Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  Alia touched the finger that had rested on my lips to my Eternad armor’s breastplate. “Are you a knight?”

  I squinted at her and tried not to move my shoulder. “How would you know what a knight is?” The largest land animal on Tressel wasn’t big enough to carry Lancelot’s chain-mail undershirt. Steel-armored knights belonged to the history of planets that had evolved horses.

  The girl pointed at the sleeping man. “Pyt gives me books. So, are you?”

  “I dunno. What do you think a knight is?”

  “A hero. Protects the weak. Fights for the right.”

  I shook my head. “I protect me. I fight for a paycheck.”

  She frowned. “Well, I hope you turn out to be some kind of hero.”

  I stared, straight-faced. “Why?”

  “Pyt says if all you have to offer is the diamonds, you’ll be thrown to the rhiz.”

  I cocked my head. “I dunno. They’re pretty nice diamonds.”

  Her eyes lit. “Can I see them?”

  I nodded and pointed at a yellow, locking hard-shell case among the equipment boxes. “In there.”

  Alia retrieved the case, pushed her thumbs against the latches, then frowned. “How do I open it?”

  “You don’t.” I sighed. “The case will blow up if it’s opened without my thumb on the left latch.”

  Alia scowled and drew her hooknife. “Then I might cut off your thumb. I’m ruthless.”

  I coughed to cover a smile. Not the least tragedy of civil war is that it really did create ruthless eleven-year-olds. I’d seen too many of them. But if Alia had been one of them, she could have cut my throat with that hooknife while I slept.

  I said, “Don’t bother. Unless my thumb’s attached to me and I’m alive, the case won’t open.” Which was true. “But I’ll let you take a look at the diamonds. Heck, I’ll let you weigh them. Twelve hundred carats of perfect blue-white Weichselan diamonds, cut to a fenceable average weight between one half and three carats each.”

  Diamonds were perfect universal value totems for espionage bribes and barter. They were desired, portable, unattributable, durable, and scarce. And Howard’s spooks had long ago figured out how to make diamonds into checks that only their case officers could cash.

  Alia narrowed her eyes. “You will?”

  Pyt woke, then stood behind us, yawning, while he laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “He will because the Trueborns have coated them.”

  Alia wrinkled her forehead at me while she jerked her thumb toward Pyt. “What’s he mean?”

  I said, “He means that in four days the diamonds will turn to powder. Unless I deactivate the coating. The idea is to encourage you to keep your promise and discourage you from cutting me into bait with your hooknife.”

  It’s a basic tenet of spookology that effective lies are grounded in truth. The diamonds were coated, alright. But unlike thumbprint-recognition locks, which were real technology, the magic coating was gray household glaze. I could no more turn diamonds into powder than I could turn carriages into pumpkins. But case officers had told the coating lie for so long, and so well, in so many places, that most outworld partisans we worked with had heard it and believed it.

  At least so far.

  Alia returned the case to the spot where she got it, then stepped over the still-twitching rhizodont and relieved Pyt on the tiller.

  Pyt watched her go, then said to me, “It’s ironic. The Trueborns do these things because they don’t trust Iridians.”

  I shook my head. “That’s got nothing to do with it. When you’re as far from home as I am, you don’t trust anybody.”

  Pyt stepped over my outstretched legs, went forward, and did sailor things with ropes.

  I sighed. Maybe the myth of Trueborn magic was all that was keeping me alive.

  I sat up in the rocking boat and my shoulder throbbed less due to real Trueborn magic. I wrapped both arms around my knees and also blessed the thousands of little nano ’bots who had exhausted themselves overnight. Their tiny mechanical corpses were now drifting through my veins. They would make their way to my large intestine, then to an uncelebrated burial at sea, in the usual way.

  Later my hosts sat down in the stern and breakfasted on raw trilobite. I wasn’t invited, but wasn’t disappointed. I dug a Meal Utility Desiccated out of one plasteel, then sat with my shoulders against the deck planks while the MUD’s paste heated. Meanwhile, the boat scudded south in silence, driven by what sailors like Kit called a fair wind.

  An hour later I had moved up into the bow and sat next to Pyt as he stood scanning the horizon to our front with brass binoculars. I pointed at my jumbled gear. “I could use a hand to break out some of this.”

  “You want your weapons.”

  “Among other things.”

  Pyt jerked a thumb at the diamond case. “You already have your insurance against Iridian treachery.”

  “I’d like to have some insurance against Tressens.”

  “The nearest Tressens are a hundred miles north, aboard a cutter based at Vilus. The old tub never ventures more than thirty miles from its mooring.”

  The swamp shoreline had given way to pink rock cliffs striped with emerald moss.

  When the fisherman lowered his glasses, I pointed at the landscape and asked, “It is beautiful. Is that Iridia?”

  He shook his head. “The Tressens say Iridia doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Are they right?”

  He shrugged. “You can judge for yourself. After we take you where you’re paying us to take you.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “It’s a straight run down the coast. If the weather remains fair, two days.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you’ll pay us and we’ll leave you alone.” Pyt walked back to the stern and traded places with Alia, who was handling the tiller.

  I sighed.

  Two days. Howard Hibble liked to quote a long-dead Trueborn general named Patton, who had said that a commander shouldn’t give soldiers orders, he should give soldiers objectives, then be astonished at their ingenuity in achieving them.

  My objective according to Howard was to find out what the Tressens and the Yavi were up to, and report back. My objective according to me was to find Kit. It seemed to me that the two objectives were compatible, but mine came first. Now that I was free of Howard, I had two days to devise my plan to find her. It wouldn’t be easy.

  She had left no trail as far as the spooks knew. Her team’s uplink and transponders were as silent as mine. I knew the landing-zone coordinates where Kit had disembarked. I knew her mission, which was the same as mine. I knew what equipment she carried. Most importantly, I knew her and how she thought, maybe as well as any living human being did.

  Still, I was searching for what the Trueborns called a needle in a haystack. Worse, the haystack was an entire planet. Worst of all, the needle was trying not to be found, and Kit Born excelled at that. I held my arm, which throbbed worse now that I was moving around, and probably hurt more because I didn’t know what to do next.

  Alia came forward, carrying the binoculars, and settled across from me in the bow, replacing Pyt as lookout. But Alia stared at me, wide-eyed. “Did you really fly through the sky?”

  I winced at a shoulder twinge. “Trueborns can’t fly. I fell.”

  Alia pointed across the boat toward my helmet, which sat upside down beside me. “What do all those things in there do?”

  “Nothing you need to know. Look, I need to think—”

  She reached for my helmet. I snatched it away and jerked my thumb at Pyt. “Didn’t your father teach you to leave other people’s stuff alone?”

  “Pyt’s not my father. I mean, he is, but not my real one.”

  “Oh. What happened?”

  She looked down at the binoculars and fiddled with the focus ferrule. “Pyt won’t tell me. At least not all of it. That’s the worst part.”

  I swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
>
  I poked two fingers inside the helmet and switched on the visor displays. Then I slipped the helmet over the girl’s head, and she grinned out at me through the faceplate while the displays cycled before her eyes like multicolored butterflies.

  “Stop playing! You’re on watch!” Pyt shouted, frowning, while he worked the tiller.

  Alia began tugging the helmet off.

  I patted it back onto her head. “Push your chin against the soft knob on the left. The second one.”

  She pushed, then gasped as the green reticle frame of the mag optics framed her eyes. “Binoculars!”

  I grinned in at her. “Better. And they work in the dark.”

  Alia turned her face forward and scanned the horizon. “I just saw a fish jump! I could’ve counted his scales!”

  “If you select loop memory, you can go back to the image and you can count them. It records what you—”

  “Smoke!” Alia pointed at the horizon. I looked where she pointed, but saw nothing.

  Pyt called Alia back to take the tiller, then ran forward, snatched the binoculars from her, and trained them in the direction where the girl continued to stare. “Where away?”

  The girl pointed. “Four points starboard.”

  Pyt peered through the binoculars, shaking his head. “There’s nothing—” Then he gripped the binoculars tighter. “Gods!”

  Alia looked up at Pyt. “Is it a cutter?”

  I looked where he pointed. Now a tiny black smudge shimmered on the blue horizon.

  “What else makes that much smoke?” Pyt lowered his glasses and chewed his lip. “How the hell would they know we’re here?” He cut his eyes away from his binoculars and stared at me. “More to the point, why would they care?”

  I motioned to Alia, now back at the tiller, to take off my helmet. As she tugged, Pyt cupped a hand and shouted back, “Make for the Inside Passage!”

  Alia held out the helmet to me. I reached for it just as the girl responded to Pyt’s course-change order.

  Before I touched my helmet, the boat heeled over, turning shoreward, and my helmet rolled, then bounced across the curved deck like a bowling ball.

  I scuttled on hands and knees through the bilge sloshing in the boat’s belly. For what seemed like minutes, I pursued my helmet. Each time I caught up to it, Pyt ordered evasive action, the boat changed direction, and my helmet and I tumbled in opposite directions like spilled marbles in a bowl.

  Pyt snapped, “They’re unlimbering the four-inch!”

  Our boat heeled over again, and for the second time I cursed myself for failing to break weapons out of the sub pod. A TAR’s stock against my sore shoulder would have felt good just now, even if sinking a tub full of Tressen bullies would cause an interplanetary incident.

  “Muzzle flash!” Pyt shoved Alia flat.

  Moments later I heard the overhead rush of an artillery round, then the following report of its firing.

  Whoomp!

  A high-explosive round detonated in water nearby. The boat rocked and threw me onto my back.

  Pyt sniffed. “One hundred yards long if it was one!”

  I didn’t sniff with him. Tressens were capable gunners, given the equipment they had. The next round would be fired from even shorter range, as the distance diminished between the warship and our tiny fishing boat.

  I gave up on my helmet chase and poked my bare head above the gunwale.

  The cutter was close enough to see with my naked eyes, now. Two hundred feet of gray, angular, riveted iron, she trailed black smoke from her stacks and pushed white water off her bow, what Kit had called a bone in her teeth.

  My tank commander’s eyes made the range just over a mile, closing fast.

  The four-inch gun on the cutter’s foredeck flashed again. I counted heartbeats.

  Whoomp!

  White water geysered again, this time a hundred yards short of us.

  The Tressen swabbies had bracketed us with just two rounds.

  I craned my neck and looked out across the bow. A narrow opening in the hundred-foot-tall pink cliffs lay dead ahead of us. How far? Three hundred yards? Too far?

  The muzzle flashed again. Alia heeled us so violently that lines groaned and snapped.

  Whoom!

  The round’s concussion lifted our bow and tumbled me backward, away from the gunwale. Spray rained down into the boat and trickled off my face to puddle in my armor’s neck seal.

  A Tressen four-inch naval gun delivered a thirty-one-pound high-explosive projectile. I had seen old 105 mm howitzer projectiles that weighed half that much level small houses. One round on target would vaporize this boat and everybody in it.

  The girl’s maneuver had fooled the Tressen gunners, who had led us just too far. They were too good to be fooled twice.

  Pyt picked his way over nets, rope, and the twitching fish to the stern and pushed Alia away from the tiller and forward, toward me. “Over the side with the both of you! You can swim to shore. Once they get the boat, they won’t bother to come after you.”

  Alia clung to the mast. “I won’t leave you, Pyt!”

  If I left the boat and my equipment without at least one local partisan to guide and vouch for me, I would once again be an ignorant stranger with no hope of finding Kit, much less busting the Yavis’ plot. I flicked my eyes from Alia to Pyt. “I’m staying.”

  Our boat bobbed in the waves. While the three of us stared at one another, stalemated.

  Great. In crises, one course of action that usually fails is doing nothing.

  I stood and visored a hand above my eyes. I held my breath and watched for the next, and final, muzzle flash.

  Seventeen

  “Hold your fire!”

  The Tressen cutter captain’s jaw dropped. He lowered his field glasses and turned, chest out, to the tall man in civilian clothes who stood beside him on the cutter’s bridge. “What, sir?”

  Polian lowered his own glasses, which had been focused on the tiny sailboat in the distance. But he kept his eyes on it. “Hold your fire, Captain!”

  The captain frowned but barked over his shoulder, “Hold fire!”

  “Hold fire, aye!”

  The captain’s command was relayed as the gun crew ahead of and beneath the bridge slammed a shell into the four-inch deck gun’s breech, locked it in place, then scurried aside and stood at attention on the plank deck.

  The captain’s eyes bugged beneath gray brows at Polian. “Sir, it is bad enough that I have, at your insistence, wasted fuel oil and ammunition pursuing some lober boat. I have found it for you. Now you intend to let it get away?”

  Polian kept his eyes on the tiny boat as it inchwormed from wave crest to trough, toward the cliffs. “I do not.”

  “Then may I ask—?”

  “No.”

  Eighteen

  I finally captured my helmet, tugged it on, sealed the neck ring watertight, and ducked below the gunwale.

  When the cutter’s deck gun fired for effect, my armor would probably protect me from shell splinters and the secondary shrapnel which the boat would become. It was probable, but less so, that the Eternads would save me from concussion pulverization. I’d had tanks shot out from under me, even dinosaurs. But never a boat.

  I knelt in bilge, listening to it slop and to my heart thump. I looked left and saw Pyt huddled, his body shielding Alia, who squirmed to peek over the gunwale.

  If it hadn’t been for me, the two of them wouldn’t be facing this. I scuttled to them and spread my armored arms across the two of them. As if it could help.

  Finally I realized that I should have been hearing the shriek of an incoming round or the blast of the round’s detonation. But all I heard was water swish and raspy breathing.

  How long since the last round? A decent naval deck-gun crew, even while adjusting fire between shots, should put a round downrange every ten seconds.

  It had easily been over a minute since the last shot.

  I chinned up my helmet optics and focused
on the cutter’s deck gun. The stripe-shirted crew stood lined up at attention, as they had when I looked last. They should have been spinning elevation and deflection handwheels, ramming a shell home, something.

  I turned to Pyt, who still kept a hand on the tiller as we ran for the cliffs. “Why are they waiting?”

  He turned back to me, eyes wide, and shrugged.

  I turned and looked across the waves at the shadowed shelter of the rift in the cliffs.

  I shook my head and said to nobody, “Too far.”

  Nineteen

  Polian gripped the cutter bridge’s steel rail ahead of him. He was a ground trooper. It had never occurred to him that large ships could move so violently that handrails were needed. But that hadn’t stopped him from commandeering her.

  When Polian had read the Tressen report that the regularly scheduled Trueborn cruiser would dip lower to conduct “atmospheric tests,” the paper had seemed to stick to his fingers. The Trueborns were providing too much information. An undercurrent tugged at his instincts.

  Until the delegation currently circling the planet above him in that cruiser arrived on the surface of Tressel, Major Ruberd Polian was Yavet’s ranking representative on Tressel. As such he was free to chase every undercurrent that tugged at his instincts.

  The bookish boy finally had an opportunity to be the bold one, and Polian had seized it.

  But why would the Trueborns even bother with such a ruse? The Tressens barely believed that giant ships, invisible beyond the atmosphere, really circled their planet, anyway. They would never have noticed.

  Polian had plotted the track of the orbiting cruiser on a Tressen globe in a wooden stand, using a length of twine. How convenient that the Trueborns had chosen to sample the atmosphere one hundred miles above a desolate part of the Iridian coast, far from prying eyes.

  It was probably an inconsequential coincidence. After all, unlike Yavet, most of sparsely populated Tressel was far from prying eyes. But good intelligence officers didn’t believe in coincidence.

  Polian was convinced that the remaining Trueborn spy of the pair was at large, and a threat to expose the Yavi presence, if not the mission itself, here on Tressel. The “atmospheric sampling” was too coincidental. Were the Trueborns somehow picking up the at-large team member? If not, was he—or she—uplinking critical information about the hidden developments in the Arctic? Polian had weighed the risks, and he had acted.