Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  Not only was the chair empty: the room was empty.

  The interrogator and the guard rushed into the observation closet where Polian stood, eyes wide, pointing at the empty chair.

  “Damn. She’s disappeared,” said the interrogator as he stared into the room, jaw slack.

  Polian shook his head, slowly. “It’s impossible.”

  The interrogator said, “Trueborn case officers really are freegging magicians.”

  The guard said, “Maybe the ferrents got in here and took her.”

  Polian paused. She was no magician. And this wasn’t the ferrents’ work.

  Fifty-four

  Kit and I stood, guns drawn and pointed up at the ceiling, backs pressed flat against the observation window wall, to its right. Two more pairs of feet had just run into the room that lay on the opposite side of the glass. From there, they couldn’t see us and the room would appear to be empty.

  My heart thumped. All that this child’s trick would buy us was perhaps thirty seconds. Then common sense would overtake the Yavi’s surprise at the apparently empty locked room.

  But people who have never experienced close-quarters battle don’t realize how often the difference between life and death turns on who plays peek-a-boo better.

  I pointed the remote that I held at the door bore shaped-thermite breaching cone that I had stuck over the door lock, then turned to Kit one last time. She nodded. I thumbed the remote’s trigger.

  Pop.

  The charge fired a pencil of four thousand degree Fahrenheit flame into the lock’s guts, which dislodged the lock cylinder, then popped it out the opposite side of the door. The lock’s seared guts clunked onto the corridor floor beyond, and the heavy steel door swung out on its hinges without a squeak. Say that for Trueborns. Nobody in the universe was better at breaking stuff.

  Kit and I dashed for the door, side by side, before the smoke even cleared.

  We popped out into the corridor and turned back to back, sighting down our gun barrels.

  The place was empty.

  I shoved the observation room’s door shut until its latch clicked, put my shoulder to the guard’s desk until it squealed, and jammed it against the observation-room door.

  Kit looked up and down the corridor as I stood and turned. “Which way?”

  I grabbed her hand and tugged her in the direction of the stairwell that led to the door through which I had entered.

  Behind us, muffled shouts and banging leaked from the blocked observation-room door. Ahead loomed the corridor junction where, to our right, lurked maybe five Yavi and two ferrent rifle squads. Across the junction, nurses and hospital orderlies drifted out into the corridor, curious about the commotion.

  A nurse saw us running toward her, guns drawn. She screamed, dropped the tray she was carrying, and disappeared into a side door.

  I looked back. Already, the feeble desk that blocked the door shuddered. The Yavis my cheap trick had trapped wouldn’t be trapped long.

  I skidded Kit and me to a stop before we reached the corridor junction, then peeked around the corner. The front doors remained ajar, and through them I could see Yavi, weapons drawn and backs to us. But the corridor between us and the doors was deserted. Kit trembled, weak and coughing, in her bare feet, after running twenty yards. The two of us healthy might have simply made a run for it, but in her condition we couldn’t win either a footrace or a shoot-out. I had to do something to change the game.

  Fifty-five

  Polian had been the first of the three of them in the observation closet to realize that the woman, or an accomplice, had somehow managed to shut them in.

  He drew back from the observation closet’s door, shoulder aching from the first ineffectual blow that he had struck against it. His rage at being fooled welled up, and he threw himself again at the door with a snarl. It budged an inch. They had blocked it.

  The guard laid a hand on Polian’s arm as the older man stood, panting. “Sir, let me.”

  Polian turned and eyed the big soldier, the man’s needler still holstered. Polian couldn’t order him to shoot off the lock. The Trueborns did it all the time in the entertainment holos they exported to glorify themselves.

  Earth’s armaments industry produced what armies used to bludgeon one another, including large-caliber firearms that could hole modern body armor. Yavet had been a monolithic society for a century. Its armaments industry produced what it needed to control unorganized, unarmored, barely armed citizens who lived and worked in stack cities. Civilian suppression required gunfire that penetrated clothing and people but lacked the mass and velocity to continue on and damage property.

  Normally Polian took pride in the elegance of Yavet society and the weapons that secured it. But at the moment he wished for a Trueborn gunpowder blunderbuss that could blow the door into scrap iron.

  Instead, he had to stand back and let the soldier take a run at the blocked door. The man backed up against the observation closet’s far wall to build momentum. As the man pushed the interrogator aside, Polian looked down at his ’puter. The whole foolish business had only bought the woman momentary freedom. In her condition, she couldn’t get far. In the end, her desperation would gain her nothing, except, perhaps, a less painful death.

  Fifty-six

  It took only seconds for me to drag Kit to the front doors. We stopped, and I motioned Kit to lay on the floor while I low-crawled to the half-opened door and peeked around.

  Three feet from me, five Yavi stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to me on the clinic’s front steps. They blocked the clinic entrance. Two had sidearms drawn: three leveled drum-fed needle rifles at the ferrents beyond.

  Since I had left them in the dark, the ferrent rifle squads had redeployed into a semicircle. Each ferrent held his rifle against his shoulder and sighted along its barrel at the Yavi.

  One of the Yavi, eyes front on the ferrents who had a bead on the Yavi, was whispering to the others.

  “Mark a target. Hold your fire.”

  Between the two groups, one Yavi and one ferrent stood, the ferrent waving a paper sheet, the Yavi shaking his head.

  “What if they fire?” asked one Yavi.

  “Then you return fire. But nobody’s gonna shoot anybody. Take it easy.”

  I peered between the calves of the Yavi. The faces of the ferrent troops looked as jittery as the Yavi sounded.

  The Trueborns called this kind of guns-drawn confrontation a Mexican standoff. I called it opportunity.

  I raised my pistol and peered between the lower legs of two Yavi and toward the trench-coated ferrent out front who was waving his search warrant or whatever it was, selected semiautomatic, and thumbed off the safety. I made the range twenty yards.

  Sight alignment. Sight picture. Relax. Breathe. Squeeze.

  Bang.

  My pistol kicked; the round caught the ferrent in the fat part of his calf. He yelped, clutched at his leg, and crumpled to the pavement in full view of his troops.

  I was already skittering backward, like a crab on ’phets.

  By then, the first itchy-fingered ferrent rifleman had returned first fire at the Yavi. Who had not, in fact, fired the shot that the ferrent was returning.

  The five Yavi probably knew the shot had come from behind them but were too busy ducking and firing at the ferrents to turn and investigate.

  Kit and I low-crawled back up the hallway as behind us needlers hummed like angry Barrens dragonflies and ferrent rifles crackled off rounds that exploded the translucent windows of the clinic’s doors, as well as the transom above them, and sprayed glittering shrapnel that tinkled down on our backs and shoulders.

  Glass rained down on floor tiles. Men screamed.

  The exchange of fire petered out in seconds, and I pulled Kit to her feet. We ran, crouching, back to the corridor intersection and turned right, toward the stairwell that led to darkness and safety.

  I glanced left and saw three Yavi dashing toward us. Behind them the guard desk sa
t at an angle in the corridor. One of the three was bullet-headed and broad-shouldered and carried a needler. The second, gangling and tall, trailed. The third man, florid and half a head shorter than the other two, grimaced as he ran.

  Kit and I were halfway down the corridor to safety, dodging screaming, white-coated hospital staff, when the first needler shot whizzed past my ear.

  I dropped back and interposed myself between the Yavis and Kit as I pushed her forward toward the end of the corridor.

  Ziizz.

  My left shoulder burned as a needle tore through my jacket sleeve.

  I looked back and saw the florid-faced Yavi in the middle of the corridor intersection. He held a needler in two hands, apparently the gun that the other Yavi had been carrying, and had dropped to one knee to improve his aim at Kit and me.

  He fired again. A needle burned my back, and I staggered. When I fell, I dropped the pistol I held in one hand and the rucksack I held in the other. Both skidded along the tile and came to rest beyond my reach.

  Fifty-seven

  When Polian, peering past the front sight of the needler in his hands, saw the woman’s accomplice sprawl after the shot struck him, he pumped his fist.

  The instant that Polian saw the man’s face, he recognized him as the armored figure he had glimpsed in the boat in the Eastern Sea.

  Polian had just brought down the son of a bitch who was responsible for Sandr’s death.

  Polian shifted his aiming point. The woman had nearly reached the door at the end of the corridor when Polian’s shot had struck down her accomplice. Now she rushed back and knelt beside him.

  Polian smiled. The woman had already given them enough. He slid the needler’s selector to full automatic. The rounds would riddle her head to foot. She would die painfully and slowly, principally from blood loss.

  Sight alignment. Sight picture. She looked up, and her eyes bored into his. Not fearful, not pained. Cool and murderous.

  Relax. Polian savored the moment. He released a breath, held it, and began to squeeze the trigger.

  Fifty-eight

  “Jazen! Get up!”

  “Can’t.”

  Kit knelt and tried to drag me toward the door. Healthy, I had seen her fireman’s-carry a partisan my size a hundred yards, no problem. But tonight? No chance. I shooed her away. “Go!”

  She looked across me, back in the direction of the Yavi who had shot me, and drew her own pistol.

  Fifty-nine

  “Drop it!”

  With the woman in his sights, Polian felt warm steel press against his right temple as he knelt on the clinic’s tile floor.

  “Drop it, you son of a bitch. Or don’t. Blowing your brains out suits me fine.”

  From the corner of his right eye, Polian glimpsed a uniformed ferrent who had rushed up the corridor from the clinic’s front doors and now held a service rifle pressed against his temple. The man’s hands shook so badly that the rifle’s muzzle vibrated against Polian’s skin.

  Polian also saw the interrogator and the door guard, each facedown on the floor, hands behind his head, each straddled by a ferrent rifleman.

  Polian lowered his needler very slowly, then rested it on the floor and drew back. He continued to stare straight ahead as the woman dragged her accomplice, inch by inch, closer to the door at the corridor’s end.

  Very slowly, Polian pointed at them. “They’re getting away!”

  “Shut up!”

  Polian said, “You don’t understand!”

  “I understand! I understand three of my friends are dead because you fuckers opened fire on them.”

  The woman and the man reached the door.

  Polian hissed, teeth clenched. “No! They duped us all!”

  Down the corridor, the two of them disappeared, and the door swung shut.

  “Who did?”

  Polian pointed down the suddenly empty corridor at the closed door.

  The ferrent kept his rifle on Polian while he turned his head and stared at the empty space. “Right.”

  Polian looked over at the door guard, facedown on the ground.

  The man turned his head to face Polian. “We have three dead, too, Major. Maybe the Trueborns really are magicians.”

  Sixty

  I lay on my stomach on the landing just inside the cold, dimly lit stairwell where my floundering and Kit’s dragging had landed me.

  A needler burst will kill a person just as dead as a gunpowder assault-rifle round. But a single needle-gun round won’t, unless it tags a vital. The wound does hurt like hell, bleeds like an open faucet, and the trauma can shock you into momentary immobility if the right spot is hit.

  Kit dumped my rucksack and machine pistol alongside me. She shook two happys from a tube into her palm, then slipped them between my lips. I gulped them down dry. Then she sprayed my wound with a topical and dressed it. “I don’t think the kidney’s lacerated.”

  The stairwell was, at the moment, our dim and quiet little hideaway. But when the ferrents and Yavis who were fighting amongst themselves fifty yards from us reached a truce, my kidney would be the least of our worries. I rolled over and pushed up onto my knees. “We gotta move.”

  We emerged from the clinic into the darkness without incident. Kit limped stiffly on bare feet that had to be half-frozen. She leaned on me, and I was already bent by my wound and by my ruck. I was moving too slowly, but without Kit and the happys, I wouldn’t be moving at all.

  We circled back behind buildings, retracing the path I had taken to break in. As we crossed one open space, I had a straight-shot view back at the results of the diversion that I had started by winging one ferrent in command.

  A dozen occupied litters lay within the hemispheric glow shaped by the clinic’s grounds lighting. The litters lay in a row on the pavement between the shattered front doors and the little convoy of ferrent vehicles that remained parked at the curb. Hospital staff knelt alongside some of the wounded, but a half dozen of the litters held still, blanket-covered bodies.

  Kit and I together had fired a grand total of one shot, which had only wounded one bad guy. Yet a half-dozen people had died, and the wounded were too many for me to count. Kit wheezed and pawed my arm for a rest stop.

  As we stood in the darkness, panting, hands on knees, another long-hooded ferrent staff car pulled up behind the two canvas-topped lorries. The driver leapt out, circled the hood, and opened the rear door for the passenger.

  A ferrent sat up on one of the litters, then stood and limped toward the car and its passenger. The limper was the ferrent that I had winged, touching off the melee.

  The two senior ferrents met, talked there in the night, then walked together into the clinic. Broken glass crunched and tinkled as they reached the clinic’s front steps, then passed inside. Another litter, bearing a dead body, lay near the doors. A Yavi KIA, no doubt.

  I whispered to Kit, “Couple hundred yards more. Can you make it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Kit, we’ve gotta get out of Dodge before they regroup.”

  The best time to escape any situation, as present circumstances had just shown, was sooner, rather than later, when the enemy was confused and disorganized.

  “I know. I taught you that, remember? You go on ahead. I’ll be along. Just in second place.”

  I would have carried her in a minute, until I dropped. Her protests notwithstanding. But wounded, I physically couldn’t. “I’m not leaving you.”

  In the distance, I saw healthy ferrents organizing. Too soon, they would be hunting us. “Kit, second place tonight isn’t just first loser. It’s dead.”

  She nodded, and we shuffled toward the shelter of another intermediate building. Five yards before we reached the protective shadows, I heard the metallic click of a pistol being cocked in the darkness to our front.

  Crap. The ferrents had reorganized faster than I expected.

  Kit swung her pistol up and aimed at the sound.

  Sixty-one

  Polia
n sat in the now-disconnected metal chair in the interview room. He stared at the dark window of one-way glass. Alongside him in an unwired chair sat the interrogator, who leaned forward, forearms on knees. The door to the corridor was open, but the ferrent who had held his rifle to Polian’s head blocked the doorway, rifle trained on the two of them while he scowled.

  The ferrent glanced away from them, down the corridor, and his eyes widened. Then he snapped to present arms and stood aside.

  A different ferrent, this one in a trench coat, swept past the guard and into the room a heartbeat later. The new arrival walked straight to Polian, then stood, feet planted in front of him. “I warned you that woman was trouble!”

  Polian looked up. The black-eyed chief inspector, who Polian had argued with on the clinic’s steps weeks before, glared down at him.

  Polian nodded. “But you were wrong about why she was trouble. She’s a Trueborn spy.”

  The ferrent rolled his eyes.

  Polian said, “You need to lock down the city. Mobilize every asset you have. The danger to Tressen—”

  The ferrent’s eyes widened. “Are you insane?” He pointed a brown-gloved hand toward the carnage he had just passed through. “The danger to Tressen, Polian, is you! And your trigger-happy skinheads. Three of my men are dead!”

  “That was the Trueborns’ doing.”

  The ferrent snorted. “You mishandled a low-level Iridian terrorist. Now you want to deflect the blame for it.”

  Polian shook his head. “The woman confessed!”

  The ferrent narrowed his eyes at Polian. “Really? Pity the Interior Police missed it. Oh, that’s right. We weren’t invited.”

  “That’s beside the point. She’s escaped!”

  “Or you’ve hidden her someplace else. I find it hard to believe that your skinheads couldn’t handle a single woman.”

  “There’s another Trueborn spy.”

  “Ah.” The ferrent nodded. “A one hundred percent increase.”