An Ancient Peace (41 page)

“Who's to say it would be a bad order, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“Have you given any thought to what will happen if you get these weapons out of here?”

Again, emotions flickered across the major's face too quickly for Torin to read, but all she said was, “Yes.”

Torin found herself wondering exactly what question the major had been answering.

“Hey, Gunny?” Binti emerged from the cache with the ax—or reasonable facsimile—and headed over to where the Krai were gathered around the body. “I don't think that biscuit warmer they showed us is a biscuit warmer, not unless they went to war over cold baked goods. There's a couple dozen more of them in a case by Nadayki's science project.”

“If you're referring to one of the items the Katrien removed,” the major said, while Torin was still figuring out how to respond, “I assure you it was taken from a sarcophagus.”

“I know what I saw, Major. Nadayki saw it, too. They were either
tucking weapons in with the dead or biscuit warmers in with the weapons.”

“I very much dislike not knowing what's going on,” Major Sujuno said softly.

“The H'san like cheese.” When that finally turned the major around to face her, Torin shrugged, “It's one thing we know for sure.”

Her hair flipped up, just once, as she laughed. Reluctantly. “It might be the
only
thing we know for sure.”

Torin understood the reluctance. She didn't find bad intell particularly funny.

Lieutenant Verr turned out to have the most ax experience of the four Krai, clipping the ribs neatly off the body, then taking a final swing to detach the narrow curve of sternum.

Bone cracked.

Ressk's nostril ridges flared, then slammed shut as he threw himself backward.

“Everyone down!” Torin dropped, pulling Major Sujuno to the floor with her.

The H'san exploded.

“Power source,” Ressk shouted, as he lifted his head.

As explosions in an enclosed space went, it could've been worse. Torin's ears were ringing, but she could still hear. She got to her feet and habit held out her hand to help the major up. “Everyone all right?”

“Gunny!” It was Ressk's cry, but Werst's arm with a piece of bone protruding through a bloodstained sleeve. Hand around his bonded's wrist, Ressk stared wide-eyed across the room at Dion.

The major sighed. “He's Human. They're . . .”

Torin raised a brow.

“. . . weirdly delicate. You'll be fine.”

She didn't know that. She couldn't know that. But Sujuno's offhand, superior dismissal of the possibility that infection would eat Werst away from the inside was oddly comforting. That Krai bone and teeth were among the toughest substances in known space made little difference to bacteria. Although bacteria that affected Human systems
might not affect them. Werst didn't look convinced, but Ressk looked less like he wanted to tear Verr limb from limb.

“If he dies, I will devour you!”

Not a lot less, but less. “Let's stop any chance of him dying before it starts.” Historically, the Krai had a simple solution to potential infection: they bit the wounded area out. Torin had acquired firsthand experience of how effective it was just after she made corporal, when her Recon unit had been sent to scout a Primacy base on an OutSector planet and had gotten pinned down. She'd kept the divot in her thigh until she was tanked after Crucible to regrow her jaw. Torin closed her fingers over Werst's shoulder. “Ressk, if you could do the honors.”

“Happy to, Gunny.”

“No.” Werst pulled free of her touch as he pulled the shard from his arm. He tossed it aside and clamped his palm down on the wound as blood darkened his sleeve. “It's bone-deep,
churick
.”

Ressk shook his head. Torin wasn't sure what he was denying.

“If you manage to get it all,” Werst continued, red seeping between his fingers. “I won't be able to use the arm. If the major's right about the number of guardians, I'm going to need to use the arm.”

He wasn't wrong.

Ressk grabbed his wrist. “We need to take the whole arm off, then.” He jerked his head back and forth, back and forth, looking, Torin assumed, for the ax.

“Hey.” Werst's voice pulled Ressk's attention. “Did you miss where I said I needed to use the arm? We don't know it's infected. The major's right; just because it can take down a Human doesn't mean anything now that it's trying for a Krai.”

“If you die . . .”

“We're all going to die sooner or later.”

“Later.”

“All right.” He tugged and Ressk closed the distance between them.

Torin gave them a moment, forehead to forehead, but only a moment. “Ressk, will examining a power source help us get the hell out of here?”

“If I can figure out how to shut the guardians off . . .”

“Let his arm bleed for a while,” Torin told Binti, who'd snapped the
aid kit off her belt. Werst's cuff acknowledged a foreign substance in his blood, but wasn't able to identify it. So far, no symptoms. “Clean it out with water, don't seal it.”

“I know the drill,” Werst growled.

Recon occasionally had to improvise out on their own.

“Fine, doctor yourself. The rest of you, let's go get another H'san.”

“Good thing we have spares,” the major said, falling into step beside her.

Torin closed her teeth on the automatic
yes, sir.
It was the first one she'd had to stop.

“It's a hatch. It has two functions: it opens, it closes. Opened. Closed. All you have to do is work with that.”

“It's a locked hatch.”

“And locks have a single function.”

“It's a very old lock designed a very long time ago by a species we apparently know jackshit about.”

“Single function,” Craig repeated. “How hard can it be?”

“Fuk you.”

“Maybe if you get the hatch unlocked.” He laughed when Alamber flipped him off. He had no idea what they were going to do if they got into the ship, but the stairs from the blast bay had ended at the ten-meter–square landing outside the hatch. Given the size of the landing, they were both confident there was another entrance, but neither of them could find it. Rather than go back down to the bay and stand around with their thumbs up their asses discussing how they couldn't get out of the bay, they'd decided to try and break into the ship. Turned out that Alamber's criminal career, pre–Big Bill, had included a certain number of hacked hatches.

“It's harder on a station; you have to get through the station security as well. Not all stations, of course,” he continued twisting the upper half of his body 45 degrees and peering in behind the dangling faceplate. “Smaller stations, rougher sectors, security's shit. The contents are usually shit, too. These things tend to balance out. You're lucky you're with me; Ressk's useless at hardware.”

“And yet, the hatch is still closed.”

“At least we know the dead H'san can't get in here.”

“The dead H'san probably know where the door is.”

“They don't know anything they haven't been programmed with.”

“If it was me, I'd program in schematics. Full blueprints.”

“Good point. Shit.” Alamber's elbows jerked, but his hands remained buried in the guts of the hatch controls. “Grab that long skinny tool with the copper head and the insulated grip and poke this.”

Craig picked the tool in question off the kit spread out on top of Alamber's pack. He leaned over Alamber's shoulder and peered into the mess. “Poke what?”

In turn, Alamber leaned some of his weight against Craig's hip. “You see that shiny blue oval? Just back of my thumb?”

There were a lot of shiny blue ovals. He moved the tool. “This?”

“No!” Craig felt Alamber flinch. “My other thumb!”

“This?”

“The oval next to it. While I wish I was saying this under other circumstances, give it a good hard poke.”

The power discharge blew Craig's fingers off the grip. The tool clanged against the floor as he staggered back, eyes watering and the world reduced to a flickering pattern of bright blue dots. Hands cupped over his eyes, he blinked until his vision cleared. He'd done his own repairs on the
Promise
for years; that was not his first discharge. And he'd rephrase if he mentioned it to Alamber.

“You okay?”

He lowered his hands. Alamber's question had been muffled because he had his fingers in his mouth. “Burns?”

“Yeah, but my head hurts so much, I can't really feel it.”

“Did I poke the wrong oval?”

Alamber grinned. “No, you did it exactly right.” Fingers trailing a gossamer line of spit behind them, he reached out and popped the hatch. “It's easier when you don't have to worry about relocking it. Ever again.”

The interior of the ship was . . .

“Pink.” He wondered how the H'san saw it.

“It's more cheerful than gray.”

“It's pinker than gray,” Craig muttered climbing the ladder to the upper level. The climb took a little concentration, given that the access had been designed for the H'san, who bent in non-bipedal ways. There was a wide port across the front of the control room—because the H'san for all their other strangeness were a biocular species who responded to visual stimulus. There were obvious, if not familiar, control panels—because the H'san were among the founders of the Confederation and their designs remained popular. They also lasted for-fukking-ever, which might be why it looked like they hadn't changed much in millennia.

In front of the panel were angles and curves and protuberances that, given their positions, had to be chairs no bipedal species could possibly be comfortable sitting on.

One finger back in his mouth, Alamber studied them appraisingly.

“Don't even.”

He shrugged and turned his attention to the main panel. “You think we could get this thing going?”

“We can't close the hatch.”

“We can't
lock
the hatch,” Alamber corrected. “We've already closed it. And I'm sure we could seal it if we needed to.”

“Why would we need to?”

“Boss is in trouble; bringing an operational shuttle into the game will change the rules.”

“We don't know the game.”

“Or the rules. But that's why you wanted to break in here, isn't it?”

He ran both hands back through his hair. “Alien ship. Alien systems.”

“You said you had a friend with a H'san control panel, I'm brilliant, and physics remains a constant.”

The control panel in question had been scrubbed of all software and the hardware retrofitted into a salvage ship. This was a H'san control panel running a H'san system. A millennium-old H'san system. But Torin was in trouble, and it
was
why he'd wanted to break in.

He leaned carefully against the front of one of the chairs. “Did I ever tell you about how a Primacy bug flew a completely alien shuttle up to the
Promise
, ferrying Presit and me down to the prison where we blew the lid off the whole polynumerous plastic gray alien plan?”

“Yeah.” Alamber sat a little less carefully. “Every time we watch those recordings.”

“Well, it's a good story.” There were dials, actual dials, on the control board. “Of course, it turned out the ship was made of the little gray aliens, so maybe the bug didn't fly it so much as it had an agenda and flew itself.”

“Any chance this ship is made of little gray aliens?”

“Fuk, I hope not. Torin needs to move on.”

“What about you?”

“I need Torin to move on.”

“She never talks about them.”

“She discusses them with Dr. Ito.” Craig needed to find a way to connect with the ship's sysop. If it had one. “I don't know how much discussion happens, but I know she hates them. The aliens, not the sessions with Dr. Ito.”

“She hates those, too.”

“She says she does.” He grinned at Alamber's expression. Torin had admitted to him, in the dark, when they were touching everywhere they could be and he could feel her heartbeat strong and steady under his palm, that Dr. Ito might actually be helping to clarify a few things.
Might actually be
was Torin-speak for
yeah, surprised me, too.
The grin slipped as he remembered. “She believed in something. Not in war or territorialism or whatever the fuk the Confederation thought they were fighting for. She believed in getting the job done and getting her people home alive, and it turned out not so much that she believed in a lie, but that it was a job that never needed doing.”

“She still gets her people out alive, though.” Slender fingers touched the coiled mass of his hair. “Every time.”

“So far.”

Alamber frowned at the control panel. “Dials?”