Valour's Choice Read Free Page A

Human engineers came through the lock, waiting until they’d moved beyond their ability to overhear. “...I heard you were seeing stars in the captain’s office.”
    Torin folded her arms around her slate. Many di’Taykan worked in Intelligence—most species had to make a conscious effort not to confide in them. She had no idea how need-to-know General Morris had intended to keep the status of his visit, but it was irrelevant now. “What else have you heard, Haysole?”
    He grinned, taking her lack of denial for confirmation. “I’ve heard that the general’s looking for a chance to be, oh, let’s say, more than he is.”
    “A promotion?”
    “No one used that exact word, but...” His voice trailed off suggestively.
    Torin ignored the suggestion. “That’s it?”
    “About the general. But I’ve also heard that the new trilinshy is a di’Ka.”
    She frowned, and his grin disappeared as he realized she’d translated trilinshy to something approximating its distinctly uncomplimentary meaning.
    “That is,” he corrected hastily, “the new second lieutenant is a di’Ka, Staff Sergeant. High family. Not going to be easy to work with.”
    “For me or for you?” Private First Class Haysole was a di’Stenjic. Five more letters in a Taykan family name made for a considerable difference in class.
    “You know me, Staff...” His gesture suggested she could know him better any time it was convenient. “...I try to get along with everybody.
    “Staff Sergeant Kerr?”
    Torin started, suddenly aware she’d been staring at nothing for a few moments too long, the implications of shepherding an aristocratic second lieutenant and a combat platoon through a planetfall where no one got to shoot anything suddenly sinking in. And just in case that doesn’t seem like enough fun, let’s not forget you slept with said lieutenant. The one bright light in her morning was that that particular little tidbit hadn’t been picked up by the gossip net. “You missed a spot,” she said, pointing, and left him to it.
    * * *
    The desire for stimulants following hard on the heels of sentience, coffee had been one of Earth’s prime agricultural exports to the Confederation almost from the moment of contact. Most days, Torin appreciated the history of being able to drink exactly the same beverage that her several times great grandmother had back in the dark ages, but today she’d give her right arm for a cup of Krai sah and its highly illegal effect on the Human nervous system.
    “Staff? I got that download you wanted on the Silsviss.”
    Resisting the urge to yawn, she leaned into the video pickup. “Thank you, Corporal. Send it to the desk.”
    “Sending,” the tiny image of the Admin corporal acknowledged, and disappeared.
    There wasn’t much.
    In an effort to secure a section of the front, the Confederation planned to lay a new pattern of defense satellites with the optimum pattern placing one satellite directly in the center of 7RG6 or what was now to be called the Silsviss System. Unfortunately, the Silsviss, a warm-blooded reptilian race, had developed a limited intrasystem space travel. Both their moon and the nearest neighboring planet had been reached and they were in the process of building an orbiting space station—although Torin wondered how they’d found room for it given the number of weapons platforms already in orbit. Their technology, while crude by Confederation standards, was more than sufficient to destroy anything put into place without their cooperation—making it essential to get their cooperation.
    “Thus the suck-up mission,” Torin muttered, refilling her mug from the dispenser in the desk. She didn’t know what General Morris had been drinking but spit and polish was not a high priority for a combat unit. If Haysole’s sources were right—which they usually were—and the general intended this mission to push him toward promotion, the man was a bigger idiot than she’d first