“So now we go find uncle Caramon,” I finished, explaining my deal to Hao and Maia.

  Neither of them was happy with me. Maia because she disliked the risk involved in leaving all of our money with Young Voice, Hao because she disliked handing over an entire float pallet full of helion to anyone. She kept fiddling with it instead of letting Young Voice load it into a deep-green, bonded storage chamber he’d wheeled out from a stack of them by the magedowser.

  For a second, I’d thought Hao would clobber the load master apprentice, or that I’d have to pry her fingers from the pallet’s handle. Then she let go, glaring at him as he loaded and sealed the container.

  “Still don’t like it,” Hao grumbled, staring at the bonded container as if it had swallowed our money and refused to pass it. She clutched the flimsy printout with Young Voice’s code block, signature, and a smear from the inside of his cheek, in the hopes that genetic data would be more secure than the validated receipt he’d sent to my com.

  “Focus on the five kilos of helion it’s going to save us,” I said.

  Hao snorted.

  “All I can focus on is that the locker is blocking my tracker,” she said.

  “You put a tracker on our money?” I asked, incredulous. It was a silly thing to do, considering the clear vials of helion had gone into a bonded, secured, and very much shielded locker.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Hao said.

  “No, because a bonded locker is twenty Faraday cages one on top of the other,” I said. “They also work as armor, sound suppression, fire resistance. Any force strong enough to breach a bonded locker would melt it to slag.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Hao said, making a face. She sounded like a petulant toddler. Or a thwarted engineer.

  “You don’t have to like it,” I said, patiently. “You have to find the milling drills we need to buy.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Sintered milling presses,” Hao corrected, launching into an explanation of rubidium laser printing, which I didn’t understand but highly appreciated, because it made her stop complaining about leaving our money behind.

  Truth of life: find the right toy and you could distract anyone.

  The Raist’s cargo hold stretched before us, an endless expanse of wares and storage. Every few hundred meters, there would be ramps to higher and lower levels. I tried to guess the total extent of the loading space and failed. In the millions, or billions, of square meters. It made the Bucket’s cargo hold look like a drained swimming pool.

  Workers in dark green, with the Raist’s golden eyeball-on-a-stick insignia passed us without comment or interest. Visitors in a hundred different styles of informal ship’s dress, mostly variants on the multi-pocket pants-and-jacket combo, rode by on ped carts, boxy, white vehicles that zipped around on tiny wheels, the wheels louder than their electric engines.

  The carts looked comfortable, in four- or eight-seat configurations atop a raised cargo hold, whizzing passengers from white-marked parking and pick-up spaces next to every docking bay.

  I pushed the thought away. The carts were a waste of money. You could run faster than one if you pushed yourself. Besides, walking was good for you. And you got to see the sights.

  Like lots and lots of locked and guarded cargo containers. Still, we couldn’t afford the money.

  We passed one of the Raist’s warpstone engines. Unlike the Bucket’s open wake engines, these were enclosed, half-a-kilometer long oblongs that stretched across several levels. Their hulls were warded against impact, fire, breach, energy weapons.

  Masterful work, very old, the lines and curves still clean and sharp after centuries.

  No one built trade vessels any more. Not cost effective. Better to run long haulers one-tenth the Raist’s length, a thousandth of its cargo capacity.

  A lot faster, though, but boring. The Raist was void-lovingly amazing. If I could negotiate an inspection of the void engines into any purchasing contract we signed, I’d be happy for a lifetime.

  With magic, the inside is always more interesting than the outside. I angled, walking up to the engine’s armored outer shell, reaching out to touch it.

  A small, blue spark leaped out, painfully jolting my finger. I jerked back, searching for the source.

  Proximity ward, the size of my thumbnail, stamped into the engine’s steel casing every two meters, topping a limited strength force ward. That’s where the spark had come from. Brilliant solution, I’d have to remember it.

  I walked on, following the curve of the engine casing, happily engrossed in thoughts about how to create something like that for my own wards.

  That’s why I didn’t notice the men following us, until it was too late.