Undercurrents Read Online Free Page A

at the bill. “You got imported. There won’t be change back from that.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Imported?”
    I nodded, swept up the bill. “Authentic Tennessee sour mash.” I figured one obvious lie deserved another.
    I eyed his glass. Still full. Which either meant he knew Shipyard bootleg will make you blind, or he was on duty. Probably both.
    He said, “I hear Jazen Parker inherited this place. You him?”
    I shrugged. “You can hear anything in Shipyard.” But he had heard right about how I got the bar. The mother of an only child I had served with in the Legion left Fatso’s to me when I was, uh, between jobs, two years before. She left it to me partly because she couldn’t leave it to her son. I had been with him when he died in action. Partly because she felt guilty about having fingered me for a bounty hunter who almost killed me, too.
    The liar looked around the empty cavern. “Business good?”
    “Profitable enough when there are cruisers in the port.” I leaned forward, palms on my bar. “And there aren’t any in the port. So who the hell are you, really?”
    He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m a messenger. Somebody would like to see you, Lieutenant Parker.”
    A spook. I shook my head. “Just Parker. I resigned my commission two years ago, when my hitch ended.”
    I began my military career, if you call mercenary work military, with a two-year Legion hitch. Legion enlistment got me off Yavet ahead of the bounty hunters, but my Legion time ended, shall we say, poorly. My second hitch was in the Trueborn military-intelligence service. That got me commissioned as an officer and a gentleman, but ended even worse. Twice bitten, thrice shy.
    He shrugged again. “It was a gesture of respect. I saw your file. It says a lot good about you.”
    I shrugged back. “You saw I’ve got a shotgun under this bar, too. My file says I’m not afraid to use it. As a gesture of respect, I won’t. If you drink up and leave.”
    He raised his hands, palms out, and smiled. “Just doing my job, sir. The Old Man’s here. Came all the way out just to see you.”
    I raised my eyebrows. It was one of those lies so obvious that I knew it was true. Everybody within the hollowed-out moonlet that was the interstellar crossroad called Mousetrap knew the next cruiser wasn’t due in until tomorrow.
    However, less than everybody knew that a VIP and his personal security detail could launch from an inbound cruiser in a fast-mover and beat the cruiser in by a full day. Cruisers drift in through the North Lock, then down Broadway, the fifteen-mile-long axial tunnel that cores Mousetrap like an apple, to the berths at the South End. But fastys could enter Mousetrap very privately. The moonlet’s skin was peppered with abandoned interceptor sally ports that still worked fine if you knew the codes. Which was exactly the way Lieutenant General Howard Hibble, aka King of the Spooks, aka the Old Man, would make an entrance.
    The security-detail spook shrugged again. “He just wants to visit.”
    “I’ll be here ’til closing.”
    “You know he can’t come up to Shipyard.”
    I knew nothing of the sort, but I was curious. And my calendar wasn’t exactly full. “Where, then?”
    “At the Pseudocephalopod War Museum, First Battle of Mousetrap exhibit. In an hour.”
    Forty-one minutes later I stepped off the Southbound tuber at Museum Station and blinked at the contrast. I always did when I traveled from Shipyard to the South End.
    Mousetrap was originally mankind’s interstellar Gibraltar, our bulwark against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Since we won the war, the South End had remained the crossroads of the Human Union, the gateway to the temporal-fabric insertion points that led, directly or indirectly, to the five hundred twelve planets that comprised the Human Union. As such, the South End was insufferably bright and clean and quiet.
    After the war, the North End, where the great ships that won the war for us had been