Echoes of an Alien Sky (28 page)

"I did the preliminary studies on the deep tissue samples that were sent to
E6
," Mirine told them. "There are indications that the individuals they're from were sick. Some of the findings are consistent with viral attack."

They came into the canteen. A few figures were seated around the room, but the two bio technicians hadn't arrived yet. "How widespread could it have been?" Yorim asked, looking curious.

"We don't know," Mirine answered.

"It couldn't have been a pandemic, could it? Brysek asked, seeing Yorim's point. "Something to do with what wiped the Terrans out?"

"We've wondered that too," Mirine said.

"But how would something like that get to Luna and spread?" Yorim asked.

"The only way would be if they brought it with them," Mirine replied. "Once inside a closed environment, it would be everywhere in no time."

"Wow," Yorim murmured.

He was obviously still thinking about it as they came to the serving counter to inspect the cook's offerings for the day. "An epidemic loose. People shooting each other." He looked aside at Mirine. "Did you come down in Aluam's elevator? See the bullet marks?"

"Aluam?"

"Aluam Brysek."

"Oh, is that his name? Yes, he pointed them out. It sounds as if maybe it wasn't the luckiest of places to be."

"Does Lorili still have her katek?" Kyal asked Mirine. The Terran icon that stood for Providence had looked like the Venusian good-luck character.

"The one her mother gave her? Oh, you know about that. Yes, she still wears it most of the time."

The pancakes looked good, Kyal thought. He fancied something sweet and not too heavy. While he waited for Yorim to fill his plate first, he reflected that the Terrans' icon didn't seem to have brought them a lot of good luck. Disease loose and violence down underground. Destroyed vehicles up on the surface, with remains of bodies that had been burned and blasted. The same feeling came over him that he had experienced looking at the ruins of the town in the Caucasus, the bleak, featureless hills where Moscow had once stood, and the animals browsing among the forested remains of Paris. It was still and peaceful now. Yet what forgotten events had taken place here out on Luna all those millennia ago that would never now be told?

The Army general who was known as Polo stormed into the lower communications room at Terminus. His expression was dark with anger. The aide with him was blanching openly with fear. Get me "Oberstein in the ship!" he barked at the controller in charge of communications.

"What did you find?" his adjutant, Glasey, asked. He had been left with a squad to watch the room.

"It's cleaned out down there. They're loaded up already. Except for a roomful of mokofaces."

"Mokofaces! Here?"

"They're in an isolation section," the officer who claimed to be base commander blurted. They had found him in one of the upper rooms, unable to give a coherent account of the situation and seemingly bewildered. "It has an independent air recirculation system, and the door is guarded. They can't get up to this level."

"Fatalities?" Polo queried.

The commander's eyes dropped. "Some. . . . They've been moved to the rear lock loading zone. It's evacuated. Open to the outside."

Polo looked away, dismissing the matter as now of secondary importance. "Make sure the ferry doesn't move," he told Glassy, referring to the ship they had just arrived in. "Take Blue, Yellow, and Green squads from our guard and round up any one else you can move, and secure it. Get all our people back on board, and have the commander at the pad set up automatic cannon to rake the area on the approach side. Post detachments to secure the elevator approaches here and at the surface. If anyone gets in the way, shoot them."

"Sir." Glasey nodded to two of the staff subalterns to follow him and hurried out.

"I must protest . . ." the base commander began.

Polo cut him off curtly. "This is survival now. I'm in charge here." He glared around the room. "Everybody got that?" A burly staff sergeant straightened up from beside the base commander and looked at him inquiringly. Polo dropped his hand quietly to the pistol holstered at his hip. The commander shook his head, and the sergeant eased back down. Nobody else made to challenge. "Bring all the ground vehicles you've got to the main entrance," Polo told the commander. "Stand down the guards in the access antechambers and muster your staff. Get surplus numbers into suits." It was more to keep them busy. He had no real expectation of getting everyone to the ferry. If Glasey got their own people back on board, it would be full anyway. The commander stared at him, swallowed numbly, and then passed the orders on to his own subordinates. Polo strode over to the console where an operator was trying to raise the ship. The communications controller moved behind him, watched closely by one of Polo's guards.

Polo had arrived with his staff and entourage less than an hour before. As far as he knew theirs had been the last ferry to get away—certainly from any of the West Coast bases, anyway. It was all over on Earth. The plague had been confirmed from Finland to Terra Del Fuego, Tibet to central Australia, and across the Pacific islands. Breakdown was general and universal: rioting, panic, and conflagrations in the cities, unchecked banditry loose everywhere. Weapons were being launched and fired, not in any planned or organized war but simply as part of the craziness that the disease itself seemed to induce, and from the realization that there was no escape. It was if the world was rushing into an unconscious collective decision to get it over with quickly. The disease was characterized in its terminal phase by purple blotches on the face and upper body that became connected by a tracery of lines. It had gotten its name, "moko plague," from the Maori tattooing system.

As far as the rest of the world had been told, the craft that had been undergoing tests and was now in orbit above the Moon, was the unmanned star probe that had been conceived and put under development in better times. By the time the official story began being questioned openly, it no longer really mattered. Its current flight after lifting off from Terminus was supposed to have been for a final test of the propulsion dynamics before loading and embarkation. Polo had been told that his rearguard would be the last group of arrivals from Earth to be joining it after holding the launch facilities in California and demolishing any other serviceable vessels there. It was looking as if he had been set up.

Oberstein appeared on the screen, looking sour-faced and grim. Polo wasted no time on preliminaries. "What is this? Terminus is evacuated."

"Simply to make the best use of the time. We—"

"We're coming up now. Put your flight engineer on to fix the docking trajectory and coordinates."

"We are working on a revised schedule. I understand your concern, General. Please bear with us. . . ."

They would need some time to build to full power for liftout. Polo recognized that Oberstein was stalling. "No. This isn't a request or a bargaining session. We are coming up now. I demand that we be received."

Oberstein's face hardened. "You are not in a position to make demands," General, he said icily.

Polo had been expecting it. "You aren't yet ready for liftout," he reminded the deputy to the Director. "The Euro-Russian base on Nearside is equipped with interceptor missiles. If they were to learn the true nature of Terminus, they wouldn't let you get away. They would disable or destroy you."

The face on the screen looked uncertain. Even if it were ready to lift now, a fully loaded ship of that mass would never outrun AMMs in the early phase of exiting from low lunar orbit. "What makes you think they have missiles there?" he demanded. "I have not heard this before."

"It was my job down there to know. Just convey it to the Director," Polo replied. It was pure bluff; but there was nothing else to play.

An operator across the room announced, "It looks like there's trouble up top, sir."

"Let's see it," the base commander said. He had moved to stand closer behind Polo, with the communications controller. The operator brought images from the surface cameras up onto several of the wall monitors. They showed confrontations between groups of armed, space suited figures. Others were trying to block some vehicles moving up a ramp from the underground depot at the rear of the complex. At the same time, the sounds of disturbances and raised voices began filtering in through the doors to the corridor outside the room.

Oberstein reappeared. "Are there any mokos among your group, General?"

"Of course not," Polo replied impatiently.

"Or anyone who has been in contact with them, who could be infected?"

"No." There had been five suspects, and a few more whose stories sounded weak. All had been left in California. "Stop these games. I have ordered a connection to Nearside. The channel is being held open."

"You will be received as the final complement. Please be quick."

"We're leaving for the pad now." Polo motioned to his own officers to clear the way and headed for the doors, at the same time using his phone to alert Glasey. "We're coming up now." He no longer had any interest in what the base commander and his people did. They were irrelevant now.

He heard the consternation breaking out behind them as he came out into the corridor, and those he had just left realized what was happening. Shots sounded. His men were returning fire. One of them went down. Polo had unholstered his pistol by the time the reached the elevator. "At the elevator now," he told Glasey over the phone.

"We're holding the area, but it's turning bad here," Glasey's voice replied. "The word's out. They're panicking."

"Thirty seconds."

As Polo and his officers bundled themselves in, a smattering of bullets from somewhere tore into the elevator car. One of the figures cried out and slumped against the wall. He was pushed out before the doors closed. The remainder who couldn't fit in were running for the stairs. The last thing Polo saw was a firefight breaking out between his own men and the base commander's.

They emerged into a scene of tumult and the sounds of shouting and firing. Glasey's squad was holding the way through to the surface locks, where two vehicles were attached and a crawler waiting to move in. Other figures were heading for the suiting rooms in the antechamber area, intending to try and make it to a vehicle outside. Polo's impressions became blurred. A face contorted with malice appeared in his field of view. Polo shot it two times, point-blank. Another figure behind it was gunned down from elsewhere and collapsed spurting blood amid flying shreds of flesh. Glasey was ahead of him, then turning to fire back with a machine pistol at somewhere behind. The door through the lock loomed ahead. Then they were inside. Polo was breathless, his chest pounding. Out of a window he could see the other crawler starting to move. Somebody was standing by the lock door, holding it for several figures backing toward it, firing. "Close it!" Polo barked. "Let's move!" The last defenders outside tumbled in.

The scene outside was confused. Vehicles were being hit and immobilized; figures in sits were bounding on the surface, firing, being blown apart. Who was trying to achieve what was impossible to make out. It was as if the kind of insanity he had seen in the last few days on Earth was breaking out all over again.

The offocer sitting next to the driver turned to call back. "Shuttle captain for you, sir."

Polo elbowed his way forward through the crush to front and took the handset. "Reading."

"All aboard and secure here. Fighting is spreading to the pad area. What's your situation?"

"We're in the second crawler that's approaching you now. Direct covering fire on those units moving in to our right, about two hundred yards out. Be ready for immediate launch. We're cleared for the ship."

"Wilco."

It had dawned on the workers around the pad area that they were not going to be included. They had been told that more ferries from Earth would be coming in before the ship now in orbit departed, but that obviously wasn't going to happen, and had never been meant to happen. There was enough other transportation out there to get the ones who were left to the bases on Nearside. What they did then would have to be their problem.

Polo was sweating and shaking by the time he collapsed into a seat in the front cabin of the ferry and buckled up. The inner lock door closed, and the voices of the flight crew rattling out final launch checks came from above. In the seat opposite, Glasey gave an order into a field mike for the automatic cannon placed outside to open up, providing a screen of fire to cover the launch. Polo had never known so few seconds take so long to drag by.

Finally, he felt the vessel moving. Outside, the ground with its scenes of desperation and folly fell away and was replaced by stars. "Climbing and on course as programmed," the captain's voice reported. "We've got them on visual, coming up over the horizon now."

Polo leaned to the side, and craning toward a port he could see it—vast and awe-inspiring, rising like a distant, immense bird from its barren, rocky eyrie. Haven . . . at last. After everything. In the horrors of those past few weeks, he had sometimes found himself wondering if he had invented it in his mind as a dream, a trick of self-preservation to stop himself from going insane. But it was there; it was real and solid, coming to take them into its protective embrace. He fell back in his seat and closed his eyes. Only now did he realize that he was shaking with the release of the tension that he had carried for days. He gripped his arms above the elbows as he sat in the seat and braced his legs firmly so that the trembling wouldn't show. He had brought them all through. The tell-tale of the all-too human weaknesses that assailed him were not appropriate to the image he had to maintain. He drew in a long, deep breath and released it as a series of quiet shivers. Relief seeped through his body, beginning from his spine and his loins, like liquid percolating cell by cell through a sponge.

The missile from the ship hit the ferry dead center when it was twenty-five miles out. It carried a tactical fission warhead rated at two kilotons. After the flash, the cloud of debris dispersed in moments to be lost in the starfield.