A truth of Valor

Then the door closed, the halves coming together hard enough he felt the vibrations through his gloves. Through his knees. As he watched, still crawling forward, the telltales turned green.

He kept crawling. Inching forward. Muscles screaming.

That was the way out, and he was Goddamned well going out it.

Suddenly, the floor receded as the net lifted about half a meter into the air. He grunted as his weight drove the cables into his chest, making it hard to breathe. His right leg slipped through the gap he'd cut, but his left remained hung up.

When they came to get him out, he'd get one chance.

He went limp, cutting tool hopefully hidden behind the curve of his gloved fingers. With luck, they'd think he'd taken damage and was a little out of it.

With luck, they'd be quick about it because he didn't know how long he could overcome his need to move, to get free, to get to his ship, to get to Torin.

The net started to swing almost immediately.

Maybe his luck was changing.

He turned his head inside the helmet, the polarizing making the movement invisible from the outside, and saw boots approaching. HE boots. They hadn't pressurized the cargo bay, then.

As the wearer of the boots peeled the net away, and he could feel himself begin to fall, Craig flicked his cutter on. Letting gravity win, he dropped free of the net, landing back on his hands and knees.

He made contact, that much he knew, but he had no idea how much damage he'd done. No idea if he'd bought himself enough time to get to the door.

Surging up onto his feet, he'd taken only two steps forward when something jabbed his thigh, and the jolt snapped his head back, driving the edge of the suit's collar into the back of his neck.

Torin would've made sure the bastard stayed down, he thought as he pitched forward, slamming face first into the deck, mouth filled with blood from where he driven his teeth through his tongue. Next time… "You had to fukking knock him out?" Cho glared up at Almon, who glared back, the ends of his hair carving short choppy arcs over the collar of his suit.

"The ablin gon savit tried to take Nadayki's leg off." Almon jerked his head toward the deck where Doc had the gash sealed and was working on getting the younger di'Taykan out of his suit. "I didn't have time to fukking mess around being pleasant."

The problem was that not everyone reacted well to the tasik-where not well could be defined as turned into drooling, brain-dead meat. Originally developed to control the large, flightless birds that were the main source of animal protein on the Taykan home world, they were a cheaper "personal weapon" to acquire than black market military guns, and Cho had two on board. "If you've broken him…"

"Then he's broken," Almon interrupted flatly, most of his light receptors closed, his eyes pale yellow, lid to lid. "And we'll get another one. And if that one tries to kill my thytrin, I'll break them, too."

He wasn't going to back down, Cho realized. Not when it came to protecting his thytrin. If Almon hadn't been already suited up and on his way into the cargo bay, Nadayki would have bled out and Almon would likely have ripped the helmet off their captured CSO and spaced him. Pushed now, he'd push back and he was still wearing the tasik clipped to his suit. Lucky for him, Cho knew that the trick to turning the kind of people who were willing to do the things the job required into a functioning crew, was knowing when not to push. And when to shove the offender out the air lock.

Stretching out a foot, Cho poked the body slumped against the bulkhead. Everyone looked bigger suited up, but Craig Ryder was clearly not small. "Get your suit off," he snapped at Almon. "Then get his suit off and get him secured to the chair before he comes to. Doc, how will we know if Ryder's still functional?"

"Functional is usually pretty fukking obvious," Doc grunted without looking up, his hands leaving bloody prints all over the ruin of Nadayki's suit.

Head lolling forward, too heavy for his neck to hold, Craig felt like he had the worst hangover in the history of hangovers. Worse than that time back when him and Kurt and Nicole had grabbed the first bottle they could get their hands on out of Nic's dad's liquor cabinet and gotten stupidly drunk on creme de menthe. Only a drongo could have decided that that particular green poison, of all the many ways the Human species had created to get shitfaced, needed to go with them into space. Took months before Nic had stopped puking at the smell of mint.

He remembered a card game. Except he never drank to excess when he was playing.

After?

He tried to move his arms and legs. Couldn't. How fukking drunk had he gotten that he couldn't…

Couldn't because there were bands around his arms. He could feel the pressure against his skin. Bands around his ankles, too. Warm liquid pooled on his right thigh, but it was his left thigh that hurt. Blood?

Hospital?

No. He was sitting up.

Station lockup?

No. Torin wouldn't…

Torin!

He saw stars, the attacking ship, his poor wounded lady, debris flying off in every possible direction, Torin caught up in it-the bright orange of her HE suit, visible then obscured by wreckage as he pinwheeled.

Memory surged back hard enough it slapped against the inside of his skull, causing starbursts of brilliant white against the inside of his lids. The attack. The explosion. The net. Pain…

They'd hit him with some kind of current.

Pain radiated out from the burning circle in his left thigh where they'd jabbed the contact point into flesh. The dull pain across his lower back matched up to where his tanks impacted. The ache in his mouth-Craig remembered spasming, teeth closing on his own flesh. Last but not least, a red-hot iron spike had been jabbed into each temple.

Only not actual spikes since he was apparently still alive.

He was pretty sure he was breathing.

He was naked. No surprise, if they'd just peeled him out of his suit.

Tied to a chair. He couldn't lift his head or open his eyes.

Torin's suit had been leaking air.

No way she'd survived a war and been taken out by pirate scum.

No fukking way.

But she hadn't been conscious.

And her suit had been leaking air.

He recognized the vibrations he could feel through the soles of his feet. The Susumi engines were on-line. The pirates had folded away from the debris field.

Away from Torin.

This wasn't the first time he'd been expected to believe Torin had carked it. Last time, the Primacy had taken out most of a battalion, melted Marines and equipment and the ground they were standing on into a sheet of gray-green glass. He hadn't mourned Torin then. He wouldn't now.

Muscles knotting across his shoulders and upper back, he forced his head up and his eyes open.

"Finally."

Craig blinked, closed his mouth around a line of pink drool-the warm liquid on his thigh explained-and looked for the source of the voice. The young male di'Taykan standing by the hatch had pale yellow hair and a nasty expression. As Craig watched, he raised one long-fingered hand to his throat, and turned his masker off.

"Fuk you." Even to his own ears, it sounded garbled, but Craig figured he got his message across.

The di'Taykan sneered. "I'll remind you of that in a few minutes when you're begging me for release."

Dragging his tongue across dry lips, Craig managed a snort. "Are di'Taykan even able to withhold sex?" The plastic cable ties that held his forearms and his lower legs tight to the chair had no give in them. Fukking sentient alien plastic, never around when needed. The chair had been secured to the deck. No matter how he threw his weight-forward, back, side to side-he couldn't budge it.

When he rocked his hips forward, his ass came off the seat, skin ripping up off the plastic with a disgusting sucking sound. If these were the same pirates who'd tortured Rogelio Page-and he almost wanted them to be if only to keep down the numbers of bugfuk crazy sons of bitches cruising around known space-he had a good idea of what made the seat sticky. Maybe not a good idea…