Bringing Stella Home (17 page)

“
Do you think we use this
facility because we need to?” the albino asked, still laughing. “As
if our engineers and shipbuilders couldn’t do any better than this!
No, my friend—in the depths of Tenguri, the rain is made of
diamonds.”

Ben didn’t understand the meaning of
the proverb, nor what the man had found so funny. He felt suddenly
out of place, like an alien in a foreign world. A nervous smile
crept to his lips, but he could not laugh.

The albino officer stopped laughing as
abruptly as he had started. He reached into a drawer and pulled out
a gun.

Ben’s eyes widened as the man laid it
on the table between them. It was a large handgun; the chamber was
the size of Ben’s fist, while the barrel was almost half as long as
his forearm. The grip had been worn smooth with use, but the body
was clean and appeared to be in perfect condition.

“
Take it,” said the albino.
“It’s for you.”

Ben stood as if rooted to the spot.
For several seconds, he couldn’t move a muscle in his body. His
mind reeled with confusion and terror and rage and
exhaustion.

A shudder passed through his body, and
he watched as he stepped forward and picked up the weapon. The
firmness of its weight, the coldness of the grip—the very sight of
the weapon in his hands gave him a strange sensation, one that he
could not place. He closed his eyes for a moment and grasped at
that distant yet familiar feeling. It felt so delicious, like
something he had not tasted in a long, long time.

Power.

He opened his eyes and checked the
gun’s chamber. “Yes,” said the officer from across the desk. “It’s
loaded.”

It was—with a single
bullet.

Ben snapped the chamber shut and
looked up at the albino, who stared back at him with his demonic
red eyes. Time slowed to a crawl, and in an instant, awareness
flooded into Ben’s mind, a perfect awareness of everything around
him. The buzzing of the ventilator shafts, the chipping paint in
the right corner near the ceiling, the individual beats of his
heart—in that one unending moment, he was aware of it all. His
hands trembled, and a cold sweat formed on the back of his
neck.

I could kill this
man,
Ben realized.
Or I could kill myself.

In one smooth, exhilarating motion, he
leveled the weapon at the albino’s head and squeezed the
trigger.

For Stella, you
bastard.

The crack of the gun filled Ben’s ears
with a loud noise, followed by a muted sizzle. The air above the
desk shimmered, and the stench of spent gunpowder mingled with a
metallic, ozone smell.

He blinked. The albino officer stood
exactly where he had a moment ago, completely unaffected by the
shot. No blood, no wound, no crying out in pain or falling to the
ground. It was as if Ben had missed—or as if the bullet had never
hit him.

Ben screamed with the last of his
strength. A horrible spasm passed through his body, and he fell to
his knees, his whole body trembling uncontrollably. He pounded his
fists into the cold, hard floor and screamed until he choked on his
own breath. Sobbing, he collapsed in a heap.

Powerless—he was utterly, completely,
totally powerless.

After a long silence, a gentle hand
patted him on the shoulder. It was the albino. Ben stared up into
his blood red eyes.

“
There are two kinds of men
in this universe,” the man said, “the strong and the weak. Fear is
for the weak; power is for the strong. You have passed through the
crucible of pain and fear, of death and fire. You stand at the
brink of your own weakness, cleansed and expunged of all
corruption, a masterwork waiting to be born.”

The albino officer helped Ben to his
feet and placed the gun back into his hand, closing his fingers
over it as if over something precious.

“
Take this weapon,” the
officer said. “Feel it in your hands. You are not unlike it: empty,
unresponsive, powerless—yet so incredibly full of
potential.”

He released Ben’s hands and stepped
back. Ben stared at the gun in his hands, until everything but the
man’s voice faded from his mind.

“
That’s right. Feel the
potential—feed on it. Thrilling, no? You want it for yourself,
don’t you?”

Ben blinked and nodded. It had been so
long since he had felt any real power.

“
I can give you what you’ve
lost. I can give you the power you so crave. The only question is
whether you want it.”

Ben hesitated for only a
moment.

“
Yes.”

The officer smiled. “Then welcome,
soldier.”

Part II: Ben

Chapter 8

“
Two Gaian Imperial
battlegroups are arrived this morning, Captain,” said Sergeant
Roman Krikoryan in his heavy Tajji accent. “I am thinking it is
mistake to stay at this place.”

Captain Danica Nova nodded and sighed.
The spineless Imperials were swarming to the end of the Karduna
starlane like flies to a dying bitch in heat. It was almost as if
they were at war with the refugees, not the Hameji. She certainly
wouldn’t put it past them.

“
We stay until we’ve met
with our client, Roman,” she said, glancing up from her instruments
to face her chief NCO. “After that, we’ll consider our
options.”

Roman fingered the grizzled silvery
hair of his goatee. “And what if the client is Imperial
agent?”

“
Leave that to
me.”

Danica turned and looked out the
forward window at the massive spherical bulk of the starlane
station. Built as a relay point for traffic between the Gaia Nova
and Karduna systems, it housed more than a dozen peta-watt power
generators and a whole network of jump drives. The redundancy
ensured that starships spent at most only a few minutes here before
passing to the Karduna system nearly half a light-year
away.

With the fall of Karduna to the
unstoppable Hameji, however, traffic had come to a complete stop. A
flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees now inundated this deep
space outpost. Their ships swarmed the station, clustering around
the already overcrowded docking node. The Imperials, bastards that
they were, had refused to give anyone entry into the New Gaian
Empire without proper immigration papers, so here the
disenfranchised Kardunasians languished.

Danica sympathized with the refugees,
but she was glad for the growing humanitarian crisis that allowed
her and her men to slip by unnoticed. Not that the Imperials
weren’t hiring; at the going rate for mercenaries, a couple solid
jobs could make every last soldier on her crew a millionaire. Be
that as it may, however, it still didn’t top the reward the
Imperials had put on their heads. Although the higher-ups might be
desperate enough to do it anyway, she wouldn’t put it past some
lower officer to stab them all in the back.

Besides, she’d sooner die than work
for the Empire.

“
Sikorsky,” she said, “What
do you gather from the fleet’s movements?”

Lieutenant Anya Sikorsky,
pilot of the
Tajji Flame,
quickly scanned the data on her screen. A young
blonde only twenty-six standard years of age, she cut an attractive
figure in her form-fitting jumpsuit. Some might wonder why Danica
had chosen this young woman to be her pilot—or why Anya hadn’t
pursued a lucrative career as a fashion model instead. Danica knew
full well why not: Models couldn’t expect to keep their jobs when
they left a trail of bodies wherever they went.

“
They seem to be
reinforcing the defensive perimeter,” said Anya. “I don’t think
they’ll give us any trouble—not right now, at least.”

“
Have you located our
contact?”

“
Yes, Captain. The
Catriona
is
two-point-four k-clicks out, closing on our position. At her
current velocity, we should be docked in ten minutes.”

“
Good work, Sikorsky. Keep
me apprised of any changes in Gaian fleet movements.”

Danica turned to face her cybernetics
officer. “Ayvazyan,” she said, “give me a status
update.”

If Anya was an unlikely military
officer, Lieutenant Ilya Ayvazyan was a positive delinquent—the
last kind of person anyone would expect to find on a private
military crew. Scrawny and unkempt, with greasy black hair and a
perpetually smug look on his face, he didn’t mix well with the
other officers—or with the general public, either. Danica had never
had reason to regret taking him on, however. Though Ilya was barely
twenty-two, dressed like a grungy civilian, and often smoked in
public areas of the ship (much to Roman’s frustration), the kid was
a genius hacker. More than once, he’d gotten them out of
trouble—and thrown the enemy into a whole world of hurt.

Ilya casually leaned back in his
chair. “Our client’s ship has some pretty pathetic security
systems, I can tell you that,” he said. “I’ve already cracked the
ice and should have complete access to his data in a couple of
minutes.”

“
What have you
found?”

“
So far, he checks out.
Kardunasian born and bred, privately owned ship with no record in
the Imperial database, clean slate all around. Either the Imperials
are getting really good at covering their agents, or this guy’s
legit.”

“
Good,” said Danica. “Let
me know the moment you find anything fishy.”

“
You got it.”

Danica glanced down at the clock on
her wrist console and shook her head. Their contact was
late.

“
Our jump reserves are
running hot, Captain,” said Anya. “Should I bleed off the batteries
and recharge once we’ve docked?”

“
No,” said Danica. “Keep
our jump drive at the ready. I want to be able to run the instant
the Imperials so much as sneeze in our direction.”

“
And take the client with
us?” asked Roman from behind her.

“
Yes,” said Danica.
If all else fails, at least we’ll come out with a
hostage.

Four weeks since their arrival at
Karduna, and everything had gone to hell in a ruptured escape pod.
They’d barely escaped the Hameji with their lives, and now their
only potential client in weeks was some kid by the name of James
McCoy. Danica wasn’t in the habit of taking jobs from boys too
young to shave, but lately things had gotten desperate. The Hameji
had ruthlessly crushed every military force within a hundred
parsecs—everyone except the New Gaian Empire, which seemed to be
next. While the Imperials were desperate to take on as many hired
guns as they could find, the Hameji weren’t. With their funds and
supply stores running low, Danica couldn’t afford to turn any
private job down.

A blinking light on her
display screen brought her out of her thoughts. It was
an incoming message
.

“
Captain,” said Anya,
“the
Catriona
is
within range and wishes to dock with us.”

“
Proceed,” said Danica. She
turned to Roman. “Considering the circumstances, I don’t think it’s
prudent for me to leave my post on the bridge. Send a few men to
bring him here.”

“
Yes, Captain,” said Roman.
He rose and left the bridge, the door hissing shut behind
him.

Of course, a face-to-face
meeting was not strictly necessary—they could easily conduct their
business over the KG-1 localnet via the
Tajji Flame’s
secure servers.
Something about this contract seemed suspicious, though, and Danica
didn’t feel safe conducting business on the grid. Ilya was good,
but the Imperials had a lot more resources to draw on. If they cut
through his ice and infiltrated her network, they could shut down
the
Flame’s
systems before any of them had time to react. Danica wasn’t
about to put her men in that kind of danger.

She watched in silence as
the
Catriona
flew
into position overhead. It was a small ship, little more than a
light transport shuttle retrofitted with a jump drive. From the
cosmic weathering on the hull, Danica guessed she was going on
three or four decades of use. Definitely obsolete.

“
Any hidden gun
emplacements?” she asked.

“
No,” said Anya. “I’ve
scanned her twice, Captain. I don’t think she’s armed.”

“
Good. Scan her a third
time, and keep your finger on the jump drive.”

A distant groaning noise came through
the walls of the ship as they docked. Half a minute later, an
indicator blinked, showing that the main airlock was
open.

No incident. Not yet.

Moments later, the door to the bridge
hissed open. Danica stood with her hands clasped smartly behind her
back and nodded at her men as they stepped through. Behind Roman
and flanked by Peter and Nicholas, two of her huskiest soldiers,
the young boy stepped onto the bridge.

Danica frowned; ‘boy’ was certainly an
apt term for him. His cheeks were pale and soft, his bowl-cut hair
knotty and uncombed. He barely came up to Roman’s chin, and his
arms were as scrawny as Danica’s had been at his age.