The Stars Blue Yonder by Sandra McDonald

swirls across its surface darkened to red and burst into flame. Remembered pain rippled through him—skin blistering, smoke searing his lungs. This was where his journey had started, damn it. If the answers weren’t here, they might not be anywhere. Already, though, the Flying Doctor was fading into blackness. Myell lurched forward and grabbed the thing with both hands.
    â€œTell me what Kultana is!” he shouted.
    The Roon threw him backward. Waves of fire raced across the skin cloak. Myell landed hard, his legs and arms jerking against the rough unyielding ground. From somewhere high above came a waft of cold air, and a girl’s frantic voice.
    â€œIt’s okay,” Twig was saying. “Please wake up, please, you can’t keep sleeping.”
    He blinked his eyes open and saw Twig hovering over him. Behind her, the sky was gray and threatening with rain. With her help he sat up.
    â€œWhere’s Kyle?” he asked.
    Twig burst into tears.
    â€œWhere is he?” Myell demanded. “Where did he go?”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The baby kicked. Hard. Jodenny pushed her finger against her side and said, “Stop that. Mommy’s trying to sleep.”
    Junior kicked again. The ocean continued to smash against the reef and roll into the lagoon, where it lapped up near her bare feet. Jodenny had put her beach towel down well above the high tide mark. It was amazing what the cargo holds of the
Kamchatka
had yielded up—she also had a garish pink beach bag, which was stocked with water and snacks for her and Junior as well as her gib, a flashlight and knife, and a romance paperback with a cracked spine and some missing pages.
    Seagulls flapped overhead and continued northward. The breeze had kicked up during the afternoon and the sky was more gray than blue. She imagined another storm somewhere offshore, brewing up a potent mix of wind and rain. Jodenny hadn’t gotten to the beach untilnearly noon, and she was determined to relax there as long as possible. Anything to prolong returning to the village and the inevitable argument with people who thought they knew more than she did about her own body and limitations.
    â€œI’m pregnant, not incapacitated,” she’d said to Mark Sweeney. “Don’t treat me like glass.”
    â€œYou could slip,” Captain Balandra warned.
    â€œYou could go into early labor,” Ensign Collins said.
    If she’d been in a more gracious mood she might have thanked them for their concern. Not many women in the colony had gotten pregnant yet. Everyone had a vested interest in helping her deliver a healthy baby. She was also a grieving widow, and everyone knew how often she trekked up the hill to where Myell’s body lay rotting in a dark grave.
    She’d let grief dictate her days and nights for almost seven months now, and had told herself she needed to move on. Let his memory rest, instead of pick at it like a wound that never had the chance to close up. The notion was sound. Laudable. Her future was here, not in the past. But when she woke up some mornings she found her face wet with tears and her hands scrunched under her chin, as if in prayer.
    Mark Sweeney’s last-ditch argument that morning had been “At least take Sam. He won’t let anything happen to you.”
    Osherman would have come if she’d asked, but she didn’t ask. He constantly acted anxious and jittery and on edge in ways that made it hard for many people to relax around him. He still couldn’t talk, and Ensign Collins couldn’t tell if the problem was physical, psychological, or both. What no one saw was how far he’d come from the wreck of a man they’d found on Burringurrah—Osherman and Anna Gayle both, prisoners of the Roon, though one had clearly resisted with all his might and the other had thrown her lot in with the enemy.
    Junior kicked again. Jodenny didn’t like the kicking part of being pregnant. She