Bringing Stella Home (4 page)

“
I don’t see the battle,”
she said. “Are we clear?”

As if in response, a series of small,
soundless explosions puffed out among the backdrop of the stars.
The targets were nowhere in sight—probably too distant to be
visible, or obscured by the planet’s shadow.

“
Oh no,” said Stella, “was
that another—”

“
I don’t think so,” said
Ben. “Standard Kardunasian battle cruisers carry at least two dozen
jump beacons each, and they almost certainly launched them as soon
as the Hameji attacked. If they try to nuke us across space with a
jumped warhead, the beacons will draw their fire. Those explosions
are harmless.”

Probably harmless. He hoped they were
harmless.

“
So we’re going to make
it?”

Before he could answer, a
series of brilliant flashes illuminated the entire sky, searing the
interior of the shuttle with light. Stella and the other passengers
screamed; Ben hurriedly grabbed her again and covered his
eyes.
One one thousand, two one
thousand…

After about ten seconds, he peeked
out. The interior lights had all died, but the afterglow of the
explosions was bright enough to illuminate the cabin, casting eerie
shadows across the aisle. Ignoring the screams of the other
passengers, Ben stared out the window.

As he did, his eyes opened wide with
horror.

He counted not one, not two, but five
diminishing fireballs, the auroral glow lighting the planet below
with intense light. The fragmented hulls of two KDF cruisers arced
overhead, barely missing the shuttle. Though they orbited past in
only a split second, Ben clearly saw that the ships were broken
apart, completely obliterated.

A tactical Hameji fusillade—exactly
like the one at Tajjur that had defeated the Gaian Imperial forces
stationed there. Dozens of multi-ton bombs, jumped in impossible
unison—a clean sweep. Everything gone. Everything.

Blood drained from his
cheeks, and he suddenly felt very weak.
They’ve broken our defenses,
he
thought silently to himself.
The fleet is
crippled. The battle is as good as over.

We’ve lost.

Through the walls, he heard the
distant sound of metal scraping against on metal—the sound of the
shuttle’s docking gear making contact with another ship. A slight
lurch flung his head down, chin against his chest, but the ship
soon righted itself, and the noise stopped.

“
We’ve docked,” Ben said,
unstrapping himself before the
Fasten Seat
Restraints
sign flashed off. Stella nodded
and did the same. In the aisle, the other passengers were already
spilling frantically from their seats, pushing past the
stewardesses despite their best efforts to keep some semblance of
order.

Ben stood up and took his sister by
the hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * * * *

“
Undock with the station,”
came Adam’s voice over the intercom. “I’ll be on the bridge in a
minute.”

A message from local traffic control
flashed across the screen, ordering all vessels to cease undocking
operations until properly authorized. James hesitated.

“
But Dad,” he said, “the
port authority—”

“
I don’t care what the port
authority says, we’re getting the hell out of here. Do
it.”

James swallowed and closed
the message. He then sealed the airlock and began powering up the
engines. The ship’s computer ran through the warm-up sequence,
checking the
Llewellyn’s
various systems. Everything cleared. Behind him,
the low hum of the engine sounded through the walls.

With the undocking process
underway, James glanced out the forward window. Several of the
other ships at the station had broken away from their airlocks,
engines flaring as they desperately scrambled to climb out of
Kardunash IV’s gravity well. Out of the corner of his eye, he
caught the flash of a larger ship as it passed into jumpspace.
James tapped his armrests with his fingers and bit his lip;
the
Llewellyn
was
a local freighter, equipped only with sublight engines. No jump
drive.

He glanced down at the blue oceans and
swirling clouds of Kardunash IV, still nervously tapping his
fingers. With the sublight engines, at least they would be able to
escape the planet’s gravity well—that was more than the people on
the ferry shuttles had. More than—

Ben and Stella.

He bolted upright in his seat. Ben and
Stella—they were still on the shuttle! If they didn’t find their
way to another ship, then—

The door hissed open behind him,
making him jump. His father strode onto the bridge, taking his seat
at the pilot’s chair.

“
How are we looking?” he
asked as he brought up the controls.

“
Engine’s at forty-five
percent,” said James, his voice quivering. “All other systems are
go. We’ve sealed off the airlock and are ready to detach from the
station.”

“
What news can you give
me?” asked his father. “Where’s the fighting worst?”

“
The night side,” said
James, glancing at the scanners. “Dad—”

“
Good. Drop the cargo and
plot us a course for a full reversal. I want us climbing the
gravity well in the opposite direction before our orbit takes us
into the battle.”

James frowned. A full orbital reversal
meant using more fuel in ten minutes than they had burned in the
last three weeks. Once they hit their target arc, there would be no
turning back.

“
But Dad—”

“
Just do it. It’s the only
chance we have to get out of here alive.”

James swallowed and turned
to his console, hesitating only a second before keying the command
to eject all cargo. Outside, more than fifty tons of high-grade
steel jettisoned from the cargo hold. He watched on the display as
millions of credits worth of cargo drifted out of the open bay
doors and fell slowly toward the peaceful planet below. It was a
terrible waste, he knew, but the
Llewellyn
would never be able to
escape in time with all that extra mass weighing them
down.

“
All systems go,” said
Adam. “Detaching from the station. Prepare the bridge gravitic
dampers.”

James turned frantically to his
father. “Dad, Ben and Stella are still out there. We can’t leave
yet—not without them!”

His father hesitated over the
controls, as if teetering over the edge of an abyss.

“
We can’t do that, Son,” he
said, his voice low. “We don’t have time. They’re probably on the
surface by now, and if they aren’t, they’re caught up in the middle
of the battle. We have to get out now, while we can. I’m
sorry.”

“
No!” James screamed,
sitting upright in his chair. “We can’t just leave them like
this!”

“
We don’t have a choice,
James,” his father shouted. “Now strap in and prepare for
launch—that’s an order.”

“
Y-yes, sir,” James
stammered.

He strapped himself into
his seat and activated the gravitic dampers. Outside the main
forward window, the stars spun and the station passed out of view
as Adam maneuvered the
Llewellyn
toward the sun, away from the approaching night
side of Kardunash IV. James swallowed, choking back
tears.

“
Prepare for hard burn in
five, four, three, two, one—”

An invisible hand pressed James
against his seat, starting gradually but gaining strength with each
passing second. He glanced down at his computer—ten gees of
acceleration outside the gravitic damper field, rising quickly.
Inside the bridge, they were at point-five gees, rising to
point-six.

He watched on the rear video feed as
the station shot away, rapidly growing smaller against the backdrop
of the planet’s surface. The drifting drums of steel from the cargo
hold shrunk until they were barely visible against the angelic
white clouds.

A bright pink flash filled
the rear display and the sky to the right of the bridge window.
Only a nuclear bomb could cause an explosion that huge. The lights
on the bridge flickered as the
Llewellyn’s
cosmic ray shielding
absorbed the radiation from the blast. In the rear video feed, the
brilliant afterglow took several seconds to fade.

“
Dad, we have to turn
around!”

“
I’m sorry, Son,” said his
father. “We can’t save them.”

The scanners showed the
changing path of the
Llewellyn
as she continued to accelerate at ten gees. The
arcs curved up away from the night side of the planet, unraveling
like a handful of lighted strands, each pointing to a predicted
end-path at their current rate of acceleration.

“
But what
about—”

“
We have no way of knowing
where they are or of getting to them. For all we know, they’re
already on the surface.”

“
You don’t know that,”
James said quickly. “They might still be in orbit. They might be
waiting for us, for all we—”

“
That’s enough,” his father
said sharply.

James fell silent. On the
scanners, the arc of the
Llewellyn’s
flight path peeled out
from orbit entirely, their trajectory pointing directly away from
the planet.

“
Map a course for home,”
his father said, his voice low. “Help me switch to
autopilot.”

The counter ticked up to twenty gees
outside—two-point-three on the bridge. Enough to make anyone squirm
in their seats. James was hardly aware of it, however. His fingers
flew over the keyboard and his eyes danced with the numbers across
the screen, but all his motions were merely automatic.

Stella is so much better
at this,
he thought to himself.
She should be the one setting the course—not
me.

The thought no sooner entered his head
than he remembered how they’d drawn straws to see who got to go
planetside first. She was down there because of him.

His fingers became stiff, and his
whole body began to shake. His eyes went wide, and his vision went
blurry. He drew in a sharp breath, and tried in vain to bring
himself under control.

“
James,” said his father.
“Son, are you all right?”

“
It should have been me,”
James cried, his voice cracking. He didn’t even care. “Stella
should be here—I should be the one down there, not her!”

His father reached out against the
growing gee forces and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,
Son,” he said. “We’re going to get through this. Keep yourself
together.”

How am I supposed to keep
myself together?
James thought to himself,
clenching his hands into fists.
It should
be me down there, not her.

On the rear video feed, a series of
nuclear explosions cast brilliant bursts of light across the sky.
The explosions faded slowly, reflected in eerie, nebulous hues
against the twilight crescent of the night side of the world. He
zoomed in and found the remnants of broken and destroyed ships,
split hulls and falling debris.

James’s stomach rose in his chest, and
a wave of nausea nearly made him vomit. There had been people on
those ships—real, living people. Now, they were all
dead.

Were Ben and Stella among
them?

He activated the feed controls and
zoomed in, tracing the field of battle until he came to the Hameji
ships. They had regrouped and were flying in formation now, despite
all the chaos of the battle zone. As he panned out, the camera fell
on a massive tube-like ship nearly twenty kilometers
long.

James caught his breath. Blue light
flared from the engines behind the enormous vessel, lighting up all
the ships and debris behind it. He zoomed out as a massive asteroid
shot out the end of the tube. At that resolution, the rock must
have been at least half a kilometer in diameter—an awesome size for
something moving so fast.

With wide, horrified eyes,
he followed the giant chunk of space rock as it hurtled towards the
planet. It struck the center of one of
Kardunash IV’s
domes—one of the
continent-sized urban centers, full of billions of
people.

He gasped. A giant brown splotch rose
up into the atmosphere like mud from the bottom of a stream bed.
When it hit the upper atmosphere, it began to trace a teardrop band
across the rest of the world, the muddy blackness tainting the
white clouds a dirty gray. Not far from the first, a second
asteroid struck, kicking up another black cloud of destruction.
Down near the equator, a third plume billowed out—and then a
fourth.

James felt the blood drain
from his face, leaving his skin cold and clammy. He could hardly
believe what he was seeing. The mass accelerators, the asteroids—it
was
Tajjur V
and
Belarius III
all over again. The Hameji were slagging the planet,
annihilating everyone and everything on the surface.