Linao’s eyes narrowed, and she pushed back her chair and stood. “Time for me to take you to Ritter.”
She meant that statement to cow them.
Velda kept a neutral face, but the voices inside her were cheering at the thought of new balls.
That might not be what’s going to happen, she warned them.We have no idea what he plans to do.
28
Ethanworried he was trying too hard with his attempt to make himself look weaker, but Velda kept touching him, quick brushes of her fingers on the back of his hand, and he was getting the message that she approved, that he should keep it up.
Her fear for him was just one more thing to love about her, even though there was going to come a time, and soon, where he wouldn’t be able to keep up the ruse.
Linao was already suspicious of him, although his comment about the Cores being dishonorable had annoyed her enough that she was striding ahead of them, eager to put them back in Ritter’s clutches.
She flipped between sharing secrets with them and then also trying to keep them in a state of fear, and he wondered if she shared as much as she did because she didn’t often get the chance to talk to peers and she knew they were going to die anyway, so a little sharing didn’t matter.
It made a twisted sort of sense.
She asked for directions a few times, but eventually they arrived back in the med bay, where they’d hidden out the day before.
Ritter was already there, studying the equipment with interest.
When he turned to face them, Ethan had the distinct impression he was unhappy to see Linao, and not all that happy to see Ethan and Velda, either.
Nirro wandered out from a small room to the side of the med bay, and Linao took a surprised step back at the sight of him.
That’s what Nirro had been called away about, Ethan realized. They’d been told Ritter was setting up the experiment, and they wanted to observe. Or interfere.
Whatever it was, it had already complicated things.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Linao asked Nirro, pointing to the box which was open on the counter.
“You think I have?” Nirro asked without answering.
“We know you found that ghost ship in Raxian airspace well over a year ago, and that turned out to be an ancestral ship. Either the Raxians are lying about finding a box of them onboard, which we don’t think they are, or you got onboard first and took it before you started towing the ship away.” Linao leaned against the wall.
“Interesting.” Nirro stared at the box with renewed curiosity. “I haven’t ever seen anything like it, but it’s possible it happened the way you say. I don’t know anything about it, though.”
Of course. Ethan thought about how many ancestral wrecks had been found recently. The Raxian find was the first, or rather, they’d thought it was the first, but according to Linao, the first one had been nearly twenty years ago on Garmen. Then the Raxian find, then the one on Faldine. After that, there was the find on the small moon, Fynian, and then the wreck Wren Thorakis had stumbled across on Ytla. If there were boxes full of silver balls in each one, where were they?
And that didn’t even address the find the Cores had made on Fjern, the planet where the silver balls had been working as designed for thousands of years.
“The leader of the Caruson that took control of the ore ship was very interested in the balls. He contacted his superiors about them and then took them when he escaped.” Linao walked forward and bent a little to look at them more closely. “I had the sense he knew about them beforehand.”
“I’m a rebel now, remember,” Nirro said. “I may have been in the military before, but I wasn’t at the top of the chain. I would not have been given access to that information.”
“But you were onboard the Caruso warship that towed the old ancestral wreck in Raxian airspace,” Linao said. “You were part of the crew.”
Nirro went still and looked over at Linao. “Who told you that?” he asked.
Linao shrugged, and the way she did it, eyes a little averted, told Ethan she suddenly regretted saying that. She’d showed her hand, and Nirro did not like it at all.
“Are you still dealing with the establishment as well as us?” Nirro asked. “Playing both sides?” He made an explosive sound. “You have to be, to know something like that.”
Linao’s silence lasted too long and Nirro looked out into the passageway and called something in Caruson. Light flashed—a laz shot—coming from just outside the med bay doors.
It hit Linao in the back and she went down hard.
