Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) Read online

  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-lik
e 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.

  In the center of the machine shop, men welded the breaches in the hull of one of Mandrake Company’s shuttles. Robots rolled or floated by, carrying materials to and from the repair docks where larger ships were being worked on. Such as his. The Albatross was not visible from the shop, and Viktor was thankful for that. It stung to see his ship so damaged, and it reminded him of other duties he had to attend to: the funerals and settling of payments to the families of the two men who had died. Two others had been transferred to the station hospital already, their burn injuries too severe for his own sickbay to handle. Viktor did not know if they would return to the company.

  “That was an expensive mess,” Borage said, shaking his head at the charred shuttle. “In more ways than one.”

  His chief engineer’s voice did not hold censure, at least not that Viktor could detect, but he grimaced, anyway. They were mercenaries, and dying by the sword was part of the job, but it had been a while since they had been in a conflict that ugly, and he keenly felt the responsibility for the lost and injured men. He usually made better decisions, picking the company’s battles carefully. This had been a choice made too much with the heart. And as was so often the case, his heart liked to side with the underdog. It was even worse this time, because he had been fooled.

  “But it could have been worse,” Borage added, glancing warily at Viktor, as if realizing his words might have implied condemnation. “You got most of us out alive. And Azarov here got that fire out in time. Thought we were going to have to vent the entire—”

  “Is that Captain Mandrake under all that soot?” a boisterous voice interrupted Borage.

  It belonged to Spike Sherkov, a mercenary captain with a scar stretching vertically down the side of his face and disappearing into a beard almost as big as his ego. He strolled into the machine shop with two other men that Viktor did not know striding beside him. One, a Chinese man, wore the tabs and uniform of a Fleet captain. He was young for the position, no more than thirty, and Viktor had not run into him before. Nor did he want to deal with the Fleet now. Fortunately, there had only been one military ship in dock, an Intrepid-class heavy cruiser that had looked so new, it might be on its maiden voyage.

  “Sherkov,” Mandrake said and started to turn his back on the group—he didn’t like the other mercenary under any circumstances and was in no mood to socialize now.

  “Saw your pink shuttle a couple of weeks ago, Mandrake. It’s a real beaut.”

  The men with him chuckled. Viktor clenched his jaw, but did not otherwise let his thoughts show on his face. He got ribbed often enough about that from his own men, the ones who had been with him since the inception of the company and felt confident enough to tease him. Ankari had leased the craft for her business and painted it before it had occurred to him to put a no-pink stipulation in the contract. He loathed having the thing in his shuttle bay, even if he understood her reasoning for the paint choice perfectly well. She wished to ensure that the craft, which was full of her team’s expensive scientific research equipment, would never be borrowed, at least not by a man. The company’s one female pilot, Lieutenant Calendula, had not shown much interest in flying it, either.

  “What color are you thinking for the Albatross itself, Mandrake?” Sherkov went on. “Maybe baby blue? Or purple with white polka dots? As long as you’re here for repairs, you’ll want to pretty it up, won’t you?”

  “Those repair estimates being sent by carrier pigeon?” Viktor asked, keeping his back to the other captain, hoping Sherkov would go away. What a Fleet officer was doing chumming around with him, Viktor could not guess. Fleet usually pretended mercenaries did not exist, or, if they did exist, lumped them in with pirates and smugglers and kidnappers, the dregs of the galaxy and people to be ignored—or shot.

  “We’ll have them for you soon, Captain,” one of the mechanics said with a cheerful wave. Of course he was cheerful. He was about to make enough money to retire on.

  “What’s the matter, Mandrake?” Sherkov asked. “Don’t want to talk to us?”

  Viktor might have punched the annoying twit, but the Fleet officer muddied the waters. Fleet usually left him alone, but Viktor had bounties on his head on a couple of planets and had made a prominent finance lord disappear not that long ago. If the military wanted a reason to make trouble for him, it wouldn’t have to look far. Maybe this was a setup, with Sherkov trying to provoke him into violence in front of witnesses. Who was the third man? Undercover Station Security?

  “I won’t bother you anymore then, but we were trying to settle a bet and thought you might help.” Sherkov stopped behind him, apparently unwilling to take silence for an answer.

  Viktor adjusted his position so he could watch the men, since having them at his back made his shoulder blades itch.

  “Sir,” Azarov said and tilted his chin toward the doorway.

  Viktor had already seen her walk in, and he held back another grimace. He wanted nothing more than to see Ankari—especially since she was wearing form-hugging trousers and a wrap tunic that accented her lithe figure wonderfully—but this was not the time. Not while he was dealing with the ship’s business and certainly not while this idiot was mocking him. It was bad enough that Borage and Azarov were here for it. He doubted Borage would start rumors, but a few words from the young sergeant, and the entire ship would know that its captain had done nothing while being harassed.

  “Is that her?” Sherkov asked, noticing Ankari—as soon as Viktor had glanced in her direction, she had waved cheerfully. “The reason you lost your balls, Mandrake? I’d heard she was the reason for the pink shuttle, but is she the reason you couldn’t fight worth spit at Nimbus? Too busy thinking about getting your cock sucked to shoot straight?”

  Viktor clenched his fist, hot fury burning through his veins, almost blurring his vision with its intensity. He could handle being mocked for a paint job, but this implication that he was inept...

  Adrenaline flooded his veins, and his muscles bunched, straining at his shirt, craving action. He envisioned leaping on Sherkov, ripping off his head, and shoving it up his ass.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ankari’s step falter, concern blossoming on her face. She must have heard Sherkov’s words. The captain had dropped into a fighting stance, clearly anticipating
Viktor’s attack, but he took the time to give a slight nod to the Fleet captain.

  It was a trap. He didn’t know who had instigated it or what these people ultimately wanted, but he forced himself not to act, no matter how much he wanted to pound on this twit.

  “Deck Ten, Sherkov,” Viktor said, his body still hot, still craving a fight.

  “What?” The mercenary’s brow furrowed.

  “That’s where the gym is on this station. You have a problem with me, you meet me on the mat there at eighteen hundred hours.” The rules on the judo mat were different; if Sherkov accepted his challenge, Viktor could pummel him to within an inch of death, and the law couldn’t touch him. He smiled wolfishly, relishing this thought. Maybe Sherkov would even give him a challenge, let him work out his fury over the entire last month on something more satisfying than the punching bag in his cabin.

  Uncertainty flashed across Sherkov’s face, and he glanced at the Fleet captain again.

  “Bring your new friend if you want,” Viktor said, his voice soft. “I’ll welcome it.”

  The Fleet captain’s lip twitched, but he did not otherwise react. He waved to a mechanic near the shop entrance and headed in that direction, giving Ankari a curious look as he walked past her. Viktor stared at Sherkov, hoping the man saw how much Viktor wanted to see him at eighteen hundred hours. On the off chance he showed up, maybe Viktor would invite Ankari to watch.

  “I’m... busy tonight,” Sherkov said. “Busy thinking up ways to keep my crew alive and not sacrifice them in a fool’s war.” He flipped his hand and stalked off.

  Viktor ground his teeth, irritated because those jabs about the mission were striking far too close to home and even more irritated that he would not get a chance to take his aggressions out on anyone who deserved it. He eyed Azarov, almost tempted to ask the man if he wanted to go a few rounds later, but the soot-smeared sergeant looked too weary to contemplate anything more than his rack. Maybe Viktor would comm Sergei later. When his duties here were done. He took a deep breath, trying to relax muscles tenser than steel.