Free Shades of Dark by Linnea Sinclair

that I’d still be able to receive their signals. That was another problem with being slippery. Communications’ signals were skewed.
    “Hypers online,” Marsh said.
    That, at least, looked good. Between Marsh and Aubry, the Karn ’s sublight and jumpspace engines were as pristine as Philip Guthrie’s dress uniform.
    But this gate…I watched signal strength and purity spike, flatten, and spike again. Shit. I retracted vanes and scanner dishes, aware of the low beeping sound from Sully’s station as communications went offline. I didn’t like this at all. It gave me sweaty palms, but I couldn’t afford to take my fingers off the console to wipe them down my pants leg.
    And Sully…no, I didn’t need to think about Sully now. We hadn’t had a chance to talk about anything personal since he’d left the cabin an hour and a half ago to find Gregor. When he returned, he seemed to have shed his hurt feelings, but all we had time for was a crash course in slippery jumpgates. Crash course. God, why did I choose that word? One thing I did not need right now was a systems crash.
    And one thing I did not have was an old entry record for the Karn for this gate. Sully had used a few of the older gates before, but never this one.
    “Two minutes to hard edge.”
    “Thanks, Verno.” The Karn was performing flawlessly, adjusting inertia and mass as it leeched on to the energies of the neverwhen. Then a little shimmy, something slightly out of phase. Shit!
    Chaz?
    Sully’s familiar warmth filled me.
    I’ve got her, I sent back. It’s just not going to be pretty.
    You’re the best, angel-mine. I’m here if you need me.
    Think you can stabilize a gate in under ninety seconds? I tried to send a wisecracking smile along with my words but I was too busy to concentrate on that. Then, among the spikes and valleys of the signal, I thought I saw something I could use. Something the Karn could use.
    And people said there was no value in pub-crawling with the old-timers.
    Ships didn’t always have the sophisticated systems they do now. Starfaring was vastly more risky in the decades before I was born. “There’s always one part of a gate signal that screams the loudest,” I remembered a silver-haired freighter pilot telling us, her pilot’s braid longer than mine was now. Her name was Kimber An, and she was something of a legend around the pubs on Marker 3, for both her stories and her drinking skills. “Don’t matter it’s whipping around like a polecat’s ass end. Grab it. It’ll pull you through.”
    The Karn wanted a nice consistent signal. I keyed in some quick reconfigurations, taking that choice away from her. And locked her onto the strongest one.
    We lurched through the gate. That’s probably the kindest way of putting it. Shuddering, shimmying, ship’s stats inching uncomfortably toward the red zone, we skittered through. No alarms wailed, though. Nothing sheared, broke, or hissed out coolant. It was not the most elegant of gate entries, but we made it.
    One saving grace: the gate’s inconsistent signal wash would eradicate any ion trail we left behind. If the Farosians were looking for us, they’d not know where we went.
    Then five minutes later: “Communications temporarily offline,” Sully announced.
    “How temporarily?” Marsh asked. He’d been through older gates before.
    “I’ll have to wait until gate-exit to collect my Baris Cup winnings,” Sully replied.
    Or to have any idea of what Tage and Burke were doing. There’d be no updates from Philip or Drogue, no clue as to what Thad may have told Tage.
    “Optimist,” Marsh shot back, grinning.
    There was that. For the next shipday, the crew would have no idea that the man they were traveling with and had sworn allegiance to was a human Kyi-Ragkiril . It bought Sully a little more time, but in truth only delayed the inevitable.
    Sully stopped by my chair on his way off the bridge, brushing the top of my head with a kiss. He’d shut off our mental