Undercurrents Read online

  The drone wasn’t moving much faster than I was. My only chance was to grasp one of the ED’s tail fins as it passed me, then hang on so that I stopped spinning and resumed a headfirst dive, following behind the drone like a hitched trailer.

  But even with the rigid support of the Eternads, reaching out into the slipstream at almost five hundred miles per hour could tear my arm from its socket.

  I panted inside my armor. If I reached, I might die in moments. But if I missed this bus, if the drone passed by and left me tumbling, I would just keep tumbling. Even if the slipstream didn’t “disarticulate” me, the chute, which was designed to deploy freely, would foul. Tangled lines and canopy would simply form a pretty carbon-fiber–reinforced streamer behind me. I would slam onto Tressel and explode in a shower of bone, tissue, and puked-out desiccated turkey.

  I gritted my teeth, made a gauntleted fist, and inched it toward the drone.

  The new irregularity to my profile made me yaw worse.

  Pop.

  I yelped inside my helmet as the slipstream dislocated my wrist. My reach had been too aggressive. The Eternads’ rigidity kept things attached, as far as I could tell, but the pain was knife-edge.

  Now my chances depended on just one hand. I waited until my tumble corkscrewed me around, so that the good hand was alongside the drone’s fins.

  The drone’s rear fins were passing my head now. Three heartbeats from now my last chance would be gone.

  The sky had bloomed indigo, and the slipstream of the still-thin atmosphere boomed as the shock waves bounced me against the drone.

  I grabbed for a tail fin and caught something.

  I tried to tighten my fingers around it and realized I had hold of the left access-panel release.

  The panel peeled back like banana skin. Then the slipstream ripped it loose. Items of spy crap spewed into the troposphere, then tumbled alongside me like a highly classified meteor shower. A four-inch gap opened between the drone’s fin and my fingers.

  “Arrr!” I forced my hand back and death-gripped the fin.

  This time, I held on. The speed differential between my slower fall and the drone’s fall yanked me into the wind shadow behind the ED.

  Pop.

  I yelped. I had separated my shoulder once before, falling off a hovertank fender onto a boulder. I got chewed out by a sergeant for clumsiness and had to route-march behind the tank for six miles so I would learn to be more careful next time. This time the separation felt more severe, but so were the consequences if I let go.

  The drone, now with me flapping behind and screaming inside my armor, flashed into high clouds. Ice crystallized on the outside of my vomit-smeared visor.

  “Dammit.” Blind again. I chinned the visor’s defroster. By the time my view cleared, the drone and I had popped out of the clouds into an overcast day.

  Below me was supposed to be the Eastern Sea of Tressel, off the coast of the part of Tressen that had once been the Unified Duchies of Iridia. A boatload of Iridian partisans, of questionable friendliness, was supposed to fish me, Weddle, and the drone out of the sea after I landed.

  The sea was blue. What I saw below, through a film of Turkey With Giblet Gravy Paste, was only half twinkling blue. That was the sea, muted sunlight reflecting off waves. Half my field of vision was scum green laced with barf brown. The drone’s trajectory was dropping it and me too far toward shore.

  I clung to the drone’s fin. The thicker atmosphere down here was slowing the drone and me. The plan had been that in the thicker air I would “steer” myself toward the target landing zone in the sea, while the drone followed. Unfortunately, I had wound up behind the drone, so instead the drone and I remained a trailer following a runaway bus, bound wherever wind and gravity took us.

  The landing, it became clearer with each yard of free fall, was not going to be in the twinkling blue sea, where a boatload of friendlies would rush to collect me. The drone and I were plummeting inland. I had to correct course.

  Crack.

  The altimeters on the drone and on my chute pack popped the small drogue chutes off my back and out the drone’s tapered tail.

  “Crap!” I let go of the drone’s fin like it had caught fire and spun myself away. Either the drone’s drogue chute or the main chute that the drogue was tugging out would foul my own chute. If that happened, being off target or losing my equipment wouldn’t matter. The drone and I would hit like dropped rocks.

  Whomp.

  I screamed as the shock of my main chute’s deployment jerked my wrecked shoulder.

  Happily, my chute’s opening separated me clean from the ED, which dangled beneath its own intact chute a hundred feet below and four hundred feet to my left.

  A mere thousand feet below, too close for meaningful course alteration, Mother Tressel rushed up to greet me.

  Unhappily, her kiss was going to be sloppy.

  Twelve

  I grimaced as I yanked the toggles that controlled my chute canopy, struggling to sideslip so that I would land in the sea’s open water. But a thousand feet disappear fast, and the wrist at the end of my dislocated shoulder refused to cooperate, so one toggle worked and the other didn’t, and I just corkscrewed down into the inland swamps.

  My boots crackled sideways through leathery foliage sixty feet above mud. Then the first substantial branch caught beneath my shoulder and spun me. Pain seared my shoulder as the impact popped the joint back into place.

  Then my canopy hung up in the treetops. I swayed as I dangled. Water the color and consistency of old gravy lapped at my boot toes. I twisted as I dangled. I was down in one piece, but where? Dragonflies as big as vultures zigged through mist patches adrift above the water.

  Based on my briefing, I had landed in the Tressen Barrens, one hundred thousand square miles of brackish coastal swamp that would, in a couple of hundred million years, provide this planet with more coal than Trueborns had hubris.

  The “trees” were cycads, meaning their trunks had the proportions and texture of pinecones, with palm-frond branches feather-dustering from their tops. The biggest land animals in the Barrens were dog-sized, bow-legged, flat-bodied amphibians that sunned themselves on the trunks of fallen cycads that were as mottled brown as they were. My visor display measured ambient temperature at ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit with ninety-four percent humidity.

  Inside my suit I thanked Mr. Eternad, if such a person existed, for climate control, like a million other GIs had over the last century.

  Unfortunately, no smiling friendlies waited to greet me. Fortunately, the drone lay just a hundred feet away, orange fuselage crumpled but otherwise whole, on a mudflat.

  Whatever equipment had spilled out during free fall was lost to me forever, scattered and splattered over square miles of this swamp. But the drone contained, if it was still inside, a heliograph signal mirror with sight and tripod mount. I could use it to signal the friendlies of my whereabouts. If I could change my whereabouts to the seashore. If the friendlies were close enough and vigilant enough to spot a signal. And if they were really friendly.

  There was also a meds kit that would allow me to make a field reduction of my dislocated wrist. The kit also contained happy pills more serious than the ones in my helmet dispenser. The happys would allow me to keep going, since I couldn’t wait for the wrist and shoulder to improve.

  First I had to escape my chute harness. I tried to punch the chest release plate, but with the bad wrist all I did was demonstrate how loud a human scream sounds inside an Eternad helmet.

  The branches of the cycad from which I dangled drooped beneath my weight as I struggled. I now splashed knee-deep in the swamp.

  My good hand was free enough to tug my bush knife from its thigh scabbard so I could cut away the shroud lines. After thirty seconds of sawing, I plopped into waist-deep water.

  The plop stung enough that I popped a couple of helmet happys, pending a dose of the hard stuff from the meds kit.

  I slogged toward the drone,
shoulder and wrist throbbing, knee-deep in opaque water, across a slick mud bottom. Ten minutes later I reached the drone. By the time I crawled up onto the mudflat, I was wheezing like a plasteel lungfish and my sweat had maxed my ventilators.

  A flat-headed amphibian the size of an alley cat had beaten me to the drone, attracted, I suppose, by the friction warmth generated by the drone’s passage through the lower atmosphere. The flat-head squatted in the recess that housed the drone’s remaining access-panel release. She—enough females have ignored me that I just know—squatted there, oblivious to my approach.

  I didn’t know what to expect from her. The Tressen Barrens faunal brief mostly lost my attention because Barrens operations were labeled “I.S.,” for “Improbable Scenario.” Or, as case officers restated the acronym, “Ignorable (I’ll just say here) Stuff.”

  The amphibian turned one glassy frog eye to me, decided I was no threat, and looked away.

  I stepped forward, shooing her off the drone. Finally she plopped onto the mud and waddled off. Then I dug gauntleted fingers into the hinge-release recess and tugged the pin. I touched something squishy, jerked my hand from the release recess, and glanced down. Before the amphibian had left, she had deposited a load of (I’ll just say here) stuff.

  While I swore and wiped my fingers on ground moss, the drone banana-peeled itself open, and I catalogued what equipment I had lost.

  My heart sank. Where the uplink case had nestled there was now a bare socket and two torn tie-down straps. The uplink encrypted messages, searched the sky for, and then locked on to, receivers aboard any cruiser within a hundred thousand miles. Then the uplink squirted the messages to the receivers in a beam no wider, or more detectable, than an invisible pencil one hundred thousand miles long. Because this fiasco was so secret, we were only supposed to use the uplink in life-threatening emergencies, or to summon the pickup Scorpion.

  Without the uplink, I was now invisible to the spooks up above.

  Well, fortunately that wasn’t entirely true. Both Weddle’s armor and mine had a transponder built in to the left shoulder that squirted a simple, brief “here I am” to the sky every sixty seconds, once it was activated. It was activated either by the wearer, voluntarily, or involuntarily by the suit, if the suit detected a really miserable set of wearer vitals.

  Weddel’s vitals, obviously, were as bad as could be. If his transponder had survived the fall, which was possible but doubtful, the spooks up above us thought we were someplace where I wasn’t.

  I side-tapped my temple pad to turn my transponder on. The little green light didn’t flash. I tried again. Nothing.

  “Crap.” My heart rate rose, a vital which the suit was perfectly happy to display for me.

  I reached up with my good hand and gently touched the suit’s shoulder plate. The good thing about Eternad armor is that it gives itself up to absorb a severe impact so the wearer’s body doesn’t absorb it. My shoulder plate had done its job somewhere during my fall, and therefore my arm remained attached. But the shoulder plate was caved in by a dent the size of a tennis ball. Somewhere in there were the mashed remains of my transponder.

  There was a worst-case search-and-rescue backup plan for barefoot case officers. Like most Hibble plans it was well-intentioned, obsolete, and cheap.

  It consisted of laying out fabric panels in a prearranged pattern on open ground. Those panels would, theoretically, be spotted by a lookdown resource; then somebody would come and give the officer a lift home. “Lookdown resource” normally meant a satellite, of which we had none orbiting Tressel, thanks to the diplomats. That meant that Spook Central would have to import, then deploy, a recon Scorpion to do the looking down, which could take weeks. Meanwhile the barefoot officer had to stay put around the panels. I couldn’t stay put even for hours.

  I sat back on my armored butt, rested my good hand on the ground, and said aloud to the swamp, “Crap.”

  I had wanted to be independent, not orphaned. Before I even started, I had lost my partner, my overhead support, and, for a while at least, the use of my left arm.

  I sat in the alien mud and felt sorry for myself for sixty seconds. Then I stood up and reassessed, one hand on my hip while I favored the sore-wristed hand. I needed my local help now more than ever.

  That meant I had to make it to the coast with the heliograph.

  Even healthy, I couldn’t carry much more than half the load. That was part of Weddle’s job. So, what to take along?

  A GI’s first priority is to keep his weapon with him. His second is to get it back if he loses it. His third, failing one and two, is to steal someone else’s. But the deadliest thing I could aim and fire one-handed, until I got into the meds pack, was a sidearm. A rifle was less valuable at the moment than the daylight I would waste prepping it.

  I glanced around the swamp. No need for a gun to counter an immediate enemy threat. There wasn’t a Tressen within miles.

  But did I need a gun to counter natural threats?

  I wiped my fingers clean with a cycad frond while I considered. Basic planetology rubs off on a GI after a few tours, as inevitably as frog shit. These amphibians and cycads looked and behaved like amphibians and cycads that had already evolved, then gone extinct, on planets like Earth and Yavet. “Like environments evolve like faunas.” Tressel was a warm, wet, slow-evolving rock. Earth was a warm, wet, fast-evolving rock. Thus, Tressel had giant frogs. Earth used to have giant frogs.

  The geneticists doubted that interplanetarily disparate species, however overtly similar, would voluntarily interbreed. Having seen my first Tressen lady frog, I doubted it, too. But then I’m not a gentleman frog.

  I peered across the swamp. Somewhere out in the mist croaked a male who thought that frog was hot merchandise. But somebody else out there thought she was lunch.

  I wrinkled my forehead. My meager memory of the brief was that the Barrens’s top land predators weren’t much bigger or meaner than the misshapen frog that I had just shooed off the drone.

  I rubbed my good hand on my armored thigh. Supposedly, they actually tested an Eternad boot once by leaving it in a tiger cage. After a week the tigers had lost three teeth chewing on the boot, which was unscratched. I reached the conclusion that no gun was required here in the Barrens, at least on land.

  The shallow swamp water held shellfish that looked, as I remembered, like lobsters or scorpions. I had lost even minimal interest in the segment about them when I learned that they didn’t even have tail stingers. I didn’t recall how big they were, but they sounded less threatening than the frogs.

  I would have to lead the partisans back here to recover the rest of my gear, anyway. I ignored the weapons pod, bent on one knee and raced the sinking sun until I had set my dislocated wrist, loaded a watertight backpack with the heliograph, and dropped a couple serious happys.

  By the time I straightened up and stretched, my visor display predicted three hours more of signal-sufficient daylight. Overland I would have to hack through vegetation with the suit’s bush knife, unable to trade hands and distribute the workload. Worse, I would likely have to detour around the densest thickets. I squinted up at the gray sky and shook my head. Overland I’d never make the coast before dark.

  I turned toward the sludge-brown bayou I had landed in, while my shoulder socket throbbed against my armor’s underlayer. The bayou curved, but wound directly toward the ocean. Fallen fronds on the water’s surface drifted seaward as fast as a man could walk.

  I nodded to myself. Improvisation separates good case officers from dead ones.

  Eternads weren’t diving suits, but they were watertight enough for waterborne assault, even for underwater demolition missions in a pinch. In my suit I could float on the outrunning tide like a human beach ball. I would reach the ocean in a half hour. During which I could rest my arm and conserve my energy. If time in the field teaches a GI anything, it is never walk if you can hitch a ride.

  I punched up the suit’s overboard mode, then gritted my tee
th. The micropump between my shoulder blades pounded my damaged joints as its vibration inflated the suit’s flotation bladders. Then I waded out knee-deep, lay back, arms and legs splayed, and drifted, belly to the sky. As I pinwheeled slowly downstream atop the warm water, dragonflies whirred across my field of vision against a lattice of cycad branches and gray sky. The surface current rafted me toward the coast. I smiled at my ingenuity and enjoyed the ride.

  As the good ship Jazen drifted, so did my mind. The happys I had dropped spread a warm buzz throughout my body. Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me.

  Two minutes and two hundred yards later, I turned my head to watch a pickle-sized pink worm wriggle toward me across the surface. It was probably toxic, the pink color a defense mechanism advertising “Don’t eat me!”

  I wrinkled my forehead as I yawned. There had been something in the brief about the pink worms, but what? The nagging thought caused me roll onto my belly, then stand in water that proved to be waist deep. The little worm danced across the surface. I fingered the bush knife in my leg scabbard with my good hand.

  The worm had something to do with the big lobsters. They—

  Whoom.

  Brown water turned white as it foamed up around the worm, then geysered up. Something grabbed me around the waist and squeezed.

  Thirteen

  Lobster, my ass. Muddy water flooded over my faceplate and closed out the daylight as a monster dragged me under and toward the channel’s center.

  Desperation concentrates the mind, and now the brief about the scorpions flooded back over my drugged brain.

  Barrens scorpions weren’t, biologically speaking, scorpions. But they weren’t restaurant lobsters, either. They were Tressel’s version of pterygotid eurypterids, giant nightmares that had evolved, then died off, on Earth and Yavet during those planets’ respective Paleozoic eras. Pterygotid eurypterids filled the brackish-water estuary-predator niche until they went extinct. Then crocodiles moved in and replaced them.