Garro looked back at the moon. 'My faith is in the strength of a starship's hull and the power of gravity/ he replied, but even as he said the words, they seemed hollow and incomplete.

Carya eyed him curiously. Perhaps he sensed the captain's disquiet. 'The universe is vast, sir. One can find faith in many places.'

'Coming up to first course correction,' called the deck officer. 'Stand by for emergency manoeuvres.'

'Mark/ said a servitor in a toneless voice. 'Executing manoeuvre.'

The frigate's deck yawed and Garro felt the motion in the pit of his stomach. With all the available energy channelling into the drives, the ship's gravitational compensators were lagging behind and he felt the turn more distinctly than usual. He gripped a support stanchion with one hand and put his weight on his organic leg.

'Thermal bloom from their bow/ warned Sendek, having taken it upon himself to assist the bridge crew at the sensor pulpit. 'Discharge] Incoming fire, multiple lance bolts!'

'Push the turn!' shouted Carya. He said something else, but the words were drowned out as heavy rods of tuned energy struck the aft of the Eisenstein and pitched her forward like a ship cresting a wave. The compensators were slow again, and Garro's arm shot out and grabbed the shipmaster, halting his fall towards a console. The battle-captain felt something in Carya's wrist dislocate.

'Engine three power levels dropping!' shouted Vought. 'Coolant leaks on decks nine and seven!'

Carya recovered and nodded to Garro. 'Increase thrust from the other nozzles to compensate! We can't let them gain any ground!'

The ship was trembling, the throbbing vibration of a machine pushed to the edge of its operating limit. Sendek called out from his station. 'We're entering the White Moon's gravity well, captain, accelerating.'

Carya gasped as he snapped his augmetic hand back into place. 'Ah, the point of no return, Garro/ he said. 'Now we'll see if Racel is as good as I said she was.'

'If her calculations are off by more than a few degrees, we will be nothing but a new crater and a scattering of metal shavings/ Decius said darkly.

The moon filled the forward viewport. 'Have faith/ Garro replied.

'LORD, WE HAVE been captured by the lunar gravitational pull/ reported Typhon's shipmaster. 'Our velocity is increasing. I would humbly suggest we attempt to evade, and-'

'If we break contact now, the Eisenstein escapes/ the first captain said flatly. 'This vessel has power enough to pull free, yes? You'll use it when I order you to and not before.'

'By your command.'

Typhon glared at the gunnery officer. 'You! Where are my kills? I want that frigate obliterated! Get it done!'

'Lord, the ship is agile and our cannons are largely fixed emplacements'

'Results, not excuses!' came the growling retort. 'Do your duty or I'll find a man who can!'

On the giant pict screen over his command throne, Typhon watched the trails of fumes and wreckage spilling from Eisenstein and smiled coldly.

RACEL VOUGHT BLINKED sweat out of her eyes and pressed her hands on the flat panel of the control console. The reflected ivory starlight from the White Moon's surface illuminated the bridge with stark edges and hard lines. It was a funerary glow, devoid of any life, and it seemed to draw her energy from her. She took a shuddering breath. The lives of every person aboard the frigate were squarely in her hands at this moment, gambled on a string of numbers she had hastily computed while Isstvan III had died before her eyes. She was afraid to look at them again for fear that she might find she had made some horrible mistake. Better that she not know, better she hang on to the fragile thread of confidence that had propelled her to this daring course in the first place. If Vought had made any miscalculations, she would not live to regret it.

The theory was sound, she could be sure of that. The gravity of the dense, iron-heavy White Moon was already enveloping the Eisenstein, dragging it down towards the satellite's craggy surface. If she did not intervene, it would do exactly that, and like the dour Death Guard had said, the frigate would become a grave marker.

Vought's plan was built on the mathematics of orbits and the physics of gravitation, a school of learning that extended back to the very first steps of mankind into space, when thrust and fuel were precious commodities. In the Thirty-first Millennium, with brute force engines capable of throwing star-ships wherever they needed to go, it wasn't often such knowledge was required, but today it might save their lives.

Racel glanced over her shoulder and found both Baryk and the Death Guard battle-captain looking back at her. She expected judgemental, commanding stares from both men, but instead there was silent assurance in their eyes. They were trusting her to fulfil her promise. She gave them an answering nod and went back to her task.

Klaxons warned of new salvos of incoming fire. She tuned them out of her thoughts, concentrating instead on the complex plots of trajectory and flight path before her. There was no margin for error. As Eisenstein fell towards the planetoid, the drives would shift and ease her through the White Moon's gravitational envelope, using the energy of the satellite to throw the frigate about in a slingshot arc, boosting the vessel's sub-light speed, projecting her away towards the jump point. The Terminus Est would never be able to catch them.

The frigate's shuddering grew as the craft entered the final vector of the slingshot course. 'Prepare for course correction,' Vought shouted over the rumbling. 'A/tarkV

STREAKS OF FIRE jetted from the Eisenstein's port flank as the autonomic trim controls slewed the ship away from the moon. The bow veered as if wrenched by an

invisible hand, shifting the axis with brutal force. The extremes of tension between the lunar gravity and the artificial g-forces generated inside the vessel knotted and turned. Hull plates popped and warped as rivets as big as a man sheared off and broke. Conduits stressed beyond their tolerances ruptured and spewed toxic fumes. Forced past her limits, Eisenstein howled like a wounded animal under the punishment, but it turned, metre by agonising metre, falling into the small corridor of orbital space that would propel the frigate away from Isstvan III.

'TYPHON!' SHOUTED THE shipmaster, throwing procedure aside by daring to address the first captain without the prefix of his rank. 'We must evade! We cannot follow the frigate's course, we'll be drawn down on to the moon! Our mass is too great-'

Furious, the Death Guard struck the naval officer with a sudden backhand, battering the man to the decking with his cheekbones shattered and blood streaming from cuts. 'Evade, then!' he spat, 'but warp curse you, I want everything thrown at that bloody ship before we let him go!'

The rest of the bridge crew scrambled to carry out his orders, leaving the mewling shipmaster to tend to himself. Typhon snatched up his manreaper and held it tightly, his anger hot and deadly. He cursed Garro as the Eisenstein slipped out of his grasp.

THE TERMINUS EST bore down, the warship's drives casting a halo of crackling red light, a shark snapping at a minnow. The craft groaned as the monstrous thrust of her drives tore the ship out of the White Moon's gravity well, the blade-sharp prow crossing the path of the frigate. As it did so, every lance cannon

on Typhon's battle cruiser erupted as one in a screaming concert of power, tearing across the dark towards the fleeing vessel.

'INCOMING FIRE!' BARKED Sendek. 'Brace for impact!'

Garro heard the words and then suddenly he was airborne, the deck dropping away from him. The Death Guard spun and tumbled across the bridge, rebounding off stanchions and clipping the ceiling before the energy of the slamming impact dissipated and he collided with a control console.