The Mandala Maneuver (13 page)

Something had awakened him, though, some prickling of unease. No, his people were not precisely psychic, but they were sensitive…and he could feel the edges of negative emotions or intentions or whatever one wanted to call them intruding against his consciousness.

He sat up in bed, glad that he had put his trousers on over the strange Gaian underwear. His tunic and robes remained where he had left them, draped over the foot of the bunk. Moving quietly, as much to avoid disturbing Alexa as to keep from alerting anyone or anything that might be lurking outside, he reached into the bundle of clothing and drew out the pulse pistol. It was a weapon of last resort, but he knew he would not hesitate to use it to protect Alexa and himself. The Gaians sneered at the Zhore behind their backs, calling them pacifists, as if that word were an insult, but Lirzhan did not take it as such. A peaceful solution was always best, but if one did not present itself, then so be it.

A few soft, cat-like paces, and he was out the door and down the corridor. As a precaution, Alexa had locked the door to the station and closed the storm shutters, so Lirzhan guessed it would be almost impossible for any wild creatures to gain entry. The so-called “civilized” kind of creature, however….

Pulses of negative energy beat against him as soon as he entered the front room. They had shut off the lights in here before retiring for the night, and so the glowing cherry-red circle of metal around the lock told him something was very, very wrong.

He dropped into a crouch at once, using the table where they had eaten their evening meal as cover. Peering between its legs, he saw a flare of sudden light, then heard a clank as the lock came free from the door and fell to the floor. Almost at the same time the door itself swung inward, and human males dressed in dark clothing entered the room, weapons drawn. Although he could not read their thoughts directly, he still felt the malice radiating from them, the intention to kill whoever they found.

Irzhaan, forgive me for the lives I must take.

The first pulse bolt hit the lead man in the head, and he fell at once. His companions swore, and began to fire back in Lirzhan’s direction. Luckily, though, the table took the brunt of the damage, and he shot through its legs, aiming upward, hitting another of the men in the stomach. The intruder dropped to his knees, cursing and shrieking in pain, while the lone man still standing continued to fire at Lirzhan. Bits and pieces of the table and its surrounding chairs began to explode outward under the assault, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hide there much longer.

“Hey — were you looking for me?” Alexa called out, and the man immediately turned to fire in her direction. She dropped to the floor, and Lirzhan took advantage of her attacker’s brief distraction to shoot him again twice — first in the knee so he stumbled and lost his balance, and then right through the neck. He slumped to the floor and lay there, unmoving.

“You all right?” she asked Lirzhan, although she did not come to check on him. Instead, she went directly to the man with the stomach wound.

“He’s still — ”

Lirzhan had meant to say “armed” but didn’t have enough time, as she apparently spotted the man’s dropped pulse pistol and kicked it away from his desperately straining fingers, then bent over and picked it up herself. She pointed it at the man’s head. “Talk.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said, clutching his stomach and groaning.

“Well, that’s not very professional,” she said, then looked over at Lirzhan. “Check the other ones — see if they’re carrying any identification.”

He pushed himself up from the wreckage of the table and chairs, and went over to the last man he’d shot, as he was closest. Pulse wounds tended to self-cauterize, so there wasn’t a great deal of blood. Even so, Lirzhan was not exactly comfortable being so close to the aftermath of that brief round of violence.

But as he did not wish to appear squeamish in front of Alexa, he squatted down next to the dead man and began going through his pockets. All of them were empty, although he did have a second pistol still in its holster and several spare battery packs attached to his belt.

“We’re — not — amateurs,” the gut-shot man mumbled, his eyes turning glassy. Going into shock, perhaps?

“Well, I’m not so sure about that, considering a couple of diplomats just got the drop on you,” Alexa replied coolly. One would have thought she was facing him across a negotiating table while wearing her most tailored suit, instead of standing there in men’s underwear and a T-shirt that almost covered up the briefs, the shirt was so long on her.

“Blow me.”

Lirzhan reflected on the curiosities of human invective while going over to the first man he’d shot and performing a similar inspection. Nothing there, either.

Despite his deteriorating state, the wounded man couldn’t seem to stop staring at Lirzhan as he went about these tasks. “So that’s what you look like under those robes. Freaky.”

While he himself really didn’t care what the mercenary — or whatever he was — thought of his appearance, apparently Alexa did not share those sentiments.

“He’s a darn sight better-looking than you,” she said coldly. Then she knelt down next to him and placed the muzzle of the pulse pistol against his temple. “You might want to start talking.”

“Don’t have anything to say.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” Lirzhan said, as he had completed his search of the second man and found nothing. “Who sent you?”

“Santa Claus.”

The words had no meaning for him, and Lirzhan shot a puzzled glance at Alexa. She scowled, saying, “Kids’ stories. He’s just messing with us.”

The man grinned, although his breath was beginning to rattle in his throat. It was clear enough that he required immediate medical attention. The station probably had a first aid kit of some kind, more extensive than the rudimentary supplies included with the emergency bag, but Lirzhan doubted that would be enough to save their attacker. No, he needed surgery and a real medical team…both of which were in short supply on Mandala.

Then Alexa got down on her knees and began rifling through the man’s pockets with her left hand while keeping the pulse pistol pointed at his temple. Lirzhan could feel the pulse of animosity before the fallen mercenary even moved. The man reached up, trying to grab Alexa’s wrist. She started and pulled the trigger, sending a bright green flash of energy directly into his temple at close range. His head fell back against the laminate floor with a sharp
crack
.

“Dammit,” she said softly, and got to her feet.

Despite her studiously casual expression, Lirzhan could tell she was shaken. “Are you all right?”

She appeared to ponder the question for a few seconds, as if she were not entirely sure what he meant. Then she replied, “Well, I just shot a man in the head. It’s not really something I’ve done before, so I suppose I’m trying to process what it means.”

At once Lirzhan went to her and took her in his arms. For the briefest of seconds she remained stiff, not allowing herself to relax into his embrace. But then she buried her head against his chest and took a deep breath.

“I probably shouldn’t have shot him.”

“You did the right thing,” Lirzhan said, and reached up to stroke her hair down to its tangled braid. “He was trying to take the gun from you so he could shoot you. You were only protecting yourself.”

She lifted her head and stared into his eyes. Her own looked strained, the pupils dark, dilated, but he did not see anything worse than that in her gaze. “I thought the Zhore were pacifists.”

“We are, up to a point. There is nothing wrong with defending oneself.”

“You continue to surprise me every day, Lirzhan.” Very gently she pulled away from him and surveyed the room, taking in the bodies of their three downed assailants. “I doubted they walked here. So let’s see what they’ve left for us, since they didn’t oblige us by carrying any ID or anything else to help us figure out who they are.”

“Would you rather not wait until morning?”

“No,” she said shortly, going to the ruin of the door. Well, the door itself was more or less intact, but with a hole where the combination lock/latch had been located, it wasn’t going to do much good in keeping anything…or anyone…out. She pushed it open an inch and peered outside, clearly making sure the men hadn’t left a companion outside before she moved out of the station.

He followed her out the door. The air was cool and damp, and although it was still very dark beyond the pool of light provided by the security light next to the door, he could feel the hush around the world that seemed to suggest dawn was not far off.

“Jackpot,” Alexa said, hurrying over to the skimmer parked a few yards off among the trees.

It looked identical to the one that had been shooting at them several days earlier, and he guessed the men they had dispatched were those same unknown assailants. He could see that it was a small open-cockpit craft intended for low-level atmospheric flight, with wheels and heavy tires for transport over rough terrain and a retractable roof. Most likely the tires and wheels tucked up into the undercarriage when the vehicle was in the air.

“This would have come in handy a few days ago,” Lirzhan remarked, as she opened the door and climbed inside. “But as it certainly won’t get us off-planet, I am not sure how much good it is going to do us now.”

She glanced over at him, and even in the gloom he could see the lift of her eyebrows. “No, of course it won’t get us off-planet, but it’ll get us back to wherever they came from. They’ve got to have a base of operations somewhere. I’ll just pull up the trip log and backtrack us to where they came from. They’ll have left a larger ship capable of interstellar flight there.”

“And do you know how to pilot such a ship?” he asked gently, not wishing to quash her enthusiasm too badly.

“No.” She pushed a lock of wayward hair off her forehead, and seemed to be thinking furiously. “But any ship designed to travel between star systems will have a subspace comm system, one that’s not programmed to call home directly to GEC HQ the way our emergency beacon is. So we’ll use that to contact someone to come get us. You can even get in touch with your superiors on Zhoraan if it makes you more comfortable.”

For her to make such a concession told him how much her attitude toward him had changed, even if she were not yet prepared to admit such a thing openly. And he had to confess that her plan seemed sound enough.

“What if there are more mercenaries — or whatever they were — back at this ship you’re convinced is there?”

She actually smiled, her teeth flashing in the darkness. “Well, we didn’t do too bad a job of handling these three, so it might not be that big a problem. Or they might not have left anyone there at all. Why bother to mount a guard when you’ve landed on an uninhabited planet?”

“Perhaps. And we will have their guns as well. But I would suggest changing into more appropriate attire before we leave.”

A quick glance down at herself, and she smiled and shook her head. “You’re right, of course. Well, let’s get changed and packed and out of here as quickly as we can, just in case those men did leave a companion behind, someone who might be expecting a check-in call from them at any moment.”

“Good point. Very well — let us get what we can, and start moving.”

She let herself out of the skimmer and came back to the station, striding past him and inside, then heading on to the bedroom. Once there, she pulled a set of coveralls out of the closet and drew them on over the undershirt and underpants she already wore.

“I figured this would be a little more practical than a skirt and jacket,” she explained, tucking the legs of the coveralls into her boots before strapping her belt around her waist. The coveralls were somewhat big for her, and puffed out slightly both above and below the belt.

Lirzhan smothered a smile. “You’re probably right.” He gathered up his robes and put them on, although he did not draw the hood over his head. Not yet, anyway.

If Alexa was bothered by his wearing the robes once more, she didn’t show it. A quick nod, and she went on into the bathroom, taking the spare towels and some soap — “just in case” — before she headed out to the front room and gathered up several days’ worth of SRPs.

“I don’t want to strip the place bare, just in case another research team gets sent here,” she explained as she shoved her loot into the now over-extended emergency bag. “But I also don’t know what we’re going to find at that ship, so I figured we’d better play it safe.”

He couldn’t really argue with that. Perhaps he would have raised some protest if she’d attempted to take any more than she had, but as it was….

“Are we going to do anything about them?” he asked, looking down at the bodies of the three dead men, still sprawled on the floor.

“Well, since we don’t really have the equipment to bury them or burn them, what do you suggest we do?”

“Drag them outside. If there are any predators or scavengers in these woods, they should take care of them for us.”

Her eyes widened. “That is…remarkably realistic of you.”

“Is it?” He had not thought of the matter that way. Even predators and scavengers had their place in the natural order of things, and in this situation they would be providing a necessary service. “No worse than leaving them in here to rot. Besides, at least that way some animals may be fed, and since these men are long past worrying about such things, it seems the simplest way to handle the problem.”

A reluctant nod. “Okay.” She went over to the man she’d shot in the head, as he was closest to the door. “Give me a hand with this?”

I
t had been
, as one of her foster mothers liked to say, a hell of a day. And the sun wasn’t even up yet.

Alexa sat in the pilot’s seat of the skimmer, as Lirzhan said he had no idea how to operate the vehicle. She wasn’t sure whether knowing how to drive a ground transport made her that much more qualified, but she hadn’t bothered to argue. If she kept them just above the trees and didn’t try anything fancy, she figured they should be okay.

It had only taken a few minutes to figure out the onboard log and program it to retrace its trip to the science station. Judging by the maps scrolling across the screen on the dashboard, their destination was some hundred and fifty kilometers away, which meant a journey of a little less than an hour in a vehicle of this type. An old boyfriend had owned one that was similar, if an older model, and so she had a basic idea of their speed rating. Behind them the horizon began to glow, which meant they were traveling due west.

Lirzhan pulled out a breakfast bar from the rations she had taken and handed it to her. “I don’t really see how these are different from the protein bars,” he said, opening one for himself and sniffing at it dubiously.

“They are. They’re made with fruit and grains — you’ll be fine.”

He took a cautious bite, and then smiled. “Yes, this is much better.”

“Told you.”

If someone had told her she’d ever be this at ease with him, especially after sharing a kiss that redefined what a kiss should feel like, she’d have told that hypothetical person they were crazy. And let’s not forget the shoot-’em-up with the mercs and dragging the bodies out of the station one by one and leaving them for the Mandala equivalent of wolves or vultures or whatever.

But now….

She sneaked a quick peek at Lirzhan and watched for a few seconds as he munched quietly away on his breakfast bar, his gaze seeming to study the landscape as it passed by roughly forty meters beneath them. The cool morning breeze caught the loose strands of long black hair around his face and whipped them to and fro, but he didn’t seem to mind.

What exactly they were heading toward, she didn’t know for sure. Maybe the mercs had only been dropped off here rather than flying their own ship. But she and Lirzhan had brought the beacon with them, so they could always use it wherever they ended up, rather than back at the science station. And the skimmer had provided them with some much-needed mobility.

No need to worry about fuel, as the cell on board would last through more than a thousand trips such as this. Right now it just felt good to be up in the wind and the sun, watching the blue-green forests pass by below them, broken here and there by the shimmer of a stream, and once by an enormous calm lake surrounded by rocky shores.

Lirzhan was right; it was beautiful here.

The instrument panel pinged, signaling that they were closing in on their destination. Below them, the ground had grown rocky again, the trees thinning out as they climbed into yet another unknown range.

“I’m going to bring us down a little bit at a time, in case the men who came after us left anyone behind,” she told Lirzhan, and he nodded, then said,

“Luckily, at first they shouldn’t notice anything wrong…until we get close enough for them to actually see who’s in the skimmer.”

“Well, aside from the fact that they were probably expecting their missing friends to have checked in by now. But that can’t be helped.”

She dropped lower so they were barely skimming the ground, not quite a meter and a half in the air. The rocky terrain slipped past. Getting closer now…

…and she let out a surprised yelp and banked hard left to avoid coming up on an enormous edifice, all steel girders and flat metal plate, covering at least an acre. Past it she could see heavy earth-moving equipment, but no people.

Without thinking she turned them around, speeding back the way they had come. Beside her, Lirzhan sat up very straight, asking, “What was
that?
”

“I don’t know,” she said, practically biting out the words to keep her voice from shaking. “It looked like some sort of mining operation.”

“Mining operation?” he repeated, casting one last look over his shoulder, even though they’d dipped below the ridge line and the facility was effectively hidden. “I thought you said this planet had been designated as ‘containing no exploitable resources.’”

“That’s what the write-up said!” she snapped, the jangle of adrenaline along her nerve endings making the words come out far more abruptly than she’d intended. “Look, is anyone following us?”

He unfastened the safety harness he wore and stood up, black hair whipping like crazed snakes around his head. After turning around and surveying the horizon in all directions, he said, “I don’t see anyone.”

“Well, that’s something.” Probably they hadn’t gotten close enough for anyone on the ground to get a good look at who was really piloting the skimmer. The vehicle itself wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, since it had clearly come from the base itself. “We’re coming back up on some trees — I’m going to land us there so we can figure out what to do next.”

Slowing down, she brought the vehicle lower until it glided between the first few outlying trees. They settled with a soft
thump
on a patch of pale olive-colored grass, and Alexa relaxed her death grip on the controls.

Lirzhan remained standing. He gazed down at her for a few seconds, then extended a hand. She took it and followed him out of the skimmer. How he knew she needed to stand on firm ground to gather her thoughts, she had no idea, but she was grateful for his perceptivity.

“So…” he said at last.

“So,” she said heavily, and reached up to push some loose hair off her forehead. She really had done a crap job with that braid this morning. “I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing good.”

“Surely it’s only an illegal mining operation,” Lirzhan replied. “Of course these things should not be encouraged because of the damage they do to the environment, but….”

“I don’t think that’s all it is.” Alexa couldn’t even say why exactly, but something about this really didn’t smell right. “That facility looked far too big for anything unregulated. There are outfits that drop small refining stations on out-of-the-way worlds, hoping to get a bunch of whatever ore’s hot on the market before someone notices what they’re doing and they have to pull up stakes and move on. But this wasn’t one of those. It’s big enough you could probably see it from orbit. Not exactly the sort of thing you can hide easily, so it can’t be something set up by a small fly-by-night operation.”

“So what do you think is going on?” He was frowning now, as if he were starting to put two and two together as well.

“I have no idea. But small-time ore thieves aren’t going to waste their time sending a team of mercs to take out two crash-landed diplomats. Hell, they might try to rescue us in case there was a reward or something, because those types are always looking for a quick unit, but using mercenaries to kill us?” She shook her head. “No way. Especially since our original crash site has to be a few hundred kilometers from here. We would never have stumbled across this place by accident. The chances of discovery were almost nil.”

Lirzhan’s expression had grown progressively grimmer during this speech. “Perhaps this is connected somehow to the destruction of our ship in the first place.”

Frowning, she crossed her arms and asked, “How so? That is, I’m guessing that once we crashed here, whoever’s running that facility decided we were a threat and sent a team to take care of the problem, as it were. But I’m not sure how to connect the actual attack on our ship to that.”

His mouth thinned. “I cannot say for certain. It is just…a feeling.”

A feeling. Then again, he did seem to have an almost preternatural awareness about their environment that continued to confound her. She decided to go for broke. The worst he could do was ask her to mind her own business. “Lirzhan, are you psychic?”

A short laugh, although it had little humor in it. “No. That is, not precisely. My people are empathic…we sense emotions, intentions. It is the reason we wear the robes. They are woven with a fiber derived from a certain plant on our home world, one that helps to block the empathic vibrations. Otherwise, it would be difficult to function normally with those outside our closest circles of family and friends. Our empathic faculties are the reason for
sayara
.” He blinked, as if bringing himself back to the matter at hand. “At any rate, it is not as if I read the thoughts of the men we killed back at the science station, or picked up anything from our brief fly-by at that facility. It is just…my intuition tells me they must be related somehow.”

She wouldn’t presume to argue with him. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for being able to fully comprehend the ramifications of being empathic in the way that he had just described. Even so, his revelation merely reinforced in her the belief that they needed to find out more, needed to discover exactly what was going on at that facility…and who precisely knew about it.

“All right,” she said. “Then I know what I have to do.”

“And what is that?”

His expression told her he’d already begun to guess what she had in mind, but she went ahead and told him anyway.

“I need to get inside and see what they’re really doing in there.”

L
irzhan didn’t know
why he should be so surprised. Her boldness continued to startle him. “You can’t be serious.”

“And why not?” She stared up at him, hands planted on her hips.

Because I have only just found you, and I cannot lose you.

Such arguments would probably not find much of a reception with her, though, and so he only said, “You are a very capable woman, Alexa, but you are not a spy. You have not been trained for such a task.”

“Have you?” she retorted, the challenge clear in her voice.

“No,” he said seriously. “As you, I have been trained in diplomacy, in working with those not of my race, in languages and statecraft. I am not suggesting that I go in your place — I am suggesting that neither of us do such a foolhardy thing.”

Her mouth tightened a little at the word “foolhardy,” but she replied mildly enough, “I don’t think it’s that foolhardy. After all, look at me.” She gestured toward the baggy borrowed coveralls she was wearing. “I can take off the belt, and untuck the pants from my boots, and if that facility is anything like most other mining outfits, I’ll look more or less like a worker at the facility. No one should pay any attention to me.”

Lirzhan wasn’t so sure about that, because even in her current less-than-flattering attire and with her hair admittedly a mess, her beauty shone forth, bright and obvious as the sun in the sky. She did not look like a miner…or at least not one that he’d ever heard of. He opened his mouth to say as much, but she forestalled him by reaching down and getting some dirt on her fingertips, then smudging it on her chin and the tip of her nose.

“See? Completely incognito.”

At first he could not recall what that particular word meant, and he frowned a little as he dug into the lesser-used portions of his Galactic Standard vocabulary. “Ah,” he said, and despite everything, he couldn’t help smiling at her pleasure in that minor subterfuge. “I am not sure if that is as good a disguise as you think it is.”

“It will be fine.” To his shock and infinite joy, she went up on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his cheek. Warmth seemed to radiate outward from the place where her mouth rested, and then she sank back down on the soles of her feet and sent him a beseeching look. “Besides, you’re not going to deprive me of my chance to finally play Nancy Drew, are you?”

The reference was completely unfamiliar to him. “What is a Nancy Drew?”

Alexa shot him a rueful yet somehow amused glance. “I suppose it would be too much to expect you to recognize that obscure twentieth-century reference. Anyway, Nancy Drew is a character in a series of books written hundreds of years ago. I came across them while scouring the public domain archives for books to read. Anyway, she’s an adolescent girl who goes around and solves mysteries.”

“And her parents have no problem with this?”

“In the books her mother is dead, and her father doesn’t seem to have a lot of input.” Impatiently, Alexa undid her belt and tossed it back into the skimmer, then pulled the legs of her coveralls out of her expensive-looking boots and pushed them down to her ankles. After completing this procedure, she smoothed her hands over the heavy fabric to get out some of the worst of the wrinkles caused by her belt.

He must have looked rather sour during this whole process, because she glanced back up at him and shook her head.

“It’s really not that bad, Lirzhan. I doubt anyone’s going to look twice at me. But to make you feel better, we can fly back and come in from the other side, do some reconnoitering, before you drop me off.”

“And if it looks too dangerous, you will give up this plan?”

Surprisingly, she nodded at once. “Of course. I don’t have a death wish. But we’re going to have to do something, because otherwise I don’t know how we’re going to get off Mandala.”