The Stars Blue Yonder (29 page)

The prospect was mildly entertaining, but it was easier to just stare at the ceiling and ignore the thirst in his throat and wait for the blue ring. Frankly, he didn't have the energy to do much more. The energy or the interest.

The hatch opened. He pretended to be asleep.

“I know you're awake,” the ensign said, her voice clear and hard. “If you want, I can yank a power cable out of the wall and stick it up your nose until you cooperate.”

“Jesus,” he said, and squinted up at her. “What kind of person are you?”

“The kind of person who's in charge around here. How did you get in?

“You won't believe me,” he said.

“Quit stalling.”

“I'm not stalling.” Myell pulled futilely at the restraints. “Where's Lieutenant Scott? Lieutenant Jodenny Scott?”

“Never heard of her,” the ensign said.

That was impossible. He'd never been in an eddy without her. But that was a problem he could deal with later.

He said, “Read my dog tag. I'm military, just like you. Team Space.”

She gave his civilian clothes a skeptical look. He couldn't remember how many eddies ago he'd lost the uniform that Adryn Ling had given him on the
Confident
, but he supposed he didn't look much like a Team
Space sailor. Or maybe in this eddy, sailors died off once they were done with puberty.

“How'd you get here?” she said. “Beam down here from some spaceship in orbit?”

He was startled by the idea he was in a time and place when teleportation technology actually worked. Then he figured she was being sarcastic. She was good at being sarcastic.

“Cassandra!” Speed came skidding into the room. “The scanners!”

She said, “
Ensign Darling
, remember?”

His face twisted up as he remembered military protocol. “Ensign Darling, ma'am. The scanners lit up like Christmas Day. There's Roon in the tunnels! On their way here!”

“Fuck it all,” Darling said. She and the sergeant dashed off without bothering to untie him.

Myell swore and started rocking the table back and forth.

The restraint around his left ankle gave way first, which let him kick at the restraint around his right ankle, and when both were free he swung his legs to the floor and rammed the table into the bulkhead. The noise was loud, too loud, but no one came to investigate. Finally the supports snapped and he was able to free his wrists. He was looking for something to use as a club or a knife when the dim lighting flickered and died, plunging everything into darkness.

“Goddammit,” he said to himself, but not very loudly.

A battery-operated light switched on in the passageway outside the room. Myell crept toward it, listening hard for weapons fire. He was half tempted to find a deep dark hole and wait out the arrival of the blue ring, but what if this was the one damn time the ouroboros didn't come for him? He'd never been in this eddy before. The rules might be all different.

He might actually die and stay dead this time.

The passage led to a lift whose doors were frozen open and with a floor littered by debris.

Near the lift was a ladder through the deck and overhead. Voices drifted down from somewhere up above, and another light shone from two or three decks overhead. Myell investigated the rest of the passage,
which led to three locked doors and the room where he'd been prisoner.

He returned to the ladder and considered going downward, but the pool of darkness there was complete.

Up, then, quietly, one hand over the other, his knee throbbing from Speed's kick. The next deck proved to be as empty as the one he'd left behind, but opened up more questions. In the absence of any engine noise and in light of their comments he concluded this was an underground military complex, not a spaceship, but the absence of an adult staff worried him. The equipment and space indicated that once the place had been home to more than just a skeleton crew, or had been planned for full staffing. Now it was just a shell.

And the Roon were on their way.

He climbed up one more level. The passage there led to what was some kind of makeshift control room. In the dim red light Myell could make out five kids. The main power was still out but they were monitoring cell-powered scanners and casting anxious looks toward a large hatch. The sergeant had said tunnels; Myell guessed that the labyrinth lay beyond that plated door.

Ensign Darling was the only one standing and glaring at the hatch as if her resolve alone would keep it sealed. Speed was crouched under a console, fixing something. Three other children in ragtag clothes and dirty faces were huddled against the bulkhead. The two youngest were crying.

“Bell, Ammy, stop that,” Darling ordered.

One of the equipment scanners was giving off a low beep slowly increasing in tempo. A proximity alarm, Myell figured. His hands felt itchy without a weapon to hold. He might have been trained as a supply tech, but he was more than willing to shoot at any Roon that came through the door.

“Shouldn't we fall back?” he asked.

His voice made the children jerk in alarm. Darling swung her mazer on him but didn't fire. He wondered if the thing was even charged.

“Shut up,” she said. “Falling back is the last thing we're going to do.”

“Who is he, Cassandra?” asked the boy sitting with Ammy and Bell.
He was maybe ten years old or so, and incredibly filthy. None of them looked like they'd seen a bath in a long time.

Speed crawled out from under his console. “Ignore him, Nelson. He's nothing.”

Myell didn't make any sudden moves. “How many Roon?”

“Hundreds,” Darling said.

“You can't evacuate?”

Incredibly, she almost smiled. “There's nowhere to go under a million tons of mountain.”

That partially answered one of his questions. The beeping on the proximity alarm grew closer. Nelson pressed his fist against his teeth. The two little girls wept. Speed scooped up one of them and hugged her tight.

“It'll soon be over, Bell,” he said.

Whoever these kids were, they had little illusion about what was going to happen in the next few minutes.

“Where exactly are we?” Myell asked.

“Why don't you know?” Darling asked.

“Because I'm not from here,” he said. “The last time I saw the Roon was at the battle of Kultana.”

“Kultana!” Nelson said, past his fist.

“Shut up,” Darling told her. The gaze she turned on Myell was cold and hard. “You're lying.”

Nelson said, “My dad died at Kultana. When I was a baby.”

Myell didn't have time to do the math before the scanner began to whine a steady annoying alarm. Something solid slammed into the other side of the hatch. The vibration rattled Myell's teeth and made the littlest ones shriek. A circle of red appeared in the metal.

“They're burning their way in?” Myell demanded. “Why?”

Darling didn't deign to answer. Instead she slapped her hand down on the console in front of her and thumbed a series of switches jury-rigged to wires stretched across the floor and into a junction box.

“Speed, now!” she said.

Speed threw a lever.

A soft walloping sound drifting up the ladder behind Myell. As far as explosions went, it wasn't much at all. But more explosions ripped out
after it, a series of louder blasts that rushed up shafts and tore down bulkheads and collapsed overheads, letting tons of rock crash through old barriers. Myell understood then the cables he'd seen in the passages. Remote-controlled explosives. This children's army's plan to fight off the Roon had nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with self-destruction.

The deck heaved wildly under Myell's feet and tossed him backward. He landed hard; pain flashed across his shoulders and ribs. The rippling explosions kept slamming through the air. The darkness was full of dust and the smell of burnt chemicals. He couldn't breathe through the debris, couldn't think through the chaos and panic, but after a while he realized the noise had stopped and the wet, limp bundle across his legs was someone's body.

He reached down, groping. The girl against him let out a gasp that sounded like she was drowning. Myell lifted her body and brought her close. There was no light, and no sound but their own panicked breathing and her spitting out blood.

“It worked,” Ensign Darling said, when she could.

“Why?” he asked. He couldn't quite hear out of one ear, and his whole body felt like it had been pummeled by sledgehammers. “Why destroy everything?”

She was quiet so long he feared she'd fallen unconscious. But then she said, “So they couldn't get it.”

“Get what?”

Her head was heavy against his shoulder. The wetness pooling on his shirt was her blood, and his slippery fingers could neither find the source nor stanch it.

“They can't have it,” she whispered.

“Have what, Ensign?”

She died without telling him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jodenny's tea had gone cold in the cup, but she was thirsty and drank it anyway. Her fingers shook against the delicate china.

“I don't understand,” she said. “This was what—twenty years ago?”

Darling's gaze was steady. “You flatter me, Commander. Thirty. I was seventeen at the time. Oldest of us all, and the leader by default. It's not a position I would have chosen on my own. But the rebel army in our area had been decimated, and I was the only one left to lead them.”

“I don't understand how you're here if you died. Did Terry resuscitate you?”

“No.” Darling reached toward the tea tray. “I died, in that—what does he call them? Eddy. I died in that eddy. So did the rest of my crew. We'd rigged the caves to blow in case the Roon came knocking. We all knew we wouldn't survive.”

Confusion twisted through Jodenny and must have shown in her face.

“I wasn't there,” Darling said. “This me, that is. I'm not the one who died in Chief Myell's arms. He told me about it later, though. When he came back the next time and convinced us there was another way. But I fear I'm getting ahead of myself. Ask me where he went when the blue ring came for him in that rubble.”

Jodenny obeyed. “Where did he go?”

“To the Roon,” Darling said. And this time her fingers were the ones shaking against her cup. “Your husband traveled to the heart of the Roon empire to face down the one they call the Flying Doctor. And that whore, the traitor Anna Gayle.”

Myell remembered this: Darling limp in his arms, the heat and dust of the collapsed complex, the slow suffocation and icy terror of being entombed.

Worse were the digging noises around him. Metal against rock. Intermittent but undeniable.

The Roon, digging their way in.

This new place? Wasn't much different.

Pitch-black. Deep, rumbling sounds of machinery made the rough ground vibrate beneath him. But this place was colder, wetter, and he could hear voices both distant and indecipherable. The ring had again brought him somewhere he'd never been before. It was nowhere he wanted to stay, but his body didn't have the strength to move. He couldn't even find the strength to say his own name. Then a foot stepped down on his leg and Myell let out a yelp of pain.

“Jesus!” a man said from almost on top of him. “What the hell?”

Light flared, and Myell tried to turn away. Rough hands probed at him.

“Lemme alone,” he mumbled.

“Human,” a woman said. “Lots of blood.”

Myell insisted, “Not mine,” because it was true. Most of it was Ensign Darling's. The stink of it and his own waste made him want to vomit. But the man and woman above him, their blurry faces indistinct, weren't that clean or sweet-smelling themselves.

“What's your name?” the woman asked. “Who did this to you?”

An obnoxiously loud buzzing sound filled the air. “No time,” the man said. He slid his hands under Myell's shoulders. “Look, pal, you've got to get up and get moving, or they'll leave you down here all night. You'll never survive the farols.”

He didn't care. The ring would come for him, as it always did, and this nightmarish place would be another memory.

“He's going to slow us down, Chief,” the woman said. “If we miss that last lift, we're no better off ourselves.”

“He's fine.” The man dragged Myell upward. “Get on your feet. You don't want to die down here, not like this.”

Myell would have happily disagreed with him, but his feet were already moving. He understood that these strangers were risking themselves for him and their lives weren't his to throw away. Still, he resented them for pushing him forward, steering him in this cave or tunnel or whatever, making him struggle alongside them. When absolutely none of it fucking mattered at all.

“Tom,” the woman said. “They're going to notice the blood.”

“They don't care.”

“But they'll still notice.”

The man cursed, stopped. The next thing Myell knew, his shirt was being ripped off and discarded. He shivered in the cold air. They started moving again, which struck him as funny. Blood got people's attention around here, but being shirtless didn't?

A moment later the darkness opened into a large, dimly lit cavern forty or fifty meters high. Hundreds of people were moving quietly forward. Myell's vision cleared enough that he could see fashion was not a priority; the men and women around him were filthy, their clothes sometimes nothing more than rags, and even without a shirt on he was better off than half of them. The strangest thing, though, was that his eyes obviously weren't working right—it looked like some of the people had elongated faces, or faces with fur, or bodies with extra limbs, or other tricks that his brain couldn't process.

The woman had said, “Human,” as if there were other options.

Myell recoiled from the sight and the stench of the human and alien crowd. The man holding him by the arms didn't let his grasp slip, however.
“Don't stop now,” he warned, steering him forward. “Remember the Monitors.”