A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  I got a hand onto a rung of the ladder, trying to think ahead, trying to remember how to override the emergency seal above me.

  But I couldn’t do it. It had taken all my strength to crawl to the ladder, and I couldn’t pull myself up it. Not with the weight of three men on my back. Peters was shouting hoarsely behind me, but his words made no sense.

  Then suddenly the weight lifted and we were down to two Gs. I pulled myself up the ladder, and Elliot spoke behind me.

  “I can give you forty seconds, Torres. After that the ship’s my first priority.”

  Peters was next to me, then, pushing an oxygen bottle under my arm. Then I was up against the plate of the seal, staring at a pressure gauge inset into it. 9.6 PSI. I couldn’t remember: Was that the actual pressure on the far side, above the seal, or was it the difference between the pressure on the two sides of the seal, an almost non-existent pressure above it and our own twelve pounds of pressure below?

  I grabbed for the red lever inset into the ceiling and tugged. With a light hiss the plate slid open an inch. There was still some pressure above.

  But the plate stopped where it was. I stared at it and tried to think, feeling the seconds ticking away.

  The lever was a crank handle. The bones in my fingers were grinding into the rung of the severed ladder, straining to hold my weight as I began to crank with all my strength. Air rushed past me and then I was sucked through, the bottle banging against the metal and the mask catching on the way.

  The plate shot home again below me and sealed tight.

  I

  remember crawling past the privacy panel on 38-deck, wondering why it was so dark, wondering why I was growing faint even when I was breathing, finally remembering my oxygen mask.

  A hand in front of me—Pham stretched out on the floor, reaching for her escape, her skin darker than mine. Too dark.

  Trying to get the mask on her, running out of time. Dragging her back to the ladder, reaching for the red lever. Nothing. It spun in my hand, disabled. Those unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of a seal were not allowed to open it, condemned.

  Pain swelled in my gut. There will be a swelling of stomach gasses, leading to rupture, preceded by bleeding from the eyes and ears. Groping for the mask, vision clearing. Then the plate was open again and a big hand was reaching through, taking Pham out of my arms.

  I went through the opening the wrong way, head first, and my forty seconds were up. Elliot couldn’t wait any longer. He rammed the ship up to four Gs, and there was the pain of twisting awkwardly and slamming into the deck, and there was a picture on the screen: the edge of the torus sliding by, very, very close.

  W

  e were not pursued. We reassembled the fleet and limped for home, our own crippled ship coupled to Bolton’s to share his precious air.

  Where the attacking fleet had come from, we didn’t know. It seemed impossible that it could have arrived from Serenitas at that very instant, launched through the Serenitas torus with such pinpoint accuracy and timing that it would appear in our system exactly between us and our own torus. It was more likely that they had popped up in our system sometime in the past, undetected, and had hidden behind our torus, waiting to slip out when necessary to protect the approaches to Serenitas.

  Counting their ships in the recordings, the attackers represented only a part of the great alien fleet the probe had seen in Serenitas. The rest either still waited near that far planet, or else had hidden somewhere close by in Holzstein’s System.

  Eighty-three of our warships had flashed out of existence, and seven capital ships had shattered from the strain of the thrust. Our recordings also showed another sixteen smaller vessels and two more capital ships that for one reason or another had failed to develop enough thrust to clear the torus, and which the alien attackers had then destroyed, presumably to prevent them from smashing into the torus they themselves needed to return to Serenitas.

  One of our warships had succeeded in executing a complex six-G attack, and had destroyed two attackers with its primary weapon before being destroyed itself. Another two attackers had been destroyed by fast missiles, both of them magnetic-field-seeking.

  Pham’s arm had been dislocated, and she had torn ligaments in it so badly that Perris believed she might never regain full use of it.

  Anne Miller was dead. Her heart had stopped under the terrible weight. Susan Perris tended to her mortal remains and Peters to her soul, and as I watched from the shadows I reflected on the irony of her passing.

  She had died face to face with the black, gun-laden ships of the very aliens we had thought existed only in her imagination. And her life’s work, the drones that had been intended to protect her, the drones we were now sure had themselves been destroyed by the alien’s fierce weapons, had come to nothing.

  Many hours after our aborted attempt to reach Serenitas we remembered the message received in the final moments of the approach, and we sat huddled on the MI deck and listened, surrounded by the stench and the wreckage, numb from the failure and loss.

  “Torres from Dorczak. I know you don’t have time to answer, but Godspeed and good luck. We’ve caught one of your aliens.”

  TWENTY

  The Fourth Seal

  I

  want you to come with me, Harry, to look at this thing they’ve caught. We’re going to have to try and talk to it, and I’ll need your help.”

  Harry Penderson nodded inside his helmet and touched the faceplate, absently feeling for the scar on his cheek.

  “Look at this.” He shined his helmet light on a child’s doll, found lying in the dirt under the main dome. It had been burned in half.

  “Why that, do you suppose?” I said. “Because of its human form? So far they’ve been pretty unimpressed by the distinction between human and anything else.”

  “No, look.” He twisted it to show the insides. “It’s full of MI. That’s what they saw. Same with all this other stuff.” He tossed the doll aside.

  “So, Torres, you’ve got the whole system staying away from this thing, waiting for you to go and see it personally.”

  “I need to, Harry.”

  “I know. Father Peters said you would need to. Still, from what Carolyn tells me, it’s pretty uninteresting so far. It hasn’t batted an eye since they caught it. Hasn’t got eyes to bat. I hear that their people even reported it dead, until someone said if that was the case why was it still on its feet and why was it still warm. I’m not sure its guards are too bright.”

  “She’s trying to keep down the number of people who know about it. She hasn’t even been out to see it herself. I did ask her to have them monitor temperature and humidity and sound, though, from outside the cage. No change in any of them so far.”

  “Why sound? Why not the whole spectrum?”

  “An animal that sends radio signals? Possible, I guess. I didn’t think of that.”

  “None of the witnesses reported sounds during the attack on Allerton’s base. A couple of them described the attack as ‘quiet and unhurried.’ And from the mess here at our own base, it looks like they work just fine in a vacuum. Which means they communicate with something besides sound.”

  We had returned from the torus to find our base in a shambles. The manufacturing domes for ships’ engines and armaments had been leveled, all with the same alien thoroughness we’d found on Asile. The other domes had been neatly breached, but only a few of the items we’d left in them had been selected out for attack: some desiccated livestock embryos, an inoperative searchlight, a bank of wall ovens, some of the heaps of slag out on the surface. In every case, though, even the smallest power cell or generator had been searched out and destroyed.

  Yet items of far greater economic and military utility had been left untouched, such as the domes’ giant oxygen separators and scrubbers, the big surface trailers, the farms’ fertilizer tanks, and the smelters and rolling mills themselves.

  The attack was unmistakably the same as at the Chinese station
on Asile and, by all accounts, the same as the more recent one on the English-speaking base at Wallneck, on the isthmus of Lowhead—although that attack had left many more casualties. What was becoming clearer and clearer, though, as we trudged through the wreckage with our lamps, was that all of those attacks bore no resemblance at all to the earlier failures of our own two domes—the landing dome just days after the first news of the aliens, and the farming industries dome whose breach had prompted lifting the fleet.

  “All right, Harry, I’ve seen enough. Let’s get ready for the run to H-n. The ship Tyrone’s outfitting with a cage ought to be ready.”

  “You’re bringing it back?”

  “Yes. I told Carolyn we had better facilities here for examining it, or whatever. Although I don’t know if that’s still true.”

  Penderson’s helmet turned my way. “You know we can’t set up this base, again, Torres. It’s much too vulnerable now.”

  “We can’t stay in those ships, either, damn it! There’s no fuel, no air, no decent food. Everybody’s at each other’s throat . . . we’ve burned our bridges behind us, Harry. And these sons of bitches are burning them in front. We have to reopen these domes.”

  Not all of the fleet had returned to the black planet yet. Shortly after turning for home, back toward the base we’d abandoned, we’d had to stare helplessly through telescopes at the flickering lights and radiation bursts as our base was destroyed.

  That, then, was when the indecision had set in, slinking into our midst like a wary predator. Tensions grew even as we mourned the dead, and the fleet began to tear at itself like a trapped animal.

  A few fast ships had accompanied me back to the black planet, hoping to find more reassuring news. Others had drifted away from the fleet in sullen silence, striking out on new orbits for the warmth of the inner planets or the safety of the outer moons. Polaski had raced off somewhere to agitate for joint weapons production with other colonies, while Chan, Peters and Perris had stayed with the fleet, moving to the other ships to work with the scores of new orphans. In the end, the command ship had been left crippled and empty, towed in by Bolton.

  But now Penderson and I were left with little reassurance to offer, beyond the fact that our support systems were still intact. The aliens had again proved thorough and powerful, and I was beginning to fear for humanity’s survival anywhere in the system.

  Or worse. There was something else, now, something that was never spoken of on the radios, and only whispered in conversations. Something we superstitiously avoided even in our own thoughts. Throughout the system, we’d begun quietly to erase every reference to Earth, every coordinate, every faintest allusion. We pretended that we had no origins, no past. It was a claim we’d once made in repudiation of our own planet, but made now out of an uneasy loyalty.

  “So you’re going to scan this thing and dissect it, and all that?”

  Penderson and I trudged out across the iron floor of the airlock tunnel, out of the main dome. We crunched across the surface and passed one at a time through the tiny lock of our transparent observation boat, throwing our torches and suits down inside.

  “Dissect it, you mean, so that Polaski and Rosler can find just the right nerve gas and radiation to melt them into glorious sludge? No, Harry, I don’t think so. I’ve got a feeling our survival depends more on finding out who they are and what they’re after, than on how to kill them. Which isn’t going to be easy. There’s something about these attacks, Harry . . . I don’t know, it’s eerie, foreign. Alien. It scares the hell out of me.”

  “Scares you and the surviving witnesses, both. Some of them still aren’t talking, yet there’s not a scratch on them. You know what that one pilot is supposed to have said? The colonel? He said it would have been better if he’d at least been wounded. If he’d just lost his legs or something.”

  “I know, Harry, I know. Come on, let’s go.”

  The observation boat was a peculiar vessel, little more than a sliver of a deck set into a clear bubble. Two swiveling seats forward were for the pilot and an observer. Behind them, running along the clear walls, two soft benches also served as cots. All the way aft was the airlock and a tiny galley, head and shower.

  Floating out in space in the transparent boats left most of us feeling anxious and overexposed, and as Penderson pulled us off the ground I caught myself reaching under my vest mindlessly to check the body armor beneath it, as though that would help. I never liked being more than a few feet off the surface in these eggshell-thin boats, and now Penderson was about to run it all the way up into orbit.

  As we skimmed along the surface and began the climb, however, a figure below broke away from a cluster of lights on the surface and waved us down, so Penderson settled back in and spun the tail and its airlock toward him. There was a clumping and hissing from the lock, followed by a suit hitting the deck. I shifted around to look.

  “Good afternoon, Rosler.”

  He kicked his suit aside and began to clean his glasses, the corner of his mouth twisted into a now-permanent smirk. I hadn’t seen him since before the trip to Asile.

  “All right,” he said, “you can go.” He didn’t lookup.

  Penderson glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. “Thank you very much,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.” Without turning around he twitched the controls suddenly to jerk the boat off the ground. But Rosler was already sitting down.

  No one spoke during the long climb. I concentrated on the deck between my knees.

  “That was quite a job you did on Pham, Rosler,” I said when we reached orbit.

  “Yeah, well. It’s how you keep them in line.”

  “You really believe that bullshit?” said Penderson over his shoulder.

  “What do you know, a couple of limp dicks like you? You couldn’t even hold onto your own wife, Penderson.”

  Where had Rosler gotten a story like that? Penderson’s wife had been in his arms when she died.

  “Anyway,” said Rosler, “the bitch likes it.”

  The scar on Penderson’s cheek had turned a deeper purple.

  “What’s the matter, Rosler?” he said. “Can’t satisfy a real woman? One who’s not hurting so bad she needs that kind of abuse?”

  Rosler wiped his nose on the back of his hand and tried to push the hair out of his eyes. “Piss off, Penderson. If I need advice from niggers and wetbacks, I’ll ask for it.”

  “All right,” I said. “That’s enough. You’re out of line, Rosler.”

  “I wouldn’t talk, Torres. You’re on pretty thin ice, yourself.”

  “I said that’s enough. Now, where are we dropping you?”

  “Four-Four-Two. It’s a trooper, trailing aft. Meridian plus seven degrees at the hour.”

  “All right. Harry, if you’re the better man here, let’s see it in the docking. You’re a professional, remember that.” I knew he wanted to hurt Rosler, but I wanted to get the detour over with. Not so much for diplomatic reasons as that I wanted to get out of the fishbowl and into a well-armed vessel with opaque walls.

  We dropped Rosler off without another word, then Penderson maneuvered us forward among the orbiting ships to let me off on the provisioning vessel to which Elliot had docked the modified trooper, the one I would use for transporting the alien. Then Penderson set off on the long ride forward to return the transparent boat to the orbiting can, where I would pick him up on my way to H-II.

  The atmosphere-capable transport Elliot had prepared for me was an iron tube of the same type we’d ridden to in Asile with Bolton’s commandos. Its outside was rusted and unpainted, and it floated gloomily in the dark, tied to the larger ship like a sulking child on a leash. Its sides were pitted with dark portholes, and its windscreens were scarred and black, like the eyes of an underwater predator.

  Inside, Elliot had pulled out all but the two pilots’ seats. That left a bare, forty-foot-long cylinder with iron decking and exposed conduits, ducts and vent gratings. The after end of the ship had been separa
ted off by heavy, vertical iron bars, with a small hatch cut into the rear of the ship for loading the animal. Although Dorczak hadn’t seen the animal herself when we’d last talked, she’d told us that similar caging had sufficed so far, and that no special atmosphere or other accommodations seemed to be necessary.

  I assembled a personal kit from the provisioning ship’s stores, then gave Elliot last-minute instructions for preparing a report on what we’d found on the surface. I hoped to be back with the specimen in less than a week, before the body of the fleet returned, and in a position to make informed recommendations before Rosler dreamed up something new for Polaski, like throwing high-G seven-year-olds into the maw of the aliens’ weapons.

  During the disastrous alien repulse at the torus, quick-thinking commanders had ordered spectrographs and radiation counts of the attackers’ weapons—and, more importantly, on the debris from our destroyed ships. Scientists had then re-examined the data returned by Sun of Gabriel, looking specifically for that same radiation signature somewhere in the Serenitas System.

  And they’d found it. Out near the periphery of the system, not far from where the probe had first seen the alien fleet, was a slender, thirty-thousand-mile-long cloud of hot particles, tightly aligned and pointing out toward Holzstein’s System, the direction from which the Europeans had been coming. The calculated mass of the particle cloud was sufficiently close to that of the European fleet to serve as proof: Wherever in space the aliens had been before the European venture, they’d known that the Europeans were coming. And they had drawn back to wait.

  The next question had been quick to follow: Knowing the nature of the aliens’ weapons and the composition of our original drones and their ships, could we calculate the radioactive signature that the drones’ destruction would have left? The scientists’ answer was Yes, they could; and in short order they found the drones’ signature as well. Everywhere in Serenitas System that the probe aimed its instruments, the death of the drones was spelled out in expanding, cooling clouds of particles. Decay and dissipation rates gave the timing: They had died over a three-year period, beginning nearly five years before the probe’s visit. The aliens had been unerringly thorough.