He glanced at Vray and nodded.
"Stand by for translation."
Birrel looked at Kara.
"That only means," she said, "that we're going faster."
"How much faster?"
"Well, just at first," she said, "about double the speed of light."
Birrel stopped trying to go along intelligently with any of it. He just let it happen.
The lights inside the ship dimmed and burned blue. There was a screeching whine that rose up and out of hearing, clawing at the nerves as it went, and then there was a moment of awful vertigo when the ship and everything in it seemed to slip and fall sideways in an insane fashion.
The open ports slid shut automatically. Just before they closed Birrel caught a glimpse through them of the stars he had been looking at only a few moments before. They shifted, streamed like burning rain, and vanished, to be replaced by squiggling lines of lights.
Then the ports were shut and there was nothing except the personal sense of disorientation to show that anything had happened.