Undercurrents (8 page)

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 teeth. 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.

The scorpions hunted by lying in opaque water that hid their ton-plus bulk, navigating with dinner-plate–sized compound eyes. They lured prey with wormlike stalks that periscoped above their manhole-cover–sized flat heads. Apparently some animals were dumb enough to buy the worm trick. I now knew of at least one.

The scorpion clamped me with its two pincers. One vised my left thigh, the other my waist. The scorpion dragged me backward toward the channel’s deep center, thrashing a horizontal fluke flexed by tail muscles four yards long and a yard wide.

The scorpion’s mouth, on the underside of its flat head, was too small and mandibular to bite chunks off prey. So the scorpion battle plan was to crush and drown prey, then store the carcass under a rock for leisurely nibbling, after rot softened the meal.

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?