A Grey Moon Over China (41 page)

Pham hit the ramp and fought her way up it, heaving for breath, her hand still gripping her gun. Behind her, the swirling layer of dust was up to McKenna’s knees. The wind and fog sucking toward the hole in the dome whipped at his hair. The rest of the spotlights blew out, and the thickening fog obscured his form almost completely.

He made it to the foot of the ramp at the same time as Pham reached the door frame. Not ten seconds had passed since the tractor had plowed into the glass wall.

McKenna looked up suddenly at Pham ahead of him.
“No!”

Pham hadn’t even turned around to see if anyone else behind her was trying to reach the airlock tunnel. The instant she reached the airlock, she slammed her hand back against the controls, sending the door trundling closed along its track. Penderson swore, and both he and I pushed our way toward the controls, though with no hope of reaching them in time. Pham was several paces into the tunnel and grabbing for the conduit herself when she heard McKenna’s shout. Only then did she turn.

McKenna launched himself toward the narrowing doorway with a hoarse cry, forcing himself through just before it closed. But as he smashed against the moving edge of the door it spun him around before he was completely through, catching his trailing arm at the shoulder as it closed.

Penderson and I were still moving and Pham was still turning around to look when the airlock door sensed the presence of McKenna’s arm and froze, pinning him to the frame.

But it froze for only an instant. Even as it stopped, it sensed the difference in pressure between the airlock tunnel and the ruptured dome outside, and obeyed a higher priority: With the full force of its motors it crushed McKenna’s arm, sealing him and us almost completely into the airlock. And as his screams echoed through the iron tunnel, we dimly heard the dome’s cracked panels blowing out one after the other, like distant gunfire in the arctic night.

McKenna choked off his screams to gasp for air just as Pham finished her turn toward him. And at that same instant, she and Penderson and I—and McKenna—all heard the same sound: air hissing past the airlock door, past the imperfect seal where the bone of his crushed arm was lodged. Our ears began to pop again. The tunnel’s own air bottles opened and hissed into the lock, trying to maintain pressure. They would last no more than a minute.

With the same momentum that had turned her around, in what might have been no more than a blind reflex, Pham dropped her gun and lunged for the red override lever at the top of the panel, the lever that would force the door back open, blowing Roddy McKenna back into the vacuum like a cannon shot.

“Jesus
Christ!
” shouted Penderson. “What the
fuck
are you doing?”

McKenna raised his head just as she moved, and when their eyes met she froze, her hand inches from the lever. Air continued to hiss past the door. No one in the tunnel moved.

We could only see the back of Pham’s head, but we could see all of McKenna’s face. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue. His face was pale under a sheen of sweat. But his eyes were now perfectly clear as he stared at her, filled with what could only be the loathing of utter betrayal.

Pham lowered her arm.

The hiss of the air bottles dwindled, and again the pressure in the tunnel began to drop as the air hissed out past McKenna’s arm. Penderson started to move again, still gripping the conduit, carefully approaching Pham from the back.

Finally McKenna broke his gaze with Pham and looked at me, now trembling from shock. Penderson reached Pham’s shoulder and carefully pulled her away from the panel, then worked his way past her, never letting go of the conduit.

Yet there was little he could do, beyond getting a grip on McKenna before opening the door. Which merely left him with a near certainty of being pulled out, too; short of chains wrapped around him, it would be impossible to hold McKenna against the wall of air that would hit him if the door opened—and short of opening the door there was no way to dislodge his arm.

McKenna stared at me for a moment, then dropped his gaze and reached with his good hand into his breast pocket. His side was soaked with blood from the severed shoulder. He pulled a folded wad of paper from his pocket with a shaking hand and tossed it as far as he could along the floor toward me. It landed out of my reach, but Elliot’s boot immediately slid out and held it.

McKenna glanced at me again, then one more time at Pham. The air was thin enough now that it was hard to breathe. A light breeze blew against the back of my neck as the last of our air moved toward the door.

Penderson had almost reached the panel, and McKenna’s eyes finally flicked toward him. Then, with all of his remaining strength, McKenna flung himself around to his full reach and slammed his good hand against the override lever.

I
remember the sound of it, and I remember Penderson diving forward to close the door again. But I don’t remember seeing McKenna go.

Mostly I remember him when he was eight years old, a blue-eyed and freckled boy, alone with his machines and the music that he had taught them to play. Alone, that afternoon, with a man who had no time to listen.

It was Elliot who turned me away from the door finally, gripping my
arm and sitting me down on the floor to lean against the wall. Then at some point minutes or hours later, he pressed the blood-stained piece of paper into my hand.

“He was giving it to you, Torres. Maybe you ought to look at it.”

The others were sitting against the walls as well, watching me and breathing slowly in the thin air. Pham sat in a huddle in the corner, her face hidden.

I unfolded the paper numbly, but only to stare uncomprehendingly at columns of times and dates. The numbers swam before me, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t understand what it was McKenna had left me.

Then I remembered why I’d come looking for him in the first place, and suddenly I understood. And as I understood, a chill crept up my spine. The iron wall against my back suddenly seemed far too thin.

“What is it, Torres?”

Dorczak and Penderson were watching me, as well.

“The torus in Serenitas System,” I said. “Remember how Roddy told us it had never been rotated to point anywhere but back here at Holzstein’s? That was how he knew it couldn’t have been used to send the Europeans or the drones onward to some other system.”

“That’s right.”

I handed him the paper. “He said it had never been rotated anywhere else. But he didn’t say it had never been used.”

Farther down the tunnel, comprehension settled into Dorczak and Penderson’s eyes at the same time.

“It
has
been used,” I said, “hundreds of times. Someone’s been coming back this way from Serenitas over a period that goes back years. Coming in large numbers.”

S
ometime later that night the rescuers finished welding a trailer against the side of the tunnel, and cut their way in. We stayed in the trailer several hours more while they worked to free the troop trailer jammed into the dome wall. Because of the officer’s quick orders, both of the trailers had been sealed in time, as had the cab of the second tractor. But the officer herself, and her driver, were gone. She hadn’t gotten the door closed, after all.

Charlie Peters had come with the rescuers to say the words that needed to be said, and to look after Pham. Kip had come, too. He lay on his back on the rear bench of the trailer and played his flute.

I drifted in and out of sleep as I listened, dreaming at one point about the underground cavern and its one passage.

As always I sat hunched in the cold, and as always my mother hovered over my shoulder, watching. But this time someone else was in the cavern with us.

“And I heard the second beast say ‘Come and see . . .’ ”

Peters was talking to himself in the back of the trailer.

“And there went out another horse that was red, and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth. And there was given to him a great sword.”

I
still say there’s no way she could have missed knowing McKenna was behind her. Either way, she should have looked.” The ship shuddered as we dragged deeper into the atmosphere, and Elliot turned away from the porthole with a sour face as it slued sideways. The engines growled as the MI tried to correct, while in the cabin joints groaned in protest.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, rechecking my harness. “Chan says Pham can hardly remember what happened that night.”

“How come Pham’s staying with Chan, anyhow?”

“She’s not. She’s in the infirmary. Rosler beat her again. With an iron pipe.”

“Jesus.”

“Probably thought she’d sullied his image or something.” The engines whined as the transport sank and then pitched nose-low. The commandos sitting in front of us swayed impassively on their metal benches, accustomed to the abuse. All the way at the front, Bolton released his belts and leaned past the pilot, trying to see the planet’s surface. Then he turned and worked his way back with a map in his hand.

“Right,” he said, and squatted next to us. “Let’s have a look at where this signal’s coming from, shall we?” He worked to unfold the map while the ship dipped and shook in the rough air.

The ship was little more than an iron tube welded to a pair of induction engines—not at all aerodynamic or stable, kept upright only by its MI. It had crossed the ninety million miles from the black planet to the Europeans’ abandoned planet of H-iii in three days, at one and a half Gs all the way. It stank of sweat and bad plumbing.

“All right, here it is,” said Bolton. “What we’re interested in is these uplands, about five thousand square miles of high shale running along behind the mountains.” The mountains he pointed to ranged across the planet’s
Empty Quarter, a massive plate of clay and shale thrust up in the planet’s early years. The new settlements were all on the far side of the planet, in cultivated valleys left behind by the Europeans.

“I thought the distress signal was coming from the lowlands,” I said. Elliot and I hadn’t been on the planet before; Bolton and his teams had.

“Quite so—right here below the escarpment. About eleven miles out, right where no settlement ought to be. And where no one in his right mind would put one.” He pointed on the map, holding onto the bench again as the ship skidded sideways. “At any rate,” he said, “it’s on these uplands that we’ll land . . . about here. Then we’ll work our way along to the edge for a snug little peek at whatever’s out there.”

“Okay. What’s all this here, though?” Someone had carefully shaded in most of the highland area with fine crosshatching.

“Ah . . . that’s nothing, actually. Nothing to do with the mission.” He refolded his map.

“Bolton . . .”

“Hey, Torres, look at this.” Elliot had been watching through the porthole, and now he pulled me over to look past him.

The planet’s horizon curved away in the far distance, a cracked expanse of grey softened only by the thin atmosphere. As barren as the planet seemed—
Asile
, it was called—the sight of its sunny horizon and thin blue sky stabbed with its familiarity.

But Elliot wasn’t looking at the sun on the plains. He was watching the approach of a craggy range of mountains, sweeping up into the thinner blue air ahead of us. On the distant steppes beyond them, a lazy funnel-cloud snaked high into the atmosphere. Between us and the funnel, a narrow line of rain-laden clouds clung to the mountain’s near flank. I turned back to Bolton.

“Cyclonic storms?”

“Um, no, not exactly. That is to say, there are storms . . . but I think not just where you’re looking, if you see what I mean.”

I didn’t, but I looked back out the side just the same. Elliot made a noise of surprise and pointed to a solitary lake, glinting through a gap in the clouds like mercury against the grey steppes. I asked Bolton for the map again, remembering the crosshatching. But he didn’t hand it to me. Instead, he just sighed and beckoned to Roscoe Throckmorton.

“Roscoe,” he said, “I think perhaps we’ll give our guests a quick tour, after all, hm? Show them our little project? Have Stephanie give us a bit of a drive-about, would you?” Throckmorton hesitated, then worked his way back up to the pilot. Bolton squeezed onto the bench next to me and changed the subject.