A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “Inbounds are stable on default orbits. No braking. Three minutes twenty to local horizon.”

  “Twelve seconds to CV ignition on updated profile.”

  The center became silent as we waited, except for the scuffling feet and muttered oaths of Elliot’s people. I watched them for a second and wondered what they were working on. Everything seemed to be running well enough.

  “Three seconds.” We stared at the two blank monitors, then suddenly they flickered to life as the two capture vessels threw off their sheep’s clothing and began transmitting. The pictures at first showed different parts of our planet’s razor-sharp terminator sweeping crazily across the screens as the ships tumbled, but then with a flare of attitude jets the pictures stabilized to show a background of stars. Nothing happened for a moment after that, then suddenly on both screens a bright pair of dots appeared, streaking at tremendous speed from the top of the screen into the distance—the intruding ships entering their orbit around our planet.

  It seemed as if the pair of dots would disappear in the distance completely, but when they were almost gone they seemed to slow to a stop and begin swelling in size, instead, streaking back toward the cameras. In truth, they hadn’t slowed at all, but now the capture vessels were accelerating toward them at a terrific rate, their own increasing speed throwing them into higher and higher orbits to converge with the targets. It was an impressive and graceful sight, and it was hard to remember that behind the cameras, the crews on the CVs were suffering badly under the crushing acceleration.

  Now the targets swelled from dots into identifiable ships rushing toward the cameras. Only seconds had passed, yet now a collision at more than a thousand miles per hour seemed inevitable. Then at the last instant the capture vessels fired their forward-facing solid rockets and the screens turned white.

  When they cleared again, in front of each of the cameras hung one of the small grey Coalition ships, sliding back into the maw of the dry-docks. It had been only nineteen seconds since the capture vessels first fired their engines.

  “I’m impressed,” said Dorczak. “Swallow them whole and take your time smoking out the crews.”

  But at the last instant before being swallowed whole, something squat and heavy separated from one of the ships in a flash of exploding bolts.

  “Bogey drop!”

  “Tracking.”

  “Inbound. One minute forty-three to horizon.”

  “Ballistics, trajectory please.”

  “No, sir, not ballistic. Bogey is correcting.”

  “Guided bogey, folks.”

  “No, belay that, too—Mama’s blind now, inside the CV. We have a smart bogey here, people, smart bogey. ECM . . .”

  At that moment the voice trailed away and the center became quiet. Something was wrong. Then all at once Tyrone Elliot’s voice shot out from behind the lights.

  “Well, why didn’t some motherfucking son of a bitch think of this a year ago?” A crash of tools came from the darkness, then another flashlight flared on and moved away. So that was it: The heavily MI-dependent electronic countermeasures were down. If whatever it was that had separated at the last minute from the attacking ship was indeed steering itself in toward our base, then we needed our ECM capability—the electronic sleight of hand that would blind or mislead it.

  “One minute to horizon.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Elliot,” said Plath, “we appreciate what you’re doing. Surface Defense, from the glimpse we got I’d say we’ve got a detonation device of some kind here, so you can try to shoot it down. Although at that speed, I don’t know. Ranging, what’s its profile going to be when we get line-of-sight?”

  “Range at horizon will be 1,354 miles, bearing 89.2 flat, altitude 224 descending, speed 19,807, time to impact four minutes six.”

  “All right. Scramble any flight-ready ships you can. Get them clear. And let’s not have any yahoos up there playing hero with this thing. It’s too fast—”

  “Belay that,” said Polaski. “I want every armed vessel we’ve got on that thing’s path. I want to see this thing shot down. No one’s turning tail, is that clear?” Plath looked away—Polaski was bypassing him by talking directly to the controllers. And if I interceded against Polaski, Rosler would step in to confirm the order, and I’d have no choice but to take him down a notch in front of his reports.

  “Ten seconds to horizon.” Beyond the farthest row of consoles, Elliot’s people were slamming circuit modules back into the open console bays.

  “Okay,” said a controller, “we’ve got the pop-up . . . there she is, folks, strong radar print. And man, that sucker is moving. Stand by for default POI. Kind of makes you wish we had an atmosphere, doesn’t it? That’d be one crispy critter.”

  “All right, here we go. Can’t do anything about it, but we’re ID’ing the thing’s targeting freqs. Okay, it’s got radar . . . it’s got active IR . . . it’s got a radio altimeter, coming up.”

  “Three minutes thirty to impact.”

  “Default point-of-impact looks like west end, centerline. Farming domes maybe. What do you suppose it is? Radiation bomb?”

  Dorczak had been getting restless, and now she stepped forward and spoke to Plath directly.

  “Excuse me Director, but the machine’s target acquisition frequencies—”

  “Dorczak!” said Rosler. “Stow it. You don’t have any business in here.”

  “Three minutes.” Elliot and two technicians raced across the dirt.

  “Launch Controller,” said Plath evenly, glancing with interest at Dorczak, “you are to disregard the instructions you received earlier and direct all vessels off-range now. They are preventing us from employing static ground defenses.” The launch controller glanced briefly at Rosler and Polaski, then pulled down his microphone as Plath turned back toward Dorczak.

  “Yes, Commander, you were saying—”

  With a crash of metal against metal Elliot and his technicians threw themselves onto the grating and slapped up row after row of circuit breakers. Sixteen years ago he’d been in another control room, light-years away, bringing up another faulty system during a similar attack. How little things had changed.

  “Go, go, go! You’re up!” Screens flickered to life. “Station radar, blue shift! Show him overflight. Now!”

  On the chance that the thing was sniffing its way in along our own outgoing radar signals, we would steadily increase our radar’s frequency in the hope of making it think it was going faster than it was, and about to overfly its target.

  “Two minutes forty. We have visual.”

  “Okay . . . target-aq, we’ve still got time—trail a mouse. Drag him back.”

  This part was trickier. We would pick up the bomb’s own sensing frequencies, then feed back to it slightly altered responses, thus “moving” our base across the landscape toward it. Trailing a mouse. It was slower but more reliable than direct jamming.

  “All right, mouse is moving and rising, all frequencies. Waiting for bogey to correct.”

  “Two minutes twenty.”

  “No correction.”

  Dorczak suddenly took a step forward and spoke in a sharp, clear voice, one I’d seldom heard her use. The center went quiet.

  “If that is a Co ali tion device, Director, then it was built by the Japa nese. If it is a Japa nese device, every target acquisition and navigational frequency it uses is positioned between two stronger dummy frequencies, in the knowledge that McAllister and EDA automatics—which I have reason to believe you are using—will stop scanning at the first frequency they find.”

  The silence stretched out, then Plath spun back toward the room.

  “You heard the woman! Manual scanning across the board!”

  “Son of a bitch, she’s right. Look at that! And there’s another one! And there . . . Jesus, Simon, this is going to take a long time.”

  “One minute fifty.”

  “Jam, sir?”

  “Stand by.” People stole glances at the h
orizon through the glass dome, although the bomb was still more than five hundred miles away. Elliot leaned on a post with his head back, pouring water on his face.

  “One minute ten.” “Stand by on surface units.”

  “Bogey’s correcting, sir! Descending . . . hang on . . . sharp descent! Holding . . . again! And again . . . I think we’ve got her, sir! POI fifty short . . . sixty . . . eighty—”

  Cheering began, but Plath held up a hand and the dome became quiet again. Elliot brought his head back down. Polaski and Rosler turned to look out the side of the dome. Dorczak came back to stand next to me and turned to look, too. Seconds ticked by.

  A rhythmic squeaking came from somewhere in the dome. The lamps under the canopy swung. Then they slowed again and stopped, and Plath let out his breath and sat down on the grating. The bomb had struck.

  Elliot looked at me and bowed.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Dorczak as the cheering started up again, “that it’s time for dinner?”

  “It could be arranged.”

  “You and Kathy? And your priest, if he’s still around? Father Peters? I’ve brought him a little something.”

  F

  or the love of Saint Anne, Carolyn, you shouldn’t have!”

  But there were tears in Peters’ eyes as he turned a bottle of Australian burgundy to catch the dim light in his quarters. “What a lovely thing to do. Come, we’ll share it, just the four of us. How can I ever repay you?”

  “You’ve already repaid me, Father—you’ve let me sit down. Ed here kept me on my feet all afternoon, watching Batman and Robin jack off in front of the help. Excuse me, Father.”

  “No, no,” he said equably, and poured the wine into his precious set of crystal glasses.

  “Charlie called Rosler ‘the snake of Satan’ today,” I said.

  “He’d be flattered,” said Dorczak, eyeing the wine skeptically. Peters had been too polite to sniff the cork.

  “Charlie also called Polaski ‘innocent.’ ”

  “Umm, Eddie,” said Peters distractedly, “you do my eloquence an injustice. Out of context and all.” He stared at the wine in his glass while the rest of us watched him closely. His eyes darted across to meet ours several times.

  “Ah, look at that!” he said finally, still not taking a sip. “The very nectar of Eden. No, what I said was, he’s innocent in a way someone like you could never be. Or the girl, Tuyet.”

  “She’s not a girl, Charlie, she’s a grown woman.”

  “Ah . . . no. I don’t think so. Not yet.”

  “And why are you always saying we’re alike? It makes my skin crawl.”

  “You are alike,” said Chan. She was enjoying herself. “I keep telling you, but you never listen.” She slid a foot along my ankle under the table.

  Dorczak was nodding. “They are, aren’t they?” She sniffed at her glass as inconspicuously as she could. “Moody types with complicated pasts. You just hold yourself back, is all. You’re always trying to pretend there’s no one home.”

  Peters took a delicate sip from his glass through pursed lips, while his eyes roamed around the room as if he weren’t really present.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “This really is quite good,” Peters said with evident relief.

  Dorczak took a cautious sip. “Yes, it is. Though I have to say,” she said, changing the subject again, “I heard altogether too much about innocence from the nuns in school.”

  “Oh? You? Roman Catholic or New American?”

  “Oh, very New American, my family.”

  “Ah, well then. But aye, as you say, sin is what you’ve got, innocence is what you need but can’t have. Although you must keep trying, of course—keeps the Church in business.” He gestured at his glass on the table. “Now that is true innocence.”

  “The wine?” said Dorczak, a bit distractedly.

  “Oh, my lord, no—wine is cloudy with lies, dear woman. Mild-mannered and lovely, but filled with secrets. No, no, not the wine . . .” He smiled a little vacantly at her. “The crystal, Carolyn—the world flows through crystal such as this undeceived. Though, mind you, its clarity comes of being fused in a terrible heat, its imperfections fired away in a hellish crucible. That is the truest innocence, you know, being exhausted utterly of one’s own sin. The most powerful thing in the world.”

  By this point Chan was evidently the only one who was following him. “We don’t see much of that, do we?” she said.

  “Aye, lass, the soul is a shy thing. It’s got to be strong if it’s to become so naked in the world.”

  Dorczak was nodding pleasantly if distantly, sipping at her wine as she looked around the room. Peters finally settled back into his chair with a self-satisfied look and began to tap his fingers gently against his glass, beaming at it. Chan stretched her arms overhead and turned her attention to Dorczak.

  I was watching Dorczak, as well. “We had a deal, Carolyn,” I said.

  “Did we?”

  “You were going to tell me how many people know about the Serenitas probe.” Her eyes lit up despite herself as I confirmed her assumption.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “No one really knows. I was just guessing.” She looked smug despite herself. “I hope I haven’t delayed your plans any.”

  “Oh, no, not at all. In fact, I ordered it launched while I had you in the tractor on the way to the operations center. It’s four million miles away by now.”

  She stared at me for a while, her lips starting to purse and her brown eyes narrowing. Then she threw back her head and laughed. I’d never seen her really laugh before, and it was a good sound, a clean, full-blooded American laugh.

  “You son of a bastard,” she said finally, and sighed. She took a drink and sighed again, and gazed at the tabletop, a distant look in her eyes.

  Chan was watching her. “You haven’t said anything about home, Carolyn. Lowhead. How’s it been?

  “Oh, bad. Worse than before. Too many settlers in their flimsy little ships, not enough land yet to support them. People starting to panic because there’s no way out. Bastards taking charge while everybody else is busy trying to stay alive. Not good.”

  Chan made a face. “Pretty much the same story we get from everywhere, isn’t it? The place is turning into a battleground, everyone armed to the teeth and at everyone else’s throats.”

  Dorczak leaned forward and set her glass on the table. “Kind of apocalyptic, isn’t it?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, how does Revelations go, Father? Humanity loses its way and sinks further into warfare and hatred. Then a terrible host descends from the heavens and destroys all of man’s works in retribution.”

  “Aye. He that killeth with the sword . . . But then there’s one who rises up from among men, remember, with a power so pure that the terrible multitude bows down and lets her pass.”

  “Eddie,” said Chan. “There’s a call for you.”

  I looked around. “How do you know?” “

  I just know.”

  “Hello?” I said, into the room.

  “Mr. Torres? It’s Priscilla Bates, from the can.” The “can” was the orbiting station. I couldn’t tell where in the room her voice was coming from, but it was tired and tense.

  “Yes, Priscilla.”

  “Listen, the Co ali tion ship—the one that released its bomb? We’ve got everyone off it. The other one still has its bomb on board—inside the capture vessel—and they’re threatening to blow it if we start cutting our way in. So that might take us a few days.”

  “Well, that’s mostly good news. Thanks for keeping me informed, Priscilla.”

  “Um . . . that’s not why I called, exactly. Are you free to talk?”

  I glanced at Dorczak, but she just pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling.

  “Mostly.”

  “Okay. I’ve been talking to some of the prisoners, one of them in particular. An asteroid miner, used to be freelance. I think you should come up and see him
.”

  I frowned and looked at Dorczak again. “I’m going to be tied up with a special mission for a while, ’Scilla. Can you just keep him on ice?”

  “Um, I guess, but still I think you should talk to him before anyone else does.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me why?”

  There was a long pause before she answered.

  “He says he found one of the drones.”

  FIFTEEN

  Not the Wolf nor the Child

  T

  wo years ago, more or less.” The prisoner floated on the other side of the padded equipment room on the orbiting station and watched me closely.

  “If the drone was so hard to see,” I said, “how did you know it was there?”

  His eyes shifted. He worked his lips back and forth across the edges of his teeth and thought.

  “It was hard to find with the naked eye, see,” he said, “because it had that round torpedo shape and that perfectly reflective surface. And I mean perfect—to keep it cold even when the sun was shining on it, we figured. But it wasn’t hard to see on our instruments, because it was so heavy. That’s what we were looking for, you know—asteroids with a lot of metal in ’em.”

  The man spoke as though my questions were just one of a number of things on his mind while his eyes darted around the corners of the room. He was a tough and sinewy man, with creased, gunmetal-black skin. He had a badly healed scar down the side of his face, which he rubbed now and then when he talked.

  “So was it still cold?”

  “Oh, shit yes. That much of it was still working, even if the damaged tail kept it from going anywhere. It’d kept itself real cold just floating out there in the asteroids all that time—how long did you say? Nine, ten years?”

  I was starting to answer when suddenly he shot across the room and slammed me up against the padded wall. He wrenched me around and then bashed me with his boots as he pushed off again—my gun out of my shoulder holster and resting in his hand. He swept it around in my direction, then just as suddenly let out a snort of disgust and sent the gun spinning back across the room toward me.