by Tanya Huff
“Can you leave anything alone if it’s dangling?”
“Why would I?”
“Quiet!” Sujuno felt her nails dig into her palms and ignored the pain. This was it. She knew it.
Three steps more and the water reached Broadbent’s armpits. The ancient H’san had clearly angled the bottom steeply toward the center. One more step and he’d be swimming.
“Wait.” He froze at her command. “Can you feel the pattern?”
The water was clear enough and he was still close enough she could see his feet move. “Yes, sir.”
Her turn to wait. After a moment she growled, “And?”
“It’s raised.” Balanced on his left leg, he bent his knee and stretched his right leg out in front of him. “I think it gets more raised farther in.”
“Are you saying,” Dion demanded, “that the pattern is dominant in the spatial relationship it maintains with the bottom of the bottom of the pool and that it grows more dominant the closer you move toward the center?”
Wenn’s teeth snapped together. “Oh, come on, seriously? Major, let me . . .”
“No.” Dion either didn’t know or didn’t care about the threat inherent in the sound. She’d seen Krai teeth crush Human bone. “Not until we’ve been paid. Keep moving, Broadbent.”
He swam with short, awkward looking strokes, neither hands nor feet breaking the surface. When he reached the center, she heard him take a deep breath then he flipped forward and floated for a moment, facedown. Sujuno had to assume that, in spite of the depth, the water remained clear enough he could see the bottom. After longer than she was comfortable with, his legs dropped and his head came up. He spent a moment breathing, then said, “Lines come together around a squiggle, Major.”
Dion stepped closer to the edge. “I hesitate to ask, given your description, but does your squiggle happen to resemble the mark I’ve spent the last two days searching for?”
Broadbent bobbed up and down, the curves of his shoulders breaking the surface. He spat out a mouthful of water and stared at Dion for a long moment, his position inhibiting a physical response. “We’ve been searching for,” he said at last.
“Is the mark raised like the pattern you followed to the center of the pool?” Sujuno asked before Dion could spit out another string of stupid.
“Looks like, sir. Hard to tell how high from here, though.”
“At that depth, light’s probably too diffused for shadows,” Vree murmured.
“Does it appear to be the mark we’ve been searching for?”
“Um . . .” He glanced down. “Yes, sir.”
“I expect, and this is an educated guess, that he needs to depress it.” Dion took another step, glanced down as water lapped against his boot, and stepped back again. “You need to depress it,” he repeated.
“Tell it it’ll never amount to shit,” Wenn snickered.
“Tell it it’s weak,” Keo laughed, flexing her exoskeleton.
“Tell it it’s all alone,” Nadayki said, voice and hair flat. “It’ll always be all alone.”
“The law is very clear; there is no line if the sole survivor is di’Taykan. We are sorry for your loss, Sujuno di’Kail, but there are many families who would be happy to have you join their name.”
“But when I am qui, the law will allow me to declare progenitor and restore the line.”
“The law will allow this, yes, but it is very expensive to register a new progenitor and you will not be qui for many years. The Taykan are not intended to remain alone as you will be until you change.”
“Major?”
Only Toporov noticed. He was better at his job than she’d given him credit for.
“The professor’s right.” Her tone added how much she disliked admitting it. Vree laughed. Dion heard only the words and preened. “Broadbent, if you can reach the bottom, you should de . . . you should press the mark.” The mark they’d found after days of moving rock and dirt had also been raised stone, protruding out of the wall beside a metal door. Simple. Uncomplicated. Obvious. It had sunk into the wall when Dion had pushed against it and the door to the catacomb had opened. “If you can’t reach bottom, come back and we’ll find something light enough for you to swim with that’ll extend your reach.”
Side by side along the curved edge of the pool, they all watched the light as Broadbent dove, pale flashes of arms and legs and torso following behind. His first dive took him nowhere near the bottom—refracted light had made the pool seem shallower than it apparently was. He surfaced, gulped in air, and dove again.
Closer.
When he surfaced the second time, he sucked in a desperate breath before his nose and mouth were entirely clear.
“Report,” she snapped when he finally stopped coughing.
“I can do it, sir.”
And then he did nothing at all but breathe for a ridiculously long time. She realized what he was doing just as she felt Toporov readying himself to bellow and said, “He’s hyperventilating. Leave him be.”
The sergeant grunted agreement.
On his other side, Nadayki murmured, “I feel like I should say something about heavy breathing, but who the fuk cares.”
Broadbent dove again.
She felt the click through the soles of her boots.
“Was that . . .” Dion began and was drowned out by the crash of stone panels opening. By the roar of thousands of liters of water draining away. By ancient machinery pushing the nose of a small ship up through the absence of floor where the pool had been.
Her back slammed up against the Mictok’s plinth and she realized they’d all stumbled back. They hadn’t needed to, the floor had remained rock solid, but fight or flight had kicked in during the sound and fury and there’d been nothing to fight. Breathing heavily, she clenched her teeth and pushed herself up onto her feet to keep from reaching out and touching Nadayki. Pressure on new bruises provided potent distraction.
“Broadbent!” Toporov knelt at the curved line where the floor ended, leaning as far forward as the side of the ship allowed, peering down into the lower level. “Broadbent!”
“He’s dead.”
“We don’t know that, Major.”
“Look up, Sergeant. Two, two and half meters, forty degrees left of your zero.” The ship looked nothing like modern H’san ships, but function put a certain form on anything intended for space that started at the bottom of a gravity well. The translucent smear she’d directed the sergeant’s attention to was red and brown, topped with pinkish-gray froth. Water had feathered the lower edges, but impact had obviously occurred after most of it had drained away.
Toporov shook his head. “He could be injured.”
“Those are brains,” Keo said from behind her.
They’d all seen brains before. When she was a mere second lieutenant, Sujuno had found a bit of her captain’s brains in a pocket of her combats while walking to the extraction point two days after her first battle had ended. Back at base, she’d thrown them in the incinerator and silently accepted the abuse the supply sergeant had thrown at her when she went in for a new set. By the time she got out, newly a major, she’d long since learned that a familiar set of combats, with dependable tech, meant more that random bits of brain.
Wen’s arm rose, and a small stone rang against the side of the ship. “We should’ve tied a rope around him.”
“I’m telling you, you’d have still lost him. Given the mass of the water and the speed with which it drained, the force on his body would have been enough to have dragged anyone anchoring the end of the rope in after him. The only possible result would have been multiple brains smeared on a magnificent, ancient vessel.” As Wenn lifted his arm again, Dion put himself between the Krai and the ship. “Stop it!”
“It goes into space,” Wenn sneered. “I’m not going to dent it.”
“D
o you have any comprehension of how priceless this vessel is?”
“I’ve got a pretty good comprehension of how stupid this whole thing is,” Nadayki called from the stairs. He sprawled gracefully four steps up, having removed himself as far from the edge of the pool as he could. Sujuno reluctantly admired his survival instincts. “Why the fuk would the H’san set up a kill switch? Go for a swim, press a symbol. Oh, look, it’s a spaceship, and you’re dead.”
Dion’s lip curled. “Do not assume you understand how the ancient H’san thought.”
“I understand stupid.” He tapped his chest, his hair a lime-green aurora around his head. “Genius.” Arms wide, he indicated the whole cavern. “Stupid.”
Sujuno nodded. “He’s right.”
“I don’t believe he is.” Dion waved his slate, screen still showing the latest symbol. “Most of the Younger Races are barely able to comprehend how modern H’san think. I am one of the few, the very few, who have any small understanding of the ancients. And even given my scholarship, we have no context for what just happened and therefore no way of knowing their reasoning. And I guarantee, they had reasons for this cavern, for the bodies, and for the ship.”
“I don’t care. Ignoring for the moment that we’ve just witnessed a spaceship rising through a pool into an underground cavern . . .”
“Stupid,” Nadayki muttered.
“. . . it would be pointless to go to the trouble of creating the kind of treasure hunt we’ve been involved in only to have set it up so that it kills the treasure hunters before they reach the end.”
Dion folded his arms. “Sacrificial intent.”
“Seriously?” Wen sighed.
“If we allow that the ancient H’san were not acting pointlessly . . .”
“Acting bugfuk crazy,” Nadayki muttered.
“. . . and as Broadbent is dead,” Sujuno continued over the enthusiastic agreement to Nadayki’s amendment, “we can assume that the mark Broadbent found may have resembled the mark we’ve been searching for, but was not, in fact, the actual mark.”
“You asked him if it appeared to be the mark.” Wen rocked back and forth, hands opening and closing. “Not if it was the mark. Serley chrika, Major, you killed Broadbent!”
“Chill, Wen. You didn’t even like him,” Keo pointed out.
“Not the point!”
“I’ll allow that Broadbent was stupid,” Dion sneered.
Wen charged, the staccato slap of bare feet against stone the only warning.
“Sergeant!”
Toporov grabbed the Krai out of the air, pushed him into his bonded’s arms, and backed off, hands well away from snapping teeth. Verr gripped Wen’s shoulders, pressed their foreheads together, and reminded him they could divide Broadbent’s share among the survivors.
“Broadbent died. No one killed him. And you,” Sujuno snarled at Wen, “do not need to threaten Dion in his memory.”
“It wasn’t a threat,” Wen growled.
“I wasn’t threatened,” Dion muttered at his slate.
“You don’t seem to care that he died.” Arms folded, Keo glared at Nadayki. “You were fukking him last night, he’s dead today, and you’re all critical about the H’san.”
“There’s a lot to be critical about.” Nadayki leaned back on his elbows and sighed. “And why should I care more about him dying just because I fukked him last night? Humans are so weird about sex.”
“Yeah, well, don’t even pretend that being a shithead is the di’Taykan default because I’ve known plenty of di’Taykan.”
He grinned. “How well?”
“Enough!” Sujuno swept her gaze over the entire team, pausing only long enough to stare Nadayki down. “The weapons are on the lowest level of these catacombs, we’ve known that from the beginning, and the bottom of that ship is a long way down. I will not leave here without those weapons, so there has to be a way. Find it.”
Verr pulled far enough away from her bonded so that she could shake her head. “I don’t know, Major, we’ve searched everywhere.”
“Obviously, we haven’t.” She could hear the Krai breathing, Dion’s fingers tapping against his slate, Keo shuffling around in a small circle as though she could see what they’d all missed from where she was standing.
“All in favor of finding a better way to spend our time, wave a body part.”
She turned in time to see Nadayki shove a hand in under his waistband, reaching for the body part he intended to wave. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Took a step toward him. “The stairs.”
“Major?” Toporov moved to stand behind her left shoulder.
“We didn’t search the stairs.” They’d walked down them. They’d been distracted by the dead on plinths and the benches and the water. They’d searched the walls all the way around the pool and they’d searched the floor, but they hadn’t searched the stairs. The stairs had brought them down into the cavern and they needed stairs taking them down farther still. Unless Dion had been talking out of his ass from day one, it was the kind of symmetry the H’san appreciated.
“Uh . . .” Nadayki reluctantly waved a hand. “I searched the steps for a control panel.”
“But only for a control panel.”
“I guess . . .”
The mark had been carved shallowly into the riser of the lowest step.
She had to press it herself.
“Forget it, Major.” Verr spoke for all of them. “We’re not touching it. Not after what happened to Broadbent.”
This was the way to the weapons. To her progenitor. The grooves felt cold under her fingertips as she traced them. When she applied pressure, the entire riser shifted two centimeters in and a three-by-five–meter slab of floor slid back to disappear under the cavern wall.
Arms flailing, Verr staggered and would have fallen into the opening had Keo not grabbed her and dragged her back.
“Stupid,” Nadayki reiterated.
“I’ve definitely started leaning toward your bugfuk crazy theory,” Verr growled, nostril ridges tightly closed. “That’s a fukking safety violation at the very least.”
“I assure you . . .” Dion began.
“Shut up.”
“Packs on, people. We can’t carry the sled down that.”
Keo grinned. “We could slide the sled, Sarge. Let it bounce.”
“Packs,” he repeated.
Sujuno had kept hers ready to go. The others, even the sergeant, had gotten sloppy, and she ground her teeth at the delay.
The stairs, carved out of the same pinkish rock as the cavern, went straight down forty-three steps to a landing. A one hundred and eighty degree turn and straight down thirty-seven steps to a landing.
The risers on H’san stairs were variable heights and seldom level, the off angles running between two or three degrees to just under twenty. On a single short flight, it had been annoying. By the second landing Sujuno’s calves were cramping with the effort of maintaining her balance at speed and they all kept one hand on the wall. They’d done little resembling hard labor since landing, but compensating for heights and angles seemed to be requiring enough effort from all involved she realized the planet’s pull had wearied them more than she’d thought.
They’d rest as they cataloged the weapons, not before.
“What do the H’san have against elevators?” Nadayki skipped a shallow step, stumbled, and caught himself by grabbing a handful of Toporov’s jacket.
“This place is millennia old; you couldn’t pay me enough to get into an elevator. Besides . . .” Toporov tugged his jacket free. “. . . what would power it?”
“Geothermal running to secure generators. Solar fields we didn’t spot from orbit. Magic. Same thing that’s powering the lights and whatever they used to pop a fukking spaceship through the floor.”
Forty-one steps. A turn. Fifty-three
steps. A turn.
“What’s with their hard-on for prime numbers?” Verr wondered.
Fifty-nine steps.
The lower corridor was the darker pink of the bottom of the pool. It was damp, but there was no standing water. The pool had drained through it, not into it. At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor to the left ran straight for approximately thirty meters and ended—although light and shadow suggested a ninety-degree turn and the corridor continuing. To the right, it did the same although it also curved around the end of three enormous cones, narrow ends anchored in the body of the ship, stone following the same arc as the pool on the level above .
“Engines,” Wen said, after a visual examination. “Ship takes off, it’ll slag this level.”
“The ship is an antique,” Sujuno reminded him. “Older than antique. What makes you think it’ll work?”
Wen shrugged. “Everything else has.”
She couldn’t argue with that. They’d expected ruins and faced a fully operational security system. The H’san built to last. Some of what they’d built even made sense.
“Where’s the machinery that lifted it through the pool?” Nadayki demanded, head turned three quarters of the way around as he stared up between the ship and the wall. “For that matter, where’s the floor of the pool? And what’s holding this in place besides bits of Broadbent?”
“The H’san move in mysterious ways,” Dion told him, and Sujuno wanted to smack the smug, sanctimonious smile right off his face.
Nadayki straightened and smiled back at him. “Fuk you.”
“We’re wasting time, people! Let’s get this area secured!”
Verr patted Toporov on the arm as she passed. “Thanks for checking that the decibel security is still off, Sergeant.”
The straight walls of the corridor were bare, but the curve that circled the ship had been covered in multiple lines of inset stone.
“That’s a lot of H’san. How do we find which one we need?”
“Don’t touch it!” Dion grabbed Keo’s arm and landed on his ass up against the far wall.
