Spy to Die For (Assassins Guild) (13 page)

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.

Her grip around him tightened as if she sensed his nervousness. He hadn’t been this overwhelmed since the first time he left the Tranquility House.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked louder.

“Not yet,” she said, “but I will.”

He read her lips as much as he understood what she was saying.

They moved through the door and into the crowd. He felt a little dizzy, but he always did in crowds this large. He could see the tops of their heads, and that made the crowd seem more like a single entity rather than a bunch of human beings. The heads became a unit, like water through a conduit, with other conduits coming into it, changing some of the flow. He could see everything as a unit, but individuals were hard to see at all.

“Must be nice for you,” Skye said. “You can see over everyone.”

And she couldn’t. He hadn’t realized that. To her, it probably looked like the worst kind of obstacle course.

“Tell me where you need us to go and I’ll get us there,” he said.

He needed a purpose to get through this crowd, and leading them forward would give him that purpose.

“The maps I looked at on the ship showed that there was an entire section devoted to spaceship sales not too far from here.”

Of course it would be near the port. That way people could see the ships.

He scanned over the sea of heads, noting that his eyes had grown used to the brighter lights. The music sounded tinnier in here, maybe because he caught echoes of so many different strains.

He could see signs, but he couldn’t read them even though they appeared to be in Standard. They were too low, eye-level for people like Skye.

Then he saw a ship in the distance. It seemed to be made of yellow light, and it floated over the crowd. He saw some hands pointing upward. Alongside the ship was a banner, also in the shape of a ship, informing anyone who wanted something like that to go to Pavilion Fifty-three.

Fifty-three pavilions. He suspected where they stood was considered a pavilion. His stomach clenched. He was starting to get a sense of scale here, and it was unbelievably huge.

All of Krell could fit into this pavilion or whatever the hell it was. And there were fifty-two more of them?

No wonder Skye had been confident that no one would care about them.

Hardly anyone was looking up at him, no one commented on their appearance, and as they made their way through the crowd, they had to shove just like everyone else.

He was glad he didn’t have a bag or his usual equipment with him, just the chips with information embedded in his hand. His default was to shut all of that off, so no one could lift information as he passed.

Good thing, too, because he hadn’t even thought of pickpockets until now.

He kept a tight grip on Skye, their bodies glued at the sides. Even so, she nearly lost hold of him once or twice as people continually banged into her.

He steered her toward that ship, and she didn’t seem to care. She seemed relieved that he knew where he was going.

He only knew what he could see, and he could see just a bit more than she could.

They used their bodies almost as a battering ram to get through the crowd. People of all shapes and sizes passed them, some slamming into them, some carefully avoiding them.

He could see dozens of businesses, but could barely read the signs. Most of the signs, he realized after a few minutes, were on the ground, in bright lights, with arrows or maps leading to the storefront.

“I’ll get us to the ship area,” he said to Skye, “but you might have some luck getting us to the right store.”

He nodded at the floor in front of them. Her mouth opened a bit—she hadn’t noticed that—and then she nodded.

They had become a strange team, him looking up and her looking down.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to cross this part of the Pavilion. They finally got close to that floating ship which, Jack realized, was
huge
. It towered over him and would have crossed the entire width of the concourse on Krell. Here, it nearly vanished amongst the choices.

What kind of money maintained a place like this?

As soon as he asked himself the question, he realized he didn’t want to know.

Skye’s fingers dug into his side, pulling him to the left. He glanced down at her.

“Over there,” she said.

He looked toward the thing she nodded at. Rows and rows and rows of storefronts, all advertising ships at cheap prices.

“Crap,” he said. “How do we know where to go?”

“We guess,” she said, and pulled him forward.

It felt like slogging through a space walk in the bulkiest space suit ever invented.

Skye had not expected so many people here on Zaeen. If she were honest with herself, despite what she said to Jack, she hadn’t expected the place to be so big.

She had been doing her research, of course, but knowing that a place was the size of a small planet and actually
going
to that small planet were two different things. Zaeen had grown tremendously since she’d last been here. This kind of growth would have been unprecedented in any sector outside of the Brezev Sector.

Regulations barely existed here, and what ones did exist could be bribed away.

That thought was one she chose not to share with Jack. Despite his “glass-half-full” thing, he seemed like a bit of a worrier, and anyone with a brain would worry about the fact that Zaeen did not regulate anything.

Parts of the station could fall off at any time.

For all she knew, parts had.

She had initially toyed with the idea of buying Jack his own ship and getting him out of here. She didn’t want to be separated from him which, she knew, was more the lust and loneliness talking than anything else. She had helped him a great deal, and if he would take her money (with the promise of paying her back; she already knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t want anything else), then they could go their separate ways.

She had initially planned to stay here to find some trace of her mother.

But the whole Rover thing was bothering her, as was the involvement of Liora Olliver. Something was up, and Skye wasn’t sure she could spend time here without losing what little lead she had.

She also knew that her reaction to all of this might simply be a rationalization so that she could stay with Jack.

She didn’t want to examine that.

There had to be fifty shops purporting to sell spaceships ahead of her. If she logged into Zaeen’s network this close to the shops, she would find positive information on all of them, with the most positive on the shop that could afford the most advertising.

She should have researched ships before abandoning theirs.

As if she had had time.

She knew what she wanted, though, so she pulled Jack toward a kiosk that had lots of information on it.

“Is that wise?” he said when he saw what she was about to do.

“You have links that can access the public networks?” she asked. “Because I have nothing internal.”

He smiled at her. “Me, either. And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t do so here.”

He was right: credit rip-offs, identity theft, tracer software, everything she worried about and more would come into a person’s internal links through the Zaeen network.

If she had initially wondered where the money came from to run this place, she wondered no longer. Just ripping off the careless would bring in millions. Maybe tens of millions.

And since Zaeen was in the Brezev Sector, there was no recourse for the average citizen who suffered a catastrophic financial loss.

The kiosk stood a foot higher than she did, and blocked her view of that part of the Pavilion. She didn’t like that, but she saw no way around it.

She plugged in information on fast ships with some weaponry and great shields. She also needed a ship with a registration that was valid in several sectors so that no one would arrest them for flying an unregistered ship in the wrong sector. A valid registration wouldn’t guarantee that the ship wasn’t stolen, but it would make the theft harder to prove.

Not that she cared. She didn’t plan to use the ship long and she knew that Jack was smart enough to understand how dangerous buying a ship in this area actually was.

She also needed a ship that was fly-ready. She couldn’t wait weeks for the ship to be delivered and/or repaired.

Only five shops met all her needs, and only one was close by. Its information displayed in purple. All she had to do was follow the purple arrows, and she would get there.

“Got it,” she said.

Jack kept his back to the search, protecting her, making sure no one else got close enough to see what she was doing. It was probably a futile effort—some bot somewhere probably tracked all of the information displayed in the kiosk—but she appreciated the gesture anyway.

She tapped his back. He turned and encircled her with his arm. She liked that more than she wanted to admit.

She put her arm around his waist like she had before, and they walked toward the shop she had chosen.

It wasn’t the biggest, the brightest, or the loudest shop in this ship-oriented part of the Pavilion. That distinction belonged to the store that had floated the ship above them. Tethers of yellow light connected that ship to the outside of the store.

Instead, she led Jack to the store down a narrow passageway from that one. The exterior had purple lighting, but strangely, it was tasteful. It blended with the shiny black door. Only a small purple ship, glowing in the center of that door, advertised what the shop sold.

“Nice,” Jack said, and she could actually hear him without lip-reading. The noise factor in this part of the passageway was down significantly.

It made her relax just a bit. She wondered if that was intention of the shop owners, then decided it didn’t matter.

When she pushed open the door to the shop, a light flared in the back. The shop itself was silent, startlingly so. Tiny replicas of ships sat on top of displays. More images of ships floated across the walls. The map of the interior of
One
of
Our
Best
Models
covered the floor. A star field covered the ceiling, and she had a hunch it hid all kinds of surveillance equipment.

The most startling thing of all, though, was that Jack could stand upright. He didn’t even have to duck as he went through the door, although he did. Force of habit, she assumed.

His gaze met hers. “I’m not comfortable with you paying—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said. She didn’t add the word “again” because that wasn’t fair. She would have been uncomfortable too. “Let’s just get out of here. Then we can work out the details.”

She knew how that would sound to anyone watching the surveillance, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they wanted out, and she wasn’t all that interested in saving money.

“Let me handle the negotiation at least,” he said.

She shook her head. She didn’t want to waste time bickering over price. “It’s just better if we get it done.”

He looked like he was about to say something, when a wizened little man walked out of the back door.

“Welcome,” he said in accented Standard. “Let me help you find the perfect ship.”