Embustero- Pale Boundaries

by Scott Cleveland

  He let Terson do the honors.

  The weapon discharged with a roar and lead splattered against the bullet trap at the end of the range. Aerie motioned Terson to repeat the process when the pistol didn’t jam or fly apart, and he emptied the entire magazine with successive tugs on the line. The casings showed no signs of cracking or expansion, and Aerie declared the weapon proven after a quick field strip and reassembly. “Thing with the ammo, though,” he cautioned while he reloaded the magazine, “is watch what the cases are made of if you plan to reload. Brass is best, but it’s expensive. Some of the ceramics you find are okay, too, but these—” he held up the handful of steel casings for a moment, then turned and dropped them in a bin—“Are scrap metal once they’re fired. You might get one, maybe two more loads, but they’ll fail for sure, eventually.”

  Terson stepped to the firing line and settled into his stance, sights lined up on the first in a line of water-filled containers. He thumbed off the safety and slowly increased the pressure on the trigger until the gun leapt upward of its own volition and the container exploded in a shower of liquid. The recoil slammed the butt of the pistol against his palm with enough force to sting, and the surprise prompted Aerie to suggest he hold the grip more tightly. Terson did so, and each target fell in turn, soaking the floor and walls as if a thunderstorm had passed.

  “Now, refinishing a piece like this is not ordinarily a good thing to a collector,” the armorer said back in the shop, “but the rarity, combined with the fact that it fires, makes that inconsequential in this case. It needs re-bluing in order to properly preserve it, but I’ll give you fifteen thousand for it straight up, right here, right now.”

  The offer would set him up comfortably for several months, he knew, but a part of him still viewed a firearm as a source of security, even if he couldn’t reasonably expect to need one. “I’ll have to think it over,” he replied.

  “I understand,” Aerie nodded. “Not a decision to make quickly. What I’d like to do, though, is go ahead and re-blue it for you and I’ll do it for half price. Just for the opportunity to say I worked on one,” he hastened to add at Terson’s raised eyebrow.

  “Not to predispose me to sell it to you instead, if I happen to get a better offer?” he asked lightly.

  “There’s that,” Aerie grinned, “but seriously—this would go into my private collection and I’ll be surprised if you can get a better offer for it. Just remember I offered first, okay?” He stuck out his hand, and Terson shook it firmly.

  “Deal.”

  TWELVE

  Tammuz Station: 2710:03:33 Standard

  Terson set up in an all-hours café in the passenger terminal just down the corridor from the Customs exit while he waited out the three days remaining for the Embustero a.k.a Ladybird to vanish from the dock listings. A small table in the back corner offered a reasonable view of the corridor outside and a better one of the café entrance should someone from the Embustero or the old starhound who’d accosted him upon his arrival appear. Generous tips to the wait staff kept him safe from harassment and his spot available on the rare occasions he found it necessary to leave.

  He identified a handful of regulars among travelers and carousing stationers while he waited, scanning everyone who entered, but he knew there were dozens of crewmen on the Embustero that he’d never laid eyes on. It wouldn’t be difficult for Shadrack to figure out who was least likely to be identified and send them to scout out Joseph Pelletier.

  The freighter’s departure was just over thirty-six hours out when Terson saw a young woman enter who was more interested in the bar’s patrons than its services. She searched the place methodically, attracting a good deal of attention while doing so. Her body stiffened with recognition when her eyes lit on Terson and she approached boldly.

  “You owe me some money,” she said as she slid into the seat across from him. The voice was maddeningly familiar; he stared slack-jawed as he tried to recall the face. She waved her hand in front of his eyes. “You drunk?”

  “Liz?” Her smirk confirmed his guess. This was not the B. Lizzard he recalled from the Embustero. This one was made up, styled, expressive and dressed in contour-hugging clothes that exposed her skin from the neck to the first swell of her breasts, from wrist to shoulder. “What the hell are you doing here?” Of more interest: “How did you find me?”

  “Shore leave—privilege of seniority,” she said in answer to his first question. As to his second: “There aren’t that many places to hide on this side of the station, and recovering my money was a powerful motivation.”

  “Your money…?”

  “My money,” she nodded. “Imagine my disappointment when I find out someone has already checked into my room and emptied my expense account. Some bimbo you picked up?”

  Terson still couldn’t shake his confusion. “Bimbo?”

  “Reservations for two,” she explained as if to a child. “Two checked in; I wasn’t one of them, which begs the question: who was it?”

  “Nobody; a mix-up,” Terson said as a thought occurred to him. “That note wasn’t from Druski. It was from you?”

  “And you repay my kindness by cleaning me out and taking off.”

  “I—why?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Terson sputtered. “Why did you do that?”

  “Self-preservation,” she replied. “The last thing we needed was you getting picked up for vagrancy before we could get out-system again.” She gestured to the crowd in the terminal. “I could have saved myself the trouble if I’d known about this.”

  “So,” he said, working out the implications of her claim, “Shadrack and Druski didn’t know?”

  “All me,” she reiterated. “But that expense account was for me—for official business. There’s no way to explain why it’s all gone, so I came looking for you.”

  “So you found me,” Terson said, “and I’m doing fine. Now what?” The explanation made sense, but he wasn’t willing to let go of his earlier paranoid interpretation of events on her word alone. He scanned the café carefully; no one seemed to pay them undue attention.

  “There’s nobody looking for you, Joey,” Liz said.

  “You were.”

  “Nobody else,” she clarified with unveiled exasperation.

  “We’ll see; come on.” Terson headed for the door, towing the woman by the wrist. He cut left in the corridor then crossed to the other side and went right again, finally ducking into another lounge. He scanned the pedestrian flow for anyone following in his wake.

  “Satisfied?” Liz demanded.

  “Not quite,” Terson replied. “Why are you the only one to come off the ship?” he demanded in turn. “What’s with…this?” he gestured at her, up and down, with his free hand.

  Liz’s face assumed the blank expression he was accustomed to. “I have an arrangement with Shadrack. I go ashore lots of places where the other’s don’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “None of your business.”

  Terson released her and turned away. “Don’t follow me.”

  She caught him by the arm before he could take a step. “Wait! Please. Joey, it’s because I just need to feel—normal—for a while. Like them.” She nodded to the mass around them. “Nobody here knows me,” she explained. “I can talk to people—or not—if I want. I can be what I want. Nobody judges, and if they do it doesn’t matter—they won’t remember me, you know?”

  The sincere truth of the statement struck him to the core. The premise he’d built his paranoia on over the last few days vanished, as if she’d reached into him and plucked out a sliver he didn’t know was there. He didn’t want to trust her, but the inexplicable, visceral reaction made it impossible not to. He leaned back against the wall, sweating.

  “You do know,” she whispered, eyes widening at the realization. “Meg was the only one who ever understood! How—“

  Terson waved his hands. “Hold on; just stop…talking.” Esc
aping isolation through anonymity seemed contradictory at first, but it did make sense. On Nivia he was conspicuous in appearance, attitude and outlook, every word and action subject to scrutiny. The transient nature of a starport made it a cultural no-man’s land where peculiarity was the expected norm; no one gave him a second glance.

  Liz tugged him to a booth and ordered them drinks. He downed the first in one shot—she signaled for a refill. He sipped the second at a more moderate rate, but the one-a-day diet of space rations wasn’t enough to slow the alcohol’s absorption and before too long his head began to buzz.

  He dug out his wallet for the station account card and handed it to her.

  “This is all that’s left,” he said. “Might be enough to keep you from getting in trouble.”

  “Thanks. Do you need some to get by for a while?”

  Terson shook his head; finished off his drink. “I’ve got resources.” Another drink appeared in front of him like magic. “I think I should go.”

  “Do me a favor?” Liz asked quietly, ducking her head as if embarrassed.

  “If I can.”

  She gestured to the nearly deserted faux-wood floor in the middle of the lounge. “Do you dance?”

  “Not according to my wife.”

  “We’ll go slow.”

  Music drifted from above in low, easy swells. Liz put her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder; they rocked from side to side, turning in circles with slow, aimless steps. The intimacy felt good even though it wasn’t with Virene; even though it was with a woman he barely knew, a woman who by her own admission would have left him to die on Nivia, who later helped drug him and who, with good reason, he’d concluded was a simmering kettle of crazy. They danced until the lounge closed for its shift-end cleaning and they found themselves in the dim corridor, treading quietly to keep from disturbing the travelers dozing along the walls.

  They found a spot to sit near one of the large viewports and watched storm clouds swirl in the atmosphere of the planet hanging outside. The illumination reflected back at the station was bright enough to cast shadows behind them, explaining the absence of anyone trying to sleep.

  “What are you going to do now?” Liz asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Terson shrugged. He’d been too intent on escaping a nonexistent hazard to think about it.

  “Shadrack will take you if you change your mind before we leave,” Liz said, “and we’re leaving earlier than our flight plan says—I have to go.”

  “That way,” he inclined his head back the way they’d come. “First door on the right after the café.”

  “Go as in leave,” she amended, and touched his arm. “Good luck, Joey.”

  He suddenly remembered the old man and searched his pockets, unable to remember for certain if he’d ever taken the scrap of paper he’d been given out of his old shipsuit. “Wait,” he called when he found it. “Some old guy gave this to me,” he said. “He seemed to know more than he should have. Wanted to talk to Shadrack before you left.”

  She peered at the message. “Did he give you a name?”

  “Macloud, Maclod, something like that.”

  “How long have you had this?” she demanded.

  “I dunno. Few hours.”

  Liz spun and headed down the corridor at a dead run.

  Markland, Colvard and Druski sat in a semi-circle in front of Shadrack’s desk, which was bare but for the scribbled note Liz had boarded with and the silver uniform button Markland had received on Caliban Station. The woeful tale Markland had squeezed out of Benjamin Grogan about the mishap on Nivia had provided the final clue explaining how Cormack MacLeod had happened upon them, but next to nothing about his motive.

  Markland was furious at the lapse in security, but Shadrack couldn’t find fault—beyond Grogan’s piss-poor flying—with his crew. The sled had to be repaired, they were without the advice of their senior officers, and who would have thought that a fly-by-night refitter would possess the investigative skills to ascertain the ship’s identity and activities from nothing but a bit of flair from a uniform?

  “I guess this means Pelletier is off the hook,” Druski quipped.

  “Quite a coincidence,” Markland asserted, “that this message from MacLeod came through him.”

  “Sweet Jesus, man!” Druski exclaimed. “Pelletier was the only one to leave the ship! Who else would MacLeod contact?”

  The conversation shaped up the way Shadrack suspected it would: Markland still convinced the young man was a plant, Druski defending him, and Colvard unwilling to lend his full support to either argument. “The issue,” Shadrack declared to forestall the irrelevant conflict, “is not how we arrived at this but what to do about it.”

  “This guy never said what he wanted?” Druski asked.

  “He told me at Caliban that he had a business proposition,” Markland replied, “nothing more. Frankly, I didn’t give it any thought beyond the threat of extortion.”

  “He’s got us by the balls,” Colvard noted, “but he hasn’t made any demands.”

  “What the hell do you think this is?” Markland said angrily, waving at the scrap.

  “If he wants to talk; fine. Let’s hear what he has to say,” Colvard said.

  “We need to put as much distance between him and us as fast as possible,” Markland countered.

  “What do you say, Meg?” Shadrack asked.

  The ship’s medic shrugged. “You kids slug it out and I’ll patch up the loser.”

  Shadrack sighed. “How much cargo is left to load?”

  “Last of it is coming aboard now,” Markland told him.

  Shadrack sighed. He’d hoped to leave the problem of Cormack MacLeod at Nivia and maintain the Ladybird’s clean reputation, but the circumstances had changed drastically. It was time to take more drastic measures than he desired, but there was no help for it. “I think,” he said heavily, “that it’s time to bid the Ladybird farewell.” The others didn’t look as stunned at the statement as he expected. Instead of argument he received resigned nods.

  “That’s going to be rough,” Colvard said by way of understatement. The slight financial headway the Embustero had made since adopting the Ladybird moniker would be wiped out and then some.

  “Alright, then,” Shadrack said, “we need to establish what our options are. Get Liz and Nuke up here.” The meeting adjourned while the ship’s engineer and accountant were located and began again with a quick summation to catch them both up.

  “Recap what we have in the holds,” Shadrack said.

  “Primarily raw plastics and unrefined petrochemicals,” Liz said. “We took on one hundred tons each of refined sugar and grains on speculation. Fifty tons of refined metals, another fifty tons of miscellaneous manufactured and consumer goods in trade for our poached meat at Caliban. Seventy-five percent of the space-available and transshipment cargo from Nivia has been off-loaded, leaving us at nearly thirty percent unoccupied hold space, including ballast voids.”

  “What kind of money are we looking at?” Shadrack asked.

  “Commodities with provenance: three to four million euros,” the young woman replied. “Commodities without: four to five million in value, but we’ll only get a fifth of that based on past performance. We might get two-thirds of the wholesale value in the right venue.”

  “We need to maximize our income,” Shadrack pointed out. “We can’t afford to be picky about where we get it.” He turned to the engineer: “Mr. Neuchterlien, what will it take to reconfigure the ship?”

  “If we shed the superstructure and recoat the hull we won’t bear more than a coincidental resemblance to the Ladybird,” he said. “The tough part is what to do about our transponders. Unless we want to resume our legitimate identity, we’ll have to get the spare recoded and forge new papers. Very expensive.”

  “We can’t be picky about where we get the work done, either,” Shadrack said. “We need a refitter with reasonable quality who won’t ask too many questi
ons. Suggestions?”

  “Assend,” Liz said flatly. No one looked pleased with the prospect, but Neuchterlein voted grudgingly in favor.

  “Assend’s got the facilities.”

  “Assend it is,” Shadrack decided. “And I want the holds full to bursting—contract delivery and space available, as much as we can get. Undercut bids by any amount necessary to get cargo; promise delivery yesterday.”

  “But we won’t make money that way,” Colvard objected, “especially if we’re going to Assend first!” Neuchterlein and Markland turned meaningful stares on the second mate, who caught on a moment later. “Ah. In for a penny, in for a pound, is it?”

  “We’re ditching the Ladybird anyway,” Druski clarified. “Might as well get everybody pissed at us at the same time.”

  “Our flight plan still says we’re going back to Nivia and we’ll leave it that way; it might not be much of a distraction, but it’s the best we can do without tipping off our shadow or the skip-tracers, if they’re waiting for us.”

  Shadrack dismissed his officers and composed a terse message that he hoped would give MacLeod the illusion of control, affording the Embustero the opportunity to slip away before he realized he’d been had:

  Understand you wish to discuss business. Current obligations prevent me from considering new clients at this time. Will entertain your request upon return to Nivia.

  It was a risky gambit. If MacLeod saw it as a delaying tactic it might goad him into taking action. The issue then became a matter of what MacLeod knew and what he could prove. To date the only official charges against the Embustero were civil—failure to pay for repairs and refitting after the disastrous voyage to Proxima Cygni. The local authorities weren’t likely to try and stop the freighter once it was underway without compelling evidence that the Ladybird was in fact the Embustero. Even if MacLeod possessed such evidence, the nature of the crime probably wouldn’t justify the risk and disruption of a chase.

  The authorities at Tammuz would simply hyperlink the information to the Ladybird’s next supposed port of call—Nivia—where the local police would wait patiently for the freighter to drop out of jump. Which wouldn’t happen, since Shadrack had no intention of following his flight plan. By the time anyone realized what he’d done and calculated his actual jump vector, assuming they cared, the ship would be off to another transfer point. The Ladybird would become one more wanted vessel among thousands, never to be seen again.