The Outback Stars

by Sandra McDonald

  “We’re tracking you at 46-340-Bravo,” Hosaka said. “Is that right?”

  Myell read the address on the nearest bin. “Perfect.”

  Something flickered at the edge of his vision, but when he swung around he saw only crates lashed into place behind the metal gratings. Newsvids of the Yangtze disaster rose in his mind. No one knew why their T6 had exploded. One moment it was all whole and intact, the next a horrific outrushing of shrapnel and burning cargo.

  “Haven’t you found anything yet?” Strayborn asked.

  “I don’t see it,” Myell said. “Are you sure—no, wait.”

  Another flicker of motion, gone almost before he could register it. Goose bumps ran across the back of his neck. Maybe someone was playing tricks on him. Maybe this was an elaborate setup for some new prank by Chiba. Or maybe someone—something?—was in the slot with him, crouched behind the crates. Something cold and alien, sinuous and malevolent. The fact that no alien life had ever been discovered in the Seven Sisters did nothing to calm him.

  “Terry?” Hosaka asked.

  “It’s okay.” Myell hoped they didn’t hear the crack in his voice. “I thought I saw—”

  Something large darted by at the corner of his eye. “Christ!” he said. “Something’s moving down here!”

  “Stay exactly where you are,” Strayborn ordered.

  “Don’t move,” Hosaka echoed.

  Myell ignored them both. He swung his flashlight down the slots and maneuvered closer to the bins. Strayborn and Hosaka were chattering on, reading off lists of DNGO whereabouts, double-checking that no strays had slipped through Core’s lockdown. With each eliminated possibility he heard doubt edging into their voices and knew, with a sinking feeling, that this would be another bit of gossip held against him—nut job Myell, imagining monsters in the slots and under his bed.

  “There’s nothing on the scopes,” Strayborn finally said, which was a polite way of questioning his sanity.

  “Maybe it’s Circe,” Hosaka said. “You should get out of there until we make sure.”

  “No,” Myell said. He had calmed down a little, and was beginning to doubt whether he’d really seen anything at all. “I’ll get her.”

  He moved deeper into the slots gingerly, hyperaware of every shadow. Ten minutes later his beam caught the silver-gray of Circe’s hull. The DNGO hung adrift with her lights out. She didn’t look damaged, but nothing happened when Myell tried to reset her manually. “She’s not responding.”

  “Batteries must be dead,” Strayborn said.

  “I doubt it,” he replied. The rechargeable ion cells had a shelf life of several hundred hours, and the DNGOs were programmed to charge themselves during off-hours. More likely Circe had burned out a thruster or lost her navigation sensors, but neither problem should have made her shut down so entirely.

  Strayborn said, “Doesn’t matter. Haul her out of there.”

  Myell fitted the DNGO with a restraining bolt in case she decided to wake up and finish the last task remaining in her cache. Like an oversized silver balloon, she drifted as he pulled her out of the slots. Focusing on the DNGO’s motion took his mind off the creepy feeling of being stalked, but he was still appallingly glad when they exited the maze into the free space of the shaft. Hosaka sent down another DNGO to tow Circe to the command module, and Myell made his own way back up to level fifty.

  By the time he’d processed himself through the airlock, Hosaka had plugged Circe into the ship’s power supply and had ordered a reboot. Hosaka said, “I hope the data’s still intact.”

  Ishikawa helped Myell out of his suit. “Then can we go eat?”

  No one said anything about his meltdown in the slots. Myell rubbed his arms until they’d warmed up and hoped the subject never came up again. He had seen something, hadn’t he? He sat down and saw that Ishikawa had been fiddling with the control panel while he was gone.

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  Ishikawa’s nose crinkled in confusion. “You mean with the synch log? Trying to figure out more about how it all works. Sounds important.”

  She was more likely to be cruising the ship’s message boards than actually taking the initiative on anything, but Myell’s suspicions were distracted by the flashing tally from Circe’s newly synched memory. “Crap,” Hosaka said from the command module. “We’re never getting out of here.”

  The comparison between transactions recorded by Core and transactions recorded by Circe scored only a seventy-eight percent match. Date of request, requisition number, quantity ordered, quantity retrieved, quantity delivered—a deviation in any of a dozen categories was enough to kick the record onto the discrepancy list. It was the worst number from any of the DNGOs, and would drag down the monthly score to an unacceptable level.

  “We’re going to have to justify each record manually.” Strayborn didn’t sound happy. “Myell, Ish, you take the first hundred and fifty. Lange, Su, you take the second batch.”

  Myell heard heartfelt groans over the comm.

  “How about we take a dinner break first, Sarge?” Su asked. “We’re starving down here.”

  “Just a half hour,” Lange added.

  While they tried to persuade Strayborn to let them go, Myell skimmed over the data. “Jen,” he said, “sort the discrepancies by date.”

  “Why?” Hosaka asked. “Oh. I see it. Most of the mismatches are in the last twenty-four hours. If her batteries were going, it might have affected her data collection.”

  Myell said, “We don’t know it’s the batteries. I’ll have to test it.”

  “If it wasn’t the battery, we’ll be sitting here all night trying to figure out why Core says the galley got a thousand spoons while Circe says it only got ten,” Strayborn said. “It’ll take us until at least midnight, and that’s not counting all the other records we have to justify before we can think of getting out of here and preparing for tomorrow’s uniform inspection.”

  Hosaka said, “It’s the battery.”

  Lange and Su agreed.

  “Myell?” Strayborn asked

  Myell squeezed the bridge of his nose. “We can’t write off three hundred transactions without justification.”

  “We’ve got justification,” Strayborn said. “They’re all glitches. I’ll write up a paragraph or two and make sure the chief and Lieutenant Scott are okay with it.”

  Ishikawa’s hopeful gaze did Myell in. He already felt like a fool for imagining something in the slots. He wouldn’t be the jerk who kept everyone at work all night long.

  “All right,” Myell said. No use fighting about it. “It’s probably the battery.”

  * * *

  On her way to dinner Jodenny passed Quenger boarding a lift.

  “You shouldn’t waste too much time in our wardroom,” he said. “The real action’s elsewhere.”

  She replied, “I’m not interested in real action. I’ve seen enough of it.”

  “That’s obvious.” Quenger nodded toward her MacBride Cross. “Flaunting it, are you? You weren’t wearing that when you first came aboard.”

  The lift doors closed before she could tell him to go screw himself. Jodenny fumed all the way to the wardroom, where Ysten and Weaver were mixing drinks and Francesco was watching the ship’s evening news.

  “You look ready to rip someone in pieces,” Weaver said.

  “I am.” Jodenny considered pouring herself a strong drink but went to the table instead. “AT Ashmont, what time is it?”

  “Ma’am? It’s top of the hour.”

  “Start serving,” Jodenny ordered.

  “We usually wait,” Weaver said.

  “I’m the senior officer here,” Jodenny said, “and I’d like to eat.”

  Francesco might have been senior to her, depending on his commissioning date, but he only scratched his ear and took a seat without comment. Ysten and Weaver both sat down with cautious expressions. Zeni and Hultz wandered in ten minutes later and look startled to see the first course u
nder way. “What happened?” Zeni asked.

  “It’s a new tradition,” Jodenny said. “Dinner starts promptly at eighteen hundred.”

  Ysten didn’t come to dinner at all, which prompted Hultz’s bit of gossip. “I hear Dicensu knocked him unconscious on the Flats.”

  “They bumped each other in the passage,” Jodenny said. “Nothing more.”

  Weaver reached for her beer. “He’s in big trouble with Vu, anyway. Keeps bad-mouthing the food on the mess decks. Not too smart when your own boss is in charge of it, right?”

  Jodenny couldn’t have said what dinner that night tasted like. The minor victory of eating on time was far outweighed by Quenger’s cutting remarks. A heavy depression swung over her, a pitch-black shadow that encompassed the terrible condition of Underway Stores, the encounter with Osherman at lunch, and her problems with Nitta and Ysten.

  “Is anything wrong?” Francesco asked when she went to check her queue after dinner.

  “No,” Jodenny said. “I’m waiting for a report.”

  “No talk of paperwork so soon after eating. Come play Seven Up.”

  Jodenny partnered with Hultz. Zeni cut for the deal and Francesco showed the highest card. He dealt out six cards to each of them and turned up the next for trump. Hultz begged, Francesco dealt out more, and Jodenny wondered if Nitta had at least had dinner delivered to the crew working over in T6.

  “You weren’t even trying,” Hultz said when they lost the hand.

  “I’m sorry.” Jodenny stood. “Excuse me. There’s something I need to go do.”

  She couldn’t pretend to be in the tower for some casual reason. She would have to betray herself as someone who didn’t trust her own people. Even as the tram crossed across the gulf from Mainship, she told herself to turn back. But she ignored her own advice and crossed the access ring to T6’s control module.

  The lights were down, the displays dim. Perplexed, her pulse beginning to pound against her temple, Jodenny went to the Underway Stores office and saw Nitta at his desk.

  “I’m routing the inventory to you right this minute. Ninety-two percent.” Nitta leaned back in his chair to beam at her. “We did a damn fine job.”

  Jodenny didn’t return his smile. “I look forward to reading it. Don’t forget that uniform inspection in the morning.”

  “Come on, Miz Scott. Don’t you think we could forego that? Everyone worked late.”

  Jodenny glanced pointedly at the clock. “Not that late.”

  “I think it’ll go over well if you postpone it.”

  “No.”

  He chuckled. “Then I better go hem my trousers.”

  Jodenny watched him go. In the fourteen or so hours that she’d known him, she hadn’t thought he was capable of a good mood. She went to her desk and activated Holland.

  “Take a look at the monthly inventory sitting in my queue,” Jodenny said. “Run all the standard fraud and irregularity checks. Double-check the ID numbers, purchase orders, accounts receivable, issued goods, and dingo retrieval rates.”

  After a moment Holland said, “I’ve detected no anomalies, Lieutenant.”

  Ninety-two percent. Not bad. She could think of one or two of her supply school classmates who would be happy to score that high.

  Maybe her job wasn’t going to be as difficult as she had feared.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Myell woke earlier than usual from nightmares. First he’d been in the slots, lost in the dark maze while something sinister and cold ruthlessly tracked him down. Then he’d been back on Baiame, running from his older brother’s wrath across an immense field of rotting crops. Black vines reached for his ankles and tried to drag him down to the dirt. “Come take your beating!” Daris yelled, his voice booming across the steel-gray sky. Legs numb, chest laboring, Myell fell to his knees. Just before Daris’s unseen fist rammed into the small of his back (he couldn’t see it but he knew it was coming, with the odd prescience of dreams) a voice commanded, “Stop!” The same naked Aboriginal he’d seen on the tram appeared on a nearby hill. The circles and swirls on his body were silver in the odd light, and his spear pulsed with unnatural power. He was a shaman, Myell realized. A medicine man fallen out of Aboriginal history.

  “Begone!” The shaman stabbed his spear at a point over Myell’s shoulder. The spear turned into a multicolored snake that arched through the air with a hiss like falling rain. “You are not welcome in this world!”

  Lightning; thunder; the heavy smell of ozone. Myell blinked his eyes and found himself curled up in his rack. Koo stared at him from the perch of a rock he’d placed in her terrarium. He could feel his heart thudding in his chest like a thing gone wild.

  “Shit,” he said, and Koo skittered off her rock to burrow under some grass.

  Timrin was away on watch. After a few minutes Myell snapped on the light and got dressed. He went up to the E-Deck gym and did a half hour on a treadmill, but not even a brisk run could drive away lingering feelings of doom. The terror he’d felt in the slots was just the result of an overactive imagination. Daris was a demon he’d long put to rest, or so he’d hoped. And what was his subconscious doing, mucking around with that weird shaman? Myell had no Aboriginal ancestors that he knew of, and certainly didn’t need any defending him in his dreams.

  He returned to Supply berthing downladder into the lounge, which was littered with leftovers and empty beer cans. Erickson was asleep on one of the sofas, no doubt kicked out of his cabin so Chang could have a girlfriend over. Joe Olsson was waiting for the lift. It would have been easier to pass him by, and smarter, too, but Myell stopped anyway.

  “Olsson,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “You still seeing Shevi Dyatt?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Wanted to make sure she’s not unhappy about it.”

  Olsson stabbed the lift button. “Fuck off, Myell.”

  “No need to get hostile,” he said, and wished he had a way of recording the conversation in case Olsson got physical.

  Olsson’s lips thinned. “She say something to you?”

  “No. And I’m not getting involved. Just be careful.”

  “Yeah, like you were with Wendy Ford.” The lift doors opened and Olsson stepped inside. “Find that dingo you lost on the Rocks? No, and you’re not going to. Keep asking questions, and you’ll lose a lot more.”

  As Myell watched the doors close he imagined the stupefied expression on his own face. He had toyed with the idea that Chiba’s dogs had taken Castalia, but why would they? Just to mess with him? Dumbfounded, he returned to his cabin, showered, and donned his neatest uniform. He still had an hour before Lieutenant Scott’s inspection began and was heading for the mess decks when Security pinged him.

  “Report to Lieutenant Commander Senga’s office,” he was told.

  He went, his throat tight. The Security offices were open twenty-four/seven, but the day shift had yet to come on duty. A regular tech directed him past empty desks to Senga’s office, which was grammed in black tile and smelled like burned coffee. Sergeant Rosegarten was standing with Senga, an unhappy expression on her face. Senga, who’d been Wendy Ford’s staunchest supporter, gave Myell a cold look.

  “Sit down, Sergeant,” Senga said. “Tell me what you really did with that dingo you reported missing.”

  Myell sat. As evenly as possible he said, “I left it on the Rocks and it disappeared, sir.”

  “On its own,” Senga said, and there was no missing the sarcasm. “It just flew away.”

  Rosegarten’s frown deepened.

  “No, sir,” Myell said. “It was fitted with a restraining bolt.”

  Senga hammered away at his story. Why did he take the DNGO to the Rocks if the Repair Shop was closed? Why didn’t he leave it there when the alarms sounded? How hard had he tried to retrieve it? The insinuation that he’d stolen it was clear, but Myell refused to be baited. He tried not to look at the clock, but the minutes ticked away toward division qu
arters.

  “You know what I think?” Senga said. “I think you’ll say anything to cover your ass.”

  He wasn’t about to repeat what Olsson had said in the lounge, and he certainly wasn’t going to show them the bruises that Chiba had left from the manhandling. Senga would probably blame him for fighting and get him thrown into the brig again.

  “I don’t have any reason to lie to you, sir. But I do have to be at division quarters in ten minutes.”

  Senga smiled for the first time. “Well, Lieutenant Scott will understand. She’s the one who called me, after all. She wanted to know why you weren’t charged for raping AT Ford. She’s worried more equipment might go missing.”

  Myell had expected Jodenny Scott to hear about the mess, but had held on to some faint hope that she might give him a chance to have his say. “If you suspect me of something, I demand written notification of my legal rights and want a lawyer present.”

  “You demand?” Senga leaned forward, fists curled.

  “Sir,” Rosegarten said, “may I speak with you outside?”

  “How about you go outside and Sergeant Myell and I talk about his demands?”

  “Sir,” she insisted, an edge in her voice that even Myell couldn’t miss. Senga and Rosegarten left. Myell watched the clock. Oh-six-forty-five came and went. He couldn’t do anything about it, not unless he bolted from the room without permission. Finally Rosegarten returned alone.

  “I apologize for the lieutenant commander,” she said, her expression stoic. “You’re free to go.”

  Myell left. The trams were running slow, and it was several minutes before he was crossing the access ring to T6. He hesitated at the command module, wondering if it was better to miss quarters altogether than show up late, but duty compelled him to ride the lift down. The division was still assembled in ranks and Lieutenant Scott was inspecting Ishikawa with Chief Nitta beside her. Nitta smirked at Myell’s tardiness. Jodenny gave him the briefest glance and said, “Into line, Sergeant.”

  He did as told and fixed his gaze on the back of Chang’s head. The hold was very quiet, with only an occasional shuffle of feet and Lieutenant Scott’s low murmurs of approval or disapproval. “You need a better haircut,” she told Lange. “Nice boots, AM Dicensu,” she said a moment later. When she reached Myell she gave him a thorough scrutiny from top to bottom. He didn’t dare break attention to meet her eyes, but knew they were full of disappointment. “Satisfactory,” she told Nitta, and with a soft beep the judgment was entered into Nitta’s gib. “Two demerits for being late.” Then, louder, she said, “Underway Stores, dismissed.”