Free Undercurrents by Robert Buettner Page A

have giant frogs.
    The geneticists doubted that interplanetarily disparate species, however overtly similar, would voluntarily interbreed. Having seen my first Tressen lady frog, I doubted it, too. But then I’m not a gentleman frog.
    I peered across the swamp. Somewhere out in the mist croaked a male who thought that frog was hot merchandise. But somebody else out there thought she was lunch.
    I wrinkled my forehead. My meager memory of the brief was that the Barrens’s top land predators weren’t much bigger or meaner than the misshapen frog that I had just shooed off the drone.
    I rubbed my good hand on my armored thigh. Supposedly, they actually tested an Eternad boot once by leaving it in a tiger cage. After a week the tigers had lost three teeth chewing on the boot, which was unscratched. I reached the conclusion that no gun was required here in the Barrens, at least on land.
    The shallow swamp water held shellfish that looked, as I remembered, like lobsters or scorpions. I had lost even minimal interest in the segment about them when I learned that they didn’t even have tail stingers. I didn’t recall how big they were, but they sounded less threatening than the frogs.
    I would have to lead the partisans back here to recover the rest of my gear, anyway. I ignored the weapons pod, bent on one knee and raced the sinking sun until I had set my dislocated wrist, loaded a watertight backpack with the heliograph, and dropped a couple serious happys.
    By the time I straightened up and stretched, my visor display predicted three hours more of signal-sufficient daylight. Overland I would have to hack through vegetation with the suit’s bush knife, unable to trade hands and distribute the workload. Worse, I would likely have to detour around the densest thickets. I squinted up at the gray sky and shook my head. Overland I’d never make the coast before dark.
    I turned toward the sludge-brown bayou I had landed in, while my shoulder socket throbbed against my armor’s underlayer. The bayou curved, but wound directly toward the ocean. Fallen fronds on the water’s surface drifted seaward as fast as a man could walk.
    I nodded to myself. Improvisation separates good case officers from dead ones.
    Eternads weren’t diving suits, but they were watertight enough for waterborne assault, even for underwater demolition missions in a pinch. In my suit I could float on the outrunning tide like a human beach ball. I would reach the ocean in a half hour. During which I could rest my arm and conserve my energy. If time in the field teaches a GI anything, it is never walk if you can hitch a ride.
    I punched up the suit’s overboard mode, then gritted my teeth. The micropump between my shoulder blades pounded my damaged joints as its vibration inflated the suit’s flotation bladders. Then I waded out knee-deep, lay back, arms and legs splayed, and drifted, belly to the sky. As I pinwheeled slowly downstream atop the warm water, dragonflies whirred across my field of vision against a lattice of cycad branches and gray sky. The surface current rafted me toward the coast. I smiled at my ingenuity and enjoyed the ride.
    As the good ship Jazen drifted, so did my mind. The happys I had dropped spread a warm buzz throughout my body. Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me.
    Two minutes and two hundred yards later, I turned my head to watch a pickle-sized pink worm wriggle toward me across the surface. It was probably toxic, the pink color a defense mechanism advertising “Don’t eat me!”
    I wrinkled my forehead as I yawned. There had been something in the brief about the pink worms, but what? The nagging thought caused me roll onto my belly, then stand in water that proved to be waist deep. The little worm danced across the surface. I fingered the bush knife in my leg scabbard with my good hand.
    The worm had something to do with the big lobsters. They—
    Whoom .
    Brown water turned white as it foamed up around the worm, then geysered up.