The Assassin's Salvation (Mandrake Company) (19 page)

“I’m tempted to try.” Ankari stalked to the door, which opened for
her
, even if it wouldn’t budge for him. She paused in the threshold, peered up and down the corridor, then looked back at him. “I know you’re already a suspect in this mess, but if you want to help me get to the bottom of this…” She spread her hand, palm up. “I guess I don’t have the power to promise much, but as long as Viktor’s alive and not drugged or something crazy, he
should
listen to me.” She leaned against the jamb, keeping the door open. Inviting him to escape?

Sergei blew out a slow breath, eyeing the corridor. If
anyone
caught him out there, he was going to get into trouble. More trouble. And if he went down and thumped on the sickbay guard, it was a foregone conclusion his absence would be noticed soon. But if Mandrake was in danger, either from this scheme in sickbay or from the person who had programmed the robot, then how could Sergei sit in his cabin and wait things out?

“Let’s go,” he said, stepping into the doorway with Ankari. He checked the corridor for himself, but the night sleep cycle had started, and traffic was sparse. If one was going to skulk around the ship, this was the time to do it. “Sickbay?” he asked.

“Let’s get Jamie first. I think she may be on house arrest too. If the sickbay door has been keyed to select personnel, we might need help getting through it. In case this doesn’t work.” She smiled and lifted an electronic key on a fob.

Sergei recognized it as the type of key that opened flex-cuffs, and it probably worked on some of the doors on the ship, as well. Belatedly, he wondered if Ankari actually
had
had the clearance necessary to open his cabin.

“She read all of the technical manuals for the
Albatross
at one point,” Ankari added.

“No particular reason?”

“Let’s just say that this isn’t our first jailbreak.”

Sergei didn’t need any more convincing to go off and find Jamie. Even if he was risking much, being out of his cabin, it reassured him that Ankari considered him an ally in this. Though he had to admit, he wasn’t quite sure why. Sergeant Hazel certainly hadn’t trusted him from the beginning, even if that might have revolved around some sense of protectiveness for Jamie.

“Out of curiosity,” Sergei said as they neared the end of the corridor of private quarters, “why don’t you think I’m a suspect?”

“Jamie trusts you, and I trust her.”

“Oh. Good.”

“I think Viktor trusts you too.”

Huh. Sergei wondered when a discussion had come up between them that involved him. They hadn’t been together much since his arrival.

“Also, when Jamie bends over and you catch yourself looking at her butt, you have the decency to look away.” Ankari gave him a quick smile and waved at the sensor in front of a door. “A lot of men on the ship don’t.”

“Oh,” he repeated, flushing. If only she knew how indecent so many of his thoughts were.

“And you got her out of that
spa
,” Ankari added more quietly, though by now, she was frowning at the door instead of looking at him. She waved at the sensor again. The faint ding of the inside chime was audible, but nothing happened.

Sergei flushed more deeply, wondering if Jamie and Ankari had engaged in a girl-to-girl talk about that event at some point.

When nobody answered the second chime, Ankari dug out the key again and laid it against a small sensor eye beneath the palm-activated lock panel. The door opened. The cabin was empty.

“Huh,” Ankari said. “I thought she had been ordered to stay in her room too. I guess we try sickbay without her.”

Sergei nodded and followed her, but he gave the cabin a long look over his shoulder as they left, hoping Jamie hadn’t gone somewhere that she might need thorns without him.

* * *

The robot had already been disassembled with the parts labeled and resting on a table in a machine shop on the lowest deck. The other two cleaning units from the shuttle bay were there, as well, though they hadn’t been taken apart, beyond what was normal for maintenance. A control CPU lay on one corner of the table, a diagnostic computer hooked up to it. Thomlin’s intelligence people had either given up on the project or had taken off for the day, because Jamie had the shop to herself. She was glad, because she didn’t want a bunch of engineers with far more experience than she glaring at her as she poked around.

She looked over their work first. They had removed a firing apparatus from the arm of the robot, and it lay next to the CPU. The shell of the arms, both of them, had been cast into a box beside the table. It didn’t take an expert to tell that the firing apparatus had been jury-rigged and wasn’t made from the robot’s typical parts. She scanned through the diagnostic program that had checked the CPU, frowning because nothing there indicated that it had been tampered with. According to its log, it thought it had been squirting soap out for cleaning the floors.

Jamie grabbed an Eytect unit from the wall, looped the frame over her ear, and called up the magnifying power of the lens. She picked up a pair of tweezers, resigning herself to going over everything in intimate detail. But she couldn’t help feeling she was simply repeating the same research that Thomlin’s team would have already done. And, given the degree to which the robot had been disassembled, they had been thorough, especially in regard to the CPU and the firing mechanism.

“But what about those arms?” she muttered, turning off the magnifying lens and poking into the box of discarded parts. They represented the shell of the robot, so she could see why they had been dismissed, but maybe someone hadn’t looked inside them as closely as they should have, especially if they had been focused on the CPU.

“Ah ha, what’s this?”

She squinted into the shell of the robot’s long upper arm. The firing mechanism might have been stripped out, but something was attached to the inside. She grabbed it, but a zap of electricity ran up her arm before she could think of removing it. She yelped, almost dropping the part in her haste to pull her hand out and shake away the pain.

“That is
not
typical.” She grabbed a blowtorch.

She cut a line around that small attachment, but felt uneasy, knowing that she was doing a little more than “research” now. The intelligence team would know someone had been poking around and might be irritated at the destruction. But the captain had given her permission to come down here, right? And Thomlin knew she was there. So what if nobody had given permission for blowtorch usage?

Once she had cut an incision around the piece, Jamie dumped it on the table, nudging it with a plastic scalpel to keep the current from running up through her arm again. Electricity crackled in the air at the intrusion, but it didn’t hurt her this time. She managed to flip over her new find. A secondary CPU. There weren’t any wires coming out of it, which was probably why the others hadn’t noticed it, but it could easily have the capacity for wireless control built in.

“Which explains why the robot’s main CPU didn’t know what its arm was up to…” But who had put it there? Unlike the firing mechanism, which looked like it had been made from two-dozen spare parts, including something that looked suspiciously like the end of a fork, the secondary CPU was sleek and new, clearly straight from a manufacturer. It had been purchased somewhere, and if she could locate the record, maybe…

She plugged into the network through the diagnostic computer and typed in the model number and manufacturer. Intent on her work, she didn’t hear the door open behind her.

“Well, well,” a man said, and Jamie jumped, spinning around. “What’s wandered into our little lab?”

Two
men had come in, and both were scowling at her, their fists on their hips. She recognized both of them, but they worked the night shift, and she hadn’t seen them around much. The speaker was a Corporal Delgado, and he worked intelligence and communications on the bridge at night. The second man, she didn’t know by name, but he had the build, brawn, and scars of one of the infantry soldiers, with one of those scars cutting across the side of his cheek, some old laser burn that must have come close to taking his head off. Maybe he helped with the intelligence department’s interrogations. If so, Jamie supposed she should be glad it had been Thomlin who had come to her cabin. This brute would do far more than take notes and sneeze at a plant.

“The captain said I could come down here,” Jamie said.

“Oh, really? The captain who’s laid up in sickbay and who hasn’t been seen since yesterday?”

“Yes… He called Thomlin right in front of me.”

“
Lieutenant
Thomlin,” the scarred man said, his scowl deepening.

“All right…” Jamie said, though she was tempted to point out that she was a civilian and not in their chain of command.

“What are you doing down here, Flipkens?” Delgado looked at the table, his face hardening. Maybe he had been the one working on the project earlier, and had noticed that things had been moved around.

“I found a secondary CPU in the arm sleeve,” Jamie said, hoping he might be intrigued by this new mystery and forget his ire over her presence. “I’m trying to figure out where it came from. The model number implies Novus Earth origins, a big manufacturer on the northern continent there. But it’s two years old, so it could have sat in a shop on a shelf anywhere between there and here for a while since then.”

Delgado’s shaggy brows rose, and he did appear interested. His buddy was another story. While Delgado had walked up to the table, the other mercenary had moved closer to Jamie and stood only a couple of feet from her now. He looked down at her, his expression one of hostility rather than the lust she sometimes got from the men. She wasn’t sure this was an improvement.

“It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice, girl,” Scar said.

“What’s that?” Jamie asked, thinking over Sergei’s defense moves in her head, deciding what she would do if he grabbed her wrist or her shoulder. Sweat had broken out on her hands, and she wiped them on her trousers and tried to stay calm. Nobody had touched her yet; this man was just looming intimidatingly. The mercenaries all did that well. It must be a job requirement.

“That you get a lot of special treatment around here.”

“Pardon?” Jamie eased a few steps closer to the table, though she would have preferred to ease herself out the door. But she hadn’t figured out who had purchased that chip yet. Delgado had looked at it, set it down, and was studying the readout from the diagnostic she had run on it. She needed the model number to have a chance at tracking down the buyer, and she hadn’t thought to memorize it, thus she needed the chip. And, afraid she was about to be booted out of the mechanics room, she wanted to take that chip with her.

“You heard me.” Scar followed her, not letting her have any space. “You’re cute and perky, and all the men fall over themselves to accommodate you. Lieutenant Sequoia and Lieutenant Chang have been teaching you everything they know, and for what? You never joined the company. You don’t have any loyalty to us. You’re not one of us.” He raised a finger and pointed it at her chest. “Might be, you’d sell us all out to the highest bidder.” This time he tapped her with his finger, prodding her in the shoulder. “Might be, you already sold out the captain. Or worse.”

“I’m trying to help the captain,” Jamie said, though she doubted the thug would listen to reason. Delgado was still studying the readout, so she laid her hand on the table next to the chip. She would risk another shock to slip it into a pocket and get out of there.

“I’ll bet you are,” Scar growled.

He tried to grab her shoulder, but Jamie skittered back, evading the grasp. Unfortunately, she bumped into the table and couldn’t go as far as she would have liked. But she was right next to the chip now. And Delgado wasn’t paying attention. She laid her hand on the chip, gritting her teeth as the electrical charge crackled up her arm, and slipped it into her pocket.

She tried to watch Scar while she did this, but he lunged for her again, and she wasn’t fast enough to get away. This time, he caught her around the wrist. The move she had practiced with Sergei jumped into her mind, and she performed it more by reflex than by conscious thought. She stomped on his instep at the same time as she twisted her wrist to escape his grip. She grabbed his arm and lunged in close, turning her back toward his hip. He probably wouldn’t have been startled against a male opponent, but he must not have expected her to step in—he stumbled and didn’t react quickly enough. She crouched and shoved her weight back into him, even as she grabbed his arm with both hands to haul him over her shoulder, throwing him into the table.

He was a good fifty pounds heavier than Sergei, and she almost didn’t get him over her—and the effort elicited a staggering torque of pain from her back—but the table made the landing particularly impressive. He smashed onto it, and robot innards flew everywhere.

Delgado cursed, grabbing at the diagnostic computer to keep it from being hurled off the table. Jamie didn’t know what the repercussions for her move would be, and she wasn’t going to stick around to find out. She sprinted out the door, caromed off the corridor wall, and raced for the nearest ladder well. She tossed her comm-patch on the floor, so she couldn’t be tracked easily, then ran for the grow room. She doubted it would take the company long to find her if they put their resources into looking—the computer could locate people by more than comm-patches—but if she had a quiet half hour, she thought she could solve her problem.

Jamie scooted into the brightly lit grow room and followed a wall filled with flowering and fruiting vines, ducked around complex hydroponics systems and berry bushes in soil-filled pots, then squeezed into a corner behind a grove of banana and plantain trees. She sat on the floor, her back to an empty spot in a wall otherwise occupied with a vertical lettuce garden. She yanked out her tablet and plugged in the chip number, crossing her fingers that the answer was on the network, and further crossing her fingers that nobody would walk in on her before she finished researching. She had already spent time in the brig and had no interest in returning to it.