The Stars Down Under (11 page)

Myell found his voice. “Don't. I'll come back. I'll come home. Remember that—”

A flash of hard yellow light took him, Gayle, Nam, and four Marines away before he could complete the sentence.

Jodenny sank to her knees on the ground, unable to stand on her own.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Stale air. Flashes of artificial light, painful against his eyes. But not as painful as the dry heaves tearing from his stomach up his throat. In retrospect, he was glad he hadn't eaten lunch.

Urgent voices swirled over his head.

“GNATs deployed, Commander. Outside atmosphere cold but clear—”

“No sign of Commander Gold's team, no radio signals—”

“Time elapsed: forty seconds. Forty-five…”

“We have to stop here,” a man said. “He needs to stabilize.”

Gayle, sounding irritated, asked, “Why is he sick so soon, Ensign Collins?”

Collins answered, “This wasn't unexpected, after his reaction on Warramala. Commander Nam?”

Myell curled into himself further, aware of dirt and dust, and someone's hand on his shoulder. Bile burned at the back of his throat.

“You're sure he can't make the next one?” Gayle asked.

“Not without the risk of cardiac arrest, ma'am.”

Nam said, “Haul out, then. We're stopping.”

Gayle cursed. Strong hands reached under Myell's shoulders and more hands gripped his ankles. When they tried to lift him, he fought against the movement.

“It's okay, Chief,” Collins said.

“He's fighting,” said the woman at Myell's ankles.

Nam asked, “Can you sedate him?”

Myell gave up struggling. He was lifted and carried out of the ouroboros. They put him on the ground. Collins pressed some cold gel on the inside of Myell's right wrist, and some of the nausea began to pass.

Other voices in the dark were talking about GNATs, weather reports, recon information. Myell caught only part of the conversation. Eventually Collins and the woman carried Myell out of the Mother Sphere. The new planet's sky was black and clear, without any of Kimberley's city glow. A stream gurgled nearby and stars glittered above the branches of pine trees. The air smelled faintly salty.

“Make camp here,” Nam ordered. “I want him ready to travel by morning.”

Myell was eased onto a blanket. Several battery lanterns powered up, the blue-white light a comfort.

“Tents up, sir?” someone asked.

“Is the weather going to hold, Chief Saadi?” Nam asked.

“Too soon to tell, sir.”

Nam said, “No tents. Not yet.”

Collins, a dark-haired man with freckles across his nose, urged Myell to drink from a water bottle. Camouflage insignia on his collar indicated that he was an ensign, though he was clearly older than Myell. Former enlisted, perhaps. Or maybe a late addition to the Medical Corps.

“You a doctor?” Myell croaked out.

“Medic,” Collins said easily. “Feeling better? Your temperature's coming back up. I've given you a dose of Blue-Q.”

Gayle, standing nearby, said, “So he's better. We can keep going?”

“Not until morning,” Nam insisted.

Myell huddled in the bedroll as Nam set up a watch schedule. Sergeant Breme, the only female soldier, got the first watch. Sergeant Lavasseur, a lanky blond with a scar on his chin, would stand second watch. Chief Saadi, with his shaved head and intense stare, would round up with the third. Saadi controlled the remote-controlled GNATs and comm equipment, which he compulsively checked on the two gibs he carried with him.

“Fly, babies, fly,” he was saying.

“Lavasseur, you're in charge of dinner,” Nam ordered.

“Now, Commander?” Lavasseur asked. He had a strange accent. American, maybe. Must have come from Earth. “It's only fifteen hundred hours.”

Breme jerked her head toward the dark sky. “Not here, it's not. Don't want jet lag, do we?”

Saadi consulted his gibs. “I've got multiple readings coming in. We've got a fix on several stars in the Rosette Nebula. The GNATs are still calculating the differentials—okay, here we go. This planet's a little bit smaller than Fortune, a little faster rotation, weather should hold, we should see sunup in about—oh, roughly, seven and a half hours. So it is
well
within time for dinner.”

Lavasseur said, “Trip is going to mess up my circadian rhythm.”

“Is that a complaint?” Nam asked.

“No, sir,” Lavasseur said easily. “Just an observation.”

Myell pulled the blanket tighter. He wished Jodenny were there. The look on her face as the soldiers had dragged him to the ouroboros was everything he had never wanted to see on her—anguish, helplessness, fury. She hadn't known Gayle's plan. Of course she hadn't known. He was the one who'd fallen for lies and tears. But if he hadn't volunteered to walk into the Mother Sphere, Nam or the others might have dragged him in anyway. The idea of choice had always been an illusion.

He slept, somehow, though his chest ached from missing Jodenny. When he opened his eyes again, a small fire was burning in a circle of rocks not too far away. Lavasseur had the watch. Gayle was sitting against a log and typing in her gib, her face bathed with its blue glow.

“Better or worse?” Collins asked, from somewhere behind Myell.

Myell rolled over. “Better,” he admitted. “Thirsty.”

Collins gave him a water bottle and rubbed more of the cool gel against his wrist.

“What did you call that stuff?” Myell asked.

“Blue-Q. Helps a lot. We've been receiving treatment for a few days now, but you haven't—”

“Ensign,” Gayle said, a warning in her voice.

Myell pulled the blanket closer. The temperature had dropped while he was sleeping. “You knew the network would work for me.”

“I had hopes,” Gayle replied, without looking up. “It was hard enough to get you to consider cooperation in the first place. If I told you I wanted you to come along, you'd have run off screaming.”

Myell said, “So you decided to drag me along anyway.”

“In the service of Team Space.”

“Team Space doesn't need this service.”

Lavasseur, warming his hands by the fire, watched the two of them.

“We disagree.” Gayle shut down her gib. “I don't expect you to be happy about it, but there's no turning back. The token carries us always forward, never backward. Your cooperation will ensure that we return as quickly as possible.”

“My cooperation,” he repeated.

“Passive cooperation,” Gayle added. “Nothing is expected of you, Chief, other than you don't impede our progress. Think of it as a vacation.”

Myell resisted the urge to vomit.

Collins said, “I suggest you get some sleep, Chief.”

“I have to use the latrine,” Myell said.

Commander Nam sat up in his bedroll. “I'll take him.”

The last thing Myell wanted was help to the latrine from a commander. But he let Nam walk him down a narrow path toward the trees. Nam's flashlight led the way. Crickets and the occasional scuffling sounds of night animals reminded Myell of home, and home made him think of Jodenny. He finished as quickly as possible.

“Let's take a little detour,” Nam suggested.

Nam steered him down a small hill to where the grass gave way to sand and the stream joined the sea. The roiling black mass of water was the source of the salty smell that Myell had been denying for hours. He shrank back, because if there was anything worse than the ocean it was the ocean
at night,
infinite dark roiling terrifying
ocean at night.

Nam scowled at him. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” Myell forced out, the word half strangled.

Nam thumbed his radio as if to call Ensign Collins but then stopped. He took Myell back up to a copse of evergreens. The view of the ocean was blocked, and they could see Lavasseur's distant figure sitting by the fire. Myell sank to the grass with his head between his knees.

“That wasn't in your file,” Nam said. “Thalassaphobia.”

Several moments passed before Myell could say, “Doesn't come up much when you're sailing the Alcheringa. Most people don't know there's a word for it.”

Nam's gaze was locked on the dark woods. “My mother had it. Couldn't go near the ocean without throwing up.”

Myell sucked in another deep breath. His head no longer felt full of salt and rotting fish smells.

“Dr. Gayle doesn't think you're going to cooperate.” Nam's dark face was impassive. “I told her that of course you will. Whether you want to be here or not is irrelevant. This is a duty assignment like any other.”

“I was brought on this mission against my will, at gunpoint,” Myell said. “I wasn't given the chance to disobey. I would have taken the brig over this.”

Nam made a snorting noise. “If you say so. Like it or not, you're part of a security project that will have ramifications for centuries to come. You feel some ownership and possessiveness, maybe a sense of entitlement. All because you tripped through the Warramala Spheres and had a hallucination about a talking snake.”

Myell kept his gaze stubbornly on his knees.

“Let me tell you this, Chief. I don't know why the network stopped working. I don't know why it loves you enough to start sending tokens again. We've got nine people out here to rescue, nine people who are a hell of a lot braver than you or me. So you follow the orders you're given, you make sure those tokens keep coming, and we save that missing team. When we get home you go back to playing Izim and moaning about how unfair life is. Understand? Otherwise I'll have you sedated, and we'll carry your body through the stations until we get back to Fortune.”

“Yes, sir,” Myell said, his fists clenched. “I understand completely.”

*   *   *

Sunrise arrived on the schedule Saadi had predicted. The landscape was pretty enough, a virgin pine forest sloping east toward the sea. The Mother Sphere stood alone, no other Spheres flanking her. Saadi and Gayle took vids, drew maps, and collected up the miniature GNAT satellites while Breme and Collins broke camp.

Lavasseur handed Myell a set of green fatigues in his size, along with boots, a flashlight, and a water bottle. Myell was glad enough to get out of his Supply School clothes that he didn't dwell on the fact that they'd stocked up on equipment for him. He kept the dilly bag around his waist, glad for the small, comforting weight.

“Why aren't we wearing protection?” he asked. “Doesn't anyone worry that the next station might not have oxygen, or be poisonous in other ways?”

“The rings don't transport organic material that's sealed up,” Collins said. “Inorganic material, fine. Crates and clothes and equipment all go through. Dead things? Sure. They sent some dead mice in sealed gear through Swedenville. But never living humans in protective suits. And never any DNGOs or robots.”

“There's got to be a pretty sensitive scanning system at work,” Myell said. “To differentiate all that.”

Nam said, “So it would seem.”

Gayle was bright eyed and eager to start off, but she wanted to see if the token in the Mother Sphere would respond to anyone but Myell. She tried it, then Nam, then the Marines, but the ouroboros didn't sing out an approach until Myell stepped inside.

“Why only you?” Gayle asked Myell.

“I don't know,” Myell said.

“Would you tell us if you did, Chief?” Lavasseur asked.

Breme poked him. “Shut up.”

Nam, who'd been watching Myell, turned away.

The ouroboros was just large enough for all of them and the sled. Myell glanced at the glyphs carved inside the ring. Thirty-something more stops to go. He tensed and held his breath, which was silly. Transport through the ring never hurt. The aftereffects were the miserable part.

A hand closed on his arm. Collins said, “You should be fine, Chief.”

Yellow flashed at them from all sides. The next station on the Bainbridge loop was as hollow and musty as any other he'd visited. To Myell's surprise, he didn't feel much worse for the wear. Saadi deployed GNATs past the Sphere's archway and took readings while Lavasseur vidded the interior. Breme kept a steady countdown for the token departure. They had assumed that the same amount of time would pass at each station: ninety seconds, give or take a split second.

“No radio signals,” Saadi reported, watching his gibs. “Exterior looks like a swamp and it's raining out. No sign of Commander Gold's team. There are two Father Spheres outside.”

Gayle, who was swinging her own gib back and forth, nodded briskly. She stepped out of the ouroboros's confines. “We need to check them out. Map their tokens.”

“No,” Nam said. “We keep going.”

“Commander, we're tasked with learning as much about the network as we can,” Gayle said.

Nam's gaze was unflinching. “We're not stopping at every station on this loop so you can gather data, Dr. Gayle. If the situation warrants, I'll be happy to let you do your digging.”

Breme said, “One minute until we depart, sir.”

Gayle showed no sign of stepping back into the ouroboros. “Team Space gave us a clear mandate, Commander. Search and recovery of my husband's team, but intelligence gathering as well.”

“Commander Gold's team has been trapped out here for months,” Nam said. “They're our first priority. If you choose to stop I'm not going to argue with you, Doctor. But this team and I are going forward. Hopefully you'll be here the next time a rescue team comes through. If one ever does.”

Collins was studiously ignoring the argument. Myell had the distinct impression that it wasn't the first time Gayle and Nam had clashed, nor would it be the last.

“Thirty seconds, sir,” Breme reported.

Gayle's glare didn't abate, but she stepped back into the ring.