“No, sir, they can’t,” it said politely. Bolton blinked. “Ms. Chan says we don’t see the same way you do.”
“Indeed. But they can send voice, hm?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re being deucedly civil. All right, then, get a flying drone on its way out toward that settlement—we’ll steer it in. Then get another one a mile or so up the ridge to relay signals—I don’t want to be giving away our position.”
“Mile?” said the drone.
“Yes, mile, damn it! As in mil, as in thousand, as in a thousand paces by a Roman legionnaire. One mile, five thousand feet!”
“I’m not Roman. I’m Jewish.”
“You’re what?”
“Mr. Patel said I looked Jewish.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Just do it!”
“Stop shouting. I’ve already done it, if you’d only look.”
A little spider drone slipped across the edge, then flew out toward the first glimmering of sun. Another one veered off to follow the edge of the escarpment, clumsily navigating along the uneven ground.
For the next half hour, via Little Bolton, we steered in the flying drone—which complained shrilly and frequently of disorientation and homesickness—and studied the distant settlement, where two things struck us increasingly as peculiar. First, it was not an ordinary agricultural station. There was too much high technology visible, and too little evidence of cultivation. And there were no ships or ground vehicles at all.
Secondly, the condition of the settlement was nothing short of bizarre. Nearly every object we could see, whether livestock, building, water tank or tree—even a mound of dirt—had been attacked. The dirt pile had a hole bored into it. The buildings had individual corners or walls removed. Even the one small tree we could see looked like it had been sliced evenly in two.
“It’s as though everything’s been hobbled,” said Bolton, “lest it get away. That doesn’t make a pissing lot of sense, does it? Why would you want to cripple a bloody mound of sod, for Christ’s sake?”
Elliot thought he saw a door in the big building drifting closed, even though it had already been closed before. I didn’t see the door close, but as I looked at the building I realized that it looked familiar, even though I couldn’t possible have seen it before.
Eventually Little Bolton reported that the spider drone had reached the settlement. We instructed it to move around calling out “hello.”
Now and then we saw the rising sun glinting from the little drone as it flitted between the buildings, then for a long time we didn’t see it at all.
“She says someone answered,” said Little Bolton.
“Put us through!” I said. “Quick—we need to talk directly.”
“I think not just now . . . perhaps in a minute. She’s under attack, is the thing.”
“What? Let us listen at least, for Christ’s sake.” Instantly there came the sound of breaking glass, then a man’s frightened shouting—though in a language we didn’t recognize.
“Where is it now?” I said. “The drone.”
“She doesn’t know where she is. You may speak, though, if you like.”
“We’re friends!” I shouted at Little Bolton, feeling ridiculous even as I said it. “We’ve come to help.” The shouting stopped. Then after a minute it was followed by a question we couldn’t understand.
“Mandarin?” I said.
“Shanghai, Fukien,” said Bolton. “I can never quite tell. Roscoe.”
Roscoe stepped out of the shadows. “Yes.”
“Roscoe, have we got someone who speaks Cantonese or Mandarin, or the like? The time lag home would be too long, I’m afraid.”
Throckmorton’s ferret’s eyes stabbed here and there for a minute while he thought. “Amoy—Wei. Johnny, get Wei up here, would you?” Throckmorton had lain down on his stomach, peering over the edge with the rest of us, and again there was no way to tell who he was talking to.
“Like magic, ain’t it?” whispered Elliot to me. “These guys lie around practicing this shit, did you know that?” Nothing happened for a minute, then Little Bolton’s speaker sounded with the cautious questioning again. I answered as reassuringly as I could, remembering the edge of hysteria in the man’s voice when he’d been shouting. He didn’t answer.
I had expected the Amoy-speaking Wei to be an older man, one who might have spoken it as a child, but instead it was a quiet, part-Chinese girl who appeared suddenly, squatting down between Throckmorton and the little grasshopper drone.
“Wei,” said Bolton, “translate for Mr. Torres here.”
“Tell him,” I said, “that we’re here to help him, and that we need to know what happened.” She translated fluently into the odd, strangled sounds of the Fukien dialect, and when the man didn’t answer she repeated it. Then she added something of her own, and the man suddenly spoke in English.
“Ha!” he said. “You speak Amoy pretty good. Like serving girl, maybe. What, you Nationalist dog?”
Bolton and I looked at each other.
“I bet you fuck like dog, too—what you think? You got pretty voice.” He suddenly burst out with a brittle, uneven laugh, then stopped in a fit of coughing. “Who you talk for, ha?” he said with difficulty.
“Commander Michael Bolton,” said Wei.
“Nah. Him I don’t know.”
Nothing but his labored breathing came through for a minute after that. He was probably wounded like everything else. Then he spoke a few words I couldn’t understand.
“He says,” said Wei, “that you don’t want to know what happened—and when are you coming to get him? Then he said something about ‘fire-dogs.’ I don’t know what he means.”
“Tell us what happened,” I said to the man. But there was just his breathing.
Then suddenly I remembered where I’d seen a vaulted metal building like that before.
“Bolton, Roscoe—particle and radiation imaging of that building. Can you do it?” Throckmorton nodded and slipped away. I wondered if there was anything he couldn’t produce.
“Who else you talking for there, you?” said the voice.
Bolton looked at the girl and inclined his head toward me. “Eduardo Torres,” she said.
“So! That true? You Engineer Torres himself?” He coughed. “One who build big ships and bang-bang battery, ha?”
“Yes,” I said. The girl’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Yah, okay, you I know. Everybody know. You one who butcher American Army Thirty-Nine Division. You famous boy, uh-huh. Kill round-eye Europeans, too. So you knew Chih-Hsien Chien, ha?”
Elliot and Bolton and I looked at each other in surprise. Wei didn’t understand.
“Who’s Chih-Hsien Chien?” she whispered.
“Be quiet,” hissed Little Bolton. “They’re thinking.”
Finally I said to the man, “Yes, we knew him. Why do you ask?”
“ ’Cause he make fool out of you, just like pretty soon beasties make fools out of all of us, I think.” He laughed again, then choked it off with the coughing.
“Tell us why Chih-Hsien turned the Europeans against us,” said Bolton. “Do you know? We’re still coming to get you, but we’d like to know.”
“Ha! You don’t come. I die anyway, pretty soon. Pretty soon we all die, eh? Well, I tell you. Crazy-man Chien, first he do what we Chinese tell him to. He tell round-eye Europeans a couple secrets, try to get them to blow you up pretty good there on your island. We think, after they blow you up pretty good we come in, make like good guys, everything okay, except while we smiling and all we put drones and batteries in our pockets, eh? Except bad-boy Torres, he pretty clever guy. He got little surprise in batteries, kill round-eyes instead. So we all think okay, we try something else. But Chien, he all mad like monkey. He supposed to be big guy after Europeans blow you up, but now he nothing. So he start telling Europeans lies about you to get even. He tell them that all the help you claiming to give them and the other colonists, you just fak
ing it, and really after you leave Earth you going to cut everyone off. We all think ha-ha, pretty funny, scare Europeans a little. But we don’t know crazy round-eye European snakes bring old Russian-pig weapons with them here in space. Not so funny.”
“So what did you do?” I said.
“So. We do what Chinese always do. We wait. Now Europeans gone, and all your bang-bang batteries empty, so we making our own, okay. So we start thinking . . . but don’t matter now. Little dead dragons, they make everything finished.”
“Tell us what happened.”
“Ha!” He laughed, then started shouting incoherently. Wei looked at me and shrugged. Finally the man drew in a hoarse breath and went on.
“They don’t care! Not nothing! They crazy—they just walk around and . . . and . . . like they got to break everything. Not kill—different. Like they got to break. Me they break—everyone, everything.”
“You said ‘dead’ dragons—why?” Throckmorton reappeared to set something up next to the telescope tube.
“Because they dead! They don’t care! They not like you, me—they don’t listen, they don’t run, they don’t see us! They just take their time, break everything!” He shouted angrily, then it sounded like something smacked against the listening spider drone.
“What did they look like?” I said. “You said ‘fire-dogs,’ and then you said ‘dragons.’ ”
But he didn’t answer. After a while we realized we couldn’t hear the ragged breathing or the coughing any longer. I asked Little Bolton what had happened.
“She says the person is still there, but isn’t speaking.”
“Jesus.”
Throckmorton hunched over our little screen to set something, then suddenly he straightened up and whistled. All five of us squeezed in to see. Little Bolton yelped and backed out of the way.
On the screen at least four of the settlement’s structures were glowing, with the main vaulted building showing up as a bright yellow. Along the edge of the screen were counts of free particles and radioisotopes being emitted, with radiocobalt at the top blinking on and off.
“Well ain’t that something,” said Elliot. “That ain’t from the ‘little dead dragons.’ That’s from the Chinese, who are out here building themselves radiation weapons.”
“Were.”
“Yup.”
“Commander?” A soldier had crept up to hand Bolton a slip of paper. Bolton looked at it and the life seemed to go out of him. He crumpled the paper up and stuffed it in his pocket.
“It seems,” he said, “that one of our industrial domes has blown out without explanation, and accordingly a decision has been made to raise the fleet.”
Polaski, I thought.
Bolton looked up at me. “Immediately. All forces have been recalled, and we are to meet them in orbit with dispatch. Ground forces unable to disengage will be left behind.”
Polaski had gotten his way.
NINETEEN
Behold, I Come As
a Multitude
T
hat oughta be a real pretty sight, Torres, but it’s just plain sad, if you know what I mean.”
White against the black, the fleet hung sleek and assured, in its element once again for the first time in almost thirteen years. One hundred eighty capital ships in a line, all of our own remaining ships plus those that had joined us. Nearly a thousand smaller ships surrounded them, a cloud of minions attending the majesty of the giants.
Riding in the fleet were more than twelve thousand souls: founders and infants, soldiers and prisoners, exiles spanning four generations.
But the fleet’s majesty and history were mocked now by the uncertainty of its purpose. Gone was the promise, replaced by the tightening trap, and by the bickering, and the fear. Gone was the adventure, and gone were the gardens, replaced by monstrous weapons mounted in the upper decks.
There were ships with powerful engines, carrying giant new cannon, and ships filled with tough and solid soldiers, raised on the promise of invincibility. And there were ships filled with children who would never walk, the price paid for those few who would ride the fast ships into war—a war which, even still, only Polaski and Rosler were sure we were fighting.
“I don’t know, Tyrone,” I said. “What else are we supposed to do?”
“Yeah. Ain’t nowhere to hide, anymore, is there, Torres?”
“No. So what does a man do, Tyrone, when there’s nowhere to go, and the whole world’s slipping out of his control?”
“Breakfast comes to mind.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. What makes you think it ever was under your control?”
Near the center of the fleet, driven by a light plume of hot gasses from its tail, was the great ship with the familiar 00 across its nose. As the little commando ship on which we rode rotated to match the larger ship’s acceleration, our perspective shifted and suddenly the fleet no longer stretched off into the distance, but instead climbed straight up into a black sky, one ship high above the other.
When we coupled, Elliot pushed his way through the airlock and disappeared into the big ship’s commons, and after a few last words with Bolton I followed him through.
I stopped in the center of the deck, struck by the rancid air.
“So,” said Polaski behind me. He was leaning against a table in the dim light, his arms folded in front of him. “So you went running off to Asile with Bolton.” I didn’t know whether it was a question or not.
“Yes.”
“I hear the Chinese were cut up pretty bad.”
“Only a few of them, Polaski. It was just a weapons station.”
He thought for a minute, then dropped his hands to the edge of the table. “We’re going in after the aliens, Torres. Are you with me or not?”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrowed as he thought about it, then he raised his arm with a finger extended like a gun. He pulled the trigger. “Click.”
C
han and Kip were on the floor of Charlie Peters’ quarters, surrounded by sacks of dirt, working to transplant seedlings into pots. There was an unfamiliar tension in Chan’s face, and new grey in her hair as I leaned down to kiss her. Kip waved, glad to see me, solemn.
“Where’s Charlie?” I said.
“Down with Pham and the medic.” She pushed the hair out of her face with the back of a hand. “I don’t know why he bothers—she hates the poor man.” She handed Kip more plantings. “I swear he treats her like the next messiah or something.”
“Pham’s got a medic? Rosler beat her that bad?”
“No, she’s all right. Bruises, dislocation. The medic’s for Anne. They’re keeping her sedated. Worried about her heart.”
“I’m surprised she allows it.”
Chan frowned. “She hasn’t got a choice. She’s a fleet resource, you know, strategic property. As long as there’s a chance the drones are still out there, we need her alive.”
“You know she had the drones’ communications codes in a case, in her workroom.”
“MI deck. I moved them myself.”
“All right.” I looked around the room, conscious of the two-hundred-foot particle cannon overhead where the gardens had once been. “Chan, how many ships had been fitted with cannon before the weapons dome blew out?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “All of them. It wasn’t the weapons dome that blew.”
I was confused for a minute; I’d been sure it was the weapons dome that blew, although I couldn’t remember why I thought so. “Which one was it?”
“Wheel assemblies and trailers. Farming tools.”
There was something wrong. I brushed off my hands and moved around the room, trying to concentrate, but in the end something else caught my eye, instead. Near the top of one of Peters’ cases was a photograph of a much younger Chan, down on one knee and smiling into the camera. She was posing next to a little grasshopper drone draped in British racing green.
“Chan?”
“H
m?”
“Did you know that Bolton had a couple hundred fleet drones with him? Out on missions,” I hastened to add. “Up until the recall?”
She stopped her planting and gave me a patient look. “Planting trees on Asile, you mean. Of course. He still does.”
I
was thinking about Chan’s being privy to Bolton’s project, and about his leaving it in place despite the mobilization, when I arrived in Pham’s quarters to find Peters being thrown out and the medic packing her kit to follow. The medic was a competent-looking woman, attractive and alert, but clearly in no mood for abuse.
“At least Rosler got balls, Mush-Face!” Pham shouted at Peters. “All you got’s prissy little god—make you be nice all the time. How ’bout you fuck Miss Saintly-Patience here, go tell God how nice it was!”
She saw me and her head snapped around toward me, releasing Peters. “Hah! No-Balls here not even nice. He just dead from brain down, can’t tell a teat from a cow, kill them all just the same! Shit.”
She was as agitated as I’d ever seen her, leaning forward and stabbing at the air with her finger, her voice shrill and unsteady, her face a swollen, yellowish black. One arm was taped against her side, and she’d lost much too much weight.
I followed Peters back onto the lift, and we got off at the quarters Chan and I shared. Peters threw himself into a chair and ran a hand across his face and up over his balding head.
“Is she really worth it, Charlie?” I said.
“Aye, lad—she’s worth everything. She’s all we’ve got.”
I still didn’t understand what he meant when he talked like this. Pham was beaten. Hammered down until there was nothing left but the spit and the abuse. Peters seemed to see her at the head of some sort of legions of deliverance, but I knew she would never again hold that kind of power.
“She has it now, Eddie.” I looked at him. “She’s got the one thing that’ll save us all, in the end.” But instead of going on to deliver one of his sermons as I expected, he rummaged in a kit bag to hold out a rolled piece of paper. “I’m sorry, Eddie, it was all I had time to bring.” It was the blue and green photograph of Serenitas from my office wall, now worn and creased from the travel.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 31
