Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

“The snow is not so deep,” Dayuki responded. “The seedlings would be covered otherwise.”

The security officer offered up an irritated frown that she blithely failed to notice. Hal watched the exchange with some amusement. Proper Minzoku women, like the two McKeon had married, did not contradict men so blatantly. That Dayuki exercised the prerogatives of an Onjin female clearly consternated him.

“There!” McKeon pointed.

Hal brought all floodlights to bear and circled back around to land. McKeon went to the salon and rousted his men. A gust of wind above sent snow drifting ahead of the armed party as it converged on the wrecked aircar.

“All clear,” the leader radioed back. Hal, McKeon and Dayuki joined them outside. “Passenger side is open, just as we found it,” he said. “There are tracks. The pilot’s on the other side.”

Hal inspected the body somberly. The upper half of his torso looked like the frayed end of a bloody rope. His trouser pockets were pulled inside out. Tracks churned the crimson snow around the remains and struck a straight line into the trees, filling quickly with snow.

“Reilly,” Hal said.

McKeon prodded the corpse with a toe. “I remember him a little taller.”

Hal pointed at the tracks leading away.

“Get after him,” McKeon said, dispatching his men. He walked around and brushed the snow from the aircar’s tail. “Unmarked,” he announced. “I doubt we’ll find a VIN number, either.”

Damn and double damn! There wasn’t enough left of the pilot to identify except: “Take some blood and tissue samples,” Hal said. “He may be listed in the Federal DNA database.”

“Unless he’s a spacer,” McKeon said.

Hal grunted at that. The Family had become complacent in more than Minzoku obedience. His attempts to resolve the situation subtly had failed. Subtlety had, in fact, been a major contributor to the present situation over the years. Laissez-faire had allowed the cogs to develop into mechanisms in their own right that must now be dealt with as such.

The snow began falling at an angle as a brisk breeze kicked up. Somewhere in the darkness an animal yowled, eliciting a chorus of answering calls and counter-calls that built to a raucous crescendo before falling abruptly silent.

“That sounds close,” Hal noted, turning toward the shuttle. “We should wait inside.”

“Wait,” McKeon said, pointing in the direction his men had gone, where the trees now fractured a jostling flashlight beam. “Someone’s coming back.”

Terson knelt beneath a tree a few dozen meters from the aircar. Gaps in the drooping, snow-laden boughs offered a relatively clear view while simultaneously obscuring him from observation as the sleek, expensive shuttlecraft bearing Zarn’s murderers settled to the ground, preceded by an avalanche of snow and broken branches.

Figures in battle-dress dropped from the nose ramp before it fully extended and advanced on the downed aircar with weapons at the ready as the whine of repellers died away. Moments later three more people disembarked to confer before sending them off on the obvious trail Terson laid before they arrived.

Terson froze in place, resisting the urge to crouch lower lest the movement betray him to alert eyes, but his caution wasn’t necessary. They stomped past like a herd of cattle, assuring him that the steps he’d taken to misdirect pursuit would go unquestioned.

The three who remained stood together chatting, arrogant in the assumption that their quarry wasn’t capable of bringing the battle to them—arrogant enough to stand with their backs to the wide-open and unattended shuttle while their best means of defense followed a torturous trail leading right back to where it started.

If Terson had his way their security would return to find nothing but the bodies of their employers and an empty space where the shuttle had been. He slipped from his shelter and made his way to the tracks of the men sent to find him, completing the circuitous loop.

The wind gusted fitfully, one moment obscuring their voices, the next erasing them entirely. The wind died for an instant, allowing a snippet of incongruous conversation to reach him sharp and clear: “—doubt we’ll find a—”

Terson’s pulse hammered in his forehead; his breath quickened and his muscles quivered. Something in that snatch of speech—perhaps a particular tone, inflection or the combination of words themselves—matched a voice he would not forget as long as he lived: the voice of Virene’s killer whispering questions in his ear while the drugs dragged him into oblivion.

He clenched the Bowie in his fist and turned on the flash light.

He’d start with that one.

One of McKeon’s men appeared from the trees where Reilly’s trail entered and waved an arm. He called out, but the combination of wind and hood clutched tight against it muffled his voice beyond intelligibility. “Use the radio!” McKeon yelled.

“Broken,” the muffled voice replied, beckoning again. “Found something!”

Dayuki caught Hal’s coat sleeve as he started to follow McKeon and stood on her toes as he bent toward her. “Look at his clothes!” she whispered urgently.

The Fort’s security personnel wore state of the art, individually tailored cold weather uniforms. This man wore a utilitarian, ill-fitting one-piece bunched at the knees and ankles as if too long for his frame—the kind of thing someone might carry as emergency gear.

Oblivious, McKeon stomped on, too intent on his footing to notice what Dayuki had and already too far away to warn without alerting Reilly that his deception had been discovered. Hal pulled his needle-beamer from inside his coat, stepped to one side, aimed and fired in a single swift motion.

He missed.

The beam spent itself against a branch behind Reilly, igniting needles with a crackle and showering him with burning pitch. The gaijin hunkered down, spoiling Hal’s second shot. McKeon drew his beamer as he spun to identify the source of the gunfire, offering his back to the quarry.

Reilly closed the intervening distance in an instant, right arm held straight down and stiff. The naked blade clutched in his fist flashed as he swung it from the hip. McKeon gasped as it plunged into his kidney. He dropped to his knees, driven as much by the force of the blow as the sudden gushing wound in his side. Reilly had an arm around his throat before the shock wore off and drove the blade in again, higher, aiming for a lung. Reilly released his hold and plucked McKeon’s needle-beamer from his nerveless fingers as he toppled face-first into the snow.

The stunning speed of the attack left Hal momentarily nonplused. Before he could gather his wits again, Reilly raised his arm and fired. Puffs of steam appeared in the air like an ephemeral string of pearls as the beam vaporized the snowflakes in its path. The left side of Hal’s hood ignited, scorching his face. He fired wildly as he retreated, slapping at the flames with his free hand.

“Back to the shuttle!” he cried for Dayuki’s benefit before taking off as fast as he could run. Reilly’s weapon hurled one more steaming spear past him, and then Hal was at the base of the ramp. He turned back for Dayuki, and it was only then that he realized that she hadn’t followed.

The Minzoku girl ran straight at Reilly, twirling her coat before her in an ill-conceived attempt to draw his fire, and he obliged.

Dayuki advanced behind a shield of illusion as she spun the parka back and forth, the blur of speed expanding it to twice its size to the eye of the gaijin . He fired on her with cold, measured calculation, each shot placed unerringly in the center of mass confronting him but Dayuki skipped back and forth, opposite the direction of her decoy. The beams sizzled past her body with mere centimeters to spare and she reached her quarry unharmed, though the coat was little more than smoking rags when she cast it away.