“Twenty percent,” Hao said, shifting in her co-pilot’s couch, trying to cram her head into a more comfortable position. The ceiling didn’t oblige.

  I shifted in my own couch, luxuriating in the way it adjusted, reforming itself around my body. The readouts showed all green, with a few oranges and a single white, where the missing center engine would have been.

  “Fusion core fine,” I said. “Go to fifty.”

  Hao gave me a look from beneath her bushy eyebrows.

  “We’ve got a full cargo hold,” she said. “If the engines go unstable…”

  She didn’t finish the thought. I merely smiled at her.

  “We’re hauling eleven hundred tons of reclaimed armor plate,” I said. “The only thing that can break back there are the crates of vanilla, and they’ve got cubic meters of steel protecting them.”

  She raised one of her eyebrows, but obediently increased the power.

  The engines ran smooth, the Bucket flying stable. I conjured a thread of force from the void, not doing anything with it, just holding it in my mind, feeling for irregularities in the engines’ echoes.

  Nothing. The rebalanced warpstones hummed along, providing a hot, slightly greasy feeling. I let the thread go, and it dissipated from my mind like a string of melting snowflakes. Even the ventilation in the cockpit functioned somewhat, a weak wafting of slightly stale air. We’d have time to repair it during our journey. I wasn’t going to stop anywhere until either the supplies or the helion started running out, and by then we’d be in a quadrant where no one had heard about a Jake Nobody shipping a void wyrm hatchling in a rust-bucket ship. And we’d have a lot of imbued armor, and a much better sensor net. I’d make sure of that.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Engines at fifty percent,” Hao said. “Speed at three hundred c.”

  A light-year in a day. Our bow wave pushing aside anything we might encounter. The ship graveyard behind us. Two working engines, another two scavenged ones waiting in the cargo bay to be installed in the top position. The hatchling asleep in his basket, the void carrying us, and nothing on the sensors.

  Freedom.

  “How high do you think we can go?” I asked.

  “Captain?” Hao’s other eyebrow joined the first. She tapped the readout, shifting views without doing anything. They all seemed fine to me. “Is that wise?”

  “Better to stress test the engines now, while no one is chasing us,” I said.

  “Those grunts from the Gold and Carnelian—” Hao began, but I interrupted her.

  “They’ll take months to reach the closest port in that shuttle,” I said. “And it’s too small to have a transmission tower. We’ve got everything under control. Throttle up, and let ‘er rip.”

  “Whatever you say,” Hao said, pushing the power indicator on the readout.

  Sixty percent. Seventy. Eighty. By ninety, we were doing close to seven hundred c, with a thousand tons of mass in our hold.

  “Everything under control,” I said.

  A faint burned smell filled the cockpit. I sniffed, looked around, sniffed again. Definitely burned.

  “Are we on fire?” I asked.

  Hao tapped through the readouts. None of them indicated anything amiss. The smell of burning grew stronger.

  Burning flour.

  “Crud!” I yelled, jumping out of my pilot’s couch and grabbing a fire extinguisher.

  There was a slight haze in the corridor, a sticky, sweet-smelling smoke seeping out from the mess. It became a torrent when I keyed the door open. The fire alarm started beeping. My vanilla cake was overflowing the pan and dripping down onto the hot plate.

  I tapped the kitchen readout, keying the oven off, increasing the ventilation in the mess.

  “Hey captain,” Hao hollered behind me, “does this mean I can start cooking again?”

  It was going to be a very long journey.

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