The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  No doubt. No question.

  Absolute certainty.

  He needed to run. Run now.

  He couldn’t move, held in place by the awareness of his approaching death.

  Where the hell was Huirre? Huirre had the tasiks. Huirre should be here, beside him. He shouldn’t be standing alone, that’s why he had fukking crew!

  “Torin!”

  Ryder. Still closer to the hatch than the gunnery sergeant but quickly closing the distance between them. To Cho’s surprise, the gunnery sergeant jerked to a reluctant stop.

  Craig hadn’t expected Torin to stop. He’d hoped. If he’d had time, he’d have prayed, but he hadn’t expected it.

  When she turned, he wished he was closer. Wished he was far enough away he couldn’t see the look on her face.

  “Don’t.” No need for him to elaborate. They both knew what he meant.

  Torin spat a mouthful of blood out onto the deck. “He deserves . . .”

  “Not arguing.” Almost to her now, Craig cut her off. “But what he deserves and what you should do about it . . . Torin, it’s not who you are. It’s not what you are.”

  Her expression was pure Doc. Her mouth twisted into something that in no way resembled a smile. “I’ve killed before.”

  “I know.” Here and now, there were three bodies on the deck. Although he’d killed one of them and wasn’t going to think too hard about that until they’d come out the other side of a Susumi fold and were safely away. “But there’s a difference between killing and . . .” Fuk! He sketched meanings in the air. “. . . killing.”

  Torin knew what Craig meant. Probably better than he did. The differences between killing officers and murdering officers had come with Humans into space. Had come with the Krai and with the di’Taykan. Professionals recognized the difference.

  Cho was the latter.

  He’d used Doc, used the broken pieces of the man as a weapon.

  Cho had taken the chance Craig had offered, turned, ran for the Heart. Torin could order Ressk to secure the air lock. Hell, she could probably use the rage still sizzling under her skin and catch the son of a bitch before he reached the air lock. Make him pay for . . . for everything. For Sirin and Jan. For Sergeant Rogelio Page. For the destruction of the Promise.

  For Craig. For taking him. For everything that had happened to him.

  For Doc, when it came down to it.

  *Gunny!* Werst sounded like he’d been trying to get her attention for a while. *Ressk has control, but it won’t last. What do you want him to do?*

  That depended on what she was going to do, didn’t it?

  “. . . 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.

  All those years at war and she’d never hated the enemy. She’d done what she had to in order to complete the mission and get her people out alive. What she had to. Not what she wanted to. Not even what she thought she needed to.

  This wasn’t what she was. If she let rage make her into a weapon, however justified the rage, where would it stop? And, once over the line, how much easier the second time? And the time after that?

  How many times could she cross the line and still be able to cross back?

  How many times had Doc?

  Craig had been freed, but the armory was still in enemy hands.

  She had a mission to complete and people to get out alive.

  When she let the rage go, her knees nearly buckled.

  “Turn off the gravity.” Another mouthful of blood spat away from the implant. “Open the doors.”

  *Gunny, you’re not suited up. Neither of you.*

  Craig had reached her side. Torin sagged against him, breathing shallowly. “Give us three minutes . . .”

  “Five,” Craig corrected. And she remembered that Ressk had patched both implants into the ship’s signal.

  “Five,” she agreed. “If we can’t get suited up in five minutes, we deserve to blow out with the armory.”

  Cho reached the air lock.

  Torin’s good hand closed into a fist around a handful of Craig’s overalls. On their way to the lockers, she paused, reached down, and closed Doc’s eyes.

  In her experience, the dead did not look at peace. They looked dead.

  TWELVE

  “OUT OF MY WAY!”Cho pushed past Huirre and slammed both fists down against the air lock’s inner hatch. Once. Twice. “Get this thing open! Now!”

  “I’m trying, Captain!” He could hear the whine of excuses in Dysun’s voice. He should never have brought her and her thytrins on board. “But with it slaved to the outer hatch . . .”

  “I don’t fukking care! Get. It. Open!” He couldn’t hear anything from the ore docks. Not fighting. Not her boots against the deck coming closer.

  “You okay, Captain?”

  He turned on Huirre, pleased to see his nose ridges snap shut as he backed up. “Where the fuk were you?” he snarled.

  “She killed Doc! I wasn’t fukking facing her unarmed. I was going to bring you the tasik Doc dropped, but it wasn’t working. I tried to get it working.” Huirre glanced over his shoulder and pounded on the hatch, but Cho wasn’t falling for that we’re in this shit together crap.

  “Liar! Coward!”

  “You ran!” Huirre’s lips drew back off his teeth. He glanced back toward the outer hatch. “Is she coming after you? The gunnery sergeant?”

  “Shut up!” She wanted him dead. She was hurt, but that wouldn’t matter. People like her, people like Doc, they just kept coming. “Dysun! Every second I’m in here, you lose ten percent of your share!”

  The inner hatch opened.

  Yeah, that lit a fire under her ass. “Close everything and get to your board. You, too!” Cho turned far enough to see Huirre slinking out of the air lock. “And later, when this is over . . .” He layered enough menace into the pause to keep Huirre’s nose ridges closed, then he pivoted on one foot and ran for the control room. “Move, damn it!”

  Behind him, he heard Dysun ask about Doc.

  “Dead,” Huirre told her.

  Dead. Big Bill thought he was winning, but he was wrong. There was an oldEarth saying, the bigger they were, the harder they fell and every species Humans had run into since hauling their asses into space had a variation on it. These sorts of sayings became universal for a reason, and Cho was going to fukking prove it.

  Big Bill was going down!

  “Marines, we are leaving.” Arm pressed against the broken rib, Torin struggled to match Craig’s stride. He was making good time using the heel of his left foot, but pain of impact was easier to ignore than a potentially punctured lung.

  Not a competition, Torin reminded herself silently. It didn’t matter if Craig ended up carrying her the rest of the way to the lockers as long as they both got there while breathing remained an option. “Werst, take the Star out; rendezvous by the ore docks!”

  *She’s locked down, Gunny!*

  Of course she was. “Ressk, you said if you took her out of Vrijheid’s operating system, the station would kick her clear?”

  *Yeah, but when we detach from the station, proximity protocols will have the docking computer try and take control whether it has a record of us or not.*

  And that would give Big Bill control of the Star. “Can you lock it out?”

  *Not without closing down communications.*

  “What does . . . never mind.” Torin raised a hand Ressk couldn’t see. Explanations she wouldn’t understand were explanations she didn’t need to hear. “All right, shut down the comm. Then the gravity. Open the loading doors. Blow the Star free, then get in as close to the ore dock as you can. Mashona, get the grapples on the armory . . .” Mashona had never used a grapple gun, but she could blow the eye out of the Queen of Spades with anything else, so Torin had no concerns about her being able to fake it. “
. . . and shoot one our way. We’ll use it to get back to the lock.”

  “Roger, Gunny.*

  *Gunny,* Ressk broke in. “The Heart is armed.*

  “Mashona, you’re cleared to return fire.”

  *With the cutting tool, Gunny?*

  “No, open a window and throw empty beer pouches at them. Yes, with the cutting tool! It’s a just a bennie with delusions of grandeur.”

  *Roger, Gunny.*

  “All right, people, you know what you’re supposed to do. Get your thumbs out of your asses and do it!”

  *Meet you outside, Gunny.*

  Torin lost the ping of the implants going off-line in her labored breathing. Civilian life had left her appallingly out of shape, but she managed to sound almost normal when she said, “Looks like we’re on our own.”

  “About time,” Craig snorted as they limped to a stop at the lockers. “Cramps my style when the kids listen in.”

  “You have a style?” Torin reached past him for the latch, but he stopped her, fingers closing around her jaw.

  “Your head’s still bleeding.”

  “It’s a head wound. They do that.”

  “We need to . . .”

  “Rip a piece off my sleeve.”

  “What?”

  “We just need to stop it from dripping in my eye. Running out of time,” she added when Craig opened his mouth to protest.

  “Later,” he muttered, grabbing the edge of damaged sleeve and tearing a strip free.

  At this point, Torin figured later referred to enough that there was no time to expand on it. When Craig raised the fabric tentatively toward her face, she took it from him and pressed it down over the cut, the blood on the surrounding skin tacky enough to hold it in place.

  He rolled his eyes and yanked the locker open. “This one was Nadayki’s. This one . . . Doc’s.” His tone said he thought she’d have trouble wearing the latter suit.

  She felt closer to Doc than she had to anyone since Craig had been taken.

  “You’re too tall for Doc’s.” Torin yanked the suit out of the fill niche and let it pool to the deck, the torso held more or less upright by the tanks. “Fuk. My boots . . .” Bending was pretty much out of the question.

  Craig dropped to one knee and unfastened them. Torin resisted the urge to run her fingers through his hair.

  She had hold of the locker, mostly to help her stay standing, when the gravity cut out. Anchored, she folded her legs up and shoved them into the rising suit. Teeth clenched, she started to twist, but Craig’s hand crossed in front of hers, reached into the collar, and magged her boots to the deck. After that, it was as simple as getting into an HE suit with a cracked rib and four useless fingers.

  At least no one was shooting at her, which made suiting up significantly more fun than on three previous attempts.

  Just before she slid her good hand down the sleeve, she reached into the locker and touched the gray plastic suit mount. Her fingers brushed against Craig’s as he did the exact same thing.

  It felt like the first time she’d smiled in . . . several lifetimes.

  Given the smile, their teeth cracked when Craig leaned forward and kissed her.

  Emergency klaxons didn’t so much shatter the silence as bludgeon it flat.

  “Because I’m just that good,” Craig murmured as he pulled away.

  Torin bit her lip. Laughing now would shatter the tenuous grip she had on the gunnery sergeant, and her work wasn’t done.

  The crack of seals breaking, of atmosphere beginning to vent, caused a hindbrain response, but training kicked in before panic, and Torin had her helmet flipped up and sealed before the currents started pulling. Craig may have been born dirtside but he was station raised and had lived his life in space—odds were high he’d sealed his helmet even faster.

  The inside of Doc’s suit smelled like hartwood, a popular scent for men’s toiletries back home on Paradise. At one time or another, both Torin’s brothers had used it. She hadn’t smelled it on Doc when she’d killed him.

  The rush of escaping air had already begun to pull on the outside of the suit when Torin released one boot, twisted, bent her knee, and remagged it to the wall. It was a fight against the equalizing pressure to get the second up, but she managed. Body parallel to the deck, helmet pointed toward the opening doors, she turned her head to see Craig had assumed the same emergency position.

  The boots were designed to hold even against an atmospheric pressure of 1.06 kilograms per square centimeter suddenly leaving the station.

  Leg bones were not.

  The decompression doors were about five centimeters apart, and there was still enough atmosphere in the ore docks that the slam of the wrench across the break rang out loud enough to be heard in spite of the rush of air and helmets. Eight centimeters apart when the first of the Grr brothers hit, nine for the second, ten by the time enough bones had broken to fit them both through the space. When Doc hit a moment later, there was almost no delay—Human bones being so much easier to break than Krai.

  Torin felt the bulkhead shake as the armory slammed against the inside of the storage pod. Given that it was nearly as tall as the pod and taller than the door, it was, unfortunately, going nowhere without help.

  “Should we be worried about that?”

  It seemed Doc had been a little hard of hearing. Torin lowered the volume on his suit comm. “The ship it was on blew up around it. It should be able to survive this.”

  “Should?”

  The doors were at the two-meter mark, and most of the atmosphere had vented. Torin released her boots, used her hands to push off gently, folded her feet under her as she came up on the vertical, and used her legs to shoot toward the ceiling and the cargo runners.

  Craig was no more than a second behind her.

  Unable to get to them from within, Big Bill would send ships. That was a given. He wouldn’t let the armory go without a fight. What was also a given was that venting the volume of atmosphere in the ore dock was enough to force the station computers to make orbital corrections. While that was happening, the docking computer would lock down the clamps to minimize the variables. They didn’t have much time; hopefully, they had enough.

  Reaching the cluster of cables, Torin grabbed one and turned so her boots hit the ceiling. “Where the hell are the controls?”

  “Here.” Craig flipped the ten-centimeter disk on the end of a cable so Torin could see the controls on its top. “There’s a manual fail-safe on each cable in case something takes out the central controls.”

  There was—had been—a war going on. Stations were prime targets.

  “Flick the release,” he continued, adding action to words, “Then push off toward the pod. The cable will scroll out with you.”

  “What happens if Big Bill cuts the power?” Torin asked as she followed him down.

  “We’re screwed, so let’s hope he doesn’t think of it.”

  “Captain!” Huirre had both hands and a foot working his board. “The docking clamps won’t release!”

  “The docking computer is in lockdown, Captain. We can’t access it.”

  We, Cho growled silently. Spreading the blame. He wanted to scream at Dysun to keep her fukking hair still.

  “There’s no way to get free of the station,” she added.

  “There fukking well is!” Cho slapped his palm down on his board. “Krisk! How much explosives do we have?”

  “Why?”

  “Why? So I can stuff them up your ass and detonate! Do we have enough to unlock the docking clamps?”

  “We do.” The engineer sounded bored. When they got out of this, Cho’d give him bored! “You could always use the emergency blow.”

  When Cho looked up, Huirre shrugged. “Use the what?” he demanded.

  “It’s a last resort in case the station gets attacked and is—oh, I don’t know—falling out of orbit. It blows the ship away. Of course, it blows a fukking hole in the station and the atmosphere plus anything lying around
loose vents right at the ship, so, like I said, last resort.”

  “Doors are almost all the way open, Captain.” He could see from where he was sitting that Dysun had called up a new screen. So she wasn’t completely useless. “The dock has lost atmosphere.”

  “Well, fuk it, if that’s the case, use the blow. I’ll send the command to your board. Hang on . . . Should be showing now.”

  “How do you know this?” How did he not know this? The Heart of Stone was Cho’s ship. His. Not Krisk’s.

  The engineer snorted. “I helped design the fukking ship for the Navy, didn’t I.”

  After this was over, he was going to have a talk with Krisk. Pry him out of his engine room and find out why he’d been hiding . . .

  “Captain!” The hatch slammed against the bulkhead, and Almon charged into the control room. “Nadayki’s not on board! He’s still on the ore docks.”

  “Then he’s dead,” Cho said bluntly.

  Almon’s eyes darkened. “You left him there to die!”

  Cho ducked the first wild swing, and then Nat appeared, nose streaming blood, and jabbed a trank into Almon’s neck. He staggered sideways and hit the deck hard.

  “Bastard slammed a pointy elbow in my face when I tried to stop him.” Nat rolled him over with the toe of her boot. “My best guess is he’ll be out for a couple of hours. What do you want me to do with him, Cap?”

  “Drag him to his quarters and lock him in.” Cho stared past Nat at Dysun. If he’d thought her fukking hair had been annoying before, now it was so agitated it seemed every hair moved independently. Her eyes were so dark no orange showed. “Big Bill vented the docks,” he said. “Not me. You want to get back at him, avenge Nadayki, you stay at your station and we grab that armory and we come back weaponed up and kick his ass!”

  Her hair slowed and her eyes lightened. “Your word that we come back.”

  “William Ponner thought he could take what was mine. Thought he could tell me what to do. No one does that.”

  Dysun stared at him for a moment, then took a deep breath and slid back into her seat. “Ready to blow the clamps, Captain.”