Undercurrents by Robert Buettner

“I want to see Howard. Now.”

Nine
    Ten minutes after I had mutinied, the vast bay had been cleared except for Howard and me. Riding his little scooter, he circled my chair. “I warned you that this would be dangerous, Jazen.”
    I swiveled my head and stared at him as he orbited me. “No, Howard. Dangerous is shooting and drowning and fighting six-legged telepathic monsters. This is a science project. And I’m the hamster.”
    “Jazen, the rest of the Union thinks Earth succeeds because we’re rich or lucky. And we’re both. But the truth is that we succeed because we take risks. When the need is great enough, we dive in at the deep end, then scramble to learn to swim. I can’t tell you how many times I saw your father improvise like that.”
    My father? Where did that come from? I shook my head. “Don’t try to play that card with me! You say you can’t tell me about him. But you trot him out as soon as you need to manipulate me.”
    He didn’t answer, just drifted his scooter to a girder supporting the bay wall. He dug a penknife from a pocket, scraped a paint chip off the girder onto the blade, then rotated it in front of his eyes like a jeweler appraising a wedding ring. “Look at these layers. You know, I’ll bet the Emerald River ’s been repainted and updated a dozen times since the war. You knew your mother commanded her once, didn’t you?”
    He paused to let me sniff the bait.
    I sighed. Then, manipulation or not, I swallowed it whole. “What was she like back then?”
    He smiled and stared into the space between us. “Admiral Ozawa was as fine a ship handler as the war produced. Mimi could fly anything, though. Not just cruisers. She started out as a fighter jock. And the handsomest woman who ever wore a flight suit. At least, your father seemed to think so every moment they were together.”
    He slid the scooter alongside me, then leaned close. “Not that they were together much. Or that there weren’t painful adjustments to make each time they got back together. That’s the nature of relationships in the military, Jazen. The separations and the stresses grow people apart. But they can grow back together, too, if they try. Your parents did.”
    Back together. I believed him because I wanted to.
    “Got one of your hunches about whether Kit’s still alive, Howard?”
    “If they had captured or killed her, they’d be parading their Trueborn spy to embarrass us by now. Or at least they’d be looking to exchange her for one of their captured coverts. If the team’s on the run down there, Tressel’s no picnic, but she’s survived worse.”
    “Howard, if it were my mother down there, what would my father do?”
    “Saving Kit’s secondary to your mission, Jazen.”
    “Yeah. Howard, what would he do?”
    “Everything.”
    I nodded. Then I stood, lifted the suit off the deck plates, and stuck a foot into the leggings.
    I believed Howard about Kit’s chances because I wanted to, just like I wanted to believe about the chances for Kit and me. But Howard’s reasoning about the probability that she was still alive made sense on an objective level, too.
    Howard waved at the personnel hatch, and Weddle and the rest of the briefers reentered.
    Howard squinted at his ’puter. “Study hard, you two. You drop in sixteen hours.”

Ten
    Fifteen hours and fifty-nine minutes later I hung head down in my Eternads, festooned with fins and dive brakes that were supposed to keep me from disintegrating at six hundred miles per hour. I hung in a drop cradle that the spooks had bolted above the centerline of the launch bay’s doors. Twenty feet away, in an identical cradle, Weddle hung. Between us in a third cradle hung a man-sized, finned object that looked like a day-glo orange, old-fashioned gravity bomb.
    The bay had already been evacuated, first of spooks then of air, so the only sounds I could hear were on the hardwired intercom that was plugged into my suit’s thigh connector, and any sound