Bringing Stella Home (22 page)

“
Yes,” said James. “I
know.”

A foot nudged his from
under the table. James’s eyes flashed to Anya, the only female
officer in the room.
It’s all
right,
she mouthed at him with her gorgeous
lips. James’s heart skipped a beat.

“
What most people don’t
know about is the flood of refugees that came to Belarius before it
fell,” Ilya continued. “Have you heard of them?”

“
No,” James admitted. “I
haven’t.”

“
It was a few years ago,
about half a year before the Hameji smashed Belarius III. The
refugees were all spacefarers from the outer reaches—you know, the
kind that wander the stars and never settle down. Shipbound tribes
not unlike the Hameji.”

James nodded, even though he knew
almost nothing about the Outer Reaches. He didn’t want the others
to think he was an idiot, especially Anya.

“
Yeah, yeah,” said Maria,
one of the sergeants below Roman. “We’ve heard the story. You ran
across some old reports in the defense network back when we did
that blockade run.”

“
That’s right,” said Ilya.
“You see, I wondered what it was that made the spacefarers seek
refuge in settled space. For a nomadic people, that’s a pretty big
shift, don’t you think?”

“
Well, yeah,” said
James.

“
It was the Hameji,”
muttered Vaclav. “They wreaked havoc on the Outer Reaches long
before they came here.”

“
But that’s just the
thing,” said Ilya. “How did the Hameji do it? How did they drive
almost a million starfarers out of a swath of space more than a
hundred parsecs across?”

James looked to Vaclav, but the man
shrugged and returned to his synthmeal without an
answer.

“
Remember,” said Ilya,
“these spacefarers were tough. They squatted on the edges of known
space, mining uncharted resources beyond the laws of any
government. What’s more, they’re constantly at war with each
other—one of their gunboats could take on three Imperial cruisers
and come out spaceworthy. Compared to them, we’re just a bunch of
softies.”

“
Your point being?” Maria
asked, an annoyed scowl on her face.

“
Put it together yourself,”
said Ilya, shooting her an irritated look. “The Hameji were badass
way before they came after us.”

“
So what about these
spacefaring refugees?” James asked, a little too
hastily.

“
I’ll tell you,” said Ilya,
turning back to him. “They were the survivors from the first Hameji
wars—the ones who refused to join the original Hameji tribes. And
you know what? They should have won—they had the Hameji outnumbered
and outgunned.”

James shifted uneasily in his seat.
“How do you know this?”

“
The refugee reports were
pretty interesting, so I hacked into their main flagship and
downloaded the ship’s log.”

“
Isn’t that supposed to be
impossible?” said James. Ship logs were hardwired to the main
astrogation computer, with no other interface except the terminals
on the bridge.

Ilya snickered. “To you, maybe. But I
have my ways.”

He put an arm around Anya’s waist. To
James’s dismay, she scooted closer to him and started stroking his
back.

“
The records of the battle
were fascinating,” said Ilya, squeezing Anya’s waist. “The Hameji
made a surprise attack from nearly five light-years
out.”

“
Yeah,” said James.
“So?”

“
Five light-years, kid.
Their ships were scattered across almost thirty million klicks of
space, yet they coordinated the attack with perfect precision.
Sound familiar?”

“
Yeah,” James
lied.

“
So you can tell me what
happened next.”

James fidgeted with his
spoon and nervously tapped his foot.
Ben
would know,
he thought to
himself.

“
They…regrouped?”

Ilya let out a sneering laugh. “Wrong,
kid. Dead wrong.”

“
Don’t be so hard on him,”
said Anya, shrugging off Ilya’s arm. “He’s just a kid.”

James’s heart fell.
I am
not
‘just a kid.’

“
The Hameji never regroup,”
said Vaclav. “They wear down their opponents’ defenses and cripple
them with a perfectly synchronized fusillade of jumped
nukes.”

“
Exactly,” said Ilya.
“Which makes you wonder, how can they possibly coordinate an attack
like that when their ships are scattered across so much space? It’s
as if they have some form of instantaneous communication beyond our
current level of technology.”

Maria sighed and shook her head, while
Vaclav returned to his food. James, however, found himself becoming
more and more interested.

“
How could they do that?”
he asked.

“
You want to
know?”

“
Yeah,” he said, trying not
to sound too eager. “How?”

Ilya shot Anya a glance, then turned
to James and narrowed his eyes. “You ever heard of the Tenguri
system?” he asked.

“
No.”

“
It’s the location of the
Hameji homeworld. They—”

“
I thought you said they
live on their ships. How can they have a homeworld?”

“
They’ve still got to get
their resources from somewhere, kid,” Ilya snapped at him.
“Besides, Tenguri isn’t much of a system. There’s only one planet:
a hot Jupiter with an orbital period of only three
days.”

“
So how is that the Hameji
homeworld?”

“
They don’t live there, you
moron. They worship there.”

James frowned. “Worship?”

“
Yeah, worship. Don’t you
know your history? Thousands of years ago, when Earth was still a
fresh memory, people believed that the stars and planets were the
homes of the gods and goddesses. That’s how Gaia Nova got its
name—the new mother goddess, or New Earth. Surely you know
that.”

James bit his lip and said nothing. He
didn’t like how Ilya was talking down to him—as if he were just a
boy.

“
The Hameji still hold to
those old ways,” Ilya continued, “but they’ve completely rebuilt
the pantheon. Instead of worshiping Gaia Nova as the central
goddess, they worship a god named ‘Tenguri.’ They believe he’s the
supreme creator of the universe. So, like any good pagans would,
they named their home star after him.”

“
What do we call that
star?”

Ilya shrugged. “I don’t think we have
a name—just a catalog number. The name doesn’t really matter,
though. What matters is what the records said about a Hameji grand
council.”

“
A grand
council?”

“
Yeah—a council of all the
starfaring fleets and tribes, just before the Hameji launched their
campaign. Those who refused the invitation were the first on the
chopping block when the fighting started. Those who did attend
were…transformed, shall we say.”

James frowned.
“Transformed?”

“
Don’t listen to him,” said
Vaclav. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Ilya shrugged. “I’m just telling him
what the log said—nothing more, nothing less.”

James couldn’t ignore his curiosity.
“What did it say?”

“
It said that this
particular tribe’s chief came back from the council terribly sick,
with a glow in his eyes that didn’t seem entirely human. He died a
little while after, prompting his sons to declare war against the
Hameji.”

“
Wait—that’s
it?”

Ilya grinned. “That’s all that was in
the log. Though if you ask me, I think there’s a connection between
that council and the Hameji’s faster-than-light communication
abilities. Maybe they found some way to link their commanders’
minds together, so they can talk to each other instantaneously.
Maybe they’re all one giant hive-mind.”

Maria sighed and shook her head.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “Ilya, you’re just putting crazy
ideas into the kid’s head. You’ve got nothing to go off of but your
own damn speculation.”

“
Well,” said Ilya,
shrugging off her accusations with little apparent concern, “maybe
I
am
wrong. But if
I am, answer me this: how are the Hameji able to conduct such
perfectly coordinated attacks?”

No one had an answer. Anya ran her
fingers through Ilya’s hair, eying him with a sultry look on her
face. James scowled.

“
Why should I believe you?”
he asked.

“
Because you have to
believe something,” said Ilya, his voice soft and deadly. “If you
don’t, then you really will go crazy.”

* * * * *

Ben filed past the soldiers into the
windowless room and formed a tight circle with the other prisoners
around the edge of the walls. He couldn’t help but notice how
different this place was from the rest of the obsolete mining
facility. The walls were drab and gray, but not as rusted and
corroded as the rest of the station. Perhaps this room was part of
a new wing—or perhaps the soldiers had taken them to a different
ship.

Stella,
he thought, more as a dumb reflex than anything
else.
Must find Stella.
He shook his head and cast the thought out of his
mind; it brought back too many memories of the prisoner ship. Too
many memories of his powerlessness.

I’m sorry, Stella,
he thought to himself.
I’m sorry I was too weak to save you.

Once all the prisoners were sitting in
a circle—all fifty or so of them—the soldiers left the room. They
had barely left before half a dozen men in gas masks came in,
carrying an antique, wooden table unlike anything Ben had
seen.

It was small, only about a meter tall,
with a large, bulbous jar set in the bottom like a fuel tank, full
of boiling water. A long hose, about as thick as two of his
fingers, lay coiled like a snake on top. Both the table and the
hose’s mouthpiece were inlaid with ornate gold and silver images.
Ben stared, entranced, at what appeared to be dragons and monsters
devouring planets and stars. Storms of fire circled around
demon-like creatures with fangs protruding upwards from their lower
jaws. The images were as frightening as they were
exotic.

The men carrying the table stopped at
the center of the room and set it down. While they unwound the hose
and adjusted some unseen knobs, a striking young man strode into
the room. He was young and dark-skinned, with a sharp face and a
razor thin beard that stretched from his sideburns to the point of
his chin. His eyes were a thick hazel color, set deep in their
sockets. He wore the crisp gray fatigues Ben had seen on the Hameji
officers on the prisoner ship. Though the man was only of medium
build, his body seemed to radiate power.

Ben felt drawn to him at
once.

The young man stopped at the center of
the room and systematically looked each of the prisoners in the
eye. As he went down the line, Ben felt a thrill from the man’s
penetrating gaze.

“
Men,” he said, addressing
them, “I am Sergeant Voche of the Hameji Empath Corps. Hear me
speak!”

The man spoke the Gaian dialect with a
thick, foreign accent. His “v”s and “s”s were long and sharp, like
knives.

“
I understand how you
feel,” Voche continued. “You feel weak, alone, and powerless. Some
of you may even be wondering why you are still alive.”

He paused. Ben’s heart started to beat
faster.

“
But the truth,” said
Voche, “is that your minds have been cleansed and your spirits
purged. Purged of what? Purged of the filth and squalor in which
you have unceasingly wallowed since birth. Purged of the shameful
weakness of that diseased and bloated society that spawned
you.”

The masked men carefully fed a
substance that looked like dead grass into the table, turning the
boiling water a deep red. Ben caught the smell of something
burning.

“
All your life, you have
been weak,” Voche continued, his voice steadily rising. “All your
life, you have been alone. Your planetborn society has kept you
constantly at the breast, gorging you on the milk of its own
fornication. You have never known the power that comes from
unity—complete and total unity.”

The men in gas masks walked the hose
to the edge of the circle. They gave the mouthpiece to one of the
prisoners across from James. He inhaled deeply and coughed hard,
expelling white smoke that smelled like overripe fruit mixed with
diesel.

“
But now, you have been
purged of your weakness. Now, you are prepared to learn the true
meaning of power—to be knit together in one body, perfectly
united.”

The men started making their way
around the circle, passing the mouthpiece to each of the prisoners.
As they moved down the line, the room slowly filled with a smoky
white haze. Though the stench of the drug repulsed Ben at first,
the taste was surprisingly pleasant. It had a peculiar relaxing
effect on his muscles, even when smoked secondhand.