A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  Again I started to pull free, but this time held myself in check with an effort. I knew she could move so fast that trying to get free would play into her game, whatever it was. It would be something she was expecting, and I wouldn’t do it. But despite the pain I was hardening under her strokes, and I knew she could feel it.

  “So you like me a little bit, hm? Maybe you don’t hate me so much.” Massaging me with the palm of her hand, pressing harder and then harder still as her tongue worked deeper into my ear. My arm, meanwhile, had gone numb from the pain.

  I don’t remember moving. I was angry at my own powerlessness, and even angrier that whatever fleeting and seductive sense of shared existence I’d had for a moment had been so suddenly mocked and cheapened. And for what? Now there was just the pain, and, suddenly mixed in with the pain, movement. Pain that seemed to come from far away, but then not from far away at all, suddenly very close. And one of us moving. One of us, or both.

  A sharp crack from her head. My hand, pressing her face against the wall, hard. Up under her chin, forcing it sideways. Blood on her temple. A sound from somewhere deep in her throat, or from mine. I couldn’t tell.

  I don’t remember what I said. I remember my voice, someone’s voice, but I don’t remember what it said.

  What I do remember and have always remembered is what I saw in her eyes at that moment. Disappointment. Unbearable frustration. Eyes turned away, toward the wall but not seeing, filling slowly with tears.

  M

  inutes later I lay in my chamber, shaking. For that one instant I’d been out of control, close to something I wanted no part of.

  From what little I’d come to know of Pham, it was a kind of violence that should have belonged to her, that in fact would surely consume her in the end, but not me. Yet here I was hiding from it in the darkened, chilly bowels of our fortress, thinking how to force it away, and even better how to suffocate it in the still darker airlessness of outer space ahead.

  Finally I threw off the blanket and sat up, unable to lie still. The movement caused the cot to screech sharply against the stone floor. I drew up my knees and stared past them at the empty opening into the corridor.

  A sound was coming from close by, high up on the wall. Inside the room.

  Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap. I stared up into the shadows.

  There was something there, little more than a darker shadow against the shadows surrounding it, no larger than my hand. It floated next to the wall high up, the faint sound of blowing air coming from beneath it. It was finding its way toward the opening by tapping against the wall, making shallow, careful arcs in the air before striking it again.

  Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap.

  “Who is it?” I said, finding the challenge absurd even as I spoke it. But it stopped right away nevertheless and waited, then finally answered.

  “Who is speaking?” it said. A cool, clear voice, not quite female.

  “Torres, for Christ’s sake. Who are you?” I couldn’t see it any more. “I said, who are you?”

  It didn’t move or speak for a long time. There was only the rasp of my own breathing and the whisper of its fan in the darkness.

  The gloom shifted a little in the corner where it hovered.

  “Yes,” it said at last. “I know you.”

  Tap. Tap. Tap. It had worked its way around the corner and into the opening. I’d been dismissed.

  “Who are you?” I screamed at it, lunging forward to grab the sides of the cot. But the tiny drone had disappeared into the corridor and flown away.

  SIX

  And The Nations

  Will Tremble Before You

  L

  adies, Gentlemen, Drones—start your engines!”

  Children shrieked with delight as twenty wobbling work platforms rose up from the south runway. The platforms jockeyed for position, tipping precariously.

  “On your marks!” No one was anywhere near the marks, but it didn’t matter. The boxy little companion drones, their six legs tucked under them like grasshoppers’, squatted on their platforms and pulled even with the farthest forward humans, evidently deciding it must be legal.

  “Get ready!” Stocky little three-year-olds jumped up and down on the seats. Parents lifted infants up to see.

  “Go!”

  The cavern filled with a manic giggling as the drones shot straight into the air instead of forward, shrieking and heckling and diving at their human competitors. Chan and Patel had spent days teaching them to giggle like that.

  Even the delegates from the colonists’ committees applauded, sitting in their little groups with their colored security badges, distracted for the time being from their bickering.

  More cheers. One of the drones had crashed its platform into the runway and was pushing it vigorously toward the finish line, stopping every few paces to do a little dance on its insect-like feet. Someone had dressed it in six red tennis shoes. Toddlers tried to get away from their parents and onto the runway for a ride.

  “Okay folks, here he comes . . . he’s at the finish line . . . the judges are working hard on a decision . . . here we have it—yes! Ladies and gentlemen, another twenty-way tie! Let’s hear it for the winners!”

  The man next to me whistled and applauded. He was our logistics chief, a sturdy, ruddy-faced Irish loadmaster named Charlie Peters, whom we’d coaxed away from a regular unit during our early days in the caverns, four years ago. He gestured at the quiet south-side runway, speaking in his soft brogue.

  “I’m glad we closed it, Eddie. It wasn’t any good last time, everybody jumping each time a transport landed and the doors opened. What the hell if we get a day behind on shipments, I say. This is more important. The poor kids.”

  He was right about the last fair. The problem hadn’t been noise from the transports—they ran quietly enough on our batteries now—it was jumpiness about security. There’d been fresh memories of attacks on the planes and on the elevator doors, and too many ugly scenes involving security people nervous about infiltrators. Having the children up for the fresh air had been hard.

  Chan and Patel stood near the starting line, talking with one of the drones getting ready to play in the soccer game. It was draped in British racing green. Chan held a hand absently under her growing belly. Two more months.

  “Mr. Torres to the command complex, please. Eduardo Torres, if you are on the airfield level please come to the central command complex.”

  I nodded to Peters, then worked my way along the stands to the elevators. Chan and Patel backed away from the two-foot-long grasshopper drone, then suddenly, with a synchronized snick of oiled machinery, it jackknifed high into the air. It landed less elegantly, but Chan righted it and leaned down to talk to it again.

  The sounds of the fair were cut off by the elevator doors sealing shut. With a lurch and rumble the six-minute descent began.

  Benches had been installed around the walls, except along the back where they’d been torn out again and replaced by truck tires and signs that read NO STANDING—KEEP CHILDREN AWAY! We learned our lessons.

  At the bottom the doors opened with a pop of changing pressure, then a rush of icy air.

  The underground roadway outside the elevator stretched away for miles to vanish in an antiseptic light and cold mist. Against both sides, stacked two high in their cradles and end to end until they disappeared in the distance, were the drone ships—sealed, silent, iced over in frost and shrouded in mist.

  Vapor rose from nitrogen hoses snaking away toward Miller’s chambers. Carefully separated from the hoses were the optical fibers that hour after hour fed the world’s data libraries into the waiting drones.

  The ships were ugly, like enormous, welded steel barrels lying on their sides, with blunt ends and a dozen reinforcing ribs along the sides. The ends facing me had eight evenly-spaced hatch covers and nothing more, while the far ends with the engine exhausts were covered by the temporary ring of the fan-stage. Each was 155 feet long and twenty-six wide, millimeters narrower than
the hole in the torus they would hurtle through at seventy thousand miles per hour.

  There were four hundred ships. Lying inside them at –203°C, shaped like ten-foot-long, polished steel torpedoes, waited the real drones. Thirty-eight thousand of them.

  I’d come many times to look at the drone ships in recent months, often at night when no one else was there. After the days of heated arguments and angry demands pouring in from around the world, the drones possessed a kind of seductive orderliness and predictability. I watched them for hours.

  Now I drove a cart along the cross-island corridor toward the north wall. Cameras followed my progress.

  The drone ships had actually been built elsewhere, as had the colony ships in final assembly three miles underground to the east. Anne Miller had programmed the actual drones, always in secret. I spied on her and Polaski spied on her, but if Polaski had learned more than I had about the drones’ programming, he hadn’t let on. I asked, but he never said.

  The only manufacturing we did on the island was the quantum batteries. Everything else was built by industrial consortia around the world, in exchange for batteries and the right to market them. It was an arrangement Patel had designed to avoid using hard currency. Still, the consortia dragged their feet, hoping to crack the secret of the cells before having to deliver on the multi-billion-dollar ships.

  All the while, the supposedly independent regional colonists’ committees—responsible for the extra colony ships Patel had insisted we finance—were coming under the increasing control of governments and of the consortia themselves, and were demanding greater and greater shares of the ships in exchange for minimal cooperation. At the same time, the leaders of the committees secretly sold off the batteries intended for the ships and lined their own pockets.

  Patel’s demands to market the batteries equitably throughout the world were openly scoffed at. Through one contrivance or another they flowed to the wealthiest nations, whose economies were thus staggering under the loss of energy-related jobs—a state of affairs for which we were then blamed and hated. The rest of the world, meanwhile, hated us for not releasing the batteries faster. The consortia hated us for our stranglehold on the technology.

  The colonists themselves, finally, hated us for our control of the drones—which gave us final, critical control over the exodus.

  The rest of the world, meanwhile, the seven billion souls with no hope of owning a battery of their own or a place in the exodus, suffered. Regional destabilization was worse than even Patel had projected. If the Cold War had served one generation as the backbone of global order, it had been nothing compared to the way the now-collapsing oil market had served the next; yet where oil production had for better or worse been unforgivingly geographic, the battery market had coalesced firmly around existing industrial power. The Middle East tore at itself in search of new demons; Russia once more grew dangerously insular; the Pacific Rim, Beijing excepted, relented in its shunning of the pauperized United States and took its joint revenge on China with its iron grip on oil fields from the Caucuses to Indonesia.

  And we were blamed for it all.

  I made the turn to the north-wall corridor and stopped by the window of the children’s infirmary. The infirmary was cut into the hundred-foot-thick outside wall of the island, as far from the vulnerable elevators as possible. Medics moved from crib to crib behind the glass.

  There were too many children—sixty-eight of them now from a total of fewer than eight hundred. And at that, these were only the ones we’d been able to let live at birth. Like elsewhere in the world there were too many birth defects, often with later complications that even our best scanners and MI couldn’t repair.

  Still, genetic defects accounted for only half the children in the infirmary. The rest were there because of the centrifuge.

  Polaski had learned that a side-effect of testing infants in the centrifuge was that the test itself allowed them to score higher on subsequent runs. So he’d ordered repeated exposure of two or three Gs for all children, without ever asking me. I’d meant to overrule him, but public resistance to the policy had waned after the attacks on the island had begun, and I’d said nothing.

  Now I sat and watched the children play or cry, or just struggle to stay alive. There was no turning back, I thought. I was going to go, and Polaski was going to go, and Tuyet Pham. All of us to a place, I had once thought, where this kind of suffering would be at an end.

  Children waved to me through the window, but I just watched them, as I always did. As always I felt unable to wave back, unable to respond at all.

  “Mr. Torres, please!” I was taking too long.

  Stopping moments later in front of the command complex windows, it was clear why I’d been called. His Excellency Chih-Hsien Chien, emissary of the Greater Chinese Peoples’ Space Colonization Committee, did not look happy.

  Nor did Priscilla Bates, the Air Defense room duty officer. Nor her superior, David Rosler, who was now Air Operations chief. Technicians behind them studied their consoles with conspicuous diligence. Pham was sprawled in a command chair ignoring them, watching the human-vs.-drone soccer game on the situation monitors. She was infantry chief, and shouldn’t really have had any business in Air Defense.

  “Ah, Mr. Torres,” said Chih-Hsien. “Thank you for coming so promptly.”

  “My pleasure, Excellency.”

  “That I very much doubt. However, I do bring excellent news.”

  I glanced at Priscilla Bates, then at Rosler, who looked down to wipe his glasses on his shirt tail. Then back at Chih-Hsien’s wizened, hard-to-read face. “I see.”

  “Yes. I am honored to announce that the heroic efforts by the People’s Republic of China and her valiant allies to remedy the western nations’ failure to complete the Kerr-mass toroidal projector have succeeded.”

  A long pause.

  “It’s been tested?”

  “Yes, Mr. Torres. This morning. An object was translated through the torus at speed, in the direction of Holzstein’s Star. The predicted Hawking-Rosen effect was observed—the object appeared to possess infinite length, then vanished.”

  It was very good news. The tunnel was ready for the drones.

  “This is certainly a great success,” I said, “for the Greater Chinese Peoples’ Committee as well as for the People’s Republic. You’ve done the colonization effort a great service.”

  “A great service, yes. Disproportionately great, perhaps.”

  “I believe,” I said carefully, “that our enterprise has already been disproportionately generous toward Chinese ambitions for the peaceful colonization of space. To the detriment, I might remind you, of the Africans and the Europeans.”

  “Pah! The Europeans! They are worthless scum. I do not know why you involve them at all.”

  “Oh? What do you know about the Europeans?”

  “I know that they are tired of being the second-class citizens that they are, and that they are up to no good. For what other reason do you think the Commonwealth have excused themselves and asked to work with the North Americans instead of the Europeans? They want no part of the Europeans’ vile plans. No, I could put the Europeans’ ships to far better use, I assure you.”

  “We are in the best position to judge how the ships will be used.”

  “You are in a position to judge nothing! You are young and arrogant, you and your criminal band. You treat the suffering peoples of the world like servants. You claim to decide who will survive and who will not. And the deaths you cause with your exploding batteries are obscene! Do not speak to me of judgment!”

  “You know that without harsh protection for the batteries none of us would be here.”

  “Perhaps. But you did not need to force us, your loyal allies, to carry more than two million of them all the way to the torus. We could have built a single one at the site, or carried a few large ones with us. You see, you do not trust even us!”

  “We couldn’t be sure that others wouldn’t attack the
torus, Excellency, and steal the design from such unprotected cells.”

  “The torus and the approaches to it are exceedingly well defended. No one may approach.”

  There was something final in his tone. Rosler put on his glasses.

  So the Chinese were sealing up the Torus. Priscilla Bates shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, then after a minute one of the technicians called out.

  “Priscilla! Unauthorized engine-start, north runway. No ID, no IFF!” His monitor showed a picture from an airfield camera trying to follow one of our tail-fans down the runway.

  “Track it, Sayid! Infrared and zero in. We need to see who it is—maybe his radio is out. Let’s go, lock on!”

  The camera swung uncertainly back and forth past the plane as it approached the opening and rotated for take-off.

  Then Pham was reaching across the technician’s console. The picture snapped into focus and tracked. In quick succession she forced over a bank of switches, then pushed away the technician’s hand and reached for the aiming ball. White crosshairs slid in and locked on the plane. The picture itself didn’t zoom in, so the inside of the cockpit still wasn’t visible. But the instant the crosshairs were centered she knocked aside a red switch canopy and jammed her hand onto the button.

  The aircraft blossomed into a brilliant orange, then collapsed on the runway and smeared across it. It exploded again in a furious cloud of white flame as the battery struck the ground.

  Bates grabbed for a phone. Screens up and down the consoles lit and steadied as technicians went to full alert. Pham snorted and went back to her chair. She weaved a little as she walked, smacking into a console on the way.

  The soccer game had stopped. Fire crews raced for the north runway. Pilots reported in as they reached their planes.