Warner breathed out a heavy grumble. He marched over, grabbed the handle with one hand, and yanked it open with seemingly zero effort. A haze of dust plumed out with it. Cavalon coughed as he accidentally inhaled a lungful, then slid Warner a frown.
The man crossed his arms over his broad chest, then rumbled, “You musta loosened it for me.”
Cavalon breathed a laugh and shook the dust from his hair. “Right. Thanks, bud.” He stepped back, sweeping his hands toward the open hatch. “Any takers? Don’t all jump at once.”
He looked between Emery and Warner, but they only stared back at him expectantly.
“Right,” Cavalon sighed. Apparently this would be on him. “Shit-cutting. Shit-cutting…” He muttered the phrase to himself like a mantra as he knelt in front of the narrow hatch and peered into the pitch-dark beyond.
“What the hell’re you sayin’？” Emery asked through her aggressive gum chomping.
Cavalon waved her off as he lay in front of the open hatch, then pulled himself into the dark. Stifling heat greeted him, the air gritty and thick, like sliding into a boiling river of sand. Sweat instantly beaded along his hairline.
“Bloody hell,” he cursed, shimmying on his back until he slid fully inside.
The minimal light spilling in from the repair suite disappeared into total blackness a few meters in.
“It’s dark as the void in here,” he called back toward the square of light at his feet. “Can’t see shit.”
Footsteps squeaked and a few moments later, Emery’s thin voice echoed into the inferno. “Incoming!”
A palm-sized disc skidded across the metal floor, landing centimeters from Cavalon’s hand. He grabbed it, fumbling his fingers over the smooth surface.
“Switch’s on the … side…” Emery’s suspicion-filled voice called from the hatch.
He finally clicked the disc on, sending out a burst of blue-tinged light. Squinting as his eyes readjusted, he swept the beam to both sides.
The low overhead sat only a half meter above his face, comprised of rows upon rows of meter-long missiles, waiting in cradles to be grabbed by the automated system and whisked off to launch tubes all over the ship. Despite the sweat trickling down his back, a chill rushed up his spine, and he couldn’t resist a shudder. It terrified as much as impressed him that one could fit so much destruction into such a small shell.
Unbidden, memories began to surface, and he clamped his eyes shut and tried to fight them away. But it was beyond useless. He’d known it was coming from the second the word “missile” had dropped out of his mouth. He’d held out hope he could put it off—at least get the task done, get through the rest of first shift, second shift, third, if that’s what Rake wanted, then let his exhausted, feverish dreams work it out instead. But his brain didn’t seem to care.
In an instant, his nostrils filled with the stale, dusty scent of the long-forgotten relief bunker under the eastern wing of his former home. He’d spent so much time in that old work space, it was too easy to visualize it filling into the darkness around him, frozen in time. The beam of the light disc became the glow of the work light shining across the worn counters and onto the hastily copied schematics tacked to the wall. The whir of the bobbin filled his ears, echoing off the reinforced concrete as it wound the strands of silver into wire. The air filled with the scent of burnt flesh as he charred the tips of his fingers over and over again with that damn handheld spot welder.
But any amount of pain he may have endured had been worth it. After a great deal of trial and error—and probably a little radiation poisoning—he’d made two of his very own, very customized replies to his grandfather’s latest egomaniacal undertaking.
Cavalon had told exactly one other person his plan, he’d had no choice; he’d never had much of a mind for computers, and couldn’t possibly figure out how to build the command circuitry on his own. Though they’d agreed to help, they urged him to reconsider, to try communication first—but only a Mercer could know how truly, utterly self-defeating that proposition was. His words had fallen on deaf ears too many times. If nothing else, this response had been too loud to ignore.