A Grey Moon Over China Read Free

twenty-one barely-charted volcanic ridges and cinder cones off the shipping lanes and airways, which from above looked mostly like dried rabbit shit with green mold on it sticking out of the ocean. Before the war it had been a mecca for transoceanic racers, religious cults, and rich bastards on the outs with latest regime in Cambodia or the Philippines, but now there was almost no one. Out here was a hundred forty-seven half-dead, insect-ridden combat engineers who prayed every morning not to be noticed for one more day by the enemy or by our own battalion, eighty miles to the north on the island with the big air base. So why would someone hiding from the American military be out here? Like a flea hiding between the bear’s claws, it was either really dumb or really smart.
    And we had to get him back before
what
came down? Too much was happening—the Army poking around after leaving us alone for a year, heavy equipment for the MI priests suddenly showing up on our eighty pitiful acres of dead grass and rusting tin, talk about heavy demolitions . . . and now Polaski back. To do what I told him to? Not likely. I was an Army hardware engineer, no more. I took care of the island’s machines, from the cooling rods in the big antennas to the drones we put up at night to listen in on the Japanese. I tuned them and I studied them, and I spent my nights alone with them and the sounds of the jungle, not wanting to sleep. And that was all.
    Polaski’s truck skidded to a stop in front of Bolton’s bungalow across the clearing. Smoke trailed from the motors. He strode through the grass and jumped onto Bolton’s porch.
    “Tyrone?” I said.
    “Yup.”
    “Why would anyone steal the plans to
counter
-biologicals?”
    He was quiet for a minute.
    “I been hearing a long time,” he said, “how you’re one of the real smart ones, Torres. I think maybe you got yourself a good question there. Japanese sure as hell don’t need to defend against their own shit, huh?”
    “Why’s Polaski here, Tyrone?”
    He shrugged. “Blow something up, I expect. It’s what he does.”
    Clouds scudded along the horizon over the ocean. I tried not to think about Polaski, and tried to remember the daydream he’d interrupted, instead.
    There’d been a time when missions to the stars had been planned by the western nations, out through America’s “space tunnel.” It was a moon-sized torus near Venus that was supposed to pass the ships onward, along with their cargos of colonists and seed and livestock embryos. The project had died from poverty and warfare, but it was those same trees and horses I’d been thinking about that morning. Trees and horses and Katherine Chan, and a piece of land far from Earth and the war. All of it impossible.
    “Well,” said Elliot, “I guess I don’t know what demolition’s got to do with MI folks, after all, now that I think about it. But you might have noticed the priests had something to do with a bunch of sonic diggers out behind Bolton’s bungalow.”
    “Diggers?”
    “Yup. Big suckers.”
     
    T
orres.”
    Elliot’s voice, far away. The dog snarled and pushed its face in through the spokes of the wheel, in under the wagon where I’d crawled.
    “Jesus Christ, boy, wake up. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”
    I was four, and the dog’s teeth were red and its breath was hot on my face. Its neck was bloody with open sores. Dogs behind it fought each other and tore at the entrails of an infant they’d dragged away from its
carreta
, away from its sleeping parents in their tin and cardboard house. My mother and father were nowhere. The little girl’s unseeing face jerked in the dust and blood spattered under the wagon. Helpless men across the road shuffled their feet and threw rocks at the dogs.
    “Come on, Torres.”
    There was foam in the dog’s mouth, under its lip where it curled back from its teeth.
    “Shit, what’s the matter with this boy?”
     
    L
ater that morning I sat