An Ancient Peace

by Tanya Huff

“Situation means a truce until we get out?”

  “It does.” Given the numbers, she suspected that having the major’s people on their side meant sweet fuk all, but it was a legitimate reason to delay the inevitable.

  “And after?” Binti’s expression said, I trust you to do the right thing.

  Torin would’ve preferred her expression to say, I trust in our orders. But, in the end, that was Torin’s job. “Let’s get out of here first.”

  The weapon cache was huge. Torin had expected an oversized Marine armory and not crowded shelves and vaults following a spiral both up and down—like Bufush’s junk shop made deadly and rearranged inside a giant snail shell. The architecture was entirely different from anything else they’d passed although, granted, taking the shortcuts through the catacombs on the weapon’s trail meant they’d likely missed a few chambers. The structure looked to have been built of polished concrete and the same brassy metal as the guardians’ doors.

  The section nearest the entrance held blades. Curved, straight, short, long; apparently every culture went through a phase where they jabbed holes in each other. Torin doubted the H’san had been using them at the same time as the planet busters, but, for all she knew, they might have.

  “I assume the blades weren’t going with you, Major?” The mercs’ ship had a decent-sized cargo hold as well as expandable pens—most of the weapons would be fine riding out the trip in vacuum. The shuttle, however, had significantly less space. Either they were after something specific, or the reward was great enough to risk multiple trips in spite of the satellite defenses.

  “Aren’t going with me,” the major corrected. “I won’t be paid for weapons a decent blacksmith can re-create.”

  “So you’re working for someone. Not Dion, or you’d care that he was dying.”

  If the major had been Human, Torin might’ve been able to read the expressions chasing each other across her face, but the physiognomy was just different enough they moved too fast for her to translate. Anger. Pain. Maybe resentment? With only four letters in her family name, Sujuno di’Kail had definitely come out of the Taykan upper class. Had her family cut her off? If she was willing to dump the seeds of another war and millions more dead out into the Confederation, the bar had been set pretty damned low when Torin considered what else she might have been willing to do.

  The clash of steel and Ressk’s voice cut off her response. “It’s big enough, but it’s too flexible.”

  Torin half expected a comment from the major, but she only huffed out a disapproving breath. Fair enough. Alamber had been the only di’Taykan Torin had spent time with lately and he’d never have let that go, but officers were taught to be more circumspect.

  “Hey, Major!” Wen’s voice bounced down from an upper level. “We might’ve found another whatchathing.”

  “Might have?”

  “Not sure. It’s got attachments.”

  Alamber wouldn’t have let that go either. The major only headed up the spiral, long legs taking her quickly out of sight. The Taykan were, as a species, effortlessly graceful—it had to do with the way their joints were connected according to a bored tech during one of Torin’s lengthier stays in Med-op—but the major moved as though she were holding pieces of herself in place. Torin made a mental note to ask about injuries when she reappeared.

  If the three cases stacked by the door also contained whatchathings, ready to be carried out to the ship, Torin had to reluctantly admire their industriousness. Two piles of re-dead H’san and still time to find the weapons they’d been sent for. She also wondered why the H’san were so hot for pink. The cases were almost exactly the color of the darker stone at the bottom of the last flight of stairs.

  About to join the search for a saw . . .

  “In what universe do two serrations make a serrated edge? For fuksake, Mashona, do you even know what a saw looks like?”

  . . . Torin heard a noise from lower down the spiral. The major, the lieutenant, and Wen were still up the spiral—she could hear them speaking, though she couldn’t make out the actual words—so the banging had to have come from the last member of the major’s crew. The one trying to get a larger energy weapon to work.

  She saw the bright flash of lime-green hair first, then, a few steps lower, the di’Taykan whose head it covered. He was leaning over an open case twice the size of the three already gathered and swearing softly to himself in a dialect Torin didn’t know—although he might have been praying. Torin had heard Marines do both and the rhythm and emphasis were almost identical. He straightened, turned, and dropped the tool he’d been using. It bounced almost to Torin’s feet as the light receptors in his eyes snapped open and his hair flattened to his head.

  “Ablin gon savit! Who the sanLi are you? And where the fuk did you come from? Hang on.” His hair started to lift. “I’ve seen you before. You were with Big Bill on Vrijheid. You were fighting the Grrr brothers right before the station blew the fuk up.”

  She remembered him as well. Nadayki di’Berinango. He’d been with Craig, attempting to crack the Marine armory the pirates had stolen. He’d been one of the pirates.

  “The station didn’t blow up, Nadayki.”

  Blood pounding in her ears, Torin hadn’t heard the major descend to stand behind her. The trick was not reacting.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Kerr blew it up. Blew up the station and the pirates who’d taken her vantru.”

  Nadayki’s hair flattened again. “You blew up the Heart of Stone? You? My thytrins were on that ship and you killed them.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Craig had locked Nadayki out of the cargo bay, kept him from boarding the ship. That was the only reason he hadn’t died with his thytrins.

  “Keep your sorry,” he spat. “You don’t care that they’re dead.”

  Torin considered it for a moment and not for the first time. Every now and then, she thought about the Heart of Stone exploding as it made ready to jump into Susumi space. The pirates had been escaping with a Marine armory after killing three CSOs and capturing and torturing Craig. She was self-aware enough to know that they’d died as much for what they’d done to Craig as what they could do with the contents of the armory. “No,” she said. “I don’t care.” If she felt anything, it was satisfaction.

  “I’m going to kill you!” His hands curled into fists, but he was smart enough not to attack. As he’d said, he’d seen her fight the Grrr Brothers. He shifted a dark-eyed gaze to the major. “Why is she even fukking here?”

  “She’s here to arrest us. For, what was it, Gunnery Sergeant?” Sujuno sounded as if she was asking about the price of drinks in the officer’s mess. “Trespassing, theft, desecration, and murder?”

  “Murder?” Nadayki folded his arms. “Nobody got murdered!”

  “The Katrien . . .”

  “She doesn’t count!”

  That opinion had begun to piss Torin off.

  “So why is she here?” Nadayki’s hair whipped back and forth so quickly it looked like a solid curve rather than individual strands. “If you know she’s here to arrest us, why haven’t you shot her?”

  “We need her help to get out of the bunker.”

  Nadayki waved that off. “No, we don’t. I’ll get this thing working and we’ll blow the walking dead away.”

  “It’s not the walking, it’s the attacking. And I’ve told you, the controls are biometric, but feel free to keep trying.” The major sighed. “He might as well keep trying. He’s useless in a fight, completely untrained.”

  “He’s a civilian.”

  “That’s what I said. A close facsimile of a saw has been found, Gunnery Sergeant. I assumed you’d want to see the dissection.”

  “Lead the way.”

  At no point had the two di’Taykan come close enough to touch.

  Werst crouched down beside the corpse, his KC balanced acro
ss his back, his hands dangling between his knees. “I didn’t know you were all up on xeno-anatomy.”

  “I’m not.” Ressk set the blade above the uppermost hole in the skull and began to draw the saw back and forth. It caught on the desiccated flesh, bucked, then bit into bone.

  “And yet . . .”

  “I used to hunt with my jerta. We’d go out into the wildland, him and me, and shoot a vertak or a sinsac and butcher it before bringing it home. It was his way of getting his city-born son back to nature and Ner forbid we just climb a tree like everyone else.” He sighed and met his bonded’s gaze. “Look, none of us knows squat about doing a dissection—our happy group of grave robbers didn’t even think of it—but if I can find what’s controlling these things, then I might be able to shut them down. I don’t have to do this right or scientifically, I just have to get into its head.”

  “Have you tried communicating with them?” Binti asked, staying far enough away from Ressk’s butchering to miss the details.

  Verr flapped her nostril ridges. “They’re dead!”

  “But they’re also up and walking around and working together. That implies internal communications, at the very least.”

  “Well, unless you brought a singularly useful linguist with you, at the very least, no one here talks ancient H’san and even if this lot doesn’t predate the Confederation, they certainly predate Federate.”

  “What about trying music? Art? Math?”

  “Sure, because while a shitload of zombie H’san are trying to kill you, why not introduce them to the tunes they missed while they were dead?”

  “Or we could take them all down with Viridian Interval’s last upload.”

  Verr snorted out a reluctant laugh. “Pretty sure that counts as cruel and unusual.”

  Torin counted the ammunition spread out on the table and then again, just to be sure. Her people had come in with four sixty-round magazines as reloads. Sixty rounds in the KC made three hundred all together. Each. The major’s people had no reloads. One magazine. Sixty rounds for each of the six Marines and they’d been able to recover only one weapon from their three dead.

  “It’s a cemetery planet,” the major snapped. “We were expecting static defenses, not a firefight.”

  Five or six shots to kill each of the redead H’san. Torin expected they’d blown most of their ammo during the mass attacks. In spite of the major’s defensiveness, she put the blame for shorting the supplies squarely on the late Sergeant Toporov. The KC-7 wasn’t designed to be decorative. If it was a part of operational gear, it needed to be supported.

  She glanced over at the entrance to the weapons cache. What was it Hollice used to say? Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

  “They’ve been gone too long,” Craig growled, walking back to the curve around the ship’s engines. They hadn’t found a way into the ship, so they’d been going up to the cavern, one at a time, and sorting through the supplies left behind. Sure, potentially dangerous and hard on the knees, but it was that or follow Torin, and he knew how that would turn out.

  “Too long?” Alamber folded his arms and leaned gracefully against the wall. “That’s a little arbitrary, isn’t it? We haven’t heard any more gunfire, so I expect the boss is trying to convince them of the error of their ways.”

  “She doesn’t usually spend much time on that.” Torin was more you have one chance to see reason before I take matters into my own hands.

  “Good point. You think they’ve run into trouble?”

  He ran a hand back through his hair. “I think the odds are very high.”

  “So it’s up to us to get them out of trouble.”

  Torin would kill him if he charged in assuming she needed rescue. “A little more information wouldn’t hurt, let’s . . .”

  Alamber’s sudden grip on his forearm cut him off. When he turned to look—he hadn’t heard the young di’Taykan move—Alamber pressed the finger of his other hand to his lips, ears swiveled all the way forward, more visible than usual because his healthy hair still wrapped the injured hair. Something coming, he mouthed. More than two feet.

  All the younger races were bipedal.

  More than one? Craig mouthed back, when Alamber freed his mouth.

  He half shrugged. No scent.

  It might be nothing, but Craig’d bet the papers for Promise it was nothing good. He moved them back around the curve where they’d be hidden by the ship’s engines and covered by the scent of decay. In close to the ship, out of the line of sight from the corridor, they synced their breathing and waited. Craig had been at this for enough time now that he knew they hadn’t been waiting long, definitely not as long as it felt, when he heard it, too. Creaking and tapping and metal whispering against metal. Not trying to be stealthy.

  Robots? That would explain the lack of scent.

  The sudden increase in volume suggested it, or they, had arrived at the part of the corridor closest to the curve around the ship.

  The sounds stopped.

  Time passed.

  Alamber shrugged and pointed at the damp pile of entrails. He couldn’t smell anything over it. Had there been anything to smell.

  Steadying himself on the dark metal curve of the engine, Craig peered around the corner.

  He’d seen enough dead H’san lying curled in sarcophagi over the last two days to recognize one standing. It wore what looked like metal-and-leather armor. Even before he’d joined up with Torin, he’d known that looked low tech was often a dangerous lie. In one appendage, it held a short, fat cone by a handle that looped out of the narrow end. Looking directly into the wide end, he couldn’t tell if the cone was solid or hollow. The H’san stood completely still, completely still, and looked more like the statues up in the cavern than a living creature. The eyes that were a little too large for the face, giving H’san an appearance of youth and innocence to every species in the Confederation who birthed live young, were open and staring right at him.

  Shite.

  He whipped back. Motioned Alamber to silence. Held his breath.

  Heard movement.

  The movement was deliberate rather than quick, but they couldn’t outrun a H’san. He knew that because he’d heard a H’san could outrun a Ciptran and he’d seen a motivated Ciptran keep up to a skimmer.

  “Down.”

  Alamber grabbed his arm. “What?”

  “Down into the blast bay.”

  “That’s insane!”

  “Only if the engines fire.” He grabbed his pack, slid it between the curve of the engine and the floor, and dropped it. “It’s not that far. Move!”

  Credit where due, Alamber moved.

  His pack preceding him, he moved faster through the narrow space. His head, instead of Craig’s head and shoulders, remained stuck up over the edge of the floor when the H’san came into view. Eyes suddenly dark, he disappeared so quickly Craig knew he’d let himself go, free sliding between polished metal and stone.

  Craig cracked his chin on the edge when he followed. He moved a lot faster when he ran out of engine, hit a solid surface, rolled, slammed into a warm body, and froze.

  Alamber’s arms went around him and when he looked up, instinctively given that it was pitch-black in the blast bay, he felt the di’Taykan shake his head.

  They waited. And then, as their eyes adjusted and a gray ring began to define the walls of the bay, they waited some more.

  Finally, he felt Alamber relax. “It’s gone. It circled the ship and kept going. I guess the dead are all ‘out of sight out of mind’; programming stripped down to the basics.”

  “The H’san programmed their dead?”

  “Someone did. Necro-neuro programming.”

  “You made that up.” The bottom of his chin was sticky and hurt like fuk when he touched it.

  “Well, yeah, but the dead don’t get up
and walk around on their own. And speaking of up . . .”

  Craig caught himself as Alamber released him and stood. “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing if I can reach the bottom of the engines so we can climb out.” He was a line of darker gray against the wall. “No. But we didn’t fall that far, so if I stood on your shoulders, I could reach. Probably be able to inch my way up. Of course, once I was up, how would you get out? I doubt I could brace myself securely enough to pull you up into the crevasse.”

  “There’s rope in Werst’s pack.”

  “And nothing to tie it to. Nothing personal, but you’d drag me back down. Maybe we could tie a couple of packs together and jam them tight.” His voice had begun to circle the bay. “Wait, I just remembered the collapsible tubes in the cavern! I could tie two or three of them together for strength and, no, that wouldn’t work. There’s nothing to brace them against.”

  Craig put out a hand, searching for his pack, touched something that rocked, and reached for it. Felt eyes, a nose . . . the jaw was missing. It was wet and cold. He swallowed. Tasted bile. Swallowed again.

  “What?”

  He didn’t remember making a noise, but he must have. “Head that belongs with the pieces, I assume.” It was dark enough in the center of the bay, he couldn’t see it. Death, he could cope with. Violent death, not so much. Teeth clenched, he wiped his hand on his thigh and stood. “Can you see?”

  “Not right into the middle, too much contrast. I’m getting a good look at the walls, though.”

  “As long as the light doesn’t go out.”

  “That’s it. Look at the bright side. The boss has definitely rubbed off on you.”

  “Yes, she has.” Craig fitted the response with a di’Taykan emphasis. When Alamber laughed, the dark seemed less grim. “How’s your head?”

  “Managed to avoid smacking it into the rock. Still feels like I set it on fire.” He pushed Craig’s pack into his hands. “Not that I’ve ever set it on fire. Turns out I’ll try anything once is more of a guideline.”

  Untangling the straps by touch, Craig realized he could now see the blacker oval of the broken skull and found he couldn’t look away, waiting for his eyes to adjust enough to see a face.