Undercurrents Read online

  Undercurrents

  Robert Buettner

  Baen

  BAEN BOOKS by ROBERT BUETTNER

  Orphan’s Legacy Series:

  Overkill

  Undercurrents

  Undercurrents

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert Buettner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-43913449-8

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First printing, July 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buettner, Robert.

  Undercurrents / Robert Buettner.

  p. cm. — (Orphans legacy ; 2)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3449-8 (trade pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3602.U344U54 2011

  813’.6—dc22

  2011014194

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Bill, Rick, and Debi

  Brief excerpts from Henry V, Act IV, Scene III, by

  William Shakespeare, used by generous permission of nobody, because they’re in the public domain, for crying out loud

  If a ship’s master misreads the current, they take away his ship.

  If a spy misreads the undercurrents, they take away his head.

  —Attributed to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Commandant of German Intelligence, at Flossenburg Concentration Camp, Bavaria, Earth; April, 1945, as he awaited execution on suspicion of plotting to kill Adolf Hitler.

  One

  “What do you make of it, Sarge?”

  The sergeant watched the Tressen sentry tug his face scarf back up as wind-driven snow needled the boy’s cheeks. North of Tressel’s Arctic Circle, winter days were short, and this one was already dying. In the fading light, the sentry hiked up his greatcoat and bent forward so he could peer down at the object that his kneeling platoon sergeant was studying.

  The object protruded from a drift at the end of the snow furrow the sentry’s boot had plowed when he had tripped over the thing. It resembled an overturned white kitchen pot. A knee-high white wire stuck up from the bowl, thrashing in the mounting gale like a fern stalk.

  The sergeant cocked his helmeted head as he knelt, as careful not to touch it as a hot stove.

  The kid rolled his eyes. “Sarge, if it didn’t blow up when I tripped over it—”

  The sergeant cut the kid off with an upraised palm. “The fish-eaters love second-touch booby traps.”

  The kid smiled. “Come on, Sarge. There’s no rebels up here.”

  The kid was almost certainly right. There had been few rebels anywhere since before the sergeant himself had been a green, stupid boot. But the object was too civilized for this wilderness, too sleek for this time. The sergeant stood back, hands on hips. “Well, I think it’s got something to do with wireless.”

  It had been pure stupidity turned to luck that the kid had chosen to piss fifty yards in front of his fighting hole instead of in the designated latrine trench behind the perimeter. One of the boy’s buddies in the positions to his left or right might have shot him for an intruder. In fact, they should have. Their failure to do so would make for a lively instructional conversation later. Albeit a one-sided one.

  The sergeant looked up at the flakes suddenly swirling around the two of them. Blizzard coming, and a long night as well. He sneezed into his mitten, wiped snot on his greatcoat, then dug inside his pocket for his signal whistle.

  “Maybe our guests”—the sergeant spat the word—“will know what this thing is.”

  The soldiers of the Yavi intelligence unit that the sergeant’s platoon had been ordered to escort weren’t of this world, but they were as human as the sergeant was. Yavi and Tressens were fruit of the same tree, abducted from the Motherworld thirty thousand years ago, or so the historians claimed. But Yavet had civilized faster than Tressel. Yavet’s technology was, they said, a century ahead of Tressel’s. Yavet had even leapfrogged Earth, the Motherworld herself, by twenty years, they said.

  Whatever they said, the sergeant thought that if the rest of the Yavi resembled these intelligence poofs, the Yavi were twenty years more arrogant than the Trueborns, too. And it was hard to be more arrogant than a Trueborn Earthman.

  The sergeant untangled the signal whistle’s lanyard, fumbling with mittened hands. Then he raised the whistle toward his lips.

  Since the private had led the sergeant out here to the object, the kid had been shifting from one foot to another with ever-increasing frequency. At that moment he stepped forward, pointing with one hand. “Okay if I go over there and take a leak now, Sarge?”

  The private’s single step yielded three results, each bad.

  The first result was bad for the private. His step moved his helmeted head into the path of a rifle round then inbound toward his sergeant, which round was meant to prevent the sergeant from blowing his signal whistle.

  The round perforated the private’s steel helmet like a finger through tissue, then split his head like a scarf-wrapped melon.

  The impact of bullet against helmet, then bone, deflected and split the round so that its fragments sang harmlessly past the sergeant’s ear. The explosion of the boy’s head shocked the sergeant into frozen paralysis for two heartbeats.

  The next result occurred two seconds later and was bad for the sergeant. A bolt-action Tressen service rifle with iron sights can accurately engage a stationary target from three hundred yards at a rate of one round every two seconds, if operated by an exceptional marksman. With the private’s head removed from the line of fire, the follow-on round struck the sergeant an inch below his left eye.

  The sergeant’s head snapped back. Then his brain and skull atomized. His helmet fell on the snow, rocking like an inverted tortoise shell, while blood and brain-tissue mist condensed in the cold, then rained down around it.

  The third result of the private’s step was bad for the marksman. Distance and swirling wind had carried the rifle shots’ reports away from the Tressen defensive perimeter. Blowing snow already dusted both bodies and would soon bury them. Therefore, the marksman’s efficient violence would have gone undetected, as planned, until the gathering storm passed. But during the two seconds after the private intercepted the first shot, and before the follow-on shot struck, the wind shifted as the sergeant’s last breath escaped through his signal whistle.

  A gust carried the whistle shriek back, inside the defensive perimeter, then up and over the topographic crest of the ridge along which the perimeter stretched, and finally down into the shallow valley beyond.

  In the valley, already shadowed by the Arctic night, driven snow fogged the glow of floodlights atop plasteel scaffolding. The floods lit a freshly blasted pit as wide and deep as an amphitheater, and in the pit’s center bustled a dozen Yavi and two dozen Tressens. The Yavi, warm and faceless in visored body armor that glinted under the lights, directed the Tressens, who shivered beneath steel helmets and within bulky greatcoats.

  The whistle’s alarm caused both Yavi and Tressens to look up simultaneously.

  Fluttering invisible above the pit, a hummingbird-sized surveillance ’bot recorded the image of the work party’s reaction, then transmitted th
e image as a signal too faint to be detected even by Yavi listening equipment. The ’bot’s signal barely carried as far as the relay pod that the poor, headless sentry had tripped over. The pod, in turn, recrypted the image into an equally faint signal that reached out barely three hundred yards. There the image displayed on the visor screen of a white-armored figure. The armored marksman crabbed backward, then lay belly down in the snow, now hidden from view on the reverse slope of the next ridgeline.

  “Dammit!” The marksman pounded the snow, frustrated first by the necessity of shooting two grunts who presented no physical threat, and second by the fact that their deaths hadn’t salvaged the mission. The marksman’s junior teammate had already perished four days earlier in a crevasse fall, taking the team’s uplink transmitter down with him.

  The marksman bit down on an inner helmet switch that signaled the relay transmitter and the imaging ’bot to incinerate themselves. Then the marksman considered a range of lousy options.

  The rifle was Tressen manufactured, obsolete even locally. Its extra bulk during evasive action outweighed any future utility it might have in a shoot-out, if this fiasco deteriorated further. If found, the weapon would be assumed stolen, which it was, then abandoned by an Iridian rebel, which it was not. The marksman’s armor, if found, would not, however, be assumed to be of Tressen manufacture. The suit looked like it came from another planet. Because it had.

  The marksman chinned the helmet’s visor display to meteorologics. The squall would strengthen for the next twenty-six hours. Windblown snow should cover tracks and discourage pursuit. The marksman’s armor was less advanced than Yavi armor, but it could sustain its wearer under blizzard conditions for days. If the Yavi and the Tressens could be evaded in the meantime.

  The marksman left the rifle behind, then ran into a thickening curtain of blowing snow, away from the patrols that were sure to follow.

  Two

  “Stop here and let me out!” Major Ruberd Polian shouted over the blizzard at the skimmer’s driver, as the skimmer slid up alongside the two snow-dusted bodies.

  “Yes, Sir!” The driver reversed thrust, Polian lurched forward until his armor’s helmet banged the skimmer’s windscreen, and the skimmer following behind them slewed and nearly rear-ended them.

  The driver’s eyes widened. “Dammit!”

  He wasn’t reacting to what he had just done to his commanding officer, Polian realized, but to the two headless bodies alongside which the driver had stopped the skimmer.

  The kid turned his head away and gagged. “Sorry, sir.”

  On Yavet, Polian’s father had been a cop. One evening Polian had pulled up crime-scene images from the old man’s personal ’puter while it lay on the hall table. Polian had gagged at the sight of mutilated corpses, and those were just holos. When his father caught him, he had slapped Polian. “There’s nothing wrong with what I do!”

  Polian touched the kid’s arm. “Don’t worry. If a soldier ever gets used to it, it’s time to quit.”

  The kid nodded, wiped his eyes.

  Polian turned to the two cub lieutenants in the skimmer’s rear seat. The one on the left, fat-cheeked and soft, looked half sick from the bumpy skimmer ride. “Sandr, you dismount here, with me.” The kid on the right was lean and hard. “Frei, you take command of both skimmers.”

  Lieutenant Frei smiled, but craned his neck at the storm that swirled around them. “Sir?”

  “Lay out a patrol grid.” Polian waved a hand at the snow curtain and at the bodies. “Comb this area until you find the people who did this.” Polian pointed at the lean lieutenant. “Full armor. Full sensors. Weapons locked and loaded. Shoot anything that moves. I don’t want anybody else ending up like these two because somebody got careless.”

  Polian and the soft lieutenant jumped the three feet over the skimmer’s side and sank knee deep in snow.

  Polian brushed snow off his thigh plates, muttering into his open mike. Polian hated losing soldiers, even Tressens. So he had just ordered Frei to shoot first. But as an intelligence officer, Polian knew that he should have ordered Frei to risk more lives, if necessary, to capture an interrogable prisoner.

  This was an obvious Iridian rebel hit-and-run. Obvious to some, anyway.

  Alongside Polian, the skimmer, freed of the weight of two passengers, bobbed up like a dinghy at sea. He frowned behind his visor as something tugged at his mind, and he muttered, “Undercurrents…”

  Sandr, alongside him, asked, “Sir?”

  Polian waved a gauntleted hand. “Nothing.”

  On Polian’s twelfth birthday, like every legally born Yavi, he had received a pass for a day outside. It was the day when every father spoke to every son about what it meant to be a man. Polian’s father had taken him uplevels, to Sky-ceiling, where they rented an open skimmer, filter masks, and waders. They had driven to the sea, dismounted, and stood on the beach, staring out through the haze at the gray, opaque waves.

  Then Polian’s father had dragged him by the hand out into the sea. When the water reached as high as Polian’s waist, Polian’s father released his son’s hand.

  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 o
f 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.