Midnight emergency drills reminded Heath why the Universal War Conventions considered sleep deprivation a form of torture. But he was out of bed and jogging towards the bridge within seconds of the blaring alarm going off. Narrow halls forced him to bang shoulders with more than one crewmember emerging from their own bunks. It was a familiar dance in which his body knew the steps, even if his mind was still waking up. Get to the bridge on time, or suffer for it later.

  “All hands to stations. All hands to stations,” repeated every few seconds in the expressionless voice of the ship AI.

  The main passageway opened up when he left the living quarters, giving him more room to dodge around the rest of the crew. Lights that should have been dimmed for the night shift blazed at full power, reflecting off the glass-smooth white walls, spotless as always.

  Heath kept moving towards the bridge, putting every point of Power and Reflexes to use as he ran. The emergency protocols for an aspiring Pilot were very clear, he should have been there before the alarms started going off.

  The Wandering Loon lurched, sending Heath stumbling into the wall.

  “Should have taken [Steady] like we told you,” Jas called out.

  Of course someone saw that. Heath didn’t have time to return the heckling of the Apprentice Engineer, already finding more speed on his race to the bridge. Jolting like that wasn’t part of the drills. Uncle Walt might get creative on occasion to keep his crew on their toes, but Heath’s gut said this was real.

  Seconds later, the hatch to the bridge slid silently into the wall for him to enter. The alarm was muted in the command center, but that just left more room for his uncle to yell.

  “I wanted that telemetry yesterday, what’s going on out there, Masterson?”

  The veteran Spacer didn’t usually let anyone get away with talking to him like that, Captain or no. That lack of return snark more than anything else told Heath things were very wrong as he nudged the third-shift Spacer out of the pilot’s station and took over.

  The familiar display lit up as it recognized him, spinning up their current flight path and flagging any known hazards. When he’d left at the end of his last shift, it was practically a blank screen.

  “Half the sensors are fried. Mana levels are going crazy. Astral storm.” Masterson gestured and the main view screen lit up, a glowing mass of writhing energy covering all except the smallest sliver of a corner, where a white dot lingered, representing the ship as it waited to be devoured.

  Heath flipped the controls and lowered their accel, sending the extra energy into the stabilizers. The jolting ride smoothed out enough to be tolerable, but whatever was out there didn’t want to be ignored.

  Uncle Walt let out a string of impressive curses. Even five years into his Spacer career, a few were new to Heath’s ears.

  “Everybody listen up!” Walt bellowed. A tinny echo told Heath the man had activated one of his Class Skills, projecting the sound to everyone on board the Wandering Loon.

  “We’re going headfirst into an astral storm. Shut down every system we can live without and make sure our auxiliary power sources are isolated. I’m hard-locking our trajectory. Everyone on this ship better be strapped down in the next sixty seconds! Captain out.”

  His uncle turned a gimlet eye on the pilot station. “Heath, you heard me. Hard lock on the next gate, constant acceleration at 3.5 standard gravity until we hit the storm, then thrusters only, as straight as we can manage.”

  “Captain, that will take us straight through. I can angle us up and over, I’m sure of it.”

  Masterson snorted from his own station. “No outrunning an astral storm, kid.”

  “You have to let me try!”

  “You have your orders, crewmember! Follow them,” his uncle’s—no, his Captain’s—voice barked out.

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  Heath winced and did as he was told. On occasion he could push the rules a bit with Uncle Walt, but Captain Walt expected to be obeyed in an emergency.

  There was barely anything he needed to account for in their course, way out here on the backwater system’s fringes. No gravity wells or asteroids that required skill to maneuver around. But he double- then triple-checked his work before locking them in. On his viewscreen, the glowing green line that was the Loon’s path went directly into the storm.

  His uncle was still shouting orders. “Life support in full isolation. Engineering, cut the links to anything we don’t need to fly. Anything leftover to shields, but on its own circuit.”

  Job done, Heath confirmed his harness was fully engaged. He felt useless; a pilot locked out of flight controls. A real Pilot might have some options. A Spacer with a [Piloting] Skill and a dream, not so much. He wished he’d shoved a stress toy into his pocket. Or some rope he could fiddle with. But if he ran back to his bunk right now his uncle might literally flay him alive.

  A reflection in a chrome-coated pipe let him see his uncle’s expression. The vacant look in his eyes a telltale sign he was interfacing with his Class abilities. One by one, alarms turned off, sensors stopped beeping, and lights dropped down to the normal ‘night’ levels. Even their display screens winked out, leaving only the barest feedback from the ship’s main systems for the bridge crew to decipher.

  The bridge was silent beyond some heavy breathing and the tap, tap, tap of something hitting the corrugated floor.

  “Heath,” his uncle said.

  Oh, the tapping was him. He forced his feet to still, but the nervous energy wasn’t so easily quelled. His fingers started tapping against his thighs instead. Walt sighed but didn’t correct him again. What felt like eons passed, though it was certainly only a few minutes before he spoke up.

  “I don’t understand,” Heath whispered.

  Another sigh from his uncle. But it was true. Heath was the least experienced on the ship by about 5 years and just as many levels, but he knew about astral storms. Just like anyone that lived on the Rim. And rule one was that you never, ever flew through one. He hadn’t known they could even form this far from a star.

  “The Loon let us down.” Uncle Walt’s words were heavy with disappointment. Heath would have done anything in that moment to avoid hearing what came next. “We should have sensed a storm far enough out to make it behind a colony shield or through a gate. That’s not happening, not this far out.”

  “Why can’t we just go around? I swear Unc–Captain, I’ve been practicing on the sims in the training suite. I can take us around. Or outrun it back the way we came.”

  That got him a round of chuckles from the rest of the bridge crew, forced as they were, but it was his uncle that answered. “Can’t outrun magic winds, son. Best we can do is limit what we have running and hope the storm doesn’t break them anyway. And that if it does, that we can get the aux power up and running in time to cut over.”

  For once, Heath shut up after only a few questions. Astral storms were exhilarating planet-side. He remembered watching through the windows as a little kid, the one and only time he’d experienced the phenomenon before. School had been canceled that day, and his mom had taken the time off from her workshop to watch it with him. Magic fell like rain across the settlement shields. The violent reactions within the storm of aetherized argo had bloomed into branching mana-lightning that seemed to have a mind of its own. His terror at the sight blunted when those shields never even flickered in the onslaught.

  But it was the aftermath that made the storms truly dangerous. Plants and animals would mutate, sometimes the landscape itself would come alive, rippling and changing with the whims of the System. Anything could happen when the ambient magic was whipped into that kind of a frenzy.

  What would that look like in space, without those shields? He wished he didn’t have to find out. Rumor had it that the Core worlds didn’t get astral storms at all, but Heath didn’t believe that. What kind of power would it take to control a force of nature?

  All his attempts at self-distraction shattered under the increasing vibration of the ship. They must be flying through the storm now. The Loon lurched again, throwing him into the harness, straps crossing in an x over his chest and keeping him in his chair. He thanked the gods that artificial gravity was considered a ship-necessity or it would take every point in Power to keep themselves from flying across the bridge.

  Heath was thrown again. Right then left, the hard metal armrests digging into his abdomen as he pitched side to side, adding to the impressive collection of bruises he would have to show for this adventure.

  “Listen up everyone, we should be coming up on the edge of the storm. Good luck.” Uncle Walt’s words rattled in Heath’s head, an application of [Captain’s Voice] he usually found too intrusive to bother with, instead relying on the ship’s speakers.

  Then the meaning hit Heath. The turbulence so far was just the impact of the tempest on the local gravity fields and argo flows. They hadn’t even entered the stormfront.

  Heath could tell when they passed that imaginary boundary, realizing he was a fool to have ever thought otherwise. The turbulence they’d felt before was like an amusement park ride in comparison.

  They were thrown back and forth, again and again. Grunts of pain and occasional cursing the only sounds from the bridge crew. Carter at the engineering station got the worst of it, being the next-lowest level after Heath. The two bunkmates would have to compare battle scars once the adventure was over.

  Every fiber of his being wished he had invested a couple more stat points in Toughness. But he was a Spacer trying to evolve into Pilot, that class wasn’t supposed to need to take a hit.

  Deep, painful groans came from the ship. Metal grated across metal, and one ominous snap broke the silence. Without the displays Heath couldn’t tell if they were still on course, or if the storm would keep them forever, tossed around and around in its depths. Hope was a thin line to hang their lives on. Spacers were accustomed to more risk than most, but flying blind was the kind of terror he hadn’t realized was possible on a cargo hauler.

  Everything stilled. Adrenaline kept his body rigid, bracing for the next hit…but nothing came. Heath took a few gasping breaths, the fear and danger hitting him all at once. They had made it.

  His hands were shaking too much to undo the safety harness, but it didn’t matter, his legs wouldn’t hold him up anyway. Head tilted back, Heath concentrated on breathing. And not crying in front of the crew. It meant he missed what happened next.

  There was a flash. A swelling of magic to his left, a class ability he had no time to name. For a moment Heath saw white-purple light cascading through the bridge, the scent of ozone rubbing against his skin. His world went black.