Spy to Die For

dumped her time after time. At some point, she had to learn the lesson.

No one wanted her. No one would stick with her. No one would want something permanent. Not after they got to know her.

Not even the Guild wanted something permanent. They just wanted her to repay the investment they’d made in her. That was all.

Well, when she gave them this list, she would consider the investment repaid.

That thought gave her strength. She sat back up and forced herself to pay attention to the board.

A flashing light in the far corner caught her attention. The flash was faint, almost nonexistent. She tapped it.

The ship’s scanner said, Ship-sized object. No registration. No identification. Scans failing. Hands-on analysis might be possible. Hypothesis could be derived from component parts.

She had never seen a message like that before from any ship. She frowned at it, figuring it out.

Was she seeing something in stealth mode? Or something else?

“Jack, have you seen anything like this?”

He moved from his research chair to the copilot’s chair. The chair groaned underneath his weight.

“Yeah,” he said. “Some really sensitive navigation panels constantly scan images, and as the panel understands what it has seen in the past, it puts it on the screen.”

She let out a small breath. “You mean like a ghost image, not an image of what’s really out there? A reflection of what had been there?” she asked. Then she frowned as she contemplated that idea. “Well, that would explain the message.”

“What message?”

She moved that message to his screen. He swore when he saw it.

“Let me find this,” he said. His tone sounded urgent.

“What are we looking for?” she asked.

“More images just like this,” he said.

“You think there’s an army of these things?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I think this is an old image that the scanning system is trying to understand. Something made it visible to our systems just for a second. We need to figure out what that something is and scan for it.”

“I can do that.” She knew this ship’s systems really well now. She tapped the screen and made sure the computer started looking for the signature it had found before. She told the computer not to worry about what it was, just where it was, and where it had been.

The computer gave her a secondary screen, with a map of ghostly images, all the same size.

“Shit,” she said softly.

“What?” Jack asked.

She imposed their ship’s path onto the ghostly images. The images matched.

“We’re being tailed,” she said.

“How is that possible?” Jack asked.

“That’s not the question to ask at the moment,” Skye said. “The question to ask is how do we lose the tail?”

“Evasive maneuvers?” Jack asked.

She glanced at him sideways. “You’ve never flown a ship, have you?”

“Not without autopilot,” he said.

“The tail knows where we are. They’re tracking our signature. It doesn’t matter if we fly in circles, they’ll still find us.”

“So,” Jack said, “how do we lose them?”

She swallowed hard. “I don’t think we do.”

Jack turned toward her, surprise on his face. “Why not?”

“We’re not far from Kordita. They know where we’re going or can guess. We land, and we just keep going. I can lose someone on foot. Can’t you?”

Jack nodded, but he looked preoccupied. “I can lose most people,” he said. “But not everyone.”

She had to sound strong. She smiled at him. “The good news is that this isn’t ‘everyone.’ It’s someone.”

“Or a group of someones,” Jack said.

“And we have no idea if they’re after us or the Hawk.”

“I thought the Hawk wasn’t stolen,” Jack said as he used his fingers to expand the images on the screen.

“I don’t think it was,” Skye said. “I checked the registration as best I could. But you never know. And the last time we got chased, we were chased because of the ship.”

She felt odd saying that. She’d never been chased before she met Jack. She’d never been in the middle of anything like this before she met Jack.

He was maneuvering the images on the screen. “It’s not the Hawk,” he said softly.

She glanced over, saw a series of little ghost images, and couldn’t quite make sense of them. “How do you know?”

He pointed to the first image. “That’s not long after we hacked into the Guild’s database.”

“They’ve been onto us since then?” she asked.

He nodded. “Maybe it’s the Guild.”

“The Guild doesn’t operate that way,” she said.

“Not for its members. But what about outsiders who tap in?”

It sounded logical, but it didn’t feel logical. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” Jack said. “Let me do what I can to find out.”

Chapter 50

Jack dug into the computer system. He had a sick feeling about that ship, and he tried to ignore it. If he worked off of preconceptions, he might make mistakes.

That was the last thing he needed to do.

He found the ship’s silhouette, and let the Hawk plot the ship’s trajectory. Then he continued to dig.

The Hawk continually revised the images on the screen, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. The other ship kept getting closer and closer—not in real time, but in the past. Only he was just seeing it now, because the tracking was catching up to the ship, and that wasn’t good. It meant that the ship had probably slowed down.

And if that ship followed the Hawk’s trajectory, then that meant it was really close.

Jack sent that data back to Skye but kept working. He needed to find out whose ship this was. If it belonged to the Guild, then Skye would deal with them. She would apologize, explain the situation, and find a resolution.

If the ship belonged to someone he and Skye didn’t know, then Skye’s plan of going straight to Kordita and playing a ground game made sense. They were heading to the Guild, and no strangers got into the Guild. Jack wasn’t even sure he would be able to.

But he worried that the ship belonged to a Rover, and if that were the case, then he and Skye were in deep trouble.

He paused for just a moment as a thought flitted across his brain. Then he realized that he had missed something obvious.

He went back into the information the computer had sent him, and looked for images of the ship before it went into stealth mode.