A Grey Moon Over China (55 page)

And it was exhilarating because we had the codes that would stop them.

Through the haze in the square I watched Bolton and Throckmorton lift Pham to her feet and help her out of the square, away from the shadows and into the road that led back through the dome. Her gun lay at Peters’ feet. Peters stood looking down at Rosler’s body, at the rivulets of blood cutting channels in the dust, running in and out of the shadows and making a faint trickling sound through the silence.

Though she had been holding the massive gun in hands that were shaking, and squinting through her own blood and tears as she fired a broadside of steel needles like buckshot in a crowded square, Pham had hit Rosler squarely in the center of his chest. Little of him remained.

I edged through the crowd and pushed my way past Chan, then pulled Elliot away.

“Let’s go.” I got him suited up and then out onto the surface outside the main dome, past the stream of matériel and troop trailers growling through the tunnel to the warships outside.

We opened our face plates in an armored shuttle and lifted off toward the orbiting fleet.

“What the hell are you doing, Torres? Here we are—Rosler’s dead, Pham’s gone and blown her last fuse and ain’t worth a bent nickel anymore, Polaski’s got balls for brains and something bad’s coming down on Boar River with Carolyn gone and all, and now we got aliens an hour out—”

“They’re not aliens,” I said. “They’re the drones.”

“So the alien’s have got drones, too. Right now I don’t—”

“Our own drones.”

“The drones are gone, Torres, dusted in the next system—” “The originals are gone. They were destroyed by the next generation as a matter of course when it cleaned up. These are their offspring, Tyrone, generations later. They advanced faster than even Anne thought possible.”

“Come on, Torres, the drones were on our side. Shit, they’d be out here protecting us.”

“No. They were supposed to protect the planets, not us. Against ‘alien force.’ That’s what they’re doing.”

“Damn it, Torres, you said there ain’t no aliens.”

“We
are
the aliens, Tyrone. They don’t know who we are.”

“Lord, now you’ve went and got strange, too. You, Pham, and Charlie . . .”

“You weren’t in Flight Ops on the island, Tyrone, when the drones were sent up. You didn’t hear what Anne Miller said after we’d lost so many of the drone ships. She said their mission would be intact no matter what—that the only shortages were from losing both ships carrying agriculture and both ships carrying history and the arts. I may have been the only one who heard her, and its significance didn’t register until Harry showed up talking about the drone he found.”

“So who cares if they know history?”

“They didn’t know
anything
about Earth, Tyrone. They didn’t even know it existed. They thought they were born right here in Holzstein’s. So when they saw us coming, the Europeans with those big guns, they ran. When Anne sent her instructions about defending themselves, it never occurred to her that we were the ones they’d defend against. She knew, though, after Harry’s drone.”

“So let’s talk to them,” said Elliot. “Tell them to cool it.”

“We’re going to. We’ll get the communications codes off the ship and then talk to them.”

The fleet swung into view through the strip of windscreen. Our stomachs sagged as I dropped the thrust and rolled the shuttle onto its back to keep our weight on the floor. Elliot leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands inside his helmet, rubbing his temples.

“I knew a fella in Louisiana, once,” he said. “Got so confused he just sat down and died.”

The crippled command ship drifted closer.

“Shit, Torres, I don’t know what’s going on anymore, but it’s time to get
out of all this. Time to go find me someplace warm, and where I don’t weigh so damned much.”

“That’s just it, Tyrone, we’re going to get out. We’ve got control over the aliens now. Think about it—they’ll just stop. They’ll be powerless, and we can move on. Serenitas is sunny and lightweight like you want. Remember what it looks like, Tyrone. Remember what you said when you saw it. ‘Fairweather’ you said. You named it, Tyrone.”

“I don’t know if I believe you anymore, Torres. I just know it’s time to get out.”

We docked and moved into the big ship. It was floating under a light thrust among the deserted repair platforms. We tugged our way up the ladder to the MI decks, where Chan had said the case with the codes had been stowed. Among the trash and the twisted pieces of the grating, difficult to see in the red emergency lighting, we found the slender metal case strapped against one wall. I tripped the buckles and opened the case. Set into its padded bottom were two dull silver shapes, petabyte memory blocks like the ones I’d once stolen. But unlike the oblong pieces of silver that had unleashed this storm a lifetime ago, these held the key to quelling it once and for all.

“I say,” came a voice, “who’s mucking about in my parlor?”

Little Bolton drifted up the ladder and onto the deck. “By Jove, it’s only—” He stopped in the middle of the grating, motionless and quiet. Elliot and I waited.

“I hear something,” said Little Bolton.

“You hear something? Where? On the MI decks?”

“No. I hear something inside.”

Elliot stared at him, then slowly turned to one of the consoles. He fiddled with it until a radar picture came to life on the wall. Hundreds of ships were closing in on us, very close.

“Damn, Torres,” he said, “they’re right overhead.”

“Where are we, Tyrone?”

“Backside, by the cracks. Look at the bottom of the screen. All that clutter’s the trap we’re laying in the fissures. And we’re right in the middle—Jesus, Torres, why’d you pull this stunt about laying a trap, anyway?”

“To keep Polaski busy fighting aliens, Tyrone. To give me time. He and Allerton are up to something.”

“Shit, Torres, that ain’t news. They’re up to fighting and winning. Fighting aliens, colonists, themselves, don’t make no difference. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. We’re in big trouble.”

“Just a minute. Little B., what is it you hear inside?”

“Just . . . rather like voices, like the way I myself talk inside. Except the voices don’t mean anything.”

“Little B., did Anne Miller ever tell you and your friends to pass along everything you heard us talk about?”

“We like Ms. Chan better. She shows us things.”

“But did you tell Ms. Miller?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The little drone squatted in silence.

“I don’t know,” it said at last.

“Come
on
, Torres,” said Elliot. “Let’s move!”

Little Bolton begged to be taken along, and when we finally thrust off from the big ship it was only to find our way blocked completely. Making a deeper black against the darkness, ghostly shapes slid out of space and toward the decoys, down toward the great fissures in the planet’s surface. One of the shapes glided toward us, then all at once our windscreen was filled with the glistening, bronze-colored nose of a strange vessel. It hovered in front of us. My blood turned cold and sweat rose along the back my of neck, and I found myself sliding the metal case off my seat and down onto the deck, as though the ship, like a living thing, could see it and know what it was.

“Torres,” said Elliot.

“Yes.” My mouth was dry.

“Don’t crap in your suit.”

The vessel slid beneath us and out of sight. I was left wondering if it had really been there, if it had really seen us at all. Elliot’s hand shook as he adjusted our view of the planet passing below.

Then the windshield lit up as the thousand-mile-long fissures exploded with heaters and lasers. Drone ships by the hundreds suddenly stood out in stark relief against the inferno as they struggled to escape from the deep rifts, trying to fire on our ships rolling in over the rim at their spine-crushing six Gs.

Other drone ships plunged lower into the flames to attack the decoy buildings at the bottom, while on the surface our ground troops blew the camouflage off their missile batteries and launched at the ships still descending from space. Our own ships down in the rifts spun around to race back out of the fire zone, just before it erupted into a string of sun-white clouds that sent burning drone ships tumbling high above the surface, later to crash to the ground behind the missile crews. More drone ships flew down into the fissures to take their place.

“Fusion,” I said. “We’re using fusion. Courtesy of Bart Allerton. Son of a bitch, we’re killing our own people along with the drones.”

“I wonder if they’re alive,” said Elliot.

“The drones?”

“The ships. I mean, if the aliens are machines—the drones, I mean—then they wouldn’t even think of building ships that need crews, would they? They’d just build big, space-going animals—drones, machines, critters, whatever the fuck I’m talking about. Jesus, Torres,
are
they alive? Is anything alive—are
we
alive? I don’t even know anymore. Holy mother of God, look at that!”

Beams of light slid downward from the invaders. Where the beams sliced into the surface they turned it a blinding white, and moved glowing walls of flame toward our crews. Our own crews’ weapons tried without success to stop them. Hundreds of men and women were about to disappear into the flames. The drones just had too many ships, huge numbers of them that they sacrificed one after the other.

“Good going, Torres,” said Elliot.

The surface went dark. In unison the remaining drone ships sprouted flame from their engines and accelerated away from the fissures. Elliot let out his breath. “Sweet land o’ mercy, Torres. What scared them off, do you think?”

“I don’t think anything did. I think they figured out the deception.”

“You mean they figured out they’d been conned into the cracks?”

“Yes.”

Elliot was quiet for a minute.

“Then I sure as hell hope,” he said, “that they don’t remember who did the conning. Them’s some bad folks to have pissed off at a fella. And you got enough enemies as it is.”

“That shielding’s not on the cage yet, is it?”

“No.”

“Then we’re in trouble.”

The windscreen blazed to life as a giant shape hurtled past. Its lance of flame burned across our shuttle and sent it tumbling. The cabin overheated, suddenly smoking from the corners and stinking of burnt insulation. The windscreen turned a charred black, and we were left to feel our way home, blind and scarcely able to breathe in the smoky air.

T
he
drones?
The aliens are the
drones
? My God, Eddie, how? Why are we being killed by Anne’s drones?
How long have you known?”
Chan wiped her mouth with the back of an unsteady hand.

“Only a few hours, Chan.”

“Why?”

“Well, because Anne thought human minds made them human. She thought they would side with us.”

“Eddie,” said Peters, “they’re trying to kill us.”

“I
know
. The problem is that nowhere in her programming did she actually come out and tell them they weren’t the only ones in the universe. They ended up like she was. That’s what Pham said about her, remember—that she’d isolated herself and convinced herself there was nothing else.”

“Nothing else but what?”

“Nothing but her own mind. She probably sensed there was something out there, something messy and dangerous and human, but it was so alien to her that in the end she was building machines to defend herself from it.”

“That’s a fine irony,” said Peters. “Because in truth it wasn’t humans at all she should have feared, but the weapons. And it’s the weapons the drones are coming after, isn’t it?”

Chan took her cat in her arms, the peculiar grey cat with its green eyes, and scratched it behind the ears. She turned to stare out through the window.

“Yes,” I said. “At least that.”

F
rom the black planet the drone ships fanned out through the Holzstein system. Euphoria over their rout in the fissures faded as they went about their business, indifferent to their losses. The trap we’d set turned out to have had no lasting effect at all, except to anger the colonies even more than before as questions flew about the fusion weapons we’d used.

It also ended my pact with the drone in its cage. We hadn’t replaced the shielding in time, and it had surely learned about the ambush from its fellows. It spoke not another word, no matter how doggedly we tried.

As the weeks passed and the level of fear in the system rose to the breaking point, the colonists began to marshal their forces in preparation for fighting the drones. But every time they did, the drones attacked—blind, methodical, sinking their endless, indifferent forces into the battle. The colonists fought back as best they could, not knowing what else to do. And all the while, as they came to understand what had really happened, they became even angrier.

Even the original news of the existence of aliens hadn’t sent shockwaves through the system as powerful as those from the discovery that they were really our drones. None of us had thought to release the news in a controlled way, so it leaked out through military and commercial channels as soon as I’d informed our commanders.