Valor's Trial (6 page)

“No,
you
don't understand . . .”

One foot raised to step over the hatch, Craig put it down again and eased back into the corridor. The voice filling the room he'd been about to enter was male, the tone frustration heading toward anger. He was, himself, just here for information, he didn't want to intrude on another man's grief.

“. . . I have all the information you lot are willing to give me and I'm not here to talk to a counselor; I'm here to talk to talk to someone who doesn't have their head up their ass about this . . .”

Obviously, the man hadn't spent much time dealing with the military. In Craig's experience, head up the ass was the default posture.

“. . . my daughter isn't dead!”

A thousand daughters in uniform.

More. So many more.

And more than a thousand fathers who'd refuse to believe.

There was no reason, absolutely no reason that this overheard conversation had anything to do with Torin. Except that Craig's code had directed him here, to this anteroom off the docking bay, an area barely inside the station, awkward civilian interactions kept at the edge of things military. Three dozen doors along this corridor—he'd counted them while wondering what the hell he was doing there, pacing past other men and women who seemed to have a lot fewer questions. Three dozen doors and the notification code brought him to this one.

He stepped into the room.

The Krai corporal behind the desk looked up, his nose ridges flaring. Or maybe her nose ridges—secondary sexual characteristics were subtle and Craig never had been able to tell the Krai apart. Since it had never been an issue, he didn't worry about it much. “I'm sorry, sir, I'll just be a moment.”

Ignoring her—or him—Craig crossed to the man standing by the desk. He was big—not just in contrast to the meter-tall Marine behind the desk—and the patchy red-brown of his tan said he spent most of his time outside in actual atmosphere. Before the Marine could speak again, Craig held out his hand. “Craig Ryder.”

Deep-set eyes narrowed, creases pleating at the outside corners. Recognition dawned, and he nodded, once. Craig always figured Torin had picked up the gesture in the military. Maybe not.

“John Kerr.” Torin's father had one hell of a grip, his hand hard and callused.

“Drink?”

“You know how to find a bar in this tin can?”

“Mate, I can find a bar in Susumi space.”

“Yeah? Well, I don't have the faintest idea what means . . .” He scratched along the edge of his jaw, nails rasping against rough skin where the depilatory had begun to wear off. “. . . but if you can find a bar, I'll buy.”

“Sir. Sirs,” the corporal amended as they turned together. “The Corps will deal with your needs while on Ventris.”

“The Corps can,” John Kerr began. Stopped. Drew in a deep breath. And pointed one large, scarred finger across the desk. “I'll be back.”

“Torin liked this bar.”

“Yeah.” Their notification codes hadn't got them onto Concourse Two; that had been Craig's not entirely legal schematic of the nonsensitive parts of the station, a little bullshit to an actual live Marine at a checkpoint, and the taking of the Commandant of the Corps' name in vain when asked for his authorization by the station sysop at the last hatch. There were plenty of bars on Concourse One, the area reserved for those just passing through. Craig knew and liked a number of them, knew and avoided a couple more, and didn't want to see the inside of any of them. Not now.

Torin had liked
Sutton's
.

Half a dozen second lieutenants had pushed two of the small tables together over in the corner, a couple of Krai NCOs sat at the bar watching cricket on the vid screen and occasionally commenting in their own language, but other than that the bar was empty. The Corps ran on a 28-hour clock, but 1530 seemed to be an off hour.

John took a long swallow and set his glass back on the table. “The beer's good.”

Craig raised his own glass in acknowledgment and drank. They hadn't done a lot of talking on the way and now . . . “You don't think she's carked it.” At John's blank expression, he shook his head. “Sorry. Died. You don't think she's died.”

“I don't. They hear it all the time, you know:
My
kid's not dead.” His hand tightened around the base of the glass. “There's no body. They haven't found anything that resembles her fukking DNA. Give me a body. Give me something.” His eyes were a darker brown than Torin's, but the intensity was the same. “I'll believe when I have proof but not until.”

“The force of the blast melted rock.” Presit had been right. Nothing could have survived it. “The whole area was slagged.”

“I saw the vids.”

The vids had come in a packet with the notification code. Craig had always suspected these sorts of things were sterilized for public consumption—the last thing the Corps needed to do was expose the grieving to the ugly reality of war. In this case, there'd been nothing to sterilize because the enemy blast had done the job too well. Over thirty square kilometers of battlefield had been turned to a rippled sheet of gray green. Shining. Lifeless. A helpful X marked Torin's last known position.

“She was too far from the edge to have been thrown clear.” Far enough from the edge that being thrown clear would have killed her.

One dark brow rose. “My daughter tells us you're a bit of a gambler. Guess you have to be,” he continued without waiting for a response. “Doing what you do. You want to bet on a sure thing, you bet on my daughter having survived.”

“I don't . . .” Craig drank a little more beer if only because it forced him to unclench his teeth. “I didn't believe it when I first heard, but . . .” Then the notification. Then the vids. Then Ventris. Then sitting down in a bar on a military station with Torin's father. That last, he realized—feeling as though the station had just vented into space, feeling steel bands tighten around his chest, feeling his lungs fight for air—that was when the verb changed.

Torin was dead. And only a galah would, could believe different.

He might have said it out loud. He wasn't sure.

A large hand closed around his wrist, and Torin's father said, “No.”

“No what? No one could have survived that.” How the fuk did he get here . . . here trying to convince a man he'd just met that his daughter was dead?

John's grip returned to his glass. “Saying it doesn't make it true.”

Craig frowned. Hadn't Presit said that to him? Hadn't she been arguing the other side?

“Mr. Ryder.”

He recognized the voice. When he looked up at the Commandant of the Corps, he also recognized the pissed-off expression on the face of the colonel standing behind her. “High Tekamal Louden.” Then, because he didn't what else to say and she was obviously waiting for something, he nodded toward the other man. “John Kerr.”

“Yes, of course,” she said as he stood and held out his hand. “I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Kerr, and wish it had been under better circumstances.”

“High Tekamal? That's . . .”

“High Tekamal Louden is the Commandant of the Corps,” the colonel pointed out.

John Kerr shot him a disinterested glance. “And you're not,” he said dryly. Dismissing the man with an ease that caused the corner of the commandant's mouth to twitch, he indicated the table's third chair. “Join us for a drink, Commandant?”

“I'd like to, yes. I'm sure you have things to do, Colonel.”

Too well trained to react, the colonel managed a neutral, “Yes, sir.”

Sure money he'd be waiting when she left the bar,
Craig thought as he turned and walked stiffly away.

“You're here, both of you, because you were notified about Gunnery Sergeant Kerr,” Louden said as the bartender sent over a glass filled with a lager significantly paler than the ales the two men were drinking. Either she came in here a lot, or every bar on
Ventris
had Commandant Landen's preferences on file. Given the demands on her time, probably the latter.

“And you're here . . . ?” John prodded. “Not that I don't doubt my daughter was an exemplary Marine, but from what I hear, you lose a lot of those every day.”

“Too many.” She raised her glass slightly before she drank, and the men drank with her. “But most of those,” she continued after the glasses returned to the table, “don't have a . . .” Eyes the same pale gray as the station walls swept over Craig and back to John. “. . . friend who uses my name to access sections of the station off limits to casual civilians.”

The snort was deeper but similar in every other respect to the sound his daughter made. “Is he in trouble?”

“No. We, the Corps, indeed the entire Confederation, owe Mr. Ryder a debt . . .”

She wasn't, Craig realized, going to explain what exactly that debt was. Probably not a good idea to remind civilians about the infiltration of the military by molecular-sized bits of intelligent plastic.

“. . . and he's taking advantage of that.”

John nodded. “And you like him.”

A network of fine lines bracketed the pale eyes when she smiled. “And I like him.”

“Good. The Corps was everything to my daughter for a long time. We always figured that when she finally met someone, they'd be a part of that. When he wasn't, we were curious. But you, for all intents and purposes, you are the Corps, so if you like him, well, that's another point in his favor.”

“The gunny didn't tell you much about him, then.”

He took another drink. “Torin was never one for passing on details of her personal life.”

“Thank fuk for that,” Craig muttered into his beer.

“I need to know what happened to my daughter, Commandant.” The tip of one finger rubbed a pattern into the condensation on the tabletop. “I can't go home and tell them that the Corps doesn't know.”

She died.
Craig thought. He could barely hear Louden's answer over the roaring in his ears.

“Gunnery Sergeant Kerr died while performing her duty as a Marine.”

“You've got no evidence of that.”

“We have no evidence she survived either. We're no longer receiving a signal from her ID, and she couldn't possibly survive anything able to destroy that chip.”

John Kerr shrugged broad shoulders. “Chip could have been removed and destroyed.”

“Mr. Kerr, we lost seven hundred and thirty-eight people in the attack that took your daughter. Another twenty-seven died in other actions during that same battle and we had three hundred and twelve wounded. We took . . .” Both her hands tightened around the base of her glass. “We took catastrophic losses that day and I would give anything to believe that even one of those seven hundred and sixty-five people survived, but I can't.”

“I can.”

“How?”

A good question and one Craig wanted the answer to as well. He wanted his belief in Torin's invincibility back.

“This whole thing could be a ploy by the Others. They could have cleared the battlefield before they destroyed it, before they destroyed the evidence.” He held up a calloused hand. “I know what you're going to say, the Others don't take prisoners—but they could. They could be covering their tracks. Could have been covering their tracks from the beginning. Every body you never found could have been a result of the enemy scooping up your people, questioning them, learning about the Confederation, using them for slave labor, hell, using them for food.

The High Tekamal sighed and shook her head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Kerr, but we learned early on in this war that if you surrender to the Others, you die, even when it's in their best interests to keep you alive. We don't know why, but we do know that they don't take prisoners.”

Based on her initial experience, Torin had to say that the afterlife truly sucked. Her entire body ached, her mouth tasted like she'd been licking shell casings, and she had a headache centered over both eyes that pounded on and on like a silent artillery barrage in her skull.

No noise, just the kind of pounding that shook teeth free.

No.

Not quite
no
noise.

A soft scuffling.

Bare feet on rock.

To both Krai and di'Taykan, the Human sense of smell was limited, but she had no trouble identifying the sharp, old-cheese scent of unwashed flesh.

Holding her breath, she waited until the first tentative touch, then grabbed about ten centimeters back, wrapped her fingers around a warm cylinder of flesh, and slammed it to the ground. By the time she had her knee pressed against the familiar ridges of a bowed spine, she had her eyes open.

Krai. Problem, but not a bad one. Krai bone was one of the toughest substances in known space, but joints were, as always, the weakest part of the design, and a spine was essentially a long line of joints. She'd have been in trouble had she not managed to flip . . .
him,
Torin guessed from the size and the pattern of mottling on the nearly hairless scalp, but as it was, all she had to do was hang on.

And hope she hadn't taken down a medic come to check on her condition.

That would be embarrassing.

And not the first time.

Although medics were usually cleaner.

“Arshantac chrick!”
she barked as he struggled. The approximate translation: Yield or be food! Historically, Krai battles became banquets with astonishing speed although, even had she been Krai, Torin doubted she'd have made a meal of her captive. To begin with, the smell was distinctly off-putting, but more importantly, he wore a Marine Corps uniform, and the Corps had worked very hard to instill the belief that Marines did not eat other Marines.