Undercurrents (29 page)

He had seen the whole fiasco unfold, indeed he had made much of it unfold, yet it seemed unreal. He reached the fallen Tressen major and felt Vendl’s neck for a pulse, but the cold flesh beneath Polian’s fingertips told him not to bother. And that it was all real.

Polian stared at the dead man’s shattered thigh. An adult human body, whether it originated on Yavet, on Tressel, or even on Earth, had only perhaps five quarts of blood to give up. It seemed that all of Major Vendl’s quarts had pooled there among the cobbles.

Polian clenched his teeth, dragged himself into a sitting position, and stared out across the dying flames at the darkness into which the two Trueborns had escaped, again.

They would never stop him. But now he hoped they would try.

Though he would probably be hanged for this catastrophe before they could.

Seventy-eight

Kit and I hit the jackpot after we limped aboard our return freight before sunrise. Our boxcar was loaded with household goods. We drew straws for first watch, then decided we were both too exhausted to stay awake alone, anyway. So we each wrapped up in blankets, trusted the espionage gods to protect us against waking up in leg irons, and slept like corpses.

We got away with it not, I think, because the gods
did
care, but because it had been so many years since Iridian rebels had mattered that the Tressens
didn’t
care.

I woke to sunshine filtering in through the rolling boxcar’s slatted sides, and Kit’s fingertips gentle on my cheek. Even better, her face was six inches from mine, her lips were puckered, and her eyes were closed.

I leaned toward her, and her eyes opened.

She said, “Oh. I tried not to wake you.” Her fingers smoothed a plastitch strip over the slash in my cheek, while she blew on it. That would dry the solution which would pucker my wound’s edges together so the nano ’bots could knit them.

She drew back and examined her work; then her mouth turned down at the corners as though she was about to cry. “Oh, Parker. I did my best, but it was open down to the bone. I really do think that one is gonna leave a mark.”

I smiled though it stung. “Bigger mark on the Yavi and the Tressens, though. How about you?”

She laid her left hand on her right shoulder, then rotated her right arm slowly, and winced. “Okay. You’re a good pillow to land on. But I’ve got bruises on bruises in places you can’t imagine.”

“I can imagine plenty. I could blow on them for you.”

She rolled her eyes. “It really is the first thing to come back, then?”

I paused, swallowed. “It never went away.”

She blinked. Then she turned her back and dug through my ruck for a couple of Meals Utility Desiccated. “Like I said. You haven’t changed.”

“Neither have you. It’s not good enough that I risk my life to save yours, is it? I have to risk it to save the universe. Doing the right thing’s never good enough for you! I have to do it for the right reason. That Trueborn crap about the happy few who shed blood with one another? I still wouldn’t hold my manhood cheap if I’d been lucky enough to avoid it.”

She squeezed my breakfast tube to start it warming, but so hard that her fingers whitened. “You still don’t get it, do you? It’s not about misplaced testosterone. It’s about giving yourself to something bigger and better than your own welfare. Or even your buddy’s welfare.”

“Idealism’s a luxury. Downlevels kids can’t afford it.”

“But rich Trueborn kids can?”

“If the tiara fits…”

She chucked the MUD into my lap, then squeezed her own.

I lifted the warmed tube, read the label, and raised my eyebrows. “Buttermilk waffles with maple syrup and bacon. My favorite.”

Kit whispered, “You think I’d ever forget?”

The boxcar’s door was open, and she turned her face toward it, and away from me, while she ate.

She always did that when she didn’t want me to see her cry.

The rest of the trip, we were both very quiet.

Seventy-nine

Polian lay in a white-walled, plain private room at the clinic where his last bloody contest with the Trueborns had gone awry. He lay atop the linens, the bed’s head cranked vertical, so he could see the clumsy plaster boot with which the Tressen surgeons had weighed down his throbbing right ankle.

He snorted at the irony. The interrogator was the only Yavet-trained medical professional attached to this task force, but he was forbidden to treat Polian, or any other member of the task force, by modern means for fear that would blow his or their covers. At the moment Polian thought it was an idiotic rule, even though he had made it.

Polian looked up as he heard a rap on the jamb of the room’s open door.

Gill cocked his head at Polian, then pulled the door shut behind him and strode to the younger man’s bedside. Gill looked down and smiled.

Polian frowned back. Gill looked different, and yet more normal. Then it hit Polian, and he widened his eyes. “General, you’re in uniform.”

Gill grinned as he held out his arms and looked down at the Tressen battle dress uniform that hung from his thin frame. “Major, we haven’t been fooling anybody on this planet except ourselves. We’re in a shooting war of consequence now. We may as well act like it.”

Polian shook his head. “We aren’t authorized—”

“We are. I do the authorizing until my notification gets back to Yavet and the chain of command’s response arrives. Which will be months from now.”

“How do you intend to proceed, sir?”

“I leaned on Zeit himself. The battalion guarding the shuttle strip and convoying the cavorite down here’s been seconded to us. And our own troops will operate openly and integrated within the force. Divided command is confused command.”

Polian turned his face away. If he, Polian, had recognized that sooner last night, how many casualties could have been avoided?

Gill patted Polian’s uninjured thigh. “Don’t whip yourself, Major. That Tressen commander didn’t know what he was up against. You tried to tell him. He paid for not listening. Now his battalion’s grieving for its major and in need of a commander.”

Polian nodded.

Gill laid his hand on Polian’s shoulder. “Soon as we get you a walking cast, I want you to step into that command slot, Ruberd.”

Polian stiffened his back. “Sir, I’m a staff officer.”

Gill made a fist. “You got those riflemen off their bellies! You’re a leader! And you seem to be the only person on this planet who outguesses these Trueborns.”

Polian felt his throat swell. He had expected a court-martial. Gill had instead given him far more than the benefit of the doubt. Finally, he said, “What schedule do you intend that we follow now, General?”

“The next cruiser’s due in four weeks. We should deliver the cavorite inside the spaceport defensive perimeter in time to conceal it in other cargo before the down shuttle arrives. But no earlier. Then we load the stuff. Once it’s aboard the cruiser, the parcels will get lost in the shuffle and offloaded at intermediate ports before the Trueborns even know they exist.”

Polian said, “Their intel down here seems to be better than we expected. They may know our schedule.”

Gill smiled at Polian. “The schedule I’m most interested in now, Ruberd, is yours. How soon will you be up and around?”

“Before the Trueborns know what hit them, if possible.”

Eighty

When Kit and I met with Celline again, she had returned to the encampment sheltered against the cliffs where I had first been taken.

The three of us sat together in Celline’s plain quarters around a conference table. Kit and I laid out what we had learned, and we asked Celline to help us derail the Yavi, who were our enemy, and the Tressens, who were hers, because together they would become a more dangerous threat to everybody. Celline wasn’t dumb. She agreed.

We evaluated our options.

If we could simply have communicated what we knew to the Trueborns, the cavorite would become a useless, embargoed rockpile here on Tressel. But we couldn’t get so much as a birthday card off Tressel in time.

That simplified our objective. We had to make sure that the Yavi couldn’t get the cavorite off Tressel. But simple objectives rarely can be simply accomplished.

We couldn’t shoot down the shuttle, because we lacked the means. Besides, nobody in Human Union history had ever shot down a neutral-flagged vessel. It wasn’t ground any of us wanted to break.

We couldn’t attack the cavorite mine. If a case-officer team in Eternads couldn’t reach the mine in fighting trim, Iridians in overcoats certainly couldn’t.

We couldn’t intercept the shipment in transit from the Arctic to the shuttle landing strip, because we couldn’t intercept what we couldn’t find or catch. A skimmer convoy could take any route over any terrain, change it at any time, and could outrun any vehicles the Iridians had or could steal.

The only
time
the Yavi’s cavorite would be vulnerable was shortly before the next cruiser arrived, in four weeks. The only
place
was at the so-called spaceport. Unfortunately, the Yavi and the Tressens had recognized that vulnerability and had converted a joke of a spaceport into an improvised fortress that was no laugher.

Irregular armies historically penetrated fortresses by infiltrating them. Belly-crawling in the dark was a staple of guerilla warfare. However, the Yavi military was an offshoot of a culture that sniffed out and killed people wholesale. The shuttle strip was now surrounded by a buffer of antipersonnel sensors that could detect a house cat at a thousand yards.

All of the above left us one very bad option.

In the table’s center, where the hologen usually goes in meetings, I unrolled for Celline a flat paper map of the city of Tressia. It was an old map, and I had drawn in the shuttle strip north of the city with a wooden-shafted pencil. Kit and I had also drawn in the details of the perimeter surrounding it, from sandbag strongpoints to barbed wire, to antipersonnel sensor arrays, based on our observations.

Celline spread her hand so that the little finger and thumb spanned the distance between the first of two doubled rows of concertina wire and the nearest covered position from which infantry could mount an assault on the perimeter. That cover consisted of a single row of attached working-class houses that backed on the rail line from the south that led into the main rail yards.

Celline shook her head. “Infantry would have to cross at minimum a mile of open ground, exposed to an enemy firing from covered positions within their perimeter. Every army is made up of few teeth supported by a long tail. Our tail is longer than most, because a higher proportion of our troops are no longer able to perform combat service.”

I frowned. “What could you put up, total, ma’am?”

Celline frowned back at me. “Lieutenant, my army can deploy perhaps two combat-ready platoons, totaling one hundred.”

My jaw sagged. That wasn’t an army. Trueborn college football teams dressed that many for home games.

Celline stared at the map. “The Tressen battalion you’ve observed numbers nearly one thousand. Plus these Yavi of yours. We would field one attacker against ten defenders. The textbook preferred ratio is three attackers against two defenders.”

I sighed. The beautiful warrior princess could do command math. That didn’t make her sums prettier.

Celline tapped a finger on one of the emplacements that had been erected behind the concertina. “These needle machine guns you say these people have. How much fire can they lay down?”

I cocked my head. “They run cool. They can sustain three thousand rounds a minute until the ammunition or the nitrogen runs out. They always have plenty of both.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Three thousand rounds?”

Kit said, “Darts, really. Yavi weapons systems are designed more for population suppression than war fighting. If we had body armor—but we don’t.”

“My soldiers are valiant and competent. But I’ve wasted too many in impossible set-piece battles before. A frontal assault won’t work. All of these ideas won’t work.” Celline’s shoulders slumped. Even Kit’s did.

Celline ran a hand through her hair as she looked at Kit, then back to me. “I believe in my cause and in my troops. But I do not believe that God will send another rolling church bell to smite our enemies.”

I glanced out the window. Alia ran past, Pyt trailing behind slowly as she ducked behind a rock and hid from him.

I looked back at the group. “The Trueborns say that God helps those who help themselves, ma’am.”

Celline cocked her head. “We say that, too. Lieutenant, do you have an idea that
will
work?”

I shrugged. “The next cruiser’s due in four weeks. In three, you’ll be able to tell me whether I do.”

Eighty-one

Polian sat in a parked skimmer, warmed by his armor, and looked out across the brown, Arctic plain. Acres of ground now lay open to the sky. Tressen combat engineers had scraped snow away that had lain undisturbed for centuries.

More Tressens, great-coated infantry, shuffled across the frozen ground in skirmish lines, their rifles replaced by simple rakes. Moment by moment, a man would halt, stoop, and place a plucked red stone into his cross-slung cloth bag. It more resembled a harvest than a military maneuver.

Yet he was witnessing, indeed was in charge of, this most militarily significant operation in the history of his world. He shifted his weight, then lifted his armored thigh with both hands and moved it closer to the skimmer’s floor heat vent. The Tressen cast on his ankle, that protruded below the sawed-off leg segment of his armor, was neither light nor warm.

But except for the cast, Yavi technology was now employed openly. Polian turned and counted down the row of skimmers parked to his left on the snow. Five were loaded with harvested cavorite. Five more soon would be.

He glanced at the calendar in his visor display. Two weeks until the shuttle lifted off. Two weeks more to plan and to agonize over what might go wrong.

Gill, who had remained at the fortified shuttle strip, gave Polian wide latitude to plan, to agonize over, to command this operation. The old moustache had proven to be the best officer Polian had ever served under. And yet, Polian agonized more about Gill than about the Trueborns or the rebels or the downshuttle’s schedule.