Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) (17 page)

“I was mostly hoping Borage would partake in that. Every time we spar on the judo mat, he claws me with those talons of his.”

“I thought you knew that was my secret attack, Captain.”

Yes, the scabs on Viktor’s shins proved it. “What did you find in the library?”

Borage glanced toward the guard again, looking like he would have preferred to write up the details in a note and slide it through some bars to Viktor. Alas, one rarely found cells with bars anymore. “As soon as we learned that the Fleet had an interest in Mandrake Company, I assumed it was a result of our mission with the treasure hunter,” Borage said.

He had assumed that right away? Viktor grunted and nodded for him to continue, trying not to feel slow for having taken a while to remember the alien artifacts.

“I didn’t think to look up Commodore Parsons, but I did jump on all of the engineering news and rumor hubs on the network to see if the engines were being talked about yet. To say they are would be an understatement. There are schematics, some the fluff of people’s imaginations and others that appear legitimate, based on the small amount of data I was given.” A hint of hurt entered Borage’s eyes, as if Viktor should have ensured his engineers had been invited to Blackwell’s ship for a field trip.

Viktor had been more interested in the holo-projector, since it might come in useful for his ship in the near term. Whatever happened with those engines, he was certain it would be years, if not decades, before the technology would be integrated into human ships.

“The holographic projector was also mentioned on the various hubs,” Borage said, “but nobody had schematics or even pictures of it. The speculation was that Fleet had locked it down and was threatening to kill anyone who leaked information on it, but there are Fleet engineers that lurk on those hubs, as well—most of them are incognito, but I’ve been in engineering circles for long enough now to have sussed out some of the identities behind people’s handles. Those engineers were just as mystified as to where the device had gone. Some of them work at top-secret research facilities, so if anyone knew where the projector had been stored, it would be them. Of course, they could be feigning ignorance, but I did not get that sense. Some were quite agitated and offering rewards for leads.”

“What kind of reward tempts an engineer?” Viktor asked, eyeing Borage’s rumpled clothes. His chief engineer was fastidious about investing and maintaining his retirement account, but he never seemed that motivated by money, material items, or pleasures of the flesh. The fact that he had been in a library instead of enjoying his luxury room spoke to that.

“We like puzzles, clues to mysteries that haven’t been solved, tidbits of engineering history and artifacts.” Borage scratched his jaw. “My Lieutenant Howler was once wooed out of a considerable sum of money in exchange for a shower curtain woven with metal threads derived from a reclaimed submarine. There was lewd square-root humor cleverly threaded into the mesh.”

“Lewd square-root humor?” the heretofore-silent Azarov asked, apparently finding this as puzzling as the notion of a pedicure.

“It’s a cartoon. With equations whose answers spell out—”

“The projector,” Viktor said, not certain how long visiting hour might last.

“Er, yes. No one knows where it is, but everyone wants it. That’s what I was trying to imply, sir. If not the original machine, then a copy of the schematics.” Borage raised his brows.

“And someone has figured out that we might have a copy?”

“That I don’t know, but people have figured out where the artifacts were found—there’s been a frenzy of new mining claims registered for Karzelek. It wouldn’t take much for someone to learn that we were in the area at the same time as the alien artifacts were discovered.”

“So, why target us instead of Parsons?” Viktor mused.

“I don’t know, sir, but we’ll look him up, see what we can find.”

A throat cleared off to the side, the security guard. “Time’s up.”

“Of course,” Borage murmured. “Anything else we can get you, sir?”

“No.” Viktor doubted the guards would let him accept cakes with files in them.

“At least you won’t be tempted to break your no-sitting rule here.” Borage waved to the cell’s sole furnishing, a toilet that flipped out of the corner. “Not for long, anyway.”

“One hopes,” Azarov murmured. “I heard that rats and insects crawl out of some of the commodes in the less well kept areas here.”

“Commodes, Sergeant?” Borage asked. “You really do come from a civilized planet, don’t you?”

Azarov shrugged, his cheeks coloring.

“Check on Ankari and her friends too, Borage.” Viktor didn’t care about Azarov’s upbringing, not now. “They weren’t arrested, but—” Remembering the listening guard, he kept himself from saying that they should have been. “I want to make sure they haven’t been harmed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Borage walked away, but Azarov lingered, the earnest sergeant lowering his voice and whispering, “I’ve taken a look at the schematics, sir, and the station jail employs the Merkowitz Prison Fire Safety System. It’s more humane than some of the systems found in the outer core. In the event of a fire where the temperatures reach approximately 60 degrees Celsius, the force barriers would be lowered, so prisoners would not be in danger of burning alive in their cells.”

“You, too, big boy,” the guard called. “This isn’t social hour at the pub.”

Azarov issued Viktor a quick salute before jogging out of sight, forgetting that the mercenaries didn’t bother with salutes. Viktor appreciated the gesture, nonetheless, and the information. He had no idea how he could use it at this time—an image of him blowing hot air onto a sensor popped into his mind—but one never knew when an opportunity might arise. For now, all he could do was wait and trust his people to do their research.

Chapter 7

“How long has it been since Jamie left?” Ankari asked, looking up from the holodisplay stretched across the air above the table. Everything from the station news feed to her research on Fleet ship movements to a letter she had just sent to her data-crunching friend Fumio sprawled in front of her.

Lauren sat on the other side of the suite’s living room, engrossed in her own streams of information, ones that had more to do with her work than rescuing colleagues. Her brow furrowed as she squinted at some readout, and she did not answer.

Ankari checked the time herself. “Two hours. Something must have gone wrong.”

Jamie had come up with a scheme to help Sergei sneak off the ship without those androids noticing, but she had not divulged the details. Ankari had assumed it involved distracting the guards, either virtually or physically, and that those two could handle the problem themselves. Now, with time seeping past, she wondered if she should have gone along. She could do this research from anywhere. Whether Jamie returned soon or not, she and Lauren should find a new hotel room. She was hoping Fumio would have a way of booking one that wouldn’t use any of their names or bank accounts, just in case that Captain Xu turned out to be assiduous in searching for his tablet thief. She
hoped
he grew bored with the project or had other more important duties that required his attention—he was the captain of a one-thousand-man Fleet vessel, after all—but she couldn’t count on that.

“Or they found a closet,” Lauren murmured, not looking up from her holodisplay.

“What?”

“If the shuttle is still guarded, they couldn’t have used that, so perhaps a closet along the way sufficed.”

“I’m sure Jamie isn’t having sex with Sergei when the captain is in the brig and Fleet officers are stalking us.” Technically, the Fleet officer was only stalking Ankari, but no need to mention that.

Lauren finally looked toward her, though only to raise her eyebrows in an extremely dry look. “Really? You and Mandrake could not contain yourselves last night. Even if we were busy with work and projects, we noticed that you didn’t return to the shuttle.”

“Er, yes, but nobody was in the brig then. And we simply didn’t want to bother you. It’s not as if our shuttle has private cabins. You should be thankful that you had the place to yourselves. You almost had Commander Borage and Sergeant Azarov for bunk mates.”

“Judging by the length of their other encounters, I would not worry for another two hours.”

“Borage and Azarov’s?” Ankari asked. “I didn’t know they were a couple.”

Unsurprisingly, Lauren’s expression was not amused.

“I also didn’t know you were timing Jamie and Sergei when they went off to find... closets.” Ankari grimaced at the idea of Lauren keeping track of her and Viktor’s dalliances. She knew scientists liked to collect data but would not have guessed human sexual relations were of interest to Lauren.

“Only in the cases where I’ve sought Jamie’s assistance in some engineering or mechanical matter only to find her detained.” Lauren’s lips tightened with disapproval.

A soft knock came from the corridor. Ankari jumped to her feet. Jamie was on the approved guest list, so the door should have opened for her. Had she sent Sergei ahead? Or maybe she hadn’t been able to extricate him at all, she was in jail herself, and a security officer had come to collect Ankari.

But the door slid aside, revealing Jamie and a familiar man dressed in grays and blacks. Jamie’s long hair, usually worn in tight braids, had been pulled back into a single ponytail, with stray wisps escaping to frame her face. Her cheeks had a ruddy glow that had not been there earlier, and Ankari glanced at Lauren, amused that her social-interaction-loathing microbiologist had guessed correctly.

Jamie smiled and waved with one hand. The other was clutching the hand of the man beside her, Sergei Zharkov. Ankari waved back at them, giving Sergei a nod, though she never knew how to act around him. On paper, he wasn’t any older than she, but his deep brown eyes seemed to have seen centuries rather than less than three decades. They brightened somewhat when he shared small, secret smiles with Jamie, but even her presence never quite alleviated the somber aura that he carried with him. If a stranger were making guesses as to his occupation, mortician would surely be on the list. Appropriate, perhaps, for one who specialized in taking lives.

“I’m glad you could make it, Sergei,” Ankari said. “Was it difficult to escape?”

She wondered if others might sneak off the ship if events necessitated it, such as if they were to stage a jailbreak for Viktor.

“Not with Jamie’s help.”

“You found some program to disrupt the androids’ artificial neural networks?” Ankari guessed, knowing Jamie had a knack for building and manipulating robots, a skill that might translate to androids, as well, even if they were more sophisticated.

“Uhm, kind of. I asked them for directions to a different shuttle bay while Sergei sneaked out behind them.” Jamie shrugged sheepishly. “It wouldn’t have worked for most people, but Sergei could sneak past a guard dog on high alert, even if he had a steak hanging from his back pocket.”

“I wore a sensor-scrambling suit,” Sergei said dryly, patting a satchel slung over his shoulder. “All I needed was for them to be looking the other way.”

“A sensor-scrambling suit?” Ankari asked, as Jamie and Sergei stepped inside, the door closing behind them. “That could come in handy. Listen, Jamie told you that Viktor—Captain Mandrake—has been locked in a cell here, right?”

“She didn’t have to. Everyone on the ship knows.”

Ankari hesitated, wondering how Viktor would feel about that. She knew he and his paranoid streak worried about mutinies and lesser insurgencies that could cost him men, equipment, or time.

“Are you willing to help us help him?” Ankari asked. “I intend to—”

“Yes,” Sergei said.

Jamie nudged him. “You’re supposed to wait for people to finish the question before responding. It’s polite.”

“Even when you know the answer?”

Ankari held up a hand. “It’s all right.”

It was more than all right. By habit, she had started to try to talk him around to her way of thinking, but she had forgotten that the reason she had chosen him was as much because of his loyalty to Viktor as his loyalty to Jamie. Even if he was not from Grenavine, the way some of Viktor’s core men were, Sergei had served with him in the Fleet, and they experienced cruelties that had made them close. Ankari didn’t know the extent of those cruelties, for Viktor had never spoken of them in any detail, but she could guess the gist from the various terse comments he had made from time to time.

“I’ve been trying to do some research on this supposed medical emergency that has had people dying in the shops and that has resulted in the quarantine—” Ankari waved to the holodisplay still hovering above the table, “—but there’s nothing on the news feed except that the authorities here are looking into it. I’d like to know what
really
killed the people and if we’re truly dealing with a disease or if, as I suspect, something else is going on. Do you think you could sneak into the morgue—or maybe the corpses are being stored in a research laboratory in the hospital wing—and take some pictures of them as well any data sheets that might have been filled out during the autopsy? I know that’s a grisly task—” Ankari would not have wanted to assign it to herself, “—but will it bother you? Poking around dead bodies in a morgue?”

Sergei gazed blandly at her. “I usually make the dead bodies.”

Jamie’s face crinkled with distaste. Sergei’s occupation had not noticeably deterred her from pursuing a romance with him, but she never appeared that enthused by the idea of “shop talk,” either.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Ankari said.

“This morgue research, it will help the captain?” Sergei’s eyebrows rose. “When you requested my assistance, I had assumed assassinations and jailbreaks would be involved.”

“Well, I think Viktor would prefer simply being let out as opposed to leaving a pile of corpses in his wake, but I do want him out of there, one way or another, before all those Fleet ships show up for their conference. If we can get the quarantine lifted, it will be much easier to leave. I also think Viktor would want to...” Ankari stopped herself from saying something like “do good” or “solve a mystery for the greater good,” since she did not know how Sergei would react to that. “After your last mission, I think he wouldn’t mind a chance to do something noble,” she said, not certain that was any better. But if Sergei had known Viktor for years, he probably already knew about his captain’s honorable streak.