Free An Ancient Peace by Tanya Huff Page B

declared.
    â€œIn 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
?”
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œTorin?” Tipping his chair back, Craig snagged a damp cloth from the galley’s half meter of counter.
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œOr 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.
    â€œTwo points!” Binti and Ressk called together, slapping palms over the table.
    â€œNo 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.”
    â€œYeah.” 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.”
    â€œYeah?” Werst snorted. “My
jernil
said my
jernine
repeated on her for days.”
    â€œTouching.” 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.”
    â€œYeah, 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?”
    â€œGiven 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.
    â€œAblin gon savit!”
Alamber grabbed it back. “How many times do I have to tell you, no feet