“Helping Jack achieve escape velocity.”
“Uh, okay—and you’ve done this before?”
“Yes,” she said, firming her jaw. “Sort of.”
“Sir…” The edge of his voice creaked.
She blew out a heavy breath. “I used it once to pull a crippled fighter from planetary orbit. This is … similar.” Similar enough. She hoped.
“But it worked?” Puck asked.
“Yeah, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
She sighed. “I mean, the other ship flung a little … fast, and ended up in a spin, and it didn’t have working engines to right itself, so there were some g-force-related issues—void, it doesn’t fucking matter, okay? The point is, it worked and it will again.” It had to.
Puck hesitated only a heartbeat, then his reply came steady. “Understood, sir.”
“I’m taking the wheel. Ride that speed for me. I need it right at five percent.”
Any slower and they’d leave Jackin behind. Any faster and they’d crash face-first into them. It’d be one way to go. At least she’d have tried, and not left him to fly toward the collapsing edge of the universe without even knowing what he was headed into.
“Yes, sir,” Puck said.
With both hands, Adequin passed her holographic menus to Puck. They slid across the console and he caught them. He rearranged the screens in an arc in front of him.
“Two hundred,” he said.
Adequin pressed a button on the cold metal console, and two control sticks raised up.
Someone behind her whispered in awe, “Old school…”
“Clear the pit,” Adequin said.
With a shuffle of feet and a door whizzing shut, the tension in the air settled. It was just her and Puck. Just them and the controls. Just their Hermes and Jackin’s.
“Can we push our weight to starboard bow?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what these basic exploratory vessels were capable of.
Puck swept to a menu and dragged a slider up to max. Adequin’s weight pressed down into the cushioned seat.
“Density’s at max,” Puck confirmed. “One hundred.”
“Give them that flash at the two mark.”
“Copy, sir.”
Adequin took hold of the control sticks and their cool, soft gel molded to her grip.
After a beep, the computer’s voice spoke up. “Confirm settings.”
“Confirmed,” she said, and the gel solidified. Her Imprints ran into her arms and hands, ready to aid her reflexes.
“Here we go,” Puck said. “Ten…”
Adequin’s eyes flickered to the flashing scene behind Jackin. Less than a quarter of the Argus remained. She refocused on the SGL.
“Seven…”
Proximity alarms blared, blasting against her eardrums and bathing the console in flashes of red light.
“Caution,” the computer warned. “Approaching mass detected.”
She ground her teeth. She should have disabled that.
“Five…”
This was just a modified slingshot. Or even more apt: like taking a very brief and quickly aborted “ride” on the Divide. Though she’d never done it, she’d learned the concept when she came to the Argus, and Griffith had bored her with theoretical discussions about it plenty of times over the last three years.