Free Blood & Steel by Angela Knight Page A

the doors slipped soundlessly open. She charged inside, immediately ducked left and leaped to the top of a stack of cargo crates ten meters high.  Without hesitating, she began to bound from stack to stack, each leap carrying her further into the hold’s poorly-lit gloom.
    It was a huge space, long and narrow, running almost the length of Kring Station. Cargo and supply containers were stored here before being transferred to the ships that would carry them to their destinations. Thousands and thousands of containers of every imaginable size, arranged in great stacks to form a city of crates.
    The perfect hiding place, with countless nooks and crannies to tuck herself into. 
    By all rights, the hold’s doors should have stopped Blade. Elyn wasn’t surprised they slid open for him too. Since he was a Tekker, his nanoplant system was even better than hers when it came to hacking.
    As the doors finally rumbled closed, she spotted the hiding place she was looking for and leaped down to duck into a narrow gap between two crates. It was barely wide enough for her shoulders, so she turned sideways and froze with her back against one stack.
    Stealth field , she ordered her cyplant.
    Processing , the cybernetic implant responded, before adding, Stealth field in place .
    Implants throughout her body now generated a jamming field that should confuse Blade’s nanotekker sensors. The field was designed to make her body’s assorted readings blend into the background data. Even the sounds she made would be tempered. There was a lot of equipment in here, along with organics from a hundred worlds, including living creatures in stasis. With luck, Blade would be unable to pick her out against the noise.
    She worked with ruthless discipline to control her breathing. Had she run far enough into the hold? Elyn scanned for him. For a moment, her sensors picked him out plainly as he moved slowly through the hold, searching.
    And then he was simply gone. He’d raised his own jamming field.
    Elyn had expected as much. They’d had only one night together six months ago, but she’d learned a hell of a lot about the big warrior in those few short hours. Intelligent, skilled, and determined, Blade knew how to get what he wanted and didn’t stop until he had it. He was also big, as powerfully built as Kruz, yet with a certain elegance of muscle and motion her master had lacked, with long fingers that had made her body sing.  As many lovers as she’d had, none had been Blade’s match.
    She suspected she wouldn’t be able to kill him even if she got the chance. Not even to survive. He’d gotten too far under her skin.
    Now it was time for a brisk game of cat and mouse as she tried to get out of the hold before he could track her down. Luckily, her cyplant had already located a servoid passage. Used by the small maintenance servoids that kept the hold clean, the passages were barely wide enough for Elyn’s shoulders. Blade would never be able to get his brawny torso through an opening that small.
    The trick, of course, was reaching the passage before he found her. Get that door open , she told her cyplant, and leaped down from her hiding place.
    She landed in a four-point crouch, knees bent, rolling on her toes, fingertips spread on the floor. The stealth field quieted the soft thump to a bare whisper. Pausing, she listened, but heard nothing except the hum and buzz of stasis units and other assorted equipment. Silent as a ghost, Elyn headed for the servoid passage as her comp worked to hack it. Sweat trickled down her spine as she slipped shadow-quiet between the towers of crates.
    She spotted the passage door through a gap in the stacks, a circular indentation in the curve of the bulkhead. She ghosted toward it. Twenty meters. Ten. Five. Two. Sweat beaded her upper lip. Have you unlocked the passage? she asked her cyplant.
    Yes .
    Blade should know one of the passages was her objective, otherwise she’d trapped herself in here, and he’d