The Outback Stars

CHAPTER


FIVE





C

hief Nitta wasn’t in the Underway Stores office at oh-seven hundred hours. Neither were the two administrative aides. The first one, a gangly woman named RT Caldicot, came in at oh-seven-twelve with coffee and doughnuts in hand. “We’re not open yet, Lieutenant. You want to come back later?”



“We’re open,” Jodenny said. “I’m your new DIVO.”



“Oh.” Caldicot didn’t look impressed. “I was expecting Lieutenant Quenger.”



Jodenny didn’t believe for one second that Caldicot had somehow missed the news of her appointment. “Where do you usually hold di-vision quarters?”



Caldicot took a bite of her doughnut and spoke with her mouth full. “In the crew lounge. We had one last week.”



“They’re supposed to be held daily.”



“Lieutenant Commander Greiger didn’t see the need.”



“I do. Page all our people and have them in T6 in fifteen minutes. Anyone who isn’t there will be locked out and earn two demerits.”



“Ma’am! That’s a little extreme for your first morning, isn’t it? We don’t start work around here until oh-seven-thirty.”



“Ship’s regs say oh-seven hundred.”



“If you walk down the Flats you won’t find a soul—”



“Fifteen minutes, RT Caldicot. Be there.”



Jodenny left the offices and boarded a tram to cross the gulf. She told herself she wasn’t superstitious, but doubt rode with her. Assem-bling her entire division at the base of T6 was an invitation to disaster. She hadn’t been in the Yangtze’s T6 when the CFP bomb detonated, but instead up on the bridge turning over duty. The first alarm had started shrieking right after she signed out of the log. Only the luck of the watch schedule had kept her from being vented into space or crushed between steel or burnt alive…



So lost was she in grim memories that Jodenny almost missed getting off at the first stop on the Rocks. A group of DNGOs was moving in tandem down the boulevard, watering plants and sweep-ing up litter. Advertisements played silently on overvids and side-walks. Jodenny crossed T6’s access ring and descended to the base of the hold. She peered up the shaft at the twinkling lights of DN-GOs and when she looked down the alleged rapist was standing a few meters away.



“Good morning, ma’am,” Myell said.



“Good morning, Sergeant.” Jodenny told herself she was safe, that he’d never been proven guilty. Then again, many guilty people got off scot-free. Casually she said, “I see you polished your boots.”




“You were right. They were dirty.”



His gaze was level and, on the surface, untroubled. But there was something about the way he held his hands flat against his legs that made Jodenny think he was nervous about her being there. She asked, “How long have you worked down here?”



“Since we left Kiwi, ma’am.”



Since Al-Banna had come aboard. The new SUPPO might have gotten the charges cleared, but he let Greiger shove Myell to the bot-tom of the tower to do shitty jobs far below his rank. Not much of a punishment if he was guilty, but an injustice if innocent.



The arrival of four able techs interrupted them. “AT Ishikawa,”

Jodenny said. “Start taking a roster. That lift gets turned off at oh-seven-thirty precisely.”



“Yes, ma’am!” The young sailor unnecessarily saluted. She was a pretty girl, with fine features and neatly braided hair. It took a second for Jodenny to remember the wardroom talk about Ishikawa being a kasai girl. Accepting gifts for companionship was a tradition from old Japan, not exactly legal under Team Space regulations, not exactly il-legal either.



Jodenny turned to Myell. “Show me your spaces, Sergeant.”



Two DNGOs sat inactive in Myell’s workshop, with tools and spare parts hung neatly beside them. A quick glance at Myell’s main-tenance log and she knew she wouldn’t have to worry about him do-ing his job. One entry did catch her eye, however. She asked, “What’s this about a missing dingo?”



“A Class III disappeared during the GQ yesterday,” Myell said.



“Disappeared in the slots?” Jodenny asked. DNGOs were always getting lost in the maze of bins on each level. Sometimes they broke, sometimes they powered down by accident. Jem had claimed they were sneaking off to fool around and make baby DNGOs.



“No, on the Rocks. I was taking her to Repair. I notified Loss Ac-counting and they’re coming later to investigate.”



She would have to follow up on that further. Jodenny inspected Myell’s bench, which was almost painfully neat. The only personal touch was a gram of a tropical beach. In it, a woman with an easy smile held back her long hair and squinted at the camera. She wore a bright yellow dress, and the blue—green surf swirled around her ankles.



“Is that Baiame?” she asked.



“No, Earth. Before the Debasement.” He sounded a little wistful.

“Someplace called the Gold Coast.”



“A friend?”



“My mom,” he said. “She died a long time ago.”



“I’m sorry.” Jodenny didn’t tell him that her own parents had died when she was a toddler. She studied him in profile. Handsome, yes. He had a faint scar above his eyebrow that would be easy to fix, but for some reason he hadn’t bothered to. Her impression was of an in-telligent if not a cheerful man. But who would be jolly, stuck in the bottom of a cold cargo hold for months on end with only DNGOs for company?



“Lieutenant Scott,” a man said, and she turned to see a dark-skinned sergeant approach. He was shorter than Myell but twice as wide, his immaculate uniform stretching over thick muscles. Maori, maybe, though most of them had stayed back on Earth. “I’m Strayborn, ma’am, your leading sergeant. I’m in charge here in T6. Wel-come aboard.”



“Thank you.”



“The troops are assembled and eager to meet you.”



Fourteen people had assembled in ragged rows. Strayborn joined the front line and Myell melted into the back. No sign of Chief Nitta, but Caldicot had managed to get herself there on time. Jodenny checked her watch and made sure Ishikawa shut off the lift.



“Underway Stores, atten-hut,” she ordered.



She had seen better military posture among schoolchildren. Half of them were in standard coveralls with scuffed boots, soiled cuffs, or worn elbows. Others wore working trousers and blue shirts that had clearly seen better days. At least two of the men had hair past the edge of their collars and one woman had cascades of blonde curls pinned in a sloppy knot.



Jodenny began calling names off her gib. “AT Amador.”



“He’s on watch, ma’am,” Strayborn said. “So are AT Lange and Sergeant VanAmsal.”



“AT Amir.”



Strayborn grimaced. “Transferred last month.”



“AT Barivee.”



“He’s in the brig, ma’am.” RT Gallivan, standing in the front row, gave her a cheeky smile. “Keeping AT Kevwitch and AT Yee com-pany, no doubt. There’s a bartender in Red Arrow with a beef to set-tle about some broken furniture.”



Jodenny continued steadfastly down the list. AT Chang was pres-ent and wearing an Alcheringa Soccer League T-shirt under his jump-suit. AM

Dicensu was missing, and at his name someone chuckled. Young AM

Dyatt, in the back row, was at least seven months preg-nant. AT

Nagarajan’s hair was completely out of reg, but RT Minnich could have been a poster boy for a Team Space brochure.



Gallivan spoke up again. “You forgot AT Lund, ma’am. No doubt at Sick Call again.”



“Thank you.” Jodenny added Lund to her list and put her gib away.

“Division quarters will be every morning at oh-six-forty-five until fur-ther notice. Tomorrow morning we’ll have a uniform inspection, blue jumpsuits. That means clean clothes, required patches, and reg-ulation haircuts. Working hours begin here at quarters, lunch is from eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty, and knockoff is at seventeen hundred or until work is done.”



Ishikawa made a startled noise. Jodenny ignored it.



“Let me tell you what I know about Underway Stores.” She gave them a steely appraisal. “It’s not as glamorous as Flight Support. It’s not as interesting as Ship’s Services. If you want a steady career, you work in Disbursing. If you like to cook, you work in Food Ser-vices. For everyone else it’s a choice between Underway Stores or Maintenance—telling a dingo to retrieve a broom or telling it to sweep the deck. Not very exciting at all.”



Gallivan snickered.



Jodenny said, “Sergeant Strayborn. Two demerits for the next per-son who can’t keep quiet.”



“Yes, ma’am.”



Gallivan’s smirk disappeared.



“Most people don’t realize how crucial Underway Stores is,” she continued. “When our team doesn’t deliver supplies to the galley, people can’t eat. When our team doesn’t issue bleach to the laundry shops, nobody gets clean underwear. Customer service is our first priority. We’re going to reduce our backlog, improve our satisfaction rating, and treat every single customer we get with the utmost pro-fessionalism. Is there any question about that?”



Silence.



“Let’s get to work,” Jodenny said. “Underway Stores, dismissed.”



Her new division quickly departed. Strayborn said, “Miz Scott? Thank you for calling inspections for tomorrow. It’s been a while.”



Jodenny glanced at his shiny patches and spotless boots. “How close are you to being promoted to chief?”



“I’ve got my hopes set on the ECP—the list should be out soon.”



The Enlisted Commissioning Program made officers out of sailors who had earned their university degrees through Core. The process was grueling and the standards high. She made a note to check out his application and was giving him more orders when the lift re-turned with three people onboard, including Chief Nitta.




“Someone turned off the goddamned lift!” he said, his expression mottled.



“I did, Chief.”



“We were on time!”



“Let’s have a talk, Chief.” Jodenny started climbing the nearest lad-der. “Sergeant Strayborn, lock down level one for us.”



She didn’t look to see if Nitta followed, but after a moment his footsteps rang out behind her. Jodenny checked the indicator lights to make sure traffic on the level was disabled and swung off the ladder. A Class I DNGO stood nearby, paralyzed, a smartcrate in its claws. Behind it, the slots stretched out in dark and complicated patterns. Slot stories had become Team Space folklore—ghosts in the maze, techs who went in to retrieve DNGOs and got lost forever.



“Do you know what’s on this level, Chief?” she asked.



“Agroparts.”



“Uniforms. Do you know our backlog status on uniforms? Three weeks. Three weeks to get some apprentice mate a new set of cover-alls.”



Nitta spread his hands. “Everything’s been backlogged since we deployed. We loaded a thousand uniform items at Kookaburra.”



“Then you better make sure they start getting distributed. This di-vision is in serious trouble. Our COSAL reports are overdue to Fleet and we missed two data calls. We’ve got a five-week backlog on com-mon parts for Housekeeping, six weeks for the galley. The March in-ventory showed a fifteen percent error rate and April’s numbers should have been turned in last week. I also can’t find the semiannual evals for able techs, which were due last week.”



Nitta glared at her. “Just hold on a minute, Lieutenant. You don’t know what it’s like on this ship. You can come in and make all the value judgments you want, but you don’t know how things work around here.”



“I know how things work around here now. You’ve got until the end of the day to get that inventory on my desk. And you’ll be right beside me at the uniform inspection tomorrow morning, so you’d better see to your own uniform first. Your pants are too long.”



He wagged a finger at her. “First off, I didn’t get your message be-cause I was on watch in Flight Ops all night.”



Amazing that he could stand watch and still visit the Underway Stores office with Quenger, but she didn’t contradict him.



“Secondly, you can have the inventory done right, or you can have it done by the end of the day, but you can’t have both.”



“Why not? If you’ve been doing the daily and weekly reconcilia-tions, all you have to do is compile everything and check the discrep-ancies.”



Nitta folded his arms. “If you’d ever worked in Underway Stores before, you’d know it’s more complicated than that.”



She didn’t tell him that she had, in fact, worked in Underway Stores, for Jem. “No, it’s not. We take on provisions at every port. Core tells the dingoes where to store items and the dingoes do it. When someone onboard requests something, they transmit the req-uisition, Core approves it, and the dingoes deliver the items to the is-sue rooms or to the loading docks. All you have to do is match the records and balance the money.”



“We’re a little behind in the dailies.”



“How far behind?”



“Don’t worry about it. You’ll get your inventory.” Nitta stalked off without permission.



Jodenny made herself count to fifty before she followed him down the ladder. Ready to reprimand anyone who gave her a cross-eyed look, she trammed back to her office and found Caldicot in confer-ence with a civilian woman who was old enough to be Jodenny’s grandmother. Beside them stood an apprentice mate with wide blue eyes and pimples on his chin.



“Miz Scott!” The AM hurried to her side. “I’m Peter Dicensu. I’m sorry I wasn’t at quarters. I got called for a Sweet test!”



Caldicot warned, “Peter, leave Miz Scott alone. She’s busy.”



Jodenny said, “It’s all right. AM Dicensu, what’s your job?”



“I help Mary, when she lets me. And I move things. And I can play Snipe.”



“You don’t play Snipe at work, do you?” Jodenny asked.



Dicensu ducked his head. “Only when there’s nothing else to do, ma’am.”



Caldicot handed him a gib. “You always have something to do. Sometimes you forget. Take this to Sergeant Strayborn. Get him to sign it. Then to RT Gallivan. He’ll sign it, too. And RT Minnich after that.”



“No problem!” Dicensu said, and dashed off.



The women watched him go.



“Before you ask,” Caldicot said, “he’s related to some three-star ad-miral on Warramala.”



Jodenny shut her mouth.



The civilian woman offered her hand. “Lieutenant Scott, I’m Liddy Mullaly. I’m sorry I wasn’t on time—my husband was late returning from watch in Engineering, and I wasn’t sure how to get here. It’s my first day.”



“Mine, too,” Jodenny said. “Is that an American accent I hear?”



Mrs. Mullaly beamed. Not only did she have the accent, but her face bore the kind of skin damage that came from living on a planet with a dangerously thinned ozone layer. “Born and bred, all my life. Then I decided, what the hell, time to see the universe. I met Mike on Fortune and we got married and here I am, at my age, in deep space. I’ve never worked for the military before. Is that a problem?”



Mrs. Mullaly’s expression seemed so eager and cheerful that Jodenny gave her the benefit of the doubt. “I’m sure it will be fine.”



Jodenny retreated to her office and rubbed her temples. Employ-ing civilians for nonessential jobs was one tactic Team Space used to keep military spouses occupied during the long Alcheringa deploy-ments, but did she have to get one so green behind the ears? And an American, to boot. Jodenny had never been to Earth, but she’d heard wild things about the kinds of people who roughed out a living in what was left of the United States. That Mrs. Mullaly’s husband worked in Engineering was an additional concern. Any indiscreet word or action on Jodenny’s part might easily spread—it wasn’t oil that kept Team Space lubricated, it was the damned gossip.



With a sigh she turned to her deskgib. Imail had already begun to pile up in her queue. Somewhere in the bowels of Core, a demonic subroutine had started assigning her all of Greiger’s old collateral du-ties. Cultural Diversity Committee. Voting Information Officer. Shore Leave Recommendations Board. Meanwhile the Public Relations of-fice wondered if she would like to participate in a roundtable discus-sion about the Yangtze. Not at all. A civilian wanted to know if she thought the explosion had been caused by invading aliens. Delete. A barely coherent message placed blame for every death in the universe on the state of New Palestine on Fortune.



“Configure agent,” she told Core. “Female, random name, no sense of humor.”



A voice said, “Good morning, Lieutenant. My name is Holland.”



“Start sorting my mail, Holland. Delete anything with a subject or message text that references my last ship, regardless of originator.”



“Do you mean the Yangtze?”



“Yes.”



“Understood, Lieutenant.”



Jodenny pinged Bartis and tried to get on Lieutenant Commander Wildstein’s schedule. Bartis said, “She’s very busy this week, Lieu-tenant. I’ll call your agent when there’s an opening.”




“I appreciate it.” Jodenny wondered if Wildstein would be as busy if someone else was calling—her protégé Quenger, for instance. She pinged Security and reached the office of the Assistant Security Offi-cer, Lieutenant Commander Senga. He was a slight but intense man, with a noticeable tic in his left eyelid.



“I’m told I have three sailors in the brig,” she said after introducing herself. “Kevwitch, Yee, and Barivee.”



Senga checked his gib, one hand drumming restlessly on his desk.

“Bar brawl. They already went to mast. Three weeks in the brig and docked pay. Captain’s very strict on that.”



Jodenny changed the subject. “One of my dingoes disappeared during the GQ yesterday. Any chance of recovering it?”



“The Loss Accounting Division will take a statement, poke around, but you know. Kids or pranksters, probably. That dingo could be in a hundred pieces by now, souvenirs of the trip.”



“Kids or pranksters during a General Quarters?”



He sounded glum. “You’d be surprised what disappears on this ship.”



“The dingo was with Sergeant Myell,” Jodenny said. “I understand he’s been in trouble recently.”



Senga straightened immediately. “He should have been court-martialed for what happened.”



The vehemence in his tone surprised her. Jodenny asked, “So why wasn’t he?”



“The girl didn’t want to testify. Myell probably got to her, intimi-dated her. Him or his friends. The captain could have gone ahead and had Myell charged anyway—should have, just to keep him from at-tacking some other poor tech. If you’ve got missing equipment and he was the last person to use it, there’s your thief.”



Jodenny had already considered the idea. “He works with dingoes all the time. If he wanted parts, he could probably find a more subtle way to steal them.”



Senga’s frown deepened. “Unless that’s what he wants you to think.”



“He doesn’t seem like the type.”



“I’ve known him longer than you. He’s exactly the type. If he’s stealing Team Space property, we’ll nail him for it. That’s a promise.”



His eagerness disturbed her. Jodenny signed off and leaned back in her chair. She couldn’t see Myell stealing a DNGO, and had to trust that if he hadn’t been brought to court-martial there was probably a good reason.

“Holland, retrieve the personnel files on the following division members: Kevwitch, Yee, Barivee, Lund, Dyatt, Myell, and Dicensu.” She might as well get to know the more troubled members of her division through reports filed by her predecessors. But she would start with the most troublesome.

“Open Myell’s first.”



* * * *