Pale Boundaries

by Cleveland, Scott

  “Indium gallium antimonide,” Hal finished for her. Den Tun must have discovered the use to which the Onjin put the raw materials his people supplied. The growing circumstantial evidence suggested that the old man was trying to produce the substance and may have succeeded. Though no scientist himself, Hal knew that the production process did not lend itself to establishment in the facilities the Minzoku controlled. At least not the ones that the Onjin knew about.

  The Onjin consumed massive quantities of electricity in the course of their activities, power they did not share with the Minzoku. Den Tun and his people possessed a single oil-fired electrical generating plant constructed to power their base when the Onjin originally occupied it. That would be the simplest place to construct a laboratory, but the Onjin had detailed blueprints of the base as well as full access anytime they wished. They rarely exercised that prerogative, but the possibility made it too dangerous for the Minzoku to house an unsanctioned facility there.

  That left only one Minzoku possession with an established power grid and a ready explanation for the level of consumption a single production facility required. “Do a detailed, multi-spectral satellite survey of the area around Tessoua,” Hal ordered.

  Saint Anatone Aerospaceport: 2709:05:03

  “Final boarding call for Flight 6721 to Nivia Station. Any remaining passengers for Flight 6721 please report to the gate immediately.”

  “That’s you,” Virene sniffed miserably. “You’d better go.” Her arms remained around Terson’s neck despite her words. He looked to the gate where Zarn spread his hands, entreating him to finish up. Terson waved him on and pried himself from his wife’s grasp.

  “Virene, I really have to go!”

  “I just told you that!”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said primly, wiping at her eyes. “You’re the one still standing here.”

  “Sorry; I’ll call as soon as I can.” Terson kissed her and dashed for the gate, shrugging at the attendant’s deprecating frown. He caught up with Zarn at the shuttle hatch and ducked through. The flight attendant inside checked his ticket and indicated the rear of the vehicle, redundant information given that it was a full flight and Terson was the last aboard. He dropped into the acceleration couch next to Zarn and buckled in.

  “She always this emotional?” Vondelis asked.

  “Not usually,” Terson replied. “She’s still rattled over that thing with the cargo shuttle.”

  “I think flying would make me a little queasy, too, if I were married,” Zarn said. “The idea of dying in a crash doesn’t bother me as much as the thought of leaving somebody behind.”

  The passenger across the aisle way cast them an unfriendly glance and Terson decided not to engage the subject further. The boarding tube and gantry disconnected from the commuter shuttle and swung away. The flight attendant appeared, demonstrating the craft’s restraints and pointing out emergency exits. “In a few minutes the captain will rotate the passenger compartment to launch position,” she said happily. “Please ensure all personal items are secured in the locker beneath your seat, as loose objects may injure you or other passengers during launch.”

  Terson’s weight shift as the passenger compartment tilted back 90 degrees so the occupants lay on their backs. The countdown appeared on the view screen at the front of the cabin. At ten seconds the pilot brought the orbital engines up to idle; at zero the craft leapt from its cradle as if it had been kicked. Terson relaxed into his seat, letting the force flow through him as the pressure against his chest increased. Within seconds the vibration and crackle eased in the thinning atmosphere.

  “There it is,” Zarn said four hours later, drawing Terson’s attention to the cabin viewscreen. Nivia Station was of classic wheel-and-spoke construction from the decades before affordable gravity control technology became available. The architects and engineers overcame the difficulty of docking a ship with a rotating object by splitting the station into two concentric rings connected by maglev rails, allowing the inner habitation ring to spin while the counter-rotating outer ring remained stationary relative to space. Dozens of spacecraft of all sizes sat in dock, sleds and tugs swarming around them. Dozens more lay in parking orbits a few hundred kilometers away.

  The station monitored everything that entered or exited Nivia’s atmosphere, the stellar equivalent of a firewall separating the planet from the rest of the system. The Commonwealth required that all planets with native biospheres maintain a significant degree of physical isolation from the outside to prevent biological cross-contamination. The mechanisms developed to accomplish this varied from system to system, but typically included the orbital population on the “secure” side of the theoretical line, allowing spacers and groundhogs to travel freely within the star system without decontamination or quarantine.

  Nivian policy drew the line at the atmosphere, with the exception of exempted stations and vessels, to the point of using proprietary docking mechanisms to physically prevent spacer craft from mooring at “secure” facilities. Hence, any spacer visiting Nivia station was restricted to the quarter outfitted with standard couplings, and Nivian vessels designated as “secure” were incapable of docking at spacer facilities or with spacer vessels. The arrangement gave the planetary population enormous political leverage to the dismay and dissatisfaction of the larger space-based population.

  Terson and Zarn headed straight for Malone’s dock, located half way around the station’s outer ring from the shuttle terminal, to check in and file their final flight plan then inspect the ship they’d drawn for the evaluation. The T-108 trainers Malone operated were impressively large viewed from the outside, but huge liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks took up most of the internal volume. Chemical thrust was inefficient compared to the amount of power an equal weight of hydrogen could produce in a modern fusion plant, but the difference in maintenance costs more than made up for the cost of the fuel.

  The 108’s tiny flight deck contained a single sleeping bunk only slightly larger than the pilot and navigator stations, shared by both occupants on alternate watches. It connected directly to a primitive zero-G toilet facility. The ship offered no shower; bathing had to wait for a layover or be conducted with moist body wipes. The difficulty in removing a pressure suit in such confined space was prohibitive except in extreme circumstances.

  The galley consisted of a storage bin full of space rations.

  Terson made no secret of checking Zarn’s work as he performed his own, and once or twice he found Zarn checking up on him. They still had several hours to wait before their scheduled departure, and Zarn suggested they take the opportunity to fill up on real food, since the chances of rescheduling their transit slot were essentially zero.

  They crossed over to the main station and headed for a chain restaurant they were both familiar with. Terson permitted himself a single cold beer while they waited for their orders, as did Zarn. “I heard you got an interview with Outbound,” Vondelis said. “How’s that fit in with married life?”

  “Not so good,” Terson replied. Especially now. “Virene’s not thrilled with the idea.”

  “I wouldn’t think. You pretty much set on deep-haul work?”

  “There aren’t that many alternatives,” Terson said. “Sun Cargo gets more applications than openings, and Outbound is the only long-haul shipper based on Nivia. I’ll be damned if I move to the belt.”

  “There are options,” Zarn said nonchalantly. “You don’t usually hear about them unless you’ve got an inside track or know somebody who does.”

  Terson put his bottle down and regarded his classmate, wondering if what he’d heard was what he thought it was, or if he was about to run smack into another bizarre Nivian social convention. “I’d appreciate the chance to consider any option,” he replied with what he hoped was the appropriate degree of leading ambiguity.

  “It’s not a line of work you can talk about,” Zarn cautioned.

  “Illegal, you mean?�
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  “What? No! Not illegal at all, just…unpopular.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  Zarn lowered his voice. “I assume you have unofficial flight hours, based on how fast you picked up your light aircraft certification.”

  “I started back home when I was twelve,” Terson said. “Regulations were pretty loose; we didn’t need formal training in the bush.”

  “I thought so,” Zarn nodded. “There is a selective market for pilots with those skills,” he said.

  The revelation came as a surprise to Terson. “I looked for that kind of work right off,” he said. “I got the impression it didn’t exist here, as such.”

  “It’s that inside track thing,” Zarn explained. “Does that line of work still interest you?”

  “Sure,” Terson said, “but tell me why you quit in favor of this.”

  “I didn’t quit. The harvest exporter I work for is paying for my orbital certification.” All certified harvesters exported a certain percentage of their quota to the belt, he explained, but his employer was the only one that specialized in the off-planet market. Since most Nivians considered exporting unethical, if not downright immoral, the company did its best to keep out of the public eye, including running a small fleet of shuttles directly from its harvest camps in the bush.

  “Lots of people get orbital licenses, but seat-of-the-pants experience is hard to come by. I can guarantee an interview once you graduate, and I’ll lay you ten to one odds they’ll hire you.”

  “And this is legit?” Terson pressed. It surprised him that he cared, but having invested so much in getting clear of Nivia’s legal system he wasn’t a bit interested in running afoul of it again.

  “Absolutely,” Zarn assured him, “and the profit margin means starting pay is higher than at Sun or Outbound.”

  That didn’t surprise Terson a bit. Habitable planets were the rare exception in the universe and the systems that possessed them were wealthy beyond any monetary expression. Inevitably a rivalry developed between planet dwellers—groundhogs—and those born in space on any number of moons, asteroids, stations and starships.

  The rivalry was healthy and symbiotic, ordinarily. The spacers provided easily mined and refined metals, staffed orbital factories that generated materials too dangerous or difficult to produce in a biosphere, and in return the planet provided variety, recreation, the opportunity to relax the strict rules of space survival and, most importantly, inexpensive and abundant food. A suitable planet could supply the dietary needs of over ten billion people. Terson’s underpopulated homeworld had managed to feed the spacers in its own system and still exported millions of tons out-system. Nivia, however, generated less than five percent of the food consumed in its system despite its vastly more user-friendly landmasses.

  Nivia’s regimented population control eliminated any need to expand the planetary infrastructure and the maintenance needs weren’t enough to purchase more than a fraction of the spacers’ resources. The bulk of their production left the system as exports at prices so low the miners barely broke even.

  Invariably the spacers paid the higher price. Meat animals were impossible to raise in contained habitats; even hydroponically-grown vegetable protein was prohibitively expensive, relegating most spacers to imported and therefore only slightly less expensive processed foodstuffs. The poorest subsisted on soy derivatives if they were lucky, algae and yeast cakes if they weren’t.

  The philosophy of fanatical environmentalism and the laws of economics should have strangled the system; Terson did not understand how the whole dysfunctional relationship held together. Groundhogs like Zarn seemed unable to perceive the undercurrent of resentment among the spacers they met on the station. They assumed that since they had enough air, water and food so did everyone else. Upstanding citizens who’d never set foot off the planet nodded in grim satisfaction when the EPEA intercepted spacers trespassing—poaching—on their chaste world.

  No one ever wondered why spacers were desperate enough to risk death for a few thousand pounds of roots, berries and fish.

  No one ever wondered what would happen if they grew any more desperate.

  Beta Continent: 2709:05:03 Standard

  Hal and Dayuki slipped away from the Minzoku base in the same horse-drawn cart they’d used before. The weather this night was a little cooler, and Dayuki wore her uniform instead of the casual kimono and leggings. Hal likewise wore a night-camouflage uniform McKeon provided. They followed the same road as before into Tessoua, but stayed on the thoroughfare through the center of town instead of turning into the alley behind Bulao’s little café. No one on the street spared the cart or its occupants more than a casual glance as it passed by, and soon enough the streetlights fell behind and darkness enveloped the roadway once more.

  Two kilometers beyond Tessoua, Dayuki turned the cart off the road into a sparsely-wooded clearing where McKeon waited in his ORV with a passenger of his own: a nervous and jittery Derner, pulled from his bed and stuffed into the chief of security’s vehicle without explanation.

  “Tell Derner we’re not going to kill him,” McKeon suggested when Hal and Dayuki boarded.

  “We’re not going to kill you, Derner,” Hal said cheerfully.

  The promise comforted the metallurgist only slightly. “T-then why am I here?” he demanded querulously. “What do you need me for?”

  “We’re conducting an operation that might benefit from your expertise,” Hal explained. “That’s all you need to know for now.”

  McKeon pulled onto the road and accelerated into the darkness with the aid of infrared contact lenses and filters over the vehicle’s headlights. The contacts lent his eyes a disconcerting monochrome glow.

  Tamara’s scan of the countryside around Tessoua revealed a singular oddity: a road and structure that appeared in certain wavelengths but which vanished completely in the visible spectrum. That inconsistency alone warranted investigation.

  The satellite imagery placed the junction just five kilometers from where Hal and Dayuki met McKeon, but without the detailed map derived from it they would have discounted the turn-off as what it appeared to be: the entrance to a primitive sand and gravel quarry.

  The hooves of draft animals had churned the ground into a slurry of mud, pebbles and manure, eradicating any coherent pattern of use. Piles of hand-sifted sand and rock, separating grates, broken tools and other refuse left behind by peasants scratching what they could out of the low-quality deposit supported the illusion. McKeon continued on to a rocky, rain-washed trail ascending a hillock steep enough to dissuade anyone without rugged mechanical transportation from attempting to negotiate it.

  The ORV made the climb with little trouble and hopped over the crest onto a narrow, smooth road bedded with material from the quarry behind them. The tops of the trees on either side were bowed inward slightly by a thick layer of interwoven evergreen vines, lending the trail a cave-like quality.

  McKeon stopped and referred to his satellite map. “The structure is about a kilometer and a half away,” he said. “We won’t be able to pull off if the underbrush beside the road is this thick the whole way. I recommend we walk in.” Hal agreed, and the Fort’s chief of security backed their heavy vehicle into a tangle of lighter brush near the mouth of the passageway. Hal helped him pull a length of plastic camouflage netting from a dispenser under the front bumper that hid the ORV from immediate view.

  Hal, Derner and Dayuki donned night-vision spectacles and set off with McKeon in the lead. It was quickly apparent that the metallurgist was no outdoorsman: he stumbled over rocks and depressions even with the aid of his light-enhancing eyewear, voicing monosyllabic expressions of discomfort and unhappiness that drew several reproachful hisses from Dayuki. McKeon finally threatened to gag the man if he couldn’t keep silent.

  A short time later the road widened into a cul-de-sac fifty to sixty meters across. Like the road, it was hidden by vines strung overhead which were partially supported by masts exten
ding from the roof of a windowless, single-story concrete building. The slab of wall facing the road was featureless except for a formidable steel blast door large enough to accommodate a vehicle three times the size of McKeon’s ORV. The personnel door built into the lower right-hand side was secured by an electronic combination lock.

  McKeon touched Hal’s elbow and pointed to one corner where a young Minzoku soldier with an automatic rifle slung across his back ambled into view. A moment later another appeared from the opposite direction. They exchanged a few words as they passed, then vanished again. McKeon drew the Onjin back to the relative concealment of the road and shrugged out of his pack.

  “I brought a decoder,” he said quietly, “but we’ll have to take out the guards.”

  “I don’t want to tip off Den Tun,” Hal reminded him again.

  McKeon held up a small aerosol can. “This is a mild anesthetic and short-term memory blocker. It takes effect quickly, but has to be deployed at point-blank range.”

  “Give it to Dayuki,” Hal instructed. McKeon looked uncertain, but complied. Dayuki was either trustworthy or she wasn’t. They would find out soon enough.

  “This stuff is primarily an inhalant, but it will absorb through the skin, too, and it’s persistent,” McKeon explained to the Minzoku girl. “Don’t touch anything that’s been sprayed. They’ll act a little drunk when it takes effect and they should be fairly compliant to verbal direction—just send them on their way and they won’t remember anything that happened for five to ten minutes before it’s administered.”

  “I understand,” Dayuki said.

  “I’ll cover you from here, in case anything goes wrong.”

  Dayuki only nodded, offering no comment on the double meaning. The guards were not in sight when the four Onjin crept back to the clearing. Dayuki stripped off her spectacles and strode into the open, navigating through the darkness with the aid of a tiny electric torch. McKeon gave Hal one more uncertain look as he unlimbered his compact machine gun and screwed a suppresser onto the barrel. He settled into a sitting position, bracing his elbows against his knees, eye firm against the night scope.