Spy to Die For (Assassins Guild) (20 page)

There was no quick route from their location in the NetherRealm to Kordita, the planet where the Assassins Guild made its home. Even with their speedy ship, it took four days of solid travel.

Jack got his lovemaking on the cockpit floor, mostly because neither he nor Skye wanted to leave the navigation system unmonitored, particularly after that explosion near Zaeen. The lovemaking wasn’t as exciting as Jack had hoped it would be.

Instead, like all of their interactions these days, it had a touch of sadness. They were still deeply attracted, and the sex was wonderful, and inventive. But it no longer felt new. It felt instead like the kind of sex people had after they had already broken up.

Jack tried to approach the topic a dozen times, but always elliptically. And he had started to learn that Skye wasn’t good with subtlety. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t understood the conspiracy recruitments when they happened.

She didn’t believe that people could think differently than she did, so when she was confronted by someone with a competing (but unarticulated) agenda, she simply ignored it, or failed to comprehend all of the subtext.

It wasn’t that she was dumb, it was that she lacked an interest in others that appeared in situations like that.

They had maybe a half a day to travel to get to Kordita when Jack decided to be as blunt as he possibly could. By then, they had finished all of the research they could do with the records available to them. They had decided to make a risky hack into the Guild’s database when they were still in the NetherRealm. That hack had lasted less than ten seconds and had garnered most of the Guild’s current information.

They had sorted through it on the rest of the trip here, but now they were done. Mostly, all they had gained was more confirmation that the people they suspected were worth their suspicions.

Skye sat in the pilot’s chair. Lately, she’d been doing hands-on flying because she worried about the proximity of some other ships. She said she paid better attention when she actually manipulated the controls herself.

She had done the bulk of the flying on the return trip. One of them had to monitor to make sure they weren’t followed, so when she needed sleep, he spelled her. During those times, he used the autopilot and did research nearby.

This meant that the two of them were on different schedules, so they hadn’t even had a chance to sleep in the same bed.

Jack missed it.

She had the screens open, so that she could see everything around them. He usually didn’t pay much attention to anything outside of a ship, but he did lately. And he was noticing just how much extra traffic there was here. It was as if they had left an unexplored part of the galaxy and arrived in a part that was running out of room for ships and humans.

Jack sat at his research station. The chair had become familiar to him, but it didn’t allow him to see her unless he swiveled toward her, which he did now.

“Skye,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”

She was staring at the navigation board in front of her. From this distance, it looked like a bunch of multicolored dots moving in a variety of directions.

“It’s kind of important,” he said.

Kind of. As in not entirely. He mentally kicked himself for the hedge.

“All right.” She tapped something, then raised her head. Her eyes were a bit glazed. He was surprised to note the shadows under them. Had she been working that hard?

He supposed so. He had too, but he always worked hard. He rarely thought about it.

“It’s about us,” he said. He had never used that word before,
us
, and it made him nervous.

A small frown creased the spot just above her nose. He wanted to caress the frown away, but he was too far from her. He had initially thought of moving to the copilot’s chair before having this discussion, but was now glad he hadn’t. He needed the distance. He wanted to focus on the words, not on that magical physical pull between them.

“We haven’t talked about the future,” he said.

She shrugged. He didn’t like the reaction, but he pushed forward.

“I initially worried that talking about the future was wrong because there was no guarantee that I’d have one,” he said. “But I think if we present this information to the Guild, and they deal with Heller and by extension, the Rovers, I’ll be fine. I’ll be able to make choices. And so will you.”

She didn’t say a word. For a moment, he thought she would turn back toward the navigation panel in front of her. He wasn’t even sure she understood him.

“I don’t have friends, Jack,” she said. “Most people would consider that a warning sign.”

A warning sign of what? He almost asked the question, but decided not to get sidetracked.

“I think you do have friends,” he said. “You just haven’t noticed.”

Her lips thinned, but that flat expression remained on her face.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m not talking about friendship here.”

Her frown grew deeper. “We’re loners. We work separately. We come from different cultures.”

“And we’ve had a hell of a run these last few weeks,” he said. “We get along really well.”

“Because of the sex,” she said.

The words stung him. He hadn’t thought that. He wondered how she could.

“No,” he said. “Even without the sex. We’ve talked about a lot of things, examined a lot of things, spent quiet time together—”

“And you think that’ll last past this trip?” she asked.

Now he was feeling defensive. “Don’t you?”

She shrugged again. “I’ve never been in this situation before.”

And it sounded like, from her tone, that she didn’t want to be in the situation now.

Still, he pressed on. “I would like to continue spending time with you.”

That sounded too vague.

“I’d like some kind of relationship,” he said.

Less vague.

“Maybe even something perman—”

“Jack,” she said, her voice cold. “I don’t make attachments. I thought you knew that.”

Then she turned around and went back to the navigation panel as if nothing had happened.

His heart ached. He’d never really felt like this before, as if he’d been gut-punched when no one touched him.

“I’d like you to make an exception,” he said.

She didn’t respond. He thought about repeating himself, but knew that she’d ignore that as well.

Maybe he hadn’t been unclear earlier. Maybe she had just been ignoring him, hoping he wouldn’t continue to bring the topic up.

She had made herself very clear from the beginning. A one-night stand. She had said she liked him, but nothing more. No words of love during lovemaking—or rather, sex. And she didn’t make attachments.

He did. She had known that.

But apparently, being the kind of person she was, she either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared.

He turned his chair back toward the research screen, but he couldn’t concentrate. He’d never been in this situation before. No woman had interested him like Skye. He hadn’t ever felt this way about anyone.

He loved her.

And apparently, she did not love him back.

If this trip had taught her anything, it was that she knew nothing about people. Skye bent over the navigation panel, pretending that nothing had happened. She felt Jack’s gaze on her back and she knew when he had turned away.

She had a gut sense of people, but only as it pertained to her. Were they safe? Were they honest? Were they people she needed to spend time with?

Whether or not they were into something bad or good, it didn’t matter if it didn’t concern her.

She’d been thinking about the conspiracy for days, knowing that she had probably missed a hundred clues, primarily because she hadn’t cared about the future of the Guild. She had only concentrated on leaving it.

And now this, with Jack. She had been very clear. She didn’t make friends. She wasn’t warm and cuddly. She was brittle and breakable and she wasn’t going to change. Eventually, he wouldn’t find her intriguing. He would find her irritating, and he would leave her one day just like everyone else had.

The best way to avoid that was to avoid the attachment.

No one came back. Everyone left.

How she felt about him didn’t matter because he would never return the emotion. He might think he loved her, but he didn’t. He was only responding to the sexual connection and once that faded, then he would move on somewhere else.

He was talking about a future now, but once they had survived all of this—once they had made it to that future—he would want out.

Everyone did.

Her fingers kept missing the edges of the screen. She finally had to stop trying to work the navigation panel and flatten her hands against her thighs. She needed to get ahold of herself.

I
don’t have friends
, she had said to him.

And he had said,
I
think
you
do
have
friends. You just haven’t noticed
.

Could that be true? How could she have friends if she hadn’t noticed? Weren’t friends like pets or children? Didn’t they require care and feeding and constant attention?

The fact that she didn’t know these things meant that she wasn’t attachment material. She had purposely not learned any of it.

But she did care about some people back at the Guild. The idea of them getting caught in the crossfire of whatever might happen disturbed her more than she could say.

Just like the idea of Jack getting killed disturbed her. That was why she had joined him in the first place, even after that spectacular one-night stand. She wanted to know he was surviving out there, living his life.

Was that friendship? Or was she just being selfish?

And how could she tell the difference?

She wanted to ask him, which was rich in irony. He was the only person she trusted to tell her how friendship worked.

And she was going to walk away from his.

Only he’d been clear: he hadn’t wanted friendship. He wanted “some kind of relationship.” He wanted something “perman—” She had interrupted him, because she hadn’t wanted to hear the word
permanent
.

She hadn’t wanted to contemplate it. It would be too tempting. Like chasing after her parents after they 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.”