Mercenary Instinct (a science fiction romance) (7 page)

The force field dropped, and she was out of
time to second-guess herself.

Striker extended his arm, as if he were
inviting her to stroll out to a ballroom floor with him. Right.

Ankari licked her lips and stepped out. She
resisted the urge to look back at her partners with a
what-have-I-done expression on her face. Instead, she laid her hand
on Strider’s arm and smiled up at him. He reactivated the force
field and led her past empty cells and to the door at the end of
the corridor.

“Gotta sign her out,” said the soldier at the
desk. He was watching a movie on his tablet—maybe he hadn’t been
all that entertained by Striker’s attempts to woo a prisoner after
all.

“The captain said—” Striker started, but the
soldier interrupted him.

“I don’t care what the captain said. I’m not
getting busted on account of your oversexed tent pole. Gotta sign
her out.” He flipped from his movie to a signature form and held it
up for Striker.

Ankari was beginning to wonder what the
captain
had
said. It seemed to have changed from the time
Striker had first entered to now. Rewriting the conversation in his
head as he went along, was he?

Striker shrugged and scribbled his name with
his finger, then led Ankari out the door. He slung an arm around
her and started groping her as they walked. She hoped it wasn’t far
to his quarters, but if it was... she let her hand dangle close to
her pocket.

“This is going to be fun,” he promised.

“Can’t wait,” she mumbled.

“Really?” He stopped in front of an alcove
with a ladder going up, his eyes burning like he might strip her
down right there.

“No, I can wait.” The man was literal, wasn’t
he? “I want the romance. The music, remember? And your comics.”

“Oh.” He brightened, then stepped onto the
bottom rung. “Yes, I just drew a new panel. You’ll like it.”

He was an artist? She couldn’t even imagine
what he might draw. Something lurid, probably.

“Follow me,” he said.

Between one eye blink and the next, she
realized he was giving her the opportunity she had been hoping for.
While he was climbing, he wasn’t holding her and couldn’t see what
she was doing. She lunged up the rungs behind him to catch him
before he clambered out on the next level. Fortunately, he was
going up two levels. They were halfway to the top deck when she got
close enough to stab him in the butt with the needle. She jammed it
in without mercy, knowing it had to go through a couple of layers
of clothes and also knowing that he would jerk away as soon as he
felt it. She pressed the button that released the drug.

“What was that?” he roared, spinning on the
ladder and staring down at her.

“My fingernails,” Ankari said, trying to hide
the syringe from view and hoping the sedative kicked in quickly. “I
saw your hard butt and couldn’t resist—”

He dropped down, smacking her arm away. “That
wasn’t any fingernail.”

Her knuckles banged against the side of the
ladder well, and the syringe flew from her hand. It bounced off a
rung, dropped a floor and a half to the deck below, and rolled into
the light spilling in from the corridor.

“You drugged me?” Striker demanded, taking
another step down and reaching for her hair.

And that was her cue to run.

Ankari let go a hair’s breadth before he
could grab her hair, skimming down the ladder and dropping to the
deck. She lunged out into the corridor. Fortunately, it was late
enough that nobody else was around. She thought of sprinting in a
random direction, but plastered herself against the wall instead.
If she fled, she risked running into someone.

Striker barreled out of the ladder well. He
must have expected her to run—he started to sprint, then stopped
himself with a jerk, his arms thrown out for balance, and she got
her split-second of surprise. She launched a foot at his exposed
torso. The sidekick slipped under his arm, hammering him in the
ribs. She’d thrown all of her weight behind it, but he was so big
that he didn’t even stagger to the side. He might have a bruise in
the morning, but that didn’t keep him from lunging at her.

She evaded his long arms by dropping to the
floor and launching a second kick as she fell, this one taking him
in the side of the knee. It affected him more than the blow to the
ribs had. There was less muscle to protect the joint, and his leg
crumpled. He didn’t lose his balance and go down, but he did pitch
forward for a moment, having to grab the wall to support
himself.

Ankari rolled backward in a somersault and
came up on her feet, facing him. He glowered at her, rage blazing
from his eyes.

Anytime, that sedative could start working
anytime...

Striker lunged at her. Were his movements the
tiniest bit slower than before? She didn’t know his norm and
couldn’t be sure, but she had time to leap back, throwing up a
block to deflect his grasping fingers.

“Stop moving, you tricky bitch,” Striker
snarled. “I’ll—” He lunged again, punching toward her face.

Expecting it, Ankari leaped back again. This
time, he had been feinting, and he followed his jab with a rush and
a fist toward her stomach. Under normal circumstances, his speed
and strength might have gotten through her defenses, but he was
definitely moving more slowly. He almost stumbled over his own feet
too. She blocked both attacks and threw a heel strike at his groin.
Her first thought had been to go for the ribs, but she had already
felt how much muscle plated them. The groin was a different
story.

He yowled, and she winced at the noise. She
needed to shut him up somehow, or she would never get her chance in
the library. Soldiers would be streaming out into the corridor any
moment.

But the sedative finally kicked in, and he
didn’t get another yowl out. He was clutching his groin with one
hand and reaching uselessly toward her with the other when his eyes
rolled back in his head. He crumpled to the floor.

Though Ankari’s instincts were to run, to get
space between her and the commotion and who cared about the
direction, she took fifteen seconds to pat him down first. If he
had a tablet on him, she wouldn’t need to find a library. But he
didn’t have anything in his pockets besides folding knives.

Ankari thought about pulling him into the
ladder well or maybe even a cabin, if she could get a door to open,
so she would have more time before he was found, but he was well
over two hundred pounds and too heavy for her to drag far. She
dared not waste any more time, so she left him as he was and ran
down the corridor, glancing at doors. Some had labels, some didn’t.
This level had shuttle bays, weapons and sensor stations, and cargo
bays, rather than cabins—that might explain why nobody had burst
out to check on the noise yet. More out of curiosity than anything
else, she tried to open the shuttle bay door. She couldn’t leave
without her comrades, nor did she have any idea how to fly some
random mercenary craft, but it would be good to know if she
could
get into that room. Alas, the doors were keyed to
people’s palms, and it didn’t budge. Would
any
of the doors
open for her? What if she found her library and couldn’t get in?
Like the security pad in the brig, this one had that little sensor
below the palm pad. Maybe she could find the key that activated
it.

She reached the end of the corridor and was
on the verge of running back to the brig and trying to sedate that
guard who’d had a tablet when she spotted a door labeled
“recreation.” That was probably for drinking and gambling and
watching movies, but it might also have the computer she longed to
hijack.

She reached for the palm pad next to the
door, dreading a rejection, but the entrance opened before she
touched the panel. “I guess anyone is allowed to recreate,” she
mumbled, slipping inside.

The room inside stood empty. Ankari had to
weave around pool tables, floor dart lanes, and through an aerial
star-fighting game flashing its lights in the air, but she spotted
what she sought. A bank of computer stations waited on the far
wall, and she jogged over, sitting down at one. A hologram flared
to life in the air above the desk and waited for a voice prompt or
physical commands. Glad for a familiar operating system, she swiped
at the air, bringing up the mail program, and she logged into
GalNet. She tapped her fingers on the desk, and a keyboard flared
to life. She sent a hasty plea to her hacker friend, Fumio,
explaining her situation in as few sentences as possible, then
pulled up information on Felgard at the same time as she located a
copy of her wanted poster. They were a ways out from the core
planets, so the net wasn’t very fast, and she drummed her fingers
with impatience as she waited for her search requests to be
answered. She was all too aware of her limited time. More than
once, she second-guessed herself, wondering if she should be doing
something better with these minutes of freedom, something that
might lead her to an escape. But where could she go? Even if she
could
acquire and fly a shuttle, her options would be
limited if they weren’t close to a planet.

The information on Felgard came up, and she
skimmed through it, trying to commit as much to memory as she
could.

Far too soon, the hiss of a door sliding open
sounded behind her. Ankari kept reading, kept devouring
information, until a hand landed on her shoulder. She held her open
hands out and turned, expecting a security guard. But it was the
captain. His hair was tousled, and he was wearing a rumpled
short-sleeve sleep shirt. She stared down at the corded muscles of
his forearm beneath black tattoos of leaves and thorns stretching
from his wrists to his elbows, and belatedly realized she should
have hunted around and found the syringe before leaving Striker.
She could have jabbed him with a dose of sedative, or something
more toxic if she could have found it. The bastard deserved it.

Someone shifted in the doorway. Ah, there
were the security guards. The syringe probably wouldn’t have
mattered when there was backup so close.

Ankari lifted her gaze to the captain’s eyes,
wondering what she would see there. Irritation, most likely.
Especially if he had been woken from sleep.

“You seem to have left your date,” he said
blandly.

For reasons she could only guess at, he
seemed more... amused than irritated. It flustered her. Perhaps
because he wasn’t wearing all of his weapons—or his habitual
glower—she had a hard time remembering that this was the man who
had destroyed her ship. Or maybe it had something to do with the
way that shirt so nicely hugged his form. Who had dreamily pointed
out he was handsome? Jamie? It was true, especially without the
glower.

Ankari lifted her chin, determined not to
acknowledge any attraction—and determined to stop looking at his
nicely outlined pectoral muscles. “He had roaming hands. I find
that unacceptable on a first date.”

The captain snorted. “All right, woman. Back
to your cell.” He took her elbow and pointed her toward the door.
His grip wasn’t harsh, but it
was
firm. She would have to be
content with the information she had gathered, because she wasn’t
getting any more tonight.

* * *

Viktor yawned but kept his eyes focused on
the video feedback from the brig. He wasn’t going back to bed until
he figured out how his prisoner had acquired Dr. Zimonjic’s
syringe. Viktor had been standing there, watching the women the
whole time that medical treatment had been going on. He’d already
scoured the footage from the corridor and, even though there
weren’t recording devices in the ladders, had gotten the gist of
what had happened in there from Strider’s outcries of rage, which a
nearby camera had picked up. What had happened after, out in the
corridor, had surprised him. Not the fact that Striker had been
bested by a woman—Hazel often took him down on the wrestling mat,
because he had a tendency to underestimate the fairer sex—but the
fact that this scheming little entrepreneur knew mashatui, a
martial art that had developed on the world of Spero. Spero had
been destroyed—wiped clean of life and left a radioactive
mess—twenty years ago, much as his own Grenavine had been
annihilated. Both planets had been used as examples for the rest of
the system, a blunt, terrifying, and devastating way to end
rebellions that had been centuries in the making. Now everyone
knew, those who defied GalCon suffered total eradication.

Questioning his assessment, Viktor had played
that short fight in the corridor countless times, watching the
flowing style of her kicks and blocks. It was that flow that made
the martial art unique and memorable. For centuries before the
rebellion, Spero had been ruled by a pair of finance lords who had
treated the populace like indentured servants, allowing little to
no freedom. Among other things, they hadn’t been permitted to carry
weapons, nor had they been allowed to study unarmed combat. The
oppressed citizens, always planning for a day when they might
overthrow their unwanted rulers, had practiced an ancient martial
art on the sly, adapting it so it looked more like a dance than a
style of combat, turning it into something their rulers wouldn’t
recognize as a means of attack and defense, even if they were
watching the katas being performed. There were precedents, some
that dated back to Old Earth, but mashatui was the only living
style of this type, as Viktor well knew; every unarmed combat
system had been drilled into him during his military training. And
even mashatui was barely considered “living.” Not when so few of
Spero’s inhabitants remained.

Markovich couldn’t have been more than a few
years old when the planet was destroyed. Did this mean her family
had left before the devastation? That a father or mother had
trained her? Viktor hadn’t heard of the art being taught in
schools.