Undercurrents (13 page)

When you’re young, committing to anything is hard. But, as the girl and I knew, being alone was harder.

The channel beyond the falls was narrow, flat, and slow. Daylight was now gone from the canyon floor.

I panted.

I turned to Pyt. “Can we stop here?”

He nodded, glancing back over his shoulder at the now-distant falls. Then he grounded the boat, its prow grinding up onto a half-moon–shaped beach pocketed in a bend and walled by cliffs. While Alia made the boat fast, Pyt grabbed my elbow and took me aside. “What are you thinking, Jazen?”

I pointed back along the channel in the direction of Dead Man’s Falls. “The Yavi must have bought our spoof, or they’d have been on us an hour ago. If they went over your falls, fine. But if they didn’t, they’ll backtrack. Then come after us down this channel.”

He nodded. “We have to assume the worst, then plan to deal with it. I agree.”

I nodded back as I rummaged through my gear. “If they make it over the falls, running won’t save us. The skimmer’s faster than we are, and they won’t fall for a decoy again.”

He crossed his arms. “Then we fight.”

I shook my head. “Force against force? A dozen Yavi commandos would annihilate the three of us in a fair fight.”

Pyt narrowed his eyes. “You’re suggesting we run away?”

I shook my head again. “I’m suggesting we make it an unfair fight.” I knelt and popped seals on a plasteel. “We call the equipment I have in this container force multipliers. If the skimmer makes it over the falls, the Yavi will be channeled down that gorge for a hundred yards. And they’ll be as shell-shocked as I was for a couple minutes.”

Pyt smiled. “We lay an ambush?”

I shook my head one more time. “I lay an ambush. You two continue downstream.”

Pyt frowned. “You? That’s—”

“See this?” I held up a curved slab of olive plastic, as rectangular and thick as a Gideon Bible.

Pyt ran a finger across words molded into the slab’s convex plastic face like a book title, in Standard. He read aloud, “This Side Toward Enemy.” Then he sniffed. “We already have mines. We use Tressen artillery shells when we can steal them, and nails in gunpowder when we can’t.”

I sighed. Trueborns, for all their self-proclaimed goodness, had invented more ways to slaughter people on the cheap than any three outworld societies combined. Pyt probably didn’t realize that improvised explosive devices, the poor man’s force multiplier, had been invented on Earth a century before.

Even the IED’s regular-forces cousin, the command-detonated directional antipersonnel mine, hadn’t evolved much. Why mess with a bad thing?

I rotated the mine as I pointed out its features to Pyt. “This beats a bucket of nails. Convex slab of plastic explosive, here. Harmless as cookie dough without a detonating cap. Seven hundred rifle balls stuck into the explosive’s front. The cookie’s sealed in weatherproof plastic. Blasting cap in the back, here. Detonation wires out the back, here. There’s even a peep sight, here on top. Emplace, back off, send a spark to the cap, and…boom!”

Pyt jerked his hand back off the mine’s face.

I set the mine down and unboxed another. “Any man-sized target within a sixty-degree arc fifty yards downrange will take a bullet.”

While he hefted the mine, I laid out a half-dozen more. “I’ll set these along the gorge, just beneath the waterline, angled up, and detonate them when the skimmer’s inside the kill box. Skimmer armor’s like kitchen foil. One mine should disable everyone in the skimmer, armored or not, but a little overkill won’t hurt. Two mines I’ll hardwire back to me, to be detonated on command by me, from cover, fifty yards downstream. I’ll set four more to detonate automatically, as fail-safes. Two on photoelectric trips, two on temperature sensors.”

I peeled Cosplas off a heavy machine gun, stripped and reassembled it. “When the first mine blows, I’ll fire straight down the gorge. Enfilade fire. Like knocking down dominoes.” I palmed back the gun’s charging handle, released it, then tapped the handle to seat it. “Yavi body armor may protect them from some of the mine shrapnel, but it won’t stop a heavy machine-gun round.”

“We know ambush technique. You could use some help.”

I swept a hand above the equipment containers. “Sure. If I had a day to teach you new techniques to ambush armored troops in a skink. These will be Yavi, equipped like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I twisted a buzz bug to activate it, then said, “Pick a number between one and five.”

Pyt wrinkled his forehead. “Three.”

“Now pick another.”

“One. Why?”

I coded the bug, then handed it to him. “Keep this in your pocket. It’s a wireless receiver. If the Yavi don’t show up, or the ambush succeeds, I’ll transmit a burst signal from my helmet comm. The receiver’s silent, but if you’re within twenty miles of me, my signal will make it vibrate. If you receive three vibes, one minute apart each, wait for me at the next fork. If you receive nothing, keep running. If you receive any other pattern, keep running. Any other pattern could be a spoof transmitted by the Yavi. Clear?”

“Clear.” Pyt nodded slowly. “But I would have expected a Trueborn to make those he had paid for take the risk. Not himself.”

I watched the girl, who had rolled up her pant legs and was wading in the stream, chasing shellfish, then cocked my head inside my helmet. “Me, too.”

Twenty minutes later, I was alone in the gorge. I had set passive listeners to warn me if the skimmer closed in while I was prepping the ambush. Then I had waded back upstream and emplaced mines to envelop the ambush kill zone.

By the time I had run det wires, set aiming and ranging marks for the gun, and scooped out a firing position on the little beach, I was wheezing. The warning sensors remained quiet. I lay on my back alongside the gun on its bipod, popped my visor, and stared up at the night-sky sliver that showed between the gorge walls. As I watched, a streak flashed across the sky, as fleeting as the meteor “shooting stars” that lit Earth’s night skies.

I smiled. I had seen enough old-style orbitals cross above enough battlefields to recognize the difference between spacecraft and meteors. The streak was a downshuttle. Soon that shuttle’s human cargo would be standing in immigration and baggage-claim lines, bitching about the discomfort and inconvenience of shuttling in this day and age. I smiled. I would gladly have traded my planetfall experience for theirs.

In the cool darkness, listening to the distant falls purr, I yawned. If this plan did come to a firefight, I needed to be fresh. I maxed my sensor alarms and checked the gun and the mine det clackers one more time. Then I popped two dozers from my helmet dispenser. The nice thing about dozers was that when you woke, you woke one hundred percent alert. I chased them with fortified water from my helmet nipple.

While I waited for the dozers to kick in, I visualized myself lying on a starlit beach less hostile than this one, with Kit alongside me. Pyt was right. Why was I lone-wolfing this ambush when the book dictated that I enlist expendable locals to do it? I was in this to save the damsel and run, not to stick my neck out for some child I hardly knew. Wasn’t I?

Before I could answer my own question, I slept.

Twenty-seven

The skimmer crept down the pitch-dark gorge, floating a foot above the current roaring beneath it. Polian fended the skimmer off the rock wall, green in the amplified light of his snoopers, with a gauntlet.

“All stop!” The Tressen seaman seated alongside Polian touched the skimmer driver’s arm, and the skimmer stopped and hovered. The seaman turned to Polian. “This one’s more rapids than a sheer fall, Cap’n.” He cupped a hand around his ear. “The pitch of the sound tells you.”

Polian ground his teeth. The pitch hadn’t told this man enough last time. And so a promising officer, who was a good kid, was dead. But this Tressen was the best guide Polian had.

“Sir, I got organics a thousand yards dead ahead! We’re catching them!” the specialist monitoring the sensors whispered into his helmet mike.

Polian frowned. “Movers or stationary?”

“Uh. Actually, they
are
stationary, sir.”

Mazzen, the brevet corporal, frowned, too. “Maybe they wrecked on the falls.”

Polian shook his head. “They know this place. They didn’t wreck themselves.”

“But if they think we wrecked, they may have put in for the night.”

Polian stared around them at the narrow gorge. It would become even narrower, and more demanding of their attention, when they reached the falls or rapids or whatever rumbled up ahead. He shook his head again. “He’s too smart to assume that. They’ve set an ambush at the base of the falls.”

Polian turned to Mazzen and pointed at the gorge walls. “Can you get six men up to the top of this canyon?” Polian pointed at the sensor image and the map onscreen. “Move down past the falls on foot? Flank them?”

Mazzen’s boots clanged as he popped his climbing crampons. “Hour up the wall, sir. Another hour hump downstream. Thirty minutes to down rappel.” He smiled. “Actually, we wouldn’t need to down rappel. We could take ’em under fire from above. Hell, chuck grenades down on them.” Then Mazzen frowned. “But I suppose you want them alive, sir?”

“I do. As soon as you’re in position above and behind them, we’ll bring the skimmer forward and distract them.”

Ten minutes later, Mazzen’s team clung to the gorge wall thirty feet above the skimmer, already looking as small as a half-dozen green monkeys climbing a green curtain.

Polian tapped the specialist’s shoulder and took the sensor-display tablet from the man. The target indicator hadn’t moved. It was, of course, possible that they really had misjudged the success of their little decoy game and stopped to rest. That would make capture even easier.

Polian opened his visor and let the night air and the roar of the undercurrent wash over him. Actually, it didn’t matter what their mind-set was, or whether they were asleep or awake. He whispered to the shapeless blob on the tablet screen, “You’re mine now.”

Twenty-eight

I woke, belly down in my slit trench, because a hand grabbed my shoulder as my sensors screeched.

I spun onto my back, drew my bush knife, and pressed it to my attacker’s throat.

“Jazen! It’s me!” The girl’s eyes bulged.

I recoiled, whispering, “Alia? What the hell?”

Pyt, speaking from over my shoulder, said, “Iridians don’t cut and run. Alia had to remind me of that.”

I thrust my knife back into its scabbard then pounded the boulder. “Crap!”

Alia’s face fell.

My army, a half-handed, middle-aged stepfather and a prepubescent girl, stood there jut-jawed. They clutched their hunting rifles like they thought they were three hundred Trueborn Spartans at Thermopylae. Pyt, I guessed, also came back to see whether Trueborns were, to use an expression that made no sense on a world without mammals, all hat and no cattle.

I cupped Alia’s chin in one gauntleted hand, until her eyes met mine. “You’re very brave to come back. But I didn’t send you downstream to protect you from a fight. I’m wearing armor that will barely show on Yavi sensors. The two of you will glow in the dark like vending-machine rubbers.”

Alia wrinkled her forehead. “Like what?”

I raised my eyebrows at Pyt and shrugged while I answered Alia. “Never mind. Look, if the Yavi know we’re here, this won’t be an ambush. It’ll be a clusterfuck.”

Alia wrinkled her forehead again.

I pointed at an upturned rock ledge. Needle guns were designed to kill selectively in civilian crowds, not penetrate cover. “Both of you get behind that. Maybe they won’t—”

Wheet. Wheet. Wheet.

The remote sensors I had set downstream klaxoned in my helmet. At the same instant, a new sound mingled with the falls’ distant rumble. The skimmer’s whine.

I ran, crouching, back to where the pair huddled behind the slab and pointed at the sky. “Keep your eyes on the gorge rim. If they know we’re here, they may try to flank us. Shoot anything that moves.” If a Yavi did poke a helmeted head over the rim above us, the Iridian rifles wouldn’t dent his helmet. But the shots might slow him down, and they would warn me that he was there.

Whirrr.

I maxed my snoops and focused on the lip of the first cascade, six hundred yards away. The skimmer’s snout peeked out above the precipice, then withdrew.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

Two hunting rifles rattled behind me.

“Jazen! They’re up above! All around us.”

The skimmer peeked out again, this time slewed broadside.

Prraaap.

The skimmer’s side-mounted needle gun hosed the rock ledge with a burst that sang away in a shower of orange ricochet sparks and spent rounds.

Thump.

An object, dropped from above, half buried itself in the sand ten yards from me. Illumination canister. Its fuse fizzed; then the charge burst in a white, arcing flash.

My snoops compensated. The Yavis’ snoops would, too. Neither I nor they needed illumination. The canister had been dropped to momentarily blind my two would-be helpers.

Meanwhile, the skimmer refused to enter my kill zone.

Alia called, “Jazen! We can’t see!”

I fired twenty machine-gun rounds at the spot where the skimmer had been seconds before. As much from frustration as from murderous intent or tactical cleverness. The burst’s tracers zigzagged in green streak ricochets, then disappeared harmlessly up the gorge.

The skimmer showed its snout again. I aimed, fired. And the gun jammed after a single round.

Something wriggled against the gorge wall, above and to my flank, like a spilled basket of cobras.

I groaned. Rappel ropes.

My side was outnumbered, outgunned, blind, surrounded, and had ceded the high ground to the enemy. I had been wrong. This ambush would have to get lots better to rise to the level of a clusterfuck.

I swung the gun around to pick off as many of the Yavi as I could as soon as they began bouncing down the rock walls toward us. I tried to clear the jam, failed, and tried again.

Finally, I drew my sidearm in one hand and my bush knife in the other and faced the still-unused rappel ropes. “Well, a few of you baby-killers are going down with me!”