A Grey Moon Over China (65 page)

B
art Allerton was forced to the floor so quickly that none of us fully realized it had happened. As his hand descended toward the bassinet Pham seemed to draw away from him, but a moment later she was reaching for him as though to keep him from falling. Then she was lifting the baby, and Bart Allerton was making an odd sound from where he lay on the floor, his larynx crushed.

It was several minutes later when Susan Perris stood up from Allerton’s side and told us in a shaky voice that he was not in danger, but that he had suffered wounds she wouldn’t have thought someone half his size could inflict.

Then, with a last look at Allerton and a chilly glance directed at me, Perris left to summon help. Chan followed her out, though she seemed uninterested in Allerton. For a few minutes, then, the room was filled with uneasy fits of conversation, dropping away occasionally into nervous silence. Pham was gone, her departure unnoticed.

Polaski’s face had closed over into a mask during the confrontation, and now, with careful looks at me and at Dorczak, and with a quick look at Allerton on the floor, he motioned to Jacob Todd and strode out of the door. He pushed a hand against Kip’s chest on the way out, causing him to stumble against the chairs and fall.

Harry Penderson helped Kip up, then leaned across the table to me with his hand extended.

“How you been keeping yourself?” he said.

“Jesus, Harry, I don’t believe you’re here.” I shook his hand, then walked around the table to embrace Carolyn Dorczak.

“Cheer up, Ed,” she said.

“Damn it, Carolyn, no one knew . . . we thought you were dead.”

She stepped back as the medics moved Allerton’s stretcher through the
door, his bluish face twisted with pain. Dorczak hugged herself and moved closer to Penderson, then turned back to me.

“I know that’s what you thought,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She glanced at Allerton as he disappeared. “The girl’s quick, isn’t she? Scary, if she’s not on your side. We heard she brought back a baby from Four. That’s a change, isn’t it?”

“She killed David Rosler,” I said.

“I know,” said Dorczak. “I can’t say Harry minded any.”

“How did you hear about it?” I said. “Where the hell have you two
been?
”

“Mike Bolton told us. He said Pham’s been having a rough time. She’s done a lot to help us out, though. We’ve been back on the Boar River plains, Ed—Sammy Becker’s been back and forth to keep us in touch. I was sorry to hear about Mike, by the way. I kind of had an itch for him once, you know.” With a wry little smile she took Penderson’s hand. “He was very gracious about it.”

“Bolton knew where you were?” I said. I felt the nausea coming back.

Dorczak pushed her hair out of the way and nodded uncertainly. “He wasn’t sure where you stood, Ed.”

“Okay.” I watched her for a minute. “So you’re back at the helm in Lowhead, then? Does that mean you can hold your ships back from Polaski’s assault on the torus? You know about that?”

“Oh, yes, we know.” All at once she looked tired. “I don’t know, Ed. I may have hammered a civilian government back into place, but it’s only because the military was already nervous about Allerton. I still need to be pretty careful about pissing them off. The truth is, if you were to stop people on the street in West Lowhead and ask them, they’d say they still want a strong posture against these drones. None of them’s ready to have us lay down our weapons and trust in their benevolent grace. It’s only the intellectuals who’re saying we should, and I’m not sure even they are ready to let go and rely on faith alone. No, Ed, I can give you some time, but that’s all. And maybe your defections will help. But by now I think you’re the only one who can stop Polaski. I know he likes to think he wipes his feet on you these days, but without you to pump him up he’ll fall apart and this whole system might have a chance to come up for air.”

“Our defections?”

Penderson nodded. “Priscilla Bates is coming back to Boar River with us. With Throckmorton and all of his troops in tow, and there’s a few others. What do you need more time
for
, Torres?”

I put my hands in my pockets, but neither Elliot nor I answered.

“Jeeps,” said Dorczak, “you boys look like you’ve been caught smoking or something.”

Then her face sobered. “You’re not going back, are you? To try and get control of the drones again? Oh, Ed, don’t!”

I
’d meant to find Chan the night before Elliot and I left, but provisioning the ship seemed to grow more complicated at the last minute, and by the time we were ready to seal the locks I only had a minute to look for her. I didn’t find her, but I did promise myself that I’d spend more time with her as soon as we returned.

Elliot spent the evening with Perris, but in the morning he seemed more tired and distracted than ever.

“Harry and Carolyn said to say good-bye,” he said.

“They’re gone?”

“They left early. Worried about the home front. Did you know they were married?”

“No. When?”

“Back on the plains. Becker married ’em—senior officer present and all that.”

I’d had to tell Kip he couldn’t come. I found him in my quarters sitting against the wall, with my gun in his hands. He was turning it this way and that, looking at it from all sides. I took it away and told him he was to stay with Chan.

The only one to see the two of us off, in the end, was Pham.

The day before, the Russian Marina Tonova had silenced a move to hold Pham accountable for assault and battery against Allerton, at one point slapping Polaski publicly for suggesting that Pham’s straying priorities had placed the mission in jeopardy because of it. Tonova had then dropped her official duties and closeted herself with Pham, announcing it as her intention to teach Pham how to raise a child.

Now Pham stood leaning against the wall, watching as we clattered our way into the lock for the last time, dragging our boots and oxygen bottles behind us. The baby squirmed in her arms and chattered importantly, pointing at each piece of equipment in turn and looking up at me with his big eyes each time he pointed.

“So,” said Pham.

It was the last sight I had of the fleet—Pham leaning against the steel bulkhead, dark eyes and smooth skin contrasted against her black hair and white blouse, relaxed and a little sad, the baby in her arms pointing solemnly at my face through the porthole.

*  *  *

K
new a fella in Louisiana, once,” said Elliot, “got tired of living and went around poking in corners all the time. Looking for the plug, he said.”

Elliot was sprawled in the pilot’s seat, tipped back to see overhead in the direction we were moving, trying to maneuver us into orbit with his bare toes on the controls. Even as he spoke the shuttle lurched several times in rapid succession. A density finder pulled out of my hands and crashed to the deck.

“Hell, Torres,” said Elliot over his shoulder, “you already checked that thing eighty-nine times. Just as well you finally set it down.”

“The codes case may have been moved, Tyrone, and we’re going to have to go right to it. We’re only going to have one chance to get at it before the drones start deciding we’re important again.”

“Well, maybe, maybe not—so far no one’s ever seen ’em take after a regular suit or an ordinary supply shuttle. You just smile and nod when we’re down there, Torres, and don’t get all uptight and start throwing rocks and waving your toys around.”

“We have to have
some
advantage, Tyrone—Jesus, it makes my skin crawl, going back in there. You weren’t there when it was wall-to-wall drones.” My palms were sweating. The memory of the bodies, the blood, the shadowy drones drifting through the darkness, had wrapped itself around me like the stench of death itself. I had ached for a weapon then, and I couldn’t imagine going back without one now.

“Your advantage is
faith
, boy,
faith
. You’re gonna have to take all that being-in-charge shit and let it go.” He tipped his head back to grin at me upside down, opening his fist as though letting something go. The ship twisted and dropped out from under us.

“Oops. Tricky bastard, huh?”

If the drones couldn’t see a weapon, I knew, they wouldn’t fire. And if they were going to fire anyway, or if they were blocking the way to the case, then it would be just as well if we had one.

The ship righted itself as the MI took over our orbit around the black planet. Elliot abandoned the controls and spun around to look at me.

“We can still turn around, Torres. Seems like a mighty fine idea, as a matter of fact. You see, I’m willing to bet a bright fella like you can talk FleetSys into shutting itself down right on Polaski’s ass, and without that ol’ box of wires, ain’t no one attacking nothing. Might just
force
all them generals and admirals to have a little faith, don’t you suppose?”

“We’ve been through this before, Tyrone. It takes at least two fleet officers to change FleetSys’ commands, and with Rosler and Bolton gone that only leaves me and Polaski. Priscilla took herself off the list long ago.”

“Well, shoot, Torres. Just forget about the whole thing, then. Learn how to dig wells or something.”

The trip hadn’t been easy. Day after day I’d tried to keep busy, but all the while I was plagued by the memory of Singh looking at me, and Polaski’s grey eyes, and Pham’s challenge about standing up to the real enemy.

“Here, look at this,” I said. I brought up a picture of the surface on our screens, with our old base coming into view over the horizon. It was early in the planet’s morning. Elliot tipped his seat forward and stared at it.

“Them critters is taking this pretty serious, aren’t they?”

Across an area stretching for miles out from the main dome lay row upon row of new ships. Most of them were smaller than the drones’ original ones. Packed in among them were complex staging areas and assembly lines, each of them leading off to the mining equipment and to some other kind of heavy equipment we didn’t recognize. Every square foot was dense with activity.

“Lord almighty, look at that. Must be twenty thousand of ’em down there, all different shapes and sizes. They’ve got the smelters going again, huh?”

Our orbit took us over the base and Elliot pointed to an empty stretch of ground a quarter of a mile from the front of the main dome. “Right there,” he said. “We’ll put down on our next pass, real gentle-like. Then walk back to the dome.”

“Christ, Tyrone, we’d have to walk right through the middle of the drones to get to the lock tunnel.”

As the image slid off the screen and was replaced by the empty wastes, he leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Faith,” he said. He straightened and reached for his boots. “Fifty-six minutes.”

But it was more faith than I had.

R
emember, Torres, back on that stinking little island in the Pacific? After Chan jinxed the air controllers and sent that poor son-of-a-bitch MP packing?”

We were suited up and sat with our feet on the instrument panel and our helmets on our laps, watching the terminator slip toward us.

“I never seen you carrying on like you done that night,” he said. “Remember, you and me kept trying to get Bolton drunk and he’d just sit there saying ‘No thank you,’ all polite-like? With Polaski sitting on his bunk cleaning his revolver all night, and you trying to get Chan into the bushes somewhere and she was so out of it she’d just wake up and tell you it was
raining and fall back asleep. It was you and me in the end there, wasn’t it? Sitting out on the porch in the middle of the monsoons at three in the morning, soaking wet and popping grenades off at Polaski’s truck, seeing if we could get the sucker to turn over? Shit, Torres, we had some good times there for a while, didn’t we?”

“They’ll be back, Tyrone. Pretty soon now, they’ll be back.”

“Yeah, I suppose. Hell, I can’t even remember if we ever did get the truck to turn over. You were so drunk you probably don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Here we go,” I said. I pulled my feet back from the panel and floated up against the harness just as the shuttle rolled and fired its engines. As it dropped to the surface I held the navigation screen’s crosshairs over the tiny clearing Elliot had pointed out, and in minutes we were bumping against the ground. We held our breath and stared out through the windscreen.

For a few seconds nothing happened. Then all at once a group of the tiny drone scouts darted in to take up positions around the shuttle.

“Oh, shit.”

We stared past the scouts at the banks of machinery and drones spread out in every direction, waiting for them to pick up weapons and turn them on us. The scouts hovered, and the seconds ticked by. Then just as quickly as they’d appeared, they vanished.

Nothing else happened. Fifty feet in front of us, on an assembly line, arms were being attached to rows of partially assembled drones—arms which then immediately came to life and took over the remaining assembly of their own bodies. They stood on an immaculately clean area of the surface fused to a glassy smoothness. Their movements were almost too quick to follow. None paid us the least attention.