“What’s happening?” Hao asked.

  The breaking yard shook. Vibrations traveled up my arms and legs, making me bounce, the magnetic soles of my boots skipping and sliding against the metal floor.

  “Ripstone,” I said. “They’re firing on the yard, breaking it up behind us.”

  It was like sitting in a conductive cage, watching lightning bolts slam into the material around you, or being dipped in static electricity. My teeth felt fuzzy, and clattered as the ripstone discharge blasted away pieces of the yard. The Bucket’s sensor readout was alive with white lines, and hard to read for all the shaking. I grabbed my engraving drill and moved to the wall behind us.

  Hao pulled me down. Moments later, something pinged from the wall, close to where I’d been standing.

  Of course. The grunts were to keep us pinned.

  Why had Dordolio decided to kill us? I had no idea.

  Except that ripstone was magic, as was the hatchling. Void wyrms are resilient, much more so than other creatures. They starve readily, and can be hurt by high-caliber munitions, but they eat magic, diffusing all but the most powerful spells. The hatchling might survive a near miss from a ripstone. We wouldn’t.

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  I scratched a ward, tried to imbue it, and had it shatter.

  Crud. Hadn’t happened since I was a student. The entire yard was vibrating, making my lines poor, jagged, unusable. I bent down, cutting over them, smoothing them where I could.

  Stupid. No ward would hold against a ripstone big enough to require a star ship to carry it. A foil could rip asunder regular wards, and it had only a tiny ripstone at its tip. A ship-based ripstone would pass through my best wards like a solar flare through morning mist.

  Think.

  I tried, tried gathering the facts, putting them together into some kind of solution. Nothing came.

  Hao’s Hurmer started flashing. I pressed my eye to the crack above her head, saw the grunts advancing. Grains of sand from the Hurmer disintegrated into pure energy when they struck the walls, and the armor of the grunts. Ten of them, powering through the vacuum on hand-held chemical rocket boosters.

  Crude. Effective. Hao’s Hurmer wouldn’t do squat against power armor.

  I cracked my second ward. The razor blast ripped away pieces of the crucible, flinging them after the cloud of void shards. It ripped into the troops, tumbling them, tearing holes in their armor. Venting air turned to plumes of glittering ice crystals, followed by dark blobs of blood. The chemical rockets went flying, pushing the suits wildly in all directions.

  My heart hammered, my mouth tasted like acid and bile. The power armors spun and tumbled, out of control. If anyone had survived the razor ward, they were playing dead.

  The last chemical rocket flared out, leaving behind a cone of orange-hot metal and a few dots of light in the darkness of the hall. One of the dead grunts rotated, his helmet lights drawing a shining path along the wall, round and round, over and over.

  A flash of light broke through the wall behind and above us.

  Dordolio’s ripstone had drilled into the room.