Valor's Trial (10 page)

After a moment, the world shifted into a sharper focus.

“Let's do this. Remember, Private,” she continued as Kyster hesitated, “you've got two things those people in there don't. A belly full of meat and me.” She rubbed a bit of dust off one toe cap, twitched her vest down into position, and rounded the corner.

There was a trick to making boots—the same boots worn to slip silently up behind the enemy—ring against stone. As she wouldn't be able to slip silently up behind
Colonel
Harnett, Torin announced her presence with authority. It was less efficient but a lot more fun.

The tunnel opened out into a chamber that wasn't actually circular but seven-sided with a tunnel in the middle of each of the walls she could see—a sort of a nexus or node in the tunnel system. The ceiling was a broad cone, about three meters high at the edges to easily five times in the center where a smooth pipe dropped down to . . . possibly the floor, the billowing walls of crude tents hid the lower two, two and half meters. Torin assumed the tents were Harnett's command center.

Striding forward, she had time to see that most of the Marines present were sitting or lying on pallets. The faces turned toward her were uniformly gray, the Human males easily distinguished by their beards, depilatories long since worn off. Torin had stridden barely two meters from the tunnel mouth when the first of Harnett's people reached her, the di'Taykan staring at her with a combination of fear and disbelief, violet eyes dark as her gaze flicked between her face and her collar tabs.

There was an old joke in the Corps about a man who'd gone to his eternal rest in the Garden and, while he was sitting by the gate, he saw one of the newly dead welcomed by three acolytes and a small child throwing flowers.

“I didn't get a welcome like that,” he complained to an acolyte near him.

“Ah,” said the acolyte, “but this is the High Exalted of the Church of the Red Star's Light.”

And that satisfied the man until the next day when he saw another of the dead welcomed by a dozen acolytes, half a dozen small children, fireworks, performing animals, and a full brass band. As he watched, mouth open, he saw the Gardener walk over to greet this new arrival in person.

“The High Exalted arrived yesterday,” he reminded the nearest acolyte. “Who the hell is that?”

“That,” said the acolyte proudly, “is a gunnery sergeant. We've never had one of them before.”

Torin made sure that every millimeter of her said,
this is a gunnery sergeant.
Given the situation around the pipe, she was willing to bet they hadn't had one of those before. She locked her gaze on the di'Taykan.

Who slowly straightened. Her head rose. Her shoulders went back. Her feet shuffled out into parade rest. Odds were good she didn't even know she was doing it.

Torin glanced down at the club, essentially identical to the one she'd left back in the cave, and raised a single brow—the ability worth every credit she'd paid for the download.

The club came up to shoulder rest.

Torin waited.

Violet hair began to scribe short jerky arcs in the air.

“I assume you've been sent to find out who I am, Private . . .”

“Di'Ferinic Akemi, Gunnery Sergeant!”

Torin waited a moment longer. She could hear the background noise falling off.

The violet eyes darkened and lightened, and Akemi's gaze flicked to Torin's face and away. “Ah . . .”

“Identify . . .” Torin prompted.

“Identify yourself and state your business!”

Torin's voice filled those parts of the node the background noise had vacated. “Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr. I'm here to see Colonel Harnett.” She had to force herself to use the rank, but she managed it. No need to force herself to sound impatient. Every moment she had to spend on Harnett was one more she wasn't spending on escape.

Akemi shook herself, as though trying to wake up, and managed to bark out, “Why?” in a voice that only proved how shaken she was.

“
Why
is none of your business,” Torin snapped. She nodded toward the half dozen watchers. She'd have thought that the monotony of imprisonment would have pulled more of them toward a change in their routine, but it seemed only the closest cared enough to make the effort of rising off their pallets.

They were thin, uniforms hanging loose, and the three di'Taykan standing remained in constant physical contact, a sure indication of distress. Shoulders slumped, their faces wore a patina of dirt and hopelessness.

Looking at them, Torin saw only Marines.

One by one, they began to straighten.

Then a swaggering Human, a good half meter taller than Torin's 1.8 and burly to near beefiness shoved one of the watchers hard enough to knock him off his feet and stomped forward to glare down at her from barely an arm's length away. She'd been keeping half her attention on his approach while talking to Akemi. His red-blond beard actually bristled; she'd never seen a beard do that before, and she'd seen Craig's beard do some fascinating things. Like the woman in the tunnel, he'd removed his sleeves—an impressive bit of tailoring since the construction of Corps combats was definitely Marine resistant. The watching Marines drifted away, Corporal Bristly Beard's presence negating any interest they had in what was going on.

“You tell me your business with the colonel, or you don't come any closer.” He snarled so broadly, she could see bits of food stuck between his teeth.

The brow rose again.

He frowned, realized where she was looking, and stopped snarling, cheeks flushing self-consciously.

“My business with the colonel is need to know, Corporal . . .”

“Alejandro Edwards, Gunnery Sergeant.” He drew out her rank, his tone mocking.

“Corporal Edwards . . .”
Her
tone suggested she hadn't quite decided if he was worth the time it would take to bring him up to Corps standards, but the odds were against it. The difference was subtle, the biggest difference that Torin's words slipped in under the skin, their edges so sharp the immediate damage remained unnoted.

“Fine.” He sounded a little sulky now. “You want to see the colonel? I'll take you to see the colonel.”

The final statement was clearly intended to be a threat. Torin didn't give a half-eaten rat's ass what his intentions were. “Thank you, Corporal. Lead on.”

He scowled past her. “Akemi! Check out the fukking tunnel. See if she's got friends out there.”

“And do what if she does?”

Edwards opened his mouth to say something, saw Kyster standing at parade rest behind Torin's left shoulder, and snarled. “Who the hell is he?”

“He's with me.”

The corporal visibly weighed his options. His gaze dropped to the knife in her boot and hazel eyes widened slightly as he recognized it. Bullies were often cowards. Not always, but in Torin's experience often enough. “You're responsible for him,” he muttered at last.

The look Torin shot him said that was too stupidly obvious to merit a response.

He turned, suddenly anxious to get moving. “Right. Follow me.”

“Let's go, Private Kyster.”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

Textbook response. Muscles tensed across Edward's broad shoulders, and Torin hid a smile.

A rough estimate of the node's area put it between 200 and 250 square meters. Unless there were a lot of people hiding in and on the other side of the tents, she put the number of people at around a hundred. Three platoons worth of Marines, the usual ground troops mix—even numbers of Human and di'Taykan, ten percent Krai. Their feet weren't made for boots, so Krai who joined the Corps rather than the Navy usually headed into Armored or Air Support.

Mostly the captive Marines lay on pallets arranged in rows starting about two meters in from the outer walls. A few of them sat up as she passed. A whisper followed her, spread out, and rippled around the node. The sibilants made at least one of the words obvious.

So some of these Marines had arrived after the tales of the mission on Silsvah had made the rounds. A single platoon of underarmed Marines, trapped in a barely defensible position, had defeated several hundred of the giant lizards. Her own part in the story had involved defeating one of those giant lizards in single combat and showing the willingness to kill a two-star general had it been necessary in order to bring the Silsviss into the Confederation as allies against the Others. Both parts of the story had grown in the telling, and she'd had to endure the embellishments and speculation for months. It looked as though she was about to reap the benefits.

The ripple lifted a few more Marines onto their feet, and as they began to move closer to try and get a look, the movement lifted a few more.

The area between the pallets and tents had been kept clear, a demilitarized zone easy to patrol, except . . . just as the curve made determining the details difficult, she could see a body staked out. A small body. Krai.

“New guy,” Edwards snorted without prodding. “Tried to rush the communal food. Can't have that, can we, Gunnery Sergeant? We'll leave him there until he's hungry enough to see reason.”

Until he was too hungry to fight back.

Behind her, she could hear Kyster's teeth snapping rhythmically together. She'd been reminded earlier that Krai teeth had no trouble with Human bone. It seemed Edwards didn't need the reminder.

“Make him stop,” he snarled, two spots of color high on each cheek above his beard.

Torin's eyes narrowed. “You were taking me to Colonel Harnett,” she said.

Another long moment of weighing his options, then Edwards turned on one heel muttering, “Yeah, the colonel'll stop him.”

At the entrance to the tents, he shoved a flap of fabric aside and spat, “Wait here.” Before he could turn, she caught his gaze with hers and held it. When he added a reluctant “Gunnery Sergeant,” she let him go.

Harnett kept her waiting.

Good. The longer she stood, sweeping her gaze over the pallets, the more Marines dragged themselves onto their feet and shuffled toward her with the short careful stride of those afraid of losing an already precarious balance and, should they fall, not entirely certain they could rise again. In a remarkably short time, a decent-sized crowd, a full platoon's worth at least, stood at the edge of the demilitarized zone. When pressure from the rear pushed a few forward, they scuttled back into the pack.

She saw no one she recognized, but then she was careful not to see individuals, just Marines, because her belief that these
were
Marines was the only reason this was going to work.

“All right, you can . . . What the fuk? Go on, move!” Edwards charged a couple of steps toward the crowd, and they scattered. They didn't scatter far, Torin noted. By the time Edwards returned to her side, muttering under his breath, they were already shuffling back.

“Colonel says to bring you in.” A jerk of a bristling chin at Kyster. “He stays out here.”

Where more Marines would gather to look at him and note he had been recently well fed. Starving people—and if this lot wasn't starving, they were close to it—maintained a very specific focus.

“Private Kyster.”

“Gunnery Sergeant!”

“Remain here until I return.”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” His anger over the staked Krai had added a carrying edge to his voice, banishing the last of his fear.

Torin flashed her teeth as she passed, a promise as she followed Edwards into the tent.

She saw no supports—the fabric clearly had some kind of tech woven in—and the rooms were open to the sky. To the roof. Edwards led her to the right, through three narrow passages, and into another open area around the center pipe. The pipe was a lot bigger up close than she'd originally thought. Maybe three meters in diameter, it ran from the ceiling down into the floor. At the two-meter level or just above, a variety of pipes emerged hanging over niches pressed into the metal. Food, she assumed. And water. The smell of unwashed flesh was weaker here and the smell of waste stronger. The latter was an interesting observation she'd have to take the time to figure out later.

Standing by the pipe with seven—no, eight—goons, spread out to his right was the alleged Colonel Harnett. He stood a little taller than Torin with brown hair and a red-brown beard and no indication he'd been missing meals. More the opposite. A slight paunch strained against his combats, but Torin wouldn't make the mistake of thinking a little belly fat had made him weak. A weak man wouldn't have been able to maintain the kind of control he had. He knew how to fight and would do it ruthlessly. The fact that his goons were armed and he wasn't just drove that point home.

He could have been any age between thirty and seventy—impossible to tell and irrelevant anyway.

He retained his sleeves, but his collar was missing.

No surprise that.

Not a colonel, then.

The goon squads meant he didn't do his own dirty work. That sounded like an officer. But he appeared to have no clear delineation between himself and the goons who carried out his orders. Officers learned early on that removing themselves by the distance of at least one NCO from the more unpleasant orders was more than a good idea; it was virtually a necessity if they were going to command.

She watched him watch her as she closed the distance between them. His eyes lingered on her collar tabs and narrowed slightly in resentment.

A staff sergeant, then.

Probably passed over for promotion.

Torin would have bet her pension that Harnett's belief he knew best had first slowed and then stopped him, keeping him off the promotion list entirely in spite of the war and need for experienced replacements as Marines were lost. Senior NCOs didn't think they knew best, they knew the Corps did and, as the voice of the Corps, that omnipotence
then
devolved onto them. It was a fine distinction but a necessary one.