Rebels and Lovers (38 page)

More proof, as far as he was concerned, that he and Makaiden were on the same datastream, as the saying went. Tavia never would have inquired. Tavia would have had no idea what he was even attempting to do.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

He shot her a quick glance, then went back to the small bits of code on his screen. He was moving and backing up files at this point—boring work, but incredibly necessary. “Depends if you’re willing to share your knowledge.”

It was strictly a guess on his part. GGS pilots weren’t supposed to know illegal procedures like changing a ship’s embedded identification program. But the little she’d let him learn of her real history, and the large amount of time he’d spent watching her negotiate her way around Dock Five, only cemented his belief that there was a lot more to Makaiden Milo Griggs than Petra Frederick could ever guess at.

He wanted to prove to her that those things were neither a detriment nor an impediment. He could still hear her
It would never have worked out. Not really
. He was so unsettled at the time she said it, he hadn’t considered her reasoning behind it. But dealing with Makaiden wasn’t all that much different from being at the negotiating table with an unwilling or insecure CEO of some business that GGS wanted to acquire. As long as the focus was on what didn’t work, negotiations would go downhill. The focus had to be on the strong points, the strengths of the merger.

Those strengths included her knowledge and his skills.

Besides, he really needed to kiss her again. Soon.

Her gaze avoided his. “I don’t—”

“Don’t go all proper and by-the-book on me now. I need you.” That could be taken in several ways, and he meant all of them. “And we have only forty-five minutes.”

She swore softly under her breath, then swiveled around the chair on his left and sat. “I’ve never done it. I’ve seen it done two, three times on ships my father’s crew, um, appropriated. Never on a Blackfire. What I saw, what I know, might be outdated.”

“It’s more than I’ve seen. I only know what they do in those action vids Trip’s so addicted to.”

Alarm flashed in her eyes. “But you know—”

“Code theory and program structure? Totally. But this is an Imperial government-created program and fail-safe.”

“Government issue? Well, hell, Dev,” she drawled. “That should make it easy.”

His laugh was a half snort, half chuckle, and then she was grinning too. Until he held her gaze for a little too long. Then her smile faded. “We’re wasting time.”

“We have”—he glanced at the holographic display hovering over the edge of the Rada—“four more minutes to waste. Backup’s still in progress. Tell me the biggest problem I’ll encounter and we’ll go from there.”

“This is a legit freighter, not a pirate rig or conversion. Tampering with an Imperial ident program can trigger the complete lockup of ship’s primaries. Backups won’t reinstall. Engines shut down. Systems we need—like lights, grav, enviro—quit. We drift until we run out of air and die. Unless we freeze to death first.”

That was a big problem, although the idea of wrapping himself around Makaiden’s body to keep her warm held definite appeal. He stared at her a long moment. Those problems weren’t the ones he expected. Threat of jail times, fines, okay. GGS was always facing the threat of fines for some alleged and often imagined discrepancy. But the fact that the ship itself would turn into judge, jury, and executioner …

He saw Tage behind this. It was brilliant and horrific at the same time.

“Our chances sound better if we face whatever ship is behind us. We don’t have to do this.”

She leaned both elbows on the table. “Chances are, if the worst happens—and knowing you, I’m betting it won’t—whoever’s behind us won’t let us drift and die. We have about five hours of air on board once we kick
in backup enviro. We blow the engines and regular enviro, we’re no worse than if they ID and board us. But if we make them go away, that increases your chances of getting to the
Prosperity
and home.” She leaned back.

“This all comes back to my registering this ship in my name, doesn’t it? Makaiden, I’m sorry.”

A shrug preceded her answer. “You’re not used to Dock Five.”

“I’ve dealt with marginal business operations before. It wasn’t that.” He hesitated for a second. Guthrie men were horribly inept at expressing their feelings. He abandoned all the romantic avenues he’d tried to this point—and failed with—and went for plain honesty. “It was finding you. Nothing’s ever been so important to me before.”

That brought her arms crossing protectively over her chest.

“I know you don’t believe me and that a big reason is because of my relationship with Tavia. In a way, you were right when you said she and I deserved each other.” He shook his head with a short, derisive laugh. “She always said that by being together, we were saving two other people from heartache. She’s a barrister with aggressive political ambitions, and she’s very up front about wanting only a low-maintenance relationship. And I … I thought you were happily married.” He paused. “I know it sounds cold, shallow. But Tavia or I aren’t so cold and shallow that we’d fake loving someone when we didn’t. We also had an agreement. If either of us found someone we loved, the relationship would end. No problems, no rancor.” The slight narrowing of her eyes signaled her suspicion. “When we get back to Garno, you can ask her.”

Suspicion wavered, Makaiden’s lips parting slightly. Devin hoped that was a good sign.

“When we get—” But her sentence ended when the panel on the bulkhead chimed.

“Captain Makaiden? That ship’s three hours forty-five minutes out. They’re really moving.”

Makaiden reached back and tapped the comm button on the panel. “Thanks, Trip. We’re just finishing backups here. Alert me to any more changes. Captain out.” She tapped it again, then turned back to Devin. For a very long moment, she was as quiet as he was before. Then she sucked in a long breath. “Okay. Truce for now. We have to get working on this ID program. Because if we don’t, it won’t matter how we feel about each other. We won’t be alive long enough to enjoy it.”

The acknowledgment—albeit oblique—that she did have feelings for him made him smile. “That’s the most encouraging dire prediction I’ve ever heard. Backup’s done.” He expanded the Rada’s holoscreen and motioned Makaiden closer. “Let’s take a closer look at that program.”

A closer look was both encouraging and discouraging. The encouraging part was that Imperial identification programs hadn’t changed all that much in the past decade or so. The discouraging part was that the program was full of fail-safes and traps, many of which seemed innocuous on first inspection. Devin knew this was no time for distraction. If anything, he needed a cool head and a large dose of inspiration. To him, Makaiden was both. One part of him wanted to send her back to the bridge. The other wanted her here.

He found justification in the latter with the fact that she’d seen this before. He hadn’t. He needed all the
help he could get. The holoscreen before him was a jumble of numbers, letters, and icons that made up a ship’s systems codes. This wasn’t the same as unraveling a financial account-protection program. Lives were involved. In spite of all the things that had happened, he’d come to rather like his life. And he was responsible for Barty and Trip. And for Makaiden, though he doubted she’d acknowledge that.

He managed to break down the first two levels of security guarding the program in about fifteen minutes. But then he was staring at a string of coding he didn’t like and didn’t fully understand—and that made him like it even less.

“Out of my realm,” Makaiden admitted. “Maybe Barty can help?”

He hated to lose her presence. A lot of the anger he’d sensed from her hours ago had faded. Their former camaraderie—while not back—felt as if it might consider returning.

“Make sure he brings his DRECU,” he said, not without a bit of reluctance.

She pushed herself out of her chair, then headed for the corridor and the bridge. The room seemed a little colder, a little less bright, without her. Moments later, heavier footsteps sounded through the open doorway.

“Trouble?” Barty asked as he stepped into Makaiden’s quarters.

Devin shot a quick glance toward the corridor. No Makaiden following behind. Disappointment fought with practicality. She’d been off the bridge for a while and deserved to sit in command of her ship. “Sorry to take you from your work.”

“The illustrious Fetter brothers, though interesting reading, can wait. Nothing I’ve come across so far
points to why Fuzz-face came after Trip. What’s your problem here?”

“This looks like object coding. But if it is, it doesn’t belong here. I’m thinking it’s a shunting bug.” Error or deliberate, he couldn’t tell, but if he popped it, whole parts of the program could dump or shunt over to a wrong location.

Barty took the chair Makaiden had vacated and stared at the Rada’s display. “I haven’t seen this before, but perhaps I have something in archives.” He slid his microcomp next to Devin’s, tagged the offending data, then started searching.

Devin went back to the ID program, trying another bit of wizardry to see if he could unearth a back door—a deliberate security hole often inserted by a program’s creator, ostensibly for ease-of-maintenance purposes by restricted, authorized techs. Or sometimes for more nefarious purposes. He was hoping for the former. The latter could set off alarms within the program and disable the
Rider
.

“Try this,” Barty said, turning his screen toward Devin. “It’s a sample code string from an Imperial ID verification program that’s been used on Starport Six and Marker.”

Devin snagged the sample from Barty’s smaller DRECU. Maybe, just maybe. He thought he saw a pattern but didn’t want to be overconfident. He chose a different section of code, copied it, studied it. Maybe …

“Devin?” Makaiden’s voice sounded through the cabin’s comm speaker. “That forty-five-minute window you had is now less than twenty. I need answers.”

Shit
. He rose, but Barty was already reaching back, tapping open the comm-panel speaker. He slumped back in his seat. “Acknowledged,” he said, knowing
she could hear him. He wiped his palm over his face, but that didn’t help clear his mind. “I’m not where I want to be with this program. Maybe in two, three hours—”

“We don’t have two or three hours.”

“I know.” He glanced at Barty. The man didn’t look happy either. “Makaiden, can you spare three minutes to look over what I’ve done?”

“Be right there.”

This time the lighter, quicker footsteps in the corridor were the ones he wanted to hear.

She leaned on the table, palms flat on the top, and studied the Rada’s display for just about the three minutes he’d allotted. Then: “This is far from my area of expertise. But what you have there,” and she pointed to a section he’d highlighted, “looks like the stuff my uncle would do. I recognize some of the same commands. But more than that, I don’t know.” She pulled back from the table and shoved her hands in the back pockets of her pants.

Barty nodded. “I say we go with it. A lot of the Englarian mission ships aren’t that sophisticated and have been cobbled together from donated parts. They have older comm packs, older ID programs. As long as whoever’s behind us doesn’t scan us as the
Void Rider
, I think we can bluff our way through anything else.”

Devin arched an eyebrow at Barty, the realization of exactly who they had to masquerade as hitting home. “And if they demand visual contact? You can impersonate an Englarian monk?” Devin knew with fair certainty he couldn’t. He’d been raised in traditional Celestialism: a monotheistic religion that much of the Empire followed. Englarians were … different. Where he prayed to God, they prayed to Abbot Eng, who, his followers believed, would intercede with God on their
behalf. They also had a whole list of ritualistic blessings that they could spout off on command. If they weren’t communing with the abbot, they were blessing somebody. Their unflappable placidity made him itch.

As he watched, Barty’s expression transformed from its normal penetrating stare to a bland, almost beatific mien. “Praise the stars, brother. It’s clear the abbot has brought you to me as a divine sign. So how may I be of service to you this blessed day?”

Makaiden let out a low whistle. “Damn, he’s good.”

Barty turned toward her. “Through the divine guidance of our beloved Abbot Eng, I always seek that which is beneficent.” His voice was soft, almost sweet. He brought his hands together in a prayerful motion that was graceful and fluid, looking as if he’d made the gesture for decades.

He
was
good. Devin had no problem blocking out his emotions, but it was his choice when he did so—not because some old man in a flowing robe decreed he should act that way. And he’d be damned if he knew how to look so benignly—and divinely—besotted.

“I think I have a tan blanket or sheet somewhere I can use to make you a robe.” Makaiden stepped toward the corridor. “That is, a robe for Brother …?”

“Brother Balatharis,” Barthol said with a slight incline of his head. “Your humble servant.”

Devin snorted out a laugh. Thank God for Barty.
Pun intended
.

“Fifteen minutes,” Makaiden called out over her shoulder. She stopped, angling halfway around in the open doorway. “Can you amend the ID in that time?”

Devin’s expression sobered. “I have to.”

She studied him. “You’ll do it. I have faith in you.”

Then before he could wonder further about the softening in her expression, she headed down the corridor, out of his sight.

Ten minutes later, he had the small snippet of code that would alter every mention of the
Void Rider
to the
Veil of Relief
, showing ownership by the Order of Devoted Missionaries on Calfedar. The order was real, according to Barty, who provided the data that would make everything look authentic. The ship’s name wasn’t on the order’s roster; however, it was one of the few that would not only work in their guise as a missionary ship but—more important—fit decently into allocated spaces in the code strings of the ID program.