Valour's Choice

by Tanya Huff

  Binti drew in a deep breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

  An instant later the Silsviss’ head exploded, spraying everyone within three or four meters with brain, bone, and blood. He stood there for a moment, headless, then slowly collapsed backward.

  “She’s got him, sir.” And moving her mouth away from the mike. “What have you got in your clip?”

  “Impact boomers, Staff Sergeant.”

  “The 462s?”

  “Yep.”

  “That explains it.”

  The skull-topped staff remained upright for a moment longer, the bone gleaming in the bright sunlight; then it too crashed to the ground. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay there long. The battle for possession was brief, but bloody.

  “Did that guy just lose a leg?”

  “I think so, Staff.”

  There were two more bodies when the skull was raised again, but the vast majority of the Silsviss didn’t even seem to notice. The whole thing, from shot to recovery, took less than four minutes.

  “Well, bugger that,” Torin muttered.

  “I could take him out, too,” Binti offered, taking aim.

  “Doesn’t seem like it would do any good,” Torin told her. “Watch the sun on your scope and scanner,” she said, crawling away in a cloud of dust rising up out of the crushed thatch. “It wouldn’t take much to set this stuff alight.”

  “We may not have stopped anything, but at least we didn’t set anything off,” Jarret observed as she dropped off the wall at his feet.

  “Sir!” Mysho’s voice caroled over the compound from the west building. “There’s something happening!”

  One after another, sections of the line boomed from expanded throat pouches, ran about ten meters forward, stopped, and boomed again.

  “You were saying, sir?”

  For the first time it became obvious that the line of Silsviss was four or five bodies deep. Six deep on the more uneven ground.

  “Do the ones in front look smaller to you?” Torin asked quietly.

  Cri Sawyes nodded. “They’re probably the youngessst, the mossst rash. The mossst eager to show their courage.”

  Boom. Run. Boom.

  Eventually, all the layers of the entire circle had moved in.

  * * *

  “Enough of this,” Hollice muttered. “Shit or get off the pot!”

  The booming stopped and the shrieking started as the inner ring of the circle charged forward.

  “I think they heard you.” Juan swung the heavy gun around and slipped his finger over the trigger. “Now, try telling them to go fuk themselves.”

  * * *

  Down on the ground, Torin moved to the north wall.

  “In the middle of the compound, Jarret drew in a deep breath. “Marines, ready!”

  His helmet modified the volume and made sure that every other helmet got the message, but Torin was pleased that the mechanical assistance hadn’t been necessary. It took some new officers a while to realize that in combat the equipment backed up the verbal order and not the other way around.

  “Mark your targets,” she said quietly, walking behind the line of kneeling Marines. “We haven’t got the ammo to waste on wild firing.”

  The ring of shrieking Silsviss charged closer.

  “Aim!”

  And closer.

  “Fire!”

  Technology had made the KC essentially noiseless when fired. R&D had been thrilled but the people actually using the weapons had been less than happy. They’d compromised somewhere between a good old bang and ear protection.

  Thirty-six of them going off at once made satisfactory noise.

  Silsviss began to fall.

  “Heavy gunners! Switch to grenades!”

  Up on the roof, Juan snapped his upper receiver into a new position. “Fukking A.”

  Clusters of Silsviss were blown into pieces.

  The shrieking changed in pitch.

  Leaving the fallen, the ring pulled back until it rejoined the rest of the circle.

  “Cease firing!”

  They were surrounded by the dead, but there didn’t seem to be many wounded. A ragged keening drew Torin’s attention to a Silsviss thrashing from side to side in a bloody froth. She turned to the lieutenant.

  His eyes so dark they held almost no color, he nodded.

  “Mashona!”

  When Binti looked over the edge of the roof, Torin pointed.

  A single shot.

  The thrashing stopped.

  “With any luck,” Lieutenant Jarret said as she reached his side, “that was enough to discourage them.”

  Torin understood how he felt—it hadn’t been a fight, it had been a slaughter—but it didn’t feel over to her. “Sir, I’d like to check out the reaction of that command group.” When he nodded, she ran for the roof.

  They were crouched down, drawing in the dirt, the skull keeping watch overhead. One of them looked up, pointed toward the buildings, then began to draw again.

  Feeling a little sick, she realized what they were doing. What they’d done.

  “I don’t know what they’re planning to do next, sir,” she said, joining the two lieutenants and Cri Sawyes at the well. “But I think I know what that charge was for. They were mapping our weapons. Looking for weak spots in the defense.”

  “They were sending kids out to be shot?” Jarret shook his head in mute denial—not of her theory, she was pleased to note, but of the very idea. “They were deliberately using the deaths of their own to plan their offense?”

  She kept her tone matter-of-fact to better absorb the pain in his. “It’s just a guess, sir.”

  “But an accurate guesss.” Cri Sawyes whistled his approval. “The lowessst membersss in a pack hierarchy have little worth.”

  His ridges white, Ghard took a step away. “I can’t believe you people! You’re savages!”

  The Silsviss shrugged, his tail moving from side to side. “And thisss isss why you need usss on your ssside.”

  “We don’t need you!”

  “No?” His voice was calm, but the movement of his tail sped up. “Then why are you here?”

  “Enough!” Jarret threw the word between them. “Our fight is out there!”

  “And he should be out there with them, not in here with us,” Ghard snarled, his upper lip pulled back off large, ivory teeth.

  “Lieutenant...”

  Torin was impressed by the amount of quiet warning in that single word.

  “...you are so far out of line that if we didn’t need every weapon for our defense, I’d relieve you of yours. For the last time, Cri Sawyes is our ally.” He took a step toward the Krai, using the difference in their height to his advantage. “And I mean it, Ghard; that was the last ti—”

  Torin knocked Lieutenant Jarret flat a second before the well exploded. Their faces were inches apart as small bits of debris rained down around them and the proximity made her head swim. Before the lieutenant had quite recovered from his surprise, she cranked his masker up another notch.

  “What the...!”

  “I heard it coming in, sir.” She rolled off him and stood, half expecting a salacious comment to ignore. Most di’Taykan wouldn’t have been able to resist, regardless of circumstances, but the lieutenant got quickly and quietly to his feet.

  The well had contained most of the blast. One of the headsized rocks had been flung inches into the mud brick of the western building but the rest hadn’t traveled far. Torin picked her way to the edge of the blast zone, retreating quickly when the ground shifted underfoot. “The good news, a foot in either direction and we’d have had casualties. The bad news, we won’t be using that well again.”

  “That was one of our weapons.”

  “Yes, sir. It was. An emmy if I’m not mistaken.” Tone and expression made it quite clear that she wasn’t. Which was when the next logical assumption occurred to them both.

  Jarret straightened, dropping the pieces of rock he’d just picked up. “Marines!
Off those roofs! Now!”

  Training put eight bodies in motion before the emphasis was added.

  Not fast enough.

  Hollice cried out, spun sideways, landed flat against the thatch, and slid.

  Torin caught him before he hit the ground, ignoring the background warning from her slate that his med-alert had gone off. She didn’t need a computer implant to tell her that his right shoulder would probably need to be replaced—would definitely need to be rebuilt.

  “Nice catch... Staff.” His voice was surprisingly strong, but his eyes were glassy as she lowered him to the ground.

  “I try not to let my people bounce, Corporal. Stretcher!”

  To give the Mictok credit, they arrived with admirable speed. In spite of everything, Torin’s mouth twitched at the pattern of crimson crosses painted onto their carapaces and she wondered whose idea that had been.

  Not until Hollice gasped, “Mine,” did she realize she’d asked the question out loud. “From the medics of old Earth,” he added weakly. “They were... bored.”

  Torin assumed he meant the Mictok, not the medics of old Earth.

  Another explosion pounded them with dirt clods as she helped lift him onto the stretcher.

  “Our own... weapons?” he asked, sucking air through his teeth.

  “Our own weapons,” Torin told him.

  “Adding insult to... injury,” he muttered as the Mictok carried him away.

  The third explosion fell short and hit a cluster of Silsviss bodies. From the sudden screaming, one of them hadn’t been dead.

  With no order given, three shots rang out and the screaming stopped.

  Wiping her hands against her thighs, Torin crossed the compound to the lieutenant, wondering idly how much blood a pair of dress uniform trousers could absorb.

  “Everyone keep your head down!” he shouted as she stopped beside him. “Staff, with the roofs denied us, we’ve got to open firing holes in those walls.”

  “Yes, sir. If I could suggest we send the di’Taykan inside; without water, we’re going to have to keep them cool.”

  “Them?”

  “Are you willing to go inside, sir?”

  “No.”

  Torin shrugged, silently but eloquently saying, “I thought not,” and began barking orders. She sent fourteen of the fifteen di’Taykan inside and set a twenty-minute chime into her slate to rotate the fifteenth. Lieutenant Ghard and his two aircrew moved reluctantly to crouch behind the south barricade.

  Sporadic KC fire tore chunks out of the walls without penetrating the building, a few slammed into the grain bags, and some whistled by overhead.

  “Staff?”

  She frowned and held up a hand. A moment later she lowered it. “Sorry, sir, I was counting. I think the Silsviss only got the one locker open. That would make twenty-eight KCs spread pretty much all around us, but no heavy guns and no sidearms.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “There’s no heavies firing because they’d be going right through both the walls and the grain bags. I’m assuming there’s no sidearms because they were in the locker with the heavies.”

  “But they have an emmy.”

  “Yes, sir. The evidence certainly points that way.”

  She heard him sigh, the sound eerily audible even over all the surrounding noise.

  “Go ahead, Staff,” he said without looking at her. “Say it.”

  “Say what, sir?” Attempting unsuccessfully to work out the actual position of the guns, she was only half paying attention.

  “That you were right and I was wrong.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “We should have blown the locker.”

  That brought her back to the moment. Torin looked from the clenched hands to the muscle jumping in his jaw and pitched her voice for his ears alone. “Sir, I will give you my opinion— occasionally, whether you want it or not—before you give an order, but after, I will support you, totally. We should have blown the locker. We didn’t. So now we deal.”

  He turned to face her, and she saw the knowledge that he was responsible for Hollice’s injury in his expression. Well, he was. But if he was going to be a combat officer, he’d be responsible for a whole lot more soon enough.

  “Looking at the bright side, sir—they could have grabbed a box of impact boomers instead of standard ammo.”

  They both flattened as a shell whistled overhead but blew thirty meters on the other side of the south wall.

  “And,” she added as they stood again, “they’re lousy shots.”

  “I expect that they’ll get better,” Jarret observed dryly, dusting himself off. “We’ve got to take that thing out.”

  “From the trajectory, I’d say that they’re moving it between shots and pretty damned quickly, too. If we can’t pick it up on a targeting scanner... Ressk!”

  The Krai ran in from his position at the north wall. “Staff?”

  “Can we target one of our own pieces?”

  “Our own...?” Understanding dawned. “I don’t think so. The specs aren’t in the scanner, Staff. We don’t usually shoot at ourselves.”

  “Can you reprogram it?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not exactly how it works.”

  “I don’t care how it works, as long as it works.”

  “Okay...” Shoving his helmet back on his head, he thought for a moment, then he smiled. “If I convince it that the other emmy is a captured piece, it can input the specs from that.” The smile faded. “But that’ll mean we’ll have one less weapon because the second emmy can’t be fired or the first’ll lock on.”

  “It’ll also mean they’ll have one less weapon out there,” Lieutenant Jarret reminded him. “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The next shell exploded just outside the south wall, the concussion knocking several grain bags into the compound.

  “Ressk! Hurry up!” Ears ringing, Torin raced for the wall, grabbed one end of a grain bag and together with Cri Sawyes, swung it off a downed Marine. “Are you all right?”

  “Bruised, but I think so...” She blinked as a round from a KC whistled past her nose then managed a strained smile. “I guess that one wasn’t for me.”

  “Good.” Torin clapped her on the shoulder as she stood, then jumped as the lieutenant’s voice rang out behind her.

  “Cover that south hill with fire. I want their heads kept down while we rebuild this wall!”

  “Sir, you should be back in the center of the compound. It’s too dangerous out here.”

  “Stop arguing and start stacking, Staff. This wall has to be repaired before the dust settles and they can see to aim.”

  And if you take a random shot in the head, you’ll be just as dead, Torin thought, wrestling one of the bags back into position.

  Hurriedly repaired, the wall was neither as straight, nor as secure, but it was a solid barrier again and that was what mattered. The lieutenant was sweating freely by the time they were done. Torin racked her brains for a way to get him inside and out of the worst of the day’s heat.

  “Should I go check on the civilians, sir?”

  He glanced toward the western building and squared his shoulders. “No, thank you, Staff. I’d better do it. There’s going to be a lot of explaining to do when this is over, and I’d like us all to be telling the same story.”

  “Well done,” Cri Sawyes murmured as they watched the lieutenant walk away. “If you’d sssuggesssted he go inssside, he’d have thought you were trying to coddle him and never agreed.”

  Torin shot him a look from the under the edge of her helmet and led the way back into the center of the compound. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No. Of courssse not. He’sss coming along very nicely, Ssstaff Sssergeant. He isss learning to take command, and your Marinesss will notice that he wasss willing to put himssself at risssk to sssee that the wall protecting them wasss rebuilt.”

  Another shell whistled by overhead, very nearly exploding with
in the opposite curve of the Silsviss circle. Torin shook her head ruefully at the miss. It’d make the day so much easier if they’d just start killing each other and leave her Marines alone.

  “One would almossst think that thisss whole incident had been ssset up.”

  “Set up for what?”

  “A training exercissse, Ssstaff Sssergeant. Diplomacy, then combat. Show, then sssubssstance. Who could ask for more?” That sort of accusation was just what she needed. She glared at him through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know how your people train, Cri Sawyes, but Marines do not set up training exercises where other Marines get shot.”

  “Of courssse not.” He bowed, his tail rising. “I apologissse.”

  “Good.”

  After a moment’s silence, he said, “Ssspeaking of Marinesss being shot, I wasss impresssed with the way you caught Corporal Hollice. And with the way you handled thossse grain bagsss jussst now. You’re much ssstronger than you look.”

  The last was said in such a hopefully speculative tone that Torin reluctantly replied. “It’s an easy answer—Paradise, where I was born, is 1.14 Earth gravity. Silsvah, is .92 Earth gravity. It’s a small difference, but it comes in handy.”

  He looked around the compound. With all but one of the di’Taykan inside and only two Krai in the platoon, the Marines looked as though they were a single species force once again. “Ssso all the Humansss have at leassst the advantage of that .08 difference?”

  “Well, yes...” She started moving toward Ressk and the emmy. “...but I’m also much stronger than I look.”

  Out on the low ring of hills, any Silsviss who showed his head for long enough—whether he was rising up to take aim or just having a look around, died. And for every Silsviss who died, there seemed to be an infinite number to take his place. Not exactly infinite, but...

  “Any sufficiently large number might as well be infinite,” Torin muttered.

  “What was that, Staff?”

  “Just talking to myself, Ressk.”

  “The only way you can have an intelligent conversation?”

  “Don’t step on my lines, Private,” she advised with mock severity. “It makes me cranky. We’re under fire and no one would ever notice another casualty.” Then in her normal tone, she added, “How’s it coming?”