She couldn’t help but shrug as she dragged the lounger out from underneath the plank and folded it.
“Every second of every day I might die. Why be more scared of one thing over another? I took the precautions I could.” When Rand raised his brows, seeming to question her, she elaborated. “Being under the gangplank would give me a few seconds of shelter to put in my breathing tube and turn on my distress beacon. I’ve already stored up about a day’s worth of air in the suit, which also gives me some crush protection. That’s as good a chance as I’d have in the ship.”
He was leaning against the doorway, just watching. She could feel his eyes on her, looking her up and down. It was as though his gaze was hands, flowing over her skin, making her shiver. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and glanced at him. He pursed his lips and nodded. “Clever. I wondered what the suit was about – other than to hide your figure. Pity. It’s a hell of a figure.”
Had he ever noticed her figure? She honestly couldn’t remember him ever commenting on it. She’d sure noticed his. Broad shoulders, narrow waist and oh, those sultry blue eyes and those dimples.
Mmm-mmm. “I could say the same.”
He froze and so did she. Crap! Had she really said that out loud? Eek! There was a long pause where neither said anything. Finally, she needed to break the silence . . . with something safe. “Part of the suit’s bulk is the KevSix breastplate. Disrupts nearly every ranged weapon on the market – including the Stovian pulse rifles.”
His voice was flat when he responded. “KevSix has only been on the market for about a year.”
She sighed. Even though he’d dropped the subject in Berell’s office, that discussion wasn’t over. “Two for me. I’ve been the guinea pig. After all, whose rifle sight am I not in?”
There wasn’t any way for him not to acknowledge that point, so he did with a slightly reluctant tip of his head. But then he dropped the bomb. “Rifle sights for a few years, sure. But twenty?”
She opened her mouth but was saved from responding when the captain of the transport announced, “We’re about to come out of the hole. Two minutes to all quiet. Five minutes to launch.”
It didn’t give them much time. At least it was obvious Rand had done his homework too. He grabbed the loungers that El passed him and stowed them quickly and efficiently. There was economy of motion as he waved her inside the ship – not out of courtesy but because she had to be seated in order for him to get into his part of the cockpit.
She turned on the air scrubber first. If there were any error signals, the whole trip was off. There was no way they’d have enough air to make it to the return ship without the recirc filters working. After a long moment where both of them held their breaths, green light filled the tiny space. Her butterflies settled just a bit.
Now it was time to figure out whether they could save the human race.
Three
Did she have the right stuff to pull off this mission? Rand didn’t know. Admittedly, Grayson had surprised him by staying cool under fire when he’d locked her out of the ship. But she shouldn’t have admitted a weakness. It had almost been as though she was asking him to test her. Or had she expected it?
Had she lied about her fear of being crushed? She didn’t seem particularly upset. Was she playing him?
I just can’t tell . And that bugged the crap out of him. It also bothered him that he couldn’t find any evidence that she wasn’t El Tyler. He had checked every record the night before they left, asked everyone he knew without actually mentioning Grayson’s name. But while everybody presumed Tyler was male, nobody had ever officially seen the pilot without a helmet. “Like it’s glued on,” said his best source when he’d asked if Tyler’s face had ever been seen. “Never outside the Joint Chiefs chamber, and maybe not in there either,” the head of the Captain Tyler fan club claimed. Asking her would do no good. He’d already made the accusation and she’d insisted she was the man himself. Worse, Berell had insisted it too, and he respected the hell out of Berell.
So, fine. There were ways to learn the identity of a pilot. There were certain flying techniques that nobody had ever mastered as well as Tyler. He just had to figure out a way to force her into the maneuvers.
The add-on timer glued to the panel a scant meter from his nose flickered on and started the silent countdown from a hundred seconds as they plugged their grav suits into the vital sign monitors and adjusted the visual feeds into their helmets. When it reached zero, the lower hold doors opened and they fell into black, unforgiving space, where no human fighter ship had ever been. As they floated in the wake of the gravity fields of four planets, he watched as the grain ship’s bay doors closed. The moment they latched, he knew the captain had pulled a level to release the air from the bubble. The wheat had probably already collapsed into the space where they’d been, leaving no evidence of their presence in the hold but a plastic floor liner that wouldn’t be looked at twice when they offloaded.
There was no going back.
Well, at least not until they met up with the ship again on the return trip . . . if they lived that long.
He held his breath as the passive scanners pulled in signals from ships of all sizes as they brought supplies to the starving Stovian people. The war with Earth had taxed resources probably more than the emperor would like. Rumors had begun that food was being rationed on Stovia for the first time in the home planet’s history.
A green light signaled the all-clear and they could speak again. He raised the face shield and his eyes adjusted to the darker space of the cabin. “Okay, so what’s the plan?” He turned his head and still whispered just because it was habit. “We’ve got enough fuel for about fifteen hours.” When he breathed in again, he caught a whiff of shampoo and sweat from the heavy helmet.
Grayson likewise raised her face shield, so her voice was back to a pleasant alto. “From the maps I’ve reviewed, take a course of 190.818 at sixteen degrees for about three hours. I’ll be using the grav fields to steer as much as I can. That way we can save fuel and also not have the thrusters appear on scanners.
Your job will be to keep us on course, so stay sharp.”
He barely managed not to choke. She was insane. Absolutely crazy. “We’ll use the thrusters more by trying to navigate only on gravity fields. Every time you move the stick, you’ll go a thousand feet farther than you planned and have to hit the engines. We’ll run out of fuel before we even get there. You planning on committing suicide?”
She reached backward awkwardly and pushed down his face shield. “Look in the lower left corner of the display.”
He did. There was an object there, about ten times the size of their ship. “So? What am I looking at?”
“Asteroid. When I first met with the transport captain, he said there was a small asteroid field that circled Stovia, similar to Saturn but not as wide. He suggested that if we stayed in the wake of the biggest one, we could get within a few thousand kilometers of the planet and we’d look like just another dead rock in the sky.”
So . . . crazy like a fox. “That’s going to be a tricky bit of flying. You’ll have to be within a few football fields of the surface of the asteroid to pull it off.”
She turned her head and smiled. The white of her teeth turned green under the lights from the dash. “I can fly it if you can nav it. Easier than the Sirian belt firefight in April.”