Valour's Choice

by Tanya Huff

  Only standing beside the buildings did it become obvious that they’d built in a shallow valley.

  “An enemy on those hills would have the high ground,” Torin muttered. “Not good.”

  “Not bad,” Cri Sawyes corrected. “From here, those hillsss are in easssy range of your weaponsss, but on the hillsss your enemy hasss no weaponsss that will reach you. Againssst greater numbersss, it isss far better to have a wall at your back.”

  Torin couldn’t argue with that.

  Both buildings were a single story high. Rectangular, they were set so that the end of one angled off the side of the other with fifteen meters between them on the north and thirty on the south. If there was a reason for their placement, Torin couldn’t see it. The walls were made of thick mud bricks coated in a facing layer of mud and were topped with shallow-angled thatch roofs. Inside they’d been divided into thirds, rooms closed off from each other by a surprisingly heavy wooden door. A narrow window high in each room’s outside wall let in light. One building, as reported, was empty. The other was filled with large fabric sacks of grain.

  In spite of their rustic setting, the waterproof, vermin-proof sacks were clearly the product of a technological society.

  “I expect the grain isss brought in for the young malesss,” Cri Sawyes explained to Torin, pouring a sample from one hand to the other. “We are, like all of you, omnivorousss.”

  An eyebrow rose of its own volition. “You intended for them to kill each other, but you don’t want them to starve to death?”

  “It isss more complicated than that, Ssstaff Sssergeant, but esssentially, yesss.”

  “So for the packs, this is neutral ground?” When he agreed that it was, Torin sighed. “And we’ve moved in. That’s going to piss them off but good.”

  Chewing the grain he’d been examining, Cri Sawyes followed her out of the building. “If I underssstand your comment correctly, it does sssum up the problem.”

  “Maybe we should leave.”

  “That would be wissse—were there anywhere to go. Asss there isss not...”

  They joined the lieutenant at the well just as Dr. Leor finished testing the grain.

  “As usual, the Krai may eat it although they will need to supplement for the amino acids it lacks.”

  “And the rest of us?”

  “This one thinks not. And now, this one has patients to settle. That building is empty? Then this one will use the farthest room for those already injured and the nearest room to treat those about to be injured.”

  “And the middle room?” Torin wondered.

  “If there is to be fighting,” the doctor pointed out disapprovingly, “the middle room will fill quickly enough.” He minced off, shouting orders to the two corpsmen as he went.

  Torin peered into the well. She could see her reflection shimmering in the darkness about six meters down. “Bad news about the grain, sir.”

  “We have food, Staff. The bags of grain are a lot more useful as part of our defenses.”

  “We’ll use them to buy our way out of a fight?” she asked, straightening.

  “Wouldn’t work,” Cri Sawyes said shortly. “They will attack regardless.”

  “We use the bags to build walls between the buildings.” Jarret turned and pointed. “There and there. It’ll give us one unbroken front with the well safely inside.”

  “There’s certainly enough,” Torin admitted, mentally converting the stored grain into walls. “An excellent idea, sir.”

  “I’m not totally helpless without you, Staff.”

  “Since you’re smiling, sir, I’ll accept that ludicrous observation in the spirit in which it was offered.”

  His smile began to broaden, then cut off completely at the unmistakable alarm sounding from the helmet tucked under his arm. “Staff!”

  “On my way, sir. Mysho! Conn! Get your teams and follow me!” As she ran past her pack, she grabbed her own helmet and crammed it onto her head. Without turning, she raced back along the path of trampled vegetation, eight pairs of boots pounding the dry ground behind her.

  * * *

  “They’re so fast!” Binti squeezed off another round prone from her vantage point on top of the largest boulder. It bit into the dirt directly behind where a Silsviss had been.

  “Where are they fukking going?”

  To everyone’s surprise, the Dornagain ambassador answered. “They are using the contours of the land. Every hollow, every rise.”

  “But we went over that land! It’s fukking flat!” The slightly louder whomp of the heavy gun sent every Silsviss in sight, out of sight.

  “Apparently not so flat as you assume and, with their coloring, they lie like shadows on the ground.”

  “If they’d clump up a little more, I’d launch a fukking grenade or two at them. I don’t need to see them to blow them up. And why do they keep yelling?”

  “I believe they are issuing challenges.”

  “Well, they can just fukking stop.”

  Sitting back on his haunches behind the largest of the boulders presenting the smallest target possible, the ambassador studied the Marine curiously. “Later, Private Checya, when we have time, I would like to discuss the psychological determinates in your use of copulative profanity.”

  Juan shot a short but incredulous glance back over his shoulder. “Yeah. Later. If we fukking survive.” His eyes widened as he faced front again. “Incoming!”

  Short arrows flung off the ends of whiplike branches filled the air on Juan’s side of the boulders. Most fell short, but the rest rattled against the stone like hard rain.

  “They gotta stop doing that soon!” Tucked as far into his crevasse as he could get, he winced as one of the arrows bounced off the protruding muzzle of his gun. “How many of those fukking things did they bring!”

  “You want to know, you go count them,” Binti advised, taking aim at the last of the archers to duck. “Got him!”

  “I’m hit!”

  The two statements came so close together that for a moment no one knew how to respond. Then Binti squirmed around to peer down the south side of her perch. “Ressk?”

  The Krai said something in his own language that could have been either prayer or profanity and added, “A spear knocked my helmet off. My ears are ringing, but I’m all right.” Gingerly replacing the helmet, he glanced up at the sharpshooter. “Binti, ignore the arrows from now on. The Silsviss are using them to draw your fire so they can get close enough to toss the heavy artillery at the other two sides.”

  “Ressk’s right,” Hollice called, hidden from view by the four Dornagain. “I had spear throwers this side as well.”

  “Then why didn’t you fukking shoot him?”

  “You try it, asshole. They throw and duck in the same motion.” He wiped one sweaty palm after another against his thighs. “Okay, next time: arrow side ducks, spear sides will spray the whole area.”

  “Waste of ammunition,” Binti cautioned.

  Juan snorted. “Show of fukking force.”

  “I believe you are both correct,” the ambassador offered. When the silence stretched, he added, “And what is Private Mashona to do?”

  “Fire at anything that shows itself... Incoming!”

  When the noise died and the varying projectiles had settled one way or another, three Silsviss were down and the rest had fallen completely silent.

  “Well, that’s a nice fukking change,” Juan muttered, squinting out into the setting sun.

  Ears ringing, Hollice risked a look back at their charges. “Everyone... oh, crap. You’re hit.”

  “Who’s hit?” Ressk demanded.

  “One of the Dornagain. Uh...” He screwed up his face trying to remember the younger male’s name. “It’s Walks In Thought.” He hadn’t been able to see much beyond Thinks Deeply’s bulk, but he had seen golden fur streaked with red and dark fluid glistening on a raised spear point. “Hey!”

  Think Deeply turned at his nudge.

  “Is he hurt badly?�
��

  “No. It is a flesh wound only. I am sure it looks worse than it is.”

  “Speaking of flesh wounds,” Binti called down from her vantage point. “One of those lizards just got winged and his buddy’s crawling over to him. I’ve got a clear shot at the buddy.”

  “Leave it,” Hollice told her. “We’re not going to shoot them as they tend their wounded.”

  Moving frighteningly quickly in spite of his awkward position, the crawling Silsviss reached his wounded comrade, ripped out his throat with a vicious sweep of extended claws, and dove into the hollow the dying male no longer needed as bright red arterial blood arced up and sank down.

  “I think tend to would be the more accurate phrase,” Binti observed dryly. “The wounded Silsviss is now dead and buddy has his spot and his weapons.”

  “Odds are good they don’t take prisoners either,” Ressk noted.

  Exhaling forcefully, Hollice sagged and banged his helmet lightly against the rock. “One more thing to worry about.”

  “Two more,” Thinks Deeply corrected, extending her hand into the corporal’s field of vision. Held pincerlike between her claws was one of the arrows. “Do you see this discoloration here?”

  An orange/brown stain covered the pointed end.

  “Don’t tell me...”

  “I believe the arrows are poisoned.”

  Her words carried clearly over the new challenges rising around them. “Poisoned?” Binti repeated. She laid her head down on her forearm. “Can this day get any worse?”

  “Poisoned for lizards doesn’t necessarily mean poisoned for us,” Ressk reminded them.

  “Do you wish to bet your life on that?” Thinks Deeply wondered. It sounded as though she actually wanted to know the answer, that she hadn’t been asking a rhetorical question.

  Ressk sighed, blowing out his cheeks until his ridges spread. “As long as we’re having a lull, why don’t I try running it through the sla...”

  “Incoming!”

  “Or not.”

  * * *

  Lying prone just below the crest of a long undulation in the ground—she couldn’t bring herself to call it a hill—Torin stared down at the half-dozen boulders and the surrounding Silsviss. Her helmet scanner placed Privates Mashona and Checya and two of the Dornagain, but the rocks prevented her from reading the rest. She knew they were alive, but she’d have felt better had she been able to see them.

  Early evening breezes brought with them the sounds of Silsviss shrieking. It might have helped had they known what was actually being said, but Torin’s translator held only the common trade language and under these circumstances was completely useless.

  “Sounds mocking,” Conn observed thoughtfully beside her.

  “Mocking?”

  “Yeah, you know, Come out here and try that, you big pissant, I just dare you!”

  On Torin’s other side, Mysho snorted. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with four-year-olds.”

  “Hey, my daughter does not say pissant.”

  Torin raised a hand before the argument could escalate. “Taking into consideration all the warnings about not reading familiar motivations into an alien species, blah, blah, blah, I think Conn’s right. It does sound like they’re taunting.”

  “Trying to get them to come out from behind the rocks?”

  “Very likely.”

  “So they think we’re stupid.”

  “I suspect no one ever warned them about reading familiar motivations into an alien species.”

  Mysho and Conn exchanged an identical look over her back.

  “So you’re saying the Silsviss are stupid?” Mysho said after a moment.

  “No. I’m saying that taunting must work on another Silsviss since they’re putting so much effort into it.”

  “Unless it’s a case of hope springing eternal,” Cohn offered.

  “Unless,” Torin agreed.

  The ground between their hiding place and the rocks was superficially flat but actually pocketed with small irregularities into and behind which a single Silsviss could hide. Torin could see four of the enemy quite clearly—three were definitely hittable from where they were, and the fourth was about a fifty/ fifty chance. Binti Mashona could have made it a sure thing, but she was currently perched on a boulder almost half a kilometer away. All four shots would have to be taken simultaneously so as not to give warning. And then what?

  “Well, Staff, what do we do?” Mysho asked, as though she’d been reading Torin’s mind.

  “Hollice says they’re surrounded and that of the original thirty unfriendlies, nine have been shot, leaving approximately twenty-one continuing to attack.”

  “Approximately twenty-one?” Conn shook his head in disbelief. “Even Myrna could do the math.”

  “They’ve spread out, and I expect they’re moving too fast to get an exact count without actually having the Silsviss programmed into the scanners.”

  “If they’ve shot nine, it doesn’t sound like they need us. At this rate they’ll be able to walk out of there before dark.”

  “Unless this lot decides to stop showing themselves and just hold them there until their buddies arrive.” Cri Sawyes had insisted that all the Silsviss would go first to the VTA. Torin couldn’t help but wonder if that had been an innocent miscalculation or something more serious. Was he as much on their side as he argued he was?

  Drop it. Just drop it. Her instincts said to trust him and she wasn’t about to start questioning her instincts now. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do: we form a line, fire simultaneously at the four we can see, aiming as close as possible without hitting them. That’ll get their attention in a big way and with any luck when they see a line of Marines coming over the hill, they’ll run like hell.”

  “And if they don’t? Or if they run like hell toward us?”

  “Then we shoot them. According to Hollice, their maximum range isn’t much more than twenty meters—ours is considerably more than that. By the time we’re close enough to be hit, they’ll all be dead. Anchor both ends of the line with the heavy gunners; they can take care of any Silsviss who try to flank us.”

  “They’re that fast?”

  “Corporal Hollice’s exact phrase was like shit through a H’san.”

  Mysho pursed her lips, impressed. “That’s fast.”

  “Just tell your heavies they’re not to use the flamers under any circumstances.” Torin tore a handful of dead grass out from under the living and waved it for emphasis. “I don’t want this whole area on fire.”

  “But what happens if the Silsviss stay hidden?” Conn protested. “We can’t hit them if we can’t see them. If they lie still until we’re close enough for their weapons, it becomes a crap shoot as to who gets their shot off first.”

  “There’s two solutions to that,” Torin told him. “First, everyone keeps their scanner down. I know it’s a pain when you’re moving, but it will see things your eyes won’t. The closer we get, the harder it will be for the Silsviss to hide. Second, make sure you get your shot off first.”

  “Yeah, well that’s the trick, isn’t it,” Conn muttered.

  “Oh, come on, even Kleers can shoot faster than some primitive.”

  Torin glanced over her shoulder at the young Krai, who, hearing Mysho use his name, looked up and grinned. A sudden flurry of shots turned her attention back to the problem at hand. “Bottom line, we have to get our people and the civilians out of there before enough Silsviss show up to simply overwhelm them with numbers. Mysho, go left. Conn, go right. I’ll hold the center. The two Marines to either side of me will be taking those first four shots across the bow, as it were, so place your people accordingly. Once the shooting starts, make every round count, we don’t know how long we’re going to have to make our ammunition last. Remember there’s nine of us and only twenty-one...” Another shot rang out from the rocks. “...twenty of them.” Reaching up, she snapped her helmet mike down against the corner of her mouth. “I’ll
let Corporal Hollice know we’re on our way.”

  * * *

  Rather than have her taken out by friendly fire, Hollice rearranged the Dornagain and had Binti relinquish her perch for a crevice by Juan. “When the Silsviss hear an attack on the south, they’re liable to attack us on the north—they’ll think our attention is fixed away from them, and if they’ve got any brains at all, they’ll want into the shelter of these rocks.”

  “If they have any brains at all, they’ll run away,” Binti muttered, settling herself in her new position.

  “Yeah?” Juan looked up from checking a wrist point and grinned. “If I’d had any brains, I’d have been a fukking beautician like my mama wanted.”

  “Look alive, people!” Hollice’s voice bounced from boulder to boulder. “The cavalry’s on its way in.”

  Binti shot a questioning glance toward the heavy gunner. “Cavalry?”

  Juan shrugged, a minimalist movement to keep the exoskeleton from turning it into something more destructive. “I don’t know what the fuk he’s talkin’ about most of the time either.”

  * * *

  “All right, Marines, keep alert. If you spot an unfriendly running away from you, let him. Otherwise, shoot.” Torin wanted to say shoot to wound but given Hollice’s recent report of Silsviss first aid, she didn’t see much point. While she had no desire to be a part of the Silsvah culling program, neither did she want to leave injured teenagers scattered about waiting in pain for their comrades to return and finish them off. Which meant they’d have to take care of the wounded. Since she had no idea of how they were supposed to manage that, better there weren’t that many wounded to take care of.

  If war was fun, everybody’d be doing it.

  And this action was only a sidebar to the actual war. If they’d been shot down anywhere but over the preserve... For a moment, Torin wondered if maybe the whole incident was a part of the Silsvah culling program, then she dismissed the thought. Now wasn’t the time.

  “Keep your scanners down and watch out for Silsviss staying hidden until we’re on them and they can use their spears,” she continued, barely vocalizing into her helmet mike. “Remember that you’re just as dead if they kill you with a pointy stick.”