Undercurrents

by Robert Buettner

  I had forgotten that I was in the presence of Annie Oakley.

  Kit turned back to me, hands on hips, and stared. “It takes two to operate the gun, Parker. Move your ass!”

  I had seen that look before. I had also forgotten that I was in the presence of a woman bent on saving the universe.

  In the distance, the shuttle engines climbed the scale.

  I turned to the ammunition rack, slid out an armor-piercing round, and loaded it while she cranked the traversing wheel.

  Kit panted as she bore down on the wheel. “Jeez, Parker. Didn’t you grease this thing?”

  “That shouldn’t make—” I wrinkled my forehead, peeked out past the cannon slit, then recoiled.

  Glaring back at me through the slit was the face of a thin, gray-moustached old man. His face was smoke smudged, and the left sleeve of his Tressen battle-dress uniform had been torn away. But the leaves of a Yavi lieutenant general were pinned above his right sleeve. He straddled the six-pounder’s barrel as though he were bareback-riding an anaconda.

  I glanced at Kit. She had given up on the wheel, and bent, hands on knees, while she peeked out through the gap between the cannon’s barrel and the sponson. “Parker! We can’t aim this thing with that fucker on there! Shoot him.”

  If we couldn’t aim the cannon with his weight aboard, we certainly couldn’t wiggle it around and shake him off. Running outside and wrestling with him would take too long.

  I drew my machine pistol and sighted down the barrel through the slit at the old man. Behind him, I could still see the shuttle. Its engines were now so near max that they shook the ground, and the space plane’s vertical stabilizers vibrated.

  I looked into his eyes, and in that instant I knew. I knew that he was the sixth man in the skimmer we had crushed, and the only survivor. I knew that with those leaves, he was also Gill, the general in charge here on whom we had eavesdropped. He knew the shuttle’s importance, knew that the six-pounder was our last chance to stop it. And he was risking his life the only way he had left to stop us.

  “Parker! I can still hit it on the roll. For God’s sake, take the shot!”

  I aligned my sights. As I did, I saw the old soldier’s forearm, bare as he clung to the cannon barrel. Burned into his skin was a Legion graves-registration tattoo.

  Just like the one I had. And that told me everything about him.

  He was small, a downlevels birth. He had joined the Legion. The only Yavis who joined the Legion were Illegals who had nothing left to lose, like I had, once. The old man was living the lie that I would have lived. He was an Illegal with a new identity who went to sleep every night wondering whether it was the night that a bounty hunter would make sure he never woke up.

  I stared into his eyes, then lifted my pistol barrel vertical and slid the safety on. I could no more shoot him than I could shoot myself.

  The floor plates beneath my boots shook as the shuttle rumbled in the distance. Then the sound Dopplered away until it mingled with the roar of the rain.

  Kit touched my shoulder. “Parker, what the hell have you done?”

  I glanced at her, then back out through the aiming slit. Gill was gone. So was the shuttle, and with it the stones that let men fly to the stars. I said, “Long story.”

  “Better be a good one.”

  Outside the tank, the rain diminished to a drizzle, and we heard the buzz of skimmers in the distance. We leaned together so we could peer out the slit. A half-dozen more Yavi skimmers had formed up, just inside the open door of the Yavi’s grand memorial shuttle-hangar dome, a mile away. Soon we would have company.

  Kit said, “We should run.” Then she pointed at the six-pounder’s locked and loaded breech. “Be a shame to re-rack that round.”

  I nodded, then traversed the gun while she set elevation. When she was satisfied, she poked her head out the sponson hatch and held a finger up into the wind.

  Then she ducked back, tweaked the elevation wheel, and yanked the six-pounder’s pistol-grip trigger.

  Whoom!

  The gun recoiled on its carriage, cordite smell and smoke swirled, Thunderer One rocked, and my unconscious crew stirred.

  Kit and I rushed out through the sponson hatch and stood in the drizzle, hands visored above our eyes. We watched as the six-pounder’s round Annie Oakleyed invisibly downrange, while my crew and Kit’s platoon wandered up alongside us staring where we were staring.

  The nonexplosive armor-piercing round barely seemed to jostle the third skimmer from the right when it struck. But it doesn’t take explosives to blow a nitrogen bottle. A moment later, the skimmer exploded. Then it set off the other skimmers alongside it like a string of giant firecrackers. There must have been more skimmers and flammables inside the hangar, because secondary explosions erupted. They inflated the dome like a balloon, then the structure sagged back, collapsed on itself, and steam, debris, and flame erupted from all sides of the wreckage.

  One minute later, the great silver symbol of Yavi–Republican Socialist brotherhood and cooperation had been reduced to still and smoking rubble, steaming in the rain.

  Someone in the little crowd of Iridian partisans standing behind Kit and me whistled, then said, “They really aren’t going to like this.”

  I shrugged as I stared at the rubble. “Not the prize we needed. But a solid second place.”

  Kit shook her head, arms crossed, as she stared at the smoking wreckage in the distance. “Second place? You mean first loser.”

  That was what she always used to say to me when she outsprinted me on a burn lap. I raised my remaining eyebrow. “Does that mean that now we run?”

  She nodded. “Yep. Direction?”

  “Your turn to pick.”

  She shrugged, shouldered a ruck, and limped east. I pulled on my own ruck and followed.

  We didn’t run fast. We didn’t run in step.

  But at least we ran together.

  Ninety-one

  On the night that I had broken Kit out of the Tressen Clinic, I had told Alia that a by-the-book raid had a rally point, where the raiders reassembled after action. The spaceport battle was a raid, alright, but not by the book.

  We had always known that the tanks would be abandoned. The surviving raiders would, like successful guerillas always did, scatter, then melt away like fish in a sea of fishes, and live to bite another day.

  Kit and I knew that south toward Iridia along the railroad was the most obvious, and so worst, escape route for us. So we headed east to the coast.

  There we stole a boat and sailed—well, Kit sailed; I barfed—south. We scuttled the boat south of the Barrens, humped back through the canyons of the Inside Passage, then crossed the Iridian Corridor.

  Two weeks after the raid, we reached the camp from which we had started.

  Celline was already there, concussed and limping after being blown off of Thunderer Two. Sixty-six more raiders had also returned safely to that camp. Sixteen more had returned to other camps. Three wounded were being hidden by the physician who had helped us before, inside Tressia. One soldier had fallen when we took the patrol train. Four fell during the raid, all inside Thunderer Two.

  Seven remained missing in action. We hoped they would be found. But we knew they wouldn’t be forgotten. None of those who were already being called “The One Hundred” ever would.

  The Yavi got creamed, but still pulled off the greatest heist in the history of Cold War II, though they couldn’t advertise it.

  Nobody had to advertise what Republican Socialism lost. The burst silver bubble whispered volumes about its vulnerability.

  Recruits, not a gray hair on them, were already trickling into the rebel camps. Three meetings of something called the Free Tressen Resistance had been busted up in Tressia. Each meeting was being held in a church. In each case the conspirators escaped the ferrents because a lookout rang the church’s bell.

  As soon as Kit and I returned, we laid out our pickup-panel display in the cleared area behind Celline’s
quarters, then settled in to await a pickup that might never come.

  A week after we returned, Celline held a private ceremony behind her place.

  When Kit and I arrived, we found Her Grace standing, with her back to us, hands clasped behind her, wearing an unsoldierly Iridian-cut business suit. A delicate tiara was visible in her pulled-back hair. She stood alongside a nearly empty table draped in the Iridian flag, that rustled in the breeze of a cloudless day.

  The rest of the crowd comprised Alia, who sat on a bench in the clearing, reading aloud from an Iridian grammar primer, to Pyt, who sat beside her.

  Celline, who was watching Alia, turned, saw us, and smiled. The duchess said, “Please forgive the lack of grandeur. Not so much has changed.”

  Kit said, “That’s not what I hear, Your Grace.”

  Celline nodded. “Yes, it’s promising. But the Republican Socialists have scarcely toppled. This isn’t, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s countryman, Churchill, the end, or even the beginning of the end. But for us it is a new beginning. I won’t see the end.” She turned her head, and her eyes rested on Alia again. “But the fifty-eighth duchess will.”

  My jaw dropped. “Alia?”

  “My daughter is hardly something to advertise, Jazen. I’ve had a target over my own heart so long that I sometimes pretend I’m dead. Churchill also said that in war truth is so valuable that it must always be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.” She smiled. “And by Pyt. His uncle served my family all his life, and now Pyt has taken his place. Families are tangled things, you know. That’s why you deserve to know about her. About your heritage.”

  I squinted. “I don’t understand.”

  “Part of the reason I allowed Alia to accompany you, though it placed her in danger, is that her destiny demands an education in danger. Pyt can train her up for her role, but he can’t do it all. I also wanted her to know you, Jazen. She’s half Trueborn, you know. The strawberry-blonde half. And, after a fashion, your niece.”

  I stepped backward. Then I said, “Tell me—”

  The duchess cut me off with an upraised palm. “In time. Jazen, first I would like to present these.”

  She laid her palm on three flat, blue velvet boxes stacked on the flag alongside her and said, “The Star of Iridia.”

  Her Grace stood, motioned me to step forward and kneel, then slipped the medal over my bowed head and let it dangle at the end of a red velvet ribbon.

  I stepped back and hefted the medal in my hand. I’ve always thought that medals were just ways to divert attention from mistakes that got somebody killed. And these were no different.

  But when I watched Kit kneel, saw the ribbon slip over her hair and around her neck, and saw the way the medal lay over her heart when she stood, I cried. For the dead, for the missing, for our failure, certainly. But those tragedies and mistakes didn’t diminish her valor.

  Then Celline handed the third box to me.

  I took it and wrinkled my forehead. “Ma’am?”

  “Your father’s. I’ve never been able to present it in person. It’s my way of saying to you, Jazen, that I hope, I believe, that someday you will present it for me.”

  Now she had me crying again. This time I had to wipe my eyes. “What should I tell him?”

  “That it’s the greatest honor my people can bestow.”

  As I watched Celline, a shadow crossed her face, then darkened the clearing. I turned and looked up.

  A matte-black ceramic watermelon seed fifty feet long hung motionless fifty feet above us. It radiated heat down on us as though the sun had reappeared twenty million miles closer to us. Juking through the atmosphere at four thousand miles per hour will do that to a spacecraft’s skin temperature. The big watermelon seed was as silent as a C-drive ship always was, emitting just a crackle as its skin cooled.

  I widened my eyes. “For once, they’re early?”

  The Scorpion sideslipped to the clearing’s center as Pyt and Alia ran and stood alongside us.

  Once they were clear, the Scorpion descended until it hovered just far enough above the signal panels laid out in the clearing that they didn’t catch fire. The opaque canopy clamshelled open, and we glimpsed the pilot in the left front seat. The figure in the right front seat grinned down at us.

  I groaned. “Howard?”

  Howard’s eyes darted around the sylvan, unthreatening clearing, then rested on Kit’s and my well-scrubbed faces. He said, “Emergency extraction is for emergencies. Do you know what it costs to operate this thing?”

  Kit rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Howard?”

  Howard looked wounded. “It was a joke.”

  I raised my palm. “We got that, Howard. But there is an emergency.”

  “You mean the cavorite?”

  Kit’s eyes widened. “You know?”

  “We pieced it together after we interviewed the shuttle crew.”

  I pumped my fist. “Then the Yavi didn’t get away with it?”

  Howard shook his head. “Oh, heavens, yes, they did! The cavorite is long gone.”

  My heart sank.

  Kit ground her teeth. “Now the baby-killers have starships?”

  Howard shook his head. “Oh, no. Without C-drive, they’re like hitchhikers with a can of gasoline, but no car.”

  Gasoline? Was Howard that old?

  I said, “Oh.”

  “But that’s about to change, if we don’t get busy. You think I came to sign your expense reports? I need a team. Actually, I don’t need a team. I need you two. Now!”

  The insulated ladder whined down across the Scorpion’s flank.

  I looked at Kit and raised my eyebrows. “The man needs a team. Does he have a team?”

  I waited for her answer, every heartbeat like a hammer.

  Finally, she grasped the ladder’s bottom rung. “Maybe, Parker. Maybe.”

  Afterword

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” idiomatically translates from the original French as “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The Vietnamese (who used to be the French Indo-Chinese, but were pretty much la même chose when they were) say it a bit differently: “Old wine in new bottles.”

  The only nation that insists that things really do change at the drop of a bottle is the Republic of Speculative Fiction. Of which you must be a citizen, because you are reading this. These days you can’t browse the Kindle store’s aisles without tripping over a story that Defines a Totally New and Wildly Original Subgenre!!!

  Once there was science fiction. Now there is hard science fiction, military science fiction, space opera, new space opera, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, bit lit, alternate history, time travel, steampunk, splatter punk—I could go on, but already Undercurrents is hopelessly past deadline.

  Undercurrents is also hopelessly searching for a subgenre. Or is it?

  In January, 2010, Pevnost, the Czech Republic’s glossy, premier print magazine of speculative fiction, devoted an entire issue to “military science fiction,” in particular James Cameron’s Avatar (surely you’ve heard of it) and the Jason Wander/Orphanage series (surely…okay, not so much). The Jason Wander/Orphanage books are the five-volume prequel to Undercurrents and Overkill. Their translations are popular with the Czechs (who used to be the Czechoslovakians, but their beer’s the same. Plus ça change…).

  Pevnost differentiated Avatar as a Totally New and Wildly Original Subgenre, roughly translated as “Military Science Romantic Fantasy.” Ex-military/paramilitary protagonist, preferably a smartass; military hardware and panache; strong, independent female characters; a prominent love story, and alien worlds and creatures; all unstifled by NASA-level rigor. And that’s probably a good Kindle store aisle within which to shelve Undercurrents, too.

  But what Pevnost didn’t say was that Avatar, and I hope Undercurrents and its precursors, were good because they were about what characters you care about would do next, and why. Or, as SFWA Grand Master, multi-Hugo/Nebula winner, and writer
’s writer Joe Haldeman once told me about Orphanage, they were the rare sort of story that keeps him turning the pages.

  George R.R. Martin, who writes both science fiction and fantasy, says that “He engaged the hyperdrive, then…” and “She cast the spell, then…” are doorways into the same house, but with different furniture.

  There are really only two speculative fiction subgenres: good and bad. The difference isn’t the furniture, it’s characters you care about, what they will do next, and why.

  I tried to make Undercurrents, and the six books that precede it, the good kind. Hope you enjoy them.

  —Robert Buettner

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, first, to my publisher, Toni Weisskopf, for the opportunity and encouragement to create Overkill, as well as for insights and ideas that helped make it better. Thanks also to editors Jim Minz and Danielle Turner, for wisdom, to my copy editor, Paul Witcover, for perfection, and to Kurt Miller for dazzling cover art. Thanks also to Laura Haywood-Cory and to everyone at Baen Books for remarkable support and enthusiasm.

  Thanks, as ever, to my superb agent, Winifred Golden.

  Finally and forever, thanks to Mary Beth for everything that matters.

  About the Author

  Robert Buettner’s first novel, Orphanage, nominated for the Quill Award as best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror novel of 2004, was compared favorably to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers by the Washington Post, Denver Post, Sci-Fi Channel’s Science Fiction Weekly, and others. Now in its ninth English-language printing, Orphanage, and other books in his Jason Wander series, have been republished by Science Fiction Book Club and released by various publishers in Chinese, Czech, French, Russian, and Spanish. Orphan’s Triumph, the fifth and final book in the Jason Wander series, was named one of Fandomania’s best fifteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror books of 2009—one of only two science fiction books to make the list.

  In March, 2011, Baen Books released Overkill, Robert’s sixth novel, and first in his Orphan’s Legacy series, to which the Jason Wander books are prequels. Undercurrents is the second Orphan’s Legacy book.