Undercurrents (18 page)

Gill stared at the stone. “And the mote generates the force that moves starships?”

“No, sir. Gravity is the force. One of the basic forces of this universe. Cavorite is antithetic to gravity.” Polian took the stone back and turned it. “Right now, this stone, and all the matter in this universe, stays where it is because the gravitational forces generated by the mass of this universe act uniformly on it from all sides.” Polian tipped his hand, and the unsupported stone fell to the snow. “If I take away the gravity pulling on one side of this stone, like I just took away my hand, the gravity of the rest of the universe pulls the stone the other way. Cavorite doesn’t so much block gravity as it eats gravity.”

Gill toed the stone in the snow. “Doesn’t seem to be hungry just now.”

Polian smiled as he stooped and retrieved the stone. “Modulating the removal and replacement of the shielding. Harnessing the power. That’s the real secret of C-drive. It’s the part that took the Slugs so long, sir.”

“And only took the Trueborns the time required to steal it from the little maggots.”

Polian nodded. “And the Trueborns inherited the only source of propulsion-grade cavorite in the universe, to boot.”

Polian swung his hand at the surrounding landscape. “But Bren’s not the only source any more! These meteorites are sprinkled across an impact zone a hundred miles long. Clear back across the trace of the ice-train railroad we came north on. But the quality back there’s unsuited for propulsion.”

Gill narrowed his eyes. “How did we find this?”

“We didn’t. Two years ago the Tressens approached one of our missionary teams with a sample that had been gathering dust in a mineral-specimen storeroom. The Tressens had literally stumbled across it when they built the ice-rail line.”

“I’m surprised they knew what they had.”

“Actually, they didn’t. At the time the stuff was discovered, the Trueborns still had a diplomatic presence on Tressel. All the Tressens knew was that the Trueborns were inordinately nosy about this stuff.”

Gill toed a stone in the snow again. “I take it there’s more where this came from?”

Polian led them up out of the pit, scuffed the snow with his boot for thirty seconds, then bent and plucked up another stone slightly smaller than the first. “The bolides are very low density, and they struck the surface at a low angle. Some buried themselves, but sixty percent of them skidded, bounced, or barely dug in. They’re literally scattered across the surface beneath the snow, even forty thousand years after they fell. When we arrived, we expected it would take months to evaluate the deposit. Then years more to mount a clandestine mining operation.”

Gill rubbed his chin. “Major, what would the Trueborns do if they knew about this?”

“If I had their monopoly and found out that it was at risk, I’d go to war to preserve it.”

Gill nodded. “I agree. And if you’re right about this woman and the fellow in that boat, the Trueborns may be on the brink of finding out.”

Polian dug another glowing stone from the snow, tossed it in his palm, then dropped it again. As he gazed back to the south, he sighed. Somewhere down there, he was convinced, a Trueborn who had slipped through his fingers like a cavorite stone was doing whatever he could to find out exactly.

Thirty-eight

Two days after my conversation with Celline, her group and I had settled in at one of a network of rebel camps that were hidden in the Central Plateau’s forests. Celline shifted constantly among the camps, both to show the flag for her troops’ morale and to minimize the possibility of her capture.

The camp nestled at the base of an overgrown escarpment peppered with shallow caves. The units in camp spent most of their time training, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that there seemed to be half as many units as there were available billets, and most of the soldiers were so old that they didn’t really seem to need training. One troop wasn’t only younger, she got different training. Pyt tutored Alia daily in everything from algebra to written and spoken Iridian, which the Tressens had outlawed. He also taught her pugil-stick drill.

A modern army takes real-time communication and surveillance for granted. On Tressel information was exchanged slower, especially among the rebels. Celline had circulated urgent inquiries across the Iridians’ human intelligence network, such as it was, looking for clues for me.

While I waited for intel returns, I hung out with the only other person on post who had free time and a juvenile streak. One afternoon, with Pyt’s blessing, I chased Alia up a scree slope at the cliff base. I had told him I would give her some escape and evasion training. We were playing hide-and-seek, which, when I thought about it, was pretty much the same thing.

I scrambled to the junction where the scree met the cliff, panting, and realized that Alia had vanished.

Then I saw that beyond the scree the cliff tucked back into a cave’s mouth fifty yards wide, a hundred yards deep, and twelve feet tall. More like the underlip of a ledge than a cave. I bent, hands on knees, and squinted into the dimness. I didn’t see Alia, but I did see a jumble of unnatural shapes.

I shuffled into the darkness toward the closest object. It seemed to be an up-angled log, but the cavern smelled of old canvas, rusted metal, and oil. I reached out to the shape and touched not wood but steel, a horizontal, tapered tube as big around as my bicep.

I pulled out my pocket flash, which was cheating for hide-and-seek, but spies cheat all the time.

The thing I had touched was an old-fashioned, wood-spoke-wheeled, breech-loaded artillery rifle. I shone the flash around the cave and saw a jumble of military hardware. Water-cooled machine guns on tripods, their blunt muzzles angled toward the cavern’s ceiling. More artillery pieces, hand-cranked wired field telephone kits. The back wall was piled to the ceiling with wooden packing crates, to the extent that I could see the back wall. The part I couldn’t see was obscured by parked vehicles of various sizes, from two-wheeled gun caissons to rusting, boxy trucks.

Calling that scrap heap an armory was a stretch, but museum almost fit. Especially for a former tanker like me.

Alongside the trucks were parked four tanks. “Tanks” was as big a stretch as “armory.” They closely resembled the first tracked armored vehicles, which on Earth were rolled out well over a century earlier, to break the stalemate in a trench war similar to the meat grinder that had ended with the rape of Iridia by Tressen.

The tanks’ tracks stretched around rhombohedral flanks plated with riveted steel armor from which bulged sponsons set with side-firing cannon. I had seen holos, mostly remastered sepia-toned twodee motion pictures, but for a tanker to see one of these in the steel was like a paleontologist staring at a live dinosaur. I walked to the closest old crawler and rapped on its plating.

“Who’s there?” Alia’s giggle echoed from inside the dinosaur’s belly.

“A tank driver.”

The tank’s main hatch, which was just a steel door set in the beast’s flat flank, squealed, and Alia poked her head out. “You drove one of these?”

I walked to the machine’s rear, and clambered up the forward-sloping rear tread like it was a shallow ladder. “I was a hovertanker. Hovertanks don’t have tracks. They ride on an air cushion, like the skimmer that chased us. I’ve driven crawlers. But never any this old. Does the army ever use these?”

“They’re museum pieces. Slow. Hard to maintain. Fuel is scarce. They’re as useless as the rest of these supplies, because we’ve learned to avoid set-piece battles, anyway.” It wasn’t Alia who answered me, but Celline.

She stood silhouetted, hands on hips, against the bright light oval formed by the cave mouth.

I visored my hand above my eyes and blinked. “Alia was learning to hide.”

Celline crouched so that she could peer at Alia over the tank’s hull, then spoke not so much to me as to the girl. “I wish she were as good at Iridian grammar as she is at hiding.” Celline stood and looked at me. “Jazen, I came looking for you because we’ve heard something back.”

I leapt off the crawler’s back and landed, crouching, on the cave’s dirt floor. “Where is she? They.”

Celline walked to the tank and laid one hand on the right six-pounder’s barrel while she held her other hand out, palm down. “It’s just raw information, Jazen. Nothing definite.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Well? Ma’am.”

She said, “A physician—a Tressen who was once married to an Iridian—on the staff of a clinic in Tressel occasionally assists us. He was treating a comatose woman who, he was told, had been struck by a lorry. He doubted that.”

“Why?”

“An accident victim usually doesn’t have an armed ferrent posted at the door to her room.”

My heart skipped. “What do you mean, ‘was’ treating? Is she…?”

“Alive, as far as the physician knows. He’s no longer attending her. There was some sort of argument between the Interior Police and an anonymous man over her treatment. The man seemed influential.”

“Why?”

“Only someone influential would dare argue with a ferrent, Jazen. Shortly after the argument, our friend the doctor was relieved from the case. The patient was moved to a more secure location within the clinic. And she was placed under heavier guard, by people who didn’t look like ferrents.”

I frowned. “Could this prisoner be just a routine criminal?”

“Perhaps. But the ferrents don’t deal with routine crimes. And it’s the only lead we have for you, so far.”

“Then I need to talk to this physician.”

Celline shook her head. “Just tell us what information you need. We’ll send someone. You can’t go. Not with your accent.”

“What’s my accent have to do with it?”

“You would certainly have to speak to someone.”

“Why?”

“The clinic’s not just in Tressen. It’s in Tressia, the capital. In fact, it’s in the Government Quarter, six blocks from ferrent headquarters. Interior Police on every other street corner check the identity papers of everyone who enters the Government Quarter.”

“Then I’ll go with whomever you were going to send, and they can do the talking. Ma’am, I don’t just need to talk to the physician. If this is the person I’m looking for, I need to see this place if I’m going to make a plan that gets me in and gets me out of it.”

Celline shook her head again. “If you go with one of our men, you would just endanger him more. We’ve heard that the Tressens are double-checking pairs of adults traveling together. A new protocol.”

I puffed out a breath. “We can thank the Tressens’ new buddies for that profile. The Yavi must have told them that Trueborn case officers come in sets of two.”

Alia said, “They never check Pyt and me at all.”

Eyes wide, I looked down at the girl, who had crawled out from beneath the ancient tank to stand beside us. “You’ve been to Tressia?”

Celline nodded. “Pyt’s been traveling there for us for years. The Tressens tolerate a black market in medical supplies, which we need.”

Well, that explained how “we” knew the doctor.

Celline laid her hand on Alia’s head and smiled down at her. “Alia’s presence can be disarming.”

Using a child as a disguise seemed callous. But a child who grew up with a target on her back, the way I had grown up with a target on mine, accepted callous as normal. Undesirable, but normal.

I narrowed my eyes at Celline. “Tressia’s nearly four hundred miles from here. If I hike fifty miles a day, it would still take a week. I don’t have that long.”

Alia shook her head. “Walk? We don’t walk. We can get there and back in two days—”

“We?” I pointed from Alia to my chest and back. “We? This wouldn’t be a shopping trip with old Pyt. This will be dangerous. No!” I crossed my arms. Then I paused and cocked my head at Celline. “Did she say two days?”

Thirty-nine

Polian wrapped his hands around his warm tea mug as he stared from the clinic’s empty visitor’s lounge down the building’s white-walled entry corridor. Three days had passed since he had briefed Gill in the snow-covered arctic pit, and during the entire return trip Polian had rarely even been chilly in his armor. But psychologically he craved the tea mug’s warmth. The human mind convinced itself of things that weren’t true. This morning, Polian was counting on that weakness.

The door guard unlocked, then opened, one of the translucent entry doors that spanned the corridor’s far end. The door’s hinge creak echoed through air that smelled of disinfectant as daylight flashed in.

A man dressed in Tressen civvies, tall even for Yavi military, stepped through sideways. The tall man wrestled a metal case with both hands, then set it down in the corridor and flexed his fingers while the guard closed and relocked the door. The man was slender, hawk-faced, and the echoes of his panting breath displaced the sound of the door lock clicking.

After a full minute, the man picked up the case again, walked down the corridor, and set the case down in front of Polian. “I lugged my equipment nine blocks from that damn boarding house. If you had put me up in a hotel commensurate with my rank I could have gotten a cab.”

Polian sighed. A Medical Corps major had no rank as far as real officers were concerned. Polian shook his head at the interrogation specialist. “Every hotel desk clerk and cabbie in this city reports to the Interior Police. I don’t want the ferrents to know you’re here.”

The interrogator pulled out a chair and reached for the teapot on the table.

A physician, in fact the one who had laughed at the ferrent when Polian had his run-in, passed them on his way toward the clinic’s occupied rooms. He glanced up from a clipboard at them, then looked away.

Polian stood and grasped the tea pot and two mugs. “We’ll take it with us. The ferrents will get wind of what we’re doing here too soon as it is.”

Polian led the interrogator down the hallway perpendicular to the entry hall, past rooms that had been emptied at his order, until they arrived at a closed, steel-riveted door, in front of which a Yavi sat at a desk. The man sprang up from his chair, which, like the desk, Polian had insisted be placed in the corridor. The man’s civilian jacket gapped and revealed the pistol he wore in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket.