by R. M. Olson
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
JAILBREAK
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
ENJOYED THE BOOK?
JAILBREAK
Book 2 in The Ungovernable series
R.M. OLSON
Copyright (c) 2020
R.M. Olson
All rights reserved
To Frances, who knows all the best prison tropes
JAILBREAK:
The unauthorized act of removing restrictions on a device or system placed there by the manufacturer or operator.
Also, an escape from jail.
CHAPTER ONE
JEZ GRINNED AT the man sitting across the table from her. He smelled of sour sweat and too much sump, and his pilot coat was thick with grease and dirt.
He didn’t grin back. “Well, you scrawny plaguer? You going to call, or fold?”
She leaned back on the rickety metal stool, still grinning. “Neither. I’m raising.”
The small kabak was noisy, crowded with hard-drinking, grim-faced men and women in tattered pilot’s coats or grubby peasant smocks, but a handful of the man’s crewmates had gathered around the gambling table. At least, she assumed they were his crewmates. Couldn’t imagine anyone else would stand that close to him on purpose.
“Raise with what?” he grunted, clearly skeptical.
She grinned wider. She didn’t look like much right now, sure. But she plaguing well smelled better than he did. That should count for something, right?
Casually, she reached into her coat and pulled out a small chip. She kept her fist closed around it for effect as she touched it to the betting chip in the centre.
The six pairs of eyes widened as the numbers clicked higher, and the man’s heavy eyebrows dropped into a scowl.
“What?” she asked innocently. “Can’t meet it?” She shrugged. “You could always fold.”
“You damn—” he half stood, leaning forward.
Her heart was pounding, every muscle in her body tingling with anticipation.
This was what she lived for.
“Or,” she said casually, “I suppose you could put in that information chip my friend was asking you about earlier. I’d take that as a call.”
He would probably just kill her. Or try, of course. But what the hell. If you weren’t about to be killed at least a couple times a week, were you even really alive?
“Why do you want it so badly?” he grumbled. She shrugged.
“That’s fine, you can fold. I don’t care. Got plenty of credits in there, I could buy myself enough sump to last me five standard years. Or maybe one really, really good night.”
“How did some scum-sucking lowlife pilot like you come up with that kind of credits?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You calling, or folding? Don’t got all day.”
He looked down at the symbols on the smooth tokens in his hand and scowled.
He had a good hand.
She’d checked.
Slowly, he pulled a small chip out of his inner pocket. “I lose this, my job’s not worth spit.”
She shrugged and made as if to scoop the betting chip towards herself. He slapped his meaty hand down on her wrist.
“Damn you.” He dropped the small chip into the centre of the table. “Now, I say we’re dropping tokens.”
With a dramatic flourish he spread his tokens out on the table and broke into a slow, mean smile, the expression ugly on his stubbly face.
It really was a good hand.
She would have let her grin drop if she could. But she couldn’t help it. Never been that good at modesty, really.
So she was grinning so wide her face felt stretched as she tossed her tokens casually onto the table.
There was that one delightful moment, as he saw the symbols and made the calculations in his head. Then his eyes bugged out, his face darkening with rage.
She scooped up the betting chip and the information chip and shoved them in the inside pocket of her jacket. Time to leave.
His fist caught her in the ribs as she stood, and she grunted and stumbled sideways. He shoved the table out of the way and grabbed her by the shoulder, hoisting her bodily into the air.
“You cheated! You plaguing scum-sucker.”
She turned her head and bit down as hard as she could into the fleshy part of his hand. He howled in pain, and she dropped to the ground. She grabbed the stool she’d been sitting on and swung it into position just as he lunged down at her. The stool legs caught him under the ribcage, and for a split second he stood, face frozen in agony, gasping for breath. She rolled out from under the stool, spun around, and flung it into the face of the man next to her, who, in fairness, looked like he had been about to recover his wits and grab for her. He grunted and stumbled back, cursing, and she turned and brought her forehead down on the bridge of her erstwhile gambling partner’s nose. He fell against the broken table, clutching his bloody face, just as another one of his friends grabbed her from behind. She threw her head back, connecting squarely with his jaw, and then took advantage of the momentary slackening of his grasp to drive her elbow hard into his sternum. She dropped to the floor as another man and a woman grabbed for her and rolled between their legs. Then she jumped to her feet, checked her coat pocket, and sprinted for the exit, still grinning, the man and all of his friends hot on her tail.
She burst out of the kabak, glanced quickly in both directions, then took off down the dirt street towards the edge of the shabby town. She slapped the com on her wrist as she ran.
“Hey kids, time to go!” she called. A moment later, Lev’s long-suffering sigh came through her earpiece.
“Where are you, Jez?”
“Be there in a jiff.”
“And someone’s after you.”
A heat blast scorched the dirt beside her, sending up a thick scent of ozone and burnt earth. She yelped and dodged as another blast sizzled past her and left a charred mark across the colourful shutters on the dingy prefab house across from her.
“Yep. Don’t call you genius boy for nothing!”
She ducked down an alley, dodged into another street, and took a sharp right.
There, ahead of her, was the wall marking the end of town, the intricate carvings and once-brilliant colours now faded and shabby. And after that …
The crew behind her were gaining. She half turned, and squeezed off a shot from the modded heat pistol she’d borrowed from Ysbel.
The street in front of her pursuers disappeared in a ball of smoke and flame, and from behind it she heard strangled cursing.
“Ysbel! You’re beautiful,” she called over the com.
“Piss off.”
“Pees oaf yourself,” sh
e called back, imitating the woman’s heavy outer-rim accent.
She sprinted through the gates of the town—no city force field on this dump of a planet—and slowed, grinning.
Three figures stood in front of the loading ramp to the most stunning ship she’d ever seen in her life—a sleek long-haul, with beautiful old-fashioned rivets and smooth metal panels, its body the dull, glossy sheen of something old that had been restored and polished to perfection.
Yes, she’d been flying this little beauty for the last two weeks, but honestly, every time she saw it again her heart skipped a beat.
Tae was glowering at her—nothing new there—Ysbel was giving her the usual flat stare, and Lev was shaking his head slightly, his expression resigned.
All three of them had drawn heat-guns, and they were holding them in a no-nonsense way.
“What did you do, Jez?” Lev asked as she jogged up to them.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just making new friends. Hey! You figured out how to hold a gun!”
Lev gave her a look that was almost as flat as Ysbel’s. Granted, he didn’t look nearly as intimidating as the stocky, muscular woman, with her shaved head and obvious familiarity with weapons, but Jez had to admit that being on the run had been good for him. He still looked more like a scholar than anything else, with his messy cropped hair and the thoughtful, calculating expression on his face, but at least he’d figured out which end of the gun to point at the bad guys. Or the good guys. Whoever was chasing them at the moment.
Two weeks of Ysbel’s tutelage would do that to a person, even a soft boy like genius over there.
She reached them and turned around, drawing her own pistol. “Ysbel, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I might love you mostly for your weapons.”
“That’s good. I might kill you with them one of these days.”
Tae shoved his dark hair out of his eyes and glared at her. “Can we spend one day getting supplies without you getting into a fight Jez? One day?”
“Nope.” She grinned at him.
The gambler’s crew had come through the gates and slowed on seeing their company. They’d all drawn weapons, and now they were approaching cautiously.
“Your pilot stole something from me,” the man in the dirty pilot’s coat called out. Jez was gratified to see that his nose was swollen to twice its previous size.
“Hey now, can’t handle the pressure, stay out of the game,” Jez called back. “Not my fault you can’t pay what you play.”
“You cheated!” he growled.
She shrugged, still grinning. “How do you cheat at fool’s tokens?”
Lev sighed and slapped his com.
“Masha, you were right. Jez found someone who wants to kill her. We’ve got to go.” He glanced at the scowling young man beside him. “Tae, can you throw the last few boxes in? Ysbel and I will hold them off.”
“And me,” said Jez. Lev glared at her.
“Hand the pilot over and we’ll call it even,” the man called. “There’s more of us. You don’t want a fight, and neither do we.”
Ysbel turned her flat stare on the approaching group, and they slowed further.
“It’s tempting,” she said. “But I have dibs on killing this idiot, so I’m afraid I can’t.”
The man shifted his grip on his pistol.
Ysbel raised one eyebrow. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Tell your pilot to give me back what’s mine.”
“Was yours. Until I won it,” Jez shot back. She glanced quickly over her shoulder. Tae was carrying the last of the boxes up the ramp, and she could feel in her bones the slight vibration that told her that the ship was running.
Damn.
She slapped her com. “Masha, stay out of my cockpit!”
The man in the dirty pilot’s coat whipped his pistol up and cracked off a blast. Jez dove for the ground, knocking Lev out of the way as Ysbel fired.
The force of the blast from Ysbel’s modded gun threw Jez against the ramp, practically on top of Lev. He shoved her off him, and she rolled to her feet, yanked him up, and pushed him up the ramp.
“Get in, genius.”
Ysbel had holstered her weapon and was running in after them. Jez took one last look around, grinning, paused long enough to make a rude gesture at the stunned gamblers, and swung herself up the ramp.
Tae was already closing it behind them.
She shoved her way past him into the cockpit, where a pleasant, competent-looking woman in a long pilot’s coat sat in the pilot’s seat, her black hair pulled back into a simple rat tail and her expression one of bland helpfulness. You’d hardly see the calculation beneath it unless you were looking.
“You’ve already blown up one of my ships, Masha,” Jez growled. “Move over.”
Masha stood, giving Jez a cold look. “If you had fewer people trying to kill you, I suspect it would be easier to keep your ships from getting blown up,” she said, words tinged with ice.
“Shut up,” Jez grumbled, sliding into the pilot’s seat. She rested her hands on the controls for half a moment, letting the perfect, perfect feeling of the ship wash over her. Then she touched the stick, ever so slightly, and the ship lifted delicately off the ground.
“Strap in, kids,” she called over the ship’s com.
On the holoscreen in front of her, the right shield glowed as a heat-blast bounced off it.
She gave a beatific smile, settled herself into her seat, and pulled back smoothly on the control stick.
The ship pointed its nose to the sky and streaked towards the blue line of atmosphere, leaving Jez’s stomach far behind. The speed of it shoved her back into her seat, and she half-closed her eyes in pure bliss.
This was life.
This was what she was born for.
The shields glowed a dull orange as they shot through the atmosphere, and the controls trembled against her hands, and then they were through.
She let out a long breath as the rich black of shallow space enveloped them, tension draining from her body.
Finally.
They’d been planet-side for less than a day, but she already hurt from missing this.
She leaned back in her seat, staring out at the vast expanse, the tiny pricks of fire that were the stars, the brown-blue glow of the planet through the rear window.
Every time. It almost made her cry, every single time. She’d spent three plaguing weeks on a prison ship back when she’d been picked up for smuggling, and every moment of every day in that tiny, miserable cell she’d longed for this. She’d needed it like she needed the blood in her veins and the air in her lungs, and every day she couldn’t have it she’d died just a little bit more.
And now that she was back in the sky, it took her breath away every single time.
Freedom.
Home.
The only thing she’d ever wanted.
She let her hand rest on the control stick and closed her eyes, feeling the ship in her bones, the rightness of it.
She was jolted from her reverie by the sound, from somewhere behind her, of someone swearing loudly.
That would be Tae. Probably hadn’t strapped down in time.
She opened her eyes and turned back to the cockpit window, staring at the endless expanse surrounding them. Then, reluctantly, she glanced at the com screen, set a few calculations into the controls, and stood.
Even after two weeks, leaving this perfect, beautiful cockpit was almost a physical pain.
She patted her coat pocket and grinned.
This time, though—
She couldn’t wait to see the expression on Ysbel’s face.
CHAPTER TWO
LEV TOOK A deep breath and released his harness.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like flying. But what Jez did wasn’t flying so much as it was some sort of aerial acrobatic routine.
At least he hadn’t thrown up this time.
He shook his head, ran a shaky hand over his face, and stoo
d cautiously. As long as they weren’t being chased, Jez would probably have set a course. Which meant he was probably safe. And from the look of those gamblers, he doubted very much they had a ship that could come close to the Ungovernable.
To be fair, he’d spent the last two weeks pouring over every piece of information on board the ship they’d stolen so spectacularly out from under the nose of the system’s most dangerous weapons dealer. He was increasingly coming to the conclusion that no one had a ship that could come close to the Ungovernable.
The others had gathered on the main deck by the time he arrived. Masha’s arms were crossed, and there was a dangerous glint in her dark eyes.
She didn’t look happy.
Lev sighed.
A few moments later, the lanky pilot sauntered into the room. Her black hair was tousled, and there was a broad grin across her tawny face, and despite everything, he couldn’t stop his heart from skipping slightly, like it seemed to every time he saw her these days.
Which, of course, was utterly ridiculous.
“Well Jez,” said Masha, her tone cold. “Would you like to explain what just happened?”
Jez grinned. “Sure. I went to the town kabak, took all the credits you gave me, and used them to gamble on a game of fool’s tokens against someone who turned out to be a sore loser.”
Lev winced. Masha closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“I didn’t get drunk,” Jez added helpfully. “I thought about it. But the sump there was absolute crap.”
Lev sighed and stepped forward before Jez could actually get herself murdered. “Jez—”
“No.” Masha’s voice was solid ice now. “I appreciate your efforts, Lev. But I’d like Jez to explain to me why she told me she needed supplies for the ship, and then went to buy sump and a stake in a game of fools’s tokens.”
“I did need supplies,” said Jez. “Tech-head over there got them for me.” She gestured to Tae.
Tae exchanged an exasperated glance with Lev, then turned to scowl at Jez.
“For heaven’s sake, Jez, you didn’t tell me—”
