I down-tuned the power to the engine wards, bringing the Bucket out of the void. The collision alarm flashed momentarily orange, a spatter of loose hydrogen atoms and a few micrometer-sized particles pinging off the heatshield as the bow wave collapsed, dumping us in slow space.

  On the scanners, New Millet was a beautiful world. Greenish-blue with water vapor tracing white lines over it.

  I love water-rich worlds. The ambient temperature is always near human-normal, and the cloud patterns are beautiful. They stretch and curve like planet-sized wards, teasing me with their complexity, hinting at knowledge and freedom if only I had the skill and ability to understand their message.

  I had no trouble understanding the message from the Federal Navy blockade task force, though.

  "Unidentified ship," it blared on all open channels, "Do not approach. Dump velocity to a standstill relative planetary body. Prepare to be boarded."

  "Unidentified the cold void," I muttered, careful not to switch on the transmission. The Bucket was broadcasting its trans-space codes as the Bucket of Joy, a light transport out of Santa Kylie. The codes were even real, although the name wasn't. But it would take the Feds months to request ship registry records from Santa K, if they even bothered, which was unlikely. The logo accompanying their broadcast showed up on my readout as a triplet of crossed warp-cores and the words "SecUnit Free Fleet".

  Free Fleets were bad news anywhere. They were the free trader equivalent of Syndicate pirates, groups of ships chartered by investment corporations that hired out as reinforcements to the Fed Navy. In theory, they obeyed the Fed laws to the letter. In practice, they obeyed the laws to the letter while carefully forgetting all about the spirit of them.

  But I was broadcasting a single-string Envoy code. Not the full code, that would have been suspicious, but enough of it for the Feds to validate that I had a right to be there, and ask for more. Hopefully, it would be enough to keep even a Free Fleet from any preemptive shooting.

  Or not. With big fleets, you never knew. Someone might get nervous. Or the chain of command could be slow enough that the order not to fire didn't make it to the people doing the aiming.

  I turned the Bucket, breaking hard. That should be clear enough. Complying. Don't fire. My palms still sweated, leaving smudges on the control readouts.

  The Fed's broadcast kept blaring, listing the penalties of transgression, up to and including involuntary molecular disassembly, which was Fed speak for getting nuked then vaporized by their close-range plasma cannons.

  I muted the broadcast, having heard it all before. Whatever was going to happen, I'd done all I could by complying with their demands to slow.

  No worries.

  Crudmucking Feds. My breath hissed in and out, loud in my ears. I focused on it, taking a minute to savor the body-molded softness of my Aral-made pilot's couch. No way of knowing what would await me on the planet, but wars and comfort seldom mixed.

  The readouts kept shining green, meaning that the Feds hadn't made good on their threat to nuke us. Either that, or they'd finally bothered to separate out the envoy code snippet and run it through their validation algorithms.

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  A faint smell of fresh cinnamon filled the cockpit. I still hadn't figured out what Hao had done to the ventilation system to create it. Probably installed some kind of ozonizer. She swore she hadn't, though, and I wasn't objecting. The air was crudmucking wonderful.

  Her co-pilot's couch creaked, the cream white cover objecting as Hao shifted. Likely, she was nervous too. She hated being helpless just as much as I did.

  "Not long now," I said without turning my head.

  "You sure about this, Captain?" Hao said. "Theres’s crud all coming from the planet."

  She tapped one of the com readouts in front of her, an overview of busy com channels. It was half-a-minute out of date, the Bucket still being some nine million kilometers from New Millet, but even to my eyes, it looked empty.

  A few encrypted threads, some low-power static on a score of channels, nothing more. If there was a war, it was nothing like any war I'd ever seen.

  Coms are everything in war. You might not be able to decode it, but everyone chatters. Helps with the pre- and post-combat jitters. And during combat, you either scream into your coms, for information, for help, for pure fear, or you're silent because you're dead. This big nothing coming from Millet didn't make sense.

  "As sure as I can be," I said to Hao. I expected her to raise an eyebrow at me, but when I turned my head, she just looked anxious. It was still voidmungingly strange. Hao giving me grief was normal. Hao worried was not.

  "No turning back now," I said. "Point of last choice was seventy lightyears ago."

  I didn't add that I couldn't abandon the Knife.

  His kid was somewhere on that planet. I imagined a skinny twenty-something. Or not. Who knew how old the Knife really was.

  "I know," Hao said. "Doesn't mean I have to like it. You taking your magerifle?"

  "No," I said. That got me the raised eyebrow.

  I knew what she was thinking, that my magerifle and magefoil were the two most potent hand weapons hidden in the Bucket's warded gun safe. Which was true. But they'd mark me as a warder, or at least a mage, and I didn't want that.

  An envoy wearing a warded coat, even one as complex and valuable as mine, was normal. Common sense, protecting yourself. It was what people expected.

  An envoy lugging a magerifle, heading into a mage war, that would get me banned from the planet. Or shot, depending on the whims of the fleet's commanding admiral. Voidmucking Feds.

  They wouldn't take kindly to it. Say what you want about those crudmuckers, but when they decided something, they stuck with it. Mage quarantine meant mage quarantine. No mages allowed, in or out.

  "We're being hailed," Hao said, interrupting my happy thoughts.

  "Put it on," I said, and she tapped the com readout.

  "Bucket of Joy, you are cleared for approach," a professional voice said. Couldn't tell if it was male or female, young or old. Professional was what the Feds did, and they did it well.

  Soulless. No passion.

  Then again, with that amount of firepower, they didn't need passion. The blockade fleet contained three carriers, dozens of fighters swarming around them, tiny dots on the sensor net readout.

  A screen of cruisers and destroyers held positions at distances ranging from a few hundred kilometers to dozens of lightseconds from the carriers.

  The Feds even had a bombard, a heavy battlecruiser in low orbit, probably loaded with ground-penetrating nukes, or chem loads. Or maybe a giant plasma cannon. Something that could burn a city if they felt like it.

  Voidmucking strange. A navy blockade didn't have ground assault privileges. Any weapons were supposed to be purely defensive, meaning destroy anything in space, leave the planet alone.

  I wondered what they were defending against with a bombard. The whole situation felt wrong, made me want to run and hide.

  Except I couldn't. Made me almost regret giving my word.

  "Approaching now," I told fleet dispatch, putting some power into the Bucket's engines. "Thank you, Fleet."

  Rule of thumb: always be polite to the person with the firepower. Politeness is free, death is permanent.

  "Acknowledged, Bucket of Joy," dispatch's soulless voice said. "Prepare to be boarded."

  Well, crud.