Undercurrents-ARC Page 7

  The beast shifted its pincers to better grip this hard-shelled, unfamiliar fish.

  I broke free and slogged, gasping, into the shallows. There I drew my puny bush knife while I screamed at the idiot who decided not to bring a gun.

  The bug shot after me into the shallows, then rose up on eight legs. Water streamed off its armored back and off its two snapping pincers, upraised like a boxer’s gloves. It punched one pincer at me, and I slashed with my knife. The blade exploded water but slid off the bug like a toothpick off a lobster claw.

  Meanwhile the scorpion’s other claw thrust beneath the water, clamped my ankle, and dragged me down again.

  I hacked every appendage I could reach with the bush knife, but this time I couldn’t break the monster’s grip. The good news was that the Eternad’s strain gauges stayed in the green. This monster wasn’t strong enough to crush up-to-date plasteel.

  The bad news was that, according to the suit’s sensors, the water in the deep center of the channel was saltier, and therefore heavier. It lay beneath the layer of fresh water that was flowing seaward. The salty undercurrent was drifting the bug and me inland. That was fine with the bug, who preferred brackish water to the saltier open sea, and disastrous for me.

  One reason that the scorpion liked inland waters was that Tressel’s Paleozoic ocean was chock-full of fish big enough and mean enough to eat it.

  I wasn’t strong enough to break free of this beast, but, with the help of the suit’s buoyancy, I could force the pair of us to the surface. I blew the floatation to max, and the two of us popped up like a buoy.

  The surface current was still running out to sea. After only moments on the surface and above the undercurrent, the scorpion and I reversed direction and floated seaward as we struggled, whether the beast liked it or not.

  For the next ten minutes we drifted down the cycad-roofed bayou like it was fight night in the tunnel of love, pummeling one another without result.

  Then the leafy cycad roof vanished. The estuary spilled its fresh water out into the sea, where it would blend with the salty ocean.

  Heh, heh. As soon as the scorpion sensed the change of salinity, it would drop me like a hot amphibian and swim back to the shelter of its swamp.

  I looked skyward. Still daylight. Once freed, I would swim ashore and set up the heliograph tripod.

  I punched the air with my injured fist, grimaced, but hooted at the scorpion anyway. “End of the line, dumb ass!”

  Ten minutes later, the dumb ass and I continued to drift out to sea locked together, only one of us really fighting anymore. He may have been uncomfortable in salt water. He may have feared open-water predators bigger than himself. But he was too dumb to let go of a meal once he had clamped onto it. No wonder his kind were headed for extinction.

  I pushed myself up against the bug’s claws and stretched my neck. The waves were only a couple of feet high, but that was enough to obscure my vision. I couldn’t see any friendlies. If they had hung around the landing zone, if they had ever been at the landing zone, they probably couldn’t see me.

  If night fell and the friendlies gave me up for dead, I might as well be. The distance between me and my objectives would be as unbridgeable as the light-years I was from home. I might as well have hit the mud at terminal velocity, or become bug food back in the swamp.

  I was down to one option. I hated to use up my one and only signal pyrotechnic. If a bomb explodes in the ocean and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

  I eyed the sinking glow of the sun beyond the overcast. Time was running out.

  Digging into my suit’s thigh pocket, I tugged out the pyro signal canister and hefted it. It felt heavier than the Mark II I was used to. I read the stenciled instructions.

  MARK IV ENHANCED SEARCH AND RESCUE PYROTECHNIC DEVICE

  PULL PIN AND THROW

  Well, that part remained idiot-proof. There was more.

  CAUTION: DO NOT DEPLOY WITHIN THIRTY YARDS OF PERSONNEL OR CONCUSSION-SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT

  Seriously? It was a glorified firecracker, for God’s sake. I reduced the gain on my helmet audio and pulled the pin. Then I chucked the canister into the water, where it splashed down four yards away.

  Foom!

  Even muted, the sound knifed my ears. Blue sea spouted against the gray sky, and threw me and the bug twenty feet.

  We splashed back into the water, sank, then surfaced in a froth. I said, “Wow.”

  A pall of purple marker smoke blotted out the daylight as it drifted across me.

  Not us. Me.

  The bug was gone. Maybe dead. Maybe scared. I didn’t care which.

  I was free at last. I floated on my back and paddled my unencumbered feet. “Woo hoo!”

  The purple smoke dissipated.

  I stopped woo-hooing and listened to the waves as they metronomed against my helmet. There was no other sound, such as a friendly voice.

  I trod water and thrust my uninjured arm above the wave crests so I could periscope the vicinity with my finger cam. I didn’t see land. The estuary outflow had carried us farther than I had realized.

  I was free. But I was alone. And it was getting dark. I said to nobody, “Oboy.”

  At least it couldn’t get worse.

  My foot felt cold. And wet. The pyro’s concussion had ruptured a suit seal. I was sinking slowly, but I was sinking.

  Blup.

  I turned my head as a dead fish bobbed to the surface alongside me. They had been serious about the thirty-yard safe radius.

  Blup. Blup. Blup.

  Two minutes later I stopped counting the concussed, belly-up Paleozoic fish that surrounded me.

  I periscoped another brief snapshot. Silver in the distance, a fin that appeared to be attached to something bigger than the scorpion cut the water. It was inbound toward me and my fish fry.

  The brief about open-water fauna I had paid attention to. Tressen sea rhizodonts reached lengths of up to twenty-five feet, had four hundred needle teeth per jaw, foul dispositions, and insatiable appetites. They ate pterygotid eurypterids, if any ventured beyond the swamps, for breakfast.

  I trod water and reached for my bush knife as the cold of inflowing water in my suit reached my knee.

  I had been wrong. It could get worse.

  Fourteen

  Ten minutes after I spotted the first fin, the first rhiz brushed against my thigh plate as it swooshed past in the twilight, mouth agape to scoop dead fish into a lower jaw studded with more four-inch teeth than I could count. For the moment, I suppose I smelled and felt as appetizing as driftwood. But if these monsters decided I was food, I wasn’t sure whether the suit would keep them out indefinitely. And I didn’t know how deep these fish might dive or how deep the suit would stay pressure-tight if one dove and took me with it.

  Bump.

  A big one thumped my back, and I sucked a breath and clenched my teeth. The happys I had taken, back in the relative safety of the lair of the giant scorpions, were wearing off. My shoulder throbbed, and my cold, wet leg was growing numb.

  It was nearly full dark now. There were no friendlies.

  Beneath the surface, something clamped against my boot.

  I kicked.

  It held fast.

  Fifteen

  I thrashed in the dark sea, paddling but going nowhere against the thing that held me.

  My eyes swelled and burned. I had reenlisted. I had traveled halfway across the known universe. I had jumped out of a perfectly intact starship a hundred miles high and fought a swamp monster for her. It was bad enough that I would never see her again. The worst was that she would never even know I had tried. I punched a wave and struggled harder. “Goddammit!”

  “Stop kicking, you stupid bugger!”

  I rolled onto my back. A dark silhouette loomed against the purple twilight sky.

  I floated alongside an open boat under sail. The boat carried two human beings who were tugging at a grapple that was hooked around my boot.

  Splash
.

  The smaller of the two humans let go of me, poked a pitchfork-sized trident into the waves, and discouraged a rhiz.

  Then I relaxed, let them reel me in, and extended my good arm. The larger man hooked a hand under my backpack and tugged me as I kicked my boots; then I tumbled over the gunwale into the boat.

  I rocked in the slop that sloshed the boat’s bottom while I stared up at the two silhouettes and coughed. A rhiz, silver and thrashing and as long as I was tall, thrashed in the boat’s belly, clamped ineffectually to my armored calf. The smaller man pounded the fish with a club until it let go, then watched as it thrashed slower and slower, until it lay motionless and gasping.

  The boat was thirty feet long, with square cloth sails. Just an open wooden tub with a tiller aft and benches and lockers along its sides. Iridian lober boats, and lobers, who fished for trilobites and lobe-finned fish, hadn’t changed much in a thousand years.

  The smaller figure turned to the one who had pulled me in. “You think this is one of them?”

  The voice squeaked. A girl, not a man.

  “Who else would he be?” Deeper voice.

  “There were supposed to be two.”

  “All these rhiz? The other one’s bait by now.”

  I raised my eyebrows and didn’t bother to switch on my translator. Apparently one thing had changed in a thousand years. I resented the tidal wave of Earth culture that swamped the rest of the Human Union as much as anyone raised on an outworld did. But Terracentrism had its virtues. At this moment the Trueborn mission schools, and cowboy holos and comic chips that had made Standard the language, even in literal backwaters like this one, sounded pretty good.

  Rhizodonts twice the size of the one for which I had been bait thumped the open boat’s hull planks. The man who had pulled me aboard was lean, with a gray beard and Iridian-green eyes, and wore a lober fisherman’s leather armor. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”

  The bearded man snorted. “None returned. Your bomb’s attracted half the rhiz in this bay.”

  “It attracted you, too. I had to do something.”

  “We were where we were told to be! You weren’t.”

  “I’m sorry. You turned out to be too small a target from a hundred miles up.”

  The man snorted again. “Iridia’s always too small for the Trueborns.”

  I sighed inside my helmet. Decades earlier, Earth tilted against Iridia and toward Tressen to end a bloody, stalemated war between them. The Tilt ended the war, alright. But the Tressens turned their victory into a campaign to eradicate Iridia from the face of this planet.

  Earth didn’t like genocide any better than the next smug, patronizing superpower. But Earth had its hands full saving the human race from the Slugs. So Earth imposed isolating sanctions on Tressen, then washed its collective hands of the Iridians. No wonder Kit had to go in here friendless. And no wonder these two weren’t overjoyed to see me.

  But they were the closest things to allies I had.

  I sat up in the boat and popped my visor. “I’m Jazen. You?”

  The man just stared at me.

  I eye-rolled. It was possible to overdo operational security. “Look, I need to call you something.”

  The gray-bearded man shrugged. “I’m Pyt. The girl is Alia.”

  I squinted at the smaller Iridian. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back, and her shirt hung on an eleven-year-old’s board-flat frame, but girl she was.

  I nodded. “We need to retrieve my baggage, Pyt.”

  “Why?”

  Because without it I’m just an ignorant stranger. With it I’m an ignorant stranger armed to the teeth. “Because that’s where the diamonds are.”

  Pyt fended off a rhiz with his trident, then jerked his head shoreward. “We need to get away from this bait shop anyway. How far?”

  I shrugged and punched up the Equipment Drone’s locator, then pointed over the gunwale. “Thousand yards inland. That heading.”

  Two dark hours and two scorpion encounters later, the little boat creaked and rolled as it sailed away from the Barrens with my stuff aboard. We were bound south, toward the rock-bound Iridian coast.

  The moon had risen, and reflected off the waves like a rolling carpet of silver coins.

  Pyt sat in the boat’s stern, the tiller pressed between his arm and torso, while he shucked a raw trilobite with a lober’s hooknife. The girl slept, wrapped in blankets, in the prow.

  Pyt nodded at the sea and smiled at me. “Beautiful, no?”

  I hung my helmetless head over the gunwale and dry heaved for the second time. I gasped and spat at the waves. “I hate water.” The rhizodont alongside me banged its tail against my belly. “Can we throw that thing out? ’Cause I’m not eating it.”

  Pyt shook his head. “Never waste something you can cut into bait.”

  “And I thought you were keeping me around just for the diamonds.”

  That finally coaxed a smile from Pyt. He said, “You Trueborns don’t sail, then?”

  I wiped drool off my chin, dug out a motion-sickness cap from the meds kit, and gulped it dry.

  My shoulder throbbed. While I was in the meds kit, I punched in the details of my brachial injuries, selected the two caps the screen prescribed, and swallowed them. The sedative in the first one would knock me out. The second contained nano machines, activated by stomach acid, that would swim through my bloodstream and repair my arm damage.

  Pyt watched in silence as I played doctor.

  Finally, I answered him. “Some Trueborns sail.”

  Kit had a rich kid’s shelf full of yachting trophies, not to mention a boathouse full of day sailers, at her parents’ beach place in the Caribbean. One weekend on leave down there she had tried to teach me the difference between a jib and a bowline. But we were alone together, and we ended up, uh, distracted. Well, I was distracted and she had let me be.

  I gulped a breath and said to Pyt, “But I’m Trueborn by blood only. My parents were born on Earth. I was born and raised downlevels on Yavet. Like living in the bottom of a layer cake. I never saw an ocean until I joined the Legion.”

  He frowned. “The Legion? I agreed to guide a Trueborn military officer. Not a hired murderer.”

  “The Legion was a long time ago. I am a Trueborn military officer. I’m also a saloon owner on holiday.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Look, I didn’t abandon Iridia. The diplomat assholes who did that retired before I was born.” But I was sent here by the diplomat assholes who replaced them. “My partner’s already dead.”

  Pyt stiffened, started to say something. Then he turned his face away and stared at the shore.

  I, in turn, stared out across the empty sea. My partner? Somewhere out there the white-bread junior case officer who I had barely met was already two separate chunks of rhizodont bait. I didn’t know whether Weddle sailed, like Kit did. I didn’t know his parents any better than I didn’t know my own. When I tried to picture his face, all I could see was the bloody stump of his spinal cord flapping out of his helmet as it tumbled through the sky. I dry-heaved over the side again.

  I wiped my eyes. My two allies seemed in no hurry to get to know me any more than I had been in a hurry to get to know Weddle. So I studied them. Both wore brown leather-plated armor. The case brief said the Iridian lober culture was a littoral-zone subsistence economy.

  Family units hand-fished for needle-toothed, lobe-finned fish and trilobites. Trilobites were millipede shellfish, some with back spines that would make a porcupine jealous.

  Pyt looked to be fifty, broad-faced and lean, with hair that had once been brown. The girl, Alia, couldn’t have been older than eleven. Unlike Pyt, she had delicate features and strawberry-blonde hair. But she cocked her head just in the way that the man did. A daughter who favored her mother?

  Pyt had lost the little and ring fingers of his right hand at the first joint of each. Digital amputation was one of a lober’s many occupational hazards. The rule of thumb, so to
speak, was one finger joint lost for each five years fishing. The girl still had all ten fingers.

  I saw a watertight locker in the stern that was the right shape to house long guns, but the Iridians weren’t hunters by nature. They weren’t killers, either. Like most partisans, Pyt and Alia hardly looked the part. But they had fished me out of a mess. I had to trust them if I was going to accomplish anything.

  I also had to heal. My shoulder muscles spasmed as the drugs began working.

  I rolled onto my side, helmet faceplate open, in case I heaved again. Then I counted back from a hundred, waiting for the cap to settle my stomach, the sed to knock me out, and the nanos to sail my bloodstream like microscopic hospital ships.

  The boat rocked, the crew snored, and I hadn’t slept since before the pre-drop briefing.

  The last number I remembered was eighty-six.

  Kit’s finger traced my lips as she smiled down at me, smelling of lemons. I smiled back as I took her finger between my lips.

  Then the smell changed as she leaned down and whispered. “Are you a knight?”

  I woke with sun in my eyes and the girl staring down at me through my open faceplate.

  Sixteen

  “What? I groaned and slid my eyes until I saw Pyt dozing in the stern alongside the tied-down tiller.

  Alia touched the finger that had rested on my lips to my Eternad armor’s breastplate. “Are you a knight?”

  I squinted at her and tried not to move my shoulder. “How would you know what a knight is?” The largest land animal on Tressel wasn’t big enough to carry Lancelot’s chain-mail undershirt. Steel-armored knights belonged to the history of planets that had evolved horses.

  The girl pointed at the sleeping man. “Pyt gives me books. So, are you?”

  “I dunno. What do you think a knight is?”

  “A hero. Protects the weak. Fights for the right.”

  I shook my head. “I protect me. I fight for a paycheck.”

  She frowned. “Well, I hope you turn out to be some kind of hero.”

  I stared, straight-faced. “Why?”

  “Pyt says if all you have to offer is the diamonds, you’ll be thrown to the rhiz.”