The Outback Stars

by Sandra McDonald

  Myell wondered if she ever said the Yangtze’s name.

  Jodenny continued. “It didn’t help that the chief kept telling him about the Legend of the Lost AT. Had him half convinced a ghost was going to creep up and grab him by the back of the neck.”

  Did she know she was rambling nervously?

  “I never heard that one,” Ysten said, and Myell realized he was wrong. She wasn’t telling the story to quell the anxiousness of being in the slots. She was telling it to keep Amador and Ysten occupied.

  Her headvid showed her passing B-block. “Way back when, on one of the first Team Space freighters, an AT went into the slots to pull out something that had been requisitioned—this is in the days when you had to pull the small items by hand—and something went wrong. He reported being lost. Then he lost his headlamp, so he couldn’t see where he was. Core couldn’t track the marker on his suit or pinpoint where he was. His comm stayed open, though, and you could hear him trying to hold everything together. They sent in a chief to pull him out but he couldn’t find him—every time it seemed like they were getting close, the chief would turn down a block and find no one there.”

  “How long did this go on?” Ysten asked.

  “By the time they sent a second team in, it had been almost twelve hours. By the time they sent the third team in, the AT’s suit was almost out of power.”

  Myell kept his eyes on Jodenny’s EV display. The Legend of the Lost AT was a fairy tale told to impressionable young sailors or ensigns. Jodenny continued. “He was delirious near the end. Kept telling his lieutenant that he could see tigers and lions and other animals. They figured he was out of it from dehydration.”

  “They found him, though, right?” Ysten asked.

  “No,” Jodenny said. “Never. Even when they reached Fortune and combed through every centimeter of the tower, they never found the body.”

  Ysten drew himself up in his chair. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Would I lie?” Jodenny asked. “Oh, here, look. Here’s Athena.”

  * * *

  Telling the story had made her trip go quickly. Athena now caught the focus of Jodenny’s headlamp, and it only took a once-over to see the bin gate had closed while the DNGO was retrieving a crate. Jodenny’s light caught the address on the bin overhead.

  “She got herself stuck,” Jodenny reported. “Did you say Mike block?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Amador said. “She’d just finished making a pickup.”

  Jodenny opened the gate, braced herself, and tugged Athena and her cargo free. The DNGO had automatically powered down to conserve energy, but Jodenny fitted her with a restraining bolt anyway.

  “Careful, Lieutenant,” Myell’s voice said in her ear. He sounded very tense. “Who knows what’s in her cache?”

  “I hear you.” Jodenny unhooked the gib from her belt and swiped it over the smartcrate Athena had been clutching. The crate’s coded information instantly downloaded for her. “What does Core say Athena was retrieving?”

  “Cleaning supplies,” Amador replied.

  The smartcrate listed its contents as plumbing equipment. She wanted to open it up, but she didn’t have the crate’s authorization codes and hadn’t brought any kind of crowbar. Jodenny shoved it back into the bin, closed the gate, and leashed Athena to her belt. “We’re on our way out.”

  Fifteen minutes later she dropped Athena off at the command module and let Myell and Ysten help her out of the EV suit. “Let me know what Repair Services says.”

  Amador went to take the DNGO over. Ysten excused himself to go stand a training watch. Myell said, “Lieutenant, if you want to know what’s wrong with Athena, the Repair Shop isn’t where you should send her.”

  Jodenny reached down to tighten her boots. “It’s not?”

  “It might be better to run a diagnostic here.”

  “Sergeant—”

  “At least check her out before you send her over. Once they take her apart, you’ll only have their word for it.”

  Myell sounded painfully earnest. Jodenny sighed and pinged Amador. “Bring Athena down to Sergeant Myell’s old workbench.”

  Jodenny and Myell went down to the bench. Amador showed up a few minutes later with Athena bobbing behind him. Once he was gone, Myell plugged Athena into the board and powered her up. The DNGO’s lights blinked as she raised and spun her head. “There’s my girl,” he murmured, one hand on her hull. He connected her to his gib and data filled the screen.

  Jodenny said, “At least her memory looks intact.”

  Myell studied the information silently for a moment. “I meant to tell you about Ng, but then Chief Nitta died and you were already upset.”

  She supposed she could concede a little as well. “Maybe I overreacted. I did promise not to tell anyone.”

  He shrugged. “I might have told someone, too.”

  “Might have?” Her voice came out with a squeak.

  “It slipped out while I was in Sick Berth. Chaplain Mow.”

  The lift arrived. Perhaps alerted by Amador, Ishikawa approached timidly and asked, “Anything I can help with, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” Jodenny said. “Thanks anyway.”

  Ishikawa lingered.

  “You’re dismissed, AT Ishikawa.”

  When they were alone, Jodenny asked, “What exactly did you tell Chaplain Mow?”

  “Everything, it turns out.” Myell pried Athena’s registration plate off and peered inside. He changed the subject. “This is a Class III made by a company called Fortunate Robotics. The dingoes that have had problems in the last few months all come from there. Maybe there’s a design or factory flaw they all share—or maybe something else is going on with them.”

  While Myell poked around the DNGO’s innards, Jodenny told him about Dr. Ng’s theories and about the Wondjina travel reported by Mary Dory forty years earlier. Myell said, “She doesn’t sound like a very reliable witness,” and pulled out something small and silver.

  “What’s that?” Jodenny asked.

  He studied it in the light. “A master chip. I haven’t seen one in a long time. When I first got into Team Space, Class I and II dingoes worked on a distributive system. They gave each other storage and retrieval commands. But they were too easy to manipulate. There was a lot of fraud and theft, because you could install one of these and make a dingo do something that wouldn’t be logged into its records…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Sergeant?”

  “The morning of the accident,” he said. “Andromeda.”

  Jodenny didn’t like the increasing chalkiness in his face. “Do you remember something?”

  “I found—” Myell tore open one of the workbench drawers and reached inside it. “Jesus, I found one, how could I forget that?”

  “You found one what?”

  He pulled another master chip from the drawer. “In Andromeda. The morning of the accident.”

  Jodenny gazed up the shaft. “So there’s more than one.”

  “There could be dozens. Any of the units I sent over to Repair—it’s Chiba’s people. They stick these things in our dingoes and then we wonder why they’re glitched.”

  “By controlling the dingoes they can steal whatever they want,” Jodenny said. “But the annual physical inventory will show the items are missing.”

  Myell dropped onto his stool as if all the energy had suddenly drained out of him. “Not if they change the records in Core.”

  Jodenny hooked her own gib into the board. “Core thought Athena had finished making a delivery in Mike block when she shut down. I found her at Lima block, retrieving a crate. Let’s see what she was taking.”

  The container ID spilled on to the screen.

  “Invalid number,” Myell said. “That container doesn’t exist.”

  “Then they’re not just stealing things. They’re smuggling cargo as well. Guns, Sweet, stolen property—it could be anything.” Jodenny gazed upward again. “We’ve got to find out what’s in
that container.”

  “That’s not necessary, Lieutenant Scott. We’ll take it from here.”

  Standing at the base of the nearest ladder, holding up Inspector General badges, were AT Ishikawa and Commander Osherman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jodenny stared at the young woman she’d known as AT Ishikawa. “Agent Ishikawa? But you’re only eighteen years old.”

  Ishikawa grinned. “Twenty-four, Lieutenant. I only look eighteen.”

  The four of them had moved up to the command module. Myell had taken a seat but Jodenny was standing by the windows, beyond which DNGOs arced and flew through the shaft. Osherman said, “The two of you have gotten yourself tangled up in a fleet-wide investigation that’s included year-long operations on several ships, including the Yangtze and Aral Sea. Your initiative is appreciated, but you’re jeopardizing a case much larger than you can imagine.”

  Only he could mix praise and recrimination so deftly. Jodenny didn’t care if he was unhappy with her. If someone had actually taken the time to clue her into the smugglers operating in her own department, she wouldn’t have stumbled into it like a woman in a darkened room full of furniture. The idea of Osherman working for the Inspector General left her cold. He was a spy—a legal spy, a spy out for the greater good of Team Space, but a spy nonetheless.

  “They’re reprogramming the dingoes, aren’t they?” Myell asked. “Using master chips to give them off-the-book commands.”

  Osherman said, “Obviously I can’t confirm anything. I have a duty to protect the integrity of this investigation.”

  “What about a duty to protect Sergeant Myell’s life?” Jodenny remembered him limp on the floor of the observation module. “Circe nearly killed him because she had one of those damned chips in her.”

  “It wasn’t Circe,” Myell said.

  Jodenny gave him an inquisitive look but he was focused inward, on something only he could see. “The hull markings were wrong,” he said. “I remember that now. It was Castalia, the unit stolen back at Kookaburra.”

  Osherman’s expression gave away nothing. “It doesn’t matter. The people who’ve subverted the dingoes—well, let’s just say they didn’t realize they had glitched the command routines that kick in during a General Quarters. In my opinion it was truly an accident.”

  “The people who’ve subverted the dingoes,” Jodenny repeated the phrase. She focused on the tower shaft, where the DNGO lights were entrancing, almost hypnotic. “Chief Chiba, because nothing could go on in Repair that he didn’t have a hand in. Lieutenant Quenger, who went to the academy with Lieutenant Anzo—the same lieutenant who delayed reporting Lieutenant Commander Greiger’s accident to the captain and who covered for Chiba and Engel when they stole that dingo during the GQ. She works in Data, so it was easy to falsify the lifepod entries to give them alibis. But she made a mistake and made the report times unrealistic. More people who work for Chiba. Chief Nitta? Was his overdose an accident, or was someone trying to shut him up? What about Commander Matsuda’s disappearance back on Kiwi?”

  Osherman stayed silent. Jodenny turned around to stare at him. “Why? What are they smuggling or stealing? Weapons? Explosives?”

  “Leave it alone, Lieutenant,” Osherman said. “You did enough harm with your curiosity back in the warehouse district on Mary River. By following Quenger and Nitta like some amateur detective, you almost wrecked our entire operation.”

  “Those were your people who tried to detain me?” Jodenny had never told Myell about the events that had brought her to his brother’s farm and could see the curiosity on his face.

  “I can’t—” Osherman started.

  Ishikawa said, “It doesn’t hurt for her to know that, sir, and she’s earned it. Yes, Lieutenant. It was a joint effort between Team Space and the local authorities. We couldn’t afford to let you make Lieutenant Quenger suspicious. If you’d come with us, we could have explained things there and then. But you ran, which increased suspicion that you were somehow involved or trying to get involved.”

  Outside the shaft, a DNGO hovered and spun in place, its lights blinking. Jodenny had the uncomfortable feeling it was eavesdropping. “What did I ever do to warrant suspicion?”

  Osherman grimaced. “You called in an admiral’s favor at Fleet to get reassigned to this ship ahead of any other eligible lieutenant. Then you got yourself put in charge of Underway Stores, the very center of our investigation. No one knew what your motives or plans were.”

  “My motives…” Jodenny shook her head. “My only motive was to do the job I’m supposed to do.”

  Ishikawa was eyeing the DNGO outside the window. Her hand moved across the controls, and it flew off. “On Mary River, you evaded our people and disappeared. We didn’t realize you’d gotten out of town until our people saw you return with Sergeant Myell. There was a great discussion then about whether or not to remove you from the equation, but Commander Osherman believed it would be best to keep you. He’s always been your advocate.”

  “Have you?” Jodenny asked.

  Osherman’s gaze was level. “You doubt it?”

  She couldn’t say, one way or the other. The only comfort was that if Ishikawa was telling the truth, then they probably didn’t know about her and Myell’s trip through the Mother Sphere. “Did you make that complaint about fraternization?”

  “There was no complaint,” Osherman admitted. “Lieutenant Commander Wildstein was asked to convince you to transfer Sergeant Myell. We’ve been worried about his curiosity as much as yours.”

  But Wildstein had done a piss-poor job, and that had probably been deliberate. Certainly she could have come down harder on Jodenny, made the fraternization issue a bigger leverage point.

  “I didn’t ask for Underway Stores. Why wasn’t Quenger put in charge?” Jodenny asked. “You might have had more opportunity to find out how their operations work.”

  “Captain Umbundo had his own ideas,” Osherman said tightly. Jodenny tried to put herself in the same position as the captain—knowing there were thieves on his ship, but unable to properly chase them down because of an outside investigation. Realizing how poor leadership was contributing to the problem, but prevented from shifting or punishing personnel while the investigation continued. Jodenny had simply been a wild card thrown into the mix.

  Myell spoke up from where he’d been watching the conversation. “What about the dingoes? If some of them are operating independent of Core, what’s to prevent another accident?”

  Ishikawa responded. “We don’t know how many have been compromised, Sergeant, and we can’t do a full inspection without scaring the people we’re trying to catch.”

  “I’m not sending any of my people into the slots knowing they could be killed,” Jodenny said.

  Osherman said, “Once we get to Warramala this will all be over. We’ve asked the captain not to conduct any more drills. He’s not happy, but he understands.”

  Myell didn’t look happy, either. “What if there’s a real emergency?”

  “Then this ship will have bigger problems than a bunch of rogue dingoes,” Osherman said. “Lieutenant Scott, it’s vitally important that you and Sergeant Myell understand how delicate this operation is. You can’t discuss it once we leave this room. I’ll tell you right now that there are several places being monitored—”

  “You’re listening in on my division?” Jodenny asked.

  “—as are several communications channels, gibs, imail, and personal imail.”

  “Personal accounts are protected,” Myell said.

  “Not if there’s a court order.” Osherman cocked his head in consideration. “Is there something you’d like to tell us, Sergeant?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jodenny said. “He nearly died.”

  “We don’t know everyone who’s involved, and so everyone’s a suspect. Is everyone here clear? No talking about this. No confiding in anyone. Word gets out, more lives might be lost.”

  “More?” Jodenny asked
sharply. “Who?”

  “I can’t say.” Osherman turned to Myell. “Do we have your cooperation, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  “Lieutenant Scott?”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. Beyond the window, another DNGO descended from the shaft and blinked at them, its hull shiny and reflective.

  “You don’t have to.” Osherman stood abruptly. “As far as anyone knows—and if anyone should ask you—Athena glitched doing exactly what Core was telling her to do. Agent Ishikawa will take care of the log entries. Please leave your gibs with me, and I’ll make sure they’re returned to you in the morning.”

  Jodenny and Myell caught an empty tram back to Mainship and sat in seats across from each other. Myell kept his gaze on the advertisements blinking overhead. Jodenny wondered who else in the Supply Department could possibly be working undercover. Surely not just Ishikawa, an able technician without access to the wardroom or chiefs’ mess. Maybe an officer like Weaver, who always had a sharp question or two. Ysten? Surely not. The truth was she didn’t know who she could really trust. Meanwhile she had to sit back, keep silent, and watch the entire Supply Department be compromised.

  Forgetting that Osherman had confiscated her gib, she reached for it and grasped only empty air. Myell eyed her speculatively. “You did good work today,” she told him.

  He didn’t need her to tell him that. He was self-sufficient beyond her measure, able to make his own decisions without outside influence. Maybe he had learned that in the hold, but Jodenny suspected the skill could be traced back to a failed farm on Baiame.

  “Didn’t get us anywhere, did it?” Myell asked, but she had no answer.

  * * *

  The next morning Jodenny sent Faddig to conduct quarters and holed up in her office, unable to face the fact that Osherman’s investigation and the unmasked smuggling ring were going to stain Underway Stores, the Supply Department, and the Aral Sea as a whole. The scandal would blight Team Space itself. Any hopes she’d had for a good tour were gone. Commodore Campos had been right. Someone else should have taken the job.