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to her panel before she could ask for them. Damn, he was good. When she got her command back, she’d recruit him.
    “There’s your course, Captain,” he said. “Laid and locked.”
    “Acknowledged,” Ari said. “Mr. Turrel, stand by to drop radiation shielding on my mark. Once it’s down, give me a by-second count if you please.”
    “Standing by.”
    “Give me the stabilizers,” Seaghdh said. “I’ll keep us upright.”
    She did. “Going in.”
    “Particle level increasing, Ari!” Raj warned.
    “I see it. Gods I hate not being able to steer by the engines.”
    “Let me bring your atmospherics online,” one of the men interjected. “Just enough to give you some steerage!”
    Ari glanced at him. Copper skin, bloody coveralls. He’d been the one with the broken arm. She didn’t yet know his name. “I can’t afford the hull stress.”
    The lights died. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sindrivik shift to a systems panel and begin working. The lights flickered back on.
    “Yes, you can!” the other man hollered back over the racket of the engine and the creak of hull plates. “Reduce your star drive output when you drop into the groove.”
    Without her okay, Seaghdh began reworking his calculations with the new parameters. Ari scowled.
    These men had hijacked the ship and imprisoned her family and friends. She didn’t trust them. She couldn’t. But this wasn’t about trust. It was about survival. Theirs as well as hers.
    “Do it,” she said, reconfiguring her piloting plan.
    Through the noise of protesting metal, and the howl of stressed engine feeds, she thought she heard Seaghdh mutter, “Good girl.”
    New formulas fed into her panel from Seaghdh’s station and it struck her how much trust and familiarity—almost intimacy—existed between a good pilot and navigator team.
    Seaghdh helped her wrestle the ungainly boat into the course he’d plotted. For a moment, they spun helplessly in the grip of the solar winds.
    “Atmospherics at thirty! Give the port side a blow!” the man in bloody coveralls yelled.
    Ari fired the port engine. Their spin slowed. Wobbling, the ship strained, then abruptly leaped forward, riding the solar wind current. She cut the thruster.
    “Raj? Levels?”
    “Acceptable, but go now!”
    “Acknowledged. Mr. Turrel?”
    “Still standing by,” the big man rumbled.
    “Cut power to radiation shielding on my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”
    “Radiation shielding off-line,” he replied and began counting off the seconds.
    The men listened intently, counting with him. Seaghdh shot her a glance when Turrel reached twelve, then thirteen and she didn’t order the shields back up.
    “That’s it!” Raj yelled. “Saturation!”
    “Get those shields up!” Ari shouted.
    “Shields online!” Turrel replied. “Power fluctuating . . . Shields optimal.”
    “We’re clean,” Ari said. “Nice work. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
    They picked up another burst of speed. She nudged all three engines. For several seconds nothing happened. Then, engines whining and metal straining, the Sen Ekir ’s nose lifted and they broke free. The devilish winds hadn’t finished with them, though, and they bounced, skipping like a stone once, twice, before the star relinquished its grasp.
    Ari banked down the atmospherics, locked in a course that would take them out of system, switched the view screen to watch Occaltus’s sun diminish in their wake, and then glanced at the man sitting at engineering.
    “I take it you’re V’kyrri?”
    Pale, sea green eyes looked back at her. His light brown hair contrasted with copper-colored skin. He nodded.
    “Thank you,” she said. Sure, he’d talked her through using the atmospherics so that she didn’t get them all killed. Survival. She could respect that, but a good captain knew to recognize a valuable contribution.
    The man nodded again. “Never seen atmospherics quite like the ones you have strapped to this tub, but I have