Undercurrents (12 page)

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!”

“I didn’t lie. It is the easiest passage. Watch how I tie myself in, then you do the same.”

Twenty-five

Alone at a polished wood table in the cutter’s officer’s mess, Polian sat hunched over a mug of tepid local tea and ground his teeth. He tugged back the sleeve of his Tressen jacket and eyed his ’puter.

If he were back home, with a lousy brigade recon platoon, he could have simply put up a drone and tracked this boat forever. Polian sighed. It was a rule of covert operations that the equipment they let you bring was always one item short of the equipment you needed.

So, with a permanent change in the human balance of power at stake, here he sat. Reduced to awaiting progress reports about a rowboat race, relayed in the clear on glorified portable telephones with awful reception. He should have taken command of the skimmer himself. But this expedition into which he had thrown his troops was already Polian’s first real foray from staff officer to commander. The experience would grow Polian as a commander, just as it would grow Sandr, and Polian had seen too many grandstanding commanders who led from the front unnecessarily.

A Tressen seaman rapped on the mess hatchway’s steel surround as he turtled his head in through the opening. “Sir? Your man on deck says a call is coming in on your wireless.”

The sailor jumped aside, wide-eyed, as Polian sprinted past him to the passage ladder.

Polian took the ladder two steps at a time, barked a shin as he emerged from below decks into twilight, and limped, swearing under his breath, to Frei, the budding line lieutenant, whom Polian had assigned to monitor the handtalk.

Polian snatched the handtalk from Frei, and a voice, not Sandr’s, crackled in Polian’s ear. “—at first light. Or we can give it up.”

Polian panted. “Rover, this is Base. What’s your situation?”

“Base, we’ve taken a casualty.”

Polian closed his eyes and gripped the handtalk. Polian recognized the voice now. Mazzen, the brevet corporal. That meant the casualty—

“Sir, the lieutenant’s dead.”

Polian stepped back, off balance, though the ship wasn’t rolling. His shoulders slumped. He should have gone himself. “How?”

“The passage we took. It wasn’t the one the Iridian boat took, sir.”

Polian wrinkled his forehead in the fading light. “Then how—?”

“They spoofed us, sir. Tied some big, half-live fish to a barrel and let the current carry it. The sensors aren’t close-calibrated, so we got mass and residual motion and organic indicators from it. Took a while to catch up with it and recognize the decoy.”

“But Sandr?”

“Sir, the decoy suckered us into a gorge that led to a waterfall. Dropped straight down two hundred feet to solid rock. The passage was too narrow for us to turn the skink around. We barely stopped in time. Then we had to reverse out with everybody fending off the walls with their weapon stocks. We lost a man overboard.” There was a pause. “Me. I was a goner. Except Lieutenant Sandr dove in after me and got a line on me. But nobody had a line on him.”

Another pause.

“He didn’t hesitate a heartbeat, sir. If he had, I wouldn’t be here.”

Polian leaned against the deck gun and wiped his eyes. “I understand.” Polian stared across the calm sea at the last red glow of daylight above the cliffs. Somewhere beyond those cliffs was Mazzen and the skimmer, the Iridian boat, and what remained of Sandr. Sandr, who had died because he, Polian, who had no experience of command at all, had some addled aversion to leading from the front. And he, Polian, had filled the kid with stupid notions of responsibility and decisiveness, as if he himself understood them.

“Sir, he hit the rocks headfirst. Armor or not… We haven’t been able to reduce the remains, sir. Honestly, we’d probably lose somebody else trying. I’m sorry, sir. I know you and the elltee…”

Polian straightened and drew a breath. “So, where are you now?”

“Back in the intersection. Now we’re calibrated. And we’ve got reliable residuals to track. With snoopers we can make better time than the rebels can. The Tressen guide says we can still overtake them within an hour, now that we’re both navigating in darkness.”

Polian rubbed his forehead with numb fingers. “Yes. Of course.”

Alongside Polian, Lieutenant Frei cleared his throat. “Sir? I overheard. If Mazzen waits, there’s time for the Tressens to ferry me out to the skink in their launch. I could take Sandr’s place and direct the pursuit.”

Polian blinked as he felt swelling around his eyes. Then he clapped the boy on the shoulder. “I appreciate that, Frei.” Polian shook his head. “But it’s my place to go.”

Frei opened his mouth, then closed it.

Polian thumbed the handtalk. “Mazzen? Hold your position.”

“Hold? Sir, I—yes, sir.”

“I’m on my way to join you.”

“Oh. But if I may, sir? A question?”

“Shoot.”

“How did fishermen a hundred years behind the times learn to spoof a sensor array?”

Polian felt blood rise in his cheeks. The guilt for Sandr’s death didn’t rest entirely on Polian. “They didn’t, Mazzen. But once I get out there, we will find the bastard who did this. And he’ll pay for it.”

Twenty-six

I clung to the ropes around my waist that lashed me to the quaking boat and stared at the girl. Alia sat across from me, roped the same way and staring back. We teetered on the lip of the first, twenty-foot stair-step drop of Dead Man’s Falls. The roar of the falls drowned the hull’s creaks. And probably the grinding of my teeth.

The girl sat serene, staring ahead as the bow dipped. As Pyt had told me, they had done this before. The distances between Yavet and Tressel, and the differences between life on each of them, could scarcely have been greater. Yet the girl and I were alike. For practical purposes she was growing up orphaned by parents she never knew, as I had. Like every Iridian, and every child born Illegal on Yavet, she was subject to summary execution for the crime of living.

The boat passed its tipping point, and I must have yipped. She looked at me with the Iridian green eyes that marked her and shrugged. “Don’t worry. The next steps aren’t any worse.”

Boom
.

The keel struck a boulder, and the boat rolled right.

Boom
. Back left.

Spray drenched my armor. Inside it, my underlayer was already sweat soaked.

Pyt, back on the tiller, straightened us, and we careened between glistening black boulders and over the second twenty-foot step.

All three of the channels among which we had chosen plunged down the same two-hundred-foot-high escarpment. Name notwithstanding, Dead Man’s Falls made the plunge in survivable twenty-foot drops. The other channels’ falls, Pyt had told me, dropped sheer.

My improvised sensor decoy must have worked, or the skimmer would have caught us well before we reached these falls. So were the Yavi all dead? And if they were, had I killed them?

I swallowed. As an officer in Earth’s army, I had taken an oath to defend my parents’ homeworld against enemies and oppressors, and Yavet was certainly both. I had spent my growing years on Yavet hiding from a government that wanted Illegals like me dead. But still I had been raised a Yavi.