An Ancient Peace (32 page)

That, and the profanity.

“Fukking inedible testes?” Craig asked as they ran.

“Close enough.”

Ressk was sitting on the floor across from the twenty-first crypt, Werst checking a burn that ran diagonally across his scalp.

“I think the security system had a little trouble calibrating for the lack of height,” Alamber murmured as Torin stopped beside him.

Torin thought about the burn on Binti's shoulder, painful but not debilitating, and doubted it.

“Again nothing serious,” Craig said as he sealed it.

“Hurts like fuk,” Ressk growled.

“If fukking hurts,” Alamber began. He stopped when Torin shot him a warning glare. “Oh, come on, Boss. Classic straight line. More than I could resist.”

“Try harder. Can I assume,” she returned her attention to Ressk, “you weren't shouting about a body?”

“Uh . . .” Ressk flushed, the darker green mottling across his cheeks darkening further still. “It wasn't so much about the body, Gunny, but where it was. Is. I got uncomfortably close.” He nodded across the hall at the polished stone wall under the balcony. “Beneath the loop with the double curved lines through it.”

Torin checked the railing, and crossed carefully. She couldn't see . . .

And then she could.

The floor had been laid in such a way that the missing section remained hidden until she was almost on it. Pit trap. Basic, but effective. Head up, she sniffed, smelled the five of them, the omnipresent dust, and nothing else. The lower temperature in the catacombs had kept Jamers from smelling much different than the dead H'san, but a body introduced to the bottom of a pit trap would have had its physical integrity breached and even a Human nose should have been able to smell that.

She moved closer, sliding her boots across the floor, and looked down.

Polished stone walls enclosed a square meter of air. Three meters down, the pink turned gray. At six, darkness. Evidence suggested not even the H'san put lights in a pit trap.

Directly over the pit, she thought she could catch a faint whiff of the unforgettable mix of shit and blood that lingered over battlefields and wondered how far the poor s.o.b. had fallen before hitting bottom. Were they standing dead center on the trap when the floor collapsed beneath them? Or had they been moving quickly along the wall and not seen the trap until too late?

“Do we drop a flare, Gunny?” Binti asked beside her.

“No. Whoever they are, we can't get them out, so we leave them buried with the H'san.”

“Bag of dicks,” Binti muttered.

“Still not arguing.”

Crypt twenty-one hadn't been tossed. Nor had twenty-two, or twenty-three through thirty, all left to the dead without the detritus of the living. They returned to the pit trap together.

“All right.” Craig folded his arms. “Where did they go? And if they kept going straight ahead, why did they stop searching the tombs for the weapons?”

“They weren't searching for the weapons,” Torin said slowly, staring at the infinity point as she put the pieces together. She turned and looked down at the pit. “They were searching for a sign of where to go next.”

“That's an emphatic sign.”

“Could be another corridor at the bottom of the pit,” Ressk said thoughtfully, one finger tracing the edge of the burn on his scalp. “If my scanner was working . . .”

“It's not,” Werst snarled. Ressk got hurt, Werst got crankier. They'd all learned to ignore it.

“All I see is dark.” Binti leaned in. “What do we do if there's an opening halfway down?”

“If you can go halfway, you can go all the way and get your people out.”

“
You
could,” Craig pointed out as Torin squatted and cocked her head, changing the way the light hit the wall on the other side of the pit. “What?”

“There's a chip out of the stone. I thought it was a fleck of the gray but from down here I can see the shadow. Alamber?”

He crouched beside her. “Oh, yeah. There. I don't see any symbols or anything, Boss, but the stone's smudged in a line about half a meter over and a meter up from the chip.”

“That's it.” She straightened. “Craig's taller, but Alamber's lighter.” Hand around the di'Taykan's arm, she tugged him up. “Stand here. Lean forward, open the door.”

He pulled against her grip, not enough to get free, only enough so she knew he wasn't happy. “What door?”

“The one under the smudges. Werst. Mashona.”

“On it, Gunny.”

She waited until they were in position, back-to-back in the center of the corridor, then checked that the buckle was as much functional as decorative before taking a hold of Alamber's belt. At her nod, Craig took the other side.

“If I slip . . .”

“I weigh twice what you do, kid. We've got you.”

Hair flat against his head, he leaned forward and pressed a palm against the wall. A one-by-two–meter section swung away from the pressure. And closed as he released it. And swung open again.

“Looks like the pit on its side. Only taller,” Ressk added after a moment.

The biggest difference was that passage behind the door ended in a rectangle, not a square, of darkness and that a hunk of ceramic—probably not a biscuit maker, but Torin wasn't taking bets—had been left leaning against the wall about a meter and a half in, a prop to keep the door open while they moved their gear through. The chip had likely been caused when the mercs had lifted the sled up into the passage.

“We're moving into an area with no apparent access to outside air. Filters on.”

“I hate filters.”

Filters for the Krai covered everything below their eyes, loose enough within the seal to allow for movement of their nostril ridges.

“You hate being gassed more.”

Ressk didn't seem convinced, scowling as he slapped the clear film over his face and secured the edges.

When they—in every possible combination of
they
—found no way to manipulate the door from the other side, they left it propped open behind them. Since they'd ultimately closed it, Torin assumed the mercs knew another way out.

“If this gets narrower . . .” Craig touched the walls with his elbows. “. . . I'm not going to be happy.”

“At least if the floor goes out you can brace yourself.”

“There's that.”

“How did the H'san fit through here?”

“Less chatter, people.” Although the question about the H'san was valid. There had to be a limit to how far a sentient species could compact.

“Lights on, Gunny?”

Lights would paint a target on them should anyone be waiting at the other end of the passage or heading back toward them. On the other hand, the H'san had put a pit trap in with their dead within sight of the main . . .

She glanced back, shifting until she could see the perfectly square hole in the floor, too small for a H'san. Unless the floor had been designed to collapse in variable ways depending on who triggered it and a H'san standing on the same spot would have opened up a hole twice the size. One of her brothers had a game biscuit with traps that used those parameters. She wondered it if had been designed by the H'san.

“Torin? What are you thinking about?”

“That Mashona's right and the H'san are a bag of dicks.” Turning her back on the pit, she shifted her pack. “Ressk and Werst, lights on, aimed at the floor. Ressk up front with me, Werst on our six with Mashona. Craig and Alamber . . .”

“Tucked snug in the middle, Boss?”

“No talking. No noise. We smell, see, hear anything, lights out. Questions? Let's go.”

The PIDs—Personal Illumination Devices—clipped to the straps of their packs beamed golden circles onto the floor. Barely enough light to maneuver safely. Possibly enough light to be dangerous.

Torin set the kind of pace intended to eat distance without tiring the team unnecessarily and soon the sounds of movement, the circles of light, the smell of three species in an enclosed environment, became background and she could extend her senses beyond their position. She knew Werst and Ressk had fully opened nostril ridges and that Alamber's eyes were dark and his hair flipped away from his ears.

If the mercs were waiting ahead of them in the passage, if they'd set perimeter beacons Torin's team had tripped, then she was leading them into a shooting gallery.

After three hours and twenty-seven minutes, Alamber whispered, “Light ahead.”

They stood in sudden darkness as both PIDs turned off.

Twenty-four minutes later, Torin could make out a patch of gray.

The gray grew paler and became a two-by-three–meter opening. What little sound they were making began to dissipate into what had to be a larger room beyond the exit.

“Hold here.” Beckoning Ressk forward with her, she added, “Remember what was under the welcome mat at the other end.”

Behind the faint glimmer of the filter, Ressk's nostril's flared. “Smells like . . .”

“Impact boomers,” Torin said, edging up to the doorway, her back against the stone.

As her elbow broke the line of the door, the lights came on.

T
ORIN LOOKED OUT
into the middle of another wide corridor an indefinite distance long; vanishing points to both the right and left, the opposite wall approximately six meters away. She missed being able to ping it, but the difference between approximate and exact was immaterial without the need to target artillery. Which she didn't get to do anymore. Although, it looked like someone had.

“Looks like they emptied the magazine,” Ressk said beside her.

The entire visible length of wall they faced had once been covered with floor-to-ceiling, glass-and-metal display cases. Directly across from where they stood, the cases and their contents had been destroyed, broken glass and twisted metal and unrecognizable debris extending some distance beyond the immediate impact zone.

The mercs had cleared a path for the sled through the debris field exposing a floor made of tiny colored tiles laid out in geometric patterns, and she could clearly see where one of the sled's metal wheels had crushed the tiles on both sides of a grout line. The tiles were surprisingly delicate given that they were on a floor and Torin appreciated the new ease of tracking. Following the path, she could see where they'd made camp to the far right of the debris field.

Off the path, debris kicked aside indicated exploration in both directions, but, as the sled had only gone one way, they could ignore everything to the left of the door.

Torin stepped out onto the mosaic floor and followed the path for a couple of meters, then turned to face the door—and the mural
around it. Painted in brilliant colors unfaded by time, the door included in the painting's narrative, it depicted H'san using the artifacts in the surviving cases. Occasionally in ways Torin hadn't expected. Or believed possible.

Large and small chunks of the wall had been chipped out by flying debris, exposing the stone behind the ancient H'san equivalent of plaster.

“Museum, Gunny?”

“Cache. Museum implies access by the public.” She bit back the urge to tell Ressk to be careful as he followed her out onto the floor. The Krai knew better than she did how to keep from lacerating their feet.

“Holy shit.” Craig braced his hands against the walls of the passageway, leaned forward, and looked around. “What happened?”

“Fun with explosives?” Alamber suggested, peering over Craig's arm. “Hey, Boss, can we come out?”

“Stay close.” She moved to study the pitted wall where the impact boomers had hit and counted two twisted pieces of metal that had definitely been weapons as well as another four possibles, too damaged or too H'san for her to be sure. The question was: why would the H'san target this entrance? And not merely target, six weapons aimed at a two-by-three opening could only be called targeting with prejudice. Who had they expected to emerge?

Someone going after the weapons cache. Someone who knew the route well enough to find a hidden door, but who didn't have the codes to walk it safely.

Someone who got lucky.

“Werst, check the passageway. See if the defenses got a shot off.”

“You think their heavy gunner reacted to an attack?” Craig reached out, but didn't touch the wall. Torin had been pleased to see that salvage paranoia, where any hunk of twisted metal floating in vacuum post battle could turn out to be deadly, had made a direct transition to feet-on-the-ground paranoia.

“No, I think it was instinct,” she told him. “Unless the defenses fired a warning shot first, no one's reactions are that fast. But a gunner
who's seen enough combat, well, a sound, a flash of light, a change of air pressure . . .”

“I've got something, Gunny!”

The two-finger deep gully Werst found hadn't been blasted out of the rock. Or burned.

“Disintegrated?” Alamber offered, running a finger along the smooth rock at the bottom.

Craig snorted. “Disintegrator rays show up on bad vids, not in the real world.”

“Well, if it turns out we're in a bad vid, that's all the more reason to make sure their weapons don't leave this planet. Let's move.” She beckoned Ressk back to her side and stepped out onto the path.

“What about the filters, Gunny?”

The air still smelled of impact boomers, but was clearly circulating through both crypts and corridor—or was it a tunnel?—and cache. She had no idea if it had begun circulating with the mercs' arrival, or if it had been circulating for centuries for whatever reason the H'san had thought was valid. Nor did she care. With no apparent exterior access, they were in an enclosed, potentially hostile environment. Granted, given the size of the place, the H'san would have to either use one hell of a lot of an airborne toxin, aim it specifically, or drop partitions to create a smaller airtight enclosure, but all three options were valid ways to keep the curious or opportunistic or bugfuk crazy away from the weapons.

“Filters stay on.”

The H'san's decibel-based security kept complaints at a quiet rumble.

What she'd thought was a pile of coarse white sand along the boundary of the merc campsite turned out to be broken glass. The mercs had left bags of waste behind again.

The sled's trail continued to the right, tiles crushed in a double line.

“Why would the H'san save all this shit?” Craig asked after they'd walked past about a kilometer of shelving. “I mean, grave goods are a stupid waste, but a guy can wrap his head around the reasoning. This? This makes no sense.”

Torin glanced over at a completely featureless ceramic cube and
shrugged. “They gave up violence, but kept all their weapons. That's a good indication they don't like to throw anything out.”

They passed three sections of destroyed mural, the stone exposed, the plaster ground to dust underfoot. By the time they got close to the point the mercs had exited the corridor . . .

“Eight klicks from the door,” Werst said, shifting his pack.

“
Senak
,” Alamber snorted.

. . . they were no longer following the floor so much as aiming for the destruction. Huge chunks of the mural, a priceless and irreplaceable piece of ancient H'san art, had been tossed aside to uncover a metal wall. They'd cut the hole to the dimensions of the sled. Flesh compressed, gear didn't.

Body out of the line of fire, Torin unclipped her light from the strap, bent, and pointed it through the hole. If the H'san remained consistent, the dark meant the mercs had moved on.

“Gunny?”

“New catacomb like the first, crypts on the right, balcony on the left. If the corridor has an end, the light doesn't reach it.”

Craig stepped forward as she straightened and ran his palm over the edge of the cut. “The metal's a composite. I'm not sure of what.” He picked at a chunk of mural still stubbornly adhering to the wall. It didn't budge. “No evidence of solvent. It would've taken the better part of a day to pry the mural off the metal and days to cut through, even given the size of their torch.”

“How can you tell the size of their anything?” Alamber asked, innuendo surprisingly absent.

“Heat of the burn,” Craig explained. “The hotter it gets the smoother the cut. This, this cut is slick.”

That helped to explain the weight of the sled. The torch could be used as a weapon, but as the mercs were also conventionally armed, Torin decided not to worry about it.

“It's not a door,” Alamber muttered. “How did they know where to break through the mural?”

Binti spread her hands. “Sign on the section they trashed: this way to weapons, cut here.”

“No, there's a door here.” Ressk touched the seam where the metal
joined the stone. “It's the only place they uncovered between here and the destruction where the wall isn't stone. They couldn't find the door, they got frustrated, so they took a shortcut. See, there?” He pointed to where the edge curved dimpled up into a half circle. “They burned through there first to check visuals.”

“But how did they know? Scanners aren't working and they couldn't have been randomly digging through the mural for metal. There aren't enough holes, not over a distance of . . .” Alamber shot Werst a look. “. . . eight kilometers.”

“I'm telling you, sign on the mural.” Binti huffed out a breath. “Misinterpreted the first few times, got it right this time.”

“What, you think the H'san left a trail of bread crumbs leading to the weapons?”

“They left a map,” Torin said, drawing everyone's attention. “Notes. A recording of interpretive dance. The means don't matter. They left a way for future H'san to check that the cache remained secure. Someone found it.” She considered the need for the impact boomers. “Or part of it.”

“Yeah, but how did they know where to . . .”

“It doesn't matter,” Torin repeated, cutting off Alamber's question. “We go where the mercs went only we move a lot faster.” When she twisted to find the angle to get both her and her pack through the hole, Craig touched her hip, his hand warm in spite of multiple layers between his skin and hers.

“Torin, maybe we should bunk in here for the night. It's been a long day.”

“Time isn't our . . .” she began. And then the lights in the corridor went out.

“Garn chreen!”

“Didn't mean to grab that, Werst. Swear to you, I was startled.”

Not surprisingly, Werst's light was the first on.

“You know the other place the lights went out like this?” Binti said through clenched teeth, shadows of her fingers dancing over the display cases as she adjusted her light.

“Prison planet?” Ressk growled, sounding more like his bonded than himself.

“Yeah. That'd be the place.”

They weren't wrong. Torin could feel the weight of the prison bearing down on her, the lives ruined, the lives she hadn't been able to save. The gray aliens admitting responsibility for millions of deaths over five centuries—a social experiment and they were the lab rats. She could hear that weight flattening Werst and Binti and Ressk's voices and wouldn't add the force of her feelings to it. Part of her job was to help carry them. If she was fine, they'd be fine. That was how it worked. She buried her reaction—the anger, the guilt, the betrayal—under the sound of mild irritation. “Looks like we're taking Craig's suggestion and bunking here for the night. Head back about ten meters, set up against the wall.”

As Alamber stepped forward, Werst reached up and tugged the beam of his PID toward the floor. “Down and close to your body, like in the passage. You don't want them to see yours if they're coming back. And we want to see theirs.”

“Did you want to see mine?”

Alamber hadn't been one of the POWs. Torin had edited her report to the Justice Department to keep him
out
of prison.

Craig's fingers on her wrist, skin to skin as though she were di'Taykan and needed the comfort of touch, made her think of the look on his face when he'd arrived on that prison planet and pushed back the helmet of the HE suit. That memory was strong enough to help carry the rest.

“Gunny?” Ressk pointed his light at his cheek and flicked the edge of the filter glistening over his lower face.

They could eat through the filters. Field rations had a nipple designed to pass through the membrane and reseal it on the way out. But it wasn't comfortable and field rations were only just palatable as it was. She pried a corner off the lower edge of her jaw and ripped the filter off. “Give me a twenty count.”

“Why you . . . ?” Craig began.

Torin cut him off. “Because I'm fast enough to get another one on if I start to react.”

“And if it sneaks up on you?”

“The cuff'll show any deviation from Human norm.”

Alamber's hair flipped up. “Any deviation?”

“That's twenty. Gunny?”

She took a deep breath and checked her cuff. “No effect.”

“Yes!”

A few minutes later, rubbing residue off the bridge of her nose, Torin looked at the bag of pale paste—the Corps cooks hadn't bothered to make field rations appear any more appetizing than they tasted—and considered asking for a splash of the spices Alamber pulled out of his pack.

“You can have some of mine.” Craig brandished an identical spice pouch, her thought processes apparently so obvious he didn't need to see her face.

“Taste buds dead of boredom or taste buds fried.” She shook her head. “Tough choice.”

If it hadn't been so dark, she'd have missed the flicker as Craig opened the pouch. Grabbing a fistful of his jacket, she yanked him sideways across her legs. Light splashed against the wall where his torso had been. The mural cracked.

Alamber keened.

Torin didn't see the flash that answered the noise, but she saw Werst move, hand over Alamber's mouth as he took the di'Taykan to the floor.

They'd gotten used to keeping their voices low, not forgetting, but adapting to what happened when they raised them.

Alamber's cry of pain had been loud enough to set off the beams, but before that . . .

“The spices. It's the only thing they had in common. Are you . . .”

“I'm not hit.” Craig's palm pressed warm against her cheek as they untangled their legs.

Alamber lay with his head in Werst's lap, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth, noises muffled against Werst's palm.

“Second beam hit the inside of his arm. Ashed the fabric, fried the skin.” Binti ran her hands under Alamber's clothes. “I can't find the first.”

Torin caught hold of her arm, stilled her. “I see it.” She adjusted her light to illuminate a two-finger–wide band of hair burned away on the
left side of Alamber's head. The centimeter-high stubble seeped clear fluid from every hair.

“Oh, fuk . . .”

“Craig.” Torin reached a hand behind her. “Sealant with the highest level of pain killer.” The tube dropped onto her palm. She thumbed off the lid and sprayed a thick layer over the burn. The sense organs that were Taykan hair could be bent, broken, or cut with manageable levels of pain. A burn was excruciating.