The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  “You got it. Or him.” Dysun made a small adjustment to her scanners and sat back, looking pleased with herself. “One of them is enough larger to account for Human gender differences and is in a significantly older suit. The smaller one, she’s wearing a Marine design, no more than a year old. Sending specifics to cargo.”

  “Almon?”

  “It’s enough data to aim the net around him if you can get him out in the open, Captain.”

  Dysun answered before Cho could. “I take out their tethers, and send the next shot into the debris. That’ll shake them loose. That is if Huirre can keep us pointed the right way.”

  “I could fly this ship right up your ass,” Huirre growled.

  “Promises, promises.”

  “Move in fast,” Cho snapped. “Dysun, you take out the ship as soon as their proximity alarms go off. We don’t want them getting back to it and fukking dying on us. Then take out the tethers, then hit the debris. If you’ve got a clear shot at the woman, take it. Get her out of Almon’s way.”

  “Aye, Captain.” The ends of her hair flipped back and forth

  This was going to work, he could feel it. This time, Craig Ryder would give them the information they needed. Cho could see the armory opening. He could almost feel one of the Corps’ ubiquitous KC-7s in his hands, bucking back as he switched it to full auto and squeezed the trigger. Ships in orbit could EMP more complex weapons but no one on either side had been able to dream up a way to stop a basic chemical reaction from happening. Armed with KC-7s, they could take over any station they docked at.

  This time, nothing would go wrong. “Dysun, whatever happens to their drive, happens to you.”

  Her hair stilled. “Aye, Captain.”

  “The fuk!” As Promise’s proximity siren screamed through his suit’s comm link, Craig, slapped his last charge down, and worked his way backward along the path of his tether as fast as possible. Unfortunately, as fast as possible was too fukking slow, but a hole ripped into his suit by a jagged edge would slow him more. “Torin! Have you got a visual?” He didn’t have to shout to be heard over the siren, the comm would take care of volume levels, but it felt good. Like he was doing something.

  “Negative. Still obscured by wreckage.”

  “It’s probably the wreckage that set it off.” He jerked his line off a twisted cable end. “If we got it moving ...”

  “Not unless you’ve been putting on weight,” Torin snorted. “Four meters and I’m out.”

  He could see the patch of stars that marked his entry to the clump’s inner labyrinth. “I’m out in three.”

  They emerged at roughly the same time. Torin popped out and kept rising at about 120 degrees to his zero, clearing the slab of metal cutting up like a fin out of the tangle and then remagging her boots to snap down onto the upper edge. “I’ve pinged the Promise. The debris hasn’t moved.”

  “Then what the fuk . . .” His boots demagged, he pushed off, grabbed a loop of piping, swung around it until he pointed the right way, then bent his arms and shoved off. As he landed three meters from Torin’s position, the top of the Promise’s cabin blew off, debris spraying out as she decompressed into vacuum.

  He didn’t remember moving, but Torin’s grip on his ankle said they both had.

  “Let me go, damn it!” He had to get to his lady. She wasn’t answering, but he knew she wasn’t dead. Holed, yes, open to vacuum, but nothing crucial had been hit.

  “Craig! Listen to me! There’s a ship ...”

  The next shot took out the line holding Promise to the wreckage.

  In order to set the charges around the piece of tech, they’d both tethered to the grapple head. With that gone, the only thing holding him in place was Torin’s grip.

  He could see the incoming ship. Ex-Navy with a cargo hold attached like half the small freighters in known space. But the guns said . . .

  “Pirates!”

  “No shit!” The next shot slapped into the slab of metal just under Torin’s boots. Craig whipped backward as her knees buckled, but she hung on. “They want the salvage! We need to get clear!”

  “No! It’s not the salvage they’re after!”

  “Damn it, Torin, you don’t know . . .”

  The next shot slid behind the slab and into the wreckage.

  The clump shuddered.

  He felt Torin’s grip shift as her body adjusted to the movement under her feet.

  Then the charges blew. Shards of debris flew past. Hit his shoulder. His suit absorbed most of the impact, but it fukking hurt.

  He heard Torin grunt, more an exhalation than an actual sound as though, just for that moment, she were breathing inside his helmet with him.

  Then he felt her grip fall away.

  She’d never have let him go were she still able to hold on.

  “Torin!”

  He saw stars, the attacking ship, his poor wounded lady, debris flying off in every possible direction, Torin caught up in it—the bright orange of her HE suit, visible then obscured by wreckage as he pinwheeled. He reached out. Stupidly. She’d absorbed more of the blast. Was moving away faster than he was spinning. Red lights flashed around the edge of her helmet.

  Red lights . . .

  Air leak!

  Craig tasted blood as he slammed against the mesh of a cable net, jaw impacting with the hard edge of his suit’s collar. His faceplate, crossed by four cables, creaked but held. He couldn’t turn his head, but if they’d netted him, they planned to haul him in. The ship he’d seen while spinning had to have been two kilometers away, minimum. Two kilometers of cable gave him time . . .

  His charges were gone, but he had a cutting tool on his belt. Much smaller but the same basic principle as the Marine’s bennies.

  Don’t think about Marines now.

  Right arm trapped between two loops, he shoved his left between his body and the net.

  Torin’s trained for this, he reminded himself. Situations like this.

  Fumbling the magnetic clasp out, he managed to shove his first two fingers into the tool pouch.

  If Torin were conscious, she’d have her suit patched before she lost enough air for it to matter.

  With the charges gone, it wasn’t that hard to hook out the cutter.

  If Torin were conscious, she’d be talking, implant to implant, to keep the pirates from overhearing. If she’d been hit hard enough to damage her implant . . .

  The cutter was harder to use with his left hand, and working so close to his body, there was always the chance he’d hole his own suit.

  Didn’t stop him from aiming it at the net and turning it up to full burn.

  All he could hear was his own breath. In. Out. A little too fast. A little too hard.

  Three strands through.

  Four.

  One more . . .

  A sudden shadow caught his attention. Craig turned his head to see the edge of a cargo door go by on his right. He’d barely been pulled over the threshold when the gravity generators kicked in and slammed him down hard onto the deck, the edge of his tank driving into his kidneys with enough force to ensure he’d be pissing blood. Teeth clenched, he flopped over onto his side.

  And saw ...

  He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was fukking huge and explained why they’d dropped him so close to the door. There wasn’t room to drop him any farther in.

  A siren wailed as the doors started to close, and he fought the weight of the net to raise himself up onto his hands and knees. Promise still had power. Craig could see her lights flashing in the distance. If he could get to her, he could get to Torin.

  Then the door closed, the halves coming together hard enough he felt the vibrations through his gloves. Through his knees. As he watched, still crawling forward, the telltales turned green.

  He kept crawling. Inching forward. Muscles screaming.

  That was the way out, and he was Goddamned well going out it.

  Suddenly, the floor receded as the net lifted about half a meter i
nto the air. He grunted as his weight drove the cables into his chest, making it hard to breathe. His right leg slipped through the gap he’d cut, but his left remained hung up.

  When they came to get him out, he’d get one chance.

  He went limp, cutting tool hopefully hidden behind the curve of his gloved fingers. With luck, they’d think he’d taken damage and was a little out of it.

  With luck, they’d be quick about it because he didn’t know how long he could overcome his need to move, to get free, to get to his ship, to get to Torin.

  The net started to swing almost immediately.

  Maybe his luck was changing.

  He turned his head inside the helmet, the polarizing making the movement invisible from the outside, and saw boots approaching. HE boots. They hadn’t pressurized the cargo bay, then.

  As the wearer of the boots peeled the net away, and he could feel himself begin to fall, Craig flicked his cutter on. Letting gravity win, he dropped free of the net, landing back on his hands and knees.

  He made contact, that much he knew, but he had no idea how much damage he’d done. No idea if he’d bought himself enough time to get to the door.

  Surging up onto his feet, he’d taken only two steps forward when something jabbed his thigh, and the jolt snapped his head back, driving the edge of the suit’s collar into the back of his neck.

  Torin would’ve made sure the bastard stayed down, he thought as he pitched forward, slamming face first into the deck, mouth filled with blood from where he driven his teeth through his tongue. Next time . . .

  “You had to fukking knock him out?” Cho glared up at Almon, who glared back, the ends of his hair carving short choppy arcs over the collar of his suit.

  “The ablin gon savit tried to take Nadayki’s leg off.” Almon jerked his head toward the deck where Doc had the gash sealed and was working on getting the younger di’Taykan out of his suit. “I didn’t have time to fukking mess around being pleasant.”

  The problem was that not everyone reacted well to the tasik—where not well could be defined as turned into drooling, brain-dead meat. Originally developed to control the large, flightless birds that were the main source of animal protein on the Taykan home world, they were a cheaper “personal weapon” to acquire than black market military guns, and Cho had two on board. “If you’ve broken him ...”

  “Then he’s broken,” Almon interrupted flatly, most of his light receptors closed, his eyes pale yellow, lid to lid. “And we’ll get another one. And if that one tries to kill my thytrin, I’ll break them, too.”

  He wasn’t going to back down, Cho realized. Not when it came to protecting his thytrin. If Almon hadn’t been already suited up and on his way into the cargo bay, Nadayki would have bled out and Almon would likely have ripped the helmet off their captured CSO and spaced him. Pushed now, he’d push back and he was still wearing the tasik clipped to his suit. Lucky for him, Cho knew that the trick to turning the kind of people who were willing to do the things the job required into a functioning crew, was knowing when not to push. And when to shove the offender out the air lock.

  Stretching out a foot, Cho poked the body slumped against the bulkhead. Everyone looked bigger suited up, but Craig Ryder was clearly not small. “Get your suit off,” he snapped at Almon. “Then get his suit off and get him secured to the chair before he comes to. Doc, how will we know if Ryder’s still functional?”

  “Functional is usually pretty fukking obvious,” Doc grunted without looking up, his hands leaving bloody prints all over the ruin of Nadayki’s suit.

  Head lolling forward, too heavy for his neck to hold, Craig felt like he had the worst hangover in the history of hangovers. Worse than that time back when him and Kurt and Nicole had grabbed the first bottle they could get their hands on out of Nic’s dad’s liquor cabinet and gotten stupidly drunk on crème de menthe. Only a drongo could have decided that that particular green poison, of all the many ways the Human species had created to get shitfaced, needed to go with them into space. Took months before Nic had stopped puking at the smell of mint.

  He remembered a card game. Except he never drank to excess when he was playing.

  After?

  He tried to move his arms and legs. Couldn’t. How fukking drunk had he gotten that he couldn’t . . .

  Couldn’t because there were bands around his arms. He could feel the pressure against his skin. Bands around his ankles, too. Warm liquid pooled on his right thigh, but it was his left thigh that hurt. Blood?

  Hospital?

  No. He was sitting up.

  Station lockup?

  No. Torin wouldn’t . . .

  Torin!

  He saw stars, the attacking ship, his poor wounded lady, debris flying off in every possible direction, Torin caught up in it—the bright orange of her HE suit, visible then obscured by wreckage as he pinwheeled.

  Memory surged back hard enough it slapped against the inside of his skull, causing starbursts of brilliant white against the inside of his lids. The attack. The explosion. The net. Pain . . .

  They’d hit him with some kind of current.

  Pain radiated out from the burning circle in his left thigh where they’d jabbed the contact point into flesh. The dull pain across his lower back matched up to where his tanks impacted. The ache in his mouth—Craig remembered spasming, teeth closing on his own flesh. Last but not least, a red-hot iron spike had been jabbed into each temple.

  Only not actual spikes since he was apparently still alive.

  He was pretty sure he was breathing.

  He was naked. No surprise, if they’d just peeled him out of his suit.

  Tied to a chair. He couldn’t lift his head or open his eyes.

  Torin’s suit had been leaking air.

  No way she’d survived a war and been taken out by pirate scum.

  No fukking way.

  But she hadn’t been conscious.

  And her suit had been leaking air.

  He recognized the vibrations he could feel through the soles of his feet. The Susumi engines were on-line. The pirates had folded away from the debris field.

  Away from Torin.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d been expected to believe Torin had carked it. Last time, the Primacy had taken out most of a battalion, melted Marines and equipment and the ground they were standing on into a sheet of gray-green glass. He hadn’t mourned Torin then. He wouldn’t now.

  Muscles knotting across his shoulders and upper back, he forced his head up and his eyes open.

  “Finally.”

  Craig blinked, closed his mouth around a line of pink drool—the warm liquid on his thigh explained—and looked for the source of the voice. The young male di’Taykan standing by the hatch had pale yellow hair and a nasty expression. As Craig watched, he raised one long-fingered hand to his throat, and turned his masker off.

  “Fuk you.” Even to his own ears, it sounded garbled, but Craig figured he got his message across.

  The di’Taykan sneered. “I’ll remind you of that in a few minutes when you’re begging me for release.”

  Dragging his tongue across dry lips, Craig managed a snort. “Are di’Taykan even able to withhold sex?” The plastic cable ties that held his forearms and his lower legs tight to the chair had no give in them. Fukking sentient alien plastic, never around when needed. The chair had been secured to the deck. No matter how he threw his weight—forward, back, side to side—he couldn’t budge it.

  When he rocked his hips forward, his ass came off the seat, skin ripping up off the plastic with a disgusting sucking sound. If these were the same pirates who’d tortured Rogelio Page—and he almost wanted them to be if only to keep down the numbers of bugfuk crazy sons of bitches cruising around known space—he had a good idea of what made the seat sticky. Maybe not a good idea . . .

  The di’Taykan watched him, eyes dark, so he rocked his hips forward again, trying to bring the bastard close enough that he could rip his throat out with his teet
h. He’d never considered himself a violent man, but for this lot, he’d make an exception.

  He felt himself beginning to respond to the pheromones. They’d crank him up until he was so sexually frustrated he couldn’t think straight and then go after whatever the fuk it was they wanted to know. Had they started that way with Page?

  Tough old bastard had held out, though, forced them to bring out the knives and live wires.

  Had died in this chair.

  This chair.

  This inert plastic chair. Fukking figured. Insult added to injury.

  Craig began to fight the bindings. Held nothing back. Felt his knee pop. Kept fighting. Had no idea when the struggle turned to rut. His skin felt on fire, and if he didn’t get some release, soon, he was going to . . .

  The fist that smashed into his face snapped him back to himself. He’d never had any interest in tying sex to pain. Although, by the third blow, he couldn’t remember why.

  Out in the corridor, Cho frowned down at the monitor and the image of Almon beating their prisoner. “This can’t go the way the last one did.”

  Beside him, Doc shrugged. “Then make him an offer.”

  “An offer?”

  “Traditionally, in this way of life, if the captured seaman had needed skills, it was join the crew or die.”

  “Join the crew?”

  “Or die.”

  “What if he decides to die?”

  Doc sighed. “No one decides to die. Page was a crazy old loner who stood on principle, but his actual death was an accident.”

  “You accidentally questioned him to death?” Cho asked dryly.

  “It happens. The point is, it won’t happen to this guy if I don’t have to question him.” Doc repeated the emphasis exactly. “Ryder’s ship has been destroyed, his woman is dead, what does he have to return to? Nothing. Offer him life.”

  “As a part of the crew? We won’t be able to trust him.”

  “So? When push comes to shove, we don’t trust anyone.”

  It was, Cho acknowledged silently, opening the hatch, a valid point.