Bringing Stella Home (25 page)

The boy grasped the muzzle of his gun,
still hot, and smiled.

* * * * *

James dropped to his knees
and pointed his laser-paintball rifle down the dim, narrow corridor
of the
Tajji Flame.
His chest heaved with exertion against the artificial gravity,
set to 150 percent of standard for the shipwide training exercises.
Ahead of him, Mikhail crouched and motioned for the others to get
down.

“
Shields up,” he told his
squad. “Any minute now. Get ready to fall back.”

James sighed. “We tried that last
time. It didn’t work.”

“
Shh!”

James rolled his eyes. What was the
point of repeating the same mistakes, time and again? The walls all
around them were splattered with paint from the previous
rounds—blue for the first, green for the second, red for the third,
and in a few minutes they’d be splattered with a bright coat of
yellow. Their armor, too, was splattered—James’s more than all of
them put together. Cleaning all of this was going to be a pain and
a half, but James tried not to think of that now, not
while—

The blast door hissed and parted. Two
small, round objects rolled through before the door was completely
open.

“
Grenade!” shouted
Mikhail.

James buried his face in his elbow
just as the grenades exploded with a small puffing noise. The edges
of his arm flared with brilliant light, shining bright red through
his eyelids. A moment later, paintballs sliced through the air and
splattered on the walls and floor. His squadmates started shouting,
and James lifted his head and dropped to the floor, firing wildly
with his gun.

“
Fall back!” Mikhail
shouted. “Fall back!”

James blinked and stared through the
doorway. Fuzzy silhouettes gradually gave way to more solid forms.
Half a dozen red dots of laser light danced along the walls on
either side as Maria’s squad advanced.

Not this time,
James thought to himself, rising to his
feet.

With a loud cry, he ran straight at
the other squad, firing. “Come on!” he shouted to his other
squadmates. “We can take ‘em!” Downrange, someone cried out in
pain, while the silhouettes slunk against the walls, falling back
before him.

As James ran screaming down the
corridor, the red points of laser-light leaped from the walls and
converged on his chest. The mock RPV shield on his wrist began to
blink.

“
Fall back, kid,” Mikhail
shouted from far behind. “You’re going to blow!”

James was too busy to
listen, however. He zig-zagged as he charged, firing
indiscriminately at everything he saw.
I
can get them before my shield blows,
he
told himself.
If only—

His gun suddenly locked up, refusing
to fire. He dropped to his stomach and checked the magazine—still
full—but noticed that the light on his wrist had stopped
blinking.

“
McCoy is down,” came
Ilya’s voice over the shipwide intercom. “So are Yeubanks and
Ladroga.”

“
What?” shouted a young
woman. One of the dark shapes rose from the shadows, not ten yards
from where James lay on the floor. “How?”

“
Killed in the blast from
McCoy’s shield,” said Ilya.

“
Wait,” said James, “what
do you mean I’m dead?”

“
Your shield blew, kid,”
said Ilya. “Get down and let the exercise continue.”

“
But I was under fire for
less than five seconds!”

“
With four heavy assault
rifles pumping lead slugs into you at five hundred rounds per
minute,” came Ilya’s voice. “Now shut up and get down.”

“
No, you listen to me!”
James shouted. He slipped off his helmet and rose to his feet. “I
swear, Ilya, you’ve got the game rigged. Why don’t you come down
from the bridge and—”

Something powerful struck him in the
back. An instant later, he slammed face-first into the
wall.

“
Ow!” he cried, turning
around to see what had struck him. Before he could react, one of
Maria’s soldiers raised a gun and pointed it at his
chest.

The paintballs pelted his armor at
point blank range. Each blow was enough to knock the wind out of
him. He gasped for breath and bounced around on the floor as the
shots made a bright yellow dot in the center of his
chest.

“
You’re dead,” said the
soldier. “Now shut up and move aside.”

James slumped to the ground as his
whole body started to ache. He clenched his fists and tried to pull
himself up, but found he didn’t have the strength in the extra
gravity. Further down, Ladroga and Yeubanks had their helmets off
and were glowering at him.

“
Worthless kid,” said
Yeubanks, spitting on the floor. She helped Ladroga to his feet,
and together they walked away, leaving him to lie pathetically on
the floor.

* * * * *

Something was wrong. The boy without a
name didn’t know what it was, but it resonated clearly through the
hearts of his platoon brothers. The rhythmic march down the
corridor did little to comfort them, in spite of the perfect unity
of their step. They felt no security in their togetherness—only a
vague, unshakable feeling of impending danger.

Voche led them in a direction they had
never gone. The hall went down a level on a gradual incline, air
ducts and pipes running unexposed along the ceiling next to cold,
green lights.

At the end of the hallway, they came
to a freight door. It seemed ordinary enough—aged metal surface,
chipping paint, early signs of corrosion—but somehow the boy knew
otherwise. Something dangerous was behind that door—something
monstrous.

“
Halt,” said
Voche.

The platoon instantly came to a stop.
The boy’s knees began to tremble.

“
Take
positions!”

In spite of their growing fear, the
reflexes from training quickly took over. Like a well-oiled
machine, the boy ran to the front of the line with a dozen others
and crouched down, about fifteen meters from the door.

He stared straight ahead, arms
shaking, knees trembling. In spite of the cool air, his palms were
sweaty, making his hands feel slippery. The chamber suddenly seemed
to darken, while the air grew unbearably stale. His breathing came
short and ragged as his heart pounded in his chest.

Voche stepped in front of them.
“This,” he said, “is more than a door.” He knocked casually on the
corroded surface; at the low thumping noise, several of them
flinched. “It is a barrier between you and the enemy. You must
always keep that in mind. Whenever you come to a barrier like this,
know that the enemy is waiting for you.”

The boy drew in a sharp breath. The
instant Voche paused, the fear they all shared multiplied tenfold.
It was as if something invisible, something untouchable, had
reached out through the door and stabbed him in the
chest.

“
When you storm a ship,”
continued Voche, “you must not underestimate the enemy’s
forces.”

A feeling of weakness swept over
them—of powerlessness, as if an unseen monster had blinded their
eyes and turned their muscles to pudding. In that moment, the boy
felt alone and vulnerable, naked in a nightmare.

“
Make no mistake about it,”
said Voche, his voice rising. “Death lies on the other side of that
door. Will it be yours, or will it be the enemy’s?”

A collective shudder passed through
them all. The boy’s eyes widened and he gasped for breath. In an
instant, his fear and terror dropped out from underneath him,
leaving him devoid of feeling.

It was almost as if he had
died.

“
Are you ready?” Voche
shouted, his voice filling the chamber.

Life came to the boy’s limbs
again—life and urgency. His muscles trembled with focused
anticipation as every part of his being focused on the door. Like a
cornered animal, he made ready to fight to the death.

“
Attack!”

At that instant, the door slid open.
Time froze, and the boy became hyper-aware of his surroundings—the
rust in the walls, the three-quarter inch gaps in the floor
grating, the sweat on his brow and in his palms. In that instant,
he could feel the presence of each of his platoon brothers
individually, clearer than ever before.

One of them was missing.

In the instant before the guns
erupted, the boy saw clearly what lay on the other side of the
door. His nameless platoon brother lay in a rapidly swelling pool
of fresh blood, naked and face upward on the floor. His skull had
been cracked open, his single remaining eye staring up at the
ceiling from a bloody socket. Blood gushed outward from a hole in
his chest.

Behind the body, half a dozen men
stood with guns in their hands.

The entire hallway exploded with the
sound of gunfire. Bullets flew like a meteor shower, shredding the
bodies of the men on the other side. They twitched like
marionettes, jolted as if by invisible strings from some unseen
hand above them. Blood and gore sprayed from their ruptured bodies,
splattering the walls and floor.

An instant later, the boy was on his
feet, charging with his platoon brethren. They fired repeatedly
into the dismembered corpses, blowing them to pieces, splattering
their armor with blood and brains and flecks of bone and
skin.

Slowly, realization of their victory
won over the animal frenzy. It was over. The monster was dead. The
danger had passed—it would no longer threaten them.

Nothing could threaten them. They were
One.

The boy lifted his head and whooped
triumphantly at the top of his lungs. Together, several of his
other platoon brothers followed suit. Their cries resonated through
the chamber, drowning out all other noise.

We will not be defeated.
We will not be afraid. We will conquer.

As the victory cry rose in volume, the
boy’s eyes wandered to a dismembered hand that still held onto its
gun. As his eyes passed over it, he realized that the gun was
actually a piece of harmless plastic, stuck to the hand with thick
gray tape. A disembodied head, scorched by plasma, had a gag still
tied between the man’s teeth.

The boy only noticed it with passing
interest, however. He and his platoon brethren were too euphoric to
care.

We will
conquer!

Chapter 12

Danica stepped briskly down the main
corridor of her ship. The walls, she was pleased to note, had been
cleaned of any trace of the training earlier in the week. The acrid
smell of the cleanser still hung in the air, while further down,
she heard the scraping of a brush and the sound of muttered
curses.

She turned the corner and stopped.
Ensign McCoy was on his hands and knees, scrubbing the wall and
floor. Ahead of him, the last ten meters of paint-splattered
hallway stretched to the main airlock. Even though the training
battle had been relatively light on this part of the ship, the
ensign certainly had a good few hours of work ahead of
him.

“
Stupid,” he muttered to
himself, not yet aware of Danica’s presence. “Just
because…stupid…”

Danica indulged herself with a brief
smile before folding her arms.

“
Ensign McCoy!” she
boomed.

The boy leaped to his feet and spun
around. In his rush, he slipped on the wet floor and nearly
tripped. His cheeks turned bright red as he steadied himself
against the wall.

“
Captain!” he said. “I
didn’t expect you to—”

“
Why haven’t you finished
with this hallway yet, Ensign? I put you on cleanup duty three
hours ago.”

His eyes widened. “I—I’ve been working
hard—really!”

“
I know you have,” said
Danica. “You’ve done good work, too. But you need to be quicker—the
rest of your team finished with their sections a long time
ago.”

“
But you gave me more work
than anyone,” James whined. “It’s not my fault!”

Danica frowned and said
nothing.

“
Besides,” James stammered,
“I think the game is rigged. I’ve died more than anyone else—it’s
just not fair.”

“
And exactly how do you
think the simulations are rigged?”

He drew in a sharp breath. “It’s
just—I mean, every time someone points a laser at me, Ilya marks me
dead, even when my RPV shields are up. Are those things so
useless?” He shook his head and clenched his fists. “That little
bastard just sits in his chair and watches us do all the heavy
work, while he—”

“
That’s enough,
Ensign.”

“
But Ilya, he—”

“
I personally review every
training exercise in detail. Believe me, if Ilya was somehow
stacking the odds against you, I would have seen it. He’s
not.”

James frowned, but kept
silent.

“
The simple truth, Ensign,
is that you’re no good as a soldier. Alone, you lack the skills to
do any real damage, much less stay alive. What’s worse, you’re much
too reckless to work as part of a team. You’re a maverick,
Ensign—and a stupid, clumsy one at that.”