A Grey Moon Over China (61 page)

But she is not looking at it. She is looking the other way, over her shoulder. Looking for the source of the cry. Her eyes move carefully, probing among the shapes on the floor.

Then she is moving.

“Pham,” I say. I want her to return to the case, want her hand to close again around the handle of it and never let it go.

I grasp the railing with both hands and lean as far out as I can.

“Pham, the case. We have to have the case.”

But she doesn’t hear me. I strain forward until I’m well out over the bay, screaming at her inside. But there is nothing I can do, and my despair only grows.

In the center of the floor there is the shape of a man in a white coat. He is on his knees, bent forward. Underneath him, his great, black hand holds a breathing mask, immovable in his dying grip, around the face of the infant.
Tiny hands reach around it, moving one way and then the other, looking for warmth.

Pham takes the man’s arm and tries to pull it away, then glances back at the stairway. The drone has lowered its weapon.

The man’s arm comes free. Pham lifts the infant, and now she is comforting it, holding it close to her.

“Come,” she says. Whether to me or the infant, I do not know, but she is leaving.

The drones on the mezzanine next to me move closer. It is Peters’ body I had touched, there behind them. It is no longer covered by the blanket. I back away down the stairs, careful of my footing, and turn to follow Pham.

Then I stop. I can still make it, I think. I take a step into the room, then stop again as the horror finally fills me with its full force.

The building is dark, a place out of the underworld. Smoke drifts across the corpses while the drones wander among them like sentinels over the dead. And somewhere beyond them, lost in the darkness, is the case. The one that would have brought us past the final hurdle in our journey, the one that would have finally brought us peace. The one for which I now have the password.

Pham waits for me in the doorway. She has opened her suit and placed the infant against her stomach, then closed the material around him. It is as though she means to bear the child again, herself. She holds out a hand to me.

I
pushed the tractor’s throttle all the way forward.

“Damn it, Pham, you could have had the case.”

She adjusted the airflow to her suit. “This more important.”

“More important than a million lives? Our futures were in that case, Pham.”

“Futures, yah. Baby here now.” She reached out to close her door, then pointed. “Look!”

Little Bolton was pumping his six legs across the square as fast as he could, while drones with their weapons moved around behind him. Others wandered toward the airlock tunnel in front of us.

“He’s not going to make it,” I said. “And I can’t stop.” I tapped the throttle lever to make sure it was all the way open. The distance between us and Little Bolton dropped to fifty yards, then forty. His blunt front end was low to the ground, all six legs pumping frantically, kicking up a trail of black dust that rushed eastward toward the breach.

Off to our other side a dim beam glowed briefly from one of the drone’s weapons, aimed in our direction, then suddenly the tractor slued as one of the wheel motors froze up. Pham slammed home the seals on my helmet while I fought the tractor back on course, then just as Little Bolton disappeared under the wheels Pham reached out through her open door. There was a blur of movement and then Pham was dragging the little grasshopper drone into the cab amid a thrashing of legs and a muffled screaming I couldn’t hear through my helmet. Pham pressed the door controls then turned on my suit radios.

“—of little faith! Oh,
ye
of little faith! And you thought I couldn’t jump! ‘Done in a table,’ he says! ‘How did you get up on that roof,’ he says! Oh my, look at me, look at me, ten feet that must have been. Ten feet!”

I turned the wheel, and with a
thump
we rolled over one of the drones. We were into the lock tunnel.

“Eddie, look out!” Pham pointed to the rear-view screen where twin lances of flame slid across the ground toward our tunnel.

“Down!” Something burst into the cab behind us and the air filled with smoke, then in the next instant the tractor hit the outer door of the airlock at full speed with the inner door still open. The tractor staggered for an instant then lifted completely off the ground and shot forward, driven by the wall of air from the dome’s decompression. Debris and equipment and drones shot past us in a cloud of freezing vapor, which turned the surface into a blinding world of white as it sparkled in the dying sun.

I groped for Pham’s helmet to swing home the ring, then pulled it up against my visor so I could see her pressure readings through the mist. They steadied just as our burning motor and the crashing of the debris went silent and the mist dissipated. The tractor slued sideways one last time and rose up on its edge before settling to a stop. For an instant neither of us moved, then I was pulling Little Bolton and Pham down the ladder. She held a hand under the swell of the baby in the front of her suit.

“No, Eddie,” she said, “we go this way. We need an unarmed shuttle.”

Inside the supply shuttle she’d chosen she peeled off her suit while I maneuvered the craft around to the west side of the dome then gradually upward. The plains below were strewn with ships and large areas of bewildering activity. Drone ships came and went, but none paid us attention and only a few moved toward the blown-out dome to see what had happened.

The baby cried as Pham tried to get the tip of a water bottle into his mouth, then finally he was quiet as he sucked.

“We need milk,” said Pham. “Eight hours old, nothing. How long we got?”

“An hour before we reach the ships.”

I called Tyrone Elliot and gave him the news, that I was returning with nothing more than a password, and Pham with an infant. Elliot was to have his medic friend, Susan Perris, prepare milk and a neonatal exam, and beyond that we would talk when we reached the fleet.

The fleet, Elliot told me, the civilian fleet with the can in tow, was moving into a slow orbit toward the now-deserted inner moon of the fifth planet, where it was felt we would be safe in the abandoned Indian mines.

I pushed away the microphone.

“So,” I said to Pham. “What now?”

I felt drained and bitter, scarcely interested in going on. I’d been awake for twenty-six hours with too little to eat, and too many people had died. I’d failed.

Pham had turned all of the heaters and lights on in the back of the shuttle, and now she sat in the center of the glow with the baby wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, held awkwardly against her as he sucked at the water bottle. She adjusted his position off and on, trying to hold his head up with her good arm.

“Why we got to do anything?” she said.

I looked at her.

“What about the drones?”

“Hell with drones. I know, Empty-Eyes got big plan now, I bet, all fleets, everybody new guns, try to kill little dead drones forever. But you not so stupid, hah? Got person inside, maybe. Leave Empty-Eyes alone, Eddie, go someplace nice. West side of Boar River, nice place. Maybe you go there, hah?”

“You’re pretty cheerful.”

“Why not? I got nice company. Anyway, today maybe last day we got, and kid should have good time.”

I thought about that for a while.

“What about the drones?” I said.

“What you care about drones! Drones be here forever, nothing we can do to change it.”

The baby choked. In a panic Pham hit him on the back, only to set off a new round of crying.

The drones, with all their power, I thought, would indeed become a constant of colonized space. There would be nothing that could change it. But it was hard to accept.

“Life full of stupid things,” she said, “and most stupid things we make, hah? Like drones. Nothing we do can change it, so what you care? Get China-Girl, go someplace nice.”

“We still have to do something about the drones, Pham. Are you just going to wish them away?”

“No! Why you got to fight? You no fight, they no fight. Don’t beat head on wall all the time, hah? Maybe smart choice I make in there, leaving box behind. Now pretty soon drones make everybody stop fighting. I think not so much coincidence, Ice-Lady’s little password.”

“What do you mean?”

“If she picked big important number for password like everybody think, then you find it and get all hard-on powerful again, hah? But for one time in her life, Ice-Lady pick something pretty. So instead, we find baby. So, good, finished. Everybody go someplace nice. Some people even taking little farmer-boats through torus to new planet. You go there, too, maybe.”

The thought of taking a ship into the maw of the drones’ forces at the torus again was chilling. Especially in an unarmed trading boat. Our own past experience, together with the vestiges of the terrible destruction that had befallen the Europeans, spoke against traveling into the tunnel before the drones were completely defeated. No matter what prize waited at the other end.

“Eddie?” said Pham.

“Yes.” The infant was quiet on her shoulder. His eyes were almost half open. He had a well-formed face, with olive skin and black hair, and dark eyes. His lips were moist from the water, and were opened slightly where his cheek pressed against Pham’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said.

My mind was still on the tunnel.

“Why?”

“Before,” she said, “when we try to go through tunnel to Serenitas you save my life. I pretty mad, so I not say thank you.”

“Why mad?”

“Yah. You such perfect person, always okay, always important guy, then you almost get killed saving crazy person—”

“You’re not—”

“No, it’s okay. It’s true, I pretty crazy sometimes. Stephanie, she say I got to tell you thank you, but always I say no, later. But now it’s time. So, thank you.”

The baby’s eyes fell closed.

H
ull Zero-Zero floated among the few remaining ships of the civilian fleet, heavily patched from the damage of the year before. Its engines flickered at a meager tenth of a G to save precious fuel and power cells.
Nearby drifted Bolton’s ships, with skeleton crews under the command of Roscoe Throckmorton. And far below us—or behind us—a ring of eight ships in their landing configuration under the command of Priscilla Bates, towed the giant orbital can, home to the orphans and now an orphan itself.

We were on a gentle five-month climb to the fifth planet, where Polaski had set up camp by the abandoned Indian mines. He’d called for a gathering of the powers in the system in order to disclose a stunning discovery he said had been made about the drones, and to implement a new plan of attack that hinged on it.

Among all of those to whom I’d had to break the news of Peters’ and Bolton’s deaths, Kip had surprised me by being the most upset. From that moment on, in fact, he stayed close to me, following me where I went and sleeping nearby, sometimes sitting and watching me for hours with an odd intensity. He became like a shadow to me after a time, and now and then it seemed as though, as he watched me, his face reflected thoughts I was at that very moment having. I would notice that his eyes had filled with tears, only to realize that I had myself been thinking about Charlie Peters’ old face, or recalling the gentle Gaelic rhythms of his voice. Then sometimes I would wonder at an apprehension in Kip’s eyes, only to realize that I’d been thinking again about drifting unarmed through the tunnel to Serenitas, the way Pham had said.

But mostly Kip just watched me, and mostly I just sat and brooded about the lost case and about the password, and about the green and blue planet we could no longer reach. Or about Polaski’s plan.

At first Chan seemed less affected by the news, but after a time it seemed as though she’d finally lost whatever spark had been left in her. She still spent her time working in the children’s quarter of the can, but no longer with any great interest.

Pham, on the other hand, had pretty much disappeared.

Elliot toiled unenthusiastically to keep the fleet running. He spent his spare time alone with Perris, or else in desultory radio conversations with acquaintances around the system.

“I’m leaving the fleet after the conference, Torres,” he told me one day. “Me and Susan. We’re going to try Boar River, helping out on a farm, maybe. Grew up on a farm.” He didn’t look at me as he told me, and I didn’t answer him.

Later that day he was on the MI decks with his feet up and his eyes closed, and his hands behind his head.
Sweet Lord,
he sang,
come and take your angel, lyin’ on the banks of Jordan. . . .

It was Elliot who brought me the news about the torus here in Holzstein’s System.

“They’ve rotated it. The drones. First time in sixteen years it’s pointed anywhere but Serenitas, and now they’ve rotated it and sent more’n six hundred ships through it—some special kind of ship they been building down on our old base.”

“Rotated it where, Tyrone?”

He looked away, and in that moment he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him.