The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “It’s incredibly cool,” Beranski said. “They’re going to shit themselves in jealousy back on Fortune.”

  “If we ever get back to Fortune,” one of Beranski’s aides said gloomily.

  Jodenny was holding on to Myell’s arm as if she feared he’d get too close to it and vanish. Myell patted her fingers. He had no intention of getting near the thing. Just looking at it made his skin itch.

  “What now?” Myell asked. “Am I supposed to try controlling it with my mind?”

  “Can you?” Beranski asked, intrigued.

  “No,” Myell said.

  “Would you tell me if you could?”

  Myell raised an eyebrow.

  Beranski spread his hands. “Admiral Su says you never wanted the responsibility of controlling the system. That you turned it down.”

  “True enough,” Myell said. “But I’m not going to lie about it. If I could control it, I probably wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  Denials and protestations aside, Myell spent the rest of the day with Beranski as the team ran tests and scans on the blue ouroboros. Again and again he answered questions he’d already answered—where he’d been, when, under what circumstances, how long each trip had lasted. Jodenny stayed close by, obviously bored, but every time he suggested she go back to their cabin and sleep, she gave him the evil eye.

  Instead she amused herself by borrowing Chief Ovadia’s SOEL and watching library vids about the Hero of Burringurrah, and the Roon invasion of Earth, and the Big Daddy Sphere, also known as the First Egg. Some of the vids were documentaries, and others pure fiction, and still others pure fiction done very badly with actors who looked nothing like Jodenny or Myell.

  “Do you know how many things they’ve gotten wrong?” Jodenny asked.

  Myell had come to her chair for a short break from the questions and tests. He put a hand on her belly to feel Junior and said, “How could I? I wasn’t there.”

  “I can guarantee you there were no spectacular explosions or beautiful native women on your trip across the outback.” She gave him a speculative look. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Not that I’m complaining. But you died.”

  “Turned into a god,” Myell said.

  She nodded.

  He sat down on the small stool beside her. “Anna Gayle. She was there?”

  Jodenny nodded.

  “One of their prisoners?”

  “Maybe at first,” she said, begrudgingly. “But not by the time I saw her. She was helping them.”

  He scratched his chin. “Could be that she had no choice.”

  “Everyone has choices,” Jodenny said. “Sam didn’t help them. He was barely alive. Even when he got his physical health back, he couldn’t talk, couldn’t sit still, prowled the woods, woke up screaming at night—you’ve seen him.”

  “I know,” Myell said. “You save him, though. Eventually. In the future that I’ve seen.”

  She lifted her chin. “You’ve seen wrong, though. If there’s any saving to be done, he’ll do it himself. He’s one of the strongest people I know.”

  Captain McNaughton came by, though he mostly ignored Myell and Jodenny. He quizzed Beranski on their progress, inspected the ring from afar, and stalked off again. Admiral Nam had apparently shuttled back to the Melbourne but would be back in a few hours. Adryn had gone off duty and had said something about working out some misunderstanding with her wife. Myell, who was still marveling that Adryn wasn’t a little kid anymore, hadn’t realized she was married to another woman.

  “Does that bother you?” Jodenny asked.

  “Blows my mind,” he admitted. “Not the marriage thing. That she’s even old enough to be in the military.”

  “I wonder if the wedding announcement was in the news.” Sitting there in the middle of the hangar, Jodenny did a search and came up with a clipping from the news archive. She read it and frowned.

  Myell asked “What?” and leaned over her shoulder to read it. “Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Ling and Mrs. Dottie Myell announce the marriage of their daughters,” Myell read. “Why isn’t Colby mentioned too?”

  Jodenny didn’t feel comfortable telling him about the divorce. “Maybe he opposed the marriage.”

  Myell scratched his chin. “I don’t see why.”

  “We can ask Adryn later,” Jodenny said.

  Around sixteen hundred hours, just as she was getting hungry and tired and bone-dead exhausted again, Commander Haines came by for a status check and announced, by the way, that he and Jodenny were invited to the ship’s wardroom for dinner. There were only twenty-two officers in the wardroom aside from the pilots, who dined separately. Dinner was at eighteen hundred hours.

  Jodenny was completely sure she would rather eat in with Myell in their cabin. Her preference must have shone in her face.

  “It would be prudent to make nice with the captain,” Haines said. “This is the last formal dinner before we’re in Roon range tomorrow.”

  “I want to bring my husband,” she said.

  He frowned. “Chiefs aren’t allowed in the wardroom.”

  “Hero of Burringurrah,” Jodenny reminded him. “I’m pretty sure you can swing a special invitation.”

  Haines swallowed a reply and went off. Soon an airman relayed the message that Myell was also invited to dinner in the officers’ wardroom. Myell took the news with a grimace. At seventeen hundred Beranski called for a dinner break, and they went back up to their cabin. The security escort that had followed them around until then was gone. Nearly dying in pursuit of the blue ring must have convinced someone important that Jodenny and Myell weren’t a threat after all.

  Once in the cabin, Myell stretched out on the bed and kicked off his boots. “You go dine with the nice officers. I’ll nap.”

  “You’re coming,” Jodenny said. “I need backup.”

  “You don’t have to go, either.”

  “Help me figure out what to wear,” she insisted.

  She didn’t have a formal uniform to wear and fretted over that. On Team Space ships, officers always dressed for dinner. She polished up her insignia and pinned her hair up as tightly as she could. Then her scalp began to ache, and had to put her hair down again.

  Myell watched with amusement and made no attempt to help.

  “Don’t make me hurt you,” she said.

  He dragged himself into the shower unit. The steam rolled out, soapy-smelling and hot, and Jodenny contemplated slipping inside with him. She peeked through the shower door. Even with the burn marks on him, even that small thick one on his thigh, he was as handsome as she’d ever seen him. Her ardor was diminished by a comparison of her size to the width of the unit. She might be able to wedge herself in there, but they’d both get stuck and require extraction by the ship’s engineers.

  “What’s that frown for?” Myell asked when he emerged. A towel was wrapped around his waist, and beads of water dotted his chest.

  “I swore I would never do this,” Jodenny sniffled.

  “Do what?”

  “I’m fat and I’m ugly,” she said.

  Myell pulled her close and squeezed her shoulders. “You’re pregnant and you’re beautiful.”

  “My ankles are swollen like grapefruit.”

  “There’s an entire fleet of aliens on their way to destroy us. They don’t care about your ankles.”

  Jodenny tweaked his nose. “That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

  “That’s supposed to put things into perspective.” His lips were soft on her forehead. “Do you want me to try and free the blue ring? Make it take us away from here?”

  She had been thinking about it, though she wouldn’t admit it. All her reasons against it rose to her tongue. “You can’t. We can’t. Leave Adryn and Chief Cappaletto and anyone’s who been good to us? They’d have to face the Roon without us.”

  “This battle has already happened. I’ve been to the future forty years after the Kamchatka was stranded there. That’s twenty-five years from this moment
now. You’re seventy years old and I’m still dead. I don’t know what happened in this corner of the galaxy but by that then-now, as Commander Perry calls it, this is all over.”

  “Time travel makes my nose bleed,” she said. “I refuse to believe things can’t change. Ignore what Perry said. Ignore Homer. We’ll figure this out. We’ll find out what Kultana is, and how you can get there.”

  He paused. His warm hands went still against her back.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’d rather not talk about Homer when I’m half naked and holding you in my arms.”

  She wouldn’t be distracted. “We have to stand with everyone here. Here and now. For better and for worse.”

  Myell answered with a kiss.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At seventeen-forty-five Commander Endicott came by. He assured them it didn’t matter if they didn’t have formal uniforms, because the Confident’s crew didn’t dress for dinner. Jodenny was only slightly relieved. She felt it incumbent as a representative from Team Space to at least set the standard.

  “Don’t worry,” Endicott said. “People want to meet the Hero of Burringurrah no matter what he’s wearing.”

  Jodenny’s lips pursed. To Myell she said, “Maybe you should go on and I’ll just stay here.”

  Endicott coughed. “I mean, they want to meet both of you.”

  The Confident’s wardroom was a long, low compartment with dark blue walls and oil paintings of bygone sailing ships. A blue-gray rug stretched across the deck, and the furniture was made of heavy, bulky faux wood. A long bar lined one of the bulkheads. Most of the officers were male. They offered friendly handshakes to both Jodenny and Myell upon introduction.

  “Good to have you,” said a lieutenant commander from Engineering.

  “Biggest surprise since the cook served fresh turkey at Thanksgiving,” said a lieutenant from Supply.

  A commander from Navigation said, “You’re a damned sight prettier than most of our visiting officers.”

  Jodenny didn’t appreciate that last remark, but she let the comment go in favor of finding a chair to sit in. Myell went to the bar to get her a glass of lemonade. He looked uncomfortable and wasn’t talking much. She almost regretted bringing him along, but was utterly glad he wasn’t out of her sight getting in trouble somewhere.

  “Chief Myell,” said a young ensign. “Is it true? Everything that happened in the vids?”

  Jodenny gazed at his round cheeks and dewy skin. So young. So unprepared.

  “Probably not,” Myell said.

  They were introduced to several more officers, and though once upon a time she might have remembered most of them, baby brain made it hard for her to hold to any specifics.

  A lieutenant said to Myell, “So tell us, Chief. Are those Roon bastards as ugly as they say?”

  “Uglier,” Myell said. “And they smell bad, too.”

  Smiles all around. Confidence, boisterousness. Jodenny was going to be ill. None of them understood what they were getting into. She knew firsthand the stench of the Roon army, the stink of them so vivid in her memories she could smell it now, in the wardroom.

  The young ensign said, “Dumb assholes, aren’t they?”

  Myell looked surprised. “Not at all. They’re smart, fast, stronger than we are. If nothing else, they have interstellar engines that can carry them across the galaxy. And control of the Wondjina network.”

  “We’ve got the new Apollo missile system,” Haines said. Jodenny hadn’t noticed him at the fringe of the crowd. He added, “Better than ever. It’ll take care of them.”

  “You don’t know that,” Myell said.

  Several officers turned his way. Jodenny felt a headache trying to squeeze into the space between her eyes. The friendly conviviality of the wardroom was shifting into something hostile not toward the Roon but toward Myell himself. For daring to speak the truth, or how he saw it. It was a trait she admired, though there was such a thing as timing, wasn’t there?

  The arrival of Captain McNaughton, tense and unhappy as usual, brought the wardroom to its feet. He was flanked by his equally grim-looking senior staff, none of whom looked particularly happy Jodenny and Myell had joined them. Then again, their attention was probably focused on the upcoming battle, and they had a much more realistic idea of the odds than Haines or any of the junior crew.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” McNaughton said.

  “You’re just in time, Captain,” Haines said. “Chief Myell is telling us how superior the Roon armada is.”

  McNaughton gazed at Myell, who met his eyes without flinching.

  “Is that so?” McNaughton asked.

  “They were ahead of us fifteen years ago, and they’ve had all this time to get even better,” Myell said.

  McNaughton said, “But we have you, Chief. Made the whole Roon army up and disappear, didn’t you? That’s the story. You’re the hero.”

  The wardroom had gone quiet around them.

  “There’s probably only one way to survive this encounter,” Myell said. “You won’t do it, and I doubt it would work, but it beats wholesale slaughter.”

  Jodenny knew what was coming.

  McNaughton didn’t, or didn’t care. “And what’s that?”

  “Surrender,” Myell said.

  A murmur through the room. Disagreement. More hostility. Jodenny wanted to strangle him. He had deliberately picked this fight. Had known what he was doing the minute he stepped into the room.

  Myell put his drink down and gave Jodenny an apologetic nod. “Excuse me, Commander Scott,” he said. “I’ll be in the chiefs’ mess.”

  Contrary to whatever Jodenny believed, Myell hadn’t intended to turn the whole wardroom against him. But he couldn’t just stand there and encourage them toward their own destruction, either. There were too many young foolish people on this ship. Too many old ones, too. He himself felt incredibly old, as if all the years he’d visited had suddenly accumulated and were pressing down on his shoulders.

  He didn’t go to the chiefs’ mess. Instead he wound up in the infirmary, which was dark and soothing this time of the evening. The doctor on duty, a young ensign named Connelly, asked if he needed medical attention. He replied that he was only there to visit Osherman.

  “He’s sleeping,” Dr. Connelly confided. “It was a hard afternoon. Dr. Cho discovered a neural plug. Very small, very discreet, some kind of Roon technology. It might eventually dissolve on its own given enough time, but he tried a few things today and they’ll try some more tomorrow if it hasn’t worked.”

  “If it dissolves, he’ll be able to talk?”

  “He’ll be able to talk and maybe more. We think the plug affects not only speech, but other areas of the brain, too. It might cause hallucinations, depression, anxiety.”

  All the years Sam Osherman had suffered—would suffer—and people assumed it was the Roon captivity that had done it to him. Myell felt sick knowing that it was something else entirely.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said.

  He didn’t want to wake Osherman and so he retreated, heading back toward his and Jodenny’s cabin. He was halfway to the nearest lift when Homer appeared out of nowhere, as crazily dressed as ever in pinks and yellows.

  “Gampa!” he said. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Maybe I’m not interested,” Myell said, and continued past him to the lift.

  Homer followed him inside. “It’s very important. You’ve got to get out of here, and fast. The Roon are on their way and they’re in a bad mood.”

  Myell said “Deck Four” to the lift control and added, to Homer, “I thought you weren’t supposed to share information about the future. Doesn’t it ruin your research?”

  “My research will be fine,” Homer said earnestly. “The important thing is that you get out using the ring.”

  “Why?” Myell affected boredom. “This is it. Kultana, right? I made it.”

  Homer rocked back and forth on his heels. “It’
s not the same! It’s more than just a place, Gampa. You have to come the right way or it won’t work.”

  “Full stop,” Myell said to the lift.

  The small car glided to a halt. The beige walls glowed with soft light and the controls hummed, waiting for further instruction.

  Myell turned to Homer. “You come in and out of my life whenever you want, never giving a damn about when I really need you. I’m not sure anything you tell me is ever the truth, and even if it is, I think you’re keeping some of it for yourself. If you want my help, you’ve got to tell me everything. That starts right now.”

  Homer’s face crinkled up in a grimace. “I would if I could, Gampa.”

  Myell told the lift to resume its journey.

  “Honest!” Homer said. “Please listen to me.”

  “Why haven’t you asked me about the Flying Doctor?” Myell asked.

  Carefully Homer said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I told you I was being visited, and you were surprised. Didn’t know everything after all. But since then, you haven’t asked me a single question about that. Isn’t it important for your so-called research?”

  Homer waved a hand. “I don’t need to know, Gampa. I went and looked it up. That Roon is just a fluke. He’s inconsequential. Ignore him and he’ll go away.”

  “Funny. That doesn’t work with you.”

  “I’m not kidding!” Homer blurted out, almost a shout. “You have to leave before the Roon armada gets here. Your mission is too important. Mankind is too important.”

  Myell gave him a level look. Evaluating. Judging.

  “What about Jodenny and the baby?” he asked.

  “You saw what happened last time,” Homer said quietly. “You want to risk that again?”

  The lift slid to a stop and the doors opened. Homer vanished. Myell clenched his hands in frustration. He hadn’t expected much in the way of information, and what he’d gotten was disheartening. The armada was coming, this wasn’t the right Kultana, and Jodenny and the baby were in jeopardy no matter what.