Spy to Die For

Chapter 30

Apparently, everyone on Zaeen had seen the ship explode. It had happened so close that Zaeen had to suspend ship traffic and turn on its own shields. A few of the automatic lasers had destroyed the largest bits of debris just to keep them from damaging the station itself.

If station was the right word. Jack had never seen any place like this megalopolis. He’d been on big space resorts in the past, but they had a lot of private areas and one central purpose, usually some kind of relaxation for the rich and powerful, with a small section reserved for other travelers who had to stop but couldn’t afford the main part of the resort.

Zaeen was like five gigantic cities mixed with three resorts and seven shopping centers, none of it geared exclusively toward the filthy rich. Most of it seemed made for the middle-of-the-road traveler who needed time away from his horrible life or for the residents of Zaeen themselves, the people who actually worked on this place, and needed to house, feed, and clothe their families.

The landing area wasn’t a bay or a dock. It was a full-fledged port. And it took Skye a bit of negotiation to get someone to allow them entry. She had to prove that they wouldn’t be indigent.

Apparently, Zaeen would have turned them away, even if they arrived on the lifepod after that large explosion, if they couldn’t pay for their own way on the station.

Jack thought he’d seen it all, but even so that seemed remarkably cold to him. He felt outrage but didn’t express it. He didn’t want Zaeen to turn them away.

After they got clearance to enter, they got off the pod with the shirts on their back, and were forced into some truly rigid (and stinky) decontamination chambers, after which they had to buy new clothing, because their clothing was deemed contaminated, even though it wasn’t. The way Jack knew that it was all rigged was that Skye had to pay for the clothing before they got off the lifepod. She was promised a refund if their clothing wasn’t contaminated.

Jack wanted to call it all a scam, but he didn’t dare. He needed to be grateful. He was alive, he hadn’t been blown up by the ship they stole or murdered by his former colleagues.

And as he had said to Skye not an hour before, he had spent more than twenty-four hours in the company of one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

Hell, if he were honest with himself, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And he wanted to see her again.

After he got out of decontamination—well, after he got through the large retail center attached to the decontamination unit—he went to the “Reuniting Antechamber” as the section was called, hoping Skye had waited for him.

Part of him worried that she hadn’t, that she got some kind of payment for bringing hapless people like him to this place. Granted, he might not have gotten that idea if it weren’t for some warning brochures that he watched while going through the somewhat rude decontamination process. Apparently, a lot of people got dragged here with the promise of riches or jobs, only to discover that they simply fodder for the gigantic economic machine that was Zaeen.

The Reuniting Antechamber was as small as the retail center was large. It was a white room with a high ceiling (thank heavens) and bench seats in small groupings. Two other people sat on the benches as far away from each other as they could get.

Jack sat near the door, figuring he would give Skye an hour or two before leaving the Chamber.

Then he would have to figure out what to do next. If he accessed his funds, he would alert the Rovers to his presence. That was the bad news. The good news was that most Rovers never came to the Brezev Sector; there just wasn’t enough work here for outsiders. Everything got handled in Sector, or so he always thought.

Or maybe it didn’t get handled at all.

He’d been sitting only five minutes when Skye stumbled in. She was wearing form-fitting black pants stuffed into shiny boots and a black top that left little to the imagination.

Not that he needed his imagination to know what was under her clothes. Just his memory.

The memory made him stand, since remaining seated would have shown his reaction to the memory to everyone else in the room. He tugged on his pants—not form fitting (except at the moment) but black just like Skye’s.

She grinned at him. “I hadn’t planned to dress like twins.”

“I don’t think anyone would mistake us for twins,” he said softly, then kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down farther. There was relief in that kiss and passion, and a whole lot of promise.

He couldn’t break it off.

She had to.

“I was going to say that the clothing might make them think us a performing troop,” she said, her cheeks flushed, “but I don’t think I could perform in public.”

Jack’s cheeks heated. He couldn’t either.

He slipped his arm around her shoulder, then led her to the exit. The other people in the room watched them as if they were nothing more than some kind of video display.

Still, he was happy to get out of there.

“I don’t think we should stay here long since our arrival was pretty dramatic,” he said softly as he pulled her close.

She put her arm around his waist, and that warmed him. He hadn’t expected it. He wished he were just a bit shorter so that she could rest her head against his shoulder while they were walking.

“I don’t think anyone will notice our arrival,” she said.

“They already have,” he said. At least one person mentioned it to him in Decontamination.

“All of Zaeen noticed it,” she said, “but that’s not going to last.”

She sounded certain. He wasn’t sure how she could be.

“You seem pretty confident for a glass-always-empty woman,” he said.

She chuckled. “You have no idea how big this place is.”

“I thought you haven’t been here in years,” he said.

“I haven’t. But it was big then.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking. Places that seemed large to children weren’t always large to adults. He knew that better than most. He’d been a pretty scrawny kid. By the time he hit his growth, everything from his past looked small.

He smiled at the thought, then felt a moment of worry for Rikki. He needed to get out of his own predicament so that he could find out information for her.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Skye asked.

He didn’t answer that, partly because he didn’t, and partly because she sounded amused.

Why would she sound amused?

Then the doors to the restricted area opened, and a cacophony hit him. Sound first—voices, music, laughter, all vying for attention, getting louder and louder as each moment went by.

But sight hit second, mostly in colors—red, green, blue, yellow—he couldn’t process it all because it was so bright. The lighting was higher than lighting he’d seen anywhere else.

Then the smells, everything from frying food to perfumes to the sour stench of human sweat.

Skye’s arm pushed at his back. “Come on,” she said.

She had to be almost shouting but he barely heard her.

And he hadn’t realized until that moment that he had stopped.

She pointed up, and his gaze followed her finger. The ceiling was high.

He let out a small breath of surprise. Ceilings were never high in space stations. Never.

But that explained the echoey noise, the overwhelmed feeling, the sense that he was about to enter a new world.

“Most of these people had no idea that anything happened outside the station,” Skye said.

“I guess not,” he said, but he couldn’t even hear himself.