A Grey Moon Over China (2 page)

T
here were times on the island, late in the summer of 2027, when I thought I could hear the sun hissing off the ground. It was the same noise that the insects made in the jungle, out there on our miserable little cluster of Pacific islands, misbegotten and nameless somewhere south of the Marshalls, and it pressed down on me like the dust that hung in the air and stained it yellow.

But if I closed my eyes, I could imagine the noise was the sound of water, instead. On some days there was only the sun, hissing down on the islands and the ocean, but on the afternoon Sergeant Polaski was to arrive it was the sound of water, cool and clear in the shadows. I was standing on the rutted ground by the runway, remembering a picture I’d seen of a river in
Las Serranías del Burro
, when the cough of his airplane intruded, rough and dry on the still air.

It backfired again and throttled down over the jungle, then shuddered onto the dirt runway in a cloud of smoke. When it had rumbled by I closed my eyes again, unwilling to give up my thoughts to a man whose arrival would surely end what little peace I’d found here.

The plane turned and taxied back, then waited out in the sun with its engines idling. Minutes passed.

“Torres.”

I opened my eyes. The airplane shimmered in the heat while its crew wrestled a crate down a ramp into the dirt.

When I turned in the direction of the voice I found myself looking into the barrel of a revolver, gripped in the hand of a short, blond man with a pale, unremarkable face and expressionless grey eyes.

“Hello, Polaski.”

He let down the hammer. “That’s not real bright, Torres, standing out
in the dirt with your eyes closed.” The crew pushed the ramp back up into the plane.

I hated Polaski. Hated him and loved him. I hadn’t seen him since 1st Engineers, where we’d served together until the unit was disbanded. It was broken up after Polaski killed an officer with an anti-tank round—broken up mainly because the MPs couldn’t decide who’d done it. Polaski himself fingered a half-breed Samoan named Tulafono for it; it was the day after Tulafono had beaten me with a tire iron for swearing in Spanish.

Polaski was kicked back to sergeant in a demolitions unit, but I’d kept warrant officer and was sent to join the forward units in the Pacific. Now Polaski was here, too, evidently as part of an Army plan involving heavy demolitions. It was a plan I didn’t like because I knew nothing about it, which was why I’d picked Polaski up at the airstrip in the first place. That, and the hint of anticipation I’d felt when I first heard he was coming, the sense of a change in the wind that I didn’t yet understand.

“What are they planning for these islands, Polaski?”

“Nothing you need to know about.” With a shriek from the brakes the plane jerked forward again, a wavering blob of silver in the heat, and left behind a cloud of smoke and the crate, dumped on the runway like the stool of a great bird. “It isn’t going to work, anyway,” he said.

The engines spun up and the plane bounced around over the ruts, then rose tiredly up over the jungle.

“What isn’t?”

Polaski didn’t answer.

“I heard we’re looking for someone,” I said.

Still he didn’t answer. I was almost wishing he’d gone, too, leaving me to my thoughts of how to get out of the war, how to get away and find a place of my own. How to get off of the planet altogether.

“Do you have a priest named Katherine Chan?” he said.

“Yes.”

“The crate’s for her. Let’s go, I’m in a hurry.”

P
olaski and I had been picked up off the streets in Army sweeps at the age of fourteen, then sent to Technical Warfare School. For a country with too many immigrants, too little oil, and an aversion to drafting its own citizens, conscription as an alternative to deportation had become just another of the Army’s growing number of dirty secrets. The four-year Tech-War School, itself a secret and open only to the conscripts with the most potential, was designed to provide regular Army units with
technologically sophisticated soldiers, able to fight in the Pacific with little support.

Polaski called us the “Shorts”; in addition to whatever the Army thought of as intelligence, it had picked us for endurance, and in the end that had meant squat and tough. So we were squat, tough, smart and educated, and something of an embarrassment: Greater knowledge of the war hadn’t always brought the Army greater loyalty.

“I need to see your captain,” said Polaski. He’d taken over my truck by the runway, and now its electric motors hissed and spat as he ran down trees and rocks in the jungle.

“We haven’t got a captain,” I said

“A lieutenant?”

“You need to see Bolton.”

“Choppers?”

“No. We get them from Airmobile on the big island.”

The jungle dropped away with a smack of high grass on the hood and a dry scraping sound as it dragged along underneath. We were in the big clearing by the beach, next to the helicopter pad and the mess canopy with its leaning, rusted poles. Scrub grass and rows of bungalows stretched away to the jungle on the far side.

Polaski dropped me off and drove away to find Michael Bolton. But before he’d gone fifty yards, a familiar furry streak raced in from the side toward the truck’s front wheels—McGafferty’s dog, low to the ground and barking for all he was worth.

Polaski swerved sharply. But he swerved toward the dog, not away from it, as though hoping the dog would overshoot. But it was a miscalculation, and with a sound muted by the distance into a soft thumping, the dog’s body tumbled out from underneath the wheels and lay still in the dirt. Polaski kept going.

“At least you could stop and look!”

I shouted at him again and looked for a rock to throw, but it was too late. He was gone across the clearing.

The dog was dead. Its back and neck were broken and it bled from half a dozen wounds. I stroked its muzzle with the back of my hand and pulled out a rock that had lodged in its mouth with the broken teeth. I moved him away from the track, then trudged back to the mess.

The air under the canopy was heavy and still, punctuated only by the wet sound of sunflower husks spat across the floor by Sergeant First Class Tyrone Elliot. He was leaning back in a chair with his feet up on the table, a tall, powerful Southerner with mild eyes and black stubble on his dark
face. His jaw was broad and square with thick muscles bunching in his neck as he chewed. Deep lines ran from the corners of his eyes and down past his mouth, as though he’d been tired for a long time. The hands on his knees were big and still.

He didn’t say anything for a while, but sat and chewed and watched the receding back of Polaski’s truck.

“So your old buddy Polaski’s here,” he said finally. He rummaged in his pocket for more seeds. “So maybe we’ll forget to tell him about the water, what do you think?”

“Polaski’s all right,” I said. “He gets things done.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He should have stopped, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

Elliot launched himself out of his seat to slam his hands together overhead, then just as suddenly sat back down and wiped them on his fatigues. “Polaski’s crazy, Torres. I been with him in the 89th. He ain’t all there, you know, and he don’t see you when he look at you. He’s mean, boy, and he’s crazy. You stay away from him.”

“It’s the war that’s mean, Tyrone.”

“Don’t stick up for him.”

“It’s the war, Tyrone. The whole planet. It’s gotten so bad I don’t even know any more when I’ll wake up puking blood from some new wonder we’ve dumped in the water. You saw what happened to the lieutenant.”

“Yeah, I know.” He spat another shell. “Anyhow, nothing we can do about it. Or you back to thinking about getting off?”

“Of course I’m thinking about getting off.”

Far off, I was thinking. Off-planet with someone like Katherine Chan, someone still in one piece. As far and as fast as an engine could carry us, away from the memories that followed me everywhere I went. Memories of Mexico and hunger, memories of boats filled with children and the stink of death. Broken dogs, broken children. Memories of the frozen pavement in Chicago, memories of my father hanging from the wires in the desert . . .

“Uh-uh, no sir.” Elliot stuck another seed in his mouth. “Ain’t no one gotten off this old ball of trouble for a long time, except rich folks in their tin cans up there. U.S. quit on the space tunnel years ago, I keep telling you. And no one ever built drones smart enough to send through it, anyhow. So that’s that. Rich folks is stuck in their cans, and you and me is stuck in 42nd Engineers digging out holes to piss in. So you take what you got, Torres, which is a fine afternoon and something to chew on. Here, have some.”

I swatted at a fly. “What’s the Army planning for these islands, Tyrone? Polaski won’t say.”

“You tell Polaski to piss off. Word I got is you’re the only one he pays any mind to, anyway. What’s happening on these islands is that Army and Air Force is going to try something funny on those skinny little atolls east of here, except folks is saying it ain’t going to work.”

“Bolton says we’re looking for someone.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. Been going on a long time. DoD’s looking for one of their smart-boys, went and slipped out on ’em. DARPA fellow with plans for counter-BCs that’s going to save all our asses. He took ’em a year ago, and now Army’s saying he’s out here somewhere and we got to get him back before all this other big shit comes down.”

Out here somewhere? Out here was twenty-one barely-charted volcanic ridges and cinder cones off the shipping lanes and airways, which from above looked mostly like dried rabbit shit with green mold on it sticking out of the ocean. Before the war it had been a mecca for transoceanic racers, religious cults, and rich bastards on the outs with latest regime in Cambodia or the Philippines, but now there was almost no one. Out here was a hundred forty-seven half-dead, insect-ridden combat engineers who prayed every morning not to be noticed for one more day by the enemy or by our own battalion, eighty miles to the north on the island with the big air base. So why would someone hiding from the American military be out here? Like a flea hiding between the bear’s claws, it was either really dumb or really smart.

And we had to get him back before
what
came down? Too much was happening—the Army poking around after leaving us alone for a year, heavy equipment for the MI priests suddenly showing up on our eighty pitiful acres of dead grass and rusting tin, talk about heavy demolitions . . . and now Polaski back. To do what I told him to? Not likely. I was an Army hardware engineer, no more. I took care of the island’s machines, from the cooling rods in the big antennas to the drones we put up at night to listen in on the Japanese. I tuned them and I studied them, and I spent my nights alone with them and the sounds of the jungle, not wanting to sleep. And that was all.

Polaski’s truck skidded to a stop in front of Bolton’s bungalow across the clearing. Smoke trailed from the motors. He strode through the grass and jumped onto Bolton’s porch.

“Tyrone?” I said.

“Yup.”

“Why would anyone steal the plans to
counter
-biologicals?”

He was quiet for a minute.

“I been hearing a long time,” he said, “how you’re one of the real smart ones, Torres. I think maybe you got yourself a good question there. Japanese sure as hell don’t need to defend against their own shit, huh?”

“Why’s Polaski here, Tyrone?”

He shrugged. “Blow something up, I expect. It’s what he does.”

Clouds scudded along the horizon over the ocean. I tried not to think about Polaski, and tried to remember the daydream he’d interrupted, instead.

There’d been a time when missions to the stars had been planned by the western nations, out through America’s “space tunnel.” It was a moon-sized torus near Venus that was supposed to pass the ships onward, along with their cargos of colonists and seed and livestock embryos. The project had died from poverty and warfare, but it was those same trees and horses I’d been thinking about that morning. Trees and horses and Katherine Chan, and a piece of land far from Earth and the war. All of it impossible.