Valour's Choice (12 page)

“Just fukking ignore him,” Juan advised.

* * *

Moving between the pockets of deep shadow created by the dim street lighting, the pair of dark figures had followed the Marines from the embassy to the bar. There’d been a brief exchange when the six had met up with the two Silsviss soldiers, but they hadn’t interfered. Seconds after the Marines had followed Sooton and Hairken onto the patio, they’d slipped into the
savara
by a side door. The taller of the two had pulled the proprietor aside for a hurried conversation and, after an official bit of hardware had been flashed, they’d been led along the edges of the room and up a flight of stairs to an empty loft overlooking the patio.

Down below, the Marines were waiting for the
kritkar
to arrive.

“I see why no one uses this place,” Torin complained, pulling off the leather cap that had hidden her hair and reshaped her head to a vaguely Silsviss silhouette. “It’s hotter than bloody blue blazes up here.”

“How hot isss bloody blue blazesss?” Cri Sawyes wondered, settling himself at the edge of the loft.

“Not as hot as this. Are you sure they can’t see you?”

He pulled his tail back into the shadows, “Posssitive. I would, however, be more concemed that they don’t sssee you. I very much doubt that any of your lot would recognize me at this dissstance.”

“The two di’Taykan might. They have a highly developed sense of smell.”

“Even over thisss?” His gesture took in the nearly visible miasma of beer, greasy food, and heated bodies rising from the patio.

“Probably not.” Torin made a note of both exits, then settled down beside him. “Should I be worried about the Silsviss we passed downstairs? One or two of them seemed to be giving me what I could only call a flat, unfriendly stare.”

“We interrupted their drinking. Thossse inssside are not necessssarily here for a good time. They’re the ssseriousss drinkerssss.”

“From the scars, they looked like serious fighters.”

“Yesss...” Cri Sawyes fingered the scar on his hip. “They’re the type who challenge and lossse and challenge and lossse— they can’t win, but they can’t ssstop challenging either. I expect it’sss why they drink. Pitiful really.”

“And the boys on the patio?”

“I doubt there hasss ever been a ssseriousss challenge made by any of them.”

“How can you tell?”

“Few ssscarsss. And besssidesss...” His tongue flicked out. “I helped to ssselect the sssoldiersss who would guard the politiciansss who would meet with the aliensss.”

“Ah.” A quick glance over the railing showed Ressk had slaved his slate to Binti’s. “It’s not going to be hard to keep an eye on my lot, is it? Given sizes and colors, they stick out like half a dozen sore thumbs.”

Cri Sawyes glanced down at his hand, looking more than a little puzzled. Then he shook his head, having clearly decided it didn’t matter. “To be perfectly honessst, I’m amazed your Lieutenant Jarret allowed you to go through with thisss.”

“Our orders state that we’re to report on how the Marines and Silsviss interact. We can’t do that unless we have some actual interaction.” Torin nodded toward the patio. “Besides, there’re three Humans, two’di’Taykan, and a Krai down there, and if any one of them can’t get along with your common Silsviss soldier— or vice versa—I want to know now. Not when we’re facing the Others and it might cause a problem.”

“And you don’t think it will caussse a problem now?”

She shrugged. “It’ll cause a bigger problem if it’s accompanied by live ammunition.”

“True. But sssuppossse the right combination of Marinesss hadn’t decided to go over the wall?”

“I’d have sent them back until they got it right.”

“Ssstaff Sssergeant...”

“All right, when it came down to it, this is essentially the group I expected to make the break. Everyone’s rapidly reaching the point where they need to do something that doesn’t involve standing guard at an unused door, but these six are a little closer to that point than the rest.” Torin swiped at the sweat on her neck, then rubbed her hand dry against her hip. “It’s also why four of them are in the same fireteam—complementary temperaments ensures they work well as a unit.”

“And their copy of the transsslation program? You planned that asss well?”

“I made it available to Ressk. He did the rest.”

“I sssee.” Cri Sawyes sat quietly for a moment, tail tip twitching as he thought. “You know your people,” he said at last.

Torin nodded. “They’re
my
people.”

* * *

The
kritkar
arrived in a covered dish. An expectant silence followed its path from the kitchen to the table as the Silsviss on the patio waited to see what these alien soldiers would do.

A few tongues flicked out as Plaskry elbowed Yrs out of the way the moment he’d set the dish down. It was the bigger male’s joke, after all, and he wanted to deliver the punch line.

“Help yourself,” he said and lifted the lid.

A claw, about half an inch long, appeared over the edge of the bowl as the first of the
kritkar
attempted a last minute escape.

The tongue flickering grew more pronounced.

“Like this,” Plaskry hissed, scooping up a handful of the tiny live crustaceans and popping them into his mouth.

“Oh, like
that
.” Ressk looked around at the others as though he’d only been waiting for instruction. “Not one at a time...” He scooped an equally large handful out of the bowl. “...like this.”

Plaskry stopped chewing to watch and forgot about chewing altogether when Ressk reached for seconds, thirds, fourths, and finally picked out and ate the last three. Suddenly conscious of everyone staring at him, the Krai flushed and stopped digging at a bit of shell caught between his teeth. “Oh. Sorry. Did the rest of you want some?”

The silence lasted another two heartbeats, then erupted. Sooton and Hairken thumped each other on the chest and whacked tails, triumphantly reminding each other that they’d brought the aliens to the
savara
in the first place. After a moment of pulling the loudest phrases from the air, the two slates now holding the program spat out mostly unintelligible congratulations and a few insults thrown toward Plaskry.

“Just once I’d like to go some place where they didn’t try to gross us out with the local delicacy,” Binti muttered under the noise. “So, what’d they taste like?”

Ressk shrugged. “
Chrick.
Crunchy—but then all seafood tastes the same to me.”

“Pity you didn’t leave enough to run past a slate,” Hollice grunted. “We could’ve checked to see if they were poisonous to the rest of us.”

“And you’d have eaten a handful?”

“Hey, I once ate two dozen raw oysters to impress my best friend’s date and crunchy could only be an improvement over that phlegm on the half shell.”

“You figure tall, tailed, and ugly over there is going to spring for another bowl?” Binti wondered.

On cue, Plaskry rounded the table and clamped one hand down on Ressk’s shoulder. “Your little food eaten before the main meal...”

Binti snarled and hooked her slate back on her belt.

“...cost me a third of my pay chit!”

Continuing to dig at the bit of shell, Ressk grinned. “Guess there’s no chance of seconds, then.”

The big Silsviss hissed, and his tail whacked Ressk’s stool at the spot where a tail would usually have hung. “Seconds? You aliens have got more male equipment than a large carnivorous quadruped!”

Ressk snatched his slate to safety before Binti could edit the program with her fist. “Then I guess I owe you a beer. Yrs!”

Attention jerked away from his mournful examination of the empty bowl, Yrs looked first to the slate and then up at Ressk.

He tossed over his souvenir credit chit. “Beer for the
partizay
on me!”

* * *

“Deftly done,” Cri Sawyes acknowledged as Yrs left the patio to renewed noise.

“It’s an old shtick,” Torin told him. “The Krai can eat almost anything on almost any world. They have the Galaxy’s most efficient gut.”

“I wasss referring more to the way they usssed that efficient gut to manipulate the sssituation. Only the Krai, who asss you sssay can eat anything, had to eat the
kritkar
and yet all the Marinesss benefit. They have been accepted by the sssoldiersss.”

“So far,” Torin agreed. “But don’t forget they’re also buying a round. That helped.”

“True. You do realize that the sssoldiersss will now attempt to get your people drunk.”

“I realize.”

“And?”

“It should be interesting.”

* * *

The high-pitched beeping cut through the ambient noise like a hot knife through field rations and fell right smack in the middle of the tonal range guaranteed to produce maximum irritation. Swearing in three languages, all six Marines dropped their attention to their slates.

“Mine,” Sooton muttered, plucking a black rubber cylinder off his harness. He flicked out an antenna, opened his auditory ridge to insert a round knob and bent the rest of the cylinder around by his mouth. “Yeah... Just a minute. I’m getting interference from the buildings...” Pushing back his stool, he walked over to the edge of the patio, talking as he moved.

“You think they operate on fukking radio waves?” Juan wondered, eyes gleaming.

“That’s always been the cheapest.” Mysho waved her beer around at the Silsviss. “And they’ve got to be cheap. Almost everyone seems to have one.”

“Low tech,” he sneered. “They’ve only got audio.”

“Give them a break, Juan. They’d barely got off the planet before the Confederation contacted them.”

Grunting a reluctant agreement, Juan moved over beside Sooton when he returned to the table and asked if he could see the cylinder.

“Sure. It was Blarnic,” he added to the table at large. “Wanted to know if anything was happening here tonight.”

Tongues flickered.

Squinting down at the handset, Juan rubbed a finger over the rubberized controls. “How does it work?”

“You mean inside?”

“No, I mean how does it fukking break rocks. Yeah, I mean inside.”

“No idea.” Sooton looked around, then pointed. “But Hars over there is a tech. He should know.”

Juan grabbed for his slate as he stood, but Ressk blocked his hand. “Not yet. I’ve only copied half the translation program.”

“You haven’t even started copyin’ it onto Haysole’s slate, and he seems to be fukking managin’ without it.”

They both looked over to a dark corner where the di’Taykan had gathered a small group of his own.

“He’s probably playing ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ I doubt he’s talking much.”

“Wonder if he’s winning.”

Ressk snickered.

* * *

“What isss the young male with the blue hair doing?”

“Plopping his pecker on the table, as near as I can tell from up here.”

Cri Sawyes turned from the view below to stare at Torin. “I beg your pardon, Ssstaff Sssergeant.”

“It’s a di’Taykan thing. They like to know where they stand.”

“He isss comparing the sssize of his reproductive organ to thossse of the sssoldiersss?”

“Yeah. Don’t Silsviss do that?”

“Yesss, when we are young in the pressservesss but not usssually at thisss age.”

“The di’Taykan can be pretty persuasive, and he’s probably curious because nothing shows.” Her gaze dropped. She didn’t intend it to, but she couldn’t help it.

Cri Sawyes’ tongue flicked out. “I am
not
going to show you mine.”

“No, sir.” Ears burning, she returned her attention back to the patio.

* * *

“...so we’ve got them pinned down in this small village, the civilians cleared out when they saw trouble coming, so it’s just them and a couple of nasty artillery pieces that don’t seem to be running out of their powering medium any time soon, and those egg suckers with the most metal send us in to clear the place residence by residence!”

“Idiots!” Hollice slapped the table for emphasis. “Why didn’t they just call in an air strike?”

Sooton hissed and smacked his hand down, beside the corporal’s. “That’s what we wanted to know!”

* * *

Juan grabbed a small electrical component just before it rolled though a puddle of beer and tried to snap it back into Hars’ headset. “So this goes here?”

“No.” A somewhat unsteady claw tapped the rubber “Here.”

“That’s what I fukking said,
here.”

Hars belched.

* * *

“But you’re a mammal!”

Mysho’s eyes lightened. “Your point?”

* * *

Binti’s third dart hit the spinning target on the outer edge and during the instant between the cancellation of the old momentum and the application of the new, her fourth dart hit the black triangle in the middle.

“Harttag!”
roared her partner, smacking her in the backs of the legs with his tail. He hissed, disappointment coloring his glee, and smacked her again. “How can we celebrate
harttag
when you have no tail!”

“I don’t have a tail,” Binti agreed, moving inside the painful blows. “But I do have hips.” Her answering blow lifted him over an empty stool and into the lap of a Silsviss who’d been watching the game.

After a moment’s stunned silence, tongues began to flick.

With his own tongue flicking so fast he could hardly breathe, Binti had to help her fallen partner to his feet.

* * *

“Your people ssseem to be drinking in moderation.”

“Moderation might be a bit of an overstatement.” Torin tracked Mysho’s path from the bar to the table and noted whom she unloaded the beer in front of. “But they’re being careful.” It helped that the Silsviss beer contained less alcohol than they were used to, but she saw no need to pass that information on. “It shouldn’t be long now.”

Cri Sawyes blew out his throat pouch impatiently. “What shouldn’t?”

“See that group over in the corner? I’m guessing they’re a different
partizay
than the group my lot hooked up with and that the two don’t get along. Maybe one
partizay
feels like they’ve been pulling more crap duties than the other, maybe it’s personal, it doesn’t really matter—they’ve been glaring across the patio all night.”