Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  My pistol clattered on the crypt’s rock floor.

  Only then did a silhouette glide out of the shadows toward me. The woman was as tall as I was, slim and athletic. She wore a simple battle-dress uniform, trousers bloused over boots, and a single ammunition bandolier crossed her chest. Her hair was blonde and pulled back, and I guessed she was in her forties. Her eyes were even more bright emerald than Pyt’s or Alia’s, and she carried herself with that confidence common to Trueborns but uncommon in outworlders. When she turned her head, her silhouette against the torchlight matched the profile of the young woman whose stone image adorned the sarcophagus. I smiled in spite of my predicament. Reports of the death of the fifty-seventh duchess were exaggerated.

  Pyt stepped toward her and dropped his head. “Ma’am.”

  She flicked a hand, motioning him closer. He whispered in her ear.

  She stared at me with those big eyes, her chin elevated. In fatigues and over forty, she was a knockout. She must have been a goddess at her coming-out party.

  She said, “Lieutenant Jazen Parker. Pyt says that you’re odd for a Trueborn.”

  I stood motionless, then swallowed, and the blade’s steel pressed against my Adam’s apple. Head back, I croaked, “I wouldn’t believe much Pyt says. He also told me you were dead. Ma’am.”

  She smiled. “It can be a convenient fiction.”

  “Yep. You could’ve had the diamonds for nothing and been rid of me.”

  She glanced at the rifles pointed at me. “We still can.”

  I shifted my weight, and the blade at my throat scraped unshaved whiskers. “We need help. It’s in your interest to help us.”

  She smiled. “Forgive my skepticism. Iridians have met few Trueborns they could trust.”

  “Me, too.”

  She raised her eyebrows and half smiled. “That sounds familiar.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “I—why?”

  She waved away the man who held a knife to my throat.

  He frowned, then withdrew his blade and stepped back with a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Celline leaned toward me and squinted.

  I rubbed my throat. “What is it?”

  She stepped back and glanced over at the man who had held the knife to my throat. “Can we make it across the Corridor at the appropriate time, Captain?”

  “Of course, ma’am. We always have.”

  “I mean if we take Lieutenant Parker here with us. He’s favoring a shoulder, and limping.”

  The captain eyed me. “That would be a question for our guest, ma’am.”

  She looked me up and down. “I would bet he has a foot soldier’s genes.”

  It was an odd way to phrase a vote of confidence.

  I pointed at the captain. He was as gray as Pyt and probably older. “I can keep up with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  The captain frowned. “We’d best move out, then, ma’am.”

  She stared at me again and sighed. “This isn’t the time or the place to get to know you, Lieutenant Jazen Parker.”

  After a hundred yards by my pace count, down a tunnel that led away from the crypt, we emerged into the now-moonless darkness of a cool Iridian night.

  Within the first hundred yards I regretted my representation of fitness. My shoulder remained worse than expected, the Iridian boots were hell, and Celline’s troops double-timed when the terrain and light allowed. Sandwiched front and back by two troops with sidearms, I struggled.

  I didn’t know where we were going, or why. I didn’t know who my captors were, though I had a pretty good idea.

  But at least my potential ally was alive, and so was I. Unless the pace killed me. Or my potential ally did.

  Thirty-five

  Polian turned his back to the wind that had screeched unchecked across a hundred miles of drifted snow, all the way from Tressel’s North Pole. He flapped his arms against his Tressen overcoat. However comfortable Tressen clothing otherwise was, it was impossible to keep warm up here in the stuff. Sheep, and wool, still lay eons in Tressel’s future.

  He stepped into the wind shadow thrown by the ice train’s now-still locomotive. The train had reached its northern limit as surely as his overcoat had. It was impossible to travel any farther in any conveyance the Tressens had yet invented.

  He watched his men—now they were Gill’s men, from a chain-of-command standpoint—unload and prep the skimmers. Meanwhile, the Tressens bustled around the train that had brought them all this far.

  Polian and Gill stepped inside a frigid shed and began changing into heated armor for the trip. The skimmers’ thin, retractable canopies were designed to keep sun and rain out, not heat in.

  Gill’s limbs quivered like parchment-swathed branches beneath his underlayer as he tugged on his armor. He gazed out the shed window. Beyond the complex of drifted-over sheds that formed the Northern Terminus of the ice-train railroad, the train that had brought them blasted its whistle and began to move south with a fresh crew.

  Gill pointed at the train as it rolled away. “That train’s going back empty. You said the iron mines are south of here. So why does this place exist?”

  Polian’s teeth chattered as he pointed past the sheds at the never-melted snow. “No function, today. Years ago, this is where the Tressens brought the Iridian troublemakers.” There was, Polian remembered, a Tressen saying that the only Iridian who didn’t make trouble was a dead one. “After the war, Iridians were forced from their lands and told they were being relocated north to settle the northern wilderness. That was a raw deal. But about what the Iridians expected from the Tressens. They boarded the trains grudgingly, but they boarded. Of course, they would have balked at the truth.”

  “What was the truth?”

  “The Tressens hauled the Iridians up here by the trainload, like cattle. Then they dumped them into fenced-off compounds in the snow without food, water, or shelter. The Iridians died of exposure, dehydration, starvation. There was a macabre efficiency to it. All it took was enough personnel at this end to assure the trains could be turned around, and to keep the Iridians inside the fences until nature killed them.”

  Gill stared into the darkness, and Polian wondered what he was thinking.

  Polian said, “The Tressens didn’t even need to bury the bodies. They just let the wind cover them with snow. If our train had stopped during the last sixty miles, you couldn’t have walked a hundred feet from the tracks without tripping over a corpse.”

  “This is the graveyard of a nation?” It was cold, but Gill shivered visibly.

  Polian nodded. “When the bodies filled up one compound, the Tressens just extended the ice road a bit farther north and fenced off a new compound. Nobody at the south end had any idea what was going on because this place is so inaccessible.”

  Gill sighed. “Did you ever wonder whether we’re so different, Major?”

  Polian stared at his new boss. If you have more people than resources, why waste the latter growing the former to adulthood? An overquota Yavi terminated at birth wasted no resources and created minimal societal entanglements. That wasn’t cruel. It was basic civics to every Yavi. Especially to Yavi like Polian, whose father, the vice cop, terminated Illegals daily. When you thought about it, Iridians were just Illegals who had already consumed more than their share.

  Polian and Gill buckled into their skimmer seats, and the skimmer’s relief driver pulled the compartment door shut behind them. The hovercraft’s starter whined, then it rose and wobbled in the wind.

  Polian wrinkled his brow as he stared out at glistening white snow and steel-blue sky. It almost seemed like Gill questioned the basic morality of the society he had defended for all his life.

  Well, if Gill did question Yavi society, that was more than the Trueborns did with Trueborn society. Their blindness to their own idiocy took away an impartial observer’s breath. An “inalienable right” to life was not only absurd, it begat chaos. Idiots begat more idiots. Trueborns thought they dominated the Union
because they were just, but the truth was that they were just lucky.

  The driver backed the skimmer off the platform, spun it around, and idled two feet above the crusted snow. The escort skimmer, bearing the protective troops, fell in behind them, then the little convoy shot north across the barren whiteness.

  Polian gazed out through the skimmer’s side curtain as the featureless snow whisked past. The nations of Earth still fought among themselves. The Trueborns allowed idiots to beget idiots; then the productive parts of Trueborn society supported them. Worse, because they were lucky enough to control interstellar travel, the Trueborns exported their idiots and their idiocy.

  Polian sat back, let the skimmer’s vibration lull him, and smiled. Well, the Trueborns’ luck was about to change.

  Thirty-six

  The Iridian rebel column of which I had become an unwelcome part marched like foot cavalry until the first pale light of Tressel’s sun diluted the darkness. As it became brighter, I could see that they were aging foot cavalry, but spry for geezers.

  We halted suddenly, by which time my borrowed boots had raised, then broken, blisters on both my feet. I estimated by pace count that we had moved inland fourteen miles.

  Alia, who had been tasked to lead three soldiers back to retrieve, then carry, my gear, came and knelt alongside me while I sat on a rock and tugged off one of my Iridian boots.

  The brushy knoll atop which we had halted offered some cover. I looked out across the dimly visible broad valley that stretched away to our north and south and swung my hand. “Is this the Bloody Corridor?”

  Alia cocked her head. “How do you know about the Corridor?”

  “I did my homework. That’s what you should be doing. Not playing soldier.”

  “I’m not playing!” She turned away and crossed her arms.

  According to the case brief, the naked, jumbled rock terrain that comprised the Iridian coastaI zone was a fifteen-mile-wide maze of flooded channels and jumbled ridges and canyons. It stretched north all the way to the Barrens, and the swamp’s natural barrier defined part of the Iridian-Tressen boundary. The inland portion of northern Iridia was a plateau carpeted with impenetrable tree-fern forests.

  A single, mile-wide rift valley, the Iridian Corridor, bisected Iridia at the transition between the coastal zone and the Iridian Central Plateau.

  After the war, when the Tressens needed a railroad to bring oppressors in to Iridia and take spoils out, they chose the easiest route, which was down the Corridor’s flat, unforested center.

  Emerging industrial cultures live and die by their railroads. The Trueborns fought incessant internecine wars that they misnamed “civil.” Jefferson Davis, a warlord during one of them, had observed that an invading army dangles within an invaded country like a spider, suspended from the slender thread of the supply line that connects it to its home. In Davis’s America, and in post-war Iridia, steel rails, not silk, formed that fragile thread.

  The Iridian rebels hid in the forests of the Iridian Plateau, from which they raided the Tressen railroad, cut the spider’s thread, then disappeared. In response, the Tressens built a string of fortified strongpoints up and down the railroad. At first, the fortified line was there to protect the railroad, and to split Iridia in two, with the interior cut off from the sea. Later, the strongpoints served as bait. The Tressens tried to draw the dwindling rebel army into set-piece battles, by which the Tressens could bleed it. The conventional wisdom was that every yard of what came to be called the Bloody Corridor was a death trap. That was probably hyperbole, but I wasn’t looking forward to crossing a mile of open ground to prove it.

  Nonetheless, ten minutes later I had my boots back on, and our platoon-sized unit dispersed in a line along the brushy ridge, crouched, and waited.

  As the dawn trickled light across the Corridor, I saw the railroad, no more than a fragile black ribbon, a half mile to our front, laid across a mossy plain. A half mile beyond the rails the ground sloped upward to the Plateau’s still-dark and welcome forest.

  The Corridor was heavily fortified at points where rebel attacks had succeeded in the past, and at bottlenecks where repairs to destroyed track would be difficult. This place was neither, just a slightly narrow section of the valley. Today, Celline wanted safe passage, not a fight.

  I fidgeted and whispered to Alia, “Okay. I know that you’re not playing. We’re going to cross a mile of open ground in a line, to minimize our exposure time. But every minute we wait, it gets lighter. Why?”

  “Celline knows what she’s doing.” Alia cupped a hand behind her ear. “Listen.”

  Whooo.

  The distant steam whistle echoed, faint and on our right.

  Six minutes later, a five-car Tressen armored train chugged past us, headlight burning a yellow hole in the dark, trailing an inky snake of black smoke spewed by the moss-refined oil that powered Tressen civilization. Behind the locomotive and tank tender rumbled an iron-riveted, enclosed troop car. An armored, manned guard turret whiskered with machine guns grew from the car’s roof like an angular wart. Behind the troop cars trundled two empty flatcars, their decks ajangle with tie-down chains.

  Likely, on some days, the flatcars carried armored cars that could be ramped off to chase down items of interest—such as us—that the train’s lookouts spotted on its morning run to clear the corridor for the day’s traffic.

  My heart pounded. Even without mech support, the troops on that train, and their heavier weapons, would cut Celline’s merry band into fish bait if they spotted us.

  Alia pointed to our left, in the direction the train was bound. “The train stops every morning three miles south, at the strongpoint beyond that rise. The train brings hot breakfast and mail. Any patrol that might have spotted us will have turned for home as soon as they heard the whistle. That’s why we cross here.”

  The strength of regular armies was disciplined adherence to established procedure. The weakness of regular armies was that irregular armies turned that strength against them.

  The train vanished over the rise, and the rebels, Alia, and I were off at a dead run, downslope in the half light, each soldier maintaining separation and depth with the soldiers on his flanks. Occasionally, a section leader would slow or speed up an element with a hand signal.

  Trueborn infantry still were instructed in troop movement without intra-unit radios, but I doubted that the average contemporary grunt could get out of his own way without a noncom in his ear.

  Every trooper hit the gravel roadbed within a five-second interval, and the formation slowed for a heartbeat while we trued the line.

  As we paused on the elevated roadbed, I wrinkled my nose and asked Alia, “What stinks?”

  She pointed between the cross ties, at a litter of rotted fish flesh and bone. “The trains that go north carry fish to make fertilizer for Tressen. The railroad always smells like this.”

  We crossed the tracks and ran, maybe faster to escape the smell, and were in among the fern trees on the opposite slope ten minutes later, without incident.

  Two miles into the woods we stopped again. My feet screamed, my lungs burned, and I bent, hands on knees, gasping, while the unit set a defensive perimeter.

  In contemporary warfare, regular infantry, with their sensory advantage, own the night and laager up by day. On most outworlds the situation was reversed. Darkness was the irregulars’ friend, not the regulars’. We would laager here for the day.

  Fine by me.

  Celline’s troops dug fighting holes, then settled down in them to eat and sleep in shifts. Our defensive position had been well chosen, in a thicket so dense that a dragonfly, much less a Tressen, couldn’t have walked within fifty yards without being heard. I dug a hole anyway.

  Nobody offered to share trilobite jerky, which didn’t hurt my feelings. I hotted up a Meal Utility Desiccated, salved my blisters, shot up my shoulder, and slept for three hours.

  “A word, Lieutenant Parker?”

  I woke to see Celline
bent, hands on knees, over me.

  I sat up, rubbed my face. “Sure. Yes, ma’am.”

  We walked to a trickling stream that lay within the defensive perimeter but out of earshot of the others.

  The duchess sat on a flat rock and motioned me to sit on one across from her.

  The afternoon was warm, and dragonflies hummed at a distance, just loud enough to be heard above the gurgle of water over the stones.

  She rested her elbow on a raised knee and cupped her chin in her hand. “What am I going to do with you?”

  I had expected some diplomatic foreplay. On Earth I saw a holomentary about the queen of England meeting commoners. Mostly she asked them where they were from. I cleared my throat. “Grant me a favor, I hope. Ma’am.”

  “The favors Iridia has done for the Trueborns in the past were repaid with treachery.”

  I squirmed on my rock. She had the diamonds, which would buy a lot of boots and ammunition, but the deal had been that they earned me an audience, not a favor. A case officer’s first rule vis-à-vis local allies was that a deal was a deal. The second rule was to find something you and your host could agree on.

  “I understand, ma’am. Where I grew up nobody trusted the Trueborns, either.”

  “Oh. Tell me about where you grew up.”

  I sat back. Suddenly our negotiation had regressed into small talk. Maybe the custom in Iridia was that the monarch small-talked later, rather than sooner.

  What to say about my heritage? There are two kinds of Yavi Illegals. Those who lie about it and dead ones. But one reason I had quit the spook business was because I was tired of lying. I leaned forward, hands on knees. “I was born on Yavet.”

  She cocked her head, frowned. “You look—I find that hard to believe, Lieutenant.”

  “I look Trueborn because my parents were Trueborns.”