Rake shot him an incredulous look. “Conveniently?”
“A distraction. One that worked, I might add.”
Cavalon almost ran squarely into Rake’s back as she stopped dead in her tracks.
“What—？” he began, but cut short when Rake clamped a hand over his mouth. She held a finger to her lips and stared down the air-lock-lined corridor. The floor rumbled along with a hiss of air.
Hand still over his mouth, Rake pulled him into a narrow alcove across the hall, jammed beside a vertical support beam. His stomach turned with a wave of nausea, the silence around them oppressive.
Then came the short blare of an air-lock siren, a hiss of air pressurizing, the sound of a door sliding open, and a shuffle of trundling footsteps, followed by the half-witted grunts of a half dozen Drudgers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cavalon clamped his eyes shut—as if eliminating his sense of sight would somehow make him quieter or still his pounding heart. Rake’s hand fell away from his face, and he found the nerve to open his eyes, mostly to confirm she hadn’t abandoned him.
Rake still stood mere centimeters away. Her fingers flashed across her nexus, and the comms interface showed a red warning symbol. The mainframe hadn’t fully rebooted. They couldn’t call Jackin and the others.
Rake looked at him, her warm eyes serious, breath slow and controlled and deadly quiet. She appeared the exact opposite of how he felt. How was she not in a total panic? It had to take a special kind of temerity to stand there, a meter from at least a half dozen armed Drudgers, shoved in an alcove with a man who’d never fired a gun in his life, and maintain that degree of composure. It was honestly unsettling.
Rake kept her eyes locked on his, then raised one finger to her lips and waited.
Shut up. He could do that. He gave a short nod.
She curled her fingers into a fist.
Stay put. He gave another short nod.
Rake shouldered her rifle, then slid out of the alcove. After a frenzied squeak of boots on metal, a barrage of gunfire erupted—the sharp, chalky twangs of a plasma rifle. He really hoped Rake’s plasma rifle.
Mere seconds later, the bombardment ceased, punctuated by a meaty thunk, then the heavy galumph of a body falling lifelessly to the floor. Then silence.
An odd sense of calm washed over him. If Rake had lived, then he was safe. But if Rake had died, then he was dead too, and it’d all be over. And that sounded easy, and peaceful, and would sort of be okay.
A fist reached in and grabbed him by the front of his vest, pulling him out of the alcove. Rake stared him down, rifle slung over her shoulder and her knife—bloody knife—in the other hand. He glanced past her, gaze flitting from corpse to corpse as he tallied the body count. Four—no, five. Five Drudgers. One Rake.
“Probably a scouting party,” she explained, voice hushed. “They’ll send more once these don’t report back. Do you think you can find your way back to Jackin?”
Cavalon’s reluctant nod took a hard turn and circled into a fervent shake of his head. “No. No. I have no idea how we got here.”
She didn’t seem to register his admission. “The mainframe is still rebooting. Jackin may not even know it’s docked.”
“Yeah,” Cavalon said, eyes wide, nodding emphatically. “That was some great timing on our part.”
“Oculus,” Rake said, voice sharp. “You need to go back and warn them.”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Cavalon agreed. “Let’s get backup.”
She shook her head. “They’re over a half hour away round trip. I can’t let the Drudgers get a foothold on this side of the gate just to wait for a few more guns. They have double our numbers and this place is a maze. They’d be able to overwhelm us easily.”