All animals run from magic. Smart critters. Not that I appreciated the fact. Herding goats was becoming my least favorite pastime.

  I kept four threads in my mind at the same time, feeling for the goats, the heat of life in a lukewarm planet signifying those skipping, black shapes that wanted to go every way but toward the port. I kept poking them, like I had the Syndic guards at the bunker, trying to keep the threads in my mind stable, crawling when I could, my heart pounding, my head pounding in time with it, flashes of imaginary grey and black blobs lighting the night, blocking my vision. My teeth ground against each other so hard that I was waiting for the taste of blood in my mouth when they cracked.

  "You're leaving a trail," the Knife whispered from behind me, shuffling sand.

  "Your job," I hissed between my clenched teeth, poking a goat that had strayed too far to the right. If I let one away, the others would follow. Yet I had to keep them close enough to mask us, and heading in the right direction.

  "Right," the Knife whispered. "Turn right."

  "What the crud for?" I whispered back. I wanted to scream. Why were we whispering?

  The sensors. The Syndicates had a sensor net around the port. I should have created a heat ward, making us invisible to the thermals. I should have brought more food.

  Should have learned about goats, and other arcane critters, too, when I had the chance. I had an acquaintance at the Academy who studied mythical beasts. Unicorns, wolves, dolphins. Who'd have thought that it could come in handy?

  "There's a sensor ahead of us," the Knife whispered. "See that bulge?"

  I didn't but wasn't about to tell him so. Instead, I flailed at the goats, turning them, crawled in their general direction.

  One of them got a whiff of us, or heard us, or something, and the entire herd bounded forward, leaving us exposed. I stretched my threads, poked them form the front, turning them toward us.

  "Hate the crud critters," I whispered.

  "Everyone does," the Knife whispered back. "Just keep them close."

  "I'm trying," I said.

  Somehow, I did. Meter by meter, minute by minute, we moved forward. Suddenly, a small canyon opened before us, four, maybe five meters deep, about ten wide. The goats were flowing down into it like they were made out of water. Void-loving critters moved like they were born to climb.

  "Crud," I said.

  "No, it's good," the Knife said. "Turn them leftwards, we'll get closer to City."

  I whipped my threads around, tapped the heat of the goats, sending spikes of pain through my head, nausea through my gut.

  One of my threads snapped. Too much strain. I was beginning to zone out.

  "How far does this go?" I said, half-climbing, half-falling down into the gully.

  "Don't know," the Knife said. "Hopefully far enough. Keep driving the goats."

  I drove them, whipping them with threads of magic when I needed to, resting when I didn't. They ran from our steps willingly enough, but tried to climb the walls, forcing me to poke them. In the gully, we were protected from the thermal scanners, the infrared cameras, most of the Syndic's sensors.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Unless they had seismic detectors sensitive enough to tell a hoof from a boot. If they did, we were void-bound. Hopefully they didn't.

  Who'd want to get close to Syndicates? The Kylians who had stormed their transmission control and sent that message, for one. I pushed the thought out of my mind. Hopefully, they hadn't used this path.

  The lead goat, a big, bearded one, brayed, or mooed, or whatever they did, a loud, annoying, grating noise. It started to climb the right-hand wall and I poked it. It refused to come down, so I put more force in the poke.

  The goat rebounded, came jumping down into the bottom of our trench. The walls were only two meters high here, and getting lower all the time. Soon, we'd have to crawl again.

  I had no idea if I could do it. Not while I kept the goats moving.

  "I need to rest," I said, my voice hoarse. "Sleep."

  "Can't," the Knife said. "We're close, maybe two kilometers. The dawn's coming."

  The sky above me was still deep blue. But I wasn't seeing all of it. The Knife had a better sense of time on Remba.

  How long until the Syndicate's main forces started waking up? We'd have to deal with hunting parties going out, repair crews, supply flights. Any one of them could stumble into us.

  I couldn't move the goats more. We'd need to turn around and flee soon. If I was going to blow their engine, I had to blow it now.

  I sat down, let the threads I'd been using dissipate, drank my remaining water. Ran a finger over the rim and used the moisture to wipe my eyes and forehead. Anything to make me more alert. I was so tired. A cup of tea would have been nice. I'd even force myself to drink coffee, if we had some.

  No time for dreams and regrets. Deep breath. Another. And another. Relax my shoulders. Massage my jaws. Focus. Breathe.

  I unslung my magerifle, aimed it at where I thought the Bucket was, and conjured up a thread of force, feeding it into the wards.

  The connection was instant, a hard, warm, greasy vibration. I'd know it anywhere, the feel of a warpstone drive. I'd nursed the Bucket's engines along when they were just covered with remnants of warpstone dust. Now they had full, working stones, and I'd flown them for months. I knew those engines like I knew the smell of the Bucket, the cool dryness of its ventilation, the thrumming of the deck plates beneath my feet.

  Time to use that. I raised my rifle. Ten degrees, fifteen, twenty. At thirty-five, I felt a twinge, a tension in the connection, and wrapped my mind around it, keeping the thread together. Forty-five, fifty, sixty. By seventy degrees, I was searching for an echo in the sky, a set of unbalanced engines, kept in sync by a constant flow of power from the hauler's fusion core.

  Nothing.

  I kept raising the rifle, pointing it toward where I thought the ships might be, flailing with the thread as much as I dared. A sparkle, somewhere close, the crackle of electricity. I pushed it from my mind, sweeping the rifle straight up.

  Nothing.

  A minute passed. My eyes stung with sweat and I pressed them closed. The air smelled of grilled meat. My stomach grumbled. Hallucinations. Saliva filled my mouth. I kept my magerifle pointing at the sky.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Something.

  A shred, a sliver, a tilt to the void. The heat of working warpstone engines. Distant, but there. Several shapes.

  Two big ones.

  Those would be the haulers. The cruisers had balanced engines. Had to have, to get the kind of focus they'd need to hunt down other ships. The haulers only had to shift mass. They could do that with unsynched clusters.

  I picked one of the engine clusters, felt it, felt its vibration.

  Raw. Uneven. So different from the fast, clean vibration of the Bucket. Wrap one end of my thread around the Bucket's engines. Hold the other ready, the magerifle shaking in my hands.

  Steady. I needed to keep it steady.

  Wedge the rifle between my legs, lean on it, keep the thread going.

  My body shook. My world shook. My thread vibrated, the force of the Bucket's engines shaking it.

  Tapping against that engine cluster. Tapping and not getting in. My head felt ready to shatter. I bit my lip, drawing blood, felt the world tilt. Not now. Couldn't faint now.

  A wave of doubt crashed over me. What if my mind wasn't strong enough? What if the Bucket's engines weren't strong enough? The echoes vibrated against each other, jangling in my head.

  The wards on my rifle grew warm, warmer, hot. The rifle steamed in the cold air.

  The hauler's engines weren't deteriorating. I needed a wave, something to hit them with.

  The Bucket's engines were closer. I punched them with what force I could summon.

  The engine unbalanced. Only for a moment, but it was enough to send a spike through the thread, a snap that struck clear at my mind. It felt like the world shearing to pieces, a thousand shards stabbing all at once. Blackness enveloped me.

  I fought it, fought to stay conscious, stay intact.

  The wave struck the hauler's engine cluster. The unbalanced engines all spiked at once.

  Their stones shattered, the feedback shredding my thread, parts of the wave hitting me.

  I let the blackness swallow me.