The Stars Down Under (40 page)

Wings. Myell nearly lost his balance again, but somehow managed to stay on his feet.

The King loomed over them, still a few meters away, no recognizable expression on that alien face. Maybe he was a general, or a diplomat, or something other than a monarch, but it didn't matter. Myell's heart pounded like the drums of a military tattoo, so loud that surely every soldier in the Roon army could hear it, every soldier recognize the call.

He took his own step forward, though Nam tried to hold him back.

“Wait,” Nam said.

“No,” Myell replied. This was what they had made the journey for. This meeting, on Earth's exposed breastbone.

But once he was forward, once his relatively puny height was measured against the King's in the glare of light, Myell wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. Salute? Kneel? Kiss the King's claws, beg in supplication? Maybe he was there to surrender the planet formally. He had no authority, no invested power. He was utterly terrified.

But he was also Jungali.

He was the helmsman.

The King raised his left hand. Anna Gayle stepped forward. She was dressed in a gray feather cloak and dark robes. Her face was scrubbed clean, and her hair, red and lustrous, fell over her shoulders like a goddess's.

“Sergeant Myell,” she said briskly. “Commander.”

Nam spat in the dust. “Are you their prisoner, or their princess?”

Gayle smiled without humor. “Considering that you left me to die on Garanwa's station? Probably a little bit of both. But the Roon were smarter than us all along. They had transportation en route from the moment we landed there. Some kind of telepathy, I think. I'm not privy to it. I think it's safe to say they were looking for Garanwa all along. We helped them find him.”

Myell closed his eyes briefly. An entire race of lizards, telepathically linked. Ships outfitted with interstellar propulsion faster than anything Team Space used. Weapons technology that humanity couldn't match or understand.

Nam said, in a strangled voice, “You're helping them.”

She flicked her gaze to the King. Her voice was more monotone than usual, more flat. For a fleeting instant he wondered if she was drugged, or somehow under Roon influence. She said, “I'm just along for the ride, gentlemen. Doing my part to foster interspecies communication. Otherwise, the consequences are rather severe.”

One of the soldiers pushed a man forward. The prisoner was dirty and emaciated, his hair and beard wildly tangled. The scraps of clothing on his legs and arms weren't enough to cover up dark bruises, ragged scrapes, and long gouge marks. The man landed on his hands and knees with a moan. He kept his head bowed to the King, but Myell recognized his profile.

“Commander,” he murmured.

Not a flicker of acknowledgment from Sam Osherman other than the slight stiffening of his back, the tiny curl of a filthy foot.

“I said there were consequences,” Gayle said mildly.

Machinery began to groan deep in the ground. Rocks tumbled and scraped and dislodged as an enormous Sphere was wrenched from the heart of the Burringurrah and slowly lifted into the air by gravity beams. Millions of years of dirt flaked from its brown encrusted surfaces. It was a dark, spherical moon larger than the
Kamchatka
. He couldn't look at it without flinching, couldn't breathe in the face of its power and might.

“What is it?” Nam asked.

“The First Egg,” Myell said, the words scraping his throat. “First Egg of the Rainbow Serpent.”

Chittering passed along the lines of soldiers. The Roon King held up his hand and they silenced. Wind whistled up over the edges of the plateau, stirring the King's cloak. Sam Osherman didn't look up, but his shoulders were shaking.

“This is all they want,” Gayle said.

Myell rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. “It's all there is.”

Nam clutched him harder, still trying to stay upright on his one good leg. “What do you mean?”

“It controls every Sphere, every ouroboros,” Myell said. “The Alcheringas. Not only the Little A and the Big One, but all there are in the universe—and there are so many more than we know about. It controls the planets the Nogomain built for us. It can control suns, and comets, and galaxies themselves.”

The Roon King turned his face to the First Egg, his teeth sharp in the floodlights. Small Roon robots like DNGOs rose around the Egg, scanning it with lights. Searching for an entrance. The way in. But getting inside the Egg would accomplish nothing without a Nogomain to operate it. Without Jungali.

“How do you know?” Nam asked.

Abruptly Myell began to laugh.

Because it was pretty funny. Poor Garanwa, sick and dying, alone for so long, waiting for Myell. Who finally showed up, bringing Roon with him. Big mistake there. But the real mistake was Garanwa's thinking that Myell could handle the knowledge that had been transferred, that Myell's poor addled brain could be of any use whatsoever. No matter what useful pieces of trivia popped up now and then, they were simply jetsam floating on the surface of a poisoned sea. He wasn't Jungali. He couldn't control himself, or the rings, or the First Egg, or the fucking cosmos. He didn't
know
anything. He had failed every step along the way.

The Roon King turned back to him and made a clicking noise.

“I really don't know,” Myell said, mirth bubbling down. “All this trouble, and I'm the last person who can help you.”

The Roon columns parted, waves and ripples extending outward. Two humans were tugged forward, Jodenny and a man Myell tried to recognize—Sweeney, was it? From the
Kamchatka.
Jodenny, looking dirty and tired but otherwise well, tried to rush to him. She was held back.

“Terry!” she called out.

His sense of humor dried up immediately.

Gayle came to Myell. Her soft hand traced a path down his cheekbone and along his jaw. “As someone who recently lost a spouse to the ineptitude of Team Space, let me tell you. Give them what they want or they'll kill her.”

He understood. Saw, in a flash like lightning, what had to be done. Kuvik had known. Yambli had known. The boy Burringurrah, fleeing the initiation rites of his tribe, had figured it out in the end. Transformation required sacrifice. Of one's self, and sometimes more.

“Fuck her!” Jodenny said. “Don't listen to her, Terry.”

Gayle said, soft and insidious, “Or maybe they'll do to her what they did to Commander Osherman. Would you like me to describe it to you? Tell you what I've seen?”

Nam shoved Gayle away. The Roon soldiers closest by made a grab for Nam. Myell snatched the knife from Nam's belt and immediately drove it into the Roon King's side. The knife slid along the armor, found a weak spot, but didn't go far into tough leathery flesh. Instead, the Roon King struck at Myell with one of his clawed hands. Razors tore through Myell's cheek and jaw and neck and sent him flying through the air.

He landed hard on his side, agony thudding through him. Blood filled his mouth, hot salty blood, and more of it drenched his side, pouring from the deep gouges that he could feel, not see. He was barely aware of Jodenny's shouts, of Nam crawling toward him, of the Roon cheering on their King. Overhead, clouds rolled up against one another. A flash of lightning heralded the first rain in months.

Myell rolled weakly to his side, trying to spit up the blood, but he was choking on it, dying on it. In blurred vision he saw the First Egg light up with trails of gold and silver and blue, songlines crisscrossing its globe. How strange, how pretty. Like rivers of light, converging and diverging, cool and pretty and twisting upon one another in patterns established yet fluid, always fluid.

“Jesus,” Nam was babbling, shaky hands trying to staunch Myell's bleeding wounds, but no fingers could plug the torn arteries in his throat, the vessels ripped irreparably.

Myell slumped, dizziness and weakness making it impossible for him to keep the weight of his head up. He couldn't breathe without a gurgle, couldn't drag air into his body. Part of him panicking, flailing, but the strength for that was fading, too, and he could barely keep his eyes gazing on the Roon King, who was staring at the beautiful First Egg and had no pity for dying humans.

Jodenny fell to his side. Myell tried to cup her cheek the way she had cupped his, that confused night in the
Kamchatka
infirmary. She had been so tender. Now his touch was rough with calluses, sticky with blood, and too tremulous to stay still for even a moment on her cheek.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “You can't leave without me.”

Lightning zigzagged across the sky, along with first drops of stinging rain. The First Egg sang with light and then turned completely black.

Myell died with the image of Jodenny filling his vision.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

Rain began to fall.

No gentle drops here. The water was hard and cold and hammering. The pelts bounced off the First Egg and filled the air with wild thumping, like a thousand men banging on drums. The Roon soldiers shifted uneasily, and the Roon King made a sharp, angry sound.

Jodenny was still kneeling at Myell's side. His eyes were open but glassy. His lips were blue in the harsh Roon light. She pushed on his bloody chest and blew air into his lungs but he had gone far beyond any place where she could help him.

Nam pulled her away. Jodenny tried to pull free, determined to provoke the Roon King into striking her as well, ending her life, but Nam said, “That's not what he wants!”

“I don't care!” she shouted back, into the cacophony of the First Egg's drums. Oblivion and void would be welcome—

But then she saw the plateau below Burringurrah fill with light, marvelous light, a sea of rainbow colors. The rainfall was making the ancient ocean bloom with neon reds, tender blues and greens, hot pink, silver whites, gold. Impossible, all of it. The colors reached up into the sky and became hot lightning bolts that pulsed, exploded, each bolt branching into a dozen more, each branch feeding back to the horizon.

None of the bolts touched ground but the charged electrical air made her hair lift, her skin itch. No thunder rolled down from the sky, or maybe the First Egg drowned it all out.

Jungali,
said Myell's voice, somewhere in Jodenny's heart.

She spun to her husband but he was dead, horribly dead, his corpse being washed clean by rain.

The bolts slowed as if they were a vid image being stilled by an unseen hand. The dome of the sky became a pattern of hot-white tree branches, etched and sparkling in the blackness. The sea of light on the Burringurrah plain stilled and froze.

The Roon King, his head thrown back to the rain, his wings outstretched, turned into an unmoving statue. His soldiers also slowed to a stop, as surely as if they'd been turned to stone.

“Are they dead?” Nam asked.

Jodenny limped to the Roon King's side. She wanted to push him into the pit of the First Egg or maybe even cut off his head. Eat him, limb by limb. Gayle was nearby, also frozen. Her lips were parted in a word never to be completed. Jodenny could easily defile both of them. But Mark Sweeney, who had been standing by in silence, took her arm and said, “Commander,” as if duty had any sway in this nightmare, as if rank could restore her to sanity.

Nam was struggling to stand, his right leg useless beneath him. Sweeney helped him up. A dirty, bedraggled man in rags was staring at Myell's corpse, no expression on his bruised face.

His bruised,
familiar
face. She had lain with that man in bed, had cupped his cheeks with her hands and tasted his lips.

“Sam?” she asked, and felt dizzy. “Sam, is that you?”

He didn't reply.

The First Egg drummed and glowed under the unforgiving rain.

“My God,” Sweeney said, and Jodenny looked up.

Shards of the lightning branches broke off and began to tumble out of the sky. They fell silently and swiftly, and hit the ground at a precise spot beside the frozen Roon King. A dozen, then a dozen more, the shards coalescing, merging, until a white figure in Myell's shape and form appeared. He was taller than Myell, larger, not the same man, but some kind of creature born from the same body, as Garanwa had once been from a boy named Burringurrah.

The First Egg fell quiet. The rain eased into drizzle, and made a soft comforting sound as drops landed on the plateau.

“You're Jungali,” Jodenny said.

He nodded. There was no smile on his face, but he looked kind, patient.

“You're the helmsman?” Nam asked, leaning heavily on Mark Sweeney.

“I am,” he said, in a voice as sonorous as thunder. His gaze turned to the plain, to the rainbow sea still illuminated by the lightning branches above. He was watching something Jodenny couldn't see, or remembering something private and ancient.

“Will you help us?” she asked. “Kill them all?”

If there was anything left of Myell in him, she knew he would help. But this Jungali was a god, or something close to it.

“Not a god,” he said. “Nogomain. We serve the Wondjina.”

Jodenny took a deep breath. “Will the Wondjina help us?”

He turned his face to her. So familiar, yet so strange. His forehead was smaller, the eyes deeper, the mouth more lush.

“The Wondjina have always been helping. Who brings the lightning? Who births the crocodiles?”

She was too tired and grief-stricken for riddles. Jodenny turned away. The First Egg, quiet in the sky, caught her eye. It was no longer black. Its surface had changed to bright blue and green oceans, to brown land masses under wispy clouds, white polar regions covered with ice.

“You were given this world to learn in, to grow out of,” Jungali said. “You conquered each other and ruined the land, battles that did not need to be fought.”

“It's our nature to battle,” Nam said.