by Tanya Huff
Understandably, Torin allowed.
“. . . so he waited until he saw the plinth H’san unlocking the doors. Fired four shots center mass to no effect and ran. There’s three rooms of guardians by each of the bunker entrances.”
“We call them entrances because we can’t fukking use them as exits,” muttered the other Krai.
Major Sujuno squared her shoulders. “The sergeant died so the rest of us could get to safety. It didn’t take long before we realized we were trapped. If we cross the threshold, on this side or the other, the H’san roil out through those doors like seratts. We’ve examined their armor, and a standard round will go through certain points . . .”
At which point Torin realized that the pile of junk the pair of Krai stood beside was metal plate and leather straps and entirely the wrong level of tech for the H’san who’d buried the bunker under their interred dead.
“. . . because the armor is designed to protect against the energy weapons they’re carrying, not a tungsten carbide core designed for maximum penetration.”
“The energy weapons?”
“They’re biometric, keyed to the H’san. Every weapon in here is keyed to the H’san. I’ve got someone working on cracking it, and if we can get one of the big guns operating, it may turn the tide, but—bottom line—Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, there’s too many of them. We’re trapped.”
“If there’s that many of them, why didn’t we see them in the corridors?”
“You wouldn’t. If no one crosses the threshold for . . . What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Forty-nine minutes, Major.”
“If no one crosses the threshold for forty-nine minutes, most of them regroup, taking the dead with them behind the doors. We can’t get an accurate count of the number left on patrol, but if we stay by the threshold for more than seven minutes, one of them will charge the door. The first time it happened, the outer door went down. We lost the middle door the second time. So far, we’ve stopped them before they reach the inner doors. I’m not certain they’re intentionally sacrificing themselves to drive us back, but that’s the end result.” She turned, shining her light toward the rear wall of the barracks where five or six H’san were piled between the ends of the final two platforms, looking even more familiarly dead than the single body at Torin’s feet. “There’s another pile like this on the other side. Just after we dropped the third H’san, Corporal Keo thought she could use the flamethrower in her nine to simultaneously seal all three doors before another patrol showed up.”
The doors were approximately seven meters apart. Torin tried to work out the angle. “That’s not possible.”
“How unfortunate you weren’t here, Gunnery Sergeant.”
Too flat to be disdain, Torin couldn’t work out what the major’s voice was hiding. She decided not to ask if anyone had tried to stop the heavy gunner from making a suicide run. Odds were, the answer would make her angry and, if the major was telling the truth, they had to work together to get free of the guardians. At the moment, she saw no reason to believe the major was lying. Her reaction to Ressk’s suggestion of automatic defenses had been entirely honest.
“They ripped Keo’s exo off after they killed her,” the lieutenant said, teeth yellow in the light of the PIDs. “They don’t like technology.”
“What happens if you leave all your tech behind?” Ressk asked.
The major laughed, all shards and edges. “They don’t like us either.”
The silence stretched. Torin contemplated having common ground with a dead H’san, then Ressk crouched beside the body. “Is this blood?”
“What else would it be?” the major snapped, half a centimeter of hair curling dismissively.
“Don’t know yet. Have you done a dissection? Checked to see if you can affect their operating system?”
“They’re dead H’san. Walking around,” snarled the second of the major’s Krai.
“Using weapons,” the lieutenant added.
“Okay.” Ressk poked at the liquid and sniffed his finger. “Revenk!” He scrubbed his finger against the floor. “Point is, there’s no such thing as zombies. This isn’t blood; rough guess it’s a vector to keep the current running through desiccated tissue. And just because we wouldn’t turn our dead into an automated security system, doesn’t mean the ancient H’san haven’t.”
Since Torin was clearly not intended to hear Binti’s response describing the ancient H’san, she let it go. “How long have you been trapped, Major?”
The mask stiffened. “Not quite two days.”
Torin glanced back at the pile of dead H’san. In less than two days, the major’s team had made a dozen or more attempts to break free. She couldn’t decide if she admired their tenacity or was appalled by the way they kept repeating the same action, expecting a different result.
“What happened to her body?” Werst asked suddenly, locking a flat unfriendly stare on the major. “Your heavy gunner’s body? And the sergeant’s? You can’t go out for them and we didn’t see them. Are they both around on the other side?”
“She told you.” The second Krai stepped away from the wall, hands curled into fists, nostril ridges half closed. “They take the dead in with them.”
Werst glanced over at Torin and when she nodded, curious about where he was going with this, asked, “Has anything other than dead H’san come back out?”
“This is Dion, our expert on the ancient H’san.” Sujuno prodded Dion in the hip with her boot. “He’s the next thing to useless, but he’s all we’ve got.”
Even in the big common room with its jellied chairs and feeding rounds over by the food prep area, non-H’san were more comfortable on the floor, so they’d laid out Dion’s bedroll near the counter where he could sit up, leaning back against the glass. Right arm curled against his body, Dion had spread the rolled sheets of acetate they’d found in the offices out around him and had used a multitude of colors to isolate symbols and symbol sets. The word wet had been written in blue next to a series of symbols circled in blue, then crossed out and replaced with a red word Sujuno couldn’t read. Maybe staff? had been scrawled in black over the red.
He ignored both her boot and her comments.
“That wound’s infected.”
Sujuno glanced over to see Kerr studying Dion’s bare right arm, too swollen now to fit comfortably in a sleeve. Purple/red lines snaked out from under the dressing, climbing both up toward his shoulder and down into his hand. According to the Krai, his fingers looked like uncooked sausages. When Dion had recoiled, they’d snapped their teeth in unison and laughed.
“Really? Infected? Thank the gods you’re here, Gunnery Sergeant or we might never have noticed that.” When Kerr did nothing but raise a questioning brow in her direction, she drove her fingernails into her palms and kept her voice level. “We sealed it, but modern antibiotics are barely slowing the progress of what’s in the wound.”
“Dead H’san.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t know her,” Dion muttered, glancing up from his notes and back down again, as though the sudden appearance of strangers at the bottom of a necropolis wasn’t worth his time. His eyelids were pink and puffy. “Is this a rescue? If it isn’t, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be, I’d prefer another scholar or an actual physician rather than one more example of how an appalling number of theoretically civilized people prefer violence to thought.”
Sujuno considered proving his point by prodding him again with some force behind her boot. “Gunnery Sergeant Kerr works for the Justice Department. She’s here to arrest us.”
“Is that so? So scholarship is a crime now?” he demanded, smearing the sweat on his forehead with the back of his left hand.
Kerr’s lip curled. “No, but trespass, theft, desecration of multiple grave sites, and murder are.”
They were to be blamed for more than t
respass, theft, desecration, and murder; she could read it in the stiffness of the gunnery sergeant’s posture, although her expression gave nothing away. Out of the Corps she might be, but Torin Kerr was still the definitive career NCO. Sujuno hated how comforting she found that on a deep level, and she promised herself she’d take the time to gouge the feelings out once they were free of the H’san. “Dion, have you found any reference to the guardians creating more guardians out of the dead?”
“Are you telling me they’re created from other than dead H’san, Major?”
“Corporal Werst makes a credible argument that there’s no reason for the H’san to regroup behind closed doors unless they’re performing repairs and there’s no reason to take the bodies of our dead with them unless they’re repairing them as well.”
“Who the fuk is Corporal Werst?”
“He is.” Kerr nodded at the Krai watching suspiciously over by the door to the weapons cache, just out of eavesdropping range.
“Dion!” Sujuno snapped her fingers to attract his wandering attention. “New guardians from the newly dead—have you found a reference?”
His lips moved as he repeated her words silently, then he flipped through the sheets until he found one nearly covered in alternating green and red. “I believe,” he said, tapping a messy green square, “that this says guardian.”
She still couldn’t tell if the square enclosed six symbols or seven. “So you said earlier. And?”
“And what? This is entirely new text in ancient H’san, Major. It took me five years to translate the guide to the weapons; you can’t expect an instruction manual for the guardians in less than two days. We’re just lucky these pages are also in what we in preConfederate languages call storytelling mode, which was dialectically stable for centuries or the vocabulary I have stored would be entirely worthless. And,” he glared up at the gunnery sergeant, “no one was murdered. While you can certainly argue that they didn’t perform them to a high standard, the dead members of the expedition died performing the duties they were hired to perform.”
Going out in front so you don’t have to. Sujuno could see the words cross Kerr’s face and dug her nails in deeper to keep from saying them aloud. To keep from marching in step with the gunnery sergeant. But all Kerr said was, “Jamers a Tur fenYenstrakin.”
“The smelly Katrien? You had her killed, Major?” Dion pointed a red stylus up at her, the tip wobbling.
Sujuno sighed. “The grave goods the Katrien sold alerted the Justice Department to our presence here. I realized that was a possibility from the moment I discovered she’d taken them. Given the progress we were making, I assumed we’d be out of here before the wheels of justice made one of their oh, so slow revolutions.”
“Yet, in spite of that assumption,” Kerr said, “she’s still dead.”
“To prevent her from doing further damage. And, in the end . . .” She waved a hand toward the doors out of the common room. Five downed H’san beyond one. Six beyond the other. Through the storerooms and over the threshold, countless dead H’san. “In the end,” she repeated, “we’re all dead, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“Not yet.”
Sujuno watched Kerr turn away and cross to join Werst. The Krai, in turn watched her until Kerr was close enough to speak quietly with him.
“If they’re here to arrest us, why are you welcoming them?”
“Why am I . . . ?” She shook her head. “You weren’t lying about ignoring popular media. Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, by her own admission, does one thing well. She gets her people out alive.”
“You want us to become her people? Fine. But I can’t see what she can do in this situation. Even with the four of them—and, yes, they’re Marines, oh my, I’m so excited . . .” Sweat rolled down the side of Dion’s face. “. . . we’re vastly outnumbered and surrounded by an enemy that’s not easy to kill.”
“That hasn’t stopped her in the past.”
“Why does the major hate you?” Werst asked, eyes locked on the di’Taykan who continued talking to the infected Human. “When you’re not looking at her, she looks ready to crack your bones for marrow.”
Torin gave it a moment’s thought. If Werst had noticed, the major wasn’t trying to hide it from anyone but her. “If it’s not about exposing the gray aliens, I have no idea why she’d hate me.”
“It’s not about the aliens. It’s personal.”
“I personally exposed them.”
“It’s not that. There’s something off about her.”
“Besides wanting to crack my bones for marrow?”
The corners of his mouth curled up. “Not everyone has to love you, Gunny.” And curled back down again. “We’re not here to make friends. It would’ve been easier if they’d been loading the weapons on their shuttle when we arrived.”
Judge. Jury. And executioner.
“It’s not supposed to be easy.”
“The more time we spend with them, the harder it’ll get. We work together to get out of this trap and . . .”
“Thank you, Master Corporal Obvious.”
They watched the major shift through Dion’s notes. “She says she saw my brief on the Silsviss. We’ve never met.”
“It’s not all about you. I’ve been around di’Taykans every day since I joined and almost every day after we got out, and she . . .” Werst shook his head. “You ever see a di’Taykan with hair that still?”
While not entirely motionless, Sujuno’s hair moved significantly less than most di’Taykan, and Torin had seen her force it down at least once. More noticeably, she hadn’t touched any of her people—not the two Krai as she passed them and not Dion, even though Dion’s head was at hand height. He was clearly suffering, and among the Taykan, a touch for comfort only required the need for comfort. “I’d wish Alamber was here to figure it out, but there’s enough of us chin-deep in shit already.”
“You worried about them?”
“Alamber’s a survivor, and Craig’s almost as paranoid as I am.” Of course she was worried about them. With the comms useless, she’d already given half a thought to testing the acoustics of the tunnels. Hard surfaces, straight lines, di’Taykan hearing—if sergeants and above wanted to be heard, they were heard. “Besides,” she said, weight back on her heels, hands crossed over her KC, “it’s Craig’s turn to rescue me.”
“I admire the equality in your relationship.”
“Thank you. And speaking of relationships . . .”
Gripping a double handful of blanket, Ressk backed into the big common room dragging the H’san body into the light. Binti, Lieutenant Verr, and Wen, Verr’s bonded, had the other three corners, Binti towering over the three Krai. Even desiccated, the H’san probably outweighed all four of them, but the blanket slid easily over the ubiquitous polished stone.
“. . . how did you get out of helping with that?”
“If you were going in here with the major, someone had to stay with you, given the potential bone cracking and marrow eating. The Human have anything to say?”
“He’s positive that one of those sheets says guardian on it.”
“Guardian like dead H’san being called guardian or what?”
“No idea. Also, the infection in his arm is killing him and he’s in so much denial about that, he’s pretty stress free about the bigger problem.”
Werst made a noncommittal noise.
“What does that mean?”
“Our orders are to execute these people.”
“To stop a war, I know.” Four lives against millions.
“Just saying. Denial.”
“Delay. Until we deal with the . . . zombie H’san keeping us in this bunker.” She squared her shoulders and watched the major talk to Dion. “I’ll complete the mission, Werst.”
“You’re not alone, Gunny.”
They’d talked about that, the two
of them in Susumi space, sharing a watch while the others slept.
“All right.” Ressk straightened and headed over to join them, Binti right behind him. “If there’s no saws down here, I need a heavy knife with a serrated edge.”
“We didn’t see any saws, but there’s a shitload of blades,” Wen said as he and Vree caught up. “There’s got to be something that’ll work.”
“Heavy ax?” Verr touched the small ax on her belt. Torin had seen new recruits wearing them. Visible religious icons were against regulation, so she’d never had the opportunity to see how useful they were as a weapon.
“I haven’t done any ax work in years,” Ressk said thoughtfully.
“A ser tyrin plee kerstirin like you with an ax?” Wen scoffed.
Werst growled and showed teeth. “What did you call him?”
“Enough.” Torin’s voice cracked out and four sets of nostril ridges snapped closed, lips quickly covering teeth. “Insults in Federate only. If there’s going to be blood spilled, it is not going to be over a misunderstanding.”
Verr remembered her rank in time to not answer, Yes, Gunnery Sergeant, with the rest.
Binti leaned in close. “Admit it, Gunny, two days of keeping it quiet—you missed the yelling.”
“Corporal, if I’d wanted to yell, I’d have reflected those security beams back off my shining personality.”
Grinning, Binti stared across the room at the food prep area. As her grin slipped, Torin realized she was actually staring back toward the stairs and the ship and the two people they’d left behind. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I know.” If Craig came after her, they’d be trapped together and she wouldn’t be distracted by worry about a patrol stumbling over him. On the other hand, if he didn’t come into the bunker, they’d still have a potential front outside the perimeter. On yet another hand, Alamber and Ressk’s complementary skills hadn’t yet hit code they couldn’t crack. If Ressk was right about the H’san, he could use Alamber beside him.