A Grey Moon Over China (33 page)

“Look behind you.” Again she gasped. Stretching for miles behind us was the trail of dust kicked up by our passage, still glowing in the setting sun and suspended against the featureless black, like an electric snake lancing down toward us from out of space. The driver illuminated a direction finder on the dash.

I was sure that Dorczak hadn’t noticed a slender pillar of flame rising upward from the horizon behind us, but I had.

“Blacked out?” I asked the aide.

“Yes, sir. You won’t see much till we’re inside the dome.” She was right: After a few minutes the tractor slowed, with nothing more than a dim
marker light crawling past above the cab. The tractor rocked to a stop with a humming of motors, then it was buffeted by blasts of air from the sides. We were in the lock tunnel.

Then we were moving again and turning to the side, only to stop one more time and crawl forward through the darkness bit by bit until we stopped for the last time. Solenoids snapped home next to our heads, and with a sucking sound from the doors the smell of watered-down dirt hit us as the doors slid open.

Fifty yards off through the darkness, under the center of the dome, was the military operations command, illuminated by dim red light that reflected from a canopy suspended haphazardly above it. We climbed down from the cab and scuffed through the damp dust toward the center, really nothing more than thirty tables and consoles placed on a metal grating. Some of the consoles were partly disemboweled, while exposed bundles of cable snaked across the ground or hung precariously from the canopy’s supports. Pacing impatiently among the rows of glowing consoles was David Rosler, looking as unkempt and temporary as the rest of the complex. The center’s director, a competent ship’s captain named Simon Plath, stood nearer to us at the back, speaking now and then in a low voice.

Technicians were down on their knees on the far side of the covered area, working quickly behind the farthest row of consoles. Bent over and hurrying back and forth among them, shining with perspiration and stripped down to his t-shirt, was the muscular form of Tyrone Elliot.

“So this is it,” whispered Dorczak with mock reverence in her voice, “the pulsing nerve center of the mighty empire.”

The director leaned down next to one of the console controllers, then stood and spoke in a clear voice. “Capture vessels established on default orbit, blacked out and tumbling.”

He was referring to a trick we had used elsewhere with good success: The capture vessels—high-powered, piloted “dry-docks” that could open their bays to swallow smaller ships—were observing radio silence and cooling down their skins, while they tumbled slowly to mimic orbiting debris.

“All right,” said Rosler impatiently, standing still now and looking down as he cleaned his glasses on his shirt-tail. “Get boarding parties ready for launch. Second and Third Marines. Colonel Pham commanding.”

“The colonel’s just down with Fourth Surface Assault, sir.”

“I’m sure she’s recovered!” snapped Rosler. “Do it.” The director started to answer back, but thought better of it and turned to one of the controllers. I interrupted.

“Director,” I said, “once the capture vessels have the targets, bring them
up against the orbiting station and have the prisoners processed there. This base is closed until we complete other operations.”

Polaski’s voice rang out from the darkened periphery. “What the fuck is
she
doing here?” He was getting down from a transport and pointing at Dorczak.

He walked closer.

“Go back to your cave, Torres.” He stopped in front of Dorczak.

“We don’t allow civilians in here, Secretary, and that applies to your friend here, too.”

Three years ago, during a regular staff meeting, Polaski had forced a vote on the issue of civilians entering secure facilities.

It was a meeting at which, curiously enough, all of his own military confidants were present, while attendance by the professionals and fleet officers was as light as usual. The meeting also followed weeks of more or less hysterical claims by the military that classified materials were being stolen from the headquarters building.

“Maybe you should stop making paper airplanes out of them,” Priscilla Bates had said after the meeting opened, “or getting drunk and yelling about them across the urinals.” She sat at my end of the table, facing Polaski and the dour-faced Rosler at the other. Their cronies sat with them, mostly senior officers in the Marines or the base-defense units—Polaski’s palace guard.

“Maybe we should just keep dick-jockeys and riffraff out of headquarters,” said Carl Bermer, Polaski’s beetle-browed chief aide. He’d forgotten for the moment that dick-jockeys included Rosler. He meant pilots of the long ships, and civilians.

“All right, enough of that,” said Polaski with an air of benign neutrality. “We need to keep civilians off the military sites, is all. We don’t need a pissing match about it.”

“It’s not on the agenda,” I said.

Polaski and Rosler furrowed their brows in unison and studied the papers in front of them.

“Yes it is.”

I looked down. It was there, near the bottom. It hadn’t been there on the original notice.

“You’ve been pretty busy with the probe,” said Polaski, “so maybe you missed it. Maybe you’ve got more to do than you can handle, Torres. It’s understandable.”

Bates had counted heads, and now she slipped me a piece of paper: VETO?

I shook my head. Out of context, a vote that appeared to favor lax security at a time of increased attacks would provide Polaski with more ammunition
against the professional officer corps. So with some bickering over what was really meant by civilian, the resolution passed.

There was no good line between military and civilian leadership for the colony, but as the colony’s head and nominal military commander, my own offices were in the military headquarters building. That was where I was the next day when Roddy McKenna called. He’d come to see me, he said, but had been turned away at the door.

Similar calls came that same day from Anne Miller and Charlie Peters, and even from Chan, who knew more military secrets than the military itself. At the same time, Priscilla Bates and other fleet officers, even engineers and administrators who were hard to construe as military, were saluted sharply at the door and allowed in.

“The last I bothered to check,” said Chan, “I outrank Polaski. Where does he get off thinking anyone on this base is a civilian, anyway?”

“It’s not important,” I said. We were making progress on moving the capital ships’ engines to the Serenitas probe at the time, and I didn’t want to get into a fight that might leave them hostage. Instead I moved my project notes to the little office on the alley by the assembly building, and went back and forth as needed.

I returned to the headquarters building one day about a week later to find Carl Bermer installed at a desk in my office. He had his gun apart on the desk and was cleaning it with a spare shirt I kept in a drawer.

“You’re in my office,” I said.

“General Polaski said you wouldn’t mind,” said Bermer.

“He’s a general now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me my shirt.”

“This is yours?”

I took the shirt and went to Polaski’s office. Rosler was there with him, his feet up on the side of the desk.

“Why’s Bermer in my office?” I said.

“We didn’t think you’d be needing it,” said Polaski.

“I see. And why did we think that?”

“We think,” said Rosler, “that you don’t have your eye on the ball.”

“Which ball is that, Rosler?”

“
The
ball.”

“He means,” said Polaski, “the ball that doesn’t involve taking engines out of our capital ships. If you want to finish your little project, Torres, be glad you have someplace to work at all. You might keep that in mind.”

I tossed the shirt onto the desk and leaned down to look into the familiar grey eyes.

“I have my eye on someplace better than
this
, Polaski. That’s why we’re here, remember? That’s why I let you come along fifteen years ago. It’s why I made you, Polaski. That’s something
you
might keep in mind.”

“No, Torres, it’s me that’s going to get you where you want to go. But I have my eye on the realities, not the fantasy. You, on the other hand, are becoming a liability.”

“Forget it, Polaski. The only reality you care about is putting a gun to the system’s head.”

He picked up the shirt and dropped it in a waste bucket by his chair. “Well, you
made
me, remember?”

“Polaski, if we ever get to Serenitas, you’ll be disappointed as hell.”

His grey eyes studied mine for a moment.

“So will you, Torres. So will you.”

N
ow Polaski was standing in front of Dorczak in the operations dome, waiting for her to turn away and leave. Dorczak ignored him and turned instead to the director, who was still watching us.

“Hello, Simon. Nice to see you again.”

“Commander.” A smile flickered across Simon Plath’s face. He avoided looking at Polaski.

Into the silence that followed came the scuff of feet from Elliot and his people, still working as fast as they could with their flashlights in the dark. They were following cables out to the edge of the dome where they led across the surface to the big ships and the fleet MI. Polaski turned abruptly to the director.

“Make this a full exercise, Plath. Five Gs.” He stalked off toward Rosler. A surprised oath came from the controllers, then another voice cut them off.

“Incoming identified, Mr. Plath. Two vessels, IS-20 types, modified. Still not braking.”

A woman at a table near us put down a phone. “Intelligence estimate, sir. Independent Mining Coalition ships. Ordinance unknown. Probably hoping to embarrass us on our own doorstep. Possibly to discredit us with Pikes Mountain Company.” Next to me, Dorczak nodded her agreement.

“Excuse me, Mr. Rosler,” said Plath smoothly, “five Gs seems unnecessarily—”

“Do it!”

Plath frowned and turned away. “Very well. CV Telemetry—upload five Gs and additional crew warnings. Also log a command with both capture
vehicles: As soon as they come back up live, I want visuals all the way in. Bring the visuals up on monitors six and eight.”

“Inbounds are stable on default orbits. No braking. Three minutes twenty to local horizon.”

“Twelve seconds to CV ignition on updated profile.”

The center became silent as we waited, except for the scuffling feet and muttered oaths of Elliot’s people. I watched them for a second and wondered what they were working on. Everything seemed to be running well enough.

“Three seconds.” We stared at the two blank monitors, then suddenly they flickered to life as the two capture vessels threw off their sheep’s clothing and began transmitting. The pictures at first showed different parts of our planet’s razor-sharp terminator sweeping crazily across the screens as the ships tumbled, but then with a flare of attitude jets the pictures stabilized to show a background of stars. Nothing happened for a moment after that, then suddenly on both screens a bright pair of dots appeared, streaking at tremendous speed from the top of the screen into the distance—the intruding ships entering their orbit around our planet.

It seemed as if the pair of dots would disappear in the distance completely, but when they were almost gone they seemed to slow to a stop and begin swelling in size, instead, streaking back toward the cameras. In truth, they hadn’t slowed at all, but now the capture vessels were accelerating toward them at a terrific rate, their own increasing speed throwing them into higher and higher orbits to converge with the targets. It was an impressive and graceful sight, and it was hard to remember that behind the cameras, the crews on the CVs were suffering badly under the crushing acceleration.

Now the targets swelled from dots into identifiable ships rushing toward the cameras. Only seconds had passed, yet now a collision at more than a thousand miles per hour seemed inevitable. Then at the last instant the capture vessels fired their forward-facing solid rockets and the screens turned white.

When they cleared again, in front of each of the cameras hung one of the small grey Coalition ships, sliding back into the maw of the dry-docks. It had been only nineteen seconds since the capture vessels first fired their engines.

“I’m impressed,” said Dorczak. “Swallow them whole and take your time smoking out the crews.”

But at the last instant before being swallowed whole, something squat and heavy separated from one of the ships in a flash of exploding bolts.

“Bogey drop!”

“Tracking.”

“Inbound. One minute forty-three to horizon.”

“Ballistics, trajectory please.”

“No, sir, not ballistic. Bogey is correcting.”

“Guided bogey, folks.”

“No, belay that, too—Mama’s blind now, inside the CV. We have a smart bogey here, people, smart bogey. ECM . . .”

At that moment the voice trailed away and the center became quiet. Something was wrong. Then all at once Tyrone Elliot’s voice shot out from behind the lights.