“She must be enjoying having an assistant.” Mandrake plucked the green beverage out of the carrier. No question of which drink was for him.
“I imagine so.”
“I hope you’re getting something out of it.”
“Besides the honor of the job?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll see if I make it through my probationary period.”
As Chanda headed toward Kor, the clunking and clanking robot rolled out, and everybody’s attention shifted to it.
“Uh,” Sparks said, “why is it noticeably charred? We didn’t send it in that way.”
“Did the quashi attack it?” Mandrake asked.
“Not unless it can wield a blowtorch.”
“Its antennae are capable of limited prehensile movements,” Kor murmured.
The bot wobbled to a stop, clinked, and slumped to one side, the wheels no longer properly aligned.
Jamie prodded it with a screwdriver and then her finger. “It’s not warm. It wasn’t caught in a fire. Let me see what I can figure out, assuming Sparks’s control display is still out.”
“Yes,” Sparks said as Jamie started disassembling the robot. “Not only did the program crash, but the reset for my tablet is taking a long time.”
Kor noticed that the vials he’d placed in what had been a launch mechanism on the front of the robot were gone. The launch mechanism itself hung limply, looking like it would clatter to the deck at any moment.
“What’s going on?” Chanda whispered to Kor, standing close enough that her shoulder brushed his.
He took one of the coffees, wondering if that had been an accidental brush or… not. “Thank you. We’re attempting to nullify the quashi.”
“Nullify? Kill?”
“Actually, the drug I put together after researching everything I could find about their anatomy was specifically designed not to kill it. Just to knock it out. I’m a healer, not a killer.”
Kor supposed he should have added a qualifying now to the end of that sentence. Mandrake looked over at him. Fortunately, he didn’t point out all the people that Kor had killed back in their Crimson Ops days.
“I know what happened,” Borage said from the control station. “Both to our remote control bot and to cause all these alarms to go off.”
“I’m not sure about the exterior charring, but I think its circuits were fried by an EMF pulse.” Jamie held up a smoking circuit board.
“Which was launched by a furry animal?” Mandrake asked mildly.
“Uh,” Jamie said.
“That seems even more unlikely than it wielding a blowtorch with its antennae,” Sparks said.
Mandrake looked at Chanda. “I’m thinking of your earlier suggestion.”
“That coffee is superior to green sludge?” Borage asked, coming over and plucking up one of the steaming mugs.
“That the creature terrorizing our ducts may look like a quashi,” Mandrake said, “but I don’t believe it is one.”
“I don’t either, or my drug would have knocked it unconscious.” Kor made his tone dry when he added, “Also, the encyclopedia entry didn’t mention the creatures having the ability to throw EMF pulses around.”
Chanda finished handing out drinks and returned to Kor’s side. He smiled at her, glad she wanted to stand next to him instead of Mandrake or Borage. Not that the rumpled and stained engineer was known to attract women. And Mandrake was… fierce. Even when he wasn’t trying to be. Ankari had to be a woman who liked a challenge. Not that his own visage had teddy-bear qualities. Kor ruefully touched the nose that he’d broken numerous times in his youth.
“Which begs the question,” Mandrake said, “were those animals truly a mix-up or did someone deliberately set us up?”
“By sneaking a fake one into the batch?” Kor asked. “A fake one programmed to escape and—”
A fzzzt sounded, and the lights went out again.
Mandrake sighed. “Sabotage my ship.”
“I’ll get on it, sir,” Borage said.
“Why would someone want to sabotage the ship?” Chanda asked.
“I can give you dozens of reasons and dozens of possible people,” Mandrake grumbled. “I’ve made a lot of enemies over the years. I’m going to the bridge to get intel on this, see if they can figure out who dropped the box of rodent substitutes off at our airlock. Maybe threats delivered to the company Keys ordered her lab rats from will yield some answers. In the meantime, Borage, get the lights back on, fix everything that’s broken, and figure out how to destroy our saboteur.”
“Yes, sir.” Despite the prompt reply, Borage sounded daunted.
Thumps and clanks sounded as people got to work in the dark. A groan-hiss announced the door opening—being manually forced open—and Mandrake stomped into the equally dark corridor outside.
“How do we destroy it if we can’t get to it?” Sparks asked.
Kor didn’t know if he was speaking to him, Jamie, or the room at large.
“We can’t use an electromagnetic attack of our own,” Sparks added, “not without risking damaging our own systems. Further.”
“Chase it out into the open and shoot it with weapons?” Jamie suggested.
“Chase it with what? It destroyed our bot.”
“We could send a weapon into the duct,” Borage said, “if there was a way to get a tracker put on the saboteur. Unfortunately, since it’s just a machine—we believe—surrounded by a lot of other machinery, it’s hard to find with sensors alone, especially when it’s hunkered down and not moving. I believe that’s the case currently. I can’t find it with any of our sensor equipment, and I was able to earlier.”
“I wonder if the EMF pulse is the only kind of attack it’s capable of,” Kor said. “That probably wouldn’t bother a living creature. Though it looks like it might have scorched your robot with a little more than electromagnetism.” He waved to its charred carapace.
“A living creature?” Sparks asked. “It’s not like we have a rat terrier to send into the ducts and catch it. You know the captain keeps refusing to let Sergeant Tick get a hunting dog to help him track.”
“We have the rest of the quashis,” Chanda said.
“How does that help?” Sparks asked.
“They would be small enough to get anywhere the saboteur can get. Maybe we could convince them to go back into the ducts and find a friend. That could work, especially if we only took one out. You’ve seen how they’re pack creatures and clump together.”
“It could get fried if it clumps on to the one in there,” Jamie said.
“Maybe not,” Chanda said. “The fake one came out of the same box as the others. I bet it’s programmed not to bother them. Before it could get out and get to work, it had to fit in and make us believe it was one of them. It may even trill.”
“What would the point be of sending one of those fluff balls in there?” Sparks asked. “It’s not a terrier that’s going to grab the other one in its mouth and shake it to death. Do they even have mouths?”
“Between their legs,” Kor said.
“They have legs?”
“Short ones.”
“Between their legs is a weird place to put a mouth.” Sparks’s eyes glinted, and Kor imagined some dirty joke popping into his head.
Fortunately, Chanda spoke again before it came out.
“You said you could fire a weapon if a tracking device was planted on the fake quashi,” she said. “How about we get one of them out, place a tracking device with sticky sides on it, put it in the duct, and hope it finds its buddy and rubs up against him. It. If we’re lucky, the tracking device will stick to the fake creature. Then we can lure the real quashi back out with apples, and you people can send a weapon into the ducts to get the saboteur. Something with a small charge so you don’t harm your own equipment. This could work. It’ll be just like using a tracking device to launch a Trandoorian Mega Rocket down the asteroid sewers in Deep Space Hunters.”
“A what in what?
” Sparks asked.
“I’ve played it.” Kor grinned at Chanda, though he could barely make her out in the dim lighting—only a few panels glowed in the room. “I’m not the engineer here, but I believe it would be possible to apply an adhesive that was stronger on one side of the tracking device than the other, so it would be more likely to come off if the two quashis bumped.”
“It would be just as likely to come off on the wall,” Sparks muttered.
“We’ll put it on its head,” Chanda said. “Er, its front. Hopefully it’ll shove its front up against another one. But not the side of a duct.”
Sparks grumbled under his breath.
“What have we got to lose?” Kor thought they should try it, especially since nobody had suggested anything else.
A clunk came from the distance, followed by a grinding noise.
“A lot,” Sparks muttered. “A lot.”
* * *
“I hope you’re ready for this, Roberta,” Chanda murmured to the quashi, stroking her blue fur as she headed back to Engineering, glad the lights had come back on.
Nerves teased her stomach. What had seemed a brilliant plan twenty minutes earlier—or at least a plan that could potentially work—now seemed far more likely to get her furry friend killed. What if the fake quashi attacked Roberta? What if she became lost in the ductwork and couldn’t find her way back out?
Chanda hadn’t intended to choose the one quashi she had named—and grown attached to—but as she’d stood before the cages, she’d realized Roberta was the only one she knew would traipse across a room and climb objects for apples. And the creature seemed bright. Chanda didn’t know about any of the other ones.
An uncertain trill came from the quashi. Chanda didn’t know if it was because Roberta sensed her concern… or because she had stopped petting it.
“If you don’t want to do this, girl, let me know,” she said, returning to petting the quashi as she walked.
“Girl?” came a voice from behind her. “You’ve decided I was right? Or you’ve learned how to identify their sexes?”
Chanda turned to wait for Kor to catch up. He carried his medical kit, and she wondered if he was contributing a “wad” again as part of the attack on the saboteur. But if the fake quashi was all computerized with machine bits, she couldn’t imagine what a doctor might bring to use against it.
“It’s cute, fluffy, and trills,” Chanda said. “I’ve decided that you’re right and it’s likely a girl. Or at least girlish.”
“Boys can’t trill?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to demonstrate?”
She didn’t think he would, but Kor paused, considered, then made a throaty noise that mixed a hum and something a choking frog might make. He raised his eyebrows.
Chanda shook her head. “Whatever that was, it wasn’t a trill.”
A questioning trill came from the quashi.
“Roberta agrees,” Chanda said.
“Huh.”
She pointed at his medical kit as they continued walking toward Engineering. “Did they ask you to help out again?”
“To supply an adhesive for the tracking device. And yes, I agree with your unspoken question. It’s rather amazing how often I’m being asked to assist with this entire quashi situation.”
“You feel it’s beneath you?”
“Mostly I feel unqualified to handle it. Though I don’t mind that it’s let me… ah, that you’ve been assisting too. That we’re assisting together.”
Chanda cocked her head, surprised to hear him stumble over words. Somehow, seeing a man as big and fearsome-looking as he was flustered was odd.
Kor rolled his eyes. At himself? “I mean, I like having an excuse to spend time with you,” he said. “And your excellent selection of shirts.” He waved toward her chest—today, she wore a blue Star Marauders T-shirt.
“Oh.” Chanda bit her lip to keep a silly smile from bursting out. She started to say more, that she liked spending time with him, too, but the door to Engineering opened, and Commander Borage walked out.
“Ah, there you are,” Borage said, looking more at Kor than Chanda. He did shift his gaze toward her—and Roberta—and press his lips together in what was either skepticism or disapproval. Maybe both.
“We’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, Commander,” Kor said.
“Yes, but I missed you terribly.” Borage stepped aside, waving them through the door. “Sparks managed to give himself an electrical burn while fixing damage that our furry intruder caused. New damage.”
“People only miss me when they’ve hurt themselves,” Kor murmured to Chanda as they stepped inside.
“I think I’d miss you if you were gone a long time.” She smiled at him.
“What counts as a long time? More than fifteen minutes?”
“Maybe a little more.”
“But surely less than three days, right?”
Borage cleared his throat as he walked in after them and frowned at their silly banter. “Jamie and I are ready for your adhesive any time, Doc.”
“Right.” Kor patted Chanda on the back before veering to the side where Sparks was clutching his hand and scowling at a holographic display.
Borage went to a work table where Jamie hunched, assembling something that looked like a miniature rocket launcher. She glanced back at Chanda and Roberta and waved to a corner of the table.
“There’s your tracker, Chanda,” Jamie said. “We get to see if your idea works.”
Her expression wasn’t as skeptical or disapproving as Borage’s had been, but Chanda heard her mutter something about a Plan B to Borage.
Chanda frowned and stroked Roberta. “We’ll make Plan A work, won’t we, girl?”
She couldn’t tell if the responding trill denoted agreement or that Chanda was petting the quashi in just the right place. Either way, she decided to find it encouraging.
She walked over and picked up the gray disc-shaped tracking device. Looking more like a token to operate an old-fashioned laundry machine than a high-tech piece of equipment, it didn’t have any hooks or an obvious way to attach itself to something else. Not yet.
Chanda walked it over to Sparks and Kor.
“Do her first,” Sparks said, nodding toward her.
“Er, what?” Kor asked.
“I think that was dirty.” Chanda smiled, amused that Kor never seemed to think along those lines. Hadn’t he ever been a lecherous soldier before turning doctor and monk?
“I mean, figure out how to stick the tracker on the fluff ball before worrying about my hand,” Sparks said. “It’s chewed through more wires since you left, and we’re worried it’s angling toward something critical. It’s started moving around quickly back there, like it knows we’re aware of it and is determined to finish its mission.”
“How intelligent is this thing?” Kor asked.
“Hard to say. It hasn’t come out and challenged Commander Thatcher to math games yet.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t see through this.” Kor waved at the quashi, then opened his kit.
Chanda looked worriedly at Roberta. If their enemy was intelligent, would it realize she represented a threat? When she hadn’t before when they’d all been in that box?
Her throat tightened at the idea of her plan resulting in Roberta being killed. Or worse. Yes, there were a lot more quashis back in the shuttle, but this was the one Chanda had been working with, and she felt an attachment to her.
Roberta tipped sideways in her arms, as if to settle in for a nap, and rested an antenna on Chanda’s wrist.
Chanda bit her lip. Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe—
“Ready?” Kor held up a tube of gel.
“That’s the adhesive?”
“No.” He leaned over the quashi with the tube open, a silvery gel oozing from the tip, but paused. “We decided to put the tracker on the front, right? Do you know which end is the front?”
Chanda pointed toward the end with the two antennae.
/> “Ah, that makes sense.” Kor squeezed some of the gel onto Roberta’s fur, then used his finger to smear it around.
Chanda arched her eyebrows. The quashi stopped trilling, but she couldn’t tell if Roberta was truly disturbed or just wondering what this crazy doctor was doing to her.
When Kor was done, a large patch of her fur lay flattened to her body, a sheen of gel glistening on it. He took the tracker from Chanda’s hand, then wrapped a band around it, the outside sticky. It took some artful maneuvering for him to apply it to the quashi without getting a finger stuck between the tracker and the animal in the process.
“It won’t stick that well to the gelled fur,” Kor explained. “I’m hoping it’ll find the fluffy and dry fur of the saboteur a lot more appealing.”
“Ah.”
“Now, you just have to convince it—her—to butt heads with the intruder. Or bodies, I guess.” Kor stepped back, holding her gaze.
Did he expect her to telepathically command the quashi to do that? As if she could. She was hoping for luck here, and she knew it.
Still, Chanda murmured to Roberta as she headed for the open duct where Jamie knelt again, a tablet in hand. “Find your fake buddy, please? And be careful in there. Nuzzle him a bit, and then get out.”
“You’ve decided the mechanical one is male?” Jamie asked.
“It’s thuggishly breaking things. It must be male.”
“Should we be insulted?” Borage asked from behind them.
“Possibly so,” Kor said.
Chanda had no more words of advice for Roberta, so she bent to one knee and set her inside the duct. The quashi sat motionless, aside from one antenna. That antenna lifted up and quirked back and forth before it dropped back down even with the other one.
“I’m impressed so far,” Borage said after a few seconds with the quashi doing nothing.
“Shall I give it a nudge?” Jamie asked, lifting a tool.
“Go find him, girl,” Chanda said. “It won’t take long, and then I’ll have an apple slice for you.”
Both antennae lifted this time. Then the quashi flowed into the dark duct. Chanda’s fear for Roberta returned, and she remembered the blackened robot that had lumbered out of the duct earlier.
Mandrake Company- The Complete Series Page 180