Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

“You shouldn’t have done that!” Tamara gasped.

“The gaijin betrayed Hal -san ,” Dayuki declared approvingly.

“He controlled most of our supply line!” Tamara exclaimed. “He may have arranged to disclose what he knew about us if he died!”

“Then you’d better arrange to get someone in here to find out,” Hal replied. “In the meantime, we know right about where Reilly is going to be in a couple of hours and we need to get there before Sorenson’s people pick him up.”

Hal slugged down the last of his whiskey and tossed the glass in after the bodies.

The Minzoku sailors did not bother to blindfold Terson at the egress ladder—it was pitch black outside and cold as an icebox. His borrowed clothing offered no barrier to the incessant coastal breeze and the air was heavy with the ominous promise of worse to come. Lineman and Boathook helped him into a waiting inflatable raft. The flat-bottomed little craft rode the swell of each wave as its electric motor propelled it across the water, adding nausea to Terson’s discomfort.

They’d taken Terson back to the submarine after a wait of mere hours. Upon reaching the submarine’s destination—a detail Den Tun refused to reveal—Terson would turn over the old man’s evidence to someone who would ferry him to “sympathetic gaijin .”

It seemed unlikely that the Minzoku or their sympathizers could hatch a feasible scheme to get him off-world in such a short period of time, and he suspected that the Minzoku were under pressure to get the transfer underway as soon as possible, leaving the responsibility of arrangements to their mysterious contact.

Terson wanted an explicit statement to that effect, but Den Tun made it clear that he was not privileged to details beyond those necessary to perform his task, answering his demand for more substantive information with an offer to release him immediately and point him in the direction of the nearest outlaw gaijin colony. If not for what he’d already seen and heard Terson might have accepted the offer, but his practiced cynicism could not ignore the probability of a bullet to the head—some irony, there—within his first ten steps.

He had no choice but to accept Den Tun’s refusal to offer detailed assurances as evidence that he had none to give. At least he proved reliable in one respect: he turned over the documents and small possessions from the hydrojet’s strongbox in their entirety and provided Terson with a smuggler’s belt in which to carry them.

He spent the trip back no less a prisoner than before but moderately more comfortable.

The Minzoku sailors slowed as the sound of surf grew louder. Lineman probed ahead with a pole and Boathook steered carefully, correcting at his pilot’s direction. Then they were among the low breakers and Terson could just make out the shore. A beach of brilliant white sand stretched for a quarter of a kilometer inland from the high tide mark, ending abruptly where the forest sprang up like a defensive wall. The two sailors dragged the raft onto the pebbly shore and turned to launch it again the moment Terson stepped out.

“Wait a minute!” Terson exclaimed. “There’s no one here!”

The men paused. Boathook gave him a gentle push in the direction of the trees. “Yugo now,” he said thickly, then scrambled into the raft. Terson choked off the urge to call out again as they vanished into the darkness. They’d followed their orders; the gaijin was someone else’s problem now.

He headed up the beach seeking shelter for the night. The sand crunched under his feet and a chill spread up his ankles. The shore wasn’t covered with sand, he realized. It was snow!

The sky tore open at the revelation, releasing its burden of moisture in thick, wet clumps of snow. Terson continued on to discover that the shore’s smooth upward slope was an illusion produced by snow suspended atop bushy shrubs. He waded into the mess with a drowning sensation as the undergrowth deepened, dumping slush on him as he thrashed onward. The spindly, interwoven twigs compressed into a nearly impenetrable mat before him, dragging him to a halt several times before he finally crashed through to the other side, emerging wet, cold and shivering.

A beam of light stung his eyes, startling him. “You were supposed to wait on the beach,” stated a reproachful but strangely familiar voice as Terson held up a hand to shield himself.

“Get that thing out of my face!” he growled.

The beam dropped to the ground. “You were supposed to wait,” the voice reiterated. “I almost lost you.”

Again, the feeling that he should know the name behind the voice. Terson made out the form of his surly contact as the dazzle faded from his eyes—tall and bulky in cold-weather clothing, face obscured by a parka hood. “Why weren’t you there to meet me?” Terson demanded.

The figure gestured about with his hands, as if the answer were obvious. “It’s snowing,” he said with a dry chuckle, the final clue to the speaker’s unlikely identity.

“So what got you the shit detail, Zarn?”

The light shot back to Terson’s face. “What the hell are you doing here?” Vondelis exclaimed.

“Flirting with hypothermia,” Terson replied through chattering teeth.

Zarn removed his parka and threw it around Terson’s shoulders, exposing a handgun strapped under his right arm, comforting evidence that he hadn’t come unprepared. “I’ve got transport nearby,” he said. “You can warm up and tell me what the hell’s going on.”

Zarn’s flashlight beam lanced through the forest, illuminating the surrounding trees in a ghostly backwash. Snowflakes that found their way through occasional breaks in the thick canopy overhead drifted down in glistening columns, collecting in small piles on the ground below. Zarn avoided stepping in them and Terson followed suite, unsure if they represented some local hazard or if it was merely an attempt to limit obvious tracks. Fifty or sixty meters back the trees gave way to a meadow. The men tramped through the chilling fluff to a two-seat aircar blanketed with several centimeters of new snow.

“Get those wet clothes off,” Zarn ordered. Terson complied and stood shivering in his underwear while Zarn opened the aircraft’s cargo hatch and pulled out a bundle that disgorged an insulated one-piece coverall, boots and mittens. None of it fit well, even after adjusting the straps and draw-strings. It was just as cold as the cargo space, but at least it was dry and presented a barrier to the wind. A hard, heavy lump in a pouch at the right hip turned out to be a power cell. Filaments in the fabric began to heat seconds after Zarn showed him how to turn it on. Terson climbed into the aircar’s rear seat and cupped his leaden hands around a heat vent.

Zarn cleared the snow from the front windscreen, climbed in and pulled the gull-wing hatch closed with a solid thump. “So, Reilly,” he said conversationally, “what brings you out tonight?”

“What did they tell you?” Terson asked.

“Not much,” Zarn replied. “The boss said to fly here and wait for somebody to show up. He said you’d have something for me, and I’m supposed to give you this.” He handed a sealed packet over his shoulder. “Then I drop you off at God’s Saucer and head back to camp.”

Terson broke the seal and looked inside to find a set of Nivian ID with his picture but someone else’s name and a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros. Zarn cleared his throat and snapped his fingers.

Terson handed over Den Tun’s package. Zarn’s ignorance, if genuine, made him nothing but a mule. Whether that meant the information was less significant than the old man claimed, or the risk of transferring it too great to jeopardize someone more informed, it made no sense to endanger his friend with knowledge he didn’t already possess.