by Kris Delake
She took a deep breath. “That’s seen as punishment. The Guild has a lot of rules, a code, really, and anyone who violates it—”
“Gets kicked out, demoted, or can no longer act as an assassin.” He leaned back, having a sudden thought. “Were you demoted?”
She laughed, then frowned when she realized he wasn’t laughing with her. “You’re serious.”
“Yes,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I never became an assassin in the first place. I didn’t lie to you about that.”
Now he had offended her and he hadn’t meant to. She was helping him for no reason he could understand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. He had worked alone too long. He really had no idea how to deal with other people on more than a casual basis.
He didn’t say anything else. He finished his meal instead. Then he picked up both plates and headed to the kitchen.
He really did need to make some decisions, and he needed to make them alone.
Chapter 25
Skye remained motionless in her chair. Jack had offended her.
He had offended her about the Guild.
She found that very strange.
She would have said she hadn’t felt enough loyalty to the Guild to be offended. After all, they had essentially tricked her just to get her services.
Yes, they had taken her in as a ten-year-old, but then they had had her sign a legal document at fourteen, the earliest age they could, telling her that they would cover her room, board, and schooling, which she could work off long after she graduated.
She had always thought she could work off that schooling as a chef or a teacher or one of the support staff at the Guild. And then, when the Guild put her into assassin’s training, she balked. She had said she didn’t want to be an assassin.
And they told her she had signed up for it.
She went through everything, and failed much of it, because she wasn’t suited to it. Her case had gone all the way to the top of the Guild. Director Ammons made a deal with her, so that she would spy for them instead of kill for them. Skye was stuck with it, until her massive debt was paid off.
She always said she hated them for that.
And yet she had just defended them to Jack.
Did she actually care about the Guild?
She stood up. He had left, clearly troubled. His apology had sounded heartfelt. Poor man. He had a lot to deal with right now. Including her.
And including their rival organizations.
Or rather, his former organization.
What had he done for them to want him dead? What did he know?
Maybe he should share that with her, and then they’d be able to solve this all together.
He had to know something that would threaten the Rovers’ very existence. Right? Or was this Heller guy just acting alone?
Something moved in the spacescape in the back corner of the room. It took her half a minute to remember that they were in the cockpit of a ship. She had been so focused on Jack, on the past, that she had lost track of where she was.
She went back to the navigation panel, and tapped it, magnifying the image a thousand times of whatever she had seen.
Ships. She saw ships.
And they seemed to be heading toward Rapido.
She hit the ship-wide communications array.
“Jack, I need you here now,” she said.
Then she poured over the route that Rapido had set. It was random, like she had programmed. Then she went deeper into the navigational system and found something she had missed earlier: This ship had a program that allowed it to bypass “dangerous” systems. The program was customized, meaning that whoever owned Rapido had designed the dangerous systems route to stay away from places where he was in danger, whatever that meant.
She was afraid she knew what it meant.
“What?” Jack ducked under the door.
“Look.” She showed him the ships. The navigation panel showed that they were even closer than they had been.
Then she explained about the dangerous route program.
“Crap.” Jack sank into his chair. “So what we know about this guy gets worse with each passing moment. He took an expensive ship built for speed to Krell, which isn’t the most savory place in the universe. He has more aliases than a Rover with a death wish, and he has places he needs to avoid. We, of course, flew right into one of them.”
Somehow she felt that as a personal affront, although she knew that Jack didn’t mean it that way. “If I’d known we had to activate the escape system and the dangerous route program at the same time, and compare them, I would have,” she said.
“You didn’t,” he said. “But you’d think they’d be linked somehow so that they would activate at the same time.”
“You would think that.…” She frowned. “Unless he sometimes had to do business on these places.”
Jack let out a small laugh. “Of course he did. Under an alias.”
“Or two. Or three.”
“Well, shit,” Jack said, and he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at those ships which had gotten so much closer that they no longer fit in the magnified viewing screen. “Obviously, there’s a lot more here that we should have known.”
“We were trying to find out…”
He put a hand on hers, sending a jolt of electricity through her. “We didn’t. I’m not blaming you.”
She knew that. She wasn’t sure why she was so defensive, and then she realized what was going on.
She felt like she had made a mistake. She hadn’t investigated clearly enough. She had focused in the wrong direction.
She had thought about getting Jack away from those Rovers and she had thought about stealing a ship so that no one on Krell would catch them, thinking they’d dump the ship as soon as possible. That was why she hadn’t worried about who owned the ship.
She figured the owner would come after the two of them and never find them.
But she hadn’t done her due diligence. She hadn’t figured out who she was stealing from.
And, granted, the last time she had done anything this elaborate, she’d had her parents as backup. They had probably done due diligence together or maybe, knowing them, they hadn’t cared.
“How do you make this thing smaller?” Jack asked, looking at the screen magnification. She appreciated the fact that he did not sound panicked. She might have sounded panicked in his shoes.
She tapped on the navigation board. The ships now fit into the raised-up screen, but they kept moving forward.
“I can’t read this language or I’d help you here,” Jack said. “If you show me what to do…”
She glanced at him in surprise. Languages were a major part of Guild training. But of course, he’d had no formal training, and he probably used translation devices when he researched.
“I don’t have the time at the moment,” she said. She needed to do something else first. She needed to find out what Rapido’s defensive capabilities were. She knew in general, but now she needed to know in specific.
“If you get hurt,” he said, “I can’t run this thing. At least show me the automatic pilot.”
She tapped the screen. “I just set the language in the autopilot to Standard so that you can read the instructions. If you need the automatic pilot, you give it one of the aliases and then tell it to engage.”
He looked at her sideways. “What’s more important than showing me?”
“Figuring out what the hell weapons systems we have.”
“There are a dozen ships out there,” he said. “Weapons aren’t going to help us. At least two of those ships are military issue.”
She glanced up. He was right. The ships out front were standard space yachts, but they were being followed by two military ships.
“Those military ships could be after the space yachts,” she said.
“Or they could be after us,” he said. “This thing have shields?”
“Good on
es, if he kept factory issue,” she said.
“Then let’s get out of here,” Jack said. “We’re not going to use weapons. You told me this ship was built for speed, and we need to run.”
He was right; she knew he was right. She just had to take action.
“We need to figure out where we’re going,” she said.
“Somewhere not on that danger map. We don’t want to get caught like this again,” he said. “And we need to go somewhere that will let us sell a hot ship without turning us over to the local authorities.”
She felt a thread of irritation. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“If I knew more about the sector, I’d help,” he said. “But I’m a little constrained here. I don’t know the language on this ship, I can’t fly the damn thing, I don’t know much about the Brezev Sector, and I really don’t want to be blown to smithereens.”
“Details, details,” she said, and activated the screens. Then she studied the controls. “There is a maximum speed here, but I don’t know how long this ship can sustain it.”
“I really don’t give a damn,” he said. “Get us the hell out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and slapped her palm on the speed controls. The ship jerked, which shocked her, and then everything became ribbons of light.
Damn. If the speed indicator on the navigation board was correct, they were going faster than she thought possible.
She hoped the ship could sustain this speed.
She hoped to hell none of those space yachts could match the speed.
Because if they could, this ship wouldn’t protect her and Jack for long.
Chapter 26
Skye wobbled as the ship hit its maximum speed, and Jack put out his hands to catch her. He really needed her now. He hadn’t been kidding about that. He couldn’t fly this thing, and he had no idea where the weapons were located even if he did figure out how to fly it.
Then there was the matter of a destination.
“Where’re we going?” he asked. He wouldn’t insult her by double checking that she had compared their new destination with that danger map. He hoped like hell she had.
“It’s a place called Zaeen,” she said. “I haven’t been there since I was a child.”
“Great,” Jack said. He hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic. He just couldn’t help himself.
“It’s the only place I could think of,” she said.
Before he had wondered if she felt defensive. Now he knew she did. Defensiveness didn’t suit her. Besides, she had nothing to be defensive about.
“You’re saving my ass, you know that, right?” he said.
She shook her head, as if she didn’t want to hear it. Her hands kept flying along the navigation board. “I feel like I’m the one who has been constantly putting it in jeopardy.”
He stared her for a moment. “Anyone following us?”
“Not that I can tell,” she said, still looking at the screens. “Nothing’s showing up on any of the sensors.”
“And unless someone greets us when we reach our destination, we’re home safe,” he said. “There’s no way they can know where we’re going, right?”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “There’s always a way. You know that. They can tap into our comm system, and they could view the navigation, and—”
“I suppose,” he said. “But you know how hard that is, and I do as well. Besides, it’s nearly impossible when you weren’t planning for it, at least from that distance.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You’re a ‘glass-is-always-half-full’ kinda guy, aren’t you?”
He laughed. Rikki had accused him of that. Being too optimistic had hurt him in the past, particularly when someone talked of adopting him as a child. But he always felt he was better off believing the best of people rather than the worst.
“Do you really see yourself as a ‘glass-half-empty woman’?” he asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, glancing at the navigation. “I’m not sure there’s anything in the glass at all.”
He wanted to take her in his arms, and for the first time, the feeling wasn’t sexual. He wanted to comfort her. No one should be as pessimistic and sad as she was. Not for any reason.
“So, Miss Empty Glass, are we in the clear?” he asked, trying to keep the tone light.
“For the next hour or two,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Then sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
She glanced at herself, then chuckled. “I’m just making you stand.”
“That too,” he said. “You know, someday, I’m going to build myself a custom ship, one with plenty of room, so I don’t spend my entire life hunched.”
“You could spend your entire life planetside,” she said. “Then you have an actual sky above you and you wouldn’t have to worry about banging your head.”
He gave her a wolfish grin. “I like having a Skye above me, and I rather enjoy banging.”
She looked at him sideways, her luscious mouth upturned just a bit. “Focus,” she said. “We’ll need all the energy we can get to survive going to Zaeen.”
“I’m not familiar with it,” he said.
“I haven’t been there in nearly two decades,” she said. “But I’ve been checking it out—”
“In your copious spare time, as you research me, this ship, and the criminal who owns the ship,” Jack said.
That upturn became a smile. He liked it when she smiled. It made her dark eyes light up.
“No,” she said. “Before I met you, I’d been researching Zaeen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” she said. “It was the last place I ever saw my parents.”
He let that sink in. He would have thought the last place she ever saw her parents was Kordita, where the Assassins Guild was. Someone had to drop her off there.
“And you were a child,” he said.
She nodded, her chin set. He recognized that look too. It was a common one among the children in Tranquility House, particularly among those kids who believed that their parents would come back for them.
Of course, the idiot parents never did.
Jack sighed. Sometimes he could be a glass-half-empty kinda guy, particularly when it came to parenting. Humans had been around for millennia, and a large portion of the human race never seemed to master parenting at all.
You’d think there’d be some kind of rule book or something, and first in it would be, Put the needs of the child above your own.
But then, that would be too difficult for most of these bastards.
“That surprise you?” she asked.
“Nothing surprises me.” He was lying. He had just surprised himself. He should have mentioned his own childhood, the fact that he couldn’t even remember his own parents and he had no idea why they dropped him at Tranquility House. Even though he’d tried to research it, he never found a trace of them.
It would have helped if he had known his real name.
Or theirs.
“They gave me to a so-called uncle who was supposed to take me to Kordita to wait for them. My father thought he could work with the Guild, or so he said. He figured they needed thieves. My uncle kept me for half a year before just giving me to the Guild.”
She said it all matter-of-factly, but Jack could tell it hurt.
“Did you ever figure out what happened?” he asked.
She looked at him, her face bleak. He recognized that expression too. Kids often got it too young, when they knew that the people they cared about the most never cared about them.
“To my parents?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Exactly what happened every time before when they dumped me. They figured they found a sucker who could take the kid, and they’d be able to live kid-free and unencumbered for the rest of their days.” She shrugged, as if trying to pretend that it didn’t hurt. “Guess they finally accomplished that.”
He wasn’t sure h
e could ever encounter those people. They’d tried to abandon their daughter more than once? He’d heard of parents like that from the kids at Tranquility House but he had always accepted it as part of those kids’ lives. He had been young and hadn’t thought about the kind of pain it caused.
Clearly, for Skye, the pain remained, much as she pretended otherwise.
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.”
