Read A Grey Moon Over China Online
Authors: A. Thomas Day
A Grey Moon Over China (37 page)
“But Ed,” said Bates, “surely the messenger drone knew who we were, and what all of our ships were for?”
Miller closed her eyes.
“Ah, Priscilla,” I said. “You weren’t in the Operations room back on the island when the drones launched. There’s something Anne said, but no one heard her—”
A scrabbling sound suddenly came from the door, then it burst open with the two little grasshopper drones tumbling in after it and scurrying to the side. There was nothing else in the doorway except the empty alleyway and the swirling dust glowing in the sunlight—and the crunching of boots approaching through the gravel. The footsteps got louder, then all at once Michael Bolton stood in the doorway, wearing an imposing military uniform but looking dustier and more tired than I’d ever seen him. Penderson tensed and took a step toward the door.
“Easy, Harry,” said Bates. “He’s one of the good guys. Michael Bolton, Harry Penderson.”
Bolton took a step in and leaned back against the doorway, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” he said, not moving to shake hands.
“I thought you were off-planet,” I said.
“Was. I’ve had a bit of a fire under my tail for a couple of days, though—just put down. Picked up a whisper and thought we’d best get back. I take it you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what? Did you make contact with the Europeans?”
“Would have . . . remarkable what these frightful togs will do. But no, it’s moot now.” He pushed himself off the doorpost and brushed the dust from his jacket, then stepped forward and held out his hand to Penderson.
“Pleased to meet you, Penderson. You look like you could do with a stiff drink. Hello Anne, Priscilla.” He gave Chan’s hand a squeeze, then turned and sat down in a chair, stretching his legs stiffly in front of him. “Wretched buggers, those Europeans. They’re pulling out, you know. Going through the tunnel.”
We stared at him as he idly plucked pieces of something out of his gold braid. Finally he looked up again. “Seems they were a bit discomposed by your probe, Torres . . . took it to mean we were about to go through ourselves. Suspicious bastards, aren’t they? Lou Fiedler’s just confirmed it—they’re abandoning the third planet. They’ve pulled back all their pickets, which have themselves already gone through, by the by. All those bloody big cannon of theirs.”
F
or the first time in years, that night, I dreamed about the cavern and the passageway leading away from it. There was someone in the cavern with me, though—just behind me and to one side, watching over my shoulder and whispering in my ear.
“You see . . .” My mother’s voice. “The demon’s right in front of you now. Naked. Don’t go.”
“Don’t you see the light, though? At the end of the passage, like the moon? I can reach it.”
“You reached for love once, Eduardo, and killed your father. You reached for power once, too, and killed an old man who’d done you no harm. Then you reached for freedom, and killed Madhu. Stay here with me, where it’s safe.”
“But I didn’t reach for the baby, and it died, too.”
“Stay.”
“I’ve already sent out the probe.”
“And you see—death has followed it already.”
Sun of Gabriel
P
ham slammed her metal cup onto the table, spilling bitter liquid, and pushed it across the pitted surface to a confused Roddy McKenna.
“You want to be powerful guy? Okay, you drink that. You drink it all quick like, no pussy feets or someone fuck with you, hah?” She looked away with a frown and sucked at the liquor on her knuckles, snorting now and then as if to remind herself of McKenna’s inexperience, lest his fascination with her warrant some sort of self-consciousness on her part.
The two of them sat across a table from each other at the far end of the recreation center, while Tyrone Elliot and I sat with our backs to the bar and our feet up on stools, watching McKenna struggle with the mysteries of life according to Colonel T. Pham. Eight months had passed since the launching of the probe into Serenitas, without a word back.
“I knew a fella in Louisiana, once,” said Elliot, tossing back his own drink and belching. “Followed a mule around for forty days and forty nights . . . figured the mule musta known something, it was so quiet and serene, like.” He groped around behind him for the jar. “Finally got tired of stepping in mule shit and came back home to his wife and kids.”
The four of us were the only ones in the room—Pham and McKenna at one end, and Elliot and I at the other. Afternoon light filtered through the windows that had been cut into the black walls, but otherwise the room was dark. Back in the shadows near Pham and McKenna an obese pig rooted under the tables, grunting and rummaging for scraps. No one knew where it had come from; the story was that it had wanted a drink so badly that it held its breath and ran the two miles across the surface from the farming domes.
Down at the other end McKenna suddenly doubled over, then straightened back up with an effort.
“That’s pretty good stuff,” he said, gripping the cup and struggling to keep the liquor down.
“Bullshit.” Pham lurched across the table and snatched back the empty cup, while McKenna tried to keep his eyes off her snake-like body leaning toward him. “That stuff kill you. You telling me what you think I want to hear. The world fuck with you real quick, buddy boy, you do that. Run around being sucker, thinking maybe if you just a little bit better guy, then boss-man, or father-man or priest-man finally see you there and say Yah, okay, you good enough now. Shit.” She stared into the cup and tapped it impatiently on the table, as though trying to remember whether she’d already filled it again.
Next to me Elliot sighed and re-crossed his legs. “Sad, ain’t it. Spark beat out of a pretty woman like that. Even if she is so short.” He scratched his chin and looked at me. “ ’Course, you probably agree with her, don’t you? You short, depressed people always stick together, I noticed.”
“I just wish she’d leave him alone, is all. He’s got no business being in here.”
“So? Prove her wrong. You’re the boss-man, ain’t you? When was the last time you told him he’s doing okay? Here we got the whole system beating on us asking when the probe’s coming back and are we gonna say it’s safe to follow the Europeans or not, and that kid thinks it’s all his fault ’cause ol’
Sun of Gabriel
ain’t come back.”
“Aieee!
Fucking pig!” At the other end of the room the waddling pink shape had reached Pham’s table, snuffling at the bench leg and urinating noisily into the dirt. Pham’s shout didn’t have any impact on it at all, so she threw back her head and drained her cup, then flung it at the pig. It clanked against the beast’s forehead between its little black eyes, but still it paid her no attention and went on sniffing at the bench. McKenna pulled himself unsteadily to his feet to lean across the table and watch.
“Hah! I think maybe we have piggy for dinner, what you think?” She dragged out her huge fléchette gun and held it out in both hands. For a minute I thought the pig was finished, but instead she pointed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
As strong as she was, the gun drove her bodily back along the bench she was straddling. The force of the blast swept across the room in a hot wave, and the gout of flame from the barrel reached all the way to the ceiling—which now bore a ragged three-foot hole through the brick. Mortar dust rained to the floor and a cloud of it swirled beneath the hole in the sudden sunlight coming through it.
The pig hadn’t seemed to notice the blast at all, but it did gradually stop its snuffling as it realized that it stood exactly in the center of a heavenly shaft of light, slanting down through the haze and spilling across its pink feet and the wet black dirt around it. Pham was sprawled back along the
bench looking at it disgustedly, while the pig slowly raised its head and looked into the circle of celestial light, as though surprised that God should have shed His benevolence upon it for doing no more than urinating on the rec center floor.
Elliot scratched his chin and leaned closer. “Twenty-to-one she don’t shoot up through that hole again.”
“That’s a sucker’s bet, Tyrone. If she shoots up through that hole it’s going to go right through the dome, and I don’t live to collect.”
He looked at me. “You’re pretty smart for a short, depressed person, you know that?”
“I work at it. Now what?” The pig’s attention had finally wandered from the hole, and now its little eyes were following something else across the room; we peered into the gloom to make out a spider drone flitting along the ceiling toward us.
“Hah!” Pham’s gun swept down from where it still pointed at the hole in the ceiling and swung across the room toward the drone as it closed on us. I watched in fascination and held my breath. Just as the gun lined unsteadily up on the drone, the drone spoke in its pleasant little voice.
“Mr. Torres? Katherine Chan sends her compliments, and wishes you to know that the probe has—” With a crashing of benches the drunken Roddy McKenna lunged across the table and drove Pham’s hand upward just as she pulled the trigger. The room shook with another powerful blast and a gout of flame, and after a few long seconds Elliot and I opened our eyes carefully to look up at the ceiling. Not four feet from the first hole was a new one, with swirls of dust and brick raining down onto the floor and billowing out into the air. The pig didn’t even hesitate, but trotted across into the new pool of light and contentedly resumed its rooting. Pham turned and spat in McKenna’s face and jerked her arm away. “Prick,” she said, and sat back with a snort of disgust.
From next to me came a polite “Ahem.” The spider drone hovered at my side, unfazed by its brush with death. “Ms. Chan wishes you to know that the probe has returned and has sent a communication, and that your presence is requested in the research center auditorium. Thank you.”
Elliot held out his hand. “Congratulations, Torres, you done good. I never doubted you at all, hardly.”
C
ables from the research building tunneled under the edge of the dome to a row of dish antennas, rotating with infinite precision and patience as they listened to the whispering of the distant probe. Other cables slithered farther across the black dirt to a row of smaller antennas that pointed
to our ships resting on the horizon, where the massive fleet MI worked to process the billions of pages of data collected by the probe during eight months in the Serenitas system.
Indoors, metal chairs scraped against the brick floor as senior personnel filed in and took places on one side of a long row of tables. The tables stood in the center of the auditorium, a cold iron and brick hall with a high vaulted ceiling and a meager string of lamps hanging from it. Behind where we sat at the tables the auditorium was empty, but on the wall facing us hung rows of big display screens, suspended above doors that led to the labs and offices. Between our table and the wall with the screens, the floor was covered with a metal grating on which technicians were hastily setting up desks and computer consoles, and rows of printers and monitors on portable stands.
Charlie Peters was present in his capacity as logistics chief, looking red-faced and pleasant with Kip in tow. Chan was there, too, dragging a chair across the floor with one hand and trying to read from a slippery sheaf of papers in the other. Polaski and Miller were already seated, Miller looking agitated and worrying a tiny notebook in one hand. Bolton and Roscoe Throckmorton sat back in their chairs at one end, while on the far side of the table, among the banks of presentation equipment, Elliot stood among the screens and tables arguing quietly with Lou Fiedler’s radio astronomers. The young Roddy McKenna sat ashen-faced and disconsolate at a keyboard at the back, his day in the limelight shrouded by his alcoholic haze.
Nearly forty people worked over the machines spread across the grating, beginning the Herculean task of digesting the probe’s raw data even as the probe turned for its long sweep back from where it had re-entered our system. Those data were being sent back from the probe’s memory in the fastest way possible, a direct, unformatted dump into FleetSys’ own immense storage. But that also meant that the data needed massive processing before becoming usable. We expected to get the gross facts over a period of a few hours, but detailed interpretations could take weeks; and some facts, though discernable in theory, might never be sifted out of the hundred-trillion bits now racing toward us.