"I don't like it," Hao said, fidgeting in her spot in the co-pilot's couch, making it twist from side to side. The couch's bearings squeaked annoyingly.

  "What's not to like?" I said. "We're two hundred light-years from Jackson, nobody knows us, and nobody has heard of the Bucket of Dice. Besides, we can't stay alone forever. Don't you want to see other people?"

  The collision alert kept winking orange on my pilot's readout, which was the ship's way of saying that we were going to pass through a star system. Other than that, the entire board was green. Engines green, sensors green, power green. Even the auxiliary connectors were signaling green, something I didn't think was possible on the Bucket. Before Hao signed on, I hadn't even known we had auxiliary connectors or a secondary power system. The Bucket had been a junkyard salvage when I got my hands on her. Hao had done wonders for it in the past four months of travel.

  "Or," said Hao, "they've heard of the Bucket of Diamonds, an unarmed Mino StarWorks Javelin, carrying a live void wyrm free for the taking. And I like people, but this is a boiling pot."

  "A hatchling," I corrected. "And he's not free for the taking. A boiling pot would be nice. Something with spices."

  Hao gave me one of her trademark icy cold looks from her too-blue eyes. Tall, skilled, and opinionated, that was my mechanic-slash-co-pilot.

  "Please remind me to remind you of those words after we get killed and your hatchling gets stolen," she said. Revise that to very opinionated.

  "Noted.” I rolled my shoulders, creaked my neck. I’d spent way too long in the pilot’s seat. “No one's going to get killed. News doesn't travel two hundred light-years in four months. Nobody travels two hundred light-years in four months."

  "We did," Hao corrected.

  "We are desperate." Which had been true. We’d been chased, shot at, blown up, and generally maltreated. Then we’d had four months of travel to repair, ward, and eat every scrap of fresh and frozen produce we’d had. Now we were only low on supplies, which was a clear improvement.

  We had a cargo bay full of vanilla and warded armor plates. The armor plates were three, five, and ten centimeter thick slabs of nanoformed steel warded against various things, mostly impact. Good work, which I should know, having done the wards myself. Not fancy, but something a small, independent trader might have for sale.

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  The vanilla was organic, planet-grown, and wonderfully aromatic. I was crudmunchingly tired of it.

  But the Bucket had undergone a transformation. The command couches were light cream, not their old color of weak coffee. The system’s status readout shone green. The engines were calibrated. The ventilation was up to spec and its soft hum filled the cockpit with cool, dry air that, for some strange reason, occasionally smelled faintly of cinnamon. We even had a strong sensor net and good armor bolted on, much stronger than the wards I was willing to sell. All in all, it was a major improvement on how things stood four months ago.

  Except for the final leg of our journey.

  "Rimont is a great place," I said. "A quarter of a million citizens, major mining hub, no less than four gas giants extracting helium-3, and most importantly, no Goldilocks zone planet within fifty light-years. Meaning that our vanilla, which I assume you're as tired of as I am, will be worth a kiloton of helion."

  Which was an exaggeration, helium-3 not being all that much cheaper even in a production system, and us having only four crates of vanilla, but I wanted Hao to see my point.

  "I still don't like it," she said, her bushy eyebrows drawing together. "We could find a small trading post-"

  "Where we would be remembered," I interrupted. "And when the stories about us reach that place, people would put two and two together and add up to Syndicate involvement. Or the Feds. We'd get as hunted as before. There are advantages to pots."

  Hao twisted in her couch, the bearings squeaking again. She'd fixed our warpstone engines. She'd re-cut the couch's supports, lowering it and allowing her to sit without cramming her head into the ceiling, and suddenly she couldn't fix a squeaky bearing?

  "Will you stop that? It's annoying."

  "Sorry, captain," Hao said, putting the stress on the cap in captain the way the navy did it. In the past four months, I'd discovered that she could have a passive aggressive streak a kilometer wide when it suited her. Fortunately, it wasn't permanent but rather a negotiation tactic. She twisted her co-pilot's couch. The bearing squeaked.

  I sighed theatrically.

  "Fine," I said. "Be a voidmunching crudsucker. But please give me a reason why we shouldn't go to Rimont."

  She fell silent, staring out through the Bucket's high-tempered quartz viewports. The viewports were ten centimeters thick, and warded around the edges. Outside, the stars crawled by, tiny specs of light in a sea of darkness, shifting ever-so-slowly to our rear.

  "Well?" I said.

  Hao shrugged. "I just don't like it."

  "I'll keep that in mind," I said. "Dock, sell, buy, refit, eat, leave. Nothing more."

  "Oath?"

  "Oath," I replied. "Unless they have a swimming pool, in which case all oaths are off."

  That got me another raised eyebrow. And to think it had just resumed its normal position.

  "What?" I said. "Wouldn't you want to spend some time in a civilized place, eating well-cooked meals, sleeping in a decently-sized bed, and swimming whenever you wanted?"

  The second bushy eyebrow joined the first. "You'd jump in a hole filled with water? One deep enough to require a breathing apparatus to survive?"

  "And I'd enjoy every second of it."

  "You're a very strange person, captain," Hao said, but she said it with a smile.