Undercurrents (2 page)

Polian turned to his father, eyes wide. And then something beneath the surface tugged at Polian. Gently at first, then stronger. A crosscurrent of water, beneath the still surface, swept Polian’s feet off the shifting seabed and dragged him out toward the emptiness.

He screamed, clawed for his father’s arm.

The older man allowed him to drift for a moment, then caught his son’s hand, pulled him upright, and stared down into his eyes. “Undercurrent. You see one thing on the surface. But underneath, things are moving in a different direction. And the difference can kill you. Ruberd, if you’re gonna be a cop, you have to be tougher. And you have to learn that a good cop never forgets to read the undercurrents.”

The experience had been intended to teach Polian what it would take to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, it had turned Polian bookish, the bright kid in class rather than the bold one. And a bright kid who became an analytical-intelligence officer, not a cop. But Polian never forgot to read the undercurrents.

Aboard the skimmer, Lieutenant Frei touched his helmet faceplate with a salute to Polian. The driver twisted the wheel, swung the vehicle away from the excavation site, and both skimmers vanished into the swirling snow within twenty yards.

Polian turned, then looked down at the corpses.

Alongside Polian, Lieutenant Sandr threw back his visor, bent at the waist, and vomited into the snow.

Polian sighed, but didn’t afford Lieutenant Sandr the sympathy he’d shown the skimmer driver.

It was, Polian knew, because Sandr was too much like Polian himself. Sandr was uplevels raised, a bright, bookish boy. A degreed xenogeologist. University boys skated basic and went straight to intel officer’s training. Sandr had never learned what the downlevels kids did, either from life or from the tongue and baton of a basic instructor. Neither, Polian knew, had he.

So Polian had assigned the patrol to Frei, born to be a line officer, a leader of men.

On the other hand, officers like Polian and Sandr, who would be a staff officer, an advisor to commanders, as Polian was, had their place. A xenogeologist ought to be good at puzzles. And Polian had a puzzle on his hands.

Polian knelt alongside the nearest body, a raw private by his sleeve flashes, and rubbed at a black smudge on the side of the body’s greatcoat. He rubbed the black stuff between his gauntlet fingers. Soot.

Inside his temperature-controlled armor, Polian felt cold congeal in his stomach. Undercurrents tugged harder at his mind. “Sandr, wipe the drool off and give me a hand here.”

It took both of them to roll the headless body, already frozen stiff as a log, over onto its back.

Within the snow hollow vacated by the torso was a deeper pit in the snow, displacing the volume of a flower pot. The smaller pit had icy, blackened sides.

Polian stood back, hands on hips, then pointed at the pit. “What do you make of that, Sandr?”

“Sir?” The boy genius cocked his helmeted head. “Uh, well…these two made a fire to keep warm. Somebody spotted it and shot them. This fellow fell on top of the fire as he died, and smothered it. Bandits would have ransacked the bodies for valuables, so it must have been rebels.”

Polian sighed, pointed at the other body. “That sergeant had twenty years in, by his sleeve hash marks. An experienced soldier wanders fifty yards in front of his lines to build a fire?”

“Oh.”

“And where would he get firewood?”

The xenogeologist turned and looked into the storm as though trees might have sprouted on the barren, snowy plain while they spoke. The kid shrugged. “I guess the rebels just stumbled across these two, killed them, then tried to burn the bodies, to cover up.”

Polian sighed again. Xenogeology must not be that tough. “I agree with you that these two weren’t shot by bandits. We’re a hundred miles above this planet’s Arctic Circle. The nearest settlement is at Northern Terminus, where we jumped off, one hundred six miles west. Any bandit who tried to make a living at this spot would starve waiting for victims.”

Sandr spread upturned palms. “That leaves the rebels. As I said. Sir.”

Polian pressed his lips together. Then he said, “Iridian rebels haven’t done more than blow up the occasional railroad track in years. See any tracks?”

“I understand, sir. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have followed us up here.”

“How? By dogsled?” The largest land animals evolved to date on Tressel were bow-legged amphibians that couldn’t survive an autumn frost, much less a blizzard. The only vehicles on Tressel capable of crossing the frozen wasteland between the northern terminus of the Arctic Railroad and this excavation site were Polian’s skimmers. The skimmers had been downsmuggled a component at a time.

“Well, these two didn’t shoot each other!” The lieutenant gulped. “Sir.”

Polian nodded. “On that, we agree again. Sandr, you graduated Intelligence Officer School, yes?”

The kid straightened. “Perfect scores on every exam, sir.”

Polian rolled his eyes behind his visor. He made a mental note to tell Intel School’s faculty where they could put their exam program.

“Do you recall any remote covert sensor, in even a half-modern intelligence inventory, that isn’t equipped with a pyrotechnic self-destruct?”

The kid furrowed his pale brow behind his visor. “No. But the soot couldn’t be from a self-destruct. Technologically this planet’s a hundred-plus years behind us, almost that far behind even
Earth
. The Tressen military has no modern covert sensors. And so the rebels
certainly
don’t have them.”

Polian stared at the kid as wind rattled snow against their helmets.

Finally, the boy genius said, “Oh.”

Two hours later, a detail made up of Tressen soldiers had tagged and bagged their mates’ frozen remains, improvising from sample sacks intended for storage and transport of this mission’s objective.

Polian’s earpiece crackled; then Lieutenant Frei said, “Sir, we got ten yards’ visibility out here. So far we’ve cleared about four square miles.”

Polian ground his teeth. Too slow. If these guys could evade as well as they could shoot, they would lose themselves in the storm. “Visibility stinks here, too. What do your thermals show?”

“Actually, sir, that’s why I’m reporting. The sensors weren’t showing much in this crud. Then Mazzen said, well, these are
prospecting
skimmers, so why don’t we switch over to their magnetometers. We did, and five minutes later we found a steel rifle! Obsolete local military. Bet we find the serial number matches one the rebels stole from some armory, and the ballistics match with the bullets that—uh.”

Polian exhaled. Of course the gun would be a locally manufactured piece. And of course it would turn out to be the “murder weapon.” But this was a covert operation that could change human history, not a homicide investigation. Nonetheless, initiative should be encouraged. Mazzen was a sharp kid, NCO material. Polian said, “Tell Mazzen good thinking, for me. And that he’s breveted to corporal.”

Polian could
hear
Frei smile. “Outstanding, sir! He’ll appreciate that, Major! The rebels must be carrying rifles, shovels, helmets—hell, pots and pans—all kinds of metal. We’ll get ’em now.”

Inside his helmet, Polian shook his head. “Okay. But stay sharp. Eternad armor barely shows on normal sensors. A magnetometer’s blind to it.”

“Eternads, sir?” Polian could hear the smirk in Frei’s voice, too. Frei said, “Only Trueborns use Eternads. And they don’t carry bolt-action rifles.”

Three

The marksman burrowed into the snow, panting. It was full dark now. But colder, which meant that a heat source stood out more against its surroundings.

Eternad armor vented body and mechanical heat in irregular patterns. That theoretically camouflaged the wearer’s passive infrared signature. But Eternads blew less deceptively than Yavi armor did. And Yavi passive sensors were sensitive enough to detect even Yavi armor. Being twenty years behind the bad guys was a bitch.

The marksman shut down all the suit’s external sensors and the heater, cutting what the suit blew, then waited for the exhaust-temp and heart-rate displays to drop back into the green. The rest was welcome.

Minutes passed while the wind howled. The overall situation was more frustrating now. The signals spooks had got it right. The Yavi
had
inserted a unit here on Tressel, clandestinely and illegally. That had been expected, because clandestine and illegal was how the baby-killers always worked. Of course, it had been just as illegal to insert the marksman’s team in response.

Well, hardly “just as.” The Tressens, who were even bigger villains than the Yavi, knew the Yavi were here. In fact the Tressens had welcomed these Yavi, according to the images. The Tressens were providing security and labor to help the baby-killers get whatever it was they wanted up here in the frozen north.

And whatever the two most isolated and autocratic rogue worlds in the Human Union wanted was certainly bad for Earth. And probably worse for the rest of the Union.

But the chance to record proof of the plot had now gone up in smoke, literally. Earth couldn’t afford to confront its two most bellicose neighbors with a conspiracy that the Motherworld could neither prove nor understand.

The Motherworld also couldn’t afford to have a covert spook of its own captured here on Tressel. Trueborns were the Good Guys, the ones who played by the rules. The marksman’s presence here violated about a dozen rules derived from the Sovereignty Clause of the Human Union Charter.

The heat-signature readings and heart rate on the marksman’s visor display dropped back into the green.
Time to run like you stole something, again.

The marksman sucked on the helmet’s water nipple, chinned the suit’s sensors back on, then stood in the storm and waited for them to activate.

A shadow barreled out of the blowing snow just as the marksman’s helmet sensors flashed red and howled.

The Yavi skimmer’s front debris guard slammed the marksman’s chest plate. A four-ton object moving at twenty miles per hour met a stationary object that weighed, all-up gear plus living tissue, one hundred eighty-one pounds. The result was predictable.

The marksman thought, somersaulting through blowing snow, that physics were a bitch.

Then there was pain, and, finally, darkness.

Four

Polian stood over the dented, twisted armor suit that lay in the snow, glinting in the foggy cone projected by the skimmer’s headlights. Polian shook his head. “How long ago did you hit him?”

“An hour, sir. Give or take.” The skimmer’s driver knelt alongside his machine, wedged a boot against the bent debris guard. He grasped the plasteel tubing in two gauntleted hands, grunted, and pulled the guard back to a semblance of functionality.

Polian cut his helmet mike so he could swear, because Frei stood beside him.

Magnetometer! If they had been running normal thermal sensors, they might have detected this spy and taken him alive instead of pulverizing him. Now all Polian had was a third corpse. A corpse wearing Eternad armor, certainly. But the Trueborns would claim, successfully, that didn’t prove anything except poor inventory control. They would deplore the black market in restricted technology and ask the Yavi to help them tighten their security. It was so predictable, so phony.

Polian bent down and peered at the dented armor’s opaque faceplate, upturned toward the storm. One fact was undeniable. This one had been a covert-ops specialist, alright, and a good one. Crack shot with a gunpowder antique. Smart enough to discard the rifle, both to mislead and to lighten his load. He had probably shut down his own sensors to reduce his heat signature, and it had worked. Just dumb bad luck for him that the skimmer, blind to his presence, had whacked him.

Local technology had yet produced no vehicle that could keep up with a skimmer over snow, and as Polian knew from recent experience, smuggling anything as big as a skimmer down from orbit was nearly impossible.

That meant that this guy had route-marched at least a hundred and six frigid, snowy miles to catch up with them. But not just this guy.

Polian turned to Frei. “Get back on your grid. Pick up the search where you left off. And keep the thermal on this time!”

The younger man eyed the storm swirling around them. “Sir? There’s no other tracks. And we respooled the sensor recordings while we were waiting for you. There was just the one set of vitals.”

“Trueborn special-operations teams work as matched pairs. There’s another snake in this snow someplace.”

Frei saluted, then turned to the skimmer crew.

Partner or not, wearing Eternad armor or not, this guy had been a hard case to have followed them up here. From the tracks in the snow, after the skimmer bounced him, he had still crawled fifty yards from where he had landed before he collapsed.

Polian whispered to the motionless faceplate, “Oh, you lucky sonuvabitch. If we had taken you alive we might have turned you over to the local spooks. You self-righteous pricks call
Yavi
intel inhumane? Nobody can make a subject suffer like the ferrents can.”

Polian stood, stretched, and started to turn away.

Then the corpse groaned and twitched one arm.

Polian’s jaw dropped. Then he smiled.

Ten minutes later, two Tressen privates had gotten the Trueborn spy, armor and all, lashed to a skimmer’s rear rack. None too gently, and the spy moaned.

After waving the two Tressens out of earshot, Polian leaned down until his helmet was a handspan away from the spy’s opaque faceplate, and popped his own faceplate open. Then Polian reached down and worked the exterior faceplate latch on the spy’s helmet. He wanted to see the fear in the murdering bastard’s face, eye to eye, when he told the spy what the ferrents would do to make him talk.

Polian popped the spy’s faceplate open and stared down.

Polian’s eyes widened. “What the hell?”

Five

As I stood behind the bar at Jazen’s, I polished its nickel surface with a towel in one hand. I like the place neat, because I’m Jazen. I also like the place peaceful, because I’m too familiar with other times than peace. Therefore, I snaked my free hand beneath the bar until my fingers brushed the stock of the sawed off shotgun. The gun lay alongside the little paper garnish umbrellas. Like every bar in Shipyard, Jazen’s needed the former more than the latter.