The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  “Pen’s too big to fit inside,” Almon explained before Cho could ask what the hell they were doing. Eyes locked on the screen, he had so many light receptors open very little of the pale yellow remained. “Don’t know what this guy found, Captain, but he found one fuk of a lot of it.”

  The deck plates quivered as something big came under the influence of the artificial gravity on the other side of the inner hatch.

  “Sorry, Captain.” Nadayki, the youngest of the three di’Taykan, flashed him a nervous smile, lime-green hair jerking back and forth in a nervous arc.

  Cho smiled back. Nadayki’s trouble with the law had been the reason the three had initially gone on the run. The Taykan were stupid when it came to family loyalties. “You dent my ship and I’ll space you.”

  “He will, too. Space you soon as look at you. Mackenzie Cho’s the meanest son of a bitch in this end of the galaxy.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling my mother names?” Cho said quietly as Nat Forester moved up to stand just behind his left shoulder, slate in hand.

  “At least once more, Cap. Krisk says he needs condenser parts and Doc says if you pitch another field kitchen, he’s going to throw six kinds of fit.”

  “That kitchen had been slagged.”

  Nat shrugged. “He says he could have fixed it. And he likes the food.”

  “The food is crap.”

  “Not arguing, but Doc likes it and there’s always a market for kitchens. You’re letting your prejudices cut into profits.”

  “It’s not prejudice. I know the food they turn out is crap.”

  “And I know,” his quartermaster grunted, “that these two’d probably work faster if you weren’t peering over their shoulders.”

  “Sucks to be them.”

  In spite of the captain’s presence, or maybe because of it, the two di’Taykan worked full out for almost two hours, creating a complex three-dimensional jigsaw of captured salvage in order to fit it into the available space. Finally, Almon sighed and said, “Cargo’s locked and loaded, Captain.”

  “Noted.” Cho raised his voice slightly; the comm pickups in the extension could be temperamental. “Huirre.”

  “Captain.”

  “Turn us toward home.” They’d kick on the Susumi drive after he and Nat had the cargo sorted, separated the crap from the cream, and ditched the crap.

  “Aye, sir. Home it is.” The subtext—about fukking time—came through loud and clear, but they’d been roaming for a while, looking for a prize worth the trip, so he let it go.

  “Cap and I going to fit in there?” Nat wondered, peering past Almon at his screen.

  “No. Too tight.” Almon turned just far enough to wink at her, a Human gesture the di’Taykan had wholeheartedly adopted. “Tight’s good.”

  Nat winked back. “Not arguing, kid.”

  The di’Taykan were known as the most sexually indiscriminating species in known space, but tossing innuendo at Nat Forester put them above and beyond. Cho trusted Nat with his life, but he’d fuk Huirre first. And given that Huirre had been involved with a cartel that provided Human body parts to Krai kitchens, that was saying something.

  “That’s not so much tight as wall to fukking wall,” Nat snorted, transferring her attention from Almon’s screen to her own. “Crowded enough we’ll have to use the eye for first sort.” She called up the controls on her slate one-handed, then ran the hand back through short gray hair. “Eye gives me fukking vertigo. Let’s just hope I don’t puke.”

  “Don’t,” Cho told her, his own slate ready.

  “Yes, sir, Cap. Because my stomach always does what you tell it.”

  It was a good prize, Cho acknowledged as he guided the remote camera around and through what were clearly parts retrieved from a single destroyed battle cruiser. Looked like they’d scored some of the Marine package, too, he realized as the eye picked out the crest of the Corps on a . . .

  “Holy fukking shit.”

  “Cap?”

  He fed her slate the coordinates without speaking.

  “Holy fukking shit,” she agreed a moment later. “Now that’s worth puking over.”

  They’d scored a Marine armory. An undamaged Marine Corps armory. A small fortune in weapons if he decided to sell them. A way to change the future if he didn’t.

  The seals were solid and . . .

  ... had been oversealed by one of the dead CSOs.

  If he wanted to get the armory open without blowing it and everything around it to hell and gone, he needed another CSO. Alive this time.

  “Promise, you are cleared at vector twenty-four point seven for two hundred kilometers. Returning computer control in three, two, one.”

  “Return acknowledged, Paradise Station.” Craig ran both hands along the edge of his board, the movement not quite a caress. While he understood why the station controlled all approaches and departures—the unforgiving nature of vacuum made accidents usually fatal and always expensive—it wasn’t required that he actually like being forced to sit as a passenger in his own ship. So he didn’t. But he sure as hell liked getting his lady back.

  “All right, you said you’d tell me when we were in space.” His poor old pilot’s chair dipped as Torin settled enough weight to make a point across the top. “We’re in space. Spill.”

  Torin hadn’t been happy about being kept in the dark, but she hadn’t done anything about it either, and Craig knew that represented a huge leap in trust for them. Torin didn’t like not knowing things.

  “We’ve seen your family,” he told her, leaning back and looking up. “I figured that now we could lob in and see mine.”

  She frowned. “Your parents died thirteen years ago, and you haven’t seen your cousin Joe for nearly six.”

  “You fossicked through my records, then.”

  Torin spun the chair around and straddled his lap. The chair complained again, and Craig told it silently to shut up as he slid his hands up the curve of her hips to settle around her waist. At 1.8 meters with a fighter’s muscle, Torin wasn’t light, but he knew for a fact the chair could hold them both . . . while moving a lot more vigorously.

  “I checked after I joined you here, on the Promise,” she said. “Not before.”

  So her research had no influence on her joining him. He appreciated that she’d decided with her heart and not her head. “You could have asked.”

  “You never spoke of them and, just in case . . .” She waved a hand, the gesture taking in the bunk, the half-circle table, the two chairs, and closed hatch to the head. “. . . we don’t have a lot of room for touchy subjects.”

  “’S truth. But unless we make one hell of a find—working tech say—even adding another three square meters’ll cost more than we can afford this year.” They’d used a chunk of Torin’s final payment from the Corps to put in a new converter. As long as they could find ice—and if they couldn’t find ice, he was in the wrong business—they could replenish both water and oxygen significantly faster than two people could use it. That and the upgraded CO2 scrubbers went a long way toward removing any residual dread of sharing the limited resources of a small ship with another person.

  With Torin anyway.

  “We were talking about your family.” She rocked her hips forward, and his eyes rolled back. Torin had relaxed the moment the air lock telltales had gone red and they were clear of Paradise and her family. When she got like this, it was hard to remember she knew twenty-five ways to kill a man with her bare hands. “Where are we going?”

  “Salvage station.”

  She stopped moving. Craig made an inarticulate protest.

  “They actually exist?”

  “Seventy-two-hour fold and we’ll rock up. You can see for yourself.”

  “And they’re safe?”

  He laughed at that. The myths about salvage stations usually included the word deathtrap in the description. “For fuksake, Torin, you were a Marine!”

  “And contrary to popular opin
ion, gunnery sergeants can’t breathe vacuum.”

  “Trust me, if there’s one thing a salvage operator understands, given how much time we spend suited up, it’s not breathing vacuum. Now then,” reaching up, he cupped the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, “you could keep working on that twenty-sixth way to kill a man. Seems I’m not dead yet.”

  “It does not look cobbled together,” Craig muttered. “It looks ...”

  Torin waited while Craig frowned out at the station they were approaching, obviously searching for the right response to her initial reaction. Which had been, all things considered, relatively mild.

  “All right, fine,” he surrendered, “you win. It looks cobbled together. But give it a fair go. People are raising families in there.”

  “Families?” Torin leaned forward and took another look at the tangled mass of habitats referred to as Salvage Station 24. “In that?” It was hard to pick out details given the glare off the hectares of deployed solar sails, but she was certain she could see one of the H’san’s ceramic pods cozied up next to a piece of a decommissioned Navy cruiser, as well as half a dozen Marine packages. Tucked up against it, in no discernible pattern, she could see a dozen ships the Promise’s size or a very little larger. Apparently, salvage operators didn’t believe in docking arms on their stations.

  A direct hit by the enemy would turn ninety percent of this particular station back into the scrap it had started as.

  “Not at war,” she reminded herself. “Not anymore.” Then she added aloud, “Shouldn’t you let them know we’re on our way in?”

  “They know.”

  Eyes narrowed, Torin studied the board. There’d never been any question that Craig would teach her to both fly and repair the ship—she’d spent most of her previous career working to keep the Marines under her alive and now all that training and experience had been refocused on the Promise and her captain—but she’d been infantry and that meant starting essentially from scratch.

  “Give me a large group of heavily armed people and I’ll make it do whatever you want, but this ..” Blowing out a deep breath, she’d shaken her head as she tried to make sense of the display. “I’m neither a pilot nor an engineer.”

  “You’ll dux it out. This is easier than dealing with a large group of people.”

  “Maybe for you.”

  Definitely for him. Torin sectioned the board but still couldn’t find a data stream that suggested the Promise was in communication with the station. “I don’t see it,” she admitted at last.

  “They pinged us 100 kliks out and got the codes.”

  She stopped staring at the board and turned to stare at him. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And docking?”

  “I’ll bring her in alongside a free nipple and we’ll grapple in. Use the universal hookup if there’s no match.”

  “Well, that’s very . . .” Torin considered and discarded a few words. “. . . independent.”

  Craig grinned at her. “You’re swearing inside, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all. Watch where you’re going.” She sat back and rested her hands on her thighs, watching so that her fingers didn’t curl into fists. “I spent my entire career being carted around by the Navy, depending on their engineers to do the math right. This is just a difference in scale.”

  Craig’s brows rose as he micro-fired a forward thruster.

  “A big difference,” Torin admitted.

  They rose a bit higher.

  “Fine. I’m swearing a little. There’s a reason docking computers are the default.”

  “No worries, I can do anything my computer can. Although in some cases it may take me a little longer,” he added quickly as Torin opened her mouth.

  As she hadn’t decided if she appreciated or was appalled by the sentiment, Torin let that stand. “So who’s in charge here?”

  The corner of his mouth that she could see, twitched. “Group consensus as needed.”

  “So, essentially, no one. Shoot me now.” After watching mismatched pieces go by for a while, and watching Craig’s brows dip closer to the bridge of his nose, she asked, “What happens if there isn’t a free lock?”

  “There’s always a free lock,” he muttered. Promise twitched as he gave the upper aft thrusters a bit of juice. “But it looks like we’ll have to hook in a little far from where I usually dock.”

  “And that means? Other than the obvious?”

  “We’re going to need a native guide once we get inside.”

  “Craig! Hombre! Empezabamos a pensar que no quisiste que los de mas te ven con nosotros, you son of a bitch!”

  Torin moved back half a step as a tall man with four-centimeter dreads and three white stars tattooed on his left cheek swept Craig up into a hug that looked painful. She didn’t recognize the language—although it sounded Human—and she didn’t know their relationship—although since no one had started throwing punches, she assumed they were at least friends. It seemed safest to give herself some maneuvering room.

  “Pedro!” Craig locked his arms around the other man and lifted him off his feet. “Too long, mate! Too long!”

  “Had to let the bruises fade,” Pedro snickered as they released each other at exactly the same time. He leaned out around Craig’s shoulders. “And you must be Torin.”

  She nodded, expression neutral. He’d had to have spent the last year without a comm hookup of any kind not to recognize her face. The vid Presit a Tur durValintrisy had shot of her conversation with the polynumerous, shape-shifting, organic plastic alien hive mind who’d been responsible for a war that had taken millions, if not hundreds of millions of lives had been played 28/10 on some stations.

  Pedro grinned at her. “All that publicity and you couldn’t do any better than this asshole?”

  Craig dodged the punch aimed at his arm. “Torin Kerr, meet Pedro Buckner. Best mate I ever made.”

  He wanted them to like each other; she could hear it in his voice. That meant he wasn’t bothering to hide it since he had one of the most unreadable poker faces/voices she’d ever played against. Which meant it was important to him. Torin locked eyes with Pedro and held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  To her surprise—because he in no way telegraphed the move—he grabbed it and pulled her into a hug. “I, too, have spent time locked into a small ship with that man. You have my sympathy, chica.”

  Torin had no real problem with physical greetings from vetted sources, so she hugged him back and only barely stopped herself from turning it into a pissing contest like the one he’d had with Craig.

  Who was smiling when they parted like he’d known how close it had come.

  And, of course, he had.

  She was weighing a couple of responses when the communications implant in her jaw pinged and she tongued it without thinking.

  *Salvage Station 24 requests access codes.*

  “You can tell it to piss up a rope,” Pedro told her, as she frowned. He’d probably recognized the common expression of someone listening to a voice in their head. “But if we lose hull integrity, responses are faster if the OS can coordinate the implanted beyond the emergency frequency.” He tapped his jaw.

  According to Craig, many CSOs got basic implants the moment they could afford it. Torin had assumed it was to remain in contact with their ships while loading cargo but, as all Hazardous Environment suits had comm units, it now seemed more likely it was for the times they were unsuited. When she glanced over at him, Craig nodded. Since Craig had refused to allow the Berganitan access to either his implant or his ship while on the Navy battleship, that said something.

  Mostly about Craig.

  Torin tongued in her codes. It bothered her more to be unconnected. Being able to instantly reach the station sysop could mean the difference between trying to breathe vacuum and not. The construction of this particular station only reinforced that belief.

  The inside of the station was as much of a rab
bit warren as it looked to be from the outside. No point in actually making that observation aloud, though; the odds were good neither man knew what a rabbit was. Falling into step behind Pedro, Torin could see wear—everything from scuff marks to hard use—but no oxidizations. She was encouraged by the lack of actual decay but would have liked to have the scuff marks dealt with. Polishing made an excellent punishment for minor disciplinary . . .

  Shaking her head, she dragged her finger in and out of a dent. Not her problem anymore. Sometimes, she forgot.

  Creating a mental map of the path back to the Promise missed being the most difficult bit of orienteering she’d ever done only because no one was shooting at her.

  The familiar smell of a few too many people for the air scrubbers ghosted along beside them, seasoned by something enough like curry to make her stomach growl. Their path seemed to be leading them toward the center of the station and although she could hear people—Krai and Human definitely, di’Taykan and Katrien probably—they didn’t actually run into anyone.

  Given the number of ships attached to the station, that seemed strange.

  “What’s up with the ghost ship effect?” Apparently Craig thought so too.

  “Jan and Sirin were supposed to be in four days ago,” Pedro explained, ducking as he stepped through an interior hatch. “Got cut off in the middle of a transmission. Brian Larson—you remember him, damn near lost his fukking arm when a tangle blew—he’s heading out to check their last coordinates. Chloe Badawi’s checking out the other end of their intended Susumi fold, and most folk are sticking pretty close to home until word comes in.”

  “Cut off in the middle of a transmission,” Craig repeated, touching the tips of his fingers to the gray plastic hatch numbers as he followed. “Mechanical problems?”

  Pedro snorted. “On Jan’s ship? I don’t think so. Jan considered her ship a part of her body.” He tossed the information in Torin’s direction. “No way it would have the kind of mechanical problems that’d keep them from getting a message out for four days. Wouldn’t happen. Just, no. And,” he added darkly, “Sirin said they’d picked up a maker.”