The Stars Down Under (6 page)

“Crocs aren't nice or mean.” The girl met his gaze with eyes as gray as the reptile's. “They just are, right?”

“I suppose,” Myell said.

One last painting caught his eye. A lone black vulture whirled over a grassy plain, homing in on animal corpses lying below. Something about the painting made a rough chill go through him.

“Jungali,” the girl said.

“What?” Myell asked sharply.

“Jungle cats,” the girl said, indicating the corpses. “Lions.”

Myell couldn't bear to look anymore. The market had grown too crowded, too loud. He hurried toward Supply School. The smell of the ocean made him nauseated. He went to his little basement office and sat there for two hours until Sergeant Etedgy knocked on his door, looking apologetic.

“Captain sent down some work for you to do,” he said. Two ATs bearing boxes of loosely bound regulations followed Etedgy in. “He wants you to check the LOEPs on these and requisition any that we need.”

The sailors put the boxes down on the deck. Myell didn't bother to point out that coordinating Lists of Effective Pages was a job any clerk could do. Instead, he offered Etedgy a bland smile. “No problem.”

Once the sailors were gone Etedgy said, “I'm sorry.”

“It's nothing to worry about.”

“Not to be too frank, Chief, it's a shit job.”

“But it's all mine,” Myell said.

Kuvik had made the job more interesting. Half the books had split their spines, spilling their contents into jumbles of dusty, tattered paper. He must have dug deep in his closet to find them. No one consulted paper regulations anymore, not when databases could easily be consulted and cross-indexed again.

“Mine,” Myell repeated, once he was alone.

Fifteen minutes before the first-period lunch, he went over to the mess deck and was first in line for the food. The faculty wardroom was empty and sparkling clean. Myell plunked his tray down at the center table and began to eat at a leisurely pace.

Two lieutenants arrived soon after and immediately went to a table in the corner. A gaggle of ensigns came in and claimed a rectangular table. Two chiefs who were part of Senior Chief Talic's clique came in with their trays, halted when they saw Myell at their table, reversed course, and chose to sit elsewhere.

Senior Chief Talic arrived next.

“You weren't invited to sit here,” he said in a low voice over Myell's shoulder.

“I'm sorry, I didn't hear you,” Myell said, loud and pleasant. “You wanted to welcome me to Supply School? Thank you, Senior Chief Talic. I'm happy to be here.”

The ensigns and lieutenants looked their way and murmured among themselves. Talic put his tray down so hard that the silverware rattled. He took the seat opposite Myell.

“Did you have a good morning in class?” Myell asked.

Talic ignored him.

Myell pitched his voice louder again. “I asked if you had a good morning—”

Talic's glare was murderous. “It was fine.”

“My morning was good, too,” Myell confided.

Senior Chief Gooder, short and squat with the shoulders of a weight lifter, took the seat next to Myell and offered his hand. “My twelve-year-old daughter and her friends have a vicious little clique in school, but we're worse. Welcome aboard.”

“Frank,” Talic said, “you know what this is about.”

Gooder shook out his napkin. “Yes, yes, standards, principles, pull the other one, why don't you? He's the only one at this entire command with a Silver Star on his uniform, so he must be doing something right.”

Two other chiefs eventually joined them. They weren't as friendly as Gooder, but not as frosty as Talic. The table by the aquarium filled up with Captain Kuvik's secretary and other staff, some of whom gave Myell speculative looks. The conversation at the chiefs' table centered on Saturday's graduation, and some controversy over the AT who had been chosen as class speaker.

“Should have been based on grades, not personality,” Talic argued.

“Best grades only means someone's good at taking tests,” Gooder said. “Doesn't mean the person's articulate, or can hold the interest of a crowd.”

“Tradition,” one of the other chiefs said. “You're not going to convince Captain Kuvik to do it any other way than it's always been done.”

“What do you think about tradition, Myell?” Gooder asked, a gleam in his eye.

Myell took his time answering. “Some are good. Some are outdated.”

Talic jabbed a fork into the air. “Tried and true. It works. You don't go changing things on a whim, or because someone cries to their mommy, or because someone has a nervous little fit.”

Myell wasn't about to point out that tradition was what had killed that chief-designee on Kookaburra. Everyone at the table surely knew the story. Dehydration, overexertion, a heart attack. It wasn't the first accidental death during a hazing ceremony but it was supposed to be the last. The initiation procedures for chiefs had changed radically after that, and had become “optional.” Somewhere over at Fleet, Myell's former shipmates from the
Aral Sea
were no doubt still discovering that “optional” abuse was no less humiliating than the nonoptional kind.

“Only dead things are immune to change,” Myell said. “Dead people, dead institutions, dead minds.”

Talic's fork jabbed his way, but his gaze abruptly swiveled to the doorway. Myell glanced over his shoulder and saw Captain Kuvik carrying his tray in. He was accompanied by civilians in business attire.

“Captain hardly ever eats here,” Gooder murmured, reaching for the salt. “Damn efficiency experts from Fleet. They come by to make life hell every now and again.”

Talic seemed unwilling to continue his arguments about tradition with Kuvik in the room. He left, soon followed by the others at their table, leaving only Gooder to dally over his coffee. Gooder asked, “So, they really stick you down in the basement?”

“Any lower and I'd be in the foundation,” Myell said.

Gooder grinned. “That's our captain for you. Don't worry. Your tour's three years, right? By the end of year two he'll have warmed up a degree or two. Might even let you teach a class.”

“I doubt that.”

“He's rigid, but usually fair. Listens to reason.”

“Not on the subject of chief initiation,” Myell said. “Or fraternization.”

“So it's true? You married your lieutenant?”

“It's not exactly like that.”

Gooder clapped him on the shoulder. “Nothing ever is.”

After lunch Myell returned to his little office and spent the entire afternoon on his tedious task. To lighten up the silence of the basement he played music on his bee. He thought of Kuvik eating lunch with the so-called efficiency experts. Maybe they were really men from Fleet. Would Team Space transfer him anyway, force him to work on the Wondjina network despite his protests? He'd been told that the project was voluntary, but he couldn't be sure.

Stop being paranoid, he told himself.

At sixteen-hundred hours he still had several more days of work ahead of him. Myell left his office, started for the lift, then stopped when the overhead lights went off. He heard scuffling footsteps but was too slow to dodge the arms that grabbed him and dragged him backward. He kicked and yelled as adhesive tape was slapped over his mouth.

“We'll fucking show you what initiation means,” someone said, a man's voice that he didn't recognize.

A hood was pulled over his head. It smelled musty and tainted with machine oil. He was hauled down the corridor. He couldn't be sure, not in the rush of panic, not as he fought to breathe past the tape and tried to break their strong hold, but he thought maybe there were three assailants. A door opened. Machinery hummed nearby. Air units, water heaters, the plumbing system. He fought as hard as he could, trying to squirm free, to yell, but they easily slammed him up against a support pillar. A fist drove into his abdomen.

“None of it's optional,” one of his attackers said. A man, no one he could identify. “You call Fleet and tell them you want to go through initiation. Otherwise—” Another fist landed in his stomach. “Otherwise we'll be waiting for you every day, fucking teach you a lesson, you understand?”

They grabbed his hair and tipped his head back so tightly that he couldn't breathe.

“Understand?” the man said again.

Though Myell hated to let them win, he made a muffled sound of surrender.

“Good,” he was told. “Be a good boy now. Work hard at it, why don't you, and maybe you'll get free on your own. If not, we'll send someone along in the morning to get you. Won't be the most enjoyable night you've ever spent, but you can use it to think about how much you'll enjoy initiation.”

They tied him to the pillar with rope and left him there, breathing hard through his nose, pain like fire in his stomach. His legs were shaking so hard he thought they might give way. The attackers left without another word. Only the clang of the closing door told him he was alone. He pulled at the rope but the knots were solid, and already the muscles in his shoulders were beginning to cramp.

Think, he told himself. You can get out of this. They don't dare leave you alone like this.

But they did.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Anna Gayle's lab suite was in the basement of the Team Space complex on Rathbone Street. The lights were off, with information playing out in strong colors on a wallgib.

“This is a map of the Wondjina network stations that Team Space has visited,” Gayle said. Her face was tight and smooth in the reflected light. “Eighty stations over the course of the last six years. There'd be more if they didn't make people so damn sick. We have a labeling system that helps keep track of where the loop originated and the station number.”

Jodenny gazed at the map. “So Chief Myell and I traveled where?”

“On your first trip, you went through MRLM1—that's Mary River Lakeland Mother Station 1, the originating station. It's an express route, to MRLM2—that's Mary River Lakeland Mother Station 2—and back again,” Gayle said.

There were two other people in the lab with them. Gayle had introduced them as Leorah Farber and Teddy Toledo. Toledo, helpful and earnest, built like a large refrigerator, said, “Express routes only go one or two stops and come back. Loops go a lot farther.”

Gayle pointed at a circle of green lights. “This was your second trip, as you recounted it to the agents on Warramala. You got on at Warramala Sowbridge Mother 1 and went several stations on that loop, which runs one hundred and forty stations.”

“We got very sick,” Jodenny said.

“But you got back by transferring through other Spheres,” Farber said. She was quieter than her partner, with a deeply somber expression. “Your husband claimed a serpent spoke to him and told him how.”

Jodenny wasn't about to defend or explain Myell's Rainbow Serpent. If they hadn't taken a shortcut through the network, they'd probably be dead by now. Or still lost, like Sam Osherman.

“You said six years,” Jodenny said. “Why couldn't anyone use them before?”

“There are fourteen sets of Wondjina Spheres here on Fortune.” Gayle turned back to her map. “Tourists have been traipsing in and out of them for decades without triggering any tokens. Sure, there have always been urban legends, myths. People who claim to see spirits in them, or walk through one and end up back on Earth, or in heaven, or some pastel-colored astral plane. But only six years ago did we actually receive a verifiable report. An AT on Kiwi, visiting her parents on their farm, went sightseeing and wound up on a Kiwi express. Scared her silly.”

Toledo said, “She'd been in and out of Spheres ever since she was a child. Never happened before.”

Jodenny frowned. “I thought you have to be exposed to the system in order to travel in it. I saw one on the
Yangtze.
The next time I visited a Mother Sphere, I triggered one. Chief Myell was with me, so he was exposed then and could trigger them in any other Spheres he visited.”

Gayle said, “Not every Mother Sphere seems to be active, and even those that are seem to go through periods when they're offline. But yes, that first AT was the only one who, to our knowledge, was not previously exposed. Why that token came for her, we don't know.”

“Why do you call it a token?” Jodenny asked.

Toledo replied, “Someone thought the system resembles an old token ring computer network. Pre-Debasement technology. You've got fifty computers on the same network, and one token looping around between them on a fixed route. The computer that wanted to transmit information would grab the token, stick data in it, then send it on its way again so that other—”

“Yes, yes,” Gayle said, interrupting. “As far as we know, there's only one ring at a time in any given Wondjina loop. When you step into a station that authorizes you, you have to wait for the token to come along. It might be a few seconds, it might be a minute, but if someone else is using it, nothing happens. That's the case up at Swedenville. We've done most of our experiments there.”

“Is that where your husband's expedition left from?” Jodenny asked, returning her gaze to the map.

“No. They left from Bainbridge.” Gayle keyed in a command, and a new map popped up. “We know from examining the token's diagram that it has thirty-four stations, none of which cross-references Swedenville or any other Spheres in the Seven Sisters. Like every other Sphere, it refused to transfer any automated probes—we tried DNGOs, we tried remote cameras, nothing. With the advances the medical division made, Robert thought thirty-four stations were well within reach for a human expedition.”

Goosebumps rose on her arms. Jodenny resisted the urge to rub at them. “How big is the entire network?”