The Truth of Valor (13 page)

Lifting her head, Torin frowned past Lurell’s shoulder and across the bar toward the windows—Craig liked the potential for a quick escape an outside seat represented, Torin preferred a wall at her back. “Lurell, you know a big male Rakva with a dark blue crest?”

Lurell jumped and only just managed to keep from looking over her shoulder. “This one has a brother with a dark blue crest,” she admitted, with studied nonchalance. “Why does one ask?”

Torin shrugged. “He just went by outside on the concourse. He didn’t look happy.”

“How could one tell?”

“Could have been the way his crest was up,” Torin told her, blandly. “Or could have been because people were hauling ass out of his way.”

“Ah. And he is . . . ?”

Taking a long swallow of beer, Torin put the bottle down before answering. “He’s gone now.”

“Ah.”

Cards shuffled, Kensu, the scarlet-haired di’Taykan dealing, paused as Lurell pushed her chits around on the table “You in, baby bird?”

“Yes . . . No.”

His eyes lightened. “Which is it?”

Crest flattened, she scooped up her chits and stood. “This one remembers this one has things to do. This one ...” She opened and closed her beak a couple of times, then ruffled her feathers—the Rakva equivalent of a blush—and headed for the door. Where she paused and turned. “This one wonders which way . . .”

“That way.” Torin pointed.

Lurell nodded. Left the bar. Went the other way.

“Not that I’m objecting ...” Kensu dropped a red nebulae in front of her on his first circuit of the table. “. . . but why make up stories to scare the baby bird away?”

“I don’t like taking money from children.” Torin checked her cards again. They hadn’t changed into something she could use.

“No brother?” Craig asked, brow up. He hadn’t been able to see the window. Kensu had.

“No brother.” The quartermaster had been a Rakva with Lurell’s coloring. Pictures of his fledglings had been scattered around the office. The blue feathers in the crests were fairly distinctive, so she’d played the odds.

“How’s she going to learn if you mollycoddle her?” Surrivna Pen, one of the two Niln at the table wondered. “Kid needs to learn the world’ll shit on her if it can.”

“She doesn’t need to learn it from me,” Torin said.

The Niln snorted something that sounded very much like,
“Soft.”

Rolling her shoulders, Torin considered responding to the deliberate provocation and decided against it. A fight would end the game, and given what they’d made for the salvage, Craig’s skill at the table had taken on a new relevance.

“Done dealing,” Kensu pointed out. “Ante up, people.”

Torin sighed and turned her facing cards down. Time to call it a night. “Try not to lose the ship,” she murmured, gripping Craig’s shoulder as she passed.

He grinned. “Have I ever?”

“Not so far.”

Heading out the door, she passed an older Human woman with short gray hair hurrying in on a direct line to the poker table. With her was a Human male, moving a little slower, paying more attention to his surroundings. There was nothing about him that attracted attention, but Torin figured it was a surer thing than her last hand that his outer calm covered an inner twitchiness. No mistaking the tension that pleated the soft skin around his eyes. Ex-military—the tells were obvious to anyone who’d spent as much time in uniform as Torin had—with the look of someone who’d seen too much and not been able to let any of it go. He was the first person she’d met since getting out that she wasn’t entirely positive she could beat if it came to a fight. He’d nodded in her direction as they passed, an acknowledgment that carried the hint of a warning.

Torin had no intention of sharing war stories. She let the warning stand.

“So.” Craig watched the Human woman lay her money on the table and grinned, “Who are you when you’re home, then, mate?”

“None of your damned business who I am at home.” But she smiled as she said it. When making an effort to be charming, Craig knew he was hard to ignore. “I’m Nat when I’m here, though.”

“You’re not local.”

“You psychic?”

“These fine folk are local ...” He indicated the other four players, “. . . and they don’t know you from a H’san’s ass either. That tells me you’re docked here. Like me. Salvage.”

“Do tell.” She grinned and scratched at her head. “Cargo.”

Nearly an hour later, Craig watched a small pot move across the table to Surrivna Pen who flicked her nictating membranes across her eyes twice when she got a good hand. Unlike Yavenit Tay, the other Niln at the table, who tapped his tail. With everyone’s tells identified, he could start winning.

“So . . .” He turned to Nat, who
stopped
scratching when the cards went her way. “What’re you hauling?”

“Bad luck,” Nat snorted, beckoning the server over. “Had a hinky fold that wasted a galley’s worth of food. Had to resupply.”

The
Heart of Stone
had been at the other end of the docking arm for seventy-two hours. The story had spread. “So that’s you, then.”

She shrugged, aware that kind of luck would get talked about.

“And you . . .” Kensu nodded at Craig, hair flicking out and back. “. . . sold a double pen of scrap to the quartermaster for recycling. Now we’ve established strangers get talked about, it’s your deal, Ryder.” He tapped a long finger against his pile of chits. “Or am I playing with myself here.”

Nat glanced under the table. “Oh, sure, get my hopes up.”

Concentrating on the worn cards—this late in the game they were a bit sticky, and he sure as shit didn’t want play called for perceived cheating, not now, not with the groundwork done—Craig missed Kensu’s response. Not that it mattered. Given the comment, any response by a di’Taykan would merely be variation on a theme.

A couple of hands later, in the pause while refills arrived, Nat turned to him, much the way he’d turned to her earlier, Human to Human, and asked, “So where you heading after?”

He shrugged. “Not a hundred percent sure.”

“Well, before we got fukked by that Susumi wave, we might’ve stumbled over a tech field out by the edge; not more than a day’s fold away.”

Everyone always knew where the treasure was.

“Math makes it a debris drift from where those bastards took out the
Norrington
and the
M’rcgunn
and the
Silvaus
? The
Salanos
? Fuk it, the other ship that was with them.” She topped up her new glass with the dregs of the old and handed the empty to the server. “Cap even thought about checking it out. Didn’t.” When she smiled broadly, her face folded into pleats that gave some indication of her actual age. “Or I wouldn’t be mentioning it. Us having no tags and all. Anyway, I’m not sure anyone’s tagged it yet and even if they have, it’s the kind of field that a second tag or even a third tag could make some haul on.”

A tech field, Craig admitted silently, even on third tag, could very well net them enough credit they’d be able to add another three square to the
Promise
sooner rather than later. He’d expected Torin to have trouble rubbing elbows 28/10 on a one-man ship, but her years in the Corps had trained her to share limited space—accepting or ignoring other bodies as required. He, however, had been used to working alone—being alone—and regular sex could only compensate for so much.

Sooner, rather than later, sounded damned good to him.

“Any chance you remember the coordinates?” he asked, checking his cards.

Nat snorted. “I might have them on me.”

“How much?”

Her eyes narrowed as she studied the chits in front of him. “We’ll talk when the game’s over. Time to play now.”

“Dangerous on the edge,” Kensu pointed out absently, frowning at the pair of threes he’d just been dealt.

Craig had a nine and a seven showing, an eight and a six down. “Danger is my middle name.”

“And the female you travel with?” Yavenit asked, tail still.

He laughed. “Danger is her
first
name.”

“She looks familiar,” Surrivna said thoughtfully, dealing out the final round.

So far, only the quartermaster had recognized Torin as the gunnery sergeant who’d blown the lid off the little gray aliens’ power-behind-the-war gig. Unavoidable, given that he’d had her codes on the docket. Without the uniform, without the expectation of seeing her in a half-built OutSector station, she’d gone unnoted by everyone else. Although his economic reasons were valid, that anonymity had been a deciding factor when Craig had chosen where they’d empty their pens. Even among the salvage operators—who collectively used
none of my business
as a mantra, for fuksake—someone had tried to pick a fight and, as far as he was concerned, Torin had already done more fighting than any two people should have to.

By morning, the whole station would be talking about her, but by morning they’d be gone.

“Are we playing or talking?” he asked the table at large as Nat dug bloody fingernails into her scalp.

Sleep when you can
was not one of the Corps’ official mottos, but Torin had always figured it should have been. Head pillowed on her jacket, she woke when Craig approached their air lock. Ankles crossed, she rolled up onto her feet.

“They charge us every time we use the lock,” she reminded him as his brows rose.

He grinned and spread his hands. “I wasn’t going to ask.”

“How’d you do?”

“I won big.” He moved closer when she turned to code in.

Torin leaned back against his heat. The floor had been a bit cold. “And then?”

“How do you know there’s an
and then
?”

Torin said nothing as the telltales turned green.

“Okay, there’s an
and then
.” He shifted, trying to get a look at her face. “Are you smiling?”

She was. “So you blew your winnings on racing stripes for the
Promise
?”

“Not quite.” Torin felt his chest rise and fall against her back as he took a deep breath. “I used my winnings to buy the coordinates for a tech field from a cargo jockey.”

“Magic beans were going to be my next guess.”

FOUR

CRAIG BLINKED UP AT THE
top of the bunk, wondering what had woken him. He shifted, realized he was alone, and from the lack of residual heat, probably had been for some time. Rolling up onto his side, he could see the back of the pilot’s chair silhouetted against light rising from the control panel and assumed Torin was in the chair.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said before he could speak.

It would never not be fukking creepy when she did that.

“Your breathing changed,” she added, spinning the chair around far enough so he could see her against the lit screen.

Craig thought about pointing out that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Torin wasn’t most people, never would be. The hour seemed to call for the direct approach. “What’re you doing?”

“Threat assessing. Go back to sleep.”

Yeah, like that was going to happen now. “Are we in danger?”

Torin huffed a laugh. “Most of the time.” One hand rose up through the light to wave at the fuzz of Susumi through the front port. “Screw up a basic trigonometric function, and that shit eats you for breakfast.”

Old news. “Specific danger?” he prodded, covering a yawn with his fist.

He couldn’t quite see her shrug, but her tone told him she had. “The data stores have nothing on
The Heart of Stone.
”

“No reason they should. It’s a cargo ship I’ve never run into before.”

“I don’t trust this . . .
Nat
. I don’t trust that she sold you the coordinates for so much less than they could be worth.”

“
Could
be worth,” Craig repeated, adding emphasis. “And she sold them for as much as she could get. Nat did okay, more than, given that she can’t bring in military salvage without tags. She got a sure thing. We’re taking the chance. And I checked the math before I paid her—the odds of it being a debris drift from the destruction of the
Norrington
, the
M’rcgunn,
and the
Salvanos
are high. Very high, even. But you know that because I showed you the numbers.” Eyes narrowed, he strained unsuccessfully to see her expression. “What’s really wrong?”

For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she sighed.

“I knew Marines on the
M’rcgunn
. Most of them are still MIA.”

“. . . three hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and twenty brought home. And counting.”

“You’re wondering if we’ll find them.”

“It had crossed my mind.”

Craig knew that one of Torin’s hands rested on the place the tiny cylinders holding the ashes of the dead would fit into a combat vest. He suspected she still carried every Marine she hadn’t been able to bring home alive. He wanted to tell her she could put them down. Knew it wasn’t his place. But he’d do what he could. “Come back to bed. Celebrate life.”

He could feel her stare. Heard her snort. “That may be the corniest pickup line anyone has ever used on me.”

“What can I say?” He grinned. “You’re a sure thing; I’ve stopped trying.”

Torin had always thought that, given the chance, she’d prefer to be at the controls during a Susumi fold rather than have her survival depend on another’s ability to get the equation right. Far as the Navy’s Susumi engineers were concerned, Marines were meat in a can. Not that Torin had ever actively worried about them getting it wrong. No point. Nothing she could do, strapped down in one of the Marine packets, would affect the outcome. She preferred to save her concern for things she
could
affect.

Turned out, being at the controls gave her exactly as much satisfaction as she’d thought it would. It felt good to have external responsibilities again.

The last time, she’d merely been at the controls when they emerged. This time, it was her fold, start to finish.

As the Susumi wave faded, she brought the front thrusters on to slow their emergent speed, and then checked her boards. “We’ve arrived at the coordinates we were aiming . . . Shit!”