Undercurrents (26 page)

Gill waved his hand at the ferrents. “Not those butchers. The Trueborns. They call our population-control policies mass murder.”

“Sir?” If Gill had been an ordinary citizen, Polian would have been tempted to arrest him for treason.

Gill waved his hand again. “Don’t worry, Captain. I’m not a subversive. Just an old man who’s seen too much death.”

And one who hadn’t reprimanded Polian for this entire fiasco.

“Major, allying totalitarian societies is like stuffing two fire-ant colonies into one bottle. The Tassini on Bren do that.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“When the bottle gets shaken, the ants fight. But if you pour enough sugar into the bottle, they go their separate ways.”

“Sir?” Polian stifled an eye roll. Gill didn’t think like a Yavi. At least, not like a legal one.

“Major, you were right about these Trueborns. They’re more real than the ferrents thought. Frankly, maybe more real than I thought. And they’re pretty good at shaking up this bottle.”

“Uh—thank you, General.”

“What we need to do now is accelerate a positive result before it’s too late.”

Polian sat back in his seat as the car pulled up in front of Gill’s hotel.

As Gill stepped to the curb, he leaned back in to the car and said, “Ruberd, you’re a bright guy. Think me up some sugar, will you?”

Polian managed a smile. “How soon, sir?”

“Before the Trueborns figure out what’s going on and shake the bottle again.”

Sixty-six

The day after I had slept through the most interesting part of Kit and Alia’s girl talk, the three of us managed a happily uninteresting disembarkation from our boxcar at the spot where we were expected. Pyt and a detachment escorted us to a different rebel encampment, to which Celline had displaced during our absence. The place was as old and understaffed as the first one.

We were supposed to return from Tressia with information and a plan. When we showed up with a warrior princess to boot, it was natural enough that she was invited to dine with the only other warrior princess at large on Tressel.

Alia and I were invited, too. The four of us dined in Celline’s quarters, a cabin as spartan as her troops’ billets. We ate the same menu as Celline’s troops, too, and dinner wasn’t served until after the troops had eaten.

Halfway into the fish course—who am I kidding? All Iridian courses are fish courses—Celline turned to Kit. “Colonel, why did you come here?”

I paused with a forkfull of crabmeat in front of my mouth. It wasn’t the kind of question a soldier answered for a just-met semi-ally who didn’t need to know the answer, especially in front of an eleven-year-old. But a case officer in the field was no ordinary soldier, and Kit Born was no ordinary case officer.

Kit and I both knew that we needed Celline’s cooperation, and we wouldn’t get it if we treated her like an untrustworthy hick.

Kit looked up from her meal. She still looked thin and pale, but already the light had returned to her eyes, and she filled out her Iridian fatigues better with every meal. She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “Ma’am, your friends the Republican Socialists would love to have a technically advanced ally like the Yavi.”

Celline stared at her, eyes suddenly cold. “As we say it, Colonel, every bully wants a bigger stick. Apparently the stick Earth gave the Tressens the first time wasn’t big enough.”

Kit inclined her head. “I’m sorry. I really am. Earth understands Iridian anger. We didn’t even try to link with you when we were inserted.”

Celline shifted her gaze to me. “Obviously that changed by the time Lieutenant Parker was inserted. Earth figured out that we were too angry to ask, but not too principled to bribe?”

Kit ignored the barbs. “Ma’am, what we need to figure out is what the Republican Socialists offered that bribed the Yavi. One of my interrogators was a major, and the way he was getting bossed around, his superior was a general officer. The Yavi don’t send generals to command routine outworld brush fires.”

Alia asked Kit, “How did you get caught?”

I watched Celline. If Alia hadn’t asked, Celline would have.

“My partner and I didn’t come down on a shuttle. But we knew all the Yavis had to come and go aboard one. So we staked out that vacant lot they call a spaceport in Tressia. When the next party of Yavi imposters arrived, we followed them.”

Alia leaned forward, eyes wide. “Where did they go?”

Kit shrugged. “North to the Ice Line by commercial rail. That was an easy tail for us. We just bought tickets on phony ID papers. Then the Yavi went on, even farther north, by ice train.”

Celline’s eyes widened. “The RS doesn’t sell tickets for the ice trains.”

Kit wrinkled her forehead at Celline. “You know the ice trains?”

Celline frowned. “Too well. Please, Colonel. Continue.”

“You’re right. They don’t sell tickets. It’s a military-run train. We stowed away on the undercarriages.” Kit glanced at me. “Eternads are a case officer’s best friends. But once the Yavi arrived at the end of the ice-train line, they continued on farther northeast, out across the snow flats. Jazen, they’ve downsmuggled more than that one skimmer you saw. They must have been at this for years. It’s just one more indication how big this is.”

Alia asked, “They got away?”

“No. They would have, but I made the decision to follow them on foot.” Kit stared down at the table and shook her head. “Hostile, unfamiliar environment. Weather went to hell. Risky.” Kit’s face darkened, and she swallowed. “My junior died in a crevasse fall during a storm. Took our uplink with him.”

And another piece of her heart. More victims sacrificed to her Trueborn delusions of duty.

She took a deep breath. “My luck just got worse from there. I wound up in that damn clinic broken in a half-dozen places, with the ferrents and Yavi intelligence pulling on me like dogs with a chew toy. The rest, you know.”

Actually, I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to know. It was obvious that the hologen that Kit had fried before we escaped contained a confession that the Yavi had wrung from her by drugs and torture. One thing I did know was that I owed the Yavi payback for that. Worse for them, Kit Born owed them, too.

Celline wrinkled her forehead. “Do you have any idea what they were doing up there?”

Kit shrugged. “I didn’t see much before things went to hell. They had opened a small-scale excavation surrounded by disproportionate security. Buried treasure. Mining, maybe.”

Celline nodded. “Ah. Both, actually, I think.”

Kit and I both stared at her, jaws dropped.

I asked, “What?”

“They’re after the stones.”

Kit stared at her. “What stones?”

Celline said, “Your father’s stones, Jazen.”

Sixty-seven

Three days after Gill and Polian had parted, they met again in the makeshift office that Gill’s predecessor had made out of an urban hotel room.

“At ease, Major. You look cold.” Gill nodded at a teapot set on a warming plate on a sideboard. “Pour yourself a cup, then sit with me.”

It was cold. Polian buttoned another button on his Tressen jacket.

Once the two of them were seated at a conference table set to the side of Gill’s desk, Polian tugged a hologen from his bag, switched it on in the center of the table, then pointed at the graphic that hung in the air between them.

“This red pancake is a threedee schematic of the deposit. The vertical scale is exaggerated because the deposit is so thin that if it weren’t exaggerated it would look like a circular sheet of paper.”

Gill stared at the holo while he rubbed his chin and nodded. “You’re saying that the stones aren’t buried even as deep as you thought?”

Polian nodded. “The burial depths turn out to be about the same as they are for the weapons-grade cavorite at the west end of the fall. Weapons grade behaves like a less dense material than propulsion grade, so we expected that we’d have to dig for this stuff.”

Gill sipped his tea. “Major, what’s the soonest you could begin full-scale extraction operations?”

“Do you mean from now, or from the time we downsmuggle the mining equipment, General?”

“What equipment do we need?”

Polian cocked his head, then ran a finger along the perimeter of the image. “Actually, sir, the way this has shaped up, we wouldn’t need equipment. We could literally put troops to work raking stones up from under the snow.”

Gill cocked his head. “How much of this stuff could we get like that?”

Polian waved up another figure, this one a threedee numeric matrix. “You know, sir, given good weather and motivated workers, we could harvest enough stones to power a cruiser fleet for a decade in three weeks.”

“How big a mountain would that be?”

Polian cocked his head as he stared at the ceiling. “You’d be surprised. I think you could load it all into ten skimmers.”

Gill nodded. “If that’s all it amounts to, we could pack the stones into the leftover containers we used to downsmuggle skimmer parts and upsmuggle the whole thing on a single shuttle. Nobody cares what leaves Tressel. Just what arrives. We’d be out of here before the Trueborns knew what they missed.”

Polian didn’t answer. He stood, walked to the room’s window, and looked out across the city. In the distance, he saw the spaceport’s silver hemisphere, the runways, and the broad, exposed plain across which the shuttle runway stretched.

Gill came and stood alongside him, then clapped him on the shoulder. The general’s bony hand felt light through the soft fabric of Polian’s jacket. “Something bothering you, Major?”

Polian pointed out at the spaceport. “It’s pretty exposed. I’d like to do something about that.”

Gill frowned. “The Iridians haven’t mounted a meaningful operation inside the Tressen border in years.”

“They haven’t had Trueborn help in years.”

“According to the spy, she didn’t know what she was looking at up in the Arctic. She certainly doesn’t know how fast this thing is going to move from here forward. We didn’t know ourselves until five minutes ago.”

“I’d still like to fortify the place.”

Gill nodded. “I’d rather prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it fails to occur. Do it, Major. Do all of it.”

Sixty-eight

After Celline had dropped the bomb about my father, she called for Pyt to take Alia off to bed. Then Kit and I walked with her out to the base of a low rock face at the edge of the camp. There, the racing moon’s light reflected off two dozen stone grave markers that were tucked back beneath an overhang. There, presumably, godless Tressens would never find and desecrate them.

Celline bent and touched the nearest stone. “Jazen, each of these men and women survived the Long March with me. There are only a few of us left now.”

“Ma’am?”

“After Earth handed the war to the Tressens, and before there was a rebellion, the Tressens began the wholesale extermination of the Iridian people. The ice trains carried unknowing Iridian families north by the trainload to freeze and starve. Colonel Born, that train you rode carried you through the grave of a nation.”

Kit whispered, “I didn’t know the specifics.”

Celline sighed. “That was the Tressen’s intention, of course.”

I bent and squinted at a marker. “You said that my father—”

“Long before I knew him, your father was a soldier who was sent here to Tressel to help the Tressens win the war against us. A high-level military advisor.”

My heart sank. No wonder nobody wanted to talk about General Jason Wander. He helped kill a whole nation. As I knelt there in the vanishing moonlight, I cradled my head in one hand. Howard had finally led me to an answer. He had never promised that I would like it.

Celline touched my shoulder. “Jazen, nations pick wars. Soldiers only fight them. It wasn’t the loss of the war that destroyed Iridia, it was what the Tressens did afterward. I’ve never blamed your father for that.”

A Legionnaire learns early that soldiers don’t pick their wars.

I said, “But you said you knew him.”

“That came years later. The Trueborns sent Jason Wander back to Tressel.”

“To make things right?”

She shook her head. “Nations do the right thing for others when it’s also the right thing for themselves. He was sent back because the Trueborns needed cavorite.”

I shook my head. “The Trueborns have all the cavorite in the known universe. On Bren. I know. I got blown up there once helping them keep it flowing.”

Kit touched my shoulder as she shook
her
head. “No. This makes sense. Not that Howard would ever admit it.”

Howard Hibble wouldn’t admit that the sun rose unless somebody electrocuted him first.

Kit said, “Jazen, the only reason the Slugs bothered to impress human slaves in the first place was because cavorite was poison to them, but not to us. There have always been rumors about how the war ended. That we weaponized a grade of cavorite that couldn’t be used for fuel.”

It did make sense. The Trueborns were always bellyaching about everybody else’s human rights violations. Everybody knew we won the war. The history chips said we won a massive battle, out at the edge of the universe, between gigantic fleets of colossal starships. But if we actually won by wholesale poisoning of the only other intelligent species known in the universe, we wouldn’t advertise it. How could Earth argue that its brand of genocide was different than the Tressen brand?

Celline said, “Hibble sent your father back to get the stones. And your father did. But he also risked his life, shoulder to shoulder with me and other Iridians, to strike out against the Tressens.”

“Why?”

“The stones were under the death camps. Then your father helped me and the core of what became the rebellion escape from the Tressens.”

“My father was part of the Long March?”

Celline shook her head. “He had another war to fight. Not just for our survival, but for the survival of mankind. However, without him there would have been no Long March. And without the Long March from the Arctic, there would have been no rebellion.”

Kit frowned and crossed her arms. “But why would the Yavi want weapons-grade cavorite? It’s useless for starship fuel. All it’s good for is killing a species that’s been extinct for thirty years.”