Bringing Stella Home (9 page)

“
And what kind of
transparency measures do you have in place?” his father asked. “No
one is going to appropriate funding without sufficient
oversight.”

“
I don’t know yet, Dad.
I’ll figure it out.”

“
If you want your bill to
pass, you’d better. But if by ‘outsourcing’ you mean—”

“
I’m not doing anything
wrong!” James shouted. “It’s my right as a citizen to bring
legislation to the General Assembly, isn’t it?”

“
Why are you
shouting?”

“
I’m not
shouting!”

“
Yes you are.
Why?”

“
Because—” James turned to
face the screen and bit his lip so hard it went numb.

“
Son,” his father said,
putting a hand on his shoulder. “I understand what you’re feeling
right now. You want to see your brother and sister again. So do I.
But at some point, we need to accept the fact that they’re gone. I
think you should reconsider what you’re doing.”

“
No, Dad,” James said,
shrugging off his father’s hand.

“
You don’t know what you’re
doing. These are serious times—we can’t afford to have frivolous
legislation bogging down—”

James spun around to face his father.
“Frivolous legislation? You think getting Ben and Stella back is
frivolous?”

“
Yes, I do.”

“
How can you possibly say
that?” James asked, trembling with rage.

“
Because there’s nothing
you or I can do. Even if Ben and Stella are alive, the Hameji are
too strong.”

“
Maybe for us,” James
muttered without thinking.

“
And just who were you
planning on ‘outsourcing’ to? Mercenaries?”

“
No,” James said
quickly—too quickly. “I mean—”

“
I hope not, because
misusing public funds is a serious crime.”

“
I know, Dad—I
know.”

His father sighed. “James, do you have
any idea what you’re asking? Hundreds of thousands of credits to
fund your private quest, from an embattled society that can’t
afford it. And if you go up against the Hameji in the name of the
Colony, do you have any idea what they’ll do to us? They’ll kill us
all!”

“
I know, Dad.”

“
Then why can’t you let it
go and move on? Ben and Stella are gone. Neither you nor I can
bring them back. At best, you’ll just be wasting your time and the
Colony’s money.”

“
Are you going to stop me?”
James asked.

“
What?”

“
I said, are you going to
stop me?”

His father stared at him long and
hard. For a heart-stopping moment, James feared that the answer
would be yes.

“
No,” his father finally
said, looking away. “I won’t stop you. You’re a citizen. It’s your
right.”

“
Good.” James turned to the
computer.

“
But wait, Son,” his father
said. James stopped and glanced over his shoulder.

“
I want you to think very
hard about what you’re doing. Is this for the good of the Colony,
or is this something you’re doing for your own selfish
reasons?”

James clenched his fists and bit his
lower lip. How could his father call him selfish for wanting to
save his brother and sister? The thought infuriated him.

“
I know you miss them,” his
father continued. “Believe me, I do too. But sometimes we have to
accept what we can’t change.”

“
Are you
finished?”

“
Please, James—please,
think long and hard about this bill. We can’t change the past, no
matter how hard we try. We can only look to the future.”

James didn’t answer. After some time,
his father left the room. Five minutes later, James transmitted the
draft of his bill to the office of the Secretary of the General
Assembly.

* * * * *

Ben trembled from exhaustion. A
painful, high pitched noise buzzed incessantly in his ear, leaving
him no quiet space. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since
he’d last slept. Hours? Days? Weeks, even? He wished he could at
least see where they’d taken him, but they had put the hood back
over his face. His hands were bound tightly behind him, his wrists
raw from the rough bonds. He was still naked, and the air was cold
enough to draw goosebumps across his flesh as he lay sprawled out
across the hard metal floor.

Everything but the immediate present
seemed nothing but a half-remembered dream to him—random, with no
pattern. Hood lifted, food forced into his mouth, dribbling down
his chest. Water poured across his face. Buzzing off, sleep for a
few precious hours. Coldness, heat; sweating, shivering. Weeks
could have passed—months, even.

But the present—that was not a dream.
That was more real than he could bear. His hunger, his
nakedness—even the pain faded into a low drone after a while. It
was the terrible, inescapable presentness of his thoughts that ate
at him. He could not escape the torture of his own mind—the torture
of consciousness.

Stella
. He had to get to her; had to save her. Whatever they did to
him wasn’t important—he had to stop them from hurting
her.

Then they came for him.

The buzzing stopped, leaving an empty
ringing in Ben’s head. A door hissed open, followed by footsteps on
the metal floor. Hands lifted him to his feet, and the hood was
pulled off, exposing his face to light so brilliant that it seemed
to burn his eyeballs. Ben blinked and shut his eyes.

Someone cut his bonds, freeing his
hands. Others lifted him roughly to his feet, but he didn’t have
the strength to stand. Soldiers on either side held him up, half
dragging, half carrying him forward.

Once out of the prison cell, his eyes
adjusted to the dim light of the corridor. The walls were a dark,
greenish-gray, the steel floor hard and black. The booted feet of
the soldiers trod loudly over it.

They lined him up next to two other
prisoners, both men, both strangers. Their bodies were bruised,
their emaciated ribs quite visible. Ben glanced down at his own
stomach and realized that it was the same with him. He knew he
should find this unsettling, but he felt too worn out to
care.

The soldiers made them face a glass
wall. On the other side, Ben saw three prisoners: two men and one
woman, their naked bodies as bruised and emaciated as his own.
Something about the room seemed odd to him. The wall on the
opposite side of the room was actually a large door, like the
opening to a hangar bay.

Or perhaps an airlock.

Before he could say or do anything,
the door flew open, revealing the black, starry void of space. A
mighty roar of outrushing air drowned out the screams of the
prisoners, then quickly faded into silence—absolute, terrible
silence.

Both men were immediately sucked out
of the airlock, fear glazed across their faces as they raced into
oblivion. The woman, however, found a crevice in the wall and held
on to the last. Ben watched in horror as her arms and legs turned
blue and slowly began to bloat. Her eyes rolled back in her
sockets, revealing the ghostly whites. Her grip came loose, and her
body drifted slowly out into the starry expanse like a twisted
marionette. Her stiff, frozen limbs had the appearance of a child’s
action figure, arms and legs jutting out like plastic
appendages.

The door closed, and the airlock
refilled with air. The taste of vomit filled Ben’s mouth, and his
stomach went suddenly weak. His legs fell out from under him; only
the grip of the soldiers at his side kept him on his
feet.

They were getting the airlock ready
for another execution.

A thousand stray thoughts raced
through his tortured mind, assailing him with flashes of pure
terror. Images from his memory blinked across his mind’s eye like
the random splash of characters across a dying computer. He felt
caught up in a nightmare, like a spectator in his own body,
powerless to run from the terrors that chased him.

The soldiers shoved him through a
door, into the airlock with half a dozen other prisoners. His
screams mingled with theirs as together they pounded their fists
against the glass and scraped at the door until blood oozed from
their fingertips.

The eyes of the soldiers stared at him
from the other side of the window. He felt a raspiness in his
breath, bruises on the palms of his hands from striking the
unyielding duraglass. Lack of breath—the goosebumps already
spreading across his bare skin.

Blood still frozen on the floor. The
brutal coldness of the air. Falling. Darkness.

Then, hands touching him, pulling him.
Warm air, bright light. The hard metal floor against his bare feet,
the rough fabric of the hood against his face.

Then, cold, hard floor.

Silence.

* * * * *

James’s bill lasted barely two days
before the voters killed it.

It almost died before it came to the
floor. After registering it with the secretary, James had six hours
to gather twenty signatures in support of the legislation. He’d
somehow overlooked that rule, and found himself desperately calling
every friend he could think of to gather the required signatures.
He got the last one in only a minute before the
deadline.

Of course, he didn’t ask his father
for support. He already knew what the answer would be.

After a hasty dinner, James once again
returned to the bridge to check on the status of his bill. A few
votes had trickled in, mostly nays, but the vast majority of voters
hadn’t yet noticed it. That wasn’t too surprising, considering all
the other legislation on the floor.

Still, he needed to find some
supporting votes, and he needed them soon. If, after twenty-four
hours, more than ninety percent of the votes were against his bill,
it would automatically die, no matter the voter turnout.

He spent all night alone on the
bridge, posting hastily written op-ed articles on all the political
forums that would give him space. His bill acquired some positive
momentum, but not enough to counteract the votes against him.
Still, by the time he went to bed, there were only around
sixty-forty nays. When the citizens awoke in the morning and read
his posts, they would hopefully start to join his side.

Instead, he awoke to find his bill in
immediate danger. An influential watchdog group had lumped it with
a number of other pieces of legislation that they considered a
waste of government spending. Within minutes, more than five
hundred nays flooded in, threatening to torpedo the bill before
most of the citizens even had a chance to see it.

Exasperated, James spent the next ten
hours calling up every possible friend to get as many yea votes as
possible. Unfortunately, it always came back to the same question:
What kind of oversight measures did he plan to put in place to
guarantee transparency of the funding? He didn’t dare admit that he
might use the funds to hire mercenaries.

The bill lasted past the sudden-death
threshold, but with only thirteen percent of the votes in his
favor. If he didn’t get that number up to at least fifteen percent
by the next day, according to the Assembly’s rules, his legislation
would die.

He spent the next twenty-four hours on
the bridge, breaking only for an hour or two of sleep at his chair.
Despite his best efforts, another watchdog group picked up the
issue and started lobbying hard against him. He spent the last few
hours furiously pounding out rebuttals, ignoring his growling
stomach and aching bladder to fight against the growing tide of
criticism.

Just when he thought all was lost, a
friend brought a sympathetic liberal watchdog group to the
attention of his plight. When he heard the news, James leaped up
from his seat and fell on his knees, weeping for joy and relief. He
wasn’t alone—and now, with someone else to advocate his bill,
perhaps it might have a chance.

Sadly, that was not the
case.

Instead of advocating the bill, the
liberal watchdog group brought forward a motion to recant and send
it into a joint committee for revisions. Just like everyone else,
they cited the lack of proper funding oversight as their primary
concern. With the proposed motion, the group was effectively taking
over the bill—cutting James out in the process. The only way he
could stop them was to organize a draft committee—in just six
hours.

Once again, he went to his friends.
Once again, they questioned the lack of oversight. Once again, he
argued that it wasn’t necessary, only to have them express their
regret and turn him down.

Red-eyed and trembling from
exhaustion, he stared in disbelief at the computer screen. Only the
low hum of the ventilation system broke the silence as the last few
minutes ticked away
. He had failed. It was
over.

Footsteps sounded behind him as his
father stepped onto the bridge. “What’s the matter,
Son?”

James didn’t answer. His father peered
over his shoulder at the screen.