A Grey Moon Over China (20 page)

S
irens woke me at three o’clock the next morning, out of dreams about Madhu and the great snake. Lights burned in the corridor, blurring in and out of focus as I buttoned my shirt and tried to overcome my fatigue, which, as ever, sleep had done little to dispel.

When I reached Air Defense, Priscilla Bates and David Rosler were looking down at an infrared image of the shelf, viewed from the opening. It was covered with smudges of light.

“Twenty thousand, maybe,” said Bates. I could scarcely hear her.

“Troops. Heavy equipment. Surface attack only, nothing powered by batteries. Americans—came in by ship. Marines, presumably. Shot out our east-wall defenses before we even knew they were there. Jammed our radar.”

I stared down at the image.

The shelf. Troops were on the roof of our launch chamber, and in all our planning we’d never even thought of it. Such a simple and obvious mistake, and now we were trapped.

Rosler seemed unconcerned.

Pham came in behind him, looking sick and ashen-faced. She put a hand on his arm, but without even a backward glance he shook it off. She stood next to him, just the same, and stared unsteadily at the screen.

“So, Torres,” said Rosler. “Let’s see what you do about it this time.”

I knew just what we were going to do, and it was something that frightened me more than anything had in all the years we’d been on the island.

You do have a choice, Chan had once said. You don’t have to go.

“They’re going to come up that face,” I said, “and try an assault through the cavern. That’s going to take time.”

Rosler cleaned his glasses. “So?”

Bates hugged herself and looked from one of us to the other. “If we
have to launch,” she said, “won’t it be an awfully long wait before the last of them is up off the shelf?”

“Yes.”

But maybe we didn’t have to decide yet. We could take the first step, and decide when we knew more. “More importantly,” I said, “how long before the first of them gets up the face, through the cavern, and down the elevator shafts?”

Six hours, was the consensus.

“Rosler. Move command to the ships—we’ll monitor the shelf from there.” Every other aspect of our lives had long since been moved against just such a contingency. “Announce full boarding, with engine-start and launch sequence. Not a drill. I’m moving to Zero for systems start. Let’s go, Pham.”

The launch chamber under the shelf was blazing with mercury arc lamps. Voices rang out in the freezing air, while hammers slammed retaining pins out of the gantries. We’d practiced for a premature launch time and again, yet it was still our worst fear. It meant leaving with nowhere to go.

Pham followed me through the irradiation chamber and up the lift to decks 36/37, the double-height MI deck. Everyone else was already in position, listening to Bates reading boarding instructions over the radios.

I pushed behind Elliot’s seat.

“Morning, Torres.”

“Morning.” I kicked my seat around to face the consoles and squeezed into it, glancing down at the frozen banks of equipment under the grating beneath us. The MI decks contained the ship’s intelligence, linked to identical systems in the other 127 ships. The fleet’s MI was designed to be holographic, so that the fleet could be run from any ship no matter how many others were lost.

But the deck itself was uncomfortable. There were no contoured instrument panels or subdued lighting, no carpeted aisles or doors that hissed politely aside. It was awkward and cramped, with jagged edges and exposed conduits, raw welds and bulging rivets. The consoles were bolted to a noisy metal grating over the hardware, and it all swayed and rattled and stank.

In the center of the grating stood a dense group of six consoles. We sat facing each other across them. Acceleration seats for another six were bolted to the walls behind them.

Directly across the consoles from me sat Pham, slumped in her seat, swiveling from side to side as she stared vacantly at her screens.

To my left sat Elliot, hunched over his screens and frowning at them. He was Power and Environmental Systems officer for the fleet; along with P and E officers under him in the other ships, it was up to him to keep us moving and alive.

Opposite him sat Anne Miller, quiet and unreadable as her eyes flicked among her screens and her hands moved in their gloves. She would coordinate our mission with that of the drones sometime in the future. For now she assisted Chan in uploading ground systems into the fleet MI.

Chan and Polaski sat opposite each other. Chan was around to my left, on the other side of Elliot. Polaski sat to my right. He was slouched in his seat with his hands in his pockets, staring at an image of the shelf that spanned the chamber high above us.

Kip sat against the wall behind him. He was dressed awkwardly in the regulation sterile jumpsuit, swiveling from side to side as he studied a talking music box someone had given him.

Together with Charlie Peters and Madhu Patel in their quarters on 41-deck, our ship’s complement came to nine—although like the others we could carry twenty-four if we needed to. We were as light as we were because we hadn’t wanted families with children on the command ship, and because we didn’t allow redundant expertise on any one vessel.

“Poor, stupid fools,” said Polaski.

Chan looked up.

“You’re not thinking of launching with all those people up there, Polaski.”

“If it’s time to go,” he said, “it’s time to go.”

“They’ll move off the shelf by themselves. You just
want
to blow them off, don’t you?”

“I want to win.”

“A sensible attitude,” said Miller. “I’m glad to see someone along with intelligence.”

“Not this again.” Elliot jammed a checklist into a slot. “Do we have to have robot-woman along, Torres?”

“That’s enough,” I said. “Let’s go, Pham.”

“They’re not
robots
,” said Miller. “They’re drones. There’s a difference.”

“That’s
enough
. Come on, Pham, let’s have it.”

Pham fiddled with her headset and squinted at her screens. She began reading lethargically.

“True launch procedure,” she said. “Confirm this is the correct checklist.”

“Confirmed.”

“Communications, flights zero through seven.”

The leaders of each of the sixteen-ship flights responded.

“Check.”

“Personnel on board and secure.”

I hesitated for a moment, not having checked the whole ship yet.

“Check.”

“Systems integrity and console status, critical stations, command vessel.”

“P and E,” I said.

“Check,” said Elliot.

“Maneuvering systems.”

“Three in three,” said Chan.

The checklist went on for forty minutes. Polaski broke the rules twice to go below for coffee, while Pham periodically dozed off or else lunged forward to slam her fist onto her console. It was close to five in the morning when we finished.

“Explosive canopy interlock.”

I reached for the overhead panel, then stopped—we hadn’t made a decision. We hadn’t even talked about it. On the other hand, we couldn’t afford to get sidetracked during the checklist. There would be time.

I unwound the retaining wires from the interlock lever and pulled them free, then carefully slid the locking pins out. The lever clicked into place when I turned it. Polaski matched my movements on his own overhead panel.

“Interlock disabled.”

“Explode canopy.”

“Hold.”

I let out my breath and dropped back in the seat. For another few minutes we sat and fidgeted. The engine hummed beneath us.

Rosler’s voice came through from the speakers.

“I can’t tell without daylight, but I think there’s activity against the face.”

Screens bolted to the bulkheads still showed the thousands of blurry red dots on the shelf above us. They had concentrated around the cliff below the runway opening.

“Any signals activity, Rosler?”

“No. They’ve got to be using land wires.”

“All right. Call if you get any.” I cut him off.

“Has anyone figured out,” said Polaski, “if the shelf is going to blow with the extra weight on it?”

“Yes,” said Miller. “I have. It makes no difference. Our course is still clear, I would think.”

“God save us from clear thinking,” said Elliot.

“Come, Mr. Elliot. How is it you’re so concerned about the people attacking us?”

“Well, hell,” he said. “I guess the good Lord would just want me to blow them up as fast as I can, wouldn’t He?”

“Yes,” she said, “He would. Would you like to know why?”

No one answered, but as I watched her gaze steadily at Elliot I began to suspect what she had in mind. She was ahead of the rest of us, as ever.

“Because those warships holding position to our east,” she said, “will have surface-to-air missiles on them. And the more officers we take out on that shelf, the more seconds of confusion we will have to get this fleet out of those missiles’ range.”

“They’re not after us, Anne,” I said. “They’re just after the batteries.”

She turned her calm gaze on me, now, and kept it there.

Wasn’t that what Madhu had said? That at some level the world wanted us to succeed? But surely that didn’t include a U.S. Navy that had just seen several U.S. Marine regiments disappear in front of its eyes. I prayed that the Navy would be quick enough to understand the significance of the flames erupting from the empty launch chamber and the cavern above moments
after
our liftoff, when charges were detonated to remove every trace of the battery technology and our future plans. Because if they did understand, then from that instant on they would very much want us to stay alive.

We waited. Kip started and stopped his music box. Pham fidgeted and swore at the equipment. A whirring sound came from the lift shaft, and a spider drone floated out over the consoles, sampling the air. Polaski tried to land a ball of paper on top of it, and when it darted away from him and closer to Pham she lashed out and sent it spinning across the room to smack into an air shaft.

“At least,” said Elliot, watching the drone retreat, “what I keep thinking is that maybe we’re gone. Maybe I can stop waking up in the morning waiting for something else to turn bad.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Madhu says there’s a price to pay for the way things got, and it has to be paid whether we go or not.”

“You people are screwy,” said Polaski. “We’re winning and you know it.”

Chan threw down her pencil. “You only want to win if somebody else loses, Polaski, and that makes me angry. That’s not why we’re doing this!”

“Somebody always wins,” he said, “and somebody loses. I want us to win by getting off this planet is all, like we decided.”

“As long as you’re in charge. You’re not fooling anyone, Polaski. You haven’t fooled anyone since your little eyes lit up at Eddie’s plans five years ago.”

“Come
on
, people,” I said. “This is hard enough as it is.
Pham!
Jesus—stop pounding on your console. What the hell’s wrong with it, anyway?”

“Piece of shit.”

“You’re just so hung over you can’t focus on anything.”

“Not like you, hah, Mr. Torres? Maybe it do you good to get a little drunk sometimes, fuck people for fun. Not like you fuck people, hah?”

We stared at the screens and waited for the Marines to do something. A buzzer sounded.

“Torres, it’s Rosler. Kill your infrared.”

The screens lost their tint to show the light of dawn washing across the shelf. A line of platforms was moving up the cliff toward the opening.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s what we expected.”

“No, it’s not. Look close, next to the launchers on the platforms. Enhanced radiation rounds. They drop one of those down the elevator shafts and the island’s theirs, ships and all. All they have to do is scrape out the meat. Look at the troops on the shelf—radiation suits. I’d say we’ve got twenty minutes.”

“Sweet Lord almighty.”

“Still so sanguine, Mr. Elliot?” said Miller.

“Okay, Rosler. We’ll think about it.” I hit the switch and looked around. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck into the suit.

“We know what Polaski wants to do,” said Chan.

“Come on, Chan. We need to think.”

“Hah!” said Pham. “Let them fight. You just say stop ’cause if she make Polaski small, then you small, too.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Ah, come on, Mr. Torres. All the time you whisper in Polaski’s ear what to do and he get to be powerful guy and you get to be nice guy. You make him fuck everybody for you, hah? Let’s see what you do now, Mister. Me, I like powerful guy.”

“Is that why you let Rosler smack you around? That’s pretty powerful. All right, people, if you’ve got any ideas, I need them now.”