Beams of light slid downward from the invaders. Where the beams sliced into the surface they turned it a blinding white, and moved glowing walls of flame toward our crews. Our own crews’ weapons tried without success to stop them. Hundreds of men and women were about to disappear into the flames. The drones just had too many ships, huge numbers of them that they sacrificed one after the other.
“Good going, Torres,” said Elliot.
The surface went dark. In unison the remaining drone ships sprouted flame from their engines and accelerated away from the fissures. Elliot let out his breath. “Sweet land o’ mercy, Torres. What scared them off, do you think?”
“I don’t think anything did. I think they figured out the deception.”
“You mean they figured out they’d been conned into the cracks?”
“Yes.”
Elliot was quiet for a minute.
“Then I sure as hell hope,” he said, “that they don’t remember who did the conning. Them’s some bad folks to have pissed off at a fella. And you got enough enemies as it is.”
“That shielding’s not on the cage yet, is it?”
“No.”
“Then we’re in trouble.”
The windscreen blazed to life as a giant shape hurtled past. Its lance of flame burned across our shuttle and sent it tumbling. The cabin overheated, suddenly smoking from the corners and stinking of burnt insulation. The windscreen turned a charred black, and we were left to feel our way home, blind and scarcely able to breathe in the smoky air.
T
he drones? The aliens are the drones? My God, Eddie, how? Why are we being killed by Anne’s drones? How long have you known?” Chan wiped her mouth with the back of an unsteady hand.
“Only a few hours, Chan.”
“Why?”
“Well, because Anne thought human minds made them human. She thought they would side with us.”
“Eddie,” said Peters, “they’re trying to kill us.”
“I know. The problem is that nowhere in her programming did she actually come out and tell them they weren’t the only ones in the universe. They ended up like she was. That’s what Pham said about her, remember—that she’d isolated herself and convinced herself there was nothing else.”
“Nothing else but what?”
“Nothing but her own mind. She probably sensed there was something out there, something messy and dangerous and human, but it was so alien to her that in the end she was building machines to defend herself from it.”
“That’s a fine irony,” said Peters. “Because in truth it wasn’t humans at all she should have feared, but the weapons. And it’s the weapons the drones are coming after, isn’t it?”
Chan took her cat in her arms, the peculiar grey cat with its green eyes, and scratched it behind the ears. She turned to stare out through the window.
“Yes,” I said. “At least that.”
F
rom the black planet the drone ships fanned out through the Holzstein system. Euphoria over their rout in the fissures faded as they went about their business, indifferent to their losses. The trap we’d set turned out to have had no lasting effect at all, except to anger the colonies even more than before as questions flew about the fusion weapons we’d used.
It also ended my pact with the drone in its cage. We hadn’t replaced the shielding in time, and it had surely learned about the ambush from its fellows. It spoke not another word, no matter how doggedly we tried.
As the weeks passed and the level of fear in the system rose to the breaking point, the colonists began to marshal their forces in preparation for fighting the drones. But every time they did, the drones attacked—blind, methodical, sinking their endless, indifferent forces into the battle. The colonists fought back as best they could, not knowing what else to do. And all the while, as they came to understand what had really happened, they became even angrier.
Even the original news of the existence of aliens hadn’t sent shockwaves through the system as powerful as those from the discovery that they were really our drones. None of us had thought to release the news in a controlled way, so it leaked out through military and commercial channels as soon as I’d informed our commanders.
Even then much of the system misunderstood, believing we’d known all along that the aliens were our own drones and that we were using them to remove any competition for Serenitas. I received calls from former allies, claiming to know that even the attacks on our own base were only self-inflicted for show.
But soon the recordings of the ambush were transmitted through the system and examined, and the accusations turned to bitter questions about how it could have happened in the first place. Polaski threw our own forces into the fray, as always trading them for power and yet more ships, while those of us on the base labored to restart the farming domes.
Chan and I worked to understand the drones’ communications codes embedded in Miller’s blocks. The blocks had turned out to contain complex communications protocols rather than merely an encryption key. Too, while at first the protocols seemed to be complete, time after time we failed to make them run through to completion in tests. We pored over Miller’s old records and bullied the priests in the research labs. We ran experiments in the vehicle assembly building, time and again pulling the blocks out of their case, then carefully putting them back. But no matter how we tried, it became clear that there was some final, critical piece of information we didn’t have. A password. Chan grew increasingly fearful and restless as time passed and the drones tightened their grip on the system. Eventually she became altogether uncommunicative, no longer even interested in the renewed prize of the blue and green planet.
During those uneasy nine months, while we watched the sky and waited for the attack on the base that had to come, while our lives trickled away in disappointment and frustration, I saw Pham just three times.
The first was late one evening a month after the attack, when, irritated by the poor reception I was getting of the drone’s EHF communications, I went looking for help to bring a bigger antenna down from orbit. I walked back into the maze of dark alleyways into the commandos’ district of the dome. It was an isolated quarter where soft light seeped under the doors and cooking smells and music filtered into the night air.
Michael Bolton, at first furious when he learned we were being murdered by our own survey drones, later became tight-lipped and uncooperative, refusing to commit his teams to Polaski’s campaign of head-on warfare. Instead he held the commandos back for the defense of the remaining civilians on the base, trying to keep both his troops and the civilians alive for as long as possible. The teams kept mostly to themselves while they waited, but I’d seen an occasional one of their ships taking off or landing. I also knew, from a conversation I’d overheard between Chan and a grasshopper drone, that the commandos’ forestry work on the highlands of Asile still continued.
On the night I went looking for help with the antenna, I was searching for Roscoe Throckmorton. I didn’t know exactly where he lived. I stopped at one door and knocked, then stood in the black alley and waited, shifting my feet in the cold and picking out the smells on the air. The door swung open and light poured into the alley, while a young pilot, Stephanie Teal, stood on the threshold. She wore a robe and slippers, and held the stub of a pencil in her hand.
In the room behind her, curled up in an armchair and looking up to see who was at the door, was Pham. She sat by a light and held a book in her hands. She was freshly scrubbed. Her hair was trimmed and wet from the shower, and she wore a white robe and a pair of reading glasses I’d never seen before. Her face was pale and tired, though, and she peered into the darkness outside with a little uncertainty.
Teal sent me to another building, and after a last glimpse of Pham watching from the chair, the door was pushed gently closed and I was left in the darkened alley.
The next time I saw her was four months later, while Chan and I worked on the iron mezzanine of the vehicle assembly bu
ilding. We were transmitting one possible permutation of the missing password after another to FleetSys. The giant fleet MI was then struggling to simulate the unpredictable, blindingly fast intuitive leaps and self-modifying twists of the drones’ intelligence, and so respond as they would. Even though we had the communications protocols for the drones, we didn’t dare transmit to them directly until we had the password, for fear they’d stop listening altogether if they received a forgery. Or else attack.
“It’s no use, Eddie,” said Chan. “Even if Anne instructed the drones to hand the password down from generation to generation—which I’m sure she did—we’re not going to fool them by cramming a million re-tries down their throats. You worked with her on the power-cell codes. You know the kind of cryptographer she was. Their definition of legitimate transmission error is going to be pretty conservative. Let’s just forget it, Eddie. It’s no use.”
As she talked I looked out a small window set in the wall, watching Stephanie Teal. She was standing in the sun up the alley, leaning against the wall next to Charlie Peters’ quarters. She’d been there for over an hour.
Chan came up beside me and we watched as Pham came out of Peters’ quarters and closed the door behind her. She and Teal then turned and walked up the alley away from us. Pham’s step seemed lighter. They both wore light, warm-weather jumpsuits, out of place on a base where most of us now wore armor and weapons as we waited.
“I want to leave, Eddie,” said Chan.
The two women in the alleyway turned the corner.
“We talk about breaking free,” said Chan, “but we’re really slaves to the drones. Every day we hear about another ship lost, another colony at war. More friends gone. And we walk around waiting for the next attack to hit here. And all we do is sit around looking for a password we’re never going to find. With our heads buried in books and computers, trying to find the magic letters that’ll make the horror stop . . . Hardly anyone’s left, Eddie. Carolyn and Harry are gone—”
“That wasn’t the drones,” I said. “That was Allerton and his toady, Becker.”
“It’s the same thing, Eddie. The wars we brought along, the bastards out there, the drones . . . we can’t change it. Let’s just go. Leave the guns behind so the drones won’t come after us, and go away.”
“They’re going after people everywhere, Chan. There’s nowhere to go.”
“Only when they’re armed! You know what Anne’s matrix says: alien force. That’s all they’re interested in. People who don’t set up defenses are being left alone. That’s the ‘known constant’ of the universe now, Eddie. And no one’s going to change it—live in peace and be left alone. People are even saying that unarmed boats are making it through the tunnel to Serenitas.”
“Win by giving up? I find that hard to believe. A man would be crazy to go out there unarmed.”
She turned away. “You never talk about Carolyn or Harry, Eddie.”
It was true. I’d formed a picture in my mind of Penderson standing at the mouth of the hangar saying something, but that was all. There was spray from the rain on his face, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Something about Dorczak or Colonel Becker. I could hear the rain, and I could see Becker in the background, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. But it had been important.
“I want to leave,” said Chan, “and go to Asile. Even if I have to go alone.”
“Chan—” I stopped, remembering something.
“Listen, Chan,” I said. “When I came back from Asile, you already knew about Bolton’s forestation project.”
“I helped plan it, Eddie.”
“You and Bolton?”
“Yes.”
That surprised me.
“Okay, but when I got back from Asile you already knew that he’d left the grasshopper drones in place. And you hadn’t talked to him yet.”
“Yes. He wanted that forest on those hills, Eddie, and he didn’t think we’d make it through the tunnel.”
“But how did you know?”
She looked at me for a minute.
“From the drones, Eddie. Our little grasshopper drones.”
“They tell you what they hear?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?” I thought of all the little spider drones in the background over the years. Shifting for a better view as they watched . . .
“Yes,” she said.
“And they told Anne everything, too,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Although I kept telling them not to.”
“But they did anyway? Why?”
“I don’t know. I asked them a hundred times if they answered to anyone but me, and they insisted that they didn’t. But I do know that Anne didn’t trust us. She thought she had to learn everything she could from us in case she had to pass it along to her drones.”
“Christ.”
“There’s someone else, too,” said Chan.
“Someone else, what?”
“They tell someone else everything they hear.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“I don’t know. All I know is they dump their records into three separate partitions on FleetSys. They’ve been doing it ever since we reached Earth orbit.”
T
he last time I saw Pham during those nine months, during that lull before the great storm, was another three months after that. I was standing again in the shadows of the mezzanine in the assembly building. But Chan had gone off somewhere on the base to be alone, and now Polaski paced behind me. The hull-clamps on his boots banged against the iron as I looked out across Trinity Square, out through the front of the dome.
“I need ships,” Polaski was saying, “not some goddamned secret message. Ships, missiles. You said you’re the only one who could talk to that POW down there, but you’ve got nothing, so get out of here and help me fight, instead.”
It was late in the planet’s afternoon. I put a pair of binoculars to my eyes again and focused on the horizon.
“No,” I said.
Polaski stopped his pacing.
That morning, Pham had walked out across the square and suited up by the lock tunnel, then she’d driven out across the surface to the wreckage of the landing dome twenty miles away. For hours, then, every time I’d put the binoculars to my eyes, she’d been stooped over and searching through the debris in the freezing vacuum. Then sometime later she’d been half a mile farther out, swinging something at the hard surface, over and over. It was a dangerous kind of exertion in a suit, especially in the high gravity, yet for hour after hour, every time I looked, she was still digging.
“What do you mean ‘no?’ ” said Polaski.
“I haven’t seen your spooks for a while,” I said. “Did they get tired of following me, or have you got them all in the wards helping the radiation victims?”
“What do you mean ‘no,’ Torres?”
This time when I looked, whatever Pham had had in her hands was gone, and instead she was standing still next to a block of some kind she’d placed on the surface. The sunlight on the ground took on the rippling look of broken shadows, and an instant later the surface turned black to leave Pham and the object next to her lit all by themselves, floating in the darkness.
“What I mean,” I said, “is that I’m not going to help you fight the drones. I’m going to find the password, at which point I’ll control them. I’ll set them to finish terraforming the planets, while I go on to Serenitas.”
Polaski fell silent. Pham’s suit lights came on and she started back toward the dome.
“What were you doing with Bart Allerton, Polaski,” I said, “that Dorczak and I weren’t supposed to know about?”
Still he didn’t speak, but now I heard the soft, precise snick of rounds dropping into the chambers of his revolver.
“By the way,” I said, “that was a good deal you made.”
The sound from the revolver stopped. “What deal?”
“The deal you made with Anne Miller when we reached Earth orbit
. Allowing her to make unsupervised transmissions to the drones, while you got access to the ship’s spiders and grasshoppers to use as spies. Your officers will applaud your ingenuity, Polaski. Spider drones watching them in their bedrooms, spider drones sniffing around during their pre-vote meetings . . .”
For a while there was no noise at all. The sound of the safety disengaging hadn’t come yet.
“We’re here to win,” said Polaski after a minute. His voice had a hoarse sound to it.
“To win against whom, Polaski? The other colonists? Yourself? Or is it still the aliens? Tell me something, Polaski, how many lives was it worth to you to mobilize the fleet and go after the aliens, before they were even a threat? Was it worth Pham’s and mine when the landing dome blew out —”
Out on the surface Pham had reached the airlock. I lowered the binoculars.
“Yes?” said Polaski.
After a minute he turned for the door, then stopped.
“Torres,” he said. “Remember that you’re as expendable as Dorczak was.” He left, and his hull clamps clattered against the iron of the stairs on the way down.
N
ine months and two days after our only victory over the drones—the day Pham had shot David Rosler—I had become so frustrated by our failure to find the password that I finally made the decision to transmit to the drones without it.
We loaded the communications programs from the blocks into the ground transmitters for the last time, and while Elliot and Chan monitored the fleet’s instruments from orbit, I drove a tractor out past the horizon, pulling a broadcast antenna far away from the base. I called Elliot.
“All right,” I said, “I’m ready.” The bleak landscape was starkly empty in the early light. Tiny on the horizon, back to the south, the eastern slope of the main dome glinted silver in the sun. The other side of it was still black. Along the western horizon were the twisted black remains of the landing dome, and tiny in the distance behind it the abandoned operations dome.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 40
