The Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company series Book 4) Page 2

  Thomlin sneezed again, withdrew a precisely folded handkerchief square from an inside pocket and dabbed at his nose as he glared at the cactus.

  “‘The powers of nature are never in repose; her work never stands still,’” Kalish quoted, smiling slightly.

  He blinked and stared at her, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Adam Sedgwick? I wouldn’t mind claiming the father of geology as a namesake, but I confess that my mother named me after a more recent Sedgwick, the biologist responsible for first cross-pollinating Earth peas with a similar species discovered in our system.”

  Kalish stared back at him, shocked that he had recognized the quote. A mercenary was the last person she would have expected to have a grounding in the history of science.

  “Uh, right,” Striker said. “So, you got something for us to blow up, lady?”

  “Ms. Blackwell,” Commander Thatcher corrected. “And I believe we are to participate in a raid and information acquisition mission? Possibly leading to a more lucrative contract that will engage the whole company?”

  He pointed toward the pale bluish-green sky, toward his ship presumably, though of course it would be in orbit and not visible from the ground. Kalish hoped so, anyway. She caught herself glancing up to make sure. The last thing she wanted was to let the miners know someone had come to visit, especially after she had so painstakingly had her sister fly in under the cover of night and a storm, thus to hide their approach. The sky, fortunately, was empty of spaceships.

  “If we acquire the data I need, yes. A very lucrative contract.” Kalish managed not to grimace—barely. She had already had to make a substantial down payment and had placed the rest into an escrow account, so the mercenary captain knew she could pay.

  “Excellent.” Striker patted a black pack on the ground, one bulging with lumpy shapes. “I’m ready to make the booms.”

  “I had a stealth mission in mind,” Kalish said.

  “No problem. I have quiet booms too.”

  “Only the mind of Sergeant Striker could not consider that an oxymoron,” Thomlin murmured.

  “Better keep your lips from flapping, Sniffles. A piece of pollen might fall on them.” Striker glared at Thomlin, who glared right back at him.

  Kalish hoped her elite team of mercenaries—Mandrake Company’s page on the network had billed them thusly—wasn’t about to descend into fisticuffs in front of her.

  “I acquired satellite imagery of the mining outpost from orbit,” Commander Thatcher said, ignoring the men glowering at each other behind his back. “If you have additional data, we should pool our resources and plan our mission.”

  Kalish nodded, relieved that someone had business on the mind. “Just what I was thinking. I have the information right here.” She tapped at the folding tablet in her jacket pocket. “Shall we go to your camp?”

  “Is it just you?” Val sounded surprised. “I thought you would have some men of your own to bring.”

  “My men will stay to watch my ship and stage a rescue if intervention is needed.” No need to mention that her “men” were her mother and her sister.

  “Your men?” Tick asked, glancing toward the rocks, then sharing a long look with Striker. Did they already know that there were only three people out here, all women?

  “That the old lady up in the boulders, making like an eagle?” Striker asked.

  A streak of crimson laser fire shrieked out of those boulders, blasting a head-sized rock near the sergeant. Fragments flew everywhere. He grunted, raising his arm, even if he didn’t appear particularly alarmed by the attack. Tick and Thatcher had shifted their rifles toward the rocks. Kalish winced, hoping Mom’s distaste of being called an “old lady” didn’t get her in trouble.

  “That’s one of them,” Kalish said quickly. The mercenaries shouldn’t return fire if they knew the person was with her. “As she would be quick to tell you, she’s not an old lady. She’s in the prime of her life.”

  “Her aim is certainly prime,” Tick said, chomping his gum and shoving Striker in the shoulder. “She could have pierced your ear there.”

  “Whatever.”

  Thatcher pointed toward the rocks lining the other end of the clearing. “Our landing spot is six hundred meters in that direction.”

  “You brought two combat shuttles, right?” Kalish asked, though she didn’t miss Thomlin carefully and precisely refolding his handkerchief and slipping it into his pocket before he started after Thatcher. She might have only known the man for three minutes, but she could already imagine him walking away from one of Striker’s “booms” without so much as a wrinkle in his clothing, despite shrapnel and smoke flying everywhere behind him.

  “Yes,” Val said, “and we’re happy to use them, but we saw you have a ship too. And presumably a pilot of your own? If it’s a stealth mission to steal some data, why do you need so many ships?”

  “The ships are for Stage Two,” Kalish said. Though she found herself liking Val, she wasn’t even close to ready to divulge her true purpose here to a pack of mercenaries. Contract or not, she would be a fool to trust any of them.

  She was already nervous about going alone with them to their ships. Val and Thatcher seemed professional enough, but she didn’t like the way Striker kept looking at her chest. The mercenaries might have Fleet-like ranks, but she doubted any code of honor—or risk of court martial and death—guided their actions. She would hope that as long as she was in the putative position of employer, they wouldn’t harass her in any way, but she resolved not to be caught alone with Sergeant Wandering Eyes there. She also worried about what would happen if they didn’t prove themselves capable of helping her with her mission and she decided not to extend the contract. Even though she had worked numerous stipulations in when speaking to the captain, she had a feeling the mercenaries wouldn’t appreciate diverting to this dust ball for nothing.

  * * *

  Sedgwick Thomlin forced himself to keep his eyes on the satellite images as he flipped through them for his small audience, describing the layout of the mining camp, the capabilities of the security system they would face, and the possible places it might be breached to gain undetected entrance. He most certainly did not look at their new boss, no matter how nicely her clothing hugged her hips and breasts, or how appealing he found her deep brown eyes and full lips. After all, he had barely noticed those attributes until she had surprised him with that quotation. He hadn’t met many treasure hunters, but he had expected someone more akin to an unschooled pirate rather than an educated woman.

  “There are approximately five hundred miners,” Sedge said from his position near the pilot’s chair, pointing at a personnel graph he had mixed into the installation and topography slides. It hovered in the air over the control console, enlarged so everyone could see. Ms. Blackwell and the rest of the Mandrake Company team sat in the shuttle’s troop seats. “This represents a large force that could potentially be armed and brought to bear, but they work around the clock, splitting Karzelek’s twenty-two-hour day with alternating shifts. At any given time, there are men in the surface base, off-duty and sleeping or on-duty and performing administrative and support duties, but most workers will be in the mines themselves, a mix of man-made tunnels and an extensive natural cavern system that’s rumored to extend hundreds, if not thousands, of miles beneath the surface of the planet.”

  This time, he couldn’t resist looking at Kalish—Ms. Blackwell, he corrected, reminding himself for the fourth or fifth time that it wasn’t appropriate to think of their employer on a first-name basis unless invited to do so. He wanted to ask if “Stage Two” of the mission involved going into those caverns for some treasure or another and, if so, what treasure it might be.

  Captain Mandrake had ordered Sedge to research Ms. Blackwell and her small outfit before accepting the mission, ostensibly so they would know if she could in fact pay for the hundred-man company’s services, but also so they might know what to expect. Was Mandrake Company jumping in with a thief
or a respectable GalCon citizen? She didn’t have a criminal record, but the captain’s suspicion had been that she meant to rob the miners or the mines, stealing some of the gold, iridium, tripytarium, or other precious metals the installation was known for. Sedge, however, had researched the planet further and found several mentions of ancient alien relics being found in those caverns, and, based on the profile he had put together for Ms. Blackwell, he suspected that might be her interest. It was only when he had informed the captain thusly that Mandrake had grown more interested in accepting the assignment, perhaps because his girlfriend’s business dealt with remnants from the ancient civilization.

  Ms. Blackwell returned his gaze but didn’t comment on his presentation.

  “You have identified a way to circumvent their security system?” Commander Thatcher prompted.

  Sedge flushed, hoping he hadn’t been looking at Ms. Blackwell for too long. “Yes, I believe so. According to the information Ms. Blackwell provided us with, their software is nearly a decade old. It’s likely they don’t expect to be bothered often this far out, but the sniffer I sent out did detect that it’s been kept up-to-date with the latest security patches. Rather than finding a leak in the system that would make it possible to erase all trace of our entry, I thought it would be more practical to install a virus that could bring the entire system down for a short time. My understanding from the captain’s briefings is that the files Ms. Blackwell wishes to scan are physical in nature, kept in a foreman’s office rather than on the computer system.”

  “That’s what my research told me,” Ms. Blackwell said. “After being hacked from a distance by a competitor some fifteen years ago, Ferago Enterprises, the company that owns these mines, decided to rely upon physical copies. The files are kept in a safe in Ernest Saakashvili’s office.”

  “Files for what?” Lieutenant Val Calendula asked from her seat next to Thatcher. “Are we allowed to know what we’re looking for?”

  Ms. Blackwell hesitated.

  Sedge had wanted to ask the very same question, so he hoped she answered. His curiosity nearly made him bounce on his toes. Stealing ore didn’t hold any interest for him, but like so many others, he found the mystery of the ancient aliens fascinating. They had moved to this system tens of thousands of years ago, long before the human colonists had come, terraforming the planets and making many of them habitable. But they had disappeared ten thousand years ago, leaving only ruins and fossils here and there to prove their existence.

  “Maps,” Ms. Blackwell said. “They’re maps of the caverns, fifty years’ worth of the company’s cartography efforts. According to my source, the miners were never that inquisitive, and tended to stop exploring any time they found valuable ore, but they still have the most extensive maps of Karzelek’s caverns that exist.”

  “And what are we hoping to find by using the maps?” Val asked.

  Ms. Blackwell’s lips thinned. “That will be revealed as needed. If you’re hired for Step Two.”

  Val didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she looked like she wanted to. “Got it,” was all she said.

  Sedge could understand Ms. Blackwell’s desire to keep information to herself—mercenaries didn’t have the most savory reputations, and, despite whatever research she had done, she had no way to truly know that Mandrake Company was an honorable outfit. Still, he also wanted to ply her with questions. Maybe he could sit beside her on the flight to the mining camp and show her his enthusiasm for the long-gone aliens. During his linguistics training at the academy, he had taken an elective on the ancient culture’s hieroglyphic writing system. Perhaps she would realize he could be useful to her mission and confide in him.

  “Won’t the miners get suspicious when this virus takes down their computer?” Sergeant Tick asked. He was sitting next to Striker, trading moves on some game that hovered in the air between them. Sedge was surprised he had been paying attention. No, that wasn’t exactly true. Tick had a few more brain cells between his ears than Striker.

  “Very likely,” Sedge said. “But the virus is designed to make it appear that the system is simply acting buggy for some reason or another. They may believe a solar flare or some space radiation from the nebula is responsible.”

  “A solar flare, this far out? You’d have to hug a heat lamp to get a suntan around here.”

  “Nonetheless, our meddling shouldn’t be immediately obvious. If they take precautionary measures, I believe it’s more likely they’ll move men to their ore or ingot holding facilities. We are in the fourth week since their last ore pickup, in a six week schedule, so they should have a significant amount of precious metals on hand.”

  “So if we can’t get the maps, we can blow up a smelter and take some nice gold home?” Striker asked.

  “That would be a felonious action,” Commander Thatcher said.

  “As opposed to stealing someone’s maps?”

  “The captain implied we would be scanning the maps, not stealing them.” Thatcher smiled slightly, bowed his head, and like a monk reciting a koan, added, “‘Information wants to be free.’”

  Ms. Blackwell smirked. “Stewart Brand.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Thatcher said.

  “What?” Tick asked.

  “That was often said back on Old Earth, when networks were first being established,” Ms. Blackwell said. “Naturally, I agree. At least when it comes to useful maps.”

  Sedge smiled at Ms. Blackwell, then decided from Val’s frown that it might be an overly smitten-looking smile, and dropped it. He waved at the slides again. Time to wrap up the briefing. “We shall strive for stealth, but Striker is prepared if we need a distraction in order to escape with the files.”

  Striker smiled and patted his bag of explosives.

  Ms. Blackwell watched him dubiously. Sedge hoped that the mission would go smoothly and that they wouldn’t need to resort to tactics approved by the Chief of Boom.

  “Very well,” Thatcher said. “We’ll take one shuttle, and I’ll fly us in. There’s a butte a mile out that we can land behind. The shuttle is sensor shielded, but that’s as close as I want to get, lest we risk visual detection from an alert watchman on the wall. Lieutenant Calendula will remain with the craft. Tick will go in with Ms. Blackwell and Thomlin, and Striker and I will monitor from the perimeter, preparing to distract if necessary.”

  “I don’t get to go with the infiltration team?” Striker asked.

  “Lieutenant Calendula has informed me that your tactless words and incessant leers—” Thatcher glanced at Val, as if to verify he was quoting her correctly, “—may be unappreciated by Ms. Blackwell. You will not accompany her anywhere during the mission.”

  Striker slumped back in his seat, frowning back and forth from Thatcher to Calendula. “I liked it more before you had a woman, sir. You never used to know what was tactless.”

  Val smiled and gave him a rude gesture. Thatcher swung into the pilot’s seat and fired up the engine.

  “My leers aren’t incessant,” Striker grumbled to Tick, poking the air above the tablet to make a move. “They’re very... cessant.”

  “Inactive or dormant?” Sedge asked, doubting Striker knew what the word meant.

  “Friendly. And sexy. Women like them.”

  Skeptical, Sedge looked at Ms. Blackwell for confirmation. But she had already strapped into her seat and pulled out a tablet of her own, opening the display in privacy mode so he couldn’t see what she was working on. Remembering his earlier thought of sitting beside her and telling her about his electives, Sedge took a step in that direction. But he hesitated. If she was engrossed in something private, she might not appreciate having him so close. There were numerous other places he could sit.

  “Take a seat, Lieutenant Thomlin,” Thatcher said. “We’re taking off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sedge decided to risk Ms. Blackwell’s ire and headed toward her, though he tried to walk casually, as if he was merely going to the first open seat and had nothing fu
rther on his mind. The last thing he wanted was to have Val accuse him of leering, incessantly, surreptitiously, or otherwise. He also had no wish to make Ms. Blackwell uncomfortable. Calm, casual, indifferent. That was him.

  No sooner had he reached Ms. Blackwell than he sneezed mightily, one of those irritating surprise sneezes that startled a man. And those around him. She flinched and stared up at him.

  “My apologies,” he murmured, dipping into his pocket for his handkerchief.

  “Thomlin, you took your medication, didn’t you?” Thatcher asked.

  Embarrassed heat warmed his cheeks. Ms. Blackwell was still looking at him, probably wondering why a thirty-year-old man had to be reminded to take an antihistamine like a distracted toddler. “Yes, it should kick in fully before we reach the installation. This planet is proving to be particularly taxing on my immune system.”

  “How can that be?” Striker asked. “We haven’t seen more than three plants. And they were cactuses. Who’s allergic to cactus?”

  “It’s the dust,” Sedge said stiffly.

  “Can’t the doc give you a shot or something?”

  “I react poorly to the most common drugs used for controlling the human histamine response.” Sedge decided not to mention the instances of anaphylactic shock. He had no wish to share his vulnerabilities with Striker. Or Ms. Blackwell. How had they gotten onto this horrible topic anyway?

  He slid into the seat next to Ms. Blackwell, even though he was more inclined to flee to the rear and hide in the weapons locker at this point. She was still looking at him, but her expression was hardly one of sexual interest—he would have settled for any interest whatsoever. Rather, she had that look that so many of his peers often wore: wondering how someone with so many allergies could make it as a mercenary.

  “I’m quite hale in most ways,” Sedge felt compelled to tell her. “It’s a hypersensitivity rather than a weakness, you understand. I haven’t had a cold or other bacterial invasion in years, and I’m in the top tenth percentile on the ship when it comes to the physical fitness tests.” He resisted the urge to take off his jacket and push up his shirt sleeve to flex his biceps—Striker did that move all the time, and it never worked on women. “My parents were explorers in their wilder youths, out in the jungles and rainforests of Mercruse and Amselite III. They sought unique specimens to breed with plants back in their greenhouses, and my mother was afflicted by a nasty parasite before she realized she was pregnant with me. They returned to civilization for treatment, but it was a stubborn parasite that took years to eradicate fully. In the meantime, I was born prematurely and with a compromised immune system. It made for an inconvenient childhood, but I grew out of most of it, and I’m quite normal now.” He wrinkled his nose, trying to fight off another sneeze. When would that damned pill kick in?