by Kris Delake
And then things at the Guild hadn’t worked out either. No wonder she liked working alone. He would have too in her situation.
He felt a brief moment of amusement. He liked working alone as well, for similar reasons.
He hoped that amusement hadn’t shown on his face, because it had been directed at himself, not at her.
“And this so-called uncle,” he said. “He didn’t…”
“Want me?” Skye said. “Of course not. I’m the proverbial unwanted kid. Or I was.”
The present tense was telling as well. She still saw herself as that abandoned child.
Well, he saw himself the same way. Maybe that was why they had such a deep connection.
“I was actually going to ask if he hurt you,” Jack asked.
“By dumping me off?” She turned toward Jack with such surprise that he could feel it as if it were his own. “I felt no attachment to him.”
“No,” Jack said gently. “Sometimes ‘uncle’ is a euphemism for a man who has expectations of a certain kind of sexual—”
“Ew,” she said. “No. No.”
She shook her head as if trying to get an image out of her brain.
“No,” she said a third time. “I won’t say he was a good man, because he was a friend of my parents and he did similar things to make money, but he actually tried to do right by me. Leaving me at the Guild was smart on his part, since my father said they’d eventually show up.”
Then her mouth flattened. She ran a hand over her face.
“But,” she said, “if no one had ever opened that gate for me, I would have been completely alone. He walked off before they took me in.”
So the so-called uncle wasn’t a good man after all. Just a better man than Skye’s father. But Jack didn’t make the commentary. It wasn’t his to judge.
She looked at the navigation panel in front of her. “I never really thought I’d go back to Zaeen.”
Yet she’d been investigating it. Jack almost didn’t ask about it, but he was ever curious, and he couldn’t quite restrain himself.
“Even though you’d been researching it,” he said.
She lowered her head, laughed once—an odd almost reluctant sound—and then leaned back in her chair.
“I could tell you a partial truth,” she said. “I could tell you I’ve been checking up on them for years.”
“Seeing if they came back to Zaeen?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Had they?”
She shook her head. “Not using any identification that I could find,” she said. “Doesn’t mean they don’t have aliases I don’t know.”
He nodded. He understood that.
“Why is that a partial truth?” he asked.
“Because—” She glanced at him, her expression speculative. He could almost sense her trying to figure out just how much of her own life she wanted to trust him with. “Because I’m going to be done with the Guild in a couple of years, and then I want to find them.”
“And do what?” he asked.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t know, exactly. Show them what they missed? See if they even think about me? Get them arrested? The one thing I know I can’t do is kill them. I’m not that person.”
“Although you’re still that angry,” he said.
“Probably, deep down,” she said. “Yeah. I am.”
He nodded. “Me too,” he said. “Not at your parents, but at my own.”
Chapter 27
The story Jack told her seemed pretty simple on the surface: his parents had abandoned him into some kind of government-controlled child care, and had never come back for him. Jack told it simply as if it were nothing more than a fact of life, but Skye could hear the pain underneath it all.
She recognized it. She had felt it herself, and she hoped she had kept it mostly hidden.
Although she was a bit shaky after telling him about her parents. She’d told dozens of people that story over the years, although never all in one piece, and never quite as clearly. Usually someone with authority would ask, and she’d tell them only what they needed to know. Then they’d need more and she’d tell them that.
Finally, they’d have the entire sorry tale, although most of the time they wouldn’t recognize that she’d told them everything. They’d forget parts or confuse her with someone else or ask her all over again.
Jack was the only person who had heard it all at once, and he was certainly the only person who had ever asked her if her so-called uncle had used her for his sexual pleasure. Jack hadn’t asked it salaciously either. He’d been concerned for her.
She wondered what he’d seen in that child-care place. Probably more than she ever wanted to think about.
Someone had dumped Jack as well, although she wasn’t sure it was his parents. The fact that he had no idea who he was and couldn’t figure it out disturbed her. It sounded like there had been some trauma back there, trauma locked in his brain. Trauma no one had tried to figure out.
She made herself focus on him. She owed him that for listening to her.
“You’ve tried to find them?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He sat perfectly still in the copilot’s chair, maybe the first time she’d seen him sitting that motionless. “The ultimate hunter. I started out by breaking into the files at Tranquility House. I hired a few investigators to look for me, and discovered I was better at searching than they were.”
“You did a DNA match?” she asked.
He didn’t seem insulted by the obvious question. “When I could afford it,” he said. “And nothing. Not even a blocked category. It’s like I started to exist at eight and had no history before that.”
She twisted a little in her chair. “You don’t think someone was trying to hide you?”
“The secret prince syndrome?” He laughed. “Every kid at Tranquility House believed he was royalty that someone had hidden. It’s part of being abandoned, I think. Only Rikki didn’t.”
“Rikki?” Skye asked. “Who’s he?”
“She,” Jack said. “She’s my oldest friend. She knew who her parents were. They’d died rather horribly, and she had nowhere else to go.”
He was silent for a moment. He seemed to be contemplating something.
“Speaking of,” he said. “Do you know an assassin named Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski or, I guess, Misha? He’s with the Guild.”
Skye stiffened. Why would Jack want to know about an assassin with the Guild? What did it matter to him?
“Why? What’s he got to do with you?” Her tone sounded a little sharp, even to her.
“Not with me,” Jack said. “Rikki. She wanted me to check on him.”
That seemed odd to Skye. She was about to say so when Jack added, “I used to be Rikki’s go-to guy for information. This one’s important to her. It’s personal.”
It got stranger. Skye shifted in her seat. She wasn’t used to talking about the Guild or its members with anyone from outside the Guild.
“Personal?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you think assassination is always personal?”
Jack laughed, which surprised her. “Rikki’s an assassin too. She trained with the Rovers, but she left long before I did. She met this Orlinski on a job and she’s worried about something. I guess he—God, I don’t know how much I can say without breaking confidence.”
“He’s not poaching from her,” Skye said. “He never would.”
She’d known Misha for years. He was probably the most stand-up person she’d met in the Guild.
“That’s not it.” Jack sighed. “I guess he’s interested in Rikki, and she seems to be interested in return.”
Misha? Skye rocked back in her seat in surprise. Really? She’d’ve thought him a eunuch, if it weren’t for a rather ugly breakup he’d had with Liora Olliver.
The very thought of her made Skye wince. She hadn’t considered anything about Liora since it became clear that the Rovers were after Jack. She’d left Liora on that station with H
eller.
“Do you know Liora Olliver?” she asked Jack.
“No, why? Should I?”
She shook her head.
“Does she have something to do with this Orlinski?”
“Not anymore,” Skye said. “Except that they’re both part of the Guild.”
She’d have to tell Jack about Liora at some point. Just not now.
“Here’s what I know about Misha,” Skye said. “He’s one of the best men in the Guild. He never breaks rules. He goes out of his way to minimize collateral damage, sometimes abandoning jobs to keep innocents safe. He’s quick, he’s good, and he’s probably the most honest man I know.”
Although she wanted to consider Jack the most honest man she knew. But she hadn’t spent enough time with him. She wasn’t sure of him. Not yet, anyway.
But her gut said he was reliable. Maybe more reliable than Misha.
“I’ll be honest, though,” Skye said. “I can’t imagine him falling for someone outside of the Guild. He’s all-Guild all the way.”
“You sound like you don’t approve,” Jack said.
She shrugged. “They haven’t exactly treated me well.”
Then the ship lurched again, and stars formed around them. Visible stars.
Skye couldn’t talk any longer. She needed to look for threats and wayward ships.
She leaned over the navigation board, putting in information, and making sure she hadn’t missed any warnings.
Jack didn’t say anything as she worked. He just watched her, then got up and peered at the various screens, as if he could see something.
“Where’s Zaeen?” he asked.
“About fifteen minutes out,” she said, a little startled that they were this close.
“What port are we stopping at?” he asked.
“I don’t think we’re stopping at a port,” she said. “This ship is too much trouble.”
“Meaning what?” he asked.
“Meaning that if we land her, one of those other ships will find us. I don’t want to risk that, do you?”
“What do you propose?” he asked.
“We’ll set the automatic pilot and let her go on her way.”
“And then what are we going to do?” he asked.
“There are lifepods,” she said. “I think we’ll take the largest of them.”
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.
She grinned at him. “You’ll find that I don’t joke about life and death matters.”
“Someone’s following us again, aren’t they?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“If they are, then getting into a lifepod is stupid. They’ll catch us.”
“No, they won’t,” she said. “You can change sensor indicators.”
“Not on a lifepod where I don’t even know the language,” he said.
“Then talk me through the way you usually do it,” she said. “I’m sure I can make it work.”
“I’m glad one of us is,” he muttered. “I really am.”
Chapter 28
The lifepod was amazingly big, considering the size of the spaceship they were vacating. But “amazingly big” and actually big enough for Jack were two different things. He had to hunch his shoulders, bend his knees, and squeeze in sideways just to get through the hatch. Then he had to crawl to move to the controls.
He felt ridiculous. It didn’t help that Skye had to duck to get inside as well, and bend over to walk to the controls. He still took the stupidity of the design personally.
The thing was decked out like some kind of tent. A fabric floor with tons of padding underneath, matching fabric walls and ceiling, made Jack wonder what else this pod got used for besides a possible escape from the parent vessel. Jack had a hunch, but he wasn’t going to say anything to Skye.
A few hours ago, he might have told her, but a few hours ago, they weren’t being stalked by ships whose crew thought they were someone else.
He inched his way to the control panel. Skye sealed off the main door, then hit release.
She had set the main vessel’s autopilot to engage the moment this pod left. Jack had no idea how she’d done that, but he was glad she had.
She made her way over to him, her movements closer to walking than his had been. Still, she looked odd as she slowly eased toward him. And, dammit, he found even those odd movements sexy—the way that she touched things, that frown on her face as she worked to keep her footing, the way she dropped down beside him with a sense of relief.
She tapped on the navigation screen, hit a few glowing lights, and transformed the entire thing into Standard. Suddenly he could read and identify everything.
“Why couldn’t you do that on the ship?” he asked.
“I tried. It didn’t exist in the ship proper,” she said. “But apparently someone forgot to fix it in the lifepods.”
It only took him a few seconds to change the sensor indicators. The job here was actually easier than the one he had done on Krell.
“Got it,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Those ships are too close.”
She flattened her palm against a gigantic red image that was clear in any language: that was the thing that separated the pod from the ship.
Then she scooted him over just a bit, her hip touching his, her leg warm. He glanced at her, hoping to catch her with just a small grin or something. All he wanted was a kiss. Just one, because she was so close and because they had made it this far.
But she had turned on the navigation controls. She was pointing the pod directly at a gigantic space station. He assumed that was probably Zaeen. Most places to buy spaceships, particularly hot ones, weren’t on any planet, but orbited around them.
He watched the pod’s image on the internal screen. The pod drifted toward the station. Behind them, the ship itself lurched and he tilted his head.
He had hated that when he’d been on board. He thought it truly strange that it happened now, when the ship was supposed to be hitting its autopilot.
Besides, even as the ship lurched, he shouldn’t have seen it. Hell, he shouldn’t have felt it on the ship itself. The attitude controls should have taken care of the problem.
“Skye,” he said as he finally realized what was going on, “we need some speed here.”
“What?” she asked, still frowning over the controls.
The ship still hadn’t left the area, although it seemed to be trying. It moved forward, then back, then forward again, each time bobbing up and down as if it were a bottle in a bucket of water.
“Just do it,” he said.
She tapped the screen and the pod zoomed forward.
She leaned back. “With that, we should be in Zaeen in—”
But she never finished the sentence, because the pod’s shields went from Standard to Hardened, and a voice told them in bad Standard to strap in. Not that Jack could find any straps.
Not that he looked.
He was staring at the images of what was going on around them. The ship behind them exploded into a bright white light, making his eyes ache even though the screens adjusted for the glare.
“Go, go, go,” he said to Skye.
“Don’t tell me again,” she said.
“Any way to cloak this thing?” he asked.
“It’s a damn lifepod. Of course there isn’t,” she said.
He should have changed the specs to invisible. The pod was now moving so fast that he couldn’t mess with anything. Besides, when shields hardened, all available energy went there and not to any other system.
Debris shadowed them, some of it as large as the pod itself. The screen was so filled with debris, in fact, that he couldn’t see the ships they’d been fleeing from.
“You still have navigation control?” he asked.
“I sure as hell hope so.” Skye was doing all kinds of things to that board that he didn’t entirely understand.
“We don’t want those ships to see us,” he said.
&
nbsp; “No shit,” she said.
“I mean,” he said, “use some of that debris to hide us.”
She glanced at him, her eyes wild. He couldn’t tell if she thought his idea brilliant or the stupidest thing she had ever heard. But she leaned over the console again, and the image on the screen changed.
He couldn’t even see the pod any longer—and the screen was supposed to show the pod above all else.
He hoped to hell that was how it worked for those other ships. He didn’t want the folks flying them to catch up to the pod.
“How far out are we?” he asked.
“Too far,” Skye said. “This debris could shred us. These shields are cheap-ass things.”
“You’d think in a ship that expensive—”
“Yeah, you would,” she said. “But it didn’t. So I need to focus.”
He agreed with that. She did. He would watch the area around them, not that he could do any good. He would have to trust her.
Just like he’d been trusting her all along.
Chapter 29
Skye had the pod’s controls on manual because the automatic controls sucked. She dodged all kinds of debris with hands-on flying, while keeping the speed of the pod as high as she could get it.
For a moment, she’d been tempted to slow the pod and let the debris go around her. The debris had a lot of momentum. It would go past her relatively quickly, or so she thought until she realized just how much debris there was.
Those ships had been too far out to destroy the ship she’d been on that thoroughly.
She hit a scan on the navigation board. There had to be someone else hiding around here, someone big and mean, someone who might come after them on Zaeen.
“What’re you doing?” Jack asked.
He was looking at the scan.
“Someone destroyed that ship,” she said.
“Yes, they did,” he said, “but they aren’t here.”
He sounded certain. She didn’t have time for certainty, particularly misplaced certainty.
“I’m not sure we should go to Zaeen,” she said, “but I don’t see any way around it. I don’t think this pod will actually fly anywhere else.”