Apex by Aer-ki Jyr Page B

holster and slid into the pilot’s chair. She ran through a quick engine start-­up, powered up the shields, and remotely retracted the boarding ramp after making sure all five of her passengers were aboard.
    Meanwhile, the Cres did a sweep of the ship to look for additional intruders. Their mental inventory came up negative, and their visual sweep detected nothing out of the ordinary. When finished, Ivara joined Jalia on the bridge and sat down at one of the secondary stations.
    â€œCan you . . .” Jalia began to ask.
    â€œYes,” Ivara answered, pulling out the small device from inside the cloak she had reclad herself with and began hacking into the local planetary information grid. As Jalia engaged the gravity drives in antigravity mode and eased the ship off the ground, Ivara displayed a small holographic map in her palm again.
    â€œNo activity yet,” she relayed to the Junta. “I wouldn’t count on that lasting.”
    â€œMe neither,” Jalia said as the ship’s landing gear retracted. Once locked in place, Jalia stood the ship on its tail using the small bow gravity drive, bringing the nose of the Resolute up 90 degrees until it was pointing to the sky.
    â€œHere we go,” Jalia said, kicking in the primary drive at relatively low power. The ship visually jerked and rocketed skyward, accelerating fast.
    Jalia luckily found a sizeable hole in the aerial and orbital traffic patterns and pushed her ship as hard as she could against the atmospheric drag. The friction was absorbed by the Resolute ’s shields, but still they could only take so much. Plus the dimensions of the shields weren’t superaerodynamic, so she had a bit of a struggle on her hands piloting a straight line up, but she managed well enough.
    They escaped the atmosphere within forty seconds, after which Jalia greatly increased their speed, pushing off against the planet’s gravity well in a perpendicular direction from the system’s star. She didn’t care where they were headed just yet, all that mattered right now was getting off the planet and getting some maneuvering room between themselves and any potential pursuers.
    Jalia kicked off the drive and let the ship coast, glancing at the sensor panel to make sure they weren’t in danger of running into anything ahead, at least nothing big enough to see. Debris impacts were always possible, and extremely dangerous. Fortunately, space was vast and mostly empty.
    The Junta slid out of her seat and into the adjacent navigator’s station. She brought up a system map and began plotting jumppoints for the adjacent star systems. Four pulsating dots appeared on the holographic map, then stretched out into lines intersecting the center of Hellis. Any point along those lines would allow a jump to the distant system along that exact trajectory, with any point farther away not being able to yield sufficient repulsory momentum to achieve the desired speed that Jalia had input into the computer.
    Faster ships could use weaker gravity to attain similar speeds, thus they had longer jumplines to work with. The Resolute ’s possibilities had plenty of leeway, allowing the ship to get enough gravity to push on without having to get sunburnt from getting ultraclose to the star.
    One of the jumplines switched from blue to flashing red, along with a highlighted icon ring pointing out that one of the small outer planets in the system was sitting along the trajectory of the jumpline to the Pella System.
    Jalia frowned. If she wanted to, she could tighten her calculations and probably still make the jump. The parameters the computer was using were generous, meaning that the warning would pop up if there was any interference within a sizeable zone around the jumpline.
    No point in taking any chances.
    That meant Pella was out, leaving Korfax, Mewlon, and Wresto as possible destinations. There were four other reliable spacelanes out of Hellis, but the