I put down the drill, the tiny, high-speed engraving head gouging a slim white line in my workbench. I didn’t mind. The black polymer top was already scarred with dozens of such lines. I ran my fingertip over the curve engraved in the thick slab of steel spaceship armor plate, feeling for any rough edges.

  I take my work seriously. It’s what keeps me alive.

  The ward engraved in the armor plate felt solid, the edges sharp, the middle smooth. I relaxed my mind, sensing the flow of magic around me, then conjured a thread of force from the void through which the Bucket was traveling.

  It came – a tingly, cold, brittle, scraping along my mind – and I fed it into the plate. The ward shimmered a faint blueish green, then faded into the gray of simple nano-layered steel as the thread dissipated.

  The ward didn’t imbue. Didn’t shatter, either.

  Good enough. I’d imbue it tomorrow, when I wasn’t so tired and my mind wasn’t so foggy.

  I forced myself away from the table. I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to keep living and breathing. Having half the sector’s bounty hunters and Syndicate crime bosses after you, and the Federals as well, is quite the motivation.

  Not that I didn’t deserve it. In my previous life, if I’d heard that some Jake Nobody was flying around in a half-derelict spaceship with a live void wyrm hatchling sleeping in a dog basket in the cabin, I’d have chased me, too.

  The hatchling snuffled, as if he’d heard my thoughts. Which wasn’t impossible. Then again, nothing is impossible when you don’t know the rules. And as far as I could tell, aided by the admittedly poor encyclopedia in the Bucket’s memory banks, I was the first human to be the guardian of a wyrm hatchling.

  What I’d figured out was that he slept for weeks on end, ate ridiculous amounts of protein, and liked to stick close to me. Which I liked, too. Warding was less lonely with the hatchling around. Even magic felt different, the threads of force I conjured from the void warmer. Or maybe that was the wishful thinking of an addled mind. Either way, he was fairly small, for a void wyrm – the size of a very large dog, a scaly, black lump curled up in the corner of my cabin.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The cabin also contained my bunk, my leisure station, my sonic shower, and my workbench. Which said pretty much everything one needed to know about the Bucket, the wisdom of my career choices, and what I thought of safety inspections.

  Well, maybe not the last part. I’m big on gun safety. Especially when I’m on the receiving end.

  The hatchling snuffled again – a deep, wet sound. This time, I sniffed, too. There was something strange in the air.

  The Bucket usually smells like the freight hauler she is: polished steel, conducting polymers, ozone, and that weird, vibrating, slightly hot-and-greasy vibe the warpstone engines give off.

  This was different. This smelled burnt.

  Smoke.

  I jumped from the bench, grabbing the fire extinguisher and slapping the door opener at the same time. There was a slight haze in the main corridor, muting the light from the dual strips in the ceiling. The air was all cloying and sticky, like pulverized sweets.

  I jogged toward the mess, which was a room half the size of my captain’s cabin. It was painted a soothing pastel green. Or rather, it had been painted a soothing pastel green, at the start of this voyage.

  I keyed the door open and lifted the fire extinguisher, letting loose a short fwoosh of foam through the widening gap.

  “Crudmunching voidsucker!” Hao yelled from inside.

  She was two heads taller than me, and broader in the shoulders to boot, having been born and raised on a high-gravity world. My mechanic, co-pilot, and crew, but definitely not cook. The soot streaks staining the no-longer-pale-green walls were ample evidence of that.

  “Didn’t I tell you to leave the stove alone?” I said.

  Hao grunted, wiping foam from her bushy eyebrows.

  “Got tired of eating reheated cans of Jackson preserves,” she said.

  “So you decided to burn down my ship.”

  That got me a glare.

  “Well, captain,” she said, with a navy emphasis on the cap in captain, “I can’t learn to cook unless I try. And you can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  “No, but I can blame you,” I said. “You are to leave the kitchen to someone who doesn’t burn it down. You should have called me.”

  Glare. Shrug. Annoyed quirking of one bushy eyebrow.

  “Didn’t you have important work to do?” she said. “Like trying to make sure our rear won’t be shot off the moment we turn down the engines?”

  I had to give her that. Warding those armor plates would keep us from getting killed. Letting Hao cook would only poison us, and possibly burn us. Priorities.

  “That big bastard still on our tail?” I asked.

  “A good half-parsec away,” Hao said. “We wouldn’t even see him if your sensors weren’t so crudmunching good.”

  I noticed that she still said your about anything having to do with the Bucket. I had hoped she’d settle in, and start seeing herself as crew, and seeing the Bucket the way I did. Like home.

  “Any idea what kind of ship that is?” I asked.

  “None.”

  I sighed.

  “Heat me up a can of Jackson’s finest vat beans,” I said. “I’m going to the cockpit.”

  It was going to be another long day.