Peters dropped to his knees and groped for his cane. “Keep going,” he said. He couldn’t breathe properly. “Take your case and go.” He looked back at Bolton. “I’ll catch you up—oh Lord, laddie, no!”
He’d started to get up, but now seemed to fall again. He was bent over, clawing at a section of wall that had collapsed, barely visible under the layer of oily smoke. An arm stuck out from under the wall, just visible where the smoke parted, and a head of sandy hair. A walking stick.
“Hold up!” I shouted through the haze over the square. “We need medics!” The roar of flames and the crump of grenades answered out of the smoke, but no voices.
“Go,” said Bolton, in a faint and unfamiliar voice.
Peters and I tried to lift the section of wall.
“No,” said Bolton. “Torres, don’t let him—”
Something darted past, and flames hissed in the rubble nearby. Peters wiped away the blood on Bolton’s face.
It was a terrible face now, dark and contorted. The tendons stood out from the flesh as he tried to turn and see Peters.
“Colwyn,” he said, or something that sounded like it. But his words were lost as more blood began to flow. He looked wildly around him for a moment, his hand groping for Peters’, scrabbling in the dust like a claw. Then finally he lifted that awful, straining face upward, and there it remained.
Peters and I stared down at it, then backed away into the smoke, away from the heat. We lost sight of him as a new line of flame etched its way across the wall toward where he lay.
I stumbled into the alley leading north, one hand around Peters and the other on the case, shouting over my shoulder into the smoke behind us. “It’s clear this way!” I said.
But it wasn’t. Like rats sniffing along a sewer, sturdy-looking, charcoal-colored drones were approaching through the passage ahead of us. They were low to the ground and broad-backed, clearly higher-gravity models than before—either because of their base on the triply-heavy H-vi, or because earlier visitors to the black planet had recommended a sturdier design for the next attack. I eased the case around behind Peters’ bent back, not knowing whether that was what they had come for—whether the drone in his cage had understood my message and described it. Peters stopped and leaned against the wall, unable to go on. Voices came from close behind us.
The drones moved toward us with a sort of elegant, fluid movement. They carried a variety of odd, compact devices in the hands extending from their backs. They must have had a policy of not incorporating their weapons into their own design, so that the weapons could be upgraded more often than the rest. In either case, it was a design and manufacturing cycle that was frighteningly short, even compared to the speed that manufacturing MI had reached on Earth.
A pair of shadows flickered through the air. One of them froze in front of us, a tiny vertical cylinder with a ring of grappling claws around its base. A gentle hissing sound—and whirlpools in the dust below it—indicated rockets or fans inside. The other one flitted on toward the commandos behind us. Watchers.
The drones up the alley ignored us. My ears popped again as pressure in the dome dropped, then suddenly an explosion lifted several of the drones into the air. Their shapes distorted wildly as they slammed into the nearby walls, but didn’t rupture, as though sheathed in nanoskin. The tiny flying drone in front of us shot back up the alley toward the source of the grenade, then an instant later the remaining drones in front lit their burners even as they scrambled back to their feet.
Cries of pain and exploding masonry came from behind us. In front, between us and the vehicle assembly building, all of the headless drones, even the damaged ones, had remained upright during the grenade’s explosion, stabilized by gyros, presumably. They had also fired their one, lethally accurate shot through clouds of blinding and burningly hot gas—the flying scouts were sighting for them.
“Go on, Eddie, get yourself back,” said Peters. “You with your box there. Perhaps they’ll let me draw them on while you slip through.” Peters sank to his knees and stifled a hoarse cough as the surviving drones wandered up the alley toward us.
“No,” I said. I pulled him to his feet as a drone brushed against my leg. It paid us no attention.
Larger scouts flew into the alley ahead of us and clamped themselves onto their immobilized fellows, then seconds later the alley was clear. The surviving drones walked off into the smoke and flames behind us.
P
ham was the last one into the big vehicle assembly building. I pushed in just before her, dragging Peters past the crowds to the stairs, while she stood in the doorway pulling in the last of the commandos.
“Quick, quick! Inside! All you do good, but next time motion-guided, yah? Set shooters now—we go after little see-bugs next time, okay? Then we blow smoke, doggies don’t see too good. Hey! You hurry up, okay? You—Tight-Buns! Move ass, maybe I let you kiss me what you think? Muzzles down—better you kill kids than you kill dome, hah?”
She slammed and bolted the door and I kicked the codes case in under the stairs, out of sight. I shifted Peters’ weight and she joined me to help. She was still barefooted.
“Father Charlie!” she said, suddenly realizing he was there, “you hurt bad!” We got him up the clattering stairs and eased him down against the wall at the edge of the mezzanine grating, where he closed his eyes.
“Michael’s dead, lass,” he said to her.
“No! You don’t say that!”
“Aye. Saved our wretched little lives, he did, waiting out that lying bastard in its cage.”
Pham turned to look at me, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. I looked away, and she knelt down next to Peters and pressed her hand against his side.
Peters gasped. “Aye, that’s it, there. Took a bit o’ the wall, I’m afraid. I’ll be all right, though, lass, if you’ll not be doing that again. Don’t mind me.”
The building’s electric lights flickered and died, then came back on for a minute before dying out altogether. That left only the sunlight filtering through the windows, twisting with shadows as smoke rolled past.
A powerful baritone voice spoke on the floor below. “Give us room, please. We need some light, here, if you would move aside, please.”
The vehicle assembly building was the one the Serenitas Probe had been launched from. It rose all the way to the dome, where it had its own retractable glass roof, a bright circle of sky high above us. The sun stood directly above it, and so shone down in a vertical shaft onto the floor below. Medics there tried to make room for a stretcher, which bore a woman with a white robe draped across her swollen belly. Drip bottles and monitors hung from the rail of the stretcher. Her hair was singed and her face bruised, injuries she’d apparently sustained during the attack.
A shrill chirping came from one of the monitors, then stopped with the slap of a switch. “I’m losing her again,” said one of the medics. “She can’t take any more moving around.”
“All right, there . . . easy, now. Down easy.” The baritone belonged to an enormous, black-skinned man who leaned down just then to look into her face.
“Fetal heart’s down.”
“Oxygen, please.”
“Induce?”
“Can’t afford the contractions . . . easy, now, there you go.”
“We’re going to need her back in surgery, you know that, don’t you? Or some portable gear.”
“You saw what it’s like out there. Just hang on and wait. Let’s see what happens.” The woman cried out weakly, barely conscious.
Charlie Peters leaned forward with an effort and looked down at the medics in their dark green and the silent woman in white, and at the frightened faces of the farmers and clerks and machinists pressed in around them. He watched the activity in the circle of light for a moment, then leaned back against the wall.
“Father Charlie, you hurt more than you say.” Pham got up. “I get medics, okay?”
“No.” Peters put out a hand. “They’ll be wasti
ng their time on an old man like me. They’ve got more important work at hand.”
Pham knelt down again, and sat back on her heels with tears on her face. Whether for the mother and her baby, or for Peters, or for Michael Bolton, I couldn’t tell.
For me, I couldn’t believe Bolton was dead. Several times I found myself thinking he must be on the floor below, out of sight in the shadows beneath the mezzanine. But the only image I could bring to mind when I tried to think of his face was of the drone in its cage, watching as I passed through the smoke that last time.
“Do you have a radio, Mr. Torres?” A man was looking up at me from below.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“We don’t know what the situation is outside. We’ve got guns, but no radios.”
“No, please.” Pham moved quickly to the railing and looked down. “No guns unless no choice.”
The man was skeptical. He held one hand against an arm heavily band-aged and soaked in blood. “Maybe.”
Behind him a medic shielded her eyes from the sun overhead and leaned down to her instruments, then spoke quietly to the others. “We may have a choice here, guys.”
“No,” said the black man, cradling the woman’s head in a giant hand. “She won’t survive a section if we do it here. If we go ahead it’s only to save the child.”
“Christ. What a crummy, goddamned way to go.”
“Yes. Ease her back up a little there.”
Outside there was an explosion of masonry, out across Trinity Square. It wasn’t clear what the drones were doing, unless they really were looking for the case hidden below. The case the prisoner had told them I had.
“Tuyet, lass.” Peters had his hand clasped around the cross at his neck, and had been speaking to himself quietly. Now he opened his hand and held out to Pham a tiny, stoppered phial.
“Take this down and place a little on the woman’s hand. There’s a good lass. Two drops, if you would. One for the mother, and one for the child.”
She took the phial and held it uneasily in her hand, and finally Peters reached out and folded her fingers around it. “Extreme unction,” he said. “ ’Tis my duty as a priest. Go now.” He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, then began to speak to her again. Pham stopped him.
“I know,” she said. “The words, I know. Old priests in camps say them every day. Too many times.” She went down the stairs and made her way through the packed bodies to the woman’s side, and stepped into the circle of sunlight. She still wore only the thin white blouse tied above the waist, and her lightweight pants tied around her hips with a cotton string. She was out of place among the packed bodies with their heavy work clothes and uniforms and slung weapons.
One of the medics stopped her, not understanding what she was doing, but she spoke to him quietly and they both glanced up at Peters. Then she knelt down next to the stretcher and worked a drop of the oil into the back of the woman’s hand, speaking quietly. She looked at the woman for a moment then and hesitated, then returned up the steps and handed the phial to Peters.
“Not for the baby,” she said.
“Well, then.” He closed his eyes again.
None of us spoke for a quarter of an hour. Peters and I leaned against the outside wall while Pham knelt next to him. Indecipherable sounds came from outside, and tense voices from below. The medics were worried at some new sign of fetal distress.
“Well,” said Peters quietly, “ ’tis a foolish life I’ve led, isn’t it?” He lifted his head from the wall with his eyes half open. “Tramping about with a bottle o’ ointment in my waistcoat, waiting for something grand. For the sound o’ trumpets, a fine, blue ribbon for virtue at the close of a mean little life. But there’s no ribbon out here in the black, is there? Just cold.”
“Father—”
“Claiming a calling from God like some poor novice dressing up the abbot before his vows. A cowardly man is the truth, afraid to leave his mark like other men. Prattling on about fine Christian principle.” He paused, struggling for breath. “ ’Tis the height o’ arrogance, don’t you think, a man contriving a god so he can tell himself he’s been chosen by him, that he’s been vouched for in some high purpose? But what is it I’ve done, really, except meddle like an old man?”
“Father, you’ve done—”
But he wasn’t listening.
“And here I am now,” he said, “with an eye against the black and my faith shriveling up like a virgin’s womb, saying if there’s a god why don’t I feel him, why can’t I reach out and touch his face, now when I’m in need of it, now when it’s so cold—”
Pham had reached up to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, and now she lifted Peters’ creased old hand and pushed aside her collar with it. She moved it down to rest over her heart, his palm open against her bare skin. Peters closed his eyes and leaned slowly back.
I walked to the railing to watch the medics below. One sponged the woman’s forehead while another tried to fit a pressure bottle onto an air syringe. Her hands were shaking, and she couldn’t get it on. A big black hand reached across to take it and finish the job.
I moved to the window. Drones wandered across Trinity Square, some of them milling around the doors to our building. Beyond the wall of the dome more ships had landed, and the black, midday sky above was filled with them as they spread farther out across the landscape. No help would be coming anytime soon from the fleet; if it was true that the drones overlooked unarmed and non-threatening vessels, still, no one would have the courage to fly any down—and unarmed ships would do us little good, in any case. Our only chance lay in slipping out to the remaining shuttles, or waiting out the attack—assuming it would ever end. But pressure continued to drop under the dome, outside the building, and we had no suits.
A shout came from below.
“Flutter on the mother. Skip! Two . . . three . . .”
“Massage, keep it high.”
“. . . six, seven . . .”
“Fetal’s dropping. We’re losing the baby, people.”
“All right, here we go. Here to here, there’s your mark. Sponge with the gown.”
“You two, hold her down. There’s no anesthetic.”
“Longer cut . . . all right, there’s the wall. Convulsions . . .”
“Baby’s heart’s gone! He can’t take that.”
“All right, get to the cord first, the minute you see it in here. And then you—yes, you, that whole bottle there into the mother. The minute they’ve got the cord. Okay, right lumbar—get ready to turn her.”
Charlie Peters sat forward a little next to me so he could see.
“Eddie,” he said.
I sat down and he put a hand on my arm. He didn’t say anything more, but just watched the activity below.
“Got the cord—barely clamped.”
“Turn the mother. All right, now, Atropine”
“Okay, there’s the head . . . I don’t like that color.”
“A boy—did she know?”
“Yes. Suction! Again. Okay, that doesn’t look too bad. Oxygen now, blow it in.”
“Sixty-five seconds since he went out—he needs air . . .”
“There he goes! All right, son, give us another one like that one. Another breath. God Almighty, there you go. If you can keep that up you’ll be all right.”
“I wish those legs looked better. He isn’t ever going to walk on them, I’ll tell you that.”
“Yeah, well I just wish he had a mother.”
“God, look at him take that air—that’s enough of a miracle. One minute of life and counting.”
Charlie Peters next to me shook his head. “No,” he said, hoarsely. “No, he’s always been alive. He’s only waking from a dream, is all. A dream about God.” I could barely hear him. “ ’Tis a dream he’ll forget, though, as the days pass. Like the rest of us.”
A medic swaddled the baby while another lifted the stretcher’s sheet up over the mother. No one else in the building spoke
.
And in the middle of the floor, in the center of the circle of pale white light shining down from above, the baby struggled to open his eyes. And next to me, Peters closed his.
“A dream about God,” he said again. His grip on my arm loosened and he turned a little to one side.
Charlie Peters died in Pham’s arms without another word. And at that same moment, down on the floor below, the baby cried out once and then was quiet again.
I walked away. Near the window I stopped and looked back.
I looked at the baby, held now in the arms of the great black man below. I looked at Peters, quiet at last. And I looked at Pham, gazing down at him with tears in her eyes, stroking his brow.
Each of the three was alone in that great, cold building, I thought, surrounded outside by the drones and by the empty wastelands farther out still. Each was alone, and in some way not alone. And not one of the three was aware of me at all, there where I stood looking back at them from the window.
M
r. Torres? Eddie?”
I’d fallen asleep. Peters’ body had been moved into a corner and covered with a blanket. Pham stood by the window in the afternoon light, whispering to me. I watched her for a minute before answering.
“Yes?” I said.
“Come look.” She made room for me at the window.
The square was empty. Smoke hung in the sunlight, indicating that there was at least some air left in the dome. The fleet of black ships still waited across the wastes, although there seemed to be no more activity near the dome.
“How long will it last?” I said. “We need to go out and find a trailer, and pull it up against the building. Then if we can load it up and slip it out through the tunnel, we can reach the shuttles. They still look intact.”
“Yah, okay. Let’s go.” She flitted down the steps in her bare feet, then with a brief word to the nervous guards at the doors we cracked them open and she and I slipped out into Trinity Square. We were helped through by a sharp gust of air from the pressure behind.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 42