A Grey Moon Over China (30 page)

“Aye, well, it always seemed like something I’d done well to put behind me, if you want to know the truth.”

“That’s yours?” I said. “The collar?”

“Aye, lad. As a young man I was that most formidable of God’s creatures, you know. An Irish Roman Catholic Priest.”

“You’re serious? I thought you were a U.S. Army loadmaster. How’d you get from one to the other?”

“Well. I’m not sure I can say any more.”

“How long has it been?”

“Hm?” He studied his reflection in the mirror. “Oh. I took instruction in County Cork, you know.”

This seemed to be enough of an explanation to him, so he stopped.

“Well,” he said again after a minute, “that was where I was ordained, anyway. To the accompaniment of much hand-wringing by my mother and carrying-on by my father. In my youthful enlightenment I was sure I’d been saved for some fine purpose, you see, but it was a far less profitable one than my father had had in mind.

“Anyway, the fine purpose my
bishop
had in mind was the saving of the dockworkers of Cork Harbor, so that’s where I went to hold forth, in the town of Cobh. Except that the dockworkers of Cobh hadn’t heard about this fine purpose, so they didn’t come to visit me in my little church, but left me to the damp little old ladies who
did
come, but who I was fairly certain were saved already. So I was quite discouraged, I tell you. I decided if God wasn’t going to send His children to hear my fine sermons, then I would go down and have a word with them myself.”

Peters searched for something else in his case but didn’t find it, then took out a clothes brush instead and used it on his shoes, stopping now and then to work at the leather with a moistened finger.

“So that I did. On Sundays I prattled on about this and that to the old ladies, but during the week I went down to the boats to help with the cargoes and talk to the sailors about their lives. Not about God’s, you see, because it bored them to tears.

“Then one day I just stayed aboard, leaving God in His little box on the Bridge Road. I was quite certain by then that He’d never had any use for me in the first place.

“But I tell you, children, as I’ve grown older I’ve wondered whether He ever really was inside that little church, and whether He really sent me away at all or only called me closer. Closer all the time, you see. Until now.”

He pulled on his sweater to hide all but a thin edge of the collar.

“But, if God hasn’t called me, then Patty Kelly has, and I really should think of some fine-sounding words to say. I can’t for the life of me remember a proper service for sailors lost at sea.”

A
ll right, listen
up
.” Polaski raised his voice to get everyone quiet. They’d waited a long time while Polaski and I had finished a last-minute meeting
with Chan and Rosler, and officers didn’t like to wait. There were too many of them in one place, in any case.

“As you know—”

The airlock cycled open and Pham walked in. She had scratches and bruises on her cheek, and wore the huge pistol on her hip. She squeezed in next to Rosler.

“Now,” said Polaski. “As you know, the presence of hostile forces in this system has forced us to change our plans.”

Throughout the fleet, eyes would be shifting from defense monitors to the encrypted transmission of Polaski’s speech. Ship’s crews, soldiers, civilians, all waiting to see what he and I had decided.

“It looks like we were too trusting—” said Polaski, and stopped. “Someone said we’re doing formalities for the dead. Who?”

Peters hesitated, then took a step forward. “I thought I might say a few words,” he said.

“Fine,” said Polaski, “so go ahead.” But he didn’t move aside, and Peters had to try and talk around him. Pham rolled her eyes and fidgeted.

“I think—” said Peters. Then he cleared his throat and looked down at his feet. He started over. “Mr. Polaski mentioned formalities for the dead,” he said. “I think the dead are in God’s hands and in no need of formalities. It is we who need some comfort.”

Pham belched and jammed her hands in her pockets, then suddenly yanked them out. “A
priest?
” She’d seen the collar. “A fucking
priest?
Oh, shit!” She rolled her eyes. “ ‘
Father
,’ ” she drawled.

“Shut up, Pham,” said Bolton. He was careful to speak quietly, so the microphones wouldn’t pick it up.

“Hah! Fuck you. Shit, a priest.”

Peters watched her for a minute, then went on.

“We fancy ourselves here for different reasons,” he said. “Some are searching for a fine, sunny home. Others are running from their pasts, although I’ll wager they’ve not come far. Still others are striving for power and dominion, only to have their noses bloodied the first day.

“But our companions are dead, my friends—they’ll not be back. ’Tis a hard thing, I know, but no less real for being hard. God whispers what we must do, but in the clamor of flight I fear we haven’t heard. We’ve searched the sky for machines to tell us what to do instead, or for a paradise to welcome us home, or for the perfect weapon to protect us. But He is not there, my friends. Not in the sky.

“Well. With those few words for the living, let us now bow our heads.

“Unto almighty God, we commend the souls of our brothers and sisters departed, and commit their bodies to the dark in sure and certain hope of
resurrection through our Lord, at whose coming the darkness shall give up her dead, and the bodies of those who sleep in her shall be made whole as if they were angels to guide us on. Amen.”

“Amens” trickled in from the audience, and the deck was quiet until a silken voice dropped another pleasant “amen” from the ceiling, where a spider drone bobbed in a curtsy. Peters blinked at it, then remained standing awkwardly in front of Polaski. There were no caskets to slide from the rail or ashes to scatter, no clods of dirt to toss in the grave. There was no book to close or incense burner to lift, no sash to take from his head to give to an altar boy. He just stood there by himself, unsure of what to do next.

“You finished?” said Polaski.

“Yes . . . yes, I suppose I am. Thank you.”

“Good. All right, listen. Most of you know the European fleet has split up, and that they’re taking up positions around the new tunnel and around Holzstein-
III
, the planet we planned to make our temporary base. We think they’re going to establish themselves on H-
III
and wait for the drones to send back word about Serenitas, then demand a deal before letting us through.

“We think we can dislodge them from the torus. But developing the necessary skills and assault vessels is going to take a planetary base and superior soldiers, and more labor and matériel than we have. Now, as far as a base and training soldiers goes, we’re all right—we can settle on the fourth planet.”

Silence fell across the deck. Faces turned to masks, mindful of the precious illusion of united leadership.

How our compatriots would be hating Polaski at that moment, I thought. How their voices would be raised in anger throughout the fleet as they finally understood what he’d said: There would be no sun for their children after all, no water or trees, not even for the briefest pause after eight years of hard rock and steel. There would only be a frozen hell of lifeless black dust and crushing weight.

And how it would have been me they’d be hating, instead, if I’d taken my place in front of the cameras. Know as they might where the decision had come from, it was Polaski’s face they could see.

“H-
IV
has a strategically useful orbit,” said Polaski, for all the world as though he’d just received applause for his announcement, “and its 1.4 surface gravity will make picking the best children easier. Especially the third generation. The oldest we have now are already good material, and in just a few years they’ll be proving themselves the toughest contenders in—”

“No.”

It was Bolton who’d spoken, very quietly. “You don’t muck with the children,” he said.

“Fourteen is old enough to fight and have more children, and that will be pretty soon. I’d think you of all people would know the value of—”

Bolton’s eyes drifted closed very slightly. “I said no. And you don’t need fighting crews to attack those ships. You need automatics.”

Polaski glared at him, then spun away to face the cameras. “There are two kinds of colonists who are going to arrive in this system,” he said. “Peaceful ones, and ones who are smart enough not to be. And when there’s a shortage of resources like there is, that’s a recipe for war.

“Now the Europeans will reserve their strategic weapons to interdict movement toward their new planet and the torus. That will leave us, with our conventional superiority, as the major power on the majority of the planets and on the asteroids and shipping lanes. In exchange for using that superiority to maintain order, we’ll receive the resources and new recruits we need.

“An assault on the torus cannot occur until the drones return. In the meantime, we will put down on the black planet of Holzstein-
IV
and arm ourselves and build assault ships. We will select and condition the toughest crews, and then we will wait.”

Bolton’s eyes were almost closed.

“Perhaps,” he said.

B
ut the drones didn’t return. For eleven years we clung to the black planet and fought the colonists’ wars for them, and for eleven years we grew stronger. But while we waited for some sign from the drones, some whisper from space to send us onward, none came. Time passed and we learned to live with the cold and the weight of the fourth planet, and a third generation fought its way through a difficult infancy and into the only life it had ever known. Desperate colonists poured in from Earth only to bring their wars with them, bickering for ground on the second planet or on the moons and asteroids, or else going up against the Europeans’ defenses around the third planet, always failing. And always we were called upon to rescue the survivors, and always we exacted the same price: half the ships we rescued, and the youngest and strongest recruits. No one had tried to live on the black planet with us, and no one had returned to Earth or tried to move on, because no one could dislodge the Europeans’ robot ships from the mouth of the new tunnel.

I stood at the window and thought about the Eurpeans’ ships, not for the first time. Thin, cold sunlight sliced across the complex, and cast a shadow of the dome’s iron lattice onto the black dirt below. The European ships were the single unknown, the wild card in a project I’d given the last six years of my life to.

The building I looked down from was the only tall structure under the main dome, and as such it commanded a view of all of the other massive, ugly domes sprawled across the black dirt and gravel to the horizon twenty miles away. The domes were made of crude glass formed from silica we found on the surface. The glass panels were glued into a structure of iron mined and smelted out in pits between the domes.

Vehicles ground their way across the surface from dome to dome, while bleed-off from the smelters and outgassing from the domes’ sealants gave
the appearance of smoke drifting across coal fields. Armed ships stood in readiness across the landscape, and banks of weapons in hardened bunkers hugged the ground and waited. In the farther distance stood clusters of pale white columns—our original ships, emptied of only a few of their thousands of tons of equipment, still equipped and waiting to take us onward. The bleak scene on the freezing plains seemed appropriate for forces that had become irresistibly powerful, as Polaski had vowed they would, but who collected nothing in return but more power and yet more time to go on waiting.