The journey to the next jump point was a short twenty-six minutes. It was uneventful, though not restful. The two pirate ships had caught up with them just a few minutes into the journey and Drake was still expecting an ambush at the next jump point or soon after.
He took time to leave the bridge, walking the Dagger for ten minutes and trying to appear more relaxed than he felt for the sake of his crew. He wasn’t sure how well he’d succeeded.
Of course he could have used his link with the Azimuth and the crew to know whether he was convincing everyone, but he’d made absolutely certain that link was locked down as far as was possible.
He was finding things still leaked through sometimes, no matter how hard he tried to block everything, but that was very different from actively eavesdr
