The Truth of Valor (9 page)

“Are you that certain without knowing what it is?”

“I’m that certain. One job together and I go back to not giving a shit about what you or this
cark
sucker gets up to.” Holding up her slate, she nodded toward his. “I’ve got a set of temporary codes you can use to contact me.”

She had a jagged scar across her forehead, Cho realized as the codes transferred, the angles too regular to be accidental. When she saw him staring, she drew her lips back off her teeth, and Huirre whimpered. Cho curled his own lip in response. He’d been hated before; it didn’t bother him much. During his court-martial, the hatred coming off the families of the dead sailors had been so virulent the Navy’d had to remove them from the courtroom in order to get anything done. “Any suggestions where we can pick up a Human CSO fast and easy?”

Her nose ridges snapped shut. “Fuk you; I’m support during take-down. That’s it. You can do your own
serley
research.”

He wouldn’t have trusted her information anyway. “I’ll be taking the
Heart of Stone
out in about fifty-six hours. Be ready.”

“If you can’t give me an exact time now, I want a four-hour heads up,” she told him flatly.

“Deal.” In the interest of keeping his fingers, Cho didn’t hold out his hand. He watched Huirre watch her leave the
Groise
. “You know why she hates Humans?”

Huirre snorted. “Why does anyone hate Humans? Pity she won’t be part of the revolution. I’d love a chance to sink my teeth into that one. What a pair of
amalork
.”

Only the Krai would get hot about jaw muscles. “She’d have you for breakfast.”

“I’d die happy.”

Cho rolled his eyes and waved a server over. Krai bar or not, if he left now, it would look like Firrg commanded his movement, and he wasn’t having that. “Just as well she doesn’t want in on the buy. I wouldn’t trust the psychotic bitch not to turn on me the moment she was armed.”

“That, Captain . . .” Huirre reached across the table and drained Firrg’s abandoned glass. “. . . is because you’re a very smart man.”

“You sure you’re okay with this?”

Torin glanced up from her slate, more than happy to be pulled away from studying government regs defining legal salvage. “With working?”

“Yeah, because you used to lay about on your arse.” Spinning the control chair around, Craig lifted his legs and dropped his heels on the scuff mark at the edge of the panel. “You’ve called CSOs carrion crows in the past.”

“Never to you.”

He shrugged. “You were tanked for quite a while after Crucible, and Sergeant Jiir has both a low tolerance for alcohol and a touching belief in the fairness of the universe.”

“He’ll draw to an inside straight?”

“Every damned time.”

Torin thought about asking how
many
times but decided Jiir was an adult and a sergeant, and if the first time he’d played cards with Craig hadn’t taught him to back away slowly, well, that wasn’t her problem anymore. As for tales told under the influence . . .

She set her slate down on the small table. “I didn’t like you—collectively you—making money off the dead. Which . . .” She held up her hand to cut off his protest. “. . . was pretty fukking hypocritical considering how I made my living. I know. But these were my dead, and . . .”

“And I wasn’t in the club.”

“Yeah.” It sounded petty and arrogant put like that, but Torin had long since learned to own her shit. “Then there was you, personally . . .” She rolled her eyes as he flexed. “. . . and by the time I woke up in that tank, it was clear you and me, we weren’t an every now and then kind of thing, so I did a little thinking. When they gave me back my slate in rehab, I did some research. Do you know how many families of military personnel Civilian Salvage Operators have given closure to?”

Craig shook his head. “Nine out of ten times, it’s scrap, Torin. Maybe some retrievable tech.”

“And that tenth time has added up to three hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and twenty brought home. And counting.”

“That’s . . .” He blinked. Frowned. Swung his feet down to the deck and leaned forward, elbows braced against his thighs. “That’s a lot.”

“Those little gray plastic bastards have kept us at war for a long time. And that number doesn’t include the DNA evidence from the Primacy on record. As soon as the politicians stop talking out of their asses, they can go home, too.”

Torin watched his mouth move as he repeated the number silently to himself. “That’s what changed your mind about salvage operators?” he said at last.

“That’s what changed my mind.”

“Made it all right for you to throw in with me?”

They didn’t talk about what they had between them, so she shrugged. “It didn’t hurt that the sex was amazing.”

“Was?”

“It’s been a few hours, I don’t like to apply old intell to new condi . . .”

She could have stopped him from toppling her off the chair and onto the deck, but as that had been the reaction she’d been trying to evoke, she’d have just been shooting herself in the foot.

A little over two hours later, the alarm went off.

“Ten minutes and we’re out of Susumi space.” Craig kissed her bare shoulder and sat up. “You should take the controls.”

“I should? Why?”

“Because either things are good and there’s nothing you can screw up. Or,” he continued getting to his feet, “things’ll be fukked and we’ll die instantly, so there’s still nothing you can screw up.”

“Or we enter regular space next to a big yellow alien ship that turns out to be the mastermind—masterminds—behind centuries of inter-galactic bloodshed.”

“Yeah, right,” he snorted holding out his hand. “Like that’ll happen. Again. Come on.”

Scooping her shirt off the floor as she stood, Torin tossed it onto the pilot’s chair before she sat down. She checked the runout on the Susumi equation, then she posed her hands over the thruster controls in case they needed to avoid the unexpected.

Promise
counted down from ten, then the stars reappeared in the small front port.

“Another trip where we didn’t come a gutser,” Craig patted the bulkhead. “I count that a win.”

“Navigation says we’re right where we’re supposed to be,” Torin told him as the forward thrusters came on and they began to brake. Half her attention on their speed, she asked, “So where are we?”

“Just on the edge of an old debris field. It’s big but well picked over. There’s definitely nothing left here but chunks of metal and plastic for the recyclers. No tech. No DNA. I figured it’d be best for your first time out.” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him skimming back into his shorts. “Of course, that was before we had our talk. Maybe you’d rather ...”

“Scrap for a first time out is fine.”

He reached over Torin’s shoulder, and activated the long-range sensors. “There should be another ship out here. Old guy named Rogelio Page has been working this patch for years.”

“He won’t mind that we’re here?”

“The debris field is big enough for two tags. He has first tag but second tag is open. He’ll appreciate the company, tell us what sector we can clear, and be backup if something goes wrong. And it’ll give me a chance to check on him. He doesn’t come in much.”

“Oh, yeah. Rugged individualists,” Torin muttered. “Alone and independent.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. I just . . .” A sudden alarm from her implant cut her off. She tongued the volume down and frowned. “Strange. I’ve picked up another implant.”

“Picked up?”

“Turns out the upgrade the techs put in when they rebuilt my jaw has a finder in it.” The techs never left a scar. Torin rubbed at her jaw anyway. “Nice of them to tell me.”

“You didn’t read the documentation?”

“No one ever reads the documentation.” An alert from an implant shot down Craig’s belief only scrap remained out here. “I can link with
Promise
, give her the coordinates.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

She worked best under a hierarchy, knowing where to push and knowing where it was best to give in. This equal partners thing took some getting used to.

As
Promise
brought them up to the new coordinates, Torin expected to find a piece of jaw, overlooked in the vastness emptiness of space, not an entire naked body, cartwheeling slowly against a backdrop of stars.

Even before bringing the body on board, two things were obvious.

The Marine hadn’t been dead long.

And he’d been tortured.

THREE

TORIN KNELT BY THE BODY
of the dead Marine, cataloguing his visible injuries. Had she been able to download the stored medical data on his implant as well as receive the BFFM beacon, she’d have been able to list internal damages as well. As it was, she could record only what she could see. That was enough. All the bones in his hands and feet had been broken, the cartilage in his nose had been removed, and one eye had been punctured multiple times. No point in destroying both eyes—that would have kept him from seeing what was coming.

His torturer had known how to use fear.

His kneecaps had been twisted to the side. His genitals had been both bruised and burned. Given the purple-and-green discoloration covering his torso, the odds were good ribs had been cracked and then pressure had been applied to the damage.

Over the years, Torin had seen a lot of injuries—limbs lost, guts literally spilled—but nothing that provided evidence in flesh and bone of such deliberate brutality.

He had a crest tattooed on the bicep of his left arm: 3rd Division, 1st Re’carta, 4th Battalion, Sierra Company.

“Did you know him, then?”

Torin took a final recording, shifted her weight back, and stood. “He has a sergeant’s implant. Given his apparent age, I assume he’s been retired for more than a few years.” Which wasn’t exactly what Craig had asked. She hadn’t served with him, but she knew him. Had stood beside him on the yellow line that first day at Ventris Station. Had sat beside him on a VTA dropping for dirt. Had lain beside him in the mud, hands steady on her KC-7 as he bitched about the weather. Torin sent a copy of the file to
Promise
’s data storage. Just in case. “He didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.”

Craig rubbed at the reddened dent the plumbing hook-in from the HE suit had left on his hip. “You know that because . . . ?”

“There’s nothing here that would have killed him outright.” She gestured with the slate. “He died of the cumulative effect of his injuries, so his death was unintentional. Also, they didn’t destroy his ability to talk—his lips are split, but they didn’t go after his teeth or his tongue although he’s bitten through his tongue himself.”

“Doesn’t look like he carked it that long ago either.” When Torin shifted her attention off her slate and onto him, he shrugged. “If he’d been in vacuum any length of time, he’d have dehydrated more.”

“So, not left over from the battle.”

“Battle?”

“The one that created the debris field.”

“Fuk, no,” he snorted. “That battle happened back before you enlisted.”

A lifetime ago. “Where’s the nearest Warden’s office?”

“Torin . . .”

One hand on the sergeant’s shoulder, she met Craig’s gaze. “This one’s mine.”

“They won’t . . .”

“Craig.”

“Nearest Warden’s office is on Sulun Station—Sulun’s a recent di’Taykan expansion planet.” He rattled off the coordinates, but when Torin raised a brow at him, he added, “It’s a short fold.”

“How short?”

“About a day and a half in Susumi.” Craig gestured at the body and added in a tone so neutral it had to be deliberate. “He’ll have to be secured in the pen.”

Torin thought about Jan and Sirin laid out for viewing in the market. “You say that like you think I might object.”

“He’s a Marine.”

“He’s a dead Marine. I don’t get sentimental about the dead.”

Craig stared at her for a long moment. “You get angry,” he said at last.

“Sometimes,” she admitted.

He nodded although she wasn’t entirely certain what he was acknowledging. “Well, the sergeant here’s not going to get any fresher. Throw out one segment while I suit up again, would you.”

With a last look at the body, Torin moved to the pilot’s chair and called up the screen that deployed the salvage pen. She’d ridden in it—with the survivors of the recon team sent to Big Yellow—and even if the sergeant had still been in a position to care, he’d likely had rougher rides over the years.

“So who do you think dumped the poor bastard out here?” Craig asked. She could hear the creak of his HE suit going back on.

“I’m hoping pirates.”

“Hoping?”

“I don’t like the alternative.” She didn’t need to voice the alternative; Craig had been there for the reveal. If the gray plastic aliens had maintained an interstellar war for generations in order to use it as a social laboratory then they could easily torture a few individuals in order to provide more
context
. “The sergeant’s spent a lot of the last few years in space. His feet have no calluses and there’s a scar on his hip where a suit’s rubbed.” Glancing up as the segment began unfolding, Torin muttered, “They can come up with broccoli in a tube and yet they still can’t design a plumbing hook-in that doesn’t leave a mark.”