Undercurrents (3 page)

I had just three customers, normal because the next cruiser wasn’t due in to the Port of Mousetrap until the next morning. What wasn’t normal was that each of the three smelled like a different kind of trouble.

The first customer sat at the bar, a graying Trueborn gunnery sergeant, retired. I knew that from the ID he had shown. Not that I’m nosy. Shipyard’s no place for the nosy. But active duty and vets with ID got two for one at Jazen’s ever since I took it over. And always would. The gunny had availed himself of my generosity and belted enough doubles to put an ex-GI like me under the table. I hated to concede any field to the jarheads, but in that activity they practiced harder than we did.

He shot me a drowsy glance, then lifted his empty glass with a hand that wobbled. Raw field regrows usually wobbled, and vet bennies didn’t cover fine-motor neural rehab.

I smiled. “Take a coffee break, Gunny? On me.” A passed-out drunk was bad for business, which didn’t bother me. But the old soldier had given his arm, and a lifetime, to his service. Refusing him anything that I had
did
bother me.

He nodded, lurched to his feet, saluted, and turned for the door. That caused his gaze to cross the second of my three customers. The second was a Yavi, in civvies but with head shaved high and tight, who sat alone at a table staring into a beer.

The gunny muttered, “Don’t care to drink with baby-killers anyway.”

The Yavi’s forearms, which were tattooed, and as muscular as the gunny’s had been once, tightened. The Yavi’s business chip, which entered him in a drawing for a free full-body massage next door that nobody ever won, claimed he was a manufacturers’ rep. I grew up on Yavet, one of the few Illegal babies that the customer and his ilk hadn’t managed to kill. Therefore, I recognized him for Yavi military in civilian drag.

Obviously, the gunny had recognized him, too. Which was going to be a problem.

Yavet and Earth were the Human Union’s only nuclear powers, and they were within twenty years of one another in technologic development. Yavet lagged Earth in just one discipline, but it was a honker. Only Earth had starships.

The Trueborns let anybody and anything ride their ships, because they believed everybody should be free. Of course, “free to ride” didn’t mean “ride for free.” Open access made Earth rich. And the access wasn’t entirely open. The Trueborns refused to carry military. Except their own, and the Legion, which was an Earth-based independent contractor. Both of whom were, of course, even-handed peacekeepers.

This infuriated Yavet, which was overpopulated, overpolluted, and proud to be both. Yavet needed
lebensraum
worse than a teenaged boy needed a free full body massage.

But without starships, Yavet could no more expand than a sixteen-year-old without a car could get laid.

So the Yavi did what they could get away with to grow their influence. They smuggled military to the outworlds aboard Trueborn starships. The Trueborns let them get away with it as long as the influence growth was minute. When any Yavi project posed a greater threat to Earth, GIs on both sides died restoring the balance in chilly, undeclared brushfire wars. There had been so many such brush fires that the Trueborns called the arrangement Cold War II. The only things a GI hates more than getting killed in an undeclared war are the people who are trying to kill him. Trueborn soldiers hated Yavi soldiers, and the Yavi returned the favor.

The Yavi stood, hefted his glass mug like a Trueborn baseball, and spilled his beer.

As the two soldiers glared at each other, I smiled at the Yavi. “Let me refill that for you. On the house.”

The Yavi ignored me and wound up to peg a fastball at the gunny.

The gunny snatched a bar stool and turned it legs-up, like a bat. The legs trembled in his bony hands. “I remember my pugil-stick drill. You remember yours, ‘salesman’?”

Brawls weren’t so much bad for business as hard on furniture. My friendly offers of freebies weren’t defusing the crisis. I drew the shotgun and clicked off the safety.

A salesman wouldn’t recognize the click, but a soldier would. Both men froze.

I shifted the saloon gun’s stubby barrels back and forth from one torso to the other. “Free City of Shipyard Municipal Ordinance 6.21 authorizes the use of deadly force by a licensed establishment owner in defense of property. I own this place. That’s my beer stein and my bar stool. So can’t we all just get along?”

Neither man budged, while their breath rasps echoed off the bar’s hewn nickel-iron walls. The gunny gave away too much in age and bulk to the Yavi to win the fight. However, if he managed to break a chair over a Yavi, he’d brag at the Shipyard VIW Post for years. But if the Yavi blew his cover, his superiors would cashier him, or worse. And he knew it.

The Yavi slammed his mug back down on his table. “Fuck it.” Then he spun on his heel, walked out the open door into the passage, turned right, and was gone.

“Gutless weasel.” The gunny snorted. He replaced the barstool on the floor with quivering hands, nodded to me, and stalked out, too.

The Gunny turned left, and I exhaled audibly.

My third—and now only—customer had sat silently at a corner table during the flap.

He watched the door until the sound of both mens’ footfalls faded. Then, while I slid the shotgun back underneath the bar, he stood and carried his glass back to me.

I had noted when he came in that he was as militarily erect as the other two and carried himself with that sense of entitlement that outworlders immediately recognize in any Trueborn. When he had come in, he had said he was a cruiser tourist. However, the only cruiser due for the month was still inbound, so that was a lie. But the Free City of Shipyard ran on cash in the fist, not on truth. Therefore I had shut up and poured.

The liar laid a bill on my bar. “For the whisky.”

I pointed at the bill. “You got imported. There won’t be change back from that.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Imported?”

I nodded, swept up the bill. “Authentic Tennessee sour mash.” I figured one obvious lie deserved another.

I eyed his glass. Still full. Which either meant he knew Shipyard bootleg will make you blind, or he was on duty. Probably both.

He said, “I hear Jazen Parker inherited this place. You him?”

I shrugged. “You can hear anything in Shipyard.” But he had heard right about how I got the bar. The mother of an only child I had served with in the Legion left Fatso’s to me when I was, uh, between jobs, two years before. She left it to me partly because she couldn’t leave it to her son. I had been with him when he died in action. Partly because she felt guilty about having fingered me for a bounty hunter who almost killed me, too.

The liar looked around the empty cavern. “Business good?”

“Profitable enough when there are cruisers in the port.” I leaned forward, palms on my bar. “And there aren’t any in the port. So who the hell are you, really?”

He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m a messenger. Somebody would like to see you, Lieutenant Parker.”

A spook. I shook my head. “Just Parker. I resigned my commission two years ago, when my hitch ended.”

I began my military career, if you call mercenary work military, with a two-year Legion hitch. Legion enlistment got me off Yavet ahead of the bounty hunters, but my Legion time ended, shall we say, poorly. My second hitch was in the Trueborn military-intelligence service. That got me commissioned as an officer and a gentleman, but ended even worse. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

He shrugged again. “It was a gesture of respect. I saw your file. It says a lot good about you.”

I shrugged back. “You saw I’ve got a shotgun under this bar, too. My file says I’m not afraid to use it. As a gesture of respect, I won’t. If you drink up and leave.”

He raised his hands, palms out, and smiled. “Just doing my job, sir. The Old Man’s here. Came all the way out just to see you.”

I raised my eyebrows. It was one of those lies so obvious that I knew it was true. Everybody within the hollowed-out moonlet that was the interstellar crossroad called Mousetrap knew the next cruiser wasn’t due in until tomorrow.

However, less than everybody knew that a VIP and his personal security detail could launch from an inbound cruiser in a fast-mover and beat the cruiser in by a full day. Cruisers drift in through the North Lock, then down Broadway, the fifteen-mile-long axial tunnel that cores Mousetrap like an apple, to the berths at the South End. But fastys could enter Mousetrap very privately. The moonlet’s skin was peppered with abandoned interceptor sally ports that still worked fine if you knew the codes. Which was exactly the way Lieutenant General Howard Hibble, aka King of the Spooks, aka the Old Man, would make an entrance.

The security-detail spook shrugged again. “He just wants to visit.”

“I’ll be here ’til closing.”

“You know he can’t come up to Shipyard.”

I knew nothing of the sort, but I was curious. And my calendar wasn’t exactly full. “Where, then?”

“At the Pseudocephalopod War Museum, First Battle of Mousetrap exhibit. In an hour.”

Forty-one minutes later I stepped off the Southbound tuber at Museum Station and blinked at the contrast. I always did when I traveled from Shipyard to the South End.

Mousetrap was originally mankind’s interstellar Gibraltar, our bulwark against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Since we won the war, the South End had remained the crossroads of the Human Union, the gateway to the temporal-fabric insertion points that led, directly or indirectly, to the five hundred twelve planets that comprised the Human Union. As such, the South End was insufferably bright and clean and quiet.

After the war, the North End, where the great ships that won the war for us had been built and berthed, had been abandoned by the Human Union. Eventually Mousetrap’s unemployed shipwrights had squatted there, then declared themselves an independent and, uh, socially liberated community. Today the Free City of Shipyard, where nothing was free but everything was available if one paid cash, was the graffiti-tagged nest of addicts, villains, and libertines that I called home.

The Museum and War Memorials saw little traffic when the Port was between cruisers, but today Museum Station was so deserted that I heard my shoes squeak on the floor tile as I walked.

I looked down the platform. The crawl above the museum entrance read “Closed this afternoon. Private event.”

I smiled. Somehow, I had the feeling that, despite the sign, when I got close enough that my ID, but nobody else’s, tickled the sensors, the doors would slide open anyway.

Ten minutes’ walk down the dim museum corridor I came to the First Battle of Mousetrap Gallery and saw Howard Hibble for the first time in two years. He sat with his back to me, staring through the glass wall at the static displays beyond. He teetered on a hovering scooter, his bony hands grasping the tiller. Not because he was obese. Howard was as gaunt as ever. But because he was old.

“How’s the saloon business?” He spoke without turning. I suppose he saw my reflection in the glass, the way I saw his. He wore civvies as wrinkled as his skin, and they bagged on his skinny frame as badly as his uniforms always did. Old-fashioned glasses covered his eyes, the kind that hooked over his ears and rested across his nose.

“Better than the spook business, if you’ve got time to waste on me.” I pointed through the glass at the display of twodee photographs from the start of the war, when the Slugs blitzed Earth seventy years before, and at his picture in an intelligence captain’s uniform in particular. “You haven’t changed much.”

He shrugged. “Trueborn medicine and near-light-travel time dilation.”

I snorted. “I mean the spook theatrics.” I threw my arms wide and spun in a circle. “
Here
you meet me?”

“It seemed appropriate, considering. Besides, your parents—”

I stopped spinning and pointed at him. “Exactly! The only reason I signed on with you was because you said you’d tell me the truth about my parents.”

He raised a bony palm off the scooter’s tiller and shook his head. “No. I told you I knew your parents during the war and that your separation from them at birth wasn’t the abandonment it’s seemed to you over the years. That was the truth.”

I cocked my head. “Oh. And I suppose you’re here now to tell me the rest of the truth, finally?”

Behind his glasses, Howard Hibble rolled sleepy eyes. “It was classified then, it’s classified now.”

I returned his eye roll. “Come on, Howard! What could be classified about a war that we won thirty years ago? Against an enemy that doesn’t exist anymore?” I pointed at a different holo display. “Jason Wander, GI hero of the Battle of Ganymede.” And another. “General Jason Wander, goat of the First Battle of Mousetrap, hero of the Second Battle of Mousetrap.”

“It doesn’t say he was the goat.”

“No.” I waved my hand down the corridor. “But of all the heroes, he’s the only one without a picture here. Or anywhere. I’ve looked all over the Net. And after Second Mousetrap—poof—he just disappears from the history chips. And so does Admiral Mimi Ozawa.”

“I told you he and your mother were alive and working for me, at least part-time. I can tell you that’s still true.”

“Where? Doing what? Why the whitewash of what they did in the war? And why did they leave me on Yavet with the midwife who delivered me?”

“I can’t answer your questions directly. Jazen, you know I trust you. But, operationally, you have no need to know the answers.”

“Then I have no need to continue this conversation.” I turned away.

Howard said, “But I can offer you a job where you would need to know.”

I stopped. Only someone who has no past understands why it’s important. “Desk job?”

“Case officer. I’ll be honest. It’s extremely dangerous. The incumbent senior on the team that your team would replace was, in my opinion, our best. The team went silent a month ago.”

Incumbent case officers? Why not just call spies spies? Because Howard Hibble was hooked on euphemistic understatement. That also meant that when he called the job “extremely dangerous,” the job was a death sentence.