An Ancient Peace (31 page)

“No. Let's not advertise our presence any more than we have to.” They had a fifty/fifty shot the doors would stay open until they were deliberately closed or they'd close automatically the moment no one stood in the way. “Alamber, look around in here for the symbol that opened things up. The mercs didn't believe they were trapped, or they'd have tried to break free.”

“We're calling them mercs now?” Craig asked, carrying her pack in.

“Evidence in the shuttle says armed ex-military. Mercs.”

He nodded at her KC.

She shrugged. “We're the good guys.”

“The mercs are working with more information,” Alamber protested, peering up at the balcony, arms out from his sides so the cooler air could get in under his clothes.

“But our hearts are pure.” A hand on his shoulder, Torin tugged him around to face the door. “It won't be up there; it's a door control.”

“Yeah, but those freaky carved balustrades? They're like the symbols around the door. Letters, or whole words maybe.”

“Still not going to be up there unless the last H'san out had a ladder.” She pointed. “Pretend the H'san occasionally default to logic and search around the door.”

It didn't take him long to find it. Pink on pink this time, not black on black.

“Probably a di'Taykan flying that Taykan shuttle, then,” Craig said, squinting at the place Alamber insisted the symbol had been carved. “And the H'san either have good eyes or a sick sense of humor.”

“Whole planet of dead people.” Binti adjusted her grip on her weapon. “I vote sick sense of humor.”

Torin agreed. “Werst, inside.”

“We know the external control works, Gunny. Maybe, I should stay out here.”

“We're not splitting up.” The thought of one of her people on the other side of those doors, sat like a rock in her stomach. She beckoned him forward. “Clear the doors, people, let's see what happens.”

The doors closed as silently as they'd opened. Torin nodded at Alamber.

The doors opened.

Thirty seconds later, they closed again.

“You know,” Craig said thoughtfully, “I don't really care about them not telling us where their home system was—is—but I'm a little pissed about them hiding a way to keep machinery working perfectly after being left on its own for millennia.”

Torin frowned at the wall. “Mark the spot so if Alamber's not with us, we can still get out.”

“Why wouldn't I be with you?” Alamber demanded, hair expanding into a sudden, pale aurora around his head.

“Plenty of reasons,” Werst told him.

Ressk smacked his bonded's shoulder and added, “Not all of them bad.”

“Some of them bad.”

“True.”

“Mark the spot,” Torin snapped.

The wall wouldn't take a mark. They couldn't chip it, carve it, or write on it.

Alamber's hair smoothed out as he purred, “I guess you'll have to take special care of me.”

“Not in a crypt,” Binti snorted.

“The dead don't care.”

“You don't know that,” Ressk said trying to scrape an arrow sign into the floor with the point of his knife. “Zombie voyeurs.”

“Stop saying
zombie
.” Torin frowned down the corridor, mostly to stop herself from smiling. Armed, taking a small team into enemy territory. Complete the mission. Bring her people out alive. This was the first time she'd felt settled in her skin since Colonel Hurrs had shown them a biscuit maker. “All right, they've moved on, but we're looking at approximately four klicks of corridor straight out with no way of knowing how much farther it goes or if they took a sudden turn at any point on the way. They left no sign out here . . .” The sled had marked the threshold but not the floor. “So we check the crypts—out of sight, out of mind, and anything they left behind is information we don't have.”

The crypts, evenly spaced along the right wall, had no doors. Internal lights came on in the first when Torin stepped over the threshold.

“Yeah, that's not creepy at all,” Ressk muttered, heading for crypt two.

The first crypt was a large, square room with a black stone sarcophagus, about a meter and a half high, taking up most of the floor space.
The empty meter of space all around left barely enough room for an adult H'san. Black-on-pink symbols covered all the walls but the one with the door.

“Oh, sure,” Craig muttered beside her. “These we can see.”

Hands folded over her weapon, Torin studied words she couldn't read and thought about how the Confederation had been given form by the H'san, how the H'san had determined from the beginning what would and wouldn't be allowed. She thought about how they'd hidden their weapons when they gave up war rather than destroy them. She wondered what else they were hiding with their dead.

And so much for feeling settled.

“Torin.” When she turned, Craig had a triangular piece of the sarcophagus lifted up out of place. “The corner's been broken off. You want to rob graves, you need to get the graves open.”

He waited until she stood beside him before shining a light inside. It took a moment to separate substance from shadow.

“Six?” Craig asked.

“Maybe seven.”

The sarcophagus clearly extended down below the floor line. Inside, multiple H'san lay curled in what might be a fetal position—with the H'san it was hard to tell. They were desiccated, not rotted. Flesh tight to bones, mouths and eyes sealed closed.

“Dehydrate before interment?”

“Probably.”

He pointed. “Some arsehole's dug in.”

The dead in the corner farthest from the break lay tidily interlocked, limbs around each other, wicker baskets tucked in curves and hollows. Under the break, the bodies had been tossed around, ends of broken bone gleaming, baskets empty.

“They're looking for something.”

“The weapons?”

“Only if whatever map they're following stopped at the doors.” She rubbed her thumb against the smooth stone. “Which it could have. They'd have to check every sarcophagus to make sure the weapons weren't in the baskets and/or hidden under the bodies.”

“Because as unlikely as that is, that's what you'd do?”

“If I had incomplete information. A general location, but nothing specific.”

“Lovely.”

A moment later, it wasn't Alamber's yell that had her racing for the third tomb; it was the familiar sound of an energy weapon that followed.

Werst charged out of the second tomb as she passed, Ressk behind him.

“Mashona!” She caught the flicker from the corner of her eye and dropped to the floor, rolling over, weapon ready, nothing to shoot. On a hunch, she reached over and touched the place where she'd been standing. The stone was warm.

Werst's nostril ridges were shut, his weapon pointed at the far wall, his voice barely loud enough to hear. “It came out of the lights, Gunny, reacting to the noise. We take them out, if we
can
take them out, and we're in the dark.”

“A security system protecting dead H'san,” Ressk snarled softly.

Torin rolled up onto her feet. “Protecting a weapons cache that could plunge known space back into war.”

“And that,” Ressk allowed. “Guess we're in the right place.”

“Plunge?” Craig asked as they ran toward the third tomb, boots making barely more noise than the Krai's bare feet.

“Too much?”

“Little bit.”

The third crypt looked like the first. The symbols were in a different order—different words, sentences, obituaries—but, otherwise, an exact match, including the broken corner on the sarcophagus.

Just inside the door, Alamber leaned close to Binti's shoulder, hair jerking back and forth in short, quick arcs. His fingers weren't quite touching a strip of blistered skin that followed the curve of Binti's shoulder.

“She shoved me out of the way,” Alamber whispered. “Took the shot meant for me.”

“Second part of that was an accident.” Binti nudged him with her hip, and he settled into the contact. “The security's sound activated,” she explained when Torin came closer.

“Yeah, we got that; it took a shot at me in the corridor. You okay?”

“It's minor. Hurts like fuk, though.” It looked minor, a finger-width burn, six centimeters long, and past it about a centimeter of her shoulder strap turned to ash. “I think,” she continued as Torin checked the damage, “it's a warning to be respectful of the dead, and I stand by my observation that the ancient H'san were a bag of dicks.”

“Not arguing,” Torin told her. Craig shifted her out of the way, pulling the first aid kit from his pack. They'd needed a corpsman, he was as close to Navy as they had, and he wouldn't carry a weapon. She didn't . . .
no one
wanted him carrying a weapon. She took another step left until Alamber was close enough he could lean into her side. “What surprised you?”

“There's a body. Not H'san,” he continued, before she could point out the obvious. Reluctantly breaking contact, he led the way around to the rear of the crypt.

A dead Katrien had been propped against the carved rock; her head flopped over onto her left shoulder, her fur dry and patchy, eyes glazed gray, lips pulled back off pointed yellow teeth. There were no visible wounds, except for the broken neck.

“You've seen bodies before.” Torin dropped to one knee and tugged the worn shoulder pouch out from under a mangy elbow.

“Like you said, it took me by surprise.”

“Jumped out at you?”

“Funny, Boss.”

The Katrien's slate was an older model with nearly a full charge. It wasn't locked, so Torin flicked through to the first level. “The slate's registered to Jamers a Tur fenYenstrakin. I doubt she's lent it out.”

“So they killed her. Because she was stealing from them?”

“Hard to say. It could have been an accident.” Torin didn't bother trying to sound like she believed it.

Alamber hummed noncommittally, and held out a hand for the slate. “I'll see what she's got on it. Might be something useful. What do we tell Presit?”

“The truth. Jamers was dead when we found her. Wait here.” She shrugged out of her pack, both shoulders at once, catching it easily before it hit the floor.

“Hey, Boss? Do you remember that vid Presit took when she and Craig found you guys on the prison planet?”

“I don't need to see the vid, I was there.” He'd watched everything about her that Presit had shot, including rough footage that had never aired. Torin wasn't too happy about it, but she had no reason to stop him. Craig encouraged him. Sometimes, he watched with him.

“Right, well, the way Jamers' eyes are all glazed over and gray, it reminds me of the way Presit's eyes were when the gray aliens were leaving her brain.”

Torin shot him a look of disbelief.

He shrugged. “What can I say, it's a creepy similarity.”

“Keep it to yourself,” Torin told him, shaking out a Corps body bag and laying it on the floor beside the corpse.

“I know Presit said she'd been gone for years, but I thought she'd be younger. Younger than Presit anyway. She looks old.” He huffed out a breath. “And dead.”

Jamers had been dead for a while; rigor had left the body and the flesh compacted under Torin's fingers. The moist interior had begun to rot. She wasn't wasting sympathy if there were gray aliens trapped in there.

Alamber watched her seal the bag, eyes dark, hair still. “There's a hundred bits of the Corps you didn't pick up, but that you brought with?”

“I don't leave anyone behind.”

“And you told Presit we'd bring Jamers out.”

“And that.” With the slates restricted, she had to set the charge by hand. The bag stiffened, pushed against her boot, then flattened. She flicked the ash to one end and poured it into the attached cylinder, having practiced the motion more often than she cared to remember. Her hand paused halfway to the vest she wasn't wearing and, grateful she had Alamber with her and not Werst who would have noticed the truncated move, she tucked Jamers into her pack instead. “Come on, let's tell the rest what you found.”

The fifth crypt had pieces of torn paper on the floor, an empty coffee pouch behind the sarcophagus, and a crumpled filter. The eighth had a small pile of empty food packs, refilled with waste.

“I guess if you're willing to start a war . . .” Binti straightened and rubbed her palms against her thighs. “. . . you don't have a problem with littering.”

“We carry ours out,” Torin growled.

“If the H'san want to find out who broke in, they can build up a DNA profile by isolating epithelial cells excreted in urine.” Alamber spread his hands when everyone turned to stare. “What? I picked up a lot of odd information working for Big Bill.”

“We carry ours out,” Torin repeated.

“Hey, I'm on your side, Boss.”

The sarcophagus in crypt twelve was the first the mercs had broken into at the far corner. If it had taken them that long to notice their previous vandalism would be visible from the door, Torin could only conclude grave robbing didn't attract the sharpest knives in the armory. A half a dozen pieces of ceramic had been shoved in on top of the bodies, and she'd bet this was where the biscuit warmer had come from.

“Loot abandoned on orders.”

Craig shot Torin a silent question as he slid the broken corner back into place.

She shrugged. “When you've risked your life chasing the enemy out, picking up a few things for yourself doesn't seem unreasonable. The Corps frowns on it.”

“Egregiously?”

“What do you think?”

“Gunny!”

Again, it wasn't Ressk's shout that started them running, but the weapons fire after it.

“Garn chreen ta dirin avirrk!”