The Privilege of Peace

by Tanya Huff

  It’s too narrow.

  It’s wobbling.

  It’s a web!

  Which was not to say Torin’s brain, at least, didn’t try.

  “That was fun,” Binti forced out through clenched teeth as she reached the other side. “I vote we strip to our skivvies and travel through the cold, merciless vacuum of space on the way back.”

  “Be a lot easier without boots,” Ressk agreed.

  “Missing my point,” Binti told him. “It’s a spider thing.”

  “Human spider thing,” Werst grunted, jumping up onto the deck beside his bonded.

  *I saw that vid. I didn’t get how they could have missed the obvious thing to do with eight arms.*

  “Alamber . . .” A di’Taykan could turn anything to innuendo. And, if given the chance, usually did. That said, he had a point about the eight arms.

  *Still a clear run to the tanks, Boss.*

  “Let’s go, people.”

  The control room for the mining operation took up about a third of the arc facing the gas giant and overlooked the two docking positions on either side of the stacked tanks. The pirates, plus the Mictok hostages, were currently in the control room. It being unlikely they’d surrender without a fight, Torin wanted the pirates in one of the docking arms, an area designed to deal with explosive decompression.

  On this mission, Strike Team Alpha carried bennies. Made up of a molecular disruption charge and a cutting laser, they were designed for use on ships and stations. The MDC exploded the cellular structure of organics, the amount of damage dependent on a combination of power level and length of contact. The cutting laser, while not originally intended to be a weapon, had certainly been used as one, but both options lessened the danger of random holes in the hull. This trip out, in their continuing effort to keep the Strike Teams from shooting people, R&D had also equipped each of them with species-specific gas grenades—three grenades per Warden, one grenade for each of the Younger Races.

  In their previous attacks on the mining stations, the pirates had carried KC-7s, the standard Marine weapon that fired explosively propelled solids and was immune to enemy EMPs. Or, on occasion, badly aimed friendly EMPs.

  *I have control of the station, Boss. You’re about a minute thirty to the hatch.*

  “Craig?”

  *Ready when you are, Torin.*

  “Go.”

  The klaxon blaring from multiple speakers was a sound specific to mining stations; fragile habitats attached to enormous tanks of volatile gasses. Torin knew there were no leaks, no possibility of immediate explosion, but her pulse still pounded at her temples, subharmonics screaming at her hindbrain to run. Run far. Run fast.

  *They’re running.*

  “Codes?”

  *Have been changed.*

  The stream of profanity spilling through the open hatch between the boarding party and the port docking arm suggested the pirates had discovered their airlock codes were no longer functional and they couldn’t get to their ship.

  *Control room access locked down.*

  Nor could they retreat to the control room.

  Torin paused, waited for the team to fall into position, then stepped through the hatch. Clustered around the airlock connecting the station to their ship, were six pretty standard Humans. Two were paler than Torin, their skin the near translucence of those who never saw natural light. One them, a female a good two meters tall, had veins and arteries tattooed on the visible skin of her arms and face. Torin had seen more Human circulatory systems than she’d ever wanted to—including bits of her own—and she found it disconcerting as decoration. The other four were various shades of beige and brown although none of the six came close to matching the deep, rich tones of Binti Mashona. Five of them were yelling.

  The sixth . . .

  *Hey, Boss! There’s only one Mictok registering in the control room. The docking arm’s too well shielded for me to get a clear signal, but our hostage situation might be ongoing.*

  “Acknowledged.”

  *You knew that already, didn’t you?*

  “I did.”

  The sixth pirate held a Mictok up against her body by an eyestalk. The Mictok could have gotten away; the grip allowed her enough lateral movement to bring her mandibles up to soft tissue, but the Mictok were one of the Elder Races. Socially evolved above violence, The Elder Races had formed the Confederation out of likewise evolved species, those who’d reached the ability to destroy themselves and moved past it. Great in theory, less great in actuality when the Primacy had attacked and the Confederation was unable to defend itself. Their solution had been to grant the Younger Races—Humans, Krai, and Taykan—an early membership in exchange for their agreement to fight in an intergalactic war. Torin didn’t know about the Krai and the Taykan, but Human history said they’d taken one look at the advantages, signed on the dotted line, and chambered a round. The end of the war had flooded the Confederation with a large number of all three Younger Races trained to violence, a significant portion of them unwilling to play nicely with others.

  The Elder Races were having trouble dealing. Ethically. Politically.

  Occasionally, one on one.

  The Mictok stood on her four rear legs, high enough to take the pressure off her eyestalk. The four legs in the air waved ineffectually. Torin could see the reflection of her HE suit as a line of orange across the smooth black surface of the Mictok’s eyes, but she could see no way to get the hostage clear without damage. Or death. Not the death of the Mictok, granted, but coldly killing the pirate had to be a last resort.

  “They’re all Human, Gunny.”

  As they so often were these days. “Prep grenades. Deploy on my word. Alamber, turn off the alarm.”

  The shouting carried on for a moment in the sudden silence then, voice by voice, stopped until the only voice came through the speaker by the access hatch. “What the hell is going on in there?”

  “Wardens,” Torin answered. “You’re under arrest. You, on the ship, power down. You lot . . .” She swept her gaze around the pirates gathered by the hatch, three of the captive Mictok’s eyes following the sweep. “. . . drop your weapons.”

  “Fuk you, Warden!” The speaker was the eldest by a visible margin, his skin wrapped loosely around muscle and bone, the lines around eyes and mouth scored deep.

  *I have control of exteriors, Boss. They’re locked on the nipple.*

  “We have your ship secured,” Torin told them, her tone slipping from Warden to gunnery sergeant, leaving no room for disbelief. “You have nowhere to go. Drop your weapons, surrender, and I’ll ask the Dornagain to go easy on you.”

  “What are they going to do?” the tattooed woman sneered, even as the barrel of her KC had begun to dip toward the floor. “Bureaucracy us to death?”

  “Stacks of forms in triplicate,” Torin acknowledged. “It’s terrifying to watch.”

  One smile. One dawning realization. Four cornered rats. Tough room.

  “We could shoot our way out!” one of the rats snarled, waving his weapon in a way that made Torin think of recruits who wanted to hit back after a lifetime of being bullied. They seldom made it through basic.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” the eldest snapped before Torin could respond.

  “They’ve only got bennies!”

  “Because they’re not idiots. You don’t carry projective weapons in a station, for fuksake.” Odds were high that muttered observation had come from one of the two who were spacer pale. Torin suspected it was the weight of that knowledge, pounded into thick heads by Marine and Navy DI’s, that had kept them from firing the moment they’d realized they were trapped.

  “So we trash the station! Who cares?”

  Torin met the tattooed woman’s eyes and raised a brow. Got a silent What can you do? in return. Ex-Navy. Petty officer at least.

  “You want
us, Warden?”

  Torin snapped her gaze back to the woman holding the Mictok. She was a good half meter shorter than Torin, with the kind of wiry build and ropy muscle that told of poor nutrition through puberty. Not everyone chose to accept the Confederation’s guarantee of a healthy standard of living. Enclaves of Humans insisted on living the way they believed Humans should live—back to the land, happily ignoring that the land was on a planet very different from the planet they’d evolved on making back irrelevant. Torin had served with a few and every one of them had resented the hell out of the way they’d been forced to grow up. She could see that same resentment in this woman’s pale eyes, along with a good dose of crazy.

  “You want us?” she snarled again, lips drawn back off her teeth, the cords in her neck prominent, a shimmer across the lower third of her face. She shifted her grip on the Mictok’s eyestalk and placed her other hand flat against the gleaming curve of exoskeleton. “Fine. But we’re not going down without a fight.”

  The Mictok howled.

  The hair lifted off the back of Torin’s neck. She saw the muzzle of a KC rise and flipped her helmet up. “Gas!”

  The Mictok tucked her legs in and keened.

  Torn ducked the thrown eyestalk, leapt the arc of glossy black carapace . . .

  The pirate collapsed, screaming as Torin’s right heel shattered her leg and Torin’s left hand ripped the filter off her face. Her eyes widened as she sucked in air, then rolled back, then closed.

  “Gunny! They’re all down.”

  Blood roared in Torin’s ears.

  “Torin! The ship’s doing a runner!”

  Not blood. Engines powering up way too close to the station. “How’d they get off the nipple?”

  “They haven’t. Yet!”

  Translation: They were about to rip their way free. The clamps on military stations had been designed with a breakaway option, in case the station took damage and ships had to be launched. Civilian stations were missing this helpful feature. When the ship ripped away, a chunk of the station would rip away with it.

  “Alpha Team!” The deck plates buckled. Boots unmagged, she rode it out. “Grab a body! Get out of the docking arm and secure the hatch!” She closed her fist around a handful of overalls, turned, rocked in place, and realized the injured Mictok had begun to spew webbing. When stressed, they webbed themselves into small spaces. Seemed they considered the potential for explosive decompression stressful.

  They weren’t wrong.

  “Mashona!” Torin swung the pirate up and over the Mictok. “Get her out!”

  Metal screamed. Alarms screamed back.

  Had the webbing been as thick as the webbing across the station’s center, it would’ve been faster to pry up the deck plates. Fortunately, propelled by pain and panic, these strands had been extruded in fits and starts, only a few actually connecting to bulkheads or deck, and none of them had completely solidified.

  The docking arm tipped thirty degrees.

  Torin dropped one knee to the deck and slashed at the sticky white strands holding the Mictok in place.

  “Torin! Move!”

  “Working on it!” The last strand cut, she flipped the Mictok over and shoved her toward the inner hatch, legs curled into her belly, curve of her carapace providing almost no friction, dignity sacrificed to survival. “Mashona! Incoming!”

  Binti’s answer was lost in the crack of a weld separating and the roar of air leaving the station. Torin caught a quick glimpse of the Mictok in Binti’s arms, or more precisely, Binti wrapped in the Mictok’s legs, before the inner hatch slammed shut and sealed.

  “Gunny!”

  “Not my first blowout.” Staying low, she pivoted and let the escaping air press her against the inside of the outer hatch. “I’m suited, I’m fine.” Any injury she could survive counted as fine. The trick would be keeping her suit in one piece as decompression pulled debris toward her. An abandoned KC hit the hatch a centimeter from her elbow and she looped her arm through the strap. It never hurt to pick up another weapon. The hatch buckled, the crack along one edge widening as escaping air shredded the seal. Bottom line, hatches were holes in the hull, and holes in the hull, however functional, would always be the weakest point.

  She felt the vibration in her bones when the hatch broke free. Boots and gloves magged full, Torin rode the slab of metal out into open space.

  Proximity readouts along the lower edge of her helmet spiked.

  Open, like empty, being a relative word.

  Shards of the nipple. Shards of the clamps. Shards of the arm. Torin felt multiple impacts against the hatch. And if that wasn’t enough fun, the pirate’s engines had baked the area immediately around the station. The hatch offered her some small amount of protection and while she had a full RAT in her future, as long as the pirates didn’t try for a Susumi jump, she’d survive.

  As long as she didn’t pass directly through the energy trail.

  As long as she hadn’t been thrown far enough to be caught by the gas giant’s gravity well.

  As long as she didn’t hit something solid and end up crushed between that and the hatch.

  She had no idea what would happen should the tanks, on either the ship or the station, rupture. Nor did she want to find out.

  Stars whirled around her. She closed her eyes and rode out the spin, teeth clenched. It was common knowledge that the Krai, as a species, never suffered from any kind of motion sickness. Lucky fukking Krai.

  *Torin!*

  “I’m fine.”

  *I can’t get a line on you until you clear their ship!*

  Craig had begun to sound a bit frayed. She needed to get on top of that. “Sitrep?”

  *Like that, then? Fine. I’ve grapples on the ship. The bastards aren’t moving. Their shielding thinned over the bow when they surged ahead; Alamber was on the knocker and took control.*

  *Microsecond window, Boss, but I’m just that good.*

  “Werst?”

  *Station lost some pressure, but emergency seals are holding. Bad guys have been restrained. Hostage seems to have a little trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys and won’t shut the fuk up. I haven’t shot her.*

  “I’ll make a note of your restraint on the . . .” The hatch hit something big. Torin’s teeth snapped together. She swallowed a mouthful of blood, realized she’d stopped moving, and unmagged her gloves to have a look.

  She’d impacted with the pirates’ ship, high on the port side. The hatch had either picked up some free-floating magnetism from the explosion, or emergency protocols had magnetized it for easier recovery, or the ship’s hull had been magnetized by passing space pixies—Torin neither knew nor cared. There’d been no equal and opposite reaction flinging her out into space on a new trajectory, and that was all that mattered. Off the hatch and onto the ship, she clumped up to the clear arc that allowed the persons in the control room to look out at space. The members of the Confederation were split eighty/twenty on the need for a visual backup, if only in the control room. Humans acknowledged windows were an unnecessary affectation, that if their instruments went dead, they were in a lot more trouble than eyeballs alone could rectify, and remained firmly in the twenty percent. Structural integrity be damned, they wanted a window.

  “Alamber. Patch me through to their control room.”

  *You’re in, Boss.*

  She could see a Human male scurrying from station to station, blood dribbling down his face from a split high on his cheek. With her boots and one glove attached to the ship, she slammed the butt of her rescued KC against the clear ceramic three times.

  BOOM!

  BOOM!

  BOOM!

  She couldn’t hear the impact, but the man in the control room could. He leapt back, tripped over his own feet, and stared up at her from his sprawl on the deck.

  Torin depolarized
her helmet and smiled. “You’re under arrest, asshole.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “C&C will be here in two hours and twelve minutes.” The Clean-up Crew—predominantly of Dornagain, Rakva, and Niln—never arrived until after all possibility of shooting had ended. Unfortunately, as the C&C ship contained the brig as well as a full medical suite, the Strike Teams were stuck making small talk until they arrived. First aid could only be applied to prisoners for so long before it became unnecessary touching and had, as expected, been applied to these particular prisoners while Torin took the scenic route back from her unscheduled EVA. She swept a measuring gaze over her people as she stepped into the station control room. With the plumbing hooked in, stripping out of the suit became not only a more complicated procedure, but one that required a minimum of privacy. In a room with both the Mictok and the prisoners as an audience, the other three members of the team had remained suited. Torin had stripped out of hers on her way through the Promise. Stripped, dressed, took the first course of radiation meds, and reassured both Craig and Alamber that she was fine. The Corps considered multitasking a promotion requirement for a third hook, two further promotions and five years out hadn’t diminished her ability. “Mashona, sitrep.”

  Binti nodded toward the line of zip-tied Humans sitting against the curve of the inner wall, prudently away from any live equipment. “No injuries on the side of right. The bad guys have been bagged and tagged. They shook off the gas over thirty to forty-seven minutes depending on mass, and are all reporting headaches. Unanimous description: the back of my fukking head feels like it’s in a vise.”

  “Poor sweet babies.” Torin saw another discussion with R&D in her future. Thirty to forty-seven minutes wasn’t long enough. Their desire to do no damage to a sentient species might be admirable, but they needed to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and talk to planetary law enforcement.

  “Yeoman Fredrick Solomon had a nose bleed, which is why he looks like a slaughterhouse.”

  “I have sensitive sinuses,” the eldest pirate muttered, cracking the dried blood on his upper lip.