“Shit!” I cried, barely getting the first half of the word out before the blueburn shot past us.

  “That’s impossible,” Matt exhaled behind me. “The G-forces—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of whatever he said. We had no chance of catching up to the blueburn now. We had lost it before we could take our shot. That was a secondary concern.

  The seven remaining disruptor torpedoes were struggling to make the same crazy turn, their limits pulling them directly into our path.

  I pushed the stick forward, twisting it at the same time, desperate to move away from the torpedoes. If our ship were needle or wedge shaped we would have made it. But we were riding around the universe in a giant robot head, its profile nearly identical on all sides.

  We couldn’t get out of the way.

  Not completely. Three of the torpedoes swept past, still trying to chase their intended target. The other four hit us in the face, detonating against the shields and sending a spike of energy through the nodes. If only one or two had struck us in the front of the ship, we probably would have been okay. But four at one time?

  The shields failed. The energy from the disruptor warheads dug into our patchwork aluminum shell, reaching into the electronics and overloading them. The PSC reacted by going offline and taking all of the other systems with it.

  The bridge went dark. My helmet blanked out. Life support stopped functioning. Gravity failed. The thrusters shut down, leaving us adrift and unable to escape the Royal Sentry, who would no doubt come for us the moment its captain accepted the truth:

  The blueburn had gotten away.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Shit!” Matt cried, shaking his head. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

  “Relax, Sherlock,” Keep said, remaining calm in the darkness of the flight deck. “It isn’t that bad.”

  “Are you kidding? Going after that ship was your idea, and now look at us.” He kept shaking his head. “We should have dropped in a different system and jumped here in the hopper.”

  “Matt, freaking out isn’t going to help,” I said, ripping my flight helmet off and locking it to its post on the back of my seat. “We dropped out of hyperspace far enough away to avoid sensor detection from Atlas’ orbit. There was no way to know we’d have company out here.”

  “Exactamundo,” Keep agreed. “What he said.”

  “Fine, but we still should have left the blueburn alone.” He thrust his finger toward Gia. “Aren’t you like a super billionaire or something? Why did we need to chase after twenty million electro?”

  “Whoa,” Gia said. “Don’t drag me into this. I already explained why I can’t fund this expedition.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Matt pushed.

  “Aiding and abetting fugitives will ruin me. I’ll lose the deed to my planet.”

  “But you are aiding and abetting us. You’re part of the crew.”

  “Nobody knows that. I start sending funds to strange accounts, and that’ll change in a hurry.”

  “Newsflash, G,” Matt continued. “If they capture us, they’ll know you were here.”

  “I can tell them you abducted me. That I’m a prisoner.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  Her face hardened. “You may have the chance for me to prove I would. I want to help you crush Sedaya, but you know I won’t risk everything I’ve worked so hard for to do it.”

  “That’s enough,” I snapped. “We’re wasting time. Alter, how long will it take us to get back up and running?”

  “We’ve been through this before,” Alter replied. “I can reset the PSC, but rebooting will take more time than we have before those ships arrive.”

  “How do you know?”

  She pointed out of the forward transparency. My final maneuvers combined with the torpedoes had left us in a spin, bringing the trailing warships across into view for only a few seconds. “They’re already coming about.”

  Their thruster trails told the tale. They knew they couldn’t catch the blueburn, not with its new heading and current velocity. But why not go check out the ship that had tried to help them catch the escaping fugitive? Right now, they probably thought we were just some random mercenary or private starship owner who had been in the right place at the right time and wanted to earn twenty million electro. Which was almost true, save for the one minor detail that turned the whole occasion to hell.

  We were fugitives too.

  We could change our identifier to help our disguise, but nothing we did would help once the Sentry drew close enough to get a solid visual. There just weren’t many giant robot heads flying around the galaxy. In fact, I was pretty sure we were the only one.

  “What do we do now?” Gia asked. “And how much time do we have to do it?”

  “Five minutes, give or take,” Alter replied. “We have the space hopper. We can evacuate in that.”

  “You want to abandon ship?” Matt asked.

  “Of course not,” Alter answered. “But I also don’t want to go to prison.”

  “There’s no guarantee we’ll go to prison,” I said. “We still have intel to share with the Empress. If we convince the captain of the Sentry to listen to reason, we might be able to wiggle our way out of trouble before we wind up incarcerated again.”

  “I wouldn’t lean too heavily into those odds,” Keep commented. “There’s a reason we developed an actual plan to get an audience with her.”

  “A plan that’s gone to hell now,” I replied. “Which means we need to improvise.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you there, kid. But letting them take us in is the wrong move. Believe me.”

  “Okay, grandpa,” Matt said. “What do you suggest?”

  “Bailing in the star hopper won’t work. They’ll pick us up on sensors the moment we light the thrusters and all we’ll succeed in doing is starting a new chase. I highly doubt they’ll waste more disruptor warheads on the likes of us, which means badabing badaBOOM!” He spread his hands apart, making the sound of an explosion.

  “There’s no sound in space,” Matt pointed out.

  Keep glared at him. “Seriously? It’s for dramatic effect.”

  “So how do we get out of this?” I asked. “It seems like you already have a…” I trailed off. It was my turn to shake my head. “No. Nope. Nuh-uh.”

  “Bennie, it’s the only way,” Keep pressed.

  “What’s the only way?” Matt asked.

  “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll use the star hopper. If we calculate jump coordinates ahead of time—”

  “As soon as we make a move to jump, the Sentry will pick up the energy signature and blast us with torpedoes while our shields are down,” Alter said. “We’d need to outrun them first, just like the blueburn did.”

  “You just said we could escape in the star hopper,” I complained.

  “That was thirty seconds ago. The Sentry is that much closer now.”

  “Crap.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Keep said. “We weren’t getting out that way.”

  “Uh, did somebody turn out the lights?” Druck asked over the embedded comms.

  “You just noticed that now?” Quasar replied.

  “I was taking a nap.”

  “During combat maneuvers? Have you even noticed there’s no gravity?”

  “I was tired. What did I miss?”

  “You missed us getting hit with a disruptor torpedo,” I said. “There’s a Royal Sentry coming our way. We have four minutes to do something.”

  “Do what?”

  “Something,” I repeated.

  “You know what we need to do, kid,” Keep said. “Why are you so reluctant?”

  “One, I don’t want to leave the Star of Caprum behind.”

  “We don’t need to. It’s portable. Alter can go get it.”

  “Really?” I replied.

  “Yeppers. No problemo there.”

  “Two, I don’t want to lose my starship.”

  “Our starship,” Matt said. “And that probably should have been mentioned first.”

  “The Sentry will confiscate Head Case and take it to the Royal Guard base on Atlas,” Keep said. “Alter can recover the ship there.”

  “I can?” Alter said.

  “Can’t you? I would think it would be pretty easy compared to some of the other things you’ve done.”

  “You did recover Head Case on Kasper,” I said before looking back at Keep. “Three, I don’t want to upset Mom again.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I guess being sent back to Persephon is definitely better than seeing your mother again. What was I thinking?”

  “Ben, what is he talking about?” Matt asked.

  “He wants to use the Mustang to transit back to Earth,” I explained, keeping my eyes on Keep. “And once we’re there, how long before we come back? And do we have to traverse the galaxy again to get back here?”

  “I’m not exhausted like I was the last time. A few days. And we can transit to Atlas’ surface. I know the coordinates. Badabing bada—”

  “Why the hell didn’t we just do that in the first place?” I shouted, interrupting him. “We didn’t need to come all the way back across the Spiral. And we didn’t need to buy the space hopper.”

  “Believe it or not, transiting isn’t the bees knees. I don’t really like the idea either, but there’s no other way.”

  I stared at him, hesitant to abandon Head Case. At least the Royal Guard wasn’t an actual enemy. Both the ship and the Star would stay out of Sedaya’s hands.

  “Do you want to stand here and argue about it while that Sentry pulls us into its hangar or do you want to escape?” Keep pushed. “Tick-tock, kid.”

  I exhaled sharply. “Fine. Alter, can you go get the Star?”

  “Of course,” she replied, unbuckling herself from her seat and planting her magboots on the deck.

  “And maybe make sure the Grimoire is tucked away somewhere safe too?” Keep added.

  “Already on my emergency todo list,” she replied, clomping her way across the flight deck to manually crank open the door.

  “Matt, Druck, Zar, make a pit stop at the armory and grab as much gear as you can in the next two minutes. The rest of you head for the hangar. It’s going to be a tight fit in the car, but we’ll make it work. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Where are you going?” Matt asked.

  “I need to get something from my room,” I replied, glancing out of the transparency. The warships again appeared to rotate through our line of sight, a lot closer than before. “Let’s move it team, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  We all headed for the door. Alter had already slipped through the space between the two panels and made it to the elevator, having already dumped her off on Deck Six. She'd sent the cab back down so it was waiting for us when we arrived.

  “Here’s to emergency power,” Matt said as we all boarded.

  “Tell me about it,” I replied. “Otherwise I’d have to navigate Deck Three full-sized, and Druck, Zar, and Shaq would be pint-sized.”

  He laughed, releasing some of his nervous tension. “Darn. I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

  “You never know. You might still get the chance,” I said as the elevator stopped at Deck Three.

  The trio waited outside when the doors opened. Shaq hopped from Quasar’s shoulder to mine as I passed them, headed in the opposite direction, as they floated into the elevator cab. I pulled myself hand over hand along the bulkhead to get to my room as fast as I could. When I arrived, I grabbed the gift George had given me. I still didn’t know what was in the box, but I definitely didn’t want the Royal Guard to have it.

  “Let’s hope emergency power lasts another minute,” I said to Shaq as I hurried back to the elevator. “Or Matt’s going to wet himself when we get to the hangar.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The emergency power held out long enough for all of us to reach the hangar. Shaq and I arrived just ahead of Matt, Druck, and Quasar, who each carried a space pack laden with hastily gathered goodies from the armory. I flinched as a car horn blared, my head whipping toward the sudden appearance of headlights in the hangar's back corner.

  Keep leaned out of the Mustang's front passenger side window. “Can we get a move on here?” he shouted at us. As if to emphasize the urgency in his statement, Head Case jolted. The sudden change in inertia would have knocked me off my feet if I hadn’t been magnetically connected to the deck. “That was the Sentry locking on a drone to stop our spin.”

  “Is Alter with you?” I asked as we all raced for the car.

  “I’m here,” she said, waving out the rear window.

  “There’s no way we'll all fit,” Matt said, racing ahead of me and heading for the driver’s seat.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “It’s my car. I’m driving.”

  “You don’t know how to transit.”

  He released the maglock on his boots to hurdle over the top of the car, grabbing the roof and landing cleanly on the other side. It was a far cry from his first intentional zero-g experience, which had ended when he vomited on the deck. Again.

  “Matt!” I shouted, annoyed he had chosen this moment to break the chain of command.

  “It’s okay, kid,” Keep said. “He can drive. I’ve got the catalyst.” He pushed open his door. “Squeeze in.”

  I shoved him toward the middle of the forward row of seats with Shaq still on my shoulder. Quasar beat Druck to the back. If we had anyone else with us we probably could have fit four across. She took up too much space, leaving the soldier of fortune as the odd man out.

  “What about me?” Druck whined.

  “Trunk it is,” Matt said as the deck started to vibrate. “Hurry.”

  Druck grumbled under his breath and circled to the rear to pop the trunk. He climbed in and ducked down, pulling the lid closed behind him. I could still hear him muttering his complaints through the rear seat.

  “How do we drive with no gravity?” I asked.

  “We don’t need to move much to transit,” Keep replied.

  “Since when?”

  “Since ever. I don’t make the rules, kid.”

  “Wait, I don’t actually get to drive?” Matt asked.

  “Nope. That’s why it didn’t matter that you got behind the wheel.”

  Matt’s face fell. “Damn. No shrunken Ben, no driving the Wickmobile. This escape stinks.”

  “Better to escape stinky than not escape at all,” Keep replied. He reached into his pocket, producing one of the sigiltech rings and handing it to me. “Bennie, when the portal opens, give us a push.”

  “What about the anchors holding the car in place?” I asked, excitedly sliding the ring onto my finger. I hadn’t used a single sigil in weeks. I had missed it.

  “They’re magnetic. Push hard enough to break the grip, but not too hard.”

  “You do know pushing not too hard isn’t my strong suit.”

  “Just do your best not to give us whiplash.” Keep flipped open the transmission gear selector, revealing the needle beneath.

  “What’s that for?” Matt questioned.

  “This,” Keep answered, slamming his hand down on it. Matt winced and turned green as blood ran down the sides of the selector. Keep’s jaw tightened in pain but he didn’t cry out. Instead, he whispered his focus word under his breath, activating the catalyst in the car. The dark transit portal opened ahead of us. “Now, kid,” he said, voice strained from effort.

  “Distra,” I whispered, pushing the car forward similarly to how I had pushed the hovercart on Sedaya’s space dock, only with a much, much lighter touch, at least for me. It was still enough to yank the Mustang forward, shoving us all back in our seats as it broke free of the magnetic anchors and launched toward the portal. The Royal Guard had done us a favor by stopping our spin, allowing the Mustang to go straight into the void.

  My heart lurched as we entered. I didn’t want to leave Head Case behind. I didn’t want strangers combing through it, raiding the armory, confiscating everything including the space hopper. We had spent a week working on a plan to get a message to the Empress, and in five minutes a random encounter with an L6VOI had screwed everything up. At the same time, it was a reminder of how fast life could change, and that I shouldn’t take a single second for granted.

  Passing through the void always seemed to be like dropping a wet blanket on my mood, but that thought helped get me through without falling into a sudden, deep depression. Glancing around the car, I couldn’t say the same for any of the others save for Keep. Unsurprisingly, Alter looked the most distraught, though maybe that was more because she was leaving her home behind than because of the void. Matt’s head slumped forward, eyes tearing up. I didn’t know what thoughts came into his head, but I had a feeling they involved his father.

  “Mattie!” Keep shouted, getting his attention as we passed to the other side of the tear in spacetime.

  His head snapped up, hands gripping the wheel as we emerged into the middle of a cornfield. The car dropped about six inches from the air, bouncing hard while smashing down stalks as the momentum of my push wore out. We came to a stop surrounded by the crop. Humid air and a hot sun immediately started baking us.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Bill’s farm,” Keep replied. “We were supposed to come out in the barn. My aim was a little off, I guess.”

  I couldn’t see the barn past the height of the stalks. “Yeah, just a little. What if we came out into a wall or something? Or off the side of a cliff or on top of a building?”

  “That can’t happen.”

  “Why not? Depending on where you’re aiming, that could be a little off.”

  “It didn’t happen,” Keep said, updating his original response. “Tally ho, Sherlock.”

  Matt glanced at him before starting the engine, a smile spreading across his face in response to the resulting purr. “Does transiting always feel like someone tore your heart out and stomped on it?”