Bringing Stella Home (47 page)

“
Sikorsky, recharge the
jump drive and keep it primed and hot. The moment we undock with
the station—and I mean the
moment
we undock—I want to be out of here.”

“
Got it,
Captain.”

The blood red crescent of the gas
giant waxed wider in the window as the ship maneuvered into its
appointed orbit.

* * * * *

“
What’s the news from
home?” asked Sholpan—no, Stella, now that she was with Lars. She
sat eagerly on the edge of her seat.

“
Your parents are doing
well,” he said. “I saw them a week ago, just before I
left.”

Relief flooded through Stella’s
exhausted body. She felt as if a terrible weight had been lifted
from her.

“
And what about my
brothers?” she asked. “James was with Dad on the
Llewellyn
, but has anyone
heard from Ben?”

Lars stopped and glanced over his
shoulder as a servant walked past them. The room, which had once
been part of the convention suite, was lightly trafficked but still
open to the public. A small fountain bubbled in the center, while
magnificent glass windows gave them a stunning view of Kardunash
III below. The servant checked the potted plants in the corner
before turning and leaving the way he’d come.

“
Don’t mind them,” said
Stella. “They won’t understand us.”

“
Right,” said Lars, leaning
forward and speaking softer anyway. “Well, Ben disappeared on the
day of the invasion, captured when you were. No one knows what
happened to him.”

Stella bit her lip and nodded. The
news about Ben saddened her, but somehow it wasn’t as devastating
as she’d feared it would be. In fact, she now realized she’d been
expecting it.

“
And James,” she asked.
“How is he?”

Lars shook his head. “James is gone,
too. He—”

“
What?” said Stella,
bolting upright. “Didn’t he make it out with my father?”

“
He did,” said Lars, “but a
few days after they returned, he stole one of your family’s ships
and ran away.”

“
But why?”

Lars shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure.
Maybe he fled the system like so many other refugees. Nearly half
of our citizens are already gone, and more are leaving every
day.”

“
No,” she said, shaking her
head. “James wouldn’t run away from home like that.”

“
Yes, but sometimes people
in a crisis do things that you wouldn’t expect. At least we know
the Hameji didn’t get him—not like they got you, at
least.”

Stella fell back in her chair,
dumbstruck by what she’d heard. Why would James run away? It didn’t
make any sense.

“
You seem to be doing quite
well at least,” said Lars, patting her on the knee. “When we heard
you’d been lost, we feared the worst.”

Stella bit her lip and tried very hard
not to break down. Now that Lars was here, everything seemed ten
times harder. Navigating through Hameji politics, trying
desperately to make a life for herself as one of them—all she
wanted was for Lars to hold her and tell her that everything would
be all right, that he had come to take her home.

But that, of course, was
impossible.

“
Enough about me,” she
said, struggling to regain her composure. “How have you
been?”

Lars sighed. “I wish I could say that
all is well. Unfortunately, we’ve fallen on some very hard
times.”

“
Hard times?”

“
Yes,” he said. “Ever since
the invasion, it’s been one crisis after another.”

“
What about the Hameji?”
Stella asked, her voice low. “What have they done?”

“
Thankfully, very little.
There was a bit of looting in the beginning, but almost no one was
actually hurt. A few citizens were taken hostage, to ensure our
cooperation, but last I’ve heard they’re being treated
well.”

“
That’s good,” said
Stella.

Lars nodded. “Since we’re only a minor
colony, the Hameji haven’t set up a garrison. They keep a cruiser
parked outside the station, but for the most part they keep their
hands out of our internal affairs. We hardly ever see any actual
troops.”

“
So they haven’t interfered
with the General Assembly?”

“
No. As far as domestic
affairs go, we’re free to govern ourselves.”

Stella let out a breath she didn’t
know she’d been holding. “That’s very good.”

“
Yes. Not everything is as
bleak as it seems.”

“
No, it isn’t.”

For several moments, they sat in
silence. Through the window, the swirling mass of the planet shone
down on them, bringing out the redness in Lars’s cheeks.

“
The Patrician sent me here
to petition for relief,” he said. “Ever since the beginning of the
occupation, we’ve been in a dismal humanitarian crisis. Nearly all
food imports have come to a halt, and the Hameji are doing nothing
to restore them. Worse, they demand a quarterly tribute and expect
us to resupply their ships at their whim. It’s killing us,
Stella—we can’t keep it up for much longer.”

“
That’s
terrible.”

“
I know. Actually, I was
thinking you could help with that,” he said, his eyes pleading with
her.

“
Really? How?”

“
Qasar rules as an absolute
dictator. He doesn’t care about us, because we’re a small community
that doesn’t produce much wealth. But you’re his wife; you have
influence. If you plead our case, he just might send us the aid we
need.”

Stella’s stomach dropped, and her
cheeks began to pale. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have as
much pull as you think. Qasar has many wives—”

“
Anything you can do for us
is something,” said Lars. He clasped his hand in hers. “Please,
Stella—you can do this. I know you can.”

Stella said nothing for
several moments. In the awful silence, Narju’s words came to her,
cutting through her heart like a laser.
We
do not choose the life that fate gives us. We only choose how we
live it—and how to give of ourselves before our time is
over.

“
I want to go home,” she
whispered.

“
We all do,” Lars said, his
voice low. “We all wish we could go back to the way things
were.”

“
But we can’t,” said
Sholpan, finishing the thought. She took in a deep breath. “All
right,” she said, “I’ll try my best.”

Lars smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
“You have no idea how much of a blessing this is to us. I know
there’s a reason you’ve been put here, in this place at this
time.”

Just like Narju,
she thought sadly to herself.

“
I need to be going,” said
Lars, checking his wrist console as he rose to his feet. “I’m
wanted with the delegation.”

“
Yes,” said Sholpan, rising
with him. “Please—let’s meet again, before you go.”

“
Of course.”

He gave her a friendly hug before
leaving. Tears welled up in Sholpan’s eyes, and she bit her lip to
keep them from spilling out. As much as she wanted to go home with
him, she knew it was impossible. She was Qasar’s wife, not Lars’s
lover. She was Hameji now.

* * * * *

James stared at the airlock
door, trying very hard to ignore the sweat that was starting to
pool in his armpits underneath the heavy Hameji armor.
I can do this,
he told
himself, envisioning the face of his brother’s killer.
I’m not a sheep—I’m a wolf.

The airlock pressurized, the door slid
open, and Danica led him out into the low-gravity maintenance
corridor of the docking arm. James floated into the empty space and
stared down the long hexagonal shaft. Vertigo nearly overwhelmed
him; the station node was almost a kilometer away. Following
Danica’s lead, he pulled himself down the corridor, using the
handholds to keep pace. As they approached the node, the station’s
artificial gravity field grew stronger, and they half walked, half
pulled themselves the rest of the way, moving in complete and utter
silence.

They passed through the station’s
maintenance airlock without incident. As they entered the main
terminal, a pair of guards at the gate nodded at them. Underneath
his visor, James grew tense, but their disguises worked; the guards
took them for Hameji soldiers, and let them pass into the station
unhindered.

The hallways of the onetime pleasure
resort were wide and well-lit, with pearly tile floors, crystal
chandeliers, and high, vaulted ceilings. They were also almost
totally deserted. Scorch marks and bullet holes marked where the
fighting had been the worst, while dying potted plants met them at
every turn, their dry brown leaves scattered across the otherwise
spotless floors. Some of the chandeliers still worked, while others
lay at the sides of the area, partially smashed.

How many people died in
these corridors?
James thought to himself.
They moved too fast for him to wonder for long.

Danica led him down a long,
complicated path with almost a dozen turns. The corridors became
narrower and more windy, and the signs of battle became sparser.
The potted plants in this part of the station were still green and
cared for.

Almost
there
, James told himself. His heart
pounded in his chest, and he gripped the pistol in his holster with
a tense, sweaty hand.

Footsteps sounded from around the
corner, coming in their direction. Danica hastily stood by the
nearest door, making as if she were guarding it. At a gesture from
her eyes, James did the same. A band of women in long white dresses
walked by, barely noticing them.

As soon as the corridor was empty
again, Danica turned and keyed the door. It hissed open, and they
stepped into a dark, empty maintenance corridor.

“
How close are we?” asked
James once the door was shut.

“
Shh!” hissed Danica. She
checked her wrist console; the dim glow of the screen lit up her
face in the dimness. “One level up and two halls over.”

James’s heart thumped wildly in
excitement. Stella’s quarters were less than a hundred yards
away.

Danica led them up a ladder into an
adjoining shaft. They made their way some distance in the darkness,
until they met another door. Danica motioned for James to go to the
panel and wait. She squatted and placed her wrist console up
against the metal, reading the glowing screen. After a few seconds,
she rose to her feet and nodded. James keyed it open.

They stepped out into a white-tiled
corridor identical to the one they’d left. Danica stepped swiftly
now, moving with a sense of urgency. James followed, adrenaline
rushing through his already tense body.

As they reached an intersection, James
heard footsteps coming from the left. Before either of them could
react, a man stepped into view. He was a Hameji officer, dressed in
a gray uniform with red epaulets. He had a swarthy face and jet
black hair. His razor thin beard traced the line of his jaw down to
the bottom of the chin, where it expanded into a pointed
goatee.

James recognized him instantly as
Ben’s killer.

Faster than thought, faster than
consciousness, an image flashed into his mind. Darkness, smoke and
blood. Walls pocked with bullets and smoldering plasma. Ben,
staring at him with a hot plasma burst burning a hole through his
chest.

The sharp noise of a gunshot snapped
James to the present. As if in a trance, he watched the officer’s
eyes roll back in their sockets as the man stumbled and fell
backwards. His body struck the wall and collapsed on the floor,
smearing bright red blood against the pearly white
tiles.

James glanced down at the gun in his
hand. His grip was so tight that he could feel his own heartbeat
through it. Smoke issued from the end of the weapon.

“
Shit,” said Danica. She
grabbed him by the arm and practically yanked him off his feet,
running down the narrow corridor. He followed, legs and feet
numb.

Behind them, a door hissed open and
people began to shout. Danica and James turned the corner and ran.
The shouting grew louder, followed by the unmistakable pounding of
Hameji boots.

Chapter 25

“
What a tiresome morning,”
said Qasar as he collapsed onto the couch in his quarters. “Nothing
but endless petitions. Are these planetborn hordes so mindless that
they can’t rule themselves?”

They were doing fine
before you came,
Sholpan thought bitterly
to herself. She sat across from him on an ornate wooden chair, a
magnificent glass table set on a beautifully woven rug between
them. Qasar had chosen one of the richest suites on the station for
his quarters; Sholpan had never been surrounded by more wealth.
Knowing how her friends and family were suffering, however, she
took no joy in it.

“
Take that moon, for
example,” Qasar continued, “What was it’s name? Skye? The
settlement suffers from such a lack of discipline that the riots
have almost destroyed the outpost’s life support systems. Can you
believe that? It’s absurd!”