A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  I could hear his breathing as he steadied himself. The sound carried through the dry air and echoed back and forth in the corner between the walls. Finally he turned away from the black brick and trudged across the square, in and out of the light with his head down and Pham over his shoulder. Turning off the square by the probe’s assembly building, he reached the makeshift office I kept along the alley, then rolled Pham onto the sofa.

  “Well! Some coffee if we might, there’s a fine idea. I’ll just straighten up a bit.” But behind his nonchalance he was tired. I checked Pham’s pulse, then sat down and watched Peters clean up.

  It was a rough and lopsided little room, but the brick walls were painted with precious white paint, and I’d put in heaters and lights. On the wall above Pham was a painstakingly assembled photograph of the blue and green planet, Serenitas.

  “Poor lass.” Peters poked through my hardcopy books while stealing glances at Pham.

  “Charlie, she’s not ‘poor.’ She’s drugged to the gills.”

  “Aye, I know, poor thing. Such a sweet girl, too, when she sleeps.” He settled into a chair to read.

  “Charlie, you’re talking about a woman who’s said to be slaughtering civilians and carving her initials on her prisoners.”

  “Aye, that’s a terrible business, I know. All this killing’s got to stop, Eddie. This little one here, you know, and Polaski and Anne Miller, and that snake of Satan himself, David Rosler . . . all of them.” He turned the page.

  “Miller? Anne Miller’s sitting in the North Tower mixing bat’s dung and mumbling incantations for the drones to return. I wouldn’t say she’s killing anybody, Charlie.”

  Peters shut the book and looked at me as though over reading glasses. “You aren’t listening to me, laddie. Polaski’s taken children and made machines out of them, and Anne’s taken machines and made humans out of them, and they’re both thinking that that’s all human beings are. And in their own little ways they’re filling up the worlds with the dead.”

  Pham’s eyes were open. She was watching me without expression, the way she had so often through the years. I watched her back for a while, wondering at the depth of that look. Without moving a muscle, without shifting her eyes or blinking, it was nevertheless a seduction, a moist, hypnotic beckoning to something deep inside of me. Like a reptile rippling the surface of a muddy pond.

  But there was something new in her face now. In the tension around her eyes and mouth there was a ghost of uncertainty, a shadow of weariness and pain. Vulnerability.

  She pushed herself upright and sat forward on the sofa, working her head from side to side.

  “Ah,” said Peters, “I see you’re awake. Come, rest, I’ll get you some water. How do you feel?” He turned and went off to rummage in a box while Pham ignored him, dropping her eyes to the floor with a flicker of irritation. “Here, here’s some water. It’ll make you feel much better.” He leaned down and held out a glass. Still she didn’t look up. “You know, Tuyet, when I was younger—”

  With a flick of her wrist she knocked the glass out of his hand. “Stop it!” She jerked her head around to one side and stared into the corner, eyes blazing and jaw working under the skin, clearly holding herself in check.

  But then she got to her feet and pushed a hand into his chest, forcing him to take a step back.

  “Why you so nice all the time, hah? Why you bring me here, eh, father!” She spat the word and pushed past him, making her way unsteadily to the door and banging through it like a cat escaping into the street. Peters looked down in confusion at the water on his hand, and for an unguarded moment he, too, seemed frail and uncertain.

  I

  caught a ride on a mining tractor to the landing dome on the horizon. The American Carolyn Dorczak was just emerging from a landing transfer trailer when I arrived, stepping down behind the man who was now her superior, the man who managed the big English-speaking colony at West Lowhead on the second planet. Bart Allerton.

  Polaski had carefully assembled our most presentable troops for review, all wearing their heaviest equipment and standing ramrod straight. The visitors, by contrast, were already struggling in the high gravity, nearly twice that of their own planet.

  Our troops were dwarfed by the off-worlders, who were dragging themselves along the rough dirt, coughing from the dust and squinting directly into the setting sun. No other lights had been turned on, giving the scene its intended brutal atmosphere, the cold air and the silence punctuated only by the coughing and the scraping of feet in the gravel. Polaski led the way, holding a swagger stick in his left hand and sweeping the other in lavish gestures, spelling out the troops’ advantages and extolling the third generation’s unparalleled prospects. Carolyn Dorczak slipped away from the entourage and walked tiredly over to stand next to me.

  “Stop looking so serious, Ed—you look like you’ve got a lemon stuck in your throat. Don’t you ever have fun?”

  “Hello, Commander. You look a little worn out yourself. What time is it for you?”

  “Not ‘commander’ anymore, I’m afraid. Just ‘Carolyn.’ ” She pursed her lips. “Nighttime. You?”

  “I don’t know. No one pays much attention to ship’s time anymore. The sunsets are thirty-three hours apart. Sorry about the charade.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” She rubbed her arms in the cold. “It’ll impress Bart.” She shifted her weight and looked around at the dome. Her pleasant face had changed little since her last visit, the intelligent brown eyes as always belying a pretense of agreeable inattention, the unruly hair still cut close to keep it in line. “So where’s our charming friend, Michael Bolton? The ladies were kind of hoping to say hello—he and his merry band have quite a reputation in the system, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t. They’re all on R and R.”

  “Shame.”

  It wasn’t really true: Bolton was on one of H-v’s moons, negotiating with a group that claimed to have contacts among the Europeans.

  Dorczak shrugged her coat closer around her and peered up at the top of the dome. “I know things, Ed.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “I know that there are some very heavy ships inbound from the asteroids, and that you’re scanning them with everything you’ve got—which means you don’t know who they are. We also noticed that all your surface defenses are active. A little nervous, are you?”

  “No one would try to attack us here, Carolyn.”

  She nodded absently. “I also hear you’re going to try to send a probe in after your drones. Which means you don’t know what happened to them, either. For all your brave talk when we entered the system eleven years ago, you’ve never known.”

  I was trying to think of an answer when an aide slipped a note into my hand. I read it and then handed it back, and whispered to the aide for a moment. She left, then a minute later reappeared at the edge of the dome and nodded to us. I turned to Dorczak.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. How’d you like to visit our command post while our ships stop and board those very unidentified vessels?”

  “Entertaining thought. And?”

  “And you tell me if there’s anyone else in the system who thinks we’re sending a probe.”

  “Okay.”

  I caught the aide’s eye and nodded toward a tractor sitting inside the nearest airlock. “Let’s slip out this way—Polaski would shit.”

  We rode in the pressurized cab of the tractor while the aide next to us drove, farther and farther across the frozen black wastes and past the last of the ships and the last of the domes. The sun resting on the horizon dropped suddenly below it and winked out, leaving Dorczak to gasp and grope instinctively for a way to stop the tractor. It was suddenly so dark that we couldn’t see our own hands.

  “Look behind you.” Again she gasped. Stretching for miles behind us was the trail of dust kicked up by our passage, still glowing in the setting sun and suspended against the featureless black, like an electric snake lancing down to
ward us from out of space. The driver illuminated a direction finder on the dash.

  I was sure that Dorczak hadn’t noticed a slender pillar of flame rising upward from the horizon behind us, but I had.

  “Blacked out?” I asked the aide.

  “Yes, sir. You won’t see much till we’re inside the dome.” She was right: After a few minutes the tractor slowed, with nothing more than a dim marker light crawling past above the cab. The tractor rocked to a stop with a humming of motors, then it was buffeted by blasts of air from the sides. We were in the lock tunnel.

  Then we were moving again and turning to the side, only to stop one more time and crawl forward through the darkness bit by bit until we stopped for the last time. Solenoids snapped home next to our heads, and with a sucking sound from the doors the smell of watered-down dirt hit us as the doors slid open.

  Fifty yards off through the darkness, under the center of the dome, was the military operations command, illuminated by dim red light that reflected from a canopy suspended haphazardly above it. We climbed down from the cab and scuffed through the damp dust toward the center, really nothing more than thirty tables and consoles placed on a metal grating. Some of the consoles were partly disemboweled, while exposed bundles of cable snaked across the ground or hung precariously from the canopy’s supports. Pacing impatiently among the rows of glowing consoles was David Rosler, looking as unkempt and temporary as the rest of the complex. The center’s director, a competent ship’s captain named Simon Plath, stood nearer to us at the back, speaking now and then in a low voice.

  Technicians were down on their knees on the far side of the covered area, working quickly behind the farthest row of consoles. Bent over and hurrying back and forth among them, shining with perspiration and stripped down to his t-shirt, was the muscular form of Tyrone Elliot.

  “So this is it,” whispered Dorczak with mock reverence in her voice, “the pulsing nerve center of the mighty empire.”

  The director leaned down next to one of the console controllers, then stood and spoke in a clear voice. “Capture vessels established on default orbit, blacked out and tumbling.”

  He was referring to a trick we had used elsewhere with good success: The capture vessels—high-powered, piloted “dry-docks” that could open their bays to swallow smaller ships—were observing radio silence and cooling down their skins, while they tumbled slowly to mimic orbiting debris.

  “All right,” said Rosler impatiently, standing still now and looking down as he cleaned his glasses on his shirt-tail. “Get boarding parties ready for launch. Second and Third Marines. Colonel Pham commanding.”

  “The colonel’s just down with Fourth Surface Assault, sir.”

  “I’m sure she’s recovered!” snapped Rosler. “Do it.” The director started to answer back, but thought better of it and turned to one of the controllers. I interrupted.

  “Director,” I said, “once the capture vessels have the targets, bring them up against the orbiting station and have the prisoners processed there. This base is closed until we complete other operations.”

  Polaski’s voice rang out from the darkened periphery. “What the fuck is she doing here?” He was getting down from a transport and pointing at Dorczak.

  He walked closer.

  “Go back to your cave, Torres.” He stopped in front of Dorczak.

  “We don’t allow civilians in here, Secretary, and that applies to your friend here, too.”

  Three years ago, during a regular staff meeting, Polaski had forced a vote on the issue of civilians entering secure facilities.

  It was a meeting at which, curiously enough, all of his own military confidants were present, while attendance by the professionals and fleet officers was as light as usual. The meeting also followed weeks of more or less hysterical claims by the military that classified materials were being stolen from the headquarters building.

  “Maybe you should stop making paper airplanes out of them,” Priscilla Bates had said after the meeting opened, “or getting drunk and yelling about them across the urinals.” She sat at my end of the table, facing Polaski and the dour-faced Rosler at the other. Their cronies sat with them, mostly senior officers in the Marines or the base-defense units—Polaski’s palace guard.

  “Maybe we should just keep dick-jockeys and riffraff out of headquarters,” said Carl Bermer, Polaski’s beetle-browed chief aide. He’d forgotten for the moment that dick-jockeys included Rosler. He meant pilots of the long ships, and civilians.

  “All right, enough of that,” said Polaski with an air of benign neutrality. “We need to keep civilians off the military sites, is all. We don’t need a pissing match about it.”

  “It’s not on the agenda,” I said.

  Polaski and Rosler furrowed their brows in unison and studied the papers in front of them.

  “Yes it is.”

  I looked down. It was there, near the bottom. It hadn’t been there on the original notice.

  “You’ve been pretty busy with the probe,” said Polaski, “so maybe you missed it. Maybe you’ve got more to do than you can handle, Torres. It’s understandable.”

  Bates had counted heads, and now she slipped me a piece of paper: VETO?

  I shook my head. Out of context, a vote that appeared to favor lax security at a time of increased attacks would provide Polaski with more ammunition against the professional officer corps. So with some bickering over what was really meant by civilian, the resolution passed.

  There was no good line between military and civilian leadership for the colony, but as the colony’s head and nominal military commander, my own offices were in the military headquarters building. That was where I was the next day when Roddy McKenna called. He’d come to see me, he said, but had been turned away at the door.

  Similar calls came that same day from Anne Miller and Charlie Peters, and even from Chan, who knew more military secrets than the military itself. At the same time, Priscilla Bates and other fleet officers, even engineers and administrators who were hard to construe as military, were saluted sharply at the door and allowed in.

  “The last I bothered to check,” said Chan, “I outrank Polaski. Where does he get off thinking anyone on this base is a civilian, anyway?”

  “It’s not important,” I said. We were making progress on moving the capital ships’ engines to the Serenitas probe at the time, and I didn’t want to get into a fight that might leave them hostage. Instead I moved my project notes to the little office on the alley by the assembly building, and went back and forth as needed.

  I returned to the headquarters building one day about a week later to find Carl Bermer installed at a desk in my office. He had his gun apart on the desk and was cleaning it with a spare shirt I kept in a drawer.

  “You’re in my office,” I said.

  “General Polaski said you wouldn’t mind,” said Bermer.

  “He’s a general now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Give me my shirt.”

  “This is yours?”

  I took the shirt and went to Polaski’s office. Rosler was there with him, his feet up on the side of the desk.

  “Why’s Bermer in my office?” I said.

  “We didn’t think you’d be needing it,” said Polaski.

  “I see. And why did we think that?”

  “We think,” said Rosler, “that you don’t have your eye on the ball.”

  “Which ball is that, Rosler?”

  “The ball.”

  “He means,” said Polaski, “the ball that doesn’t involve taking engines out of our capital ships. If you want to finish your little project, Torres, be glad you have someplace to work at all. You might keep that in mind.”

  I tossed the shirt onto the desk and leaned down to look into the familiar grey eyes.

  “I have my eye on someplace better than this, Polaski. That’s why we’re here, remember? That’s why I let you come along fifteen years ago. It’s why I made you, Polaski. That’s something y
ou might keep in mind.”

  “No, Torres, it’s me that’s going to get you where you want to go. But I have my eye on the realities, not the fantasy. You, on the other hand, are becoming a liability.”

  “Forget it, Polaski. The only reality you care about is putting a gun to the system’s head.”

  He picked up the shirt and dropped it in a waste bucket by his chair. “Well, you made me, remember?”

  “Polaski, if we ever get to Serenitas, you’ll be disappointed as hell.”

  His grey eyes studied mine for a moment.

  “So will you, Torres. So will you.”

  N

  ow Polaski was standing in front of Dorczak in the operations dome, waiting for her to turn away and leave. Dorczak ignored him and turned instead to the director, who was still watching us.

  “Hello, Simon. Nice to see you again.”

  “Commander.” A smile flickered across Simon Plath’s face. He avoided looking at Polaski.

  Into the silence that followed came the scuff of feet from Elliot and his people, still working as fast as they could with their flashlights in the dark. They were following cables out to the edge of the dome where they led across the surface to the big ships and the fleet MI. Polaski turned abruptly to the director.

  “Make this a full exercise, Plath. Five Gs.” He stalked off toward Rosler. A surprised oath came from the controllers, then another voice cut them off.

  “Incoming identified, Mr. Plath. Two vessels, IS-20 types, modified. Still not braking.”

  A woman at a table near us put down a phone. “Intelligence estimate, sir. Independent Mining Coalition ships. Ordinance unknown. Probably hoping to embarrass us on our own doorstep. Possibly to discredit us with Pikes Mountain Company.” Next to me, Dorczak nodded her agreement.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Rosler,” said Plath smoothly, “five Gs seems unnecessarily—”

  “Do it!”

  Plath frowned and turned away. “Very well. CV Telemetry—upload five Gs and additional crew warnings. Also log a command with both capture vehicles: As soon as they come back up live, I want visuals all the way in. Bring the visuals up on monitors six and eight.”