“I never expected to hear that from you,” Terson said, “considering the rumors.”
“Yeah, well, they’d get me one way or the other,” Tham replied.
“What if we didn’t have to leave?”
“We won’t have a choice when they start knocking down the walls at the ranch,” Tham snorted.
“I know a place.”
“The Militia is getting its ass kicked.”
“Not Militia,” Terson said, “Passive Resistants. Good set-up, well hidden. We can walk it in a couple of weeks.”
Tham’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t. The ranch I can handle, you know?” He gestured around. “Not this!”
“Jack, I can get us out!” Terson insisted, frustrated by the man’s fatalism.
“Shut up a minute, Reilly, and listen. Listen hard, and tell me what you hear.” There was no harm in humoring his idiocy, so Terson closed his eyes and tilted his head and heard—nothing. “That’s my point,” Tham said when Terson told him. “To me, right now, it’s so goddamned noisy I can’t hear myself think! You’re half my age, and conditioned to this place. I weigh twice what I’m used to, my back hurts all the time, I’ve had one knee replaced already and the other is bad.
“I’m forty-four, Terson, but I’ve got the body of a sixty-year-old. I won’t make it if I try to walk out.”
Terson stood, resigned. He didn’t want to leave Jack by himself, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice his own freedom so lightly. “We’ll get you set up here before I leave, okay?”
Tham tapped the ashes out of his pipe. “Yeah. Sure.”
CCB regulations demanded that nothing man-made remain on the planet and no expense would be spared to recover the wreckage of the helicopter. Locating survivors was merely a by-product of the effort, so there was no telling how long Tham might have to wait. Terson helped him build a simple shelter and left him the bulk of the survival rations, along with both personal rescue beacons and all the bug-bombs.
“Sure you don’t want a couple of these?” Tham asked of the potent insecticide foggers.
Terson shook his head. “I’ll be on the move.” They shook hands solemnly, and Terson set off through the shaded twilight.
He’d traveled less than one hundred meters and caught the first pungent whiff of burned plastic when he heard the rapid thud of Tham’s shotgun behind him. He hurried back the way he’d come, moving faster along his back trail than he had cutting it, and emerged at the base of the tree where he’d left Tham.
Something had shredded his clothing; his torso was crosshatched with wounds from which blood still flowed. His face was frozen in an expression of wide-eyed horror that Terson would never forget. A perfunctory check of his vitals confirmed what Terson already knew: Jack Tham was dead. A fresh torrent of guilt washed through Terson as he stood. He would never have left an injured comrade alone, and even whole Jack Tham proved no more capable of surviving on his own.
A faint scrabble overhead made Terson glance up—into the iridescent, multifaceted eyes of a chinche poised to slash at him with a primitive razorgrass blade. Terson blocked the attack with the butt of his rifle and stumbled out of range. The insectoid’s powerful rear legs were capable of propelling it twice the distance that separated it from the human, but its abdominal cavity was grossly swollen with blood, hindering its range of motion.
That did not prevent it from calling for help.
The vestigial wings on its back vibrated, filling the air with a piercing, high-pitched whine that set Terson’s teeth on edge. Other chinche responded to the call. Their individual replies merged into a deafening drone that seemed to come from everywhere, growing louder by the second.
Terson slung his rifle and snatched up both the survival pack and the shotgun. He was too exposed in the dense jungle to fight off the creatures, but he might have a chance if enough of the helicopter was intact. He crashed headlong through the jungle along his earlier route, digging in the pack for the bug-bombs. He dropped them in his path every ten meters, leaving a trail of toxic mist behind him. Chinche could not hold their breath and the first to enter the cloud fell writhing and spinning as the nerve agent worked its havoc.
The foggers would only provide a few moments of lead time before the chinche simply swarmed around them, but it might be all he needed to reach the helicopter and whatever protection it might offer.
A smoky fire line appeared ahead, flames on the ground crackling weakly, struggling against the moisture-laden plant life. Terson pushed through, eyes tearing in the smoke, and broke out into a bare blackened patch fifty meters across. The inferno left nothing of the fuselage but a ring of blackened titanium ribs.
He increased his pace across the hot ash, weaving through a stand of blackened tree trunks to the center of the burn where the impact and subsequent explosion had gouged out a shallow crater. The material mounded around the edge provided a barrier sufficient to conceal most of his body when he knelt, shotgun clamped firmly between his elbow and hip.
The chinche’s maddening war cry grew louder, threatening to split his skull, and then fell abruptly silent. Minutes passed. Terson did not misinterpret the silence as a sign of the insectoids’ retreat; he knew they were watching, planning, and that he would not learn the outcome until they acted.
The sound of a metal pan dragging across a washboard emerged from the jungle to his right. Answering calls sounded from the left, rear and directly ahead. A moment later he heard a single chirp, and chinche rushed in from every direction. The actual attack was surprisingly silent, compared to the pursuit. The creatures generated no sound but the gentle rustle and click of their pebble adornments as they raced across the clearing and leapt from trunk to trunk.
Terson’s response was immediate and devastating. He hurled a withering stream of shotgun fire through their ranks, exploding carapaces and blowing off chitinous limbs. Fletched razorgrass darts rained down from the branches above, burying themselves in the ground and biting into fallen logs. Terson turned the shotgun skyward, blowing apart the tufted masses of twigs and leaves where the chinche hid. He killed dozens with each sweep of the barrel, but one advanced for every five he stopped. His perimeter shrank until the projectiles they flung began landing inside the crater.
A dart sliced into his calf; another glanced across his shoulder. The cuts burned with pain beyond the physical injuries. The cumulative effects of the poison increased with each additional wound; his sight swam and blurred, the grip on his weapon weakened.
Terson dropped the shotgun when the ammunition ran out and reached down for his rifle. He couldn’t lift it, and the effort exhausted him too much to stand upright again. He toppled on his side, muscles soft and sluggish, struggling for each breath. He soon experienced the horror so evident on Jack Tham’s face. The chinche surrounded him, fighting each other for a claim of the booty. Blades slashed his flesh from every angle, inflicting wounds from which they raced to lap up his blood before he expired.
Intense, agonizing heat washed across him accompanied by a sudden, massive downdraft that whipped up a choking cloud of ash.
Terson stared dumbly at the Colonial Police helicopter hovering overhead as the door gunner played the beam of his Active Denial weapon back and forth over the chinche in the crater. The Colonization Board mandated the use of the supposedly non-lethal device in any situation involving chinche, inadvertently supplying the colonists with their most effective weapon against the insectoids to date. Although the microwave energy spent itself against the first layer of skin in mammals, producing an excruciating but harmless burning sensation, it penetrated the chinche’s dry, porous chitin, exciting the moisture in their innards faster than their bodies could dissipate the heat.
The chinche clinging to Terson dropped dead, roasted in their own shells.
Terson dimly perceived someone rappelling from the helicopter, then a dizzying harness ride ten meters into the air where the gunner pulled Terson and his rescuer into the helicopter. The last thing he reme
mbered was a laryngoscope blade sliding down his throat as they intubated him.
ONE
Saint Anatone, Nivia: 2708:08:19 Standard
The sound of a steel door slamming against its stops tore through Terson’s throbbing head like a bullet. His eyelids felt like they were lined with sandpaper. His mouth tasted like a small animal had crawled inside and shit itself to death.
“Reilly; out!”
Terson pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across a floor tacky with bile and stale urine. The jailer took him by the arm and led him to the discharge station. A tall, slender man in a black jumpsuit stood in the foyer bouncing on the balls of his feet—Captain Maalan Bragg, the Federal Police investigator who also acted as Terson’s probation officer.
His belongings spilled onto the counter before him. Nothing was left of the hundred-euro note he remembered leaving home with but small change. The arrest bond slid across to him.
“Twenty-five hundred,” the jailer smirked. “Cash or credit?”
Terson flipped his debit card back. “Cash—and I want my receipt this time.”
The transaction processed and his card hit him in the chest. “See you next week, smartass.”
Bragg intercepted him as he headed for the door. “You violated probation again.”
Terson examined his knuckles. New cuts and scrapes lay atop old scars and partially healed wounds. He explored the inside of his mouth with his tongue for cuts or missing teeth, but everything was as it should be.
“I guess I won.”
Bragg only shook his head and pointed at the door.
The humid air outside enveloped Terson like a moist blanket. His eyes teared up in the bright, clear sunlight. He fumbled at his pockets but his sunglasses were gone, lost during the night’s binge. He stepped into Bragg’s shadow and followed the officer to a car equipped, mercifully, with tinted windows.
Bragg was already sweating heavily in the heat and humidity, but to Terson the air was just on the edge of comfortable. He had yet to experience more than a few days he considered hot. He certainly didn’t sweat like the locals, who dashed from air-conditioned dwelling to air-conditioned vehicle as if their veins coursed ice water, and then massed on the beaches to expose their bodies to insects and the crisping radiation of the sun.
No one thought to caution Terson about the sun when he arrived. Algran Asta’s perpetual cloud cover blocked the most harmful radiation, and the rare periods of clear sky were too brief to do damage. Terson found Nivia’s deep blue sky fascinating the first day, but he woke that night in horrible pain to find his face, neck and hands bright red and blistered. He rushed to the local hospital in near panic, convinced he’d contracted some disfiguring disease. The medical staff chuckled at his ignorance, adding anger to his anxiety, which brought on an attack of another sort no one thought of, this one life threatening.
Terson grew up in high gravity at an altitude lower than Nivia’s sea level on a planet with an average atmospheric oxygen level of twenty-seven percent. Consequently, his lungs lacked the capacity to oxygenate his blood normally on Nivia, where the air pressure and oxygen levels were considerably less than what his physiology was accustomed to. He collapsed in the hospital and almost died before the staff realized that he was suffering from acute altitude sickness.
The damnable AC in Bragg’s cruiser came on before they reached the street. Terson closed his eyes and rested his head against the warm window while they drove downtown. He could not say he received less than a fair deal from the Commonwealth, though it was a close thing. The prosecution painted him as not merely a Militia sympathizer, but an active member who participated in a potentially deadly attack on two Marine pilots engaged in the performance of their lawful duties. The alleged Militia member who launched the weapon was never found and therefore existed as nothing more than a transparent fabrication intended to deflect responsibility for the crime from the real culprit.
The defense produced the falsified manifest signed by the shipping agent in Windstone who was later indicted for an unrelated incident in which he attempted to funnel weapons to the Colonial Resistant Militia disguised as legal cargo using an unsuspecting shipper. The Marine pilots confirmed that they observed two individuals eject from the helicopter, but the prosecution could not adequately explain how either man could fly and fire the weapon at the same time.
Terson was found guilty of providing false statements to an agent of the Colonization Board, to wit: the Marine pilot who first contacted him. He received four years, suspended, with credit for time served, and maintained his resettlement rights plus full compensation for the family homestead and herds held in trust for him by Boss Hanstead.
Bragg turned down a ramp leading to the Federal Police garrison’s parking garage. He boasted a corner office on the upper floors with a good view of the ocean two kilometers distant. Terson sat, rubbing his temples while Bragg shuffled paperwork.
“It becomes a felony if you accumulate too many probation violations,” Bragg said.
Terson shrugged.
“We’ve got people you can talk to,” Bragg said. “There’s no reason for you to live like this.”
Terson rested his face in his hands; a wad of scum oozed down his throat. He’d heard the coming lecture a dozen times, but the sooner he got through it the sooner he could go home.
The vidcom behind the desk chimed. Bragg stabbed the privacy switch and picked up the handset. The light over the video transmitter gleamed, though the screen and speaker remained inactive. “Yes, ma’am,” Bragg told the unseen caller, “I’ll bring it up right now.” He pulled another file from his desk. “Wait here.” The door closed behind him with a well-oiled click.
Terson could hardly believe his luck when they offered him another Class I colony; planets with a breathable atmosphere were rare, and after months in a cell he would have accepted transportation to anyplace with a sky, breathable or not. Had Terson actually read Nivia’s strict environmental charter before he signed he might have changed his mind.
Though inhabited for just over one hundred and seventy-five years, with a population barely over the median average of Algran Asta, Nivia was far from the raw, burgeoning colony Terson expected. Habitation was forbidden on two of the planet’s three continents; new development on the Alpha continent required years of permits and hearings.
Slow growth coupled with advanced technology offered a standard of living higher than colonies twice as old. The state provided for the colonists’ organic needs through carefully managed harvesting of wildlife, making large-scale agriculture and animal husbandry unnecessary. The ocean yielded the bulk of the food, but even getting a job as a deck hand required education and certifications Terson didn’t have.
The thing he found most confounding was the strict population control program, which dictated that the arrival of every Permanent Foreign Immigrant reduced the quota of authorized pregnancies among native Nivians by an equal number. Inexplicably, the locals blamed the immigrants, or phigs, as they preferred to call the newcomers, rather than their own idiotic policies.
The office door opened but instead of Bragg, a girl swept in, skidding uncertainly when she saw Terson. Red hair framed her face and shoulders in soft curls, and obvious feminine curves strained under her sleeveless summer blouse, which had been cropped to her midriff revealing a firm, tanned stomach.
She gazed at him quizzically for a moment. “I’m here to see Captain Bragg.”
“He had to step out.”
“Oh.” A smile lit her face. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and sat down. “I haven’t seen you around before,” she decided. “My name’s Virene.” She extended her hand, surveying him with intelligent green eyes. Perfume wafted around her, ambrosia compared to the drunk tank’s bouquet.
He shook her hand perfunctorily. The brief contact set his heart thudding in his chest and he hoped that he didn’t smell as bad as he suspected that he did. If she detected his bodily fragrances, she kept it to h
erself.
“Your turn,” she prompted.
“I’m sorry?”
“My name is Virene,” she explained, hands turning inward to indicate herself, then outward toward him, “and your name is…?”
The feared blush rushed up from his collar. “Sorry. I’m Terson. You must be his…daughter?”
“Me? Absolutely not!” Virene exclaimed with melodramatic horror before breaking into laughter. “I like to think I’m his number one miscreant. So, Terson, what are you in for?”
“A series of unfortunate misunderstandings.”
“I’ll bet. I have been brought in three times for public indecency, although,” she grinned with a wink, holding out her arms, “I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me there’s anything indecent about this.”
He couldn’t, though the thoughts that rushed into his mind clearly were, and he was certain that each and every one advertised itself on his face for her to see. He stood abruptly. “I have to go.”
“Well, nice meeting you, Terson,” she said as he headed for the door. “I work at The Pit—you should stop by sometime.”
The door clicked shut behind him. The memory of her perfume lingered all the way to the street.
The cramped public housing they’d assigned Terson when he first arrived was infested with Saint Anatone’s entire population of addicts, mental cases and petty criminals. Terson had never been forced to tolerate the like on Hanstead Ranch and made no attempt to hide the disdain he felt for his neighbors, who returned it tenfold.
Phigs occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder, even among scum.
Mutual disdain escalated to occasional harassment and threats of violence before Terson discovered that there was an isolated area in which a man could travel with relative freedom: the two hundred kilometer band of coastal waters that ringed the continent between the northern thirty-eighth parallel and southern thirty-sixth. Flat, open water wasn’t exactly what Terson considered a wilderness, but it offered the only available respite from Nivia’s inhabitants and their bizarre rules.
Pale Boundaries Page 2