“Then talk me through the way you usually do it,” she said. “I’m sure I can make it work.”
“I’m glad one of us is,” he muttered. “I really am.”
Chapter 28
The lifepod was amazingly big, considering the size of the spaceship they were vacating. But “amazingly big” and actually big enough for Jack were two different things. He had to hunch his shoulders, bend his knees, and squeeze in sideways just to get through the hatch. Then he had to crawl to move to the controls.
He felt ridiculous. It didn’t help that Skye had to duck to get inside as well, and bend over to walk to the controls. He still took the stupidity of the design personally.
The thing was decked out like some kind of tent. A fabric floor with tons of padding underneath, matching fabric walls and ceiling, made Jack wonder what else this pod got used for besides a possible escape from the parent vessel. Jack had a hunch, but he wasn’t going to say anything to Skye.
A few hours ago, he might have told her, but a few hours ago, they weren’t being stalked by ships whose crew thought they were someone else.
He inched his way to the control panel. Skye sealed off the main door, then hit release.
She had set the main vessel’s autopilot to engage the moment this pod left. Jack had no idea how she’d done that, but he was glad she had.
She made her way over to him, her movements closer to walking than his had been. Still, she looked odd as she slowly eased toward him. And, dammit, he found even those odd movements sexy—the way that she touched things, that frown on her face as she worked to keep her footing, the way she dropped down beside him with a sense of relief.
She tapped on the navigation screen, hit a few glowing lights, and transformed the entire thing into Standard. Suddenly he could read and identify everything.
“Why couldn’t you do that on the ship?” he asked.
“I tried. It didn’t exist in the ship proper,” she said. “But apparently someone forgot to fix it in the lifepods.”
It only took him a few seconds to change the sensor indicators. The job here was actually easier than the one he had done on Krell.
“Got it,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Those ships are too close.”
She flattened her palm against a gigantic red image that was clear in any language: that was the thing that separated the pod from the ship.
Then she scooted him over just a bit, her hip touching his, her leg warm. He glanced at her, hoping to catch her with just a small grin or something. All he wanted was a kiss. Just one, because she was so close and because they had made it this far.
But she had turned on the navigation controls. She was pointing the pod directly at a gigantic space station. He assumed that was probably Zaeen. Most places to buy spaceships, particularly hot ones, weren’t on any planet, but orbited around them.
He watched the pod’s image on the internal screen. The pod drifted toward the station. Behind them, the ship itself lurched and he tilted his head.
He had hated that when he’d been on board. He thought it truly strange that it happened now, when the ship was supposed to be hitting its autopilot.
Besides, even as the ship lurched, he shouldn’t have seen it. Hell, he shouldn’t have felt it on the ship itself. The attitude controls should have taken care of the problem.
“Skye,” he said as he finally realized what was going on, “we need some speed here.”
“What?” she asked, still frowning over the controls.
The ship still hadn’t left the area, although it seemed to be trying. It moved forward, then back, then forward again, each time bobbing up and down as if it were a bottle in a bucket of water.
“Just do it,” he said.
She tapped the screen and the pod zoomed forward.
She leaned back. “With that, we should be in Zaeen in—”
But she never finished the sentence, because the pod’s shields went from Standard to Hardened, and a voice told them in bad Standard to strap in. Not that Jack could find any straps.
Not that he looked.
He was staring at the images of what was going on around them. The ship behind them exploded into a bright white light, making his eyes ache even though the screens adjusted for the glare.
“Go, go, go,” he said to Skye.
“Don’t tell me again,” she said.
“Any way to cloak this thing?” he asked.
“It’s a damn lifepod. Of course there isn’t,” she said.
He should have changed the specs to invisible. The pod was now moving so fast that he couldn’t mess with anything. Besides, when shields hardened, all available energy went there and not to any other system.
Debris shadowed them, some of it as large as the pod itself. The screen was so filled with debris, in fact, that he couldn’t see the ships they’d been fleeing from.
“You still have navigation control?” he asked.
“I sure as hell hope so.” Skye was doing all kinds of things to that board that he didn’t entirely understand.
“We don’t want those ships to see us,” he said.
“No shit,” she said.
“I mean,” he said, “use some of that debris to hide us.”
She glanced at him, her eyes wild. He couldn’t tell if she thought his idea brilliant or the stupidest thing she had ever heard. But she leaned over the console again, and the image on the screen changed.
He couldn’t even see the pod any longer—and the screen was supposed to show the pod above all else.
He hoped to hell that was how it worked for those other ships. He didn’t want the folks flying them to catch up to the pod.
“How far out are we?” he asked.
“Too far,” Skye said. “This debris could shred us. These shields are cheap-ass things.”
“You’d think in a ship that expensive—”
“Yeah, you would,” she said. “But it didn’t. So I need to focus.”
He agreed with that. She did. He would watch the area around them, not that he could do any good. He would have to trust her.
Just like he’d been trusting her all along.
Chapter 29
Skye had the pod’s controls on manual because the automatic controls sucked. She dodged all kinds of debris with hands-on flying, while keeping the speed of the pod as high as she could get it.
For a moment, she’d been tempted to slow the pod and let the debris go around her. The debris had a lot of momentum. It would go past her relatively quickly, or so she thought until she realized just how much debris there was.
Those ships had been too far out to destroy the ship she’d been on that thoroughly.
She hit a scan on the navigation board. There had to be someone else hiding around here, someone big and mean, someone who might come after them on Zaeen.
