by Tanya Huff
“No guarantees until I see the rest of it, but, yeah, it’s a VTA. Design’s similar to what the H’san used about ten years ago. Knew a guy at the station . . .” The station was always Salvage Station 24. Home, even if Craig could never return to it. “. . . who boosted a control panel out of an old H’san shuttle in a junkyard on Borin. Installed it in his wreck of a Drop Beetle and actually got the damned thing working. Until this trip, that conversation was as close to the Core as I’ve ever gotten. She looks like she’s in good shape.”
Torin glanced up. The dome still looked solid.
“Yeah.” Craig followed her line of sight. “No idea. One thing the last couple of days have taught me, the H’san might’ve able to start up a galactic democracy, but they never got around to inventing the doorknob.”
“Boss?” Alamber trotted across from a bench, and thrust a pile of discarded filters toward her, his own still a shimmer in front of his face. “There’s no dust down here.”
The dust swirled up to but not over the threshold at the top of the stairs—air currents or H’san tech, Torin wasn’t sure, but there was no dust in the air in the cavern, although they’d all brought in a patina of red. Habit had her glance at her slate. Externals remained shut down. “How many discards?”
“Five or six. They’re in a disgusting clump, I don’t want to count them.” He looked miserable and had started to sound sulky.
The mercs had been in the dust catacomb for days and while they’d have needed to change their filters, Torin could think of no reason they’d have dumped the used ones so far from their gear unless they’d been standing by the bench when they took them off. “Give me thirty seconds. If I don’t collapse, you can remove yours.” She pulled the release tab and ran her thumbs in under the seal to break it.
Alamber threw the discards back toward the bench. “It was twenty last time. Why thirty?”
“Larger space.” She scratched at the residue around her hairline.
He locked his eyes on his cuff and at thirty made a noise very like a whimper as he peeled his filter off and dropped it. When he unwrapped the shirt around his head, his uninjured hair had curled in over the wound. The injured hair had begun to die.
“Filters are optional, people.”
“Filters are gone.” Ressk’s was off before he finished speaking.
“So the cavern’s secure—for Navy definitions of the word secure.” Filter off, nostril ridges opening and closing, Werst nodded toward the rectangular hole in the floor. “We go down?”
“We go down.” Torin crossed to the narrow edge and leaned forward, forearm braced on her thigh. The stairs ended in a landing so there was more than one flight. The lights were on. She glanced up the stairs, past the rubble, at darkness. So far, following the light had worked for them. As the others gathered around, she laid her finger across her lips, then tapped her ear. One by one, they shook their heads. If the mercs were close, they weren’t making the kind of noise three different species could hear.
“They could be waiting quietly at the bottom of the stairs,” Binti murmured. “Waiting to pick us off, one by one.”
“If they shoot the person in front of you and you continue forward, you deserve to be shot.” She settled her pack, checked her weapon, and stepped down. “Let’s go.”
“Hey, Ryder. You think there’s a hatch into that ship from a lower level?” Ressk asked, one step behind her.
“I’m not ruling out the possibility that the H’san built that ship around themselves,” Craig told him, the timbre of his voice changing as his head moved into the stairwell, below the level of the floor, “and didn’t bother installing hatches.”
“You think it’ll work?”
“Everything else has.”
The five flights of stairs were as annoyingly variable as the short flight under the sarcophagus had been. Significantly more of Torin’s attention went to not falling rather than to an analysis of what they might be walking into. The arboreal Krai were having the least amount of trouble, but even they stumbled over sudden angle changes. Werst had begun to swear softly under his breath.
Given the pink walls and the restricted real estate, Torin found herself remembering a rebirthing process the psychologist before Dr. Ito had suggested they try. They hadn’t.
On the fourth landing, Alamber said, “Prime numbers. Each flight of stairs is a different prime number.”
“Why?” Torin asked. If they were walking into another H’san trap . . .
“The H’san are dicks,” Binti said from the rear of the descent.
“Good a reason as any, Boss.”
The lower corridor was empty and the stone the darkest pink yet. The air held battlefield odors of blood and shit. Both to the left and right, the corridor ran thirty meters straight to a corner. Torin held her position and sent Ressk around the curve that circled the bottom of three engine cones, mirroring the arc of open stone on the cavern level.
“Body parts,” he said as he returned, nostril ridges half closed. “Human. Residue suggests they got caught between the ship and the stone.”
The vibration they’d felt earlier could have been the ship moving. Torin pushed questions of both how and why aside.
“Looks like the blood and viscera got washed to the next level down,” he added. “There’s a constant thirty-five-to-forty–centimeter gap all the way around between the engines and the stone. Oh, and the writing . . .” Ressk nodded toward the black on pink. “. . . also goes all the way around. Seems like they had something to say. Almost a shame we’ll never know what it is.”
“Almost,” Torin agreed. Foot on the bottom step, she leaned up the stairs and said, “Down and to the right, tuck back out of sight by the engines. We’ve got corners in both directions, and we don’t want to set up a shooting gallery. I’ll cover your six.”
By the time she joined them, Ressk had quietly explained about the body.
“So they’re down three,” Craig began.
Werst cut him off. “That we know of. And they could be down three archaeologists, so we’ll be facing as many guns.”
“You sound like Torin, mate.”
“Except I don’t want to . . . Gunny!”
“I heard it.” The ex-Marines moved into defensive positions as she tried to determine which direction the shots had come from, the echoes from all the hard surfaces . . .
A single shot. Shooter wasn’t as close as she’d first assumed. No ricochet. That round had hit a soft target.
“To the left. Marines, with me. Leave your packs with Craig and Alamber.” The last year had forced her to change a number of the ways she did things, but she did not take civilians into a potential firefight. “You two, stay here. Anyone heads this way who isn’t us, get out of sight around the curve.”
“With the body?” Alamber demanded, the ends of his hair lifting.
Werst rolled his eyes. “You could probably take it in a fight.”
“You could probably . . .”
“We’ll try and get into the ship.” Craig cut him off, a hand around his wrist. “Be careful.”
Torin didn’t look his way as she slipped out of her pack, checked her weapon, and motioned the others into movement. “You, too.”
They ran to the left. Paused at the corner. Turned right into yet another vanishing point corridor.
“Gunny.”
“I see it.”
Blood. Dried brown. Iron-based blood. Not specifically helpful.
On the right, they passed three metal doors, scaled-down versions of the one that led into the catacombs from the plateau.
Ten meters past the last door, a side corridor joined the main from the right. Torin brought them to a stop just before they reached it and took a look. It ended in a broken door at roughly the same distance the ship’s engines had been from the first corner. Signs of destructio
n equaled signs of life. She’d long since grown immune to the irony.
Dangling from its top hinge, the broken metal door had been built to a basic rectangle proportionate to the H’san. Dim lights were on in the big room it opened into. If the lights were on, someone was home.
Shelves and broken shelves, scattered and broken content, provided a hundred hiding places.
Torin sent Mashona and Werst to the left; she went right with Ressk.
The lights in the corridor went out the moment they stepped over the threshold. Looking back, the dark appeared to be a solid sheet of black, as though the light in the room were somehow contained. Which was a bullshit optical illusion created by the contrast, but it wasn’t hard to see why so many sentient species feared the dark. Imaginations were often a pain in the ass.
The shelves still standing held supplies. Food, bedding, soaps—she didn’t need to be able to read the labels. Assuming certain species’ similarities, they were making their way through the storeroom for a bunker.
When they reached the back wall unopposed, they found a door flat on the floor of a dark hall, darker rectangles at intervals on the left. The door was wood, the hall barely two meters wide—it looked like the low rent crypt district. Torin signaled for Ressk to keep watch and stepped into the hall. The lights stayed off, but there was enough spillover from the storeroom for her to see into the first of the darker rectangles. Not a crypt. A barracks. Her light picked out two rows of beds, ten per row, unmistakably shaped for the H’san. Someday she’d love to know what the spiral thing between the beds was for. Not today.
Light off, she returned to the storeroom.
“Mashona says they have an opening, no door, on their side. What now, Gunny?”
“We join them.” She waved to catch Binti’s eye and signaled that she and Ressk were on their way.
They dropped back into the shelves rather than remain exposed at the rear wall, and ran. Even still carrying a fighting load, her knees appreciated the absence of the full pack. The four of them met up between two shelves of sealed, octagonal tubes.
“From now on we maintain eyelines.” Torin glanced into a hall identical to the one on the right except that it had never had a door. “With no way to communicate, that was as much separation as I’m willing to risk.”
The lights stayed on in the storeroom when Werst, on their six, stepped into the hall. The lights in the hall stayed off.
She left Werst in the dark, at the door of what looked like a multi-H’san office complete with species-specific workstations and tech that might once have been computer interface systems. Or it could have been an extremely angular, multiple-client, sexual-relief unit for the barracks.
“Sure, save the bureaucracy.” Binti approached a tall glass cabinet with deep drawers and found herself unable to grip the pulls with Human fingers. “Permission to break something, Gunny?”
“Denied.”
Inside the cabinet, rectangles of glass had been racked on their sides and they gleamed with a rainbow of colors as Binti’s light passed over them. “This is depressing. I always thought the H’san were above all that.”
“All that?” Ressk asked, holding a small metal spiral up to his light.
“You know, forms and memos and business shit.”
“If that’s what that is.”
“That’s what it looks like. So much for the idea that they ran their empire on song and ca . . .”
“Incoming!”
Three lights went out simultaneously, and Torin dropped behind a solid piece of meter-high glass and metal. She could hear Mashona and Ressk to her right and, as she hadn’t heard Werst move, assumed he’d slipped into the room and taken a position by the door.
A familiar beam of light illuminated the doorway, the person wearing it safely back behind the protection of the wall.
“Who are you?” The voice was female and di’Taykan and it sounded as though she was one wrong answer away from either screaming or emptying a magazine into a room full of glass.
Torin could work with the first, but she doubt any of them would survive the second. She shifted into a crouch. “Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr.”
“Lead big,” Ressk muttered.
If the di’Taykan was ex-Corps, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr’s reputation would get them a conversation or get them killed. Odds were about fifty/fifty.
“Of course you are.” The incipient panic had disappeared like it had been switched off, the tone now so neutral it could have been machine generated. “Come out where I can see you.”
“Into the hall? No. You step into the room.”
“By all means, let’s make it convenient for you.” It wasn’t sarcasm. It was . . . nothing. The light dropped to the floor, and a moment later, the PID was kicked over the threshold. It rolled forward about half a meter and ended up shining a cone of light toward the ceiling.
The spill was enough that Torin could make out shapes and shadows.
Taykan could see clearly even in lower levels, but she didn’t know Werst was by the door and when she reacted, she aimed high.
Glass shattered.
Torin picked up the PID and pointed it at the di’Taykan on the floor, Werst’s blade at her throat, her turquoise hair surprisingly sleek.
Her lip curled. “I should’ve known they’d send you after us.”
Assuming they meant the Justice Department, Torin didn’t correct her. The emphasis on the pronoun only reinforced how exposing the gray aliens had made Gunnery Sergeant Kerr enemies in the Corps. Some people didn’t deal well with discovering everything they’d been fighting for was a lie.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Knife still at her throat, she didn’t seem upset by her position. “Major Sujuno di’Kail. Ex-major, I suppose, but then why should I ex out if you haven’t? I was at your lecture on Ventris after the Silsviss incident. You followed us, didn’t you? Didn’t need to work anything out, didn’t need to spend days finding the way. We did that for you.” Wrist held in Werst’s foot, she waved her fingers, Taykan graceful. “You just followed. Except, you followed a little too far and now you’re as trapped as we are. Surprise. There’s no difficulty getting into the bunker system, but you can’t get out.”
“Automated defenses.” Ressk fell in on Torin’s right, his KC pointed at the major.
Major Sujuno had her voice under control, but her laugh teetered on the edge of hysteria. “Did I say that?”
NINE
TORIN LOOKED DOWN at the strangely familiar body on the floor of the third and final barracks. “That’s a dead H’san.”
Major Sujuno folded her arms, hair tight to her head. “It was dead before we killed it.”
That explained the feeling of familiarity. Torin had never met a live H’san, but she’d spent the last two days looking at dead ones. The flesh appeared to have been dehydrated. The joints protruded. The biggest difference between this dead H’san and the occupants of the sarcophagi was that the eyes and mouth of this H’san hadn’t been sealed shut. Or the biggest difference might have been the three holes in the front of the head and the two center chest, all seeping clear fluid. Given the lack of exit wounds, the head shots had ricocheted around inside the skull, dicing the upper brain, and the chest wound seemed to be lined up with the superior heart. She assumed either clumping would have killed a living H’san, which this wasn’t. “So, zombie H’san?”
Werst made a sound that might have been a choked-off laugh.
The major spun around to face him. “You think this is funny? They killed two of my people!”
Torin glanced over at the two Krai who’d been in the room when the major had led them in. They stood with their backs to the wall, nearly out of the circle of light around the body, their weapons ready. Clearly a bonded pair although she had no idea of their genders and just as clearly ex-Corps from the way they held the KC-7s
. The major had lost a Human and a di’Taykan on the way to the cavern and the body around the curve had to have been one of hers, so the question became: how many more in her crew?
One of the questions.
“Major Sujuno.” Torin had spent years being the support that allowed officers to give the orders that sent Marines out to die. Her tone turned the major back toward her, her expression shifting from rage to . . . nothing. A mask Torin was not permitted to see behind. “Where did the attackers come from?”
“From behind the metal doors you passed on the way to the bunker.” The major’s turquoise eyes were darker than the light level required. “You can call the rooms barracks, or storerooms, or crypts, but the doors leading into them were barred from the outside when we passed them the first time.”
“If they were locked from the outside, how did the . . .” Werst flared his nostrils at her when Torin paused so she skipped the word zombie. “. . . H’san get out?”
“We didn’t let them out, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr.” The Krai on the right’s nostrils were closed and the lip curled, showing teeth. “If that’s what you’re implying.”
Officer. Lieutenant at best or there would have been confidence enough to let that first statement stand on its own. “Only a request for information.” She kept her tone even.
“The H’san from the plinth released them.” Major Sujuno’s tone, on the other hand, said, I know how ridiculous that sounds, and I’m entirely out of fuks to give.
“From the cavern?”
“Unless you know where they’ve propped up another dead H’san on a plinth, Gunnery Sergeant, yes, from the cavern. Dion, Lieutenant Verr, and Sergeant Toporov found the other entrance to the bunker—the corridors loop the perimeter—when they emerged, the H’san attacked and wounded Dion . . .”
Verr was the Krai officer, still no idea of gender although both Werst and Ressk would know. Dion was species nonspecific.
“. . . but it was unsteady on its feet, so Sergeant Toporov was able to break up the attack and get Dion and Verr moving back toward the rest of us. He wanted more intell . . .”
