A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “I can’t help you on that one. What do your people say?”

  She shrugged. “First of all, we’re pretty sure their attack on your base in the Pacific was designed to get control of the drones. They didn’t think they could trust you with them.”

  The idea took me by surprise; we’d always assumed they were after the batteries.

  “Given that they failed,” said Dorczak, “we believe that they’ve now come prepared to do their own terraforming, in order not to be dependent on anyone. We think that’s what the heavy equipment is for.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But why their mad rush for the tunnel?”

  “You said it yourself—they don’t trust the Chinese not to cripple it behind them. In any case, if the Europeans are planning to take care of themselves, then we don’t think they’ll be a factor in where the rest of us put down. Shall we talk to Southern Hem, see if we can nudge them toward the second planet to leave H-III for us?”

  “All right. Who’ve you been dealing with over there?”

  “Sort of a revolving door with them, isn’t it? A fellow named Lal Singh. ‘Your Excellency’ to the likes of you and me.”

  Another screen came to life on our far wall, showing the back of a bronze-colored head plastered with thin, oily hair. After a moment the head whipped around to show the wild, deep-set eyes of His Excellency Lal Singh, who coughed once sharply and then stared first down at his own screen, then at a point somewhere above the camera. A second face, broad and very black, bobbed in and out, trying to insert itself into the picture.

  “So there you are, Madame,” said Singh finally. “And Admiral Torres. You have kept me waiting a very long time.”

  “But you’ve just now come through—” I started, but Dorczak cut me off.

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” she said, “we have. We wanted to be sure you’d had ample time to survey the system for yourselves, so that you might give us your insight on the best landing sites.”

  Singh glared above the screen for several seconds. “Just so,” he said finally, drawing himself up with an air of newly-discovered importance. “Before we announce our findings, however, it would at the very least be amusing to know what your own drones have had to say, Admiral Torres.” He glowered at the tops of our heads.

  “They tell us first of all, Your Excellency, that there is more than enough room for us, and for North America and Commonwealth, and for Southern Hemisphere as well—”

  “I would wish you to note, Gentlemen,” said Singh, either overlooking or dismissing Dorczak’s sex, “that India is first of all a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, and is secondly not at all in the southern hemisphere. So I will assume that the fleets to which you refer are those of the English-Speaking Peoples and of the Great Southern Continents. Very well, then. Tell me, Admiral—where exactly do you intend to settle?” He blinked rapidly several times.

  “We will be happy to discuss—” I said, but Dorczak cut me off again.

  “On the second planet, Excellency.” She spoke with the well-oiled sincerity of a professional minion, leaning forward and folding her hands neatly on the top of her console. “While we feel that the third planet should provide a wealth of very, very good opportunities—”

  “We will be the judges of that, Miss Dorczak. If Holzstein-III is such a fine place, then you should find yourselves very happy there, should you not?” He drew himself up in his seat. “Very well, Admiral. You may inform your subordinates that the people of the Great Southern Continents have claimed the second planet of the Holzstein system, including all of its satellites, drones and sensibilities.”

  Without another word his screen blinked out, and I was left looking into Dorczak’s sincere eyes.

  “Well,” she said sincerely, “it seems that we lesser peoples have been relegated to H-III. Tant pis. See you in orbit, ‘Admiral.’ ”

  Dorczak blinked out, too, and our deck was left quiet except for Pham’s snoring and the hiss of the ventilators.

  “ ‘Sensibilities?’ ” said Elliot.

  “Do you get the feeling,” I said, “that Dorczak’s people are very well organized?”

  “Yes,” said Polaski. “Quite a challenge, isn’t it? All right, listen up. Chan, work with Rosler. Program for a quarter-G while the fleet moves into landing configuration, then back up to 1.2 G for a braking course into near–H-III orbit. In the meantime, Torres and Pham—wake her up, will you, Miller—Torres and Pham and I are taking a shuttle to pay a visit to Bolton. And I don’t want him to know we’re coming.”

  T

  he shuttle stank of burnt insulation and ozone from the power cells. We couldn’t remember how to set its maximum maneuvering thrust, so it smashed us back and forth against the gratings and conduits all the way down along the fleet to Bolton’s ship. Then we forgot that docking while the fleet was under thrust meant that the shuttle would roll its nose upward to place its belly against the ship’s airlock, so without warning it dropped us into the after machinery compartment. By the time we stepped onto Bolton’s immaculately clean commons, we were streaked with oil and graphite.

  Still, throughout the ride I was preoccupied by something entirely different. We’d backed ourselves into a decision to settle on the good planets until word came from the drones, and it was a decision that left me uneasy. I knew that however much of a consensus there was for moving on to Serenitas later, settling down in the meantime would take on a certain inertia—and that inertia, I knew, would be hard to break. It was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. I took Polaski aside, leaving Pham to fidget and stare out the portholes.

  “You don’t give orders without my permission, Polaski,” I said. He raised an eyebrow very slightly. “Especially when we haven’t decided where to land.”

  The eyebrow came back down and interest flickered briefly across his face, before being extinguished.

  “There’s only three planets we can land on,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  He studied me now with no expression at all. “Maybe,” he said, “we should have a temporary base somewhere. Somewhere that’ll toughen up the troops a little? Keep our options open?”

  “All right,” I said. “If you think they need it.”

  A

  dozen of the ship’s complement were lounging in Bolton’s commons when we stepped aboard, all of them from the Special Operations Engineers he’d put together years earlier. Even with the time since they’d last seen combat, they were an alert-looking group, wearing t-shirts and denims or their dark green jumpsuits. Technical manuals and game boards lay on the tables, the pages leafing back and forth in the quarter-G thrust; they were trained to operate free of electronics should it ever be necessary, and it had spilled over into their entertainment. We received a polite scrutiny.

  A bright flicker of light came from a wall-sized screen to one side of the deck. It showed a view of the entire fleet, white against the black of space. The message 7F-FWD REALTIME in the corner indicated it was being taken from the after-most ship of Bolton’s flight, which was also the last ship in the fleet, and the one with the most panoramic view of all the others.

  The fleet was no longer strung out in a line, but with the firing of thousands of attitude jets was reforming into clusters of eight ships each. The ships in each cluster had pulled even with and parallel to one another, arranged like the fence posts of a very tall, circular corral, with about sixty feet separating each ship from the one next to it around the ring. Impossibly delicate-looking trestlework booms had cantilevered out from three places on each hull, reaching out to mate with corresponding receptacles on the next ship clockwise, thus locking each cluster into the corral shape with eight posts. This eight-point configuration was the only way the slender ships could land and remain upright.

  One of the ships in the nearest cluster had what looked like a tick fastened to its side, which I soon realized was our own shuttle, fastened to the airlock next to where we stood.

  The fli
cker of light came again. It wasn’t from the attitude jets, but from arc welders in one of the other clusters.

  “Flight One,” said Bolton from behind us. “Second wing.” He was standing in the center of the commons watching us with his hands behind his back. He still had traces of his schoolboy look about him, but his face had hardened over the past few years, and behind his calm gaze there was an unmistakable air of authority and command. Next to him stood the slight, dark-haired Roscoe Throckmorton, with his sharp nose and quick, ferret’s eyes.

  “It has only seven ships,” said Bolton, gesturing to the screen.

  He was right. It was Hull One-Eight that had collapsed in Earth orbit, and now the seven-ship wing’s couplings were having to be modified.

  The deck shook with a clunk, followed by the whining of a motor. Polaski and I both turned to find its source, but neither Pham nor the others reacted at all.

  Throckmorton nodded pleasantly toward the screen. “We’re on 30-deck,” he said. “Amidships.”

  On the screen, three booms were hinging out from our ship, the center one coming from a point near the shuttle. After watching their progress for a minute, Polaski turned to Bolton.

  “We want to talk to you in private.”

  Bolton’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly, but other than that he showed no reaction. “We are quite private here.”

  Polaski glanced around. “All right,” he said. “Someone’s giving the Europeans information. Information it’s not in our interest for them to have.”

  “Yes,” said Bolton.

  “Someone on this ship.”

  This time Bolton showed no reaction at all, although after a minute he rolled up onto his toes and then slowly let himself back down.

  “Indeed,” he said.

  No one spoke for a time. It seemed as though Bolton was staring through the walls as he thought. Then his focus returned to Polaski, and he relaxed and rocked onto his toes again.

  “You think,” he said, “that it was one of us.”

  A phone blinked. Roscoe Throckmorton picked it up, then after a moment handed it to Bolton. Bolton listened, too, then handed it back. He spoke over his shoulder without taking his eyes off of Polaski.

  “Jamie, our guests’ shuttle is blocking the coupling. Take it for a bit of a ride, would you, until the maneuver is done?”

  A petite blond woman with lively eyes and a quick step slipped into the airlock.

  Then suddenly Bolton’s eyes snapped back to the screen. His movement was so sudden that the rest of us spun to look as well, searching for something out of place. My first thought involved the shuttle, but even as we watched, the shuttle fired its engines normally and moved away.

  It was something else that had caught Bolton’s attention. Sweeping in toward the distant arc welders was a column of odd, powdery light, pulsing faintly and reaching clear across the screen. It was almost like a flaw in the picture, an illusion, hard to keep in focus.

  Then all at once the column of light was in among the arc welders and sweeping across one of the ships. The hull turned a brilliant white where it touched, and suddenly a cloud of gas and debris blossomed outward as the ship disintegrated.

  Unable to digest what was happening, I found myself thinking idly about relative decompression rates, about whether any of the ship’s emergency lift seals had shot home in time.

  But now the strange light had disappeared, and my attention shifted as Bolton’s young pilot fired our shuttle’s engines to their full thrust to clear the ships. Then the column of light was back, much nearer now and closing in on the shuttle. Heat-seeking. Then the shuttle was gone, too, disintegrated.

  We have no defenses, I thought, and started to move. No defenses at all.

  Our ship lurched and threw me to the floor. One of our sister ships glowed, and its three booms, torn loose from our ship, bent and flapped as if in a wind.

  Bolton was shouting.

  “FleetSys, instructions! Maneuvering, Wing One. Rotate, conical separation, three Gs four seconds, one point five indefinite. Execute!”

  He was making for the lift, but the deck tilted and he was sucked down as if pushed by a giant hand. I crashed down on top of him, and for four long seconds I couldn’t breathe as we clawed our way toward the lift.

  The acceleration stopped and we moved to the MI decks, Bolton shouting his staccato instructions to FleetSys all the way.

  The ship tilted again and Bolton shoved me into a seat. His duty officers were working on a positions display, in one corner of which a string of black dots was unraveling against the white background—our own fleet—while thousands of miles away another cluster moved rapidly by.

  In between the two clusters floated a pair of small dots. An indicator arrow moved across the screen toward them, then changed shape and snapped into a rectangle around them. The screen changed to black at that moment, with the two dots now white. The picture zoomed in, re-centering again and again, and soon the dots elongated into the familiar white pencil shapes of ships.

  “Bastards,” said Bolton, and pulled down his microphone. The two ships were large on the screen now, blurry and jittery at the extreme magnification. Targeting markers moved in and bracketed them, labeling them T1 and T2.

  “Prepare for sustained thrust,” said Bolton. “FleetSys, instruction Parthian shot, targets”—he squinted at the screen—“T2 before T1. Four Gs, pulses at maximum. Stand by.” He kicked at his seat-locking lever and shoved his hands into control gloves, then looked swiftly around the deck.

  “Execute.”

  Like a hammer blow the ship slammed into my back and crushed the breath out of me, sending a burning pain up through my neck. My arms were sucked down off the armrests like sacks of sand, while my eyes were ground into the backs of their sockets. I had a sudden sick memory of the centrifuge at the Army school, and as the pain spread out through my back I remembered, too, the blinding, all-consuming pain I’d felt after the first weeks in the crowded refugee boats.

  Bolton’s ship began to vibrate like a plucked string, and I pictured it shattering. My impulse was to reach for the controls and stop the giant engine, but with a feeling of sickening helplessness I understood why Bolton had become so skilled at talking to the fleet MI. I couldn’t move.

  The two targets grew quickly on the screen, then something else sent a chill through me and washed away the other pain. A column of light had sprung from the end of target number two, and it was turning toward us. The American commander, Carolyn Dorczak, had been wrong. The Europeans hadn’t brought terraforming equipment at all, but particle beam weapons.

  The beam swept closer. From the blur of digits on the screen, we had too far to go. “FleetSys,” said Bolton between his teeth. “Instruction spiral execute.”

  A sideways motion was added to the crush of acceleration. White spots spread across my vision. The targets began corkscrewing on the screen; we were accelerating toward them along a spiraling course the weapon couldn’t track. FleetSys’ calculations for the course must have been stunningly complex. Bolton hadn’t been wasting his time.

  “FleetSys broadcast,” said Bolton, and his next words boomed through the ship. “Expect turnover and maximum thrust.”

  Maximum thrust? Surely this was it. Already I felt I couldn’t take the pain any longer, as though my heart would burst from the weight of it. I wanted it to stop, no matter what the cost.

  Now the target ships filled the entire screen. The apparently unarmed ship, target number one, fired its engines and moved away. An instant later the weight vanished and I was falling. My stomach heaved, and the bile sprayed out in a cloud across the deck. We pitched forward drunkenly as the ship rotated end-over-end, the turnover, and then I understood what Bolton was going to do: the Parthian shot. He had programmed the ship to burn an enemy with the ship’s own engine, pulsing its hundred-mile lance of flame toward the other ship at maximum power.

  Our targets swam back into view through the after cameras, then in the
very next instant I was slammed backward by a hammer blow of unimaginable force, and passed out.

  Blackness finally lifted, leaving an awful pain. Then I was slammed into the seat again. I came out of it one more time to find myself choking on my own blood, then the blow came again, and again, and again, until I lost all sense of time, all sense of anything but the pain.

  T

  he darkness lifted for the last time. My sleeve came away from my mouth soaked in blood. Others coughed, or retched, or gasped for breath.

  Across from me sat Polaski, blood all around his eyes, turning slowly to look at the overhead screens.

  The two European ships drifted aimlessly. The robot ship carrying the weapon was intact, although discolored over much of its length. The other ship had been burned through. The ragged edges of its wound glowed red, fed by wisps of oxygen seeping from the ruptured seals. The severed end of the ship drifted nearby, surrounded by a cloud of debris and the twisted, dismembered corpses of the crew.

  Polaski, for one of the few times I’d ever seen him do so, smiled. It was a grotesque thing—his thin lips curling upward in a face turning black from the acceleration, his eyes, red all through and seeping blood across his cheeks, the tendons in his face pulling his mouth into that rictus of a thin, self-satisfied smile.

  He’d been vindicated. His prophesy, self-fulfilling though it might have been regarding the inevitability of conflict, the decisive advantage of acceleration, the high-G training—all of it had come true just as he had said. In these people’s blind rush to escape from Earth, to get away from its hatred and warfare, in their willingness to use whatever means that escape required, they had only brought it along. And Polaski, finding within it fertile ground for yet another victory, misunderstanding completely our purpose, was pleased.