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but no more. As it was, we were better off blasting from Iniomi than the “official” rescue craft would be in lifting from Pallant, which had half as much again in the way of gravity drag.
    While Johnny was still in the thirties, the port authority gave me the go-ahead to blast. By this time the whole ship was alive and alert. Ecdyon had staggered up to the control room to watch the action and Nick was at my shoulder. Eve was around somewhere, but neither Charlot nor the other Gallacellan had shown. I guessed that they were in conference somewhere on the ground, and that was why the crew pep talk hadn’t materialized.
    I took her up on a strictly regulation cannon burn, and I felt the flux come alive as we juggled the power.
    â€œRight,” I said to Johnny, “we’re going to race the transfer and use every available second. Give me a hundred countdown and make sure that you have everything hot and set when we get to zero.”
    It wasn’t really fair on him to cut his time like that—it was pushing the limitations of the engine, and when you start pushing the limitations of the engine you’re usually well beyond those of the engineer. If we missed the transfer we’d lose seconds instead of making them, and even though it would be my fault, Johnny was bound to think of it as his.
    â€œNick,” I said, forgetting in the heat of the moment that we were on board and that he was the captain, “the info came in on a bleep. Pick it out and play it back to yourself. I haven’t the time to take it myself. Just tell me what the situation is after we transfer, OK?”
    He moved to comply. All the time I was speaking I was preparing to make the transfer. I was really pounding the flux, because I needed all the shields up. Leucifer was a matter-dense system and you can’t go making tachyonic transfers in bad vacuum without a full complement of shields. As it was, we were bound to lose power when I went transcee. One shield at least was bound to crack, and unless Johnny and I were really on our toes we could bleed flux. After what the ship had gone through yesterday another bleed could wreck her—or at least ground her for a month.
    But she behaved beautifully. The flux stayed perfectly balanced, my timing was dead on, and we were through the light barrier in no time. A slight movement of my ship limbs, the sensation of wind riffling feathers, and the shielding was back full, perfectly powered, dead even.
    â€œBeautiful,” I said. “Great work, son.” Johnny said nothing. I kept concentrating and I kept accelerating. I searched inside the hood, but I couldn’t see the stricken ship—or, at least, I couldn’t sort her out from all the other junk that was floating around.
    â€œPosition?” I shouted.
    Nick reeled off some figures, and I spotted her as soon as I had the region to look. I could see two other ships in the mid-part of the system. One was near Pallant and was presumably the boat coming out in answer to the mayday. The other was also headed toward the emergency, but she was a long way out, coming in from an outer world, or from outside the system.
    I covered the distance between Iniomi and the injured ship in a matter of minutes. The junk that was all over the system didn’t try to get in my way, and with the special faculties of the Swan I was virtually able to ignore the particles strewn along our path.
    â€œCount me down to back-transfer,” I told Johnny, and while he was coming down from a hundred Nick gave me the essence of what he’d learned from the bleep.
    â€œIt’s a yacht called the Saberwing ,” he said, “privately owned on Pallant by a man named Ferrier. Crew of three. Mayday came in only a few minutes ago, but the mayday signal gave no information except the name of the ship. Either a bad captain or...anyway, no way of knowing what’s wrong.”
    â€œWhat a moron,” I said.