Undercurrents (16 page)

I shook my head. “The coating’s phony. Just like your warrior queen. The diamonds are fine.”

Alia’s lower lip stuck out. “You lied to us. Heroes don’t lie.”

“
You
lied to
me
! Everybody lies, Alia. Welcome to life.”

Pyt said, “I’m sorry, Jazen.”

“Sorry?” I threw my hands up in the darkness. “What do I do now? I need intelligence, not transgenerational con men.” I sat cross-legged on the floor in the dark and rubbed my forehead. I could leave these two and find a safe open spot to lay out my phone-home panels. With luck I’d be on my way off this clown show of a rock within a couple of months.

Alia opened her mouth, but Pyt shushed her.

Or I could retrace my steps, then stumble around this planet on my own looking for Kit until my accent and my incompetence got me killed.

I stood and shifted the sidearm at my waist. “See you two around.”

“No, Jazen!” Alia stepped toward me as I turned, and the light of her torch fell across my face for the first time.

From the darkness, a woman’s voice gasped.

I froze there in the torchlight.

After four heartbeats the voice said, “Who
are
you?”

Thirty-three

Just before midnight on the day after Polian had met General Gill, the two of them dismounted from the Tressen military two-car train that had brought them north on steel rails from the capital. Ice Line Station, on Tressen’s flat, frigid northern prairie, marked the end of that line. The place was just a huddle of huts, windows dark in the night, that existed only because at this place one railroad ended and another began.

Along with a half-dozen Yavi commandos, Polian and Gill stepped off onto a wind-scoured iron transfer platform that bridged the space between the train that had carried them north and the train aboard which they would continue their journey.

Oil lamps suspended beneath the platform canopy swayed in the wind, and the lamps threw elongate shadows into the dark beyond the platform.

All the men lumbered, bundled in civilian Tressen winter wear. Their armor and two skimmers were loaded, beneath tarps, on the flatcar behind the train’s passenger coach.

Polian walked along the platform, pointing with a blunt mitten at the spiked wheels of the new train’s engine while he leaned toward the general to be heard above the wind. He lectured the general, who walked a pace back, hands clasped behind his back. Beyond the ice train’s black bulk, the frozen river, the riverbank, and the sky merged into a monochrome ebony wall.

Polian said to Gill, “North of here—the Ice Line—the Tressens don’t lay rails. The rivers are frozen as hard as iron three-fourths of the year, and the mines are inoperable during melt season, anyway. So these locomotives tow sledges on tracks cut in the ice.”

Gill turned back to the first train as the Tressen platform crew and the commandos rolled the covered skimmers’ cargo pallets across the platform and onto the transfer train’s waiting flat sledge.

Gill shook his head. “Mag levs on wheels. Straight off a history chip.”

Polian continued, “Our new train will head north at first light and take us a hundred miles farther. The last hundred miles can only be covered by skimmer.”

Chains rattled in the darkness as the commandos locked the skimmers down on their new flatcar.

Gill squinted into the featureless blackness that surrounded them. “So we travel in daylight. Any sights to see along the way?”

Polian stared into the night. “Yes. Unfortunately.”

Thirty-four

My heart skipped at the sound of the woman’s voice. Pyt and Alia had led me into a trap. I reached down and unsnapped my sidearm holster’s flap.

Before my pistol cleared its holster, the crackle of released rifle safeties echoed off the dark Iridian crypt’s walls. A half-dozen men seemed to materialize from the darkness and formed a semicircle around me, rifles aimed at my head. One stepped forward and pressed a knife long enough to be a sword against my throat while he twisted the sidearm out of my holster.

My pistol clattered on the crypt’s rock floor.

Only then did a silhouette glide out of the shadows toward me. The woman was as tall as I was, slim and athletic. She wore a simple battle-dress uniform, trousers bloused over boots, and a single ammunition bandolier crossed her chest. Her hair was blonde and pulled back, and I guessed she was in her forties. Her eyes were even more bright emerald than Pyt’s or Alia’s, and she carried herself with that confidence common to Trueborns but uncommon in outworlders. When she turned her head, her silhouette against the torchlight matched the profile of the young woman whose stone image adorned the sarcophagus. I smiled in spite of my predicament. Reports of the death of the fifty-seventh duchess were exaggerated.

Pyt stepped toward her and dropped his head. “Ma’am.”

She flicked a hand, motioning him closer. He whispered in her ear.

She stared at me with those big eyes, her chin elevated. In fatigues and over forty, she was a knockout. She must have been a goddess at her coming-out party.

She said, “Lieutenant Jazen Parker. Pyt says that you’re odd for a Trueborn.”

I stood motionless, then swallowed, and the blade’s steel pressed against my Adam’s apple. Head back, I croaked, “I wouldn’t believe much Pyt says. He also told me you were dead. Ma’am.”

She smiled. “It can be a convenient fiction.”

“Yep. You could’ve had the diamonds for nothing and been rid of me.”

She glanced at the rifles pointed at me. “We still can.”

I shifted my weight, and the blade at my throat scraped unshaved whiskers. “We need help. It’s in your interest to help us.”

She smiled. “Forgive my skepticism. Iridians have met few Trueborns they could trust.”

“Me, too.”

She raised her eyebrows and half smiled. “That sounds familiar.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “I—why?”

She waved away the man who held a knife to my throat.

He frowned, then withdrew his blade and stepped back with a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

Celline leaned toward me and squinted.

I rubbed my throat. “What
is
it?”

She stepped back and glanced over at the man who had held the knife to my throat. “Can we make it across the Corridor at the appropriate time, Captain?”

“Of course, ma’am. We always have.”

“I mean if we take Lieutenant Parker here with us. He’s favoring a shoulder, and limping.”

The captain eyed me. “That would be a question for our guest, ma’am.”

She looked me up and down. “I would bet he has a foot soldier’s genes.”

It was an odd way to phrase a vote of confidence.

I pointed at the captain. He was as gray as Pyt and probably older. “I can keep up with
him
, if that’s what you mean.”

The captain frowned. “We’d best move out, then, ma’am.”

She stared at me again and sighed. “This isn’t the time or the place to get to know you, Lieutenant Jazen Parker.”

After a hundred yards by my pace count, down a tunnel that led away from the crypt, we emerged into the now-moonless darkness of a cool Iridian night.

Within the first hundred yards I regretted my representation of fitness. My shoulder remained worse than expected, the Iridian boots were hell, and Celline’s troops double-timed when the terrain and light allowed. Sandwiched front and back by two troops with sidearms, I struggled.

I didn’t know where we were going, or why. I didn’t know who my captors were, though I had a pretty good idea.

But at least my potential ally was alive, and so was I. Unless the pace killed me. Or my potential ally did.

Thirty-five

Polian turned his back to the wind that had screeched unchecked across a hundred miles of drifted snow, all the way from Tressel’s North Pole. He flapped his arms against his Tressen overcoat. However comfortable Tressen clothing otherwise was, it was impossible to keep warm up here in the stuff. Sheep, and wool, still lay eons in Tressel’s future.

He stepped into the wind shadow thrown by the ice train’s now-still locomotive. The train had reached its northern limit as surely as his overcoat had. It was impossible to travel any farther in any conveyance the Tressens had yet invented.

He watched his men—now they were Gill’s men, from a chain-of-command standpoint—unload and prep the skimmers. Meanwhile, the Tressens bustled around the train that had brought them all this far.

Polian and Gill stepped inside a frigid shed and began changing into heated armor for the trip. The skimmers’ thin, retractable canopies were designed to keep sun and rain out, not heat in.

Gill’s limbs quivered like parchment-swathed branches beneath his underlayer as he tugged on his armor. He gazed out the shed window. Beyond the complex of drifted-over sheds that formed the Northern Terminus of the ice-train railroad, the train that had brought them blasted its whistle and began to move south with a fresh crew.

Gill pointed at the train as it rolled away. “That train’s going back empty. You said the iron mines are south of here. So why does this place exist?”

Polian’s teeth chattered as he pointed past the sheds at the never-melted snow. “No function, today. Years ago, this is where the Tressens brought the Iridian troublemakers.” There was, Polian remembered, a Tressen saying that the only Iridian who didn’t make trouble was a dead one. “After the war, Iridians were forced from their lands and told they were being relocated north to settle the northern wilderness. That was a raw deal. But about what the Iridians expected from the Tressens. They boarded the trains grudgingly, but they boarded. Of course, they would have balked at the truth.”

“What was the truth?”

“The Tressens hauled the Iridians up here by the trainload, like cattle. Then they dumped them into fenced-off compounds in the snow without food, water, or shelter. The Iridians died of exposure, dehydration, starvation. There was a macabre efficiency to it. All it took was enough personnel at this end to assure the trains could be turned around, and to keep the Iridians inside the fences until nature killed them.”

Gill stared into the darkness, and Polian wondered what he was thinking.

Polian said, “The Tressens didn’t even need to bury the bodies. They just let the wind cover them with snow. If our train had stopped during the last sixty miles, you couldn’t have walked a hundred feet from the tracks without tripping over a corpse.”

“This is the graveyard of a nation?” It was cold, but Gill shivered visibly.

Polian nodded. “When the bodies filled up one compound, the Tressens just extended the ice road a bit farther north and fenced off a new compound. Nobody at the south end had any idea what was going on because this place is so inaccessible.”

Gill sighed. “Did you ever wonder whether we’re so different, Major?”

Polian stared at his new boss. If you have more people than resources, why waste the latter growing the former to adulthood? An overquota Yavi terminated at birth wasted no resources and created minimal societal entanglements. That wasn’t cruel. It was basic civics to every Yavi. Especially to Yavi like Polian, whose father, the vice cop, terminated Illegals daily. When you thought about it, Iridians were just Illegals who had already consumed more than their share.

Polian and Gill buckled into their skimmer seats, and the skimmer’s relief driver pulled the compartment door shut behind them. The hovercraft’s starter whined, then it rose and wobbled in the wind.

Polian wrinkled his brow as he stared out at glistening white snow and steel-blue sky. It almost seemed like Gill questioned the basic morality of the society he had defended for all his life.

Well, if Gill did question Yavi society, that was more than the Trueborns did with Trueborn society. Their blindness to their own idiocy took away an impartial observer’s breath. An “inalienable right” to life was not only absurd, it begat chaos. Idiots begat more idiots. Trueborns thought they dominated the Union because they were just, but the truth was that they were just lucky.

The driver backed the skimmer off the platform, spun it around, and idled two feet above the crusted snow. The escort skimmer, bearing the protective troops, fell in behind them, then the little convoy shot north across the barren whiteness.

Polian gazed out through the skimmer’s side curtain as the featureless snow whisked past. The nations of Earth still fought among themselves. The Trueborns allowed idiots to beget idiots; then the productive parts of Trueborn society supported them. Worse, because they were lucky enough to control interstellar travel, the Trueborns exported their idiots and their idiocy.

Polian sat back, let the skimmer’s vibration lull him, and smiled. Well, the Trueborns’ luck was about to change.

Thirty-six

The Iridian rebel column of which I had become an unwelcome part marched like foot cavalry until the first pale light of Tressel’s sun diluted the darkness. As it became brighter, I could see that they were aging foot cavalry, but spry for geezers.

We halted suddenly, by which time my borrowed boots had raised, then broken, blisters on both my feet. I estimated by pace count that we had moved inland fourteen miles.

Alia, who had been tasked to lead three soldiers back to retrieve, then carry, my gear, came and knelt alongside me while I sat on a rock and tugged off one of my Iridian boots.

The brushy knoll atop which we had halted offered some cover. I looked out across the dimly visible broad valley that stretched away to our north and south and swung my hand. “Is this the Bloody Corridor?”

Alia cocked her head. “How do you know about the Corridor?”

“I did my homework. That’s what you should be doing. Not playing soldier.”

“I’m not playing!” She turned away and crossed her arms.

According to the case brief, the naked, jumbled rock terrain that comprised the Iridian coastaI zone was a fifteen-mile-wide maze of flooded channels and jumbled ridges and canyons. It stretched north all the way to the Barrens, and the swamp’s natural barrier defined part of the Iridian-Tressen boundary. The inland portion of northern Iridia was a plateau carpeted with impenetrable tree-fern forests.