Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  Schaffner reached for the control, hesitated with his fingertips resting against it. “Was Judith right, about what you were offering?”

  Jefferson nodded. “Yes, if you’ll take the entanglement. It’s painless.”

  Neil Schaffner looked at him, pale eyes catching light under the silver thatch of his hair. He pushed the start control.

  “I’m going to need some ranid volunteers.”

  It wasn’t a great idea to call Moon Morrow for comfort, but somehow Closs found himself doing it anyway. He caught her at lunch, dining from hand-painted china with delicate silver manipulators. The food was bitter greens and some cold, rare, shaved red meat. Bison, probably, unless it was offworld. He didn’t imagine that Morrow would eat anything as unsafe as Earth beef, even if it were possible to get.

  She wrapped greens in a shred of meat and raised them to her mouth, balancing the bundle on slender tools. He waited until she had swallowed and cleared her palate with a sip of water. He was opening his mouth to request her attention when she fixed him with a glance and interrupted. “There’s been another attack, Timothy.”

  His voice died with the breath that carried it. “Where?”

  A transfer icon blipped red in the corner of his display. Expecting a map or a series of still images, he accepted the data stream. And found himself immersed in VR as if dumped into fifty feet of water in a weighted vest—the images rushing past him while he struggled to start breathing, to remember to keep moving the air in and out.

  And then the hard-earned combat reflexes took over, and—like a fish dumped overboard—Closs began to swim.

  A starship—not a lighter, no, and he still read consoles well enough to see that they were slowing from relativistic; inbound rather than outbound, then. Alarm claxons sounded outside his helmet; he was suited and armed, the powerpack of a beam weapon weighing across his back. This ship had been relativistic for some time; the equipment was not unlike what he’d used when he was active duty.

  For a moment, he was afflicted with a powerful sense of déjà vu. He could have been twenty-two and a lieutenant again, a kid fresh from Titan Academy, with more brains and guts than sense. But then the body he rode in moved and he wasn’t in charge of it, and he relaxed. This was a game he’d played as a line commander, riding along in the back of a sergeant’s or lieutenant’s head—sometimes four or twelve at once. The miracle of modern warfare: even the guy at the back knew what was going on at the front, from many angles.

  He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like when you had nothing to go on but estimated positions, radio reports, and guesswork. What a way to fight a war.

  He checked his vehicle’s vital stats—PFC Amelie Heaney, age twenty-three (or about 115, nonrelativistic), currently nursing a sprained ankle from training and a sour stomach from the antifungals she was taking for a welting, cracking case of athlete’s foot.

  The information might flow faster, but the soldier’s lot never changed. Currently, her heart rate was elevated, her eyes were darting port and starboard and up and down, and she was only breathing slow and deep because she was consciously regulating the pattern. Her squad was six; two were right behind her, three more detailed to survey a different corridor. Her ship was the Earth Core Company True Blue, and she was one of twenty-four marines on board, each of them working out a resettlement stake.

  Their normal concern was pirates, though PFC Heaney had never seen one. She thought they were pretty romantic, for space scum—striking, pillaging, and vanishing into the future on a trail of hard-bent light. But there weren’t many; cargo didn’t travel by shipping, which left only the ransom for human lives to interest an opportunist. So they mostly struck shipping close to its point of origin, while there might still be somebody alive on the homeworld who cared.

  Once they’d passed the halfway point, she’d started anticipating a quiet trip.

  And it had been. Until about ten minutes ago.

  And now she was sidling along the True Blue’s aft main corridor, her half-squad guarding her back, a beam cannon strapped to her right arm, and every siren on the ship warning of imminent hull breach. Unless they wanted the ship herself, PFC Heaney didn’t have the first idea what might be going on.

  Closs envied her innocence. Because now Morrow was feeding him schematics, the real-time record of the ship’s nervous system, the sensory motes that webbed her hull and bulkheads. That knowledge overlaid Heaney’s advance, and he wanted to shout at her, as her own commander must be doing, that the hull ten yards down the corridor was losing integrity, that the corridor would soon be violently open to space.

  He multitasked; Morrow threw more feeds at him. He could handle the six half-squad leaders; he made Heaney primary—she was closest to an incipient breach—and watched the other five peripherally, also prioritizing the hull sensorium.

  Heaney and her squadmates quit their cautious slide and hustled. Forward, not back, as befitted marines. Their goal was to clear the airproof bulkheads and be on-site when the boarding party came in through the breach. External cameras were showing something weird; not just crawlers ripping the shielding with armored talons, but a night-black macro-fog, a machine made of multiple-component machines—each as big as Closs’s fist, and black enough that the object looked at first like a missing patch in the hull of the True Blue. It flexed against the hull like a starfish humping a submarine, and sudden white crystals glittered around it.

  The snow-globe effect was why Closs knew a split second before Heaney did that the hull had been breached. She found out the hard way; the joints of her vacuum suit stiffened, and the boarding claxons fell silent, though she could still feel their shiver through the magnetic soles of her boots. In the corridor, both behind the half-squad and ahead, airlock shields crashed down, sealing them in.

  The rush of expelled air ripped at her suit, but the magnets held, and she was still planted solidly, bringing her weapon to bear, when a knobby matte black tendril curled through the rent in the hull. It groped, twitched, telescoped at the marines with reflexive speed—

  Heaney’s weapon lashed out silently—no atmosphere to sizzle under its bolt—and was followed a split-second later by those of her squadmates. There was a projecting bulkhead on either side of the sealed airlock and just inside, designed to provide cover; the squad dove behind it.

  Just in time, as the black tendril slammed after them. It sparked and arced, withdrew, shedding ragged bits of eviscerated foglets. Some of the component machines stuttered and twitched on the corridor floor. Heaney kicked one away as it grabbed at her suit; the armor held. The thing went flying.

  She looked up to see the tendril coming apart into hundreds—thousands—of crawling machines…

  Morrow cut the feed. Closs slumped against his desk chair, rolling his shoulders back. His right hand ached from clenching on the trigger of Heaney’s weapon. “All of them?” he asked.

  Boarding, making sure that the marines and crew saw the enemy, interacted with them…when the enemy could have just shot a big rock at the True Blue. Starships were impossibly easy to destroy. This didn’t make any sense. He looked at her, image to image, light-years between them, and waited for her to give him an answer he could accept.

  She shook her head, and failed him. “It took the ship apart,” Morrow said. “Find me a solution, Tim.”

  Clean, dry, illegally skinned, and wearing stolen clothes, Cricket spent the next morning and afternoon hiding in plain sight. It was both easier and harder than she expected, and quite strange overall, because she didn’t dare connex.

  She could surf news through a public terminal, but she wasn’t confident that the false persona she’d chipped off the stuff in her jump kit would hold up to a Rim security scan. She had a nasty suspicion that something had come in with the information that Lucienne had sent her.

  The data was tagged, maybe. And the data was in her head. And there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it, because Cricket couldn’t find the tag, or bea
con, or whatever might be in there.

  Which was a problem long-term, if she wanted to live. Or if she ever wanted to work again. And a problem immediately, in that activities as simple as hailing a water taxi or paying her lunch tab became infinitely more complicated when you couldn’t just connex the bill. She had money; her jump identity was supplied. But accessing or using it was going to be a real trick.

  There was somebody she could talk to, if she wanted to take the chance. André trusted him. But André trusted Cricket, too, which wasn’t exactly a testimonial to his excellent judgment.

  How far she’d fallen, if Nouel Huc was the best she could do for an ally.

  She was waiting at the Zheleznyj Tigr when the doors opened. She paid at the door, with a dwindling cash card, and was the first one into the club. Uncool, but she wanted to beat Huc here.

  At least André was unreachable. Huc couldn’t ring him up and spill the beans; whatever Jean Kroc said about André’s motivation, Cricket didn’t trust him either. She didn’t trust his ethics or his glib head full of self-justifying stories and she didn’t buy his motives for wanting to learn to conjure. But she’d had that fight with Jean, and Jean was as stubborn as they came. It didn’t matter how many times Cricket pointed out that André was the worst kind of sorcerer’s apprentice—the sort that lied and snuck and eventually betrayed. Jean was sure he could save André, and if he couldn’t save André, that he could use him.

  And Jean was mad enough to see it as a challenge, too. A test of his dedication, to reclaim the man who had killed Lucienne.

  She wasn’t going to make excuses for Jean Kroc. He knew the parable of the snake as well as she did. He was just crazy enough to think himself immune.

  She picked a round table at the front, near the stage. Nouel Huc’s habitual table, with its red-handkerchiefhemmed tablecloth and its white waxflowers nodding sleepily in the vase. The server tried to talk her into another seat, but she tipped her head and said, “I’m expected.”

  She wasn’t pretty enough to be believed, not dressed like this. But Huc did his own species of business, and his clients weren’t all as natty as André.

  “Will you be on M~ Huc’s account?” the server asked, with at least a show of politeness.

  Cricket thought of the dwindling balance on her cash card. “Yes.”

  Let Huc take it out of her hide. She had enough to offer that he could stand her the cost of a meal.

  Whether the staff of the Zheleznyj Tigr called him, or whether he was just running early, it was less than a quarter before she looked up to find his shadow falling across her. “M~ Huc,” she said, placing a hand on the edge of the table to help her balance to her feet. He laid a hand on her shoulder and she sat back.

  It was a reassuring hand, whether or not he meant it to be. “I understand we are acquainted?”

  She relaxed into the chair as he stepped away, moved around the table, and sat. She liked the way he set his elbows on the table, too, wide apart, and leaned forward between them, not bothering to hide an amused smile. He wanted her to soak in that warmth, she thought. Soak in it, drown in it. Trust him.

  He was better at it than André, and she thought he could probably also beat up her father if he had to. But she really didn’t need to go about collecting spare thugs. Not right now.

  “Not under any name it’s safe for me to use,” she said. Her skins were pretty good; they’d hold up even under a parser filter. “But I’m a friend of André Deschênes.”

  “How close of a friend?”

  “Very,” she said, calmly.

  He nodded. “We’ve met before. You’ve changed your hair.”

  “And everything else,” she answered, and he laughed. “I’m in trouble, M~ Huc.”

  “Call me Nouel,” he said, and patted her hand. “You may speak freely here. Though I’m recording.”

  “Thank you, Nouel.” She hesitated, and he stepped in smoothly to fill the silence.

  “And what shall I call you?”

  Cricket hesitated. There was the name on her false ID, of course, but that was intentionally bland. She wanted something that was less of a lie, at least as much hers as Cricket. “Fisher,” she said, after consideration. “Like the cat.”

  “There’s a cat named Fisher?”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “There’s a kind of weasel they used to have in the part of Earth where I grew up. They were called fisher cats. They weren’t cats. And they didn’t fish.”

  “Ah,” he said. He looked up and waved the server over. “I see. And you’re not what you pretend to be either. One moment”—as he ordered wine in a lowered tone—“please, continue. Are you a fisher, Fisher?”

  “I’m a data miner,” she said. “And I have some information I will pay very handsomely to get to Jean Gris.”

  “And there’s a reason you can’t deliver the information yourself.”

  She had her mouth open to answer as the wine came, and held her tongue while Nouel pronounced it acceptable. The server filled their water glasses. They ordered, and as the first course was brought to the table, Cricket reminded herself that it was unwise to let him penetrate her defenses so easily. Formidable charm and a formidable wit did not translate to unassailable honesty.

  When she had eaten the first few bites, he smiled and said, “So. You owe Jean Gris money.”

  Cricket had been waiting for it, and so she managed a cool look, rather than bursting out laughing. “If it pleases you to think so.”

  “If there are greater risks,” Nouel said, with a negligent gesture of his snail pick, “it would be clever of you to inform me of your reasons. It will affect the precautions necessary to see that your message goes through.”

  “I have several reasons, all of them excellent.”

  His right hand rolled through the air, two fingers extended as if winding the words from her throat onto a ribbon.

  She shook her head. “It would be safer for you not to know.”

  “M~ Fisher, you have just described my stock-in-trade in its entirety. Perhaps you would be so good as to explain to me exactly what you need, and what you are willing to pay?”

  Which was the challenge she would have to meet, of course. She sipped wine, rolling it over her tongue, almost shocked by wood and vanilla. It had been a long time since she’d had wine like this. Part of successfully reinventing one’s self, of shedding an old personality, was reinventing everything. Likes, dislikes, favorite places, the type of people one associated with. Not just the hair, the clothes, the skin, the postures. To become someone new, you had to swallow it whole, without reservation.

  Cricket Earl Murphy wasn’t a wine drinker. Maybe Fisher would be, when Fisher became more real. “I have an entire clean established legal persona to offer,” she said. “Also, five thousand demarks in cash or cash-equivalent. And a favor from an archinformist. In return, I want a message taken to Jean Gris, and I want assistance in documenting another legal persona, though I’ll do the hackwork myself. I just need somebody who can forge the necessary. The problem is that the message I need sent to Jean is all in my head and I need a clean isolated system to download it to, because I think I have a beacon in my head as well, and I can’t connex. Jean, by the way, is no doubt being watched. Which is why I don’t dare go to him.”

  “You’re offering a lot for some pretty simple requests.”

  She wasn’t going to tell him about Lucienne. If he’d helped André do it, she didn’t want to force him into a conflict of interest. “I have proof that Rim is covering up a major ecological disaster in progress,” she said baldly, and forked up a mouthful of scallop sashimi and shredded radish. “I’d like to force them to do something about it before they poison Greene’s World so badly that Novo Haven goes the way of Patience Station or Port Katherine.”

  Fifty years after a reactor core excursion, a radius of a hundred miles around the former planetary seat of Enlil was still uninhabitable. Cricket couldn’t be held personally responsible for that one,
but the long shadow of Port Katherine had been one of the cudgels used to bludgeon her from office…when she had been someone else. She scratched a nail across the tablecloth, feeling the tip catch, bend, and release on each thread. “Nouel?”

  He seemed suitably impressed, still staring into his wineglass with his lips pursed out and twisted. He glanced up when she said his name. “You trust me not to go to Rim with this? There’d be a lot of money in it.”

  “Enough to retire on,” she agreed. “And you’d have to.”

  In an industry where contracts were unenforceable and a deal was still sealed by a handshake, she wasn’t exaggerating. If he turned Cricket in, there wasn’t an archinformist on the Rim that would give him so much as the time of day or the local acceleration due to gravity.

  He scratched his thumb across his chin. His nod did nothing to ease the tightening wire of tension laced across her spine. This was merely embracing danger in a new shape.

  “Stay through the play,” he said. “Come home with me tonight. We’ll set you up. Now sit tight, won’t you, and finish your supper? I have to make a couple of calls.”

  In the morning, the earth shook. This was not uncommon, and Gourami would usually have slept through it, drifting weightlessly for sleeping, anchored by se toefingers in the bottom mud and with eyes and nostrils just protruding from the water. But it was se watch, predawn, while Tetra dreamed, the human slept in his temporary structure, and Caetei swam hunting. And so Gourami was sprawled on slick mud churned up by mudskitters—driven from their tunnels by the previous day’s rain—waiting for the human to awaken.

  Gourami calculated quickly, decided that they were far enough up the bayou that any water surge would spend itself among the reeds and hillocks before it reached them, and rolled supine to sun se belly. Rustling shook the tent; the human struggling into his clothing, no doubt. Gourami licked eyes to clear the night’s grit from them, the warm sun flooding se veins with heat and energy. Se couldn’t sun too long, but se could certainly use a little exothermal assistance in digesting last night’s excellent meal.