“Yes, sir.” Warner hopped back up and disappeared.
“How did you find me?” Griffith asked. He ran a trembling thumb along her bruised cheekbone, and his tone hardened. “What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” Adequin said. “How did you end up here, Griff? What happened after you left the Argus?”
“We got on the Divide, same as always. But after only a few minutes, we started drifting. The sensors kept going off, reading like we were steering into it.”
“Or like it was steering into you,” Jackin said grimly.
“Exactly. It was,” Griffith said. “I think it’s moving inward.”
“It is,” Adequin said.
Griffith coughed, then grumbled, “See, this is why I needed a physicist.”
She sighed. “How’d you end up all the way out here?”
Griffith swallowed. “Once I realized it was moving, I tried to edge us away slowly, keep in that sweet spot, but it was moving too quickly—I couldn’t accommodate. Eventually I had no choice: either keep going and crash into—or through—it in a matter of minutes, or, well … I could rip away.”
“Wait, what?” Jackin said, eyes wide in disbelief. “Are you saying you disengaged without slowing down?”
Griffith gave a short nod, then groaned and sucked in a shallow breath.
“Why didn’t you decelerate?” Adequin asked. “Slow down like normal and exit?”
“It was moving too quickly—the angle too sharp. If we slowed down, I wouldn’t have met escape velocity before it’d have overtaken us. Our only chance was to pull away with enough speed to rip free entirely.”
“Void, Bach,” Jackin cursed. “How’d you pull that off?”
“I locked the crew up in the torus chamber and took manual control.”
Adequin let out a sharp breath. With the crew locked in the torus chamber—where for safety, everyone should be during the autopiloted entrance and exit from the Divide—they should have been safe from the effects of deceleration, even one as sudden as this had been. However, in the cockpit, Griffith would have been exposed. To what, she didn’t even know; she wasn’t sure anyone did. As far as she knew, no one had ever tried a maneuver like that before.
“At that speed…” Jackin mumbled, running a hand through his hair. “How’d you get enough power?”
Griffith cleared his throat. “I overclocked the ions. That hacker kid told me how to circumvent the Legion shackles a while back—one of the circitors, Amaeus something.”
Adequin raised her eyebrows. “Puck?”
“Right. More a thought experiment than anything—never thought I’d actually need to use it.”
“But it worked?” Jackin asked.
“Yeah, but the force slung us away really fast. Too fast.” He shook his head, his demeanor wilting. “There was this weird gravitational … billowing, almost. Thought every organ in my body was gonna explode. It worked, but tossed us around until I could get the engines under control, and we finally came to a stop … here. Wherever here is.”
Warner crouched beside Adequin with a biotool and an armful of cartridges. She took the tool and switched it to scanning mode. A green beam shot out the front, then fanned into a grid. She ran the light over Griffith’s chest.
Jackin glanced back at the corridor. “How’d those Drudgers even find you guys?”
“Shit if I know,” Griffith growled. “I’d barely gotten the torus chamber opened to check on the crew before they pounced on us. We took a ton of them out, but they overwhelmed us pretty quick. So I routed them down here to give the crew time to lock themselves back in the chamber, then I shut myself in here to wait it out. I watched the door access on my nexus—looks like they just off-loaded our cargo, then left.”