An Ancient Peace

by Tanya Huff

  “You’d just get big headed,” Torin told her, tucking the appendage and weapon under one arm, grabbing the remains of the first body, and dragging it between the shelves and pieces of shelves until she met the others near the back of the room.

  “Wen, Verr . . .”

  Torin couldn’t see the major’s face through the light clipped to her shoulder, but she sounded disappointed.

  “. . . get the other one and get it back here. We don’t leave it close enough to the door that the others can retrieve it.”

  “Feel better?” Werst asked as Torin handed him the piece of H’san.

  “Little bit, yeah.”

  TEN

  “WHAT STINKS?” Eyes squinted nearly closed, Craig rubbed his nose against his sleeve and sucked air in through his teeth.

  Hanging in over the edge of the engine well, Alamber dragged his tunic up over his mouth and nose. “We must’ve vented something.”

  “In a ship that’s been empty for millennia?”

  “Hey, could be the zombie H’san hanging out in here bitching about how boring it is being a guard.”

  “You think there’s more than one of them?”

  “So do you.” When he looked up, Alamber shrugged. “If there was only one of them, the boss would’ve been back by now.”

  Craig glanced at the timer on his cuff. Torin and the others had been gone just over four hours and if he’d had to bet on why, he’d bet they’d been cornered by the undead patrol. Maybe they were with the mercs. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe Torin had already dealt with the and executioner, but he doubted it. Torin would be dummying up a way to get everyone out alive—although without the comms, he had nothing to go on but his belief in Torin’s ability to get the job done. If precedent held, she’d come back to him bleeding and angry, but she would come back to him.

  “You think firing up the engine will draw the zombie H’san away from her?” Alamber asked. “I mean, from them.”

  He’d meant from her. Craig was all right with that. “I think live engines on a dead ship should catch their attention, yeah.”

  “Okay, try this.” Shifting up onto one elbow, Alamber handed over a small, curved tool with a long handle that looked like a close cousin to the tool he’d used on the hatch. “I’ve never slipped it into an engine before—insert innuendo here—but nothing else is working.”

  “What is it?” It was heavier than it looked and small enough to get past the conduit.

  “Ad sitina hunn. Closest Federate would be a . . .” His lips moved silently for a moment. “. . . a spintite socket wrench with a male adapter and an extended grip.”

  “How close?” It didn’t look like a socket wrench.

  “Does it matter? You’re about to stick it into the controls of an alien engine.”

  “Valid point.”

  They were counting on form following function. A shuttle engine provided enough lift to break out of the gravity well and attain orbit. With no identifiable antigravity tech, the H’san shuttle needed to provide one hell of a lot of lift, which should have simplified things. It hadn’t. Craig had no idea what all the conduit was for.

  It wasn’t until they’d pried the access cover off and he’d lowered himself into the generous amount of space required for an adult H’san that he’d truly realized what ancient alien mechanical systems meant. It meant neither of them had recognized a damned thing. Still, duxing out the impossible beat sitting around doing nothing, waiting for Torin to return.

  Throwing his weight against the conduit, he opened up enough space to slide the tool through. Probing individual circuits had accomplished a big fat nothing, but the curved end on the not-wrench would allow him to give two at a time a turn. Elbow jammed in the gap, he twisted the tool until . . .

  The engines roared.

  The flash nearly blinded him. Power surged up the tool, locking his fingers to the grip. He threw himself back, breaking the connection, losing his balance, and sliding down the metal bars on other side of the access well.

  The engines shut off.

  “You okay?” Lying on the deck, most of his upper body unsupported, Alamber stretched a long arm toward him.

  Craig raised a hand to keep the kid from attempting the last six centimeters and falling on his head. It took a couple of tries to get his voice working. “I’m fried but fine. How long?”

  “The engines? Not very. Microburst at best.”

  “Seemed longer.”

  “Yeah, well, you were busy watching your life flash before your eyes.”

  The fingers that had been clamped to the grip felt scorched, and he was both sweating and chilled. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Looked that bad from up here.”

  “Let’s . . .” He started to get to his feet, felt as though the gravity cut out, blinked, and sat down again.

  “You need some help? The boss would give me such crap if you got hurt handling my tool.” Craig looked up and Alamber smirked.

  It hurt when he laughed. “On the bright side, we can start the engines. We just need to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t hurt so much.” Stretching out a leg, he hooked his heel over Alamber’s not-wrench and dragged it toward him. “Now we know how to turn this thing on, let’s chuck back to the control room and take another crack at the board.”

  “Now?”

  His legs felt more fluid than he was comfortable with. “In a minute.”

  “That’s an arm–ish–like thing.” Nadayki stayed well out from the counter, eyes light as he watched Ressk cut the dried flesh back to expose the wires running down to the contact. “It’s disgusting.”

  “Not arguing,” Ressk grunted, snapping off about eight centimeters of exposed bone. “I’ve never handled so much meat I don’t want to eat.”

  Nadayki tossed his head, lime-green hair feathering out around him. “Really, because I’ve got . . .”

  Major Sujuno cleared her throat and he froze, hair clamping in tight to his head, arms wrapping around his torso. Torin hadn’t noticed it in the cache—they’d both been distracted by their history—but she’d had never seen a di’Taykan in such touch distress. Nadayki was undeniably a murdering shit, but she had to fight to stop herself from crossing to him and tucking him in against her body. Ressk was distracted by his combination of engineering and surgery, but Binti and Werst seemed to be having much the same reaction. Torin shook her head when Binti caught her eye. With Wen and the lieutenant taking their cues from the major, Nadayki probably hadn’t been touched since Dion’s injury. For it to be this noticeable, she’d bet the major hadn’t touched him for all the time they’d been together.

  Which meant the major willingly suffered from an even higher level of touch distress. High odds Nadayki had been going skin to skin with the Humans at least, but Torin would bet the major hadn’t. Had Sujuno been Torin’s major, she’d have done something about it—a destabilized officer made bad decisions. As she wasn’t, and as Nadayki was, in fact, a murdering shit, it wasn’t her problem, as hard as it might be to ignore.

  Her expression entirely neutral, Torin stepped between them. “Nadayki, we need a weapon that’ll cause maximum destruction without bringing the roof down.”

  “Destroy lots of guardians, minimal property damage?” Hair swinging, he turned and sauntered back into the cache. “It’s a good thing for you that I’m a fukking genius.”

  He hadn’t checked with the major. The major didn’t look happy about it. Torin reminded herself that she didn’t care.

  Alamber had gone for the med kit the moment they’d gotten back to the control room and Craig’s hand hurt enough he’d sat on the floor, leaning back against a relatively flat bit of the pilot’s chair, and let him spray sealant on the reddened skin. He sighed and slumped as the pain receded.

  Then straightened again almost immediately.

  “Did
I do it wrong?”

  “No, of course not.” He reached out and touched the back of his fingers to Alamber’s cheek as he kicked the bottom of the control console on the visible dent one of them had left behind. A section of panel dropped off to hit the floor with a surprisingly dull thud.

  “Well, that’s going to make things easier.” Alamber leaned in, eyes dark. “If we can hook the hardware together, I might be able to force cooperation. Hang on.”

  “Not going anywhere,” Craig said as Alamber dove back into his pack and came up with a small case.

  “Universal connection.” He grinned and waved a wire before pushing one end into his slate and heading back under the control panel with the other.

  “No such thing.”

  “You’d think that, but Big Bill was all about me getting into places I wasn’t supposed to be and it’s not like there isn’t H’san tech all over known space. I mean, if even you salvage guys grabbed some . . .”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  “It’s not. This is one use only and I may fry my slate—even with the kind of firewalls that’d stop actual fire.”

  “And if you do?”

  He shot a grin back over his shoulder, and a piece of hair unwrapped from around the injured strands to wave. “If the cable still works, I’ll take a shot at frying yours.”

  “Stand back.” Ressk, hand wrapped in a piece of H’san textile that Nadayki had sworn would insulate, completed the connection between the power source and the cone weapon. The beam left a scorched line the length of the counter and blew a circular chunk about half a centimeter deep out of the bunker wall.

  “It did more damage when the dead guy was using it,” Wen scoffed, curling his lip when Werst growled.

  “That’s because it’s an energy beam used as blunt force,” Ressk explained setting the weapon back on the counter. “Pull the trigger, swing the beam, and it’s like swinging a big invisible bat.”

  “Well, this is a bigger bat.” Nadayki dropped a . . . Torin assumed it had to be a weapon as Nadayki had carried it out of the weapons cache, but it didn’t look like any weapon she’d ever seen. It was big. Triple barrels, each barrel slightly cone-shaped and wrapped in what looked like braided fiberoptic cable. The base of the barrels twisted around a . . . She had no idea. For a BFG, it was lighter than it looked.

  “There’s no contact point on the grip!” Ressk’s teeth showed. “We need a weapon that’ll work with the power source!”

  “Calm down and cut the covering away. Here.” Nadayki tapped the textile wrapped around the grip with a slender finger. “To here. It’s what’s stopping the entire grip from being a contact point on your little bitty weapon as well.”

  Ressk’s nostril ridges fluttered. “I should’ve seen that.”

  “Yeah, you should have.”

  “Fuk you.”

  Torin stepped between them. “Nadayki, you’ve been in the cache since we arrived. Go get something to eat. Ressk . . .”

  “I can’t take a break, Gunny. We have to get out of here.”

  Torin tracked his gaze to the nearer of the two doors leading to the other side of the bunker—officers’ quarters and Med-op instead of barracks and admin. The Med-op had held a number of cubes that flattened under a minimal touch and nothing any of them had recognized, biology being significantly more variable than engineering. As they watched, Binti and Werst emerged, having gone to check that the guardians had made no unexpected inroads.

  “We have to get out of here,” Ressk repeated as Werst gave the all clear. “I have to get him out of here and to the Med-op on the ship. Let me work.”

  “On the condition you take a break if you need one.” Where need meant, I’m trusting you to tell me if you can’t do what I need you to do, and they both knew what she meant.

  “I have to set this up so the appendage holds the grip and the shooter’s grip on the appendage controls the weapon. We test it. We’re out of here. The end is in sight. I can do this.”

  “I know.”

  The big weapon worked on the same principle as the smaller one, smashing the first target to pieces. The second test against one of the redead H’san proved their armor absorbed the energy of the small weapons, but the energy of the big one overwhelmed it, slamming the body against the wall and pinning it there.

  “Except broken bones don’t stop them.” Ressk broke the contact, and they watched the body crumple.

  “Removed bones don’t stop them,” Binti pointed out.

  Nadayki jabbed at a wire-and-ceramic oval with the point of a knife. “Crush their head and you’ll disrupt the programming.”

  “We’ll use it to sweep them aside, smash them into the walls, hope we crush a few heads, and open a path through the middle while we take out as many as we can with conventional weapons. BFG makes the run first, the rest of us haul ass after. At the far end, BFG turns and either orders a drop and fires, or fires with regular ordnance in support.” Torin gripped Nadayki’s shoulder, ignoring his sudden intake of breath. “Do you have any idea what that oval thing is?”

  “Uh . . .” He looked up at her, his eyes so dark they were almost free of lime-green. “No?”

  “Then stop playing with it. If you blow your hands off, I’m not sure I like you well enough to keep you from bleeding out.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d bleed out before I let you save me.” But his hair swept across the back of her hand as he set the oval on the counter.

  “Shouldn’t I be giving the orders, Gunnery Sergeant?”

  Torin turned, met Major Sujuno’s gaze and held it. The hate was a constant presence now; acknowledged, it could be ignored. “If you believed that, Major, you wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Rhetorical question.”

  Torin’s lip lifted off her teeth into a curve only another Human would have seen as a smile. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then perhaps you should think of how we’ll need to bring more than one of these weapons into play.” The major stroked a finger down the upper barrel of the BFG. “Granted, we haven’t food nor water enough to take down all the guardians one or two at a time, but we only require seven appendages more to arm each of us. With eight of these weapons, we can destroy all opposition.”

  “We don’t need to destroy the opposition, we need to get past it.” Torin had no intention of gifting either the major or her people with any more firepower than they already had. “And I’ve fought the only one-on-one I intend to.” She could feel bruises rising and, from the swelling on the side of her face, there was a good chance her cheekbone was cracked. Again. “Once, for a weapon we could use to get out . . .” To get back to Craig. To get Werst to the Med-op. “. . . that was acceptable risk. Now we have a way out, it’s a pointless risk.”

  The major’s eyes had darkened. “Not to me.”

  “Nothing’s stopping you from cutting the appendages off as many H’san as your heart desires.” Werst shrugged at the major’s glare. “If you think you’re badass enough, go to it.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant . . .”

  “He makes a valid point. What’s more, you, none of you have to come with us.” The grave robbers trapped inside the grave they’d tried to rob would be poetic justice of a sort.

  “You wouldn’t leave us here to starve.” Major Sujuno sounded smugly certain of that.

  “Neither would I take your choice to starve away.”

  “I’m leaving with you,” Nadayki muttered, shifting closer, his arm pressing against her thigh.

  Hands curled into fists, the major stared at Torin for a long moment. “It seems I have no choice. I leave with you, under your terms, or I don’t leave at all. Or . . .” She shifted her weight, and her breath came noticeably quicker. “. . . I kill you, we kill you all, and take the weapon. We take all the weapons. And my name lives.”

  “Try.”

/>   The major blinked. “What?”

  “Try to kill me.” Making it personal would make her life so much easier. She’d survived years of people trying to kill her; not always, but often enough by killing them instead. A war between interstellar civilizations had spent a significant amount of time being about mud and blood, and she’d been covered in both a little too often. Torin had no idea how much of that showed on her face, but she wasn’t trying to hide it.

  Major Sujuno took a step back. “Lieutenant!”

  “Nothing to do with me, Major.” Lieutenant Verr stepped back farther and faster. “It’s not even that Gunnery Sergeant Kerr took down a dead H’san in single combat, it’s that she even thought of doing it in the first place.”

  “Armed dead H’san,” Wen called from beside Dion’s pallet.

  “Exactly, an armed dead H’san. Ignoring, for the moment, that she won . . . the whole idea was fukking nuts. Plus, her people are ex-infantry, they’re all carrying, and our KCs are where we left them after the ammo check. Now . . .” Verr folded her arms, the poster child for an immovable object. “. . . I want to get paid for this job as much as you do, and I don’t want to find out what the Justice Department considers a suitable rehabilitation for trespass and desecration, whatever the rest of the charges were . . . although, not the murder; we had nothing to do with that. We thought the Katrien had left. How did she die?”

  “Broken neck,” Torin told her, a little confused by Verr’s reaction to her taking down the H’san. It hadn’t been that hard. Living targets, targets that could react, feel pain, that had lives to lose were much harder.

  Hair completely motionless, the major flipped her gaze between them. “That’s not . . .”

  Verr ignored her. “Toporov, then. Broadbent was strong enough, but he was uncooked at the core—soft—and McKinnon was an engineer. I doubt she either could or would. But my point is that even more than not wanting to deal with Justice, I don’t want me and mine to die right here and right now, and I don’t want to starve to death trapped in the bottom of this fukking tomb. And trust me, Major, me and Wen, we’ll starve to death last. So we’re going to let Gunnery Sergeant Kerr get us out of here, because, surprise, the vids were right, that’s what she’s good at, and maybe we’ll reassess after and try shooting them all in the back and maybe we won’t, but we won’t die—fast or slow—because you personally think it’s a good idea.”