Undercurrents-ARC Read online

  “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 Barrett Double Express peacekeeper. The gun lay alongside the little paper garnish umbrellas. Like every bar in Shipyard, Jazen’s needed the former more than the latter.

  I had just three customers, normal because the next cruiser wasn’t due in to the Port of Mousetrap until the next morning. What wasn’t normal was that each of the three smelled like a different kind of trouble.

  The first customer sat at the bar, a graying Trueborn gunnery sergeant, retired. I knew that from the ID he had shown. Not that I’m nosy. Shipyard’s no place for the nosy. But active duty and vets with ID got two for one at Jazen’s ever since I took it over. And always would. The gunny had availed himself of my generosity and belted enough doubles to put an ex-GI like me under the table. I hated to concede any field to the jarheads, but in that activity they practiced harder than we did.

  He shot me a drowsy glance, then lifted his empty glass with a hand that wobbled. Raw field regrows usually wobbled, and vet bennies didn’t cover fine-motor neural rehab.

  I smiled. “Take a coffee break, Gunny? On me.” A passed-out drunk was bad for business, which didn’t bother me. But the old soldier had given his arm, and a lifetime, to his service. Refusing him anything that I had did bother me.

  He nodded, lurched to his feet, saluted, and turned for the door. That caused his gaze to cross the second of my three customers. The second was a Yavi, in civvies but with head shaved high and tight, who sat alone at a table staring into a beer.

  The gunny muttered, “Don’t care to drink with baby-killers anyway.”

  The Yavi’s forearms, which were tattooed, and as muscular as the gunny’s had been once, tightened. The Yavi’s business chip, which entered him in a drawing for a free full-body massage next door that nobody ever won, claimed he was a manufacturers’ rep. I grew up on Yavet, one of the few Illegal babies that the customer and his ilk hadn’t managed to kill. Therefore, I recognized him for Yavi military in civilian drag.

  Obviously, the gunny had recognized him, too. Which was going to be a problem.

  Yavet and Earth were the Human Union’s only nuclear powers, and they were within twenty years of one another in technologic development. Yavet lagged Earth in just one discipline, but it was a honker. Only Earth had starships.

  The Trueborns let anybody and anything ride their ships, because they believed everybody should be free. Of course, “free to ride” didn’t mean “ride for free.” Open access made Earth rich. And the access wasn’t entirely open. The Trueborns refused to carry military. Except their own, and the Legion, which was an Earth-based independent contractor. Both of whom were, of course, even-handed peacekeepers.

  This infuriated Yavet, which was overpopulated, overpolluted, and proud to be both. Yavet needed lebensraum worse than a teenaged boy needed a free full body massage.

  But without starships, Yavet could no more expand than a sixteen-year-old without a car could get laid.

  So the Yavi did what they could get away with to grow their influence. They smuggled military to the outworlds aboard Trueborn starships. The Trueborns let them get away with it as long as the influence growth was minute. When any Yavi project posed a greater threat to Earth, GIs on both sides died restoring the balance in chilly, undeclared brushfire wars. There had been so many such brush fires that the Trueborns called the arrangement Cold War II. The only things a GI hates more than getting killed in an undeclared war are the people who are trying to kill him. Trueborn soldiers hated Yavi soldiers, and the Yavi returned the favor.

  The Yavi stood, hefted his glass mug like a Trueborn baseball, and spilled his beer.

  As the two soldiers glared at each other, I smiled at the Yavi. “Let me refill that for you. On the house.”

  The Yavi ignored me and wound up to peg a fastball at the gunny.

  The gunny snatched a bar stool and turned it legs-up, like a bat. The legs trembled in his bony hands. “I remember my pugil-stick drill. You remember yours, ‘salesman’? ”

  Brawls weren’t so much bad for business as hard on furniture. My friendly offers of freebies weren’t defusing the crisis. I drew the Barrett and clicked off the safety.

  A salesman wouldn’t recognize the click, but a soldier would. Both men froze.

  I shifted the saloon gun’s stubby barrels back and forth from one torso to the other. “Free City of Shipyard Municipal Ordinance 6.21 authorizes the use of deadly force by a licensed establishment owner in defense of property. I own this place. That’s my beer stein and my bar stool. So can’t we all just get along?”

  Neither man budged, while their breath rasps echoed off the bar’s hewn nickel-iron walls. The gunny gave away too much in age and bulk to the Yavi to win the fight. However, if he managed to break a chair over a Yavi, he’d brag at the Shipyard VIW Post for years. But if the Yavi blew his cover, his superiors would cashier him, or worse. And he knew it.

  The Yavi slammed his mug back down on his table. “Fuck it.” Then he spun on his heel, walked out the open door into the passage, turned right, and was gone.

  “Gutless weasel.” The gunny snorted. He replaced the barstool on the floor with quivering hands, nodded to me, and stalked out, too.

  The Gunny turned left, and I exhaled audibly.

  My third—and now only—customer had sat silently at a corner table during the flap.

  He watched the door until the sound of both mens’ footfalls faded. Then, while I slid the Barrett back underneath the bar, he stood and carried his glass back to me.

  I had noted when he came in that he was as militarily erect as the other two and carried himself with that sense of entitlement that outworlders immediately recognize in any Trueborn. When he had come in, he had said he was a cruiser tourist. However, the only cruiser due for the month was still inbound, so that was a lie. But the Free City of Shipyard ran on cash in the fist, not on truth. Therefore I had shut up and poured.

  The liar laid a bill on my bar. “For the whisky.”

  I pointed at the bill. “You got imported. There won’t be change back from that.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Imported?”

  I nodded, swept up the bill. “Authentic Tennessee sour mash.” I figured one obvious lie deserved another.

  I eyed his glass. Still full. Which either meant he knew Shipyard bootleg will make you blind, or he was on duty. Probably both.

  He said, “I hear Jazen Parker inherited this place. You him?”

  I shrugged. “You can hear anything in Shipyard.” But he had heard right about how I got the bar. The mother of an only child I had served with in the Legion left Fatso’s to me when I was, uh, between jobs, two years before. She left it to me partly because she couldn’t leave it to her son. I had been with him when he died in action. Partly because she felt guilty about having fingered me for a bounty hunter who almost killed me, too.

  The liar looked around the empty cavern. “Business good?”

 
; “Profitable enough when there are cruisers in the port.” I leaned forward, palms on my bar. “And there aren’t any in the port. So who the hell are you, really?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m a messenger. Somebody would like to see you, Lieutenant Parker.”

  A spook. I shook my head. “Just Parker. I resigned my commission two years ago, when my hitch ended.”

  I began my military career, if you call mercenary work military, with a two-year Legion hitch. Legion enlistment got me off Yavet ahead of the bounty hunters, but my Legion time ended, shall we say, poorly. My second hitch was in the Trueborn military-intelligence service. That got me commissioned as an officer and a gentleman, but ended even worse. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

  He shrugged again. “It was a gesture of respect. I saw your file. It says a lot good about you.”

  I shrugged back. “You saw I’ve got a Barrett under this bar, too. My file says I’m not afraid to use it. As a gesture of respect, I won’t. If you drink up and leave.”

  He raised his hands, palms out, and smiled. “Just doing my job, sir. The Old Man’s here. Came all the way out just to see you.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It was one of those lies so obvious that I knew it was true. Everybody within the hollowed-out moonlet that was the interstellar crossroad called Mousetrap knew the next cruiser wasn’t due in until tomorrow.

  However, less than everybody knew that a VIP and his personal security detail could launch from an inbound cruiser in a fast-mover and beat the cruiser in by a full day. Cruisers drift in through the North Lock, then down Broadway, the fifteen-mile-long axial tunnel that cores Mousetrap like an apple, to the berths at the South End. But fastys could enter Mousetrap very privately. The moonlet’s skin was peppered with abandoned interceptor sally ports that still worked fine if you knew the codes. Which was exactly the way Lieutenant General Howard Hibble, aka King of the Spooks, aka the Old Man, would make an entrance.