All the time he spoke to her, he worked the screen. She shifted from foot to foot, not used to waiting for someone else. She had a plan. They needed to execute it, before Heller’s man got to the employees at the dock. If Heller’s man paid them more than Skye had—hell, if Heller’s man paid them less and then promised them a lot more with the capture and/or notification—then she and Jack were screwed.
“Is he smart enough to look at the security feed?” she asked.
“Never underestimate a Rover,” Jack said, still working.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. You folks at the Guild follow rules and rarely do anything that hasn’t been approved by someone somewhere. Rovers have to think on their feet. Of course, he would look at the security feed. He probably knows I’m in this room.”
Her breath caught. “Then we have to get out of here now.”
Jack pressed his entire hand on the screen, then turned around and grinned at her. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 17
Skye gave Jack an odd look, then raised her eyebrows just a little as if to say, What the hell. Then she opened the door, looked both ways, and waited for him.
He had shut off all but his personal jammer. He hadn’t told her about that. She would probably protest. She would want him to jam as much as possible.
But then she also didn’t know that as far as the Krell security feeds were concerned, she would be walking through the station with a five-foot-five, clean-cut, blond man. Jack hadn’t used that disguise before, at least not around Heller, so no one would be looking for it.
And he trusted Krell security to be so lax that when he did show up at the docking ring, they’d not even double check the feeds like most well-run places did. They’d think the six-foot-six black-haired guy belonged there.
The words “Krell” and “security” really didn’t belong together. It was more like Krell monitoring so that someone else’s security could use the feed after some crime happened. Or if some criminal wanted to track someone. Or whatever anyone paid for the monitoring feed.
Still, as Jack stepped into the empty corridor, his heart was in his throat. He had told Skye not to underestimate the Rovers. He had to be careful that he didn’t either.
At least he knew most of their tricks. He knew where to look for them.
Skye was already halfway down the corridor. She stopped, opened her hands in another What the hell? gesture. Only this one was a question, and an irritated one. Hurry up. Stop dawdling. You are afraid of being killed, right?
He could almost hear her say all of those things. He appreciated her silence, though. He didn’t need to answer her, which was a good thing. He hadn’t had a voice print to work with, so he hadn’t been able to modify his voice.
It was hard to track someone in a space station by the way that they spoke, but he’d done it in the past. He didn’t know if Heller had ever done it, but Jack would wager that other Rovers had.
And he had no idea which other Rovers were actually after him.
Skye had stopped in front of a wall panel. It looked no different from any other part of the wall. As he got close, she brushed the side of the panel with her hand, and the panel opened.
The back corridors. Every station had them, and they were usually easy to find.
In a place like Krell, they were predictably filthy and predictably unguarded.
He took a deep breath of the somewhat fresh air in the corridor, then followed Skye into the back passage. She could stand upright with inches to spare. He had to crouch in a way that actually twinged his back.
Normally, he wouldn’t walk through this at all. If he didn’t lean over far enough, his head would brush against a ceiling that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the station was built.
And then there was the smell. He couldn’t quite separate all of the odors out, but he recognized rancid grease right away. The fact that the back passageway smelled this bad meant that the environmental systems in here were worse than they were outside of the passageway, or that they had given up a long time ago.
He wanted to ask Skye how far they had to go, but he didn’t dare talk.
She fit easily between the walls and under that ceiling, and she didn’t seem bothered by the smell. Although he couldn’t quite tell what she was feeling, since he only saw her back.
He found himself watching her perfect little bottom, which was too much of a distraction for him. He couldn’t think about touching that bottom, being near that bottom, not right now, not when he was hunched over and walking on a squishy floor that he had trouble keeping his balance on.
He had to keep his eye out for anything unusual, a scraped-off area, other fairly fresh footprints, something, and he was having trouble concentrating on any of it.
So much for the fear-for-your-life thing focusing him. It focused him on Skye, and nothing else.
Still, he worked to maintain his concentration as she led him through tunnel after tunnel. He mentally repeated the directions they turned, and kept track of how far they walked. He had an enhancement that would also do that, but he didn’t want to activate it.
He had learned long ago that people could be tracked through the oddest enhancements, because most people never shut theirs off. That was why he had so few of them, and rarely used them.
Finally, Skye turned into a wider corridor. She looked over her shoulder (he envied that movement; he couldn’t do the same thing without scraping his head on a gushy wall), and put a finger to her lips.
As if he needed to be told to be quiet.
Then she stepped forward, one hand behind her in a stop and wait gesture. He wanted to stop and wait in a place where he could stand upright, or at least stand up a bit more. He wasn’t sure where that place was, but he knew this wasn’t it.
She left his line of sight for a brief moment, then came back and gestured him forward.
He stepped into an open area where he could stand more or less upright. He had to tilt his head sideways to keep from brushing the ceiling, but at least the ceiling here wasn’t covered in goo. He suspected that this part of the tunnels smelled better, but he couldn’t do more than suspect because the previous tunnels had ruined his nose for at least the next few hours.
He grimaced at the thought of that smell dogging him for the rest of the day. Dogging him, hell. He probably smelled like that after the walk through the tunnels.
Skye moved so close to him that he could kiss her. She didn’t seem interested, though. Instead, she brushed off his sleeves and gestured him to move his head closer.
He didn’t groan, but his back silently protested. He had to get close to that weird position he had been in just a moment ago.
“We’re about to go into the docking ring,” she whispered. “You let me talk, and don’t disagree with me or volunteer anything, no matter what I say.”
He wanted to say, What kind of amateur do you think I am? But he knew better than to speak up. She had no real idea who he was, and if she was from the Guild like she said, she thought him a dangerous and difficult amateur just because of his association with the Rovers.
So he nodded. She patted his arms, getting some more junk off them (he must have brushed against those horrible walls after all), then turned around.
He stood upright (more or less) and couldn’t suppress his sigh of relief.
She took his hand, pulling him forward, then opened the panel. At that moment, he silently cursed himself.
He should go out there first. A Rover could be waiting, one she didn’t know, and they would both die.