His coil-scarred fingers moved, very fast, and switched on the laser-pen.

    Jensen ducked the beam in time to save his eyes. He even managed to keep his pellet gun trained on the patch of sweaty chest exposed by MacKenzie's gaping coverall; but the younl~ officer didn't fire, which proved a mistake.

    Hands that by rights should have been ruined flicked a switch, and Marity came to life with a scream of drive engines. She tore her gantry ties, stabbed upward with her gravity accelerators wide open and smashed through the closed hangar doors. Jensen was thrown to the deck. He heard the wail of sheared metal as landing struts wrenched off. Marity jerked, half-spun, and yanked free, burning outward into deepspace and trailing a tumbling wake of debris. Horrified, Jensen imagined Point Station thrown into wobbling chaos: alarm sirens smothered by the inrush of vacuum, and the light-loaders' magnetic treads plodding mechanically over the dying thrash of the workers Marity had sacrificed to rip free.

    MacKenzie James sat immobile in his threadbare deck chair. 'This craft is fitted with several sets of back-up engines,' he admonished. 'Point Station personnel and Carsey sector authorities know better than to meddle with us.'

    'Bastard,' Jensen said thickly. He moved gently against the pressure of acceleration, his pellet gun trained steadily on his antagonist. 'Your mate was equally expendable?'

    'Evans?' MacKenzie James did not change expression as the glare of the laser pencil snapped out. 'No Freer ever approached us without elaborate clandestine overtures and a meeting in private. Evans should have remembered.'

    But Jensen's equilibrium had recovered. The vibration just prior to takeoff, surely that had been the lock cycling closed? Evans in all probability was on board. The control panels on the bridge seemed utterly dead; but with back-up systems, even now the mate might be piloting from a remote station elsewhere on Marity. If Evans was at the helm, Ensign Shields was going to have to fly her shapely ass off to keep up. Fortunately her ability was equal to her boasts.

    Right now the primary directive was to take control before Marity gained enough charge to sequence her FTL drive. Icily composed in the half4ight cast by the bridge control panels, Jensen shifted the target of his gun and squeezed the trigger.

The light-pen in MacKenzie's hand shattered. Fragments of

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