by Tanya Huff
“Any chance this ship is made of little gray aliens?”
“Fuk, I hope not. Torin needs to move on.”
“What about you?”
“I need Torin to move on.”
“She never talks about them.”
“She discusses them with Dr. Ito.” Craig needed to find a way to connect with the ship’s sysop. If it had one. “I don’t know how much discussion happens, but I know she hates them. The aliens, not the sessions with Dr. Ito.”
“She hates those, too.”
“She says she does.” He grinned at Alamber’s expression. Torin had admitted to him, in the dark, when they were touching everywhere they could be and he could feel her heartbeat strong and steady under his palm, that Dr. Ito might actually be helping to clarify a few things. Might actually be was Torin-speak for yeah, surprised me, too. The grin slipped as he remembered. “She believed in something. Not in war or territorialism or whatever the fuk the Confederation thought they were fighting for. She believed in getting the job done and getting her people home alive, and it turned out not so much that she believed in a lie, but that it was a job that never needed doing.”
“She still gets her people out alive, though.” Slender fingers touched the coiled mass of his hair. “Every time.”
“So far.”
Alamber frowned at the control panel. “Dials?”
This was a bad idea, but she couldn’t help Ressk—Binti was covering him, if Wen and the lieutenant weren’t assisting, they weren’t hindering—and she had no reason to wander among the weapons. She didn’t want to talk to Nadayki. She wanted to wring his skinny neck, so she stayed away. Dion was delirious during his increasingly rare moments of consciousness. Werst was napping, curled up on one of the jellied “chairs.”
Torin couldn’t sit quietly. Couldn’t settle. She needed to do something, but other than conclude the mission they’d been given by Colonel Hurrs, the only thing left to do was talk to Major Sujuno.
It was already too late to pretend she was a stranger if and/or when Torin killed her. She might as well get some answers.
“Major.” Torin stood on one side of the long counter that divided the food preparation area from the rest of the room, the major on the other. “Werst says you look at me like you want to crack my bones and eat the marrow.”
The major met Torin’s gaze, and, after a long moment, stopped pretending.
Torin had been disliked often enough over the years—she’d never denied she could be abrupt and insensitive, arrogant and hyper-vigilant, all words that had been spat at her—but she’d never been hated. She’d stared into the eyes of enemy combatants as they tried to kill each other and she hadn’t seen hate. She saw it now. Werst was right; Major Sujuno hated her. “Why?”
“You’re here to arrest us.” The major shrugged, the motion tight and controlled and at odds to the passion in her expression. “I’m committing a crime, and you’re the weapon wielded by the Justice Department. Why wouldn’t I hate you?”
“No.” It wasn’t a general hate, a hate of what Torin represented. It was personal. Werst was right about that, too.
“No?”
“No. Have we met? Was a thytrin of yours in Sh’quo Company when they died and I survived? Did I leave a thytrin of yours behind in the prison?” If either of those were the reason, Torin wouldn’t blame her. There were days she hated herself.
“Nothing so simple.” The major crossed her arms, one hand cupping her masker. One of her maskers; Torin suddenly realized she wore two. She’d begun to think that was the end of the conversation when the major said, “You were named progenitor.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Of course not.” Her voice had become a low growl, the edges unraveling, and the last centimeter of her hair flicking back and forth. “It means nothing to you. You’re not Taykan. You’ll never begin a family line. You have nothing to do with those who’ve lost everything and can’t afford to keep their name. You were named progenitor. You. You have nothing to do with the bureaucrats who mock your mourning, who only care about squeezing blood from your pain. You have nothing to do with your name dying and you unable to stop it. No one listening to you. Do you know what it costs to be named progenitor? Of course not. Why would you?” she spat, her eyes dark as she threw herself up and over the counter, sliding on the polished stone. “You have nothing to do with that!”
Torin blocked the first blow and the second. The third got through, rocking her head back as she tried to take Major Sujuno down without hurting her. And yes, she recognized the irony. The major was taller, with a longer reach, but she was reacting, not thinking, and she hadn’t had Torin’s specialist training.
When Torin finally pinned her arms, she collapsed for a moment, pushing into Torin’s touch before pulling back and hissing, “Release me, Gunnery Sergeant.”
Torin dropped her hold and stepped away, a gesture holding her people where they were. The major’s people were watching but didn’t seem to care about the aborted fight one way or the other and clearly had no intent to intervene.
The major took another deep breath and stilled her hair. She squared her shoulders, nodded toward the cache, and said, “That is the survival of my name.” Then she pivoted on one heel and walked away.
Torin stayed where she was. Looked down as Werst moved to stand beside her, his injured arm in a sling.
“Valid reason at least.”
“Millions dead,” Torin said.
Craig stepped back from the control panel and banged the side of his head against the bulkhead until Alamber grabbed his shoulder, pulling him too far away for contact. Since it hadn’t been helping, he allowed himself to be pulled.
“What?” Strong fingers dug into the knotted muscles at the base of Craig’s neck. “You expected to be in orbit by now?”
“Not orbit . . . something.” He sighed. “The lights are only on because the H’san have an automatic light fixation. We’ve managed jackshit since we broke in.”
“Since we broke in?”
“Maybe we should stop being so careful.” Shrugging off Alamber’s touch, he returned to the panel, turned dials, shifted slides, rubbed his fingers across what might have been a touch screen, and kicked the lower edge of the console for good measure, the metal booming under his boot.
“Hey! A light’s on!”
The boom caught everyone’s attention. Even Dion blinked and fought to focus.
“Hey! A light’s on!”
“Alamber?” Torin couldn’t see the speakers. Given her urge to look up, they were somewhere high.
“What does it do?”
“It lights up. How the sanLi should I know what it does? You’re the pilot. What did you do?”
“I turned that. I moved that. I touched that.”
“And you gave it the boot, right? Kicked it right . . .”
The second boom cut off halfway through.
“Sounds like they’re in the ship.” Binti swept a narrow-edge gaze around the edges of the ceiling and pointed at a dimple Torin had missed entirely. “At least we know they’re alive.”
Torin had a long swallow of water and wished she was the type of person who could drink on the job.
“Shite. The light’s off again.”
“Does it matter? We don’t know what it did.”
Craig turned, moved, touched, kicked. Nothing. “And now we’ll never know.” He dropped onto the pilot’s chair, swore, shifted, and glared at the control board. “We might be going at this the wrong way.”
“I thought we’d established that.” Alamber rolled a dial under each hand.
“That . . .” Craig pointed with his second finger. “. . . is an alien control panel, the access to an alien sysop. The alien sysop controls an alien ship.”
“Yeah?”
“Too many
variables, mate. Remember the door. It opens, it closes. It’s locked, it’s unlocked.”
“So, it’s not turning on because the hatch isn’t sealed?”
“Possibly. But you’re missing the point; we need to simplify this.”
Alamber’s eyes darkened and he hissed as his hair gave an involuntary flip. “We go directly to the engines.”
Craig grinned. “Engines turn on. Engines turn off.”
“The weapons aren’t exactly biometric, they operate on the same system as the body, powered through this contact.” Ressk lifted one of the H’san’s upper appendages to show the narrow metal plate in the palm. He’d been working nonstop since the explosion and Werst’s injury. Werst’s best chance was the medical unit on Promise and in order to get there, they had to get out. “There’s no corresponding contact in the grip of their weapon, so there’s a good chance the guardians could use anything in the armory.”
“Another reason for not letting them get this far,” Lieutenant Verr pointed out. “Right up there with not wanting to die.”
Major Sujuno ran her thumb over the contact. “If we could use this to control some of the larger weapons, we could destroy the guardians.”
“Once we destroy the guardians,” the lieutenant added, “there’s nothing stopping us from leaving.”
Torin decided to let that go for the moment. “Ressk?”
“It wouldn’t work with the bodies we have. When you shoot out the unit that powers them . . .”
“We stop them,” Wen growled.
“. . . you fry the whole system. Not to mention, you destroy the power source. Although, H’san metal to H’san metal, it gets a lot more destroyed when you hit it with an ax.”
“Axes aren’t really practical, given the scale.” They could continue to take the guardians out one at a time, piling them in the barracks away from any chance to be rebuilt—if that’s what was happening behind the metal doors—but, if the major hadn’t exaggerated the numbers, they’d be at it for a couple of tendays, even working with teams at each threshold. Food and water needs aside, Werst might not have that kind of time. She definitely didn’t have that kind of time. Torin pointed the H’san’s cone-like weapon at the wall and squeezed the grip. Nothing happened. The same way nothing had happened when she’d twisted it. “What about the head shots?”
Ressk dropped the appendage into the major’s hand and picked up the net he’d pulled out of the skull. “Hitting any of these blue disks . . .” A bit of brain dropped off the crumpled metal and bounced. “. . . fries the—for lack of a better word—wiring. I expect the surge scrambles the programming as well, but that’s entirely redundant because there’s nothing left for the programming to run through. You could skip the head shot entirely and only hit the power source and still take them down.”
“Why were you shooting them in the head?” Marines were taught to aim at the dead center of the target’s mass. Regardless of species, there was less chance of a miss and a greater chance of hitting critical organs.
“You shoot zombies in the head,” Wen snorted, the duh implied.
The major tossed the appendage over onto the body and wiped her hand on her thigh. “Once the head’s hit, they flail. Eventually their armor gets knocked askew so you can get a chest shot.”
“You can’t shoot through the armor?”
Her lip curled. “Not through the chest plate. Not unless you can hit the exact same spot at least three times.”
“If we want to use their weapons to cut down their numbers . . .” Ressk draped the net over the open skull. “. . . I need an intact power source and an appendage with a working contact.”
“How are we supposed to get that?” Wen demanded.
Ressk sighed. “You don’t shoot them in the fukking head.”
“You don’t need the head?” Torin clarified while the lieutenant moved to stand between her bonded and Ressk.
“No, just a power source and a contact point.”
“The wires around the power source?” On the second corpse, Ressk had skipped the step with the ax and cut a dozen or so wires running from the box out into the body.
“Only the box.” He held it up. “And an appendage.”
“Why not all of them?” Werst asked.
“I can only reconnect one per power source.”
“All right, then.” Torin lifted the strap of her KC off her shoulder, hung it on Werst’s, and pulled out her boot knife. “Mashona.”
“Gunny?”
“I’m going to go stand by the threshold for seven minutes and attract a guardian. I’ll need you to shoot out its knees.”
“I didn’t know they had knees,” Binti said as she checked her weapon.
“Closest equivalent.”
“Gunny . . .”
Torin looked down at Werst.
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
As they headed down the dark hall leading past the three sets of barracks to the storerooms and finally the exit, Torin realized they weren’t alone. “What?” she demanded, without turning. Someone had their light on and she needed her eyes to adapt to the lower levels in the storeroom.
After a moment’s silence, Wen said, “We want to watch.”
“I want to see you die. Why not honesty?” the major demanded at the ripple of reaction.
Why not?
“Werst.”
“I’ll watch her.”
“Ressk, keep an eye on Nadayki. It’s long odds, but if he gets something working, I don’t want him behind me when my attention’s needed elsewhere.”
“I need the power unit intact, Gunny.”
She grinned. “Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first twenty times. Mashona will set up at the farthest point where she has a clear shot. I’m not guaranteeing the guardian won’t get a few shots off, so the rest of you can wait where you like.”
No one followed her across the storeroom. During her seven-minute wait at the threshold, she cleared the area; an accidental skewering on a piece of broken shelving was not a part of her plan.
At seven minutes and twelve seconds, Torin heard the approach of a patrolling guardian, the syncopated rhythm unnaturally constant. The lights in the side corridor, lights that had come on for both Major Sujuno’s people and hers, stayed off.
She held her ground until the last moment, then dove right as the guardian surged over the threshold and Binti’s first shot rang out. Old bone was brittle bone and the joint, unprotected by armor, blew. A lower appendage collapsed and it spun to the left, its shot shattering an already damaged set of shelves. Binti’s second shot spun it left again around a second destroyed joint. Its weapon gouged a line across the stone ceiling. With a third joint destroyed, it collapsed to the floor.
Three running steps and a boost off the angle of its hip, and Torin balanced on the center of its back. With one hand on the top of its head, she reached around with the other, and slid her blade in under the metal collar that protected its throat. Cut through soft tissue. Found the join between two vertebrae. Cut up, not straight across. The sarcophagi holding the pieces of H’san had been an education.
The cone-weapon fired again, angle close enough that Torin dropped to her knees. An upper appendage reached back, hooked black nails around her lower leg, and gouged bruises into her calf as it tried to drag her forward. She braced her other knee and twisted the knife. Felt one bundle of wires give. Then the other.
Separated from its programming, its head bouncing over a pile of debris, the body ran straight for a wall on the shattered stumps of its legs. The impact flung Torin off, fingers still gripping tufts of hair. She rolled as she hit the floor, got her feet under her as the headless H’san spun in place, grabbed the appendage with the weapon, drove the point of her blade into the exposed elbow joint, popped it, cut the wires, and detached it from the body.
Arm and weapon flew in different directions.
The body rolled. Torin rolled with it, clawing her way around until she sat on its chest, the chest plate providing a secure handhold. Unfortunately, she had to cut the chest plate off. Fortunately, the leather strapping was nothing more than it appeared to be. Four quick slashes cut the plate free as what was left of the guardian thrashed from side to side, the plate clipping her in the mouth as it flew free. She spat blood and adjusted her grip, tucking in. Up close, she could see where repairs had been made in the center of the chest. See where three rounds had gone through its shoulder—chipping the bone and shredding the flesh, but not, it seemed, doing enough damage to require repairs. She ducked a flailing limb that could have eviscerated her had it any control, slid her knife between two ribs, leaned her weight against the handle, and pried the ribs apart.
The dead H’san—the guardian—headless, appendages both flailing and failing, made no noise. The re-animator hadn’t given it a voice. Torin was good with that.
She appreciated the minimal fluids as well. A beheading was usually a lot messier.
The power source glimmered through the space she’d opened. She slid the tip of her knife around it, cutting it free from the gleaming golden lines that anchored it in the dead H’san’s chest.
The guardian collapsed, one piece at a time, like a puppet having its strings slowly cut.
When it finally stilled completely, Torin tested the security of her front teeth, wiped the blood off her upper lip onto her sleeve, and climbed off to retrieve the amputated appendage.
Another guardian charged through the door.
Three fast shots took it out—the first dented the armor, the second opened up the bottom of the dent, the third went through the hole and destroyed the power source.
It slid to a stop at Torin’s feet, shoulder nudging her boot.
“You might want to quit lingering near the door, Gunny.” Binti sounded amused. “Unless you’re planning to have me take the lot of them down one at a time.”