Spy to Die For

“What’re you doing?” Jack asked.

He was looking at the scan.

“Someone destroyed that ship,” she said.

“Yes, they did,” he said, “but they aren’t here.”

He sounded certain. She didn’t have time for certainty, particularly misplaced certainty.

“I’m not sure we should go to Zaeen,” she said, “but I don’t see any way around it. I don’t think this pod will actually fly anywhere else.”

She couldn’t look at Jack because she was still doing hands-on flying, up and over one bit of debris, followed by a lateral move to dodge yet another, followed by a dip to avoid a third. Sometimes she had to do all three things at once, and that made her job exceedingly complicated. She—

“We don’t have to go anywhere else,” he said.

She didn’t want to argue with him right now. She needed to focus. Things were still coming at them at an incredible rate of speed. If she were on a normal ship, the ship would help her, but this was a damn pod with minimal everything, from controls to shields to—

“No one shot at us,” he said.

“The ship exploded,” she said.

“Yes, it did,” he said. “Because it was set up that way.”

That caught her attention. She had to look at him. He was watching the screen.

“Careful,” he said, “that bit of something…”

She saw it, and knew she couldn’t look away at all anymore. She had to keep flying this thing or the pod would get damaged.

Or worse.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “The ship blew. Someone had to do that. I checked the systems. They were fine.”

“They were,” Jack said, “because you couldn’t access parts of the system.”

More debris—a lateral move, a flip, a sideways direction. She glanced at the screen. Some of this dodging took them away from Zaeen. She had to wrestle the pod back on course.

Somewhere, she’d lost the piece of debris she’d been hiding behind. But she didn’t see the ships anymore.

Maybe they’d left when they realized they’d destroyed the ship.

“You can’t know that,” Skye said when she got a chance.

“That lurch,” he said. “Ships don’t lurch.”

“Something needed fixing, that’s true,” she said, “but it was probably the attitude controls. When they need repair, that sometimes causes a lurch.”

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.