by Kris Delake
She didn’t want to explain anything to him right now, but the conversation did keep her from panicking. She was a good pilot, but nowhere near as good as she needed to be for this. She knew dozens of pilots who were better, hundreds even. And here she was, dodging even more junk.
Pieces had started to hit the shield. Small pieces, tiny pieces in fact, but they were making a difference, hurting the integrity of the shield. The shield should have held up better.
Of course she had no idea how good a lifepod’s shields could be. You’d think that lifepod shields would be better than those inside a ship because lifepods usually had to escape from somewhere.
Hell, you’d think that a lifepod on a ship as expensive as that one would have been spectacular, not a piece of junk like this—
“Oh, shit,” she said, finally understanding what Jack was telling her. “You mean the idiot who owned the ship did this?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I do.”
She wanted to bang her head against the console, but had no time. Whoever owned that damn ship didn’t care if it got stolen. That was why it was so easy to break into.
But he was one of those bastards who got revenge on anyone who took anything from him. So he had designed the ship to get away from wherever it was before exploding.
That first lurch as the ship left Krell? That had probably been the fail-safe kicking in. The other lurches had been as the system set.
“It shouldn’t have let us into the lifepod,” she said.
“If there had been no lifepod, we would have known something was up,” Jack said.
“I didn’t check for lifepods when I was stealing ships.” She wrestled the pod back on course. The shield had lost twenty percent of its effectiveness. She could either take it off Hardened and down a degree or she could hope nothing would go through the weaker part of the shield.
“I meant when we were trying to leave the ship. I don’t think he figured we’d abandon the ship. I think that—”
“When the autopilot engaged at that fast speed,” she said. “We would have done that if we were relaxed.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And relaxing, leaving the cockpit, resting—”
“We wouldn’t have seen anything set.” She swore again, then dodged some debris twice the size of the pod.
She finally saw an opening, and if she were in a real ship, she would have zoomed toward it. But there was no zooming in this stupid pod. Just moving forward and praying.
She hated praying.
“What the hell was this guy hiding?” Skye asked.
“I don’t think he was hiding anything,” Jack said. “I think this entire system existed in case the ship got stolen, and then he’d write it off. I think we could have dug for weeks and never figured out who he was.”
“Not that we would have had weeks,” Skye said. “We hadn’t even been on that ship six hours.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “But we got six hours farther away from him when the ship exploded.”
She shook her head at it all, but part of her admired the guy’s brilliance. She had never thought of anything like that. She wouldn’t do it if she had thought of it.
That was why she wasn’t an assassin. Assassins were trained to think like that.
Then she felt cold.
“This couldn’t be one of your Rover buddy’s ships, could it?”
“No,” Jack said. “No one in the Rovers has all of these skills.”
“But you’ve been gone from the group,” Skye said. “You might not know who joined it.”
She threaded the pod through some more debris, going beneath it.
“I keep track.” Something in Jack’s voice made her want to look at him. But she couldn’t.
They were almost out of the debris field.
She went even lower. Ahead of the pod, bits of debris dipped below the pod as they continued on the various trajectories the explosion had sent them on. But pod itself was clear.
Finally.
She sat back and let out a large sigh of relief.
“We’re safe?” Jack asked.
“For the moment,” she said. “I can’t promise what will happen in Zaeen.”
“At least we’re going to get there,” he said.
She leaned back toward the console. She still had some red tape, regulations, and lying to do.
“We’re not there yet,” she said. “So let’s not be overly optimistic.”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be,” Jack said. “Just today, I dodged an assassin or two, didn’t die in an explosion, and spent some lovely time with a beautiful woman. I think I can afford to be optimistic.”
Skye smiled in spite of herself.
“I told you,” she said. “A glass-half-full kinda guy.”
And in spite of herself, she liked that.
Chapter 30
Apparently, everyone on Zaeen had seen the ship explode. It had happened so close that Zaeen had to suspend ship traffic and turn on its own shields. A few of the automatic lasers had destroyed the largest bits of debris just to keep them from damaging the station itself.
If station was the right word. Jack had never seen any place like this megalopolis. He’d been on big space resorts in the past, but they had a lot of private areas and one central purpose, usually some kind of relaxation for the rich and powerful, with a small section reserved for other travelers who had to stop but couldn’t afford the main part of the resort.
Zaeen was like five gigantic cities mixed with three resorts and seven shopping centers, none of it geared exclusively toward the filthy rich. Most of it seemed made for the middle-of-the-road traveler who needed time away from his horrible life or for the residents of Zaeen themselves, the people who actually worked on this place, and needed to house, feed, and clothe their families.
The landing area wasn’t a bay or a dock. It was a full-fledged port. And it took Skye a bit of negotiation to get someone to allow them entry. She had to prove that they wouldn’t be indigent.
Apparently, Zaeen would have turned them away, even if they arrived on the lifepod after that large explosion, if they couldn’t pay for their own way on the station.
Jack thought he’d seen it all, but even so that seemed remarkably cold to him. He felt outrage but didn’t express it. He didn’t want Zaeen to turn them away.
After they got clearance to enter, they got off the pod with the shirts on their back, and were forced into some truly rigid (and stinky) decontamination chambers, after which they had to buy new clothing, because their clothing was deemed contaminated, even though it wasn’t. The way Jack knew that it was all rigged was that Skye had to pay for the clothing before they got off the lifepod. She was promised a refund if their clothing wasn’t contaminated.
Jack wanted to call it all a scam, but he didn’t dare. He needed to be grateful. He was alive, he hadn’t been blown up by the ship they stole or murdered by his former colleagues.
And as he had said to Skye not an hour before, he had spent more than twenty-four hours in the company of one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.
Hell, if he were honest with himself, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And he wanted to see her again.
After he got out of decontamination—well, after he got through the large retail center attached to the decontamination unit—he went to the “Reuniting Antechamber” as the section was called, hoping Skye had waited for him.
Part of him worried that she hadn’t, that she got some kind of payment for bringing hapless people like him to this place. Granted, he might not have gotten that idea if it weren’t for some warning brochures that he watched while going through the somewhat rude decontamination process. Apparently, a lot of people got dragged here with the promise of riches or jobs, only to discover that they simply fodder for the gigantic economic machine that was Zaeen.
The Reuniting Antechamber was as small as the retail center was large. It was a white room with a high ceiling (thank h
eavens) and bench seats in small groupings. Two other people sat on the benches as far away from each other as they could get.
Jack sat near the door, figuring he would give Skye an hour or two before leaving the Chamber.
Then he would have to figure out what to do next. If he accessed his funds, he would alert the Rovers to his presence. That was the bad news. The good news was that most Rovers never came to the Brezev Sector; there just wasn’t enough work here for outsiders. Everything got handled in Sector, or so he always thought.
Or maybe it didn’t get handled at all.
He’d been sitting only five minutes when Skye stumbled in. She was wearing form-fitting black pants stuffed into shiny boots and a black top that left little to the imagination.
Not that he needed his imagination to know what was under her clothes. Just his memory.
The memory made him stand, since remaining seated would have shown his reaction to the memory to everyone else in the room. He tugged on his pants—not form fitting (except at the moment) but black just like Skye’s.
She grinned at him. “I hadn’t planned to dress like twins.”
“I don’t think anyone would mistake us for twins,” he said softly, then kissed her.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down farther. There was relief in that kiss and passion, and a whole lot of promise.
He couldn’t break it off.
She had to.
“I was going to say that the clothing might make them think us a performing troop,” she said, her cheeks flushed, “but I don’t think I could perform in public.”
Jack’s cheeks heated. He couldn’t either.
He slipped his arm around her shoulder, then led her to the exit. The other people in the room watched them as if they were nothing more than some kind of video display.
Still, he was happy to get out of there.
“I don’t think we should stay here long since our arrival was pretty dramatic,” he said softly as he pulled her close.
She put her arm around his waist, and that warmed him. He hadn’t expected it. He wished he were just a bit shorter so that she could rest her head against his shoulder while they were walking.
“I don’t think anyone will notice our arrival,” she said.
“They already have,” he said. At least one person mentioned it to him in Decontamination.
“All of Zaeen noticed it,” she said, “but that’s not going to last.”
She sounded certain. He wasn’t sure how she could be.
“You seem pretty confident for a glass-always-empty woman,” he said.
She chuckled. “You have no idea how big this place is.”
“I thought you haven’t been here in years,” he said.
“I haven’t. But it was big then.”
He didn’t say what he was thinking. Places that seemed large to children weren’t always large to adults. He knew that better than most. He’d been a pretty scrawny kid. By the time he hit his growth, everything from his past looked small.
He smiled at the thought, then felt a moment of worry for Rikki. He needed to get out of his own predicament so that he could find out information for her.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Skye asked.
He didn’t answer that, partly because he didn’t, and partly because she sounded amused.
Why would she sound amused?
Then the doors to the restricted area opened, and a cacophony hit him. Sound first—voices, music, laughter, all vying for attention, getting louder and louder as each moment went by.
But sight hit second, mostly in colors—red, green, blue, yellow—he couldn’t process it all because it was so bright. The lighting was higher than lighting he’d seen anywhere else.
Then the smells, everything from frying food to perfumes to the sour stench of human sweat.
Skye’s arm pushed at his back. “Come on,” she said.
She had to be almost shouting but he barely heard her.
And he hadn’t realized until that moment that he had stopped.
She pointed up, and his gaze followed her finger. The ceiling was high.
He let out a small breath of surprise. Ceilings were never high in space stations. Never.
But that explained the echoey noise, the overwhelmed feeling, the sense that he was about to enter a new world.
“Most of these people had no idea that anything happened outside the station,” Skye said.
“I guess not,” he said, but he couldn’t even hear himself.
Her grip around him tightened as if she sensed his nervousness. He hadn’t been this overwhelmed since the first time he left the Tranquility House.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked louder.
“Not yet,” she said, “but I will.”
He read her lips as much as he understood what she was saying.
They moved through the door and into the crowd. He felt a little dizzy, but he always did in crowds this large. He could see the tops of their heads, and that made the crowd seem more like a single entity rather than a bunch of human beings. The heads became a unit, like water through a conduit, with other conduits coming into it, changing some of the flow. He could see everything as a unit, but individuals were hard to see at all.
“Must be nice for you,” Skye said. “You can see over everyone.”
And she couldn’t. He hadn’t realized that. To her, it probably looked like the worst kind of obstacle course.
“Tell me where you need us to go and I’ll get us there,” he said.
He needed a purpose to get through this crowd, and leading them forward would give him that purpose.
“The maps I looked at on the ship showed that there was an entire section devoted to spaceship sales not too far from here.”
Of course it would be near the port. That way people could see the ships.
He scanned over the sea of heads, noting that his eyes had grown used to the brighter lights. The music sounded tinnier in here, maybe because he caught echoes of so many different strains.
He could see signs, but he couldn’t read them even though they appeared to be in Standard. They were too low, eye-level for people like Skye.
Then he saw a ship in the distance. It seemed to be made of yellow light, and it floated over the crowd. He saw some hands pointing upward. Alongside the ship was a banner, also in the shape of a ship, informing anyone who wanted something like that to go to Pavilion Fifty-three.
Fifty-three pavilions. He suspected where they stood was considered a pavilion. His stomach clenched. He was starting to get a sense of scale here, and it was unbelievably huge.
All of Krell could fit into this pavilion or whatever the hell it was. And there were fifty-two more of them?
No wonder Skye had been confident that no one would care about them.
Hardly anyone was looking up at him, no one commented on their appearance, and as they made their way through the crowd, they had to shove just like everyone else.
He was glad he didn’t have a bag or his usual equipment with him, just the chips with information embedded in his hand. His default was to shut all of that off, so no one could lift information as he passed.
Good thing, too, because he hadn’t even thought of pickpockets until now.
He kept a tight grip on Skye, their bodies glued at the sides. Even so, she nearly lost hold of him once or twice as people continually banged into her.
He steered her toward that ship, and she didn’t seem to care. She seemed relieved that he knew where he was going.
He only knew what he could see, and he could see just a bit more than she could.
They used their bodies almost as a battering ram to get through the crowd. People of all shapes and sizes passed them, some slamming into them, some carefully avoiding them.
He could see dozens of businesses, but could barely read the signs. Most of the signs, he realized after a few minutes, were on the ground, in bright lights, with arro
ws or maps leading to the storefront.
“I’ll get us to the ship area,” he said to Skye, “but you might have some luck getting us to the right store.”
He nodded at the floor in front of them. Her mouth opened a bit—she hadn’t noticed that—and then she nodded.
They had become a strange team, him looking up and her looking down.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to cross this part of the Pavilion. They finally got close to that floating ship which, Jack realized, was huge. It towered over him and would have crossed the entire width of the concourse on Krell. Here, it nearly vanished amongst the choices.
What kind of money maintained a place like this?
As soon as he asked himself the question, he realized he didn’t want to know.
Skye’s fingers dug into his side, pulling him to the left. He glanced down at her.
“Over there,” she said.
He looked toward the thing she nodded at. Rows and rows and rows of storefronts, all advertising ships at cheap prices.
“Crap,” he said. “How do we know where to go?”
“We guess,” she said, and pulled him forward.
Chapter 31
It felt like slogging through a space walk in the bulkiest space suit ever invented.
Skye had not expected so many people here on Zaeen. If she were honest with herself, despite what she said to Jack, she hadn’t expected the place to be so big.
She had been doing her research, of course, but knowing that a place was the size of a small planet and actually going to that small planet were two different things. Zaeen had grown tremendously since she’d last been here. This kind of growth would have been unprecedented in any sector outside of the Brezev Sector.
Regulations barely existed here, and what ones did exist could be bribed away.
That thought was one she chose not to share with Jack. Despite his “glass-half-full” thing, he seemed like a bit of a worrier, and anyone with a brain would worry about the fact that Zaeen did not regulate anything.
Parts of the station could fall off at any time.
For all she knew, parts had.
