Telu’s voice hissed both from below me and through the comm speaker. “Sorry, Cap, I was trying to get their weapons offline, but they’re locked down tight, and they have hackers of their own. They’re trying to get on the comm channel we have open to Arjan, and it’s all I can do to keep them out and it open.”
Eton’s voice piped through the comm at nearly a shout. “Should I respond? The mass driver won’t be much against their energy weapons, but I have another little something I could always go get…”
He had a “little something” on board that would be more effective against ships than the mass driver? What the hell was Eton hoarding on the Kaitan? I almost didn’t want to know.
Before I could ask, Arjan said, “Hold.” The skiff flew in a glinting streak straight for the three ships, their plasma rocket heading out to meet him. “I’ll draw their fire.”
“Arjan, are you kidding me? If they don’t blow you up first, that destroyer will be right behind them!”
“Just trust me.”
I didn’t have many other options, especially now that Arjan was out in the skiff and I couldn’t activate the drive and leave him behind. Not that we would make it far enough to engage it in the first place with the other two ships entering firing range.
Just before the first plasma rocket hit Arjan head-on, the skiff barrel-rolled in an insane blur. The rocket missed, glanced off the twisted cables behind him, and exploded harmlessly off to one side. Arjan leveled out, but only for a half second. He dove under the ships, already rolling back the other way, both to dodge the lightning storm of fire now raining down on him and to straighten out the cables. He managed to keep track of all his turns and soar up and around the ships in a dizzying arc.
Arjan’s voice came calmly over the comm, even though his brain should have been scrambled from all that spinning. “Brace yourselves.”
Trust, I thought, then threw our extra stabilizing thrusters on full blast.
“Engage the mag-field.”
I hit the button, and the dark space between the net’s cables crackled to glowing, radiant life.
We all felt it the moment the net caught the ships’ undersides. The Kaitan lurched and shuddered. If the skiff’s arc had been violent before, now Arjan was like a missile on the end of a string as he wrapped the net around our pursuers. The meteor shower of actual missiles cutting the sky behind him could no longer come close to catching up to him. The problem was, with the cables winding around the ships and losing length, Arjan was flinging himself directly into them.
“Arjan!” I cried.
“Cut loose in three, two, one…now!”
I smashed that button. The cables popped free of the Kaitan, rippling outward from the broken tension. It gave him enough slack to close the loop, encircling the bounty hunters’ ships in a golden magnetic field. He even cinched it tighter, crunching them closer together.
Just before he would have careened into them, Arjan cut the cables loose on his end and shot off into space.
Two of the ships began firing at each other to get free, and the other was caught between them. Their thrusters burned into each other’s hulls. One of them would probably explode before too long, but I didn’t want to stick around for the show.
The sleek destroyer, huge and pale as a moon, was rising behind them.
I turned off the stabilizers and, as much as I didn’t want to, I eased off the throttle too, just for a moment. “Arjan, get back to the ship, now!”
“Already there,” he said a second later.
The vibration of the opening bay doors hummed against my feet. I barely waited for them to close before I slammed the forward thrusters into full throttle. My back smashed into the seat, and Nev would have gone rolling if he hadn’t seized onto my chair.
“Hold on,” I said unnecessarily. “We have thirty seconds before I can engage the drive.”
Eton, Basra, and Telu all swore simultaneously.
“What?” But it only took a moment’s glance at my feeds to know.
A white, crackling ring of energy was rippling out from the destroyer. As it hit the three ships jumbled together, all their lights went dead and the net went haywire, arcing and sparking like a magnetic storm. Because that was exactly what it was.
It was an electromagnetic pulse, bigger and faster than any I’d ever seen. Not that I’d seen that many. In any case, it was tumbling and crashing toward our ship like a tidal wave on the ocean or an avalanche down a mountain—much, much faster than we were moving.
“That will disable us,” Nev said, his voice breathless. “We’re out of range of the tractor beam, but this is even worse. I can’t believe they’re using that on us. Go, go!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!” I practically shouted in his face.
“Don’t you have a turbo you can engage, or something?”
“This isn’t a damned racing ship! The only form of blasted turbo we have is called a Belarius Drive, and I’m going to engage it in—”
Telu shrieked, “Stop-fighting-and-engage-it-then-because-it’s-almost-on-us!”
She was right. The wave had nearly overtaken the Kaitan, lapping at the glowing jets of our thrusters. This was a safe enough distance. Any safer, and we would be done.
Undeniably abusing my equipment, I hammered on the button.
For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. I thought maybe the pulse had caught us, and the Kaitan was dead in the water. But it was only that I wasn’t yet used to activating the drive.
One second, there were stars, fixed in space, and the next they were bleeding by the viewport like drops of liquid light. After a few more seconds, we might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy from the destroyer, we were so far away. Finding us would have been like trying to pinpoint a twinkle in the night sky.
I collapsed into my chair. Nev flopped over the back of it. For a little while, I didn’t care that our heads were only inches apart as we breathed.
“Well,” Nev said, practically in my ear. “That was fun.”
I couldn’t help it; a laugh tore out of me. We met each other’s eyes in surprise—Great Collapse, the silver-gray was so bright this close—but before I could say anything, Arjan and Eton burst onto the bridge, followed by Telu and Basra. I was barely on my feet before Arjan threw himself at me, almost toppling me with his hug. Before Basra could object, Arjan snatched his coat and dragged him into his arms too, going so far as to plant a kiss on his shocked face.
For a second, the three of us froze, even Arjan, but the kiss was lost in the chaos when Telu, as small as she was, somehow wrapped herself around all of us—including Eton, who nearly crushed my ribs with one of his own hugs. And then we were laughing and shouting and jumping up and down.