Pale Boundaries

by Cleveland, Scott

  He encountered the perimeter road a few minutes later but did not slack off until the road merged into a main thoroughfare a few minutes after that. Satisfied that he’d escaped observation, assuming that the rent-a-cops at the boneyard had even bothered to investigate the ruckus, MacLeod eased into a less exhausting cadence.

  The ground beneath him began to vibrate moments before the sound reached him through the cold, dry air. The powerful low-frequency rumble vibrated the organs within his body as a starship rose from its pad several kilometers distant. MacLeod paid it no mind; he’d seen the same spectacle several times a week for more than twenty years. Of more interest were the other vehicles around him, some so large that they could crush cycle and rider beneath their treads without the driver noticing so much as a bump.

  The tempo at God’s Saucer never slacked, save when the rare rainstorms flooded the alpine desert and hydrated the lakebed, turning it into a quagmire within hours. No one complained, though. The soaking hardened the fine dust kicked loose by wheels, tracks and the blast of engines, and filled in the gouges, scrapes and craters left by botched landings and outright crashes.

  Cormack encountered no pedestrians other than those walking short distances between vehicles and buildings. Here and there he saw riggers cabling loads for crane hoists and laborers going about any number of activities, all bundled and masked against the cold wind and dust. Those that noticed Cormack stared for a moment wondering what fool risked his life and comfort traveling by cycle, unprotected against the elements.

  MacLeod had experienced exposure to worse weather than that at God’s Saucer during his sixty-three years of life. His hide had been baked by innumerable suns, freeze dried by arctic winds, attacked by fungus, radiation and chemicals. The only extra protection he afforded himself when he ventured out was the patch covering his empty left eye socket. Without it the cold penetrated his skull like a knife, leaving him bedridden with headaches that lasted for days.

  At last his destination hove into view: a rundown compound consisting of a single building with three sets of rollup doors that doubled as both workspace and living quarters. The hulls of more than two dozen small spacecraft in various stages of cannibalization littered the grounds, one more miniature boneyard among hundreds at God’s Saucer. A high fence of heavy-gauge chain link, crowned by a double coil of electrified razor wire to discourage the type of thievery MacLeod had just committed, surrounded the entire compound.

  He coasted to a stop at the gate, punched a code into the electronic cypherlock, and pushed his cycle through as soon as the gate shuddered open enough to let him pass. He repeated the process at the building and doffed the irksome eye patch once the rollup had sealed itself once more behind him.

  MacLeod’s shop was as cluttered and messy inside as out. A few custom hull molds leaned against the rear wall surrounded by numerous machining tools. Power hand tools, cutting torches and grinding devices, electronic test equipment and tangles of wire and circuit boards lay scattered about the workbenches along the walls. The only comparatively clear space was that immediately around his latest and recently completed project: a ten-meter-long baffle-rider resting on a stout timber cradle. He’d spent the better part of three months rebuilding the badly damaged ship and though he was pleased with the result, pleasure didn’t make up for the fact that the ship’s owner had stiffed him.

  Finding a buyer was only a matter of time: MacLeod was known in certain circles for the quality of his work and his abhorrence of paperwork and regulations. Still, he’d been saddled with a number of bills and it wasn’t as if he could just pack up and disappear to escape his creditors.

  He pushed aside a pile of clutter on one bench and dumped out the contents of his backpack in its place, then headed for his sparse living quarters to prepare his evening meal. He broke the seal on one of the long-expired space rations he subsisted on and turned to a cupboard where he kept his vids while it heated. Hugh Jorgan and the Space Nymphs, he decided.

  MacLeod carried the vid disk and space ration to the only furniture he owned: a high-resolution tri-dee projector and a pilot’s couch he’d salvaged from a long-range scout craft several years earlier. He settled into the chair’s aerogel padding contentedly and activated the built-in heat massage. Before long he was laughing uproariously while Hugh Jorgan engaged in an astounding number of dalliances with a bevy of vacuum-breathing nymphomaniacs bent on enslaving mankind with kinky sex.

  A buzzer over one of the rollups cawed. It repeated its call every few seconds while MacLeod crossed to the personnel door. He killed the interior lighting and cracked it open a few centimeters. A lone figure supporting itself with the aid of two canes stood at his outer gate, illuminated by the single overhead floodlight. The figure reached out carefully, as a man perched atop a tall pole and fearful of falling might, and pushed the button mounted on the fence again.

  “I hear ye!” MacLeod shouted when the bone-rattling sound of the buzzer finally cut out. “We’re closed!”

  The man said something, his voice drowned out by the scream of an engine test somewhere out on the lakebed. The budding confrontation paused until the test ran its course and the man repeated himself.

  “I come for my ship!”

  Cormack recognized him, then: it was Stoyko, the owner of the small ship in his shop. Until that moment MacLeod’s dealings with the man had been by vidcom. The spacer seemed to have aged twenty years in the two weeks since they’d last spoken. Too much time in space without gravity had atrophied even his facial muscles, which sagged under the unaccustomed physical strain.

  “Then you come with money, I expect.”

  Stoyko looked down ashamedly. “I told you before I got no money.”

  “An’ I told ye I ain’t a charity,” MacLeod yelled back. “I’m out o’ pocket a hundred thousand euros an’ more. No money; no ship!”

  “I got trade,” the man offered hopefully.

  “What sort o’ trade?”

  The man leaned on one cane and beckoned to him as he reached down to open a bag at his feet. MacLeod approached cautiously, staying to the shadows until he was sure the object wasn’t a weapon. He wouldn’t have ventured out in most circumstances, but the spacer could barely hold himself upright and decalcification had weakened his bones. Though twenty years his senior, Cormack knew he could break his arms with no effort at all. He peered through the fence at the object.

  “This here’s the flight data recorder from one of the ships I told you about,” Stoyko explained, “the one’s that busted me up. There was cargo aboard. It’s yours.”

  “Keep it,” Cormack snorted. “I got a drawer full o’ treasure maps.”

  “But it’s all I got!” the spacer protested.

  “Then ye got nothin’ at all,” Cormack enlightened him. He felt a faint twinge of guilt when he turned his back; he knew desperation when he saw it. He’d been there a time or two himself. But he’d done worse than walk away from a beggar and the guilt didn’t last as long as it took to reach his door.

  MacLeod found the body the next morning, curled up in a fetal position outside the gate. “Ach, ye poor bastard,” he said sadly, and rifled Stoyko’s pockets for valuables before he called the authorities.

  THREE

  West of the Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:03:25 Standard

  “Breakfast!” Terson called. He slid a reconstituted omelet onto each plate. Virene entered the hydrojet’s tiny galley combing out her damp hair, wearing nothing but a pair of Terson’s boxer shorts. “Didn’t mean to rush you,” he said.

  “What’s left of these ugly tan lines will be gone before we get back,” she informed him. “After that it’ll be fifty euros a viewing, so get it while it’s free.” She took a bite of omelet and aimed her fork at his waist. “You could use some evening-out yourself. Nothing frightens a woman more than Moby’s Dick coming at her in the dark.”

  “Not in your lifetime, baby. There are some places the sun will just never shine.”

 
; Virene took their plates when they finished and began scrubbing them in the sink. “Terson, have you ever thought about leaving here?”

  “There have been times I wished I wasn’t here,” he said, “but the alternatives weren’t that attractive.”

  “But if they were—if another Class I world opened, would you want to apply?”

  “Are you saying you’re not happy here?”

  “How would I know if I am or not?” she asked. “I never went more than two hundred kilometers from home until I got into Malone!” She dried the plates and put them away. “Three years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of being a—of poaching. Now I have, and there are still plenty of fish. I couldn’t imagine not having babies, but now I have friends who want them but haven’t gotten approved.”

  “You know what I think of the laws here,” Terson replied, “but there are worse places to be.”

  “You wouldn’t have said that two years ago,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have considered leaving, either,” Terson grinned.

  “People change,” she shrugged coquettishly.

  High, shredded clouds laced the sky when Terson and Virene emerged from the boat. Broken branches and bits of leaf littered the sand and bobbed in the lagoon. Tiny shore scavengers had already been at work among the debris, weaving multi-legged trails across the damp sand. Virene found a clear spot for her blanket and lay down to read, brown back and bottom glistening with oil in the sun. Terson carried the larger debris to the burning pile at the far edge of the lagoon and began to rake the sand clear of the smaller remains.

  The nightmare disturbed him more than it should have.

  The dreams had tapered off over the past two years. Sometimes they cropped up like familiar, albeit unsavory, acquaintances when he felt stressed but they’d long since lost their power to unsettle him. The untimely recurrence struck him as a bad omen, though his intellect scoffed at the notion. A dream was nothing but a dream, a symptom, at most, of his subconscious coming to terms with his marriage and the final, irrevocable resignation of his past.

  Virene saw a bright future, but Terson’s life had coincided with tragedy too many times to look ahead with the same enthusiasm. He hadn’t leapt into marriage with abandon, by any means. Though he loved Virene intensely, he’d privately agonized over each step of the relationship, forced her to make the first move through inaction, let the momentum of her personality carry them along as if ensuring her freedom of choice would relieve him of responsibility for what might happen later.

  He cast a glance at his wife, who lay on her side watching him, head propped up in the palm of her hand. She smiled suggestively when she had his undivided attention and beckoned with a fine-boned finger. Something in the air behind him caught her eye, however, and her lascivious expression morphed into curiosity. She sat up, shading her eyes for a better look.

  Terson followed her gaze and spotted a wisp of vapor high in the atmosphere to the north, growing in length from east to west at incredible speed. It didn’t look quite right for an aircraft contrail. He trotted to the boat and took another look with the binoculars he kept in the cockpit. The computer-enhanced image was grainy with distance, but there was no doubt that the object was man-made—and it was tumbling out of control, burning up in the friction of atmospheric reentry.

  A slightly smaller object fell away from the main body. Breaking thrusters flared in short bursts to shed velocity and orient the escape pod for touchdown, but they didn’t have the muscle or the fuel to completely cancel the gyration inherited from the mother craft. The pod was still spinning when it jettisoned the engine housing and deployed its high-altitude airbrakes. The four huge, heavy, fabric streamers wrapped themselves around the pod as they emerged. Three sorted themselves out after a few more rotations and sprang to their full length, flapping wildly, generating enough drag in the thin air to stabilize the craft.

  The functional airbrakes and steadily thickening atmosphere slowed the pod until the main parachute could deploy without ripping to pieces. The tangled fourth airbrake did not detach properly, however, and fouled the lighter canopy as it emerged. Half of the parachute managed to inflate, sending the entire mass into an irrecoverable flat spin.

  Terson took note of the compass heading and ran to cast off the aft line. “Virene, get aboard!”

  His urgency sent her dashing for the hydrojet. Terson gave her a hand into the boat then cast loose the fore line and climbed into the cockpit.

  The hydrojet’s impeller kicked up a surge as he backed away from the dock. He negotiated the canal out of the lagoon in full reverse, water splashing over the wing-in-ground-effect surfaces along the hull. Once clear of the rocks he paused momentarily to survey. The hydrojet needed more room to take off than to land; the channel just outside the lagoon entrance was only long enough for the latter. The meandering path through the reef to open sea took ten or fifteen minutes to negotiate, but it was high tide and the hydrojet’s draft was only a few centimeters at take-off. He backed to the edge of the channel, eyes glued to the depth gauge. Ten meters. Seven. Four. Point seven. He goosed the impeller forward, killing their momentum, and clutched the impeller engine to the jets.

  The turbines spooled up in a matter of seconds. The engines coughed once and ignited, spitting out a short-lived cloud of half-burned fuel before they settled down to a throaty roar. Terson shoved the throttles forward and the hydrojet leapt ahead, jetwash blasting up a cloud of vapor behind it.

  The far end of the channel rushed to meet them with frightening speed; the pale green sea beneath gave way to mottled shades of brown as the craft raced into the shallows. It skimmed across water no more than a few centimeters deep, the force of the engine exhaust exposing the surface of the coral, leaving a trail of sterilized rock and dead marine life in its wake.

  The hydrojet’s nose lifted. The WIG surfaces caught purchase in the air compressed between the surface of the water and the hull, lifting the craft clear as they drew lift from the aerodynamic phenomenon of ground effect.

  Terson banked starboard, scanning the cloudless blue sky for the pod but spied instead the spacecraft’s smoking wreckage as it vanished over the horizon. A plume of steam rose into the air a split second later. “Do you see it?” he asked.

  Virene didn’t answer. She sat frozen, her legs braced against the floorboards and fingers digging into the armrests, eyes squeezed shut. Her lids spasmed open and shut again at the sound of his voice, then stayed open. Her body relaxed with a loud exhalation. “You bastard!”

  “Sorry. Didn’t scare you, did I?”

  “Scare me? Why would—if you—Oh!” She crossed her arms haughtily and turned as much of her back to him as the seat harness permitted. “Is that what you’re looking for?” she demanded, pointing at the escape pod spiraling down several degrees farther along its arc.

  They reached the pod moments after it splashed down. The hull had buckled under the impact, tearing open a gash that vanished below the waterline. Terson scrambled out of the cockpit and grabbed his diving mask.

  “You can’t go in there,” Virene said incredulously. “The thing is sinking as we watch!”

  “It won’t take long. I’ll be careful.”

  “You better be!” she yelled as he stepped off the deck. He swam to the handholds and crawled up to the pod’s escape hatch. The release resisted at first, then popped and blew the door away.

  Displaced air sighed through the hatch. The pod dropped beneath Terson as the ocean, no longer impeded by air pressure, rushed in from below. Luminous webs of light reflecting from the water inside danced across the interior walls. Two of the occupied seats had broken loose and crushed the occupants to death against the bulkhead. Two more crewmen, a man and a woman, lay flaccid in their restraints while water rose around them. The man turned his head and moaned when a wavelet splashed across his face.

  Terson hoisted himself into the opening and lowered himself by one arm until his toes touched the water, crossed his legs and
let go. Debris swirled around his hips. Shorted power supplies filled the air with a haze of smoke and the stench of ozone. He moved quickly to unbuckle the crewman’s crash harness and pulled him out of the seat, letting the spacer’s life jacket support his weight as he towed the man back to the hatchway.

  The water beneath the hatch was almost up to Terson’s armpits, and he looked at the opening with consternation. Without the crewman’s help there was no way to get him up to it—but the water could do the work for him. Terson jumped up and caught the lip of the opening with his strong hand. The crewman floated nearly half a meter below him, out of reach.

  Within a few seconds, however, the water rose to the level where Terson could catch the front of the man’s life jacket. He set his grip and lifted the crewman out of the water. The cords in his neck throbbed as he raised the dead weight over his head, simultaneously hoisting himself up with his other arm until the man’s torso flopped over the edge of the hatch and gravity carried him over the side.

  Virene snagged the spacer under the arm with a dock hook and pulled him alongside the hydrojet. Their eyes locked in the instant before Terson dropped back into the pod. She yelled something as he vanished, but it was lost in the hiss and crackle of shorting circuits.

  The female spacer was completely under water. Terson ducked under to release her straps and she popped to the surface, buoyed by her life jacket. He pulled her toward the hatch, now less than a meter above the water line. A pocket of air somewhere below escaped in an explosion of foam and the pod rolled to compensate for its altered center of gravity.

  The hatch vanished and debris rained from the new ceiling. Terson dove for the submerged opening only to be brought up short by the woman’s life jacket. He turned back to release it in time to dodge aside as the seats ripped loose in the crash swept past him with their gruesome occupants. The wreckage landed against the hatchway, totally blocking it.