“What is the nature of the gaijin vessel?”
“We have video; a moment…” The screen split abruptly, showing the view as seen by a submarine’s periscope. The boat lacked official markings. The two bare-chested occupants standing in the rear appeared to be deep-sea fishing with heavy deck-mounted tackle. The camera zoomed in on the men a few seconds later.
McKeon leaned close to his ear, lowering his voice so Den Tun could not hear. “That’s Terson Reilly. The other man is a Federal Police investigator.”
That kid shows up in the damnedest places. Hal again regretted not having the foresight to extend an offer of employment to the man to begin with. “Nothing has changed,” Hal said. “Feel free to add the boat to your collection.”
“As attractive a prize as it is, I regret we cannot,” Den Tun apologized. “Our vessel is little more than a reconnaissance boat, without effective weapons or a crew large enough to conduct a boarding.”
“Then what good is it?” Hal demanded.
Den Tun ducked his head. “It seemed your priorities no longer warranted the resources of an armed vessel. I will correct the situation immediately.”
“That will take too long,” Hal snapped. “Keep us apprised of the gaijin’s position until we can handle it!”
“As you wish.”
McKeon stepped up again as soon as the screen blanked. “No federal cop would violate environmental boundaries without a damn good reason.”
“I agree,” Hal said. “Call in whatever favors you need to take care of the problem once and or all.”
The Minister of Navy spun on Den Tun in disbelief. “Your pardon, Honored One, but my crew could overwhelm that small boat in moments!”
Den Tun cut off the officer’s protest with a sharp gesture. “The Onjin hireling recognized them. Track their movements, and let us see just how significant these two gaijin are.”
SIXTEEN
Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:08:23 Standard
The Message Alert beat at Lieutenant Samuel Ramos’s ears like a metronome, dragging him from a deep, satisfying sleep that he wouldn’t recapture later no matter how hard he tried. He flailed in the darkness, striking repeatedly at his alarm clock until, stirred as much by frustration as the noise, he realized what was happening and turned on the light. The console next to his bunk continued its summons until he keyed in his password and silenced the infernal racket.
The Comsec officer enjoyed a number of perks due to the nature of his work—the cramped but private berth, for example—but he was perpetually on call.
Ramos dressed while the cryptography gear verified his key and decoded the message. The printer spat out a single sheet of paper. A second sheet emerged as he was slipping the first into an unmarked pouch. His pulse quickened at the sight of the garbled jumble of characters. Ramos stuffed the second sheet into his pocket and hurried to the bridge. “Message for the Captain!”
The Coast Guard vessel’s commanding officer accepted the pouch and read the terse message with a sigh. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a boundary runner, ladies and gentlemen. Helm, come about to course two-eight-seven, full speed ahead.” He handed the pouch back to Ramos. “Thank you, Lieutenant, that will be all.”
Ramos saluted sharply and headed below deck but not to bed, as his Captain assumed.
Nivia’s Secret Service inducted its members from all agencies and it was no mistake that every vessel, even the lumbering harvesters, carried a handful of agents. An instructor who turned out to be a high-ranking member himself had recruited Ramos at the beginning of his career in the Coast Guard.
Ramos knew from the start that his assignment in the Guard would be based solely on his temperament and abilities despite his SS membership. Even so it was with some disappointment that he found himself junior officer on a ship in the Search and Rescue branch, destined to spend his days on a milk run in the Humboldt Archipelago rescuing weekend boaters from their own stupidity, rather than a combat vessel.
Nevertheless, he performed his duties with the same pride and fervor that caught the attention of his instructor, content in the knowledge that as he advanced in the ranks of the Guard, so would he advance in the SS, which had levels of power and secrecy within itself extending beyond that of Nivia’s Governing Council. The Captain recognized and rewarded his excellent performance with rapid promotion and added responsibilities that placed him in a position to be called upon by the SS on two previous occasions.
Back in his quarters, Ramos flattened the second sheet on his desk and closed his eyes, reciting the complicated mnemonic phrase that helped him recall the proper algorithm for the month and day. He painstakingly decoded the message by hand through three layers of encryption, reducing the page of characters to a single sentence: Neutralize occupants with extreme prejudice.
He put both messages and the paper he’d used to decode into the shredder, where they were ground to dust and vented into the wind.
Terson woke with sunlight streaming into his face from the porthole at his feet. He held up a hand to shield his eyes as he sat up, slow to remember where he was and why, while his sleep-addled mind sorted through the discrepancies between what it found and what it expected to find. Concern gripped him, increasing by the moment as his mental processors defined the problem.
It was daylight and Bragg hadn’t passed on the watch.
Terson kicked off the thin blanket and stumbled across the main cabin to the stairs. Bragg might have simply fallen asleep, but it was equally likely that the land-lubbing police officer had gone overboard while pissing off the back of the boat.
Bragg looked up from his equipment as Terson emerged on the deck. His eyes were tired and red-tinged from hours staring at the screen. “You’re up,” he noted unnecessarily. “Have you got some coffee?”
“Cabinet above the stove,” Terson told him. “You didn’t wake me.”
“It didn’t seem fair; it’s my boondoggle,” Bragg shrugged as he stood. A huge yawn overtook him, and he shook his head to clear it. “Not a great idea, in hindsight. However,” he tapped the screen with a triumphant smile, “we started picking up wreckage a couple of hours ago. Looks like the debris field is only a couple of kilometers long.”
“I’ll tighten up the grid,” Terson told him. He used the head first and snagged a cup of coffee from Bragg as he passed back through the cabin on the way to the cockpit to reprogram the autopilot. “Anything happen last night?”
“Something swam by,” Bragg said. “Something big. I don’t think your little spear guns would have done much.”
“That’s why you have a handgun,” Terson reminded him.
They sat on deck eating space rations, squeezing the contents of foil packages into their mouths while the boat followed its truncated circuit. The debris field was nearly half a kilometer wide. The sun beat down on the boat relentlessly by the time Terson and Bragg were satisfied that they’d located the bulk of it. Despite the sonar’s tight resolution, the wreckage was difficult to identify as the remains of a man-made object. If not for the pod’s accompanying magnetometer and the occasional square-angled shipping container, it could easily be overlooked as a rocky anomaly in the otherwise smooth seabed.
They stripped off their shirts and hauled up the sonar pod. Terson brought the hydrojet back around and parked it above a cluster of containers. The sound of the boat’s impellers oscillated as they vectored thrust to maintain position against the steady push of current and wind.
The tiny submersible weighed considerably more than the sonar and required additional tackle for the umbilical that provided its power and communications. The sea floor lay only ten meters short of the line’s maximum length, restricting the submersible’s field of operation at the site. Bragg and Terson eased the device into the water and ran it through its paces on the surface before allowing it to begin a slow fall into the depths.
Bragg donned the control interface, a set of goggles calibrated to synchronize the movement of his head with t
he view of the cameras positioned around the submersible’s hull. The little craft’s accompanying processor at the surface converted the video into a time-lagged three-dimensional scene through which another observer could move independent of the pilot.
The water cleared as the light from the sun faded and the submersible passed below the threshold at which efficient photosynthesis occurred. The craft’s powerful lights stabbed into the darkness, illuminating small creatures that subsisted on the bits of organic matter falling from the lighted world above. The seabed appeared at last, a remarkably smooth, desolate landscape of muddy sediment.
Bragg maneuvered toward the nearest debris, guided by the sonar map. The impact had shredded the shuttle’s hull to the degree that it was nearly impossible to identify as having come from a spacecraft. Terson spotted a few structures and components he recognized, but most of the wreckage was impossible to place as to what part of the shuttle they were looking at. Much of it had already become home to bottom dwellers that vanished to safety within the tangle at the submersible’s approach.
The first shipping container in the cluster appeared out of the gloom. The force of its impact staved in the doors on the end, hydrostatic pressure ballooning its sides as it tried to plow through the water just short of orbital velocity. The contents were crushed against the rear in a solid, intermingled mass as if compressed by a hydraulic ram.
Nearby lay a mass of cargo compressed and extruded in a neat rectangular plug when the rear wall of its container failed under similar circumstances. The next container appeared to have survived intact, but succumbed to pressure and imploded during its descent. The rest of the cluster told a similar story. None of the visible cargo survived in a recognizable form.
“This isn’t right,” Terson said, rotating the virtual view in the screen before him. “These containers should be spread out like the shuttle remains, not gathered together in piles.”
“I agree,” Bragg said. He swept one of the submersible’s lights back and forth across a furrow in the mud leading to one of the containers. “What does this look like to you?”
“Drag marks,” Terson replied. On closer inspection they discovered that nearly every container in the cluster lay at the end of a shallow furrow, proving that they’d been separated from the rest of the wreckage and intentionally concentrated in one area before being abandoned.
Terson adjusted the hydrojet’s autopilot to transect the debris field in a slow, controlled drift.
They found dozens of furrows with no sign of the objects that created them. Numerous indentations in the soft sediment remained where objects had been yanked free.
A detail at the edge of the screen caught his attention. “Pan back to the left,” he told Bragg. “You see that?”
“That fish? What about it?”
“It’s dead,” Terson told him, “and it’s not the only one.” Scores of sea creatures lay about, all dead. Bragg turned the submersible to follow the trail of carcasses. A few minutes later an eel-like creature appeared, writhing in agony. Nearby lay a large dented canister bearing chemical hazard warnings. A reddish tincture oozed from around the lid’s seam and quickly dissipated in the water. Unfortunately for the nearby wildlife, dissolution did not reduce its potency.
“Toxic waste,” Bragg said. “There’s another one.” In all nearly fifty containers littered the muddy bottom suffering various degrees of damage. Obviously the shuttle’s valuable cargo had been salvaged. What remained did nothing to confirm or refute Bragg’s suspicions—or so it seemed.
“Looks like somebody beat you to it,” Terson said.
“I can guess who,” the police officer said grimly. “No one would go to the trouble of salvaging the cargo if there was nothing to hide.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that the same cargo constituted a windfall of material wealth to the outlaws reputed to lurk beyond the pale of Nivian law and order.
“This might be a case of legitimate salvage,” Terson offered. “Sun Cargo or the consignors would want their property back.”
“The loads are insured,” Bragg said.
“There you go,” Terson replied. “The insurance company recovered what it could to offset the loss.”
“The loads are insured,” Bragg explained irritably, “because the physical and financial risks of salvage this far from the coast are prohibitive. The only entity legally authorized to perform a recovery in this instance is the EPEA and they certainly wouldn’t have left toxic materials behind.”
“You did what you could,” Terson said. “It’s not your fault it didn’t pan out.”
“I know that,” Bragg sighed, “but that doesn’t make it any easier. Let’s pack it in.”
The sun was well past its zenith by the time they recovered, packed and stowed the equipment. Bragg slowed the process with the fumbling and mild confusion resulting from nearly forty hours of sleep deprivation. Terson converted the couch in the main cabin into a bed and Bragg was sound asleep seconds after he hit the mattress.
Terson secured the deck for flight and turned the boat’s nose toward the Archipelago. Instead of taking off, however, he ran on the surface for a while with the canopy rolled back to let in the moist salty air.
Bragg seemed to resign himself to the likelihood that he’d never know the answers to his many questions, but fatigue had a way of diverting attention from even the most pressing issues. Terson prayed that the man’s tenacity wouldn’t reassert itself once he was rested. The portal leading back to his simple, secure life was still open; all Maalan Bragg had to do was step through, close it behind him and forget about Terson and Virene Reilly.
One of the problems with being a cop, though, was the way it altered perceptions, defaulting to suspicion so that the slightest coincidence suggested conspiracy and any argument to the contrary, deception. With the exception of fellow police officers, everyone—friends, family, spouse—became potential suspects made to account for every innocent, incongruous act and comment. Terson observed the phenomenon in career officers during his short tour with the Colonial Police and it was the rare individual who escaped its consequences.
Many times the most unlikely string or combination of coincidences was exactly that and the connections existed only in the mind of the observer. A shuttle crashed. A rich, spoiled young man vandalized Malone property. Hooligans assaulted and killed a young woman motivated by greed. Bragg’s conspiracy could not stand on its own without the single unifying detail—Terson and Virene. Bragg would get more benefit using them as a case study to educate other immigrants why it was dangerous to exhibit the same flagrant disregard of Nivian values as the hapless couple had.
Guilt stabbed Terson under the ribs with such ferocity that he flinched.
Ultimately no matter who did the deed or the degree that Virene willingly participated, her death was Terson’s responsibility. He was the one who led her beyond the pale of her society, made her the target of criminals who correctly assumed that the bauble she wore was poached, he who didn’t protect her when she needed him most.
Terson slammed the back of his head against the headrest over and over; his jaws clenched against the despairing pain of what he’d done to the only human being who had ever honestly loved him. The pain didn’t abate—wouldn’t, couldn’t cease as long as he drew breath. He heaved himself out of the seat and lunged toward the back of the cockpit, stumbled down the narrow access to the main cabin.
He pulled a bang stick out of the gun locker, sending the rest tumbling to the floor with a clatter, scattering at his feet as he turned, pulling the pin. He clutched the shaft in both fists just under the shell. The bright red dot on the tip glowed in his eyes like a beacon in the dark, leading him toward the only peace he’d ever find. A solid tap against his forehead would end the pain.
Bragg hoisted himself up on one elbow, eyes bloodshot and bleary. “Whasrong?”
The fire in Terson’s mind vanished as if doused by a bucket of cold water. He looked from the tip of the shell to B
ragg. “What?” he panted.
“Wharyou doin?”
“I—nothing,” Terson stammered. Bragg harrumphed and rolled onto his side, his breathing falling instantly back into the rhythm of sleep.
Terson began to shake with the realization of what he’d been about to do. Never in his life had he ever seriously contemplated suicide, much less acted on the thought. The most frightening thing was how fast the impulse came over him and how little thought accompanied it. For the space of thirty seconds self-murder seemed like a perfectly reasonable method to end the excruciating emotional pain.
His unsteady fingers managed to replace the stick’s safety pin, then gather the rest and return them to the locker. Despite the noise, Bragg didn’t stir again, leaving Terson to wonder what had roused him the first time. He didn’t dwell on it too long, though, because he had a more pressing thought: where had the mindless anguish gone and what would he do if it returned?
He banished the thought; his task now was to get Bragg back to the mainland before the pilot-captain of his boat went suicidally berserk again, stranding him beyond the legal coastal boundaries on a craft he had little hope of operating on his own.
Terson took off with significantly more consideration for his passenger than when they departed Saint Anatone a day earlier. A check of the time and a mental calculation made him adjust course as the sun fell closer to the horizon. They wouldn’t reach the Archipelago until after dark, when the coastal patrols increased their vigilance to intercept poachers. There was only one place that he and Bragg could wait out the night safely.
They arrived at the island two and a half hours later. Bragg was splayed out on his back on the couch, snoring like a chain saw when Terson padded through to collect his rifle from the gun locker. He was more than happy to let the officer sleep; he wasn’t in the mood to give a tour and the mere possibility of a stranger’s feet tracking across his beach tempted him to head for the Archipelago anyway.
Pale Boundaries Page 26