Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  Pyt sipped tea. “The best.”

  “She’s almost been killed three times since I met her. Why would you involve an eleven-year-old girl in something like this?”

  “It takes two to sail the boat, especially if one has just half a hand. Iridia has too few grown sons left. Besides, she insisted.”

  I snorted. “She’s a child. You could have said no.”

  Pyt set his mug down in the moss and shook his head. “Jazen, if an Iridian owes a blood favor, the obligation passes to the legacy. Alia’s family saved my life.”

  “Oh.” I cocked my head. “Alia said you wouldn’t tell her what happened to her parents. It sounds like something heroic happened. Why should that be a secret?”

  Pyt stared at the ground while he answered me. “The situation is very complex.”

  I nodded. “Right.” It was a crappy, evasive answer. No crappier or more evasive than what Howard Hibble wouldn’t tell me about my parents. And I didn’t have time to deal with complex collateral crap here and now.

  One hundred yards from the two of us, atop a rise that must have had a terrific view, angular piles of stone shone black, lit in animate shadows by the racing moon.

  I pointed at the stone piles. “That was a building once. What is this place?”

  Pyt said, “The last place on Tressel where the Tressens would look for us.”

  “That’s a good place to be. But why?”

  He turned a full circle, pointing into the darkness. “They think this place frightens and shames Iridians.”

  I wrinkled my forehead and shrugged. “It’s quiet. It’s pretty.”

  “It was meant to teach us a lesson. Jazen, this was—is—Cella.”

  I nodded and whistled. Cella had been the home of the grand dukes of Northern Iridia. The castle had served as the seat of Iridian government for six centuries. It had symbolized everything that Iridians loved about their land and their way of life. Its image was even on Iridian money.

  We sat in an elongate, weathered depression perhaps eight feet wide and two feet deep. The depression stretched away into the darkness in both directions. It was overgrown with the local moss that passed for grass. I scuffed the moss with my boot toe and turned up a corroded cartridge case. “This was one of the siege trenches?”

  Pyt nodded. “The rains collapsed them years ago.”

  After the Tressens, with Trueborn help, won the last war between the Tressens and the Iridians, the Tressens had occupied Iridia. They also denied Iridians the right to own property, the right to procreate more Iridians, and the right to vote. Voting’s no big deal in a dictatorship, but the other stuff rankled the Iridians.

  The Tressens knew that the difference between a rankled mob and an effective rebellion is leadership. Therefore, they hanged the sitting grand duke of Iridia, ending a benign patriarchy that had been stable for six centuries. The Tressens also took over Cella. This was supposed to decapitate any potential rebellion. But the Iridians stole their duke’s body back. The Tressens responded to this act of defiance by rounding up and exterminating all the Iridians they could lay hands on. What followed, as the Trueborns say, was history.

  The history chips mark the beginning of the organized Iridian Rebellion as the day that Iridian rebels stormed and retook Cella. Celline, the last duke’s maiden daughter, led them. Celline thus became the first duchess of Iridia in six hundred years who did more than christen ships and throw alms to the poor from a balcony, while her duke ran the country.

  Pyt stood, and I followed him up the rise to the castle’s ruins. He knelt in front of the first half-buried granite block we came to, laid his forehead against the stone, closed his eyes, and sobbed.

  I bowed my head, too, but watched him from the corner of one eye.

  Celline’s rebellion had begun well, with the symbolic reoccupation of Cella. However, the Tressens had a knack for nipping stuff in the bud. They marched an expeditionary force of two full divisions to Cella, surrounded it, and laid siege. Cella’s defenders, ill equipped and outnumbered four hundred against twenty thousand, vowed to die rather than surrender.

  The Tressens were happy to oblige them. But the Iridians defended the castle with skill and courage for fifty-one days. Three thousand Tressen troops died retaking Cella, which reduced their happiness. Therefore, the Tressens publicly mutilated the Iridian defenders’ bodies. Then they hung them from Cella’s spires and blew the place to rubble. Then they burned the rubble.

  Afterward, the Tressen troops took turns urinating on the smoldering ashes. Apparently, in Iridian religion, that prevents dead souls from entering the afterlife. Nice touch.

  After a minute, Pyt stood, stared at the ground, and wiped his eyes. “This is consecrated ground to an Iridian. Do you know what was done here?”

  “I do. They were very brave.” Actually, they were more than brave. Martyrs usually get nothing for their sacrifice but remembered. But the stand made by Cella’s defenders diverted and tied up the Tressen expeditionary force for almost two months. That allowed Celline, who, to the Tressen’s dismay, turned out to have left Cella, to organize a proper rebellion. It persisted for decades, an everlasting carbuncle on the Tressen body politic.

  The rebellion’s persistence, I supposed, was why Howard had used whatever feeble contacts Earth still had on Tressel to entice some Iridian rebels to pluck me from the sea and bring me to Celline. In the absence of a proper indigenous intelligence apparatus on Tressel, I was supposed to persuade Celline to help us crack the Yavi-Tressen plot, and, if feasible, determine the fate of my predecessor case officer.

  Thus the diamonds. Frankly, my spook and Legion experience had taught me that idealistic insurgents wouldn’t trust a meddling superpower just for money. If all you brought rebels was diamonds, they would likely take them, then run. Or take them, then kill you. Too many case officers had learned that lesson the hard way.

  But Howard Hibble was supposed to be the premier genius of espionage poker in human history, and I was just a GI schooled by hard knocks. So if Howard thought Celline’s cooperation could be bought for diamonds alone, I had to play the card that Howard had dealt me.

  However, I couldn’t even try to bribe Celline until I found her.

  I looked around at the so-called rendezvous. The night was still, except for insect thrum and distant wave rumble. If the most important Iridian alive was nearby, where were the sentries? I had been lied to enough in my life to know that Pyt had lied to me about what happened to Alia’s parents. I began to wonder again about Pyt and Alia’s bona fides. Whatever local asset of Howard’s had contacted them had probably been naive. Certainly, the asset had been untrained. Had we been spoofed by imposters? Were these two just swindlers out to score a handful of diamonds?

  I eyed my ’puter. “Pyt, you’re supposed to be helping me. How long do I have to wait?”

  He snorted. “The Trueborns were supposed to help Iridia. We’re still waiting.”

  My doubts resurged. Even if Pyt and Alia were rebels rather than petty crooks, Howard Hibble had pinned Earth’s hopes on my gaining the trust of a people whom Earth had sold out. Twice.

  Not that Howard had a better option. Earth’s intel apparatus on most outworlds was awful. On Tressel, it was nonexistent.

  Earth’s outworld intelligence gap had arisen logically enough. On Earth, modern nations spied on one another by electronic eavesdropping, by database hacking, and by delegating hands-on rough stuff to remote ’bots. Live spying was a lost art.

  But outworld cultures like Tressel’s barely had telephone wires to tap. They certainly had no ’puters to hack. If you wanted their secrets, somebody had to break into a file cabinet and take them. It was easier to train a human case officer to pick a lock than it was to program ’bots for the operational nuances of five hundred different worlds. And cheaper. Which, in the post-war fever to cut defense budgets, counted for more.

  So, on the outworlds, the Trueborns had relearned to spy the old fashioned way. Routine on-plane
t gathering was handled by spooks who posed as embassy officials, and as business travelers. These imposters recruited and handled sources among the locals.

  Rough or sneaky stuff was left to a new generation of human blunt instruments, case officers like Kit Born and even me. We got briefed, imported into a situation, then we worked with intel and logistic support from each planet’s permanent embassy spooks. We did whatever we were ordered to do, then we got out. Some places the system worked.

  But on Tressel, Earth had shut down its embassy and cut trade ties years before. This was supposed to harshly punish the Tressen butchery. To me, helping the butchered by abandoning them to the butchers seemed idiotic. Maybe that’s why I was a blunt instrument, not a diplomat.

  The diplomatic quarantine of Tressel, breached only by a trickle of “humanitarian” contacts, left the planet cut off, blind and deaf about the rest of the universe. But the quarantine reciprocally left the Union’s sole superpower blind and deaf about Tressel. And so I was left to depend on one-handed Pyt and eleven-year-old Alia.

  “Your stuff’s all ashore, Jazen.” Alia walked up the rise to us, boots dripping.

  I turned to Pyt. “Now what?”

  “Now we take you to Celline. In return for which you give us clean diamonds.”

  Pyt led Alia and me past the ruins, away from the water, and down into a rocky valley. The moon set, and in the suddenly black night Pyt and Alia lit torches to light the way. Without snoops, I needed the light as much as they did.

  We descended the valley for five miles, by my pace count, until Pyt halted us at a rock overhang. The gap beneath the overhang was filled by overgrown cut stone. A rusted iron gate blocked the wall’s only opening.

  Pyt handed his torch to Alia, who held it while Pyt manipulated the gate latch.

  When Pyt tugged the gate open, the metal screech echoed in the darkness.

  I had to crouch as I followed Pyt down the passage that led away from the gate. The flickering torchlight lit walls scarred by tools. The passage was more mine shaft than cave. A hundred yards in, the passage widened and its ceiling rose, so high that the torchlight didn’t illuminate it. Cool air that fluttered the torch flames told me there was another way out.

  Dim shapes hunched in the darkness, stretching away in a double row. Pyt walked to the first one and held his torch above it. The thing was a waist-high granite box ten feet long, with a carved lid.

  Pyt said. “This is the crypt of the dukes of Iridia. We came in through the original entrance. You are looking at the sarcophagus of the first duke.”

  “The history books don’t mention this place.”

  Pyt shook his head. “Iridia’s been at war with Tressen off and on for six centuries. Family crypts are private places.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. If I were a God-fearing Iridian with hopes for the afterlife, I wouldn’t want Tressens peeing on my grave, either.

  Alia and Pyt led on up the center aisle, torches held high, with me trailing behind in the dark. We walked between two rows of sarcophagi, the fifty-six dukes of Iridia on our left and their duchesses on our right. Our breathing and footfalls echoed off the chamber walls.

  The stonework became more ornate and skillful the farther we went, as the dukes got richer, the coffin makers more skilled, and their tools and materials more sophisticated. At about three hundred years before the present, the sarcophagus lids began to bear carved, reclining likenesses of their occupants.

  The more I thought about it, the more secure this meeting place seemed. Obviously, the Tressens didn’t know it was here, or it would have been razed years ago. There were apparently at least two ways out, and the narrow, echoing entry passages prevented approaches by bad guys in numbers, or without warning. So Celline and her infrastructure might be competent, after all.

  My step picked up. It was easier to persuade competents than fools. If I could persuade her, I might find Kit after all. I might even accomplish my mission for Howard.

  Things were looking up.

  When we reached the casket of Duke fifty-six, the one whose hanging precipitated the rebellion, I realized that I had been counting the ducal caskets to my left as we walked.

  I also realized that the row of duchess caskets to my right didn’t end.

  Hair stood on my neck as Pyt passed his torch above the fifty-seventh casket in the duchess’s row.

  The sarcophagus’s lid was set with the alabaster death mask of a young woman, hands folded across her chest. Where the prior duchesses held dainty carved stone bouquets, or jeweled scepters, the young woman clasped the hilt of a simple broadsword.

  My jaw hung open as I squinted from the sarcophagus lid to Pyt and back. “What the hell? Are you telling me—”

  “Our arrangement was to take you to see Celline. Here she is. We’ve performed fully.”

  I stood in the darkness, sputtering. “I—she’s dead? Celline’s a fucking mythic figurehead?”

  “Hardly a myth.”

  “When did she die?”

  Pyt paused, glanced sideways. “Years ago. The rebellion would have died with her if the word had gotten out.”

  I stepped back deeper into the shadows and leaned against Duke fifty-six’s casket. Pyt was right. Morale-wise, one living legend is worth a thousand pep talks. But if there was no Celline to direct a rebellion, there was no Celline for me to persuade. And without her live leadership, reports of the health of the Iridian rebellion were probably overstated anyway. All I had seen of that rebellion was these two.

  I stared at Pyt and Alia. “Then are you just a couple of diamond thieves, after all?”

  Alia stepped toward me, chest out. “We’re patriots, not thieves.”

  I pointed from Pyt to Alia. “Assuming I believe that, do you two have a network? Eyes and ears to help me locate another Trueborn agent on Tressel?”

  They stood mute. Of course they didn’t.

  I sighed, then held out the diamond case to Alia. “Here. Not that you’ve earned ’em. But before you die, you might as well meet one guy who keeps his promises.”

  Alia narrowed her eyes. “What about the coating, Jazen?”

  I shook my head. “The coating’s phony. Just like your warrior queen. The diamonds are fine.”

  Alia’s lower lip stuck out. “You lied to us. Heroes don’t lie.”

  “You lied to me! Everybody lies, Alia. Welcome to life.”

  Pyt said, “I’m sorry, Jazen.”

  “Sorry?” I threw my hands up in the darkness. “What do I do now? I need intelligence, not transgenerational con men.” I sat cross-legged on the floor in the dark and rubbed my forehead. I could leave these two and find a safe open spot to lay out my phone-home panels. With luck I’d be on my way off this clown show of a rock within a couple of months.

  Alia opened her mouth, but Pyt shushed her.

  Or I could retrace my steps, then stumble around this planet on my own looking for Kit until my accent and my incompetence got me killed.

  I stood and shifted the sidearm at my waist. “See you two around.”

  “No, Jazen!” Alia stepped toward me as I turned, and the light of her torch fell across my face for the first time.

  From the darkness, a woman’s voice gasped.

  I froze there in the torchlight.

  After four heartbeats the voice said, “Who are you?”

  Thirty-three

  Just before midnight on the day after Polian had met General Gill, the two of them dismounted from the Tressen military two-car train that had brought them north on steel rails from the capital. Ice Line Station, on Tressen’s flat, frigid northern prairie, marked the end of that line. The place was just a huddle of huts, windows dark in the night, that existed only because at this place one railroad ended and another began.

  Along with a half-dozen Yavi commandos, Polian and Gill stepped off onto a wind-scoured iron transfer platform that bridged the space between the train that had carried them north and the train aboard which they would continue their jo
urney.

  Oil lamps suspended beneath the platform canopy swayed in the wind, and the lamps threw elongate shadows into the dark beyond the platform.

  All the men lumbered, bundled in civilian Tressen winter wear. Their armor and two skimmers were loaded, beneath tarps, on the flatcar behind the train’s passenger coach.

  Polian walked along the platform, pointing with a blunt mitten at the spiked wheels of the new train’s engine while he leaned toward the general to be heard above the wind. He lectured the general, who walked a pace back, hands clasped behind his back. Beyond the ice train’s black bulk, the frozen river, the riverbank, and the sky merged into a monochrome ebony wall.

  Polian said to Gill, “North of here—the Ice Line—the Tressens don’t lay rails. The rivers are frozen as hard as iron three-fourths of the year, and the mines are inoperable during melt season, anyway. So these locomotives tow sledges on tracks cut in the ice.”

  Gill turned back to the first train as the Tressen platform crew and the commandos rolled the covered skimmers’ cargo pallets across the platform and onto the transfer train’s waiting flat sledge.

  Gill shook his head. “Mag levs on wheels. Straight off a history chip.”

  Polian continued, “Our new train will head north at first light and take us a hundred miles farther. The last hundred miles can only be covered by skimmer.”

  Chains rattled in the darkness as the commandos locked the skimmers down on their new flatcar.

  Gill squinted into the featureless blackness that surrounded them. “So we travel in daylight. Any sights to see along the way?”

  Polian stared into the night. “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  Thirty-four

  My heart skipped at the sound of the woman’s voice. Pyt and Alia had led me into a trap. I reached down and unsnapped my sidearm holster’s flap.

  Before my pistol cleared its holster, the crackle of released rifle safeties echoed off the dark Iridian crypt’s walls. A half-dozen men seemed to materialize from the darkness and formed a semicircle around me, rifles aimed at my head. One stepped forward and pressed a knife long enough to be a sword against my throat while he twisted the sidearm out of my holster.