Becker hailed the Shahrazcu). Acorna nearly wept with relief to hear her uncle Hafiz’s voice apprising them of the situation.
She was about to ask to speak to him when Becker declared he had dibs on the tubing and accelerated, aiming the Condor’s nose between the two liners.
The tubing was no impediment at all for the Nupiak asteroid breaker nose cone. Space-suited bodies tumbled like corpuscles on a microscope slide of a broken capillary. Gravity boots were locking onto hulls and gloves grasping the gloves of spinning crewmates. Acorna was glad to see that most of them were managing to save themselves but even gladder to see that in order to do so, they had to let their weapons twirl out into the blackness of space.
Acorna and Aari watched for a moment, and Acoma thought again how terribly lonely it would be to go drifting in space till you died. She glanced at Becker, and at the pressure suits on the wall. Becker looked completely serious for one moment, then got up, threw pressure suits and jet packs at them and said, “Okay, boys and girls, salvage time. You too, KEN-bo, but you won’t need a suit, right? When that little -female individual was kicking the stuffing out of me, some of her boys stopped her from making it worse so I guess I owe them. Besides, I want that tubing! And then we’ll make a house call on your uncle. Lady.”
Acorna was well used to maneuvering in jets and pressure suits from her childhood mining asteroids with her uncles, and Aari also had used them before his captivity on Vhiliinyar. Fortunately, Acorna s horn was not so long that it required a special helmet. Maneuvering in space was a lot like swimming, using the jets as fins, grabbing the drifting crewmen and bringing them back to the Shahrazax) and shoving them through an airlock before going after the next one.
They managed to pluck two off the hull of their own ship where they clung like barnacles before that ship took off. As soon as they shoved the last one aboard Becker said, “Lady, you may want to visit the ShahrazaS and make sure your uncle is okay. Aari and KEN, unless you like family reunions, come on back to the Condor and we’ll eat our humble din-din of plant seeds and cat food and hope Acorna brings us back some highclass chow from her rich relative.”
Acorna waved and climbed through the airlock. The previous hitchhikers had been taken into custody by the Shahrasuuf’s crew but once she drew off her helmet, Hafiz himself was there to embrace her and welcome her aboard. As they repaired to the ship’s lounge, she felt it suddenly lurch, and saw a bolt of light zipping across the view screen from the Shahrazcu) to the departing Mu)a