Despite only having a minor upgrade to their speed, the two Terran scout ships were still the stealthiest ships in the pirate armada. Of course, hyperspace portals weren’t particularly stealthy at the best of times. There were solutions to that. “How are our decoying friends, Sarah?” Andrew Lougheed asked, studying the screens. Of Course and Oaths of Secrecy had cut their drives just before opening the portal, and were now moving entirely on cold gas jets. Compared to the interface drive’s near-instantaneous acceleration to large chunks of lightspeed, the jets’ single gravity felt glacial. “Our pirate friends are screaming across the system at forty-five percent of the speed of light,” his tactical officer reported, directing a smile Andrew’s way that skittered the edge of professionalism. He probably needed to talk to her about that, but they were privateers now. How much of the old rules really still applied?
