The Transmigration of Souls (6 page)

Tariq said, “Landing radar locked on. Three thousand meters. Fifteen hundred kps lateral velocity.”

All right. All right, Colonel Sir Qamal ibn-Aziz Alireza. This
is
your time. Engine rumbling merrily, sucking up velocity, blowing it away as fire and exhaust gas and radiant energy, ship slowing, dropping, dropping...

Mahal, reading the inertial navigation unit, said, “On track, on timeline, on target.”

“Zeq?”

“We’re doing fine. Just fine.” Soft, soothing voice.

Nothing from the other two, Rahman and Inbar just passengers. Until we get down. Then we’ll be needing a planetary geologist and an American technologies specialist...

Moment of troubled memory: “... anywhere in the solar system...” Where the Hell else had they gone? Somewhere we didn’t know about? If they put up a secret Mars base, maybe...

Mahal said, “Tracking four arc seconds west of true course...”

And Tariq said, “One thousand meters. Two hundred kps transverse...”

Alireza, adjusting the controls, felt his heart start chugging away, faster and faster, beads of sweat popping out on his brow.

Then Zeq chirped, “High gate!”

And the Moon surged up in their windows, flat, bright, yellow-white, reaching out to infinity, suddenly become a whole world.

Inbar said. “
Elohim
! I
see
it!” Voice silly with excitement.

Falling at a steep angle now, down across Peary toward the mountainous rimwall of Rozhdestvenskiy. Right
there
. Patches of burn on Lunar soil. Small, shiny things, strewn here and there. What looked like the wreck of an old spacecraft, some history-familiar American design, all angles and wrinkles of glittery gold.

A clear, glassy dome, dome of misty triangles shining in the sun, shadowy shapes within. Rahman whispered, “Still holding pressure, maybe. They built well, those old devils.”

Down and down, Lunar horizon bulging up until the toy ruins of the Americans’ mooncity were lost again. Down and down. Tariq’s numbers coming quickly now, Mahal calling out range and distance to the dome, on whose coordinates the inertial unit had been set...

Cloud of thin, flaring dust, lit by fire from within.

Mahal: “Contact!”

Zeq: “Engine stop.”

Slam
. Rattle. Bang.

Silence.

Then, over the radio link, you could hear the mission control team yahooing like cowboys in some old Italian movie. Alireza took cramped hands off the controls and flexed his fingers. No famous words prepared, just one more murmur of, “Thanks be to God Almighty.”

Subaïda Rahman unbuckled her restraining harness and said, “Let’s
go
!”

o0o

It was reasonable, Kincaid knew, for them to be using a Scavenger ship. And a good thing. Scavengers were roughly the same size and shape as human beings, though they didn’t look much like them, not really. Still, they’d had things like hands on the ends of things like arms, were upright bipeds, had their sensory organs clustered on something like a head, head mounted, more or less, on the top end of the torso. Much narrower than us, of course. Narrower and lighter, all hollow bones and muscles like tendons, so a Scavenger really looked like a cross between a bright green parakeet and a walking skeleton.

Brucie’s crew had done a good job of taking out the Scavenger upholstery and welding in old airline seats. You’d hardly know they didn’t belong here. On the other hand, we’d never even get
in
a Colonial ship, Colonials the size of toy poodles, looking like a cross between a red squirrel and a Chinese dragon, fur and scales and silver fangs and six eyes of molten gold.

But the Colonials had antigravity and hyperdrive and God knows what else, technologies, whole sciences we hadn’t even begun to understand despite decades of trying. Scavengers just a
little
better than us, a little brighter, a little more advanced.

While the Colonials flew starships and then built the Gates...

Scavengers.

Hell.

We were no more than the bugs who clean up what the hyenas and vultures leave behind. Too bad I didn’t have a chance to follow up on Jensen’s latest article. Evidence, firm evidence, thoroughly referenced in Scavenger literature, indicating that hyperdrive experiments gave Colonial scientists the key to the Gates. Which, just maybe, brought down the Jug on their heads. No more than a hint. Because, just when they had it figured out, the Jug fell on them.

And almost fell on us.

Did we close the Gate in time?

Memory of fire and death.

Maybe so. Maybe not.

The ship’s jury-rigged human intercom rasped, and Brucie’s voice said, “General called. Says the Arabs have touched down.”

“So. Chinese?”

“Falling straight in. No orbit, apparently. They could be down in maybe ninety minutes.”

Ninety minutes. “When the Hell are we leaving?”

“Right now, Sarge.”

The Scavenger reaction drive screamed, white light flooding in through the windows, making the faces of her monster-soldier-children glow like demons, and the ship lifted, bulleting into the night sky at better than fifteen gee, leaving behind a splashed, bubbling pool of molten glass where the sandstone launch field had been.

Fifteen gee. Soldiers sitting up, peering out the windows, looking down on the falling Earth, gaping, astonished at the sight. And we feel nothing. I guess the compensators still work. Hell, another few years and maybe the Scavengers would have had antigravity too, then hyperdrive, then...

Brucie called out, “Up and at ‘em, guys! Three hours to the Moon.”

o0o

They were falling in now at what seemed like a very steep angle indeed. Left to its own devices,
Ming Tian
would miss the Moon’s northern limb by about eight thousand meters, whip around the farside and head out into planetary space, accelerated by a gravitational sling shot, lost and gone forever.

No. Not forever. We’d be back again in a year or so...

Imagine that. What if the engines
don’t
fire?

We pushed it too hard. Tried too hard to be ready by too artificial a deadline. Sure, they’re old, reliable engines we’ve been using on GEO transfer stages for the better part of a century. Ninety-eight point seven percent reliable. Just imagine the look on Chang Wushi’s face as he counts down, hits the toggle and... nothing.

Looking out the viewport, Ling Erhshan could watch the Moon grow closer visibly, minute by minute. A quick glance at the mission clock. Seventeen minutes to closest approach. Meaning fourteen minutes to retrofire. No, thirteen now.

Originally, they hadn’t planned on this kind of approach. Originally, they’d planned on a leisurely reconnaissance, two or three days in Lunar polar orbit, taking photographs, making telescopic inspections of the seven known American bases, of the dozens of landing sites and hundreds of traverse tracks left behind all those years ago, then go down, probably at Peary, and see what was what. But we thought, with our conservative approach, with our commitment to a “heroic dash,” that we’d beat the Arabs here by months, maybe even years. Twelve minutes.

The speaker rasped, full of static, Chen Li’s voice: “Recon reports an American launch from California, several minutes ago. Very small. Possibly a missile of some kind.” Eleven minutes.

A missile. Bag us with nuclear warheads, take out their old base as well, for whatever reason?
Ming Tian
’s particle beam weapon might be able to deal with such a threat. He exchanged glances with Chang and Da Chai. Not
quite
worried glances. “Well, we should have a day or two.” Ten minutes.

Chen Li: “Recon reports they took off at fifteen gee. Accelerated to approximately forty kilometers per second before burnout.” Chen Li’s voice very flat. Word tones somewhat subdued, attenuated by static as well, making his phrases sound uncertain, ambiguous.

Da Chai said, “
Forty
...” Nine minutes.

Chang Wushi said, “Then they’ll be here in about...”

Ling said, “Three hours or so.” No sense breaking out a calculator. Eight minutes.

And Ling said, “They. But if it’s only a missile...”

Da Chai said, “Not something we can... wager on. Wager our lives.”

“No.” Seven minutes. Outside, the Moon was looking more and more like a slanting plain, less and less like a round yellow world. Climbing up to meet them now, Peary a bright circle, the squashed ringwall between it and Rozhdestvenskiy forming up into tall, rounded, bulging peaks and dark valleys. Old news stories say the Americans found plenty of fossil ice on the back side of these mountains. Six minutes. Those were the same mountains where the Lakota chieftain Red Hawk and his Mohican ally Chingachgook hid their revolutionary band, not so far from the Lost City of Koriolanis, where Dorian Haldane met his lady love. Five minutes.

Chang and Da Chai turned away, began strapping themselves in, focusing attention on their instruments. Too late now to worry about American missiles. Or whatever. Time now to worry about hardware. And lives. Four minutes.

Ling strapped in, still looking out the window, listening to their technical chatter. Strange to be a passenger in my own space craft. A passenger, after all these years. A wonder they let me come at all. Three minutes.

Well. I am the Chief Designer. I suppose they figured if anything went seriously wrong, I could fix it. Should have chosen Chen Li. Two minutes.

Moon outside a whole world now, as expected. Rolling hills ripping by below, mountains reaching up to pluck them from the sky. So glad I’m here. So very glad. One minute.

Long, long eternity of fear. Time enough to wonder how I’ll feel if... The engines fired after all, and down they went to a white-lit Moon.

o0o

 Through some oversight,
al-Qamar
’s Lunar rover never had a name. Maybe no one thought such a vehicle, like some huge go-kart, like the ORVs so popular with modern Tuaregs, deserved to have a name. Bounding now over the rolling charcoal hills of Peary’s floor, the four of them were clipped to their seats, watching the mountains grow larger, watching
al-Qamar
, where Mahal and Tariq stood watch as they knew they must, grow smaller, until it was no more than a golden freckle out on a darkling plain.

Six kilometers, thought Alireza. I could have done better. Now though, they rolled up in front of the Americans’ old geodesic dome, rolled through the wreckage of their abandoned hardware, rolled across the blackened star patterns of their old landing sites, rolled to a stop. The foggy dome was larger than it appeared from a distance, looming over them now.

Silence. Finally, Rahman said, “I don’t know whether it’s mist or just UV discoloration on the inner panels. Probably the latter.”

Inbar, voice very soft: “If it’s mist, then there’s air.”

“Probably air in any case. It hasn’t been all that long.”

Zeq said, “I feel like I’m trespassing in a graveyard.”

Yes. Very much like that. A little bit like the feeling you got, visiting those old gutted tombs hewn from the living rock of the Valley of the Kings. Alireza bit down on that cold feeling, putting it away. No use fretting about superstitious nonsense. No one died here. It’s like an abandoned home. Of course, abandoned homes often had that haunted feeling as well. As if the people who’d gone away, unexpectedly perhaps, might... Silly. He said, “All right, let’s go in and see what they’ve left us.” He unclipped his harness and stood, rolling to one side, wobbling unsteadily for a moment in strange, too light gravity, struggling with the unfamiliar CG of the suit, which was so much more comfortable in zero gee.

Inbar said, “Check and see if they left the key under the mat. Americans were always leaving keys under mats.”

Scratchy voice, staticky in their earphones. Mahal: “Mission control says the, um, Americans have just launched something.”

“Launched what?”

“A missile maybe. Control says it accelerated too hard to be a manned ship. It’ll get there in about three hours, they said.”

Someone, Zeq maybe, muttered
Bismallah
. Nothing else to say, when you heard something like that.

“What about the Chinese?”

“They’ll be down in fifteen minutes or so. You should see them as soon as they start retro burn, maybe ten degrees above your southern horizon.”

A bright star, falling, falling, growing brighter as it fell...

“All right. Keep us posted. We’re going in now, if we can.”

“Careful.”

“Right.”

The airlock door, it turned out, was swung open on its hinges, a gaping black hole in the foundation wall of the dome. Lightless inside.

“Something here, stuck to the wall just inside the hatch...” A piece of paper, which cracked into two pieces when Rahman plucked it from its place. She held it up to the ambient sunlight, staring at thin old writing, English script. Felt a useless impulse to blow the dust off it.

“What does it say?” asked Zeq.

Long silence. Feeling of unreality. “It says, ‘Key under mat. It’s your ass, buddy.’“

Another long silence, the Alireza said, “Isn’t
Buddy
a popular American name?”

“Sometimes. It also means
friend
.”

Alireza said, “Was it taped to a particular switch?”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s unlikely to be power.” Rahman flipped the switch and the airlock lights came on. Another long moment, the four of them looking at each other, pale, strained faces looking out through thick faceplates, then she said, “Their nuclear power system should’ve shut down long ago, untended like this.”

Zeq said, “And yet.”

“Right. Pull the outer door shut.” A slow look around, at dials and gauges, panels of switches and typical mid-21st century readouts. “This is familiar equipment.”

Inside the dome, there was air: nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, trace gases in the correct ratios, at just a few dozen millibars below standard sea level pressure.

Inbar said, “So. Do we unsuit? It’d make things easier.”