The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “Speed, now!” she said.

  Speed threw a lever.

  A soft walloping sound drifting up the ladder behind Myell. As far as explosions went, it wasn’t much at all. But more explosions ripped out after it, a series of louder blasts that rushed up shafts and tore down bulkheads and collapsed overheads, letting tons of rock crash through old barriers. Myell understood then the cables he’d seen in the passages. Remote-controlled explosives. This children’s army’s plan to fight off the Roon had nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with self-destruction.

  The deck heaved wildly under Myell’s feet and tossed him backward. He landed hard; pain flashed across his shoulders and ribs. The rippling explosions kept slamming through the air. The darkness was full of dust and the smell of burnt chemicals. He couldn’t breathe through the debris, couldn’t think through the chaos and panic, but after a while he realized the noise had stopped and the wet, limp bundle across his legs was someone’s body.

  He reached down, groping. The girl against him let out a gasp that sounded like she was drowning. Myell lifted her body and brought her close. There was no light, and no sound but their own panicked breathing and her spitting out blood.

  “It worked,” Ensign Darling said, when she could.

  “Why?” he asked. He couldn’t quite hear out of one ear, and his whole body felt like it had been pummeled by sledgehammers. “Why destroy everything?”

  She was quiet so long he feared she’d fallen unconscious. But then she said, “So they couldn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  Her head was heavy against his shoulder. The wetness pooling on his shirt was her blood, and his slippery fingers could neither find the source nor stanch it.

  “They can’t have it,” she whispered.

  “Have what, Ensign?”

  She died without telling him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jodenny’s tea had gone cold in the cup, but she was thirsty and drank it anyway. Her fingers shook against the delicate china.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “This was what—twenty years ago?”

  Darling’s gaze was steady. “You flatter me, Commander. Thirty. I was seventeen at the time. Oldest of us all, and the leader by default. It’s not a position I would have chosen on my own. But the rebel army in our area had been decimated, and I was the only one left to lead them.”

  “I don’t understand how you’re here if you died. Did Terry resuscitate you?”

  “No.” Darling reached toward the tea tray. “I died, in that—what does he call them? Eddy. I died in that eddy. So did the rest of my crew. We’d rigged the caves to blow in case the Roon came knocking. We all knew we wouldn’t survive.”

  Confusion twisted through Jodenny and must have shown in her face.

  “I wasn’t there,” Darling said. “This me, that is. I’m not the one who died in Chief Myell’s arms. He told me about it later, though. When he came back the next time and convinced us there was another way. But I fear I’m getting ahead of myself. Ask me where he went when the blue ring came for him in that rubble.”

  Jodenny obeyed. “Where did he go?”

  “To the Roon,” Darling said. And this time her fingers were the ones shaking against her cup. “Your husband traveled to the heart of the Roon empire to face down the one they call the Flying Doctor. And that whore, the traitor Anna Gayle.”

  Myell remembered this: Darling limp in his arms, the heat and dust of the collapsed complex, the slow suffocation and icy terror of being entombed.

  Worse were the digging noises around him. Metal against rock. Intermittent but undeniable.

  The Roon, digging their way in.

  This new place? Wasn’t much different.

  Pitch-black. Deep, rumbling sounds of machinery made the rough ground vibrate beneath him. But this place was colder, wetter, and he could hear voices both distant and indecipherable. The ring had again brought him somewhere he’d never been before. It was nowhere he wanted to stay, but his body didn’t have the strength to move. He couldn’t even find the strength to say his own name. Then a foot stepped down on his leg and Myell let out a yelp of pain.

  “Jesus!” a man said from almost on top of him. “What the hell?”

  Light flared, and Myell tried to turn away. Rough hands probed at him.

  “Lemme alone,” he mumbled.

  “Human,” a woman said. “Lots of blood.”

  Myell insisted, “Not mine,” because it was true. Most of it was Ensign Darling’s. The stink of it and his own waste made him want to vomit. But the man and woman above him, their blurry faces indistinct, weren’t that clean or sweet-smelling themselves.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked. “Who did this to you?”

  An obnoxiously loud buzzing sound filled the air. “No time,” the man said. He slid his hands under Myell’s shoulders. “Look, pal, you’ve got to get up and get moving, or they’ll leave you down here all night. You’ll never survive the farols.”

  He didn’t care. The ring would come for him, as it always did, and this nightmarish place would be another memory.

  “He’s going to slow us down, Chief,” the woman said. “If we miss that last lift, we’re no better off ourselves.”

  “He’s fine.” The man dragged Myell upward. “Get on your feet. You don’t want to die down here, not like this.”

  Myell would have happily disagreed with him, but his feet were already moving. He understood that these strangers were risking themselves for him and their lives weren’t his to throw away. Still, he resented them for pushing him forward, steering him in this cave or tunnel or whatever, making him struggle alongside them. When absolutely none of it fucking mattered at all.

  “Tom,” the woman said. “They’re going to notice the blood.”

  “They don’t care.”

  “But they’ll still notice.”

  The man cursed, stopped. The next thing Myell knew, his shirt was being ripped off and discarded. He shivered in the cold air. They started moving again, which struck him as funny. Blood got people’s attention around here, but being shirtless didn’t?

  A moment later the darkness opened into a large, dimly lit cavern forty or fifty meters high. Hundreds of people were moving quietly forward. Myell’s vision cleared enough that he could see fashion was not a priority; the men and women around him were filthy, their clothes sometimes nothing more than rags, and even without a shirt on he was better off than half of them. The strangest thing, though, was that his eyes obviously weren’t working right—it looked like some of the people had elongated faces, or faces with fur, or bodies with extra limbs, or other tricks that his brain couldn’t process.

  The woman had said, “Human,” as if there were other options.

  Myell recoiled from the sight and the stench of the human and alien crowd. The man holding him by the arms didn’t let his grasp slip, however. “Don’t stop now,” he warned, steering him forward. “Remember the Monitors.”

  The woman accompanying them gave Myell a brief glance. Her hair was longer than it had been on the Confident and there was a livid scar down the right side of her face, but he recognized her nonetheless.

  “Adryn,” he said, louder than intended.

  “Inside voices, as Mother would say,” the man said. He was bearded and thin, but there was a cheerfulness about him that not even this filthy, smelly place had managed to dampen. He was steering them, slowly but surely, toward one of three enormous metal lifts embedded in the stonework ahead. A tall, spindly silver robot stood at the entrance of each lift, looking like nothing more than long strips of steel welded into a tripod.

  “You’re Tom Cappaletto,” Myell murmured.

  Adryn’s dirty fingers dug in his forearm. “Who are you?”

  He couldn’t bear to explain it. Couldn’t. Around him were the human survivors of the Confident and the rest of the fleet at Kultana and the alien survivors of—of what? Other battles with the Roon, m
aybe. Prisoners of war. Captives from worlds he’d never even dreamed of, from somewhere beyond the Seven Sister planets that the Wondjina had built as mankind’s cradle.

  His knees threatened to give out again but Cappaletto and Adryn got him past a grilled gate and into one of the enormous elevator cars. Bodies pressed up against him from all sides until Myell felt pinned in place. He couldn’t have collapsed even if he’d wanted to. The creature to his left had red scales and a snout that made a faint whistle whenever he/she/it breathed. The creature on his other side was short and thick with brown, leathery skin stretched over a watermelon-sized skull. Though there were brief snippets of sounds as the lift rose upward—disgruntlement, a complaint or two, someone weeping—the ascent was mostly quiet, and tense, and surreal enough that Myell was half convinced he was having a nightmare.

  When the lift opened the crowd surged forward into more caverns. These were warmer than the ones below, with lower rock ceilings and occasional bright alcoves that let off yellow illumination. Silver Monitors similar to the ones below stood watch at various intervals, overseeing several hundred more workers—some curled up on the ground, others sitting and eating out of bowls, others limp and perhaps dead on short gray pallets. The humans clustered in their own groups, and the aliens likewise.

  Cappaletto and Adryn knew their way around. They took him to a smaller rock chamber filled with humans resting on crudely constructed cots and bunks. Adryn watched without comment as Cappaletto sat Myell down on one cot and passed him a small canteen of water. After that he loaned him a short-sleeved shirt that wasn’t clean, but wasn’t covered with blood, either.

  “What’s your name?” Cappaletto asked. “What ship were you on?”

  Myell couldn’t answer.

  Adryn said, “He’s not our responsibility, Tom. He’ll find his own people.”

  “I keep telling you, Lieutenant,” Cappaletto said. “They’re all our people.”

  She looked away in obvious disagreement.

  Myell might have slept. He didn’t remember lying down on Cappaletto’s thin blanket, but for a time his vision and hearing faded, and when he opened his eyes Adryn was gone. Cappaletto was sitting on the cot just an arm’s length away. The light was dim but he was writing something on a piece of wrinkled paper.

  It took a moment for Myell to wet his lips enough to speak.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  Cappaletto’s pencil, which was worn down to a short nub, paused against the paper. “Hard to tell. No natural light, no way of keeping time. Two years, I think. Maybe longer.”

  Two years. Jesus. Myell thought he might go insane if he were stuck here for anything longer than the time it took for the blue ring to return.

  “What about you? You’ve got that newbie look. Just got in?”

  Myell pulled himself up. “Yeah.”

  “Then how’d you know my name?”

  “We met before. A long time ago. You were on the Confident. Do you remember Chief Myell? Lieutenant Commander Jodenny Scott?”

  Cappaletto shook his head.

  “Admiral Nam?” Myell persisted. “Commander Haines?

  “Never met any admirals on the Confident. There’s none here, anyway. Haines is still around, though it won’t do you much good to talk to him.”

  “Why not?”

  Cappaletto answered, “He can’t talk. They do that to people sometimes. The Roon. If you cause trouble or try to tamper with the Monitors. Take you away, bring you back looking like shit, can’t talk.”

  Myell tried not to think of Osherman. “When I met you, you were working with Lieutenant Ling. She was on loan there from Team Space. She was married.”

  “Yeah.” Cappaletto shoved the pencil and paper into a pocket. “Dr. Ling didn’t survive the attack. I saw the body. Wasn’t pretty. My lieutenant, she was a lot broken up over it. Still is.”

  The words were flat, no signs of grief, but Myell didn’t believe Cappaletto was over the loss, either. Most of his sailors and friends were dead, news of mankind lost to him, and he was stuck in this godforsaken place where he’d probably die. Myell wanted to offer condolences but it was a tragedy too enormous for words to smooth over in any way. And he had his own deaths to grieve. The next time he visited Providence, Jodenny would be there—old Jodenny or younger Jodenny, Jodenny getting married, Jodenny giving birth to Lisa. But the copy he had taken with him to the Confident? Had died in pain and terror before the eddy reset. Or had vanished completely, unmourned by anyone but him.

  “So who are you?” Cappaletto asked. “Team Space, by your accent. Civilian? Military?”

  Myell’s gaze traveled over the prisoners in their cots. Thin, dirty, and malnourished, doomed to live the rest of their lives surrounded by rock and their own waste. He hadn’t expected the Roon to take prisoners but maybe nobody had.

  “Civilian,” Myell said. “Last name’s Kay.”

  “Kay, it is.” Cappaletto shook his hand. It was a funny gesture, given the circumstances. Sad, actually. Whatever civility existed down here was of their own making, under tragic circumstances.

  “Come on,” Cappaletto added, rising. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to get some food.”

  Myell’s brain wasn’t much for the idea of food but his stomach grumbled anyway. Cappaletto navigated through the cavern with practiced ease, moving past dozens and dozens of cots on the way to the low opening that led into another chamber, and another after that. Some areas were quiet and others louder, in a pattern Myell couldn’t quite figure out. They passed a makeshift human infirmary, and then a gaming area where a dozen short aliens were playing dice. One chamber with curtains reeked of excrement and another was some kind of nursery, with alien toddlers playing tag under the weary eyes of their scaly mothers.

  He saw no human babies or infants at all.

  “How many people are down here?” Myell asked.

  “Oh, good question. My captain, he tried to do a census when we first got here. About three hundred of us survived Kultana. Then Mary River fell, that brought a lot of people in. We’ve never really been able to get a head count on the Albasta—those are the aliens with the red scales—or the Indil, they’ve got the furry faces. Call it two thousand or so in this mine? Who knows how many other mines there are. Where did they get you?”

  “Doesn’t matter, does it? We’re all here now.”

  Cappaletto clapped him on the arm. “Truer words were never spoken, Kay.”

  The food hall, such as it was, consisted of four large metal chutes snaking down through the rock ceiling into dispensing nozzles. More Monitors kept watch on the crowds. Some workers were tasked with washing out and reissuing shallow wooden bowls. Cappaletto dug into his pocket, brought out a folded-up cloth, and extracted two jewel-like ruby rocks to exchange for a bowl.

  Myell had no rocks to trade.

  “My treat,” Cappaletto said, handing over another rock. “You can pay me back later.”

  “Is that what you dig for, down below?” Myell asked.

  “We call them rubies, but they’re not.” Cappaletto led the way to another long line that gradually shuffled forward to one of the nozzles. “Some people think they help power the Roon ships. They collect most of what we dig out of the rock and let us keep a few for food each shift. Sometimes you can buy blankets, or clothing, or whatever else the Roon deign to bring down here. Keep them on you too long, though, you get skin lesions. Then pus, then gangrene, then you lose the limb.”

  “They’re radioactive?”

  “They’re something,” Cappaletto said.

  Their turn at the nozzle came. Thick gruel slopped down into their bowls. Sniffing at the brown stuff made Myell wrinkle his nose, but it was the sight of something moving in it, sluggish and thick, that made his stomach twist.

  “Some days you get the good gruel, some days you get the bad gruel,” Cappaletto said philosophically. “Today’s our lucky day.”

  A furry alien over two meters tall grow
led at them from his spot in line. The teeth he bared were slimy and sharp.

  “We’re moving,” Cappaletto said. “No problem.”

  “Do you understand what they say?” Myell asked as they found a place to sit against the stone wall.

  “Not a word.” Cappaletto ate steadily, without seeming to mind the taste or the contents of what was in the gruel.

  Two years of that food, Myell thought. Two fucking years.

  “You get used to it,” Cappaletto added, as if reading Myell’s mind. His gaze was on his bowl. “The food, the filth, not being able to communicate with the aliens, half the time not being able to communicate with your own people. The lieutenant and I used to think alike, had the same goals. Not so much anymore. Everyone just does whatever it takes until we get out of here.”

  Myell asked, “You think rescue is coming?”

  “I think you never know what’s going to happen until you wake up and face the day.” Cappaletto shrugged. “Everyone else thinks I’m a hopeless optimist.”

  “Are you?”

  “Nah. I just don’t know how else to keep living.” Unexpectedly Cappaletto grinned. “My day would be much improved if you told me Team Space and the ACF are out there kicking Roon ass. Even if it’s not the truth. Especially if it’s not the truth, you know?”

  Myell heard the heartbreak now. Heard it and understood it.

  “The last place I was, a bunch of teenagers managed to bury half a Roon army under a mountain,” he said truthfully.

  Cappaletto searched his expression, looking for sincerity. He must have found it, because his smile grew wider. “See? Lucky day indeed.”

  Near the food hall was a place to bathe, though only in handfuls of cold water dispensed with more nozzles. There wasn’t nearly enough water to get clean, but Myell made the attempt anyway.

  “I miss showers,” Cappaletto said wistfully. “Nice hot baths. A whirlpool. Swimming pools. You don’t know how spoiled you are until everything gets ripped out from under you, you know?”