A Grey Moon Over China (9 page)

But the military needed drones, and drones meant effective intelligence. Thus that superlative mystery, the decision-making rules behind what they called “EI,” had become China Lake’s great project.

Just the same, when I left after three difficult weeks, I believed we would never build a single drone. We had neither the equipment nor the skills.

And yet, I thought, if only we could—because in the files I’d found a destination: Holzstein’s Star, a small, cool G-type known to have planets, with
no fewer than three of them livable—planets where forests could be made to grow, planets with endless amounts of land. And barely, just barely, within our reach.

T
he pilot ferrying me back to the island said something as we crossed the equator. I shook off a tangle of claustrophobic thoughts and looked at her, not understanding. She pointed out the window.

High in the atmosphere, tracing the line of the equator, ran a band of grey smoke like a noose around the belly of the world.

She shrugged and looked back at her instruments, but I watched it until it was lost from view.

O
ur camp had been turned into miles of mud and mosquitos. Tents had been set up and torn down, and at the edge of the clearing stood row after row of the cradles sonic diggers were shipped on. A mud-spattered jump-jet stood nearby.

Polaski worked his way across the muddy field toward me, looking very much in command of this stinking piece of ground. He swatted at mosquitos and flicked a new swagger stick against his calf.

He stopped and waited a few paces away, as though I was supposed to say something. When I didn’t, he turned to watch another man picking his way toward us—David Rosler, one of our fellow Shorts from the school. He was compact with soft features and limp black hair across his forehead, with a pair of glasses he alternately wore and held out to the side as though for balance on the rough ground. He wore an old military blouse stained down the front and soaked with sweat under his arms.

When he reached us he brushed his hair away from his face and dug a sleeve into each eye, clutching his glasses. He reached out to shake hands.

“So you’re the one with the brains,” he said. His hand was slack and moist. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Your boss here said he had someone pretty smart sniffing around.”

I glanced at Polaski. “Hello, Rosler.”

He jerked his head at the twelve-seater. “Let’s go.”

Rosler reminded me of a man in the Chicago yards who, in the winter I turned twelve, took my blankets and burned them to warm his hands over. It was a memory like that of my father on the border wires. It made me angry, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Rosler swung down the plane’s steps and glanced over my shoulder. “He with you?”

It was the boy I’d seen near the mess at Bolton’s briefing, nearly a month ago. He was dirty and thin, though now he did have a shirt, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot and looked anxiously from us to the plane. There was a wooden flute in his hand.

“Where the fuck did
he
come from?” said Polaski. “I thought the place was cleared. And what’s he doing out here in the first place?”

“I’ve seen him before,” I said. “By the mess. What’s your name, kid?”

Either he didn’t speak English or didn’t speak at all.

“Hey!” Polaski jabbed him in the stomach with the swagger stick. “The man’s talking to you.”

The boy gripped his stomach and looked at me with eyes wide.

“Jesus fucking
Christ
.” Polaski swung the stick at the boy’s face, then turned and climbed into the jet. “Keep him away from me, Torres.” I’d never seen him so angry, yet I had no idea what it was about.

The boy’s cheek had an ugly gash on it and was bleeding down his chin. I searched in my pockets for a cloth, knowing I didn’t have one, then finally just motioned him into the plane. He moved to the farthest seat aft, stanching the flow of blood with his shirt. I watched him for a minute, then went to sit behind Polaski and Rosler.

The plane was equipped with full gloves, set like boxing gloves onto stubby columns beside the pilot’s seat. They were small enough to be Rosler’s own, meaning that he would unclip them and use them on other equipment. As he maneuvered the plane out of the field it looked like he wasn’t moving a muscle. His typed instructions appeared on the screens while the gloves slid and rotated very slightly to control the plane. We climbed northward.

The boy was looking out the window. He had blue-black skin across fine features, with eyes wide and lips parted as he watched something below. Simple-minded and harmless . . . and familiar?

In the cockpit I watched the position readouts until scarcely twenty minutes after takeoff the latitude reached zero and stayed there. We were hovering at the equator.

“What do you think?” said Polaski.

In the ocean ahead of us lay an eerie sight, a peculiar island rising by itself from the water. Although its complete lack of features or texture and its unnatural regularity made its size difficult to estimate, judging from our altitude it was about six miles long and two wide, running east to west. It was also over a mile high, with sheer, smooth walls curving to a peak like a roof.

The walls were cloaked in a film of smoke, which near the base flickered with fire like the smooth head of a beast rising from the water in flames.
Apparently it had been cut from a much bigger island, with work still under way at the base.

There was something else behind the smoke, though. On the sheer, near end of the island, the vertical eastern end facing us, a darker black showed through off and on, then closed over again, as if it were the beast’s single, veiled eye. This dark area was thousands of feet up the island’s end wall, rectangular, and by itself more than a thousand feet high and nearly twice as wide.

Rosler raised an eyebrow at Polaski. Polaski nodded curtly and Rosler spoke into his headset. Horns blared and the screens turned red, showing splayed hands and the words ALL MANUAL. He pulled his hands out of the gloves and took off his headset, then reached forward and snapped the control column out of its recess.

The world dropped out from under me. The plane fell like a rock as the nose pitched forward, filling the windscreen with ocean. Air screamed past the fuselage for what seemed like much too long a time, until finally the nose started back up, pressing me into the seat. The island grew ever larger in front of us as we rushed toward its base.

When we were half a mile away the nose came all the way up and we raced for the eastern face at breathtaking speed, leaving me to note silently the heart-stopping moment when it was too late to turn aside. The curtain of smoke flew at us and we hurtled into the wall at full speed.

It went dark. There was no sensation at all anymore but the roar of the engines. Then all at once I was wrenched forward in my harness as the jets spun to stop us in midair, then jolted back into the seat as the plane struck ground. The engines roared louder for a moment and then finally spun down.

I unstrapped gingerly and waited for the clunk and hiss of the steps as they folded outward, then stepped down into a still, cold, and moonless night—and immediately had the unsettling sense of having crossed, strapped helplessly into the plane in those last few moments, some terrible threshold, some looking glass at the very edge of reality, some impossible point of no return leading into this utterly black, clammy purgatory—at one and the same time deep in the bowels of the Earth, and yet removed by only seconds from the sunny Pacific we’d just been flying over. I rubbed my arms against the cold and looked back the way we’d come.

No less than three miles beyond the aircraft’s tail was the bright rectangle of the opening we’d flown in through, absurdly far away. As small as it seemed because of the distance, though, the opening was the full height and width of the incomprehensibly big cavern I was now standing in—an immense and foul-smelling tomb with fused, black, vertical sides
that disappeared into the gloom more than a thousand feet above us, a ceiling invisible except for where it formed the razor-sharp upper edge of the distant opening, and the cavern’s obsidian floor, striped to form two of the biggest runways I had ever seen. Even as I watched, like a key turning in the lock, approach and marker lights flickered out on our own runway with an awful finality now that our plane was down—an omen, I was to think later, of how many years it would be before I saw an open sky again. Impossibly high up on the side walls, massive buttressing arches had been left cut out of the rock to support the ceiling, giving an impression I could never shake of a vaulted, black cathedral out of some gothic nightmare. The arches seemed to appear and disappear and sometimes even shift their position in the haze, because of the uncertain light cast into the cavern from the opening as smoke drifted across it.

The boy slipped past me and disappeared into the shadows.

“Back here,” said Polaski. He led me to the nose of the plane.

Set into the bottom of the cavern’s end wall, the end we’d been flying toward, were three tall rectangular openings. Dwarfed within each of the openings, engineering crews were installing hundred-foot-high blast doors and freight elevators into them. The ant-like appearance of the crews suddenly threw the cavern’s true size into perspective. Additional crews, nearly invisible in the darkness because of the distance, worked against the cavern’s side walls under harsh white lights and the flicker of arc welders.

“Heaters,” said Polaski. “We used heaters to fuse the surfaces. The airfield’s almost half a mile wide, and it’s the only way in—but still, it’s nothing. The real quarters and work areas are a half-mile below us. Forty million square feet of manufacturing and launch space down there.”

More space below us than in this entire cavern? This cavern alone would have swallowed downtown Chicago whole, skyscrapers included.

“Launch space?” I said. “Launch space can’t be below us.” In the broad plan we’d sketched out, however many doubts I now had about whether it could ever be done, there were to be two launches. The first, coming within a few years, would be the launch of the ships carrying the drones. Those drone ships would be durable and relatively short, and could be fired off horizontally under terrific acceleration; Polaski was presumably thinking of launching them down the runways we were standing on and out through the opening—hence the opening’s eastern orientation.

But the human ships, which would follow after several more years, would of necessity, as reflected in the old designs, be terrifically tall and slender, and as a consequence so fragile that they could never lie horizontal under gravity. Like conventional rockets, they would be manufactured and launched vertically. So how could their launch chambers be below us?

“Not below us,” said Polaski. “They’re below the waterline, but not under the main body of the island. Just before we flew into the opening, did you see a couple of miles of flat rock go by under the plane, stretching out from the east wall of the island just above the waterline?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, that’s the top of the assembly and launch chamber for the big ships. The roof’s pretty thin.”

“So we just vaporize it when we’re ready to launch?” I said. It was a pretty clever arrangement. “But why not just launch out the top of the island?” I gestured straight up above us.

In answer, Polaski nodded back toward the opening we’d flown through at the end of the runways. “Because looking down from that opening we can defend the roof of the launch chamber and keep it clear. If we were going to go out the top of the island, like you say, all someone would have to do is park a couple of frogs on the roof and there’d be shit we could do about it.”

“Torres!” Elliot was trotting across the runway toward us. He ignored Polaski. “Chan wants to see you. She’s all jumpy like, so maybe you ought to come quick.”

“All right.”

“Hey, Torres,” said Polaski as I walked away. “Do something about the boy.”

I ignored him. When we were out of earshot I stopped Elliot.

“Jesus, Tyrone. All of this in three
weeks
?”

“Yeah, I know. He’s been pushing folks pretty hard.”

“Pushing who? Who the hell are all these people?”

“Well—he brought in most of your Shorts like you planned, but he’s got some other specialists in on TDY, down on the shelf. I don’t know what he’s been telling them.”

“What’s he been telling the Shorts?”

“That we might have a way off-planet. He ain’t exactly let on we’re freelance, though.”

“Jesus. Okay—what shelf?”

“You didn’t see it coming in? Down at the waterline, below the runway mouth. Couple of miles of flat rock. The bays for the big ships are under it—Polaski says right under the airfield opening is the only place we can defend a level area like that. Those bays are big suckers, too.”

“So I heard. He said forty million feet. What’s that, a couple of square miles?”

“Mile and a half. Big enough, though. Man, we sucked smoke out of those damn bays for ten days, and it still ain’t right down there.”

I stopped.

But Elliot spoke before I could. “Listen, Torres. No one liked having you gone. I know we planned this and all, but not this fast. We ain’t got time to think, you know what I mean?”