The Truth of Valor (28 page)

Then the kid decided to prove he could evoke the same response without the pheromone boost and Craig took back every disparaging thing he’d ever thought about geeks.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Nadayki muttered in Taykan against wet skin—maybe a description of the specific act or maybe bitching about the interruption, Craig had no idea and really, really didn’t care—but kept going until Cho grabbed a handful of hair and yanked him back.

“No gods damned fukking on my time! I catch you again, and I’ll have Doc cut your damned
kayti
off. And then I’ll have Doc cut his off ...” Half a dozen lime-green hairs floated to the floor as Cho released his hold and jabbed a finger toward Craig. “. . . and fukking feed it to you. Put your damned clothes on and get back to work!”

Craig had hoped Nadayki would argue, but the mention of Doc acted like a cold shower, and the kid complied without protest, his eyes pale, one hand rubbing at the side of his head. Di’Taykan hair wasn’t actually hair. It was part of their sensory system, and losing some of it must’ve hurt like hell. Given three dead on the Prime Progenitor’s lawn, Craig couldn’t bring himself to care. Still . . . “You couldn’t have taken another fifteen minutes to show up?” he grumbled, shooting the captain a disgruntled glare as he shrugged back into his overalls.

“You can fuk on your own time, Ryder,” Cho snarled. “And your time is mine until that armory is open.” He jerked his slate off his belt. “Huirre, get down to the locker.”

“Now, Captain?”

“Yes, now!” Cho smiled unpleasantly. He jabbed a finger into Craig’s chest. “I am warning you, do
not
fuk around on me. You forget why you’re here while Huirre’s watching and I’ll let him pick a part to snack on.” The jab became a shove.

Fingers curling into fists, Craig wondered how long it would delay things if he took a swing at the captain. Given the way he felt, he’d get the shit kicked out of him in any fight, but, hell, as long as he was alive when Torin found him, that only mattered in the short term.

Something in Cho’s eyes stopped him. Something that said
go too far and you’ll be out the air lock wearing bruises and fuk all else
.

Because the trick was to stay
alive
until Torin found him.

A second shove, to prove Craig wouldn’t respond, then Cho backed up snarling, “Now, get back to work before I start carving bits off myself!”

“This is all your fault,” Nadayki muttered sullenly as they bent over the seal again.

True enough. “Takes two to tango, kid.”

“What the fuk is a tango? And stop calling me kid!”

“What if Presit’s little protégé found the wrong Vrijheid Station,” Mashona asked, saving one of Ceelin’s games as the
Second Star
began her ten count before emerging into normal space.

“How many Vrijheid Stations that supposedly took a dirt dive during the war could there be?” Werst demanded from the second chair.

Mashona shrugged. “Space is big.”

The stars reappeared.

“Ceelin found only one Vrijheid Station, and full disclosure laws give Presit access to government databases.” Torin lifted her hands up off the control panel and started working the stiffness out of the fingers.

“She could be sending us on a fool’s errand while she heads in to get the story,” Ressk said thoughtfully, rubbing a thumb along the edge of his slate. “I mean, she said she knew you weren’t going to let her join us. She could’ve set up equations to a different station and then faked her protests.”

Werst shook his head. “You always this paranoid?”

He glanced over at Torin. “Just trying to cover all bases.”

In the old days, being paranoid was a part of Torin’s job. Now . . . “I trust her. I’m not one hundred percent positive she wouldn’t screw me over, but she’d never risk Craig.”

Mashona’s brows rose and fell in exaggerated lechery. “You need to worry about her making moves on your man, Gunny?”

“Not everything crosses species lines, Mashona, di’Taykan excepted.” Her response to Mashona’s joking almost sounded normal. Under the circumstances, it was the best she could do.

“Gunny . . .”

Grateful for something to focus on, she gave Werst her full attention.

“At least some of the
cark
in this station will know you from Presit’s vids.”

“I’m counting on it. Me, and the three of you.”

“Yeah.” His nose ridges flared. “And they’ll know Craig from that last vid.”

“No, probably not. Like Presit said, he was behind the camera about ninety-five percent of the time, and when he wasn’t, Presit was all but shooting up his nose. He had the beard then, and the edits ...” Under the old adage of know thy enemy, she’d seen all the vids once. “. . . focus exclusively on the gray running out of his eyes.” Sometimes she dreamed about the way the polynumerous polyhydroxide alcoholyde shape-shifting molecular fukwads had felt, slightly cooler than body temperature as they oozed out of her tear ducts. She’d wake up furious and have to leave the bunk before she took it out on Craig. Sometimes she wondered if it had felt the same to him, if he’d felt the same about it. After she got him back, she’d ask. Add it to the list of all the things they’d intended to talk about
later
. No more waiting for later. “Odds are good no one looked away from the emerging aliens long enough to identify him and, under personal privacy laws . . .” Which did not extend to members of the military under the full disclosure act. “. . . he was never identified by name.”

“And Nat, the woman who . . .”

“The woman off the
Heart
who set us up for the ambush that took Craig,” Torin growled. “I remember her.”

“She saw you.”

“Only for a minute, and she was paying no attention to me. Had her eyes on the game. The man who came into the bar with her, he might be a problem.”

‘The guy with the crazy eyes,” Mashona put in.

“Yeah, him. But I’m not sure he saw me as an actual person—he threat assessed, he moved on. Who’d expect to see Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr on a half-finished OutSector station? I suspect that, as much as economic factors, was why Craig chose it. Here, at Vrijheid, who we are becomes the larger part of our reason for being here and being that obvious will act like camouflage; all they’ll see is the
obvious
—not the people behind it and certainly not a specific person glimpsed for a few seconds in another part of space.”

The three members of her assault team stared at her for a long moment. Finally, Ressk said, “Maybe you could change your hair?”

Torin closed her fingers around the plastic vertical that held the padded arm to the pilot’s chair. “The only reason I’d go anywhere near that man is if he ends up between me and Craig. Otherwise, I’ll avoid him. It’s a good-sized station, I’m willing to play the odds.”

“Make your bet, then, Gunny. Long-range sensors just picked up a station.” Werst swept his palm across the board. “No details, though.”

“Distance?” Mashona asked.

“If we can ping them, distance doesn’t matter. Not everyone sends out a tourist brochure, but, if nothing else, we should be receiving information about docking and fees. And what’s more, I’m reading ships, but their registries aren’t coming up. There’s no way to tell if the
Heart of Stone
is there.”

“It’s there.” The
Heart
was there, and Craig was there. Because they had to be.

“If we can ping them . . .” Mashona began.

“They can ping us.” Werst agreed.

“And they’ll get what I want them to,” Ressk said, smiling broadly. “Which is the same as what they’re giving out.”

“I wonder how close they’ll let us get?”

They were still moving fast, riding the exit surge, maintaining their emergent speed until they knew where they were going.

“No point in talking to us until they can stop us,” Werst pointed out, “and unless they’ve got some big fukking guns, we need to be a little closer for . . .”

“Hi there.” The young di’Taykan male on the screen had hair so light a blue it was nearly white and his pale eyes looked paler still given the amount of black they were lined with. Makeup had turned his skin the same shade as his hair—Torin assumed it was makeup—and he had two black rings piercing the center of his lower lip. “I’m pulling sweet fuk all off your signal, so you’ve got three minutes to make your case before I blow you to kingdom come. Which, by the way, is not an actual place but an oldEarth term meaning
up
. So, three minutes before I blow you up.”

Torin centered herself on the screen. “I heard Vrijheid Station was a refuge from government bullshit.”

“Really.” He leaned a little closer to the pickup and grinned. Torin had never see a di’Taykan with dimples. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“Krai named Firrg.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I had my foot on her throat at the time.”

“Well, that endears you to me,
trin
, but there’s . . .” His hair stilled and he frowned. “Wait, do I know you?”

Torin smiled.

“Fuk me. I do know you. You’re that gunnery sergeant who had the little gray aliens in your brain and then got captured and found out the little gray aliens were in the plastic and actually making us all run around like we were
neivins
or something. I saw the vids. You were like crazy kick ass. Seriously, fuk me.”

“Little hard from way out here.”

“Right.” His hair flipped forward over his face, then back—like his whole expression had blinked. “Okay, there’s a lock free on the delta arm. You’re going to have to give control over to the docking computer if you want to come any closer. We can’t risk you ramming the station.”

“That happens a lot?”

“Hasn’t yet. But if it did, Big Bill would fukking space me.”

“How do I know I’ll get control back?”

“We start randomly taking ships over and it’s bad for business, isn’t it? Big Bill doesn’t like things being bad for business. You leave here in good standing, and you get control back about when you would be leaving any station. Your standing ends up being not so good, well, you don’t leave and you don’t actually care about who’s flying your ship.” He glanced down at his screens. “Okay, really, you have to give control over now or you’re fukked. And not in a fun I think you’re fukking amazing because you did that whole plastic alien thing in your underwear kind of way.”

Teeth gritted, Torin sighed and surrendered control.

The
Second Star
shuddered as her forward jets fired to slow her approach.

“Wow, nice firewalls. I can’t get squat off you.” He sounded honestly impressed. “Look, when you get in, I’m pretty much guaranteeing Big Bill’s going to want to talk to you, being who you are and all, so if it takes a while to get the lock open, that’s why. Oh and don’t forget ...” He leaned closer to the screen, one hand dropping down off camera into his lap. “. . . seriously,
trin
, fuk me.”

And the screen went black.

“They listening in?”

Ressk snorted. “They’re trying to.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a fan, Gunny.” Mashona stretched out her legs, crossed her booted feet at the ankles, and grinned. “He’s kind of cute in a slightly crazy way. What’s
trin
mean?”

“Beats me. Must be new slang.”

“Context makes it sounds like sweetheart, or babe.”

“Yeah, well, he’s all yours,” Torin told her, keeping most of her attention on the boards. “My focus remains on Craig.”

“But di’Taykan don’t count. They’re like drinking that watery Niln beer—you get to have the experience with none of the effects.”

“And if I have to fuk my way past him to get to Craig, I’ll consider it for as long as it takes me to snap his neck.”

It took her a moment to realize it had gotten so quiet she could hear one of the Krai scratching through the bristles on the back of his head. She could feel their eyes on her as she turned the chair.

“We’ll get him out, Gunny.” Werst had his lips pulled back off his teeth. So did Ressk. Mashona nodded.

“I know.” Because to think in terms of anything less than one hundred percent would send them in handicapped.