The Stars Down Under (29 page)

Something moved in the corner of Myell's vision. He started to yell, but the second Roon was too damned fast. It rose out of the grass, grabbed Myell, and yanked him close.

“Chief!” Nam yelled.

“It won't hurt him!” Gayle called out. “I think it's his mate.”

The Aboriginals made unhappy noises, but they didn't raise their spears. Nam held out his knife but didn't approach. Squeezed tight, the claws sharp against his throat, Myell didn't fight or antagonize it. He felt himself dragged backward and tried not to stumble. The second Roon pulled him into the dim, dry confines of the Mother Sphere.

“It's all right,” Gayle was saying. “They're just desperate, like us.”

The two Roon conferred in clicks and whistles. Myell's breath was going short, his vision dimming, at the pressure on his throat.

“It's going to kill me,” he said.

Gayle motioned to the female. “You need him. Please.”

The male Roon kept talking, clicks and whistles and shrill little sounds. The female hauled Myell tighter, her breath foul. He didn't know what they were arguing about. He told himself he'd do the same thing, if he and Jodenny were stuck somewhere for months on end—do anything, desperate, frantic, ruthless, to get home.

The call of an approaching ouroboros made both Roon fall silent.

Languid calm enveloped Myell. The next station might be the Roon home world, or it might be another floodplain, or snow planet, or somewhere completely different, but the token was coming …

Nam and the Aboriginals appeared at the archway. Nam had taken someone's spear and looked ready to hurl it.

“They're not going to kill anyone,” Gayle said. “They want to get home, like we do.”

“Not with him,” Nam said.

The ring appeared, solid and beautiful. The female Roon dragged Myell in, and the male joined them. The male hesitated, then motioned to Gayle and Nam.

“Don't,” Myell said, the calm evaporating. “Stay here.”

“And be stranded?” Nam stepped forward.

Gayle was already ahead of him. “Not a chance.”

Shark Tooth raised a hand in farewell. “Jungali,” he said, and the others echoed. Their voices grew louder and more fervent: “Jungali, Jungali, Jungali—”

The ouroboros whisked them away.

The yellow light was different than before. Harder, hotter. Something was wrong with it. The next station appeared like a snapshot, no time for Myell to assimilate their surroundings, and then they were swept forward again. Another station materialized. But the light pushed them onward, and the next Sphere was just a blur, and Myell was aware of Nam trying to say something in the milliseconds, of the Roon chittering in alarm. The tattoos on his cheeks burned like acid. Too late he realized that they were a marker, a signal, a trap—

Then a Sphere unlike any other coalesced and stayed permanent. Myell fell to his knees. He was aware of the Roon clutching each other, Gayle vomiting on herself, Nam gasping for breath.

Soothing blue light played over them, a beam of some kind, and all the wrong parts within Myell righted themselves, all the wild chemistry in his body realigned.

“Where the hell are we?” Nam asked.

Myell focused on the room the ouroboros had left them in—room, not Sphere, large and high-domed with multiple archways leading out of it. The tiled dome glowed a soft, soothing shade of blue. The walls were smooth, curving sandstone, the floor hard dirt. He smelled the faint aroma of flowers in the air. Lilacs.

“It's the hub.” Myell rubbed his temples. “The Sphere that controls all the others. End of the line.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY

“We know this much,” Toledo said, his chair squeaking as he shifted his weight. “They arrived twelve hours ago, coming in from the other side of the sun—Demos Command didn't pick them up until they were passing Venus. Three of them. Went straight to Earth, took up orbit, haven't made a peep on any radio frequency. Don't answer hails. Don't try to communicate with anyone, it looks like. Haven't fired any weapons, haven't sent down any ships. They're just sitting there. At the same time, instrument-based radar down on Earth has gone crazy. Nothing can fly. Anything with a navigational computer on it has been rendered useless, and that includes land-, ocean-, and satellite-based missiles.”

Jodenny felt cold all over. “Earth is defenseless?”

“Even if anyone down there could launch missiles, we're talking fleas against dinosaurs here,” Toledo said glumly.

Farber, her vomit bag close at hand, asked, “Why are we still on course for Earth?”

Toledo shifted again. The chair protested. “Because that's what the Admiralty ordered.”

“There's no place else to go,” Jodenny replied. “It's a straight, empty run from the drop point to Earth.”

“We could change course for the asteroid mines or Martian colonies,” Farber said.

“It's possible the aliens don't know they're out there,” Toledo replied. “No one wants to reveal their presence if that's true. I've heard that any Team Space ships in flight have been ordered to hold position. We're talking passenger ships on their way to the moon, cargo ships outbound to Mars, the Survey Wing birdies over at Jupiter and Saturn. Even some fox fighters training off Venus. No one's going anywhere. Except us.”

Farber leaned closer to the gib, almost blocking Jodenny's view. “But we don't have any weapons. Just a handful of birdies.”

“We have ourselves,” Jodenny murmured. “Thrust and maneuverability, and engines that can be set to overload.”

Incredulous, Farber said, “What can we do? Ram them? With a ship full of civilians?”

“If it comes to that,” Jodenny said grimly.

The ships on the deskgib continued their orbit of Earth. Jodenny watched for a few more hours but didn't learn any more than she already knew. She forced herself to go off in search of food, anything that would silence the growling in her stomach, but that was a mistake. The galley was full of noise and fear, passengers with nothing else to do but worry.

“I always believed there were aliens out there,” she heard one man saying. “Just not that they'd come gunning for us.”

Hullabaloo, Baylou, and Lou Eterno called Jodenny over to their table. Reluctantly she went over with her sandwich and coffee and took the space they made for her.

“Any news from the bridge?” Hullabaloo asked.

“Why would I know?” Jodenny asked.

Baylou gave her a speculative look. “Heard you have friends in high places.”

Jodenny glanced past him to the wallvid. “Not that high.”

“I keep telling you. If they meant to wage war, they would have opened fire by now.” Hullabaloo reached past Jodenny for a salt shaker. “Earth would be rubble. We'd all be little charred bits of bone and flesh, drifting through space.”

So much for eating. Jodenny pushed her food away and said, “No one knows. Don't start planning for the worst.”

“What do you think they look like?” Lou asked. “Bug eyes? Furry? We've got a betting pool. I think they have two heads.”

She appreciated his levity. “Never saw one, couldn't begin to guess—”

But then her hand jerked, and coffee sloshed over the rim onto her hand. She was barely aware of heat and wetness. She lurched to her feet. She
had
seen one. Standing in the middle of a destroyed laboratory, an ouroboros encircling its clawed feet, a feather cloak around its scaly shoulders. The thing was maybe as surprised to see her as she was to see it. Around them, the General Quarters klaxon screamed and clanged, and Sam Osherman was saying, “Go! Get out of here!”

Hullabaloo put his hand on her arm and tried to restrain her. “Ellen? What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled. “Leave me alone.”

She fled the galley, blindly climbed the nearest ladder, and made it to her cabin without being aware of the actual steps. Once inside, she locked the hatch and slid to the deck with her arms wrapped around her knees. The chemical memory block had dissolved. She could remember everything now, every part of the
Yangtze
disaster. Her body shook and tears slid down her face and she hugged herself hard, missing Myell so keenly that she couldn't breathe, wishing he were right there beside her.

An alien, on the
Yangtze.
No wonder Team Space had blocked her memory. They hadn't worried so much about her learning the secrets of the Wondjina Transportation System. They'd been worried about the aliens, about sentient or hostile life somewhere in the network.

Jodenny slowly peeled herself from the deck. She needed a shower, something to wash off the stench of fear and despair, but settled for curling up on her bunk with Karl. The koala snuggled against her side but she was still cold, very cold, and no robot could ease that chill.

Fucking aliens. Fucking Team Space, knowing it all along.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Jem, Dianne, all the lost dead of her first ship. She didn't sleep, not with their faces and voices so present in her thoughts, but awareness of the cabin faded away. When a keening sound cut through the air she thought she was dreaming. She jerked upright and watched, in dulled surprise, as a green ouroboros appeared in the space between her bunk and Farber's. This one wasn't shaped like a snake eating its tail, but instead like a crocodile. A large, hungry crocodile with sharp eyes. Knowing eyes.

Jodenny sat up. Karl rolled aside, yawning, and went back to sleep.

“No,” Jodenny said to the ring. “I can't trust you.”

It spun lazily.

She said, “You could be a trap.”

Something small moved within its shadow. A tiny green gecko climbed up the inner rim, reached its summit, and gazed at her with head erect. The entire ouroboros lifted ever so slightly, then descended again.

Geckos and crocodiles. Totems and gods.

“Will you take me to Terry?” she asked. The gecko flicked its tail, and the ouroboros brightened like a little green sun.

“Oh, hell,” she said, and stepped inside.

*   *   *

Nam and Myell put several meters of distance between them and the Roon.

“Keep away from them, Doctor,” Nam said.

“Stop being ridiculous.” Gayle wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “They need our assistance.”

The two aliens stopped comforting each other and took an interest in their surroundings. The room had multiple archways, but no signs or maps indicated where they might lead. The dome, several hundred meters above, was as distant as the sky. The glowing walls were soothing, the air cool and fresh. The ouroboros didn't move on, but remained resting on the dirt floor.

“You're sure this is the control station?” Gayle asked. “How do you know?”

He shrugged. Myell couldn't explain it, didn't want to try. “I just do.”

“There,” Nam said, pointing past Myell's shoulder. “Look.”

Part of the wall began to slide down, revealing an eyelid-shaped viewport to outer space. A thick swath of stars ran across the sky, glittering, brilliant, close enough to almost touch. Myell had spent many nights on Baiame staring up into the nighttime sky, had visited the Seven Sisters in all their glory, but had never seen the cosmos so breathtaking, so gorgeous.

“Jesus,” Nam said.

The Roon clicked and whistled.

Myell walked slowly toward the view, aware of a faint tingle in the dirt. He stopped, stepped again. His Team Space boots were a hindrance.

“What are you doing, Chief?” Nam asked.

Myell chucked the boots aside and peeled off his socks. The dirt was cool and slightly moist under his toes. “You don't feel that?”

Nam gazed doubtfully at the ground.

Myell concentrated on the tingling. Not like static electricity, not like any kind of electricity, and it had a taste. Faintly bitter, but not unpleasant. He followed it, barely aware of Nam trailing behind, and Gayle and the Roon behind Nam.

“You're sure this is a good idea?” Nam asked.

The path led into another domed room, similar to the first, but the walls were yellow and the open viewport revealed an enormous red nebula of stars. A cluster of gum trees grew in the center of the room, ringed by small shrubs with red flowers. The air smelled wetter, tinged with sweet fragrance.

“I think we're on a space station,” Gayle said, gazing at the nebula.

“The views don't match,” Nam said. “They're probably vids, maybe artwork.”

The yellow chamber had several archways of its own. The path beneath Myell's dirty feet curved and crossed over other tingling lines, each distinct. The one he was following made him feel small and quick, camouflaged, four-legged …

He stopped and said, “It's a gecko.”

Nam was frowning deeply. “It's a what?”

“Gecko line,” Myell said. “Songline.”

He started following it again. Gayle said, “But songlines are just myths, and you're not an Aboriginal.”

Nam said, “Don't ruin the mood, Doctor.”

The gecko songline continued on through more beautiful chambers, some of them filled with blue or white light, some dim and soothing. Some had viewports onto more galactic wonders—a hot red planet here, a cluster of asteroids there—and some had only the graceful curved walls reaching up, ever up. Trees and flowers grew everywhere now, tropical rain forests re-created and thriving, and thick carpets of green grass swept Myell toward more archways, always more archways.

Gayle said, “We're going to get hopelessly lost.”

“Worry more about your friends,” Nam said.

The two Roon trailed behind them, conferring with clicks and whistles. Myell didn't spare them any of his attention. The gecko line crossed a kangaroo, a wallaby, a crocodile. The crocodile pulled him along, inexorable as the current of a stream, until they reached a chamber unlike any of the others. It was rectangular, not circular. The light was blue-white, like a summer's day, and the ground was more mossy than grassy. Orange and black towers of rock, no taller than Myell's shoulders and similar to beehives, formed mazes around small ponds and tiny streams.