A Grey Moon Over China (5 page)

Don’t ask.
A pair of dark eyes flashing their warning.
Don’t want.

I slipped the first block into my trousers pocket. The cloth lining of the pocket tore—the block was much heavier than I’d expected.

The second block slid loose from its case. The man became agitated for a moment and pent up frustration seemed to pull at his features, but the
opium soon took back its hold and left in its place only the moist, unfocused eyes, leaden already with resignation and the torpor of the drug. The block slipped free and the screen blinked out, leaving only a shadow in the gloom where he had sat, a memory fading away already into the night.

I don’t remember finding my way back to Polaski’s and my little two-man camp that night, but I do remember walking along the hillside above the jungle, smelling the hot air and the dust, and thinking I could hear someone playing a flute far off in the distance. The tune was familiar, but difficult to hear.

By the time I reached camp, though, the music was gone. Polaski was gone, too, leaving me just a sleeping bag and a packet of food.

I lay down on the bag and looked up into night, thinking that maybe my future lay out in the darkness, after all. A future bought with a single, quick, mean-spirited theft.

Just before falling asleep I remember thinking it would be good to hear the flute again. It remained quiet, though, and I reached down for the touch of the blocks instead.

I dreamed that night about a wolf. It walked toward me across a black planet at night, the color of ashes, its face smooth. And it had no eyes.

W
hen I awoke the next day the ground was shaking. My sleeping bag whipped in the wind and something heavy slid across my waist. A voice called out from above.

“It’s time, Torres.” God’s voice.

I put my face in the bag and felt for the blocks. If they were gone, I thought, maybe the punishment would stop.

“Let’s
go
, Torres!” The blocks were still there. The thing on my waist slid higher and I grabbed for it. It was a rope, a pair of ropes, and they dragged me out of the bag and lifted me into the air.

The island sank away and I coughed and squinted at the jungle, clutching the rope ladder with one hand and my pocket with the other. The old man’s bungalow was quickly gone, lost among the trees, and moments later the island itself had dwindled to little more than sand and rock in the ocean, a meaningless slash of umber against the grey.

Turbines exploded in my ears as my head lifted over the deck. Polaski sat in the far gunner’s seat with a foot up on the helicopter’s magnetic cannon, swinging it back and forth past my face. I snapped myself in and put on a headset.

“Good morning,” said Polaski.

“Jesus, Polaski, are we in a hurry, or what?”

“Bolton got orders.”

I came fully awake as I remembered the Army and its plans. And the blocks. What had I planned to do? The day was starting too fast, and I wasn’t awake enough.

“What happened yesterday?” said Polaski.

“I found something,” I said, “so I stayed.”

“You found something.”

Polaski was the last one I should be telling. He’d want to sell the blocks themselves the first chance he got.

“Under a rock, maybe?” he said. “You found something under a rock?”

“No. I took it.”

“You took it.” The cannon stopped, aimed at my crotch. “And you’re telling me this why?” He was enjoying himself. “You want me to do something about it?”

I did and I didn’t.

The helicopter plunged nose-low and raced along the beach of the main island, then banked through a gap in the jungle and heaved its tail into the air. The skids struck hard and it spun to a stop in front of the mess.

“Find me after the briefing,” said Polaski.

T
he company was sprawled in chairs under the mess canopy, disheveled but mostly good-humored. Leaning against a table in front were two women wearing the white insignia of the MI controllers, looking crisper than the others. One was A. W. Paulson, a stocky Midwesterner with hard eyes, and the other Katherine Chan, a slender, honey-skinned woman with a quick smile and glossy black hair.

I nodded to Chan, then sat down next to Elliot and tried to get the sand out of my ears. I glanced up now and then at Chan’s figure and dark eyes. Elliot blew elaborate kisses to someone in back, then settled into his seat with a sigh.

“I ain’t gonna ask,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s good.”

He leaned closer. “On the other hand, maybe I am. Hell, Torres, you look like you swallowed a cat.”

“I think I did.”

“You think you
did?
You ain’t supposed to say ‘I think I did,’ Torres, you’re supposed to say ‘Hell no, Tyrone, I ain’t swallowed no cat, what you talkin’ ’bout?’ I swear I gotta watch you short Mexicans.” He stretched out his legs. “I knew a short Mexican once. No one could see him coming, so he got stepped on a lot. Got shorter and shorter all the time.”

“You’re making that up.”

“ ’Course I’m making it up! Ain’t nothing around here to be cheerful about if you don’t make something up. See—here comes his nibs. He don’t look too cheerful, neither. He better make something up, quick.”

Bolton walked in, out of place as ever. He was a small but good-looking man with broad shoulders and sandy hair, wearing immaculate dress whites.
He looked like a freshly-scrubbed schoolboy stepping up to the front of the class, eyes alert as he surveyed the troops.

“All right, listen up.” He was Welsh, and still had the accent.

“Let’s see if we can straighten up a bit first, right where we sit, shall we? We’ve got a major coming along, and I shouldn’t want to be caught less than kempt, hm? He’s a Senior Manufactured Intelligence Controller—”

“A
what?
” The slurred question came from a woman in back, followed by snickers around the mess.

“Sorry,” mumbled the woman, finally. “I guess they teach you to talk like that in OCS.” Her eyes were glassy.

The mess quieted at the mention of OCS, and Bolton looked uncomfortable. “Well, Miss—”

Another spasm of laughter and she jammed her knuckles into her mouth. Bolton actually blushed and looked around the front for help.

Finally he took a breath and leveled his gaze at the back.

“I speak that way, Miss, precisely because I am
not
a lieutenant, and am for that reason making my very
finest
effort to seem like one—I am not even a corporal. You are clearly new here, so that is something you could not have known. Our lieutenant had the ill grace to pitch forward and puke his life onto our playing field, and a decision was made that a replacement would not be well received. Thus his bars were handed to me, and our MI controllers here were kind enough to break into BuPers and make it legal. I apologize if I am not what you expected.”

There was an awkward silence, then she wheezed out behind her hands, “Jesus, what a weird outfit.”

“It is an organization,
Private
, in which you should find yourself most comfortable.” He broke his gaze after a minute and gave the assembly a sheepish smile.

“Now, then, however much it may put us out, we have orders, and we should at least make a respectable show of following them. It seems the Army have a plan for embarrassing the enemy closing on Singapore.”

Surprised noises—we were a long way from Singapore.

“There are entrenched armor north of Singapore, and we need to tempt them into showing their hand in terms of their positions and in terms of with whom they are currently allied on the peninsula. There have been sightings of frogs in Johor, and it is of interest whether or not the enemy have access to them.”

He described the enemy’s order of battle, his command of the facts impressive. He was proving to be a good officer, even while in maneuvers he’d shown himself to be especially cunning and nasty in one-on-one combat. It was something that in the end he was always endlessly apologetic about.

“The way we will tempt them,” he said, “is by firing a bouncer out of Guayaquil, Ecuador, aimed for the big strip north of Singapore.”

Again, surprise. The giant ballistic transports were so expensive it was unheard of to launch one into the war zone. Yet Bolton was talking about firing one on its arc high above the atmosphere, along the equator from South America right into Asia.

“The moment the enemy detect the aircraft’s launch from Guayaquil,” he said, “and have calculated its trajectory, they will commit everything they have to that strip above Singapore, ready to capture or destroy the aircraft at any cost—knowing it cannot be recalled. They will also know that, even if the bouncer were able to alter its arc in mid-flight, there is nowhere between Guayaquil and Singapore capable of taking it. Thus they will move immediately.

“The U.S. Army will be there to meet them. The bouncer, ladies and gentlemen, will not.”

There was a silence, then hoots and whistles; the position of a bouncer’s four-hundred-knot landing was inalterable and was calculated to within inches before it launched.

Bolton looked embarrassed again. “Just a minute, people. Please. This particular bouncer will be equipped with braking rockets, and those rockets will arrest its arc and drop it directly down over the Pacific. Tonight. And in the five minutes after the pilots fire those rockets, this company will turn the island Sergeants Polaski and Elliot surveyed yesterday into a twenty-thousand-foot runway.

“I recognize,” he said, “that your love of the cause has diminished of late, but you will have to admit that this does sound like rather a lot of fun.”

Something out in the clearing caught my eye, as the mess erupted into shouted questions. It was a boy, wearing nothing but shorts, which at the moment were down around his knees as he urinated into the company vegetable garden. He was slender and agile-looking, with a long neck and smooth black skin. He was holding something at his side and looking straight up.

The voices in the mess stopped. Glasses rattled and a muffled roar came from the sky. The temperature began to rise, higher and higher until the air was sweltering. People were getting out of their chairs when the roaring stopped abruptly and the air cooled back down. A spattering of rain drops hit the roof and then stopped, as well.

“Fucking frogs.”

We knew what it had been. Fuel was so scarce that the U.S. had built tremendous vertical-takeoff transports powered by nuclear fission. But without water to keep the piles cool, they needed to blow huge amounts of air
down through them, so much that it took further tons of armor just to hold it down against the lift. The air came out so fast and so hot that the frog overhead could have been a mile up, trailing its characteristic little squall line across the ocean in its wake.

“So, Bolton, you going to be running this little exercise?” The distraction was over.

“Um, actually not—I’ll be at Battalion. That is why you’re getting this fine fellow of a major, name of Cole. It seems that the phasing of the required diggers and heaters, as well as their coordination with the bouncer, will take a great deal of MI—and it was felt that even the lovely Chan and Paulson here were not up to the task. Thus they have sent us a senior controller—a high priest, as it were.”

I
told Polaski about the blocks after the briefing. We stood in the shade of the helicopter, watching the cirrus gather into a thin, high overcast. The air had taken on an uneasy grey cast since morning.

“Shit, Torres, these are worth more than we make in a lifetime.” He hefted one of the blocks in his hand.

“It’s the plans inside them, Polaski. The power cell, not the blocks. Two gigawatt-hours—enough to run a house for sixty years or a car for two hundred. Portable.”

“Will it work?”

“His MI said it will.”

“Jesus.”

He handed back the block and paced.

“So what do we get, Torres? What do we want?”

“Out.”

“Oh, come on, limp dick, everybody wants out. So why not just sell these and buy your way out? Come on, Torres, everyone says how smart you are. What do you really want? An army of your own, a piece of Alaska—”