“Well, well.” Linao smirked. “You got out, too.”
“You created a good distraction,” Ethan said.
“Not that it helps you.” Linao smiled, then glanced over her shoulder as more Cores soldiers rounded the corner.
The Cores and the Caruson, working in harmony. Interesting.
The sound of laz fire was clear in the sudden silence, coming from up ahead and to the left.
“The bridge,” Linao said, and some of the Cores and some of the Caruson group around them jogged off in that direction.
“So you’ve taken the warship.” Velda was honestly impressed. “That couldn’t have been the plan all along. You were surprised when the Caruso took the ore runner.”
“No, it wasn’t the plan, but it didn’t work out too badly, did it?” Linao sounded positively exuberant.
“I’ll take them back to their cell,” she told the Caruson who seemed to be in charge, lifting the laz she was carrying. She signaled to two Cores guards and they flanked her, and she marched Velda and Ethan back to the brig.
Except no one could open it back up.
“That’s annoying.” Linao slammed her fist into the keypad. “Watch them,” she ordered the two guards. “I’ll go find someone who can open up.”
They stood in silence, up against the wall opposite the cell door, two laz pointed at them.
Velda sighed, rubbed at her eye and leaned back more firmly against the wall, sliding down it a little as if she was tired. “It’s been a long day.”
“It’s past time to sleep, is my guess,” Ethan responded. “How many hours since we were taken by the Caruson?”
“I’ve honestly lost track,” Velda said. “It could be we’ve gone for well over a day without sleep.”
Ethan yawned.
Go low, the voices in her head told her.Knock him over at the knees.
She used the wall at her back as a counterpoint and dove forward, twisting in the air and hooking her arm around the guard in front of her’s knees.
Ethan either moved a second before her, or at exactly the same moment, grabbing the laz held by the guard in front ofhim, spinning to stand behind him, hand still gripping the laz and pointing it upward as he got a chokehold.
Velda was on her feet, kicking the laz out of the guard she’d brought down’s hand, grabbing it up, and shooting him before he’d even pushed up from the ground.
She turned the laz on the other guard just as he slumped in Ethan’s arms.
Ethan laid him on the ground next to his friend, and they smiled at each other.
The sound of footsteps coming galvanized them both.
They ran in the opposite direction, looking for a place to hide, but the murmur of voices up ahead had them both slowing to a stop.
“What now?” She glanced behind them, but it would be moments before the guards were discovered and their escape would be known.
“Up.” Ethan leaped upward at an angle, and the passageway was narrow enough he was able to press his hands on one side, while his feet found purchase on the other. He walked his feet up, until he was level with the floor, and then got even higher, until he disappeared above into the gloom of the already dark passageway.
“I’m too short to do that.” Velda didn’t need to try, the voices in her head were clear that it wouldn’t work.
“Then stay where you are, lure them in, and I’ll shoot them.” Ethan’s voice was whisper quiet.
They had no choice, there were shouts from the way they’d come, and the footsteps were getting louder from the other direction.
Velda crouched down on the ground, laz in her hand but pressed up against the wall so it was not as noticeable, and waited.
