Heaven's Queen by Rachel Bach Page A

Reaper’s ship had depleted my air purifiers, so I hooked my case in to refill before going to look for Rupert.
    I found him up front in the pilot’s chair, scowling through the colorful cloud of stars the projected navigation map had thrown up around him. I sank down in the gunner’s seat beside him, careful not to touch anything. I was looking for a safe place to rest my elbows on the chair’s touch-screen arms when Rupert said, “Hicks asked me to tell you he was sorry.”
    I blinked. “What?”
    “Hicks wanted me to tell you he was sorry he tipped off Captain Pierce,” Rupert repeated, turning off the star maps. “He’d heard something about Montblanc but he didn’t know the full story or that you’d been declared dead, and when he saw me, he was worried you were in trouble. But now he sees that you didn’t need help, and he wanted you to know he was sorry for interfering.”
    It was nice to know Hicks hadn’t turned me in for the money. Still … “Why did he tell
you
?”
    “Given that you were chewing out a Home Guard captain at the time, I think he decided I was the safer option,” Rupert said, tapping his console. “He left immediately after.”
    I arched an eyebrow. Rupert didn’t look like the safer option to me. Actually, sitting hunched over in the pilot’s console with his face set in that deadly scowl, he looked downright dangerous, and extremely un-Rupert-like.
    “Hey,” I said. “Are you—”
    I was cut off by the boom of the thrusters as Rupert fired the engine. “Strap in,” he said, buckling his own harness. “Lift off in thirty seconds.”
    I glared at him as I lashed myself in, but I didn’t want to yell over the engines, so I sat back to wait. I caught one last glimpse of Anthony stepping out to join his officers on the front porch before Rupert jumped us into the air. After that, all I saw was green as we lifted out of the soypen field and into the blazing light of the gas giant and the two suns hanging in the star-spangled blue sky.
    Rupert turned as soon as we cleared orbit, putting the light at our tail as he angled the ship toward the nebula’s outer edge. “We’ve got two hours before we hit the Atlas continent freighter,” he said, tapping numbers into the autonav system. “From there, we’ll use its gate to jump to Kessel.”
    “Kessel?” I said with a snort. “That’s a pirate haven. Why the hell would we go there?”
    “Because if Captain Pierce knows you’re alive, everyone else does, too,” Rupert replied. “If we want to avoid the Eyes, we’ll need to switch this ship for something less obvious, and unlike legitimate shipyards, pirates don’t ask questions.”
    I pursed my lips. I hadn’t considered that angle yet, but he was right as usual. Even if Anthony hadn’t told anyone before he left, he sure as hell was going to light things up now. “Do you think the Eyes will try to jump us?”
    “Without a doubt,” Rupert said, locking the autonav on course. “Commander Martin is the Eye’s current head officer. He was the one who sent Caldswell and me to Montblanc to collect you after our office on Paradox forwarded Baron Kells’s write-up of your report. Once word gets out that you’re not dead, I’m sure the order to bring you in will be reinstated, and having lost you once already, I don’t think they’ll be taking any chances.”
    I did not like the sound of that. Still, it wasn’t like Rupert and I were a soft target, and we had a head start. I just hoped Rupert’s mystery plasmex doctor didn’t turn out to be a disaster like Brenton’s xith’cal, because if this failed, I didn’t have another plan B. I turned to tell Rupert my worries, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, scowling at the navigation console like he wanted to smash it to pieces.
    I rolled my eyes and leaned back in my chair. “Spit it out.”
    Rupert looked at me like he didn’t understand, and I crossed my arms over my