Chan wrapped herself around me and held tight, a shiver running through her as she pressed against me. “God, Eddie. I’m glad you’re back. Things aren’t good.”
I held her for a minute with my arms in under her loose jacket, then finally the trembling stopped and she pulled me out of Peters’ way. Tyrone Elliot, the medic Susan Perris, and Kip were on a seat at the far end. Elliot’s eyes were closed. Piles of books and debris stood against the wall, and on the wall near the door, a faded square on the wall marked the missing photograph of Serenitas.
“What’s not good?” I said to Chan.
“More of our ships are leaving, Eddie. Scores of them. We moved the children to the can to try and keep them safe, but parents are refusing to be separated from them this time. They think everyone in the system’s going to die, and they want to be with their kids at the end. Even on some of the fighting ships people have got their kids with them, but most of them are just taking their families and breaking out of orbit without even knowing where they’re going. Eddie . . . some of the orphans are asking if the aliens are coming to cut off their arms and legs because they’ve been bad.”
With an exhausted sound she sat down and buried her face in her hands. Perris stared at the floor, while next to her Kip started to cry. Elliot slept. A column of soldiers marched past outside the open door, and then it was quiet again.
From up the alley came a yell and a shout. Peters turned his head to listen. But no more sound came, until a few minutes later when a shadow crossed the door and, while his commandos waited in the alley, Michael Bolton stepped in with Flight Leader and sometime orphanage commander Priscilla Bates. Chan dried her face and Elliot opened his eyes.
Bates stopped near the door and took Peters’ arm while Bolton leaned back against a wall. It was Bates that spoke first.
“The aliens are moving faster than we thought,” she said.
“How long?”
“Less than two hours. More than five hundred ships.”
The room became quiet again.
“I don’t think they’ll attack us or the civilian ships,” I said.
No one answered for a few minutes.
“That’s not actually why we’ve come,” said Bolton. “It’s that I’ve got a rather unfortunate bit of news, I’m sorry to say.” He glanced at me.
“Especially for you, I’m afraid, Eduardo. I’ve got a chap in West Lowhead, is the thing. It seems he’s sent a report, saying a colonel in the colony defense forces—Samuel Becker by name—has formally reported to the president that a light aircraft exploded yesterday while at sea. It was carrying Administrative Chief Carolyn Dorczak and one companion. There was no other word. I’m sorry.”
No one stirred except for Kip, who looked even more frightened than before. Then through the silence came a scream. Pham’s voice, far up the alley. Peters turned for the door.
“I’ll go see,” he said. He patted Bates’ arm and disappeared around the corner with his head down, poking ahead with his cane and paying no attention to the troops who made way for him outside.
Another scream came, followed by angry shouting. I turned toward the door.
“There’s something I need to see,” I said. But it wasn’t the same thing Peters had gone to see.
When I got there, Pham stood unsteadily in the middle of the square, trying to keep her balance as she wiped the blood from her nose with a hand. Rosler stood to one side with a sneer on his face, while around the periphery of the square men and women stood, having come to see the spectacle, or the alien, or both. Now and then one of them glanced uneasily up at the dome.
“You follow me and you follow me and you follow me!” shrieked Pham. She was bent over at the waist and gasping for breath, straightening up with an effort to shout some more. Yet it wasn’t Rosler she was shouting at.
In the very center of the square, aglow in the hazy sunlight that streamed down to form a circle where he stood, Charlie Peters leaned forward with both hands on his cane and watched Pham intently as she screamed at him.
In the corner, the alien still stood, blind and immobile, watching everyone.
“Everywhere I go, you there!” shouted Pham. “You pretend to be nice, but nobody nice. You just watch all the time. That’s why you here, hah?”
I pushed past the spectators into the gloom of Anne Miller’s work room. Pham’s frenzied shrieks dwindled in the background. Stale dust rose from the floor to block what little light there was. I waved it away from my face and searched among the debris.
Furniture had been tipped over or pushed aside. Piles of old memory blocks and notebooks lay on the floor under a thick layer of dust. Finally in the corner there was a dim outline of light blue, a rectangle like a thousand others I’d seen on shelves in the background over the years. It was a slender binder filled with an untidy stack of paper. I worked it loose from the trash and wiped away the dust, but I was unable to read the cover in the bad light.
I stepped back out into the square. I was about to look down at the cover of the binder when I saw the gun in Pham’s hands. She was down on her knees, sobbing and holding her big fléchette gun in both hands, aiming it at Charlie Peters. Peters stood quietly in his column of light, looking down at her with growing concern as he leaned on his cane. Rosler stood to one side, apparently enjoying the spectacle, while on the other side Bolton and Throckmorton inched closer to Pham.
“You call yourself father?” she screamed. “You make fun of me, hah?” She wiped her face on her shoulder and shook her head to clear it. “I know about fathers and priests! You turn your back and make good laugh! You don’t fuck with me! Nobody fuck with me!” She raised the gun higher and struggled to hold it steady, screaming and sobbing at the same time. Bolton edged closer.
I thought at that moment that Peters was quietly praying to himself, but from the few words I could hear I came to understand later what he was actually saying, the line that he was finally finishing.
“I beheld,” he said, “a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death.” He glanced briefly over at Rosler, then quickly back at Pham. His years of composure finally seemed to have fallen away, and his fear showed through.
Rosler snorted in disgust at Peters’ words. “What are you, the Second Coming or something?” He turned back to Pham. “Go ahead, you dumb little shit, pop him.”
Thinking she wouldn’t really fire, and unable to wait any longer, I looked down at the binder in my hands. But in that very instant the gun exploded with a horrible noise and a blinding flash of light. A sun-like wave of heat from the muzzle swept outward across the square.
And, out in the churning dust, on that strange, bare, black earth, out in the center of his now swirling column of light, Charlie Peters crossed himself quietly and looked down at the bloody remains of David Rosler.
“No,” he said, “not the Second Coming at all. Just an old Irish priest.”
Pham was kneeling in a huddle with her arms in front of her. She was still for a moment, then shook with a small convulsion, and then again. A hoarse sob escaped from her, and she began to rock forward and back with her head still buried against her knees. She didn’t look up as Bolton pulled the gun carefully from her fingers.
When I looked back down at the binder in my hands, my own fingers were trembling—because of the explosion, because of Rosler’s sudden death, and because I had already seen the words on the cover. The words I had known would be there.
HP / Digital Equipment Corporation, Programmer’s Quick Reference. Model DEC-91.
Anne Miller’s computer on the island. Anne Miller’s voice speaking the words: Deck Ninety-One.
The creature in the cage was a child of our own drones.
Then, just at that moment, like a distant, silver thread against the awful silence, a muted cry came from far back among the alleyways. The sound of a woman at the height of passion.
How strange, I thought. Love-making at such a time as this. A tiny life beginning, perhaps, even as Ro
sler died. Even as Pham wept for her own. A flicker of light in the darkness as the drones drew nearer. Returning, at last, to their makers.
There was no one here but us.
PART FOUR
SERENITY
TWENTY-THREE
And His Slumber Shall
Bring You Peace
I
t was terrifying, and it was exhilarating. It was exhilarating because the scuff of the shoe by the bed in the dead of night had proved to be only our own child, and terrifying because of the glint of steel in his hand. It was terrifying in the way that only a cancer of the flesh can be, with that ultimate intimacy that preys on men’s minds from within. A creature, as Patel had said, of our own imaginings.
And it was exhilarating because we had the codes that would stop them.
Through the haze in the square I watched Bolton and Throckmorton lift Pham to her feet and help her out of the square, away from the shadows and into the road that led back through the dome. Her gun lay at Peters’ feet. Peters stood looking down at Rosler’s body, at the rivulets of blood cutting channels in the dust, running in and out of the shadows and making a faint trickling sound through the silence.
Though she had been holding the massive gun in hands that were shaking, and squinting through her own blood and tears as she fired a broadside of steel needles like buckshot in a crowded square, Pham had hit Rosler squarely in the center of his chest. Little of him remained.
I edged through the crowd and pushed my way past Chan, then pulled Elliot away.
“Let’s go.” I got him suited up and then out onto the surface outside the main dome, past the stream of matériel and troop trailers growling through the tunnel to the warships outside.
We opened our face plates in an armored shuttle and lifted off toward the orbiting fleet.
“What the hell are you doing, Torres? Here we are—Rosler’s dead, Pham’s gone and blown her last fuse and ain’t worth a bent nickel anymore, Polaski’s got balls for brains and something bad’s coming down on Boar River with Carolyn gone and all, and now we got aliens an hour out—”
“They’re not aliens,” I said. “They’re the drones.”
“So the alien’s have got drones, too. Right now I don’t—”
“Our own drones.”
“The drones are gone, Torres, dusted in the next system—” “The originals are gone. They were destroyed by the next generation as a matter of course when it cleaned up. These are their offspring, Tyrone, generations later. They advanced faster than even Anne thought possible.”
“Come on, Torres, the drones were on our side. Shit, they’d be out here protecting us.”
“No. They were supposed to protect the planets, not us. Against ‘alien force.’ That’s what they’re doing.”
“Damn it, Torres, you said there ain’t no aliens.”
“We are the aliens, Tyrone. They don’t know who we are.”
“Lord, now you’ve went and got strange, too. You, Pham, and Charlie . . .”
“You weren’t in Flight Ops on the island, Tyrone, when the drones were sent up. You didn’t hear what Anne Miller said after we’d lost so many of the drone ships. She said their mission would be intact no matter what—that the only shortages were from losing both ships carrying agriculture and both ships carrying history and the arts. I may have been the only one who heard her, and its significance didn’t register until Harry showed up talking about the drone he found.”
“So who cares if they know history?”
“They didn’t know anything about Earth, Tyrone. They didn’t even know it existed. They thought they were born right here in Holzstein’s. So when they saw us coming, the Europeans with those big guns, they ran. When Anne sent her instructions about defending themselves, it never occurred to her that we were the ones they’d defend against. She knew, though, after Harry’s drone.”
“So let’s talk to them,” said Elliot. “Tell them to cool it.”
“We’re going to. We’ll get the communications codes off the ship and then talk to them.”
The fleet swung into view through the strip of windscreen. Our stomachs sagged as I dropped the thrust and rolled the shuttle onto its back to keep our weight on the floor. Elliot leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands inside his helmet, rubbing his temples.
“I knew a fella in Louisiana, once,” he said. “Got so confused he just sat down and died.”
The crippled command ship drifted closer.
“Shit, Torres, I don’t know what’s going on anymore, but it’s time to get out of all this. Time to go find me someplace warm, and where I don’t weigh so damned much.”
“That’s just it, Tyrone, we’re going to get out. We’ve got control over the aliens now. Think about it—they’ll just stop. They’ll be powerless, and we can move on. Serenitas is sunny and lightweight like you want. Remember what it looks like, Tyrone. Remember what you said when you saw it. ‘Fairweather’ you said. You named it, Tyrone.”
“I don’t know if I believe you anymore, Torres. I just know it’s time to get out.”
We docked and moved into the big ship. It was floating under a light thrust among the deserted repair platforms. We tugged our way up the ladder to the MI decks, where Chan had said the case with the codes had been stowed. Among the trash and the twisted pieces of the grating, difficult to see in the red emergency lighting, we found the slender metal case strapped against one wall. I tripped the buckles and opened the case. Set into its padded bottom were two dull silver shapes, petabyte memory blocks like the ones I’d once stolen. But unlike the oblong pieces of silver that had unleashed this storm a lifetime ago, these held the key to quelling it once and for all.
“I say,” came a voice, “who’s mucking about in my parlor?”
Little Bolton drifted up the ladder and onto the deck. “By Jove, it’s only—” He stopped in the middle of the grating, motionless and quiet. Elliot and I waited.
“I hear something,” said Little Bolton.
“You hear something? Where? On the MI decks?”
“No. I hear something inside.”
Elliot stared at him, then slowly turned to one of the consoles. He fiddled with it until a radar picture came to life on the wall. Hundreds of ships were closing in on us, very close.
“Damn, Torres,” he said, “they’re right overhead.”
“Where are we, Tyrone?”
“Backside, by the cracks. Look at the bottom of the screen. All that clutter’s the trap we’re laying in the fissures. And we’re right in the middle—Jesus, Torres, why’d you pull this stunt about laying a trap, anyway?”
“To keep Polaski busy fighting aliens, Tyrone. To give me time. He and Allerton are up to something.”
“Shit, Torres, that ain’t news. They’re up to fighting and winning. Fighting aliens, colonists, themselves, don’t make no difference. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. We’re in big trouble.”
“Just a minute. Little B., what is it you hear inside?”
“Just . . . rather like voices, like the way I myself talk inside. Except the voices don’t mean anything.”
“Little B., did Anne Miller ever tell you and your friends to pass along everything you heard us talk about?”
“We like Ms. Chan better. She shows us things.”
“But did you tell Ms. Miller?”
There was a long pause.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The little drone squatted in silence.
“I don’t know,” it said at last.
“Come on, Torres,” said Elliot. “Let’s move!”
Little Bolton begged to be taken along, and when we finally thrust off from the big ship it was only to find our way blocked completely. Making a deeper black against the darkness, ghostly shapes slid out of space and toward the decoys, down toward the great fissures in the planet’s surface. One of the shapes glided toward us, then all at once our windscreen was filled with the gliste
ning, bronze-colored nose of a strange vessel. It hovered in front of us. My blood turned cold and sweat rose along the back my of neck, and I found myself sliding the metal case off my seat and down onto the deck, as though the ship, like a living thing, could see it and know what it was.
“Torres,” said Elliot.
“Yes.” My mouth was dry.
“Don’t crap in your suit.”
The vessel slid beneath us and out of sight. I was left wondering if it had really been there, if it had really seen us at all. Elliot’s hand shook as he adjusted our view of the planet passing below.
Then the windshield lit up as the thousand-mile-long fissures exploded with heaters and lasers. Drone ships by the hundreds suddenly stood out in stark relief against the inferno as they struggled to escape from the deep rifts, trying to fire on our ships rolling in over the rim at their spine-crushing six Gs.
Other drone ships plunged lower into the flames to attack the decoy buildings at the bottom, while on the surface our ground troops blew the camouflage off their missile batteries and launched at the ships still descending from space. Our own ships down in the rifts spun around to race back out of the fire zone, just before it erupted into a string of sun-white clouds that sent burning drone ships tumbling high above the surface, later to crash to the ground behind the missile crews. More drone ships flew down into the fissures to take their place.
“Fusion,” I said. “We’re using fusion. Courtesy of Bart Allerton. Son of a bitch, we’re killing our own people along with the drones.”
“I wonder if they’re alive,” said Elliot.
“The drones?”
“The ships. I mean, if the aliens are machines—the drones, I mean—then they wouldn’t even think of building ships that need crews, would they? They’d just build big, space-going animals—drones, machines, critters, whatever the fuck I’m talking about. Jesus, Torres, are they alive? Is anything alive—are we alive? I don’t even know anymore. Holy mother of God, look at that!”
A Grey Moon Over China Page 39