"We'll have to raid an unguarded outpost, a small mining asteroid is our best bet. We'll leave him there."
"Yeah," said Jordan listlessly. "A good idea, if we can run away from our personal escort. Offhand I don't think we can. They hesitated when I told them we had Cameron but they didn't drop back. Look."
He looked himself and, unbelievingly, looked again. He blinked rapidly but the screen could report only what there was.
"They're gone," he said, his voice breaking with excitement.
Almost instantly Docchi was at his side. "No, they're still following but they're very far behind." Even as he looked the pursuing ships shrank visibly, steadily losing ground.
"What's the relative speed?" said Jordan. He looked at the dials, tapped them, pounded on them, but the speed wouldn't change. If it hadn't been confirmed by the screen he'd have said that the needles were stuck or the instruments were completely unreliable.
"What did you do with the rockets?" demanded Docchi.
"That's a foolish question. What could I do? We were already at top speed for this piece of junk."
And there was no way to explain the astonishing thing that had happened. They were all in the control compartment, Cameron, Anti, Jordan and himself. Nona was there too, sitting huddled up, head resting in her arms. There was no explanation at all, unless—Docchi scanned all the instruments again. That was when he first noticed it.
Power was pouring into the gravity drive. The useless, or at least long unused dial was indicating unheard of consumption. "The gravity drive is working," Docchi said.