Otter folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward more rapidly, accelerating steadily out of the Stine Terminus, five and a half light-hours from the G5 primary of the Stine System.

“Five hundred gravities, Senior Chief,” Talmadge said.

“Five hundred gravities, aye, aye, Sir,” Powell acknowledged crisply, and Talmadge’s lips twitched as he waited for Stine Astro Control to react to his ship’s abrupt appearance.

* * *

“Sir, they’ve noticed as,” Lieutenant Jordan Rivera announced, and Commodore Magellan raised an eyebrow at his staff communications officer.

“Put it on the main display, Jordan.”

“Yes, Sir.”

An officer in the uniform of Stine Astro Control with a captain’s insignia appeared on the main com display. He had a dark complexion, a shaved head, a thick mustache, and an irate expression.

“Unknown ship!” he snarled. “Reduce acceleration immediately!”

“My, he does seem a bit unhappy,” Magellan murmured.

“Well, Sir,” Commander Wilson observed, “we are exceeding the terminus acceleration limit by about four hundred and eighty gravities. I imagine that could account for a bit of unhappiness.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the commodore conceded.

“God damn it, reduce your accel right now!” the shaven-headed captain shouted. “What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?!”

“I think he’s going to get even more unhappy just about…now,” Lieutenant Commander Sarah Tanner, Magellan’s ops officer, remarked dryly as Malcolm Taylor, his squadron’s second ship burst out of the terminus behind Otter.

Malcolm Taylor peeled off on a sharply divergent vector, accelerating just as hard as Otter, and Magellan nodded in satisfaction. Although even a relatively small terminus was an enormous volume of space, trying something like this into or out of the Manticoran Junction would have been extraordinarily dangerous. Despite the separation between inbound and outbound lanes, there was so much traffic through the Junction that the probability of a wedge-on-wedge collision would have been only too real. In Stine’s case, however, there were only a single inbound and a single outbound lane, and traffic was sparse, to say the least. He saw a single freighter’s icon on the tactical display, swinging wildly away from the terminus, even though Otter was a good forty thousand kilometers clear of her. But that was fine with him.

“Deploy the Ghost Rider platforms, Sarah,” he said. “Let’s get some eyes out there.”

“Yes, Sir. Deploying now.”

The icons of half a dozen Ghost Rider recon platforms arced away from Otter’s larger, stronger light code on the tactical plot, and he saw HMS Tiger Cub, the squadron’s third cruiser emerging from the terminus behind Malcolm Taylor.

“Who the hell are you people?!” the astro control captain on the com demanded furiously.

“Better go ahead and put me through to him, Jordan,” Magellan said.

“Yes, Sir. Live mike in three…two…one. Now.”