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Swing the ship.
Boost the speed.
Taper off the gravity.
Cut the speed.
Check the back.
She had to pee but didn’t have time.
The rhythm of flying boosted her morale. It shouldn’t have been as fun as it was, but that was the seductive draw of a keyboard. She was handling something much larger than herself with a few tiny motions.
“Other side,” she said to his headset. “I have him in Three-Bravo.”
Caligher’s voice came over the speaker. “I don’t know what that means—”
“Outside the pod room.”
He pivoted noisily on his feet. “Thanks, Lucca.”
They made a good team. She could watch out for him—he could watch out for her. Caligher got into the hallway with the intruder and a violent fight ensued.
It sounded bad. Wet and crunchy, filled with pained noises, heavy breaths, and a lot of back-and-forth scuffling.
Outrunning the shooter behind her occupied her attention. She couldn’t afford to think about whether or not Caligher was winning. She had to trust that he had it under control.
They finally went invisible.
She sat in silence, holding the joystick so tight her hand ached. The incoming fire stopped… and the pursuing ship floundered somewhere off to the side, unable to find them.
Good.
“Lucca,” Caligher said. A second voice raged from the same room as him.
“Did you get him?” she asked.
“Yeah. Nice job getting us out of harm’s way.”
She pried her shaky hand away from the joystick, leaving them in place. Invisible and safe for the moment. Safe-ish. Nothing out there would ever meet her standard of safe. There were only degrees.
“What should we do now?” she asked.
“One good strike against their ship should do the trick,” he said, pleasantly trigger-happy as always. She rubbed the space between her eyebrows.
“No!” screamed the intruder. She recognized the voice of the Ternetzi who’d started the fight in the bar. He really should have let it go when he’d had the chance.
His friend with the torn-up carapace was on that other ship, he explained frantically. Lucca was relieved the male had survived the shit Caligher had done to him. Shooting their ship to pieces would be a death sentence, just as easily as detonating the Selkie would be to her. Funny how they didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to her in these fender benders.
“Maybe you should have thought of that,” Caligher sneered. “The only reason your friend got to live at all was that Lucca felt sorry for you both.”
“—don’t do it!—”
“And you still came after us,” Caligher snarled.
“We’re not shooting anyone down,” she said. The guns were for the jump point, not people.
“You want them coming after us again?”
