The Better Part of Valor

by Tanya Huff

  “Okay. I’m pretty sure she was dead before she hit the deck. Werst did a lot of MDC damage on the lower thorax. That windmilling as she fell was a last hurrah. She could have finished us if she’d dropped three or four grenades.” He pushed back his helmet and glanced toward Guimond’s body. “Why do you figure she only dropped one?”

  “Maybe they thought the ship would endure one grenade but not two. Maybe, it’s a bug honor thing, strip off your armor…”

  “She was on a piece of armor.”

  “Yeah, but she wasn’t in it. Maybe you win points by stripping down and dropping a grenade on the enemy—this is the second time they’ve tried it.”

  “Seems to be a bit of a suicide mission.”

  “That might be the point.” Torin shrugged, suddenly not so much tired as weary. “Maybe they’ve had budget cuts back home and they can only afford one grenade each.”

  “Fukking budget cuts,” Harrop grunted. “So what do we do with her?”

  “Leave her. If her people want the body, they know where it is. Take her weapon, though. R&D’ll want it.”

  “Give me a break, Staff, it’s covered in bug guts!”

  “Welcome to another glorious day in the Corps, Corporal Harrop.”

  And, finally, Guimond.

  Welcome to another glorious day in the Corps.

  She pushed past the wailing Katrien and dropped to one knee through the cloud of shed fur. Fortunately for them, they expressed their grief at a lower decibel level than regular conversation. Nivry had turned Guimond over, still had one hand on his shoulder. His combats had contained the explosion although the force of it had collapsed his chest and forced blood from every visible pore. The blue of his eyes was strangely untouched amidst all the red. And isn’t that a fukking cliché.

  “If he’d had his vest done up…” Nivry murmured.

  Torin shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Small fingers dug into her shoulders. “You are not going to him immediately! You are letting him die!”

  “He was dead the moment he grabbed the grenade from your hands,” Torin told the reporter bluntly as someone, she neither knew nor cared who, pulled her away.

  The ring of Marines split to let Werst limp in to Guimond’s side.

  “The serley bastard’s still smiling,” he grunted.

  Which seemed like as good an epitaph as any. Torin brushed Guimond’s eyes closed, rocked back, and slid her hand into an inner pocket in his vest. The body bags were a smarter fabric than the stretchers and, unfolded, held what amounted to one massive MDC. Even given Guimond’s weight, it took only moments to get the body into the bag. Torin wiped the blood off her thumb and ran it down the seal. We’re just too fukking good at this.

  She sighed deeply and stood.

  “We will not forget. We will not fail you.”

  “Fraishin sha aren. Valynk sha haren.”

  Although Heer was the ranking Krai, no one was surprised when Werst spoke. “Kal danic dir kadir.” Leaning on Heer’s shoulder, he bit a small piece from the back of his forearm. “Kri ta chrikdan.”

  The bag stiffened, then flattened.

  Torin bent, picked up the tiny canister of ash, closed her fingers around it, and looked down at her sleeve. From the moment the grenade had fallen until the moment she could hold Private First Class August Guimond in the palm of her hand—seventeen minutes, twenty-three seconds. Bracing herself against the weight, she slipped the canister into her vest, then bent and picked up Guimond’s pack. “All right, people, let’s haul ass to that air lock.”

  “This are it? So efficient you are dealing with death! You are not care…”

  Torin had a fair indication of what her expression must have been when Ryder stepped between her and the Katrien.

  “Let it go, Torin. Presit doesn’t mean what she’s saying. She’s grieving.”

  She could feel the Marines behind her. “And we’re not?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  They locked eyes. Torin looked away first, making it quite clear she conceded his point, not the Katrien’s.

  A short choppy wave got the march moving, Nivry, Werst, Johnston, and Heer carrying the captain, Presit and Gytha, clinging so closely to each other fur merged between them, Harveer Niirantapajee, whose visible scales had turned a yellow-gray, Orla and Ryder carrying Tsui, Jynett, Dursinski, and Harrop bringing up the rear. Torin moved along the line between the two corporals, her gaze never resting for more than a moment in one place. The bugs had proved they were resourceful, the ship had proved it was not to be trusted; she had a lot to watch for.

  She reached the metal stairs just after Werst, let the two Katrien pass, caught the harveer as she stumbled stepping onto the lowest tread.

  “Can you make it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I can have someone carry you.”

  “No,” she snapped, fingers hooked around the handrail, both feet placed carefully on one step before she tried the next. “Your lot are carrying enough.”

  It might have been sympathy, but it might as easily have been criticism—neither tone nor facial features gave Torin any indication of which. Empty air where Guimond should have been passed next, then Orla and Tsui’s stretcher. She beckoned Jynett forward to take one of Orla’s handles and moved into place beside Ryder herself. Until she noticed the di’Taykans’ smirks, it didn’t even occur to her it would have made more sense to do it the other way.

  On the other hand, di’Taykans were known to smirk at weather reports, so fuk it.

  * * *

  Ryder looked from one Marine to the other. All four were wearing similar blank expressions. He’d seen men die before but he’d never seen a return to business-as-usual quite so quickly. Made sense, he supposed. Can’t have a war stop to acknowledge every new dead guy; damn thing’d never end.

  And he supposed the four Marines around him, Torin particularly, had had a lot of practice carrying on with big empty holes where people used to be.

  He hadn’t.

  “Did he have any family?”

  * * *

  At that moment, he could only mean one person.

  “His parents run an import/export business off New Horizon.” Torin would be writing them a letter when she got the rest of the team safely back to the Berganitan. Another one of Captain Travik’s jobs she’d be doing.

  “He has a younger brother who’s studying to be a teacher,” Orla offered in the pause.

  “People said his mother must’ve spent her whole pregnancy in the centrifuge,” Jynett said, grinning. “No one could believe he was station born.”

  “Big boy.”

  “Mmmm.”

  This time the smirks were closer to satisfied smiles.

  “He had this joke,” Tsui snickered, hanging white-knuckled onto the sides of the stretcher as it rose up another step. “How many dirtballs does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Dirtballs don’t screw in lightbulbs, they screw in gravity wells.”

  “What’s a lightbulb?” Orla wondered.

  “Hey, I never said it was a good joke. It was just his.”

  “He was going to re-sign at the end of his three years. He said he was happy in the Corps.”

  “He was happy cleaning the crappers.”

  “He was always happy.”

  Struggling to keep the stretcher level as they reached the top platform, Ryder shook his head. “You guys only knew him for a week.”

  “No.” Torin waited until Ryder had hold of both handles, then she stepped away. “We knew him his whole life.”

  * * *

  “Captain Carveg!” Face flushed, General Morris pounded into C3 and up to the captain’s station, gripping the edge of the console with beefy fingers. “What’s taking so damned long to launch that next shuttle? I ask your people a simple question and they shoot me a line of crap about constructing new defense systems. If I had a couple of Marine pilots here…”

  “You’d be welcome to
risk their lives in whatever way you pleased. But you don’t. You have Navy pilots, my pilots, and before I tell them to launch, I’m going to see to it they have a fighting chance.” She frowned down at the left screen. “Lieutenant, rotate B section of the grid twenty percent and run the simulation again.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  A satisfied nod and then she glanced up at the general. “Besides, General, this is the last STS shuttle we have and we thought you might like it to actually arrive at the air lock.”

  “What do you mean, it’s the last shuttle you have?”

  “Under normal circumstances, we carry four, but Mr. Ryder’s Promise is using one of the bays. We’ve lost two, one at the first air lock, one on the way to the second. We have one shuttle remaining. It’s not that difficult, General.” A flick of her wrist turned a screen toward him. “Now that we know what we’re up against, we can protect ourselves. We’ve deployed two dozen linked drones to fly in a defensive pattern round the shuttle, half a kilometer out. All six of those missile/fighters could impact simultaneously with minimal effect and they could keep doing it at thirteen-minute intervals all the way to Big Yellow and back.”

  “Why thirteen minutes?”

  “That’s the maximum time the drones need to reboot. It takes the missiles twelve minutes to cover the distance between their own launch tubes and Big Yellow, so unless they’re going to throw a steady line of those things, we’ve got it covered.”

  “And at the air lock? Which seems to be inside your thirteen-minute maximum?”

  “They won’t blow the air lock, they need it to get their own people off. And before you ask, they need to get their own people off because they’ve got the only information about Big Yellow. I’m betting the Others can no more scan it than we can.”

  The general’s eyes narrowed. “Based on what?”

  “Based on them being as dead in the water as we are.”

  “Then what about their regular fighters? Couldn’t they shoot out the drones?”

  She wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d thought he was asking for information, but his whole bearing insisted he was asking to find fault. It had been years since she’d wanted to bite someone this badly. “They could, General, but we’ll have Jades out there stopping them.”

  “All right. Fine. Good work.” He rearranged his features into an expression resembling composure, clasped his hands behind him, and rocked back on his heels. “But when do you launch, Captain? That’s the question.”

  “Flight Commander?”

  “Ready to launch now, Captain.”

  Her lips curled off her teeth in a Human approximation of a smile. General Morris should know what it really meant. “We’re ready to launch now, General. Flight Commander, launch fighters, launch shuttle, deploy defensive drones.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain. Fighters away. Shuttle…” The pause went on just a little too long.

  “Flight Commander?”

  He raised his hand, listened intently for another long moment, then slid one side of the headphones back. “The shuttle controls are unresponsive, Captain.”

  “Unresponsive?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Crews are running diagnostics now, but…”

  “But you expect they have the same problem the engines have?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What?” General Morris glared from one to the other, his face beginning to flush again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Big Yellow is fukking us around again. The shuttle will no more launch than the main thrusters will fire.”

  Arms folded, the general put himself squarely in Captain Carveg’s line of sight. “You’re taking this very calmly.”

  Captain Carveg glared up at him, lips curled. “Trust me, General, if screaming and biting would do any good, I’d be screaming and biting. Engineering’s been working all hands since the beginning, but nothing’s changed. If that serley ship’s frozen the launch controls, that shuttle’s not going anywhere.”

  “These things don’t have a manual override?”

  “What?” she snorted. “A big crank to open the launch door and some greased logs to help roll the shuttle out into space? No, the only manual override these things have involves pushing an actual sequence start switch instead of sitting back and letting the computer do it.” She ran one hand back over her scalp. “Not that a big crank and greased logs aren’t looking good right now.”

  “Captain! Buoy picking up an energy spike. The Others are opening…” His voice trailed off as he peered down at his screens.

  “Opening, Lieutenant?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. But there was a spike.”

  “The Others attempted to launch another shuttle, and Big Yellow shut them down, too.”

  “There’s, uh, no way to know that, ma’am.”

  “We’ll know if they never launch another shuttle. General Morris, you’re going to want to talk to your Marines in private. Do you need someone to take you to Communications?”

  “No. I can find my way.”

  “I’ll have the comm officer begin trying to get through now. He should have contact by the time you arrive.” The edge of the forward screen creaked, and she reluctantly loosened her grip. “Tell them this is a temporary setback. I’m not giving up.”

  “You’ll go get them yourself?”

  “If I have to.”

  “Captain! The Others are launching more fighters.”

  “Match them ship for ship, Flight Commander.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  She glared down at the screens, at the image fed from the buoy. Knowing it was foolish to put motivations on the movements of fighters two hundred and thirty-six kilometers away, something in how they were being spit out of the launch bays gave the impression that someone inside was intensely pissed off. “And I know exactly how you feel,” she growled.

  * * *

  “What do you mean, she’s not ready?”

  Chief Graham tossed a tester down to the Krai working inside the Jade and turned, one hand gripping the edge of the open panel. “What I mean, Lieutenant Commander Sibley, is that we’re replacing all your port thrusters, plus all the couplings, rebooting your whole goddamned propulsion system, and hopefully convincing your new thrusters to fire when you want them to and turn off when you don’t.”

  “Chief, the squadron’s going back out.”

  “And until your ride’s fixed, you’re not.”

  Hands deep in the pockets of his flight suit, Sibley stared at the parts of his Jade spread out on the mech deck. “How long?”

  “That depends, sir.” Dark brows drew in. “How long do you plan on standing here taking up my time?”

  * * *

  “Well?” Shylin fell into step beside him as Sibley came out into the passage. “How long?”

  “Would you believe eight inches?”

  “No.”

  “As big as a baby’s arm?”

  “Sib.”

  “Chief says it’ll be done when it’s done.”

  “Did you tell him the rest of the squadron’s going out?”

  “He knows.”

  “Did you pull rank?”

  “On a chief warrant officer?” They’d reached the link, and he slapped the call button. “Do I look suicidal?”

  FOURTEEN

  “This makes no spatial sense.”

  “This whole day’s made no sense,” Torin reminded the engineer. “Not spatially, not any other ‘ly’ you care to suggest. What’s the specific nonsense this time?”

  “The air lock opens out into space. This,” Johnston rapped his knuckles against the pale gray bulkhead, “is the hull. Except that the air lock is on the belly of the beast, so this,” he stomped on the deck, “should be the hull. Except that the room where Guimond bought it is a level below. We came up a flight of stairs to get here.”

  “Yeah, I remember. What’s your point, Johnston?”

  “My point, Staff, is that this isn’t right.”

>   “Neither was the window in the wardroom. Hell, neither was the wardroom. Is this a working air lock?”

  “As far as we can tell.”

  “Then don’t sweat the weirdness, Lance Corporal Johnston. Can you get it open?”

  “Me? No. But the harveer seems pretty confident. She worked with Dr. Hodges on the program that opened the first air lock, and she says the minimal readings she can take here are exactly—to the decimal point—the same. All she has to do is reproduce the codes on her slate and then use her filament probe to interface with the lock.”

  “All she has to do?” Torin glanced down at the elderly Niln, oblivious to the discussion going on above her head as she worked. “She has to get a Confederation slate to interface with an unknown alien technology. I can’t even get this year’s slate to interface with last year’s desk.” She clapped him lightly on the shoulder as she left. Tsui was resting comfortably, but Captain Travik’s life signs were slipping. He hadn’t regained consciousness since the switchbacks, and Torin had a strong feeling he never would.

  Keep the captain alive. Make him look like a hero. She’d pretty much screwed the pooch on both mission objectives. General Morris wasn’t going to be too happy with her.

  General Morris can kiss my noncommissioned ass.

  August Guimond was worth a dozen Captain Traviks.

  The two Katrien were slumped against the wall in an exhausted heap. At first Torin thought they had their eyes closed against the light, then she realized they were sleeping, the edges of their blended ruffs rising and falling. As she watched, Presit whimpered. Without waking, Gytha combed at her fur until she settled. No surprise they were tired, they’d now been up and at a high stress level for about twenty-three straight hours.

  Poor little thi… Torin cut the thought off short. They were not poor little things, they were adult members of a sentient species both of whom had considerably more formal education than she did. And if even I’m falling into the cute furry darlings trap, it’s no wonder they get away with being so obnoxious.

  Although in all honesty, Gytha was a sweetheart and Presit wasn’t any more obnoxious than any other reporter Torin’d had the misfortune to meet.