An Ancient Peace (34 page)

“Will it hurt the whole time?”

He remembered his Recon squad working their way through the woods. Their corporal had been hit with the backwash from a Primacy terraformer they'd taken out, turning the back of her head into seeping stubs. Almost a tenday later, the muscles of her neck had cramped with the effort she'd put into not moving her head. Occasionally, she'd whimper as though she couldn't stop the sound. “You've got the extra- strength sealant and that drug Ryder brought, so probably not.”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

Werst met the kid's pale gaze and opened his nostril ridges. “Absolutely.”

“Thanks.”

“War dead?”

Multiple H'san had been put into the sarcophagus in pieces. Torin could see shattered bone and torn tissue and an arc of teeth held together with gold wire. Desiccated organs had been tucked inside the cages of exposed ribs and laid within the cradles of gleaming pelvic bones. Her brain insisted on the faint smell of rot, refusing to acknowledge the cleansing of time.

“I hope so.”

As they moved to check again, three crypts down, she could hear the faint murmur of quiet conversations from the other pairs as they passed the open doorways.

“All we're doing is tracking the bad guys, and I still feel like we're being tested.” She stared down at another sarcophagus. “Find your way through a labyrinth of the dead to prove you're worthy to wield
our weapons. We're not dragging along an unconscious egomaniac and no one's shooting at us and the catacombs aren't likely to make a Susumi jump any time soon, but there's a faint whiff of Big Yellow about this setup.” Torin could feel Craig's gaze. When the silence extended, she turned to face him. “What?”

“What?” he repeated, brows rising. “Big Yellow was a colony. A fukking enormous colony of the gray aliens.”

“I know.” The sentient, polynumerous molecular polyhydroxide alcoholydes could combine into any shape, creating a hive mind. Twice now, enough of them had combined to become their own ship.

“I know you know.” Gaze never leaving her face, he dragged both hands back through his hair. “And now you think the gray aliens learned how to lay out a mind fuk from the H'san? From the route to the weapons cache?”

“You don't.” Not a question. He'd made it clear he didn't.

“You said yourself that the mercs don't have the whole map. Or all the notes. Or access to the entire interpretive dance.” When she raised a brow, he grinned and the stiff line of his shoulders relaxed. “The interpretive dance bit stuck. And then you said, given incomplete map, notes, and dance, this whole bullshit treasure hunt only looks like a test because the mercs don't know exactly where they're going or how to shut off the security system.”

Not quite what she said, but close enough for government work. “True.”

“Yet you don't sound convinced by your own argument.”

Torin took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing her thoughts to march in straight lines. The gray aliens had been around for a long time, long enough to engineer the interstellar war the Elder Races had been too evolved to fight. The Elder Races had trusted the Younger Races to fight, to kill, to die, but not trusted them with the coordinates of the H'san home system where the H'san, the Eldest of the Elder Races, had hidden the weapons they'd used to nearly destroy their civilization. What other information had the Younger Races not been trusted with? Had the H'san nearly destroyed other civilizations? Sure, the gray aliens had said the war had been a social experiment, but if the H'san could withhold information, why not the gray
aliens? She wiped a sleeve over the smudges Krai feet had left on the polished surface of the black stone sarcophagus. “There's no plastic here. Not in any of the crypts. Not in the eight kilometers of display cases we passed yesterday. Lots of stone. Various metals. Rubber. Ceramic. Glass. But nothing that even looks like plastic.” She shook her head at his lack of reaction. “You saw that, too.”

He shrugged. “It was a long walk and as much as I love your ass, after the first three or four kilometers, I took a look around. Hell, it could be they decided not to waste fossil fuels on shit that gets thrown out. We don't know.” Craig's expression changed as the last piece fell into place. “And that's your point, right? That we don't know what the fuk is going on.”

“Hard to run a successful mission with bad intell.”

He reached out and touched her cheek with the backs of two fingers. “I have faith in you.”

“How long do you figure they searched before they found the next exit?” Lounging against her pack, Binti gestured with a circle of dried apple. “I mean, we're moving pretty damned fast and yet . . .” She waved a hand toward the vanishing point of the corridor. “. . . we haven't covered a lot of territory, relatively speaking, and we're already past their base camp for this sector.”

“Easy enough to work out the approximate time once we find the next exit.” Ressk frowned down at his slate, refusing to take as absolute the loss of his scanner and his connection to the ship. As the satellites couldn't target him this far underground, Torin let him fuss. “Could have been a couple of tendays. But that's a couple here, a couple back by the mural, and at least one digging out the door. Six tendays and however long it took them to figure their way out of that first hall. Looks like the H'san don't check in very often.”

“Why would they think they had to? Anyone who might want the weapons has been told over and over that the H'san home system has been lost in time.” Binti folded her hands, widened her eyes, and sweetened her voice. “And the Elder Races don't do violence.”

“Sixty or seventy days?” Alamber's protest rose over Werst's muted snort of laughter. “Oh, yeah, I'd love to spend sixty or seventy days in
here talking in whispers, surrounded by a fuk of a lot of dead H'san, unable to use any sort of decent tech, eating flavorless sludge, and feeling like someone set my head on fire.”

“Guess they figured the reward was worth it.” Craig capped the tube of sealant and studied Alamber's damaged hair. It had stopped oozing, but that was the best Torin could say about it. “They must've been offered a bucket of lolly for the weapons.”

“From who?” Werst demanded. “No one with that kind of money would be willing to whisper at dead H'san.”

He wasn't wrong. The backer of this little junket would be waiting in comfort for the weapons to arrive, not be down here whispering in the dark.

“Not our problem.” Torin shrugged back into her pack, the
not yet anyway
silent and understood. “Let's go.”

Ten crypts further on, the mercs had begun to open only every fourth sarcophagus.

“They're broken into four teams,” Torin said as her team gathered in the corridor. “They're still checking the crypts, but they've decided what they're looking for isn't in with the dead.”

“And crypt number four, Gunny?”

“The heavy's still breaking the lid because they can.”

Binti snorted. “The heavy's a bit of an ass.”

“Good thing,” Craig pointed out. “It's a more obvious marker than finger- and toeprints and the occasional bit of trash.”

“Better thing, now we only have to check every fourth crypt . . .” Torin smiled. “. . . we can move faster.”

They'd eaten again before they found three sets of four crypts, untouched.

“All right.” Torin rolled her shoulders under her pack, the gravity beginning to wear. “We're looking for an exit somewhere between this crypt, which they stayed in long enough to urinate . . .”

“And my
jernine
didn't believe me when I told them about the prestige of working for the Justice Department,” Ressk murmured.

“. . . and that one.” Torin pointed at the crypt four crypts away from the last broken sarcophagus.

“No pit traps giving hints this time.” Perched on his pack, Werst
stretched his toes. “Unless they missed the sweet spot. Doesn't mean we will.”

“Yes, thank you, Werst. We're narrowing it down; let's . . .” Torin's slate chimed.

The lights went out.

“What if they left through the balcony?” Werst asked the next morning.

Everyone tilted their heads back. The balcony was four meters from the floor, the top of the railing—still made of H'san symbols—two meters from the vaulted ceiling. The angle made it impossible to get an accurate measurement on the width.

“So we waste some time searching for stairs?” Binti asked, tying her jacket across the top of her pack.

Werst secured his weapon strap. “Gunny.”

“Not on my own, not in this gravity.” She beckoned Craig over to the wall and bent, cupping her hands.

He stopped in front of her. “You're not going to boost me, right?”

“No.” Torin nodded at Werst. “We're going to throw him.”

The Krai weren't large, but their bones were dense.

“On three.”

Craig glanced over at her, past Werst's hand resting lightly on the top of his head, and grinned. Torin rolled her eyes. Their first mission for Justice, after a short farcical interval involving wreckage, a lever, and a bucket of soft fruit, they'd settled the “on three” or “three and go” question. “One. Two. Three.”

Werst grabbed the railing and swung up onto it, gripping the top rail with a hand and a foot. Instead of jumping down onto the balcony floor, he held his position. “It's not a balcony.” His voice drifted down, barely audible at the base of the wall. “It's a pit.”

“A pit?”

“Yeah, a big, long pit filled with polished bones; skulls along the back, bigger bones at the front, smaller ones filling in the middle. Top layer's H'san, don't know what's underneath. It's . . .” He paused. “It's a fuk of a lot of bones, Gunny, and I'd just as soon not check that it's H'san all the way down.”

The last H'san war had destroyed all life on this planet. Billions of
H'san dead and it seemed as though all of them had been gathered up and interred as the H'san worked out their collective guilt. Torin touched the side of her pack over Jamers' ashes. She understood their motivation.

“Hope the exit's not in with them,” Alamber sighed.

Torin ordered Werst down before responding to Alamber's comment. “It won't be. So far, they've been making it difficult to get to the weapons, not pointlessly messing with the people coming after them.”

“So far,” Alamber repeated, sucking air through his teeth as his hair jerked forward.

Craig stepped backed until he stood pressed against the opposite wall, squinting up at the balcony. “I wonder what the balustrades say?”

“Oops?” When everyone turned to look at Binti, she shrugged. “What? They repeat every seventeen symbols, so they're not saying much. I thought that was obvious,” she added, as Ressk banged his head against the wall.

They found nothing under the symbol that had been above the first door. They activated no pit traps, so Torin acknowledged it could've been worse. They looked for the symbol in each of the three crypts they were searching. When they found it, it led nowhere and appeared to have attracted no more attention from the mercs than any of the other symbols.

Ressk sagged against the sarcophagus in the second crypt and sighed, nostril ridges fluttering. “They picked a great time to learn to clean up after themselves. No drag marks suddenly cut off, no food wrapper caught halfway through the door, and no grubby footprints leading into a wall.”

“Still plenty of grubby prints.” Torin rubbed a couple off the glossy black stone. She paused. Frowned. Bent her head, left ear nearly on the stone. The overlap of hand prints along the edge nearest the door created a dulled border.

She tucked her fingers in under the narrow lip and lifted. The lid was a slab of solid stone that should have weighed hundreds of kilos. Craig, who had enough upper body muscle that his legs looked
disproportionately short, had struggled to lift the broken corners. With barely a fingertip grip, Torin shouldn't have been able to shift it.