The Outback Stars (34 page)

“How are you with DLRs?” Caldicot asked. “I'm routing you over last month's. They need to be spot-checked and archived. Lieutenant's annoyed because I keep procrastinating on them.”

“Why do you keep procrastinating?”

Caldicot smirked. “Because it annoys her.”

Myell started on the DLRs. He hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words with Caldicot in the months since she'd joined the division, and now they were expected to work side by side.

“What else annoys her?” he asked.

“Be just two minutes late in the morning. Don't do anything right away. Don't ever proofread your work.”

He was troubleshooting the second batch of DLRs when he grew aware of Jodenny and Faddig standing in front of his desk. He hadn't even heard her return.

“Aren't you supposed to be off the clock?” Jodenny asked. “You're under orders to only work half days.”

“Staring up at the overhead gets pretty boring, Lieutenant.” She of all people should know that.

Jodenny didn't even blink. “You could study for the chief's exam.”

Myell saw her scheme now. The entire reason he'd been reassigned to the admin office was so that she could make him study. Resigned, he said, “Yes, ma'am,” and shut down the reports.

“I'm walking that way,” Faddig said. “Let's go.”

Back in his cabin Myell dictated an imail to Colby and Dottie but didn't mention the accident. They wouldn't get it for several months, and by then it wouldn't matter. He tried reading more Aboriginal mythology, but the words wandered all over the page and he nearly fell asleep. He went down to the lounge, which was remarkably clean and quiet with everyone still at work. Myell slouched down on a sofa and turned on the vid. It had been so long since he played Izim that he lost his first life five minutes into the game.

In his next incarnation he followed a dragon moth down into a labyrinth of caves. The twists and turns reminded him of the slots. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on level thirty-eight, where Hosaka had said the accident took place. What had he been doing? Attempting to retrieve Circe. The level had been locked down. Nothing should have been moving—

Blankness. Dr. Moody had warned him he might not get his memory back. His brain hadn't had time to properly store all the data before it was whacked against the inside of his skull. Other memories might return to him in bits and pieces. Myell returned to the game but lost the rest of his lives in quick succession. The sofa was so comfortable he drifted off to sleep. When he woke, Gallivan, Hosaka, and Kevwitch were playing Snipe around him.

“Must be nice, lazing around all day,” Gallivan said. “Wish I had that life.”

A few minutes later they decided to go eat and dragged him along. On the mess decks, Gallivan carried his tray for him and Hosaka got him an extra serving of sashimi. Spallone was standing near the buffet but Kevwitch glared at him and Spallone immediately left.

“Spill it,” Myell said when they were all sitting in a booth. “Who put you up to this?”

Gallivan asked, “Put us up to what?”

“Eat up.” Hosaka pushed his plate closer. “No worries.”

Timrin had a watch that evening. Myell waited up for him to return. “All right,” he said, with Koo climbing down his arm. “Who organized the carrier escort duty?”

“You think you're that important, bucko?”

Koo paused on Myell's forearm. He had placed the stone gecko Ganambarr had given him on his pillow, and she obviously couldn't decide what to make of the odd intruder. Her tail flicked as she edged closer.

“Three people walked me to dinner and made sure I got back here safe and sound.” Myell still didn't know whether to be touched or irritated. “Everywhere I've gone today, someone's been with me. I don't need babysitters. What happened in the slots was an accident.”

Timrin peered into a mirror and picked at his teeth. “We'll see. Until then, expect more mates to walk you around the ship.”

“Mates?” Myell asked.

“Teammates, at least,” Timrin said. “What more could you ask for?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

As Jodenny made her way down the aisle of the H-Deck amphitheater, wondering just how many hundreds of hours of her career had been lost to boring meetings, David Quenger grabbed her arm.

He demanded, “What's this bullshit about you blaming Chiba for Myell's accident? If you can't run your division right, if you can't prevent a simple accident, then you should resign your position right now.”

Jodenny kept her voice low and calm, though her instinct was to outshout him. “Chiba has a history of threatening Myell.”

“Fuck that.”

“You want to defend him, you talk to Security,” she said, and pushed past him. Danyen Cartik waved her toward an empty seat and she sat blindly, blood rushing past her ears.

“What's wrong?” he asked. “You look like you could kill someone.”

She rubbed the spot on her arm where Quenger had touched her. “It's nothing.”

“So you say. How's your sergeant? The one that almost got flattened?”

“He's back to work.” He was also unfailingly polite and professional, as if they'd never taken a trip among the stars together, as if they were nothing more than lieutenant and sergeant. In most ways his attitude relieved her. In others—well, she had gotten what she wanted, no use crying over it.

Senga took the podium. “Warramala's a lot more diverse than our last stop. The wild woolly frontier, or so they like to think of themselves. Big believers in life, liberty, and the pursuit of fortune. We'll have shuttles running to two ports: Katherine Bay and Waipata. Katherine Bay's a big resort on the east coast of the southern continent—”

Jodenny scanned her queue as Senga talked. She remembered Katherine Bay fondly from her last stop. Excellent scuba diving there. Good opportunities for shopping. And a set of Spheres just a short flight away, where maybe she could jaunt to strange new worlds. But as she went through her imail she saw her leave chit had come back marked “Disapproved.”

“See me,” said Al-Banna's attached note.

Jodenny had already approved her own division's chits, but as she combed through the records she saw that Myell's had also been bounced back.

Senga said, “The biggest problem you're going to run into in Katherine Bay is sunburn. Waipata's got a lot more red-light districts, and with the Warramala World Cup game starting a few days after we arrive, you can imagine the possibilities for trouble.”

“Go East Enfield!” someone shouted, followed by a ripple of laughter.

“We're also going to be arriving in the middle of Gagudjun Corroboree. They're expecting thousands of people for that. Add in thousands more of drunk soccer fans—” Senga made a sour face. “It doesn't get more exciting than that.”

On the way out of the meeting Jodenny caught sight of a familiar face and cornered Francesco. “A. J.! I've been trying to reach you.”

“I know.” The strain of the scandal showed on his face. “Sorry.”

“You don't return my calls, you moved over to transient berthing—”

“I know,” he returned, more forcefully, and Jodenny realized they were standing in the middle of the passage, the most public of places.

“Let me buy you some coffee,” she said.

“I can't.” Francesco made a show of checking his watch. “I'm working temporarily over in Safety and I need to get back.”

“Then let me take you to dinner tonight.”

“I'll call you,” Francesco promised.

“A. J.—”

“What?”

Jodenny's question stalled in her throat. Francesco grimaced and said, “Yes, I did it. Yes, I'd do it again. She's worth it.”

“Make sure you call me,” was all Jodenny could say.

Jodenny trudged over to the Flats to find Al-Banna, but he was stuck in his own meeting. Wildstein said, “He disapproved your leave because Rokutan and Zarkesh already put in for time off and Vu's going to be tied up with her annual inspection. Someone's got to stick around.”

“What about Sergeant Myell's chit, ma'am?”

“He's not cleared medically.”

“I believe he is,” Jodenny said, but she didn't press the issue. If Myell was stuck on the ship, there was no chance he'd go traipsing off to a Mother Sphere to investigate without her. And there was less chance Chiba could, say, run him off a mountain.

Master Chief DiSola caught her in the passageway. “I talked to your AT Lund the other day. He says you're mother-henning him.”

“AT Lund is terribly sick,” Jodenny said. “I want him to rest.”

“I don't suppose his sudden interest in returning to work has anything to do with the broken entertainment system in his cabin? And his malfunctioning gib?”

“Are they both not working?”

“Stopped right after we left Mary River,” DiSola said.

“How unfortunate,” she said. “I'm sure he's called in a service request. Lieutenant Commander Zarkesh will no doubt make sure it's properly addressed.”

The corner of DiSola's mouth turned up. “No doubt.”

Jodenny trammed over to T6's loading dock and took Ysten into the bowels. The Direct Conveyance System that moved inventory over to Mainship was able to pinpoint every smartcrate's location at any given moment in its journey, but it required maintenance and quarterly inspections. More equipment provided umbilical services to the Towers—power, atmosphere circulation, heat, and water—and the same services to the shops and restaurants on the Rocks. The air stank of grease and the rumble of machinery made casual conversation difficult.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Ysten asked, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Any obvious safety hazards.” Jodenny flashed her torch over the equipment as they followed the narrow passage. “Check the fire suppression equipment, the sprinklers, the medbots.”

“Where do those other belts go?”

“The other towers.” Jodenny took a long sip of water from the bottle on her hip. “If you needed to move inventory from Underway Stores to, say, T4, you'd have Core redirect the system.”

“Why would we want to give stuff to other towers?”

“Temporary storage, or if one of the civilian colonies purchased supplies from us.” Jodenny's gib vibrated and she read a text message. “Oh, crap. I don't have time for this.”

“What's the matter?”

“Sweet test. My number came up.”

“Go ahead. I'll carry on down here.”

Jodenny hesitated.

Ysten gave her a stubborn look. “I told you I was going to do better.”

“I know. Just be careful—it's easy to get turned around down here, and even easier to slip or hurt yourself.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, but without rancor, and maybe there might be hope for him yet.

She climbed back up to the ring and trammed back to Mainship. The drug tests were run out of a small office near the Security Department. Several dozen sailors were already waiting in line, but officers and chiefs were sent to the front of the line. Jodenny stepped up to the desk, verified her identity with a retinal scan, and let a young tech swab the back of her hand. She verified her identity again, per procedure.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the tech said. “You're all set.”

While she was in the neighborhood she decided to stop by Commander Picariello's office. He didn't look happy to see her, but he said, “Here's a hard copy of the final report on Sergeant Myell's accident. The Safety Department's report is attached.”

Jodenny flipped through the pages. “This says it was an accident. There's nothing about Chiba or the fight in the gym.”

“They're not pertinent to what happened in T6,” he said. “The Safety Department concluded that the dingo's programming was corrupt. You can see it right there.”

“But, sir—” Jodenny said.

“An accident, Lieutenant. That's all there is,” he said, and she knew that tone. It was an official, bureaucratic, listen-to-no-common-sense tone, dictated by someone higher than him or by the needs of Team Space; it was a parasteel wall, and she had run into it before with Commodore Campos. She didn't know enough about Picariello personally to appeal to his human nature, and the differences in their rank meant she couldn't appeal to him as a peer.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

She read the reports in the passageways as she walked back to her office. Twice she nearly walked into people or into a bulkhead. There was no blame for Myell or any of her sailors, which she supposed was good news. But Picariello's abrupt disinterest in exploring other explanations, on the heels of what had seemed like genuine enthusiasm, left her cold.

*   *   *

“Everything okay, Sergeant?” Caldicot asked. “You're awfully quiet.”

“I'm reading.” Myell scanned the reconciliations that Amador had forwarded. The June inventory had come out at a ninety percent accuracy rate, lower than April and May, but Jodenny was going to have to live with it. Circe was missing a chunk of data and another DNGO, Athena, had gotten herself stuck and couldn't be retrieved until the Safety Department authorized the resumption of operations in T6. In the subreport he saw five hundred records had been reconciled by hand. He tried pulling up the individual records, but he didn't have the necessary clearance in his new position.

He visited Faddig later that morning and said, casually, “If you want me to compile the reconciliations, I'll need to access your agent.”

Faddig still had not grasped the jargon of his new job. “Do I want you to do that, or is it something I should do?”

“You could do it, Chief. I'll show you. The whole thing shouldn't take more than a day or two.”

Faddig blinked. “My agent's name is Dooley. He'll be expecting your call.”