Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  Alia leaned forward, eyes wide. “Where did they go?”

  Kit shrugged. “North to the Ice Line by commercial rail. That was an easy tail for us. We just bought tickets on phony ID papers. Then the Yavi went on, even farther north, by ice train.”

  Celline’s eyes widened. “The RS doesn’t sell tickets for the ice trains.”

  Kit wrinkled her forehead at Celline. “You know the ice trains?”

  Celline frowned. “Too well. Please, Colonel. Continue.”

  “You’re right. They don’t sell tickets. It’s a military-run train. We stowed away on the undercarriages.” Kit glanced at me. “Eternads are a case officer’s best friends. But once the Yavi arrived at the end of the ice-train line, they continued on farther northeast, out across the snow flats. Jazen, they’ve downsmuggled more than that one skimmer you saw. They must have been at this for years. It’s just one more indication how big this is.”

  Alia asked, “They got away?”

  “No. They would have, but I made the decision to follow them on foot.” Kit stared down at the table and shook her head. “Hostile, unfamiliar environment. Weather went to hell. Risky.” Kit’s face darkened, and she swallowed. “My junior died in a crevasse fall during a storm. Took our uplink with him.”

  And another piece of her heart. More victims sacrificed to her Trueborn delusions of duty.

  She took a deep breath. “My luck just got worse from there. I wound up in that damn clinic broken in a half-dozen places, with the ferrents and Yavi intelligence pulling on me like dogs with a chew toy. The rest, you know.”

  Actually, I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to know. It was obvious that the hologen that Kit had fried before we escaped contained a confession that the Yavi had wrung from her by drugs and torture. One thing I did know was that I owed the Yavi payback for that. Worse for them, Kit Born owed them, too.

  Celline wrinkled her forehead. “Do you have any idea what they were doing up there?”

  Kit shrugged. “I didn’t see much before things went to hell. They had opened a small-scale excavation surrounded by disproportionate security. Buried treasure. Mining, maybe.”

  Celline nodded. “Ah. Both, actually, I think.”

  Kit and I both stared at her, jaws dropped.

  I asked, “What?”

  “They’re after the stones.”

  Kit stared at her. “What stones?”

  Celline said, “Your father’s stones, Jazen.”

  Sixty-seven

  Three days after Gill and Polian had parted, they met again in the makeshift office that Gill’s predecessor had made out of an urban hotel room.

  “At ease, Major. You look cold.” Gill nodded at a teapot set on a warming plate on a sideboard. “Pour yourself a cup, then sit with me.”

  It was cold. Polian buttoned another button on his Tressen jacket.

  Once the two of them were seated at a conference table set to the side of Gill’s desk, Polian tugged a hologen from his bag, switched it on in the center of the table, then pointed at the graphic that hung in the air between them.

  “This red pancake is a threedee schematic of the deposit. The vertical scale is exaggerated because the deposit is so thin that if it weren’t exaggerated it would look like a circular sheet of paper.”

  Gill stared at the holo while he rubbed his chin and nodded. “You’re saying that the stones aren’t buried even as deep as you thought?”

  Polian nodded. “The burial depths turn out to be about the same as they are for the weapons-grade cavorite at the west end of the fall. Weapons grade behaves like a less dense material than propulsion grade, so we expected that we’d have to dig for this stuff.”

  Gill sipped his tea. “Major, what’s the soonest you could begin full-scale extraction operations?”

  “Do you mean from now, or from the time we downsmuggle the mining equipment, General?”

  “What equipment do we need?”

  Polian cocked his head, then ran a finger along the perimeter of the image. “Actually, sir, the way this has shaped up, we wouldn’t need equipment. We could literally put troops to work raking stones up from under the snow.”

  Gill cocked his head. “How much of this stuff could we get like that?”

  Polian waved up another figure, this one a threedee numeric matrix. “You know, sir, given good weather and motivated workers, we could harvest enough stones to power a cruiser fleet for a decade in three weeks.”

  “How big a mountain would that be?”

  Polian cocked his head as he stared at the ceiling. “You’d be surprised. I think you could load it all into ten skimmers.”

  Gill nodded. “If that’s all it amounts to, we could pack the stones into the leftover containers we used to downsmuggle skimmer parts and upsmuggle the whole thing on a single shuttle. Nobody cares what leaves Tressel. Just what arrives. We’d be out of here before the Trueborns knew what they missed.”

  Polian didn’t answer. He stood, walked to the room’s window, and looked out across the city. In the distance, he saw the spaceport’s silver hemisphere, the runways, and the broad, exposed plain across which the shuttle runway stretched.

  Gill came and stood alongside him, then clapped him on the shoulder. The general’s bony hand felt light through the soft fabric of Polian’s jacket. “Something bothering you, Major?”

  Polian pointed out at the spaceport. “It’s pretty exposed. I’d like to do something about that.”

  Gill frowned. “The Iridians haven’t mounted a meaningful operation inside the Tressen border in years.”

  “They haven’t had Trueborn help in years.”

  “According to the spy, she didn’t know what she was looking at up in the Arctic. She certainly doesn’t know how fast this thing is going to move from here forward. We didn’t know ourselves until five minutes ago.”

  “I’d still like to fortify the place.”

  Gill nodded. “I’d rather prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it fails to occur. Do it, Major. Do all of it.”

  Sixty-eight

  After Celline had dropped the bomb about my father, she called for Pyt to take Alia off to bed. Then Kit and I walked with her out to the base of a low rock face at the edge of the camp. There, the racing moon’s light reflected off two dozen stone grave markers that were tucked back beneath an overhang. There, presumably, godless Tressens would never find and desecrate them.

  Celline bent and touched the nearest stone. “Jazen, each of these men and women survived the Long March with me. There are only a few of us left now.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “After Earth handed the war to the Tressens, and before there was a rebellion, the Tressens began the wholesale extermination of the Iridian people. The ice trains carried unknowing Iridian families north by the trainload to freeze and starve. Colonel Born, that train you rode carried you through the grave of a nation.”

  Kit whispered, “I didn’t know the specifics.”

  Celline sighed. “That was the Tressen’s intention, of course.”

  I bent and squinted at a marker. “You said that my father—”

  “Long before I knew him, your father was a soldier who was sent here to Tressel to help the Tressens win the war against us. A high-level military advisor.”

  My heart sank. No wonder nobody wanted to talk about General Jason Wander. He helped kill a whole nation. As I knelt there in the vanishing moonlight, I cradled my head in one hand. Howard had finally led me to an answer. He had never promised that I would like it.

  Celline touched my shoulder. “Jazen, nations pick wars. Soldiers only fight them. It wasn’t the loss of the war that destroyed Iridia, it was what the Tressens did afterward. I’ve never blamed your father for that.”

  A Legionnaire learns early that soldiers don’t pick their wars.

  I said, “But you said you knew him.”

  “That came years later. The Trueborns sent Jason Wander back to Tressel.”

  �
�To make things right?”

  She shook her head. “Nations do the right thing for others when it’s also the right thing for themselves. He was sent back because the Trueborns needed cavorite.”

  I shook my head. “The Trueborns have all the cavorite in the known universe. On Bren. I know. I got blown up there once helping them keep it flowing.”

  Kit touched my shoulder as she shook her head. “No. This makes sense. Not that Howard would ever admit it.”

  Howard Hibble wouldn’t admit that the sun rose unless somebody electrocuted him first.

  Kit said, “Jazen, the only reason the Slugs bothered to impress human slaves in the first place was because cavorite was poison to them, but not to us. There have always been rumors about how the war ended. That we weaponized a grade of cavorite that couldn’t be used for fuel.”

  It did make sense. The Trueborns were always bellyaching about everybody else’s human rights violations. Everybody knew we won the war. The history chips said we won a massive battle, out at the edge of the universe, between gigantic fleets of colossal starships. But if we actually won by wholesale poisoning of the only other intelligent species known in the universe, we wouldn’t advertise it. How could Earth argue that its brand of genocide was different than the Tressen brand?

  Celline said, “Hibble sent your father back to get the stones. And your father did. But he also risked his life, shoulder to shoulder with me and other Iridians, to strike out against the Tressens.”

  “Why?”

  “The stones were under the death camps. Then your father helped me and the core of what became the rebellion escape from the Tressens.”

  “My father was part of the Long March?”

  Celline shook her head. “He had another war to fight. Not just for our survival, but for the survival of mankind. However, without him there would have been no Long March. And without the Long March from the Arctic, there would have been no rebellion.”

  Kit frowned and crossed her arms. “But why would the Yavi want weapons-grade cavorite? It’s useless for starship fuel. All it’s good for is killing a species that’s been extinct for thirty years.”

  The moon began to set over Tressel, and the three of us walked back toward our billets.

  Celline gazed up at the vanishing moon and smiled. “Only the Yavi know. And they aren’t about to tell us.”

  I looked at Kit and raised my eyebrows.

  She nodded, then said to Celline, “Actually, they might.”

  Sixty-nine

  The Tressen sentry snapped to as Gill, Polian, and the Tressen Regular Army major approached him across the tarmac of the spaceport runway. Gill returned the rifle salute, looked the sentry up and down, smiled and nodded. He turned to the Tressen major, and said, within the sentry’s earshot, “Your men look sharp, Major Vendl.”

  Gill still had the Chancellery fiat letter, so the compliment was no more necessary here than it had been to silence the ferrents yet again, after the funeral. Gill effectively commanded here, whether these Tressens liked it or not. But Gill was what the Trueborns called a GI’s general. He knew how to make them like it, rather than not. He had now made a friend of one soldier, of every soldier that one told, and of the major who commanded this Tressen infantry battalion. That battalion was now erecting a defensive perimeter around the landing strip.

  Vendl, the Tressen major, jowly and gruff, paused as the three of them walked along a double row of concertina wire strung between sandbag guard emplacements. Major Vendl crossed his arms. “General, may I speak frankly?”

  “It’s the only way I want my soldiers to speak.”

  “Sir, the Iridian rebels haven’t mounted an assault of any magnitude inside Tressen proper since I was a boy. All this”—he waved his hand at the ring of emplacements and wire that his battalion was building around the landing strip—“is probably for nothing.”

  Gill nodded. “Actually, I agree with you, Major. I’m preparing for the worst case. What I need to know from you and from Major Polian here is what the worst case may be.”

  Vendl, the Tressen major, pushed back his steel helmet and scratched his forehead. “The latest intelligence I’ve seen about rebel order of battle is that they can’t field more than one company-sized light-infantry unit.”

  Polian stepped in before the other major stole his thunder entirely. “The Iridian rebellion’s been reduced to irrelevance. For the last ten years they haven’t attempted more than assassinations and occasional hit-and-runs on Tressen positions down in occupied Iridia. The best estimate is that once Celline dies—if she hasn’t already—without an heir, the old guard will fold completely.”

  Gill pursed his lips. “Take it from an old guardsman—they may want to go down swinging. Tell me more about their capabilities.”

  The Tressen major shrugged. “Extrapolating from what they were, we should expect basic, leg infantry. Well-trained, minimally equipped. Highly motivated.”

  Polian said, “No body armor like contemporary infantry. Needlers will cut them to ribbons. Typical partisans. But typical partisans are more likely to try to hit us elsewhere, while the”—he glanced at Major Vendl—“the material is in transit. An ambush.”

  The Tressen major said, “They’re pretty good at ambushes. The best defense against an ambush is to not walk into it in the first place.”

  Polian said, “We won’t pick the route until the last minute. Use decoys. Ambush won’t be a problem. For that matter, nothing the Iridians might throw at us should be a problem.”

  Seventy

  About Kit’s and my freight-hopping return trip to Tressia, the less said the better. We anticipated that the Tressens might be watching the trains more closely since the Great Big Clinic Shoot-out, so we stood watches back-to-back, one asleep, one awake. Therefore, we had minimal time to get reacquainted. We also anticipated that the rail yards would be watched more closely, so we bailed out of our boxcar on the outskirts of Tressia, split up so that we didn’t fit the two-person profile the Tressens were looking for, then legged it in to town separately.

  It was past moonset when I rounded the corner and reentered the street where we had raided the church poor box. I climbed the steep cobbles toward the church, the street deserted except for a single drunk passed out in a doorway. I was so jumpy that for a moment I thought it was Kit.

  The church looked to be as cold and empty as it had been during our last visit, but I noticed a gray scuff on the left side of the entry door jamb, six inches above my eye level. That mark signaled me that Kit was already inside.

  I took the stairs two at a time and smacked my head on the bell again at the top of the stairs.

  I rubbed my head. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

  “That’s what he said.” Kit sat on the belfry floor with her head bent below the waist-high wall that enclosed the open space within which the bell hung. The single bell, which was both as tall and wide as I, was capped by a wood frame that suspended it between timber beams that supported the belfry’s pyramidal roof.

  “That’s a stupid place to hang a bell. That’s what who said?”

  Kit peered down at the data panel of the remote-activated telemetry recorder that I had placed during our last visit. It now rested in her lap like a black plastic rodent with a wire tail.

  “The bad-cop Yavi at the clinic. After I broke the good cop’s nose.”

  “No wonder you don’t get dates.”

  She looked up. “You’re late to this one. Trouble?”

  I shook my head. “You’re early.” I pointed at the recorder. “We got anything on the RAT?”

  “Couple hours.”

  I raised my eyebrows. The bug that the recorder was set to listen for was voice activated. It was common to revisit a RAT and find nothing, if the bugged subject was quiet. A normal office day often yielded only a half hour of audibles, farts included.

  She smiled. “The bad cop seemed attached to his jacket. He must wear it all day.”

  A micropowere
d flexibug, like the one Kit had slipped into the hem of the Tressen jacket that had hung in her interrogation room, transmitted a signal deliberately weak in order to be virtually undetectable. Therefore, we had to set the RAT high, such as in this tower on top of a hill, so the bug’s transmissions would reach it no matter where the subject took the bug, as long as it stayed within a city-sized radius.

  And RATs didn’t retransmit, because the signal could reveal their location. They had to be serviced by a live asset who exchanged drained batteries and full chips for fresh ones. It was clumsy, dangerous, and all very last-century. But the outworlds were last-century places. They lacked contemporary infrastructures within which to eavesdrop. You can’t hack a Net that hasn’t been invented yet.

  That wasn’t the only reason I didn’t like this situation. We were cornered up here. I slipped on my snoops and peered out over the waist-high wall of the open bell tower into darkness that the snoops turned bright, ghostly green. The street below remained deserted. I asked Kit, “Pull the chip and listen someplace safer?”

  She shook her head. “We’re already here. Once we leave, we won’t be back for a while. We could miss something that gets said in real time.”

  We could also get trapped up here like rats, lower case. I sighed and plugged my phones into the RAT’s second jack. But I remained standing, with eyes on the street below. Actually, the view wasn’t bad. I could see all the way out to the spaceport.

  After a half hour of breakfast orders and routine chatter, another voice joined the subject, who turned out to an intelligence major named Polian.

  We couldn’t see the holo the two of them were watching, but we got the gist. Kit paused the recording and said, “I know that guy. Nice for a baby-killer.” A minute later Kit spoke again. “Propulsion-grade cavorite! No wonder the Yavi sent a general to take charge of this! Rat-bastard Howard could have told us both about this.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think he knows. He misfigured that Tressel cavorite was all weapons grade.” Over the years, Howard Hibble, like most spooks, was more infamous for what he got wrong than he was famous for what he got right. Despite the periodic public outcries, it wasn’t so much that intelligence services were dishonest, and it wasn’t so much that they were stupid. They just absolutely, positively knew a lot of stuff that wasn’t true.