Bragg gave Terson the coordinates and Terson punched them into the boat’s Global Positioning System Transponder. The point was just over half the hydrojet’s maximum range. If Bragg intended to dally in the area they would have to stop in the Archipelago again to fuel up on the way back.
Terson turned his bow south. “That’s the wrong way,” Bragg noted.
“I’m the expert here; trust me.” Radar hits and transponder signals increased steadily as they approached LaCrosse Island Resort, playground of Saint Anatone’s rich and famous. Terson cruised through the private offshore moorings past large motor yachts, hydrojets, and a lavish sailboat crewed by half-naked female sailors. No one spared the interloper a second glance, assuming anyone with the money to operate such a vessel must be a fellow member of the elite. He finally spied what he wanted: a mooring with the tell-tail signs of long-term vacancy. Terson released the controls and unstrapped. “Take the wheel,” he told Bragg. “Veer left at the buoy.”
“I can’t drive this thing!” Bragg exclaimed.
“You don’t have to—just steer.” Terson pulled a wiring harness from beneath his seat cushion and opened the access door beneath the control panel. “The impeller’s going to cut out for a second.” He flipped the bypass switch hidden in the mass of wires. The engine sputtered and died.
“What happened?” Bragg asked. “I’ve got all kinds of red lights up here!”
“I’m bypassing the GPST,” Terson explained. He disconnected the stock harness connections and attached the custom wiring in its place.
“You aren’t supposed to be able to do that!”
“Remind yourself of that when we get back.” The engine rumbled back to life.
“Damnit, Reilly, you know how much trouble you’ll get in if you get caught tampering with your transponder?”
“A little less than sneaking past the coastal boundary, I think.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot who I’m talking to,” Bragg sighed.
They cruised back to the take-off buoy. Once airborne they continued east, bearing northward as if flying a circuit around the islands. Terson stayed as far out to sea as he reasonably could without raising suspicion if a Coast Guard patrol happened by, waiting for the right moment to duck and run. It came as they traversed a twenty-kilometer gap between islands where no other transponders appeared on the scope.
Terson turned hard to port and dropped to within five meters of the surface where the craft rose and fell in concert with the swells beneath it. Skimming waves would not hide them if they crossed the path of the Coast Guard or EPEA, but it might make the difference if they skirted the outer range of its sensors.
Bragg took a second dose of motion sickness medication, but the anxiety of what they were attempting kept him alert and fidgeting. He started when the GPST sounded a warning to notify them as they approached the programmed limits of permitted travel. “You’re sure that jerry-rig of yours works, right?” Bragg asked. “The GPST isn’t transmitting our location?”
“It is transmitting our location,” Terson explained. “The transponder calculates it based on signals from the satellites and transmits it back. The wiring harness I put in has a module that locks the transmitted coordinates wherever I want them to be—in this case the mooring back at LaCrosse Island.”
“I see,” Bragg chuckled. “No matter where we go the satellite thinks we’re in the Archipelago.”
“You catch on fast.” Terson disconnected the speaker when they passed the point of amnesty and the GPST resorted to a constant, ear piercing alarm.
The sun was passing through the midpoint of its descent when the hydrojet landed just short of Bragg’s coordinates. The sky was cloudless still, no indication of inclement weather approaching. The boat rode the long, low swells comfortably, good news for Bragg and his sensitive stomach.
They pulled Bragg’s cases out of the storage compartments assembled the contraption on the hydrojet’s rear deck. It consisted mainly of tackle and a hydrodynamic sensor pod. “High resolution side-scan sonar,” Bragg said. “Tow it at about ten knots. It self-adjusts its depth to scan a wedge about fifty meters wide. The data gets processed here,” he patted a case, “and displays a topographical image of the seabed accurate to ten centimeters.” The second set of cases contained a tiny wireless submersible. “Once we find the wreckage we send this down for a better look.”
Terson programmed the hydrojet’s autopilot to sweep back and forth over a one hundred square kilometer area. Bragg hovered at the screen, intent on the map building slowly before his eyes, but Terson knew that the shuttle had disintegrated on impact, making it unlikely that they’d locate the primary debris field before dark. He set about preparing the boat for a night on the open sea. “Did you bring a gun?” he asked Bragg.
Bragg reached under his shirt and held up his automatic. “Of course.”
“Save it to use on yourself,” Terson said, holding out a speargun and a brace of bang-sticks. “These are tipped with twelve-gauge, single-aught shotgun shells.” He pointed to a pin at the base of the shell. “Pull the pin to arm; it only takes six pounds of pressure to trigger and goes off on impact, so don’t wave them around. Effective range is about ten meters under water.”
Bragg took the speargun and inspected it dubiously. “I’m not planning to get in the water.”
“You don’t necessarily have to be in the water to need one,” Terson informed him. “There are some big, curious fish out here that like to rub against things.”
“Big enough to threaten a boat?”
“I’ve seen a couple that big,” Terson confirmed. “I don’t want to take chances.”
The sun set before the sonar identified anything. Terson convinced Bragg to leave the monitor long enough to eat. Afterward they went back on deck and propped their feet on the gunnels, listening to the gentle lap of water against the hull while the vestiges of light faded over the horizon. The sea had gone unusually calm, and a glorious river of stars flowed across the cloudless night sky.
“I understand what draws you out here,” Bragg said. “I don’t ever remember seeing so many stars before. It’s like being in space.”
“This is better,” Terson replied. The field of vision in orbit was restricted by miniscule viewports, and any breeze strong enough to rustle a person’s hair meant a blown seal. Lying on your back under the stars was infinitely more pleasant than being in them.
“I’m surprised you’d say that,” Bragg said. “Every other space pilot I’ve ever talked to acted like grounding was worse than death.”
“Most space pilots don’t appreciate atmospheric flight,” Terson said. “Spaceflight is ninety-nine percent computer work. Spacecraft handle like pigs in the air; it’s not their element. Spaceflight isn’t flying at all—it’s falling. What an airplane does, that’s flying.”
“Then why did you get into it?”
“No demand for bush pilots here,” Terson explained. “Shuttle work was the next best thing.”
Bragg didn’t respond for several minutes, then: “Be careful, Reilly.”
“Of what?”
“When you go, just…be careful.”
“I never said I was going anywhere.”
“You didn’t have to. You’re more relaxed than I’ve ever seen you, like somebody who thinks he’s found a way out. That means either suicide or Beta continent and you’re not the suicidal type.”
“You going to stop me?”
“I might have tried once, but…no. Now I know what it’s like when who you are runs smack up against the system,” Bragg said. “I’m risking everything I’ve worked for to prove a point, but even if I find what I think I will it might not be enough to make the system do its job. I’ll have to suffer the consequences of standing on my principles or say nothing. If I say nothing, it means my principles aren’t really worth standing on and once that happens I contribute to the failure of the system.”
“You don’t have to participate in a system you
don’t agree with,” Terson pointed out.
“No, but I sure can’t run off into the woods and as for resigning…I don’t know if I can live under a system I don’t trust.”
“Sounds like you’ve rationalized yourself out of options,” Terson said. “You’d better hope we don’t find anything.” He decided to give it a rest when Bragg didn’t reply. “I’ll take first watch. The couch in the main cabin folds down into a bed.”
Bragg declined the offer. “You go ahead. I won’t sleep anyway.”
“You’re call. Wake me up when you get tired.” Terson used the head and rolled into bed where he lay watching the stars bob up and down through the porthole at his feet.
The cloud of misfortune surrounding him since the day of his birth had overtaken his parents, his sister, Jack Tham, then Virene and now it seemed Bragg was in danger as well. A few years earlier the officer wouldn’t have been caught dead violating the law. His contact with Terson had shifted his paradigms enough to make him susceptible to a truth that, once revealed, would not allow him to return to his comfortable world of black and white. Terson was a carrier, immune to the deadly effects of the disease, but unable to keep others at a safe distance.
Bragg stared at the sonar until his eyes stung and uncontrollable yawns wracked his frame. The image grew at a glacial pace. A rough calculation told him it would take slightly over a week to scan the entire one hundred square kilometer area. A week! He’d only allotted his hastily conceived plan a few days including exploration of the wreckage.
Had he really believed that it would be as easy as dropping the device in the water and trolling around for a couple of hours? He must have, or he wouldn’t have jeopardized his career with a deception as transparent as lying to the property manager when he signed out the equipment. It wasn’t as if he could avoid getting caught. The probable loss of his job over a misappropriation was an irony too painful to contemplate.
Bragg turned away from the screen to rest his eyes. Artificial light on the otherwise dark sea was sure to draw the attention of any EPEA craft that happened by; consequently Reilly had extinguished the boat’s running lights well before dusk. The deck’s features aft of the sonar’s control head emerged from the darkness as Bragg’s eyes slowly adjusted to the ghostly illumination cast by the display. He stood, stretched and ambled over to lean on the rail overlooking the boat’s dive platform. A plume of subsurface bioluminescence rippled in the wake of the impeller jet as thousands of tiny organisms protested the disturbance.
Reilly had been completely correct in his assertion that Bragg’s campaign was driven by an unreasonable obsession. Maybe, if he referred himself the moment he returned to Saint Anatone, the Department would chalk it up to post-traumatic stress and show a compassionate degree of lenience.
Above all, he shouldn’t have placed Terson Reilly in a position to share the consequences of his misdeeds. The kid had problems of his own whether he admitted it or not and it wasn’t Bragg’s place to goad him out of the denial he used to insulate himself from his wife’s murder. He would let Reilly sleep through the night, he decided, call a halt to the search in the morning and return to Saint Anatone to face Colonel Cai’s displeasure.
A brighter patch of luminescence flashed near the surface to his left. It was gone before his head completed its turn in that direction, but another appeared closer to the boat, a long streak that intersected the impeller plume. Dozens more sprang up around the boat, twisting and spinning as a school of larger creatures fed on the zooplankton, eliciting the only reaction the tiny creatures were capable of.
Bragg patched together an image of the attackers in his mind’s eye from partial glimpses in the flashbulb-like pop as they struck the shoal: flat, ribbon-like bodies with a bulge in the center and clusters of tentacles fore and aft. They ranged in size from the length of his forearm to nearly two meters.
The feeding ended abruptly. The predatory ribbons vanished as swiftly as they arrived and the shoal of zooplankton quieted. Bragg waited a few minutes to see if the show resumed before turning back to the sonar. It was then that he discovered the reason for the predator’s rapid departure.
A patch of luminescence slid through the darkness thirty or forty meters off the hydrojet’s bow as something passed by at or just below the surface of the water. It was large enough to generate ripples that splashed against the boat a few moments later. Thoughts of sea monsters filled his mind; he wondered how Reilly’s bang sticks could possibly dissuade a creature of that size from doing whatever it pleased.
Bragg belatedly recalled the binoculars Reilly kept in the cockpit and made his way to them as quietly as he could to avoid piquing the behemoth’s curiosity any further. It was already sliding beneath the water by the time Bragg brought them to bear. The only thing he glimpsed before it vanished reminded him of a mollusk’s eyestalk, only a thousand times larger.
He considered waking Reilly as he patrolled the deck, peering into the darkness, but whatever it was seemed to have satisfied itself that the boat wasn’t worth investigating any further and departed. Bragg returned to his vigil at the sonar screen.
The first piece of wreckage appeared just as daylight touched the eastern horizon.
Beta Continent: 2709:08:23 Standard
Hal sighed contentedly as Dayuki’s hands worked at his back. She insisted on opening each day with the administration of a therapeutic massage and often closed with one as well. Hal resisted the ritual at first, citing a lack of his most critical resource—time—but she firmly overrode him with the assertion that her ministrations would, in fact, save triple the amount of time spent undergoing them through increased stamina, productivity and general well-being.
Hal wasn’t convinced yet, but the pain and stiffness in his back had subsided to a shadow of what they had been and his sciatica hadn’t relapsed since the night Derner died. That relief alone made it worth the effort, considering everything else he had on his mind.
Hal had pointedly neglected to explain the Onjin’s sudden lack of interest in the missing Tiger Opal and its accompanying technical data. Den Tun’s mystification was satisfying for a while but it hadn’t taken the old man long to figure out the game had somehow changed. Whereas the raw materials necessary to catch up on production had come in punctually after their agreement, the Minzoku now routinely contacted him with requests for parts or equipment to “repair” breakdowns and end work stoppages. Hal filled most of the requests from the Fort’s boneyard, old technology generations ahead of what the Family had allowed in the past, but more and more Den Tun insisted it was not sufficiently modern to meet the need.
Hal fell to playing Den Tun and the Chairman off one another to convince the Minzoku that the Family simply wouldn’t allow such disbursements while assuring the Chairman that the Minzoku would certainly cut off desperately needed materials if Hal didn’t give the appearance of cooperation.
The door buzzer intruded on his thoughts and Dayuki left him to check the monitor. “It is Lady Cirilo,” the Minzoku girl reported.
Hal pulled on his trousers and turned on the speaker. “What can I do for you, Tammy?”
“Den Tun is asking to speak with you, Hal. He says it’s urgent.”
“Of course it is,” Hal sighed. “We’ll be right there.” Worthless old fart! What would he attempt to extort from them now? “Weren’t you on duty last night?”
“Yes, I was just getting off when he called.”
“You should have let McKeon get me.”
“He was going to. I need to talk to you about something else. A personal matter.”
“Now?”
“If it’s convenient.” She and Sergio had been understandably cold and distant since the encounter in their apartment. Perhaps Tamara had decided to let it go. Dayuki offered Tamara a polite bow and drifted toward her room when the Onjin woman entered. “Would you stay, Lieutenant Dayuki?” Tamara asked. “This concerns you as much as Hal.” Dayuki returned to Hal’s side, her face suddenly as in
scrutable as Den Tun’s.
“I owe you an apology,” Tamara said to Hal. “I should not have passed personal details to the Old Lady. Rest assured that it won’t happen again. If I learn of anything that concerns me I’ll discuss it with you directly. My apology extends to you, too, Dayuki.”
Dayuki bowed again. “My Lady need not apologize,” she said.
“Thank you, Lieutenant, you’re very gracious. I’ll see you both at the command post.” She departed with a friendly smile, which merely kindled an uneasy wariness within Hal.
“Did anything about that strike you as strange?” he asked Dayuki.
“Lady Cirilo was quite courteous.”
“That’s what I mean.” He thought he’d witnessed every facet she possessed over the years, from seductive scheming and icy disdain to blistering rage, but he could not recall a single occasion in which she offered an apology with any semblance of sincerity.
Dayuki accompanied Hal-san to the command post. He insisted on her presence during any direct communication with the Minzoku, but despite Den Tun’s outward indifference to his former protégé the old man grew especially evasive if he spied her and was not as apt to betray some nuance she could decipher for Hal-san. McKeon, therefore, provided a small video-equipped conference room where she could ensconce herself to observe the exchanges.
Dayuki went straight to her post while Hal-san conversed with his staff. Lady Cirilo fell in next to her. “We need to talk,” the Onjin woman said. “In private.”
Dayuki stepped aside when she reached the door. “Please,” she gestured to Lady Cirilo politely, “precede me.”
Tamara hesitated uncertainly for a moment, and then shrugged. “I guess I deserved that.” She went inside and waited for Dayuki to shut the door before she spoke again: “Thank you for not telling Hal about our encounter.”
Pale Boundaries Page 25