Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

“No time for that,” Terson told him, gesturing to the bright orange parachute fluttering in the crown of the tree above them. “This is the first place they’ll look for us.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Jack said as wisps of smoke curled around his hand.

Terson didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you trying to tell me, Jack?”

Tham blew smoke over his head. “You were born here, right?”

“Might as well have been,” Terson replied. “My parents immigrated when I was two or three.”

“I figured. Kid, as planets go this one is a shit hole, and even Hanstead knows it’s only a matter of time before they yank the rest of us off. A cell is a lot safer than walking a hundred kilometers through this shit on the slight chance that we’ll get to suffer through another few months of hell.”

“I never expected to hear that from you, ” Terson said, “considering the rumors.”

“Yeah, well, they’d get me one way or the other,” Tham replied.

“What if we didn’t have to leave?”

“We won’t have a choice when they start knocking down the walls at the ranch,” Tham snorted.

“I know a place.”

“The Militia is getting its ass kicked.”

“Not Militia,” Terson said, “Passive Resistants. Good set-up, well hidden. We can walk it in a couple of weeks.”

Tham’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t. The ranch I can handle, you know?” He gestured around. “Not this!”

“Jack, I can get us out!” Terson insisted, frustrated by the man’s fatalism.

“Shut up a minute, Reilly, and listen. Listen hard, and tell me what you hear.” There was no harm in humoring his idiocy, so Terson closed his eyes and tilted his head and heard—nothing. “That’s my point,” Tham said when Terson told him. “To me, right now, it’s so goddamned noisy I can’t hear myself think! You’re half my age, and conditioned to this place. I weigh twice what I’m used to, my back hurts all the time, I’ve had one knee replaced already and the other is bad.

“I’m forty-four, Terson, but I’ve got the body of a sixty-year-old. I won’t make it if I try to walk out.”

Terson stood, resigned. He didn’t want to leave Jack by himself, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice his own freedom so lightly. “We’ll get you set up here before I leave, okay?”

Tham tapped the ashes out of his pipe. “Yeah. Sure.”

CCB regulations demanded that nothing man-made remain on the planet and no expense would be spared to recover the wreckage of the helicopter. Locating survivors was merely a by-product of the effort, so there was no telling how long Tham might have to wait. Terson helped him build a simple shelter and left him the bulk of the survival rations, along with both personal rescue beacons and all the bug-bombs.

“Sure you don’t want a couple of these?” Tham asked of the potent insecticide foggers.

Terson shook his head. “I’ll be on the move.” They shook hands solemnly, and Terson set off through the shaded twilight.

He’d traveled less than one hundred meters and caught the first pungent whiff of burned plastic when he heard the rapid thud of Tham’s shotgun behind him. He hurried back the way he’d come, moving faster along his back trail than he had cutting it, and emerged at the base of the tree where he’d left Tham.

Something had shredded his clothing; his torso was crosshatched with wounds from which blood still flowed. His face was frozen in an expression of wide-eyed horror that Terson would never forget. A perfunctory check of his vitals confirmed what Terson already knew: Jack Tham was dead. A fresh torrent of guilt washed through Terson as he stood. He would never have left an injured comrade alone, and even whole Jack Tham proved no more capable of surviving on his own.

A faint scrabble overhead made Terson glance up—into the iridescent, multifaceted eyes of a chinche poised to slash at him with a primitive razorgrass blade. Terson blocked the attack with the butt of his rifle and stumbled out of range. The insectoid’s powerful rear legs were capable of propelling it twice the distance that separated it from the human, but its abdominal cavity was grossly swollen with blood, hindering its range of motion.

That did not prevent it from calling for help.

The vestigial wings on its back vibrated, filling the air with a piercing, high-pitched whine that set Terson’s teeth on edge. Other chinche responded to the call. Their individual replies merged into a deafening drone that seemed to come from everywhere, growing louder by the second.

Terson slung his rifle and snatched up both the survival pack and the shotgun. He was too exposed in the dense jungle to fight off the creatures, but he might have a chance if enough of the helicopter was intact. He crashed headlong through the jungle along his earlier route, digging in the pack for the bug-bombs. He dropped them in his path every ten meters, leaving a trail of toxic mist behind him. Chinche could not hold their breath and the first to enter the cloud fell writhing and spinning as the nerve agent worked its havoc.

The foggers would only provide a few moments of lead time before the chinche simply swarmed around them, but it might be all he needed to reach the helicopter and whatever protection it might offer.

A smoky fire line appeared ahead, flames on the ground crackling weakly, struggling against the moisture-laden plant life. Terson pushed through, eyes tearing in the smoke, and broke out into a bare blackened patch fifty meters across. The inferno left nothing of the fuselage but a ring of blackened titanium ribs.

He increased his pace across the hot ash, weaving through a stand of blackened tree trunks to the center of the burn where the impact and subsequent explosion had gouged out a shallow crater. The material mounded around the edge provided a barrier sufficient to conceal most of his body when he knelt, shotgun clamped firmly between his elbow and hip.

The chinche’s maddening war cry grew louder, threatening to split his skull, and then fell abruptly silent. Minutes passed. Terson did not misinterpret the silence as a sign of the insectoids’ retreat; he knew they were watching, planning, and that he would not learn the outcome until they acted.

The sound of a metal pan dragging across a washboard emerged from the jungle to his right. Answering calls sounded from the left, rear and directly ahead. A moment later he heard a single chirp, and chinche rushed in from every direction. The actual attack was surprisingly silent, compared to the pursuit. The creatures generated no sound but the gentle rustle and click of their pebble adornments as they raced across the clearing and leapt from trunk to trunk.

Terson’s response was immediate and devastating. He hurled a withering stream of shotgun fire through their ranks, exploding carapaces and blowing off chitinous limbs. Fletched razorgrass darts rained down from the branches above, burying themselves in the ground and biting into fallen logs. Terson turned the shotgun skyward, blowing apart the tufted masses of twigs and leaves where the chinche hid. He killed dozens with each sweep of the barrel, but one advanced for every five he stopped. His perimeter shrank until the projectiles they flung began landing inside the crater.

A dart sliced into his calf; another glanced across his shoulder. The cuts burned with pain beyond the physical injuries. The cumulative effects of the poison increased with each additional wound; his sight swam and blurred, the grip on his weapon weakened.

Terson dropped the shotgun when the ammunition ran out and reached down for his rifle. He couldn’t lift it, and the effort exhausted him too much to stand upright again. He toppled on his side, muscles soft and sluggish, struggling for each breath. He soon experienced the horror so evident on Jack Tham’s face. The chinche surrounded him, fighting each other for a claim of the booty. Blades slashed his flesh from every angle, inflicting wounds from which they raced to lap up his blood before he expired.