The breaking yard was in absolute darkness, an infinite, lightless hole. I turned on my suit helmet lights, illuminating a long, black, steel wall.

  When we reached it, the wall turned out to be rough, as if pitted by acid. No gantries, no doors. We floated along, pulled by a pair of ward pads: fist-sized rings tied to ropes that I up-tuned to push away from us.

  After what seemed an infinity, we reached a gantry, which wasn’t much more than a long, steel pole anchored to the wall at regular intervals. The inside was smooth from rubbing on safety lines. Someone had worked here, once. Following it led us to an airlock, gaping open and dark.

  The airlock was huge, about half the size of the Bucket’s cargo bay. There were industrial clamps mounted on the walls, rounded steel claws the size of my torso. Used for holding down salvage while the airlock cycled, I figured.

  Perfect.

  I waved Hao inside, pulled the sleeping hatchling deeper into the airlock, and opened my bag of grenades. Then I glued a pair of fragmentation balls to a set of matching clamps and set their proximity fuses.

  Two would be just enough to catch any pursuers made stupid by greed.

  The inner airlock door was also open. It was smaller, maybe eight or ten meters across. I glued another grenade to it with a blob of sealant from my hull repair kit.

  Inside was a square, twenty-meter corridor that followed the outside of the yard, the curvature making it disappear beyond its own ceiling in both directions. I gestured for Hao to go in one direction and went about fifty meters along the other one. There, I affixed a fulmination grenade to the wall and set the proximity fuse with a two minute delay, allowing me to exit its sensor radius before it activated.

  “You drop grenades like a man with an armament factory in his back pocket,” Hao said by microwave tightbeam. Not as good as a fully shielded com, but the best we could do.

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  “That’s the idea,” I said. “Make them think we’ve got lots.”

  “They’ll figure out we don’t soon enough,” Hao said.

  “Yes, but it will make them nervous, and nervous men make mistakes.”

  “I’m nervous,” Hao said.

  “Which is the reason I’m not letting you set the grenades,” I said, handing her the bag.

  My ward pads fizzed out, their wards spent, so we had to pull ourselves along using the handholds that dotted the corridor’s walls. Their chill passed through my insulated gloves. I turned on the magnets in the soles of my boots, allowing me to use my legs to propel myself and the hatchling along. It was like running through a swamp, the walls sucking at my feet at every step. A hundred meters further on, maybe fifty or sixty meters beneath the hull of the breaking yard, we came to a six-way junction.

  The junction was a round bubble, fifty meters across according to the readout on my rudimentary sensor suite. I picked a tunnel at random, going deeper into the yard. Ten meters in, I stopped.

  “Time to give our guests a surprise,” I said, and pulled out my engraving drill.

  I scraped lines and curves into the wall freehand, building up a complex ward. My professors at the Academy had been furious when I’d done that, insisting that I use compasses, curve-templates and rulers. I’d once had a professor order me to use a set of calipers.

  I’d ignored them all, learning to draw wards by hand. I could feel the line when it went right, could sense the way the ward would work and the ways I might tweak it.

  Of course, I’d made my share of mistakes, resulting in long nights catching up to my classmates. But I’d learned, and by the time I finished basic schooling, I could draw wards ten times faster than my meticulous comrades. I’d only gotten faster since then.

  I could see Hao’s tension every time I glanced her way. If we had gravity, she’d be bouncing from foot to foot. Now, all she could do was push and pull on the handholds, and shine her flashlight on the empty walls.

  “Hold still,” I said. “You’re ruining my concentration.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Warding,” I said. “A broken ward.”

  “What?” she said.

  I pushed away from the wall to the extent the safety line I’d clipped to a hold allowed, and pointed.

  “That’s a flame ward,” I said. “It will produce an intense blast of heat. In atmosphere, it would create a line of plasma. Here, it’ll merely fry anyone standing before it.”

  “And if they don’t stand before it?” Hao said.

  “Then we’ve got this,” I said, pointing to a jagged gash in one smooth curve. “This will cause the ward to shatter, but not before sending the ray of heat dancing around the corridor.”

  Hao fell silent. I had to imagine her raising her eyebrows, as it was too dark to see inside her helmet.

  “Explain to me,” she said, “how this is not like something in an adventure vid?”

  I laughed, and imbued the ward.