Nineteen
Polian gripped the cutter bridge’s steel rail ahead of him. He was a ground trooper. It had never occurred to him that large ships could move so violently that handrails were needed. But that hadn’t stopped him from commandeering her.
When Polian had read the Tressen report that the regularly scheduled Trueborn cruiser would dip lower to conduct “atmospheric tests,” the paper had seemed to stick to his fingers. The Trueborns were providing too much information. An undercurrent tugged at his instincts.
Until the delegation currently circling the planet above him in that cruiser arrived on the surface of Tressel, Major Ruberd Polian was Yavet’s ranking representative on Tressel. As such he was free to chase every undercurrent that tugged at his instincts.
The bookish boy finally had an opportunity to be the bold one, and Polian had seized it.
But why would the Trueborns even bother with such a ruse? The Tressens barely believed that giant ships, invisible beyond the atmosphere, really circled their planet, anyway. They would never have noticed.
Polian had plotted the track of the orbiting cruiser on a Tressen globe in a wooden stand, using a length of twine. How convenient that the Trueborns had chosen to sample the atmosphere one hundred miles above a desolate part of the Iridian coast, far from prying eyes.
It was probably an inconsequential coincidence. After all, unlike Yavet, most of sparsely populated Tressel was far from prying eyes. But good intelligence officers didn’t believe in coincidence.
Polian was convinced that the remaining Trueborn spy of the pair was at large, and a threat to expose the Yavi presence, if not the mission itself, here on Tressel. The “atmospheric sampling” was too coincidental. Were the Trueborns somehow picking up the at-large team member? If not, was he—or she—uplinking critical information about the hidden developments in the Arctic? Polian had weighed the risks, and he had acted.
Even so, when this old steamer’s lookouts had spotted the dumpy fishing boat, Polian had doubted his action. To be sure, the boat was Iridian. Its crew were presumably Iridians.
Iridians were, by statutory definition, enemies of the Tressen state, which justified blowing them to hell. But the cutter captain was right. Using a warship to blow up lober fishermen was like steamrolling flies.
Then, at that moment, a figure stood up, unsteady, in the boat. It could have been a fisherman in lober’s armor. The telltale blue-black color could have been a trick of light. Or it could have been a Trueborn case officer wearing a suit of Eternad armor, faceplate open.
If the figure was a simple fisherman, Polian should let the Tressens blow the boat to hell. But if there was the smallest chance that it was a Trueborn spy? The woman’s missing partner?
Polian pointed at the opening in the cliffs toward which the fishing boat ran. “Can you follow them in there?”
The captain shook his head. “We’d rip out our bottom a thousand yards offshore.”
“Then can you put a marine detachment over the side in one of your launches?”
The captain shook his head again. “With the head start that boat has? Behind those cliffs there’s an uncharted network of long shore passages. They twist and braid like yarn. They’re barely wide enough and deep enough to pass a launch, and there are falls and rapids around every bend. The Iridians have been fishing and smuggling the Inside Passage for six hundred years. We’d never find them.”
Polian nodded. “Then we can’t give that boat a head start.” He turned his head to the fresh-faced Yavi in civilian clothes who stood behind him and the cutter captain. “Lieutenant Sandr, have the Tressens put the skimmer over the side.”
“Combat, sir? The skimmers aren’t even supposed to be on this planet.”
Polian turned and faced the kid. “That Trueborn spy that Frei ran over wasn’t supposed to be here either, Sandr! Take the squad. The skimmer should be able to chase down that little tub out there before it disappears. If it does make it beyond the cliffs, it should be easy enough to track. The boat and crew you can feed to the fish if you like. But bring me back the one wearing black armor. Alive enough to question! Or I’ll feed you and your squad to the fish. Clear?”
“Yes, sir!” Sandr swallowed, saluted, faced about, and double-timed off the bridge.
A Tressen junior naval officer stood at the opposite side of the bridge, staring back over his shoulder at the cutter’s captain. “Sir? They’re getting away! We have them bracketed. One round...”
The captain shook his head as he stared at the Chancellery envelope that protruded from Polian’s breast pocket. The captain squeezed his binoculars. “Ensign, have this gentleman’s contraption swung over the stern.”