A Grey Moon Over China (8 page)

“Duster one-five, our apologies. You are cleared into R-niner-zulu to pick up one Warrant Officer A. W. Paulson for routine reassignment, then return Motherlode-direct. All other orders are superseded. Clearance expires on zone departure. Contact me on engine-start.”

“Cleared R-niner-zulu, return Motherlode-direct. Roger one-five.” The pilot clipped the mike back and put her hands in her pockets. She and her chief leaned against the fuselage to watch us.

The MP stood halfway between them and our little group, then finally he, too, turned back to face us, looking grim. No one spoke.

Finally Chan said, “Lieutenant?”

It took Bolton a minute, then he straightened and tugged down his tunic. “Quite.” He turned briskly and strode off toward the MI hut.

We stood where we were for a long time—Chan, Elliot, Polaski and I on the edge of the clearing, the crew under the stubby wing of their obese helicopter, and the MP out in the middle. It began to rain.

Drops spattered against the canvas behind us, and sizzled off the helicopter’s engine housings, putting up a fine mist. The air smelled of wet dust.

Finally we heard feet slapping through the puddles and Bolton reappeared, escorting a sleepy-looking Paulson to the open cargo bay. He handed in her kit bag, then walked back to the MP and saluted.

The MP’s eyes narrowed. Rain dripped from his brow as he stared at each one of us in turn. Finally he turned back to Bolton and saluted, spun on his heel, and walked to the helicopter. The crew began their engine-start, and the pilot reached for her microphone.

We’re free, I thought. For now, at least, we’re free.

S
un hissed off the salt pan of Searles Lake, and China Lake to the west, shimmering between the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada. The temperature climbed above 130 degrees.

Inside the lab, ventilators hummed and dripped water down the walls. Computer screens waited for my instructions, if only I could think what more to ask. In the concrete pits under the grating, processors iced in frost sent up wisps of helium into the room.

The China Lake Naval Weapons Center seemed isolated and adrift. There was an air of resignation, with the staff just waiting for the war to end.

Chan had gotten me in, a week after the bouncer crash, with the rank of captain and a classification high enough that I was isolated even from the staff. The escorts who brought my meals were polite but reserved. The systems I was using were set to purge when I was done.

She’d gotten me in, but she hadn’t been happy about it.

“Why are you doing this, anyway?” she said. “And why with Polaski? I don’t think he knows when to stop, Eddie.”

T
he day after Chan had gotten our unit classified and the MP had gone, a T-98 light aircraft had landed on the island, flown by a quiet-spoken colonel from the Judge Advocate General’s office, with the name HOLKOM on his fatigues. He was a slight, mustached man with greying hair, and was accompanied by a petite woman in civilian clothes named Delaney, who blushed frequently and carried a mobile data terminal.

They were there to conduct interviews, he said.

“If I might ask a question, Colonel,” said Bolton, meeting them by the airplane while Elliot disposed of classified documents we’d been reading in
the bungalow. “How long has it been since you got your orders? This island has been sealed off, you know.”

“Oh, I’m sure it has, son, I’m sure it has. Haven’t talked to a soul in two days, is the thing—hell of a trip out from Washington. But I sure would hate to go all the way back without even a postcard for the kids, wouldn’t I? And I don’t much take orders from anyone, Lieutenant. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, I say, or what you’re up to—just poke around and you never know what you might find. Over this way, shall we?” With a hand on Bolton’s shoulder he steered us off toward the bungalow. “Sarah here”—he moved his hand over to her shoulder—“well, her mom thinks she’s in Philadelphia, as I recall. Fine woman, her mom.”

Chan had gone back to her quarters briefly and had then stolen a look into the plane, but now she gave me a tight-lipped shake of her head: There was nothing she could do.

The bungalow was clean, although Polaski’s mattress bulged in the middle more than it should have.

“Well, why don’t you just get set up there at the table, Sarah,” said Holkom, “and we can all get acquainted.”

The young woman, Sarah Delaney, glanced at Polaski and then Elliot and blushed, then sat down at her terminal. A bright pink heart with lace edges had been sewn onto the breast of her blouse. “Hi,” she said. A tiny dish antenna purred out and locked on a certain spot on the ceiling.

“So, what have we got?” said Holkom. He glanced around. “Warrant Officer Chan, Warrant Officer Torres—top of your class, weren’t you, son? Pretty good for a boy off the streets. You would have been a good officer, anyone ever tell you that? And Sergeant Elliot, okay . . .”

Elliot saluted and Holkom turned farther in his seat to take in Polaski. His eyes dropped to Polaski’s name tag.

“Oh, yes? Well, well, Platoon Sergeant Polaski, 1st Engineers. Didn’t expect to find you here. Or maybe I should have, what do you say? Well, we’ll deal with you later.”

He turned back to Delaney, now prim and upright in her chair, her fingers poised on the keys. Holkom nodded to her, then spoke to Bolton without turning around.

“You will wait outside, Mr. Bolton.”

Bolton straightened.

“Permission to speak, sir.”

Holkom didn’t answer, and went about organizing his papers.

“Sir,” said Bolton. “I have the right and the obligation to remain with my troops during the conduct of inquiries, sir.”

Holkom still didn’t look up.

“Private First Class Bolton,” he said, “you will wait outside.”

Bolton hesitated, then glanced around at the rest of us, saluted stiffly, and left.

“So,” said Holkom. “Sergeant Elliot . . .”

He questioned Elliot about the events that led up to the crash of the bouncer. Delaney typed. Occasionally Holkom directed a question to Chan, who stood against the wall with Polaski and me, then finally came around to the issue of Major Cole’s fate.

“Was the major on the runway during the approach, Sergeant?” he said to Elliot.

“No sir.”

“And at the time of the crash?”

“Uh . . . no, sir, I don’t believe he was. He was still at his command post.”

“I see. Then who killed him?”

Elliot hesitated.

“How did he die, Sergeant?”

“Is he dead, sir?” said Elliot.

It was the wrong answer. Holkom frowned as though disappointed in one of his students. He turned to Sarah Delaney, still speaking to Elliot as he did so.

“Tell me, Sergeant Elliot,” he said. He gave Delaney a nod. “What do you suppose could destroy a man so completely that nothing would be left of him?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

At that moment Holkom glanced up in surprise.

Polaski had pushed himself away from the wall and walked the few paces to the table. He seemed uninterested in the proceedings, as though he meant only to wander over to glance at Holkom’s papers. But then he took his revolver out from behind his back and put the barrel against Holkom’s face. Holkom raised his eyes to meet Polaski’s, not concerned, not yet. Mostly curious.

There was no way Polaski could have thought it through, I thought. All we’d needed was to delay the man, to raise some doubt, get him on his airplane and back to Washington before he filed any charges. Then Chan would have had time to block them, or to reverse them. To think of something. Our records would have been clean, our permanent records, and we could have backed down from the project and stayed in the Army if we’d needed to.

Polaski shot Holkom through his left eye. The crash of the gun and the
blood and the stink of sulfur exploded into the room. Polaski held the gun perfectly steady after the shot. The force of the blast sent papers billowing off the table.

Holkom landed on the floor on his back, twisted around in an odd way.

Sarah Delaney didn’t move or call out. She sat motionlessly at her keyboard as her fingers felt back and forth for their correct typing positions. She stared at Polaski. A noise came from the back of her throat.

I hesitated at that point only because I didn’t think he’d kill her. I remembered that fact later that afternoon, as I dragged the bodies out to the jungle. The idea that Sarah Delaney’s death would provide a neat solution to our dilemma hadn’t occurred to me while I was still standing there next to Polaski, in front of Holkom’s body. I hesitated only because I didn’t think he’d do it.

Or so I believed.

When I took my eyes off the blood seeping through the lace around the pink heart on her breast, it was to look over at what she’d typed on her terminal.

ELLIOT, TECH SGT TYRONE R, REFERRED FOR DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE. TYPE “RETRIEVE” TO AMEND TRANSACTION, OR MAKE NO RESPONSE TO CONTINUE.

Polaski read the screen at the same time I did. Or at least he was looking in that direction. He was closer to it than I was, so I didn’t reach for the keys myself to cancel Elliot’s referral for discharge.

Polaski leaned around to the back of the terminal and turned it off.

“Jesus
Christ
, Polaski—”

His eyes met mine and I stopped.

“You were thinking,” he said, “of turning back?”

He glanced back once at Elliot, then brushed past Bolton and left. The revolver was still in his hand.

I
s that why?” Chan had asked me. “Because he doesn’t know when to stop?”

On the second day at China Lake I’d sent Polaski a message telling him the power cells would work. The systems had found the principle unfamiliar, but they’d understood the quantum interactions it was based on. After modeling the device and running it through enough iterations of cause and effect, they’d agreed it was stable and that any good manufacturing system would be able to build it. That was as I’d expected.

But in the end it wasn’t why I’d come. I’d needed to check on the cells and on the tunnel and electric propulsion, but my real reason had to do with something no one was talking about yet—the drones.

A seldom-advertised fact of the tunnel was that once it had sent us out to some other system, there would be no way back. And we couldn’t know much ahead of time about the place we’d be stranded, either—if we sent robotic probes ahead of us through the tunnel, it would still take decades or centuries for their findings to be transmitted back in the usual way.

So we would have to send super-intelligent drones through and have them build another torus in the new system—not just for further stages of the journey, but through which they could return to Earth with news.

And drones meant China Lake. The center had shifted from its expertise in target recognition to the strange business of applied information theory, which was apparently the key to building drones. One of the scientists explained to me that the theory examined, among other things, the practical value of hard knowledge—a kind of knowledge that by itself, apparently, tended to be overrated.

“For example,” he said, “if a drone flying over a battlefield senses sulfur and a drop in pressure, it might be able to use these data to exhaustively calculate a course that improves its chances of survival. But what if it only has millionths of a second to calculate? Can it decide on the usefulness of the calculation without actually doing it? And will improving
that
decision by spending more time on it outweigh the increasing danger of waiting to act? Has the time already spent on all these decisions changed the significance of the original data?

“In other words, Captain, under time pressure the very process of thinking becomes a factor in what the thinking is
about
, and it is on this self-referential knot that conventional MI balks. Finding the best action with few data and little time amounts to the skill of making snap judgments. It is something animals evolved for and are very good at, but which current MI is not. Manufactured intelligence is less fallible—that’s its point—but it isn’t very
effective
. We had to concede long ago that infallible intelligence and effective intelligence are very different things, and to this day we can’t manufacture the effective kind very well.”