Simms lifted an eyebrow, and gave me a look that silently told me she understood now why I named the little shithead 'Skippy'.

The frigate grew closer on the display until suddenly it was right there, looming on top of us, with a docking bay door already open. Skippy let the frigate take control of the Dodo's nav system and guide us aboard, the bay door had only begun to close when the frigate jumped away. "We need to move fast," Skippy urged, "we just jumped, and I threw us off course, now I'm preventing a jump field from forming, the Kristang know something is wrong, for now they think the problem is their jump drive, that's not going to last long."

The bay doors closed agonizingly slowly, and there was a roar as the bay repressurized. As soon as the air pressure indicator read 80%, we opened the side door and the back ramp. My ears popped and I felt a stabbing pain that was difficult to ignore. "Camera is under my control. It's working," Skippy said, "they're buying our story. Outer door is now unlocked."

Skippy took control of the light sensors in the docking bay camera, and was feeding a false image to the ship, he was also chatting on the radio with the bridge crew. What he meant by our story was that the false image the Kristang crew saw through the camera was exciting and tempting; a Kristang special forces team coming out of a captured Dodo with a very special item of ancient Elder technology that supposedly had been found on Paradise. It was, according to Skippy, a Bubble Energy Tap, a device that pulled free energy from fluctuations in quantum foam, or something like that. "It's a crude technology, think of it as a battery that never wears out. Trust me, this will impress the stupid lizards," Skippy had explained. Anyway, it worked, the bridge crew unlocked the door to the interior of the ship, and we flew  across the bay in the zero gravity, only a few people missed the target and had to be pulled in before they bounced off the wall and floated away. Because Kristang frigates had small crews, and Skippy determined this frigate was short two regular crew members, there was not a crew member at the docking bay when we came in. The bridge crew told Skippy they were sending someone down to meet us, the rest of the crew were busy frantically trying to determine why their jump drive wasn't working.