Hal, Dayuki and McKeon slowly traced the path of destruction left by the shuttle’s supersonic, low-altitude pass. Heavy snow reduced the craft’s scanners to near-worthlessness. All three peered down through the cockpit ports hoping to catch a glimpse of their quarry among the bent, broken and fallen trees illuminated by the landing lights.
“We’ll never see it if it’s buried,” McKeon said.
“The snow is not so deep,” Dayuki responded. “The seedlings would be covered otherwise.”
The security officer offered up an irritated frown that she blithely failed to notice. Hal watched the exchange with some amusement. Proper Minzoku women, like the two McKeon had married, did not contradict men so blatantly. That Dayuki exercised the prerogatives of an Onjin female clearly consternated him.
“There!” McKeon pointed.
Hal brought all floodlights to bear and circled back around to land. McKeon went to the salon and rousted his men. A gust of wind above sent snow drifting ahead of the armed party as it converged on the wrecked aircar.
“All clear,” the leader radioed back. Hal, McKeon and Dayuki joined them outside. “Passenger side is open, just as we found it,” he said. “There are tracks. The pilot’s on the other side.”
Hal inspected the body somberly. The upper half of his torso looked like the frayed end of a bloody rope. His trouser pockets were pulled inside out. Tracks churned the crimson snow around the remains and struck a straight line into the trees, filling quickly with snow.
“Reilly,” Hal said.
McKeon prodded the corpse with a toe. “I remember him a little taller.”
Hal pointed at the tracks leading away.
“Get after him,” McKeon said, dispatching his men. He walked around and brushed the snow from the aircar’s tail. “Unmarked,” he announced. “I doubt we’ll find a VIN number, either.”
Damn and double damn! There wasn’t enough left of the pilot to identify except: “Take some blood and tissue samples,” Hal said. “He may be listed in the Federal DNA database.”
“Unless he’s a spacer,” McKeon said.
Hal grunted at that. The Family had become complacent in more than Minzoku obedience. His attempts to resolve the situation subtly had failed. Subtlety had, in fact, been a major contributor to the present situation over the years. Laissez-faire had allowed the cogs to develop into mechanisms in their own right that must now be dealt with as such.
The snow began falling at an angle as a brisk breeze kicked up. Somewhere in the darkness an animal yowled, eliciting a chorus of answering calls and counter-calls that built to a raucous crescendo before falling abruptly silent.
“That sounds close,” Hal noted, turning toward the shuttle. “We should wait inside.”
“Wait,” McKeon said, pointing in the direction his men had gone, where the trees now fractured a jostling flashlight beam. “Someone’s coming back.”
Terson knelt beneath a tree a few dozen meters from the aircar. Gaps in the drooping, snow-laden boughs offered a relatively clear view while simultaneously obscuring him from observation as the sleek, expensive shuttlecraft bearing Zarn’s murderers settled to the ground, preceded by an avalanche of snow and broken branches.
Figures in battle-dress dropped from the nose ramp before it fully extended and advanced on the downed aircar with weapons at the ready as the whine of repellers died away. Moments later three more people disembarked to confer before sending them off on the obvious trail Terson laid before they arrived.
Terson froze in place, resisting the urge to crouch lower lest the movement betray him to alert eyes, but his caution wasn’t necessary. They stomped past like a herd of cattle, assuring him that the steps he’d taken to misdirect pursuit would go unquestioned.
The three who remained stood together chatting, arrogant in the assumption that their quarry wasn’t capable of bringing the battle to them—arrogant enough to stand with their backs to the wide-open and unattended shuttle while their best means of defense followed a torturous trail leading right back to where it started.
If Terson had his way their security would return to find nothing but the bodies of their employers and an empty space where the shuttle had been. He slipped from his shelter and made his way to the tracks of the men sent to find him, completing the circuitous loop.
The wind gusted fitfully, one moment obscuring their voices, the next erasing them entirely. The wind died for an instant, allowing a snippet of incongruous conversation to reach him sharp and clear: “—doubt we’ll find a—”
Terson’s pulse hammered in his forehead; his breath quickened and his muscles quivered. Something in that snatch of speech—perhaps a particular tone, inflection or the combination of words themselves—matched a voice he would not forget as long as he lived: the voice of Virene’s killer whispering questions in his ear while the drugs dragged him into oblivion.
He clenched the Bowie in his fist and turned on the flash light.
He’d start with that one.
One of McKeon’s men appeared from the trees where Reilly’s trail entered and waved an arm. He called out, but the combination of wind and hood clutched tight against it muffled his voice beyond intelligibility. “Use the radio!” McKeon yelled.
“Broken,” the muffled voice replied, beckoning again. “Found something!”
Dayuki caught Hal’s coat sleeve as he started to follow McKeon and stood on her toes as he bent toward her. “Look at his clothes!” she whispered urgently.
The Fort’s security personnel wore state of the art, individually tailored cold weather uniforms. This man wore a utilitarian, ill-fitting one-piece bunched at the knees and ankles as if too long for his frame—the kind of thing someone might carry as emergency gear.
Oblivious, McKeon stomped on, too intent on his footing to notice what Dayuki had and already too far away to warn without alerting Reilly that his deception had been discovered. Hal pulled his needle-beamer from inside his coat, stepped to one side, aimed and fired in a single swift motion.
He missed.
The beam spent itself against a branch behind Reilly, igniting needles with a crackle and showering him with burning pitch. The gaijin hunkered down, spoiling Hal’s second shot. McKeon drew his beamer as he spun to identify the source of the gunfire, offering his back to the quarry.
Reilly closed the intervening distance in an instant, right arm held straight down and stiff. The naked blade clutched in his fist flashed as he swung it from the hip. McKeon gasped as it plunged into his kidney. He dropped to his knees, driven as much by the force of the blow as the sudden gushing wound in his side. Reilly had an arm around his throat before the shock wore off and drove the blade in again, higher, aiming for a lung. Reilly released his hold and plucked McKeon’s needle-beamer from his nerveless fingers as he toppled face-first into the snow.
The stunning speed of the attack left Hal momentarily nonplused. Before he could gather his wits again, Reilly raised his arm and fired. Puffs of steam appeared in the air like an ephemeral string of pearls as the beam vaporized the snowflakes in its path. The left side of Hal’s hood ignited, scorching his face. He fired wildly as he retreated, slapping at the flames with his free hand.
“Back to the shuttle!” he cried for Dayuki’s benefit before taking off as fast as he could run. Reilly’s weapon hurled one more steaming spear past him, and then Hal was at the base of the ramp. He turned back for Dayuki, and it was only then that he realized that she hadn’t followed.
The Minzoku girl ran straight at Reilly, twirling her coat before her in an ill-conceived attempt to draw his fire, and he obliged.
Dayuki advanced behind a shield of illusion as she spun the parka back and forth, the blur of speed expanding it to twice its size to the eye of the gaijin. He fired on her with cold, measured calculation, each shot placed unerringly in the center of mass confronting him but Dayuki skipped back and forth, opposite the direction of her decoy. The beams sizzled past her body with mere centimeters to
spare and she reached her quarry unharmed, though the coat was little more than smoking rags when she cast it away.
She struck the gaijin with foot, fist and elbow, knocking the weapon from his hand, but discovered a flaw in her strategy: striking the gaijin was like attacking the trunk of a tree. Thick muscle armored his pressure points; she elicited nothing but startled grunts with assaults that would leave normal men groveling at her feet. Dayuki knew, however, that the tiniest of axes, skillfully wielded, would eventually fell even the mightiest of trees.
But to do so the axe must still find its mark.
The gaijin’s shocking speed, combined with his greater mass and rudimentary blocks, proved sufficient to rob her blows of their full power even when they landed. His competence increased as his surprise wore off, and one thing became quickly apparent: Dayuki would lose this battle.
Her gender did not constrain the gaijin; his counter-strikes were capable of breaking bone. Dayuki exerted as much energy defending against his attacks as launching her own; it was inevitable that one would connect. Her only remaining option was to delay defeat long enough for Hal-san to reach safety. The gaijin seemed to sense this and pressed his advance, driving her back by the step.
The cold air seared Dayuki’s lungs as she gasped for breath. To her amazement the gaijin appeared to be losing his stamina at a greater rate, though the fight was little more than a minute old—long enough for Hal-san to reach the shuttle. Dayuki invested all she had left in another attack; a slight opening rewarded her initiative and she drove her fist into the gaijin’s throat. His thick neck saved his larynx but a spasm closed his windpipe and he fell back a step.
Dayuki risked a quick glance over her shoulder; Hal-san had still not powered up the shuttle’s thrusters—he hadn’t even bothered to close the hatch behind him! He peered through one of the cockpit windows as he stood at the console frantically manipulating controls. She felt a stab of dread when she realized why he hadn’t taken the opportunity to escape: Hal-san was waiting for her.
Dayuki paid for the split-second distraction. A foot caught her in the side, driving her sideways to the ground. She struggled to rise, gasping against the lancing pain in her ribs, made it part way up but tripped over McKeon-san’s sprawled legs and crashed back into the snow. She rolled over, sick with pain, but determined to resist the gaijin to her last breath.
The gaijin hauled her roughly to her feet, his hip deflecting the knee she aimed at his groin. He spun her around; one massive limb clamped her arms to her sides as he pulled her back solidly against his chest. His free hand closed around her throat. “Do you fly that thing?” he demanded. Dayuki saw no harm in the truth; she shook her head slightly. “Then I’ve got no quarrel with you,” he growled in her ear, “but I’ve got issues with your friends!”
He lifted her off her feet and strode toward the shuttle. Dayuki raked her heel against his exposed shin, but the gaijin merely cut off the blood to her brain with a slight tightening of his fingers. The world faded to gray for a moment and by the time she regained her faculties he’d carried her to within a dozen meters of the shuttle, close enough for Hal-san to recognize the futility of her situation. Surely he would make his escape now, and allow her to die in honorable service to the Onjin!
But Hal-san only stared down at them from the viewport, arms limp at his sides.
“I’m coming aboard,” the gaijin shouted. “Interfere and I’ll kill her! Do you understand?”
Hal-san nodded mutely. Dayuki drew a breath to object but the gaijin’s fingers shifted to the base of her jaw and forced her teeth together before she could form the words. She held Hal-san’s eyes with her own, trying to communicate a final silent plea to save himself as the gaijin carried her closer to the shuttle hatch.
Hal-san’s expression held the one emotion that Dayuki never expected to see on his face: fear.
TWENTY-ONE
Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:19 Standard
Time became a finite resource the moment the first shot rang out.
The seconds ticked by in Terson’s head—incessant, inevitable—like the timer of a bomb in the hands of a blind man. Every moment brought him closer to feeling a bullet in his back but all he could do was try to get a bulkhead between him and the men with the bullets who’d marched into the forest a few minutes before.
The woman held prisoner in his arms wasn’t helping. Her earlier demonstration of hand-to-hand combat belied her current passivity. She was a cask of gunpowder: inert and pliable until joined with a spark, and an instant’s distraction was all the spark she needed.
“You’re going to call your friend there down to the hatch,” he whispered in her ear as he carried her closer to the shuttle. “Once he’s out we’ll back up the ramp; then I’ll let you go.”
“Hal-san will kill us both first,” she replied through stiff lips.
Her accent caught him by surprise. “You’re Minzoku?” She nodded slightly. “You must be Den Tun’s traitor,” he decided. “That makes you fairly valuable.”
“I am a faithful servant of the Onjin,” she replied emphatically. “A tool to be used—or discarded—as Hal-san sees fit!”
Terson tilted her chin up to face the figure looking back from the cockpit. “The look on his face says you’re a lot more than that.” The woman fell silent, whether abandoning the subterfuge or reconsidering her outlook in light of the revelation he couldn’t tell. It would have been interesting, in other circumstances, to discover what chain of events led her to betray her people and filled her with such pride at being considered disposable.
Terson took another step, and the ground erupted beneath his feet.
Dayuki lay on her back, spread-eagle in the snow, staring up at the blackened sky with wet, stinging eyes. A high-powered energy weapon cracked off another pulse and the ground beneath her shivered as moisture in the soil somewhere nearby changed state to steam and expanded with explosive force. Silence fell for a moment, broken by the soft patter of falling mud.
“Dayuki!” Hal-san fell to his knees beside her. “Dayuki, are you hurt? Can you speak?” He lifted her by the shoulders and cradled her in his lap. The shuttle’s hatch was still wide open. She could not see the gaijin.
“Go back, Hal-san,” she groaned. “It is not safe!”
“He’s gone,” Hal-san assured her. “He ran away.” He hugged her close and she uttered a surprised cry of pain as his parka rasped across her scalded face. “I programmed the sentry gun to fire a near-miss warning. It was the only thing I could think of that wouldn’t kill you, too. Thank God you’re alright!”
Elation and shame warred in Dayuki’s heart as the obvious truth of the gaijin’s observation set in. The expression of fear on Hal-san’s face had been out of concern for Dayuki’s well-being, not his own. He’d risked his safety to preserve her life and thereby allowed the gaijin Reilly to escape. She did not know what the ramifications for the Hal-san and the rest of the Onjin would be, but she vowed never to let such a thing happen again.
McKeon-san’s men arrived at a run, weapons raised and scanning for targets as they advanced in a disciplined rank. “See to McKeon!” Hal-san called, but they ignored his command and surrounded him and Dayuki in a tight, protective ring.
“Sir, please remain where you are until we secure the area,” the leader asked in a tone that suggested steps would be taken to compel cooperation. Only after he sent a pair to sweep the shuttle did he allow Hal-san and Dayuki to rise, though the ring moved with them to the hatch. Anything more than a shallow gulp of breath triggered excruciating pain in her ribs; the few meters it took to reach the shuttle and the climb up the ramp left her dizzy and panting.
“Are you alright?” Hal-san asked.
“I am fine.” The pain in her ribs was worse, but other issues demanded Hal-san’s attention. “You must find the gaijin,” she urged. “He cannot be far.” She leaned against the wall, still short of breath, as a wave of nausea overtook her.
“We’ll
find him,” Hal-san assured her. “Sit down.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I must rest a moment.”
Hal left Dayuki and returned to the hatch. They’d moved McKeon to the bottom of the ramp and the snow around him was strewn with packaging from the shuttle’s medical kit. “How is he?”
“In a bad way, sir,” said the securityman who’d taken command. “He’s effectively bled out.”
“Do what you can and get him aboard. We’re not done here, yet.”
The man’s expression went blank. “I apologize, sir, if I was unclear: he won’t survive without advanced medical intervention.”
“You were perfectly clear,” Hal replied, “and the sooner we complete the mission the sooner he’ll get it.”
Their gazes locked. Hal knew his command of the situation was tenuous, at best. Like many administrators, he paid little attention to security personnel unless they were needed, and expected them to fade into the background again afterward. He recognized a face or two among the members of this team, but knew none of their names—and they knew that. They gave their personal loyalty to the man lying clinically dead at the bottom of the ramp; whether they would follow orders indirectly assuring his death remained to be seen.
Finally, grudgingly: “Understood, sir.”
Hal returned to the passenger compartment to check on Dayuki. Her face managed to appear ashen even through the blush of her burns. Her lips were tinged with blood. “Difficult…to…breathe,” she panted.
“I need assistance up here!” Hal bellowed.
The securityman previously working on McKeon came at a run. “She’s bleeding in one or both lungs,” he informed Hal as he strapped an oxygen mask to her face. “This is serious—life threatening.”
That decided it. “Get everyone aboard. We’re going back.”
Pale Boundaries Page 33