It was hard to trust anyone as guarded as he was.
He avoided small talk; he wouldn’t confirm his origin, though O’Brien told him flat out that she knew he wasn’t a local because his accent was wrong his physique could only come from a high-grav environment.
There was no doubt in her mind that he didn’t ordinarily need a knife to defend himself from someone like Grogan. The old scars on his arms and torso offered plenty of evidence that he’d successfully defended himself against someone or something far worse, though; again, he wouldn’t discuss it.
“How about a damned name, then?” she demanded in frustration. “You’ve got two to choose from!”
He looked back at her with an expression that gave nothing away. “I’ll answer to either.”
Was he a Joseph Pelletier, or a Terson Reilly? No way to tell by looking at him. “I had a boyfriend named Joe once,” she informed him. “He was an uncommunicative asshole, too.”
Oddly enough, the fact that he didn’t try to ingratiate himself with the spacers put O’Brien more at ease than if he’d been a gregarious extrovert. He had something to hide and wasn’t about to apologize for it; he knew the spacers had something to hide and didn’t care. The arrangement they’d entered into was all business; nothing personal, no hard feelings, hope we never see each other again.
He looked up from the map and motioned for her attention, then held a rag to his mouth as his body shook with another fit of coughing, staining it with more blood-flecked sputum. “How you feeling, ah, Joe?”
“Been better,” he replied. “Been worse.” The spacers had given him a shipsuit meant for a man several centimeters taller; one of Grogan’s as he was the only one with a girth to match. It bagged at the seat and ankles, but at least it protected him from the chill. “Does your sled have a GPS?”
“It does,” she told him, “but it fried when we took out the FLIR pod.”
“How about a compass?”
“I’ve got a little electronic hand-held.” She got it out of her pack for him.
“It’ll do. Is it calibrated for true north or magnetic north?”
“I didn’t know it mattered.”
“It doesn’t—I just have to know.” He punched through the simple menu for a moment. “True north; that’s fine. Does the sled’s altimeter work?”
“Isn’t that part of the GPS?”
“That answers my question,” he replied, and went back to the compass menu. “Never mind; this has one. I can calibrate it from the sled’s atmospheric pressure sensor and the map. Won’t be as accurate as I’d like, but it will work.”
O’Brien’s stomach began to hurt. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re going to try and navigate using a dime-store compass and a paper map?”
Pelletier nodded. “And a copilot with a sharp eye and a rudimentary familiarity with basic land navigation.”
“Maybe we should rethink this,” she said.
“Fine by me,” Pelletier shrugged. “You’re the ones in a hurry.”
He had her there. They could rethink it a hundred times, but it all came down to the Embustero breaking orbit without them in a little over sixteen hours—a deadline only slightly less certain than the sun coming up in the morning.
His confidence made him appear a godsend at first, but what he proposed to do bordered on ludicrous, now. It was easy for a spacer to say that death was preferable to stranding, but as the possibility loomed she found herself thinking that a dirtside prison might not be so bad after all.
Her attention turned back to Pelletier, who watched the play of emotions across her face while she thought it through, patient and impartial. He wasn’t constrained by a deadline, but was willing to take what struck her as an absurd risk. Was he just crazy, or was he really that good?
“Tell me straight,” she demanded, looking directly into his eyes, “what are our chances?”
“Eighty percent we get out,” he said. “Sixty percent we get out in time for you to make your lift. Twenty percent we don’t make it.”
“Twenty percent being we get killed, or get caught?”
“If we get caught the EPEA will execute us on the spot,” he assured her.
“Comforting,” she replied sourly. She nodded at the map. “Explain how this works.”
“We’ll fly out in a series of legs,” he said. “I’ve identified landmarks at each waypoint. The map gives us altitudes, the compass direction, and we’ll need a clock or stopwatch for duration. We find the landmark at each waypoint to confirm location, then change course and reset for the next waypoint.”
“That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard,” O’Brien told him.
“Maybe so, but it works. I’ve done it before.”
“In the dark?”
“Where I’m from we got fog so thick the visibility was no better.”
“Oh? Where was that?”
Pelletier ignored the question. “Who’s flying right seat?”
“Grogan’s got the most experience with the sled.”
“Grogan’s an idiot. Who’s second?”
“I guess that would be me,” she sighed.
“You need to study this, then,” Pelletier told her, gesturing to the map. “It’s going to be up to you to spot landmarks and keep track of where we are.”
She looked over his annotations, which indicated that they’d head south for quite a distance before turning east toward the preserve’s border. “What was wrong with Grogan’s course?” she asked. “We know that route a lot better.”
“Those valleys are perfect for avoiding radar,” Pelletier agreed, “but the terrain’s too narrow and rugged to navigate this way at high speed. You wouldn’t make your lift if we flew it slow enough to avoid crashing.
“This route,” he said, finger tracing the series of doglegs, “is more open and the elevations change more gradually. We can fly faster, and the trees should provide better contrast against the snow.”
“But they’ll see us on radar,” O’Brien pointed out.
“Maybe, but we’re heading away from the main search area, and they’re not looking for another aircraft. If they do happen to see us, they’ll most likely assume we’re one of them.”
O’Brien combed her fingers through her hair. Pelletier’s self-assurance was difficult to argue with, under the circumstances, but she and the others were fools to give him their trust and confidence carte blanch. “What’s the fastest you can fly the first leg?” she asked.
“The ridge should hide us for a while, so we can fly higher and faster here than we can when we get to the bottom of the valley. Why?”
“I’m going to put out a rescue strobe when we leave,” she said. “That’ll draw them all here while we haul ass the other way.”
Pelletier frowned. “Not necessarily the best idea,” he said. “The more eyes that point this way, the more likely that someone will spot us.”
“Then you’d better be as good as you seem to think you are,” O’Brien replied. “It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”
“I’ll be ready.”
The poachers finished loading their gear as dusk swept across the mountains. They chose to abandon the non-essential and consumable supplies. Grogan performed the preflight and powered up the sled’s systems before relinquishing the pilot’s seat to Pelletier. “All yours, genius.” The sled’s repellers came to life as he withdrew to the passenger compartment. “Everyone’s strapped in,” he announced.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Pelletier called back to O’Brien.
O’Brien pulled the rescue strobe from its charging socket in the sled and carried it to the aircraft’s tail. She set the strobe frequency and aimed it into the depths of the cave. “Fire in the hole!” she called, closed her eyes and triggered the strobe.
The flash dazzled her eyes through her lids and the strobe emitted a high-pitched whine as it recharged its capacitor for the next flash. O’Brien lugged the device to the mouth of the cave and shoved h
er feet into her snowshoes. Drifting snow had constricted the entrance to less than half its original size, raising concerns as to whether the sled would even fit. It was still more than large enough for a human being, though, and she trudged out to seat the strobe in the snow a few meters from the opening.
Back inside, she caught a handhold long enough to kick loose the snowshoes and swung herself aboard. She left Grogan to secure the hatch while she made her way to the cockpit and strapped in next to Pelletier. “Four minutes left!”
The sled moved forward slowly. O’Brien held her breath as the nose came in contact with the low trailing edge of the drifts and began to plow it into a hump that climbed toward the cockpit windows. The sled’s mass proved too much for the obstruction; irregular blocks of wind-compacted snow broke free and slid aside, tumbling into the darkness down-slope.
“Three minutes,” O’Brien said.
Pelletier turned onto the compass heading for the first leg. “Start the clock.” She toggled the counter, and the sled accelerated down the mountain’s flank at full speed. Dark splotches appeared in the dim gray expanse of snow beneath the sled, flocked copses of trees that grew larger and more frequent as they approached the valley floor then merged into unbroken forest.
“Any second n—” A burst of light bright enough to be seen from orbit lit the sky behind them before she finished. Reflections from the surrounding hills illuminated the valley for a split second, long enough to spot the first landmark: a pass through the foothills into the next valley. “Five minutes to the next strobe.”
Pelletier had seen the pass, too, and altered course slightly without slowing. His eyes flicked back and forth between the sled’s maneuvering clock and the little compass. O’Brien leaned forward, peering through the useless front window, straining her eyes for any clue as to what lay ahead. Her neck and shoulders tensed in anticipation of the certain impact.
The clock reached zero and began to count up. Pelletier cut power to the thrusters and pulled the nose up suddenly, using the sled’s belly as an airbrake. The added stress of the maneuver proved too much for someone in the passenger compartment. Groans of disgust followed close behind the retch and splatter of stomach contents.
Pelletier eased ahead at a snail’s pace. “That was the easy part,” he said. “Let me know when it looks like we’re on the other side.” The timely arrival of illumination from the second strobe confirmed the sled’s position a few moments later. Pelletier adjusted their altitude and turned onto the heading for the second leg.
A streak of light appeared in the darkness back the way they’d come. It sped across the sky for a moment, and then blossomed into a fireball that quickly faded to a rain of burning wreckage. “What the hell was that?” O’Brien demanded.
“The EPEA must have seen the strobe too,” Pelletier said placidly as he reset the clock. “Things’ll get pretty exciting back there.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:24 Standard
“I said land, goddamn it!”
Terson shook his head. “Just gimme another stim.” His voice shook so badly the words were nearly unintelligible.
The strain of flying blind for so many hours had taken a toll on all of them, Terson and O’Brien most of all, and of the pair Terson was by far the worst off. His coughing had worsened beyond the ability of medkit’s low-grade suppressants to control it by the time the spacers reached the halfway point. His movements and mental acuity grew progressively more sluggish with each leg, and he had to slow their flight accordingly.
The stimulant patches that kept O’Brien awake and alert had only slowed Terson’s physical deterioration, pushing his body to use up reserves already depleted by its earlier ordeal and continuing battle against the infection attacking his respiratory system.
And now, the infection was winning.
“Look,” O’Brien ordered, pointing out the dim, pale light on the eastern horizon. “Look over there! We’ve got three legs to go, and we won’t make it before daylight if you try to keep this up! Another half hour and there will be enough light to fly by ourselves.
“You got us through the worst of it; don’t kill us on the home stretch!”
Terson drew in a breath to argue, but it set off an explosive cough that sprayed blood across the flight controls before he uttered another word. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and nodded, releasing the controls to O’Brien. She brought the sled down in the trees, setting off an avalanche of snow and broken branches beneath it.
“Grogan, Berriochoa, get up here,” she yelled. “Our dirtsider’s just about had it.” Terson was too weak to make the short trip to the passenger compartment under his own power. The two big spacers half-walked, half-dragged him from the cramped flight deck to a seat where the one they called Liz wrapped him in blankets.
“He’s relapsed,” Liz announced after a cursory examination.
“It’s going to be hard to get rid of a corpse in town,” Grogan said. “Best we leave him here if he’s going to die anyway.”
“Shut up, Grogan,” O’Brien snapped. “We’ll get him to a hospital like we said.”
“That was before he woke up and saw us all,” Grogan reminded her, “and we’ll barely have time to make the port as it is.”
“Then you’d better get your ass to the cockpit and fly,” O’Brien said, “because we’ll have plenty of time if we miss the lift!” Grogan snarled under his breath and stomped off. Her face swam in Terson’s vision, concern evident, as the chills took him. “Don’t worry, Joe, I won’t let them leave you.”
Terson opened his mouth to express his gratitude the only way left—by trusting her with his real name, the one he had no doubt that she would find a way to mark his grave with if the worst happened—but his attempt to speak triggered another fit of bloody coughing. That final exertion pushed him past the threshold of the stim’s ability to keep him conscious.
O’Brien surrendered to her own fatigue and curled up in a seat next to one of the tiny ports with a blanket. Unfortunately the residual chemicals in her blood from the stim patches weren’t ready to release her.
The snow thinned as they left the mountains, now moving at a rate considerably faster than the darkness constrained them to. An hour later the sky above was pale yellow and free of all but the brightest stars. Grogan kept to the shadowed valleys as long as he was able, but eventually they had to climb over the last of the high peaks and head down toward the arid plain toward God’s Saucer.
O’Brien experienced a great deal of relief at spying familiar landmarks. For the first time in several days it seemed possible—inevitable, actually—that they’d get back to the ship and brush the dust of this miserable planet from their feet.
The western end of the lakebed came into view at last.
“I got Figenshaw on the horn,” Berriochoa called back. “They’re just starting the prelaunch checks. We should make it in plenty of time.”
Now was the last chance to jettison Pelletier’s body. He was hanging on, but looked far worse than he had when they first found him. His face was drawn and ashen; greasy sweat gave his skin an unhealthy sheen. Most telling, however, was that twice as many stim patches as O’Brien used couldn’t keep him conscious.
He’d given everything he had to get them home, but O’Brien was ashamed to admit that she didn’t intend to go to the same extreme to keep him alive. When weighing the interests of the ship and a dirtsider, the scales always tipped in favor of the ship—but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to take a chance. “Grogan, swing by that refitter that did the work on the sled for us.”
“It’s on the opposite side of the port from the lander,” he objected.
“Just do it; we’ve got time!”
“You’d better be right, Sheila,” Grogan replied, “‘cause none of us will cover for you if we miss the lift.”
The sled banked to port, following the north rim of the lakebed toward the seedy side of the field, home t
o shipbreakers, boneyards and shady repair facilities. The sled had to slow to a crawl when it dropped to surface roads, but it was large enough to usurp the right of way from lighter vehicles and less assertive drivers.
“This is it, up ahead on the left,” Grogan called back. “The gate’s closed.”
“So get out and yell.”
“Why the hell don’t you do it?” the big spacer exclaimed.
“Because he knows you,” she shot back.
Grogan cursed and slapped the harness release. He forced his way past her to the passenger compartment, popped the main egress hatch and dropped to the dry ground without waiting for the stairs to unfold.
“T hank you for contacting BlackBay Recovery,” said a pleasant female voice. “This circuit is unsecure. If you possess a BlackBay encryption certificate, please upload it now.”
Cormack MacLeod inserted the memory stick and waited while the system at the other end read the certificate and implemented the encryption. The toll calculator at the upper right corner of the black screen incremented just faster than the progress bar at the bottom, reminding MacLeod why he detested real-time hyperlink transactions. His only comfort was the knowledge that a full-bandwidth video link would have driven the toll ten times faster.
“Thank you. This circuit is now secure, and is being transferred to a BlackBay Recovery agent. Please have your Gamma Three passcode ready.”
A genderless, electronically distorted voice came on the circuit a moment later. “Thank you for waiting. Your passcode is required to continue.” MacLeod recited the alphanumeric string. “Thank you, sir or madam. How can I help you today?”
“The amount deposited to me account for the information I provided on the Embustero is more than a wee bit less than what ye led me to believe,” MacLeod said. “It doesn’t even cover me expenses!”
Pale Boundaries Page 37