“Get those coordinates out of that thing’s head, Karla,” Bradley shouted at me. I had explained the situation as we pushed the engines until they were glowing. Revaulo ships operated differently than we were used to, but it was manageable if we could get jumped out to hyperspace. That way my minion would be too far away to benefit from their hive intellect and its defenses wouldn’t be a tenth as good as it was right then. Sure, they had us pegged for stealing their ship, and would totally come after us, but if we slipped their net, the Valraithi treasure horde was as good as ours.

Maybe we could exchange their goods for Henry’s release.

Bradley jumped, and I held onto the arms of a chair which wasn’t built for human comfort. The ship accelerated a lot faster than I had expected, and I felt my insides sloshing around trying to make my puke. I probably would have if I could even get a breath. Finally, the ship came up to speed and backed off the acceleration. My lunch came up all over the ground, and Bradley turned up his nose until he did the same.

“Whoa. That was rough,” he said, trying to hold back another round. I just nodded, still feeling a little green in the face. My minion, for his part, looked completely unperturbed from the hyperspace jump. He just sat there staring blankly. It was time to poke around in his brain a bit more and find those coordinates.

That was time I didn’t have. In the last jump we met up with a whole squadron of lizard-brained idiots who shot at each other just because we were in the middle. This time, it was the pirates who caught up to us first. We made another jump and vomited the rest of my stomach onto my shoes. It worked about as well as last time, and I let Bradley have an ear-full about it.

“Quit your whining. I’ve got a plan,” he said.

“Oh, great,” I replied, wiping the crap off my face. “Care to share with the class?”

“Go load the argon into the fuel tanks. The pirates will think we’re almost zeroed out, and their super computers will mis-judge our jump probabilities. We’ll be half-way across the gap before they get wise.”

That wasn’t actually a terrible idea, but I couldn’t let Bradley know I thought so. Instead of responding, I jumped out of the seat. My Revaulo minion followed me out of the cockpit and into the hall. This ship was a larger and more military-minded model of the last Revaulo ship I was on, but they were all engineered about the same. The engine and fuel room was in the same location as it was on the zombie-filled original.

I ordered the lizard to go retrieve the fuel tanks from where we left them near the airlock while I set about uncorking the intake valves and pressing random buttons on the console until I got the tank seal open.

Or until I vented the fuel outside. I really should learn the Revaulo language one of these days.

To be fair, I wasn’t going in completely blind on where to twist a knob or what button to push. I had scavenged more than a few Revaulo ships in my time, and I had watched Bradley do all the button smashing. I just mimicked what I remembered and hoped for the best.

In the end, I didn’t get it perfectly right the first time around, but I didn’t get us killed either. The seal doors opened just as lizard minion-boy showed back up hauling the argon tanks. We got them installed in under fifteen seconds which was good because just as we finished Bradley called over the speakers that the Valraithi ships were in murder range.

“It’s connected. Gun it!” I yelled over the speaker, and Bradley did just that. This time, I didn’t have a comfy or over-sized seat to keep me in one piece. Instead, the sudden acceleration flung me off my feet, and I barely moved my head out of the way of a workbench bolted to the wall. My shoulder screamed at me in sudden pain, and I glanced down to see it protruding at an odd angle.

Minionzilla wasn’t having the slightest trouble keeping its footing with a wide stance and a tail. I pushed out a mental command for it to come over and pop my shoulder back in its socket. Unfortunately, the lizard was much faster responding than I was a blocking my pain receptors. Yes, I screamed, and yes it was not my most dignified moment, but at least Bradley wasn’t around to witness it.

This jump felt a lot more even once we got up to speed. It probably had something to do with the fact that we didn’t immediately start slowing back down, but I was just happy my insides stayed put. Making the quick walk back up to the cockpit, I slipped into the chair behind Bradley. “Plan going according to… uh… plan?”

“More or less,” he answered, but there was a little tension in his voice.

“What went wrong?”

“Well, let’s just say we got a stowaway,” he replied, and clicked the outboard feed over to the rear camera. There were bits and pieces of what looked like the nose cone of not one, but two Valraithi ships traveling in the hyperspace stream behind us. “Your aura did the gravity thing again.”

“Is that like super bad?” I asked.

Bradley shrugged. “Depends on if they put trackers on the nose assemblies or not. I put our odds at 70/30 they aren’t tracking just the front of their ships.”

“Great. What if they are?”

This made him grimace. “Well, in that case, we just made things personal. Effectively, we blew the front end off two of their ships, and probably killed a non-zero portion of their crews. They’re gonna be pissed.”

I picked up from where he left off. “So if they find us, we’re gonna be spread out across fifty systems in tiny bite-sized chunks.” Bradley nodded. “More than that, we are probably public enemy number one for a bit which will make getting into their treasure horde much riskier.”

“Bingo,” Bradley said. “Any luck cracking the lizard’s coordinates with your organic computer over there?”

After all the running around I had almost forgotten that spell was still running. The extra power wasn’t coming from me, but from my staff. A quick glance down at its little LED told me it was almost completely drained. If it had run out, the Revaulo would have been able to pull control of his body back away from me. I should have been paying closer attention. However, the good news was that I had a bright shiny new set of coordinates floating near the top of the lizard’s consciousness.

I keyed them into my tablet and pumped more power into my staff. It’s LED light rose gradually from bright red to green again. Things were finally looking up.