Undercurrents Read online

  Even so, when this old steamer’s lookouts had spotted the dumpy fishing boat, Polian had doubted his action. To be sure, the boat was Iridian. Its crew were presumably Iridians.

  Iridians were, by statutory definition, enemies of the Tressen state, which justified blowing them to hell. But the cutter captain was right. Using a warship to blow up lober fishermen was like steamrolling flies.

  Then, at that moment, a figure stood up, unsteady, in the boat. It could have been a fisherman in lober’s armor. The telltale blue-black color could have been a trick of light. Or it could have been a Trueborn case officer wearing a suit of Eternad armor, faceplate open.

  If the figure was a simple fisherman, Polian should let the Tressens blow the boat to hell. But if there was the smallest chance that it was a Trueborn spy? The woman’s missing partner?

  Polian pointed at the opening in the cliffs toward which the fishing boat ran. “Can you follow them in there?”

  The captain shook his head. “We’d rip out our bottom a thousand yards offshore.”

  “Then can you put a marine detachment over the side in one of your launches?”

  The captain shook his head again. “With the head start that boat has? Behind those cliffs there’s an uncharted network of long shore passages. They twist and braid like yarn. They’re barely wide enough and deep enough to pass a launch, and there are falls and rapids around every bend. The Iridians have been fishing and smuggling the Inside Passage for six hundred years. We’d never find them.”

  Polian nodded. “Then we can’t give that boat a head start.” He turned his head to the fresh-faced Yavi in civilian clothes who stood behind him and the cutter captain. “Lieutenant Sandr, have the Tressens put the skimmer over the side.”

  “Combat, sir? The skimmers aren’t even supposed to be on this planet.”

  Polian turned and faced the kid. “That Trueborn spy that Frei ran over wasn’t supposed to be here either, Sandr! Take the squad. The skimmer should be able to chase down that little tub out there before it disappears. If it does make it beyond the cliffs, it should be easy enough to track. The boat and crew you can feed to the fish if you like. But bring me back the one wearing black armor. Alive enough to question! Or I’ll feed you and your squad to the fish. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” Sandr swallowed, saluted, faced about, and double-timed off the bridge.

  A Tressen junior naval officer stood at the opposite side of the bridge, staring back over his shoulder at the cutter’s captain. “Sir? They’re getting away! We have them bracketed. One round...”

  The captain shook his head as he stared at the Chancellery envelope that protruded from Polian’s breast pocket. The captain squeezed his binoculars. “Ensign, have this gentleman’s contraption swung over the stern.”

  Twenty

  Alia grinned while she pounded one fist on our gunwale. She shook her other fist at the cutter. “You can’t catch us now!” She kept her feet even as our boat leapt, then crashed down in the chop along the cliff base.

  I lacked the girl’s sea legs, so I death-gripped the bucking gunwale with both hands.

  Trueborns have a saying—it only took me a couple years on my parents’ world to learn that Trueborns have a saying for everything—about the folly of counting unborn poultry. But I grinned, too.

  I nodded down my optics and zoomed on the cutter’s gun crew. They hadn’t budged. In another minute our progress would interpose the cliffs between us and the cutter. At the big ship’s stern, something moved.

  I pointed and called over surf crash to Pyt, “What are they doing?”

  He squinted at the big ship. “The cutter would ground in the shallows. So they’re putting in a shallow draft launch to chase us.” He leaned into the tiller while Alia tugged on lines for reasons I didn’t understand. Their combined action slipped us past surf that boiled around a garage-sized boulder.

  Then Pyt shook his head. “I don’t understand why they’re bothering. A motor launch is barely faster than we are. And once we make the Inside Passage, they’ll never find us.”

  I watched as the Tressens swung the craft that would hunt us out on davits over the ship’s side and lowered it on ropes and pulleys toward the waves.

  I rolled my eyes. “Crap.”

  Pyt raised his glasses, focused; then his brow wrinkled. “The fools are putting their launch in upside down!”

  I cocked my head. A twelve-place skimmer’s inverted-bathtub hull would look like an overturned open boat if you had never seen an air-cushion vehicle. I sighed again. “It’s not a boat. It’s a light-duty utility vehicle. It blows air out from beneath that skirt around its belly and floats above the water. Or the land.”

  Pyt snorted. “They have no such—.”

  Alia said, “It’s true! It looks just like the pictures!”

  Pyt turned to me, green eyes ablaze, and pointed at the skimmer. “You haven’t punished Iridia enough? You’ve given more machines to the Tressens? To hunt down the last of us?”

  “We didn’t do that. That’s a Yavi machine.”

  “Yavi?” Pyt frowned.

  I said, “Another planet. If you think the Trueborns punished you, wait ’til you meet some Yavis.”

  In the distance, the skimmer floated in the water, awaiting a helmsman. A dozen riflemen scrambled over a cargo net draped over the cutter’s side and dropped into the open skimmer’s troop space as it bobbed.

  Nine of the squad wore Yavi body armor and carried assault rifles with barrels so slender that they had to be Yavi needle guns. One man, thinner than the others, wore Tressen naval coveralls and carried a gunpowder sidearm. The last two Yavi carried crew-served needle machine guns. The gunners levered the needlers into the skimmer’s midships gun mounts and fitted their drum magazines with a weary competence that couldn’t have been Tressen. I whistled. “And you’re about to meet some.”

  The skimmer driver fired up his vehicle, and that familiar sucking whine snarled across the water. A fog of atomized seawater obscured the skimmer’s skirt, and the vehicle rose two feet above the waves.

  Pyt’s eyes widened, and he glanced back and forth between the passage entrance, now thirty yards ahead of us, and the wobbling skimmer. “How fast is that thing?”

  The skimmer’s driver got his vehicle trimmed. Its nose dipped, and it shot toward us, accelerating toward sixty miles per hour.

  Pyt swore.

  Alia slapped her forehead. “Ooh!”

  Then our creaking boat passed into shadow, behind the cliff’s shoulder. For a moment, we could neither see nor hear the dozen heavily armed troops bearing down on us. There was only the creak of our own hull as we sailed on at one sixth the speed of our pursuers.

  Pyt unlatched the locker in the stern, withdrew two single-shot rifles and cartridge bandoliers, and handed one to Alia.

  Then both of them turned and stared at me.

  Pyt pointed a three-fingered hand in my direction. “You brought these devils upon us. You get rid of them!”

  Twenty-one

  “Rover, we’ve lost sight of the boat from out here. Do you have visual on it yet?” Polian’s heart pounded as he awaited the skimmer’s reply, and he squeezed his handtalk so hard that it squirted from his fingers. It clattered across the bridge’s deck plates, and Polian kicked at it before he snatched it up.

  The Tressen captain stroked his moustache to conceal a smile. “I sympathize with your frustration. But we did everything precisely as you asked. We could have blown those fish-eaters out of the water. We’ve done it before. Your mission, your command, sir. But if they escape…”

  Polian faced away from the Tressen captain, stared out at the sky, and swallowed hard. Aboard the Trueborn cruiser circling invisibly above, hiding under a priest’s prayer shawl, rode this mission’s real commander.

  Polian was the acting senior command authority for Yavet’s entire presence on Tressel, but only until General Ulys Gill hit dirt. Gill was replacing Polian’s unexpectedly and ironically
dead boss, a this-century warrior slain by last-century Tressen influenza. With no suitable replacement on hand, command had plucked Gill off the almost-retired shelf and packed him off to Tressel with the next available detachment. Polian hardly welcomed the change. By reputation, the old moustaches had scant patience with staff officers, especially those who acted like line officers then got it wrong.

  “Base, this is Rover.” Sandr’s voice shrieked as he shouted to be heard above the skimmer’s roar. Polian had almost forgotten that he had a question pending to his subordinate.

  Sandr said, “No, we’ve lost sight of them. Once we clear the point, we should reacquire visual.”

  Pop-pop-pop. Pop-pop-pop. The sound of needle-gun bursts drifted to Polian as the squad pressured up its mounted crew-served weapons.

  “Rover, this is Base. Does that sailor with you know where he’s going?”

  “Generally. But he says nobody knows the channels and rapids ahead like the fish-eaters.”

  Polian blew out a breath. Why did everything on this simple planet have to be not simple? “You have the sensors calibrated, then?”

  “Much as we can in a new environment, sir. But it should be simple enough to follow the boat’s telltales.”

  Pop-pop-pop. One more pressuring burst.

  Sandr said, “And when we catch it, sir, we’ll razor every living thing in it.”

  “No! Rover, I want that boat interdicted. But I also want someone alive enough to tell me where it was headed and why.”

  Twenty-two

  Pyt steered our boat into a passage darkened by hundred-foot-high rock walls that narrowed upward to a slit. The channel was too open to be a cave, too narrow to be a fjord, too broad to be a crevasse.

  Boom.

  A swell tossed the boat against the cliff and knocked me off balance. I tripped over coiled rope, fell headlong against a bait barrel, and landed on the still-twitching rhizodont. It managed a slow snap at me, and I kicked its head. I grabbed at Alia’s arm to stand and knocked her down, too.

  She pulled herself upright, gasping.

  Alia furled the sails as the swells swept the boat down the passage, thumping against rock hard enough to crack our hull’s planking. She unlashed a wooden pole, three times her height, from the mast, then stood in the bow, using the pole to fend the boat off the cliffs.

  I called back to Pyt, “What do you want me to do?”

  He waved a hand, palm down. “Sit down! Shut up! We’ve done this a thousand times.”

  Ten minutes later the passage widened and the swells spilled out into the unconfined area and dissipated. Our boat slowed with the current, and I looked back up the passage, half expecting to see the skimmer bearing down.

  Alia aimed her fending pole into the water, then walked from bow to stern pushing the pole against the bottom, speeding the boat through the widened grotto.

  Fifty yards ahead, the grotto channel split into three more passages. Pyt steered us into the leftmost channel.

  I turned back to him. “What if they follow one of the other channels?”

  He smiled. “That’s the beauty of the Inside Passage. The falls at the end of either of those channels will crush a Tressen launch like an egg.”

  The Inside Passage referred to what the xenogeologists called an inundated tectonic compression zone. That was an expensive description of the place where a continent and a seabed pressed against one another, butting heads until one yielded to the other. However, in this case, both landmasses had pushed back, stubborn and unyielding.

  Like, shall we say, a Trueborn senior case officer with an idealistic board up her adorable ass, and a reasonable but pragmatic, some would say nihilistically cynical, junior case officer.

  Like Kit and me, the landmasses had finally buckled and shattered, one worse than the other. The resultant jumble of cliffs, drowned canyons, channels, rapids, and falls created a sheltered inland waterway that stretched along the shore of half a continent. The Inland Passage had connected and defined the Iridian nation for centuries.

  Pyt knew his world. But he didn’t know any others.

  I walked back and stood alongside him to answer his question. “Remember, that thing can do things a Tressen launch can’t.”

  “I saw that thing. It’s too large, too heavy. If they choose the wrong passage, it won’t survive either of those falls. So two chances in three we’re done with them.”

  I shook my head. “They won’t choose wrong. The skimmer’s got sensors that detect heat and motion residues. Even micro rippling left behind in water. It’s a mechanical bloodhound.”

  Pyt crossed his arms and just stared at me. Bloodhounds wouldn’t evolve on Tressel for eons. He frowned, then nodded. “I understand. You’re saying they can track us. What do you suggest?”

  I sucked in a breath. A case officer who was building local relationships was taught that the first request for advice or aid was a golden opportunity. If the case officer offered good ideas or useful materiel, a bond formed. If he blundered, the opportunity transmuted from gold to lead, and the locals wrote him off as worthless.

  Worse, this problem wasn’t, for example, a child’s toothache that I could cure from the meds kit. If I couldn’t think of something, we would find ourselves in a twelve-on-three firefight with a dozen trained killers.

  I rummaged through the jumbled gear in the tiny boat, searching more for an idea than an object, while Alia stared at me. I tried to look like I had a clue.

  Twenty-three

  “Talk to me, Sandr.” Polian paced the cutter’s foredeck as it rocked at anchor. The ship lay fifteen hundred yards offshore from the mouth of the passage in the cliffs, behind which the sun was now sinking.

  “Sir, we’ve reached a decision point here.”

  “You finally have them in sight?”

  “Uh...”

  Polian rolled his eyes. “A skimmer can’t catch a wooden sailboat?”

  “Major, these channels, they’re a maze. And the boat’s been running with a strong current. The current doesn’t benefit us, because we’re above it. That’s not a problem by itself, but our beam is broader than theirs, and the passage actually narrows upward in places, bottlenecks in others. So we’re reduced to a pace not much faster than double time.”

  Polian squeezed his eyes shut. “But you haven’t lost them?”

  “No, sir. But we’ve just entered a grotto. It has three other exits. This coastline is a regular maze once you get behind the cliffs.”

  “So you take the passage that the sensors show that they took.”

  “Sir, the sensor calibration’s still pretty coarse. We’ve got residual moving-target indicators and heat and organic traces extending down two divergent passages. Obviously, one indication’s false. We’re sorting relative strength and quality, but...”

  Polian squeezed his handtalk. He had assigned Sandr, the fledgling staff officer, to chase the boat in order to build the boy’s decision-making skills. So far it wasn’t working. “While you’re sorting, they’re opening the gap, son! Ninety percent of command is being right in time. Worst case, you backtrack. Choose a passage, Lieutenant.”

  Silence.

  Polian’s handtalk crackled. “Yes, sir. Here we go.”

  Polian smiled. Lessons learned in the classroom were forgotten in the field. Lessons learned in the field, however, became reflexes. The next time crisis forced Sandr, the bright but timid kid, to decide, he wouldn’t hesitate—he would leap.

  But personnel development was ancillary to Polian’s primary objective. He had overreached by exposing his covert force to chase a counterespionage hunch. If he caught a spy, he was a genius. But unless Sandr caught that boat, Polian could only look like an idiot who had chased a tub full of fishermen.

  Polian turned away from the sunset and flipped up the collar of his Tressen jacket against the rising wind. Then he looked back up at the bridge. The ship’s captain looked down, his features obscured beneath his cap-bill shadow. But Polian swore that the
bastard was laughing at him.

  Twenty-four

  We had been drifting down our passageway for twenty minutes, bumping against the rock walls. When we slowed, Alia poled.

  I kept staring back over the stern, snoopers on in late afternoon dimness, audio gain maxed. I expected to hear the snarl or see the snout of the skimmer every moment, but behind us there was nothing. Finally, I unwrapped a protein bar and chewed it while I bent and broke out weapons. Then something occurred to me.

  All three of the channels among which we had chosen ran roughly parallel. Two of the channels led to waterfalls. I ran my fingers along our boat’s rickety wooden top rail. Then I pointed at our route, wrapper in hand, and asked Pyt. “What’s at the end of this?”

  He turned his eyes up toward the dimming sky sliver that glowed between the canyon walls. “Just a splash of white water. This is the easiest passage.”

  “Good. I hate amusement rides as much as I hate water.”

  An hour later, Alia shipped her pole because the current now carried us faster than she could pole. The narrow channel became a gorge barely wider than our hull. Distant thunder rumbled.

  I turned to Alia, cupped a hand, and shouted. “Rapids?”

  She shook her head and shouted back, grinning. “Better! Dead Man’s Falls!”

  As the boat accelerated on the current, the distant thunder became a steady roar.

  I shot Pyt a bug-eyed glance. “A splash of white water?” The thunder, confined and booming off the gorge walls, now shook the boat so hard that the rope lines quivered. I pointed forward and screamed at him, “A splash?”

  Pyt shrugged, then tossed me a rope coil. “Would it have helped you to know?”

  “You goddam liar!”