The Heart of Valour Read Online Free

Major Alie and nodded, an echo of Staff Sergeant Beyhn’s single dip. “Yes, sir.”
    “You don’t look nervous.”
    “Are they likely to shoot at me, sir?”
    The major’s eyes lightened as she smiled. “I doubt it.”
    “Then I’ll be fine.”
    Torin assumed every one of the thirty officers in the room—there’d be other rooms and other ranks later—had read not only her report, but General Morris’ report, Lieutenant Jarret’s report and probably, depending on their clearance levels, both the diplomats’ and Cri Sawyes’ report. She wasn’t here to go over the facts of the mission one more time lest something crucial had been left out that effected the acceptance of the Silsviss into the Confederation and their eventual integration into the Corps. She was here because later, after the facts had been presented one more time, there’d be questions and she was the only one who could answer many of them.
    It was both clichéd and dangerous to believe that insight into a species could be gained by wholesale slaughter, but Torin was willing to bet that, here and now, no one knew the Silsviss quite like she did.
    Slate to hand in case she needed to refer to her notes, she faced the tiers of seats and began. “During the mission in question, I was a Staff Sergeant with 7th Division, 4th Recar’ta, 1st Battalion, Sh’quo Company. My orders were to put together a platoon out of able-bodied Marines to accompany a group of diplomats and their support staff—Mictok, Dornagain, and Rakva—to Silsviss under the command of Second Lieutenant di’Ka Jarret…”
    There’d been diplomacy for a while, but then all hell had broken loose.
    When she reached the point in the story where the
Berganitan
had returned to Silsvah and sent down a VTA to lift them off—the VTA they’d landed in having been lost in a swamp—she saw a few of the officers begin to stir. Either they hadn’t heard what happened after liftoff and they thought she was nearly done or, more likely, she was just getting to the part they were interested in.
    “The Silsviss have a pack mentality. They know where each one fits in the pack, and the strong fight to rise. They’d just joined our pack, and they wanted to see how much they could push us around.”
    “They wanted you to kill General Morris.”
    The statement came from a Human lieutenant colonel. He might have felt safely anonymous in the dim light amid the other twenty-nine black uniforms in the room, but Torin had spent too many years pinpointing smart-ass comments from the ranks to let him get away with it. Glancing over at him, she abandoned the last 4.5 minutes of prepared speech and said, “No, sir. They wanted me to believe it was the general’s fault and then use what I had learned about the Silsviss to save the treaty by killing him.”
    “And why didn’t you?”
    “Because we weren’t joining them, sir. They were joining us.”
    “General Morris’ report said he was willing to die.”
    “I wasn’t privileged to read the general’s report, sir.”
    “But you would have killed him if it had been necessary?” He was leaning forward now, one hand pale and obvious where it gripped the dark fabric over his right knee.
    Torin lifted her chin, locked her eyes on his face, and said, “As it wasn’t necessary, sir…” She loaded implication into the pause. “…we’ll never know.”
    The lieutenant colonel looked away first and, as his gaze dropped, Major Alie stepped forward. “Since we seem to have already opened the floor to questions, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr will now address any
other
points you may want clarified.”
    Interesting emphasis,
Torin thought as a Krai major began the official Q&A.
    For the most part, the questions stayed fairly close to her observations of the Silsviss military and how well she felt they’d integrate. As they revisited the same points over and over again, Torin became increasingly grateful that she wouldn’t be part of the team designing