An Ancient Peace (26 page)

Sujuno nodded. “He's right.”

“I don't believe he is.” Dion waved his slate, screen still showing the latest symbol. “Most of the Younger Races are barely able to comprehend how modern H'san think. I am one of the few, the very few, who have any small understanding of the ancients. And even given my scholarship, we have no context for what just happened and therefore no way of knowing their reasoning. And I guarantee, they had reasons for this cavern, for the bodies, and for the ship.”

“I don't care. Ignoring for the moment that we've just witnessed a spaceship rising through a pool into an
underground
cavern . . .”

“Stupid,” Nadayki muttered.

“. . . it would be pointless to go to the trouble of creating the kind of treasure hunt we've been involved in only to have set it up so that it kills the treasure hunters before they reach the end.”

Dion folded his arms. “Sacrificial intent.”

“Seriously?” Wen sighed.

“If we allow that the ancient H'san were not acting pointlessly . . .”

“Acting bugfuk crazy,” Nadayki muttered.

“. . . and as Broadbent is dead,” Sujuno continued over the enthusiastic agreement to Nadayki's amendment, “we can assume that the mark Broadbent found may have
resembled
the mark we've been searching for, but was not, in fact, the actual mark.”

“You asked him if it appeared to be the mark.” Wen rocked back and forth, hands opening and closing. “Not if it
was
the mark.
Serley chrika
, Major, you killed Broadbent!”

“Chill, Wen. You didn't even like him,” Keo pointed out.

“Not the point!”

“I'll allow that Broadbent was stupid,” Dion sneered.

Wen charged, the staccato slap of bare feet against stone the only warning.

“Sergeant!”

Toporov grabbed the Krai out of the air, pushed him into his bonded's arms, and backed off, hands well away from snapping teeth. Verr gripped Wen's shoulders, pressed their foreheads together, and reminded him they could divide Broadbent's share among the survivors.

“Broadbent died. No one killed him. And you,” Sujuno snarled at Wen, “do not need to threaten Dion in his memory.”

“It wasn't a threat,” Wen growled.

“I wasn't threatened,” Dion muttered at his slate.

“You don't seem to care that he died.” Arms folded, Keo glared at Nadayki. “You were fukking him last night, he's dead today, and you're all critical about the H'san.”

“There's a lot to be critical about.” Nadayki leaned back on his elbows and sighed. “And why should I care more about him dying just because I fukked him last night? Humans are so weird about sex.”

“Yeah, well, don't even pretend that being a shithead is the di'Taykan default because I've known plenty of di'Taykan.”

He grinned. “How well?”

“Enough!” Sujuno swept her gaze over the entire team, pausing only long enough to stare Nadayki down. “The weapons are on the lowest level of these catacombs, we've known that from the beginning, and the bottom of that ship is a long way down. I will not leave here without those weapons, so there has to be a way. Find it.”

Verr pulled far enough away from her bonded so that she could shake her head. “I don't know, Major, we've searched everywhere.”

“Obviously, we haven't.” She could hear the Krai breathing, Dion's fingers tapping against his slate, Keo shuffling around in a small circle as though she could see what they'd all missed from where she was standing.

“All in favor of finding a better way to spend our time, wave a body part.”

She turned in time to see Nadayki shove a hand in under his waistband, reaching for the body part he intended to wave. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Took a step toward him. “The stairs.”

“Major?” Toporov moved to stand behind her left shoulder.

“We didn't search the stairs.” They'd walked down them. They'd been distracted by the dead on plinths and the benches and the water. They'd searched the walls all the way around the pool and they'd searched the floor, but they hadn't searched the stairs. The stairs had brought them down into the cavern and they needed stairs taking
them down farther still. Unless Dion had been talking out of his ass from day one, it was the kind of symmetry the H'san appreciated.

“Uh . . .” Nadayki reluctantly waved a hand. “I searched the steps for a control panel.”

“But only for a control panel.”

“I guess . . .”

The mark had been carved shallowly into the riser of the lowest step.

She had to press it herself.

“Forget it, Major.” Verr spoke for all of them. “We're not touching it. Not after what happened to Broadbent.”

This was the way to the weapons. To her progenitor. The grooves felt cold under her fingertips as she traced them. When she applied pressure, the entire riser shifted two centimeters in and a three-by-five–meter slab of floor slid back to disappear under the cavern wall.

Arms flailing, Verr staggered and would have fallen into the opening had Keo not grabbed her and dragged her back.

“Stupid,” Nadayki reiterated.

“I've definitely started leaning toward your bugfuk crazy theory,” Verr growled, nostril ridges tightly closed. “That's a fukking safety violation at the very least.”

“I assure you . . .” Dion began.

“Shut up.”

“Packs on, people. We can't carry the sled down that.”

Keo grinned. “We could slide the sled, Sarge. Let it bounce.”

“Packs,” he repeated.

Sujuno had kept hers ready to go. The others, even the sergeant, had gotten sloppy, and she ground her teeth at the delay.

The stairs, carved out of the same pinkish rock as the cavern, went straight down forty-three steps to a landing. A one hundred and eighty degree turn and straight down thirty-seven steps to a landing.

The risers on H'san stairs were variable heights and seldom level, the off angles running between two or three degrees to just under twenty. On a single short flight, it had been annoying. By the second landing Sujuno's calves were cramping with the effort of maintaining her balance at speed and they all kept one hand on the wall. They'd
done little resembling hard labor since landing, but compensating for heights and angles seemed to be requiring enough effort from all involved she realized the planet's pull had wearied them more than she'd thought.

They'd rest as they cataloged the weapons, not before.

“What do the H'san have against elevators?” Nadayki skipped a shallow step, stumbled, and caught himself by grabbing a handful of Toporov's jacket.

“This place is millennia old; you couldn't pay me enough to get into an elevator. Besides . . .” Toporov tugged his jacket free. “. . . what would power it?”

“Geothermal running to secure generators. Solar fields we didn't spot from orbit. Magic. Same thing that's powering the lights and whatever they used to pop a fukking spaceship through the floor.”

Forty-one steps. A turn. Fifty-three steps. A turn.

“What's with their hard-on for prime numbers?” Verr wondered.

Fifty-nine steps.

The lower corridor was the darker pink of the bottom of the pool. It was damp, but there was no standing water. The pool had drained through it, not into it. At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor to the left ran straight for approximately thirty meters and ended—although light and shadow suggested a ninety-degree turn and the corridor continuing. To the right, it did the same although it also curved around the end of three enormous cones, narrow ends anchored in the body of the ship, stone following the same arc as the pool on the level above .

“Engines,” Wen said, after a visual examination. “Ship takes off, it'll slag this level.”

“The ship is an antique,” Sujuno reminded him. “Older than antique. What makes you think it'll work?”

Wen shrugged. “Everything else has.”

She couldn't argue with that. They'd expected ruins and faced a fully operational security system. The H'san built to last. Some of what they'd built even made sense.

“Where's the machinery that lifted it through the pool?” Nadayki demanded, head turned three quarters of the way around as he stared
up between the ship and the wall. “For that matter, where's the floor of the pool? And what's holding this in place besides bits of Broadbent?”

“The H'san move in mysterious ways,” Dion told him, and Sujuno wanted to smack the smug, sanctimonious smile right off his face.

Nadayki straightened and smiled back at him. “Fuk you.”

“We're wasting time, people! Let's get this area secured!”

Verr patted Toporov on the arm as she passed. “Thanks for checking that the decibel security is still off, Sergeant.”

The straight walls of the corridor were bare, but the curve that circled the ship had been covered in multiple lines of inset stone.

“That's a lot of H'san. How do we find which one we need?”

“Don't touch it!” Dion grabbed Keo's arm and landed on his ass up against the far wall.

“Sorry, you startled me.” She flexed her exoskeleton. “Don't know my own strength.” She hadn't bothered to sound sincere, they were all aware she knew her own strength down to the micro-newton. “And I wasn't planning to . . . Why does it smell like shit down here?”

“Broadbent.” Verr's voice boomed against the walls, the sound wrapping around the engines, smacking against the straight wall of the corridor, and curving back around. “He's been crushed. Bowels blown out all over the place. There's barely five, maybe ten kilos of uncorrupted meat.” Shaking her head, she appeared around the left side of the curve. “What a waste. Oh, and the H'san shit, as opposed to Broadbent's shit, goes all the way around, Major.”

Dion ghosted his hand a centimeter above the wall. “Not shit. Letters. Words. Sentences.”

“Thank you, Professor . . .” After nearly seven tendays of Dion, Sujuno figured she could handle anything the progenitor bureaucracy threw at her. “I understand how language works. What do the sentences say?”

“I don't know.” His eyes were locked on the marks they'd been following, flicking by screen after screen on his slate. “There's a possibility I could find familiarity and extrapolate from position and context, but it could take years. Decades. This is a lifetime's work. This is the kind of find H'san scholars dream of.”

“Illegal?” Nadayki snorted. “Or just boring?”

“Lieutenant, was there evidence of a door . . .” At this point their working definition of
door
had become somewhat variable. “. . . back there?”

“Didn't see one, Major.”

“All right.” She turned to Toporov. “We go out two groups; one left, one right. Fifteen minutes out, then back.”

She went left with Keo and Nadayki and Verr. Toporov, Wen, and Dion went right. Dion had insisted he stay behind to work on translating the curved wall, but Sujuno played to his ego and convinced him the sergeant would need help should they run into new writings by the H'san.

“Don't trust him on his own?” Nadayki asked as they reached the corner.

“Nor you,” she replied.

The light hadn't lied and they turned right into yet another corridor that appeared to have no end, walls joining at a distant vanishing point. The left wall was unbroken stone. Ten meters from the corner, they passed the first of three large metal doors on the right.

“What do you think is behind there, Major?”

“There were centuries' worth of dead H'san interred on this planet. I assume the doors lead to new catacombs.”

“Or maybe the shipyard where they built that shuttle,” Keo said, fingers trailing over the metal of the third door.

It wasn't that far-fetched a theory. She had no idea why she was so certain they weren't the doors to the weapons cache.

“Holy shit, they're . . .” Keo snatched her fingers back. “. . . vibrating?”

The distant slam of metal against stone caused Sujuno's hair to lift and while she forced it down, the three of them stared at the doors.

“That wasn't our door.” Verr twitched, toes flexing against the floor. “But if there's another corridor like this to the left, then who's to say there aren't other doors?”

Sujuno started to run back the way they'd come, the others falling in behind her. Her boots slid against the slick stone as she cornered. She braced herself against the wall, grabbed Keo as she slipped, and together they raced for stairs and the ship. Almost there, they saw
Toporov, Wen, and Dion running toward them, the sound of boots and bare feet echoing back from the hard surfaces of the surrounding stone.

Dion held his arm across his body, fingers dripping red, and it wasn't hard to see that only Toporov's grip on the back of his jacket kept him on his feet.

“We found the entrance to the weapons cache, Major.”

Her heart pounded too violently for her to speak.

“What happened to him?” Nadayki demanded as Verr checked her bonded.

“He tripped the defenses.” Wen pushed Verr's hands aside.

And Sujuno realized that the sounds of boots and feet had stopped, but the sound of marching, of claws, of buckles and leather, had not only continued but had grown louder.

“Sergeant?”

He shot a glance over his shoulder and his face wore an expression as close to panic as Sujuno had ever seen on an NCO. “Incoming H'san, Major.”

Her hair pulled free of her control and clamped close. “All H'san on this planet are dead, Sergeant.”

He shook his head as though denying what he was about to say. “Yes, sir, they are.”

She glanced at the stairs. From the top, they could hold the stairway. Hold it. Block it. Blow it up. But the sergeant said they'd found the entrance to the weapons cache—her mind skittered past what exactly he'd just agreed with—and the entrance was on this level. If they went up, would they ever get down again?