Undercurrents (11 page)

When the cutter’s deck gun fired for effect, my armor would probably protect me from shell splinters and the secondary shrapnel which the boat would become. It was probable, but less so, that the Eternads would save me from concussion pulverization. I’d had tanks shot out from under me, even dinosaurs. But never a boat.

I knelt in bilge, listening to it slop and to my heart thump. I looked left and saw Pyt huddled, his body shielding Alia, who squirmed to peek over the gunwale.

If it hadn’t been for me, the two of them wouldn’t be facing this. I scuttled to them and spread my armored arms across the two of them. As if it could help.

Finally I realized that I should have been hearing the shriek of an incoming round or the blast of the round’s detonation. But all I heard was water swish and raspy breathing.

How long since the last round? A decent naval deck-gun crew, even while adjusting fire between shots, should put a round downrange every ten seconds.

It had easily been over a minute since the last shot.

I chinned up my helmet optics and focused on the cutter’s deck gun. The stripe-shirted crew stood lined up at attention, as they had when I looked last. They should have been spinning elevation and deflection handwheels, ramming a shell home, something.

I turned to Pyt, who still kept a hand on the tiller as we ran for the cliffs. “Why are they waiting?”

He turned back to me, eyes wide, and shrugged.

I turned and looked across the waves at the shadowed shelter of the rift in the cliffs.

I shook my head and said to nobody, “Too far.”

Nineteen

Polian gripped the cutter bridge’s steel rail ahead of him. He was a ground trooper. It had never occurred to him that large ships could move so violently that handrails were needed. But that hadn’t stopped him from commandeering her.

When Polian had read the Tressen report that the regularly scheduled Trueborn cruiser would dip lower to conduct “atmospheric tests,” the paper had seemed to stick to his fingers. The Trueborns were providing too much information. An undercurrent tugged at his instincts.

Until the delegation currently circling the planet above him in that cruiser arrived on the surface of Tressel, Major Ruberd Polian was Yavet’s ranking representative on Tressel. As such he was free to chase every undercurrent that tugged at his instincts.

The bookish boy finally had an opportunity to be the bold one, and Polian had seized it.

But why would the Trueborns even bother with such a ruse? The Tressens barely believed that giant ships, invisible beyond the atmosphere, really circled their planet, anyway. They would never have noticed.

Polian had plotted the track of the orbiting cruiser on a Tressen globe in a wooden stand, using a length of twine. How convenient that the Trueborns had chosen to sample the atmosphere one hundred miles above a desolate part of the Iridian coast, far from prying eyes.

It was probably an inconsequential coincidence. After all, unlike Yavet, most of sparsely populated Tressel was far from prying eyes. But good intelligence officers didn’t believe in coincidence.

Polian was convinced that the remaining Trueborn spy of the pair was at large, and a threat to expose the Yavi presence, if not the mission itself, here on Tressel. The “atmospheric sampling” was too coincidental. Were the Trueborns somehow picking up the at-large team member? If not, was he—or she—uplinking critical information about the hidden developments in the Arctic? Polian had weighed the risks, and he had acted.

Even so, when this old steamer’s lookouts had spotted the dumpy fishing boat, Polian had doubted his action. To be sure, the boat was Iridian. Its crew were presumably Iridians.

Iridians were, by statutory definition, enemies of the Tressen state, which justified blowing them to hell. But the cutter captain was right. Using a warship to blow up lober fishermen was like steamrolling flies.

Then, at that moment, a figure stood up, unsteady, in the boat. It could have been a fisherman in lober’s armor. The telltale blue-black color could have been a trick of light. Or it could have been a Trueborn case officer wearing a suit of Eternad armor, faceplate open.

If the figure was a simple fisherman, Polian should let the Tressens blow the boat to hell. But if there was the smallest chance that it was a Trueborn spy? The woman’s missing partner?

Polian pointed at the opening in the cliffs toward which the fishing boat ran. “Can you follow them in there?”

The captain shook his head. “We’d rip out our bottom a thousand yards offshore.”

“Then can you put a marine detachment over the side in one of your launches?”

The captain shook his head again. “With the head start that boat has? Behind those cliffs there’s an uncharted network of long shore passages. They twist and braid like yarn. They’re barely wide enough and deep enough to pass a launch, and there are falls and rapids around every bend. The Iridians have been fishing and smuggling the Inside Passage for six hundred years. We’d never find them.”

Polian nodded. “Then we can’t give that boat a head start.” He turned his head to the fresh-faced Yavi in civilian clothes who stood behind him and the cutter captain. “Lieutenant Sandr, have the Tressens put the skimmer over the side.”

“Combat, sir? The skimmers aren’t even supposed to be on this planet.”

Polian turned and faced the kid. “That Trueborn spy that Frei ran over wasn’t supposed to be here either, Sandr! Take the squad. The skimmer should be able to chase down that little tub out there before it disappears. If it does make it beyond the cliffs, it should be easy enough to track. The boat and crew you can feed to the fish if you like. But bring me back the one wearing black armor. Alive enough to question! Or I’ll feed you and your squad to the fish. Clear?”

“Yes, sir!” Sandr swallowed, saluted, faced about, and double-timed off the bridge.

A Tressen junior naval officer stood at the opposite side of the bridge, staring back over his shoulder at the cutter’s captain. “Sir? They’re getting away! We have them bracketed. One round...”

The captain shook his head as he stared at the Chancellery envelope that protruded from Polian’s breast pocket. The captain squeezed his binoculars. “Ensign, have this gentleman’s contraption swung over the stern.”

Twenty

Alia grinned while she pounded one fist on our gunwale. She shook her other fist at the cutter. “You can’t catch us now!” She kept her feet even as our boat leapt, then crashed down in the chop along the cliff base.

I lacked the girl’s sea legs, so I death-gripped the bucking gunwale with both hands.

Trueborns have a saying—it only took me a couple years on my parents’ world to learn that Trueborns have a saying for everything—about the folly of counting unborn poultry. But I grinned, too.

I nodded down my optics and zoomed on the cutter’s gun crew. They hadn’t budged. In another minute our progress would interpose the cliffs between us and the cutter. At the big ship’s stern, something moved.

I pointed and called over surf crash to Pyt, “What are they doing?”

He squinted at the big ship. “The cutter would ground in the shallows. So they’re putting in a shallow draft launch to chase us.” He leaned into the tiller while Alia tugged on lines for reasons I didn’t understand. Their combined action slipped us past surf that boiled around a garage-sized boulder.

Then Pyt shook his head. “I don’t understand why they’re bothering. A motor launch is barely faster than we are. And once we make the Inside Passage, they’ll never find us.”

I watched as the Tressens swung the craft that would hunt us out on davits over the ship’s side and lowered it on ropes and pulleys toward the waves.

I rolled my eyes. “Crap.”

Pyt raised his glasses, focused; then his brow wrinkled. “The fools are putting their launch in upside down!”

I cocked my head. A twelve-place skimmer’s inverted-bathtub hull
would
look like an overturned open boat if you had never seen an air-cushion vehicle. I sighed again. “It’s not a boat. It’s a light-duty utility vehicle. It blows air out from beneath that skirt around its belly and floats above the water. Or the land.”

Pyt snorted. “They have no such—.”

Alia said, “It’s true! It looks just like the pictures!”

Pyt turned to me, green eyes ablaze, and pointed at the skimmer. “You haven’t punished Iridia enough? You’ve given more machines to the Tressens? To hunt down the last of us?”

“We didn’t do that. That’s a Yavi machine.”

“Yavi?” Pyt frowned.

I said, “Another planet. If you think the Trueborns punished you, wait ’til you meet some Yavis.”

In the distance, the skimmer floated in the water, awaiting a helmsman. A dozen riflemen scrambled over a cargo net draped over the cutter’s side and dropped into the open skimmer’s troop space as it bobbed.

Nine of the squad wore Yavi body armor and carried assault rifles with barrels so slender that they had to be Yavi needle guns. One man, thinner than the others, wore Tressen naval coveralls and carried a gunpowder sidearm. The last two Yavi carried crew-served needle machine guns. The gunners levered the needlers into the skimmer’s midships gun mounts and fitted their drum magazines with a weary competence that couldn’t have been Tressen. I whistled. “And you’re about to meet some.”

The skimmer driver fired up his vehicle, and that familiar sucking whine snarled across the water. A fog of atomized seawater obscured the skimmer’s skirt, and the vehicle rose two feet above the waves.

Pyt’s eyes widened, and he glanced back and forth between the passage entrance, now thirty yards ahead of us, and the wobbling skimmer. “How fast is that thing?”

The skimmer’s driver got his vehicle trimmed. Its nose dipped, and it shot toward us, accelerating toward sixty miles per hour.

Pyt swore.

Alia slapped her forehead. “Ooh!”

Then our creaking boat passed into shadow, behind the cliff’s shoulder. For a moment, we could neither see nor hear the dozen heavily armed troops bearing down on us. There was only the creak of our own hull as we sailed on at one sixth the speed of our pursuers.

Pyt unlatched the locker in the stern, withdrew two single-shot rifles and cartridge bandoliers, and handed one to Alia.

Then both of them turned and stared at me.

Pyt pointed a three-fingered hand in my direction. “You brought these devils upon us. You get rid of them!”

Twenty-one

“Rover, we’ve lost sight of the boat from out here. Do you have visual on it yet?” Polian’s heart pounded as he awaited the skimmer’s reply, and he squeezed his handtalk so hard that it squirted from his fingers. It clattered across the bridge’s deck plates, and Polian kicked at it before he snatched it up.

The Tressen captain stroked his moustache to conceal a smile. “I sympathize with your frustration. But we did everything precisely as you asked. We could have blown those fish-eaters out of the water. We’ve done it before. Your mission, your command, sir. But if they escape…”

Polian faced away from the Tressen captain, stared out at the sky, and swallowed hard. Aboard the Trueborn cruiser circling invisibly above, hiding under a priest’s prayer shawl, rode this mission’s real commander.

Polian was the acting senior command authority for Yavet’s entire presence on Tressel, but only until General Ulys Gill hit dirt. Gill was replacing Polian’s unexpectedly and ironically dead boss, a this-century warrior slain by last-century Tressen influenza. With no suitable replacement on hand, command had plucked Gill off the almost-retired shelf and packed him off to Tressel with the next available detachment. Polian hardly welcomed the change. By reputation, the old moustaches had scant patience with staff officers, especially those who acted like line officers then got it wrong.

“Base, this is Rover.” Sandr’s voice shrieked as he shouted to be heard above the skimmer’s roar. Polian had almost forgotten that he had a question pending to his subordinate.

Sandr said, “No, we’ve lost sight of them. Once we clear the point, we should reacquire visual.”

Pop
-
pop
-
pop
.
Pop
-
pop
-
pop
. The sound of needle-gun bursts drifted to Polian as the squad pressured up its mounted crew-served weapons.

“Rover, this is Base. Does that sailor with you know where he’s going?”

“Generally. But he says nobody knows the channels and rapids ahead like the fish-eaters.”

Polian blew out a breath. Why did everything on this simple planet have to be not simple? “You have the sensors calibrated, then?”

“Much as we can in a new environment, sir. But it should be simple enough to follow the boat’s telltales.”

Pop
-
pop
-
pop
. One more pressuring burst.

Sandr said, “And when we catch it, sir, we’ll razor every living thing in it.”

“No! Rover, I want that boat interdicted. But I also want someone alive enough to tell me where it was headed and why.”

Twenty-two

Pyt steered our boat into a passage darkened by hundred-foot-high rock walls that narrowed upward to a slit. The channel was too open to be a cave, too narrow to be a fjord, too broad to be a crevasse.

Boom
.

A swell tossed the boat against the cliff and knocked me off balance. I tripped over coiled rope, fell headlong against a bait barrel, and landed on the still-twitching rhizodont. It managed a slow snap at me, and I kicked its head. I grabbed at Alia’s arm to stand and knocked her down, too.

She pulled herself upright, gasping.

Alia furled the sails as the swells swept the boat down the passage, thumping against rock hard enough to crack our hull’s planking. She unlashed a wooden pole, three times her height, from the mast, then stood in the bow, using the pole to fend the boat off the cliffs.

I called back to Pyt, “What do you want me to do?”

He waved a hand, palm down. “Sit down! Shut up! We’ve done this a thousand times.”

Ten minutes later the passage widened and the swells spilled out into the unconfined area and dissipated. Our boat slowed with the current, and I looked back up the passage, half expecting to see the skimmer bearing down.