Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

It was my turn to be silent. I lay there and counted my unscratchable itches.

  Ten minutes later the ground all around me shook as the northbound Tressen patrol train rumbled closer.

  I held my breath. Pyt had camouflaged us in darkness. If he had left a foot, a sleeve exposed? If the rocks atop my chest had been shifted overnight by my heavy breathing? All it would take to get us captured or killed was one bored GI glancing down at the roadbed.

  Ruummbblle.

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  The whistle sounded again, its pitch different. The interval as wheels clacked across rail joints increased. The train was slowing!

  My heart skipped; then I remembered. The reason we were dug in here was because the railroad at this point sloped upward to the north. The grade increase minimally slowed the short, relatively light patrol train.

  But once the patrol train had cleared the Corridor, the fully loaded northbound freights that would follow would be slowed to the pace of a brisk walk.

  An hour later the day’s first freight shook the roadbed, each set of wheels clanking over the uneven joint between rails that was closest to us. As Pyt had instructed me, I counted, two clicks per axle, two axles per car. A normal freight was manned only at the engine and caboose, with a hundred unwatched boxcars in between.

  When I heard car number thirty pass, I pushed my way up from my shallow grave. Right arm. Left arm. I arched my back; rocks clattered as they tumbled off my belly. Sputtering dirt and wiping it from my mouth, I got to my hands and knees and looked forward and aft. I half expected to see riflemen dashing along the roadbed toward us. As the sear of returning circulation burned my thighs and arms, I saw nothing but open ground and a swaying, rumbling, and endless wall of boxcars.

  “Jazen!”

  Alia sat, half out of her hole, legs still covered, and tugged at her rucksack.

  I kicked away rocks, dragged the dusty bag free, and she stood, brushing herself and panting.

  Then I kicked dirt and rocks back into the holes to obscure the evidence of our visit. Pyt said a half-ass job would do. Rainy season was beginning, and the rain would tidy up.

  The unconscious clock in my head had counted the passage of twenty more cars.

  “Come on!” I grasped her hand and my own bag, and we sprinted until we matched speed with a boxcar’s door, open like the others to ventilate the stacks of slatted fish crates inside.

  I chucked my bag onto the car’s floor as I ran, snatched Alia’s bag and tossed it in, too. Then, as she grasped the boxcar’s doorframe, I boosted her in, then heaved myself up behind her.

  The two of us sprawled, puffing, on the dirty straw that covered the parts of the boxcar’s floor not occupied by crates.

  After three minutes, I sat up, my rucksack pillowing my back as I leaned against stacked, gray crates. She sat up across from me, grinning as we savored the simple joy of hopping a slow freight.

  “Hungry?” Alia tugged a silvery carcass out between a fish crate’s slats and chucked it at me.

  I blocked the fish with a forearm. “Remember what I said about mean girls.”

  “Is she mean?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman we’re trying to find.”

  “Only to mean people.”

  “Then she’s a warrior princess. Like Celline.”

  “She’s—yeah, sort of.” I squirmed at this line of inquiry.

  “Is she beautiful?”

  I felt myself flush. “That’s not important.”

  “Princesses are always beautiful. Celline is.”

  I turned and stared out the door at the passing landscape. “Yes, she is.” Time to change the subject. “What do we do at the border?”

  “She’ll kiss you if you save her, you know. A princess always kisses the hero.”

  The train rocked us as I shook my head. “She’s not that kind of princess. Care for a fish?” I pegged one at Alia.

  She covered her head with both hands and squealed.

  Then she frowned. “The border isn’t guarded anymore, since Iridia became part of Tressen. Pyt cried about that the first time we went across. And nobody goes near a stinky fish train in the rail yards. It doesn’t get scary until we get to the ferrents in town.”

  We rode in silence for ten minutes, until Alia looked up at me and cocked her head. “Then what kind of princess is she?”

  Forty-three

  Polian stood in rolled-up shirtsleeves, arms crossed, in the clinic’s muggy observation closet. Alongside him stood the interrogator and General Gill. The three men stared through the one-way glass at the woman in the brightly lit psychological-interview room beyond.

  The woman—the assassin, Polian corrected himself—paced the interview room’s floor, still unsteady and pale, but ambulatory. She wore a borrowed nurse’s smock and trousers, and a modern plastine cast still protected her mended right arm from wrist to elbow.

  As they watched, she lowered herself facedown on the floor, gritted her teeth, and tried to lever her body up with her arms in a Trueborn calisthenic. Her right arm gave way and she fell, panting. Moments later she tried again.

  Alongside Polian, General Gill ran a manual pencil down the Tressen paper pad upon which Polian had written his summary of her last session.

  The interrogator said, “We don’t have the equipment to copy the holo for you, but the gist—”

  Gill kept reading. “Amazing. Not just her physical recovery. Apart from these officers of ours who she accounted for personally…”

  Polian glanced up as the woman, her recently fractured arm trembling, completed a sixth push-up. He grimaced. Two of the officers she had “accounted for” had been friends of his. And he held her responsible for Sandr.

  The interrogator pointed at a paragraph further down the page. “It’s not just the assassinations. General, she’s confessed to outworld tampering in places where we barely knew there was anything to tamper with. The propaganda value of that holo—”

  Gill laid his jacketed arm on the interrogator’s. “This isn’t about propaganda. It’s about maintaining this operation’s security. If we do that, Yavet won’t need propaganda. You’re sure she hasn’t uplinked anything about the cavorite mining?”

  The interrogator shrugged. “That’s what she said. We can spool the holo for you. But if there’s another team operating on Tressel, she’s in the dark about it.”

  Gill stepped to the window and laid his palm on the glass, as though trying to touch the woman. “How has she been treated?”

  The interrogator glanced at Polian and raised his eyebrows. “The drugs are painless. Now that she’s off them, she’s feisty. She has no conscious recollection that she coughed up the dirt that’s summarized on that notepad. Far as she knows, she’s still a good soldier.”

  Gill raised his own eyebrows as he turned to leave the observation closet. “And what’s wrong with that?” He turned to Polian. “Major? I’d like to have a word with her.”

  By the time the guard opened the door to the interview room, the woman was seated at the table in the room’s center.

  She looked up, recognition in her eyes as she saw Polian and the interrogator.

  She pointed at Gill, gray, slight, and a head shorter than Polian, then said to Polian, “If he’s the bad cop, this is gonna take a really long time.”

  Gill crossed his arms. “I take it then that you haven’t been mistreated?”

  “And I take it you’re the boss of these two.”

  Gill shrugged.

  The woman said, “I call getting run down by an illegal military vehicle mistreatment.”

  Gill stiffened. “If we’re going to discuss illegal activity on an outworld, let’s begin with the two Tressen infantrymen you killed.”

  She paused at the mention of the dead soldiers, then shook her head. “No idea what you’re talking about. I got caught in a snowstorm while I was out jogging.”

  In his mind, Polian saw his murdered friends, and Sandr, and even the two
decapitated Tressen GIs he didn’t even know. He stepped around the table and cuffed the smart-mouthed woman with the back of his hand.

  The blow knocked her backward and toppled her chair.

  Gill grabbed Polian’s arm. “Major Polian!”

  The woman rolled to her knees, then stood. Her blue eyes burned at Polian while she laid a hand on her cheek. Then she smiled, and blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. “Seriously? You really need a better bad cop.” She stepped toward Polian and drew back her fist.

  Gill pushed Polian back and stepped between him and the woman. “Sit down, Colonel Born!”

  The woman’s eyes widened at the mention of her name and rank. She paused, then picked up her chair and sat.

  Gill said, “Colonel, I have an opinion about whether your conduct has been professional. The truth about it, and its consequences for you, will be decided in good time. However, not solely by me, certainly not by this gentleman. In the interim you will be treated as a soldier.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows, then snorted. “That’s enlightened, coming from a baby-killer.”

  Gill ignored her and turned to Polian. “Major, apologize to the prisoner.”

  Polian felt his eyes bulge. “Sir? She’s a terrorist, not—”

  “She’s a prisoner of war! And if you wish to remain an officer under my command, you will treat her as such.” Gill stared up at him, jaw thrust out, hands on hips.

  Polian ground his teeth, then stared at the woman. “I’m sorry I struck you.”

  She smirked. “Struck you, ma’am? If I’m a colonel and you’re a major…”

  Polian squeezed his eyes shut. “Ma’am.”

  Thirty minutes later, after Gill had left the clinic, Polian and the interrogator stood together again in the observation closet. The woman lay face to the wall on a cot in the interview room’s far corner, apparently sleeping.

  The interrogator said, “I warned you about him.”

  Polian asked, “How do we get the last ten percent out of her?”

  “Gill said—”

  “Gill said a tribunal would judge her. A tribunal acts on facts. Intelligence gathers facts. I’m the only intelligence officer within a hundred billion cubic light-years. How long to complete her interrogation by conventional methods?”

  The interrogator pointed at Polian’s chest. “This is strictly on you.”

  “How long?”

  The interrogator stroked his chin. “Anything that results in blood loss, you’re looking at another day from now to set it up clean. Electricity?” He shrugged as he peered up at the primitive incandescent bulb that hung above the woman. As he watched, it flickered, and she glanced up at it.

  The interrogator said, “The current’s unreliable here. I’d need to adapt my gear, probably the clinic’s, too.” He rubbed his chin again. “Might have an early glitch or two. I’m a neurologist, not an electrician. Figure a couple hours longer. But shock done right leaves no permanent visible deformity. You might want to think about that if you don’t plan to tell Gill.”

  The faces of old friends, and of Sandr, whose blood was on this woman’s hands, swam in Polian’s memory. “No marks? How painful is it?”

  “Electricity? With careful modulation you can drive a subject insane without killing her. And eventually, of course, you can kill her with it.”

  Polian stared at the assassin one more time, then removed his Tressen jacket from the hook alongside the door. As he turned the doorknob, he squinted back at the interrogator. “Electricity, then. Tomorrow night.”

  Forty-four

  The freight rolled through the outskirts of Tressia at dawn, past houses, factories, and the rest of a city drab in stone and brick.

  Then we passed a tarmac strip that stretched parallel to the tracks for, I estimated, just over two miles. In the distance, at the runway’s end, stood a complex of buildings that didn’t belong to this world. Alia pointed at the complex. “That’s where the shuttles land and take off. Pyt says it was built there so all the new goods could be put right on the trains.”

  I snorted. I knew the place, though I hadn’t seen it before. Spaceport Tressel. Spaceport was a stretch. Mousetrap, now that was a spaceport. Of course, the Tressens barely had aeroplanes, so it must’ve seemed magical to them.

  Spaceport Tressel was a presently deserted nonworking model of superpower noncooperation.

  The Cold War began warm and fuzzy, with Trueborns and Yavi competing for hearts and minds on developing outworlds by bribes consisting of obsolete leftovers. The Trueborns gifted the Tressens with finicky, last-generation chemical-fueled shuttles remaindered by the Trueborn manufacturer. The Yavi one-upped the Trueborns with a glittering, stadium-sized prefab-dome hangar-terminal complex. But the finicky shuttles’ guts hated Tressel’s climate. The giant dome that sparkled so impressively beneath the summer sun leaked like a geodesic sieve during the rainy, influenza-scourged Tressen winter.

  Then came the war, the Tilt, and the embargo. Today the shuttles hung parked in orbit, operated by a subsidized, arm’s-length contractor. The space planes landed on the overgrown flats of Spaceport Tressel only when a cruiser visited, and left before the crew caught the flu.

  Conventional wisdom held that the Yavi won. At least they netted a glitter-domed symbol of Tressen-Yavi cooperation out of the deal.

  I stared at the deserted strip, but it offered no clues. Kit’s team hadn’t arrived there. Their insertion point had been an isolated, empty clearing thirty miles from this city. But the Yavi, whom I was convinced that Kit and her junior had somehow encountered, did arrive and depart Tressel here.

  Our freight slowed to walking pace after we passed the shuttle strip and ten minutes later rolled to a stop in Tressia’s central rail yard, just one of string upon parallel string of anonymous, identical boxcars and flatcars.

  We slipped down into the chill morning and dodged through the yard, crabbing under row after row of carriages. The few yard workers we saw didn’t merely ignore us; they distanced themselves from us.

  Alia said, “Dressed like this we look like Tressen settlers. They hop freights down in the southern settlements all the time. Especially this time of year.”

  “This time of year,” late fall on into rainy winter, was the annoying time that modern societies called flu season. Pre-vaccine societies called it influenza season, but for them it wasn’t annoying: it was a time of angst and death. Without vaccines, the flu laid the strong low and killed the weak. Desperate settlers from the south brought their sick children north for “modern” medical care that was little more than hand-holding.

  It took Alia and me, rucksacks in hand, an hour to walk to the office of the Iridian-sympathizing physician who had tipped Celline’s network about his mysterious female former patient.

  His office was in the city’s Old Quarter, a warren of narrow, cobbled streets and stone buildings. The tight-packed buildings stood no higher than three stories, except for church steeples, not for aesthetics or to honor the almighty but because that was as tall as the architects of the time had been able to stack stone.

  The gray and black was relieved only by red ribbons that hung from half the doorways. The ribbons flapped in the breeze generated by chugging autos and rattling lorries as they passed. Pedestrians, heads down and hands in pockets, filled streets that a Trueborn would call overcrowded and a downlevels Yavi would call sparsely populated.

  No pedestrian bothered us, and those who approached us from downwind gave us a wide berth. What fear of influenza didn’t do, fish stink did.

  The row house that served as the physician’s office was easy to find. Flapping red ribbons hung not just beside the building’s door but from both stoop rails. The ribbons warned passersby that the influenza was inside. Generally, those homes were cleared and shunned. A doctor’s office didn’t have that luxury. Tressens had reached that unfortunate stage of medical acumen where they understood that close contact spread disease but couldn’t do much about the dis
ease once it had spread.

  The office vestibule was so crowded that we had to step over the outstretched legs of waiting patients to reach the reception nurse. After one sniff, she hustled us through a second waiting room, crowded with sad-eyed adults and weeping children, into an examining room.

  We exchanged our travel outfits for laundered clothes that had been packed in oilskin bags. Then we sat on straight chairs and waited, hands clasped between our knees.

  The doctor swept in, gray and weary, wearing a starched white long coat and spectacles rimmed with copper wire that hooked behind his ears. He smiled when he saw Alia and chucked her under the chin. “You’ve grown! How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s because you were inoculated.”

  He turned his head toward me and frowned. “Where is the other gentleman?”

  “He didn’t come this time. I’m—”

  The physician raised his palm. “What I don’t know the ferrents can never beat out of me.” He paused and fingered a stethoscope that hung around his neck. “I’m afraid you’ve come at a bad time. There’s no vaccine. At any price.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “Influenza vaccine’s not embargoed. The Trueborns send Tressel tons of it. Free.”

  “Oh, they do. But it’s all diverted to Party members’ families. They resell any leftovers they don’t ruin. But they won’t trickle into the black market for a couple of months yet. That’s when the other fellow usually visits.”

  Alia said, “He’s not here about the medicine.”

  The physician kept his eyes on me. “Well, he should be!” He pointed at the closed examining-room door. “Did you look at those people waiting to see me? This pandemic will kill one of every five out there. More, among the children!” He held up a quivering finger. “And not one has to die! Not one! All I have to give them is sympathy, hygiene advice, and a red ribbon for their door. Your people should do something about it!”

  I raised my eyebrows and laid my palm on my chest. “My people?”

  He eyed me, head to toe. “You look Trueborn. You sound Trueborn.”

  I shook my head. The Trueborns weren’t my people. The Yavi weren’t my people. I was a waif abandoned by the former, a criminal guilty of being born among the latter. I didn’t have a people. I had a job.