Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

The clock reached zero and began to count up. Pelletier cut power to the thrusters and pulled the nose up suddenly, using the sled’s belly as an airbrake. The added stress of the maneuver proved too much for someone in the passenger compartment. Groans of disgust followed close behind the retch and splatter of stomach contents.

Pelletier eased ahead at a snail’s pace. “That was the easy part,” he said. “Let me know when it looks like we’re on the other side.” The timely arrival of illumination from the second strobe confirmed the sled’s position a few moments later. Pelletier adjusted their altitude and turned onto the heading for the second leg.

A streak of light appeared in the darkness back the way they’d come. It sped across the sky for a moment, and then blossomed into a fireball that quickly faded to a rain of burning wreckage. “What the hell was that?” O’Brien demanded.

“The EPEA must have seen the strobe too,” Pelletier said placidly as he reset the clock. “Things’ll get pretty exciting back there.”

“Isaid land, goddamn it!”

Terson shook his head. “Just gimme another stim.” His voice shook so badly the words were nearly unintelligible.

The strain of flying blind for so many hours had taken a toll on all of them, Terson and O’Brien most of all, and of the pair Terson was by far the worst off. His coughing had worsened beyond the ability of medkit’s low-grade suppressants to control it by the time the spacers reached the halfway point. His movements and mental acuity grew progressively more sluggish with each leg, and he had to slow their flight accordingly.

The stimulant patches that kept O’Brien awake and alert had only slowed Terson’s physical deterioration, pushing his body to use up reserves already depleted by its earlier ordeal and continuing battle against the infection attacking his respiratory system.

And now, the infection was winning.

“Look,” O’Brien ordered, pointing out the dim, pale light on the eastern horizon. “Look over there! We’ve got three legs to go, and we won’t make it before daylight if you try to keep this up! Another half hour and there will be enough light to fly by ourselves.

“You got us through the worst of it; don’t kill us on the home stretch!”

Terson drew in a breath to argue, but it set off an explosive cough that sprayed blood across the flight controls before he uttered another word. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and nodded, releasing the controls to O’Brien. She brought the sled down in the trees, setting off an avalanche of snow and broken branches beneath it.

“Grogan, Berriochoa, get up here,” she yelled. “Our dirtsider’s just about had it.” Terson was too weak to make the short trip to the passenger compartment under his own power. The two big spacers half-walked, half-dragged him from the cramped flight deck to a seat where the one they called Liz wrapped him in blankets.

“He’s relapsed,” Liz announced after a cursory examination.

“It’s going to be hard to get rid of a corpse in town,” Grogan said. “Best we leave him here if he’s going to die anyway.”

“Shut up, Grogan,” O’Brien snapped. “We’ll get him to a hospital like we said.”

“That was before he woke up and saw us all,” Grogan reminded her, “and we’ll barely have time to make the port as it is.”

“Then you’d better get your ass to the cockpit and fly,” O’Brien said, “because we’ll have plenty of time if we miss the lift!” Grogan snarled under his breath and stomped off. Her face swam in Terson’s vision, concern evident, as the chills took him. “Don’t worry, Joe, I won’t let them leave you.”

Terson opened his mouth to express his gratitude the only way left—by trusting her with his real name, the one he had no doubt that she would find a way to mark his grave with if the worst happened—but his attempt to speak triggered another fit of bloody coughing. That final exertion pushed him past the threshold of the stim’s ability to keep him conscious.

O’Brien surrendered to her own fatigue and curled up in a seat next to one of the tiny ports with a blanket. Unfortunately the residual chemicals in her blood from the stim patches weren’t ready to release her.

The snow thinned as they left the mountains, now moving at a rate considerably faster than the darkness constrained them to. An hour later the sky above was pale yellow and free of all but the brightest stars. Grogan kept to the shadowed valleys as long as he was able, but eventually they had to climb over the last of the high peaks and head down toward the arid plain toward God’s Saucer.

O’Brien experienced a great deal of relief at spying familiar landmarks. For the first time in several days it seemed possible—inevitable, actually—that they’d get back to the ship and brush the dust of this miserable planet from their feet.

The western end of the lakebed came into view at last.

“I got Figenshaw on the horn,” Berriochoa called back. “They’re just starting the prelaunch checks. We should make it in plenty of time.”

Now was the last chance to jettison Pelletier’s body. He was hanging on, but looked far worse than he had when they first found him. His face was drawn and ashen; greasy sweat gave his skin an unhealthy sheen. Most telling, however, was that twice as many stim patches as O’Brien used couldn’t keep him conscious.

He’d given everything he had to get them home, but O’Brien was ashamed to admit that she didn’t intend to go to the same extreme to keep him alive. When weighing the interests of the ship and a dirtsider, the scales always tipped in favor of the ship—but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to take a chance. “Grogan, swing by that refitter that did the work on the sled for us.”

“It’s on the opposite side of the port from the lander,” he objected.

“Just do it; we’ve got time!”

“You’d better be right, Sheila,” Grogan replied, “‘cause none of us will cover for you if we miss the lift.”

The sled banked to port, following the north rim of the lakebed toward the seedy side of the field, home to shipbreakers, boneyards and shady repair facilities. The sled had to slow to a crawl when it dropped to surface roads, but it was large enough to usurp the right of way from lighter vehicles and less assertive drivers.

“This is it, up ahead on the left,” Grogan called back. “The gate’s closed.”

“So get out and yell.”

“Why the hell don’t you do it?” the big spacer exclaimed.

“Because he knows you,” she shot back.

Grogan cursed and slapped the harness release. He forced his way past her to the passenger compartment, popped the main egress hatch and dropped to the dry ground without waiting for the stairs to unfold.

“T hank you for contacting BlackBay Recovery,” said a pleasant female voice. “This circuit is unsecure. If you possess a BlackBay encryption certificate, please upload it now.”

Cormack MacLeod inserted the memory stick and waited while the system at the other end read the certificate and implemented the encryption. The toll calculator at the upper right corner of the black screen incremented just faster than the progress bar at the bottom, reminding MacLeod why he detested real-time hyperlink transactions. His only comfort was the knowledge that a full-bandwidth video link would have driven the toll ten times faster.

“Thank you. This circuit is now secure, and is being transferred to a BlackBay Recovery agent. Please have your Gamma Three passcode ready.”