Mercenary Instinct (a science fiction romance) (34 page)

When the truck stopped, Viktor was the first
out again, his rifle in his hands. Ankari kept expecting someone to
tell them they had to leave their weapons behind. She couldn’t
imagine the men strolling into Felgard’s tree mansion—or inner
sanctum, whatever super villains had—fully armed.

A man in a less military version of the white
uniform walked out of the vehicle house. “This way, Captain
Mandrake.” He pointed toward one of the bridges, a wide one,
fortunately.

Viktor waited until Ankari and her friends
were out, along with the rest of his soldiers, before starting
across it. Ankari shouldn’t have looked over the edge, but she
couldn’t help it. A dizzying jumble of trunks stretched downward,
vines dangling from their branches and blocking much of the view,
but she glimpsed some ferns far, far below. A drop would be deadly,
no question.

“Walk precisely where I walk, Captain,” the
butler said when they came to a platform checkered with light and
dark squares of wood, each about two feet wide. He picked his way
across in some pattern only he knew.

Ankari thought Viktor might snort at this
ridiculousness, but he grabbed a head-sized pine cone and tossed it
on a random square. When it first struck, nothing happened, but
then it bounced onto another square, which flipped open from
invisible hinges. The cone disappeared, falling into the depths
below.

Without a word, Viktor strode after their
guide, hurrying to catch up so he wouldn’t lose the pattern. The
other men also rushed to follow, Ankari included.

Three steps in, her heel landed on an edge,
and a trapdoor fell open. Even without having her weight on it, the
sudden gap and view of the distant ground made her heart jump into
her throat. She dropped into a fight stance, more for stability and
balance than any thought of fighting, and let out a slow breath,
composing herself. She caught Viktor looking in her direction, his
eyes intense, as if he would have leaped across the intervening
squares, chancing trapdoors, if he’d needed to catch her. The
concern touched her, but she was relieved he hadn’t acted on her
fumble. If
he
were the one to fall...

She gulped. This wasn’t the place to
contemplate what he had come to mean to her.

A few more heels caught, causing trapdoors to
fall open, but the Mandrake soldiers kept their calm and reached
the other side without anything more disturbing happening. The
guide continued up a ramp to a new platform where he waited for
them. Viktor looked back across the checkerboard—trying to memorize
the safe route?—for a long moment before joining the man.

Several more men in white butler-style
uniforms waited on the new platform, each carrying a bucket in one
hand and a long fork in the other. Odd. A bridge stretched ahead of
them, lined by huge pots housing strange green plants the size of
trees. Their thick stems were more than six inches wide with vines
that twisted and writhed in the breeze—or maybe they were doing
that independently of the breeze? Trumpet-shaped flowers bigger
than a man’s head swayed with their movements. Ankari couldn’t
guess if they were genetically engineered, someone’s pet project,
or native plants. After all, the trees were enormous too.

At the end of the long bridge, a big building
with numerous conical wooden roofs rose up from an elevated
platform. Felgard’s mansion?

Once all of the soldiers were gathered on the
platform, the guide nodded to the men with the buckets. They
exchanged long looks with each other, took deep—bracing?—breaths
and inched out onto the bridge. Each man stabbed a fork into his
bucket, pulling out what appeared to be fresh raw steak. Ankari
stared, puzzled, until the trumpet-flowers rotated toward the men,
revealing sharp protrusions that she could only think of as teeth.
Fangs.

One of the flowers lunged, taking a proffered
steak with a strange undulation, not unlike a jaw snapping shut.
Others descended on the steak-carrying men. Ankari had heard of
plants that ate insects, but this was crazy.

“Hurry,” the guide said, waving for them to
follow. “They’re not sated for long.”

As the guide hustled forward, staying in the
middle of the bridge, his shoulders hunched inward, his nervousness
didn’t seem like it was for show. One of the men leading the way,
feeding the plants, jumped in surprise as a flower snapped close to
his arm. He thrust a steak at it, and the trumpet shifted,
swallowing the offering and leaving him to hurry onward.

Lamenting her lack of a weapon more now than
before, Ankari trotted after the mercenaries—they were all hustling
now, crowding the guide and the men doing the feeding. Those steaks
disappeared with alarming rapidity. A big serrated dagger had
appeared in Viktor’s hand, in addition to the rifle strapped across
his chest.

Halfway across the bridge, someone behind
them snarled, a mixture of rage and pain. One of the flowers had
clamped onto a mercenary’s shoulder. He jerked back, shooting at
the trumpet point blank. More plants reared and undulated toward
him, like sharks roused by the scent of blood. A huge flower from
the other side of the bridge darted in, clamping onto the
mercenary’s ribcage.

“Keep going, keep going,” Viktor said,
pushing Ankari and the others toward the far side even as he raced
back toward the attack. All of the men around the victim were
helping, shooting and slashing at the plants.

Ankari felt cowardly for running away, but
what could she do to help? A sidekick to the stem wouldn’t harm the
flexible foliage—though it might piss it off. A kick to its pot
might do more, but the huge containers must weigh hundreds of
pounds each. No, she didn’t know how to help. Not from within the
mess. Ankari raced through the closing tunnel of greenery, dodging
as a trumpet whipped toward
her
. Even though its attack
missed, the snap of fangs inches from her ear filled her with fear,
and her run turned into a dead sprint.

Lauren and Jamie made it to the platform
ahead of her, but she tumbled out on their heels, almost crashing
into one of the men with the buckets. Zookeepers, that’s what they
were.

A couple of raw steaks slumped in the bottom
of the closest man’s bucket. Ankari grabbed them and hurled them
into the swirling mess of plants and men. Not waiting to see if it
helped at all, she rushed from zookeeper to zookeeper, grabbing any
leftover steaks and flinging them onto the bridge. She didn’t pause
to watch the effect until she had thrown the last one. It spun
through the air, droplets of blood flinging, and splatted against
someone’s chest. Viktor’s. Oops.

The mercenaries had escaped from the fray,
leaving severed vines and scorched trumpets on the bridge boards.
Many of the plants still writhed, twitching in irritation like
cats’ tails, but they let the men finish crossing. Something about
those twitches made Ankari certain the plants were only saying,
“Until next time.” The man who had been attacked was dripping a
trail of blood as he walked, but his curled lips proclaimed his
anger more than they proclaimed his agony. Viktor’s people would
probably die before admitting to pain.

“Conscientious of you to assist your
captors,” the guide said mildly, standing next to Ankari’s
shoulder.

He was watching her through slitted eyes. The
zookeepers were, too, and she had the distinct feeling that they
would have been pleased if the mercenaries were all devoured on the
bridge, since Ankari’s team had made its way through.

Ankari mustered all the righteous indignation
that she could when she said, “Nobody deserves to die that way.”
Yes,
that
was the only reason she had helped...

“Felgard somewhere in this maze?” Viktor
asked, planting himself in front of the guide. “Or are you just
taking us on the grounds tour in the hope that we won’t make it to
our meeting with him?” He still carried the wicked serrated
blade—viscous green plant juices dripped from it—and looked like he
was contemplating a throat slitting.

The guide eased back a couple of steps. The
zookeepers disappeared down side bridges, none of which were lined
with plants.

“He is waiting for you inside.” The guide
waved to a ramp leading up to the large platform that held the
mansion. “This way.”

As the man scurried up the ramp, Viktor
bumped Ankari’s shoulder. With a smirk in his eyes, he murmured,
“If you throw raw meat at your friends, I wonder what you do to
enemies.”

He was gone, striding after the guide, before
Ankari could come up with a good answer.

“Be careful, Ankari,” Lauren whispered.
“These people might figure out beforehand that we’re not exactly
Mandrake Company prisoners here.”

“Was I supposed to let the mercenaries be
eaten by plants?” Ankari headed up the ramp.

“Maybe just some of them,” Jamie muttered,
walking behind her.

“A few more minutes and the ruse will be
over. One way or another.”

Not surprisingly, Viktor and everyone else
were funneled through a security screening tunnel before being
granted entrance to the big house. Bored-looking guards pointed
toward cubbies where guns, knives, and nail files—Keys carried one
of those—could be tossed into baskets and “picked up later,” or so
the promise went. Viktor hated disarming himself, but he had
expected it, so he unstrapped everything the security personnel
pointed at. He had hoped he might sneak his bone dagger
in—sometimes it didn’t show up on scans programmed to look for
higher tech weaponry, but they found it, as well. It took nearly a
half hour for his team to pass the checkpoint, and they left the
cubbies overflowing with gear.

The delay grated on Viktor’s nerves, but he
hoped it was irritating Felgard, as well. Irritated and impatient
enemies were more likely to make mistakes, after all.

The guide finally led them
to the front door of the mansion. Even though Viktor had seen the
blueprints to the Felgard estate, he expected to have to endure
another maze inside, perhaps with more ill-disguised booby traps.
Those plants had
not
been mentioned on the maps Thomlin had dug up. But the cool,
climate-controlled home was open and spacious, with large rooms,
high ceilings, and windows in every direction, providing views of
the forest on three sides and the ocean in the distance. The guide
led the squad past a computer area and a dining room, then up a
ramp to a circular chamber that took up the entire top floor. Here,
the windows were tinted and doubled as screens with financial news
and tickers scrolling down them. One displayed a talking head
reporting on an economic upheaval in the southern province of Novus
Earth. The sound was muted, but the words scrolled through the air
below.

A few white-uniformed guards were stationed
around the perimeter of the room, armed and fit. They gave Viktor
hard stares. Viktor thought his people could handle them, even
starting out unarmed, but the ten Prodigal 700 androids were
another matter. The stony-faced humanoids were fleet issue and
designed for combat—he’d seen them in action with the robots,
cyborgs, and droids units in the army. They could withstand short
bursts of laser fire and deflect knives and bullets; they could be
knocked down by physical force, but simply would simply rise up
again. The laser pistols holstered at their waists were a threat,
but so was the way they could rip human limbs and heads right from
their bodies.

Victor gave Sergeant Aster a long look as he
came up the ramp. Aster had been carrying the generator that his
team had modified. It was supposed to be able to affect anything
with a circuit board now, at least momentarily. It was back in the
cubby with all of their weapons, but Viktor wanted his sergeant to
know he still expected him to try to get to the equipment and use
it if a fight broke out.

Aster glanced at the androids and
grimaced—probably doubting if the generator would work on them—but
nodded once. Viktor doubted it would, too, but they could hope.

At the center of the room, a man sat in a
reclining chair, his legs tilted up off the ground, his arms
supported by fancy rests with data input devices at his fingers. A
holographic display hovered at the perfect angle to be readable by
the occupant. Though Viktor had only spoken to the reedy man
through the net, he recognized Felgard promptly. He wore the same
top hat tugged over his gray hair as before, along with the
old-fashioned spectacles with the bleeping light on the frame. A
black suit suggested he rarely strolled into the tropical warmth
outside of his home.

“
How’s that chair?” Tick
whispered to Striker. “In line with what the comic literature
suggests for a super villain’s furnishings?”

“
If it can shoot lasers out
of the armrests, it will be,” Striker whispered back. “I might add
it to Volume 237.”

Viktor took note of a balcony door behind
the fancy chair. It and the ramp they had walked up were the only
visible exits to the room, but the windows might be openable, as
well. He didn’t look at Ankari or her friends or the rest of his
men as they joined him in the room, fanning out and ready to fight,
whether they had their weapons or not, but he was aware of their
presence.

“
Welcome, Captain.” The
chair rotated, seemingly of its own accord, so that Felgard faced
the group. “I’m glad you weren’t overly delayed by your Sisson Hood
mission.”

“
The bounty hunters
attacking my ship and trying to raid my brig were more of a delay
than Hood.” Viktor didn’t bother subduing the growl in his voice;
Felgard would expect him to be irked about that.

“
It seems they inspired you
to come promptly though and that you’re unharmed. Mostly.” Felgard
frowned at Rowan, the man who had been maimed by those weird
predator plants. “That fellow is bleeding on the floor. Beaumont.”
Felgard flicked his fingers.