“How is this going to help us?” I asked.

  We stood in the cargo bay beneath the central engine, the smallest and weakest of the Bucket’s three warpstone engines. The steel gantry that circled the bay bulged here, creating an oblong platform about the size of the cockpit with an even lower ceiling. I almost reached it but Hao walked bent over, like an old man beneath a bag of troubles. But at least she didn’t need a ladder to reach into the engine.

  She’d opened the covers to the engine compartment, two massive, airtight doors that swung down on either side of the platform and would supposedly prevent an exploding engine from sending shrapnel and vacuum into the hold, according to the standard spec sheet for a Mino Javelin light hauler. I never tried it. The locking clasps holding the doors up looked a bit slim to me, but I’m no engineer. The engine above whirred – not quite a purr, but not the dry rattling of an engine fueled by clumped-together warpstone dust. That sound I knew by heart, and it paid visit to my nightmares from time to time.

  The sound of a working, fully channeling warpstone was a low, regular hum – soothing, as long as you didn’t consider that you were sticking your head decimeters away from a machine that turned electric current into pure magical distortion, causing the void itself to slope. It also created a wake that tore anything material into chunks of microscopic dust. The smell of ozone leaking past the engine housing made my hair stand on end. Either that, or the engine wasn’t grounded, creating a field of static electricity. The air felt slightly greasy.

  “Well?” I said.

  Hao kept poking the engine with a long, slim rod that held a bunch of electronics. It beeped.

  “I can destabilize the torsion bars,” she said. “That should cause a vibration in the warpstone housing that will cause the stone to shift in the energy field. It will create ripples in the wake that anyone with sensors can pick up. We turn, and they think our engine is unbalanced and we’re having trouble flying straight.”

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  “Great!” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  Hao gave me one of her looks. Her eyes were very blue, and she had the uncanny ability to make them go ice cold at will.

  “There’s a downside,” she said. “Sir.”

  “Isn’t there ever,” I said. “The part where you blow us up.”

  “Only partially. I can rig the shutdown sensitivity to cut the power before the stone shatters. I think.”

  I shivered, only somewhat due to the chill in the cargo bay. No sense in wasting helion to heat it – we weren’t hauling anything.

  Hao tapped on the engine housing with her rod. The vibrations traveled down the stabilizers to my hand, crawling over my skin like ants. Hundreds of years, thousands of planets, and all humanity had truly accomplished was spreading ants and rats across the universe.

  “Captain?” Hao said. “A decision?”

  I tried not to think about shattering warpstones. I had three more, an amazing wealth. And I had two other working engines, unless the shattering stone caused a feedback in the void that cracked the others. A lump of cold tea sloshed around in my stomach. Either that, or I had an overactive imagination that kept making me think about shattering warpstones.

  “How sure are you?” I asked. “That you won’t shatter it?”

  Hao thought, which instantly endeared her to me. There’s a reason it’s called “insanely brave.” Insane brave people tend to die without thinking.

  “I’m reasonably sure,” she said after a moment.

  “Meaning?” Depending on the speaker, reasonably meant anything from ninety-nine percent plus to a coin toss.

  “I’d say we’re good in nineteen cases out of twenty,” Hao said. “The twentieth case, seventeen out of twenty the engine burns out on shutdown. The rest, the stone shatters.”

  So in just shy of one percent of the cases, we might go voidmunching crackers. Meaning that in ninety-nine percent of the cases, we’d buy ourselves a few hours to figure something out. I didn’t like the odds. I never like the odds, which is why I never gamble. Hard work, low risk, and die peacefully in my very old age, that’s my life goal.

  But we needed repairs, needed information, needed to figure out how to get away from two ships we could no longer see. Or we could let them catch us. And kill us, most likely. Yes, that was paranoid, but paranoid had kept me alive since running from the Academy. And as long as there is life, there is hope and all that. Dying later beats dying now.

  “Do it,” I said.

  I was always crud at games of chance.