A wave of what would have been nausea in a human swept through the Yawning Angel’s Mind as a signal came in from the Charitable View. Now what?

Whatever it might have feared, this was worse.

The Sleeper Service’s acceleration factor had started to increase. Almost at the same time, it had exceeded its normal maximum sustainable velocity.

Fascinated, appalled, terrified, the Yawning Angel listened to a running commentary on the other GSV’s progress from its increasingly distant child, even as it started the sequence of actions and commands that would lead to its own near-instant departure. Twelve minutes early, but that couldn’t be helped, and if people were pissed off, too bad.

Still increasing. Time to go. Disconnect. There.

The Charitable View signalled that the Sleeper Service’s outer-most field extent had shrunk to within a kilometre of naked-hull minima.

The Yawning Angel dropped away from the orbital, twisting and aiming and punching away into hyperspace only a few kilometres away from the world’s undersurface, ignoring incandescent howls of protest from the Hub over such impolite and feasibly dangerous behaviour and the astonished - but slow, so slow - yelps from people who an instant earlier had been walking down a transit corridor towards a welcoming foyer in the GSV and now found themselves bumping into emergency seal-fields and staring at nothing but blackness and stars.

The superlifter’s continuous report went on: the Sleeper Service’s acceleration kept on increasing slowly but steadily, then it paused, dropping to zero; the craft’s velocity remained constant.

Could that be it? It was still catchable. Panic over?

Then the fleeing ship’s velocity increased again; as did its rate of acceleration. Impossible!

The horrific thought which had briefly crossed the Yawning Angel’s mind moments earlier settled down to stay with all the gruesome deliberation of a self-invited house guest.

It did the arithmetic.

Take a Plate class GSV’s locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value . . . make that thirty-two at a time . . . and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service’s acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.

The Charitable View reported another smooth increase in the Sleeper Service’s rate of progress leading to another step, another pause. It was increasing its own acceleration to match.

The Yawning Angel sped after the two of them, already fearing the worst. Do the sums, do the sums. The Sleeper Service had filled at least four of its General bays with extra engine, bringing them on line two at a time, balancing the additional impetus . . .

Another increase.

Six. Probably all eight, then. What about the engineering space behind? Had that gone too?