The Outback Stars

by Sandra McDonald

Myell pulled Jodenny to the chair and hooked her into it. He tried all the buttons on the control panel but nothing worked. He tried the hatch again, but it had been sealed on the other side. The only way out was into the shaft, down to the loading dock, and maybe out through the mag-lev belts.

  “Terry?”

  “Hey.” Myell went to her and tried to smile reassuringly. “How do you feel?”

  “They zapped us,” she said thickly.

  “Who?”

  “Quenger. Chiba. Osherman. I thought they were going to kill us.” Jodenny paused. “Osherman, that goddamned son of a bitch. Something happened—it’s all fuzzy now. They found something? I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe my server,” he said.

  “Your what?”

  “I was carrying a pocket server set to record upon voice activation. Even if they took it, the data’s backed up in my personal account. Timrin could get into it.”

  Jodenny’s frown deepened. “What else have you recorded?”

  Myell said, “Nothing that would embarrass us.”

  “Oh.”

  She lapsed into silence. He listened to the sounds of his own breathing and ignored a growing queasiness in his gut. He counted to thirty. He wondered if maybe she had lapsed back into unconsciousness, but then Jodenny shifted and asked, “Where are we?”

  “T16.”

  “Our gibs?”

  “Gone. The hatch is sealed, there’s no power except for our suit batteries, the medbot can’t contact Mainship and we have”—he checked the suit chronometer—“six hours until we’re let loose into orbit.”

  “Plenty of time.” Jodenny freed herself. “What’s exactly in this tower?”

  He tried to remember the ship’s manifest. “Some suspension bridges, a few trains, railroad equipment. Maybe some power stations. And anything that’s been smuggled in since we left Fortune.”

  “We might be able to get out through the loading dock.”

  Myell bit back the taste of bile. Space sickness would have to wait. “Let’s try it.”

  They used their EV thrusters to direct themselves out of the command module, through the eerily dark shaft, and down to the loading dock. The tower was so large around them that Myell felt like a tiny fish swimming in a black sea. If it wasn’t for the hiss of Jodenny’s comm on the open channel, he would have very easily scared himself into thinking he was all alone.

  “When we miss morning quarters, they’ll start looking for us,” Jodenny said.

  “They won’t think to look here,” he replied.

  The loading dock looked ghostly in the torchlight. The tower’s DNGOs were stacked in large racks, each of them silent and useless. The mag-lev belt of the DCS was disconnected from the hull, and a thick plate covered the hatch. Myell put his gloved hand against a rivet the size of his fist.

  “There’s no possible way they’re shuffling supplies into this tower,” Jodenny said. She gasped suddenly. “Christ! Did you see something move?”

  Myell had not seen anything. He didn’t want to see anything. He wondered if the heat in his suit was working, because his skin was cold from head to toe.

  “I saw something,” Jodenny whispered.

  Neither of them moved to investigate. Being in Team Space had never demanded much bravery, Myell knew. It required endurance of petty annoyances and mammoth wastes of time, and the discipline of listening to superiors talk of nonsense and trivia, and the ability to think one way but act another, for days and months and years at a time. He had been truly scared only a few times in his military career—once while doing firefighting training in boot camp, another when Chiba’s men had entered his Security cell during the Ford affair—but all in all, he could safely say he had never been asked to chase something down in the icy darkness, something his lieutenant only thought she saw.

  “There’s nothing there,” he said.

  She either didn’t believe him or had to prove it to herself. Jodenny used her thrusters to skirt around the dark silhouette of a forklift and swept the area with her light. This time it was Myell who caught the glint of motion.

  “There!” he said, and Jodenny turned her beam. An unsecured wrench floated in midair, no doubt disturbed by their EV thrusters.

  “So much for that.” Jodenny tilted her head upward, or downward, or sideways—it was hard to say, and his stomach was churning again. “They can’t take the bridges out of here through the DCS. How do they remove the ends of the tower?”

  “They release a hundred sealing bolts, each of them twice as large as we are.” Myell tried to remain calm and objective. “The important thing is that it will be opened, sooner or later. All we have to do is hold on until then.”

  “Could be a week.”

  “Could be today. Or maybe we can figure out some way to make them open it early. I’ll go get the other oxygen tanks from the observation module so at least we’ll be able to breathe.”

  “I’ll keep looking for a way off this loading dock.”

  He hated to be separated from her, but the sooner he had those tanks in hand the better he’d feel about their chances of avoiding suffocation. Myell steered himself along the shaft with his headlamp as a guide. The open maws of the slots were particularly ominous, given their circumstances, and he forced himself not to look at them.

  “Terry?” Jodenny asked over the comm. “Did you say we were in T16? This wall marker says T18.”

  Myell continued to sail upward in the shaft. “That’s good. At least we won’t be released into orbit.”

  “Not for two months, anyway.”

  He stopped to think about that. “So I guess you could say our situation hasn’t improved.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  The observation module appeared above him. The hatch had no power but the manual override worked and he hauled himself in. He saw the control panel, two chairs, the EV closet, and a free-floating, perfectly preserved corpse.

  “Jodenny?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not alone. There’s a body up here.”

  “I’ll be right up,” Jodenny said.

  Myell moved into the module. The gray-white hand of the dead man slapped against his visor as if in jovial greeting and he powered back in alarm. His headlamp illuminated more of the corpse, which was long and stiff and wore an officer’s jumpsuit. The face had bloated in the weightlessness before freezing solid, but was still recognizable.

  “It’s Commander Matsuda,” he said when she drew near.

  “The old SUPPO?”

  “Now we know where he disappeared to.”

  She stared at the body for a full minute. “He must have been dead or unconscious when they put him in here. He didn’t get into an EV suit.”

  “At least he didn’t starve to death.”

  “Neither will we, Sergeant.”

  Moments earlier, she had called him Terry. If they were going to die, he would prefer they do it on a first-name basis. Together they inspected Matsuda’s corpse. His gib was gone and there were no obvious wounds, no readily apparent cause of death. In his pocket were his identification card and twenty yuros.

  Jodenny asked, “Should we just leave him here?”

  The prospect of tugging the corpse around like freight made Myell’s stomach churn. “You want to take him with us?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s been here for months already. Nothing’s going to happen to the body.”

  They left Matsuda and took six extra air tanks from the closet. Myell had hoped he’d feel better once they reached the command module, but the bulkheads spun lazily in his vision, and he fought the urge to take off his helmet and gulp at nonexistent air.

  “Can we wake up the dingoes?” Jodenny asked.

  “We have no way of controlling them. They’d just sit there like lumps.”

  “Can we use their batteries to power up the control panel?”

  Myell turned so she wouldn’t see him close his eyes. “Different systems. We�
�d need a dozen electricians to make it work. Same with the medbots.”

  “Look at me, Terry.”

  He blinked open his eyes and saw her visor pressed against his.

  She said, “You’re green.”

  “Spacesick,” he admitted, just as his teeth started to chatter. “It’ll pass.”

  “I’m going to turn up the heat in your suit and see what the medbot has in stock.”

  Myell only nodded. He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth and not vomit. Jodenny returned in a few minutes with a skin patch. She slid open his visor and pressed it to the side of his neck. The visor slid shut again with a click.

  “Stay here,” she said. “I’m going to poke around the loading dock some more.”

  The patch helped but made him drowsy. Loosely moored to the bulkhead, he ignored the drifting feeling and tried to figure out a way to escape. Not the loading dock. Not the command module. They couldn’t blow the bolts on the ends of the tower and there were no escape pods. Myell tried to remember more about T18’s inventory, but he hadn’t memorized the list.

  “Terry?”

  He must have dozed off, because she said it several times. “I’m here,” he said. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost oh-four-hundred.

  “I’m going to start nosing around in the slots, see what I can find.”

  “I’ll come along.”

  “You stay put.”

  “I feel better.” He did, in fact. Once in the shaft, he saw Jodenny’s lamps glittering some distance below his feet. “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything that might be useful. Or edible.”

  He assumed she didn’t mean Commander Matsuda.

  * * *

  Jodenny didn’t want to admit it, but she was extraordinarily glad of Myell’s company. The tower was creepy enough as it was with Matsuda’s body floating around. She imagined more horrendous discoveries in the slots, where the darkness seemed thicker and more ominous than it did in the shaft.

  With hydraulic crowbars they started cracking open random smartcrates on level one and discovered electrical parts. On level two, bin after bin of cement mixes, instant rebar, and steel supports. Level three was a plumber’s delight: pipes, fittings, valves, and pumps. Myell held up a glove full of screws and bolts.

  “Too bad we can’t fry them for dinner.” He sounded better than he had up in the command module and some of the color had come back to his cheeks.

  “I prefer baked, not fried,” Jodenny said. “Ever been to Minutiae?”

  “It’s not as good as they say. Have you tried Cairo Delight?”

  “Food’s too spicy.” Rokutan had taken her there. At least she’d gotten a meal before she let him take her to bed in his clean, shipshape cabin. She wondered if Myell’s cabin was messy, if his sheets smelled like he did, where he would put his hands and mouth while making love.

  “You didn’t order the right things.”

  “How about we keep looking and forget about food?”

  Myell hefted the pipe in his hand. “Too bad we couldn’t just bang out an S.O.S.”

  “No one would hear it.”

  “The bridge doesn’t monitor sealed towers in any way?”

  “There are remote fire sensors,” Jodenny admitted. “Nothing here’s going to burn without oxygen. And then there’s the…”

  Myell gave her a moment. “The what?”

  “Radiation sensors,” she said.

  They split up and started searching for smartcrates with yellow and black warning labels. There was a good chance they would find nothing, Jodenny knew. But searching was at least action, and even a little hope was better than none at all.

  At oh-seven-hundred she called a break. “Let’s rest for a bit.”

  Myell met her in the shaft and they floated in the zero-g, the lights of their EV suits tiny in the encompassing darkness. She hooked a tether line to him to conserve thruster use and checked their oxygen. Unlike everywhere else on the Aral Sea, T18 was a great hallowed hall of silence, devoid of comm announcements, gib pings, passing conversations, or death roars of Izim moths.

  “How long have you been carrying around a pocket server?” she asked, trying to sound conversational about it.

  “Since Kookaburra. What happened with Ford—that was her word against mine. I didn’t want to get into that situation again. And I wanted to get evidence against Chiba.”

  Jodenny couldn’t help herself. “What happened with Ford?”

  “Do you want the truth, or do you want the rumors instead?”

  Bitterness in his voice, which she should have expected. She pressed close to him so that she could read every nuance on his face. “I know you didn’t do it.”

  Myell gazed at her steadily. “We’d been seeing each other on the side for a few weeks. Just a few minutes here or there. Whenever people weren’t looking. She was afraid of Chiba, wanted to break up with him, didn’t know how. One night we met in one of the hydroponics labs and—well, you know. Security happened to go by. She was afraid of what Chiba would do, so she claimed rape. That’s what I think. They wouldn’t let me even talk to her, afterward. It’s possible that the whole thing was a setup from the start, because Chiba wanted me out of Underway Stores. It backfired when he got transferred instead.”

  “How did you stand it for so long?” she asked. “The gossip, the harassment—you shouldn’t have had to.”

  Myell turned his head. “It goes on every day, if not in our division, then in others.”

  Jodenny wished she could dissolve their EV suits and wrap her arms around him.

  “The day we met,” he said. “I was thinking of not coming back to the ship. Then you came up to me and said my boots needed to be polished. Who could resist? I fell in love with you right then and there.”

  Jodenny couldn’t find anything to say.

  “Sorry.” Myell sounded crestfallen. “I guess that’s out of line.”

  “No,” she replied. “It’s been so long since anyone said that to me … do you want to know when I fell in love with you?”

  “Do you love me?” Myell asked.

  “Yes.” And saying it lifted a great weight off her heart, a weight the size of the Yangtze. “We’ll both probably be court-martialed, and it’s the most reckless thing I’ve done in years, but yes. I do love you.”

  He smiled. “Then tell me.”

  “When we were in your brother’s guest room and you couldn’t understand why I was there, but you trusted me anyway. You were wearing a beige sweater.”

  “And you were wearing a nightgown with red roses on it.”

  “I thought you might knock on my door that night.”

  “You wouldn’t have let me in.”

  She grinned. “Probably not.”

  They resumed their search, working steadily from different ends of the shaft. At one point fatigue overtook Jodenny and she checked her watch. Morning quarters had come and gone. Her stomach rumbled with hunger and her throat ached. Three days to die of thirst, was that it? The silence of the tower struck her as cruel, and she clicked on her comm switch.

  “Terry? Where are you?”

  “Forty-two,” he said. “More rebar. You?”

  “Level eighteen. Plastics.” Jodenny worked her way past more bins. “How’s your oxygen?”

  “About a half hour left.”

  “Mine, too. Let’s get back to the command module.”

  Back in the module, they waited for the tanks to run down and swapped the old units for new ones. The thought of returning to the dark slots made Jodenny weak in the knees, and Myell seemed in no hurry to return either, but they had to keep looking. Sometime around lunchtime, just as Jodenny was beginning to believe she’d never eat again, her comm clicked.

  Myell said, “I’ve got something here. Some kind of medical imaging equipment.”

  “It’s a start. Where are you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Terry, this is no time for heroics. Tell me where yo
u are, and that’s a direct order.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound at all contrite. “Write me up when we get out of here.”

  Jodenny understood his reasoning but she wasn’t going to stand for it. His last report had put him somewhere on thirty-eight. She sailed up the shaft, picked level thirty-seven at random, and moved down it with a few choice, muttered curses.

  “You should go up to the command module, Jodenny. Safer that way.”

  “Not for you.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “Not for me.”

  Standard EV suits didn’t come equipped with Geiger counters. He would have no way of determining how many roentgens he’d been exposed to or when to stop. She imagined his hair and teeth falling out, the sperm dying off in his testes, and the lesions that would sear his skin.

  “It’ll go faster if we work together,” she heard herself say. “If they come fast enough, the radvaxes will take care of everything.”

  “I’ve got five crates open,” he said. “Get out of here before you expose yourself.”

  A trail of red alarm lights lit up above her head. Jodenny squinted at their brightness and followed them toward Myell. Even if the bridge sensors were immediately noticed, what priority would it rate, a radiation leak in an unmanned tower, and how long would it take to send a team out to investigate? She hoped to hell the duty officer was paying attention. When she reached Golf block she saw Myell floating listlessly.

  She pushed her face plate close to his. “Terry?”

  His expression was resigned. “I wanted you to stay safe.”

  “Safe is when I’m with you,” she told him. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  They took refuge in the command module and reminisced about Mary River.

  “I almost went with Colby and Dottie to that dance,” he said. “They wanted me to come and socialize. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d walked in and seen you there.”

  “Same thing you did when you saw me drive up with him. Kept quiet until you knew what was going on.” Jodenny cocked her head. “That’s your way, isn’t it? You keep quiet until you know the whole story.”

  He shrugged inside his suit. “Sometimes I just keep quiet.”

  Strapped into the chairs, they turned off their lights to conserve power and sat in the red glow of the emergency exit light. The shaft before them was so dark and fathomless Jodenny imagined it was like the Alcheringa itself.