Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) (31 page)

“Hell,” Azarov whispered, staring inside. “All the hells in all the galaxies...”

Not sure she wanted to see what he had uncovered, Ankari leaned around the corner. At first, all she noticed was the burned carpet in front of a big desk and a huge sooty spot on the ceiling. Azarov shone a flashlight into the smoke, and light pushed through the haze, revealing several electronic devices balancing on a massive wooden desk. They were linked by wires, forming a ring. A potted plant sat innocuously in the center, and for a stunned moment, all Ankari could think was that its little leaves were going to be blown to the closest moon when all of those explosives went off.

“Hurry,” Azarov said, stepping into the room. “It’s probably meant to go off as a distraction so the men can get to the docking bay without being stopped, but—” he glanced at the ceiling, “this could demolish the whole top of the station. I don’t know what those fools are thinking. If they don’t get to their ship first, they could be killed too.” He had fallen to his knees in front of the one of the devices before he had finished talking. He dropped his weapons and yanked out his tablet.

“Hurry, how?” Ankari swallowed, trying to control the squeaky note of panic in her voice. “How do I help?”

“We have to defuse them.”

“You know how to do that?”

“Not yet.” Azarov was swiping through his holodisplay, mumbling orders into his tablet. He glanced bleakly back at her. “I usually get called in
after
the bombs go off.”

Ankari’s return stare had to be equally bleak. “Would it be better just to run?”

Ankari could hear laser fire still squealing from somewhere down the hallway. Maybe running would not be an option. If all of the elevators and stairwells had been destroyed, they would have to climb back down the trees. There might not be time.

“I don’t think it’ll matter where you run, unless you can get onto a ship and get that ship off the station. Those bastards.”

She had been afraid of that. “How much time is there before they go off?”

“Uhm, six minutes.”

A professional bomb disposal unit would be hard-pressed to defuse that many explosives in that time, assuming they knew exactly what they were doing. Ankari shook her head slowly. There was no way this was going to work.

“I’m going to try something else,” she said, backing out of the room.

Azarov, flipping through wiring diagrams, did not acknowledge her. As much as she admired him for trying, she couldn’t imagine him finding the instructions on the network. Those looked like homemade bombs, not military ordinance. They would be unstable, unpredictable.

Ankari ran back to the room she had seen with the vaults. There were three of them against the back wall. She darted inside, jumping over one of the men Viktor had killed, and tried the handles. They were all locked.

“Of course this couldn’t be easy,” she muttered, running back into the hallway. “Hope those dead people on the floor weren’t the only ones who knew the combination.”

More laser fire came from ahead of her, and Ankari forced herself to slow down, even though she wanted to scream that fighting was pointless now. They had a far bigger problem to deal with.

“Viktor?” she called as she passed more doors and drew closer to the noise. She didn’t want to distract him, but she also did not want him to think she was an enemy coming up from behind and shoot her. “I need that CEO and I need him alive.”

Laser fire answered her. Wonderful.

With her own pistol in hand, Ankari crept forward, hugging the curve in the wall. The elevator came into view, an emergency light flashing a sickly yellow over a sobering amount of carnage. At least eight men lay in a jumble on a carpet that had been beige, but was now stained crimson with blood. Ropes were tangled about the bodies, and several of the fallen wore harnesses for rappelling. Ankari thought she recognized a few mafia faces from the firefight in the docking bay.

A gray-haired woman sat on her knees against a wall beside a potted tree, her wrists bound behind her and a gag in her mouth. Her head was bent toward her lap, either because she felt sick or because she was trying to avoid being sick by not acknowledging all of the dead people around her. Laser fire continued to whine from farther down the hall, and clouds of smoke stirred in the air.

Eyeing the doors on either side, Ankari ran forward. She was torn between her desire for caution—and to stay alive—and the knowledge that she had to hurry. The woman cringed toward the wall as she approached. She wore a business suit and did not have any weapons, so Ankari assumed she was one of the hostages.

She crouched beside the woman, then cursed because she did not have a knife. One look at the snarled tangle of a knot on the bindings told Ankari that it would take more minutes than she had to free the hostage. Instead, she yanked down the woman’s gag.

“Do you know the combination for the safes back there?” Ankari asked without preamble. “It’s an emergency.”

Tears streaked the woman’s face, and her eyes were bloodshot, but she glowered up at Ankari with impressive fierceness. “I’ll just bet it is, you snot-nosed thief. Go burn yourself in a supernova.”

“That’s what we’re all going to do if you don’t give me the combination. Look, give me the one for a vault with nothing in it. I just need the vault, not any of your belongings.”

More laser fire came from down the hallway, along with the crash of something—or someone—being hurled across a room.

The woman flinched at the noise, but turned her glare back onto Ankari, clamping her jaw shut.

“Come this way, then,” Ankari said, resisting the urge to shove the woman into the wall. That wouldn’t prove that she wasn’t a snot-nosed thief. “I’ll show you what I need it for.”

She hauled the hostage to her feet without much gentleness. She was all too aware of the timer counting down in that room with Azarov. The woman tottered and slumped against the wall. Before Ankari could pull her upright, movement at the corner of her eye made her whirl.

One of the men she had presumed dead had lifted his head. He was raising a pistol toward Ankari—or maybe toward the hostage. Ankari fired without hesitation, blasting the thug between the eyes. This time when he collapsed, he did not move again.

“You’re not with them?” the woman wondered, staring at the dead man.

Ankari didn’t bother answering. She dragged the woman back down the hall to show her the bombs. Maybe then she would understand. The station executive or board member—whatever she was—stumbled and did not move nearly fast enough for Ankari, but they finally reached the open door. Smoke still drifted out.

Inside, Azarov still knelt before the desk. He had opened the casing of one of the homemade bombs and held a laser scalpel up, the blade on the narrowest setting. A wiring diagram floated in the air above the desk, courtesy of his tablet, and it looked like it might be helping, but there were less than four minutes left on the timer, and he was still on the first bomb.

Hearing them, Azarov glanced back. Beads of sweat were running down his face, but his eyes brimmed with determination.

“I need help,” he said, turning back. “I think I can do it, but not alone. I need...” He trailed off, slicing through a wire.

The tangled maze inside that bomb filled Ankari with fear. “There’s not enough time. Find a tray, Azarov. Get them on something mobile. We’re moving them. All of them.”

The gray-haired woman was rooted in the hall, staring inside. “Dear Buddha,” she whispered, her eyes round.

“Move them where?” Azarov asked, snipping another wire. “There aren’t any airlocks up here, are there? There’s no time to—shit.”

“What?” Ankari demanded.

“Wrong wire. I...” His voice tightened. “We have less time now.”

“Get them on a cart, a tray, a robot. I don’t care. Just do it.” Ankari spun toward the woman, grabbing her arm. “Lady, I need a vault combination. Do you know it, or not?”

And what were they going to do if the answer was
not
?

The woman jerked her head in a short nod. “I know them.”

Not letting go of her arm, Ankari dragged her charge down the hallway to the room with the vaults.

“That one.” The woman nodded to the one on the end. “It’s mostly empty. I need my hands free to open it.”

Ankari looked around for a knife or a letter opener—
anything
—but didn’t see one. “Just tell me. I have a horrible memory. I swear I’ll forget it in ten seconds.”

“It’s not a combination you can punch in. It’s a retina scan, plus a pass phrase. There’s voice recognition.”

“Well, not to be rude, but—” Ankari nudged the backs of the woman’s knees with her boots, and helped—pushed—her to her knees in front of the vault. “Open it, and I promise I’ll find a knife to cut you free.”

Not waiting for agreement, Ankari ran over and searched the desk drawers for scissors. She should have asked Azarov exactly how much time they had left. Maybe she didn’t want to know.

She finally found her scissors and lunged back to the woman. Even as the hostage spoke into the sensor pad, Ankari snipped at the knots of her bonds.

The vault door opened at the same time as her hands came free. The woman reached into the vault, pulling out papers.

Ankari jumped to her feet. “Azarov! Do you have—”

He walked through the doorway, all eight bombs balanced on a slender desk calendar with a holographic display flashing that some appointment had been missed. He held it in both arms, balancing everything like a stack of playing cards in a windstorm. The plant was still in the middle of it all, and Ankari realized he had simply lifted everything off the desk.

“I think I disarmed one,” he said, “but I’m not sure. And the others...” He walked forward, his face tenser than a rubber band about to snap.

“Get them in here.” Ankari waved him down. “I don’t know if it’ll be enough, but...” She glanced at the woman, as if she might know what kind of explosions the vault might withstand. All Ankari knew was that they had to be constructed to withstand some damage, or thieves would have no trouble breaking into them.

“Less than thirty seconds,” Azarov said.

“Hurry,” Ankari urged, though there was no need. He
was
hurrying, as quickly as he dared.

The woman had pulled out stacks of papers, but she was backing away now, staring at the collection of bombs as if they were vipers. If only they were so innocuous.

“Careful,” Azarov said, tilting the desk calendar toward the vault and trying to slide all of the devices in at once. “They’re terribly unstable.” He flinched whenever a wire between them grew taut, tugging at a contact.

Ankari did her best to help him ease the bombs into the vault, even though every instinct was crying out for her to run far and run fast. She licked her lips and noticed the taste of sweat on them. Sweat was dribbling into her eyes, too, but she did not give herself the half a second it would have taken to wipe them.

The last of the bombs slid into the vault, one nudging the potted plant and almost knocking it against another bomb. Azarov snatched it out, clutching it to his chest as if it might protect them from the explosion.

“Close it,” he barked.

Ankari was already shutting the vault door. The heavy thud of the lock being thrown echoed through a room that had gone deathly quiet. She didn’t know when the alarms had stopped wailing, but she did not care. Azarov sprinted for the door, and Ankari pushed the woman after him. She closed the office door behind them, even though there was probably no point. If the vault was not enough to contain the explosion, then nothing else in between it and them would matter. Still, they ran down the hall toward the elevator, anyway.

They had not gone far when the explosion sounded.

Ankari definitely heard the boom, and she felt the reverberations through the floor. She paused mid-step, listening and waiting. Would some new alarm go off? Would a computerized voice cry of a hull breach?

But nothing happened. She looked back down the hallway and didn’t even see any smoke pouring out of the room. The door was still standing.

“Someone’s coming,” Azarov blurted from up ahead. He still carried that plant, and he lifted it, as if he might throw it. He must have set his pistol down somewhere when he had been trying to disarm the bombs.

“Viktor,” Ankari blurted with relief as he strode into view.

His face was cut, his shirt smoked, and he gripped pistols in either hand, both pointed at the floor. One of those cameras floated over his shoulder. Viktor stopped in front of the group, meeting Ankari’s eyes for a long moment. Then he took in the gray-haired woman and his sergeant, with his gaze finally settling on the plant in Azarov’s hands. His eyebrows twitched upward.

“It’s a long story,” Azarov said.

“Jie and Solomon,” the gray-haired woman asked, looking back and forth from Viktor to Ankari. “Are they...?”

“Did any of the mafia men escape?” Ankari asked, guessing at the woman’s question. “With their hostages?”

“No,” Viktor said. Not explaining further, he frowned at the potted plant. “You’re the last person I would have expected to save an arachnid, Sergeant.”

“What do you mean?” Azarov eyed him warily, sounding more concerned than he had been by the presence of ticking bombs.

Viktor pushed back a few leaves on the plant and let something crawl onto his hand. “Golden orb spider.”

“Sir,” Azarov said plaintively, stumbling back. “Those are venomous.”

“They’re not lethal to humans.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t bite you and mess you up.” Azarov shifted away from him, looking like he meant to go around Viktor and head for the elevator shaft. He jerked to a stop when he glimpsed movement in the hallway behind Viktor. The camera sphere hovered there, presumably recording everything.

Ankari walked up to it. “This is Sergeant Azarov. Despite his fear of spiders, he was instrumental in nullifying the bombs the mafia left to go off.”

“I’m not
afraid
,” Azarov grumbled, glowering at the camera. “I simply display a healthy self-preservation instinct when around venomous ones.”