Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) (2 page)

“Why don’t you get him some food logs?” Lauren asked while she pushed numbers around in her display. “He likes those, doesn’t he?”

“Don’t remind me,” Ankari said. “I’m still trying to talk him into hiring a cook for the ship, so everyone doesn’t have to live on those awful things. He says he won’t consider a cook unless the person can shave the hair off a man’s balls at twenty paces. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but assumed it referred to accuracy with a firearm.”

“You wish to examine firearms, ma’am?” the robot asked. “We carry limited laser and projectile pistols, but they are of exceedingly fine quality. The Merrimack 1330 comes with a silver inlay and—”

“No.” Ankari lifted a hand to stop the sales pitch. “I’ll—”

A crash came from the corner of the shop. The sweaty man had pitched to the floor, a stand of belt sheaths tumbling down on top of him.

Startled shoppers jumped back, gasping and pointing, while a couple of more considerate individuals rushed forward, dropping to their knees to help the man. Ankari started forward, but hesitated. She did not know what she might do to help. Her entrepreneurial background had not endowed her with much first-aid knowledge.

A crowd gathered, blocking her view and access to the man. The robot must have issued an alarm, because a door slid open, and the shopkeeper jogged into the room.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“He’s bleeding,” someone said. “From his nostrils.”

“That’s odd,” Ankari murmured. “He wasn’t earlier.”

Lauren laid a hand on her forearm. “Perhaps we should go.”

Ankari frowned at her, thinking she was being callous and only cared about finding her rats, but concern lurked in Lauren’s gray eyes, and her mouth was parted slightly as she stared at the crowd.

“Why?” Ankari asked. “What’s worrying you?”

“He could have a communicable disease. There are a number of deadly ones on the rise right now, especially on the outer planets, and a space station can be a breeding ground for viruses.”

Ankari thought that was a remote concern, but Lauren subscribed to numerous peer-reviewed journals related to medicine, so she would better know if something unpleasant lurked on the horizon. Or at their feet.

“All right.” Ankari glanced toward the crowd again—the shopkeeper had called for paramedics on the comm and was trying to shoo people back. “It looks like it’s under control, anyway.”

“Yes, all is fine,” the shopkeeper said, his voice raised to carry. “This gentleman will be cared for. Please, return to your shopping. We have many fine knives in the display cases up front.”

Ankari wandered in that direction, though maybe it would be a good time to take Lauren to the pet-store level. Later, Ankari could continue birthday-present shopping on her own. Perhaps something softer and more sensuous than a knife would be more appropriate for a reunion.

Her comm chimed, and Ankari’s stomach fluttered with anticipation. It was probably Jamie checking in, but maybe the
Albatross
had arrived. Maybe she and Viktor could have their reunion tonight.

“Yes?” she answered.

“Ankari.”

She grinned, the sound of her name on his lips sending a wave of delight through her. It
was
Viktor. Weariness came through in his voice, but he seemed pleased to catch her, too, or so she thought. It was hard to tell from nothing more than the utterance of her name, but that was more than she often had to work with—sometimes the man grunted more than he spoke.

“Hi,” she said, walking out of the store and into the atrium.

She would have preferred to make her greeting more welcoming, more sexy, but having shoppers milling all around did not encourage her to adopt a sultry tone. She strode toward a bench in the park that dominated the bottom floor of the atrium. Even if the towering oaks, tropical shrubs, and lush green grass had been engineered to clean carbon dioxide and toxins from the air more effectively than their planet-side cousins, their presence made a person believe she was out in nature rather than in the middle of a space station. Sure, one could look up past the sixteen stories of balconies, shops, and casinos ringing the atrium and see the stars pressing against the massive skylight, but the greenery was pleasant. Viktor should like this place.

“Are you here? Are you all right? Are you... alone?” If so, Ankari might risk a few crazy looks from passersby to whisper dirty thoughts in his ear.

“I’m with Borage and Azarov,” he said dryly.

Borage was the gray-haired engineering chief. No, Ankari did not want to talk dirty with him around. And Azarov, that was the sergeant with the firefighting experience, wasn’t it? Her gut clenched. Had there been fires on the ship during the battle? Or on the way to the station? Viktor sounded fine, if tired, but that didn’t mean much; he had been shot a couple of months earlier and had not shown his pain.

“If I get a room for tonight, will you be able to join me?” Ankari asked quietly, hoping he wasn’t too close to the other men. It was not as if their relationship was a secret, but she tried not to do or say anything that would make Viktor appear unprofessional—or anything less than the quintessential soldier—in front of his troops.

Viktor hesitated. “Not tonight. I’m authorizing funds transfers, checking two men into the hospital, overseeing repairs, and making funeral arrangements.”

Ankari grimaced. When they were alone together, she would ask him for the details of the last couple of weeks, or... perhaps she wouldn’t. He might not want to talk about it. Either way, she definitely would not quiz him over the comm.

“I’ve told the men they can’t take station leave until the ship is fighting-fit again,” Viktor said, the fact that he would not go off to play while the rest of his company worked left unspoken. “The major repairs might be done by tomorrow.”

Ankari did not expect him to say anything else. Even if his men had not been standing nearby, he would not say he had missed her or allow himself to grow emotional over the comm. Or in person, for that matter. Oh, she could occasionally, in intimate moments, elicit confessions of feelings from him. But for the most part, she had learned to interpret his grunts.

“Good,” Ankari said, though she was disappointed she would have to wait another day. “I’ve missed you.” Parrots and smaller birds squawked in the nearby trees, and she trusted their noise would provide some privacy, at least on her end. “I’ve been thinking of you,” she added, hoping he would know that thinking hadn’t been even remotely platonic.

He surprised her by lowering his voice and growling, “I need you, Ankari.”

The blunt admission sent a rush of heat through her body, making her wish she could run off and find him right that moment. “I’ll be waiting,” she whispered.

A male voice sounded in the background on his side, and he sighed and cut the comm.

“Can we get the rats now?” Lauren asked, walking up as soon as Ankari returned her comm unit to her pocket.

It was Ankari’s turn to sigh. After Viktor’s lustful admission, she had lost all interest in shopping, not that she had ever wanted to pick out rodents. She wanted to see Viktor. But he had not invited her to visit. Tomorrow, he had said. She didn’t want to wait, but she knew his company was everything to him, and he would not allow himself to relax when his men could not. Still, even if he couldn’t sneak away for a tryst, it wasn’t as if he had forbade her to visit him. Perhaps she could think of some official business-sounding reason that would give her an excuse to draw him away from his men for a few minutes. Not long enough for anything... naughty, but enough to check him for new scars and look into his eyes to try to get a sense of how bad it had been out there. Hospital admissions and funeral arrangements—that would be haunting him.

“And then I need to go back to the shuttle,” Lauren said. “I need to return to my...” She frowned in the direction of the knife shop.

Before Ankari could ask what had bothered her, she saw for herself: a man was directing a hover gurney out of the shop. He walked swiftly toward the closest lift with it. There was a black body bag on the gurney.

Lauren’s earlier words about diseases floated into Ankari’s mind, and she rubbed her hands on her trousers, trying to remember if she had touched that man. No, he had touched the robot, not her. But she had also touched the robot. And she had breathed the same air as he had.

“You think that’s... something?” Ankari asked, trying not to feel bad because her first thoughts were for her own safety rather than for the dead man. That fellow had not been that old. He should not have crashed to the floor in a shop and died.

“A virus? I did have that thought originally. But perhaps not.” Lauren waved to the storefront, where two security officers were walking out with a paramedic. Neither party seemed overly concerned, and the shopkeeper was standing inside by the display cases, waving for people to come in and proclaiming that nothing was wrong. “They would be quarantining the area if they believed an infectious disease was present. He may have died from some preexisting medical condition.”

The paramedic with the body bag disappeared into the lift, and Ankari forced herself to nod in agreement. She would check the news feeds later, but it had likely been a one-time situation that would not affect them again. Still, maybe she would tell Viktor about it, if only as an excuse to visit him and draw him aside.

• • • • •

After Viktor finished speaking with Ankari on the comm, he reluctantly turned back to his men and the mechanics with whom Borage was bartering. Sergeant Azarov stood back, with his hands clasped behind his back in a relaxed parade rest, listening but keeping his mouth shut unless something related to his expertise came up.

The man was only a couple of months out of the Fleet and looked the part of a soldier, even in soot-stained trousers and jacket with nothing but a Mandrake Company patch on his shoulder to associate him with a military unit. Before this mission, Viktor had considered his status provisional, but while the
Albatross
had limped to Midway 5, they had spent six hours putting out fires in the engine room and struggling to keep the ship from blowing up. Azarov was crew now. For whatever honor that was. Indeed, judging by the twist of distaste on Azarov’s lips, he might be rethinking his decision to choose the company over jail. Or maybe that expression was for the hairy-legged spider sauntering across the stained floor of the machine shop. Viktor watched Azarov take a large step back to avoid being close to its path.

Azarov must have noticed Viktor watching, because his cheeks colored slightly, and he said, “I’m disturbed by all of the insects I’ve seen here, sir. It may mean that someone isn’t keeping the place clean. We could end up getting new vacuum intake filters that are chewed up by rats.” His gaze shifted to track the arachnid’s path. “Or spiders.”

“They’re all over Midway 5,” Viktor said, deciding to be amused rather than irritated by the man’s timorous streak. So long as it didn’t show up on the battlefield—or during a firefight. It hadn’t thus far. “They’re part of the ecosystem the druids built in.”

Azarov’s forehead wrinkled. “Druids? I thought Midway 5 was owned by the usual corporate entity.”

“It is now.” Viktor almost left it at that, because the history of the station tied in to the history of his own world, something that remained painful for him even ten years after its demise. But the young sergeant appeared genuinely curious. Viktor didn’t know whether to find it depressing or comforting that the history of a place could pass out of common knowledge in so little time. Maybe it meant that his own mistakes might be forgotten after a decade and a few million miles. Forgotten by others, anyway. He feared the memory of his failures would follow him to his grave. If his body ever made it to a grave. He might go, as Hutch and Qiao had, incinerated by laser cannons, with little more than ashes remaining.

“What happened, sir?” Azarov asked.

“About two hundred years ago, a group of druids left Grenavine. Actually, they were kicked out. They loved technology too much for the back-to-the-land culture of my—of the planet.” Viktor supposed Azarov knew where he was from, so there was no reason to hide it, but distancing himself from his obliterated home world made it easier to speak about without growing emotional. “They also loved nature. They pooled their resources and built this place, so they could experiment with combining nature and technology. You’ll see trees and plants everywhere.” Viktor pointed toward the high ceiling of the machine shop, where vines crisscrossed in a net-like manner, with bushy leaves sprouting out, one in five of them shining light from its green surface. “Most, if not all of them, have a function beyond decoration. They’re not kept up as well as they were the first time I came through here, but that’s to be expected. Ten years ago, the druids sold the station to a corporation and left. As far as I’ve heard, nobody knows where they went.”

“Ten years ago? When Grenavine was destroyed?”

“Yes.”

Azarov opened his mouth, like he had more questions, but he shook his head and closed it again. Good. Viktor did not have answers.

Borage broke away from the mechanics and joined them. He had been in the thick of the firefighting, too, and he had enough soot in his hair to hide the gray and enough on his clothes to mask the coffee stains that always spattered his rumpled shirts. The soot might actually be a sartorial improvement for him. Not that Viktor was any better off. Soot, blood, and grease smeared his clothes. Even the brown leather duster he had not put on until he left the ship had absorbed some of the filth. It was just as well that he would not have time to see Ankari until the next day.

“We have an estimate yet?” Viktor asked Borage.

“Not one you’ll like.”

“Haven’t liked a repair estimate yet.”

“I told them to do better.” Borage nodded toward the mechanics, who had turned away to confer over a list. “They’re talking to their boss about it. At least the Flipkens girl got us a good deal on parts for the damaged shuttles.”

A fan started up somewhere, and Viktor could not hear any of the mechanics’ conversation as they chatted with a bald man via a video comm link. He forced himself to stay where he was and wait for them to finish.