There was one slight hitch in that plan: he owned the ship. That meant end of tomorrow she was likely out of a job and out of a place to stay. She’d have to hire on wherever she could at Lufty’s, or even maybe through the cargo docks at Port Chalo. Who knew? Starways might have an opening for a former employee. She was not, she told herself firmly, without options.
Just without hope.
The whine of the lift doors and then boot steps started her heart pounding. She didn’t want his explanations. She didn’t even want to see him. She was still reconstructing her emotional armor, and if he—
“Hey, Captain Makaiden? Sorry to bother you.”
“Trip.” She kept the relief out of her voice as she turned. “You’re not a bother.”
“I finished those two training manuals. Do you have any more?”
“We’re going to be hitting the gate exit fairly early tomorrow. You might want to get some sleep.”
He shrugged with an elegance uncommon in someone his age. It reminded her of—
“I was just going to my cabin.” She got up from her chair, pushing those unwanted thoughts to the back of her mind. She could turn systems over to autoguidance just as easily from the console in her main room. “Let me see what else I can find to challenge your brain.”
He tagged along behind her to her cabin, fiddling with his bookpad while she brought up the ship’s library database and searched it for another basic-level text. She actually might be doing his uncle Philip and the Alliance a disservice by returning him to the Guthrie household. He was a quick study, a natural. She hoped he had the guts to stand up to his father and grandfather and follow his dream.
She found something that might interest him and uploaded a copy to his bookpad.
“Do they have a flight-training program at your school?” she asked as he closed his pad.
“Yeah, but …” Another shrug.
“Your father thinks it isn’t a good idea.”
His mouth quirked wryly. “I don’t think my father will think anything I want to do is a good idea, once I get home.”
“Not right away, no. You’re going to have to take responsibility for your actions. But the time will come when you can make your own decisions. Don’t …” She hesitated, not sure what to say to this man–child who was heir to a fortune beyond her comprehension.
“Don’t let your family’s expectations dictate your heart’s desire,” said a low male voice from her open doorway.
She tensed, then turned stiffly toward Devin, who was leaning against the bulkhead jamb, arms crossed loosely over his chest. He was still in the same shirt from this morning, though now it was tucked in and no longer crooked. Dark patches on his jaw told her he hadn’t shaved.
The air in the room suddenly felt thick, heavy, and she wasn’t the only one who noticed it.
Trip stepped for the doorway. “You both, um, probably want to talk. Or something.” He nodded to Kaidee. “Thanks for the manuals, Captain.”
Devin shifted to his right. “Actually, Trip, I need your help. Barty’s already asleep and my med-patches need changing. I can’t reach the one in back.”
“Oh, sure, Uncle Devin. No problem.”
He sidled past Devin and disappeared into the corridor.
Devin didn’t move. Kaidee felt trapped by his gaze like a ship in a tow field.
“It was never my intention to hurt you,” he said quietly.
A lump formed in her throat. She wanted so badly to hate him. She shrugged, swallowing hard. “It’s better this way.” Her words came out haltingly. Damned lump. “It would never have worked out. Not really.” She tore her gaze from his and stared at the datascreen with its library listing, seeing nothing.
“It would; it still could work—”
“Uncle Devin?” Trip’s voice echoed slightly in the corridor, then boot steps sounded, returning.
Devin swore something unintelligible under his breath.
When Kaidee finally found the courage to look at the doorway, Devin was gone.
Ping! Ping!
Kaidee hated when morning came early. She hated it even more when shipmorning came early. Her body clock, usually so well tuned to her ship, was reset by the weeks spent on Dock Five, which functioned more under planetary rhythms—albeit artificial—than ship routines. With nowhere to go and nothing to do—other than check the CFTC offices to see when the embargo would end—she’d fallen into the habit of sleeping through the night.
The past few shipdays had shot that to hell.
Well, that and Devin Guthrie.
Ping! Ping!
With a groan, she rolled over on her side and slapped at the alarm. But silencing it didn’t help. Her bedroom was now at daylight brightness.
Gate exit in one hour. Then a good four hours at max sublight to the Lufty’s beacon. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Lufty’s could clear her in a half hour or make her wait for days. It depended on whether the Luftowskis still ran it. And whether the Milo name still held some clout.
She showered the lethargy out of her pores, dressed, and then chanced a quick trip belowdecks to the galley for some of Trip’s newly invented fruit. The pain, her anger at Devin, hadn’t faded, but what she’d been through with Kiler taught her how to compartmentalize things.
Thank you, Kiler Griggs.
If she ran into Devin, she’d deal with it. But the galley was empty, belowdecks quiet except for the usual ship noises and, now that she concentrated, the sound of a shower running in the crew lav. Then she remembered there was a more-than-decent slurp-and-snack in Devin’s cabin. It was the original captain’s quarters. He had everything he needed right there.
She wondered briefly if he’d keep the Rider and, if he did, if he’d use the original captain’s quarters for himself.
It was none of her business.
She trotted up the stairs with her bowl of sliced apples and a mug of coffee, then settled in to recheck all systems and go over course options. Just in case there were unfriendlies or questionables in the lanes after they cleared the gate.
The thump of the lift doors sounded from the corridor behind, then the harder, quicker boot steps she recognized as Trip’s. Devin had more of an athlete’s fluid movement. Still, she could be wrong—
“Captain Makaiden?”
She wasn’t, and let out the breath she’d been holding as she swiveled around.
Trip, hair damp, with the sleeves of his blue round-necked thermal shirt pushed up to his elbows, strode all loose-limbed and grinning onto the bridge. “Would you mind if I—”
“You’re late, Master Guthrie.” She put the stern tone in her voice that her flight instructors had used. “Your assignment is second pilot.”
“Second?” He gulped. “Second. Whoa, so totally apex!”
She pointed to the chair at the nav console behind her to the right. “Let me activate the piloting function on the console.” It hadn’t been used that way since Kiler was on board, and it hadn’t occurred to her to let Trip train on it until he’d walked on the bridge a few seconds ago. He was so eager, so positive. She needed to ride the wake of his emotions for a while.
“It’s similar to the one in the manual you have,” she said as he took his seat. “It should be on now.”
“It is.”
“Take five minutes and familiarize yourself with the location and reaction of the screens and controls. Do you want to go get your bookpad?”
“Nope.” He tapped his forehead. “Got it all here.”
“We’re twenty minutes out from gate exit. I’m going to make the first announcement on intraship now; then, when you’re ready, I’ll go over what your duties will be.”
“Yes, ma’am. Captain.”
She turned back to her console, falling easily into the routine she had for years when flying for GGS. She opened intraship with a tap of her thumb. “This is the captain. In a few minutes we’ll be fifteen out from gate exit. Whatever you have loose, strap it down. Whatever’s open,
close it. This is slippery space, and gate exit will be choppy. Your next and final advisory will be at five minutes out. At that point I want everyone strapped in a bunk or cabin chair. No exceptions. Captain out.”
She didn’t add an invitation to be on the bridge and hoped that part of her message was clear. If Devin came up here, she would just have to tolerate it. She couldn’t demand he leave the bridge and yet permit Trip to be here.
Hell, she’d survived for months with Kiler on the ship. This should be only a few more hours.
Anxious to get rid of him? She didn’t have to identify him to that annoying voice in her mind. And, yes, she was, because seeing him only prolonged the heartache.
And it won’t be heartache losing your ship?
But she was going to lose it anyway. Better to the Guthries than to Orvis.
Yet it wasn’t just her desire to put distance between herself and Devin that fueled her impatience. She knew how long it took messages and data to get from Dock Five to Aldan Prime. She hadn’t been trying to make Devin feel guilty when she’d told him that by the time they hit gate exit, the whole damned Empire would know he owned the Rider. It was fact. Devin said the stealth-pointer program in Trip’s pocket comm reported back to an Imperial office, and she believed him. Therefore she also believed that they had a very small window of three, maybe four days before whoever was tracking Trip learned they were on the Rider. Whoever was in that office didn’t have to send a ship from Aldan. Imperial cruisers were all over the sector. One could intercept them in a matter of hours.
They had to get to Lufty’s, had to get out of the space lanes before that happened. They needed to disappear from the Imperial Traffic Control databases completely. Their entry to the gate after they left Dock Five was recorded. She couldn’t change that. But her aborted jump transit made sure there’d be no exit signature for Griggs’s Void Rider.
That also meant they couldn’t upload or download any data or messages from any Imperial beacons they passed. That would be annoying—they needed to know more about the bombing of Devin’s offices.
Everything would have to wait until they got to Lufty’s.
There was safety in silence.
Exiting through the gate with slippery space still grappling for the Rider wasn’t half as problematic as what happened ten minutes later. At least, that was Kaidee’s way of looking at it.
It was bad enough having Devin in the close quarters of the bridge. But the real—and unexpected—problem turned out to be Barty.
“If we access the beacon, someone might be able to trace us. You know that.” She pointed at Barty, lounging at the comm console, but her words were also directed at Devin—standing behind Barty. For the past five minutes, Barty had been the one detailing his requests. Devin had just stood silently behind him, like his hired muscle. She thought of Frinks and his Taka. Not good.
Trip, at second pilot, was looking as if he wanted to shrink into his seat, with his hands clasped tightly at his knees and shoulders hunched. After a stellar performance going through the gate, he now had discord on his first command.
“If I don’t pick up whatever answers my queries back on Dock Five have generated, someone tracing us will be the least of our problems. They may have already traced us.”
“Not to Lufty’s.”
The older man regarded her with a narrow gaze. “Captain Griggs, ImpSec could take down Lufty’s anytime the emperor or Tage wants it. The only reason Lufty’s or Uchenna’s still operates is that it serves some purpose. Undercover operatives are two words that come to mind.”
Kaidee couldn’t deny that. It was long accepted that the reason Dock Five still existed—and its notoriety predated Tage—was because the emperor and his people felt a known den of thieves was better than an unknown one.
“You were concerned,” Barty continued, “about Imperial cruisers waiting for us at the Talgarrath gate. I agreed with that. But that would be Fleet acting as enforcer, not ImpSec. ImpSec rarely moves that overtly.”
“And we need to warn whoever’s piloting the Prosperity,” Devin added.
“And if that pilot is there on Tage’s orders?” Kaidee countered.
“Then Ethan’s message to me would have read differently.”
They’d been over that point. Though she had misgivings, Kaidee recognized that Devin was probably right. Whatever Ethan might be—an annoying womanizer at times and too full of himself almost constantly—he was a Guthrie. He’d never risk Devin’s and Trip’s lives.
“Give me some ways we can minimize detection.” She looked at Devin. Okay, she was caving. They won. But she wouldn’t make it easy on them. “I take it that’s your job?”
He leaned back against the edge of the comm console, his body flanked by the two pale yellow screens. “To be honest, I’m not as familiar with the system as I’d like to be. I’ve never had a reason to investigate Imperial protocols. I know banks, other commercial communications systems, because I’ve worked on the other end. In order to prevent hackers, you need to know how they get access.” Devin shrugged. “At worst, if I can’t delete traces of our uploads and downloads, I might be able to muddy the IDs so they won’t know who we are.”
“Might?” Kaidee never liked the sound of might. “And if they already have a watch out for us, don’t you think a null ID is as much of a clue as if we used our own? Can’t you make us read as someone else?”
“The only other codes I have available to me are other GGS ships. I think they’d figure it out.”
Kaidee didn’t like that. “Barty?”
“In order to get workable codes, I’d have to use the datalink.” He smiled thinly. “I believe we’re caught in a bit of a loop.”
They were, and she didn’t like it one bit. “We’re about thirty-five minutes out from the next-closest data beacon. Do what you can to make damned sure whatever you send and receive doesn’t also put us on some Imperial cruiser’s targeting screens.”
“We’ll make it to Lufty’s,” Barty said, rising.
Yeah, us and who else on our tail?
But she didn’t say that, she just swiveled her chair around and brought up system stats on her armrest screen. It made her look busy without requiring real concentration. She didn’t want to give Devin any opening to stay and talk.
The chair on her right squeaked. “Thanks for letting me sit second, Captain Makaiden.”
She glanced over her shoulder, aware that Barty was leaving. Aware that Devin was not. “You did good, Trip. Keep studying.”
She caught his shy smile as he turned and hurried to catch up to Barty.
She waited for one more set of departing boot steps. Devin said her name instead. “Makaiden.”
She forced herself not to look at him. “You’re down to thirty-two minutes to work your hacks. Unless what you have to say involves that, you’d better get moving.”
The last set of boot steps headed for the corridor.
Twenty minutes later, though, the men came back—this time Devin and Barty. Hoping there was some good luck somewhere in the galaxy with her name on it, Kaidee turned over the comm console to Devin, then went back to her files on Lufty’s and Uchenna’s. She listened with one ear cocked to the men—Devin swearing under his breath now and then, Barty grunting from the seat next to him. Keeping the Rider’s identity secret was not an easy task. Tampering with a ship’s ident programs was something that had put more than one freighter captain—and a handful of smugglers stupid enough to be caught—in starport lockups.
She wanted the news feeds and messages—incoming and outgoing—as badly as Devin and Barty did. She still had people at GGS she considered friends. Devin’s reminder—we need to warn whoever’s piloting the Prosperity—had struck a chord. What if Nel was on board? With Halsey’s death, Petra Frederick might send Nel, who didn’t look like the tough bodyguard she was. And what if the pilot was Bixner or Kimber-An? Kimber-An had a husband and small children.
A light blinked on her screen. “
Five minutes until we’re in range,” she announced.
“We’re good to go,” Devin answered.
She swiveled part of the way around. “I’ve set the link to go hot automatically. It’s pretty much the same system as on GGS ships. News and trade feeds will upload without any prompts. Personal stuff, it’ll flash you for passwords.”
Devin was nodding as she spoke. “How long before we make Lufty’s?”
“Lufty’s beacon is about four hours out. If we end up there.” She hadn’t written off Uchenna’s completely. If she started seeing traffic on her scanners that she didn’t like, she’d change course. “Clearance into Lufty’s could be immediate, or they could stall us for several hours if they’re swamped or don’t like my answers. The latter could cause problems. It’s no fun being a sitting target.”
“Before we do this again, we’re going to upgrade your weapons systems.”
“We’re not doing this again, Mr. Guthrie.”
His only response was the slight uplifting of one eyebrow before he turned back to his console.
“Link is hot,” Barty announced. “Let’s hope and pray we have some good news.”
And that no one was tracking their retrieval of it.
There were messages waiting. And data. But unscrambling and decoding took time, because Devin couldn’t in all good conscience let the packets go further into the ship’s systems, and eventually to his microcomp or Barty’s, without first authenticating and checking each one for worm programs. Bombs destroyed offices, but worms destroyed data—and, given their current circumstances, could also destroy systems on the ship. Both were equally lethal but, at the moment, there was only one he could do something about.
His concentration—admittedly—wasn’t the best. Makaiden was doing everything she could to push him away, and his mind kept searching for options while he worked on the packets. He needed to find a way to bring her back to him. He needed to pay attention to what he was doing.
He released a packet of data to Barty, then rewarded himself for a minute by staring at Makaiden’s profile while his memory brought up images of her body, naked, curved next to his. She was not remotely perfect, and if a director was casting a new vid, she’d never be the star. There were flaws in the symmetry of her face; her mouth was a little too wide, her nose, a bit too broad at the end. Her hair was an unremarkable color somewhere between medium blond and light blond. One eyebrow was crooked. She was of average height and weight.
Rebels and Lovers Page 27
