A Grey Moon Over China (66 page)

Elliot whistled his relief and carefully reached for the buckles on his harness. I stood up and backed along the deck toward the airlock, not wanting to take my eyes off the drones as I picked up my equipment and clipped it to my suit, tired already from the high gravity.

“Okay, Tyrone. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it.”

We locked our helmets and tested the radios, then checked the indicators on each other’s suits and separated as we fastened on the last of our equipment. As I worked I found myself waiting for a shudder of the deck as the shuttle was hit, or for the roar of flames cutting through the walls.

I was also thinking about what waited for us in the vehicle assembly building. I wondered if the case was still where I’d hidden it under the stairs, and I wondered what awaited us along the quarter-mile walk to the dome, then across Trinity Square from the destroyed airlock to the silent building.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

I cycled out through the lock first, then stood on the glassy ground watching the silent and exacting activity of the drones. Hair rose on the back of my neck. From out of the midst of the equipment a machine came rushing toward me, a device like the head of a garden rake, reeling out strands of cable. It sidestepped to miss me and continued on into the distance.

“We put down in the middle of a cable run,” I said to Elliot as another one raced toward us and veered aside. “At least they don’t seem to mind.”

“I mind, though,” said Elliot. “I see what you mean about these critters. They sure as hell give me the willies. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead or what, but they get nearly as excited about ignoring us as they do about cutting us up into pieces, and that’s spooky. Come on, let’s move it along here.”

I led the way across the surface, slogging past row after row of equipment running in its hurried precision, quick and silent. I tried not to think and not to imagine, and put one foot in front of the other and kept my eyes on the tunnel ahead. My breath hissed in through the regulators and out again, sucked through by the pumps, dry in my chest.

“Lord, look at that!” I jumped at Elliot’s voice. “What do you suppose happened to that?” He was pointing to a burned tractor lying outside the lock tunnel. It took me a minute to recognize it.

“I was in it,” I said. “Pham and I. And the baby.”

“My, oh my.” We clumped into the iron tunnel. “That’s a real nice kid, ain’t it? The baby. I think that’s fine, her taking care of him like that. Hanging onto him and all.”

Trinity Square was empty. Several of the familiar grey drones moved near the periphery, but otherwise our way to the assembly building was clear, and by the time we reached the center of the square I believed we would make it.

“Suit check,” said Elliot behind me. I turned to look him over, then stood still as he checked my shoulder and chest plates.

“What the hell’s this, Torres?” He yanked loose the grenade launcher I’d clipped under my arm, then pushed a little roughly to start me moving again. “I thought we weren’t packing.”

“A little insurance, is all, Tyrone.”

“
Fuck
, Torres, this thing will get you
killed
. Just couldn’t resist, could you? No faith at all, no sir. Swear to God, boy, I don’t know what you’d do without me to look after you. I’d say you owe me, Torres.”

“Hell, Tyrone, it’s a just a launcher. Keep it out of sight. But all right, fine, I owe you. You’ll get repaid, too, as soon as we’re back in the shuttle
with the codes. You’ll get repaid in Serenitas, you and Susan, me and Chan, all the forests and water and open space we want. Sunshine. You’ll be paid back and then some, Tyrone.”

I stopped and looked at the vehicle assembly building, trying to decide on the best way in. Then I turned around.

Elliot’s helmet was off. He was lying on the ground behind me, the helmet thrown aside by his fall. The launcher was still in his hand, melted in two. The cut had continued on into his side and across his back, through his heart. His mouth was open and his cheek was pressed into the dust, brown against the black, his eyes open and freezing over. I took a step toward him.

“Tyrone?”

He’d fallen forward and lay on his stomach, one leg straight and the other bent at the knee, his arms out from his sides and turned inward so that the palms faced up. Blood from the wound trickled to the ground and glistened black before it froze.

“Tyrone?” I stood still, listening to my own breath and watching his face. Minutes passed and the moisture from his last breath turned to a fine glitter of ice crystals on his lips, then I felt a warmth in the soles of my feet. It began where the frayed covering of the old boots chafed against my instep, then spread into my toes with a prickling sensation.

“It’s all right, Tyrone,” I said, “they just wanted the launcher.”

Was I talking too loud? I couldn’t tell.

Then the base of my spine was too warm, and soon after the heat swelled to burn in my loins, so that I wanted to peel off the suit and fling it aside.

His eyes were frozen, opaque, a grayish silver like the hairs on his temples. Moisture had frozen along both sides of his flat nose, in the lines that began in the corners of his eyes and gave them their warmth, the liquid frozen now in the lines like tears. The skin was burnished smooth by the cold, hardened by the stubble growing across his chin and down into the steel collar of his suit.

“Damn it, Tyrone, come on—Jesus!” The warmth moved through my belly and into my chest, an urgent thing I wanted to push away, and couldn’t.

Maybe there was still air in the dome after all. Maybe he was still alive. He hadn’t really seen the weapon I carried—he’d never held it in his hand at all.

But my legs were weak, and I lowered myself to my knees. I began to whisper.

“Madre de Dios.”
I reached out and groped for Elliot’s arms to turn him,
but I was unable to get a grip through the clumsy gloves and unable to see him through the tears. “Oh, God, please—no.” I tried to lift his head and press his face against mine, to feel his skin and squeeze life into him and hear his voice, to touch him, but my helmet pushed him away and my hands were like clubs. I could only grapple helplessly through the suit. Suddenly I felt as though I had only been able to grapple helplessly for him all my life, as though I’d never really touched him at all.

“No, please.” But no matter how I held him I could only feel the lifeless rubber of my suit, engulfing me like the inside of my own skin. I lowered his head and sank down next to him, pulling him closer and burying my helmet in his side—understanding, in a sudden, final moment of clarity, that I was completely alone.

I don’t know how long I stayed at his side, but I know that as the hours passed I began to grow angry. Angry at the memories of him, angry at the drones, angry at the quietness of the square. I pushed myself up and felt the suit pull at me, binding me with its bloodless skin, trapping me in with the breastplate of armor I wore and the lump of the gun I’d put under my arm, now trapped against me forever by the suit. I felt the material rubbing at my elbows, and the acceleration collars pulling at my arms and thighs . . . the warm spots behind the knees where heated air was pumped back in, the prickling where the helmet’s headband caught my eyebrows . . .

“Where are you!”

My voice echoed inside the helmet.

“Which one of you bastards killed him?”

I turned from one side of the square to the other.

“It wasn’t even his gun, damn you! Who the hell do you think you are?
Bastards!
”

But no matter which way I turned my head, I couldn’t see anything. In every direction I looked the world was just as quickly erased . . . I reached up a hand and passed it over my faceplate. Under the touch of my glove the darkness melted and spread, smearing across my view until the world was only a hazy impression beyond the helmet. It was Elliot’s blood, smeared across my gloves now and across the faceplate.

“Stop it!”

I held myself still, breathing hard.

From the bottom of my faceplate, through a blurry half-moon, I was just able to see Elliot’s sprawled form, his face still pressed into the dust. I knelt down and tried to lift him, thinking to carry him back to the shuttle and the warmth. But lifting even just his shoulders took more strength than I had. His body was stiff and awkward and unwilling, and it took all my strength just to drag him a step toward the tunnel. I set him back down
while my heart pounded and my lungs strained for air, then after a minute I lifted his shoulders again and took another step. My suit heated up and perspiration tickled across my skin, and as I struggled with the third step I thought of the drones somewhere beyond the blur of my faceplate, lifting their weapons to fire. A feeling like a hot knife stabbed through my chest. I took another step and thought of Elliot and the tears came back to my eyes. From the strain of carrying him, or the loss, I couldn’t tell.

Every few steps I rested, and the afternoon passed. By the time I’d pulled him onto the iron floor of the tunnel and stood resting on the threshold of the wastelands, the sun’s blurry glow in my faceplate told me that I’d run out of time.

I turned my helmet north and twisted my head awkwardly to look out through the tiny clear wedge at the bottom, looking for the shuttle a quarter of a mile away. The surface flared at that moment in the last light and winked into darkness. The sixteen-hour night had begun.

And the shuttle was gone.

D
uring the night I awoke unable to breathe. There was an awful noise in my chest and my lungs were heaving for air. An alarm was buzzing in the helmet, and in the midst of a growing panic I realized that the alarm had been sounding for a long time, weaving in and out of my sleep. My air was gone. I could feel nothing but the darkness and the cold iron flooring under my shoulders.

I calmed the rising panic, whispering to myself the words from the manuals. I remembered them in Elliot’s own voice, delivered during his endless training sessions. Slowly, carefully, with every sense stretched to the breaking point, I groped for the bottle on Elliot’s suit and disconnected it. I fitted it to the coupling at my belly and concentrated on feeling the coupling’s threads through my gloves, on feeling the tiny arrow etched on the head of the nozzle, on feeling the tiny ridges on the valve as I spun it open. On hearing the hiss of air burst into the darkness.

Then finally, one more time, I slept.

T
he shuttle had been moved, not destroyed. It had been lifted and then dumped carelessly against the side of the dome to get it out of the way. One of the skids had collapsed under the impact, causing the little boat to list and crushing the engines’ exhaust skirts and the forward battery compartment. The airlock in the tail still worked, and once on board I found that the rear lights, pumps and scrubbers still functioned, but that all
of the forward instruments were dead and smelled of ozone and burned silicon. I wouldn’t be leaving.

I stripped off my suit and washed the gloves and the faceplate, then plugged in the bottles to recharge. Then finally I ate, sitting on the sloping deck and thinking about Elliot, leaning against the wall and watching my hands as they held the food.

During the night I wept. I wept with a hurt that came up out of my deepest insides, an ache that wrapped its arms around me and squeezed the tears out of me as though out of a wound as I sat with my knees against my chest and my head in my arms.

The tears were for Elliot, I thought. They were for the children in the infirmary, or for the families back on Earth, or Teresa Delgado, or Charlie Peters’ god. For all I wept, I was sure that the tears were for someone else.

I have the impression now, remembering the days that followed, of washing my hands over and over, and of leaning against the bulkhead and watching my reflection in the steel door of the food warmer. I stared at my unshaven face and at the stiff black hair, and ran my hands over the rough skin and the greying eyebrows, across my cracked lips. But mostly I remember staring down at the backs of my hands, at the tiny hairs that grew from the rough skin, at the lines worn into the knuckles, at the darker brown of the veins and the slow pulse beating inside them. I stared down at them and remembered looking down at the same hands when I was a child, when they were soft and small, and innocent.

Then sometime later I dragged all of our air bottles out and returned to Elliot’s body where it lay in the iron tunnel. I lifted his shoulders and walked backwards, pulling him one painful step after another away from the dome. I pulled him until the air was running low again, and then I left him to go back for more. This I did again and again, over many days.

The drones paid me no attention. They didn’t pause in their work at all, and through those long nights out on the surface, when I lay on the ground awake, I could feel the vibrations of their feet as they passed. Sometimes they brushed into me on their way by. I would lie awake in the dark and feel them pass by on their business, while I worked at remembering Elliot’s face. Sometimes I would see them when I sat up and turned on the flashlight, to shine it down on Elliot to make sure I’d missed no detail, no line or hair that I’d failed to record perfectly.

A few times, though, I couldn’t recall Elliot’s face at all. No matter how I tried, the only image that would appear was Polaski’s, watching me from a distance.