I grabbed for my pistol, the engraving drill slipping from my fingers. The move was pure instinct. An M3 against a ripstone. Crudmunching stupid.

  The hatchling shivered in his oxy-bag and whimpered at me. I wondered why I could hear him. The oxy-bag didn’t have a transmitter.

  Everything was slow, my mind cold and clear. Another flash of ripstone drilled into the wall, shredding it. Fist-sized pieces of shrapnel tumbled into the hall.

  We were going to die.

  Hao lay with her back to the ripstone flashes, still aiming the Hurmer through the crack in the crucible. The readout on the gun flashed a row of three zeroes. No power. She kept aiming, unaware.

  No ammunition. An army in front of us. A ripstone gun at our back. The hatchling trying to curl around my legs.

  Cold anger filled my gut, flowed over my back, drilled into my scalp. In that moment I hated Dordolio, hated his unknown mage, hated the dead grunts before us, the breaking yard, the void itself.

  Crudmunching voidmuckers if they thought we would go quietly into the dark.

  The magerifle was light in my hands, weighing less than smoke. It flowed up to my shoulder, the grip caressing my hand, the trigger meshing with my finger. Its wards blazed a furious red in my mind, painting the entire breaking yard the color of blood.

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  I ripped threads of force from the void around me, shoving them into the rifle, crushing the trigger at the same time, aiming at the disintegrating wall, the ripstone flashes, the mage sitting safe kilometers away. I wanted him dead and gone.

  The discharge was a roar in my mind, a ripping, tearing, shredding sound. Flame wards, razor wards, a thousand others I had no names for boiled through me and out the muzzle.

  I struck a table-sized chunk of steel wall that had been flying toward us, pulverizing it.

  My rage turned colder, a super-frozen lake of liquid nitrogen sloshing through me. Somewhere deep in my mind, a voice was screaming that I was burning myself out, that I was fainting, that I had nothing left to give. Its words were as empty as a winter night sky, distant pricks of light in a sea of darkness.

  I needed to remove that ripstone, needed it gone before it could disintegrate us. I couldn’t reach the ship. A magerifle couldn’t fire through tens of kilometers of empty space.

  But I didn’t need to reach the ship. I only needed to reach the ripstone.

  I conjured, pulling on all the threads around me, the void, my own life thread, the warmth that was Hao.

  And one other. A thread like nothing I had ever felt before, worming its way into my awareness. A hot thread, like a string made of lava, pulling the entire volcano after it.

  The hatchling, shoving his self into the magerifle.

  I melded with him, with the threads of void that I’d grabbed, with the rifle’s wards. Together, we pulled at the distant ripstone.

  A white flash, thick as my arm, shot toward us with no wall left to intervene.

  The rifle fired.

  The bolt joined with the ripstone flash coming at us, imploding it and being sucked back along it, to the ship, the ripstone enclosure.

  Last I had felt the enclosure, I’d been trying to thread a wet noodle through it. Now I was ramming a hard-edged sword of force into it with all the hate I could muster.

  The enclosure shattered.