An Ancient Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

salvage pen. And she certainly hadn’t fought a thousand Silsviss to a standstill by herself. There’d been a platoon of Marines with her. She did, however, acknowledge that the Silsviss skull in her old quarters had probably been how the “ripped off their leader’s head” rumor had gotten started.
    Because she’d been out of the Corps at the time, the destruction of a pirate fleet and the station they’d used as their base with three ex-Marines, a civilian salvage operator, and a morally flexible di’Taykan seldom got mentioned on military stations although it was the first topic of conversation on the small OutSector stations where they often ended up in the course of their deployments by the Justice Department.
    â€œThey’re jobs, Torin,”
Craig had sighed
. “Can you try to call them jobs? For me?”
    They hadn’t been back to Ventris in nearly two months, having bounced from their previous deploy . . . job to the takedown of Human’s First, without a break. As
you are no longer a part of themilitary
had been explicitly mentioned in every Justice Department briefing they’d been to over the last year, the department sending them in to meet with Major di’Uninat Alie had come as a surprise. Major Alie had been Torin’s Intelligence Service contact before Crucible, back when she’d been the Corps’ best resource on the Silsviss. Fortunately for all concerned, her battle observations had been quickly replaced by a battery of reports from xeno-ists. Biologists. Psychologists. Sociologists. Hell, maybe even xenoherpetologists; the Silsviss
were
one of the Confederation’s few reptilian races.
    Given that the summons had been for the entire team, not for her alone, odds were the meeting had nothing to do with the Silsviss. Unless a few of the big lizards had gone rogue.
    â€œYeah, that’d be fun,” Torin muttered, pausing just inside the door of Sutton’s while her eyes adjusted to the lower light levels. She turned toward the sound of Craig’s voice and spotted the team tucked back in the far corner near the doors to the kitchen. Exiting through the kitchen and out the staff entrance would take them to the service corridors and from the service corridors, they could get anywhere in the station. More importantly, they could get back to the
Promise
. Alamber and Ressk had hacked through the lowest levels of station security, pulled the schematics, and uploaded them to everyone’s slate under a mask of false directories.
    Back in the day, Ressk had made a game of getting through at least the basic security of every ship Sho’quo Company had been deployed on. Had Military Intelligence found proof, they’d have used that leverage to poach him from the infantry, but he’d always been able to cover his tracks—at least to the point of plausible deniability. Alamber, who’d spent his formative years learning how to cripple code for shits and giggles and profit, knew a number of very nasty tricks he was more than willing to apply. Torin had cut them off before they could go any deeper and had made it clear she expected Ressk to police the young di’Taykan.
    â€œBecause, in this, you’re the only one who can,”
she’d snapped when he’d protested. She didn’t know how, she didn’t need to know how, but he’d stopped Alamber before they crossed the line between too smart for their own good and treason.
    Back in the day, when she’d had the weight of the Confederation Marine Corps behind her, she hadn’t needed to know the alternative exits from her favorite bar. Times had changed.
    She passed a table of three di’Taykan corporals in the midst of settling their bill and arguing about whose quarters had the largest bed; passed a table holding two glasses of wine where a lone Krai lieutenant sat watching the clock; passed an empty table—although a bowl holding