An Ancient Peace

by Tanya Huff

  Craig stepped backed until he stood pressed against the opposite wall, squinting up at the balcony. “I wonder what the balustrades say?”

  “Oops?” When everyone turned to look at Binti, she shrugged. “What? They repeat every seventeen symbols, so they’re not saying much. I thought that was obvious,” she added, as Ressk banged his head against the wall.

  They found nothing under the symbol that had been above the first door. They activated no pit traps, so Torin acknowledged it could’ve been worse. They looked for the symbol in each of the three crypts they were searching. When they found it, it led nowhere and appeared to have attracted no more attention from the mercs than any of the other symbols.

  Ressk sagged against the sarcophagus in the second crypt and sighed, nostril ridges fluttering. “They picked a great time to learn to clean up after themselves. No drag marks suddenly cut off, no food wrapper caught halfway through the door, and no grubby footprints leading into a wall.”

  “Still plenty of grubby prints.” Torin rubbed a couple off the glossy black stone. She paused. Frowned. Bent her head, left ear nearly on the stone. The overlap of hand prints along the edge nearest the door created a dulled border.

  She tucked her fingers in under the narrow lip and lifted. The lid was a slab of solid stone that should have weighed hundreds of kilos. Craig, who had enough upper body muscle that his legs looked disproportionately short, had struggled to lift the broken corners. With barely a fingertip grip, Torin shouldn’t have been able to shift it.

  The whole top swung up with minimal effort, exposing a flight of black stone stairs heading down into darkness.

  The second step was chipped, as though someone had misjudged the weight of an unloaded sled.

  “Well . . .” Alamber folded his arms, head angled to protect his injured hair. “. . . this is different.”

  Every other wall of the octagonal room held nine sarcophagi, in a three-by-three rectangle, the long sides of the sarcophagi facing the room. In the alternate walls were two upper rows of niches holding metal urns and, centered under them, a door. An eight-sided pillar stood in the center of the room ending two meters short of the vaulted ceiling. The sides of the pillar corresponding with the sarcophagi showed scenes of H’san life. The other four—the four facing the doors—held inset control panels.

  Ressk slowly circled the pillar, nostrils flared. “They tried all four of them, I have no idea which is the right one.”

  “I do.”

  Torin crossed to where Craig crouched at the base of one of the doors. For a moment, she thought the line of red ground into the intersection of wall and floor was dried blood, but blood dried brown not red.

  “It’s been tracked around and scuffed up by boots and equipment, but . . .” He twisted and pointed back toward the center of the room. “. . . you can still see where the spray pattern extends all the way to the pillar. I’d start there.”

  She straightened. “Alamber, Ressk.”

  “We’re on it, Gunny.”

  “A H’san panel . . .”

  “Math is math, Gunny. Numbers are numbers. We just adjust for base seven and we’re chrick.”

  “And that’s why we brought them along,” Craig said behind her, close enough he could rest a hand on her hip.

  Torin grinned. “Yeah, but they’re doing the conversions on their slates.”

  “And then applying them.”

  “Fair point. I guess we’ll keep them.”

  Without looking up from his screen, Alamber flipped her off. The mathematical distraction eased the visible tightness in his bearing and smoothed some of the lines of pain from his face. The ends of his uninjured hair had begun to swing in small, careful, arcs.

  “Gunny.” Werst’s voice rolled around the octagon, volume near the edge of what security would allow. “We’ve got rot.”

  “Bluebirds in the morning,” Craig muttered, following her to where Binti and Werst stood beside one of the niches.

  Even with her nose nearly touching the broken seal of the sarcophagus, Torin smelled nothing but the same stale air, combined with the body odors of three species who’d been restricted to basic hygiene for the last two days.

  “Seal’s broken all the way around, Gunny.” Binti squeezed out from between the narrow end of the sarcophagus and the wall of the niche.

  “Is it another set of stairs?” Craig asked.

  “No.” Binti shook her head. “Most of the mortar’s been pushed out of diagonal corners . . .” She pointed. “. . . there and there. They didn’t lift the lid, they twisted and slid.”

  This lid seemed to weigh the expected amount.

  Torin drummed her fingers on the stone. “Time, Ressk.”

  “Ancient H’san, Gunny. Base seven.”

  “Okay, we have time.” Torin shrugged out of her pack. “Binti, Werst, you’re on the back corner. Craig and I will push from here.”

  If it hadn’t been for the broken pieces of residual mortar reducing the friction, they’d have never budged it without a heavy. As it was, the four of them working together shifted it about eight centimeters before it ground to a halt.

  Torin covered her mouth and nose as Craig scrambled backward. “Far enough.”

  Binti gasped out what could have been an affirmative, while Werst breathed shallowly through his mouth, nostril ridges shut.

  “Ablin gon savit, Boss! That’s foul!”

  “Keep working, we’ll close it in a minute.” She pulled her light off her strap and aimed through the triangular space. “Full face filters, now!”

  “Oh, come on, Boss. It’s foul, but . . .”

  “Now,” she repeated, using the tone that negated argument. The three ex-Marines were already tearing open the outer pocket on their packs. Torin sealed the clear sheet, hairline to jawline, before she turned to help Craig. Again, salvage paranoia had worked in his favor. “Ressk!”

  “I’ve got him, Gunny.”

  With minimal bristles on a mostly bare scalp, the Krai could slap on a 3F faster than either of the other two Marine species, and with Alamber’s hair already injured, he’d be more tentative than usual.

  “Sound off.”

  “Sealed.”

  “Sealed.”

  “Sealed.”

  “I fukking hate these things.”

  “He’s sealed, Gunny.”

  “Good.” The pain in Alamber’s voice cut him the necessary slack. She leaned in again. “Human. Can’t tell male or female at this point.” The green-and-gray mottling was disturbingly Krai-like. “There’s red dust plugging nose, mouth, and eyes; fluids and gases had to have been released anally.” Shaking her head, she straightened again. “It’s cool and dry enough in here, I wouldn’t even try for a TOD. Anyone?” She thought about the body bags she carried. Thought about how the mercs were probably ex-Marines. She glanced at Werst and realized he knew exactly what she was thinking. The familiar crinkle of the filter punctuated a deep breath in and out again and she opened another pocket on her pack.

  “DNA sample,” Binti said as Torin reached into the sarcophagus with the probe. “That’s good,” she added as Torin slid the probe back into the slender tube and sealed it. Whether she meant good they were taking a sample out or good they weren’t scooping the entire body up off a bed of dead H’san, Torin had no idea. Not that it mattered.

  “You do realize that while you discovered that the gray aliens had been manipulating both the Confederation and the Primacy for centuries, you’re not responsible for the deaths they caused.”

  “I know.” Torin met Dr. Ito’s gaze and held it. “But someone is.”

  “All right, then . . .” She moved to the other end of the sarcophagus. “. . . let’s close it up.”

  A cloud of red dust billowed out with some force when they opened the door. Not explosive enough to reach the pr
evious coverage, but the pressure had recently been released and hadn’t had another millennium to build up again.

  “Same codes to open it from this side?” Torin nodded toward the control panel, protected from the dust by a sheet of glass.

  “Can’t tell until we try, Gunny.”

  “Leave it until we want out, then.”

  “And if they don’t work?”

  “We’ll try something else.”

  “Why, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, do you have demo charges in your pack?”

  She shot Ressk a lifted brow. “Not counting broken lids, that’s two irretrievable bodies and a hole cut through a metal wall. The ship for subtle has left the . . .”

  The floor quivered. Torin felt it through her boots and all the way up her legs until it set her stomach vibrating. Teeth clenched, she fought the urge to vomit. Binti had her hand over her mouth. A muscle jumped in Craig’s jaw, and she could see his throat work. The two Krai lifted their feet into the air; one, then the other, then again. Alamber whined, fingers fluttering over the silk shirt he’d wrapped around his head to protect his injured hair.

  Puking in a filter was unpleasant. Torin swallowed and watched the dust swirl until it felt safe to speak. “Anyone hurt?”

  “I’d forgotten field rations taste as bad going up as they do going down,” Binti muttered, attaching a nipple to her canteen and pushing it through her filter.

  “So had we all.”

  A hand on Ressk’s shoulder for balance, Werst stared at the bottom of his foot, flexing his toes. “What the hell was that, Gunny?”

  “Let’s go find out.”

  The dust tinted the air red, fine enough to be ignored as it covered everything it touched. The long corridor with the vaulted ceiling looked familiar, but the stone was gray, the ceiling was a good two meters lower, and there were crypts on both sides. Rather than the clean lines of the catacombs on the levels above, drifts of red settled on the loops and curls of decorative stonework. None of them knew H’san history well enough to tell if any of it was representational. They ignored the crypts, following the faint tracks on the floor.

  The tracks became more visible the farther they moved from the door. Torin kicked the pace up.

  “But I’m injured, Boss.”

  “You got shot in the hair, not the leg.”

  Two hours later, they followed scorch marks on the walls and ceiling to a slagged control panel. The thin slab of gray stone leaning against the wall beside it suggested the panel had been hidden in the wall. Given the H’san’s skill at near invisible joining, Torin wondered how it had been found.

  “Just a guess,” Ressk said, squinting into the melted interior, “this wasn’t the control panel they were looking for.”

  The closest sarcophagi were still sealed. No one had died in the blast.

  “Gunny.” Binti pointed at deep red marks above the doorways of two crypts. “They hung something to keep out the dust. Must’ve stuck around here for a while.”

  “Fortunately, we don’t need to. Let’s go.”

  They found two more crypts with residue over the entrances and then a second control panel left open beside the obvious outline of a stone door at the end of the corridor.

  “That’s new,” Werst grunted. “This is the first time one of these fukking corridors has ended.”

  Pushed, the door remained closed, and there was nothing to grip in order to pull. About a meter away was a broken piece of decorative stone.

  Torin rocked the stone under her boot. “They didn’t want the door to close so they blocked it. Like the door by the pit.”

  “Yeah . . .” Craig shrugged out of his pack and rolled his shoulders. “. . . except that rough edge says the door closed with enough force to break the block.”

  “There’s a couple of jackets, a half empty pouch of sah, five pieces of rigid tubing about two centimeters in diameter, an articulated hose, and three lights in that crypt, Gunny. One of the jackets is Human, but the other . . .” Binti tapped her nose, the filter crinkling. “. . . is di’Taykan and no more military than ours.”

  “So not just mercs, then.” Craig looked thoughtful.

  “I wouldn’t have sent mercs in without some kind of expert on the H’san.” Torin would have preferred an expert in her pocket as well. “Search the jackets for identification. Alamber, Ressk—control panel?”

  “Okay, this is really complicated. We could crack it. Someone else did and I’m very hot for them right now because of their brains, but it’ll take time.” The rhythms of Alamber’s voice were choppy, and he was breathing through clenched teeth. “Couple of days, maybe. Probably. And we’d have to suck all this dust clear first.”

  “We’d also have to build some kind of filter to keep the dust out while we’re working,” Ressk added, catching Alamber’s swinging arm by the wrist and holding it still.

  Alamber needed another dose of duwar.

  They needed to get through that door.

  “How long is the tubing?”

  “About a meter five. Clip them together, and you could build a frame,” Binti continued, answering the question Torin had actually asked. “We know they were hanging sheets of something to keep the dust out. They could build a shelter around the panel. Hose hooks to an external filter.”

  “We’re a bit short of equipment,” Craig pointed out.

  Torin laid her palm flat against the door. “We blow it.”

  Werst’s eyes gleamed. Although that could have been the filter.

  With stealth abandoned, they all agreed better a bigger bang than a loud noise and an intact door.

  “Definitely a big enough bang,” Craig noted when they emerged from the nearest crypt to find a door-shaped hole in the wall and no rubble larger than a Human fist.

  “The decibel security targeted the door as it blew. Might’ve helped break things up.” Beyond the opening, Torin could see pink stone rising into a massive dome and what looked almost like the nose of a ship. Underground. She checked the dome again. It seemed solid.

  At the threshold, using the wall for cover, she stood at the top of a long flight of stairs leading down to the floor of a circular cavern—given the dome, not entirely a surprise. The ship rising up through the center of the floor looked like a vacuum-to-air shuttle, much like the one they’d landed in allowing for species and millennial differences. A ring of alternating statues and benches surrounded the ship. Not far from the bottom of the stairs, a rectangular hole in the floor led to a lower level.

  If the mercs had been in the cavern, they couldn’t have missed the door blowing. In their position, Torin would wait silently, using the pedestals and angle of the stairs for cover until the new arrivals were exposed descending the stairs. Then she’d order her people to open fire.

  “I’ll go,” Werst growled from the other side of the door, as able to read the room as Torin. “I’m a smaller target.”

  “Mashona, covering fire.”

  “On it, Gunny.” Binti dropped prone in the doorway.

  Torin went to one knee beside her. “Werst, go.”

  No one fired.

  He darted right at the bottom, around into the blind spot. Came back into sight a moment later, investigated the second set of stairs, the nearer pedestals, and finally gave the all clear.

  “Alamber, Ressk, Craig. One at a time. Move.”

  The cavern secured, Torin had Werst cover Binti’s descent while she investigated the abandoned sled. Sleds. She’d been right about them taking along a second. It lay almost diagonally across the first, wheels still folded flat. Cases holding the cutter, the filter, tools, power packs, more tubing, a large roll of clear plastic—unresponsive plastic—and food were stacked messily on top, clearly having been carried down the stairs piece by piece. Four six-liter containers and eight four-liter containers of water had been lined up to one s
ide. There were no empties.

  The mercs had found water somewhere in the catacombs.

  Water with zero impurities according to her canteen.

  “Craig.” She nodded at the containers. “Let’s get started topping everyone up.”

  Two packs had been stripped and left; one rigged for Humans, one for Taykan. The body rotting with the H’san had been Human, so the body in the pit trap was di’Taykan. Unless they’d lost someone else, and there was a pack at the bottom of the pit.

  “What a lot of crap.” Ressk flicked the catch on the cutter’s container.

  “They had no idea of what they’d face.”

  “They had Jamers making runs.”

  “They wouldn’t want to wait for her.” Torin didn’t blame them, not for that. And that was fine; there was plenty of blame to go around. “Given how she ended up, I doubt they’d have trusted her to buy most of this. She’d have attracted too much attention.”

  Ressk picked up the cutting laser. The power connector dropped off. Metal crashed against stone.

  Binti dove off the stairs and flattened against the floor.

  “Security’s off,” Craig said after a long moment of nothing happening.

  “Decibel security.” Binti rolled up onto her feet and shrugged her pack back into a more comfortable position. “H’san are too fukking crazy not to have something going on down here.”

  “Spread out. Quick recon.” Torin sent Mashona and Ressk right, Werst and Alamber left. “We’re not heading down those stairs until we know what we’ve left behind us.”

  “They think they’re close, don’t they? That why this stuff’s here.” Craig twisted the top back on a canteen. “They’ve already carried the sleds down two flights of stairs, but this time they only took what they could carry.”

  “Those aren’t statues, Gunny,” Ressk called before Torin could answer. “They’re bodies, but they’re revenk. The H’san did something.”

  “The H’san did a lot of things.” Meat that wasn’t meat was not her concern, although she wasted a moment wondering why they’d left a pedestal empty. She walked to the edge of the floor. “Craig, what can you tell me about that ship?”