Valor's Trial

by Tanya Huff

  “You were each acting as your nature demanded. We had no part in it.” It turned to look at Werst. “Hazard pay is an excellent suggestion.”

  “Did it just make a joke?” Mashona wondered.

  “With sufficient data, we called in the rest of those researching.”

  “You were in contact with the . . .” There weren’t words. “. . . bits in Craig and Presit’s brains.”

  “We are in contact.”

  “All the bits?”

  “Each.”

  “Great. A polynumerous molecular telepathic species. That makes you omnipresent and damned near omnipotent.” Torin had to consciously relax her jaw to keep talking. “Why don’t we just call you gods and cut out the middleman?”

  “We do not care what you call us.”

  “Lucky for you,” Craig snarled, “ ’cause I can think of a few things . . .”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Torin let the yelling go on for a bit and then raised a hand, cutting it off.

  The alien’s gaze followed the gesture and seemed amused. “Damned near omnipotent,” it repeated.

  “Gunnery Sergeant,” Werst snorted.

  “Progenitor,” Darlys added.

  “Not. About. Me.” Torin’s tone promised consequences if anyone else piped up with an opinion. “What,” she demanded of the alien as the resulting silence stretched and lengthened, “happens now?”

  “The data must be analyzed.”

  “No, that’s what happens next. What happens now?”

  “That is not up to us.”

  “How do you figure? Because it looks like the whole fukking thing has been up to you for some time now.”

  “If you are bringing us here,” Presit snapped, “then you are sending us home!”

  “No.”

  “No? What are no meaning?”

  “What it has always meant.”

  “You are one smart-ass comment from being an entrée,” Torin told it. It was fast, sure, but the Krai were hungry and a hungry Krai was a motivated Krai.

  “Our part is over. It is time to leave.”

  “You’re going nowhere without . . .”

  Given the way nerves were stretched, Torin wasn’t surprised when the sudden shrilling of an alarm from Craig’s slate caused Kichar to haul off and slug Everim with everything she had left. As Craig snapped the slate off his belt, Freenim let Everim take his swing then pulled the two youngsters apart, tossing one at Mashona and one at Merinim.

  “Six ships just came in-system. Three of ours. Three of theirs. Theirs,” Craig qualified jerking his head toward the durlin. “They’re some distance apart, doesn’t look like they’ve spotted each other yet.”

  “I thought you said this system was off the charts?”

  “It is.”

  “Then how . . . ?”

  They turned together toward the alien.

  The alien was gone.

  Torin fought the urge to vomit. She’d have known if it had reentered her. She had to have known. “Presit?”

  “There are a blur on the recording.” Presit peered over her glasses into the camera’s monitor. “Then nothing.”

  “Fukkers!” It could have been any one of the watching Marines. It could have been all of them.

  “No argument. No time either.” They were context, sure, but they were also witnesses. It would be stupid for the alien, the Gray Ones, to keep them alive to tell both sides how they’d been screwed over. “Craig, upload everything you’ve recorded to Promise’s distress beacon, then pulse it. No matter what happens next, everyone hears what just went down.”

  “What if they don’t receive?” Craig asked, but he was slaving the camera to his slate so she let it stand.

  “It’s a distress beacon. They’ll receive. Our side will want to save us; theirs will want to take advantage.”

  “But, Gunny . . .”

  “We’re on the same side, Kyster.” She turned and swept a weary glare over Kichar and Everim. “That’s been the whole fukking point of the exercise.”

  “Gunny! They’re taking the . . .” The roar of the engines finished Ressk’s sentence. When they got to the control room, when they got the shield down again, the VTA was gone.

  “Not enough of them to become a ship this time,” Craig grunted.

  “Unless they were also the VTA,” Ressk pointed out.

  “Thanks, mate. Didn’t need to hear that.”

  “They did not go far. Not even into orbit.” Sanati smacked a screen with her palm. Against all odds, the static cleared just long enough to show the VTA on the roof of the prison.

  “They’re pulling out.” Torin rested her fists on the edge of the control panel. If her fists were holding her weight, it’d be easier to keep from punching something. “Gathering the rest of their . . . bowls.”

  It didn’t take long before the VTA was lifting again, but they all knew how fast the Gray Ones could move.

  “Fastest bowls in known space,” Werst muttered as the screen gave way to static again.

  Sanati frowned down at the board. “They have left the atmosphere.”

  Torin hadn’t seen any weapons on the VTA, but in a universe where the species running things hung out as bowls, that meant absolutely nothing.

  “They are still moving out.”

  “Perhaps they do not care that we know what they have done,” Freenim said quietly. “Perhaps they want us to bear witness as the fastest way of ending the war they started.”

  “You honestly think they care?” Torin asked him.

  The durlave shrugged. “I honestly think they do not care, and that is why they are leaving. Going back where they came from to analyze their data.”

  “Yeah, well, given the holiday camp atmosphere on this shithole of a planet, I’m just glad they took the time to build the structures out of something other than themselves.” Mashona patted the wall beside her.

  “You absolutely positive of that?” Ressk asked her.

  She stepped away from the wall. “Oh, that’s just fukking great. How do we know if they’re all gone?”

  Torin shrugged when all eyes turned to her. “We don’t. We just do our jobs the way we always have.”

  “It can’t be that easy, Gunny.”

  Fulfill the mission objectives and get her people out alive.

  “If it was easy, Mashona, they wouldn’t send in the Marines.”

  Smiles at that. At the expected among the unknown. That was part of her job, too. Be the one thing they could count on no matter what. No matter how much she wanted to beat her head against a wall and scream.

  It had been there, in her head. In her head and in Craig’s head. She glanced over at him, wondering if the thing between them, the thing she was not going to name, not yet, wondering if it had ever had anything to do with the two of them, or if it had been arranged from the moment she’d dropped through the floor of Big Yellow and nearly flattened him.

  He smiled, lifted a hand toward her, glanced around the room, and settled for shaking his head. “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, they aren’t responsible for us. For you and me.”

  “I didn’t . . .” She hadn’t had to. And maybe that said enough. Now her fists on the edge of the panel were keeping her knees from buckling. “Okay, then. So what do we do while we wait to see if we survive this next bit?”

  “What next bit, Gunny?”

  “The bit where we see if those six ships destroy each other or us.”

  “But not in that order, right, Gunny? Because if the six ships destroyed each other, then they couldn’t destroy us. Well, they could if they launched planet splitters before they blew, but . . .” Kichar’s voice trailed off. Suddenly the center of attention, she flushed.

  “They are not destroying each other.” There was a chance, albeit a small one, Presit intended to sound comforting. “Gunnery Sergeant Kerr are having ended the war. The Gray Ones are telling us we are pawns, puppets, ser ka bingh me. Gunnery
Sergeant Kerr are letting everyone know it. Forcing everyone to take a good hard look at what are happening. And she are doing it in her underwear.”

  Torin did not glace down at her bare legs. “And my question still stands, what do we do while we wait?”

  “We could eat.”

  The jaws Torin could see dropped. Ressk brought his teeth together with a snap so loud Firiv’vrak clattered something in response.

  “The duffel I dropped by the elevator has a couple dozen field rations in it,” Craig continued a little sheepishly. “I ran everything organic I had through the mess kit.”

  “There’s food?”

  “Yeah, it’s . . .”

  “Mashona!”

  “On it, Gunny.”

  Werst, who’d started moving at the mention of food, rocked to a stop by Craig’s hip, turned, and glared up at her. She ignored him. No way in a hundred hells was she sending one of the Krai out for that pack. Corps training might be the best in known space, but it only went so far.

  “I hope you are happy, Gunnery Sergeant, there are no food left on the Promise.” Presit finally kicked free of the HE suit and began to run her claws through her fur.

  “The VTA’s gone.” Torin nodded toward the window and the empty landing bay, barely visible through the new scorch marks. “You can’t get back to the Promise.”

  “He are not knowing that when he are coming down here.”

  “No, he didn’t.” She raised a brow in Craig’s direction. If he’d come dirtside with some romantic notion of dying with her, she’d kick his ass.

  “Promise can’t hold everyone here even if we just took the Marines actually in this building . . .” He raised a hand before Torin could protest. “. . . which I know you wouldn’t allow anyway, and I also knew you weren’t leaving unless everyone did—and I wasn’t leaving without you. I lost you once already, and had no intention of doing it again. I’d planned to live out my life down here if I had to.”

  Werst’s nose ridges clamped shut. “That’s so touching I think I’m going to puke.”

  Torin tried not to look as if he agreed with him. Living together on this burning shithole came perilously close to dying together.

  “I are not given a choice,” Presit snarled. “I are perfectly willing to lose you again.”

  Craig shrugged. “We wouldn’t have lived long enough to get home anyway.”

  “I are not dying here!”

  “Good.” Torin squared her shoulders. “Neither am I. Pulse the recording again.”

  “It was quite the transmission,” Captain Carveg said dryly. “There might have been a bit of a problem believing it except that all six ships jettisoned an escape pod just after we received it the first time.”

  Torin stared at the wall over the captain’s left shoulder and tried not to think about how much the healing blisters on her thighs itched where the newly issued combats rubbed.

  “And when I say all six ships jettisoned an escape pod,” the captain continued, “that’s exactly what I mean. No one gave the order. And then, funny thing, it turned out that all six ships still had a full complement of escape pods in spite of what we all saw, and in spite of what was on the computer records. Then, when the escape pods . . .” Her hands rose in air quotes, and that was a weird enough gesture from a Krai that Torin actually dropped her gaze to the captain’s face. “. . . combined and, according to long-range scanners, joined up with your VTA, well, let’s just say it was a good thing the shooting had done minimal damage until that point.”

  “So there were Gray Ones on the ships, on all the ships, on both sides, and now they’re gone?”

  Captain Carveg’s lips pulled back off her teeth. The three other officers in the room mirrored the action although none of them were Krai. “I think we can all agree they were here and that they were fukking around in, well, let’s say our Susumi equations for a start given that we suddenly found ourselves emerging into a brand-spanking-newsection of space, but as to whether or not they’re gone, I don’t know, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, because, apparently, there is no fukking way to tell. So, if you have some more insider information you’d like to make the rest of us privy to . . . ?”

  The initial debriefing down on that slag heap of a planet had been just short of brutal. Had Torin not shared a history with Captain Carveg, she doubted that she and Craig and Presit would have ever been allowed onto the Berganitan. The Primacy captains had been more willing to take their people off although they had kept weapons aimed at the Marines while they loaded their VTA.

  Durlave Kan Freenim had been the last to leave.

  “It is unlikely we will meet again.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Torin reminded him.

  “Truth. Whatever happens . . .” He waved a hand in the general direction of a war that wasn’t a war that was still going on. “. . . I have always believed that I would have more in common with certain members of the enemy than I do with some of my own people.” He held out his fist and Torin touched her knuckles to his.

  The blood on both their hands had made the contact sticky.

  Once Captain Carveg had been convinced her ship would be in no danger from bringing them aboard—and Torin had no idea what it was that had finally convinced her—the Marines had been taken to Med-op, but Craig and Presit had been scooped up immediately by Intell. It was news to Torin that the Navy even maintained intelligence officers on their destroyers. She’d closed her teeth on the nearly irresistible comment and assured Presit that vivisection was unlikely.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Kerr?”

  “I have no further information on the Gray Ones, sir. But I believe they’re gone.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You believe?”

  They said they had sufficient data. She lifted her chin, just a little. “Yes, sir.”

  “And that should be enough, should it?”

  She was still a gunnery sergeant in the Confederation Marine Corps. “Yes, sir.”

  Torin had a private room in Med-op while the Berganitan’s doctors checked her over. Her injuries were superficial—burns, bruises, a bit of malnutrition—which allowed them to move right to scanning her brain without having to bother pretending that wasn’t their entire interest. Since the Corps’ scans hadn’t found a damned thing previously, she figured the odds of the Navy finding something now were slim to none, but she kept that opinion to herself. A couple of the doctors looked as if they might consider vivisection to be a good idea.

  They wouldn’t let her see Craig.

  When one of the doctors tried to remove the salvage tag, she convinced him to let her keep it.

  “What’s that old Human saying?” Captain Carveg snorted as two corpsmen carried the doctor out. “Physician, heal thyself? You get into a fight with another member of my crew and I’ll have you on charges so fast you’ll think you’ve got a Susumi drive up your ass. But this one . . .” She reached out and gripped Torin’s shoulder for a moment. “. . . this one you get to win.”

  Torin waited, fingers wrapped around the tag. Captains didn’t visit gunnery sergeants to tell them they weren’t to be brought up on charges.

  The captain’s nose ridges closed, her grip tightened for a moment, then she let her hand fall back to her side. “The prison collapsed. It looks like earthquake damage. We’re reading working tech but no life signs.”

  There were three hundred Marines down there, maybe more, and at least that many members of the Primacy. There were six destroyers in orbit maintaining a reluctant peace. Room for everyone.

  “Gunny?”

  “Everyone, sir?”

  “I’d like to say there’s always a chance, but . . .” She shook her head. “We have teams bringing out the bodies. No one will be left behind.”

  Torin thought of Jiyuu at the bottom of the elevator shaft and her promise to Watura and of Mike burning as he held open the air lock door. “Thank you, sir.”

  After the captain l
eft, she slid out of bed and paced the length of the room, seven paces there and seven back. There and back. There and back. No point in testing to see if they’d let her leave. She’d seen the two burly, well-armed sailors standing outside her door. Sure, she could take them, but eventually sheer numbers would beat her down.

  “Gunny?”

  “Kyster. How did you . . . ?”

  He shrugged and limped a little farther into the room. “They didn’t see me. I’m good at not being seen. Did they tell you?”

  “About the prison?”

  He nodded.

  “They told me.” She let her back hit the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor. Major Kenoton. Lieutenant Myshai. Staff Sergeant Pole. Lance Corporal Divint. Private Sergei. Private Graydon.

  “Do you think . . .” His nose ridges opened and closed. “Gunny, do you think the durlin is okay?”

  “She’s with her people, Kyster.” Colonel Mariner. Second Lieutenant Teirl. Lieutenant Cafter. Lieutenant O’Neill. Major Ohi.

  “But do you think she’s okay?”

  He was still very young.

  Torin opened her arms. The impact nearly cracked a rib, but she held him the way Durlin Vertic had, in the circle of her folded legs, held him while he sobbed and murmured what Krai words of comfort she knew.

  “Are you certain you’ve made the right decision?”

  Torin stepped off the end of the ramp and held Craig in the open air lock with a raised hand. He didn’t look happy about it, but he stayed where he was, arms folded and glowering. “Mashona, Ressk, and I are all that survived of Sh’quo Company.” Captain Rose. Lieutenant Jarret. First Sergeant Tutone. Sergeant Hollice.

  “There are other companies. And a war that’s been fought for centuries doesn’t end . . .” High Tekamal Louden’s mouth twisted into a humorless smile. “. . . without a fight. It’s not going to be all politics and diplomacy and no hard feelings no matter what the H’san seem to think.”

  The Elder Races had issued statements simultaneously insisting that they’d never been under anyone’s control and that they’d always said the war wasn’t their fault. The actual statements were significantly longer and filled with the kind of bullshit rhetoric that Torin had come to expect from the Elder Races, but that was the gist of it. She tried not to enjoy the fact that their more elder than thou attitude had been shattered by molecular-sized bits of organic plastic. She tried not to wonder if they were lying.