The recording of the sensor net served up a frozen image, more detailed than anything I’d ever seen before. No wonder I had a headache. When the engine blew, it sent a spike into the Bucket’s electric systems. It also sent a spike into the void, enough to overload the right-hand engine and cause it to go into catastrophic shutdown.

  Just like my head.

  I’d been holding the wardnet together with my mind, controlling spider-web-thin strands of force. Closest I could figure, the spike had overloaded them, but not enough to rip my mind to pieces.

  Instead, it had bounced off my shaking synapses, and given us a single sensor image of extreme resolution.

  “What’s that?” Hao said, pointing to a distant blip, over a parsec away.

  “A third ship,” I said. “Fairly small, but look at the signature. They’ve got a powerful wardnet, and it’s not sensors.”

  “Armor?” Hao said.

  “Or guns,” I said. “Likely both. And it’s boxing us in quite nicely.”

  Hao twisted, scraping her head against the ceiling.

  “You have a strange definition of the word nicely,” she said. “That looks like a frigate.” She pointed to the blip that had been following us, the big ship we’d seen two days ago.

  “Or a big hauler,” I said. “Those are engine wards, four of them.”

  The green blip had four big, straight spikes coming out the back. A direction ward, sending the backflow from the warpstones away from the ship.

  “Four means a cruiser,” Hao said.

  “Doesn’t make a difference,” I said. “I’ve seen mercenary haulers converted to gunboats. They could give a Federation cruiser a run for its money.”

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  “So what do we do now?” Hao asked.

  “Die,” I said. It came out harsher than I had intended, and I winced. Jokes too close to the truth weren’t jokes. “We’ll figure something out,” I said.

  “Like?”

  “Like we’ll figure something out,” I repeated. “Like study the ‘pedia and find a friendly port. Or planet. Or anything we can hide behind.”

  “Like that?” Hao said, pointing to a faint, greenish smudge on the sensor readout.

  “That’s just a smudge,” I said.

  “It has a mass trace. In the millions of tons.”

  “How do you know?”

  Hao pointed to her co-pilot’s readout. It displayed coordinate triplets and lines of statistics.

  “You hacked the sensor net?” I said, my eyebrows doing a credible imitation of Hao’s signature move.

  Hao snorted. She sounded remarkably like the hatchling when he was in a mood.

  “I repaired the connection,” she said. “Pulled the plugs, gave them an acid wash to remove the oxidation, and hooked everything together again. You really should maintain your ship better.”

  “It’s on my list,” I muttered. And it was. Right between ‘read more’ and ‘go to a restaurant’. Both of which fell a long way beneath ‘survive’ and ‘run away.’ “What is it?”

  “No idea,” Hao said. “But it’s high-volume, low-mass, and not a gas cloud. More like a bunch of pellets.”

  “Meteorite cloud?” I said.

  “In the middle of nowhere? No.”

  “So what?”

  “You’re the captain,” Hao said. “You tell me.”

  I paused, considered. I knew what my gut was telling me: get out of all this open nothing of space. My mind was blank, letting my gut decide.

  “Let’s go find out,” I said. “At worst, it’ll beat being run down in deep space with only the occasional hydrogen atom for cover. At best, we might find something to get us clear of this situation.”

  I did a quick calculation and keyed a new course. It felt good. Not the change of course, but having made a decision. The pad was sticky beneath my fingers. More tea to clean away. Either that, or I was sweating.

  A momentary sense of nausea and vertigo accompanied the course change. The engines were definitely out of whack.

  “Six hours,” I said. “If the engines hold, and our friends don’t try to chase us down faster.”

  Hao tapped her columns of data, shifting them around.

  “The closest ship would have to do better than five hundred c in order to reach us before then. They’re been doing a consistent three hundred.”

  “Doesn’t mean they can’t,” I said, rising from my couch. The sticky material pulled at my clothes uncomfortably, leaving a wet stain.

  “Where are you going?” Hao said.

  “To give us sensors,” I said. “But first I need new pants. You stay here.”

  “And do what?” Hao sneered.

  “Why, repair the pilot’s couch,” I said sweetly, “by removing every single stain you put on it.”

  “Crudmuncher,” Hao said, but she got out the cleaning kit.