The Truth of Valor

by Huff, Tanya

  Big Bill’s chair creaked a protest as he leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I just happen to know where I can gain access to a Marine Corps armory. Still sealed. Contents intact.”

  Torin heard a nearly audible click as the last piece fell into place. Jan and Sirin had scooped an armory up out of their debris field, and everything else made perfect sense.

  Still sealed.

  “You haven’t opened it?” Even to her own ear, she sounded like she couldn’t quite catch her breath but figured there were valid reasons enough, given a sealed armory. Big Bill wouldn’t question it.

  He didn’t. Asked only, “What difference does that make?”

  They hadn’t opened it. But it was on the station and the Heart was docked, so that could only mean they were working on getting it open. Working on getting past the seal the original CSOs had used to lock it down. Using the CSO they’d grabbed to break the code when Page had died before giving them what they needed. Using Craig. Who was alive. After a moment, Torin realized Big Bill was waiting for her to answer his question. Back in the day, it had been part of her job to remain calm regardless of the situation. Surrounded by a couple hundred juvenile sentient lizards. Trapped in the belly of an unidentified ship. Under fire by their own training equipment. In a prison that shouldn’t exist. She could do this. She could sound like she didn’t want to dive across the desk and grab Big Bill’s ears and slam his head into the wall over and over and over until he agreed to take her to Craig.

  Torin regained enough motor control to shrug. “It makes a difference because you don’t know what’s in the armory.”

  “We don’t know exactly what the contents are ...” Glancing down, he shuffled a few papers on his desk and looked up again. “. . . but I’m sure you could draw up a reasonably accurate inventory.”

  “I’d have to see it. There’s more than one type of armory. Platoon support, armored support, hell, even air support.”

  Craig was at the armory.

  “So you’ll take the job?”

  If she agreed too quickly, he’d get suspicious. If she agreed too slowly, there’d be yet another delay in getting to Craig.

  “Depends. On what kind of an armory you’ve found,” she expanded when his brows rose. “No point if it’s carrying the wrong gear. And,” she added before he could speak, “it depends on what’s in it for me.”

  “You’d be at the forefront of the revolution.”

  “And?”

  “And?” He laughed. “And do you have any idea how much fifteen percent of everything amounts to Gunnery Sergeant? You’ll be very, very well compensated.”

  “After the revolution. I’m not taking a job that offers nothing more than the possibility of being well paid.”

  “You do your job right, and that possibility is a certainty.”

  “Chance is always a factor.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. Torin kept her expression absolutely neutral. And here she thought she’d never have anything to thank General Morris for.

  “You and yours stay here free,” Big Bill said at last. “Air, food, water—you work for me, I pick up the tab. Plus extra credit you can spend on the station.”

  Thus tying them to the station.

  “No deal until I see the armory.”

  Big Bill smiled that smile he’d learned from the Krai. “Seems like you’ve already attempted to take a look at it. My station, Gunnery Sergeant,” he added, more teeth coming into view as his smile broadened. “I know everything that happens on it. I assume you had a good reason to be down by the old ore docks?”

  “We did.”

  He waited and, when Torin didn’t expand on her answer, finally snarled, “Let’s hear it, then, and I’ll decide how good it is.”

  “We heard rumors that the Heart of Stone had come in with a big haul and wasn’t sharing. No one mentioned the word armory, but we thought we might convince the captain to share. For a small finder’s fee.”

  “Running percentages.” He nodded. “I do like you, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, but only I run percentages on this station. Understand?”

  Torin had seen warmer expressions on corpses. “Perfectly, sir.”

  The “sir” pulled out a real smile. Torin had known it would; it was the most manipulative word in a NCO’s arsenal. “Right, then. Let’s go take a look at the armory, and you can tell me what we have.” Pulling a pile of paper toward him, Big Bill added, “Wait for me in the outer office.” An order given to establish the chain of command. “There’s no need for your people to hang about; send them back to the ship. Do not mention the armory. You can fill them in when we have all the details worked out.”

  The vid Presit had shot on the prison planet filled all screens when Torin went back into the outer office. Each screen showed a different feed, a different point in the recording. She could see herself, Mashona, Presit, the plastic alien, and, given the HE suit, Craig’s knees. Two screens had subtitles in languages Torin didn’t recognize.

  The Grr brothers sat staring at the screens, ignoring the other people in the room.

  Appearing to ignore the other people in the room.

  Keeping the two Krai in her peripheral vision, Torin beckoned Werst, Ressk, and Mashona in close, a hand signal moving Mashona far enough to the left to block the pertinent details of their interaction from Big Bill’s muscle. “We’ve been offered a job. Training the free merchants to fight.”

  Werst recovered first. “With what?” he snorted.

  “I’m about to find out.” Hands on her hips, Torin stretched out her index finger and wrote armory on the screen of her slate. Ressk’s eyes widened slightly and she stroked the word away. “Go back to the ship, I’ll fill you in when I know what’s going on.” Wrote locked. “If you stop in the Hub for a drink, don’t mention the job offer where you could be overheard. There’s no guarantee we’re taking it.” Stroked the word away.

  “Haven’t had any better offers,” Mashona muttered.

  “Granted, but we’re not going in blind.”

  Werst’s nose ridges were nearly shut. “What’s the payment?”

  “For now? We get to breathe and eat.”

  “Activities I’m fond of,” he admitted. “However ...”

  “Still here?” Big Bill asked, stepping out of his office.

  Torin shifted slightly, just enough to put herself directly in Big Bill’s line of sight. “They were just leaving.”

  “Gunny?” Werst didn’t quite growl the word.

  “Don’t worry. Standing next to Big Bill is the safest place on the station.”

  “It’s true.” He brushed a bit of nonexistent dust off his shoulder. “Everyone loves me.”

  Ressk gave him a look that suggested he was wondering how the large man would taste with a nice red sauce. Given Big Bill’s amused expression, Torin suspected he’d been looked at that way before.

  “You’re wasting . . . Big Bill’s time,” Torin pointed out. The pause had been small enough it could be explained by any number of reasons. If Big Bill asked, she’d think of one. He didn’t ask. They were wasting her time. Craig’s time. Big Bill could shove his time up his ass for all she cared. “Go.”

  They still recognized an order when they heard one.

  When they heard the hatch close at the end of the corridor, the Grr brothers snapped off the screens and stood.

  Big Bill shook his head. “If anything comes up, the gunny’ll take care of it. Right?”

  Torin shrugged. “Your first one’s free.”

  “I do like you.”

  The Grr on the left made a noise Torin nearly echoed.

  The Grr on the right rolled his eyes and dropped back onto the sofa, grabbing for the remote.

  As she stepped out into the corridor, Torin heard the sound come up on one of the screens and Presit say, “You are having aliens and he are having aliens in your heads—being lovers who are being reunited and who are discovering way to be saving the day. Very romantic.”

>   And Big Bill said, “Whatever happened to that lover you were reunited with?”

  “We had aliens in our heads,” Torin growled, stepping through the hatch.

  When he laughed, Torin resisted the urge to turn and slam him in the throat, crushing his windpipe. But only just.

  No one approached them when they crossed the Hub although everyone tracked their progress, voices rising and falling as they passed in a wave of sound that had become familiar to Torin over the last few years.

  “Feel free to use your implant,” Big Bill told her as they started toward the ore docks, his voice pitched intimately even though there was no one around to overhear. “Many of the free merchants do, although, given that free merchants are strongly individualistic, very few of them have tied into the station. In the interest of security, I’ve had to have the station’s sysop capture and record all signals, even those using ship’s computers as SPs.”

  Torin moved her tongue away from the contact points. None of her crew had implants—the Corps installed them in sergeants and above—but Craig did and Craig was alive on the station. Walking half a stride ahead of Big Bill in an empty corridor, it had seemed like a good time to let Craig know she was there. Just a ping. A moment’s contact. And now her codes and Craig’s had been captured by the station. They wouldn’t know who he was, not yet, but the moment they did, they could connect him to her, and that could be fatal.

  “Over the years I’ve noticed a specific muscle twitch, just here . . .” Big Bill touched his own face, not hers. Good thing. She didn’t have a Krai’s jaw strength, but she’d have made a damned good attempt to bite his finger off. “. . . when an implant is in use.”

  The bastard didn’t miss much.

  “Of course, when you agree to work for me, I’ll need your codes.”

  Nadayki slapped his palm against the locker, his hair standing out around his head in a lime-green aurora. “The last eight digits are a fukking date!”

  It hurt to laugh; the vibrations felt like glass ground into the stump of his toe. Craig didn’t let that stop him. All his delaying had been completely fukking pointless.

  Patterns could be sussed out and, once found, broken, but finding a random date without hooking up a slate, with no way to tell if the first seven numbers were correct until the last number was in—time to pack a lunch. Not all CSOs added that extra layer of protection, but it wasn’t uncommon. Birthdays. Anniversaries. He’d changed his to the day he’d walked late into the briefing room on the Berganitan and first saw Torin staring down at him like he’d just crawled out of a H’san’s ass. Those who knew him had a chance of figuring it out. A stranger? No fukking way.

  It was the digital version of a steel bar across the door.

  “You’re a salvage operator, this is a salvage operator’s seal. Did you know them?”

  Craig actually had his mouth open to answer when he realized Nadayki didn’t know that Jan and Sirin had been friends. No one knew. Up until now the crew of the Heart had gone by the old truism that space was big and hadn’t asked. “Sure I did, kid. You know di’Akusi Sirin? You’re di’Taykan, they’re di’ . . .”

  “Fuk you. And if you think the captain’ll stop at a toe, you’re wrong. If he thinks you’re screwing him over, he’ll have Doc take out organs. And sell them.”

  Lovely. Craig shifted, trying to ease the burn in his left leg. “Why would you crew under someone who’d allow that?”

  “Are you kidding?” Fingers paused on his slate, Nadayki grinned down at him. “That’s hardcore. No one fuks with the captain.”

  What kind of upbringing did the kid have, Craig wondered, that he was impressed by casual cruelty? Looked like the Taykan were just as capable of fukking up their kids as every other species in known space. “Seems to me,” he said, grabbing his thigh and shifting his leg, “that it’s more like no one fuks with Doc.”

  Nadayki shook his head, hair flipping in counterpoint. “Yeah, but Doc signed on with Captain Cho, so ...”

  Craig missed the rest. He could see Nadayki’s mouth moving, so the kid was still talking, but all he could hear was the ping of his implant coming on-line.

  Torin.

  Had to be Torin.

  She was close. She’d found him.

  He couldn’t answer, not with Nadayki staring right at him, eyes dark, as he laid out all the reasons he admired a thief and murderer. His hands were shaking, so he dug his fingers into the leg of his overalls and hung on. Hung on so tightly to the bunched fabric that his knuckles were white.

  He couldn’t answer, but he could listen.

  His throat was dry. He swallowed. Waited.

  Except Torin never spoke.

  Just the ping.

  One small noise

  One small noise that could have been caused by the damage the tasik had done. A random firing of neurons that just happened to sound like an implant coming on-line. A familiar noise created by hope and applied current.

  “. . . and when I get this thing open—because I fukking will . . .” Nadayki half turned and slapped the side the of the weapons locker. “. . . the captain will lead us as we take back what’s rightfully ours!”

  “What’s rightfully yours?” Craig repeated when the pause seemed to indicate he was expected to respond. “What’s been taken from you?”

  “The universe! I am meant for more than this crap,” Nadayki continued, arms and hair spread. “I’m smarter than all of those tregradiates who said my attitude wasn’t right for their academy, and the captain’ll help me prove it. They’re going to pay!”

  “Yeah, okay.” Craig smoothed down the two handfuls of crumpled overall. “How old are you, kid?”

  “Stop calling me kid! And I’m old enough to know who has the power and that’s more than you can say.”

  “You have a ...”

  A hatch clanged in the distance. Too far away to be at the ship, so it had to be the point where the ore docks joined the station.

  Nadayki’s ear points swiveled toward the sound, his hair following the movement. “Sounds like two pairs of boots.”

  “Probably people in them, too,” Craig grunted, shifting around so his back was against the wall and a corner of the armory stood as bulwark between him and the storage pod’s open hatch.

  “Captain’s on board, so it’s got to be Big Bill. He’s the only one allowed down here.”

  “Big Bill? You’re bullshitting me, right?”

  “What? No. It’s what they call him.” He fumbled with his slate. “I need to tell the cap . . . Ablin gon savit! Lost the last fukking screen. Good thing I can . . . Captain? Big Bill’s on the dock.”

  Craig couldn’t quite catch the captain’s answer. It was just another layer of sound.

  “Yeah, but . . . I know, but . . . Yes. Okay, I will.” Forefingers and thumbs tapping on the screen, Nadayki kept his eyes locked on his slate as he said, “Captain’s on his way.”

  “Joy.” Craig let his head fall back against the bulkhead. He could hear a man’s voice, a deep burr of monologue growing louder and ending in a question eliciting a monosyllabic answer from his companion.

  He knew that grunt.

  He knew the tone and the timbre.

  He knew the feel of the lips and the taste of the mouth.

  Torin.

  Torin.

  Torin.

  It hurt to breathe.

  Torin had never seen the docking bay of an ore processing facility, but she assumed they were all much the same. Large enough for loading and unloading ore carriers and probably a lot more interesting when they hadn’t been left unused for years. These ore docks weren’t that large, the ore wasn’t stored but passed through to the smelters while supplies went the other way onto the ships, but it was empty enough that their footsteps all but echoed.

  She’d just spotted the air lock where the Heart was docked—visible lights were green—when Big Bill pointed toward an open hatch.

  “I’ve had the armory moved into that pod. Origin
ally designed for storing explosives until they were needed dirtside, it’s the best place to both control access and minimize damage to the station. If it blows, any force the pod can’t contain will be blown out along fault lines here and here.” His gesture followed shadows that moved out to the outer hull. “Depressurizing this part of the station and possibly damaging any ship at the lock, but it’s an allowable risk given the payoff, don’t you agree?”

  Torin made a noncommittal noise. The hatch on the pod needed to be closed in order for it to contain anything, but since she’d be perfectly happy watching this station broken up into its component parts and everyone on it sucking vacuum, it seemed hypocritical to point out the problem.

  When she picked up the pace, he said, “Must be strange going unarmed after all that time in the Corps. Bet you can’t wait to get your hands on a weapon.”

  He thought he knew her, and she could use that. Was using that to hide the truth. If I didn’t need you to get to Craig, I’d kill you with my bare hands wouldn’t get her far. When they reached the open hatch, Big Bill waved her on ahead.

  Torin stepped over the lip into the pod and froze.

  It was one thing to be told that Cho, and by extension Big Bill, had a sealed armory. It was another thing entirely to stand in front of it. A sealed armory meant people she wouldn’t trust as far as she could spit a H’san were in possession of enough firepower to do significant damage. The kind of death and destruction she’d spent her adult life trying to prevent, the only difference being the Primacy’s forces had been made up of soldiers, just like her, not amoral assholes

  Torin ignored the green-haired di’Taykan and stepped closer. She couldn’t walk away from this. She had to . . .