Trial and Temptation (Mandrake Company)

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Trial and Temptation

  (a Mandrake Company novel)

  by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Copyright © 2014 Ruby Lionsdrake

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go out to my editor, Shelley Holloway, as well as Sarah Engelke and Cindy Wilkinson for offering feedback on an early version of this novel. I would also like to thank you, good reader, for coming along for the ride.

  Chapter 1

  Val Calendula had no reason to be nervous. She knew how to fly. She’d been doing it for more than ten years. And yet… a bead of sweat slithered down her ribcage, and her hands shook slightly. Under normal conditions, she wouldn’t be nervous, but she was piloting an unfamiliar shuttlecraft under the watchful eyes of three mercenaries. All right, only one of the mercenaries was watching closely, from the seat next to hers. The other two were strapped into the passenger seats in the back, commenting on some sexually suggestive game they had picked up on the station. Or maybe it was an innocent game that they were making sexually suggestive.

  “Hit that, and you get to slide right up into her tunnel of love.”

  “Oh, yeah, and she’s open and ready for you too. Slicker than a lubed impact wrench.”

  It was just like being back in the military. Nothing to be nervous about.

  Except these weren’t Galactic Conglomeration soldiers. They were mercenaries. They might or might not keep things on a professional level. Mandrake Company had a reputation for being an honorable outfit, but she had never encountered them personally.

  “What are you two playing back there?” Lieutenant Sequoia asked.

  He was the one watching Val’s fingers as they danced lightly across the control panel—actually, they were dancing with all of the grace of elephants crammed into a cargo hold, and she kept leaving sweat marks on the switches. She hoped he hadn’t noticed that.

  “Star Fighter’s Revenge, sir.”

  “I have that game,” Sequoia said. “I don’t remember a tunnel of love on any of the levels.”

  “We got an, ah, enhanced version.” Both men snickered.

  Val smiled. The banter was starting to relax her, however coarse it might be. Until the lieutenant frowned at a display to the left of her seat and above her head. “Are you keeping an eye on the fuel mix ratio? I know most ships handle all of that manually, but these combat shuttles can be finicky. The ratio has to be precise.”

  “Yes, sir,” Val said, falling into the old habit of calling officers sir, even though she had been a civilian for the last eight years. If she got the job—and oh, how she needed this job—she would have to “sir” everyone again, at least those of higher rank, and she doubted she would get much rank based on the two years she had spent in the fleet after the academy. “I mean, I wasn’t, but it’s because I was expecting that display to be down here on the panel. I’ll watch it more closely now.”

  “Hm.”

  She tried not to wince at the faint disapproving note in that single syllable.

  “What do you think, sir?” one of the gamers asked. “The girl got what it takes to fly with us? More important than that, she going to be able to land in the shuttle bay without ripping a door off?”

  Val held back an indignant sniff. The hatch was in the back, so she’d really have to choke the landing to knock it off. Maybe he was worried about the door to the Albatross’s shuttle bay.

  “We’ll see,” Sequoia said neutrally.

  She tried not to find condemnation in his tone. She was qualified for this job. Mostly. She had graduated from the GalCon flight academy. So what if it had been ten years ago, and she’d been piloting clunky freighters through the extremely boring and extremely safe inner-system shipping lanes since then? So what if this was a mercenary outfit, and she’d never been in a real battle? Her résumé couldn’t have been worse than any of the others turned in, or she wouldn’t have been invited to come aboard for an interview with the flight commander.

  “She’s got a tree name,” the other gamer said. “The captain’ll take her.”

  Neither Val’s first name—Valerian—nor her last had anything to do with trees, but she didn’t correct the man. She knew what he meant. She had been born on the now-destroyed druid-dominated world of Grenavine, and Mandrake Company had a reputation for being a refuge for some of its inhabitants, those who had been off-world when it had been annihilated, and those who had skills useful to the mercenaries. Captain Mandrake himself was a native. That was why she had submitted her résumé. No need to mention that she had submitted it to three other outfits—and been rejected—before learning that Mandrake Company existed.

  “I hope so,” the other mercenary said. “We need more tits on board. Way too many dicks roaming the halls.”

  “Striker,” the lieutenant said, “it’d be nice if you could be a little less crude, given that there’s a lady present, one we’re hoping might want to stick around and work with us.”

  “Sorry, sir.” The man—Striker—lowered his voice and asked his comrade, “What should I have said? Breasts and penises?”

  Sequoia sighed.

  They flew out of the station’s shadow, and the mercenary vessel came into sight, so Val stopped paying attention to the banter. The winged, gunmetal-gray craft, with its sleek predatory visage, looked more like a bird of prey than an albatross, but maybe the name had some historical significance.

  She was more worried about the shuttle bay door than the ship itself, and her eyes fixated on that. She forced herself to check the instruments again, making the adjustments the computer suggested and nudging the starboard thrusters to line up the approach. A pilot who wanted to show off might ignore the computer, but she doubted the lieutenant would give her demerits for choosing safety over a chance to demonstrate her skills. Besides, she wasn’t that confident in her ability to show off in a craft she had never flown before. She was still surprised Sequoia had pointed her to the pilot’s seat two minutes after meeting her, but she supposed it made sense that her “interview” would start right away.

  The lieutenant waved at a comm-patch on the front of his brown leather jacket. “Bridge, this is Charlie Shuttle. Requesting permission to land.”

  “You bring back those chocolate tarts from the bakery on Level Three?” a man asked.

  “If I said no, would you let us land?”

  “Hell no, I’d send your skinny ass back to the station with my boot print embedded in it.”

  After Val made a few more adjustments, the craft came in under one of the ship’s wings, facing the shuttle bay straight on. It hadn’t been established whether the chocolate tarts had been acquired or not, but the doors opened, nonetheless. Other shuttles were parked inside, locked down in the anti-grav environment. They made for very large and very solid obstacles that she would have to maneuver around.

  Val wiped her hands on her trousers, saw Sequoia watching out of the corner of his eye, and placed them firmly back on the controls. She guided the craft through the doors without trouble. Good. Almost there.

  “Take Dock Two,” Sequoia said, waving toward the port side.

  Applying the minimum thrust, Val turned them in that direction. Her hand twitched when she spotte
d the shuttlecraft in Dock One. It was pink. What the hell? The rest of the shuttles were the same gunmetal gray as the exterior of the ship, just like everything else in the bay, including the walls themselves.

  Her twitch caused the tail to swing farther inward than she intended. She rushed to correct the mistake before they scraped against anything, but flushed in mortification, anyway. This was a simple, simple task. If she couldn’t dock a shuttle in ideal conditions, they wouldn’t believe she could fly one in combat.

  Sequoia didn’t comment, but she knew he had noticed. Maybe he would attribute it to nerves. Or maybe he knew how shocking that bright pink shuttle was; she wagered everyone jerked in surprise when they saw it.

  Fortunately, Val landed the craft without further mishaps. She forced herself to calmly unfasten her harness and face the lieutenant, not slump down in her seat with palpable relief.

  “A little rusty, eh?” Sequoia asked.

  Val thought about making an excuse and blaming the pink aberration, but he was probably referring to her whole flight out here. “It’s been a long time since I’ve flown anything except a freighter,” she admitted. “But I can get used to the maneuverability of these shuttles. I trained on all sorts of combat craft in the fleet.” No need to mention that she’d had no real-life combat experience…

  “We’ll see what Commander Thatcher says.” Sequoia thumped her on the shoulder and stood up. “Get the door, will you? Looks like the air’s back on, and if I don’t deliver those tarts to the bridge, I’ll be in danger of being taped to my bunk tonight.”

  Val’s mind had frozen at the name Thatcher, and she barely heard the rest. She’d trained under a Lieutenant Commander Thatcher back at the academy. The man had been an irritating, arrogant know-it-all, and he had looked for every excuse he could find to fail her. More than once, he’d told her that she should give up on the academy and consider civilian freighters or transport vessels. That pompous ass. Just because he had been some child prodigy who had blown up his first enemy before he’d been old enough for a ground vehicle license on his own world, that hadn’t given him the right to be such an aloof bastard.

  “Calendula?” Sequoia frowned. “The door?”

  “Sorry, sir,” she blurted, slamming a hand down on the release much harder than needed.

  All three men were frowning at her now. But the hatch dropped open, turning into a ramp, and they trudged out, hopefully forgetting about her.

  “Get yourself together, Val,” she muttered. “There’s no way it’s the same person.”

  Thatcher had been a decorated officer in the fleet; it would be nothing short of shocking to find him working for some smudgy mercenary company skulking about the outer planets.

  Val tucked a wayward lock of brown hair behind her ear, stood, and straightened her blouse. She took a deep breath, headed down the ramp, and turned toward the shuttle bay’s exit. She almost crashed into someone waiting by the end of the shuttle. Sequoia was her first thought, but this was another mercenary, a lean angular-faced man in his mid-thirties, one she recognized immediately even if it had been ten years since her classes at the academy. His dark brown eyes bored into her, as cool and aloof as ever.

  Oh, hells. Please let him not remember her. Please…

  “Lieutenant Calendula,” he said, his tone stiff, almost robotic. A lot of cadets had mused that he might be a cyborg, even if the religious fundamentalists had succeeded in scaring almost everyone out of having such operations done in recent centuries. “Follow me.”

  Lieutenant Calendula. He had used her military rank, not a civilian designation. Her shoulders slumped. He remembered her.

  * * *

  The briefing room was about what Val had expected from a mercenary ship—Spartan with bland furnishings, friction-mat flooring, and a lot more gray—but the big wooden table, with thick, timeworn boards was a pleasant surprise. Her interviewer was a less pleasant surprise.

  As she sat, she fought the urge to fidget, even though she felt like an eighteen-year-old kid again, one about to be lectured or disciplined by an overbearing instructor. She wondered if Commander Thatcher was as shocked to see her as she was to see him. He would have had more warning—surely he had seen all of the pilots’ applications—but he might not have been certain she would be the same person he had taught at the academy. Granted, only a Grenavinian would have a name like Valerian Calendula, and there were precious few Grenavinians left in the galaxy. But had he ever believed they would cross paths again? Or maybe he didn’t even remember her, beyond some vague sense that she might have passed through his classes once or twice. But no, he’d had an eidetic memory, hadn’t he? Maybe that, like the cyborg tidbit, had only been a rumor, but she had never caught him forgetting anything, that was certain.

  Whatever he was thinking now, it didn’t show in his dark eyes. His expression probably hadn’t changed in ten years. He might be handsome, his pressed gray shirt and black jacket fitting nicely, but nothing about his aloof expression suggested he would appreciate a snuggle buddy now and then. His short black hair was precisely trimmed and combed, not a single strand out of place. Doubtlessly, he never sweated nor grew flustered and ran his fingers through it.

  “Cadet Calendula,” he said. It had been lieutenant in the shuttle bay. Already demoting her, was he? “If you are accepted into the unit, you can expect rank and pay commensurate with your experience and with the position that requires filling, but you will be known as a cadet or trainee during this week of assessment. You will address me, the captain, and every other officer as sir.”

  Val wanted to roll her eyes. No kidding.

  He looked at her steadily. By the moons of Grenavine, was he waiting for a “sir” now?

  “Yes, sir,” she said. That was a lot harder to bite out than it had been ten years ago. She had been the captain and pilot of her own destiny for too long. Even if she had always had to answer to the freighter owners and the customers shipping their goods, they had rarely walked around with sticks lodged up their butts, demanding sirs and ma’ams. Maybe because they had known they wouldn’t get such honorifics from the jaded legions of freighter pilots, most too busy complaining about the cost of fuel, the threat of pirates, and their irregular bowel movements to be bothered with courtesy.

  Thatcher’s forehead wrinkled slightly. Maybe that hadn’t been the response he had wanted after all. She raised her brows, inviting him to expand or clarify. Instead, he looked at some display hovering above his tablet, the back fuzzed out to her, since it was in privacy mode.

  “We don’t have a flight simulator chamber here,” Thatcher said, “but we do have some training goggles. For the most part, you’ll work side-by-side on the bridge with Lieutenant Sequoia this week. He will act as your mentor and report back to me on your progress and aptitude for learning this ship. If you pilot sufficiently, you will also be run through combat maneuvers on the shuttles.”

  “So you won’t actually be teaching me anything yourself?” Val probably shouldn’t have asked that question out loud, but not having him around, commenting and correcting, would be a good thing. Sequoia seemed all right. Not cold and rigid at least. This should make the process less stressful.

  “I am working on a project for the captain, so my time will be divided this week. I will monitor when I’m able.”

  Goody.

  “Do you have further inquiries?” Thatcher asked.

  Further inquiries. What a stiff. “Will I be getting paid during this trial period?”

  “Room and board will be provided.”

  “So that’s a no, huh?” Val hadn’t expected any differently, but she was all too aware of the time limit looming amongst the stars. She only had a few months to earn what she needed to pay back her brother’s creditors and keep him from being sent to Daru Mack. For a quiet, scrawny kid like him, the mines would be a death sentence.

  “Cadet Calendula, your record shows that you had a steady job only three weeks ago,” Thatcher said. “Given a sim
ple financial plan and a moderately responsible adherence to budget, your eight years of freighter work should have left you with enough money to cover fiscal obligations.”

  Which she had managed just fine when she’d had only herself to take care of. If Yarrow had come to her sooner, she would have had enough in savings to help him, but he’d waited far too long to admit to his problem. Something Val wasn’t eager to tell her new commander about. Complaining about family members wasn’t appropriate, and she didn’t want to disparage her brother, anyway. He’d had it hard after their world had been destroyed; all of the survivors had.

  “I’m sorry,” Val said. “I didn’t know being moderately responsible with money was going to be a requirement for this job.”

  Being sarcastic to one’s boss probably wasn’t appropriate, either, so she threw in a smile. Maybe that would make the words seem less obnoxious. She’d been told once she had a sexy smile. Of course, the one doing the telling had been one of those old freighter captains, the ones complaining about their bowels. It was hard to take them seriously. Still, she didn’t usually have trouble finding someone to go home with if she was in the mood for some meaningless fun during a stopover on a station.

  That faint wrinkle returned to Thatcher’s forehead, the one that always suggested he found people puzzling and distasteful creatures.

  “Look, I’m ready to start anytime,” Val said. “I’m a hard worker. I’m responsible on the job even if money’s been a problem lately. You won’t regret giving me a chance here.”

  “Of course I won’t.” His statement might have given her hope, except he added, “It was the captain’s decision to give you a chance.”

  She snorted and almost asked if it was because of her heritage, but decided she didn’t want to know. Even if she had sought out Mandrake Company because of shared roots, it hadn’t been because she had been hoping for a break… not exactly. She had found the idea of working with people from her old homeland appealing. Besides, she’d like to think her record was satisfactory enough to stand on its own.