His lips twitched. “Often enough.”
I thought he was joking, but something in his voice indicated he wasn’t.
To distract myself, I stared at the static hologram from the navcube. It showed the portal through which we would be arriving, and the structure surrounding it that supported the slipstream itself.
I tapped the controls, and it zoomed past that zone, to that just beyond. A planet wreathed in cloud dominated the screen, ringed by a large asteroid belt. The extensive port authority infrastructure, complete with docking facilities, was sheltered from stray pounding rocks by powerful shields, as well as a small orbiting moon.
The slipstream ports were magnets for vendors of all kinds, and their infrastructure was designed to house markets. The gravity docks extended out from it like three-dimensional spokes on a wheel, and the berths were often at a premium. Beyond the dock itself was the departure zone, where ships waited in queue for their slipstream allotment.
It was a busy place, and by the way Zyair was revving the realspace engines, we were about to visit it at an unsuitably rapid speed.
The slipstream began its thirty-second countdown. I glanced to Zyair, who stared out the viewscreen. His eyes were alight with green fire, his wings partly spread, and every muscle was poised.
Ready.
Just looking at him lit something inside me that I didn’t wish to examine too closely.
The chime increased in frequency until it was a steady tone—and space suddenly reappeared around us.
Zyair didn’t wait for any kind of reasonable visual. He slammed the throttle forward, andStardrifterleaped from the portal like a startled deer.
I was pushed deep into my seat as we hurtled into the departure zone. My dash lit up with a million lights as the port authority demanded in a no-nonsense tone that we shut down immediately.
Instead, Zyair accelerated and took us right amid the ships waiting in queue. I held my breath as he dove between twomammoth slipstream shuttles, somehow emerging unscathed out the other side.
“Look for them,” he coached calmly. “They are there.”
The navcube was now coughing up ship ID’s along with descriptions and placement. I tapped a finger into the air on top of one—and there it was.
A Nirzk vessel.
It could be simply waiting for the slipstream, but it was smaller than theStardrifterand not in the queue. Instead, it was in motion, arcing around the stationary line of ships.
Moving to cut us off.
Zyair shot the navcube a look. “Nirzk Ranger. Heavily armed, and shaftzing fast.”
I found two more doing the same thing. “We have three Nirzks moving to intercept.” I scanned another phalanx of four, slightly larger, ships heading our way. “And the port authority is coming in from coordinates 30-0-07.”
An increasingly shrill voice was demanding that we halt. I hit the comm button. “My apologies. Our ship has experienced an engine malfunction. We are attempting to get it under control.”
That my tone remained calm throughout was a matter of pride, because the reality was that we were barrelrolling as we passed first over, and then through, two largish merchant vessels. We were doing pretty damned good when it came to controlling a supposedly bolting spaceship.
“Navigate out of the queue and standby to be contained.” The suspicion in the official’s voice verified that I wasn’t the only one to notice that.
If three or more of those port authority ships managed to surround us and activate their EMF containment field, we were toast. It would completely shut down our vessel. Which, if we were really experiencing a malfunction, would be a great thing.
As it was, we needed to avoid that. Fortunately, the port vessels were hampered by their desire to carefully negotiate their waythrough the jam-packed queue. Whereas the Nirzk vessels dipped and dove with us, and were right on our tail as we approached a slipstream shuttle.
We were going to hit it, no way we’d miss. Then Zyair stomped on the foot pedals, yanked back on the column—and flipped theStardrifterright over, in a space-shipian version ofass over tea kettle.
The Nirzk vessels were caught completely flatfooted. One managed—sort of—to mimic our maneuver. A second pulled up, coming close enough to the larger ship that it clipped off sensors. The third wasn’t so lucky—it hit the slipstream shuttle’s shields and exploded.
The explosion, Zyair’s nutzoid maneuver, and the nausea it induced all assisted me in adding a good dose of emotion to my reply to the official.
“Give us a minute to try on our own. We can’t afford the downtime.” An EMF containment could knock systems down for days. Anyone familiar with space travel would commiserate.
The official was spluttering into the comm, and no doubt was now handling an outraged slipstream shuttle crew, but the port authority vessels had hesitated in their advance.
