Rebels and Lovers (30 page)

Devin worked through lunch, analyzing all incoming and outgoing messages on his, Trip’s, and Barty’s pocket comms, as well as his Rada. He scanned Trip’s bookpad. And he damned the fact that that was all he could do. Jumpspace was, in essence, a closed system. There was no way he could access GGS, and he had to. That’s where the answers resided. All he could do now was make an educated guess.

At least he didn’t have to tell Trip that his grandfather
had been scheming to kidnap him. Because while he couldn’t fully rule it out, the more he thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed.

Unless J.M. was so desperate for Tage’s approval that he was cooperating with ImpSec. But Devin wasn’t going to bring that up to Trip yet.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor caught his attention. Then Makaiden stood in the open doorway, tray in hand.

“You have your choice of vegetable cheese casserole or cheese toast and …” She hesitated, peering at the dishes on the tray. “… fruit. I can’t be sure. Your nephew insisted on tinkering with the galley unit.”

“Casserole.”

“Wise choice.” She slid the tray onto the table.

His annoyance lessened. Even though Makaiden could be annoying, it was a different kind of annoying. He felt better in her presence.
That’s what happens when you’re irrevocably intrigued by someone. And in love with her
.

That thought should have startled him. It didn’t. He’d been more than half in love with her for years, but those were feelings he’d never let surface except in his fantasies. Now fantasy was reality, and it was—
she
was—better than he remembered. Annoyances and all.

She sat in the empty chair on his left, picked up a piece of toast, and bit gingerly into it, completely unaware of the emotional turbulence she had created in his heretofore well-ordered life. She chewed. “Not bad. A little soggy.”

“Since when does my nephew play chef?”

“Evidently it’s something his friends at college like to do: mess with the university slurp-and-snacks. Mostly it’s to turn all the food green one day, purple the next. Pranks. But in order to do that, they had to
learn how the damned units worked and how to customize nutritional components.”

Devin found himself grinning. “For me, it was cargobots, though I was a bit younger. My father used to make me accompany him to various warehouses; then he’d get embroiled in some long meeting and I’d be left to amuse myself. I once programmed an entire cargobot floor-hockey game.”

Now Makaiden was grinning, too, and that warmed him more than the casserole.

“So,” she said, “the message to meet at Port Chalo was honestly from Ethan?”

He swallowed his bite of casserole, nodding. “It was sent by someone in possession of Ethan’s codes. It was also sent by someone who writes a message like Ethan. I can’t say it couldn’t be copied. But I’d be less sure if the message had been stilted or formal.”

“But someone who works for your family would know that, right? They could mimic him?”

“You worked for us for five years,” he pointed out. “You’ve piloted Ethan and his family. Could you right now create a message that sounded authentically like my brother?”

“I don’t know.” She tilted her head in puzzlement. “Maybe. I know how he speaks. Short sentences. Impatient.”

“True. So, you’ve received a message that Barty and I have found Trip on Dock Five and all’s well, ostensibly. You want to tell us you’re sending the
Prosperity
to Port Chalo and we’re to meet it there. How would you phrase it?”

Makaiden had picked up a slice of pale fruit. She took a small bite, then pointed it at him. “Apple. Your nephew’s a genius! But, no, that’s not what I’d say. Okay, it would be an informal note. Brother to
brother. Maybe …” She took another bite of the apple slice, then chewed a moment. She sat up straighter. “Great news, Devin. Father’s pleased. We’re sending the
Prosperity
to Port Chalo. You need to set a meet point with it in four days.” She paused. “Something like that.”

Devin shook his head. “That’s the public Ethan. Not my brother Ethan. The dynamics between us …” And he pulled in a short breath, not knowing how much he should say. “Ethan and I don’t get along as well as we should. Yes, we’re brothers, but there’s a tension between us and, whenever Ethan talks to me or writes to me, I can hear it in his tone. Plus, he doesn’t call me Devin—at least, not when we’re alone. In public—at GGS—it’s always Devin. But in private, he insists on calling me D.J.”

“D.J.?” Makaiden’s eyebrows went up. “Why?”

“Because he knows I hate it.”

“Why do you hate it?”

“Because that’s what Ethan calls me.” He half-sighed, half-laughed. “That, you see, is the gist of the problem.”

“And in the message you got, he calls you D.J.?”

“Exactly.”

“Who else knows this?”

“My immediate family. I’m sure Trip’s heard him. Thana and Max too. But none of them has a reason to impersonate Ethan. And I’m not his only victim. He calls Philip ‘Scruffy.’” He stirred the casserole. “Still, I can’t unequivocally verify the message is from Ethan just because he calls me D.J. It simply increases the probability that it came from him.”

“Is that probability high enough that you feel comfortable with the meet point at Port Chalo?”

There was something unsettled in Makaiden’s voice
and posture. Devin studied her for a moment, remembering her unflappable calm in the cockpit of GGS ships. But here she was, hands clenched a little too tightly, her gaze on him in almost the same manner that his was on her.

Studying me?

“Makaiden, what is it?”

She started to speak, stopped, then: “Since, lately, people are either trying to shoot at Trip or blow up your office, I thought you might want to consider some optional landing sites.”

“Optional …?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Smugglers’ ports. If Ethan’s message isn’t legit, then whoever did send that message won’t be able to shoot the
Rider
out of the skies on approach to the spaceport.”

He knew Port Chalo had a reputation and a large black market. It would never occur to him that Makaiden was part of that—GGS was known for their thorough background checks on all their employees. But she wouldn’t have entry to those “optional landing sites” if she wasn’t. “Sounds like you’ve had an interesting past two years.” He said it lightly but had a hard time keeping the surprise out of his voice. She must have heard it, because she dropped her gaze, her fingers tightening. He flinched. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

She looked up at him, her eyes hard. “I’ve had an interesting
life
, Mr. Devin. And I knew about systems hacks and smugglers’ ports long before Kiler Griggs screwed me over, got himself killed, and left me with a shitload of debt. Okay? And, no, it’s not in my personal records and no one at GGS knew.
You
wouldn’t even know, except that, because I’ve had an interesting life, I can smell something really wrong here. And it’s spelled A-M-B-U-S-H.” She flattened her hands on the
table and pushed herself to her feet. “I’m just trying to save your respectable Guthrie asses.”

She was halfway to the door by the time he got to his feet and called after her. “Wait!”

She stopped, shoulders tensed, but she didn’t turn.

“I know you had a different upbringing than I did,” he said quietly. “That doesn’t change how I feel … that I value you. Respect you.”
That I’ve fallen in love with you
, he wanted to say but couldn’t. He was dancing dangerously close to “emotions Guthrie men don’t discuss” as it was.

Her shoulders dipped slightly. She glanced over her shoulder to where he stood, then turned. “Ever hear of Nathaniel Milo?”

That wasn’t what he expected her to say. The question caught him by surprise, and he was shaking his head before something about the name seemed familiar. But nothing he could immediately place.

“How about a ship called the
Diligent Keeper?”
Her tone was still cautious.

Milo.
Diligent Keeper
. “Vaguely,” he admitted. “I think Philip may have mentioned it when the
Loviti
was assigned to break up some piracy syndicate out in Baris or Calth.” His brother had been captain of the Imperial ship the
Morgan Loviti
back then. Not an admiral, and not with the Alliance.

Makaiden locked her hands in front of her. “It was both. Six to eight ships operating under Captain Milo’s command, with the
Keeper
as flagship, going in and out of Baris and Calth, docking at Dock Five and Talgarrath, because that’s where the buyers were. Arms trafficking, mostly, but if Imperial supply ships were carrying something else, they’d take that too.
We’d
take that too,” she amended. She lifted her chin. “I’m Nathaniel Milo’s daughter.”

It took a moment for the impact of her words to hit him. His first thought was that GGS security was obviously flawed in its background-checking methods. His second was that he was glad they were. He’d never have met Makaiden otherwise.

That’s irrational. She’s part of a smuggling syndicate family
. He could hear a clear warning tone in what he imagined—quite accurately, he had to admit—his father would say. But it didn’t matter. He knew Makaiden. It bothered him that she’d lied, or that she’d been forced to lie. But certain actions of hers, and her skittishness, now made sense.

He tried to address what he thought might be her fear—one she might not even admit to. “To the best of my knowledge, a GGS ship has never been boarded by any of your father’s people.” That’s why the name Nathaniel Milo didn’t have that much meaning for him.

“You don’t deal in military munitions.”

“Were you part of your father’s operations?”

“I was on his ships growing up, but he didn’t want that life for me. In the end, he didn’t even want that life for himself.” She shook her head sadly. “So I’d stay with an aunt or an uncle on Dock Five or on Corsau. But even that didn’t work out.” Her mouth twisted in a grim smile. “My family attracts trouble. So I’d end up back on the
Keeper
again, until I was old enough to be sent away to the academy at Ferrin’s for flight training. That’s when I went from being Kaidee Milo to Makaiden Malloy.”

And then to Makaiden Malloy Griggs. He now understood why she didn’t answer easily to Makaiden.

“And the only reason you need to know all this,” she said, “is because in order to gain entry to those optional landing sites, Kaidee Milo has to surface again.”

Kaidee wasn’t exactly sure what she anticipated as Devin’s reaction to the fact she was Nathaniel Milo’s daughter, but she would have bet a pitcher of Trouble’s Brewing’s best ale that it would be something between disdain and disappointment.

Instead, he stepped closer to her. “Will that put you in any danger? Using your father’s name after all this time?”

That wasn’t what she expected. Nor was the gentle concern on his face.

“There are some in Port Chalo who didn’t like him,” she answered cautiously. Was Devin holding back his anger until it could most hurt her? Toward the end of their marriage, Kiler had excelled at that. “But there are also many who owed him favors. I’m counting on the latter.”

Devin was silent for a moment, and Kaidee tensed slightly.

“Owed,” he said. “Your father’s no longer alive?”

“No.” That answered his question. She didn’t want to get into details. They had nothing to do with their current problems.

“Let’s get some tea, coffee. You can tell me more about these optional landing sites. I’m not sure we’ll need them. But I do know I want all the facts and the options I can get.”

——————

Talking to Devin about how smugglers and pirates operated was easier than she thought. Though as she explained the details of covert contact routines and approach patterns, she knew why. The man loved facts, data. She was simply expanding his knowledge base. Still, his lack of reaction to who her father was puzzled her.

Except
, she reminded herself,
I’m no longer a GGS employee. It’s not like he can fire me for lying on my personnel application
. Though it hadn’t been a lie. Legally, she was Makaiden Malloy. Her father had paid a lot of money to ensure that.

“We have a day and a half yet to decide what we’ll do,” Devin said finally. “I still think the message from Ethan was genuine. He did say he’d update me. He might have a message pack waiting on the
Prosperity
. Plus, he knew we’d be in transit in jumpspace, and maybe, for once, he didn’t want to worry me overmuch. In his own way, he might have felt he was saving me grief by leaving out details.”

“Or he didn’t trust the security of the
Rider’s
comm pack and just sent the basics to you via your Rada,” she pointed out.

Devin picked up his mug of tea but didn’t sip it. “He doesn’t know we’re on your ship. Last message Barty and I sent to my father was that we were bumped off a Compass Spacelines flight to Marker and had found alternative transport. I didn’t know he was sending a ship at that point. And neither Barty nor I mentioned that we met you.”

She wondered why but thought it better not to ask. “So he’s expecting you to arrive …?”