Bringing Stella Home

by Joe Vasicek

  No, she couldn’t allow herself to think about that now. Later—there would be time later. When she had a better idea where she was and what the Hameji had in store for her, she would plan her escape and get back to them. For now, though, all she could do was wait.

  Wait. Stella shivered and hugged her arms against her chest, sliding against the wall until she was sitting on the floor again. The burlap sack covered her body, but it offered her no warmth. If the Hameji kept her here much longer, she—

  The sound of metal groaning against metal jolted Stella out of her thoughts. The sound was close—close enough that the floor shook under her bare feet. They were coming.

  * * * * *

  Ben didn’t know where he was, where the Hameji had taken his sister, why he was still naked, or why they had put a hood over his head. All he knew was that he was dangling from his wrists and it hurt like hell.

  Off to his right, he heard the sound of a door opening, followed by a cold draft against his bare skin. Footsteps announced the arrival of his captors. He shivered and tried again to pull himself up so he could lift the hood off his face with his throbbing fingertips. The Hameji had clamped something around his neck, but maybe this time, he could get it off. His wrists were numb and his arms trembled with fatigue, but he pumped his legs to give himself a boost—

  The crack of a whip sounded thunderously loud in his ears, followed by a razor-sharp pain that flared across the flesh of his back. His arms gave out and he screamed in pain, body arching in agony.

  “What the hell was that for?”

  Another crack sent pain shooting up and down his shoulder. His arms trembled, and warm sweat began to form behind his ears and in his armpits. He turned his head, trying frantically to get a sense of where the blows were coming from, but the hood made it impossible to see anything.

  “Who are you?” he shouted. “What do you want with me?”

  The whip whistled as it cut through the air. It seared across his chest and belly, cutting his bare skin like a knife.

  “Stop!” he cried, his voice barely coherent. “Stop it! Whatever you want, I’ll—”

  His pleading turned to screams as the whip cracked across his back. At the same time, another blow from a completely different direction landed against his thigh and backside. A stream of blood dribbled down his shoulders, tickling his skin. He thrashed about, trying to break free of his bonds, but they held firm. Anger turned to panic as he realized how utterly powerless he was to stop the torture.

  “Wha—augh! Please! Stop!”

  The blows were coming faster now, so fast that he soon lost count. The pain washed over him, becoming his only reality. His cries turned to sobs as hot blood dribbled down his shredded skin, oozing from his wounds.

  Then, as abruptly as the beating began, it stopped.

  As Ben caught his breath, the cord suspending him in the air suddenly came loose. He fell to the floor with a thud, hands and knees striking hard metal. Rough hands lifted him by his arms, while others grasped his neck and undid the clasp holding the hood in place. A moment later, he found himself squinting in the sudden brightness. Before he had time to look around, a hand grabbed him roughly by the hair and shoved his face into a bucket.

  The ice-cold water hit his skin like an electric shock. Without thinking, he opened his mouth and tried to take a breath, then coughed and spat as he started drowning. When he tried to jerk himself free, his captors held him down until his lungs burned for air.

  Just when he thought he’d die, the hand pulled his face out of the bucket. He coughed up water and gasped for breath, then vomited explosively onto the floor.

  A moment later, his face was in the water again.

  Ben started to panic. He tried to free himself again, but a heavy blow struck him in the kidney, knocking the wind out of him. Before he knew what was happening, his lungs were filled with the terrible, icy water, and he was drowning. His eyes opened wide and his muscles grew frighteningly weak, lungs burning as if on fire.

  Then he was out again, coughing and vomiting and gasping for breath all at once. His head spun and he nearly passed out. He would have screamed, but he didn’t have the strength.

  Why were they doing this to him? What did they want? When would it stop?

  Without a word, the hands lifted him by the hair and plunged him back into the terrible, icy-cold water.

  * * * * *

  “What are you doing, Son?” James’s father said as he squinted at the screen, reading over James’s shoulder.

  “Drafting a bill,” James said. No point in hiding it.

  “What sort of a bill?”

  “I’m proposing to head an emergency search and rescue mission to search for survivors around Kardunash IV and compile a database of all Colony citizens lost so that we can—”

  “And how much funding do you plan to appropriate?”

  James took a deep breath. “Five hundred thousand Gaian credits.”

  His father’s mouth turned downward into a frown. “Half a million? That’s a lot of money for a war-torn community.”

  “It’s less than one percent of the operating budget from last year!”

  “And how are you going to spend it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” James admitted. “Fuel, supplies, equipment, outsourcing if we need it—”

  “What kind of outsourcing?”

  “It’s just a provision,” said James, hoping his father didn’t question him on that point any further. If Ben and Stella were prisoners of the Hameji, he’d need help in order to set them free. The rumors about the Hameji couldn’t all be true—there had to be some way to rescue his brother and sister.

  “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 tim
e 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 measure
s 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?”