Undercurrents (21 page)

We slipped down into the chill morning and dodged through the yard, crabbing under row after row of carriages. The few yard workers we saw didn’t merely ignore us; they distanced themselves from us.

Alia said, “Dressed like this we look like Tressen settlers. They hop freights down in the southern settlements all the time. Especially this time of year.”

“This time of year,” late fall on into rainy winter, was the annoying time that modern societies called flu season. Pre-vaccine societies called it influenza season, but for them it wasn’t annoying: it was a time of angst and death. Without vaccines, the flu laid the strong low and killed the weak. Desperate settlers from the south brought their sick children north for “modern” medical care that was little more than hand-holding.

It took Alia and me, rucksacks in hand, an hour to walk to the office of the Iridian-sympathizing physician who had tipped Celline’s network about his mysterious female former patient.

His office was in the city’s Old Quarter, a warren of narrow, cobbled streets and stone buildings. The tight-packed buildings stood no higher than three stories, except for church steeples, not for aesthetics or to honor the almighty but because that was as tall as the architects of the time had been able to stack stone.

The gray and black was relieved only by red ribbons that hung from half the doorways. The ribbons flapped in the breeze generated by chugging autos and rattling lorries as they passed. Pedestrians, heads down and hands in pockets, filled streets that a Trueborn would call overcrowded and a downlevels Yavi would call sparsely populated.

No pedestrian bothered us, and those who approached us from downwind gave us a wide berth. What fear of influenza didn’t do, fish stink did.

The row house that served as the physician’s office was easy to find. Flapping red ribbons hung not just beside the building’s door but from both stoop rails. The ribbons warned passersby that the influenza was inside. Generally, those homes were cleared and shunned. A doctor’s office didn’t have that luxury. Tressens had reached that unfortunate stage of medical acumen where they understood that close contact spread disease but couldn’t do much about the disease once it had spread.

The office vestibule was so crowded that we had to step over the outstretched legs of waiting patients to reach the reception nurse. After one sniff, she hustled us through a second waiting room, crowded with sad-eyed adults and weeping children, into an examining room.

We exchanged our travel outfits for laundered clothes that had been packed in oilskin bags. Then we sat on straight chairs and waited, hands clasped between our knees.

The doctor swept in, gray and weary, wearing a starched white long coat and spectacles rimmed with copper wire that hooked behind his ears. He smiled when he saw Alia and chucked her under the chin. “You’ve grown! How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“That’s because you were inoculated.”

He turned his head toward me and frowned. “Where is the other gentleman?”

“He didn’t come this time. I’m—”

The physician raised his palm. “What I don’t know the ferrents can never beat out of me.” He paused and fingered a stethoscope that hung around his neck. “I’m afraid you’ve come at a bad time. There’s no vaccine. At any price.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “Influenza vaccine’s not embargoed. The Trueborns send Tressel tons of it. Free.”

“Oh, they do. But it’s all diverted to Party members’ families. They resell any leftovers they don’t ruin. But they won’t trickle into the black market for a couple of months yet. That’s when the other fellow usually visits.”

Alia said, “He’s not here about the medicine.”

The physician kept his eyes on me. “Well, he should be!” He pointed at the closed examining-room door. “Did you look at those people waiting to see me? This pandemic will kill one of every five out there. More, among the children!” He held up a quivering finger. “And not one has to die! Not one! All I have to give them is sympathy, hygiene advice, and a red ribbon for their door. Your people should do something about it!”

I raised my eyebrows and laid my palm on my chest. “
My
people?”

He eyed me, head to toe. “You look Trueborn. You sound Trueborn.”

I shook my head. The Trueborns weren’t my people. The Yavi weren’t my people. I was a waif abandoned by the former, a criminal guilty of being born among the latter. I didn’t have a people. I had a job.

I pointed at the closed door, and my finger shook as hard as the physician’s had. “The people out there won’t die because of me! They won’t die because of the Trueborns, either! Blame the Republican Socialist Party!”

The physician paused, steadied himself with a hand against the door jamb, then rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. You’re right. That’s why I help the cause.” He looked up. “If you’re not here for vaccine, then you’re here about the woman.”

I nodded and leaned forward. “How is she?”

“Someone saw her walking at the clinic yesterday. Which is miraculous, considering her initial condition.”

My heart leapt. “What does this woman look like?”

“Well, like the very devil when they brought her in.” He turned his eyes to the ceiling and tapped a finger on a tooth. “I saw her prone, of course. Measured out, I should say, perhaps half a head shorter than yourself. Lovely fair skin, the few bits that weren’t bruised. Blonde hair, cropped like a boy’s. Superb muscle tone. Eyes an extraordinary shade of blue, to the extent I saw them with the lids pulled back.”

The Trueborns called the shade Caribbean blue, and Kit’s eyes were better than extraordinary.

I scooted farther forward on my chair. “Scars?”

He lifted his trouser leg and drew a finger diagonally across his left ankle. “Prominent one, just here. A knife, probably.” He pointed a finger at his chest. “Depression the diameter of a one-crown coin, just here, below the clavicle. Old gunshot entry wound if I’m any judge.”

I sank back on the chair and closed my eyes. “Yes!” Kit was alive. And walking!

He said, “You know her, then?”

“Where is this clinic?”

“It’s Republican Socialist Memorial.”

I stared at him.

He said, “Formerly Daughters of Iridia Medical Center? The Alabaster Castle!”

I turned up my palms. “Which is where?”

He eyed my fisherman’s outfit. “Ah, yes. You’re not from here.”

I pressed my palms together. “Please, Doctor. This is really important.”

He turned to Alia and raised his eyebrows.

She nodded.

Alia and I left the physician after I pumped him for another half hour. We came away with a plan, and with time to kill before we implemented it.

We scouted eat-in bakeries in the Old Quarter until we found one that baked and served brot.

Brot was a bland Iridian flatbread. Brot was served toasted, then spread with trilobite roe. The roe actually tasted like, because it was, a sort of poor man’s caviar. But there was no brot-of-the-month club, because trilobite roe looked exactly like human snot. It took us an hour to find a place that still catered to the Iridian taste for brot.

The bakery was set two steps down below street level, with narrow windows, and was a block outside the Government Quarter. We sat at a toy of a table in the corner, out of the baker’s earshot. We ate our brot, with tea that smelled like wet cat fur, and watched people’s legs and feet go by. Too often, we also saw hearse wheels roll past.

Alia poked a brot crust into roe puddled on her plate. “
Is
it your fault?”

“The doctor didn’t say anything was my fault! It’s not my job to fix the world.”

“I see. It’s only your job to rescue her tonight.”

I shook my head. “No. Tonight’s a reconnaissance. Plan first. Rescue sometime later.”

“Then why do you have guns and all that other stuff in your rucksack?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Nosy girls don’t grow breasts, either.”

She wrinkled her nose at me and glared. Then she said, “You were asleep. I was bored. Well, why do you?”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy. So plan for every contingency. She taught me that when we were together.”

“Together. Like kissing and stuff?”

Especially and stuff. I looked down into my tea and swirled it. “Together. Like senior and junior case officer. Partners.”

My eleven-year-old inquisitor raised her chin and narrowed her eyes. “Uh-
huh
.”

I turned to the bakery owner behind the counter and waved for the check.

At dusk, we lined up at a sand-bagged sidewalk checkpoint, behind a dozen homeward-bound day workers waiting to pass through Tressia’s cordoned-off Government Quarter.

My heart thumped as I toed my heavy rucksack forward each time the line advanced. For all the burying alive and hopping of freights, this was the biggest gamble so far in our journey. I could have made it safer by caching my weapons and gear and going unarmed through the checkpoint. But I had left my firepower behind once before on this planet and almost got pinched in half by a giant crab.

Alia and I reached the head of the line.

A uniformed ferrent wearing an ankle-length coat, armed with a slung rifle, waved us forward. “Papers?”

I feigned a cough so deep that my shoulders shook, covering my mouth with my hand. Then I held our forgeries out to him.

His eyes widened as he saw my fingers and the papers, dripping with green trilobite roe. He waved them back at me unexamined. “You have business in the Government Quarter?”

I coughed until my shoulders shook while I nodded.

Alia looked up at him as she wiped roe from her nose with the back of her bare hand. “My father’s sick.”

The ferrent frowned as she flicked green slime off her hand onto the sidewalk. “So are you, missy.”

“The doctor told us to go to the clinic.”

The ferrent shook his head. “The doctor’s an idiot, then. They don’t take walk-ins.”

The line behind us swelled.

Alia snapped off a sneeze that sprayed saliva in the ferrent’s general direction.

He cringed. Then he waved us past the checkpoint. “Try if you want. Just get away from me.”

Alia raised her rucksack and held it in front of the ferrent’s face. “Aren’t you supposed to look in our bags?”

My heart skipped. The machine pistols and surveillance gear in the bag dangling from my shoulder suddenly weighed a ton.

The ferrent glanced at the bag she held in front of his nose and shook his head. “Move along!”

I shook like an out-of-tune Tressen lorry as we walked away from the checkpoint. After fifty yards, we turned a corner, and I grabbed her by the shoulders and squinted down at her. “Look in our bags? What the hell were you thinking?”

“Pyt says attack can be the best defense.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Before I showed him my bag, I rubbed a goober as big as your nose on my bag handle.”

She squirmed, and I realized my fingers were digging into her shoulders.

I relaxed my grip and drew a breath. “Oh.”

She grinned. “Did you see his face when I sneezed on him?”

“You know, you were fine back there. In fact, really good.”

“Of course. Celline says girls lie better.”

We resumed walking down the dark street in the moonlight.

Alia hiked her rucksack up across her shoulder as we walked. “I could be your new partner.”

I smiled. “Maybe.”

“But no kissing.”

I smiled again. “Too many whiskers?”

Alia shook her head. “You’re already taken.”

We ducked down an alley and waited. The streetlights in the Government Quarter were shut off after moonset.

Republican Socialist civil servants were no more inclined to work late than any other kind, so the lights in the Government Quarter were mostly superfluous in the evenings. And the Tressens’ electrical grid was so feeble that after moonset they redirected most of the juice to still-inhabited parts of town, where it was needed. After moonset, the Government Quarter turned as dark as a cave, so I put on snoops and led Alia by the hand the rest of the way to the clinic.

The clinic’s grounds were easy to find. They were the only island of light in the deserted Government Quarter.

But they weren’t deserted.

I muttered, “What the hell?”

Forty-five

Polian dabbed softly with a towel at the spot where the woman’s fist had struck his jaw, and winced. He watched his two corporals wrestle her into the metal skeleton chair. The interrogator had ordered the chair bolted to the floor in the center of the clinic’s psychological-interview room. Insulated cables clamped to the chair snaked six feet across the floor and connected to a satchel-sized console laid out on a simple table. The console, in turn, was connected to the wall outlet by a thicker cable.

A third soldier sat dazed on the floor, his back against one table leg. He grimaced, slid his trouser leg up to expose the kneecap she had kicked, then gently prodded the dislocated bone.

The interrogator peered at Polian’s jaw and whistled. “That’s gonna leave a mark. I told you we should have drugged her lunch.”

Polian shook his head. “No. I want her to feel every jolt.”

The two corporals tied her onto the chair’s legs and arms, securing her at the ankles and knees, then wrists and elbows, with thick tape over her smock and trousers. Finally, they taped thin copper wires, that were wrapped at one end around parts of the chair frame, to her palms and the soles of her feet.

Only then did the interrogator step forward and stand in front of her with his arms crossed. “Colonel, please don’t think I will enjoy this night. But I find that these interviews are easier for everyone if the interviewee chooses to cooperate. I also find that some interviewees make that choice if I explain the process.”

The woman stared at him, cocking an ear toward him as she whispered, “What?”

The interrogator bent closer and stared into her eyes. “Electricity will be applied through the electrodes affixed to your palms and to the soles of your feet. Later the electrodes will be relocated to your genitalia. Initially, while I’m checking the modifications I’ve made to the equipment, the damage will only hurt your vanity. Static buildup that will cause your hair to stand out. As I increase the voltage, the pain will—”