“As commanding officer of the Marine units, you are one of the few that’s allowed to carry loaded weapons on shipboard, isn’t that right?”
“Yah?” She was unsure of her ground.
Ship’s crews were kept alive by an almost religious observance of certain rules, and one of them regulated the carrying of loaded weapons on board. Firing one in a pressurized environment meant instant death, so while in space the ground forces and even the ship’s officers themselves were not allowed to carry them. Only Pham and her Marines could.
Polaski turned to me.
“Mr. Torres, were you present on the fourteenth of this month when Colonel Pham discharged a twenty-millimeter cannon in the direction of the roof of the main dome? Twice, as I understand it.”
“Get to the point, Polaski,” I said.
But he’d already made his point. Ever since the incident several of the ships’ captains had been agitating to have Pham disciplined. But they didn’t know I had been there.
“Colonel Pham,” said Polaski, turning to her again, “with the concurrence of everyone present, including Eduardo Torres, you are hereby removed from command of all space-assault forces. They will from here on out report to the wing commanders of the vessels on which they serve.”
“What?” Her eyes grew suddenly wild, and she looked like she was going to hurl herself across the table at him.
But what about the Rats, I thought. Polaski had in a single move pitted himself against the single greatest source of power we had in the system.
“You can’t do that!” Pham was spitting her words in her fury. “You crazy, Mister? Hey, I ask you a question! How you like Rats in your bed, hah?”
Polaski stopped, perfectly still, and then, with his eyebrows raised, turned slowly around the room as though searching for something that wasn’t there. And then I understood. Polaski believed we would leave the black planet and go to Serenitas after the aliens. He believed he could persuade the colony to abandon its base and go back into space. And so he had traded the loyalty of Pham’s Rats for that of the ships’ officers.
But persuade us how? His plans to take the offensive against creatures we knew nothing about had been dismissed at every turn. While clearly something had happened to the drones and to the Europeans in Serenitas System, there was no evidence that the aliens were a threat to us here in Holzstein’s.
I stopped Polaski later and challenged him regarding existing ground engagements and other commitments we had here in this system. Having completely alienated Pham, the brass knuckles behind our most important multilateral agreements, our international relations policy was now in a shambles. He shrugged it off.
“Let Allerton handle it.”
Bart Allerton, Polaski’s friend and ally. Dorczak’s boss, the new head of the colony at Lowhead. What deal had they made?
F
rom what Kate Salfelder said that night at the labs, Pham wasn’t taking Polaski’s decision gracefully. And if there was an occasion to make an issue of it, I knew, it would involve the Marine contingents leaving that night for the now-empty third planet. The fleet was being sent to make our presence felt following the Europeans’ sudden departure, and to dampen the impending chaos left by their absence and by the news from Serenitas.
The landing dome was an iron and glass vault four hundred feet long and two hundred wide, with an airlock tunnel at each end big enough to accommodate the giant tractor-drawn trailers that crawled out across the surface to the ships.
When our own tractor cleared the inner door of the nearer tunnel and pulled to one side of the dome, the scene under the domes’ floodlights was starkly clear.
Ready to leave through the far airlock were two full troop trailers coupled to their tractors, pointing away from us, one nosing up behind the other. Only a few soldiers still stood outside the trailers’ left-side doors, waiting to step inside at the last minute and seal them. The rest of the dome was nearly empty.
The air under the harsh lights was bitterly cold, and the soldiers’ breath condensed into clouds and drifted away against the background of black glass. Far off by the left side of the dome, sitting alone among the empty waiting-benches, was the slight form of Roddy McKenna. He was watching an altercation by the tractors, close to the far airlock.
We stepped down and scuffed our way around to the front of our own tractor. Dorczak and Penderson stepped down from the other side and Penderson took off his coat to put around Dorczak’s shoulders against the cold. He put his arm around her and the four of us crunched across the black ground toward the center of the dome.
The altercation McKenna was watching involved Pham—draped in a soiled fatigue jacket and rocking unsteadily on her feet—hurling obscenities at a grim-looking officer by the forward tractor. Most of their words were lost in the odd, flat acoustics of the dome.
It was an unreal scene under the powerful lights: the ponderous iron trailers with their dark portholes, the big tractors swaying and vibrating as their motors idled, the silver trim on the soldiers’ uniforms flashing in the icy air—all of it finely etched by the lights against the dull, black ground and the glass. And then, a sequence of events occurred so rapidly and so suddenly that it wasn’t until later that we were able to reconstruct them—although even then, we never did fully understand what had caused them.
Pham was leaning forward at the waist and screaming at the officer, when from the side of the dome near McKenna came an eerie, rippling crack, like the sound of ice splitting on a lake. Pham didn’t hear it, but the officer and her soldiers did, and turned in unison to look.
Near the base of the dome one of the glass panels had developed an ominous white fracture in it. At the same time, for just an instant, a weak light passed across the glass from the outside and then vanished.
Another crack ripped through the air, and a fracture line shot across the next panel over. McKenna got to his feet in confusion, while at the far end of the dome the officer motioned curtly to her troops to get on board and seal their doors.
Pham, not having noticed anything amiss until that moment, saw them boarding and abruptly stopped her shouting. McKenna looked back and forth between the cracking panels and the tractor-trailers, then began walking toward the edge of the dome to see what was wrong with the glass.
Harry Penderson reacted the fastest, taking a grip on Dorczak and Elliot and racing them toward the airlock tunnel behind us. A third panel cracked. The sound of it lashed out through the dome like a gunshot; soon the panels would start to shatter one after the other and blow outward.
Pham finally realized that the two big tractor-trailers had begun to move. In a growing fury she reached for her gun, evidently believing she had been dismissed. The forward tractor had picked up speed and the officer was pulling her foot in to close the door, when the driver saw Pham’s gun and wrenched the wheel to one side.
Over at the side of the dome a fourth panel cracked in front of McKenna. He stopped walking and looked uncertainly back at the tractor-trailers.
In that instant, then, he and Pham and I all saw what was going to happen: The forward tractor was not going to correct its swerve in time, and was going to slice through the glass wall of the dome next to the lock.
Pham lowered the gun and bolted for the far airlock tunnel, then just as suddenly realized that its inner door was still closed. She turned and started back toward the one at our end. McKenna was behind her, because he’d had to make the longer trip around the benches. Penderson, Dorczak and Elliot were already making their way up the ramp and onto the iron floor of our airlock tunnel. When I’d made it in behind them, struggling for breath like the others, I turned back around to see a terrible sight.
The giant tractor-trailer slid slowly and even gracefully into the glass wall, then lifted up and jackknifed to a stop. No noise from the collision reached us against the sudden rush of air, but my ears popped from a pressure change. Then all across the floor of the dome, in eerie silence, a layer of black dust rose
up from the ground and began drifting toward the breach. Pham, and McKenna some twenty paces behind her, slowed as they were forced to lean into the wind of decompression, pulling their way through the accelerating layer of dust and debris. A spotlight blew out overhead and they became outlined more sharply than ever against the dark background. The moisture in the air condensed into fog.
Inside the airlock tunnel, we were facing back through the big doorway into the dome. We stood against the left wall in order to hold onto a conduit that ran the length of the tunnel, all the way back to the opening we’d come through.
The opening was made from a heavy, precision-ground frame, with a polished steel door retracted for the moment into the opening’s right side. When it closed, the door would trundle leftward like an elevator’s, closing toward our left, where the door’s control panel was bolted to the wall.
Elliot and Dorczak were behind me along the wall, while Penderson had already worked his way forward around me and was carefully moving toward the control panel, never letting go of the conduit lest the dome suddenly blow out. He was breathing hard in the thinning air, and shook his head sharply several times to clear his ears.
Pham hit the ramp and fought her way up it, heaving for breath, her hand still gripping her gun. Behind her, the swirling layer of dust was up to McKenna’s knees. The wind and fog sucking toward the hole in the dome whipped at his hair. The rest of the spotlights blew out, and the thickening fog obscured his form almost completely.
He made it to the foot of the ramp at the same time as Pham reached the door frame. Not ten seconds had passed since the tractor had plowed into the glass wall.
McKenna looked up suddenly at Pham ahead of him. “No!”
Pham hadn’t even turned around to see if anyone else behind her was trying to reach the airlock tunnel. The instant she reached the airlock, she slammed her hand back against the controls, sending the door trundling closed along its track. Penderson swore, and both he and I pushed our way toward the controls, though with no hope of reaching them in time. Pham was several paces into the tunnel and grabbing for the conduit herself when she heard McKenna’s shout. Only then did she turn.
McKenna launched himself toward the narrowing doorway with a hoarse cry, forcing himself through just before it closed. But as he smashed against the moving edge of the door it spun him around before he was completely through, catching his trailing arm at the shoulder as it closed.
Penderson and I were still moving and Pham was still turning around to look when the airlock door sensed the presence of McKenna’s arm and froze, pinning him to the frame.
But it froze for only an instant. Even as it stopped, it sensed the difference in pressure between the airlock tunnel and the ruptured dome outside, and obeyed a higher priority: With the full force of its motors it crushed McKenna’s arm, sealing him and us almost completely into the airlock. And as his screams echoed through the iron tunnel, we dimly heard the dome’s cracked panels blowing out one after the other, like distant gunfire in the arctic night.
McKenna choked off his screams to gasp for air just as Pham finished her turn toward him. And at that same instant, she and Penderson and I—and McKenna—all heard the same sound: air hissing past the airlock door, past the imperfect seal where the bone of his crushed arm was lodged. Our ears began to pop again. The tunnel’s own air bottles opened and hissed into the lock, trying to maintain pressure. They would last no more than a minute.
With the same momentum that had turned her around, in what might have been no more than a blind reflex, Pham dropped her gun and lunged for the red override lever at the top of the panel, the lever that would force the door back open, blowing Roddy McKenna back into the vacuum like a cannon shot.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Penderson. “What the fuck are you doing?”
McKenna raised his head just as she moved, and when their eyes met she froze, her hand inches from the lever. Air continued to hiss past the door. No one in the tunnel moved.
We could only see the back of Pham’s head, but we could see all of McKenna’s face. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue. His face was pale under a sheen of sweat. But his eyes were now perfectly clear as he stared at her, filled with what could only be the loathing of utter betrayal.
Pham lowered her arm.
The hiss of the air bottles dwindled, and again the pressure in the tunnel began to drop as the air hissed out past McKenna’s arm. Penderson started to move again, still gripping the conduit, carefully approaching Pham from the back.
Finally McKenna broke his gaze with Pham and looked at me, now trembling from shock. Penderson reached Pham’s shoulder and carefully pulled her away from the panel, then worked his way past her, never letting go of the conduit.
Yet there was little he could do, beyond getting a grip on McKenna before opening the door. Which merely left him with a near certainty of being pulled out, too; short of chains wrapped around him, it would be impossible to hold McKenna against the wall of air that would hit him if the door opened—and short of opening the door there was no way to dislodge his arm.
McKenna stared at me for a moment, then dropped his gaze and reached with his good hand into his breast pocket. His side was soaked with blood from the severed shoulder. He pulled a folded wad of paper from his pocket with a shaking hand and tossed it as far as he could along the floor toward me. It landed out of my reach, but Elliot’s boot immediately slid out and held it.
McKenna glanced at me again, then one more time at Pham. The air was thin enough now that it was hard to breathe. A light breeze blew against the back of my neck as the last of our air moved toward the door.
Penderson had almost reached the panel, and McKenna’s eyes finally flicked toward him. Then, with all of his remaining strength, McKenna flung himself around to his full reach and slammed his good hand against the override lever.
I
remember the sound of it, and I remember Penderson diving forward to close the door again. But I don’t remember seeing McKenna go.
Mostly I remember him when he was eight years old, a blue-eyed and freckled boy, alone with his machines and the music that he had taught them to play. Alone, that afternoon, with a man who had no time to listen.
It was Elliot who turned me away from the door finally, gripping my arm and sitting me down on the floor to lean against the wall. Then at some point minutes or hours later, he pressed the blood-stained piece of paper into my hand.
“He was giving it to you, Torres. Maybe you ought to look at it.”
The others were sitting against the walls as well, watching me and breathing slowly in the thin air. Pham sat in a huddle in the corner, her face hidden.
I unfolded the paper numbly, but only to stare uncomprehendingly at columns of times and dates. The numbers swam before me, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t understand what it was McKenna had left me.
Then I remembered why I’d come looking for him in the first place, and suddenly I understood. And as I understood, a chill crept up my spine. The iron wall against my back suddenly seemed far too thin.
“What is it, Torres?”
Dorczak and Penderson were watching me, as well.
“The torus in Serenitas System,” I said. “Remember how Roddy told us it had never been rotated to point anywhere but back here at Holzstein’s? That was how he knew it couldn’t have been used to send the Europeans or the drones onward to some other system.”
“That’s right.”
I handed him the paper. “He said it had never been rotated anywhere else. But he didn’t say it had never been used.”
Farther down the tunnel, comprehension settled into Dorczak and Penderson’s eyes at the same time.
“It has been used,” I said, “hundreds of times. Someone’s been coming back this way from Serenitas over a period that goes back years. Coming in large numbers.”
S
ometime later that night the rescuers finis
hed welding a trailer against the side of the tunnel, and cut their way in. We stayed in the trailer several hours more while they worked to free the troop trailer jammed into the dome wall. Because of the officer’s quick orders, both of the trailers had been sealed in time, as had the cab of the second tractor. But the officer herself, and her driver, were gone. She hadn’t gotten the door closed, after all.
Charlie Peters had come with the rescuers to say the words that needed to be said, and to look after Pham. Kip had come, too. He lay on his back on the rear bench of the trailer and played his flute.
I drifted in and out of sleep as I listened, dreaming at one point about the underground cavern and its one passage.
As always I sat hunched in the cold, and as always my mother hovered over my shoulder, watching. But this time someone else was in the cavern with us.
“And I heard the second beast say ‘Come and see . . .’ ”
Peters was talking to himself in the back of the trailer.
“And there went out another horse that was red, and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth. And there was given to him a great sword.”
EIGHTEEN
A Civilized and Innocent Man
I
still say there’s no way she could have missed knowing McKenna was behind her. Either way, she should have looked.” The ship shuddered as we dragged deeper into the atmosphere, and Elliot turned away from the porthole with a sour face as it slued sideways. The engines growled as the MI tried to correct, while in the cabin joints groaned in protest.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, rechecking my harness. “Chan says Pham can hardly remember what happened that night.”
“How come Pham’s staying with Chan, anyhow?”
“She’s not. She’s in the infirmary. Rosler beat her again. With an iron pipe.”
A Grey Moon Over China Page 29
