A Grey Moon Over China (44 page)

Riding in the fleet were more than twelve thousand souls: founders and infants, soldiers and prisoners, exiles spanning four generations.

But the fleet’s majesty and history were mocked now by the uncertainty of its purpose. Gone was the promise, replaced by the tightening trap, and by the bickering, and the fear. Gone was the adventure, and gone were the gardens, replaced by monstrous weapons mounted in the upper decks.

There were ships with powerful engines, carrying giant new cannon, and ships filled with tough and solid soldiers, raised on the promise of invincibility. And there were ships filled with children who would never walk, the price paid for those few who would ride the fast ships into war—a war which, even still, only Polaski and Rosler were sure we were fighting.

“I don’t know, Tyrone,” I said. “What else are we supposed to do?”

“Yeah. Ain’t nowhere to hide, anymore, is there, Torres?”

“No. So what does a man do, Tyrone, when there’s nowhere to go, and the whole world’s slipping out of his control?”

“Breakfast comes to mind.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. What makes you think it ever was under your control?”

Near the center of the fleet, driven by a light plume of hot gasses from its tail, was the great ship with the familiar 00 across its nose. As the little commando ship on which we rode rotated to match the larger ship’s acceleration,
our perspective shifted and suddenly the fleet no longer stretched off into the distance, but instead climbed straight up into a black sky, one ship high above the other.

When we coupled, Elliot pushed his way through the airlock and disappeared into the big ship’s commons, and after a few last words with Bolton I followed him through.

I stopped in the center of the deck, struck by the rancid air.

“So,” said Polaski behind me. He was leaning against a table in the dim light, his arms folded in front of him. “So you went running off to Asile with Bolton.” I didn’t know whether it was a question or not.

“Yes.”

“I hear the Chinese were cut up pretty bad.”

“Only a few of them, Polaski. It was just a weapons station.”

He thought for a minute, then dropped his hands to the edge of the table. “We’re going in after the aliens, Torres. Are you with me or not?”

“Yes.”

His eyes narrowed as he thought about it, then he raised his arm with a finger extended like a gun. He pulled the trigger. “Click.”

C
han and Kip were on the floor of Charlie Peters’ quarters, surrounded by sacks of dirt, working to transplant seedlings into pots. There was an unfamiliar tension in Chan’s face, and new grey in her hair as I leaned down to kiss her. Kip waved, glad to see me, solemn.

“Where’s Charlie?” I said.

“Down with Pham and the medic.” She pushed the hair out of her face with the back of a hand. “I don’t know why he bothers—she hates the poor man.” She handed Kip more plantings. “I swear he treats her like the next messiah or something.”

“Pham’s got a medic? Rosler beat her that bad?”

“No, she’s all right. Bruises, dislocation. The medic’s for Anne. They’re keeping her sedated. Worried about her heart.”

“I’m surprised she allows it.”

Chan frowned. “She hasn’t got a choice. She’s a fleet resource, you know, strategic property. As long as there’s a chance the drones are still out there, we need her alive.”

“You know she had the drones’ communications codes in a case, in her workroom.”

“MI deck. I moved them myself.”

“All right.” I looked around the room, conscious of the two-hundred-foot particle cannon overhead where the gardens had once been. “Chan,
how many ships had been fitted with cannon before the weapons dome blew out?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “All of them. It wasn’t the weapons dome that blew.”

I was confused for a minute; I’d been sure it was the weapons dome that blew, although I couldn’t remember why I thought so. “Which one was it?”

“Wheel assemblies and trailers. Farming tools.”

There was something wrong. I brushed off my hands and moved around the room, trying to concentrate, but in the end something else caught my eye, instead. Near the top of one of Peters’ cases was a photograph of a much younger Chan, down on one knee and smiling into the camera. She was posing next to a little grasshopper drone draped in British racing green.

“Chan?”

“Hm?”

“Did you know that Bolton had a couple hundred fleet drones with him? Out on missions,” I hastened to add. “Up until the recall?”

She stopped her planting and gave me a patient look. “Planting trees on Asile, you mean. Of course. He still does.”

I
was thinking about Chan’s being privy to Bolton’s project, and about his leaving it in place despite the mobilization, when I arrived in Pham’s quarters to find Peters being thrown out and the medic packing her kit to follow. The medic was a competent-looking woman, attractive and alert, but clearly in no mood for abuse.

“At least Rosler got balls, Mush-Face!” Pham shouted at Peters. “All you got’s prissy little god—make you be
nice
all the time. How ’bout you fuck Miss Saintly-Patience here, go tell God how
nice
it was!”

She saw me and her head snapped around toward me, releasing Peters. “Hah! No-Balls here not even
nice
. He just dead from brain down, can’t tell a teat from a cow, kill them all just the same! Shit.”

She was as agitated as I’d ever seen her, leaning forward and stabbing at the air with her finger, her voice shrill and unsteady, her face a swollen, yellowish black. One arm was taped against her side, and she’d lost much too much weight.

I followed Peters back onto the lift, and we got off at the quarters Chan and I shared. Peters threw himself into a chair and ran a hand across his face and up over his balding head.

“Is she really worth it, Charlie?” I said.

“Aye, lad—she’s worth everything. She’s all we’ve got.”

I still didn’t understand what he meant when he talked like this. Pham
was beaten. Hammered down until there was nothing left but the spit and the abuse. Peters seemed to see her at the head of some sort of legions of deliverance, but I knew she would never again hold that kind of power.

“She has it now, Eddie.” I looked at him. “She’s got the one thing that’ll save us all, in the end.” But instead of going on to deliver one of his sermons as I expected, he rummaged in a kit bag to hold out a rolled piece of paper. “I’m sorry, Eddie, it was all I had time to bring.” It was the blue and green photograph of Serenitas from my office wall, now worn and creased from the travel.

“Thank you.” I toyed with the roll.

“What went wrong, Charlie? Do you know?”

“Aye, well you might ask. Well, they searched the planet’s surface and found nothing that might have done in the dome’s glass panels, but the dome had blown out just the same and people began fearing for the ships, thinking that the host was suddenly in among us—”

“That’s not what I meant, Charlie.” He looked at me blankly.

“Ah,” he said at last. “I see. What happened before.” He stroked the arm of his chair, a man accustomed to holding a cane.

“Eddie, back on Earth we inherited a troubled civilization, and we tried to run. You can’t do that, you know. For better or worse it was ours, but off we went just the same, dragging it along, killing and thieving on the way, and now the piper’s at the door.
He that leadeth into captivity, shall go into captivity; He that killeth with the sword—”

“All right, Charlie, I get your point. But even if this mess is of our own making—”

“No, Eddie. Not of our making. It was handed to us, and we didn’t accept responsibility for it.”

“Okay, fine. But this is different, now. We’ve got intelligent creatures out there with intentions of their own, who have nothing to do with our pasts—or with moral retribution or karma or whatever the hell it is . . . things just went wrong, Charlie. And I don’t know where.”

“Ah, Eddie, Eddie—I love you dearly, but still you don’t see.” He put a hand on my arm and kept it there. “We cheated and we lied, laddie, and we drove desperate men and their weapons into space because of it. We sent robots beyond any sane man’s ken to take whole systems we’d never even been to, not asking so much as a by-your-leave. Don’t take me for an old fool, Eddie. I don’t believe for a minute this has to do with morality.”

I was surprised. “So what were we supposed to do, then, on Earth? What were we supposed to do when there was no way
to
accept the lives we were given?”

“Ah, but there always is, you see. You might not like it, but it’s there.
And there’s no changing it, or bargaining with it, or running away. It might mean everlasting suffering, or no more than a prayer for the dying. But whatever it is, it’s yours. All yours, Eddie, that’s the point. That’s when you’re free, when you accept it all as yours. That’s when the one and only course truly open to you is revealed.

B
ut as much as we might have chosen to accept our lives as they now stood, we had the futures of twelve thousand others to consider, and the eyes of another million watching to see if we would take on the alien fleet in Serenitas, or wait to be destroyed in our own homes with the rest. And so we voted to go—believing, most of us, that the aliens had decided to attack not only a Chinese nuclear weapons station, but a harmless landing dome on the black planet with Pham and me in it, and a farming equipment dome with no one in it at all. The fact that in one case laser-bearing animals of some kind had arrived to cripple indiscriminately every animate and inanimate object in sight, and that in the other, radiation had been focused on our vulnerable glass panels from a great distance, was dismissed as an unknowable subtlety of alien strategy.

And yet, I thought, who
had
destroyed the domes if not the aliens? Almost certainly not the Chinese, who had put their resources into nuclear technology instead. The Europeans and their particle weapons were long gone. The independents’ attacks were political rather than military, and anonymity did them no good. And no one else had the means, except for the Americans.

Pham didn’t join us on the MI deck for the vote, but remained in her quarters, hostile and drugged. Miller came, but was vague and disoriented. Kip fidgeted and Peters quoted Shakespeare. Polaski waited indulgently through it all, smart enough to keep quiet. In the end Chan and Elliot voted to go, as did Susan Perris, the medic, whom I’d asked to be present. And somewhere overhead, a spider drone voted loudly and repeatedly to stay, until Chan called it down for a talk.

The only real argument, as it turned out, was over how fast to get there. Polaski wanted to burn fuel and race for the torus under heavy thrust, while others—especially Chan and Perris—urged a months-long orbital drift for the sake of children who’d been removed from the weightless can.

“They can catch up later,” said Polaski.

“Guarded by whom in the meantime?” Chan had lost all patience with Polaski.

“Well, bring them along, then. I’ve got to believe they can handle at least a G or two like normal people.”

“They’re perfectly normal people!”

“Well, all right, fine. So some of them don’t make it. It’s not as though they’re doing us a lot of good.”

Kip was becoming increasingly agitated. He tugged at something in his hand with abrupt, jerky movements, and turned his head this way and that, staring at the walls until I began to worry that he was ill. I asked Susan Per-ris if there was something we should do. She looked at me disbelievingly

“He’s angry, Mr. Torres.”

I looked at Kip, at his slender form and his smooth, ebony face. He had on his short pants and his loose white shirt, and was lost in the big acceleration seat. I found myself surprised at the idea of him being angry.

In the end I reminded Polaski about accumulated strain on the ships because of the new cannon in their bows, so we agreed on a low, one-half -G thrust. We issued the orders and the fleet began its turn. FleetSys informed the torus of our approach, then began the painstaking maneuver of stretching the fleet into a quarter-million-mile-long line: high-G crews in the van with Marines and fast cannon behind them, followed by the capital ships, the children, and the remaining surface assault troops holding the rear.

After that day, Kip avoided Polaski entirely and spent more and more time with me.

D
arkness . . . almost no weight. Thin sheets and cool air, Chan’s skin against mine. Soft thighs, warm lips on my neck.

“I think I’m afraid,” I said to her.

“I know,” she said. Lips against my eyelids.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come. Maybe we should have stayed on Earth”

“I love you, Eddie. I want you to know that.”

The ship hummed beneath us and the night slid past outside, never again to turn to day.

C
oming up on two-G pass-point, Mr. Torres.”

“Very well, Mr. Plath.”