The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  “You three shouldn’t have to kill anyone,” Torin told them flatly. Ceelin had found her the original schematics of Vrijheid Station. They’d use Susumi time to commit as much of them to memory as possible. “If there’s any killing to be done, I’ll be doing it.”

  The other three exchanged a glance that held a whole conversation.

  Werst gave it a voice. “We’ve got your six, Gunny.”

  “Why?” She hadn’t planned on asking, but now it was out there. “You had lives and now . . .”

  “I wouldn’t say we had lives.” Mashona swung her legs off the bunk and sat up. “We were all kind of drifting. We’re used to being a part of something bigger, you know, and not having that anymore was . . . Well, it wasn’t. I guess what I’m trying to say is you give us ...” Mashona looked at Ressk. Ressk looked at Werst. Werst half shrugged, making the usual Krai cock-up of the movement. “. . . grounding. Direction.”

  But Torin had heard, Something to believe in . . . in the pause.

  “It’s difficult to make plans until we know what’s actually in the locker,” Big Bill said thoughtfully, indicating that Cho should sit. “But in order to expedite the eventual arming of the free merchants, I’ve made a list.” He slid a piece of paper across the desk.

  “A list?” Visitors to Big Bill’s office deep in the center sphere of the station sat in chairs that were both closer to the ground than Big Bill’s own and deliberately uncomfortable. Already fuming at being summoned like an erring ensign called before the officer of the watch, this lack of subtlety pushed Cho’s mood further into the black, and he fought to keep his expression neutral.

  “A list of who’ll be willing to pay top dollar and potentially for what; where what is based on the content of the armories my boys remember from while they were in.”

  The Grr brothers had been in the Corps. Cho couldn’t say he was surprised. “I’ve seen your type before, boy. You wanted Recon or Ranger, but you were too crazy even for those crazy fukkers.” Page’s voice in memory. “No one tried to convince you too hard to stay, after your first contract ran out, did they, boy? No, it was: so long, Private, have a nice life. Hell, have a shitty life, just have it away from us.”

  He wondered if that was where they’d met, brought together by sanctioned violence. Their own brutal tendencies honed and refined.

  Well, as refined as a fondness for eating people alive got.

  Rather than think about the screaming, Cho picked up the list. Big Bill was a manipulative son of a bitch but vested self-interest would see to it that Cho got the best price for his weapons. He attempted to think of the list as helpful instead of as an attempt to wrest away control. A really fukking annoying attempt. He frowned down at it.

  “You can’t hack paper,” Big Bill told him, misinterpreting the frown. “Some smartass will find a way into the tightest system but that right there, you need eyeballs for that and eyeballs can be controlled. You remember not to leave it lying around where any idiot can read it, and it’s about as secure as it gets. Helps, of course, that no one expects anything of import to be on paper these days. How much longer to get through the seals?”

  Cho recognized the sudden change of subject as an attempt to throw him off his game. Yeah, like he’d let his guard down that much around a power-crazy fuk like Big Bill. “Ryder, the salvage op, is back at work.”

  “Good.”

  “Doc says his brain got a bit fried by the tasik when we brought him in.”

  “Doc would know.” Even Big Bill was . . . maybe not cautious but definitely aware around Doc.

  “It’s slowed him down some,” Cho continued, “but he’s functional, and Nadayki reports they’re making progress.” Nadayki had reported nothing of the sort, but Cho had no intention of showing weakness of any kind. Even secondhand.

  “Again, good.” Big Bill’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. Didn’t even reach his cheeks. Or any other body part. “But I asked you, how long?”

  “No way of knowing.”

  “I see. As we have no idea what’s in the armory, we have no idea how much you’ll be paying me for the use of that storage pod. We don’t know the specifics of my fifteen percent,” he expanded when Cho frowned. “Given that, I’d like to know how long you plan on taking advantage of my generosity.”

  Slouching back in the chair, Cho hoped he looked like he didn’t give a H’san’s ass about eye lines or the unfortunate fact that his own ass was going numb. “Allowing me to use that pod is you minimizing the risk of blowing a hole in your station while still maintaining a certain amount of control over the contents of an armory you have no responsibility for. Length of time spent is irrelevant.”

  Big Bill stared across the deck at him, like he was actually seeing him for the first time in this conversation. “That’s a valid point.”

  He made it sound like it was first valid point Cho had ever made in his hearing.

  “Keep me informed.” Eyes narrowed, Big Bill nodded toward the piece of paper. “Take the list with you.”

  Only a suicidal idiot would mistake that for anything but a dismissal.

  By the time Cho had heaved himself up onto his feet, Big Bill had a channel open to what sounded like one of the shops in the Hub, enquiring about last quarter’s drop in profits, and therefore a drop in his fifteen percent. As far as he was concerned, Cho had already left the room.

  In the outer office the Grr brothers lay tangled together on a leather sofa, drinking sah and watching news vids, the big screen split into the top four networks. They’d been watching news vids when Cho went in to talk to Big Bill. And sure, he hadn’t been in there long, but they’d been watching news vids every time he’d been called to the inner sanctum.

  Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been a cooking show.

  No surprise the little freaks didn’t watch porn like normal people.

  Craig could see that as far as di’Taykan went, Nadayki was a lime-green geek-and-a-half, but he was still a di’Taykan and di’Taykan were hardwired to default to sex. Sex seemed to be an obvious tactic to delay the opening of the seal, with the potential to be a repeat performer. As his stomach had steadied and the red-hot spikes were not currently being driven into his temples, Craig figured it made sense to get the initial encounter out of the way

  “The thing with CSO codes,” he said, looking up from his slate, “is that they’re hard to put in and even harder to take out.”

  “Unless you know the sequence,” Nadayki snorted, eyes locked on his screen, ignoring the potential for innuendo.

  Craig fired off a second attempt. “Give us time and we’ll get it off.”

  “Fukking right. There’s no way some stupid scavenger is going to create a seal I can’t break.”

  Any other di’Taykan would have made a proposition and started the foreplay by now. Raising his assessment of the kid to a geek-and-three-quarters, Craig upped his game.

  The seal had been positioned in vacuum, which put it at an idiotically awkward angle with gravity applied. Upper body bent at about forty-five degrees, with the kid standing so close the movement of his hair kept Craig thinking of spiders and slapping at the back of his neck, it was easy enough to brush his ass to Nadayki’s groin with every position shift.

  And yeah, they still hadn’t talked about where they stood with di’Taykan before the Heart of Stone had blown their lives apart, but Craig knew where Torin stood as far as staying alive went. She’d expect him to do what he had to. So, when Nadayki finally got with the program—and seriously, he had never expected to use the word finally when it came to a di’Taykan and sex—Craig responded with, if not enthusiasm, at least interest. First chance he got, he dialed the kid’s masker back a couple of levels and enthusiasm became moot.

  Then the kid decided to prove he could evoke the same response without the pheromone boost and Craig took back every disparaging thing he’d ever thought about geeks.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Nadayki
muttered in Taykan against wet skin—maybe a description of the specific act or maybe bitching about the interruption, Craig had no idea and really, really didn’t care—but kept going until Cho grabbed a handful of hair and yanked him back.

  “No gods damned fukking on my time! I catch you again, and I’ll have Doc cut your damned kayti off. And then I’ll have Doc cut his off ...” Half a dozen lime-green hairs floated to the floor as Cho released his hold and jabbed a finger toward Craig. “. . . and fukking feed it to you. Put your damned clothes on and get back to work!”

  Craig had hoped Nadayki would argue, but the mention of Doc acted like a cold shower, and the kid complied without protest, his eyes pale, one hand rubbing at the side of his head. Di’Taykan hair wasn’t actually hair. It was part of their sensory system, and losing some of it must’ve hurt like hell. Given three dead on the Prime Progenitor’s lawn, Craig couldn’t bring himself to care. Still . . . “You couldn’t have taken another fifteen minutes to show up?” he grumbled, shooting the captain a disgruntled glare as he shrugged back into his overalls.

  “You can fuk on your own time, Ryder,” Cho snarled. “And your time is mine until that armory is open.” He jerked his slate off his belt. “Huirre, get down to the locker.”

  “Now, Captain?”

  “Yes, now!” Cho smiled unpleasantly. He jabbed a finger into Craig’s chest. “I am warning you, do not fuk around on me. You forget why you’re here while Huirre’s watching and I’ll let him pick a part to snack on.” The jab became a shove.

  Fingers curling into fists, Craig wondered how long it would delay things if he took a swing at the captain. Given the way he felt, he’d get the shit kicked out of him in any fight, but, hell, as long as he was alive when Torin found him, that only mattered in the short term.

  Something in Cho’s eyes stopped him. Something that said go too far and you’ll be out the air lock wearing bruises and fuk all else.

  Because the trick was to stay alive until Torin found him.

  A second shove, to prove Craig wouldn’t respond, then Cho backed up snarling, “Now, get back to work before I start carving bits off myself!”

  “This is all your fault,” Nadayki muttered sullenly as they bent over the seal again.

  True enough. “Takes two to tango, kid.”

  “What the fuk is a tango? And stop calling me kid!”

  “What if Presit’s little protégé found the wrong Vrijheid Station,” Mashona asked, saving one of Ceelin’s games as the Second Star began her ten count before emerging into normal space.

  “How many Vrijheid Stations that supposedly took a dirt dive during the war could there be?” Werst demanded from the second chair.

  Mashona shrugged. “Space is big.”

  The stars reappeared.

  “Ceelin found only one Vrijheid Station, and full disclosure laws give Presit access to government databases.” Torin lifted her hands up off the control panel and started working the stiffness out of the fingers.

  “She could be sending us on a fool’s errand while she heads in to get the story,” Ressk said thoughtfully, rubbing a thumb along the edge of his slate. “I mean, she said she knew you weren’t going to let her join us. She could’ve set up equations to a different station and then faked her protests.”

  Werst shook his head. “You always this paranoid?”

  He glanced over at Torin. “Just trying to cover all bases.”

  In the old days, being paranoid was a part of Torin’s job. Now . . . “I trust her. I’m not one hundred percent positive she wouldn’t screw me over, but she’d never risk Craig.”

  Mashona’s brows rose and fell in exaggerated lechery. “You need to worry about her making moves on your man, Gunny?”

  “Not everything crosses species lines, Mashona, di’Taykan excepted.” Her response to Mashona’s joking almost sounded normal. Under the circumstances, it was the best she could do.

  “Gunny . . .”

  Grateful for something to focus on, she gave Werst her full attention.

  “At least some of the cark in this station will know you from Presit’s vids.”

  “I’m counting on it. Me, and the three of you.”

  “Yeah.” His nose ridges flared. “And they’ll know Craig from that last vid.”

  “No, probably not. Like Presit said, he was behind the camera about ninety-five percent of the time, and when he wasn’t, Presit was all but shooting up his nose. He had the beard then, and the edits ...” Under the old adage of know thy enemy, she’d seen all the vids once. “. . . focus exclusively on the gray running out of his eyes.” Sometimes she dreamed about the way the polynumerous polyhydroxide alcoholyde shape-shifting molecular fukwads had felt, slightly cooler than body temperature as they oozed out of her tear ducts. She’d wake up furious and have to leave the bunk before she took it out on Craig. Sometimes she wondered if it had felt the same to him, if he’d felt the same about it. After she got him back, she’d ask. Add it to the list of all the things they’d intended to talk about later. No more waiting for later. “Odds are good no one looked away from the emerging aliens long enough to identify him and, under personal privacy laws . . .” Which did not extend to members of the military under the full disclosure act. “. . . he was never identified by name.”

  “And Nat, the woman who . . .”

  “The woman off the Heart who set us up for the ambush that took Craig,” Torin growled. “I remember her.”

  “She saw you.”

  “Only for a minute, and she was paying no attention to me. Had her eyes on the game. The man who came into the bar with her, he might be a problem.”

  ‘The guy with the crazy eyes,” Mashona put in.

  “Yeah, him. But I’m not sure he saw me as an actual person—he threat assessed, he moved on. Who’d expect to see Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr on a half-finished OutSector station? I suspect that, as much as economic factors, was why Craig chose it. Here, at Vrijheid, who we are becomes the larger part of our reason for being here and being that obvious will act like camouflage; all they’ll see is the obvious—not the people behind it and certainly not a specific person glimpsed for a few seconds in another part of space.”

  The three members of her assault team stared at her for a long moment. Finally, Ressk said, “Maybe you could change your hair?”

  Torin closed her fingers around the plastic vertical that held the padded arm to the pilot’s chair. “The only reason I’d go anywhere near that man is if he ends up between me and Craig. Otherwise, I’ll avoid him. It’s a good-sized station, I’m willing to play the odds.”

  “Make your bet, then, Gunny. Long-range sensors just picked up a station.” Werst swept his palm across the board. “No details, though.”

  “Distance?” Mashona asked.

  “If we can ping them, distance doesn’t matter. Not everyone sends out a tourist brochure, but, if nothing else, we should be receiving information about docking and fees. And what’s more, I’m reading ships, but their registries aren’t coming up. There’s no way to tell if the Heart of Stone is there.”

  “It’s there.” The Heart was there, and Craig was there. Because they had to be.

  “If we can ping them . . .” Mashona began.

  “They can ping us.” Werst agreed.

  “And they’ll get what I want them to,” Ressk said, smiling broadly. “Which is the same as what they’re giving out.”

  “I wonder how close they’ll let us get?”

  They were still moving fast, riding the exit surge, maintaining their emergent speed until they knew where they were going.

  “No point in talking to us until they can stop us,” Werst pointed out, “and unless they’ve got some big fukking guns, we need to be a little closer for . . .”

  “Hi there.” The young di’Taykan male on the screen had hair so light a blue it was nearly white and his pale eyes looked paler still given the amount of black they were lined with. Makeup had turned his skin the same shade as
his hair—Torin assumed it was makeup—and he had two black rings piercing the center of his lower lip. “I’m pulling sweet fuk all off your signal, so you’ve got three minutes to make your case before I blow you to kingdom come. Which, by the way, is not an actual place but an oldEarth term meaning up. So, three minutes before I blow you up.”

  Torin centered herself on the screen. “I heard Vrijheid Station was a refuge from government bullshit.”

  “Really.” He leaned a little closer to the pickup and grinned. Torin had never see a di’Taykan with dimples. “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Krai named Firrg.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I had my foot on her throat at the time.”

  “Well, that endears you to me, trin, but there’s . . .” His hair stilled and he frowned. “Wait, do I know you?”

  Torin smiled.

  “Fuk me. I do know you. You’re that gunnery sergeant who had the little gray aliens in your brain and then got captured and found out the little gray aliens were in the plastic and actually making us all run around like we were neivins or something. I saw the vids. You were like crazy kick ass. Seriously, fuk me.”

  “Little hard from way out here.”

  “Right.” His hair flipped forward over his face, then back—like his whole expression had blinked. “Okay, there’s a lock free on the delta arm. You’re going to have to give control over to the docking computer if you want to come any closer. We can’t risk you ramming the station.”

  “That happens a lot?”

  “Hasn’t yet. But if it did, Big Bill would fukking space me.”

  “How do I know I’ll get control back?”

  “We start randomly taking ships over and it’s bad for business, isn’t it? Big Bill doesn’t like things being bad for business. You leave here in good standing, and you get control back about when you would be leaving any station. Your standing ends up being not so good, well, you don’t leave and you don’t actually care about who’s flying your ship.” He glanced down at his screens. “Okay, really, you have to give control over now or you’re fukked. And not in a fun I think you’re fukking amazing because you did that whole plastic alien thing in your underwear kind of way.”