Valor's Trial (5 page)

The lieutenant glanced at the Marines working to rebuild the blown section, his lilac eyes dark. “Call in on what? Nothing's working!”

“We've had word that Signals are running filament. Should be out our way eventually.”

“And until then?”

Gunnery sergeants did not ever admit they didn't know. “Smoke signals, sir.”

He blinked, then he grinned again and nodded. “Stay on thirty-seven degrees. If she proved to have half a brain and stayed put, you'll find Heerik.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Keep your head down, Gunny.”

“Count on it, sir.”

She didn't find Heerik, but she found her other two squads. “God damn it, Doctorow, don't tell me you've lost your lieutenant already!”

The staff sergeant rolled his eyes. “She went up to find three squad.

“She went herself with this lot sitting on their fine Marine asses getting fat?”

The Marines close enough to hear suddenly found something to look at over the barricade.

“Said it was her job. Wouldn't listen to me. Slipped away when I was dealing with . . .”

Screaming.

“. . . that. Damn it, Huran,” he whirled and glared at the corpsman. “Knock him out if you can't shut him up.”

“We've been through this, Staff. His religion says he can only lose consciousness naturally.”

Padarkadale. Or most of him.

Torin held up her right arm. “See all these hooks? They say my religion trumps his. Dope him!”

“Gunny, I . . .”

“Do it!”

“That was intolerant of Padarkadale's beliefs,” Doctorow muttered as Huran bent back over his patient.

“Yes, it was,” Torin told him as the private stopped screaming. “His god can talk to me about it later. Which way did Heerik go?”

“That way—one hundred and eleven degrees from Marine zero.”

Torin lined up on the way he was pointing and checked her sleeve. “How far?”

“Shouldn't be more than a klik and a half.” He snorted. “Could be anywhere in hell's half acre.”

Another set of 774s roared by. Higher this time.

“They'll start dropping by eye any minute now,” Doctorow noted, glaring up into the sky.

“They've started.”

“Oh, fukking joy.”

One hundred and eleven degrees took Torin over the barricade . . .

“. . . through the woods and to grandmother's house we go,” she muttered, slapping a filter over her mouth and nose. That took care of breathing, but with all the dust in the air, she could hardly see. Running bent almost double, KC-7 in her right hand, left arm out in front to maintain her bearing, she concentrated on keeping the readout in the green.

From the sound of it, things were getting interesting in the lower atmosphere.

Interesting was seldom good for the Marines on the ground.

At a klik and a half, during a miraculous pause in both artillery and the air show, she thought she heard voices. Two hundred and fifty meters more, another pause, and she was sure of it.

“Lieutenant Heerik!”

“Gunnery Sergeant?”

No mistaking the Krai lieutenant's voice. There just weren't that many female Krai in the infantry.

Five meters more and Torin slid down into a crater, riding a ridge of dirt to Sergeant Hollice's side. A quick count gave her all twelve members of the squad and Second Lieutenant Heerik. Mashona lifted a hand in a remarkably sarcastic wave, but Ressk kept his gaze locked on the lieutenant.

“Captain would like your three squad back behind the barricade, sir.”

“I came out to bring them back in, Gunnery Sergeant . . .”

More planes screamed by. Theirs. Others. Torin frowned as something broke the sound barrier. Navy?

“. . . we were just about to leave.” She had her boots off and scrambled up the crater wall a lot faster than anyone but Ressk was likely to manage.

No, not Navy.

“Sir! Get down! Now!”

Torin had no idea which side had dropped it, or what it was, but on impact it distinctly went BOOM.

BOOM was never good.

The lieutenant turned, lips drawn back off her teeth, and looked startled as the top half of her body blew across the crater, spraying blood onto the uplifted faces below. Her legs swayed for a moment, then slowly crumpled. As they slid back down the slope, each individual mote of dust in the air picked up a gleaming white halo.

The halos joined.

The ground rose.

Torin's knees slammed into her chest, and she tasted blood.

The whole world went white.

Then black.

“N°
^.
” “I are being sorry, Craig, but Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr are . . .”

“No.” Hands flat against the control panel, Craig leaned in closer to the screen. “She isn't dead.”

Presit pulled off her dark glasses and arranged her features in what she probably thought was a sincere expression—
something furbearing species sucked at,
Craig sneered silently. “I are knowing you are not wanting to believe, but . . .”

“You said there's no body.”

“The blast are having melted her position. I are having seen the raw news feed, there are being no hope of bodies. There are barely being hope of DNA resolution.”

“The
news
. . .” He didn't bother hiding his disdain. “. . . has been wrong before.”

Dark lips drew back off very white, very pointed teeth and, within the black mask of fur, Presit's eyes narrowed. But all she said was, “True.”

“And the military doesn't know shite half the time.”

“That are being also true.”

“They haven't told me . . .” He stopped then, unsure if they would tell him. He didn't know, had no way of knowing, if Torin had added him to her notification list. If she hadn't, if Presit hadn't spotted Torin's name in the data stream coming into Sector Central News for rebroadcast, he would never have known. He'd have just kept waiting and wondering until finally there'd be no question and then . . .

His fingers curled against the warmed plastic. “She isn't dead.”

Presit shook her head, the motion sending a visible ripple through her silver-tipped dark fur, the highlights too artfully natural to be real. “Saying it are not making it true. No one are surviving that attack.”

His laugh sounded off, even to his own ears. “It wouldn't be the first time Torin's beaten the odds.”

“A direct hit by a missile fired from orbit that are melting the landscape to slag are being large odds, even for Gunnery Sergeant Kerr.” The reporter sighed, her acerbic tone softening. “She are not being invincible.”

“No.” Craig had no idea whether Presit took his soft denial as agreement or disagreement—mostly because he wasn't sure himself—but she clearly accepted it as the end of the conversation.

“I are not liking her much,” Presit admitted, muzzle wrinkling, “but I are being sorry for your sake that she are being gone. If you are wanting company?”

It took him a moment to realize what she was offering. The last thing he needed was Presit a Tur durValintrisy in his face while he was griev . . .

While he was . . .

While . . .

“No. Thanks. I'm fine.”

Presit's snort spoke volumes as the signal faded.

He got no signal off the salvage tag, but ST7/45T2 was damned near to the edge of known space. Too far to read. Too far to go himself with no certainty of salvage on the other end although he ran the Susumi calculations just because.

Then he returned to the job, working the edges of the debris field left behind when the Others slid a pair of battle cruisers into a system already claimed, scooping up the wrecked pieces of Navy Jades because, well, he had to breathe and oxygen wasn't free although he had been thinking that if things went well, he might invest in a convertersince
Promise
's arms would do just as well capturing chunks of the small ice asteroids littering known space and with two people in the cabin . . .

Sweat trickled down his sides as he stepped out of the air lock, faceplate polarizing in the unfiltered solar radiation.

Torin hadn't been ready to leave the Corps and he hadn't been ready to push, but they'd both known where they were heading, sooner or later, and it wasn't like he couldn't do the job on his own because he'd been on his own since he started, but it'd be fukking pleasant to have some backup when the only thing separating his bare ass from hard vacuum was a twelve-year-old Corps surplus HE suit and a bit of luck. A second pair of eyes would . . .

Craig locked the last piece of twisted metal and plastic in place, DNA residue flagged. DNA turned up in the strangest places. Once he'd found Human residue on wreckage from an enemy fighter. Navy had found the body months earlier and no one had any idea how those few cells had wandered. Once, he'd found a pilot, or most of one, in the crushed remains of her Jade. The Others had fried every system on her ship, and the commander had been nothing more than meat in space. The Navy couldn't find her without a signal. He'd only found her because finding the small debris, too small for the military to waste time and money recovering, was how he lived, and he worked on instinct as much as equipment.

“And what would I be doing while you're using these well-honed instincts of yours?”
Torin had asked as she pulled on her tunic.

“Same thing you're doing now,”
Craig had said, tossing her a boot.
“Keeping your people alive. Fewer people,” he'd added grinning, “but better job perks.”

She'd matched his grin as she'd snagged her first then her second boot out of the air.
“You think?”

He checked the pod configuration before he headed back into the air lock, loading the dimensions into his slate. The data went automatically into
Promise
's memory, but having survived one Susumi miscalculation, he had no intention of pushing his luck. Careless pilots were dead . . .

Were dead.

As the door cycled closed behind him, he clawed at the shoulder catches and dragged his helmet off the moment the telltales showed green, suddenly unable to breathe within the confines of the suit. Hands braced on his thighs, he sucked in deep lungfuls of air and forced his heartbeat to slow.

Fukking irony that the panic attacks he used to have at the thought of sharing limited space and resources were now being caused by the realization that . . .

No.

If there was one thing Torin excelled at, it was staying alive.

She wasn't dead.

He opened the inner door, stripped out of his suit, and hung it precisely in its locker, tank snapped up against the remix valve. Next time he needed it,
Promise
would see that it was ready.

A quick visit to the head; he never hooked up the plumbing in the suit if he didn't absolutely have to. A visit to the coffeepot to start the whole cycle up again.

And then there was no way of avoiding the message light blinking on the control panel.

Turned out he was on Torin's notification list after all.

The Confederation Marine Corps had two levels of notification. Level one included a trip into the Core and Ventris Station where the details would be explained and counselors both military and civilian would be on hand to deal with the emotional maelstrom that came with the loss of a loved one. Figuring that any maelstrom was his own damned business, Craig hadn't planned on taking them up on it until he found himself working out the Susumi equations.

Hands above the controls, he paused. He didn't need some counselor telling him how he felt.

He did, however, need to sell his salvage, and Ventris was as good a place as any. Particularly since the notification had come with a code that granted him a free berth and hook-in. No reason not to do what he could to broaden his limited profit margin.

And while he was there, as long as the Corps was paying for the privilege of his company, it wouldn't hurt to find out what the fuk they thought had happened because the whole thing sounded damned shonky to him.

“Civilian salvage vessel
Promise,
this is Ventris perimeter. State your reason for approach.”

“Salvage license tango, sierra, tango, five, seven, seven, nine, tango. I have cargo.” Craig sent the details of his load and then stared out at the bulk of Ventris Station, covering a quarter of his screen even at perimeter distance, and ignored the way his hand was resting beside the pressure pad that would transmit the notification code.

“Roger,
Promise
. Delta yard has docking available. Stand by for . . .”

“Wait.” One finger moved to the pressure pad. “And I have this.”

“Roger,
Promise.” The dispassionate tone hadn't changed although he knew there was a person of some species on the other end of the link.
“Salvage must be unloaded and cleared before you can proceed to the station. Stand by for coordinate download. Docking master will take control in three, two, one . . . mark. Docking master now in control.”

He sat back as the program ran and his ship surged forward. He'd been expecting . . . more.

A reaction.

Condolences?

Someone he could tell to fuk off, that Torin wasn't dead.

Apparently, enough Marines died it was business as usual.

“Well, fuk you, too,” he muttered at no one in particular.