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    The Heart of Valor
    The Heart of Valor
    The Heart of Valor
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Heart of Valor

    Written by Tanya Huff

    Narrated by Marguerite Gavin

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr was a Confederation Marine's marine. She'd survived more deadly encounters-and kept more of her officers and enlistees alive-than anyone in the Corps, and she was determined to keep that record intact. But since her last mission, she'd been sidelined into endless briefings and debriefings with no end in sight. So, of course, she'd jumped at the chance to go to Crucible-the Marine Corps training planet-as a temporary aide to Major Svensson. The major had been reduced to little more than a brain and a spinal cord in his last combat, and he and his doctor were anxious to field-test his newly regrown body.

    It should have been an easy twenty-day run. After all, Crucible was only set up to simulate battle situations so that recruits could be trained safely. But they were barely on-planet when someone started blasting the training scenarios to smithereens. Suddenly, Kerr found herself not only responsible for the major and his doctor but caught in a desperate fight to keep a platoon of Marine recruits alive until someone could discover what was happening on Crucible.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 7, 2009
    ISBN9781400179893
    The Heart of Valor
    Author

    Tanya Huff

    Tanya Huff lives in rural Ontario with her wife Fiona Patton, five cats, and an increasing number of fish. Her 32 novels and 83 short stories include horror, heroic fantasy, urban fantasy, comedy, and space opera. Her BLOOD series was turned into the 22-episode Blood Ties and writing episode nine allowed her to finally use her degree in Radio & Television Arts. Many of her short stories are available as eCollections. She’s on Twitter at @TanyaHuff and Facebook as Tanya Huff. She has never used her Instagram account and isn’t sure why she has it.

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    Reviews for The Heart of Valor

    4/5

    251 ratings12 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Torin is in a hot mess as usual. In this book she escorts a major and his doctor to a marine training planet, and of course there are a bunch of recruits too that will finish their training. And then boom the planet turns on them. But Torin can sure handle herself, and see to that people around her stays alive. She is so very kick-ass.

      But what I liked the most was that Torin started to question things, and I never questioned things either but now I did that too. Humans and other beings help The Elder races fight The others. But, here is the but, why are the fighting? I realized that I did not know, cos yes Torin did not know. And only The Elder races has ever been in peace talk. Sure I wondered about The Others before but now I really wonder. And because of that I want more, because I need to know now.

      Of course there are other things going on that I can't get into, why the planet turned on them. Things that has to do with book 2 and of course the whole aspect of Torin wondering what the hell is going on.

      Kick-ass action, a few dilemmas on the way ;) trust me on that. And did I say action? Lots of action and shooting.
    • 4/5
      A continuation from the Better part of Valor, unexpectedly so, in that rather than just being another adventure of Torin, there is continuity, with some of the previous artifacts making an important contribution to the plot. The story opens with Torin realising that she and her current paramour are just about the only people who remember that they departed the alien spacecraft BigYellow on one of it's escape craft. There seems to be no trace of it, the scientists don't have it, the Intel arm don't have it, and no-body even remembers it landing inside the battle-cruiser. However asking any questions about it seems to trigger official reprimands.However whiles she's back on the main Military homebase, she's actually supposed to be helping one of her former Instructors recuperate from a serious wound. He's spent several months having most of his body re-grown and integrating back into physical reality takes a little getting used to. Torin and he are supposed to join a recruit platoon on their first serious training expedition to the Crucible facility. Things start going wrong almost immediately when the scenario that's been programmed for the recruits (which Torin is aware of) doesn't follow the rules. Torin naturally originally assigns this into the Others having hacked into the IT systems, but the evidence is starting to look flimsy. She does manage to lead the recruits to an abandoned fortification, where they can endure the besieging drones until help arrives.I'm more impressed by the hooks linking back into the prior story than I was by the plot itself. Recruits on a march is fairly dull, even with all the normal innuendo of the aliens. Fun but still very lighthearted reading, you never get the impression Torin herself is in any real danger, and all the rest are merely walk-on cannon fodder without any sense on permanence. Still interested to see where it's all going to go though.
    • 3/5
      Pretty standard MilSF, which I didn't think added much to the basic formula. Women and aliens are fully integrated into the human armed forces, but there is nothing very new about that. Meant to be funny in places. Part of a series; much depends on explaining the events of the immediately preceding book. I found the swear word "fuk" irritatingly coy. Not at the top of my list.
    • 4/5
      Again with the loving Tanya Huff. This whole series is about, basically, how war is a mindfuck. This book takes it to another level, with a training exercise turning deadly and a twist that, while it's fairly heavily foreshadowed, brings the sort of wacky previous book into horrifying context. I adore the main character, the overall queer sensibility, and the hoo-rah Marine attitude tempered by the increasingly impossible situations.
    • 4/5
      Military SF, while I'm willing to read it occasionally, isn't exactly my favorite subgenre, so when I got a copy of A Confederation of Valor (an omnibus volume containing the first two novels in the Confederation series) through SantaThing a few years back, I was a little bit dubious, even though I'd enjoyed some of Tanya Huff's other books. I was very pleasantly surprised by it, though, as it turned out to be exactly the kind of military SF I didn't even know I wanted to read, thanks to its strong focus on characters rather than hardware.This third volume didn't grab me quite as well as the first two. A lot of that is probably my fault. It took me way too long to get to it after finishing the first two novels, which was a little problematic, since it turned out to be more strongly tied into previous events than I expected. Also, I kept trying to read it while seriously sleep-deprived, which never helps. Some of it, though, has to do with the fact that the plot, which involves a training exercise gone badly wrong, was pretty contrived, and not quite as well-paced as it might have been. But it was fun, nevertheless. I love the dry space marine corps sense of humor, and the protagonist, Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr, is a great character, definitely the person I'd want with me if, god forbid, I ever somehow found myself in combat.
    • 5/5
      I am still loving this series. Torin, newly promoted (though she really would rather stay away from being top brass) to gunny sargeant has agreed to accompany Major Svensson as an aide to Crucible. Crucible is the training planet for the Marines. That's where they put all their learning to practical applications. The planet sounds kind of cool - the marines have a few different training situations complete with terrain and weather variations;winter with below zero temperatures or tropical with all the accompanying bugs and heat. There are drones and other dangerous things that are programmed to run certain scenarios to put the marines through their paces - it's supposed to be dangerous, but non-deadly. At the same time Torin's new man - Craig Ryder - is wondering where that escape pod is. The one he used to escape Big Yellow and bring help back to the others. Weirdly, it seems that only ones who remember this escape pod are him, Torin and Presit (the reporter). Strange. In fact, Torin was almost in trouble over asking questions, something that makes her think she's being used,making her angry. Back on Crucible, Major Svensson (who has recently regrown almost his entire body and nervous system - I love futuristic sci-fi) seems just a bit odd to Torin. She's being his aide, managing him and protecting the civilian doctor who is monitoring him while the recruits they are accompanying are being put through the beginnings of a training program. The Staff Sargeant in charge of the recruits is the same staff sargeant that Torin trainined under years before, and she's surprised that he's still in the marines (something to do with Di'Taykan culture and his age). In fact, she finds something off about him also.... Things go from a bit off to that incredibly descriptive old anachronism - SNAFU. Yep - situation Normal-All F-d Up. Love that phrase. The training drones are suddenly deadly, the major is behaving strangely inconsistantly, the staff sargeant in charge suddenly is incapacitated and things go horribly wrong. I enjoyed the return of a few characters from The Better Part of Valor - Craig Ryder (the man for Torin), Presit (the reporter who irritates Torin and who doesn't really like Torin), and General Morris in all his pompous glory. The man tries so hard to be a good general, but he's....well he's a bit pompous - he had a smaller part to play in this book, but important. I also really enjoyed a few new characters from the recruits and the Navy spaceship. There is a recruit that is so enthusiastic that she packs everything on the suggested list - something that the other recruits thought unnecessary. She's the first to volunteer answers and actions, and she has developoed a crush on Torin. There's the tech whiz, who's good at all things programming and hacking. The Di'Taykan cultured is almost a character in itself. Ms Huff has written a great series and I've enjoyed this third novel very much. After finishing this novel, I grabbed the fourth novel off my shelf right away.
    • 3/5
      The third of Tanya Huff’s Confederation series. For those who haven’t encountered the series yet it’s a boots’ eye view military sci-fi, heavy on command structure but always viewed from the NCO/grunts on the ground perspective. Those looking for anything deep or meaningful should look away now. It has no noticeable political or philosophical agenda beyond war is hell but someone’s got to do it. It follows the career of Torin Kerr, a female career military NCO. The first time we meet her in the first book she’s already pretty much god on legs to the rank and file of Sh’quo Company. Imagine Ellen Ripley if she’d signed on with the Colonial Marine Corp rather than the Space Merchant Navy and add a few extra cans of kick-ass. She’s good at what she does, quick thinking and dedicated to keeping her people alive.The Confederation is at war with another bunch of aliens called The Others. Both groups are made up of many different types of aliens. The Confederation is a peaceful alliance of cooperation whereas The Others are made up of conquered species. Unskilled in the arts of war The Confederation recruits several species who can beef up their aptitude for combat. Top on their list of potential cannon fodder *cough* allies are a bunch of skilled bruisers called Humans. Also recruited are the di’Taykan who are sort of like sex mad Vulcans with emotionally influenced hairdos. Lastly are the Krai, an arboreal species who will eat anything ... apart from stones.This one suffered a bit from its own plot set-up. In the first couple of books one of the most entertaining aspects of the book was Torin’s talent at riding herd on the local wet behind the ears or glory seeking brass. This one has none of that. She starts off promoted to Gunnery Sergeant, pretty much bored to tears with endless debriefs and instructional talks to whoever the brass point her at, be it visiting officers or groups of raw recruits. She jumps at the chance to accompany one of her former Sh’quo commanders Major Svennson (reduced to a brain in a jar sometime before book one), as an observer on a 20 day Marine recruit training exercise. He needs to road test his new force grown body. Svensson’s doctor, two drill instructors and 37 raw recruits make up the rest of the party, commanded by Staff Sergeant Beyhn (a di’Taykan acting weirder than Spock in ‘Amok Time’). The recruits never come alive in your mind though. Huff sticks to characterising only a handful but none of them spark and the snarky to and fro from the first two books gets replaced by some pretty stilted and repetitive dialogue. Lots of wide eyed recruits yelling ‘sir, yes sir,’ repeatedly. The combat is a bit flat too, pitching AI drones, fliers and tanks against Torin’s savvy is too one sided a contest. I’ll not give up on the series yet but it had better be up for the fight next time.
    • 5/5
      Tanya Huff can write! I loved this book. I adore Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr. She rocks by the book, proving there's a reason "the book" was written! Good imagery, well-drawn characters, believable but not predictable plot, good description without an info-dump in sight--as with the others in this series, this book is a keeper.
    • 4/5
      Reviewed in my other copy - same opinion this time, how is she (Huff) going to top this one without going over the top? (which has a whole different meaning to a Marine...)
    • 4/5
      The third in this increasingly enjoyable series. A number of races--alien and human--are fighting a mysterious enemy.In this book, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is recuperating from her last mission, in which she had a close encounter with mysterious enemy technology. To escape the endless debriefing sessions, she agrees to accompany a group of recruits on a training mission. But things--of course--to disastrously wrong.
    • 5/5
      Another great book about Torin Kerr. The books have a really nice pacing. You can believe that it takes the characters a little longer then you to figure out the mystery since they are also fighting to stay a live. This is one of my favorite series and I'm glad to see its still got a great plot and great action. I would highly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      The third in the Confederation series (though I call them the Valor books), this time Torin Kerr, now a Gunnery Sargent, is sent to shepherd a major through a training exercise with a new troop of recruits. As usual, things go wrong. There's one page where I laughed out loud and then teared up, Huff is *good*. Clues are seeded, and I could usually keep up with Torin as she figured things out. My only complaint is that not *quite* enough time is spent differentiating the members of the platoon that she's working with.