She pointed to the grate and scooted to one side. He shimmied his way next to her, peering through the narrow slats into the cockpit. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the relative brightness of the room beyond.
A single Drudger stood between the pilot and copilot’s chairs, watching a video message play back over the ship’s main console. The holographic screen cast a blue glint against its steel-gray skin—it was older than most of the others Rake had killed. That they’d killed.
Unlike the others had, it wore a relatively clean Viator-issue uniform, with badges of rank pinned carelessly to the shoulders. Though Drudgers didn’t bother much with rank distinctions, he assumed this one must be the ship’s captain.
The Drudger in the recording gargled something Cavalon couldn’t understand, and the message ended. The captain dismissed the video interface and stepped aside, revealing a display of brilliantly bright, crisp white holographic screens. They looked nothing like the dim, muddy displays lined up over the cockpit terminal.
Cavalon craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the source of the screens—a polished gold pyramid about thirty centimeters wide, sitting on the terminal counter.
The displays were shaped like nothing Cavalon had ever seen—curved, equilateral triangles with the edges bulging out. Dozens layered atop one another, stacked and linked in a pattern not dissimilar to the scaled walls of the Apollo Gate corridors. The Drudger’s body and the pilot’s chair obscured much of the view, but from the various overlaid grids, he thought it might be some kind of structural blueprint, like a large, multileveled building or starship.
Cavalon quirked an eyebrow at Rake, and she returned it with a clueless shrug. The Drudger captain grumbled something to itself, reached down, and the strange displays disappeared. It shoved the pyramid aside, then swept open a menu from the cockpit terminal.
Out of sight on the far right of the room, another Drudger muttered a series of unintelligible words. The Drudger captain grunted a terse response, then the other started a long-winded reply.
Rake must have been able to understand the thick dialect, because she turned to look at Cavalon with raised eyebrows, as if to say “that’s our cue,” then thrust her palm into the grate. It shot halfway across the room and clattered into the pilot’s chair. Rake pulled herself free and fired her plasma pistol twice to the right side of the cockpit.
Cavalon leaned out to find two additional Drudgers on that side of the room, now very dead. The captain managed to claw one of its taloned fingers down Rake’s arm as she grabbed it by the front of its jumpsuit.
She threw the captain to the ground face-first, twisting one of its arms around and pressing a knee into the small of its back to pin it to the floor. She flipped her grip on the knife and held the serrated blade to the side of the Drudger’s throat. It roared and spat, but she held firm, the silver and copper squares on her arms jittering. She didn’t even spare a glance at the jagged slice it had carved down the side of her arm. Blood flowed to her wrist and across her knuckles, dripping onto the Drudger’s back at a troubling rate.
“What are you doing out here?” Rake barked. She leaned into the Drudger’s back and it groaned in pain, but didn’t answer. Rake slid the blade closer to its neck.
A sparse formation of Imprint tattoos slid up from under the captain’s collar, the glossy white squares stark against its dark gray skin. The Imprints spread thin to try and protect its neck.
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” Rake demanded.
It gave a guttural half laugh before spitting out a response Cavalon couldn’t understand.
Rake untwisted its arm and pinned its wrist to the ground in front of its face, then stabbed the back of its hand with the knife, skewering it to the floor. A few of its white Imprints slid onto the top of its hand, but they were far too late. The Drudger roared and thrashed beneath her.
Rake growled. “This can be easy or hard, Drudger.”