Undercurrents by Robert Buettner Page A

studded with more four-inch teeth than I could count. For the moment, I suppose I smelled and felt as appetizing as driftwood. But if these monsters decided I was food, I wasn’t sure whether the suit would keep them out indefinitely. And I didn’t know how deep these fish might dive or how deep the suit would stay pressure-tight if one dove and took me with it.
    Bump .
    A big one thumped my back, and I sucked a breath and clenched my teeth. The happys I had taken, back in the relative safety of the lair of the giant scorpions, were wearing off. My shoulder throbbed, and my cold, wet leg was growing numb.
    It was nearly full dark now. There were no friendlies.
    Beneath the surface, something clamped against my boot.
    I kicked.
    It held fast.

Fifteen
    I thrashed in the dark sea, paddling but going nowhere against the thing that held me.
    My eyes swelled and burned. I had reenlisted. I had traveled halfway across the known universe. I had jumped out of a perfectly good spaceship, fallen a hundred screaming miles, and fought a swamp monster for her. It was bad enough that I would never see her again. The worst was that she would never even know I had tried. I punched a wave and struggled harder. “Goddammit!”
    “Stop kicking, you stupid bugger!”
    I rolled onto my back. A dark silhouette loomed against the purple twilight sky.
    I floated alongside an open boat under sail. The boat carried two human beings who were tugging at a grapple that was hooked around my boot.
    Splash .
    The smaller of the two humans let go of me, poked a pitchfork-sized trident into the waves, and discouraged a rhiz.
    Then I relaxed, let them reel me in, and extended my good arm. The larger man hooked a hand under my backpack and tugged me as I kicked my boots; then I tumbled over the gunwale into the boat.
    I rocked in the slop that sloshed the boat’s bottom while I stared up at the two silhouettes and coughed. A rhiz, silver and thrashing and as long as I was tall, thrashed in the boat’s belly, clamped ineffectually to my armored calf. The smaller man pounded the fish with a club until it let go, then watched as it thrashed slower and slower, until it lay motionless and gasping.
    The boat was thirty feet long, with square cloth sails. Just an open wooden tub with a tiller aft and benches and lockers along its sides. Iridian lober boats, and lobers, who fished for trilobites and lobe-finned fish, hadn’t changed much in a thousand years.
    The smaller figure turned to the one who had pulled me in. “You think this is one of them?”
    The voice squeaked. A girl, not a man.
    “Who else would he be?” Deeper voice.
    “There were supposed to be two.”
    “All these rhiz? The other one’s bait by now.”
    I raised my eyebrows and didn’t bother to switch on my translator. Apparently one thing had changed in a thousand years. I resented the tidal wave of Earth culture that swamped the rest of the Human Union as much as anyone raised on an outworld did. But Terracentrism had its virtues. At this moment the Trueborn mission schools, and cowboy holos and comic chips that had made Standard the language, even in literal backwaters like this one, sounded pretty good.
    Rhizodonts twice the size of the one for which I had been bait thumped the open boat’s hull planks. The man who had pulled me aboard was lean, with a gray beard and Iridian-green eyes, and wore a lober fisherman’s leather armor. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”
    The bearded man snorted. “None returned. Your bomb’s attracted half the rhiz in this bay.”
    “It attracted you, too. I had to do something.”
    “We were where we were told to be! You weren’t.”
    “I’m sorry. You turned out to be too small a target from a hundred miles up.”
    The man snorted again. “Iridia’s always too small for the Trueborns.”
    I sighed inside my helmet. Decades earlier, Earth tilted against Iridia and toward Tressen to end a bloody, stalemated war between them. The Tilt ended the