Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  The security-detail spook shrugged again. “He just wants to visit.”

  “I’ll be here ’til closing.”

  “You know he can’t come up to Shipyard.”

  I knew nothing of the sort, but I was curious. And my calendar wasn’t exactly full. “Where, then?”

  “At the Pseudocephalopod War Museum, First Battle of Mousetrap exhibit. In an hour.”

  Forty-one minutes later I stepped off the Southbound tuber at Museum Station and blinked at the contrast. I always did when I traveled from Shipyard to the South End.

  Mousetrap was originally mankind’s interstellar Gibraltar, our bulwark against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Since we won the war, the South End had remained the crossroads of the Human Union, the gateway to the temporal-fabric insertion points that led, directly or indirectly, to the five hundred twelve planets that comprised the Human Union. As such, the South End was insufferably bright and clean and quiet.

  After the war, the North End, where the great ships that won the war for us had been built and berthed, had been abandoned by the Human Union. Eventually Mousetrap’s unemployed shipwrights had squatted there, then declared themselves an independent and, uh, socially liberated community. Today the Free City of Shipyard, where nothing was free but everything was available if one paid cash, was the graffiti-tagged nest of addicts, villains, and libertines that I called home.

  The Museum and War Memorials saw little traffic when the Port was between cruisers, but today Museum Station was so deserted that I heard my shoes squeak on the floor tile as I walked.

  I looked down the platform. The crawl above the museum entrance read “Closed this afternoon. Private event.”

  I smiled. Somehow, I had the feeling that, despite the sign, when I got close enough that my ID, but nobody else’s, tickled the sensors, the doors would slide open anyway.

  Ten minutes’ walk down the dim museum corridor I came to the First Battle of Mousetrap Gallery and saw Howard Hibble for the first time in two years. He sat with his back to me, staring through the glass wall at the static displays beyond. He teetered on a hovering scooter, his bony hands grasping the tiller. Not because he was obese. Howard was as gaunt as ever. But because he was old.

  “How’s the saloon business?” He spoke without turning. I suppose he saw my reflection in the glass, the way I saw his. He wore civvies as wrinkled as his skin, and they bagged on his skinny frame as badly as his uniforms always did. Old-fashioned glasses covered his eyes, the kind that hooked over his ears and rested across his nose.

  “Better than the spook business, if you’ve got time to waste on me.” I pointed through the glass at the display of twodee photographs from the start of the war, when the Slugs blitzed Earth seventy years before, and at his picture in an intelligence captain’s uniform in particular. “You haven’t changed much.”

  He shrugged. “Trueborn medicine and near-light-travel time dilation.”

  I snorted. “I mean the spook theatrics.” I threw my arms wide and spun in a circle. “Here you meet me?”

  “It seemed appropriate, considering. Besides, your parents—”

  I stopped spinning and pointed at him. “Exactly! The only reason I signed on with you was because you said you’d tell me the truth about my parents.”

  He raised a bony palm off the scooter’s tiller and shook his head. “No. I told you I knew your parents during the war and that your separation from them at birth wasn’t the abandonment it’s seemed to you over the years. That was the truth.”

  I cocked my head. “Oh. And I suppose you’re here now to tell me the rest of the truth, finally?”

  Behind his glasses, Howard Hibble rolled sleepy eyes. “It was classified then, it’s classified now.”

  I returned his eye roll. “Come on, Howard! What could be classified about a war that we won thirty years ago? Against an enemy that doesn’t exist anymore?” I pointed at a different holo display. “Jason Wander, GI hero of the Battle of Ganymede.” And another. “General Jason Wander, goat of the First Battle of Mousetrap, hero of the Second Battle of Mousetrap.”

  “It doesn’t say he was the goat.”

  “No.” I waved my hand down the corridor. “But of all the heroes, he’s the only one without a picture here. Or anywhere. I’ve looked all over the Net. And after Second Mousetrap—poof—he just disappears from the history chips. And so does Admiral Mimi Ozawa.”

  “I told you he and your mother were alive and working for me, at least part-time. I can tell you that’s still true.”

  “Where? Doing what? Why the whitewash of what they did in the war? And why did they leave me on Yavet with the midwife who delivered me?”

  “I can’t answer your questions directly. Jazen, you know I trust you. But, operationally, you have no need to know the answers.”

  “Then I have no need to continue this conversation.” I turned away.

  Howard said, “But I can offer you a job where you would need to know.”

  I stopped. Only someone who has no past understands why it’s important. “Desk job?”

  “Case officer. I’ll be honest. It’s extremely dangerous. The incumbent senior on the team that your team would replace was, in my opinion, our best. The team went silent a month ago.”

  Incumbent case officers? Why not just call spies spies? Because Howard Hibble was hooked on euphemistic understatement. That also meant that when he called the job “extremely dangerous,” the job was a death sentence.

  I snorted. “Went silent? You mean went dead, Howard.”

  “I mean went silent. We’ve lost contact with teams in the field before but recovered them eventually.”

  “I was barely past rookie when I left. You must have two hundred case officers more experienced than me. Why replace the best with me?”

  “You have unique qualifications.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’ll find out as you go. If you go.”

  I wanted to know why my parents abandoned me. I wanted to know how my parents had screwed up the end of the war. Screwed it up so badly that they both got expunged from history. But I rolled my eyes up to the dark museum ceiling. “No. In fact, hell no. Howard, this rabbit-in-the-hat crap is why I quit in the first place.”

  The King of the Spooks shook his head, then dropped his voice. “We both know that’s not why you quit.”

  I bit my lip, looked away from the displays, into the dark, and swallowed while my eyes burned. “You’re right.” I blinked, drew a breath. “But I’m past that. Now I’ve got a saloon to run.” I turned and walked away.

  Howard let me stalk to the end of the corridor. Then his whisper echoed to me. “Jazen, don’t you want to know who the missing incumbent senior is?”

  Six

  Dawn on the streets of Tressia was calm and greased with the oil smoke from a half-million chimneys. Polian walked, hands in civilian coat pockets, eyes cast down at the cobbles, and frowned. Not at the feel of the coat. Tressen textiles had a hand-woven texture that he enjoyed. But the day ahead was the first of the thirty-one since he had returned from the Arctic that worried him.

  He passed through a manned security checkpoint, a vestige of the day when rebel sabotage was a real threat and not just an excuse for the Interior Police to search the citizenry.

  Then Polian was within the Government Quarter of Tressen’s capital. Polian frowned again because the sterile, boxy Tressen government buildings were set back thirty yards on both sides of a boulevard that was fifteen yards wide itself. Worse, the capital city of Tressen, in fact the entire nation, was open to the sky. Polian had grown up like every legal Yavi, beneath the levels’ comforting ceilings.

  He swore as he walked. Trueborn psychologists called the Yavi discomfort with open spaces agoraphobic. Yavi psychologists called it normal. Leave it to the Trueborns to define any behavior except theirs as aberrant. The polite term for Trueborn self-absorption was “Terracentrism.” Polian preferred to call it arrogance.

  He ro
unded the last corner and let his eyes rest on the clinic. Its architecture was pleasantly different from the sterile Tressen boxes that it predated. Neo-Iridian, it was all white marble with arched doors and windows, crenulated parapets, for this world a regular castle. But in front of the castle squatted a long-hooded Tressen automobile, so black and anonymous that it could only be Interior Police. It was parked at the curb in front of the clinic’s arched entrance. Behind the car squatted a swollen-tired Tressen ambulance, rear doors swung open, exposing an empty interior waiting to be filled. Because half the clinic had been cleared, and now housed only one patient, that meant Polian’s worry about day thirty-one was justified.

  Polian ran the remaining distance and reached the clinic’s front doors just as a patient-loaded gurney’s end bumped them open in front of him. Polian planted a hand on the rolling bed’s foot rail and stopped it.

  He shouted, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The two trench-coated men pushing the gurney looked up at Polian. The one on the left peered from beneath the brim of his slouch hat with eyes as black and cold as marbles. “Custody transfer, Mr. Polian. The IP has humored you for a month.”

  The man, an Interior Police chief inspector by his lapel badge, shifted his weight and shoved the gurney toward the waiting ambulance. Polian planted his feet, shoved back until the gurney quivered, and stared at the cop. Every member of the Interior Police that Polian had encountered had the same attitude and dead eyes.

  The locals called the IP “ferrents,” after an indigenous species of anvil-headed, rat-sized amphibians. Partly because the IP wore ferrent-colored brown leather trench coats and slouch hats. Mostly because ferrents—the four footed kind—had a singularly disgusting habit of nosing around in other creatures’ dung.

  Polian looked down at the bandaged, unconscious figure strapped to the gurney. “Thirty days was a reevaluation date, not a turnover deadline.” He peered over the ferrent’s shoulder at the lab-coated physician who stood behind them in the corridor. “Doctor, what’ll happen if she’s moved?”

  The physician glanced sideways at the ferrent, around spectacles fashioned from bent wire. “As I explained to the chief inspector, each surgery has improved her chance of regaining consciousness. I think that in a few more days—”

  The ferrent rolled his eyes. “More days? She was unconscious when she got here. After a month of your coddling, she’s the same. Our methods have gotten the attention of subjects less lively than she is.”

  Ferrent “methods” would only kill her. That she die, and painfully, suited Polian fine. But not until she talked.

  The doctor and this idiot ferrent knew only that the woman on the gurney was a high-value detainee and that Polian was a civilian with an odd accent and too much stroke. And that was all they needed to know.

  So Polian simply sighed and exercised his stroke. He stared at the ferrent. “Would you care to see my papers?”

  The man scowled and stared at Polian’s chest.

  In a leather wallet in his breast pocket, Polian carried a simple letter on the personal letterhead of, and signed and sealed by, the chairman of the Republican Socialist Party and chancellor-for-life of the Tressen Republic. It advised the reader to render all assistance to the bearer that he might request. It encouraged the reader to contact the Chancellery directly if further clarification was required.

  So far, further clarification had never, ever been required by anyone who saw the letter.

  Undoubtedly, the ferrent’s predecessor had told this new ferrent about the fiat letter, if the doctor hadn’t. Polian cursed himself silently for keeping a predictable schedule. The ferrents had expected to steal the woman before he arrived, then fumble and shuffle about her whereabouts while they worked her over. They had nearly succeeded. The Trueborns had a saying that possession was nine points of the law. Evidently the Tressens did, too.

  The doctor laid a hand on the ferrent’s coat sleeve and shook his head. The gesture measured the power of a simple Chancellery fiat letter. Just as no sane civilian Yavi back home laid hands on a government representative, no sane Tressen laid hands on a ferrent, unless the consequences of holding back were worse.

  The ferrent glanced down at the hand quivering on his sleeve, then up at Polian. After two breaths, the ferrent nodded to his trench-coated companion, and the two relaxed their grips on the gurney rails. The senior ferrent narrowed his eyes at Polian and pointed. “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’ll regret this. This woman is trouble.”

  Polian warmed to his role and mocked a pout. “Ah, women! How many years have the Interior Police been chasing Celline? Or does she chase you?” To the remaining Iridians, and the Tressens who covertly sympathized with them, Celline was hope. To the ferrents, her rebellion was an infuriating symbol of their impotence. To Polian, she was irrelevant. But she was a momentarily amusing pin with which to prick this ferrent’s ass.

  The ferrent’s pointing finger shook. “We don’t chase myths. The last Iridian royal was hanged years ago.”

  Polian smiled again. “Then why is her wanted poster still hanging in the employee lounge? Just an oversight, I’m sure. A rebellion could never survive for thirty years. Not against you ferrents.”

  The doctor coughed a laugh into his hand. He had probably never heard anyone call a chief inspector of the Interior Police “ferrent” to his face.

  The ferrent folded his pointed finger into a fist, shook it, then waved his subordinate to follow him as he stalked out the doors.

  Twenty minutes later, in the windowless hospital room to which the anonymous patient had been returned, Polian stood alongside the unconscious woman while she breathed.

  He stared down at her. With the bruising faded from her cheeks, she was a beautiful woman, but somehow not a regal one.

  Polian stroked his chin and thought out loud. “Well, whoever you are, you’re no more an Iridian than I’m a Tressen. You’re a Trueborn from your toes to your eyeballs. You’ve got an athlete’s body. Or a soldier’s.” He ran a finger along the intravenous feeding tube taped to the woman’s emaciated arm. “Well, you did have a month ago.”

  Her wounds had been so massive that her stable survival was, considering the primitive state of Tressen medical practice, miraculous. Back home, Yavi medical technology could have healed her to interrogatable condition long ago. And Yavi interrogation methods would then have wrung her dry within days. For now, all Polian could do was wonder. “How much do you know? How much does your partner know? How much of what you know have you passed on to your masters?”

  Wonder, and wait on the next damn Trueborn cruiser to bring the next Yavi “humanitarian” delegation to Tressen.

  He sighed at the serene, silent spy. “Well, once we succeed here, nothing the Trueborns know will help them.”

  Seven

  “Those are the roughest holy men I’ve ever seen.” The blue-eyed, pale kid seated across from me stared past me at the far side of the main dining salon of the Human Union Bastogne-class cruiser Emerald River. The twenty Yavi who were seated there wore cleric shawls and bowed their shaved heads in post-meal prayer. But they were the fittest priests anybody had ever seen.

  Three days after my conversation with Howard Hibble, Emerald River had slid her ancient, mile-long bulk out Mousetrap’s South Lock. Bound, as scheduled, for Tressel, she carried me, along with an insertion-support team and the rookie case officer with whom Howard had paired me. This lunch was my first meeting with my new junior.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “They aren’t preachers, Weddle, if I know my Yavi. And I do. I grew up on Yavet.”

  My new partner wrinkled his forehead. “You? You look as Trueborn as I do.”

  Actually, nobody looked as white-bread Trueborn as Weddle. Fortunately, the look blended with the Tressens with whom we would be mingling.

  “Long, boring story. Weddle, there are two kinds of Yavi. The first kind are the general population. Short, docile, beat down by generations of
overcrowding.” I jerked my thumb at the Yavi lunch group. “The second kind of Yavi are those jokers. Military, and cops who act like military. The second kind make sure the first kind stay docile. They make decent soldiers, and excellent bullies.”

  The bulk of Emerald River’s cargo consisted of farm implements, electronics, and the latest consumer goods from the Motherworld. Those items would be off-loaded at intermediate planetary waypoints. Once the cruiser reached her turnaround point, which for an embargoed world like Tressel was a geosynchronous parking orbit, she would off-load in orbit her remaining cargo. That consisted of a minimal volume of unembargoed humanitarian items, mostly medical supplies and the freely distributed Trueborn holy books called Gideon Bibles.

  Emerald River would also off-load a personnel pod carrying the twenty liars who sat on the other side of the dining salon.

  The cargo, human and otherwise, would be shuttled down aboard old-fashioned chemical-fueled space planes operated by neutrals under contract with the Union.

  Once on Tressel, the twenty liars would not distribute holy books. They would do what Yavi covert military parties did on every outworld. Build Yavi influence, at the expense of Earth’s influence, by espionage and violence.

  Not that Weddle and I were much better. We were supposed to be tourists. He wore a flower-print shirt and kept poking his own cheek with the umbrella garnish that stuck up out of his drink.

  Neither we nor the Yavi were fooling the other. The charade had teetered at an uneasy balance point for decades.

  Neither the Trueborns nor the Yavi wanted Cold War II to explode into Interstellar War II. The Yavi had the Human Union’s largest population and correspondingly largest gross planetary product. The Trueborns had the smug prestige of being the cradle of mankind. More importantly, the Trueborns controlled the starships that connected the worlds of the Union.