfectly. One of the dreadnaughts that had just made it past the black holes split open, disgorging wave after wave of fighters—another carrier ship.

  “Justified forces, fall back to the lunar atmosphere,” John Henry ordered. “Get in range of the anti-aircraft guns around the three cannon emplacements. You can’t weather this assault on your own. If you can, divide evenly between Chariot, Delta, and Echo—don’t give the Pax a clear target to prioritize.”

  A good strategy, but if we were too busy trying to just survive this attack, it meant no one would be able to take out the dropships.

  Still, I didn’t see another move—not yet. I did as John Henry had bid us, dropping back into position with the other Justified forces, still fighting the second Pax wave. The whole dogfight was shifting into the atmosphere, ships racing and clawing at each other even as we fought the pull of the gravity well, littering the surface of the moon below with burning wreckage and no few blackened bodies.

  Frustrated and stymied, I kept at least a sliver of my attention on the dropships, getting farther and farther out of the combat envelope, untouchable. I’d fallen back toward Echo gun, and it was like pressing on a bruise just to remind yourself it was there, watching the dropships move out of range so they could disgorge infantry to assault the very gun I was defending.

  Perhaps if I’d hit the frigate just a little earlier, or done just a little more damage, they wouldn’t have been able to launch in conjunction with the new wave of fighters. But I hadn’t, and we didn’t, and there was nothing we could do now as the dropships got clear of the fighting and set down, the soldiers starting their march across the moon’s surface just beyond the temperature divide where the crystal froze out of the heat of the suns. There was nothing we could do—we were too busy just trying to stay alive as more and more Pax fighters flooded into the atmosphere.

  Esa’s hands were flying over her controls, and the blue laser fire she spat from the wing-mounted units was almost stuttering as she swapped targets on the fly; she was good at this, very good, knew when to pursue an enemy and when to let them escape, turning her attention to a closer foe. Marus was keeping them off our tail from the turret, which meant I was free to concentrate Schaz’s flight path on offense, a relative rarity among the Justified pilots.

  I swept us through the battle, identifying hard-pressed Justified ships and trying to at least buy them breathing room, but I couldn’t be everywhere, and Scheherazade’s shields still hadn’t returned to full after our attack run on the frigate, which meant I had to be more careful than I would like.

  We were fighting back, fighting hard, but we were losing ships, even after we came into the firing solution of the anti-aircraft batteries around Echo. Slowly but surely, we were losing the fight for control of the moon’s atmosphere.

  “All Justified fighters: break off,” came John Henry’s voice, heavy with loss. After all, he was an AI, powered by a massive complex of databanks deep in the heart of Sanctum, capable of being a hundred places at once and processing a million thoughts simultaneously. Every pilot who died was his friend; every ship that flamed out was an AI he had helped raise. Still, he knew a losing fight when he saw one, and there was no clawing our way back from this. “We’re moving the frigates into position to cover your retreat, just over the storm line,” he continued. “Get back to Sanctum; repair, rearm.”

  “We can’t give up the lunar guns yet!” I shouted back. I knew that the other pilots would be doing the same. We hadn’t fought this hard, given so much, watched our friends flame out and die, just to surrender this ground. As I banked Scheherazade I could see Echo gun just over our wing, the cannon blasting at the enemy above. “There are still dreadnaughts coming through, we have to—”

  “If you all fall here there will be none of you left to protect Sanctum itself,” John Henry thundered, cutting through all the objections at once. “We knew these guns would fall. It was only a matter of time. We are at war; losses are inevitable.”

  He was right, and I knew he was right; this had been part of our plan all along, we’d just hoped it wouldn’t happen so fast. I’d thought we might at least be able to evacuate the gun crews before it came to this. But the Pax had established aerial dominance, and it was only a matter of time before their siege troops reached the cannons as well. The turrets and the anti-aircraft batteries would protect the gun crews for a time, but they’d know what was coming, even as they kept fighting. They’d know they were finished.

  The Pax didn’t take prisoners. Not if a battle was still being fought.

  I opened up a comm channel, wide to the whole Justified fleet, and to the gun crews as well. “This is Jane Kamali, of Scheherazade,” I said, and my voice sounded dull and empty, even to my own ears. “To the gunnery positions on the surface: if we can come back for you, we will come back for you. Keep fucking fighting. Hold on for as long as you can. They’ll try to take the guns intact; you can make them pay for that. Set traps, set ambushes, keep yourselves alive. Give them hell.”

  “You do the same, Kamali,” one of the gunnery crews replied; whoever was on the comm. “You do the same.”

  My teeth clenched, my vision almost shaking with rage, I peeled off from the fight, moving into the protective screen of the frigates’ fire and heading back for Sanctum. Beneath me, the storm that raged across the temperature divide on the surface of the moon spat and growled and screamed; I knew just how it felt.

  CHAPTER 10

  What’s happening?” Esa asked. “Why are we retreating? Why—”

  “We can’t spend all our forces over the lunar guns, Esa,” Marus told her through the comm. “If we did, there’d be no ships left to protect the planetary cannon, and those will be able to hold a firing solution on the Pax dreadnaughts for much longer.”

  “But there are still people down there, we just heard them!” Esa protested. “They—”

  “They knew when they volunteered that this would happen,” I told her. I didn’t like it, not any more than she did, but it was the truth. “We were never going to be able to hold the lunar guns.”

  A few of the Pax fighters—the bravest, or at least the most zealous—were still trying to engage us, even under the screen of our frigates’ firing solutions. As we rose above the storm below I painted as many of them as I could with targeting locks and released the few missiles we had left after our attack run on the frigate, catching the enemy between the razor-sharp rain of the storm front, the frigates’ fire, and the missiles now homing in on them from our position. No sense in hoarding ordnance if we were heading back to Sanctum.

  “But . . . but . . .” A teenager’s favorite word spilled from Esa’s lips like it was something she was fumbling in her hands.

  “We were never going to get out of this without casualties, kid,” I told her softly. As if to prove my point, one of the suicidal Pax ships managed to sweep through the frigates’ fire and release a missile; it connected, short range, with a Justified fighter, and the craft broke up in a wave of flame, pieces scattering into the storm clouds below. Unbidden, my hand rose up from the stick, pressed against the cockpit window, as though I could feel the sear of the fires on my palm. All I actually felt was cold.

  “Our scouts said there were at least three dreadnaughts modified into carriers,” Marus reminded Esa. “We’ve only seen two so far. That means we’ve only faced two-thirds of their fighter groups, at best. If we fought to the last over the moon, that third carrier could jump in and release its waves of fighters to pound the planetary guns without us being able to do a damn thing to stop it.”

  “But they’re still alive!” The words were almost a scream.

  “They are,” I agreed. “And we’re not abandoning them. But we can’t do them any good like this. Combat burns through fusion energy, fast—the constant firing of our weapons and the battering of our shields takes its toll. We need to get to Sanctum, recharge Schaz’s core, resupply our missiles, let the engineers patch the damage she�
�s taken.”

  “You’ve taken damage?” Esa asked Schaz softly. “You’re hurt?”

  “Just a few scratches, my dear,” Scheherazade replied, her plummy aristocrat’s voice as nonchalant as she could make it. “Nothing serious.” She wasn’t lying, but it was at the very least an optimistic view of the truth; we’d taken a battering assaulting the frigate, and again fighting off the Pax attack before our shields could recharge. Nothing critical was damaged, but the parts that protected the critical systems were.

  As we retreated toward Sanctum, we could see the line of Pax dreadnaughts stretching through the system, hulking pieces of darkness against the spread of the cosmos and the spin of the ruined system beyond. The guns on the planet underneath had firing solutions now, and they were hammering the dreadnaughts with all they had, but at least a few of the enemy supercraft had changed their approach, were lining up shots on the planetary cannon instead. The scale of the Pax attack—the size of the dreadnaughts, the simple mass of them—made Schaz seem tiny in comparison, made even our protective frigate seem like a small boat on a deep sea where leviathans moved under the water.

  “We can’t just leave them,” Esa said again, almost begging.

  “We won’t,” I told her. I was watching the dreadnaughts trade fire with the cannons on the planet below, but my thoughts were still with the crews manning the guns on the moon, the shields around their compounds shuddering under Pax bombing runs, knowing that ground troops were moving toward their location, inexorable and relentless in their march.

  “You have a plan?” Marus asked me.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good one.” I shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Javier, on the comms; I’d almost forgotten that I’d patched Bolivar into Scheherazade’s internal network, so he and the Preacher could hear anything Esa and I said to Marus. “We’re in.” Javier had never been the type to leave anyone behind. It was one of the things I loved about him.