and was sitting on his heels beside them. 'What's up?' She filled him in quickly, as a third and a fourth person in that same uniform ambled into the dock.
There were now four crewman in the docks during break. All four of them in a dock area where there were no ships loading or unloading and no new ships expected to dock in the next twenty-four hours.
'Tia, I don't like this either,' he said, much to her relief, standing up and heading for the main console. 'I want you to get the station manager online and see what-'
Abruptly, as if someone had given the four men a signal, they dropped everything they were pretending to do and headed for her docking slip.
Tia made a split-second decision, for within a few seconds they were going to be in her airlock.
She slammed her airlock shut, but one of the men now running for her lock had some kind of black box in his hands; she couldn't trust that he might not be able to override her own lock controls. 'Alex!' she cried, as she frantically hot-keyed her engines from cold-start. 'They're going to board!'
As Alex flung himself at his acceleration couch, she sent off a databurst to the station manager and hit the emergency override on her side of the dock.
The dockside airlock doors slammed shut, literally in the faces of the four men approaching. Another databurst to the docking-slip controls gave her an emergency uncouple, there weren't too many pilots who knew about that kind of override, still in place from the bad old days when captains had to worry about pirates and station-raiders. She gave her insystem attitude thrusters a kick and shoved free of the dock altogether, frantically switching to external optics and looking for a clear path out to deep space.
As her adrenaline level kicked up, her reactions went into overdrive, and what had been real-time became slow motion. Alex sailed ungracefully through the air, lurching for his chair; to her, the high-speed chatter of comlinks between AIs slowed to a drawl. Calculations were going on in her subsystems that she was only minimally aware of; a kind of background murmur as she switched from camera to camera, looking for the trouble she knew must be out there.
'The chair Alex,' she got out, just in time to spot a bee-craft, the kind made for outside construction work on the station, heading straight for her. Behind it were two men in self-propelled welder-suits. Someone had stolen or requisitioned station equipment, and they were going to get inside her no matter what the consequences were. Accidents in space were so easy to arrange.
Alex wasn't strapped down yet. She couldn't wait.
She spun around as Alex leapt for his couch, throwing him off-balance, and blasted herself out of station- space with a fine disregard for right of way and inertia as he grabbed and caught the arm of the chair.
Alex slammed face-first into the couch, yelped in pain at the impact, and clung with both hands.
Another small craft heading for her with the purposeful acceleration of someone who intended to ram. She poured on the speed, all alarms and SOS signals blaring, while Alex squirmed around and fastened himself in, moaning. His nose dripped blood down the side of his face, and his lip poured scarlet where he'd bitten or cut it.
She dove under the bow of a tug, delaying her pursuer. Who was in on this? Was this something the High Families were behind? Surely not. Please, not.
She continued to accelerate, throwing off distress signals even onto the relays, dumping real-time replays into message bursts every few seconds. Another tug loomed up in front of her; she sideslipped at the last moment, skimming by the Al-driven ship so close that it shot attitude thrusters out in all directions, the AI driven into confusion by her wild flying.
The ship behind was still coming on; no longer gaining, but not losing any ground either.
But with all the fuss that Tia was putting up, even Presley Station couldn't ignore the feet that someone was trying to jack her. Especially not with Central Systems investigators due any day, and with the way she was dumping her records onto the relays. If 'they' were allied with the station, 'they' wouldn't be able to catch everything and wipe it. If AH One-Oh-Three-Three disappeared, she was making it very hard for the claim of 'accident' to hold any water. I hope.
As Tia continued to head for deep space, a patrol craft finally put in an appearance, cutting in between her and her pursuer, who belatedly turned to make a run for it.
Tia slowed, and stopped, and held her position, as the adrenaline in her blood slacked off. I remember panting, I remember shivering. I'd do both even now, if I could. As it was, errant impulses danced along her sensors, ghost-feelings of the might-have-been of weapon fire, tractor beams.
Slow heart. It's all right. Gradually her perception slowed back down to real-time, and the outside world 'sped up'. That was when the station manager himself hailed her.
'Of course I'm sure they were trying to break in,' she snapped in reply to his query, re-sending him her recordings, with close-ups on suspicious bulges under the coveralls that were the right size and placement for
