Mercenary Instinct (a science fiction romance)

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  “A what?”

  “You would have to be tested, of course, certified disease free and metabolically sound, but from what I’ve seen—” Ankari gave his stomach a pat, “—you probably have excellent gut microbiota.”

  “I...”

  Goodness, had she rendered the mighty captain speechless? “It’s quite amazing, really, considering the food you eat. All those dubious logs.”

  Of course, if he had been raised in Grenavine, he would have been born into an ideal environment. The planet had been known for its people’s back-to-nature lifestyle, with farmers growing food forests that mimicked the wilderness and maintaining livestock that roamed free on mountainsides rather than being cooped up in barns. A healthy place to be a kid. She wondered if he had appreciated it at the time. Probably not. What kid did?

  “Do you always discuss these topics with men you see, or am I special?” Viktor asked.

  “You’re special.” Ankari had been in the mining business briefly with a former lover and had discussed work with him, but she hadn’t ever complimented his gut bugs. He would have been too busy trying to talk her out of her fifty percent share to notice, anyway. “I just wanted to try and give you an idea as to our value. Our business’s value, that is. Your people take a risk going in to see Felgard. He might not even pay you. I imagine he has all sorts of security, and he isn’t afraid of mercenaries.”

  “He should be,” Viktor said.

  “Regardless, if Mandrake Company chose to work with our business, instead, we could give you some shares and a percentage of earnings. It would be an investment in the future rather than a simple payday.”

  “If you were making money now, that might be an easier sell.”

  “Yes, but now’s the time to get in. You could have, say, ten percent just for helping us with this small Felgard problem, whereas when we’re big and can afford our own huge security staff, we’d have no need of you.”

  “No need at all?” Viktor murmured, lowering his chin and gazing at her through his eyelashes.

  The expression surprised her, both for its playfulness—such a strange word to attribute to him—and because it immediately had her thinking bedroom thoughts. “Well, I would always be open to hiring quality help, but you wouldn’t get the deal I’m offering now.”

  “And are you authorized to offer this deal? How much of the company do you own?”

  “Seventy-five percent.”

  He straightened, surprise crossing his face, then a more serious expression taking control. “That much? I had this notion that you and the others would be equal partners. You and the microbiologist, at least.”

  “Jamie only has five percent. We basically brought her on to pilot us around the system and keep that boat in the air. I thought about offering Lauren half, or closer to fifty percent, but she was just sitting in a lab, doing research and working for someone else when we met. I was the one, with my knack for crazy schemes, to suggest there might be a way to finance independent research and turn the results into a practice that could help people. Further, she had no interest in running day-to-day operations or doing the marketing or any of the things that actually make a business successful, so I offered her a percentage commensurate with the effort she was willing to make.” Ankari remembered how she had been the one to climb down that ancient latrine shaft, doing the dirty work. Literally. “I’m fully able to offer your company ten percent to come on board as our... special security detachment. Temporarily, of course. I don’t expect you to forget all of your other assignments and be at my beck and call. This would just be for Felgard and... any other emergencies that might come up.”

  “Twenty percent,” Viktor said, “and you set up your labs on my ship, so we can keep an eye on our investment.”

  Ankari stared at him. Was he actually negotiating with her? Yes, she had made an offer, but she hadn’t expected him to take it, not right here and now. She had mostly wanted to give him something to think about, an option that might appease his crew, the possibility that they could potentially earn more over time than they would from turning her in. Twenty percent. That would still leave her as the majority shareholder but without much wiggle room if she needed to barter pieces of the company to others in the future.

  “Fifteen percent,” Ankari said, “and we will gladly accept your offer of a laboratory if it comes fully stocked with the equipment we need, equipment we had before a certain mercenary company blew up my ship.”

  “How much would that equipment cost?”

  “We don’t need anything shiny. I can shop at the surplus medical suppliers, auction houses, and rummage sales, get good deals. Three or four thousand should get us set up nicely.”

  “Twenty percent, and I know an illegal medical facility we can raid for your equipment.”

  Ankari almost choked on the idea. Raid. As if that were a common business practice. “You’re offering to undertake this raid with your ship and your men?” The men he was afraid might mutiny over her bounty not being collected? Was she insane for even negotiating with him? Was this all legal?

  “Yes.” Viktor stuck his hand out. “Deal?”

  Wasn’t she supposed to be the business savvy one here? Why did she feel like she wasn’t getting the best of this negotiation? She should have known he was brighter than he looked the moment she’d met him and he had known what the hell aliuolite was. “Twenty percent,” she said, “but I want the option to buy you back down to ten percent later on, given a five-hundred-thousand-aurum valuation of the company.”

  “You can buy us down to fifteen percent at that valuation.” His hand was still sticking out.

  Ankari looked at it for a long moment. “Just to be clear, this deal would start as soon as we return to your ship, and my team and I would no longer be staying in the brig?”

  “You’ll stay in your lab.”

  “Which won’t be in the brig.”

  “Correct.”

  “Where will it be?” she asked, imagining some utility closet full of mops.

  “I’ll find a spot.”

  “Larger than a closet?”

  “You can set up in my cabin if I can’t find anything bigger.” Viktor wriggled his fingers for emphasis. “Do people ever actually close deals with you?”

  “Rarely.” Ankari took his hand. “All right. It’s a deal. All of it. You’ll handle explaining things to your company?”

  “Yes.”

  “This should prove interesting,” a voice murmured from behind them.

  Ankari jumped, but Viktor responded right away so he must have known Sergeant Hazel was sitting there, sipping her coffee, all along. “That’s why you signed on with me, isn’t it? I’m sure ‘see interesting places and meet interesting people’ is on your application.”

  “I was twenty-two at the time,” Hazel said. “I thought the gum stuck to the deck of the space port was interesting.”

  “Then this won’t disappoint.”

  Chapter 12

  Stars drifted by outside of the porthole in the Albatross’s briefing room. Viktor leaned against the wall at the head of the rectangular wooden table, its warm knots and whorls a contrast to the cold gray metal of the ship’s bulkheads. The old cedar boards had come from Grenavine, and Commander Borage, the chief of engineering who had been a carpenter in his former life, had assembled it and figured out a way to attach it to the deck plating so it wouldn’t fly around in a rough battle. Borage sat to the right of the head of the table now, with Commander Garland waiting across from him. Sergeant Tick, Sergeant Hazel, Lieutenant Sequoia, Sergeant Aster, and Sergeant Rowan occupied the other seats, everyone silent, but everyone making eye contact and trading shrugs with each other, wondering why they had been called here. They knew the old crew had been assembled, the men and women Viktor trusted most because he had known them longest and they had all come from Grenavine, either when he had or later on, as homeless refugees drifting out of space to join the outfit when they’d heard about it. Zimonjic, who had been
married for a time and had left her Grenavinian surname behind, was the only one absent, but there was an empty chair waiting for her. There were others on the Albatross who ranked higher, but they hadn’t been invited to this private meeting. Doubtlessly, Viktor’s old comrades were wondering why.

  The door open and Dr. Zimonjic entered, her pockets full of medical tools once again. She had been busy patching up Tick, Hazel, and the company’s three new business partners—Viktor was about to explain that revision to everyone, everyone he felt he could implicitly trust, both because of their long service and because they had joined the company for reasons other than money.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Zimonjic said. “I was treating those girls, so they could be returned to the brig. Something odd happened though. Cutty said he was taking them to some new lab that’s being set up on B-deck?” She looked at Viktor as she spoke, her eyebrows elevated.

  “Yes.” Viktor waved her to the empty seat. “There’s been a change of plans.”

  Tick, who was chomping cheerily on his gum, elbowed Hazel. “Here it comes.”

  He looked like a man anticipating an entertaining show. Hazel, her face guarded, didn’t respond.

  “Since we captured those women—Markovich, Keys, and Flipkens—I’ve learned that they haven’t committed any crimes—” Viktor thought of Ankari’s pickpocketing of his key, but that hardly counted, “—so Lord Felgard’s bounty is a rogue one. The law isn’t going to touch him over it, but we would be walking the edge of a cliff if we turned these people over to him.”

  Commander Borage pushed a hand through his scruffy mop of gray hair, taking the lack of a dress code to the extreme, as usual. His face hadn’t seen a razor in days, and there were enough coffee stains on his shirt that it looked like a diorama of Mondor’s seventeen moons. “We’ve walked along that edge before, sir. You’ve been known to take a particular interest in figuring out how far we can push GalCon without becoming targets for retribution.”

  “But I haven’t turned innocent civilians over to petty finance lords with some secret, illegal agenda, either.” Viktor spoke the truth, but he hadn’t always taken a stand on issues of morality—sometimes a man couldn’t afford to out here, not if he wanted to keep his ship flying and his crew eating—and he watched the faces around the table warily, wondering if anyone would call him a hypocrite. He demanded military courtesy and respect around the rest of the crew, but these people all knew he’d always expected them to speak openly to him in private.

  “The whole crew’s anticipating that bounty.” Borage looked around, probably wondering if he had the support of the others. He received a few nods. “We’ll get more for them than we got for destroying all of Sisson Hood’s men and turning his head over to the magistrate on Sturm. And, Captain, we need a lot of repairs after the Fallow Station Battle.”

  Viktor nodded. He knew that all too well. They were on their way to Recon and Repair at the Dock Seven space station now.

  “We’re out of at least a dozen spare parts in the engine room right now, what’s installed is cobbled together with spit and tape, our weapons are depleted, and the fuel tanks are running near empty.” Borage folded his hands on the table and studied them. “I’m not just trying to pad my retirement account here with my concerns about bounties. It’s going to be an expensive repair bill.”

  “Retirement account?” Tick grinned. “Who told you that you’ve got a retirement account, Borage?”

  “Well, I get this quarterly report.” Borage managed a faint smile. “It all looks very official.”

  “Lies, it’s all lies. The job’s designed to kill you before you ever get to draw on it.”

  That drew a few snorts. Viktor couldn’t deny it. He doubted he would make it to retirement. How many mercenaries ever did?

  “We’ll have enough,” Viktor said. “We got paid for Fallow and with the bonus of Sisson Hood’s bounty, we’ll easily... break even.”

  There was no way to spin that more positively, and this round of snorts was expected.

  “It’d be nice to come out ahead once in a while,” Lieutenant Sequoia murmured wistfully.

  That might be as good of an opening as he would get for discussing their new business partners, but Zimonjic spoke first.

  “Captain, these women... do you have solid evidence that they’re not criminals? I wouldn’t expect you to simply take a person’s word for it, but I just wanted to make sure.” There was nothing antagonistic or suspicious in her expression; she looked like she simply wanted to know the answer, and was perhaps hoping Viktor might have overlooked something and that Ankari and her partners would indeed be proven criminals.

  “I had doubts from the beginning, and I had Thomlin dig around. None of them has a criminal record, nor are Felgard’s claims substantive.” True enough. He had been hounding Thomlin for that information since returning to the ship. He would have preferred to personally handle the preparations of Ankari’s lab, but he had known he would need evidence, or as close to it as he could get, before sharing his decision here.

  “Just because something couldn’t be dug up on the net doesn’t mean there isn’t something there,” Zimonjic said.

  Tick nudged Hazel again. “Sounds like someone’s bitter that one of her syringes was stolen.”

  “Not at all,” Zimonjic said. “But it is because of how easily that happened that I question Ms. Markovich’s... wholesomeness. Just because a criminal hasn’t been caught and doesn’t have a public record doesn’t mean he or she isn’t a criminal.”

  “Nonetheless, I’m not going to punish someone without some proof that she deserves it,” Viktor said. “It’s my fault for not doing more due diligence ahead of time.” Not that he ever had when browsing the wanted posters around the system. And if Ankari were male, would he have bothered to look deeper? Maybe. But he had admittedly found her compelling. Best to move on and not give the others time to linger on his words. “We’ll still be going to see Felgard. It’ll be an incursion rather than a delivery.”

  Eyebrows flew up around the table.

  “As you already know, Felgard double-crossed us on the bounty. I intend to make it clear to the rest of the system that Mandrake Company is not to be crossed.” Viktor let that sink in before continuing on. That, at least, would sound like him, the influence of a woman notwithstanding. “I would have shot Felgard for that alone, but I’ve struck a deal with Markovich. We’ll be taking care of him for her and will receive a twenty percent share of their company in exchange for our services.” Viktor didn’t mention that there would be ongoing services and that the women were setting up camp on the Albatross. Those details could be explained later. As could the fact that he had tasked Thomlin with hunting around to see if any rogue bounties might be out for the finance lord himself. Someone like that had to have enemies or at least competitors who would be happy to see him gone—and might pay for that to happen. Viktor could hardly bring this up when Felgard himself wasn’t a criminal and his main argument for not turning in the women was that they weren’t criminals, either.

  Tick’s ever-present gum chewing had come to a halt, his jaw hanging slack.

  “You want us to break into Felgard’s compound and kill him?” Garland asked. “How many times did you get hit on the head down on that Moon, Viktor?”

  “He’ll have the best security money can buy,” Borage said. “Not to mention powerful allies. We’re good, but is this a war we want to fight? Sneaking in and trying to kill a lord of finance?”

  “We won’t have to sneak in. We’ll walk in the front door under the guise of delivering his bounty. And Markovich doesn’t demand that he be killed, only that he ceases to be a problem for her company. Since we’ll own a share of that company, we’ll naturally want to protect our interests.”

  “She doesn’t demand that he be killed?” Borage asked. “Wasn’t she a prisoner yesterday? How the hell did she turn into our employer?”

  That had been a poor choice of words. Viktor wasn’t u
sed to having to explain himself. “Business partner,” he corrected.

  Tick and Hazel were exchanging long looks, and he braced himself for a contribution that might theorize exactly how Ankari had come to be... making demands. He hadn’t been flaunting his new relationship, but he hadn’t skulked around or hidden anything, either.

  “Sir,” Hazel said carefully—apparently she’d lost the silent argument as to who should broach the subject. “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never let... feelings for someone influence your command decisions. I’m—we’re—concerned that might be the case now, and that it might be to the detriment of the company.”

  This time a lot more jaws than Tick’s fell open. Zimonjic looked particularly apoplectic, even if she soon rearranged her face into a more neutral position. Viktor understood why, but he didn’t know what to say to her. He never had.

  “You’re wrong, Sergeant,” Viktor said, though he was speaking to all of those in the room, all of those staring eyes fixed on him. “I’ve let my feelings influence my decisions from the beginning. There are a lot of people here—” he spread a palm toward the table, “—who didn’t know much about their jobs and had no military experience when I brought them on board. I chose them over more qualified individuals because we share an ancestry, roots we could trace back to the first colonists who landed on Grenavine.”

  Several people looked down at the table or at their hands. Viktor hated to use their common history to try to take advantage of past favors like this, but the truth was he needed a favor. Who else could he ask?

  “Sometimes, you have to trust that people are worth more than their résumés,” he said, “and that they can grow into the responsibility you give them.”

  “But, sir,” Lieutenant Sequoia said, “they’re not applying to join the company. They’re... I don’t know what they are. I’m not sure I can trust them.”

  “I understand,” Viktor said, “but I hope you can trust me. I won’t put the company at more risk than is necessary. I can go down with a small team and deal with this. If I get myself killed, Garland can rename the company, steer the Albatross off to distant stars, and likely avoid any wrath my actions might draw.”