A Grey Moon Over China (21 page)

“Rosler not hit me! You don’t say that!”

“Or he ignores you. You like that better? Now that’s enough! Polaski?”

“Let’s go.”

“Just a minute. Anne?”

“Of course.”

“Pham?”

“Hah!” Her lip curled for some new sarcasm, then she realized she was being watched. She looked down at her screens, glancing up at me only briefly.

She began jogging a foot under the console. The seconds passed. Her brow furrowed, and she looked uncertainly at Chan. Finally she gave a little nod, then looked away and shrugged.

“Chan?” I said.

Chan bit her lip. I felt a stab of pain as she moved a hand across her belly the way she had when she was carrying the baby.

“Yes, Eddie.”

“Tyrone?”

“Yeah. Lord help us, Torres, but we gotta go.”

I took a breath and nodded to Polaski. He twisted his lever and held it.

I snapped the communications switch on the armrest and kicked the lever that snapped the acceleration seats forward and locked them into position.

“Rosler. Flights. True launch—this is not a drill.”

I reached for the lever.
God help us.
I twisted it.

The rock shelf, sprinkled with its carpet of Marines in the early light, rose up toward the cameras like a child’s balloon inflating. It swept past the platforms and crushed them against the cliff, then a cloud of vapor followed and the rock and debris disintegrated. The pictures went out.

The ship shook once, then hummed. It moved.

“MIC status.”

“Um—” Elliot pulled himself closer to his console, dazed. “Seventy percent, all ships.”

Voices came through from the other ships.

“Sever ground links.”

“Separation and motion, all ships.”

“Spacing maneuver commencing.”

“We have insertion lock on all flights, Zero.”

The weight grew and the pitch of the humming increased.

It’s over, I thought. If nothing else, it’s over. I fought off the image of the Marines on the ballooning shelf, soldiers just like us, turning quietly to white dust. Twenty thousand of them.

“Eight-zero percent, all ships.”

“Five hundred feet.”

“Clear of gantries and housing.”

“Spacing attitude.”

“One thousand feet.”

“Roll-over.”

The new weight and the throb of the ship as it tipped toward the east were now a relief, a final release.

“Spacing complete.”

“Eddie—” A new voice.

“Stand by. Checkpoint, HE pressure.”

“Four thousand feet. Human environments go across the board.”

“Rotation complete.”

“Six thousand.”

Faster. Faster! A litany now in my mind. Harder!

“One-zero thousand.”

“NEO departure clock.”

“One-five thousand at ninety percent.”

“Eddie!” Charlie Peter’s voice.

“You’re on command channel, Charlie. Stand by.”

“Three-zero thousand.”

“Insertion spacing.”

It was everything I’d wanted for all those years: the speed, the power, the
pace
of it. The freedom. The ship surged and hummed, and pressed me harder into the seat.

“One-zero-six thousand: two-zero miles.”

“Power to five-five percent.”

“One-two thousand per.”

“Eddie, damn it—it’s Madhu!”

“What is it, Charlie?”

God Almighty, don’t let up now.

“He went down to warn them, Eddie! Down to the shelf! He took his platform and he was down there when it blew! Oh, Jesus, I didn’t think you’d do it.”

Madhu on the shelf? Madhu was in his quarters.

Pham’s eyes met mine, and in that moment we became frozen together. Neither of us moved.

The weight of the launch grew, then became unbearable.

No, I thought. Not again.

Rosler’s voice in the distance. “You’re on command, Peters. Clear off now.”

Madhu dead. Madhu a breath of dust on the white balloon, another puppet hanging from the wires.

“Checkpoint, re-entry option.”

“Re-entry option canceled. Checkpoint clear.”

I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him, and I can’t do this without him.

Kip sat with the music box in both hands, tears streaming from his eyes.

T
hat information isn’t your private property, Polaski.”

He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, then looked down at it on his hand. I moved sideways to keep him away from the lift.

“If you’ve learned anything about the programs Miller’s writing,” I said, “you give it up.”

“To just anyone?” he said.

“To me.”

“Oh, so it’s
your
private property.”

He sounded bored, as though the outcome of the confrontation was of no particular interest. “Not to be confused with the riffraff’s private property.”

“Forget it, Polaski. You can drive wedges between your private little armies and keep them off balance, but don’t try it between me and the crews. I’m the only one who keeps them off your back, remember?”

He’d done it too many times in the two years since we’d launched, taken the ambitious and the idle among the troops and turned them against their own ships’ captains. Then fanned their new-found loyalty with his visions of greatness and destiny. That the captains hadn’t turned against him altogether was testimony to the depth of his own conviction that everything he did was necessary for the mission, in what he believed to be an infinitely unforgiving universe.

In that way, with his vision and his seductive singleness of purpose, he had planted his roots firmly into the fleet’s gaping, self-inflicted wound of Madhu Patel’s death. That wound, that bottomless, sucking void of any remaining moral direction, had let loose upon the fleet an insidious air of distrust and recrimination. And in the stink of it, Polaski and his minions had thrived.

Then for two years he and I had circled each other and waited, just as
the four great fleets now circled the sun and waited along with us, while Polaski and I played at our intrigues, bound together all the while by what was ultimately our common purpose.

On Earth, meanwhile, international tensions had boiled over disastrously as economic growth had ground to a halt. While we continued to transmit the power cells’ keep-alive signals from solar orbit, we were no longer there to manufacture the new ones needed to fuel growth; and until we were safety on our way into the tunnel we would not broadcast the plans. The price of oil surged once again, and with the rigid order once imposed on its distribution having frayed during the past six years, Central Asia erupted into flames as the Caucasus moved on Iranian-occupied Iraq, the tribal regions on the Caspian gas routes, and Pakistani loyalists on the Haryāna pipelines—and India and Iran, drowning in the turmoil, responded without hesitation with dirty and badly aimed nuclear weapons that achieved exactly nothing.

We hadn’t meant it to be like this, but we had been given no choice.

“So what is all this, Torres?” said Polaski. “What makes you think I suddenly know when the drones are coming back?”

“Six files were transferred out of Anne’s partition on FleetSys into yours on the seventeenth. The transfer was initiated by her. What was in them?”

He started to say something, then stopped. He hadn’t expected me to know. Not for the first time, he’d underestimated Chan’s grip on the fleet MI.

“They were probability studies,” he said. “Showing when we can expect the drones. I asked her for them.”

“That’s what she’s been working on?”

“That’s right.”

“For two whole years, Polaski?”

“That’s right,” he said, “for two years.”

It wasn’t true, of course. Even though for a full year before launch Anne Miller had done no work of any kind, within days of Patel’s death she had retired to her quarters and begun an all-consuming labor that had yet to end. Like the rest of us, she had found the need—or in her case, perhaps, the long-sought opportunity—to fill some part of Madhu Patel’s void in her own way. Precisely with what she was filling it, however, no one but Polaski seemed to know.

“So now that you’ve got your probability studies, Polaski, how long are we going to wait for a drone to come back? The troops need an answer.”

He shrugged, then motioned to the rag wrapped around my knuckles. I tossed it to him. He dabbed at the blood on his mouth with it.

“We wait forever,” he said finally. “That was the whole point of launching
the way we did, wasn’t it? To get everyone’s butts off the dirt and piss the Americans off so bad the chicken-shits in the fleet couldn’t whine about going home again? I don’t see you wanting to go back, Torres. And you let Pham worry about the troops. Just get her ass into gear, is all.”

Tuyet Pham, unlike Miller, had begun no work of any kind after Patel’s death. Instead, from that moment during the launch when she’d sat across from me and met my eyes, she’d said nothing at all, to anyone, on any subject, until fully a month later she’d seemed to come to some sort of decision and had begun a relentless, around-the-clock campaign of heaping abuse upon her most ardent supporter, Charlie Peters. Peters, for all we could tell, didn’t mind in the least, and had seemed to find it an entirely expected development in the strange course of her affairs.

Chan had wept. For days, for weeks, even now sometimes, she wept. Whether for Patel, or for what she believed would become of us without him, it was impossible to tell.

I, on the other hand, had felt nothing.

“That’s right,” I said to Polaski, “we wait.”

I
’m gonna be sick, Torres.”

“Close your eyes.”

I floated closer and looked in through Elliot’s face plate, but all I could see was a reflection of the sight that was making us dizzy.

The ships of the fleet stretched away into space behind me. They were paired up on mile-long cables, hanging by their noses at the ends, revolving about one another. They were like sixty-three pinwheels, white pencils on silver threads, all of them turning about the same invisible axis. Three ships, instead of two, formed the final pinwheel. Hull One-Eight had collapsed in Earth orbit.

“You okay, Tyrone?”

“Give me another minute. And remind me never to try that again, okay?”

“All right. Hold still.” I plugged a private communications fiber into his suit and killed the radios.

“I need to talk about Anne,” I said.

“You need to talk about anything, boy. Hang on, I’m trying not to puke.”

I looked cautiously back at the ships. They were on the cables because they needed to be under acceleration—whether through gravity, centrifugation, or thrust didn’t matter. When they were unaccelerated, the gardens had to be cooled down to force the insects to land, so that they wouldn’t
bash themselves to pieces trying to fly in freefall, but the plants couldn’t handle the cold. So we spun the ships on the cables, instead.