The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  “You are probably needing to be getting the captain alone,” Presit scoffed. “You are not able to guarantee anyone else are having the information you need.”

  “Then I’ll get the captain.”

  “And it being are just that easy for you?”

  Torin pulled up the charts with the Susumi equations. Remembered Craig bitching about her basic level math. “I’m motivated.”

  SIX

  “SO, I ARE THINKING THAT while we are being trapped together in Susumi space and are having time, you should be filling me in on the Silsviss.”

  Stretched out on the bunk, replaying her last moments with Craig over and over, Torin had been paying next to no attention to Presit’s background babble, but that got her attention. “I should fill you in on the Silsviss? Where the hell did that come from?”

  “If a large, aggressive, reptilian species are joining the Confederation ...” One foot pressed against the edge of the control panel, Presit rocked the pilot’s chair back and forth. Unlike the chair in the Promise, the pivot point was mercifully silent. “. . . I are thinking smaller mammalian species are wanting to know about it.”

  She had a point, Torin acknowledged. On Silsviss, small mammalian species were considered snacks. “Well, you’re out of luck because I can’t talk about them.”

  “Can’t or won’t.”

  “Both.” Sitting up, Torin scraped a clump of silver-tipped fur off the blanket and wondered just why she’d agreed to have Presit come along. They’d established beyond a doubt that the reporter was Craig’s friend, but she wasn’t Torin’s. No more than Torin was hers.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Faulty logic from a military point of view, where nothing prevented the enemy of an enemy from also being an enemy, but Torin supposed it worked in this instance. Craig had given them common ground; perhaps it was time to move beyond that and establish a connection of their own.

  One of the basic tenets of the Corps was that no Marine got left behind, that in the midst of violence and death, in spite of rank or lack of rank or species or gender, they were all in it together. For whatever reason, Presit had stepped up when no one else had.

  “There are being stories about Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr and the Silsviss. I are thinking you are wanting to set the record straight. Ceelin are just sleeping. He could be setting up ...”

  “No. I was senior NCO of the platoon accompanying the first lot of diplomats,” Torin told her, rolling the fur into a tight silver cylinder. “That’s all.”

  Presit snorted. “That are not what the rumors are saying. I are knowing what you are doing on Big Yellow, and I are knowing what you are doing on Crucible, and I are knowing what you are doing on the aliens’ prison planet, so, given what I are knowing, I are wondering if there are being any truth to those rumors.”

  “Exaggerations . . .”

  “I are not doubting that,” Presit snorted. “But I are also not doubting there are being truths at their core and a story people are wanting to hear.”

  “It’s not a story I can tell.” It had been a military exercise, and for all the law said full disclosure to the press, the brass had kept the final facts need to know only. As Presit opened her mouth, Torin held up a hand. “But when I can tell it, I’ll tell it to you. Okay?”

  The lights were low enough that Presit hadn’t put on her glasses, but her eyes were as unreadable as the mirrored lenses would have been. After a long moment she nodded, fluffed her ruff with her claws, and said, “Okay.”

  Progress. As her head began to tip forward of its own volition, Torin stretched back out on the bunk. The random moments of weakness came less frequently but were still a disturbing reminder that she wasn’t yet at a hundred percent. The one good thing about time wasted in Susumi was that it gave her time to finish healing.

  “I are hating this.”

  Pedro, or a member of his family, had scratched Sonrisa de señora Luck sobre nosotros in the painted metal above the bunk. “You hate what?”

  “Waiting. We are having gone through the information the CSOs are sending us. We are having researched the Prospect Processing Station, not that there are being much available information to research. We are having decided I are being distraction while you are being muscle.”

  It hadn’t so much been a decision, Torin amended slightly, as it had been the only possible division of labor.

  “Now we are having nothing to do. Unless you are telling . . .”

  “No.” The plastic trim around the small light over the bunk still had no reaction to her touch. She closed her eyes. “Sleeping now.”

  “I are knowing why you are sleeping!”

  “Still healing. Go talk to Ceelin.”

  “Oh, no. I are knowing that you are trying to be ignoring me ...”

  Torin had spent a high percentage of her adult life sleeping in war zones and not even Presit could match an artillery barrage for either volume or duration. Although she tried.

  The computer countdown ended and Craig felt the ship’s vibration change as they came out of Susumi space. With his last meal sitting like salvage in his stomach, he prayed to the gods of his childhood that with him and his codes on board, the ship had gone to ground rather than gone hunting for new prey. If he were captain and he had a crewmember he didn’t trust and had just picked up a new captive he needed to brutalize, he’d put that crewmember back in the room with the chair. Only, this time, the new crewmember would be the one standing. And that new crewmember would cross a line they couldn’t cross back or they’d take a short walk out the air lock. Craig liked to think he knew what his choice would be, but he was honest enough with himself to realize it wasn’t something he could know until he actually had to make the decision.

  Kill or die.

  Sounded like the same choice Torin had made for years.

  Close, but not quite.

  The locked door said Cho didn’t trust him. That maybe Cho figured injuries be damned, if let loose, Craig would overpower the entire crew and fly the ship to the nearest Warden’s office. Torin might—fuk it, Torin would—but he wasn’t Torin.

  But if Cho thought three days of minimal contact would soften him up, the captain knew sweet fuk all about how salvage operators worked. Before Torin, Craig’s default had been two or three tendays with no one to talk to but Promise and the space between the stars.

  Doc had brought him a pair of overalls on his last visit in to check his knee. They stank of di’Taykan and Craig reacted to them just being in the room.

  “You wouldn’t fit into mine or Nat’s or the captain’s,” Doc had growled, his hands gentler on the bruised flesh than his voice. “You’re too damned tall. Rest of the crew’s Krai or di’Taykan. You do the math.”

  Sure, might have been as simple as that.

  Might have been Almon continuing to fuk with him.

  Either way, he hadn’t put them on. Not like he was packing anything the crew hadn’t seen. Nat’s casual lechery as she delivered his food—blatant enough to distract him as he ran his fingers over the gray plastic tray—made him reconsider; even the dubious shield of pheromone-drenched cloth became better than no shield at all.

  He rubbed his palms against the navy blue fabric stretched over his thighs.

  No point in counting his heartbeat to keep track of the time between emerging from Susumi and arriving at their final destination—distance between emergence and final destination depended on the equation used and the standard emergent point was ninety minutes out. Even if pirates refused to conform to standards, counting wouldn’t change a damned thing.

  Torin would probably count.

  Craig stretched out on the bunk, hands behind his head.

  Torin was a tad anal at times.

  He’d just close his eyes for a quick kip.

  He had no idea how much later the familiar soft bump of a ship making contact with a docking nipple woke him.

  Weird how the internal dampeners never seemed to compensate for that.
<
br />   They’d be coming for him soon.

  Prospect was a Krai colony planet, settled for barely two hundred years. The city clustered around the spaceport was a splash of light, but the rest of the land mass under the station’s geosynchronous orbit was dark, even though it was just past sunset in that hemisphere. Low population density explained part of it, the Krai’s preference for living in actual high forest canopy rather than high-tech imitations explained the rest.

  The planet’s Krai name was in a dialect Torin had never mastered although she was fluent enough in most to ensure the Krai who’d been under her command had assumed the worst. Her vocabulary in any dialect skewed toward profanity and comfort.

  “It are making a better impression if you are able to be throwing the species’ name in,” Presit admitted, fluffing out her ruff as Ceelin packed the brushes away. “But only if it are pronounced correctly, otherwise, stick to Federate. Prospect are being a perfectly fine name.”

  Prospect Station was not only the link between the planet and the rest of the Confederation but the ore processing center for the planet below.

  “Apparently, planets that are being capable of growing such enormous trees are being short of certain minerals. Who knew?” Presit’s tone suggested someone was an idiot.

  The ore processing made it a lot rougher place than most planets’ primary stations, which probably explained why Firrg and her crew thought it safe to hang around after unloading their stolen ore.

  As the station’s sysop brought them in, Torin examined the three other ships on the docking arm. The Dargonar was registered as a C Class cargo vessel the same as the Heart of Stone had been.

  “It are not looking like a dangerous pirate ship,” Ceelin noted, standing up on his toes to see out the port. “It are having no weapons. Not even as much as this ship.”

  “The weapons are preConfederation Krai,” Torin told him. “There . . .” She used a light pen to circle the forward guns. “There. There. And there for sure. People forget the Krai, like the Taykan, like Humans, were in space before the Confederation emissaries arrived and they took all their really dangerous toys with them.”

  “PreConfederation weapons are being antiques,” Presit scoffed.

  “Fine. Copies of preConfederation weapons.”

  “And you are just happening to be able to identify them?”

  “Me and a couple million other Marines. We don’t spend all our time dirtside shooting at things,” she added off Presit’s look.

  But all Presit said was, “Didn’t spend all your time.”

  Hard to remember given the assault she was planning.

  To Torin’s surprise, one of the other ships was Silsviss.

  Presit combed gleaming copper claws through her ruff. “I are maybe knowing they going to be here,” she admitted. “There are being small integration attempts before they are being given full citizenship where studies are being done on how they are dealing with other species off their planet as well as on. They are wanting to look into orbital smelting, and Prospect are small enough and isolated enough if it are all going wrong, damage should be at a minimum. I are hoping you are giving me enough background to be picking up the story.”

  “You have a story.”

  “Good thing,” the reporter snorted. “Because you are being no help at all.”

  Moments after the Second Star had attached to the docking nipple, Torin had the board shut down and the air lock sequence initiated.

  “I are needing to go out first,” Presit reminded her, digging a sharp elbow into Torin’s thigh. “I are the reason we are being here, remember?” She nodded toward Ceelin and the camera.

  Torin drew in a deep breath. “Almost an hour to get onto the Star. Ninety minutes to get far enough away from the salvage station to fold. Two hours from emergence to docking. Not counting time in Susumi, Craig’s been gone twenty hours.”

  “I know. But you are not helping him if station sysop are not agreeing you have a reason to be breathing their air. This are not a place anyone are going without a reason ...” Her muzzle wrinkled. “. . . or at all if possible, and your reason are likely to have someone calling the Wardens or have whoever are working here with Captain Firrg giving her warnings, so it are better if you are being invisible behind me.” The air lock telltales went green, and Presit settled her mirrored glasses on her muzzle. “Show time.”

  “You have got to be fukking kidding me.” One hand braced against the bulkhead to counteract the dizzy spells he was still having, Craig stared at the screen outside the cargo bay as the eye moved around the gray-green metal rectangle taking up most of the room. “That’s a weapons locker. A Marine Corps weapons locker.”

  A sealed Marine Corps weapons locker—double sealed, in fact with both the Corps’ seal and the CSO seal intact. That meant there were weapons inside. KC-7s at the very least, the chemical-powered, practically indestructible, primary weapon of the Corps. Primitive enough they couldn’t be neutralized at a distance the way more high-tech weapons could be and dangerous enough that even in spite of an interfering plastic molecular hive mind, the Corps had nearly fought the Primacy to a stalemate with them.

  Torin wasn’t big on war stories, but sometimes, lying with her head on his shoulder as the sweat dried and stuck them together, she’d sketch out what he knew were the bare bones of her life before he became a part of it. He’d seen her in action on Big Yellow. He’d seen what she survived on Crucible and the prison planet. He didn’t really want to know any more than what she was comfortable telling him. In fact, given how she’d looked the first time he’d seen her in the tank after Crucible, there were things about her previous life he wished he could forget.

  At least now he knew why Jan and Sirin had died trying to keep their salvage from the pirates. This could shift power in the whole sector, maybe far enough that other sectors could fall. Craig didn’t have Torin’s eye for ex-military, but of the members of the crew he’d met—where met included having the shit beat out of him by—he’d bet both Captain Cho and Doc had served. From a violent life to a violent life; no great stretch to assume more pirates would be ex-military than not.

  There went any hope that a high proportion of the people who’d end up with these weapons wouldn’t know how to use them.

  Torin had to find him fast; it was no longer just his life on the line.

  And fuk but the universe had a sick sense of humor. What kind of sick joke was it that pirates would happen on this particular cargo in the minimal amount of time between the sealing of it and sending the packet to register salvaged weapons with the military. It hadn’t been registered, that was for damned sure, or he wouldn’t be here because the Navy would. Torin’d call that kind of a fukked-up coincidence a reason to call in air support . . .

  Torin wouldn’t believe in that kind of a fukked-up coincidence.

  “You intercepted the registration packet.”

  Almon glanced up from the controls of the eye and smiled unpleasantly. “We did.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Surprise.” The di’Taykan moved closer. Craig gritted his teeth and ignored his body’s reaction. Even with Almon’s masker up to full, he’d taken such a hit of pheromone he’d be feeling the effects for days. Hopefully only days. “My thytrin,” Almon continued, voice dropping into a near growl, pale yellow eyes darkening as more light receptors opened, “the one you nearly killed, he can make a comm unit beg.”

  “Kinky. That why you’re here? Because your thytrin is more into machines than meat?” Craig blocked Almon’s blow. “I’m crew now. You don’t get to touch me.”

  “You don’t get it, do you, Ryder?” He was standing close enough now that the ends of his hair stroked Craig’s cheek. “You don’t get to touch me.”

  “Enough.” Cho’s voiced backed Almon all the way to the screen. “I need him able to think with something other than his dick.” The captain stopped just behind Craig’s left shoulder. “Can you crack it?”

&n
bsp; Craig had little doubt that if he said no he’d be out the air lock—probably in the kind of condition that would make a fast death in vacuum a gift. He rubbed at the small patch of stubble on the edge of his jaw. “My codes will get me into the guts of the seal. After that, it’s grunt work.” Sentient species were incapable of being completely random, a pattern always emerged. Find the pattern, work the code. Open the lock.

  “Once you’re in, we can hook up a slate and . . .”

  “No.” Craig wanted to smile but doubted smug satisfaction would go over well. “Hook in anything the seal reads as a random number generator, and you’ll fuse it. Usually, that’d mean hacking the seal off the salvage physically and ringing every bell in the yard when you tried to sell it. You . . . we,” he amended, “don’t have to worry about sales. We have another problem.” He tapped the screen. “Fusing the CSO seal will melt it into the Corps’ seal. The Corps’ seal will read that as an attempted forced entry and self-destruct.”

  “So when you say grunt work?” the captain growled.

  “We can use a slate to input, but what we input will have to be worked out the old-fashioned way.”

  “So why do we need him again?” Almon sneered.

  The captain raised an eyebrow that asked the same thing.

  “Without my codes, you’ll fuse the seal trying to get in.” Craig spread his hands. “Boom. And I have a better chance of recognizing the locking pattern than someone with no background in the way salvage operators do things. It’ll save some time.”

  “How much time?”

  “No idea. Faster with me than without me, that’s all I know.”

  Cho stared at him for a long moment. Craig tried to look like a man who didn’t want to be thrown out an air lock. Finally, the captain nodded. “Your slate stays with me. I’ll supply a scrubbed slate and you’ll be working with Nadayki ...”

  “Captain!”

  “And you can shut the fuk up about it.” Cho moved up into Almon’s space. “Ryder didn’t lure the kid into a dark alley and stick him for his beer money. Ryder fought back. Nadayki didn’t haul ass out of the way fast enough. End of discussion.”