Embustero- Pale Boundaries

by Scott Cleveland

  “You okay, Joey?”

  “Just a head-rush,” he replied. The commons faded behind the dazzle and he felt his knees hit the deck, trays slipping from his fingers. “Ah, crap…”

  “Damnit, doc, I’m fine!”

  “The fat lip says otherwise,” Druski replied as she connected a new bag of saline to Terson’s IV. “You’re lucky it wasn’t your nose.”

  “I just stood up too fast!”

  “You passed out three times getting here,” she informed him. “Remember any of that?”

  “Well…no, not exactly,” Terson admitted. “But I feel fine, now.”

  “That’s because you’re lying down,” the medic explained. “You’ve got unusually low blood pressure for some reason, and you’re not leaving until I find out why.” Multiple blood samples and a third bag of saline later she returned with her verdict and a syringe: “No specific cause,” she announced. “You were a bit dehydrated when you came in and you’re vitamin deficient, but nothing serious that I can find. Your blood pressure is back to normal, so I’ll send you on your way in a few minutes.” She approached with the syringe.

  “What’s that for?” Terson demanded.

  “A vitamin supplement to correct your deficiencies,” she explained.

  “Can’t I just take a pill?”

  “Don’t be a crybaby,” Druski snorted. “It goes in the IV.”

  “How long will it take?” Terson insisted. “I really need to piss.”

  “Three units of saline will do that,” she nodded as she injected the contents of the syringe into the IV tube. “I’ll get you a pan.” She walked out and slid the door shut behind her with a click.

  “Bullshit.” Small an indignity though it was, the prospect proved one too many for the morning. Terson held the IV in place with his thumb and tore off the tape that secured it with his teeth. Blood welled up from the entry point when he pulled out the port and he quickly bent his elbow to staunch the flow while he searched the drawers for a wad of gauze. He slipped back into the upper portion of his shipsuit and crossed to the door.

  It was locked.

  “Damnit!” The pressure in his bladder had increased twofold when he stood up, and delaying relief seemed to double it again. There being no other immediate alternative, he used the examination room’s tiny sink before turning again to the issue of the locked door. He tugged again, harder, in case it was merely stuck, but it didn’t budge.

  “Druski, open the door,” he called.

  The medic didn’t respond, but the speaker in the ceiling emitted three long horn-blasts followed by Shadrack’s voice: “All hands rig for jump—T minus three minutes.”

  Jump? The Embustero’s next two ports of call were in-system, and a jump now could only mean—“NO!” Terson shouted. “No fucking way!” He lunged at the door; his kick shook it to its frame and sent a bolt of pain through his knee. He roared and kicked again with the same result, though this time Druski responded from the other side.

  “Calm down, Joseph!”

  “Open the door!”

  “I’m not crazy,” the medic replied. “Sit down and relax; there’s nothing you can do!”

  The medic and her lying bastard of a captain were going to find out just how wrong she was. He turned to the exam table, squatted to seize the lower supports at one corner, and heaved upward with his entire body. The hardware securing it to the floor held, but the thin metal of the foot failed, deforming enough to slip past the head of the bolt. The next three came loose in quick succession, providing an expedient battering ram with which to address the door.

  The first blow forced the lower corner out of its track; the locking mechanism disintegrated with the second. He burst completely through with the third, to find Druski standing between him and the infirmary’s entrance with her hands on her hips and a disgusted look on her face. “This is one helluva mess.”

  “It’s going to get bigger if you don’t get the hell out of my way,” Terson growled.

  Druski crossed her arms. “Not going to happen, Joseph. You go stomping through the ship you’ll get shot—don’t be stupid.”

  “Too late!” Terson spat. “I was stupid to trust you bastards in the first place!” He advanced toward her. “Now I’m going to leave.”

  Druski didn’t budge at his approach, didn’t cower, didn’t even appear to tense up. “You can leave if you want,” she said. “Just not yet.”

  “You lied to me once already; why should I believe you now?”

  “I never lied to you!” Druski shouted angrily. The vehemence of her denial set him back a step. “And I won’t,” she continued at lower volume.

  “Shadrack did,” he insisted.

  “He has his reasons,” she replied, “but none of them involve harming you. He just wants to protect his crew—and you, believe it or not.”

  The desire to believe it took Terson by surprise. He’d had to fend for himself since childhood, and rarely encountered anyone with both the inclination and means to protect him from much of anything. “Why the hell would he care?”

  “For purely selfish reasons, believe me,” Druski sighed. “You know how some people can pick up a geometric puzzle and just…see the pattern of relationships it takes to solve it? Shad seems to do the same thing with people, like he’s building sculptures with personalities. He can see where all the cogs go and how they work together. Somehow he thinks you fit in here.”

  “Sorry to disappoint him, but I don’t share the desire.”

  “He knows that,” Druski said evenly, “and he didn’t want any trouble.” A mild, momentary disorientation came over him as the starship transited out of normal space. “I was supposed to knock you out for a couple of hours so you wouldn’t know we jumped.”

  “Well, I know,” Terson pointed out. “So where does that leave us?”

  Markland and Colvard eased into the room from the corridor. Both wore side arms, and Markland’s hand gripped the butt of his tightly. “That depends on you,” the first mate said. “You can come quietly or I can shoot you.” Colvard looked nervous, but the steel in Markland’s voice told Terson that the officer wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.

  “It’s a moot point,” Druski told the spacers.

  “It’s a security matter, Meg,” Markland replied with a nod to the wrecked door behind Terson. “Cooperation will go a long way right now,” he added meaningfully.

  Terson raised his hands resignedly. “You’re just loving this, aren’t you, asshole?”

  Druski heard Shadrack enter and spun her chair to face him. “Things got a little out of hand,” she said.

  “Clearly,” her captain replied as he surveyed the damage. “He did all this himself?”

  “In under a minute and a half,” she told him.

  “He doesn’t look that strong.”

  “High-gravity physiques can be misleading,” she said. “Being so pissed off didn’t help matters,” she added in her told-you-so tone.

  “I wanted to avoid this. What happened?”

  “I couldn’t sedate him until the vasodilators wore off. I guess he got impatient before the sedative got to him.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t see that coming; I can’t say I’ve ever treated anyone of sound mind willing to pull out their own IV.”

  Shadrack’s hand engulfed her shoulder. “You took a chance stopping him,” he said with the hang-dog expression that meant he truly regretted what had happened. “I wish you hadn’t—he could have killed you.”

  Druski patted his hand. “He wouldn’t have laid a hand on me,” she assured him. “Not a defenseless, unthreatening woman.”

  “You’re hardly defenseless,” Shadrack snorted.

  “He never needs to know that,” she smiled. Then, more seriously: “He’d have mopped the floor with a man. You need to remember that.”

  Shadrack nodded. “I’ll let him cool off for a few hours. I’m not sure what I can do to salvage the situation, though.”

  “Tell him the truth,”
Druski suggested.

  “Yes,” he nodded again. “I owe him that. I’ll make sure he understands what happened is my fault. He’ll come around.”

  “Like Liz?” Druski asked impulsively.

  Shadrack’s countenance twisted with a moment of pain. “Your point?”

  “He’s messed up, Shad, to the soul—like Liz. Like I was. I don’t know what situation we pulled him out of but I guarantee this: mentally, ending up here was nothing but an intermission. What we just did to him makes it real again in the worst way and you shouldn’t expect him to docilely toe your line.”

  “Your prescription?”

  “If he wants to leave, then let him go!”

  Shadrack stood. “I’ve never kept anyone here by force.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Not your problem, Meg.”

  Druski tipped her head acquiescently. She knew when to argue with her captain and when to bide her time.

  Shadrack usually put in half a shift on the bridge during a jump to satisfy himself that the Embustero and her crew made an orderly transition out of normal space. The commotion in the infirmary and its aftermath interrupted his routine and the captain spent only a few minutes before leaving again.

  “I’m turning in, Mr. Markland. You have the con.”

  “Aye, sir. Good night.” Markland settled into the command station and began to browse the menu of status reports and indicators. The trouble Pelletier caused was only a harbinger of what would come later. The prospect of entering jumpspace had once been an event to look forward to, a holiday after weeks or months of system travel. Most of the crew had gone into coldsleep, leaving a single low-manned shift to monitor the ship’s systems during the transit. Easy, boring duty that few objected to when their turn came.

  It hadn’t been that way for a long time.

  The destruction and damage of coldsleep pods at Proxima Cygni made the Embustero feel like a soup can during transit, a result of too many people with too little to keep them busy. Markland often felt like an entertainment director, constantly juggling activities and schedules to provide the illusion of variety. As hard as he worked, boredom always won out and the result was always unpleasant—sometimes downright violent—as isolation and monotony amplified minor personality conflicts and petty jealousies to rampant gossip and fistfights.

  A red telltale caught his attention as he flipped past. “Systems, this is Command,” Markland called. “I’m showing a fault at one of the maintenance locks. Can you confirm that?”

  “My board is green, sir.”

  “Check your sub-menu.”

  “Stand by…Aye, sir, I’ve got it here, too. Looks like a non-vital error on one of the service couplings. We may have torn the end off an umbilical. I’ll send one of the cambots out and take a look.”

  “Very well. Route the feed up here, too, will you?”

  “Sure thing. Systems out.”

  “Command out.”

  One of Markland’s auxiliary screens flickered to life, displaying the video feed from the cambot as it emerged from its bay. The grainy image flickered and lost sync every few seconds due to the various forms of radiant energy trapped within the bubble of space the ship occupied. The interference would grow with time, as would the ship’s hull temperature, until they dropped out of jump and shed the excess energy in a flash of RF and infrared.

  Markland continued his other checks, casting a glance at the screen occasionally to check the cambot’s progress as it slowly made its way along the Embustero’s hull on magnetic tracks.

  “Command, this is Systems,” an anxious voice called. “Are you seeing this?”

  Markland peered at the screen for a moment before he realized what the crewman was talking about: the Embustero had sprouted some kind of protuberance where a maintenance lock should have been. “What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know for sure, sir. It could be a limpet.” The crewman’s voice took on a fearful timbre at the thought.

  “A limpet mine that size is overkill,” Markland disagreed. Besides, it was over an airlock and the surrounding hull was reinforced in such areas to keep a breach from tearing the ship open. If someone wanted to disable them there were more logical places for a mine. Markland had a hunch he knew what had attached itself to the Embustero and who was responsible.

  “Engineering, this is Command. Put Neuchterlien on.”

  “Aye, stand by.”

  “Neuchterlien here.”

  “Take a look at the video feed on channel nine,” Markland said. “Tell me what you see.”

  “That there,” he confirmed, “is a baffle-rider with a leech package.”

  “Get up here on the double,” Markland ordered. He keyed the direct line to Shadrack’s quarters. “Captain to the bridge, ASAP!”

  Shadrack peered at the distorted image relayed from the cambot outside while Neuchterlien explained: “He latched onto the lock’s grapples and tapped our service couplings to pull our air and power and conserve his own reserves. Probably has a bad loopback on his side or we’d never have caught on.”

  “Can we get rid of him?” Markland asked.

  “You mean scare him off, or…” he drew a finger across his throat.

  “That.”

  “I can shunt the air coupling to space, try to depressurize him, but if he’s smart he’s got a back-flow valve. Best bet is to inject hydrogen into the airstream, spark it from our side and burst him like a popcorn kernel.”

  “And put a hole in us,” Shadrack noted.

  “Always that chance.”

  “And if we want him alive?”

  “Get some anesthetic from Druski,” he said. “Pump it into the airstream and knock him out. Do an EVA to get a line on him, unbolt the grapples from inside the outer hull, tow him into the main cargo lock and cut him open.”

  “How long will all that take?” Shadrack asked.

  “Ten, twelve hours.”

  “An EVA is inherently dangerous,” Markland said. “This clown isn’t worth it.”

  Shadrack tugged at his beard. “Is there any way he can get aboard?”

  Neuchterlien’s face screwed up in doubt. “Not very likely, but I won’t bet my life on it. I can bolt the hatches from inside to make sure.”

  “Do that. We’ll leave him where he is, for now, but keep the cambot on him at all times,” Shadrack said.

  “That’s not wise,” Markland objected.

  “You just told me it’s not worth the risk of an EVA to go out and get him,” Shadrack replied. “That leaves only three uncertain methods of killing him. Would you rather try those?”

  “Yes, sir, I would.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Shadrack responded in a flat tone. “We don’t even know if it’s your codger or not. If so, I’m comfortable just knowing where he is. Anything else?”

  “Yes, sir,” Markland continued doggedly. “That airlock is one section aft of Pelletier’s quarters. That’s a coincidence I’m not comfortable with.”

  “So noted. That will be all.” Markland spun on his heel with an icy look and took his station without further comment. Shadrack regretted the abrupt dismissal for an instant. Screw him; he had it coming. He turned back to the engineer, who had studied the image on the screen pointedly during the exchange. “Get that airlock secured.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Discounting the five-centimeter-thick sheet of transparent acrylic where the door should have been, there wasn’t much difference between the Embustero’s brig and Terson’s quarters. He couldn’t help but see Shadrack in the corridor, but chose not to acknowledge him.

  The Embustero’s commander watched him silently for a few minutes before he spoke: “Joseph, can I talk to you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You have every right to be angry,” Shadrack said. “I lied to you. That’s not something I expect you to forgive, but I hope you’ll let me try to explain.”

  Terson closed his eyes. He couldn’t stop Shadrack
from talking, but any response would legitimize the spacer’s gesture. Better to let him have his say and get it over with.

  Shadrack continued after a moment: “We lost some good people a while back,” he said. “Repairs bankrupted us. We had to do some things we’re not proud of to survive.

  “We’ve run short-handed ever since. I can’t hire on just anyone, considering what we’ve been involved in. Honest men wouldn’t abide us long and the dishonest sort would poison us.

  “You came along at the right time with the right skills. We need you, Joseph.”

  Terson couldn’t let it continue. He sat up and glared at the spacer. “You didn’t even ask!”

  Shadrack dipped his head. “No, I didn’t. That was a mistake and a sin. I’m asking now, but just one thing: give it a chance.” The cell door slid aside and Shadrack stepped back. “Give it a chance and if you want to leave I won’t stop you.” The spacer turned and walked away from the open door, leaving the choice to remain inside or not to Terson.

  He stayed where he was, angrily refusing to offer even a tacit suggestion that he’d accepted either Shadrack’s apology or explanation. He was cynical enough not to need or expect the former, and the latter had come too late to do any good. A straightforward declaration of the situation from the beginning, even if it wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear, was far preferable to manipulation with lies and subterfuge.

  I was an idiot to hope otherwise.

  And that was the crux of the issue.

  Terson had never experienced emptiness, until recently. The loss of his family on Algran Asta had come early enough in his life that he couldn’t even remember them. His emotionally Spartan upbringing at Boss Hanstead’s hands made friends exterior attachments in the best of cases, things he could cut away without damage.

  He’d never had a soul mate until Virene, but she hadn’t filled a space; she’d melded with him like a foreign object enveloped by the trunk of a tree, eventually part of the plant, but never losing its identity. The wound of her loss had closed over, but a void remained, and the fuzzy camaraderie he’d found aboard the Embustero had been easy to let in. It dulled the pain, but he recognized now that it constituted nothing but a crutch, and a weak one at that—something he could use, if necessary, but must never depend on to support him.