than originally planned. I want to bring her back here without having to go get her.
A huge rush of air sucks me in toward the door. I stop the door from opening wide enough to suck me through it, and I brace myself against the wall so the rush of air doesn’t pinch my suit through the opening.
I look back and see her flying toward me. If only I could see the look on her face.
I catch her as she slams into me. Her helmet hits hard against my gut, knocking the air out of me. Fuck, that’s gonna’ leave a bruise.
When the air is all gone, we fall to the ground.
She’s shouting something, but I can’t hear her through the helmet. There’s no way for me to interface with the ancient comms link on her suit. It’s probably better that I can’t hear anything she’s saying anyway.
I deploy a winch out of the multi-tool on my wrist. I hook it to her suit so she’s stuck to me.
She tries to fight, but I’m way too strong for her. I just tug her along as if she was on a leash, all the way to the breach in the hull.
She freaks out when she sees empty space through a hole in the wall. So I just tear on the rope and throw her through the hole and into space. If I’m lucky she’ll faint and save me some extra work.
I go out behind her, but I attach magnetically to the hull, anchoring her to the ship so that she doesn’t float out into space forever.
Arcturus, my home star, is only about twice as big as the other stars in the sky from this distance. Still over a month away for the human colony ship.
I hit a button on my wrist, and the big wire extending out from my ship glows violet. The wire is magnetic, and I shoot another line out from my free hand--the one not connected to Catherine--into the direction of the glowing wire. The magnets catch, and with a big tug, I pull myself off the human ship and toward mine.
It takes a few minutes for my ship to reel us in, and despite Catherine’s attempts to fight free, we get into my ship’s cargo hold with a few minutes to spare. I have accounted for her being a bit off when she said “twenty minutes ago.” If it was actually “thirty minutes ago” we have probably only seconds to spare. So I waste no time.
We’re going to be accelerating hard, and I don’t have time to get Catherine de-suited and strapped into a couch, so I just spray her with foam.
It encases her, still in her suit, in a big foam blob on the side of the cargo bay. The foam is good at absorbing high-Gs. She’ll be fine.
I disconnect the line to her and pull my weightless body through the tiny living quarters and into the cockpit.
I start the ship up. The big interstellar ship I stole Catherine from is breaking hard. Its engines are pointed toward Arcturus, and they are firing at full force. Every second it loses a lot of speed relative to my ship. It’s still travelling at a few percent of light speed, and in just over a month it will coast to a near stop on the outer edge of my home system.
That loss of speed means that even though I haven’t even started my own engines, the human ship is already behind me. I can see its engines blasting bright behind me, so bright I can’t look directly at it. Like a small sun.
I start my own engines, and I put as much distance as I can between myself and the ship.
As I throttle up to four G’s, I think about Catherine in the cargo hold. What if humans are too weak to sustain higher G-forces, even in the foam cocoon? I wanted to accelerate at ten G’s, but what if that hurts her?
I grind my teeth together and settle for six G’s. She’s worth too much money, and the whole thing is a waste of time if I kill her trying to accelerate too fast.
After a minute or so, I get a warning ping from the ship’s HUD.
Incoming missiles.
Fuck.
I didn’t get enough space between us. Six G’s wasn’t enough. That damn human.
I cut the engines, re-orient the ship, and start them again. As soon as I turn the engines back on, my display shows the missile exploding open.