The Tracker's Dilemma: (A Mandrake Company Science Fiction Romance) by Ruby Lionsdrake Page A

shone the beam inside.
    The light flared like a sun in Tick’s Eytect unit before it dampened the night vision aspect down. He grimaced, blinking a few times and removing the device. He stuffed it in his pocket as he followed the captain inside.
    Lights came on overhead, vining plants stretching along the cave ceiling with some of the leaves glowing with whitish green intensity, enough to drive the shadows back to the corners. Tick had seen the leaf-lights before on Midway 5, so wasn’t too startled by them, but he still found them odd.
    As he’d noticed before, banks of computer equipment lined one wall, while the grow beds stretched a hundred feet or more to the back of the cave. Under the brighter light, Tick could identify various edible and medicinal plants stretching up to different heights. He recognized a lot of them from the gardens of his childhood, and he knew many were annuals. Floating misters hovered over the vegetation, and the farming process appeared largely automated, but someone must have been by this year to plant the beds.
    Despite the captain’s insistence that he lead and Ms. Keys follow, she was only a step behind him, and she quickly veered off to explore. A holodisplay popped into existence above the computer terminal, and she started pressing buttons. A cross-section of some plant appeared in the air.
    While a frowning Captain Mandrake walked over to join her, or maybe to berate her, Striker found the bat that had flown through the wall. It lay unmoving in a bed of gigantic strawberries, one wing draping over the edge.
    “It’s dead,” Striker said. “And it’s bleeding on those strawberries. Gross.”
    “You shouldn’t have been so inconsiderate as to shoot it,” Tick said.
    “Not everybody can holler and make hordes of man-eating predators fly away.”
    “How do you know they were man-eating?” Tick asked, wanting to distract him—distract everyone—from what he may or may not have accomplished with his shout. He still thought that might have been a coincidence.
    “One tried to take a bite out of my favorite shoulder.”
    “You have a favorite shoulder?”
    “The one that I tuck Thumper against.”
    Tick snorted. That was the grenade launcher, if he recalled correctly. Striker had names for most of his weapons.
    Striker found an unbloodied strawberry and plucked it. “Think these are safe to eat?”
    “No idea.”
    Tick walked the perimeter of the cave, looking for threats—or clues as to what Keys sought back here. He couldn’t imagine that stumbling across a greenhouse would further her research greatly. Still, she murmured happily to herself from the computer terminal, swiping her finger through the holodisplay, bringing images of other plants to life.
    “Tick,” Mandrake said and waved him over. He stood behind Keys, half-watching as she zipped through the data. It didn’t look like the druids had password-protected their computer. Maybe they figured protecting the cave had been enough.
    Tick joined him. “What is it?”
    “Why don’t you get Dr. Keys, so she can take a look at this too?” Mandrake tilted his head toward the computer.
    Ms. Keys hadn’t seemed to hear him. She was leaning into the console, perusing a single page of data now, something with a lot of text along with some DNA double helixes. Tick wasn’t close enough to read any of the words, not that they would have made sense to him, but she had clearly found something that interested her.
    “So our scientist can enlighten us?” Tick asked softly, having already guessed that Ms. Keys wasn’t sharing everything with the captain—or her sister, either.
    Mandrake nodded once. “I don’t know why I was the key to the front door, but—” He twitched one of his broad shoulders. Feeling uncertain that he had helped Keys get in?
    “I’ll get Lauren—Dr. Keys.” Tick headed for the cave entrance.
    Mandrake’s eyebrow moved ever so slightly at the first name familiarity, but all he said was,