Mercenary Courage (Mandrake Company) (14 page)

Frowning, he leaned closer and lifted one of the man’s arms, pushing back the sleeve. A pair of puncture marks marred the pale skin on top of his wrist. They did not appear large enough to have killed a person or even to have done much damage. Maybe one of the animals in the store had escaped and bitten him.

Viktor released the arm. “That had started to heal. I doubt it’s what killed him.”

Ankari swallowed. “You think he died from the... whatever it is that killed the other people?”

As far as she had heard, all of the deaths had occurred in this shopping area around the atrium.

“I haven’t seen the other bodies,” Viktor said, “and the news hasn’t shared details, at least it hadn’t yesterday. I need to comm the ship.”

Right. They had been too busy with other activities last night to watch the news. Viktor’s head turned toward the far end of the aisle. He held up a finger and walked in that direction, not making a sound as he drew closer to the front of the store.

“Sure, leave me alone with the body,” Ankari grumbled.

She was inclined to leave the corpse and return to the rat hunt, but she wondered if this might have been the storeowner. That could explain why the shop had been closed. Or maybe it was another customer who had wandered in and died, and the owner had seen it happen. After that, he or she might have locked up the store and fled, afraid of the contagion spreading.

To search for identification, Ankari made herself pat down the cold figure—Viktor was right in that the man had been dead for some time. Alas, not many people carried purses or wallets in this day and age. She didn’t find a tablet, either.

“Ankari,” came Jamie’s whisper from the back of the aisle. “Why are you groping a dead man?”

“Because Viktor and I are having a fight, and he wouldn’t do it for me.” Ankari pulled out her tablet, unfolded it, and found the billing program for their business.

“I got the countdown on the alarm to stop. It’ll still go off if it starts up again, but my program reset the clock, so the security system thinks it’s three hours ago. And a fight? Really?” Jamie sounded surprised. She and Lauren shuffled down the aisle, though they stopped several paces from the body.

Ankari wished she had not said anything. It had been a flippant comment to a flippant question, not anything she had wanted to discuss here. But Lauren and Jamie were staring at her in curiosity, as if the possibility of a couple’s brawl was more important than a dead man.

“Sort of a fight,” she admitted. “He thinks we should move our lab and business off the ship, so we’re not in danger.”

“Leave Sergei?” Jamie blurted.

“Leave the men I’ve already implanted with the test microbiota?” Lauren’s protest was equally heartfelt.

“We’re still discussing it. Perhaps you can voice your concerns to him individually, so he knows I’m not the foolish one. Or the only foolish one.” Ankari picked up the dead man’s arm and, trying not to feel like a ghoul, lined up the floating scanner on her tablet to read the subcutaneous banking chip most adults had in a fingertip or palm.

“You’re not charging him for something, are you?” Jamie asked. “I think it’s too late for Lauren’s gut bugs to help him.”

“I’m charging him a penny, which I will refund, in order to get his name and address. With that, we’ll be able to figure out if he’s the store owner. And if he’s not, we’ll be able to figure out where he came from.”

“When did you get appointed as an investigator for this case?” Lauren asked dryly, running a hand along the shelves and walking past the body. This aisle did not contain any live animals, only feed and housing options for cats, ferrets, and rodents.

“When a quarantine made it so we couldn’t leave when we want to.”

Lauren turned at the intersection and disappeared.

“Keep an eye on her, will you, Jamie?”

Ankari stood up to read the data file that came up along with a bill asking for the man’s signature. Ralph Albert Ackerman’s signature, to be specific. He was from Anchortown on Sturm, a populated and fairly civilized moon, especially for one so close to the rim. She wouldn’t say the same for Drang, where she and her team had been chased through the jungle by hurricanes and raptors, but Sturm was an unlikely place for a new virus to appear. Of course, viruses could mutate and appear even in highly sanitized population centers, she supposed. If Lauren hadn’t run off to the mouse aisle, she could have asked.

She typed in a search for Ackerman, heading toward the storefront to look for Viktor while it ran. Maybe Ackerman had been a part of an exploratory mission on some remote moon, or some scientist studying a deadly strain that had escaped from containment. Something like that should come up on the news. Ankari wished she knew the names of the other people who had died. She was about to tell the tablet to search for updates on the station quarantine and victims, but a loud thud from the front of the store made her jump.

Someone must have struck the barrier with a fist. Even more people were visible in front of the store now, with lights shifting back and forth. The force field must have been soundproof, because Ankari couldn’t hear whatever the crowd might be talking about. She was surprised the security men had not come up with a way to handle them yet, but when they did, that could put an end to her team’s investigation, so she would hope for ineptitude. Just not so much ineptitude that it allowed that bomb to go off.

“Over here,” came Viktor’s voice from the checkout counter in the front corner of the store. Getting there without being seen through the barrier might be tricky. She couldn’t see him, so he must be crouching behind the L-shaped counter.

Ankari turned off her flashlight, letting the glow of those lanterns out front guide her, and took a roundabout way, ducking to move past pens of gerbils and terrariums full of giant spiders. She passed a couple of freezers of meat and found Viktor crouching in front of a vault embedded in the wall, only the closed door visible.

“Are we going to rob the place of its solid aurum bars?” Ankari asked.

The heavy-looking contraption, with its gold inlay and intricate etchings, reminded her more of an old-fashioned bank vault one might have found in the Old West on historic Earth rather than a modern repository for caching valuables. Some people in the outer core
did
keep physical gold instead of relying on the digital banking system, but it seemed an unlikely choice for a pet store owner on Midway 5. It did have an unusual, mottled green surface, as if the vault was made from some plant material, rather than metal.

“No.” Viktor touched a label on the door.

In the gloom, Ankari could not make out the lettering, so she risked her flashlight again. The counter should hide them, but she was aware of the milling crowd on the other side of the barrier, just a few feet away. Another thump came from that direction. What were those people doing? It wasn’t as if they could knock down an energy door with a battering ram.

Dog and Cat Collars
, the label on the vault read.

“The storekeeper must keep some gold and diamond ones in there,” Ankari said. During her brief business stint selling gadgets for detangling dog and cat fur, she had come across a few clients with fancy pet couture. Diamonds and gold had been rare—all right, nonexistent—in the Novus Earth neighborhood she had plied her trade in, but she had heard of such things.

“Are you... interested in buying one?” Ankari couldn’t imagine what here would have captured his attention. “For one of Lauren’s lab rats?”

Viktor gave her a sidelong look, then knocked on the door. Before Ankari could ask if he expected an answer, a frenzied knocking came from within the vault. She stumbled backward, her shoulders thumping against shelves of bags and boxes under the counter.

“Someone’s
in
there?” she asked.

Viktor placed his Lock Master against the door, next to a sensor pad. “I don’t think this will be powerful enough to open a vault door. We may have to find a laser cutter.” He tapped at the alloy with his fingernail. “A big one. This is reinforced.”

“
We
have to find a laser cutter? I’m all for helping people to escape from vaults, especially ones that don’t look large enough to fit a person in, but perhaps we should leave this for the authorities.”

“As you’re doing with the health investigation?” Viktor nodded to the display hovering above her tablet.

“Er.” Ankari had not wanted to end the search early, so she had left it open with the program running. “Running searches doesn’t involve breaking and entering.”

Viktor twitched an eyebrow toward the back door.

“Much,” Ankari amended.

Thumps came from within the vault again. Her gut twisted at the idea of someone being locked up in there, especially if this had happened a day or more ago. How long had the store been closed? Lauren hadn’t come by here until yesterday, as far as Ankari knew. During their first two weeks on the station, the business had been busy servicing clients, so there hadn’t been much time for field trips.

“I found them,” Lauren said, walking up the aisle along the wall toward them, a box in her hands, one that presumably held a sufficient supply of Mercrusean Grays.

Ankari was about to tell her to crouch down, so the people on the balcony would not see her, but Lauren paused to peer at some cages.

“Chimpanzees, oh. As omnivorous frugivores, their diets are different enough from humans that they wouldn’t be ideal test candidates, but it could be interesting, given their other similarities to humans.”

“You’re
not
doing tests on chimps. They’re
too
similar to humans.” Ankari didn’t like that the mice and rats were used for tests, either, but they had such short lives that it bothered her less.

“You didn’t object to the fact that I’ve started clinical trials on some of the mercenaries,” Lauren said.

“What’s your point?”

That earned her a baleful look, but Viktor’s lock-picking tool bleated dyspeptically and regained his attention. Shaking his head, he removed it.

“The lock is too sophisticated. We’ll have to—”

A
bzzzt-zap
sounded, and light flooded the pet shop. At first, Ankari thought someone else had come in the back door and turned on the lights, but as soon as shouts and confused cries came from the front of the store—from the
balcony
—she realized what had happened. Someone had figured out a way to bring down the force field.

“We have to get out of here,” Ankari whispered, pointing toward the aisle where Lauren waited. If they stayed low, maybe they could all sneak to the back wall that way, and eventually out the door.

“Weapons down,” someone barked on the balcony.

A clang came from the middle of the store, something bouncing off the end of an aisle.

“Down,” Viktor barked.

He buried Ankari, covering her body with his, before she could react. An explosion roared from the center of the store, brilliant white light flooding every crevice. Even with her eyes squinted shut and even with Viktor on top of her, Ankari sensed the brightness. Heat and noise followed the light, the roar pounding her eardrums like hammers. The smell of something burning flooded her nostrils. Something struck Viktor, because he jerked above her. He didn’t move his body from hers, though.

The light dwindled. The noise, too, or maybe her ears had been damaged and she simply could not hear it anymore.

Viktor knelt back, then pulled her up. He pointed toward the aisle behind the counter, what remained of it. The rows of shelves had fallen, knocked toward the walls. Though black dots floated through her eyes, Ankari spotted Lauren and Jamie through thick smoke hazing the air. They crouched at the far end, their arms protecting their heads.

“Go,” Viktor whispered in her ear. Or maybe he yelled it, and a whisper was all that her stunned drums could hear.

Knowing she had to check on her friends, Ankari crawled toward the aisle. She managed to rise to her feet, though her legs wobbled beneath her. It might not matter now, but her senses told her to stay out of sight, so she hunkered low. Not that anyone was likely to run in—flames leapt from the center of the store, and shrapnel was still falling. Or maybe those were ceiling panels. Items kept banging to the floor all over the place. The smoke hanging in the air ought to hide her somewhat, but it tickled her throat, and she struggled not to cough.

Ankari had to drop to her hands and knees to make it down the aisle beneath the fallen shelving unit that leaned against the wall. As she inched along, pushing away everything from warped cages to bags of feed on the floor, she grew aware of terrified screeches and howls. She didn’t know what that fire was burning or how quickly someone would show up to put it out, but the usual station sprinklers full of flame-extinguishing chemicals had not gone off yet. She started opening the cages that were along her way, in part to free the animals so they could save themselves and in part because a flood of animals rushing out of the store might buy her team a few more minutes to escape undetected.

A second clang sounded, identical to the first, and fresh terror flooded Ankari’s limbs. Another bomb?

A crunch sounded behind her, and she turned in time to see Viktor racing out from behind the counter. But he didn’t crawl into the aisle with her—he disappeared, heading for the center of the store. Toward the source of the clang. What was he thinking?

“An...kari?” came a groan from ahead of her. Jamie.

As much as Ankari wanted to help Viktor with whatever he was doing, she had to help her friends out of here. Viktor could take care of himself—she had to trust in that.

When she reached the others, Lauren was kneeling, her rat box clutched to her chest, her eyes wide. She appeared uninjured, but Jamie was grabbing her head. Even in the smoky air, the blood staining her hand and her pale hair was visible. Ankari slipped her arm around Jamie’s back. With the toppled shelves overhead, there was not room to stand, but she steered her toward the back door.

“This way,” she said, jerking her chin toward the exit for Lauren’s sake. As smart as her microbiologist was, she was not the quickest to react in a battle situation.