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The Ithaca Mandate: Chapter 14 [Snippet]
Judith cast her attention out the grimy freighter windows. In the distance, another vessel hovered in the gap between stars. She was so far off that she looked little more than a specter–a vestige of alabaster against velvety black, a shiver of movement in the void. The red bloom of her engines was just starting to grow, expanding as if to obscure her from the insolent violation of Judith’s gaze. Ithaca had arrived six days before Ardent to render aid to the stricken freighter, but her presence there was grudging, a sour token of compliance to her Captain’s demands. Judith could sense the great ship’s resentment in the way she loomed, her colossal impatience pulsing across the expanse in time to her engines’ ominous burgeoning glow. The red swelled until it encompassed her entirely, and then with a violent flare Ithaca was gone, snapped out of existence as though she had never been there at all. Her departure seemed almost petulant, her sudden absence so striking it stole the air from Judith’s lungs and returned it to them molten. She stared at the empty place where Ithaca had been, blistered and breathless, unsettled by an instinct she couldn’t define.