We were still flying. That was the good news. The left engine still managed to tilt the void so that our little part of the universe slid forward toward infinity at around a hundred times the speed of light. Which was a fair speed for an average ship, but horrible for a low-mass hauler like the Bucket, running with an empty cargo hold.

  I sank down into my sticky pilot’s couch. My pants soaked up the last of the iced tea.

  “Voidmunching mugger,” I muttered.

  “What?” Hao asked, cramming herself into the cockpit. It still smelled of smoke.

  “Not you,” I said, and started fiddling with the controls. Cleanup could wait.

  The warning lights had dropped back to a comfortable yellow, with a few greens between them. Good enough. I’d made landings on all reds, flying on pure warpdust, and walked away. Well, limped away.

  The sensors were a bigger problem. They were gone, not even a shred of connection left. I tried conjuring a thread of force, feeling around the hull where the wards should have reflected it, but all I managed was conjuring back my headache.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “We’re blind,” I said.

  “Why?” Hao asked, tapping away at her station.

  It took all my restraint not to yell at her. I could feel sour bile at the back of my throat, clamoring to come up.

  “Because,” I said, raising a finger into the air and waving it around like a pontificating professor, trying not to let my despair into my voice, “the sensor net is dead.”

  “So use the recording,” Hao said.

  My finger stopped.

  “The what?” I said.

  Hao raised one of her eyebrows. She managed to convey a heap of meaning in that motion, ranging from contempt, to pity, to ironic surprise. Or maybe that was me reading things into it.

  “We’re recording every reading in the cockpit,” she said, tapping the wall where a panel was welded shut, marred by traces of an old sticker scraped off of it. “Standard feature on all the old FedSec-accredited ships. Goes into the black box, in case we blow up and someone cares enough to check why.”

  “Really?” I said. “I’m carrying recordings of everything I do?”

  “Only the last six hours,” Hao said. “And only if you know how to get at them.”

  “Please tell me you do,” I said. “And then figure out how to disable it without it looking deliberate.”

  Hao just grinned.

  It took her five minutes to restore the feed from the sensors.