The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams

Author:Drew Williams [Williams, Drew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CHAPTER 7

The moon passing beneath Schaz’s body was a barren landscape of strange, twisting crystalline formations, all violet reflection and turquoise shards of climbing minerals. Sanctum’s homeworld was a great deal of things, but it was also very pretty. Even the boiling seas, where the light from the suns raised the temperatures to past the crystals’ melting point—leading to constant storms of razor-like shards on the edge of the temperature differential—had a certain glorious awe to them.

The city itself—and that’s what it was, not just a colony, or a military base, but a city, populated by people from all over the galaxy, people trying to make that galaxy better, even if they could only do so from hiding—was built across a mountainside, overlooking a crater filled with a pellucid sea of indigo-to-red crystal, the formations frozen in sweeping waves when the destruction that had swept through the system had locked the moon’s orbit in place. The mountain itself rose up from out of that sweep of crystal, its rocky outcroppings at first studded with the growths as well, then less and less as it climbed higher. The lights of Sanctum shone from the peak, a beacon even in the constant daylight—a beacon the Pax were coming to snuff out.

Scheherazade set down on one of the landing platforms jutting out from the mountainside. Sanctum clung to the side of the rock in platforms and bridges, the peak drilled almost hollow so that the city was held just as much within the stone as it was anchored to the outside. The landing platform was already buzzing with activity, people running around, trying to prepare for what was coming. I doubted they could, but it was good to know the council weren’t completely sticking their heads in the sand.

When we disembarked, I grabbed the nearest technician I could find, a Reint called SamMay. She was taller than most of her species, which meant she came almost all the way up to my chin; she grinned as she saw me. The technicians always liked me, for some reason—despite the fact that Schaz could be . . . particular about how, exactly, they worked on her, though she was usually effusive with her praise when they finally got something the way she liked it.

The Reint as a species had evolved down a tributary of the evolutionary river closer to reptilian than mammalian; SamMay’s scales were a latticed pattern of neon orange and pink, and her fingers still ended in the retractable talons that meant Reint were handy mechanics, given that those talons were hard enough—and sharp enough—to double for most of the tools in a toolkit.

“Get a crew together, whoever you can find,” I told her. I wasn’t trying to be rude; you just sometimes have to be . . . abrupt with Reint, or else they’ll simply wander off and do something else entirely. “I need Schaz patched, rearmed, and in prime condition as soon as possible. Take a look at her maneuvering thrusters in particular—at least three took some bad hits.

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