The Stars Down Under (36 page)

“It's a dangerous game,” Nam said.

Jodenny said, “It's not a game.”

The
Kamchatka
started another sweep of the Roon ship's underbelly. Jodenny leaned forward, elbows on her knees, trying to make sense of the green scalelike attachments, the plates and protuberances and knobby features. She felt Myell's foot lash out against hers, and turned in alarm as he bolted upright.

“Stop them!” he shouted. No trace of the stutter remained. “Make them stop!”

A bright light flashed across the vidscreen. A thump vibrated through the
Kamchatka,
as if the whole ship had been slapped. The General Quarters alarm began to screech, tearing at Jodenny's ears alongside Myell's shouts.

“Stop them!” he kept shouting. The tendons in his neck bulged and he bared his teeth. He tried scrambling to the hatch but Ruiz's staff blocked him and started pulling him back. Jodenny tried to help, got an elbow in the face for her efforts, and was knocked off balance as the lifeboat unclamped.

“Emergency release!” someone yelled. “Strap in!”

The boat began to fall away from the
Kamchatka
. Myell was wrestled back to his seat and restrained. Jodenny hated to see Ruiz slap a sedative patch on his skin, but she didn't interfere. Myell slumped back, his eyes rolling up. The lifeboat continued to accelerate. Nam yanked Jodenny to her cushion and pulled down a safety strap just as alarms lit up across the bulkhead.

“Did they attack?” Jodenny demanded. “How's the
Kamchatka
?”

Nam pointed to a screen. “Repelled, but intact. Looks like only three or four lifeboats fell off.”

“Can we go back?” Ruiz asked, his voice high with fear.

“No propulsion. We can't turn around,” Jodenny said.

“Worse than that.” Nam's expression was grim. “We're plummeting too fast. Whatever the Roon are using on Earth-based nav systems must be messing with our autopilot as well.”

The officer in charge of the lifeboat, Chief Alvarez from the Data Department, wrestled with the helm controls. Interior alarms began to wail. A voice from the
Kamchatka
was issuing advice, but even Jodenny could see there was little that Alvarez could do. In his chair, Myell murmured a sedated complaint. She grabbed his hand, and for good measure grabbed one of Nam's as well.

“We're going to be fine,” Nam told her. The vibrations of the lifeboat made his voice waver. “Understand?”

The tiny ship plummeted toward land.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

Painkillers muddied Jodenny's thinking.

“Where are we?” she would ask, several times a day, and Myell couldn't always remember. Sometimes Nam would answer. Sometimes Dr. Ruiz would answer instead. Myell would listen carefully, then wander outside into the blistering, parched outback and forget everything they'd told him.

It bothered him that his mind seemed full of holes and crazy angles, but Ruiz told him he was getting better, and Nam would nod agreement before going back to the radio.

They were in Western Australia, Myell knew. They had been on a ship called the
Kamchatka
. Their lifeboat and several others had launched when the Roon did something to push the ship out of close proximity. The
Kamchatka
had suffered some damage but was still in orbit high overhead, on orders from Team Space. Nam talked to them every now and again on the radio. Myell listened, though it was hard for him to maintain focus on the way words worked, the way sentences flowed together and made sense.

He knew it hadn't always been that way. He remembered living on Fortune, marrying Jodenny, being stationed on the
Aral Sea,
joining Team Space. But he couldn't remember what it was like to have words flow out of his mouth like water in a river. Couldn't remember how to freely express what was going on in his head.

But the pictures … he could see pictures, day and night, pictures even when his eyes were closed, images of ruin and destruction that soaked into his flesh and sank to the bone. He couldn't shut them off completely no matter how hard he tried. Nam and Ruiz told him that the images weren't true, that the Roon weren't attacking.

“They will,” Myell said.

Nam asked, “You're sure?”

Myell wasn't sure of anything anymore.

Sitting with Jodenny helped. When she held his hand, the burning cities and charred bodies behind his eyes faded into faint shapes that he could almost ignore. But she was groggy, in pain, fading, and fear made him afraid that just one more of his touches, one hot breath against her face, and she would be lost to him forever.

“Why don't they come for us?” he asked Nam.

“They are,” Nam said. “But this place was the middle of nowhere even before the Debasement, and it's taking a long time to muster a land rescue. The Roon have grounded all airships, remember?”

Jodenny, the pregnant passenger, and two of the crew had been injured in the crash. The lifeboat carried plenty of water and food, but the hull was breached and of little protection against the heat of the day. The sunlight was indirect, diffused, victim of Earth's dirty atmosphere. It hadn't always been that way, because there was something Nam called the Debasement, which Myell understood to be a bad thing. Nam was in charge, but he was different from how Myell remembered him. Silent, mostly, his face drawn in deep lines.

“He's worried,” Jodenny explained. “We're stuck out here and he holds himself responsible for all these people.”

Karl raised his head from the nest in Jodenny's blankets. He too had been damaged in the crash, his fur singed and one paw bent. Often he curled up in Myell's lap, and Myell would pet him for hours.

Commander Nam sometimes talked about going for help. Ruiz told him he would die in the heat, or from snakes, or from any of the wild dingoes that circled the lifeboat at night. Because of the Debasement there were other things out there too, radiation-besotted, deformed, snarling. Nam scoffed at that notion, but on watch, at night, he was careful to keep the lifeboat's mazers close at hand.

On their third day in the desert Jodenny was groggier than usual, but she did open her eyes long enough to ask Myell how he felt.

“Hot,” he said, which was the truth.

She gave him a crooked smile. “Memories all come back?”

He didn't think so.

“If I have to go…” Jodenny said, and swallowed hard. She touched his face with trembling fingers. “If I have to leave you, it's not because I want to, okay?”

“You can't leave,” he said, stretching out beside her on the deck, scooting as close as he dared. “Can't.”

She fingered his hair. “Sometimes we have to,” she said, her eyes bright. “Sometimes we can't help it.”

Myell whispered, “I won't let you.”

That night, at sunset, two rescue teams arrived from Carnarvon. The crew cheered and even Jodenny mustered a smile. They crammed themselves into the flatbed vehicles and left all their gear behind. The flits turned west, toward the red sky, and in the excitement Karl was left behind with the wreck. By the time Myell remembered him, it was too late to turn back.

*   *   *

Jodenny was in a hospital in hell. The Carnarvon clinic hadn't been fully stocked or staffed before the Roon arrival and it certainly wasn't now. All forty beds were occupied by the ill or elderly, most struck down by dysentery or chronic illnesses. Other patients lay in cots in the hallways. The medical crew from the
Kamchatka'
s lifeboat were helping out the Aboriginal staff as best they could. If not for Dr. Ruiz, the only physicians would be a dentist and an unlicensed podiatrist. Post-Debasement Earth wasn't strict about medical staffing standards, especially with a nine-hundred-kilometer stretch to the nearest major city.

The hospital's air-conditioning didn't work, which made every room an oven. Ice was in short supply. The power generators were rationed, four hours off for every four hours on. Flies and roaches were a problem, as was overall sanitation. Nam had mustered up some volunteers to tackle the septic system, which was overtaxed and badly in need of new parts. Back on Fortune, it would take a few hours to get the parts made. On pre-Debasement Earth, it might take years.

“I'm afraid their bone knitter isn't working either,” Ruiz said.

Jodenny squinted up at him from her lumpy, sweaty bed. Painkillers kept her broken hip numb, but could do nothing about other discomforts. “Can it be fixed?”

Ruiz squeezed the bridge of his nose. “No. We're trying to find another nearby, but the likeliest source is Perth. None of the flits around here could make it that far without running out of fuel. The Roon still aren't letting ships take off.”

So she was to be laid up, crippled, for the foreseeable, horrendous future.

Myell came to Jodenny every day. His speech had gotten better since the crash but he looked haggard, weary, lost. Nam brought them both as much food and water as he could scavenge.

She said, “I'm glad you're here. I know you must be tempted to go off down to Perth, to do what you can about the Roon. Thank you for all your help.”

He shrugged. “Least I could do.”

Jodenny wasn't sure where Myell went when he wasn't with her, but sometimes he came to her with hair stiffened by sea salt, his face burned from wild solar rays.

“What are you doing out there?” she would ask.

He shook his head and kissed her cheek, which only made her worry more. The town wasn't safe. At night there were often gunshots, drunken singing, fistfights. The volunteer police force was vastly outnumbered by locals, stragglers, scavengers, and outback marauders looking for a place to lay up while the Roon ships roamed overhead. One tiny, thin strip of civilization, Jodenny thought, losing the battle against enemies outside and inside.

The clinic had no wallvids, but someone had a radio. According to news reports out of Perth, the Roon were still methodically scanning the whole of Earth. No more missiles had launched their way, no Team Space ships had tried another close approach, and no communications had been established.

“But the
Kamchatka'
s still up there,” Nam told her during his next visit. “I imagined that passenger petition has grown pretty long by now.”

Jodenny asked, “Do you know where Terry is?”

“At the beach. I left him there a little while ago. One of the med techs is watching him.”

“The beach?” Jodenny struggled to make sense of that. “Why?”

“He goes swimming. Throws himself into the waves and stays in the water for hours.”

“He doesn't like the ocean. Never has.”

“I know.”

After that, Jodenny dreamed of sharks. Their fins sliced through the surf and their teeth bit into Myell's leg but it was her hip that flared into agony. She woke in the middle of the night, coated with sweat, biting into her lip. The med tech was late with the painkillers.

Jodenny turned her face into her pillow and wept.

She didn't see Myell again until that afternoon, and she begged him to stay with her. “Please,” Jodenny said. “I don't want you going to the ocean.”

“The water makes it easier,” he said.

“Makes what easier?”

He waved his hand in the air. “Everything.”

She persuaded him to stay the night on a cot that Nam found and set up near the window. Jodenny's roommate, an old woman with pneumonia who never received visitors, was in no position to object. The room smelled of urine and the night was like a furnace, the sky lit by fires from looting on Carnarvon's south side.

“Kay,” he whispered in the orange-tinged darkness.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I wasn't always this way.”

“Which way?”

“Broken.”

“You're not broken.” Jodenny peered at him as best she could. “We're just going through a rough patch.”

He made a noise that might have been a laugh, then was silent.

Jodenny dozed fitfully. Dulled pain made her clench and unclench her fists. She was trying not to think of the
Kamchatka,
the Roon, the dying old woman in the next bed over. The smell of sickness wafted through the hospital, along with rot and bleach and blood and feces, and she wanted to scream, but didn't have the energy.

Sometime before dawn, she was woken from a restless sleep by Myell. He was standing beside her bed, his hair rumpled, his expression serene. She thought he might have been kissing her in his sleep.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“I have to go,” he said, almost a whisper. “I know what to do. How to stop them.”

He sounded utterly confident. And that confidence scared her more than anything else could have done. She said, “Terry, no.”

He kissed her, openmouthed, his lips warm and convincing, his hand cradling her head.

“Look at the ceiling,” he said.

Jodenny tried to focus. All she saw were cracks in the plaster and a light bulb that didn't work even when the power was on. After a few more seconds of staring she thought she saw some kind of shape, an outline. An egret. She remembered swooping through the air with feathers in her nose and hands. The exhilaration of flight, and the bird's cry when it was attacked.

“It's a crocodile,” Myell said.

“No, it's not,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “There's nothing up there.”

His gaze lifted. “I didn't tell you. I met crocodiles. Dozens of them. Free-not-chained. She kissed me in the ocean, and I couldn't stop her.”

Myell's skin was warm, his eyes wide. Jodenny thought maybe he was sleepwalking, though he'd never done that before. They were so far gone from normal that anything was possible.

“Can we talk about it after breakfast?” she asked. “Can you wait that long?”

He bent very close to her. “Do you trust me?”