The Truth of Valor (3 page)

“Take us in alongside the pen,” Cho ordered, then opened the channel to engineering, cutting Krisk off in mid rave with a terse, “Shut up. If there’s no breach and no chance of a breach, that salvage remains our first concern. Make sure the hatch to the cargo bay hasn’t been compromised. I’m on my way down.”

The
Heart of Stone
had been designed as a scout ship for the Navy. When Cho’d taken it over, he’d doubled her firepower and added a cargo bay. Fortunately, vacuum didn’t care about aerodynamics. In his line of work, he couldn’t waste time reworking Susumi equations for every piece of crap they picked up—space was big, sure, but there was always a chance the Navy could accidentally stumble over them while they were sitting around dividing by the cube root of who the fuk cares. Cargo had to fit inside the ship’s set parameters.

When he arrived in the extension, delayed a few minutes by a sparking panel near the air lock that joined the old and new, the outer hatch was open and Dysun’s
thytrins
were working the grapples, plucking the salvage out of the
Firebreather
’s pen.

“Pen’s too big to fit inside,” Almon explained before Cho could ask what the hell they were doing. Eyes locked on the screen, he had so many light receptors open very little of the pale yellow remained. “Don’t know what this guy found, Captain, but he found one fuk of a lot of it.”

The deck plates quivered as something big came under the influence of the artificial gravity on the other side of the inner hatch.

“Sorry, Captain.” Nadayki, the youngest of the three di’Taykan, flashed him a nervous smile, lime-green hair jerking back and forth in a nervous arc.

Cho smiled back. Nadayki’s trouble with the law had been the reason the three had initially gone on the run. The Taykan were stupid when it came to family loyalties. “You dent my ship and I’ll space you.”

“He will, too. Space you soon as look at you. Mackenzie Cho’s the meanest son of a bitch in this end of the galaxy.”

“How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling my mother names?” Cho said quietly as Nat Forester moved up to stand just behind his left shoulder, slate in hand.

“At least once more, Cap. Krisk says he needs condenser parts and Doc says if you pitch another field kitchen, he’s going to throw six kinds of fit.”

“That kitchen had been slagged.”

Nat shrugged. “He says he could have fixed it. And he likes the food.”

“The food is crap.”

“Not arguing, but Doc likes it and there’s always a market for kitchens. You’re letting your prejudices cut into profits.”

“It’s not prejudice. I
know
the food they turn out is crap.”

“And I know,” his quartermaster grunted, “that these two’d probably work faster if you weren’t peering over their shoulders.”

“Sucks to be them.”

In spite of the captain’s presence, or maybe because of it, the two di’Taykan worked full out for almost two hours, creating a complex three-dimensional jigsaw of captured salvage in order to fit it into the available space. Finally, Almon sighed and said, “Cargo’s locked and loaded, Captain.”

“Noted.” Cho raised his voice slightly; the comm pickups in the extension could be temperamental. “Huirre.”

“Captain.”

“Turn us toward home.” They’d kick on the Susumi drive after he and Nat had the cargo sorted, separated the crap from the cream, and ditched the crap.

“Aye, sir. Home it is.”
The subtext—
about fukking time
—came through loud and clear, but they’d been roaming for a while, looking for a prize worth the trip, so he let it go.

“Cap and I going to fit in there?” Nat wondered, peering past Almon at his screen.

“No. Too tight.” Almon turned just far enough to wink at her, a Human gesture the di’Taykan had wholeheartedly adopted. “Tight’s good.”

Nat winked back. “Not arguing, kid.”

The di’Taykan were known as the most sexually indiscriminating species in known space, but tossing innuendo at Nat Forester put them above and beyond. Cho trusted Nat with his life, but he’d fuk Huirre first. And given that Huirre had been involved with a cartel that provided Human body parts to Krai kitchens, that was saying something.

“That’s not so much tight as wall to fukking wall,” Nat snorted, transferring her attention from Almon’s screen to her own. “Crowded enough we’ll have to use the eye for first sort.” She called up the controls on her slate one-handed, then ran the hand back through short gray hair. “Eye gives me fukking vertigo. Let’s just hope I don’t puke.”

“Don’t,” Cho told her, his own slate ready.

“Yes, sir, Cap. Because my stomach always does what you tell it.”

It was a good prize, Cho acknowledged as he guided the remote camera around and through what were clearly parts retrieved from a single destroyed battle cruiser. Looked like they’d scored some of the Marine package, too, he realized as the eye picked out the crest of the Corps on a . . .

“Holy fukking shit.”

“Cap?”

He fed her slate the coordinates without speaking.

“Holy fukking shit,” she agreed a moment later. “Now that’s worth puking over.”

They’d scored a Marine armory. An undamaged Marine Corps armory. A small fortune in weapons if he decided to sell them. A way to change the future if he didn’t.

The seals were solid and . . .

... had been oversealed by one of the dead CSOs.

If he wanted to get the armory open without blowing it and everything around it to hell and gone, he needed another CSO. Alive this time.

“
Promise
, you are cleared at vector twenty-four point seven for two hundred kilometers. Returning computer control in three, two, one.”

“Return acknowledged, Paradise Station.” Craig ran both hands along the edge of his board, the movement not quite a caress. While he understood why the station controlled all approaches and departures—the unforgiving nature of vacuum made accidents usually fatal and always expensive—it wasn’t required that he actually like being forced to sit as a passenger in his own ship. So he didn’t. But he sure as hell liked getting his lady back.

“All right, you said you’d tell me when we were in space.” His poor old pilot’s chair dipped as Torin settled enough weight to make a point across the top. “We’re in space. Spill.”

Torin hadn’t been happy about being kept in the dark, but she hadn’t done anything about it either, and Craig knew that represented a huge leap in trust for them. Torin didn’t like not knowing things.

“We’ve seen your family,” he told her, leaning back and looking up. “I figured that now we could lob in and see mine.”

She frowned. “Your parents died thirteen years ago, and you haven’t seen your cousin Joe for nearly six.”

“You fossicked through my records, then.”

Torin spun the chair around and straddled his lap. The chair complained again, and Craig told it silently to shut up as he slid his hands up the curve of her hips to settle around her waist. At 1.8 meters with a fighter’s muscle, Torin wasn’t light, but he knew for a fact the chair could hold them both . . . while moving a lot more vigorously.

“I checked after I joined you here, on the
Promise
,” she said. “Not before.”

So her research had no influence on her joining him. He appreciated that she’d decided with her heart and not her head. “You could have asked.”

“You never spoke of them and, just in case . . .” She waved a hand, the gesture taking in the bunk, the half-circle table, the two chairs, and closed hatch to the head. “. . . we don’t have a lot of room for touchy subjects.”

“’S truth. But unless we make one hell of a find—working tech say—even adding another three square meters’ll cost more than we can afford this year.” They’d used a chunk of Torin’s final payment from the Corps to put in a new converter. As long as they could find ice—and if they couldn’t find ice, he was in the wrong business—they could replenish both water and oxygen significantly faster than two people could use it. That and the upgraded CO2 scrubbers went a long way toward removing any residual dread of sharing the limited resources of a small ship with another person.

With Torin anyway.

“We were talking about your family.” She rocked her hips forward, and his eyes rolled back. Torin had relaxed the moment the air lock telltales had gone red and they were clear of Paradise and
her
family. When she got like this, it was hard to remember she knew twenty-five ways to kill a man with her bare hands. “Where are we going?”

“Salvage station.”

She stopped moving. Craig made an inarticulate protest.

“They actually exist?”

“Seventy-two-hour fold and we’ll rock up. You can see for yourself.”

“And they’re safe?”

He laughed at that. The myths about salvage stations usually included the word deathtrap in the description. “For fuksake, Torin, you were a Marine!”

“And contrary to popular opinion, gunnery sergeants can’t breathe vacuum.”

“Trust me, if there’s one thing a salvage operator understands, given how much time we spend suited up, it’s not breathing vacuum. Now then,” reaching up, he cupped the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, “you could keep working on that twenty-sixth way to kill a man. Seems I’m not dead yet.”

“It does not look cobbled together,” Craig muttered. “It looks ...”

Torin waited while Craig frowned out at the station they were approaching, obviously searching for the right response to her initial reaction. Which had been, all things considered, relatively mild.

“All right, fine,” he surrendered, “you win. It looks cobbled together. But give it a fair go. People are raising families in there.”

“Families?” Torin leaned forward and took another look at the tangled mass of habitats referred to as Salvage Station 24. “In that?” It was hard to pick out details given the glare off the hectares of deployed solar sails, but she was certain she could see one of the H’san’s ceramic pods cozied up next to a piece of a decommissioned Navy cruiser, as well as half a dozen Marine packages. Tucked up against it, in no discernible pattern, she could see a dozen ships the
Promise’s
size or a very little larger. Apparently, salvage operators didn’t believe in docking arms on their stations.

A direct hit by the enemy would turn ninety percent of this particular station back into the scrap it had started as.

“Not at war,”
she reminded herself.
“Not anymore.”
Then she added aloud, “Shouldn’t you let them know we’re on our way in?”

“They know.”

Eyes narrowed, Torin studied the board. There’d never been any question that Craig would teach her to both fly and repair the ship—she’d spent most of her previous career working to keep the Marines under her alive and now all that training and experience had been refocused on the
Promise
and her captain—but she’d been infantry and that meant starting essentially from scratch.

“Give me a large group of heavily armed people and I’ll make it do whatever you want, but this ..”
Blowing out a deep breath, she’d shaken her head as she tried to make sense of the display.
“I’m neither a pilot nor an engineer.”

“You’ll dux it out. This is easier than dealing with a large group of people.”

“Maybe for you.”

Definitely for him. Torin sectioned the board but still couldn’t find a data stream that suggested the
Promise
was in communication with the station. “I don’t see it,” she admitted at last.

“They pinged us 100 kliks out and got the codes.”

She stopped staring at the board and turned to stare at him. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“And docking?”

“I’ll bring her in alongside a free nipple and we’ll grapple in. Use the universal hookup if there’s no match.”

“Well, that’s very . . .” Torin considered and discarded a few words. “. . . independent.”

Craig grinned at her. “You’re swearing inside, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. Watch where you’re going.” She sat back and rested her hands on her thighs, watching so that her fingers didn’t curl into fists. “I spent my entire career being carted around by the Navy, depending on their engineers to do the math right. This is just a difference in scale.”

Craig’s brows rose as he micro-fired a forward thruster.

“A big difference,” Torin admitted.

They rose a bit higher.

“Fine. I’m swearing a little. There’s a reason docking computers are the default.”

“No worries, I can do anything my computer can. Although in some cases it may take me a little longer,” he added quickly as Torin opened her mouth.

As she hadn’t decided if she appreciated or was appalled by the sentiment, Torin let that stand. “So who’s in charge here?”

The corner of his mouth that she could see, twitched. “Group consensus as needed.”

“So, essentially, no one. Shoot me now.” After watching mismatched pieces go by for a while, and watching Craig’s brows dip closer to the bridge of his nose, she asked, “What happens if there isn’t a free lock?”