After Rake cleared the entrance, she breezed past Cavalon to head to the other side of the room. She didn’t appear keen to partake in the Drudgers’ head-on approach, because instead of moving down one of the two hallways, she motioned for him to follow as she crouched in front of a large grate in the wall.
She pulled the cover loose, then set it aside and crawled in. He shuffled forward and crouched, heading in after her. The vent allowed barely enough room for him to crawl on his hands and knees. After a few meters, they stopped in front of another grate. Rake leaned in, first peering through, then turning her ear to press against it. Cavalon could barely make out a few grunts and shuffling noises.
Rake looked back at him, her closed fist signaling him to hold. She spun around, then tucked her legs to her chest and in one quick motion, punted the metal with both feet. It flew off and into the room beyond. So much for subtlety.
Rake launched herself into the room, and Cavalon peered out far enough to watch in stunned silence as she, by every definition of the word, perfectly executed six Drudgers.
The one she’d kicked the vent cover into died first, via a plasma bolt to the head even as it flew back against the wall from the force of the grate. She simultaneously stabbed another Drudger in the flank. How her knife had ended up in her hand, he didn’t even know.
She turned that motion into a sweeping kick, knocking a Drudger to the ground at her feet. The knife slid directly from the flank of the other Drudger into the chest of the prone one, just as Rake’s rifle swung up in her other hand. She fired off two shots to the far right—past Cavalon’s field of vision, though he could hear grunts and the sounds of bodies collapsing.
Rake yanked the knife out of one torso and turned into another as it charged from the left side of the room. She’d apparently received the same anatomical training as Mesa, because all the Drudgers that met her knife died instantly.
The alarmingly impressive affair lasted all of ten seconds. If this was her “rusty,” after five years of idleness aboard the Argus, he couldn’t imagine what she’d been capable of during the war.
Rake stood among the six dead Drudgers, hardly winded. Every bare patch of skin on her neck and arms glittered with silver and copper Imprint squares—so many more than he’d seen in their default layout on her right arm before. They receded into their standard formation, the hundreds that had flowed into her arms and neck disappearing beneath her shirt.
He had to wonder where she kept them all. She must have way, way more Imprints than he did.
Cavalon pulled himself out of the dusty ventilation shaft and into the room. A series of stiff-looking, hard-backed couches lined the walls. Food wrappers, piles of discharged energy cells and power cartridges, and other garbage littered the floor.
He wiped his dusty hands off on his chest. “Well,” he began, but realized he had no words for what had just happened. Rake tossed her rifle to the ground, then picked up one of the Drudgers’ beefy plasma pistols. She checked the cartridge, seemed satisfied, then stuck the gun in the strap of her weapons belt.
Cavalon’s eyes lingered on the splayed body of a nearby Drudger. “All this subterfuge is fun, but why don’t we just rig the engines to blow and call it a day?”
Rake sighed and shook her head as she pulled her knife from the chest of the last Drudger she’d killed.
“I can arrange that for you, you know,” he said.
“I’m sure you can. But even if that wouldn’t put a massive fucking hole in this side of the station, we need this ship. It’s our only shot at getting through this gate in one piece.”
“Oh … right.” He scratched the back of his neck. Relay gates, much like jump drives, required a certain mass—a stability threshold of sorts—in order for the ship to arrive at its destination in one, unmangled piece. He’d completely forgotten. Or rather, thinking that far ahead never even crossed his mind.