An Ancient Peace (29 page)

“Craig?”

“Lightning.” Strain tightened his voice.

“This high?” They were still in the upper atmosphere.

“Apparently.”

The shuttle wobbled.

They'd shifted close to a meter with the first hit. Five centimeters with the second. They had two meters three centimeters clearance. Still plenty of room.

Then the left side of the shuttle tipped up and they slid hard to the right, Craig swearing like a sailor—a steady and unimaginative stream of
fuk fuk fuk fuk.

This wasn't her first drop while taking fire. She knew the feel of an energy weapon impacting with the solid plates of a military shuttle. She knew the smell of ozone. The feel of free falling in a heavy, spinning can with no way to control her descent. The need to trust in the pilot's skills because she had no choice. That this time the pilot was a man she loved made no difference to how much she hated the lack of control.

The maneuvering thrusters shoved her hard into the left side of the webbing. Held her there for one heartbeat. Two. Three. The spinning stopped and technically she supposed they weren't free falling any longer no matter what it felt like.

“This part always takes too
serly chricka
long,” Werst snarled behind her.

“Brace for impact!”

“About fukking time.”

Torin set her pack down in the shade at the base of a huge, red slab of rock and looked back along the impact ditch to where the shuttle rested, half buried in sand. They'd been twice lucky. First, that the satellites had only been able to get off one shot and, second, that Craig had threaded the shuttle into a gully instead of flattening it against one of the many cliffs. “Nice landing.”

“Tell us another,” Craig snorted.

“We walked away and no one's shooting at us. I'm counting it a win.”

“You have very low standards.”

She turned to find him squinting up at her, deep creases at the corners of his eyes. There was a still a smear of blood on his upper lip. His nose had turned purple and had begun to swell. He never
tightened his webbing—said it interfered with his flying—and when the ship had hit, he'd slammed his face into the board. Only experience had kept her from overreacting to the amount of blood as she'd worked to get him free.

Later, when she checked his cuff, his stats indicated no real damage and it appeared the greater damage was to the tech; all five cuffs had stopped transmitting to hers. Or hers had stopped receiving. She hated not having access to the physical status of her team.
I'm fine
could and had meant anything up to and including broken bones.

But, this time, they'd all walked away.

Nothing broken, not even Craig's nose, no one badly hurt.

She smiled. He smiled back at her, the red between his teeth familiar. “They work for me.”

“What do?”

“Low standards.”

He laughed, winced, and spat a mouthful of blood to one side. “Lucky me.”

“Maybe later.”

“We can't be too far off course.” Standing just outside the hatch, Ressk held out his slate at shoulder height. “If I scan for the Younger Races, I should be able to get a read on the position of the grave robbers.”

Werst glanced up from where he was piling salvaged supplies up against the side of the shuttle. “You think they're stupid enough to leave organic evidence?”

“I think they're stupid enough to . . .”

The impact threw Werst about four meters and slammed him down on his ass in the sand. “Ressk!” Nostril ridges shut, he forced himself up onto his feet and staggered back through the puddle of melted sand by the half-buried hatch. “Ressk!” He dropped to his knees when the sand grew too hot underfoot, but even a meter away, smoke stinging his eyes, he could see no remains. Smell nothing but scorched glass and steel. When he reached out to dig, a hand closed around his wrist just as the skin on his fingertips began to blister and pulled him back.

He fought. Against the hands holding him. Against the arm locked around him. Against screaming. Howling. Wailing.

“Hey! Werst!
Churick
! I'm okay!”

A familiar palm against his cheek. He blinked. Focused. Took a deep breath as the hands and the arm released him and fell forward against Ressk's chest, gripping handfuls of his jacket. “How?”

“I saved him.”

Werst lifted his head to see Alamber grinning down at them, brushing sand off his clothes.

“It occurred to me, thinking about the H'san, that the way they're built, they've got to be all about redundancies, right? So, they're going to have something in place in case intruders actually get through the whole death by satellite thing and make it to the surface. I was about to point out that locking onto a slate—or the antique H'san equivalent—would make an efficient targeting system for that redundancy when I saw Ressk put thumb to screen, so I grabbed his ankles and hauled his ass back in the shuttle as fire fell from above. Metaphorical fire. I think it was actually the same type of high energy pulse that hit the ship.”

As terror and grief bled away, Werst could hear adrenaline burning off in Alamber's explanation, see it in the speed pale hair flipped around his head. He touched his forehead to Ressk's, opened his nostril ridges so their edges touched, and exhaled. Then he pushed himself away—although not entirely away, his fingers still crushed the thick fabric of Ressk's jacket—and looked up at the di'Taykan. “Thank you.
Agro se terker tesergerr ih.
”

His hair stilled. “You're welcome?”

“There's a life between us,” he translated. “A debt.”

“He cracked my elbow on the edge of the hatch,” Ressk muttered. “Hurts like fuk.”

“You're not a puddle of melted glass,” Werst reminded him, punctuating his observation with a shake. He heard a soft huff of breath and turned to see Gunny's lips—it had been her arm around his chest—pressed into a thin pale line, Ryder's hand on her shoulder, and he remembered how Sh'quo Company had died, melted into the planet's surface by a Primacy weapon.

“I think we can safely say . . .” Binti poked her head out of the hatch
and jerked back at the heat still rising off the ground. “. . . that the ancient H'san are a bag of dicks.”

Eyes over the edge, Torin could see no danger, so she lifted herself up onto the top of the cliff. The Krai were better climbers, but she needed to get the lay of the land. Stepping away from the drop, she brushed off her hands and shifted the strap of her KC so the weapon rested more comfortably across her shoulders. Craig's flying had been even better and, given their speed, luckier than she'd assumed. He'd hit the only surface in sight that gave them a chance of surviving the crash, sand being more forgiving than rock. The plateau she stood on stretched out unnaturally flat, kilometer after kilometer of red granite, the edges of black slabs rising up at irregular intervals. A long shadow hugging the ground in the distance might be another cliff, might be low clouds.

Off to her right, the huge, red sun hung low on the horizon. The light seemed—not artificial, she'd spent a good portion of her life under the artificial lights of ships and stations, but like it had presence. Substance. Like they'd feel it sliding past their skin as they moved through it. She didn't like it.

Not that it mattered.

The gravity was a little heavier than home and a noticeable amount heavier than ships and stations. It wasn't optimal for any of them, but hopefully they wouldn't be here long enough for it to become a problem. The smell of scorched metal covered any local scents although she had to admit there were valid reasons the Human sense of smell was generally considered to be piss useless. The air was completely still and the silence a little unnerving.

Returning to the edge, she braced a forearm against her thigh and leaned forward until she could see faces staring up at her. “The people we're looking for are about ten to twenty klicks back that way.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We might as well climb out here, I don't see a faster route. We'll secure a line and send the packs up first. Ressk, to me.”

“On my way, Gunny.” Coil of rope over his shoulder, Ressk started up the rock face.

Torin moved back, out of the way. Arboreal, no Krai would need help making a climb a Human had managed. Eyes on the horizon, the comforting weight of a weapon in her hands, she made a note of how clearly voices carried in the silken air.

“We can't use our slates. How does she know where to go?” Alamber protested. “It's not like she was looking out the window and spotted them on the way down.”

“She was Recon,” Werst told him.

“And what? That gives her magic mapping powers? ‘She was Recon' explains exactly nothing.”

“It would if you were a Marine.”

“It would if I was a Marine? Seriously? That's really not helpful. And technically, doesn't Ressk owe me a life?”

“Shut up.”

The black slabs were giant symbols set into the red rock, large enough they could probably be seen from space. If the whole planet was a cemetery, then odds were high they were walking across the surface of a massive tombstone. The odds were high everyone on the team had figured that out, but as no one else mentioned it, neither did Torin.

About fifteen kilometers from the crash site, the low shadow became another red rock cliff.

Breathing heavily, cheeks flushed, Alamber sagged against the rock. “Look, all I'm saying is that with the slates off, you can't tell how far we've come.”

“We were infantry,” Werst reminded him. “We humped over a shitload of terrain. Plateau's flat, Gunny's moving us at about six kilometers an hour, took us two and a half hours to get here. Fifteen klicks.”

“Do we go up, Gunny?” Binti asked.

Torin shook her head. “Look to the left, about three kilometers along the cliff face. What do you see?”

“Big pile of rubble. Section of the cliff probably collapsed.”

“Or someone dug into it.”