An Ancient Peace

by Tanya Huff

It took a moment to remember the reason they’d volunteered. He’d saved Ressk’s life at the shuttle.

  “You two, keep his head stationary. Mashona, get his legs. We’ll lift him onto his bedroll, then I want Craig to take a look at Ressk’s head and Binti’s shoulder.”

  “The sealant’s holding, Gunny.”

  “He’ll check anyway. On three. Two . . .”

  “Why aren’t I standing watch?” Craig murmured, lips resting against the edge of Torin’s ear. He hadn’t said anything while watches were being set because he didn’t challenge her authority in front of the others. Privately, however, with their bedrolls overlapping, he wasn’t asking Gunnery Sergeant Kerr but Torin.

  She tightened the arm wrapped around his waist. “You’ll stand tomorrow night, if we don’t catch up.”

  “If we do catch up, there’s going to be fighting. You lot need your sleep.”

  “If you’re going to fly an unfamiliar shuttle out of here, you need to be on top of your game.”

  “An unfamiliar . . . ?” He frowned and thought about turning on his light so he could see her face. “What are you talking about?” He could feel her thinking about how to answer him. “Torin?”

  She went still against his side. “No matter what happens down here, we’re not leaving in our shuttle.”

  Ah. “I keep telling you, luv, that wasn’t a crash. I’ll cop to a hard landing, but our shuttle’s fine.”

  “Our shuttle’s engines are full of sand and if you start them, they’ll be full of glass.”

  “That’s nothing to be all big note about.” When she didn’t fill the pause left for argument, he sighed, lifting her head as his chest expanded. They’d taken everything not bolted down, but since they hadn’t been in the habit of keeping anything on the shuttle that they hadn’t planned to use dirtside, that had been easy enough to ignore. But he’d known. He moved his nose to feel the ache, to take himself back to the pilot’s chair as they fell through the lower atmosphere. “Ressk scrub her clean?”

  “He did. We’d have blown her, but we didn’t want to give our grave robbers a heads-up.”

  Craig rubbed his thumb in slow circles over the inside of Torin’s wrist and reminded himself they’d all walked away. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get too attached. So who’s going to skite the loss to Justice?”

  “Colonel Hurrs owes us. He can explain.”

  That sounded fair. “So, the Taykan shuttle?”

  “Bigger than ours. Probably faster.”

  “Faster’s good. It won’t be as tough.”

  He felt the warmth as Torin huffed out a laugh. “You need to work on your landings.”

  On the last watch, assuming the lights came back on, Torin sat and listened to her people breathe, listened for her enemies’ approach. She doubted the mercs would be back this way until they headed out with the weapons—odds were, part of the weight on the sled was a second, collapsed sled. It didn’t matter how silently the mercs moved; the sleds would give their position away in plenty of time. She also doubted she’d ever reach a stage where she could trust her enemies to act as anticipated.

  Alamber’s breathing—shallower and faster than normal, even with the sedative—hitched and Torin rose up on her knees beside his boots. She flicked her light on at its lowest setting and slowly moved it up the length of his body, until the reflected light off his chest allowed her to see that his eyes were open. He licked his lips, swallowed, did it again. Swallowed almost frantically.

  Torin gripped his ankle, fingers up under fabric against skin, and handed him a pouch of water. Hands shaking, he raised it and locked his lips around the nipple. A moment later, she pulled the half-empty pouch from lax fingers as he slid back into an undrugged sleep, the undamaged part of his head resting on Ressk’s stomach. Ressk’s left hand cupped the back of his neck. Werst’s right spanned the line of pale skin below the rucked-up edge of his tunic.

  She tugged his arm free of the tangle and turned it until she could see his cuff. Watched it until his pulse slowed and his respiration evened out.

  Seven hours and twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds after the lights went off, they came back on, red and almost translucent for a few moments until Torin’s eyes adapted.

  She let the team spend as much time as she thought they could spare fussing over Alamber while she redistributed the contents of his pack, halving the weight he carried.

  He pushed them away before she could call an end to it. “I’m fine.” The hair on the uninjured side of his head flicked forward and he sucked air through his teeth. “Okay, I’m not fine, but as long as the sealant holds, it’s bearable. Let’s go already, so we can get the job done and get out of here because I’m not only in pain, I’m also stuck eating the same tasteless muck you lot do.”

  Torin met his gaze, nodded once, and shrugged into her pack. “Ressk, you’re on point.”

  “Gunny, he’s . . .”

  “What part of on point do you not understand?”

  The lights came on in the catacombs on the other side of the hole when Ressk’s boot touched the floor.

  “That’s a lot of wasted meat.” He readjusted his pack and stepped away from the hole, weapon ready. “I’ll never understand the way most species treat the dead.”

  “Most?” Binti twisted her upper body and pack through on the diagonal.

  “Ciptran males fight to the death for the right to mate and the females lay eggs in the thorax of the loser.”

  “Didn’t need to know that.”

  The sled left no marks on the stone slabs of the new floor, but the mercs were searching the crypts again.

  “Let’s assume we’re doing a wash and repeat of corridor one. Find a crypt they haven’t tossed.”

  “That’s a lot of crypts, Gunny.”

  Torin looked toward yet another vanishing point and squared her shoulders. She could identify human-scale objects at just under three kilometers, given reasonably decent light and air quality, but the corridor stretched empty for so long, it seemed like an optical illusion. “We’ll be done sooner if we don’t stand around talking about it.”

  “Oh, for fuk’s sake, Ressk, we don’t need to baby him; Alamber’s a part of the team, he’s not a civilian. Would you’d be this annoying if it was me?”

  Ressk glanced up at her. “Hell, no. Not if it was you.”

  Binti laughed, the sound ringing in the enclosed stone of the crypt.

  They froze, Ressk’s hand around her knee. The burn on her shoulder ached, the skin pulled under the straps of her pack and her weapon.

  “Suddenly not so funny,” she murmured after a long moment.

  “So you saw Marines get burned?”

  “Yeah.” Werst kicked the empty coffee pouch back behind the sarcophagus. Bring it in, carry it out; what the fuk was so hard to understand about that?

  “Will my hair grow back?”

  He was about to snap that Alamber knew more about di’Taykan hair than he did, but then he saw the look on the kid’s face, the barely hidden fear. Apparently Big Bill hadn’t set any di’Taykan on fire during Alamber’s tenure on Vrijheid Station. “Sure, eventually. After the injured hair dies and drops out.”

  “Will it hurt the whole time?”

  He remembered his Recon squad working their way through the woods. Their corporal had been hit with the backwash from a Primacy terraformer they’d taken out, turning the back of her head into seeping stubs. Almost a tenday later, the muscles of her neck had cramped with the effort she’d put into not moving her head. Occasionally, she’d whimper as though she couldn’t stop the sound. “You’ve got the extra- strength sealant and that drug Ryder brought, so probably not.”

  “Are you bullshitting me?”

  Werst met the kid’s pale gaze and opened his nostril ridges. “Absolutely.”

  “Th
anks.”

  “War dead?”

  Multiple H’san had been put into the sarcophagus in pieces. Torin could see shattered bone and torn tissue and an arc of teeth held together with gold wire. Desiccated organs had been tucked inside the cages of exposed ribs and laid within the cradles of gleaming pelvic bones. Her brain insisted on the faint smell of rot, refusing to acknowledge the cleansing of time.

  “I hope so.”

  As they moved to check again, three crypts down, she could hear the faint murmur of quiet conversations from the other pairs as they passed the open doorways.

  “All we’re doing is tracking the bad guys, and I still feel like we’re being tested.” She stared down at another sarcophagus. “Find your way through a labyrinth of the dead to prove you’re worthy to wield our weapons. We’re not dragging along an unconscious egomaniac and no one’s shooting at us and the catacombs aren’t likely to make a Susumi jump any time soon, but there’s a faint whiff of Big Yellow about this setup.” Torin could feel Craig’s gaze. When the silence extended, she turned to face him. “What?”

  “What?” he repeated, brows rising. “Big Yellow was a colony. A fukking enormous colony of the gray aliens.”

  “I know.” The sentient, polynumerous molecular polyhydroxide alcoholydes could combine into any shape, creating a hive mind. Twice now, enough of them had combined to become their own ship.

  “I know you know.” Gaze never leaving her face, he dragged both hands back through his hair. “And now you think the gray aliens learned how to lay out a mind fuk from the H’san? From the route to the weapons cache?”

  “You don’t.” Not a question. He’d made it clear he didn’t.

  “You said yourself that the mercs don’t have the whole map. Or all the notes. Or access to the entire interpretive dance.” When she raised a brow, he grinned and the stiff line of his shoulders relaxed. “The interpretive dance bit stuck. And then you said, given incomplete map, notes, and dance, this whole bullshit treasure hunt only looks like a test because the mercs don’t know exactly where they’re going or how to shut off the security system.”

  Not quite what she said, but close enough for government work. “True.”

  “Yet you don’t sound convinced by your own argument.”

  Torin took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing her thoughts to march in straight lines. The gray aliens had been around for a long time, long enough to engineer the interstellar war the Elder Races had been too evolved to fight. The Elder Races had trusted the Younger Races to fight, to kill, to die, but not trusted them with the coordinates of the H’san home system where the H’san, the Eldest of the Elder Races, had hidden the weapons they’d used to nearly destroy their civilization. What other information had the Younger Races not been trusted with? Had the H’san nearly destroyed other civilizations? Sure, the gray aliens had said the war had been a social experiment, but if the H’san could withhold information, why not the gray aliens? She wiped a sleeve over the smudges Krai feet had left on the polished surface of the black stone sarcophagus. “There’s no plastic here. Not in any of the crypts. Not in the eight kilometers of display cases we passed yesterday. Lots of stone. Various metals. Rubber. Ceramic. Glass. But nothing that even looks like plastic.” She shook her head at his lack of reaction. “You saw that, too.”

  He shrugged. “It was a long walk and as much as I love your ass, after the first three or four kilometers, I took a look around. Hell, it could be they decided not to waste fossil fuels on shit that gets thrown out. We don’t know.” Craig’s expression changed as the last piece fell into place. “And that’s your point, right? That we don’t know what the fuk is going on.”

  “Hard to run a successful mission with bad intell.”

  He reached out and touched her cheek with the backs of two fingers. “I have faith in you.”

  “How long do you figure they searched before they found the next exit?” Lounging against her pack, Binti gestured with a circle of dried apple. “I mean, we’re moving pretty damned fast and yet . . .” She waved a hand toward the vanishing point of the corridor. “. . . we haven’t covered a lot of territory, relatively speaking, and we’re already past their base camp for this sector.”

  “Easy enough to work out the approximate time once we find the next exit.” Ressk frowned down at his slate, refusing to take as absolute the loss of his scanner and his connection to the ship. As the satellites couldn’t target him this far underground, Torin let him fuss. “Could have been a couple of tendays. But that’s a couple here, a couple back by the mural, and at least one digging out the door. Six tendays and however long it took them to figure their way out of that first hall. Looks like the H’san don’t check in very often.”

  “Why would they think they had to? Anyone who might want the weapons has been told over and over that the H’san home system has been lost in time.” Binti folded her hands, widened her eyes, and sweetened her voice. “And the Elder Races don’t do violence.”

  “Sixty or seventy days?” Alamber’s protest rose over Werst’s muted snort of laughter. “Oh, yeah, I’d love to spend sixty or seventy days in here talking in whispers, surrounded by a fuk of a lot of dead H’san, unable to use any sort of decent tech, eating flavorless sludge, and feeling like someone set my head on fire.”

  “Guess they figured the reward was worth it.” Craig capped the tube of sealant and studied Alamber’s damaged hair. It had stopped oozing, but that was the best Torin could say about it. “They must’ve been offered a bucket of lolly for the weapons.”

  “From who?” Werst demanded. “No one with that kind of money would be willing to whisper at dead H’san.”

  He wasn’t wrong. The backer of this little junket would be waiting in comfort for the weapons to arrive, not be down here whispering in the dark.

  “Not our problem.” Torin shrugged back into her pack, the not yet anyway silent and understood. “Let’s go.”

  Ten crypts further on, the mercs had begun to open only every fourth sarcophagus.

  “They’re broken into four teams,” Torin said as her team gathered in the corridor. “They’re still checking the crypts, but they’ve decided what they’re looking for isn’t in with the dead.”

  “And crypt number four, Gunny?”

  “The heavy’s still breaking the lid because they can.”

  Binti snorted. “The heavy’s a bit of an ass.”

  “Good thing,” Craig pointed out. “It’s a more obvious marker than finger- and toeprints and the occasional bit of trash.”

  “Better thing, now we only have to check every fourth crypt . . .” Torin smiled. “. . . we can move faster.”

  They’d eaten again before they found three sets of four crypts, untouched.

  “All right.” Torin rolled her shoulders under her pack, the gravity beginning to wear. “We’re looking for an exit somewhere between this crypt, which they stayed in long enough to urinate . . .”

  “And my jernine didn’t believe me when I told them about the prestige of working for the Justice Department,” Ressk murmured.

  “. . . and that one.” Torin pointed at the crypt four crypts away from the last broken sarcophagus.

  “No pit traps giving hints this time.” Perched on his pack, Werst stretched his toes. “Unless they missed the sweet spot. Doesn’t mean we will.”

  “Yes, thank you, Werst. We’re narrowing it down; let’s . . .” Torin’s slate chimed.

  The lights went out.

  “What if they left through the balcony?” Werst asked the next morning.

  Everyone tilted their heads back. The balcony was four meters from the floor, the top of the railing—still made of H’san symbols—two meters from the vaulted ceiling. The angle made it impossible to get an accurate measurement on the width.

  “So we waste some time searching for stairs?” Binti asked,
tying her jacket across the top of her pack.

  Werst secured his weapon strap. “Gunny.”

  “Not on my own, not in this gravity.” She beckoned Craig over to the wall and bent, cupping her hands.

  He stopped in front of her. “You’re not going to boost me, right?”

  “No.” Torin nodded at Werst. “We’re going to throw him.”

  The Krai weren’t large, but their bones were dense.

  “On three.”

  Craig glanced over at her, past Werst’s hand resting lightly on the top of his head, and grinned. Torin rolled her eyes. Their first mission for Justice, after a short farcical interval involving wreckage, a lever, and a bucket of soft fruit, they’d settled the “on three” or “three and go” question. “One. Two. Three.”

  Werst grabbed the railing and swung up onto it, gripping the top rail with a hand and a foot. Instead of jumping down onto the balcony floor, he held his position. “It’s not a balcony.” His voice drifted down, barely audible at the base of the wall. “It’s a pit.”

  “A pit?”

  “Yeah, a big, long pit filled with polished bones; skulls along the back, bigger bones at the front, smaller ones filling in the middle. Top layer’s H’san, don’t know what’s underneath. It’s . . .” He paused. “It’s a fuk of a lot of bones, Gunny, and I’d just as soon not check that it’s H’san all the way down.”

  The last H’san war had destroyed all life on this planet. Billions of H’san dead and it seemed as though all of them had been gathered up and interred as the H’san worked out their collective guilt. Torin touched the side of her pack over Jamers’ ashes. She understood their motivation.

  “Hope the exit’s not in with them,” Alamber sighed.

  Torin ordered Werst down before responding to Alamber’s comment. “It won’t be. So far, they’ve been making it difficult to get to the weapons, not pointlessly messing with the people coming after them.”

  “So far,” Alamber repeated, sucking air through his teeth as his hair jerked forward.