The Stars Blue Yonder (30 page)

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, maybe. 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 growled 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?”

“I know.”

When they were done they made their way back through the warrens. Myell kept close watch on the Monitors. They didn't move or make noise in any way. Their only signs of life were the silver beams of light that swept out of their torsos and through the caverns every few minutes, scanning the environment. They didn't even respond when some of the furry aliens deposited red rocks in piles at their feet.

“We think the Albasta worship them as gods,” Cappaletto said. “They say prayers to them. Leave them presents. Sometimes leave a dead infant, though I don't know if they were dead at birth or sacrificed to the cause.”

Myell swallowed hard. “Do the Monitors ever respond?”

“Not to human prayers. But you can go talk to them all you like, if it'll make you feel better. You're sure you don't have any people at all here?”

“No.”

“And you're going to remain remarkably closemouthed about how and when you got here?”

Myell said, “If there's time, I'll tell you later.”

Sleeping arrangements in the workers' chambers were matters of species, military status, and rank. Cappaletto and Adryn bunked down in an area reserved for Team Space and ACF officers and senior enlisted. Adryn didn't look pleased when Cappaletto tried to give the empty cot beside him to Myell.

“That's Commander Endicott's,” she said.

Cappaletto gave her a patient look.

“He's coming back,” she added, biting her lower lip. “It's only been a few days.”

“Didn't make the lift,” Cappaletto told Myell. “You've always got to make the lift. Those farols come in when the outside world gets dark. Nasty things, like dogs but three times bigger. They won't leave much behind, if anything. Sometimes a bone or two. Sometimes teeth.”

“The Roon don't care about losing people down there?” Myell asked.

“The Roon don't care if we get eaten or eat each other,” Cappaletto said. “They don't even know us by name. There's no roll call, no tracking, no rosters. Only the Monitors to make sure we don't try to hijack the lifts or damage their equipment, and to send in other machines that haul out the dead. We work as much as we want to earn our rubies and food; the only rule is survival.”

Myell was flummoxed. “There are no records of who's down here?”

Cappaletto shook his head. “But we try to keep their names in our heads. On pieces of paper, when there is any. If we don't remember, who will? People who die, people who disappear, people who get taken . . .”

He trailed off.

Myell said, “Taken.”

Cappaletto's expression darkened. “The Roon come down every now and then and haul people away. Not often. Mostly we never see them again. The ones who come back—well, they don't live very long, usually. Or they can't talk. But those who do, they tell stories about a woman. Some horrible woman. Used to be human. Now—not so much.”