The Heart of Valour (18 page)

“The Gunny’s done this before. Heads down!”

Problem was, if the pin jammed, the barrel
could
explode. It wasn’t likely given relative sizes and the stupid-proof construction of the weapon, but it was possible. Weighing that possibility against the certainty that the tank would wipe out the camp and everyone in it with its next couple of shots, Torin aimed low and pulled the trigger. A spray of ice six meters in front of the tank and seventy degrees off marked where the pin impacted. “Set the screamer!”

“Impact probably destroyed it,” Jiir muttered, jabbing at his slate.

“There’s a chance,” Torin admitted. The pins were Marine-resistant, but very few things were built Marine-proof. She watched in her scanner as the tank’s big gun pivoted around to the right searching for this new perimeter pin. Confused by the screamer, it fired.

The shell slammed through the ice.

The recruits holding defensive positions along the shore were completely silent.

Water and ice together muffled the explosion.

Half a heartbeat later, sounding like a platoon’s worth of KC-7s all firing at once, the ice began to crack. With a boom that echoed off the trees, the rear of the tank dropped.

The tracks spun, grabbing air and spraying water up over the tipping slab.

Three seconds later, it was all over. The only sound on the lakeshore was the sound of waves slapping against the hole in the ice.

“On Carlong,” Major Svensson said into the silence, “there was a big old ice wall holding back a river. Gunnery Sergeant Kerr fired a perimeter pin at it, and the enemy’s mortars took it down, wiping out the leading edge of their advance. Bought us a few hours where no Marines died. She was a staff sergeant then, of course.”

“Of course,” Jiir muttered, staring out at the spreading patch of open water. “Aren’t tanks supposed to be waterproof?”

“Not as much as they’d like you to think. I’ll keep this for a while,” Torin told Stone, gesturing with the KC-9 as the recruit got slowly to his feet. “I want to make sure I didn’t damage it. All right, people!” She raised her voice, letting the sound lift the surrounding fireteams up onto their feet. Beyhn was out and Crucible was using live ammo; she’d be damned if she was giving way to a pair of sergeants. “I want a tightened perimeter and damage reports. Move!” She turned to the major. “That last shell sounded too close to the camp—the firing system had probably started to compensate for the screamers. We may have injured.” Had she been part of the platoon, she’d know because the medical information on every recruit would have been in her slate. As it was, she knew the major hadn’t been hit, and that was it.

“Deal with it, Gunny.” He turned back toward the camp. “As soon as I get the codes out of Beyhn’s slate, I want a few words with our eyes in the sky!”

“Yes, si…”

“Gunny?”

Momentarily unable to form the words, Torin pointed past his shoulder at the rising streak of light drawing a gleaming, deadly line against the night sky.

“That can’t…” He shook his head. “…can’t be what it looks like.”

“I hope you’re right, sir.” Because it looked like a surface-to-air missile.

A moment later, pieces of the OP began to rain fire through the atmosphere; shooting stars against the darkness that represented the deaths of the eleven Marines and six Navy corpsmen who had been on board when the missile hit. There could also have been up to a dozen wounded recruits from the other three platoons dirtside in the sick bay—no way to tell watching from the ground as the station fell and burned.

All along the shore, Marines who’d been on their way back to camp stood and stared at the sky.

Torin took a deep breath and when she was certain nothing but what she intended would show in her voice, snapped, “I could have sworn I gave you lot something to do!”

“They blew up the Orbital Platform, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“Someone did,” she allowed. “And there’s not a damned thing we can do about it, but we can do something about a blasted perimeter and possible casualties, so
move
!”

They moved.

When it was just her and the major on the frozen beach, Torin glanced at her sleeve. “They timed the missile for just after the
NirWentry
’s jump to Susumi.” She forced her teeth to unclench, forced her tongue away from her implant. The upgrade had reserve power, but who the hell was she going to talk to. “Eight days before another ship’s in system.”

“The OP had a Susumi beacon,” Major Svensson said in the same quiet voice. “They might have had time to get a message off.”

“Yes, sir. That’s possible.”

But neither of them believed it.

* * *

A splintered branch about twelve centimeters long and less than one in diameter had been flung like a dart under the edge of Recruit di’Lammin Oshyo’s helmet, into and through her right eye socket, and then her brain.

“There’s no exit wound.” Torin straightened and wiped wet hands on her thighs. “Probably splintered further when it hit the back of her skull.”

“You keep telling them to keep their helmets on,” Sergeant Annatahwee muttered. “Like it fukking matters sometimes.”

There was nothing Torin could say to that, so she moved on. Soon Sung Cho, the recruit positioned next to Oshyo, had taken a facial laceration from a second piece of flying debris. It had opened his cheekbone deep, but Cho had pinched the wound closed and sprayed a layer of sealant on it. A handful of snow had scrubbed the blood from his combats. One injury, one death, one tank; it could have been a lot worse.

Perimeter pins had been reset and teams two/one and two/two—less Lirit who remained at Beyhn’s shelter—were standing the first four-hour watch, individuals placed close enough together that their lines of sight overlapped. If tanks were out there firing live rounds, bets were off on what else might show up. Perimeter pins might no longer be enough. Moonlight and starlight reflected off the snow, and the sentries navigated the bands of shadow between the trees with their scanners down, using as little light as possible.

“Camp is secured, sir.”

“Good.” Major Svensson glanced toward the lake, just barely visible through the trees. “What the hell do you think is going on, Gunny? This is more than just a glitch.”

“Best guess: someone has hacked Crucible’s system, sir.”

“The Others?”

Torin thought a moment before answering. When the Others came into Confederation space, they invaded to advance their perimeter. If Crucible was suddenly in contested real estate, then the Corps had a lot more to worry about than the loss of its training facility. If the Others had developed a new battle plan, however, a plan to take out the Marines at the source… “This is a little subtle for them, sir, but they are who we’re fighting. There’s no ship in system eight days out of ten; if they timed it right, they’d only have the Orbital Platform and its satellites to avoid—easy enough for a good pilot in a small VTA. Once down, they find the nearest CPN…”

“Not exactly difficult,” the major grunted, pulling off helmet and toque as one unit and running a hand back over his head. “The damned things aren’t more than a day’s march apart.”

“In case something goes wrong.”

He raised a pale brow. “Where wrong isn’t referring to antitank rounds being fired at recruits?”

“Yes, sir. The nodes can’t be too well hidden, or they wouldn’t be very useful in an emergency. Once the Others have cracked the system, they wait until the Navy’s gone, then they blow the OP and control the satellites with an uplink from the ground. They have surveillance, the tank proves that—they know where we are—and at least some control of the peripherals.”

“Which the tank also proves.”

The tank gave the Others the most firepower for the least amount of reprogramming.

“Yes, sir.”

“If it’s so easy for the satellite to find us, why the hell didn’t it spot
them
?”

“Easier to hide from someone who isn’t looking for you, sir. Not to mention,” she added dryly, “the ETGs mean we’ve got a platoon of recruits with BFFMs built into their combats.” To a certain extent, all combats carried enough tech to act as a
Better Fukking Find Me.
The trainers just went the extra distance.

“Not to mention: do we strip them down?”

“Maybe we should hold that in reserve, sir.”

“Right.” Headgear back in place, he sighed deeply, blowing out an impressive plume of air and nodded toward the center of the camp. “Well, while we’re contemplating fighting a war in long underwear, let’s tackle the more immediate problem.”

“Staff Sergeant Beyhn.”

“You read my mind, Gunny.”

“Just part of the service, sir.”

* * *

There were ten di’Taykan around Beyhn’s shelter—of the original fifteen, one was dead and three were on watch, so that meant one was likely in the shelter. Dr. Sloan emerged as Torin glared a path clear to the entrance.

“He’s essentially stable,” she said, then focused on the two non-di’Taykan as she pulled on her mitts. “Everything okay?” She’d seen to the wounded, complimented Cho’s quick thinking, and then returned to the staff sergeant.

“For certain values of the word
okay
,” the major told her. “What’s wrong with Staff Sergeant Beyhn?”

“Well, he’s an idiot.” One of the di’Taykan growled. Before Torin could respond, the doctor snarled, “Don’t even go there. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know!”

“Nice someone knows,” Major Svensson said pointedly.

“He delayed the change,” Dr. Sloan snorted. “Used mail order drugs to repress, thus my diagnosis of idiot.”

“What change?”

“He’s becoming qui.”

“Qui’Taykan?”

“No, qui sera sera! Of course qui’Taykan. And because of the aforementioned drugs and repression and idiotic-acy, it’s not going well.”

The Taykan had three distinct biological divisions over their life span: the di’Taykan, the qui’Taykan, and the tir’Taykan. The qui’Taykan were the breeders—temporarily fertile, extremely conservative, and seldom if ever seen away from territory the Taykan claimed as their own. And that essentially summed up everything Torin knew about them. They weren’t part of the Corps, so they weren’t her problem. So they previously
hadn’t been
her problem.

“Jonin.”

“I couldn’t… I wanted to…” His hair spread out from his head in a cobalt corona, a visible indication of how upset he was. “We don’t talk about it. It isn’t done.”

Behind him, the other di’Taykan shifted—the movement eerily coordinated.

“It’s going to be done now,” Major Svensson growled.

Torin had never seen a di’Taykan look so completely miserable, and she’d seen them covered in blood, missing their favorite body parts.

“Yes, sir.”

“And put your damned helmet on!”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

“I thought I could detect a difference before we left Ventris Station, certain variations in his scent. And then, that morning when we formed up in the shuttle terminal, Staff Sergeant Beyhn was…” Jonin paused, searching for the word, “…softer, but by the time we left, he was right back to being a…” The second pause suggested Jonin had remembered his audience and was reconsidering his initial description.

“Aggressive son of a bitch?” Major Svensson suggested mildly from the stump he was using as a command center.

Jonin nodded, hair under the edge of his helmet moving against the motion. “Yes, sir.” He didn’t look comfortable with the description, but then he was using a formal aristocratic cadence that once again reminded Torin of Lieutenant Jarret back at Sh’quo Company, and
aggressive son of a bitch
didn’t exactly fit the tone. No matter how accurate a description of the staff sergeant it might be.

“Once we were on the
NirWentry
,” Jonin continued, “there were other recruits in both this platoon and in Platoon 72 who began to notice changes in the staff sergeant’s scent. Some of them came to me. I suspect all the di’Taykan had noticed the changes in scent at this point, but most of them kept it to themselves. Many of them probably denied even noticing. This…” He swallowed, took a deep breath, and kept going. “… to become qui is very private and personal. To speak of it even among ourselves goes against what we have been taught all our lives.”

“But
some
spoke of it.”

“Yes sir. There are always those bound less by cultural expectations than others, and some were beginning to consider this… situation more as Marines and less as di’Taykan.”

“But enough as di’Taykan that they wanted you to do something about it.”

“Yes, sir. I approached Gunnery Sergeant Kerr.”

“And didn’t actually tell me anything,” Torin pointed out.

“I…” He glanced down at his hands, the long fingers laced together, then back up again. “No, I didn’t.” One foot shifted, digging a hole in the snow, but he offered no excuses. Torin respected that, even through her annoyance. “Usually, when the change comes upon you, you return to your family and go into seclusion with those of your closest
thytrins
who have already changed. They assist in the process. No disrespect intended, but Staff Sergeant Beyhn waited too long.”

“That’s a little too obvious to be disrespectful,” the major noted.

“Yes, sir. Anyway, it kept getting worse. The staff sergeant’s decision making began to be affected.”

“The delay in coming to a decision when we were pinned down…” The major glanced at his sleeve. “…this morning.”

The Crucible day had been divided into twenty-seven hours, sixty-six minutes—as close to the twenty-eight hour cycle on the stations as the Corps could manage. It was only 2240. Still the second day of a twenty-day scenario.

“Yes, sir. The qui don’t…” He swallowed and kept going, his eyes so light Torin doubted he could see through them. He couldn’t close them, not while talking to a superior, so he did what he could. Torin didn’t entirely blame him. “…deal well with risk.”

“Wonderful.” Running both hands up under the edge of his toque, Major Svensson turned his attention from Jonin to the doctor. “But the staff sergeant isn’t qui yet?”