Valor's Trial

by Tanya Huff

  The look Torin shot him said that was too stupidly obvious to merit a response.

  He turned, suddenly anxious to get moving. “Right. Follow me.”

  “Let’s go, Private Kyster.”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  Textbook response. Muscles tensed across Edward’s broad shoulders, and Torin hid a smile.

  A rough estimate of the node’s area put it between 200 and 250 square meters. Unless there were a lot of people hiding in and on the other side of the tents, she put the number of people at around a hundred. Three platoons worth of Marines, the usual ground troops mix—even numbers of Human and di’Taykan, ten percent Krai. Their feet weren’t made for boots, so Krai who joined the Corps rather than the Navy usually headed into Armored or Air Support.

  Mostly the captive Marines lay on pallets arranged in rows starting about two meters in from the outer walls. A few of them sat up as she passed. A whisper followed her, spread out, and rippled around the node. The sibilants made at least one of the words obvious.

  Silsviss.

  So some of these Marines had arrived after the tales of the mission on Silsvah had made the rounds. A single platoon of underarmed Marines, trapped in a barely defensible position, had defeated several hundred of the giant lizards. Her own part in the story had involved defeating one of those giant lizards in single combat and showing the willingness to kill a two-star general had it been necessary in order to bring the Silsviss into the Confederation as allies against the Others. Both parts of the story had grown in the telling, and she’d had to endure the embellishments and speculation for months. It looked as though she was about to reap the benefits.

  The ripple lifted a few more Marines onto their feet, and as they began to move closer to try and get a look, the movement lifted a few more.

  The area between the pallets and tents had been kept clear, a demilitarized zone easy to patrol, except . . . just as the curve made determining the details difficult, she could see a body staked out. A small body. Krai.

  “New guy,” Edwards snorted without prodding. “Tried to rush the communal food. Can’t have that, can we, Gunnery Sergeant? We’ll leave him there until he’s hungry enough to see reason.”

  Until he was too hungry to fight back.

  Behind her, she could hear Kyster’s teeth snapping rhythmically together. She’d been reminded earlier that Krai teeth had no trouble with Human bone. It seemed Edwards didn’t need the reminder.

  “Make him stop,” he snarled, two spots of color high on each cheek above his beard.

  Torin’s eyes narrowed. “You were taking me to Colonel Harnett,” she said.

  Another long moment of weighing his options, then Edwards turned on one heel muttering, “Yeah, the colonel’ll stop him.”

  At the entrance to the tents, he shoved a flap of fabric aside and spat, “Wait here.” Before he could turn, she caught his gaze with hers and held it. When he added a reluctant “Gunnery Sergeant,” she let him go.

  Harnett kept her waiting.

  Good. The longer she stood, sweeping her gaze over the pallets, the more Marines dragged themselves onto their feet and shuffled toward her with the short careful stride of those afraid of losing an already precarious balance and, should they fall, not entirely certain they could rise again. In a remarkably short time, a decent-sized crowd, a full platoon’s worth at least, stood at the edge of the demilitarized zone. When pressure from the rear pushed a few forward, they scuttled back into the pack.

  She saw no one she recognized, but then she was careful not to see individuals, just Marines, because her belief that these were Marines was the only reason this was going to work.

  “All right, you can . . . What the fuk? Go on, move!” Edwards charged a couple of steps toward the crowd, and they scattered. They didn’t scatter far, Torin noted. By the time Edwards returned to her side, muttering under his breath, they were already shuffling back.

  “Colonel says to bring you in.” A jerk of a bristling chin at Kyster. “He stays out here.”

  Where more Marines would gather to look at him and note he had been recently well fed. Starving people—and if this lot wasn’t starving, they were close to it—maintained a very specific focus.

  “Private Kyster.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant!”

  “Remain here until I return.”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” His anger over the staked Krai had added a carrying edge to his voice, banishing the last of his fear.

  Torin flashed her teeth as she passed, a promise as she followed Edwards into the tent.

  She saw no supports—the fabric clearly had some kind of tech woven in—and the rooms were open to the sky. To the roof. Edwards led her to the right, through three narrow passages, and into another open area around the center pipe. The pipe was a lot bigger up close than she’d originally thought. Maybe three meters in diameter, it ran from the ceiling down into the floor. At the two-meter level or just above, a variety of pipes emerged hanging over niches pressed into the metal. Food, she assumed. And water. The smell of unwashed flesh was weaker here and the smell of waste stronger. The latter was an interesting observation she’d have to take the time to figure out later.

  Standing by the pipe with seven—no, eight—goons, spread out to his right was the alleged Colonel Harnett. He stood a little taller than Torin with brown hair and a red-brown beard and no indication he’d been missing meals. More the opposite. A slight paunch strained against his combats, but Torin wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking a little belly fat had made him weak. A weak man wouldn’t have been able to maintain the kind of control he had. He knew how to fight and would do it ruthlessly. The fact that his goons were armed and he wasn’t just drove that point home.

  He could have been any age between thirty and seventy—impossible to tell and irrelevant anyway.

  He retained his sleeves, but his collar was missing.

  No surprise that.

  Not a colonel, then.

  The goon squads meant he didn’t do his own dirty work. That sounded like an officer. But he appeared to have no clear delineation between himself and the goons who carried out his orders. Officers learned early on that removing themselves by the distance of at least one NCO from the more unpleasant orders was more than a good idea; it was virtually a necessity if they were going to command.

  She watched him watch her as she closed the distance between them. His eyes lingered on her collar tabs and narrowed slightly in resentment.

  A staff sergeant, then.

  Probably passed over for promotion.

  Torin would have bet her pension that Harnett’s belief he knew best had first slowed and then stopped him, keeping him off the promotion list entirely in spite of the war and need for experienced replacements as Marines were lost. Senior NCOs didn’t think they knew best, they knew the Corps did and, as the voice of the Corps, that omnipotence then devolved onto them. It was a fine distinction but a necessary one.

  An officer in charge would have created a situation she needed to deal with for the sake of the Marines his ego had fukked over. For the sake of the Marines left to die in the caves. For the sake of the Marines slowly starving to death under his command. The crap going down in the node was a more extreme example of abuse of power than usual, but finding a solution would still be part of her job description.

  A staff sergeant, though . . .

  It still came down to doing what was necessary to keep her people alive, but that, that made it personal. Only the thought that it would make it harder to get them around Harnett’s throat kept her from curling her hands into fists.

  Two meters away, she came to parade rest, and waited. Gunnery sergeants didn’t speak first, colonels did. It took Harnett a moment to remember that.

  “So, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, is it?” His smile was broad and false. He didn’t seem to recognize her name, but from the reaction sweeping through his goon squad, at least a few of them did. “What brings you here?”
<
br />   “Reporting to the commander of this area, sir.” She’d have liked to use that sir to tell him what she thought of him, but it seemed wisest to keep her tone ice and iron. He’d have her opinion on things soon enough.

  Pleased by what he heard as deference but clearly confused, Harnett frowned. “How did you get past my guards?”

  “I was challenged.”

  “Not the purple idiot!” He’d clearly heard what had happened just after she entered the node. “The guards in the . . .” Torin almost saw the lights go on. “You didn’t come from the other pipe, did you? You woke up in a small cave,” he continued, answering his own question. “Last day or two.”

  “She’s got the tunnel rat with her, Colonel Harnett, sir,” Edwards told him before Torin could answer. He spoke quickly, eagerly, currying favor with information. “The Krai. The one with the fukked foot. I knew he was still alive. I told you, remember? She left him outside. And that’s not all, the rest of them, they’re all up and crowdin’ the fukking line. Waiting to see what the . . . what she’s going to do.”

  “Crowding the fukking line?” Harnett’s smile twisted. “Well, get your ass out there and discourage them from crowding the fukking line. Take Bakune and Maeken with you. Let’s show the gunny we can maintain discipline.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel Harnett.” Edwards grinned so broadly he could barely get his lips around the words.

  When Edwards left, he took two of the three di’Taykan with him, lowering the odds to six to one. No one moved into his place behind her. And while the six remaining goons had moved closer, not one of them moved to cover Harnett’s left. When this was over, she’d have a few words to say about proper security measures.

  “Colonel Harnett, sir. Look at her boot.”

  His eyes flicked down to the knife and up again to her face. “So you did run into some of my guards.”

  Torin let nothing show on her face. “I believe the three persons were referred to as a hunting party, sir.”

  “Were?” This new smile told her he finally understood what was going on and was happy his world made sense again. “Well, yes, I believe they were. The question becomes, what are we going to do with you, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr?” He spread his hands, and, still smiling, slowly turned.

  Clearly, there’d been coup attempts before.

  For a moment, Torin thought about making the bastard work a little harder for it, but she’d had about as much of Colonel Harnett as she could stomach, so she took her cue.

  They expected her to go for the knife in her boot. That was one of the reasons she wore it. Ignoring the knife gave her a two or three second jump on a reaction.

  He expected her to try and stab him in the back.

  When he whirled to face her, she was two seconds closer than expected and already on her knees sliding under his kick. Up on her feet inside his guard, one hand went to his chin and the other to the back of his head. Once again, momentum, his and hers, added force as she straightened her inner arm.

  He was already sagging when she felt a knife slam into her vest, and although it didn’t have a hope getting through the body armor, the impact pushed her from cold rage to full fury. Bending her knees, Torin let the late colonel fall across her back, hoisted him up, and heaved him at the goon squad. Paradise, her birth planet, had a gravity 1.14 Human norm. It was a small difference, but added to adrenaline, it came in handy. She had her knife out by the time he stopped bouncing, and when she blocked the next blow, she didn’t block it blade to blade but blade to hilt.

  As she’d already noticed, the flaked edge was sharp.

  Three fingers fell. She cut the scream off in his throat.

  They obviously hadn’t fought anyone who hadn’t been starved or beaten in months. Forty hours ago, Torin had been in combat.

  One of the women approached and got a boot to the side of the knee. The body armor in the vest was inert, but it depended on tech in the combats and all tech was down. As the joint cracked and she crumbled, Torin ducked in, grabbed her, turned her as a shield toward the whistle of a descending club. The stone sent teeth flying. Impact loosened the wielder of the club’s grip, and a second later Torin used his own weapon to smash in his throat. Soft tissue was always the safer shot.

  Three down.

  The other three stared at her over the body of Colonel Harnett.

  If they decided to rush her together, Torin wouldn’t stand a chance. Even one at a time, the odds weren’t in her favor, not having to adjust for both Human and di’Taykan physiognomy.

  So she smiled and said, “Don’t.”

  And like the hundred Marines who’d been ground under the heels of maybe two dozen goons, they didn’t.

  It was all a matter of perception.

  They believed she could win.

  The man with the crushed throat had died, heels drumming. The woman with the smashed mouth and the broken knee should have been alive—none of her injuries were fatal—but lips were blue and one hand still clutched at the collar of her combats. If Torin had to hazard a guess, she’d say the dead woman had choked on her own teeth. Had she lived, the pain from her knee would have been intense and the shattered bones in her jaw couldn’t have been rebuilt without tech. She’d have complicated what had to be clear and simple.

  The three remaining members of the goon squad still standing by the pipe stepped back as Torin stepped over the body.

  If there was a moment of savage pleasure taken in their fear, Torin didn’t let it show. “Weapons there!” Out in the open where they couldn’t retrieve them unobserved. “Then get these walls down.”

  “But . . .”

  “Now!”

  From the time she walked into the tent to the time the walls began collapsing gracefully to the floor, no more than fifteen minutes had elapsed.

  Colonel Harnett had a storeroom of gear taken off dead and dying Marines. Colonel Harnett had what passed for opulent personal quarters. Colonel Harnett had three of the youngest Marines in a room by his quarters. While not as well fed as his fighters, they were less thin than the general population and the scraps of clothing he’d left them made it obvious what he used them for.

  They wore twisted fabric collars and cuffs.

  “What the fuk is going . . .”

  Sweeping Edwards’ feet out from under him, Torin yanked his left arm over his head and slammed the stone knife into his armpit, grinding it through his ribs, and driving it into his heart. The silence as he hit the ground was absolute. Fighting her way back from a blind rage that would have seen every one of Harnett’s people dead by her hand, she could hear nothing but her own blood pounding between her ears.

  The fabric walls lay in drifts around her. She could feel the weight of a hundred pairs of watching eyes from the other side of the demilitarized zone and six pairs watching from a lot closer. It was dangerous to gain a reputation for uncontrollable rage, no matter how justified. Edwards’ death would just have to be fuel for another story then.

  “That,” she snarled, bending to wipe her blade on Edwards’ hip, “is why you don’t cut the sleeves off your uniform.” As she straightened, the two di’Taykan who’d been with Edwards took a step toward her. She let them see what she was thinking, and they backed away. “Private Kyster!”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr!”

  “Release the prisoner.”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  “You!” The finger she pointed toward the youngest of the surviving goons was only metaphorically not dripping red. “Name!”

  “Private di’Nurin Jiyuu, Gunnery Sergeant!” He looked a little surprised by the vehemence of his reply.

  “How many still out in the tunnels?”

  “There’s two and a runner in tunnel seven, Gunnery Sergeant,” Jiyuu told her quickly. Time under Harnett had clearly taught him to suck up to power. “Three in tunnel four. Tunnel two hunting party has already checked back.”

  If there’d been only two hunting parties working, then the three i
n tunnel four had already checked out. Torin could see Akemi standing just back of the assembled Marines, closer to the tunnels than the pipe. If she decided to run and turn the five goons still out in the tunnels into a strike force, there’d be trouble.

  “Private Akemi!”

  She visibly started at the sound of her name, her hair flipping back and forth.

  “Get over here. Double time.”

  There was absolutely no reason Akemi should obey. There were a hundred starving Marines between them, no way Torin could get to her in time should she decide to run, and it was clear—even at a distance—that she was considering it. Had any of the survivors standing unsecured behind Torin said anything . . .

  No one did. Although Bakune shuffled back from the spreading puddle of Edwards’ blood.

  Torin snapped out, “That wasn’t a request, Private.”

  Decision made for her, Akemi pushed her way through the crowd, jogged across the open area as though expecting a shot in the back at any moment, and rocked to a stop an arm’s length away.

  “Weapons there,” Torin pointed. “Then join the rest.”

  The violet eyes darkened, as she took in the bodies, gaze lingering for a moment not on Harnett but on the three severed fingers. “Are you . . . ?”

  “Let’s move, Private, we’ve got a lot of work to do before dark. Mind the blood,” she added. “You track it around, you clean it up.” She waited until Akemi’s weapons hit the pile, then drew in a deep breath and faced the mass of gray and brown. “Sergeants and above, fall in. Three ranks!”

  A hundred pairs of eyes blinked.

  Torin’s eyes narrowed. “Now!”

  In the end, there were eleven of them. They locked their eyes on the far wall; none of them looked at her. She could have said she expected more of them, but she hadn’t been here, she hadn’t been starved and beaten, so all she said was, “Who’s senior?”

  A staff sergeant with a pale beard and a missing front tooth stepped forward. “Staff Sergeant Kerin Pole, Gunnery Sergeant.”