I found Hao in the left engine nacelle. It wasn’t a proper nacelle, since the connecting carrier was big enough to walk through, but it kept the engine mostly separate from the body of the Bucket.

  Whatever marketing genius over at Mino StarWorks had decided to call the model a Javelin should have been beaten to death by the engineering and design teams. The Bucket was a flat-topped, flat-bottomed tub with a rising rear-loading ramp, meaning that it tapered to something that, from the correct angle, if you were deeply drunk, might conceivably be called a spear tip. In the rear. The front was rounded, mostly ablative heatshield to facilitate atmospheric entry.

  The Bucket was a bulbous, ugly, silvery thing that smelled of hot metal and scorched polymers, and had saved my life more times that I cared to count. I loved it.

  “Hey,” I said, startling Hao into dropping the dowsing rod she was using to snoop around the engine.

  “What in the deep void are you flying on?” she blurted out.

  “Warpstone,” I said, gracing her with a savage grin, all teeth. The only people allowed to talk down the Bucket was me, myself and I.

  “Warpdust more like,” she said. “There’s barely enough to register on the dowser.”

  I shrugged. “You use what you have. I use electroactive biopolymers to bake it into usable pieces, mostly polysaccharides.”

  Hao raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Because they're conductive but non-ionizing?” she said.

  “And harden just nicely by drying,” I said. “And because they’re plant-based, they conduct magic almost as good as living tissue.”

  I stopped talking, giving her plenty of time to reply. Like why she’d entered my ship without my leave. I might have pointed out the amount of wards I'd engraved on the Bucket, but since they hadn’t triggered when the thieves entered, I guessed that Hao wasn’t worried about them. Either that, or she hadn’t thought that a mage-ship might differ from your regular junk-hauler.

  She kept staring at me. After what felt like enough time to brew a decent cup of tea, she puffed up her cheeks and sighed.

  “Flying on warpdust,” she said. “I don’t know whether that’s genius or insanity.”

  “Insanity,” I replied. “No sane person would fly on pure warpdust.”

  “Well, you won’t be flying anywhere for a while,” she said. “Unless you can magic up more dust.”

  “I can scrape the engine housing clean,” I said. “The right nacelle might have some, too. It wasn’t completely burnt out when I left for Jackson. The top engine was.”

  She shook her head. “You are cracking insane. But it’s your life, if you even manage to get this tub into orbit.”

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  “It’s a bucket, not a tub,” I said.

  Bantering with Hao felt good. Comfortable, like we’d done it a thousand times before.

  Which was suspicious. Mechanics normally aren’t chosen for their people skills. If she was as skilled with her tool chest as Tomlin thought, and could charm customers, too, she should be on some high-resource planet earning kilos of helion servicing the sky hopper of some nouveau riche Federation brat while gulping strawberry juice in the beach breeze in the evenings. Instead, she was stuck in the voidcracking end-of-nowhere Jackson Depot.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, before my brain caught up with my mouth.

  “Because I figure that you've held back some means of paying me,” she replied. “And if you don’t, you can always sell that foil of yours.”

  “No,” I said. I could have believed that, except that she was familiar enough with foils to spot one in a scabbard. “I want to know what you’re doing on Jackson.”

  “None of your business,” Hao said, turning her back on me and rummaging in her tool chest.

  “I’m making it my business.” I reached out to grab her shoulder and turn her around.

  She twisted in my grip, toward me, using my pull to give momentum to her pivot, powering the crowbar she swung at my midriff.

  Fighting in enclosed spaces ends one of two ways. Either someone gets badly mauled, or you end up in a pile on the floor.

  We ended up in a pile, Hao cursing and spitting, trying to free her crowbar. It had struck the nacelle wall with a resounding clang, bounced against the armor covering my ribs, and caught uncomfortably in my armpit.

  That was the point at which Hao had lost her balance and pulled me down with her. I’d fallen over her, shoving an elbow into her gut, which I’d figured would put her out of the fight but only caused her to knee me in the face. My mageshield absorbed some of the force, saving my teeth, but the blow was enough to make me bite my lip.

  “Look what you did,” I said, spitting blood.

  “Voidmunching crudbucket,” she yelled. “Nobody touches me, nobody!”

  “Void, I’m sorry already,” I said, pulling myself away from her while keeping the crowbar pinned beneath my arm. We struggled briefly over it. I considered breaking her hold with a cutting punch to her lower arm, but decided against it. I needed her knowledge, and it would be a lot harder to extract if she had reason to hate me.

  “I’ll let go if you promise not to crack my skull,” I said. “Or any other part of my body.”

  She hissed, breathing heavily, then looked away. I released her crowbar and she turned to put it back in the toolbox.

  And then she swung.

  It was a beautiful swing: short, powerful, and just shy of the wall, aimed squarely at my head.

  I didn’t flinch.

  The crowbar stopped two hand spans from me, just out of range of my mageshield. Hao held it in one hand in a sword-fencer’s grip. The tip shook minutely.

  “Void,” she said. “You really are insane. What would you have done if I’d hit you?”

  “My mageshield would have stopped it,” I said. “Look down.”

  She did.

  My right hand rested on the hilt of my flameblade, still in its scabbard. In my left I held the Chimer, the pistol’s short barrel pointed at her midriff.

  “You don’t have any armor,” I said. “I would have had to clean chunks of your flesh from the inside of my engine, not to speak of the blood.”

  We breathed deeply in silence, like an old, married couple winding down after a customary fight.

  “So,” I said, “promise not to brain me?”

  She tossed the crowbar into the tool chest. It bounced, clanking against the other tools.

  “This time I want to hear you say it,” I said, and waited, the Chimer still aimed at her gut.

  Hey, Filip Wiltgren, the author, here. If you're reading this anywhere except on Royal Road, know that it's a pirated copy. And if you paid anything for it, you just got scammed, as it's free on Royal Road. Consider filing an pirated content report.

  Hao glared for a long breath, then grimaced.

  “So you do learn,” she countered. “I promise not to brain you right now.”

  “Good enough,” I said. “How about a cup of tea and then you tell me what you’re doing on Jackson?”

  She wiped her hands on her work shirt.

  “Make it coffee, make it liquored, and I’ll consider it.”