Spy to Die For

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.