A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “Jesus.”

  “Probably thought she’d sullied his image or something.” The engines whined as the transport sank and then pitched nose-low. The commandos sitting in front of us swayed impassively on their metal benches, accustomed to the abuse. All the way at the front, Bolton released his belts and leaned past the pilot, trying to see the planet’s surface. Then he turned and worked his way back with a map in his hand.

  “Right,” he said, and squatted next to us. “Let’s have a look at where this signal’s coming from, shall we?” He worked to unfold the map while the ship dipped and shook in the rough air.

  The ship was little more than an iron tube welded to a pair of induction engines—not at all aerodynamic or stable, kept upright only by its MI. It had crossed the ninety million miles from the black planet to the Europeans’ abandoned planet of H-iii in three days, at one and a half Gs all the way. It stank of sweat and bad plumbing.

  “All right, here it is,” said Bolton. “What we’re interested in is these uplands, about five thousand square miles of high shale running along behind the mountains.” The mountains he pointed to ranged across the planet’s Empty Quarter, a massive plate of clay and shale thrust up in the planet’s early years. The new settlements were all on the far side of the planet, in cultivated valleys left behind by the Europeans.

  “I thought the distress signal was coming from the lowlands,” I said. Elliot and I hadn’t been on the planet before; Bolton and his teams had.

  “Quite so—right here below the escarpment. About eleven miles out, right where no settlement ought to be. And where no one in his right mind would put one.” He pointed on the map, holding onto the bench again as the ship skidded sideways. “At any rate,” he said, “it’s on these uplands that we’ll land . . . about here. Then we’ll work our way along to the edge for a snug little peek at whatever’s out there.”

  “Okay. What’s all this here, though?” Someone had carefully shaded in most of the highland area with fine crosshatching.

  “Ah . . . that’s nothing, actually. Nothing to do with the mission.” He refolded his map.

  “Bolton . . .”

  “Hey, Torres, look at this.” Elliot had been watching through the porthole, and now he pulled me over to look past him.

  The planet’s horizon curved away in the far distance, a cracked expanse of grey softened only by the thin atmosphere. As barren as the planet seemed—Asile, it was called—the sight of its sunny horizon and thin blue sky stabbed with its familiarity.

  But Elliot wasn’t looking at the sun on the plains. He was watching the approach of a craggy range of mountains, sweeping up into the thinner blue air ahead of us. On the distant steppes beyond them, a lazy funnel-cloud snaked high into the atmosphere. Between us and the funnel, a narrow line of rain-laden clouds clung to the mountain’s near flank. I turned back to Bolton.

  “Cyclonic storms?”

  “Um, no, not exactly. That is to say, there are storms . . . but I think not just where you’re looking, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t, but I looked back out the side just the same. Elliot made a noise of surprise and pointed to a solitary lake, glinting through a gap in the clouds like mercury against the grey steppes. I asked Bolton for the map again, remembering the crosshatching. But he didn’t hand it to me. Instead, he just sighed and beckoned to Roscoe Throckmorton.

  “Roscoe,” he said, “I think perhaps we’ll give our guests a quick tour, after all, hm? Show them our little project? Have Stephanie give us a bit of a drive-about, would you?” Throckmorton hesitated, then worked his way back up to the pilot. Bolton squeezed onto the bench next to me and changed the subject.

  “So. Early tomorrow morning we should know what this is all about, then.”

  “Maybe . . . I noticed we’re slipping in across the mountains from the side opposite the signal source. You’re resisting the urge to overfly, I take it?”

  “Yes. I confess I’ve acquired your disquiet about this whole thing. It does feel a bit as though we’re being set up, and overflying seems so predictable, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe not. It’s a standard emergency locator beacon, after all, and telescopy does show some kind of settlement, even if the maps don’t.”

  Neither, however, did Dorczak’s intelligence network, or our own.

  “Then why,” said Bolton, “did you warn away every rescue team in the system? And why is it you ring home every hour to see what the lab says about the glass panels that blew out in the landing dome? What do they say, by the by?”

  “Possibility of fatigue in their common cross-member.”

  Both Elliot and Bolton made disbelieving noises.

  “Although there are signs of lattice dissolution in the glass itself, simultaneously on multiple panels. Possibly from focused microwave radiation.”

  “Ah-hah.”

  “We should have built those domes differently,” I said. “I didn’t know when we built them—”

  “It ain’t your fault he’s dead, Torres!” said Elliot. “I swear to God I’m tired of telling you that.” He turned back to the porthole. “It wasn’t the dome that killed him.”

  Bolton and I watched the back of Elliot’s head for a minute, then sat and brooded while the ship swayed and shook irritably in the updrafts from the mountains’ flank. Finally, with a last, convulsive shudder, the ship settled into the mists and the cabin fell gloomy and dark, swallowed by clouds that a moment earlier had seemed far away and insignificant. Now the sunny plains and fine white clouds had fallen behind us like a memory from another world.

  When we dropped out from under the cloudy netherworld it was to find ourselves flying low over a shadowy wasteland of grey shale. The planet’s reappearance as ordinary ground beneath us seemed like a sleight of hand, a shift in perspective we had somehow missed in the clouds.

  Then all at once we swept back into sunlight and the land changed from the course shale into a rich and fine soil. The lake flashed by underneath and the pilot banked. Bolton pointed out the forward windscreen. To one side of our new course lay the cracked grey rock we’d left behind, and to the other the darker, furrowed soil. And in the distance, exactly straddling the dividing line, a funnel-shaped cloud of enormous proportions roiled into the sky from behind a machine that moved along the ground, half-buried. When I finally realized what it was I glanced back at Bolton, who looked pleased with himself and a little defensive at the same time.

  Originally transported to the system as the rear third of one of the drone ships, the grey cylinder plowing the highland plateau was the centerpiece of Earth’s terraforming technology, manufactured years before we left but never used until the drones brought two hundred of them to Holzstein’s and Serenitas. Designed to be powered by nuclear fission, but greatly compacted using our quantum cells, the fifty-foot monsters inhaled rock and ice to produce atmospheric gasses. In the case of Asile that meant mostly oxygen, to convert its hydrogen-dominant fledgling atmosphere.

  But the machines had the side-benefit of producing fine soil, though with the drawback of removing, rather than adding, nitrogen to it. For that reason, and because the machines worked best on ice, they were nearly always set in motion near the poles. Bolton had evidently lifted this one and brought it down to his equatorial highlands to generate soil at a much faster than usual rate.

  “Nitrogen?” I asked him.

  “Surface mining to make potassium nitrate, then we fill in the gash with rain water from the ridge—that was the lake you saw.”

  “Why are you doing this?” The ship turned to avoid the funnel pouring from the cylinder, and Bolton nodded back out the side. Below us, tiny silver shapes worked their way along the new soil—grasshopper drones nearly a hundred abreast, following along in the furrows.

  Then they were gone behind us, and after another few miles came lines of green saplings. A cluster of makeshift buildings slid beneath us, then we were settling in for a landing in the rolling hills at the far edge of the
uplands.

  The engines threw up a cloud of loose shale that clattered against the fuselage, then with a sharp impact on the skids the ship went silent for the first time in three days. The black-clad troops slipped out through the doors with their kits and disappeared into the afternoon shadows, letting in cool air that smelled slightly of sulfur. Bolton checked the cabin, then followed Elliot and me down the twelve-foot ladder, while the pilot pulled out a tool bag and climbed down to begin inspecting the engines and the power cell compartments under the ship.

  A light breeze came up from the plateaus as the hot metal creaked and hissed. The land we had crossed stretched to the far horizon with its thin new carpet of green. “Bolton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment I thought he’d answered twice, then I heard the air hiss between his teeth as he spun to look up at the ship’s open door. Teetering precariously at the edge was a little grasshopper drone, cautiously feeling the open space with his front feet. Little Bolton.

  The real Bolton was furious. “Why, you little . . . you little cheat!” He ran an exasperated hand through his hair. “You told me you were someone else, didn’t you!”

  “Of course I did,” it said matter-of-factly, trying to tip sideways to see down the ladder. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have let me come.” A middle foot slipped on the edge and it backed away. “Would you, now?”

  The brooding look on Elliot’s face softened. With a quick glance at Bolton he pulled himself back up the ladder and grabbed the drone. It yelped once as it slid off the edge, then it started chirping cheerfully as Elliot stuck it under an arm and climbed down. It scrabbled away when it touched ground.

  Bolton had turned away and was looking out across his plateau with his arms folded. Finally he turned back and stabbed a finger at the drone. “But you bloody well keep up, this time!” I had heard about Bolton’s inconsolable funks when his little double was around, but I’d never seen one. “I’m not carrying you again, do you hear?” Elliot worked to keep a straight face and tossed me a pack.

  With nods to the pilot the three of us began hiking up the ravine, toward the ridge overlooking the deserted plains, accompanied by the scampering of Little Bolton’s six feet across the rocks. “Do you really mean to leave her unguarded?” I asked, indicating the pilot now alone in the empty hills and the lengthening shadows. I didn’t know what she’d need guarding against, but I hadn’t forgotten the signal coming from the plains ahead of us.

  “We have other pilots,” said Bolton. He was still sulking. I glanced at Elliot, who just shrugged and eyed the nearby ridges. “Don’t bother looking,” said Bolton, “you won’t see them. Come along, Torres, the ship’s well guarded.” He picked up his pace.

  “Okay,” I said. “So—you’re busy foresting a couple million acres here on Asile, while the rest of us are worrying about how to arm the fleet and how to get to Serenitas. Why?”

  He gave me a guarded look. “Look, Torres. No one’s ever quite certain where you stand on things, but you do know that Polaski would get a royal bug up his arse if he heard about this. ‘Misappropriating military resources’ and all that chest-beating crap.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He glanced at me again, then slowed to let the drone catch up. “I turned forty this year, Torres, and I’ve decided I’m too old to keep pretending things are going to get better. I don’t know who these buggers are out there, or if I’ll wake up properly tomorrow, but I have accepted that I may never see that siren planet of yours. It seems like we’re always struggling against the stream, is the thing, and here we are laying in armament again. I keep wondering if we haven’t missed something along the way.”

  He lowered his pack to the ground. “We’ll camp here. And you”—he aimed a finger at the drone—“I know you like to ring up your little friends and chat them up all night, but we are observing radio silence. Do you understand what that means?”

  The drone belched, then turned ploddingly around and scraped a hind foot at Bolton, who frowned disgustedly and opened his pack. “Anyway, Torres, no one’s throwing in the towel yet, but some of us thought we might just hedge our bets a little.” He pulled the string on a rations heater and sat down to eat.

  When I looked at Elliot he just raised an eyebrow, then began searching through his own pack.

  I

  slept badly during Asile’s short night, and finally woke in the darkness. I felt uneasy and restless in the thin air and the light gravity.

  I climbed the slope to the edge of the cliff, and watched as the first cold flush of dawn seeped into the sky beyond the lowlands. It crept toward me across the wastes with a hard, pale light, the uncaring, shadowless light of desolation. It spoke of old losses, of incomprehensible spans of time.

  The colorless sliver of Asile’s greater moon drifted into the sky. I drew my coat tighter and remembered Madhu’s face, wet with tears as he sat next to me and watched a different moon, heavy and full and grey.

  And as I sat there on the mountains of that ancient planet, looking down on its wilderness in the chilly dawn, I remembered the face of my daughter for the first time. Tiny, and helpless, and still.

  The image came unbidden, and was just as quickly replaced by the face of young Teresa Delgado, solemn and proud on her third birthday, filled to overflowing with her own future.

  And then, finally, I remembered Roddy McKenna as he died.

  I had always thought of myself as an admirable man. A restrained and civilized man, above all blame. Yet, sitting there on the ridge, I saw it for the lie that it was. Pham’s act of cowardice had somehow peeled back the lie of my own life, and I knew that I, like David Rosler, wanted to silence her for it, escape from what she’d done. But escape meant Serenitas, and now the alien ships stood in the way, a thousand flint-black eyes glinting in the face of an un-amused god.

  The outline of the great moon faded away in the greying sky, and for a moment I searched for it anxiously, feeling suddenly vulnerable. An old man, I thought, admirable and alone.

  “What I like about sunup,” said Elliot beside me, “is how it don’t pretend to be nothing else, if you know what I mean. Here.” He handed me a pair of heavy goggles and pointed out across the dark lowlands, just as Bolton settled in on my other side. “One-one-six.”

  I fitted on the goggles and the scene brightened, then I turned my head slowly to the right as the illuminated scale ticked off the true bearing. Tiny motors whirred as it focused. At 116° I stopped. Near the horizon was a thin line of darker grey against the land. Bolton’s and Elliot’s goggles purred next to me.

  I tried several times to close my left eye without moving the right, and finally the goggles understood and zoomed in on the distant smudge. At extreme magnification the pattern of structures sorted themselves out, just as we had seen them from space. But as hard as I tried to hold my head still, the goggles couldn’t completely stabilize the image, and finally I took them off. Next to me, Bolton tried for a minute longer, holding his head in both hands, then took his off, too.

  “Roscoe,” he said quietly. Throckmorton was nowhere to be seen. “Let’s have the spyglass up here, if you would, please.”

  Elliot took off his goggles as well, and the three of us watched the light creep in among the shadows far below. Then came the scratching of metal feet against the rock and the little drone trudged up with a short black tube and a thin case strapped to its back.

  Bolton took the tube and pulled out a tripod, then crawled a way along the cliff and balanced it on the edge, pointed roughly at the distant structures. Then he lay back down next to us and slid a screen out of its case, and folded it back to stand on its own. He swore under his breath as he tried to get his blunt fingers around the tiny controls beside the screen. I wondered whether he’d had as much trouble sleeping as I had. The screen finally lit, and the tube on the cliff swung around as Bolton centered it.

  “Lord almighty!” said Elliot.

  “Sweet saint
s of Gwynedd,” said Bolton at the same time, “what in the bloody hell did that, do you suppose?” The screen had centered on a small plot of grass near the settlement. Lying in the corner of it was the cleanly severed front half of a cow. The rest of the cow was nowhere in sight. “That was a bloody big sword, did that.”

  Elliot looked away. “Lasers,” he said. “Let’s see it on infrared.” Bolton fumbled with the controls.

  “I expected to find weird shit down here,” said Elliot, “but not that.” The screen blinked out, then remained a fuzzy grey—the cow was cold. Bolton widened the picture and several brighter spots appeared, a couple of them from animals in the foreground, and one from the barely warm outline of a vaulted building behind them.

  He switched back to visual and panned across the settlement. More livestock carcasses appeared, and what looked like the sprawled form of a woman between two low buildings. A cow hobbled into view. One of its hind legs had been severed at the shank, although in the nearly sterile environment it looked as if it had healed. A riderless horse stood against one of the building walls, grazing at the sparse grass and apparently uninjured.

  The view panned across the settlement’s scattered buildings, then came to rest on the vaulted building that still showed some warmth. Most of the buildings were ramshackle clay structures, but this one was clean and sharp and built of metal. Bolton stared at it for a minute, then craned around toward the little drone behind us. “You—come here.”

  It didn’t move. “I’ve got a name,” it said. “ ‘You’ seems so government school.”

  “Bugger it all to hell, you little shit, you don’t have a name! That’s my name you’ve got, and I won’t stand for it. Now come here!” He rubbed his eyes. “God, listen to me.”

  “I’m going to sulk,” said the drone.

  “Pray, do.”

  After a moment Bolton turned and slid back down to the drone. “All right. Listen—can your little flying friends transmit pictures back to us?” He held up a hand. “No, don’t ask them. I just wonder if you know.”