A hair more power to the starboard thrusters, not to pull the Goldenfels but rather to skid the Princess Cecile sidewise to port. The freighter’s rotation meant the cables attached to her dorsal masts had started to slacken. One had kinked and parted, a ringing crash like the sound of a plasma bolt striking the hull in vacuum.
“Come on, you fat bitch!” Daniel said, but he shouldn’t’ve been swearing at the Goldenfels; they’d treat the freighter well and she’d be their friend. More power and the Princess Cecile slid measurably to port. The Goldenfels was coming, great God almighty she was coming, she was coming over, yes, by God she—
The freighter reached her balance point and hung. The Princess Cecile danced in a tethered hover, bobbing between the ground and ten feet in the air. Asymmetric strains made her porpoise as well, bow and stern rising and falling alternately. If the Goldenfels slipped back, her mass would flip the corvette into the ground on the other side of her unless the cables parted first; and they wouldn’t, not all of them.
One of the Goldenfels’ masts tore out of the hull plating, jerked skyward on the pull of two cables. The freighter rotated another few degrees before her lifted outrigger rolled toward the ground at increasing speed. Maybe it was removing the mast’s weight, maybe it was recoil from the shock of metal shearing; maybe it was luck.
Hogg cheered but Daniel didn’t have time to. Instinct urged him to chop his throttles, but he’d thought the situation through over the past four days. He boosted power to his port thrusters, lifting that side against the inertia of the starboard thrusters. They were trying to spin the corvette onto her back now that the freighter’s mass didn’t anchor her through the taut cables.
The Princess Cecile rose twenty feet before Daniel got control, real control, and brought her into balance. He’d begun lowering her with her thrust reduced to 21% when the Goldenfels’ outrigger hit the ground in a crash like the earth splitting.
The freighter bounced into the air again in a doughnut of yellow-gray dust swelling out around the hull, lifted by the shock rather than the touch of the steel outriggers. The compression wave buffeted the Princess Cecile but Daniel didn’t overcompensate, just let the ship rise and fall; and, falling, kiss the ground to settle. They were twenty yards closer to the Goldenfels than they’d been when he lit the thrusters.
“Shutting down,” he said by rote; and did so, cutting the feeds to the thrusters. In the hissing silence his ears still remembered the clash of the Goldenfels hitting, then hitting again. Bloody hell, they’d be lucky if they hadn’t dismounted the fusion bottle in her Power Room. . . .
Daniel drew in a deep breath, then expanded his exterior display. The cables were a knotted tangle rather than the neat cat’s cradle Woetjans and her riggers had strung; the outriggers lay across loops of them. They’d wind up leaving half the gear behind because they didn’t have time to dig out each strand and coil it. . . .
Adele had cut in the external audio pickups. People were cheering. People were cheering Captain Leary.
Daniel slowly began to grin.
CHAPTER 27
Adele looked worn as she came around the end of the outrigger where Daniel stood looking up at the freighter’s stern. Mr. Pasternak had left several minutes before to return to the Goldenfels’ Power Room where he was rewiring the High Drive installation. Daniel had stayed to . . .
He grinned. He hadn’t stayed for any particular reason beyond the fact that he was exhausted and nobody happened to be shouting at him right this moment, forcing his attention onto the next problem. If Adele was tired, she wasn’t the only one. The past . . . seventeen days . . . had been very hard. Daniel felt obscurely pleased to have remembered the length of time they’d been here on Morzanga.
Adele followed the line of his gaze to the hull above. She frowned. “Are those cracks serious?” she said. Her lips pursed and she added, “That is, they are cracks, aren’t they?”