The Tracker's Dilemma: (A Mandrake Company Science Fiction Romance)

by Ruby Lionsdrake

“You heard him,” he barked to his men, jerking a thumb toward the open hatch.

  As Tick ran toward it, Mandrake lunged for the trader, who was spinning away, her braid flying behind her as she turned toward her own craft. He caught her around the waist, her pudginess not keeping him from lifting her over his shoulder with one arm.

  Tick paused at the ramp to the hatch, in part to lay down cover for the captain if necessary, and in part because he couldn’t help but doubt his vision. Was he about to be made a fool?

  “Put me down, Mandrake,” Farley roared at the same time as something shot out of the lake.

  The enemy ship.

  It roared out of the water, droplets streaming from its hull, and it arrowed straight toward them. The energy-dampening netting that had hidden it from sensors did nothing to hide the craft from the human eye. The torpedo ports that Tick had seen in his vision—how in all the hells in the galaxy had he seen that?—glowed white, an attack imminent.

  As soon as the captain ran up the ramp with his prisoner, Tick spun to follow. The charge from his laser pistol would bounce harmlessly off a spaceship hull. Hazel and Hemlock raced inside on his heels.

  “Shields,” Mandrake barked to the pilot, Commander Thatcher. “Get us off the ground.”

  “Is everybody inside?” Up front, Thatcher’s hand hovered over the button that would close the hatch. They couldn’t take off or raise shields until that was secured.

  “Striker,” Mandrake yelled. He hadn’t set his captive down yet, and she was kicking and shouting, almost drowning him out. “Get in here.”

  Thatcher was watching the enemy ship on the view screen, and he must have decided they couldn’t wait. He hit the button to withdraw the ramp and close the hatch, then swiped his hand through a holodisplay above the panel.

  Tick ran to the hatchway. What was that idiot Striker doing?

  A suck-thump noise came from the base of the ramp, then Striker raced in, wobbling as it rose underneath his feet.

  “She’s firing,” Hemlock warned—he had charged up to the front and crouched behind Thatcher.

  Striker ended up diving inside, almost crashing into Tick. Tick scrambled aside as a boom erupted from over the lake. A flash of white light filled the shuttle, and then a shockwave battered them, the deck vibrating under Tick’s feet.

  “Shields are now up,” Thatcher said calmly. “Lifting off to engage in evasive maneuvers.”

  Only Thatcher could manage to sound like an emotionless android as an enemy vessel bore down on them, torpedoes launching.

  “Might not be anything to evade,” Striker said, jogging up the aisle between the chairs. “Did Thumper hit him?” He patted his grenade launcher lovingly. “Had my sights lined up good, but then the ramp started lifting under my toes.” He shot an accusatory glare toward Thatcher.

  Tick shoved Striker toward a seat. Assuming the grenade hadn’t blown the enemy shuttle out of the sky, things were about to get rough. Tick wasn’t crazy about flying under the best of circumstances, and the trip back to the Albatross wouldn’t likely be the best of circumstances.

  Striker let himself be shoved—it wasn’t as if he could fire more grenades from inside—though he had to remove some of his weapons before he could buckle himself in. Just as Tick reached for his own harness, the first torpedo struck their shuttle. The shields were up, but the force of it still nearly knocked him out of his seat.

  “Damn,” Striker said, “guess I didn’t hit him a good one. Why’d you have to lift the ramp, Thatcher? You know you got to let the Chief of Boom do his work.” He thumped himself in the chest.

  “Commander Thatcher,” their pilot said calmly without looking back. His hands flew over the controls, both physical and holographically displayed, and the shuttle banked sharply as another torpedo screamed past. A boom sounded as it struck the ground somewhere below them, dirt clods shooting up high enough to appear on the view screen. Now that they were in the air, Thatcher would be harder to catch than a greased pig, and Tick took some comfort in knowing he was one of the best pilots out there. They should be all right. Unless the enemy pilot was also one of the best. Or better.

  Tick grimaced and gripped the armrests of his seat. Ground combat didn’t faze him, but this? Flying around in the back seat of a shuttle where he was helpless to protect his fate? Tracking and fighting skills were useless up here.

  “Still want those two hundred aurums?” Mandrake asked.

  He had secured his captive in one seat a few spots up the row from Tick and Striker, and he sat across from her, his harness fastened as he calmly pointed a pistol toward Farley. Apparently, he wasn’t angry enough to wrap a hand around her throat—yet.

  “Always want aurums, Mandrake,” the woman said, glowering at him. “You know how hard it is to survive out here on the rim, especially when you’re just a girl without an army of big louts to guard your back.”

  “Who’s she calling a lout?” Striker asked.

  “Is it hard to sound indignant about being called a lout when you’re fondling your grenades?” Tick asked, trying to distract himself from the way the ground and the sky kept alternately coming into sight on the view screen. Did Thatcher have to spin so much? The artificial gravity kept them from being thrown about inside of the cabin, but Tick’s stomach still protested.

  “What do you mean?” Striker asked blankly.

  “Never mind.”

  Corporal Hemlock didn’t seem upset by Thatcher’s spinning and gyrating. He leaned forward, asking if he could help with weapons. Damn perky new men.

  “You hire those people?” Mandrake asked, jerking a thumb toward the view screen. The enemy craft came into sight, this time, the back end of it. Thatcher maneuvered behind it, aiming for the orange glow of its thrusters, his hand hovering over their own torpedo launchers.

  “Go to Hell, Mandrake,” Farley growled. “I’m not answering your questions unless you plaster some gold bars into my hands.”

  “How ’bout we plaster her bones all over the walls?” Striker suggested, raising his eyebrow toward the captain, probably asking if he wanted to make this a real interrogation.

  “The painted vessel has been annihilated,” Thatcher said calmly, “along with a large portion of the shoreline.”

  “The painted vessel!” Farley blurted, trying to stand up—the harness held her in her seat. “You mean my Bessy?”

  “If that is the name of the ship that was parked beneath the trees, yes.”

  “Those bastards,” she seethed, fingernails digging into her armrests.

  “Care to tell us whether you’re working with them now?” Mandrake asked calmly.

  She scowled at him and looked like she would clam up, but for a moment, Tick could see what she was thinking, or at least he seemed to be able to do so. He had a flash of insight, access to a memory of hers, of powerful armed men surrounding her, of her back to the hull of her shuttle, of sweat slithering down her ribcage.

  “They strong-armed her,” Tick said, before he could think wiser of keeping his strange thoughts—no, her thoughts—to himself. “Knew she’d sold you information before and figured you’d trust her enough to show up.”

  The trader’s eyes bulged as she looked at Tick, some of her anger and defiance replaced by a hint of fear. “How do you know that?”

  “It true?” Mandrake asked, also giving Tick an odd look. It wasn’t one of fear, but a hint of confusion, or perhaps wariness, edged his face.

  Tick shut his mouth, fear creeping into his gut too. What was happening to him? Why did he know things he couldn’t possibly know?

  “It’s true,” Farley whispered. “GalCon wants you captured alive and brought in, Mandrake. They’re offering good money for you, and they’ve put the word out that anybody who hires you in the meantime is going to get a squad of Crimson Ops soldiers visiting their doorsteps.”

  The captain leaned back, frowning thoughtfully.

  “Think that explains why we haven’t had any offers of work in
a month, sir?” Striker asked.

  “It might, if she’s telling the truth.” Mandrake looked to Tick again, his expression still thoughtful.

  Tick shrugged back. He wasn’t getting any more weird insights, and he didn’t know what to think of the others. Before today, nothing like this had ever happened. He’d had a few drinks the night before, but surely that couldn’t account for this. The day before, he had received another dosing of Dr. Keys’ gut bugs, but that was—

  A surge of adrenaline ran through him as his thoughts lurched. Could that have somehow caused this?

  It was an experimental treatment, with him and a few of the other mercenaries participating in the first human trials, from what he’d heard. But it had been his fourth time receiving a dose, and nothing strange had happened after the first three times. Oh, he had been able to run longer and lift more weight at the gym, and his vital signs had all been excellent, but that had been expected. Lauren Keys hadn’t mentioned anything about side effects to his mind. It had been nearly a month since the trial started. What would cause his brain to start doing funky things now?

  Mandrake’s comm-patch beeped as Thatcher sent them through another series of spirals and loops. He fired several times, and Tick barely heard the captain answer over the noise.

  “Can you repeat that?” Mandrake asked after the torpedoes had launched.

  “We may have a new assignment, Viktor.” It was Ankari, the captain’s girlfriend and the head of Microbacteriotherapy, Inc., the little company behind Dr. Keys’ experiments.

  Unease flowed through Tick’s veins, and he strained to listen, not sure if he was experiencing another bout of prescience or if his instincts just told him that this might have something to do with him.

  “We could use work,” Mandrake said, eyeing his captive. “What is it?”

  “Lauren’s sister contacted us from Dock Seven. She wants to hire us to take her on an expedition.”

  “Lauren? Dr. Keys?”

  “My microbiologist, yes,” Ankari said. “I believe you’ve met her five or six hundred times.”

  Mandrake snorted. “Yes, but she only acknowledged my presence two or three of those five hundred times. I don’t think she knows who I am.”

  “Oh, she knows. She’s waiting for you to sign up for her trials. She has a fondness for Grenavinians, you know.”

  Tick felt some of the blood drain from his face. He was Grenavinian, the same as the captain. They had both been off planet and serving in the military ten years earlier when their world had been destroyed. He didn’t know why that would make his people special, but he rested his hand on his abdomen, imagining millions of alien bacteria rooting around in his intestines, doing strange things to his body—to his mind. Why had he let himself sign up for those trials? All because he’d wanted to get closer to Lauren?

  “You know damned well that was why,” he grumbled under his breath.

  The shuttle’s weapons fired again.

  “Another direct hit,” Thatcher announced. “That may be enough to—ah, yes. His engines are damaged, and he’s losing altitude.”

  “Nice shot, Thatcher,” Hemlock said, pumping a fist.

  “Commander Thatcher.”

  “Yes, sorry. Sir.” Hemlock made a face.

  “The sister have money?” Mandrake asked over his comm-patch. “We’re back up to a hundred men. We can’t afford to do charity assignments—or expeditions.”

  “My understanding is that she does have funding and can afford your rates, but we’ll have to return to Dock Seven to pick her up and get the details.”

  “Picking up women hasn’t gone well for me of late,” Mandrake said, giving the trader another look.

  “Maybe you’re out of practice,” Ankari said. “I’ll give you some pointers tonight.”

  He snorted and signed off.

  “Tick,” Mandrake said.

  “Sir?”

  “What exactly did you see when you were walking around the lake?”

  “Sir?” More unease stirred in Tick’s gut—he had a feeling he knew precisely where the captain was going with his question.

  “When you were tracking. You must have seen something on the ground that told you there was a shuttle hiding in the lake.” Mandrake gazed steadily at him, his green eyes piercing.

  Tick chewed on his gum and tried for some of his usual ease, but that ease was eluding him today. “Wish I had seen something, sir, but it was just… a hunch.”

  “A hunch that we were about to get attacked, just then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mandrake raised an eyebrow toward Farley, but he didn’t bring up Tick’s unlikely knowledge about the coercion scheme. Instead, he said, “Why don’t you go visit Dr. Keys when we get back?”

  Tick swallowed. Captain Mandrake, as big and muscular as Striker, always looked more like a brute than a thinker, but Tick had learned long ago that his captain knew how to rub his brain cells together and make sparks.

  “I will, sir,” Tick said quietly.

  “Gladly he will,” Striker said. “He’s still hoping to get that itch scratched.”

  “Striker, why don’t you go visit a library when we get back?” Mandrake asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind.”

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Lauren Keys recorded the statistics as A27 ran on the treadmill, maintaining faster than a twelve-mile-per-hour pace, his breathing steady and even, despite the sweat dripping down his bare chest. Why her test subjects always insisted on taking their shirts off when they ran for her, she didn’t know. She certainly did not require it. She had performed complete physicals on all of them before the testing began, and it wasn’t as if she would gauge their health and improvements by studying their biceps or pectoralis major. A couple of the men had proudly shown her that their muscles had increased in size since starting the inoculations. They had seemed disappointed when she had turned down their offers to “squeeze them and see for yourself.” That hadn’t kept a few of them from asking her to share a meal in the mess hall. The blunter ones had simply asked her to have sex with them. Multiple times.

  The specimen currently on the treadmill had only asked once—about dinner, not sex. He never leered at her chest when he came for his checkups. By the standards of the mercenaries on the ship, he was inordinately polite, calling her Doc or ma’am, and would remove the odd fur cap he often wore, giving her a slight bow whenever he came in. She did appreciate that, though that didn’t mean she had any desire to engage in sex with him, or with any of the other men on the ship.

  “You can stop,” Lauren said. “You’ve taken another eleven seconds off your two-mile time.”

  He turned off the treadmill and stepped down, saying nothing as he grabbed a towel and mopped himself off. Lauren crinkled her nose as he tossed it into a sweat-scented hamper full of other towels. She was glad it made sense to perform the stamina and strength tests in the ship’s gymnasium, rather than in her laboratory. The idea of sweaty towels being flung onto the pristinely sanitized countertops would make any scientist shudder.

  As he grabbed his shirt, A27 did not engage in any of the idle chatter that usually flowed out of his mouth. Lauren had made several notes regarding his garrulousness—she made notes on everything regarding her specimens—so she found this odd.

  “Are you experiencing any discomfort?” she asked.

  A27 had been about to don his shirt, but he fumbled and dropped it. “What?”

  “Are you experiencing any inexplicable discomfort or side effects that I should know about?” she clarified.

  He stared at her, his mouth dangling open. Though he had attractive and symmetrical features, with a cleft chin, a straight nose, and clear green eyes, this particular expression wasn’t that flattering. If she hadn’t performed an IQ test as well as a battery of physical exams on him, she might have thought him daft.

  “No. Yes.” He plucked his shirt off the deck. “Sort of.”

  �
��Explain in detail, please.” Lauren had put away her tablet computer, but she withdrew it and unfolded it again, then turned on the recorder and held it toward his face.

  “Uh.” His stare shifted from her to it, and then he glanced over to the group of men working out with the weight machines on the other side of the gym. “Are you going to share what I say with the captain?”

  “With Captain Mandrake? Unlikely.”

  He looked relieved. Odd.

  Since she didn’t want him to falsely believe that everything would be kept confidential, she added, “I do, of course, intend to share all of my data with my colleagues in my field, and I’ve started writing articles that may appear in peer-reviewed journals. Given the incredible results we’re already seeing, I wouldn’t be surprised if journalists wished to access my work to share the findings with the popular press.” She sneered slightly at that idea. Journalists were as inevitable as death and taxes, and she accepted them as a necessary evil, but they so often misinterpreted the data, either intentionally, to sensationalize their stories, or out of pure ignorance.

  “Oh,” A27 mouthed. “You know, now that I think about it, there hasn’t been any discomfort. Or side effects.” He yanked his shirt over his head. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “A27,” she said, lifting a hand.

  “Sorry, I’m supposed to be on duty in a few minutes. I have to go.” He brushed past her, almost running for the door. He forgot to snatch his fur cap off the rack he had tossed it on when he entered, but he came back for it and plopped it on his head. The ringed tail of whatever creature it had once been twitched agitatedly between his shoulder blades as he jogged out.

  “Odd man,” Lauren said, and turned off the recorder.

  It occurred to her that she should have assured him that all of her reports to outside entities would be anonymized, with the men’s specimen names being used, rather than identifying data. She would have to correct what might have been a misconception on his part the next time he reported for testing.

  In the meantime, she had to prepare for an event far less pleasant than running tests and acquiring data. She had to get ready for her sister’s arrival. She wrinkled her nose again, and this time it had nothing to do with sweaty towels.