An Ancient Peace (33 page)

Alamber shuddered and hiccupped damply as Werst uncovered his mouth. “Boss, I didn't . . .”

“I know.” Torin tossed the tube to Binti. “It was the spices. They took a shot at Craig, too.”

“Fukking bag of dicks,” Binti muttered, sealing the burn on Alamber's arm.

“Spices?” Ressk had moved to kneel behind his bonded, chest pressed up against Werst's back, a second layer of support. “That's the definition of arbitrary, Gunny.”

“The composition of the spices could be similar to an ancient threat.”

“I thought the beams were warnings?” Craig asked softly over her shoulder.

“They set it up a millennia before they made contact with the Taykan.” Alamber's pulse was thready and the skin of his throat damp under her fingers. The biometric in his cuff told her nothing she hadn't observed. “They couldn't have known.”

“You defending this, Gunny?” Werst nodded at Alamber panting against his thigh, teeth clenched so tightly a muscle jumped in his jaw.

“No, I'm still going to punch the next H'san I see. I'll add this to the list of reasons.”

Craig pressed closer, copying Ressk's position. “Shouldn't the sealant have dealt with the pain?”

“Not yet.” Torin cupped Alamber's cheek and he nuzzled into her palm. “It needs to be absorbed by the hair shafts.”

“You've dealt with this before.”

She thought of flamethrowers on the battlefield and heated metal
in APCs hit with heavy ordnance, and electrical fires as they fought their way through stations captured by the Primacy. “Once or twice.”

Craig's warmth moved away and she heard him digging through the medkit. “I brought
duwar.
Diluted, but it should put him out for about six hours.”

“That's a Taykan drug.”

“He's a di'Taykan. Seemed relevant to bring it.”

“Clever.” Torin's fingers lingered on Craig's as he passed over the vial. “Alamber.” His eyes when he opened them were so uniformly pale blue, she doubted he could see her. “I want you to drink this.” She dimpled his lower lip with her thumb. “Come on, open. There's no reason to be conscious for the next few hours.”

His tongue swiped against her skin before he gasped, “If they come?”

Didn't matter who he thought
they
were. “I'll carry you. Or Craig will. Or Binti. Or Werst and Ressk together. You know we can.”

“Yes.” He opened his mouth, swallowed, sighed, and a moment later the rigid lines of his body relaxed.

Torin released a breath she didn't remember holding. “Someone touches him at all times.”

“We've got him, Gunny.” Supporting Alamber's head with both hands, Werst edged back far enough that Ressk could move in and wrap an arm around his body.

It took a moment to remember the reason they'd volunteered. He'd saved Ressk's life at the shuttle.

“You two, keep his head stationary. Mashona, get his legs. We'll lift him onto his bedroll, then I want Craig to take a look at Ressk's head and Binti's shoulder.”

“The sealant's holding, Gunny.”

“He'll check anyway. On three. Two . . .”

“Why aren't I standing watch?” Craig murmured, lips resting against the edge of Torin's ear. He hadn't said anything while watches were being set because he didn't challenge her authority in front of the others. Privately, however, with their bedrolls overlapping, he wasn't asking Gunnery Sergeant Kerr but Torin.

She tightened the arm wrapped around his waist. “You'll stand tomorrow night, if we don't catch up.”

“If we do catch up, there's going to be fighting. You lot need your sleep.”

“If you're going to fly an unfamiliar shuttle out of here, you need to be on top of your game.”

“An unfamiliar . . . ?” He frowned and thought about turning on his light so he could see her face. “What are you talking about?” He could feel her thinking about how to answer him. “Torin?”

She went still against his side. “No matter what happens down here, we're not leaving in our shuttle.”

Ah. “I keep telling you, luv, that wasn't a crash. I'll cop to a hard landing, but our shuttle's fine.”

“Our shuttle's engines are full of sand and if you start them, they'll be full of glass.”

“That's nothing to be all big note about.” When she didn't fill the pause left for argument, he sighed, lifting her head as his chest expanded. They'd taken everything not bolted down, but since they hadn't been in the habit of keeping anything on the shuttle that they hadn't planned to use dirtside, that had been easy enough to ignore. But he'd known. He moved his nose to feel the ache, to take himself back to the pilot's chair as they fell through the lower atmosphere. “Ressk scrub her clean?”

“He did. We'd have blown her, but we didn't want to give our grave robbers a heads-up.”

Craig rubbed his thumb in slow circles over the inside of Torin's wrist and reminded himself they'd all walked away. “Guess it's a good thing I didn't get too attached. So who's going to skite the loss to Justice?”

“Colonel Hurrs owes us. He can explain.”

That sounded fair. “So, the Taykan shuttle?”

“Bigger than ours. Probably faster.”

“Faster's good. It won't be as tough.”

He felt the warmth as Torin huffed out a laugh. “You need to work on your landings.”

On the last watch, assuming the lights came back on, Torin sat and listened to her people breathe, listened for her enemies' approach.
She doubted the mercs would be back this way until they headed out with the weapons—odds were, part of the weight on the sled was a second, collapsed sled. It didn't matter how silently the mercs moved; the sleds would give their position away in plenty of time. She also doubted she'd ever reach a stage where she could trust her enemies to act as anticipated.

Alamber's breathing—shallower and faster than normal, even with the sedative—hitched and Torin rose up on her knees beside his boots. She flicked her light on at its lowest setting and slowly moved it up the length of his body, until the reflected light off his chest allowed her to see that his eyes were open. He licked his lips, swallowed, did it again. Swallowed almost frantically.

Torin gripped his ankle, fingers up under fabric against skin, and handed him a pouch of water. Hands shaking, he raised it and locked his lips around the nipple. A moment later, she pulled the half-empty pouch from lax fingers as he slid back into an undrugged sleep, the undamaged part of his head resting on Ressk's stomach. Ressk's left hand cupped the back of his neck. Werst's right spanned the line of pale skin below the rucked-up edge of his tunic.

She tugged his arm free of the tangle and turned it until she could see his cuff. Watched it until his pulse slowed and his respiration evened out.

Seven hours and twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds after the lights went off, they came back on, red and almost translucent for a few moments until Torin's eyes adapted.

She let the team spend as much time as she thought they could spare fussing over Alamber while she redistributed the contents of his pack, halving the weight he carried.

He pushed them away before she could call an end to it. “I'm fine.” The hair on the uninjured side of his head flicked forward and he sucked air through his teeth. “Okay, I'm not fine, but as long as the sealant holds, it's bearable. Let's go already, so we can get the job done and get out of here because I'm not only in pain, I'm also stuck eating the same tasteless muck you lot do.”

Torin met his gaze, nodded once, and shrugged into her pack. “Ressk, you're on point.”

“Gunny, he's . . .”

“What part of
on point
do you not understand?”

The lights came on in the catacombs on the other side of the hole when Ressk's boot touched the floor.

“That's a lot of wasted meat.” He readjusted his pack and stepped away from the hole, weapon ready. “I'll never understand the way most species treat the dead.”

“Most?” Binti twisted her upper body and pack through on the diagonal.

“Ciptran males fight to the death for the right to mate and the females lay eggs in the thorax of the loser.”

“Didn't need to know that.”

The sled left no marks on the stone slabs of the new floor, but the mercs were searching the crypts again.

“Let's assume we're doing a wash and repeat of corridor one. Find a crypt they haven't tossed.”

“That's a lot of crypts, Gunny.”

Torin looked toward yet another vanishing point and squared her shoulders. She could identify human-scale objects at just under three kilometers, given reasonably decent light and air quality, but the corridor stretched empty for so long, it seemed like an optical illusion. “We'll be done sooner if we don't stand around talking about it.”

“Oh, for fuk's sake, Ressk, we don't need to baby him; Alamber's a part of the team, he's not a civilian. Would you'd be this annoying if it was me?”

Ressk glanced up at her. “Hell, no. Not if it was
you
.”

Binti laughed, the sound ringing in the enclosed stone of the crypt.

They froze, Ressk's hand around her knee. The burn on her shoulder ached, the skin pulled under the straps of her pack and her weapon.

“Suddenly not so funny,” she murmured after a long moment.

“So you saw Marines get burned?”

“Yeah.” Werst kicked the empty coffee pouch back behind the
sarcophagus. Bring it in, carry it out; what the fuk was so hard to understand about that?

“Will my hair grow back?”

He was about to snap that Alamber knew more about di'Taykan hair than he did, but then he saw the look on the kid's face, the barely hidden fear. Apparently Big Bill hadn't set any di'Taykan on fire during Alamber's tenure on Vrijheid Station. “Sure, eventually. After the injured hair dies and drops out.”