Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  “I can prove what I say.” Polian nodded toward the hologen on the table. “I can literally let you watch her confession. If I prove to you that she’s a threat, will you concentrate on stopping her instead of on blame-fixing?”

  The ferrent snorted, spun on his heel to leave. But when he reached the doorway, he bent and lifted the burnt and misshapen lock cylinder that lay there. He frowned. “I know these locks. They’re unbreakable.”

  Polian raised his arms. “Every minute you waste—we waste—their trail gets colder.”

  The ferrent turned the twisted steel in his hands, then pointed at the hologen. “Show me.”

  Polian stood, hurried to the table, then lifted the hologen into play position and tapped the start button.

  Sixty-two

  At the sound of the pistol cocking, my heart rate spiked, and I gripped my own machine pistol tighter.

  Kit raised her off hand to grip and aim her machine pistol. I reached for her arm. “Wait!”

  “Jazen?” Alia’s voice hissed from the darkness.

  By the time my arm touched Kit’s, she was dropping the pistol back to her side. Alia stepped out of the shadows, into the pale light that leaked from the clinic’s grounds. The .38 she gripped two-handed and pointed skyward.

  I flapped a hand at Kit and her pistol. “It’s okay. She’s with me.”

  Kit looked Alia up and down. “Well, well, Parker. Lost your appetite for older women?”

  I held out two hands, palms spread, at Alia. “What the hell? You were supposed to stay back at the rally point and secure it.”

  “Pyt taught me to take initiative. You picked a dumb rally point. This one’s just as secure, and it’s closer. Now we can get away sooner. By the way, you missed an excellent gunfight.” Alia tucked her pistol back into her trousers’ waistband. Then she looked Kit up and down.

  So did I. Kit stood, shaking in dirty smock and trousers, and hugged herself with her bare arms, one of which was sheathed in a cast. Her bare feet were blue with cold and bloody from our run across broken glass. Dried blood painted her chin, and her teeth chattered. She was so thin that, if she had been a chicken, a dozen of her would have been required to boil down to a cup of soup. Captivity and torture had sunk her eyes deep into her face, and electricity had exploded her hair into a dirty blond feather duster.

  Alia waved me close and tugged my arm so my ear was alongside her lips. Then she whispered behind her hand. “Are you sure you got the right prisoner? For a princess, she looks a little shopworn.”

  Sixty-three

  Polian stared down at the hologen, then depressed play again. He swore and stabbed the button. The machine just sat there. He looked up at the interrogator. “What did you do to it?”

  The interrogator shrugged. “Never touched it.”

  Polian lifted the machine and shook it.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing, Polian?” The chief inspector crossed his arms, then glanced down at his old wristwatch, sighed, and jerked his thumb in the direction of the clinic’s front. “I have wounded to attend to.” He turned on his heel and said to the rifleman in the doorway, “Come with me!”

  The uniformed ferrent’s jaw dropped. “What about these two, sir?”

  “Released on their own recognizance for now. We can find them. Apparently the only aliens capable of disappearing are Trueborn spies.”

  After the chief inspector had left the two Yavi alone in the interview room, Polian dug his fingernail under the hologen’s side-access panel, then flipped it open.

  Soot dribbled out and formed a conical, black pile on the tabletop.

  The interrogator stared, then slammed his hand on the table. “She fried it!”

  Polian ground his teeth. The woman had been left alone with the hologen. A simple incendiary straw in the hologen’s memory slot and the most unassailable and valuable evidence of Trueborn misconduct that had been developed over the entire course of the Cold War had been reduced to rubbish.

  Polian sat, shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. Then he realized that he also had casualties it was his responsibility to see to. He pulled himself together, rubbed his face, and straightened his shirtsleeves, using his shadowy reflection in the observation window’s featureless dark glass.

  “Long day.” The interrogator stood and walked toward the corridor.

  Polian followed. As he reached the doorway, he turned back into the room, then looked around. His Tressen jacket hung off of a chair back. A bedraggled commander was the last thing that his men needed to see after this debacle. Polian slipped the jacket on and smoothed its collar where it lay across the back of his neck. The fabric was comforting. After this night, he needed all the comfort he could find.

  Sixty-four

  Normally, Tressen checkpoint soldiers care who enters the Government Quarter, not who leaves. If Tressen society communicated in real time, though, the abnormal events of that night would have had those soldiers on high alert in seconds.

  But the Tressens didn’t communicate in real time. So Alia and I, supporting Kit, bundled into my jacket, between us, slipped past a checkpoint and out into the narrow, twisting streets of the Old Quarter within minutes.

  Since the Republican Socialists had taken over, Tressen’s official religion was Republican Socialism. But on Tressel, like on most of the outworlds, old-time monotheism had acquired a certain momentum that even totalitarians hadn’t been able to arrest. The Church of Tressel had managed to keep its doors open across Tressen. Literally.

  We found a twisting side street that led up a hill. The Church of Tressel apparently believed in building as close as possible to its principal shareholder, and there was, in fact, a church on top of the hill. Its doors were unlocked, because you never knew when somebody might feel the need to be saved. But apparently we had picked a light-need night, because the place was deserted inside. We rummaged through the church poor box and built a wardrobe for Kit. It didn’t make her look less shopworn, but it improved her morale.

  The three of us sat in a rear pew while Kit tried on shoes that Alia passed to her. Alia pointed at the shoes. “We’re taking those from the poor. Shouldn’t we pay for them?”

  I sighed. In the first place, we had spent the last of our Tressen currency on tea and brot at the bakery. In the second place, the only other suitable tokens of value we still had were a couple of Weichselan diamonds apiece, which were not only gross overpayment for secondhand shoes but a tipoff if they turned up in the poor box. But the wound in my back ached. Also, as I came down off the happys, fatigue wedged itself into a corner of my consciousness.

  “Those?” I pointed at the shoes Alia wanted to pay for and shook my head. “I think the poor already gave those back.”

  As I was getting weaker, Kit, ratty shoes and all, was getting stronger. She pointed at the rucksack in my lap, and I passed it to her. She rummaged, handed me an object, then pointed at a steep, spiral staircase behind us that wound up and into an opening in the ceiling. “Bell tower?”

  I stared at her. “I have to do the rescuing and the climbing?”

  Alia stuck out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll do it.”

  I stared at her. “Do what?”

  She eyed the unfamiliar thing. “Oh. I don’t know.”

  I sighed, lifted myself onto my feet, and shuffled to the spiral staircase with the object in one hand.

  Five minutes later I wound down the bell-tower staircase, rubbing a knot on my head where I had hit it on the bell that hung in the tower. Tired soldiers make mistakes. The sooner we got out of here the better.

  I stepped back down onto the marble-tiled floor and found the pews empty. The clothing Kit hadn’t appropriated had been returned to the poor box, and the two females in my life were dressed and waiting on me at the door, arms crossed.

  Kit said, “We’ve got a train to catch.”

  Successful field espionage isn’t just about being smarter. It’s about being smarter, sooner.

  Before sunrise,
the three of us had snuck aboard a freight that had already begun to roll south but hadn’t yet reached even walking pace. Once the Yavi and the ferrents resolved their mutual dysfunction, or at least reined it in, trains like the one we had hopped would be searched. Eventually, telegraph alerts would go out through the cables buried in the roadbed to the strongpoints down the line. The three of us would become an even more endangered species. But at that moment, we remained ahead of the game.

  At midmorning, Kit, Alia, and I sat in a boxcar facing the open door and watching Tressel roll by as we headed south into Iridia. The cargo crates against which we leaned contained manufactured goods, not fish, so the car smelled better. The car rocked, and I rocked with it.

  I drifted, half asleep, down off the stimulants that had driven me, sedated against the pain of my wound and bleary even without the drugs.

  I watched through half-closed eyes as Alia peered into Kit’s face.

  “You have pretty eyes. Not pukey green like mine.”

  Kit stared out at the landscape. “Thanks. Where I come from, blue eyes are common. Green eyes are rare. With those eyes, boys would go nuts over you.”

  “Like Jazen is nuts over you?”

  I closed my eyes before Kit could glance at me, and pretended to sleep, which didn’t take much pretending.

  Kit sighed. “Maybe once.”

  Alia said, “Are you nuts over him?”

  If the hole in my back didn’t kill me, the waiting to hear her answer might.

  Kit said, “Things are different in situations like this.”

  “I don’t mean like now, when you’re both all sweaty and gross.”

  “That’s not what I meant, either. Physically intimate case officer pairs are fairly common. The problem between us was mission orientation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The sedative tugged me toward unconsciousness.

  Kit said, “I wanted to save the universe, which was our job. Jazen just wanted to save me.”

  “He got in trouble for that?”

  “No. But because of Jazen’s misplaced focus, I finally had to recommend that we be repartnered. Jazen quit rather than serve with anyone but me.”

  “Why was it so important?”

  “In our business, misplaced focus gets people killed.”

  “I mean why was it so important to him?”

  “Living without someone who you”—I heard her swallow—“someone who you work closely with is painful. Every day of your life that you wake up and realize that they’re gone, it’s like somebody reached into your chest and squeezed your heart.”

  “Oh. He saved you just now. Does that mean you will take him back, or you won’t?”

  I fought to stay awake. But before Kit answered, I lost the fight to the healing sedatives. That meant that when I woke up the next day I was still going to feel somebody squeezing my heart.

  Sixty-five

  Polian turned up his Tressen jacket tighter as chill wind tore at him and at the other mourners in the stone line at the Tressen cemetery. The wind scudded a low cloud ceiling across the morning sky and caused already-bowed heads to dip lower. The place itself was bland, treeless granite, punctuated by waist-high stone mounds. Polian stared down at the fist-sized granite cobble in his hand, then glanced at the similar stone carried by Gill, who shuffled in line alongside him and to his right.

  Ten feet to Gill’s right, in a parallel line, walked the ferrent chief inspector with whom Polian had locked horns, somber and carrying his own stone. Ten yards farther ahead, the two lines would pass three stone cairns, and he and Gill would confront the ferrent across the stone-covered bodies of the three ferrents who had been killed by Yavi needle rounds the previous night. Not, Polian reminded himself, by Yavi. At least, not in a causational sense. The three Tressens and the three dead Yavi were victims of an exchange of gunfire triggered, Polian was sure, by the Trueborns.

  As he shuffled along, it occurred to Polian that one could tell a lot about a society by how it handled death. The three dead Yavi had already been cremated and their ashes sealed in envelopes. The ceremony had been appropriately brief. Yavet couldn’t spare space for holes filled with decomposing flesh, nor waste emotional energy on afterlife fantasies.

  This Republican Socialist funeral was mercifully atheistic, compared to Iridian or Trueborn rituals. But equally barbaric, except for detail variations imposed by differing physical environments.

  Seventy percent of Tressen, Sandr had told him, was soilless, moss-covered granite. So bodies weren’t buried, they were simply covered with loose stones.

  The Tressens were, at least, better than the Trueborns, who buried their corpses, then left them to rot in the ground.

  Gill was the first to reach the stone cairn. He bowed as he laid his stone atop the waist-high cairn, then backed away. Polian copied the old man’s behavior, but glanced up, across the stones that covered the dead men. His eyes met the black eyes of the ferrent chief inspector, who glared as he placed his own stone.

  Afterward, Polian and Gill left the cemetery together in the backseat of a Tressen staff car driven by a Yavi trooper.

  Gill stared out the car window at the chief inspector, who huddled alongside the now-deserted cairn, smoking, with a knot of ferrents.

  Gill said, “Polian, you ever wonder whether the other folks have it right?”

  “General?”

  “The three men we lost? Didn’t give them much of a send-off, did we? Maybe we hold human life too cheap.”

  Polian stiffened his back against the car seat. “The Tressens have systematically exterminated a nation of eleven million people, sir.”

  Gill waved his hand at the ferrents. “Not those butchers. The Trueborns. They call our population-control policies mass murder.”

  “Sir?” If Gill had been an ordinary citizen, Polian would have been tempted to arrest him for treason.

  Gill waved his hand again. “Don’t worry, Captain. I’m not a subversive. Just an old man who’s seen too much death.”

  And one who hadn’t reprimanded Polian for this entire fiasco.

  “Major, allying totalitarian societies is like stuffing two fire-ant colonies into one bottle. The Tassini on Bren do that.”

  “I don’t follow you, sir.”

  “When the bottle gets shaken, the ants fight. But if you pour enough sugar into the bottle, they go their separate ways.”

  “Sir?” Polian stifled an eye roll. Gill didn’t think like a Yavi. At least, not like a legal one.

  “Major, you were right about these Trueborns. They’re more real than the ferrents thought. Frankly, maybe more real than I thought. And they’re pretty good at shaking up this bottle.”

  “Uh—thank you, General.”

  “What we need to do now is accelerate a positive result before it’s too late.”

  Polian sat back in his seat as the car pulled up in front of Gill’s hotel.

  As Gill stepped to the curb, he leaned back in to the car and said, “Ruberd, you’re a bright guy. Think me up some sugar, will you?”

  Polian managed a smile. “How soon, sir?”

  “Before the Trueborns figure out what’s going on and shake the bottle again.”

  Sixty-six

  The day after I had slept through the most interesting part of Kit and Alia’s girl talk, the three of us managed a happily uninteresting disembarkation from our boxcar at the spot where we were expected. Pyt and a detachment escorted us to a different rebel encampment, to which Celline had displaced during our absence. The place was as old and understaffed as the first one.

  We were supposed to return from Tressia with information and a plan. When we showed up with a warrior princess to boot, it was natural enough that she was invited to dine with the only other warrior princess at large on Tressel.

  Alia and I were invited, too. The four of us dined in Celline’s quarters, a cabin as spartan as her troops’ billets. We ate the same menu as Celline’s troops, too, and dinner w
asn’t served until after the troops had eaten.

  Halfway into the fish course—who am I kidding? All Iridian courses are fish courses—Celline turned to Kit. “Colonel, why did you come here?”

  I paused with a forkfull of crabmeat in front of my mouth. It wasn’t the kind of question a soldier answered for a just-met semi-ally who didn’t need to know the answer, especially in front of an eleven-year-old. But a case officer in the field was no ordinary soldier, and Kit Born was no ordinary case officer.

  Kit and I both knew that we needed Celline’s cooperation, and we wouldn’t get it if we treated her like an untrustworthy hick.

  Kit looked up from her meal. She still looked thin and pale, but already the light had returned to her eyes, and she filled out her Iridian fatigues better with every meal. She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “Ma’am, your friends the Republican Socialists would love to have a technically advanced ally like the Yavi.”

  Celline stared at her, eyes suddenly cold. “As we say it, Colonel, every bully wants a bigger stick. Apparently the stick Earth gave the Tressens the first time wasn’t big enough.”

  Kit inclined her head. “I’m sorry. I really am. Earth understands Iridian anger. We didn’t even try to link with you when we were inserted.”

  Celline shifted her gaze to me. “Obviously that changed by the time Lieutenant Parker was inserted. Earth figured out that we were too angry to ask, but not too principled to bribe?”

  Kit ignored the barbs. “Ma’am, what we need to figure out is what the Republican Socialists offered that bribed the Yavi. One of my interrogators was a major, and the way he was getting bossed around, his superior was a general officer. The Yavi don’t send generals to command routine outworld brush fires.”

  Alia asked Kit, “How did you get caught?”

  I watched Celline. If Alia hadn’t asked, Celline would have.

  “My partner and I didn’t come down on a shuttle. But we knew all the Yavis had to come and go aboard one. So we staked out that vacant lot they call a spaceport in Tressia. When the next party of Yavi imposters arrived, we followed them.”