A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

Horns blared from the ceiling.

  06.00 SGF PASSPOINT + 00:00:07. OVERRIDE OPTION CANCELED. STAND BY FOR ZERO THRUST.

  I was still watching Chan.

  “Madre de Dios,” I said, my voice drowned out by the horns. “What’s happening?” Someone inside of our fleet was advising the Europeans, just as someone had advised them before their raid on the island, telling them where to attack.

  “Hey, good buddy.” Elliot was tapping a pencil against my screen, where he’d brought up the free-fall checklist.

  “All right, thank you. Um—ship’s drones secured . . .” I looked up at Miller.

  “They’re not my drones, Edward.”

  “Jesus. Chan?”

  “Stand by.”

  There were forty-eight seconds left—we were way behind.

  Thwack. A spider drone magnetized itself to the ceiling, while Elliot passed out paper sacks.

  “Use them this time, boys and girls. I’m not cleaning out the filters again.”

  “Drones secure,” shouted Chan, stuffing loose items into pouches along with the others. Peters had heaved himself across the communications console to grab for Kip’s harness.

  “Fluids and pumps!”

  “Done,” said Elliot.

  “Quarters—”

  We were falling.

  There was no deafening siren, no wrenching maneuver, no change in sound. Our seats had disappeared, was all, and we were falling. I grabbed the edge of the console, but it didn’t help. I pictured us plummeting downward, twisting in the wind, plunging closer and closer to a nightmarish impact . . . My knuckles turned white, and my legs tensed for the crash.

  But we were, in fact, perfectly still. We weren’t falling at all—the thrust from our engines had stopped, was all, and we were at rest.

  I eased my grip and choked back the bile, knowing that the worst was over. The first tingling of euphoria crept into my toes and the backs of my knees.

  Buckles snapped and Pham twisted her way out of her seat. She thrust herself across the deck, arching her back almost double to jackknife up into the lift. It was a stunning display of skill, remembered during all our months of confinement, with the power and grace of a cat leaping for freedom.

  “Pham!” shouted Elliot. But with a flick of her arm she was gone up the ladder.

  There was a rancid smell on the deck. Peters was bent double, wiping at his mouth and holding his bag between shaking fingers.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Elliot. “I’ve got a light on a suit.” I looked at him, not understanding. Where had Pham gone?

  “She’s suiting up,” he said.

  We looked at the mission clocks. Five minutes. Chan looked at each of us in turn.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Six-One East,” said Elliot. “Airlock cycling.”

  I didn’t answer. Whatever Pham intended, it had all at once lit a spark of interest in me, a bright flame of anticipation against the bleak horizon of my mood, against the long months of monotony. She was, I thought, surely about to die.

  I pulled down my microphone and reached out to change to suit frequency, but the motion sent me sideways and I could no longer reach.

  “Pham,” said Elliot into his mike.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What the fuck is she doing?” said Polaski, agitated in his seat. “Come on, people, get her down.”

  “FleetSys,” I said, “seal the outer locks.” I was certain it was too late, but I said it anyway.

  “Yes, Mr. Torres,” said FleetSys.

  This was followed by a long pause.

  “Permanently or temporarily?” it said.

  “Forget it, Torres,” said Elliot. “She’s out.”

  Four minutes left.

  Peters coughed weakly. “For heaven’s sake, she’ll be pulled apart by fields or something, won’t she?”

  “No,” I said. I was looking up at the empty overhead screen, wondering, even as I stared at it, why I’d looked in the first place. Pham’s tiny body, I was thinking, would be crushed between the ring and the giant ship, turned to dust in the heat of its passage. Unless she got out in front.

  “We won’t feel any forces at all going through,” I said. “The problem comes afterwards.” I remembered why I’d looked at the screen.

  “Let’s get a picture, Chan. Forward cameras.”

  The image snapped to life and steadied, showing no sight of Pham. Centered starkly on the screen, however, was the torus. It filled the picture, overwhelming in its size and regularity, its white shape cut sharply across its middle by its own shadow. It was more than 1,500 miles across, yet where it tapered inward, farther and farther to diminish into a seemingly solid point at its center, there was no sign at all of the hole through which we were to pass. Yet it was rushing toward us with such nerve-shattering speed that we could only stare, scarcely able to breathe.

  The ratio of the torus’ overall size to the size of the still invisible hole in its center gave some clue to its power. It would deliver more energy than any device ever before built, yet that entire energy would be focused on the tiny thread of its axis, and only for the incomprehensibly brief instant we would occupy it. It would tear us out of the Solar System, I thought, sucking at our insides, ripping us bodily from our pasts . . .

  “There she is.”

  Pham’s space-suited figure had drifted out forward of the ship. Needles of flame from her jets glinted against the gold foil of her tether, drifting out behind her.

  Three minutes.

  “Pham,” said Elliot.

  No answer.

  “Pham, listen. As soon as we’re through we have to maneuver, and you’re going to have to be off that tether.”

  The speaker crackled.

  “I crazy, maybe, Mr. Elliot, but not stupid.”

  She sounded perfectly reasonable. I was surprised. Anne Miller was watching me with something like amusement. Charlie Peters, face white and bathed in sweat, cast worried glances at the screen while he fussed with Kip’s harness.

  Two minutes.

  The tapering funnel in the center of the torus filled the screen, still a thousand miles away. A faint, syncopated ticking came through the walls of the ship, as its jets adjusted our course a hundred times a second, calculating each correction to the millimeter.

  Pham had reached the end of her tether and was facing into the maw of the tunnel, her arms and legs spread apart like a skydiver’s. No sign of the passageway through the torus had appeared.

  Then from the speakers came a wild, drawn-out scream from the bottom of her lungs, a yell of total abandon, on and on and on, scarcely human. Challenging, triumphant. Safe inside the ship, I shrank back from the screen as the torus swallowed us with its frightening speed. Pham arched her spine and threw back her head, spreading her limbs even farther.

  For an instant, then, I thought I knew what she must be feeling. It was the thrill of perfect, utter vulnerability, straining forward with all her might into the fury of her own passage. I knew it in a moment of perfect clarity, and it frightened me.

  A black spot appeared in the center of the funnel.

  “Haieee!” screamed Pham, “straight up the crack of God!”

  Peters coughed, and we were inside the torus. The passage closed around us and pressed inward as if to squeeze the very life from us, hurtling past in a blur of speed beyond comprehension. The spot grew into a narrow tunnel. A light appeared at its end.

  “Perhaps,” whispered Peters shakily, “ ’tis the face of God, instead.”

  In an instant the light beyond the passageway had swelled like a balloon to become the surface of a star, filling the screen and blinding us, searing into its surface the silhouette of Pham and her tether, her final scream still filling the air.

  The star receded. Points of light near to it receded as well, and the smaller ones disappeared into the darkness altogether. It was as if a telescoping lens had suddenly been drawn back.

  Then the star floated alone
. It looked much too far away, and too cold.

  No one spoke. Heartbeat after heartbeat passed and we stared at the star and at Pham’s body, floating limply at the end of her tether, her suit barely visible in the dim light. The tunnel was gone.

  Then all at once the picture in front of us was replaced by a complicated, shifting diagram of orbital vectors and trajectories, all of them leading into the center of Holzstein’s Star.

  “Tyrone,” I said, “go and get her. Stand by for maneuvering at . . . one and a half Gs.” I was having trouble concentrating.

  “Charlie, as soon as One-Zero’s through, tell Rosler I want the listeners on One-Six to identify all drone transmissions, and download their positions to Anne. We need to talk to them, and we don’t have much time before deciding where we’re going to put down. Then talk to Tawali. I want a visual of that other planet in the next system, patched through to here.

  “Then when Seven-Zero’s through,” I said, “I want to talk to Bolton.”

  Chan was looking at something over my shoulder, rubbing her arms as though cold, the way she’d done in the gardens a few hours ago.

  On the wall-screen behind me was a picture of the Holzstein system. The star itself hung in a corner of the screen, smaller and cooler than the sun we’d left behind. A few other stars hung in the background, but on the whole the system looked too empty.

  I was about to ask her why she’d positioned the sun so far off center, when something in another corner caught my eye. Barely visible against the background was a pitted, nearly black sphere, dull and motionless against the darker space behind it. No features were visible on it beyond an uneven, lighter grey at the poles. It was Holzstein-IV, the planet the drones had believed to be uninhabitable.

  “One-Six is through,” said Peters. “They’re reeling out the antennas now.”

  Elliot spoke at the same moment as Peters, his voice thin and reedy from someone else’s headset. My hand shot out for the speaker switches, but the movement was too fast and I spun away again. I groped for the ALL switch on my armrest.

  “Is she all right?” I said to the entire fleet.

  “Take it easy,” said Elliot. His voice came from every speaker. “She’s fine.”

  “All right,” I said. “Okay.”

  I righted myself and reset the switch. “Stand by for maneuvering.”

  “Three-Bravo’s through,” said Peters. “Radio dishes are going out.”

  I accepted FleetSys’ proposed spacing maneuver, just as Polaski launched a pencil at an unused sick-bag floating above us. Suddenly the ship lurched forward, then rotated and lurched again, and the pencil and the bag slammed into Chan’s console. Then they were floating again.

  “Mr. Torres, this is Lou Fiedler. We’ve got a lock on the coordinates the drones gave us for the planet in the next system. Patching through on channel thirty-one, visual, color-corrected. It’ll take a while, though.”

  It did take a while. We put the image up on the big overhead screen, to find it completely dark except for a sprinkling of dots around the edge of a large circle. Slowly it filled in.

  “One photon at a time,” said Fiedler. “It’s like taking a picture of a flea on a searchlight. Good position, though, almost full-face. Terminator’s on the upper-right.”

  When the circle had filled in to become a pale, even disk, it took on colors—a deep, rich blue, which in turn took on wisps of white and green.

  Pham drifted down out of the lift shaft. She looked flushed and alive and was followed down by Elliot. They stopped to watch the image of the planet unfolding on the screen.

  It had filled in enough now to have texture and shadows, and the snaking outlines of continents began to lace the blue oceans.

  “Generous God in heaven,” whispered Peters as the image grew out of the darkness, “what a thing of beauty that is.”

  “And how many years away,” said Chan, a warning tone in her voice.

  It really was beautiful, like a gem through a jeweler’s glass. The oceans shaded from a deep Persian blue in their depths to a silky cerulean in the shallows, and seemed to sparkle. Mountain ranges glistened with snow. It was like the visions that grow from the unformed blackness of dreams.

  I met Chan’s eyes. She held my gaze for a moment, then looked down at her hands in her lap. I turned back to the blue and green sphere. I was struck by its calmness, and by how few clouds drifted across its face.

  It had struck Elliot, too.

  “We could almost call it ‘Fairweather,’ ” he said.

  “That’s very common,” said Miller.

  “I’m very common, myself,” said Elliot. He sighed. “So make it Latin or something.”

  “ ‘Luciditas,’ ” said Peters. “Fair weather is ‘luciditas.’ ”

  “ ‘Lucidity’ for a planet?” said Polaski. A light blinked on my communications panel, but I ignored it.

  “Or else ‘Serenitas,’ ” said Peters.

  We looked at the shimmering image. It was clear and perfect and new, and over a hundred-million-million miles away—at the far end of another journey not even known to be possible, even by the drones.

  “Eddie,” said Peters. I went on watching, not wanting to look away.

  “Eddie, One-Six called. They say there aren’t any drones. None, anywhere. They’re all gone.”

  TWELVE

  Of Kings and

  Common Thieves

  P

  erhaps the drones just have nothing to say.” Miller’s earrings glinted in the red light.

  “That won’t wash, Anne. We’ve had the antennas out all night. More than thirty thousand drones entered this system, and you’re going to tell us they’ve had nothing to say to one another in fourteen hours?”

  Her eyes darted from one of us to the other. They were glassy and bloodshot, and so uneasy that I’d begun to believe she really didn’t know what had happened to her drones.

  “Maybe they’re on the far side of one of the planets,” she said.

  I sighed and rubbed at my own eyes. They stung from the bad air, which was hot and stank of vomit and sweat.

  “That won’t wash, either,” said Chan, pulling off her headset and looking down at a scrap of paper.

  “We’ve found the new torus the drones built, out between Holzstein-IV and -V. We queried it about activity, and it reports passing over a thousand vessels into that next system, the Serenitas system. The last one went through more than two days ago.” She put the paper down.

  “That’s all of the original drone ships, plus six hundred that they must have built. Which is more than the ‘contingent’ the messenger claimed they would send.”

  “Oh, man.” Elliot dropped his head into his arms. “We are fucked.”

  “Hey!” Polaski motioned to Pham where she was curled up in her seat. “Somebody kick her awake and send her for coffee.”

  “No, no,” said Peters. “Let the girl have her rest. Come along, Kipper, old son, let’s stretch our legs a bit, hm?”

  Chan waited till they were gone, then picked up the paper again.

  “The torus also reports having been rotated to send a vessel back to Earth—”

  “Our messenger,” said Elliot.

  “—twice.”

  Elliot looked at her blankly. “Twice?”

  “Twice.”

  “So we must have just missed the second one.”

  “No,” said Chan. “It went back more than three months ago.”

  A grasshopper drone jackknifed itself off the lift and clattered onto the deck, carrying a cluster of coffee balloons on its back. “Bimbo,” it said cheerfully. A light blinked on my console.

  “Jesus,” I said. “We’ve got to make decisions, and I don’t know what’s going on. We can’t put NA/C off much longer.” I acknowledged the call.

  “Well?” said Carolyn Dorczak. Her voice was even, no longer friendly. “Are you ready to discuss your plans yet? Or are we going to stay in this parking orbit forever?”

&nbs
p; “All right,” I said, “let’s see what we can work out.” And figure out how not to have to lie, I thought.

  “I’d like to put you up on visual,” she said. “I’ve got quite a few people here.”

  In other words, Commander, you want to watch my eyes. “All right,” I said. I pressed a switch and a blue light began to flash near the top of my console. Dorczak’s face came up on a screen on the far wall, her eyes on something below the camera. She was a plain but competent-looking woman, with unruly dark hair and intelligent brown eyes, and a way of pursing her lips in a half-smile while she thought.

  “So,” she said, and looked into the camera.

  “All right, here’s what we’ve got. The latest information from the drones is that the twin planets in this system—Holzstein-II and -III—remain equally hospitable, with water and atmospheric gasses being produced at the poles. Simple algaes and minimum air pressure exist in the lower equatorial regions. Prognoses are reasonably good.” It was, of course, technically true, but nothing we hadn’t learned months earlier.

  Dorczak looked away to listen to someone off-screen, then turned back with her pursed lips and her cryptic smile.

  “I guess the real question, Ed, is what are your intentions? Where are you going to put down?”

  “I think,” I said, “that we’re sufficiently satisfied with the drones’ accuracy that we’re willing to take our lead from you and the others. You know that our ultimate interest is in the next system, and it may be that Holzstein-III is a little better positioned for the jump to it, but just the same we’ll let you and the others pick your landing sites first.”

  Dorczak relaxed visibly and gave a nod to someone off-camera.

  “That’s good, Ed. That’s very good. I’m glad to hear you say that. So maybe we should get Southern Hem on the line?”

  “Yes, but in just a minute. What about the Chinese—are you talking to them at all?”

  “Not much. But we do have something of a . . . foreign affairs department, if you will, that feels the Chinese are only interested in their status vis-à-vis future colonists coming out from Earth, and that they expect you to head for H-III just as you said. So what we think they’ll do is grab the other one for themselves, H-II.” She glanced above the camera. “They just started arriving, by the way. Magic, isn’t it—ships appearing out of nothing in the middle of space? Anyway, the Europeans will be right behind them. So, now you tell me: What do you think the Europeans are up to?”