“Gonna be close,” Dalton wheezed.
“Turn away from the gates,” Lyth’s voice said calmly.
“That turns us away from you!” Dalton shot back.
“I’ll intercept,” Lyth replied. “If you remain on your current heading, they will reach firing range before I reach you. If you turn, it gives me time.”
“Do it, Dalton,” I snapped.
Dalton ran his thumb over the steering gyro, and the ship curved, pulling us against the high sides of our chairs. Dalton groaned.
Then the arc eased. We were heading directly for the red sun.
“Don’t slow down,” Lyth said. “I’ll come over the top of you.”
On the screen in front of me, the Lythion turned side on and slid through space.
For three minutes, we listened to the muffled roar of the engines and our heartbeats.
“Directly over you,” Lyth said. “Don’t twitch.”
Dalton swallowed. I switched the view to directly above the ship and we both watched the spindly-looking derrick structure that was the drop-ship’s cradle move into place over us. Through the struts, I could see more stars. The struts were no longer rusty, but a dull silver that gleamed in the sunlight.
The cradle connected with a thud that boomed like a bell inside the drop ship. Then the secondary thud of the permanent docking passage connected.
“Punch it, Lyth!” Dalton said.
“Not until you’re in a shell,” Lyth replied. The Lythion was already moving around in a gracefully and painfully slow arc, the sun moving down the screen and sideways.
“Forget about me!” Dalton cried, struggling to get out of the pilot’s chair.
I pulled him out and ducked under his arm and hauled him toward the door. The gee forces were mounting even though Lyth was being gentle. We waded into the corridor. Dalton tried to help and I didn’t tell him to stop struggling so I could carry him.
Juliyana met us halfway down the passage. She carried a small box. “Here,” she said, striding around Dalton. She put the box against the back of his Imperial uniform and it swarmed frantically.
“What the hell?” he breathed as the liquid-looking nanobots climbed up his neck and over his chin.
“Sorry,” Juliyana said softly, as the layer rose up over his face. “But this will save you.”
Dalton’s figure froze and Juliyana caught at his shoulder as he rocked, about to topple.
“Go, Lyth!” she shouted.
The ship surged.
“I’ve got Dalton,” Juliyana said. “Go help Lyth.”
I ran—well, slow walked and breathed hard, which felt like an all-out sprint to my laboring heart. This was why there were age restrictions on crush juice. Older hearts couldn’t stand the strain.
Lyth stood at the view windows, as rigidly still as Dalton had been. I moved up to the captain’s shell and gratefully put my back to it and felt the cushioning give way a little beneath me. “Plan?” I asked breathlessly.
“Over them, in a arc just out of range of their guns,” Lyth said. “Then into the gate—it will be a very sharp angle.”
I leaned forward to spot the black ships below us, and much further beneath them, the Acean moon we’d just left. “They’ll try to intercept.”
“I’ve calculated their trajectory and speed. That’s why the sharp angle—I’m compensating.” His tone was clipped. He was busy processing.
I let him be. All I could do was wait.
It was a very long twenty-three minutes before I saw the blue of the live gate from the very top of the window—we were diving into the gate upside-down relative to me—which was the only reference point I had. “Capacitor ready,” I murmured, seeing the notification on the panel.
Lyth didn’t acknowledge. His gaze was distant.
The ship shivered as we dived.
Immediately, the pressure against me eased. The rumble from the reaction engines disappeared.
Silence.
Lyth turned to me. “Now what?”
Good question.
“Danny, get here right now!” Juliyana yelled through the intercom.
I didn’t ask for an explanation. Her tone said not to. I ran, Lyth pounding after me.
19
Juliyana had carried Dalton all the way to the primary corridor, a pretty impressive feat under the pressure of high gee inertial forces. There, though, she had put him on the floor, his body still rigid beneath the nanobot shell. She’d needed both hands, because the long barrel antique shriver pointed at her required lifting them high in the air.
I came to a skidding halt beside her and raised my hands, too. The boy holding the shriver looked more terrified than either of us. He was shaking as he sighted along the barrel, both arms akimbo. Even though there were no markers telling how many rejuvenations an adult had gone through, I guessed this boy was still in his first cycle and yet to face growing old.
He was just under two meters tall, but skinny, his face gaunt, with high cheek bones and a spray of freckles over his face that didn’t help impart any sense of maturity. His hair was shorn short with complete lack of regard to styling. His black-eyed gaze shifted from me to Juliyana and back to me, then he took in Lyth, to my right. The shriver moved from one to the other of us.
“Where the hell did you come from?” I demanded.
“I already asked that,” Juliyana said, with a patient tone.
“Just shut up!” the boy screamed, waving the muzzle of the shriver. His voice was that of an older man—I shoved his age up into the middle of his second decade, maybe a bit more, but not much. He wore the working coveralls of a laborer of some sort, filthy with grease, stained beyond cleaning, and spacer boots. The boots told me he was a dock worker of some type, which gave me a hint how he’d ended up on board.
Lyth took a half step sideways, so that his heel rested up against Dalton. The nanobots over Dalton squirmed and flowed, running off him like water.
“What are you doing?” the boy screamed.
“You came on board at Keeler, didn’t you?” I looked at Lyth. “You didn’t notice?”
“I was watching for security alerts,” Lyth reminded me.
