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

although he’d been a lot closer to the pipe, so one of the colonel’s hunting parties had found him almost immediately. “We’re way far out here. Almost to the end. Safer. Hunting parties don’t come this far.”
    â€œGlad to hear that. Tell me about them.”
    There wasn’t much to tell she hadn’t already assumed. A goon squad was a goon squad no matter what it was called. They “hunted” the Marines that landed in the little caves. Stripped them of whatever gear they’d kept before they’d recovered enough to defend themselves. The injured were left to die or helped on the way. The healthy were taken to the pipe and assimilated into Harnett’s fiefdom.
    Years of practice kept her feelings from her voice. Kyster didn’t need to deal with that on top of everything else. When she saw him staring at her hands, she managed to uncurl both fists. “And the pipe, what’s that?”
    The pipe was an actual pipe in the middle of the big open area where a number of the tunnels met. The food chute was there, and water, sometimes even hot water. The colonel and his staff lived right up beside it.
    Control the food, control the population.
    Kyster had no idea how many people Harnett controlled, but he knew there were at least four hunting parties of three Marines each. “No Krai.” He was proud of that.
    Torin didn’t explain that the Krai were good fighters and good Marinesbut, at a meter high, not exactly physically imposing. “He keeps at least some of people he trusts around him at all times, doesn’t he?”
    â€œHis staff.”
    â€œA goon’s a goon, Private. Is the colonel’s . . . group, the only group down here?”
    He was pretty sure there were others; the tunnels extended for kilometers in every direction—Kyster had no idea how far—and once he’d watched a hunting party returning after having clearly been in some kind of a fight. If they’d found something that could beat them, he wasn’t going anywhere near it. Besides, it was safest to avoid the places the hunting parties went.
    â€œNever come out here. Never been a Marine dropped out here since I came.”
    â€œThen why are you out this far?”
    â€œWater.”
    The moment he said it, the inside of her throat felt as though it had been lightly sanded.
    She stood, stiffly, and stretched, bracing her hands against the rough rock of the ceiling. “Lead on, Private. The day I’ve had, I could do with a drink.”
    He turned to the right once out of what she’d come to think of as her cave. Just before the rockfall, he turned right again and slipped through what had probably once been the entrance to another small cave. The spill of rock had turned it into a dark, rough-edge wedge in the tunnel wall.
    Brows up, Torin took a mental measurement, turned sideways and slid her right arm through. She was in shoulder-deep before her reaching fingers felt the other side. The spread-eagled crouch required to distribute height and bulk wasn’t going to be fun, but she could do it.
    Breasts and buttocks compress, but skulls don’t, and she was bleeding from a scrape along her right cheek before she popped out into a space that from the sound—and the closeness of Private Kyster—was about a quarter the size of the one she’d originally appeared in. With the spill of light from the tunnel cut off, it was too dark for even di’Taykan eyesight.
    â€œDon’t stand.” Kyster’s fingers closed around her arm as she began to straighten. “Low ceiling, Gunny.”
    She went to one knee instead.
    â€œWater’s . . .”
    She could almost hear him thinking in the pause. Trying to dredge up words he hadn’t used in all the long days he’d been alone.
    â€œWater’s forty-five degrees to your zero,” he continued, swallowed, and added, “about a meter five away. Dribbles from a