A Grey Moon Over China (58 page)

Pham posted a guard in Trinity Square around the vehicle assembly building, where most of the civilians waited. Radios crackled in tense conversation with the ships in orbit. Elliot and the others on the ships were trying to come up with a way to get more shuttles down to us, even while more and more drone ships approached. Soldiers on the ground eyed the horizon or the black sky overhead, and held their weapons in sweating hands and shrugged to shift the oxygen tanks on their backs to get more comfortable.

Bolton posted a guard in Miller’s square, where Rosler had died, then watched doubtfully as I approached the drone in its cage. Bolton carried a grenade launcher on his back, but he still wore his shorts and t-shirt, and still carried the walking stick in one hand. He swung the tip against his calf over and over. Peters stood next to him, leaning on his cane and ignoring everyone’s advice to get under cover.

In its nine months in the square the drone hadn’t moved, nor had it made any sound through the speaker next to the cage. At least—we knew—it hadn’t sent any messages to the other drones in all that time, either; once the shielding had been put into place it had never been turned off, even briefly, for fear that the drone might have picked up too much information about the base.

“I don’t wholly approve, Torres,” said Bolton. “Your plan makes me a little apprehensive, if the truth were known. I don’t imagine this fellow’s even aware there
is
a password, and I certainly don’t think it would give it up if it were. Personally I’d rather take a chance and slip out on a shuttle, and just go home.”

“Home, Bolton?”

“Um . . . yes. As you know.”

I’d loaded the drones’ communications codes into our transmitters one last time, and now, while the drone ships waited on the horizon and still others approached from space, I set the metal case with the codes down at my side and held the terminal in the other hand. I spoke toward the cage.

“These are the communications codes that control your species. They are what your ships have come to this planet to look for, but your friends
do not know where they are. If you will tell me the password that belongs to these codes, I will open your communications.”

“Yes,” said the drone from its speaker.

“Well,” said Bolton behind me. “You’ve been forgiven your little deceits regarding the fissures, it seems.”

I glanced at the sky. The drone remained silent.

“Well?” I said.

“You first,” it said.

The mutual leaking of military information
, Penderson had said,
is a learned art
. The drone remained motionless in its shadows, hidden from the sun.

“No,” I said.

Silence.

At least the drone seemed to know the password—an important step, because this was our last chance to learn it. I felt the pressure of Bolton and the others watching.

“When I open your communications,” I said to the drone, “then you will say the password.” A compromise.

“Yes,” it said.

I looked back at Bolton and Peters. My hand was sweating on the handle of the terminal. Bolton glanced restlessly around at his troops. Peters looked mostly confused, with the lines on his old face deepened with his frowning.

“All right,” I said, turning back to the drone. I reached for the switch and held it on. Then I straightened up and got ready to enter the password into the terminal. Once in, the broadcast disabling the drones would follow in seconds.

Nothing happened.

“Say the password,” I said.

Still nothing.

The drone remained silent.
Deceit, too
, Penderson had said,
is a learned art
. The seconds crawled by, and turned into minutes. Bolton’s stick tapped like a metronome against his calf.

“I’m afraid you’ve been hoisted with your own petard, Torres,” he said. “Come on, give it up.”

A radio crackled as tense voices came in from the distance.

“Another minute,” I said. My fingers twitched on the terminal’s keys. I stared at the speaker, willing it to make a sound. My ears popped, once and then again, but I paid no attention.

The minute passed. “Torres,” said Bolton, his voice firmer now, “look down.” I pulled my eyes away from the speaker and looked at the slate-black ground. A layer of dust had risen up and was drifting eastward.

I set the terminal down gently and groped for the handle of the codes case, unable to take my eyes off the sight at my feet.

“How long?” I said. “How long have we got?”

“From a small breach like that?” said Bolton. “We may be all right for days, if the converters stay intact. I’m more concerned with what’s coming in through that breach. Let’s go now, start backing out. Eyes sharp.” He unslung his launcher, then something small and dark zigzagged through the air, too quick to follow.

“Wait,” I said.

Bolton armed the launcher.

“Now
, Torres! We’ve risked our necks for you long enough. Now
move!”
I backed away reluctantly, unable to give up on the password.

We’d turned toward the assembly building, northward, when a ripping sound began close by. The air filled with smoke, then Peters shouted. A line of flame was eating its way across the wall toward him.

Bolton moved his launcher and fired down the alley. With a
crump
and a rumbling concussion the flame went out. Someone backed into me. I fought to keep my grip on the case.

A dozen drones appeared at the end of the alley leading the other way, to the south. They were thicker and squatter than the one in the cage, and they wandered back and forth without apparent purpose, back and forth past the far entrance to the alley. Bolton fired again.

“All right, back it up. North, all of you. Torres, get a hold of Peters there and run like the devil!”

“South!” shouted another. “They’re coming up from the south, too!” Tiny shapes flitted through the air.

“Get away—”

Someone fell as lances of blue flame shot into the square from the south. I grabbed Peters’ arm and shook him out of his confusion, then the wall next to us exploded and crumbled. Peters’ arm jerked in my hand and he stumbled. In the next instant Bolton sent us flying while something crashed to the ground where we’d been standing.

Peters dropped to his knees and groped for his cane. “Keep going,” he said. He couldn’t breathe properly. “Take your case and go.” He looked back at Bolton. “I’ll catch you up—oh Lord, laddie, no!”

He’d started to get up, but now seemed to fall again. He was bent over, clawing at a section of wall that had collapsed, barely visible under the layer of oily smoke. An arm stuck out from under the wall, just visible where the smoke parted, and a head of sandy hair. A walking stick.

“Hold up!” I shouted through the haze over the square. “We need
medics!” The roar of flames and the
crump
of grenades answered out of the smoke, but no voices.

“Go,” said Bolton, in a faint and unfamiliar voice.

Peters and I tried to lift the section of wall.

“No,” said Bolton. “Torres, don’t let him—”

Something darted past, and flames hissed in the rubble nearby. Peters wiped away the blood on Bolton’s face.

It was a terrible face now, dark and contorted. The tendons stood out from the flesh as he tried to turn and see Peters.

“Colwyn,” he said, or something that sounded like it. But his words were lost as more blood began to flow. He looked wildly around him for a moment, his hand groping for Peters’, scrabbling in the dust like a claw. Then finally he lifted that awful, straining face upward, and there it remained.

Peters and I stared down at it, then backed away into the smoke, away from the heat. We lost sight of him as a new line of flame etched its way across the wall toward where he lay.

I stumbled into the alley leading north, one hand around Peters and the other on the case, shouting over my shoulder into the smoke behind us. “It’s clear this way!” I said.

But it wasn’t. Like rats sniffing along a sewer, sturdy-looking, charcoal-colored drones were approaching through the passage ahead of us. They were low to the ground and broad-backed, clearly higher-gravity models than before—either because of their base on the triply-heavy H-vi, or because earlier visitors to the black planet had recommended a sturdier design for the next attack. I eased the case around behind Peters’ bent back, not knowing whether that was what they had come for—whether the drone in his cage had understood my message and described it. Peters stopped and leaned against the wall, unable to go on. Voices came from close behind us.

The drones moved toward us with a sort of elegant, fluid movement. They carried a variety of odd, compact devices in the hands extending from their backs. They must have had a policy of not incorporating their weapons into their own design, so that the weapons could be upgraded more often than the rest. In either case, it was a design and manufacturing cycle that was frighteningly short, even compared to the speed that manufacturing MI had reached on Earth.

A pair of shadows flickered through the air. One of them froze in front of us, a tiny vertical cylinder with a ring of grappling claws around its base. A gentle hissing sound—and whirlpools in the dust below it—indicated rockets or fans inside. The other one flitted on toward the commandos behind us. Watchers.

The drones up the alley ignored us. My ears popped again as pressure in the dome dropped, then suddenly an explosion lifted several of the drones into the air. Their shapes distorted wildly as they slammed into the nearby walls, but didn’t rupture, as though sheathed in nanoskin. The tiny flying drone in front of us shot back up the alley toward the source of the grenade, then an instant later the remaining drones in front lit their burners even as they scrambled back to their feet.

Cries of pain and exploding masonry came from behind us. In front, between us and the vehicle assembly building, all of the headless drones, even the damaged ones, had remained upright during the grenade’s explosion, stabilized by gyros, presumably. They had also fired their one, lethally accurate shot through clouds of blinding and burningly hot gas—the flying scouts were sighting for them.

“Go on, Eddie, get yourself back,” said Peters. “You with your box there. Perhaps they’ll let me draw them on while you slip through.” Peters sank to his knees and stifled a hoarse cough as the surviving drones wandered up the alley toward us.

“No,” I said. I pulled him to his feet as a drone brushed against my leg. It paid us no attention.

Larger scouts flew into the alley ahead of us and clamped themselves onto their immobilized fellows, then seconds later the alley was clear. The surviving drones walked off into the smoke and flames behind us.

P
ham was the last one into the big vehicle assembly building. I pushed in just before her, dragging Peters past the crowds to the stairs, while she stood in the doorway pulling in the last of the commandos.

“Quick, quick! Inside! All you do good, but next time motion-guided, yah? Set shooters now—we go after little see-bugs next time, okay? Then we blow smoke, doggies don’t see too good. Hey! You hurry up, okay? You—Tight-Buns! Move ass, maybe I let you kiss me what you think? Muzzles down—better you kill kids than you kill dome, hah?”

She slammed and bolted the door and I kicked the codes case in under the stairs, out of sight. I shifted Peters’ weight and she joined me to help. She was still barefooted.

“Father Charlie!” she said, suddenly realizing he was there, “you hurt bad!” We got him up the clattering stairs and eased him down against the wall at the edge of the mezzanine grating, where he closed his eyes.

“Michael’s dead, lass,” he said to her.

“No! You don’t say that!”

“Aye. Saved our wretched little lives, he did, waiting out that lying bastard in its cage.”

Pham turned to look at me, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. I looked away, and she knelt down next to Peters and pressed her hand against his side.

Peters gasped. “Aye, that’s it, there. Took a bit o’ the wall, I’m afraid. I’ll be all right, though, lass, if you’ll not be doing that again. Don’t mind me.”

The building’s electric lights flickered and died, then came back on for a minute before dying out altogether. That left only the sunlight filtering through the windows, twisting with shadows as smoke rolled past.

A powerful baritone voice spoke on the floor below. “Give us room, please. We need some light, here, if you would move aside, please.”

The vehicle assembly building was the one the Serenitas Probe had been launched from. It rose all the way to the dome, where it had its own retractable glass roof, a bright circle of sky high above us. The sun stood directly above it, and so shone down in a vertical shaft onto the floor below. Medics there tried to make room for a stretcher, which bore a woman with a white robe draped across her swollen belly. Drip bottles and monitors hung from the rail of the stretcher. Her hair was singed and her face bruised, injuries she’d apparently sustained during the attack.

A shrill chirping came from one of the monitors, then stopped with the slap of a switch. “I’m losing her again,” said one of the medics. “She can’t take any more moving around.”