Cavalon had been following Bray down long corridor after long corridor, and with every turn, it became increasingly clearer where they were headed: the hangar. Those creative punishments Rake mentioned? He wasn’t an idiot. Hangars were home to one of the few things he dreaded more than Rake’s wrath: air locks.
He’d heard enough horror stories of marauders wandering the Inward Expanse to have earned a proper fear of the ways in which one could turn an air lock into a torture device. Sensory deprivation. Slow, drawn-out depressurizations. Or, what had to be far, far worse: the opposite. Hacking the controls and over-cranking the pressure. At least hypoxia would offer some fun hallucinations, or make you sleepy and oblivious after a time. But being slowly drowned in an excess of atmospheric gases until your cell membranes disintegrated, collapsing your lungs, detaching your retinas, while being overcome with vertigo and convulsions, all while puking your guts out? No thanks.
Rake didn’t seem the needless-torture type, at least. A little tightly wound, maybe, but nothing a couple of weeks on a beach in the Outer Core drowning herself in cocktails wouldn’t fix. So he had to assume if she bothered killing him, she’d probably do it quickly.
He blew out a long breath and sidelined the morbid train of thought, staring at the back of Bray’s boots as he tried to put a finger on what had pushed Rake over the edge. Though he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d screwed up and didn’t realize it. He thought he’d been doing better, for the most part. Sure, he’d found that weird copy of himself amusing, and she’d rightfully reprimanded him, but he’d returned to his endless mopping and hadn’t said a single snarky thing all day. And he’d fixed the literal shit out of that latrine tank the other night. Rake had to have noticed he was trying, even if he sucked at it.
He slicked his hair away from his forehead, plastered with cold sweat. Maybe it would just be a threat. “Look what fate will befall you if you don’t stop being such an arrant tool.”
Cavalon followed Bray around another corner and their pace slowed. He looked up to find Rake standing inside a small storage room with a man he’d seen on the bridge the last couple of days, usually hovering anxiously over his terminal. The conversation hushed as they approached.
Rake gave Bray a curt nod. “Thanks, Bray. You can go.” Bray saluted and left. “Oculus, have you met Optio Jackin North?”
“Not properly, sir.” Cavalon walked into the small room and shook Jackin’s hand. “Cavalon Mer—er, uh, Cavalon. Sir. Good to meet you.”
Jackin raised a thick eyebrow and gave Rake a sidelong glance. “Good to meet you too…”
Rake ignored Jackin’s apparent skepticism as she held up a cylindrical container. She looked at Cavalon expectantly.
He cleared his throat. “You’ve, uh … got a warp core, there.”
“We do,” Rake replied.
“What’s that all about?”
“That’s classified.”
His eyes narrowed, his instincts cultivating a handful of particularly snarky responses, but he hesitated. Rake wasn’t giving him that look of exasperated tolerance he’d already grown accustomed to. Instead, she looked at him with a kind of calculated hope that made him worry he’d somehow already failed her.
“I understand.” His eyes widened, surprised by his own response. “Sir.”
“We need this recharged,” she said. “Is that possible?”
“Theoretically or practically?”
“Immediately.”
Her serious look didn’t waver.
He nodded slowly. “Fair enough.” He took the canister and turned it over in his hands. A small amount of glowing blue acium flowed along the glass encasement within. “Depends on the ship in question, but this is maybe a quarter of what you’d need just to do a baseline warp.”