“I can’t,” said Jint, Lafier’s face floating to mind as he shook his head. “I can’t afford to take it that easy.”
“Don’t be so vague. How about you stay for three days, then?”
All right, might as well meet him halfway, thought Jint. “Sure. If it’s not a bother.”
“If it’s not a bother? If it were, I wouldn’t have offered, stupid. I think you’ve got a bad case of space-brain.”
“I just forgot how Delktunians do things, that’s all,” said Jint.
“Yeah, and that’s what we call space-brain. Besides, what’s the rush? You got a lady waiting for you up there?”
“Kind of,” said Jint.
“Don’t front with me,” said Durin disbelievingly. “Admit it, you’re just bound up by some dumb schedule. You’re a fancy-shmancy noble and you can’t even make your own plans? What was the point of becoming a noble, anyway?”
“In the Empire, the higher up you are, the less freedom you have.”
“And you still want to be one? You’re a real dope sometimes.”
“I thought you said we ought to leave the subject at that? Otherwise we’ll never stop.”
“C’mon, man, are you really that dense? I swear, you’re so dense you can’t tell the difference between a dog and a hog. I meant we were leaving the serious discussion at that. What I’m engaging in right now is yet another sign of affection.”
“That was a sign of affection?” said Jint, feigning surprise. “You’ve lost your touch, Que Durin. ‘Dope’? That was so tame, it was barely mosquito bite-level.”
“I pulled my punches on purpose, on account of your space-brain. Tsk, tsk, you oughta express some gratitude for my thoughtfulness. Now then, I’m gonna call the boys. Wait here, will ya?”
While Durin got out his own mobile computer to contact the others, Jint turned his back and gripped the memchip in his hand tightly. All this time, Jint had operated under the impression that he could no longer live as “Jint Lynn” or “Lynn Jint.” And now that he knew that wasn’t true, he realized he wasn’t the least bit shaken by that revelation. He’d already resolved to live as Linn Ssynec Raucr Dreuc Haïder Ghintec.
Lafier felt the flow of charged particles on the left half of her body as she spurred the ship on. She accelerated even more, wondering what would happen. Her back sank into her seat, and, fingers pinned, she found she couldn’t control the ship very well. This was the limit.
She let up on the acceleration, though she kept flying at a pace that would make any Lander lose consciousness. She violently changed course, hull screeching.
She was aboard the single-seat intrastellar ship owned by the House of Vorlash. Though an old model, it was in good condition, with both power capacity and responsiveness unchanged since the time of manufacture.
At first, she felt a slight bit out of place, since it was her first time piloting this ship, but that discomfort had dissipated in a matter of minutes. After all, she’d been flying this type of traffic vessel since childhood. Now it fit her body like an extension of herself. When an Abh closed her eyes and switched to frocragh slona (beyond-ship spatiosensory perception), a ship was like a piece of clothing.
Granted, compared to an assault ship, this ship felt lacking. Piloting an assault ship was akin to moving in a set of steel armor. Each maneuver was accompanied by a weighty reaction. This ship, on the other hand, was a gauze jumpsuit. One could drive it without feeling much of any push-back. And most saliently of all, there was none of the tension that came with having the lives of twenty people in her hands.
No tension didn’t mean no fun, of course. She was enjoying this cruise, frolicking through space as though she were a tot once more. She set Delktu as her destination and pushed to maximum thrust. Immediately, her body became buried in her seat, and the air was pushed out of her lungs. She suspended the main engines, but her relative speed compared to the planet was still quite high. If she left it as is, she’d end up plummeting right into its atmosphere at an angle perpendicular to the surface.
She moved her left hand, the control gauntlet hand, and thus revved the attitude control engines, shifting course, and sweeping over Delktu. The atmosphere up here was so thin as to be nonexistent, but still it rebuffed the vessel, which changed course significantly. The joy engendered by the alterations in acceleration coursed through her body, and she was left gasping. In that moment, her body and soul knew that Abhs were born to soar through the heavens.
To the Abh, who had broken past their erstwhile status as mere bio-droids and constructed a mega-empire, spurring on ships was still a part of life, and she hadn’t gotten a chance for a joy ride in quite a while. Having a good time making such rash maneuvers blew away the dregs of stagnation that had piled up in her heart.
Again she veered, commencing rapid deceleration. Might as well throw in a tailspin while she was at it, too. At the time she deemed appropriate, she stopped the engines and hitched onto Delktu’s satellite orbit. She relaxed her whole body as she perceived the landworld above her with her frocragh. The landworld Jint was on.
I wonder whether walking on a landworld’s surface is a part of Jint’s life.
She’d touched down onto a landworld only twice in her life, but she just didn’t think she’d ever like it. The air smelled. Not unbearably, but once her head started worrying about it, it wouldn’t stop. Probably because of the lack of proper purification equipment in the atmosphere’s system of circulation. How do you live on such an unregulated world without worrying? It seemed to her that Jint only ever felt anxious when he was betwixt the stars, no matter whether he was on a ship or in an orbital building. If it was floating through
