The Outback Stars

CHAPTER


TWENTY





T

he next day she took Rokutan up on his offer to tour the Flight Deck and hangar. The Flight Deck was on A-Deck, and it was from there that all the birdies, foxes, and other ship’s craft launched and returned. A few dozen craft sat parked against the bulkheads, much as they’d been during the Hail and Farewell. The launch doors were closed, but during normal ops they would be open with a clearshield in place. The lifts, winches, and DNGOs that moved the ships around in the cavernous space were all quiet, and only one ser-geant was on duty in the overhead booth normally manned by two dozen Flight crew.



“Everyone’s off in meetings or training,” the sergeant said when Rokutan brought Jodenny up.



Rokutan said, “Lieutenant Scott was interested in seeing how things worked up here.”



“Sure thing, Commander,” the sergeant said. He gave Jodenny a quick but thorough overview of the panels, vids, and sensors. “There’s nothing going on while we’re in the Alcheringa, but the minute we drop out at Warramala we’ll launch the foxes, get the birdies out in-specting the towers, start receiving passengers and cargo, and start up training flights. Everything gets prepped, repaired, boarded, un-loaded down in the hangar—the Flight Deck’s only for launching and landing, and you don’t want to be out there when the birdies fire up their engines anyway.”



Jodenny nodded politely, well aware of most of that already.



“We do primary monitoring from this station here. There’s always a Flight Duty Officer on watch, even when nothing’s happening. In the event of an emergency that FDO can take remote control of any ship that carries our markers. There’s a backup station on the bridge, and they can do the same. In a really big emergency, the bridge can ac-tually ditch the clearshield by jettisoning the shield generators. We’ve got our own manual override—that control panel down there.”



Jodenny could see the panel, which was marked with clear danger signs.



The sergeant snickered. “Course, you’d only do that if you’re crazy, desperate, or bucking for a hero’s medal.”




He paused, his gaze flickered to the MacBride Cross on Jodenny’s uniform. She pretended not to notice. Hastily the sergeant said, “Any-way that’s all that’s exciting up here. The hangar’s where the real action is.”



“Thanks, Sergeant,” Rokutan said.



A shielded evacuation ladder led from the Ops booth through the Flight Deck and into the hangar below. A dozen birdies were stripped open for maintenance, and at least thirty mechanics were busy run-ning diagnostics or swapping out equipment. The Flight Support of-fice was a tiny room with space enough for only three desks, some filing cabinets, and a few battered chairs. It smelled like machine oil and fried electronics circuits.



“Morning, sir,” said Sergeant Gordon, a cheerful woman sitting at one of the desks. “Morning, ma’am. Like our office? Used to be a supply closet. The commander gets his own office in Ops. They like him up there.”



Jodenny’s gib pinged. “Excuse me,” she said, and saw that it was Dr. Ng on her ID screen. “I forgot a meeting. Can I take a rain check?”



“Rain or shine, we’re here,” Rokutan said easily. “Come back any-time.”



Jodenny hurried down to F-Deck. Ng wasn’t in his office. She wan-dered around the science maze until she saw him standing in a small conference room, getting berated by another scientist.



“—that’s not what you’re funded for, Harry,” the woman was say-ing.

“Keep your eyes on your own work, and for god’s sake give up these conspiracy theories.”



Jodenny tiptoed away and waited a few minutes. When Ng did re-turn to his office he had red cheeks and looked miserable. “Oh,” he said, when he saw Jodenny. “Come in.”



Ng had revidded his walls so that the Pleiades star cluster covered the overhead. The Seven Sisters, Jodenny noted. “Everything all right?”

she asked.



“Yes. Fine.” Ng’s attention was solely on his deskgib. “I tried call-ing you. Those runes. They could be from the Wondjina.”



“You said they weren’t.”



“They’re not the kind of runes we’re used to seeing inscribed on Sphere archways.” Ng turned the deskgib screen so she could see it. His shoulders relaxed a bit as he warmed to the topic. “There are thirty-two distinct markings in that alphabet, most of them simple vertical and diagonal hash marks. Symbols that would have been easy to carve into trees and stone to convey short messages— things like ‘This way to the village.’

Pre-medieval Vikings on Earth had a similar system. Of course, we don’t have any kind of Rosetta stone, so no one knows what they mean. We do believe that beings we call the Wondjina built the Spheres, and maybe made the Little and Big Alcheringas, so they would have needed another alphabet to communicate complex messages—engineering logs, scientific research, things like that. The Vikings had another alpha-bet, too.”



“No one’s ever found another Wondjina alphabet.”



“True. Except for the Spheres, all traces of their civilization have vanished. But about forty years ago an old woman named Mary Dory told the police that she walked into a Mother Sphere near Arborway on Fortune and walked out of a Mother Sphere on some other planet. This was back when people still hoped that Spheres might hold treasure, or dead pharaohs, or all the secrets of the universe. She was as drunk as a skunk when she talked to the police, though, and no one else who visited the Sphere found anything amiss, so it got filed as a piece of urban legend. Twenty years later it was docu-mented in a thesis by a graduate student specializing in modern folk-lore.” Ng tapped on his deskgib, indicating the pie-shaped symbol. “The student found this same symbol in Mary Dory’s diaries.”



Jodenny stared at the symbol. She and Myell hadn’t been the first to travel through a Sphere, but they’d been damn close.



“Where exactly did Mary Dory see it?”



“The diary didn’t say. And by the time the graduate student went looking, the old lady had disappeared. No one knows what happened to her.”



“Can I access the thesis and diaries?” Jodenny asked.



Ng shook his head. “No, just abstracts and some sample pages. I doubt the diaries were ever archived in their entirety, and if so they wouldn’t be included in the standard Team Space databases. But when we get to Warramala I can check in some civilian libraries there.”



Jodenny stared at the pie-shaped symbol. An old woman, a bottle of booze, a mysterious trip. “Can I get you to test some soil samples? From the bottom of some boots.”



Ng stared at her. “Whose boots? Soil from where?”



“Don’t ask. I just want to see if there’s anything unusual. Any unidentified plants or minerals.”



“You won’t even tell me who saw these symbols, and when, and where—don’t you understand? If you can step through a Sphere and wind up somewhere else, maybe that has something to do with what happened to the Yangtze.”



“How could it?” Jodenny demanded.



Ng waved his hands in irritation. “I don’t know. I can’t know, until I get more facts. And you’re the one who’s got data she won’t share. Do I think the Spheres can magically transport anyone? No. Not based on what we know right now about them.”



“But you think they could make a starship explode,” Jodenny said.



They stared at each other for a moment.



Jodenny broke the silence. “Please test the boots. If there’s nothing unusual on them, there’s nothing to talk about. When we get to Warramala we can check the libraries, and go from there.”



Ng didn’t look happy about it, but he didn’t fight her, either. Jo-denny left the Space Sciences labs with images of runes in her head. On the Flats she saw Olsson waiting for a lift. He stabbed the call but-ton when he saw her, a guilty expression on his face.



“AT Olsson,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”



“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and darted a nervous look around.



“You haven’t answered my imail.” Jodenny had only sent the imail because AM Dyatt had begged her to, and his failure to respond was annoying.



“Sorry, ma’am.” The lift doors opened, and Olsson hurried inside. “I can’t talk. I’m late to watch.”



He was probably lying, but she let him go anyway. She turned away from the lift and saw RT Bartis gazing at her from the corner of the Supply Officer’s suite. He blinked at her and turned away, and she went back to her office thinking only of Ng and Wondjina runes.



* * * *



C

hang wanted off that night’s midwatch and offered seventy yuros for anyone to take it. Myell swapped for free. Walking cold decks dur-ing the wee hours was preferable to being chased by Daris through nightmares. At midnight he reported to the watch office, where thirty other men and women were donning belts and other gear.



“Remind me why robots can’t do this shit,” AT Hull said from be-hind him.



“Because Team Space needs to keep you busy somehow, bucky,”

someone else replied.



Myell turned around. “Because robots can tell when a sensor is triggered, but they can’t tell from a sailor’s expression if he’s up to no good.”



Hull shrugged. “I guess.”




Interesting duty was patrolling the Rocks, where there was plenty of opportunity to meet women. Shitty duty was the underdeck crew bars, off-limits to civilians, where off-duty sailors drank and brawled. Myell and Hull pulled rotation on E-and F-Decks, which would be mostly quiet. Hull hated working in Ops and wouldn’t stop com-plaining about it.



“Twice last week Chief came to work pissed,” Hull said. “Lieu-tenant saw it but didn’t do anything. Why don’t we all throw back a dozen pints before coming to work? What’s the point if no one cares? Might as well sit around all day cruising message boards rather than actually try to get anything done.”



They got off the lift at F-Deck and started down the passage. The of-ficers’ gym was open twenty-four hours a day, but no one was inside.



“—so then she told him she’d sleep with him if he changed the ros-ter, and he did, then he finds out she gave him herpes—”



The hydroponics lab was shut down and the door lock said it was secure. Myell double-checked by turning the knob and scanned the lock with his gib.



“—he would have gotten kicked out too, but the Sweet test came back borderline and they gave him a third chance—”



The ship’s training library was used for night classes conducted by live instructors. Locked. The post office handled packages, handmail, and imail. Locked. While Hull droned on about his division, Myell went through the entire checklist and stopped only when he saw a light on in Space Sciences.



“Everything okay, Dr. Ng?” he asked the scientist sitting in his of-fice.



Ng shielded his deskgib as if protecting some highly classified se-cret. “Yes, Sergeant. Thank you.”



Myell and Hull went upladder to E-Deck. The AT started another long sob story and Myell interrupted him to ask, “If you’re so miser-able, why don’t you ask for a transfer?”



Hull grimaced. “One department’s the same as the other, right? Hey, let’s get some coffee.”



“Your job is checking hatches and keeping an eye out, not getting coffee.”



“I’ll get coffee, you check the hatches.” Hull headed for the nearest vending machines.



Myell tried one of the back doors to the E-Deck gym. Unlocked. The passage led to maintenance rooms for the swimming pool, saunas, and steam rooms. A few meters down the passage he found a door clumsily propped open with a towel. He eased into the men’s locker room. White tiles gleamed underneath his boots, and the smell of soap hung heavy in the warm, moist air.



He heard something odd-a squeak, then a thud. He stopped, afraid that the Rainbow Serpent and the Wirrinun were about to put in a special waking appearance. But the next thud sounded too pro-saic to be of supernatural origin. He rounded the corner to where Engel had Olsson pinned against a row of lockers. Spallone stood a meter or so away, vicious glee on his face. Olsson was naked and wet, blood staining the corner of his mouth.



“Let him go,” Myell ordered.



Spallone barely glanced at him. “F*ck you, Myell. Turn and walk away.”



“Don’t leave!” Olsson pleaded, and Engel shook him.



“Shut the f*ck up,” Engel said.



Myell put a hand on his radio. “Back off now, the two of you, or we can talk about it with the duty officer.”



Engel glanced over his shoulder at Spallone. Myell kept his expres-sion stony. He predicted Spallone rushing him a second before Spal-lone tried it. He caught him by the arm, twisted the arm behind his back, and shoved him up against the wall. Spallone cursed and spat, but Myell leveraged his arm until it was close to breaking.



“You want more, swipe?” Myell asked.



Spallone didn’t stop struggling. “You and me, Myell. You and me.”



“Anytime, shithead.”



Hull piped up from the doorway, where he was observing them all.

“Coffee, anyone? Scalding hot, poured over your head? Who wants it?”



Myell said, “Engel, let him go.”



Engel reluctantly backed off from Olsson, who slid to the floor with a thump and sat there with his hand pressed against his jaw. Spallone grumbled and swore some more but finally calmed down enough that Myell released him.



“Are we reporting this, Sergeant?” Hull asked.



“No, you’re not,” Spallone said.



Hull grimaced. “Not the sergeant I meant. Sergeant Myell?”



From the floor, Olsson said, “I won’t testify.”



“None of us will.” Spallone’s eyes were on Myell only. “Leave it alone or pay the consequences. It’ll be our word against yours, and you know how that always goes.”



Myell did know. “Your word means shit. Get the f*ck out of here.”



Spallone smirked. “Keep your eyes at the back of your head,” he said, and he and Engel walked away and out the back door.



Olsson pulled himself up to the bench. “Shit.”



“You all right?” Myell asked.



“Yeah.” Olsson grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his hips, but didn’t seem inclined to say more.



Hull was watching the door worriedly. “We’re really not reporting this?

Just let them get away with it?”



“Give us a minute,” Myell said to Hull. When they were alone Myell said, “You’re going to tell Security what happened. You’ve got two witnesses to back you up.”



Olsson’s tone was tight. “Leave it, Myell, before someone gets hurt in a bad way.”



“That’ll be you, next time they get you alone in a corner.” Myell didn’t like Olsson, but he wasn’t going to be responsible for anything happening to him. “If you care for Dyatt, if that kid’s yours, you need to take care of things before you get yourself hurt or killed.”



Olsson put his hands over his face. “No one can help with this.”



“Is it about the dingo that was stolen?”



Silence.



“I know something’s going on,” Myell said. “You don’t have to go along with them. You could ask for a transfer—”



“Myell, leave it alone.” Olsson stood and started pulling his clothes from a locker. “You’re the last f*cking person I’m going to talk to.”



Myell said, “Then at least talk to Chaplain Mow.”



“What the hell can a chaplain do?”



“Get you reassigned, like Dyatt. Maybe more, depending. We can go right now. She won’t mind.”



Olsson shut the locker door and leaned his head against it. For a moment all he did was breathe noisily through his mouth. Then he said, “I’ll go on my own.”



“Trust me,” Myell said. “Walking around alone isn’t what you want to be doing right now.”



* * * *



S

anchez had qualified, Gunther was close to taking his oral exams, Hultz had passed her written tests, and Ysten was almost done with his qualifications. Jodenny scheduled herself for a bridge training watch and made sure that it was during a shift when Osherman would be off duty. The Officer of the Day was Lieutenant Hamied, a severe-looking woman with tight, worn features. Once Hamied took turnover and made sure they were sailing smoothly along the Alcheringa, she asked, “What’s the normal output range of the power plants while in port?”



“Two hundred fifty to three-fifty Hawkings,” Jodenny said.




“Under what conditions can the Officer of the Day authorize a search warrant?”



“Only if the CO and XO are incapacitated and all legal require-ments as outlined in TSINST 5367 are met.”



Hamied asked, “When do you notify the captain of an injury or ill-ness among the crew?”



“Good question,” said Chief Roush, the Assistant Officer of the Watch. He draped himself over the nearest railing. “Who can say, these days?”



“Was there a problem?” Jodenny asked.



Hamied allowed, “A little one.”



Roush stroked his jaw. “There was an accident back on Kook-aburra and the duty officer didn’t tell him right away. Hell to pay for that, you can be sure.”



“Lieutenant Commander Greiger?” Jodenny asked. “That acci-dent?”



Roush said, “I hear it took the local police a while to find him, and they didn’t know he was Team Space right away. Even after it was reported, Lieutenant Anzo didn’t say boo to the captain until the morning.”



Hamied reached for Jodenny’s gib. “Let’s see your qualification list, see what we can sign off.”



They went through two dozen questions, easy stuff mostly. Then Jodenny took her place on the podium and settled in to watch the evening’s proceedings. From the bridge, the city was a metropolis that included power grids, telecommunications, water treatment plants, air scrubbers, traffic jams, law enforcement problems, and medical emergencies. On any given night, the crew of five thousand sailors and a civilian population twice that size could get into consid-erable trouble, but for the first hour Hamied’s only concerns were a brief power outage on D-Deck and a report of a stolen gib on G-Deck.



Two hours into the watch, a Security report came in of two do-wops fighting on the Rocks over a Sweet deal gone bad. The senior Security officer on duty had them arrested and taken to the civvie jail in T1, where they would face a magistrate in the morning. Shortly thereafter someone suffered a cardiac emergency in T14, the prison colony. They had their own doctors and security guards to respond to that. Around midnight a radiation alarm went off in T3; the manifest showed there was some radioactive materials stored on level four-teen, and a team of rad techs responded.



“False alarm,” came the report, twenty minutes later.



The rest of the watch was routine. Around oh-four-hundred Jo-denny found herself yawning uncontrollably. She walked around, drank a large cup of coffee, and leaned backward, stretching her spine. At the crest of the bridge dome was a wooden carving of a gum tree. Every Team Space ship had some kind of totem like that, in honor of Jackie MacBride and her crew. This tree, with its maze of spindly branches and green leaves, had a snake entwined around its trunk. A snake that wound around and around, and bit its own tail.



“Something interesting up there, Lieutenant?” Chief Roush asked.



Jodenny rubbed her arms against a sudden chill. “Not so much.”



They turned the watch over at oh-six-hundred and Jodenny was back in her cabin twenty minutes later. She splashed her face with cold water and changed uniforms. After quarters she would check in at the office and return for some much-needed sleep. On impulse she had Holland call up the logs and reports about Greiger’s accident. A flit, a country road, neither alcohol nor drugs believed to be con-tributing factors—maybe Greiger was just a lousy driver.



“Was there ever a follow-up report from Kookaburra about Lieu-tenant Commander Greiger’s medical status?” she asked.



Holland replied, “Not that I can see, Lieutenant.”



Maybe he had died of his injuries. More likely he was off enjoying medical leave at the beach while she cleaned up his damned division.



Her eyes returned to the deskgib. Lieutenant Jennifer Anzo, the of-ficer who had failed to report Greiger’s accident right away, had grad-uated from Officer Candidate School in the same class as David Quenger. Quenger, in turn, had been slated to take over Greiger’s job until Jodenny arrived. She queried Anzo’s duty assignment and saw that she was attached to the Data Department, working for Osherman. There was a pattern there, a network of connections she couldn’t quite see, but she was too tired to think it through.



With only fifteen minutes until morning quarters she swung by the mess decks and found Francesco in a corner booth, looking hung-over and nursing a cup of coffee.



“Do you know Lieutenant Anzo in Data?” she asked.



“Not by name. Why?”



Jodenny slid into his booth. “Heard she got into trouble with the captain when she didn’t report Greiger’s accident.”



Francesco reached for the imitation sugar. “You can get in trouble for a lot less. You don’t want to be making too many inquiries about Data, anyway.”



“Why not?”



He dumped the sugar into this cup. “Close-knit bunch. Keep to themselves. Something dirty happens, they sweep it under the rug and don’t want you peeking.”



“Did something dirty happen?”



He wagged a finger at her. “Precisely my point. Don’t ask, don’t get lied to.”



Jodenny checked her watch. She was perilously close to being late to quarters. “Something dirty about Greiger? It’s no secret he wasn’t doing a good job in Underway Stores. But why would Anzo delay re-porting his accident?”



“I don’t know what you’re rambling on about.”



“But you suspect.”



Francesco reached for more sugar. “I suspect a lot of things. Why did Commander Matsuda keep Greiger and Chiba in Underway Stores, when everyone knew they were trouble? Was he part of what-ever they’re up to? Where did Matsuda disappear to, anyway? And remember that dingo your division lost when we were leaving Kook-aburra? Bigger stuff than that’s gone missing. People hush it up, in-vestigations get quashed. You can guess who did it, but they’ve always got alibis on the other side of the ship when shit happens.”



Jodenny had to go immediately or set a bad example for her sailors.

“Thanks for the info. You all right, or just up too late?”



Francesco poured himself more coffee. “A gentleman never tells.”



* * * *



J

odenny was almost late to quarters. Myell watched her rush in just a moment before Nitta called the ranks to order. Her face was hag-gard, as if she’d been up all night. After quarters she asked Myell to take on Ensign Ysten for the day, training him in tower operations.



“Yet another in a long line of skills I’ll never need to know,” Ysten said as he and Myell rode the lift to the command module.



Myell wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Ysten hanging around all day. He, Hosaka, and Ishikawa were finishing up the June inventory and the DNGOs were acting up again. Thera had a three-minute gap in her memory and Andromeda failed to acknowledge a retrieval order from Core. Myell had both robots report to the bottom of the hold.



“I’ll go take a look at them, Sergeant,” Hosaka said.



“No, I will,” he said, enjoying the power of delegation. If one of them had to be stuck with Ysten, it might as well be her. “I’ll be back soon.”



Hosaka mouthed a mild obscenity at him as he left. Myell only grinned. He took Andromeda to his workbench and stripped out her transceiver. It tested fine when he ran a diagnostic, but just to be sure he swapped it out for a standby unit. While he was wrestling it in he spied a tiny silver chip. He might have ignored it completely if he hadn’t seen ones just like it back when he served on the Kashmir. He extracted the master chip and held it up to the light.




“Well, hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?”



Master chips were only in use on Class IV and Class V DNGOs. Andromeda was a Class III, and the chip appeared fairly new. He had it running through the diagnostic unit when Hosaka pinged and said, “Circe won’t respond.”



“Have Core reboot her.”



“I tried, Sarge.”



Ensign Ysten cut onto the line. “Sergeant, really, you need to han-dle this yourself.”



Myell knew Ysten didn’t like Hosaka, and hadn’t since she had complained to Jodenny about his safety inspection. “I’ll be right up,” he said, and sealed Andromeda up again. He almost left the master chip out on the bench, but reconsidered. He reached far into the top drawer and pressed up with his fingers until a small compartment fell open. Chief Mustav had kept a liquor flask in there, all the better for warming oneself up on cold mornings in the hold. The chip easily fit inside.



Up in the command module, he tried recalling Circe. She ignored all requests.



Ysten said, “You’ll have to get her.”



He could have sent Ishikawa or Hosaka, but it would be more ex-pedient to do it himself. As a favor to Hosaka he took Ysten up to the observation module, where Ishikawa had already hauled out an EV suit and gear.



“Would you like to come into the slots with me, sir?” Myell asked.



Ysten’s lips thinned. “I’ll stay right here on terra firma.”



Over the comm, Hosaka announced she was locking down the tower. Five minutes later the DNGOs were stilled and Myell was gaz-ing at the drop from the safety of the ledge. That first step never got any better. He maneuvered down the rungs a short distance to level forty-eight and peered into the slot. His headlamp picked out bins, grates, and navigation markers.



“How long does this normally take?” Ysten asked over his headset.



“Depends on how badly she’s stuck, sir,” Myell replied.



He moved slowly through the zero-g, trying hard to keep from imagining monsters lurking in the shadows. Why did Andromeda have a master chip inside her? For the same reasons other DNGOs did. Someone outside of Core was radioing her instructions. Such a person would have needed access to the DNGOs to make the modifi-cations. Someone who worked in Repair. What had Dyatt said the night he took her to Chaplain Mow? That Olsson and the others were at the shop in the middle of the night—



The General Quarters alarm tore through his headset, making him jerk in surprise.



“Damn it,” Hosaka said. “Goddamned GQ!”



Up in the observation module, Ishikawa asked, “What do we do?”



Myell ordered, “Go to your stations. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”



“You know we can’t,” Hosaka said. “We can’t leave anyone in the shaft unattended.”



Their delay would drag down the department’s response rate but it was the captain’s fault for having a drill at such an inopportune time anyway. The obnoxiously loud siren made Myell’s ears ache and he dialed down his comm. He headed back toward the shaft.



Ysten asked, peevishly, “Where are you, Sergeant?”



“Still at D—”



Something bright and fast-moving flashed in the corner of his eye.



“Shit!” Myell tried to jerk away, but the DNGO slammed into him and sent him reeling against the nearest bin. The lamp in his helmet flickered and went out. For a moment he felt no injuries. What fortune. Direct impact with a flying hunk of metal and he wasn’t even hurt. Then red sparkles filled his vision and a bone-deep pain seared through his right side, hip, and knee as surely as if he’d been set on fire.



“Terry!” Hosaka’s voice was sharp in his ear.



“Report, Sergeant!” Ysten ordered.



“Dingo—” he started, and coughed up blood. Some of it splattered against his helmet but most of it clogged his throat or hung in the zero-g. The DNGO that had hit him hovered just a few feet away, hav-ing automatically gone into standby mode.



“Sarge, where are you?” Ishikawa asked.



Darkness and his own blood obscured the bin markers. Myell’s suit temperature must have dropped thirty degrees, because his lungs were freezing up in his chest. Fire and ice battled through him. Al-though he could wrap his hands around the thruster controls, he didn’t have the strength to squeeze the handles or steer himself in any given direction. Even if he did move, he feared ramming himself against the DNGO or into bins. More blood clogged his throat and his efforts to clear it produced an odd choking screech. The voices on his headset faded in and out, accompanied by the GQ alarm.



“Which dingo hit him?” Hosaka asked.



Ishikawa sounded near tears. “Circe.”



“What does it matter?” Ysten demanded.



“If we can kick her out of standby, she can tow him out to the shaft.”

Hosaka’s voice turned stern. “Terry! Do you see Circe? Can you get to her?”



The DNGO’s blue lights blurred at the edges. Every breath sent red-hot spears into Myell’s side, and for one clear moment he imag-ined his injuries—crushed ribs, maybe a punctured lung, some other fractures. He tried to get closer to the robot and saw that something was wrong. The hull markings, the scratches…



“Terry, listen to me,” Hosaka said. “Hold on!”



He remembered his mother, dead too early by her own hand. And surely he was dying too, because he could almost see her image re-flected on the DNGO’s hull, and wasn’t that how things worked? That the dead came to escort you to the other side? She would have been more useful if she’d come on those cold winter mornings to protect him from Daris, but anger served no purpose and he was glad of the company. She looked like Colby, her skin smooth and dewy, her hair short and golden. The last present she had given him was a gram of herself on a beach, and then she had hanged herself.



“Terry,” someone said—maybe his mother, maybe Hosaka, maybe even the sour Ensign Ysten. It didn’t matter. Blood was in his throat again, and this time he couldn’t cough it out no matter how hard he tried.



His heart stuttered and all sensation faded away.



* * * *