“You’re on the short list. You can board that shuttle where those other two women are waiting now.” The recruiter waved vaguely at a silver bullet-shaped craft resting behind the pavilion. The two women he had mentioned had the rundown look of people who had been through countless jobs, each worse than the last. They were sucking on cigarettes as if they were the only things keeping them upright. “Dobb will check you out in a minute. You can come back and get your belongings if you pass the head mechanic’s interview over there.”
“Check you out?” Sergei asked as they walked toward the shuttle. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but I’d be more worried about this second interview. The head mechanic might want you to do more than hold a rag.”
“I plan to disappear before that becomes a problem.”
“So I’ll have to hold my own rags? Dustin, I was expecting more support from my loyal husband of ten years.”
He bumped her with his hip and grinned at her, the smile all his, even with the cosmetics. “You know you have grease on your cheek, right? How do you always manage that?”
“Pretty simply. I touch things. And then I touch myself.”
His grin widened. “I must confess I’m having dirty thoughts. All this talk of self-touching.”
“You’re a naughty man, Mr. Strongbow.” They were within hearing range of the two smoking women, so Jamie didn’t add anything else.
Sergei murmured, “Yes, and I’m glad you don’t seem to mind now that the truth has come out.”
She gave him a swat on the butt, but then clasped her hands in front of her, since the beleaguered women had turned to face them. Actually they were facing Sergei.
“A man?” one asked.
Sergei looked down. “I’m fairly certain that’s the case, yes.”
“You’re either brave or you like being dominated.”
They shared snickers.
Jamie frowned, not understanding the joke. Something sexual, she knew that much, but they had just met Sergei. What could he have done to elicit that comment?
“I’ll go with brave,” Sergei said, though he didn’t look any more enlightened than Jamie. “Something we should know?”
The women’s snickers faded.
“You don’t know about Laframboise’s preferences?” the talkative one asked while her buddy looked Sergei up and down and took another puff from the cigarette. Smoke lingered in the air around them and smelled of more bracing narcotics than tobacco or adrenocharge. “You must not be from around here. You didn’t think it odd that there were so few men in the line?”
“I thought it odd,” Jamie said, not that the women were talking to her. They seemed to be enjoying the view Sergei provided while they spoke to him. The quiet one’s gaze was particularly intrusive. Not that Sergei wasn’t pleasant to look at, but Jamie got the impression that they had both escaped from some all-female prison and hadn’t seen a man in a long time.
“Laframboise doesn’t like men?” Sergei asked.
“Oh, she likes them fine. Why don’t you go ask the recruiter about working there, before it’s too late? He’s one of the lucky ones—he got stationed over here.”
Sergei looked toward the pavilion, but he didn’t move. “Job’s a job,” he said.
“It’s your cock,” the silent one said.
Jamie blinked at the blunt language. Maybe her prison guess had been accurate. Jamie touched the back of Sergei’s hand, though she couldn’t imagine him being worried about some woman who was old enough to be his mother.
He nodded at her and squeezed her hand, though the earlier humor had disappeared from his eyes. He wasn’t thinking dirty thoughts now. Jamie hoped nothing from his past came back to haunt him on this mission for the captain. With luck, he would be able to get to Laframboise before she even knew he existed.
Another bored-looking man walked in their direction, wearing a shirt that read Tritech Security.
“This it for Laframboise?” he asked.
The women shrugged at him.
“Probably,” the recruiter called from the pavilion. “Confirm their backgrounds, then send them inside. The pilot will be too drunk to fly in another twenty minutes if that shuttle doesn’t take off.”
“That’s reassuring,” Jamie muttered.
The talkative woman snorted, smoke coming out of her nostrils. “I heard he’s one of Laframboise’s favorites.”
“Chip,” the security man grunted.
Jamie held up her finger, her nerves attacking her belly for the first time. She hadn’t been worried about passing the repair test, but this? They were about to find out if Ankari’s friend did good work.
The security man held out a small scanner, and Jamie placed her finger on it, so it could read the id/banking chip she had had since she was old enough to have an account of her own. Ankari’s friend had sent a program through the network that camouflaged her existing information with a new identity. It wasn’t supposed to delete any of her current data, and he would be able to remove the cover later. That was what she had been promised, anyway. If she had more money in her bank account, she might be more worried about the operation.
A bleep sounded from the reader. Before she could wonder if that was promising or not, something stabbed her finger.
“Ouch, what was that?” Jamie yanked her hand back.
Sergei leaned closer, his eyes hard as he regarded the scanner and the person holding it.
“Blood sample,” the security man said in his same bored monotone. “It’ll run it against the planet database. Laframboise doesn’t hire outsiders or downsiders.”
“Yeah, she likes her meat local,” the talkative woman said with another snicker.
The security man held the scanner out to her. “Next.”
She stuck her finger into it without hesitation.
Jamie met Sergei’s eyes, fearing they were in trouble. Did this mean that their fancy fake identifications wouldn’t mean a thing if the planet blood bank didn’t have a match?
He nodded grimly.
“Clear.” The security man waved the smokers inside. He held up a hand toward Jamie, though she hadn’t moved to follow yet. “Still waiting on yours. You from the northern hemisphere?”
“Yes,” Jamie said, though her identity had her place of residence as less than a hundred miles away. She could have been born on the other side of the planet, right?
Sergei was examining their surroundings attentively as the security man scanned his finger. Did he expect a squad of policemen to come trotting in their direction at any second? Maybe he was thinking of calling the captain. Except that he hadn’t brought his comm-patch along. He had promised he did not intend to be captured, but in case it happened, he hadn’t wanted to implicate Mandrake Company. He only had a cheap local device suitable for planetary communication. For the same reason, Jamie had her private and unmarked unit, the one she used to communicate with Ankari and Lauren. She could call them if needed, and they would get the word out to the company, but Jamie didn’t see what the captain could do at this point. Mow down a field full of job hunters?
A bleep came from the scanner. “No match found,” the security man said. “You, either.”
Jamie half-expected him to pull out the laser pistol he wore at his belt, and from the way Sergei lowered a couple of inches, poised to spring, he did too. But the man was part of a third-party security service and apparently didn’t care much whether people cleared or not.
“You’ll have to talk to the recruiter,” he told them, then turned, opening his mouth, as if to call out to the pavilion.
Sergei moved so quickly, Jamie was barely aware of it. He slapped his hand over the man’s mouth at the same time as he grabbed his neck, digging a thumb into his throat and forcing him backward.
A faint gagging sound was all the security guard managed as he was pushed through a hatch and into the silver shuttle. The recruiter was facing the last couple of people in line and didn’t notice any o
f this. Jamie jumped inside after Sergei and closed the hatch. Hadn’t the recruiter said the shuttle was set to take off soon? Maybe he wouldn’t notice if it left before waiting for those last couple of applicants to make it through their interviews.
Two steps into the craft, Jamie almost tripped over the security man, who was lying on the deck, his eyes shut. The compact shuttle held four rows of four seats each, with an aisle down the middle. The smoking women were sitting in the back, their cigarettes dangling from their lips, their eyes wide as they stared past Jamie, to the front of the craft where Sergei had already removed the pilot from the chair. He appeared to be unconscious too. At least, Jamie hoped the men were only unconscious. Sergei’s rapid efficiency didn’t surprise her, exactly, but seeing him downing people so quickly reminded her of what his occupation was in a very real way.
“Got any rope in your pockets?” he asked, glancing at her, or maybe making sure the two women weren’t doing anything threatening. Their cigarettes were still dangling.
“I have quick-bind glue.” Jamie dug out the small tube. She doubted it was what he had in mind, but she read the label, regardless. “Guaranteed to make anything stick to anything else. Dissolves in alcohol solutions.”
Sergei picked up a flask on the floor by the pilot’s chair, jumped over the rows of seats to bypass Jamie, and opened the hatch to throw it out. He immediately shut the hatch again and turned to Jamie. “Let’s have it.”
She handed him the tube. “It’s self-extracting. Just push the dot there.”
Sergei returned to the pilot’s side. Jamie stepped past both of them and sat at the controls, assuming Sergei would want her to fly them to the island, or at least out of the stadium before that squad of policemen with rifles showed up.
The pilot groaned when Sergei rolled him onto his face to glue his hands behind his back. At least that meant he was still alive. Sergei dragged him to a pair of seats, flung the glue around liberally, then spread the man across them.
The women shifted uneasily when he approached them.
“I apologize, ladies, but we can’t have you wandering away to tell people about this.”
“You’re not going to glue us, are you?”
“The alternative is death.”
Eyes bulging, they stared at each other, then back at him. “Glue isn’t so bad.”
“The handsome ones never treat you right,” the quiet one sighed.
“Jamie?” Sergei asked as he attended to them. “Have you ever flown this model of shuttle before?”
“No, but I already have the technical manual out.” She waved to a holodisplay she had brought up above the control panel. She didn’t look back to see how concerned his expression was—though his long pause did make her wonder.
“All right. I’m going to need you to fly us to Laframboise’s island, then see if there’s some kind of programmable autopilot, so we can send these three on a sightseeing trip around the planet after we get out. Oh, and if you could disable the comm system, that would be helpful. In case these three figure out how to unglue themselves, we don’t want anyone sending warnings back to Laframboise’s people.”
“You don’t want much, do you?” Jamie had looked at the map before coming down and knew it was only a half-hour flight to Laframboise’s private island. She might be able to dawdle to buy time, but too much would be suspicious. Maybe they could wait here a while before leaving.
A banging came at the hatch door.
Maybe not.
“Time to go.” Sergei jogged up and strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat. This early change to their plan had her concerned, but he leaned back and didn’t appear worried.
“So I gathered.” Jamie fired up the engines and ran a quick pre-flight check. The craft reminded her of a simpler version of Mandrake Company’s combat shuttles. She left the technical manual up—she would need to look up the limitations of the autopilot feature—but soon had them ready to go.
“You think they’ll let us land?” she asked. “Without the pilot here to supply codes or whatever they might request?”
“The pilot is here.”
“Well, yes, but he might not want to supply us with anything.” Jamie glanced back, though the man’s head wasn’t visible above the row of seats in front of him. She hoped Sergei hadn’t glued his skin to the material. Having accidentally bound her fingers together with the stuff before, she knew it wasn’t pleasant. An alcohol solution might loosen the goop, but it had a tendency to take a lot of skin off with it.
“He won’t have an option.”
“Oh.”
Jamie would hope for a lax controller over there then. After all, they were using a Laframboise craft and flying in from the next island over, not docking an unknown spaceship from another planet.
“Thrusters on,” Jamie said, hoping whoever was banging on the hatch was bright enough to scurry out of the way. If there were exterior cameras that could cycle through outside displays, she hadn’t found them yet. And instead of a view screen, they had an actual windshield that was looking out at a wall at the moment. As they rose, the wall turned into a rooftop. Jamie applied more power, and they continued upward quickly, lifting up over the stadium and the skyscrapers of the city. Clouds obscured the blue of the ocean that would lie far below, but she punched the coordinates of Laframboise’s floating island into the computer, and they were soon heading in the right direction. “Thirty-seven minute ETA.”
“Good.” Sergei smiled at her and gripped her shoulder.
“I’ll check on your other requests, but I think we should let the others know about our change of plans.”
Sergei lifted his brows. “The plan is still the same.”
“Gluing people to their chairs wasn’t in my original proposal.”
“No? Strange that you didn’t think to account for that.”
Jamie pulled out her private comm unit. “Do you want to talk to Ankari, or shall I? Just to make sure the captain is ready to come in and blow some things up if we need a distraction.”
“I hardly think that will be necessary.” But Sergei accepted the comm.
“Humor me.”
“Ankari here,” came the familiar voice over the comm. “Problem, Jamie?”
“This is Sergei. Did you know that your earnest, young pilot has a command streak? Perhaps you should encourage her to take the lead in some of your business adventures.”
“Is ‘command streak’ code for she’s ordering you around?”
“More or less. I also don’t think she approved of the fact that I glued the pilot to… himself. And a row of seats.”
“Oh, dear,” Ankari said. “Does that mean she’s flying?”
“Yes,” Jamie said, “and I’m fine. Just looking up some things in the technical manuals again. Sergei can fill you in.” Now that the craft was on autopilot, she swiped through the manual, hunting for a way that they could depart on the island, then get their prisoners out of the way for a while, in a manner that wouldn’t permanently strand anyone.
“Zharkov,” came Mandrake’s growl over the comm. “How did you fu—screw this up so quickly?”
Sergei’s face grew more serious. “We didn’t anticipate a blood check. We’re going to land on our own and continue with our plan. We shouldn’t need…”
“Ass rescuing?”
“Right.”
“Let us know if that changes. The men are itching for a fight after a week off, and Lieutenant Calendula assures me she can blow things up as spectacularly as Frog. She also assures me that, unlike Frog, she can blow up only the things I ask her to blow up.”
“I thought she was just along because Frog wasn’t willing to fly a pink shuttle,” came someone’s voice in the background.
Others snickered, then abruptly fell silent. A result of the captain glaring at them, no doubt.
Jamie tried to ignore the talk and concentrate. It was going to take some reprogramming to convince the autopilot to do what Sergei wanted. It would b
e much easier to simply leave the people glued up and hope nobody came in to clean the shuttle or check on the interior while she and Sergei were infiltrating the compound, but she supposed what he wanted was safer.
Shaking her head, Jamie set to work. She found a hack on the network and installed that, hoping that would save her time. Minutes ticked past with her barely aware of her surroundings, the sighs and moans from the glued passengers, the white clouds drifting past the windshield, or Sergei’s gaze as he alternately watched her work and checked on his prisoners.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked softly.
“Is it too soon to ask for massages?” Jamie didn’t know how he could remain so calm. Tension knotted her shoulders, and she was all too aware of the seconds bleeding past.
“No, but I’m afraid the bliss of my touch would distract you from your work.”
“You have a high opinion of yourself.”
“You’ll find out why when we’re done with all this and I treat you to my skilled hands.”
She almost snorted, but his hands had been skilled last night. The memory of the way she had squirmed and pleaded for him made her cheeks warm. He was watching her, and she wondered if he could read her thoughts, because a slight smile turned up the corners of his mouth. She pursed her lips and concentrated on the task in front of her.
Twilight was gathering outside, but the lights of a city came into view, its dark base nestled among the clouds. It was much smaller than the other floating metropolises they had visited. Still, it reputedly housed a thousand people, and the shuttle’s sensors reported it was at least a mile across.
The comm hissed, then a woman said, “You’re cleared for landing, Cloudstar Seven.”
“No challenge?” Jamie asked. “That’s lucky.”
“Yes, but she didn’t direct us where to land.” Sergei leaned forward, eyeing the layers of lights in the city. The outermost buildings only rose a few levels, but a clump of towers in the center shone lights from twelve or fifteen stories. “You think she has her own independent docks at the house? Or are there city ones we’re supposed to use?”
Mandrake Company- The Complete Series Page 72
