Embustero- Pale Boundaries

by Scott Cleveland

  At least Megan still has scruples.

  Nivia: 2710:01:30 Standard

  Hal woke startled and disoriented with a warm body pressed against him and hair tickling his face. It took a few moments to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there. The recollection brought with it a silent groan.

  He and Tamara Cirilo lay on their backs, her head resting on his right shoulder. His arm was folded over her chest. Shit. Shit, shit, shit! He shifted his weight to ease away from her.

  “I’m already awake,” she whispered.

  “You were going to tell me when my clothes were ready,” Hal said.

  “I tried; you wouldn’t wake up.” A pause, then: “Nothing happened.”

  “Guess you didn’t plan on me being so tired, huh?”

  Tamara lifted his arm off her chest and rolled away from him. “Go to hell!” She rose up on her knees, illuminated by the digital clock dial on one shelf of the headboard. “You think I’m so desperate I’d—I’d—rape you?”

  “I…uh—“

  “Poor Halsor, always got Tammy panting after him like a bitch in heat! Poor Halsor doesn’t want to get trapped into marriage!” She pressed her hand against a flat, flawless belly. “I saved this for you! I could have had a baby with anyone, anytime, but I saved it for you and now you can’t stand to touch me! How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “I’m sorry, Tammy.”

  She picked up her pillow and hit him with it as hard as she could. “Damn you and your sorry! Damnit, damnit, DAMNIT!” She used the pillow to punctuate each word. Hal closed his eyes and took the beating, surprised that she hadn’t exchanged the bedding for something more substantial. She exhausted her rage and knelt with the pillow on her knees, tears streaming down her face.

  “I can’t believe,” she sobbed, “that I spent all these years waiting for you to grow up, and when you finally did you chose someone else!”

  Her words contained the hint of an accusation but her vulnerability and pain elicited a sense of shame within him that made the idea of defending himself seem mean. Hal took her hand and drew her back to him, wiped at her tears with the heel of his hand and let her bury her face in his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Tammy.” He meant to kiss her on the forehead. Afterward he wasn’t sure that she raised her head innocently to say something or, seeing what was about to occur, that he made any effort to avoid it.

  Their lips met and did not part. The contact sparked off a conflagration fueled by pain and need and lust. Her tongue was in his mouth and his hands went beneath her clothes. Her fingernails raked at his back, their bodies rocked at a desperate cadence and they came within seconds of each other. They rolled apart when the fire burned itself out, gasping for breath.

  “I didn’t intend this to happen,” Tamara said after a few minutes, “but I’m not sorry it did. I missed you.”

  “I believe you,” Hal replied. “What now?”

  “We get up in the morning and go to work like nothing happened,” she replied. “Then I come back here and you go home to Dayuki and we try to figure out how to save her.”

  Hal reached over and stroked her hair. “You’ve changed.”

  “Everything else is changing,” she said, “how could I stay the same? That’s the problem with my father.”

  “He changed?”

  “No, he—just a second. I have to get out of this thing.” She sat up and took off her pullover, which had bunched up under her arms during their brief encounter. “The problem is he won’t change. He’s lived here his entire life and the idea of leaving terrifies him. I get a little sick thinking about it, too. A lot of us do.”

  “It’s inevitable,” Hal said. “You heard the Old Lady. The Family will take care of you like it always has. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Tamara rolled onto her side to face him. “You don’t understand. Ever since I was a child I knew where I would live, what I’d be doing, who my friends would be, everything. I don’t think I’ve laid eyes on more than a thousand people in my whole life.

  “Where will I go when we leave here? It’s not possible to keep us all together; we’ll spread out to other Family holdings where eventually we’ll have new friends and a new way of life but thinking that far ahead is frightening. The older ones, like my father, won’t even talk about it. The world outside is just too big for them.”

  “They’ll be cared for whether they believe it now or not,” Hal assured her.

  “That’s not what they need. Think about it: what if you lived your entire life in one place in a position of authority, a lifetime expert on your environment, and one day the Family comes in and moves you to a strange place where you have no idea what’s going on. All your expertise becomes moot. No one seeks you out for advice. Nobody listens to you!”

  “I see your point,” Hal replied. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Tamara sighed. “Just keep it in mind. Be patient with us.”

  “I will,” he promised. They cuddled in silence for awhile until Hal reached up over his head and tilted the face of the clock down so he could read it. Still four hours to go before the official start of the workday.

  “I’ll never get back to sleep now,” Tamara sighed. “We might as well get up.”

  “We’ve got time,” Hal chuckled. “It’d be a shame to waste it.”

  Tamara looked at him uncomprehendingly. “What are you…” Hal took one of her hands and kissed her knuckles, then wrist. “Oh! I guess once more for old times sake can’t hurt.”

  They made love again slowly, old friends becoming reacquainted, and did manage to doze off for awhile before the alarm sounded.

  Hal and Tamara left her apartment separately and took different paths back to the command post. The stale smell that met him when he entered his office came as a surprise; the clutter of files, paperwork and trash accumulated during the time he’d lived there did not.

  Fortunately it hadn’t been necessary to continue the ploy for as long as he’d expected.

  Tamara Cirilo’s intervention wasn’t completely unanticipated, though the direction it had taken wasn’t exactly where he wanted to go. On the other hand, grooming the situation with a bit of care might well work to his benefit. Dayuki’s potential reaction caused him some apprehension until he reminded himself of her cultural tolerance of such things.

  A wise man marries three times, she’d once told him: Once for wealth, once for power and once for comfort. And as for love? A man takes a mistress for love—and a wise mistress saves his gifts for the time that he loves another.

  Amazing what opportunities could result from such a slight tweak of perspective. An affair with Tamara might draw attention away from Dayuki, give him occasion to devise a scheme to protect her right under the Family’s collective noses.

  For now, he had to attack the pile of projects he’d allowed to accumulate during his apparent bout with depression, starting with Tamara’s report. Dozens of Minzoku settlements had sprung up since the time of Hal’s grandfather. The largest and most technological lay within the neutron bomb’s kill zone. The rest spread randomly across the eastern half of the continent, fanning out from the original settlement on the coast.

  Tamara had color coded them according to their likely level of interaction with the Onjin and Sorenson’s people. The western-most villages were coded green—no significant chance of contact with the Onjin, populations no greater than five hundred, subsistence farmers and hunters too busy trying to stay alive to pose a threat. From what he read Hal doubted that any of them had even a grade school education.

  The towns that required the most attention were within two hundred kilometers of the coast. These were the populations that provided Den Tun his labor forces and military recruits. Only a small percentage of these Minzoku had ever encountered the Onjin firsthand, but all had significant knowledge of the Family and its local activities through various friends or relatives. Tamara’s proposed solut
ion was germ warfare: a virulent form of scratch fever spread by flea-like parasites native to Beta continent. The computer model suggested that an early spring release would spread the disease through the Minzoku population in a matter of weeks, resulting in a mortality rate of seventy-five percent or better. The survivors were likely to fall victim to secondary infections, starvation or bands of gaijin outlaws that preyed on the Minzoku’s outlying settlements.

  The second half of Tamara Cirilo’s report listed individual Minzoku known to have personal knowledge of the Onjin. A picture, if available, accompanied each name along with the occupation, last known location and the expected cause of death. Den Tun topped the list, followed by his ministers, officers and administrators. Most were expected to die in the destruction of the base.

  Next: the inhabitants of Sin City, followed by the names and faces of over a hundred gaijin officials. Hal found Dayuki’s death listed under “execution.” If only it was as simple as deleting her from the database! The Old Lady was sure to check on that, however; might even demand physical proof of her death.

  What he needed, then, was a body.

  Hal went through the list of Sin City’s inhabitants carefully. The majority were shop owners, their families and prostitutes. It wasn’t long before he had a list of half-breed Minzoku women. Many had left the town after the Fort went into lockdown but a dozen or so remained. He narrowed the list by age and height, resulting in three girls who resembled Dayuki in build and stature. No one who knew Dayuki personally would be fooled, but there weren’t many people at the Fort who did and adding traumatic injuries to the face would tie up the loose ends nicely.

  Hal visited Erin Nowatchik after lunch that afternoon. “When will you start producing the virus?” he asked the biochemist.

  “We’ve had samples of this strain on ice for several years,” Nowatchik said. “All we have to do is introduce it to a host a few weeks before deployment. Gathering the bugs that act as the delivery vector is what takes the most time.”

  “Will you need additional resources to begin?”

  “Yes,” Nowatchik nodded. “I need four tons of hay.”

  “Hay,” Hal asked, “as in animal feed?”

  “Precisely; I’ll show you.” He followed the scientist into a narrow corridor equipped with thick viewpanes that overlooked the lab’s quarantine area. “We’ll need several hundred million parasites to deploy the disease,” she explained. “I took the liberty of starting production as soon as Tamara Cirilo approached me about it.” The equipment in one room had been stripped out and replaced with straw-lined pens and watering troughs. Two dozen large grazers stood hobbled in stalls too narrow to turn around in. Lab technicians in protective suits ran some kind of brush through the animals’ long hair.

  “That’s how we’re breeding the parasites,” Nowatchik told him. “We comb out the eggs and nits every couple of days and freeze them.”

  “Are they already infected?” Hal asked.

  “Oh, no!” she laughed. “The biohazard suits aren’t necessary, but they’re the best way to keep from getting infested with the little bastards. Just before we deploy the disease vector we’ll infect the grazers and turn the nits loose on them. After twelve hours we’ll start collecting the adults for packaging.”

  “Four tons. I’ll have to give that some thought,” Hal said. “Den Tun might get suspicious.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nowatchik said. “I’ve kept animals now and then for experiments. I bought these from a Minzoku rancher we’ve done business with before; he won’t think it unusual, but with winter coming on he’ll want more for feed than I can authorize from petty cash.”

  “Who authorized the transaction?” Hal demanded.

  “Why, I did,” Nowatchik replied, stunned by his interrogative tone. “We’ve handled minor transactions like that for several years.”

  “From now on,” Hal said, “you will route all acquisitions from the Minzoku to me.”

  “Very well.”

  Hal turned back to the activity below. “I want you to perform a test of the delivery. How long before you could release it in Sin City?”

  “A week or two,” Nowatchik said, “but may I ask why? The vaccinations we’ll use to protect our own people are really artificial antibodies—we’ll have instant immunity but it will fade over the next month. I’ll have to produce more serum for the main release and vaccinate everyone again.”

  “Misdirection,” Hal explained. “A limited outbreak now will set the stage for an epidemic in the spring without the Minzoku suspecting us—we clearly wouldn’t release a deadly disease so close to home.

  “In fact,” Hal said as an idea sprang to mind, “we’ll offer the serum to the Minzoku in Sin City after a few dozen fall ill. We’ll do the same after the epidemic hits, only the serum we use then will be inert—or worse.” The vaccinations would placate Den Tun’s distrust and make those vaccinated complacent while the disease ran through them unchecked.

  “I’ll authorize the feed purchase,” Hal went on. “Get with McKeon to have it delivered.”

  SEVEN

  The Embustero: 2710:01:37 Standard

  The Embustero was twelve hours out of Caliban Station before the flurry of activity accompanying the sudden change of cargo sorted itself out. Terson, Mackey and O’Brien put in an eighteen-hour irregular shift before ballasting was complete and caught six hours of stand-down before starting their normal second shift.

  Terson woke with just enough time to drag himself to the showers before breakfast, but others chose to sacrifice food for sleep, judging by the light attendance. He prayed that his hard work in port would induce Colvard to be merciful in his assignments this shift.

  “Hi, I don’t think we’ve really met,” said a crewman from the other side of the serving line. “It’s Joseph, right? I’m Michelle.” The owner of the voice had a vaguely familiar face—female and fairly attractive.

  “That’s right.” Terson offered a polite smile. “Nice to meet you.” He turned his attention to the selection of hot rations, transferring an entrée and two side dishes to his tray before moving on.

  She paced him to the beverage dispenser. “We found a real treat in port,” she said. “Genuine Terran coffee; it’s supposed to be quite the pick-me-up. Would you like to try some?”

  “Um, yes, that would be fine, thank you.”

  She filled a wide-mouthed individual hot beverage container from a carafe and passed it across to him with a smile. “Some people like it with a little sugar,” she said. “Enjoy!”

  “Thanks, I will,” Terson promised, though he wasn’t entirely certain that he would. ‘Coffee’ was one of many ubiquitous words in the human sphere, like ‘fish,’ ‘bird,’ and ‘tree;’ used as general descriptors but widely variable when it came to details. Coffee on his homeworld of Algran Asta was brewed from a bark, while on Nivia it came from a root. The only thing they shared in common was that they were both a hot drink generally consumed in the morning.

  This brew, genuine Terran or not, smelled good, at least.

  “Trying the coffee?” Jerrell Mackey asked as Terson joined him. “You are in for a real treat.”

  “That’s what I’m led to believe,” Terson replied. He thumbed the stopper back to take a sip—and grimaced at the bitter astringent taste. “I don’t think any amount of sugar will save this,” he concluded.

  “It’s tolerable,” Mackey grinned, “though I’m forced to wonder under what circumstances someone thought it was a good idea to burn a bean, soak it in water, then drink it more than once. Probably the same guy brave enough to take a second bite of grapefruit.”

  “Grapes are fine,” Terson countered.

  “The name is misleading, believe me,” Mackey replied. He passed Terson a handful of dry creamer packets. “Load it up with this.”

  The additive softened the bitterness, though Terson concluded that genuine Terran coffee wouldn’t make his list of favorites. The rest of the shift crew drifted in
while he finished his breakfast, and Michelle made frequent forays into the commons with the carafe to offer her concoction to those who bypassed the chow line and refill cups.

  The first sip resulted in a range of disagreeable expressions, and most who’d gone through the line declined her offer of more. Her smile was strained by the time she made her way to Terson and Mackey. “Take a refill,” Mackey whispered as she approached.

  “I don’t think so,” Terson said.

  “You don’t have to drink it,” the crewman urged quickly, before holding out his own mug. “Thanks, Michelle. Where’d you find real coffee?”

  “One of the specialty suppliers at Caliban,” she explained. “It’s only the second or third time I’ve come across it so I thought I’d give it a try.” She gestured to the commons with her free hand. “I guess it wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “I’ve heard it’s an acquired taste,” the spacer replied.

  “It was pretty expensive, though,” she admitted. “Markland’s not going to be happy if it goes to waste.” She turned to Terson hopefully. “Would you like some more?”

  “Can’t turn down the real thing,” Terson said. “How much did you get?”

  “Four kilos,” she said. “It should last a while, at this rate.”

  “All the more for us!” Mackey exclaimed brightly.

  “I’m glad somebody likes it,” she smiled, and continued her rounds.

  “You trying to get in her pants?” Terson asked once she was out of earshot.

  “Just trying to give her confidence a boost,” the spacer replied as he poured sweetener into his mug.

  “Use your own stomach to do it,” Terson shot. He pushed his mug over to Mackey. “Drink it or dump it.”

  The spacer shrugged and poured sweetener into it, too. “Deal, but you take my dishes.”

  Terson tipped Mackey’s empties onto his own tray and nested the now-vacant one beneath it. “Don’t get used to this, chucklehead.” A light-headed sensation came over him when he stood, and he had to pause after a few steps when it didn’t pass. Spears of light radiated inward from the periphery of his vision and his ears began to ring.