A Grey Moon Over China (25 page)

“Hello, Torres, this is Fiedler. We can’t do it—Southern Hem’s in the way. The only ones with a clear shot are North-Am-Common and the Chinese. Which means NA/C.”

“All right.” I stared at the screen again. “God
damn
it, how did they get there?”

I picked a new frequency, manually this time.

“Commander Dorczak.”

Carolyn Dorczak was an American, the commander of the biggest fleet—the North Americans, together with the former British Commonwealth, who’d joined them after their break with the Europeans.

“Good morning, Ed,” said Dorczak. “I was expecting your call. You can’t see who’s come on line there, and you want us to look. Okay—we’re putting out the big dish right now. We should have a hull-count pretty quick. And as soon as you’ve finished sending us the battery release codes, we’d be happy to pass it along.”

I pushed my microphone up and nodded to Peters.

“Just them,” I said. “ ‘Esperanza-dash-NAC.’ No slash.” I pulled the mike back down.

“It’s on its way, Commander.”

“I’m sure it is, Ed.”

I stabbed at the armrest.

“Bates.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me if I’ve got this right. When the drone came back a few months ago and we broke orbit, it was at least two days later before we aimed a tight beam at NA/C and gave them the information, knowing that at best they could hit the tunnel six hours behind us.”

“About five,” said Bates.

Chan reached for her keyboard—she’d seen what I was leading up to.

“All right, five. Then a week later, we did the same for Southern Hem, then the Chinese, stacking them six hours one behind the other.”

“Yes.”

“Then a
month
later we broadcast the all-clear publicly, so that anyone else who’d made it to orbit could follow. If I remember it right, no matter where they were in the system at that point, they could arrive at best eight days behind the Chinese, taking their chances that the Chinese had left the tunnel open.”

Chan nodded as she typed.

“That’s right,” said Bates, “except that we’ve got someone only hours behind the Chinese. Which means someone else transmitted the all-clear, too. Except that—”

“ ‘Except’ is right. Stand by.” A red light had come on next to my console.

“Yes, Commander,” I said.

“Well, guess what,” said Dorczak. “Those mealy-mouthed little dung beetles made it off the dirt, after all.”

“The Europeans.”

“The Europeans. One hundred fourteen ships’ worth.”

Chan and I looked at each other.

“That’s not all,” said Dorczak. “Our people got some pretty strange readings taking that count. I don’t know what exactly—they’re putting out another dish now. We’ll be back.”

“Thank you.”

Polaski was restless. “Come on, Torres, what was that all about with Bates, before?” He looked like he really didn’t know. “Someone had to have put out the all-clear, except what?”

Chan answered without looking up.

“We would have heard it,” she said.

“Begging your pardon?” said Peters.

“We would have heard it,” said Chan, looking up now. “If one of the fleets had sent a broadcast in all directions, we would have heard it. Whoever gave the Europeans the information did it on a tight beam.”

The deck was quiet while the idea took root.

“Which means,” I said, “that someone knew exactly where the Europeans were.”

The red light went on again. “Unfortunately,” I said, “that’s still not the half of it. Yes, Commander?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” said Dorczak, “but sixty-two of those ships are cold.”

“Cold?” A chill crept up along my spine as I thought of the drone ships.

“Cold,” she said, “as in no human life.”

“Carolyn,” I said, glancing at Miller, “are we talking about liquid-nitrogen-type cold? Even after the solar fly-by?”

“Hang on.”

“No,” she said after a minute. “Ambient temperature. A little warming from the engines, is all.”

Polaski pulled down his microphone. “Maybe they all got killed,” he said.

“No,” said Dorczak. “We also probed for density, and those ships came back nearly solid. I mean, they are
heavy
.”

“All right, Commander, thank you. Did you get the release codes for the batteries?”

“Of course.”

I disconnected and looked around.

“You said,” said Polaski, “that sending information to the Europeans on a tight beam was only half of it. So what’s the rest? Come on.”

Chan answered for me.

“It came from this fleet,” she said.

“Good Lord,” said Peters. “That doesn’t seem very likely, does it? Surely we’d have a record of such things?”

“Yes.”

“Including what ship it came from?”

“Yes,” she said. “It came from Bolton’s.”

Horns blared from the ceiling.

06.00 SGF PASSPOINT + 00:00:07. OVERRIDE OPTION CANCELED. STAND BY FOR ZERO THRUST
.

I was still watching Chan.

“Madre de Dios,”
I said, my voice drowned out by the horns. “What’s happening?” Someone inside of our fleet was advising the Europeans, just as someone had advised them before their raid on the island, telling them where to attack.

“Hey, good buddy.” Elliot was tapping a pencil against my screen, where he’d brought up the free-fall checklist.

“All right, thank you. Um—ship’s drones secured . . .” I looked up at Miller.

“They’re not
my
drones, Edward.”

“Jesus. Chan?”

“Stand by.”

There were forty-eight seconds left—we were way behind.

Thwack.
A spider drone magnetized itself to the ceiling, while Elliot passed out paper sacks.

“Use
them this time, boys and girls. I’m not cleaning out the filters again.”

“Drones secure,” shouted Chan, stuffing loose items into pouches along with the others. Peters had heaved himself across the communications console to grab for Kip’s harness.

“Fluids and pumps!”

“Done,” said Elliot.

“Quarters—”

We were falling.

There was no deafening siren, no wrenching maneuver, no change in sound. Our seats had disappeared, was all, and we were falling. I grabbed the edge of the console, but it didn’t help. I pictured us plummeting downward, twisting in the wind, plunging closer and closer to a nightmarish impact . . . My knuckles turned white, and my legs tensed for the crash.

But we were, in fact, perfectly still. We weren’t falling at all—the thrust from our engines had stopped, was all, and we were at rest.

I eased my grip and choked back the bile, knowing that the worst was over. The first tingling of euphoria crept into my toes and the backs of my knees.

Buckles snapped and Pham twisted her way out of her seat. She thrust herself across the deck, arching her back almost double to jackknife up into the lift. It was a stunning display of skill, remembered during all our months of confinement, with the power and grace of a cat leaping for freedom.

“Pham!” shouted Elliot. But with a flick of her arm she was gone up the ladder.

There was a rancid smell on the deck. Peters was bent double, wiping at his mouth and holding his bag between shaking fingers.

“Oh, Christ,” said Elliot. “I’ve got a light on a suit.” I looked at him, not understanding. Where had Pham gone?

“She’s suiting up,” he said.

We looked at the mission clocks. Five minutes. Chan looked at each of us in turn.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Six-One East,” said Elliot. “Airlock cycling.”

I didn’t answer. Whatever Pham intended, it had all at once lit a spark of interest in me, a bright flame of anticipation against the bleak horizon of my mood, against the long months of monotony. She was, I thought, surely about to die.

I pulled down my microphone and reached out to change to suit frequency, but the motion sent me sideways and I could no longer reach.

“Pham,” said Elliot into his mike.

She didn’t answer.

“What the fuck is she doing?” said Polaski, agitated in his seat. “Come on, people, get her down.”

“FleetSys,” I said, “seal the outer locks.” I was certain it was too late, but I said it anyway.

“Yes, Mr. Torres,” said FleetSys.

This was followed by a long pause.

“Permanently or temporarily?” it said.

“Forget it, Torres,” said Elliot. “She’s out.”

Four minutes left.

Peters coughed weakly. “For heaven’s sake, she’ll be pulled apart by fields or something, won’t she?”

“No,” I said. I was looking up at the empty overhead screen, wondering, even as I stared at it, why I’d looked in the first place. Pham’s tiny body, I was thinking, would be crushed between the ring and the giant ship, turned to dust in the heat of its passage. Unless she got out in front.

“We won’t feel any forces at all going through,” I said. “The problem comes afterwards.” I remembered why I’d looked at the screen.

“Let’s get a picture, Chan. Forward cameras.”

The image snapped to life and steadied, showing no sight of Pham. Centered starkly on the screen, however, was the torus. It filled the picture, overwhelming in its size and regularity, its white shape cut sharply across its middle by its own shadow. It was more than 1,500 miles across, yet where it tapered inward, farther and farther to diminish into a seemingly solid point at its center, there was no sign at all of the hole through which we were to
pass. Yet it was rushing toward us with such nerve-shattering speed that we could only stare, scarcely able to breathe.

The ratio of the torus’ overall size to the size of the still invisible hole in its center gave some clue to its power. It would deliver more energy than any device ever before built, yet that entire energy would be focused on the tiny thread of its axis, and only for the incomprehensibly brief instant we would occupy it. It would tear us out of the Solar System, I thought, sucking at our insides, ripping us bodily from our pasts . . .

“There she is.”

Pham’s space-suited figure had drifted out forward of the ship. Needles of flame from her jets glinted against the gold foil of her tether, drifting out behind her.

Three minutes.

“Pham,” said Elliot.

No answer.

“Pham, listen. As soon as we’re through we have to maneuver, and you’re going to have to be off that tether.”

The speaker crackled.

“I crazy, maybe, Mr. Elliot, but not stupid.”

She sounded perfectly reasonable. I was surprised. Anne Miller was watching me with something like amusement. Charlie Peters, face white and bathed in sweat, cast worried glances at the screen while he fussed with Kip’s harness.

Two minutes.

The tapering funnel in the center of the torus filled the screen, still a thousand miles away. A faint, syncopated ticking came through the walls of the ship, as its jets adjusted our course a hundred times a second, calculating each correction to the millimeter.

Pham had reached the end of her tether and was facing into the maw of the tunnel, her arms and legs spread apart like a skydiver’s. No sign of the passageway through the torus had appeared.

Then from the speakers came a wild, drawn-out scream from the bottom of her lungs, a yell of total abandon, on and on and on, scarcely human. Challenging, triumphant. Safe inside the ship, I shrank back from the screen as the torus swallowed us with its frightening speed. Pham arched her spine and threw back her head, spreading her limbs even farther.

For an instant, then, I thought I knew what she must be feeling. It was the thrill of perfect, utter vulnerability, straining forward with all her might into the fury of her own passage. I knew it in a moment of perfect clarity, and it frightened me.

A black spot appeared in the center of the funnel.

“Haieee!”
screamed Pham, “straight up the crack of God!”

Peters coughed, and we were inside the torus. The passage closed around us and pressed inward as if to squeeze the very life from us, hurtling past in a blur of speed beyond comprehension. The spot grew into a narrow tunnel. A light appeared at its end.

“Perhaps,” whispered Peters shakily, “ ’tis the face of God, instead.”

In an instant the light beyond the passageway had swelled like a balloon to become the surface of a star, filling the screen and blinding us, searing into its surface the silhouette of Pham and her tether, her final scream still filling the air.

The star receded. Points of light near to it receded as well, and the smaller ones disappeared into the darkness altogether. It was as if a telescoping lens had suddenly been drawn back.