Undertow (28 page)

The storm covered any sound of the flashboat’s engine as André doused the lights and motored in near-darkness to within sight of the mooring, relying on his augments to find his way. The craft Jean had liberated at Nouel’s barge wasn’t the only boat tied up by the paramangrove roots. Not surprising, given the beacon; somebody in Rim must have gotten lucky. Through the coded channel, André said, “Jean, you have company on the way, if it’s not there yet.”

“Thanks,” Jean said. “I can see them on the motes. They’re unlikely to find their way in—shit.”

“What?”

“Well,” Jean said, reluctantly. “They appear to have brought equipment. And some of it looks like it might go boom.”

“Am I going to need this boat again?” André fought it into the shelter of a paramangrove, wincing as the wind blew it hard against the roots and something crunched.

“Anything’s possible.” André waited; Jean caved. “But we’ll probably be dead. Or gone out the back door.”

“You have a back door?”

“Every good fox has a back door, André. Can you handle the company? There seem to be about six of them. No, seven.”

“And one in the boats,” André said. “Sure. I can handle that.”

He checked his pistol.

He had five bullets left.

The trees looked easy, but not with his leg in that cast. André popped the bubble on the flashboat to get a little more room and hauled himself up on the gunwale. The boat tipped somewhat, but he extended his broken leg across the beam, and it didn’t rock more than once. There was an underdash light, dim and greenish. Rain lashed his scalp and trickled down his back as he bent forward to struggle with the straps on the cast. The boat was already shipping water. He didn’t expect to see it again—but then, he didn’t really expect to come back.

The bones were at least partially healed. If it had been a less complicated break, he would have been walking unassisted after three weeks. As he opened the clamshell halves of the cast, he told himself that his orthopod was being unnecessarily conservative.

His body heat evaporated in cool moisture, as if someone lifted a warm cloth from his skin and left only shreds of vapor behind. The flashboat had a first-aid kit; he dressed the calf in gauze where hardware broke the skin, and wound it with waterproof bandaging, trying to ignore how the shank had wasted. He’d be fine without the cast.

If the leg would hold his weight. If he could stop thinking about the fall that awaited him if he slipped, in the rain and the dark. If it wasn’t for the red memory of bone and blood and incapacitating pain.

Meticulously, André removed his other shoe. He placed it beside the cast in the flashboat, then checked to be sure his gun was securely in place. He thought about programming the autopilot to rev the engines to life after a five-minute delay—as a distraction—but either he’d be dead by then or he’d be better off with the Rimmers not knowing there was anybody home but them and Jean Kroc. The beacon was enough of a clue that somebody was coming.

The boat gave one more good wobble when he stood. He stabilized it; the effort sent a spike of pure white electricity up his leg.

This wasn’t going to be any fun at all.

The bark of the paramangrove was slick, but he managed to wriggle and slide into a low branch, kicking off from the spreading roots with his uninjured leg. From there, he could all but walk up the branches, though he limited himself to more of a painstaking sidle.

Before his adventure in the swamp, he would have skipped along the branches as if trotting along a sidewalk, sidling effortlessly from shadow to shadow. Now he stopped and calculated each step, lifting his good leg up first so he could heave the rest of him after, one hand always on a branch or the trunk of the paramangrove.

Good joke, that. André alone knew of three different worlds that had species called something like paramangrove, neomangrove, whatever. He guessed it didn’t matter, though, if you never got off the ground.

The rain and wind shipped about him, and farther from the trunk, branches lashed. He felt the vibrations through the soles of his feet; they thundered and thumped and itched in his healing bone until he felt like the bridge of a violin. He crept along the branches hunched, trying to present as small a silhouette as possible to the wind.

The guard by the boats was just as well ignored. He couldn’t spare a bullet, and the sounds of a scuffle would just alert the others. Assuming that André could win that argument in his current weakened state.

That was the most worrying question of all.

Well, he’d heal. Or he’d have more to worry about than a shattered limb.

“Jean, you still there?”

“Like a bog tick. And so are my friends by the door.”

“Do you have any weapons?”

“If they don’t blow the place apart around me, I can defend myself when they enter. But if they take the probability engine offline, then we’ve lost anyway. It’s our only way to get to Lucienne. I sent the data on ahead.”

The conversation was silent on André’s end; he willed his conversation into the headset. Jean, without implants, answered verbally.

“Good. Right,” André said. “Uplink me a schematic of the opposition, please?”

Jean did it, and André paused and considered. There were three on the branch, two covering, two—not counting the one at the boat—serving as a picket. And the most dangerous weapon on site wasn’t his sidearm, or that of any of the Rimmers.

It was the bundle of explosives that Jean had correctly identified, and that they were affixing to the trunk of one of the largest and most stately trees. It was a small enough package that he was reasonably certain it contained one of two or three shock-resistant high explosives, which would have to be triggered by a small quantity of more volatile explosive. If they had any sense, the Rimmers wouldn’t try to hook up the detonator—and the timer—to the bomb until it was secure. Then they’d place a blast shield over it, to shape the charge, and retreat.

“You don’t have any booby traps?”

“What do you want, killer robot squirrels? They already disarmed the weapon I had covering the door. You distract them enough for me to get this door open without getting my face blown off, and you’ll have all the help you’re crying out for.”

The officers had lit their work area with IR floods clamped to nearby tree limbs; these suited André’s augments fine.

“Yeah,” André said. “It’d be nice.” He wanted some elevation on the Rimmers, but not too much. And with his leg fragile and the wind threatening to sweep him from his slick-wet perch with every painstaking motion, he was asking for a noisy slip. Eventually, though, he found a limb he could straddle, a lateral branch crossing it at a forty-five-degree angle about a half-meter higher. It didn’t point in quite the right direction, but it would do.

The wind wasn’t going to help either. The labyrinth of branches made its gusts chaotic; it blew cold down his neck and rain into his eyes. And not only would he have to watch all those flickering leaves and try to outsmart the wind, he was shooting some twenty meters with a handgun. At night, amid trees that creaked and shifted and moaned as they rubbed together, on branches that thumped branches, sending showers of fat droplets through the canopy.

It was a crazy, impossible shot.

“Jean,” he said. “I need a little luck.”

“That’s still an extraordinarily bad idea.”

“If it wasn’t important—”

Jean’s silence implied much. As did the slow deliberation with which he said, “By which we prove ourselves no more capable, under pressure, of picking the hard and risky path than any Charter Trade exec.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” Jean said. André heard clicking. Was Jean actually using a keyboard? “It’s all right because we’re the good guys, right? Consider it done. Look, just disable the charge and get inside the door, okay? Don’t worry about anything but speed.”

Oh, the implications in that demand. André steadied his hands on the cross branch and sighted, timing the whip of leaves, the sway of branches, the movement of the officer as he finished setting the charge against the door and turned to receive the detonator from his assistant. Waiting the moment. The gale still rose, the rain stinging hard. The limb the Rimmers stood on was as broad as a sidewalk, and it would take André at least five seconds to reach it, probably another second and a half to get to the door. If nobody shot him along the way. If he didn’t rebreak his leg. If…

The moment came, a lull, a luff, as if the storm drew a breath.

André caressed the trigger.

Loud as the end of the world, loud even over the roar of the storm through the trees, the gun wrenched in his hand. One shot.

The officer who had had the detonator in his hands—

—had no hands. He toppled backward, blood trailing like strewn confetti. The other two cleared the branch so fast that André couldn’t tell if they dove aside or had been blown clear.

It didn’t matter. He moved. Clipped the pistol into its magnetic holster, dropped three meters, caught himself on rough slimed wood, and swung. His shoulder wrenched, his left hand tore. His hot, bloody palm skidded on rain-cold bark. A weapon barked, and something drew a line of fire along his hip and thigh.

Flailing, swearing, André swung and fell to the lower branch, managing to take most of the shock on his good leg. The branch didn’t even dip under his weight. Blood oozed from the gunshot wound, made treacherous footing deadly. He went to one knee.

Luck. He felt the hiss of a bullet pass him, never even heard the report. The wind that had saved him frayed the sound. Leaving handprints in blood, André scrambled forward, crouched like a froggie. There was light ahead, suddenly, an oblong shape. He dove toward it, heard this gunshot, all right, as Jean unloaded the shotgun over his head. Once, twice, three times in under two seconds. Cold rain rivuleted André’s scalp, dripped from his eyebrows. Jean might have two more rounds, or five. André couldn’t clearly see the gun.

He fell inside the door. Jean grabbed him by the collar, backing up, and hauled his feet inside.

Blood smeared everything as André pushed himself to his feet. It was dark, opaque as milk. For a moment, he stared at it, stunned. “How bad?” Jean asked.

André shook his head. “Not bad.” And then he poked the wound in his leg to be sure, and hissed. No, not bad. “Stings like a bastard. You said you had a back way out?”

Jean handed him the shotgun. “Watch the door. Stay back.”

The officers might have another detonator. André and Jean shared a look; they didn’t need to share the words. André hauled himself up. “Lucienne?”

“She’s on the VR,” Jean said. “I don’t really have screens.”

The temptation to turn and see what Jean was doing, to ogle his bizarre hand-shopped console with its scorch marks and its rainbowed, heat-discolored metal, was unbearable. André folded his hands on the shotgun and watched the door. Five minutes, seven. “Can you see what they’re doing out there?”

“Bringing up another detonator,” Jean said. “Come here, plug into this thing. We’ll download your head to Lucienne.”

“She’s already got the stuff from Maurice?” André dug inside his shirt, found it in the pocket next to his skin. “God, got a chair? My leg—”

He’d have gnawed it off, given half a reason. It couldn’t hurt more. Jean rose, silently, and gestured him into the chair. “I got it to her. She wants your hard memory, too. Anything you have on Closs.”

“It’s all wet memory.” But he could dump some of it to hard. Most of it. As he settled himself and surrendered the shotgun back to Jean, he was already transferring. A matter of microseconds, once he set the pull variables. It wouldn’t get everything. It might get enough. “There’s no back door, is there, Jean? This is my fucking testimony.”

“Would I lie?” Jean said. He glanced at the door. André couldn’t hear what was going on out there, but the Rimmers had to have brought the fresh detonator up by now. “Put the headset on.”

You’d lie and lie again,
André thought. Neither he nor Jean had had the time to get the device off the outside of the door. It was still stuck there, a deadly limpet mine.

He closed the VR set over his eyes and looked into Lucienne’s. “Hello, M~ Spivak.”

“Dump,” she said.

“Dumping,” he replied. He slotted the chit, gave her the unsorted contents of his head, all the information Maurice had died for, and Cricket, probably, and Nouel. Everything that he and Jean were going to die for now.

All his secrets.

André Deschênes felt naked, and full of a numinous truth. It took under ninety seconds. He felt nothing.

Lucienne had been looking aside, perhaps conversing with someone on another connection. But she glanced back and smiled when he was done, a wide, red-lipped, flashing smile. “I won’t be able to get you a suspended sentence, André,” she said. “But this might take off some time.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “That’s not what I did it for.”

She winked and cut the connection.

The chamber door blew in.

André lifted his head in a plain white room. “I’m dead,” he said.

“No,” Jean answered. “
You’re
on Earth. Feel the gravity.”

He lifted one foot, the other. There was no wound on his hip. His leg didn’t ache. His palm wasn’t torn. Blood, fatigue, and rainwater did not blur his sight.

“How?”

Jean smiled, bristled face sparkling like mica in the unforgiving light. “Same way Cricket got to Novo Haven.” He paused, but another voice filled his silence as the door whisked aside.

“You’re dead, M~ Deschênes,” Lucienne Spivak said. She wore a butter-colored jumpsuit a little paler and more golden than her skin, her black hair dressed up and sparkling with jeweled feather-pins. “Charter Trade officers killed you on Greene’s World, approximately seventeen seconds ago. I realize this comes as something of a shock.”

André Deschênes is dead. Long live whoever the hell I am
. “Cricket?”

“We haven’t heard,” she said. “There’s no connex yet. I’m sorry.”

She was talking to André, but she was looking at Jean. And Jean was looking back at her.