Mercenary Instinct (a science fiction romance) Read Free Page A

behind a
boulder, and Ankari almost peed down her leg. He had removed the
scanner on his head, and his two hard green eyes were staring
straight at the view screen. She expected him to raise his pistol
and point it at them, but even if the freighter wasn’t a sleek
warship, its hull would easily withstand the firepower of a hand
weapon. Those grenades that other brute had been carrying might do
some damage, but Ankari didn’t see him. The captain was alone. But
his lips were moving. Issuing some command to the rest of his team?
Letting them know he had found Ankari’s ship and that he needed
help bringing it down? Well, the Marie Curie wasn’t waiting
around for that.
    “Who’s he ?” Jamie asked. “He’s
handsome. Pissed looking, but handsome.”
    “Calm your teenage hormones down and get us
some altitude,” Ankari said.
    “I haven’t been a teenager for weeks now, you
know.”
    “He wants to kidnap us, not get in bed with
us. Now, go.”
    “Really? Kidnap all of us?” Fortunately,
Jamie’s fingers danced across the controls as she spoke, and the
captain disappeared from view as the ship rose from the ground.
Soon, he and his men would be powerless to stop them.
    That didn’t keep Ankari’s fingers from
digging into the back of Jamie’s chair. “Lauren and me for sure. I
don’t know if they’re aware of your existence.”
    “Typical.” Jamie sniffed. “Let me get us
turned away from that mountain, and it’ll be a clear shot into
space.”
    “Good.” As the view rotated, Ankari was on
the verge of loosening her fingers when a sleek black shuttlecraft
glided out of the twilight sky. Before she could do more than
wonder if it had weapons, a torpedo launched from its bow.
    “No, no, no,” Jamie said over and over,
trying to navigate out of the way.
    But even the most agile GalCon fighter
couldn’t have dodged at that close range. Ankari didn’t have time
to brace herself before the world exploded in her face.
    Her last thought, as she was hurled backward,
was that she should have known the captain was calling to a ship,
not talking to his crew. Then her head struck the bulkhead, and
darkness swallowed the world.
    * * *
    Captain Viktor Mandrake led his team toward
the smoking wreckage, grimacing at the damage Frog’s torpedo had
done. The ugly little freighter would never fly again,
and—worse—its passengers might not have survived. He flipped open
his pocket tablet and skimmed the wanted hologram that formed in
the air above it. Yes, alive. The prisoners were supposed to be
delivered alive.
    “Problem, sir?” Sergeant Hazel asked, falling
into step beside him.
    Corporal Jiang had also caught up with them,
clutching at a shoulder smoldering from a laser blast, and wearing
a chagrined expression. He probably felt abashed after letting the
girl out of his grasp. He should.
    Striker, Dunhill, and Chen were making sure
all of the thugs who had ambushed the team were either dead or knew
better than to bother Mandrake Company again. Viktor also wanted to
know if there had been a reason behind the ambush, or if the
riffraff had simply been trying to take advantage of distracted
people. Maybe they had overheard that woman’s lie about the fortune
to be made in fossilized crap.
    “They’re wanted alive,” Viktor said.
    “They weren’t very high up when Frog hit
them, sir. The crash shouldn’t have killed them.”
    “The torpedo hit right below their nav
cabin.”
    “Oh. That might have cut them up.”
    The torpedo, or the crash, or both, had left
a jagged hole in the side of the freighter. That was fortuitous,
because the cargo door looked too smashed to ever open again.
    Viktor ducked circuitry and jagged pieces of
hull, but paused before charging inside, inhaling, listening, and
looking in all directions. He wouldn’t expect a handful of
civilians to lay a crafty trap or have the wherewithal to mount a
defense, but one never knew. The woman who had seemed to be in
charge—Ankari