The Stars Down Under

by Sandra McDonald

  “Only dead things are immune to change,” Myell said. “Dead people, dead institutions, dead minds.”

  Talic’s fork jabbed his way, but his gaze abruptly swiveled to the doorway. Myell glanced over his shoulder and saw Captain Kuvik carrying his tray in. He was accompanied by civilians in business attire.

  “Captain hardly ever eats here,” Gooder murmured, reaching for the salt. “Damn efficiency experts from Fleet. They come by to make life hell every now and again.”

  Talic seemed unwilling to continue his arguments about tradition with Kuvik in the room. He left, soon followed by the others at their table, leaving only Gooder to dally over his coffee. Gooder asked, “So, they really stick you down in the basement?”

  “Any lower and I’d be in the foundation,” Myell said.

  Gooder grinned. “That’s our captain for you. Don’t worry. Your tour’s three years, right? By the end of year two he’ll have warmed up a degree or two. Might even let you teach a class.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He’s rigid, but usually fair. Listens to reason.”

  “Not on the subject of chief initiation,” Myell said. “Or fraternization.”

  “So it’s true? You married your lieutenant?”

  “It’s not exactly like that.”

  Gooder clapped him on the shoulder. “Nothing ever is.”

  After lunch Myell returned to his little office and spent the entire afternoon on his tedious task. To lighten up the silence of the basement he played music on his bee. He thought of Kuvik eating lunch with the so-called efficiency experts. Maybe they were really men from Fleet. Would Team Space transfer him anyway, force him to work on the Wondjina network despite his protests? He’d been told that the project was voluntary, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Stop being paranoid, he told himself.

  At sixteen-hundred hours he still had several more days of work ahead of him. Myell left his office, started for the lift, then stopped when the overhead lights went off. He heard scuffling footsteps but was too slow to dodge the arms that grabbed him and dragged him backward. He kicked and yelled as adhesive tape was slapped over his mouth.

  “We’ll fucking show you what initiation means,” someone said, a man’s voice that he didn’t recognize.

  A hood was pulled over his head. It smelled musty and tainted with machine oil. He was hauled down the corridor. He couldn’t be sure, not in the rush of panic, not as he fought to breathe past the tape and tried to break their strong hold, but he thought maybe there were three assailants. A door opened. Machinery hummed nearby. Air units, water heaters, the plumbing system. He fought as hard as he could, trying to squirm free, to yell, but they easily slammed him up against a support pillar. A fist drove into his abdomen.

  “None of it’s optional,” one of his attackers said. A man, no one he could identify. “You call Fleet and tell them you want to go through initiation. Otherwise—” Another fist landed in his stomach. “Otherwise we’ll be waiting for you every day, fucking teach you a lesson, you understand?”

  They grabbed his hair and tipped his head back so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.

  “Understand?” the man said again.

  Though Myell hated to let them win, he made a muffled sound of surrender.

  “Good,” he was told. “Be a good boy now. Work hard at it, why don’t you, and maybe you’ll get free on your own. If not, we’ll send someone along in the morning to get you. Won’t be the most enjoyable night you’ve ever spent, but you can use it to think about how much you’ll enjoy initiation.”

  They tied him to the pillar with rope and left him there, breathing hard through his nose, pain like fire in his stomach. His legs were shaking so hard he thought they might give way. The attackers left without another word. Only the clang of the closing door told him he was alone. He pulled at the rope but the knots were solid, and already the muscles in his shoulders were beginning to cramp.

  Think, he told himself. You can get out of this. They don’t dare leave you alone like this.

  But they did.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Anna Gayle’s lab suite was in the basement of the Team Space complex on Rathbone Street. The lights were off, with information playing out in strong colors on a wallgib.

  “This is a map of the Wondjina network stations that Team Space has visited,” Gayle said. Her face was tight and smooth in the reflected light. “Eighty stations over the course of the last six years. There’d be more if they didn’t make people so damn sick. We have a labeling system that helps keep track of where the loop originated and the station number.”

  Jodenny gazed at the map. “So Chief Myell and I traveled where?”

  “On your first trip, you went through MRLM1—that’s Mary River Lakeland Mother Station 1, the originating station. It’s an express route, to MRLM2—that’s Mary River Lakeland Mother Station 2—and back again,” Gayle said.

  There were two other people in the lab with them. Gayle had introduced them as Leorah Farber and Teddy Toledo. Toledo, helpful and earnest, built like a large refrigerator, said, “Express routes only go one or two stops and come back. Loops go a lot farther.”

  Gayle pointed at a circle of green lights. “This was your second trip, as you recounted it to the agents on Warramala. You got on at Warramala Sowbridge Mother 1 and went several stations on that loop, which runs one hundred and forty stations.”

  “We got very sick,” Jodenny said.

  “But you got back by transferring through other Spheres,” Farber said. She was quieter than her partner, with a deeply somber expression. “Your husband claimed a serpent spoke to him and told him how.”

  Jodenny wasn’t about to defend or explain Myell’s Rainbow Serpent. If they hadn’t taken a shortcut through the network, they’d probably be dead by now. Or still lost, like Sam Osherman.

  “You said six years,” Jodenny said. “Why couldn’t anyone use them before?”

  “There are fourteen sets of Wondjina Spheres here on Fortune.” Gayle turned back to her map. “Tourists have been traipsing in and out of them for decades without triggering any tokens. Sure, there have always been urban legends, myths. People who claim to see spirits in them, or walk through one and end up back on Earth, or in heaven, or some pastel-colored astral plane. But only six years ago did we actually receive a verifiable report. An AT on Kiwi, visiting her parents on their farm, went sightseeing and wound up on a Kiwi express. Scared her silly.”

  Toledo said, “She’d been in and out of Spheres ever since she was a child. Never happened before.”

  Jodenny frowned. “I thought you have to be exposed to the system in order to travel in it. I saw one on the Yangtze. The next time I visited a Mother Sphere, I triggered one. Chief Myell was with me, so he was exposed then and could trigger them in any other Spheres he visited.”

  Gayle said, “Not every Mother Sphere seems to be active, and even those that are seem to go through periods when they’re offline. But yes, that first AT was the only one who, to our knowledge, was not previously exposed. Why that token came for her, we don’t know.”

  “Why do you call it a token?” Jodenny asked.

  Toledo replied, “Someone thought the system resembles an old token ring computer network. Pre-Debasement technology. You’ve got fifty computers on the same network, and one token looping around between them on a fixed route. The computer that wanted to transmit information would grab the token, stick data in it, then send it on its way again so that other—”

  “Yes, yes,” Gayle said, interrupting. “As far as we know, there’s only one ring at a time in any given Wondjina loop. When you step into a station that authorizes you, you have to wait for the token to come along. It might be a few seconds, it might be a minute, but if someone else is using it, nothing happens. That’s the case up at Swedenville. We’ve done most of our experiments there.”

  “Is that where your husband’s expedition left from?” Jodenny asked, returning her gaze to
the map.

  “No. They left from Bainbridge.” Gayle keyed in a command, and a new map popped up. “We know from examining the token’s diagram that it has thirty-four stations, none of which cross-references Swedenville or any other Spheres in the Seven Sisters. Like every other Sphere, it refused to transfer any automated probes—we tried DNGOs, we tried remote cameras, nothing. With the advances the medical division made, Robert thought thirty-four stations were well within reach for a human expedition.”

  Goosebumps rose on her arms. Jodenny resisted the urge to rub at them. “How big is the entire network?”

  “Thousands of stations,” Farber said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  Gayle shut off the wallgib and brought the overhead lights up to full illumination. “What we’d really like to pinpoint is the network’s control station. The hub of it all, or hubs if there’s more than one. You can grind a Sphere into dust and not find any type of machinery inside. How the tokens appear, what power source sends them spiraling onward—it’s a mystery.”

  Jodenny asked, “You’ve destroyed a Sphere?”

  Gayle gave her a patient look. “Hypothetical computer models. We would never destroy an archaeological artifact.”

  “But you did capture a token,” Jodenny said. “You tried to transport it on the Yangtze, and it ended up destroying the ship.”

  She tried not to sound bitter about it. Hundreds of people dead. Her shipmates, her closest friends. The actual sequence of events was still an enigma to her. The Team Space agents on Warramala had insisted that no memory block had been installed in her mind, but Sam Osherman had told her otherwise. If he was alive, if she ever found him again, she intended to wrap her hands around his throat and throttle the truth out of him.

  Gayle sat down. Her gaze, always direct, burned into Jodenny. “The field office had no way of knowing what destruction the token would cause while transporting it. You can be sure that no one will try that again. Safety is our highest priority. That, and preserving the integrity of the network. We only want to understand what the Wondjina left for us. With any luck at all, it will help us understand them better. Bring us closer to who and what they were.”

  Myell would no doubt have something to say about that. Jodenny checked the nearest clock. He should be off work by now, on his way home. She hoped his second day at Supply School had been easier than his first one.

  “All you want me to do is see if a Mother Sphere will respond to me?” she asked.

  Gayle nodded. “If the system stays operational, if it’s safe, we’ll send a rescue team after Robert’s group. If you’d like, I could get you on the team. With the new medical treatments, the sickness is no longer a problem. You could be part of an amazing adventure, Commander.”

  The offer was more tempting than she wanted to admit. Jodenny said, “What if the token doesn’t come?”

  “If it doesn’t, we’ll have to try something else. Can I count on your cooperation, Commander?”

  Jodenny said, “When do you want to try?”

  Gayle leaned forward. “Tonight. Tomorrow. You decide.”

  Her eagerness was a little unsettling. Jodenny said, “Let me call you in the morning.”

  She was halfway down the passageway, heading for the lift, when Leorah Farber came after her.

  “Commander,” Farber said. “A word?”

  Jodenny replied, “I said I’d call in the morning.”

  Farber said, “It’s about your husband. We’d appreciate his cooperation as well. I’ve tried talking to him and understand his reluctance, but this is an issue larger than individual concerns any of us might have.”

  The passageway was long but wide, filled with gleaming white floor tiles and windowless beige walls. A medbot sat on a perch high above, waiting for emergencies. Jodenny said, “His ‘individual concerns’ are pretty big.”

  “I know,” Farber said. “But I’ve also talked to his commanding officer at Supply School. Captain Kuvik doesn’t want him there. Doesn’t believe he sets a good role model for the students or staff. Why should Chief Myell continue in such a hostile environment—”

  “Wait,” Jodenny said hotly. “Not a good role model? Winner of a Silver Star?”

  Farber glanced pointedly at Jodenny’s wedding ring. “It’s not my opinion, ma’am. It’s Captain Kuvik’s. The fraternization issue, skipping initiation—these aren’t taken lightly. But I promise you, here, in this project, no one will make an issue of it.”

  Jodenny shook her head in disgust. “If that’s your entire sales pitch, Miss Farber, it’s no wonder you didn’t win him over.”

  She took public transportation home, mulling over Farber’s words and rehearsing what to tell Myell about the project. She wouldn’t even mention Gayle’s casual offer to include her in the rescue mission. Better that he didn’t even think that was an option. She wouldn’t go gallivanting around the universe without him, anyway. Jodenny tried pinging him from the monorail, but he didn’t respond to his bee. He hadn’t left any messages and Betsy reported that he wasn’t home.

  That was strange, but perhaps he’d gone to the gym and left his bee on a locker shelf. Once she was home and out of her uniform, Jodenny tried calling him again. No answer. She curled up on the ugly sofa with her gib, reading the news, watching the daylight fade outside. Karl snuggled between her feet, his ears twitching.

  “Where are you?” she asked the ceiling.

  Myell didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Myell couldn’t reach his bee. It buzzed more than once, and he imagined Jodenny’s increasing worry on the other end. Sooner or later she would call the duty officer at Supply School to find out what time he’d left. The duty officer would report that he hadn’t flashed his ID at the lobby security scanner on his way out. A search might commence. The idea of anyone finding him here, bound and gagged in the dark, was utterly humiliating.

  He twisted and squirmed for the knots. Some large piece of machinery nearby started to hiss. Warm air blasted over him, and the dark terror of the hood over his head dissolved into a burnt-red desert that he hadn’t seen since Warramala.

  This landscape was different from the one he’d experienced then. A watering hole, large and unexpectedly blue, lay not far from his feet. A crocodile was immersed in it. Only the creature’s head and snout showed. Its teeth were white like bone, its skin gray verging on black.

  “I didn’t have time for you,” Myell said, shuddering.

  The crocodile stared at him, its eyes flat and green. “Jungali,” it said, though its mouth didn’t move.

  Myell tried closing his eyes, but they were already closed. Jungali was the nickname his mother had given him as a child. Was the name the Rainbow Serpent had used, in asking him to choose between the so-called real world and the Dreamtime.

  “That’s not me,” he said.

  The ground around the watering hole rippled, and another reptile tore free of the ground. It rose on its hind legs like a dinosaur might. Its breath smelled like burnt flesh, like something rancid and rotting left to dry under the sun. Thunderhead clouds boiled in the sky.

  “Jungali!” the crocodile cried, and scurried out of the waterhole toward him. The dinosaur-thing attacked it with claws and teeth, and their ferocious struggles ripped through the air.

  Myell jerked backward. The vision disappeared, replaced by darkness and the sounds of machinery, the cut of rope against his skin. Oxygen was becoming a problem. He forced himself to calm down, but it took several long moments before he could breathe steadily through his nose, and even longer before his hands were steady enough to get to work.

  He finally managed to free himself, at the cost of torn and scraped wrists. The rest of the faculty and students had long departed the school, and the lobby was empty but for a bored-looking AT.

  “Night, Chief,” he said, as Myell passed through the scanners.

  The air outside was fresh and mild compared to the basement. The after-work crowd had thinned. If he chec
ked over his shoulder once or twice, that was caution and not paranoia. On the train ride home he worried how he was going to explain things. Jodenny would want to get involved, pull rank, pull strings, as she had on the Aral Sea. He didn’t need to be rescued by his wife. He wouldn’t allow a repeat of the bullying there to mar his time on Fortune.

  His bee was silent, though. Maybe she’d given up trying to contact him. When the monorail drew close to Adeline Oaks, he pinged Betsy.

  “Commander Scott is asleep,” she told him. “Shall I wake her? She was eager to reach you.”

  “No,” Myell said. “Leave her alone.”

  He trudged home from the train station in the darkness. She was dozing on the sofa when he let himself in. He hurried to their bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  There were no marks on his face, except for irritation where the tape glue had been. His wrists wouldn’t look pretty come morning. Myell turned on the shower and climbed in under hot water. Only under its strong torrent did he allow himself to close his eyes, and lean against the shower wall, and let himself tremble.

  * * *

  Without meaning to, Jodenny had fallen asleep on the ugly sofa. When she woke the sky was full dark and the shower was running in the master bathroom.

  She poked her head into the bathroom. “Terry?”

  “You were sleeping,” he said from behind the shower screen and a cloud of steam. “Didn’t want to wake you.”

  Jodenny yawned at her mirror reflection. “I tried to reach you. Is your bee working?”

  “It’s been frizzing out all day. Sorry I was late—a few unexpected things came up.”

  “School was okay?”

  Myell reached for a bar of soap. “Every day’s something new. I’ll get the hang of it. Did you eat?”

  Jodenny thought of Farber’s words. Hostile environment. She said, “I’m starving. Want to go to Mexwax?”