An Ancient Peace (36 page)

With stealth abandoned, they all agreed better a bigger bang than a loud noise and an intact door.

“Definitely a big enough bang,” Craig noted when they emerged
from the nearest crypt to find a door-shaped hole in the wall and no rubble larger than a Human fist.

“The decibel security targeted the door as it blew. Might've helped break things up.” Beyond the opening, Torin could see pink stone rising into a massive dome and what looked almost like the nose of a ship. Underground. She checked the dome again. It seemed solid.

At the threshold, using the wall for cover, she stood at the top of a long flight of stairs leading down to the floor of a circular cavern—given the dome, not entirely a surprise. The ship rising up through the center of the floor looked like a vacuum-to-air shuttle, much like the one they'd landed in allowing for species and millennial differences. A ring of alternating statues and benches surrounded the ship. Not far from the bottom of the stairs, a rectangular hole in the floor led to a lower level.

If the mercs had been in the cavern, they couldn't have missed the door blowing. In their position, Torin would wait silently, using the pedestals and angle of the stairs for cover until the new arrivals were exposed descending the stairs. Then she'd order her people to open fire.

“I'll go,” Werst growled from the other side of the door, as able to read the room as Torin. “I'm a smaller target.”

“Mashona, covering fire.”

“On it, Gunny.” Binti dropped prone in the doorway.

Torin went to one knee beside her. “Werst, go.”

No one fired.

He darted right at the bottom, around into the blind spot. Came back into sight a moment later, investigated the second set of stairs, the nearer pedestals, and finally gave the all clear.

“Alamber, Ressk, Craig. One at a time. Move.”

The cavern secured, Torin had Werst cover Binti's descent while she investigated the abandoned sled. Sleds. She'd been right about them taking along a second. It lay almost diagonally across the first, wheels still folded flat. Cases holding the cutter, the filter, tools, power packs, more tubing, a large roll of clear plastic—unresponsive plastic—and food were stacked messily on top, clearly having been carried down the stairs piece by piece. Four six-liter containers and eight
four-liter containers of water had been lined up to one side. There were no empties.

The mercs had found water somewhere in the catacombs.

Water with zero impurities according to her canteen.

“Craig.” She nodded at the containers. “Let's get started topping everyone up.”

Two packs had been stripped and left; one rigged for Humans, one for Taykan. The body rotting with the H'san had been Human, so the body in the pit trap was di'Taykan. Unless they'd lost someone else, and there was a pack at the bottom of the pit.

“What a lot of crap.” Ressk flicked the catch on the cutter's container.

“They had no idea of what they'd face.”

“They had Jamers making runs.”

“They wouldn't want to wait for her.” Torin didn't blame them, not for that. And that was fine; there was plenty of blame to go around. “Given how she ended up, I doubt they'd have trusted her to buy most of this. She'd have attracted too much attention.”

Ressk picked up the cutting laser. The power connector dropped off. Metal crashed against stone.

Binti dove off the stairs and flattened against the floor.

“Security's off,” Craig said after a long moment of nothing happening.

“Decibel security.” Binti rolled up onto her feet and shrugged her pack back into a more comfortable position. “H'san are too fukking crazy not to have something going on down here.”

“Spread out. Quick recon.” Torin sent Mashona and Ressk right, Werst and Alamber left. “We're not heading down those stairs until we know what we've left behind us.”

“They think they're close, don't they? That why this stuff's here.” Craig twisted the top back on a canteen. “They've already carried the sleds down two flights of stairs, but this time they only took what they could carry.”

“Those aren't statues, Gunny,” Ressk called before Torin could answer. “They're bodies, but they're
revenk
. The H'san did something.”

“The H'san did a lot of things.” Meat that wasn't meat was not her concern, although she wasted a moment wondering why they'd left a pedestal empty. She walked to the edge of the floor. “Craig, what can you tell me about that ship?”

“No guarantees until I see the rest of it, but, yeah, it's a VTA. Design's similar to what the H'san used about ten years ago. Knew a guy at the station . . .”
The
station was always Salvage Station 24. Home, even if Craig could never return to it. “. . . who boosted a control panel out of an old H'san shuttle in a junkyard on Borin. Installed it in his wreck of a Drop Beetle and actually got the damned thing working. Until this trip, that conversation was as close to the Core as I've ever gotten. She looks like she's in good shape.”

Torin glanced up. The dome still looked solid.

“Yeah.” Craig followed her line of sight. “No idea. One thing the last couple of days have taught me, the H'san might've able to start up a galactic democracy, but they never got around to inventing the doorknob.”

“Boss?” Alamber trotted across from a bench, and thrust a pile of discarded filters toward her, his own still a shimmer in front of his face. “There's no dust down here.”

The dust swirled up to but not over the threshold at the top of the stairs—air currents or H'san tech, Torin wasn't sure, but there was no dust in the air in the cavern, although they'd all brought in a patina of red. Habit had her glance at her slate. Externals remained shut down. “How many discards?”

“Five or six. They're in a disgusting clump, I don't want to count them.” He looked miserable and had started to sound sulky.

The mercs had been in the dust catacomb for days and while they'd have needed to change their filters, Torin could think of no reason they'd have dumped the used ones so far from their gear unless they'd been standing by the bench when they took them off. “Give me thirty seconds. If I don't collapse, you can remove yours.” She pulled the release tab and ran her thumbs in under the seal to break it.

Alamber threw the discards back toward the bench. “It was twenty last time. Why thirty?”

“Larger space.” She scratched at the residue around her hairline.

He locked his eyes on his cuff and at thirty made a noise very like a whimper as he peeled his filter off and dropped it. When he unwrapped the shirt around his head, his uninjured hair had curled in over the wound. The injured hair had begun to die.

“Filters are optional, people.”

“Filters are gone.” Ressk's was off before he finished speaking.

“So the cavern's secure—for Navy definitions of the word secure.” Filter off, nostril ridges opening and closing, Werst nodded toward the rectangular hole in the floor. “We go down?”

“We go down.” Torin crossed to the narrow edge and leaned forward, forearm braced on her thigh. The stairs ended in a landing so there was more than one flight. The lights were on. She glanced up the stairs, past the rubble, at darkness. So far, following the light had worked for them. As the others gathered around, she laid her finger across her lips, then tapped her ear. One by one, they shook their heads. If the mercs were close, they weren't making the kind of noise three different species could hear.

“They could be waiting quietly at the bottom of the stairs,” Binti murmured. “Waiting to pick us off, one by one.”

“If they shoot the person in front of you and you continue forward, you deserve to be shot.” She settled her pack, checked her weapon, and stepped down. “Let's go.”

“Hey, Ryder. You think there's a hatch into that ship from a lower level?” Ressk asked, one step behind her.

“I'm not ruling out the possibility that the H'san built that ship around themselves,” Craig told him, the timbre of his voice changing as his head moved into the stairwell, below the level of the floor, “and didn't bother installing hatches.”

“You think it'll work?”

“Everything else has.”

The five flights of stairs were as annoyingly variable as the short flight under the sarcophagus had been. Significantly more of Torin's attention went to not falling rather than to an analysis of what they might be walking into. The arboreal Krai were having the least amount of trouble, but even they stumbled over sudden angle changes. Werst had begun to swear softly under his breath.

Given the pink walls and the restricted real estate, Torin found herself remembering a rebirthing process the psychologist before Dr. Ito had suggested they try. They hadn't.

On the fourth landing, Alamber said, “Prime numbers. Each flight of stairs is a different prime number.”

“Why?” Torin asked. If they were walking into another H'san trap . . .

“The H'san are dicks,” Binti said from the rear of the descent.

“Good a reason as any, Boss.”

The lower corridor was empty and the stone the darkest pink yet. The air held battlefield odors of blood and shit. Both to the left and right, the corridor ran thirty meters straight to a corner. Torin held her position and sent Ressk around the curve that circled the bottom of three engine cones, mirroring the arc of open stone on the cavern level.

“Body parts,” he said as he returned, nostril ridges half closed. “Human. Residue suggests they got caught between the ship and the stone.”

The vibration they'd felt earlier could have been the ship moving. Torin pushed questions of both how and why aside.

“Looks like the blood and viscera got washed to the next level down,” he added. “There's a constant thirty-five-to-forty–centimeter gap all the way around between the engines and the stone. Oh, and the writing . . .” Ressk nodded toward the black on pink. “. . . also goes all the way around. Seems like they had something to say. Almost a shame we'll never know what it is.”

“Almost,” Torin agreed. Foot on the bottom step, she leaned up the stairs and said, “Down and to the right, tuck back out of sight by the engines. We've got corners in both directions, and we don't want to set up a shooting gallery. I'll cover your six.”

By the time she joined them, Ressk had quietly explained about the body.

“So they're down three,” Craig began.

Werst cut him off. “That we know of. And they could be down three archaeologists, so we'll be facing as many guns.”

“You sound like Torin, mate.”

“Except I don't want to . . . Gunny!”

“I heard it.” The ex-Marines moved into defensive positions as she tried to determine which direction the shots had come from, the echoes from all the hard surfaces . . .

A single shot. Shooter wasn't as close as she'd first assumed. No ricochet. That round had hit a soft target.

“To the left. Marines, with me. Leave your packs with Craig and Alamber.” The last year had forced her to change a number of the ways she did things, but she did not take civilians into a potential firefight. “You two, stay here. Anyone heads this way who isn't us, get out of sight around the curve.”

“With the body?” Alamber demanded, the ends of his hair lifting.

Werst rolled his eyes. “You could probably take it in a fight.”

“You could probably . . .”

“We'll try and get into the ship.” Craig cut him off, a hand around his wrist. “Be careful.”

Torin didn't look his way as she slipped out of her pack, checked her weapon, and motioned the others into movement. “You, too.”

They ran to the left. Paused at the corner. Turned right into yet another vanishing point corridor.

“Gunny.”

“I see it.”

Blood. Dried brown. Iron-based blood. Not specifically helpful.

On the right, they passed three metal doors, scaled-down versions of the one that led into the catacombs from the plateau.

Ten meters past the last door, a side corridor joined the main from the right. Torin brought them to a stop just before they reached it and took a look. It ended in a broken door at roughly the same distance the ship's engines had been from the first corner. Signs of destruction equaled signs of life. She'd long since grown immune to the irony.

Dangling from its top hinge, the broken metal door had been built to a basic rectangle proportionate to the H'san. Dim lights were on in the big room it opened into. If the lights were on, someone was home.

Shelves and broken shelves, scattered and broken content, provided a hundred hiding places.

Torin sent Mashona and Werst to the left; she went right with Ressk.

The lights in the corridor went out the moment they stepped over the threshold. Looking back, the dark appeared to be a solid sheet of black, as though the light in the room were somehow contained. Which was a bullshit optical illusion created by the contrast, but it wasn't hard to see why so many sentient species feared the dark. Imaginations were often a pain in the ass.

The shelves still standing held supplies. Food, bedding, soaps—she didn't need to be able to read the labels. Assuming certain species' similarities, they were making their way through the storeroom for a bunker.

When they reached the back wall unopposed, they found a door flat on the floor of a dark hall, darker rectangles at intervals on the left. The door was wood, the hall barely two meters wide—it looked like the low rent crypt district. Torin signaled for Ressk to keep watch and stepped into the hall. The lights stayed off, but there was enough spillover from the storeroom for her to see into the first of the darker rectangles. Not a crypt. A barracks. Her light picked out two rows of beds, ten per row, unmistakably shaped for the H'san. Someday she'd love to know what the spiral thing between the beds was for. Not today.