Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

“This here’s the flight data recorder from one of the ships I told you about,” Stoyko explained, “the one’s that busted me up. There was cargo aboard. It’s yours.”

“Keep it,” Cormack snorted. “I got a drawer full o’ treasure maps.”

“But it’s all I got!” the spacer protested.

“Then ye got nothin’ at all,” Cormack enlightened him. He felt a faint twinge of guilt when he turned his back; he knew desperation when he saw it. He’d been there a time or two himself. But he’d done worse than walk away from a beggar and the guilt didn’t last as long as it took to reach his door.

MacLeod found the body the next morning, curled up in a fetal position outside the gate. “Ach, ye poor bastard,” he said sadly, and rifled Stoyko’s pockets for valuables before he called the authorities.

“Breakfast!” Terson called. He slid a reconstituted omelet onto each plate. Virene entered the hydrojet’s tiny galley combing out her damp hair, wearing nothing but a pair of Terson’s boxer shorts. “Didn’t mean to rush you,” he said.

“What’s left of these ugly tan lines will be gone before we get back,” she informed him. “After that it’ll be fifty euros a viewing, so get it while it’s free.” She took a bite of omelet and aimed her fork at his waist. “You could use some evening-out yourself. Nothing frightens a woman more than Moby’s Dick coming at her in the dark.”

“Not in your lifetime, baby. There are some places the sun will just never shine.”

Virene took their plates when they finished and began scrubbing them in the sink. “Terson, have you ever thought about leaving here?”

“There have been times I wished I wasn’t here,” he said, “but the alternatives weren’t that attractive.”

“But if they were—if another Class I world opened, would you want to apply?”

“Are you saying you’re not happy here?”

“How would I know if I am or not?” she asked. “I never went more than two hundred kilometers from home until I got into Malone!” She dried the plates and put them away. “Three years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of being a—of poaching. Now I have, and there are still plenty of fish. I couldn’t imagine not having babies, but now I have friends who want them but haven’t gotten approved.”

“You know what I think of the laws here,” Terson replied, “but there are worse places to be.”

“You wouldn’t have said that two years ago,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have considered leaving, either,” Terson grinned.

“People change,” she shrugged coquettishly.

High, shredded clouds laced the sky when Terson and Virene emerged from the boat. Broken branches and bits of leaf littered the sand and bobbed in the lagoon. Tiny shore scavengers had already been at work among the debris, weaving multi-legged trails across the damp sand. Virene found a clear spot for her blanket and lay down to read, brown back and bottom glistening with oil in the sun. Terson carried the larger debris to the burning pile at the far edge of the lagoon and began to rake the sand clear of the smaller remains.

The nightmare disturbed him more than it should have.

The dreams had tapered off over the past two years. Sometimes they cropped up like familiar, albeit unsavory, acquaintances when he felt stressed but they’d long since lost their power to unsettle him. The untimely recurrence struck him as a bad omen, though his intellect scoffed at the notion. A dream was nothing but a dream, a symptom, at most, of his subconscious coming to terms with his marriage and the final, irrevocable resignation of his past.

Virene saw a bright future, but Terson’s life had coincided with tragedy too many times to look ahead with the same enthusiasm. He hadn’t leapt into marriage with abandon, by any means. Though he loved Virene intensely, he’d privately agonized over each step of the relationship, forced her to make the first move through inaction, let the momentum of her personality carry them along as if ensuring her freedom of choice would relieve him of responsibility for what might happen later.

He cast a glance at his wife, who lay on her side watching him, head propped up in the palm of her hand. She smiled suggestively when she had his undivided attention and beckoned with a fine-boned finger. Something in the air behind him caught her eye, however, and her lascivious expression morphed into curiosity. She sat up, shading her eyes for a better look.

Terson followed her gaze and spotted a wisp of vapor high in the atmosphere to the north, growing in length from east to west at incredible speed. It didn’t look quite right for an aircraft contrail. He trotted to the boat and took another look with the binoculars he kept in the cockpit. The computer-enhanced image was grainy with distance, but there was no doubt that the object was man-made—and it was tumbling out of control, burning up in the friction of atmospheric reentry.

A slightly smaller object fell away from the main body. Breaking thrusters flared in short bursts to shed velocity and orient the escape pod for touchdown, but they didn’t have the muscle or the fuel to completely cancel the gyration inherited from the mother craft. The pod was still spinning when it jettisoned the engine housing and deployed its high-altitude airbrakes. The four huge, heavy, fabric streamers wrapped themselves around the pod as they emerged. Three sorted themselves out after a few more rotations and sprang to their full length, flapping wildly, generating enough drag in the thin air to stabilize the craft.

The functional airbrakes and steadily thickening atmosphere slowed the pod until the main parachute could deploy without ripping to pieces. The tangled fourth airbrake did not detach properly, however, and fouled the lighter canopy as it emerged. Half of the parachute managed to inflate, sending the entire mass into an irrecoverable flat spin.

Terson took note of the compass heading and ran to cast off the aft line. “Virene, get aboard!”

His urgency sent her dashing for the hydrojet. Terson gave her a hand into the boat then cast loose the fore line and climbed into the cockpit.

The hydrojet’s impeller kicked up a surge as he backed away from the dock. He negotiated the canal out of the lagoon in full reverse, water splashing over the wing-in-ground-effect surfaces along the hull. Once clear of the rocks he paused momentarily to survey. The hydrojet needed more room to take off than to land; the channel just outside the lagoon entrance was only long enough for the latter. The meandering path through the reef to open sea took ten or fifteen minutes to negotiate, but it was high tide and the hydrojet’s draft was only a few centimeters at take-off. He backed to the edge of the channel, eyes glued to the depth gauge. Ten meters. Seven. Four. Point seven. He goosed the impeller forward, killing their momentum, and clutched the impeller engine to the jets.

The turbines spooled up in a matter of seconds. The engines coughed once and ignited, spitting out a short-lived cloud of half-burned fuel before they settled down to a throaty roar. Terson shoved the throttles forward and the hydrojet leapt ahead, jetwash blasting up a cloud of vapor behind it.

The far end of the channel rushed to meet them with frightening speed; the pale green sea beneath gave way to mottled shades of brown as the craft raced into the shallows. It skimmed across water no more than a few centimeters deep, the force of the engine exhaust exposing the surface of the coral, leaving a trail of sterilized rock and dead marine life in its wake.

The hydrojet’s nose lifted. The WIG surfaces caught purchase in the air compressed between the surface of the water and the hull, lifting the craft clear as they drew lift from the aerodynamic phenomenon of ground effect.