Valor's Trial

by Tanya Huff

  Torin didn’t need to say any of that aloud—even if she thought the translation program could handle it. Durlave Kan Freenim knew their choices as well as she did.

  “Now, we go on. Together.”

  “Yes.” Freenim’s head wobbled. Probably the equivalent of a nod. “Together. Knowing where the other is, that is . . . best.”

  Would have been interesting to know why the translation program paused.

  “You have no officer? Then Durlin Vertic will lead.”

  “I lead my people.”

  “The durlin will lead you.”

  The durlin was listening, claws on her left forefoot lightly scoring the ground, so Torin nodded and said, “Yes.” Lying convincingly had never been a problem.

  The Primacy had been following the Artek who’d been following subtle vibrations they could feel through their feet.

  “So we’ll be following the bugs, Gunny?” Kichar’s eyes were enormous. “They’re allies now?”

  “They’re Artek and remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Torin told her. She hadn’t been surprised when the phrase had translated perfectly. “Although it might be more accurate to say the enemy of my enemy is not currently my enemy though that will change with circumstances. For now . . .” Her expression suggested they not argue. “. . . we’ll operate like two squads in a single unit.”

  “I’d rather have them where I can see them,” Darlys admitted.

  “That’s why you’re with us,” Werst snorted, scowling up at the di’Taykan.

  “United front, people!” Torin snapped. She’d started forgetting the di’Taykan had been Harnett’s before they were hers, but Werst never would and she appreciated the reminder. “Fake it if you have to. Our odds of getting the hell out of here just went up, and we need to get moving before . . .”

  The tunnels plunged into darkness. From the spot where the ten members of the Primacy had been standing came the distinct scent of sandalwood.

  “Never mind.”

  “We move at one light. The Artek say we are close to the beginning of the vibrations.” Vertic’s lips pulled up off her teeth. Torin didn’t assume she was smiling. “When we meet the ones who hide us here, your people will fight?”

  “Yes, Durlin. My people will fight.”

  “Good. For now, learn what is needed to know.” She pivoted on one back foot and returned to the two male quadrupeds, leaving Torin and Freenim alone in the DMZ between the two groups. Although it was difficult to tell given that Torin’s cuff light was illuminating the durlin’s path and nothing much higher, the males seemed to relax a little the moment Vertic was in arm’s reach.

  The small group had escaped from their holding tunnels a day before Torin’s people. As near as she could tell from her interpretation of the translation program’s more idiosyncratic word choices, their prisons had been identical—tunnels, pipes, areas around the pipes under the control of senior officers. The biscuits she compared with Freenim looked the same, but they’d both been around enough to not suggest swapping the contents of their lunch pails.

  Everyone in the group but the Artek had been scooped from the battle on Estee.

  “We landed in small caves off the big tunnels; lost one too badly injured for the primitive aid available, but the rest of us came together under the durlin. She convinced the seniors to allow her to attempt an escape.”

  Torin made a note of his expression. Given that he was a senior NCO talking about a junior officer, the way he said convinced told her a lot. As backgrounds went, it was heavily edited, but she’d left out a few details herself. No point in giving it all up on the first date.

  Her opinion of Durlin Vertic went up.

  “The Artek argued on going with us.”

  “You understand them?”

  He snorted. “They are very . . .”

  The translation program ran through a number of words that made no sense before settling on unstoppable. Torin ran through a few words herself but figured that persistent was probably the closest. Freenim had also noticed that the older prisoners had stopped caring about escape and had, like Torin, assumed it was due to an additive in the food.

  “They are content to be where they are. Except for the Artek. But the body differences are so great, how can they match the drug in the food we all eat?”

  Good question. When it came right down to it, mammals were mammals, furred or hairless, two legs or four. And speaking of four . . .

  “When I fought the durlin’s people, there were riders.”

  “No Ner were taken,” Freenim told her. “The Polint are not happy. All your species are here?”

  “All our warrior species.” He hadn’t asked about the heavy gunners, so Torin didn’t fill him in. He’d engaged with the enemy as often as she had, he had to know they existed.

  “So few.”

  “Enough.”

  He leaned around her to look down the tunnel, Mike and Ressk visible in a pool of light as they worked on the slate. When he straightened, he looked thoughtful. Or possibly constipated. This was the first time she’d ever had a conversation with a member of the Primacy that didn’t involve a high-caliber weapon as the primary conversationalist. “There is information you are not telling me.”

  Torin snorted. “There is information you are not telling me.”

  She made a note of how his features arranged themselves when she knew he was amused. “Of course.”

  “I don’t like taking orders from an enemy officer, Gunny.”

  “You’re not. You’re taking orders from me.”

  “And you’re taking orders from her.”

  “Officers are officers, Werst. And durlins are lieutenants—I can handle her. The Artek are following vibrations in the floors and the walls and . . .” She frowned as Cherry Bug looped the tunnel just at the edge of the pooled light, running up one wall across the ceiling and down the other. Torin suspected they were too heavy to manage the trick at anything but full speed, far too heavy to actually walk on the ceiling, but she still glanced up, skin creeping on the back of her neck, realized Werst was doing the same, and grinned. “We’re not wandering blind any more, that’s the main thing.”

  “And when we get where we’re going?” Mike put in on her other side.

  “Depends on where we end up and what happens when we get there. We’re playing this one by ear, people.”

  “I admire your optimism, Gunny.”

  “You’re supposed to.” And maybe the additives in the biscuits were taking the edge off. Maybe they kept her—maybe they kept everyone—from wanting to continue the fight. Maybe not. Maybe they were all capable of being a lot more evolved about things than anyone suspected. The reason didn’t matter. All that mattered right now was getting the hell out of the tunnels.

  Next morning they assembled at first light, Durlin Vertic absently clawing at the floor as she swept a narrowed gaze over Torin and her people. Torin had a feeling that the scrape of claws against rock was going to get old really fast. “The Artek lead. We follow. You guard the rear.” Then she spun around and moved up behind the three Artek with Sanati. One of the bipeds—Torin really needed to get a species name from Freenim—snarled something the slate missed but her implant picked up. She very much doubted the translation was precise, but then, it didn’t need to be.

  “We going to have trouble with the history between us?” she asked the other NCO.

  Freenim snorted. “Some of both our people are young. What do you believe?”

  She snorted in turn. “We’ll have trouble.”

  “Good assumption.” He shot her a look that could only be interpreted as long suffering and strode ahead to growl at the younger members of his species beyond the implant’s pickup.

  Torin barely had time to assign a march order, placing Kichar and Watura at the rear, when the Artek, wafting a scent like buttered lavender, began to move. For the Artek and the Polina it was a slow run. For the rest of them, a little faster. It was entirely possible t
hat the durlin was trying to see what they were made of. It was also possible that this was their standard operating speed, but given the looks Freenim’s people were shooting at their officer, Torin doubted it.

  “Their durlin’s got guts putting us at their backs,” Jiyuu muttered.

  She did have guts, but Freenim was at their rear and Torin right behind him leading her people, so she likely felt they could handle anything that came up.

  “Gunny?”

  “Werst.” She fell back a few strides. Barefoot, the Krai could handle the pace. In boots, they’d have never done it.

  “Any problem with us taking the high road?”

  Glancing up, she measured the distance between the edge of the lights, thought about asking if he was sure Kyster could bridge it, and decided he wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t been. “You drop if you feel anything that indicates a break in the cable.”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  “Knock yourselves out.” The lights ran about twelve centimeters under the curved roof of the tunnel three meters up. The Krai were all around a meter high. “You need a lift?”

  “Got it covered. Ressk! Kyster!” He threw the names back over his shoulder. “Going up.”

  “Gunny?”

  “It’s okay, Kyster. Just hang back of my position. I don’t want any misunderstandings with our new friends.” In military terms, friend carried less significance than ally.

  They must have discussed it in the night as first Ressk then Kyster literally ran up Werst’s body and jumped for the lights from his shoulders. Then Ressk held the cable in both feet and dropped down holding Kyster. Werst climbed them both. The maneuver cost them a little distance but they quickly made it up, swinging from hand to foot.

  Freenim shot her a questioning glance—wrinkles across the pale skin of his forehead standing in for eyebrows—but Krai physiognomy made questions moot. It was pretty obvious why they’d taken the high road. Even with one bad foot, Kyster had no trouble keeping up.

  She figured they’d covered about fifteen kilometers at a steady trot, boots beating the distance into the stone, when all three Artek ran straight at a wall. And up the wall. And back down to the floor. Torin suspected that frustration smelled like a wet dog lightly sprinkled with cinnamon.

  Hand up, she brought her people to a halt, maintaining the careful spacing between the two groups. Three slap/thuds as the Krai dropped back to the ground, and Torin noted that the three di’Taykan were showing the most effect from the run. No surprise. They’d been down here the longest on questionable rations, no matter that they’d been getting the supplement all along. And she suspected Harnett hadn’t been big on PT.

  “They say . . .” Sanati glanced at the blank wall as though it could have answers. “. . . the sounds go up here.”

  “The same sounds they have followed?” Durlin Vertic demanded, claws digging at the floor again.

  Sanati waved her hands in the universal gesture for I don’t know what the fuk they’re talking about. “Perhaps.”

  “That isn’t an answer!”

  One of the Artek—Torin thought, given the deep brown-on-brown pattern on her exoskeleton, it might have been the one she mentally referred to as Cherry Bug—turned and clattered her mandibles up at the snarling officer, all four arms waving.

  “This is so loud,” Sanati translated. “If not the same sound, then we not feel the same sound.”

  “Durlave Kan! Have everyone . . .” Vertic so obviously didn’t look back at Torin when her people did, she might as well have been staring. “. . . spread out along this wall. Find a way through to that noise. If it goes up, we’re going up.”

  Freenim turned to Torin. “We need to find the way in the wall.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  The wall was solid.

  Nothing any of the six species present could do made any impression on it. The durlin finally had to snap something out in her own language to the two males in order to get them to stop clawing at the stone. When she was done, Freenim ran up one side of them and down the other. It was amusing to watch—Torin moved Mike and the slate far enough away to allow the dressing down a semblance of privacy—but it didn’t get them any farther along. The air was redolent with the smell of wet cinnamon dog.

  “Never have a demo charge on you when you need one,” Kichar sighed, sagging against the stone and sliding to the floor.

  “There has to be a way through to another level that doesn’t involve wholesale destruction,” Watura moaned, hair limp, lime-green ends barely moving. “What the fuk do these assholes have against stairs?”

  “Or a lift tube?” asked a voice from farther down the tunnel.

  “A lift tube would help,” Torin admitted.

  “No, Gunny, I meant there’s a lift tube.” Kyster stepped back from the dark rectangle that had just opened under his hand in the opposite wall. “Here.”

  If it was a lift tube—and it was definitely a tube of the correct dimensions, but that was all Mike was willing to commit to without finding some sort of tech—the antigravity wasn’t on.

  One of the bipeds—species name, Druin—leaned out over the edge and dropped a rock. Since s/he pulled it from the bag of rocks intended to be used with the sling, Torin was just as glad to see it go. So far no one had broken the truce, but missile weapons on only one side of an argument lent an unfair advantage to the side in question. The rock fell far enough that its inevitable landing was barely audible.

  “Well, down would be easy,” Mike noted dryly.

  The rock seemed to have fallen a lot farther than the three levels they’d climbed.

  “We have risen four,” Freenim said thoughtfully. “But I would guess it fell farther than that also.”

  “Could be levels of dumbass empty tunnels under,” Werst snorted. “Like these up here.”

  “It’s possible,” Torin acknowledged. Dumbass described these latest tunnels—although pointless and annoying would also be pretty damned accurate. Given the number of turns and cross tunnels and blind ends, they weren’t the shortest distance between two points. They just were—the turns, cross tunnels and blind ends leading nowhere. It was like negotiating a particularly futile maze.

  “Could be more tunnels above these.”

  “Could be.” She shone her cuff light up and squinted along the beam. “That looks like the upper end.” Leaning a little farther, Mike holding a fistful of her vest, she managed to make out two darker rectangles against the inside of the tube between them and the top. “Only two floors up. Eight meters max.”

  “Might as well be twenty,” Durlin Vertic snarled after she’d had a look. “Even the Artek cannot hold a vertical surface so time.”

  The correct translation should probably have been for so long rather than so time, but the meaning was clear.

  “And there’s nothing for the Krai to climb.”

  Even the pebbled finish was gone.

  “No hand grips. What if it’s not a lift, but a link tube?” Ressk offered. “And that rock hit the top of a car not the bottom of the tube. All we need to do is call a link!”

  Mike waved a hand at the featureless wall. “So call one.”

  “There’s got to be tech in here somewhere. Kyster! How’d you get the serley door open?”

  Kyster rubbed at the back of his neck. “Was just banging the wall.”

  All three di’Taykan snickered.

  “Banging on the wall!”

  More banging accomplished absolutely nothing. Kicking merely proved that in a game of rock versus boot, rock won.

  “There must be tech!” Sanati almost wailed. Frustration seemed to be creating a bond between her and Ressk.

  “Then find it,” Vertic snarled. “We cannot spend our lives here!”

  Torin was starting to like the four-legged officer.

  “Gunny, we have an idea.” Darlys moved closer, Jiyuu and Watura on her heels. “What about a low-tech way?”

  “I am listening.”

>   “Two people make a base here, standing facing each other at the edge. Watura stands on their shoulders, then Jiyuu stands on his, then I stand on Jiyuu’s. One of the Krai climbs us, gets the door open, and secures the rope.”

  “Volunteering to commit suicide does not impress me, Darlys.”

  “We’re serious, Gunny.” She looked more than serious, she looked as if she were seconds away from begging for the chance to do something stupidly dangerous. “We can do it.”

  “We’ll brace ourselves against the side of the wall,” Jiyuu put in. The break he’d taken from sucking up seemed to be over. “We’re the only ones who can do this.”

  “Watura?”

  He shrugged.

  “You have something to say about this?” Torin asked.

  Watura glanced over at Jiyuu and shrugged again. “Not really, Gunny.”

  “It was Darlys’ idea, but I came up with the two people bracing the whole thing at the bottom.” His eyes a pale pink, Jiyuu looked remarkably pleased with himself.

  Torin shook her head. “There’s got to be another way.”

  There was no other way.

  “They will not die themselves?” Vertic wondered.

  “It’s very dangerous,” Torin agreed, assuming the durlin had actuallymeant kill themselves, “but it was their idea and physically they’re certainly capable of doing it.”

  “I would not order it.”

  Good for her. “They’ve volunteered.”