The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  “I know.” Whichever gun we approached first, it meant the Pax would realize what we were up to, and likely intensify their assault on the other two guns. The plan would almost certainly buy Seamus’s gunships enough time to evacuate the first gun; after that, though, the second gun would be harder, and the third harder than that.

  We would have to choose which crews to save.

  “Javier,” I opened up my comms to Bolivar. “You hit the enemy around Chariot first; it’s the furthest out. We’ll hit Echo, then meet you at Delta. Try to add as much chaos to the mix as we can.”

  “Got it,” he replied, rolling Bolivar off our current trajectory, to speed over the frozen lunar landscape. “Stay safe.”

  “You too.”

  Then there was no more time—the battlefield appeared around the curve of the moon, hundreds of Pax troops, if not thousands, surging toward the shielded fortresses of the guns, the autoturrets and anti-aircraft emplacements roaring at their attackers, gunships and land-based assault craft returning fire.

  “Target the gunships as much as you can,” I told Esa and Marus. “They’ll pose the greatest threat to our evacuation squad.”

  “Got it,” Marus answered. I could hear Esa swallow, but she didn’t say anything, though her hands tightened on her controls.

  As we sped closer to the fighting, my finger hovered over the command to de-stealth. I’d have to pull us out of concealment before our weapons could fire. The timing would have to be precise.

  Scheherazade shook with flak and turbulence from the rounds ripping through the atmosphere; none of it was aimed at us, it was just everywhere. “Here we go,” I told them. “Stealth systems disengaging in three . . . two . . .”

  CHAPTER 14

  I pulled us out of stealth, and we opened fire.

  I kept us as close to the surface as possible, under the angle of Echo’s anti-aircraft guns, so we could hit the enemy ships trying to approach below the same defilade. We’d taken them by surprise: I’d had a more difficult time tracking and taking down targets in simulators. Esa dragged the lasers through the Pax contingent of ground forces charging at the gun; Marus fired at the tanks and troops transports as we passed, leaving a wave of explosions in our wake.

  I banked hard as we approached the far edge of the Pax line, veering back toward the next mass of gunships beginning their attack run on the facility. They scattered like we were a predator among a flock of birds, and I targeted whoever I could find with the forward lasers, using Schaz’s stronger engines to rocket through their ranks, and let Marus pick off those we passed.

  Together he and I dropped an impressive number of them, sending them spinning or falling down to the surface and sowing more chaos among the ground troops; that, in turn, caused even more of the gunships to panic and run, trying to pull up to escape both us and the wild return fire the soldiers below were shooting off. Unfortunately for them, the only vector left for the gunships to use to try to escape the chaos took them directly into Echo’s anti-aircraft targeting solutions instead.

  Esa was still causing chaos in the ranks of the troops below; the moon itself offered little cover from the azure fire scything out of Scheherazade’s laser batteries, and they hadn’t really been prepared for an assault by a ship of Scheherazade’s size. Everywhere the infantry turned there was either falling gunship debris or bright blue death cutting furrows through the lunar surface, and whatever else got in its way. I pulled us up into a hard loop; the Pax had started to recover from the surprise attack, and were beginning to muster return fire. They didn’t have much that could really hurt us, but any depletion to our shields meant we’d have less time when the enemy fighters arrived.

  Right on cue: “We’ve got incoming fighters,” Schaz warned. “The ground troops have called for help.”

  “Good. That’s the plan,” I replied. “What’s the angle?”

  “Most of them were concentrated at Delta; they’ve split between coming after us and going after Bolivar at Chariot.”

  Perfect, exactly what we wanted. “One more pass, then we’ll hit them head on,” I said. I brought us back over the facility itself, the intensifying fire from Echo’s autoturrets scorching across the moon’s surface below us as the remaining Pax tried for a last charge at the big gun. We let loose with everything we had at whatever targets we could find, then I banked Scheherazade again, setting a course for Delta and the Pax craft on intercept.

  We’d hardly escaped the envelope of the fighting around Echo when the massed flight of Pax fighters appeared over the horizon, nearly a dozen of them. More than we could take on at once. Beating them, however, wasn’t the plan. “Schaz, shift everything to the engines and to the forward shields,” I said. “We’ll bull right through them. As soon as we pass through their ranks, shift everything back to the stealth drive.”

  “We won’t lose them for long, not at that close range,” she warned.

  “I know, but it will confuse them long enough for us to adjust course. We want them to chase us, remember?”

  “Ordinarily I’d complain about the damage you’re about to incur to my systems and my paint job right about now,” she said.

  “You’re not going to?”

  “I could not give less of a shit. That programming spike MelWill whipped up for me is super exciting. Let’s give them hell.”

  We raced right into the Pax’s targeting solution, and the air around us became fire. I danced us through the maelstrom, not worried about picking targets for Esa or Marus or myself, just keeping us alive long enough to blast right through the mass of Pax ships.

  Our guns dropped into silence as the stealth systems kicked on, and I immediately shifted course again, my attention flicking to the damage readouts on my HUD. Our shields had taken a beating, but very little actual damage had made it through, and Schaz was shifting power through her systems with remarkable efficiency, so fast I could barely follow: a side effect of the new temporary programming MelWill had granted her, no doubt.

  “They’re still right behind us,” Marus warned from the turret. “I do not like staring at a mass of enemy ships and not being able to fire at them. Just so you know.”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll force us to drop the stealth drive right about—”

  A shock vibrated through Schaz’s systems as the Pax detonated an EMP torpedo somewhere in our vicinity, the time-tested method of shifting an enemy craft out of stealth. The EMP wave didn’t make it through our shields, of course, but it did disrupt the stealth systems, and just like that we were visible again, both to radar and to the naked eye.

  Marus opened fire, as did Esa, and I shifted our shields to our aft and put everything I had into the engines. We roared over the moon’s surface, whipping past canyons and peaks of frozen crystal, heading toward Delta position, and the second gun there.

  “Javier?” I opened a comm channel to Bolivar. “How you doing?”

  “On course for Delta,” he confirmed. “I’ve got a great many friends following me to the soiree, though.”

  “We picked up a similar group of pests. We’d love to introduce them to our pack of party-crashers.”

  “It’s always nice for old friends to meet new friends. Dead-on course?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  He sent me his approach vector; it scrolled across my HUD, and I shifted course to match. The second gun was approaching at speed; we’d be right above it when the two groups met.

  The Pax forces assaulting the facility came into view just before the facility itself did, again, both sides trading fire over the desolate landscape. I sent a few loose shots toward the Pax ground forces, managing a truly impressive detonation when I landed a lucky shot on the fusion battery of a troop transport, but mainly I focused on keeping my course set, and then there was Bolivar, screaming toward us, the pack of Pax fighters on his tail nearly identical to the group on ours.

  I shifted our approach just slightly, until we were pointed directly at Bolivar’s nose. We scre
amed toward each other over the lunar landscape, racing across the surface and the conflict below. Javier opened fire; so did I, each of us targeting the enemy craft on the far side of the other, finding a rhythm—like a dance—as we each shifted our craft to let the other’s forward fire sweep past us.

  We both banked at the last moment, passing each other with only meters to spare, and hit the enemy craft racing toward us dead on. Even as Esa cut through their ranks with her lasers, I painted as many as I could and opened up the missile banks. The Pax were doing the same, of course, and I was dodging and weaving through their fire even as Marus kept attacking the ships behind us, picking them off as they scattered from Bolivar’s frontal assault.

  The fighter pilots were smarter than the gunships had been; they managed to avoid flying directly into the line of Delta’s anti-aircraft fire. That meant their movements were more constrained than ours, however, and we were dropping them right and left. Their munitions and their shields were running dry; at least some of them hadn’t been able to resupply since they’d arrived in-system, and even those that had managed to do so had spent most of their ordnance against the guns already. By contrast, we were fully loaded, and ready to kill.

  Which isn’t to say it was easy; we were still vastly outnumbered, substantially outgunned, and we were still trying to hit the targets on the ground and the enemy gunships assaulting the cannon, as well as dealing with the fighters. Javier and I wove our ships around each other, anticipating the other’s movements, a kinetic dance of death and salvation, making sure one of us always had a straight line to the blind spots of the other. I’d forgotten how good it felt to fly combat missions with another pilot, one who was attuned to my proficiencies and adept at masking my weaknesses; I hadn’t done anything like this since the sect wars, flying nighttime bombing runs into the siphoning fields of a local gas giant.

  I’d missed it.

  War is terrifying, and war is awful, and war is death and carnage and mayhem, but there’s at least a little part of it that was exhilarating, too, that was thrilling in all the right horrible ways, and the very fact of our survival, of our success, sent my heart racing. We’re terrible creatures, all of us, to get such joy out of so much death, but we are what we are.

  I was good at this, and so was Javier, and being good at something felt right, even when it was something violent and bloody and mean.

  Bolivar and Scheherazade danced among the inferior ships, fighting and clawing and spitting fire and tearing the enemy out of the sky, letting none come close; we were immortal in that moment, the best of the best, and nothing could touch us and nothing could bring us down. We had a mission and we were going to execute it and the Pax would pay for attacking our homes, would pay for raining fire down on our friends, would pay for every Justified they’d ever laid low. We were goddamned war incarnate, the living embodiment of death and carnage and vengeance and wrath, and as horrible as it might have made me, it felt like the best thing in the world.

  CHAPTER 15

  It couldn’t last forever.

  Even as fast as we were cutting them down, the Pax fighters still greatly outnumbered us, and our shields were draining in such sustained combat conditions. “We can’t keep this up much longer,” Javier warned, even as he dropped low, racing across the Pax battalions on the surface to let the Preacher cut them apart with Bolivar’s lasers. “We’ve taken a real beating.”

  “And we’ve got more incoming,” Schaz warned as well. “The Pax have seen what we’re trying to do—they’ve diverted forces from the main combat, up by the frigates, to try and bring us down.”

  A part of me was still singing from the violence, still exulting in the terror and the chaos of it all; it wanted to charge the new assault as well, to make them pay just like we had all the others. I shut that part down, hard. “Then we run,” I said simply. “Set a return course for Sanctum, over the pole of the moon. It’ll be long, but we can’t risk leading them to the gunships.” Speaking of, I scanned my HUD; Seamus’s extraction crews were indeed landing at the cannon sites, slipping through the shields to extract the remaining gun crews. We’d led the enemy fighters into the no-man’s-land between the guns, and they were so busy worrying about us they hadn’t even noticed the evacuating happening at the sites they were meant to be attacking.

  The weapons at the facilities were still firing, of course, but John Henry was running them now. With as many different processes as he was managing, not even he could match the accuracy and the fire rate of sentient operatives, but he was doing the best he could, trying not to let the Pax know that we were evacuating the sentient beings that had been running the show.

  “Can you take one last pass over the enemy positions on the ground?” I asked Javier. “The gunships have landed; we just need to buy them a little more time.” At Chariot and Echo, the enemy would be regrouping, readying to push their attack again; there was nothing we could do about that. We hadn’t had a free hand over the assault group pressing Delta, though, and they were still pushing forward, trying to claim the cannon. If they managed to get through with our gunship still on the ground, it would be a massacre.

  “We’re locked in on your run,” Javier confirmed. “We’ll follow you.”

  I cut Scheherazade in a tight loop, still firing at the airborne Pax forces, and then rolled over the assaulting troops, giving Esa one last shot with her lasers. She diced them apart as if she were wielding a knife on a cutting board, the light of the blue fire reflecting in the crystal sea around the Pax soldiers until the whole surface of the moon glowed with shining indigo flame.

  My comm crackled to life as I pulled us away from the combat, peeling off across the moon’s surface, the Pax fighters still on our tail. “This is Riot Tallgrass; I’m in command of the gunships from Sanctum,” said the Justified on the other end of the line. “We’ve completed extraction at the lunar guns; we’re headed home. Thanks for the diversion.”

  “Any time, Tallgrass,” I replied. “Stay safe.”

  “You too. That was a hell of a—” His signal cut out in a burst of static. I frowned, and looked to my scans; at least a few enemy gunships had made it through our attack, and were harrying the Justified forces as they fled across the moon. I cursed, but there was nothing we could do about it now—trying to aid them would just lead the fighters behind us directly to the fleeing gunships.

  “We’ve still got a great many fighters back here,” Marus warned. I could hear the rail cannon in the turret chugging away over the comms. “Any plans to deal with them?”

  “Just hold tight,” I promised, shifting our throttle to full and pushing all the shielding we had left—which wasn’t much—to the aft of Scheherazade. “We’re on a course back to Sanctum; keep them from shooting us out of the sky, and we’ll lead them right back into Sanctum’s anti-aircraft solution.”

  “Easier said than done, you know.”

  “It’s that or die above this moon.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t try, just that I can only shoot at one of them at a time, and there’s at least a dozen back there.”

  I keyed the comm over to Javier. “How are you two doing?” I asked him.

  “We’ve taken some hits,” he acknowledged. Bolivar wasn’t the combat craft Scheherazade was; it made sense that he would be worse off. “Could really use a resupply and a few minutes with friendly engineers right about now.”

  I read the scans of his ship; if anything, he was understating the damage. Bolivar was listing badly, barely able to keep up with the pace I was setting. The stick must have been shaking in Javier’s hands as though he were trying to pilot through a hurricane. “Pull as close in front of me as you can without giving up your rear turret’s solution,” I told him. “Let us take the brunt of the—”

  Again, my comms crackled to life. “This is John Henry, with a message to all Justified fighters active in the fight,” the AI said. “Situation report follows: the Pax will shortly overwhelm the lunar cannon emplacements. Th
ey’re refocusing their attacks on Alpha and Bravo sites, trying to bring down the planetary guns, including shifting two frigates to screen the approach from Sanctum. Anyone outside of that envelope—get into the skies above the guns, now. Once those frigates seal the Sanctum approach, the path between the moon and the world below will be cut off. You’ll be on your own.

  “The only good news I have to offer is that we believe their last dreadnaught has entered the system. They have ten fully functional dreadnaughts in theater, and there are at least three more that have been knocked out of firing position and are incapable of regaining it, but still have functional anti-aircraft guns: be wary of straying into their envelope.

  “We can hold the line here; we can win this fight. But we must protect the planetary guns, or else all of the dreadnaughts will be able to focus their fire on Sanctum and we will lose two-thirds of our remaining offensive capabilities. I say again: any Justified craft capable of reaching planetary atmosphere, divert to the defense of Alpha or Bravo, now. Those guns must hold.”

  I cursed again. “What does it mean?” Esa asked.

  “Nothing good,” I told her. What it meant was that if we returned to Sanctum, we’d be able to repair and resupply, but it also meant that once we did so, we’d be functionally cut off from the fighting planetside. Any attempt to reach Alpha or Bravo from Sanctum itself would see us flying through the gauntlet the Pax had set up with their frigates, not to mention getting past the dreadnaughts they already had in place over Sanctum. Not even our stealth kits were up to that.

  Right now, however, we were clear; we could make it to the planet without getting anywhere near that kill zone. Of course, that would mean diving into the fight on the world below, where our positions were already beat half to hell, and it would mean doing so without a resupply.