The Truth of Valor (17 page)

Oh, thank gods, this was something she knew. “I’d patch the leak, Staff Sergeant.”

“You’d patch the leak, Private Kerr? That’s it?”

Torin had no idea what he was getting at. “Yes, Staff Sergeant. I’d patch the leak in the suit.” Since he seemed to be waiting for more, she added, “Or I’d die.”

“And you don’t intend to die, is that it?”

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “No, Staff Sergeant, I do not.”

His eyes darkened further and she wondered how much more there was for him to see. After a long moment he nodded, and said, “Good.”

Wait . . .

She frowned. She had a leak in her HE suit?

Not good.

Leak in suit . . .

As soon as the pressure dropped, the internal patching material would have been released. If the leak was large enough, a further drop in pressure would release the secondary IPM.

Conscious personnel were instructed not to wait for the release. Conscious personnel needed to preserve more air. Torin’s first attempt resulted in an inarticulate croak. No good enough. She wet her lips, swallowed, and tried again.

“Command! Patch release!”

Better.

It was cold. She remembered that from training. Cold and a little slimy.

“And then what, Private Kerr?”

Staff Sergeant Beyhn’s red eyes were blinking. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

Torin blinked when the lights stopped and the surrounding stars came slowly into focus. The surrounding stars and quite a bit of moving debris. Calming her breathing, she worked back from what she knew.

She was in an HE suit. In space. Surrounded by moving debris. There’d been an explosion. Frowning, she opened and closed her right hand. She’d been holding something.

Craig. She’d been holding Craig. The tethers had been cut.

She couldn’t see him. Not even with the helmet magnification on full.

“Craig! This is Torin, do you copy?”

A ship had come out of nowhere, shot out
Promise
’s cabin, cut the tethers, and blown up the clump of wreckage she and Craig had been tagging.

“Craig! Damn it, answer me!”

The wreckage had blown as spectacularly as it had because the shot had set off the eight small charges they’d set to free up that piece of Primacy tech.

“Command! Run diagnostics on communication unit.”

By tucking her head down, she could see
Promise
’s lights flashing in the distance and her own cut tether pointing back the way she’d come. She was moving away from the ship. Diagnostics told her there was nothing wrong with the comm.

“Craig!”

No answer.

No sound at all but her own breathing. Usually, Torin found that comforting.

She’d been carrying twelve hours of air when they left the ship. They’d been out for ninety minutes when the shooting had started. Her suit said she had four hours and twenty-three minutes left. The leak had not been a hallucination. Or not only a hallucination.

Four hours and twenty-one minutes before the scrubbers were no longer effective and the oxygen levels dropped below what the suit considered air. She could manage for another ten to fifteen minutes after that as long she didn’t need to do anything too complex

Even more fun, two layers of internal patching hadn’t quite stopped the leak.

“Shit.”

Had she been wearing jets, it wouldn’t have mattered; she’d be back to the
Promise
before she ran out. But she’d been wearing a safety line. Jets and a safety line were redundant.

Apparently not.

Had she been in Craig’s suit instead of one of the new military tested designs, she’d have been screwed and this was not the time to think about Craig in Craig’s ten-year-old suit, unconscious, unable to make repairs. “Command! Foam release.”

The foam—more or less the same material that protected Navy fliers in disabled pods—filled in all the space between Torin and her suit, started warm, got very hot for seven seconds, then semi-solidified, becoming, in essence, a second suit. She could still bend her arms and legs but not without effort. Design flaw—fix a leak, but then make her work harder, breathe harder. To add insult to injury, the foam itself was a brilliant pink. So was the skin under the foam. On the other hand, insulted beat dead. The collar seals bulged up against the bottom of her chin but held.

Giving thanks that she’d bothered to hook up the plumbing this trip, Torin considered her next option.

She wasn’t moving particularly fast, but she was moving away from the ship. Fortunately, the tagging gun was still strapped to her leg and . . .

Her tanks hit first.

Given the amount of debris around her, moving at differing angles and speeds, it was inevitable she make contact with a piece of it. This felt like a big piece. And, in this instance,
make contact
was clearly a euphemism for
full body impact
.

Her tanks, or tanks like them, had been dropped out of a low orbit and continued to work when the defense contractors dug them out of six meters of dirt. Torin had seen the vid; she wasn’t worried about her tanks.

Instinct said, brace for impact.

Training said, relax

Torin had seen Marines thrown about like rag dolls by unexpected explosions, ending up bruised and battered but without major injuries. Rag dolls didn’t break.

The foam pressing against the collar seal held her head in place.

Her brain, unfortunately, continued moving until it was stopped by the inside of her skull.

“If the collision is relatively elastic, then object A is going to rebound much like a rubber ball, traveling now back along its original course.” Sergeant Roper paused, turned away from the formulas on the screen, swept a weary gaze over the training platoon and said, “Here in the Corps, we call
inelastic
collisions crashes. Try to avoid them.”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

Torin really wished people would stop shouting. She had one fuk of a headache.

Opening her eyes, she squinted her surroundings into focus and slowly realized something was wrong.

No, right.

Most of the wreckage continued to follow the blast radius, moving out and away.

She was on her way back.

That was good.

Four hours and six minutes of air.

Okay, the concussion she seemed to have wasn’t optimum, but as long as she could avoid slamming into anything else that massed out significantly higher than she did, she could work around it.

Evidence seemed to suggest an HE suit full of semi-solidified foam made collisions remarkably elastic.

Unfortunately, because her tanks had hit first, she’d lost enough energy during the crash that she’d slowed considerably. She pinged the
Promise
—114 kilometers—then waited five minutes and pinged again—113.27 kilometers. She’d traveled .73 of a kilometer in five minutes, .146 in one minute, so in sixty minutes she’d travel 8.76 kilometers.

“These things need a fukking speedometer,” she muttered, redoing the math.

Math never lied.

When she ran out of air, she’d be a little under 80 K short of the ship.

She needed to be moving three times faster. Roughly three point three times faster, but who was counting.

Not entirely convinced she could keep it down, Torin took a sip of tepid water and swallowed carefully. Ignoring the unpleasant reality of—she glanced down—three hours and forty-one minutes of air—the two liters of water would recycle for days until the laws of diminishing returns caught up to her. The concentrated sludge in the emergency food pouch would keep her from starving. Craig had mocked her when she filled it. His was empty.

Mouth moistened, she tongued his codes into her implant. Her comm was working, but his might have been damaged in the explosion. “Craig! Answer me!”

Still nothing.

Torin ran her magnification back to full, trying to see between the pieces in the thicker parts of the debris field, but she had a bad feeling she wouldn’t find him without the ship’s scanners.

She froze. Barely breathing.

One of the charges hadn’t blown. A ping read it at 2.6 kilometers away at 320 degrees to her zero. Without maneuvering thrusters, it might as well be in the next system.

Three hours and thirty-seven minutes of air.

If she could get to the charge, she could use it to shoot herself at the ship.

Shoot . . .

Her brain must’ve taken more damage than she’d thought.

Forcing her arm down to her side, she slid the first finger of her right hand through the trigger guard and pulled the tagging gun free of the holster. Still ninety-seven tags in the magazine. She drew a mental line along the path the piece of debris carrying the charge would take. Another along the line she’d have to take to meet up with it.

Aimed the barrel back along that line.

Adjusted to account for the debris’ speed.

Adjusted to account for her speed.

Adjusted to account for any additional speed that might be added by the tagging gun during the course correction.

Realized there was no way in hell she could do that kind of math in her head.

And pulled the trigger.

Better to die attempting the impossible.

A full magazine held a hundred tags. She’d used three while they set the charges. She used another twenty-two before her path looked like it would cross the debris’ path. Maybe. Probably.

“Fuk it.”

Three hours and four minutes of air.

Two hours and fifty one minutes.

It was going to be close.

Another six tags made it closer.

Moving slowly and carefully, Torin stretched out her left arm . . .

Two hours and forty-seven minutes.

... and closed her thumb and forefinger on the edge of the debris.

At this point, spin didn’t matter—she’d have to aim herself at the ship regardless, so she moved as quickly as she could, arming the charge and then using the remains of her tether to strap the piece of debris across her back. By the time she managed it, she’d used up another forty-nine minutes of air.

Fourteen tags lined her up facing the
Promise
’s lights.

Fifty-one tags left to adjust her course—she was aiming a projectile at a target almost a hundred kilometers away by eye—and to keep her from slamming into the ship at a speed that would do neither her nor the ship any good.

It all came down to whether or not the blast would supply enough push to get her to the
Promise
’s tanks before her air ran out.

“Fire in the hole!”

Teeth together, tongue safely out of danger, she detonated the charge.

“Escape pods . . .” Captain Farmer slapped the curved metal of the pod beside her. “. . . are not designed for comfort. They are designed to get you away from your transportation and the battle that’s destroyed it as quickly as possible. You will be pulling close to 4 Gs during the initial thrust, so if you’ve taken any injuries during the time the Navy has been getting the shit shot out of it, it’s going to hurt.” She smiled out at the training platoon. “Here in the Corps, we feel a little pain is preferable to going down with the ship.”

When Torin came to, a nosebleed had gummed her lips together. She checked the time—she’d been out for twelve minutes—worked her lips apart, and licked them mostly clean. Good thing she’d never minded the taste of blood.

Most of the debris field had moved past her at this point. This was a good thing because slamming into random pieces of wreckage currently filled the top spot on her list of things she’d rather not do.

A ping put her at 84.6 kilometers from the ship. She’d traveled 14.4 kilometers in the twelve minutes she’d been out. That was 1.2 kilometers a minute and 67 kilometers an hour.

She’d reach the
Promise
in an hour and thirty-six minutes.

This left her a little better than thirteen minutes to get inside and hook up to the ship’s tanks. At full magnification, it appeared that only the cabin had been holed, but she couldn’t be a hundred percent positive the tanks were intact until she actually got there.

Decelerating would also eat up some time, but she had a plan.

If not for the concussion, she’d catch a quick nap—setting her comm to wake her in an hour. As that wasn’t an option . . .

The Susumi radiation they’d read on arrival had undoubtedly come from the other CSO’s ship, destroyed more thoroughly than the
Promise
. That explained why there’d been no answer. Nat, the cargo jockey who’d pointed them at this field, had been on station because her ship had taken a bad fold. Not a huge jump to suspect it hadn’t been a bad fold at all but that they’d been caught in the blast radius. No one deliberately put themselves in the radius of a Susumi blast. The destruction had been an accident.

Rogelio Page’s injuries told her they wanted information from a CSO.

The blast had destroyed any chance of them picking up a new operator.

So they’d had to look elsewhere.

Craig wasn’t answering his comm or his implant.

There was always the chance he’d died when the charges blew.

Torin didn’t think so.

Didn’t want to think so.

Nor did she think she’d find him when she finally got to the ship’s scanners.

The pirates needed him. They—Nat and her crew—had scooped him up and left her for dead.

She was more than a little pissed about that.

Turned out, an hour and a half later, her course didn’t need much correction.

“Let’s hear it for paying attention on the heavy ordinance range.”

Torin took three shots to slightly change her angle of approach and spent the rest of the tags to slow herself as much as possible. She hadn’t aimed herself right at the ship but just over it, her boots barely clearing the metal. As it passed under her, she took a quick look at the hole in the cabin. The control panel looked intact and the odds were very good the main cabin had been sealed off immediately from the rest of the ship. There’d be air. If she could get to it.

The moment her body cleared the ship on the far side, she remagged her boots. Full power. They slammed her down onto the ship working against her forward momentum.