“Ready?” I said.

  The two cracked stones from the right Rexard lay in a shielded blast compartment. Hao and I wore space suits, a real one for me, a sealed enviro-suit for Hao. I’d added a pair of wards to hers, to prevent leaks. It increased the heaviness in my head but also the likelihood of her survival if the Bucket tore open.

  Even the hatchling lay in an emergency oxy-bag, although I suspected he didn’t need it. Being mostly magic, void wyrms don’t follow the rules regular biological entities live by.

  “Ready,” said Hao, her voice thin through the enviro-suit’s cheap microphone.

  I hesitated, trying to force a spark of creativity, something that would avert this situation, turn it from nightmare to dream. Nothing came.

  We were traveling at just shy of a hundred c. We needed to reach a hundred and fifty, and keep it there, to make the graveyard before our pursuers.

  A final moment for the muse to magically hand me a perfect solution. It remained on vacation.

  “Go,” I said, and Hao transferred her engine readout to my station.

  One mostly good engine. One fueled by the warpdust embedded in the steel after the explosion. Mentally, I loosened my muscles one by one, running through my body from forehead to toes. The toes are important. A lot of people forget them.

  Then I extended my senses, summoned a thin thread of force, and brought up the power in the right Rexard.

  Slowly, slowly. Twenty volts, fifty, two hundred. At three-thirty, I felt a twinge in the void. At four hundred volts, the readout registered a fluctuation in the engine housing.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  We were getting thrust.

  The void was shifting a bit more, increasing our rate of slide. In my mind, the Bucket felt like a rock-hard egg sliding across a frying pan, greasy and hot at the same time.

  The engine wobbled, causing a shutdown warning to blink. I overrode the safety, coaxing a few more c of speed out of the engine. We were doing a hundred and forty.

  The right engine was at eleven hundred volts and wobbling. I kept pushing at it with my thread of force, jiggling it just so to keep it active, eating electricity and yielding motion. It wouldn’t take much more for it to unbalance.

  Time to bounce the engines off of each other. I increased the power to the left Rexard, using the echo it generated to prop up the right one.

  Stable at one hundred and fifty-two c. My jaw and shoulder blades unclenched. We’d made it.

  “They’ve increased speed,” Hao said. “We’ll get intercepted half an hour before we reach the outskirts of the graveyard.”

  I didn’t waste time on cursing. Instead, I increased the power to both engines.

  The wobble became a tremor, passing through the length of the Bucket to shake the cockpit, rattling my teeth. I bit my tongue, my mouth filling with the iron taste of blood.

  The thread of force I used to tap the right Rexard jerked and twisted. It felt like having a pair of heavyweight fighters holding a grudge match in my head, using my skull as the ropes.

  “They’re matching us,” Hao said.

  “How much?” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Four hundred c.” She sounded scared. Those were some powerful engines that big crudmuncher had.

  I pushed the left Rexard up to sixty-five percent. The echo pushed against the right, and I had to increase the power there, or let the engine be snuffed out.

  The tremor changed to a rattle. I felt myself bouncing in the couch. Black spots wiggled at the corners of my vision. Strangely, I smelled cinnamon.

  “Now?” I gasped, pushing the word out. We were doing two hundred c on warpstone dust.

  “They’re at five hundred c,” Hao said. “But we’ll make it. Ten minutes to spare. I think.”

  The thread in my head twanged. The Rexard had gotten a blowback. Not from the dust. It had to come from the left engine.

  “Go. To back,” I said. “Check. Left engine.”

  Hao ran from the cockpit. I focused on keeping my head intact, watching the time on the readout tick up. Slow, so slow. My teeth clacked as my head jerked from side to side. I could hold it together. Just a little bit more.

  The collision alarm howled.