Undercurrents Read online

“How fast?”

  He shifted his weight. “We’ve calculated that you shouldn’t break the sound barrier.”

  I smiled. “No, really.”

  “Really. Actually, if you did go supersonic, that could be a problem. The fins we’re adding to the suit’s thigh plates will keep you falling headfirst—”

  “Headfirst? Nice touch. Thanks. But no.” Spook jump school had included one sky dive–style belly-flop familiarization jump. “I’ll just belly flop. That’ll slow me down.”

  He paused and stared at me. “—Headfirst. In practical vacuum you can’t stop spinning if you start. If you belly flop, then start to spin, you’d spin flat, like you were an old holodisc on a turntable. When you reached one hundred forty-five rpm, centrifugal force would pancake your brain flat against the top of your skull.”

  “Oh.”

  “That would snap your brain off of your brain stem.”

  I swallowed. “Which would kill me.”

  He shook his head. “Actually, no.”

  “Great news.”

  “You’d already be dead. Increased pressure in your cranial blood vessels would have ruptured them before that.”

  I nodded. “Okay, then. Headfirst.”

  He paused again, hands on hips, and sighed. “Sir, this will go smoother if you just trust us. We’ve thought this through.”

  I nodded. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m the one doing the falling.”

  He grinned at me and pumped his fist. “And what a ride, huh? Air-borne, sir!”

  I sighed. “Yeah. All the way.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “As I was saying, the problem if you go supersonic in the headfirst attitude is that your head becomes supersonic first. A moment before your torso does.”

  “So?”

  “So the buffeting instability of an object’s transonic passage can cause the object to disarticulate along planes of weakness.”

  I stared at him.

  He said, “Uh, back in the day, experimental aircraft used to break up. After all, we still call it the sound barrier. The human body, even in armor, is weaker than an old jet fuselage.”

  I frowned. “I’d break when I hit the barrier?”

  He nodded. “Ever shoot a chicken into a boulder?”

  No, but it sounded like some of Howard’s twisted minions had.

  He thrust up his index finger. “But we’re attaching speed-sensitive dive brakes to the suit. They’ll slow you automatically. Heck, you won’t exceed six hundred miles per hour. Probably.”

  “Probably?” My voice rose. “Probably?”

  He turned his palms up and cocked his head. “Given budget and time, we’d have tested this technique better, Lieutenant. But this case requirement just came up. We needed technology that was already on the shelf, and—”

  I sighed. Everybody who works for Howard sighs a lot. “And cheap?” Spook budgets had been unlimited during the Slug War, when human existence hung in the balance. Mankind had mortgaged its future to build Mousetrap and the cruiser fleet. But now we were still paying off the debt decades later.

  He flicked his eyes down at the deck plates, then looked up. “This concept was developed clear back in the space-capsule days, so the old astronauts could escape from a malfunctioning reaction-propelled spacecraft. After we got C-drive, spacecraft didn’t really need the technology.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “But back in the space-capsule days it did work?”

  “The odds of a successful outcome are five in ten.”

  “This saved five astronauts? I never heard of even one.”

  “Our simulated odds. Nobody’s ever actually done this and lived. General Hibble prefers to say that nobody’s actually done this and died.”

  “Yet.” I stared up at the bay roof plates. I scuffed my boot toe across the deck.

  Then I sighed, unclamped my helmet, and tugged it off. I stripped off the rest of the suit, dropped it to the deck plates, and stood there barefoot in my skivs.

  “I know, sir. I jump out of perfectly good airplanes every week back home, for fun and for jump-pay qualification. Weddle’s a better jumper than I am. But if I were in your boots, sir? Honestly?” He shook his head.

  I sat down at the table and crossed my arms. “I want to see Howard. Now.”

  Nine

  Ten minutes after I had mutinied, the vast bay had been cleared except for Howard and me. Riding his little scooter, he circled my chair. “I warned you that this would be dangerous, Jazen.”

  I swiveled my head and stared at him as he orbited me. “No, Howard. Dangerous is shooting and drowning and fighting six-legged telepathic monsters. This is a science project. And I’m the hamster.”

  “Jazen, the rest of the Union thinks Earth succeeds because we’re rich or lucky. And we’re both. But the truth is that we succeed because we take risks. When the need is great enough, we dive in at the deep end, then scramble to learn to swim. I can’t tell you how many times I saw your father improvise like that.”

  My father? Where did that come from? I shook my head. “Don’t try to play that card with me! You say you can’t tell me about him. But you trot him out as soon as you need to manipulate me.”

  He didn’t answer, just drifted his scooter to a girder supporting the bay wall. He dug a penknife from a pocket, scraped a paint chip off the girder onto the blade, then rotated it in front of his eyes like a jeweler appraising a wedding ring. “Look at these layers. You know, I’ll bet the Emerald River’s been repainted and updated a dozen times since the war. You knew your mother commanded her once, didn’t you?”

  He paused to let me sniff the bait.

  I sighed. Then, manipulation or not, I swallowed it whole. “What was she like back then?”

  He smiled and stared into the space between us. “Admiral Ozawa was as fine a ship handler as the war produced. Mimi could fly anything, though. Not just cruisers. She started out as a fighter jock. And the handsomest woman who ever wore a flight suit. At least, your father seemed to think so every moment they were together.”

  He slid the scooter alongside me, then leaned close. “Not that they were together much. Or that there weren’t painful adjustments to make each time they got back together. That’s the nature of relationships in the military, Jazen. The separations and the stresses grow people apart. But they can grow back together, too, if they try. Your parents did.”

  Back together. I believed him because I wanted to.

  “Got one of your hunches about whether Kit’s still alive, Howard?”

  “If they had captured or killed her, they’d be parading their Trueborn spy to embarrass us by now. Or at least they’d be looking to exchange her for one of their captured coverts. If the team’s on the run down there, Tressel’s no picnic, but she’s survived worse.”

  “Howard, if it were my mother down there, what would my father do?”

  “Saving Kit’s secondary to your mission, Jazen.”

  “Yeah. Howard, what would he do?”

  “Everything.”

  I nodded. Then I stood, lifted the suit off the deck plates, and stuck a foot into the leggings.

  I believed Howard about Kit’s chances because I wanted to, just like I wanted to believe about the chances for Kit and me. But Howard’s reasoning about the probability that she was still alive made sense on an objective level, too.

  Howard waved at the personnel hatch, and Weddle and the rest of the briefers reentered.

  Howard squinted at his ’puter. “Study hard, you two. You drop in sixteen hours.”

  Ten

  Fifteen hours and fifty-nine minutes later I hung head down in my Eternads, festooned with fins and dive brakes that were supposed to keep me from disintegrating at six hundred miles per hour. I hung in a drop cradle that the spooks had bolted above the centerline of the launch bay’s doors. Twenty feet away, in an identical cradle, Weddle hung. Between us in a third cradle hung a man-sized, finned object that looked like a day-glo orange, old-fashioned gravity bomb.r />
  The bay had already been evacuated, first of spooks then of air, so the only sounds I could hear were on the hardwired intercom that was plugged into my suit’s thigh connector, and any sound that was conducted through the solid cradle connected to my suit.

  I must have looked as vicious as a bat big enough to bite rhinos, but I felt like vomit waiting to happen. Eighteen inches below my helmet’s crest, on the opposite side of the bay-door plates, things began going bump, even louder than the blood pounding in my ears.

  I chinned my intercom mike. “What’s that noise?”

  Howard’s voice crackled in my ears. “Don’t worry. It’s abnormal, but it’s according to plan. The ship’s dropped twenty-five miles. That puts it into atmosphere just dense enough that frost condenses on the shaded portion of the outer hull. When the ship’s rotation brings the frost into the sun and heats it, chunks break off.”

  “Why the hell would you plan that?”

  “The main reason the ship’s altitude has to be lower is so your free-fall velocity doesn’t reach the sound barrier. The condensation chunking’s a phenomenon that we hadn’t anticipated until last week. But we realized that the chunks will be a bonus. They’re about the same size as you two, and of the equipment drone. When you drop, any radar analyst should dismiss you as just chunks of ice.”

  Eye roll. “Radar analysts? Howard, I’ll blow every radar analyst on Tressel.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “What if either of us collides with an ice chunk?”

  There was the deer-in-the-headlights pause of a spook who just thought of something too late. Then Howard said, “Well, the suits are very tough.”

  He didn’t add “probably,” which I was tired of hearing anyway.

  A third, distant voice crackled. “Bay doors will open on my mark.”

  I drew a breath and closed my eyes.

  Howard said, “Be careful down there, Jazen.”

  “Mark.”

  The bay doors rumbled, I opened my eyes, and the last remaining air blew hull-plate dust out into blackness. The intercom’s crackle cut off knife-sharp as the cradle clamps released me and the hardwire jack unplugged.

  Bang. Hissss.

  The rocket booster that pushed me toward the planet below really was gentle. At least gentler than a jump-master’s boot on a reluctant student jumper’s ass.

  A jolt smacked me through the armor’s backplate as the spent booster separated itself from me. I felt myself fall in silence while I stared down at white, swirled clouds. They looked to have been painted above blue ocean that stretched to a curved horizon in every direction.

  As the jump-master and I had practiced while I hung in the cradle, I kept my body rigid, hands tight to my sides, ankles together.

  Twenty yards to my right I could just make out Weddle falling in formation like a wingman. I wasn’t about to crane my neck to look at him, much less wave.

  I shot down toward Tressel like a plasteel arrow. The only sound audible in the suit was my rapid breathing. I spoke out loud inside my helmet. “Not so bad.”

  Then I noticed another object tumbling along at the edge of my vision, between Weddle and me. White and ragged.

  Blam.

  Something struck my left boot. One of Howard’s bonus ice chunks. Probably.

  “Goddam your science projects, Howard!” My view changed to blackness, then back to the planet, alternating. The collision with the ice chunk had set me somersaulting, head over feet, at a slow and constant rate.

  As I rotated, I saw a half-dozen ice chunks flying in formation. Above, alongside, and now below me.

  “Oh, crap!” I wasn’t flat-spinning toward cerebral hemorrhage, but there was nothing, not even air, to grab hold of as I fell. I couldn’t stop my tumbling. Within minutes the atmosphere would thicken. My speed would increase, maybe not beyond the sound barrier, but even at a modest four hundred miles per hour the wind would tear an extended limb off my body the way a Visigoth tore a leg off a roast goose.

  Howard had the uplink to Emerald River blocked, so I couldn’t ask for advice. I couldn’t spot Weddle, but he was a master parachutist. So I chinned the emergency suit-to-suit. “Weddle? I got hit. I’m tumbling. What do I do?”

  Nothing.

  “Weddle? Goddammit, chin on your suit-to-suit!”

  Another object tumbled into view, smaller and darker than the flying icebergs.

  It was an Eternad helmet, dented. Probably by the impact of a falling ice chunk.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  The helmet disappeared from view as I spun. “Weddle?” They say there are no stupid questions, but that one was close.

  I made another revolution and glimpsed the helmet again. Something red and white flapped out of the helmet’s neck ring.

  Weddle’s spinal cord, or what was left of it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and gagged.

  When I opened them, Weddle’s head was gone. Mercifully for both of us, I suppose. I couldn’t spot the rest of him, which, along with the ice storm, seemed to have fallen away from me, below.

  A small favor. With each revolution I glimpsed the black space above me. Emerald River soon shrank to rice-grain size as the gulf between us widened.

  But as Emerald River shrank, another speck, gray against the blackness of space, grew. Something was gaining on me.

  Again, I said, “Oh, crap.”

  Eleven

  One minute later I was twenty miles closer to Tressel and to impersonating Humpty Dumpty. My visor display pegged my speed at four hundred miles per hour. The sky was more deep purple than black, and the speck chasing me had swollen to the size and color of an orange.

  The speck wasn’t Weddle’s decapitated corpse. It was the equipment drone that had hung in the cradle between him and me, and dropped seconds after us.

  The ED was an unpowered, streamlined pod packed with the team’s weapons and equipment. It was equipped with a parachute system in its tail similar to the ones that were supposed to waft us down in one piece.

  It’s hard to land parachuted objects, human or inanimate, close together even when they’re dropped from an airplane. Dropped from a hundred miles up in space, keeping Weddle, the ED, and me usefully close together at landing was like dropping three olives into the same martini glass from a skyscraper’s observation deck. But that was just the kind of challenge that Howard’s geeks relished. So they had repurposed another obsolete, cheap, on-the-shelf technology, then let my life depend on it.

  The ED was a dumb-bomb casing sans explosives, but the spooks had fitted it with a smart-munition kit.

  Smart-munition kits had revolutionized Trueborn warfare during what they called Cold War I. A dumb bomb’s nose was fitted with an eye that detected a specific frequency of laser light. When the eye saw the light, it signaled fins fitted on the bomb’s ass end. The fins ruddered the bomb so the eye kept pointing at the light source.

  That light source, back during the Cold War, was a laser beam reflecting off a target. The beam was shot at and kept on the target by an aircraft or even by a GI on the ground aiming a glorified flashlight. Smart bombs were so accurate that they could literally fly down a chimney, if the target was properly laser-illuminated. Smart-munition kits worked. Even better, they worked cheap. There were moments when the hype about Trueborn cleverness seemed justified.

  Since I was the target that the ED needed to steer toward, and I was falling headfirst, the spooks had installed a laser beacon on my boot sole. Weddle’s suit had a secondary beacon, but the thought was that a master parachutist could steer toward me and the drone easier than I could steer toward either of them.

  The spooks had also put a laser range finder on the ED that measured the distance to my beacon, then deployed or feathered the ED’s dive brakes if it began catching up too close to me.

  The ED would follow me down until both my chutes and its chutes popped. We would then be so close to the surface that my equipment would land within shouting distance,
but not on top of me. The briefing spooks hand-waved a bit about the not-on-top-of-me part, but otherwise the concept seemed sound.

  During the early free-fall moments the ED’s eye was locked on to my boot-sole laser beacon. Therefore the ED had, as a matter of physics, slid into the same imaginary elevator shaft I was falling down, plummeting directly behind me. Good thing, because the ED’s fins had no air to rudder against anyway at super-atmospheric altitude.

  Then I had started tumbling through the barely thickening atmosphere. As far as the ED’s eye could see, my sole beacon had disappeared. When we were both falling streamlined, our speeds would have matched. Now I was spinning like a lazy snowball, so I was accelerating slower than the drone was. But the drone didn’t slow itself down to avoid me because it couldn’t see me. It just barreled down toward me like a runaway bus with a sleeping driver.

  The gap between me and the drone shrank so that I could make out the four-inch–diameter ceramic nose cone. Through it the laser sensors peered but saw nothing.

  My heart pounded. Collision with an ice chunk had killed my junior case officer less than a minute into the mission. Another collision had set me tumbling, which was probably going to kill me. Now I was about to get rear-ended by a runaway bus, which would make things worse. Or would it?

  At my current speed, even the whisper-thin Tressen atmosphere screamed by my helmet and warmed my suit’s outer skin. Twitching an arm was like lifting weights, but I just managed, and my attitude in the slipstream twitched, too. Not much. But maybe enough.

  My twitch shifted my trajectory so that the ED didn’t hit me, but drew alongside me like a bus passing in the fast lane. The shock waves spreading off the drone’s nose, like swells off a boat prow, interfered with the waves I was throwing, and buffeted me.

  I gasped as my head-over-heels tumble corkscrewed into a yawing, off-axis spin.

  The mental picture of Weddle’s bloody cervical vertebrae forced itself into my consciousness. My head pounded and my stomach rebelled.

  “Gaakk!” I spewed bile and Meals Utility Desiccated onto my inner visor. The ventilator shrieked as it sucked puke, but for critical seconds I was blind.