The Outback Stars

CHAPTER


TWENTY-EIGHT





H

urry up,” Timrin said. “We don’t want them to run out of beer before we get there.” Myell reached into his locker for the gift he’d gotten Gallivan. It wasn’t much, just something to help him kick off his new career as a civilian musician. His knuckles brushed something unfamiliar and he pulled out the jewelry box Dottie had slipped into his rucksack. He hadn’t forgotten about it, but he hadn’t taken it out since Mary River. “Give me a minute,” Myell said. “I’ll meet you in the lounge.” Timrin went ahead, grumbling about prima-donna roommates. Myell set the box down next to Koo’s empty terrarium and lifted the carved lid. The contents had been jumbled over the years, mixing earrings with necklaces and broken watches. Nothing triggered any memories. He fingered a blue-white stone pendant and a turquoise bracelet. Cheap stuff, nothing he’d want to give to anyone, especially maddening lieutenants. Her order to him not to investigate the Bow-els still rankled. Couldn’t she see how much trouble they could get in by not taking a look? A stone pendant drew his attention. He held it up to the light, sure that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but there was no mistaking the design.



A snake eating its own tail.



An ouroboros.



He dug out the carved stone Ganambarr had given him. The color was the same blue-black, and the type of rock was similar if not iden-tical. He didn’t know enough to tell if both had been carved by the same hand, but they each had a small gouge on the bottom, as if the maker had left a mark.



The comm pinged. “Hurry up in there!” Timrin said from the lounge.



Myell put the jewelry box back and added his mother’s ouroboros pendant to his dilly bag. Finding it was probably only a coincidence, but maybe it was a message. “You will have to choose,” the Wirrinun had said. And so he would. He would disobey Jodenny and go to the Bowels. But not before he said good-bye to Gallivan.



* * * *



T

rue to his word, Al-Banna came to dinner in the wardroom and brought his wife. Sayura Al-Banna was a tall, statuesque woman with jet-black hair and a warm laugh. Al-Banna nodded in approval at the wardroom’s improved decor and atmosphere. “It’s about time some-one took charge and cleaned up this place,” he said as Ashmont served soup.



“It was Jodenny, sir,” Hultz said helpfully.



“It was all of us,” Jodenny replied. She had been slightly uneasy about Rokutan coming, but he was on watch. Francesco hadn’t dined in the wardroom since the scandal broke, and she missed him terribly. But it was Quenger’s absence that worried her most. He wouldn’t miss a chance to rub arms with the SUPPO unless for a very good reason.



“You keep looking at the clock,” Hultz said, after dinner had bro-ken up.



“Do I?” Jodenny asked.



“Come on, Lieutenant, play euchre with us,” Al-Banna said from a corner chair.



She partnered with Vu for one game only, then stood up apologet-ically. “You’ll have to excuse me, sir. RT Gallivan’s having a going-away party and I promised I’d show up.”



“Why don’t we all go?” Vu suggested.



Jodenny couldn’t think of a worse suggestion, actually, but within minutes almost all of them were traipsing over to the Rocks, dinner uniforms and all, to the bar where Gallivan’s rock ‘n’ roll band was belting out standard classics. The place was large and crowded, with two levels stretching away into dark corners and a dance floor already jammed with military and civilians alike. Gallivan waved from the stage and Timrin came over to buy Jodenny a beer.



“Have you seen Sergeant Myell?” she asked him. “I have to ask him something about a COSAL.”



Timrin waved to a dark corner. “Back there somewhere. Having a good time for a change.”



Jodenny sat at the bar and sipped at her beer. She resisted Zeni’s entreaties to dance and instead watched couples grope and shimmy to the beat. She didn’t see any sign of Myell at all. After an hour she made her way to the head and slid out a side exit. The air on the Rocks was cooler than it had been inside, but the crowds watching the final quarter of Talofofo vs. Lake Eerie were just as lively. Jodenny made her way through the throngs to T6’s access ring and went down to the loading dock, where all was blessedly quiet. She dug through a supply locker until she found a spare jumpsuit and boots and changed into them, grateful to be out of her skirt and heels. Armed with a flashlight and her gib she climbed downladder and al-most immediately stepped on Myell’s shoulders.



“What are you doing here?” he asked, and got out of her way. He too was wearing a jumpsuit but had obviously dressed in a hurry, with the zipper stuck halfway. She caught a glimpse of his bare chest and tore her gaze away.



“Me?” Jodenny demanded. “Why do you insist on ignoring my or-ders?”



“Why do you give me orders you know I won’t obey?”



She glared at him. He was entirely unperturbed. “Fine,” she said, and flashed her light down the passageway. The mag-lev belt ran along the starboard bulkhead, protected by a clearshield. Smartcrates delivered by the DNGOs were humming along toward Mainship. They followed the crates to where the mag-lev met the Rocks and settled down to see if any diverted off to any of the branch lines. Tram noise from overhead, coupled with water, power, and sewer sounds, made casual conversation difficult.



“How long should we wait?” Myell asked.



Jodenny shrugged. “Give it an hour or two.”



The air was dripping with humidity and smelled like machine oil. There wasn’t much room to sit on the deck but they wedged them-selves between air-conditioning units. Jodenny decided she was crazy to be sitting alone with Myell. Her leg inadvertently pressed against his, his bulk solid against her right hip. If she were a good lieutenant she’d put a halt to their amateur investigation and go back up to the light and crowds. As it was, they could do just about anything they wanted to down here and no one would be the wiser. Jodenny glanced at Myell. His cheeks were flushed.



“You all right?” she asked.



“Fine,” he said. “Hot down here.”



Ninety minutes later their watch paid off. A set of pushing gear came alive and knocked aside three crates so that they were no longer destined for Mainship but instead for some other tower. Jodenny and Myell tried to follow, but the mag-lev was faster than they were and soon the crates were out of sight.



“It doesn’t matter,” Jodenny said. “The only towers to be released are T14, T16, and T19, and these belts run to even-numbered towers. T14 is the prison colony. What’s in T16?”



“Trains and bridges, I think.”



She wiped sweat off her forehead with her sleeve and wished she’d had the foresight to bring water. Myell took the lead and had to bend over to pass beneath jutting ducts. He helped her over a patch of something dark and foul on the floor. The noise from the tram sys-tem receded, and the air got a little cooler.



“More legends,” he said. “People who hitchhike on ships and live under the Rocks.”




Jodenny had heard that one. “They ride the circuit for years and years, living so long in the dark that they go blind.”



The belt abruptly descended down through the deck. They climbed downladder into a passage that was narrower, dirtier, and darker than the one they left behind. Jodenny could almost feel the grime sinking into her pores and blood. “Here comes another one,” Myell said as a smartcrate overtook them. “Greedy bastards, aren’t they?”



They were getting close to T16 when lights flickered in the pas-sageway and voices echoed against the bulkheads. A maintenance crew from Tower Operations, she told herself, but she stopped walk-ing and shut off her torch. Myell stood beside her, so close she could feel his body heat.



“I hear Chiba,” he whispered.



Silver-white light scorched across Jodenny’s line of vision. The mazer charge threw Myell back against the bulkhead. The next charge stabbed through Jodenny’s side to her spine and sent a skewering pain up to the base of her skull. She’d never been mazered before, al-though once at the academy she’d been punched so hard in a boxing ring that she saw stars. She saw them again now, bright lacy pinpoints falling like snowflakes, and as all her limbs went numb she pitched forward helplessly, unable to brace herself as the deck slammed up under her face.



A moment or two of blackness, not much at all. She came to her senses prone on the deck, her right arm pinned beneath her, drool down the side of her face. With blurred, doubled vision she saw Quenger and Chiba looking down on her with contempt.



“Now, Jo, Jo, Jo,” Quenger said. “Look what you’ve done to your-self this time.”



He crouched beside her and ran his fingers across her cheek. Jodenny wanted to recoil, but her body felt distant and unreal, as if it belonged to someone else. In a deceptively mild tone Quenger said,

“Couldn’t mind your own business. Couldn’t keep your hands off everything. Stealing the division officer job wasn’t enough, is that it?”



Chiba said, “Oh, f*ck her and Myell. Let’s be done with this.”



Quenger’s expression brightened, as if he truly was considering peeling away Jodenny’s clothes and raping her on the deck. She wouldn’t be able to stop him. Chiba and Quenger both could do whatever they wanted. Then a third person drew near, and Jodenny’s pulse soared with recognition. The lying, double-crossing son of a bitch—



“We don’t have much time,” Osherman said. He gazed down at Jodenny dispassionately. “Leave them here. We’re never coming back, anyway. By the time anyone finds them we’ll be long gone.”



“Leave them alive?” Chiba lifted his mazer again and aimed it at Jodenny’s head. “No. No witnesses.”



So this was it. They were going to die in the filthy, rotten Bowels and it was Jodenny’s fault for not discouraging Myell from his specu-lations. So stupid. She’d been so stupid.



Quenger stood up. “So do it already. We’ve only got a few hours.”



Chiba scowled. The mazer lowered a few centimeters. “Why don’t you get your hands dirty on this one? You never do the hard work.”



“I could do it,” Quenger blustered. “You don’t think I can?”



“Wait. What’s this?” Osherman crouched down to the deck. He picked up a small cylindrical object, some kind of computer equip-ment.

“Looks like a pocket server.”



Chiba said, “They’ve been f*cking recording us—”



The mazer struck again. Jodenny knew nothing.



* * * *



T

he sound of a hatch slamming shut brought Myell around. At first he thought he was back in Sick Berth after the accident in T6, but that couldn’t be right unless the staff had turned out the lights and low-ered the thermostat by several degrees. He strained to make out his surroundings but saw only a blurred red glow moving a few meters away. It took several moments for him to realize that the light was an exit sign and that he was the one who was moving about.



He tried to drag himself upright, but there was no upright to be found. The gravity had disappeared while he was unconscious. He twisted in midair and grasped for any available handhold. His fingers scraped the soft, fine strands of a woman’s hair.



“Jodenny” he croaked out, but she didn’t answer. Myell pulled himself closer. He touched a shoulder, a possible breast, another breast, and there, the belt of her jumpsuit.



With one hand firmly around her belt he tried again for a hand-hold on the deck or bulkheads. He attempted to drift toward the red light, but he had no real maneuvering ability. When his icy fingers touched a flat surface he twisted around to get his feet against it. He pushed off toward the emergency light and the hatch beneath it.



Myell slapped the exit control but nothing happened. His chest be-gan aching as he considered the possibilities of where they might be. “Medbot, activate,” he mumbled. He repeated it again, louder. A green light lit up on the opposite bulkhead as the unit flew toward the sound of his voice.



“Environmental conditions unsound,” the medbot said. “Initiating emergency protocols.”



An air vent hissed. Myell turned toward the stream of cold oxygen and gulped in deep breaths. The backup atmospherics would last only about ten minutes, depending on consumption. By the light of the medbot’s headlamp he could see he was floating near the ceiling of T16’s command module. The control panels were all powered down. Beyond the plastiglass windows, the tower shaft was pitch-black. The scant heat and air that had come in when their attackers had shoved them inside were already dissipating.



“Jodenny, wake up.” He pulled her limp body close to his. Her face was shockingly pale, but her lips weren’t blue. Yet.



“Contacting Emergency Services,” the medbot said.



Myell wrapped his legs around her to anchor her. Still clinging to the emergency light, he used his free hand to slap her cheeks. Her hair, loose from its braid, rippled like seaweed.



“Unable to make contact,” the medbot announced.



Of course not. T16 was unmanned and disconnected. In just a few hours it was going to be let loose into Warramala’s orbit and picked up by escort tugs.



“Jodenny.” Myell resisted the impulse to therapeutically kiss her and force some air past those pretty lips. She was unconscious but breathing. The medbot had reached its own diagnosis.



“No external injuries noted and vital statistics within range. What caused this condition?”



“I don’t know.” The last thing he remembered was walking in the Bowels with Jodenny. He checked his and Jodenny’s suits. Their gibs were gone, as was his pocket server, but he still had his dilly bag. Myell used Jodenny’s belt to tether the two of them together and wrapped one hand around the medbot. “Services no longer needed. Return to your roost.”



The medbot immediately swooped back to its perch, taking the two of them with it. Not as fast or agile as a Class III, but it served its purpose. Myell was within kicking distance of the storage closet. His fingers ached with cold as he pulled it open and fished for an EV suit.



“Couldn’t shut up,” he chided himself as he pulled the suit on.

“Couldn’t stay home and mind your own goddamned business.”



Once the EV suit was sealed he turned on the controls, and the first blast of heat made him groan in relief. The air smelled better and cleaner than the backup atmospherics. He was able to maneuver now too, and it was easy to retrieve Jodenny. Harder to get her into the suit, but finally she was sealed inside. They now had ten hours each of air, with two additional canisters in the closet and more probably stored in the observation module on level fifty.




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. Some-thing 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 breath-ing 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 Jo-denny’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,”

Jo-denny 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 obser-vation 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 suf-focation. 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 Tl6? 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 situ-ation 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 in-spected Matsuda’s corpse. His gib was gone and there were no obvi-ous 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 sys-tems. 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.



* * * *



J

odenny 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 got-ten 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 con-versations, 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 hydro-ponics 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 trans-ferred 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 un-derstand 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 imag-ing equipment.”



“It’s a start. Where are you?”



He didn’t answer.



“Terry, this is no time for heroics. Tell me where you 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 ex-pose 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 radia-tion 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 at-tention. 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.”



* * * *



T

hey 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.



“Jodenny,” he said, as if trying the name out for size. “Kay. Where did you get the name Kay from, anyway?”



“Jodenny Katherine Scott. Katherine comes from my mother.”



“Is she still alive?” Myell asked.



“No. Both my parents died when I was an infant.”



“I’m sorry.”



She had never known them. Had never had anyone like that to love and lose. But his mother had killed herself when he was just a child, and his father had drank himself to death afterward.



“We’re going to get out of here,” she told Myell. “There’s not go-ing to be any death today.”



“I know,” he said, but there was little conviction to his voice. She checked her watch. An hour had passed since he’d started opening crates. If the bridge hadn’t noticed by now, they might not notice at all. How long did it take radiation sickness to kick in?



“Terry, I never thanked you for being on my side from day one.”



“All part of the job, ma’am.” He reached out and patted her gloved hand clumsily.



Her eyelids grated like sandpaper. She needed rest in a desperate way, but feared running out of oxygen while asleep.



“Hear that?” Myell asked drowsily some time later. “Drums.”



She heard nothing. “Talk to me. What was it like, growing up on Baiame?”



“Like hell,” he said. “Can’t you hear them? I’m not delirious, I swear it.”



The hatch opened, spilling light into the module. Help had finally come.



* * * *