Free Undercurrents by Robert Buettner

within a hundred thousand miles. Then the uplink squirted the messages to the receivers in a beam no wider, or more detectable, than an invisible pencil one hundred thousand miles long. Because this fiasco was so secret, we were only supposed to use the uplink in life-threatening emergencies, or to summon the pickup Scorpion.
    Without the uplink, I was now invisible to the spooks up above.
    Well, fortunately that wasn’t entirely true. Both Weddle’s armor and mine had a transponder built in to the left shoulder that squirted a simple, brief “here I am” to the sky every sixty seconds, once it was activated. It was activated either by the wearer, voluntarily, or involuntarily by the suit, if the suit detected a really miserable set of wearer vitals.
    Weddel’s vitals, obviously, were as bad as could be. If his transponder had survived the fall, which was possible but doubtful, the spooks up above us thought we were someplace where I wasn’t.
    I side-tapped my temple pad to turn my transponder on. The little green light didn’t flash. I tried again. Nothing.
    “Crap.” My heart rate rose, a vital which the suit was perfectly happy to display for me.
    I reached up with my good hand and gently touched the suit’s shoulder plate. The good thing about Eternad armor is that it gives itself up to absorb a severe impact so the wearer’s body doesn’t absorb it. My shoulder plate had done its job somewhere during my fall, and therefore my arm remained attached. But the shoulder plate was caved in by a dent the size of a tennis ball. Somewhere in there were the mashed remains of my transponder.
    There was a worst-case search-and-rescue backup plan for barefoot case officers. Like most Hibble plans it was well-intentioned, obsolete, and cheap.
    It consisted of laying out fabric panels in a prearranged pattern on open ground. Those panels would, theoretically, be spotted by a lookdown resource; then somebody would come and give the officer a lift home. “Lookdown resource” normally meant a satellite, of which we had none orbiting Tressel, thanks to the diplomats. That meant that Spook Central would have to import, then deploy, a recon Scorpion to do the looking down, which could take weeks. Meanwhile the barefoot officer had to stay put around the panels. I couldn’t stay put even for hours.
    I sat back on my armored butt, rested my good hand on the ground, and said aloud to the swamp, “Crap.”
    I had wanted to be independent, not orphaned. Before I even started, I had lost my partner, my overhead support, and, for a while at least, the use of my left arm.
    I sat in the alien mud and felt sorry for myself for sixty seconds. Then I stood up and reassessed, one hand on my hip while I favored the sore-wristed hand. I needed my local help now more than ever.
    That meant I had to make it to the coast with the heliograph.
    Even healthy, I couldn’t carry much more than half the load. That was part of Weddle’s job. So, what to take along?
    A GI’s first priority is to keep his weapon with him. His second is to get it back if he loses it. His third, failing one and two, is to steal someone else’s. But the deadliest thing I could aim and fire one-handed, until I got into the meds pack, was a sidearm. A rifle was less valuable at the moment than the daylight I would waste prepping it.
    I glanced around the swamp. No need for a gun to counter an immediate enemy threat. There wasn’t a Tressen within miles.
    But did I need a gun to counter natural threats?
    I wiped my fingers clean with a cycad frond while I considered. Basic planetology rubs off on a GI after a few tours, as inevitably as frog shit. These amphibians and cycads looked and behaved like amphibians and cycads that had already evolved, then gone extinct, on planets like Earth and Yavet. “Like environments evolve like faunas.” Tressel was a warm, wet, slow-evolving rock. Earth was a warm, wet, fast-evolving rock. Thus, Tressel had giant frogs. Earth used to