A Grey Moon Over China (18 page)

“God damn it, I’m running this—”

“That’s right, Torres. You’re running it and you want to win so bad your prick hurts. You want your little picket fence in the sky no matter what it takes and I’m getting it for you. And that means there’s going to be shit you don’t want to know about, doesn’t it?”

I stared at him.

“Isn’t that right, Torres? You never want to know the shitty parts.”

I left him standing against the wall.

Bolton had the tunneling sled into the center elevator. How was he going to reach the connector, though? Tunneling up through half a mile of rock would take hours, but his only alternative was to go out through the opening, up the eastern face, and back along the ridge. Which he couldn’t do.

Up on the airfield, a frog’s laser barrel slid above the lip and began aiming bursts at the middle elevator’s blast door. I reached for a microphone.

“Bolton, there’s a burner on the doors to your elevator shaft. When you reach the top and open your inside doors, that blast door’s all that’s going to be between you and the frog.”

“His position?” A grid snapped onto the screen.

“Inclination zero, azimuth three decimal niner left. I say again
your
left, three decimal niner.”

“And where is he targeting, please?”

“Bottom center, middle doors.”

Inside Bolton’s elevator, the sled floated up to the ceiling so that it wouldn’t slam into it when the elevator stopped. Then it moved to one side, still facing the doors.

“Open my inside doors, please.” The doors slid aside to reveal the shaft speeding by.

Suddenly the elevator flared white as Bolton fired his entire bank of diggers in the confined space. The picture went blank.

Looking at the outside of the outer doors, from cameras up on the airfield, the frog was rapidly enlarging a gaping hole in the elevator’s blast doors. Then all at once a patch at one of the upper corners of the doors, away from where the frog was firing, burst into flame. It grew brighter and brighter, then a bolt of fire lanced through it and down the full length of the cavern into the frog. The frog spun away.

The sled immediately pushed through the new hole and rose to the cavern roof for its run to the opening.

“Listen!” One of the controllers cocked an ear and held up a hand.

Nothing.

The room shook from another blow, but soundlessly.

“There!” A high-pitched whine, coming through the walls right after the blow.

“Heaters. They’re blowing chunks out of the wall with lasers, then clearing it with heaters. How long to go through a hundred-foot-thick wall, do you think?”

“Not very long.”

“How the hell do they know where to tunnel, though? That wall is six miles long and a mile high, and it all looks exactly the same from the outside.”

“Someone told them.”

Why
, I thought. Why now?

Whump
. Then the whining again, louder.

“There he goes!”

Bolton’s sled was disappearing out the opening. On the range officer’s screen, with its side view of the opening, the sled turned its flank to the wall and rose upward—he was gambling on the pickets’ east wall blind spot. Finally the sled stopped, just below the ridge.

I turned to the console and got ready.

“All right,” said Bolton over his radio. “We’re going to cut a bit of a groove here. We’ll need a very sharp call-out on distance to the mast, if you would. We’re going to be able to see bugger all once we get started.”

Finally I understood.

“Bolton! I can steer your sled from here. Set it to zero-zero—mark.”

“Thank you, lad, that’s very decent of you.”

Whump
.

“I’ll give you timing by voice. You’re going to leave the sled when it stops?”

“That I am, lad. All right, Roscoe, steady on.”

The sled rotated to face in along the ridge toward the antenna mast. It jerked backward in a cloud of exploding rock as the beam lit up, cutting a groove in toward the mast.

The pattern of pickets changed instantly. Two gunships streaked in toward the sled, which at the very same moment vanished in a cloud of dust exploding outward from the ridge. The gunships veered away and circled, trying to probe the cloud with radar and infrared.

“Thirty-four seconds.”

WHUMP
. An equipment rack crashed to the ground. The air grew hot. Another frog nosed around the edge of the opening.

“Fifteen.”

WHUMP, WHUMP
. Close. There had to be a frog all the way inside the hole, closing in on us.

“Five seconds.” I picked up the light-pen.

“Two. One.”

The sled stopped at the mast. Bolton appeared through the smoke, bent over and racing across the rock toward the mast.

But the smoke was already dissipating. One of the gunships accelerated around the edge of the cloud and shot in toward him.

“Company, Bolton.”

He dropped to his stomach and groped overhead for the connector. I clicked on the light-pen and tracked the gunship with it.

WHUMP
. Dust fell from the ceiling. Bolton heaved the connector up toward its socket as a line of gunfire stitched toward him.

With a final lunge against the wires the connector slid home. Our battle map blossomed with numbers.

I pressed the button.

Bolton had caught an arm in the wire bundle and was trying to pull aside from the line of fire, but he was unable to get any leverage.

The gunship changed course, then abruptly tumbled downward. Its nose dug into the rock and an instant later an oily wall of flame slid across the rock close to Bolton.

“Stay where you are, Bolton.” I flicked the light-pen over to the other gunship and pressed. It nosed down into the ridge as well and promptly exploded.

“All right, you’re clear for a minute. Get in the sled and stay there—we’re going to need you on the north wall.”

He finished untangling his arm.

“Pray tell, Eduardo.” He was out of breath. “How exactly did you do that?”

“Stand by.”

WHUMP
. Rock exploded somewhere in the wall nearby, followed by a shriek of tearing metal. I moved the light-pen to each of the aircraft along the north wall, pushing the button again and again. They plummeted down the wall and into the ocean in a cloud of steam.

“All right,” I said. “Someone write down those numbers on the screen. Fast.”

“What’s
happening?
” said Elliot. “Even the frogs are going in.”

“Is someone writing down those goddamned numbers?

“What those are,” I said after a moment, “is the serial numbers of the batteries in the aircraft. Every battery has a transponder in it—when the antennas query it, it responds with its serial number. Then if I
transmit
a serial number, that battery shuts down.”

I swept the pen across the pickets over the ocean.

“Look up those serial numbers—find out who we sold them to.”

WHUMP.

“Bolton! Get down on the north wall. There’s a laser in that hole where I can’t get at it.”

“Aye, aye.”

“Mr. Torres? Those serial numbers went to the Europeans.”

“The
Europeans
? What the hell are
they
doing here? Christ, this doesn’t make any sense.”

The complex we were in began shaking again, vibrating, and this time it didn’t stop.

“Bolton, can you see where they went in? They haven’t broken through, but they’re awfully damned close. They must be trying to hit the command center here.”

“There’s fuck all to see from here, I’m afraid. I don’t know where I am. I do think I’ve got him, though. They’ve made a bloody big hole, about your level—”

“Oh my god, no! Mr. Torres!” A woman behind me.

More shouting. Another woman’s voice, screaming now.

“The infirmary—” Awful sounds.

“It’s the children!”

Disoriented, I raced for the door—and as soon as I was through I knew something was terribly wrong. Daylight was pouring in, a hundred yards down the corridor. I ran.

The infirmary door wouldn’t move. Others were around me now, pushing, confused. I found a fire axe and tore it from the wall, then pushed my way through to the infirmary window.

And froze.

It was gone. The infirmary, utterly gone. Dust swirled over a gaping hole that sloped downward and away to daylight. The medics, the children, all gone.

Then a movement to one side caught my eye. Along one wall there remained a shattered piece of ledge, hard to see through the dust. A crib hung over the lip. Tiny hands gripped the bars and a face looked over the rail, shrieking with terror and wet with tears.

Enough of the floor remained to work my way around, if I could get through the window. The baby turned his head from side to side and cried,
but from outside the window I could hear nothing but my own breathing. I stared, gripping the axe harder.

But I didn’t swing it. I knew the baby could see me in the window and was screaming for me to come, but I just stood there and stared back for what seemed like an eternity, unable to move.

The axe was torn out of my hands. The baby lifted his head to cry harder and threw his arms out toward the window, tipping the crib.

The image of his face, and his tiny hands reaching out to me, would stay with me through all the years I had left to live.

C
han’s baby was stillborn. Chan suffered a great deal in the months that followed, and drew into herself.

I myself provided little solace. It had, in fact, become so hard for me to remember the baby that sometimes I believed she hadn’t existed. But I remembered the look in the medic’s eyes, and so I couldn’t put the event behind me completely.

It had been the worst of signs in a year filled with bad signs. I sat in the darkened manufacturing chamber now and thought about how the day past had brought only more.

By some reckonings it was the first day of the Year of the Snake—a poor sign in itself, the Chinese said. And the new year, by those reckonings, began with the full moon. The full moon meant that the sun and the moon were in line with the Earth, a circumstance that brought the highest tides of the month. This particular New Year’s marked a solstice, moreover, a time when the highest tides were to be found on the tropic of Capricorn and the tropic of Cancer, along which lay the Ganges River Delta. The conjunction of these events also came at a time when the oceans were rising because of melting ice packs, and coastal lands were subsiding because of excessive ground water pumping.

So, five and a half hours earlier, as the Year of the Snake stole westward out of Burma and the full moon rose over the Bay of Bengal, a storm had flooded the Ganges Delta. Dacca and parts of Calcutta lay under water. Forty-three million people were expected to die.

The news had chilled our own New Year’s celebration, a procession arranged by Pham and the captive Chih-Hsien Chien during a rare truce between them. The parade had gone on for the children’s sake, but only after bottles of rice wine had passed again and again among the adults.

I stood in the darkened doorway of the manufacturing chamber and
watched. The procession was led by an enormous paper snake, lowered over the heads of Chan, Elliot, Peters and others. Pham led the way, bent over with her torso inside the snake’s head. It weaved back and forth as she steered, sensuous and menacing. Lewd comments flew between her and the tail, while watchers banged noisemakers and passed bottles of the bitter wine.

Children clapped in time and jumped with excitement as the snake threw them candy. They were too young to see the edges of fear behind the merriment.

It was the snake’s job to burst through three tall paper banners blocking its path. The first was a picture of the Earth, and the second the moon. The third was painted a deep, velvety black, speckled with stars. Only by bursting through these images of the Earth, the moon and the stars could the snake find its rightful place in the heavens for the new year.