Two
“Stop here and let me out!” Major Ruberd Polian shouted over the blizzard at the skimmer’s driver, as the skimmer slid up alongside the two snow-dusted bodies.
“Yes, sir!” The driver reversed thrust, Polian lurched forward until his armor’s helmet banged the skimmer’s windscreen, and the skimmer following behind them slewed and nearly rear-ended them.
The driver’s eyes widened. “Dammit!”
He wasn’t reacting to what he had just done to his commanding officer, Polian realized, but to the two headless bodies alongside which the driver had stopped the skimmer.
The kid turned his head away and gagged. “Sorry, sir.”
On Yavet, Polian’s father had been a cop. One evening Polian had pulled up crime-scene images from the old man’s personal ’puter while it lay on the hall table. Polian had gagged at the sight of mutilated corpses, and those were just holos. When his father caught him, he had cuffed Polian. “There’s nothing wrong with what I do!”
Polian touched the kid’s arm. “Don’t worry. If a soldier ever gets used to it, it’s time to quit.”
The kid nodded, wiped his eyes.
Polian turned to the two cub lieutenants in the skimmer’s rear seat. The one on the left, fat-cheeked and soft, looked half sick from the bumpy skimmer ride. “Sandr, you dismount here, with me.” The kid on the right was lean and hard. “Frei, you take command of both skimmers.”
Lieutenant Frei smiled, but craned his neck at the storm that swirled around them. “Sir?”
“Lay out a patrol grid.” Polian waved a hand at the snow curtain and at the bodies. “Comb this area until you find the people who did this.” Polian pointed at the lean lieutenant. “Full armor. Full sensors. Weapons locked and loaded. Shoot anything that moves. I don’t want anybody else ending up like these two because somebody got careless.”
Polian and the soft lieutenant jumped the three feet over the skimmer’s side and sank knee deep in snow.
Polian brushed snow off his thigh plates, muttering into his open mike. Polian hated losing soldiers, even Tressens. So he had just ordered Frei to shoot first. But as an intelligence officer, Polian knew that he should have ordered Frei to risk more lives, if necessary, to capture an interrogable prisoner.
This was an obvious Iridian rebel hit-and-run. Obvious to some, anyway.
Alongside Polian, the skimmer, freed of the weight of two passengers, bobbed up like a dinghy at sea. He frowned behind his visor as something tugged at his mind, and he muttered, “Undercurrents…”
Sandr, alongside him, asked, “Sir?”
Polian waved a gauntleted hand. “Nothing.”
On Polian’s twelfth birthday, like every legally born Yavi, he had received a pass for a day outside. It was the day when every father spoke to every son about what it meant to be a man. Polian’s father had taken him uplevels, to Sky-ceiling, where they rented an open skimmer, filter masks, and waders. They had driven to the sea, dismounted, and stood on the beach, staring out through the haze at the gray, opaque waves.
Then Polian’s father had dragged him by the hand out into the sea. When the water reached as high as Polian’s waist, Polian’s father released his son’s hand.
Polian turned to his father, eyes wide. And then something beneath the surface tugged at Polian. Gently at first, then stronger. A crosscurrent of water, beneath the still surface, swept Polian’s feet off the shifting seabed and dragged him out toward the emptiness.
He screamed, clawed for his father’s arm.
The older man allowed him to drift for a moment, then caught his son’s hand, pulled him upright, and stared down into his eyes. “Undercurrent. You see one thing on the surface. But underneath, things are moving in a different direction. And the difference can kill you. Ruberd, if you’re gonna be a cop, you have to be tougher. And you have to learn that a good cop never forgets to read the undercurrents.”
The experience had been intended to teach Polian what it would take to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, it had turned Polian bookish, the bright kid in class rather than the bold one. And a bright kid who became an analytical-intelligence officer, not a cop. But Polian never forgot to read the undercurrents.
Aboard the skimmer, Lieutenant Frei touched his helmet faceplate with a salute to Polian. The driver twisted the wheel, swung the vehicle away from the excavation site, and both skimmers vanished into the swirling snow within twenty yards.
Polian turned, then looked down at the corpses.
Alongside Polian, Lieutenant Sandr threw back his visor, bent at the waist, and vomited into the snow.
Polian sighed, but didn’t afford Lieutenant Sandr the sympathy he’d shown the skimmer driver.
It was, Polian knew, because Sandr was too much like Polian himself. Sandr was uplevels raised, a bright, bookish boy. A degreed xenogeologist. University boys skated basic and went straight to intel officer’s training. Sandr had never learned what the downlevels kids did, either from life or from the tongue and baton of a basic instructor. Neither, Polian knew, had he.
So Polian had assigned the patrol to Frei, born to be a line officer, leader of men.
On the other hand, officers like Polian and Sandr, who would be a staff officer, an advisor to commanders, as Polian was, had their place. A xenogeologist ought to be good at puzzles. And Polian had a puzzle on his hands.
Polian knelt alongside the nearest body, a raw private by his sleeve flashes, and rubbed at a black smudge on the side of the body’s greatcoat. He rubbed the black stuff between his gauntlet fingers. Soot.
Inside his temperature-controlled armor, Polian felt cold congeal in his stomach. Undercurrents tugged harder at his mind. “Sandr, wipe the drool off and give me a hand here.”
It took both of them to roll the headless body, already frozen stiff as a log, over onto its back.
Within the snow hollow vacated by the torso was a deeper pit in the snow, displacing the volume of a flower pot. The smaller pit had icy, blackened sides.
Polian stood back, hands on hips, then pointed at the pit. “What do you make of that, Sandr?”
“Sir?” The boy genius cocked his helmeted head. “Uh, well…these two made a fire to keep warm. Somebody spotted it and shot them. This fellow fell on top of the fire as he died, and smothered it. Bandits would have ransacked the bodies for valuables, so it must have been rebels.”
Polian sighed, pointed at the other body. “That sergeant had twenty years in, by his sleeve hash marks. An experienced soldier wanders fifty yards in front of his lines to build a fire?”
“Oh.”
“And where would he get firewood?”
The xenogeologist turned and looked into the storm as though trees might have sprouted on the barren, snowy plain while they spoke. The kid shrugged. “I guess the rebels just stumbled across these two, killed them, then tried to burn the bodies, to cover up.”
Polian sighed again. Xenogeology must not be that tough. “I agree with you that these two weren’t shot by bandits. We’re a hundred miles above this planet’s Arctic Circle. The nearest settlement is at Northern Terminus, where we jumped off, one hundred six miles west. Any bandit who tried to make a living at this spot would starve waiting for victims.”
Sandr spread upturned palms. “That leaves the rebels. As I said. Sir.”
Polian pressed his lips together. Then he said, “Iridian rebels haven’t done more than blow up the occasional railroad track in years. See any tracks?”
“I understand, sir. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have followed us up here.”
“How? By dogsled?” The largest land animals evolved to date on Tressel were bow-legged amphibians that couldn’t survive an autumn frost, much less a blizzard. The only vehicles on Tressel capable of crossing the frozen wasteland between the northern terminus of the Arctic Railroad and this excavation site were Polian’s skimmers. The skimmers had been downsmuggled a component at a time.
“Well, these two didn’t shoot each other!” The lieutenant gulped. “Sir.”
Polian nodded. “On that, we agree again. Sandr, you graduated Intelligence Officer School, yes?”
The kid straightened. “Perfect scores on every exam, sir.”
Polian rolled his eyes behind his visor. He made a mental note to tell Intel School’s faculty where they could put their exam program.
“Do you recall any remote covert sensor, in even a half-modern intelligence inventory, that isn’t equipped with a pyrotechnic self-destruct?”
The kid furrowed his pale brow behind his visor. “No. But the soot couldn’t be from a self-destruct. Technologically this planet’s a hundred-plus years behind us, almost that far behind even Earth. The Tressen military has no modern covert sensors. And so the rebels certainly don’t have them.”
Polian stared at the kid as wind rattled snow against their helmets.
Finally, the boy genius said, “Oh.”
Two hours later, a detail made up of Tressen soldiers had tagged and bagged their mates’ frozen remains, improvising from sample sacks intended for storage and transport of this mission’s objective.
Polian’s earpiece crackled; then Lieutenant Frei said, “Sir, we got ten yards’ visibility out here. So far we’ve cleared about four square miles.”
Polian ground his teeth. Too slow. If these guys could evade as well as they could shoot, they would lose themselves in the storm. “Visibility stinks here, too. What do your thermals show?”
“Actually, sir, that’s why I’m reporting. The sensors weren’t showing much in this crud. Then Mazzen said, well, these are prospecting skimmers, so why don’t we switch over to their magnetometers. We did, and five minutes later we found a steel rifle! Obsolete local military. Bet we find the serial number matches one the rebels stole from some armory, and the ballistics match with the bullets that—uh.”
Polian exhaled. Of course the gun would be a locally manufactured piece. And of course it would turn out to be the “murder weapon.” But this was a covert operation that could change human history, not a homicide investigation. Nonetheless, initiative should be encouraged. Mazzen was a sharp kid, NCO material. Polian said, “Tell Mazzen good thinking, for me. And that he’s breveted to corporal.”
Polian could hear Frei smile. “Outstanding, sir! He’ll appreciate that, Major! The rebels must be carrying rifles, shovels, helmets—hell, pots and pans—all kinds of metal. We’ll get ’em now.”
Inside his helmet, Polian shook his head. “Okay. But stay sharp. Eternad armor barely shows on normal sensors. A magnetometer’s blind to it.”
“Eternads, sir?” Polian could hear the smirk in Frei’s voice, too. Frei said, “Only Trueborns use Eternads. And they don’t carry bolt-action rifles.”