The Stars Blue Yonder (16 page)

“I didn't see any kids. Just you, Commander Scott, and the other man. Do you know who I am?”

He blinked and focused on her for a moment. His voice didn't shift out of its flatness. “The nurse told me. Adryn Myell Ling. Last time I saw you, you were, what? Ten years old? You're all grown up.”

Her turn to nod.

“I'm a pilot,” she added, as if he couldn't decipher the insignia on her uniform. She mentally kicked herself. “You've been missing for fifteen years.”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. There were goosebumps on his forearms. Adryn opened the medical cabinet and searched through the shelves until she found a thin white blanket. She shook it out and put it around his shoulders. He held on to the edges with minimal effort.

“What ship is this?” he asked, and she had the distinct impression that his curiosity was a desperate last resort against something else.

“The
Confident
. It's ACF—Americanadian Forces. They don't dress for dinner and they don't have beer. Kind of uncivilized, if you ask me.”

He nodded. Not really listening to her. Or listening harder to something she couldn't hear, something beyond their little room.

Adryn sat on the edge of the exam table and swung her feet against the base of it. “I guess there are more exciting ways to interrupt a mid-watch but you've won the award for best so far. Dad's going to burst when he hears you're back. And Mom. And Jake, and TJ. Teren, Junior. He was born after you disappeared.”

The hatch clicked open and Myell stood up so quickly the blanket fluttered to the floor. Dr. Cho entered, his large face shadowed with fatigue. Laura was with him, and she gave Adryn a very brief nod.

“Chief Myell,” Cho said. “I'm taking care of your wife. She's doing fine now, as is the baby.”

Myell gazed at him soundlessly, then started to topple over.

Adryn and Cho caught him before he could hit the floor. He hadn't totally fainted away, but they manhandled him to the table and Laura got smelling salts out of the cabinet. One whiff made him shake his head and gasp sharply. Cho elevated the foot of the bed and took his pulse.

“There, now. Better?”

Myell asked, “Not damaged? Really?”

“She was in premature labor, but her water didn't break,” Laura said. “We convinced her uterus to hang in there for a while longer. The baby has a good chance of survival if delivered right now, but the closer we get to full term the better off. All the fetal scans came back normal.”

Myell covered his eyes with his left hand. Adryn patted his arm but didn't know what to say. Laura, ever practical, retrieved the fallen blanket and eased it over him. Cho scanned the vital-statistics display over the bed and asked, “How are you feeling? Light-headed, nauseous?”

“I'm fine. I want to see them.”

“In a moment,” Cho said. “Let's see your blood pressure come up.”

“If you don't take me to my wife, I guarantee my blood pressure will come up, Doc.”

Cho was not intimidated. But he helped Myell sit up, and a few moments later walked him down the hall with a security tech as escort. Adryn didn't go with them. She felt suddenly drained, and in need of a lie-down and blanket herself.

Laura cupped the back of her neck. “How are you doing?”

“I'm fine,” Adryn said. “Just a little, you know, surprised. By the returning-from-the dead thing, or wherever they've been for fifteen years and not aged a single day.”

“Your dad will be happy,” Laura said.

Adryn supposed he would. She wondered how long it would take for the news to reach him in prison. She certainly wasn't going to be the one to break five years of silence and tell him.

“Let's go,” Laura said. “I'll buy you some coffee and you can tell me all about your long-lost uncle.”

Adryn steered her into the doctors' lounge and toward the dirty aquarium. “First we've got some goldfish to rescue.”

Jodenny wasn't sure what drugs they'd given her but she felt perfectly relaxed and warm, and maybe a little hungry. She was in a private infirmary room, with pleasantly beeping machines monitoring her and Junior. The lights were down and a thoughtful nurse had put a pillow under her knees to ease the strain on her back. She was content to gaze
at the swirly pattern on the overhead, circles and curls ever so entrancing, and when someone came through the door she dragged her attention away with great reluctance.

One look at Myell's face brought back all her fear and misery.

“Kay,” he said, and then they were clutching each other so hard Jodenny thought she heard something crack in her shoulder. She didn't care. Myell was cold and trembling. He smelled like sweat. His voice stuttered against her neck with words she didn't understand. She rubbed his back and wet his shirt with her tears, and finally he eased her back against her pillows.

“You're okay?” he asked, brushing her hair back from her face. “Not in pain?”

“Not in pain, not in labor,” she replied. “But that Roon said—”

“It was wrong,” Myell said firmly. “Thank god.”

Jodenny touched his forehead and kissed him. She never wanted to let him out of her sight again. She wished she were a witch, able to wield magic and reshape the universe.

Maybe if she kissed him hard enough she could bind him to her forever.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked, sitting as close to her as possible on the narrow mattress.

She hooked one of her bare legs over his, and tugged the blanket so that it was covering both of them. His arm went around her shoulders and she leaned into him with all her weight.

“ACF ship, fifteen years forward,” he sounded very tired. “I don't know why. Every other time I've jumped, it's been to somewhere where you are. Every single time. But now you're with me and I don't know what happened to Kyle and Twig. If they're alive or if the eddy reset and wiped them away—”

She put her hand on his chest, feeling for the rhythm of his heartbeat. “Sssh. It's going to work out. We'll find them somehow. Have you seen Sam?”

“No. But I saw my niece,” he said. “Adryn. You met her on Mary River, remember? She's a sub-lieutenant now.”

Jodenny cast her memory back to a little girl playing baseball on Colby Myell's farm. “She became American?”

“No, Team Space. She's on foreign exchange, I think. She might have tried to tell me. I wasn't listening very well. Her last name is Ling now.”

“That's the doctor's name, too,” Jodenny said.

He didn't answer. His breathing was regular but a little raspy. She hoped he wasn't coming down with a cold. Between dousings in the river and under the waterfall, maybe he'd swallowed too much water or had it go down the wrong way. She'd have to keep an eye on him. Junior kicked, as if echoing the sentiment, and Jodenny put both hands on her belly. It was as impossible as a dream, but here she was with her husband and unborn daughter, something she couldn't have imagined a day or two ago.

And Sam Osherman was here, too. She wasn't sure how that fit into the dream. They were far from Providence, not only in space but also in time. Kyle and Twig were stranded somewhere in space-time, or had ceased to exist altogether. And unless the parameters had changed, in less than a day the ouroboros would come to take Myell away again.

She supposed it was selfish, but she suddenly wished for another dose of the happy drugs.

Another hour passed. Jodenny dozed off and on. Myell snored against her shoulder. Dr. Ling and Dr. Cho returned together, checked the monitors, and then to Jodenny's relief and surprise said she could be discharged.

“No bed rest?” she asked. She had despaired at the prospect of spending the foreseeable future—which was not very foreseeable, granted—flat on her back with nothing to do but watch Myell save the universe, or do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.

“Bed rest is good, but you're not limited to it,” Cho said. He adhered a thin sensor sheet to her belly to monitor Junior and gave her a prescription patch to deliver anticontraction medicine.

“And we'd like to download a Digital Duola into your head,” Ling said.

Jodenny asked, “A what?”

Ling said, “It's an information database every pregnant woman gets these days. Full access to prenatal health guidelines, anatomical presentations, answers to common pregnancy questions. There are emergency instructions if you end up having to deliver the child yourself, and postdelivery information too. Usually both parents-to-be get it.”

Jodenny looked to Myell, who was sitting on the bed looking rumpled and bleary-eyed. He asked, “You put it in our heads?”

“Not physically insert it, no,” Ling said. “It's delivered via a retinal scan. All you have to do is look into this reader here. It only takes a few seconds.”

“Technology these days.” Myell slid off the bed, put his eyes to the small scanner, and shuffled his feet anxiously. “Is it going to hurt?”

Ling turned the reader off. “It's already done. The information will unpack itself over the next several hours.”

Jodenny went next. She peered at a small blue light, blinked, and the procedure was over.

“If you're both not walking databases of pregnancy information by this time tomorrow, let me know and we'll try again,” Ling said.

Myell and Jodenny were left in Adryn's care, with two guards posted in the corridor outside. Adryn had somehow rounded up uniforms for them to wear. Unsurprisingly, there was a shortage of Team Space maternity clothes, so Jodenny made do with a large green T-shirt and pair of trousers designed for an enormously large man. Myell was easier to outfit, although his shirt was too tight. Jodenny didn't tell him, but she liked him in tight shirts.

“I can ask the
Melbourne
to send over something better,” Adryn said, eyeing the results once Jodenny was dressed. “A real uniform for you, Commander.”

Jodenny pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail. “That's Aunt Jodenny to you.”

Pink bloomed in Adryn's cheeks. “I didn't think you'd remember me.”

“It wasn't that long ago as far as I'm concerned. You were, what? Ten years old? And you wanted to be a veterinarian. You're a long way from that.”

“I like pets too much to kill the ones that need putting down,” Adryn said. “I can't believe you just jumped through time. Where did you come from?”

Myell cleared his throat in a not-so-subtle way.

Jodenny said, “It's a long story.”

“You're not going to tell me, is that it?” Adryn asked.

“Maybe later,” Myell said. “Where to now?”

She didn't look happy with either of them, but answered nonetheless. “There's a team on its way from the
Melbourne
. That's the Team Space flagship. I'm supposed take you down to Security for debriefing.”

“Are they going to turn us over to the
Melbourne
?” Myell asked.

“I don't know,” Adryn admitted. “The commanding officer here, Captain McNaughton, isn't so keen in giving you up until everyone's sure how you got onboard. Team Space can't order him to give you up. No jurisdiction. And relations between Earth and Fortune are dicey enough as it is, you know? Friends, but not friends.”

Jodenny would rather they were on a Team Space ship, surrounded by their own military. She said, “Before we go anywhere, I want to see Sam.”

Adryn's face crinkled in confusion. “Who?”

“Commander Osherman. The man who was with us,” Myell said.

“I'll have to check,” Adryn said.

She stepped out to consult with someone. Jodenny grabbed Myell's hand and squeezed it tight. “What if they separate us? You can't leave without me.”

He stroked her back. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“That's what you said last time.”

The hatch slid open a moment later. “This way,” Adryn said. “Just a quick visit.”

Jodenny and Myell followed Adryn down the passage to Osherman's room with two guards trailing behind. Dr. Cho was inside, making notes on a digital clipboard. Osherman was sound asleep, or maybe drugged. His wrists were in restraints and he looked very pale.

Jodenny's voice was faint in her own ears as she asked, “How's he doing?”

“Chief Myell said he was held captive by the Roon,” Cho said.

She nodded. Myell, beside her, touched her elbow in support.

“He shows evidence of physical mistreatment—old ligament damage, skull trauma, formerly fractured bones. There's no sign of damage to his throat or vocal cords, but there's some unusual activity in the region of his brain that controls speech. We're running more tests. We'd like to get him talking. At least interacting with our mental health team.”

Adryn said, “And if he was a prisoner of the Roon, we need to know what he knows.”

“Why?” Myell asked.

Cho blinked at them. To Adryn he said, “They don't know?” Jodenny felt goosebumps move down her spine. “Know what?”

“We're at war,” Adryn said. “With the Roon. And in two days we're going to blast their armada out of the sky.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Ma'am,” a chief said to Adryn when they stepped back into the passage. Myell hadn't seen him before. He was a tall, formidable Hispanic-looking man with olive skin and very muscled arms. “I'm Chief Ovadia. I'm here to bring them to Security.”

Adryn said, “I'll come with you.”

“That's not necessary,” Ovadia said tightly.

“I insist, Chief.”

Between Adryn, Ovadia, Jodenny, Myell, and two guards, the lift was crowded. Myell barely noticed. His palms itched with anxiety as they descended toward the Security Office.

War.

War with the Roon.

He had never been in a future eddy with the Roon in it. All his trips
had been to various stages of Jodenny's life in the Seven Sisters or in Providence, which was cut off from the rest of mankind. The residents there wouldn't know if galactic war was being waged elsewhere in the galaxy. Their isolation had been their salvation.