“You never used to throw mentions of randy times onto your lists before you met Sergei.” Ankari knocked again.
“Didn’t I? Odd.” Jamie shrugged casually, though her cheeks grew pink.
Ankari contemplated the closed door for a moment as she tapped the Lock Master device that Sergei had refused to take. It was still nestled in her pocket. She had already used it to open the lab for Lauren, whom they had left fuming and grumbling about the primitiveness of the workspace they had ushered her into. Ankari had almost left Jamie with her to stand guard, since Lauren was so uncomfortable away from her clinic and her familiar lab, but Jamie wouldn’t have had much to do. Lauren rarely asked for help when she was working, probably because she rarely realized other people were in the room when she was working. Besides, Ankari selfishly wanted someone along with her who might relay to the mercenaries what had happened, if her meager disguise failed and Security caught up with her. She only hoped Jamie wouldn’t be caught, as well.
A woman came out of an elevator at the end of the hall, a carry-cart of groceries floating after her. She stopped at an apartment a few meters away and waited for the door to slide open.
“Pardon me, but do you know if Li Yanping has been around today?” Ankari had verified the name with the virtual store directory, and it hadn’t taken much searching to find the address.
“Ahh.” The neighbor drew out the syllable as she assessed them, her eyes half-closed with suspicion or wariness.
“We came all the way from Gora, hoping to buy some of her heirloom tomato seeds,” Ankari said, glad she had looked up what the shop next to the pet store sold. “And some of her specialty grow beds, since even though we get a lot of sun, our winters are harsh.” Or so she remembered from a brief research trip to Gora. She decided not to fib further, lest the woman end up being a Goran native herself or a gardening expert. “I was hoping we might purchase a few items from her by finding her here,” Ankari finished.
“I haven’t seen her for a couple of days,” the neighbor said and hustled into her apartment with her groceries. The door shut behind her.
“She seemed mistrustful of strangers.” Ankari wondered if that was the woman’s personality or if something might have happened here recently. Maybe the mafia thugs had been bothering store owners at home too.
“Maybe she didn’t believe your story,” Jamie said. “You don’t look much like a gardener.”
Ankari frowned down at her nails. They might not have dirt under them, but they were short and natural; no long stick-ons that might suggest she never did physical labor. “I suppose you’re the farm expert, but what does a gardener traveling to a space station look like?”
“Less... purple.” Jamie flicked the brim of Ankari’s hat, then pointed at the sparkling rims of her glasses. They were not subtle, but at least Ankari had turned off the tiny displays inside the lenses that showed games or videos before her eyes.
“I’m sure gardeners like to gamble and buy ludicrous prizes while on vacation too.”
“Nobody in our farm community ever went on fancy vacations like this. Space fare is expensive. That’s why I had to seek you out for a free ride off the planet.”
Ankari laid the Lock Master against the door, hoping they could slip in before anyone else wandered out into the hall. “Ever wish you hadn’t?”
“Are you sure you want to ask that question while you’re picking a lock and causing me to become incriminated for aiding and abetting a thief?”
“This seemed like a particularly pertinent time to ask it, actually.” The device hummed softly, then clicked, not having trouble with the simple residential lock. “I just want to see if we can access her computer and find a copy of the video that would identify the mafia men.”
Ankari stepped inside—and halted. In the living area, clothing, pods of seeds, and broken glass from display cases littered the floor like autumn leaves in a forest. Furniture had been toppled over, sofa cushions torn with blades and flung across the room. A collection of what looked like antique gardening tools had been dumped to the floor in a corner. In the bedroom visible through an open door, the mattresses had been shoved off the frame, and even more clothes occupied the floor in tangled heaps. A side door that must have led to the kitchen was closed, but vegetables and jars of food had rolled out into the living room.
“You’ll be lucky if you can even find the computer,” Jamie muttered from behind Ankari’s shoulder.
“I think that’s it over there. Between the upturned grow tank and the broken plates.”
“I suppose you want me to take a look.”
“That’s why I brought you. To aid and abet.”
Jamie snorted and stepped past her, glass crunching under her feet.
“Try not to touch anything,” Ankari said, her mind forming images of Security barging in, finding them here, and believing they had done this. Even if Security did not show up until later, Ankari and Jamie did not need to leave any fingerprints. They were in enough trouble already.
“Sure, I’ll just hack into her computer with my nose.”
“Cover your finger with one of those shirts so you don’t leave any prints. I’ll look around and see if I can find any clues as to who did this.” Maybe she should be traveling around with a fingerprint analyzer.
Jamie picked up a red garment at her feet and stepped toward the computer, but then paused when she glanced at the item. She held it up, letting it dangle from her finger.
“There’s probably not enough material there to hide your prints,” Ankari said dryly. The lacy underwear reminded her of the thongs they had bought for Viktor and Sergei during an overnight trip together. Viktor had refused to wear his, and she had heard Sergei had left his in a tree. Mercenaries seemed to take themselves rather seriously.
“Yeah, I gathered that.” Jamie dropped the garment and picked up something larger and thicker. “I was just reassessing my assumptions about people who garden.”
“Not everyone comes from such a chaste rural village as you do.”
They didn’t speak after that. Jamie grew engrossed in finding a way into the computer, and Ankari was scouring the room—the floor, mostly—for clues. She didn’t know what she hoped to find in the mess, aside from something that would prove the Russian mafia was behind the trouble, both in this apartment and on the station. Unfortunately, all she discovered was broken things and more broken things.
“Jamie, while you’re rooting around in there, can you see if she had any suspicious comm messages come in over the last couple of weeks?” Ankari realized she did not know the time frame they were dealing with. Had the mafia men been threatening people for weeks, slowly tightening the screws? Or had all of this started in the last few days?
“What do suspicious comm messages look like? A business owner would get lots of inquiries from people she doesn’t know. You do.”
“Look for the ones with heavy breathing and thugly men slapping crowbars against their palms.”
Jamie snorted again, perhaps rethinking her willingness to aid and abet.
Ankari circled the bedroom, found nothing helpful, and headed back into the main room. She almost stepped on a fresh wad of gum stuck into the carpet. She started to step over it, but paused, her foot dangling in the air. She set it down and crouched in front of the gum. It looked like the nasty caffeinated stuff that Sergeant Tick chewed, but she trusted he had not been aboard the station, vandalizing apartments. While it might be possible that the homeowner had dropped it, that seemed unlikely, especially since it was still pliable. Ankari tugged out her comm unit and murmured Lauren’s name.
After several long seconds of silence, Lauren responded with an irritated, “What?”
“Well, it’s clear why you aren’t the partner in charge of customer service,” Ankari said.
“I’m attempting to culture microorganisms and run toxicology tests using primitive lab equipment only slightly above crucibles and flea glasses. What part of that implies I wish to
service anyone, customers or otherwise?”
“Flea glasses?” Jamie mouthed from the computer.
Ankari shrugged at her. “I have a quick question, Lauren. If I bring you some used gum, can you tell me who was chewing it?” As she spoke, she scraped up some of the grayish goo with one of the broken shards of glass. Too bad she did not have a test tube to stick it in.
“Not without access to the GalCon gene bank. I used to have that when I worked for a private corporation, but it’s expensive, and only people born in hospitals on the inner-core planets and stations tend to be in there. Criminals, too, sometimes, but whether your mafia people would be is questionable. Regardless, unless you want to pay the five thousand a month subscription fee, I won’t be able to access it anytime soon.”
“Oh.” Ankari stared down at her sample with disappointment.
“I have a gene sequencer on the shuttle,” Lauren said. “If you want to take me back there, I can test the genes for mutations.”
“Would that help?”
“It depends if you want to know if your criminal has inherited alterations that make him susceptible to colon cancer.”
“Uh. No, thanks.” Ankari held her sample up toward the light. She spotted something gritty on the surface, what appeared to be a fine white powder. It didn’t look like a gum additive. She glanced around, searching for something that might have billowed white dust across the room when it broke, but she didn’t see anything like that. “Any thoughts on what a white powder stuck into the top of the gum might be?”
A moment passed, and Ankari checked to make sure the line was still open.
“Lauren?”
“What?”
“Did you hear me?” Ankari asked.
“No, I thought we were done.”
The joys of communicating with scientists.
“Any chance you can identify a white powder that was stuck into the top of the gum? I don’t see any other white powder in the apartment, so I’m thinking the intruder might have had it on the bottom of his shoe.”
Not that identifying some gunk from the bottom of someone’s shoe would allow them to identify that person, but she had nothing else and was grasping for anything that remotely resembled a clue. Sherlock Holmes, she was not.
“Just bring me the gum.” Lauren sounded tired and frustrated. She probably wasn’t having luck with the blood sample.
“Will do. Goodbye.” Ankari joined Jamie at the computer. “Any chance you’ve found telltale comm messages?”
“No. I skimmed through everything from the last two weeks. Maybe mafia brutes like to do their heavy breathing and crowbar slapping in person.”
“That’s a good bet.” Ankari eyed the devastated apartment. “Nothing useful at all on the computer files?” She tried not to feel like they were wasting their time—or risking themselves for no reason by hanging out at a crime scene.
“I didn’t say that.”
Jamie swiped with her finger, spinning the holodisplay toward Ankari. A frozen video image hung in the air. It showed two men glowering in front of a rack of indoor gardening equipment, two men with the height and girth of Grenavinian Mountain Bears. Ankari didn’t recognize the one on the left, but she had seen the one on the right outside of the environmental control room not two hours earlier.
“Copy that,” Ankari said. “If we can identify those men, maybe we can figure out which ship is theirs and stop by for a visit. In fact...” She whipped out her own tablet, hoping she might get a list of all of the captains and ships docked at the station. She knew there were more than one hundred berths, not including the smaller spots available in the shuttle bays, and that they were spread across different sides and levels. Checking all of them manually would be difficult, especially since some docking bays were restricted.
“You want to stop by a mafia ship for a visit? How is this going to get the captain out of jail? Or end the quarantine, so we can go back to our normal lives?”
“I believe the mafia is behind the quarantine—or the dead people that caused the quarantine to be instated.”
“So you’re going to walk up, knock on the hatch of their ship, and ask them about it?”
“Not... exactly.” Ankari frowned at Jamie. “Have you always been this rational or have you matured in the last six months?”
“You’re just being particularly irrational, so you’re noticing the contrast.”
Before Ankari could decide if she wanted to object to that, her comm unit beeped. “Mom again. I’m going to have to talk to her soon, but let’s get out of here. I have gum to deliver to Lauren.”
“Quite a prize.”
They had gone no more than three steps into the hallway when another beep sounded. Ankari thought it was her mother again, but Jamie’s comm was responsible for the alert this time.
“It’s Sergei,” she said, and answered it.
“We are prepared to break the captain out of his cell,” Sergei said, as emotionlessly as if he were discussing the type of vegetable he would prefer with his dinner tonight. “Would you like to join us? I am certain Commander Borage will appreciate your assistance with the security system.”
“I do not need the help of a twenty-year-old girl,” came Borage’s indignant voice in the background.
“You will take her help, and you will be very appreciative of it,” Sergei said coolly.
Jamie’s brows rose, but she did not comment.
Borage did not respond to Sergei’s statement. Ankari hoped it wasn’t because he had a hand around his throat. No, Sergei wasn’t brutish. His occupation alone kept people from crossing him. As with Viktor, a cold stare was usually all it took to ensure compliance.
“We’ll join you shortly,” Ankari said, hoping to put an end to cold stares between the few allies she had here. “We just need to drop off a—” she considered the gum smudging the edge of the shard of glass, “—laboratory specimen.”
Chapter 10
Viktor had succeeded in removing the flat fixture in the ceiling. The coin-sized glowing leaf beneath it did an effective job of blinding him as he considered it. He had been hoping for electrical circuits that he might yank out and cross underneath the smoke detector. Instead, he got a plant. Given the preponderance of plants used for lighting on the station, he couldn’t be surprised. Disappointed, yes. But surprised, no.
A stem disappeared through a hole in the ceiling, one with a few small hairline cracks leading from it. The plant had probably been engineered to grow slowly and have a great deal of longevity, but if this part of the station hadn’t been serviced by someone knowledgeable in the last decade, it wasn’t surprising that some deterioration and damage had occurred. In most areas, the new owners seemed to have ignored the plant tech and installed more typical systems on top of it.
Viktor doubted there was a crawlspace above the ceiling or anything he could use for escape, but he had nothing else to do, so he might as well check. He tried to wedge his nail into the hole to widen it, but his fingers were too large. Maybe pulling some of the stem through would work? He eyed the tendrils and leaves of the tattoos on his forearms, a couple of inches visible since his arms were overhead and his sleeves hung loosely. As a kid, he wouldn’t have thought anything of yanking out a plant for his own purposes or just on a whim, but he hadn’t cared about his world or his heritage then. He had taken everything for granted, seeing the slow-paced lifestyle as a stifling prison rather than something to appreciate because it might not be there forever.
Someone spoke from up the corridor in the direction of the guard station. The voice was too muffled to make out, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was a discussion about what their prisoner was doing to the ceiling now.
With few other options, Viktor tugged on the stem. Small pieces of the ceiling cracked and snapped under the area that the light fixture had covered. Signs of moisture damage yellowed the tops of the shards, and they came away more easily than he had expected. Not surprisingly, there was not a big shaft or
anything he could crawl into in order to escape his cell. The plant ran through conduits like water through a pipe, and wherever the roots were, they were inaccessible to him.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor, doubtlessly the guards telling him to quit breaking his cell. On a whim, he decided to try a bit of acting. Nothing would likely come of it, other than a loss of his dignity, but with none of the crew here to observe, his dignity wasn’t that important.
“Mandrake,” a guard growled, coming into view. “Get down from there or I’ll shoot your dumb—”
Viktor cried out, tumbling from his toilet perch. He landed hard on his back, not trying to make the fall graceful—or painless. His hands were flung out, knuckles smacking on the hard floor. He slumped, eyes closed, his body still.
“Don’t tell me the idiot electrocuted himself,” a second guard said, walking closer.
“Guess you win the bet after all.”
“I thought it was just plants up there. You can’t electrocute yourself on a plant.”
“On this station, you can. Some of the ones running through the walls conduct electricity. I’ve been here since the beginning. You wouldn’t believe what those technodruids were up to here.” The force field buzzed as a boot struck it. “You dead, Mandrake? Get up.”
Viktor lay still, though he was starting to feel like the idiot they were accusing him of being. Even if these two cared enough about the prisoners to drop the barrier and come in and check on him, they would be warier than deer in a hunter’s sights. It wasn’t as if prisoners hadn’t been feigning sick to get the guards to check on them for thousands of years.
“Actually, it looks like he is dead.” A ticking noise sounded, the guard tapping the control interface on the wall outside the cell. “The sensors show there’s nobody in there.”
Viktor made his face stay slack, but the words puzzled him. Had he lucked into some systems malfunction? Or was the control panel tied into the light plants? Maybe pulling on the stem had detached something inside the wall, though he wouldn’t have guessed the plant had anything to do with the controls.
Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) Page 18
