The Outback Stars

by Sandra McDonald

  Gordon glanced upward. “The commander left that handmail for you. And he wants to know how you’re doing on the safety manual.”

  Jodenny picked up the pile. Rokutan had welcomed her to the division warmly enough, but all she’d done for a month was sort mail, take attendance at morning quarters, and update the division safety manuals. “You’ve got to work up to it,” he’d said when she expressed a desire to do more. Because he seemed to be happily dating a lieutenant from Admin, she didn’t think he was holding their casual encounter against her. “He’s defending his turf,” Vu had said, which was silly. She didn’t expect to make Division Officer again for a long time, whether it be on the Aral Sea or Alaska or any other freighter. She was no threat to his career.

  Just after noon, the ship dropped out of the Alcheringa. The Flight Deck above them began launching robot recons to inspect the towers, soon to be followed by the foxes. Jodenny was more interested in the datastreams coming in from Baiame—local news and entertainment, along with any imail left for them by the last freighter to pass through. The news feeds seemed unusually skimpy, however.

  “Maybe not so much has happened lately,” Gordon said.

  Someone knocked. “Sergeant Gordon,” a voice said, and Jodenny snapped her head up to see Myell standing in the hatchway. Myell continued. “Could you excuse us for a moment? The lieutenant and I need to talk.”

  Gordon blinked. “Sure thing.”

  When she was gone Myell deliberately closed the hatch, leaving just the two of them alone.

  “Are you crazy?” Jodenny asked.

  Myell gazed at her steadily. “Nowhere in ship’s regulations does it say that a lieutenant and a sergeant can’t have a private conversation behind closed doors.”

  She rose. “You don’t think people are watching us?”

  He advanced on her, his eyes dark and mouth grim. “We said we would keep this professional for three months. That doesn’t mean ignoring me in public. It doesn’t mean not even saying ‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ or ‘How are you, Sergeant?’ in a lift.”

  Jodenny flushed. “Ensign Hultz spoke to you.”

  Myell took her by the arms, and the nearness of him nearly made her dizzy. “Ensign Hultz isn’t the woman I love.”

  She would have answered but his mouth covered hers, and suddenly everything that she thought mattered fell away under his demanding kiss. Jodenny arched up against him, wanting him to touch her everywhere, eager to guide his hands under her uniform and around her hips. He groaned a little, and nuzzled the side of her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Jodenny whispered. “I shouldn’t have ignored you.”

  “You never will again,” he vowed, and tightened his hold.

  Which was exactly when the General Quarters began to shriek.

  * * *

  For a moment all Jodenny could think was, Another goddamn drill. Of all the inopportune timing … but then something made an enormous whump on the deck above them, and fire alarms began to shriek along with the General Quarters. She froze in Myell’s arms.

  “What the hell was that?” Myell asked, gazing at the overhead.

  Holland spoke up. “Lieutenant, a General Quarters alarm has been triggered by Flight Operations. There has been a subsequent explosion in the hangar outside your position. I highly advise against evacuating at this time.”

  Myell moved Jodenny aside and started tapping on the deskgib. She felt ice-cold without him to ground her, and the comm announcement did nothing to assuage her fears.

  “Fire and Security crews to A and B Decks. This is a Level One alert.”

  “Level One,” Jodenny murmured.

  “Someone’s trying to board the ship,” Myell said. He didn’t elaborate on who that might be, but there were only a few possibilities. An unknown alien species might have popped out of nowhere, bent on the conquest of Team Space. The colonists of Baiame themselves had perhaps decided to revolt against the Seven Sisters. Or the Colonial Freedom Project had launched another terrorist attack.

  Myell thumped the deskgib in disgust. “Vids are out. We can’t see what’s out there.”

  Jodenny didn’t think she could move. Not when just outside the hatch was a hellish inferno of smoke and flame, and maybe burning bodies melting onto the deck, and who knew what kind of destruction set off by whoever was trying to invade the Aral Sea. But somehow her rubbery legs supported her all the way to the hatch, where she pressed her hand against the metal and found it warm, but not searing hot.

  Myell was examining the small office. Jodenny already knew there was no second exit, no convenient, man-sized air duct to make good an escape. They were sealed up in a corner of B-Deck, and by the time fire crews reached them they’d either be baked alive or suffocated by the fumes. Already the air was warm and acrid, oily in her mouth.

  “Any EV suits?” Myell asked.

  Jodenny shook her head.

  The lights flickered, then dimmed to half power. Jodenny couldn’t hear anything from the hangar but she could imagine screams and moans, and the whoosh as the vacuum of space emptied compartments of air.

  Myell wasn’t giving up. “Is there any firefighting equipment?”

  “No.” Jodenny squeezed the word out. They didn’t even have an old-fashioned extinguisher full of foam or water.

  He grimaced. “We’re going to have to go out the front door, then.”

  Jodenny found that she could in fact move, especially when it came to grabbing his arm. “You heard Holland.”

  “I heard,” he agreed, and though he didn’t say it, she could hear it in his voice: he trusted his own judgment over that of a computer program. Myell freed the belt from around his waist and quickly looped it between the two of them. “We’ll have to crawl out. Where’s the closest exit?”

  “I don’t know.” Panic tinged her voice, and she didn’t bother to hide it.

  Myell took her by the shoulders. “Jodenny, listen to me. We’re going to get out of this, and get out together. But you have to think. Where’s the nearest exit?”

  Jodenny swallowed hard, her throat tight. Diagrams of the hangar flashed before her eyes, fuzzy in some areas, crystal clear in others. “About twenty meters to our right. There’s an escape tube with upladders and downladders, and maybe some EV suits.”

  They tied parts of their shirts over their mouths to protect their airways, then crouched low and got the hatch open. It was a dark, smoky mess out there, impossible to see far. Suppression foam drizzled down from the overhead, sticky and warm. Intense heat washed over Jodenny as she tried to make sense of shouts and muffled calls, and the blast of the General Quarters, and what might have been the high whine of mazer fire. Though he couldn’t possibly see where they were going, Myell began to crawl along the bulkhead toward the promised escape hatch. She followed on hands and knees, shaking so badly she thought she was maybe having a seizure.

  “It’s not far!” Myell called back to her. How foolish he was. Twenty meters under these circumstances was easily equal to a half million kilometers. Doggedly she kept at his heels, choking on smoke, the deck hot beneath her unprotected hands. An explosion rattled her bones. A fuel tank on one of the birdies must have blown. Something clutched Jodenny’s ankle and she let out a yelp of fear.

  “Terry!” she yelled. “Stop!”

  But he couldn’t hear her over the klaxons and whoosh of flames. Jodenny reached for her ankle and touched someone’s raw, burned hand. Blindly she tugged three times on the belt that connected her to Myell and reached for the limp form of a sailor. He was too heavy for her to lift in any way, but she dragged him a few inches, paused to choke on smoke, then tugged him some more. Her lungs were searing in her chest, and she could feel blisters forming on her face and eyelids. Burned alive was how they would be found. No MacBride Cross could protect against the element of fire. Without warning Myell’s hands fumbled next to hers, and suddenly he was pulling on the sailor and pushing Jodenny forward. As the bulkhead bumped up against her back she realiz
ed she was now in the lead. If she didn’t find the damned escape tube within seconds, all three of them were doomed.

  Jodenny crawled, dragging her trembling, aching body forward and forward and even more forward, careful to keep the bulkhead at her right shoulder. She feared they would pass right by the airlock, but then the tiles under her pained hands changed texture. She rose against the bulkhead and jammed her finger against the ID plate. Fresh air lapped at her, cold as a winter breeze. She grabbed Myell’s shoulders and yanked with all her strength. He in turn brought the injured sailor with them, so that all three of them sprawled onto the small deck of the EV space and against the ladder that led up and down.

  Jodenny was choking too hard to lift herself up. Through watering eyes she saw Myell’s dim outline as he rose on his knees and slapped the controls. Powerful fans whooshed to life, sucking the smoke out of the lock and replacing it with fresh atmosphere, but the damn klaxons continued to bang against her skull. Myell collapsed against Jodenny and they clung to each other. The sailor between them groaned, alive but seriously injured.

  “Medbot activate!” Jodenny shouted, and the little robot swooped down to start administering emergency aid.

  “We’re safe.” Myell kissed her forehead. “We’re alive.”

  Something wet soaked into her sleeve. Not foam from Myell’s uniform, but instead blood that was flowing down the side of his face. Jodenny discovered a chunk of metal embedded in his forehead just over his right eye. The eye was swollen shut.

  Alarmed, she tried to stanch the bleeding. “Terry—”

  He caught her hand and squeezed it. “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay. Myell’s eyes slid closed and he slumped against her, his body lax and heavy. Jodenny maneuvered him to the deck in a panic, barely aware of the stern voice now bellowing over her gib.

  “Lieutenant Scott!” It was Captain Umbundo. “Respond if you can hear me.”

  Jodenny blearily wondered what she had done wrong this time. “Sir?” she croaked out. “Sir, we need medical assistance. I have two injured men here—”

  “You need to go upladder to the Flight Deck,” Umbundo said. “We can’t get the clearshield to drop and the fire suppression equipment is damaged. There’s an emergency release near the hangar doors. Do you understand what I’m saying? You have to vent the Flight Deck.”

  Jodenny squeezed her eyes shut. It would be so much easier to just go to sleep, all her cares and worries forgotten, Myell’s blood on her hands along with that of so many others.

  “Everyone will die,” she pointed out, in what she thought was a reasonable tone of voice.

  “Put out those fires!” Umbundo commanded. He must have assumed all of the Flight Deck crew were already dead, or so far gone it didn’t matter. “Do you understand me, Lieutenant? The entire ship is in peril.”

  Jodenny staggered upright. Myell was unconscious, his breathing fast and labored. The injured sailor, his face bright red, was equally insensate. The medbot was doing its best for both of them and would have already transmitted their location back to Core. Jodenny groped for the EV suit hanging in its closet, got herself into it, and turned on the headset. Someone must have patched her into the bridge, because over the klaxons she could now hear Umbundo and other bridge officers, and behind them, fire and repair reports.

  “Lieutenant, do you understand what you have to do?” Umbundo asked. Under his words she could hear his unvoiced question: Do you understand you won’t be coming back?

  “Yes, sir.” And so for the sake of ship and duty she began her long climb upward, the last trip Lieutenant Jodenny Scott would ever make.

  EPILOGUE

  If Terry Myell spent one more day on the planet Baiame he might just end up hijacking a ship of his own and sailing off down the Alcheringa, regulations be damned. Of course, he wasn’t as stupid as to say the word “hijack” aloud. Since the attempted takeover of the Aral Sea, everyone took that prospect way too seriously. That was despite the fact that the CFP rebels who had boarded the Aral Sea had never gotten farther than A-Deck. Security had held back their advances, and Jodenny’s jettison of the clearshield generators had taken care of the rest. Myell still resented Umbundo for ordering her into the inferno, but the tactic had worked well enough.

  Still, here they were, a month later, the ship stuck in orbit around Baiame until the Alaska arrived. The CFP, emboldened by the destruction of the Yangtze, had toppled Baiame’s weak colonial governor and seized Team Space assets shortly before the Aral Sea’s arrival. Now most of the rebels had fled to the hills, pursued by military and civilian security forces. Myell had been deployed planetside to help reorganize the supply stores, which had been raided and looted. But he had enlisted in Team Space specifically to get away from his home planet, and not even speeding a flit over the hills outside Pink Skunk could ease his restlessness.

  “Could you slow down?” Jodenny asked from the passenger seat. She raised her perfectly healed hand and shielded her eyes against the sun. “We’ve got forty-eight hours’ leave, and I want to survive it mostly intact.”

  Myell squeezed her knee and slowed down. He would do anything for her. After the aborted hijacking he’d woken up in Sick Berth suffering from burns and a head injury. Jodenny, ensnared in cables and other debris on the Flight Deck, had been pulled out of her EV suit with broken ribs, a skull fracture, severe burns to her right hand, and pulmonary edema. It had taken her a week to wake up, and another for her to understand his marriage proposal. One of the ship’s chaplains had performed the ceremony in Sick Berth, with the bride and groom in adjacent beds and Commander Vu holding Jodenny’s bouquet for her.

  Before the ceremony, Captain Umbundo bestowed awards and field promotions. Jodenny received her second MacBride Cross and was now Lieutenant Commander Scott. Myell was issued a Silver Star, and made a Chief Petty Officer.

  “The captain should have offered you a commission,” Jodenny said as they were settling into their new married quarters in T7.

  He kissed her hand. “What would I do as Ensign Myell? Besides. Chiefs work for a living. Officers sit around and look pretty all day.”

  “Killing fifty-three men wasn’t pretty,” she murmured, her eyes damp.

  “It’s not that way at all.” Myell pulled her tight. “The Flight staff and Commander Rokutan were already dead or dying. You saved the ship.”

  She still woke up screaming some nights, and he couldn’t blame her. He had his own nightmares to deal with. Usually they were about crawling through a hangar of fire or being lost in the Wondjina Transport System, but every once in a while they were about Daris or the Wirrinun or the Rainbow Serpent. While Jodenny was still in Sick Berth he had driven out to his parents’ farm, determined to put old demons to rest, but the place was gone. Flattened by the bank, the foundation covered over with dirt. His memories weren’t so easy to bury, but when the nightmares came he and Jodenny were there for each other, to hold and comfort in any small way possible, and for that he would always be grateful.

  Now, on a bright hot day with several hours of shore leave still waiting to be filled, Myell stopped the flit on a hill. The capital city of Pink Skunk, with its prefab office buildings and well-planned parkways, lay a few kilometers away, baking in the sun’s glare.

  “That’s where I enlisted,” he said, conversationally.

  Jodenny leaned against his shoulder. “On your eighteenth birthday. I saw that in your record.”

  He had left home without Daris’s permission, and spent a terrified night in the Pink Skunk bus station fearing that his brother would show up and drag him back to the farm. The stern dictates of boot camp sergeants had been pale in comparison to life at home. Team Space had fed him, trained him, and sent him down the Alcheringa, where he’d nearly gotten lost until Jodenny came into his life. He had tried to make her understand how she had saved him, but she simply insisted that they had saved each other.

  Jodenny nuzzled his cheek. “Now you’re brooding.”

>   He kissed her soundly.

  “Much better,” Jodenny said in approval. “So, have you thought more about Wildstein’s offer?”

  “Was that an offer? I thought it was more like an order.” A wedge-tailed eagle glided by overhead, its golden wings almost as wide as Myell was tall. The rustle of its feathers reminded him of the hiss of a snake. “I don’t know if I’m the galley type.”

  Neither was Jodenny sure she was ready to take on Maintenance/Hazardous Materials. She would rather she and her newly minted chief—her husband, she reminded herself, though the wedding ring on her finger was never far from sight—spend the entire trip back to Fortune holed up in their quarters, leisurely and hedonistically enjoying the cruise. But change was a Team Space constant, and she was looking forward to getting back to work after weeks of recuperation and light duty.

  Myell had his eyes on the hawk circling overhead. Jodenny asked, “Will you be happy? Staying in Team Space, married to an officer, unable to tell people about traveling through the Spheres?”

  “If you’re beside me, yes,” he said, with no hesitation in his voice. “Will you?”

  The trip back to Fortune. More personnel problems. Politics as usual, reports and paperwork, the gossiping and backstabbing. She didn’t think she would ever rest completely easy until she knew why her memory had been blocked and what had happened to Osherman and Ishikawa, but it had been weeks since she had thought about the Yangtze. The happiness she had found with Myell could be with her every day, as permanent a part of her life as much as anything could be considered permanent in such a day and age.

  “Yes,” Jodenny said. The golden hawk dipped its head, let out a sharp cry, and flapped away into the clear sky. “I will.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.