The Privilege of Peace

by Tanya Huff

  *We’re inside the angle of the guns,* Ressk announced.

  *If you forget you’re making a fast drop toward giant angry lizards, it’s kind of peaceful,* Lorkin observed.

  *Almost restful,* Binti added. *We should do this more often.*

  “Less chatter, people.” Torin looked down between her boots, watched the station blot out the stars, noted a couple of rough patches the station crew needed to get on top of, saw the maintenance hatch roll past, and magged her soles.

  Nicholin landed with his knees bent. His body continued moving until his ass hit the station.

  “You okay?”

  *I’m good, Gunny. And more than willing to show you how very flexible I am.*

  Lorkin landed two hundred and twelve meters from the hatch, Ressk and Binti a meter to either side.

  *Thirty-seven centimeters! Too bad you’re practically in the next system, Ressk.*

  *I’m five centimeters farther out than you are!*

  *Five, five thousand. Relatively speaking, you missed.*

  The Baylet danced with the Silsviss guns, holding their attention. Craig couldn’t have done a better job.

  Although Torin would have liked to have seen him try.

  * * *

  • • •

  The passageways by the maintenance hatch were empty as expected. Moving quickly, HE suits sealed, helmets unpolarized, they opened only the interior hatches that kept them moving in a direct line toward control. If the majority of the Confederation hostages had been locked in their quarters as the heat pattern suggested, they were double-timing past people they’d come to free.

  Eventually free.

  The last thing they needed right now was civilians motivated to get into the fight.

  Second last thing, Torin amended as a young Silsviss stepped through the hatch directly in front of them.

  Lorkin pulled the trigger on his benny, the MDC hitting the exposed scales of the lizard’s face above the pale green overalls. His inner eyelids flashed closed and he howled a challenge, clearly unaffected. “Serley chrika! Why don’t bennies work on the fukkers?”

  Two prongs attached to a fine wire hissed over Ressk’s shoulder, smashed into the front curve of Lorkin’s helmet, and shattered it in a flare of blue sparks. His back bowed. He dropped to the deck, convulsed, and stilled.

  They’d all seen too much death to mistake it.

  As a second set of prongs hit Ressk in the chest, Binti raised her KC and put a shot into each of the Silsviss’ eyes, blood and brains exploding from the back of his skull.

  “Are you insane, Mashona!” Nicholin snarled, dropping to his knees by Lorkin’s body. “What if you’d holed the station?”

  “Slowed by bone, a standard round won’t make it to the next bulkhead.” KC resting at her right hip, Binti pivoted in place, scanning the passageways. “Which is an internal bulkhead anyway. And I don’t miss. It’s why I’m the one carrying the KC.”

  “You couldn’t know . . .”

  “Yeah, I could. You have no idea how many Silsviss I practiced on.” Rigid muscles, obvious even through the suit, contradicted her matter-of-fact tone. She took a deep breath and said, “Gunny?”

  Kneeling by Ressk’s shoulder, Torin took a deep breath of her own, the sound loud inside the helmet. “He’s alive.” Engaging his helmet’s override, she cradled his head on her palm as the rigid sphere peeled back and flopped to the side.

  The prongs on Ressk’s chest remained connected to the weapon loosely cradled in the hand of the dead Silsviss. Torin brushed them to the deck, then as Ressk’s nostril ridges began to flutter as he struggled for breath, she slid an arm behind his back and helped him sit. “The charge skipped over the surface.” Like the Corps suits they were modeled on, the Justice Department HE suits protected the wearer against almost anything an unfriendly universe could throw against it—up to and including most personal projectile weapons. Unfortunately, as Torin’s first close-combat instructor like to say, change was constant, and a new species meant new weapons creating entirely new parameters.

  “Most of the charge stayed on the surface. The inside of my mouth tastes like kreek.” Ressk rubbed his chest with a gloved hand and tucked his chin in so he could check the readouts along the suit’s heavy collar. “My whole system’s been reset to zero.” He frowned, brushed a piece of shattered helmet off his leg, and twisted far enough around to stare at Lorkin’s body. The other Krai’s eyes were closed and blood covered most of his face. “Ona cee kar, Lorkin,” he sighed, then frowned. “What’re the odds that weapon would have the right charge to break through?”

  “What’re the odds the field holding Lorkin’s helmet rigid had a minor flaw that prong just happened to hit?” On his knees by Lorkin’s side, Nicholin shifted the Krai’s collar so they could see the damage report. “The charge matched the flaw. Once through the helmet, the prongs drove into his nostril ridges and released the greater part of the charge into his body. Probably why his system didn’t go down.” Tossing the bloody prongs aside, he patted Lorkin’s collar gently back into place, his umber hair flat against his head. “Fatal cascade of circumstances.” He pounded his fist against the deck, once, twice, then sat back on his heels. “Fukker promised to make nusur for me.”

  “You’d have hated it,” Ressk told him.

  Nicholin’s mouth twisted into something like a smile. “Yeah, probably.”

  Binti stepped close and pinged Torin’s personal frequency. *Do we bag him now, Gunny? Or later?*

  There’d have been no need to bag him if Lorkin hadn’t fired, but blame wouldn’t bring him back.

  If the Silsviss had been older and more seasoned.

  If the Silsviss had been younger and more likely to charge than shoot.

  If Lorkin’s helmet hadn’t been flawed.

  If Cyr Tyroliz hadn’t taken the station.

  If Parliament hadn’t had its head so far up its collective ass about the Younger Races.

  “We’ll bag him later,” Torin told the entire team, dropping her helmet. “When we’ve got the station back. We can’t bag his suit and we haven’t time to remove it.” One hand pressed against the pouch where the cylinder would rest, Torin got to her feet and held out the other for Ressk. “Tuck him against the bulkhead, the Silsviss ignore the dead. Bring his weapon. They’ve used our own weapons against us before.”

  “That was true?” Nicholin asked, carefully sliding Lorkin’s body into the angle between bulkhead and deck.

  The well had contained most of the blast. One of the head-sized rocks had been flung into the mud brick of the western building, but the rest hadn’t traveled far. Torin picked her way to the edge of the blast zone, retreating quickly when the ground shifted underfoot. “The good news, a foot in either direction and we’d have had casualties. The bad news, we won’t be using that well again.”

  “That was one of our weapons.”

  “Yes, sir. It was. An emmy if I’m not mistaken.”

  Torin and Binti exchanged a speaking glance. “Yeah,” Torin said. “That was true.” She stepped over the Silsviss’ body and turned back to Lorkin before she went through the hatch. “We’ll be back,” she told him. Then she deactivated her helmet, and swept a look that was pure gunnery sergeant around the team. “No one fires until I give the order. Is that understood?”

  After a chorus of affirmatives, she indicated they should all release helmets. “The Silsviss aren’t in suits. They want holes in the hull as little as we do.”

  They left a trail of bloody boot prints behind them.

  “If the bennies have no effect, what do we do?” Nicholin asked quietly. “Mashona can’t shoot all of them.”

  “Yeah, I can.”

  “The KC is a last resort,” Torin reminded her.

  “Like you said, Gunny, the Silsviss aren’t in suits. If we hole the hull . . .�
�

  “The whole place will seal shut. We risk injuring the hostages. We aren’t at war, and the Silsviss aren’t the enemy.”

  “Sure as fuk seem like the enemy to Lorkin,” Ressk growled.

  Binti shook her head. “The longer you two are together, the more you sound like Werst.”

  “If the Silsviss aren’t the enemy,” Nicholin ground out, “why are we here?”

  “We’re here because the Silsviss broke the law. Killing them is as much a final option as killing any other member of the Confederation.”

  “They killed Lorkin.”

  “And Mashona exercised her option.” Torin had barely known Lorkin, but he’d been a Marine and a Warden and later, when they had drinks in their hands instead of weapons, his team would tell the stories that would keep his memory alive. Her grief would be laced with gratitude because losing Ressk as well, or instead, would have ripped a piece off her heart. Telling Werst would have shredded her soul.

  “So what do we do?”

  “What if we decided to play it their way?”

  “Their way?” Cri Sawyes repeated.

  “I challenge their leader, one on one. Winner takes all.” Her heart began to beat harder, faster.

  “Do you think you could beat a young male in hisss prime? One whossse only thought isss to win?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gunny?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “You’re not in the kind of shape you were back then.” Binti raised a brow when Torin glanced over. “Yeah, I can read your mind. And you’re older now.”

  “Cyr Tyroliz isn’t just out of the egg.” The protest was involuntary. She had no real intention of fighting.

  “He was a Warlord.”

  “She was a Gunnery Sergeant,” Ressk pointed out. Stopped. Threw himself at a scuffed metal plate set into the bulkhead. “Finally. An auxiliary access.” He popped the cover and propped his slate on the protruding lip. “War’s over, they should start putting these things closer to the airlocks.”

  “For your convenience?” Binti turned to secure the way they’d come.

  “Why not?” He double-tapped his slate, the close-fitting HE gloves adding little bulk to his fingers. “I’m in.”

  Nicholin, in position a meter beyond the access, glanced back over his shoulder. “That was fast.”

  “After the first couple of stations they took out, the Primacy could get into these systems almost as fast. I said almost,” Torin added as Ressk snorted. “That’s what uniformity will do for you.”

  “Makes my job . . .” Ressk broke off. “This isn’t good.” He swiped his slate first left, then right. “Communication is out.”

  “What do you mean by out?”

  “Out. Inaccessible. Gone. As far as the station sysop is concerned, interior communications don’t exist. One of two things happened—the comm tech is alive and has been encouraged to wipe the system by Cyr Tyroliz, or he had one of his people physically destroy it. Same result either way—they can talk to each other, but everyone else has been cut off. Probably so the hostages can’t communicate and there’s no risk of anyone hacking in.”

  “A little excessive,” Nicholin declared.

  “The Silsviss go big or go home,” Torin told him, remembering a couple of thousand Silsviss against a single platoon of Marines. “If we grab the comm link off the corpse, can you get into it?”

  Ressk shrugged, the HE suit making the motion look more awkward than usual. “Maybe if we’d just left Silsviss, but I haven’t seen their tech in years and they do some weird shit. Here and now, I’d likely blow myself up.”

  “We’ll keep that option in reserve, then.”

  He flipped her off and ejected his slate.

  “They’re still in station control?”

  “Except the gunners. And the corpse.”

  “Let’s move.” Cyr Tyroliz had no reason to waste one of his limited personnel on the security feeds. The hostages were locked in, with no way to communicate, and, as far as he knew, the Wardens were being held off by his guns. He didn’t know they were in the station. On the other hand, the bennies and the gas were useless and they were unable to open negotiations with Cyr Tyroliz at a safe distance. Not a great situation, but, considering her previous interaction with the Silsviss, Torin wasn’t overly concerned.

  One of her people was dead.

  One of the people she’d agreed to protect was dead.

  She wasn’t concerned. She was angry.

  “So we’re just going to walk up to station control?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then Mashona starts shooting?”

  “No.” Torin ran through the variables. “Probably not.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The hatch to station control was open and unguarded. Five Silsviss stood by the communications board—the four that Baylet’s scanners had identified and the fifth most likely having arrived from engineering, given that no one once called Warlord would be imprudent enough to leave a weapon unattended.

  Odds were high the dead Silsviss was the second heat signature the Baylet had registered in engineering.

  Five to four.

  “I feel almost sorry for them,” Binti murmured.

  Torin saw Binti’s KC rise as she stepped over the hatch. Paused as Marie’s voice rang out from the board.

  “. . . also in violation of Statute 2772 pertaining to unregulated use of station communications by unlicensed operators. These violations are separate charges not pertaining to the larger issue of attempting to destroy a Justice Department vessel.”

  “Why can’t you shut her up!”

  Torin could answer that. The Justice Department could not be cut off from a Confederation facility. In order to keep Marie from maintaining a running commentary, Cyr Tyroliz would have to destroy or erase external communications the way he had internal. He didn’t need internal communications, but he needed to know what might be coming for him.

  “Why haven’t you destroyed that ship?”

  “The gun mounts are irregular, Ret Tyroliz. The aim is substandard.”

  Could be a bad translation. Could be Silsviss gunners weren’t as likely as Confederation gunners to declare, “Gun mounts are fukked, sir, and the aim is for shit.”

  “As mounting evidence suggests you couldn’t hit us if we were standing still,” Marie said, and even the Silsviss had to have been able to hear the smile in her voice, “you might as well surrender. We’re not leaving.”

  Torin made a mental note to add a commendation to Bilodeau’s file. Anyone who could annoy a Silsviss commander to the point where he’d lost his situational awareness, deserved to have that acknowledged. She’d talk to Paul Musselman. He could name a drink after her.

  “How long until the other shuttles arrive?”

  No surprise a Warlord could mobilize a sizable force; they were lucky it had taken time.

  “Another twenty-seven hours, Ret Tyroliz. Our shuttles haven’t flown since this station appeared.”

  His lips drew back off his teeth. “The Confederation desired us tethered.”

  What the Confederation desired and what the law supported were two different things. The youngest of the Younger Races needed to learn that. Right after they learned to get the fuk over themselves.

  “Ret Tyroliz! I’ve got the scanners working!” The Silsviss sitting at the board, chair twisted sideways to accommodate his tail, glanced up at his leader, then back at the screens. “The Justice ship has weapons, but they haven’t been armed.”

  “They refuse to return fire?” His throat pouch inflated, and he slapped the deck with the metal band around the end of his tail. “Mammals do not understand war!”

  And Torin said, “We’re not at war.”

  All five spun around to face
her. Cyr Tyroliz roared—she wasn’t under his command; she wouldn’t give him the military honorific. She shot him a flat, unfriendly glare.

  Behind her, Ressk snapped his teeth together.

  Four of the pronged weapons were pointed at her. Had they been at war, had Torin been in Cyr Tyroliz’s place, they’d have already been fired. Had they been at war, she’d have had Binti shoot from the hatch, secure in the knowledge that she’d make headshots and that if there were the kind of collateral damage that led to a holed hull, well, those things happened in war.

  Cyr Tyroliz had no idea how lucky he was, but Torin would bet his challenge had been involuntary.

  War on Silsviss at the Warlord level was as much intimidation as actual fighting. If he had to personally take on all comers, he’d never have a moment to consolidate power. A lower ranking Silsviss would have attacked, like the Silsviss now laid out by Lorkin’s body. In the presence of the Warlord, these lower ranking Silsviss couldn’t attack without orders.

  His tongue tasted the air. “I know you.”

  And he wouldn’t give the order because he saw Torin’s presence in the control room alone as a personal challenge.

  “You knew me as Staff Sergeant Kerr.”

  “You have a skull on your wall.”

  “I do.”

  “So do I.”

  “We also both have recent dead, you killed four more taking this station for no good reason, and I’m done with this whole thing.”

  The Silsviss, like most sentient species, were omnivores although their teeth were pointed for ripping and tearing. “This whole thing, as you say, will be done when I kill you.”