by Kris Delake
She hadn’t wanted to contemplate it. It would be too tempting. Like chasing after her parents after they dumped her time after time. At some point, she had to learn the lesson.
No one wanted her. No one would stick with her. No one would want something permanent. Not after they got to know her.
Not even the Guild wanted something permanent. They just wanted her to repay the investment they’d made in her. That was all.
Well, when she gave them this list, she would consider the investment repaid.
That thought gave her strength. She sat back up and forced herself to pay attention to the board.
A flashing light in the far corner caught her attention. The flash was faint, almost nonexistent. She tapped it.
The ship’s scanner said, Ship-sized object. No registration. No identification. Scans failing. Hands-on analysis might be possible. Hypothesis could be derived from component parts.
She had never seen a message like that before from any ship. She frowned at it, figuring it out.
Was she seeing something in stealth mode? Or something else?
“Jack, have you seen anything like this?”
He moved from his research chair to the copilot’s chair. The chair groaned underneath his weight.
“Yeah,” he said. “Some really sensitive navigation panels constantly scan images, and as the panel understands what it has seen in the past, it puts it on the screen.”
She let out a small breath. “You mean like a ghost image, not an image of what’s really out there? A reflection of what had been there?” she asked. Then she frowned as she contemplated that idea. “Well, that would explain the message.”
“What message?”
She moved that message to his screen. He swore when he saw it.
“Let me find this,” he said. His tone sounded urgent.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“More images just like this,” he said.
“You think there’s an army of these things?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I think this is an old image that the scanning system is trying to understand. Something made it visible to our systems just for a second. We need to figure out what that something is and scan for it.”
“I can do that.” She knew this ship’s systems really well now. She tapped the screen and made sure the computer started looking for the signature it had found before. She told the computer not to worry about what it was, just where it was, and where it had been.
The computer gave her a secondary screen, with a map of ghostly images, all the same size.
“Shit,” she said softly.
“What?” Jack asked.
She imposed their ship’s path onto the ghostly images. The images matched.
“We’re being tailed,” she said.
“How is that possible?” Jack asked.
“That’s not the question to ask at the moment,” Skye said. “The question to ask is how do we lose the tail?”
“Evasive maneuvers?” Jack asked.
She glanced at him sideways. “You’ve never flown a ship, have you?”
“Not without autopilot,” he said.
“The tail knows where we are. They’re tracking our signature. It doesn’t matter if we fly in circles, they’ll still find us.”
“So,” Jack said, “how do we lose them?”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t think we do.”
Jack turned toward her, surprise on his face. “Why not?”
“We’re not far from Kordita. They know where we’re going or can guess. We land, and we just keep going. I can lose someone on foot. Can’t you?”
Jack nodded, but he looked preoccupied. “I can lose most people,” he said. “But not everyone.”
She had to sound strong. She smiled at him. “The good news is that this isn’t ‘everyone.’ It’s someone.”
“Or a group of someones,” Jack said.
“And we have no idea if they’re after us or the Hawk.”
“I thought the Hawk wasn’t stolen,” Jack said as he used his fingers to expand the images on the screen.
“I don’t think it was,” Skye said. “I checked the registration as best I could. But you never know. And the last time we got chased, we were chased because of the ship.”
She felt odd saying that. She’d never been chased before she met Jack. She’d never been in the middle of anything like this before she met Jack.
He was maneuvering the images on the screen. “It’s not the Hawk,” he said softly.
She glanced over, saw a series of little ghost images, and couldn’t quite make sense of them. “How do you know?”
He pointed to the first image. “That’s not long after we hacked into the Guild’s database.”
“They’ve been onto us since then?” she asked.
He nodded. “Maybe it’s the Guild.”
“The Guild doesn’t operate that way,” she said.
“Not for its members. But what about outsiders who tap in?”
It sounded logical, but it didn’t feel logical. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Well,” Jack said. “Let me do what I can to find out.”
Chapter 50
Jack dug into the computer system. He had a sick feeling about that ship, and he tried to ignore it. If he worked off of preconceptions, he might make mistakes.
That was the last thing he needed to do.
He found the ship’s silhouette, and let the Hawk plot the ship’s trajectory. Then he continued to dig.
The Hawk continually revised the images on the screen, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. The other ship kept getting closer and closer—not in real time, but in the past. Only he was just seeing it now, because the tracking was catching up to the ship, and that wasn’t good. It meant that the ship had probably slowed down.
And if that ship followed the Hawk’s trajectory, then that meant it was really close.
Jack sent that data back to Skye but kept working. He needed to find out whose ship this was. If it belonged to the Guild, then Skye would deal with them. She would apologize, explain the situation, and find a resolution.
If the ship belonged to someone he and Skye didn’t know, then Skye’s plan of going straight to Kordita and playing a ground game made sense. They were heading to the Guild, and no strangers got into the Guild. Jack wasn’t even sure he would be able to.
But he worried that the ship belonged to a Rover, and if that were the case, then he and Skye were in deep trouble.
He paused for just a moment as a thought flitted across his brain. Then he realized that he had missed something obvious.
He went back into the information the computer had sent him, and looked for images of the ship before it went into stealth mode.
It took some back-tracing, but he found it.
“Got you, you bastard,” he said softly.
“What?” Skye asked.
“Nothing,” Jack said. He wanted her to be focusing on their trip. “You got the information I sent you, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m trying to speed the recalibration up. I’m worried that this ship is much closer than we think.”
He was worried about that too. He looked at the configuration of the ship before it went into stealth mode, selected the image, and told the computer to find that ship in all the various registries.
The ship was smaller than Jack expected, the kind of ship only one person or two people used, which didn’t reassure him. He wanted to see a larger ship, something owned by a corporation or the Guild. He didn’t want a fast-moving stealth ship that could sneak up on something larger, like the Hawk.
While the computer searched registries in various sectors, Jack did one other thing. He hacked into the system of the store where he and Skye had purchased the Hawk. He had set up the hack before leaving, figuring they might need more information.
At the time, he had been worried that the Hawk was stolen and being resold. He want
ed information at his fingertips: if someone trailed them again and tried to attack them for something the Hawk’s original owner had done, he wanted to know who the original owner was.
He hadn’t expected to use the same hack to determine if anyone else had looked at the records.
No one outside the store had, but the records were accessed a few days after Jack and Skye left Zaeen. And then someone had dug into Skye’s identity.
“Skye,” Jack said, “did the Guild issue the identity that you used to buy this ship?”
“Why does that matter?” Skye asked.
“Because I want to know how breakable the identity is,” Jack said.
She shrugged. “If you’re good, you might be able to figure out that it came from the Guild. But you won’t be able to go beyond that.”
If you were good, you wouldn’t need to go beyond that. Hell, if you weren’t even marginally good. If someone had looked at Krell’s security feeds, saw Skye and Jack together, realized that they had stolen the Rapido together, then that someone could trace both Skye and Jack. They had been a presence on Zaeen, but they hadn’t been there long.
Long enough to be on security, though. Security that could easily be sold to someone with cash and a determination to find them.
Even someone who usually hired spies and investigators to do his dirty work could follow this trail, if he were determined enough.
Jack didn’t like how he was thinking. It was too close to a preconception.
Then the computer pinged at him. The ship following them had been part of a bulk buy from a sector so far away that it took nearly two months to travel from there to here. That wasn’t what caught Jack’s eye, though. What caught his eye was this: The ship was registered to a familiar name.
One Jack had invented. He had created the corporate identity, he had filled out all of the documentation, he had even set up the bank accounts.
That ship was part of a Rover buy from two years ago.
He tapped the screen so that the computer would show him the image of the person who had flown that ship out of its last port.
The man frozen in the two-dimensional image was slight, with scruffy brown hair. He wore the same jacket that he had worn on Krell.
Heller.
“Oh, shit,” Jack said. They were in deep trouble now.
Chapter 51
A warning light appeared on the navigation panel. Skye checked it as Jack cursed beside her.
He probably had the same thought she did; they’d been boarded.
She activated a part of the Hawk’s exterior usually used only as a ship approached a port, to identify and dislodge anything that might have attached itself to the exterior during flight.
The docking hooks near the cargo bay lit up. Something had attached itself—and space debris usually didn’t use docking hooks.
“We’ve been boarded,” she said.
Jack cursed again. Then he stood so fast that he banged his knees on the console. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of what?” she asked. “There could be a dozen people down there.”
He looked down at her, his face pale. “There isn’t. At most, there are two or three.”
“And you’re going up against two or three people?” she asked. “I’m just going to speed up and get us to Kordita as quickly as possible.”
“No,” he said. “As soon as I go below, you’re going to seal off this level. Separate the environmental system from the rest of the ship. Lock out anyone who tries to access the cockpit.”
He knew something. He wasn’t telling her everything. She felt a wave of anger run through her. Nothing infuriated her more.
“You know what’s going on,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I traced the ship. It’s small, and it belongs to Heller.”
Her breath caught. Heller? On board? How was that possible? And Jack was heading down to greet him? Alone?
“I’m going to separate the Hawk’s environmental system now,” she said. “If he put anything into it, I can scrub it. Then I’ll just get us to Kordita.”
“No,” Jack said. “Heller’s not the kind of assassin you’re used to. He doesn’t care who dies. He’s probably attaching some kind of explosive to the interior of the Hawk. Then he’s going to leave, and no one will ever know what happened. We certainly won’t. We’ll be dead.”
“He may have already done that,” she said.
“And I’ll disable it,” Jack said.
“You know how to do that?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Do you?”
“We learned how to make bombs, not how to take them apart,” she said. “And it was mostly theory, because bombs rarely take out only one target.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “This ship is the middle of a shipping lane. Heller doesn’t even care if someone else’s ship gets destroyed because of his bomb. I’m going down.”
She caught his arm. “I’ll get the Hawk away from everything. I’ll separate us off from the rest of the ship. He’ll leave. And then we can get the bomb together.”
“No,” Jack said. “Because that allows him to go free. He’ll go after your director. He’ll go after all those government contracts. He’ll kill lots of innocent people.”
“Starting with you,” Skye said.
Jack shook her off. “I’ll be all right.”
“It would be better if I went,” she said. “I’m the one with assassin training.”
“You’re the one who failed assassin training,” Jack said, his tone harsh. “I’m going. Stop arguing.”
“But you won’t know what to do,” she said.
“That means Heller won’t know what to expect,” Jack said.
He bent down, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her so thoroughly that her toes curled. She grabbed at him, feeling oddly desperate, wondering if she could seduce him into staying.
Then their lips separated, but he didn’t let go of her face.
“Here’s what you don’t know,” he said softly. “I love you. I will always love you, no matter what happens. And I do want something permanent with you. But if this is all we ever have, I’m happy we’ve had it. My life is so much better with you in it. Thank you.”
Then he turned quickly, and let himself out of the cockpit.
She was shaking, his words echoing in her ears.
“Dammit, Jack,” she said, wishing he could hear her. “I love you too.”
Chapter 52
As Jack took the ladder down to the lower levels of the ship, he hoped Skye was tracking him. He couldn’t communicate with her—he had to bet that Heller was monitoring the comm system, as well as the ship’s elevator. Which was why Jack had crammed himself into the engineering ladders, designed only for times when the elevator wasn’t working well.
He barely fit in the rounded hole that the designers had carved into the middle of the ship. The rungs of the ladder were set so that it would be easy for someone Skye’s size to go down quickly.
He kept getting tangled up in his own limbs. But he was moving as fast as he could, and as quietly as he could.
Jack hoped Skye switched the environmental system immediately. He wouldn’t put it past Heller to poison the ship’s atmosphere and then leave. That would be the easiest and most efficient way to kill them.
It would also be cowardly.
And somewhat stupid, because eventually someone would find the ship with the bodies on it. The sector government would get involved and figure out that there was no reason to kill Skye and Jack except simple murder. The Assassins Guild might actually seek retribution.
Heller wasn’t dumb. He probably knew all of that, which was why Jack was gambling that Heller wouldn’t do that.
Of course, Heller might change the atmosphere, then set a bomb. That would be smarter, particularly if the bomb had a timer. Heller could get far away, and no one would know exactly what happened.
If Jack were a betting man, that plan was what he
would have put money on. Heller would do his best to kill them, and then dispose of the evidence.
But Heller thought he had time. He figured neither Jack nor Skye knew that Heller was after Jack.
Jack hoped the information would give him an advantage.
Because he wasn’t sure what the hell kind of advantage it would give them. He was an untrained guy, going up against a trained assassin. If he got too close, Heller could just break his neck.
Jack paused on the lower level. Skye had brought a laser pistol on board. She kept all of her things in the main master suite one level down from the cockpit. He eased off the ladder onto that level.
He had to hurry. He slipped down the hall, listening hard for unusual sounds, hoping that Heller hadn’t somehow made his way here.
The master suite was at the far end of the corridor—better views from the portholes on the edge of the ship—and he cursed that. He wanted to get in and out as rapidly as possible.
Each second seemed to take an hour. He reached the door to the suite, opened it, and dashed inside.
The pistol wasn’t near Skye’s research area. She kept everything neat, which he usually appreciated. Right now, though, he wanted a messy desk with her clothes strewn on the floor, and the laser pistol on top of everything.
Instead, he had to search drawers and closets until he found it.
It was inside one of her coats, as safe as it could be in this haphazard collection of clothing and stuff she had accumulated on Zaeen.
He grabbed the pistol, examined it to make sure he knew how to use it, then set the safety and jammed the entire thing in his belt. He didn’t have time to finesse anything.
He had to find Heller, and he had to do it fast.
Chapter 53
For the first time in her life, Skye hated being alone. She paced the cockpit, wishing it were bigger just so that she had more area to walk in. She had all of the screens up as holograms, and she monitored everything.
Monitoring was all that she could do.
