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An Ancient Peace

Page 24

by Tanya Huff


  Hands folded over her weapon, Torin studied words she couldn’t read and thought about how the Confederation had been given form by the H’san, how the H’san had determined from the beginning what would and wouldn’t be allowed. She thought about how they’d hidden their weapons when they gave up war rather than destroy them. She wondered what else they were hiding with their dead.

  And so much for feeling settled.

  “Torin.” When she turned, Craig had a triangular piece of the sarcophagus lifted up out of place. “The corner’s been broken off. You want to rob graves, you need to get the graves open.”

  He waited until she stood beside him before shining a light inside. It took a moment to separate substance from shadow.

  “Six?” Craig asked.

  “Maybe seven.”

  The sarcophagus clearly extended down below the floor line. Inside, multiple H’san lay curled in what might be a fetal position—with the H’san it was hard to tell. They were desiccated, not rotted. Flesh tight to bones, mouths and eyes sealed closed.

  “Dehydrate before interment?”

  “Probably.”

  He pointed. “Some arsehole’s dug in.”

  The dead in the corner farthest from the break lay tidily interlocked, limbs around each other, wicker baskets tucked in curves and hollows. Under the break, the bodies had been tossed around, ends of broken bone gleaming, baskets empty.

  “They’re looking for something.”

  “The weapons?”

  “Only if whatever map they’re following stopped at the doors.” She rubbed her thumb against the smooth stone. “Which it could have. They’d have to check every sarcophagus to make sure the weapons weren’t in the baskets and/or hidden under the bodies.”

  “Because as unlikely as that is, that’s what you’d do?”

  “If I had incomplete information. A general location, but nothing specific.”

  “Lovely.”

  A moment later, it wasn’t Alamber’s yell that had her racing for the third tomb; it was the familiar sound of an energy weapon that followed.

  Werst charged out of the second tomb as she passed, Ressk behind him.

  “Mashona!” She caught the flicker from the corner of her eye and dropped to the floor, rolling over, weapon ready, nothing to shoot. On a hunch, she reached over and touched the place where she’d been standing. The stone was warm.

  Werst’s nostril ridges were shut, his weapon pointed at the far wall, his voice barely loud enough to hear. “It came out of the lights, Gunny, reacting to the noise. We take them out, if we can take them out, and we’re in the dark.”

  “A security system protecting dead H’san,” Ressk snarled softly.

  Torin rolled up onto her feet. “Protecting a weapons cache that could plunge known space back into war.”

  “And that,” Ressk allowed. “Guess we’re in the right place.”

  “Plunge?” Craig asked as they ran toward the third tomb, boots making barely more noise than the Krai’s bare feet.

  “Too much?”

  “Little bit.”

  The third crypt looked like the first. The symbols were in a different order—different words, sentences, obituaries—but, otherwise, an exact match, including the broken corner on the sarcophagus.

  Just inside the door, Alamber leaned close to Binti’s shoulder, hair jerking back and forth in short, quick arcs. His fingers weren’t quite touching a strip of blistered skin that followed the curve of Binti’s shoulder.

  “She shoved me out of the way,” Alamber whispered. “Took the shot meant for me.”

  “Second part of that was an accident.” Binti nudged him with her hip, and he settled into the contact. “The security’s sound activated,” she explained when Torin came closer.

  “Yeah, we got that; it took a shot at me in the corridor. You okay?”

  “It’s minor. Hurts like fuk, though.” It looked minor, a finger-width burn, six centimeters long, and past it about a centimeter of her shoulder strap turned to ash. “I think,” she continued as Torin checked the damage, “it’s a warning to be respectful of the dead, and I stand by my observation that the ancient H’san were a bag of dicks.”

  “Not arguing,” Torin told her. Craig shifted her out of the way, pulling the first aid kit from his pack. They’d needed a corpsman, he was as close to Navy as they had, and he wouldn’t carry a weapon. She didn’t . . . no one wanted him carrying a weapon. She took another step left until Alamber was close enough he could lean into her side. “What surprised you?”

  “There’s a body. Not H’san,” he continued, before she could point out the obvious. Reluctantly breaking contact, he led the way around to the rear of the crypt.

  A dead Katrien had been propped against the carved rock; her head flopped over onto her left shoulder, her fur dry and patchy, eyes glazed gray, lips pulled back off pointed yellow teeth. There were no visible wounds, except for the broken neck.

  “You’ve seen bodies before.” Torin dropped to one knee and tugged the worn shoulder pouch out from under a mangy elbow.

  “Like you said, it took me by surprise.”

  “Jumped out at you?”

  “Funny, Boss.”

  The Katrien’s slate was an older model with nearly a full charge. It wasn’t locked, so Torin flicked through to the first level. “The slate’s registered to Jamers a Tur fenYenstrakin. I doubt she’s lent it out.”

  “So they killed her. Because she was stealing from them?”

  “Hard to say. It could have been an accident.” Torin didn’t bother trying to sound like she believed it.

  Alamber hummed noncommittally, and held out a hand for the slate. “I’ll see what she’s got on it. Might be something useful. What do we tell Presit?”

  “The truth. Jamers was dead when we found her. Wait here.” She shrugged out of her pack, both shoulders at once, catching it easily before it hit the floor.

  “Hey, Boss? Do you remember that vid Presit took when she and Craig found you guys on the prison planet?”

  “I don’t need to see the vid, I was there.” He’d watched everything about her that Presit had shot, including rough footage that had never aired. Torin wasn’t too happy about it, but she had no reason to stop him. Craig encouraged him. Sometimes, he watched with him.

  “Right, well, the way Jamers’ eyes are all glazed over and gray, it reminds me of the way Presit’s eyes were when the gray aliens were leaving her brain.”

  Torin shot him a look of disbelief.

  He shrugged. “What can I say, it’s a creepy similarity.”

  “Keep it to yourself,” Torin told him, shaking out a Corps body bag and laying it on the floor beside the corpse.

  “I know Presit said she’d been gone for years, but I thought she’d be younger. Younger than Presit anyway. She looks old.” He huffed out a breath. “And dead.”

  Jamers had been dead for a while; rigor had left the body and the flesh compacted under Torin’s fingers. The moist interior had begun to rot. She wasn’t wasting sympathy if there were gray aliens trapped in there.

  Alamber watched her seal the bag, eyes dark, hair still. “There’s a hundred bits of the Corps you didn’t pick up, but that you brought with?”

  “I don’t leave anyone behind.”

  “And you told Presit we’d bring Jamers out.”

  “And that.” With the slates restricted, she had to set the charge by hand. The bag stiffened, pushed against her boot, then flattened. She flicked the ash to one end and poured it into the attached cylinder, having practiced the motion more often than she cared to remember. Her hand paused halfway to the vest she wasn’t wearing and, grateful she had Alamber with her and not Werst who would have noticed the truncated move, she tucked Jamers into her pack instead. “Come on, let’s tell the rest what you found.”


  The fifth crypt had pieces of torn paper on the floor, an empty coffee pouch behind the sarcophagus, and a crumpled filter. The eighth had a small pile of empty food packs, refilled with waste.

  “I guess if you’re willing to start a war . . .” Binti straightened and rubbed her palms against her thighs. “. . . you don’t have a problem with littering.”

  “We carry ours out,” Torin growled.

  “If the H’san want to find out who broke in, they can build up a DNA profile by isolating epithelial cells excreted in urine.” Alamber spread his hands when everyone turned to stare. “What? I picked up a lot of odd information working for Big Bill.”

  “We carry ours out,” Torin repeated.

  “Hey, I’m on your side, Boss.”

  The sarcophagus in crypt twelve was the first the mercs had broken into at the far corner. If it had taken them that long to notice their previous vandalism would be visible from the door, Torin could only conclude grave robbing didn’t attract the sharpest knives in the armory. A half a dozen pieces of ceramic had been shoved in on top of the bodies, and she’d bet this was where the biscuit warmer had come from.

  “Loot abandoned on orders.”

  Craig shot Torin a silent question as he slid the broken corner back into place.

  She shrugged. “When you’ve risked your life chasing the enemy out, picking up a few things for yourself doesn’t seem unreasonable. The Corps frowns on it.”

  “Egregiously?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Gunny!”

  Again, it wasn’t Ressk’s shout that started them running, but the weapons fire after it.

  “Garn chreen ta dirin avirrk!”

  That, and the profanity.

  “Fukking inedible testes?” Craig asked as they ran.

  “Close enough.”

  Ressk was sitting on the floor across from the twenty-first crypt, Werst checking a burn that ran diagonally across his scalp.

  “I think the security system had a little trouble calibrating for the lack of height,” Alamber murmured as Torin stopped beside him.

  Torin thought about the burn on Binti’s shoulder, painful but not debilitating, and doubted it.

  “Again nothing serious,” Craig said as he sealed it.

  “Hurts like fuk,” Ressk growled.

  “If fukking hurts,” Alamber began. He stopped when Torin shot him a warning glare. “Oh, come on, Boss. Classic straight line. More than I could resist.”

  “Try harder. Can I assume,” she returned her attention to Ressk, “you weren’t shouting about a body?”

  “Uh . . .” Ressk flushed, the darker green mottling across his cheeks darkening further still. “It wasn’t so much about the body, Gunny, but where it was. Is. I got uncomfortably close.” He nodded across the hall at the polished stone wall under the balcony. “Beneath the loop with the double curved lines through it.”

  Torin checked the railing, and crossed carefully. She couldn’t see . . .

  And then she could.

  The floor had been laid in such a way that the missing section remained hidden until she was almost on it. Pit trap. Basic, but effective. Head up, she sniffed, smelled the five of them, the omnipresent dust, and nothing else. The lower temperature in the catacombs had kept Jamers from smelling much different than the dead H’san, but a body introduced to the bottom of a pit trap would have had its physical integrity breached and even a Human nose should have been able to smell that.

  She moved closer, sliding her boots across the floor, and looked down.

  Polished stone walls enclosed a square meter of air. Three meters down, the pink turned gray. At six, darkness. Evidence suggested not even the H’san put lights in a pit trap.

  Directly over the pit, she thought she could catch a faint whiff of the unforgettable mix of shit and blood that lingered over battlefields and wondered how far the poor s.o.b. had fallen before hitting bottom. Were they standing dead center on the trap when the floor collapsed beneath them? Or had they been moving quickly along the wall and not seen the trap until too late?

  “Do we drop a flare, Gunny?” Binti asked beside her.

  “No. Whoever they are, we can’t get them out, so we leave them buried with the H’san.”

  “Bag of dicks,” Binti muttered.

  “Still not arguing.”

  Crypt twenty-one hadn’t been tossed. Nor had twenty-two, or twenty-three through thirty, all left to the dead without the detritus of the living. They returned to the pit trap together.

  “All right.” Craig folded his arms. “Where did they go? And if they kept going straight ahead, why did they stop searching the tombs for the weapons?”

  “They weren’t searching for the weapons,” Torin said slowly, staring at the infinity point as she put the pieces together. She turned and looked down at the pit. “They were searching for a sign of where to go next.”

  “That’s an emphatic sign.”

  “Could be another corridor at the bottom of the pit,” Ressk said thoughtfully, one finger tracing the edge of the burn on his scalp. “If my scanner was working . . .”

  “It’s not,” Werst snarled. Ressk got hurt, Werst got crankier. They’d all learned to ignore it.

  “All I see is dark.” Binti leaned in. “What do we do if there’s an opening halfway down?”

  “If you can go halfway, you can go all the way and get your people out.”

  “You could,” Craig pointed out as Torin squatted and cocked her head, changing the way the light hit the wall on the other side of the pit. “What?”

  “There’s a chip out of the stone. I thought it was a fleck of the gray but from down here I can see the shadow. Alamber?”

  He crouched beside her. “Oh, yeah. There. I don’t see any symbols or anything, Boss, but the stone’s smudged in a line about half a meter over and a meter up from the chip.”

  “That’s it.” She straightened. “Craig’s taller, but Alamber’s lighter.” Hand around the di’Taykan’s arm, she tugged him up. “Stand here. Lean forward, open the door.”

  He pulled against her grip, not enough to get free, only enough so she knew he wasn’t happy. “What door?”

  “The one under the smudges. Werst. Mashona.”

  “On it, Gunny.”

  She waited until they were in position, back-to-back in the center of the corridor, then checked that the buckle was as much functional as decorative before taking a hold of Alamber’s belt. At her nod, Craig took the other side.

  “If I slip . . .”

  “I weigh twice what you do, kid. We’ve got you.”

  Hair flat against his head, he leaned forward and pressed a palm against the wall. A one-by-two–meter section swung away from the pressure. And closed as he released it. And swung open again.

  “Looks like the pit on its side. Only taller,” Ressk added after a moment.

  The biggest difference was that passage behind the door ended in a rectangle, not a square, of darkness and that a hunk of ceramic—probably not a biscuit maker, but Torin wasn’t taking bets—had been left leaning against the wall about a meter and a half in, a prop to keep the door open while they moved their gear through. The chip had likely been caused when the mercs had lifted the sled up into the passage.

  “We’re moving into an area with no apparent access to outside air. Filters on.”

  “I hate filters.”

  Filters for the Krai covered everything below their eyes, loose enough within the seal to allow for movement of their nostril ridges.

  “You hate being gassed more.”

  Ressk didn’t seem convinced, scowling as he slapped the clear film over his face and secured the edges.

  When they—in every possible combination of they—found no way to manipulate the door from the other side, they left it propped open
behind them. Since they’d ultimately closed it, Torin assumed the mercs knew another way out.

  “If this gets narrower . . .” Craig touched the walls with his elbows. “. . . I’m not going to be happy.”

  “At least if the floor goes out you can brace yourself.”

  “There’s that.”

  “How did the H’san fit through here?”

  “Less chatter, people.” Although the question about the H’san was valid. There had to be a limit to how far a sentient species could compact.

  “Lights on, Gunny?”

  Lights would paint a target on them should anyone be waiting at the other end of the passage or heading back toward them. On the other hand, the H’san had put a pit trap in with their dead within sight of the main . . .

  She glanced back, shifting until she could see the perfectly square hole in the floor, too small for a H’san. Unless the floor had been designed to collapse in variable ways depending on who triggered it and a H’san standing on the same spot would have opened up a hole twice the size. One of her brothers had a game biscuit with traps that used those parameters. She wondered it if had been designed by the H’san.

  “Torin? What are you thinking about?”

  “That Mashona’s right and the H’san are a bag of dicks.” Turning her back on the pit, she shifted her pack. “Ressk and Werst, lights on, aimed at the floor. Ressk up front with me, Werst on our six with Mashona. Craig and Alamber . . .”

  “Tucked snug in the middle, Boss?”

  “No talking. No noise. We smell, see, hear anything, lights out. Questions? Let’s go.”

  The PIDs—Personal Illumination Devices—clipped to the straps of their packs beamed golden circles onto the floor. Barely enough light to maneuver safely. Possibly enough light to be dangerous.

  Torin set the kind of pace intended to eat distance without tiring the team unnecessarily and soon the sounds of movement, the circles of light, the smell of three species in an enclosed environment, became background and she could extend her senses beyond their position. She knew Werst and Ressk had fully opened nostril ridges and that Alamber’s eyes were dark and his hair flipped away from his ears.

  If the mercs were waiting ahead of them in the passage, if they’d set perimeter beacons Torin’s team had tripped, then she was leading them into a shooting gallery.

 

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