The Heart of Valour (43 page)

* * *

Sergeant Jiir wasted a second responding to Stone’s cry.

Where the hell had that flier come from, and why weren’t their
serley
scanners working?

And what the fuk was taking McGuinty so Goddamned long? The flier was going to lock targeting coordinates in a second, and then they were all screwed.

The private was standing close to the access hatch, right beside the doctor. Good, two
vertak
, one stone—he could deal with them both at the same time. Jiir started to run. “McGuinty!”

He didn’t look up from the slate. “It’s too close, Sergeant, I need more time to lock!”

Then Dr. Sloan stepped sideways, putting her noncombatant chip between McGuinty and the flier, effectively keeping the flyer from targeting McGuinty.

Smart move, Doc!
Jiir thought.
Save the guy most likely to save the whole platoon!

The flier launched all four missiles.

The sergeant realized the doctor’s forehead was bare at about the same time.

* * *

McGuinty saw blue. Bright blue.

Sound and fury.

Pain.

Hurt to breathe. Hurt to open his eyes.

He did both anyway.

* * *

“Gunny?”

“Not now, McGuinty, I’m a little busy.”

Halfway up to the access hatch, jammed sideway in the narrow stairs, Torin ignored all the shouting…

“Dr. Sloan is down! I repeat Dr. Sloan is down!”

“So are the fukking scanners!”

“It hurts! It hurts!”

“Sergeant! She’s bleeding!”

…and concentrated on clamping her left hand over the bleeder in McGuinty’s neck. Looked like a piece of shrapnel had…

Not shrapnel. Bone. And a bit of bright blue fabric. Looked like a piece of Dr. Sloan had skipped off the top of his vest and ripped a hole about a centimeter down from his jaw. The high collar of the bodyliner had probably saved his life by snagging the rough edge of the bone and changing the angle of entry.

A nick in a major blood vessel was one thing. A severed vessel—something a bit more fatal.

She snapped his sealant free and held the tube between her teeth as she grabbed her canteen and thumbed the lid off. A splash on his neck. She had to see what she was doing. Canteen balanced on his… lap was close enough, given the way they were jammed in. Knife out of her boot. Slice carefully away from her fingers, keeping the vein clamped, opening things up enough to make sure the sealant hit the hole in the vein.

Start spraying even before she had her left hand away.

Pack the wound with sealant.

Wait.

Finally breathe.

“Gunny?”

“What is it, McGuinty?”

“I think the doctor exploded.” He frowned, his eyes rolled up, and his head lolled against Torin’s stomach, temple hard up against Private Oshyo’s cylinder.

“Gunny!” Sounded like Sergeant Annatahwee was right behind her on the stairs, but Torin couldn’t turn. Not far enough. Not and be able to use her spine again later. “Are you hurt?”

Good question. She’d been almost all the way to the access hatch when all hell had broken loose on the roof. McGuinty had landed more or less in her arms a heartbeat later and she’d barely managed to stop them from slamming all the way down to the second floor. Fortunately, he was a skinny little shit. “I’m all right.” Where
all right
could be defined as none of the parts that currently hurt, hurt too much to ignore. “Get your hands under McGuinty’s shoulders here, lift him over me, and pass him back. I can’t move until he’s clear.”

“Given where your knee is, Gunny, I’m not sure we can clear him until you move.”

Oh. That was
her
knee. In combats, they all looked the same. “Try.” Because moving it—moving her right leg—didn’t seem to be an option.

The sergeant’s arms came in to Torin’s left. As she lifted, Torin got her one arm under McGuinty and helped.

“Fuk, that’s a lot of blood.”

“It’s his on me, not all his on him,” Torin grunted. As his torso moved past her ear, and the pressure holding her in place changed, she amended her
all right
to
mostly all right.

“Yours?”

“Dr. Sloan’s.”

“Fuk.”

“Yeah.” Gravity would have taken her the rest of the way down the stairs if not for the sergeant’s hip against her back. Reaching up, she straightened her leg, sucked air through her teeth and got herself turned around. McGuinty had just reached the second floor, held by Ayumi and Lirit while Piroj frantically patted him down looking for more injuries. “He’s got a bleeder in his neck. It’s sealed, but be careful. Get him to the infirmary—Piroj, careful means you need to stop groping him and let Ayumi and Lirit carry him. They’re the same height. When you get there,” she continued as Piroj reluctantly backed away. “Tell…” It took her a second to pull the name out of memory. “…Flint, he’s now the medic.”

Flint had aced the first aid course. In about ten seconds he was going to regret that.

“Gunnery Sergeant Kerr!”
Major Svensson’s voice on the command channel cut through the chatter. He didn’t sound good, but he sounded focused.
“What the hell is going on up there?”

“Flier took a shot at the roof, blew McGuinty back through the hatch and delayed me on the stairs, probably killed Dr. Sloan.” Given the bits that came through the roof with McGuinty, the odds were stronger than
probably
, but Torin wasn’t willing to commit without proof. “I’m on my way up now.”

“Keep me informed.”
He didn’t ask if she was all right; if she wasn’t, he expected her to tell him.

“Yes, sir.”

About to stand, she noticed a familiar chip on the stairs; she’d probably dropped it when she’d caught McGuinty. She’d likely never know why the aliens who made up the chip had decided to leave Dr. Sloan, and she honestly didn’t care. They’d left and, as a direct result of that leaving, the doctor was dead.

“Piroj!”

“Gunny?” He moved out around Sergeant Annatahwee.

Torin looked down at the piece of alien ship—no, the collection of aliens—rippling across the palm of her hand and remembered. They’d been in Big Yellow’s copy of the hydroponics garden on Paradise Station…

“Heer, don’t eat that. It’s not a real
gitern
, it’s part of the ship.”

The engineer looked sheepishly down at the fruit in his hand. “Ship’s partly organic, Staff.”

A quick glance at Werst showed the other Krai staring challengingly back at her. His jaw might have been moving. Nothing she could do about it now, and besides, if it came down to a one on one, Big Yellow against a Krai digestive tract, smart money would be on the colon.

Neither Heer nor Werst had suffered any ill effects.

She tossed the chip to Piroj, who caught it one-handed. “Eat that.”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

She was standing before he swallowed. The stairs were clean. Most of the blood had been on McGuinty. The roof…

It had started snowing again. Big, thick flakes drifted slowly down to spatter the red with white.

The bulk of Dr. Sloan’s body lay on the far side of the hatch from where the spray pattern suggested she’d been standing. The missile had hit the center of her chest, four inches of jacket and her sternum offering enough resistance for it to blow. They could tank a brain and a spinal cord if the med-evac arrived in time, but everything above and most of what was between the impact and the heavier bone of the pelvis had been destroyed.

“Eat with a spoon,” Piroj muttered.

A typically Krai diagnosis but inarguable.

From the sound of it—and, about to emerge, Torin had been close enough to hear it clearly—the doctor had been hit by a training missile. Intended to be all light and noise but with more than enough explosive charge to kill after being embedded in a soft target. Looked like the other two thunder sticks had missed Marines, limiting their damage.

The actual explosive warhead had hit the northeast corner of the anchor, clipping it off, and most of the shrapnel had been blocked by the building.

Most.

Sergeant Jiir knelt by a prone figure, another Marine kneeling beside him.

Torin flipped up her slate.
Izebela Vega: muscle damage right thigh, right buttock. Thigh bone nicked. No major blood vessels breached.
Nothing vital hit, thanks to the vest. That was Carson beside Jiir, then, because both Stone and Jonin were unmistakable. One team accounted for.

From the exchange of fire with the Marines on the second floor, the drones were taking advantage of the disruption caused by the flier.

“Do not break cover, people!” Torin snapped into her PCU. “You’re helping no one up here if you get killed, and you do
not
want to cause me that much paperwork! I’ll check with Jiir,” she added to Annatahwee. “Make sure no one else got hit.”

Her combats had already tightened around her left knee, offering support to the swelling joint.

Jiir looked up as she limped over. The front of his uniform and his lower nose ridges had been splattered with blood. He followed her gaze and shook his head. “Not mine. Not Vega’s either. Dr. Sloan’s.”

Torin glanced back toward the spatter pattern staining the snow. “McGuinty looks worse. The doc got around.”

“So it seems.”

“Vega?”

“Stable. I’ve almost finished field sealing. They can strip her down and do a better job when we get her downstairs.”

Vega moaned.

“It’s okay,” Carson murmured, brushing snow off the other Marine’s face, drawing red lines on pale skin with bloody fingers.

“And the scanners?” Torin asked.

“
Serley
things just stopped working,” the sergeant told her, sliding the sealant tube back into his vest. “It’s how the flier got so close.”

Although her PCU was obviously working, everything else was out. The distant horizon was just that, distant. “Couldn’t have been a pulse, or no one inside would have been affected.”

“You think it’s more of the maj… of the alien’s reprogramming?”

“Might be.” But she wasn’t sure she’d put money on it.

Jiir rolled back up onto his feet and stood. “Carson, Jonin, get her inside.”

As the di’Taykan hurried across the roof, Carson picked Vega’s weapon up out of the snow and slung it across her back. “Dr. Sloan’s dead,” she said. “We’re so screwed. Who’s going to fix us now?”

“We’ll fix each other, Private Carson. Just like we would have had to do had Dr. Sloan not been with us.” The sergeant’s smile held very little humor. “That’s what training on Crucible’s all about. Flint the medic now?” he asked Torin as Carson and Jonin carefully hoisted their moaning teammate.

“He had the best scores,” Torin answered absently. Something Jiir had said…

Training on Crucible. Scenarios.

The scenario they’d been scheduled to run had included surviving the final four days scanner free. It involved a captured weapon the Corps had reverse engineered that wiped out specific tech and left the recruits dependent on their unaugmented senses alone. It was a valuable lesson to learn, and Torin had been looking forward to it.

Except…

If the weapon had been a part of the final four days of the scenario significantly farther to the west, how had it gotten here? It hadn’t been carried by a drone. It needed too large and heavy a power source. But if it was here, and it certainly seemed to be, it needed to have been carried on something that wouldn’t mind the weight.

“Jiir, what does Crucible mount heavy equipment on?”

He shrugged. “Tanks usually. They’re the easiest to RC.”

“Shit. Marines off the roof, now!” She began hobbling for the hatch. “Marines on the second floor, drop the shelter halves over the windows! Move! Move! Move!”

“Gunny!”
Major Svensson, wondering what the hell was going on.

“Good odds there’s a tank out there, sir. With the scanners down, we’re blind and we have nothing to stop it with.”

“So all we can do is give it no specific targets like Marines or windows.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get in here, Gunny.”

“Working on it, sir!”

To give them credit, the Marines on the roof were
moving.
Torin’s bad leg brought her last to the access, a position she’d have taken anyway. Stone was the only other Marine on the roof.

“What about Dr. Sloan’s remains, Gunny?”

She glanced over at the boots. They still looked great, but she’d never find out what catalog they came from now. “We’ll bag it later,” she snapped, shoving him toward the stairs. “For now, it’s best left up here in the cold. Move!”

His head and shoulders were exposed above the edge of the roof, and she was covered only to the knee when she heard the distinctive whistle of an approaching 125mm HE round. Grabbing the shelter cloth-wrapped cover, she dragged it free of the new snow and let herself fall, twisting onto her back and pulling it over the open hatch just as the first shell exploded.

Stone’s body cushioned her fall.

“You okay?” she asked, rolling off him into the slush that covered the second floor at the bottom of the stairs.

He gasped out, “Fuk you’re heavy!” and, reassured, Torin accepted Sergeant Annatahwee’s hand up, taking all her weight on her right leg. Jiir slipped past them and adjusted the hatch.

“The tank had to have been aiming at a Marine on the roof. There are no Marines on the roof now, so it has to acquire another target before it fires again. Dr. Sloan’s body may be enough of an anomaly—I have no idea how sensitive its targeting programs are…” Unfastening her vest, she shot a question at the sergeants—who shook their heads. “…no one does, apparently, so we’ve got to bag the body, but we can’t do it in uniform.”

“You can’t do it, Gunny.” Annatahwee caught Torin’s hand, stopping her from removing the vest. “Not with that leg. You take your combats off, I’m betting it won’t hold you.”

Torin was betting it would. “The tank might be able to read the bag as well as the doctor’s body. I can’t order a Marine to go to the roof to be targeted.”

“I can. Annatahwee, it’s your go.”