The Outback Stars (8 page)

Mrs. Mullaly's expression seemed so eager and cheerful that Jodenny gave her the benefit of the doubt. “I'm sure it will be fine.”

Jodenny retreated to her office and rubbed her temples. Employing civilians for nonessential jobs was one tactic Team Space used to keep military spouses occupied during the long Alcheringa deployments, but did she have to get one so green behind the ears? And an American, to boot. Jodenny had never been to Earth, but she'd heard wild things about the kinds of people who roughed out a living in what was left of the United States. That Mrs. Mullaly's husband worked in Engineering was an additional concern. Any indiscreet word or action on Jodenny's part might easily spread—it wasn't oil that kept Team Space lubricated, it was the damned gossip.

With a sigh she turned to her deskgib. Imail had already begun to pile up in her queue. Somewhere in the bowels of Core, a demonic subroutine had started assigning her all of Greiger's old collateral duties. Cultural Diversity Committee. Voting Information Officer. Shore Leave Recommendations Board. Meanwhile the Public Relations office wondered if she would like to participate in a roundtable discussion about the
Yangtze.
Not at all. A civilian wanted to know if she thought the explosion had been caused by invading aliens. Delete. A barely coherent message placed blame for every death in the universe on the state of New Palestine on Fortune.

“Configure agent,” she told Core. “Female, random name, no sense of humor.”

A voice said, “Good morning, Lieutenant. My name is Holland.”

“Start sorting my mail, Holland. Delete anything with a subject or message text that references my last ship, regardless of originator.”

“Do you mean the
Yangtze
?”

“Yes.”

“Understood, Lieutenant.”

Jodenny pinged Bartis and tried to get on Lieutenant Commander Wildstein's schedule. Bartis said, “She's very busy this week, Lieutenant. I'll call your agent when there's an opening.”

“I appreciate it.” Jodenny wondered if Wildstein would be as busy if someone else was calling—her protégé Quenger, for instance. She pinged Security and reached the office of the Assistant Security Officer, Lieutenant Commander Senga. He was a slight but intense man, with a noticeable tic in his left eyelid.

“I'm told I have three sailors in the brig,” she said after introducing herself. “Kevwitch, Yee, and Barivee.”

Senga checked his gib, one hand drumming restlessly on his desk. “Bar brawl. They already went to mast. Three weeks in the brig and docked pay. Captain's very strict on that.”

Jodenny changed the subject. “One of my dingoes disappeared during the GQ yesterday. Any chance of recovering it?”

“The Loss Accounting Division will take a statement, poke around, but you know. Kids or pranksters, probably. That dingo could be in a hundred pieces by now, souvenirs of the trip.”

“Kids or pranksters during a General Quarters?”

He sounded glum. “You'd be surprised what disappears on this ship.”

“The dingo was with Sergeant Myell,” Jodenny said. “I understand he's been in trouble recently.”

Senga straightened immediately. “He should have been court-martialed for what happened.”

The vehemence in his tone surprised her. Jodenny asked, “So why wasn't he?”

“The girl didn't want to testify. Myell probably got to her, intimidated her. Him or his friends. The captain could have gone ahead and had Myell charged anyway—should have, just to keep him from attacking some other poor tech. If you've got missing equipment and he was the last person to use it, there's your thief.”

Jodenny had already considered the idea. “He works with dingoes all the time. If he wanted parts, he could probably find a more subtle way to steal them.”

Senga's frown deepened. “Unless that's what he wants you to think.”

“He doesn't seem like the type.”

“I've known him longer than you. He's exactly the type. If he's stealing Team Space property, we'll nail him for it. That's a promise.”

His eagerness disturbed her. Jodenny signed off and leaned back in her chair. She couldn't see Myell stealing a DNGO, and had to trust that if he hadn't been brought to court-martial there was probably a good reason. “Holland, retrieve the personnel files on the following division members: Kevwitch, Yee, Barivee, Lund, Dyatt, Myell, and Dicensu.” She might as well get to know the more troubled members of her division through reports filed by her predecessors. But she would start with the most troublesome. “Open Myell's first.”

CHAPTER SIX

Sergeant Rosegarten, a diminutive woman with curly red hair, was the leading sergeant for Loss Accounting. She interviewed Myell about the loss of Castalia at the base of T6, taking notes on her gib but obviously entranced by the lights of the DNGOs operating in the shaft above them.

“You said the Repair Shop was closing?” she asked, her head tilted back.

“Yes.”

“And this was two hours before launch?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure it's safe to stand under them like this? What if one drops something?”

Myell pulled a wrench from his toolbelt and tossed it upward. It bounced harmlessly off the clearshield and clattered into the corner. “There's no gravity in the shaft, so nothing can fall. But if the gravity somehow got turned on, you could drop an asteroid on that shield and it would still hold. It's the same technology they use on the Flight Deck to protect against the vacuum of space.”

Rosegarten lowered her gaze and rubbed her neck. “So why did you take the dingo over there if they were closing?”

Myell went after the wrench. “I didn't know their hours had changed.”

Rosegarten consulted her gib. “So there you were, on the Rocks, the General Quarters alarm went off, and you did what?”

Myell hung the wrench back in its proper slot over his bench. Some of the other wrenches were in the wrong places. Every time he let Ishikawa near his things she managed to rearrange them. “I tied her to the post. She had a restraining bolt that wouldn't have let her go off on her own, but I wanted to make sure. After we were cleared to return to quarters I went back to the Rocks and she was gone.”

“Doesn't each dingo have a positioning transceiver that allows it to be tracked by Core?”

“I've tried several times. She's not showing up on any scopes. Either the transceiver's not working or Core's misreading her signal.” Myell adjusted the magnetic strips holding his screwdrivers in place. He realized Rosegarten might interpret his action as nervous fidgeting and stilled his hands. “I've seen both situations before.”

“Have you lost dingoes before?”

Myell tried not to sound annoyed. “I didn't lose this one.”

Abruptly she pocketed her gib. “I agree. I don't see any blame in this for you, Sergeant, except for not knowing the Repair Shop was closed. I'll file your statement and my review. Who knows? Maybe the dingo will show up on its own.”

She sounded optimistic, but Myell doubted he'd ever see Castalia again. She was probably torn down to her frame by now and stripped of anything that could be sold or swapped. After Rosegarten left, Myell began work again on Isis, who needed a new transceiver. He took off her access plate and was wrist-deep in her frame when Strayborn came by.

“Lieutenant wants the inventory done today,” Strayborn said.

Myell took back every nice thing he'd ever thought about Jodenny Scott. “That's crazy. The reconciliations are overdue, the dingoes are nowhere near uploaded—”

Strayborn held up a forestalling hand. “Orders.”

Myell blew out a noisy breath and patted Isis. “If I finish fixing this one, it'll go faster.”

“No time. I need you up in the command module with Ishikawa. You recall the dingoes, Hosaka and I will handle the uploads. Send this one over to the Repair Shop.”

He wouldn't, but there was no use arguing about it. Instead Myell said, “There's no way we can finish the whole inventory today.”

Strayborn clapped him on the shoulder. “What Lieutenant wants, Lieutenant gets.”

*   *   *

Evaluations from Myell's earlier ships portrayed a serious, dedicated sailor who'd enlisted on Baiame the day he turned eighteen. He had earned high marks and two achievement awards on the
Kashmir,
where his chiefs and division officers had noted his reliability and initiative. Those same traits were cited in his early promotion to sergeant on the
Okeechobee,
where he had been in charge of two issue rooms and later a loading dock. For his first few months on the
Aral Sea,
under the supervision of Lieutenant Commander Ellithorpe and Chief Mustav, things had gone well; it was only after Greiger took over and Chief Chiba moved in that Myell's scores dropped. Chiba's first review stated, “Surly and uncooperative. Shows no leadership potential and is a detriment to the division.”

Jodenny had seen good sailors turn bad for various reasons. Sometimes they got addicted to Sweet or some other drug, or fell in with the wrong crowd, or let an unhappy romance influence their professional lives. Having met Chiba and witnessed firsthand the results of Greiger's management style, she was inclined to go with her gut instinct on Myell.

“RT Caldicot,” Jodenny said, pinging her. “Update the division roster by noon. Get those AT evals started. Set up a meeting with the chief and all the sergeants for sometime tomorrow, here in my office. And schedule yourself too so we can go over office procedures.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Caldicot didn't sound enthused.

She put the service records aside and concentrated for the rest of the morning on overdue COSAL reports. When lunchtime rolled around Jodenny considered eating out of the vends but braved the mess deck instead. Inside the entrance she hesitated, caught by bittersweet longing for the company of the officers she had eaten with so many times. She imagined the
Yangtze
galley now, twisted and dark and cold, bone embedded in metal—

A Drive tech bumped into her arm, almost toppling her tray. “Sorry, ma'am.”

Jem's voice:“Where would you rather be, boot?”

Jodenny forced herself into line and picked out selections from the salad bar. Decorations for the week centered around the celebration of Mother's Day in several nations, and she ignored the callousness of the organizers in thinking everyone had a mother to celebrate. She went to the wardroom seating area and saw three clusters—one large group of Data officers to port, some Drive officers straight ahead, and a rowdy table of Flight officers to starboard. Closer at hand was a young ensign with a Data patch munching on a kofte burger.

“May I sit down?” she asked.

His nametag said Cartik and he wore the pinched expression of someone trying hard to look as if he didn't mind eating by himself. “You don't want to eat here.”

“Is the food that bad?”

“Not here. I mean, here here. It being your second day and all, you probably want to meet more people.”

“How do you know it's my second day?”

“You're all over the vids, Lieutenant.” Cartik started to rise. “If you'll excuse me—”

“Sit down, mister. That's an order.”

Cartik blinked. “That's illegal. You can't order me to have lunch with you.”

“In that case, I'll give you a yuro to stay.”

He didn't smile, but his shoulders relaxed a little. “Five.”

“Five,” she agreed. Cartik took his seat again. Five yuros would barely buy a candy bar in the ship's store. Jodenny added, “With negotiating skills like that you should be in the Supply Department.”

The smile dissolved into a frown. “Couldn't be any worse.”

“What's wrong with Data?”

Cartik glanced at the Data Department officers sitting at the next table. Jodenny changed the subject and asked him about life on the
Aral Sea.
He'd been onboard a year but couldn't recommend much for recreation except the occasional Mystery parties from Drive. He didn't play Snipe or Izim, but on his pocket server he ran several soccer discussion groups. He seemed reasonably intelligent, able to carry on a decent conversation, and she could discern no reason for his being an outcast from the Data Department. But he was definitely an outcast.

“Hi!” Hultz slid into the chair next to Jodenny. With her were Quenger, Zeni, and a man Jodenny didn't recognize. “I called your office but your agent didn't pick up.”

“Speaking of leaving…” Cartik rose again.

“Don't go on our account,” Quenger said. “We don't mind slumming.”

Quenger missed the look that remark earned him but Jodenny didn't. After Cartik left, Hultz introduced Sub-lieutenant Cully Gunther.

“Glad to meet you!” Gunther reached for the rolls and nearly knocked over his water glass. “What do you think of the ship? Did you ask for this posting? Big mistake. I'd have asked for one of the new probes, I hear they're the ticket to adventure, not these milk runs—”

“Cully, shut up,” Hultz said kindly.

Quenger said, “How's it going? They say Greiger left Underway Stores in a real mess.”

“Not at all,” Jodenny said. “A few loose ends. Nothing we can't take care of.”

Hultz and Gunther launched into a story about something Greiger had done at a party several months previously. Although Jodenny tried to stay interested she felt Quenger staring at her. She wondered if he was plotting revenge for taking the job he wanted. She was so focused on ignoring him that she failed to notice Osherman coming up the ramp with his lunch tray.

“—and he denied everything, threatened everyone to never say a word about it, and wouldn't drink beer for the next month.” Hultz finished as Osherman stopped beside their table with a lunch tray in hand.