An Ancient Peace (8 page)

“Probably?” He leaned in to catch Alamber's gaze. “This is more you.”

“I was working a program to crack the buoys for Big Bill, but I needed a working buoy to finish.” He glanced around the table and added, “You have to race the security resets.” When Ressk snorted, his hair flattened. “I was simplifying for my audience.”

“And your audience appreciates it,” Binti told him. “How far did you get?”

“I told you.” His shoulders began to rise. “I needed a buoy to finish. I didn't have one.”

Torin could read Big Bill's response in the lines of Alamber's body.
Worthless
had probably been the kindest word used. She caught Craig's eye, and the two of them had a silent conversation about how unfortunate it was that Justice had the former crime lord tucked away out of reach.

“Got it with you?” When Alamber nodded, Ressk pushed his slate over. “Share up.”

“Because you're just that good?”

Ressk showed a bit of teeth. “No complaints so far.”

“Three more days in Susumi to work it out, gentlemen. Will that be long enough or should we have Craig jump us in and out of the Core a few more times?” Torin smiled as they turned identical expressions of pique on her, equally annoyed by her lack of faith in their combined abilities.

“In three days we'll own those buoys,” Alamber declared.

“In three days,” Ressk snorted, “the horse might talk.”

Alamber's eyes darkened so quickly he had to catch hold of the table as he turned. “Are you mocking me,
trin
?”

“It's an oldEarth saying he got off a guy we used to serve with,” Binti explained, wrapping a hand around Alamber's forearm, loose enough he could pull away easily if he wanted to, her thumb stroking small circles on the soft inner skin of his wrist. “Guy named Hollice. He had a million of them. Half of them made no sense and the other half were too stupid to repeat.”

Sergeant Adrian Hollice had died with the rest of the Sh'quo Company on ST7/45T2. His remains, and the remains of most of a ground expeditionary force had been fused permanently into the planet's surface by a Primacy weapon. The toes of Ressk's right foot drummed against the table until Werst, who'd been Recon with Bravo Company—also lost in the glass—reached out and gripped the back of his neck. Teeth gritted against the sudden spill of hot liquid over her hand, Torin set her coffee carefully down on the table. Hollice had been in her squad when she was a sergeant and then, when she made staff sergeant, her platoon. She'd fast tracked him for his SLC, but had been tanked, regrowing her jaw, when he got his third chevron.

“Torin?” Tipping his chair back, Craig snagged a damp cloth from the galley's half meter of counter.

“It's okay.” She pulled the cloth out of his grip before he could clean either the table or her. “Sometimes,” she said, eyes locked on the skim of moisture trailing behind the cloth, “talking to Hollice was like talking to a Katrien. It was definitely Federate and, given the context, you thought you knew what he was saying, but I never did find out what a rubber stamp was.”

“Or how shit got on the stick,” Ressk added.

As she listened to the other two surviving members of Sh'quo Company dig out what they remembered from Hollice's love of oldEarth idioms, Torin realized she was smiling. She tossed the cloth over her shoulder into the tiny sink.

“Two points!” Binti and Ressk called together, slapping palms over the table.

“No idea,” Torin admitted when Craig's brows rose. “Hollice used to yell it. He yelled it once when the artillery actually nailed the coordinates we called in.”

Binti took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I heard he aced his sergeant's exam.”

“Yeah.” Ressk raised his pouch of
sah
. “I heard that, too.”

Alamber turned from rummaging through one of the upper cupboards. “My
yasha
told me that when you remember someone they never really die.”

“Yeah?” Werst snorted. “My
jernil
said my
jernine
repeated on her for days.”

“Touching.” Binti beckoned Alamber over and plunged a hand into the bag of cookies he'd found. “
My
grandmother never talked about eating dead people because in her house, that would have been a fukking creepy dinner table conversation.”

“Yeah, well I find it shonky that the H'san bury their dead with biscuit warmers,” Craig said. “Why waste gear on the dead that the living can use?”

Ressk's nostril ridges opened and shut. “Like a biscuit warmer and enough weapons to rebang the big one?”

“Given how long it's taking the grave robbers to find the weapons, seems the H'san object to coordinates in general,” Alamber pointed out, reclaiming the bag, the cookies, and his seat.

Werst rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Well, when we find the planet, it won't be hard to find the only living people on it.” With both hands wrapped around his
sah
, he grabbed the bag with a foot.

“Ablin gon savit!”
Alamber grabbed it back. “How many times do I have to tell you, no feet in the communal food! I don't care what they let you do in the Marines!”

“He was Recon,” Binti sighed, as though that explained everything.

“Then he can go find the planet.” Alamber held the bag over his head. “We'll find a
mirin
with deep baths and large beds and wait.”

Torin figured Werst was about half a second away from climbing the much taller di'Taykan like a tree—which was exactly what Alamber wanted. She caught Alamber's gaze and he sighed, set the bag on the table, reached into it, and, their eyes still locked, licked the icing out from between two wafers. Torin maintained zero reaction until Alamber looked away, his hair flattening, as he ate the damned cookie.

“Look, most people are shit at keeping secrets.” She finished the dregs of her coffee. “The odds are in our favor that the grave robber who's been selling the artifacts will be
most people
. Odds are higher they're not using more than the four Susumi equations we have evidence of. Every new jump's a chance to drop a decimal and die horribly, so why risk it? Alamber's right, it's taking them time to find the weapons; they'll be picking up supplies for the dig on those jumps, not just selling grave goods. The dealers won't be our only source.”

“Smart people would want to spread the jumps out as much as possible,” Craig protested. “Keep from establishing a pattern.”

“Smart people,” Werst snorted, spraying crumbs, “wouldn't have sent up flares by selling the artifacts. These are not smart people.”

“Major Sujuno?”

She looked up from entering the day's notes into her slate. H'san security had wiped out all conductivity, reducing them to isolated programming, no scanners of any kind, no coms. Her jaw unit hadn't been this silent since she'd gone home on leave and . . . Her slate creaked as her grip tightened, and she forced her hand to relax. Took a deep breath, banished the memories, and beckoned Toporov into the crypt. He moved quickly for such a large man, but not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of red dust from following him through the overlap in the clear plastic sheeting.

Half a meter from the enormous stone sarcophagus she was using as a standing desk, he fell into a reasonable approximation of at ease—learned behaviors made it easier to maintain order, so from the beginning she'd
run the dig as close to a military maneuver as she could stomach. “Dion's found the next symbol.”

“Is he certain, Sergeant? Because I seem to recall that the mark he found the day before yesterday went absolutely nowhere.” Dion's information, the information he'd pulled from an ancient crystal allegedly found discarded in the Central Library's trash, was more a suggestion than an actual map. The degenerating, millennia-old memories of the last H'san who'd seen the weapons cache had contained nothing as useful as directions, but rather a blank verse ode to symbols scratched throughout a city of the dead. Dion, who had an annoying habit of randomly announcing he was an expert in ancient H'san, remained convinced the symbols marked the route to the weapons. He'd been right about the location of the planet as well as about the planetary security, so Sujuno was giving him the benefit of the doubt on the symbols. She didn't know if Dion had found their backer or if his bragging had led their backer to him. Nor did she care. The only thing that mattered was that her payment, upon delivery of the weapons, would be enough to register a progenitor and begin her family line again.

“He's pretty certain, Major. He found another control panel behind it.”

“Behind the symbol?”

“Yeah, tucked inside the block of stone. The front face sheared off, pretty as anything.” One huge hand sketched the fall in the air. “And there it was.”

“And what does it do?”

Toporov began to shrug, caught her eye, and turned it into an uncomfortable twitch. “Can't say yet, sir. Pirate doesn't want to crack the case without an air lock to keep the dust out.”

In spite of her best efforts to keep it still, her hair flicked back behind her ears. She hated the dust. Suspected it was actually one of the H'san's subtler traps. The fine, red grit got in everywhere, adhered to moisture, and, eventually, created an impenetrable barrier. Katherine McKenna, out front when they'd breached this sector, had breathed deep in the initial release and suffocated before any of them had realized the problem. McKenna had been Corps of Engineers and the
team's medic. Sujuno had been furious about losing another one of her people to carelessness.

She was still angry about the loss of Timin di'Geirah, and that disaster had occurred back on the first day they'd breached the tombs. Along with the progenitor price, she had to provide proof there'd be sufficient gender divergences after the change to qui. Timin hadn't yet agreed to sign on, but she was certain he would have by the end of the mission. His carelessness had cost her.

In comparison, all McKenna's death had cost was comfort; the whole team had been living in filters and would have to remain in filters until they cleared the dust.

Her hair tried to flick forward again when Toporov held out a piece of paper—two-millennia–old paper pulled from one the first tombs they'd opened—but she held it still and waited until he set it on the tomb to pick it up. “I see he's drawn up a plan.” A double air lock, each section only large enough for one person and both set up with six point four nine minutes of air exchange. “That's . . . precise.”

“The math is on the back. Pirate says he'll need to rework it if anyone else goes in.”

She didn't flip the page, trusting the math if not the pirate himself. Although, credit where due, she'd only had to correct his assumptions once and he'd been careful not to touch her since, his response significantly better than most others of their ridiculously tactile species. “Build it. And tell him to take food, water, and a bucket in with him. We've a finite supply of filters and there's no telling how long this dust will be with us.”

“About that, Major, Verr says she can fly the Katrien's ship if we need . . .”

“No.” She wasn't denying that Verr could fly the ship—a Marine pilot, the ex-lieutenant had flown them through Susumi space and then switched to the Taykan VTA they'd taken down to the landing site. Verr could fly anything she could get into the air. Had her bonded's temper not gotten him discharged, had she not followed Wen into a civilian life they were both ill-suited to, Verr would have continued flying M74s until the final moment of the war. Sujuno was casting no doubt on Verr's ability to fly the Katrien ship, merely on the necessity.

Showing more perception than usual, Toporov seemed to take her meaning from the single syllable. He nodded, spun on one heel, and slipped back through the overlap, calling for Verr and Wen to bring the construction materials before he'd cleared the plastic.

If this was the correct control panel, and not another dummy or another trap, then they were close. Close enough they had no need to risk a supply run.