The largest structure turned out to be a breaking yard: a squat, dark, circular tower in space, two kilometers long, spiky with protruding industrial assembly arms. The center was hollow, but not all the way through. The Bucket’s radar ping reflected from a solid wall about fifteen hundred meters in.

  We anchored some five hundred meters inside, clamping the Bucket to an industrial-sized mooring wider than the Bucket was tall, making us a tiny silver droplet against the darkness of the yard.

  I shut down the engines and the fusion core. It might buy us a few more minutes while the enemy ship searched for us. And without power, the Bucket wouldn’t be a threat. They might leave her alone.

  We spent a short time in my gun locker. I wished I’d had some serious firepower, something like power armor with a rail gun. Instead, I had a collection of well-maintained human-portable firearms.

  I forced Hao to take my Hurmer sandgun, a short, bulky submachine gun that fired ionized grains of sand, accelerating them to near light speed. A single power charge held a thousand rounds, and we had three. The Hurmer was lethal against unarmored opponents, and decently effective in spray-and-pray mode. I didn’t have high hopes against trained, armored mercenaries.

  Hao had always said she was crud with guns, so I also lent her my flameblade. She had proven herself good in hand-to-hand, and a magic knife beat her preferred crowbar. My hand hovered over my foil, but I left it in the safety of my gun locker.

  Instead, I took my rifle.

  There are few weapons that carry as much mythology as the magerifle. Most of it is false, silly, or plain wrong. A magerifle can’t bring down a space ship in orbit, can’t fire around corners, can’t shoot flesh-eating magic darts or any of the other idiotic things you see in the adventure vids. I’d explained as much to Hao when she’d become ecstatic upon hearing that I had one. A magerifle isn’t a magic weapon, merely a weapon powered by magic.

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  But it is also a piece of warded tech that requires no ammunition and can blow a hole in an armored suit. It has a number of other perks, like the fact that it can fire through the void, bypassing inconvenient matter, such as armor. As long as you keep pushing force into it, a magerifle can keep killing without jamming, overheating, unbalancing, disrupting, or burning out.

  There’s a reason why the common name for people who carry them is ‘slayer.’

  The second to most common name is ‘idiot.’ Because that’s the effect of pushing too much force through your head into anything. There are many ways to burn out your brain, and smashing force into a rifle in the middle of combat sure is one of them. Adrenaline makes you forget how dangerous a magerifle can be, and then you forget everything.

  Still, after a magefoil, the magerifle is the most effective piece of killing machinery known to man that doesn’t involve nuking the planet from space.

  I tried not to think about that. The Syndicate crews or bounty hunters, whichever they were, that were chasing us wouldn’t nuke the yard. They wanted the hatchling alive, because a live void wyrm was worth a kiloton of helion. They would come in person.

  And in armor. I tried not to think about that, either. I didn’t even have a working mageshield.

  Time to go.

  I added a bag of grenades to our loadout, closed the gun locker, stuffed a pair of ration bars in my side pocket, keyed the computer to lock everything down, changed my mind, grabbed the last bottle of tea from the fridge, changed my mind again, added a Mino M3 heavy-caliber pistol and four magazines to my pack, locked everything down again, and shut off the emergency power the Bucket had been running on, leaving only the com and the sensors active. As an afterthought, I snatched up the remains of my mageshield from my cabin. The armored leather jacket that held it was whole if old, but the shield had more holes than a salt shaker. Still, it might provide some protection. I wrapped it around the hatchling’s oxy-bag.

  With the gravity in the Bucket turned off, we went weightless. It helped us maneuver the sleeping hatchling and our loads into the airlock.

  Space greeted us with a sea of stars, and a wall of darkness.