by Tanya Huff
Binti stared at the grave robbers’ ship. “If I hit it right . . .” She pointed at something no else in the control room could see. “. . . there, I can disable it.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then boom.”
“Boom is bad.” Craig reminded them, although none of them, singly or collectively, needed reminding. “If any debris heads dirtside, the satellites could backtrack the shot and decide we need to be dealt with.”
“Not to mention the radiation wave from the Susumi engines,” Ressk added dryly.
“And that.” That uncontained Susumi radiation only affected organics at the cellular level wasn’t particularly comforting. Torin had always been fond of her cellular levels. That said, she trusted Binti to make the shot. She’d trusted her to make harder shots. “Since sweet fuk all about this has been under our control, let’s at least stop them from running. Do it.”
Binti took over Ressk’s chair. Rolled the tension out of her shoulders. Pulled up the cutting laser. Set it on pulse.
“Wait!” Eyes still locked on his screens, left hand dancing over numbers, Alamber waved his right, hair waving in time. “I’ve cracked the satellite system!”
“Hairline crack,” Ressk snorted, ducking the di’Taykan’s flailing arm and leaning in over his lap to check the scrolling code.
“Got further than you got, old man.”
Ressk snapped his teeth together.
Alamber murmured, “Promises, promises.” And then continued. “The block they used that’s keeping instrumentation from spotting the ship? It’s not just on the ship. It extends into the lower atmosphere—it’s why they bothered setting up a geostationary orbit. If we stay inside that narrow corridor, it’ll not only keep the satellites from spotting us but take us right to where they landed.”
Binti lifted her hands away from the laser controls and glanced up at Torin.
“You’re sure?” Torin wouldn’t have asked any of the others—her ex-Marines, Craig—if they weren’t sure, they wouldn’t have spoken. Alamber’s more flexible world view made his definitives surprisingly malleable.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. And finally said, “Eighty percent sure, Boss. I can’t get any further into the satellites without being spotted.”
“Ressk?”
Ressk backed away, shaking his head. “If he can’t get in, I can’t get in, Gunny.”
Twenty percent chance of dying, then. “Everyone gear up. Shuttle in fifteen.” She could live with twenty percent.
“I’ll lock the board.” Craig moved Alamber out of his seat. “How narrow a corridor?”
“Please,” Alamber blew out a dismissive puff of air. “There’s plenty of room. It’s four meters, six centimeters wider than the shuttle.”
Two meters, three centimeters on each side. For all Craig owned vacuum, he didn’t have the hours in on VTA. Torin shifted the odds to a twenty-four, maybe twenty-five percent chance of dying. Still doable. “Marines, meet me at the galley in ten.”
Halfway out the hatch, Binti glanced over at Werst before asking, “For snacks?”
“For weapons.”
“Chrick! Not,” Werst added hurriedly, “that I want to shoot someone, I’m just tired of feeling naked.”
Torin thought of how she’d felt before the drop to Abalae. “I understand.”
Alamber grinned. “I like feeling naked. I like feeling you na . . .”
“Gunny?”
“And that’s why we keep the guns locked up.”
It didn’t look like secure weapons storage. It looked like a drawer for storing perishables. Enemies boarding the Promise would first have to find where the weapons were being kept, and then get it open without Torin’s DNA.
“Look, if anyone gets as far as this drawer, they’re already well armed and my DNA has been spread out over a few parsecs of space.”
While acknowledging that the entire point of using Torin’s team was that some people couldn’t be stopped by the Justice Department’s current methods, the Wardens still hadn’t been happy about it.
Torin winced as the needles jabbed into the fingers wrapped around the drawer’s handle. Prints weren’t enough, the security system required living blood and, once disengaged, more paperwork than Torin had ever seen, and she’d filled in as Sho’quo Company’s First Sergeant for a while before the drop to Silsvah. She assumed the paperwork was Justice’s guarantee that she’d open the drawer only when absolutely necessary. They weren’t wrong.
“What are we going to tell them?”
She turned to Ressk. He was already in the modified version of combats Justice allowed them, minus the boots, and he didn’t look happy.
“I can’t scrub the lock report without scrubbing the ship’s entire memory.” He squatted beside her as the drawer opened, her identity confirmed. “Alamber thought he could corrupt the file, insert joke here, but after about thirty-six hours, he had to admit defeat.” When Torin raised a brow, his nostril ridges closed slightly. “We heard Colonel Hurrs’ orders the same time you did, Gunny, and we had time in Susumi to fill.”
The first KC-7 was Werst’s, but Ressk was there, he could help. Hers next. Then Binti’s.
“Gunny?” His tone was a worried poke. “What are we going to tell the Justice Department when they ask why?”
“I . . .” Torin emphasized the pronoun as she reached up and set Binti’s scope on the counter. “. . . don’t know why, not yet. When I’m sure, that’s what I’ll tell them.”
“Yeah but, that’s . . .” He stared at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
She pulled out an ammo pack and wondered what he saw.
The shuttle cabin looked a lot like Promise’s control room—six chairs instead of five, three rows of two; pilot, second, four passengers. Behind, a small cargo hold. The biggest differences were the weapons stations to both port and starboard—the weapons removed before decommissioning. Every now and then over the last year, particularly when Justice could give them no definitive answer on the firepower they’d be facing, Torin considered using Alamber’s contacts to pull a couple of missile launchers off the black market. It wasn’t the law that stopped her—she wasn’t sure how she felt about discovering that—it was that, in the end, with a fairly good idea of how those “contacts” would respond, she refused to add herself to the list of those who used Alamber.
Discolored patches in the gray paint and empty sections behind unlabeled panels indicated that the weapons weren’t the only things missing. Torin figured if the Navy wanted to clean and shine before they designated the shuttle as surplus, she was all for it. Werst had pointed out that no one had wanted the Navy’s porn stores anyway. Alamber had begged to differ. Which had led to a conversation about begging and differing Torin was still trying to forget.
“I’m not reading surface water.” Torin, a fan of knowing what kind of shit they were likely to land in, had no problem giving up the second seat so Ressk could work the scanners. “Looks like we were right about what supplies Jamers was bringing in.”
They’d loaded water enough for five days. Two and a half days in, Torin would have to make a decision about whether or not they continued the hunt. She could only hope that people who didn’t give a shit about the death that would come with another war would give an equal lack of shit to covering their tracks.
“Didn’t someone say this planet was inside the edge of the old habitable zone?” Binti asked, securing the knives in her boot sheaths. “Doesn’t habitable require water?”
“Variable definitions of habitable?” Werst offered.
“Surface water probably burned off when the star went red. It’s a good thing there wasn’t more oxygen in the atmosphere or we’d have lost that also and would have to spend our entire time dirtside in HE suits.” As it was, the Humans wouldn’t be running any marathons, an
d the Krai were likely to get headachy and cranky. Crankier. Alamber would be happy about the air quality and unhappy about the heat, although the environmental tech in his clothes would deal with most of it. She made a mental note to prod Justice once again about getting them actual combats. Half the people they faced had managed to find sets, and it pissed her off that while her team had to wear biometric cuffs to synchronize their medical data, the bad guys got to take advantage of embedded tech significantly better than that provided by civilian wear.
The snicker slipped out before she could stop it.
“Gunny?”
“Just thinking about choices.” She’d agreed to work behind Justice’s back. To lie to every person in known space except two Intelligence officers and the five people on the shuttle with her. But she drew the line at buying black market combats. There was something very fukked up about . . .
The shuttle jerked. Torin slammed up against her webbing. She heard swearing, boots leaving the floor and banging back down. A hundred drops had her teeth clamped together and her tongue safely out from between them. It sounded like Alamber hadn’t been so prepared.
“Craig?”
“Lightning.” Strain tightened his voice.
“This high?” They were still in the upper atmosphere.
“Apparently.”
The shuttle wobbled.
They’d shifted close to a meter with the first hit. Five centimeters with the second. They had two meters three centimeters clearance. Still plenty of room.
Then the left side of the shuttle tipped up and they slid hard to the right, Craig swearing like a sailor—a steady and unimaginative stream of fuk fuk fuk fuk.
This wasn’t her first drop while taking fire. She knew the feel of an energy weapon impacting with the solid plates of a military shuttle. She knew the smell of ozone. The feel of free falling in a heavy, spinning can with no way to control her descent. The need to trust in the pilot’s skills because she had no choice. That this time the pilot was a man she loved made no difference to how much she hated the lack of control.
The maneuvering thrusters shoved her hard into the left side of the webbing. Held her there for one heartbeat. Two. Three. The spinning stopped and technically she supposed they weren’t free falling any longer no matter what it felt like.
“This part always takes too serly chricka long,” Werst snarled behind her.
“Brace for impact!”
“About fukking time.”
Torin set her pack down in the shade at the base of a huge, red slab of rock and looked back along the impact ditch to where the shuttle rested, half buried in sand. They’d been twice lucky. First, that the satellites had only been able to get off one shot and, second, that Craig had threaded the shuttle into a gully instead of flattening it against one of the many cliffs. “Nice landing.”
“Tell us another,” Craig snorted.
“We walked away and no one’s shooting at us. I’m counting it a win.”
“You have very low standards.”
She turned to find him squinting up at her, deep creases at the corners of his eyes. There was a still a smear of blood on his upper lip. His nose had turned purple and had begun to swell. He never tightened his webbing—said it interfered with his flying—and when the ship had hit, he’d slammed his face into the board. Only experience had kept her from overreacting to the amount of blood as she’d worked to get him free.
Later, when she checked his cuff, his stats indicated no real damage and it appeared the greater damage was to the tech; all five cuffs had stopped transmitting to hers. Or hers had stopped receiving. She hated not having access to the physical status of her team. I’m fine could and had meant anything up to and including broken bones.
But, this time, they’d all walked away.
Nothing broken, not even Craig’s nose, no one badly hurt.
She smiled. He smiled back at her, the red between his teeth familiar. “They work for me.”
“What do?”
“Low standards.”
He laughed, winced, and spat a mouthful of blood to one side. “Lucky me.”
“Maybe later.”
“We can’t be too far off course.” Standing just outside the hatch, Ressk held out his slate at shoulder height. “If I scan for the Younger Races, I should be able to get a read on the position of the grave robbers.”
Werst glanced up from where he was piling salvaged supplies up against the side of the shuttle. “You think they’re stupid enough to leave organic evidence?”
“I think they’re stupid enough to . . .”
The impact threw Werst about four meters and slammed him down on his ass in the sand. “Ressk!” Nostril ridges shut, he forced himself up onto his feet and staggered back through the puddle of melted sand by the half-buried hatch. “Ressk!” He dropped to his knees when the sand grew too hot underfoot, but even a meter away, smoke stinging his eyes, he could see no remains. Smell nothing but scorched glass and steel. When he reached out to dig, a hand closed around his wrist just as the skin on his fingertips began to blister and pulled him back.
He fought. Against the hands holding him. Against the arm locked around him. Against screaming. Howling. Wailing.
“Hey! Werst! Churick! I’m okay!”
A familiar palm against his cheek. He blinked. Focused. Took a deep breath as the hands and the arm released him and fell forward against Ressk’s chest, gripping handfuls of his jacket. “How?”
“I saved him.”
Werst lifted his head to see Alamber grinning down at them, brushing sand off his clothes.
“It occurred to me, thinking about the H’san, that the way they’re built, they’ve got to be all about redundancies, right? So, they’re going to have something in place in case intruders actually get through the whole death by satellite thing and make it to the surface. I was about to point out that locking onto a slate—or the antique H’san equivalent—would make an efficient targeting system for that redundancy when I saw Ressk put thumb to screen, so I grabbed his ankles and hauled his ass back in the shuttle as fire fell from above. Metaphorical fire. I think it was actually the same type of high energy pulse that hit the ship.”
As terror and grief bled away, Werst could hear adrenaline burning off in Alamber’s explanation, see it in the speed pale hair flipped around his head. He touched his forehead to Ressk’s, opened his nostril ridges so their edges touched, and exhaled. Then he pushed himself away—although not entirely away, his fingers still crushed the thick fabric of Ressk’s jacket—and looked up at the di’Taykan. “Thank you. Agro se terker tesergerr ih.”
His hair stilled. “You’re welcome?”
“There’s a life between us,” he translated. “A debt.”
“He cracked my elbow on the edge of the hatch,” Ressk muttered. “Hurts like fuk.”
“You’re not a puddle of melted glass,” Werst reminded him, punctuating his observation with a shake. He heard a soft huff of breath and turned to see Gunny’s lips—it had been her arm around his chest—pressed into a thin pale line, Ryder’s hand on her shoulder, and he remembered how Sh’quo Company had died, melted into the planet’s surface by a Primacy weapon.
“I think we can safely say . . .” Binti poked her head out of the hatch and jerked back at the heat still rising off the ground. “. . . that the ancient H’san are a bag of dicks.”
Eyes over the edge, Torin could see no danger, so she lifted herself up onto the top of the cliff. The Krai were better climbers, but she needed to get the lay of the land. Stepping away from the drop, she brushed off her hands and shifted the strap of her KC so the weapon rested more comfortably across her shoulders. Craig’s flying had been even better and, given their speed, luckier than she’d assumed. He’d hit the only surface in sight that gave them a chance of surviving the crash, sand being more forgivin
g than rock. The plateau she stood on stretched out unnaturally flat, kilometer after kilometer of red granite, the edges of black slabs rising up at irregular intervals. A long shadow hugging the ground in the distance might be another cliff, might be low clouds.
Off to her right, the huge, red sun hung low on the horizon. The light seemed—not artificial, she’d spent a good portion of her life under the artificial lights of ships and stations, but like it had presence. Substance. Like they’d feel it sliding past their skin as they moved through it. She didn’t like it.
Not that it mattered.
The gravity was a little heavier than home and a noticeable amount heavier than ships and stations. It wasn’t optimal for any of them, but hopefully they wouldn’t be here long enough for it to become a problem. The smell of scorched metal covered any local scents although she had to admit there were valid reasons the Human sense of smell was generally considered to be piss useless. The air was completely still and the silence a little unnerving.
Returning to the edge, she braced a forearm against her thigh and leaned forward until she could see faces staring up at her. “The people we’re looking for are about ten to twenty klicks back that way.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We might as well climb out here, I don’t see a faster route. We’ll secure a line and send the packs up first. Ressk, to me.”
“On my way, Gunny.” Coil of rope over his shoulder, Ressk started up the rock face.
Torin moved back, out of the way. Arboreal, no Krai would need help making a climb a Human had managed. Eyes on the horizon, the comforting weight of a weapon in her hands, she made a note of how clearly voices carried in the silken air.
“We can’t use our slates. How does she know where to go?” Alamber protested. “It’s not like she was looking out the window and spotted them on the way down.”
“She was Recon,” Werst told him.
“And what? That gives her magic mapping powers? ‘She was Recon’ explains exactly nothing.”