by Kris Delake
Apparently, she had used thigh muscles she hadn’t used in years—maybe ever. And then there were the bruises on her knees.
She carried her clothes over one arm. “I’m going to see what kind of shower this place has,” she said.
He was sitting up, but one leg was raised, hiding that eager penis. He ran a hand through his hair as well, and it only served to make the strands stick up more.
“Not food?” he asked.
She glanced at the navigation map. They weren’t far from the Brezev System.
“Food eventually. But first, I think we need to be ready in case something happens,” she said.
“Something did happen. I got hit with your energy-sapping enthusiasm ray.”
She laughed again. “I mean something else,” she said, letting herself be serious. “We’re not too far away from the system boundaries. We’re going to have to be on guard.”
“For what?” he asked.
“For anything,” she said, and left the cockpit.
Chapter 22
Skye sure knew how to kill a mood. Of course, she knew how to start one too.
Jack smiled, then levered himself off the cockpit floor. He felt less wobbly than he had after last night, but he still felt like he’d lost more energy than he thought possible.
He braced one hand on his chair, noted that the harness had fallen to the side, and that there was an unidentifiable stain in the center of the seat. Or maybe it was identifiable.
He didn’t want to figure out what, exactly, it was. He pressed one of the cleaning controls on the chair’s side, and hoped that the nanocleaners were up for the job.
In the meantime, he searched for his clothes. Somehow they had gotten strewn all over the cockpit. His shirt had slid against the wall, and looked like it was now bunched up against some of the planets in the Brezev Sector.
Skye was right; they were close.
He hoped she came back soon because he was not only unequipped to fly this thing, but he also had no idea where they were going.
He stood for a moment, naked in a field of stars. At least that was what it felt like. He hadn’t really paid attention to the scenery, outside of his focus on Skye, no matter what she said about this being like making love in space.
Although she had said having sex. He let out a small sigh. It felt more profound that simple sex to him. He wondered if it had to her.
She leaned in the door, her hair shiny and her face a bit ruddy. “The best sonic shower I’ve ever had,” she said. “It’s yours now. I’m going to rustle up some food.”
He wanted to kiss her again, but she had already vanished. He felt the last of the arousal leave his body. He did need the shower. He also needed rest, but he doubted he would get any.
He took his shirt away from the screen and thought he saw some movement there that he hadn’t expected. He squinted, trying to see if the movement was just reflective of their travels or if it was something else.
It could be anything else. Asteroids, ships going in different directions, moons, or just a trick of the light.
Still, it might’ve been something.
So he walked over to the navigation center. It was in a language he had never seen before, with symbols he didn’t recognize. He couldn’t pilot this thing even if he wanted to.
He glanced at that part of the screen again, but didn’t see anything unusual.
Still, that moment left him unsettled. Skye had been right earlier: they needed to distract themselves so they wouldn’t worry.
But the distraction had gone to the other part of the ship, searching for food. He needed to figure out what he was going to do in the Brezev System.
He had let Skye take the lead so far, and he was grateful. But it was his life on the line, and he needed to figure out how to protect himself.
He grabbed his clothes and walked out of the cockpit. The narrow corridor was tall enough for him to stand upright. A door to his left opened into what had to be the master suite. It was done as sparely as the rest of the ship, although the bed’s thick mattress beckoned. That bed was probably large enough to fit him.
He couldn’t think about that. Instead, he went through another door and found the shower, which was the size of the airlock. Here he would have to crouch, and he hoped that the shower would get all the pertinent parts.
He dropped his clothes outside the shower door. It finally hit him that he had left everything on Krell, from his ship to his clothing to the only possessions that meant anything to him.
He always traveled light, but not this light. He didn’t even have his weapon. And if he accessed his accounts, the Rovers would probably find him.
He was going to have to move money in Brezev, and quickly. Then he would have to thread it through half a dozen accounts, and flee to somewhere else all at the same time.
He leaned his head against the cool shower door. He was probably going to end up one of those people who spent his entire life on the run.
That thought destroyed any good mood he’d already had. Sure, he used to travel a lot when he worked for the Rovers, but he had built himself a home not far from Rikki’s on Unbey. He rarely used it, but he liked knowing it was there.
The problem was that the Rovers knew too.
He had gone from being a silent collector of information to one of those guys whose life was forfeit because he knew too much.
And he wasn’t really sure how he had gotten here in the first place.
Chapter 23
Skye’s first indication that she might have chosen the wrong ship came in the kitchen. It was well stocked. And by well stocked, she meant stocked by a ship that someone used not just for short hops, but for long ones. Plus most of the food here was extremely fresh, the kind of fresh that went for a premium on a place like Krell.
Someone had planned to take this ship soon.
She took advantage of the fresh apples and oranges, probably grown in Krell’s own hydroponics lab, and created a salad with fresh greens as well. Then she mixed it with a dressing she’d had on Krell, and added bread baked so recently that it still smelled like it had just finished cooking.
She put two bottled waters against her arm, and carried everything back into the cockpit.
Jack hadn’t arrived yet. She could probably check on him in that shower, but that might lead to more delays.
Then she grinned. Might was the wrong word. It would lead to more delays.
And right now, she couldn’t afford the distraction.
The navigation console had two food trays built in so that the pilot and copilot could eat here without worrying about spills. She hit the button that made the trays extend to their full length, set the salad on them, and then got to work on the ship itself.
She had looked at the registry before stealing the ship, but she well knew that a registry meant nothing. She’d forged dozens of them. She needed to do more than search through the registry to figure out whose ship she had stolen.
The ship’s name was Rapido, which seemed both an obvious reference and a placeholder name to her. It suggested little about the owner. That owner would have no way of knowing Skye was taking Rapido toward the Brezev Sector, but eventually, he (or she) would find out. Information traveled quickly. And if the ship’s owner was someone known for taking revenge, then Skye would have to dump this ship as quickly as possible.
She was deep into her research when she felt Jack enter the room. She could always tell when someone was around, but her body never went into a pleasurable alert like this. Her skin tingled, and she hadn’t even looked at him.
“There’s a lot of fresh food,” she said. “I made us salads, but if you want something else—”
“That’s fine,” he said and returned to his copilot chair. He smelled faintly of the shower’s built-in soap and something she had come to recognize as Jack.
She didn’t look directly at him. The fact that he sat so close took too much of her attention already.
“The food
made you nervous, huh?” he asked.
She stopped and looked at him. His face was freshly scrubbed and he had gotten rid of some of the stubble that had started to grow. He had combed his hair. He looked like a man on a mission, not like a man who had spent a good part of the afternoon on the cockpit floor.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“You haven’t touched it.” He took his plate. “Besides, food this fresh would have freaked me out.”
“Would have?” she asked.
“Does,” he said. “It does freak me out. But I’m too hungry to care.”
Then he nodded at her plate.
“Eat something,” he said.
She wasn’t sure if he was waiting for her to take a bite before he did, but it wouldn’t surprise her. Anyone who had lived among assassins knew that it was better to let the person who prepared the food take the first bite.
Of course, if he were truly paranoid, he would switch plates with her.
She picked up her fork and ate some apple. It crunched. Jack smiled and started to eat as well.
She felt oddly relieved that he hadn’t tried to switch plates. In her circles, that was a mark of trust.
“Whose ship is this?” he asked.
“That was what I was just trying to figure out,” she said. “There are layers and layers and layers here.”
He nodded. “Let me help.”
“I can—”
“I know,” he said, “but this is my specialty, just like it’s yours. With both of us doing the work, we might learn something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Something we don’t want to know.”
Chapter 24
The ship’s owner had more aliases than most Rovers. Jack didn’t like that at all. Someone with that many aliases had something to hide. He quit working on tracking the man before Skye did, just because somewhere along the way he realized that a guy like this wouldn’t keep his true identity anywhere on this ship, especially not in his own database.
Skye paused to finish the extremely good salad she had prepared for them. Jack couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything that healthy, nutritious, or fresh. He’d just kept treating himself to gut-busting meals like the burgers on Krell, and he knew that eventually that would catch up to him.
Skye looked at him sideways. Apparently he had done something to attract her attention.
“What?” she asked as she chewed the last of her bread. He even liked that. She burped like a freighter pilot and ate like a soldier. Manners were clearly not her strong suit.
“We’re not going to find him here,” Jack said.
“I know,” she said. “But I may have screwed us royally by taking this ship.”
He grinned. “No, you screwed us royally on that chair, and we enjoyed it.”
She chuckled.
“However,” he said, “we do need a plan. Someone will recognize this ship, so we need to go to a place that will look the other way.”
He didn’t know a lot of places in the Brezev Sector. He had a hunch the ones he knew about were the ones everyone knew about. He never trusted places like that, because that meant they expected their potential clientele to be idiots.
“Most shipyards in the Brezev Sector take hot ships,” she said. “But most of those shipyards are indebted to existing big players, folks we might not even know about. They don’t advertise.”
“I know,” Jack said. He didn’t know much about exchanging hot ships, except that he knew how to track someone who had stolen a ship. He knew how easily some places gave up that information as well, although he’d never tried in the Brezev Sector.
Most people in the Brezev Sector considered the Rovers to be too law-abiding because the Rovers made sure their assassins were licensed and they worked on jobs that were sanctioned.
Or they had until Heller came on board.
Jack shuddered.
“What?” Skye asked. She was picking at her salad now.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Do you want to do something else? Because I’m not sure how long we can use this ship.”
“I know,” he said. “I realized in the shower that I need to figure out what I’m doing.”
“If you play it right,” she said, “you can just stay out here. I doubt anyone could find you.”
He had considered that already. It would be easy enough to disappear. He could vanish entirely and no one would find him.
Until they needed to—and even then he might be able to stay one step ahead of whoever wanted to catch him.
The problems went deeper than that. He’d have to give up his friendships. Most of his life was built on connections. That was how he got information. Of course, he knew that most of those people gave up the information easily, but that didn’t make them any less valuable to him.
And he’d have to abandon Rikki. She was his only family. He couldn’t just leave her behind with no word.
Especially not now. She was involved with a man she didn’t really know, and he was messing with her head.
She had asked Jack to find out about him, and Jack would. In fact, he would ask Skye about him at some point.
Just not right now.
Jack had other pressing matters on his mind.
“I know no one could find me,” he said after a moment. “At least, I know it intellectually.”
“It’s a big universe,” she said, and she wasn’t being fatuous like most people when they mentioned how large the universe was. He could tell. She was trying to be helpful.
He glanced over at her and smiled. “I know that too. I could start a new life.”
She was watching him closely, as if what he said next mattered to her.
He almost said, I’ll start a new life if you come with me.
But he didn’t. Not because of her. God knows, life with Skye would be interesting, and if they cooled on each other sexually, they could move on, no strings.
Although even that thought disturbed him.
He didn’t examine why. At least not yet. Ever since yesterday, he had been responding to people, not taking action on his own.
He needed to do things for himself first.
“But you don’t want a new life? You’re not willing to start one?” She sounded almost defensive, and he wasn’t sure why that was. Did she want him to start a new life? If so, why?
“Would you?” he asked, realizing that he was just asking his question sideways.
“Start a new life if I were in your shoes? Absolutely,” she said.
He shook his head. He hadn’t been asking that question. “Would you start a new life now? Would you just walk away from everything you know?”
“You realize that’s why most people get assassinated, don’t you?” she asked without answering him. In fact, she hadn’t even looked at him. “They don’t run when they should.”
She picked up the last slice of apple from her plate, but she didn’t eat. She stared at it like something was written on it.
“That’s a fake statistic,” he said. “Most of the people I find have been on the run for years. They lose track, they need to find their families again, they relax, and I locate them. Ninety percent of what I did for the Rovers was finding people who had theoretically vanished.”
“Then they didn’t do it right,” she said.
He sighed. He used to think that too. “Most of them had. Some never had contact with their past again. We all leave traces, Skye. Sometimes the traces are really simple ones. We’ve left a lot of DNA in this ship, and no matter how thoroughly we clean it, we won’t get it all.”
He half thought she’d smile at the comment about DNA, but she didn’t. Instead she set that slice of apple back on her plate.
“You’re afraid they’ll find you,” she said. “They probably won’t, particularly if what you say about the Rovers is true. If you were their go-to guy and you’re gone, then who would search?”
He had wondered that himself. It would take a long tim
e for someone else to learn his job—not that they could. They’d have to already know how to do it, because there was no one in the Rovers or affiliated with them who knew how to get information the way that Jack did.
“I want this settled,” he said. “I don’t want to spend my entire life on the run. I don’t want to worry that if I relax for one moment, someone will find me and assassinate me. I mean, imagine if I have a family or something. You know these assassins. They’ll take out an entire neighborhood to get one guy.”
She made a sound of astonishment. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I were.” That was another thing that had disgusted him about the Rovers. At first, Jack thought he could stop the killing of innocents by better research. He could even give some assassins real-time information.
But so many of them didn’t want to hear from him at all, and so many of them didn’t care who they hurt in the process of earning their money.
Sure, governments could prosecute for collateral damage, but so many of the governments either hired Rovers or members of the Assassins Guild that they often did nothing at all. And when they did do something, it was usually in the form of levying a small fine, something any well-paid assassin could easily afford.
“Well,” Skye said primly. He hadn’t thought she was capable of prim. “No one in the Guild would level a neighborhood to get one target.”
He swiveled in his chair. Her naïveté was breathtaking.
“Really?” he said. “Because I know of several cases in which that happened, and those were Guild cases.”
“I’m sure whoever did it was sanctioned or kicked out of the Guild.” Skye still sounded prim, although there was a small frown in the middle of her forehead.
“No, they haven’t,” Jack said. “Most of the folks I know about still work for the Guild. In fact, some of them have risen pretty high in the Guild infrastructure.”
