Jeannie Holmes - The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance

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.

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.”

But the closer they got to the asteroid, the harder this whole mission looked. The asteroid appeared smooth and quiet from a distance, but close up was a tumbling, shifting mass of spiked ice and rock.

Pieces the size of an aircraft carrier would occasionally break off and collide with a dozen other bits of rock before settling into an uneasy orbit around the planet. Yet the closer they got, the more stable Grayson’s vital signs were. Her heart rate was slow and steady, her blood pressure what he would expect from a person sitting in a rocker with a cat in their lap.

She abruptly cranked the stick up and to the left and simultaneously hit the left thruster. Left on left caused the ship to spiral, and then another deft movement of her wrist caused them to do a neat flip around a frozen rock the size of a house. They landed back at nearly the exact spot they had started. The “Tyler Tip” – the one move that couldn’t be faked. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t just experienced it.