The Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company series Book 4) (18 page)

A clank came from beyond the open hatch at the end of the corridor, the one that led to the bridge. A younger version of Kalish walked past the doorway, glanced curiously in their direction, then disappeared.

“
Sorry,” Kalish said, “I didn’t mean to ramble about myself. What were you asking about?”

“
I... don’t remember,” Sedge said, even if he did. He wasn’t sure if she had deliberately diverted the conversation away from her father or if it had been accidental, but he sensed that he wouldn’t get more from her on the subject. He hadn’t minded hearing about her past, anyway. It sounded adventurous. “It’s impressive that you’ve found so many things. Especially that wreck on Novus Earth. That planet has a population of five billion. It’s not as if it’s some remote, forsaken world. I’m sure people are out there hunting in that jungle all the time.”

Kalish shrugged, almost shyly. “Dad used to say that I had a mind that thought sideways and made connections where other people didn’t see them. It wasn’t really a compliment, since I sometimes struggled to make the more obvious connections that everyone else saw.” Her mouth twisted. “Anyway, let me give you the rest of the tour.”

The ship lurched again.

“
This place is creepy, Kay,” came the sister’s call.

“
I know. It’s a cavern. It’s supposed to be.”

Kalish waved for Sedge to follow her to the bridge.

Bridge
was an optimistic term for it. Perhaps cockpit would be more appropriate, since it wasn’t any larger than the navigation space in the combat shuttles. Equipment running overhead as well as along the walls on either side of the pilots’ chairs made it feel more cramped.

The woman sitting in the main chair leaned forward, using an old flight stick controller for navigation instead of a holo-interface. Sedge wondered if he had misidentified the freighter. Maybe it was even older than he had originally thought and had simply been upgraded over time.

“
Tia, this is Sedgwick Thomlin,” Kalish said. “An intelligence officer from Mandrake Company. Sedge, Tia.”

“
Hi, Sedgy,” Tia said brightly, glancing backward only for a moment.

He had a glimpse of dimples and an easy smile before she returned her focus to the task. The walls of the cavern had narrowed to a couple dozen meters, and she had a tight grip on the flight stick as she followed the two shuttles through the space. Here and there rock formations rose from the depths or descended from the ceiling, and she had to dip or rise to avoid them. Up ahead, a massive pillar in the center meant she would have to tilt the entire saucer sideways to skim past. Sedge made a note not to distract her.

Kalish winced at the bastardization of his name, but he didn’t mind. It was better than Sniffles.

With one hand, Tia waved Kalish forward. Not taking her eyes from the view screen, she whispered, “He’s a salted caramel,” and winked. “Better than Mingus.”

Sedge scratched his head, not sure what to make of the comment. Had it been a compliment? If so, the girl might change her mind once he broke out in hives in front of her, but with luck they would spend most of the mission in the ships, and that wouldn’t happen.

“
Tia is twenty, but still thinks she’s a kid,” Kalish explained to Sedge, looking faintly embarrassed by the comment. “She rates boys according to her favorite ice cream flavors. I believe salted caramel is third best.”

“
Nope, nope,” Tia said, tilting them to avoid the pillar. “It’s up to second. I got sick of black cherry chocolate.”

Sedge braced himself against a wall. Whatever the ship relied on for artificial gravity, it wasn’t that reliable. He guessed they might only have ten or twenty percent of normal when in space.

“
What’s at the top of the list?” he asked.

“
Honey lavender,” Tia said.

“
Last I heard, there were only two men who rated that comparison,” Kalish said. “The vid star, Edgardo Garcia, and the zero-grav racquetball player, Nikolay Volkov.”

“
Yes. They’re delicious.” Tia sighed with longing, then glanced back again. “Kalish doesn’t appreciate how much I’m giving up to be here, flying in this pit for her. I could be back on Orion Prime, hunting for my own honey lavender.”

“
Uh huh. I’m paying you a lot more than you were making as a part-time lifeguard,
and
you’re getting college credits for this.”

“
But no boys on the last planet, and no boys on this one. Or if there are any, I never get to see them.”

“
Keep talking like that,” Kalish said, “and I’ll toss you to the miners on the way out. You’ll be lucky if any of them even rate as strawberry.”

“
Oh, gross.”

Kalish nodded Sedge toward the corridor. “Now that you feel confident about the maturity of our pilot, I’ll introduce you to Mom. I think she’s in engineering.”

They stepped into the corridor, and Sedge halted, a stern woman with braided blonde-gray hair standing no more than two feet away. He wasn’t sure what he had expected when Kalish had been explaining her mother’s career as a finance officer, but the lean woman with sleeves rolled up and tattoos covering her ropy forearms wasn’t it. She glowered at him with icy blue eyes in a hard, weathered face. A pistol, a dagger, and a multitool hung from her belt, and she wore a laser rifle strapped to her back as well. If Sergeant Hazel had lighter skin, Sedge would have believed this woman could be her mother.

“
Mom,” Kalish said. “This is Sedgwick Thomlin. Sedge, this is Tina.”

“
Tina?” Sedge managed to keep the shocked, strangled tone out of his voice, but barely.

Her eyes narrowed anyway. She smelled faintly of some floral perfume or another. It seemed out of place, given her tough exterior, and it made his nostrils twitch.

“
They called her Tank in the Fleet.” Kalish winked.

“
Can I call her Mrs. Blackwell?” Sedge smiled, attempting to win the woman over, or at least make the iciness fade from her face. It was hard to imagine the tough lady working in some high-rise on Orion Prime, with a corner office looking out over the city. Maybe she was one of those rare finance pundits who preferred an office in the back of a mechanic’s garage. Or a tattoo parlor.

“
Ms.
Blackwell. And you better.” She frowned as she looked him up and down—they were almost the same height. “
Sedge
?” She sounded even less impressed by his name than he had been by hers. “You the mission commander?”

“
No, ma’am.” Ma’am seemed safer and less confusing than Ms. Blackwell, since they had already been calling Kalish that. That must mean the parents were divorced, or had never been married. He struggled to imagine this woman with a mild-mannered history professor, though he supposed not all professors were mild-mannered. “I’m the intelligence officer.”

“
He put together a program that located possible places for the ruins,” Kalish said.

“
We’ll see.” The woman pushed past Sedge, bumping shoulders with him even though he tried to move aside.

Her perfume won the assault on his nostrils, and he loosed a series of sneezes, barely managing to get his hand up to cover his nose. She paused to frown even more deeply at him, then strode through the hatchway and onto the bridge. The hatch slammed shut with a clang.

“
I’m not sure she likes me,” Sedge said.

“
She’s never liked any of my bo—male friends.”

Kalish turned down the corridor before he could catch the expression on her face, but Sedge allowed himself to feel hopeful at that slipup. What could she have meant to say besides boyfriend? Maybe he
hadn’t
imagined that connection on the shuttle when she had clasped his hand.

She pushed open the last hatch in the corridor. “Here’s where we eat and make food. Have a seat, and I’ll see if anyone wants to join us.”

As Sedge walked in and sat at the four-person table, he debated on that word,
anyone
. Since Tia was flying, as evinced by the dips and occasional shudders that ran through the ship, she wouldn’t be able to leave the bridge. That must mean dinner with Mom.

He tried not to feel bleak at that thought but didn’t quite manage.

Kalish set three places at the table, using the magnetic plates that stuck to the surface, since the ship kept tilting and trembling. The silverware was more likely to go flying, so she stuck it in a magnetic cup and turned that into a centerpiece. Usually, nobody bothered with plates or forks, since the ration bricks were designed to be eaten out of the package, but she had found a batch of her mother’s favorite apples and heated them up, so they would have a side dish with their bricks.

She smiled ruefully, remembering the expression on Sedge’s face when he had run into her mother. After Kalish had promised a woman who baked apples, he must have been expecting someone more domestic looking. Bringing men to meet her mother was always a fraught activity, so Kalish was relieved she had merely introduced him as the mercenary intelligence officer. That’s all he was after all. That had been a silly slipup when she had started to call him a boyfriend. Of course, she had only meant a friend who was a boy. She didn’t even know when he had become that. Somewhere between the first and second time he had saved her life, perhaps.

He was sitting in a chair and talking to Commander Thatcher now. Kalish listened in as she heated the apples in the galley and chose three of the more appealing prepared meals. Ham and Mercrusean sprouts. That sounded vaguely nutritious.

“
No, sir,” Sedge said. “I don’t have anything new to report. I’ve met the crew and we’re about to have dinner.”

“
Dinner?” Thatcher sounded like he had never heard of the meal. “
Now
? Aren’t you watching the caverns? We’re passing a great deal of fascinating terrain, excellent examples of cave coral, helictites, and flowstones, and I believe there are creatures in here that have never been documented before. The giant glowing anthropods hanging from the ceiling were chittering, almost as if they have their own language.”

“
That does sound interesting, sir.” Sedge smiled through the pass-way at Kalish. “Any alien ruins sighted yet?”

“
No, but we’re thirty miles from the first checkpoint on your list.”

“
It’s possible there might be some elsewhere in the cavern. And those booby traps could be anywhere.”

“
Booby traps?” Thatcher asked.

“
Ah, did I not mention that? Kalish shared the information with me. It’s not confirmed.”

“
I expect more thorough reports, Thomlin. You have been distracted on this mission.”

Sedge grimaced and tapped a fingernail on the table. Kalish tried to give him an encouraging smile, but he was too busy staring at the table and looking abashed. She had been worrying about whether she could trust him fully; it hadn’t occurred to her that
she
might be some kind of bad influence.

“
Sorry, sir. I’ll share anything else I find out.”

“
Do so. We’ll continue for a couple more hours, then find a place to set the ships down for the night. Lieutenant Calendula has informed me that some pilots require more than three hours of sleep at night.”

“
I’m sure that’s true, sir. Thomlin, out.”

Kalish brought out the pot of apples and the heated ham-and-vegetable slabs. They could be eaten cold, but they were moderately more appealing when hot.

“
May I see the package?” Sedge asked, waving at the meal brick.

Oh, right. His allergies. There had been a number of food ones. Kalish retrieved the wrapper for him. “The apples just have cinnamon, brown sugar, and lemon.”

“
Sounds good. Thank you.” He read the ingredient list, then set it aside. “No strawberries or mangos. I should be safe from the food. From your mother is another matter.”

“
Are you worried by the number of weapons she carries around? She was a mechanic on an infantry ship for a lot of her time in the Fleet.”