“You destroyed them,” Hao whispered, her mouth slack, the bottle of tea hanging limply from her fingers. “Wow.”

  I shook my head. Bad mistake. My vision turned tunnel, blackness encroaching at the edges. A wave of bile crawled up my throat. I shut my eyes, willing myself not to puke, or faint.

  Coldness flowed over my forehead. It made me snap to alertness, heart drumming, breath catching in my throat.

  Hao stood beside me, holding the bottle of iced tea to my head. As I calmed, I realized it felt nice, physical cold overriding the internal, crystalline, paralyzing cold of the void.

  “Thanks,” I croaked, my throat raw, like I’d been screaming all day.

  “How?” Hao said.

  I took the bottle from her, unscrewed the cap, drank. Lemon, sugar, lime, the bitter blackness of the tea.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Destroy them, I mean. Burned out the sensor array.”

  Hao glanced at the empty sensor readout.

  “So they’re not gone?”

  “Only invisible.”

  “Crud,” she said, disappointed.

  Her disappointment annoyed me. It shouldn’t have, but I’d liked the idea that she'd thought me powerful enough to destroy a starship with my mind. This whole having-a-crew thing was going to my head. Soon I’d start wearing one of those ridiculous white caps with stars, like the Federal Navy used.

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  “We can’t be world-class chefs, all of us,” I said sourly.

  “Point taken.”

  She didn’t sound apologetic. But at least she had the decency to grimace, which I took as an apology. One takes one’s victories where one can, and all that.

  “They had a ripstone,” I said. “A big one in a warded enclosure.”

  “What does that mean?” Hao asked.

  “No idea,” I said. “But it can’t be good. Best case, they’re hauling it to be cut up for mounts. Worst case, it’s a complete weapon, a ship-scale foil.”

  Hao raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Is that even possible?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. But as worst cases go, that’s not the worst worst case I can come up with, only the worst plausible.”

  And it was bad enough. Ripstone was like a magerifle, a bullet traveling through the void. My foil, with its tiny ripstone fastened at the tip, would cut through a ship’s armor plate. What a ship-sized piece of ripstone could do, I didn’t even want to think about.

  I drained the last of the tea. The bottle smelled of lemon. Good days, for as long as we had concentrate left. After that, it would be synthesized ascorbic acid and vat-generated polysaccharides, assuming we lived that long. Oh, the joys of the modern world.

  “What do we do now?” Hao asked.

  “Run, without appearing that we’re running. If they figure we’ve spotted them, they might decide to use that ripstone on us. We need to alter our course without it being obvious. It’ll buy us some time to get the sensor net up to basics, enough to let us see what we’re running from. After that, we need to find an inhabited planet with anti-piracy laws. Either that, or a mercenary fleet that can be bought with eight hundred grams of helion and a small shipment of vanilla.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I’ll let you know when it happens,” I replied.

  She snorted. “Your sense of humor is terrible, captain.”

  “It would be a lot better if I knew how to turn away without letting our hunters know they’ve been seen.”

  I lifted the bottle, realized it was empty, and tried to lick the last drops of tea from the rim. There weren’t any.

  “That’s easy,” Hao said. “All we need to do is blow out one of our engines.”

  I stared at her, the remains of the lemon tea suddenly bitter in my mouth.

  “You want to blow up the Bucket?” I growled, with all the self-control I could muster.

  Apparently, it wasn’t all that much. Hao recoiled, tiny motion, but enough to make me feel bad. Anger is no way to treat crew.

  “Only a small part of it,” she said. “Unless you have a better idea, sir.”

  I didn’t.