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. It is starting and ending a jump that kills him off, the long aching hours when he may have to make a split-second decision involving the lives -- or freedom -- of his family.
If raiders wished to destroy merchant ships, Sisu and her sisters would not stand a chance. But the raider wants loot and slaves; it gains nothing simply to blast a ship.
Merchantmen are limited by no qualms; an attacking ship's destruction is the ideal outcome. Atomic target-seekers are dreadfully expensive, and using them up is rough on profit-and-loss -- but there is no holding back if the computer says the target can be reached -- whereas a raider will use destruction weapons only to save himself. His tactic is to blind the trader, burn out her instruments so that he can get close enough to paralyze everyone aboard -- or, failing that, kill without destroying ship and cargo.
The trader runs if she can, fights if she must. But when she fights, she fights to kill.
Whenever Sisu was below speed-of-light, she listened with artificial senses to every disturbance in multi-space, the whisper of n-space communication or the "white" roar of a ship boosting at many gravities. Data poured into the ship's astrogational analog of space and the questions were: Where is this other ship? What is its course? speed? acceleration? Can it catch us before we reach n-space?
If the answers were threatening, digested data channeled into port and starboard fire-control computers and Sisu braced herself to fight
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