Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  She sat back and smiled. “I find that easy to believe.” She nodded.

  I said, “But we were separated when I was born. I’ve never met them.”

  Her eyes softened. “That must have devastated your father.”

  My father? I snorted. “It was no picnic for me. The midwife who delivered me raised me, hid me downlevels because I was an Illegal. I finally joined the Legion to dodge the vice cops. After the Legion, I fell into a hitch as a Trueborn case officer. Turned out that the King of the Spooks had served with my father.”

  The duchess’s jaw dropped. Then she nodded. “Ah. Yes. The King of the Spooks. It all makes sense now. Hibble is so—the Trueborns have a word—Byzantine.”

  It was my turn to drop my jaw. “You know Howard?”

  “For too long. Though indirectly. Jazen, are you aware that an Iridian who owes a blood favor to a father owes it to the son as well?”

  I nodded. Like Pyt owed Alia. “Yes, ma’am, I heard that.” I wrinkled my brow. “Are you saying…?”

  “I owe Jason Wander my life, and more.”

  I sat there, still and silent while the dragonflies droned.

  The “unique qualifications” for which Howard Hibble had re-recruited me were my genes. I was the only available Trueborn who still had a friend on Tressel. And an influential friend, at that.

  I shook my head and muttered, “Howard, you devious rat bastard.”

  Celline threw back her head and laughed. “You sound just like your father. He said worse about Hibble. Often. You don’t only look like Jason, you know.”

  “Honestly, ma’am, I barely knew that.” I stared into the shadows. Rat bastard though he was, Howard had made good on his word back in Mousetrap. The answers I had needed all my life were here, at least some of them.

  Celline leaned forward. “But you didn’t come so far to listen to an old woman reminisce. How can I—how can we—help you?”

  “I…” Actually, I ached to listen to her memories of my father. But she was right. Kit could die while Celline told me stories. Or the Yavi could take over the universe. I set my astonishment aside. “I need to find two more Trueborns. Case officers like me. We lost contact with them six weeks ago.”

  She nodded. “Where are they?”

  I squirmed. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “This is a big world, Jazen. And my people are small within it.”

  I nodded. It was futile.

  But she said, “Where do we begin?”

  I rubbed my forehead. A good spook who didn’t want to be found wouldn’t be found, and Kit Born was the best. But, like one of those invisible subatomic particles, a spook could sometimes be identified by the disturbance caused in the surrounding area. “See whether the Tressens have been looking for somebody, somebody unusual. Or if some other people, unusual people, have been looking.”

  She smiled. “The Tressens are always looking for somebody. But I take your point. We are few, but a few sets of eyes and ears still watch out on our behalf. How soon do you need to find your colleagues?”

  I scratched my head. I had witnessed, in fact been the target of, a mechanized attack by Yavi military, operating openly off a Tressen warship. The Cold War between the Trueborns and the Yavi had stayed cold for decades because both sides honored delicate etiquette rules. The Yavi had just broken the rules worse than a food fight in church.

  The Yavi wouldn’t risk turning the Cold War into a hot war unless they were close to something huge. Especially a hot war that, without starships, Yavet could neither wage nor win.

  I frowned at my new old friend and answered her pending question. “Ma’am, we need to find them yesterday.”

  Thirty-seven

  Polian watched the Tressen sun creep along the arctic horizon, low and cold even at mid-morning, its glare veiled behind the snow fog boiling from the skimmer’s skirt. As he watched, the skimmer crossed the red line of outermost sensor pickets, got pinged by the sentry equipment on the defensive perimeter, and sent back the day’s response authentication.

  If the planners had allowed him to equip the Tressens with proper equipment to begin with, the woman never would have gotten close enough to be a problem, either for Yavet or for him.

  The long-coated sentries who flagged the skimmer down, ancient rifles at the ready, were still Tressen. Polian didn’t trust the locals, but Yavi on dirt here remained too scarce to do without.

  Four minutes later, the skimmer cleared inner-perimeter security, then greased to a stop alongside the main excavation. The driver turned to Polian; he nodded, and the skimmer sank onto the snow and shut down.

  Almost before the engine vibration died, Gill was out and legging it through the snow, down into the pit, where the six Yavi combat engineers working the site were drawn up in a tiny rank at attention.

  Polian caught up to Gill, then fell in behind him as the old soldier inspected the troops.

  Gill stepped from one to the other and looked them up and down. Gill, visor up and breath fog curling in the Arctic cold, paused in front of one man, spoke, received a nod back and a laugh, then clapped the kid on an armored shoulder.

  After Polian dismissed his men to return to their work, he turned to Gill. “What would the general like to know about our operation?”

  Gill smiled at him. “Start with everything. Let the old man stop you if he’s already heard it.”

  Polian stepped to soil mounded in the bucket of a hydraulic excavator, dug out a glassy, spherical stone the size of a bird’s egg, and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. It glowed red with inner fire despite the waning daylight. “Cavorite. It took the Slugs three million years to discover and tame it. It took the Trueborns one war to steal and misname it.”

  Gill raised bushy eyebrows as he extended his palm. “What’s wrong with the name?”

  Polian dropped the stone into the general’s glove, and the older man held it up to the sky as he turned it in his fingers.

  Polian smiled. “It’s named for a fictitious Earth metal that was supposed to block gravity.”

  Gill said, “But on Tressel this metal’s for real?”

  Polian shook his head. “No, sir. That is, cavorite’s not metal, and it’s not from Tressel, at least not originally. That stone’s a meteorite that fell here as part of a shower forty thousand years ago.”

  “Fell from where?”

  “That stone is the product of a collision between this universe and another universe that abuts this one. The core mote in that stone isn’t metal. It isn’t even matter. It doesn’t block gravity. It eats it.”

  Gill stared at the stone. “And the mote generates the force that moves starships?”

  “No, sir. Gravity is the force. One of the basic forces of this universe. Cavorite is antithetic to gravity.” Polian took the stone back and turned it. “Right now, this stone, and all the matter in this universe, stays where it is because the gravitational forces generated by the mass of this universe act uniformly on it from all sides.” Polian tipped his hand, and the unsupported stone fell to the snow. “If I take away the gravity pulling on one side of this stone, like I just took away my hand, the gravity of the rest of the universe pulls the stone the other way. Cavorite doesn’t so much block gravity as it eats gravity.”

  Gill toed the stone in the snow. “Doesn’t seem to be hungry just now.”

  Polian smiled as he stooped and retrieved the stone. “Modulating the removal and replacement of the shielding. Harnessing the power. That’s the real secret of C-drive. It’s the part that took the Slugs so long, sir.”

  “And only took the Trueborns the time required to steal it from the little maggots.”

  Polian nodded. “And the Trueborns inherited the only source of propulsion-grade cavorite in the universe, to boot.”

  Polian swung his hand at the surrounding landscape. “But Bren’s not the only source any more! These meteorites are sprinkled across an impact zone a hundred miles long. Clear back acro
ss the trace of the ice-train railroad we came north on. But the quality back there’s unsuited for propulsion.”

  Gill narrowed his eyes. “How did we find this?”

  “We didn’t. Two years ago the Tressens approached one of our missionary teams with a sample that had been gathering dust in a mineral-specimen storeroom. The Tressens had literally stumbled across it when they built the ice-rail line.”

  “I’m surprised they knew what they had.”

  “Actually, they didn’t. At the time the stuff was discovered, the Trueborns still had a diplomatic presence on Tressel. All the Tressens knew was that the Trueborns were inordinately nosy about this stuff.”

  Gill toed a stone in the snow again. “I take it there’s more where this came from?”

  Polian led them up out of the pit, scuffed the snow with his boot for thirty seconds, then bent and plucked up another stone slightly smaller than the first. “The bolides are very low density, and they struck the surface at a low angle. Some buried themselves, but sixty percent of them skidded, bounced, or barely dug in. They’re literally scattered across the surface beneath the snow, even forty thousand years after they fell. When we arrived, we expected it would take months to evaluate the deposit. Then years more to mount a clandestine mining operation.”

  Gill rubbed his chin. “Major, what would the Trueborns do if they knew about this?”

  “If I had their monopoly and found out that it was at risk, I’d go to war to preserve it.”

  Gill nodded. “I agree. And if you’re right about this woman and the fellow in that boat, the Trueborns may be on the brink of finding out.”

  Polian dug another glowing stone from the snow, tossed it in his palm, then dropped it again. As he gazed back to the south, he sighed. Somewhere down there, he was convinced, a Trueborn who had slipped through his fingers like a cavorite stone was doing whatever he could to find out exactly.

  Thirty-eight

  Two days after my conversation with Celline, her group and I had settled in at one of a network of rebel camps that were hidden in the Central Plateau’s forests. Celline shifted constantly among the camps, both to show the flag for her troops’ morale and to minimize the possibility of her capture.

  The camp nestled at the base of an overgrown escarpment peppered with shallow caves. The units in camp spent most of their time training, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that there seemed to be half as many units as there were available billets, and most of the soldiers were so old that they didn’t really seem to need training. One troop wasn’t only younger, she got different training. Pyt tutored Alia daily in everything from algebra to written and spoken Iridian, which the Tressens had outlawed. He also taught her pugil-stick drill.

  A modern army takes real-time communication and surveillance for granted. On Tressel information was exchanged slower, especially among the rebels. Celline had circulated urgent inquiries across the Iridians’ human intelligence network, such as it was, looking for clues for me.

  While I waited for intel returns, I hung out with the only other person on post who had free time and a juvenile streak. One afternoon, with Pyt’s blessing, I chased Alia up a scree slope at the cliff base. I had told him I would give her some escape and evasion training. We were playing hide-and-seek, which, when I thought about it, was pretty much the same thing.

  I scrambled to the junction where the scree met the cliff, panting, and realized that Alia had vanished.

  Then I saw that beyond the scree the cliff tucked back into a cave’s mouth fifty yards wide, a hundred yards deep, and twelve feet tall. More like the underlip of a ledge than a cave. I bent, hands on knees, and squinted into the dimness. I didn’t see Alia, but I did see a jumble of unnatural shapes.

  I shuffled into the darkness toward the closest object. It seemed to be an up-angled log, but the cavern smelled of old canvas, rusted metal, and oil. I reached out to the shape and touched not wood but steel, a horizontal, tapered tube as big around as my bicep.

  I pulled out my pocket flash, which was cheating for hide-and-seek, but spies cheat all the time.

  The thing I had touched was an old-fashioned, wood-spoke-wheeled, breech-loaded artillery rifle. I shone the flash around the cave and saw a jumble of military hardware. Water-cooled machine guns on tripods, their blunt muzzles angled toward the cavern’s ceiling. More artillery pieces, hand-cranked wired field telephone kits. The back wall was piled to the ceiling with wooden packing crates, to the extent that I could see the back wall. The part I couldn’t see was obscured by parked vehicles of various sizes, from two-wheeled gun caissons to rusting, boxy trucks.

  Calling that scrap heap an armory was a stretch, but museum almost fit. Especially for a former tanker like me.

  Alongside the trucks were parked four tanks. “Tanks” was as big a stretch as “armory.” They closely resembled the first tracked armored vehicles, which on Earth were rolled out well over a century earlier, to break the stalemate in a trench war similar to the meat grinder that had ended with the rape of Iridia by Tressen.

  The tanks’ tracks stretched around rhombohedral flanks plated with riveted steel armor from which bulged sponsons set with side-firing cannon. I had seen holos, mostly remastered sepia-toned twodee motion pictures, but for a tanker to see one of these in the steel was like a paleontologist staring at a live dinosaur. I walked to the closest old crawler and rapped on its plating.

  “Who’s there?” Alia’s giggle echoed from inside the dinosaur’s belly.

  “A tank driver.”

  The tank’s main hatch, which was just a steel door set in the beast’s flat flank, squealed, and Alia poked her head out. “You drove one of these?”

  I walked to the machine’s rear, and clambered up the forward-sloping rear tread like it was a shallow ladder. “I was a hovertanker. Hovertanks don’t have tracks. They ride on an air cushion, like the skimmer that chased us. I’ve driven crawlers. But never any this old. Does the army ever use these?”

  “They’re museum pieces. Slow. Hard to maintain. Fuel is scarce. They’re as useless as the rest of these supplies, because we’ve learned to avoid set-piece battles, anyway.” It wasn’t Alia who answered me, but Celline.

  She stood silhouetted, hands on hips, against the bright light oval formed by the cave mouth.

  I visored my hand above my eyes and blinked. “Alia was learning to hide.”

  Celline crouched so that she could peer at Alia over the tank’s hull, then spoke not so much to me as to the girl. “I wish she were as good at Iridian grammar as she is at hiding.” Celline stood and looked at me. “Jazen, I came looking for you because we’ve heard something back.”

  I leapt off the crawler’s back and landed, crouching, on the cave’s dirt floor. “Where is she? They.”

  Celline walked to the tank and laid one hand on the right six-pounder’s barrel while she held her other hand out, palm down. “It’s just raw information, Jazen. Nothing definite.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Well? Ma’am.”

  She said, “A physician—a Tressen who was once married to an Iridian—on the staff of a clinic in Tressel occasionally assists us. He was treating a comatose woman who, he was told, had been struck by a lorry. He doubted that.”

  “Why?”

  “An accident victim usually doesn’t have an armed ferrent posted at the door to her room.”

  My heart skipped. “What do you mean, ‘was’ treating? Is she…?”

  “Alive, as far as the physician knows. He’s no longer attending her. There was some sort of argument between the Interior Police and an anonymous man over her treatment. The man seemed influential.”

  “Why?”

  “Only someone influential would dare argue with a ferrent, Jazen. Shortly after the argument, our friend the doctor was relieved from the case. The patient was moved to a more secure location within the clinic. And she was placed under heavier guard, by people who didn’t look like ferrents.”

  I frown
ed. “Could this prisoner be just a routine criminal?”

  “Perhaps. But the ferrents don’t deal with routine crimes. And it’s the only lead we have for you, so far.”

  “Then I need to talk to this physician.”

  Celline shook her head. “Just tell us what information you need. We’ll send someone. You can’t go. Not with your accent.”

  “What’s my accent have to do with it?”

  “You would certainly have to speak to someone.”

  “Why?”

  “The clinic’s not just in Tressen. It’s in Tressia, the capital. In fact, it’s in the Government Quarter, six blocks from ferrent headquarters. Interior Police on every other street corner check the identity papers of everyone who enters the Government Quarter.”

  “Then I’ll go with whomever you were going to send, and they can do the talking. Ma’am, I don’t just need to talk to the physician. If this is the person I’m looking for, I need to see this place if I’m going to make a plan that gets me in and gets me out of it.”

  Celline shook her head again. “If you go with one of our men, you would just endanger him more. We’ve heard that the Tressens are double-checking pairs of adults traveling together. A new protocol.”

  I puffed out a breath. “We can thank the Tressens’ new buddies for that profile. The Yavi must have told them that Trueborn case officers come in sets of two.”

  Alia said, “They never check Pyt and me at all.”

  Eyes wide, I looked down at the girl, who had crawled out from beneath the ancient tank to stand beside us. “You’ve been to Tressia?”

  Celline nodded. “Pyt’s been traveling there for us for years. The Tressens tolerate a black market in medical supplies, which we need.”

  Well, that explained how “we” knew the doctor.

  Celline laid her hand on Alia’s head and smiled down at her. “Alia’s presence can be disarming.”

  Using a child as a disguise seemed callous. But a child who grew up with a target on her back, the way I had grown up with a target on mine, accepted callous as normal. Undesirable, but normal.