An Ancient Peace (11 page)

She shrugged; it wasn't a sound they'd been conditioned to, there weren't a lot of angry kids on a battlefield. Across the cabin, Binti pulled her jacket over her head. “He's tired, that's all.” A bit of emerald fluff flattened against the screen over the air purifiers. “And I think the yellow-and-blue one plucked a feather.”

The tether dropped them on a constructed island in an equatorial sea. A boat to take them to a transport station on the closest continent, visible as a green-blue smudge against the horizon, had been covered in the drop ticket.

When the boat rose out of the water on what looked like skis, Torin tightened her grip on the railing.

“They're called hydrofoils. They lessen friction and allow the boat to move faster while using less fuel.”

Torin turned to Ressk, his face lifted into the wind, eyes and nostril ridges slitted nearly shut.

“What?” he asked. “You think we only have trees on Harask, Gunny? We have oceans. Four of them. And rivers. And lakes.”

She knew that.

“Look, Yeen!” Binti pointed at long, lithe shapes moving parallel to the ship just under the surface of the water, rounded curves and translucent flukes rising and falling amidst the waves.

Squinting, trying to pick out a definitive feature, Torin decided to take Binti's word on the species. Three members of the Confederation were water breathers, but the Primacy had never attacked a wet world, so the Corps had never deployed to one and Paradise had been rejected after offering her seas for colonies. Before Colonel Hurrs, Torin had believed the water breathers had rejected Paradise because her seas had been too cold or too salty or too warm or not salty enough. Now, she suspected it had more to do with the 2.8 billion Human inhabitants.

“I bet they let the Yeen land in a shuttle,” Craig muttered.

“Or they filled the tether with water. It's waterproof,” Alamber added.

“Do I want to know how you know that?”

“If you can't figure it out, I have serious concerns about your ability to extrapolate from known data.” He laughed when Craig flipped him off. “I checked before we docked.” The wind moved Alamber's ribbons in long sinuous arcs his hair tried to copy. “There's always seats on the freight tether.”

“I don't like being dependent on someone else's schedule.”

“What's the difference between that and taking the shuttle to and from Paradise?” Torin wondered.

He braced his forearms on the railing. “We weren't working on Paradise.”

Although they
were
working here on Abalae, there should be nothing in this part of the job that would require them to leave suddenly, on their own schedule. Of course,
should
was one of those words that got people killed, Torin acknowledged, watching a huge white sea bird dip down to touch the crest of a wave.

A spear thrust up out of the water and red bloomed against the white. The bird hit the water, floated for a moment on the surface, and then abruptly disappeared.

“Seriously?” Alamber snorted. “You know their interstellar craft use an independently developed version of the Susumi drive, right? They can bend space and they hunt with a spear. That's just wrong.”

“That was a sport hunter, nothing to do with tech level. Or don't your people fish?” Werst asked when Alamber made a disgusted noise.

“Kill for fun?” His eyes were so light Torin wondered if he could see, and his hair flattened so tightly against his head she could see the curve of his skull. “That's barbaric!”

“You know, for an ex-criminal . . .” Torin moved away from the railing and tucked him into the circle of her arms. “. . . you have a number of interesting blind spots.”

“I never killed anyone,” he protested, the fine tremors shaking his body beginning to ease with physical contact. “And even Big Bill didn't kill for fun.”

Torin had her doubts about that, but decided to keep them to herself.

“You know what would make me feel better?” he asked after a few minutes.

“Yes.” She shifted Alamber into Craig's arms and checked his masker. “But Binti's gone to find food, so you'll have to settle for that.”

The transport station had been built over the end of the dock, a sturdy structure covered in photovoltaic panels, large enough for passengers to disembark inside. While the station could have easily been automated, a dozen Trun in transport uniforms stopped working and watched as they
crossed from the landing to the ticket counter. At a glance from Torin, Alamber peeled off and advanced toward them, smiling his most distracting smile, one hand at the pheromone masker at his throat.

“Lower it one mark only,”
she'd told him.
“We have no idea how the Trun will react . . .”
All mammals reacted. “. . .
and we only want them happy enough to answer a few questions.”

“Maybe that's all you want,”
he'd sighed.

“Six seats.” Craig touched his slate to the counter and two fingers to the plastic casing around the edge of the screen. “Commerce Three, Section Eighteen.”

The Trun who ran the transaction slid six pieces of actual paper across the counter, half turned, and murmured something that sounded distinctly uncomplimentary to zir companion. When zi looked back, Torin met zir eyes. And smiled.

Zir eyes widened. “Details . . .” Zi swallowed and tried again. “Details have been sent to your slates, Visitor.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure.” Zir tail wound around the other Trun's. “I mean, you're welcome, Visitor.”

“Letting them know they can't trash talk Humans?” Craig asked as they walked away.

“Letting them know they can't trash talk us,” Torin snorted. “Humanity's on its own.”

Transport turned out to be a maglev train, much like the ones on the stations and the larger of the Navy's destroyers. The trains, like the tether, were set up predominately to carry freight, the four-link trains tagged Learning, Discovery, Commerce, and Nature, looking distinctly second class beside the sleek metal platforms being loaded with crates. Arguing about their baggage, the Niln climbed into Learning, the Rakva family boarded Nature. The team had Commerce to themselves.

The link's seats had been designed for tails, but were comfortable enough for those species without. Everything was worn, rubbed smooth by use. In spite of the lingering scent of powerful cleansers, the interior had the grubby patina of a link too long in service. Torin touched one of the faded red plastic seats that made up a row of four
along one outside wall before she sat, her back to the window, her reflection in the window across the car.

“They really don't like anything in the air, do they?” Craig touched and sat on her right.

“Ground transport allows greater control of visitors.” She touched the seat to her left and silently acknowledged that touching every seat would border on obsessive. “We're confined, at their discretion, to a five-by-three–meter compartment.”

“And that doesn't sound at all ominous,” Werst muttered as he and Ressk sat in the two seats at the end of their row facing the direction of travel.

Binti took a seat across the aisle. “At least we're not heading into a war zone.”

Torin had led them to the middle of the car so they couldn't be cornered, movement preferable even over the possibility of being surrounded. Without a heavy gunner, it was easier to fight through flesh than a solid wall. Not that they'd have to.

“Did I mention those tails are fully prehensile?” Alamber reached up and pressed his palms flat against the ceiling. The Trun, while not as short as the Krai, weren't tall. “I am
really
looking forward to a test drive. What?” he demanded when Werst snorted. “Plenty of people spill secrets after sex.”

“He has a point.” Ressk admitted. “You told him about our . . .”

Werst's nostril ridges flared. “That was
not
a secret.”

None of Torin's business. “Have the workers at the terminal seen any . . .”

“Of us?” Alamber's head moved one way, his hair moved another. “No. Looks more and more like they spent the lolly to take another tether.”

“Lolly?” Torin asked.

Alamber nodded at Craig. “He says it.”

“And you're working on a new dialect?”

“Might come in handy.”

Torin couldn't argue with that.

As a bland, species-nonspecific voice began listing the behavior expected while the train was in motion, Binti shook her head. “Low
rent tether aside, this is not the rough and ready free trade sort of place you'd expect grave . . . antique hunters to resupply at.”

“Maybe that's why they came.” Torin frowned up at an ad for a spa on its second loop through a dozen static-filled images. “No chance of being caught up in a sweep by the Wardens. Or maybe this is rough and ready for the Core worlds. How would we know?”

At almost five hundred kilometers an hour . . .

“This train is moving faster than the tether.” Ressk glanced up from his slate. “Does no one else find that strange?”

. . . the windows were opaque unless specifically touched transparent. Werst tapped the glass clear, dark, clear, dark, clear, dark until Torin reached over and grabbed his wrist.

“Stop that, or I'll puke in your lap.”

Krai didn't get motion sick. Or space sick. Or, apparently flickering images going by too fast to really focus on, sick. Neither did gunnery sergeants, but Torin wasn't willing to completely discount the possibility.

At the first station, they were instructed to remain seated while five people entered the link. Two Trun. Three Katrien. The Katrien Torin saw OutSector were plush, their fur thick and dark with silver tips, their hands and feet glossy black. These three had sleeker fur without the silver, their hands and feet a deep brown, the darker masks around their eyes and muzzle less distinctive. The glasses protecting their sensitive eyes from the light weren't mirrored but after a moment's thought Torin realized that might be one of Presit's affectations rather than a species imperative. The Katrien reporter liked to make an impression. All three fell silent as they realized who they were about to share the link with, then turning their backs, began talking at once, their voices rising quickly into the cat fight range. The Trun, however, huddled silently at the far left of the link, tails entwined.

Binti flicked her eyes in their direction. Torin shook her head, willing to bet, in spite of unfamiliar physiognomy, the Trun looked wary, not threatening.

At the next stop, two adults and a juvenile Trun stepped on at the far right end of the link, looked around, and, hair up and ears flat, froze in place. They jerked as the doors shut and finally sat as the train
started to move. Before the train was fully out of the station, the youngster knelt on the seat and stared over the back. When Torin smiled, without showing teeth, zir eyes widened but before any further contact could be made, a tail dragged zir down into the seat.

The next stop was close enough the train hadn't time to reach full speed and the car was three quarters full when they pulled away. They were still the only members of the Younger Races present and the seats around them remained empty.

“Are you a Marine?”

Torin looked up from her slate. She'd been watching the youngster approach, wondering how far zi'd make it before the adults noticed zi was gone. “I was.”

“Was it scary?”

“Sometimes.”

“Oh.” Holding zir tail in one hand, zi stroked the orange tip with the other. “My kada says there wasn't no reason for there to be a war.”

“There wasn't.”

Zi cocked zir head, golden eyes wide. “Then why did you go and fight?”

“We thought there was a reason.”

“Were you wrong?”

Sliding through the spectrum and then fading back into gray, the alien mass rose in the middle, rounded the crest, extruded two short arms, and created a vaguely bipedal shape. It turned its minimal face toward the camera and blinked gray on gray eyes. “It takes time to collect sufficient data on new species. Creating extreme situations erases all but essential behaviors and shortens the duration of the study.”