The Heart of Valor

by Tanya Huff

  Torin maintained her own hair at di’Taykan length, but she knew Human Marines who kept their personal hygiene units locked at the dead tissue setting. She thought it made them look like they’d just been detanked, but hell—if they were into an I nearly had my ass shot off hair style, who was she to complain?

  Staff Sergeant Beyhn stood by an inner wall, watching the last recruits cross into processing. Up close, he looked tired, like he hadn’t been sleeping. di’Taykan didn’t get bags under their eyes, but he was close.

  “They’re not mine,” he said as Torin joined him. “I’ve got a group coming up on one twenty I should be with right now, but for the last few days this place has been jumping like the seals are blown, and assignments have therefore been late coming down.” He turned to face her. “You wouldn’t know why, would you, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr?”

  “I hear Major Svensson has recently been detanked, Staff Sergeant.”

  He made a noise that from a Human would have been noncommittal but from a di’Taykan bordered on insulting. “Don’t give me that crap, Gunny. The whole station knows that you single-handedly brought the Silsviss in on our side and followed it up by outsmarting a big yellow spaceship and bringing your recon team safely home.”

  “Not all of them.” Torin closed her hand around the memory of the small, metal cylinder that held the remains of PFC August Guimond.

  Beyhn stared at her for a long moment, his eyes moving from near pink to scarlet as more and more light receptors opened. Finally he nodded, his expression relaxing, and Torin realized that she’d been measured and not found wanting.

  A smart person would have let it go. “You thought I might be . . .”

  “Getting too big for your britches.”

  Torin blinked. “What?”

  “Means full of yourself. Picked it up from a Marine who came through on his SLC.”

  There could only be one Marine that fond of oldEarth idiom. “Hollice?”

  “That’s the name.” He headed down the corridor, and Torin fell into step beside him. “So, since it’s unlikely they promoted you for just doing your job, I’m guessing you’ve got blackmail material on that General Morris who seems to like you so much.”

  As it happened, she did, but since her old DI wasn’t actually digging for information, she merely said, “Ours is not to question why, Sergeant.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, that’s what they keep telling me.”

  *Your O930 briefing has been moved to L6S23C29.*

  Torin tongued an acknowledgment and checked the time.

  *0858*

  No need to hurry.

  “New implant? You half winced just there,” the sergeant continued when she raised an inquiring brow. “Like you were reacting to the memory of pain.”

  She fought the urge to cup the left side of her jaw, recently cracked by the techs back at Battalion who’d installed her new unit during the short time she’d spent with her company on the OutSector station before being ordered coreward to Ventris. The bone ached and the skin over it felt tender. “Good call.”

  “Not really. Automatic upgrade when you hit Gunny,” he reminded her. “Been a long time since I got cracked, but I seem to remember them saying it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Yeah. That’s what they say.”

  “Lying bastards. Where you heading?”

  “L6S23C29.”

  “You remember how to find your way around?”

  “I do.”

  An ability to negotiate Ventris Station was a hard-earned skill. The word tesseract had been mentioned on more than one occasion. Other, less scientific words were used more frequently, the Corps having a long history of creative profanity and two new languages to practice it in. Torin had refamiliarized herself with the more unique aspects of station navigation early that morning on her five k run.

  “Well, if you find your way to the baby-sitter’s club sometime when I’m not hand feeding the future of the Corps, I’ll buy you a drink.” Then he glanced at the half dozen chevrons surrounding the crossed KC-7s on her sleeve, looked up, and nodded; that same single dip of the head. “Good work, Marine.”

  He’d been the first person to call her Marine. She’d just finished two tendays on Crucible, her and the rest of Platoon 29, learning to actually use all the information they’d had crammed into their heads over the first 120 days of training. They’d been in ranks, bloody but unbeaten at the pickup point, and, as the VTA’s hatch opened, Sergeant Beyhn had yelled, “Double-time, Marines. We’re moving out.” That had been—and remained—the proudest moment of her life.

  “Don’t get all choked up on me now,” he grinned as he opened the door into Hygiene and the sound of seventy-two recruits being sanitized drifted into the corridor. “I bet Sergeant Hayman you’d make Gunny before I got out and Jude’s just contributed a solid fifty to my offspring fund.”

  Torin didn’t bother hiding her shudder. “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “That I bet a fifty on you?”

  “That you have an offspring fund.”

  * * *

  Level 6, Section 23, Compartment 29—according to the station directory, she couldn’t get there from where she was. Torin snorted and headed for the nearest vertical. All routes on Ventris Station led to the main parade square. Logically, from the main parade square, it was then possible to get to any address in the station.

  They should never have let the H’san help with the design. She slowed to let an approaching captain into the shaft first, waited for the next available rising strap, and stepped across a whole lot of nothing to catch hold of it. The public terminal was on level one, but there were fourteen sublevels under that. Her stomach did a lazy loop in the zero gravity, then settled.

  Even with the workday underway for almost an hour, the shaft was busy. She nodded at a descending technical sergeant, politely ignored a pair of officers sharing a strap while they discussed their latest liberty, and raised an eyebrow at a Krai recruit adjusting her uniform as she passed, one foot holding the strap, both hands attempting to straighten her collar. The Krai had no problem in zero gee—no nausea, no disorientation—but other species weren’t so lucky. Human and di’Taykan recruits who’d spent their whole lives dirtside were tested in zero gee modules before they were allowed into the shafts, but even then it was pretty much a guarantee that the rest of the station would be dodging wobbly globes of vomit and the embarrassed recruit trying to clean them up at some point during the first thirty days of every Basic course. Since a new course started every ten days, it paid to pay attention in the verticals.

  At Level 3, Torin grabbed the bar over the door and flipped out into the deck. The link station was right where she remembered it. By the time the link arrived, there were eight Marines waiting with her, and she had less than twenty minutes’ travel time left.

  Not a problem.

  Like the public terminal, the main parade square had been designated as an “outside” area of the station. On her way around to the link station that would take her to Section 23, Torin snapped off three salutes and then stopped by a recruit who stood staring around at eighteen potential exits in rising panic.

  “Where do you need to be?” she asked.

  Pale gray eyes holding an equal mix of determination and fear locked on her face. “Sir! This . . .”

  “Don’t call me sir, I’m not your DI. Call me Gunnery Sergeant.”

  “Sir! Yes, si . . . Yes, Gunnery Sergeant! This recruit needs to be at L4S12 main administration.”

  She checked his collar tabs. He was still in his first fifty. “Are you cleared for verticals?”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  “Take that shaft . . . That shaft!” She reached out and turned his head. “Take it up two levels. Turn right immediately out of the shaft. Keep moving until you get to Section 12 then take the first vertical you see back down a level.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I have to be there in four minutes!”

  I
t was hard not to smile. “Then you’d better hurry.”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  She watched him double-time off, turned back toward her station, and saluted a Krai lieutenant wearing a Ventris patch who was staring at her with disapproval.

  “The recruits need to learn their way around on their own, Gunny.”

  Stifling a sigh, she stopped walking. She really didn’t have time for this. “The recruits need to learn they can depend on other Marines when the chips are down, Lieutenant.”

  “And what does he learn if you tell him how to get where he’s going?”

  “That it isn’t a weakness to ask for directions.”

  “He didn’t ask for directions, Gunny.”

  “Now he knows he can, sir.”

  The lieutenant’s nose ridges flared. “You can’t ask for directions in combat!”

  Torin did not drop her gaze to the lieutenant’s chest and an absence of ribbons but was so obvious about it, she might as well have. “You’d be surprised, sir.” She snapped off another salute and was in the link and gone before he realized he’d been dismissed.

  She reached L6S23C29 with three minutes and forty-two seconds to spare.

  And found her reputation had preceded her.

  “Congratulations on the promotion, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr.”

  “Thank you, Captain Stedrin. And you on yours.”

  The captain smiled, pale blue hair flicking back and forth. “I suspect the general thought it was easier to promote me than to break in another aide. Besides, we’ve got an actual staff now, and he probably believes the extra bar will make it easier for me to take command.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, sir.”

  Captain Stedrin’s hair sped up a little. “That’s quite the compliment coming from you, Gunny.”

  “Yes, sir.” She meant it, though. When they’d first met on the Berganitan, Lieutenant Stedrin had been a typical “stick-up-the-ass” young officer—not, as it happened too different from the lieutenant she’d just been talking to on the parade square although the attitude was temperamentally unusual for a di’Taykan—but he’d made the right decisions when it mattered, and while he might never be much of a line officer, she’d been in the Corps long enough to know that a good staff officer, one who cared about the Marines more than the paperwork, was worth his weight in ammo. Maybe not the impact boomers, but definitely the regular rounds.

  She glanced across the front of the small lecture hall to where General Morris, still without that third star and his promotion to Tekamal and apparently destined to be her personal pain in the brass for years to come, was speaking to a di’Taykan major. The deep orange hair made it a sure bet that it was Major di’Uninat Alie, the Intelligence officer who’d debriefed Torin just after she’d arrived at the station. “The general’s filling her in on what he considers the pertinent points, isn’t he, sir?”

  “I think that’s a given.”

  General Morris had chosen her for the mission to Silsvah. She supposed it was a compliment that he’d believed her capable of doing what was necessary to bring the Silsviss into the Confederation before the Others could recruit them, but she’d lost thirteen Marines on what was supposed to be ceremonial duty, and while she had no trouble following orders, she disliked being manipulated. He’d also chosen her to lead the recon platoon into Big Yellow, the unidentified alien vessel found floating dead in space. Probably another compliment. He’d needed a senior NCO capable of riding herd on a glory-seeking officer destined for promotion to placate the Krai members of Parliament, but since Captain Travik had spent most of the mission unconscious, the official reports were slightly different than the reality of the situation.

  Torin really hated politics.

  Fortunately, she wasn’t expected to smile as the general approached.

  “Staff Sergeant Kerr. Good to see you again. I’ve just been telling Major Alie what she can expect.”

  “Sir.” Captain Stedrin cleared his throat, a Human noise the di’Taykan had adopted. “It’s Gunnery Sergeant now.”

  “Why, so it is.” General Morris’ florid cheeks flushed darker as his gaze flickered to her collar tabs and back. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say.”

  “Sir?”

  “About the Silsviss.”

  He was staying? Well that was just fukking wonderful. “Yes, sir.”

  With a final, patronizing nod, the general moved toward an empty seat in the last row. Captain Stedrin let him get most of the way there before he caught up and bent to murmur something in the general’s ear. Standing by the lectern, Torin couldn’t hear the captain’s part of the conversation, but the general’s, “What now?” came through loud and clear. After a moment, and an inspection of the captain’s slate, he shook his head and stomped off out the rear door.

  Captain Stedrin shot her a very di’Taykan grin as he followed.

  The bastard had waited until the last minute to clear the general out just to watch her sweat. Nice one. He’d known from the beginning they’d be leaving, or he’d have left his slate with the others on the table near the lower door. Torin had been warned her slate wouldn’t record—Compartments 21 to 39 were configured to prevent it—but slates were designed to be ultimately flexible, and there was only one way to be certain no one would enter the information with a stylus and that was to take them out of the hands of their owners. She suspected there were certain things about the way the Silsviss had joined the Confederation that the highest levels of the Corps preferred the general population never knew. Ultimately, there’d be no way to prevent it, but—in the here and now—the top brass was doing what they could to slow things down.

  “Are you ready, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr?”

  She faced Major Alie and nodded, an echo of Staff Sergeant Beyhn’s single dip. “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t look nervous.”

  “Are they likely to shoot at me, sir?”

  The major’s eyes lightened as she smiled. “I doubt it.”

  “Then I’ll be fine.”

  Torin assumed every one of the thirty officers in the room—there’d be other rooms and other ranks later—had read not only her report, but General Morris’ report, Lieutenant Jarret’s report and probably, depending on their clearance levels, both the diplomats’ and Cri Sawyes’ report. She wasn’t here to go over the facts of the mission one more time lest something crucial had been left out that effected the acceptance of the Silsviss into the Confederation and their eventual integration into the Corps. She was here because later, after the facts had been presented one more time, there’d be questions and she was the only one who could answer many of them.

  It was both clichéd and dangerous to believe that insight into a species could be gained by wholesale slaughter, but Torin was willing to bet that, here and now, no one knew the Silsviss quite like she did.

  Slate to hand in case she needed to refer to her notes, she faced the tiers of seats and began. “During the mission in question, I was a Staff Sergeant with 7th Division, 4th Recar’ta, 1st Battalion, Sh’quo Company. My orders were to put together a platoon out of able-bodied Marines to accompany a group of diplomats and their support staff—Mictok, Dornagain, and Rakva—to Silsviss under the command of Second Lieutenant di’Ka Jarret . . .”

  There’d been diplomacy for a while, but then all hell had broken loose.

  When she reached the point in the story where the Berganitan had returned to Silsvah and sent down a VTA to lift them off—the VTA they’d landed in having been lost in a swamp—she saw a few of the officers begin to stir. Either they hadn’t heard what happened after liftoff and they thought she was nearly done or, more likely, she was just getting to the part they were interested in.

  “The Silsviss have a pack mentality. They know where each one fits in the pack, and the strong fight to rise. They’d just joined our pack, and they wanted
to see how much they could push us around.”

  “They wanted you to kill General Morris.”

  The statement came from a Human lieutenant colonel. He might have felt safely anonymous in the dim light amid the other twenty-nine black uniforms in the room, but Torin had spent too many years pinpointing smart-ass comments from the ranks to let him get away with it. Glancing over at him, she abandoned the last 4.5 minutes of prepared speech and said, “No, sir. They wanted me to believe it was the general’s fault and then use what I had learned about the Silsviss to save the treaty by killing him.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “Because we weren’t joining them, sir. They were joining us.”

  “General Morris’ report said he was willing to die.”

  “I wasn’t privileged to read the general’s report, sir.”

  “But you would have killed him if it had been necessary?” He was leaning forward now, one hand pale and obvious where it gripped the dark fabric over his right knee.

  Torin lifted her chin, locked her eyes on his face, and said, “As it wasn’t necessary, sir . . .” She loaded implication into the pause. “. . . we’ll never know.”

  The lieutenant colonel looked away first and, as his gaze dropped, Major Alie stepped forward. “Since we seem to have already opened the floor to questions, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr will now address any other points you may want clarified.”

  Interesting emphasis, Torin thought as a Krai major began the official Q&A.

  For the most part, the questions stayed fairly close to her observations of the Silsviss military and how well she felt they’d integrate. As they revisited the same points over and over again, Torin became increasingly grateful that she wouldn’t be part of the team designing the integration protocols. Given how long it had taken before the Krai joined mixed fireteams, she figured she’d be long retired before she had to worry about maintaining discipline with di’Taykan-sized lizards in the ranks.

  When the briefing finally ended, just before 1300, Torin followed the major’s silent order and stepped back to let the room empty before she left. With the major acting as a barrier between her and any further questions, she kept her gaze locked on the far wall to give no one a chance to draw her into conversation.