Undercurrents (17 page)

A single, mile-wide rift valley, the Iridian Corridor, bisected Iridia at the transition between the coastal zone and the Iridian Central Plateau.

After the war, when the Tressens needed a railroad to bring oppressors in to Iridia and take spoils out, they chose the easiest route, which was down the Corridor’s flat, unforested center.

Emerging industrial cultures live and die by their railroads. The Trueborns fought incessant internecine wars that they misnamed “civil.” Jefferson Davis, a warlord during one of them, had observed that an invading army dangles within an invaded country like a spider, suspended from the slender thread of the supply line that connects it to its home. In Davis’s America, and in post-war Iridia, steel rails, not silk, formed that fragile thread.

The Iridian rebels hid in the forests of the Iridian Plateau, from which they raided the Tressen railroad, cut the spider’s thread, then disappeared. In response, the Tressens built a string of fortified strongpoints up and down the railroad. At first, the fortified line was there to protect the railroad, and to split Iridia in two, with the interior cut off from the sea. Later, the strongpoints served as bait. The Tressens tried to draw the dwindling rebel army into set-piece battles, by which the Tressens could bleed it. The conventional wisdom was that every yard of what came to be called the Bloody Corridor was a death trap. That was probably hyperbole, but I wasn’t looking forward to crossing a mile of open ground to prove it.

Nonetheless, ten minutes later I had my boots back on, and our platoon-sized unit dispersed in a line along the brushy ridge, crouched, and waited.

As the dawn trickled light across the Corridor, I saw the railroad, no more than a fragile black ribbon, a half mile to our front, laid across a mossy plain. A half mile beyond the rails the ground sloped upward to the Plateau’s still-dark and welcome forest.

The Corridor was heavily fortified at points where rebel attacks had succeeded in the past, and at bottlenecks where repairs to destroyed track would be difficult. This place was neither, just a slightly narrow section of the valley. Today, Celline wanted safe passage, not a fight.

I fidgeted and whispered to Alia, “Okay. I know that you’re not playing. We’re going to cross a mile of open ground in a line, to minimize our exposure time. But every minute we wait, it gets lighter. Why?”

“Celline knows what she’s doing.” Alia cupped a hand behind her ear. “Listen.”

Whooo
.

The distant steam whistle echoed, faint and on our right.

Six minutes later, a five-car Tressen armored train chugged past us, headlight burning a yellow hole in the dark, trailing an inky snake of black smoke spewed by the moss-refined oil that powered Tressen civilization. Behind the locomotive and tank tender rumbled an iron-riveted, enclosed troop car. An armored, manned guard turret whiskered with machine guns grew from the car’s roof like an angular wart. Behind the troop cars trundled two empty flatcars, their decks ajangle with tie-down chains.

Likely, on some days, the flatcars carried armored cars that could be ramped off to chase down items of interest—such as us—that the train’s lookouts spotted on its morning run to clear the corridor for the day’s traffic.

My heart pounded. Even without mech support, the troops on that train, and their heavier weapons, would cut Celline’s merry band into fish bait if they spotted us.

Alia pointed to our left, in the direction the train was bound. “The train stops every morning three miles south, at the strongpoint beyond that rise. The train brings hot breakfast and mail. Any patrol that might have spotted us will have turned for home as soon as they heard the whistle. That’s why we cross here.”

The strength of regular armies was disciplined adherence to established procedure. The weakness of regular armies was that irregular armies turned that strength against them.

The train vanished over the rise, and the rebels, Alia, and I were off at a dead run, downslope in the half light, each soldier maintaining separation and depth with the soldiers on his flanks. Occasionally, a section leader would slow or speed up an element with a hand signal.

Trueborn infantry still were instructed in troop movement without intra-unit radios, but I doubted that the average contemporary grunt could get out of his own way without a noncom in his ear.

Every trooper hit the gravel roadbed within a five-second interval, and the formation slowed for a heartbeat while we trued the line.

As we paused on the elevated roadbed, I wrinkled my nose and asked Alia, “What stinks?”

She pointed between the cross ties, at a litter of rotted fish flesh and bone. “The trains that go north carry fish to make fertilizer for Tressen. The railroad always smells like this.”

We crossed the tracks and ran, maybe faster to escape the smell, and were in among the fern trees on the opposite slope ten minutes later, without incident.

Two miles into the woods we stopped again. My feet screamed, my lungs burned, and I bent, hands on knees, gasping, while the unit set a defensive perimeter.

In contemporary warfare, regular infantry, with their sensory advantage, own the night and laager up by day. On most outworlds the situation was reversed. Darkness was the irregulars’ friend, not the regulars’. We would laager here for the day.

Fine by me.

Celline’s troops dug fighting holes, then settled down in them to eat and sleep in shifts. Our defensive position had been well chosen, in a thicket so dense that a dragonfly, much less a Tressen, couldn’t have walked within fifty yards without being heard. I dug a hole anyway.

Nobody offered to share trilobite jerky, which didn’t hurt my feelings. I hotted up a Meal Utility Desiccated, salved my blisters, shot up my shoulder, and slept for three hours.

“A word, Lieutenant Parker?”

I woke to see Celline bent, hands on knees, over me.

I sat up, rubbed my face. “Sure. Yes, ma’am.”

We walked to a trickling stream that lay within the defensive perimeter but out of earshot of the others.

The duchess sat on a flat rock and motioned me to sit on one across from her.

The afternoon was warm, and dragonflies hummed at a distance, just loud enough to be heard above the gurgle of water over the stones.

She rested her elbow on a raised knee and cupped her chin in her hand. “What am I going to do with you?”

I had expected some diplomatic foreplay. On Earth I saw a holomentary about the queen of England meeting commoners. Mostly she asked them where they were from. I cleared my throat. “Grant me a favor, I hope. Ma’am.”

“The favors Iridia has done for the Trueborns in the past were repaid with treachery.”

I squirmed on my rock. She had the diamonds, which would buy a lot of boots and ammunition, but the deal had been that they earned me an audience, not a favor. A case officer’s first rule vis-à-vis local allies was that a deal was a deal. The second rule was to find something you and your host could agree on.

“I understand, ma’am. Where I grew up nobody trusted the Trueborns, either.”

“Oh. Tell me about where you grew up.”

I sat back. Suddenly our negotiation had regressed into small talk. Maybe the custom in Iridia was that the monarch small-talked later, rather than sooner.

What to say about my heritage? There are two kinds of Yavi Illegals. Those who lie about it and dead ones. But one reason I had quit the spook business was because I was tired of lying. I leaned forward, hands on knees. “I was born on Yavet.”

She cocked her head, frowned. “You look—I find that hard to believe, Lieutenant.”

“I look Trueborn because my parents were Trueborns.”

She sat back and smiled. “I find that easy to believe.” She nodded.

I said, “But we were separated when I was born. I’ve never met them.”

Her eyes softened. “That must have devastated your father.”

My
father
? I snorted. “It was no picnic for
me
. The midwife who delivered me raised me, hid me downlevels because I was an Illegal. I finally joined the Legion to dodge the vice cops. After the Legion, I fell into a hitch as a Trueborn case officer. Turned out that the King of the Spooks had served with my father.”

The duchess’s jaw dropped. Then she nodded. “Ah. Yes. The King of the Spooks. It all makes sense now. Hibble is so—the Trueborns have a word—Byzantine.”

It was my turn to drop my jaw. “You know Howard?”

“For too long. Though indirectly. Jazen, are you aware that an Iridian who owes a blood favor to a father owes it to the son as well?”

I nodded. Like Pyt owed Alia. “Yes, ma’am, I heard that.” I wrinkled my brow. “Are you saying…?”

“I owe Jason Wander my life, and more.”

I sat there, still and silent while the dragonflies droned.

The “unique qualifications” for which Howard Hibble had re-recruited me were my genes. I was the only available Trueborn who still had a friend on Tressel. And an influential friend, at that.

I shook my head and muttered, “Howard, you devious rat bastard.”

Celline threw back her head and laughed. “You sound just like your father. He said worse about Hibble. Often. You don’t only
look
like Jason, you know.”

“Honestly, ma’am, I barely knew
that
.” I stared into the shadows. Rat bastard though he was, Howard had made good on his word back in Mousetrap. The answers I had needed all my life were here, at least some of them.

Celline leaned forward. “But you didn’t come so far to listen to an old woman reminisce. How can I—how can we—help you?”

“I…” Actually, I ached to listen to her memories of my father. But she was right. Kit could die while Celline told me stories. Or the Yavi could take over the universe. I set my astonishment aside. “I need to find two more Trueborns. Case officers like me. We lost contact with them six weeks ago.”

She nodded. “Where are they?”

I squirmed. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

She raised her eyebrows. “This is a big world, Jazen. And my people are small within it.”

I nodded. It was futile.

But she said, “Where do we begin?”

I rubbed my forehead. A good spook who didn’t want to be found wouldn’t be found, and Kit Born was the best. But, like one of those invisible subatomic particles, a spook could sometimes be identified by the disturbance caused in the surrounding area. “See whether the Tressens have been looking for somebody, somebody unusual. Or if some other people, unusual people, have been looking.”

She smiled. “The Tressens are always looking for somebody. But I take your point. We are few, but a few sets of eyes and ears still watch out on our behalf. How soon do you need to find your colleagues?”

I scratched my head. I had witnessed, in fact been the target of, a mechanized attack by Yavi military, operating openly off a Tressen warship. The Cold War between the Trueborns and the Yavi had stayed cold for decades because both sides honored delicate etiquette rules. The Yavi had just broken the rules worse than a food fight in church.

The Yavi wouldn’t risk turning the Cold War into a hot war unless they were close to something huge. Especially a hot war that, without starships, Yavet could neither wage nor win.

I frowned at my new old friend and answered her pending question. “Ma’am, we need to find them yesterday.”

Thirty-seven

Polian watched the Tressen sun creep along the arctic horizon, low and cold even at mid-morning, its glare veiled behind the snow fog boiling from the skimmer’s skirt. As he watched, the skimmer crossed the red line of outermost sensor pickets, got pinged by the sentry equipment on the defensive perimeter, and sent back the day’s response authentication.

If the planners had allowed him to equip the Tressens with proper equipment to begin with, the woman never would have gotten close enough to be a problem, either for Yavet or for him.

The long-coated sentries who flagged the skimmer down, ancient rifles at the ready, were still Tressen. Polian didn’t trust the locals, but Yavi on dirt here remained too scarce to do without.

Four minutes later, the skimmer cleared inner-perimeter security, then greased to a stop alongside the main excavation. The driver turned to Polian; he nodded, and the skimmer sank onto the snow and shut down.

Almost before the engine vibration died, Gill was out and legging it through the snow, down into the pit, where the six Yavi combat engineers working the site were drawn up in a tiny rank at attention.

Polian caught up to Gill, then fell in behind him as the old soldier inspected the troops.

Gill stepped from one to the other and looked them up and down. Gill, visor up and breath fog curling in the Arctic cold, paused in front of one man, spoke, received a nod back and a laugh, then clapped the kid on an armored shoulder.

After Polian dismissed his men to return to their work, he turned to Gill. “What would the general like to know about our operation?”

Gill smiled at him. “Start with everything. Let the old man stop you if he’s already heard it.”

Polian stepped to soil mounded in the bucket of a hydraulic excavator, dug out a glassy, spherical stone the size of a bird’s egg, and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. It glowed red with inner fire despite the waning daylight. “Cavorite. It took the Slugs three million years to discover and tame it. It took the Trueborns one war to steal and misname it.”

Gill raised bushy eyebrows as he extended his palm. “What’s wrong with the name?”

Polian dropped the stone into the general’s glove, and the older man held it up to the sky as he turned it in his fingers.

Polian smiled. “It’s named for a fictitious Earth metal that was supposed to block gravity.”

Gill said, “But on Tressel this metal’s for real?”

Polian shook his head. “No, sir. That is, cavorite’s not metal, and it’s not from Tressel, at least not originally. That stone’s a meteorite that fell here as part of a shower forty thousand years ago.”

“Fell from where?”

“That stone is the product of a collision between this universe and another universe that abuts this one. The core mote in that stone isn’t metal. It isn’t even matter. It doesn’t block gravity. It
eats
it.”