A Peace Divided

by Tanya Huff

  “Who would.” They looked like the sort of species who enjoyed fighting. Whatever sort of species they were.

  “Polint.”

  She frowned at Ganes—who’d apparently started reading minds.

  “They’re from the Primacy. One of their military species.”

  “I are thinking all the Primacy species are military,” Lows murmured.

  “I don’t like any of this. I want to go back to the lab. The last sample should have finished running by now.”

  Arniz tightened her grip as Dzar tried to pull away. The child would never survive academia if she didn’t overcome the urge to run when exposed to things outside her comfort zone. “I need you with me. Try to keep an open mind.”

  Last to emerge from the shuttle was a pale, hairless biped, dressed in many layers of red, its eyes as black as Arniz’ own, but much larger. She noted the flicker of an inner lid with approval.

  “Is that a Trun?” asked an ancillary.

  “You are being an idiot. Trun are having fur,” muttered a second.

  “And tails,” added a third.

  “It’s not a Trun.” Something in Ganes’ voice drew Arniz’ attention off the newcomers. His eyes were locked on the shuttle, his thumb moving rapidly over his slate.

  “Hello.” It was the first Human. He was showing teeth, and Arniz felt her lips curl in response. She forced them down. She was far too old for posturing. “Sorry about interrupting science and discovery and all that shit, but we hear you’ve found a weapon that’ll destroy the plastic aliens. We want it.”

  The silence lasted approximately ten seconds, then filled with everyone talking at once until Salitwisi’s voice rose over the din. “What are you on about?”

  “None of that.” He waved a finger in a patronizing gesture. Arniz had waved enough similar fingers to recognize it. “Hand it over and we’ll be off.”

  “This are being ridiculous.” Tyven pushed her way forward. “We are having found no such thing. This planet are a Class 2 Designate, and you are not being allowed here. So you are going away. Now!”

  He reached out, wrapped a hand around her head, fingers sinking deep into her fur, then he lifted her as though she weighed nothing at all and threw her aside. “Learn to speak Federate, you annoying furball.”

  The Katrien syntax could be annoying, Arniz admitted, but that was an out-of-proportion reaction. Apparently unhurt, Tyven scrambled to her feet, her bonded and their ancillaries surrounding her, the Katrien grooming any bits of fur they could reach, the Niln touching their tongues to her muzzle and hands.

  “Eyes on me!” the Human barked. “We aren’t leaving without that weapon!” He shifted his upper body and a long metal thing with a pipe on one end and handle on the lower edge of the other swung around on a strap. He tucked his finger through a half circle on the lower edge.

  The others from the shuttle did the same.

  “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” He sounded entirely reasonable. “Your message to the university was intercepted. We know you have the weapon. You can’t deny you have the weapon. Give us the weapon. That is the easy way.”

  “And the hard way?” Tilzonicazic muttered disdainfully. “Humans, so dramatic.”

  “Harveer . . .”

  “Not now.” Arniz tongued Dzar’s cheek.

  Ganes stepped forward, putting himself between the newcomers and his fellow scientists, standing very straight. Arniz relaxed. Ganes would deal with this and they could all get back to work. “I don’t know what message you intercepted,” he said calmly, “but you’ve misinterpreted it. We’ve barely done more than begun to map the plateau. We’ve found no weapon of any kind.”

  The larger Human stared at Ganes for a long moment. “So, the hard way, then.”

  The pipe end rose.

  Ganes straightened further. “That’s enough. Now . . .”

  The sound was more of a crack than a bang.

  Ganes jerked.

  Beside her, Dzar made a soft sound and crumpled to her knees. Gravity dragged her arm from Arniz’s grip.

  Blood dribbled from a red hole in the scales of her forehead and rolled down toward her left eye. She balanced on her knees and tail for a moment, then fell forward, exposing the bloody mess of bone and brain that had replaced the smooth curve of her skull. Arniz hissed, frozen in place, uncertain of what to touch, or if she should touch. She was old, she’d seen death, but never death like this. Never so deliberate. Never so violent. Never so . . . messy.

  Arniz hissed again and spun around toward the Human, barely keeping her balance. “You murdered her!”

  “I made a point. Give me the weapon.” He enunciated each word clearly. As though they didn’t understand Federate.

  “There is no weapon! You murdered her for plastic remains found in a latrine!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Give me the weapon responsible for the plastic remains in the latrine.”

  “Pay attention!” Arniz could feel warm hands on her arms, pulling her back. “If it was the sort of plastic that can be killed, and we have no way to prove that, we don’t know what killed it!”

  “Pay attention,” he mocked. “It’s not an it. It’s a them. It’s always a them—shape-shifting molecular plastic hive mind.” He seemed unaffected by having killed and pleased by Ganes on the ground at his feet gasping for breath, blood running from his nose. “Who found the plastic?”

  Dzar’s blood had begun to soak into the ground. “She did, you idiot!”

  “One has been sacrificed for the safety of the many.” A deep voice boomed out of the shuttle.

  “Yeah.” The Human smiled. “What he said.”

  “Reports from the Ministry for the Preservation of Pre-Confederation Civilizations has shown this was not a plastic-using civilization. The question, therefore, becomes: how was the plastic destroyed and how did the remains get into the latrine?”

  Arniz heard her own words coming back to her in the same deep booming voice, and knew what message they’d intercepted. She sagged back into Tilzon’s touch, suddenly exhausted. “Do you not know the meaning of the word question when used in this context? It means, we don’t know what destroyed the plastic.”

  “Obstruction is not in your best interest, Harveer. Sergeant Martin.”

  The gun rose again. She knew what the pipe was now; knew it by its effect, even though she’d never seen one before.

  Ganes stood, staggered, and put his body in front of the gun. “We don’t know yet,” he panted, still recovering from whatever blow had put him on the ground when Arniz had her attention locked on Dzar’s body. “But we’ll find it. The more of us you have searching for it, the better the odds.”

  “You make a valid point.” The voice sounded annoyed. “Sergeant, move them into the anchor so we can have an actual conversation.”

  The gun remained pointed at Ganes.

  “Sergeant!”

  His lip curled and Arniz thought of her department head. Sergeant Martin neither liked nor respected the voice in the ship—but would follow its orders, she acknowledged, as the gun finally lowered, and the Polint, responding to his hand signals, moved out to the edges of the group.

  They were being herded, Arniz realized. People herding people. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like any of this.

  “We need to take Dzar to the infirmary,” Tilzon said quietly.

  Arniz didn’t bother moderating her voice. “She’s a little past needing the infirmary.”

  “You need a morgue.” It was the red-clad biped. They beckoned two ancillaries over. “Carry her inside.”

  One of them glanced down at the body. His tongue flicked out, then he spun around and vomited. Arniz thought his name was Nerpenialzic, one of Tyven’s but she hadn’t bothered to be sure. She met the biped’s gaze. This close, she could taste unidentified female in
the air. “There’s no reason to take the body out of the sun. We’ll make her a platform later.”

  “Will you?” After a long moment, inner eyelids flicked across the black. “We’ll see. Now, inside.”

  Arniz clutched Tilzon’s arm as they turned and followed the bulk of the team through the hatch.

  Just in front of them, Salitwisi plucked at Ganes’ sleeve. “What was that all about? What are we supposed to find? There’s nothing to find!”

  “Either they’ll keep killing us until we give them the weapon, or we help them find it.”

  “Help them find what?” When he paused, Arniz could almost hear him thinking about Dzar. “Yes, well, I suppose it won’t hurt to look.”

  “You still have the duck.” Torin ran a fingertip down a blue-green feather.

  Binti looked out of her bedroom and frowned at the stuffed waterfowl tucked on a corner shelf in her small living room. She’d picked it up during a drunken fact-finding mission on Abalae, but hadn’t been able to remember exactly where. “Why wouldn’t I keep it?”

  “Because it used to be alive.” Torin tapped a nail against the beak. “It’s a preserved corpse.”

  “You have a Silsviss skull on your wall, Gunny.”

  “Just the skull, not an entire Silsviss. But . . .” She spread her hands. “. . . it’s a valid point. Alamber hates it. Hates the duck, that is. He seems fine with the skull.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s partly why I kept it.” Binti dropped into a chair and bent over the laces on her trainers. “He doesn’t have a lot of buttons I can push. And, anyway, he’s not around much when we’re on station.”

  “He’s sleeping communally.”

  “Duh.”

  Back at the vertrasir, Gamar had complained about Alamber liking Torin best. “You okay with that?”

  Balanced on one leg, opening up her hip flexors, Binti shot Torin an irritated glare. “We’re not a couple. We’re teammates and we’re friends and we play sometimes. In case you’ve forgotten, Alamber’s di’Taykan; he’s after quantity.” She changed legs. “And me, I have no interest in being half of a couple or part of a group. I’m whole and happy on my own.” She bent, touched her palms to the floor, straightened, and added, “Also, you’re not my mother. My mother could run circles around you.”

  “Too bad speed skipped a generation.”

  “Oh, you are on, Gunny.”

  Torin reached the hatch at the end of the passageway first, but Binti passed her on the concourse. They dove into a vertical together, ignoring the handholds rising and falling in the center of the open column and free-falling through the lesser gravity. Also ignoring the profane commentary from two members of Beta Team hanging off straps a level higher.

  *Briefing Strike Team Alpha in Conference Room H’ata in twenty.*

  She tongued an acknowledgment and twisted to face Binti. “You get that?”

  “I got that.”

  Turning in the air, Torin grabbed a rising handhold as it passed, and began to climb, Binti right behind her.

  Their palms slapped simultaneously against the exit bar. Back out on the concourse, they moved smoothly to either side of a portly Niln who’d frozen in place when they suddenly appeared.

  “Knock someone over . . .” Torin hurtled a document cart that beeped at her proximity. “. . . and you lose.”

  “Unless it’s a member of another Strike Team.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  Torin reached the hatch back to the living quarters three strides in front. Binti had gotten tangled in a cluster of Katrien clerks emerging from a break room.

  “How did you miss them?” she demanded as they ran shoulder to shoulder, the sounds of a cat fight—Katrien was not an attractive language to the Human ear—cut off by the hatch.

  “I anticipated their exit.”

  “How?”

  “Gunnery sergeant.”

  “So you’re saying you’re just that good?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  The clerks from the law offices always finished their first break at 0940 and, as Strike Team Lead, Torin spent more time than Binti on the bureaucratic floors. Enough time to track movement and add it to her mental maps. Apparent omnipotence had become habit.

  Nineteen minutes later, they walked into the conference room, the last of the team to arrive.

  As Binti circled the table, Torin dropped into the seat beside Ng.

  “Running in the halls again, Warden Kerr?”

  “Still no treadmills, sir.”

  A vein throbbed in Ng’s temple. “I’ll mention it to acquisitions. Again.”

  “You know, Boss, if you wanted a workout that got your heart racing . . .”

  “Warden di’Crikeys.”

  Alamber sat back and mimed sealing his lips.

  Craig leaned closer, a warm, solid weight against Torin’s side. Across the table, Ressk had his slate out, Werst had his eyes closed, and Binti murmured in Alamber’s twitching ear too quietly to be overheard. Torin wrapped her right hand around her left wrist just above her uniform cuff, and felt settled in a way she hadn’t since the day she’d had a conversation with Major Svennson’s regrown arm.

  Which had been unsettling on a number of levels.

  Conference Room H’ata was unattractive and utilitarian and had been built without plastic.

  The new normal.

  “All right. Three days ago . . .” Ng threw a system map into the air over the center of the table. “. . . an archaeological site on 33X73, a Class 2 Designate, was taken over by a combined Confederation and Primacy force.”

  “Confederation and Primacy? Are you sure?”

  That explained the commander’s throbbing temple.

  “No, Warden Ressk, I decided to brief you on the basis of unsubstantiated rumor.”

  “We were all thinking it, sir.” Torin met and held Ng’s gaze. He’d layered calm in a thin veneer over the implications of what he was about to share, and while she had no intention of cracking that calm, neither did she have any intention of allowing his response to stand unchallenged. He could shore himself up with sarcasm if he had to, but he was not to do it at the expense of an honest response from one of her people.

  The breath he exhaled was too controlled to be called a sigh. “Yes, we’re sure. Most of the scientists are Niln or Katrien, from Alcanton University, but Dr. Harris Ganes is ex-Navy and he got a message out to the Susumi satellite the university has in orbit. Sent it to his old ship, the CS Nagtucken. Her captain sent it on to us.”

  Smart, Torin acknowledged. The Ministry would have buried it in bureaucracy.

  “Confederation and Primacy,” Ressk said again. “So someone’s actually been paying attention to that shit about finding common ground with our enemies.”

  “Besides both of us being screwed over by the plastic aliens,” Werst added.

  “Besides that.”

  “What do mercenaries want with an archaeological site on a Class 2 Designate?” Craig asked, squinting at the map. “That’s a pre-Confederation civilization with no possible salvage.”

  “There’s some indication . . .” A message file joined the system map. “. . . that one of the soil scientists found a weapon able to destroy the plastic.”

  “I can destroy the plastic,” Werst muttered as Torin read the message.

  “Not even the Krai can eat an entire species,” Alamber scoffed.

  “And, as the gunny pointed out,” Binti added, “no one checked your shit.”

  “You think they crawled out of my shit?”

  She spread her hands. “We didn’t check.”

  “That message doesn’t say they found a weapon.” Torin sat back and read the message again. “It says they found destroyed plastic where no plastic should be.”

  “We can assume
there was some extreme extrapolation around the word destroyed by whoever hired the mercenaries.”

  “By whoever sent them in looking for a weapon.” Torin swept a glance around the table and acknowledged that her team had all reached the same conclusion. “The same whoever who sent Major Sujuno to the H’san cemetery world.”

  “That’s a Susumi jump, Warden Kerr.” Ng’s expression remained entirely neutral. “Space is large, and great minds are not the only ones who think alike.”

  Alamber’s hair flipped dismissively. “Like that time there were two vids about a Human falling in love with a Verfreenitat from the Methane Alliance.”

  “Those sucked,” Binti muttered. “I mean, who wants to use an HE suit as protection?”

  Ressk nodded, opened his mouth, and snapped it shut when Torin said, “Critique on your own time, people.”

  “We have no evidence to link the two incidents,” Ng continued as though no one had spoken. “It isn’t enough that both involve a search for ancient weapons—the current search is specifically for a weapon to destroy the polynumerous molecular polyhydroxide alcoholydes . . .”

  “The plastic,” Werst growled.

  “. . . and the former was a search for weapons to . . .”

  “Possibly do the same thing. We don’t know how the H’san’s weapons were to be used,” Torin added when attention turned to her.

  “Colonel Hurr assumed revolution,” Ressk pointed out.

  “Colonel Hurr is Intelligence; he defaulted to the political position. It could be simpler.”

  Werst nodded. “Plastic aliens fukked us over, let’s find a weapon that’ll fry their asses.”

  “Except we don’t know where their asses are.” Alamber frowned. “Or if they have asses.”

  “Justice should investigate Anthony Marteau.”

  Ng stared across the table at Craig. “On what grounds, Warden Ryder? Your dislike isn’t enough to void his privacy.”

  Craig pressed his palms flat against the glass, muscles rolling in his forearms. “He can afford mercenaries.”

  “If he needs more weapons, he can build them.”

  “His designs are based on Terran weapons. Centuries old. He’s got to be jonesing for new ideas.”