A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  It was strangely quiet in the aftermath of the attack. The afternoon sun slanted through the haze, and the air stank from the fires and bit our nostrils with the stench of burned power cells. Even without the smoke it was difficult to breathe; the air had become too thin by now, still leaking out faster than the converters could replenish it. If they were running at all.

  “Pham, listen. I think there’s a trailer behind the barracks, but if all the cells have been destroyed, then none of the tractors is going to work. We’re going to have to try and bring the shuttles in through the lock, or else pull their cells out for the tractors—and either way it’s going to attract attention. Otherwise we have to send everybody out to the shuttles two or three at a time in the only suits we have. Christ, what a mess.” I was whispering, at the same time tightening the ablative armor under my tunic. It was too quiet.

  “So, okay, we look around,” she said out loud. She seemed unreasonably lighthearted.

  “Look for what?”

  “I don’t know. The horse, maybe he learn to sing, what you think?” She started off across the square, flitting in and out of the slanting shadows, looking unbearably vulnerable in the little she wore. I moved to catch up with her, digging my boots into the dust, studying the few glimpses I could get of the waiting drone ships out past the dome.

  “Tell me something, Pham,” I said as I caught up. “I thought you hated Peters.”

  “No, I never hate him,” she said. “I treat him pretty bad, though, poor guy.”

  “Poor guy? You seem pretty cheerful for being sorry for him.”

  She stopped and faced me. “He dead, Mr. Eddie. While you asleep in there maybe I cry a lot, make stupid noises, but he dead now. Before, I waste a lot of time, I think, so I say okay, but now not so much left. So come on, we see what we find.”

  I thought about it while we looked into the recreation center, and poked around through the piles of equipment Polaski had left behind in the barracks. Some of it was intact and some of it burned in two, but there were no undamaged power cells or suits. In the roadway leading along the dome wall to the rear of the barracks we found the empty troop trailer, apparently intact but with no tractor. “Damn it, Pham, the air in that building isn’t even going to last the night; we don’t have time for this. We have to find a radio that’s—”

  “Eddie, why we got—look.” She pointed at the control box for the airlock tunnel, where a pair of red lights glowed steadily. I’d seen them earlier, but hadn’t stopped to wonder why. The tunnel’s outside doors, at its far end, were open. “Come on,” she said, “you stand on far side—no, no gun. Bad mistake. Just we get out of the way, okay?”

  I moved to one side of the inner doors while she stood at the other, forty feet away, and pressed the controls to close the outer door. The lights started to blink.

  “Still got full power!” she called out, and I cringed at the sound of her voice echoing through the dome. A moment later the lights went to green, and with a hissing of air the inner door trundled into its frame. When it thumped to a stop the square was finally quiet again, and we both looked carefully around the edge of the frame.

  A tractor stood facing us in the center of the dimly lit tunnel, its electric motors idling quietly. One of its doors stood open, and beneath it the driver lay sprawled on the ground, suffocated in the vacuum. The passenger in the cab sat slumped against the dash. Pham walked up to me quietly and put a hand on my arm.

  “Stephanie,” she said. “And Robert Kune.” She was speaking quietly now. “Robert was Michael’s lover, did you know? They go to Asile together, soon. Why they open tractor door when tunnel still open to the outside? Please, tell me why they do that.”

  “They wouldn’t, Pham. In any case, the doors wouldn’t have let them. The tunnel had to be sealed at the time, and they must have been getting out to trigger the manual controls.”

  “But who open the tunnel from outside. Drones?”

  “Maybe the drones are sending out control signals now. On purpose or by accident, I don’t know. Come on, we have to get their suits, and then move the tractor into the dome.”

  We struggled together to peel the suits from the two rigid bodies, trying not to look at their faces. Pham’s friend, Stephanie Teal, had been caught under one of the tires, where she’d been blown during the explosive decompression—her eyes wide with surprise, her mouth open in her last struggle for air. In the cab, Robert Kune’s eyes were closed and his face relaxed, an exquisitely handsome young man whose Nigerian parents had joined us from the Christian colony on Boar River. All I could think of as I looked at him was that now there were more visits to be made, more calls to be put through; I was beginning to feel like I was swimming through a dream, through a world of shadows and mirage where none of this had happened, where Peters hadn’t died—

  “Let’s go, Pham, we’ll check the suits later.” I was also becoming more and more aware of the drones somewhere outside the airlock’s thin doors. “We have to move this tractor—that outer door could open again any—”

  I was cut off by a distant whoosh and an explosion, then the peculiar ripping sound of pulse lasers. It was coming from inside the dome, not outside. “Grenades—at close quarters! Where in the hell?”

  We spun around to look back at the tall assembly building. The square in front of it was still empty, but in the alley alongside the building we could see drones moving near its far corner.

  “Why they using guns? No!” A bluish light flickered suddenly in the building’s windows, and then all at once it grew brighter as weapons began to fire back. “Noooo!” Pham started to run for the building, but I grabbed her arm and held her back as more drones appeared around the side of the building and wandered into the square.

  “There’s nothing you can do! Somebody must have seen the drones coming back and gotten nervous. Come on, we’re going to be trapped in this tunnel. We have to get out of the square.”

  From inside the assembly building came the roaring sounds and the flickering lights of a pitched battle in the enclosed space, and as we walked quickly toward the corner of the barracks, a portion of the assembly building’s first floor wall began to glow and then disintegrate.

  “Please, no!” Pham leaned against a corner of the barracks and hugged herself, staring at the horrible spectacle in what had been our last sanctuary. “Everyone in there, they all die like that—piece-of-shit bastards!” Tears ran down her face as she hugged herself tighter and watched. “So why they do it, hah? They want your case with codes, or what?” Drones wandered toward us across the square.

  “No. If they’d seen me take it in, and knew what it was, then they had their chance long before now. One of our people must have just opened the door and started firing.”

  A window high in the building blew out in a high-pitched shattering of glass, and heavy black smoke poured out behind it and rose to gather in the top of the dome.

  “Oh, God no, nobody stay alive in there!” As she spoke, one of the drones’ miniature scouts streaked toward us where we stood by the barracks and then stopped abruptly in a nearby window, gripping the sill with its tiny claws. A four-legged drone wandered up to us, its weapon held at the end of its compact arm, and Pham grabbed at my arm to stop me as I reached for my gun. But the drone just pushed between the wall and Pham’s legs, and after stepping around the corner for a moment it started back the way it had come, the little flying scout taking off after it. Apparently neither of them had noticed the tractor idling inside the open lock tunnel.

  At the far end of the square, drones walked out of the assembly building through the collapsed wall, followed by new clouds of smoke. Several more were carried out in the grapples of the larger flying cylinders, then after a few minutes the square was empty again.

  For a long time we stood and watched the smoke trickle out of the distant building and then finally die away. Pham wiped at her eyes and turned away from the square, walking up the perimeter road past the barracks, washed in the
late sun and casting a long shadow on the wall. When I caught up with her she leaned back against the wall, and faced into the sun to watch me.

  “A little while ago,” she said finally, “I think I want to ask you why they all come here, why you take such a big chance, why you wait too long with Michael and Father Peters, why you make such big mistakes—why all my friends dead.”

  I sat down on the trailer’s coupling and studied her as she spoke, the dark eyes in the delicate face, the high cheekbones and the small, flat nose and full lips, the low sun bathing her skin and turning it a soft white. She wasn’t expecting me to answer, and I knew there was nothing I could say, in any case.

  “But I know, easy to get crazy thinking how things maybe should be different, blaming Eddie Torres because everything just the same. Long time I hate you, you know. Always I want to be just like you, strong and okay all the time, so I hate you. But nobody’s fault. Friends dead, okay, very sad for me. Nobody’s fault.” She looked away.

  We stayed like that for a time, watching the drone ships on the horizon glinting in the sun. Occasionally a ship would arrive or depart, or move along the horizon, around toward the east side of the dome.

  “You want to dance?” she said. She’d moved away from the wall, and stood on her toes with her arms out, casting a sharp, clean shadow against the dusty bricks.

  “No.”

  She began to dance nevertheless, tiny and poised, turning in slow circles as her shadow followed, her feet whispering across the ground. The sunlight glowed against her skin through her blouse, outlining first her shoulders, then her breasts and her arms as she turned. On and on she went, eyes closed, until finally she stopped and hugged herself, opening her eyes to look up at the dome.

  “Hard to breathe,” she said.

  I followed her eyes, and after a minute looked back out across the surface at the ships. “All I wanted to do was stop them,” I said.

  “Well, then,” interrupted a crisp, new voice suddenly, “you should have asked them nicely, shouldn’t you?” It was Bolton’s voice. We both spun to look.

  “Up here, if you please.”

  “Jesus! Little Bolton.” The grasshopper drone’s front end hung over the edge of the barrack’s roof. “What are you doing up there?”

  “I’m a coward. What are you doing down there?”

  “I wish we knew. How did you get up there?”

  “I jumped. You know how splendidly good I am at altitude, Mr. Torres. It’s only forward momentum that’s shy.”

  “Um, right. What do you mean, we should have asked them nicely?” “Why, with the password, of course.”

  Pham and I looked at each other. I got to my feet slowly. “What password, Little Bolton?” My mouth was dry.

  “The one Ms. Miller always used to make us do what she wanted. What other password could you mean? Surely you know.”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t.”

  Could it be? That the spiders and grasshoppers had an older layer, after all, a meta-password they had never acknowledged while Miller was still alive? We’d never thought to ask again after she died. Had they been programmed to change allegiance on news of her death? Or had their old constructs of curiosity and will led them to decide this on their own?

  “No,” I said again. “We used every number and spec there is, Little B., and this is what happened. What password?”

  “China Moon.”

  My heart was beating too loudly. The thin air was becoming hard to suck into my lungs. “Pham, the tractor. We’re going to back it up to the assembly building. Slowly, putting the suits on as we go. The case is hidden underneath the far staircase; I’m sure they didn’t find it. Move quietly and try not to look at anything else. We’ll leave the tractor running and both go in together. Now.”

  We took turns holding the wheel as we wriggled into the suits, leaving just the helmets on the seat when we stepped down quietly and pushed open the main doors into the building.

  It was fortunate for us that the inside of the building was in shadow now, because from what little we could see it looked like the bloodbath Col o nel Becker had described at Wallneck. The horror of it grew in me as I sensed the blood around my feet and the burned flesh and the dismembered bodies. Pham moved ahead of me, stepping gingerly among the burned masonry and the bodies, while I tried to follow in her footsteps and looked around carefully at the open doors and the holes in the walls.

  “Pham—drones!” Several of them had walked quietly in through the rear door, moving idly toward the staircases. “Keep going! I’m going around over the mezzanine!”

  I worked my way back as quickly as I could and raced up the steps as Pham pushed her way forward. A piece of the building’s wall in front of her suddenly glowed and then crumbled inward, and more drones stepped in over the bricks. “Hurry, Pham!”

  I tore my way up the stairs, tugging at the rail as I went, and then launched myself across the mezzanine, trying to keep sight of Pham as she hurried toward the back wall and the stairs. And then suddenly I twisted and fell, smashing into the railing to keep from running into half a dozen more drones that stood perfectly still in front of me, blocking my way.

  “Pham! I can’t get through up here. Hurry!” I clawed my way around to avoid the drones as they moved toward me, and tried to keep Pham in sight at the same time. She was moving faster than the drones down below, just a few feet away from where the corner of the case showed from under the stairs, and she was beginning to bend down to reach for it.

  “You’re still clear, Pham! Go! You’ve got it!” I scrambled backward.

  It was just as Pham’s fingertips touched the case, as one of the drones raised its weapon to fire at her, that the baby cried.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Tears on the Earth,

  a Child in the Heavens

  H

  ere, I must pause in my story. For when I think back to that dark afternoon, I am overcome by the magnitude of the events that were about to occur, and by the sense of disaster that was to fall across me because of them. But I know that it was not my own story I’d meant to tell, so I collect my thoughts and tell myself I must do my best to remember the day as it truly was.

  I look back, then, and see myself surrounded by those dark walls at that moment, by the iron flooring and stairs. I see the drones in front of me, waiting, I don’t know what for. But they are preventing me from crossing the chamber to the stairs where the case is hidden. The railing is cold and rough in my hands.

  Pham is below me. She is leaning forward a little at the waist, knees bent, and her hand is around the handle of the case.

  But she is not looking at it. She is looking the other way, over her shoulder. Looking for the source of the cry. Her eyes move carefully, probing among the shapes on the floor.

  Then she is moving.

  “Pham,” I say. I want her to return to the case, want her hand to close again around the handle of it and never let it go.

  I grasp the railing with both hands and lean as far out as I can.

  “Pham, the case. We have to have the case.”

  But she doesn’t hear me. I strain forward until I’m well out over the bay, screaming at her inside. But there is nothing I can do, and my despair only grows.

  In the center of the floor there is the shape of a man in a white coat. He is on his knees, bent forward. Underneath him, his great, black hand holds a breathing mask, immovable in his dying grip, around the face of the infant. Tiny hands reach around it, moving one way and then the other, looking for warmth.

  Pham takes the man’s arm and tries to pull it away, then glances back at the stairway. The drone has lowered its weapon.

  The man’s arm comes free. Pham lifts the infant, and now she is comforting it, holding it close to her.

  “Come,” she says. Whether to me or the infant, I do not know, but she is leaving.

  The drones on the mezzanine next to me move closer. It is Peters’ body I had touched, there behind them. It is n
o longer covered by the blanket. I back away down the stairs, careful of my footing, and turn to follow Pham.

  Then I stop. I can still make it, I think. I take a step into the room, then stop again as the horror finally fills me with its full force.

  The building is dark, a place out of the underworld. Smoke drifts across the corpses while the drones wander among them like sentinels over the dead. And somewhere beyond them, lost in the darkness, is the case. The one that would have brought us past the final hurdle in our journey, the one that would have finally brought us peace. The one for which I now have the password.

  Pham waits for me in the doorway. She has opened her suit and placed the infant against her stomach, then closed the material around him. It is as though she means to bear the child again, herself. She holds out a hand to me.

  I

  pushed the tractor’s throttle all the way forward.

  “Damn it, Pham, you could have had the case.”

  She adjusted the airflow to her suit. “This more important.”

  “More important than a million lives? Our futures were in that case, Pham.”

  “Futures, yah. Baby here now.” She reached out to close her door, then pointed. “Look!”

  Little Bolton was pumping his six legs across the square as fast as he could, while drones with their weapons moved around behind him. Others wandered toward the airlock tunnel in front of us.

  “He’s not going to make it,” I said. “And I can’t stop.” I tapped the throttle lever to make sure it was all the way open. The distance between us and Little Bolton dropped to fifty yards, then forty. His blunt front end was low to the ground, all six legs pumping frantically, kicking up a trail of black dust that rushed eastward toward the breach.

  Off to our other side a dim beam glowed briefly from one of the drone’s weapons, aimed in our direction, then suddenly the tractor slued as one of the wheel motors froze up. Pham slammed home the seals on my helmet while I fought the tractor back on course, then just as Little Bolton disappeared under the wheels Pham reached out through her open door. There was a blur of movement and then Pham was dragging the little grasshopper drone into the cab amid a thrashing of legs and a muffled screaming I couldn’t hear through my helmet. Pham pressed the door controls then turned on my suit radios.