The Stars Down Under (14 page)

Nam didn't sit up. Drool had accumulated at the corner of his mouth. He swiped his lips clumsily with the back of his hand. “They follow us?”

Myell sat back on his heels. “You call them Yips. Why?”

Nam squinted at him. “Where's Dr. Gayle?”

“Did you know there were aliens in the network?”

Nam squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Gayle. Go with her. Who knows what's out there.”

Myell wanted to argue more, to demand answers, but he hauled himself to his feet and passed under the archway. The marshland surrounding them was cracked and baked from drought. Dried-up creeks stretched out in all directions, punctuated by eucalyptus and gum trees. Insects buzzed in the scrub bushes that surrounded the Mother Sphere and the two Children that flanked it.

Gayle was stomping around, glaring at everything as if personally affronted.

“No equipment whatsoever,” she said. “My gib, the Blue-Q, all of our resources—back at the base camp.”

“Who are the Yips? And why didn't you mention the fact that we might run into them?”

Gayle gave him a narrow look.

“Focus, Chief. We have more important things to worry about right now.”

Myell's fists ached. He unclenched them and rubbed them against his thighs. It was ridiculous to keep his winter coat on and he wrenched it off, and dropped his thermal sweater next to it.

“Don't look so aggrieved,” Gayle said. “You knew there was intelligent life out in the network. You spoke to a snake, didn't you? So if there happen to be some Bunyips running around, that's no surprise.”

“Bunyips?”
Myell asked. “What kind of name is that?”

Nam appeared in the Mother Sphere archway, clutching it for support. His pallor was awful. “Old urban legend.”

“Not an urban legend. A folk myth,” Gayle said. “A creature in the Australian bush rumored to have feathers and scales and a terrible screech.”

Nam squeezed his eyes shut against the brilliant sunlight. “Not a myth any longer.”

Myell thought of the alien child proffering dead flesh. “What about everyone else? Do they know about them?”

Gayle stopped pacing and pulled off her coat. Her T-shirt was already damp with sweat. “Will you stop considering yourself a victim of some conspiracy? You didn't need to know.”

“Is the rest of the team safe?” Myell asked icily.

Nam started sliding down the archway as his knees buckled. “They can protect themselves.”

Myell went to Nam's side. He lowered the commander and helped him out of his winter gear. He gave him water from his own bottle. Gayle went off to investigate the interiors of the two other Spheres. Flies buzzed in the heated air, and Myell swatted to keep them away.

“We have to go back,” Nam said, eyes still closed.

Myell said, “There were forty or fifty glyphs on that token. We'd never survive a loop all the way around.”

“Can you get us back?”

“How?” Myell asked.

“Talk to your snake friend.”

“It's not my friend.” Myell hadn't seen the Rainbow Serpent or accompanying shaman since he and Jodenny returned to Warramala. “I wouldn't even know how.”

“You can't improvise?”

Myell scowled. He was keeping an eye on the interior of the Mother, waiting to see if the Bunyips—really, what a name—followed.

“Why were they there?” he asked, thinking aloud. “Camped out. For a while, judging by the snow on the dead one. Two adults and a kid.”

“Stuck,” Nam said. “Trapped when the system shut down. You're still the only one who can call a token. Which means the rest of our team is trapped back in the snow until we get back to them.”

Forty or more stations to get back, and no Blue-Q to ease the way. Myell swatted at more flies. The horizon to the west was hazy and gray, and a shift of the wind brought him a hot, bitter smell.

“That's smoke,” he said, standing.

“Muck fire, maybe,” Nam said.

“No GNATs to tell for sure.”

“Not much of anything,” Nam said. “Inventory?”

“Winter gear, some emergency hand warmers, three flashlights, three bottles of water, three radios, and whatever's stashed in your and Dr. Gayle's pockets. Your mazer fell before we were transported.”

Nam opened his eyes reluctantly. “Unarmed, no equipment, no food. Not exactly the rescue mission I'd planned.”

The flies were feasting on Myell's neck. He swatted and squashed some, and gazed out at the dried-up marshland.

Nam said, “Evidence of intelligent aliens was found at several different stations on loops out of Kiwi and Warramala. Fire pits, crude shelters, animal carcasses that showed evidence of tools. There were three confirmed sightings of creatures that walked upright and wore feather cloaks. One exchange of hostile fire. Two of our own were killed. Then a team working on Kookaburra captured a token and tried to ship it back to the research facilities on Fortune. They thought the risk was small, and it was important to get a handle on this technology if we were going to be facing hostile species. You know this part.”

“The
Yangtze
blew up when it tried to enter the Alcheringa,” Myell said.

“The disassembled token activated. Someone—something—was trying to come through.”

“Jodenny didn't see anything,” Myell said, but even as the words came out of his mouth he knew they were wrong. Jodenny's memories had been tampered with. Blocked. Sam Osherman had said that Team Space had done it, though others had denied it.

“She did see something, didn't she?” Myell asked. “She saw one of them. That's what you're telling me.”

“Team Space thought it prudent to block that information.”

“Tamper with her brain, you mean. Osherman saw it too, didn't he? Son of a bitch.”

Nam put a hand out to the Sphere and pushed himself upright. “Saadi, Collins, the others—they didn't know much more than to be prepared. And so we all are.”

Gayle returned with a disgruntled air. “I can't trigger any tokens. You'll have to try, Chief. Unless it interferes with your personal idea of what this mission is about.”

Nam said, “Dr. Gayle. There's only the three of us, and he's the only one who can make the Spheres work. I think a little civility is in order.”

Gayle's mouth formed an unhappy little line. “Fine. Chief Myell, will you
please
try to save our asses by triggering a token?”

Nam rested outside while Myell went to try. The first Child responded almost as soon as he entered it. The token came bearing sixty glyphs. Gayle recognized number thirty as a remote spot on Kiwi.

“Too far,” she said. “Even if we got there safely, it's a thousand-kilometer hike to civilization. Then it would take us months to ride the Alcheringa back to Fortune.”

They checked on Nam, whose eyes were closed again. His skin was clammy under Myell's touch and his pulse a little fast. In the second Child, the arriving token had only two glyphs on it.

Gayle said, “An express. I don't recognize the destination. Could lead to more Spheres, could be a dead end.”

The air outside was growing thicker with the smoke from the muck fire. The sky had darkened and grit made Myell's eyes sting. Gayle gazed at the Mother Sphere and said, “We'll have to keep going on the loop. Hope that the next station holds more promise.”

“Not today, we won't.” Myell bent low to Nam. “The commander's too sick. We don't have any Blue-Q or medical equipment to revive him if he gets worse.”

Nam proved he wasn't asleep by saying, “Don't be ridiculous. Fire's coming.” The words were slurred, almost indistinct.

Alarmed, Gayle said, “I agree. We can't stay here.”

“We'll retreat until the fire's out, then come back,” Myell said. “These Spheres aren't going to burn down. I'm sure they've been through worse over the centuries.”

Nam swatted at Myell's arm. “Go ahead without me.”

“That's not even an option, sir. You're going to have to walk.”

Nam cursed, Gayle argued, but Myell told them that they were wasting time. The fire was growing closer. Unless they planned to be incinerated in its path, they had to move
now.
Finally Nam let Myell help him up to his unsteady feet and Gayle shut up and they started east, skirting the marsh, fire and smoke chasing them.

The air was baking hot, Nam's weight heavy against Myell as he tried to maneuver both of them across the unsteady ground. Gayle led the way in grim silence, keeping an eye out for snakes or crocodiles or other predators. Home on Baiame had been less desolate, but the wide open space with no sign of civilization was familiar to Myell, the sense that the world was endless and forever, horizon to horizon, with nothing between a man and the madness of the wide open. Black vultures flew east over their heads, eager to escape the inferno, but one bird took an interest in the human party and circled downward with increasingly loud cries.

Gayle said, “Kill it, won't you?”

Myell asked, “With what?”

Nam, his breathing labored, only grunted.

The fires pushed them eastward. The hillside became more dense with gum and dried-out creek beds and scrub bushes. Myell was soaked with sweat, aching from exertion, but strangely enough his skin bothered him the most. He itched all over. Even his tongue itched, which was odd. Gayle was scratching her arms so often that welts had started to appear.

Myell asked, “That Blue-Q. It's addictive, isn't it? We're in withdrawal.”

“It's a small price to pay,” Gayle said.

“How bad will it get?”

Gayle shrugged.

They were hiking above the valley now. The landscape fell away, rugged and harsh but beautiful in its own strange way. Jodenny would like it for a day hike, as long as the day ended with a reliable flit to carry them back to modern civilization. Thinking of Jodenny comforted him a little, but he was already starting to fear he might never see her again. It would just be him and Gayle and Nam lost on this outback planet, doomed to wander forever and never find their way home.

“Done,” Nam finally said. He sagged so abruptly that Myell nearly lost hold of him. They were several kilometers east of the fires, which were now smudges on the horizon. It wasn't an ideal spot to make camp, not with dry, loose ground sloping toward gullies, but Nam had reached the end of his endurance and even Gayle looked exhausted.

They drank from their water supplies. “Better in you than in a bottle,” Nam muttered, but Myell rationed himself strictly. Gayle curled up on the ground, her head pillowed on her arms. She didn't volunteer to go off and hunt down dinner for everyone. Myell considered the odds of stoning or catching a wild animal. He wished he'd thought to stuff his pockets with ration bars that morning.

Though he was bone-tired, someone needed to keep watch on the fire and for wild animals. It was late afternoon, the sun burning somewhere low in the smoky west. Gayle and Nam slept. Myell forced himself to walk a perimeter line, to throw rocks at an improvised target, do anything he could to stay awake. Darkness came, and soon afterward rain started dropping from the sky. The others woke immediately.

“Thank God for small miracles,” Gayle said as she played her flashlight over the ground and up into the sky.

Myell welcomed the wetness. He let it soak into his skin and onto his tongue. Nam, beside him, rolled onto his back and spread open his arms as a father would to a child. But then the water started pouring down. Lightning arced in a hot blue flash across the sky. Thunder rolled across the clouds a few seconds later, a long, low, rumbling explosion.

“We can't stay out here!” Gayle said.

“We have nowhere else to go!” Myell said.

More lightning slammed through the air above them. The shock of it made Myell's heart jump. Automatically he pulled into himself, hoping to become as small a target as possible. Rain soaked down, hammering and pummeling. A punishment. He'd never been caught outside like this, never been lashed by the elements. Sound and light blistered through the air, diminishing his will and turning him to spineless flesh.

Nam pressed against him. They both huddled into the mud with their hands laced over their heads. Gayle yelled against the thunder, her words unintelligible. Railing against the unfairness of the universe, perhaps. Even with his eyes closed Myell could see the lightning bolts, hot against his eyelids. Electricity sizzled through the air and was followed by deafening booms that made his teeth ache. The urge to flee nearly made him scramble to his feet, but that would be suicidal.
Stay away from storms,
his mother had always told him.
Stay low. Stay low …

He tried picturing the Rainbow Serpent, appealing to it for help. Mud and water pushed against his mouth and he choked, spat out. Jodenny would kill him if he drowned. The softening ground sucked at him, trying to swallow him whole. Quicksand? And still the thunder and lightning chased each other across the nighttime clouds, a terrible game of one upmanship that had him trembling so wildly that he feared pissing his own pants.

Nam tugged at his arm and yelled something, but Myell's ears had dulled from trauma and he couldn't make out the words.

“Easing up!” Nam shouted, and Myell risked a glance skyward. The rain was still torrential, but the storm itself had passed its peak of fury.

“I hate this!” Gayle said from nearby. “We should have kept going on the loop! Stupid goddamned chiefs—”

So she'd been cursing Myell all this time, not the universe. He found that funny. So funny that he began to laugh. The laughter made him slide a little in the mud. But his amusement ended when the ground below slipped away, carrying him like a river.

“Chief!” Nam screamed, and grabbed for him.

The grab missed. Myell slid away.

Rocks gouged into his hips and legs as the hillside collapsed. A slow, inexorable tide carried him down several feet, twisting and turning him. He covered his face, hoping mud wouldn't bury him alive. But the ride didn't last long before he thudded to a stop. He tilted his head back, rain still hitting hard, then lurched to his knees and feet in a pit of cold mud.