Not something he’d been able to do before.
He paused.Is this reliable?he asked the silver balls.
We would do nothing to endanger you, they assured him.
He loosened his shoulders and then dived into the med bay, rolling to the right and coming up, laz ready.
Brink gave a shriek of surprise and lifted her own laz. Ethan shot it out of her hand.
She stared down at her hand, panting. “You’re fast.”
“How many of you are left?” Ethan asked. Not that he expected an honest answer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Linao is being held in a cell, but everyone else was defending the ship.”
His gaze caught sight of a pile of restraints on the counter behind her, considered restraining her, and then shot her instead.
It was easier. He was all for an easy life right now.
He laid her on her back, then checked her laz, and saw it was set to kill. He felt even less guilty about his decision.
He jogged back to the bridge and stopped in surprise when he found a Caruson soldier dead in the passageway, blades lying beside him.
“That was me,” Velda called from behind the bridge doors. “He recovered from a laz hit and started following you.”
Relief washed through him.
Velda was fine.
That’s all that really mattered, he realized.
He walked up to the bridge doors. “You worked out how to open them yet?”
“No.” Her voice was clear and he looked down to see her crouched down on the other side, looking up at him through the gap. “I was hoping your magic fingers could do their thing.”
His magic fingers.
He remembered when he’d been able to disable the lens in their cell. Maybe he could . . .
He moved to the keypad and touched it, resting his fingertips lightly. “I think I can make it open, but then I don’t think it will close again.”
“Works for me,” Velda said.
He thought it through, realized it didn’t matter if the bridge couldn’t be secured if they had the whole ship—which they would.
The doors ground open, as if there was some resistance somewhere, and looking to the side he saw the damage to the door was making opening up difficult. He could smell burning by the time they were three quarters open. They stopped there, and went no further.
“Good enough.” Velda had risen to her feet and reached out to touch his shoulder. “All right?”
“Yes. I think Linao is the only one left either alive or conscious. According to Brink, she’s locked up in a cell.”
“How much luck can one woman have?” Velda wondered. “We’re going to take them all to the Caruso ship, I assume?”
Ethan was already deep inside the room, leaning down to grab Sylvester by his feet. He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Of course.”
She smiled. “We’ll have to do it fast. Nirro will regain consciousness soon enough.”
“And we might not have got everyone in the warship, either. Anyone not unconscious is probably already trying to revive their colleagues. We need to be gone by then.” He sniffed the air. “Is that just the smell of burning from the door?”
