Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

“Then I shall be on my way,” Gidden said, leaning on his cane to rise. “It has been a pleasure.”

“Likewise, Mr. Undersecretary.”

Gidden winked at her as he passed. “You are an excellent liar, Colonel.”

Sheila O’Brien sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, eyes drinking up the stunning view beyond the cave mouth. Bright sunlight streamed out of the clear, cobalt blue sky, spilling across jagged peaks topped with curls of snow that trailed wisps of sparkling crystals into the air as the frigid breeze worked to ablate what the storm had deposited.

The snow-covered slope below the cave stretched unbroken for nearly a kilometer before the first puffed mound of a buried tree cast its long shadow toward the bottom of the valley. O’Brien longed to strap on a pair of skis, plunge into the powder outside and race through the crisp, clear air as she had during her childhood on another planet a long time ago.

The glint of sunlight from an object hurtling through the sky reminded her why she couldn’t. The object came on quickly, resolving into an airsled before it buzzed overhead, past the poachers’ hideout. Now she regretted her soft heartedness, which stood to cost them all dearly. If Grogan hadn’t had a hard-on for a fur, if the storm hadn’t lasted as long as it had…

If she’d just left the guy where they found him.

The wind and early snowfall both protected and trapped them now. The path they’d worn up the slope to their hideout over months of hunting was hidden under a meter of virgin snow, but the pristine surface would betray them if they ventured outside, even to drag their inadvertent charge into the open where his friends could find him. The Embustero could not delay its departure for too long, and would not return to Nivia for several months.

Another airsled appeared for a moment before dipping out of sight again. As near as she could determine, the search area ended at the ridge just west of their hideout.

Jerrell Mackey squeezed between the Embustero’s cargo sled and the cave wall to squat next to her. “They still at it?”

“Haven’t let up since the snow stopped,” she told him. “How’s the dirtsider doing?”

“Liz says he’s got pneumonia.”

“Guess I screwed him all the way around. And us,” she sighed.

“Maybe so. Maybe not,” he said. “Help me set this up, then I’ve got something to show you.” Together they assembled the tripod and fanned out the antenna dish, aiming it toward the sky where the Embustero’s orbit broke the horizon every eight hours, permitting thirty minutes of tight-beam communication before it passed beyond line-of-sight again. O’Brien plugged the cable into the remote head and spooled it out behind them as they picked their way back into the guts of the mountain.

The irregular walls cast nightmarish shadows in the lights and O’Brien experienced a healthy unease as they descended. Their hideout had been formed not by centuries of water eroding limestone, but a catastrophic landslide. They padded through spaces formed by slabs of rock the size of buildings jumbled together like a child’s building blocks. The chaotic mass seemed ready to tumble the rest of the way to the bottom of the valley at the least provocation, though what she and the others had stumbled upon during an early expedition suggested that it had been stable for centuries.

Their path took them steadily downward through a series of difficult, claustrophobic passages interspersed with openings to side passages. Some led to useful voids where the poachers stored equipment or bushmeat, but the hand-written chalk signage and stacks of rock outside others warned of hidden pits, unstable strata or dead ends.

The main passage finally ended at a pit descending straight down another ten meters. Light from below illuminated an A-frame spanning the void. An electric winch for supplies dangled from one side of the crossbeam, a rope ladder for personnel from the other.

What began as a hole in the floor of a cave ended as a hole in the ceiling of a man-made tunnel lined with tool-worked stone and buttressed by reinforced concrete pillars. The passageway predated the landslide by an indeterminate number of years, but all evidence pointed to the cataclysm as the cause of its ruin. Branching corridors suggested that it was a small portion of a larger complex, but they all ended abruptly where crushing weight overcame structural integrity.

The portion they’d stumbled upon while searching the voids for hibernating furbeasts during one of their earliest expeditions consisted of four corridors, each roughly thirty meters in length, arranged to form a square; branch corridors extended beyond the corners in both directions for varying distances before ending at cave-ins. Interconnecting rooms of varying dimensions occupied the central square.

Artifacts implying some kind of communication and administrative facility filled the rooms. None of it had been disturbed since the disaster—since the last survivor died, rather. The spacers found the skeletal remains of seventeen individuals huddled in a single room, and interred them permanently beneath the contents of other offices as they cleared them for their own use.

O’Brien still felt queasy whenever she passed that doorway. It wasn’t the thought of human skeletons just meters away that disturbed her, it was the thought that what had happened before could happen again; that she and her fellow crewmen might become the next to survive long enough in the darkness to suffer death by suffocation, dehydration, or starvation. The possibility alone was enough to discourage the Embustero’s crewmen from disturbing the collapses despite the possibility of finding other portions of the complex intact.

Mackey and O’Brien continued down the tunnel toward the entrance to the main room guided by battery-powered illumination installed on previous expeditions. Inside they found the other members of their party gathered around three radiant heaters, silent and worried. There hadn’t been much to do after packing up the cargo sled except worry, though O’Brien noticed that someone, probably motivated by their space-bred dislike of dirt, had swept the floor clean enough to eat from.

O’Brien bore them no malice for their fastidiousness. It was easier for a dirtsider to adapt to space than it was a spacer to adapt to a planet. Even so, after years in space she, too, had to remind herself that wind was not an atmosphere leak and soil not a detestable source of contamination or waste of delta-v.

She plugged the antenna cable into the encryption module of their receiver and turned on the alarm that would alert them when it detected the Embustero’s carrier wave. “What did you want to show me?” she asked Mackey.

He led her from the common room to the adjoining space they used as a bunkhouse and withdrew a belt made of small linked pouches from under his cot. “Liz found this when she stripped him down to cool the fever,” he said. He lay out the contents: miscellaneous personal effects, a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros, two identical envelopes.

A wad of personal documents slid into O’Brien’s hand when she opened the first. The face on the Nivian identification card was that of the dirtsider, clean-shaved and unmarked by frostbite and deprivation. Joseph Pelletier. She opened the second envelope to find documents identical to the first, from the ID card to the basic starpilot’s certification, but under the name Terson Reilly. Both sets were stained and water damaged, making it impossible to tell if one were newer than the other.

“I don’t know what he needs two sets of ID for,” Mackey said, “but I can tell you one thing: it ain’t legal.”