by Tanya Huff
After three hours and twenty-seven minutes, Alamber whispered, “Light ahead.”
They stood in sudden darkness as both PIDs turned off.
Twenty-four minutes later, Torin could make out a patch of gray.
The gray grew paler and became a two-by-three–meter opening. What little sound they were making began to dissipate into what had to be a larger room beyond the exit.
“Hold here.” Beckoning Ressk forward with her, she added, “Remember what was under the welcome mat at the other end.”
Behind the faint glimmer of the filter, Ressk’s nostril’s flared. “Smells like . . .”
“Impact boomers,” Torin said, edging up to the doorway, her back against the stone.
As her elbow broke the line of the door, the lights came on.
EIGHT
TORIN LOOKED OUT into the middle of another wide corridor an indefinite distance long; vanishing points to both the right and left, the opposite wall approximately six meters away. She missed being able to ping it, but the difference between approximate and exact was immaterial without the need to target artillery. Which she didn’t get to do anymore. Although, it looked like someone had.
“Looks like they emptied the magazine,” Ressk said beside her.
The entire visible length of wall they faced had once been covered with floor-to-ceiling, glass-and-metal display cases. Directly across from where they stood, the cases and their contents had been destroyed, broken glass and twisted metal and unrecognizable debris extending some distance beyond the immediate impact zone.
The mercs had cleared a path for the sled through the debris field exposing a floor made of tiny colored tiles laid out in geometric patterns, and she could clearly see where one of the sled’s metal wheels had crushed the tiles on both sides of a grout line. The tiles were surprisingly delicate given that they were on a floor and Torin appreciated the new ease of tracking. Following the path, she could see where they’d made camp to the far right of the debris field.
Off the path, debris kicked aside indicated exploration in both directions, but, as the sled had only gone one way, they could ignore everything to the left of the door.
Torin stepped out onto the mosaic floor and followed the path for a couple of meters, then turned to face the door—and the mural around it. Painted in brilliant colors unfaded by time, the door included in the painting’s narrative, it depicted H’san using the artifacts in the surviving cases. Occasionally in ways Torin hadn’t expected. Or believed possible.
Large and small chunks of the wall had been chipped out by flying debris, exposing the stone behind the ancient H’san equivalent of plaster.
“Museum, Gunny?”
“Cache. Museum implies access by the public.” She bit back the urge to tell Ressk to be careful as he followed her out onto the floor. The Krai knew better than she did how to keep from lacerating their feet.
“Holy shit.” Craig braced his hands against the walls of the passageway, leaned forward, and looked around. “What happened?”
“Fun with explosives?” Alamber suggested, peering over Craig’s arm. “Hey, Boss, can we come out?”
“Stay close.” She moved to study the pitted wall where the impact boomers had hit and counted two twisted pieces of metal that had definitely been weapons as well as another four possibles, too damaged or too H’san for her to be sure. The question was: why would the H’san target this entrance? And not merely target, six weapons aimed at a two-by-three opening could only be called targeting with prejudice. Who had they expected to emerge?
Someone going after the weapons cache. Someone who knew the route well enough to find a hidden door, but who didn’t have the codes to walk it safely.
Someone who got lucky.
“Werst, check the passageway. See if the defenses got a shot off.”
“You think their heavy gunner reacted to an attack?” Craig reached out, but didn’t touch the wall. Torin had been pleased to see that salvage paranoia, where any hunk of twisted metal floating in vacuum post battle could turn out to be deadly, had made a direct transition to feet-on-the-ground paranoia.
“No, I think it was instinct,” she told him. “Unless the defenses fired a warning shot first, no one’s reactions are that fast. But a gunner who’s seen enough combat, well, a sound, a flash of light, a change of air pressure . . .”
“I’ve got something, Gunny!”
The two-finger deep gully Werst found hadn’t been blasted out of the rock. Or burned.
“Disintegrated?” Alamber offered, running a finger along the smooth rock at the bottom.
Craig snorted. “Disintegrator rays show up on bad vids, not in the real world.”
“Well, if it turns out we’re in a bad vid, that’s all the more reason to make sure their weapons don’t leave this planet. Let’s move.” She beckoned Ressk back to her side and stepped out onto the path.
“What about the filters, Gunny?”
The air still smelled of impact boomers, but was clearly circulating through both crypts and corridor—or was it a tunnel?—and cache. She had no idea if it had begun circulating with the mercs’ arrival, or if it had been circulating for centuries for whatever reason the H’san had thought was valid. Nor did she care. With no apparent exterior access, they were in an enclosed, potentially hostile environment. Granted, given the size of the place, the H’san would have to either use one hell of a lot of an airborne toxin, aim it specifically, or drop partitions to create a smaller airtight enclosure, but all three options were valid ways to keep the curious or opportunistic or bugfuk crazy away from the weapons.
“Filters stay on.”
The H’san’s decibel-based security kept complaints at a quiet rumble.
What she’d thought was a pile of coarse white sand along the boundary of the merc campsite turned out to be broken glass. The mercs had left bags of waste behind again.
The sled’s trail continued to the right, tiles crushed in a double line.
“Why would the H’san save all this shit?” Craig asked after they’d walked past about a kilometer of shelving. “I mean, grave goods are a stupid waste, but a guy can wrap his head around the reasoning. This? This makes no sense.”
Torin glanced over at a completely featureless ceramic cube and shrugged. “They gave up violence, but kept all their weapons. That’s a good indication they don’t like to throw anything out.”
They passed three sections of destroyed mural, the stone exposed, the plaster ground to dust underfoot. By the time they got close to the point the mercs had exited the corridor . . .
“Eight klicks from the door,” Werst said, shifting his pack.
“Senak,” Alamber snorted.
. . . they were no longer following the floor so much as aiming for the destruction. Huge chunks of the mural, a priceless and irreplaceable piece of ancient H’san art, had been tossed aside to uncover a metal wall. They’d cut the hole to the dimensions of the sled. Flesh compressed, gear didn’t.
Body out of the line of fire, Torin unclipped her light from the strap, bent, and pointed it through the hole. If the H’san remained consistent, the dark meant the mercs had moved on.
“Gunny?”
“New catacomb like the first, crypts on the right, balcony on the left. If the corridor has an end, the light doesn’t reach it.”
Craig stepped forward as she straightened and ran his palm over the edge of the cut. “The metal’s a composite. I’m not sure of what.” He picked at a chunk of mural still stubbornly adhering to the wall. It didn’t budge. “No evidence of solvent. It would’ve taken the better part of a day to pry the mural off the metal and days to cut through, even given the size of their torch.”
“How can you tell the size of their anything?” Alamber asked, innuendo surprisingly absent.
“Heat of the burn,” Craig explained. �
�The hotter it gets the smoother the cut. This, this cut is slick.”
That helped to explain the weight of the sled. The torch could be used as a weapon, but as the mercs were also conventionally armed, Torin decided not to worry about it.
“It’s not a door,” Alamber muttered. “How did they know where to break through the mural?”
Binti spread her hands. “Sign on the section they trashed: this way to weapons, cut here.”
“No, there’s a door here.” Ressk touched the seam where the metal joined the stone. “It’s the only place they uncovered between here and the destruction where the wall isn’t stone. They couldn’t find the door, they got frustrated, so they took a shortcut. See, there?” He pointed to where the edge curved dimpled up into a half circle. “They burned through there first to check visuals.”
“But how did they know? Scanners aren’t working and they couldn’t have been randomly digging through the mural for metal. There aren’t enough holes, not over a distance of . . .” Alamber shot Werst a look. “. . . eight kilometers.”
“I’m telling you, sign on the mural.” Binti huffed out a breath. “Misinterpreted the first few times, got it right this time.”
“What, you think the H’san left a trail of bread crumbs leading to the weapons?”
“They left a map,” Torin said, drawing everyone’s attention. “Notes. A recording of interpretive dance. The means don’t matter. They left a way for future H’san to check that the cache remained secure. Someone found it.” She considered the need for the impact boomers. “Or part of it.”
“Yeah, but how did they know where to . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Torin repeated, cutting off Alamber’s question. “We go where the mercs went only we move a lot faster.” When she twisted to find the angle to get both her and her pack through the hole, Craig touched her hip, his hand warm in spite of multiple layers between his skin and hers.
“Torin, maybe we should bunk in here for the night. It’s been a long day.”
“Time isn’t our . . .” she began. And then the lights in the corridor went out.
“Garn chreen!”
“Didn’t mean to grab that, Werst. Swear to you, I was startled.”
Not surprisingly, Werst’s light was the first on.
“You know the other place the lights went out like this?” Binti said through clenched teeth, shadows of her fingers dancing over the display cases as she adjusted her light.
“Prison planet?” Ressk growled, sounding more like his bonded than himself.
“Yeah. That’d be the place.”
They weren’t wrong. Torin could feel the weight of the prison bearing down on her, the lives ruined, the lives she hadn’t been able to save. The gray aliens admitting responsibility for millions of deaths over five centuries—a social experiment and they were the lab rats. She could hear that weight flattening Werst and Binti and Ressk’s voices and wouldn’t add the force of her feelings to it. Part of her job was to help carry them. If she was fine, they’d be fine. That was how it worked. She buried her reaction—the anger, the guilt, the betrayal—under the sound of mild irritation. “Looks like we’re taking Craig’s suggestion and bunking here for the night. Head back about ten meters, set up against the wall.”
As Alamber stepped forward, Werst reached up and tugged the beam of his PID toward the floor. “Down and close to your body, like in the passage. You don’t want them to see yours if they’re coming back. And we want to see theirs.”
“Did you want to see mine?”
Alamber hadn’t been one of the POWs. Torin had edited her report to the Justice Department to keep him out of prison.
Craig’s fingers on her wrist, skin to skin as though she were di’Taykan and needed the comfort of touch, made her think of the look on his face when he’d arrived on that prison planet and pushed back the helmet of the HE suit. That memory was strong enough to help carry the rest.
“Gunny?” Ressk pointed his light at his cheek and flicked the edge of the filter glistening over his lower face.
They could eat through the filters. Field rations had a nipple designed to pass through the membrane and reseal it on the way out. But it wasn’t comfortable and field rations were only just palatable as it was. She pried a corner off the lower edge of her jaw and ripped the filter off. “Give me a twenty count.”
“Why you . . . ?” Craig began.
Torin cut him off. “Because I’m fast enough to get another one on if I start to react.”
“And if it sneaks up on you?”
“The cuff’ll show any deviation from Human norm.”
Alamber’s hair flipped up. “Any deviation?”
“That’s twenty. Gunny?”
She took a deep breath and checked her cuff. “No effect.”
“Yes!”
A few minutes later, rubbing residue off the bridge of her nose, Torin looked at the bag of pale paste—the Corps cooks hadn’t bothered to make field rations appear any more appetizing than they tasted—and considered asking for a splash of the spices Alamber pulled out of his pack.
“You can have some of mine.” Craig brandished an identical spice pouch, her thought processes apparently so obvious he didn’t need to see her face.
“Taste buds dead of boredom or taste buds fried.” She shook her head. “Tough choice.”
If it hadn’t been so dark, she’d have missed the flicker as Craig opened the pouch. Grabbing a fistful of his jacket, she yanked him sideways across her legs. Light splashed against the wall where his torso had been. The mural cracked.
Alamber keened.
Torin didn’t see the flash that answered the noise, but she saw Werst move, hand over Alamber’s mouth as he took the di’Taykan to the floor.
They’d gotten used to keeping their voices low, not forgetting, but adapting to what happened when they raised them.
Alamber’s cry of pain had been loud enough to set off the beams, but before that . . .
“The spices. It’s the only thing they had in common. Are you . . .”
“I’m not hit.” Craig’s palm pressed warm against her cheek as they untangled their legs.
Alamber lay with his head in Werst’s lap, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth, noises muffled against Werst’s palm.
“Second beam hit the inside of his arm. Ashed the fabric, fried the skin.” Binti ran her hands under Alamber’s clothes. “I can’t find the first.”
Torin caught hold of her arm, stilled her. “I see it.” She adjusted her light to illuminate a two-finger–wide band of hair burned away on the left side of Alamber’s head. The centimeter-high stubble seeped clear fluid from every hair.
“Oh, fuk . . .”
“Craig.” Torin reached a hand behind her. “Sealant with the highest level of pain killer.” The tube dropped onto her palm. She thumbed off the lid and sprayed a thick layer over the burn. The sense organs that were Taykan hair could be bent, broken, or cut with manageable levels of pain. A burn was excruciating.
Alamber shuddered and hiccupped damply as Werst uncovered his mouth. “Boss, I didn’t . . .”
“I know.” Torin tossed the tube to Binti. “It was the spices. They took a shot at Craig, too.”
“Fukking bag of dicks,” Binti muttered, sealing the burn on Alamber’s arm.
“Spices?” Ressk had moved to kneel behind his bonded, chest pressed up against Werst’s back, a second layer of support. “That’s the definition of arbitrary, Gunny.”
“The composition of the spices could be similar to an ancient threat.”
“I thought the beams were warnings?” Craig asked softly over her shoulder.
“They set it up a millennia before they made contact with the Taykan.” Alamber’s pulse was thready and the skin of his throat damp under her fingers. The biometric in his cuff
told her nothing she hadn’t observed. “They couldn’t have known.”
“You defending this, Gunny?” Werst nodded at Alamber panting against his thigh, teeth clenched so tightly a muscle jumped in his jaw.
“No, I’m still going to punch the next H’san I see. I’ll add this to the list of reasons.”
Craig pressed closer, copying Ressk’s position. “Shouldn’t the sealant have dealt with the pain?”
“Not yet.” Torin cupped Alamber’s cheek and he nuzzled into her palm. “It needs to be absorbed by the hair shafts.”
“You’ve dealt with this before.”
She thought of flamethrowers on the battlefield and heated metal in APCs hit with heavy ordnance, and electrical fires as they fought their way through stations captured by the Primacy. “Once or twice.”
Craig’s warmth moved away and she heard him digging through the medkit. “I brought duwar. Diluted, but it should put him out for about six hours.”
“That’s a Taykan drug.”
“He’s a di’Taykan. Seemed relevant to bring it.”
“Clever.” Torin’s fingers lingered on Craig’s as he passed over the vial. “Alamber.” His eyes when he opened them were so uniformly pale blue, she doubted he could see her. “I want you to drink this.” She dimpled his lower lip with her thumb. “Come on, open. There’s no reason to be conscious for the next few hours.”
His tongue swiped against her skin before he gasped, “If they come?”
Didn’t matter who he thought they were. “I’ll carry you. Or Craig will. Or Binti. Or Werst and Ressk together. You know we can.”
“Yes.” He opened his mouth, swallowed, sighed, and a moment later the rigid lines of his body relaxed.
Torin released a breath she didn’t remember holding. “Someone touches him at all times.”
“We’ve got him, Gunny.” Supporting Alamber’s head with both hands, Werst edged back far enough that Ressk could move in and wrap an arm around his body.
