An Ancient Peace (44 page)

“On the condition you take a break if you need one.” Where
need
meant,
I'm trusting you to tell me if you can't do what I need you to do,
and they both knew what she meant.

“I have to set this up so the appendage holds the grip and the shooter's grip on the appendage controls the weapon. We test it. We're out of here. The end is in sight. I can do this.”

“I know.”

The big weapon worked on the same principle as the smaller one, smashing the first target to pieces. The second test against one of the redead H'san proved their armor absorbed the energy of the small weapons, but the energy of the big one overwhelmed it, slamming the body against the wall and pinning it there.

“Except broken bones don't stop them.” Ressk broke the contact, and they watched the body crumple.

“Removed bones don't stop them,” Binti pointed out.

Nadayki jabbed at a wire-and-ceramic oval with the point of a knife. “Crush their head and you'll disrupt the programming.”

“We'll use it to sweep them aside, smash them into the walls, hope we crush a few heads, and open a path through the middle while we take out as many as we can with conventional weapons. BFG makes the run first, the rest of us haul ass after. At the far end, BFG turns and either orders a drop and fires, or fires with regular ordnance in support.” Torin gripped Nadayki's shoulder, ignoring his sudden intake of breath. “Do you have any idea what that oval thing is?”

“Uh . . .” He looked up at her, his eyes so dark they were almost free of lime-green. “No?”

“Then stop playing with it. If you blow your hands off, I'm not sure I like you well enough to keep you from bleeding out.”

“Yeah, well, I'd bleed out before I let you save me.” But his hair swept across the back of her hand as he set the oval on the counter.

“Shouldn't I be giving the orders, Gunnery Sergeant?”

Torin turned, met Major Sujuno's gaze and held it. The hate was a constant presence now; acknowledged, it could be ignored. “If you believed that, Major, you wouldn't have asked.”

“Rhetorical question.”

Torin's lip lifted off her teeth into a curve only another Human would have seen as a smile. “I don't think so.”

“Then perhaps you should think of how we'll need to bring more than one of these weapons into play.” The major stroked a finger down the upper barrel of the BFG. “Granted, we haven't food nor water enough to take down all the guardians one or two at a time, but we only require seven appendages more to arm each of us. With eight of these weapons, we can destroy all opposition.”

“We don't need to destroy the opposition, we need to get past it.” Torin had no intention of gifting either the major or her people with any more firepower than they already had. “And I've fought the only one-on-one I intend to.” She could feel bruises rising and, from the swelling on the side of her face, there was a good chance her cheekbone was cracked. Again. “Once, for a weapon we could use to get
out . . .” To get back to Craig. To get Werst to the Med-op. “. . . that was acceptable risk. Now we have a way out, it's a pointless risk.”

The major's eyes had darkened. “Not to me.”

“Nothing's stopping you from cutting the appendages off as many H'san as your heart desires.” Werst shrugged at the major's glare. “If you think you're badass enough, go to it.”

“Gunnery Sergeant . . .”

“He makes a valid point. What's more, you, none of you have to come with us.” The grave robbers trapped inside the grave they'd tried to rob would be poetic justice of a sort.

“You wouldn't leave us here to starve.” Major Sujuno sounded smugly certain of that.

“Neither would I take your choice to starve away.”

“
I'm
leaving with you,” Nadayki muttered, shifting closer, his arm pressing against her thigh.

Hands curled into fists, the major stared at Torin for a long moment. “It seems I
have
no choice. I leave with you, under your terms, or I don't leave at all. Or . . .” She shifted her weight, and her breath came noticeably quicker. “. . . I kill you, we kill you all, and take the weapon. We take all the weapons. And my name lives.”

“Try.”

The major blinked. “What?”

“Try to kill me.” Making it personal would make her life so much easier. She'd survived years of people trying to kill her; not always, but often enough by killing them instead. A war between interstellar civilizations had spent a significant amount of time being about mud and blood, and she'd been covered in both a little too often. Torin had no idea how much of that showed on her face, but she wasn't trying to hide it.

Major Sujuno took a step back. “Lieutenant!”

“Nothing to do with me, Major.” Lieutenant Verr stepped back farther and faster. “It's not even that Gunnery Sergeant Kerr took down a dead H'san in single combat, it's that she even thought of doing it in the first place.”

“Armed dead H'san,” Wen called from beside Dion's pallet.

“Exactly, an armed dead H'san. Ignoring, for the moment, that she
won . . . the whole idea was fukking nuts. Plus, her people are ex-infantry, they're all carrying, and our KCs are where we left them after the ammo check. Now . . .” Verr folded her arms, the poster child for an immovable object. “. . . I want to get paid for this job as much as you do, and I don't want to find out what the Justice Department considers a suitable rehabilitation for trespass and desecration, whatever the rest of the charges were . . . although, not the murder; we had nothing to do with that. We thought the Katrien had left. How did she die?”

“Broken neck,” Torin told her, a little confused by Verr's reaction to her taking down the H'san. It hadn't been that hard. Living targets, targets that could react, feel pain, that had lives to lose were much harder.

Hair completely motionless, the major flipped her gaze between them. “That's not . . .”

Verr ignored her. “Toporov, then. Broadbent was strong enough, but he was uncooked at the core—soft—and McKinnon was an engineer. I doubt she either could or would. But my point is that even more than not wanting to deal with Justice, I don't want me and mine to die right here and right now, and I don't want to starve to death trapped in the bottom of this fukking tomb. And trust me, Major, me and Wen, we'll starve to death last. So we're going to let Gunnery Sergeant Kerr get us out of here, because, surprise, the vids were right, that's what she's good at, and maybe we'll reassess after and try shooting them all in the back and maybe we won't, but we won't die—fast or slow—because you personally think it's a good idea.”

“I am in command of this expedition, Lieutenant!”

“Expedition's over, Major. It was a good run, but it ended when we were trapped by zombie H'san.” Verr nodded toward Torin. “She's been in charge since she got here.”

Major Sujuno stood for a moment, pinned between them, then she wrapped herself in the neutral Marine officer personae she'd worn before allowing the hate to rise to the surface. Everyone's gaze on her, she walked to her weapon and pointedly picked it up, hanging the strap over her shoulder. “We'll leave at your discretion, Gunnery Sergeant.”

As though she expected Torin to believe it would be that easy.

“Shoot us all in the back?” Torin asked Verr.

Who shrugged. “Just a thought. I doubt it would work.”

“Gunny!”

Torin tightened her hold on Nadayki's shoulder for a heartbeat, his pulse having finally steadied under her fingers, then, ignoring the major entirely, crossed to where Werst crouched by Dion's pallet. The scholar hadn't been conscious since Torin's fight. As the red lines of the infection had spread out onto his chest and up into his throat, it had become obvious he wouldn't make it back to Med-op in time.

Werst glanced up at her, nostril ridges wide. “He opened his eyes, said, I told you so, and died.”

“His last words were I told you so?”

“He went the way he would've wanted to,” Wen said from the other side of the body. “Smug and sanctimonious to the end.” He sounded amused, but sincere.

“Do we take him out?” Werst asked, nodding at Torin's belt.

An NCO carried a minimum of three things into a firefight. A weapon. Ammunition. And a promise that if it was up to them, no one would be left behind.

Torin considered Dion. It would be hypocritical to say it wasn't her choice. They couldn't get to Private Timin di'Geirah, whose body rotted at the bottom of the pit trap, and they couldn't get to enough of Corporal Katherine McKinnon shoved into a sarcophagus with the H'san. Parts of the crushed and dismembered Corporal Broadbent waited for her to get a DNA sample and the guardians had taken the bodies of Sergeant Yasha Toporov and Corporal Srey Keo. But Jamers was in Torin's pack and they had Dion.

“We take him out.”

To her surprise, Ressk took Wen's place, helping Werst lay Dion out flat. A glance at the counter showed Nadayki working on the BFG, the major watching, arms folded—a nontypical position for a di'Taykan. Mashona watched the major, hands crossed on top of her KC—an entirely typical position for Mashona.

Ressk's nostril ridges fluttered as he sealed the upper edge of the
bag. “They should've taken the wound before the infection got into his blood.”

Torin assumed “they” referred to Lieutenant Verr and Wen, who had curled up together on one of the H'san . . . chairs. She waited until she held Dion's cylinder in her hand, the curves cool against her palm, before saying, “Werst.”

“Little late, Gunny.” He slipped his arm out of the sling. Binti had cut his blood-soaked sleeve off above the elbow so she could clearly see the skin around the wound had turned a darker green and one dark line ran up to disappear under the edge of the cut. “It'd be more than a divot at this point.”

His temperature had gone up a full degree. Pushing the fabric back, she noted the infection ended a centimeter past his elbow. “We've got an ax. We can take the arm off.”

Ressk jerked as though he felt the blow.

Werst flexed his fingers, and Torin watched the skin ride over the muscles of his forearm. “I still need both hands to help get us out of here and, after that, it's less than three days back to the ship now we know where we're going. Less than two if we hustle. Plenty of time.”

Torin drew a line on Werst's sleeve about four centimeters from his shoulder. “It gets to here, we reassess.”

Werst nodded agreement. Ressk shook his head.

“All right, let's get this show on the road.” As Torin led them back to the counter and the BFG, she heard Werst say, “Then Colonel Hurrs will just have to approve a tank so I can regrow the arm.”

“Without giving this whole shit-storm away?” Ressk growled.

“Sure. He's head of Intell. That makes him a
cark
sucker by default.”

Nadayki had been adjusting the sensitivity of the contact point. “We're squeezing a dead H'san to fire this, and, while I might normally make a comment about that, just—no. Since squeezing a dead H'san isn't exactly a quantitative measurement of force, and again, no comments, I figured it needed to be cranked up a bit, so I slaved my slate in and tweaked the code.”

Torin sneezed. “What can I smell?”

“Besides, dead H'san?” He held up a twisted and blackened piece
of almost familiar tech. “That would be my slate. Bit of unexpected blowback, ancient alien tech and all.” Patting the uppermost barrel, he dipped his head and smiled almost shyly at her. “It's more sensitive to pressure than it was.”

“Good work.”

His hair flipped up and he snorted. “Of course it is.”

But Torin had seen both his surprise and his pleasure and wondered what the hell the universe was doing sending her another damaged di'Taykan.

“You can't not, can you, Gunny?” Binti asked softly.

“Excellent question. All right, people.” She raised her voice to a non-ignorable volume. “We are leaving. Get your packs, let's go.”

“Leave your packs.” Major Sujuno confined her gaze to the pair of Krai on the chair. “We'll come back for them after we destroy the guardians, when we come back for the weapons.”

Lieutenant Verr and Wen exchanged a look and Torin hid a reluctant smile at how clearly they were wondering if the major had been paying attention. Finally, Wen shrugged. “I don't actually want to fight in my pack.”

“No one's making you,” Torin told him. “But we're not coming back for it.”

“Fuk that shit.” Both Wen and his bonded went for their packs.

“So . . .” Werst nodded at the FBG. “Who gets to squeeze a dead H'san?”

“Sounds so attractive when you put it that way. What?” Binti demanded, suddenly aware Werst had switched his attention to her. “Oh, no.” She thumped her chest. “Sniper. Distance and accuracy, that's what I'm about. You don't want to waste that on blunt force trauma. You carry it.”

“I'm a little close to the ground for the H'san.”

“Don't look at me.” Nadayki patted the KC he'd hung around his neck. “I'm good to go.”

Torin only barely stopped herself from snatching it away from him. “You gave a civilian a weapon, Major?”

“I plan on selling a civilian a whole lot of weapons, Gunnery Sergeant, but in this instance, Nadayki gave himself a weapon when
Corporal McKinnon no longer needed hers. And let's stop playing around, your
alsLan
's right, the Krai are too low to the ground to do anything but break legs and we both know you have no intention of permitting me an advantage.”

“You're right. We don't have time for this.”
Craig must be going insane
. Good news, he hadn't shown up yet, so he was sticking to the schedule they'd evolved over the last year. She swung her KC across her back and picked up the BFG. The piece of dead H'san felt like fuzzy jerky laced through with wire. She'd handled pieces of bodies that had felt a lot worse.