A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  Elliot spent the evening with Perris, but in the morning he seemed more tired and distracted than ever.

  “Harry and Carolyn said to say good-bye,” he said.

  “They’re gone?”

  “They left early. Worried about the home front. Did you know they were married?”

  “No. When?”

  “Back on the plains. Becker married ’em—senior officer present and all that.”

  I’d had to tell Kip he couldn’t come. I found him in my quarters sitting against the wall, with my gun in his hands. He was turning it this way and that, looking at it from all sides. I took it away and told him he was to stay with Chan.

  The only one to see the two of us off, in the end, was Pham.

  The day before, the Russian Marina Tonova had silenced a move to hold Pham accountable for assault and battery against Allerton, at one point slapping Polaski publicly for suggesting that Pham’s straying priorities had placed the mission in jeopardy because of it. Tonova had then dropped her official duties and closeted herself with Pham, announcing it as her intention to teach Pham how to raise a child.

  Now Pham stood leaning against the wall, watching as we clattered our way into the lock for the last time, dragging our boots and oxygen bottles behind us. The baby squirmed in her arms and chattered importantly, pointing at each piece of equipment in turn and looking up at me with his big eyes each time he pointed.

  “So,” said Pham.

  It was the last sight I had of the fleet—Pham leaning against the steel bulkhead, dark eyes and smooth skin contrasted against her black hair and white blouse, relaxed and a little sad, the baby in her arms pointing solemnly at my face through the porthole.

  * * *

  K

  new a fella in Louisiana, once,” said Elliot, “got tired of living and went around poking in corners all the time. Looking for the plug, he said.”

  Elliot was sprawled in the pilot’s seat, tipped back to see overhead in the direction we were moving, trying to maneuver us into orbit with his bare toes on the controls. Even as he spoke the shuttle lurched several times in rapid succession. A density finder pulled out of my hands and crashed to the deck.

  “Hell, Torres,” said Elliot over his shoulder, “you already checked that thing eighty-nine times. Just as well you finally set it down.”

  “The codes case may have been moved, Tyrone, and we’re going to have to go right to it. We’re only going to have one chance to get at it before the drones start deciding we’re important again.”

  “Well, maybe, maybe not—so far no one’s ever seen ’em take after a regular suit or an ordinary supply shuttle. You just smile and nod when we’re down there, Torres, and don’t get all uptight and start throwing rocks and waving your toys around.”

  “We have to have some advantage, Tyrone—Jesus, it makes my skin crawl, going back in there. You weren’t there when it was wall-to-wall drones.” My palms were sweating. The memory of the bodies, the blood, the shadowy drones drifting through the darkness, had wrapped itself around me like the stench of death itself. I had ached for a weapon then, and I couldn’t imagine going back without one now.

  “Your advantage is faith, boy, faith. You’re gonna have to take all that being-in-charge shit and let it go.” He tipped his head back to grin at me upside down, opening his fist as though letting something go. The ship twisted and dropped out from under us.

  “Oops. Tricky bastard, huh?”

  If the drones couldn’t see a weapon, I knew, they wouldn’t fire. And if they were going to fire anyway, or if they were blocking the way to the case, then it would be just as well if we had one.

  The ship righted itself as the MI took over our orbit around the black planet. Elliot abandoned the controls and spun around to look at me.

  “We can still turn around, Torres. Seems like a mighty fine idea, as a matter of fact. You see, I’m willing to bet a bright fella like you can talk FleetSys into shutting itself down right on Polaski’s ass, and without that ol’ box of wires, ain’t no one attacking nothing. Might just force all them generals and admirals to have a little faith, don’t you suppose?”

  “We’ve been through this before, Tyrone. It takes at least two fleet officers to change FleetSys’ commands, and with Rosler and Bolton gone that only leaves me and Polaski. Priscilla took herself off the list long ago.”

  “Well, shoot, Torres. Just forget about the whole thing, then. Learn how to dig wells or something.”

  The trip hadn’t been easy. Day after day I’d tried to keep busy, but all the while I was plagued by the memory of Singh looking at me, and Polaski’s grey eyes, and Pham’s challenge about standing up to the real enemy.

  “Here, look at this,” I said. I brought up a picture of the surface on our screens, with our old base coming into view over the horizon. It was early in the planet’s morning. Elliot tipped his seat forward and stared at it.

  “Them critters is taking this pretty serious, aren’t they?”

  Across an area stretching for miles out from the main dome lay row upon row of new ships. Most of them were smaller than the drones’ original ones. Packed in among them were complex staging areas and assembly lines, each of them leading off to the mining equipment and to some other kind of heavy equipment we didn’t recognize. Every square foot was dense with activity.

  “Lord almighty, look at that. Must be twenty thousand of ’em down there, all different shapes and sizes. They’ve got the smelters going again, huh?”

  Our orbit took us over the base and Elliot pointed to an empty stretch of ground a quarter of a mile from the front of the main dome. “Right there,” he said. “We’ll put down on our next pass, real gentle-like. Then walk back to the dome.”

  “Christ, Tyrone, we’d have to walk right through the middle of the drones to get to the lock tunnel.”

  As the image slid off the screen and was replaced by the empty wastes, he leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “Faith,” he said. He straightened and reached for his boots. “Fifty-six minutes.”

  But it was more faith than I had.

  R

  emember, Torres, back on that stinking little island in the Pacific? After Chan jinxed the air controllers and sent that poor son-of-a-bitch MP packing?”

  We were suited up and sat with our feet on the instrument panel and our helmets on our laps, watching the terminator slip toward us.

  “I never seen you carrying on like you done that night,” he said. “Remember, you and me kept trying to get Bolton drunk and he’d just sit there saying ‘No thank you,’ all polite-like? With Polaski sitting on his bunk cleaning his revolver all night, and you trying to get Chan into the bushes somewhere and she was so out of it she’d just wake up and tell you it was raining and fall back asleep. It was you and me in the end there, wasn’t it? Sitting out on the porch in the middle of the monsoons at three in the morning, soaking wet and popping grenades off at Polaski’s truck, seeing if we could get the sucker to turn over? Shit, Torres, we had some good times there for a while, didn’t we?”

  “They’ll be back, Tyrone. Pretty soon now, they’ll be back.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Hell, I can’t even remember if we ever did get the truck to turn over. You were so drunk you probably don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Here we go,” I said. I pulled my feet back from the panel and floated up against the harness just as the shuttle rolled and fired its engines. As it dropped to the surface I held the navigation screen’s crosshairs over the tiny clearing Elliot had pointed out, and in minutes we were bumping against the ground. We held our breath and stared out through the windscreen.

  For a few seconds nothing happened. Then all at once a group of the tiny drone scouts darted in to take up positions around the shuttle.

  “Oh, shit.”

  We stared past the scouts at the banks of machinery and drones spread out in every direction, waiting for them to pick up weapons and turn them on us. The
scouts hovered, and the seconds ticked by. Then just as quickly as they’d appeared, they vanished.

  Nothing else happened. Fifty feet in front of us, on an assembly line, arms were being attached to rows of partially assembled drones—arms which then immediately came to life and took over the remaining assembly of their own bodies. They stood on an immaculately clean area of the surface fused to a glassy smoothness. Their movements were almost too quick to follow. None paid us the least attention.

  Elliot whistled his relief and carefully reached for the buckles on his harness. I stood up and backed along the deck toward the airlock, not wanting to take my eyes off the drones as I picked up my equipment and clipped it to my suit, tired already from the high gravity.

  “Okay, Tyrone. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it.”

  We locked our helmets and tested the radios, then checked the indicators on each other’s suits and separated as we fastened on the last of our equipment. As I worked I found myself waiting for a shudder of the deck as the shuttle was hit, or for the roar of flames cutting through the walls.

  I was also thinking about what waited for us in the vehicle assembly building. I wondered if the case was still where I’d hidden it under the stairs, and I wondered what awaited us along the quarter-mile walk to the dome, then across Trinity Square from the destroyed airlock to the silent building.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  I cycled out through the lock first, then stood on the glassy ground watching the silent and exacting activity of the drones. Hair rose on the back of my neck. From out of the midst of the equipment a machine came rushing toward me, a device like the head of a garden rake, reeling out strands of cable. It sidestepped to miss me and continued on into the distance.

  “We put down in the middle of a cable run,” I said to Elliot as another one raced toward us and veered aside. “At least they don’t seem to mind.”

  “I mind, though,” said Elliot. “I see what you mean about these critters. They sure as hell give me the willies. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead or what, but they get nearly as excited about ignoring us as they do about cutting us up into pieces, and that’s spooky. Come on, let’s move it along here.”

  I led the way across the surface, slogging past row after row of equipment running in its hurried precision, quick and silent. I tried not to think and not to imagine, and put one foot in front of the other and kept my eyes on the tunnel ahead. My breath hissed in through the regulators and out again, sucked through by the pumps, dry in my chest.

  “Lord, look at that!” I jumped at Elliot’s voice. “What do you suppose happened to that?” He was pointing to a burned tractor lying outside the lock tunnel. It took me a minute to recognize it.

  “I was in it,” I said. “Pham and I. And the baby.”

  “My, oh my.” We clumped into the iron tunnel. “That’s a real nice kid, ain’t it? The baby. I think that’s fine, her taking care of him like that. Hanging onto him and all.”

  Trinity Square was empty. Several of the familiar grey drones moved near the periphery, but otherwise our way to the assembly building was clear, and by the time we reached the center of the square I believed we would make it.

  “Suit check,” said Elliot behind me. I turned to look him over, then stood still as he checked my shoulder and chest plates.

  “What the hell’s this, Torres?” He yanked loose the grenade launcher I’d clipped under my arm, then pushed a little roughly to start me moving again. “I thought we weren’t packing.”

  “A little insurance, is all, Tyrone.”

  “Fuck, Torres, this thing will get you killed. Just couldn’t resist, could you? No faith at all, no sir. Swear to God, boy, I don’t know what you’d do without me to look after you. I’d say you owe me, Torres.”

  “Hell, Tyrone, it’s a just a launcher. Keep it out of sight. But all right, fine, I owe you. You’ll get repaid, too, as soon as we’re back in the shuttle with the codes. You’ll get repaid in Serenitas, you and Susan, me and Chan, all the forests and water and open space we want. Sunshine. You’ll be paid back and then some, Tyrone.”

  I stopped and looked at the vehicle assembly building, trying to decide on the best way in. Then I turned around.

  Elliot’s helmet was off. He was lying on the ground behind me, the helmet thrown aside by his fall. The launcher was still in his hand, melted in two. The cut had continued on into his side and across his back, through his heart. His mouth was open and his cheek was pressed into the dust, brown against the black, his eyes open and freezing over. I took a step toward him.

  “Tyrone?”

  He’d fallen forward and lay on his stomach, one leg straight and the other bent at the knee, his arms out from his sides and turned inward so that the palms faced up. Blood from the wound trickled to the ground and glistened black before it froze.

  “Tyrone?” I stood still, listening to my own breath and watching his face. Minutes passed and the moisture from his last breath turned to a fine glitter of ice crystals on his lips, then I felt a warmth in the soles of my feet. It began where the frayed covering of the old boots chafed against my instep, then spread into my toes with a prickling sensation.

  “It’s all right, Tyrone,” I said, “they just wanted the launcher.”

  Was I talking too loud? I couldn’t tell.

  Then the base of my spine was too warm, and soon after the heat swelled to burn in my loins, so that I wanted to peel off the suit and fling it aside.

  His eyes were frozen, opaque, a grayish silver like the hairs on his temples. Moisture had frozen along both sides of his flat nose, in the lines that began in the corners of his eyes and gave them their warmth, the liquid frozen now in the lines like tears. The skin was burnished smooth by the cold, hardened by the stubble growing across his chin and down into the steel collar of his suit.

  “Damn it, Tyrone, come on—Jesus!” The warmth moved through my belly and into my chest, an urgent thing I wanted to push away, and couldn’t.

  Maybe there was still air in the dome after all. Maybe he was still alive. He hadn’t really seen the weapon I carried—he’d never held it in his hand at all.

  But my legs were weak, and I lowered myself to my knees. I began to whisper.

  “Madre de Dios.” I reached out and groped for Elliot’s arms to turn him, but I was unable to get a grip through the clumsy gloves and unable to see him through the tears. “Oh, God, please—no.” I tried to lift his head and press his face against mine, to feel his skin and squeeze life into him and hear his voice, to touch him, but my helmet pushed him away and my hands were like clubs. I could only grapple helplessly through the suit. Suddenly I felt as though I had only been able to grapple helplessly for him all my life, as though I’d never really touched him at all.

  “No, please.” But no matter how I held him I could only feel the lifeless rubber of my suit, engulfing me like the inside of my own skin. I lowered his head and sank down next to him, pulling him closer and burying my helmet in his side—understanding, in a sudden, final moment of clarity, that I was completely alone.

  I don’t know how long I stayed at his side, but I know that as the hours passed I began to grow angry. Angry at the memories of him, angry at the drones, angry at the quietness of the square. I pushed myself up and felt the suit pull at me, binding me with its bloodless skin, trapping me in with the breastplate of armor I wore and the lump of the gun I’d put under my arm, now trapped against me forever by the suit. I felt the material rubbing at my elbows, and the acceleration collars pulling at my arms and thighs . . . the warm spots behind the knees where heated air was pumped back in, the prickling where the helmet’s headband caught my eyebrows . . .

  “Where are you!”

  My voice echoed inside the helmet.

  “Which one of you bastards killed him?”

  I turned from one side of the square to the other.

  “It wasn’t even his gun, damn you! Who the hell do you think
you are? Bastards!”

  But no matter which way I turned my head, I couldn’t see anything. In every direction I looked the world was just as quickly erased . . . I reached up a hand and passed it over my faceplate. Under the touch of my glove the darkness melted and spread, smearing across my view until the world was only a hazy impression beyond the helmet. It was Elliot’s blood, smeared across my gloves now and across the faceplate.

  “Stop it!”

  I held myself still, breathing hard.

  From the bottom of my faceplate, through a blurry half-moon, I was just able to see Elliot’s sprawled form, his face still pressed into the dust. I knelt down and tried to lift him, thinking to carry him back to the shuttle and the warmth. But lifting even just his shoulders took more strength than I had. His body was stiff and awkward and unwilling, and it took all my strength just to drag him a step toward the tunnel. I set him back down while my heart pounded and my lungs strained for air, then after a minute I lifted his shoulders again and took another step. My suit heated up and perspiration tickled across my skin, and as I struggled with the third step I thought of the drones somewhere beyond the blur of my faceplate, lifting their weapons to fire. A feeling like a hot knife stabbed through my chest. I took another step and thought of Elliot and the tears came back to my eyes. From the strain of carrying him, or the loss, I couldn’t tell.

  Every few steps I rested, and the afternoon passed. By the time I’d pulled him onto the iron floor of the tunnel and stood resting on the threshold of the wastelands, the sun’s blurry glow in my faceplate told me that I’d run out of time.

  I turned my helmet north and twisted my head awkwardly to look out through the tiny clear wedge at the bottom, looking for the shuttle a quarter of a mile away. The surface flared at that moment in the last light and winked into darkness. The sixteen-hour night had begun.