The Tracker's Dilemma: (A Mandrake Company Science Fiction Romance)

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  He jogged to the cliff and rested his hand on the nub Mandrake had touched earlier.

  “Who seeks entrance to the Hidden Grotto?” the same mechanical voice asked.

  Lauren stepped back, looking curiously up and down the cliff.

  “Sergeant Tick.” He remembered that Mandrake had used his real name and added, “Heath Hawthorn.” Maybe the thing was programmed to open for Grenavinians.

  The beam did not turn on to examine him. He tried knocking on the damp surface, but it felt as if his knuckles bumped against solid rock. “Convincing door.”

  If the others were inside, they may not have heard the sound through the barrier.

  “You’re sure that’s the spot?”

  “It was an hour ago.” He tried twisting the nub.

  “Who seeks entrance to the Hidden Grotto?” the voice repeated.

  “Willow Mandrake,” Tick tried with a shrug.

  To his surprise, the light beam appeared as it had before, enveloping him. Some kind of energy scan made his body tingle. He had no idea why the captain’s name would work as a passcode, but he hoped the beam wasn’t smart enough to realize that a different Grenavinian was using it.

  “Willow?” Lauren quirked an eyebrow.

  “You didn’t know that was his real name? I thought Ankari might have mentioned it.”

  “She calls him Viktor.”

  “He prefers Viktor.”

  “Do you prefer Tick? To Heath?”

  “Not really. It’s what I’m used to, but I’ll answer to either. I, ah, wouldn’t mind if you called me Heath.” He’d made the offer the day before, and she’d said she would, but she hadn’t yet.

  “Good.”

  The light winked out. Tick sighed and stepped back, figuring he had failed to pass the test, but after a moment of apparent consideration, the forcefield disappeared, revealing the cave once again. Three things had changed. First, full day had come, and natural light filtered down from skylights that he hadn’t noticed before. The plant-based illumination had dimmed. Second, more gouge marks had bitten into the floor, leaving shattered pieces of cement everywhere. Two of the grow beds closest to the entrance had been decimated. Lastly… no one was there.

  Tick stepped inside. “Hello?”

  Nobody responded.

  Chapter 8

  Lauren rubbed the back of her neck. She had been reading through files in the computer Tick had directed her to for at least an hour. Her upper back ached, right along with her neck. The hard cave floor lacked the cushioned ergonomic mat she stood on when she worked in her lab on the shuttle or on the ship. In addition, she was already tired. Yawns kept bringing tears to her eyes as she scrolled through pages of data, most of it on plants the druids had experimented on. What had her sister found so fascinating here?

  She yawned again and swiped to the next file. Her internal clock was off since the moon and the Albatross were not on the same day-night schedule, but she guessed it was nearing midnight on the ship.

  “Doing all right?” Tick asked, coming up behind her.

  He had been poking all around the strange indoor-greenhouse-cave, examining the laser damage and trying to figure out where the others had gone. As far as she knew, he hadn’t found another exit yet. He had been grumbling about how the bare cement floor did not leave prints. His only clues were missing strawberries—apparently, Striker hadn’t been the only one munching on them—and the damaged grow beds near the entrance. If the men had run into the cave, a maneuverable ship might have lowered into the canyon and found an angle from which it could shoot at them.

  “I’m fine.” Lauren lowered her hand, realizing she had been kneading her back and stretching her neck. “I’m not seeing what excited my sister.”

  “Nothing about ESP?”

  “Not unless the strawberries are particularly prescient.” Lauren nodded toward the laser marks on the floor. “Any luck figuring out where the others went?”

  “Not yet. I did find a half-smoked cigarette on the floor by the rear wall.”

  “Maybe they got cornered back there and had to surrender.”

  “Surrender?” he asked as if he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Since he knew about redoubtable mercenaries, she found that unlikely.

  “They could have been captured.”

  “If the captain had been backed into a corner, he would have had our people blow up the whole mountain to deter his enemies and keep that from happening. Haven’t you seen Striker’s grenades?” True, Striker hadn’t been there, but Tick had seen other men with bandoliers of grenades. The Chief of Boom wasn’t the only infantry grunt in the company who slung explosives around.

  “I try not to look at Striker’s grenades.”

  “An amazing number of women say that.” Tick smiled, but it did not last as he gazed pensively around the cave.

  Lauren found herself glad to have his company. Usually, she didn’t want to be disturbed when she researched, but this place was strange, and howls and hoots occasionally drifted in from the jungle, reminding her that she was a long way from home. Not that she’d ever had much of a home, since work had kept her busy and there’d never been family to invite over. Still, she’d once had a nice flat near the university in Orion Prime’s tech corridor. She’d had colleagues to talk to and her cat Youyou for company at home. It had been over a year since she spent any time alone with a male friend—or a male colleague, as it had been. With some bemusement, she realized she could come to consider Tick a friend. She rarely spoke of her parents and her past to anyone, but it had been easy to open up to him on the ship the other day, maybe because he hadn’t been leering at her breasts like the other mercenaries. Or maybe because he was Grenavinian, and she knew he’d lost much too.

  Strange to think she could befriend anyone who toted guns around and was named after a bug. Of course, he had invited her to call him Heath. Being named after a plant was slightly better than being named after a blood-sucking arachnid.

  She turned back to the computer, stretching her neck and wishing for at least the tenth time that the druids had left chairs around their greenhouse.

  “Have you changed your mind about that massage yet?” Tick asked.

  “What?”

  He shuffled closer and leaned his rifle against the computer console. “Your neck is telling me it wants it.”

  “My neck is talking to you?” Lauren bit her lip and stared straight ahead at the columns of text floating before her eyes, though she wasn’t that fascinated with the discussion of manipulating plum trees to thrive in the volcanic soil on Grenavine’s southern continent, especially since that continent was no more.

  “You didn’t know? Probably because you’re lacking these new ESP talents. Have you tried inoculating yourself with your own experimental gut bugs?”

  Gut bugs. She snorted. That was what Ankari called them. So unscientific.

  Tick rested his hands on her shoulders, not moving them at first. Silently asking if she objected?

  She didn’t know if her neck truly had anything to say on the matter, but a massage would feel good. She just didn’t know if she should encourage such intimacy. After all, she had just been admitting that she could see herself calling him a friend, but if past experiences proved an indicator of future—or present—events, he might see this as some segue to sex. And if she rebuffed him again, he might withdraw his interest in her as a person and as a friend. It wasn’t as if she was that fascinating of a companion—she knew that. She almost always preferred her work to social activities, and she didn’t have any clue how to discuss other subjects. She ignored popular culture, politics, religion, and news. Did mercenaries talk about such things? She didn’t even know. From her experience, they spent an inordinate amount of time talking about sex, and she didn’t have much of a frame of reference for engaging in those discussions, either.

  Realizing that her thoughts were spinning in circles, and oddly coming back to the matter of sex numerous times, she took a deep breat
h and flipped to the next file on the computer. Tick’s hands moved. Not away from her, as she thought they might when she didn’t make a sound of contentment or acceptance. Instead, his thumbs started working on the tired muscles at the base of her neck while his hands kneaded her shoulders.

  “If I’m annoying you, feel free to tell me to go away,” he said quietly, his mouth not far from her ear.

  “It’s all right,” she heard herself say, though she didn’t know if it was an honest statement. Did she truly not mind him there? Or was she more interested in not offending him? So long as his hands didn’t start roaming to other spots, she supposed she didn’t mind this closeness. The kneading did feel good. Very good. She gripped the edge of the console to keep herself from leaning back into him. She could smell the mint of his gum and the scent of the jungle that lingered about him after their tramp through the foliage. She wondered what she smelled like. She wouldn’t mind some of her lab sanitizer to wash her hands with, or an entire shower to wash everything with.

  She grew oddly aware of her body as he touched her, of the way her nerves were affected by the massage, the small movements of his hands, hands that had the strength to dig in and rub the tension from knotted muscle, yet were gentle enough that the service felt pleasurable rather than painful. She hadn’t had many massages in her life, never feeling that comfortable with touching of any sort, and didn’t have much of a basis for comparison, but she did like this one so far. Her body agreed, loosening in response, and she remembered the way her cat had basked in his sunbeam, stretched out in pure sybaritic pleasure.

  Her nipples tightened beneath her shirt as his fingernails scraped lightly across the side of her neck when he switched positions again, and warmth tingled between her thighs. She almost laughed, realizing she found this more arousing than all of the kissing Professor Alberti had inflicted on her as a precursor to their union. As if rubbing saliva-covered tongues together should be arousing. She’d been too busy thinking of the unsanitary aspect of it all to find it anything but off-putting.

  “You can read the good bits to me, if you wish,” Tick said, shifting his hands to the side of her neck, his thumbs to the back of her head and rubbing her scalp through her hair. That felt amazing. Her eyes wanted to close rather than to stay open and study the file.

  “The good bits?” she asked, remembering that he had spoken. “About genetically engineering fruit trees to produce a superior yield, even in harsh conditions?”

  “Well, maybe there’s something in there about genetically engineering humans to thrive in harsh conditions. Not that Grenavine was that harsh, but I seem to remember from my history classes as a boy that there were a lot of heavy metals in the environment, so our insides had to become good at clearing them from our bodies. Sorry, I don’t know the science terms for that. I just remember it being in the books that a lot of the first colonists’ babies were born with birth defects or were stillborns because of elements that were toxic to us, so the scientists tinkered with our genes as an alternative to just trying to purify the air and water on the planet, though others did try to do that too. I think that was a part of the reason we planted so many trees everywhere and got really into growing forests. The druidism and nature worshipping came later. The early colonists were just trying to lock up the toxins in flora that lived a long time and could hold a lot.” Tick’s hands paused. “Sorry, I’m sure you know all of this, and it probably has nothing to do with the ESP. In fact, I don’t know how it could.”

  “No, don’t stop.”

  “Talking or massaging?”

  “Both.”

  His words were spurring ideas for her. She actually wasn’t that familiar with the history of Grenavine. She’d known they had done minor manipulations to their population early on, before the stigma against genetic engineering had spread across the system, but she’d thought it had been for aesthetics, such as creating predominantly green eyes among the population, rather than for practical reasons. She definitely had noticed that they had enhanced methylation systems, and it had been one of the reasons she’d been eager to have them in her study, as they already tended toward good health, but she hadn’t realized that had been inculcated with gene manipulation as a survival mechanism. Ankari had speculated that their good health arose from living in a more natural and less industrialized environment than the people in the rest of the system, and that could certainly play into things, but this made even more sense. And was it possible that some of those early genetic manipulations had affected their brains in a manner that could make them more receptive to enhancements offered by the symbiotic relationship with the intestinal flora?

  “I’m getting excited, Heath.” Lauren pulled up the holo keyboard and typed in search terms, her fingers flying.

  “About me or about your research?”

  “You?” she asked, puzzled as only half of her mind heard him—the other half was already focusing on the new files opening before her, ones detailing the work the early geneticists had done to the population, to the human population, not the fruit tree population. She glanced at the last-opened date on the file. Yes, Hailey had been in here today. Lauren fished in her pocket for her tablet, so she could copy the files, or at least take pictures of the display in case they were protected.

  Tick chuckled softly. “I guess that answers my question.”

  He ran his hands from her shoulders to her upper arms, giving her a squeeze, a signal that the massage was ending. A surprisingly intense feeling of distress surged through her—she didn’t want him to stop touching her.

  With her free hand, she clasped one of his before he let go. “Don’t stop. It feels good.”

  He hesitated, and she worried she had offended him with her demands, especially when she wasn’t prepared to reciprocate, at least not with sexual favors, presuming he still wished those. When she finished studying the file, she would consider offering to return the massage, as that seemed fair. Even though she never found touching to be necessary in day-to-day life, a part of her wondered what it might be like to have him remove his shirt and to slide her hands along his shoulders and back.

  “Please,” she added, when he remained still, as if uncertain. That should take the edge from her command.

  “Always happy to oblige a lady,” he murmured, his hands moving back up to her shoulders, fingers and thumbs resuming their kneading.

  He bent his neck, and she saw his jaw in her peripheral vision, noticing that quite a few hours had passed since he’d shaved and that early beard growth darkened his skin. He lifted one hand, brushing her hair back, tucking the locks behind her ear. A little thrill of pleasure ran through her nerves, her nipples tightening again, poking against her bra as if they wanted to be freed. A silly thought. And how odd that having her hair touched should stir such sensations. She never bothered fiddling with her hair or even her breasts when she used tools to give herself orgasms. Those had always involved stimulating the clitoris directly. She thought of the clumsy way Professor Alberti had gone about that, leaving her wishing she had simply used her own hand. Strange that memories of sex and stimulation kept entering her mind.

  His lips brushed the side of her neck, the touch warm and dry, and new sparks of sensation lit up her nerves. “You smell good,” he said, his voice slightly husky.

  It occurred to her that he might be thinking of sex, even growing aroused from touching her. As much as she enjoyed the massage, the way he was still rubbing away knots with his strong fingers, she ought to push him back and end this encounter, lest he believe it would lead to other things. Even if she could imagine having sex with him, who would do such a thing on the floor of a cave? How primitive. And dirty. Besides, they were down here on a mission and had work to do. Further, his entire company was missing. This was hardly the time to—

  She swallowed as his warm lips trailed up the side of her neck to her ear. He nuzzled her, the scrape of his beard stubble teasing her skin, then caught her earlobe in his mouth. She was on the
verge of pointing out that she had been out in that bacteria-ridden jungle without cleaning and that putting anything of hers in his mouth was highly unsanitary when his teeth grazed her soft skin, and he sucked on the lobe. An intense wave of pleasure coursed through her body, and she almost gasped.

  “Heath,” she said his name, though she couldn’t get more out. The words tangled on her tongue, her ability to be rational momentarily lost. She turned toward him, conflicted as to whether to push him away or pull him close. Her mind argued for the former while the growing heat between her legs acknowledged that desire had been awakened and that he might be able to slake it better than she could.

  A grinding of stone against stone came from the back of the cave. He jumped back, as if she’d slapped him. Her hand was hovering in the air, as indecisive as her mind, but she hadn’t been thinking of striking. A slap would be a poor reward for his attentive massage.

  Tick—Heath—spun toward the back wall, and she remembered the noise, realized his spring backward hadn’t had anything to do with her.

  She lowered her hand as a portion of the wall—some kind of large, hidden door—pushed outward. It had been so cleverly disguised that she never would have guessed it existed. Judging by the way Heath gaped at it, he hadn’t seen evidence of it, either.

  “Finally,” a male voice floated out, accompanied by footfalls, many footfalls.

  Disappointment washed over Lauren as Captain Mandrake, Sergeant Hazel, and the rest of the missing men strode out into the lit cave, shaking their heads and grousing as they walked around the grow beds and toward the computer station. Her time alone with Heath was over.

  He glanced at her as the men approached, his expression hard to decipher, though he looked like someone who had been caught. Or maybe made a mistake.

  She lifted her chin and told herself it was good that the others were returning. Who knew what else he might have tried to do if they had remained alone? It had been as she originally suspected—the massage had been offered in an attempt to get close to her, in the hope that she would initiate sex, or that he would initiate it and she would allow it. As if this wasn’t, as she had asserted earlier, a ridiculous place for such an encounter. Further, it disappointed her to have her suspicions affirmed, to know that his interest in spending time with her was likely based only on a desire to find a shuttle bay to dock in. So transparent. So predictable.