Quoted By:
Now you gently ease into the throttle, both the reactor and the main engine finally springing life. As you do, you both listen and expand your Vis Sense, making certain that there are no discordant notes in the hum running through the hull and no oddities in the power output and transfer.
Oh yeah, being an unregistered psion - there's one more crime to add to the list.
However, all remains well with the ship's systems, even as you finally reach full burn. At which point you let the autopilot take over and simply sit there, watching the speed indicator climb from kilometers per second to tens, then to hundreds, the target being an even thousand - a safe enough inner system cruising speed that should let you pass in the vicinity of the innermost planet's orbit within two days or so. You'll need to go much faster soon enough, but no reason to draw attention to yourself quite yet. The inertial dampeners seem to be working fine, at least - you can barely feel the acceleration.
"I thought we were doing a slingshot around the sun," Fia says, observing the course display from the co-pilot's seat.
"That's still the plan. But remember: we will be pursued. We'll adjust course once we know what's coming after us and on what vector."
Fia is the unexpected companion on your escape from Barter. A designermate - an artificial sapient grown in a vat to the buyer's specifications, for the broadly understood purpose of "companionship". But Fia, in her own words, is jailbroken - her mind truly her own, free of the loyalty conditioning that would have her slip into lethal depression upon being separated from her owner.
And even if Jay Roberts - the owner of the ship you stole - did not own her, she had made it clear that their relationship dynamic was lacking, to put it gently. To the point that she was already going to abandon him - and it was only your sudden appearance that interfered with her own escape.
Which in your eyes says far more than words could. It requires significant incentive to overcome the inertia of one's life's trajectory. To successfully fight back against a sense of helplessness, the insidious belief that trying to change things for the better will only make them worse.
And perhaps it is for the better that she ended up with you, rather than wandering an unfamiliar station, particularly given her earlier question concerning slavery. Barter did not engage in the slave trade officially - not for any moral reasons, but simply because the profit margins were too narrow, given what food, water and even air cost on the station - but a lonely designermate could very easily draw the wrong sort of attention.
(cont)
