Undercurrents Read Online Free Page B

built and berthed, had been abandoned by the Human Union. Eventually Mousetrap’s unemployed shipwrights had squatted there, then declared themselves an independent and, uh, socially liberated community. Today the Free City of Shipyard, where nothing was free but everything was available if one paid cash, was the graffiti-tagged nest of addicts, villains, and libertines that I called home.
    The Museum and War Memorials saw little traffic when the Port was between cruisers, but today Museum Station was so deserted that I heard my shoes squeak on the floor tile as I walked.
    I looked down the platform. The crawl above the museum entrance read “Closed this afternoon. Private event.”
    I smiled. Somehow, I had the feeling that, despite the sign, when I got close enough that my ID, but nobody else’s, tickled the sensors, the doors would slide open anyway.
    Ten minutes’ walk down the dim museum corridor I came to the First Battle of Mousetrap Gallery and saw Howard Hibble for the first time in two years. He sat with his back to me, staring through the glass wall at the static displays beyond. He teetered on a hovering scooter, his bony hands grasping the tiller. Not because he was obese. Howard was as gaunt as ever. But because he was old.
    “How’s the saloon business?” He spoke without turning. I suppose he saw my reflection in the glass, the way I saw his. He wore civvies as wrinkled as his skin, and they bagged on his skinny frame as badly as his uniforms always did. Old-fashioned glasses covered his eyes, the kind that hooked over his ears and rested across his nose.
    “Better than the spook business, if you’ve got time to waste on me.” I pointed through the glass at the display of twodee photographs from the start of the war, when the Slugs blitzed Earth seventy years before, and at his picture in an intelligence captain’s uniform in particular. “You haven’t changed much.”
    He shrugged. “Trueborn medicine and near-light-travel time dilation.”
    I snorted. “I mean the spook theatrics.” I threw my arms wide and spun in a circle. “ Here you meet me?”
    “It seemed appropriate, considering. Besides, your parents—”
    I stopped spinning and pointed at him. “Exactly! The only reason I signed on with you was because you said you’d tell me the truth about my parents.”
    He raised a bony palm off the scooter’s tiller and shook his head. “No. I told you I knew your parents during the war and that your separation from them at birth wasn’t the abandonment it’s seemed to you over the years. That was the truth.”
    I cocked my head. “Oh. And I suppose you’re here now to tell me the rest of the truth, finally?”
    Behind his glasses, Howard Hibble rolled sleepy eyes. “It was classified then, it’s classified now.”
    I returned his eye roll. “Come on, Howard! What could be classified about a war that we won thirty years ago? Against an enemy that doesn’t exist anymore?” I pointed at a different holo display. “Jason Wander, GI hero of the Battle of Ganymede.” And another. “General Jason Wander, goat of the First Battle of Mousetrap, hero of the Second Battle of Mousetrap.”
    “It doesn’t say he was the goat.”
    “No.” I waved my hand down the corridor. “But of all the heroes, he’s the only one without a picture here. Or anywhere. I’ve looked all over the Net. And after Second Mousetrap—poof—he just disappears from the history chips. And so does Admiral Mimi Ozawa.”
    “I told you he and your mother were alive and working for me, at least part-time. I can tell you that’s still true.”
    “Where? Doing what? Why the whitewash of what they did in the war? And why did they leave me on Yavet with the midwife who delivered me?”
    “I can’t answer your questions directly. Jazen, you know I trust you. But, operationally, you have no need to know the answers.”
    “Then I have no need to continue this conversation.” I turned away.
    Howard said, “But I