by Tanya Huff
“Smart people would want to spread the jumps out as much as possible,” Craig protested. “Keep from establishing a pattern.”
“Smart people,” Werst snorted, spraying crumbs, “wouldn’t have sent up flares by selling the artifacts. These are not smart people.”
“Major Sujuno?”
She looked up from entering the day’s notes into her slate. H’san security had wiped out all conductivity, reducing them to isolated programming, no scanners of any kind, no coms. Her jaw unit hadn’t been this silent since she’d gone home on leave and . . . Her slate creaked as her grip tightened, and she forced her hand to relax. Took a deep breath, banished the memories, and beckoned Toporov into the crypt. He moved quickly for such a large man, but not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of red dust from following him through the overlap in the clear plastic sheeting.
Half a meter from the enormous stone sarcophagus she was using as a standing desk, he fell into a reasonable approximation of at ease—learned behaviors made it easier to maintain order, so from the beginning she’d run the dig as close to a military maneuver as she could stomach. “Dion’s found the next symbol.”
“Is he certain, Sergeant? Because I seem to recall that the mark he found the day before yesterday went absolutely nowhere.” Dion’s information, the information he’d pulled from an ancient crystal allegedly found discarded in the Central Library’s trash, was more a suggestion than an actual map. The degenerating, millennia-old memories of the last H’san who’d seen the weapons cache had contained nothing as useful as directions, but rather a blank verse ode to symbols scratched throughout a city of the dead. Dion, who had an annoying habit of randomly announcing he was an expert in ancient H’san, remained convinced the symbols marked the route to the weapons. He’d been right about the location of the planet as well as about the planetary security, so Sujuno was giving him the benefit of the doubt on the symbols. She didn’t know if Dion had found their backer or if his bragging had led their backer to him. Nor did she care. The only thing that mattered was that her payment, upon delivery of the weapons, would be enough to register a progenitor and begin her family line again.
“He’s pretty certain, Major. He found another control panel behind it.”
“Behind the symbol?”
“Yeah, tucked inside the block of stone. The front face sheared off, pretty as anything.” One huge hand sketched the fall in the air. “And there it was.”
“And what does it do?”
Toporov began to shrug, caught her eye, and turned it into an uncomfortable twitch. “Can’t say yet, sir. Pirate doesn’t want to crack the case without an air lock to keep the dust out.”
In spite of her best efforts to keep it still, her hair flicked back behind her ears. She hated the dust. Suspected it was actually one of the H’san’s subtler traps. The fine, red grit got in everywhere, adhered to moisture, and, eventually, created an impenetrable barrier. Katherine McKenna, out front when they’d breached this sector, had breathed deep in the initial release and suffocated before any of them had realized the problem. McKenna had been Corps of Engineers and the team’s medic. Sujuno had been furious about losing another one of her people to carelessness.
She was still angry about the loss of Timin di’Geirah, and that disaster had occurred back on the first day they’d breached the tombs. Along with the progenitor price, she had to provide proof there’d be sufficient gender divergences after the change to qui. Timin hadn’t yet agreed to sign on, but she was certain he would have by the end of the mission. His carelessness had cost her.
In comparison, all McKenna’s death had cost was comfort; the whole team had been living in filters and would have to remain in filters until they cleared the dust.
Her hair tried to flick forward again when Toporov held out a piece of paper—two-millennia–old paper pulled from one the first tombs they’d opened—but she held it still and waited until he set it on the tomb to pick it up. “I see he’s drawn up a plan.” A double air lock, each section only large enough for one person and both set up with six point four nine minutes of air exchange. “That’s . . . precise.”
“The math is on the back. Pirate says he’ll need to rework it if anyone else goes in.”
She didn’t flip the page, trusting the math if not the pirate himself. Although, credit where due, she’d only had to correct his assumptions once and he’d been careful not to touch her since, his response significantly better than most others of their ridiculously tactile species. “Build it. And tell him to take food, water, and a bucket in with him. We’ve a finite supply of filters and there’s no telling how long this dust will be with us.”
“About that, Major, Verr says she can fly the Katrien’s ship if we need . . .”
“No.” She wasn’t denying that Verr could fly the ship—a Marine pilot, the ex-lieutenant had flown them through Susumi space and then switched to the Taykan VTA they’d taken down to the landing site. Verr could fly anything she could get into the air. Had her bonded’s temper not gotten him discharged, had she not followed Wen into a civilian life they were both ill-suited to, Verr would have continued flying M74s until the final moment of the war. Sujuno was casting no doubt on Verr’s ability to fly the Katrien ship, merely on the necessity.
Showing more perception than usual, Toporov seemed to take her meaning from the single syllable. He nodded, spun on one heel, and slipped back through the overlap, calling for Verr and Wen to bring the construction materials before he’d cleared the plastic.
If this was the correct control panel, and not another dummy or another trap, then they were close. Close enough they had no need to risk a supply run.
Because ships emerged from Susumi space minutes after they entered, regardless of distance traveled, there were academics who claimed the time spent within a mathematical construct was irrelevant. Those people were idiots. In Susumi space, the ship and those she carried defined their own reality and with reality so tightly defined, relevant things were inevitably squeezed out of dark corners.
Torin knew how to deal with Marines and a Marine’s problems. Mission prep helped, but this time there wasn’t much of it. Not yet. So when Werst needed to fight, she stepped in and called it training. When Ressk wielded code like a weapon, she minimized collateral damage and calibrated his sights. On day three, after a night when her dead died again while she fought against the drag of melted glass, unable to get to them, she sat shoulder to shoulder with Binti in the darkened galley and watched recordings of a Rakva soap opera with the translator off, adding their own dialogue to the ruffled feathers and high drama. She didn’t need to ask why Binti was there. She didn’t need to explain why she was.
Marines, she understood.
Craig’s demons were remarkably similar.
On day two, Torin woke with Craig’s arms wrapped tightly around her, his heart racing, his breath huffing out hard and hot against the top of her head. On day four, she woke crouched on the deck ready to fight—thrown out of bed by his old panic of too many people and too little air. In the first case, she was there for him to hold as long as he needed to. In the second, her reassurances were less passive and, counterintuitively, used up a fair bit of air.
Alamber . . .
He’d done what he had to in order to survive in Big Bill’s criminal organization after his vantru died. Torin appreciated his competence, admired his courage, and acknowledged his vantru had been a viciously twisted excuse for sentience who’d thoroughly screwed him over. At an age when sex should have been play and exploration, he’d been taught to use it, and the touch di’Taykans needed, as a means to an end. He was brilliant and screamingly insecure and, in spite of the certain knowledge that he’d broken any number of laws, Torin had no intention of turning him over to the authorities even though she suspected she should. Suspected it might be better for him to get his shit straightened out by professionals during an off
icial rehabilitation. But he had no family to stand for him and, given a choice, he’d chosen to stay. She wouldn’t be another person who held power over him and abandoned him.
After a year, he still doubted Torin wanted him there because she wouldn’t have sex with him.
He was an adult. Old enough to die for the Confederation. Older than many of the Corps’ new recruits.
Taykans were a communal species. If they could help it, they never slept alone. Most often, Alamber slept with Binti, sometimes he slept with Werst and Ressk, and . . .
. . . on day five . . .
“Boss?”
“All right, come on.” She slid back against Craig and lifted the covers so Alamber could crawl in beside her. He squirmed around until she swatted him, then settled with his head on her shoulder, legs long enough to wrap around hers and Craig’s, his skin cool and soft, his hair slowly stilling, the metal of the masker warming between them.
This wasn’t sex. It was comfort. Family. Needing to know he belonged. It happened most often while they were in Susumi space—Binti had a theory it was tied to the distinctive hum of the Susumi engines and they’d shared a silent agreement not to speculate on what had caused it. His scars were layered and deep, but every now and then he let her give him a few hours of peace. By morning, he’d be back to insecurity and innuendo.
“We have got to get another di’Taykan in this crew,” she murmured when Alamber’s breathing slowed and the grip on her arm finally eased.
Craig kissed the back of her neck, his arm wrapped around her, one big hand cupping Alamber’s hip. “Not arguing.”
“What do you want?” With only one other di’Taykan on the entire planet, Sujuno hadn’t needed to look up from her slate when she’d heard the rustle of the plastic sheeting being moved aside. The scent was unmistakable. “Turn your masker back up,” she snapped before he could get any closer. Most di’Taykan commanders allowed maskers to be removed when there were only di’Taykan, present but most did not mean all; her vows kept her from indulging in such pointless excesses. If he chose to remove it among the Humans and Krai, well, that had nothing to do with her.
“They’ve almost got the air lock built.”
“Good.”
“I could be in there for a couple of days. Or longer.”
She looked up then to see his lime-green eyes darken as more and more light receptors opened.
He shuffled his feet, his hair flicked around his head in small arrhythmic arcs, and, when he finally realized she wasn’t going to fill in the blanks, sighed. “I thought we should spend some time together before I got sealed in.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because . . .” His fingertip traced a pattern she didn’t understand on the lid of the sarcophagus. “. . . I’ll be alone in there and you’ll be alone out here and Humans and Krai are all very well for a while when you’re not about to be alone and Timin’s dead.”
“Major, I may have found something.”
The others were searching the crypts, searching the sarcophagi, searching the bodies, but Timin had remained in the main hall of the necropolis, frowning down at his slate and then up at the symbols that made up the balusters of the balcony railing. As Lieutenant di’Geirah had been a linguist within the Intelligence Service, Sujuno had kept the greater part of her attention on him.
“There,” he said, as she joined him in the center of the hall. “If Dion’s right, then that sequence ends in the symbol we need.”
She could barely see the difference between the symbols he pointed at, but then, she didn’t need to.
“Logically,” Timin continued, moving toward the far wall, “the door, exit, opening, govian, should be under the symbol.”
Sujuno fell into step beside him. “I don’t see it.”
“The H’san know how to . . .”
The floor fell out from under him, what had looked like solid stone shattering into hundreds, thousands of tiny pieces. She felt the side of her foot begin to dip, and time fractured as she jumped away. She saw Timin throw out a hand, reaching, his eyes black, his hair clamped tight to his head. She knew where the edge was. She could step forward enough to grab his hand. To yank him to safety. To save him. To touch him. Hand to hand. Skin to skin.
No.
Time pieced itself together.
Timin disappeared, screaming. The fingers of one hand slapped the edge, but gravity gave him no chance to hang on.
By the time he hit the bottom and the soft/hard, wet impact cut off the scream, the others had gathered.
“Should we . . .” Toporov began.
Sujuno cut him off. “Lieutenant di’Geirah is dead. We would be of as little assistance to him as he now will be to us. We should check that section of wall for an exit to the weapons cache.”
“Major?”
He’d moved closer. She stared at his reaching hand until he lowered it then nodded, once, and said, “Get out.”
“Jump ends in three. Two. One. And we’re out.”
The song Promise sang to keep them moving, to keep them safe, chased away the hum of Susumi, and Craig felt his shoulder muscles relax.
“Coreward buoy, registered.” Sitting second, Werst enlarged the pertinent screens. “We’re not only alive, we’re right where we’re supposed to be, three and a half minutes after we left.”
As a hundred kilometers of translucent netting harvested the energy of their Susumi wave, the buoy brought Promise’s front thrusters on to slow their emergent speed. “You know,” Craig growled, hands held above the board, “I only thought I hated giving over control to the docking master. That’s all over soft compared to how I feel about handing her over to a buoy.”
“Garn chreen,” Ressk breathed from the second row of jump seats. “I’ve never seen so many stars.”
Craig hadn’t either. Facing into the heart of the galaxy, even as far out as they still were, meant facing into a blaze of light, individual stars lost in the center of the display.
“I’ve heard that the Mictok homeworld never gets dark,” Binti said from directly behind him.
“Yeah, and that’s why evolution went with the exoskeleton.” Twisting slightly, Craig could see Alamber in the seat beside Torin, his legs crossed, his pale feet bare. “All the bugs are from farther in. Ow. What?”
He saw the corner of Torin’s mouth twitch when Binti leaned over and flicked the di’Taykan on the ear. “We don’t say bugs.”
“So we say what?” Alamber sneered. “Evolved insectoid species?”
“We say Mictok. Or Ciptran,” Torin told him, eyes on the stars. “The same way we say di’Taykan or Krai or Human.”
“Yeah, but, Boss, that net out there? Probably extruded from Mictok ass.”
“Your point?”
“They creep me the sanLi out.”
“They creep everyone the hell out, Alamber. They’re giant spiders. Suck it up, be polite.”
“Get it off me. Get it off me,” Binti said quietly.
“Hollice?” Craig asked as Torin’s left hand twitched toward her torso.
“Glicksohn.”
He liked to think it was progress that the names of the dead were being spoken. Sliding the incoming data into a temporary file, he tossed her a grin. With nothing to choose between the three dealers, they’d gone with a random draw and Torin’s expression when it turned out they were chasing the biscuit warmer had been aces. “The buoy’s cleared us for Abalae.” The codes tapped in, he felt Promise alter her course. Even a million point six kilometers out from the planet—no one jumped close in the Core—space didn’t seem as big in here.
He already missed the dark.
Their new registry raised no alarms when Commitment docked as an independent trader on the most stripped down of Abalae’s three stations.
“If I hack the sysop, I could narr
ow our target.” Irritation added volume to the slap of Ressk’s feet against the deck as all six of them made their way along the docking arm toward the main bulk of the station. “Once I’m in this station, I can squirt over to the others . . .”
“Never going to unhear that,” Binti muttered.
“. . . and amalgamate the data before I sift it. Give me a couple of hours and I can come up with the registry number of every ship that makes regular runs. A few hours more and I can hand over a list of their crews.”
“We don’t need a list of their crews.”
“Yeah, but I could still give you one.”
“You’ll dux out the ship we need faster if we can narrow the parameters before you start,” Craig told him. “Faster you’re in and out, less likely you are to end up with your balls in a vise.”
“And it’s been a while since any of us have been dirtside,” Torin added. Most of them had taken personal time during the ship’s refit—Craig had refused to leave the dockyard, Alamber had stayed with Craig, the rest of them had visited family, Torin had caught hell for not bringing Craig with her—but they’d had very little down time since the team had gone active. “We could use the break.”
“We’re lucky they had seats for all of us,” Alamber said as they entered the waiting area outside the tether’s boarding gate. “We were looking at four days of total boredom if we’d had to wait for the next drop. As it is, we won’t be here long enough to overhaul the station’s entirely out-of-date entertainment options. They’d have thanked us,” he added when Torin’s eyebrow rose.
“You know, we have a shuttle,” Craig began, but Alamber cut him off.
“Landing fees are stupidly expensive on any planet with an elevator system and this one’s got three.”
“All extruded out of Mictok ass,” Werst noted.
Torin crossed to look out the nearer of the two, meter-high, concave ports that broke up the outer bulkhead. The surface was smudged and pitted, but it looked structurally sound with no weak points an assault team could take advantage of. She leaned forward, one hand against the glass, weight shifting to account for the duffel bag hung over her shoulder, and counted nine moving lights. Nine ships, too many stars to count.