The Stars Blue Yonder (6 page)

“What are you doing, Jodenny?” Ensign Dyanne Owens asked.

“Sleeping. Go away.”

“You plan on missing morning quarters?”

“No quarters on Sunday.”

“Too bad this is Monday.”

Jodenny forced her eyes open. “It is not!”

Dyanne sat in her chair and began tugging off her boots. She'd had
the midwatch, and dark circles rimmed her eyes. “Okay, it's not. You're right and the rest of the ship's wrong.”

Jodenny wasn't entirely convinced. The supply wardroom aboard the
Yangtze
was notorious for pranks. She retrieved her gib from under the pillow and demanded, “Kay! What day is it?”

Her agent responded, “Today is Monday, ma'am.”

Jodenny wrestled free of her sheets and flung herself toward her locker. Long years of habit from the academy meant she had put out her uniform the night before. She tugged on her pants and boots, pinned her hair up with one swift move, and didn't bother rinsing the gummy feeling out of her mouth.

“Don't forget your gib,” Dyanne said when Jodenny was halfway into the passageway.

She spun on her heel, grabbed the gib off her bunk, and sprinted down the passage. A small DNGO was cleaning the carpet, smack dab in her way. Jodenny squeezed past it. Another DNGO was washing down the bulkhead. She circled around that, too. A third DNGO was hovering near the overhead, cleaning a vent. This cleaning business was getting out of hand. Jodenny ducked under the robot and barreled into the lounge area, which was inexplicably filled with a dozen other officers all grinning at her.

“Surprise!” they shouted.

Her boss, Lieutenant Jem Ross, grinned widely. “Welcome to your promotion party.”

“My—” Jodenny was speechless. Her face grew hot but she matched Jem's smile. “All this for little old me?”

“All this,” Dyanne confirmed, coming up behind her and slapping her shoulder.

First came the very brief ceremony, in which Jem read aloud Jodenny's promotion to full lieutenant and pinned new insignia on her collar. After that Jodenny cut the cake, which was entirely too decadent for this early on a Sunday—yes, Sunday, not Monday—morning. That she'd fallen for their dastardly plan caused no end of merriment, from ensigns to commanders alike.

“You'll get yours,” Jodenny told Dyanne. “Wait until it's your turn.”

Jodenny was halfway through her slice of cake and eyeing another
piece when her gib beeped and said, “Lieutenant Scott, you're needed in the Security Office.”

She gave Jem a dirty look, but he raised his hands innocently. “No prank. It's probably AT Tossen again, drunk on duty. Your turn to deal with him.”

“I'll be right back,” she told everyone. “Don't eat all my cake.”

Dyanne raised a glass of punch. “We'll be here when you get back.”

She took a ladder down to D-deck, which was almost deserted this early in the morning. She thought terrible things about AT Tossen. He was more trouble than worth, always in some kind of mess or another. As an academy student she'd never realized how much time and effort went into personnel management. Why people couldn't just behave and do their jobs was a mystery to her.

The Security Office was a black-and-gray space dominated by a large counter and a sergeant wearing a scowl.

“Lieutenant Scott, reporting as ordered,” she said.

“Take a seat, ma'am. The commander will be out in a minute.”

Jodenny sat on a long gray bench. One minute turned into two and three and four as she sat with nothing interesting to do but stare at the deck, the counter, or the overhead. She checked her imail but didn't have the heart to start tackling the junior sailor evaluations piling up in her queue. Wistfully she thought of her promotion party carrying on without her, and resolved to make Tossen regret this morning for months to come.

She started to fidget, her stomach rumbled, and she longed for a big hot cup of anything filled with caffeine. Normally she drank only coffee but lately Jem had been drinking a special drink called horchata. Another ten minutes passed. Just as she was thinking about finding a vending machine, a hatch opened down the passageway and reprieve arrived in the shape of Commander Delaney, the Security Officer.

Delaney was a tall woman, big in the shoulders, and though they'd been at functions together Jodenny had never spoken to her one-on-one. She looked like she hadn't had any sleep at all. Tossen really must have gotten himself in trouble this time to require attention from Delaney herself.

“Lieutenant Scott, come on back,” Delaney said.

They went down the passageway to a large conference room. Inside were two guards, a med tech, and some officers Jodenny didn't know. At the table were a teenage boy, a younger girl, and a man with his head pillowed on his left arm. No one looked very happy, but the girl and boy perked up instantly when they saw Jodenny.

“Nana!” The girl rose from her seat.

Jodenny recoiled. She inadvertently brushed up against a tall lieutenant commander.

He said, rather casually, “She called me Grandpa.”

“Twig, sit.” The man lifted his head and tugged the girl back into her chair. “She doesn't know you. Neither of them do.”

“What kind of joke is this?” Jodenny demanded.

Commander Delaney shook her head. “Stowaways. With a most unusual story, though, including some rather tall tales about you and Lieutenant Commander Osherman here.”

“We're not stowaways.” The teenage boy stared defiantly at Jodenny. “I'm Kyle and this is Twig. You're our grandmother. This is Terry Myell. He's your husband, or at least he's going to be.”

Osherman asked, “Then how am I your grandfather?”

Twig said, “You're going to be her husband, too.”

Osherman made a faint noise of protest. Jodenny wanted to protest as well.

Delaney said, “According to Core, Sergeant Myell here is an active duty sailor stationed on the
Okeechobee
. But his dog tag lists his rank as a chief, with Lieutenant Commander Jodenny Scott as his legal spouse, and the most recent entries are dated three years from now.”

“I've been trying to tell you. We're time travelers,” Myell said wearily. He gave Jodenny the quickest of glances, as if it were painful to see her. “Any chance of getting some coffee?”

Myell had woken up just a few hours ago, relieved.

He was accustomed to waking up in unusual situations, often in darkness, far too often in some kind of danger. This new place was indeed dark, but also quiet and soothing. The air wasn't too warm or too cold. It smelled faintly like machinery. The background hum of a spaceship, perhaps. The floor beneath him felt like a metallic deck, and when
he blinked his eyes open he saw conduits and ducts. Definitely a ship, then. He liked that. He might be able to blend in, steal some food, maybe grab a change of clothes.

He stood up, wincing at the ache in his back. Whatever the Roon had hit him with, it wasn't nice. As he straightened, he nearly hit his head. The overhead was low and busy with ducts.

Then he realized he wasn't alone, and bumped his head anyway.

“Where are we?” Kyle asked from where he was sitting against the bulkhead.

Twig, huddled beside him, was crying. “I want my mom.”

“What are you two doing here?” Myell asked, sounding stupid even to himself.

Kyle pulled himself up. He was short enough that the pipes ran harmlessly over his head. “Are we on a ship?”

Neither of them had ever been on a spaceship, of course. They might have seen pictures or records, especially of the
Kamchatka
, but their experience was the forest and beach, and running barefoot through Providence.

“How did you get here?” he asked, still confused.

“There was a flash of light,” Kyle said. “What did you do? Where's home?”

“I don't know.” As soon as the words were out, Myell knew he had made a mistake. He was the adult here, a grandfather even if his first child hadn't been born yet. He had a responsibility to be confident and parental so the children wouldn't panic.

Too bad he was the one already panicking. Homer had never told him he could take anyone with him through the blue ouroboros. He had no idea how that worked. Or how to get them back where they belonged.

Twig hugged her knees close. “I want my mom.”

“All right, look.” Myell crouched down beside them. “We're on a Team Space ship. If we wait long enough, the blue ring will come and take us away. But you've got to stick by me, got it? All the time.”

Kyle demanded, “What about the Roon? Is it here, too?”

“I don't think so,” Myell said. “I never saw it before, and there's no
reason to believe it can follow us. Anyone asks, you stay quiet. Leave it to me to handle.”

Twig squinted at him. “Why? They're dangerous!”

Kyle said, “How do we know you can handle it?”

“Because I've got a lot more experience than you,” Myell said. “And if we are where I think we are, they're not going to believe you anyway. The people here don't know anything about the Roon yet.”

And he gave them that little speech just in time, too, because five minutes later two security techs showed up, alerted by remote sensors to trespassers in the T6 cargo hold. Myell was dismayed to see
Yangtze
patches on their sleeves. The
Yangtze
was a doomed ship, fated to explode off Kookaburra. If the kids noticed the patches or recognized their significance, they didn't say. Myell tried to convince the guards that they were colonists who had gotten lost, but they didn't have any ship identification cards.

It also didn't help when one of the security techs ran his gib near Myell's collarbone and picked up on his dog tag.

“Says you're Chief Teren Myell of the Supply Corps,” the tech said. He gave Myell's worn clothes another lookover. “You don't look like a chief.”

Myell said, “I'm not. Your machine's wrong.”

One of the techs turned to Kyle. “Is this really your father, kid?”

Myell hoped Kyle would be less than forthcoming, but Kyle said, “Actually, he's my sort of grandfather.”

“Uncle,” Myell corrected. “Uncle Terry, that's me.”

The tech raised his eyebrow.

The techs decided to bring them back to Mainship to sort everything out. The five of them took the lift up to the access ring and crossed over to the Rocks. The long promenade of shops and restaurants was empty of people, and the sky on the overhead vid was just beginning to brighten with sunrise. They boarded the first car of an arriving tram and Kyle, obviously awestruck, pressed his forehead to the nearest window as they crossed the umbilical shaft to Mainship.

Twig wasn't as impressed. She was quiet and wide-eyed, and clung to Myell's side. He supposed getting caught by Security didn't really
matter. The three of them would get fed and quartered until the ouroboros showed up. He thought he'd understood the rules of the ring, how it was determined to fling him around the universe willy-nilly and alone. Maybe he understood nothing at all.

“Is Lieutenant Scott on duty?” he asked one of the techs.

“Why do you ask?”

“She's my division officer. And my wife.”

The first tech cracked a smile. “I think you're drunk, Chief.”

“I wish,” he said. “Could you call her, please? She needs to know.”

And he needed to know she was alive.

But the tech didn't call Jodenny. Myell refrained from wrestling the gib out of his hands and doing it himself. There was time, he told himself, finding no amusement in the thought. The techs took them to the Security office and put them in a conference room. An ensign showed up to ask questions, followed by a lieutenant, followed eventually by Commander Delaney. Myell decided to be as honest as possible.

“We're from the future, we travel in time, this is my granddaughter Twig, this is my wife's grandson Kyle, can you call her? And Commander Sam Osherman, too. He's Kyle's grandfather.”

Osherman arrived, looking impossibly young, followed soon by Jodenny, whose loveliness hit Myell in the gut all over again. Alive, young, disbelieving. Good for her. Skepticism was a healthy trait in a junior officer. He told them all that they wouldn't remember any of this later, and of course they didn't believe that, either.

“This isn't getting us anywhere,” Commander Delaney finally said. “The children will be put in temporary foster care. Sergeant Myell, you're obviously AWOL from your current duty station. I don't know why you falsified the personal information on your dog tag, or what you hope to gain from this charade, but maybe a stay in the brig will convince you how serious this prank of yours is.”

“The brig!” Myell said.

Twig latched on to Myell's arm. “No! We're not going anywhere.”

Delaney said, calmly, “I'm afraid we don't have much choice. It'll take a while for us to analyze the DNA samples you provided. Do you have some other kind of proof to support your story, Sergeant?”

The bit about the samples was crap, of course. The results would be
back almost immediately as long as they had the right equipment. Myell could tell them about the disaster down the road, the lives that would be destroyed when the
Yangtze
was lost, but that wasn't proof. He could tell them who would win the historic soccer match between Dunredding and Boomerang Moon, but that was another six months away. No one on this ship could verify the classified information he knew about the Wondjina Transportation System.

Aside from spilling intimate details about Jodenny, his only recourse was revealing information about someone else.

Myell said, “I'll talk to Commander Osherman. Just the two of us.”

Delaney said, “Why?”

“Alone, please,” Myell said.

Osherman nodded.

The kids stayed with Jodenny and the other officers while Myell and Osherman were led to a separate room. Myell was acutely aware of the overhead camera watching them.