Bringing Stella Home (51 page)

“
But it is, Stella—it is!
You deserve to be happy, not married to a monster. Are you ready to
spend the rest of your life with him? Are you ready to bear his
children?”

“
No,” she said, tears
shimmering in her eyes. “No, I—”

“
You don’t have to do
this,” he continued, his voice gaining strength. “Come with us.
This isn’t the life you deserve, Stella—it isn’t the life you want
to live.”

“
It’s not about me,” she
cried. “Can’t you see that? It’s about the people I love. Do you
think I wanted any of this, that I would have chosen this for
myself? This isn’t something I want, James, but what can I do? I
could never live with myself if the others died because I failed to
save them.”

James opened his mouth to answer, but
found he had nothing to say.

“
I’m so sorry,” she
continued, “but we can’t go back to the way things were. All we can
do is live on and do our best with what we have.”

He looked into her eyes and realized
that she wasn’t the same sister he’d known before. She seemed much
older now—more grown up. Somehow, that frightened him most of
all.

“
Don’t be sad for me,
James,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Wherever you go,
be happy. For me.”

She wrapped her arms around him,
giving him one final, parting hug. James clung to her, as if to
hold on forever. But all too soon, she let him go.

“
Will I ever see you
again?” he asked.

“
Of course! Qasar holds his
court on this station, and I’ll be here whenever he is.”

He nodded. “Then I’ll come back as
often as I can.”

She smiled. “Tell Mother and Father
that I’m all right. Tell them that I love them and miss
them.”

“
I will.”

“
Goodbye,” said
Stella.

“
Goodbye,” James
whispered.

He felt a hand on his shoulder,
pulling him gently away. As he turned to join Danica and Lars, he
glanced over his shoulder to get one last glimpse of his sister.
Stella waved to him from beneath the giant vines and enormous
flowers, a reddish shadow cast across her face from the glow of the
gas giant below. She smiled one last time before they rounded a
corner and passed out of view.

Chapter 27

Danica followed Lars onto
the bridge of the
Freedom’s Banner.
Compared to the
Tajji
Flame,
the cozy sublight freighter seemed
fresh out of the shipyards. It didn’t feel like home, but at least
it was a ride.

“
Are we ready to transmit?”
she asked the captain—a stocky, white-haired man by the name of
Olaf Stanislaw.

“
Anytime,” the old man
said, waving her to the empty chair next to him. “She’s all
yours.”

Danica assumed her seat and settled
in. She stared for several moments at the starfield out the window
before bringing up the message.

“
How many weeks before we
arrive in port?”

“
Two at least,” he said,
yawning.

Danica turned to her screen and leaned
forward.

Attn: MSG
Krikoryan,
she wrote.
Cpt Nova reporting Operation
Blue
Phoenix
has failed. Lts Ayvazyan &
Sikorsky KIA. E McCoy alive, target lost.

She paused, wondering how
best to encode the coordinates. After a few moments, she
typed:
RP: Ensign POC.

The captain glanced over
her shoulder. “Ensign port-of-call? Where is
that—
Kardunash VII
?
And how do you expect them to find you if you don’t give ‘em a
timestamp?”

“
My men will know what it
means,” Danica said.
Besides,
she told herself,
if they
don’t, I could use some time to myself.

She transmitted the message, rose to
her feet, nodded to the captain, and left the bridge.

* * * * *

Three days into their
voyage, news reached them that
Gaia
Nova
had fallen. With the Gaian Imperial
Navy scattered and broken, the Hameji had brought their mass
accelerators into orbit and slagged the planet, the same as with
Kardunash IV and Tajjur V. In a matter of hours, over three
thousand years of human history and culture were lost
forever.

A somber, melancholy mood
fell over the
Freedom’s Banner
at the news. Captain Stanislaw spent more and more
time in his quarters, and the crew talked among themselves in
hushed, subdued tones. Some of them even wept. Though few of them
had ever been to to the capitol world of the once-proud Gaian
Empire, its fall was the ultimate victory of the Hameji conquest.
Before, the people of Karduna could dare to hope that someone would
come and liberate them. Now, that hope was gone forever.

The news had a curious effect on
Danica—it hit her like a blow to the gut and sent her to the cabin
to get a drink. Eight shots of Tajji vodka later, she staggered
into the public bathroom, vomited all over the floor, and passed
out with her head in the toilet. She woke up in Lars’s quarters
with a sky-splitting headache and a cold pack on her forehead,
naked except for a patient’s gown and overcome with a terrible bout
of depression. For the first time in years, she wanted nothing more
than to shut out the universe and be done with it all.

Instead, she vomited a second time and
promptly passed out.

Her dreams were surprisingly lucid, a
patchwork nightmare of memories from her life before her mercenary
career. She saw herself as a little girl, playing with Karen in a
field of grass. She saw her father, dressed in full uniform,
bouncing her on his leg while the medals on his chest jingled like
miniature bells. She saw her mother, tucking her into bed and
kissing her goodnight. Then, air raid drills and bomb shelters,
pink and orange explosions against the night sky—her mother,
sobbing uncontrollably as they said goodbye to her father for the
last time.

On the scanner, she saw a hundred
Imperial dreadnoughts jump into local space. She was on board a
ship now—the last ship to escape from Tajjur V. In a panic, she
realized that her family was still on the planet’s surface. She
struggled with titanic effort to lift her legs and run to the
pilot’s chair, but her feet were frozen to the spot; all she could
do was watch.

The blue-green world of
Tajjur V loomed large in the forward window
.
White clouds drifted across the
verdant planetscape like puffs of cotton. While she watched,
hundreds of Hameji mass accelerators took their positions in orbit
and pointed their kilometer-long cannons at the surface. In unison,
they ejected billions of tons of iron and space rock into the
surface of her beloved homeworld. The white cotton clouds turned
gray, then black, then red as the world began to bleed. It ran
crimson with the blood of all the innocent souls killed by the
Hameji and the Gaian Imperials, all the women and children
massacred like her family from the senseless oppression.

She woke up drenched in
sweat.

At first, she thought she
was in the medical bay of the
Tajji
Flame.
Then Lars entered the room, and she
realized she was still on the
Freedom’s
Banner.
A sudden longing for her own ship
overwhelmed her, a longing so strong that it would have brought her
to tears had she not been so exhausted.

“
Good morning,” said Lars.
“How are you feeling?”

“
Like I woke up on the
wrong end of an orbital cannon.”

He laughed. “At least you don’t look
it.”

Danica wasn’t so sure.

Two hours later, after she’d showered,
dressed, and eaten, she felt a little better. The alcohol passed
through her system easily enough, but escaping her own tortured
thoughts was much more difficult. Ever since the Gaian occupation
forces had slaughtered her family, she’d harbored the vague hope
that one day she would have her revenge on them for what they’d
done. Now, with Gaia Nova obliterated and the Empire in ruins, that
vengeance was impossible.

Are you pleased with me,
Father?
She couldn’t imagine he would be.
Where was she when the Imperials had finally met their end? Holed
up on a local freighter in the Karduna system, limping back from a
failed mission. She’d had more than a decade to avenge her family’s
deaths, and she’d squandered it.
In all
those years,
she wondered,
w
hat good have I
accomplished?

There was
her crew, of course. That was something of an
accomplishment, taking care of all them—but wait. Anya, Ilya, and
Artyom were dead. Vaclav had chosen to leave. Abu Kariym was still
with them, but his wife and children had been living on Gaia Nova;
he’d probably be leaving soon to search for them. And as for
Roman—Danica didn’t even want to think about how much she had cost
him.

At least James is still
alive,
she thought bitterly to
herself.
At least I saved the
boy.

Or had she?

With a start, she realized that she
hadn’t spoken with him since leaving Kardunash III. For all she
knew, he could have killed himself—God knew he must be
contemplating it.

Not waiting another second, she rose
to her feet and went straight to his quarters.

* * * * *

“
Ensign McCoy!”

The sound of Danica’s voice broke
through James’s moroseness. He blinked and sat up on his
cot.

“
What is it?”

“
I think you and I need to
have a little chat.”

Why? What’s there to talk
about?
The contract was complete—the
mission was an utter failure. What could she possibly want with
him?

“
Sure,” he muttered. It was
easier than saying no.

She took a seat on the other end of
the cot and stared into his eyes. “You look like a broken man,” she
said. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“
Tell you what?”

“
What’s bothering you,” she
repeated. “What’s on your mind.”

He blinked again. The light in the
room seemed suddenly very bright.

“
I don’t know,” he
muttered.

“
Bullshit. You know. Tell
me.”

He drew in a deep breath. “It—it’s
just hard to believe that they’re gone.”

“
That who’s
gone?”

James said nothing.

“
McCoy,” said Danica, “Look
at me.”

James lifted his eyes from the floor
and looked her in the face. To his surprise, she seemed
distraught.

“
You need to quit feeling
sorry for yourself,” she told him. “This moping around isn’t going
to get you anywhere. You have a future. You have a family and a
home waiting for you.”

“
No,” he said. “I broke the
law when I left. My father never left me the
Catriona,
I stole—”

“
I don’t think for a second
that that’s going to keep your parents from taking you back.
Neither should you.”

She gave him a meaningful look. James
glanced back down at the floor without saying anything. Several
moments passed.

“
You want to know
something?” she asked. “Did you know that I had a brother who
looked just like you?”

“
No.”

“
I did. And you know what
happened to him?”

“
What?”

“
The damned Imperials
tortured and killed him.”

James glanced up.

“
They slaughtered my entire
family after taking over my homeworld,” Danica continued. “My
father was an admiral in the Tajji navy, and when they interrogated
him, he wouldn’t talk. That’s why they killed us.”

James frowned. “How did you
escape?”

“
I didn’t. I left in a
misguided attempt to save my father. When I returned and found them
dead, I ran away, vowing to avenge them.” She sighed. “But revenge
is a tricky business, especially when you’re fighting a faceless
enemy. Eventually, I settled for a life as a mercenary.”

“
I’m sorry about your
family,” James said.

“
I am, too. Now, let me ask
you something: do you think I ever got to say goodbye?”

Danica’s face had reddened somewhat,
and she sounded angrier than he’d ever heard her.

“
N-no. Why?”

“
Because you did,” she
said, pointing her finger into his chest to drive the point home.
“
You
did. You said
goodbye to your sister. You said goodbye to your brother. Those are
things that I never had—things that billions of victims in this war
never will.”

James bit his lip as his eyes went
blurry. His shoulders started shaking; he couldn’t hold back the
tears any longer.