It wasn't the one she would have picked; there were nearer exit routes.
“Why that one?” She said.
“I've studied their strategies for many years. This route gives us our best chance of escaping.”
“You can't be sure of that.”
“No.”
She didn't argue further. The immediate threat from the nukes was gone. They had a little time before any engagement with the approaching Concordance ships. She picked herself off the floor and helped Ondo to peel off his environmental suit. As she did so, she noticed her left hand was trembling, minutely but rapidly. It was almost blurred to look at. She held it up to study, intrigued. “Something's going wrong with my biomechanics.”
Ondo took both her hands and held them in his, studying them, turning them over, comparing artificial with natural.
He said, “I don't think there's anything wrong with your augmentations.”
The adrenaline was still pumping through her, like the control mechanism had spiralled out of control. “You can see the tremor.”
He let go of her hands. “Your enhanced internal senses make you more aware of it, that's all. Your right hand is doing it, too.”
“No, it isn't.” But she held her natural hand up to the light and saw that he was correct. It, too, shook.
“It's actually a sign that your systems have become well-integrated,” said Ondo. “Both halves acting in concert.”
“Then, what's wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you, at least nothing that isn't understandable. You've just seen your own father murdered minutes after discovering he was still alive. You're still recovering from what happened to you when you escaped the planet the first time. It's normal to have a reaction to all of that. Anyone would.”
“I'm not having a reaction. I'm fine.”
“You're functioning, there's a difference. You may need short-term biochemical remediation, but if we escape from this, we should talk about what you've been through at more length. It will help.”
She often felt angry at him, at his intrusions, at being given instructions. On more than one occasion during her rehabilitation she'd had to resist the urge to punch him.
“I don't need to talk,” she said. “I need to escape this damn system and never come back.”
They were on the Dragon's cartography deck now. They walked through a three-dimensional image of the Maes Far system that filled the room. Tags marked ships and satellites, while the vectors of vessels moving in-system were projected in coloured lines. Seven Concordance craft had now arrived. They were Cathedral class, resembling the ship that had punched her from the sky the first time she escaped from Maes Far. Their twisting, nacreous forms made her think of a scatter of shells on the beach, sea-washed and gleaming. Each one was easily capable of reducing the Dragon to its constituent quarks and leptons if they managed to manoeuvre within range. The two nearer ones had released high-g missiles, but they were too remote to imminently threaten the Dragon.
She studied the pattern of them, trying to understand what Concordance's plan was. “They're corralling us, cutting off escape routes.”
“It's their usual approach, but they can't plug all the holes.”
Their route into metaspace was still clear, but a ship could emerge in that direction at any moment. It was possible they were being shepherded into a trap.
They watched in nervous silence as the dance of ships and missiles unfolded. Now the display showed the countdown to their metaspace translation point. Twenty-two minutes. The Dragon accumulated velocity all the time, bringing the point nearer, by the same token making them less manoeuvrable if they needed to dodge and fight. There was a grey area when they would be far enough from the stellar mass to make the jump probably safe, and then there was a point farther out at which the manoeuvre approached 99% dependable. That was Ondo's preferred target; she'd have gone with anything above 90%. The longer they waited, the higher the chance of a Concordance ship emerging directly in their path.
She brought the Dragon's forwards weapon arrays online in readiness. There was a moment, four hundred thousand kilometres from the planet, when she held up her left hand and covered the receding disc of Maes Far with a single one of her artificial fingers, blotting it out just as the shroud had blotted out the sun. Everything she'd ever known and loved, concealed by a single fingertip.
The countdown had reached eight minutes when the Dragon calmly announced it had detected a ship-sized mass emerging from metaspace ahead of them. Another Concordance vessel, arriving on their escape vector. Ondo hesitated, waiting for more data. He was too damned analytical, too ready to observe. Like the whole universe was simply a puzzle put there for him to ponder.
She had no such hang-ups. They needed to act. The safe translation probability was at 84.5%. It would have to be good enough. She instructed the Dragon to commence its translation into metaspace. Ondo's hand moved as if he planned to override her, but he stopped himself. She felt the translation process beginning; the flutter in her stomach, the accelerating headlong rush that was a plummeting fall and a soaring high-g rush at the same time. The Dragon completed its translation calculations as it powered up its metaspace projectors.
They were half-translated out of reality when the Concordance ship arrived. Ondo had explained to her the dangers of a ghost translation, of intersecting with another ship as it dropped into normal space at the precise moment they jumped out. It was a vanishingly rare event but almost always fatal to all involved. Depending on the relative degrees of
