A Grey Moon Over China (45 page)

When he reached his six-G point, Simon Plath in the forward-most gunship would be committed. Our own ship was well back in the fleet, so at the same moment that Plath was committed we would still have the option to abort at only about three Gs. Nevertheless, the moment of his commitment was the moment when all of the ships would achieve final velocityrelative
to the torus and cut their engines, so we needed to keep abreast of his position at all times.

More desultory reports trickled in from the fleet, while those of us on the MI deck fiddled uselessly with our equipment, the actual preparations already having been made again and again during the days past. On the big overhead screen the torus began to take on definition, the size of a giant moon now, pale in the weak light from Holzstein’s Star behind us.

The MI deck was dreary and cluttered and filled with stale air. The equipment was balky and in poor repair, grimy from disuse. The open grating underfoot was clogged with empty coffee balloons and Polaski’s paper airplanes. Chan had long ago given up trying to keep the trash from building up in the fleet MI’s ventilators underneath.

I checked the screen again and swiveled away from the console, pushing my headset to one side. Anne Miller was resting in the seat behind me, heavily sedated and trying to keep her eyes open. A short time ago she had suddenly begun talking about the drones and about Madhu Patel, although for no reason that I could tell. I thought that our approach to Serenitas had probably brought it on.

“You started to tell me again, Anne, about how Madhu tried to keep you from building fighting machines. Why? What did he think you were going to do?”

“No, he didn’t. He made me think about him being hurt by them, is all. He was very clever.” Her eyes drifted closed.

“He couldn’t walk very well,” she said finally. “You could hear him clumping and dragging along from a long ways away. That was nice.”

I looked at Susan Perris nearby, but she just shrugged and shook her head. She couldn’t hear us from where she sat.

“But the idea of Madhu being hurt didn’t mean much after he died, did it?” I asked. “All of that would have changed?”

She looked at me vaguely. “Well, yes. I needed to protect us.”

“From the possibility of aliens, you mean. After he died.”

She looked puzzled, but then she nodded. “Yes, aliens.” Minutes trickled by without her speaking again, her eyes on the image of the pale circle growing in the darkness ahead of us.

“China moon,” she said, still staring at it.

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what Madhu said, when he visited me at the Lake. ‘China moon.’ Before the war. We used to go for rides at dawn, when it was cool, and once there was a full moon setting over the Sierra. He said it looked like porcelain. ‘It’s a china moon over China Lake,’ he said. But he was glad it was setting, he said, not rising. I remember, because that was the day the Pacific War began.”

Simon Plath’s voice crackled in my headset. “Three-G pass-point. Pretty good shape up here—all ready for our little friends.”

Elliot hunted through the system for the freefall checklist, while Chan blinked at her screens and rubbed her eyes. Next to Pham’s and Miller’s empty seats, under a drooping mass of exposed cables, Peters and Kip sat by the communications console. Polaski sprawled to my right with an overlay marker in his hand, drawing little creatures of some kind on his screens. I turned back to Miller.

“Is that why you changed your instructions to the drones, Anne? Because Madhu was gone?”

“I suppose.”

“Finishing work you’d wanted to do at China Lake? Arming them so much that they drew the wrath of these aliens?”

She tensed. “It
should
have worked! This is
exactly
what they were for!” She gripped the armrest. Perris motioned for me to cut it out.

“Five-G pass-point, Mr. Torres,” came Plath’s voice, “if you concur. One-way tunnel to serenity, here we come . . . at least they can’t see us coming, eh? We’ll just pop up somewhere in their backyards like gophers.”

Chan nodded and pointed at her screen. My own read 02.00 SGF PASSPOINT +00:01:14. Our ship was into the final approach, although we could still quit at about two Gs—three Gs more gently than Plath in the lead.

“We concur, Mr. Plath. We’re on the clock now, no need for further call-outs. Good luck.” The great, pale grey torus grew on our screen, with the curving line of our ships disappearing up toward the maw of the terrific device.

“What’s he mean, ‘pop up like gophers?’ ” said Peters. “Surely they’re watching the torus from that big fleet of theirs.”

“No, Charlie, they can only see the torus at
Serenitas.
Each tunnel is just one-way, remember. We’ll pop out at some unpredictable spot in Serenitas System, somewhere unrelated to their own torus, and unrelated to wherever the last set of ships appeared.”

Perris was behind me doing something with Miller, while Elliot reached out to get her to sit back down. He passed out the space-sickness vacuum bags.

Overhead, the sight of the slender thread of ships disappearing up toward the torus was mesmerizing. Elliot tapped his pencil against my screen.

“Torres.”

“Right. Okay, here we go. Ship’s drones secured.”

“Done,” said Chan.

“Hey Torres,” said a voice from a speaker.

“Hurry it up, Rosler, what is it?”

“Take it easy. You’ve got a message coming in.”

Peters at the communications console was ignoring the flashing light as he methodically unfolded his sickness bag. He was already pale and beginning to sweat with anticipation. The incoming signal was being recorded by the MI, a communication sent from somewhere in the system behind us where the five- or ten-minute lag would make conversation impossible.

“Forty seconds to freefall and fleet commit.”

“Okay. Fluids and pumps.” We’d listen to the message later.

“Done.”

“Quarters and—”

“
Oh my God, get
—” Plath, screaming in my headphones, voice choked off in mid-sentence.

“Jesus Christ, Torres!” shouted Elliot. Peters was struggling to get out of his seat, trapped by his harness.

“Abort, abort!”
Chan sat frozen at her keys, staring in horror at the big screen.

“Abort!” I shouted, not understanding why but feeling the rush of adrenaline. My headset came alive with voices, and finally I looked up at the screen, while at the same time a confused memory shouted at me along with the other voices. Having called for the abort, something else was supposed to be happening—and it wasn’t.

Sirens. 03.00 SGF PASSPOINT -00:00:05. STAND BY FOR ZERO THRUST. I stared at the overhead screen.
Simon says, Simon says.

“FleetSys,
abort!”

The screen was still filled with the great, grayish torus, with our slender line of ships still threading up toward its center. But across the expanse of the torus there was now a field of black—an impossible number of odd, glistening black shapes blocking our way.

I was falling. Then just as suddenly I was slammed against the side of the seat as our ship’s jets fired to pivot us sideways. The view on the screen slid to one side and snapped to a new camera. Our own fleet’s ships in the far distance had also turned side-on to the torus and had sprouted hundred-mile-long lances of flame. They began to accelerate out of the way at full thrust. The ships nearer to us accelerated less harshly, having more time, and soon there was a curving line of ships arcing away from our course, away from the tremendous black fleet in our way.

“No!
My God, what are they
doing?”

At first it looked like flashes from the sun glinting off our farthest ships. But then the ships were gone, disappearing like sparks in the night, flaring briefly against the round grey circle behind them.

Miller spoke.

“Again,” was all she said, then our seats slammed into us as the engine reignited and tried to drive us clear of the approaching torus.

Faint shafts of light lanced out from the noses of our distant gunships, but the beams were useless unless they could turn again to face the attacking fleet—and that they couldn’t afford to do.

“Turn
and face
them!” shouted Polaski. “Plath! All of you! Bring those cannon to bear! That’s what we
built
them for!”

“Plath’s dead,” said Chan. She was straining forward against the weight and counting something on her screen.

“They
can’t
turn, Polaski,” I said. “They’ll ram the torus.”

“Well, they can take out some fucking enemy ships on the way!”

I dragged my own mike down and keyed the armrest. “Disregard,” I said, and pushed the mike away. “That’s insane, Polaski—sacrificing ships against unbeatable odds. Save them for later.”

But some of the gunships had already begun to pivot back toward the attackers with their weapons lit. Every one of them flared and winked out before it could even finish the turn.

Our own ship began to shake. I keyed the mike again. “All vessels, best escape thrust. Gunships only: one flight of missiles each, spread your targeting specs.” We needed to know what would get through and what wouldn’t.

“Damn it, Torres!” hissed Polaski. “At least we can turn and use these cannon we’ve got back here on the dick-ships! We’ve still got time! Who the hell’s side are you on, anyway?”

“No,” said Chan. “You so much as twitch one of these big cannon and they’ll take out all of the capital ships instantly. You’re not paying attention.”

A vibration ran the length of our ship, then the MI deck began to shake from side to side; with the heavy cannon resting in the nose, six hundred feet above the engine, the slender ship was now oscillating at the center. With an ominous rending of metal, a piece of equipment above us ripped lose, and a moment later a spider drone burst from overhead like a gunshot and crashed through the deck, powered by our tremendous acceleration. The noise from the shaking was louder, and my arm was smashing from side to side; I couldn’t get a grip on the controls.

“Elliot!” I said. I didn’t know if I he could hear me. “More thrust! Can you reach? More thrust!”

“You’re crazy!”

“Yes, more! Anything, any change—break the resonance, damn it!”

His flailing hand smashed into his keys and got a grip. But in that instant we heard an awful sound, a sound that became more and more
terrible as we understood its implications. It sounded like an artillery piece at close quarters—a powerful explosion, sharp and clean amidst the roaring chaos.

It was the sound of an explosive charge slamming home a between-decks seal—the heavy guillotine blade that shot through the lift cables and the ladder and the air ducts, all of them, isolating a breached segment of the ship. It had shot home right at the top of the MI deck, between decks thirty-seven and thirty-eight. Somewhere above us, the ship was coming apart.

“
Tuyet!
” Peters had understood first, and was scrabbling at his harness to get free.

Pham was in her 38-deck quarters, on the wrong side of the seal.

I was on my hands and knees, then, trying to crawl across the thrashing grating to the ladder.

Elliot increased the thrust at that moment, sucking me down onto my belly. But the hellish shaking subsided. Something overhead pulled loose due to the added weight and smashed through the grating next to me, then the deck tipped and the lighting flickered uncertainly, finally turning to red.

I got a hand onto a rung of the ladder, trying to think ahead, trying to remember how to override the emergency seal above me.

But I couldn’t do it. It had taken all my strength to crawl to the ladder, and I couldn’t pull myself up it. Not with the weight of three men on my back. Peters was shouting hoarsely behind me, but his words made no sense.

Then suddenly the weight lifted and we were down to two Gs. I pulled myself up the ladder, and Elliot spoke behind me.

“I can give you forty seconds, Torres. After that the ship’s my first priority.”

Peters was next to me, then, pushing an oxygen bottle under my arm. Then I was up against the plate of the seal, staring at a pressure gauge inset into it. 9.6 PSI. I couldn’t remember: Was that the actual pressure on the far side, above the seal, or was it the difference between the pressure on the two sides of the seal, an almost non-existent pressure above it and our own twelve pounds of pressure below?

I grabbed for the red lever inset into the ceiling and tugged. With a light hiss the plate slid open an inch. There was still some pressure above.

But the plate stopped where it was. I stared at it and tried to think, feeling the seconds ticking away.

The lever was a crank handle. The bones in my fingers were grinding into the rung of the severed ladder, straining to hold my weight as I began to crank with all my strength. Air rushed past me and then I was sucked
through, the bottle banging against the metal and the mask catching on the way.

The plate shot home again below me and sealed tight.

I
remember crawling past the privacy panel on 38-deck, wondering why it was so dark, wondering why I was growing faint even when I was breathing, finally remembering my oxygen mask.