An Ancient Peace

by Tanya Huff

  “I am in command of this expedition, Lieutenant!”

  “Expedition’s over, Major. It was a good run, but it ended when we were trapped by zombie H’san.” Verr nodded toward Torin. “She’s been in charge since she got here.”

  Major Sujuno stood for a moment, pinned between them, then she wrapped herself in the neutral Marine officer personae she’d worn before allowing the hate to rise to the surface. Everyone’s gaze on her, she walked to her weapon and pointedly picked it up, hanging the strap over her shoulder. “We’ll leave at your discretion, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  As though she expected Torin to believe it would be that easy.

  “Shoot us all in the back?” Torin asked Verr.

  Who shrugged. “Just a thought. I doubt it would work.”

  “Gunny!”

  Torin tightened her hold on Nadayki’s shoulder for a heartbeat, his pulse having finally steadied under her fingers, then, ignoring the major entirely, crossed to where Werst crouched by Dion’s pallet. The scholar hadn’t been conscious since Torin’s fight. As the red lines of the infection had spread out onto his chest and up into his throat, it had become obvious he wouldn’t make it back to Med-op in time.

  Werst glanced up at her, nostril ridges wide. “He opened his eyes, said, I told you so, and died.”

  “His last words were I told you so?”

  “He went the way he would’ve wanted to,” Wen said from the other side of the body. “Smug and sanctimonious to the end.” He sounded amused, but sincere.

  “Do we take him out?” Werst asked, nodding at Torin’s belt.

  An NCO carried a minimum of three things into a firefight. A weapon. Ammunition. And a promise that if it was up to them, no one would be left behind.

  Torin considered Dion. It would be hypocritical to say it wasn’t her choice. They couldn’t get to Private Timin di’Geirah, whose body rotted at the bottom of the pit trap, and they couldn’t get to enough of Corporal Katherine McKinnon shoved into a sarcophagus with the H’san. Parts of the crushed and dismembered Corporal Broadbent waited for her to get a DNA sample and the guardians had taken the bodies of Sergeant Yasha Toporov and Corporal Srey Keo. But Jamers was in Torin’s pack and they had Dion.

  “We take him out.”

  To her surprise, Ressk took Wen’s place, helping Werst lay Dion out flat. A glance at the counter showed Nadayki working on the BFG, the major watching, arms folded—a nontypical position for a di’Taykan. Mashona watched the major, hands crossed on top of her KC—an entirely typical position for Mashona.

  Ressk’s nostril ridges fluttered as he sealed the upper edge of the bag. “They should’ve taken the wound before the infection got into his blood.”

  Torin assumed “they” referred to Lieutenant Verr and Wen, who had curled up together on one of the H’san . . . chairs. She waited until she held Dion’s cylinder in her hand, the curves cool against her palm, before saying, “Werst.”

  “Little late, Gunny.” He slipped his arm out of the sling. Binti had cut his blood-soaked sleeve off above the elbow so she could clearly see the skin around the wound had turned a darker green and one dark line ran up to disappear under the edge of the cut. “It’d be more than a divot at this point.”

  His temperature had gone up a full degree. Pushing the fabric back, she noted the infection ended a centimeter past his elbow. “We’ve got an ax. We can take the arm off.”

  Ressk jerked as though he felt the blow.

  Werst flexed his fingers, and Torin watched the skin ride over the muscles of his forearm. “I still need both hands to help get us out of here and, after that, it’s less than three days back to the ship now we know where we’re going. Less than two if we hustle. Plenty of time.”

  Torin drew a line on Werst’s sleeve about four centimeters from his shoulder. “It gets to here, we reassess.”

  Werst nodded agreement. Ressk shook his head.

  “All right, let’s get this show on the road.” As Torin led them back to the counter and the BFG, she heard Werst say, “Then Colonel Hurrs will just have to approve a tank so I can regrow the arm.”

  “Without giving this whole shit-storm away?” Ressk growled.

  “Sure. He’s head of Intell. That makes him a cark sucker by default.”

  Nadayki had been adjusting the sensitivity of the contact point. “We’re squeezing a dead H’san to fire this, and, while I might normally make a comment about that, just—no. Since squeezing a dead H’san isn’t exactly a quantitative measurement of force, and again, no comments, I figured it needed to be cranked up a bit, so I slaved my slate in and tweaked the code.”

  Torin sneezed. “What can I smell?”

  “Besides, dead H’san?” He held up a twisted and blackened piece of almost familiar tech. “That would be my slate. Bit of unexpected blowback, ancient alien tech and all.” Patting the uppermost barrel, he dipped his head and smiled almost shyly at her. “It’s more sensitive to pressure than it was.”

  “Good work.”

  His hair flipped up and he snorted. “Of course it is.”

  But Torin had seen both his surprise and his pleasure and wondered what the hell the universe was doing sending her another damaged di’Taykan.

  “You can’t not, can you, Gunny?” Binti asked softly.

  “Excellent question. All right, people.” She raised her voice to a non-ignorable volume. “We are leaving. Get your packs, let’s go.”

  “Leave your packs.” Major Sujuno confined her gaze to the pair of Krai on the chair. “We’ll come back for them after we destroy the guardians, when we come back for the weapons.”

  Lieutenant Verr and Wen exchanged a look and Torin hid a reluctant smile at how clearly they were wondering if the major had been paying attention. Finally, Wen shrugged. “I don’t actually want to fight in my pack.”

  “No one’s making you,” Torin told him. “But we’re not coming back for it.”

  “Fuk that shit.” Both Wen and his bonded went for their packs.

  “So . . .” Werst nodded at the FBG. “Who gets to squeeze a dead H’san?”

  “Sounds so attractive when you put it that way. What?” Binti demanded, suddenly aware Werst had switched his attention to her. “Oh, no.” She thumped her chest. “Sniper. Distance and accuracy, that’s what I’m about. You don’t want to waste that on blunt force trauma. You carry it.”

  “I’m a little close to the ground for the H’san.”

  “Don’t look at me.” Nadayki patted the KC he’d hung around his neck. “I’m good to go.”

  Torin only barely stopped herself from snatching it away from him. “You gave a civilian a weapon, Major?”

  “I plan on selling a civilian a whole lot of weapons, Gunnery Sergeant, but in this instance, Nadayki gave himself a weapon when Corporal McKinnon no longer needed hers. And let’s stop playing around, your alsLan’s right, the Krai are too low to the ground to do anything but break legs and we both know you have no intention of permitting me an advantage.”

  “You’re right. We don’t have time for this.” Craig must be going insane. Good news, he hadn’t shown up yet, so he was sticking to the schedule they’d evolved over the last year. She swung her KC across her back and picked up the BFG. The piece of dead H’san felt like fuzzy jerky laced through with wire. She’d handled pieces of bodies that had felt a lot worse.

  “Their heads are big and unarmored, and their eye sockets are disproportionately large,” she said as they passed the barracks. “You have a good chance of getting through the skull and disrupting their programming. Mashona, on our six. Odds are high the patrol will approach from one eighty, not the zero. Don’t let them get close.” Werst would keep an eye on the major. Verr and Wen wanted out of the trap, which made them a problem she could deal with later. Wen’s pack bulged suspiciously, and she made a mental note to search it when
they reached the cavern and dropped a couple of demo charges down the stairs. Halfway across the storeroom, she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. “Nadayki, do you know how to use that?”

  Even without eyes on him, the hair flip came through loud and clear. “The explosive force of a propellant is channeled down a barrel driving a projectile out of the barrel and toward a target. To cause this to happen, point and apply pressure to the dangly bit. Ignoring for the moment how good I am at dangly bits, it’s not rocket science.”

  She should take the gun away from him. That seemed hypocritical when she about to fire an ancient alien weapon by way of a piece of ancient alien, the firing mechanism worked out by members of two different species with no engineering training between them, who’d worked together under the inaccurate observation the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Bottom line, she wanted as many weapons she understood in the fight as possible. “Keep the end with the hole pointed at the guardians and only at the guardians.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “You’re untrained. Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.” She paused on the threshold long enough to think, how is this my life? Then she stepped out into the corridor.

  Around the corner, the metal doors slammed open like she’d flipped a switch, the sound rolling through the underground like thunder.

  “Well, they’re not trying to take us by surprise,” Binti muttered.

  Was the noise a warning? Get back inside while you still can? Probably not. The odds were higher it was intended to inspire fear. It was definitely deliberate. H’san engineering had kept the catacombs lit and the air fresh; they wouldn’t have miscalculated the weight of the doors and the give in the hinges.

  “We need to get to the corner before they box us in. Move!” Running full out, Torin wondered how Keo had thought she could make it all the way to the doors before there were too many H’san to . . .

  “Holy fuk.”

  “Well put.”

  The first of the guardians wasn’t quite at the corner. So many guardians and except for the sound of their feet and the creak of their armor, so silent.

  “They need to make some noise,” Ressk muttered.

  “The dead will be ever silent unless the living give them voice,” Major Sujuno called out, close enough on her right that Torin was thankful for Werst’s steady presence. “In retrospect, we should have paid more attention to the less directional parts of Dion’s translation.”

  Torin lifted the BFG as the surrounding KCs opened fire. Remembered the shot the Human’s First guard had fired in the mining tunnel. It had been a lucky accident that the ricochet had hit the idiot who’d pulled the trigger. Here, the odds were high any ricochet would hit a H’san because there was one fuk of a lot of them pouring out of all three doors.

  With the closest guardian a little too close, she squeezed the desiccated flesh and closed the contact. The energy beam punched a hole down the middle of the swarm, slamming bodies up against the far corner a hundred meters away. Swinging the triple muzzle from side to side, she slapped guardians against the walls and swept a tangle of them back in through the open doors.

  “Clear path! Let’s go!”

  Her boots beat out a rhythm to follow as she charged toward the corner at the far end of the corridor. The H’san piled up against the wall would complicate things, but, once they got by, they could hold that corner until everyone escaped up into the cavern. She expected to meet Craig and Alamber at the corner; they’d have heard the doors open.

  The guardians she ran toward lay still, too crushed between the beam and the wall to rise. Those she ran past, while tangled around each other and tangled around their own broken bones, attempted to struggle upright and get on with the job. She appreciated the sentiment in the abstract.

  Past the first door.

  Past the second.

  Almost to the third . . .

  Torin jerked back, yanked almost off her feet by the strap of the KC across her chest. The BFG in one hand, she slipped free of the strap and spun around. Metal slammed into her face, hitting the cracked cheekbone, flinging her sideways into a pile of struggling H’san. Focusing was . . . wasn’t . . .

  A boot drove into her stomach and the BFG was ripped out of her hands.

  Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, who had chosen to both leave the Corps behind and carry it with her, assumed everyone would follow because she was Gunnery Sergeant Kerr. Sujuno lifted her KC, aimed and fired and fired again and waited for her chance. She watched how the first shot of the H’san weapon slammed the guardians against the far wall, and she heard their bones shatter and knew what she had to do. She watched the guardians swept to the left and the right. She shot at their power packs when she saw their armor dislodged. She needed them destroyed. She was not leaving here without those weapons.

  And Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, who had no right to be named progenitor, in her need to return to those she’d left behind, had shown her how to do it without having the seerint to do it herself.

  She had to get out. That was why she’d remained silent. Why she’d waited.

  She had to get out with the weapons.

  To do that, she had to destroy both the guardians and Gunnery Sergeant Kerr. With Kerr gone, Kerr’s people would follow her. Of course they would. They were Corps and she was a major.

  When Kerr opened the way and they started to run, she quickly outdistanced the Krai. They were at a disadvantage on the flat, and as long as she stayed close to their precious gunny, Werst wouldn’t fire. Of course she knew Werst watched her. She wasn’t a fool. The others aimed at the H’san. Back where his short legs had left him, he’d be aiming at her.

  To her surprise, as she yanked Kerr back, the gunnery sergeant’s KC came free. Her own hanging from her shoulder, Sujuno changed her grip and slammed the butt into Kerr’s face when she turned. A boot driven into soft tissue, a grab from lax fingers, and ridiculously simply, the H’san weapon was hers.

  “Major!”

  Verr had no claim on her attention now. Maybe later. She’d need help getting the weapons out after she destroyed the guardians at the source. After she whipped the beam around the inside of the three rooms and destroyed their contents as certainly as a bullet unable to leave a skull. She’d sweep the others back and away again as she moved to the next room. And the next. With the guardians on this corridor gone, she’d cross through the bunker and destroy the guardians on the other side. Eventually, they’d all be dead and she could take her time getting all the weapons out.

  Having all the weapons paid for.

  A bullet took a chip out of the wall far above the thrashing H’san.

  “Major!”

  Werst had missed his shot. Or been made to miss. Lieutenant Verr would stay by her. Lieutenant Verr also wanted to be paid.

  With all light receptors open, she stepped up to the third room and could see long, narrow metal arms joined together at one point like a nightmare insect, reaching high and dipping low, flexing multiple joints. An arm lifted a piece of H’san from one of the surrounding bins and laid it on a broad table. Wire dangled from another. She could smell rot and solder as waves of dry heat pulsed out toward the cooler air.

  She had one foot over the threshold, weapon raised, when Sergeant Toporov lurched out of the shadows.

  New scars cut across his skin, new wounds sealed shut, sensors visible in empty sockets evidence of the fragility of Human eyes compared to H’san. He wore Keo’s exoskeleton, pieces joined by twisted wire to make up the difference in their sizes. The contact points had been driven into pale and damaged flesh. Gold wires emerged through the skin of his palms and wrapped around his fingers. When he grabbed her, Sujuno felt the wires and not flesh and bone.

  Dead flesh.

  Dead bone.

  Dead like her entire family, only they would never rise and walk again.

&nb
sp; It had been so long since she’d been touched.

  The flesh that fired the weapon had shifted when she snatched it up. The beam had barely strength enough to blast back a pair of approaching H’san.

  Her feet left the floor.

  Alive, Toporov had not been that strong.

  He yanked the weapon from her hand and tossed it aside as though it meant nothing. As though it didn’t mean everything.

  H’san, not all completely rebuilt, surrounded them.

  Pressed tightly against Toporov, she reached back into the crowd, searching, fingers sliding over dry fur and desiccated flesh until they closed around metal. The metal moved. Boots braced against the sergeant’s thigh, she yanked the knife from its sheath. H’san made. Two serrations on the blade near the handle.

  The incision over the power source gaped, damaged ribs pulled apart by her weight dangling off one of Toporov’s arms.

  She would not be stopped now. She would not fail her family again.

  One hand lay flat against his chest, soft pressure of hair against her palm. The other drove the knife in through the incision. It slipped easily between the curving bone; room for a blade left when they’d pried the cage apart.

  “Major!”

  “You are not my progenitor!” She thrust the blade into the power source.

  “DOWN!”

  Ears ringing, Torin lifted her head in time to see a piece of meat fall from the ceiling and land wet and quivering on the floor. She shoved a twitching H’san away and stood, holding out a hand to pull Ressk to his feet. She heard shots, muffled, saw Binti back toward them kicking a boot away, the jagged bone that stuck out of the top scraping against the floor. Saw Verr and Werst pulling Wen out from under a pile of pieces. Barely stopped herself from taking Nadayki down when he grabbed her arm and waved his hand in front of her face.