A Grey Moon Over China (22 page)

The last time they’d been unaccelerated was when we’d reached solar orbit two years ago, when the fleet MI had begun the delicate dance that ended with the ships orbiting one other. The length of the cables had been set, on my instructions, to produce an uncomfortable 1.2 Gs at mid-decks. This was to begin training us for even higher thrusts later on. I’d taken Polaski’s war-minded cautions to heart, though I wasn’t certain why. I was sure only that with Madhu Patel’s death, my own outlook had changed.

To travel from one ship to another we had to exit through a nose hatch, then clamp a motorized climber onto the cable and start up toward the axis of rotation. While starting the climb, the cable and the ship we’d exited from seemed to stand perfectly still, hanging from the other ship six thousand feet above. All of the other ship-pairs looked stationary as well. The sun and the stars, however, swept around us in a complete circle once every minute.

As we climbed higher on the cable we became lighter, until at the coupling in the center there was no up or down at all. The center-points of all the cables had red beacons attached to them, so that from where Elliot and I floated along the axis, the beacons on all of the cables were lined up in a sixty-mile-long string of lights.

According to the original designers’ manuals, once we’d climbed a cable and reached the center point, but before we’d pushed off toward the beacon on the next cable, it was a good idea to discontinue our own cable-synchronous rotation and synchronize with the stars, instead. Otherwise, the moment we wandered at all away from the beacon-to-beacon axis, the cables’ rotation and our own rotation were suddenly on different axes. That left neither the ships nor the stars frozen in space, leading to a ferocious disorientation.

But Elliot and I had tried it the wrong way, anyway.

“Okay, Torres. But let’s keep going—I gotta get these soil samples to the lab.”

We pushed off toward the next beacon, passing an adult towing a class of six-year-olds, faceless in their little suits.

“What’s Anne working on, Tyrone?” I said.

“Hell, Torres, I don’t know. Everyone says she’s getting ready to update the drones’ programs, if one ever comes back.”

“So why wasn’t she working on it in the year before we left? What changed?”

“You know what changed, Torres.”

“She wasn’t sorry to see Madhu go, was she?”

“Don’t pussyfoot around, boy. That woman looked like the weight of
Hades came off her back when he died. Heads up, cable’s coming—we gotta unplug or snag. Anyway, why don’t you ask your buddy, Polaski? He’s got spooks and priests all over the place.”

“He says he doesn’t know.”

“You gotta do something about him, Torres. All these spooks and private guards and shit . . . he takes it serious, boy. Everyone else thinks it’s a game, except for him and Miller. And you, I don’t know about. Anyway, what about Pham? I heard she got one of her people in working for Miller.”

“Anne’s wise to him. Anne’s been feeding Pham fake programs—Pham showed them to Chan. All the man learned is that Miller cut some kind of deal with Polaski. He doesn’t know what.”

“Okay, here we go. Radios on.”

I unplugged while Elliot grabbed the pinwheeling cable and snapped his climber onto it. When he started down—or out, at this point—I clipped on behind him and felt the familiar tug as the cable caught me up and started me turning.

“Anyway, Tyrone, keep your ears open.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s with the soil samples?”

“Soil samples, water samples, air samples, oil samples, coolant samples, you name it. I’ve even got a little bottle of live and kicking detrivores, here. Once a month I gotta do this.”

“What’s a detrivore?”

“Little crawly fella that eats bug shit and dead bug bits. Bottom of the food chain. Botany folks are always asking for them.”

“Okay, we’re down to a half G. Let’s see if we can get the Wizard of Oz to open the airlock this time. Keep you from having to slide down on your face again.”

We were half way down the cable to the ship. We would be entering through an airlock on the rounded slope of the nose, and it was easiest to have the airlock opened from the inside, rather than us having to slide down to the handle and open it manually.

“FleetSys,” I said.

The fleet MI answered promptly through our radios.

“Yes, Mr. Torres.”

“Open airlock Six-One West on hull One-Fox.”

“It is open already.”

I looked down past Elliot. “No, it’s not.”

“Your words are not clear, Mr. Torres. ‘Note snot?’ ”

“The airlock is not open.”

“Yes.”

I stopped to think. “ ‘Yes,’ you agree, or ‘yes,’ it’s open?”

“Your question is not clear, Mr. Torres.”

Elliot snorted. “You fucked that up pretty quick, Torres. Stuck sensor on the airlock.”

“FleetSys, reset conversation.”

“Yes, Mr. Torres.”

“Reset all sensors on airlock Six-One West on hull One-Fox.”

“Done.”

“Open the airlock.”

“It is open already.”

“God damn it, who are you going to believe, me or your sensor?”

Elliot made a noise.

“Your question is not clear, Mr. Torres.”

“FleetSys, terminate conversation. Jesus. All right, Tyrone, I guess you get to belly down and open it yourself.”

“Did you ever notice, Torres, how none of the priests ever tries talking to that thing? They always find a terminal.”

“Yeah. Okay, you’re almost down. Start braking.”

We slowed near the rounded nose of One-Fox, and vertigo set back in. It was like landing on the sloping roof of a sky-scraper, with nothing but space hanging beneath its base.

Elliot got his boots onto the hull next to the cable port, then backed up gingerly, trying to remain vertical as he let out the tether from the climber. As he backed further down the slope toward the airlock, it was harder and harder for him remain upright.

“Lean back against the tether, Tyrone.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“You’ve never done this with Pham around, have you? First time I got where you are, she kicked my feet out from under me. Sent me over the edge.”

“That girl really hates you, doesn’t she, Torres?”

“She does it to everyone. Makes you trust your tether.”

“Uh-huh. Doesn’t sound to me like you minded, much.”

He made it to the airlock and pushed apart the locking lugs. The door sank inward and a slender ladder slid up over the lip. Elliot grabbed it and it slid back in, then a moment later I followed.

While the lock was named after 61-deck, there was really no such deck. There was just a cramped space under the ship’s nose with the locks, cable housing, forward-looking instruments, and a suiting-up area near the top of the lift, where the lift platforms flipped over from up to down. We unsuited and started down.

There was nothing to be seen from the lift while dropping past the gardens. There were, in fact, no lift-stops at all in the gardens; one had to enter at the bottom. There were also no cameras, machines, or—except for emergencies—paging speakers in the gardens. Privacy ethics had built up since launch, and the gardens were sacrosanct.

The industrial decks, however, were brightly lit and noisy. Some ships used that group of decks for entomology labs, like this one, while others contained suit manufacturing, infirmaries, electronics, fiber extrusion, bakeries, and so on.

I stepped from the lift and bumped into Elliot as he made his way around a madly spinning device that nearly filled the deck. It was a screened-in cage at the end of a moving arm, which a bearded man and two stocky children watched intently.

After a minute a solenoid slapped home and the arm stopped. The children raced up to peer inside.

“There’s still three of ’em, Mr. Delgado. No, four. Five!”

“Okay,” said the man, “you know what to do—five’s more than enough. Give them to the queen, now.”

The girl planted her tongue between her teeth, then reached into the cage with tongs, drawing out something that she dropped into a jar the boy held out. It was clear they’d done it many times before. They’re being made to grow up too fast, I thought.

Delgado glanced up.

“Hello, Mr. Elliot. Mr. Torres, nice to see you.”

“Hello, Ramón.” I worked my way around the machine. “What are you up to?”

“Two GBs.”

“Two GBs?” It sounded like a candy, or a car.

“Ha!” said Delgado. “I’ve seen that look before. Listen: two . . . G . . . bees. Got it? Okay. We got a notice from Captain Rosler. Mr. Polaski wants to be able to run at two Gs without stopping, so we’ve got to come up with two-G pollinators. Okay, kids, take a break. Whoops, hand me that phone, please. Hello? Yes? Yes, he is, just a minute please. Mr. Torres, it’s Kathy Chan.”

I took the phone while Elliot unloaded his samples and Delgado logged them in.

At least a minute after I’d hung up, I was still staring down at the phone. Elliot and Delgado stopped.

“What, Torres?”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“A drone,” I said finally.

They looked at me, and then down at the phone, as though hoping it might elaborate. When Delgado spoke, his mouth was so dry I could scarcely hear him.

“And . . . ?”

I shook my head. “They’re recording the transmission now. It’ll take some time.”

We continued to look down at the phone, all three of us now, not knowing what else to do. Ever since the launch, we’d lived with the awful fear that the drones had never even made it to Holzstein’s System, or that they’d made it but hadn’t been able to build another torus to return through. And for all my bravado to Polaski, the same question had haunted every one of us all that time: How long would we wait? And if that allotted time expired, what would we do then?

But now a drone had returned, and the next, inevitable question hung in the air: Was there anywhere to go?

I cleared my throat.

“Go and tell your wife, Ramón. Just Elena, no one else. Wait for the announcement. Come on, Elliot, let’s go. I want to see what the drones and their mistress have to say to one another.”

People and noise both were filling the MI deck when we got back—Miller, Chan, Polaski, Peters, half a dozen others. Only Pham, who hadn’t been seen for days, was missing. Everyone else was squeezed into the tiny space, poring over a transcription of the drone’s message.

I glanced quickly at the communications console. OUTBOUND TRANSMISSION ACTIVE flashed on the screen. Other words scrolled past on the data screen, too fast to see. Miller’s new instructions, I was sure, for the drone to take back with it to feed to its fellows.

We finally moved down to the commons deck, where there was more room, and Chan summed up what we’d learned so far.

“The drones made it to Holzstein’s and built a new torus. This return messenger hit our solar system very well-positioned for its turnaround for going back, meaning that their new tunnel works extremely well.

“They found three landable planets, as forecast. Limited terraforming has begun on two of them, the third being too heavy. Both of the viables are colder than expected, and will remain cold even after hydrogen conversion produces an atmosphere and water. Limited equatorial zones will be habitable, at best.

“Landable satellites were found throughout the system. No life forms were encountered.

“After the drones set terraforming in motion on the two viables, they
appear to have decided there is little left for them to do in such a marginal system, and therein lies some better news.

“They have identified yet another system—coordinates given below—possessing at least one confirmed, ideal Earth-type. A perfect, already habitable planet. As soon as instructions are received via the returning messenger, they plan to rotate their new torus and send a contingent on to that other system.”

A gunshot sounded. Elliot was holding a bottle of champagne, unauthorized cargo though it was, and was pouring it into cups.

I took one and looked down at the swirling liquid, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment both. And, all the while, uneasiness about Miller and her drones. Why, I wondered. They had performed perfectly. Had they not begun terraforming as claimed? Was that it? Was Miller going to hold this other, reportedly perfect planet hostage, taking bids for passage while we rotted on planets left deliberately fallow? I hadn’t trusted Anne Miller when she’d arrived on our island, and I didn’t trust her now. Not her, nor Polaski, yet I felt them both slipping beyond my grasp.

“Where’s Anne?” I said. “There—Anne!” I made a noise against the table, and lifted my cup.

“A toast,” I said. “You are to be congratulated.”

“Yes,” she said, and raised her cup very slightly.

That was it, then the noise resumed. The specialists began calculating approach windows to the torus, to be used by us and by the three regional fleets that had made it off Earth in the past year. I slipped onto the lift.