Torin stepped over the lip into the pod and froze.
It was one thing to be told that Cho, and by extension Big Bill, had a sealed armory. It was another thing entirely to stand in front of it. A sealed armory meant people she wouldn't trust as far as she could spit a H'san were in possession of enough firepower to do significant damage. The kind of death and destruction she'd spent her adult life trying to prevent, the only difference being the Primacy's forces had been made up of soldiers, just like her, not amoral assholes
Torin ignored the green-haired di'Taykan and stepped closer. She couldn't walk away from this. She had to…
Craig.
He was sitting on the floor, wearing a pair of ugly navy blue overalls, his eyes bloodshot and darkly shadowed, his lips chapped, his face bruised, his hair looking like it hadn't been brushed in days.
Alive.
His lips were pressed together, and he was breathing fast and shallow.
Torin had seen enough pain over the years to recognize it now.
He was in pain.
But alive.
He didn't seem surprised to see her.
There wasn't enough air in the pod.
Torin locked her leg muscles and braced one hand against the armory to keep from throwing herself into Craig's arms. Both Big Bill and the di'Taykan were behind her by the hatch. There were footsteps approaching.
There were a thousand things she wanted to say in the seconds she had. Craig would know that whatever it looked like, she was there to get him out. He'd know she couldn't just leave the armory. He had to be told the implants were tapped before he tried to contact her. He'd know they were live, he must've heard the ping.
So out of all the thousand things she wanted to say, she mouthed, Implant tapped.
He swallowed, she watched his Adam's apple rise and fall. He nodded; a small, careful movement.
And that was all the time they had.
"Captain Cho, excellent timing." Big Bill was smiling his Krai smile, Torin could hear it in his voice. "I hope there's been some progress made."
Captain Cho.
Captain of the Heart of Stone.
The captain who'd given the order to take Craig.
Torin began to turn. Paused. Craig wore a standard soft-soled boot on his right foot, but his left was bare of everything but a bandage folded over…
… the empty place where the smallest toe should be.
Craig felt as though his heart had stopped when Torin came into the pod. It stopped again as she looked up from the bandage and turned toward the hatch.
He knew that expression.
Last time he'd seen it, Doc had been wearing it.
NINE
"Who's she?" CAPTAIN CHO frowned up at Torin, obviously trying to remember where he recognized her from.
Hands locked together behind her back, her body between Craig and the pirate captain, Torin tried to work out what would happen if she locked them around Cho's throat instead. Craig was in pain. The injury could have been accidental, but allowing the pain, that was something else entirely. That was purposeful. That was torture. That was the reason she should kill son of a bitch right now.
Except…
If she killed him…
"She is the H'san's mother," Big Bill said. "This is Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr."
The roaring in her ears made it sound as though Big Bill had answered the captain from the bottom of a vertical.
"The one who discovered the gray plastic aliens?" Cho's eyes narrowed. "I thought she left the Corps."
"She did."
"Doesn't that make her an ex-gunnery sergeant?"
"Not possible."
"What's she doing here?"
Torin could snap Cho's neck before Big Bill realized she'd moved.
Then…
She tried to shift the flood of pros and cons into some kind of order, into some kind of strategy, but the anger kept getting in the way. She couldn't kill Cho, no matter how much she wanted to, until she knew she could get Craig off the station. And she couldn't plan a way to get Craig off the station when the need to make Cho pay pushed everything else aside. It was almost funny how, temporarily, the anger was the only thing keeping Cho alive.
"She is going to teach the free merchants how to use the weapons in the locker as I have no intention of allowing untrained persons to carry weapons inside my station. Projectile weapons," Big Bill added, "in case you've forgotten what the Corps carries."
Even while speaking to Big Bill, Torin noted Cho kept part of his attention on her; although he very deliberately didn't look her in the eye. "She works for you?"
"She will. When your people finally get this thing open." Arms folded, Big Bill half turned toward the locker. "About that, Captain; do we have a time frame or am I giving you access to my station indefinitely for no apparent reason?"
"Nadayki!"
The young di'Taykan was unarmed, Torin noted as he stepped forward, adding a fourth point, shifting their triangle. He favored his left leg and moved as though he were uncomfortable in his body-unusually graceless for a di'Taykan. If it came to a fight, he couldn't protect his captain.
Depending on how he got the wound, he might not want to protect his captain. Nothing said Craig had been the only one taken and tortured.
"We're down to the last section, Captain, but…" Nadayki's hair lay flat against his head. "… it's a date."
Cho blinked. His attention split three ways between Torin, Big Bill, and Nadayki and unable to watch all three of them at once, he couldn't seem to get a handle on the information he'd just been given. "A date?"
"Yeah, a date. Eight numbers, two sets of two and a set of four. And I can't run a number from a slate without slagging the seal, and slagging the seal will set off the Marine seal and that'll blow the armory."
"We know all that." Cho made the statement a threat. Torin barely stopped herself from a fatal reaction. She shifted her weight forward, back muscles knotting when she didn't throw the blow. Craig moved behind her, she could hear him breathing heavily through his nose, but she didn't dare turn. It helped that the movement sounded deliberate not involuntary. Not controlled by the pain. Hopefully, he'd remained sitting on the deck to conserve his strength because if it turned out he was unable to stand, she'd have to…
Have to…
She bit through the inside of her lip. Focused on the taste of iron and Nadayki's voice as he said, "Without the slate hooked in, coming up with a specific combination of eight numbers, that's impossible. Well, technically, not impossible, but the time I'll need to…"
Big Bill cut him off with a raised hand. "Dates are relevant to the people who set them, are they not?"
Nadayki glanced over at Cho and when the captain didn't respond said, "Yeah, almost always, but we know shit about the people who set this."
"You know the name of their ship," Big Bill sighed. "A little research into public databases and you'd learn several possible dates I'm sure. However, in the interest of saving some time, which you seem to believe I have an indefinite amount of…" He nodded past Nadayki at Craig. Torin turned to follow the gesture. Enough to see Craig's face but not enough to remove her primary focus from Cho. "He's a salvage operator. Perhaps he knows them?"
Craig rolled his eyes; all familiar attitude, like he hadn't just been tortured. Torin began silently listing the parts of a KC-7 to keep herself from doing something stupid. "Oh, sure, all salvage operators know each other," he muttered. "It's not like space is big or anything."
He was right, Torin realized. The sons of bitches who took him had no reason to believe he knew the CSOs who'd lost the original cargo. Space was big. Trite but true. And Craig could bluff a table off a substantial pot while holding nothing more than trip eights.
Cho muttered something in a Human dialect Torin didn't know, then took a short, jerky step toward Craig and snarled, "I should have left your toe where it was and cut off your useless fukking nuts."