The Outback Stars

CHAPTER


TWENTY-SIX





Y

ou’ve got a crush on Lieutenant Scott,” Gallivan said to Myell at breakfast, half an hour before quarters, as they sat in a cor-ner booth on the mess decks. On the overvids, Hal and Sal showed ex-cerpts from Chief Nitta’s memorial service. His autopsy results were already the subject of rumor and gossip on the ship’s message boards.



Myell stared at his gib. “You’re wrong.”



Gallivan snatched one of Myell’s pieces of toast. “Punching Lange in front of a dozen witnesses cemented the rumors.”



“What rumors?”



“What do you think, that we’re all daft? Saw her sitting with Com-mander Osherman during the memorial service, though. Heard they were an item on the Yangtze.”



Myell peered over the top of the gib. “Do you want me to punch you?”



“Certainly not,” Gallivan said. “I’m just saying nothing good can come of it.”



“Shut up, Mike.”



Gallivan managed to stay quiet for only a moment. “Did you find your lizard yet?”



“No.” Myell knew it was absurd to grieve over a missing gecko, but he felt sick just the same. “Tell me, what part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?”



“You going to eat those hash browns?”



“Have them.” Myell pushed his plate away. He’d lost his appetite.



* * * *



F

or the first time since taking over Underway Stores, Jodenny rushed through quarters. All she wanted to do was get back to her of-fice, turn off her gib, and shut off all the lights. Otherwise, just one more sympathetic comment or imail about Nitta’s death would make her start screaming. She hurried out of T6 as soon as possible, made it back to the office before Myell or Caldicot, and was settling into her plan for total retreat when the comm pinged. She only answered it because Ng’s caller identification flashed on the screen.




He said, “I’m sorry about your chief, but still angry with you for wasting my time.”



“Wasting your time? What do you mean?”



Ng told her about his conversation with Myell, and how he’d left the soil analysis from her boots—nothing surprising in it at all—with him. Once Myell and Caldicot were back from T6 and working at their desks, Jodenny emerged from her office with a stack of folders. Myell was on a call that sounded personal.



“I’ll talk to you later,” he murmured. A pause. “Okay, lunch.” He hung up.



Jodenny handed the folders to Caldicot. “Take these to Lieutenant Commander Vu. Right now, please.”



When they were alone, Jodenny asked, “Is there something you forgot to give me, Sergeant?”



Myell went to a filing cabinet and began sorting through paper-work.

“Such as?”



“Something from Dr. Ng?”



“The same Dr. Ng you confided in? About that thing we agreed to keep quiet?”



Jodenny wanted to grab the papers out of his hands and throw them into the air. “I only told him what I had to.”



“Did you tell Commander Osherman, too?”



Jodenny glared at him. “What? Why would I?”



“I saw you with him at the memorial service. You two have a history.”



“My history, Sergeant, is none of your concern. Do I ask you who you’re going to lunch with? Who you’re whispering with on the comm?”



As Myell opened his mouth to retort Faddig emerged from his of-fice wearing a baffled expression. “These F-189s—” he started to say, but stopped. “Everything all right here?”



“The lieutenant and I are having a disagreement,” Myell said.



Faddig perked up. “About what?”



“Inventory,” Jodenny snapped. “Step into my office, Sergeant.”



Behind closed doors Jodenny said, “I don’t have to ask you—” and at the same time Myell said, “You don’t get to decide—” and a part of her observed how close they were to each other, how dangerously close. She could even smell the faint trace of soap on his skin. The comm pinged.



Jodenny hit the speaker button. “What is it?”



“Watch your tone, Lieutenant,” Al-Banna said.



She was immensely glad they were on audio only. “Sorry, sir.”



“Just so you know, the glitches in Core have been repaired. You’re authorized to start sending people into the slots again.”



“They fixed all the errors?” Jodenny asked.



“You don’t trust the Data Department?”



“We’re talking about people’s lives, sir.”



“I know what we’re talking about.” Al-Banna terminated the call.



Jodenny sat at her desk. As much as she wanted to throttle him for talking to Ng, fighting with Myell made her feel sick. By excluding him from Ng’s theories she was treating him as poorly as Nitta and the others had. But she wasn’t quite ready to admit it.



“Call Amador,” she said, “and tell him I’ll be over there at fourteen hundred to pull Athena out.”



A little too sharply Myell asked, “You?”



“Yes, me.” Jodenny’s anger began to rise again. “I won’t send any-one in until I’m confident the problems are cleared up.”



“I’ll go in. I’ve got the most experience.”



“No one’s going into the slots until I do, and that’s an order.”



Myell threw up his hands. “Do you know how stubborn you are?”



“Not half as stubborn as you!”



They didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the morning.



* * * *



M

yell waited until Jodenny was off to a meeting and Caldicot at lunch before he used Faddig’s agent to read the Data Department’s report on the glitches in Core. Then he got Dicensu to cover the of-fice and went up to C-Deck to track down Ensign Cartik, who was listed as one of the report’s authors. Cartik, who worked in one of a dozen small cubicles, was surprised to meet him.



“Not everyone who gets flattened by a dingo lives to tell the tale,” he said, clearing a chair for Myell.



“How many people get flattened by dingoes, sir?”



“You’re the only one on this ship. There was an accident on the Oceania a year or so ago, though.”



Myell hadn’t researched the problem on other ships. “Same glitches?”



Cartik squinted at him. “What’s your interest in it all?”



“Purely personal, sir. Lieutenant Scott said I should follow up on anything that I didn’t understand.”



Well, maybe she hadn’t said it in so many words. But the mention of Jodenny’s name seemed to assure Cartik. He tapped on his desk-gib. “The Class III on the Oceania did ignore a lockdown order, but it was corrupt all the way through its registry. The Oceania pulled all their Class Ills and inspected them. No other unit had the same problem.”



“But we didn’t pull all of ours, did we?”



“No.” Cartik looked uncomfortable. “They decided not to.”



“Who decided not to, sir?”



Cartik shut down his screen. “I don’t have that information.”



“One more question, sir. I noticed Circe had no record of the colli-sion with me. Are we sure she was the one who did it?”



“I don’t know what you mean,” Cartik said.



“How do we know it wasn’t another dingo on that level?”



Cartik’s gaze went over Myell’s shoulder. “Sergeant,” Commander Osherman said. Myell wondered how long he’d been standing there. Osherman continued. “Good to see you’ve recovered from your acci-dent.”



Myell stood. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”



“The sergeant was just on his way back to Underway Stores,” Car-tik said.



Actually, Myell was on his way to T6. If he timed it right, he could be in the slots before Jodenny arrived. He would try again to talk her out of it. But when he reached the tower, Jodenny was already up in the observation module getting into the EV suit. Amador was man-ning the command module.



“She won’t listen to me,” Amador told Myell. “Stubborn as hell.”



Ysten arrived. “She’s really going in?” he asked incredulously.



“Yes, sir,” Myell said.



Ysten edged out Myell for one of the command chairs. “Where is she?”



“About to come down,” Amador said. A few moments later, Jo-denny powered by the command module windows. She gave them all a brief wave. Myell’s stomach knotted. He tracked her progress on the overvid.



“I’m entering level twelve now,” Jodenny said.



Although he would have traded places with her, Myell was suddenly glad not to be in those dark, narrow confines. He double-checked that the level was locked down and verified all traffic had stopped.



“Athena should be halfway between Mike and November blocks,”

Amador said. “Should take you about ten minutes to get there.”



“I know.” Jodenny sounded amused. “I’ve been in the slots before.”



“Yes, ma’am,” Amador said.



“One of the ensigns on my last ship got lost in them once,” she of-fered. “Blew his headlamp and got turned all around. It would have been kind of funny if he hadn’t been so petrified.”




Myell wondered if she ever said the Yangtze’s name.



Jodenny continued. “It didn’t help that the chief kept telling him about the Legend of the Lost AT. Had him half convinced a ghost was going to creep up and grab him by the back of the neck.”



Did she know she was rambling nervously?



“I never heard that one,” Ysten said, and Myell realized he was wrong. She wasn’t telling the story to quell the anxiousness of being in the slots. She was telling it to keep Amador and Ysten occupied.



Her headvid showed her passing B-block. “Way back when, on one of the first Team Space freighters, an AT went into the slots to pull out something that had been requisitioned—this is in the days when you had to pull the small items by hand—and something went wrong. He reported being lost. Then he lost his headlamp, so he couldn’t see where he was. Core couldn’t track the marker on his suit or pinpoint where he was. His comm stayed open, though, and you could hear him trying to hold everything together. They sent in a chief to pull him out but he couldn’t find him—every time it seemed like they were getting close, the chief would turn down a block and find no one there.”



“How long did this go on?” Ysten asked:



“By the time they sent a second team in, it had been almost twelve hours. By the time they sent the third team in, the AT’s suit was al-most out of power.”



Myell kept his eyes on Jodenny’s EV display. The Legend of the Lost AT was a fairy tale told to impressionable young sailors or en-signs. Jodenny continued. “He was delirious near the end. Kept telling his lieutenant that he could see tigers and lions and other ani-mals. They figured he was out of it from dehydration.”



“They found him, though, right?” Ysten asked.



“No,” Jodenny said. “Never. Even when they reached Fortune and combed through every centimeter of the tower, they never found the body.”



Ysten drew himself up in his chair. “I don’t believe that.”



“Would I lie?” Jodenny asked. “Oh, here, look. Here’s Athena.”



* * * *



T

elling the story had made her trip go quickly. Athena now caught the focus of Jodenny’s headlamp, and it only took a once-over to see the bin gate had closed while the DNGO was retrieving a crate. Jo-denny’s light caught the address on the bin overhead.



“She got herself stuck,” Jodenny reported. “Did you say Mike block?”



“Yes, ma’am,” Amador said. “She’d just finished making a pickup.”



Jodenny opened the gate, braced herself, and tugged Athena and her cargo free. The DNGO had automatically powered down to con-serve energy, but Jodenny fitted her with a restraining bolt anyway.



“Careful, Lieutenant,” Myell’s voice said in her ear. He sounded very tense. “Who knows what’s in her cache?”



“I hear you.” Jodenny unhooked the gib from her belt and swiped it over the smartcrate Athena had been clutching. The crate’s coded information instantly downloaded for her. “What does Core say Athena was retrieving?”



“Cleaning supplies,” Amador replied.



The smartcrate listed its contents as plumbing equipment. She wanted to open it up, but she didn’t have the crate’s authorization codes and hadn’t brought any kind of crowbar. Jodenny shoved it back into the bin, closed the gate, and leashed Athena to her belt. “We’re on our way out.”



Fifteen minutes later she dropped Athena off at the command module and let Myell and Ysten help her out of the EV suit. “Let me know what Repair Services says.”



Amador went to take the DNGO over. Ysten excused himself to go stand a training watch. Myell said, “Lieutenant, if you want to know what’s wrong with Athena, the Repair Shop isn’t where you should send her.”



Jodenny reached down to tighten her boots. “It’s not?”



“It might be better to run a diagnostic here.”



“Sergeant—”



“At least check her out before you send her over. Once they take her apart, you’ll only have their word for it.”



Myell sounded painfully earnest. Jodenny sighed and pinged Amador.

“Bring Athena down to Sergeant Myell’s old workbench.”



Jodenny and Myell went down to the bench. Amador showed up a few minutes later with Athena bobbing behind him. Once he was gone, Myell plugged Athena into the board and powered her up. The DNGO’s lights blinked as she raised and spun her head. “There’s my girl,” he murmured, one hand on her hull. He connected her to his gib and data filled the screen.



Jodenny said, “At least her memory looks intact.”



Myell studied the information silently for a moment. “I meant to tell you about Ng, but then Chief Nitta died and you were already upset.”



She supposed she could concede a little as well. “Maybe I overre-acted. I did promise not to tell anyone.”



He shrugged. “I might have told someone, too.”



“Might have?” Her voice came out with a squeak.



“It slipped out while I was in Sick Berth. Chaplain Mow.”



The lift arrived. Perhaps alerted by Amador, Ishikawa approached timidly and asked, “Anything I can help with, Lieutenant?”



“No,” Jodenny said. “Thanks anyway.”



Ishikawa lingered.



“You’re dismissed, AT Ishikawa.”



When they were alone, Jodenny asked, “What exactly did you tell Chaplain Mow?”



“Everything, it turns out.” Myell pried Athena’s registration plate off and peered inside. He changed the subject. “This is a Class III made by a company called Fortunate Robotics. The dingoes that have had problems in the last few months all come from there. Maybe there’s a design or factory flaw they all share—or maybe something else is going on with them.”



While Myell poked around the DNGO’s innards, Jodenny told him about Dr. Ng’s theories and about the Wondjina travel reported by Mary Dory forty years earlier. Myell said, “She doesn’t sound like a very reliable witness,” and pulled out something small and silver.



“What’s that?” Jodenny asked.



He studied it in the light. “A master chip. I haven’t seen one in a long time. When I first got into Team Space, Class I and II dingoes worked on a distributive system. They gave each other storage and retrieval commands. But they were too easy to manipulate. There was a lot of fraud and theft, because you could install one of these and make a dingo do something that wouldn’t be logged into its records…”



His voice trailed off.



“Sergeant?”



“The morning of the accident,” he said. “Andromeda.”



Jodenny didn’t like the increasing chalkiness in his face. “Do you remember something?”



“I found—” Myell tore open one of the workbench drawers and reached inside it. “Jesus, I found one, how could I forget that?”



“You found one what?”



He pulled another master chip from the drawer. “In Andromeda. The morning of the accident.”



Jodenny gazed up the shaft. “So there’s more than one.”



“There could be dozens. Any of the units I sent over to Repair— it’s Chiba’s people. They stick these things in our dingoes and then we wonder why they’re glitched.”




“By controlling the dingoes they can steal whatever they want,”

Jo-denny said. “But the annual physical inventory will show the items are missing.”



Myell dropped onto his stool as if all the energy had suddenly drained out of him. “Not if they change the records in Core.”



Jodenny hooked her own gib into the board. “Core thought Athena had finished making a delivery in Mike block when she shut down. I found her at Lima block, retrieving a crate. Let’s see what she was taking.”



The container ID spilled on to the screen.



“Invalid number,” Myell said. “That container doesn’t exist.”



“Then they’re not just stealing things. They’re smuggling cargo as well. Guns, Sweet, stolen property—it could be anything.” Jodenny gazed upward again. “We’ve got to find out what’s in that container.”



“That’s not necessary, Lieutenant Scott. We’ll take it from here.”

Standing at the base of the nearest ladder, holding up Inspector General badges, were AT Ishikawa and Commander Osherman.



* * * *