Embustero- Pale Boundaries

by Scott Cleveland

A steel column a meter in diameter stood in the center of the room. Conduit ran across the ceiling from a bank of electronic equipment and vanished into a coupling that protruded from the side of the column. McKeon pulled a radiation detector from his pack and played it over the surface of the column from the floor to ceiling. The device issued a soothing purr to assure them that the only radiation evident was that which occurred naturally in the surrounding basalt.

  Hal claimed a bunk and unlaced his boots. His shins and the soles of his feet ached from the long walk. He suspected that he’d be worse off in the morning. “You really want to get started now?” he asked McKeon. “I’m beat.”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep and find out in the morning that we got a lethal dose of radiation overnight.”

  The explanation drove home the realization that Hal was not merely an observer to the murders that would take place in a few months, but a participant. They dealt with technology that demanded attention to detail and a single mistake could kill him. “Anything else we should check now?”

  “One or two things,” McKeon confirmed. “I can take care of it.”

  “No, I should help,” Hal said and pulled his boots back on. “We’re both tired. Two pairs of eyes are more likely to spot a problem. We shouldn’t leave anything to chance.”

  “No, we don’t want that,” McKeon agreed quietly.

  It was another three hours before the preliminary system checks confirmed that the bunker was safe for long-term occupation. Hal settled gratefully into his bunk after a meal of preserved rations and a shower to rinse off the sweat and lingering stench of guano.

  He expected to drop off to sleep quickly, but instead found himself fretting Dayuki’s fate once again. He’d managed to delay addressing the issue for several weeks after the Old Lady’s decree, mentally pushing it off to deal with at some vague future moment, but the task at hand brought it into sudden, unavoidable focus.

  The natural flow of events led inevitably to Dayuki’s death. Waiting any longer to interfere, hoping for a reprieve to present itself, only reduced the opportunity to control the situation. Acting too soon, interfering too much, risked hastening an undesirable outcome.

  What I have to, he’d told McKeon hours ago. When the time comes. Any hint of disobedience on his part, would spur his mother to save him the trouble of carrying out her orders; she’d have Dayuki killed immediately. He had to make the other Onjin, even those expressing sympathy for his predicament, believe he’d chosen the path of acquiescence and appear to follow it step by reluctant step.

  How to do so—well, that was the hell of it, and it might even require him to deceive Dayuki, no easy endeavor. Like a con man stringing a mark along by appealing to their own greed, Hal had to play to the Family’s selfish desires, let the appearance of eventual cooperation build their confidence, and take advantage of the first chance to remove Dayuki from danger.

  FOUR

  Beta Continent, Nivia: 2710:04:35 Standard

  Caliban’s gaseous cauldron evoked a sense of unparalleled amazement in the Embustero’s captain each time he saw it. Shadrack stared with fascination at the ever-changing quilt of ivory and salmon clouds boiling across the planet’s surface driven by storms older than mankind’s habitation of the system.

  The gas giant was two thousand times the size of Nivia; its largest moon, Juno, was nearly three-quarters Nivia’s mass but followed an orbit deep inside the giant’s deadly radiation belts. The planetoid’s natural magnetic fields offered sufficient protection to those who worked and mined the surface, but getting to or from the moon was a journey no one made on a whim. Raw materials made their way to Caliban Station and hundreds of manned and automated factories holding at safer orbits by means of a battery of mass drivers scattered across Juno’s equator.

  Goods and personnel necessary to maintain the mining operations traveled aboard specialized, heavily-shielded shuttles, but the dozens of dead vessels drifting within the cloud of electromagnetic poison offered a constant reminder of the danger.

  Caliban’s four tiny outer moons: Ceres, Iris, Nymph and Aerial were more or less uninhabited, though close telescopic inspection would reveal the blasted remains of structures destroyed during a violent but short-lived Belter insurrection four decades earlier. The victorious federal government vowed that the moons would never again see Belter control and surrounded Caliban with the weight of its manufacturing facilities—facilities staffed and managed entirely by dirtsiders from Nivia.

  Whether it was the insurrection that led to the bizarre relationship between Nivian dirtsiders and spacers or vice versa, Shadrack had never managed to ferret out. Ultimately it didn’t matter to him or his crew in either case—the fact of the situation offered the Embustero the break it needed to survive.

  Habitable planets were the rare exception in the universe and systems that possessed them were wealthy beyond any monetary expression. Inevitably a rivalry developed between planet dwellers—dirtsiders (or groundhogs, depending on the local vernacular)—and those born in space on any number of moons, asteroids, stations and starships.

  The rivalry was healthy and symbiotic, in normal circumstances: the spacers provided easily mined and refined metals, staffed orbital factories that generated materials too dangerous or difficult to produce in a biosphere, and in return the planet provided variety, recreation, the opportunity to relax the strict rules of space survival and, most importantly, inexpensive and abundant food. A suitable planet could supply the dietary needs of over ten billion people.

  Nivia, however, generated less than five percent of the food consumed in the system, despite its vastly more user-friendly landmasses. The government’s regimented population control eliminated any need to expand the planetary infrastructure and the maintenance needs required but a fraction of the spacers’ resources. The bulk of their production left the system as exports at prices so low the spacers barely broke even.

  Invariably the spacers paid the higher price. Meat animals were impossible to raise in contained habitats; even hydroponically-grown vegetable protein was prohibitively expensive, relegating most spacers to imported and therefore only slightly less expensive processed foodstuffs. The poorest subsisted on soy derivatives if they were lucky, algae and yeast cakes if they weren’t.

  The philosophy of fanatical environmentalism and the laws of economics should have strangled the system; many who recognized the problem as such could not explain how the dysfunctional arrangement held together.

  Shadrack, as intimately immersed in the process as he and his ship had become, knew all too well—Poaching. The dirtsiders manning Caliban’s facilities fell within the pale of Nivia’s benevolence and received their fair share of edible biomass harvested from the planet’s pristine ecosystem. A man or woman willing to choke down yeast cakes one or two meals a week could sell their surplus rations to spacers at five to ten times their cost.

  An unscrupulous freighter captain and crew, working with a connected middleman, could do even better.

  Markland walked onto the bridge. “Permission to disembark?” He’d stripped the ship’s patch and other identifying flair from his shipsuit, replacing it with that of his virtuous alter ego, Seppo Kosunen of the Ladybird.

  “Granted,” Shadrack rumbled. “Do us proud, Captain Kosunen.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Shadrack’s attention turned to the ship’s navigation screens rather than Caliban’s display after the first mate departed. The greater percentage of orbital traffic was local vessels, but he noted transponder IDs belonging to several intra-system freighters and ferries. He lingered on those for a few moments, experiencing a familiar sour burn in his stomach, one he imagined he shared with the commanders of Belter vessels also slighted by capricious Nivian regulations. Shadrack could only stew over how much farther ahead the Embustero might be financially if it weren’t for the obligatory garbage run leaving Nivia while “certified” vessels (all dirt-side owned) could get in two to three runs in the tim
e it took him to make one.

  He steered his mind away from that old complaint to matters of more immediate importance: namely the identities and destinations of interstellar vessels such as his own. Within certain parameters those details guided the selection of the Embustero’s discretionary cargo and occasionally led to profits greater than those obtained from the illicit victuals nicked from Nivia. He could only determine so much from the port indexes, however, and what Shadrack needed—longed for—was access to the private scuttlebutt and rumors circulating between the other ship’s captains.

  And that was one thing he couldn’t have.

  Access to that kind of insider information required personal relationships, and personal relationships required either a reasonable degree of forthrightness or an inordinate degree of deceit. Both carried an equal risk of exposure, one from too much honesty, the other from a failure to keep the lies consistent.

  Isolation seemed the only solution, and isolation presented its own problems.

  Terson found settling into a routine aboard the Embustero an easier transition than he’d first expected. The crewmen on second watch were remarkably incurious in regard to his past and the circumstances that brought him aboard; they seemed to simply accept the identity he offered and let everything else, obvious questions in particular, lie sequestered in obscurity.

  Neither were they garrulous when it came to their own pasts, or that of their ship. Terson made it a point to avoid asking direct questions of any of them lest they expect him to reciprocate, but one expected to glean at least a sense of a group’s history through casual conversation. He decided, on reflection, that it was due either to secrets greater than their poaching or a result of a micro-society so insular that there was no need to make reference to past events that were, to them, a given.

  They were a relatively friendly bunch by and large, if somewhat reserved around someone they knew to be a temporary associate. The only crewmembers to express any degree of overt animosity toward him were Grogan and the first mate, Markland, both of whom worked the alternate shift, an arrangement Terson found completely satisfactory, though to be honest their hostility didn’t hold a candle to what he’d faced as an immigrant on Nivia.

  Terson still wasn’t sure what it was about him that rubbed Markland the wrong way, but the source of Grogan’s attitude was concrete and understandable—the tip of a skinning knife pressed against the loudmouth’s Adam’s apple. The act that earned the big spacer’s rancor also seemed to have earned Terson a degree of celebrity—he nearly always managed to find a free drink at hand in the commons at the end of nearly every shift.

  Genuine appreciation for the Embustero’s help moved him to work hard and diligently at whatever task the second mate assigned. The tasks tended toward menial, monotonous and dirty, often all three at once. He became familiar with spaces within the ship that he was certain no more than a handful of regular crew had ever laid eyes on, and scrubbed, steamed or polished clean every one.

  Long hours of hard work followed by a wind-down in the commons at shift-end each day with a couple of drinks and a few games of billiards made the voyage pass quickly. The arrival at Caliban, however, reminded Terson that he had only a few more weeks of sanctuary in which to formulate a plan for his future.

  He suffered no desire to return to Nivia where nothing but painful memories, certain arrest and prosecution or worse awaited him. That he’d been able to both take vengeance on the man responsible for Virene’s death and escape with his own life against all reasonable probabilities was message enough to avoid the planet permanently. Failing to pass Den Tun’s information to its intended recipient was disappointing, but the failure proved the existence of another leak in the Minzoku leadership’s security, a fringe benefit that the old man had unapologetically acknowledged when he proposed the mission.

  The old man likely considered Terson dead or captured by now, if he thought of him at all. Terson might have managed to track down the Nivian courier’s employer if the Embustero’s poachers had left him at God’s Saucer, but the trail cooled with the passing of time, and even if he did locate Den Tun’s contact his sudden appearance after so long would cause any reasonable person to suspect trap or treachery.

  It was in Terson’s best interest to quietly fade away from the whole affair. The Belter habitat at A-30-Sierra, conveniently enough, was a good place to do so. The asteroid was a major population center and transit hub in the belt, where one more dirtsider wouldn’t be remarkable and his obviously non-Nivian origins might prove a greater asset than liability.

  From there he could travel anywhere in the system while his alternate identity developed a legitimate history that would withstand scrutiny when he finally departed the Nivia system. Best of all, he doubted that Belters would much care if Joseph Pelletier was actually Terson Reilly, a man wanted for who-knew-what on Nivia proper.

  Hell, it might make him a fucking hero.

  Port call meant calling out both shifts; the commons was crowded when Terson arrived, the chow line long, and the seating limited. He gave his magnetic hot-ration tray a quick jerk to free it from the counter and weaved through legs and around bodies, scanning the crowd for Mackey or O’Brien. They apparently hadn’t shown yet, but he did spy three empty seats in the far corner and claimed the middle one. He flipped the lids of his dishes back. One held a steaming lump of something that almost passed for real meat.

  Someone said something behind him. It took a moment before he realized she was addressing him.

  “What?”

  “My seat,” Liz said flatly. “You’re sitting in my seat.”

  “These are empty,” he said, gesturing to his sides with either hand.

  “It’s my seat.”

  “Live with it,” Terson snapped and went on eating, watching her from the corner of his eye. Her light brown eyes were emotionless and her face was as flat as her voice. She had simply stated the fact and left him to do something about it. He had no doubt that she would stand there until he finished and left.

  The other crewmen at the table observed the exchange with undisguised amusement; a ripple of faces turning toward them set off Terson’s self-consciousness. Water slopped out of the open glass into his breakfast when he pulled the tray loose to move. “Hell!”

  Liz sat, ate and was gone so fast Terson wondered why she’d bothered to make an issue of it.

  Mackey appeared at Terson’s shoulder with his own tray. “Guess you know why these were available now, huh?”

  “That chick is looped,” Terson grumbled as the spacer sat down.

  “That’s no way to talk about the woman who installed your catheter,” Mackey informed him with grave sincerity. “She hasn’t been that intimate with anyone in, oh, years. She must like you.”

  “She as much as told me I’d be dead if she had her way,” Terson countered, “and how the hell’d you know about the catheter?”

  “I heard it from Sheila, who heard it from Lewis, who heard it from Lad Hussein. Don’t ask me how he knew.”

  “And this is an issue, why?” Terson demanded.

  “She’s weird; you’re new—figure it out.”

  Having lived the better part of the last four years a pariah on Nivia, Terson couldn’t help but acknowledge a twinge of sympathy for the woman despite the irritation. “She always been that way?” he asked.

  “Long as I’ve been aboard,” Mackey shrugged, “but she’s been here a few years longer than I have, so I can’t speak to that. Hey, listen; you want to help shift cargo for a few hours—avoid the make-work Colvard’s been dishing you?”

  “Scrubbing confined spaces with caustic chemicals? Absolutely.”

  Terson cast his gaze about to locate the second mate when they finished eating and took a circuitous route to the exit in order to avoid the officer and whatever detail he’d planned to pass the watch. Mackey led him aft and down two decks where the narrow corridors interconnecting the various holds and ballast voids teemed with crewmen prep
aring to rearrange the ship’s load.

  “Make way!” someone shouted from behind. “Coming through, make way!” Grogan appeared as they all pressed their backs to the walls, shouldering around other crewmen in his rush.

  “Idiot’s late,” Mackey said to no one in particular.

  “So who’s Jones?” Terson asked once the big spacer brushed by and vanished around a corner.

  “Who?”

  “Jones. Grogan’s nametag said Jones.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Mackey’s ears turned red. “She’s on first watch. Probably why he’s late.”

  O’Brien met them at the entrance to the Embustero’s center hold with a sheaf of printouts. “These are the ones we’re looking for,” she told Terson. “They’re distributed more or less randomly through the stacks.” She undogged the hatch and stepped through, leaving Terson and Mackey to follow. It was dark as Hades inside until she threw the floodlight switch.

  Mackey groaned when he saw the expanse of shipping containers before them. “This’ll take all day!”

  “Yep,” O’Brien sighed as she divided the sheets between them.

  Terson began to wonder if avoiding Colvard had been such a good idea after all.

  Loading was already underway when Markland arrived at the lander bay, the single advantage of arriving at Caliban with an empty hold. Containers could be arranged in chalks in the vacant deck space as the crew reached them rather than continually shifting them like a massive three-dimensional slide puzzle. Consequently he found an orderly queue of pallets awaiting dollies in the approach corridor instead of frustrated, red-faced cargo handlers swearing at the tops of their lungs.

  It was, in fact, entirely too calm.

  He found a covey of dolly operators loitering at the head of the column and the reason became clear once he sighted the open hatch leading to the lander’s cargo bay: the cargo sled, which should have been loaded and moved to a transfer lock, was still in place.