A Grey Moon Over China (40 page)

Polaski had announced his intention of going into Serenitas after the aliens?

“Don’t look so surprised, Ed, I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to go along—anything to slip your way in to that planet of yours, hm?”

“I’d say it’s about time old Polaski was stopped,” said Elliot. “Shoot, don’t look at me like that. I ain’t the first one what thunk it.”

No one spoke for a while. Penderson tapped out a tattoo on the steering wheel, while Dorczak inspected the buildings around us in the darkness. Finally I turned to her.

“What about Lowhead, Carolyn. And the rest of the planet? Is this something people want to do?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. People are acting funny. A few of the smarter ones are saying we need to know more, but some of the others are talking about trying to go back to Earth, or else slipping into Serenity System unnoticed, with no weapons. And of course there’re the usual
sightings of slime-green alien fleets and what-not. The latest thing is wolf sightings.”

Penderson turned in his seat. “
Wolf
sightings?”

“Yeah, I know it’s a little—”

“No,” he said. “It’s not that.” He looked at her worriedly for a while, chewing on his lip. “It’s that I’ve heard that story before. More than a year ago. And a
long
way from where you come from—miners out on H-v’s moons.” He glanced around, first at Elliot, then at me. “Except that the story I heard wasn’t about any ordinary wolf.”

Dorczak stared at him.

“A wolf without a head,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Come on, you guys,” said Elliot. “Those kinds of stories are all over the place, and folks drag ’em out when they get scared about something. Why, I knew a fella in Louisiana, once—”

“Tyrone,” I said. “I need to talk to Roddy McKenna. Now. He started to say something in the auditorium and got cut off, and I forgot about it. Let’s go—research center. Jesus, Harry, hurry.”

We found the center’s labs still brightly lit and crowded with scientists, working around the clock to coax information from
Sun of Gabriel
’s massive stream of data. Roddy McKenna was nowhere in sight, but I finally won Kate Salfelder’s attention by standing between her and a display of Serenitas.

When I asked about McKenna she just frowned and shook her head.

“Go and find him, Eddie dear. He’s gone off after that awful woman again, and I worry. He was upset, the way he gets. Said it’s unfair what Mr. Polaski did to her. Said she was going to fight it, and he was going to help.” She wrung her hands in front of her, unable to fathom such a thing. “Eddie . . . he looks up to you so much. But you don’t ever say anything, and then he takes off after that woman, instead. Go and talk to him, won’t you, dear?”

“Kate,” I said, “the other day in the auditorium, Roddy was working on the probe’s communications with the Serenitas torus, and a couple of times he started to say something. Do you know what it was, or where those records are so we can take a look?”

She shook her head sympathetically and pointed to a row of desks along the wall. Stacks of vellum were balanced everywhere, with piles of memory blocks strewn about them with meaningless notations on them. Whatever McKenna had found, only he was going to be able to tell us what it was.

“All right, Kate. I’ll call you when I find him. Come on, Tyrone. Harry, you know how to drive the tractors by now and how to find the landing dome at night—you drive. That has to be where Pham went.”

We drove at Penderson’s breakneck speed through the black night, and I explained what Polaski had done to Pham.

She’d been summoned early one morning to a meeting of the military service chiefs and line officers. Included were the senior ship’s captains—traditionally Polaski’s weakest area of support—and the commanders of the space-assault Marine units. The Marines reported to Pham and lived in uneasy coexistence with the officers on whose ships they served. Conspicuously absent, however, were officers from the “Rats,” Pham’s fiercely loyal ground troops.

“Colonel Pham,” Polaski had said. He had cultivated her meticulously over the years, currying favor with her Rats and Marines, but his tone now was peremptory.

“As commanding officer of the Marine units, you are one of the few that’s allowed to carry loaded weapons on shipboard, isn’t that right?”

“Yah?” She was unsure of her ground.

Ship’s crews were kept alive by an almost religious observance of certain rules, and one of them regulated the carrying of loaded weapons on board. Firing one in a pressurized environment meant instant death, so while in space the ground forces and even the ship’s officers themselves were not allowed to carry them. Only Pham and her Marines could.

Polaski turned to me.

“Mr. Torres, were you present on the fourteenth of this month when Colonel Pham discharged a twenty-millimeter cannon in the direction of the roof of the main dome? Twice, as I understand it.”

“Get to the point, Polaski,” I said.

But he’d already made his point. Ever since the incident several of the ships’ captains had been agitating to have Pham disciplined. But they didn’t know I had been there.

“Colonel Pham,” said Polaski, turning to her again, “with the concurrence of everyone present, including Eduardo Torres, you are hereby removed from command of all space-assault forces. They will from here on out report to the wing commanders of the vessels on which they serve.”

“What?”
Her eyes grew suddenly wild, and she looked like she was going to hurl herself across the table at him.

But what about the Rats, I thought. Polaski had in a single move pitted himself against the single greatest source of power we had in the system.

“You can’t do that!” Pham was spitting her words in her fury. “You crazy, Mister? Hey, I ask you a question! How you like Rats in your bed,
hah?”

Polaski stopped, perfectly still, and then, with his eyebrows raised, turned slowly around the room as though searching for something that wasn’t there. And then I understood. Polaski believed we would leave the
black planet and go to Serenitas after the aliens. He believed he could persuade the colony to abandon its base and go back into space. And so he had traded the loyalty of Pham’s Rats for that of the ships’ officers.

But persuade us how? His plans to take the offensive against creatures we knew nothing about had been dismissed at every turn. While clearly something had happened to the drones and to the Europeans in Serenitas System, there was no evidence that the aliens were a threat to us here in Holzstein’s.

I stopped Polaski later and challenged him regarding existing ground engagements and other commitments we had here in this system. Having completely alienated Pham, the brass knuckles behind our most important multilateral agreements, our international relations policy was now in a shambles. He shrugged it off.

“Let Allerton handle it.”

Bart Allerton, Polaski’s friend and ally. Dorczak’s boss, the new head of the colony at Lowhead. What deal had they made?

F
rom what Kate Salfelder said that night at the labs, Pham wasn’t taking Polaski’s decision gracefully. And if there was an occasion to make an issue of it, I knew, it would involve the Marine contingents leaving that night for the now-empty third planet. The fleet was being sent to make our presence felt following the Europeans’ sudden departure, and to dampen the impending chaos left by their absence and by the news from Serenitas.

The landing dome was an iron and glass vault four hundred feet long and two hundred wide, with an airlock tunnel at each end big enough to accommodate the giant tractor-drawn trailers that crawled out across the surface to the ships.

When our own tractor cleared the inner door of the nearer tunnel and pulled to one side of the dome, the scene under the domes’ floodlights was starkly clear.

Ready to leave through the far airlock were two full troop trailers coupled to their tractors, pointing away from us, one nosing up behind the other. Only a few soldiers still stood outside the trailers’ left-side doors, waiting to step inside at the last minute and seal them. The rest of the dome was nearly empty.

The air under the harsh lights was bitterly cold, and the soldiers’ breath condensed into clouds and drifted away against the background of black glass. Far off by the left side of the dome, sitting alone among the empty waiting-benches, was the slight form of Roddy McKenna. He was watching an altercation by the tractors, close to the far airlock.

We stepped down and scuffed our way around to the front of our own tractor. Dorczak and Penderson stepped down from the other side and Penderson took off his coat to put around Dorczak’s shoulders against the cold. He put his arm around her and the four of us crunched across the black ground toward the center of the dome.

The altercation McKenna was watching involved Pham—draped in a soiled fatigue jacket and rocking unsteadily on her feet—hurling obscenities at a grim-looking officer by the forward tractor. Most of their words were lost in the odd, flat acoustics of the dome.

It was an unreal scene under the powerful lights: the ponderous iron trailers with their dark portholes, the big tractors swaying and vibrating as their motors idled, the silver trim on the soldiers’ uniforms flashing in the icy air—all of it finely etched by the lights against the dull, black ground and the glass. And then, a sequence of events occurred so rapidly and so suddenly that it wasn’t until later that we were able to reconstruct them—although even then, we never did fully understand what had caused them.

Pham was leaning forward at the waist and screaming at the officer, when from the side of the dome near McKenna came an eerie, rippling
crack
, like the sound of ice splitting on a lake. Pham didn’t hear it, but the officer and her soldiers did, and turned in unison to look.

Near the base of the dome one of the glass panels had developed an ominous white fracture in it. At the same time, for just an instant, a weak light passed across the glass from the outside and then vanished.

Another
crack
ripped through the air, and a fracture line shot across the next panel over. McKenna got to his feet in confusion, while at the far end of the dome the officer motioned curtly to her troops to get on board and seal their doors.

Pham, not having noticed anything amiss until that moment, saw them boarding and abruptly stopped her shouting. McKenna looked back and forth between the cracking panels and the tractor-trailers, then began walking toward the edge of the dome to see what was wrong with the glass.

Harry Penderson reacted the fastest, taking a grip on Dorczak and Elliot and racing them toward the airlock tunnel behind us. A third panel cracked. The sound of it lashed out through the dome like a gunshot; soon the panels would start to shatter one after the other and blow outward.

Pham finally realized that the two big tractor-trailers had begun to move. In a growing fury she reached for her gun, evidently believing she had been dismissed. The forward tractor had picked up speed and the officer was pulling her foot in to close the door, when the driver saw Pham’s gun and wrenched the wheel to one side.

Over at the side of the dome a fourth panel cracked in front of McKenna. He stopped walking and looked uncertainly back at the tractor-trailers.

In that instant, then, he and Pham and I all saw what was going to happen: The forward tractor was not going to correct its swerve in time, and was going to slice through the glass wall of the dome next to the lock.

Pham lowered the gun and bolted for the far airlock tunnel, then just as suddenly realized that its inner door was still closed. She turned and started back toward the one at our end. McKenna was behind her, because he’d had to make the longer trip around the benches. Penderson, Dorczak and Elliot were already making their way up the ramp and onto the iron floor of our airlock tunnel. When I’d made it in behind them, struggling for breath like the others, I turned back around to see a terrible sight.

The giant tractor-trailer slid slowly and even gracefully into the glass wall, then lifted up and jackknifed to a stop. No noise from the collision reached us against the sudden rush of air, but my ears popped from a pressure change. Then all across the floor of the dome, in eerie silence, a layer of black dust rose up from the ground and began drifting toward the breach. Pham, and McKenna some twenty paces behind her, slowed as they were forced to lean into the wind of decompression, pulling their way through the accelerating layer of dust and debris. A spotlight blew out overhead and they became outlined more sharply than ever against the dark background. The moisture in the air condensed into fog.

Inside the airlock tunnel, we were facing back through the big doorway into the dome. We stood against the left wall in order to hold onto a conduit that ran the length of the tunnel, all the way back to the opening we’d come through.

The opening was made from a heavy, precision-ground frame, with a polished steel door retracted for the moment into the opening’s right side. When it closed, the door would trundle leftward like an elevator’s, closing toward our left, where the door’s control panel was bolted to the wall.

Elliot and Dorczak were behind me along the wall, while Penderson had already worked his way forward around me and was carefully moving toward the control panel, never letting go of the conduit lest the dome suddenly blow out. He was breathing hard in the thinning air, and shook his head sharply several times to clear his ears.