You can’t collide with anything in the void. You don’t travel in the void. The warpstone twists the void, and the void brings real space with it. In theory, you don’t move at all.

  In practice, you’re traveling at several hundred times the speed of light. The void bubble pushes aside the hydrogen atoms that crowd the emptiness of space. The occasional micrometer-sized dust particle gets swept away, too. Anything that does make it into the bubble of void-encased real space will retain its regular, physics-mandated sub-light speed, as will you.

  The problem arises when you encounter larger particles, in the millimeter or even centimeter range.

  They aggregate.

  At sub-light speed, you might get hit by one or two, if you’re unlucky. Now increase that by a thousand-fold, and you’re pelted by a rain of particles, some large enough to go in through the Bucket’s nose and out through the rear cargo bay, turning everything inside into so much scrap metal and pulped meat.

  A trained pilot would reverse the engines, brake to a halt, and get caught by the big ship trailing him. But I’m not a trained pilot. Everything I know is self-taught.

  By the time I realized what was happening, the Bucket had been hit twice, small particles smashing into the nose heat shield, speed turning them into sledgehammer blows. E equal mc-squared is a pain.

  My concentration slipped, and the Rexards started jerking against each other, the vibrations coming through the floor tossing me around in the pilot’s couch. Prudence won over the gut instinct telling me to run and I cut back on the power.

  Our speed dropped from two hundred c, to one-fifty, then one-twenty.

  Something big hit the Bucket, ripping away a piece of the heatshield. It whizzed past the front window, making me duck uselessly, a black shadow with glowing orange edges.

  I wished we didn’t have viewports. Armored or not, a centimeter-sized object traveling at fifty thousand kilometers per second, relative, would go through the ports like a plasma beam through water.

  Still, I had to keep pushing, hoping the ship behind us would follow safety regulations and brake before it caught up to us. If we got inside the range of their guns, they’d disable us, or run us down, merging our void bubbles and boarding.

  Another particle hit the heat shield, but this one got deflected by an impact ward. The ward flared and died, sending a momentary spike of cold pain into my already pounding head.

  Something big loomed on the scanners. I cut back to a hundred c. That was still almost two billion kilometers per minute, meaning we’d cross an average-sized star system in the time it took to brew a cup of tea.

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  Too fast – much too fast. Small particles smacked into the steel of the Bucket like submachine gun rounds and pinged off. We had to cut back.

  But I couldn’t power down while we needed to escape. Our only hope was to hold out long enough for the pilot of the big bastard behind us to feel the tension and brake, and then we could brake too, hoping the collapsing bow wave wouldn’t smash us. We were playing a game of follow-me-chicken, while flying blind.

  I needed to see. I needed to know where the densest clouds of particles were, and avoid them.

  Three threads of cold void-borne force danced in my mind, jiggling the Rexards. I extended myself, searching for a fourth, caught it. This one I sent into the sensor net.

  No images. Too low resolution for that… but a feeling. Clouds of pressure, heading our way. Dense clouds before us, above, beneath, to the left.

  There. A slightly lower density to the right. I adjusted the engines, changed heading.

  The pinging lessened.

  I pressed the wardnet until my head echoed with pain so cold it felt hot, my closed eyelids twitching, the course changes pushing the Bucket through a narrow tunnel between the clouds of matter.

  It dead-ended.

  A massive cloud of particles hanging in space before us. We’d crash through it, and it through us. We had to stop.

  No. Not now. Had to get away from the pursuers.

  I waited for what felt like half a minute, though it was most likely half of that. The feeling that we were about to hit something big got stronger the entire time. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I cut power to the Rexards, idling them at five percent capacity.

  The void around the Bucket started unbending. This was a crucial moment. If there were too many particles when the void bubble went flat, they wouldn’t be deflected.

  Another dust particle hit the heatshield, producing a screech like shearing metal. A second got deflected by the wards. I cursed the fact that I hadn’t worked on the physical wards more. What good is magic protection if a simple rock can hole you?

  Our speed dropped, dropped, dropped some more. We were a light-day out from the graveyard proper. There shouldn’t have been this many particles out here.

  Unless someone had twisted the void in some very bad ways. There’s a reason nobody wants to stand behind a warpstone engine. The wake can rip pretty much anything to pieces, and send those pieces hurling away at several times the speed of light before the void unbends.

  Our speed kept dropping, and with it the amount of debris hitting us. At ten c, the bow wave collapsed, sending a shower of particles into and past the Bucket. I felt the wave go, like surfacing after a deep dive, cold water cascading off my head, and I threw all the threads I’d been using to jiggle the warpdust in the Rexard into the front wards, flaring them.

  Another trick I’d never been taught. The flare shattered most of the wards, removing my ward-net, but it stopped the rain of particles that we had built up, destroying or deflecting them all.

  The Bucket fell silent. The readout said our air pressure was good. No holes. I leaned back, my helmet against the pilot’s couch, and exhaled. My mouth still tasted like blood, and my nose was full of that strange smell of candied cinnamon.

  “I’ll get you a tea,” Hao said, her voice shaky over the com.

  I turned, saw her looming in the door to the cockpit. The red warning lights blinking all over our readouts reflected from her face shield.

  “You been there long?” I said.

  “Long enough to know that you’re the best cracking void-space navigator I’ve ever seen,” Hao said. “Also crudmunching insane. Sir.”

  Just before she turned away, I noticed how pale she was. Her legs wobbled a bit as she walked to the mess.

  Long enough, indeed.