by Kris Delake
The corridor was empty, which relieved her. She was worried that someone had figured out who she was and had followed her. She also worried that they had found Jack alone and had hurt him.
She didn’t want to think that anyone had killed him, not in that room, not after the night they’d had. She wanted that room to remain the way it was, locked in her memory as a place of pleasure, not as a place of death.
Her heart pounded. She had never felt like this on her own escapes. Not that she’d really run for her life as an adult. She’d slipped in and out of various high-end buildings, lots of space yachts, and more than her share of cabins on various cruise lines. She’d always worried a bit about being caught, but never worried that someone would kill her.
Plus, no one would ever figure out why she’d been in a room because she never stole anything—except information, of course. She figured that down the road, she would get caught and then she would tell them that she had the wrong room, that somehow her passcode had worked or the door was open or something along those lines.
And she knew that whoever caught her would think the moment strange, but would believe her because she had no record and nothing would disappear.
This felt different, though. It wasn’t her life or her liberty at stake.
It was Jack’s.
And she actually cared about that.
The caring had made her act differently, although she had tried hard not to. She had paid off employees so that she could get into the well-guarded section of the dock bay, one for the high-end visitors. The employees had had a price already set, which led her to believe that she wasn’t the first to ever do this.
Of course, on Krell, she probably wasn’t.
She scouted the ships herself, even though one of the employees had pointed her to the ships he believed were the most, in his words, “accessible.” She wondered if he got a fee when someone was caught or if he expected a finder’s fee for whatever was inside.
She had just thanked him and continued the search on her own. Certain models of space yachts were more secure than others. Plus, she had learned, over the years, that some models were easy to break into but hard to fly. She’d never stolen a space yacht. Scratch that—she hadn’t stolen one since she left her parents. (She’d made a daring escape at eight, and her parents had used her to communicate with various space ports, posing as a child who had somehow managed to fly a ship in trouble.)
But she had gotten into a lot of yachts, and because she collected information, she had looked at their navigation systems just to see which ones would be easiest to breach.
She found at least two here. She didn’t look at them too closely—she was afraid that employee would notice, and report it to someone—but she mentally marked where they were.
Then she left conspicuously, saying her thank-yous to all the employees whose coffers she’d fattened.
She wasn’t planning to bring Jack through the front door of the bay. She’d been to Krell often enough to learn the back passages. If the employees caught her, so be it. She had already paid them and she was willing to pay them more.
But she would do this one delicately, and delicately meant smuggling Jack out without anyone seeing his tall, lanky frame.
She wasn’t even going to suggest that he change his hair color or his clothing. That body of his (which she had enjoyed so much) would give him away every time.
She swallowed hard, then slipped into the corridor. She had kept an eye out for tails. The fact that she hadn’t seen any didn’t mean that she wasn’t being followed. Even though she had borrowed one of Jack’s jammers, she knew that some equipment was so sophisticated she wouldn’t be able to fool it. She hoped no one had tried to track her with anything like that.
Her heart started pounding as she got close to the room. She was afraid he had lied to her, afraid that he had left just after she had.
She had the frightened feeling that if he had done that, he would have died quickly.
She hoped he had trusted her long enough to remain safe.
When she reached the room, she opened the door with a palm scan. At first she didn’t see him. She had expected him to be somewhere nearby and he wasn’t.
Her breath shortened, and she had to will herself not to panic, not to make things up. She didn’t say his name. She didn’t say anything. She just let the door close behind her, and hoped for the best.
He peered around the bedroom door, worry lines creasing his forehead. Then those lines vanished. He smiled, just a little, and then ducked under the door frame.
Apparently he had been worried she wouldn’t return.
“You’re early,” he said.
“It took less time than I thought,” she said. “This next will be the hard part.”
She still wasn’t used to looking up at anyone, and she was looking up at him. She had watched him duck under that door frame, and she worried that he might have the same trouble in the back corridors.
“I don’t think we can hide you,” she said. “You’re too tall.”
He nodded. “That’s one thing enhancements can’t change. However, jammers can hide me if you tell me our route.”
“Jamming the security feeds will be suspicious,” she said.
“That’s not what I’m going to do,” he said. He walked over to the wall screen that she hadn’t touched. “I can get into Krell’s systems and change my signature on the security equipment.”
“Someone will find it,” Skye said.
He looked at her over his shoulder, then he grinned. “Yeah, someone will. If someone looks. The problem for Heller is that I was the only one on his team who could do things like this. The Rovers aren’t the Assassins Guild. They don’t have enough money to hire redundant employees.”
“Don’t Rovers get paid for their jobs?” she asked, rather than telling him that the Guild didn’t have anyone quite like her either. He might never understand that. She wasn’t sure the Guild did.
“Sure they do,” he said, “but they get the money directly and then pay the Rovers if they remember. When the job comes through the Rovers, the Rovers keep half of the up-front fee and let the assassin take the rest.”
“Sounds inefficient,” she said.
“Inefficient, impossible to enforce, and ripe for theft,” he said. “I always made sure I got paid up front.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine working like that. It had to be stressful. Her salary and bonuses went to paying off her debts. But she could live off her expense account. If she decided to stay with the Guild after all her debts were paid off, she would make a small fortune.
All the time he spoke to her, he worked the screen. She shifted from foot to foot, not used to waiting for someone else. She had a plan. They needed to execute it, before Heller’s man got to the employees at the dock. If Heller’s man paid them more than Skye had—hell, if Heller’s man paid them less and then promised them a lot more with the capture and/or notification—then she and Jack were screwed.
“Is he smart enough to look at the security feed?” she asked.
“Never underestimate a Rover,” Jack said, still working.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. You folks at the Guild follow rules and rarely do anything that hasn’t been approved by someone somewhere. Rovers have to think on their feet. Of course, he would look at the security feed. He probably knows I’m in this room.”
Her breath caught. “Then we have to get out of here now.”
Jack pressed his entire hand on the screen, then turned around and grinned at her. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 17
Skye gave Jack an odd look, then raised her eyebrows just a little as if to say, What the hell. Then she opened the door, looked both ways, and waited for him.
He had shut off all but his personal jammer. He hadn’t told her about that. She would probably protest. She would want him to jam as much as possible.
But then sh
e also didn’t know that as far as the Krell security feeds were concerned, she would be walking through the station with a five-foot-five, clean-cut, blond man. Jack hadn’t used that disguise before, at least not around Heller, so no one would be looking for it.
And he trusted Krell security to be so lax that when he did show up at the docking ring, they’d not even double check the feeds like most well-run places did. They’d think the six-foot-six black-haired guy belonged there.
The words “Krell” and “security” really didn’t belong together. It was more like Krell monitoring so that someone else’s security could use the feed after some crime happened. Or if some criminal wanted to track someone. Or whatever anyone paid for the monitoring feed.
Still, as Jack stepped into the empty corridor, his heart was in his throat. He had told Skye not to underestimate the Rovers. He had to be careful that he didn’t either.
At least he knew most of their tricks. He knew where to look for them.
Skye was already halfway down the corridor. She stopped, opened her hands in another What the hell? gesture. Only this one was a question, and an irritated one. Hurry up. Stop dawdling. You are afraid of being killed, right?
He could almost hear her say all of those things. He appreciated her silence, though. He didn’t need to answer her, which was a good thing. He hadn’t had a voice print to work with, so he hadn’t been able to modify his voice.
It was hard to track someone in a space station by the way that they spoke, but he’d done it in the past. He didn’t know if Heller had ever done it, but Jack would wager that other Rovers had.
And he had no idea which other Rovers were actually after him.
Skye had stopped in front of a wall panel. It looked no different from any other part of the wall. As he got close, she brushed the side of the panel with her hand, and the panel opened.
The back corridors. Every station had them, and they were usually easy to find.
In a place like Krell, they were predictably filthy and predictably unguarded.
He took a deep breath of the somewhat fresh air in the corridor, then followed Skye into the back passage. She could stand upright with inches to spare. He had to crouch in a way that actually twinged his back.
Normally, he wouldn’t walk through this at all. If he didn’t lean over far enough, his head would brush against a ceiling that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the station was built.
And then there was the smell. He couldn’t quite separate all of the odors out, but he recognized rancid grease right away. The fact that the back passageway smelled this bad meant that the environmental systems in here were worse than they were outside of the passageway, or that they had given up a long time ago.
He wanted to ask Skye how far they had to go, but he didn’t dare talk.
She fit easily between the walls and under that ceiling, and she didn’t seem bothered by the smell. Although he couldn’t quite tell what she was feeling, since he only saw her back.
He found himself watching her perfect little bottom, which was too much of a distraction for him. He couldn’t think about touching that bottom, being near that bottom, not right now, not when he was hunched over and walking on a squishy floor that he had trouble keeping his balance on.
He had to keep his eye out for anything unusual, a scraped-off area, other fairly fresh footprints, something, and he was having trouble concentrating on any of it.
So much for the fear-for-your-life thing focusing him. It focused him on Skye, and nothing else.
Still, he worked to maintain his concentration as she led him through tunnel after tunnel. He mentally repeated the directions they turned, and kept track of how far they walked. He had an enhancement that would also do that, but he didn’t want to activate it.
He had learned long ago that people could be tracked through the oddest enhancements, because most people never shut theirs off. That was why he had so few of them, and rarely used them.
Finally, Skye turned into a wider corridor. She looked over her shoulder (he envied that movement; he couldn’t do the same thing without scraping his head on a gushy wall), and put a finger to her lips.
As if he needed to be told to be quiet.
Then she stepped forward, one hand behind her in a stop and wait gesture. He wanted to stop and wait in a place where he could stand upright, or at least stand up a bit more. He wasn’t sure where that place was, but he knew this wasn’t it.
She left his line of sight for a brief moment, then came back and gestured him forward.
He stepped into an open area where he could stand more or less upright. He had to tilt his head sideways to keep from brushing the ceiling, but at least the ceiling here wasn’t covered in goo. He suspected that this part of the tunnels smelled better, but he couldn’t do more than suspect because the previous tunnels had ruined his nose for at least the next few hours.
He grimaced at the thought of that smell dogging him for the rest of the day. Dogging him, hell. He probably smelled like that after the walk through the tunnels.
Skye moved so close to him that he could kiss her. She didn’t seem interested, though. Instead, she brushed off his sleeves and gestured him to move his head closer.
He didn’t groan, but his back silently protested. He had to get close to that weird position he had been in just a moment ago.
“We’re about to go into the docking ring,” she whispered. “You let me talk, and don’t disagree with me or volunteer anything, no matter what I say.”
He wanted to say, What kind of amateur do you think I am? But he knew better than to speak up. She had no real idea who he was, and if she was from the Guild like she said, she thought him a dangerous and difficult amateur just because of his association with the Rovers.
So he nodded. She patted his arms, getting some more junk off them (he must have brushed against those horrible walls after all), then turned around.
He stood upright (more or less) and couldn’t suppress his sigh of relief.
She took his hand, pulling him forward, then opened the panel. At that moment, he silently cursed himself.
He should go out there first. A Rover could be waiting, one she didn’t know, and they would both die.
But Jack hadn’t thought of it until now.
And he hoped now wasn’t too late.
Chapter 18
The employee lunchroom behind the docking ring was empty. Still, Skye stepped into it gingerly, hoping no one hid nearby.
The lunchroom had been tacked on later, probably placed in what had been designed as a guard station. The ceiling was as high as the ceiling in the ring, which was to say, higher than the interior of Krell, and she knew that Jack would appreciate that.
One large, very clean table stood in the middle of the floor, which was also startlingly clean, startling not just because they were on Krell, but because Skye had never seen a clean employees-only lunchroom, not even in the Guild.
The blinking red lines were the only thing that moved in the room besides her. She stepped out of the panel and let out a sigh of relief.
She had paid off one of the docking ring employees to clear this room, but paying off someone didn’t mean they’d do what she asked. Hell, he might not have done what she asked—the room might be empty at all times except whenever lunch was—but she didn’t care.
She had gotten Jack this far.
Now came the tricky part.
She pulled him forward.
He stepped out of the panel, looked up, and then stood upright with such a sigh of relief that she felt for him. Then he brushed off the top of his head, as if he had touched that horrible ceiling in the passageways. He did have some black streaks on the side of his face.
She probably did too, which made her shudder. Those passageways had been nasty.
She inclined her head toward a nearby sink. Jack looked at her with gratitude, then cautiously made his way over there. She followed. They needed to clean off as best they could and quickl
y.
Jack finished up, then stepped aside so she could rinse off as well. That hadn’t cleaned up the smell. But she headed toward the door, hoping he remembered her admonition.
It slid silently sideways instead of opening outward. Three employees stood near their stations, theoretically monitoring any ship that wanted to land on Krell. Automation didn’t work here; there were too many variables, most of them with shady reputations.
The employee that Skye had talked with, a man still so young that his enhancements couldn’t cope with all of his bad skin, winked at her. She winked back.
Then she slipped right toward the part of the ring where the high-end space yachts got stored. Most of them had security too tight for her to breach, but two models built for speed rather than comfort didn’t. Apparently a lot of the comfort items on a space yacht slowed it down, or at least ruined the sleeker designs that enhanced swiftness.
She could feel Jack behind her. He was going to have to duck again as they walked into the ring. This part had been upgraded most recently. The walls actually gleamed here, and the ring itself, while still plain, had a bounce to it that suggested custom-made materials.
The ships she wanted were farther down the ring, in their own hangers. She made it to the first. Fortunately, it was also her first choice, primarily because it was newer, and because a cursory search didn’t show any affiliations with known crime rings. She’d learned that one from her parents as well.
She slipped into the airlock and beckoned Jack to follow. The ships docked half in and half out of the ring. When they wanted to leave, they unclamped and backed out before they took off.
This allowed someone to flee even if no employees were working and even if someone else tried to shut down the automated docking system.
Jack slipped in with her. The space was narrow, partly because the nose of the ship pushed up in here as well. Earlier, it had taken her a minute to find the door. It blended into the ship’s blackness with no obvious lines around it.
