Thirteen

 

Whiteley’s ship started the moment Zagrando touched the controls, just like it would have with Whiteley at the helm. The ship rose easily, and all of the monitors—from the automated ones to the visual ones—showed no one following him.

This ship was huge, and it felt empty. Zagrando had hated it from the first moment he’d seen it, and he hated it more now. It looked more like a battleship than a businessman’s yacht, with all the weaponry up front and the utilitarian cockpit.

Zagrando’s stomach ached. He was both tense and queasy. He had to get off this ship quickly, and he really didn’t have a plan for that. He figured the Black Fleet would know within hours that Whiteley no longer piloted his own ship.

And Zagrando did not want to be on board when they figured it out. He suspected they would do nothing to him because Whiteley had been the one who had been incautious, but Whiteley was part of the Black Fleet family and Zagrando was not. Therefore, predicting what the Black Fleet would do to him was a fool’s game.

Even though he had disabled the ship’s coded command system before boarding, he had not expected to steal the thing. Now he was in an unfamiliar region of space in a stolen ship, after he had shot its owner, who was an integral part of the Black Fleet.

He didn’t dare contact the Earth Alliance. He didn’t dare contact anyone for help.

He had to figure this out on his own.

But first, he had to get the Emzada’s skin cells off him. He had no idea what that goo would do to him after a day or so of contact, and he really didn’t want to find out.

He clicked into the ship’s navigation system, looking for nearby starbases. He didn’t want anything affiliated with the Earth Alliance. Nor did he want a place frequented by the Black Fleet.

He needed some place that would allow him to dump this ship and purchase another. Then he would have to dump that ship somewhere along the way—after changing its identification codes—and find yet another.

At some point he would have to stop leaving a trail—both physically and metaphorically. He needed a destination, but his desire for one warred with his desire to get this crap off his skin.

His nose twitched, and his throat felt thick with Emzada cells. How many of those damn things had he swallowed anyway?

He would have to use one of the nanocleansers from Whiteley’s medical stock, just to make sure this stuff hadn’t permanently become part of his system.

It would be brilliant, wouldn’t it, if those cells turned into some kind of tracking device.

Three years ago, he would have considered that thought paranoid. Now he worried that he wasn’t paranoid enough.

The navigation system pinged. It had located several stops not too far away. Most were human-based. One was Disty-owned, and his already tortured skin crawled at the thought. He hated the warrens that the Disty built everywhere, but he’d use them if he had to.

The other belonged to the J’Slik. His already upset stomach twisted even more at the thought of going there. The J’Slik refused to join the Earth Alliance because of all the legal requirements. Like the Black Fleet, the J’Slik had a criminal culture. Unlike the Black Fleet, the J’Slik believed the individual primary, so anything any J’Slik individual did took precedence over any group activity.

He had studied the J’Slik and had run into a few of them, but he had never deliberately gone to one of their bases.

But the Black Fleet tried to avoid them as well. And that, more than anything, was a point in the J’Slik’s favor.

Besides, the J’Slik loved trades and money—of all types. Zagrando had something to trade and, failing that, he had enough money to buy his way out of there.

The trick would be to leave shortly after he arrived.

He programmed the coordinates into the navigation system, then sighed. He had a hunch that just by programming those coordinates, he guaranteed some Black Fleet ships would head his way.

He hoped he could get to the starbase before they did.

But he wasn’t going to worry about it at the moment. He was going to think about it all after he had cleaned the Emzada out of his system.

Before he left the cockpit, he activated one more automatic control. He wanted the ship’s cleaning system to get rid of any trace of the Emzada as well.

He didn’t want to get reinfected when he stepped out of that shower. He needed to be clean, even though he wondered if he would ever feel clean again.