The Heart of Valour

by Tanya Huff

  Someone cried out.

  No point in asking who’d moved when turning to look would answer the question. Snapping the scarab closed as it cleared the hole, she slid it into her combats as she rolled up onto her feet.

  The handful of snow Lumenz held against his chin turned rapidly red. His expression as much embarrassment as pain, he fumbled in his vest with his other hand for a tube of sealant. Even Marines able to wade ankle-deep through battlefield gore could freeze at the sight of their own blood and Torin was pleased to see Lumenz hadn’t.

  As he tossed the snow aside and sprayed the slice closed, she stepped closer. He stiffened, waiting for a reaming out, but she only nodded as he spat out a mouthful of foul-tasting chemical, and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t lose your nose.”

  On either side of an impressive protuberance, his cheeks flushed.

  “Bury the bloody snow.” Swinging her weapon around into her hands, she double-tongued her implant to let the major know the path had been cleared. “All right, one/three, let’s move.”

  “Gunny?”

  “Lumenz.”

  “Why couldn’t we have marked the trap for the platoon and walked around it?”

  “Because the filaments don’t always kill.” She allowed the rage, present since she’d identified the trap, to rise. “They… wound indiscriminately.” She hated the damned things; not only because of the damage they could inflict on their actual targets but because of the wild animal lying legless and still thrashing beside the first one she’d ever seen. Swearing in all three of the Corps languages, her sergeant had slit its throat and then disarmed the trap. No one in the squad mentioned that they were losing time and every one of them saluted the animal as they passed, its torment having saved the Marine on point a similar fate.

  “But, Gunny, the time…”

  “Fuk the time.” They were racing the Others’ ability to hack the security on the drones, and any time spent not moving toward Dunstan Mills might come back to kick their collective asses later. To his credit, the major had left the decision of disarming the filament up to her. Even knowing that the Others were activating lessons in the shittier parts of war all along the trail, and that they couldn’t safely make up the time, she still couldn’t, wouldn’t leave that fukking thing up.

  Considering what they’d already run into, she circled around an old piece of deadfall rather than stepping over it, one/three following carefully behind like heavily armed ducklings. Tentative heavily armed ducklings.

  “Caution, not fear,” she snapped.

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  In unison. While they might be afraid of what they’d face on the trail, they were definitely afraid of her. Not good. She dialed the rage back, packed it down until she could stuff the memory back into the compartment marked do not open it had been dragged out of. A deep breath of cold, damp air. These Marines were here on Crucible to be taught, so she’d teach them.

  “Ashlan…”

  The di’Taykan lengthened his stride until he was beside her. “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  “How do we know this trap was rigged recently?”

  “Um… because we just got here? The enemy’s either watching us on a satellite feed or they’re extrapolating our path from the topography,” he added hurriedly when she raised a what the hell are you talking about brow. “They couldn’t have figured out we were going to choose this particular gully until two or three kilometers after we came off the swamp, so they had to have rigged the trap recently.”

  “Granted. But not the answer I was looking for. Thing is…” Another deep breath. “…specifics change, so you want to keep things as simple as possible. Filament is always rigged right in front of pursuit because it’s indiscriminate; dead or injured wildlife will give its position away.”

  The silence had a different feel now. The Corps had little use for Marines unable to connect the dots and she could almost hear these three making connections.

  “Gunny…”

  No, she was not filling in details. “If you run into filament—and trust me when I say I mean that euphemistically—it means that you’re climbing up the enemies’ butt. It could mean they want to slow you down while they set up an ambush in better terrain or that they’re heading for somewhere they think they can defend, and they’re slowing you down to make sure they can get there.”

  “But today…”

  Torin shrugged, cutting off the question. “Today it’s probably nothing more than a simple ‘if, then’ statement. If Platoon 71 goes this way, then we’ll activate this. If it goes that way, then we’ll activate that. And as soon as we’ve reprogrammed enough drones, we’ll drop everything we’ve got on them and wipe them off the planet.”

  “They may not.”

  “Yeah, they will.” A triangular crack in the rock ahead and to the left was large enough for a drone. She brought the team to a stop, sent Lumenz to check it out, and kept a light on it as they passed. “Because it’s what I’d do.”

  “If they know we’re here, then they know where we’re going. On this heading, there’s only one logical place to make a stand.” Ashlan seemed to be thinking aloud.

  Torin appreciated that—both for the thinking and the aloud. “And?”

  “And they’ll have baked a crif,” muttered a dry voice from the rear.

  Kaimi, the second di’Taykan in the squad, had a cynicism unusual in her species. It made her seem remarkably Human in spite of the lavender hair and eyes, but Torin had long since learned not to fall into the “sounds like must be like” trap. Ducking under a low hanging branch, she snorted. “Even so, knowing when and where the battle’s going to be beats planning on the fly.”

  The di’Taykan’s mittened hand came into her peripheral vision as he reached out to move the next branch along. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Well, it’s war; it’s not rocket science.” Then the memory of what had once been accomplished by three Marines with a surface-to-air missile launcher, a game chip, and the guts from a field kitchen twisted her mouth into a grin. “Usually,” she repeated.

  * * *

  “It’s good to be more than just an observer, isn’t it, Gunny?”

  Torin, watching Sakur and Jonin carefully moving Staff Sergeant Beyhn from the stretcher into his shelter, wondered how the hell Major Svensson expected her to respond to that. As far as she was concerned, she’d never been an observer. Her job was to fulfill mission objectives while keeping those Marines she was responsible for alive. She had been responsible for the major and Dr. Sloan; she was now responsible for the major, Dr. Sloan, and Platoon 71. Her hand rose to touch the small metal cylinder holding the remains of Private di’Lammin Oshyo—it was nothing more than a matter of degree.

  Was it good to be back in actual combat instead of playing silly buggers against a system that guaranteed only the extraordinarily stupid or inordinately unlucky could get hurt? Actually, yes. Everyone liked their work to have meaning.

  And no.

  Given the present circumstances, only a fool or an optimist would assume they’d seen their final KIA, and Torin was neither.

  Fortunately, the major kept talking. “I hated being sent to Crucible while Marines were fighting a war. If I was combat ready, I wanted to be back in combat. You know?”

  She did. “Yes, sir.”

  Which did not mean that he wanted the war to come here just so he could be back in the thick of it. Too many officers liked to make it all about them, but Major Svensson knew there was war enough to go around.

  They’d kept moving through dusk and into early dark in order to make it to the theoretical safety of the next CPN. Torin had half expected the drones to attack at their closest perimeter, and when that attack never happened thanked any gods listening that they’d beaten the Others’ reprogramming. She only hoped that the other three platoons of recruits spread out over the planet were doing as well.

  Fumbling his slate back onto his belt, the major sank down ont
o an ancient rockfall at the base of the cliff and almost, but not quite, made it look as though his legs hadn’t nearly given out under him.

  Torin watched him as she set up their shelter and because he had a bit of color back in his cheeks when she rejoined him she asked only, “How’s the hand, sir?”

  He had his mittens off, thumb of his right hand digging into the palm of his left. “Itches. The part I hate most about healing.”

  “Dr. Sloan…”

  “Is busy dealing with the staff sergeant. Trying to get enough information to deal with the staff sergeant,” he amended as an incredulous shout of “You have got to be kidding me!” rose out of the middle of a cluster of half a dozen di’Taykan.

  Lirit stumbled back as the doctor pushed past her, the cluster opening to watch the doctor stomp away, a dark slash of blue against the gray-on-gray the uniforms and the snow had become after sunset. If Torin had to guess, based on body language and the movement of their hair, all six of them were embarrassed. And that was a description she couldn’t remember ever having applied to a di’Taykan.

  “They really don’t know anything,” Dr. Sloan announced the moment she was close enough, where close enough meant she obviously didn’t care who overheard, “when that blue hair…”

  “Private di’Arl Jonin,” Torin interrupted.

  “Right. Fine. When Private Jonin said his people don’t talk about this, he meant it literally.” She dropped her volume slightly as she planted her boots in front of Torin and Major Svensson, but only slightly. “I have only theoretical knowledge of the change, and even I know more details than these Marines do. This is going to happen to their bodies someday and the only information they have is that they should head home at the first indication the change has begun.”

  “A Taykan heading into qui while still in the Corps gets an immediate medical discharge,” Major Svensson told her quietly.

  “And that’s a big help now. Staff Sergeant Beyhn has been having a series of small seizures as his brain chemistry adjusts to the new normal.” The doctor sketched mitten-thick quotation marks in the air around the final word. “But, unfortunately, since I don’t know where things are supposed to end up, I can’t actually define normal, so any response I make is based on a less-than-informed guess.”

  “Come on, Doc, you do experimental procedures all the time. A lot of that is guesswork.”

  “It’s the less-than-informed I’m having trouble with,” she snapped. “And speaking of…” She pulled her slate from one voluminous pocket. “Let’s see your hand.”

  He held out his right hand.

  Dr. Sloan looked down at his palm and her brows dipped. That was enough to pull his left hand around to join the right.

  Torin was impressed; she couldn’t have done it better herself.

  As the screen lit up with numbers and what looked like a small graph, the doctor frowned at her slate. “You’re still very active on the molecular level and the temperature in the surrounding tissue is up one fourteenth of a degree.”

  “And that means?”

  “That you’re still very active on the molecular level and the temperature in the surrounding tissue is up one fourteenth of a degree.” Moving the scan up his arm, her frown deepened. “The join is holding, but I need probes of…”

  “Doctor!” All three of them turned to see Jonin half out of the staff sergeant’s shelter. The four di’Taykan who had assigned themselves guard duty on first watch brought their weapons up. “It’s happening again!”

  “What’s happening again?” the major demanded as Dr. Sloan started to move and Torin made a gesture that suggested those weapons be lowered immediately or they’d end up somewhere extremely unpleasant.

  “Could be a lot of things. This is me off to my next learning experience.” She stopped four strides out and half turned. “Are we likely to be attacked tonight?”

  Torin shook her head. “The odds are against it, ma’am. We’re right on top of the CPN, and they’re too expensive to lose.”

  The noncombatant chip rode up and down on her forehead as she frowned. “The Others care about the Corps budget?”

  “No, ma’am, but they’d have to reprogram each drone individually and crack a number of safety protocols to bring the drones in this close.”

  “And that’s not likely to happen because? I mean, since they’re clearly already able to hack the system?”

  “It would mean that of all the Marines on Crucible, they’re choosing tonight to focus all their reprogramming attention on us. Possible, but as I said, the odds are against it. And even if they are, hacking through safety protocols takes time.”

  “Good.” She snapped out the word like it was the final one on the subject and continued on her way to the shelter.

  Torin watched as she dove inside, saw the sides of the shelter bulge and shook her head. “That’s got to be a little crowded in there.”

  “I think the doc can handle it, Gunny.”

  And Sakur emerged right on cue, his hair whipping back and forth as he stood and glared down at the door he’d just been summarily backed out of.

  * * *

  “So all that screwing around with the staff sergeant’s slate that you were doing today…” Piroj shuffled left, then right, then finally gave up attempting to see around his teammate. “…I’m guessing you were beating his high score in Delaysa Tong.”

  McGuinty’s gaze flicked between his slate and the node’s screen. “What the fuk are you talking about?”

  “You’re not in, are you?”

  “What was your first clue?” He scowled at the scrolling lines of code, frustration level rising, and touched the screen, freezing the numbers in place.

  Piroj juggled his weapon from hand to hand. “Fact I’m still standing here freezing my ass off and not in the shelter, boots off and starting to warm up, that gave me the first clue. Fact you’re still playing with that thing gave me the second.”

  “Oh, yeah, playing. This is fukking fun and games.” The Others might not have gotten around to reprogramming Crucible’s drones, but they definitely controlled the system, locking him out with encryptions that weren’t just alien, they were weirdly alien, and that was distracting because he kept thinking they weren’t alien at all—and then they were again. But numbers were numbers and code was code, and he’d been so close to cracking the insanely-more-complicated Ventris security when they shipped for Crucible that he should have been able to get this. Except he wasn’t. It just… kept… slipping… by. “Crap!” Slate shoved under his arm, he began working the screen with both hands as the light in the niche began to pulse.

  “Ah, shit, look at the lights. Are you doing that? McGuinty?”

  “Shut the fuk up!” The CPN, built into a niche carved out of the wall of a steep-sided gully, was identical to the previous CPN, and both were kissing cousins to the station consoles he’d grown up with. The weird alien encryption did not—thank God—extend to the security protocols. This sudden cascade, he could stop. Probably.

  “McGuinty! What’s happening?”

  “What part of shut the fuk up don’t you get?” This wasn’t especially complex, it was just moving fast. The trick was to get ahead of it and… “Got it!” The pulsing stopped. The light settled back down to the traditional dim glow, and his heart settled with it. He really wanted a stim, but he didn’t dare risk it with the rest of the platoon so close.

  “You said you disconnected the security codes!” Piroj smacked the barrel of his KC-7 against McGuinty’s shoulder.

  “I did!” As his bodysuit sucked up the sweat, McGuinty turned his back on the node and smacked the barrel away, glaring at the other Marine. Piroj’s nose ridges flared, his lip pulling up off his teeth, and McGuinty forced himself to calm down. He needed all his fingers. “All right, so I missed one. If I hadn’t stopped it, we’d have lost the core.”

  “The data storage?” With no challenge to respond to, Piroj’s ridges snapped closed with one final puff of water va
por. “That where the command codes for the drones stay when they’re home?”

  “Yeah. No. Sort of.”

  “If the drones don’t have commands, what happens to them?”

  “I dunno. I guess they fall out of the sky.”

  The words hung between them for a moment, then Piroj shrugged. “So, I’m not raised in a can, techie-type, but wouldn’t that be a good thing? Least while we’re up this node’s tree?”

  …in this node’s territory, McGuinty translated, and then the implications smacked him in the chops. “Crap. Crap. Crap!” Whirling around, he stared at the screen. Stopping the core dump had been instinct. Station kids learned early on that hard vacuum was unforgiving of mistakes and that hacking any system on station meant small, careful, specific changes. Control maintained at all times. That control had nearly given him Ventris. “But we’re not in a fukking vacuum now,” he muttered. His intervention had knocked him right back to the beginning, tossed him out through the layers of encryption he’d already broken. The Corps’ crest, the only thing currently on the screen, seemed to be mocking him.

  “Problems, Marine?”

  He snapped to attention at the sound of the major’s voice, heard Piroj doing the same.

  “Sir! No, sir!”

  “Glad to hear it. As you were.”

  Backing up until he was beside his teammate, McGuinty wished Major Svensson had stopped about two meters farther away. Probably intentionally looming. Officers probably do that. He wasn’t quite as short as the Krai—Not quite as good looking either, Piroj had pointed out toothily—but the major was tall enough, and close enough so that distinction became moot.

  “So…” Major Svensson frowned down at the node. “This is as far as you’ve gotten?”

  He actually felt his ears heat up. “No, sir! I got tossed trying to prevent a critical error.”

  Beside him, Piroj shifted his weight from boot to boot.

  “Well, why don’t you two relax for a moment while we see if I can get us in a little further.” The major paused, right hand raised, bare fingers nearly touching the screen. “I assume I need to disable the security codes?”