Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  I pointed at the closed door, and my finger shook as hard as the physician’s had. “The people out there won’t die because of me! They won’t die because of the Trueborns, either! Blame the Republican Socialist Party!”

  The physician paused, steadied himself with a hand against the door jamb, then rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. You’re right. That’s why I help the cause.” He looked up. “If you’re not here for vaccine, then you’re here about the woman.”

  I nodded and leaned forward. “How is she?”

  “Someone saw her walking at the clinic yesterday. Which is miraculous, considering her initial condition.”

  My heart leapt. “What does this woman look like?”

  “Well, like the very devil when they brought her in.” He turned his eyes to the ceiling and tapped a finger on a tooth. “I saw her prone, of course. Measured out, I should say, perhaps half a head shorter than yourself. Lovely fair skin, the few bits that weren’t bruised. Blonde hair, cropped like a boy’s. Superb muscle tone. Eyes an extraordinary shade of blue, to the extent I saw them with the lids pulled back.”

  The Trueborns called the shade Caribbean blue, and Kit’s eyes were better than extraordinary.

  I scooted farther forward on my chair. “Scars?”

  He lifted his trouser leg and drew a finger diagonally across his left ankle. “Prominent one, just here. A knife, probably.” He pointed a finger at his chest. “Depression the diameter of a one-crown coin, just here, below the clavicle. Old gunshot entry wound if I’m any judge.”

  I sank back on the chair and closed my eyes. “Yes!” Kit was alive. And walking!

  He said, “You know her, then?”

  “Where is this clinic?”

  “It’s Republican Socialist Memorial.”

  I stared at him.

  He said, “Formerly Daughters of Iridia Medical Center? The Alabaster Castle!”

  I turned up my palms. “Which is where?”

  He eyed my fisherman’s outfit. “Ah, yes. You’re not from here.”

  I pressed my palms together. “Please, Doctor. This is really important.”

  He turned to Alia and raised his eyebrows.

  She nodded.

  Alia and I left the physician after I pumped him for another half hour. We came away with a plan, and with time to kill before we implemented it.

  We scouted eat-in bakeries in the Old Quarter until we found one that baked and served brot.

  Brot was a bland Iridian flatbread. Brot was served toasted, then spread with trilobite roe. The roe actually tasted like, because it was, a sort of poor man’s caviar. But there was no brot-of-the-month club, because trilobite roe looked exactly like human snot. It took us an hour to find a place that still catered to the Iridian taste for brot.

  The bakery was set two steps down below street level, with narrow windows, and was a block outside the Government Quarter. We sat at a toy of a table in the corner, out of the baker’s earshot. We ate our brot, with tea that smelled like wet cat fur, and watched people’s legs and feet go by. Too often, we also saw hearse wheels roll past.

  Alia poked a brot crust into roe puddled on her plate. “Is it your fault?”

  “The doctor didn’t say anything was my fault! It’s not my job to fix the world.”

  “I see. It’s only your job to rescue her tonight.”

  I shook my head. “No. Tonight’s a reconnaissance. Plan first. Rescue sometime later.”

  “Then why do you have guns and all that other stuff in your rucksack?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Nosy girls don’t grow breasts, either.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me and glared. Then she said, “You were asleep. I was bored. Well, why do you?”

  “No plan survives contact with the enemy. So plan for every contingency. She taught me that when we were together.”

  “Together. Like kissing and stuff?”

  Especially and stuff. I looked down into my tea and swirled it. “Together. Like senior and junior case officer. Partners.”

  My eleven-year-old inquisitor raised her chin and narrowed her eyes. “Uh-huh.”

  I turned to the bakery owner behind the counter and waved for the check.

  At dusk, we lined up at a sand-bagged sidewalk checkpoint, behind a dozen homeward-bound day workers waiting to pass through Tressia’s cordoned-off Government Quarter.

  My heart thumped as I toed my heavy rucksack forward each time the line advanced. For all the burying alive and hopping of freights, this was the biggest gamble so far in our journey. I could have made it safer by caching my weapons and gear and going unarmed through the checkpoint. But I had left my firepower behind once before on this planet and almost got pinched in half by a giant crab.

  Alia and I reached the head of the line.

  A uniformed ferrent wearing an ankle-length coat, armed with a slung rifle, waved us forward. “Papers?”

  I feigned a cough so deep that my shoulders shook, covering my mouth with my hand. Then I held our forgeries out to him.

  His eyes widened as he saw my fingers and the papers, dripping with green trilobite roe. He waved them back at me unexamined. “You have business in the Government Quarter?”

  I coughed until my shoulders shook while I nodded.

  Alia looked up at him as she wiped roe from her nose with the back of her bare hand. “My father’s sick.”

  The ferrent frowned as she flicked green slime off her hand onto the sidewalk. “So are you, missy.”

  “The doctor told us to go to the clinic.”

  The ferrent shook his head. “The doctor’s an idiot, then. They don’t take walk-ins.”

  The line behind us swelled.

  Alia snapped off a sneeze that sprayed saliva in the ferrent’s general direction.

  He cringed. Then he waved us past the checkpoint. “Try if you want. Just get away from me.”

  Alia raised her rucksack and held it in front of the ferrent’s face. “Aren’t you supposed to look in our bags?”

  My heart skipped. The machine pistols and surveillance gear in the bag dangling from my shoulder suddenly weighed a ton.

  The ferrent glanced at the bag she held in front of his nose and shook his head. “Move along!”

  I shook like an out-of-tune Tressen lorry as we walked away from the checkpoint. After fifty yards, we turned a corner, and I grabbed her by the shoulders and squinted down at her. “Look in our bags? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Pyt says attack can be the best defense.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Before I showed him my bag, I rubbed a goober as big as your nose on my bag handle.”

  She squirmed, and I realized my fingers were digging into her shoulders.

  I relaxed my grip and drew a breath. “Oh.”

  She grinned. “Did you see his face when I sneezed on him?”

  “You know, you were fine back there. In fact, really good.”

  “Of course. Celline says girls lie better.”

  We resumed walking down the dark street in the moonlight.

  Alia hiked her rucksack up across her shoulder as we walked. “I could be your new partner.”

  I smiled. “Maybe.”

  “But no kissing.”

  I smiled again. “Too many whiskers?”

  Alia shook her head. “You’re already taken.”

  We ducked down an alley and waited. The streetlights in the Government Quarter were shut off after moonset.

  Republican Socialist civil servants were no more inclined to work late than any other kind, so the lights in the Government Quarter were mostly superfluous in the evenings. And the Tressens’ electrical grid was so feeble that after moonset they redirected most of the juice to still-inhabited parts of town, where it was needed. After moonset, the Government Quarter turned as dark as a cave, so I put on snoops and led Alia by the hand the rest of the way to the clinic.

  The clinic’s grounds were easy to find. They were the only island of light in the deserted Government Quar
ter.

  But they weren’t deserted.

  I muttered, “What the hell?”

  Forty-five

  Polian dabbed softly with a towel at the spot where the woman’s fist had struck his jaw, and winced. He watched his two corporals wrestle her into the metal skeleton chair. The interrogator had ordered the chair bolted to the floor in the center of the clinic’s psychological-interview room. Insulated cables clamped to the chair snaked six feet across the floor and connected to a satchel-sized console laid out on a simple table. The console, in turn, was connected to the wall outlet by a thicker cable.

  A third soldier sat dazed on the floor, his back against one table leg. He grimaced, slid his trouser leg up to expose the kneecap she had kicked, then gently prodded the dislocated bone.

  The interrogator peered at Polian’s jaw and whistled. “That’s gonna leave a mark. I told you we should have drugged her lunch.”

  Polian shook his head. “No. I want her to feel every jolt.”

  The two corporals tied her onto the chair’s legs and arms, securing her at the ankles and knees, then wrists and elbows, with thick tape over her smock and trousers. Finally, they taped thin copper wires, that were wrapped at one end around parts of the chair frame, to her palms and the soles of her feet.

  Only then did the interrogator step forward and stand in front of her with his arms crossed. “Colonel, please don’t think I will enjoy this night. But I find that these interviews are easier for everyone if the interviewee chooses to cooperate. I also find that some interviewees make that choice if I explain the process.”

  The woman stared at him, cocking an ear toward him as she whispered, “What?”

  The interrogator bent closer and stared into her eyes. “Electricity will be applied through the electrodes affixed to your palms and to the soles of your feet. Later the electrodes will be relocated to your genitalia. Initially, while I’m checking the modifications I’ve made to the equipment, the damage will only hurt your vanity. Static buildup that will cause your hair to stand out. As I increase the voltage, the pain will—”

  She snapped her head forward, and her skull struck the interrogator’s nose so hard that Polian heard a crack like a snapped chicken bone.

  The interrogator staggered back, hand up to stanch the blood gushing down across his lips and chin.

  She stared at him, eyes narrowed. “How ’bout that? Already you’re not enjoying this night.”

  Polian stepped alongside the interrogator. He passed the man the hand towel with which he had been dabbing his jaw. Then he peered, wide-eyed, at the man’s swelling nose, and whistled. “That’s gonna leave a mark!”

  The interrogator glared at Polian across the wadded towel as he pressed it to his nose and a bright red stain blossomed across the fabric.

  Polian raised his eyebrows. “Mind if I chat with her while you fix that?”

  He removed his Tressen jacket, folded it, then laid it on the table. Then he stood, hands on knees, at a safe distance from the woman and smiled at her. “Me? I’m not like the gentleman you just sucker punched. I am the bad cop. Very bad. I don’t want to make this interview pleasant. I want to hurt you. Like you’ve hurt so many fine soldiers.”

  She shook her head. “Baby-killers aren’t fine soldiers. The only thing I’ve ever hurt is your rotten system.”

  It was, Polian thought, a genuinely felt, if futile, posture. Zealots actually took pride in enduring pain for a cause. He needed to change her attitude.

  The interrogator stepped forward, his nose now bandaged. Arms outstretched, he rammed the bloody towel that he had used to contain his nosebleed into her mouth until she gagged. “These walls are thick. But not thick enough to muffle the screaming you’re going to do. I’m not going to play good cop anymore, Colonel. We’ll move quickly through the preparatory stages and get right to the really horrifying stuff.”

  “ ’Ite me, ah’hole.”

  Polian walked to the table and flicked on the hologen that lay alongside the electrical console. He let the recording of her first session run until the moment when she said, “You bet your ass. Senior special-operations case officer.” Then he paused the recording so that her image hung in the air in front of her, her lips parted as she prepared to reveal a lifetime of secrets that would humiliate her nation.

  She stared, and her eyes widened.

  Polian smiled at her and pointed at the image. “You have no memory of this at all, do you? You’ve hurt my cause over the years, Colonel. I’ll concede you that. But this confession holo will hurt your cause worse. Far worse. Your epitaph won’t be heroine. It will be traitor.”

  For the first time, confusion then fear sparked in the woman’s eyes.

  Polian smiled more broadly. It was one thing to endure pain for a cause. Quite another to suffer it for betraying one. Stripped of pride in her own heroism, she would crumble quickly. She would talk, then she would plead, weeping, for them to let her shame die with her. Then she would die.

  He turned to the interrogator and nodded. “Let’s get started.”

  Forty-six

  I tugged Alia behind a building across the street from the clinic where Kit was being held. Then I adjusted my snoops for the available light and peered around the building’s corner.

  Alia whispered, “What do you see?”

  I saw a white building gingerbreaded with arched windows and parapets. “He wasn’t kidding. It is a castle.”

  “Of course. Where else would they hold a princess?”

  I adjusted the snoops’ magnification. “One Interior Police staff car and two covered lorries. They’re just sitting in front of the clinic at the curb. They’re seventy-five yards away from us. Twenty yards in front of the building.”

  “More guards? Then they know we’re here!”

  I shook my head, and the image blurred for an instant. “The doctor said the guards he’s seen since the argument have all been Yavi. These guys are ferrents.”

  The image steadied as one of the clinic’s front doors opened and two broad-shouldered bullet heads in civilian clothes, right hands inside their jackets, trotted down the front steps toward the Interior Police vehicles.

  The staff car’s door opened, and a man in a brown trenchcoat and slouch hat stepped out and toward the Yavi guards.

  I whispered, “My guess is we just walked in on round two of the turf battle over the prisoner.”

  The man in the trenchcoat and the two Yavi met at the curb. He held out a paper, then pointed at it, then at the clinic.

  One Yavi shook his head, while the ferrent waved his arms. Their voices echoed off the stone buildings.

  Alia said, “They sound mad.”

  A second ferrent stepped out of the staff car. Then the tailgates of the two lorries banged down, and two squads of uniformed ferrent riflemen, like the checkpoint guard who had passed us through, clambered out.

  A third Yavi appeared at the top of the entrance steps. A short-barreled Yavi needle gun with a drum magazine dangled by its sling from his right shoulder.

  “Things are warming up.”

  “Are they going to fight?”

  I shrugged and slid off the snoops to adjust the sensitivity. “Maybe. At the least they’re gonna argue.”

  Alia whispered, “This is perfect!”

  “Huh?”

  “Pyt says the best time to attack is when the enemy is distracted.”

  “Well, in this case Pyt just may be wrong.”

  Alia sniffed. “What kind of hero are you?”

  I slid the snoops over her eyes, thumbed the autofocus, then pushed her head out around the building’s corner. “The kind who can count! How many do you see?”

  Alia pointed her finger in the air. “One. Two. Three—”

  I snatched the snoops back and stared down at her. “Twenty-nine! Counting the Yavi.”

  She rolled her eyes and pointed to the side of the building. “You don’t storm the castle, of course! The doctor said there’s a side door. I s
aw explosives in your bag. Blow it open.”

  I did have door bores with me, and the Tressens didn’t have much in the way of remote alarm systems. But I shook my head. “Even if I circled behind those other buildings, I’d finally have to cross a hundred yards of open, floodlit ground. That’s suicide.”

  In the shadows, Alia crossed her arms and snorted. “Some hero!”

  “Stop that!” I drew my bush knife and waved it. “I can’t just wave my magic sword and make—”

  Bam!

  It was more a crackle than an explosion. The clinic lights flickered, something else popped, then the building and grounds were plunged into total blackness.

  Forty-seven

  Polian shuffled forward, arms extended, in the suddenly pitch-black room. He stubbed his toe and fell. “What the hell did you do?”

  The interrogator’s disembodied voice echoed in the darkness. “I told you there could be glitches when we powered up! It’s just a fuse or something!”

  Polian heard the echoing footfalls of running feet on floor tile, and the voices of his men. “We’re under attack!”

  Pop-pop-pop.

  A needler set for three-round burst.

  Someone screamed.

  “Cease fire! Cease fucking fire! Whoever that was, you almost hit me!”

  “Lock the place down!”

  Polian screamed into the darkness, loud enough that his men would hear him. He should have issued snoopers and just let the hospital staff be suspicious. “Stop it! Stop it, all of you! We’re not under attack! It’s a damn blown fuse! Stop locking things down! Go find a way to get the power back on!”

  The interrogator’s voice sounded in the dark. “Polian?”

  “What?”

  “Do your men have any idea how to restore power?”

  “They’re soldiers, not electricians. What about the hospital staff?”

  “Who knows? This culture is new to electricity. They’ve got a rotten power grid. They don’t even have backup power in a hospital.”