Attacked By Eels

The Wanderer-7 was cutting through a thin ribbon of ancient basalt dust that drifted lazily between two minor asteroid clusters. 

Leo sat in the command throne with his hands resting easy on the armrests, half listening to Jin-Ah and Aoi murmur through their final approach vectors.

…The feeling at the base of his spine snapped taut.

It came on hard and sudden, an iron grip closing around his spine like a coiled spring, and it yanked his whole awareness toward the forward canopy with violent urgency. 

The faint curious twitch he'd felt in the Boiling Belt had been a whisper however this was a hand on the back of his neck shoving his face toward the dark.

His eyes narrowed. 

Before any sensor could make a sound, he drove both bare hands into the bio-synthetic crystal cradles in the armrests, and his mind locked into the corvette's neural bus in a blinding fraction of a second.