The alarm brought us to the cockpit, a shred of rat burger still stuck between my teeth. I sucked at it, but it wouldn’t budge.

  There was a big, fuzzy blob visible on the readout. The four-engined hauler had realized we were running for structure, and decided to catch up to us.

  “Can we make it?” I asked.

  “Calculating.” Hao’s fingers danced over the readout, the views switching too fast for me to understand what she was looking at. After a moment, she stopped tapping.

  “No,” she said. “They’ll get us at least a light-month short.”

  “Can we push the engines?”

  “The left Rexard is already operating at fifty percent,” Hao said. “I can try bringing it up to sixty, with a reasonable chance of making it, but it will leave us almost four light-weeks shy.”

  “What about the right one? How bad was it?”

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  “The stones are cracked. It’s full of warpdust. Even if we could get it stabilized, the reverberations from the dust would shatter the stones.”

  An engine with cracked stones and full of warpdust. I’d flown on engines powered by warpdust before, but not while they held stones.

  Flying on warpdust wasn’t good for you, and required a skilled mage to constantly tune the output. And it tended to burn out when stressed. Or burn the mage’s mind. Still, I’d done it before. And it would keep us away from our pursuers. Dying now versus dying later.

  I blinked, thought, blinked again. Tried analyzing the situation logically and gave up. I’ve never been much for sequential logic. I prepared to go with my gut, and my gut told me to go crackers.

  “Let’s yank the stones from the right Rexard,” I said.

  Hao furrowed her brow.

  “What in the cold void for?” she said.

  I grinned.

  “Because I’m an expert at flying on warpdust,” I said.

  Hao put her head in her hands.

  “That’s the dumbest suggestion I’ve heard in a long time,” she said.

  “You got a better idea?” I said.

  She just shook her head.

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