Excerpt: Prospect

Maran accelerated. He saw Hol closing in on his position and let loose on the throttle, but it was slow to respond—the Radia engines were notorious for being sluggish to react to sudden inputs. There was a reason they were an afterthought addition to second-rate freighters, after all. He fired as soon as his sensors showed he was in range, but Hol’s blaster fire was already away. At impact it was impossible to tell whose bolts took the rock apart, but neither of them noticed. Because by the time the rock was separated into its elemental components and dissipated in a rusty cloud, Maran had overcorrected his trajectory and surged—faster than he expected, because his engines had finally provided a burst of speed—into Hol’s flight path.
It was all Hol could do not to collide dead-on with the other ship. His experience told him that Maran would pull up, despite being on a convergent course, so Hol jabbed his controls away from him to force his own vessel down. His experience told him that doing so would angle his ship, and therefore its deflector shield, sharply enough against the other freighter that the impact force of their mutual velocity would be softened by the change in vectors and the cushion of the shields. His experience told him this would create a jolting collision of artificial atmosphere, the pressure of which would hurt like hell but keep the hulls from physically colliding. His experience told him that afterward, when his breath came back, he would berate himself and have to figure out how to explain to the soldiers in whom he was trying so hard to instill discipline that he’d made a poor decision, but that physically everyone would be just fine and they’d move on to learn from the event.
Hol’s experience was wrong.