Undercurrents by Robert Buettner Page B

war, alright. But the Tressens turned their victory into a campaign to eradicate Iridia from the face of this planet.
    Earth didn’t like genocide any better than the next smug, patronizing superpower. But Earth had its hands full saving the human race from the Slugs. So Earth imposed isolating sanctions on Tressen, then washed its collective hands of the Iridians. No wonder Kit had to go in here friendless. And no wonder these two weren’t overjoyed to see me.
    But they were the closest things to allies I had.
    I sat up in the boat and popped my visor. “I’m Jazen. You?”
    The man just stared at me.
    I eye-rolled. It was possible to overdo operational security. “Look, I need to call you something.”
    The gray-bearded man shrugged. “I’m Pyt. The girl is Alia.”
    I squinted at the smaller Iridian. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back, and her shirt hung on an eleven-year-old’s board-flat frame, but girl she was.
    I nodded. “We need to retrieve my baggage, Pyt.”
    “Why?”
    Because without it I’m just an ignorant stranger. With it I’m an ignorant stranger armed to the teeth. “Because that’s where the diamonds are.”
    Pyt fended off a rhiz with his trident, then jerked his head shoreward. “We need to get away from this bait shop anyway. How far?”
    I shrugged and punched up the Equipment Drone’s locator, then pointed over the gunwale. “Thousand yards inland. That heading.”
    Two dark hours and two scorpion encounters later, the little boat creaked and rolled as it sailed away from the Barrens with my stuff aboard. We were bound south, toward the rock-bound Iridian coast.
    The moon had risen, and reflected off the waves like a rolling carpet of silver coins.
    Pyt sat in the boat’s stern, the tiller pressed between his arm and torso, while he shucked a raw trilobite with a lober’s hooknife. The girl slept, wrapped in blankets, in the prow.
    Pyt nodded at the sea and smiled at me. “Beautiful, no?”
    I hung my helmetless head over the gunwale and dry heaved for the second time. I gasped and spat at the waves. “I hate water.” The rhizodont alongside me banged its tail against my belly. “Can we throw that thing out? ’Cause I’m not eating it.”
    Pyt shook his head. “Never waste something you can cut into bait.”
    “And I thought you were keeping me around just for the diamonds.”
    That finally coaxed a smile from Pyt. He said, “You Trueborns don’t sail, then?”
    I wiped drool off my chin, dug out a motion-sickness cap from the meds kit, and gulped it dry.
    My shoulder throbbed. While I was in the meds kit, I punched in the details of my brachial injuries, selected the two caps the screen prescribed, and swallowed them. The sedative in the first one would knock me out. The second contained nano machines, activated by stomach acid, that would swim through my bloodstream and repair my arm damage.
    Pyt watched in silence as I played doctor.
    Finally, I answered him. “Some Trueborns sail.”
    Kit had a rich kid’s shelf full of yachting trophies, not to mention a boathouse full of day sailers, at her parents’ beach place in the Caribbean. One weekend on leave down there she had tried to teach me the difference between a jib and a bowline. But we were alone together, and we ended up, uh, distracted. Well, I was distracted and she had let me be.
    I gulped a breath and said to Pyt, “But I’m Trueborn by blood only. My parents were born on Earth. I was born and raised downlevels on Yavet. Like living in the bottom of a layer cake. I never saw an ocean until I joined the Legion.”
    He frowned. “The Legion? I agreed to guide a Trueborn military officer. Not a hired murderer.”
    “The Legion was a long time ago. I am a Trueborn military officer. I’m also a saloon owner on holiday.”
    He rolled his eyes.
    “Look, I didn’t abandon Iridia. The diplomat assholes who did that retired before I was born.” But I was sent here by the diplomat assholes who replaced