Rebels and Lovers (36 page)

“Second?” He gulped. “Second. Whoa, so totally apex!”

She pointed to the chair at the nav console behind her to the right. “Let me activate the piloting function on the console.” It hadn’t been used that way since Kiler was on board, and it hadn’t occurred to her to let Trip train on it until he’d walked on the bridge a few seconds ago. He was so eager, so positive. She needed to ride the wake of his emotions for a while.

“It’s similar to the one in the manual you have,” she said as he took his seat. “It should be on now.”

“It is.”

“Take five minutes and familiarize yourself with the location and reaction of the screens and controls. Do you want to go get your bookpad?”

“Nope.” He tapped his forehead. “Got it all here.”

“We’re twenty minutes out from gate exit. I’m going to make the first announcement on intraship now; then, when you’re ready, I’ll go over what your duties will be.”

“Yes, ma’am. Captain.”

She turned back to her console, falling easily into the routine she had for years when flying for GGS. She opened intraship with a tap of her thumb. “This is the captain. In a few minutes we’ll be fifteen out from gate exit. Whatever you have loose, strap it down. Whatever’s open, close it. This is slippery space, and gate exit will be choppy. Your next and final advisory will
be at five minutes out. At that point I want everyone strapped in a bunk or cabin chair. No exceptions. Captain out.”

She didn’t add an invitation to be on the bridge and hoped that part of her message was clear. If Devin came up here, she would just have to tolerate it. She couldn’t demand he leave the bridge and yet permit Trip to be here.

Hell, she’d survived for months with Kiler on the ship. This should be only a few more hours.

Anxious to get rid of him?
She didn’t have to identify
him
to that annoying voice in her mind. And, yes, she was, because seeing him only prolonged the heartache.

And it won’t be heartache losing your ship?

But she was going to lose it anyway. Better to the Guthries than to Orvis.

Yet it wasn’t just her desire to put distance between herself and Devin that fueled her impatience. She knew how long it took messages and data to get from Dock Five to Aldan Prime. She hadn’t been trying to make Devin feel guilty when she’d told him that by the time they hit gate exit, the whole damned Empire would know he owned the
Rider
. It was fact. Devin said the stealth-pointer program in Trip’s pocket comm reported back to an Imperial office, and she believed him. Therefore she also believed that they had a very small window of three, maybe four days before whoever was tracking Trip learned they were on the
Rider
. Whoever was in that office didn’t have to send a ship from Aldan. Imperial cruisers were all over the sector. One could intercept them in a matter of hours.

They had to get to Lufty’s, had to get out of the space lanes before that happened. They needed to disappear from the Imperial Traffic Control databases
completely. Their entry to the gate after they left Dock Five was recorded. She couldn’t change that. But her aborted jump transit made sure there’d be no exit signature for Griggs’s
Void Rider
.

That also meant they couldn’t upload or download any data or messages from any Imperial beacons they passed. That would be annoying—they needed to know more about the bombing of Devin’s offices.

Everything would have to wait until they got to Lufty’s.

There was safety in silence.

Exiting through the gate with slippery space still grappling for the
Rider
wasn’t half as problematic as what happened ten minutes later. At least, that was Kaidee’s way of looking at it.

It was bad enough having Devin in the close quarters of the bridge. But the real—and unexpected—problem turned out to be Barty.

“If we access the beacon, someone might be able to trace us. You know that.” She pointed at Barty, lounging at the comm console, but her words were also directed at Devin—standing behind Barty. For the past five minutes, Barty had been the one detailing his requests. Devin had just stood silently behind him, like his hired muscle. She thought of Frinks and his Taka. Not good.

Trip, at second pilot, was looking as if he wanted to shrink into his seat, with his hands clasped tightly at his knees and shoulders hunched. After a stellar performance going through the gate, he now had discord on his first command.

“If I don’t pick up whatever answers my queries back on Dock Five have generated, someone tracing us
will be the least of our problems. They may have already traced us.”

“Not to Lufty’s.”

The older man regarded her with a narrow gaze. “Captain Griggs, ImpSec could take down Lufty’s anytime the emperor or Tage wants it. The only reason Lufty’s or Uchenna’s still operates is that it serves some purpose.
Undercover operatives
are two words that come to mind.”

Kaidee couldn’t deny that. It was long accepted that the reason Dock Five still existed—and its notoriety predated Tage—was because the emperor and his people felt a known den of thieves was better than an unknown one.

“You were concerned,” Barty continued, “about Imperial cruisers waiting for us at the Talgarrath gate. I agreed with that. But that would be Fleet acting as enforcer, not ImpSec. ImpSec rarely moves that overtly.”

“And we need to warn whoever’s piloting the
Prosperity,”
Devin added.

“And if that pilot is there on Tage’s orders?” Kaidee countered.

“Then Ethan’s message to me would have read differently.”

They’d been over that point. Though she had misgivings, Kaidee recognized that Devin was probably right. Whatever Ethan might be—an annoying womanizer at times and too full of himself almost constantly—he was a Guthrie. He’d never risk Devin’s and Trip’s lives.

“Give me some ways we can minimize detection.” She looked at Devin. Okay, she was caving. They won. But she wouldn’t make it easy on them. “I take it that’s your job?”

He leaned back against the edge of the comm console, his body flanked by the two pale yellow screens. “To be honest, I’m not as familiar with the system as I’d like to be. I’ve never had a reason to investigate Imperial protocols. I know banks, other commercial communications systems, because I’ve worked on the other end. In order to prevent hackers, you need to know how they get access.” Devin shrugged. “At worst, if I can’t delete traces of our uploads and downloads, I might be able to muddy the IDs so they won’t know who we are.”

“Might?” Kaidee never liked the sound of
might
. “And if they already have a watch out for us, don’t you think a null ID is as much of a clue as if we used our own? Can’t you make us read as someone else?”

“The only other codes I have available to me are other GGS ships. I think they’d figure it out.”

Kaidee didn’t like that. “Barty?”

“In order to get workable codes, I’d have to use the datalink.” He smiled thinly. “I believe we’re caught in a bit of a loop.”

They were, and she didn’t like it one bit. “We’re about thirty-five minutes out from the next-closest data beacon. Do what you can to make
damned
sure whatever you send and receive doesn’t also put us on some Imperial cruiser’s targeting screens.”

“We’ll make it to Lufty’s,” Barty said, rising.

Yeah, us and who else on our tail?

But she didn’t say that, she just swiveled her chair around and brought up system stats on her armrest screen. It made her look busy without requiring real concentration. She didn’t want to give Devin any opening to stay and talk.

The chair on her right squeaked. “Thanks for letting me sit second, Captain Makaiden.”

She glanced over her shoulder, aware that Barty was leaving. Aware that Devin was not. “You did good, Trip. Keep studying.”

She caught his shy smile as he turned and hurried to catch up to Barty.

She waited for one more set of departing boot steps. Devin said her name instead. “Makaiden.”

She forced herself not to look at him. “You’re down to thirty-two minutes to work your hacks. Unless what you have to say involves that, you’d better get moving.”

The last set of boot steps headed for the corridor.

Twenty minutes later, though, the men came back—this time Devin and Barty. Hoping there was some good luck somewhere in the galaxy with her name on it, Kaidee turned over the comm console to Devin, then went back to her files on Lufty’s and Uchenna’s. She listened with one ear cocked to the men—Devin swearing under his breath now and then, Barty grunting from the seat next to him. Keeping the
Rider’s
identity secret was not an easy task. Tampering with a ship’s ident programs was something that had put more than one freighter captain—and a handful of smugglers stupid enough to be caught—in starport lockups.

She wanted the news feeds and messages—incoming and outgoing—as badly as Devin and Barty did. She still had people at GGS she considered friends. Devin’s reminder—
we need to warn whoever’s piloting the
Prosperity—had struck a chord. What if Nel was on board? With Halsey’s death, Petra Frederick might send Nel, who didn’t look like the tough bodyguard she was. And what if the pilot was Bixner or Kimber-An? Kimber-An had a husband and small children.

A light blinked on her screen. “Five minutes until we’re in range,” she announced.

“We’re good to go,” Devin answered.

She swiveled part of the way around. “I’ve set the link to go hot automatically. It’s pretty much the same system as on GGS ships. News and trade feeds will upload without any prompts. Personal stuff, it’ll flash you for passwords.”

Devin was nodding as she spoke. “How long before we make Lufty’s?”

“Lufty’s
beacon
is about four hours out. If we end up there.” She hadn’t written off Uchenna’s completely. If she started seeing traffic on her scanners that she didn’t like, she’d change course. “Clearance into Lufty’s could be immediate, or they could stall us for several hours if they’re swamped or don’t like my answers. The latter could cause problems. It’s no fun being a sitting target.”

“Before we do this again, we’re going to upgrade your weapons systems.”

“We’re not doing this again, Mr. Guthrie.”

His only response was the slight uplifting of one eyebrow before he turned back to his console.

“Link is hot,” Barty announced. “Let’s hope and pray we have some good news.”

And that no one was tracking their retrieval of it.

There were messages waiting. And data. But unscrambling and decoding took time, because Devin couldn’t in all good conscience let the packets go further into the ship’s systems, and eventually to his microcomp or Barty’s, without first authenticating and checking each one for worm programs. Bombs destroyed offices, but worms destroyed data—and, given their current circumstances, could also destroy systems on the ship. Both were equally lethal but, at the moment, there was only one he could do something about.

His concentration—admittedly—wasn’t the best. Makaiden was doing everything she could to push him away, and his mind kept searching for options while he worked on the packets. He needed to find a way to bring her back to him. He needed to pay attention to what he was doing.

He released a packet of data to Barty, then rewarded himself for a minute by staring at Makaiden’s profile while his memory brought up images of her body, naked, curved next to his. She was not remotely perfect, and if a director was casting a new vid, she’d never be the star. There were flaws in the symmetry of her face; her mouth was a little too wide, her nose, a bit too broad at the end. Her hair was an unremarkable color somewhere between medium blond and light blond. One eyebrow was crooked. She was of average height and weight.

Jonathan once referred to her as “passably pretty.” Devin thought she was gorgeous, and he loved every
average, crooked, flawed, passably pretty inch of her. He had for seven years. He found the width of her mouth expressive, and her crooked eyebrow impish, playful. On her, the utilitarian blue GGS pilot’s uniform looked both professional and sexy as hell—damned odd combination. Her plain, rumpled freighter grays made his fingers itch to pull them off.

He recognized that Tavia was considered beautiful, yet he could easily go weeks without touching her. Every time he looked at Makaiden, he wanted to bury his face in her neck and shove his hands under her clothes.

Not an easy task when she was barely willing to talk to him—not that they’d had a sufficient block of time that didn’t also involve trying to stay one jump ahead of whoever was behind them. But he had tried, and she had rebuffed.

He went back to the comm console.
Clear another packet and you can stare at Makaiden again
.

“Munton Fetter! Well, I’ll be damned.”

At Barty’s startled exclamation, Devin took his gaze from the jumble of numbers and letters on the comm console. The older man was leaning back in his chair, the DRECU angled in the air so as to bring attention to it. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Barty continued.

Makaiden was also looking over her shoulder, eyes slightly narrow. “Munton Fetter? Person, place, or thing? Sounds like a Takan meat dish.”