The Outback Stars

CHAPTER


FOURTEEN





I

t took some creative maneuvering to avoid Jodenny, but Myell sus-pected she must have heard about the confrontation with Chiba by now and he didn’t want to talk about it. Come morning he’d be sitting on a birdie and two hours after that would have the firm ground of Mary River under his feet. Until then he was satisfied to eat dinner alone on the mess decks long after most people had finished. He was reviewing message boards on his gib when VanAmsal slid into his booth.



“Did you do it?” VanAmsal asked.



“Do what?”



“Ford.”



“No.” Myell went back to his dinner of potatoes and beans.



“She said you did.” VanAmsal took his butter knife and scratched it along the table’s surface. “One of you is lying.”



“It’s not me.”



She gazed at him steadily. “Why’s your face all bruised?”



Myell touched his cheek. “This wasn’t—”



“Everyone knows you were ambushed the day we dropped,” she said. “Shevi Dyatt went to Sick Berth this morning with a black eye that she claims she got from walking into a door. Someone needs to teach Chiba’s men a lesson.”



“Tisa—”



“I’d stay in my cabin tonight if I were you,” she said, and walked away.



Myell went back to Supply berthing. The lounge was empty and Gallivan didn’t answer his gib. His uneasiness increasing, Myell trammed over to the Rocks. Music spilled out of storefronts, colonists ate sumptuous meals under the starry dome, and children darted in and around their parents’ legs. The evening’s game, Dunredding vs. Notting Bay, played out in every bar and on the Rocks’ main vids. An exceptionally bad call by a referee caused a riot of boos and heckles. Myell checked the clubs where Gallivan’s band played and the the-ater where old Earth films were shown on an old-fashioned flat screen. He ran into Lieutenant Francesco from Disbursing at the popcorn counter.



“Something wrong, Sergeant?” Francesco asked. “You look worried.”



“No, sir,” Myell said. “Have a good evening.”



On his way out he saw Chief Vostic duck into a corner. There were rumors about Francesco and Vostic, but he had no interest in seeing if they were true. For the next hour he scoured the Rocks but returned to his cabin in defeat. Timrin, standing a Fire and Security midwatch, pinged him at oh-three-hundred.



“There was a fight down near the Flight Deck,” Timrin said.

“Se-curity’s sorting them all out now. Your guys and Maintenance.”



“Shit,” Myell said. “Does Lieutenant Scott know?”



“She’s on her way down.”



“Should I come, too?” he asked.



Timrin gave him a humorless smile. “If I were you, I’d go crawl under a rock. The less anyone sees of you, the better for everyone.”



* * * *



J

odenny had spent most of her afternoon attending meetings, an-swering COSAL data requests, and reviewing the final May inventory, which held at ninety-five percent. After work, she popped aspirin for a headache and had dinner in the wardroom. Then she gathered Hultz, Gunther, and Ysten to tell them any liberty they’d been granted for Mary River was canceled because their watch qualifications were unfinished.



“That’s not fair!” Gunther said.



“I’ve been planning a trip on Mary River since deployment began,”

Ysten said.



“If you’d finished up like Sanchez did, you wouldn’t be in this predicament,” Jodenny said. “Besides, you’re not liberty-starved. You all had time off on Kiwi and Kookaburra.”



“Can’t you talk to Commander Al-Banna and change his mind?” Hultz asked.



“It was my idea,” Jodenny said.



Hultz threw herself back on the sofa. “But it’s all so dumb! Ship’s velocity, Alcheringa coordinates—I mean, really, when will I ever be in charge of the bridge when there’s not seventy people who know what they’re doing better than I do?”



“When those seventy people are dead or dying,” Jodenny snapped.



That night she had a nightmare in which she could hear Dyanne telling her not to be so hard on the ensigns. In her dream Dyanne was standing right behind her. “Turn around and see,” Dyanne said, but Jodenny wouldn’t. She knew the thing behind her wasn’t human any-more, but instead a monster of crushed bone and flesh. The buckled decks of the Yangtze stretched all around her, the bulkheads burning and ripping apart—



Holland’s voice said, “Lieutenant, please wake up. Security has in-formed me that RT Gallivan, RT Chang, AT Kevwitch, and AT Ishikawa have been taken into custody for fighting.”



Jodenny stared at the ceiling for a moment, unsure if she was awake or still dreaming. She asked Holland to repeat what she had said and then called the duty sergeant, Sergeant Timrin. He told her that sailors from the Maintenance division were also involved in the fight. He said, “Lieutenant Quenger’s been notified, and Chief Chiba’s on his way. Do you want me to call the SUPPO?”




“No, don’t bother him. I’ll be right down.”



The situation was bad enough without the added detail that Osherman was the Command Duty Officer, and his grim expression was the first thing Jodenny saw when she arrived in Security. Her four sailors were sequestered in one cell sporting a variety of bruises and cuts. In a separate cell sat Spallone, Engel, and Olsson, each of them equally banged up. Chiba had already arrived and acted mad enough to throw a few punches himself.



“Your people started this,” he said to Jodenny.



Jodenny ignored his accusatory tone. “Commander, what hap-pened?”



“They claim it’s something about the soccer game,” Osherman said.



“I lost some money myself,” Sergeant Timrin volunteered from the corner.



Osherman gave him a withering look. “I don’t believe them.”



“My men are clean.” Chiba glared at the holding cells. “They know my rules about fighting and they know what I’d do to them after a thing like this. If anyone started it, it was Underway Stores.”



Jodenny appealed to Osherman. “Fighting is a serious offense, sir, but this looks more like a scuffle—”



“Have you seen Engel’s eye?” Chiba demanded.



Jodenny kept talking. “What if we agree to handle it in-house? I’m sure Commander Al-Banna would be happy to address it within the Supply Department. Less paperwork and bloodshed all around if we don’t have to do captain’s masts.”



“It’s not up to Commander Al-Banna,” Osherman said, but she no-ticed that he didn’t entirely disagree with the suggestion.



“I think Underway Stores should pay for starting trouble,” Chiba said.



Jodenny turned to Timrin. “Was there any property damage, Sergeant Timrin?”



“Not at all, ma’am.”



“That’s not what I meant,” Chiba fumed.



“And no civilians saw what happened,” Timrin added helpfully.



“Release them and we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again,”

Jo-denny said to Osherman.



Osherman didn’t look entirely convinced. “Do you agree, Chief, or do you want to muddy up both divisions in front of the CO?”



For a minute Jodenny thought he was going to be an a*shole about it, just because he could. Then Chiba blew out a noisy breath. “Looks like I’m outvoted, doesn’t it?”



Osherman went off to consult by gib with Senga and Picariello. Chiba glowered at everyone and everything. Jodenny decided not to try to reason with him. When Osherman returned he said, “All right. They’re yours. No complaints will be filed for the time being. But the incident’s in the log, and next time this happens, they’ll face double charges.”



“There won’t be a next time,” Jodenny promised, and went to col-lect her sailors.



“Lieutenant!” Gallivan stood up with some excuse ready on his lips, but she wasn’t in the mood to hear it.



“Go back to your cabins, lock the doors, clean yourselves up, and get into your best dress uniforms,” she ordered. “We’re all going to be in the SUPPO’s office at oh-seven-hundred.”



Gallivan asked, “Don’t you want to know what happened?”



“They started it,” Chang said.



“I don’t want to hear excuses,” Jodenny said. “The one thing I told you all when we first started working together was that I expected you to be professionals. This is so far from the definition of profes-sional that I guess I was speaking some foreign language.”



“But we did it for Underway Stores,” Gallivan protested.



She retorted, “I thought it was about soccer.”



Chang swallowed hard. “It was for the honor of the division, ma’am. You can’t let them push people around.”



“Who did they push around?” Jodenny asked, although she already had a good idea.



Kevwitch kept silent. Ishikawa, who had said nothing since Jo-denny entered the cell, studied the tips of her boots. Chang turned immediately to Gallivan, who cleared his throat and said, “It doesn’t matter, ma’am. We’ve all worked out an understanding.”



“Do as I told you,” she said. “And if you so much as ping someone from Maintenance I’ll have you back here so fast you’ll think you never left.”



“Ma’am,” Gallivan said, but she pointed toward the lift and he plodded off with a hangdog expression.



“AT Kevwitch,” she said, commanding him to stay. “Do you have a keen wish to spend the entire cruise here in the brig?”



“No, ma’am.”



“You would think a man your size could stay out of trouble.”



“It’s because I’m this size that I’m always in trouble,” he said glumly.

“Everyone wants backup, or to prove a point, or to make a show of force.”



“Is that what you were doing tonight? Making a show of force?”



His cheeks colored. “Shevi Dyatt never treats me like an ogre. Sergeant Myell always talks to me like I’m smart.”



“Did Dyatt or Myell ask you to do this?”



“No!” he said. “They don’t know anything about it.”



“So you just decided to defend the division’s honor. I can see Chang and Gallivan in such a harebrained scheme, but Ishikawa? You took an eighteen-year-old girl into a fight?”



Kevwitch blinked in surprise. “Oh, no. She was there with Spallone and such. Hangs out with them sometimes, you know.”



Jodenny hadn’t heard that, but she wasn’t surprised that Ishikawa was less than sensible about who she hung out with. “You’re dis-missed, AT

Kevwitch.”



She pinged Nitta, informed him of what had happened, and told him to conduct morning quarters. At oh-seven-hundred she had her four sailors standing at attention outside Al-Banna’s door, much to Bartis’s amusement. When Al-Banna came in fifteen minutes later he snapped, “Just you, Lieutenant. Inside. Now.”



Jodenny took a deep breath and followed him. Al-Banna had turned off his decor since her last visit, leaving in place only the gray parasteel and a few framed commendations.



“Do I look like some kind of goddamned babysitter?” he asked once the hatch was closed. “You should have let them rot in the brig!”



“I figured the department doesn’t need any more bad publicity—”



“I’ll decide what this department does and does not need. Not you. Understood? If our sailors are dumb enough to get caught fighting, they deserve to be hauled in front of the captain! And what’s this bull-shit about it being about a soccer game?”



Jodenny said, “Dunredding vs. Notting Bay, sir. I had a hundred yuros on it myself.”



Al-Banna scowled. “Get out of here and send your people in.”



A half hour after they went in, her four sailors emerged looking thoroughly shaken. Ishikawa had tear tracks on her face, Kevwitch’s armpits were soaked with sweat, and Chang was so pale she almost had him sit down. Even the normally insouciant Gallivan had to roll his shoulders a few times.



“Commander’s got quite a temper,” he said.



“Yes, he does,” Jodenny said.



“Get me Zarkesh, Quenger, and Chiba!” Al-Banna bellowed, and Jodenny ushered her errant sailors out the door as Bartis scrambled to obey.




* * * *



M

yell noticed that Gallivan, Chang, Ishikawa, and Kevwitch were all absent from morning quarters. Speculation ran rampant: Al-Banna, most agreed, had probably thrown them in the brig. Nitta, acting hungover, had nothing to say about it. He read off a few an-nouncements before letting everyone go off to work. By oh-eight-hundred, just as Myell was heading off for shore leave, Ishikawa showed up in T6. Her visit to Mary River had been canceled and Al-Banna had ordered her to do fifty hours of extra duty.



“I only went to help!” Ishikawa broke into tears. “I didn’t mean to hit anyone.”



Myell left Hosaka to console her. Though time was short, he trammed over to IR2 to ask Gallivan, “Why?”



“Why what?” Gallivan asked, fingering his cut lip. “Why did we teach those dongers a lesson? Easy enough to figure out.”



“Explain it in little words,” Myell suggested.



Gallivan started stacking boots onto a shelf. “I told you, Terry. You have mates here. So does Dyatt. Chiba and his dogs know now that we’ve got our eyes on them, and that we’re not going to stand for any messing around with our people.”



“It’s just going to make things worse,” Myell said.



“Sergeant Gloom, that’s you. Always looking at the worse angle of things.”



Myell wanted to argue more, but he didn’t dare miss his flight. “We’re going to talk about this later,” he promised Gallivan.



“Whatever you say, Gloom. Give my love to Mary River, won’t you?”



* * * *