The skin was stretched taut across Gavin's gaunt features, the freckles standing out like pennies.
The air, rapidly growing denser, began to whine like the keening for the dead. He stiffened, straining to catch the sound he had imagined.
It came again. The cough of a rocket tube.
A wild hope flamed in Gavin's blue eyes. The roar of the jets blasted into life. The cabin heeled sharply to starboard. Gavin slid down the sloping deck until he fetched up against the bulkhead, which had suddenly become the floor.
The Nova, he realized in a flood of relief, had come out of the fall and was speeding parallel to the surface. He sat down, his joints turning to water. He had a violent urge to be sick.
Gavin's first belief that the attacking ship had been one of Terra's patrol spacers gave way to doubt. In the first place, the Nova hadn't been beyond Venus' thousand-mile-limit. Furthermore, he didn't believe a Terran patrol ship would have waylaid the Nova outward bound when she was innocent of her cargo of slaves.
Then who was it?
He heard a bolt click back. The door through which he had entered was directly overhead. The Nova, though, had been constructed for flying either keel-on or stern-down. The passages which previously had been horizontal were now vertical, and the vertical wells running from bow to stern lay horizontal to the angle of flight. A door which had been overhead when they were shooting straight up, now was directly across the cabin.
As Gavin watched, it swung open. Nadia Petrovna was framed in the opening.
She said in a breathless tight voice, "You've got to take over the engine room! Half the black gang are dead or laid up! Captain Cabot sent me to fetch you!"