Another ship headed toward us, from high front-portside. Slower than the big blip chasing us, and smaller, but coming in at an oblique angle.

  Too perfect to be a coincidence, coming in almost head-on. Unless we changed our heading, it would reach us in about a day.

  One ship in front, one ship in back, nothing else anywhere near. Things like this didn’t happen. That big ship following us had to have a transmission tower, had to be in contact with someone that could send a ship on an intercept course.

  They weren’t taking any risks. They wanted to box us in. But they were still far off. We could study them, and figure out their capabilities, then turn to an angle calculated to minimize their engine and position advantage, and run.

  “Why aren’t we turning?” Hao said. There was a bead of sweat on her temple. My own hair was spiked with wetness. The ventilation system in the cockpit had given out again. The readouts were steaming up.

  So much for having a mechanic on board.

  “Because they don’t know we can see them,” I said. “A regular scan wouldn’t discover them for hours. That means we’ll be able to study them a lot closer than they’d expect. Might give us an advantage later.”

  “Later, as in when they start shooting at us?” Hao said, a barb of stress in her voice. I’d never asked her why she’d been discharged from the Federal Navy. Being gun-shy would do it.

  “Later, as in when we start running,” I said. “We might spot a cargo fleet, or an armed refueling station not in the Bucket’s ‘pedia that we can head for. Anything that can give us some cover. We’re still powering on only two warpstones. They don’t expect us to have much more.”

  “I don’t expect us to have much more,” Hao said. “We haven’t calibrated the Rexards, and I wouldn’t trust that remaining trash-heap engine you keep calling an original part.”

  Which was true. The Rexards were new to the Bucket, the engines scavenged from an old frigate and much more powerful than anything the Bucket had ever possessed. In theory, with our low mass and a five-warpstone engine setup, we should be able to outrun anything in this sector, including a Fed navy fast picket. In practice, the Rexards had sat unused for ten years in a cave. Still, they were better than flying on nothing but warpdust and the occasional fragment of cracked warpstone that had powered my old engines. But I had serious doubts about whether the Rexards’ mounts would hold under stress.

  I had no intention of trying. Having your engines rip away from your ship is not conducive to long-term survival.

  “Do me a favor and grab a bottle of tea from the fridge?” I said.

  “I just got here,” Hao objected.

  “And I’m the captain,” I countered. “Also, the only one who can trim our magic sensor array.”

  Her mouth twisted like she’d swallowed a pound of ascerbic acid, but she unfolded from the couch.

  “Aye, sir,” she said, attempting a salute. Her hand smacked into the ceiling. “Voidmunching crud,” she cursed.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Get me a sandwich, too,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Then I pushed Hao from my awareness and focused on the sensor array.

  I needed to figure out who those two ships were, and how to get away from them. I needed to know if we could run, or if we’d have to fight.

  A fight would be very one-sided. The Bucket didn’t have any guns, except for the two portable plasma cannons in a hidden compartment beneath the main hallway. They’d be as effective as throwing rocks at void wyrms.

  But I could tune my sensor net, use it to actively explore the reflections those ships cast into the void…

  Using my mind to touch the void. It made throwing a rock at a void wyrm look smart. Which I’d done, once. The rock had bounced, the wyrm had not. Goes to show how smart I am.

  The Bucket’s sensor array consisted of strands of braided wards all over her hull. I had the advantage of knowing them perfectly, having warded the Bucket myself, which was more than most sensor techs did.

  Hopefully, it would keep my mind from freezing over. I’d seen what happened to mages who played too closely with the void. The lucky ones ended up mindless and drooling in a permanent vegetative state. The unlucky ones only got halfway there.

  I pushed that thought into a small room, closed the door, keyed it permanently shut, and told myself that everything was going to be fine. Then I focused on my wards, and began.

  Tuning wards is like pouring water. You can do it fast and sloshy, or slow and steady. I chose slow and steady, conjuring slim threads of force from the void.

  They came, thin icicles in my mind. I let them slip around my awareness, weaving them into braids, caressing the wards with them. Slowly, the reflections of the approaching ship started to build.

  Large, but not heavy. Slim, a sprinter.

  Mere impressions, nothing concrete. Feelings, mediated by the ever-present threads of force that crisscross infinity in their cold majesty. I directed the wards, up-tuned and down-tuned them, amplified the emissions from the approaching ship, cancelling out the distractions of our own.

  Hot engines, hot life. A feeling of confinement, enclosure, likely something powerful, driven by wards or stones. I focused on that thread, teasing it out from the multitude of others.

  It got easier as I probed, aided by skill, time, and the ship coming closer. The impression grew. A flow of potential power, stopped by a wall, an enclosure of counter-power around it. A weapon, likely. Magical. A flame cannon or void cutter.

  I needed to know which. Flame cannons were short-range weapons, horrible against stationary targets, but not much danger to us. A void cutter could kill you from a fraction of a light-year away. Far beyond the range of conventional munitions, if you could aim it, and keep it from burning out your mage’s mind.

  The wards were numerous, but not well designed. There were cracks. Maybe an up-gunned ship, some fringe warder kludging together the enclosure from stacks of interlocking wards. I probed the cracks, tapping, pushing, inserting the slimmest threads of void-borne force I could.

  My mind started going stale with the void’s cold, my attention flagging, going to stupid, irrelevant memories. The hatchling’s lightning-ozone smell. The way Hao had kept fighting in the tunnels beneath Jackson, half her calf blown away and bleeding. I tried ignoring them, kept pushing at the enclosure.

  There – a hole in the wardnet a fraction wider than the others. I let go of all threads but that one, focusing on it.

  It was like threading a needle a kilometer away, using a wet noodle. But I was the greatest wet-noodle wrangler the Academy on Shaya had ever produced. I snapped my wards just so, sending a minute wave of force along the void threads. Toward the approaching ship.

  The noodle whipped tight. My wards pushed it forward, through the crack.

  The thread of force flared, crackling all the way back to the Bucket, hitting my wards with waves of lightning, sending jagged white edges into my mind.

  I gagged, my throat constricting, choking off air to contain sudden nausea. My sensor array flared and burned, wards shattering all along its length. The approaching ships disappeared from the readout in green flares and accompanied by the fumes of burned polymer insulation. Something had overloaded in the Bucket’s wardframe.

  “Hao!” I gargled through the open door to the cockpit. Then I sank down into my couch and let darkness claim me.