Valor's Trial by Tanya Huff Read Free Book Online Page B

suspected these sorts of things were sterilized for public consumption—the last thing the Corps needed to do was expose the grieving to the ugly reality of war. In this case, there’d been nothing to sterilize because the enemy blast had done the job too well. Over thirty square kilometers of battlefield had been turned to a rippled sheet of gray green. Shining. Lifeless. A helpful X marked Torin’s last known position.
    â€œShe was too far from the edge to have been thrown clear.” Far enough from the edge that being thrown clear would have killed her.
    One dark brow rose. “My daughter tells us you’re a bit of a gambler. Guess you have to be,” he continued without waiting for a response. “Doing what you do. You want to bet on a sure thing, you bet on my daughter having survived.”
    â€œI don’t . . .” Craig drank a little more beer if only because it forced him to unclench his teeth. “I didn’t believe it when I first heard, but . . .” Then the notification. Then the vids. Then Ventris. Then sitting down in a bar on a military station with Torin’s father. That last, he realized—feeling as though the station had just vented into space, feeling steel bands tighten around his chest, feeling his lungs fight for air—that was when the verb changed.
    Torin was dead. And only a galah would, could believe different.
    He might have said it out loud. He wasn’t sure.
    A large hand closed around his wrist, and Torin’s father said, “No.”
    â€œNo what? No one could have survived that.” How the fuk did he get here . . . here trying to convince a man he’d just met that his daughter was dead?
    John’s grip returned to his glass. “Saying it doesn’t make it true.”
    Craig frowned. Hadn’t Presit said that to him? Hadn’t she been arguing the other side?
    â€œMr. Ryder.”
    He recognized the voice. When he looked up at the Commandant of the Corps, he also recognized the pissed-off expression on the face of the colonel standing behind her. “High Tekamal Louden.” Then, because he didn’t what else to say and she was obviously waiting for something, he nodded toward the other man. “John Kerr.”
    â€œYes, of course,” she said as he stood and held out his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Kerr, and wish it had been under better circumstances.”
    â€œHigh Tekamal? That’s . . .”
    â€œHigh Tekamal Louden is the Commandant of the Corps,” the colonel pointed out.
    John Kerr shot him a disinterested glance. “And you’re not,” he said dryly. Dismissing the man with an ease that caused the corner of the commandant’s mouth to twitch, he indicated the table’s third chair. “Join us for a drink, Commandant?”
    â€œI’d like to, yes. I’m sure you have things to do, Colonel.”
    Too well trained to react, the colonel managed a neutral, “Yes, sir.”
    Sure money he’d be waiting when she left the bar, Craig thought as he turned and walked stiffly away.
    â€œYou’re here, both of you, because you were notified about Gunnery Sergeant Kerr,” Louden said as the bartender sent over a glass filled with a lager significantly paler than the ales the two men were drinking. Either she came in here a lot, or every bar on Ventris had Commandant Landen’s preferences on file. Given the demands on her time, probably the latter.
    â€œAnd you’re here . . . ?” John prodded. “Not that I don’t doubt my daughter was an exemplary Marine, but from what I hear, you lose a lot of those every day.”
    â€œToo many.” She raised her glass slightly before she drank, and the men drank with her. “But most of those,” she continued after the glasses returned to the table, “don’t have a . . .” Eyes the same pale gray as the station walls swept over Craig and