Read Online The Truth of Valor by Tanya Huff - Free Book Online Page B

he’d expected—fluent and without so much as an accent. He could have brought Nat instead of Huirre, who sat staring at the other captain with hunger. With the Krai, hunger covered a number of options.
    “ Serley son of a bitch wants his pound of flesh,” Firrg snarled. Smart people didn’t assume they could tell what another species was thinking but the hatred in her eyes was unmistakable. Cho wondered if Big Bill knew. Or cared if he did. “I have no choice,” she continued, “the Dargonar is by your side . . .”
    “And under my command.”
    “And under your serley command,” she agreed through clenched teeth, shifting a little of that hatred toward him. “But that’s it. Everything goes through me. I don’t want your kind having any contact with my crew, and I don’t want any part in what you and Big Bill are up to.”
    “Are you that certain without knowing what it is?”
    “I’m that certain. One job together and I go back to not giving a shit about what you or this cark sucker gets up to.” Holding up her slate, she nodded toward his. “I’ve got a set of temporary codes you can use to contact me.”
    She had a jagged scar across her forehead, Cho realized as the codes transferred, the angles too regular to be accidental. When she saw him staring, she drew her lips back off her teeth, and Huirre whimpered. Cho curled his own lip in response. He’d been hated before; it didn’t bother him much. During his court-martial, the hatred coming off the families of the dead sailors had been so virulent the Navy’d had to remove them from the courtroom in order to get anything done. “Any suggestions where we can pick up a Human CSO fast and easy?”
    Her nose ridges snapped shut. “Fuk you; I’m support during take-down. That’s it. You can do your own serley research.”
    He wouldn’t have trusted her information anyway. “I’ll be taking the Heart of Stone out in about fifty-six hours. Be ready.”
    “If you can’t give me an exact time now, I want a four-hour heads up,” she told him flatly.
    “Deal.” In the interest of keeping his fingers, Cho didn’t hold out his hand. He watched Huirre watch her leave the Groise . “You know why she hates Humans?”
    Huirre snorted. “Why does anyone hate Humans? Pity she won’t be part of the revolution. I’d love a chance to sink my teeth into that one. What a pair of amalork .”
    Only the Krai would get hot about jaw muscles. “She’d have you for breakfast.”
    “I’d die happy.”
    Cho rolled his eyes and waved a server over. Krai bar or not, if he left now, it would look like Firrg commanded his movement, and he wasn’t having that. “Just as well she doesn’t want in on the buy. I wouldn’t trust the psychotic bitch not to turn on me the moment she was armed.”
    “That, Captain . . .” Huirre reached across the table and drained Firrg’s abandoned glass. “. . . is because you’re a very smart man.”

    “You sure you’re okay with this?”
    Torin glanced up from her slate, more than happy to be pulled away from studying government regs defining legal salvage. “With working?”
    “Yeah, because you used to lay about on your arse.” Spinning the control chair around, Craig lifted his legs and dropped his heels on the scuff mark at the edge of the panel. “You’ve called CSOs carrion crows in the past.”
    “Never to you.”
    He shrugged. “You were tanked for quite a while after Crucible, and Sergeant Jiir has both a low tolerance for alcohol and a touching belief in the fairness of the universe.”
    “He’ll draw to an inside straight?”
    “Every damned time.”
    Torin thought about asking how many times but decided Jiir was an adult and a sergeant, and if the first time he’d played cards with Craig hadn’t taught him to back away slowly, well, that wasn’t her problem anymore. As for tales told under the influence . . .
    She set her slate down on the small table. “I didn’t like you—collectively