The Stars Down Under (3 page)

“And you look like you've got a baby on your back,” Jodenny replied.

Noreen juggled the carrier a little. A chubby-faced baby in pink clothes gave Jodenny a wide-eyed look and waved a clenched fist.

“My daughter Emma,” Noreen said. “My second. She's my best sweetheart.”

Jodenny waggled her fingers at Emma, who responding by drooling. “Two? Already?”

“Tom and I want four. Tommy Allcot. You remember him, don't you? He was in the class ahead of ours at the Academy. Big guy, soccer player?”

“I remember.” Jostling pedestrians forced Jodenny to step closer. “How do you do it? Kids and husband and work?”

“Oh, I resigned my commission.” Noreen wiped Emma's drool from her shoulder with practiced ease. “They let you, you know, if you get pregnant. I figure one member of Team Space was enough for this family, and I still get all the benefits of being a dependent.”

The military word
dependent
was old-fashioned and politically incorrect. Jodenny was glad she didn't “depend” on Myell, or he on her.

“But look at you, Miss Lieutenant Commander!” Noreen eyed Jodenny's uniform with admiration. If she'd heard about Jodenny's heroism on the
Aral Sea
and the
Yangtze,
she didn't say anything. “Look at that ring on your finger. The girl who never dated. Who'd you marry?”

Jodenny pulled her hand free. Her wedding ring was a single diamond, purchased in haste on Baiame. Myell had promised to upgrade it. “He's in Team Space, too. Supply.”

Baby Emma's fists began to wave in earnest, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Noreen said, “You'll have to come to dinner. Your husband and my husband, you and me—we'll do a barbecue. We live in Adeline Oaks.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Jodenny lied.

Emma's wails grew in volume, and her face turned red.

“We're off to her pediatrician,” Noreen explained. “Call me! I'm in the base directory!”

With a wave and another hug, Noreen hurried off. Jodenny blew out a relieved breath and went up a flight of stairs to the monorail station. That Noreen and her husband lived in Adeline Oaks was an unfortunate stroke of luck. Myell was already uncomfortable enough living surrounded by officers. He'd never enjoy a barbecue with Academy graduates.

A train was already on the platform. Jodenny found a cushioned seat, wedged her briefcase between her ankles, and scanned the news on her gib. The upcoming election for Fortune's Parliament had turned vicious and cutthroat. Other candidates were vying for positions open in the Parliament of the Seven Sisters. The Prime Minister of Fortune was secure in his job for another year or two, but increasingly strident action by the Colonial Freedom Project terrorists was affecting his agenda. Though they hadn't discussed it, Jodenny had registered with the Prime Minister's Liberal party and assumed Myell had done so as well.

A woman in a smart blue suit brushed by Jodenny's knees, took the seat facing her, and murmured a question.

“Sorry?” Jodenny asked.

“Are we going outbound?” the woman asked brightly. She had a broad accent, from somewhere in the north.

“Yes. Last stop is Killarney,” Jodenny replied.

“Excellent. Thank you.”

She carried no briefcase, only a small purse. Her shoes were expensive but practical. She wore her red hair in a sleek ponytail. Although Jodenny ran for exercise, the other woman had the lean, disciplined look of an athlete. Someone used to hardship and success.

“I'm Dr. Anna Gayle,” the woman said. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Commander Scott.”

Jodenny eyed her warily. “Is it?”

“Yes. To be frank, I need your help.”

Another crackpot, Jodenny thought. She attracted them like flies to shit. She reached for her briefcase and checked the overvid for the train's progress. “I can't help you.”

Gayle leaned forward. “It's not about the
Yangtze.”

Even now, Jodenny had difficulty hearing the doomed ship's name. Her leg had healed up fine, as had the injuries she'd received later. Her nightmares had mostly faded. If at times she saw the faces of the dead in the crowd, or heard their whispered voices, then she was certainly allowed.

Jodenny asked, “Then what's it about?”

“My husband. He's an archaeologist. He's been missing for four months.”

“What do I have to do with it?”

“You may have crossed paths with him in some remote, uncharted lands.”

Jodenny's fuzzy brain took a minute to process that. “No,” she said firmly, and headed for the double doors.

Gayle followed her, still earnest, but with a hint of desperation in her voice. “It's not only him. There are eight other people as well. People who have families that love them and desperately want them to return. Just as you returned.”

The monorail slid to a stop. Disembarking passengers jostled Jodenny, but she didn't move. Gayle's careful words were clear enough. Her husband and she were somehow affiliated with the secret project known as the Wondjina Transportation System. Traversing the system by accident had nearly killed Jodenny and Myell. They had turned down a subsequent offer of employment with the project, and vowed to put it all behind them.

Working at Team Space headquarters was an excellent career step. No one made an issue of Jodenny being married to an enlisted man, though they had yet to present themselves together at any social or formal events. Jodenny's co-workers all seemed nice, and more importantly, competent. All in all, she anticipated a challenging but satisfying tour of duty.

And if her new job wasn't quite as exciting as working with alien technology that could fling people across the galaxy, that was the price she would pay for a few years of stability with Myell in a home they built together.

Gayle asked, “Can we talk? One married woman to another?”

The doors gave a warning beep.

“He's my heart,” Gayle said. Her face turned pink. “He's all I want.”

The doors closed. Jodenny took a seat again, her briefcase clutched tightly against her chest. Myell was all she wanted, as well. But sometimes, without fully admitting it, she wondered if she might
need
a little more.

*   *   *

A gray, unmarked flit was parked outside Jodenny's house.

“They're just to make sure we're not interrupted,” Gayle assured her, easily keeping pace with Jodenny's quick strides down the street.

Adeline Oaks was quiet and drowsy in the morning heat, the children in school and the spouses off to their jobs or whatever kept them busy on a Monday morning. Jodenny thumbed open her front door and let Gayle follow her inside. Myell had left the house only slightly messy. They had yet to decide on a formal decorating scheme, though he'd bought a green sofa for the living room and put floor plants in all the corners. The plants were okay, but the sofa was ugly.

“Coffee?” Jodenny asked.

Gayle sat at the kitchen island. “Black and hot. Thank you.”

“Start talking, Doctor. I'm eight hours overdue for my bedtime.”

Gayle showed her gib to Jodenny. On the screen, a good-looking man with a thick beard and bright blue eyes smiled for the camera. “Robert. We met as graduate students. About two years ago Team Space recruited us both for help deciphering the Wondjina Transportation System. Robert was far more eager to conduct field work than I was. He went with teams on two trips through the Spheres at Swedenville. He was very ill, afterward. As everyone is. You and your husband found that out on Warramala, right?”

Jodenny handed over a cup of black coffee. “Keep talking.”

“I told him it was unsafe to keep going. And unfair to our children. Then the medical branch, which had been experimenting with prophylactic treatments to ward off the travel sickness, announced a breakthrough. He volunteered for one more mission, as much to test the new treatment as to satisfy his insatiable curiosity. They left just before you and your husband stumbled through the Spheres on Warramala. They've never returned.”

Jodenny poured herself a glass of soy milk but didn't drink it. Traveling through the Wondjina Spheres had made her worst, most vile hangovers seem like minor headaches. She remembered the sickness working all the way through her skin and bones, and the way Myell had gone lax and unseeing in her arms.

“No one was sent after them?” she asked.

Gayle abruptly shut off the gib. “We tried. The system wouldn't activate. None of the Spheres on Fortune would send a token ring—what you call an ouroboros. When you and Chief Myell arrived on the
Aral Sea,
we read the classified file about your exploits. Obviously the problem was local. But then the
Alaska
docked yesterday.”

The
Alaska
was a month behind the
Aral Sea.
News on the Big Alcheringa traveled only as fast as the ships riding it along the route of the Seven Sisters.

“Our branch office on Baiame sent word that their Spheres also aren't functioning. It's believed they stopped working after you and Chief Myell returned to Warramala.”

“No one said anything to us there,” Jodenny protested.

Gayle replied, “I understand there were more pressing problems to be dealt with.”

Well, yes, if one counted the attempted overthrow of the local government. Jodenny said, “Whatever the case, you can't blame us. We didn't do anything that would make the system stop working.”

Gayle ran her fingers around the rim of her coffee cup. “We're hoping that if you step into a Mother Sphere here, the system will respond—”

Something moved in the corner of Jodenny's eye. Gayle saw it as well and bolted from her chair. Karl, the mechanical koala, had lumbered out of the bedroom and was rubbing himself against a potted plant. He turned his eyes on them and said, “Hungry, hungry.”

“He's harmless,” Jodenny said.

Gayle turned her back on Karl. “Commander, all you have to do is give up an hour of your time. The nearest Spheres are at Bainbridge. If a token appears, we'll take over. If the system ignores you, then you go home. No harm done.”

Jodenny didn't answer. Karl scratched himself and lumbered toward the floor plants. He wasn't programmed to eat, but sometimes he chewed on leaves.

“I'll have to talk to my husband,” Jodenny finally said.

Gayle looked almost pathetically grateful. “Thank you, Commander. You don't know how much I appreciate it.”

When she was alone, Jodenny made sure the doors were locked. She slid into the softest T-shirt she could find, which happened to be Myell's. She collected Karl. The bot agreeably snuggled up against her in the wide, warm bed. The mattress molded to her shape, Betsy screened down all the windows, and Karl snored softly. Quiet and stillness enveloped her.

The Wondjina Transportation System, dead. The most important discovery since the Little Alcheringa, the wormhole that connected Earth to Fortune. Or even since the Big Alcheringa, which linked Fortune to the six other planets of the Seven Sisters. Gayle's husband and eight other missing scientists, lost and stranded somewhere. Jodenny's former lover Sam Osherman was out there too, maybe injured, maybe dead.

She didn't fall asleep for a long, long time.

*   *   *

“No,” Myell said.

He was sitting in a windowless conference room with the two representatives from Fleet. One was a woman named Leorah Farber. She had dark black hair cut very short and a heart-shaped face currently expressing a frown. The other, Teddy Toledo, had wide shoulders, a thick neck, and curly brown hair. Both wore business suits. Farber was standing by the door, and Toledo sat across from Myell at a long table made of faux wood. The smooth brown walls were vidded with the same Supply School pictures that hung in Captain Kuvik's suite.

Farber had done very little talking, but she watched Myell with an intensity that was perhaps meant to be intimidating. Toledo had done nothing
but
talk, at about two thousand words a minute. The fast pace made him sound like a teenager talking about Izim or Snipe.

“—I don't think you're understanding what's at stake, here, Chief, we're talking about the lives of people who were stuck in a system that stopped working because of something you or your wife did while you were in it, otherwise how can anyone explain why nothing works now, nothing at all? I'm not saying sabotage, no one's saying that, but you have to admit the timing is bad, and maybe you found some equipment you didn't want to tell anyone about, maybe you pressed a button or two—”

Myell wondered if Toledo had played football in school. He had the hulking, menacing build for it. But he was more earnest than menacing. Not the captain of the team, then. Maybe the co-captain. American football had fallen out of favor over the years, but on Myell's first ship, the
Kashmir,
some of the sergeants and chiefs had enjoyed scrimmaging on the flight deck using Australian rules.

“—Don't you understand, Chief? All you have to do is stand in the Sphere. We'll be there if the token ring activates.”

Myell could almost hear the mournful horn already, the warning that an ouroboros—“token ring” seemed such a dull phrase—was about to arrive in one of the ancient structures left by the creators of the Alcheringa and Seven Sisters.

He repeated, “No.”

Toledo threw up his hands. “Don't you feel any responsibility at all?”

Myell had his doubts about Toledo's claim that he and Jodenny had somehow broken the system. The fault, if any, rested with the Rainbow Serpent. The Creator God that Myell had spoken with and turned away from.

“If it's so important to you that we try, why hasn't someone given me a direct order?” Myell asked.

“You've refused orders before,” said Farber. “In such a delicate situation as this, we agreed to try to enlist your help rather than demand it.”