Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  Like any other belligerent couple, each of the two cultures thought it held the moral high ground.

  Earth had waged and won the war that eradicated the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony and saved the human race. In the process, Earth had lost sixty million people and had stolen starship technology from the Slugs fair and square.

  For its part, Yavet had produced mankind’s most numerically prolific and technically advanced society, albeit one that executed unpermitted babies at birth, raped the environment, and generally made Earth’s last-century Nazis look soft.

  The Trueborns refused to share C-drive with Neo-Nazis. The Yavi refused to be judged by holier-than-thou hypocrites. The only thing stupider or worse than the rivalry would have been all-out war. Avoiding which was, therefore, the overriding goal and sworn duty for which every spook case officer would joyfully sacrifice his or her life. And/or the life of his or her partner. It said so right in the oath.

  I forked up my last bite of blueberry pie, then glanced at my ’puter. My new junior looked across at me like a puppy.

  I suppose I looked at Kit that way when I was the green junior case officer and she was my senior. Weddle and I would henceforth be, as Kit and I had been, as every case officer team was, closer than siblings. Well, not exactly. If Kit had been my sister, our off-duty, uh, interaction would have gotten us arrested some places in the Union. But Weddle and I would train together, eat together, study together, and depend on one another for our very lives.

  I slapped my palms on the tablecloth, like the impatient older brother I was about to become. “Weddle, time to save the universe. Or die trying.”

  Part one of universe-saving for a case officer team is insertion prep. Prep was normally conducted on dirt, and took months. Weddle and I were being prepped for this insertion on the fly, in weeks.

  Mostly, that didn’t bother me. A kid who grows up denied the right to go to school, which was how I had grown up on Yavet, grows up thirsty for knowledge.

  During my two years on Earth I had read everything I could lay hands on. Mostly, a soldier can lay his hands on military history, but I had sponged up other things, too. A playwright named Shakespeare came highly recommended. They said he wrote in the language that became Standard, but at first I barely recognized it. I even read a Gideon Bible once.

  I always enjoyed the classroom segments of an insertion prep. Say that for Howard. He had been a professor before the Slug War. So spook branch always force-fed a case officer the natural history of the planet for which he or she was bound, its human history, and a dumbed-down helping of any science the case required.

  We got our physical exams updated and a comprehensive prick-and-swallow to immunize us against local diseases.

  The physical training and hand-to-hand combat segments of insertion prep were usually just to maintain established fitness and skills. But in my case they were a sweaty and necessary evil. Two years of saloon keeping, in the spun-up rotational gravity of a hollow meteor with a mass less than Manhattan Island’s, had been no health-club membership. Weddle kicked my butt daily in all phases.

  Running we did by laps around one of the outer decks, like hamsters in a cosmic wheel.

  Case officers ran wearing full rucksacks, to simulate field conditions. The only thing more precious to a case officer in the field than his or her partner and weapon was the equipment in his ruck. However, on the last lap packs were dropped for a final sprint.

  It was called the burn lap, but not just for what it did to your lungs and thighs. A case officer’s pack was only dropped if the bad guys in hot pursuit got danger-close. And only after yanking a timer cord that caused the pack, and its classified contents, to burn like Krakatoa. And, with luck, take down some bad guys.

  Kit and I had always run the burn lap competitively. If I won, we showered ensemble. Sometimes even if I lost. Though then I had to listen to her crow about how second place was just first loser. That was one of her favorite gungho–isms.

  But the part of prep I really cared about was the mission-specific case briefing. The CB began after Emerald River made her last jump through the temporal fabric, which left us a week of near-light travel away from Tressel parking orbit.

  The first thing that made this particular case briefing abnormal, considering Howard’s security fetish, was that the CB was conducted in the echoing emptiness of Emerald River’s Bay Twenty-four.

  Cruisers were originally built as warships. But there were no other ships left in the universe to make war on. Lacking need to project military power, the Trueborns used their cruisers to project mercantile and cultural power across five hundred and twelve planets. All concerned got richer and smarter. However, the Trueborns got richest and smartest.

  Emerald River’s belt line was ringed with thirty-six launch and recovery bays that had once housed interceptors and attack transports. In civilian service, most of the bays were empty. But the bays, and the C-drive engineering spaces in the booms behind them, were still sealed off from forward-area passengers, especially curious Yavi “civilians,” by a locked and loaded marine platoon.

  The second thing that made this case briefing abnormal was that the King of the Spooks himself had made the trip with us and was briefing us personally.

  Howard Hibble’s voice echoed in the hangar-sized, pie-slice–shaped bay, and nobody could hear it except me, Weddle, and the three cleared members of the insertion team.

  We sat, hands folded, around a table set up on the deck plates while Howard slid back and forth on his scooter the way a lecturer paced a stage. The only other things in the bay were three sealed plasteel cargo containers. Those were packed with mission-specific equipment. The stuff the spooks thought I needed to know about would be explained to me.

  Howard said, “Six months ago we developed intelligence that Yavet and Tressel intended to form a clandestine alliance.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but I didn’t ask how we came to know that. Spooks are closemouthed, even among themselves, about “sources and methods.” “Sources and methods” meant how and/or from whom raw information was obtained. “Developed intelligence” was what spooks made of all the information they assembled. It might mean that we had it all on holo. Or it might mean that Howard had a wild-ass hunch.

  I furrowed my brow. “Tressen’s a fourth-rate civilization stuck at the end of a jump line. What could be in that for the Yavi?”

  Howard pursed his lips. “Well, I have a hunch about that.”

  I knew asking what Howard’s hunch was would be as futile as asking about sources and methods. Howard’s hunches had proven world-savingly right often during the last half century. That’s why the tight-ass Trueborn military let him run his branch like a libertarian bus wreck.

  Howard made a thin fist. “But we need proof. That’s why we inserted Colonel Born’s team.”

  My heart skipped when he mentioned Kit’s name. Howard normally ignored rank and called people by their first names, just one of the anarchic quirks that drove the regular army bughouse. Calling Kit by her rank was, I think, his attempt to depersonalize the situation and keep me focused and quiet. It didn’t work.

  I interrupted him. “What happened to her, Howard?”

  “We don’t know, Jazen.”

  “What feedback have you gotten from the local contacts?”

  Howard shook his head. “None. The team went in barefoot. We haven’t had reliable human assets on Tressel for years. Kit freelances and improvises better than anybody I’ve ever seen. Well, almost anybody.”

  “Then you want us to follow her?” The only reason I was once again sitting in a starship, surrounded by spooks thinking up ways to endanger me, was Kit.

  Howard shook his head. “We don’t know what’s happened to her, but any step we followed when we inserted her team could have been the step that got them in trouble. So we’re changing everything up for you two. Except that once your feet are wet, you’ll be unsupervised, like she was.” He blinked. “Is.”

  My bre
ath caught and my heart thumped. She was alive down there somewhere. I had to believe that.

  So I nodded at Howard. “Understood.”

  Weddle just sat, arms folded and eyes locked on Howard like a good junior. At my first briefing, as a good junior, I had done the same thing. Actually, my eyes had been locked more on my senior than on my briefer.

  Really, what I meant by “understood” was that whatever spy foolishness Howard wanted me to pursue, my personal first priority was Kit. The sheer hostility of the planet and society we were going to operate in would isolate me. I would be free to pursue my priority first and Howard’s spy foolishness second. I wasn’t sticking my neck out for some secret handshake. I was sticking my neck out for Kit. So my spy oath was a lie. But lying was what spies did.

  “How soon does our Scorpion drop?” I wrinkled my forehead and looked around the empty bay as I said it. It should have occurred to me sooner that the insertion vehicle wasn’t in the bay with us.

  Normally, a case-officer team entered an area of operations like any other cruiser passengers, except with phony ID. But in closed and hostile environments like Tressel, insertion was done by ferrying the team down to a planet’s surface at a remote location, unannounced and undetected, in a Scorpion T. Spook Scorpion transport variants were as fast and shifty as Scorpion fighters, but with a radar cross section smaller than the bluebird of happiness and a heat signature fainter than that of day-old pizza.

  From orbital strap-in to disembarkation on the ground normally took ten minutes. Things might get hairy later, but insertion by Scorpion had the drama of a limo ride from the airport.

  Howard frowned and shook his head. “We inserted Kit’s team by Scorpion. So that’s the first thing we’re changing for you.” He waved at the peephole in the personnel hatch that led into the bay from the passageway. The hatch undogged from the other side, and two more spooks, each wearing coveralls and paratroop jump boots, came in, walked to us, and saluted Howard.

  Howard returned the salute with a limp hand.

  The redheaded para turned to me and smiled. “Good thing you’re not afraid of heights, Lieutenant.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “Huh?”

  Eight

  Twenty minutes later, Howard and the other briefing spooks adjourned for coffee and probably a game of chess.

  Weddle and I stood in the empty, echoing bay with our respective trainers, arms outstretched like scarecrows.

  The redhead, who turned out to be an Airborne School jumpmaster, knelt alongside me. He was fitting an Eternad armor suit he had unpacked from one of the plasteel crates. As he worked he tapped suit features and lectured. “Thigh scabbard. One each twenty-four-inch synthetic koto-steel bush knife—”

  I sighed and tapped my opposite thigh pocket. “One each search-and-rescue pyrotechnic canister.”

  He stood, slipped the helmet down over my head like a coronation. “I gather you’ve worn Eternads before, Lieutenant?”

  I nodded.

  “When last, sir? The latest evolution’s had a couple tweaks.”

  Successive evolutions of the Eternad fighting suit had been saving Trueborn GI lives, including mine, since clear back at the start of the Slug War.

  “Couple years.” I sniffed the prior occupant’s sweat in the helmet pads. “I think somebody’s been wearing this suit ever since.”

  He smiled. “We’re fitting each of you to a suit that’s broken in. Seventy percent of new suits experience out-of-the-box glitches. Can’t tolerate that when we’re already pushing the equipment’s limit.”

  I frowned out through my open faceplate. Pushing my equipment’s limit? Eternads store a GI’s body-movement energy, then use it to run their computers and sensors, and to heat and warm the GI. They synthesize or purify air, and water if necessary. They keep out any water that isn’t necessary, such as the kind one might fall into. They also keep out vacuum, bullets, shrapnel, chemical and biological agents, and the occasional mosquito. But they’re light enough and supple enough to let the GI double-time a marathon. Eternad armor’s limit is hard to push.

  He snapped my visor shut to pressure test the seals, so I was talking to myself when I asked, “What the hell does that mean?”

  Ten minutes later, my suit was fitted and cooling me. Meanwhile, the spook had unpacked another plasteel. The jigsaw he had laid out on the floor was sleek and radar-absorbent black. He held a cylindrical section alongside my suit’s thigh, cocked his head, then replaced it with a different one.

  I popped my visor as he said, “The fairing pieces look different outside the wind tunnel.”

  “Wind tunnel?”

  He stared into my helmet. “General Hibble didn’t tell you?”

  I sighed. “Why don’t you?”

  He glanced at the closed hatch, then back at me, and lowered his voice. “Sir, Weddle’s a master parachutist. But they did say you’re Airborne qualified?”

  I nodded. “Made it through jump school.”

  He smiled and raised a fist. “Air-borne!”

  I bumped his fist with mine while avoiding a visible eye roll. “All the way.” I left the military for many good and sufficient reasons. Somewhere on my reason list was gung-ho phobia.

  The jumpmaster ratcheted the suit’s right forearm until it matched the length of my own. “Basically, sir, this jump will be just like a static-line school jump. Only from a little higher altitude.”

  My heart skipped. “Jump?” I had graduated jump school because my military operational specialty required it, but it scared me green. Now it was clear that Weddle and I weren’t going to step out onto Tressel’s surface from a Scorpion, like exiting a taxi. We were going to parachute to the surface.

  I frowned. “A little higher” meant something different to someone wearing paratroop jump boots than to sane people. “Not a HALO jump?”

  Super spooks like Kit Born, and special-operations troops since long before the Slug War, often jumped High Altitude-Low Opening. HALO jumpers exited an aircraft in the frozen stratosphere, breathing bottled oxygen and bundled against the cold, then fell arms and legs splayed and belly-down for most of ten miles before they opened their chutes. While falling they attained a terminal velocity of one hundred twenty miles per hour. Very stealthy. Very scary.

  He raised his palm and shook his head. “HALO? Oh, no, sir!”

  I exhaled. “Good.”

  “A Scorpion that low might be detected.”

  This time, I rolled my eyes visibly. “Detected? The Tressens only invented aerial searchlights six years ago. They couldn’t detect a Scorpion if one fell on them.”

  He shrugged. “General Hibble’s afraid the Yavi might have smuggled in modern air-defense detection systems, and crews to operate them, to help the Tressens.”

  There was no paranoid like an Intel paranoid. But I sighed. After all, something had tripped Kit up. If I hoped to get her out, Weddle and I had to avoid whatever it was.

  The jumpmaster pointed at the bay outer doors, which, because of rotational gravity, we were actually standing on. “It’s really pretty simple. A cruiser moves by gravity manipulation. It doesn’t really orbit, just mimics orbit to match speed and trajectory with conventional shuttles that actually do need to maintain orbital velocities to stay aloft. So the ship will simply drop down and circle the planet twenty-five miles lower, for a brief interval.”

  “You’re afraid the Tressens will notice a four-place stealth aircraft. So you’re going to use a mile-long spaceship instead?”

  “We’ve already told the Tressens that the Emerald River will be varying her altitude this trip. As a humanitarian favor. The diplomats won’t let us drop off satellites around Tressel. So we’re doing atmospheric research, to increase the accuracy of Tressel weather forecasting. Perfectly logical.”

  Spook logic was not Aristotelian logic. One minute paranoia drove them. The next they were overconfident enough to hide in plain sight behind some obvious lie.

  The jumpmaster said, “While
the ship’s at the lower altitude, we’ll open the bay doors. Low-thrust boosters attached to your suits will kick-start you two out into space. Then you’ll just fall through the atmosphere until your altimeter reading opens your chute.”

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head. Bad logic was arguable. Bad physics wasn’t. “That won’t work. We’ll burn up like old space capsules.”

  He shook his head back at me. “Nope. The old space capsules actually were in orbit. They used atmospheric friction to decelerate them from orbital velocity so they could fall back to the surface. Friction absorbs speed energy by turning it into heat energy. Like car brakes. But this ship will be moving geosynchronously. Moving at the same speed as the atmosphere. For you two it’ll be like jumping out of a stationary balloon’s gondola. Just from higher up.”

  I glanced over at Weddle, the master parachutist who was barely old enough to shave. He and the other jumpmaster were chatting it up, smiling.

  I cocked my head. I had bet my life on Eternads before. If white-bread Weddle could do this, I could. But the jumpmaster had mentioned pushing the suit’s limits. “Can the suits stay pressure tight at a hundred twenty miles an hour?”

  The jumpmaster frowned. “One twenty? Sir, that’s where things get a little complicated. Terminal velocity is the speed at which a free-falling object’s atmospheric drag equals gravitational acceleration. For a parachutist jumping from ten miles up, terminal velocity is about a hundred twenty miles per hour You’ll be falling through near vacuum at first. So atmospheric drag won’t retard your acceleration much for the first hundred miles or so.”

  My eyes popped wider. “I fall a hundred miles?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Give or take.”

  “How fast?”

  He turned his palms up. “Well, the density of Tressen’s upper atmosphere’s different from Earth’s, fortunately.”